Von Bismarck & Maus's Perpetual Storytelling Machine

Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus have created an interesting work: The Perpetual Storytelling Machine.

From the project's website:

The "Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus" is a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings.

The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents -- linked by over 22 million references -- form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext.

New visual connections and narrative layers emerge through the interweaving of the story with the depiction of technical developments.

The actual method is that the machine downloads the text for a recent best selling novel and then using the book's text as keywords for looking up patent drawings.

I have been playing around with similar ideas... My focus, however, was on generating a perpetual story using short stories posted to news groups as source material. The illustrations were going to be photos from Flickr found via keyword search (we did a similar thing in Benjamin Rosenbaum and my Tumbarumba project).

The use of patent drawings is brilliant... Much more satisfying than Flickr photos. However, it doesn't appear that the novel's text is presented along side the drawings... which seems too bad. More interesting, I think, then seeing semi-random connections between the drawings would be to have insight into how the drawings relate to the text.

Related: my earlier post in which I took issue with von Bismarck's The Image Fulgurator

Kenny Marshall's "prototype for an infinite array of semi-autonomous percussive devices"

Kenny Marshall has portfolio full of interesting kinetic work. He describes his prototype for an infinite array of semi-autonomous percussive devices as being:

... a group of small robotic sculptures, each connected to its immediate neighbors via wires, that together form a net of robotic life that spreads across the Garden at the Mattress Factory and over nearby structures. These twenty-five mechanical crickets fill the garden with sound as they listen to their neighbors and act accordingly during Pittsburgh's Robot250 festival. Using Dr. John Conway’s rules for The Game of Life, each robot activates when a preset number of his neighbors is active and deactivates if too few or too many of his neighbors are active.

The Game of Life is an interesting simulation of simple life that been a favorite of geeky-types since 1970. Worth checking out (if you're a geeky-type).

Demirjian & Seldess's "Nitrogen Cycles"

I've been meaning to blog about Andrew Demirjian & Zachary Seldess's Nitrogen Cycles (2009) ever since I saw it early this year at Gallery Aferro.

A video of the artwork can be seen on Demirjian's website.

Here's how Andrew Demirjian describes the work:

Nitrogen Cycles is an 8-channel sound art installation that sonically maps the daily activity of live fish into the gallery space. A rectangular fish tank stands in the center of the gallery and each fish is assigned a unique tone that spatially travels through the rectangular gallery corresponding to that fish’s activity. The music generated is a reflection of the dynamic shifts in the location, speed and the relationship between the fish in their daily lives. Through motion and color tracking a sonic transposition is created that immerses the listener into an aural experience of the movements inside the fish tank. This twists the visitor's traditional sensory experience by putting their ears inside the tank and the eyes outside of it.

Four speakers are low to the ground and an additional four are over six feet high in the air, so we hear the fish sound travel and pan with height fluctuations as well as width. The pitch scales from low to high on the y-axis, and the x-axis controls a tremolo effect that is fastest at the center of the tank and slower at the edges. When a fish moves quickly the sound is processed with a filtering effect that emphasizes their sharp movement.

Henrik Menné

I've become an instant fan of Danish artist Henrik Menné. His sculptures have a poetry that is often missing in technology-based art. He seems to have something in common with Tim Hawkinson and Olafur Eliasson.

75P. 2004, paraffin and iron, 150x150x150cm (Cone: 70x100cm)
Fotograf Anders Sune Berg

Description of 75P from the kunstdk.dk website:

The machine is an iron construction on which a small rotating iron disk is mounted. Onto this rotating disk, small drops of hot wax are poured. The rotating disk swirls the drops creating a shape on the floor. The rotating disk is 15 centimetres in diameter and placed 80 cm above the floor. With these measurements, the drops will create a shape of approximately 1 m in diameter. After a few days, the wax will have created a thin cone-shaped shell.

Stone. 2001, marble, water, fibreglass, 70x130x180cm (Stone: 36x36x50cm).
Fotograf Anders Sune Berg

The white marble cube is hollowed out and floats on the water.

