[Please forward this call to appropriate lists and sites!]

Sporkworld.org will host a new collaborative exhibit of computer-generated digital abstract paintings, to open in Spring 2006. The exhibit will consist of computer-generated paintings which are different on each viewing, accompanied by computer-generated art criticism, and a dynamically-generated soundtrack made up of visitor comments about art, recorded in many languages.

Artists may contribute to this project in four ways. The first two options are for artist/programmers to contribute programs to generate paintings or texts about paintings, while the third option simply requires recording your voice. The fourth option is a call to photographers and visual artists to create images of museum visitors.

Art Machine submissions may be created in Flash (preferred), or another client-side web technology (by arrangement). Crticism Machine submissions may be in Flash, Shockwave, Javascript, or PHP, or another technology by arrangement. Contributions to the soundtrack should be submitted in MP3 format if possible, and otherwise as WAV files. The images of museum visitors should be in JPG or PNG format.

Sporkworld will provide the gallery environment in which the art is viewed, which will have a button for each Art Machine and each Criticism Machine so that users may see the machines generate new material. The art generated by submitted Art Machines will be loaded into picture frames in the virtual gallery, which users can walk through using a scrolling interface.

Please send questions and submissions to Millie Niss at men2@columbia.edu before April 30, 2006.

1. Submitting an art machine

Web programmers are invited to submit web-based programs that produce a new abstract composition each time the program is run. The resulting art can be in any non-realistic, not strictly representational style, and compositions may make use of images of recognizable objects if they so desire. The composition should rely on some kind of random process, so that an infinite (or at least very large) variety of compositions can be produced by each program. Programs may attempt to imitate the style of a well-known artist or may generate art in a style of their own. The goal of this project is to produce compositions (really meta-compositions) that are attractive and look like believable art. We are interested in programs which generate very simple, spare compositions yet can produce a wide variety of different effects, although programs which produce more Baroque, detailed, and complex imagery are also sought. Your program may be designed to generate a specific style of composition, so that the results look like variations on a human-designed theme, or they may aim at generating the widest possible variety of paintings. What we are not aiming at is results that look very mathematical, like early computer graphics. Programmers should try to make thier machines create art which looks organic, emotional, deliberately-designed, hallucinogenic, harmonious, bleak, jarring, etc. Programmers/artists should do as much thinking about design principles as about mathematics or programming. We would like to see works which have algorithms specially designed to produce aesthetically pleasing (by whatever standard) compositions, but we also would like to see what kinds of compositions can be produced by very simple-minded programs.

Example: A very simple art-generating program might put a random number of overlapping squares on the canvas, in various orientations. This is easily made more flexible by making the squares come in different colors, putting them on painted backgrounds, allowing shapes other than squares, etc. etc. Bear in mind that this sort of thing is the most basic possibility. (But simple programs may be best at producing consistently pleasing paintings or at imitating the style of a known painter. For example, it is not too hard to see how to make some kinds of fake Mondrian paintings.) More complex programs might draw irregukar curved shapes, use patterns, incorporate written words or small realistic images, or use complex gradients and stacked translucent layers to create a more organic look.

Technical details: The most convenient format for submissions is Flash. The program should produce a composition of 500 pixels wide by 375 pixels high. The art machine should be smaller than 200 Kb, and smaller than 100 kb if possible. This size refers to how much must be loaded at one time to run the program once. It is acceptable for machines to use a larger library of assets which are externally loaded, so long as only 200kb must be loaded each time a composition is produced. The total size should be under 2MB.

If the work is in Flash, it should have a function on its main timeline called generate(), so that the main gallery movie (to be provided by Sporkworld) can load the art machines into frames and display them, along with a button for generating a new composition (which will call generate()).

We will attempt (assuming the art machine is practical and meets the requirements) to accept art machines which use other languages and technologies, athough artists wanting to do this should be willing to research how their work can be controlled from Flash (e.g. via Javascript and FSCommand, etc.). If you wish to do a work using a technology other than Flash, please email men2@columbia.edu as soon as possible so that your technology may be incorporated into the design of the gallery.

Please send a brief (less than one page; it could be just a sentence or two) non-technical explanation of the algorithm your machine uses along with the machine itself. Viewers of the Fake Art exhibit will have access to these explanations if they want to see how a machine works, but the explanations wikll not appear unless the viewer chooses to have the secret of any particular machine revealed, and that will be possible only after the art made by the machine has been shown.

2. Submitting an art theory/art criticism machine

This a call for programs which generate fake art criticism/art theory texts to accompany the exhibit af abstract art. You may aim for a ridiculous effect or try to make a machine that creates texts that someone might actually believe were written by a curator, newspaper art critic, or expoert on cultural theory. Machines can range from very simple (choosing a random sequence of canned sentences from a list, if the list is long and well-constructed) or may make use of sophisticated natural language processing. The results do not have to make sense and may be poetic if you so choose. The texts to be generated may be mock-academic and theoretical, and may cite many sources, or may be more direct, such as explanations of how the artist supposedly came up with the idea for the painting while taking a bath or what the painting means politically, etc. Texts may purport to quote various people (from expert art historians to the man-on-the-street or a child at the museum) who give opinions on the art.

We are also very interested in machines that generate texts that purport to be written by the artists themselves.

Technical details: If the machine is written in Flash, it should consist of a 1 pixel by 1 pixel movie with a white stage, which will be hidden from the viewer. The program will have a generate() function on its main timeline that returns the generated text as a string of HTML. Alternatively, machines may be written in the PHP server-side scripting language, in which case the PHP page should return the HTML text via POST.

Please send a brief (less than one page; it could be just a sentence or two) non-technical explanation of the algorithm your machine uses along with the machine itself. Viewers of the Fake Art exhibit will have access to these explanations if they want to see how a machine works, but the explanations wikll not appear unless the viewer chooses to have the secret of any particular machine revealed, and that will be possible only after the text generated by the machine has been shown.

Advanced Option for Brave Programmers: You are challenged to make a combined Art Machine/Art Criticism machine, in which the texts generated by the Criticism Machine are based on the specific characteristics of the particular composition that has been generated by the Art Machine.

3. Contributing to the soundtrack of museum visitors' conversations

The digital exhibit of Faket Art will be accompanied by a soundtrack made up of overlapping voice samples. The soundtrack is designed to simulate the sound of a large crowd visiting the exhibit. The crowd will have sophisticated art connoisseurs in it, but also small children, people who hate art and are being dragged to the museum by thier parents or spouse, people who make fun of the art, people who make stupid comments about art, people who are very emotional in their response, etc. Some comments may not be directly related to the art: you can record a child begging to go home, someone asking where to find the restroom, someone who has just stepped on someone else's foot, guards telling visitors not to touch the artwork, etc. Voices may include fragments of guided tours or lectures about the paintings.

We are to imagine that this exhibit takes place in a museum in a major world capital, where there are many tourists. Accordingly, we would like to gather voices speaking as many languages as possible. Your sounds may contain sound effects other than voices but the sounds should complement the voices.

Please produce your sounds in MP3 format (if possible) or WAV format. Sounds should be no more than 1 minute long (many should be shorter), but you may submit as many sounds as you want.