What is art?

[Gravdigr]

SMD?

[lumberjim]

some mother ducker?

Shaking my dong?

might just be a contraction for 'somebody's'

[John Sellers]

Art is in the eye of the beholder.

[henry quirk]

...the nasty lil bug that gets in your head, eats on your brain, lays eggs, then dies.

...the mummified cat poop you find under the sofa well after you strangled the four-legged bastid and tossed its carcass in a dunpster.

...the sound of a baby chokin' on strained peas while ma watches 'Dancing With The Stars'.

...the smell of a well-used public restroom.

...the dog realizin' the leg it was gonna bite is attached to a body that bites back.

...the thug who gets shot in the face by the easy mark.

...the bored cashier sellin' you defective condoms on a Saturday night.

...the wizard throwing lightinin' bolts out of his ass 'just because'.

...sittin' on your stoop, smokin' and sippin' coffee, watchin' mushrooms grow on the horizon.

...the burly rapist left dead and unsatisfied by the mousy woman from Poughkeepsie.

...the sun beatin' down on your head.

...the client who stiffs you for 500 bucks.

...the tires of the client who stiffed you for 500 bucks (cuz 'if he ain't gonna pay me, he's gonna pay somebody').

[Carruthers]

It's a Rembrandt isn't it? Well, only up to a point.
ING, the Dutch bank, and Microsoft joined forces to produce 'The Next Rembrandt' by computer analysis of a number of his paintings.

From the Daily Telegraph:

The team behind the painting insisted it was not an attempt to to mimic, copy or reproduce what Rembrandt painted. Bas Korsten, a creative director who came up with the project idea, said they used "technological advances" including "big data", facial recognition and 3D printing techniques "to predict, on the basis of analysis, what the Great Master might have painted next." The painting was created through a complicated process using software that interpreted Rembrandt’s use of geometry and composition – qualities that marked him out as one of the finest Dutch painters of the 17th century.

A height map was then used to determine how to mimic his brushstrokes, and recreate the texture typical of his paintings. The final painting was then printed, made up of 13 layers of paint-based UV ink.

“We looked at a number of Rembrandt paintings, and we scanned their surface texture, their elemental composition, and what kinds of pigments were used. That’s the kind of information you need if you want to generate a painting by Rembrandt virtually”, said Joris Dik from the team at the Technical University Delft, which also contributed to the project.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with art, not everyone was impressed.

This particularly splenetic piece is from The Guardian:

What a horrible, tasteless, insensitive and soulless travesty of all that is creative in human nature. What a vile product of our strange time when the best brains dedicate themselves to the stupidest “challenges”, when technology is used for things it should never be used for and everybody feels obliged to applaud the heartless results because we so revere everything digital.

Hey, they’ve replaced the most poetic and searching portrait painter in history with a machine. When are we going to get Shakespeare’s plays and Bach’s St Matthew Passion rebooted by computers? I cannot wait for Love’s Labours Have Been Successfully Functionalised by William Shakesbot.

You cannot, I repeat, cannot, replicate the genius of Rembrandt van Rijn. His art is not a set of algorithms or stylistic tics that can be recreated by a human or mechanical imitator. He can only be faked – and a fake is a dead, dull thing with none of the life of the original. What these silly people have done is to invent a new way to mock art. Bravo to them! But the Dutch art historians and museums who appear to have lent their authority to such a venture are fools.

[lumberjim]

Looks like if UT and digr had a kid

[Gravdigr]

Oh. My. God.

[xoxoxoBruce]

What a horrible, tasteless, insensitive and soulless travesty of all that is creative in human nature. What a vile product of our strange time when the best brains dedicate themselves to the stupidest “challenges”, when technology is used for things it should never be used for and everybody feels obliged to applaud the heartless results because we so revere everything digital.

I have to agree with this, don't the whiz kids have something better to do?

[Clodfobble]

[Devil's Advocate]This all falls under the larger umbrella of AI, which has technological uses beyond recreation of art styles. When we explore relatively useless things, we often find answers to completely different problems.[/Devil's Advocate.] That being said, yeah, we don't need the art. We need the information about how the computer came up with the art so we can get it to come up with other stuff.

[Carruthers]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

I have to agree with this, don't the whiz kids have something better to do?

It was an interesting, and perhaps ultimately useful, experiment in computing, ING got some publicity and brought art to a wider audience and J Walter Thompson were awarded a couple of baubles at a prestigious advertising shindig. There doesn't seem to be much of a downside to the whole project.

Incidentally, JWT and ING produced a new take on Rembrandt's 'The Night Watch' when Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum re-opened in 2013 after refurbishment.



The original...

[lumberjim]

I doubt the AI was slick enough to use texture the way he did.

http://www.naturalpigments.com/art-s...sto-technique/

[Carruthers]

Originally Posted by lumberjim

I doubt the AI was slick enough to use texture the way he did.

http://www.naturalpigments.com/art-s...sto-technique/

The IT bods made a commendable effort to replicate the technique, so I think they deserve full marks for that.

[Griff]

There are machine planets all over the galaxy which think they have art.

[henry quirk]

...meat loaf (both lower and upper case).

[henry quirk]

...the bloody 'thing' the cats left on the stoop, the 'thing' I bare-foot stepped on as I stumbled out of the house at 4 for the day's first smoke.