|
| | |
|
- Notes regarding available publications
- Some publications have the illustrations omitted. The intention is to insert them at a future date. Every effort has been made to reproduce these publications and make them available to the public error-free. If you have or find clear evidence to the contrary, however, you are welcome to send an email with the details.
Currently Available Publications
"Fingerpainting for the 21st Century"
|
2016

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 2M File Type: PDF
|
"...This part of the process is not as straightforward as it sounds. Some of the colors I can display on my big screen are outside the gamut of the printer; it simply can't produce them from the six "primaries" it uses. Obviously, getting the color relationships right on the canvas is more important than getting them to match those on the screen..."
|
|
"Driving the Creative Machine." Orcas Center, Crossroads Lecture Series
|
2010

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 17M File Type: PDF
|
"...I happen to believe, for example, that typically creativity arises when the individual starts to question the unquestioned assumptions of his field and to act out the scenarios that present themselves as a result. What if an image didn't need to
reflect the appearance of the world from a single viewpoint? (Cubism?) What if we didn't have to use only the colors we find in nature? (Matisse?) What if one could discover the rules we use in making art and then have a machine act out the rules? (Cohen?) What if?..."
|
|
"The Art of Self-Assembly: the Self-Assembly of Art" Dagstuhl Seminar on Computational Creativity
|
2009

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 24K File Type: OpenDocument Text (.odt)
|
"...though I've always thought of my goal as program autonomy rather than creativity. Maybe that's just putting a different label on the same package, but where I wouldn't have known how to proceed on the path to creativity, the path to autonomy has been clear. It has simply meant handing off to the program a steadily increasing range of responsibility for the decisions leading to the making of art objects. That's the path I've been following since I wrote my first computer program forty years ago..."
|
|
"Art in Consumerland; Where, Exactly?" UC Santa Barbara.
|
2008

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 117K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...The escalating technological changes of the past three decades has resulted in a deep rift between the domains of production and consumption, exhibiting markedly different profiles with respect to knowledge and expertise. For a number of reasons, high-tech-oriented elements of the art community have relocated to the consumer side of the divide, where they have established a sub-culture in parallel with, but not otherwise influencing, the mainstream culture.
By contrast, AARON is a largely autonomous art-making computer program that remains located on the production side of the divide. As a world-class colorist its work is fully equivalent to human output, and it is perhaps the only program of its kind with full access to the mainstream culture. This talk describes some of the most recent developments of the program and discusses why they could not have been made from inside consumerland..."
|
|
"Toward a Diaper-Free Autonomy." Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
|
2007

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 102K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...'What’s your claim to fame?' she asked. I said, 'I’ll be the first artist in history to have a posthumous exhibition of new work.' She looked a bit blank; I thought perhaps she didn’t know what posthumous meant. 'A joke,' I said.
I did, indeed, intend it as a joke. But as you may judge from what I have to tell you this afternoon, it seems to have been more a manifesto than anything else, a statement of purpose that has been driving my work for a very long time...."
|
|
Lisbon Catalog Introduction
|
2007

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 44K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...I started to fret about the long-term prospects for my painting. I thought it rested too heavily upon my ability to invent formal material, and I was beginning to doubt whether that inventiveness could be sustained indefinitely. Shouldn’t it be possible, I wondered, to formulate a set of rules by which paintings could virtually 'paint themselves?'
Indeed, it was possible. A group of paintings I showed in the Venice Biennale in 1966 were made by spattering paint onto the canvas to create a kind of 'terrain,' then applying rules that determined how a line would move through that terrain. I thought of it as analogous to the way the rule of gravity controls the way water finds a path through an area of rough ground.
..."
|
|
Santa Cruz Music Festival: Panel on Algorithms
|
|
2006

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 83K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...I need to explain that the particular body of knowledge I’m concerned with here relates to color; AARON’s use of color, which has been my principal focus for several years now. The configurational aspects of its subject matter – which is based entirely on plant growth – serve to provide a format for the program’s complex use of color, and that hasn’t changed much, either over the past couple of years or in the recent transition.
At the first level, then, AARON was a typical rule-based program for which I wrote the coloring rules, and my own knowledge of color advanced considerably over the years as a direct result of doing so. As a result, the rules themselves became increasingly complex and detailed. So complex, in fact, that it was the increasing difficulty of modifying one part of the rule base without screwing things up in another part that persuaded me finally to dispense with the rule base altogether..."
|
|
"AARON, Colorist: from Expert System to Expert"
|
2006