Beholder (Container). 2005, ventilators and foamed polysterene, diameter 210 cm
Photograph: Anders Sune Berg

[via Make]

Tobias Leingruber's "Time Machine 1.0"

Tobias Leingruber writes about his Time Machine 1.0 Firefox add-on:

Nowadays the web is designed by professionals, and everybody has a broadband connection. Ebay was overtaken by so called "Power-Sellers" and the shiny and smooth Web 2.0 Blogger-Design rules the web.

In the 90's People started creating webpages about their hobbies and dogs on geocities or other free webspace providers. As many people didn't have much content to post on their "homepages", they just put an "under construction" sign on it to show that the website was not finished yet, but maybe in a couple days.

As the people only had slow modems, it was really important to keep the data small. Otherwise the user would have to wait for like 5 minutes for a website to load. This is one reason why midi files became popular - It was the only way to listen to music on the early web. (You are listening to the great euro dance classic "Dune - Rainbow to the Stars")

This Firefox Add-on uses the syntax of any webpage, and changes it into a beautiful Web 1.0 amateur page. This is my tribute to all the pioneers of the web.

[via Ceci Moss on Rhizome]

Clouds, clouds, clouds

Super Mario Clouds (2002)
Cory Arcangel, modified game cartridge

cloud.s (2009)
Jason Sloan, twitter-fed generative art

[via Rhizome]

clouds of clouds (2008)
Miguel Leal & Luis Sarmento, Flickr-fed generative art

Drunkard's Walk vs. PMU

When I was at PS1 the other day, I came across Simon Ingram's Drunkard's Walk (2008) as part of a group show by Minus Space in the Boiler Room:

Drunkard's Walk, 2008, Ingram

Drunkard's Walk (detail), 2008, Ingram

Drunkard's Walk (finished painting), 2008, Ingram

Drunkard's Walk seems to be a poor-man's version of Roxy Paine's PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit) 1999-2000:

PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit), 1999-2000, Roxy Paine

PMU, Roxy Paine

PMU, Roxy Paine

I take Drunkard's Walk to be a commentary of some sort (satire perhaps?) on Paine's work. However, when I watch an interview with Ingram (see below) he makes no reference to Paine's PMU. It would be interesting to hear Ingram's thoughts regarding Paine.

"Untethered" at Eyebeam

The Untethered show at Eyebeam ended on October 25th, but you can still see a nice round-up it at wmmna.

Dead Star, Michel de Broin, 2008

Buttons, Sascha Pohflepp, 2006

Buttons is a camera without optical parts. When the camera’s button is pressed, the camera does not record an image, instead it records the time. It then wirelessly searches the Internet for photographs that were taken by someone else at the very moment of the button press. Pohflepp says:

After a few minutes or hours, depending on how soon someone else shares their photo on the web, an image will appear on the [camera’s] screen... In a way, it belongs half to the person who had pressed the button and still remembers that moment. Because of that connection, the photos are never dismissed as random, no matter how enigmatic they may be.

Blendie, Kelly Dobson, 2003-2004

From Dobson's statement on Blendie:

Blendie is an interactive, sensitive, intelligent, voice controlled blender with a mind of its own. Materials are a 1950's Osterizer blender altered with custom made hardware and software for sound analysis and motor control.

People induce the blender to spin by sounding the sounds of its motor in action. A person may growl low pitch blender-like sounds to get it to spin slow (Blendie pitch and power matches the person) and the person can growl blender-style at higher pitches to speed up Blendie. The experience for the participant is to speak the language of the machine and thus to more deeply understand and connect with the machine. The action may also bring about personal revelations in the participant. The participant empathizes with Blendie and in this new approach to a domestic appliance, a conscious and personally meaningful relationship is facilitated.

Machines by Michael Kontopoulos

Machines that Almost Fall Over from Michael Kontopoulos



Machine that Tries to Draw Circles from Michael Kontopoulos

[via John Michael Boling at Rhizome]

Yuri Suzuki

[via We Make Money Not Art]

Yuri Suzuki recently earned an MA in Design Products program at the Royal College of Art.

The projects of his that caught my eye include Sound Chaser (which is a bit like a toy train that rides/plays rails of records, see above) and Prepared Turntable (a five-armed record player, see below).

My hard drive is experiencing some strange noises

Gregory Chatonsky's project uses sensors to translate (using Pure Data) the vibrations from a malfunctioning hard drive into sound.

