http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1375634345/islands-of-the-dying-light

When I was talking with another parent about boys’ addiction to iPads (and pocket Nintendos), he said: yeah, I’ve gotten to the point where I scream, will you put the f^&%$ing iPad down and go watch TV!

Anyway, as you say, I think we’re getting back in touch with the value(s) of passivity these days. I think there’s a much more complicated temporality to “critique” or “being critical” than academics have traditionally argued for.

http://flowtv.org/2012/04/the-new-passivity/

I really like the idea of electronic passports that communicate one’s location in terms of social community. One could also imagine this getting very meta with a service that locates you in social media space (where you’re on, where you’re off). Of course, you could always turn this one off too…

Thanks for the funny piece,
ap

Given that Charles Taylor is one of the two or three worst arts critics I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading, I couldn’t agree more.

Taylor’s method of movie-reviewing can be summed up thusly: he assumes everything Pauline Kael ever wrote about anything is the incarnate Word of God. He simply parrots whatever she said about particular actors or directors, then lobs some extra snark and snideness in the direction of whatever readers happen to disagree with his views. He never, ever builds a cogent case for or against particular films, he simply assumes that Kael’s already done so so he doesn’t have to bother.

But Kael’s books are freely available at libraries and Amazon.com is just a click away – if I want to read Kael, I’ll read her. Taylor offers nothing to the reader who already knows what Kael thought.

When it comes to book reviewing, he generally copies B.R. Myers of “Reader’s Manifesto” fame (or infamy). Apart from copying Myers, all he does is rant about how Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and other acclaimed contemporary writers all suck, and how the snobbism of the literati has kept the likes of J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, and Dan Brown from getting their due (despite the fact that all but Brown among these names have received more than their share of admiring reviews). Taylor is simply saturated with resentment and bile, he conducts himself like he’s the smartest guy in the room. The only problem is, he isn’t actually smart, and on some level he knows it, so he’s in a perpetual state of disgruntlement. He likes condescending to the reader, he likes to sneer and to snark, but on the internet, anyone can reply to a belligerent critic, and Taylor hates being confronted with the evidence that the readers he likes to disdain are very often much smarter and more eloquent than himself, and can easily deflate his flimsy arguments.

This is the real source of his animosity. It’s not that bloggers are less qualified to write about movies or books than “the pros.” It’s just the opposite. Taylor hates having to face the proof, day after day, of his own intellectual inferiority to countless unpaid bloggers and commentators who can show him up for the banal non-thinker (with lousy taste in film and literature) he truly is.

On the other hand, if you’re dying to know how much of a raging hard-on Angelina Jolie or porn star Jenna Jameson give him, then Taylor’s your man. After reading his umpteenth gushy tribute to the divine Angelina (which commences with a sneering attack on the loser-ish sexual preferences of the dweeby beta males who might prefer one of Jolie’s inferior movie star peers such as Amy Adams), I’m not exactly weeping into my corn flakes that no one wants to publish or read Taylor anymore.

Indeed there is some complexity in the problem of autonomy here. Indeed a computer does absolutely nothing without the human culture’s interaction with it. So in that deep foundational sense, a computer program can never be creative, it can only do what its told. What is interesting in this area is the level of control we impose on the computers. If we want machines to surprise us (as I do) then we (programmers) need to allow space for that surprise, it could come from bugs, it could come from complexity. In terms of machine creativity it often comes from the liminal spaces that we do not conceive of (the cross of a vase and a car). In these cases, the machines do strange things because it does not have the same conceptual rules that inform our choices, so there are many things in between that are possible. The kind of products (antennas for example) that are produced by machines are evaluated through testing alone. When an engineer builds an antenna, they build on the conceptual and cultural theory of electronics and RF, they are bounded by discipline. If a machine does the same job it often has no such knowledge, all it ‘knows’ is that the simulation results indicate a successful design. That is why these products are not understood by us, because we use our own conceptual and cultural systems of knowledge to do things, not random choices validated by simulation. This kind of process is too slow to be useful for a person. Still the code for the simulation itself is a result of the designers conceptual and cultural knowledge. Thus these machines are always creative prosthetics.

