Creativity comes in different forms. One of them is combinational, the process of making unfamiliar combinations from familiar ideas. Picasso’s collages are a classic example. You might think that nothing is easier for a computer; that Computer art should master the ability to create new combinations of old ideas. This might be true in some sense, argues Margaret Boden, but is it valuable at all? And how do current limitations of AI impact on and limit computer art? Overall creativity seems to require the creation of something new, surprising and valuable. With computer art you easily obtain something new and surprising. More rarely will you get something valuable.

In March 2016, Google’s artificial intelligence program AlphaGo beat South Korean world Go champion Lee Sedol, winning with a 4-1 score. And many might remember that, a couple of decades ago, Deep Blue defeated chess legend Garry Kasparov. Nowadays Machine Learning makes headlines worldwide by implementing – with increased power – ideas that first came out about 30 years ago. No one would deny that such results are truly astonishingly and impressive, but visual computer art is challenging and hard to evaluate.

How is Machine Learning related to computer art? Deep learning is a branch of machine learning using multi-layered neural networks that attempt to model high level abstractions in data by finding specific patterns. Some suggested that the system could be used not only to find pre-existing structures in the data, but also to generate new compositions using images in databases. For example a computer can easily integrate a picture of your father with that of a dog, producing a new item. This would be new and surprising, but how do we assess its value?

The Cherry Picture (Kurt Schwitters, 1921) is a famous composition made of scraps and objects collected from Hannover, the artists’ hometown. It is composed of many different, unrelated images. Some coloured cherries are clearly visible at the centre. However, the composition does not have anything to do with cherries (or with anything else): it is abstract. Picking twenty random images, a computer might do something similar. However, to produce something interesting, one must know what the important visual principles are. How could anyone put those principles in a program given that programmers themselves cannot predict its outputs or guide the system? For the moment, computers can combine interesting pictures, but this is probably different from what we would call an interesting collage. In the XVI century, Arcimboldo created portrait heads entirely made by fruits or vegetables. Subtle abilities – far from those of contemporary computers – of visual comparison are required to produce works of this value and quality.

Source: Creativity & the Mind report

Berys Gaut suggests that in mythologizing the portrait of the artist as someone standing in isolation, Romanticism depicted the creative process as occurring in the creator’s head. In a letter once assumed to be authentic, Mozart described his compositional method, propagating the conception of art as the working of an inscrutable inner inspiration. The letter is now widely thought to be a forgery, fraudulently written and published by one of Mozart’s biographers. Indeed, the author of the letter, Friedrich Rochlitz, played an active role in the construction of the myths surrounding the Austrian composer’s life and work. According to more reliable sources, Mozart’s method was quite different: the composer worked with the keyboard, writing fragments, sketches and drafts before finalising musical pieces.[1]The romantic idea of creativity has proved to be extremely resistant and influential beyond the romantic era. Famously Collingwood defended the idea that the material aspects of producing a piece of art do not have much to do with creativity itself.[2] What is objectified in paint or stone is an idea that is already complete in the artist’s head. In other words, the creative process terminates even before the real process of making art begins. There are few cases in which this might be actually true. Notoriously, people other than the artist himself usually executed Soll LeWitt’s wall drawings.

However, following contemporary Situated Cognition Theory, this is unlikely to be a fair representation of how creativity works in general. Not only do the material aspects of creating a piece of art fundamentally depend on the relationship with the external world, but creativity itself may be shaped by external conditions and circumstances: the boundaries of cognition extend beyond those of individual organisms. Moreover, according to Embedded Cognition, cognitive activity exploits the structures present in the social and natural environment. Routinely, cognising agents create such structures in order to enable or enhance cognition itself.[3]As a matter of fact, the romantic conception of creativity is unsupported by scientific evidence about how the creative process unfolds. But how does the creative process rely on environmental factors? In a classic paper focussed on the distinction between imagery and perception, Chambers and Reisberg investigated if mental images could be ambiguous[4]. In particular, after being exposed (for 5 seconds) to ambiguous pictures – like the rabbit-duck – subjects were required to reinterpret the mental images of those bistable figures. Unable to recognise the second object hidden in the figure during the exposure, participants were able to discover it once they had to draw it by themselves. Such result suggests that people can imagine only a duck or a rabbit but, in the drawing process, they are able to see more. The fact that artists tend to prepare sketches before completing real work can be seen as evidence of how creativity needs to be activated in the external world in order to to unfold.