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 128K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...And a few months ago I replaced the entire system with a remarkably simple algorithm that not only performed at least as well as its predecessor, but opened up a much wider range of coloring strategies than had been possible before. It’s that algorithmic system I want to talk about. It really is simple; it could have been written in a couple of hours by any novice programmer, if he had known what to write. ..."
|
|
"Color, Simply."
|
|
2006

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 131K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...I wasn’t there to get a PhD. Progress in the arts is a bit like stumbling in the dark towards some strongly-felt but ill-perceived destination, and it isn’t to be measured in successfully completed projects. I hoped that being at Stanford would prove to be one more step in my own forward movement as an artist, but if you have some idea what computing was like thirty years ago you’ll recognize that it was a long-shot at best. All the same, there was no question of declaring my program to be a success and moving on to something else; I was committed to doing what I was doing, win or lose, for reasons deeply embedded in my life and work up to that time...."
|
|
"Creativity." For Prof. Ed Feigenbaum's Festschrift, Panel on Creativity, Learning and Discovery.
|
2006

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 41K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97-2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...the essential core of creativity lies, not in its implementation, but in the lifelong intellectual development of the individual and in the highly differentiated world model to which it gives rise. For the individual who lives inside that world model, a problem that invokes creativity sticks out like a sore thumb and the need to deal with it is unavoidable and compelling. For the rest of us outside that model, it isn’t even a minor bump..."
|
|
Part A of A/B, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 2004
|
2004

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 84K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...The year is 2054 and today is my 126th birthday. I awoke from a good night’s sleep, ate a leisurely breakfast, and now I am in my studio to find that my collaborator, AARON, has been pretty busy during the night. There’s a very large holographic sculpture that wasn’t there last night occupying about half the space, and the forty-foot wall piece on the end wall has changed almost beyond recognition since last night. (1) At this rate I’m going to need an even bigger studio.
AARON is a computer program, so it doesn’t need to sleep. Even so, I’m constantly amazed by its productivity and I sometimes wonder why it needs me at all.
A fiction, obviously; I didn’t really sleep very well last night, it was still 2004 when I woke up and, however old you may think I look, I’m not actually 126 years old. Fictions aren’t necessarily any better for being true, but some are more plausible than others and I want to start today by considering just how plausible this one is..."
|
|
Part B of A/B, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 2004
|
|
2004

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 68K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...As I concluded yesterday, my own choice has been to reject the role of fool playing with the fool-proof toys of a short-attention-span culture and to insist upon my right to apply traditional levels of expertise to the writing of programs – just one program, actually, that has developed steadily over a thirty-plus years – to do exactly want I want it to do. What I want to do, in fact, is to develop some level of autonomy.
Set against current trends in art-making that’s an unconventional position and
I want to show that it’s a viable one; and to show in some detail what kind of gains one might hope for by adopting it..."
|
|
"Style as Emergence (from What?)" American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Fall Colloquium Washington DC.
|
2004

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 118K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...I had the good fortune, in my student days, to take several art history seminars with one of the greatest art historians of his time, Rudolf Wittkower. In one of them, on attribution, Rudy told how he had once gone into a small country church in Italy he’d never visited before, and sensed something oddly familiar about it; something about it was reminding him of another, very different church. Searching through the church’s archives, then, he found a floor plan, and in the floor plan he found pin holes. Pin holes meant that the plan had been traced. And when he went to the archives of the other church, he found that its floor plan had corresponding pin holes.
Great detective work! But it’s what preceded the detective work that’s really impressive; because, after all, how many of us could recognize the stylistic signature of one architect carried over into a different building by a different architect when we were standing on the signature?
I came away from those seminars with some hesitation about using words like ‘style’ and ‘creativity’, words that seems to change their meaning from one conversation to the next, so that one can never be quite sure what’s being discussed. I’ve always regarded ‘style’, in particular, as arguably the most difficult word in the entire vocabulary of art history. So, having been silly enough to agree to giving a paper on the subject, I think I’d better begin by saying what I understand by the word, and to make clear that I intend it to apply exclusively to style in the visual arts -- painting, specifically – with no implication that it applies in other areas of the arts, concerning which I know very little..."
|
|
"A Sorcerer's Apprentice" Talk at the Tate Modern
|
2004

