The Hammock Papers: Mimicking.

06 October 2016

Mimicking.

On any given day in a lab in New Jersey, a humming machine traces the lines of a hand-drawn image: a woman’s face drawn by Matisse. The machine highlights each new line it sees, recording and cataloging its thickness, shape, and the artist it was created by.

But the computer isn’t merely scanning the image, it’s learning. The Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers University is currently teaching the machine to appreciate and understand art, and the subtle differences within a painting or drawing.

“The A.I. will be able to tell a Van Gogh versus a Matisse, for example, based on the visual elements that are somehow unconscious to the artist,” explains Ahmed Elgammal, Professor and Director of the lab.

Scientists have been exploring artificial intelligence in relation to art for years, and while artificial intelligence systems can now make paintings of their own dreams, humans still have the only brains capable of appreciating them. This is where the Art and Artificial Intelligence lab comes in. Computer scientists there hope to bring artificial minds closer to mimicking human intelligence, and their work may also help solve a problem that has plagued the art world for hundreds of years: art forgeries.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL