Kaush-K

LATENT

FLORA

Beauty continues to be a mystifying aspect of the human aesthetic experience whose complexity remains to be accommodated by algorithmic approaches. How can one encode into a machine the properties of a concept whose assessment is highly subjective and dependent on individual context and experience?


According to Kant, not all forms of beauty are dependent (relative to the sort of thing the object is). He claims that there are some “free beauties”, for which we don’t need to know anything conceptually in order to experience pleasure in apprehending them. "free beauties” are those beautiful objects which we can appraise without reference to any concept or past example. Aesthetic judgments about these types of beauties are then truly universal and not just subjective, unlike judgments concerning dependent beauties.


To this special category belong flowers. The flower, as an example of universal beauty, is a prototype of all art, and throws the distinction between art and science into relief. We admire any piece of art like we do a flower — as an example of something everyone ought to find beautiful, without reference to a purpose but always hinting at one.


The flower’s context-independent nature makes it a concrete parameter in training a neural network to accommodate the concept of beauty. Its beauty takes the form of its design, with the arrangement of its lines and colors forming a formalist conception of aesthetic value in the machine