John Luther Adams's "The Place Where You Go to Listen"

Alex Roth has an article in the most recent New Yorker about John Luther Adams's generative music installation. In a nutshell:

"The Place" translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.

From Roth's description it seems like Adams did a very good job of data visualization (or rather, data auralization). The listener has a sense of what the music represents:

The first day I was there, "The Place" was subdued, though it cast a hypnotic spell. Checking the Alaskan data stations on my laptop, I saw that geomagnetic activity was negligible. Some minor seismic activity in the region had set off the bass frequencies, but it was a rather opaque ripple of beats, suggestive of a dance party in an underground crypt. Clouds covered the sky, so the Day Choir was muted. After a few minutes, there was a noticeable change: the solar harmonies acquired extra radiance, with upper intervals oscillating in an almost melodic fashion. Certain that the sun had come out, I left "The Place," and looked out the windows of the lobby. The Alaska Range was glistening on the far side of the Tanana Valley.

When I arrived the next day, just before noon, "The Place" was jumping. A mild earthquake in the Alaska Range, measuring 2.99 on the Richter scale, was causing the Earth Drums to pound more loudly and go deeper in register. (If a major earthquake were to hit Fairbanks, "The Place," if it survived, would throb to the frequency 24.27Hz, an abyssal tone that Adams associates with the rotation of the earth.) Even more spectacular were the high sounds showering down from speakers on the ceiling.

"The Place" sounds like a very compelling work and a real accomplishment... however, Roth's article does seem a bit naive in regards to how the installation fits into the tradition of generative art. Roth writes:

["The Place"] is a forbiddingly complex creation that contains a probably unresolvable philosophical contradiction. On the one hand, it lacks a will of its own; it is at the mercy of its data streams, the humors of the earth. On the other hand, it is a deeply personal work, whose material reflects Adams's long-standing preoccupation with multiple systems of tuning, his fascination with slow-motion formal processes, his love of foggy masses of sound in which many events are unfolding at independent tempos.

Fair enough... but the same contradiction is inherent to almost every generative artwork. It's almost like waxing poetic over how a particular sculpture seems to be dealing with issues of form in space. Uh, yeah... that's what sculptures do.

I was also struck by this quote of Adams's:

"Actually, my original conception for 'The Place' was truly grandiose. I thought that it might be a piece that could be realized at any location on the earth, and that each location would have its unique sonic signature. That idea--tuning the whole world--stayed with me for a long time. But at some point I realized that I was tuning it so that this place, this room, on this hill, looking out over the Alaska Range, was the sweetest-sounding spot on earth."

I spent part of last summer doing investigations with generative music and sound (and I hope this summer to bring this work to fruition). I discovered that it is fairly easy to create a process for making reasonably convincing (if not wholly compelling) music. What is much more difficult is having that artwork capable of generating a variety of distinct pieces.

I think Adams is being very upfront about how the installation is tuned to the Alaskan environmental variables in particular. If he had done a more generic tuning--one that would work in any given place--he probably wouldn't have been able to achieve his "unique sonic signature" idea. Each place would probably end up sounding very much like all the other locations.

Golan Levin, in an interview with Carlos Zanni, argued that interactive and generative art is about "creating an illusion of control: the sense that the 'artist' has relinquished authorship to the user, or to some clever algorithm. In fact, this is a myth."

What Levin is saying, I think, is that the artist/composer has complete control over how the triggering data is framed. Often the truly defining characteristics of generative artworks are the elements over which the artist maintains control rather than the aspects determined by the stochastic input. For example, Adams said he tuned the installation to that place in particular. He determined that earthquakes trigger the Earth Drums and he undoubtedly adjusted it so that the average level of tremors generally sounds good. This is very much like when I saw guitarist Elvin Bishop at a blues festival--at one point in the set he had an audience member strum the guitar while Bishop continued to finger the chord changes. It was fun and a neat trick, but the strumming no more determined the direction of Bishop's song than the tremors determines Adam's.

These issues of illusion and control remind me of my childhood interest in stage magic. I used to learn tricks and read up on magicians until I eventually realized that stage magic would always be unsatisfying to me because I'm not interested in the illusion of magic, what I really wanted was real magic. I have similar feelings about generative art... I play around the edges of it, but I'm not interested in presenting the illusion of machine creativity.

