Visual Hallucination For Computational Creation

Abstract Research on computational painters usually focuses on simulating rational parts of the generative process. From an art-historic perspective it is plausible to assume that also an arational process, namely visual hallucination, played an important role in modern fine art movements like Surrealism. The present work investigates this connection between creativity and hallucination. Using psychological findings, a three-step process of perception-based creativity is derived to connect the two phenomena. Insights on the neurological correlates of hallucination are used to define properties necessary for modelling them. Based on these properties a recent technique for feature visualisation in Convolutional Neural Networks is identified as a computational model of hallucination. Contrasting the thus enabled perception-based approach with the Painting Fool allows to introduce a distinction between two distinct creative acts, sketch composition and rendering. The contribution of this work is threefold: First, a computational model of hallucination is presented and discussed in the context of a computational painter. Second, a theoretic distinction is introduced that aligns research on different strands of computational creativity and captures the differences to current computational painters. Third, the case is made that computational methods can be used to simulate abnormal mental patterns, thus investigating the role that "madness" might play in creativity -instead of simply renouncing the myth of the mad artist

The Machine as Artist: An Introduction

With the understanding that art and technology are continuing to experience an historic and rapidly intensifying rapprochement—but with the understanding as well that accounts thereof have tended to be constrained by scientific/engineering rigor on the one hand, or have tended to swing to the opposite extreme—it is the goal of this special issue of Arts to provide an opportunity for artists, humanists, scientists, and engineers to consider this development from the broader perspective which it deserves, while at the same time retaining a focus on what must surely be the emerging core of our subject: the state of the art in mechatronics and computation is such that we can now begin to speak comfortably of the machine as artist and we can begin to hope, as well, that an aesthetic sensitivity on the part of the machine might help lead to a friendlier and more sensitive machine intelligence in general

The Machine as Art/ The Machine as Artist

The articles collected in this volume from the two companion Arts Special Issues, “The Machine as Art (in the 20th Century)” and “The Machine as Artist (in the 21st Century)”, represent a unique scholarly resource: analyses by artists, scientists, and engineers, as well as art historians, covering not only the current (and astounding) rapprochement between art and technology but also the vital post-World War II period that has led up to it; this collection is also distinguished by several of the contributors being prominent individuals within their own fields, or as artists who have actually participated in the still unfolding events with which it is concerne