computational creativity

Talking Artificial Creativity in Korea

Just returned from an amazing event in Seoul, the MBN Y Forum.  Gave a talk where I discussed how over the past 15 years my robots have gone from being over-engineered printers to semi-autonomous creative machines.

The thumbnail for this video of my talk is my favorite photo of the event taken by my wife.  I have to say, I really like being featured on a large format screen as I talk about art in front of thousands of people. Here is another stitched together panorama shot of the event. 

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And finally for the substance, here 

Can robots be creative? They Probably Already Are...

In this video I demonstrate many of the algorithms and approaches I have programmed into my painting robots in an attempt to give them creative autonomy. I hope to demonstrate that it is no longer a question of whether machines can be creative, but only a debate of whether their creations can be considered art.

So can robot's make art?
Probably not.

Can robots be creative?
Probably, and in the artistic discipline of portraiture, they are already very close to human parity.

Pindar Van Arman

HBO Vice Piece on CloudPainter - The da Vinci Coder

Typically the pun applied to artistic robots make me cringe, but I actually liked HBO Vice's name for their segment on CloudPainter. they called me The Da Vinci Coder.  

Spent the day with them couple of weeks ago and really enjoyed their treatment of what I am trying to do with my art.  Not sure how you can access HBO Vice without HBO, but if you can it is a good description of where the state of the art is with artificial creativity.  If you can't, here are some stills from the episode and a brief description...

Hunter and I working on setting up a painting...

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One of my robots working on a portrait...

Elle asking some questions...

Cool shot of my paint covered hands...

One of my robots working on a portrait of Elle...

... and me walking Elle through some of the many algorithms, both borrowed and invented, that I use to get from a photograph of her to a finished stylized portrait below.