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In-Depth Information
Fig. 1.12
A series of stills from the “Meeting of Minds” and the “Eye to Eye” paint dances pro-
duced by The Painting Fool
exhibition of work by members of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory, held at
La Maison Rouge in Paris in September 2011 (see
www.thepaintingfool.com
for
details).
This project raises the issue of software undertaking tasks that people cannot
perform—in this case, the calculation of where to place thousands of strokes at
thousands of time steps. As artists have been finding out since the advent of the com-
puting age, getting software to undertake tasks beyond their capacity can enhance
the space of possibilities in creative projects. Moreover, in an age of personalisa-
tion, such as personalised healthcare, personalised entertainment, etc., the only way
to achieve personalised artistry will be to engage computers to produce artworks for
people on an individual level. However, we note that the aesthetic decisions for the
paint dance project were still undertaken by us, and not the software. Hence, in line
with our guideline of climbing the meta-mountain, the next stage for this project
will be to enable the software to invent animation techniques and make aesthetic
judgements about what to apply while composing the paint dances.
1.5 Future Directions
We tend to undertake projects within quite large research programmes over a lengthy
period of time, whereby multi-faceted intelligent systems are built by developing
and combining our own techniques with existing AI systems (adhering to the prin-
ciple that the whole is usually more than the sum of its parts). Ultimately, our aim
is for the software we build to exhibit a range of intelligent behaviours while gener-
ating culturally interesting artefacts, all within a Computational Creativity setting.
The Painting Fool is very much a work in progress, and we are not claiming that it
should be taken seriously as an independently creative artist yet (and even if or when
we do make that claim, it will be in reference to an artist of a low ability, at least
to start with). In order to discuss future directions for The Painting Fool project, we
address our current progress with respect to the guiding principles mentioned above,
highlight areas where these principles can be used to assess the system negatively,
and suggest ways forward.
With respect to the skill, appreciation and imagination requirements of the cre-
ativity tripod, it is easy to argue that the software is able to simulate the kinds of
physical skills that are required of a painter. In addition, with the ability to pro-
duce paint dances, we can claim that the software has skills not possessed by hu-
man painters. There are numerous additional physical skills that we would like to
