Category: Picture

I love the idea of computer generated art, problem is that computers lack that subjectivity that determines what we judge to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art. That’s why using computers for what they are good at, processing millions of functions a second, alongside a person’s innate ability to ‘choose’ between two or more objects is a very interesting idea. Take del.icio.us popular, Amazon’s web services, Digg , YouTube etc etc. What rises to the top is generally considered ‘good’ the millions of less ‘good’ items remain languishing in the chaos. I have experimented with Genetic Algorithms to produce images for a while now, problem is that as each image is technically unique, you tend to end up with chaos.

William Poundstone, author of The Recursive Universe, contrived an analogy to illustrate why searching huge Borgian libraries of knowledge is as difficult as searching the huge Borgian library of nature itself. Imagine, Poundstone said, that there is a library with all possible videos. Like all Borgian spaces, most of the items in this library are full of noise and random grayness. A typical tape would be two hours of snow. The main problem with searching for a viewable video is that no title, call name, or symbol of any sort could represent a random tape in any less space or time than the tape itself. Most of the items in a Borgian library are incompressible into anything shorter than the work itself. (This irreducibility is the current definition of randomness.) To search the tapes, they must be watched, and therefore the information, time, and energy needed to sort through all the tapes would exceed the information, time, and energy needed to create the tape you wanted, no matter what the tape was.

Source: Kevin Kelly

I just wish I was better at programming so I could attempt to sift through the chaos.