This short book is a collection of 12 chapters by just as many authors. Mealing collected the papers and wrote both a short introduction and the first chapter.

The chapters are somewhat ill assorted: their length varies from eight pages to 18; the number of references in their bibliographies varies from zero to 53; they are written in very different styles and with very different purposes. Moreover, most of the chapters have no abstract at all, making it often difficult to understand a chapter’s focus. Thus, it is not easy to give a general impression about the whole.

However, it should be noted that this is a British-centered book. Furthermore, it is not very recent: the first edition was published in 1997; only two chapters were added for the present edition, which date back to 2002. This is unfortunate, since the material attempts to be at the cutting edge of available techniques. A lot of things happened in the last 12 years, especially with regards to the use of the World Wide Web (WWW), but also the available technology for screens and printers. The few illustrations do not attempt to use color, which, in fact, is not even mentioned in the book. Some authors seem to rely on virtual reality, although the applications of their ideas to art are not the most successful.

The different chapters do not read with the same ease. Some are academic discussions about art and computers, without a visible structure of the discourse and a clear goal. Others are much more specific, with reference to actual works and a really critical spirit. Some consider that anything new and modern is good, while others seem to think exactly the opposite.

The difficulty, in fact, is that it would be useful to know what art is, exactly, including how to decide whether some production--made with the help of a computer or not--is a piece of art. Reffin-Smith’s chapter discusses this at length and with wit, but without drawing any clear conclusion. The examples he gives in the text, in particular, are not especially convincing. If they were, anybody using photo processing software in the simplest way is an artist.

When Pablo Picasso proposed putting his signature on pebbles he found on the shore, was he making works of art? When some people click on a few menus and buttons in a graphic application and look with awe at the images they get at random, are they making works of art? Is the possibility of presenting works in a gallery the fundamental criterion for recognizing works of art? This is not really discussed anywhere in the book, which is too bad.

In fact, I found King’s chapter the most interesting. King begins with a long digression about quantum mechanics and consciousness. Only in the end does he discuss the possibility of completely artificial art, where the computer chooses, from among its productions, those it considers beautiful and worth saving. However, would these works be presented to humans, or simply to other computers?

Finally, I found the book worthy of reading because of some of the most thought-provoking chapters, especially the two I mentioned. As a book about the state of the art in using computers for producing artistic works, it is, unfortunately, already obsolete.