Computers and paintbrushes
My thoughts on generative art and its place in society
Lately, my fascination with using mathematics and computing for art, has only grown. To me, it’s nothing short of amazing — you see, I never was any good with brushes and color palettes. Clumsy, was what one teacher once used, to describe my endeavors in her art lessons.
But here, I’m in my element. After all, numbers and code come naturally, to me. Numbers become my strokes, lines of Python, my color palette and paintbrushes. No more clumsy, klutzy me, ruining a piece of amateur art.
I think generative art opens up a host of possibilities. And I think the biggest possibility can be best illustrated, with something another generative art enthusiast drew with some code:
The amount of detail and structure, the strokes…the number of strokes this contains. It would have taken a human ages to paint this. Yet the code to build this(it’s written in Python) takes a couple of minutes to run on my laptop, and a second to run on my cluster. Yes, it took me a couple of minutes to create something that could have taken an accomplished painter months of work. The conclusions are obvious, at this point.
This also raises the second possibility — anyone can be an artist, as long as they can code. I’m not a professional artist. I didn’t go to art school. I just have ideas in my mind, that I can bring to life, using code. So does that make me an artist in the traditional sense of the word? Or does this make me an artist because of the creativity involved in my work?
In turn, this leads me to another point. I once read a paper on how ancient cave paintings in Spain should not be counted as art, since, as the auther claimed, art was meant to serve as a measurement of a society’s physical, mental and spiritual advancement. Intrinsically, while the author had a point, I had my doubts. Does art serve such a higher purpose to society, or is it only an unbiased medium for expressing the aspirations of society? I’d like to believe the latter. But reconciling them is evidently not easy. Until now. That is what regenerative art does, in my opinion. It manages to help a person like me express a thought in my head, with the tools I know best. But at the same time, it also manages to showcase our evolution, showcase how far we’ve come, because, let’s admit it — my fingers don’t hold the brush, my code does. A program that I wrote, paints for me, after I tell it how to.
I’d like to see more debates, more discussions around the avenues that generative art open up. I think we have great tools, great languages. But what we need, is exploration. Maybe it’s time for a new era in art.
