This
lecture looks at the approach being taken by artists working with the new media.
In particular it will focus on two areas of contemporary interest, robotic art
and generative art. It will draw examples of these approaches from music, the
visual arts, the plastic arts and textual art. It will seek to highlight the
interests and aesthetics of artists using these approaches.
As Eduardo Kac notes in his recent article in Convergence
" One of the most problematic issues of robotics in art is the very definition of what a robot is" ( Kac 2001 pg. 76)
Kac goes on to note there are a number of traditions that the contemporary artists has to take note of the :
Erkki Huhtamo also recognizes 'soft' virtual entities, such as 'bots' operating on the Internet (see ALife) and desktop programs such as digital pets, and questions whether these should be regarded as robots as well. (Huhtamo and Kusahara 2002).
The lack of a single definition of what a robot is has actually stimulated robotic art. Many artists claim that their work actually highlights the complex issues and ambiguities surrounding robots, and that they are important part of an ongoing discussion about the robotic condition in our contemporary societies. As Erkki Huhtamo notes:
"It might be claimed that all robots are in the end discursive entities (although often material, as well) determined by the discourses enveloping them at different times and indifferent cultural contexts" ( Huhtamo and Kushara 2002).
As Kac notes, the aim of the robotic art is to challenge our understanding of robots by:
"questioning….our premises in conceiving, building, and employing these electronic creatures." (Kac 2001a peg 76)
An example of this approach is Norman White's Helpless Robot or HLR from 1988. As Kac notes:
"This work humorously reverses the polarity of robot-human relationships, asking the humans to help an electronic creature conventionally designed to be a human aid." (Kac2001b Pg. 94).
Robotic art has also addressed the social context in which machines are utilized. The collaborative team, Survival Research Laboratories (see the SRL website) use machines in performances that also feature music, explosives, fire and animal parts.: SRL argue that they are:
"an organization of creative technicians dedicated to redirecting the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare."(SRL website)
Kac's article identifies a number of strategies used by robotic artists explore robots,
Interest
in telepresence has been particularly stimulated by the popularization of the
Internet and the World Wide Web and it often called net art. A number of arts
project have addressed the issues surrounding being able to interact with an
environment at a distance. The 1995 art installation, The Telegarden, for example,
utilized the web to enable visitors to plant and water seeds in a real living
garden using an industrial robot arm (see The Telegarden website). Machiko Kurahara
argues that :
"the main goal of piece is not the gardening itself. The possibility of cultivating a real garden with real plants at a distance provides members from all over the world with an arena of communication. In fact, because the plants might overgrow or have other problems, the tele-gardeners need to talk to each other. The serious-looking industrial robot arm is the key to fostering a network community." ( Huhtamo and Kusahara 2002).
Interestingly, with the introduction of cheap webcams, this high art interest in 'telepresence' has now become a popular cultural phenomenon. The earliest and arguably strangest example of webcam's popularity is the now defunct Trojan Room Laboratories Cambridge University Coffee Pot site. This site was wired up by researchers at the University of Cambridge who wanted to know whether there was any coffee in their coffee pot. However, between 1995 and 2001 this site received over 2.4 million hits from visitors all over the world (Wired 2001).
***Webcam workshop***
One
of the problems with trying to distinguish a true 'robotic' art centres on the
relationship between software and hardware deployed in a particular project.
The difficulty of this relationship is clearly demonstrated by the work of the
artist, Harold Cohen.
Harold Cohen is an English Artist who has spent the last thirty years working in the USA on AARON, an artificial intelligence-based autonomous painting system. AARON produces pictures using the formal and aesthetic principles that Cohen has 'taught' the program over the last thirty years. AARON is more than just a sophisticated drawing package, however, as the actual outcome is determined by the program and not by Cohen or any other human agent.
AARON has had many guises over the last thirty years, its hardware has ranged from a small drawing turtle crawling over a piece of paper to an elaborate plotting arrangement. Recently, however, AARON has a fully digital download available on the Internet as freeware ( see Kurweil Cyberart Technologies website). Arguably AARON started off life as a robotic art system and has now become an artificial intelligence art system. Erkki Huhtamo notes that:
" This leads me to ask which more important in a robotic system, its 'brain' or its 'body'?" ( Huhtamo and Kusahara 2002).
