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Most art is most definitely rational, deliberate, and reasoned. It doesn't appear so when you're thrown into the deep end (personally, although I'd been exposed
by geraldalewis 15y ago
Most art is most definitely rational, deliberate, and reasoned. It doesn't appear so when you're thrown into the deep end (personally, although I'd been exposed to it countless times, it took me a while to appreciate work like that of Mondrian). Blocks of code look equally irrational to non-coders.
All the great Renaissance painters were as obsessed with math as they were pigments. Their art is accessible, so probably appears rational. Modern art is also rational, but understanding why it is rational sometimes means the viewer needs an understanding of its history, or the artist's intentions.
Cubism is a great example of this: it might appear irrational for the artist to paint a subject's eyes and their nose on the same plane, but it is not. Cubism is a process in which multiple vantage points are presented at once. Even though it is not a mechanical process dictated by strict rules, it is indeed a process.
while i
--i
subject.angle = random() * 360
# copies a nose, eye, etc.
feature = copy( subject.facial_features[ random() * 10 ] )
paint( feature )
Edit: I'm afraid I didn't express myself clearly -- by `rational`, I mean: reasoned, thought out, and deliberate.
- mattgreenrocks 15y agoThe output may seem rational, but was the process of synthesizing it 100% rational? Can you write a program that creates the Mona Lisa while explaining each decision along the way?
- geraldalewis 15y agoThe rationale for the decisions da Vinci made while painting the Mona Lisa are actually pretty well documented http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa .
- mattgreenrocks 15y agoYes, they are. I think we can agree that there is a beautiful elegance to it that is similar to that of mathematics. But that doesn't answer my question, which asked how to write a program that was capable of outputting the Mona Lisa while rationalizing the decisions it is making. Shouldn't we be able to feed everything we know about the Mona Lisa into a program so it could generate something similar? If not, why not?
- geraldalewis 15y agoI'd say that simply because something is rational doesn't mean it can be codified into a computer program (yet). (Maybe my example code disrupted my point more than helped.) The design of most computer programs is rational, but a computer isn't sophisticated enough to program itself. I'm actually having trouble thinking of an important human endeavor this was not in some way rational. Maybe some `Outsider Art` created by mental patients? Programmers who work in `BrainFuck` or `LOLCODE`? I guess I'd only think of something as irrational if I thought a reasonable person would not come to a given conclusion based on the same inputs (such as knowledge, skill, experience, etc).
- khafra 15y agoExplain to me exactly what it is about creating the Mona Lisa that cannot be done by a machine, and I will write a program which does it (with apologies to Von Neumann). In other words, this sounds like an "irrationalism of the gaps" theory.
- mattgreenrocks 15y agoA sense of aesthetics? (Let me guess, that answer doesn't count because it cannot be quantified.)
- khafra 15y agoNot because it cannot be quantified, but because you failed to quantify it. A sense of aesthetics is not an irreducible "thing," it's a set of algorithms and heuristics. If you could explain exactly why you find DaVinci's creativity so appealing, you still wouldn't be able to reproduce it directly--but you would have reduced it to a problem in NP.
- juiceandjuice 15y agoWas Van Gogh cutting off his ear rational? Just because something can be explained by some sort of progression doesn't make it inherently "rational"
- zinkem 15y agoAnd just because someone has a mental illness that causes strife in their personal life, it doesn't make their work inherently irrational.
- geraldalewis 15y agoNo, cutting off his ear wasn't rational, but it also wasn't art. I think a reasoned process is rational, but maybe this is getting into semantics.
- juiceandjuice 15y agoA person who isn't rational is going to always produce rational art. A rational statement.
- rimantas 15y agoAbout as rational as statement "A male father will always produce male children".