The incorporation of the computer into the artistic arena has nourished a revolution in Contemporary Arts. As a result, important changes have taken place affecting not only the process of generation of artistic works, but also the role of the artist, of the audience and the channels used to display the works of art.

It is the object of this research to analyse the causes and repercussions of these changes, as well as to offer an overview of the new bunch of creative tendencies that have arisen with the utilisation of digital technology for the generation of art. We will concentrate on the dialogue between Art and Technology, especially on the area of Visual Arts. In order to do this, we will focus on the dual character that the computer acquires either as a medium to create art or as an originator of art by itself.

I take this opportunity to put into words my most sincere gratitude to Bob Hendley for his support and motivation both, during the supervision of my project and throughout this challenging year of personal transition into the field of Computer Science. I want to express my thanks and admiration towards him for all the things that he has taught me not only at an academic level but also as a person.

I want to thank Tim Williams too, for his unconditional technical support, and Jim Beadle. Thanks to both of them for their patience and for letting me become a "honorary member" of their office during the past year.

Finally, another big thank you to my friends Vishaka Panchmia, through whom I got to learn new things about India and her fascinating culture; Nezosh Hunter, for her encouragement; Stuart Green, for making it a pleasure living at his place, and Monica Borg.

ABSTRACT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1. INTRODUCTION

2. Part 1: WHEN TECHNOLOGY TURNED INTO ARTS <

3. THE ROLE OF THE COMPUTER IN VISUAL ARTS

4. COMPUTER GENERATED POETRY

5. Part 2: APPLIED COMPUTER POETRY AND VISUAL ARTS.

6. CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

NOTES

1. INTRODUCTION

Traditionally, canvas has long been the arena in which paint works were displayed, whereas paper was the medium used for the divulgation of literary masterpieces. These days, with the incorporation of the computer in the artistic field, the evolution of computer graphics and the utilisation of different digital tools to generate art in various forms, we are entitled to speak of Digital Art as a new tendency within the existing universe of artistic manifestations.

It is an aim of this project to concentrate on the fields of computer poetry generation and visual arts in order to present an overview of what is being done in these evolving areas. We also intend to pinpoint the different possibilities that the incorporation of the computer into the Arts has to offer to the artist.

So as to achieve this, we will concentrate on two different approaches. Depending on the role that the computer plays in the creative process, we will distinguish between the use of the computer as a medium or as a tool to produce art, and the use of the computer as an originator of art. Consequently, a substantial part of the project will be based on research work.

However, we also intend to illustrate this theoretical analysis with various examples that show the results of the computer turned into a key element in the artistic process.

In this sense, we will refer to A.D.A.M., a computer program of our creation that generates lyrical poems in a random way. This program illustrates the use of the computer as an originator of art, since the only role of the human artist in this particular case is the one of writing the computer program. As for the illustration of the role of the computer as a medium to produce art, we have created V.E.R.N., a collection of visual poems that illustrates the function of the computer in the generation of art.

2. Part 1: WHEN TECHNOLOGY TURNED INTO ARTS
1. The Digital Media

There is a revolution going on in Contemporary Art that is being nourished by Digital Technology, in particular the Internet. In the past, Art was mainly confined to museums and art galleries, and to experience it, one had to travel to a specific location and enter a physical space that housed the artworks. These days, the Internet has changed all that. Artists are now producing artistic works intended for a global audience, using the computer as a tool for creativity and creating specifically for the Internet. A creative dialogue has been initiated between Art and Technology that has broadened the traditional forms of expression. Visual languages have started to play an important role in electronically mediated communication. Iconography has been developed as an important component of user interface design, and interactivity has become the main purpose of digital artistic tendencies that intend to get the audience involved in the creative process through the use of active agents in communication that replace the old passive communicators. In the turn of the millennium, Digital Art and new Multimedia Technology are being incorporated to Contemporary Art in order to produce artistic manifestations that gather together sound, music, movement, spatial and aesthetic components, and boost up a cycle of increasing globalisation of culture.

 

2. The Artist

Digital Art or Computer Generated Art has also affected the role that the artist plays in the creative process. Contemporary artists are now embracing the use of the new technology for their creative work. Using the computer as a medium to display their works, digital artists can reach a global audience through their Web sites or through the sites that museums and art galleries have created for their exhibitions.

Artists who work with the new media tend to share experimental attitudes open to changes and they often find themselves refitting existing genres and creating new languages to express their particular art forms. That is the case of artists like the Corean Nam June Paik (Seoul, 1932), a pioneer in the utilisation of multimedia technology in Contemporary Art. It is also the case of the media artists that recently took part in the exhibition "Unknown / Infinity: Culture and Identity in the Digital Age" at the Taipei Gallery in New York. In this exhibition, eight digital artists showed works on digital photography, interactive installations and Web art through which they expressed their struggle to maintain their personal and cultural identity in the face of advancing global technology.

In all the previous cases, the artists are using the computer as an instrument to reveal their art. However, a new dimension of the computer artist is the portrait of the artist as a programmer: an artist with a new creative strategy that is the one of writing computer programs that generate digital art.

