Feeling like and Artist

“We are not thinking machines that feel. We are feeling machines that think” — Dr. Antonio Damasio

I was a bit astounded recently while reading a piece by Sarah Cascone, senior writer for Artnet News, entitled “New Rembrandt Artwork Created via 168,263 ‘Painting Fragments’” in which Ms. Cascone describes how Bas Korsten, J. Walter Thompson’s creative director, “came up” with a simple, but potentially disturbing, creative prompt, “Can we teach a computer how to paint like Rembrandt?”.

For me the surprising phrase was “like Rembrandt”. What did Mr. Korsten really mean? It turns out he didn’t really mean “like Rembrandt” because his IT team responded by thinking of ways they could enable a computer to paint a piece of art that had the same characteristics as one that “Rembrandt himself might have painted. However, as I’ll describe, painting “like” an artist is not about producing paintings that have the “same characteristics” as those produced by the artist”, rather, it’s about feeling like an artist felt as he produced his artistic work, something computers are unlikely to do for the foreseeable future.

Mr. Korsten’s IT team’s efforts should not be dismissed. They answered his question by creating a relatively sophisticated software application that:

1. “learned” the characteristics of Rembrandt’s style, including his use of geometry, composition, and painting materials and
2. generated “features” of a painting…