13
January 2025

Can computers cry? - Lecture

Welcome to The Arts Society Bowdon
Monday, January 13, 2025 - 13:45
The Bowdon Rooms
The Firs Bowdon WA14 2TQ
Online Event

Can computers cry? – Art touches human emotions which machines cannot feel.

CAN COMPUTERS CRY? – ART TOUCHES HUMAN EMOTIONS WHICH MACHINES CANNOT FEEL

Art of all kinds can touch us and make us respond, often beyond the expectation of the artist. Happiness, sadness, pity, compassion, a spiritual uplifting, curiosity – all human emotions which even the most sophisticated machine programming will never feel. 

In this constantly updated talk Justin demonstrates how art arises from human imagining to feed our emotions and discusses the difference between mere imitation of the physical world, which even computers can be taught to do, and the creation of truly human art which enhances our lives.

The attached image is OpenAI’s text-to-image model DALL·E 2, following the text prompt ‘Girl with a pearl earring by Vermeer’ and exposed to various images.

THE ARTS SOCIETY ACCREDITED LECTURER

Mr Justin Reay

After officer service in the Royal Navy, Justin entered a long career in business, becoming CEO of a healthcare company, Director of European Cultural and Business Studies for a Japanese executive school at Oxford and Washington DC, and a consultant in management development. Retiring from business in 2001, he lectured and wrote on naval history and, as one of the historians working towards the bicentenary commemoration of the Battle of Trafalgar, Justin was given unprecedented access to the former Admiralty buildings in London. This encouraged him to study the History of Art and Architecture, for which he was awarded the University of Oxford’s Diploma with Distinction. He later completed a doctoral thesis on medieval naval weapons systems with the University of Exeter.

From 2002 he was senior lecturer in post-graduate marketing at Oxford FE College and is a qualified teacher. For six years from 2004 he also delivered courses in the Oxford / UCal Berkeley accredited residential schools. In 2011 he was appointed as tutor in the History of Art and Classical Civilization at leading tutorial colleges in Oxford, and also privately tutors undergraduate and post-graduate art history students.

Formerly a senior academic manager at the Bodleian Library, Justin is a published historian, and among his impending works are an edition of Samuel Pepys’s naval papers in the Bodleian’s collections, and a study of the Admiralty buildings in London. He is frequently engaged as an enrichment speaker on art history for a European cruise line. Justin is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Historical Society, a Governor of the RNLI, a Founder Member of the Grinling Gibbons Society, and a member of The Arts Society Cheltenham.