One of the most relevant examples of this innovative artistic tendency is Harold Cohen, the British abstract painter, creator of Aaron, the first robot artist. Cohen, a computer programmer as well as a successful artist, was taken with the power and potential of programming. He used that interest to complement his quest to understand the process in which the artist uses what he knows in order to create art. Aaron was the result, a drawing program that simulated the artist’s creative behaviour by storing and applying certain rules of construction and representation as specified by Cohen. Aaron became the artist, and Cohen the "meta-artist".





Two pictures generated by the latest version of Aaron

 

3. The Computer

The existence of programs like Aaron, that appear to be creative and recognise creativity, leads us onto the analysis of the role that computers play in the creative process. As Margaret Boden states in The Creative Mind, at first sight art might seem highly unpromising as a domain for computer creativity. However, as we mentioned before, computers are widely used by artists as tools, or even as imaginative aids.

Computer music makes use of sounds and allows composers to experiment with computer-generated chords or phrases that they might not have ever discovered by themselves. In the same way, computer graphics or computer animations sometimes produce images of fascinating beauty, and allow human artists to create brand new types of visual effects. Also, writing programs may help both -children and adults- to plan and produce texts of a level of complexity and coherence that could had been hardly achieved without them. Nevertheless, in all these cases a certain level of human supervision is essential to obtain the output concerned.

On the other hand, sometimes it is possible for the human artist to remain apart from the creative process and give the computer full autonomy to become the originator of the artistic work, emulating in this way the creative talents of human musicians, painters, poets or novelists. One of the most successful programs of this type is Aaron, the drawing program which we were referring to earlier.

Aaron is not a typical image generator of what has come to be known as computer art or digital art. Aaron does not generate geometric forms, certainly interesting, but infinitely repeatable. It does not either produce fractals, beautiful and random, despite of not being representative of the items which comprise the world. Aaron is not a tool for painters, designers, draftsmen or animators to be used as a medium to express the creative ideas of the human user. Instead, Aaron is a computer program with a software interface to a hardware drawing device that creates original pictures, each picture different from the others and each one indistinguishable by the uninformed observer from the work of a human artist. As such, Aaron is significant to the computer scientist as well as to the artist, because it uses artificial intelligence to encapsulate and replicate much of the behaviour that the artist unconsciously employs to create art.

In fact, Aaron is an interesting computational project that has been developed in several phases. The development from one version of Aaron to the next generally involved a fundamental change in the nature of the program and a radical alteration of the conceptual space that it inhabits. The early Aaron concentrated on spontaneous drawings of abstract forms which could sometimes resemble rocks, sticks, and occasionally, some strange forms of birds or insects. However, under no circumstance was the computer able to produce anything similar to human figures. Later developments of Aaron produced more complex drawings depicting groups of human figures in a jungle or vegetation, whereas the program’s most recent images display human figures of a fully three-dimensional type. All the different versions of Aaron can draw new pictures and produce aesthetically satisfying results at the touch of a button.

At the close of the world-fair in Tsukuba, (Japan, 1997), the organisers sent back to Harold Cohen the 7,000 drawings that the program had done there, each one unique and not seen before.

After evaluating these drawings, some experts agreed that Aaron meets all the criteria necessary to be regarded as a creative tool. It shows the ability to inhabit and explore a conceptual space rich enough to generate indefinitely many surprises. Aaron also shows the capacity of judgement that makes this program able to reconsider past choices and decide what to do next, as well as the aptitude to evaluate various possible structures for itself in order to avoid nonsense and cliché. However, some others experts still refuse to call Aaron creative, since they believe in the assumption that no computer program can really be called creative, no matter what novelties it manages to produce.

4. The Audience

We started this chapter by referring to the revolution that is going on in Contemporary Art as a result of the incorporation of the new technologies into the various different ways of artistic manifestations, and the consequent broadening of the long-established concept of artistic expression.

As we have seen, the effects of this revolution can be appreciated at several levels of the creative process. Firstly, the incorporation of the digital media into the arts has its repercussions in the channel through which art is transmitted. Whereas paper or canvas used to be the arena where writing or painting took the appearance of light and were called Art, these days web sites appear to be changing all that, especially for digital artists who work on virtual art created in the mind, programmed on machines, and then projected and viewed electronically. Digital media has changed the traditional function of the artist by turning him into a meta-artist who is open to changes and continuous metamorphoses, and also because it plays an important role in bridging the cultural and language gaps between sciences, arts and humanities.

We have referred earlier to the role that the computer -the essential tool used by digital artists- has in their creative process. The computer used as a medium to display the works of art, but also the computer with a whole potential to generate new forms of art.

All these changes in the creative process definitely have an effect in the way in which the audience perceives the new artistic works. On the side of the artist, there is an intention of globalisation of the culture, making the works of art interactive and accessible to anyone with a computer from anywhere in the world. On the side of the audience, there is a positive response to the definite goal of leaving behind the traditional, passive, distant and safe role of mere spectator in order to adopt an active part that helps to overcome the initial coldness of the new medium.

