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Shall we celebrate machines' human behaviour?
Posted on February 8, 2021


Following on the excitement of having my new generative prints at home, I’ve spent some time today observing one in particular:
It all started with this first experiment...

I’ve been playing for the last days with noise and geometric elements in Processing. I typically use to search for organic shapes but this time the randomness of the experiments brought me something different. It suddenly appeared on my canvas a kind of an army of little soldiers coming to me. I found it quite funny and I started playing with colors and different parameters of the spheres which where actually each on of the “soldiers”.

Then I exported it as a quite huge file to get a good resolution and I explored in detail the small figures - thousands of little kind of three dimensional triangles.

Then, zooming in it, the image reminded me somehow the Bulgarian Rose Valley. That crowded field of flowers I've seen so many times in pictures.

Rose-picking in 1932, photgraphy from littlerosefields.org

Rose-picking in 1932, photgraphy from littlerosefields.org

In Front of a Distillery 1932, photgraphy from littlerosefields.org

So I said, well, what if I change soldiers for flowers?! I played a little bit more with the palette and it turned out this.

I really liked the result, I find it quite delicate so I exported it again and printed it now to see these flowers in high resolution.

Finally, once here I decided to transform that kind of field overview to something a bit more detailed, and I got this last version.

So I printed it as well

And here comes the point of this post: doesn’t it look this one like an oil painting on canvas? This is of course an effect (or illusion) from the large amount of fine lines created by the generative process. But! Illusion or not, it looks like something non digital.

That impression made me happy. You know, we are always proud of the machines when they act like humans, ..but! Is this proudness a good driver to keep exploring those relationships between humans and machines? Shall we work on getting closer to a human way of doing things, or besides that should we explore what machines can give us and we are not able to? I definitely find it an intriguing question.

It was Yves Klein, the artist who created (thanks to science and experimentation) a completely new color and built on that a work of art. He not only wanted to show pure colors, but he wanted to exhibit the glory of a new color. Something more than the fact that modern chemistry was being able to create new pigments: the concept itself behind this art was inspired by technology.

Sounds good :)

PS: If you are interested in art and techonology, I strongly recommend the book "Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color", by Philip Ball.

And now yes:
cheers!