The Machine as Artist: An Introduction

With the understanding that art and technology are continuing to experience an historic and rapidly intensifying rapprochement—but with the understanding as well that accounts thereof have tended to be constrained by scientific/engineering rigor on the one hand, or have tended to swing to the opposite extreme—it is the goal of this special issue of Arts to provide an opportunity for artists, humanists, scientists, and engineers to consider this development from the broader perspective which it deserves, while at the same time retaining a focus on what must surely be the emerging core of our subject: the state of the art in mechatronics and computation is such that we can now begin to speak comfortably of the machine as artist and we can begin to hope, as well, that an aesthetic sensitivity on the part of the machine might help lead to a friendlier and more sensitive machine intelligence in general.