Notes

Computer Generated Art

Shown above is a piece of the early 20th century Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Mondrian along with cubism, is one of the pioneers of abstract art. His enthralling paintings, such as the one shown above, are still being examined by historians and future artists alike. His minimalist paintings marked an important turning point in the field of art. The question that many lovers of art began asking was, "How much can be expressed in a small amount of detail?" rather than, "How much detail can we express?" Mondrian spent hours ensuring that he chose the correct colors and that the squares were stuffed with the right colors. This was so that gallery viewers could be amazed by the way he expressed the emotions on the canvas. The sample shows that Mondrian was a true master of his art.



The image above is not one of the most famous Mondrian work It was created by a computer in less than an second, using a program that I spent an hour and a half writing for fun the other day. Here are some moreexamples:



There are 100 more. Here's another set of Bach music in a short video that I created to see if I could. Heck, I could even write a program to automates the production of videos like this. I'd only need just ten lines of code.



Computer Generated Art



It's not difficult to find someone who believes these paintings are genuine Mondrian paintings. All you require is someone to state that they have an Ph.D. who speaks with authority and uses big vocabulary. In reality, you'll be more difficult to find skeptical people today than believers. You may even meet people who have Ph.Ds to join in the discussion. I can recall either watching a video or reading an article (I wish I could actually find the source to this link so that I could actually use actual names) where an art professor at a prestigious college explained that on the first day of class he would display a picture on the screen and explain to students that it was the result of a painting by one of the most famous abstract painters who worked in the same way that Mondrian did. He would then give his students a few minutes to look over the painting before letting them explain the emotions and ideas that they felt the artist wanted to convey. After giving them time to think and for a few of them to speak, he'd pull out his smock to show his students that the image they were putting all their effort into was not a painting at all and was actually an image of his smock that was dirty.



While I'm not sure of what the professor was trying to convey, I do remember that it taught me that anyone can be convinced that nearly everything is art. This is a subject I've discussed in the past. Artists are becoming outdated. I wrote a program that could produce more Mondrian imitations in less than two hours than Mondrian could have accomplished throughout his entire career. While no one has yet created an oil painting robot, it's only a matter time before some random professor decides that he will spend the taxpayer money it was given to construct one.



Computer generated art isn't the future, it is already present. Minecraft is the most played video game and despite actively being developed it barely employs any artists since the bulk of Minecraft's beautification of its visuals is accomplished by an algorithm. There exist entire Reddit threads dedicated to showing the beautiful "naturally created landscapes" of Minecraft. These are people looking at art created by computers , not humans. Minecraft isn't the only game that is like this. Many video game developers have abandoned the idea of creating maps and levels and instead opted to have computers create a distinct world for each player, typically procedurally.



This is not something the fine art community has yet to accept. Many of them think of Mondrian's work and the png files my program creates as sacred. (I am curious to know what Mondrian would think of my program). Their culture, and indeed their whole system, aren't prepared to face the future that is here. Computer-generated worlds, images, personalities, and characters are already in existence. It's just an issue of time until we have computer-generated film and music. MCNAME The idea that the world's entire entertainment industry could fall into the hands of a handful of AI supreme rulers doesn't sound that far fetched. The majority of people don't care because they can't tell the difference between an actual Mondrian painting and an unintentional collage created by computers.


Homepage: https://mcname.org/