This binary opposition might be rather artificial. Machiko Kushara concludes that
"if the thing that matters in a 'robot' is its brain, the concerns explored by robot art could easily shift to other fields, A-Life art, multimedia art, net art, interactive art, and so on…. I think the notion of 'robot' has always been associated with the capability of movement as well as with an artificial body or brain." (Huhtamo and Kusahara 2002).
AARON provides a very good example of the kind of process-based operation being investigated by artists working with computers. It also provides a good link between robotic and generative art.
Generative art has been defined in almost as many ways as there are practitioners
working in generative art. Here are two definitions of generative art, provided
by workers in this field:
A. "Generative art is a term given to work which stems from concentrating on the processes involved in producing an artwork, usually (although not strictly) automated by the use of a machine or computer, or by using mathematics or pragmatic instructions to define the rules by which such artworks are executed." (Adrian Ward Generative.Net Website)
B. "Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist creates
a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine,
or other procedural invention, which is then set into motion with some degree
of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art."
(Philip Galanter Generative.Net Website)
Visual artists have been interested in the relationship between representation and mathematics since antiquity. Artists have observed that a number of regularly occurring patterns can be observed in nature. These observations have spurred artists to use number system such as the 'golden section' and the 'vanishing point' in their work.
One of the most influential mathematicians in this area has been Fibonacci, who described a number of number series which have fascinated artists. The so-called Fibonacci Numbers - ( a series such as 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987) have influenced a whole range of art work from sculpture to animation. More recently artist and animators have found the mathematics of fractals to be useful in describing organic structures such as the curve of a sea-shell.
A number of artists have explored the opportunities made available by computers. They have used fractal and Fibonacci programs to generate artwork. These techniques are now available to website designers. For example, Macromedia Flash MX, the 2-D animation tool, features a programming capability using action script which allows artists to produce generative artwork for the Net.
Music is a temporal art, that, is it occurs in the linearity of time. Traditional western composers have undertaken to exactly describe the order and contents of all of the sounds in their pieces. The write out 'note for note' all of the sounds they want and expect to hear. More recently, however, a tradition of high-art experimental composing has grown up with different aims. As the critic and composer Michael Nyman notes:
"Experimental composers are by and large not concerned with prescribing a defined time-object whose materials , structuring and relationships are calculated and arranged in advance, but are more excited by the prospect of outlining a situation in which sounds may occur, a process of generating action ( sounding or otherwise) , a field delineated by certain compositional rules." ( Nyman 1999 pg. 4)
In doing so, they set up procedures that then generate music.
Musicians have been ready adopters of computer technology. Synthesizer, sequencers and FX generators are all standard equipment in music studios. To date most of the music made with this equipment has been prescribed using the traditional compositional mode, with the composer mapping out every note ( one after the other). Sequencers and Loop-generators have also been used .
The procedural capabilities of the computer have been used to create 'generative music'. With an off-the-peg program such as 'Band-in-a-Box' the user feeds the program the relevant chords for the song and the program generates a backing track. More avant-garde approaches
A recent article in Computer Music argues that music:
"Film and TV have influenced the structure of music for the last century, as did theatre and opera before them. Interactive applications and entertainment are now set to rewrite the rulebook. Certainly, within the last 100 years , film has been the single most important influence on narrative music, having been responsible for some of the most interesting, provocative and memorable music of the last century. Although the influence of film music can be felt heavily within the new wave of games consols through increased use of 'orchestral' soundtracks, the actual structure of the music and the purposes for which the pieces are written is distinctively different. The reason for this restructuring is the modular and interactive nature of the new media of games and the Internet."( See the CM guide to Interactive Music pg. 41)
Games Loops and user defined changes - Modular structure
Generative Texts
The twentieth century saw a long tradition of experimentation in the literary arts. The Dada-ist author Tristan Tzara created poetry in the 1920s by cutting up newspapers and then drawing words and phrases out of a hat. The American novelist William Burroughs used a similar technique in the 1940s to create the names and images used in his work. These techniques have generally gone under the heading of 'Cut and Paste' and are still used by a wide-range of authors as aids to creativity.
In the 1960s a number of poets and experimental writers were influenced by the philosophy and work of John Cage and produced processes for generating texts.. The poet Jackson Maclow, for example, developed a number of procedures. One of these techniques is based on the idea of an acrostic and is called a 'diastic' by Maclow and others.