 

3. THE ROLE OF THE COMPUTER IN VISUAL ARTS

In the previous chapter we called attention to the transformations that are taking place in Contemporary Art as a result of the incorporation of the new technologies into that area. We mentioned the different ways in which the computer can affect the role of the artist and the creative process itself, depending on whether is used by the artist as a tool, or as an actual generator of art. In this chapter, we will concentrate on the function that the computer performs as a medium, and also as an originator, both in a creative and in a technical environment.

1. The Computer as a Medium

We already made reference to the importance that computers have as a medium for the artist to display his creative works. As well as creative tools, computers are used in scientific or technological environments as a medium to develop and test new systems, experiment different medical procedures, and even to improve ways of social research, just to mention a few examples of the vast range of technical applications that computers have in these fields. In the next few paragraphs we will concentrate on the study of some of these applications.

2. The Computer as a Medium in a Technical Environment

1. Computer Simulations

Simulations give us new insights into fundamental problems that are often omitted from current research topics because they are too hard to be analysed with any standard methods. At present, simulation programs are used in a wide variety of fields, from education to software testing, not to mention engineering, urban design, social sciences, etc. However, due to time and space constrains we will not refer to all these fields in detail. On the other hand, we will focus on the application of computer simulations in the areas of education and social research, in order to offer an overview of the basic principles on which computer simulations work.

Some researchers hypothesise about the idea of society being reducible to a computer program. For a start, nobody would like to presume such a claim. However, a considerable amount of the research done in the area of social phenomena -such as economics, geography, social sciences, etc.- use computer simulations to help us understand what is happening in social events.

Simulations also offer several advantages for various teaching purposes such as program evaluation. Firstly, students can construct, as well as observe the simulation program in progress and get an idea of how a real data analysis might unfold. Besides, the simulation presents the information in a number of ways so that the student can achieve a better understanding of the case study.

Simulations illustrate clearly some key assumptions and allow the student to examine what would happen if these assumptions were violated. Consequently, we can conclude that computer simulations are an excellent way to show how apparently sensible analytic procedures can yield biased estimates under certain given conditions.

1. Virtual Worlds

Some people regard Virtual Reality (VR) as any electronic representation that they can interact with. Virtual Reality systems allow the user to use the computer to interact with objects which are not there. New experiences and new capabilities are made possible by creating a virtual environment in which the user manipulates objects, builds worlds and communicates with other virtual users.

From a technical perspective, Virtual Reality is a form of immersion in an illusion that is achievable through the utilisation of certain types of hardware and software. Virtual Reality is a combination of three-dimensional stereoscopic optical displays, or "eyephones", a head-tracking device to monitor head movement and a dataglove or handheld device to add feedback so that the user can manipulate objects perceived in the artificial environment. Audio with three-dimensional acoustics can support the illusion of being submerged in a virtual world.

According to this view, Virtual Reality consequently means sensory immersion in a virtual environment. One prime example of this sort of application came from the U.S. Air force, which first developed this hardware for flight simulation. In that case, the computer generated much of the same sensory input that a jet pilot would experience in an actual cockpit. The pilot could respond to the sensations with some sort of action, e.g.: by turning a control knob, which then fed into the computer, which again adjusted the sensations. In this way, a pilot could get practice or training without even leaving the ground.

2. Augmented Reality

One of the most powerful uses of Virtual Reality is the ability to augment the user’s view of the real world with additional information. This idea is known as Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality is based on the principle of using explanatory graphics and text overlaid on the surroundings of the virtual world, so that it can explain how to operate, maintain or repair equipment, without requiring the user refer to a separate paper or electronic manual.

Some of the most relevant projects in Augmented Reality have been developed by researchers at Columbia’s School of Architecture. In this school, some architects and students have begun to explore the benefits of exposing a building’s "architectural anatomy" in order to allow them to visualise the otherwise hidden infrastructure of the building. Other examples of the use of Augmented Reality have been tried in business situations so as to facilitate the participants the interaction with a dynamic shared financial or organisational model represented in 3D and selectively supplemented with each user’s personal and private annotations.

Augmented Reality has also been used for the design of user interfaces combining the 2D interaction space of a conventional portable workstation within a large 3D virtual surround, presented on a see-through, head-mounted display with very positive results.

3. Smart Computer Graphics

Advances and breakthroughs in the area of Computer Graphics have made visual media a major ingredient of the modern user interface. They have also made graphics play a dominant role in the way people will communicate and interact with computers in the future.

The evolution of computing towards more and more pervasive and distributed devices pose new challenging problems for the effective use of graphics. Intelligent behaviour and graphics provide the technical core for a next generation of interfaces that, in order to be successful, will depend on the principles and findings from both, Cognitive Psychology and Graphics Design to be able to reflect the user’s needs and abilities.

Recent advances in Computer Graphics have allowed AI researchers to integrate graphics in their systems without being burdened by low-level issues, such as image rendering. At the same time, graphics acceleration hardware has become affordable and is now available for a broad number of platforms. As a result, there are some existing AI techniques that have matured to the point that they have become likely to be the vehicle through which principles from Graphics Design and the results of research in the cognitive aspect of visual representations will be integrated in the next generation of graphical interfaces.

