An 🎨 project documenting explorations of art using AI to augment the creative process.
"Chance must be recognized as a new stimulus to artistic creation."—Dada
Randomness is part of the world around us—it's a thing that helps us, and finding harmony with these varying oscillators, number generators, statisical processes, algorythms and formulae is priority one. The world around us—as explained by science and math—has always been a part of some of the most interesting creativity.
In regard to one of those important artists of the 20th century, we have some great descriptions of the process for artists that seem to be random:
"(Jackson Pollock's) particular painting technique essentially lets physics be a player in the creative process...To the degree that he lets physics take a role in the painting process, he is inviting physics to be a coauthor of his pieces."
Pollock probably didn't consciously realize how he was exploiting fluid dynamics in his paintings. "I think if you told Pollock, 'You're exploring physics,' he would think you were crazy," Herczynski said. "He did it intuitively. His interest was not so much the physics of the process, it was to achieve a certain aesthetic effect. But the two are bound together. You can't separate them. You're inviting physics to be a part of it."
The purpose of this discussion is to harness that energy:
To the Abstract Expressionists, the idea of chance entering an artist’s work was rather foreign. “Although de Kooning and Pollock made use of chance effects,” notes Calvin Tomkins in his book Off the Wall, “letting the paint run and drip in their spontaneous encounters with the canvas, they were not about to hand over the whole process to accident.”
“It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess,” Pollock said.
The character of good art, of proper a e s t h e t i c is to lean into what the explorations of science and technology in the pursuit of the good.
Discovering the digital tools available to content creators is a weird, wonderful thing.
For Google I/O 2019, the annual musical numbers that are parot of the festival experience were augmented with a smattering of music that heavily leverages randomness and learning.
A few folks involved in this process described how they did this in a great session talk. Here's a brief summary:
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YACHT (also known as YOUNG AMERICANS CHALLENGING HIGH TECHNOLOGY) and the Flaming Lips produced a song that heavily uses constraints. The band generated MIDI, lyrics and the like into their process.
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The Flaming Lips, famous for multi-source experiences like Zaireeka (4 CDs to be played), and The Parking Lot Experiments (40 cassettes to be sync'd in a pakring lot) played a bowl of fruit on top of an AI-powered melody. They then threw inflatable versions of those fruits into an audience who played the sundry of fruits in a semi-random instrumental moment of bliss.
By leveraging randomness in the creative process, you might get something that is good. (Maybe.) At the very least, you might be inspired to harness nature, technology and the like into something bigger, better and wild.
For these projects, we intend to do is play with machine learning-powered projects like these: https://magenta.tensorflow.org/demos/web/
But there are no rules—except having fun. (And whatever other constraints you put on your project.)
Produced at Code and Coffee on May 11, 2019.
C&&C regular Rafael Vasquez randomly suggested we use this song as insipration.
We took this audio and processed it through PIANO SCRIBE.
We brought its midi files into Apple Logic X, quantized the notes and manipulated the time. Rafael then played the song (based on his memory) on top of the melody. Additional Fx processing was performed, a percussive beat was added and a derrivative media was formed. All the stuff we worked with is available here.