TOOLBOXBROWSE TOPICS
RESOURCESABOUT THIS SITEpmwiki.org |
the further exploits of AARON, Painter. By Harold Cohen. In Stanford Humanities Review , volume 4, issue 2 (1995) - Constructions of the Mind: Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities. " AARON began its existence some time in the mid-seventies, in my attempt to answer what seemed then, but turned out not to be, a simple question: What are the minimum conditions under which a set of marks functions as an image?"
Art in Review; Leo Villareal. By Andrea K. Scott. The New York Times (March 23, 2007). "When you think about artificial intelligence, Mark Rothko isn't the first name that comes to mind. But Field, the software-driven sculpture at the heart of Leo Villareal's third New York show, makes the leap. A computer code written by Mr. Villareal generates an autonomous system that illuminates thousands of colored LEDs, hidden behind a panel of opaque acrylic."
Art by Robotticelli. Metro.co.uk (September 25, 2006). "A computer with imagination -- is it the stuff of nightmarish sci-fi or the future of art? A computer scientist who specialises in artificial intelligence has devised a program which could put ordinary PCs in Picasso's league. Dr Simon Colton believes computers have the ability to be creative and could produce their own masterpieces. ... He has designed software which enables computers to paint from a digital image without human assistance. ... Dr Colton will demonstrate his work at Imperial College, London, tonight."
Raffaello D'Andrea's robotic chair creates stir online, falling apart and reassembling itself. By Anne Ju.Cornell University Chronicle Online (October 20, 2006). "A seemingly simple, sturdy, wood-veneer chair has become an online video hit. With its 'brain' in its seat, the chair collapses into a disheveled, disconnected heap; its legs then slowly find each corner of the base, connect back together and eventually, the chair stands upright.The next breakthrough in artificial intelligence? Not quite, says the chair's system architect, Raffaello D'Andrea, Cornell associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. 'It has no utilitarian value,' D'Andrea said. 'It is an art piece.' ... The creation of the chair would have been artistic achievement enough, except that the robot's rapid rise to fame over the Internet has created an unexpected buzz. A recent spot that aired on the Discovery Channel also helped surge the chair into an international spotlight. ... [Canadian artist Max] Dean says many people value the chair for the part of themselves they see in it. 'It's continually reassembling itself,' he said. 'Somewhat like what we do in our own lives. We fall apart and put ourselves back together.'"
"Chickens are Us" and other observations of robotic art. By Patricia Donovan. University at Buffalo Reporter (December 4, 2003; Volume 35, Number 14). "Hundreds of artists in all corners of the world -- a number of them at UB -- use emerging technologies as a tool for material and cultural analysis. One of them is conceptual artist Marc Böhlen, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study. His medium is not oil or bronze, but robotics and site-specific data, and his practice combines the structured approach of scientific investigation with artistic intuition, spiced with a deliberate and effective dash of good or bad taste. ... Böhlen considers the media arts in the context of the history of automation technologies. They were invented with the hope of improving everyday life, he notes, and in some ways they have. 'Our unquestioned pursuit of efficiency, however, has made us slaves of automation,' he says, a point made by artists from the mid-19th century on. 'Through our very inventiveness and persistence, we have separated ourselves from the constraints of our natural surroundings. In my work, I attempt to contradict preconceptions of what technical mediation is by a practice that is poetically inspired, radical and technically competent.' To this end, Böhlen builds machines whose functions contradict their assumed utilitarian purpose. ... He says 'the Keeper' is designed to re-imagine -- beyond issues of security and repression -- how machines that use biometric technology are able to control our identities and validate our right to gain access to any space. "
True bliss with art that can be undone. By Dave Horrigan. South China Morning Post (August 17, 2004; subscription req'd.). "Studio Artist was created by legendary programmer John Dalton as an intelligent, art-generating machine. In the early days of Macintosh, Mr Dalton created groundbreaking software, some of which remain the industry standard, such as Deck multi-track recording software. Mr Dalton's vision was to apply state-of-the-art, artificial intelligence algorithms to the creation of art. Studio Artist is the result of that experiment. The application looks at a photo or drawing and interprets it with an artistic effect. But do not get Studio Artist confused with a simple Photoshop filter. The application interprets the patterns, shadows, textures and/or coloured forms, and renders them as an artist might."
