Aesthetics in the Context of New Media Art and Knowledge Visualization

This chapter discusses aesthetic values in mathematics, science, and computing including aesthetic computing and aesthetic issues related to digital environment. A study of aesthetics has always been related to the arts, philosophy of art, and our judgments about sensory or emotional values of specific art works; they are in the focus of neuroaesthetics. The objectives of aesthetic studies have been changing following the developments in computing technology, shifting the stress on usability and efficiency of projects and visualizations. Challenges and demands in aesthetics and art are then discussed, starting from an essential question (What is an artwork and what is not an artwork?), and including art definitions, art manifestos, opinions on the role of art, beauty, and aesthetic perception of art. Aesthetic education and ways of looking at art complete the chapter.

Computational Aesthetics: On the Complexity of Computer-Generated Paintings

This article discusses how visual arts and computer technology could complement and assist each other in new and emerging interdisciplinary areas known as computational aesthetics and aesthetic computing. The authors present examples of computational aesthetics that demonstrate that modern computer technology can generate aesthetic forms of visual art. Several levels of complexity in computerized abstract paintings are discussed and explored. The authors recently experimented with encoding computational rules to automatically generate a particular style of abstract painting in an attempt to explore one of the levels. The preliminary results of this research are presented. A more systematic and grammar-based approach is discussed as a potential future direction of work.

Customized Visual Computing

Aesthetic computing is defined as the application of art theory and practice toward the field of computing. This chapter introduces Aesthetic Computing and its approach for the task of multimedia representation of formal structures. We chose the structure of a simple computer program to illustrate the method. Examples used to represent the program illustrate how we may customize formal structures—such as programs—to allow users to employ visualization and human interaction as means to achieve a variety of diverse presentation artifacts. To date, the method has been used in education, to promote creativity in computing and model building, and as a technique for bridging the arts with computer science.