Instruction Set is an embryonic open software project with a simple process, gathering different code implementations of a given "instruction." The format reminds me of two Whitney Artport projects - CODeDOC (2002), and Casey Reas' {Software} Structures (2004). It's good to see this approach being updated and opened out for a wider community.
The initial instruction was La Monte Young's wonderful Composition 1960 #10: "Draw a straight line and follow it." Implementations range from the abstract and conceptual to the more performative, in languages from Python and Javascript to Supercollider and Processing; web2.0 nerds like me will appreciate markluffel's Twitter version. Anyhow, I've just posted a belated implementation of "Draw a straight line..." (screengrab above). Nothing amazing, more just filling in a gap and solving a pragmatic problem - how to wring some generative juice out of the instructions - by manipulating the space, rather than the line.
That follow up post on transmateriality and hardware practice is coming soon, really. Off-task productivity is an amazing thing.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Draw a Straight Line...
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
There is no Software - Kittler and Evolvable Hardware
I'm slowly developing this notion of transmateriality; in this post, some media theory and a nice example from computer science. In the next I'll try to connect all this with some current art work, and back to the notion of the transmaterial.
Thanks to a prod from my friend Brogan Bunt, I've been reading Friedrich Kittler, a literary and media theorist who has made some striking forays into computational media. In a paper from 1995 he grapples, like Kirschenbaum, with the grounding of computation in matter, distilling this position to a wonderful aphorism: "there is no software." Kittler begins by announcing the end of writing; that texts "do not exist anymore in perceivable time and space" but have been miniaturised to the scale of integrated circuits. This miniaturisation, in which writing escapes the bounds of human perception, is facilitated by Turing's core principle of computing, which sets out minimal conditions for computation and proves its independence from hardware - the ability for any number of different physical machines to implement a universal computer. This principle, Kittler says, "has had the effect of duplicating the implosion of hardware by an explosion of software." "Ordinary language" is overtaken by a new hierarchy of programming languages, layers that reach from the command line down to assembler and the very protocols embedded in the silicon itself.
Kittler plays out this "descent" in which each layer depends on the one below it; the word processor depends on DOS, which in turn rests on the hardwired BIOS. Ultimately "[a]ll code operations, despite their metaphoric faculties such as "call" or "return", come down to absolutely local string manipulations and that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences." In other words, although they resemble "ordinary" language, programming languages return us to the imperceptible, inaccessable, too-fast and too-small world of the microprocessor. So, "there is no software at all," except as defined by the "environment of everyday language" that surrounds computation.
In a paranoid turn Kittler analyses the tendency of computer culture to "systematically obscure hardware by software, electronic signifiers by interfaces between formal and everyday languages." In the GUI, but also in high level languages such as C (let alone Java), the physical machine is increasingly concealed from its users, and its programmers, in the name of functionality and "friendliness."
Finally Kittler considers the limits and thresholds of "programmable matter"; he points out that current computing hardware relies on the isolation of discrete elements from each other and thus a limit to connectivity. This contrasts with the "maximal connectivity" of the physical systems - "waves, weather and wars" outside the computer. The current approach to computing hardware is essentially more of the same: more transistors, more elements, smaller circuits with better isolation. Kittler instead suggests that the only way to "keep up" with the physical complexity of the world is to match it with "nonprogrammable systems" made of "sheer hardware": "a physical device working amidst physical devices and subjected to the same bounded resources." In such devices once again "software as an ever-feasible abstraction would not exist any more."
Interestingly Kittler ends up close to where my earlier work on art and artificial life (published as Metacreation) came to rest. In considering the desire for emergence in a-life art, I wondered about the constraints imposed by the physical substrate - the "coarse, rigid grammar" of digital electronics. My favourite demonstration of what lies beyond this grammar is the evolvable hardware work of Adrian Thompson, in which circuit designs for programmable chips (field gate programmable arrays - as in the image above) are evolved using a genetic algorithm and tested in hardware for their performance in a particular task. It's perhaps not surprising that successful circuits were evolved over many thousands of generations; but the fun part is that when analysed, these circuits were completely unlike any human-designed computing machine. In Kittler's words they were "sheer hardware," treating the chip as a "maximally connective" physical substrate rather than an abstracted set of discrete elements. Some chips drew on external influences, such as electromagnetic radiation, to achieve their evolved ends; so the chip is not formally isolated (but to quote Kittler again) "a physical device working amidst physical devices." Not only that, they were often "tuned" to the physical specificities of a single chip, despite the FPGAs being notionally identical - the exact opposite to the hardware-indpendence of the Turing Machine.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Wanted: Research Students (A Message from my Sponsor)
I've kept my academic day job out of this blog until now; but that's really a false distinction since the work presented here is largely supported by my employer. So with that in mind, a message from my sponsor - and actually, from me too.
