The future of…

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The future of the Arts

Jan 2001

Let me come clean straight away. At school I came consistently last in the class in art for all three years that it was compulsory. It would be hard to find anyone with less ability in the field. My 5 year old daughter has almost reached my skill level in drawing. But even from the position of someone with an artistic age of 5, it is obvious that there is change afoot. In fact, it is probably my total lack of expertise that makes it easier for me to see what is coming since I am effectively an outsider.

I have 34 musical instruments in my house but can only play the guitar and keyboard, both badly. I compose music, but you wouldn't want to listen to it. But when I play the keyboard, all I am actually doing is pressing keys. I don't make sounds in the same way as when I pick at guitar strings. Keyboards are 'play by wire' technology. A few chips monitor the keys, noting which ones I hit and how fast. They then produce and send appropriate electric signals to the speakers, depending which instrument I have selected. I can also set various background accompaniments. The point here is that I still think of it as my music, even though all I am doing is telling a microprocessor what to do on my behalf. One day, I will be able to hit a few keys to give the computer some idea of a theme, and it will produce beautiful works based on my idea. It will still be my music, but 99.9% of the creativity will be synthetic. We already see some hints of progress in this direction. One of my colleagues, Paul Hodgson, has written software that attempts to improvise jazz in real time in a style similar to Charlie Parker, though Paul is the first to emphasise that it still falls far short of the real thing. It works by breaking down existing works into musical phrases and recombining these and variants of them into 'new pieces'. Different works can be blended, and evolutionary design techniques could be used to evolve completely new works according to the taste of the composer. Paul himself believes his particular technique will never produce great music, and that computer will never approach human intelligence or consciousness, but on this we disagree. Experts sometimes underestimate their own ingenuity, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if some later inspiration were to give us a piece of software that produces works as good or better than people. Then, someone with my profound incompetence could produce works worthy of the great composers of history. This will one day come as standard in electronic instruments. We will still think of them in the same way, just as tools, and we will still think of the music as ours. We may use a JCB to dig a garden pond, but we still created it. It just did all the work.

With this sort of music creativity engine, the other arts would be similarly affected. Computers will help us build on the merest hint of human creativity, enhancing our work and enabling us to do much greater things than we could achieve by our raw ability alone. I can't paint or draw for toffee, but I do have imagination. So I am excited by this development. Soon, with the right tools, I am sure I will be able to produce pleasant paintings, attractively designed furniture, design my own clothes. I know what sort of paintings I like, and I could scan them into my computer, or download them from the net. A future program will allow me to build on those styles and produce new ones along similar lines. I will be able to guide it with verbal instructions. 'A few more trees on the hill, and a cedar in the foreground just here, a bit bigger, and move it to the left a bit'. Designing ties or graphics for tee shirts could be similarly facilitated. Why buy a mass produced design when you can have a completely personal design? Customised manufacturing is set to be the norm in many areas, and personal design will be an important part of this process.

We will probably always admire those people with raw talent, and these advances are unlikely to make a big dent in conventional art sales for that reason. Professional artists will always retain some sort of an edge, maybe even by producing the best seeds for computer creativity. Instead, computer assisted and computer enhanced art will make our lives more artistically enriched, and ourselves more fulfilled as a result. We will be able to express our own personalities more effectively in our everyday environment, instead of just decorating it with a few expressions of someone else's.

One area that is appears to me to be overrated is originality. Anyone can immediately come up with many original designs. There is an infinitely large field to pick from and only a small number have ever been realised, so coming up with something from the infinite set that still haven't been thought of is easy and therefore of little intrinsic value. It is only when it is combined with judgement or skill in making it real that it becomes valuable. Here again, computers will be able to assist. Analysing a great many existing pictures or works or art should give some clues as to what most people like and dislike. Significant progress in image recognition and categorisation is required before we can automatically categorise and analyse pictures, but since people can do it with apparent ease, it is only a matter of time before computers can cope, and one day they will surpass our ability. Just as they can already carry out simple sorting tasks better than people, they will learn to automatically determine whether a picture is likely to be attractive to people, or conforms to whatever type of 'taste'. Then it should be possible for a computer to automatically create new pictures in a particular style or taste by either recombining appropriate ideas, or just randomly mixing any ideas together and then filtering the new pictures according to 'taste'.

Furniture design, and in fact the design of almost every artefact around us, is not just a matter of appearance, there are also basic physics and engineering principles that need to be taken into account. However, design rules are very easy for a computer to implement, and designs can easily be verified as feasible by the computer. Static and dynamic properties of materials and joints, ergonomics and reliability can all be assessed by computer programs. Ordinary people should therefore be able to participate more fully in the design of the objects making up their everyday environment.

In cyberspace, they will have much greater flexibility. Virtual objects and environments do not have to conform to any laws of physics, so more elaborate and artistic structures are possible. Ergonomics is still important of course if people need to be able to use things, but computers can check interfaces and so on against general design principles. The sad fact is that this isn't done very often even today, with many web sites and environments being very difficult and unpleasant to use.

Whether pictures or music, clothing or furniture, real or virtual, computer generated art will be cheap and attractive, and may eventually be even more pleasing to us than human works. What value will we then place on 'art'? We can't even define it today in a way that everyone agrees with. If I dump a load of potatoes in the Tate Gallery, whether it is then art depends apparently only on how well know I am as an artist. The debate as to whether machines are capable of producing art, which will doubtless continue long after machine generated works outsell those created by humans.