The authors present a system built to generate arrangements of threedimensional models for aesthetic evaluation, with the aim being to support an artist in their creative process. The authors explore how this system can automatically generate aesthetically pleasing content for use in the media and design industry, based on standards originally developed in master artworks. They then demonstrate the effectiveness of their process in the context of paintings using a collection of images inspired by the work of the artist Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890–1964). Finally, they compare the results of their system with the results of a well-known Generative Adversarial Network (GAN).

Organic Art (William Latham and Stephen Todd, 1987) was reincarnated by the same authors with programmer and artist Peter Todd as Mutator2 (2013); Mutator2 was transitioned into VR as Mutator VR (2016) with programmer and artist Lance Putnam. The authors describe the graphics and audio systems of these works, particularly the procedural generation and visual effects and the creative exploitation of these effects within an art installation. The authors mix “real” and “unreal” features and effects, inspired by surrealist art, to create highly immersive psychedelic organic experiences for the viewer-participant. Interface simplicity and discoverability is critical for VR exhibitions, as is the balance between an experience constrained by an artist's choices and a freer (but riskier) one with greater public choice. Public gallery installation of Mutator VR creates special challenges.

ABSTRACT One of the most interesting-if frustrating-aspects of charting the history of computer art is trying to understand the intersections of specific technologies and artistic experimentation. It is rarely as clear-cut as a simple linear influence of one to the other, partly because artists are able to envision all kinds of possibilities that technology might enable them to realize in some kind of form, but as they do so, the technology is itself shaped, especially in terms of how it is perceived by others. Do artists find a way to give technologies an aesthetic outlet, or do some technologies possess-or facilitate-a characteristic aesthetic that finds its expression through specific artists? Certainly, in the history of computer art it would seem that particular aesthetics, technologies, and artists are closely intertwined in certain periods. This intertwining of art, technology, and ideas stolen from the natural world has never been so arguably merged as the period in the history of computer art from 1980 to 1993. We take as the defining start of this period the initial work of Mandelbrot on fractals that became known as the Mandelbrot set and led to his famous illustrated art-science book The Fractal Geometry of Nature . In 1993, this first highly creative period in evolutionary computer art came to an end with major publications by pioneers Karl Sims, Stephen Todd, and William Latham.