Fig. 1
Group-level temporal transitions of visual art styles in the complexity-entropy (C-H) plane. (a) Contemporary user-generated visual art styles of DeviantArt and Bēhance (2010–2020) compared to the main divisions of art historical periods mapped in the C-H plane. Images with distinct forms and a limited number of ordinal patterns typically exhibit low H values and high C values. Conversely, disordered images comprising more random or interrelated components generally display high H values and low C values. The result reveals that the average C-H values of art historical styles have shifted toward the higher C and lower H areas over time. (b, c) Yearly C-H trajectory of contemporary user-generated visual arts from DeviantArt’s Daily Deviations and Bēhance’s Best of Bēhance (refer to the Data (Materials)). Each C-H plane is composed of multiple elliptical areas, with each ellipse representing 95% confidence interval bounds from the yearly average C-H values of the intragroup visual artworks. The multiple CI ellipses, along with the yearly C-H trajectories connecting them, altogether illustrate the yearly transitions of visual art styles on each platform. Also, insets are included to show the cumulative number of samples over the given time frame.
