But I do agree generative art feels niche and most people don’t know about it or take it seriously, largely because of how it looks. I think there are many reasons why but a couple things come quickly to mind:
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1 - Many of us start as programmers first, artists second. I think fine art, design & typography studies would be tremendously helpful to advancing that group of generative artists (I am of course including myself here too)
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2 - I think we, as programmers, have a tendency to take the easy/lazy route. I am very guilty of using off the shelf perlin/simplex noise (which seems identifiable even in your post!) which will quickly look dated as the tech & knowledge/skills advance
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3 - as
@manoloidee mentioned, it is not always easy to “show” the audience the process, complexity or simple beauty involved in generative art when you only show the output.#plottertwitter IMHO starts to show the algo/process, not surprised it’s gone a little “viral” recently2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes -
I wonder how much of this comes down to programmers being generally bad at communicating complex processes. Story is a big part of artwork in general, and that's no different for
#generative. But jargon *always* hurts and simple explanations are better.2 replies 1 retweet 7 likes -
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.
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