4. Data Visualisation

Data visualisation is a tool that enables the user to quickly and easily locate a document from a large data set.

When planning a visualisation solution, there are several factors that are crucial. The user has to carefully consider the type of effects that it would be useful to view, the software tools and computational platforms which are available, and the way in which the visualisations are presented and accessed. In all visualisation solutions the way in which data is interpreted is essential, although this is heavily dependent on the user. In some cases, the user may be an expert in the field, whereas in some other cases the visualisation procedure may be required as an educational tool

One important fact to keep in mind when working on data visualisation is that there are various possible ways to visualise data, therefore it is very important to find the best way to make the visualisation accessible to the user.

5. Computation Based Design

Computation Based Design is a field that exists under different denominations such as Computational Prototyping, Multidisciplinary Design and Optimisation, Simulation-Based Design, just to mention some. It involves a combination of simulation, modelling and design tools that are required for the design of complex systems.

One example of the use of Computation Based Design is the computational prototyping of the Boeing 777, which was designed, tested and repaired before a single component had been manufactured.

One of the main goals of this sort of simulation-based design is that of being able to incorporate multidisciplinary and cross-functional requirements and objectives in the early stages of the design process, where tools such as computational prototypes and optimisation can make the biggest difference. However, Computational Based Design is a field that still needs a lot of development, despite of the increase in the application of new emerging methods, specially in the design of ships, aircraft’s, electronic systems and automotive systems.

2. The Computer as a Medium in a Creative Environment

In the previous sections we attempted to explain some of the situations in which a computer is used as a tool to generate models, to analyse data or to produce simulations of real situations in a technical frame of reference. However, the computer can also be utilised as a medium for creative purposes. As we will see in the next section, the evolution of computer graphics over the last three decades has given drive to artists, film-makers and other entertaining industries to learn and make use of it in order to boost the development of imaginary fantasy.

1. Computer Generated Imagery and Digital Cinema

In the beginning, computer graphics were only geometric shapes, calculated by the computer and seen on a monitor.

In the early 60s, a program called Sketchpad, created at the MIT, allowed some researchers to draw lines and light directly on a cathode ray tube (CTR) producing very primitive geometric figures. This was the beginning of computer graphics. These days, computer graphics mix hard science and creative arts with the result of flourishing areas within the computer graphics industry that vary from desktop publishing to virtual worlds, including there the successful field of Digital Cinema.

Indeed, Cinema, the Seventh Art, has not managed to escape from the magnetism of digital technology. In fact, due to digital technology, motion pictures are poised to make their greatest technological leap since the introduction of sound. Besides, the utilisation of the computer as a medium to create computer generated imagery, digital enhancement of picture elements, morphs, warps and the rest has moved from a trickle a few years ago, to a vast torrent of imagery today. Films like Terminator 2, Toy Story, Forrest Gump, Jurassic Park or Apollo 13 have made it obvious that digital imagery is here to stay.



Toy Story, an example of Digital Cinema

In the case of Digital cinema, the importance of the role of the computer goes far beyond merely creating cool morphs. The computer has a definite impact on the creation of film structure -especially since the creation of parallel editing- and film aesthetics and meaning.

Nevertheless, new technology creates new contexts, and, even if the computer holds the power to make films with splendid scenes, story telling is still the most significant element for a film. Yet, computer graphic is still important to emphasise some metaphors and to create prosodic patterns. One good example is the film Forrest Gump, with a great prosodic devise -the feather gliding down the sense at the opening and floating away at the end- that becomes a computer generated effect which is a genius combination of arts and computer technology for a film. It is films like this or like Toy Story that, by bringing together computer generated technology and classical story telling have become a milestone and a technological feat. Toy Story, for instance, at 77 minutes, is the first completely synthetic feature-length cartoon, that recreates a three-dimensional look and feel that was achieved with the utilisation of the Pixar technology.

Anyhow, apart from digital cinema, computer animators also focus their attention on TV. The creation of TV commercials has allowed them to increase the sophistication and complexity of computer-generated images exponentially.

They need more complex images to make things look more real even if depicting reality is a very complex task in itself. Animation has a much more different dynamic than reality because it does not obey the laws of physics, which is part of their appeal to public. So, as the camera moves rotating around a character, it tilts and creates a perspective that it would be difficult to achieve otherwise.

The tendency of digital image is trying to catch the real movement of a character for the computer-generated figure at the real time. That means, to record the motion of a real performer by the computer and to import it to an imaginary figure, something that was put in practise in the movie Terminator 2 to capture the real movements of the actor who plays T1000.



Terminator represents the synchronisation of real and digital performance

2. Stereograms

Another application that uses the computer as a medium to produce creative visual effects is the generation of Stereograms.

Stereograms represent one of the latest approaches to create the illusion of three dimensions. They were first seen in their current form in 1990, and they differ from earlier 3D technologies in the fact that there are no special viewing aids required. All that is necessary is to diverge ones eyes as if the person was looking through the screen or paper showing the picture.

