Yanyi Lu: Augmented Creativity
Artist(s):
Title:
- Augmented Creativity
Exhibition:
- SIGGRAPH Asia 2020: Untitled & Untied
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More artworks from SIGGRAPH Asia 2020:
Category:
Artist Statement:
Summary
This work experiments a co-creation system of art making by man, machine and nature, expressing an entangled relationship between them. By comparing the contributions of different participants, the unique ability of human beings in creative creation is further verified and understood.
Abstract
This work explores a new definition of creativity in the digital context and speculates about a dynamic relationship between man and machine in aesthetic creation. The experiment collected the images from OpenProcessing community as training samples and fed them into styleGAN machine learning model to generate new graphics. The relationship between human and machine changes from slave and slaver to friend and collaborator with the emerging of machine learning. The relationship of machine and human in creative creation seems to be a closed dynamic loop. At the end, this work speculates that humans are always inspiring themselves and that machines created by humans are just bridges and catalysts in this closed loop.
Process Information:
It was once generally accepted that creativity is a uniquely human ability. With the development of technology, people raise some questions about the creativity of machine in the field of art. Can machines also be creative and produce new artistic ideas that have not been discovered by human?
I chose images from OpenProcessing community as training samples because at this stage people still treat machine as a programming tool to create artistic graphics. It looks like 99% creativity is from human while machine just contributes 1% creativity to assist human in realizing their ideas. However, with the intervention of machine learning (machine creates new artistic ideas with the feed of works from human), the output of machine seems to be out of control. In the experiment, I am surprised to see some amazing images and it reminds me the contribution to creativity from machine can never be just 1%. The relationship between human and machine changes from slave and slaver to friend and collaborator with the emerging of machine learning. Will artists be inspired by new images created by machines and build on them? Can the developed images by human be used as samples for further model training? Creativity in the digital age seems to be a closed dynamic loop. The relationship between machines and people in creative creation is constantly changing at different stages.
On the other hand, can we also speculate that humans are always inspiring themselves, and that machines created by humans are only bridges and catalysts in this closed loop? Just like this year’s theme of Post-Algorithm, we use the technology as a tool, not as a purpose. Technology is a great tool for augmenting creativity but not for generating countless fake creativity without context.
Other Information:
Inspiration Behind the Project
I often think about questions like what creativity is, where it comes from, does it uniquely exist in human, and how to enhance it. When I learned about the term ‘computational creativity,’ I thought that was what I wanted to explore in this project.
I did some research and summarized some existing arguments. In many works, it seemed people always critically discuss the relationship between human and machine. I wondered if we can be more inclusive and blurrier in species and then I chose to use multispecies storytelling in this work. I hope that when we discuss augmented creativity systems, we can have more diverse perspectives, more agents and participants. Although we discuss how each participant contributes, the aim is to reflect on human creativity from this comparison.