I'm looking for research students! My research interests are pretty well represented by this blog, and visualised in the tag cloud: criticism, theory and practice in computational media, data practices, generative art, a-life art, experimental sound and music, digital culture in general. With my colleagues Stephen Barrass and Sam Hinton we span internet history and theory, gaming, sonification, AR, perceptual approaches to HCI, and wearables. With our collective track record and mix of specialisations, we're one of the best groups in the country for this kind of work. What's more our new Faculty of Design and Creative Practice now combines media arts with architecture, landscape architecture, cultural heritage, industrial design and graphic design, so there's a vast field of crossovers there. All our research programs encourage practice-led research, and thesis forms that combine writing with creative projects.
If this sounds like you, and you're interested in stand-alone Honours, Masters by Research or PhD study, get in touch.
We now return you to our scheduled programming.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Strange Ontologies
Another piece of work from my time at CEMA; this one a paper, co-authored with Mark Guglielmetti and Troy Innocent. This paper started with some discussions about models in generative systems, and a feeling that certain kinds of models, or rather certain ontologies - formally defined networks of entities and relations - play an important role in defining the generative outcomes of formal systems. Troy and Mark are also very much into gaming (more than me anyway, my peak gaming experience occurred about twenty years ago and involved an Amiga 1000); as we talked it seemed that these generative ontological structures might also be at work in some of the more interesting games and game art projects around. Mark made me sit down and play Portal (below). Then we started discussing social software...
So in this paper we consider both philosophical and computational senses of "ontology", and propose that computational ontologies (or data models) actually implement philosophical ontologies (notions of what "is"). What's more these ontologies become dynamic, interactive processes; and that's when things get interesting. We focus on "strange ontologies": where default, common-sense or conventional ontological structures are tweaked or hacked, or where emergent phenomena pop out from apparently straightforward structures of being and relation. We draw on examples from social software, gaming (including Portal and Warcraft), art games or game art (including Julian Oliver's Second Person Shooter), new media / generative art (Guglielmetti's own Laboratories of Thought (below) and Jonathan McCabe's Origami Butterfly Method).
The paper has been submitted to an upcoming issue of ACM Computers in Entertainment; for now, grab the pdf and cite it via the permalink for this post. We're seeking feedback on this too - let us know your thoughts.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Self-Organised Phyllotaxis
Like Mr Smith, I'm being a bad host, but trust me, there's some good stuff in the works. Meantime, like Smith, here's something else entirely. In this case it's a little generative sketch I recently dusted off, some source code, and a side observation about Processing culture on the web.
While at CEMA last year I was working on a project with spirals as a kind of required element. I was talking to Jon McCormack about this, when he said something like "Oh, anyone can code up a spiral. What you want to do is make a system where spirals emerge." This is a classic a-life approach, of course, but also for me seemed technically daunting. Jon pointed me to Ball's The Self-Made Tapestry as well as to the literature on spiral phyllotaxis, a fundamental structure in plant morphogenesis. Douady and Couder published a brilliant paper on this topic in 1995 [pdf], so I set about implementing their model.
It's a beautiful thing - buds, or "primordia", are spawned by a central ring of "base" points. Douady and Couder show that you can create phylotactic spirals with a model where primordia inhibit the budding process in their neighbourhood; the result is that when a primordium forms, the next one to emerge will pop out some distance away. By simply changing the growth rate and the inhibition threshhold, you get a variety of self-organised spirals, but also other less predictable complex systems traits.
As it turned out I didn't use this for the "spiral" project - more on that soon - but rediscovered it recently when I was asked to reproduce an old drawing of a sort of abstract lotus-flower structure. In the image above the bases are invisible, and the primordia are drawn as circles that expand over time - instant lotus generator (more images).
Have a play with the applet, or just grab the Processing source. Let me know if you use it, too.