There are different types of stereograms, but the most representative are the ones known as Single Image Sterereograms (SIS), or Single Image Random Dot Stereograms (SIRDS), if the pattern consists of randomly coloured dots.

A stereogram picture is made up of a pattern which repeats across the width of the page. When the user diverges his eyes in order to see it, each eye looks at adjacent repeats of the pattern, but the brain is "fooled" into believing that both eyes are still looking at exactly the same thing. Since the pattern is not copies but subtly distorted in each repeat, the two eyes see slightly different images. At this point, human perception takes over and the brain concludes that the differing images arise from looking at a three dimensional object, whose form it decodes in an instant, and the 3D illusion occurs.



An example of a SIS Stereogram

Sterograms are made by computer, starting with a depth-map that describes how each part of the scene is. For each point in the depth-map, corresponding pairs of points on the screen are identified. Their separation is calculated depending on the depth, and their position has to coincide with the original point on the depth-map. This pattern is applied, subject to the constrain that both points in any part must have the same colour.

 

3. The Computer as an Originator

Just as we previously mentioned, apart from being used as a medium to develop new systems in a technological domain, or in addition to the use that we have examined as a tool to create artistic pieces of work, computers can also be transformed into generators of art. We will concentrate on this aspect of the computer as a creator in the next few sections.

1. Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS)

Knowledge-Based Systems are a subfield of Artificial Intelligence concerned with creating programs that embody the reasoning expertise of human experts. In simplest terms, the overall intent is a form of intellectual cloning: find people with reasoning skills which are important and rare, such as an expert medical diagnostician, a chess player, a chemist, etc., talk to them to determine what specialised knowledge they have and how they reason, and then embody that knowledge and reasoning in a program.

At Columbia University Computer Science Department, a group of computer scientists has collaborated on the development of a project called COMET (Co-ordinated Multimedia Explanation Testbed), an integrated system that generates multimedia explanations of equipment maintenance and repair procedures. Other projects generated by this group on this area include the development of a framework for accessing healthcare data spread across many different systems, using representations of both, the physical space of the hospital and of abstract organisational and relational spaces to structure a virtual world; or a project that will present patient data to hospital caregivers through automated multimedia briefings that integrate 3D animation with speech.

In general terms, Knowledge-Based Systems rely on an ongoing research on the automated generation of animation. Running projects, like ESPLANADE (Expert System for PLANning Animation Design and Editing) are a testbed for experimenting with ruled-based generation of 3D animated presentations. However, while most of the work on computer animation has concentrated on motion planning, this project stresses the automated application of hierarchical cinematic editing techniques, and supports selection and layout to present parallel actions, planned by a separate domain planner.

2. Natural Language Generators

Natural Language Processing is an area within Artificial Intelligence that involves the development and use of computational models to process language. Within this area there are two general areas of research: comprehension, which deals with processes that extract information from language, such as natural language understanding or information retrieval, and generation, which deals with processes of conveying information using language.

Automated Natural Language Generation (NLG) investigates how to build computer programs that produce high-quality text from computer-internal representations of information.

Even if Natural Language Generation does not include research on the automatic production of speech, whether from text or from a more abstract input, research in this field has steadily moved away from modelling how people produce language to the development of methods by which computers can be made to do so robustly. Applications of this subject include the creation of interfaces to databases, text processing and message understanding, multilingual interfaces as aids for foreign languages correspondences, web pages, and speech-to-speech translation in limited domains.

3. Speech Recognition in Machines

During the last few years there has been an emerging need for humans to communicate with machines in order to control their actions or to obtain information. Initial attempts at providing human-machine communications led to the development of the keyboard, the mouse, the trackball, the touch-screen and the joystick. However, none of these communication devices provides the richness or the ease of use of speech, which has been the most natural form of communication between humans for tens of centuries.

Since a need has arisen to provide a voice interface between humans and machines, this need has been met, to a limited extent, by speech processing systems that enable a machine to speak and to understand human speech.

4. Story-tellers

Storyteller systems are sophisticated programs with deep and detailed knowledge of some particular domains and access to media resources such as recorded video, sound, and text regarding the domain in question.

By combining these resources with synthesised graphical and textual representations, a storyteller system produces a story customised to what it learns of a listener’s background, preferences and interests. These stories emerge dynamically as the system interacts with the user. Questions and criticisms yield wholly new sequences of video, sound, and explanation in reply. Such systems transform the character of publication, and rather than producing epistles, emissaries are produced.

5. Evolutionary Art

Evolutionary art is a comparatively recent form of art that is virtually exclusively generated on computers.

The main idea behind evolutionary art is that the artist is able to control the development of a piece of work through some form of "selection", in a manner analogous to natural selection. In all evolutionary art, one or more parent pictures or virtual sculptures are mutated and/or crossbred to produce a number of children, which are then selected again. The more advanced systems allow the artist to assign a "goodness" factor to each child. The results of this "selection" are then used to produce a next generation.

One of the main advantages of evolutionary systems is that they allow the artist to generate complex computer artwork without having to delve into the actual programming used. The tasks of the artist within an evolutionary art process include establishing plans for reproducing the images and determining which motives should combine with each other and how they should do that, and also the evaluation of the creative process and some post processing operations.



