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"Computer generated art tends to lack expressive individuality"

That's a pretty massive blanket statement to apply to a whole field of art.

"I think, is why it feels less valid than human-made art."

You realize there's still a human making the art, right? It's not like a computer rendered piece is of the computer's will. A painting isn't of the paint's will.

Some people paint, some people sculpt, some people make electrons do a whole bunch of math really fast. You can't always let means overrule intention.

I'm talking about cases where human involvement is minimal. If all I need to do to make a painting is press the "run" button, there's not much intention there. I haven't expressed anything.

You could certainly make the case for "expressive individuality" in the program making the art, especially if it was written by just one person. But computer programs, IMHO, fail the "valid art" test for other reasons. Of Dutton's twelve criteria they miss at least two: representation (6) and emotional saturation (9).

" If all I need to do to make a painting is press the "run" button, there's not much intention there."

If all I need to do to kill another person is press the "run" button, there's not much intention there.

Sure, that'd be severe exaggeration in most cases, but we're talking about art, and that art has happened (See the works of yoko ono (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYJ3dPwa2tI), wafaa bilal (http://wafaabilal.com/html/shootAnIraqi.html), etc.) Are you both psychic AND time traveling in order to be able to tell what someone was thinking when they hit that button? I realize this puts me in the place of defending art /I/ personally don't like, but that "valid art" term is just the worst.

There are also types of art that are all about hitting the button. For instance, field recording. Wonderful article on it at http://www.factmag.com/2014/11/18/a-beginners-guide-to-field..., but the quote from Yan Jun I reference the most is:

--

“There is no such thing as documenting a reality,” he tells me, “There is no divide between documenting and creating. The point is I don’t build dreams neither by field recording nor by playing my electronics instruments or computer. To choose equipments, choose position and push record button are acts of composing. Tiny meaningless noises can be a beautiful composition. To summarise I can use this equation – I push the record button = someone making a musique concréte piece = Bach.”

--

Seriously. I'm happy you read a book about art, and that's not sarcastic. Most people won't ever put that much time into thinking about art, and it's cool you did. Just be careful about how much credit you give anything that ever uses the term "Valid Art".

I think you're making the same category of error of which you accuse the_duck, albeit in the opposite direction, when you say "that art has happened" or claiming that field recording is art, or reverently quoting Yan Jun drawing an equivalence between pushing a record button and Bach. You dropped the word "valid", but you're still making assertions about what is and is not art.

Collectively, humans don't always agree about what is art. One option is to simply always be agnostic about what is and is not art. Then there's no argument.

Another option is to claim that there does exist some dividing line. And if you want to come to an agreement with anyone about that dividing line, it's hilariously delusional to miss the fact that there does not exist a broad consensus about when it is appropriate to use that word, and you need to construct that agreement. And if you want to do that, the idea of "valid art" is essential; blithely saying "that art has happened" is disingenuous at best.

Me, I choose to be agnostic about what is art. I don't understand the value of agreeing about it (except, perhaps, for the purpose of bureaucratic allocation of grants and funding). But even having taken that position, Dutton's ideas about a 12-factor model seem pretty interesting, as a sociological investigation of what other criteria other humans seem to use.

There are paint-by-number programs and then there is Paint-By-Number with real paint. There are software engineers and programmers and there are people who just type in code while following a tutorial (or even just download the sample code and hit build). Everything beyond this from-zero point is extraordinarily complex.

Does a painting composed of a single stroke lack something to be art? What if that painting was done and redone a hundred times? What if the artist's assistant did it at their direction? Does it matter if the artist crafted the brush themselves by carving a fine branch, procuring their own glue and sable, and putting the thing together? Or if instead they bought 10 brushes and 10 sketchbooks in pursuit of an idea? Is the "end product" more or less legitimate because the artist had a clear vision of what they wanted at the start versus having only a vague direction and experimenting until they were satisfied?

the intention doesn't happen when the "run" button is pressed, it happens when the program is written.

unless it's an AI program and then I think it is back to passing "expressive individuality" with extra credit :)

I would just like to say that the fact that the Electric Sheep guy participated in this comment thread makes me unreasonably happy. :)

I think people devalue art in many cases where the outcome is merely something beautiful.