It is a step in the direction for generative art to be based upon chance--that is based on something unpredictable yet representational such as the brightness of light, the amount of carbon dioxide in the room, etc. Ideally the originating chance occurrence can be sensed by the viewer (in the same way that Roth deduced the change in light based upon the shift in the music's mood). It's hard to say what level of illusion is in "The Place," but it does seem there is a reasonable transparency between the sounds and the real-world input that triggered them.

"Cantata Park" by Metamatic Collective

Second Life has been attracting a lot of attention as a platform for media artists... some of the work isn't all that interesting (especially if it mainly depends on the aging novelty of avatars virtual spaces)... but some of it is quite interesting such as Eteam's Second Life Dumpster (Marisa Olson describes it here);

Turbulence's Networked_Performance blog reported on another intriguing Second Life project:

Cantata Park 1 (2006) [Teleport to Mashup Park, Marni (206, 35, 23)] -- by Metamatic (Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash) -- is an interactive, spatialised sound sculpture built in the virtual world Second Life. The sculpture is made from 256 individual nodes in a 16 x 16 grid. Each node is embedded with a single word, triggered by a participant's movement through the work. Each participant creates a random narrative, assembled on-the-fly, and in real-time.

Cantata Park explores the notion of a "cut-up narrative". By disassembling and reassembling a passage of text, the participant is free to extract unseen meaning from an existing text. The cut-up technique was popularised by Beat poets in the 1950's-70's as a method to "break the linearity" of written language, with William S. Burroughs using it extensively in his works. Burroughs believed non-pictorial languages contained a virus. By using non-linear writing techniques he believed the true meaning of language could be exposed, and the spoken word used as a weapon.

Cantata Park uses a passage of 256 words from Burroughs' The Electronic Revolution (1971) and transfers the cut-up technique into a real-time 3D environment.

The work explores the possibilities of metaverse art, limitations of Second Life's construction tools and scripting language, and the ability to appreciate conceptual art by proxy of an avatar.

A day without the mobile-phone

Recordings of the sculpture made by Andrew McKenzie, h3o

Eve Arpo & Riin Kranna-Rõõs coordinated "a day without the mobile-phone" last September in Tallinn, Estonia. The project is a an installation made up of cell phones collected from the people in the city. The phones are hung on a tree where they create a light- and sound-installation. Through out the night the phones light up, ring, & vibrate as they receive phone calls--some inadvertent and some specifically to trigger the sculpture.

The artists are organizing a second installation for June 2008 in Edmonton, Canada as part of of The Works Art & Design Festival.



Part 1: TV coverage in top evening news, Reporter, Kanal2.
Part 2: documentation from the installation, recorded by Üllar Luup, Reporter, Kanal2

Absolut sound sculptures

Absolut Vodka has sponsored two sound art installations: Absolut Quartet in NYC and Absolut Choir in Stockholm. Both installation are interactive via the web.

I have mixed feelings about corporate sponsorship of art. It is helping artists create and promote their artworks (and corporate sponsorship of museum exhibits has certainly become common-place). But imposing the vodka's name on the artwork's titles seems too intrusive to me. At least it isn't as obnoxiously promotional as some corporate art events.

Absolut Quartet (see video above) is the more interesting of the two works. It seems inspired by the Animusic "Pipe Dream" computer animation (see below), which became an urban legend (claiming that "Pipe Dream" was a physical sculpture).

[Via Make]

Musical tables

I'm gearing up to do a series of acoustic artworks and have been looking at what is out there. Golan Levin's Scrapple (2005) is quite cool:



Surprising similiar to Scrapple is the Reactable (see video below) which was developed at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Since the two projects came out at almost the same time, it seems they the artist/developers simply came up with similar ideas independently, with a couple of notable differences.

Scrapple's table acts as a score and objects placed on it are interpreted into sound chronologically, whereas the Reactable is more amorphous in terms of how objects' sounds relate to time. Also, the Reactable has specific objects that are dedicated for generating or manipulating particular sounds, whereas Scrapple will interpret any object placed upon it (which seems particularly interesting to me). I suspect that the Reactable is more flexible in the sounds it can create, while Scrapple is more intuitive in its usage.