An image generated using evolutionary algorithms (by Steven Rooke)

Steven Rooke is one of the most notorious evolutionary artists at the moment. In his web page, he explains the procedures that he uses to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution in order to breed genetic algorithms as visual forms. His creative technique is inspired by the one of the evolutionary art pioneer Karl Sims, and in general terms it matches the basic creative steps that we outlined before. As he says, the base of his work relies on a primordial soup of virtual DNA that he had constructed earlier. That material is used to create a population of images that are used later on for sexual reproduction mixing the virtual genes of the fittest parents. This reproductive technique is also accompanied by occasional random mutation, with the result of a mosaic of new images that fill the screen. According to Rooke, a new image is born when its genetic structure is expressed as millions of coloured pixels filling a frame in a patter that is dictated by some genetic instructions.

 

4. COMPUTER GENERATED POETRY

The writing of texts and the creative use of the language in order to produce art have always been fields dominated by humans. However, the creation of programs that generate poetry automatically has been a repetitive dream within the Artificial Intelligence community during the last few decades. This happens despite of the fact that Computer Generated Poetry has generally been assigned a low priority, especially compared to other natural language processing applications. This is mainly due to the difficulties of computer poetry generation and because other applications such as natural language database interfaces, automatic translators or dialogue systems provide more immediate rewards.

In the next sections we will refer to the different approaches used to produce computer generated poetry. These approaches will be determined by the role that the computer plays in the creative course of action.

Depending on whether the computer is acting as a medium or as an originator of art, we will consider two different poetic tendencies, Visual Aesthetics or Literary Aesthetics.

We will link the first one of these poetry generation tendencies, Visual Poetry, with the forefront literary movements that convulsed some European countries at the beginning of the last century, such as Surrealism or Dadaism. These two literary trends emphasise the importance that the visual aspect of the poem has in order to communicate a message in an alternative way. The typographic experiments introduced by these schools are still being continued these days -with some important alterations- by new schools of contemporary graphic designers such as Digital Typography or Deconstructive Typography.

We will also refer to the role of the computer as an originator of text-based poetry, paying special attention to the difficulties of poetry generation, particularly when compared to the traditional informative way of natural language generation. We will be especially concerned with the complications that computer poetry generators have to face in order to find resources that satisfy the multitude of phonetic, syntactic and semantic constrains that appear in conventional language generation systems.

Nevertheless, we want to highlight the fact that, whereas our criteria to classify the different types of computer generated poetry are based on the dual role that the computer happens to play in the creative process, there are some other researchers specialised in the field of techno-literature who distinguish between up to seven different categories of computer generated poems, including hypertext poetry, hypermedia poetry, random poetry generators, sound poetry, spoken word poems, visual poetry and animated text cyberpoems.

1. Visual Aesthetics versus Literary Aesthetics

Visual poetry is a genre that has a long and varied history since the time of the ancient Greeks to the latest experiments with animated texts and hypertext poems. However, despite the fact that visual poetry is one of the hallmarks of our age, for various reasons the critical response to visual poetry over the years has been disappointing, since critics have been more inclined to pamper texts that fit into the traditional literary canon. Consequently, it is a goal of our study to recognise visual poetry as a significant form of art, and to make an effort to better understand it.

To start our discussion we could pinpoint that from the inception of visual poetry, the critical reaction has been diverse. Either one accepts Horace’s dictum ut pictura poiesis -"in poetry as in painting"- or one agrees with Lessing in the Laokoön that the two media are incompatible.

Lessing based his argument on the fact that painting is a spatial art, whereas poetry is temporal. However, in our study we will be mainly interested in seeing how the principles of painting can be applied to poetry, and how this interesting aesthetic problem can be explored again and again using a variety of approaches. We will focus our attention in the works that are created using the computer as a tool.

For our purposes we will define visual poetry as poetry meant to be seen. We will also emphasise that the combination of painting and poetry cannot be considered either as a compromise or as an evasion. It is a synthesis of the principles underlying each medium, and it is one of the most radical reinventions of our time.

Like Surrealism, visual poetry aims to abolish the dual perspective introduced by the written word. Its underlying principle is that not only is each letter a unit in a verbal chain, but it also belongs to a visual chain, and therefore, the visual dimension is an integral part of the poem, that develops and expands the verbal text. As we will see in the practical part of our study, in the best poems there is a constant dialogue between these two levels that increases the depth and breadth of the our experience.

1. Origins of Visual Poetry

Even if the origins of visual poetry can be dated in the Ancient Greece, it is during the 20^th century that great value started to be placed on seeing and sight. We could refer to the invention of the early cinema as one of the leading factors that emphasised the visual sign at the expense of everything else, and introduced a radically new syntax. Not only was the word subordinated to the image, but also the way in which images were linked together was new and exciting.

At the same time, when newspapers and magazines began to proliferate, they became increasingly oriented towards the visual, incorporating more and more photographic illustrations in periodicals, and also, intensifying the amount of visual advertisements. This development, together with the parallel rise of modern commercial advertising, which introduced additional visual stimulus to everyday life, resulted in poetry becoming more and more visual itself.

