Month: October 2021

Creative coding

Wondering about how AI “make its own decisions and interpretations” and having some discussions with engineers, I have signed for a Creative coding workshop with Damien Borowik in UAL, where he reveals more about the Creative coding course he is teaching. I learned about the Processing software – a completely unknown medium for me and about the huge engineering & art community around it. I completely enjoyed writing my own code and seeing it visualised into an art piece.

At the end of the evening, two ideas really fascinated me – the existence of random() and noise() functions.

We humans have found a way to generate randomness by a machine! The Perlin noise has been developed back in the 1980s by Ken Perlin – not even a novelty idea. It turns out we can actually just randomly pre-program a glitch or a bug or anything we want. What a powerful tool to have! And what a philosophical debate of who actually makes the decision as soon the function is called! Regardless of the answer, the essence is that there is a way to “recreate digitally” the incidental shake of the painter’s hand that makes the art work unique…

This was one very entertaining evening I spent, where a seed has been planted – can I become an artist by doing what I really enjoy – coding?

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Interview with an artist

Having had observations on the AI art scene, I went to speak to a pop culture artist who likes “embracement of technology” – Timothy Gatenby. During the session we have discussed the uniqueness of the AI art works and originality – “it doesn’t necessarily have to be made from the hand of the artist, as long the initial idea is theirs”. As an artist, seeking to push the boundaries, he is interested in the new ways to communicate with the audience and excited about the opportunities. He sees technologies and AI in art much more as an opportunity than a thread.

Art is evolving together with society, and as an artist, one may either ride the wave or fall behind. I would argue that an AI algorithm is just an enhanced / different tool (let’s say a brush and canvas vs a digital camera), it is something more than that, by being able to “make its own decisions and interpretations”. AI-generated art has the potential to become a new normal in the near future and artists may divide even further than just digital and physical – but also ones that are using AI.

Below is the full recording of the interview.

Interview with Tim Download

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