From 24.10-14.11 2013 an art project ArNePo is exhibited in the corridor connecting Exactum and Physicum. ArNePo is a computational creativity project done in collaboration by the Discovery research group with an Estonian artist Sandra Lääne.
A quick summary of the workflow of the project was the following:
- Computer was monitoring news sources
- For each day in December 2013 it clustered the news into topics
- For each topic a poem was generated
- For each poem the processes related to poem generation were used to generate an abstract image
- 11 pairs of the poem and image pairs were selected and painted on canvas with acrylics
The aim of the project was to create a setting where the computer program is instructing the artist. In practice in this project the computer applied strong constraints to the artist, but still the final decisions were made by the painter(e.g. which paintings to paint, the painting arrangement in exhibitions etc).
The P.O. Eticus is a corpus based poetry generation method, which uses poetry corpus and semantic word associations for generating the poetry. The images generated by the computer are a matrix representation of an abstraction of the function which extracts the concepts from the set of topical news stories. The relevant words in the poem are then fed to Google Image Search and the results of the search are used for determining the colour palette of the image.
This project has also been covered in Estonian national weekly newspaper Eesti Ekspress in a news article "Arvuti luuletab ja maalib" ("Computer poetizes and paints") on 6. August 2013. Check out the news story (in Estonian) from here.