Bayesian Beauty: On the ART of EVE’ and the Act of Enjoyment

EVE’ is a novel theory of aesthetic response, whose atomic components are Expectations (E), Violations (V) and Explanations (E’) – formulated computationally via Bayesian extensions to information theory. To motivate EVE’, this paper reviews the philosophical aesthetics of Aristotle and the computational aesthetics of Birkhoff and Bense. This review highlights some psychological limitations in the latter theories, and shows how the mathematical machinery of Bayesian belief can implement Aristotle’s approach and improve on other approaches. In particular, it is shown that the mathematical and informational measures proposed by Birkhoff and Bense are lacking a temporal treatment of causality and contextuality. The contribution is a Bayesian theory called EVE’, which is demonstrated by dissecting a “dynamic drawing” – showing how EVE’ can model the aesthetics of “reversalrecognition” proposed by Aristotle. This example illustrates how EVE’ might be used to analyze aesthetics and perhaps even synthesize artwork in the field of artificial intelligence.