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 195K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...I never imagined, when I went to California on a one-year visiting professorship in 1968, that I would still be there thirty-six years later. The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft aglay, though I’m quite sure that Robert Burns could never have guessed just how far aglay they might gang.
As it has turned out, these thirty-six years have witnessed some of the most astonishing cultural changes in human history, with the emergence of technology as one of the principal engines driving cultural change. And for me, they witnessed a move away from the conventional practices of painting with which I came of age as an artist in favor of technologies that hadn’t existed a decade earlier. To talk sensibly about that move I need to locate it within the rapidly-changing technological and cultural context, and much of what I will have to say focuses on what I was able to bring with me from the old mode to the new; specifically, the notion of expertise with respect to an artist’s chosen technologies..."
|
|
"Making Art for a Changing World", Invited talk, RCAST, Tokyo University, 2002.
|
2002

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 2.1M File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97-2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...Human beings are innately technological. Ever since Prometheus stole fire from the gods, we’ve been inventing gadgets and processes to do what we couldn’t do with our bare hands and we’re well along the path to similarly delimiting our unaided brains. People have been replacing worn-out body parts routinely for a number of years and brain implants became a reality, earlier this year, when we saw a monkey with a brain implant move the cursor on a computer screen just by thinking about it. As to the part about my computer collaborator: the fact is that AARON has been in existence since the early ‘nineteen-seventies and has been demonstrating increasing expertise and sophistication in its output ever since.
Technology proceeds in large part by co-opting existing technologies -- the more you have the more you can develop -- and that means that technological development is inherently exponential. It took most of history to reach the present, rapidly-rising part of the exponential curve, but now technological developments are tripping over each other and it seems almost as if anything that can be imagined can become real, with the time between imagination and reification becoming, not just shorter, but exponentially shorter.
Do I really believe it will happen?..."
|
|
"Decoupling Art and Affluence." Lisp Users Annual Conference, Seattle
|
2001

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 742K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"..For reasons that I hope to make clear, I’m going to be talking as much about the reasons we do things as about the things we do, so I have to ask why I made that decision. Not because I knew what would happen thirty years later, obviously. It was simply that, in a world where few people knew anything about computers and most of them had it wrong, I didn’t want to present myself as a magician with a magic box. I wanted to clarify, not to mystify. I was acting out of a persistent belief that the health of art is strongly determined by its relationship to the culture it serves and that supports it and I was groping for an appropriate form for that relationship..."
|
|
"A Million Millenial Medicis" Invited Talk, Rhodes College
|
1999

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 71K File Type: Microsoft Office Word 97 - 2003 Document (.doc)
|
"...Imagine that you have just come home from work. You walk into your living room and say, 'painting, please, something simple.' A large rectangle half the size of your living room wall lights up and an image starts to form; first a line drawing, then color, apparently applied by an invisible brush, and finally, to repair where the paint has gone over the lines, the lines are redrawn. 'Nice,' you say, 'but you know what? Charlie and Heather are coming over for dinner. A couple of days ago you did a painting with a woman that looked rather like Heather. Let’s have that one again.' The image on the wall disappears, and a new one takes its place. 'Great,' you say, 'They’ll like that. And while you’re about it, how about making a nice big print they can take home with them.'
Science fiction, do you think? Fifty years in the future? Twenty? Ten? Apparently not. The two images you’ve just seen were generated on this laptop here by my computer program, AARON..."
|
|
"A Self-defining Game for One Player" Loughborough Conference on Congnition and Creativity
|
1999

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 62K File Type: PDF
|
"...as to whether we will ever be able to claim that a computer program is creative. What would be involved in giving a program that capacity? What is creativity actually like?..."
|
|
Edinburgh Conference, Invited Talk
|
1999

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 73K File Type: PDF
|
"...AARON is sitting quietly on my desk, generating original images at the rate of about one every two minutes...
when I’m watching it, I am aware of a couple of questions that need to be
addressed: if I say that I have a creative family, and then I were to say that I have a creative
computer program, would I mean the same thing by the word 'creative'? And how far could I
justify the claim that my computer program – or any other computer program – is, in fact,
creative?..."
|
|
"Colouring without Seeing: A Problem in Machine Creativity"
|
1999

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 341K File Type: PDF
|
"...I am aware of a couple of questions that need to be addressed: if I say that I have a creative family, and then I were to say that I have a creative computer program, would I mean the same thing by the word "creative"? And how far could I justify the claim that my computer program - or any other computer program - is, in fact, creative?..."
|
|
"The Further Exploits of Aaron, Painter" (Text for Standford Humanities Review)
|
1994

