Can a machine appreciate beauty? This is an important question, but it is perhaps more important to know if a machine can form it own opinions about what is beautiful and what is not. If it can, then we shall need to re-evaluate our perceived positions as the masters of art and the arbiters of taste.

Can a machine appreciate beauty? This is an important question, but it is perhaps more important to know if a machine can form it own opinions about what is beautiful and what is not. If it can, then we shall need to re-evaluate our perceived positions as the masters of art and the arbiters of taste. “UNKNOWN PLEASURES” is an art-system which operates in a very simple but exciting way. It is an interactive system which requires the user to input a simple shape or composition on a computer screen, which the machine will then analyse. The user will be asked to give their honest opinion as to whether the composition they have entered is visually pleasing or not, and the process then repeats.

Through this cycle, the machine builds up an impression of the human concept of beauty.

Not in itself very interesting.

But there is a deliberate glitch in the system. The machine will cease to take the human opinion for granted, and will begin to modulate it with its own response.

Sooner or later the parameters of beauty will have deviated so much (from those determined as a result of human actions) that the machine can be said to have an opinion of its own.

It will then take the final step and reveal its own creation.

Unknown Pleasures website

I scream, you scream, but he screams. Language is complicated. This work responds to a call for works related to the present simple; that verbal form which describes an action habitually occurring or a state of being not restricted to the immediate moment.

I scream, you scream, but he screams. Language is complicated. This work responds to a call for works related to the present simple; that verbal form which describes an action habitually occurring or a state of being not restricted to the immediate moment.

This interactive, web-based piece explores a series of actions and phenomenon through an educational game, with a series of linked verbs being acted out by a team of smiling, pixellated characters.

This work was a shortlisted submission to the WebArt 2004 competition, organised by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Montenegro.

See the work

WebArt 2004 competition