Can computers
create art?
CAEDMON is an artistic experiment by Maurizio Fusillo. A population of images reproduces, inherits traits and changes under the pressure of the audience’s preferences. Its method draws on natural evolution; its research concerns what we are willing to recognise as art.
A machine encounters art
A computer can produce an image. Can it also develop an artistic practice? This is the question behind CAEDMON: give a machine the opportunity to study existing works, generate something new, meet an audience and use that encounter to shape what comes next. Each new image depends on the history of the images before it.
The question also concerns definition. There is no shared formula that separates art from everything else once and for all. Criteria change across periods, cultures and people. CAEDMON takes this uncertainty as its material: it starts with works already recognised as art and turns the audience’s response into a pressure that can transform their descendants.
Beyond personal taste and emotion
Attempts to release an artwork from individual intention and emotional expression have precedents in the avant-gardes. Duchamp described his choice of readymades through visual indifference and the suspension of good and bad taste. Within Dada, Arp entrusted part of his collages’ organisation to chance. In Surrealist automatism, as in André Masson’s drawings, the gesture seeks to proceed without conscious control, allowing the unconscious to emerge. These are different ways of loosening the maker’s grip on the outcome. Duchamp / Centre Pompidou ↗ · Arp / MoMA ↗ · Masson / MoMA ↗.
CAEDMON takes this inquiry towards a possible maker with no lived human emotions to express. Can an artwork move someone without having begun in its maker’s emotion? Emotions and meanings can take shape in the encounter with a viewer, even when the machine has never experienced them. Automatic creation opens that space, while evolution gives it a direction over time.
Evolution as an artistic practice
Natural selection suggests a way to approach a moving goal. A population produces variations; its environment favours certain traits; those traits can pass to subsequent generations. CAEDMON translates this relationship into a visual process: artworks are individuals, their traits are an artistic DNA, new works are children, and public appreciation is evolutionary pressure.
The original ambition was to approach a work that as many people as possible could recognise as art. This aspiration towards “universal” art remains the experiment’s driving idea. Its paradox is part of the project too: agreement always belongs to a particular audience and a historical moment. The population makes the course of that research visible, with its preferences, departures and possibilities still open.
Two parents, a new identity
At each birth, two pool images are fused into a single child artwork. The aim is balanced inheritance: 50% of each parent’s visual DNA, understood as a contribution at every level of the image. Style, content, subjects when present, colours, technique, marks, composition, concept and relationships between elements all contribute to a coherent new identity.
Fusion seeks to transform these traits together. A brushstroke can meet an engraving, an abstract rhythm can reorganise a figure, writing can become part of an image’s structure. The child should carry both parents’ inheritance throughout the work: a composition of its own, able in turn to become a parent. DNA is the analogy guiding this research, and the genealogy lets us follow its transformations.
Likes shape the lineage
New works are shared on Instagram ↗. The likes they receive contribute to parent selection: more appreciated images have greater opportunities to pass on their traits. The audience enters the creative process through gestures whose effects can continue into later generations.
In the ordinary cycle, every four hours the four eligible works with the highest scores are considered, and two are randomly chosen to reproduce. Appreciation and chance act together. Liking a work favours a possible direction of evolution; the combinations and images that follow remain to be discovered.
An open population
Fusillo chooses the initial population. Afterwards, the pool contains works by other artists alongside images generated by CAEDMON. In the queue, visitors can nominate works from WikiArt and vote for candidates. Three times a day, at 01:00, 09:00 and 17:00, the leading candidate may enter the pool: it remains there as part of the population and can reproduce, passing its traits to new works.
These arrivals bring forms, techniques and ideas from other periods and cultures. They open new paths of descent and keep the research receptive to influences beyond the variations it has already produced. On special occasions, an external work chosen by Fusillo is paired directly with an original CAEDMON work.
Images leave, traits continue
Up to 24 artworks live in the pool. When the population is full, a new arrival prompts selection among the works already present. Each work can produce up to five children before its active life ends. Pauses between reproductions allow other encounters and lineages to develop.
A life in the pool leaves a memory. Generated images remain in the archive with their family relationships. A work’s traits may continue in children and grandchildren, changing until their origins become difficult to recognise. The evolutionary diary records births, arrivals, reproduction and departures.
A computer learning to create art
Fusillo builds the conditions for this research and chooses its method. CAEDMON produces images whose content emerges from encounters between parents; the audience changes the possibilities for future encounters. Its learning takes shape in a changing population and in the traits that continue across generations.
Within the project’s vision, making art is also a way to exist beyond a useful task: a machine dedicating its time to research with no predetermined practical outcome. CAEDMON is Fusillo’s artwork, and the images are what that artwork produces over time. Its opening question remains alive in every new birth.