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 423K File Type: PDF
|
"...While it has not been the case that my own work, straddling the apparently disjoint fields of art and artificial intelligence, has been ignored, I have found few art writers willing to exhibit their ignorance about technology, and as few in the science community able or willing to handle the art part...I must take advantage of this opportunity, then, to provide an overview of the past four years, during which time much has happened..."
|
|
"Brother Giorgio's Kangaroo"
|
1990

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 384K File Type: PDF
|
"...AARON has never seen a person or walked through a botanical garden. Giorgio has never seen a kangaroo. Since most of us today get most of our knowledge of the world indirectly and heavily wrapped in the understanding of other people from grade school teachers to television anchor persons, it should come as no surprise that a computer program doesn't have to experience the world itself in order to know about it..."
|
|
"How to Draw Three People in a Botanical Garden"
|
1988

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 477K File Type: PDF
|
"...the goal of this research is to discover what the artist needs to know about the world in order to make plausible representations of it: not correct representations, or complete representations, or realistic representations...If I had asked how much the artist needs to know, the answer would have been that the question is hardly relevant: we make representations with whatever we know... The goal, rather, is to discover how representational structures represent what they represent: how we use what we know to build those structures. What does AARON represent, and how - by means of what structures - is it represented?..."
|
|
"Off the Shelf"
|
1986

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 161K File Type: PDF
|
"...Let me tell you what I believe. Let me tell you what I do...I have always felt that if you want to test the validity of a belief, you bash is up against a wall as hard as you can to see if it breaks...My programs function as model of the things people do - the things I believe they do, that is to say - when they make images. The way the programs perform tells me something about the plausibility of the things I believe..."
|
|
"How to Make a Drawing"
|
1982

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 91K File Type: PDF
|
"...Aaron's education was actually quite unusual. There were no courses in US history, no calculus, no languages: in fact, there were no courses at all, and Aaron was awared no degree. We might best summarize this unorthodox education by saying that it was aimed exclusively -- literally exclusively -- at teaching the student how to make drawings..."
|
|
"What is an Image"
|
|
1979

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 1.1MB File Type: PDF
|
"...It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that image-making as a whole is vision-based, even though it bears directly on the issue of appearances only occasionally. It is my belief that even when an image is not purposively referential -- as in the case with AARON -- or when the artist seeks to refer to some element of experience which has no visual counterpart, it is his ability to echo the structure of the visual experience which gives the image its plausibility..."
|
|
"The Material of Symbols"
|
1976

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 569K File Type: PDF
|
"...symbol-manipulation which is directed towards communication between individuals and between groups must obviously involve highly acculturated performance. For a symbolic structure to stand any reasonable chance of being unambiguously understood, its maker must both have clear knowledge of the expectations which the reader will bring to its reading, and be prepared to accept the constraints imposed by those expectations. Communication is possible within a culture only because of existing agreements as to what entity is to stand for what entity, and how it is to be presented to be recognized as doing so. At an even more basic level, this implies also that all the involved parties know about the same entities: which may be true, more or less, within the same culture, but is unlikely to be true from one culture to another..."
|
|
"On Purpose"
|
1974

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 446K File Type: PDF
|
"...The development of the computer has brought with it a cultural revolution of massive proportions...I have come to believe, through my own work with the machine, that there may be more fundamental notions of purpose, and a more fundamental view of what the machine can accomplish, than we have seen so far; and this article is intended as a speculative enquiry into that proposition..."
|
|
"Parallel to Perception"
|
1973

DOWNLOAD
File Size: 229K File Type: PDF
|
"...I should define my position more carefully, for the simulation of human perceptual processes arises as a result, rather that as a motive, for his work. What ever other territories may appear to be invaded, I believe that my behavior is, in itself, primarily artmaking behavior, and I have proceeded by attempting to deduce from the requirements of the venture as a whole what perception-like abilities may be appropriate... The purpose of this essay, then, is to say something about the nature of the characterizations, or representations, of the work in progress which the machine will need to build; and about the constraints under which they are formulated..."
|
|
----

Sorry Unavailable
File Size: ???K File Type: Unknown
|
Sorry no further publications available at this time
"...check back soon for additonal publications and availability..."
|
| |