Which leads me to a side point. What's become of the applets-on-the-web side of the Processing community? Maybe it's just me, but it seems to be diminishing; instead there's tons of (web-compressed) video, with relatively sparse documentation and source. Is it because of the increased interest in using Processing for generative motion graphics (and other exotic, large scale, non-applet-friendly things)? Maybe I'm over-reliant on ProcessingBlogs, which now seems to be all Vimeo, all the time. Any thoughts?
Friday, March 07, 2008
Notes on Transmateriality
At the recent UTS symposium I gave a short presentation titled "After Inframedia: Presence and Transmateriality." The presence stuff I covered earlier, but the second idea - which I touched on very briefly in this 2003 paper - is much less developed. So here goes.
The relationship between matter and "information" or "the digital" has been a recurring theme in new media theory for more than a decade. We could sketch it very roughly as follows. In the early to mid 90s, as digital hype was gathering pace, artists and cultural theorists began to critique the apparent drive towards disembodiment in technoculture. Simon Penny's 1991 text "Virtual Reality as the end of the Enlightenment Project" is a good (and early) example, even if VR now looks a bit like a straw figure in these critiques. This critical project of grounding the digital in the material (and the body) has continued. In 2000 Felix Stalder wrote of the "ideology of immateriality" underpinning the so-called "new economy." Around the same time Katherine Hayles published a more complex investigation in How We Became Posthuman, asking "how information lost its body" but also considering the inevitably embodied effects of this supposedly immaterial stuff (this is well covered in her paper The Materiality of Informatics).
Hayles introduces a conceptual pair: inscription and incorporation. Inscription is "normalized and abstract ... a system of signs operating independently of any particular manifestation" [Posthuman 198]. Inscription refers to the properties of a text, for example, that can be transcribed without regard to its specific embodied manifestation - digital computation thus relies on inscription, in moving patterns of data through various substrates. Incorporation is its flip-side, referring to the inescapably embodied aspect of a sign. Both inscription and incorporation are verbs - practices or processes - rather than ontological states; and they oscillate, a bit like presence and meaning for Gumbrecht: "incorporating practices are in constant interplay with inscriptions that abstract the practices into signs" [199].
Today I came a cross a more recent paper by Matthew Kirschenbaum, who pursues this investigation into the materiality of the digital, and like Hayles is approaching it from the perspective of textuality. In “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” (pdf) Kirschenbaum critiques the neo-Romantic, screen-focused tendencies of digital textual theory that tend to emphasise ephemerality and instability. He uses digital forensics to moves us from the screen to the hard drive, showing exactly how data is embodied (as in this image: a magnetic force microscopy image of a hard drive surface, from Pacific Nanotechnology). In the process he introduces another pair of concepts: formal and forensic materiality. Formal materiality refers to machine-readable data that reveals material specificities - in Kirschenbaum's paper, the use of a hex reader to discover traces of not-quite overwritten game code on an old Apple II floppy disc.
Forensic materiality refers to the material residues or byproducts that mark out one digital instantiation as different to another; for example the physical instantiation of copies of a file on two different hard drives will be different due to the material specificities of the drives - as when a misaligned write head again leaves traces of overwritten data. Yet these files are, for the computers concerned, formally identical. As Kirschenbaum writes, this shows how
"computers ... are material machines dedicated to propagating a behavioral illusion, or call it a working model, of immateriality."This really nails it for me. It's exactly the functionality of this immateriality that earlier critiques of the disembodied digital overlook. It is an illusion, but it's an illusion that (mostly) works, and so is easily maintained: this is a hard-working model.
I'm developing an idea of transmateriality (sorry about the coinage), that draws on Hayles and describes exactly the "conundrum" that Kirschenbaum poses here; but that also has, I think, some wider implications, specifically for the media arts. Briefly, it proposes that the digital is, of course, always and inevitably embodied; that concepts like "data" are functional abstractions for describing the propagation of material patterns through material substrates. But that at the same time these material patterns - and here I mean everything from optical pulses to hard disk substrates, luminous screens and speakers pushing air - these material patterns, and the sensations and aesthetics that result are profoundly shaped by data acting as if it were symbolic and immaterial. Transmateriality is an attempt to "ground" the digital without losing sight of its (let's say) generative capacities. It also seems to resonate with a lot of current work in the media arts - but more of that later.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Sound.Music.Design Symposium
A belated start to a busy new year... if you're still out there, thanks for hanging around. Last weekend I was in muggy, grimy Sydney for a symposium at UTS. Music.Sound.Design was a sort of transdisciplinary talkfest, loosely organised around the planning of a new sound/music/whatever degree. There were film sound guys, music educators, interaction designers, sonifiers, theorists, experimental musicians; and while the question of what a modern, interdisciplinary sound degree looks like remained elusive, some good stuff came out along the way.
