Generating Beautiful Pictures by Computers (コンピュータを用いた絵画生成)

Notes

情報処理学会研究報告 グラフィクスとCAD 58-11 (IPSJ SIG Technical Report, Graphics and CAD 58-11), 11 August 1992, pp. 65–71. 7 pp., in Japanese with an English title, abstract and author line. Image-only scan from the IPSJ Digital Library (IPSJ-CG92058011); it has no text layer, so it is not searchable. Sasaki, of RIKEN's Information Science Laboratory in Wako, sets out what she calls the "function method" (関数法) of picture generation and the ART systems built on it: ART-3 (Artistic Realistic Technician #3, 1978), which draws black-and-white pictures on a plotter, and the colour ART-4 then under development. She first sorts computer picture-making into seven roughly chronological approaches (wireframe, data transformation, algorithmic, patchwork, function, fractal, ray tracing) and explains why she avoided the two then in fashion: fractals because too many people were already doing them, ray tracing because its photographic realism is dull as a picture. ART instead mixes hand-drawn outlines of natural things (ducks, butterflies, flowers, Mount Fuji) with backgrounds generated entirely from mathematical functions, aiming at pictures that are realistic yet oddly removed from reality and stir the imagination. The canvas is an X–Y mesh; polygon outlines are entered by hand and their interiors filled with small picture elements (/, −, +, *) by three kinds of brush: a uniform texture brush, a random texture brush, and the "functional pattern brush", whose element size and colour are controlled by functions of position. Six figure types (line, opaque with and without holes, transparent, semi-transparent, and a type that clears the hidden-surface memory) are combined freely. ART-4 adds colour tables of 100 colours plus single-hue 100-step gradations for clouds and smoke; swapping tables gives the same drawing an entirely different mood. Four ART-3 plotter works are reproduced, all signed M. K. Sasaki: Spot-billed Duck #1 (カルガモ #1), March of the Butterflies (蝶の行進), Life of Flowers (花の命) and Fuji in Flames (炎の富士). The actual wave function behind Life of Flowers and the flame function behind Fuji in Flames are printed, each steered by three parameters a, b, c and finished with f := f_mean + c·amod(f, 1.0); the mountain in Fuji in Flames is random-texture brush, the flames, water and sky all functional pattern brush. Composition is left to the human; the system has no judgment of its own. The works were produced on a Sun-4/330 GXP. The closing essay asks why computer pictures fall short of the masters: a painter's feeling enters every stroke, and a Leonardo is worked to the finest detail, while the computer draws mechanically from input data within the limits of machine precision. Her answer is to push what computers do best (exactness, regularity, formula-driven control) and accept a cooler, more orderly, "intellectual" beauty; to exploit instant parameter variation by generating many pictures and selecting; and to invest in colour, since RGB mixing is unlimited and light-based colour never loses saturation. The larger problem she names for the future is giving the computer an aesthetic sense and a vocabulary of emotion (喜怒哀楽); an earlier attempt of hers to formalise composition as the distribution of principal elements proved very hard, but not, she thinks, impossible. Planned ART-4 improvements: many more function brushes, and colour tables keyed to emotion (cool tables for sadness, warm ones for joy). Her references include Computer Art System ART-3 (with Tateaki Sasaki), Computer Graphics and Art, August 1978, pp. 4–11, which is in this library as Vol. 3 No. 3; Towards an Intelligent Computer Art (Picture Engineering, Springer, 1982); Techniques in Computer Art (The Visual Computer, 1986); Computer Art Using Mathematical Functions (Forma 6, 1991); Knowlton's EXPLOR (1970, also in this library) and Mandelbrot's Fractals (1977). The Sasakis' "Generating Mathematical Patterns in Computer Art, Part I" (Computers and People, November–December 1981), with "Butterfly Dance" on that issue's back cover, is here too, as are her 1993 sequel Artistic Aspects of Computer Art and the August 1976 Computers and People exposition issue with her ART-3 drawing Nemophila. Her earlier Computers and Beauty (with Tateaki Sasaki) is reprinted in The Best of Creative Computing, Volume 2, also in this library.