alt Hacker NewsThis is beautiful. I'd really love to see some serious discourse about the place that generative art should have in our society and about what art really means in today's age of overconsumption.
I'm not sure art is still meant to be a widely shared experience and smarter people than should tackle this idea.
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> I'd really love to see some serious discourse about the place that generative art should have in our society
For me (and many others), the “how” of art is just as important as the “what”, if not more important. There are installations that reflect this, many of which are interactive and allow the observer to become part of the art itself.
And if you extend the definition of “generative”, it can include many other methods, like swinging a paint can with a hole in the bottom over an empty canvas to create random patterns based on pendulum movement. Myself, like many others, recognize the amount of creativity and effort that goes into this type of “generative” art, especially in comparison to others. I also appreciate the creativity and complexity of the grandparent’s generative system.
Thank you!
I'm glad people are interested in art discourse and exploring arts in general. Art is a very personal thing. Different people see arts in different ways. Yet there's some recurrent themes time after time.
I got my insight in art in musics and on why people love them so much. Musics and songs are basically repeatable patterns with slight variations in multiple dimensions, in pitch, in beat, in tone, in rhyme, in lyrics, etc. The human mind is a super pattern processing machine, as part of our evolution survival traits. Pattern brings structure, abstraction, and comfort. But strict repetitive patterns bore the mind. Human love patterns, but with variation and imperfection.
The human mind is very good in filling the missing pieces in a pattern, again from our evolution survival traits. Our ancestors could look at the tail of an animal and filled in the blank that it's a tiger hidden behind a big rock. The filling of missing pieces is by experience and learning. It really is the original generative AI.
I believe the variation and imperfection in patterns trigger the mind's filling the blank function, which triggers the generative function, which can run wild generating wide range of imagination. That's why arts can have different reaction from different people as each has their own life experience and thus different generated result.
I think art is patterns with variation, imperfection, and blanks at the most basic level. Computer generated art thus needs to fulfill that basic requirement at the least to be called art.