Artistic Aspects of Computer Art (コンピュータ・アートの芸術性)

Notes

情報処理学会研究報告 グラフィクスとCAD 64-4 (IPSJ SIG Technical Report, Graphics and CAD 64-4), 19 August 1993, pp. 27–31. 5 pp., in Japanese with an English title, abstract and author line. Image-only scan from the IPSJ Digital Library (IPSJ-CG93064004); no text layer. The sequel to Generating Beautiful Pictures by Computers (1992), also in this library, now on the colour ART-4 system. Sasaki restricts herself to the "function method", in which a handful of mathematical functions generate every pattern in a picture, and asks whether such pictures can be artistic at all, since so few functions make subtle feeling hard to express; her answer is that with enough trials they can reach a fairly high level. ART-4 takes natural things (flowers, birds, mountains) as hand-drawn outlines only and fills their interiors with function brushes; colour change is also function-controlled. The drawing sequence (Fig. 1): set the colour table, enter the source figure, transform it, decide the pattern from function values, determine inside and outside and remove hidden surfaces, fill the faces. Two works are reproduced in monochrome: Rabbit (Fig. 2), in which only the rabbit is drawn by hand and the grass is made by functions, and Mt. Fuji with Kokuryu (Fig. 3, Fuji with a black dragon), in which only the mountain's outline is hand-drawn while the dragon and the clouds are mathematical. The cloud function is printed in full: x_p := sin(0.7b(x+y)), x_m := sin(b(x+x_p−y)), f := 31.0 + sin(a(y+x_m)) + 0.5·sin(0.7a(y−x_p)) − 0.03y², and when f > 0, f := 250.0 − f_mean − c·amod(f, 1.0) + 2.5y. On artistry: a picture must first be beautiful, because an ugly one provokes displeasure and is never looked at candidly, so no theme or feeling can pass through it. Beauty (her 1992 keywords were unity and variation) is not sufficient for art but is her minimum condition, and the function method clears it easily because it yields beautiful patterns in endless variety. Putting theme and feeling into a beautiful picture is the harder problem, which she admits she has not thought through: for now it is done through the shape and colouring of the natural object and of the background pattern, a burning red base with black contrast for passion and force, green-centred schemes for calm, blue with white and black for loneliness. Fuji with Kokuryu was made on a red base with rapid function-driven colour changes to express a burning wish that the natural beauty of Japan's representative mountain be handed down to posterity; Rabbit was made as a protest against an owner who abandoned the animal and as a wish for its happiness. If the maker's thought and passion do not reach a third party the work lacks artistry, though a viewer who shares nothing of the author's thought will find it hard to understand; she is not confident her intentions came through, but thinks they did to some degree. Summary: ART-4 pictures cannot yet approach the masters, but she feels she has reached the entrance. Output was produced with help from Mr Oda of Fujitsu and Mr Horiki of RIKEN's computer room. References: Knowlton's EXPLOR (1970, also here), her Picture Engineering (1982), The Visual Computer (1986) and Forma (1991) papers, Schubert (1985), and the 1992 report.