solitary automata

Computational Aesthetics 2008::Call for Artworks and Performances

http://computational-aesthetics.org/2008/ June 18-20, 2008, Lisbon, Portugal

Keynote Speakers: Pat Hanrahan, Stanford, CA and Ernest Edmonds, UT Sydney

You are invited to participate in the fourth annual workshop on Computational Aesthetics that will take place at the Hotel Riviera in Lisbon, Portugal from 18-20 June 2008. For more details see the conference web site.

Add comment February 25th, 2008 conferences • creativity • research

Cities and Complexity

I\’ve been reading Michael Batty\’s Cities and Complexity: understanding cities with cellular automata, agent-based models, and fractals, published by MIT Press in 2005. The weighty tome contains a large number of simple models of self-organisation using agent-based methods and CAs. Here is a simple model where agents roam around looking for friends. If enough get together they from a \”city\” and others start to migrate. The interesting thing is that you get quite a bit of diversity by changing two parameters: initial number of agents (a) and the criteria for communities to form (w). This image shows a gird of images created by changing these two parameters. This simple algorithm forms a variety of DLA-like growth structures.

Add comment January 4th, 2008 books • ecosystems • musings

Tourism of Doom

An article in today\’s Age newspaper talks of a growing trend in \”doomsday tourism\” – the desire to see the world\’s remaining naturally significant sites before they disappear due to the impact of global warming or unsustainable ecological practices.

According to the article, US tourists are rushing to visit places like Antarctica, Mount Kilimanjaro, the Maldives and the Great Barrier Reef before they are gone forever. These actions only accelerating the production of greenhouse gasses and hence, the destruction of such natural treasures.

This kind of story has eerie echoes of our past disregard for the consequences of our actions. In the late 1850s, Edmond Gosse spent part of his childhood with his naturalist father exploring the estuaries and rock pools of the Devonshire coast in England. His father documented the fragile beauty of marine life in the area, and published a number of popular books on these "living flower-beds, so exquisite in their perfection". The books helped draw attention to the area and soon a number of tourists, attracted by the sublime descriptions of natural significance and beauty, ventured to the coast to see and collect these underwater treasures.

Fifty years later, Edmond Gosse returned to the shores of Devonshire and observed the consequences of all this tourism. All of the "infinite succession of soft and radiant forms, sea-anemones, sea-weeds, shells, fishes" he remembered from his childhood was gone, destroyed by an "army of collectors" who had visited, simply to see this great beauty and take a small slice of it home with them.

"There is nothing, now, where in our days there was so much. … The fairy paradise has been violated, the exquisite product of centuries  of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning, idle-minded curiosity." he wrote in 1907.

"No one will see again…what I saw in my early childhood, the submarine vision of dark rocks, speckled and starred with an infinite variety of colour, and streamed over by silken flags of royal crimson and purple."

Indeed, no one will see what we saw in our childhood, or even our adulthood as the scales of change now operate globally, not only on some rock pool in an English coastline. Humanism is "the post-Christian faith that humans can make a world better than any in which they have so far lived" according to the philosopher, John Gray. This desire to make our world better has placed us at the brink of its demise. Our dilemma, as products of evolution, is that even though we can see the consequences of this folly, we don\’t seem to be able to stop it.

Add comment December 24th, 2007 climate change • environment • musings • travel

Ecosystemics Workshop

On Wednesday, December 12 2007, CEMA will hold a one day workshop on the applications and critical analysis of Ecosystems in electronic media art. Speakers include:  Palle Dahlstdet, Alan Dorin, Alice Eldridge, Petra Gemeinboeck, Mark Guglielmetti, Troy Innocent, Jon McCormack, Peter McIlwain, Ben Porter, Rob Saunders, and Mitchell Whitelaw. The workshop will be held at the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University, Caulfield Campus. 10am – 6pm.

Add comment December 11th, 2007 conferences • ecosystems • research

Just Pick the Pretty One

JUST PICK THE  PRETTY ONE

Improvised Electronic Music 

by Dahlstedt & Mcilwain

 

Live at Horse Bazaar Dec 11, 9 pm

397 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne(Between Queen St and Elizabeth St near the corner of Hardware St) 

An evening of interesting and creative music making by two very experienced and talented composers who come from opposite ends of the world. Palle Dahlstedt (Sweden) and Peter Mcilwain (Australia) are respected for both their creative work and their research into the development of new software and hardware tools for generative music. Palle\’s software is used by the Clavia company in the renowned Nord Modular synthesisers and Peter is a co-designer of Nodal a popular new composition system for Mac OS X. Their compositions have been performed around the world and they are both experienced in live improvisation in groups such as; Palle\’s duo pantoMorf and Peter\’s Sonic Art Group. Their commissioned work includes sound installations such as Peter\’s work in the Virtual Room of the Melbourne Museum.