Organic robot creates art in Australia - Artists, scientists and computer programmers have embedded rat neurons in a robot to create a 'hybrot' artist. By James Pearce. ZDNet Australia (July 10, 2003). "The resulting robot is called 'Meart,' which stands for multi-electrode array art. [Oron] Catts said there was a feedback loop so the neurons could 'see' what they were drawing. 'The culture is fed with the original image, the portrait that they are trying to produce, and what they have drawn already, so they can subtract the image,' he said." The Artist's Angst is All in Your Head. By George Johnson. Week in Review, New York Times on the Web, Nov. 16, 1997. A marvelous article about Aaron and EMI, a music-writing computer program. Tate jumps on art carousel - New search facility brings catalogue to masses. By Miya Knights. Computing (September 29, 2005). "The Tate Gallery has launched a new search facility on its web site to attract visitors and grow sales for its art-on-demand service. The new 'carousel' feature scrolls through 2,000 catalogued pieces of art from the Tate's collection automatically, to help make them more accessible to a broader audience. Launched at the end of August, the tool uses BT-developed artificial intelligence software to display works of art in the same or similar genre to those that users have already clicked on."
But is it (robot) art? By Celeste Biever. New Scientist (December 23, 2006: Issue 2583; subscription req'd). "Max Chandler art studio is more chaotic than most. It's not that he is disorganised: the mess is down to the team of brush-wielding robots that help him paint his pictures. ... 'It's a new form of art,' says Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and psychologist who studies the impact of technology on culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'It can be partly shaped by human intentionality and partly be an elaborate dance, a negotiation with a robot.' Robotic art dates back to 1973, when Harold Cohen, a British artist who is now professor emeritus of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, developed a computer program called AARON that composed portraits of people and objects without human help. ... Still, some people might find the idea of robotic art disconcerting, says Douglas Irving Repetto, curator of the annual ArtBots exhibition in New York and an artist at the city's Columbia University. He thinks it will continue to be accepted by galleries and museums, though." Pardon Me, but the Art Is Mouthing Off. By Jori Finkel. The New York Times (November 27, 2005; subscription req'd.). "It was late in the day, rain was streaking the windows of a converted warehouse in San Francisco and the robot was not behaving. Represented by a talking head on a flat-screen monitor, and equipped with voice-recognition software, the artificial intelligence computer -- known as DiNA -- was designed to chat with visitors about current affairs. She is supposed to be a political animal, or more precisely, machine. ... The next day, relaxing on a brown couch in her studio, Ms. [Lynn] Hershman Leeson talked about what it was like to be an artist forever bumping up against the limits of technology. 'I'm always trying to do something that doesn't exist yet,' she said. "Voice recognition for DiNA, for example - everyone said that we couldn't do it, that the technology wasn't far enough along. But I've learned over the years that you can never stop at the first no.' ... For more than 30 years, she has made artwork across many platforms - from painting, photography and performance art to video, laserdisc, DVD, Web-based work and interactive sculpture. She has also made two feature-length films: 'Conceiving Ada,' in 1997, and 'Teknolust,' in 2002. Like the rest of her work, they explore mind-bending questions about reality and identity. How can we tell in an age of digital and genetic sampling what is real? Can another mode of existence become more real or powerful than ours? Does a robot have its own personality? ... Both of her movies, which won awards on the film festival circuit, are feminist sci-fi adventures. 'Conceiving Ada' is a fantasy about bringing Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's brilliant daughter, back to life through computer programming - the language she helped to invent. 'Teknolust' tells the story of a geeky female biogeneticist who uses her own DNA to create three computer-bred clones...."
FLAIRS. See the Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (AAAI Press) for papers from the AI in Music and Art Special Track (2005). A Computer That Has an Eye for Van Gogh. By Douglas Heingartner. The New York Times (June 13, 2004). "Who can say for sure that a great artwork is the real deal? ... Now a team of researchers at the University of Maastricht, here in the Netherlands, are taking a stab at rationalizing connoisseurship, a word that in its art-historical context refers to the formal process of determining who created a work of art. They have developed a computer system that quickly examines hundreds of paintings for telltale patterns. The results, they say, can lend credence to existing attributions or help dismiss them. Members of the team make modest claims for their system. 'The computer will come up with data that show some patterns, but we cannot decide whether these patterns are meaningful or not,' said Dr. Eric Postma, the leader of the project, known as Authentic, which is currently analyzing all paintings attributed to Vincent van Gogh. 'For that purpose we need experts. We can provide them with numbers, and they can interpret the numbers. And this interaction is where the real value of the project is.' ... Dr. Postma compares this pattern-seeking technique to chess. ... This is not the first time artificial intelligence has been used in authentication. In Germany in 1998, a team at the University of Bremen's Center for Computing Technologies trained their computer to identify the drawings of Delacroix, which it managed to do with 87 percent accuracy. ... In a more recent project at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, a computer distinguished between 23 paintings made by the popular Brazilian painter Candido Portinari and five by his contemporary Enrico Bianco."
