What is Abstract Art 

Making and Choice

There is something that is common to all art, that is that something is made and there is a selection made by the artist. The artist chooses, and has a range of variables to choose from. Some 20th Century artists made work by choosing material that they found. They then either left the material or presented it in some way. Kurt Switters was one artist that created a lot of work by using found material.  (nice to have some pictures here or  a link)

But what if the work is made using a totally random process, the computer has provided that opportunity. Is the following illustration a work of art?

The picture was generated by Typogenerator from http://typogenerator.net/index.php Which was created as a student project by katharina nussbaumer, summer 2004, fh hagenberg/austria, thanx to armin for the idea,thanx to nexflo for technical advice. I have tried a number of times to generate a picture that I liked. Typogenerator's variables are random use of images from the Internet, user input text, letter style, colour, and background. The user can decide to keep one or more of: letter style, colour, and background but can only choose text to input, and try to generate a more satisfactory picture.  I don't know how random the selection of colours are. The tonal range seems to be confined and the images tend to be square to the picture edges.  I have taken the same image and used Paint Shop Pro.
 

I have used a number of processes and many are not designed for the way I used them, eg. adding random noise then resizing larger. I increased the dynamic impact by rotating the image and gave more depth by using a vertical perspective distortion - I used the tool to add perspective! Light Starburst was used to provide empathasis. I would like to add some mystery by the equivalent of using layers of tissue paper and I have overdone the sparkly effect! I'll leave further experiments for another page. Is this art now that I have exercised my power to choose to select and alter; or is there more? Do I have to develop some emotional response to the image. what was I really doing?

Geoff Edwards July 2007.