Darwin's Gaze #3: Evolving Darwin's Gaze

Evolving Darwin's Gaze is an installation of generative abstract paintings that embody a cognitive approach to modeling portraiture.

This third video tells the story of how this software evolved a family of portraits using the image of Charles Darwin as the inspiration for a creative computational process.

Darwin's Gaze by Steve DiPaola (http://www.dipaola.org/)
Narrated by Steve DiPaola
Video Created by Joshua Tanenbaum (http://josh.thegeekmovement.com/)

Learn more about the artwork and explore the interactive portrait evolution software at http://www.darwinsgaze.com/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• darwin's gaze
• portraiture
• genetic programming
• creativity
• generative art
• computational art
• Charles Darwin
• Evolution

[kid29a]

Hmm this looks really interesting but it seems to me that when outcome is more similar to the original image you call it a success of genetic program but when it's less similar you call it creativity, therefore your program isn't testable. It can have bugs but their effect is no different from what you'd call a success. Some images are beautiful indeed :)

[darwinsgaze]

@kid29a

I do not deny your logic. It does use AI based on human creativity research. But a better answer to you question - one that I could not give when I made this videos - is that the artwork has toured worldwide ( and I with it with lectures and meeting 1000s of people viewing the work). At the MIT Museum, Cambridge Univ's Kings Art Centre, Univ. of Toronto, and most recently London's Tenderpixel Gallery - through it all, all thought they were looking at creativity artwork.

[TheClayPidgeon]

This could be used for some kind of intelligent image compression format!

[kid29a]

@darwinsgaze Oh I do think it's really impressive and beautiful and it certainly poses questions about what creativity is and what does being an artist mean. I hope it will be developed further :)

[l0sts0ng]

How did your fitness function work?

[coolhead20]

it'd be nice to see what would happen in a year if you were just to let it run for a year =)

[youtubep2k6]

Has some interesting implications regarding creativity, and what to do when stuck on a particular creative problem.

[hmortensen2907]

Very nice...

I'm working on something similar. I have just made the genes represent a sets of math formulas, one for each color.

(Running first real run at this very moment)

in the run, how big a generation Size did you use? Mutation rate, crossover rate, number of new genes in each generation a.s.o.

Hope to see more..