Computational Aesthetics Research Articles

Reports on the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) Workshop Program

The Workshop program of the Twenty-First Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held July 16-17, 2006 in Boston, Massachusetts. The program was chaired by Joyce Chai and Keith Decker. The titles of the 17 workshops were AIDriven Technologies for Service-Oriented Computing; Auction Mechanisms for Robot Coordination; Cognitive Modeling and Agent-Based Social Simulations, Cognitive Robotics; Computational Aesthetics: Artificial Intelligence Approaches to Beauty and Happiness; Educational Data Mining; Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning; Event Extraction and Synthesis; Heuristic Search, Memory- Based Heuristics, and Their Applications; Human Implications of Human-Robot Interaction; Intelligent Techniques in Web Personalization; Learning for Search; Modeling and Retrieval of Context; Modeling Others from Observations; and Statistical and Empirical Approaches for Spoken Dialogue Systems.

Computational Aesthetics 2005 Eurographics Workshop on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization and Imaging Girona, Spain, 18–20 May 2005

<i>Computational Aesthetics 2005 Eurographics Workshop on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization and Imaging Girona, Spain, 18–20 May 2005</i>

Interactive Journeys: Making Room to Move in the Cultural Territories of Interactivity

This paper explores the aesthetics and politics of popular cultural computer imagery in games, television and film. The author aims to map a ground for criticism of computer graphics and interactive works—by excavating cultural meanings underlying the dominant aesthetics in these images and asking what they do for their producers and users. Do the metallic bodies armor the user/producer for the fear (delight) of a machine world, producing fear (delight) in the process? Is morphing a technique to evade, or explore, the identity crisis precipitated by awareness of cultural difference? What desires produce and are produced by the gravity-less perspective and movement of three-dimensional animation? The author’s theoretical project explores how popular cultural computer aesthetics and techniques express and (re)produce subjectivity in postmodern culture. These ideas are examined through everyday aesthetic experiences, representational practices and techniques, and the accompanying changes in perception.

Reconstructing an improviser

A ‘‘rational reconstruction’’ of the jazz improvisation system implemented in [David Levitt, ‘‘A Melody Description System for Jazz Improvization,’’ MIT S.M. thesis (1981)] will be discussed. A rational reconstruction is a reimplementation of a computer program in a way which clearly reveals its basic mechanisms and the fundamental issues it addresses. Levitt’s program did melodic improvisation from an initial chord progression, based on a collection of heuristics operating over a simple constraint representation. Its rational reconstruction reveals a number of basic issues in computational aesthetics: The use of constraints to model aesthetic choice; the use of representation to encode stylistic background; and the tension between randomness and structure in creative process.

Computer aesthetics: new art experience, or the seduction of the masses

Computer aesthetics: new art experience, or the seduction of the masses

Shape Grammars and Their Uses: Artificial Perception, Shape Generation and Computer Aesthetics

Shape Grammars and Their Uses: Artificial Perception, Shape Generation and Computer Aesthetics