From Harold Cohen, www.aaronshome.com
Your article on computer art focused on Simon Colton (14 January, p 42), who says his Painting Fool program will “wake up in the morning and look at the newspaper headlines” and so produce art that is meaningful to the audience, because it is essentially drawing on the human experience. I suspect the folk in computer science who are struggling to get computers to extract meaning from natural language will find these claims as dubious as I do.
Colton refers to me as “the founder of machine fine art”, and says my program Aaron “still only creates one kind of artwork; people in a room with pot plants”. This is incorrect.
My program drew people and potted plants for a small part of its 43-year history, and it hasn’t done so in the last decade.
But what if it had? Would it have come as a big surprise to Jackson Pollock or Henri Matisse to learn that they were supposed to do different “kinds” of art? Colton asks us to move away from comparison with human art. Is this a demand for critical amnesty for computer art? I am not sure it is wise to announce how far your journey will take you before taking the first step. It seems to me that, so far, Colton has done nothing more than mimic the appearances of whatever he imagines art to be.
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New Scientist should stop applying different standards to its treatment of art and the sciences. Art is intrinsic and indispensable to the culture, as it always has been, and as science is in our own time. Please treat it seriously.
Encinitas, California, US
