Brewster was not the only one exploring the relationship between
beauty and technology at the time. Mary Boole was fascinated by the
mechanization of logic that her husband George and his colleagues were
developing[1].
She did not have the opportunity to study mathematics herself (as she points
out, women were not allowed to attend college in her day) but was eager to
discuss these ideas and try to understand them in a larger context of
aesthetics and religion.
Within the last generation we have gained a “Calculating-Engine,”
a “Calculus of Logic” (with many and widespread applications), and a “Logical
Abacus;” and we are fast discovering means of making the generation of the most
complicated and beautiful curves as mechanical a process as Logic has become.
Of what are these inventions a sign? The reasoning-machines of Babbage and
Jevons, and the sympalmograph, and other inventions for illustrating the
mathematical genesis of beauty, seem to me to have brought to a reductio ad
absurdum the worship of intellectual power and artistic genius.[2]
As the machinery behind thought and artistic creation became
understood, she thought, they would be valued less. The 19th century
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer expressed a similar idea: “That
arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it
is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.”
The Harmonograph
The sympalmograph or harmonograph that Mary Boole spoke of was
a device for tracing out the path of combined harmonic vibrations. The pattern
of Lissajous curves it traced out was a mathematically constrained image that
was widely admired for its beauty. Mary Boole was especially interested in how
mathematical curves could lead to the beautiful forms of leaves or flowers, a
theme taken up in our century in such books as The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, or The Fractal Geometry of Nature.
It was generally judged that “successful” harmonograms required
the lengths of the two pendulums to be in a ratio (such as 1:4). The chaotic
curves which result from unturned lengths were judged to be less interesting
and “out of harmony.”
The kaleidoscope and sympalmograph are examples of a particular
type of a device that is intended to generate new works of art. Each one
follows the same pattern:
·
Hand-selected forms to be recombined. Brewster
at various points recommends buttons, bits of broken glass, a distant bonfire,
dancers, coins, engravings, gems, polarized lenses, and flowers.
·
Random or nearly random input. In the
kaleidoscope, this comes from shaking the bits of glass.
·
Formal constraints. The kaleidoscope uses
mirrors to impose symmetry.
For example, a Markov poetry generator takes a set of words
(preselected for the intended effect, such as all words used in works by a
given author) recombine them randomly, but imposing constraints of use
frequency patterns. Fractal generators use slightly more sophisticated symmetry
constraints on the randomness. Similar examples can be found for music, such as
David Cope’s EMI program.
Is the Kaleidoscope Creative?
When the kaleidoscope first appeared, it was hugely popular
among all segments of society—rich and poor, old and young. Within a few years,
however, the appeal had greatly diminished. We now see a kaleidoscope as a toy
for young children. It is almost as if it were an infectious disease like
chicken pox, a fascination that overtakes each of us the first time we are exposed,
but we gradually become accustomed to. After a short time new kaleidoscope
images fail to add anything new to the already formed impression. Instead of seeing
individual works, our brains pick up on the underlying pattern that unites all
the images formed. While at first it seemed that the kaleidoscope was being
creative, it later becomes apparent that a store of creativity injected, as it
were, during the creation of it has merely been allowed to leak out slowly.
Simple recombinative novelty, then, isn’t the only thing a device
needs in order to seem truly creative to us.
What I would like to do in the following chapters is explore
just what it is that separates human creativity from the limited kind of
pseudo-creativity exhibited by the kaleidoscope. These questions are mixed in
with a tour of similar devices found in many different fields throughout
history.
·
How can a machine evaluate the quality of the
work it produces? Can a machine be built
that in some sense understands the meaning of its own output?
·
How does the free will of the artist affect
artwork and our perception of it? When an artist and a viewer perceive artwork,
what kinds of processes occur in our minds, and can they be automated, even in
principle?
·
What influences our perception of beauty, art,
and creativity? How can we define these
in a rigorous way? Can a definition ever be provided for something that by its
very nature is about discovering how to go beyond previous limits?
In the final chapter I propose a design for a machine that
would incorporate a few of the more modest of these goals. Such a machine would
have the ability to interpret its own products in a kind of aesthetic framework
and make decisions about how to revise its output to make it more appealing.
[1] See Chapter VII for more
about George Boole’s logical calculus.
[2] Mary Everest Boole, Symbolical Methods of Study,1884, p.32. Not everyone came to the same conclusion:
“That art which is above all others a cultured
art—that which aims at the production of symmetrical form, and the beauty which
is geometrical, of man, rather than irregular, of nature, is largely a matter
of machinery. For the natural and inevitable tendency of machinery is to
produce symmetry…. It seems strange that many are but now awaking to the
consciousness that machine-made articles need not be ugly.
But even when men have so awakened, the degrading influence
of overmuch faith in machinery makes itself felt. Who can contemplate without a
shudder the Corinthian cast-iron pillars of a railway station? The common mind,
when it finds that some artistic process can be performed by machinery, at once
jumps to the conclusion that art itself is, or can be made, a matter of
machinery. This recalls the familiar story of the organ-blower, who remarked
after a beautiful voluntary, ‘Ah, what fine music we do make, to be sure.’” (The
City of London school magazine 1877)
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