As visual images escalated at the social level, poets began to centre their attention on the similarities between poetry and painting, and thus, groups dedicated to the primacy of metaphor -such a the Imagists, the Ultraists, the Dadaists or the Surrealists- started to spring up.



Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire

On the technical side, the invention of the typewriter also seemed to have been a prelude to visual poetry, and even if at the beginning most of the early visual poems were drafted as hand-written manuscripts, after some time the typing machine became a favourite instrument for visual poets. A good example is typified by the Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire that can be considered as an obvious antecedent of the animated visual poems that computer artists generate these days.

2. Animated Texts

Also known as Concrete Poetry, animated poems can be regarded as a step forward in the technological development of visual poetry. As we mentioned before, the development of this poetical trend started last century with the introduction of the typing machine, and it has now been improved with the incorporation of digital technologies.

Animated poetry is a type of poetry that is generated using the computer as an instrument in order to produce a graphic animated poem. The poem is generally limited to one word, even if sometimes this is not an absolute requirement. The animation of the text is generally accomplished in Java, or with animated gif, Shockwave, Quicktime or even fancy HTML scripting.

In order to understand the poem, this must be seen, since a visual poem cannot be just simply read, and equally, it cannot be easily explained.

Animated poetry is a magnificent manifestation of poetry that is the culmination of the link between word and image. It is an experience that takes place between the viewer and the placement of the words. It also includes a dynamic representation of rhythm that is achieved displaying the movements of the images on the computer screen. Animated web poems have repetitive movements and rhythms of their own and some good examples of them can be found in the Notpoems by Adele Aldrigde, or the ones in the Komninos website.

Regarded also as animated poetry, we can refer to some other new forms of experimental visual poetry like Holopoetry, that is, poems in the shape of 3D holograms, similar to the ones produced by the Brazilian Eduardo Kac, and also 3D Stereogram Poetry.

3. Hypertext Poems

Hypertext poetry is a poetic tendency that takes advantage of the hyperlinking abilities of the Internet.

The earliest examples of poetry of this type originated as Mac hypercard stacks, and then, it progressed to HTML on the Internet. One of the earliest examples is the Liquid Language created by the Canadian David Rockeby in 1989. George Landow has also been a major hypertext theorist on the net, and in print, and he describes the non-linear hypertext literature as linking between blocks of texts (called lexias).

Hypertexts can be contained within a set number of documents to link between, or open websites that link out to other documents on the Internet. But there is another category that derives from this type of hypertext poetry, and that is the Hypermedia poetry, which not only links blocks of text, but it also brings together other features like image, sound, video and animation.



The picture above shows a "parent" hypertext poem. Each of the highlighted pieces of machinery leads on to a link that leads itself onto a poem

 



Hyperlink

 

 

Molecules

revolving gather

depends on numbers.

And number's oblique

estimation,

estimates the confidence

of distance and weight.

 

Example of hypertext poem

 

 

5. Part 2: APPLIED COMPUTER POETRY AND VISUAL ARTS.

In the previous parts of our research we have tried to present an overview of the current state of digital art, concentrating our attention in the area of digital poetry. From a theoretical approach, we have defended the existence of two fundamental types of computer generated poetry, depending on the use of the computer either as a digital tool that the artist may use to create art, or as a source to generate art by itself.

In the following sections we will illustrate both tendencies with some practical examples of computer poetry generation and visual poetry.

1. A.D.A.M., a Computer Poetry Generator

• PoetryUI.java contains the initialise method that runs the applet. This class draws the GUI and it is in this class where the instances of class Poetry.java are created.

• Poetry.java is the class that contains the syntactic rules that are going to be used to generate the poems. In this class instances of the different grammatical categories of words are created and linked with each other according to the syntactic principles stated beforehand.
• List.java is the class used to read the words stored in the file containing the text documents. It reads, tokenizes and stores the words in a vector. It also contains a random number generator that returns words within a file in a random order.
• files is a directory that contains text documents holding the corpus of words that are going to be used to generate the poems. These documents have previously been ordered in relation to various grammatical categories: adverbs, articles, prepositions, subject pronouns, object pronouns, transitive verbs, intransitive verbs, ditransitive verbs, and so on. The purpose of doing this is to facilitate syntactic and semantic agreements between the words when the generation of the poem occurs, and also to prevent certain grammatical mistakes such as associations of non personal verbs with personal subject, intransitive verbs with an direct object, etc. that would look odd.
• An HTML file wraps the applet and makes it accessible from a browser.

1. V.E.R.N., a collection of Visual Poems

1. CONCLUSION
1. Overview

Throughout the previous chapters we have offered an overview of the changes that have taken place in Contemporary Arts due to the incorporation of digital technologies into the arts. Besides, we have referred to the way in which the incorporation of the new technologies in the creative sphere has altered not only the creative process itself but also the channels through which the arts are delivered and the ways in which they are assimilated by the audience.

