Dear Mom,

Last night I attended a talk in Second Life – you remember, the virtual world where Nature has created an island? – by Simon Colton. He was telling us about a new artist called “The Painting Fool”.

He has created (and trained!!) this program which can draw paintings from photographs and even its imagination. From the talk I gather that it has built into it some emotion detection software, so if the person in the photo looks happy, for example, it will draw the picture in brighter colours. He is moving towards the idea that it could be able to generate pictures from its “imagination” using words (such as a newspaper article) as inspiration. I am not completely sure that I am comfortable with computer programs being called “creative”, but it definitely seems very clever and has won an Artificial Intelligence competition!

Here are links to two galleries of its paintings:
Amelie’s Progress
City Series

On a more tangible, smell-the-spraypaint level, I watched a guy painting this portrait of Rolf Harris on the Thames walk near Waterloo Bridge.

He did not tell me his name, but he did give me a postcard with his webaddress. Here is a link to his on-line gallery:
Blam

Yours etc,

Bronwen