My thoughts on the negative influence of intellectualism (i.e. obsession with techniques and concepts) on generative artwork:http://www.tylerlhobbs.com/writings/intellectualism-and-generative-art …
Different take: generative art is effectively about data compression, reducing representations to their approximate Kolmogorov complexity. It is only when you understand this concept that you can even notice any difference to other artwork.
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So to invert your point, maybe it's sentimentality and esotericism that hurts art. By treating beauty and interestingness as mystic concepts to be handwaved into being by art school grifters, you create a learned helplessness that art can never be truly understood.
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Schmidthuber e.g. disagrees. He claims beauty is a function of our own internal models. Something is beautiful if it corresponds closely to our internal model of a thing. Something is interesting if the world becomes more beautiful by understanding it. http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/sice2009.pdf …
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This neatly connects knowledge with beauty, and explains a curious fact: the average of 100 faces is strikingly beautiful. Yet evolution trained us to seek fitness (e.g. strong muscles or wide hips). Beauty magazines do not show average bodies. So why should average faces work?
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Understanding a generative algorithm means in some way being able to run it in your head, having an internal model of what is easy vs hard. This is why demosceners look at demos with different eyes. But demoparties are not about techniques, they are about watching the results.
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So the demosceners communicate with each other just fine. It's just not a language that artists of traditional mediums are at all proficient in, having convinced themselves that algorithmic models and beauty should never meet.
End of conversation
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