My picks from the symposium included Darrin Verhagen's presentation on audiovisual relations, in particular how the power of the synchretic weld can link incongruous materials together, fooling our cognitive "zombie agents" into thinking that normal causality is operating, when in fact we're being carefully manipulated. Also on the AV line, artist and theorist Ian Andrews gave a detailed historical overview of the whole visual music / fused audiovisual tradition, emphasising structuralist or materialist film and the trajectory from the Russian avant garde, seeking to prepare our senses for the new post-Revolutionary world, to the Modernist trope of "mediumicity". In discussion Andrews shared an interesting point about his own AV practice and how it relates to this tradition; he disavowed anything like "expression" in his work; instead he described it as the exploration of a concrete and constrained field of possibilities. So the stripped-down "mediumicity" of this practice is not reductive or reflexive so much as generative - the medium proliferates, rather than being reduced to some essence.
On another topic altogether, Julian Knowles gave a passionate keynote on the state of tertiary music education in Australia; timely especially from where I'm sitting, as the Canberra School of Music faces up to possible extinction. He was preaching to the choir here, with the crowd well stacked with experimental musos, laptoppers and the like; so his quotes from local "heritage arts" crackpots got the laughter they deserved. But Knowles also deftly showed how every single assumption made in the classical conservatorium approach - such as valuing interpretation over creation, and demanding a specific technical skillset rather than adaptability and innovation - is contradicted in the living culture of contemporary music practice. You could design a pretty interesting curriculum, he suggested, by simply inverting all those assumptions.
It was great to see Tom Ellard - now vehemently ex-Severed Heads, but a hero of my youth nonetheless. He too was seeking to get a grip on a contemporary music industry in flux, wondering whether participatory virtual environments could be a new form of "album"; and thinking, like Kandinsky, about music as a model for all kinds of art practice and education. As Ellard demonstrated, VJ tools make visual composition and semiotics literally playable - more on his site. The thirty seconds of live AV scratch video that illustrated this point had me grinning all day.
I also made it to the final performance night of this event, which featured Robin Fox, Peter Blamey, Darrin Verhagen and Yasunao Tone, all playing a lovely eight-channel surround rig. The whole night was impressive, but special mention goes to my friend Peter Blamey's set. (Image above is by mr.snow, from back in 2002). Blamey plays a sort of "no input" mixer rig - an old Tascam four track with its ins and outs all tangled up. In this set he barely touched the mixer; he didn't need to, this network was delicately poised, putting out shuddering, accelerating ramps of static, ephemeral stereo crackles, and these superb, delicate chirps from somewhere in the feedback. But unlike other feedback-driven audio I've heard, there was a total absence of drone; Blamey's mixer is wracked with spasms, waves piling up, overloading then quickly dispersed. Never exactly repeating, but completely, organically self-consistent; like Ian Andrews' work, no sense of "expression", but for me that only heightens the poetry. More on/from Blamey here and here.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
From Scratch - A Conversation with Andrew Sorensen
Andrew Sorensen is an Australian musician and programmer, author of the Impromptu live coding environment as well as a live coding musician of note. I recently caught up with his latest work, documented as screencasts on his site. In A Study in Keith Sorensen builds a Keith Jarrett machine that juxtaposes two linked layers of performance - qwerty and (phantom) piano keyboard. Stained (below) is a striking twist on the "transparent" aesthetics of live coding, as Sorensen uses Impromptu to draw in, and manipulate, the code window, hooking the graphics into the musical algorithms. These works demonstrate (for me at least) how live coding can be honed to a fine point, as a performance form. They're improvised, but also controlled and restrained; they work well as music, but clearly the real performance here is also in the developing code structures. It's in the combination of those two structural levels - the emotional impact of tonal music and the abstract, formal domain of code - that these works are really strong. In this conversation Sorensen touches on the live coding scene, performance, craft and virtuosity, code as score, coding without computers and algorithm as thought
MW: I saw that you went to the LOSS livecode festival - how was that? What's that scene like?