Diastic reading is an arbitrary but not random way of selecting words from
one text to create a new text.
A key phrase (Mac Low calls it a "title phrase") guides the selection
of words. Let's say that the key phrase is "red balloon." Starting
at the beginning of the text, we would select the first word that began with
an "r"--the first letter of the first keyword. Then, we'd continue
from where we stopped in the text until we found a word that had an "e"
as its second letter (the second letter of the keyword). Continuing, we'd look
for a word that had a "d" as the third letter. Next, we'd look for
a word that had a "b" as its first letter (the first letter of the
second keyword). If at any point we reach the end of the text, we go back and
continue from the beginning. When a word is followed by a punctuation mark or
ends a line in the source text, the line ends in the generated text. This kind
of technique lends itself to computerization and a number of computer ports
have set up diastic generators on the web (see Ron Starr's site linked below).
A number of contemporary poets ( for example Charles O Hartman and Alan Sondheim - see links below) regularly use computer programs to produce generative texts.
Computers have also been used to produce generative narratives. The most famous example of this kind of program is an AI program called Racter ( shortened from Raconteur because 1980s computers could not handle filenames longer than six characters). There is a share ware clone of Racter called CLAUDE available from the CMU Artificial Intelligence Repository. The programmers Chamberlain and Etter published a book of stories which they claimed was "by Racter" called The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed. Here is an example of a Racter story:
"Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters. That is interesting."
Racter's authors, have subsequently admitted that they edited Racters output for publication. This has caused quite a controversy as some critics argue that this undermines their claim that the book was authored by a computer.
Another approach taking programmers working with text is to produce small dialogue programs called 'chatterbots'. The first and most famous chatterbot was ELIZA. ELIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966. ELIZA also cause a sensation when it was made public as a number of individuals actually thought they were talking to a human. Chatterbots are now commonly used on websites as a semi-AI agent to help function to help visitors navigate round the site.
AARON Images are available at http://creative.lboro.ac.uk/ccrs/gallery/hcohen/hcohen_gallery2.htm
AARON downloads are available from http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/
Anonymous 'The CM guide to Interactive Music' Computer Music Issue 51 September
2002
Aeolian Interface Project, The is available at http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/gallery/radio-idt/aesthetics/index.html
Cohen, Harold there is a brief biography of author of AARON available at http://creative.lboro.ac.uk/ccrs/gallery/hcohen/hcohen.htm
Eliza - the computerised psychiatrist is available on http://www.planet-stuff.freeserve.co.uk/Software/Eliza.htm
Generative.Net: the generative art resource is available at http://www.generative.net/
Huhtamo, Erkki and Kusahara, Machiko 'Robo Renga: or a Tele-discussion about
Art and Robotics' in Convergence; The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
Volume8 Number 3 Autumn 2002
Kac, Eduardo 'The Origins and development of Robotic Art' in Convergence; The
Journal of Research into New Media Technologies Volume7 Number 1 Spring 2001
Kac, Eduardo 'Towards a Chronology of Robotic Art' in Convergence; The Journal
of Research into New Media Technologies Volume7 Number 1 Spring 2001
Kac, Eduardo is available at http://www.ekac.org/
Nyman, Michael (1999) Experimental Music:Cage and Beyond 2nd Edition
Cambridge and New York CUP
Starr, Ron Diastic Reading is available at www.angelsex.com/~rstarr/poormfa/diastic.html
Sondheim, Alan is available on http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/
Solomon, Larry J 'The Sounds of Silence :John Cage and 4'33"' is available
at http://www.azstarnet.com/~solo/4min33se.htm
Telegarden website is available at http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden/
The Trojan Room Coffee Machine is available at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html
Wired News, 'Farewell, Seminal Coffee Cam is available on http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,42254,00.html
Tyne Millennium Bridge is available at http://www.tynebridgewebcam.co.uk/webcams.htm
BBc Webcam site is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/webcams/
Jam cams for the City of Nottingham are available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham
http://www.hirmes.com/bliss.html
http://www.friendsofed.com/fmc/Lifaros/
http://www.transphormetic.com/
http://www.bit-101.com/lab.html