On 05/11/13 08:53 AM, marc garrett wrote: > > The project hinges on an algorithm designed by Lund. Using it, an artist > can theoretically determine the ideal work to create at a given point in > her career, before she’s thought of it herself.
Who's the (young?) British artist who was using a program to generate instructions for works of art about a decade ago? My books are in storage and Google is failing me. :-( As with that program, the source to this one isn't being released but the description of the program in the article is complete enough that it could be reimplemented. Scrape Art Sales Index and/or Artsy and pull out keywords to populate a database keyed on artist and gallery details. Abstract them through Wordnet for bonus points. What's interesting about the text described in the article is that it's imperative and specific: "place the seven minute fifty second video loop in the coconut soap". How did the instruction get generated? Descriptions of artworks describe their appearance and occasionally their construction, not how to assemble them. If it's a grammatical transformation of description text that fits the description of the project, but if it's hand assembled that's not just a database that has been "scraped into existence". How did the length of time get generated? If there's a module to generate durations that doesn't fit the description of the project, but if it's a reference to an existing 7.50 video it does. The pleasant surprises in the output are explained by De Bono-style creativity theory. And contemporary art oeuvres tend to be materially random enough that the randomness of the works produced looks like an oeuvre... Later, the article mentions the difficulty of targeting specific artists. A Hirst generator would be easy enough to create for works that resemble his existing oeuvre. Text generators powered by markov chains were used as a tool for parodying Usenet trolls, and their strength lies in the predictability of the obsessed. Pivoting to a new stage in an artist's career is something that would require a different approach. It's possible to move, logically, to conceptual opposites using Douglas Hofstadter's "Slipnet" approach. In the case of Hirst, cheap and common everyday materials (office equipment) become expensive and exclusive ones (diamonds) and the animal remains become human ones. Anyway, this project as a whole makes visible an aspect of How Things Are Done Now. This is "big data being used to guide the organization". What's interesting is both how much such an approach misses and how much it does capture. As ever, art both reveals and fills in the gaps of ideology. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
