Saturday, September 21, 2013

Art in the age of the machine

When Andy Warhol said he thought “everybody should be a machine” he almost certainly wasn’t thinking of them becoming painting machines. We’ve talked about machines that can paint before but now the IT guys are at it and going that extra awful step. Not content with machines that can paint like…um..machines, they're cranking up machines that can paint like humans (as if we can’t already do that ourselves).

Let's take Kenichi Yoneda. He claims in a recent Wired magazine to have created a machine that can make human-looking marks mimicking brush strokes and palette knife sweeps. It’s alright Mr Richter, you don’t have to panic just yet. Although the algorithms can imitate the human hand (sort of) they're a long ways away from the human mind. You can judge for yourself here.