Yukinori Yanagi's flags

I'm heading out to vote in Super-duper Tuesday's primary and am feeling a bit political... so today's posting are about Yukinori Yanagi's ant farm flags. Above is The World Flag Ant Farm (1990) which consists of 170 ant farms, each of which has its sand in the configuration of a nation's flag. Over the course of the exhibition, the ants shift the sand around and build a nest.

This Japanese flag is from Asia-Pacific Ant Farm (1990) in which provides the ants a tube pathway between the flags of Asian-Pacific countries.


This last image is Studies in American Art: Three Flags (2000). I imagine most of my readers recognize the homage to Jasper Johns's Three Flags.

Complexification

Complexification is an interesting (and well designed) site that I found via Make Magazine's blog. It is a gallery of generative artworks done in the Processing programming language by Jerry Tarbell. If you check it out, be sure you not only view the static images but also launch the applets so that you can trigger Tarbell's generative algorithms and see new artworks being formed.

A thought that has been in the back of my head lately is how New Media art often seems to be automatically considered Contemporary. But that isn't always the case... for example, generative art (such Tarbell's) is often focused on formal aesthetics in a way that I'd characterize as Modern.

I suppose the temporal names all these art categories have (new, contemporary, modern) does nothing to help clarify... Many, many people (including those who should know better) seem to think that Contemporary refers to a time period (i.e., art being made today is Contemporary because it is contemporary). But that's not really any more true than all art today is Modern because we're modern. Post-Modernism seems to confound as well... more than once it's been argued to me that there can never be another art movement because everything that comes after Modernism will be post-modern (I usually counter by pointing out by the same logic we're all making Post-Impressionist art). And of course the cherry on top is the Pre-Raphaelites who were founded 300 years after Raphael's death.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia currently has a particular bad definition of Contemporary Art. I spent a week or two discussing it with the folks who edit the entry... I managed to convince them to mention the idea that Contemporary doesn't not simply mean "art made today." But overall, the entry tries to describe the movement as a moment in time. For example:

The institutions of art have been criticised for regulating what is designated as contemporary art. Outsider art, for instance, is literally contemporary art, in that it is produced in the present day.

The idea of outsider art always makes me a bit queasy. I find the category patronizing and overly focused on the human-interest aspect of the artists' lives (i.e., the artist is insane, has a low IQ, a murderer, etc.). Oddly, while I agree most "Outsider Art" isn't Contemporary Art (because the intention behind the art isn't really Contemporary), faux-Outsider Art (which is Contemporary) was a fad for a few years recently. If this seems wrong-headed, consider this... a child's scrawling might be reminiscent of of Picasso or a Pollock, but that doesn't mean the child is a Modern artist (because the child isn't trying to address Modern concerns).

Coffee, knitting, rice and data visualization

I hope I write a coherent post this morning... just now I almost spooned the cat's breakfast into my coffee pot. Oh well, I'm sure I'll wake up once I have a nice hot cup of Iams.

The photo above shows the News Knitter project by artists Ebru Kurbak and Mahir M. Yavuz (it comes via Turbulence's Networked Performance blog). Kurbak & Yavuz write:

News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: whereas one receives the content from live feeds the other converts it into visual patterns, and a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. Each product, sweater of News Knitter is an evidence/result of a specific day or period.

My sweetie is learning to knit, so I've been thinking about knitting based art recently (I missed it, but about a year ago the Museum of Art & Design had a Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting show). When I read about the News Knitter I wanted to find the work compelling, but honestly I don't. I think it runs into some common problems in technology-based art:

Data visualization. This is one of the more common approaches for making Internet art. The Internet gives access to tons of information and it makes sense that artworks using the medium want to investigate its particularities. However, since this well has been dipped into so many times, one needs to think twice before having data visualization be the center of an artwork. At the very least, the result should have some point beyond "jeez, isn't this a neat looking graphic?"

Novelty art. I'm still trying to come up with the most pithy description of this problem. Novelty art is the best one I've come up with, but I had been thinking about demo-art as well. Essentially this is art which is most compelling in how it shows off a cool new technology. The way I put this in my "Teaching Philosophy" essay is:

Working with technology, particularly new technology, has the danger of resulting in art that is more focused on demonstrating the potential of the medium than on transcending it.

