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Intellect Books - Stuart Mealing

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143 pages

English

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Insightful perspectives on the use of the computer as a tool for artists. The approaches taken vary from its historical, philosophical and practical implications to the use of computer technology in art practice. The contributors include an art critic, an educator, a practicing artist and a researcher. The Editor's contribution will look at the potential for future developments in the field, looking at both the artistic and the computational aspects of the field. This collection seeks to bring together the latest theories and advances in the use of computers in art as well as looking in a practical way at the computational aspects and problems involved.

Sujets

Arts visuels

Histoire des Arts

Histoire des arts visuels

General officer

Computer science

Art

General

History

Electronic

Digital

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 janvier 2007
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841508740
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1550€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Computers & Art
Second Edition
edited by Stuart Mealing
Second edition published in Great Britain in 2002 by
Intellect, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
Second edition published in USA in 2002 by
Intellect, ISBS, 5824 N,E.Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon, 97213-3644, USA
First edition published 1n 1997
Copyright 2002 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission,
Consulting Editor: Masoud Yazdani
Copy Editors: Holly Spradling and Wendi Momen
Cover & book design: Toucan
Set in Quadraat
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-874-8 / ISBN 1-84150-062-3
Printed & bound in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press, Wiltshire
Contents
Introduction
Stuart Mealing
On drawing a circle
George Whale
Why use computers to make drawings?
Ed Burton
Representing representation: artificial intelligence and drawing
John Lansdown
Some trends in computer graphic art
Jim Noble
Fatal attraction: print meets computer
Jeremy Diggle
A year and a day on the road to Omniana
Martin Rieser
The art of interactivity: interactive installation from gallery to street
Paul Brown
Networks and artworks: the failure of the user-friendly interface
Joanna Buick
Virtual reality and art
Richard Wright
Visual technology and the poetics of knowledge
Brian Reffin-Smith
Post-modem art, or: Virtual reality as Trojan donkey, or: Horsetail tartan literature groin art
Mike King
Artificial consciousness - artificial art
Stuart Mealing
Introduction
There is an undeniable frisson about juxtaposing the words art and computers since they stand at the gateways of seemingly opposite worlds, guardians of opposite values and standards. Their juxtaposition calls into dispute embedded notions about art, about creativity, about consciousness and thus about the human condition.
For over 30 years I have been either involved with art and excited by computers or involved with computers and excited by art. I should provide a prime audience for computer art, yet have often been left curiously cold by the products of the two disciplines coming together. I would not want to compile a book documenting computer art. Computers and art , however, is an altogether more expansive subject which can look at the practice and potential of computers as tools, enablers, creators and as sources of inspiration in the field of the visual arts.
The discipline is a new one; a medium perhaps still waiting for its time. As with the early years of photography, it once aped more established media and sought comfort from its own technology, but its very existence has also provoked some of the most stimulating questions of our time. Paul Davies, in the Sunday Times, quoted the scholar George Steiner on opening the Edinburgh Arts Festival, as remarking that science has now seized the high ground of human intellectual endeavour, leaving the arts floundering and looking irrelevantly self-indulgent - a tacit acknowledgement that scientists are now tackling many of the age-old questions of existence, topics that were formerly the exclusive preserve of religion and literature. If true, it might be that in those areas of the arts which embrace and overlap the sciences there is a heightened potential for such ground to be reclaimed.
It would be strange to criticise a painting because you could see that it had been made with a brush and paint, yet computer-generated images are often criticised for being too computery or because you can tell they ve been done by a computers . This implies either that there is merit in concealing the origin of the image - that the computer is not a worthy tool for the creation of images - or that the computer generates a particular (implicitly unsatisfactory) type of image. Perceived manifestations of computer generated imagery include - a lack of evidence of hand skills, absolute precision, a clear mathematical basis for the composition, palette limitations of tone or hue, a geometrical quality of line, a regularity of shapes and objects, limitations of an output device (e.g. scale, resolution), pixellation, and a clinical cleanness of image.
