NOCTURNE
23.5" x 47" 12,569 brushstrokes 2006
Three-dimensional Wire-mesh Terrain, Fractional Brownian Motion, Nocturnes and TurnerWhistlerMonet
The inspiration for this painting came from the book TurnerWhistlerMonet and a desire to create a representational painting, a new direction for Dulcinea.
Because Paul Kirby's interest with Dulcinea is the use of brushstrokes and the spontaneity and surprise that come from AI programming, she would never be permitted to reproduce a scanned photograph. So, Kirby explored what kind of traditional landscape Dulcinea could create that would be an evolution from Whistler's nocturnes.
The painting would have compositional elements of water, landfall, clouds, distant sky, and a sun with reflections because these were the elements Kirby wanted to focus on from Whistler's compositions. Each element was mathematically created with a three-dimensional wire-mesh in a virtual world. Kirby wrote a 3D graphics pipeline in Lisp, which allowed for transporting each element (such as water) from model-space, through world-space, camera-space and display-space to eventually robot-space.
After Kirby's experience with the Yellow Impressionistic, he incorporated additional animation techniques to create each of these compositional elements. He calculated the lighting and reflections with Lambert's Law of light behavior. Finally, he removed rear-facing and obstructed surfaces.
