March 30, 2005
Ant Colony Paintings
This week in Lausanne, Switzerland is EvoMUSART, a workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art. Papers include “Genetic Paint: A Search for Salient Paintings”, “Artificial Life, Death and Epidemics in Evolutionary, Generative Electronic Art”, and “Extra-Music(ologic)al Models for Algorithmic Composition”. Here is the abstract of Jon McCormack’s “Open Problems in Evolutionary Music and Art”, that looks particularly interesting to me:
Applying evolutionary methods to the generation of music and art is a relatively new field of enquiry. While there have been some important developments, it might be argued that to date, successful results in this domain have been limited. Much of the present research can be characterized as finding ad-hoc methods that can produce subjectively interesting results. In this paper, it is argued that a stronger overall research plan is needed if the field is to develop in the longer term and attract more researchers. Five “open problems” are defined and explained as broad principle areas of investigation for evolutionary music and art. Each problem is explained and the impetus and background for it is described in the context of creative evolutionary systems.