Beauty and art are different things.

There are more beautiful things in the world than artful things.

I think people devalue art in many cases when they say, 'oh this code is so artful, it is full of art'

Could it make you cry?

That being said, although I think that "Art as communication" has some truth in that some kind of communication should happen, obviously there will be instances where that is not the case, but they are definitely something further away from the norm (and I argue the primary value) of art.

I've certainly seen code that made me cry. :)

I don't think computer art is a complicated problem.

Firstly "hand+brain+physical media" has infinitely more degrees of expressive freedom than "pixel robot."

Most pixel robots are really, really dumb.

At worst they draw simple filled shapes. At best they run some minimal - probably recursive, but still trivial - algo thing that makes nice pictures.

But art is not about making pretty pictures. It's about abstracting and intensifying human experience - which is a completely different problem.

Canvas and pigment can be a convenient way to do that, sometimes.

Code is never a convenient way to do it, because it's a very rigid and primitive medium explicitly designed to eliminate the subjectivity and intensity art specialises in.

So even the most interesting computer art is usually just shapes arranged in some semi-random way.

If it has texture at all - often it doesn't - there's absolutely nothing happening under the surface.

You can maybe say the same thing about some more abstract work.

But you certainly can't say it about art as a whole.

> If all I need to do to make a painting is press the "run" button

You do realize, the implementation, algorithm and the input data are equal parts of the artwork. That a layman will have trouble appreciating the more technical parts is irrelevant.

>That's a pretty massive blanket statement to apply to a whole field of art.

It depends who you ask. Those who were raised on oil-and-blood based artworks, or those for whom Pixar represents the highest realms to which an Artist may aspire.

Never forget, your opinion is going to be invalid once the youth graduate/take over. Your time is limited by those who grant you relevance in the world: the kids.

> Computer generated art tends to lack this trait, and this, I think, is why it feels less valid than human-made art.

I could not disagree with you more.

Most of traditional contemporary art for the past 100 years have been art pieces and products that are meta-critiques and meta-dialogues of the current understanding of Art, conversations between artists... These things attempt to explore what Art truly is. Some aspects of post modernism have taken it to the point where everything is absolutely meaningless, others as a caricature or commentary on post capitalist society.

Yves Klein painted things blue and this is art. Rothko painted squares, except more notable (to me, at least) were the namings of his paintings, most called "no. #" and such. Dali put drawers and pom poms on the breasts of classical Grecian figures, and let us not forget about Dada - whose chief goal was to destroy Art, only to become included under the category of artistic movements.

Aesthetics has been discussed for centuries, and at core, is a philosophical question. It shares many characteristics similar to computer code and classical logic, once you've abstracted layer on top of meta layer, until you really are scratching your head, wondering what the symbols you've generated actually mean.

As a painter for 20 years, and as software developer / computer scientist for 15, I rarely see anything besides an image of a thing when I walk into a museum. In computer code and mathematics, I see much, much more, and whatever it is that code communicates to me is infinite and entangled completely in my being and my nature.

Programmatically generated art is still an immature medium, and rudimentary experiments in the medium still dominate what you see. They don't need to be great art for them to stimulate a little curiousity and interest among people are are following the medium more closely than you are, and that's what you see in galleries like those presented here.

You don't find them remarkable because they're the medium's equivalent of photography's early Daguerreotypes. Those early photos lack many truly artistic qualities. The substrates couldn't capture tonality, dynamic range or action very well. The artists were still surveying the very basic possibilities of photography. It wasn't until decades later that we start seeing great art coming from photography.

The same applies here. Most generative pieces using Context Free or Processing are unremarkable as 'art' because they're just basic surveys. They're still just using tempura paint and seeing what they can do with it.

