solitary automata

EvoMUSART 2009

A belated post on EvoMUSART for 2009, this year held in the pretty city of Tübingen, Germany from 15–17th April. I presented a new paper (with Ollie Bown): Life\’s What You Make: Niche Construction and Evolutionary Art. The paper looks at how the biological process of niche construction can be used to generate diversity and variation in evolutionary art systems. We give two examples: a line drawing program and a sound-based ecosystem.

Add comment June 24th, 2009 ecosystems • evolutionary computing • talks • travel

Hyperanimation: digital images and virtual worlds

 

Add comment December 2nd, 2008 books • media

Generative music and visuals gig

A bit of fun…a gig with Alice (on cello & laptop) and Ollie (laptop) doing some generative music with some visuals supplied by VJ Jeeves. Stutter at Horse Bazaar Wednesday 12 November.  

Add comment November 12th, 2008 exhibitions

21:100:100

21:100:100 is a gallery-based exhibition of \”100 works by 100 sound artists produced in the 21st century\”. Developed by Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in collaboration with artists Oren Ambarchi and Marco Fusinato the exhibition featured all 100 works playing through individual headphones in the gallery space. Visitors can listen to each for for as long or as little as they like. While at first it seemed rather incongruous to use a visual arts space for sound art, the blue-light visual aesthetic, against the rats nest of headphone cables spiralling up into the ceiling like some kind of sonic life-support system, actually worked.

Naturally enough, a survey of this size features many local and international works of significance. Attempting to listen to all 100 works in one session is fairly ambitious, and your tolerance for focused listening may fade at some point less than 100 works…it\’s a fine line between sonic popcorn, noise and something deeper.

One of the standout works for me was David Dunn\’s The Sound of Light in Trees: The Acoustic Ecology of Pinyon Pines from 2006. Recorded using specialist microphones placed inside the bark of a pine tree in New Mexico, Dunn layers two years of recordings of beetle activity into a 1 hour soundscape that is both familiar and strange. 

Add comment October 19th, 2008 ecosystems • exhibitions

Talk at the VCA, Melbourne

I gave a talk to students at the VCA today on \”Systems, Simulation and Artifice\” as part of Chris Henschke\’s series on Art & Science. Chris is doing some very interesting work at the Australian Synchrotron, visualising and sonifying all kinds of data gathered from the device.

A few people asked me about the books I mentioned in the talk. They are:

Richard Dawkins: \”The selfish gene\” (2nd edition), Oxford University Press (wikipedia entry)

John Gray: \”Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals\”, Granta Books, 2003 (recent interview with John Gray)

Add comment August 15th, 2008 talks

Art with Brain in Mind

While randomly stumbling around the interweb, I came across and old discussion list that I often enjoyed reading and on occasions, making a contribution to. The Art with Brain in Mind list, started by David Zaig, ran from December 1999 until June 2004. No longer active, the list still has an online archive which states:

The goal of this forum is to explore the relationship between art and the mind/brain. It has a multidisciplinary focus and is open to as wide a range of relevant issues as necessary. Topics will range from the implications of the neural correlates of consciousness to the artistic and physiological roles of emotion to the possibilities of neurologically inherent aesthetic universals. This forum, a brainstorming platform, is informal and uninhibited: posting unconventional ideas, taking risks, or being open to a little silliness at times is not disallowed.

One of the more interesting debates was the old chestnut \”are computers conscious?\”, perhaps not so much for any real revelation on the subject, but as a open discussion of some rigour, yet free from the normal bounds of a peer-reviewed publication – a bit like a big conversation. Another one of my favourites was the never ending battle about the significance of evolutionary psychology to art and music.

While not that long ago, I now look back with a romantic tear in my eye to a time when the internet was a bit slower, time was a little more available, and contributing to discussion lists on lofty philosophical topics might have half-qualified as work. Sadly no more…

Add comment June 18th, 2008 music • musings • personal

Book Review: Life Extreme

Life extreme: an illustrated guide to new life, by Eduardo Kac and Avital Ronell, Dis Voir, Paris 2007.

This book is a collaboration between artist Eduardo Kac and philosopher Avital Ronell. Kac being one of the founders of twenty-first century \”bioart\”, most famously evident in his fluorescent rabbit Alba (2000). Former performance artist turned \”street philosopher\”, Ronell is well known for her juxtaposition of continental philosophy and the everyday, as evidenced in works such as The Telephone Book (1989) an innovative book that brought philosophy and technology together.

