Analog Generative Art - Nathalie Miebach

In the previous posts i talked briefly about generative art and i brought some example of the countless uses of generative algorithms in art.

Today I was watching TED and I encountered an interesting example of generative art that does not use computers to run the algorithm (although computers are used to retrieve part of the information needed for it).

The work comes from Nathalie Miebach, and american artist who uses data from weather elements to create three dimensional sculptures and music scores.

It's particularly interesting to note how all the calculation and usage of the data retrieved has been made by hand, giving large space to eventual human mistakes. In this way, the human becomes part of the algorithm by adding a certain quantity of error to the calculation.

Generative content creation #3 - Applying theories

The last task for the Generative Content Creation course consists in applying the studies previously made to a concrete project

My example comes from http://infinitecomic.com/index, a web application that generates combinations of images and text randomly chosen from the internet. This application prompts the user to insert a keyword and creates a tryptic where a random tweet containing the keyword is being printed on three versions of a flickr image.

The output of the application is very unpredictable and truly mesmerizing. The triptics formed plays with the ability of our brain to build sense by making a contrapposition of different elements that are only connected by one element of the keyword.

But while the semantic relationship between the keyword and the text is normally direct, the one with the image is only possible because of the "tags" that user give to the image. In this way, images often only

The images retrieved, are being chosen randomly by the script among all the images in flickr that contain the keyword set by the user. In

this sense, it's interesting to note how the random factor of this algorithm is strictly connected with human nature and our ability to apply labels to images and text.

This application plays on many level of generative narratives. Even though a big part of the output is given to casualty, we must consider the elements that make it an interesting piece of generative art. I found 3 elements:

1) the semiotics of comics, as for the work that the algorithm does on the pictures (the division, the squaring, the spacing and the "movement effect". this creates the illusion of a piece of comic.

2) the division of the text in three parts. This keeps continuity in the text and makes a whole of the tryptic.

3) the combination of text and pictures. The juxtaposition is a key element to create a third meaning from the first two.

This application focuses on narrativity, which is one of the key element of the definition of Packer, Randall and Jordan (2002) of multimedia. In my eyes narrativity is a key element that often is being under estimated by artists and new media producers.

Generative content creation #2 - Generative Art

The very idea of generative arts has been fascinating me for long time since i heard of the very first experiments made by the digital artists Autechre who develop some generative elements for their music and videos. Every since then i tried to reflect upon how algoritms can be at the origin of a piece of music or video and how independent can they be from their author in order to autonomously create a piece of art that can also be pleasant to be experienced.

The current field of generative art interestingly relates with different fields of science. For Galanter it relates with Complexity Science, Chaotic Systems and Random Systems, Algorithmic Complexity and Effective Complexity. In fact, generative art has deep roots in multidisciplinary fields that often have roots in engineering and software programming. Even though not necessarily the consequence of the use of a computer, generative art is often much more complex than "traditional" art because the work that needs to be done is often extremely vaste and complex. For example, to build a piece of software that creates a video that responds to audio stimulation can end up being an extremely complex task that needs skills in programming, design, sound engineering and video manipulation.

Another extremely interesting application of generative art comes from generative literature. What seems to me most interesting in the application of generative algoritms to art are the semiotical consequences that the introduction of an algoritm causes into a text.

References

Galanter, Philip. 2003. What is generative art? Complexity theory as a context for art theory. In In GA2003–6th Generative Art Conference

http://johnpriestley.net/soundreading/?p=68

Generative content creation #1 critical review

This critical review is the result of reading several papers and documents for the Generative Content Creation that i am taking as online course. The papers, diverse as approach, have as general topic new media and multimedia and are from Packer, Randall and Jordan and Manovich.

The field treated is extremely interesting as it touches many points of the master degree i'm following in IMKE and offer a broad view of the world of communication and arts that technology is currently offering.

The material i have been reviewing treat the very general definition of the terms New Media and Multimedia, and is meant to help understanding the concepts that will follow .
New Media have revolutionised the world in ways that we still don't fully comprehend and are changing at a pace that we could only compare with Moor's law. In fact, the ability of new media to change so quickly can be largely attributed to the rapid evolution of technologies, to which are deeply tied.

The materials i read for this post are meant to help defining the basic terms used for the course such as the definition of the terms "new media" and multimedia. These two terms can be seen as describing the same concept, but as we will see, authors give different definitions of the terms.

