CSCI E-9 Computational Art:
Explorations in Screen-Based and Physical Computing (22834)

• Please read this statement, then reflect on how it might (or might not) be relevant to your own work and craft a short response. What are computational ideas doing to your concepts of space, information and communication? How does access to this kind of processing allow you to embody (or disembody) ideas? A written response is acceptable, but we will also accept images, poems, songs, dance, etc. Please POST YOUR RESPONSE to the class board by THURSDAY.


• For next class: pages 1-132 In "Processing: A Programming Handbook"

• Selection from "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology"
• Selection from "The Practice of Everyday Life"
• Selection from "Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects"


Please consider the above readings in light of our class discussion and the three concepts that we wish to focus on this semester: INTENTION, AWARENESS, ACTION.

The deCerteau and the Raby texts may be considered compliments to each other, while the Braitenberg is quite different. If you are unfamiliar with deCerteau, you will probably find this the least accessible of the three texts. You may find deCerteau's bio on wikipedia helpful. Unless it is of particular interest to you, do not concern yourself too much with deCerteau's connection to psychoanalysis, what we are most interested in is his unique take on "end users" and how that might connect to us, as consumers of computation and as artists seeking to "poach" data for our own purposes.

Pick ONE of the following two options and post a response to the class blog by Friday:

1. Respond to the texts in any way you see fit, as long as the result may be shared with the class. An essay is perfectly acceptable (as is a painting, drawing or piece of software, interpretive dance or website) Be prepared to share and explain your response to the class.

2. Write. Consider the texts in light of our goals of awareness, intention and action. In particular, next week we will begin working with a toolkit that allows for the visualization of data. What does access to computation allow us to do to data that we cannot do without? What does it PREVENT us from doing? Concrete examples are good, for example, consider a way in which your understanding of a thought or idea has been clarified or or subverted recently – was computation involved? What was the experience like? How could it have been better or worse? In what ways can access to computation change our approach to information?

• For next class: pages 133-204 In "Processing: A Programming Handbook"

• Selection from 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance
• Selection from Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
Goulish writes about a particular (and to some, peculiar) relationship to mathematics, while Tufte writes about "Enthusiasts, partisans, and liars" who "have long tinkered with graphical evidence." As we set about making art with and about visual representations of data, what rights and responsibilities do we have? Are artists justified in appropriating scientific means and language? What, if anything, do we owe ourselves in this process? Our viewers?

• For next class: pages 205-314 In "Processing: A Programming Handbook"

• For presentation/discussion on the 21st. Please compose an interpretive dance. Or a processing program.
  NOTE: The entire NKS text is available online at www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/
  
  
  • Selection from "A New Kind of Science": Foundations
  
  
  • Selection from "A New Kind of Science": How do simple programs behave?
  
  
  • Selection from "A New Kind of Science": Randomness
  
  
  • Excerpt from "The Condition of Virtuality" published in "The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media"
  
  
  Thus far the voices we have heard in our reading have been largely from the arts. This time we have one brief excerpt from Katherine Hayles (Hayles is prof. of English at UCLA known for her work on the relationship between literature and science, although this except was actually chosen for its layman's explanation of Shannon's maximum entropy with respect to signal/noise). And finally a voice from the science camp, with a series of excerpts from Stephan Wolfram's New Kind of Science.
  
  Given the propensity for evocative pop-science titles (IE "The God Particle", "The Jaguar and the Quark," "Everything and Nothing") it is easy to ignore the title of Wolfram's book, until you realize that he means exactly what he says. In NKS Wolfram proposes nothing less than an entirely new paradigm of science, a claim that almost no one would dare make, then proceeds to back it up with a text whose footnotes contain enough material for multiple theses, but remains lucid and readable throughout. Wolfram provides layers upon layers, and we welcome your consideration of any of them, but because the text is so rich we thought it best to point out that for the purpose of this class we are interested in Wolfram primarily as a practical example of the incredible richness of "simple" computation and generative systems.

NO CLASS ON THE 18th - Break
On the 21st (next class) you will be presenting your first project ideas to the class.

• Please read the first chapter of Ben Fry's Visualizing Data.


• Please read the following (lots of links here, but the actual reading is quite short):
  
  
  • The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin
    
    
  • Generative Music:"Evolving metaphors, in my opinion, is what artists do." - Brian Eno
    
    
  • Wikipedia: Pareidolia
    
    
  • Some examples to look at (at least open and skim - read them in depth if you're particularly interested):
  
  
  http://www.ubu.com/film/burroughs.html
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_painting
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_randomness
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music
  http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/s.cgi
  http://www.synestesia.fi/
  
  The Wikipedia article on Applications of Randomness begins with the line "Randomness has many uses in gambling, divination, statistics, cryptography, art, etc." Consider the remarkable nature of this statement - There are few ideas which find equal use in both divination and science. Randomness and human interpretation or use of randomness is deeply ingrained in a wide range of human endeavors, from statistics (supposedly about the clarification and sorting of data) to cryptography (the deliberate obfuscation of information) And yet, randomness is something that computers find extraordinarily difficult to accomplish.
  
  Our world is analog and messy, and our digital tools are the exact opposite - small fascist universes in which it is perhaps impossible to create a "true" mess. At the same time, Randomness has always played an important part of the arts. While constructing computational artworks, how might we use randomness to make something more interesting? How random is too random? If a human writes software to generate music or visual art at random, who is the author of the work?
  
