evolving affective art

The goal of the project 'Evolutionary Affective Art' by Media Technology reseacher Jules Verdijk is to create an artificial artist that generates abstract paintings that maximize a particular emotion. Modern art is not necessarily about creating work that is aesthetically pleasing; one of it's goals could be to communicate other messages, and of the most basic messages that people perceive are emotions.

Jules asked people to indicate the emotion associated with paintings from a set of real world abstract paintings, and then classifiers were trained to predict this emotion from lower level image features.

A method was used to evolve new pictures, and each picture was represented by a specific set of 'dna' parameters that generated the painting. These classifiers were then used to evaluate the 'fitness' of these paintings, based on the emotion to maximize ('make me angry paintings'). New paintings were then evolved through mutation and natural selection, just like in regular evolution.