理化学研究所ニュース (RIKEN News) No. 94, September 1987 — Mutsuko Sasaki, 'Computer Art'

Notes

理化学研究所ニュース (RIKEN News) No. 94, 30 September 1987, published from Wako, Saitama; 7 scanned pages (6 numbered pages plus a new-technology sheet), image-only copier scan with no text layer, from RIKEN's own back-issue archive (the source link; same bytes). The lead article, pp. 1–3, is "Computer Art" (コンピュータ・アート) by Mutsuko Sasaki, then technical officer (技師) in the Information Science Laboratory: a short history and credo written for RIKEN's general readership. Computer art, she writes, began in the United States in the early 1960s on the back of the XY plotter of 1958 and reached Japan a few years later; artists and engineers worked together, the equipment was poor but the enthusiasm high, there were yearly contests and specialist magazines, the techniques were simple (random numbers, moiré from slightly varied curves) but ingenious, and several Japanese were active internationally. In the 1970s graphic displays made video art the mainstream in place of plotter art, techniques were systematised and the orthodox methods of information science entered the field. She lists the representative techniques under her own names (wireframe, data transformation, patchwork, function, fractal) and explains Mandelbrot's fractals as the way to render texture: shrink a basic pattern at a fixed ratio while shifting its position and direction, down to the resolution limit, so that rocks and forests get their fine grain, since "everything has an expression" and nothing small may be treated crudely. She herself began with wireframe moiré, then built ART (expanded here as Artificial Realistic Technician), now in its third version, ART-3: flowers and butterflies are entered, each face is painted with a chosen texture (the "brush"), and function brushes control pixel size, density and the pixels themselves by mathematical functions, with double painting or hidden-surface removal where faces overlap. Three ART-3 works, all previously published in American magazines, are reproduced on p. 3: Mandarin Ducks…1 and Mt. Fuji in Eruption from the plotter, and Butterfly March colourised on a graphics device. Functions rarely give what one wants at once, but repeated trials turn up interesting things, and the variety of expression in mathematical functions surprises even her; mathematics holds inexhaustible possibilities for art, and the work might better be called mathematical art. She then turns to what is hard. Plato's "unity and variation" governs composition, but a picture also needs a focus tied to its motif; attention-grabbing patterns are easy for a computer, emotions such as joy and sorrow extremely hard. Composition only looks simple: some years earlier she tried giving the computer several objects with sizes and weights and letting it place them, by analysing the placement of objects in masterpieces (means, variances, covariances), folding the features into one function of the object positions and minimising it, and learned how difficult automatic composition is, since there is no decisive method and every kind of composition has its own interest. Focus is hard because tiny differences of shape and colour change the whole character, as portraits show, and a good monochrome picture usually turns cartoonish when coloured. From the standpoint of automatic drawing, computer art is still a newborn. That may be fine, she argues: the beauty computers now make is a machine-like beauty without human feeling, exactly a new type of beauty seldom drawn before, and making the computer imitate humans would only produce pictures seen somewhere before. Computer art is in vogue, even among university professors, and will spread as equipment gets cheaper; its techniques advance remarkably, producing images indistinguishable from reality, but she wonders whether she is alone in feeling that artistic sense is being lost in proportion to the progress. The beginning of computer animation, John Whitney Sr.'s Arabesque, which turned musical notes into point sets by fixed rules, is plain beside today's flashy work but unsurpassed in originality and elegance. All works were made on RIKEN's computer-room equipment. The rest of the issue: a new-technology sheet on two RIKEN patents (a multinuclear-complex battery and a piezoelectric drive for Mössbauer spectroscopy), introductions of two new chief scientists, notice of the 10th RIKEN science lecture in Nagoya on 27 October 1987, and an essay on interpreting for a minister at the IAEA.