Appreciating Art with Algorithms | Hacker News Reader

Appreciating Art with Algorithms

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56 pointsingve17 comments

Whoa, was wondering where the traffic was coming from. I wrote this!

Your account of walking through the SF MOMA and being mesmerized by the possibility of turning the art into algorithms exactly mirrors my experience. I too wondered if there was a way to develop Chuck Close's mosaics with some image manipulation, but for small project I instead focused on interpreting Sol LeWitt's wall drawings as code first.

Here's a shameless plug of a very rudimentary React/WebCanvas project I've been working on: http://artgorithms.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/

Nicely done. Sigmar Polke was another artists that I was experimenting with too.

Great work! I made a whole interface for easily generating this kind of art in the browser

http://blog.zmitri.com/studio/

open source: https://github.com/dmitric/studio

If you want to add some "shaders" would love to collaborate in some way.

> I’m going to beat around the bush and not mention the artist’s name that was the source of inspiration because I’ve found articles online claiming he does not want his name referenced in personal projects, so I’ll respect their wishes.

I find this really weird. His art is public, on display at public places and he wishes not to be mentioned in public discussion?

Here is the guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close

I saw this warning online: http://www.barcodeart.com/artwork/portraits/chuck_close/ so didn't want to reference his name in the project (#4).

But from what I understand, Scott mainly got in trouble for directly using his artwork by cutting the original work of Chuck Close into cells and then using the cells to draw new images. Whether this constitutes as fair use is up for debate.

From the link:

> Chuck Close does not want his art to be trivialized. He will exercise his legal rights, even if your motives are good. If he knows about your project and does nothing, that will put him in a position where he cannot fight the next, even more egregious usage of his copyrighted images and use of his name.

This is the kind of behavior that shows nothing but weakness and lack of faith in his own art. You have just trivialized his works using something that is even more beautiful - the construction & logic behind his intricate mosaics.

I have just lost respect for him and his works.

I'm really flattered you like the results.

I'll be honest that when I first started the project (and continue to work on it) that I was conflicted. I truly love his work. I spent hours and my weekends analyzing his artwork. I'm still studying his usage of colors because there's still work to be done there.

With the discovery of legal threats and actions against Scott Blake I was disheartened because I don't believe he would like me working on this project. Here's an artist I admire and here I am doing something I love that he may not like. Difficult to come to terms with. Like everyone on HackerNews we're driven to create and solve problems. Curiosity and challenge got the best of me and I pushed forward.

I still plan on releasing a Windows version and eventually making the source code public once I cleanup some things. I'm not making a killing on the app either. It's been out for a month and it's averaging me a dollar a day (with initial publicizing it on /r/macapps and other subreddits). Helps fuel the coffee that goes into these after hours side projects.

Since I'm charging for the app, I plan on donating a portion of the proceeds to the MoMA as well (after all, they're the source of inspiration and I hope this helps give back to other artists).

If you made an iOS version, I'd buy it for up to $5.00. I suspect it would be popular.

Thank you -- I'm going to revisit this suggestion as it's been brought up by friends as well.

I actually implemented a mobile web version at first with the up-sell of buying high res images. I wasn't happy with the images it was producing though because I forced 1 setting for all images being converted for the sake of ease-of-use for the user.

But this was a mistake. Not all photos are the same: Some photos looked better with smaller/larger cells, as a diamond grid, with different color settings, etc.

Server costs and complexity grew too: (nginx, nodejs, rabbitmq). The algorithm is CPU intensive and not fast enough to my liking yet. So I released the macOS version and put the computational cost on the end user and avoiding the need to support servers.

Sounds like I should make a native mobile version with the option to tweak parameters.

Or just pre-compute low-res previews using a variety of settings and have the user highlight ones that look pleasing. Over time, you can collect this data and find heuristics (i.e., machine learning) for automatically choosing the most pleasing settings for a given image.

What Close actually wrote:

"Even if your motives are not bad, I still do not want my work trivialized. I must fight you because if I know of your project, and do nothing to exercise my legal rights, that will put me in a position where I can’t fight the next, even more egregious usage of my copyrighted image and use of my name. It may be an amusing project and many people might like it, but it is MY art that is trivialized, MY career you are jeopardizing, MY legacy, which I have to think about for my children, and MY livelihood. I must fight to protect it. I hope you will realize the harm you are doing me and my work that you claim you admire and voluntarily shut down the site so as to avoid a law-suit."