The Science of Art. By Raymond Kurzweil. Chapter 9 of his book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990). "The computer can be a powerful partner in exploring our thoughts and emotions and finding new ways of expressing them." Rat-brained robot does distant art. By Lakshmi Sandhana. BBC (July 28, 2003). "The 'brain' lives at Dr Steve Potter's lab at Georgia's Institute of Technology, Atlanta, while the 'body' is located at Guy Ben-Ary's lab at the University of Western Australia, Perth. The two ends communicate with each other in real-time through the internet. The project represents the team's effort to create a semi-living entity that learns like the living brains in people and animals do, adapting and expressing itself through art." The Mechanics of Creativity. By Roger Schank and Christopher Owens. From Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990). "Our goal is to come up with an algorithmic definition of creativity, a set of processes and steps that can account for the kind of creative thinking that we observe in people. Although the idea of a human or machine exhibiting creativity by following a set of rules seems on the face to be a contradiction, this is not necessarily so." Robotics As Art - Expand your artistic creativity ... build a robot! By Sharon Silvia. About.com. "Though we do not yet know where robotics will take us as artists, ongoing projects, offer artists and scientists a riveting ride into the evolving world of robotic art." artificial intelligence research as art. By Stephen Wilson. Stanford Humanities Review 4:2 (1995) - Constructions of the Mind: Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities. "Artificial intelligence is one of these fields of inquiry that reaches beyond its technical boundaries. At its root it is an investigation into the nature of being human, the nature of intelligence, the limits of machines, and our limits as artifact makers. I felt that, in spite of falling in and out of public favor, it was one of the grand intellectual undertakings of our times and that the arts ought to address the questions, challenges, and opportunities it generated."
Alife, from the artists at TPR/Fusebox. "Artificial Life is a field of scientific study that attempts to model living biological systems through complex algorithms. Scientists use these models to test and experiment with a multitude of factors on the behavior of the systems. We artists here at TPR/fusebox see these algorithms as a starting point for a new artistic exploration where the interactivity is not only between the user and the computer program but within the computer system itself. We are just beginning to explore. Enjoy."
"Amorphic Robot Works was formed in 1992. ARW is a New York based group of artists, engineers and technicians working together to create robotic performances and installations." An Artificial Artist. By Matthew Brand. "The Artificial Artist project seeks to endow computers with artistic vision--the ability to see something striking in a scene and express it in a new medium. Unlike most computational art, an artificial artist is not an image-altering filter nor a blind generator of pretty pictures, but a quasi-intelligent agent that has some understanding of its subjects and that makes aesthetic decisions about how to express that understanding." "ArtBots is an international art exhibition for robotic art and art-making robots. Each year we publish an open call for submissions, inviting artists from around the world to send us information about their work. No firm rules exist on the types of work that can participate; if you think it's a robot and you think it's art, we encourage you to submit."
Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. "CRCA is an Organized Research Unit of UCSD whose mission is to foster advanced research and production at the crossroads between digital technology and new art forms. Current areas of interest include interactive networked multimedia, virtual reality, computer spatialized audio, and live performance techniques for computer music and graphics." Evolutionary Computation and its application to art and design. By Craig Reynolds. An exciting collection of links where you'll find topics such as Online Interactive Evolution ("Here are some participatory, Web-based art projects which use evolutionary computation. Web users vote on the comparative esthetic value of several choices (images or sounds). These votes determine the fitness of the individuals which drives the composition of subsequent generation.), Evolution of Visual Art, and more. EvoMUSART 2006, the 4th European Workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art, at EvoWorkshops2006. "The application of Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques for the development of creative systems is a new, exciting and significant area of research. There is a growing interest in the application of these techniques in fields such as: art and music generation, analysis and interpretation; architecture; and design." Be sure to scroll down the page to see the abstracts of accepted papers.
Filmmaking Robot. Robot made by Douglas Bagnall with help. "This robot makes short films based on its visual experience. Its eyes travel about the city on buses while the body sits in a gallery. The eyes collect snippets of video, and transmit them to the body when their buses come within range of a Cafenet wireless internet node. ... . At the end of the day the robot looks over its days work and joins the best parts together as a finished film. The robot uses neural networks and heuristic rules to choose waypoints for its daily dream, but the finished film is mainly selected for the smoothness of its movement through the space." Be sure to see the still photos and the mpeg4 format films, and for some more background information, scroll down to "More information" at the bottom of their page. Other References Offline Holtzman, Steven R. 1995. Painting By Number. Technology Review 98: 60-68. Lebowitz, Michael. 1992. All Work and No Play Makes HAL a Dull program. In The Age of Intelligent Machines, 2nd edition, ed. Kurzweil, Raymond, 351-379. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. McCorduck, Pamela. 1990. Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen. New York: Freeman. |
