[NetBehaviour] Fwd: Fake Art: Call for Digital Web Art/Programs

[Michael Szpakowski]

Millie Niss <men2 at columbia.edu> wrote:

 Fake Art:
> an exhibit of fake abstract art and fake art
> criticism
> to be held in The Faketropolitan Museum of Art, a
> virtual museum which will come to www.sporkworld.org
> in Spring 2006
> 
> Sporkworld.org will host a new collaborative exhibit
> of computer-generated digital abstract paintings, to
> open in Spring 2006.  The exhibit will consist of
> computer-generated paintings which are different on
> each viewing, accompanied by computer-generated art
> criticism, and a dynamically-generated soundtrack
> made up of visitor comments about art, recorded in
> many languages. 
> 
> Artists may contribute to this project in four ways.
>  The first two options are for artist/programmers to
> contribute programs to generate paintings or texts
> about paintings, while the third option simply
> requires recording your voice. The fourth option is
> a call to photographers and visual artists to create
> images of museum visitors.  
> 
> Art Machine submissions may be created in Flash
> (preferred), Shockwave, or another client-side web
> technology (by arrangement).  Crticism Machine
> submissions may be in Flash, Shockwave, Javascript,
> or PHP, or another technology by arrangement. 
> Contributions to the soundtrack should be submitted
> in MP3 format if possible, and otherwise as WAV
> files. The images of museum visitors should be in
> JPG or PNG format.
> 
> Sporkworld will provide the gallery environment in
> which the art is viewed, which will have a button
> for each Art Machine and each Criticism Machine so
> that users may see the machines generate new
> material.  The art generated by submitted Art
> Machines will be loaded into picture frames in the
> virtual gallery, which users can walk through using
> a scrolling interface.
> 
> Please send questions and submissions to Millie Niss
> at men2 at columbia.edu before April 30, 2006.
> 
> 1.  Submitting an art machine
> 
> Web programmers are invited to submit web-based
> programs that produce a new abstract composition
> each time the program is run.  The resulting art can
> be in any non-realistic, not strictly
> representational style, and compositions may make
> use of images of recognizable objects if they so
> desire.  The composition should rely on some kind of
> random process, so that an infinite (or at least
> very large) variety of compositions can be produced
> by each program.  Programs may attempt to imitate
> the style of a well-known artist or may generate art
> in a style of their own.  The goal of this project
> is to produce compositions (really
> meta-compositions) that are attractive and look like
> believable art.  We are interested in programs which
> generate very simple, spare compositions yet can
> produce a wide variety of different effects,
> although programs which produce more Baroque,
> detailed, and complex imagery are also sought.  Your
> program may be designed to generate a specific style
> of composition, so that the results look like
> variations on a human-designed theme, or they may
> aim at generating the widest possible variety of
> paintings.  What we are not aiming at is results
> that look very mathematical, like early computer
> graphics.  Programmers should try to make thier
> machines create art which looks organic, emotional,
> deliberately-designed, hallucinogenic, harmonious,
> bleak, jarring, etc.  Programmers/artists should do
> as much thinking about design principles as about
> mathematics or programming.  We would like to see
> works which have algorithms specially designed to
> produce aesthetically pleasing (by whatever
> standard) compositions, but we also would like to
> see what kinds of compositions can be produced by
> very simple-minded programs.
> 
> Examplea:  A very simple art-generating program
> might put a random number of overlapping squares on
> the canvas, in various orientations.  This is easily
> made more flexible by making the squares come in
> different colors, putting them on painted
> backgrounds, allowing shapes other than squares,
> etc. etc.  Bear in mind that this sort of thing is
> the most basic possibility.  (But simple programs
> may be best at producing consistently pleasing
> paintings or at imitating the style of a known
> painter.  For example, it is not too hard to see how
> to make some kinds of fake Mondrian paintings.) 
> More complex programs might draw irregukar curved
> shapes, use patterns, incorporate written words or
> small realistic images, or use complex gradients and
> stacked translucent layers to create a more organic
> look.
> 
> Technical details:  The most convenient format for
> submissions is Flash.  The program should produce a
> composition of 500 pixels wide by 375 pixels high. 
> The art machine should be smaller than 200 Kb if
> possible and smaller than 100 kb if possible.  This
> size refers to hiow much must be loaded at one time
> to run the program once.  It is acceptable for
> machines to use a larger library of assets which are
> externally loaded, so long as only 200kb must be
> loaded each time a composition is produced.  The
> total size should be under 2MB.
> 
> If the work is in Flash, it should have a function
> on its main timeline called generate(), so that the
> main gallery movie (to be provided by Sporkworld)
> can load the art machines into frames and display
> them, along with a button for generating a new
> composition (which will call generate()).  Works in
> Shockwave are also easily accommodated.  
> 
> We will make every attempt (assuming the art machine
> is practical and meets the requirements) to accept
> art machines which use other languages and