One key figure in New Media Studies is Lee Manovich, a professor at UCSD who is conducing various studies on New Media. As his area of interest touches different fields from social studies to semiotics, his definition of New Media can be considered one of the most complete. For Manovich, New Media are a sort of direct evolution of the "old" media, that are translated into numerical data (digital numbers) that can be accessed and manipulated by computers.
This direct translation brings various consequences that are very specific of the computers themselves. New Media can be defined, because of their nature, by 5 main arguments: Numerical Representation, Modularity, Automation, Variability and Transcoding (Manovich 2001).
These characteristics, together with programmability (probably the most important of all), make new media a game-changing type of medium that has become an essential element of today's culture.
If we look at today's new media panoram it is, in fact, very difficult to ignore the relevance that computer software and even smartphone's applications is gaining in our society. By becoming more and more pervasive, new media are gaining time and attention once reserved to old media. Consumer computers, smartphones and tables constitute in my eyes the clearest and brightest celebration of new media for their ability to be so versatile to offer interactive contents (as for Manovich definition), but also an extraordinary way to access old media. Through digitalization, a smartphone becomes a radio, a video player, and even a book.

The definition of the concept of Multimedia by Packer, Randall and Jordan (2002) is very similar at first to the one of New media expressed by Manovich. Even though similar, for them Multimedia includes five essential that need to be considered such as: Integration, Interactivity, Hypermedia, Immersion and Narrativity. One point of difference from the other authors, however, is that Packer, Randall and Jordan do not consider essential for multimedia to be being computer-based.

Rockwell and Mactavish (2004) describe multimedia as: Computer-based, Rhetorical artifact, Multiple media, Integrated and artistic whole, and Interactive. They also provide a classification of the Types of Multimedia (Web hypermedia, Computer games, Digital art, and Multimedia encyclopedia),

It becomes clear, if we consider those different definitions that multimedia can be simply considered as a sub group of what we call new media, that is a more generic hat.

Redesigning and re-instrumentalising activities (Task #13)

Among the activities that our civilization has been carrying out until now in rather “traditional” ways, there is one that is constantly driving my attention for a strange peculiarity.
The world of photography has in fact changed in the last 20 years in significant ways due to the introduction of digital camera sensors and processors. Sincethen new, more sofisticated cameras have been produced with the purpose of constantly delivering new and more accurated reproductions of the reality.
What has changed since then in DSLR and compact cameras has always been a matter of more and more precisereproduction of pictures, higher resolutions, faster chips and less noisy sensors.
What i think is truly, deeply missing in this equation is what Smartphone producers have been so cleverly (perhaps even a bit unconsciously) doing since they allowed a camera to exist on the same device that can connect to the internet: a true possibility of sharing the taken pictures right away from the camera to the internet.
In fact what i’m proposing here is to re-instrumentalize compact cameras and DSLR cameras with the same possibilities that are offered by smartphone cameras. The step seems so small but it is not. Traditional cameras have been always perceived as an instrument on its own, capable only of capturing the light and giving the chanche to the photographer to reproduce it on printed paper. This was and is partially true, because in our digital society pictures have gained a different role and their main location is now the screen of laptops televisions and mobile phones. If we consider this it doesn’t surprise to know that applications like Instagr.am have been downloaded more than a million times in less than a month and that flickr, one of the most important photosharing social network, has declared that most of the pictures they receive each month are now being produced by mobile devices.

Most popular Cameras in the Flickr community as from May 3rd, 2011

The use of traditional cameras could (and should) be changed by adding a digital “social” layer to them, that would allow the user to instantly share pictures over the web, perhaps through a 3G/Wifi connection. In this way users won’t need anymore to download their pictures on the computer all the time, but will be able to manage them on the cloud.

Digital technology as a tool or a medium? Are we talking about just instruments or a specific form of societal activity? Is digital technology neutral

Digital technologies have become so present in our societies that they are now a need. They are already representing an enormous part of our society’s communication and it is very likely that they will become even more spread and essential. Not only the Internet, but most of the devices we interact with everyday use digital technologies: they transform the analog world into a processable set of digital information and they return it to our analog minds.

The question about the nature of digital technologies is not banal, indeed we ought to consider the role that they have in our lives, in our political systems, in our arts and in our whole environment because computers have become so ubiquitous in our societies that it’s undeniable that they are effecting our world in many ways.

George Rückriem writes in his paper “Tool or Medium” an historical research with the purpose of clarifying whether digital technologies should be seen as a tool or as a medium. He navigates through Leont’ev perspective and thoughts that generated the activity theory and tries to explain why this can be useful to solve the problem. The result of this investigation (in short) is an ambivalent (inevitable) answer “Tools and media are not different things but different functions, different modes of reflecting on them”.