It was amicably resolved.

http://hyperallergic.com/54104/my-chuck-close-problem/

Scott Blake's Close-like images were a travesty of Close's paintings, and they potentially give the impression (to an uninformed bystander) that there's no creativity or individuality in Close's work. The fact is that the similarity with Close's work is recognizable, and Close's work can be devalued by imitation ("bad money drives out good", etc.)

Dean L.'s work is more convincing as an image, but it doesn't avoid the problem of dilution by not mentioning Close's name. It's still obviously a Chuck Close filter that acts in a way that completely erases/ignores the materiality, labour, and individual creativity that Close put into his paintings.

I'm no fan of Close, but he was absolutely right to act to try to stop this from happening.

Scott's TEDx presentation says otherwise[1] - he was pretty much against Chuck's allegations to the point where he did a tongue-in-cheek presentation.

> It's still obviously a Chuck Close filter that acts in a way that completely erases/ignores the materiality, labour, and individual creativity that Close put into his paintings.

I disagree. In no way does that ignore Chuck's materiality, labour and individual creativity. In fact, it sheds more light on the process (which is very procedural and art critics would argue it is very "mechanical"). There is a tremendous amount of creativity in figuring out, as the OP has done, the underlying algorithmic beauty of replicating Chuck's works. Your definition of creative endeavor (materiality, labour) is profoundly limiting and very "physical".

I feel the opposite - OP's algorithm is way more interesting than Chuck's "materiality" and "labour". I will resort to Feynman's clip on 'Beauty of Flowers'[2], which does a better job of explaining my point.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKndFPr4vWk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo

Sure there's creativity in writing a Chuck Close filter, or a Monet filter, or a van Gogh filter: they're all conceivable and likely to become popular.

The problem is that it's not polite and indeed somewhat aggressive to put forward a bit of code as an equivalent to the human brain. Remember it's the artist's brain that's the object of interest here, as much as any well-understood but beautiful flower or pebble. Since the brain is the most complex object we know of, it's fair for anyone to feel insulted when something they create intuitively, using their whole personality, is imitated using a few lines of code. It's really a dilution of their personal "trademark" output, to frame it in commercial terms.

In a court of law, you can't do various frivolous/cheeky things without risking being found in contempt of court.

Society as a whole isn't so different, and Feynman is not a good guide to civilized, socially conscious behaviour. Remember the time he got someone seriously injured because he wanted to unmask a perpetual motion hoax? http://hoaxes.org/comments/papparticle2.html

It might have been an innocent act on Feynman's part, but bear in mind that he was just trying to expose the guy for his own slightly arrogant satisfaction. Not a good look when that ends in serious injuries.

Also, "What do you care what other people think?", the title of one of the entertaining Feynman books... Well, going back to the issue of trademark dilution, actually, in civilized society, you know as well as I do that considering other people's feelings and livelihoods is crucially important. It's not merely a conventional matter of piety, deference or respect, although sometimes those things are appropriate. It is a question of humility.

(That might not be a very HN sentiment because having a conscience gets in the way of disruption.)

According to your link, the person died (and two more were injured) but the cause was a fraudster rigging their perpetual motion machine to explode to avoid it being discovered to be a scam.

Feynman's actions had no impact on what happened, at least according to the version you linked to, which is Feynman hinself's take on things.

> Society as a whole isn't so different, and Feynman is not a good guide to civilized, socially conscious behaviour. Remember the time he got someone seriously injured because he wanted to unmask a perpetual motion hoax? http://hoaxes.org/comments/papparticle2.html It might have been an innocent act on Feynman's part, but bear in mind that he was just trying to expose the guy for his own slightly arrogant satisfaction. Not a good look when that ends in serious injuries.

Interesting article, thanks for sharing. It seems like an accident accord the article? I wouldn't be so quick to draw conclusions about Feynman's character from some accident. He has done notorious things with the CIA!

I was just trying to make a point. It could have been anyone, not necessarily Feynman, that sought beauty in various dimensions...not just the tangible paint and materiality. This point of view says nothing about civilized society or not appreciating what Chuck Close did. What the OP did just adds to the beauty of it all, doesn't take anything away from whatever it is that you romanticized about, i.e. "in the labour, materiality and individual creativity." This kind of view point is regressive in my opinion.

Feynman did nothing wrong. The guy built a bomb to cover up his fraud. He probably intended to set it off regardless of what Feynman did, according to your link. Regardless, Feynman had no way of knowing there was a bomb there.

It's completely appalling that he got away with it, despite killing a person and seriously injuring 2 more. He even successfully sued Feynman.

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