Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
them in a way which makes them more interesting to audiences. We have argued
in favour of these principles from a philosophical viewpoint in (Colton
2008b
), and
we have used them practically in the construction of The Painting Fool. Having said
that, we are still a long way off achieving our goal, and The Painting Fool is not
yet producing pictures of particularly high cultural value, or framing its work in
interesting ways.
The purpose of this chapter is to present the current state of The Painting Fool
project, to discuss some of the cultural issues raised, and to describe some ways in
which the project will continue. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give a full
technical specification of the software, which runs to around 200,000 lines of Java
code, and relies on numerous other pieces of software. In place of these details, we
refer to various technical papers where the functionality of the software is described
at length. In Sect.
1.2
, we present our work in some artistic, engineering and scien-
tific contexts. By placing our work in these contexts, in addition to studying state of
the art practices in Computational Creativity and through discussions with numer-
ous people about building an automated painter, we have put together a number of
guiding principles which we adhere to in building and framing our software. These
guiding principles are outlined in Sect.
1.3
. To best describe our progress so far with
The Painting Fool project, in Sect.
1.4
we present the motivation, cultural and social
issues, technical difficulties and research results for a number of projects carried out
within this research programme. In Sect.
1.5
, we describe future projects that we
intend to pursue towards the goal of building our automated painter, and getting it
accepted into society. We conclude in Sect.
1.6
by summarising the issues which
arise from the project and calling for collaboration on this project.
1.2 The Painting Fool in Context
Our personal preference is to think of computing as an engineering discipline which
uses both scientific and artistic methodologies to evaluate the computer programs
we design and engineer. Theoretical scientific methodologies are often employed in
order to have the ideas for software in the first place, and then experimental scientific
methodologies are employed to test the performance of software in terms of ability,
efficiency, reliability, etc. In the visual arts, software is largely employed as enabling
tools for artists to produce pieces of art or design. Increasingly, especially in so-
called
new media
circles, this has led to software itself being assessed in terms of its
cultural and artistic impact. This is most obvious with interactive digital art, where
audience members are (hopefully) intellectually stimulated through interaction with
software. In addition, video games are increasingly being seen as artistic artefacts,
and art students are regularly presenting software, such as novel web browsers, as
art objects in their degree shows. It is fairly rare to see computer programs shown in
galleries or exhibitions, unless they are interactive art pieces or they generate visual
and/or acoustic artworks for visitors. This shouldn't be taken as an indication that
general (i.e. non-art producing) software cannot be artistically valuable, because
