They all have one thing in common. They were almost entirely randomly generated.
A few weeks ago, there was a Facebook meme where everybody madly created album covers according to the following rules.
1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random... Read More”I didn't think it was going to produce anything interesting. After all, a few random words and a random image - the chances are it's gotta be crap, right? There's no artistic inspiration in there anywhere.
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 - Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.
Well, I couldn't have been more wrong. These work really well. And in fact most of the hundreds of them on Facebook work pretty well. Which left me wondering about all those high-paid artists and designers. What makes them better than a bit of randomness? Are we going to see a world where art can be produced randomly by a computer, and be indistinguishable in quality from art produced by a human?
Or maybe we'll get a compromise where the computer does most of the work, and the human makes a few decisions based on a wizard. I can imagine pressing a button, and I get a mini-app which gives me my picture and my two bits of text, and then allows me to position them, resize them, choose the font and color, and that's my album cover right there. If I don't like the result, just reset the random seed and keep going till I get something I like. Click, click, click, job done.
Would that be a bad thing? If we give more people the ability to create artwork, are we cheapening the value of art, or are we exploding a myth that only a minority have the skills and talent to be creative?
(Pictures by Johnnie Ingram, me, Inanna Maiya & David Anderson)
4 comments:
Is any remix expression artistic? Is it merely a spectrum from the brain dead (cut and paste) to the truly inspired remix/hash/cutup?
>>What makes them better than a bit of randomness? Are we going to see a world where art can be produced randomly by a computer, and be indistinguishable in quality from art produced by a human?
Er... well... Lots to take up there Matt. First of all, the sheer amount of imagery now available means that you have a great chance of getting a reasonable image randomly. And, if you get a cruddy image, then that can be looked at 'ironically' but the only reason you can do that is because the way for that concept has been paved by artists.
Indeed, there's an awful lot of 'slack' in the record cover idea - for one thing, it matters not a whit that what you come up with is complete nonsense. Why? Because we're accustomed to that kind of thing from record covers. And that's because artists (either the bands or their designers) have paved the way for that idea too.
AND, not everything is good - 'Pentodon' looks to me like a third rate boy band with a pretty bad art department behind it (seriously - it's pretty tragic).
The challenge for a computer instigated design project is not to come up with something emulative, but to come up with something innovative. In each of the covers above (except Pentodon - sorry), the meaning that you attribute is really nothing at all to do with the randomness of the selection, but more to do with the capacity for human brains to make connections. Maybe someday computers will be able to do that, but in my opinion (and I think I'm right in saying in the opinion of the AI community these days), we've still got a bit of a road to travel.
(And, I have to take exception to your inclusion of "Kelly Goto's Trying to Please Everybody" - someone with some design sense put that together! Without the handwritten title, the circles and the arrows, you have a nicely executed fashion shot (millions of those on the net) with an extremely dull title. I'd have killed that one on the first submission.)
Here's a thought - try the same random Google experiment, and instead of trying to make an interesting cover, try and make a cruddy one. I just did it first go*. It's not too hard:
LORL33.
Granted, it is kind of humorous and meaningful, but our brains can't but help impose some kind of sense on it. The other thing I had to resist was using any of my design knowledge in composing the image - I chose the fonts randomly and I stuck the text on as randomly as I could manage, with colours as random as I could manage. I didn't set out to make the cover bad so much (which I really could have done also - that's an artistic process too...), just as random as possible.
(*Actually, to be truthful, second go - the first random hit I got was an actual band - 'Murder Squad Nationwide')
Oh - and one more thing that occurred to me - to get the album title, the Google search uses snippets from quotes that have, for the main part, stood the test of time as witticisms or pieces of philosophy. The odds that the last four or five words are meaningful are damn high - that's hardly a level playing ground. Artists made those words! If you make the search any piece of random text, then you don't get much, believe me.
A second attempt. Actually, I'm beginning to like the sheer horror of this version of the game. I'm going to start a new meme - Record Covers That You Never Saw Because the Art Director Got Sacked.
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