This question of autonomy partially answers your question of “why”. The reason why I, as an artist, are interested in this stuff is because I’m not so interested in art as being an expressive discipline. (Although I can’t get away from the fact that all cultural practise does express, even if implicitly.) I’m more interested in art as a methodology for the exploration and examination of meaning. For me, art is philosophy. Of course you can’t explore meaning without making it. You just need to read a few papers in cognitive science and neurology that show that the metaphor of the computer is constantly being used to conceptualize and make sense of scientific data. We think through our technologies, so now we’re seeing everything as informational. (The entire premise of cognitive science is that symbols can be physically manifested in the pattern of activation of the brain, and those symbols are the mind, therefore the mind could be manifest in any other system that allows a similar mapping of state to symbolic representation, like a computer). By exploring creativity and autonomy (agency) in machines, I’m also reflecting on the systems of conceptualization we use to make sense of ourselves.

At the core of my current project is a philosophical question of meaning. If you take the world materially, and you don’t buy that humans are born with innate understanding of things in the world, then there is no material difference between signifier and signified (expect for intention). They are both just arrangements of material. So how does one gain meaning as a symbol and another does not? Developmental psychology says that a caregiver makes things meaningful by repetition and shared attention. The sound of the word “dog” becomes associated with some object out in the world. This model is still causal though, because although meaning is socially constructed, it is impacted upon the infant by the world. That is, the world has a causal impact on the structure of the infants conceptual system. In this way, we are passive receivers of the world, we are not agents, we simply react.

The thing I could never get my head around in Piagetian theory, is how this one-way causality could result in the infant developing intention. The theory references the reactive stimulus response patterns that become rich and complex. Their triggers become more and more broad, and eventually the routines are “differentiated” from their contexts, and can occur spontaneously (intentionally) in the absence of the trigger. How do you get from could be triggered in any context to actually being triggered?

In contemporary cognitive science there is this notion that the world impacts us, and this sets off a series of unconscious cognitive processes, which often result in behaviours and action in the world. (Just think of any routine you go through, how many things you do without realizing it). Consciousness is far from explained, but is thought of (by some) as an illusion. It is a process that allows us to take responsibility for those automatic cognitive processes that simply happen. In this case, consciousness is not causal at all, but a sense of awareness of some automatic process that reacts to the world.

The point is: are we as autonomous and intentional as we think we are? From a phenomenological perspective this seems bizarre, that intention is just an illusion, but reflects a much broader context of thinking about autonomy and self. I mean even if we think of the universe as deterministic (its a bit hard not to) then causes lead to effects, and therefore the only cause was the start of the inverse, and every choice we make is a result of a very long chain reaction. Sure you could throw in some quantum noise and complexity, but how is intention as randomness any better than intention as causally determined?

The deepest part of my work is trying to get at this idea of autonomy. Lets look at constraint, we could say that a machine’s “creativity” is just randomness in a constrained system (which it is), and that human creativity is different because we are free and have free will. But then our choices are also constrained, there are things that we cannot conceptualize, cannot sense, cannot say. We are constrained by our biology and our society. How can we really say we are free, when we around bounded by such constraint? How is this so different than a machine? Sure, humans create machines, we are not “made” by a designer, but is the random variation of evolution any better? There is the idea of autopoesis, that we are self-created (fits well with Piaget’s idea that we spontaneously become intentional as a gradual process away from simple reaction). But how does this work? How can you get something from nothing? Does autopoesis make any logical sense? Even building complexity makes sense, but saying intention arises from complexity is problematic (then animals and perhaps whole ecosystems have intention and self).

Art history has a lot of examples of art-as-making-rules. Perhaps this interest is always rooted in this question of intention, free will and autonomy.

What does it mean for a viewer? In the context of all the text above it should be clear that the criticisms that we can apply to machine’s can also be applied to us. So, lets go back to meaning. The theory of meaning I’m working with is that some stimulus out there sets off a set of processes that situate that stimulus in the context of all implicit and explicit lived experience. The meaning of a dog is the shape, colour and feel of fur, but also all the memories of childhood life with dogs, the enjoyment of play and the pain of loss. The meaning of a dog is its place in every context in which there has been a dog with all the sensorial and emotional baggage that goes with it. It also extends into use, what we can use a dog for. All of this requires no intention, it’s simply the world impacting a system where the system situates every new input in the context of all previous input, and all previous baggage. Yes, a machine has no emotions, and certainly has no notion of “use” because that requires a goal, which requires a drive for survival, or at least a reason for being. In terms of causal meaning, I think what is missing is only the richness of the meaning for the machine vs meaning for the person.