AS: Actually LOSS was fantastic. I was a little concerned at first because the number of attendees was very low (20 ish) but this ended up being one of its real charms. It was a really on the ball crowd and so the general level of conversation during the 3 days was really excellent. It was great to see everyone perform, particularly SLUB, as it was Alex Mclean’s “Hacking Perl in Nightclubs” paper that initially caught my interest. I would have enjoyed seeing a few more from-scratch live coding performances. From memory there were only 3 of them - Fredrik Olofsson, Graham Coleman and myself. Most of the other performances used pre-programmed material - which I should emphasise is still perfectly valid but I was hoping to see more from-scratch work. I should also mention that Ross Bencina and Robert Atwood both performed from-scratch live patching works. (Ross in Audiomulch and Robert in Pd).
One of the great things about that scene though is the general competency, both artistic and technical. It’s hard to find people competent in both areas. I think one of the things that emphasises this for me is that most of these guys build their own environments. And these are good environments displaying strong technical competency. Yet almost none of these guys are working as professional programmers, choosing instead to concentrate on artistic and academic projects when they could all be out earning squillions as programmers. This focus on the creative and dynamic use of computation really shined through for me at LOSS. Of course the downside is that live coders are all broke... Of course there is a history of broke hackers but that's another story.
MW: I'm attracted to live coding for the same reason - a sense that these artists are something like virtuosi in their field. But then I'm very interested in what that means, to be a virtuoso live coder - and whether it means something different in a small, expert gathering such as LOSS, to what it might mean in a different context.
Good question. I think one thing worth thinking about though is that there are a lot of people in the world with some programming experience these days. Most of the time this is at a pretty basic level, some VB scripting in Excel for example but still the number is growing rapidly, especially with younger generations. I guess in short the number of people who have a basic conception of what's going on (even if they don't understand any of the specifics) is quite high and is growing rapidly. How many people at an Australian Chamber Orchestra concert have ever played the violin - still this doesn't stop them from being mightily impressed by Richard Tognetti. In this sense of course small expert gatherings are always going to be ... well ... small.
Another interesting aspect is the high level of domain knowledge required. Just as music domain experts may struggle with the code’s syntax, good programmers can become just as lost trying to understand the semantics of a musical live coding performance. A musically literate crowd can often pick up on things even though they have no programming experience. If I type for example (random ‘(I ii IV V vi)) a musical audience will automatically pick up on the chord association that a programmer may not. Of course this all comes back to the types of symbolism that you employ.
MW: You also mention that many of these artists (including yourself) have made their own coding environments: how important is that? It's an interesting contrast with other genres - imagine if the first task for every young new media artist or computer musician was to write their own authoring tool from scratch! On the other hand for many computer artists of an earlier generation, this was an everyday reality.
Yeah, this is a really interesting question, and as you say certainly a generation ago this was almost always the case. I should say that when I talk about environment I don't necessarily mean a whole environment like Impromptu. Most of the time the environments I'm talking about are built on top of something else (well of course everything is built on top of something else but you know what I mean). Many of the "environments" that were at LOSS were built in Supercollider for example. So I don't think I'm advocating building everything yourself. The most important thing is spending the time to know your environment well. For example, one Impromptu user has built his own bindings to CSound. Not something I would want to do in a million years but he loves it and he's really productive with it so there's an example of an environment built on an environment. And the end result is that his live coding looks very different from mine even though we both use Impromptu.
It's an issue of fluency for me. Of course I'm a big advocate of craft so you'd expect me to say that!
MW: LOSS billed you as "one of the masters of from-scratch coding." I used to do a lot of sound work using only live-sampled material, which was a challenge - but live coding from scratch is something else. What's your interest in this approach?
Well, I guess there are a few things here. The first is that I think from scratch is more flexible. You aren't as emotionally constrained as you are if you're working from prewritten code. By this I mean that if you have the code in front of you you're just not as likely to explore. Of course lots of people will say that everything is an abstraction and that you never really start from scratch, which is of course true, but I think this misses the point. The blank page has a unique and mystical quality of endless possibilities.
