photography
I feel that in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that these images start out life as photographs. There’s a bunch of programming going on, the source material is often made unrecognizable (or at least seriously abstracted), and the raster to vector conversion makes things very different in feel once printed. However, I can’t help but feel like a) I’m cheating, and b) this process is little more than a fancy Photoshop filter. My desire is to have completely computer generated visual compositions, but I’m not there yet.
Right now, some of the source photos are by other people, and most are by me. As a photographer, I think I’m on the level about this, since I make double sure that any non-me photos that feed one of my final images are so seriously tweaked as not to be the same artwork. Sometimes if you smash them down to thumbnail size, you can still see a bit of the old photo.
In the short term, this experiment has a manual feedback loop, which is my selection of the images used in the first place. I am taking pictures to make abstractions to take pictures by (to paraphrase the Spacemen 3), and I find that the generative work is already affecting the way I see compositions. I spent last Saturday out and about with the camera, and found myself snapping color compositions in a different way than I had previously. Not surprising, really; the time-consuming part of this process is editing the photos, then vetting the results of runs of the program, then picking the keepers. I have a pool of about 300 photos, selected over time strictly on their color balance (that’s gate 1). The program picks an image randomly from the pool, does its thing, and I decide if the result was interesting or not (gate 2). Finally, I pick the best of the keepers (gate 3). The pool of photos was whittled down from over 15,000 of my own (and a near infinite number from the real world), I get about one interesting result out of 25 when the program runs, and about 5 out of 100 of those are keepers at the end of the day, so I’m probably looking at a minimum of 50 images for each “success”. Learning what to reject is as important, if not more so, than what to keep.
“All painting is an accident. But it’s also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.” — Francis Bacon
But I do want to move away from photographic input. My ultimate goal is to have the program generate the entire composition and have it sufficiently visually pleasing and complex to maintain interest. Eventually, what I really want is an artificial intelligence with whom I can only converse symbolically.
For now, I am starting small. I have a second Ruby program I’m calling “underpainting”, which generates bitmaps for me. It generally builds on a desaturated, grayish background, and builds up spots of saturated interest. Layout is sort of random, but I hope to put in some training/memory/analysis routines to let it learn what I like. This could be easily networked, too, so others could help me train it over the web. For now, it’s a bit stupid, but it occasionally happens on a decent result. This one has almost the same palette as a painting of the Delaware Bay marshes I have hanging in my office:
Eventually, I won’t even need the bitmap step. Another possibility is statistical analysis of the existing photos. What are my favorite colors, really? Clues about what I really like to see in paintings will help me make the programs that make more of them for me. Once there’s a set of algorithms that is correctly describing what I want to see, plans are in the works to go back to ActionScript and Max/MSP/Jitter and animate the stuff. And then there’s those designs for a painting robot to put them on canvas (completing the circle back to the physical), but we’ll leave that for another time.