
Appreciating Art with Algorithms - ingve
https://hackernoon.com/appreciating-art-with-algorithms-58b651615561
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Liuser
Whoa, was wondering where the traffic was coming from. I wrote this!

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danyim
Your account of walking through the SF MOMA and being mesmerized by the
possibility of turning the art into algorithms exactly mirrors my experience.
I too wondered if there was a way to develop Chuck Close's mosaics with some
image manipulation, but for small project I instead focused on interpreting
Sol LeWitt's wall drawings as code first.

Here's a shameless plug of a very rudimentary React/WebCanvas project I've
been working on: [http://artgorithms.s3-website-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/](http://artgorithms.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/)

~~~
Liuser
Nicely done. Sigmar Polke was another artists that I was experimenting with
too.

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npgatech
> I’m going to beat around the bush and not mention the artist’s name that was
> the source of inspiration because I’ve found articles online claiming he
> does not want his name referenced in personal projects, so I’ll respect
> their wishes.

I find this really weird. His art is public, on display at public places and
he wishes not to be mentioned in public discussion?

Here is the guy:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close)

~~~
Liuser
I saw this warning online:
[http://www.barcodeart.com/artwork/portraits/chuck_close/](http://www.barcodeart.com/artwork/portraits/chuck_close/)
so didn't want to reference his name in the project (#4).

But from what I understand, Scott mainly got in trouble for directly using his
artwork by cutting the original work of Chuck Close into cells and then using
the cells to draw new images. Whether this constitutes as fair use is up for
debate.

~~~
npgatech
From the link:

> Chuck Close does not want his art to be trivialized. He will exercise his
> legal rights, even if your motives are good. If he knows about your project
> and does nothing, that will put him in a position where he cannot fight the
> next, even more egregious usage of his copyrighted images and use of his
> name.

This is the kind of behavior that shows nothing but weakness and lack of faith
in his own art. You have just trivialized his works using something that is
even more beautiful - the construction & logic behind his intricate mosaics.

I have just lost respect for him and his works.

~~~
Liuser
I'm really flattered you like the results.

I'll be honest that when I first started the project (and continue to work on
it) that I was conflicted. I truly love his work. I spent hours and my
weekends analyzing his artwork. I'm still studying his usage of colors because
there's still work to be done there.

With the discovery of legal threats and actions against Scott Blake I was
disheartened because I don't believe he would like me working on this project.
Here's an artist I admire and here I am doing something I love that he may not
like. Difficult to come to terms with. Like everyone on HackerNews we're
driven to create and solve problems. Curiosity and challenge got the best of
me and I pushed forward.

I still plan on releasing a Windows version and eventually making the source
code public once I cleanup some things. I'm not making a killing on the app
either. It's been out for a month and it's averaging me a dollar a day (with
initial publicizing it on /r/macapps and other subreddits). Helps fuel the
coffee that goes into these after hours side projects.

Since I'm charging for the app, I plan on donating a portion of the proceeds
to the MoMA as well (after all, they're the source of inspiration and I hope
this helps give back to other artists).

~~~
eigenvalue
If you made an iOS version, I'd buy it for up to $5.00. I suspect it would be
popular.

~~~
Liuser
Thank you -- I'm going to revisit this suggestion as it's been brought up by
friends as well.

I actually implemented a mobile web version at first with the up-sell of
buying high res images. I wasn't happy with the images it was producing though
because I forced 1 setting for all images being converted for the sake of
ease-of-use for the user.

But this was a mistake. Not all photos are the same: Some photos looked better
with smaller/larger cells, as a diamond grid, with different color settings,
etc.

Server costs and complexity grew too: (nginx, nodejs, rabbitmq). The algorithm
is CPU intensive and not fast enough to my liking yet. So I released the macOS
version and put the computational cost on the end user and avoiding the need
to support servers.

Sounds like I should make a native mobile version with the option to tweak
parameters.

~~~
eigenvalue
Or just pre-compute low-res previews using a variety of settings and have the
user highlight ones that look pleasing. Over time, you can collect this data
and find heuristics (i.e., machine learning) for automatically choosing the
most pleasing settings for a given image.

