Rhea Myers

Blog

  • Stop Software Patents In Europe

    Software patents are bad for business and bad for creativity. Help stop the EU from introducing them. The EU want to override the European Parliament’s democratic decision against software patents, and to go against hundreds of thousands of their citizens who have spoken out directly against software patents:
    http://demo.ffii.org/

  • Harold Cohen Talk at Tate Modern

    Harold Cohen is giving a talk at Tate Modern on Tuesday 27th April at 6.30pm
    http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/cohen.htm

  • Drawing People

    There’s the objection to drawing people that you cannot know what another person is thinking or doing, so seeking to represent them is misrepresentation, projection, falsehood. For me, drawing people is the opposite of this. People are unknowable, you have to admit this to draw them, you admit this by drawing them. Drawing them is dealing with the unknowable. There’s a sense of wonder in all this, you can’t be arrogant, there’s no possibility of divine revelation underwriting it.
    What am I drawing when I’m drawing people? I don’t know. But I wish that I could.

  • Creativity

    Work like Gips & Stiny’s hand painted shape grammars or Harold Cohen’s AARON is creative, as the problems and solutions are identified in the creation of the work and the resulting style is necessary and historically unprecedented. H-creative, in Margaret Boden’s terminology.

  • Creativity (Not)

    The fact that some programs can produce variations on existing styles (usually Kandinsky or Mondrian) does not show that programs can be creative. The mechanisation of an existing style in humans shows a lack of creativity. The creation of new styles (the discovering and solving of new problems) is the hallmark of creativity, as long as the results are Realistic for the conditions of their production.

  • Proofs

    One advantage of using programs to make art is that the results are “proofs” of the theory of artistic production embodied in the program. Like the proofs of a mathematical theory, or the proofs of an etching. Or like an aesthetic Turing test, if a human being can’t tell the difference between a drawing made by a program and one made by another human being, the program has been proven to be successfully reproducing a human level of artistic production.

  • Bait And Switch

    Totalitarian art is brought to the attention by extra-aesthetic means; its association with and dissemination by totalitarianism. It might not otherwise be noteworthy. Any attempt to turn a somehow made-innocent eye on it to find aesthetic value in it is rehabilitating its extra-aesthetic aspect, not its aesthetics.
    To do so is a bait-and-switch:
    1. An object that is aesthetically uninteresting is given prominence.
    2. It is suggested that since this object has prominence it may be aesthetic.
    3. It is suggested that this is independent of its extra-aesthetic qualities.
    4. Voila! An unaesthetic object of interest only because it has been peddled by totalitarianism is rendered an object of aesthetic regard.

  • A Free Library

  • Random Aesthetics Links

     

  • Dropping A Constraint on rheart (ouch)

    The previous images from rheart used “convex hulls” (shapes with no inward-heading lines) to draw around. Dropping the convexity (and also the non-intersection) constraint by using a random set of points (and taking out the skeleton for the last three) gives results like this:

    There’s some cases where the drawing algorithm can’t find its way around such a random set of lines. It’s useful to see this for debugging. You can’t see it on these small images, but the lines are still slightly random as a result of the pathfinding algorithm (which is the effect I want).
    I quite like these shapes, they’re like some of my early Blobs prototypes. The rounded corners are an emergent property of the drawing algorithm, which is nice because I wanted this effect but I hadn’t worked out how to get it yet. 🙂