 

For further information see:

http://users.monash.edu.au/~pmcilwai/

http://www.ituniv.se/~palle

 

Add comment December 6th, 2007 media • music

The Art of Artificial Evolution

At last, the publication of The Art of Artificial Evolution: A Handbook on Evolutionary Art and Music, Edited by Juan Romero and Penousal Machado, Springer - Natural Computing Series, Hardcover: 458 pages, 169 illus with 91 figs in color edition. November 2007 ISBN: 978-3-540-72876-4

My chapter is \”Facing the future: evolutionary possibilities for human-machine creativity\”. Here\’s the abstract:

This chapter examines the possibilities and challenges that lie ahead for evolutionary music and art. Evolutionary computing methods have enabled new modes of creative expression in the art made by humans. One day, it may be possible for computers to make art autonomously. The idea of machines making art leads to the question: what do we mean by ‘making art’ and how do we recognise and acknowledge artistic creativity in general? Two broad categories of human-machine creativity are defined: firstly, machines that make art like, and for, humans; and secondly, machines that make ‘art’ that is recognised as creative and novel by other machines or agents. Both these categories are examined from an evolutionary computing perspective. Finding ‘good’ art involves searching a phase-space of possibilities beyond astronomical proportions, which makes evolutionary algorithms potentially suitable candidates. However, the problem of developing artistically creative programs is not simply a search problem. The multiple roles of interaction, environment, physics, and physicality are examined in the context of generating aesthetic output. A number of ‘open problems’ are proposed as grand challenges of investigation for evolutionary music and art. For each problem, the impetus and background is discussed. The paper also looks at theoretical issues that might limit prospects for art made by machines, in particular the role of embodiment, physicality and morphological computation in agent-based and evolutionary models. Finally, the paper looks at artistic challenges for evolutionary music and art systems.

Ordering Information. (European orders now available, US orders are available in a few weeks.) Here is an extract from my chapter [pdf file].

Add comment December 6th, 2007 artificial intelligence • books • evolutionary computing • papers

Self-Assembling Robotic Art – Jane Prophet

A free presentation by British cross-disciplinary researcher and artist,
Jane Prophet.

5.30pm-6.30pm
Thursday 22nd November.
RMIT Research Lounge,
Building 28, Rm 5 (behind the library),
Swanston St, Melbourne

Prophet is working with the Avoca Project as part of School of Creative
Media RMIT\’s inaugural artist-in-residence program. She is an
internationally-renowned artist exploring, amongst other things,
complexity theory, aLife and the landscape. She was recently appointed
Professor at Goldsmith\’s Interdisciplinary Computing Department.
Prophet\’s residency at Avoca will culminate in a major site-specific
installation that will launch in December.

Add comment November 20th, 2007 talks

CEMA Artist Talk: Palle Dahlstedt

: cema artist talk
: 6pm on Wednesday 17th October
: G1.04 Lecture Theatre
: Monash University, Art & Design Building Caulfield
Palle Dahlstedt
Artificial Creativity

A principal interest of Palle Dahlstedt is artificial creativity – how computers can exhibit creative behaviour on their own, based on various generative techniques. Previously, he has created self-composing software in the form of interactive installations, questioning the concepts of authorship and the roles of the composer, musician and listener, and even what is the actual work of art. In a collaboration with the people at CEMA, he is trying to generalize this idea, in a work that generates a sort of universal gestural expressions, which will be simultaneously translated into image, sound and movement.

In his presentation, he will show a series of works based on the idea of presenting vast open-ended spaces of potential output, and let the audience/visitors/listeners explore them under more or less controlled circumstances.

**
(bio)

Palle Dahlstedt (b.1971)
Palle has performed a Noh solo in full costume and mask in Japanese TV, composed music for Egyptian dancers at the Library of Alexandria, written manuals for Microsoft and performed on a modular synth with wooden sticks in Northern Iceland. His music has been used in stress research on newborn babies, and he keeps colonies of sonic creatures in his laptop.

Dahlstedt’s music has been awarded several international prizes, and he has performed, presented and exhibited on six continents. While trained as a composer and musician, he works in all artistic fields. Besides being a freelance artist, Dahlstedt is a reseracher in computer-aided creativity at Goteborg University and Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and a co-founding lecturer at their Art & Technology international master’s program. Currently he is living with his family on the island of Brännö, on the West coast of Sweden.

Home page: www.ituniv.se/~palle

Add comment October 16th, 2007 talks

CEMA Artist Talk: Mitchell Whatelaw

: cema artist talk
: 6pm on Wednesday 10th October
: Art & Design Lecture Theatre
: Monash University
: Art & Design Building Caulfield
Mitchell Whitelaw
Generative & Data Practice

My recent creative work has been an attempt to follow up, and test out,
my critical and theoretical work on generative and data art. In works
such as Boom (2005) and Us is Them (2006) I test the ability of
generative systems to create \”model worlds\” as reflective responses to
the world outside the computer. The tension and interplay between
outcome or generated surface, and process or underlying model, is an
ongoing question. More recent experiments use data visualisation as a
complementary approach to the same tension, between referentiality and
generative abstraction.

http://teemingvoid.blogspot.com
http://creative.canberra.edu.au/mitchell

bio:::
Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer and artist with interests in
new media art and culture, especially complex generative systems and
digital sound and music. His work has appeared in journals including
Leonardo, Digital Creativity and Contemporary Music Review. In 2004 his
work on a-life art was published in the book Metacreation: Art and
Artificial Life (MIT Press, 2004). His current work spans generative art
and sonic and visual data-aesthetics. He is currently a Senior Lecturer
in the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra.

Add comment October 8th, 2007 talks

Terry Dartnall

Sadly, Terry Dartnall has died. I did not know Terry personally, but I very much enjoyed reading his papers and books, particularly Creativity, Cognition and Knowledge: an interaction.

To all who knew Terry Dartnall, it is my sad duty to inform you that he has just died. Terry was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer a few months ago, and died at home on Monday. During his career, Terry worked at number of Philosophy and Computer Science departments in Australia and overseas, for the last years of his life, at Griffith University. Terry was a larger-than-life figure, who threw himself passionately into philosophy and his many other interests, from rock climbing to writing poetry. He will be fondly remembered, and sorely missed.

Graham Priest
–
School of Philosophy
University of Melbourne
Melbourne, 3010
Australia

Add comment September 26th, 2007 books • musings • personal