Secondly I think it makes the ideas more obvious to the audience. Strange as it may seem I think that this is even more important for a non-literate audience. They seem to understand that code is being constructed for them in real-time. If you start with a page full of code they're less sure what's going on. For me the code is an important ingredient of the performance. As you have said before - how it is done matters.
Thirdly, it's more fun because (a) it feels more spontaneous and hopefully the audience realizes that they're hearing something created in the moment, and (b) it's more dangerous. One of the things I love about live coding is the adrenaline rush! You kind of forget that when you stop performing. I think audiences also understand and enjoy the risk of failure.
Fourth, I honestly think the music can be better if you aren't too constrained. It's good to be as adaptable as possible - although this is a constant challenge.
MW: The idea of being more or less "emotionally constrained" when coding is striking. We don't tend to think of coding as an emotional experience - can you elaborate?
I was really just suggesting that people will use pre-written code if it's there. They are less likely to forge a new path if one is sitting right in front of them. It is this kind of emotional constraint that I was getting at.
Having said that, of course coding can be an emotional experience - it all depends on what you are coding. I don't get emotionally engaged when writing out a shopping list but I can well imagine that novelists become emotionally engaged when writing. I'm sure people have no difficulty imagining that coding can be frustrating when things are going badly and exhilarating when a difficult problem is overcome. Of course producing something aesthetic just adds to the range of emotional responses that coding can elicit (often accompanied by frustration and exhilaration). And of course there’s the music. If that’s not giving you some kind of emotional response then you’re just not working hard enough!
MW: I found your screencasts quite affecting, which surprised me - especially when in A Study for Keith (above), for example, there's nothing but code for the first minute or so. The music is emotive in its harmonic language but it wouldn't have the same impact without the code. There's a contrast in fact between the explicit, formal language of the code and the lyricism of the music. It's a sort of pathos that works because clearly these two things are tightly linked - the formal machinery of the code is generating the music.
Yes, this is true, but I also think it's worth remembering that this is not a new phenomenon. Composers have been using symbol systems to describe musical processes for a long time now. Of course programming languages have given us far more symbolic power but this does not deny the fact that composers have been working abstractly for a long time. I very much think of the program code as a "score", albeit a dynamic one. Of course this is one of the things that makes live coding fascinating - the audience actually gets to see the formal machinery that has really always been there.
Where live coding differs from the "score" metaphor is that it is also a performance practice. So there are two elements at work in the program code. Firstly the symbolic manipulation described above but secondly performative control. So in the context of an 18th century classical paradigm it is not enough to describe just the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic information, it is also necessary to describe the performance information (i.e. timbral/ gestural information over time). I think there is a very interesting mix of event based and signal based work in live coding which I think sets it apart as a platform for improvisation.
MW: The TOPLAP Manifesto is very interesting here. Its first line is "Give us access to the performer's mind, to the whole human instrument." Along similar lines it states that "Algorithms are thoughts." Do you agree?
This is a tough question. Is mathematics a creation of pure human thought, or does it have some platonic existence? Algorithms raise similar questions. But maybe this isn't the important question. Algorithms, whatever their true nature, can communicate a useful subset of thoughts - they are a shared vocabulary that we can use to communicate ideas. In this sense live coders communicate their ideas rather than share their thoughts.
MW: Though this is a distinct kind of idea; it's an idea for a procedure, an idea for action - and we perceive both the formal notation of the idea, and its action. And what's more we perceive the relation between those things - this is the program / process semantics idea that you pointed me to earlier.
Yes, exactly.
MW: I notice that Nick Collins has been exploring live coding without a computer - emphasising the idea that the "work" in live coding is an algorithm or procedure that can be implemented in different ways. What do you think of this move?
Does computation require a computer? Of course the answer to this is no it doesn’t. Is live coding about computation? I think the answer here is yes, although this is a bit weak given that we still don’t have any strong idea about exactly what computation is. So in short Nick's work is perfectly valid. However, my slightly longer response would be that I’m not sure of the point in doing live coding without the symbolic power of the computer/ programming language. I think my problem with non-formal live coding - live coding with humans for example - is that the process semantics become incredibly vague. Now of course this ambiguousness is something that some people love, but in terms of a new paradigm I’m not sure what is really different here from the conceptual art movement of the 60s? In contrast, I think the program and process semantics of formal live coding are something new. Maybe this all just comes back to my craft focus again and a bias for the art object. In my work I enjoy crafting the result in the task domain.