But keep your mind open -- give it another 30 years, as the medium matures, and you're sure to be embarassed by how trivially you pass it off here. Year after year, more expressiveness will come through in more sophisticated generators made with more and more sophisticated tools.

Absolutely! I'm a big fan of VectorPark interactive work http://www.vectorpark.com/. It's algorithmically created, yes, but also cleverly drawn within the algorithms. And more so, there's a sense of wonder and surprise and beauty to this work. It takes a really particular sort of artist/coder to pull this sort of thing off -- technical virtuosity while retaining an imagination. All too often the technical mastery required reduces subsumes the emotional range of the work...

> Most art objects are the products of a single person's imagination.

This is an unfortunate cliché that is not nearly as widely accepted as one might think. It may be true that computers have a much clearer path to hand-holding in order to produce a finished product, but the tools, materials, and education one gets in the real world make it exceedingly difficult to find art that can be seen as the product of just one person's imagination, and even more rare that it is art people then appreciate.

I admit that the whole topic is very difficult, but there are platitudes floating around which do no favors to our understanding of it. Disclaimer: I draw for a living and program (mostly) for fun.

I think this is particularly true of "fractal art," because every piece of fractal art looks like, well, a fractal. After seeing five or six high-quality rendered fractal images, they all start to look the same.

I am very much in support of software tools, especially because of how they limit you (like working with a limited palette), but you need to actually express yourself in how you use the tools. Somehow tweaking parameters and adding premade filters doesn't really do it for me.

I agree about fractals looking very similar after a while. I have seen some truly artistic fractal images created by people who also create art using non-digital tools. My hobby is "generative" digital art, and I prefer to write 99% of the code myself in order to feel that the result is truly my creation.

For me, a good way to think about it is to first inquire what is art, what is work of art, and what is the art product. The book "Art as Experience" helped me immensely.

I see art as experience that stands out from a daily experience because of its intensity and refinement. And work of art as the process of creation of the art product.

Usually, context around the art product is an important part of experience. So if we remove the object out of its context (city, creation, people, usage of it if it is a building for example..) and transport it globally to some museum the art is diminished. Sure we can write stuff next to the art product but it is not the same. What you can directly experience is just an observation of the craftsmanship, other things you have to imagine.

So if you were around the folks who are creating algorithms for computer generated art you would experience the end product much more intensely since you would directly experience the process of refinement, context, motivations and so on.

> I always found this fact fascinating. Why would I attribute different levels of worth to two artifacts that were totally identical, save for their method of construction?

You might be interested in Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in which he muses about more or less the same question: What is the difference between the original and an identical copy, made possible due to the technical advantages of our times?

Wikipedia has a summary and a link to the complete text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_M...

great comment. I think, for this case, "expressive individuality" is synonymous with intent. you can't ponder a program's intent.

that said, there is another discussion to be had about how much intent actually matters (or doesn't) in art. to that end, a computer program's art should be just as provoking as if it were created by a human.

there is how the artist intends to move you, and there is how you are actually moved. they don't have to depend on each other.

As of 2015, someone texting you specifically "how've you been today? :)" is different to someone text spamming the same to a thousand people, and is also different to computer texting the same. There is intimacy with the former, but not the latter two. As art has traditionally been a form of communication between human beings, the same principle applies.

In my gut, I sympathize with what you're saying. When I think about it though, I know digital or generative art need not be any less than an artistic work than a painting.

It's unfortunate for many digital artists that "in the gut" is where wider artistic appreciation lies. But I imagine film also took awhile for the societal gut-feels to embrace. I hope that happens

Interesting, but it feels still a bit subjective.

Also, I'm interested in what you would say about the difference between art created by a single person (say Leonardo da Vinci, or any great painter) or art created by a whole army of people (say Pixar, or any of the movie/animation studios).

Also, I am so very, very tempted to make a shirt that just says "Valid Art" on the front.