So how can a representation constructed by a machine be meaningful for the viewer, even if that object was not encoded to have a specific meaning by the programmer? It’s just enough overlap of sensed experience. My system is meant to “see” (through a camera) for very long periods in public space. Each image is broken into pieces, those pieces considered among all previous pieces (according to visual features), and a network of associations is formed. This network is the meaning of that object for the machine. Now if a viewer sees that object in the representation and recognizes it as the object out here in the world, then that is communicating that object, and depending on the context in which the object is presented by the machine, some notion of the meaning of the object for the machine (however simplistic).

Now, what if the purpose of the system was to develop a human-like meaning of objects in the world? (where the purpose of my system is an exploration of the question of meaning, autonomy, intention, and creativity). It would at the very least require a similar body with which to interact with the world, and also a care-giver to reinforce certain patterns. If it needed to eat to survive, and therefore had hardware/biologically rooted desires, it would have a much richer sense of the world (in terms of meaning as described above). Perhaps the meaning in those representations would seem human-like.

It seems your argument against these systems is the lack of an artistic intention constructing meaning in the representation. My interest in these systems is a question of intention and meaning in general (humans, animals and machines). Still for a machine to be human-like it would certainly need to have a similar kind of life, it would need to survive and be highly adaptable. Would such a machine be conscious? Well that is an open question, maybe without an answer. It seems clear it would be able to provide meaningful statement about the world though. The richness of that meaning is debatable…

To be clear I see little bridge between the phenomenological experience of consciousness and the ideas stated above. I don’t believe that machines are like humans, and that we could upload our brains into machines. The radical extension of these ways of thinking points toward a real question of our own selves and consciousness. I think this is a role for humanities thinking in science, highlighting the philosophical implications of some of these ideas.

I hope that my art reflects the question of understanding ourselves when there is no ground, only simulacra. Our conceptions change our perceptions and cause us to construct our world in a certain way, which effects our perceptions and then our conceptions. Maybe this is the key to the question of intention and autonomy, loops over lines. Maybe something never appears from nothing, there was always another something in the nothingness.

But if we’re talking about trying to create processes of autonomous computational creativity, well, for me that was the big question — what is the point of non-human creativity from the standpoint of either the human producer (who made the program but makes nothing after that) or the human recipient who enjoys the work of art made by a computer?

In the former case, I’m sure there is ton’s of creativity that goes into making automated creativity, so of course that’s valuable. But I still wonder whether it is different in kind from making something from beginning to end — making rules and making things seems different to me.

In the latter case (the receiver), my point was simply what kind of reception computational artifacts make possible — one of the points of art is to commune with the individuality of the person behind the creation. That becomes harder with artificial (or autonomous) creativity. That person is less present in the artwork. Second, the types of things computational creativity may create may be more meaningful to another computer, but perhaps less interesting to a person. That may account for why, on the whole, there is no Bach of Artificial Creativity. But it may just be a matter of time, though I think there is an ontological problem there between the identity of the maker and that of the receiver that might pose problems of reception. That’s what interests me.

On the whole of course, the point as I said in the post is that these types of projects make us look more closely at what art is and that is its true benefit for the moment, before anything of true popular appeal has been created.

thanks again for your spirited thoughts,
ap

Also I wanted to post a link to our MAMAS research group: http://metacreation.net/

I have a few thoughts. First off I have to state my bias. I’m an artist (first trained in traditional arts of photography, drawing, installation, etc., then doing a B.F.A. in “new media” where I focused on interaction, and finally my graduate work in meta-creation / computational creativity. I do practise in this area, but I would argue on the margins of it as illustrated here: http://vagueterrain.net/content/2011/09/origination-and-metacreation-conversation-ben-bogart)

It’s one thing to imagine the value of computers being “intelligent,” i.e. doing things for us so that we don’t have to do them and can concentrate on other things. But what good does it do for a computer to be “creative”?

