[Picasso] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS ForumA New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum
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Picasso
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Posted by: Jason Wesley Ellis
Picasso was one of the most prolific artists that the world has seen. His works number in the thousands.
His output has been catalogued and commentaried-but never with an appropriate underlying methadology.
Can Picasso be quantified? Picasso himself believed that in time there would be a science that would understand the individual, a science that would be able to go back in time to reconstruct, given the appropriate data, anyone. This is why Picasso became obsessed with dating evething that he made.
Is it possible, within the framework of NKS, to quantify what is all to human?
Posted by: Jason Wesley Ellis
Picasso was a thinking, rational man who, indebted to his senses (primarily sight of course), was able through hardwork and dedication to invent multiple vocabularies for the life he experienced.
In this I wouldn't say he is much different than anyone else; although his particular expressive gifts and work ethic outshone most people's.
It would be wrong-headed to try and reduce to Picasso to his talent. He was flesh and blood. However he was also highly sytematic in most of his undertakings, especially anything artistic.
I think it would be amusing if someone could somehow devise a psuedoPicasso, a program that would be capable of mimicking artistic inventiveness,,,perhaps something along the lines of the mollusc transformations in ANKS---with maybe a little bit of dimensional manipulation thrown in for good measure.
I think that many of the things that Picasso investigated throughout the course of his career would manifest themselves in such a scheme. While such a program would not by most definitions of the word be intelligent, I still think this would say much about the nature of creativity and the inventive mind. And, by extension, what it means to be human; a thinking creature forever connected to the universe of which we are only a part.
Posted by: Guy Birkin
This isn't meant to be as negative as it sounds, and I am partial to a bit of number-crunching myself (it forms the basis of my own art), but those questions got me thinking:
"Can Picasso be quantified?"
Intuitively, I would say 'no':
I'm sure that many kinds of statistical analyses could be performed on Picasso's vast output [quantification already!], but what kind of meaning might be derived from such efforts, and how might this contribute to our perception of his work, i.e. should this information be used as a tool in the apprehension of the artwork, or as something more anecdotal?
This brings us to that familiar problem of the role of the artist's intention in the appreciation of a work of art, for which there are few answers and many questions, the most pertinent being 'how did Picasso intend for us to read his work?', and the most obvious answer (which also applies to most visual art) is simply 'by looking at it'.
Of course, this does not preclude cogitation and analysis, but Picasso - of all artists - used many modes of perception besides the rational; just look at magical power (primal magic, not wizardry) of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; the emotion in his 'blue period' and in Guernica; and finally the arational and aperspectival angles of his cubist pictures.
As for
"a program that would be capable of mimicking artistic inventiveness":
Well, I've been researching a bit about digital art recently, and these are a couple of the investigations into such programs:
The former abstract painter Harold Cohen has spent the last 30 or so years working on and with AARON, the 'cybernetic artist', and his (Cohen's!) explorations of computers/machines and art touch on some NKS-related issues, e.g. the definition, perception and origin of complexity and creativity.
http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/aaron/history.html
In a similar effort to understand these relationships, Ed Burton of SODA created things like ROSE (Representation Of Spatial Experience), a program that recreates the drawings of children.
http://www.soda.co.uk/explore/index.htm
Also of note is the work of Jared Tarbell, who does wonderful algorithmic work using Flash. His stuff should interest any Artistic New-Kind-of-Scientists:
http://www.complexification.net/
http://www.levitated.net/
I've strayed a little from Picasso, but if you hadn't noticed, Herbert W. Franke - one of the earliest pioneers of computer art - has contributed to the Mathematica Graphics Gallery:
http://gallery.wolfram.com/index.html
Did he intend a rational, analytical, quantitive reception of his work by 'exhibiting' in such a context?...
Posted by: Richard Smith
In the spirit of Tarbell but quite different in all other ways is the art work on my web site:
http://home.pe.net/~rmsmith/rttext.html
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