Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
No doubt, we need the instance. We want to literally see something of the class.
Therefore, we keep an interest in the individual work. We cannot see the entire
class. It has become the most interesting, and it has become invisible. It can only be
thought.
I am often confronted with an argument of the following kind. A program is
not embedded into anything like a social and critical system, and clearly, without a
critical component, it cannot leave borders behind. So wait, the argument says, until
programs are embedded the proper way.
But computers and programs don't even have bodies. How then should they be
able to be embedded in such critical and social systems? Purpose and interest are
just not their thing. Don't you, my dear friends, see the blatant difference between
yourself and your program, between you and the machine?
Joseph Weizenbaum dedicated much of his life to convincing others of this fun-
damental difference. It seems to be very tough for some of us to accept that we are
not like machines and, therefore, they are not like us.
3.4.2 Frieder Nake: Generative Aesthetics I
A class of objects can never itself, as a class, appear physically. In other words, it
cannot be perceived sensually. It is a mental construct: the description of processes
and objects. The work of art has moved from the world of corporeality to the world
of options and possibilities. Reality now exists in two modes, as actuality and virtu-
ality.
AARON's generative approach is activity-oriented. The program controls a
drawing or painting tool whose movements generate, on paper or canvas, visible
traces for us to see. The program
Generative Aesthetics I
, however, is algorithm-
oriented. It starts from a set of data, and tries to construct an image satisfying con-
ditions that are described in the data.
You may find details of the program in Nake (
1974
, pp. 262-277). The goal of the
program was derived from the theory of information aesthetics. This theory starts
by considering a visual artefact as a sign. The sign is really a
supersign
because it is
usually realised as a structure of signs.
The theory assumes that there is a repertoire of elementary or primitive signs.
Call those primitive signs:
s
1
,s
2
,...,s
r
. They must be perceivable as individual
units. Therefore, they can be counted, and relative frequencies of their occurrence
can be established. Call those frequencies,
f
1
,f
2
,...,f
r
.
In information aesthetics, a schema of the signs with their associated relative
frequencies is called a
sign schema
. It is a purely statistical description of a class
of images. All those images belong to the class that use the same signs (think of
colours) with the same frequencies.