As a result of the research that we have done in this field, I have learnt a number of things, specially concerning the way in which new media and electronic arts are flourishing in academic environments all over the world, attracting the interest of an increasing number of students, academics and institutions that are integrating these emerging areas with other aspects of the curriculum.

The growing number of people with an academic interest on Visual Arts comes from very different disciplines. However, they all work collaboratively to try to make visible what was not visible before.

As we have learnt from previous analysis, architects, computer scientists, industrial designers and electrical engineers work together with artists, musicians, writers and graphic designers on a variety of projects on the edge of emerging research that combine the art making process with the incorporation of technology skills.

Courses on Digital Arts and New Media are taught in universities around the world, especially in the United States. They integrate a number of different disciplines that range from art history courses, to the development of computer graphics and computer generated imagery, to surveys of music technology or contemporary visual culture.

A recurrent theme in those countries where the study of digital arts is further developed in academia is the integration of electronic arts departments with other sectors of the university in order to provide a focus for exhibitions and performances as well as facilitate access to state-of-art new media technologies.

As an example, at the University of California, (U.S.A.), there is a Centre for Art and Technology that opened in the year 2000 as a showplace for the digital arts and other new technologies in the arts. This centre is dedicated to furthering the relationship between these technologies and the arts by combining the intellectual technological resources of the university in a program of interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, scientists and engineers. It also provides a venue for the creation and exhibition of new forms in the media arts and encourages artistic exploration and experimentation in digital technologies

Another fact that I learnt from my research on the implications of the introduction of digital technologies and computers into the arts is that by focusing artistic creativity on information manipulation, digital art maintains the human element in technological progress, and serves as a connection between disciplines. The vitality of such connections is essential to the enhancement of human experiences through technology. Computers demand a fresh approach to educating the artists who will supply the creative force driving this relatively new medium. However, going back to the way in which digital arts are taught in certain universities, rather than form separate departments, many institutions are integrating electronic arts courses into their studio art curriculum. For example, courses on "Electronic Imaging" are run to introduce the students to the basic skills required to use the computer as an art-making tool and to examine the impact of the computer on art and artists. In courses like this one, photography, drawing, collage and printmaking are used as a foundation and as reference points, and the students are given the opportunity to mix traditional and electronic media in their projects.

An increase of the academic attention in the field of digital arts would not only broaden the arts curriculum, open venues of academic employment for digital artist and provide workplace skills for artists, but potentially, it would also help both, students and digital artists by exposing students to the work of artists in the field.

Furthermore, a considerable part of our groundwork was focused on the analysis of the generative process of electronic literature, paying special attention to the generation of poetry. From what I have learnt from this part of my research, I understand that rooting the electronic literature movement in academic environments could be absolutely vital to the growth of the field. Once more, experiences from pioneering programs on digital writing in the United States prove that courses on computer mediated literature and electronic textuality are already helping both to bring new authors onto that field, and to provide a critical framework to help students learn new ways to analyse and appreciate these nascent forms of literature. Hyperfiction publishers like Eastgate Systems list around forty- five institutions across the States running courses in electronic literature.

As publishers rapidly enter the e-book field, but predominantly transport print models and titles with megabuck potential, these sort of courses are an important stronghold for experimental electronic literature in the United States. Additionally, literary tendencies with an enormous potential for success are hypertext poetry, as we learnt in a previous section of this analysis, and also the idea of non-linear narrative with multiple endings, multivalent storytelling and "lack" of closure.

The links between electronic literature and culture show that literature is, by no means, and antiquated cultural form relegated to the obsolescent spheres of print. Instead, it has virtually morphed in response to the new electronic culture.

As we know, digital technologies have transformed traditionally contemplative literature and plastic arts into new ways of interactive virtuosity. They also turned the role of the artist into a meta-artist and the conventional passivity of the spectators and readers into different forms of digital intercourse with the latest digital creations. None of these changes would have been possible without the use of the computer which, as we have seen throughout this analysis, has proved to be a key element in the development of the recently born Digital Arts. A creative dialogue has been initialised between Art and Technology. New forms of expressions have come to light, and with them new opportunities to discuss alternative issues like the relation between text and image, the digital condition or the general problem of aesthetics in relation to information

Given the relevance that these new artistic tendencies seem to have in the United States and in some other technology leading countries all over the computerised world, it strikes us as astonishing the exiguous acceptance that this artistic area seems to have in British institutions.

2. Further Work

• advancements in the design of the GUI
• changes in order to make the program more interactive, e.g.: possibility of poetry generation in a choice of languages or styles, etc.
• qualitative changes in order to make A.D.A.M. more intuitive when generating the poems, e.g.: instead of clicking a bottom and generating a poem, enter a word and generate a poem related to the topic that that word suggests, etc.

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Boden, M., Computer Models of Mind, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988.

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Bohn, W., The Aesthetics of visual Poetry (1912 – 1928), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1986.

--, Apollinaire, Visual Poetry and Art Criticism, Bucknell University Press: London, 1993.

García Moral, C. and Pereda, R.M., Joven Poesía Española, Cátedra: Madrid, 1979.

Harris, D. (ed.), The Spanish Avant-Garde, Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1994.

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