Reading: Machine Visions: towards a poetics of Artificial Intelligence

The text Machine Visions: towards a poetics of Artificial Intelligence just came in time as I was questioning myself if we were going to cover the use of text in its more aesthetics sense, leaning towards more into typography than mining text. So I want to share some thoughts on this subject.

In my 4 years of education back in my visual communication design degree, we were always taught we must find the best possible ways through visual entities to communicate our ideas. I always feel like there are two, if not more and which I am sure more, ways of conveying ideas in that sense. One way of approach is passing the idea directly without adding ‘spice’ to it, which could be described as a dull process now. This is what the art and literature history was all about until modernism. The second one, however, came in the 20th century, I assume starting from texts of James Joyce in literature- although it would be unrightfully not to mention pioneers of these like Tristam Shandy and maybe Don Quixote here. To find itself in different disciplines as we memorize in the modern art history. But the person I want to mention here is Paul Rand, a graphic designer, who did marvelous designs on the covers of magazines try to convey his ideas, probably one of the greatest influences in the graphic design world. The most distinct thing that attracts me to this gentleman is, his creative approach to the process of designing long before computer era [I am totally ranting about computers here] with only scissors and physical papers as technological devices. I cannot see a possibility now this to happen, at some point we are bound to computers at some part of our processes. This is necessarily not a bad thing at all though. We are allowed to gates of un-numerous multiplication of computations via computers which we wouldn’t have otherwise, and this is basically the first reason that I am taking Nature of Code or this class, to explore and possibly apply and see the results if there is anything to see at all. But I just cannot accept the fact that David Carson’s or other “new” deconstructivist works could be count as artificial intelligence. [Ok I am dramatizing at point as I know he is not mentioning AI as we all know] But still, I cannot see anything other than aesthetically pleasing works when I look at Carson’s stuff. I liked them and was really impressed when I first saw them back in my undergraduate years[also I must admit I had couple his posters on my wall back in Istanbul] , but it wouldn’t take me long to realize they were repeating variances of themselves, merely aesthetically pleasing pieces. Those were new at some point but I just couldn’t live with that point with the rest of my life. Personally I think this was one of the reasons that I felt restricted in Graphic Design. To make something beautiful or sell-able only should not be the only thing that I can do in this life. Some people are fine with that, well I like to learn new things that’s all.

I have read the text with more or less these kinds of emotions. Oh apart from that, I really would like to design the text piece I am going to create with Machine Vision anyway. I am just questioning would Java be appropriate for that? -See how I am an aesthetically minded bastard in the end:) But c’mon, wouldn’t be awesome to create something in openGL using z axis and spitting out some random words around the screen flying aesthetically pleasing!!! Ok I am not going to use that word again.