Algorithms of beauty

22 MINUTES

‘Nothing renders their beauty’ – can art ever capture the splendour of a flower?

While in her early 70s, the English artist Mary Delany (1700-88) noticed a striking resemblance between a red piece of paper sitting on her bedside table and the colour of a geranium. She then cut the paper into the shape of the flower’s petals. When a friend mistook the cut-outs for the petals of a real geranium, Delany was inspired to create even more ambitious and realistic two-dimensional paper works depicting plants. Today, her creations, which she called ‘paper mosaiks’, are seen as forerunners to modern collage.

Inspired by Delany, in her film Algorithms of Beauty, the Belgian director Miléna Trivier takes a novel approach to imitating flowers using a mosaic-making tool of her own time – artificial intelligence. For the project, she built a dataset from Delany’s 985 botanical mosaics. As depicted in the film, the resulting generated imagery took on a life of its own, appearing to transform and even breathe is curious, uncanny ways.

Will we ever be able to ‘render’ the delicate beauty of a flower into existence? Do we create images to escape the flow of time? Algorithms of Beauty is more interested in pondering these questions than answering them. Instead, Trivier, portrayed in the world of the film by the actress Isabelle Dumont, takes us on a philosophical journey into questions of imitation, creation, seeing and beauty. Through this construction, she pulls off an impressive act of creation in her own right, building a work at the nexus of AI and art that offers an original and challenging perspective on the topic.

Director: Miléna Trivier

Producer: Maxime Coton

Website: Bruits

Explore more

A marmot peeking from grass in a valley with mountains under a blue sky with clouds.

What if animals find beauty in the world, just like we do?

Chimpanzees favour the colour red. Junglefowl prefer symmetry. Our shared capacity for aesthetic pleasure is cause for wonder

by Brandon Keim

Impressionist painting of a green Japanese bridge over a pond with water lilies surrounded by lush greenery in a garden setting.

Monet understood the elusive power of a place’s atmosphere

The gist of a scene or place can subtly alter our very sense of being, an affecting quality captured by Monet’s paintings

by Pablo Fernandez Velasco

Close-up photo of an elderly man with a beard wearing a black cap, lying in a hospital bed, looking content.

After four decades in prison, Big D contemplates the brave new world that awaits him

Directed by Laura Tejero Núñez

Photo of a woman in a colourful striped dress smiling as photographers take pictures at a crowded event.

Why do beautiful people also seem smart and likeable?

Psychologists have known about the ‘halo effect’ for ages. New research suggests the power of language can help explain it

by Chris F Westbury & Daniel King

Illustration of a room with a person lounging on a bed, a pink dresser, a table with cups and a plant.
AUTISM

A mysterious black orb trails Mo, growing ever harder to ignore

A film by Gil Goletski

A waterfall under a stormy sky with mist and a building on the left cliff surrounded by trees in the background.

How to think about the sublime

An exquisite mix of fear and awe, pleasure and pain, the sublime stretches the imagination and reveals the limits of reason

by Nicole A Hall

Photo of a sleeping newborn in pink wrapped in a green blanket wearing a medical ID bracelet on their wrist.

When does the first spark of human consciousness ignite?

We can’t ask babies what they’re feeling, but ingenious new methods are shedding light on the origins of subjective awareness

by Joel Frohlich

Photo of an abandoned brick building with graffiti on its walls broken windows and overgrown plants in the foreground.

Works of urban graffiti are not vandalism, but public monuments

They might appear to have little in common with statues or obelisks, but graffiti images serve a vital public function

by Rafael Schacter