  

• For next class: pages 315-394 In "Processing: A Programming Handbook"


• What is ManyEyes?:
  Many Eyes: A Site for Visualization at Internet Scale


• Who uses it and why?:
  Harry Potter and the Meat-Filled Freezer: A Case Study of Spontaneous Usage of Visualization Tools



• Jesse will be discussing Chuck next week. These are not required reading, but if you want a preview:
  
  
  • ChucK: A Concurrent, On-the-fly, Audio Programming Language
  
  
  • Combining Analysis and Synthesis in the ChucK programming language

No readings. Work on your projects.

• No readings. Work on your projects - they are due next class.

Minds, Brains, Awareness and Action - Part I


• If software is a way of describing intent, input and output are a way of providing both awareness and action - with the addition of a micro controller and a series of sensors, we expand our programs into objects that can both learn from and affect the world. As artists working with computation, we have a unique ability to not only create an artwork as an expression of our thoughts, but to actually embody a small part of our thoughts (ourselves?) into an object that may be thought of as living a separate, smaller parallel life of its own.
  
  The next sets of readings will be a series of readings on minds, brains and awareness - what is it and where does it come from? What does it mean to try and make software aware of the world? Is it possible to build a soul, or to contain a piece of our own in an object?
  
  Rediscovering the Mind: Harold J. Morowitz (With reflections by Douglas Hofstadter)
  
  NYTimes Magazine The Brain on the Stand: Neuroscience Law and Responsibility
  
  NPR podcast on Neurophilosophy. Not a reading, but a "listen"... It's about 45min (you can listen to the stream or download it to your iPod)

• Propeller reading

Minds, Brains, Awareness and Action - Part II

• The Soul of the Mark II Beast
  
  
• Wolfram NKS Chapter 12: The Principle of Computational Equivalence
  We would like you to focus your attention on section 7, "The Phenomenon of Free Will." Please read that section thoroughly, but also make an effort to read through (or at least skim) the rest of the chapter.

• Propeller reading

Intelligence, Posthumanism and Cats



• What is awareness? intelligence? What does it mean to know something?
  James Carse: Why a Philosopher Needs a Cat
  
  
• Are we all just meat? Maybe we ought to evolve ourselves...
  Stelarc: Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strategies
  
  
• How alive is alive enough?
  Sherry Turkle: Making a Pass at a Robot
  
  
• Alan Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence
  Forming the basis of our evaluation of AI is the so called "Turing test", the basis of which is outlined in this article. For historical reasons, it is important to know about Turing. This article runs a bit long - please make an effort to read at least up to "3. The mathematical objection" and the rest if you are interested.

NO CLASS (Reading Period)

NO CLASS (Reading Period)

• Sensorial Interfaces: Chang, Iishi
For the next project you will be designing and implementing a user interaction. We would like you to focus on the experience itself - begin with a "design brief." This need not be formal, but should describe what the experience is and how it is different than the current experience. In SENSORIAL INTERFACES CHang and IIshi. Pay particular attention to the chart on page 52 (numbers on pages), the description of sensorial mapping and to the section "Understanding the Rituals." Also "Understanding Affordances," look to understand why it might be useful to augment a particular interaction... does it make sense? Is the task better served without augmentation? What about "detechnologizing" makes sense? When doesn't it?


• Simplicity in Interaction Design: Chang, Iishi, et-al

• Information Theory: Excerpt from Tog on Interface by Bruce Tognazzini
  
  
  
• The New Theatre: Excerpt from Happenings and Other Acts by Michael Kirby
  

• Assignment: work on your presentations for thursday.

• Reading TBA

• Assignment:No readings: work on your projects!

• Assignment:No readings: work on your projects!

• * PHYSICAL COMPUTING PROJECT DUE TODAY: APRIL 21st *


Assignment: For your writeup, two options. 1. Convey an interesting/unique/strange experience you've had in a virtual world. What specific characteristic of the world allowed for this experience? 2. Humans are social creatures. In general, what do you think virtual worlds add or take away from our interactions?


• Avatars!: Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet
  I am not assigning any actual reading from this 1997 book, but it is an amazing artifact. Don't miss this page with a screen shot of an internet based world from 1995. If you have the time, explore the text a bit.
  
  
• William Mitchell: Replacing Place
  Professor of architecture William Mitchell surveys the history of virtual spaces. This essay is a good historical grounding but is itself almost amusingly archaic (published in 1999), a circumstance that visits any essay that attempts to capture a freeze-frame of a rapidly evolving technology. Written several years before the launch of SL.
  
  
• Second Earth
  From MIT Technology Review Aug 2007: "The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth."



• If you don't have one, sign up for a free secondlife account. After you have done this, please email me your Avatar name so I can add you to our class group in SL.

• Secondlife: Getting Started and building: Please read chapters 1,2,3,4 (pp1-75) in "Creating Your World" text.

• REMEDIATIONS. Art in Second Life
  Article from the Journal 11Hz, a nice overview of recent use of SL by artists. This article takes a very particular Artworld viewpoint and position, but is extremely useful for exactly that reason.



• Henry Jenkins: Interactive Audiences? The "Collective Intelligence" of Media Fans
  Indirectly related to virtual worlds, but closely tied to our role as producers and consumers of new media, prof of Comparative Media Studies Henry Jenkins asks us to consider what it means for fans to find their tactics at the edges of mass-market strategies:

• Secondlife: Scripting and Avatar Animation: NON CONTIGUOUS chapters 6,7,8,11 in "Creating Your World" text.

• TBA: Virtual worlds reading

• TBA: SL technical reading

• NO CLASS: Harvard Finals week - prepare for your final presentation!
  Note we will hold optional office hours/group work time.
  
  

• NO CLASS: Harvard Finals week - prepare for your final presentation!
  Note we will hold optional office hours/group work time.
  
  

• Your final presentations. Good luck and goodnight. So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, goodbye... stay in touch.