Something that does interest me though is working with acoustic performers. I've been thinking for some time about doing a live coding performance where Impromptu output standard musical notation to four LCD displays for a string quartet to perform from. The displays would update one bar at a time giving the musicians a small amount of look ahead. I’m also very interested in working with acoustic musicians in collaborative improvisational settings.
MW: In Stained you begin drawing graphics into the code window; I really enjoy the moment where we see you prepare the code for the graphics, only to have those forms overlay the code itself. This is a direct illustration of your point about code as both performance and notation - it literally flattens those two layers into the same visual space. Where is this visual side of your work heading?
AS : Well, I should start by saying that all my history is bound up in musical, not visual work - so I'm a complete visual novice. I think the easiest answer to your question is to say that I'm exploring the space at the moment. Just enjoying playing.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Murray McKeich - Generative Gothic
While I'm in Melbourne I've been trying to catch up with some of the artists who have made this town a new media hotspot over the past decade or so. I recently met up with Murray McKeich, an artist who came to prominence in the 90s here through the amazing (and sadly departed) Australian magazine 21C. He's refined a signature style, imaging urban detritus on a flatbed scanner, then grafting those elements together into surreal-gothic hybrids. In the hyped-up, Wired-style 90s, McKeich's images in 21C were startling; artefacts from a far more unsettling future.
In recent years, as I mentioned a while back on Generator.x, McKeich has discovered generative art. His approach, and the resulting work, are interesting in part because they are so different to a lot of what goes under that banner at the moment. At the core of his practice is a kind of heresy I find really appealing: McKeich doesn't code. He cheerfully admits to being "hopeless" at programming, and has no inclination to start. I had to fight the urge to talk him around, the way I do with students sometimes, leading them gently into the joys of Processing. But I had a feeling it would be futile, and besides, the processes McKeich has devised are coding, of a sort, and they are working beautifully.
Having accumulated a massive library of scanned-in source material, and discovering Photoshop's actions, McKeich began to experiment with automated processes; macros that would randomly pull source files into large multi-layer compositions. Hierarchies and groups of layers and sources provided a mix of control and randomness. He ran batch processes that would output many thousands of stills, then hand-picked the best to form very large image sets, with works like A Thousand Pictures of Footscray and DVN (detail above). The artists's motivation here, he insists, is pragmatic, not conceptual; he's interested in the specifics of an image, the moment of its impact, not in process for its own sake. For him generative techniques are essentially a matter of externalising aspects of his own process; computational studio assistants.
McKeich's next step was his discovery of AfterEffects, which he describes as "a superior imaging tool" to Photoshop - even for stills. With a more procedural approach, nested compositions, and powerful automation, AfterEffects remains his generative platform of choice. As a kind of bonus, it produces video. McKeich's procedural motion graphics use his signature palette of materials, but feel lighter, more ephemeral. In Maddern Square (above) we seem to skirt the edge of some dense conglomerate of street flotsam which is forever dissolving into itself.
Most recently McKeich has begun a new line of work - in one sense another brilliant heresy in the super-abstract context of generative art. He's been making faces, or rather, zombies. pzombie is from "philosophical zombie," a term for a hypothetical non-conscious human in a cognitive science thought-experiment. Like digital Golems, McKeich's pzombies (above - hi res) are cooked up from junk and grime, articulated by recursive coils of AfterEffects scripting. Smoke and mirrors, in a sense, but they have that visual impact McKeich is after; he shows them in large groups, which adds to the uncanny effect. The apparently infinite variety of these faces makes them both more intriguing and more unsettling than the usual science fiction clone-armies. While the artist might deny it, there's a conceptual hook here too; who are these portraits of, after all? Aren't these zombies the faces of those studio assistants, who work tirelessly through the night, those macros within macros. This time, they've been rendering themselves.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Array Art (More Multiplicity)
Since that earlier post I've begun to notice another form of multiplicity. I'm seeing arrays everywhere, lately. Grids or articulated fields of points; substrates for transitory patterns and forms in light or sound. In United Visual Artists' recent Battles video, the band plays in a triangular grid of vertical LED strips. Patterns traverse the array, bathing the surrounding rocky landscape in flickering, articulated light. Of course UVA have got form with arrays; their 2006 Volume installation uses a similar configuration - and in a way there's a continuum between these grids and the more conventional (but equally effective) LED wall they used for the Massive Attack tour in 2003.
