Item #55163 [PIONEERING WORK ON THE EXPERIMENTAL BEGINNINGS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ART] Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung: Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informatik im Bereich ästhetischer Produktion und Kritik [Aesthetics as information processing: fundamentals and applications of computer science in the field of aesthetic production and criticism]. Frieder Nake.

Nake, Frieder.

[PIONEERING WORK ON THE EXPERIMENTAL BEGINNINGS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ART] Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung: Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informatik im Bereich ästhetischer Produktion und Kritik [Aesthetics as information processing: fundamentals and applications of computer science in the field of aesthetic production and criticism].

Vienna and New York: Springer, 1974. Original cloth binding and pictorial dust jacket; XII, 360 pp. with numerous diagrams and reproduced examples of computer-generated art. Small private owner signature to bottom of title; else very good in very good dust jacket. Item #55163

First edition of this early treatise on the first experiments to generate artworks by an "artificial intelligence". Building on Max Bense's information aesthetics, Nake's approach was to replace creativity and intuition with random numbers that moved within a framework of predetermined probabilities. Nake called this method the “simulation of intuition”. In this way, it was already possible at that time in the field of abstract art to have the computer imitate the style of certain artists for new pictures. Thus, among other things, he explains: “One analyses one or more pictures by a painter and attempts to formalize the stylistic rules found to such an extent that they become programmable. The program based on such rules is given some 'intuitive' freedom of decision and then allowed to produce a series of pictures in the style of the analyzed group.” (p. 211)

Frieder Nake was a mathematician and student of Max Bense in Stuttgart. Together with Michael Noll and Georg Nees, he was one of three pioneers of the so-called Group 3N. They were among the first to use computers and graphomats to create graphics. Nake had completed his doctorate on probability theory and was a research assistant at the computer center of the Technical University in Stuttgart for many years. For him, graphics was above all a method of mathematical research. He ended his active work as a computer artist as early as 1972. (D. Becker, AKL XCI, 2016, p. 481).