The idea of ‘incubation’ as a pure inner moment, culminating in a sort of illumination, is nothing more than a myth. But why do people describe insights as moments of pure inner inspiration? In the thirties, Norman Maier designed an experiment showing how people tend to confabulate, inventing tales that help them to explain unknown behaviours[5]. Asked to explore different solutions to a specific problem, participants tended falsely to describe the process of finding a way out as a sudden flash of insight, apparently ignoring the role of the external cues provided by the experimenter. Overall people tend to confabulate, misidentifying the source of the information they use to solve a problem.[6]In striking contrast with romantic myths, cognitive agents routinely structure the external environment in order to stimulate cognition and arouse the mind, creating tools for reinforcing intellectual abilities and working memory. We can find examples of this attitude throughout the history of Western culture, from Leonardo’s written work[7] to Frank Gehry, who describes himself as a voyeur of his thoughts, but constantly working with drawings and models.[8]  Similarly, inventive individuals like Steve Jobs or John Lasseter have stressed the importance of promoting creativity by designing stimulating working environments: Pixar Animation Studios (Emeryville, California) represents a clear example of such philosophy.

[1] Konrad, U. (2006), Compositional method, in Cliff Eisen and Simon P. Keefe, The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 100-108.[2] Collingwood, R.G. (1938), The principle of Art, Clarendon Press.[3] Robbins, P., & Aydede, M. (2008), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, Cambridge University Press.[4] Chambers, D. & Reisberg, D. (1985). Can mental images be ambiguous? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Vol 11(3): 317-328.[5] Maier, N. (1931), Reasoning in humans. The solution of a problem and its appearance in consciousness. Journal of comparative psychology 12(2):181-194.[6] Seifert, C. M., Meyer, D. E., Davidson, N., Patalano, A. L., & Yaniv, I. (1994). Demystification of cognitive insight: Opportunistic assimilation and the prepared-mind hypothesis. In R. Sternberg, & J. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of insight, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 65-124.[7] Leonardo, Kemp, M. (2001), Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings by Leonardo Da Vinci, with a Selection of Documents Relating to His Career as an Artist, Yale University Press.[8] Isenberg, B. (2009), Conversations with Frank Gehry, Alfred A. Knopf; Van Bruggen, C. (1997), Frank O. Gehry: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum.

Source: Creativity & the Mind report

An artist carrying out theoretical research at the Royal College of Art, Aura Satz presented emblematic pieces of her work, introducing the audience to her multi-faceted universe of film, sound, performance and sculpture. Satz is interested in how perception and sensory disorientation might be modulated, but her work is also strongly grounded in historical research, with a focus on lesser-known figures (women in particular) and on their relationship with science, light and sound. In presenting her work, Satz focussed on Oramics: Atalantis Anew (2011), a film-homage to musician Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958. The film is a brief encounter with Oram’s invention, the Oramics Machine, a now obsolete drawn sound technique recently restored by the Science Museum, in London. Originally used to compose electronic music, Oram’s machine worked as a pioneering synthesiser with graphical elements controlling and sequencing the audio parameters: a visionary anticipation of the present combination between art, computer science, and technology. Satz’s movie brings Oram’s invention back to life “enabling the visualisation of the drawn sound material, re-interpreting and translating it into new filmic sequences”.

 

A different project is devoted to Hedy Lamarr’s “Secret Communications System”, invented by the famous Austrian actress and Hollywood star to help combat the Nazis in World War II. Patented by Lamarr and by composer George Antheil in 1941, the system was first implemented years later, when it was employed on naval ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Partially inspired by Antheil’s unsuccessful attempt to synchronise 24 pianolas for his avant-garde creation “Ballet Mechanique”, the invention involved frequency hopping, a method for manipulating radio frequencies at irregular intervals between transmission and reception, thus creating an unbreakable code to prevent messages from being intercepted by enemies. Despite the importance of her invention for subsequent telecommunication systems, during her lifetime Lamarr obtained very little recognition of her talent. Satz’s Impulsive Synchronisation (2013) rediscovered Lamarr’s forgotten invention. Impulsive Synchronisation is a film and technically complex sound installation he work consisting of a scrolling screen in constant motion. Not by chance, the movie projected onto the scrolling screen is an extract from a romantic comedy (‘Come Live with Me’, released the same year Lamarr and Antheil submitted the patent for their invention) starring Lamarr as an Austrian clandestine who metaphorically uses a flashlight to attract the mate as lightening bugs do.

Source: Creativity & the Mind report