Computing and Art

Computing and Art

The fields of Computer science and Art have many areas of overlap.

Art Pioneers: Piet Mondrian and Michael Noll

Mondrian Composition With Lines 1917

The image above is an early artwork of Piet Mondrian, one of the founders of the Abstract Art movement in the early 20th century.

In 1965, Michael Noll created the image below, he wrote a computer program and plotter to create the first example of computer art that attempted to replicate the artwork of a well-known abstract painter, Mondrian. Noll went on to research people's perceptions of the comparison between Mondrian's original composition and his computer art generated version.

Many pictures can be thought of as consisting of series of connected and disconnected line segments. Since two points determine a line, such pictures can be described numerically by the cartesian coordinates of the end points of the lines. Thus, a picture can be uniquely transformed into numerical data which are then inversely transformable back into the original picture [Noll]

In the article linked below, Grant Taylor PhD., reflects on the importance of Noll's artwork and his research into people's perceptions about computer generated art, when compared to http://median.s151960.gridserver.com/?page_id=689

Computer Analysis of Art

The image below, from Rigau et al, shows artworks of Mondrian, Pollock, Van Gogh, which were analyzed to determine aesthetic measures for artistic compositions.

Quantifying Mondrian's Journey to Abstraction

Quantifying Mondrian's Journey to Abstraction, Artnome.com Article

In the article above, Jason Bailey discusses ways that Mondrian's artworks can be classified using quantitative methods to characterize the transformation from painting realistic landscapes to his

References

[1] J. Rigau, M. Feixas, and M. Sbert, “Conceptualizing Birkhoff’s Aesthetic Measure Using Shannon Entropy and Kolmogorov Complexity.,” in Computational Aesthetics, 2007, pp. 105–112.

[2] A. Michael Noll, “Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition with Lines’ (1917) and a Computer-Generated Picture.” The Psychological Record 16 (1966):

[3] http://median.newmediacaucus.org/routing-mondrian-the-a-michael-noll-experiment/

[4] [Jason Bailey ], link