Imperative Polarities

This interest in the necessary opposites that are manifested through right brain and left brain is why I came to the Art Institute to learn web design. More specifically, I wanted to involve and educate my left brain’s sense of code/logic and my right brain’s sense of design/art.

This fundamental culmination of forces that are opposite but each necessary for the success of the other is something that I’ve always found very interesting. In researching educational opportunities for myself, I found that other colleges had either a computer science program geared toward IT positions (left brain), or a graphic design program emphasizing craft through cutting pieces of paper and rubber cement without even touching computers (right brain). While both of these extremes are undoubtedly useful for their different respective applications, I wanted a hybrid that was a happy medium between these opposite ends of the spectrum, utilizing both sides of the brain, and I have mostly found that in the web design program at AI.

Google’s DeepDream is basically a computer vision program created by Google which uses what’s called a “convolutional neural network” to find and enhance patterns in its vast and continuously growing library of images. It does this via something called algorithmic pareidolia, meaning it takes the human tendency to see a familiar pattern of something where none actually exists (i.e. the man on the moon, animals in cloud formations, etc.) and it catalogs these patterns over and over again, building on layers of enhancement, creating some combination of a trippy, dreamlike, hallucinogenic, and/or sometimes terrifying appearance in the deliberately over-processed images. To really appreciate the enormity of its excellence, it is necessary to see an image before being processed by DeepDream and after.

Although the images generated by DeepDream are undoubtedly mind-blowing, we actually understand “surprisingly little” of how it actually works. According to the creator of DeepDream, “we simply feed the network an arbitrary image or photo and let the network analyze the picture. We then pick a layer and ask the network to enhance whatever it detected.”

Recently, there was an entire exhibition of art generated or enhanced by artificial intelligence programs held in San Francisco’s mission district, co-hosted by Google and the Gray Area Foundation. When addressing the crowd at this event, due to the slightly controversial nature of whether or not this is art, a Google machine-intelligence developer named Blaise Agϋera y Arcas “likened the artistic use of such programs to photography, or the employment of optical instruments by Renaissance artists – tools which may have had their detractors, yet are now an accepted part of art history.”

The whole concept of determining whether or not a piece is “art” reminds me of Marcel Duchamp and the concept of the readymade, where the idea of “what is art” became almost more of an intellectual pursuit than an aesthetic one. Despite all the debate, Duchamp is undeniably considered to be an integral part of art history. Similarly, Blaise Agϋera y Arcas mentions that Google’s DeepDream is “re-inscribing what it means for something to be called fine art, what counts as skill or creativity, what is natural and what is artifice, and what it means for us to be privileged as uniquely human”. Despite the controversy, kind of like Duchamp, it is without a doubt that art generated by artificial intelligence such as DeepDream will have some kind of profound effect on art and its trajectory in history that people will eventually study.

Looking into more artistic ways to pursue web design as a result of being inspired by outsider art, I came across a relatively new HTML element called canvas. It is used to draw graphics on the fly via scripting (usually JavaScript), and it can be either generated without any user input, or generated as a result of the user clicking or moving the mouse, or even inputting information via the keyboard.

This is something that I would like to further explore, because especially as a front-end web developer, I would like to be able to give myself an edge in the graphics department to really give my work that “wow” factor. There are more and more beautiful examples of canvas being used online, and they can really be true works of art, almost like a modern web version of outsider art. There is such an enormous variety of artistic things that can be done using this tool, and 21 of the best examples on the internet were collected by a code enthusiast and published in an article (Sharma). This is one of my favorite examples, and it really has to be experienced interactively to be truly appreciated.