The format of Life Extreme is simple: place stark images of genetically engineered and otherwise human-modified animals in juxtaposition with short quotes from philosophers and poets throughout history. Many of these juxtapositions are followed with short conversational text or poetic musings about the implications of the images seen on the previous page. Rather unfortunately, but I suspect deliberately, one has to turn to the end of the book to get the actual \”story\”  about these animals and how they were \”made\”. For example, on one page there is an image of a mature Afghan hound and what appears to be a young puppy. Of course things are not as innocent as they seem and we discover in the \”Biographies\” section at the end that the puppy is the first cloned dog and the mature Afghan is the source of the somatic skin cells used to clone him.

Throughout much of the book I found an implicit sense about the ethics of what is being presented, in that the authors\’ moral position, while never explicitly stated, is understood to function a priori in all the commentary. For example, following the images of a featherless chicken, bread through cross-breading, there appears the following commentary:

But that other thing, which is inexpressible and which passes through this image, is a violence, and not only because that featherless being is presented as \”edible,\” ready for consumption, obscenely expedient, thoroughly industralized. What is shown is a being that is caged, cornered, shamed, questioning.

Seems a bit rich to me firstly to express so clearly what is claimed to be \”inexpressible\”. It seems an even bigger error to claim that such animals have any concept of \”shame\”, even more so that they are \”questioning\”. I\’ve never thought of chickens as being animals capable of asking questions. Even if this is a kind of non-linguistic questioning, what are the questions that these animals might ask that chickens with feathers don\’t ask?

Selective breading of plants and animals is one of the major reasons I able to sit here and write this, and that you are able to read it. Humans have modified their food landscape (a kind of niche construction) since the earliest days of agriculture and farming. That is one of the keys to our voracious success as a species (and here I mean success only in terms of enabling our current population numbers, not in a moral sense).

The underlying ethic in the book is that all this tampering is somehow \”wrong\” in a poetic sense, but without every really explicitly stating why (since being poetic enables a lot of mystification, ambiguity and fence sitting). Perhaps it is too much to expect this from Life Extreme\’s short poetic musings: I got a lot more from Dan Dennett\’s Darwin\’s Dangerous Idea on the possible and the actual in biology than a photograph of a cubic-shaped watermelon and a short quote from Leibniz in Life Extreme.

Nonetheless, the book does have its beautiful moments, such as the image of the blue flower: the romantic symbol of the unattainable. Unattainable in poetry, but conquered by science. Highlighting the important idea that we are limited rather than liberated by our imagination through technology. This romantic preciousness of the unattainable is destroyed and now \”everything can pass into existence, everything that was once limited or everything that lived in the imaginary can now have an empirical or at least a closer to real life\”.

Life Extreme is full of these little gems – easily digestible, but sometimes profound statements on ourselves and \”the natural\”, presented with a stark and gracious simplicity. A worthy addition to your library.

Add comment May 18th, 2008 books

Stalker

How I love your eyes, my friend,
With their radiant play of fire,
When you lift them fleetingly
And like lightning in the skies
Your gaze sweeps swiftly round.

But there is charm more powerful still
In eyes downward cast
For the moment of a passionate kiss,
When through lowered eyelids glows
The sombre, dull flame of desire.
– Fyodor Tyuchev

I went to see Andrey Tarkovsky\’s film Stalker at ACMI last night. The last time I saw this film was many years ago, in the good old days when David Stratton used to boost our collective cinema literacy on SBS. It still is a wonderful achievement that a free-to-air television station was able to show just about all the masterworks of cinema from the twentieth century.

In revisiting this film, the first thing that struck me was that this is very much a film of its own place and time: ideologically, politically, emotionally, aesthetically, structurally and even mechanically: the low-bandwidth optical soundtrack contains all manor of optical static and pops, revealed in full glory by the state-of-the-art cinema sound system.

But what you do get is the sense of the majestic aesthetics of which film is capable when used in the hands of a master. The whole film is like a canvas from the old masters, each scene demanding (and allowing) careful study, revealing subtle but important details that give the film aesthetic dimensions rarely achieved in modern cinema (an even greater achievement technically as much of the film had to be re-shot due to technical difficulties processing the new Kodak film stock in the Soviet Union).

Stalker works on so many levels and dimensions: as pure visual spectacle; the rich visual and sonic iconography the film presents; the minimalist space-age soundtrack so haunting and sparsely used; the rich philosophical and emotional questions the film asks and the answers it gives. Films like Stalker raised cinema beyond mere spectacle or entertainment, and established it as an artistic medium as capable and profound as any other.