Edwin van de Heide's Pneumatic Sound Field - blogged earlier - echoes UVA's light arrays, but uses flickers of high-pressure air. There's another parallel here, in that the elements in the array - the "emitters" - are simple, physical things; points of energy. Other arrays I've noticed recently include Robert Henke and Christopher Bauder's Atom; a grid of LED-lit helium balloons that also move vertically under remote control. See also Artificiel's Condemned Bulbes (2003); and then it's a short hop to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's recent Pulse Room at the Mexican pavilion in Venice. We could add a "mirror" sub-genre, with Aleph by Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai-Fischer and Daniel Lazin's beautiful articulated arrays. I'm sure there are many more.
UVA's body of work illustrates one of the reasons I'm interested in these arrays; they represent a kind of expansion, or explosion, of the screen. In part these arrays mimic everyone's favourite luminous grid, the digital display; but they literally take it apart; they expand it in size but also string it out through physical space. Instead of a vertical image (think cinema, painting, architecture, etc) we get an often horizontal array, a field to walk through. These arrays echo the display, especially its logics of modularity and generality - a logic shared by computational culture more broadly, where grids of uniform elements create wide spaces of potential. But these are not simply low-res displays. The visual unity of the screen is based on the merged imperceptibility of the pixel elements; by contrast these works expose those elements and emphasise their interrelations, making them available as kinesthetic as much as visual experience.
In "Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects" (1969) Robert Morris discusses the "anti-formal" move in sculpture of the time, where discrete geometric objects began to be replaced by wide, horizontal fields of undifferentiated stuff. He draws inspiration from Anton Ehrenzweig, a gestalt psychologist, and his notion of "synchretic" or "scanning" perception. This is an unconscious or "low level" mode of vision that Ehrenzweig claims provides access to richly detailed information in the perceptual field. To put it in modern (ie technological) perceptual terms, scanning occurs before recognition or gestalt formation, in the perceptual pipeline. As such, argues Ehrenzweig, scanning can easily accommodate "open structures" - complexity, contingency, chaos, the unformed or uncertain. Morris argues that the lateral, post-formal "fields" in sculpture of the time, build this mode of perception into their very structure; and ties this to a larger, McLuhan-like argument that "art itself is an activity of change ... of the willingness for confusion even in the service of discovering new perceptual modes."
Leaving the modernist declarations aside, there are some interesting links between this horizontality and the perceptual mode it demands, and the arrays of the works discussed here. Works such as Morris' 1968 Untitled (Threadwaste) (above - source) emphasise unformed materiality; in works like UVA's arrays or Lozano Hemmer's Pulse Room the material and the immaterial, or informational, play against each other in a very contemporary way. These explicit, low-res arrays reveal themselves as material structures (unlike the screen), but also as material substrates for dynamic, informational patterns and forms. The role of the light source is important here; in Condemned Bulbes and Pulse Room, archaic light technology is used for its material and sonic byproducts; the globe here isn't a pixel, it's a physical device, a buzzing, glowing object, a manifestation of electricity. Yet it's also a pixel, an abstract unit in a digital array; the two are complementary, co-constituents, rather than opposites.
Ehrenzweig's "scanning" perception also seems relevant all over again; it's exactly the mode of experience that a lot of data visualisation demands, and linked to what I've described as the "artist's squint" in data art. In a culture of digital multiplicity - where, as in these arrays, we are literally surrounded by digital grids - the gestalt or fixed image is impossible; "scanning" promises access to the pre-conscious information in these articulated masses. Sometimes these works offer a reassuring, unified image of the grid, where it's in sync, under control, centrally choreographed; but other times, especially in Lozano-Hemmer's work, it's a more complex, chaotic field.
What about the relation between this form of multiplicity and the generative variety? As well as an aesthetic interest in sheer "moreness" there's a conceptual connection. In a way these arrays are the inverse of generative multiplicities that sample wide spaces of potential. These grids partly act to manifest that space of potential explicitly; this is all there is, 64 balloons (as in Atom, above) or a few dozen LED strips. But what they reveal is how that explicit grid contains a far vaster, implicit space of potential, an unthinkable mass of relations, patterns and movements. So though the manifestation is very different they suggest the same dynamic - of the actual pointing to the virtual
