Computational Aesthetics 08

The International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in In 2006 he moved to the University of Tübingen to study under Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging, has now been running annually since 2005. Computational Aesthetics bridges the analytic and synthetic by integrating aspects of computer science, philosophy, psychology, and the fine, applied & performing arts. It seeks to facilitate both the analysis and the augmentation of creative behaviour. CAe also investigates the creation of tools that can enhance the expressive power of the fine and applied arts and furthers our understanding of aesthetic evaluation, perception and meaning. In 2008 the event was organized by INESC and took place in Lisbon, Portugal and featured a collection of papers that followed the general philosophy of the conference series. We have chosen four of these papers as a representative sample of the areas that are close to the heart of the subject matter that CAe seeks to explore. The authors have been given time to explore these themes further and produce papers that go beyond the initial offerings published in the conference proceedings and include a minimum of 30% original material. In ‘Balancing the expected and the surprising in geometric patterns’ the author is inspired by the ‘Op Artists’ of the 1960s, particularly Bridget Riley’s work. He analyses these works and comments on the perceptual effects in these patterns. In the second paper, ‘Categorizing art: comparing humans and computers’, the authors tackle the difficult subject of trying to categorize artwork and performing computational experiments to explain the categorization from low-level appearance information in the image. The third paper, ‘Automatically Mimicking Unique HandDrawn Pencil Lines’ proposes an algorithm that mimics lines drawn by humans. The goal in this work is to produce an arbitrary, unique line, without repetition that can substitute for computer generated lines. In the fourth paper, ‘Improving Scans of Black and White Photographs by Recovering the Print Maker’s Artistic Intent’, the author examines the aesthetic decisions made by a print maker in producing a print from a negative and then attempts to reproduce these digitally. The research also extends this technique to produce a method of restoring a print by combining scans of different versions of the same image. In these days of world recession, humans are in great need of aesthetic content in their lives and we hope that this sampling of the work done under the banner of computational aesthetics will inspire more cooperation between arts and science.