Modern audiences seeing this film for the first time may have great difficulty with it, finding it long and boring. But it is neither. Unlike so much current cinema, it demands something from you and requires you to engage with it in a way you don\’t normally do with film. That is what makes it special.

Tarkovsky clearly saw the role and responsibility of the artist as one of monumental significance and responsibility: \”Art symbolises the meaning of our existence,\” he wrote. The very idea of the masterpiece – and the master creator – being able to channel the deepest and most important aspects of our existence into celluloid seems like a nostalgic fantasy today. We are afraid to make sweeping statements about the nature of our existence because it has become so fragmented and individual. I suspect for someone making films in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s it probably made perfect sense.

Stalker is mistakenly seen as a science fiction or fantasy film, but this is true only in a superficial sense. The film contains almost no elements one would typically associate with science fiction (the one exception being the possible revealing of the telekinetic powers of the Stalker\’s daughter at the end of the film). The primary theme of the film is that through love and self-respect man may uncover a truer meaning of existence. There are of course numerous sub-themes, such as the role of writers and scientists and how their authority is reduced to nothing without a society in which they can exist.

Stalker\’s sense of allegory that is simultaneously humorous and profound is typified by the multiplicitous use of water in the film (almost every scene appears to contain water, even underneath the floorboards in one scene as the three main characters approach \”the room\”).

\”People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I\’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn\’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, it\’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through. Whether he comes through or not depends on his own self-respect, and his capacity to distinguish between what matters and what is merely passing.\”

It is difficult to believe that a film like Stalker (or indeed almost any of Tarkovsky\’s films) could be made today. The political, financial and structural changes in the Russian film industry probably preclude it (although we do get glimpses, such as Alexander Sokurov\’s Russian Ark).

Much is made about the aura of \”masterworks\” in a time where so much visual culture exists in a digital unifier, where everything is YouTubed for posterity and instant access. Longing for masterpieces from the twentieth century of cinema, such as Stalker, may appear nostalgic and even ideologically naïve today. However, they do remind us of what great artists can achieve given the right time and space, and more importantly, belief and self-respect in their abilities and their role in society. Stalker may not be a film for everyone, but if you\’re willing to engage with it, it will reward you in ways that most other films wouldn\’t even dare to consider.

(Note: Stalker screens again on Sun 27 Apr 2008, 5.15pm at ACMI).

Add comment April 20th, 2008 media • musings

Val Plumwood

Val Plumwood was an academic, philosopher, and proponent of ecosophy. She was found dead on March 1, 2008 at her property, originally it was thought that she died from a snake or spider bite, but it was later confirmed that she died of a stroke. She was an ARC research fellow who had interesting ideas on our relationship with, and domination of nature. 

A recent episode of the Philosophers Zone on ABC radio national was devoted to her and discussions about her work. A blog set up by her friends pays tribute to her achievements and includes a beautiful image of her burial site. An modern animist death seems a nice way for an atheist to feel a connection with the environment in which they were part of.

Recommended reading: Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason. Routledge, 2002.

Add comment April 13th, 2008 environment • media • musings

Manipulating Artificial Ecosystems

EvoMUSART is on again, this year in Napoli, Italy. As part of our Design After Nature research project, Alice will be presenting our new paper \”Manipulating Artificial Ecosystems\”. The paper looks at how the biological concepts of niche construction and generalism/specialism can be used to manipulate software ecosystems. A shame one of the chairs can\’t be there, but I\’m sure all will go smoothly…

The details:

Alice Eldridge, Alan Dorin & Jon McCormack: \’Manipulating Artificial Ecosystems\’, in Applications of Evolutionary Computing (EvoWorkshops 2008: EvoCOMNET, EvoFIN, EvoHOT, EvoIASP, EvoMUSART, EvoNUM, EvoSTOC, and EvoTransLog), LNCS 4974/2008, Springer, Berlin 2008, pp. 392-401

Abstract:

Arti�cial ecosystems extend traditional evolutionary approaches in generative art in several unique and attractive ways. However some of these traits also make them difficult to work with in a creative context. This paper addresses the issue by adapting predictive modelling tools from theoretical ecology. Inspired by the ecological concept of specialism, we construct a parameterised �tness curve that controls the relative efficacy of generalist and specialist strategies. We use this to influence the population’s trajectory through phenotype space. We also demonstrate the influence of environmental structure in biasing evolutionary outcomes. These ideas are applied in a creative ecosystem, ColourCycling which generates abstract images.

Add comment March 25th, 2008 conferences • creativity • ecosystems • papers