> technologies, athough artists wanting to do this
> should be willing to research how their work can be
> controlled from Flash (e.g. via Javascript and
> FSCommand, etc.).  If you wish to do a work using a
> technology other than Flash, please email
> men2 at columbia.edu as soon as possible so that your
> technology may be incorporated into the design of
> the gallery.
> 
> Please send a brief (less than one page; it could be
> just a sentence or two) non-technical explanation of
> the algorithm your machine uses along with the
> machine itself.  Viewers of the Fake Art exhibit
> will have access to these explanations if they want
> to see how a machine works, but the explanations
> wikll not appear unless the viewer chooses to have
> the secret of any particular machine revealed, and
> that will be possible only after the art made by the
> machine has been shown.
> 
> 2. Submitting an art theory/art criticism machine
> 
> This a call for programs which generate fake art
> criticism/art theory texts to accompany the exhibit
> af abstract art.  You may aim for a ridiculous
> effect or try to make a machine that creates texts
> that someone might actually believe were written by
> a curator, newspaper art critic, or expoert on
> cultural theory.  Machines can range from very
> simple (choosing a random sequence of canned
> sentences from a list, if the list is long and
> well-constructed) or may make use of sophisticated
> natural language processing.  The results do not
> have to make sense and may be poetic if you so
> choose. The texts to be generated may be
> mock-academic and theoretical, and may cite many
> sources, or may be more direct, such as explanations
> of how the artist supposedly came up with the idea
> for the painting while taking a bath or what the
> painting means politically, etc. Texts may purport
> to quote various people (from expert art historians
> to the man-on-the-street or a child at the museum)
> who give opinions on the art.
> 
> We are also very interested in machines that
> generate texts that purport to be written by the
> artists themselves.
> 
> Technical details: If the machine is written in
> Flash, it should consist of a 1 pixel by 1 pixel
> movie with a white stage, which will be hidden from
> the viewer.  The program will have a generate()
> function on its main timeline that returns the
> generated text as a string of HTML.  Alternatively,
> machines may be written in the PHP server-side
> scripting language, in which case the PHP page
> should return the HTML text via POST.
> 
> Please send a brief (less than one page; it could be
> just a sentence or two) non-technical explanation of
> the algorithm your machine uses along with the
> machine itself.  Viewers of the Fake Art exhibit
> will have access to these explanations if they want
> to see how a machine works, but the explanations
> wikll not appear unless the viewer chooses to have
> the secret of any particular machine revealed, and
> that will be possible only after the text generated
> by the machine has been shown.
> 
> Advanced Option for Brave Programmers:  You are
> challenged to make a combined Art Machine/Art
> Criticism machine, in which the texts generated by
> the Criticism Machine are based on the specific
> characteristics of the particular composition that
> has been generated by the Art Machine.
> 
> 3.  Contributing to the soundtrack of museum
> visitors' conversations
> 
> The digital exhibit of Automatic Abstract Art will
> be accompanied by a soundtrack made up of
> overlapping voice samples.  The soundtrack is
> designed to simulate the sound of a large crowd
> visiting the exhibit.  The crowd will have
> sophisticated art connoisseurs in it, but also small
> children, people who hate art and are being dragged
> to the museum by thier parents or spouse, people who
> make fun of the art, people who make stupid comments
> about art, people who are very emotional in their
> response, etc.  Some comments may not be directly
> related to the art: you can record a child begging
> to go home, someone asking where to find the
> restroom, someone who has just stepped on someone
> else's foot, guards telling visitors not to touch
> the artwork, etc.  Voices may include fragments of
> guided tours or lectures about the paintings.  
> 
> We are to imagine that this exhibit takes place in a
> museum in a major world capital, where there are
> many tourists.  Accordingly, we would like to gather
> voices speaking as many languages as possible.  Your
> sounds may contain sound effects other than voices
> but the sounds should complement the voices.  
> 
> Please produce your sounds in MP3 format (if
> possible) or WAV format.  Sounds should be no more
> than 1 minute long (many should be shorter), but you
> may submit as many sounds as you want.
> 
> 4. Submitting museum visitor images
> 
> Images of the visitors to the virtual gallery are
> also sought.  These should be photographs or
> drawings in JPG or PNG format with a resolution of
> 300 across by 500 high. Ideally, the people should
> be on a white or transparent background so that they
> can easily be cut out and placed in the gallery. 
> Images of many kinds of people in many kinds of
> clothing are desired.  You may also send nude
> visitors, so long as they are not engaged in
> explicit lewd acts. You may include typical tourist
> trappings in your images (guide books, cameras,
> etc.) or instead send sophisticated artistic-looking
> people, or bored groups of schoolchildren, or any
> other people whom you would like to see in the
> Faketropolitan Museum of Art, a museum with free
> admission that does outreach to all elements of the
> local community and has an international reputation.
>  Images of museum guards are also welcome.
>