Perhaps there is a tendency to criticise a medium for being recognisable when it is imitating something more usually (or better?) created in another medium. The artifice (or fraud) has been exposed. You can tell it s a photograph might be a legitimate criticism of an image which purports to be a painting but not of a piece of reportage, when the opposite criticism would be valid.
It is true that the art-generating computer has sometimes been used to do things which it is not good at or for which it lacks subtlety. Such attempts imply that global aesthetic judgements should be suspended in favour of local judgement of an immature art form. This is reminiscent of interpreting the performance of a two-year-old child playing Chopsticks on the piano as charming and talented whilst recognising that an adult duplicating the performance would merely prove embarrassing. Digital art must, of course, come to stand and be judged without concession alongside other art if it is to be taken seriously and after a few false starts it is now coming to do so.
Questions queue up to launch themselves at digital art and the most challenging are philosophical. Will the medium develop its own aesthetic? If a computer was to generate images at random and was able to evaluate its output in order to produce better work, what would be its criteria for judgement? Since an expert system would only reflect existing human values, what rules would allow a computer to bootstrap its way towards building its own value system? What sense would a machine s internal aesthetic make if its product is to be viewed by humans? And many more besides.
Within these chapters a number of viewpoints are expressed and perspectives illustrated in a range of styles. There has been a conscious editorial decision not to try to unify the styles in which the chapters are written since each proves expressive of the direction from which its author comes. Between them, however, the contributions are designed to cover a broad range of issues within the field of computer art, extended in this second edition by additional chapters.
Hopefully this discursive triangulation will help to pinpoint a worthwhile subject area. Contributors to the book are variously artists, scientists, critics, philosophers, educators or often several of those things. They come to the subject from a wide and often mixed range of backgrounds and their combined essays raise questions relevant to practitioners in as many different disciplines. In some cases those questions are answered but their having been posed is more useful to the debate than their resolution. My own interests currently come together in a research project connecting computers and life drawing. For some the meeting ground between computers and art is found in philosophical discourse. For others this same wedding is consumated in purely artistic output. Each reader will bring a unique personal perspective to the book and will hopefully be stimulated to share the excitement, concern and passion expressed within these pages.
Stuart Mealing is variously a writer, researcher, lecturer and consultant in visual applications of computing. Trained initially as a fine artist in the late 60s he exhibited widely and taught in art colleges for many years whilst maintaining a practical interest in the development of computing. Many years later he took a post-graduate degree in Computing in Design and is currently a Reader in Computers and Drawing at the University of Plymouth in Exeter and the research coordinator for Art & Design.
He was a founder member of their Centre for Visual Computing, a founding editor of Digital Creativity and has also been an Honorary Research Fellow in Computer Science at Exeter University. His research interests centre on computers, drawing, creativity and artificial intelligence (although an intermittent project on visual language keeps resurfacing). His publications include five books and his papers, articles and reviews have appeared in a range of journals.
Stuart Mealing
On drawing a circle
Emotions generated in the viewer by objective drawings which are made using traditional media are different from those elicited by digitally originated marks presented on a computer screen. This chapter explores the dichotomy of production and interpretation of the two forms of mark-making and considers the possibility that they may lead to different understandings of the world.
Prologue
The story is told by Vasari 2 of Pope Benedict IX sending a messenger to a number of artists with a view to commissioning one of them. In Florence he met with Giotto and requested of him a drawing to take to His Holiness. The painter took a brush, then, resting his elbow on his side, with one turn of his hand he drew a circle so perfect and exact that it was a marvel to behold. The courtier thought he could not be serious to offer so little but took the drawing to the Pope who instantly perceived that Giotto surpassed all other painters of his time.
The implicit equation of a circle (centred on j) is: (x-xj) 2 + (y-yj) 2 - r 2 = 0.
On drawing a circle
How do you, I or Giotto draw a circle? How its circularity stored in the mind - by its appearance, by its formula, by the algorithm used to construct it? A circle could be thought of either statically or dynamically, as a concatenation of all positions in one plane which are the same distance from a single point or as an arc sweeping before your eyes. In the first incarnation it is matched by a mathematical template, in the second by a turn of the wrist.
When fingers and wrist combine to take a line o