PG: Well, thanks for those kind words. It was
indeed my first genetic piece, and in fact it was
just the starting point of the process. When
you use evolutionary methods to make generative art you go through an iterative process.
The most promising (in this case) paintings are
allowed to reproduce creating new paintings
as children. The best of the children are then
added back into the gene pool, and the best of
those are allowed to breed, and so on. The artist then becomes a kind of gardener or farmer
attempting to make better and better paintings
through selective breeding.
To start that process, however, you need an
initial gene pool. This is typically achieved by
creating random genes. That’s what this piece
was. It was only the first step, the creation of
random genes and their corresponding paintings.
One surprise, although it shouldn’t have been,
was the creation of pathological genes. The
system would use the genes to create scripts,
and Corel Painter would execute those scripts.
I was able to watch the simulated brush strokes
in sequence as Painter created the paintings. In
some pathological cases, a very promising painting would form, but then at the very end a giant
black brush would be selected and paint over
the whole thing!
This is why computational aesthetic evaluation is critical to the future of generative art. If
we want our systems to exhibit real or at least
simulated creativity, the systems will have to
exercise critical judgment. A good start would
be knowing enough to not paint over the good
parts!
After this piece was done, I went on to iteratively breed several generations of paintings.
They did indeed, in my judgment, im &