- Paul Cezanne
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| Paul Cezanne |
"If you placed an apple on a table and wanted to paint it in the manner of Cezanne, you would need to have an extensive knowledge of his work and a strong sense of his aesthetic intentions. Every brushstroke would need to be accompanied by the question, “what would Cezanne do?” You might stop frequently to refer to his paintings to see how he handled certain visual situations. As your painting progressed you would gradually develop perhaps a dozen general stylistic guidelines for yourself. These guidelines would be instructions along the lines of “when you see this, do this.” Of course, much of the process would be based on wordless intuition; a vague sense of when a group of marks looked “Cezanne-esque.”
"On a basic level, this is not unlike a how a computer algorithm works. An algorithm is "a finite sequence of instructions, logic, an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem, often used for calculation and data processing and many other fields." It acts as a kind of flow chart which guides a computer through a series of evaluations and decisions. When translating, say, a Shakespeare sonnet from one language to another, a computer will use an algorithm to evaluate and substitute words and phrases into the other language. This is called “gisting” because computers are still not capable of making a translation that is much more than 80% accurate—for all their processing power, computers have a difficult time processing the complexities and nuances of contextual meaning. In art of literary translation there are no clear-cut right or wrong rules for choosing a phrase that means the same thing in one language as it does in another and that keeps the same rhythmic or emotional characteristics. From Wikepedia:"
"Fidelity (or faithfulness) and transparency are two qualities that, for millennia, have been regarded as ideals to be striven for in translation, particularly literary translation. These two ideals are often at odds. Thus a 17th-century French critic coined the phrase les belles infidèles to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time."
"Here is a Shakespeare sonnet translated from German into English by a computer program:"
I am to compare one summer day you, which you
lovelier and moderate are? Mays expensive buds
drehn in the impact of the storm, and is all too short
summer period.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
"You get a general idea of the what the words mean but the poetry is obviously missing. The best a computer can strive for is faithful-- beautiful, for the time being, is out of the question."
"In painting a Cezannesque apple you would, in essence, be acting as a kind of translator. Specifically you would be trying to translate one visual language (Nature’s) into another’s (Cezanne’s.) Or, in Photoshop parlance, you would be acting as a Cezanne filter..."
- source: http://keiseronpainting.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-painting-and-algorithms.html
Link Full Text, On Painting and Algorithms by Duane Keiser, 4/24/11, from On Painting, What I've learned about painting and the business of art - a Blog by Duane Keiser.
