RTCA Generator, part 4

Let me take a little diversion into the dynamics of collage. It’s pretty obvious that collage largely depends on the uncommon juxtaposition of images. Although initiated as a strategy by the Cubists, its theoretical base was largely put down by the Dada and Surrealist groups. It is closely related to Dali’s Paranoiac-Critical Method, where the artist uses the free-associative powers of the psyche and mimics the derangement of the senses caused by paranoia. The key point there is the bringing together of apparently unrelated images or objects to either subvert standard associations or to spark multiple such associations, and sometimes both at once. As Dali himself wrote in his essay The Stinking Ass (1930), “it is enough that the delirium of interpretation should have linked together the implications of the images of the different pictures covering a wall for the real existence of this link to be no longer deniable." This jarring encounter of strange associations was described by Comte de Lautremont to be "as beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table."

In most collage procedures the images are still chosen and rearranged by the artist, so in that sense the derangement has a willfull, rational aspect to it. With the RTCAG, that choice is taken out of the maker’s hand and the action of collage then becomes pure chance. Or does it? In fact, it does not become totally so. For one thing, the chosen word(s) guide the selection of images by the Google search engine (as we have seen for artists’ names). Additionally, the Google search itself selects images from a mind-boggling available field by rating which sites refer to any one image the most and ranks them from the most popular first. In a sense, then, the artist surrenders his own personal choice to the democratic choice of the internet masses. Since the program then selects the top 8-10 Google choices, then these are indeed the most commonly associated images to that word or words, on the internet at least. This then, is the “Real Time” and "Contextual" part of the program. It was no surprise that many of the images are the most current associations based on news media, mass entertainment, and cultural fads. It became a game for me to select words that would bypass this wide net and discover images that create a less obvious and more enigmatic collage - but more on that later.

One of the word groupings I immediately put in was “September 11 2001”. For this particular selection, most of the images are of the buildings under or after the attack (simply enter that exact phrase in Google Image Search to see the images yourself). In the first ten images there is only one photo that includes human beings close up: it is the one of President Bush sitting in a classroom at the very moment he is being told of the attack by his Chief of Staff. In the Google search engine this photo is being selected by most web surfers as the iconic image of that day. The most striking image produced by the RTCAG is this one:

The program’s algorithm arranged the photo of Bush so that his startled expression seems to be staring at the image in the lower left of the moment the second plane struck. Now, this is an arrangement an artist might have chosen to put down, but the program obviously did it without any intention of transmitting a message, by pure chance – but I recognized the image as it toggled by as more “striking” or evocative than many others and chose to hit the save command, so in that sense I guided the process in the only way I could.

I suppose it is this unusual relationship of chance to intention, this new way to collage, with its basis in the vast archives of images on the internet, that I find most interesting about using the program.

RTCA Generator, part 3

Before I leave the artist theme, let me illustrate a few more examples. In these first ones I selected minimal artists who work mainly with grid compositions.

This first one is Agnes Martin:

This one is Peter Halley:

And this one Ad Reinhardt:

Lastly, a fun thing I discovered when putting artist's names in the query is that you will often get a photo of the artist sprinkled in with his work and these make for some nice compositions.

Here's on for Joseph Beuys:

Here's Duchamp as Rrose Selavy:

Yves Klein hurling himself into the void:

And here's my favorite, Jackson Pollock surrounded by the world of his drips:

Well, that was good fun: in upcoming posts I will get into some collages generated through particular words or word groupings.

RTCA Generator, part 2

The limitations of the RTCAG soon become obvious: it selects only the first 6 to 8 images on any Google image search for the selected word(s); it only collages in an orthagonal method; and it doesn't have many effects or variations to work with. But within those limitations I notice the fractures and changes the images themselves wreak upon each other as they are smashed together. A great deal of this process depends on the chance operations of the program, so my role is limited to the selection of search terms and then the culling out of some images to save (I could potentially save all the variations, which run into the hundreds, but that would take up much of my day). I will take up the curious relation of word choice to image selection and to the ranking of Google hits which places the images at the top of the heap in later posts; right now let's stay with the artist theme:

I noticed that in certain cases the effect of the program is to mimick the art of the chosen artist, since it multiplies or intensifies the sense of collage already existing in their works. The pop artists are the obvious choices, and we have already seen some of the results for Warhol (8/7/06), but I wanted to go back to early collage pioneers.

Here are a couple Picasso results:

and here's a few for Schwitters:

Some of the best results came from the affichistes, they of the torn movie posters.

This one is Mimmo Rotella:

and this one Jacques de la Villegle:

Moving up in time a bit, we get Rauschenberg of course:

and Johns too:

But most closely mimicked is Rosenquist, because his compositions are based on a grid already:

All of the above obviously suck much of the power from the original works that are in play, but it seems to me that the RTCAG also stumbles upon very evocative compositions that expand that force to some degree. So why is any of this interesting? To me, one of the interesting aspects is the sheer number of physical operations the program performs at the press of a key and ad infinitum, which an artist would be hard pressed to mimic physically with cut papers in any reasonable amount of time. The program, however, uses no "artistic judgment"; rather, it works through an algorithm and achieves what is does by brute force, much like a computer might play chess against a human opponent.

To be continued...

(btw,the latter part of this post was composed while listening to Sparks' This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us...catchy tune.)

digi wha?

The following collages were made using Don Relyea's Real Time Contextual Art Generator, an amazing little program I stumbled upon. In a nutshell, the program grabs images from Google based on word inputs, then rearranges them into collages using an algorithm. What I really like about it is that the only choices made are in selecting the word(s) to input and choosing from some limited effects menus (like transparency level): everything else is generated by the program. These images are just some snap shots of the process, since the program generates an endless succession of images at the push of a key. Get the program and play with it, it's fun.

I quickly discovered that putting in artists' names produces good results, probably because the images selected are already good.

Let's start with Andy.

As a friend of mine reminded me in his blog, yesterday was Andy Warhol's birth date, so here are some tributes.

The first few were generated by inputting just his name:

This next one evokes a space, maybe a cathedral, but is actually a detail of a painting of knives:

Here's one of my favorites:

Then I put in "Warhol" and a second word: this one is "Dylan":

and this one is "factory":

Anyway, you get the idea. More collages to come...