February 3, 2010

All kinds of readings for class today!! The most interesting I found to be Betts (2006) Computer analysis and Retire "Projective" article. This article brought up many interesting points for me. Basically, it talks about using computers in psychological assessments. Now I realize that many assessments for psychological purposes may already use computers, but what about art assessments? That is another subject entirely! Can computers be used to measure art? Art is one of those things, to me, that means the most (well, most of the time) to the person who created it. Only they can really tell you its true meaning, or why they picked yellow instead of blue for the dog in their painting. A computer cannot get into the innerworkings of the human mind, so it will never really be able to find out why somebody did a certain thing in an artwork. Also, what about colors? I remember a very good (and very interesting) point being brought up in class. Many cultures see colors differently. What may appear green to someone may appear blue to someone of another culture. So, could the computer take into account the culture of the person being studied? Possibly, but then you run into the problem of what color is what for what culture, and if so many people see many colors differently (take purple and fuschia for instance) what color will be called what and who will decide this to let the computer know?

This is quite a debatable topic...