3 ms·

So, here is some computer created art ("art"?): https://imgur.com/x4eR2HQ https://imgur.com/x4eR2HQ I have many many more like it. https://imgur.com/tCYhZEy htt

So, here is some computer created art ("art"?): https://imgur.com/x4eR2HQ https://imgur.com/x4eR2HQ I have many many more like it. https://imgur.com/tCYhZEy https://imgur.com/tCYhZEy I wrote the program that creates that. When I wrote it, my goal was to make a procedurally generated gas giant planet of some sort, but I didn't even know if what I was attempting would work (and for a period of about a month, it didn't work). I had/have only rudimentary control over the output. I can control the colors that go into it. I can control, to some degree, the scale of the "swirliness", but not the details of the swirliness. I can control how long I let the "swirliness" progress, and a few other things. But, I never know ahead of time how it's going to come out, and it's hard to escape the obvious fact that the computer has done nearly all of the work, and I only gave it the vaguest of directions in terms of aesthetics, although I did give it very specific instructions about how to do everything it did, those instructions were so complicated and so many, that I had next to no idea what specific output those instructions might produce, except in the most general terms. When I run the program, there's an anticipation ... "oooh, I hope this one comes out good!" but I don't know ahead of time whether it will or not.

dahart 1y ago
Why do you call it computer created, when you wrote the software? You’re giving away credit that is entirely yours, to a tool that doesn’t make any art without you. Your computer didn’t decide to make pictures of procedural gas giants, right? It doesn’t even pick the good ones from the boring ones. That’s all you. You picked the subject matter and setup the camera and shading. You designed the software UI. You decided what level of control you wanted, and you can add more control if you want. I understand you’re using procedural rules and randomness, but that was your intention, and so the story that you don’t have control and don’t know what it’ll look like when run seems to me contrived at some level. One of my main digital art projects centers on artificial evolution, which is notoriously difficult to control; I am deeply, intimately familiar with what you’re talking about, and I still say emphatically the computer is not the artist, I am, especially when I write the software. In a digital art project, the software is part of the art. You’re framing your control in terms of what happens only between starting up the software you wrote and getting one output image, but for some reason leaving out all the control and intention you exercised writing the software and deciding what kind of procedural pictures you wanted. There’s a whole category of art called “generative art” that isn’t about computers specifically, but started long before computers existed, and is about setting up and releasing a system of rules, whether physical or logical. Generative art relies on some level of randomness, and the resulting artifact is rarely predictable. And yet, it is still deterministic. The rules might be complex, but the only intention comes from the humans involved who establish the rules, and then let them execute, and hold up the output as art. Noticing the machine does the labor isn’t very relevant, IMO. Cars do a ton of complex work while driving with only vague directions, but we don’t anthropomorphize them, not seriously anyway. Knitting machines do all the complex work making clothes, but clothing designers don’t talk about collaboration with the machine, nor give design credit to the machine. Printers and copiers are very complex, but nobody waxes philosophical about them being collaborators. Just because an image might come out different every time a program runs that was designed to produce a different image every time it runs doesn’t make the machine an artist, it only shows that the computer is a useful, powerful, and reliable machine.
- ithkuil 1y ago
  Yes. It's like saying that photography isn't an art because physics does all the work of producing the picture

dahart 1y ago

Why do you call it computer created, when you wrote the software? You’re giving away credit that is entirely yours, to a tool that doesn’t make any art without you. Your computer didn’t decide to make pictures of procedural gas giants, right? It doesn’t even pick the good ones from the boring ones. That’s all you. You picked the subject matter and setup the camera and shading. You designed the software UI. You decided what level of control you wanted, and you can add more control if you want. I understand you’re using procedural rules and randomness, but that was your intention, and so the story that you don’t have control and don’t know what it’ll look like when run seems to me contrived at some level. One of my main digital art projects centers on artificial evolution, which is notoriously difficult to control; I am deeply, intimately familiar with what you’re talking about, and I still say emphatically the computer is not the artist, I am, especially when I write the software. In a digital art project, the software is part of the art. You’re framing your control in terms of what happens only between starting up the software you wrote and getting one output image, but for some reason leaving out all the control and intention you exercised writing the software and deciding what kind of procedural pictures you wanted. There’s a whole category of art called “generative art” that isn’t about computers specifically, but started long before computers existed, and is about setting up and releasing a system of rules, whether physical or logical. Generative art relies on some level of randomness, and the resulting artifact is rarely predictable. And yet, it is still deterministic. The rules might be complex, but the only intention comes from the humans involved who establish the rules, and then let them execute, and hold up the output as art. Noticing the machine does the labor isn’t very relevant, IMO. Cars do a ton of complex work while driving with only vague directions, but we don’t anthropomorphize them, not seriously anyway. Knitting machines do all the complex work making clothes, but clothing designers don’t talk about collaboration with the machine, nor give design credit to the machine. Printers and copiers are very complex, but nobody waxes philosophical about them being collaborators. Just because an image might come out different every time a program runs that was designed to produce a different image every time it runs doesn’t make the machine an artist, it only shows that the computer is a useful, powerful, and reliable machine.

ithkuil 1y ago
Yes. It's like saying that photography isn't an art because physics does all the work of producing the picture