Science, engineering, art, music, carpentry, etc. all involve creativity. What we consider valuable is valuable as a result of some creative process. There already exist examples of meta-creative systems that produce artifacts, for example antennas and electronic circuits, that perform better than the human-made counterparts, and in some cases are not even understood by human experts. Even in a very pragmatic sense, meta-creation has a lot of potential to contribute to technical endeavour. As mentioned in the post it is clear you understand the value of such projects as examinations of creativity in general, and perhaps bearing on human creativity. I may argue that the value of any meaningful representation / technology / sensorimotor routine is two fold, on one hand is its direct pragmatic use, and on the other its focal point on which to consider how it reflects our way of thinking.

It overprivileges reception over production.

I think this statement exposes some biases in your consideration of art. It entirely buys the notion that the art is simply in the *product* of the system. For me, art is not in the product, in fact the artwork *is* the system. Not just the technical / computation system, but the causal and cultural system that has allowed that whole project to exist. (More on this in my thesis, in particular chapter 6: http://www.ekran.org/ben/writing/Ben-Bogart-Thesis.pdf) Under this consideration it is actually production that is emphasized, and not reception. In my work the role of the viewer is not meant to be only a passive recipient of images, but to be challenged and critical of computational (and scientific) notions of mind. Perhaps the artwork (the technical system) is only an entry point into a broad discussion, where the art is meant to be.

Our brains are amazing at integrating things, but there are of course limits to what we can take in, remember, and combine.

There are limits to everything. Saying that computational methods allow a creative system to “draw on” more material that a human creator is greater devaluing of the human mind. I argue that the reason why images constructed by meta-creative systems are so limited in terms of variation (in form) is because of their lack of material to draw upon. There is no computational system that is able to integrate and abstract an entire lifetime of human experience in a representation compact enough to be tractable. What we know of the world is extremely rich and complex, and is not all explicit, much of it is actually implicit and unconscious. It is clear that our memories are extremely rich, both in terms of structure, but also in terms of being situated in a complex and multidimensional network of associations–and to a degree not possible with current computational methods.

…is art about the intensity of the synthesis – the ratio of compaction within a representation, the way it accounts for the maximal amount of associations on the part of a viewer, and thus its “pleasure” – or is art about something else?

Why I went into art is because what it is and can mean is much more fluid than in other areas. There is no single answer to what art is. My answer is that art is an application and/or examination of meaning (the latter for myself). Why does a set of formal patterns on a wall become meaningful for a viewer? How does the world become meaningful / conceptualized?

I see two disconnected ideas above: 1. compactness of representation, and 2. number/depth of associations caused in the viewer. I can’t get my head around them being the same thing at all.

Regarding 1, it has been proposed that the ability to compress something is relative to our ability to conceptualize it (conceptualization as compression), and that creativity may be the production of a new compressor to conceptualize a novel stimulus: http://www.springerlink.com/index/p450676545184762.pdf I don’t see how compactness has anything to do with the viewers reading of the work. A highly compressed representation may be less meaningful than a uncompressed one.

Regarding 2, I called this “the perturbation of the viewer” in my thesis. I think I may agree that the more different ways in which a artwork stimulates a viewer the more meaningful it may be considered. I think of this as inspiration. The value of art is in its ability to inspire other thoughts/ideas and artworks. (maybe this is the value of any representation). It certainly shows that the pleasure of an artwork is not only sensorial, but also cognitive / conceptual (not to buy into any dualism here). Also it works well for my own work, where the artwork is a context of discourse, through writing, public discussion, etc..

All computational systems are imbued with meaning and are therefore extensions of our conceptual systems. What “creative” machines do includes both solving pragmatic problems, and includes the construction of representations and processes that allow us to reflect on our own (collective) cognition. Creative machines are no different than any other cognition extending technology, they allows us to abstract from minuscule details and attend to the larger picture. While we can reflect on our own implicit and tacit choices and behaviours (if we are altered to them), how can we reflect on the abstractions and assumptions buried in computational systems that extend out cognition?