Faking Hirst with four lines of code

I don't know anyone who's not grateful that computers have replaced humans for performing tasks like doing arithmetic calculations or searching for bits of information. Few think, however, that humans can be replaced for creating art. I have yet to see a computer-generated piece selling for millions.

But how difficult is it to mimic art pieces on a computer? Are pieces worthless because they can easily be replicated? And who gets the credit (or the money) for a computer-generated piece - the programmer or the computer?

Here are two examples to put things in perspective. First, my replica of Damien Hirst's polka-dot-LSD painting, obtained with only a few Mathematica lines:

The advantage of using the computer here is obvious: I can generate endless variations of Hirst's piece with different colors at random at the touch of 'Shift-Enter'. How's that for simplicity and productivity?

Needless to say perhaps, I'm not a big fan of Hirst, and being able to generate what he sold (or copied) for £43,300 doesn't help me appreciate what he does.

Next, a piece of Bridget Riley I saw described this morning by Adrian Searle on the Guardian website:

Searle says about the piece: "I can't see the system of drawing at all... It took about a week, a week to actually execute... What you're watching is your own perception."

I'm not sure about my own perception - even less about Mathematica's - but I know that with a bit of fine-tuning and luck (the output is random after all), I can get close to the original, again with only a few lines of code.

Does that mean that Riley's circles are trivial? Well no. She puts a lot of time on her pieces, as shown in the Guardian video, and it does take some work for us humans to come up with something that looks random yet nice and original at the same time.

Riley has also done in the past some remarkable pieces on optical illusion and geometry. For those in London, you can see some of her works at the National Gallery until May 2011.

This is a just a preview of the underestimated art of using computers for doing art. Have a look at the Computer Arts Society website for more (historical) examples. I'll post more of my own computer art in the future, though none in the next two weeks because of Christmas vacations.

Mathematica Bingo

I've just discovered the command Speak, although it was available in Mathematica 7. After the excitement of listening to my computer reciting silly things like the first 100th digits of π, I wondered what I could do with Speak that would be useful. What I came up with is a Bingo machine - sort of useful.

Here’s what the machine looks like:

Download and run the notebook to hear the numbers as you draw them.

The code for this applet is divided into three functions. The first one initializes the set of numbers to draw (all the usual Bingo numbers) and the set of numbers drawn so far (empty set to begin with):

The second one implements a random draw in the set of numbers that remain:

The third function displays in a neat way the drawn and un-drawn numbers:

The remaining bits of code that use these functions to generate the Bingo machine can be found here. Download it and run it in Mathematica or Mathematica Player to listen to your very own Bingo master!