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Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

I found it interesting to note how viscerally uncomfortable I felt while looking at some (or, most) of these pieces.

Of course not all art has to be pleasing to the viewer, but confronting/challenging art is made deliberately that way by the artist, and the process of experiencing the art involves understanding the feeling and learning something from it.

It's a different feeling altogether to be discomforted by art, but for no purpose.

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Honestly, most of them feel very bland to me. Often in the same way, with the blank white square as the extreme case, but there are a number of other series typical of its style.

The algorithm could use some additional imbalance-creating modules.

The Apple Maps screenshots book and 9-eyes.com are two projects that really stood out for me. Neither was intentional and both involved curation, which is perhaps what is missing from this (and similar) projects.

Apple Maps screenshots book?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/pedernorrby/sets/7215763227711...

These are vastly more artistically satisfying than the OP, and most other GAN images that are presented as art. That's a great statement about process mattering as much as result (or is that just my POMO talking?)

Thanks for sharing this.

I guess in reality, the physicality of the art plays a big part of how you experience and appreciate these types of pieces.

The textures and subtle tones, the method of craft, the interplay between mixed media, the energy (or lack of), the emotion (or lack of) etc and so on.

All of that gets lost in a 512x512px image.

Looked like generic anonymous hotel/office art to me.

Technically this is great, but I guess I am not able to appreciate the art itself... but then I get zero feeling from "real" art as well. Shrug

Do you like any type of art, or is it only painting that leaves you unmoved?

If you appreciate the technicality of it that's still appreciation. I'm like that with photorealism, awed at the skill of it, but otherwise unconvinced by it as a form of painting.

Pretty much couldn't really care any less about most art. It's just some paint on a canvas or a statue or whatever.

Some people say they are emotionally moved or mesmerised by the beauty etc. Sure I can appreciate it is a skill etc etc, but I don't understand the emotional reaction people say they have - I just see a "thing" like I see advertising boards on the street as a "thing". I wonder sometimes if people just say this stuff because they think they are supposed to.

> Pretty much couldn't really care any less about most art.

Art also includes literature, music, movies, theater... Not sure if you also meant those.

Yup.

>I wonder sometimes if people just say this stuff because they think they are supposed to.

No, other people are actually capable of appreciating art as an abstraction and of having an emotional reaction to the concepts that art conveys.

100% this. In some I think I can see recognizable images (a car? A bird? A human face?) bizarrely decomposed and distorted. Combined with the manically meticulous, not-quite-repetitive patterns and discolorations, the pieces have a distinctly tortured quality to them.

>It's a different feeling altogether to be discomforted by art, but for no purpose.

There's something alienating in the emotional response evoked by an AI designed to simulate human creativity, which ironically transcends itself in the relationship between a "real" and "artificial" intelligence, creating a legitimate work of art in the contemplation of manufactured emotion. You begin to question whether your response is any less the product of a blind, stochastic machine than the stimulus.

Also some of them look like spooky faces.

I get the same feeling as you. It's like a Lovecraftian anxiety, if I had to give it a name

Or stills from a John Carpenter dream.

The term is "uncanny valley".

I get the same feeling from cheap hotel art. Dull colors, fairly abstract, and feeling kind of "soulless"(?)

All I'm getting is greyish rectangles.

Styled after Mark Rothko, or server overloaded?

Also, no sharp lines or objects. There is a lot of geometric abstract art in a continuum from organic (Pollock) to sterile(Rothko) and everything in the middle.

Wow. Sterile and Rothko are not two things I would have put in the same sentence.

Agreed, to me they're warm, they recall sunsets and fields of flowers, worn like a favourite thing. But perhaps I don't know his full body of work.

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