Letters To An
Overseas Friend.

Saw Tim’s Vermeer yesterday. SPOILER ALERT! TURN BACK NOW IF YOU HAVEN”T SEEN THE MOVIE BUT ARE PLANNING TO DO SO! If you’ve continued to read, I’ll assume you’ve seen the movie or at least know how Tim Jenison’s machine works. Jenison and Penn Jillette both state that the human acts completely objectively, as if he is a cog in the machine and not the driver. According to them, the human is only there to apply the paint and to process when the mirror’s edge has disappeared. Which sounds like something one could do with software, a camera, and a modified CNC machine. I don’t know if either of them would try to make that claim, but it sounds like a logical question to follow up with. That question being, could we then build a machine that can “look” at a room, any room, and paint a Vermeer?

Also, doesn’t Jenison’s and Jillette’s claim ignore the gorilla in the room distinction between the precision and invariance of inanimate materials versus the imprecision and variance of flesh and the human twitch? Surely the artist lends some character to the painting when using the machine? The film never tries to tackle this question: Is Jenison’s Vermeer effectively indistinguishable from the original? I know that’s not the premiss of the film. But it’s more than a tangential question, isn’t it?