Comment by chki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chki | Hacker News Reader

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Firstly, I like this project and the art itself. As others have said this is not a new thing in art but I think the presentation, the stamp and everything are quite nice.

Now secondly, obviously the premise is also completely untrue and almost impossible to achieve: The artist did have something in mind when painting these pictures: to paint pictures where only the viewer is meant to decipher the meaning while the artist themself has nothing in mind. He or she also did paint something aesthetically pleasing so there seems to be a lot of intention on that part as well. Painting something without any intention at all seems almost completely impossible to me. (Maybe you could trick somebody else into painting something without them knowing about it – but even then you are still the artist with an intention).

Finally I wanted to address the criticism by some other comments that art critique and galleries are always looking for an artistic intention even if there is none. I don't think that's completely true – I have seen plenty of exhibitions where it is explained that the artist "was just experimenting with form/colors".

Thank you!

Actually, the longest part of building this was finding the right wording. Here are some previous attempts:

- When painting this, I had no artistic intent

- When painting this, there was nothing I wanted to express with the picture

- When painting this, I wanted to express nothing

In German, there's a nice ambiguity: "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is somewhere between 'I was not thinking' and 'I wanted to express nothing.'. It's also the reason why I went with a German stamp (which is my mother tongue) and not an English one.

It is SO complicated to say that I wasn't up to anything with these pictures.

There's a piece of graffiti from the May 1968 Paris riots that goes "I have something to say but I don't know what." Reminds me of this. I can't find the original French but I think it's something like "J'ai quelque chose a dire mais je ne sais quoi."

Found it: https://www.dicocitations.com/citations/citation-67489.php

They use the pas

This is a great historical slogan, thanks for bringing it up.

There is a big difference between "... je ne sais quoi" and "... je ne sais pas quoi".

"... je ne sais pas quoi" means "I don't know what". The slogan is indeed "I have something to say but I don't know what".

"je ne sais quoi" is a weird French construction which is actually a name. It takes a masculin determinant and means "a little something".

Il manque à ce plat un petit je ne sais quoi = this meal is missing a little something

Ah, nice! I'll compile a page of related projects on the website (with all the interesting links from this discussion), and that will go on it, too, of course! Thanks!

Very Zen. Not being sarcastic and don’t mean in the corny way it’s often used here in the States implying peaceful gardens of tranquility… blah… blah… blah.

But, if I may be so bold, what you describe there is the essence of Zen. And also why zenmasters are famously reluctant to find words for it. :)

Ah, I wasn't aware of that parallel – thank you!

It sounds like you are very concerned with making sure people know this. Were you concerned with that before you painted them? Before you decided to share them, and how to share them? Then clearly there is an artistic intent behind them.

That's an interesting point that got me thinking already:

No, I wasn't aware of that when painting most of the pictures. I just enjoyed the process of painting. But, as you can imagine, wall space gets limited after painting number 25, and at some point they were hanging in the staircase, all the way down to our basement. So I thought about selling them.

That was the point when I thought that I'd love to mark them as painted without any intent. That was before picture 25, I'd say.

Now, number 26 was painted KNOWING that I'd be marking it as painted without anything in mind, which somehow (same for all upcoming pictures) increases the 'pressure' of not adding any meaning.

Until now, I'm comfortable with that (the painting process is so much fun), and it's probably a thing worth exploring further. Perhaps I could write something contradictory on the front?

Tell me about your mother…

Thanks for the added explanation! German is my mother tongue as well and I also think "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is very elegant and basically not translatable.

I’ve grown to greatly appreciate those phrases that don’t translate. Admittedly, as someone who got competent in formal programming languages before I was ever competent in a second human one- it took me a while to appreciate the “syntax error”… lol.

Aber für Deutsch, brauche iche mehr ubung! :)

"I allowed myself to be guided by the spirit of art"?

as opposed to commercialism/marketing/etc

I love this. I generally dislike art; there are a few notable exceptions.

Then especially, thank you! (If you haven't, check out the links to related artworks in this discussion – many of them I hadn't come across yet, but they have a similar vibe!)

I like this a lot. Great work :)

Thanks! It's great to read all your comments here. I appreciate a good mixture of aesthetics and self-referential logic conundrums. ;-)

+1

I guess the autor deliberately intended to have no deliberate intention in mind while painting.

Also, the author somehow "allows" the pictures to cause feelings in the viewer, but says that he/she removes him/herself from the equation. But I think he/she is a viewer of his/her own pictures while drawing it. There is definitely some feedback going on.

So one improvement could be to draw without looking at the output.

But maybe the best way to go here is to computer-generate some pictures. And one is also not allowed to hand-pick a generated picture. And one should have nothing in mind while writing that computer program.

Even if you aren't able to see the art while creating it you would still know a little of what's happening on the canvas. It would be farther removed for sure, but even the physicality of the scraping here would start to tell you what is happening.

I like the idea though, and it does take the artist a little further away.

That's an interesting idea! I'm also trying to paint something nice, so when painting, I do look at the picture and say: "Ahh, this doesn't look right.", and then I go about and change something. I do enjoy painting, and I guess I wouldn't if I, say, blindfolded my eyes. But I probably should try that ;-)

Train a GAN with images with intent, then have the computer produce an image that lacks intent of an artist but imitates the visual amenity of the input works? Art-in-the-shell??

But then you have digital pictures and nothing physical. All the fissures and layers of scraping would be missing.

There are actually some nice robot arms painting pictures and doing calligraphy:

https://www.pinterest.de/pin/brobot-desktop-robot-arm-is-pra...

There's always going to be something of the person in anything created by a person (at bare minimum reflective of the physical properties of the person, such as large or small hands). This is obviously true. Just as any interpretation of art is indicative of mental elements of the person interpreting the art.

The artworks on the linked page are similar enough in style that it's obvious something within the artist dictated them.

The question is whether there is conscious intent, and what that intent is. Lots of people create art just to create something they find beautiful, with no other meaning intended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_phenomenon

> The ideomotor phenomenon is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously.

> The phrase is most commonly used in reference to the process whereby a thought or mental image brings about a seemingly "reflexive" or automatic muscular reaction, often of minuscule degree, and potentially outside of the awareness of the subject. As in responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively with an ideomotor effect to ideas alone without the person consciously deciding to take action.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34507844

> Even humans draw many things that they don't understand. If we draw something that we completely don't understand (such as through random scribbling) we don't even call it a representation. It's a fluke. I used to scribble and then trace images in my scribbling (if possible). Often I ended up tracing things that looked like a child's bad drawing of Donald Duck, but once, without having to trace particular lines at all, my scribbling was a perfect seeming of a rose flower (with some minor additional flourishes). I recognized the rose flower, but I certainly didn't set out to draw it.

Thank you, I wasn't aware of the Ideomotor phenomenon. Very interesting!

- "The artist did have something in mind when painting these pictures: to paint pictures where only the viewer is meant to decipher the meaning."

- "He or she also did paint something aesthetically pleasing so there seems to be a lot of intention on that part as well."

Sorry, you're probably wrong on both assumptions. Playing with viewers is not common and is a genre thing. Aesthetic pleasantness is also not a required requisite of an art piece and as an intention may stand in conflict with honest self-expression.

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