Fifty Sisters
“I am an artist and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. I am interested in the creative possibilities of computers and computation, in particular how computers can enhance and augment our creativity. My interests and research are relatively broad: philosophy, evolution, nature, visualisation, interaction design, software, sound, art and the moving image. I prefer the intersections between these fields, rather than the differences that set them apart.” Jon McCormack

The Painting Fool

The Painting Fool is software that we hope will one day be taken seriously as a creative artist in its own right. This aim is being pursued as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) project, with the hope that the technical difficulties overcome along the way will lead to new and improved generic AI techniques. It is also being pursued as a sociological project, where the effect of software which might be deemed as creative is tested in the art world and the wider public. In this chapter, we summarise our progress so far in The Painting Fool project. To do this, we first compare and contrast The Painting Fool with software of a similar nature arising from AI and graphics projects. We follow this with a discussion of the guiding principles from Computational Creativity research that we adhere to in building the software.