when computer-based generative visual art is successful, what we normally see is strong in its abstraction. not in its representational dimensions. this is mainly because it's easier to create algorithms that operate meaningfully on abstract shapes, colour sets, etc than on things in photographs. the latter is basically a matter of artificial intelligence. and that's a big can to open that can take a lifetime in small advance, and mostly advance in artificial intelligence, not art. most of us, including me, are more interested in art than ai [1].
dbCinema is an attempt to combine generative visual art with a more representational dimension that what we normally see in the art. the various image search engines that are now out there offer fascinating gigantic databases of images that we can query with language that returns often startlingly relevant image sets. they are both relevant and idiosyncratic, often personal, sometimes out there, and wonderfully collective in their 'visual definition' of the query language. and the image sets they return change over time. so i thought it would be fun to create an app that would create art out of those image sets. dbCinema is a langu(im)age processor. sort of like a word processor in that you type stuff into it. but that language first retrieves a set of google/yahoo image search images and then dbCinema creates a real-time cinema using those images as 'paint'. the series i'll show you first are screenshots from some of those sessions. the screenshots are displayed in a javascript slideshow app i wrote. the series are titled according to the google/yahoo image search that provided the image set dbCinema used as 'paint' for the series. here's the second series i made: http://vispo.com/dbcinema/abstractart ja http://vispo.com Footnotes [1] here's the main way i see ai figuring in to net art of the future: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/2008/04/15/the-body-of-net-art/ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
