Scientific Arts or Science Fiction ?

Elements of contribution to the debate moderated by Hervé Fischer in Mutamorphosis, Prague, november 8, 2007

Roxame and Primeval as experimental tools

Can images be created by a genetic process, comparable to the biological ones ? And can these images be "beautiful" or at least, original and interesting ?

The Roxame software, and the PAP (Primeval Art Projecs) let us answer : Yes, certainly. But whithin limits. And the prospect of our experiments are to constantly push these limits further. Let's see some examples.

Examples with Roxame

(more on her website ).

An original image (in Paris La Défense)

And we cross it with a set of textures. The mating operation consists in transforming the original image into a map of classes (grays, vivids, blues, greens...), then replacing the original pixels by the corresponding ones in the texture image. We get :

Another example, we still start from an original image (an old wood gate in my garden) :

but this time we cross it with a geometrical generation algorithm. The mating operation consists in segmenting the original image, then, for each region, generating a rectangle and/or an ellipse, drawn or painted. Then (to get it more appealing) we apply some gradations and get :

Example with PAP (more on the Algorists website)

Initiated by Michel Bret and myself within the Algorists group, the Primeval Art Project (PAP) aims to create a "primeval soup", where autonomous generative processes create new images and select the "best ones" in a sort of Darwinian mood.

 

At present, the soup contains workds from several artists, members of the association. The first results use either :
- the Roxame algorithms seen before, giving for example the logo of the association, using several original images provided by members :

- neural network processes developped by Michel Bret, giving first results like this :

The theoretical/experimental search keeps going. Some fundamental problems are investigated, beginning with the basic one : how can image be considered as the product of a genetic process ? What is the parts of genetic code and something like a mitochondry...