Systemic Abstractors Versus the Pubic Realists

http://donrelyea.com/pubic_hair_systemic_abstractors.htm

The artist, Don Relyea, has come upon the dilemma of digital media being too perfect looking. Don feels that not seeing the imperfection that arises from human error takes away from the overall quality of the artistic piece. As such, Don is looking for a way to reintroduce some error into algorithmic and generative art that will make the art look similar to hand drawn art.

To do this, the artist starts by using a hair technique to create the image. When generating the art, he has the program use curly "pubic" hair lines to draw the pictures. This results in an image that looks "fuzzy", like the one below:

While this does take away from some of the perfection brought about by digital image creation, it still doesn't quite capture the essence of an artist making mistakes and attempting to correct them. Don expands the imperfection principle by adding a rule to his algorithm that if an area gets too dark from the amount of "hairs" drawn, reduce it by trying to "erase" the area and make the area a shade of lighter grey. By doing this, Don hopes to simulate an artist erasing their mistakes. Here is an example:

In the end, the product seems to be a distorted version of the original product. It does bear some resemblance to an image that has been erased, but it seems to have disrupted the image so much that it has lost the overall idea of the original image.

All in all, I see why Don wanted to alter the digital art in order to make it seem hand drawn. However, I feel as though it has actually taken away from the piece by making it seem too unrealistic. Even if an artist did make mistakes when drawing these images, the margin of error would not be this large. While this may have been the purpose of the artist, I believe that they should have reduced the threshold of the "erasing" in order to keep some of the structural integrity of the image.