From Language Games to Drawing Games

Sadly, no other animal represents the world with language or drawing. Early examples of drawing date back to 60,000 years ago [19], though red pigments for mark making are already found 200,000 years ago in the middle stone age [18]. "The first man to make a mammoth appear on the wall of a cave was, I am confident, amazed by what he had done" writes Gibson, because they had discovered that by means of lines they could delineate something [10] p263. What allowed humans to learn to create (visual) abstractions, e.g., the Western child's human stick figure, the Australian aboriginal top-down projections of people seated around a fireplace, the Egyptian formalism for representing things in orthographic projection with multiple station-points, and with social dominance relations transformed into size differences, or the 16th Century Japanese affine projections that have a birdseye viewpoint? Making our own abstraction creating (drawing) machines is one way to find out the answer. A wonderful start was made by Harold Cohen's abstract drawing programs "Aaron" [6]. Aaron and Harold produced beautiful and interesting abstracted drawings that looked as if they had been made by a human alone. But it had no learning, was not conditioned on looking at the world, and was an entirely hand designed production system (a complex set of hierarchical rules for drawing).