Rückriem blends psychological theories with social studies, media theories and activity theory, but what is missing in his paper (besides a clear use of English language) is a distinction between the different uses that can be performed of digital technologies. For instance if we look at computer technologies, we can can look at software such as Photoshop as a digital tool and VoIp software as a digital medium (to take clear examples)
It would be very reductive (and i believe somehow superficial) to consider digital technology as a whole, without looking at the different usages that can be done of it or even just giving a glance to the different roles of hardware and software. It is indeed a difficult task to do so, just like if we would like to find a singular adjective to describe the whole earth. (?)

Digital technologies such as Internet are media almost as per definition. They not only are channels to deliver information but also channels to receive information. But not only!
Internet can be a medium to deliver services, thus becoming a tool.

Said this, I believe that no technology can be fully neutral as they always carry limitations that in a way or another lead to different outcomes. Just think of the different results achieved in digital arts through the year of increasing of computing power!
In this way, digital instruments somehow carry a part of themselves (their result of their limitations) into the final result of their usage and in this way can deliver a message, becoming in this way both Media and Tools.
To use another example, i believe we can look at graphic interfaces as tools to interact with machines, but also as a set of statements about usability, accessibility, and even about branding trends (I’m here referring especially to operating systems). In this way, the lesson of Mc Luhan becomes can be somehow twisted as “the tool can be a medium for a message”.

ACTIVITY THEORY* As one of the possible frameworks to analyse human activities in digitally mediated environments

The Activity Theory is a framework for studying human interactions that has its roots in the second decade of the last century in Russia by Leont'ev, and Sergei Rubinstein; used since then to study human activities, it has been considered by many essential to understand them from a broader point of view than the one of psychology or even social psychology.

The Activity Theory takes human activities as a basic unit for analysing individuals and contexts: every human action is, in fact, studied in relation with others and other elements. In this way, humans are contextualized in a stronger way than the one offered by the most traditional psychological disciplines.
Not only it considers the environment of the actions, but also their temporal relationship with previous and future actions. In this way, human activities are being contextualised in a web of narratives, allowing a deeper understanding of the motivations that move the individuals.

Another essential focus of the activity theory is on the artifacts and their mediating role. As interaction happens within the limitations of instruments, the activity theory tries to define what is the role of those. How are the instruments that we use influencing our actions?
When considering the deep effect that limitations can have on our actions a very interesting example comes from the new generation of social networking platforms born with Twitter. The popular social network (which has at the present time about 200 million active users) has gained momentum thanks to its extremely restricted blogging space. While other blogging platforms were allowing their users to write "as much as they wanted", Twitter restricted its user's space to 140 characters, less than a usual text message.
By doing so, it disrupted the precedent status quo of the blogosphere and created a new genre, a new language and a whole new way of communicating through the internet. It seems to me a great example of how limitations in instruments can not only influence our behaviour but also create brand new genres. What described here is, obviously, not the only example: in all the history of technology limitations have deeply influenced our usage of tools and instruments.

Another major contribution to the activity theory comes from Enjeström. In his writings he says that "humans are able to control their behaviour through artefacts". ( Enjeström 1999:29)
He also adds some elements to the basic framework created by Leont’ev.
While Leont’ev uses a structure that includes a subject, an object, an used tool and an outcome, Enjestrom adds some elements which more connect to society and culture.

It is interesting to consider how the activity theory becomes extremely relevant nowadays while we look at the interactions that happen online, especially when we think of the social dynamics that happen in the sphere of social networks. People who have access to the statistics of big web portals, for example, know clearly how much simple changes in the digital environment influence the behaviour of their users. It is extremely relevant nowadays to study the role of the limitations applied by digital interfaces, because these are the artifacts that carry most of the communication in today’s life. Little changes applied to an instrument used by millions of people can make a great difference in the way we use our devices, and as a related consequence, to our lives.

Studying interactions with digitally mediated environments seems a bit hard when thinking of the actions that we perform on the web: if we agree that most of our actions are “diffused” in different locations (email, chats, social networks and real life), the narratives that we produce demonstrate to be, in fact, extremely complicated, almost impossible to track down, if not with a deep, accurate study.
Thus, this holistic approach could help us to better understand the real dynamics that drive the interactions between humans and computers. In this sense it’s interesting to see that most of the usability tests performed consider only the use of one piece of software at the time, and not the real usage of computers in everyday life (which normally includes strong multitasking)
It seems to me harder to study the usage of digital devices through the activity theory because of the strong tendency to multitasking that we have, possibly even stronger than the multitasking we perform in the analog world.