I worry about this alot in my own art because I think it's an easy trap to fall into. But the result is empty calories... you get a confection which might taste sweet for a moment, but ultimately isn't satisfying. Plus, once that technology is more wide-spread, the novelty-artwork loses all appeal. It's great to explore new technology, but the resulting artwork needs to be able to stand on its own... the fact that computerized knitting machines are nifty isn't really good enough.

Another data visualization/manifestation project is the eRiceCooker. Here's what it does:

eRiceCooker tracks Internet news about genetically modified rice. Whenever there is a new report about GM rice, a quarter cup of rice is dispensed into the cooker. When the cooker has enough rice for a meal, water is added automatically to the rice and the cooker is switched on. When the rice is done, an email is sent out to inviting people to eat the rice.

The more news reports appear, the more rice is cooked, the more often invitations are sent out. The project is designed to create awareness to issues surrounding genetically modified organisms by producing excessive amounts of cooked rice and attempting to feed people with it.

Currently, eRiceCooker is doing the following google news searches: GMO Rice, Gen-reis, GMO.

The eRiceCooker was made by Annina Rüst at MIT, and as student work it is very nice. But there's some aspect of it which prevents me from fully enjoying it. Here's what I think it is:

Why? In the case of the News Knitter, why tie it to the news? Is there some resonance at work there? There doesn't appear to be... it seems a random connection. News about genetically modified rice and the rice cooker is better connected, but still not fully satisfying to me. Towards the end of this post, I'll more fully explain why.


I bet you thought the coffee in the title of this posting was about my problems making it this morning. Nope! The third artwork I'd like to discuss is Benjamin Brown's News Brews.

News Brews is Brown's 2007 thesis project at the Interactive Telecommunication Program at New York University.

The News Brews device is an exploration of the possibility of creating a beverage which provides information about the daily news. News Brews connects to internet news feeds and parses them to determine the relative frequency at which different coffee growing regions are mentioned. It then brews a cup of coffee from freshly ground whole beans which contains relative proportions of beans grown in the regions in that day's news.

On a side note, the project does have a design flaw: the coffee simply pours out as the news arrives. If there isn't a cup there, or if it is filled, you get a mess. This is a nice--though unintended--metaphor for being overwhelmed with news saturation.

News Brews is basically the same concept as the eRiceCooker, perhaps to a fault... Brown looked a bit chagrined when I gently mentioned the similarity. Setting aside the issue of originality, there is something about News Brews that works better for me than the eRiceCooker. I've been mulling over why I prefer News Brews. Here's what I have come up with:

News and coffee seem to go together... I read the news while drinking coffee in the morning. While "news about rice" is, of course, tied to rice... news in general doesn't seem to relate. So why GM rice? Why the news? My suspicion is that eRiceCooker began with the idea of automating cooking rice and that the genetically modified issue was grafted on later. Adding to this is the problem is that the eRiceCooker is political art, and (in my opinion) political art really needs to be perfect--there's not the room for looseness that might be acceptable in other works of art.

The eRiceCooker is ostensibly about GM foods... so what exactly is the connection between news reports about GM rice and eating (presumably) non-GM rice? The artist's description above seems to tie an abundance of news articles/cooked-rice to GM crops producing larger yields. She refers to "excessive" amounts of rice, which seems a bit off-message. Larger crop yields is a good thing, but presumably the artist feels GM crops are not. Perhaps a tighter conceptualization would be to borrow News Brews's idea of a news blend. The cooker could mix rice (representing articles about rice in-general) with some bittering agent such as quinine (representing the GM news articles)... so that the people eating the rice are eating a representation of how GM foods are corrupting our food supply.

Thoughts (i.e., comments) on the matter are certainly welcomed!

Your thoughts on randomness

I'm contributing a chapter about randomness, chance, & art to a handbook on computation and art. At this point I'm gathering my thoughts and writing paragraphs on the subject without worrying too much about the chapter's overall structure.

Most recently I was thinking about how using random variables in art does not necessarily mean a random result. The randomness of the result is completely dependent on how the artist structures the use of stochastic stimuli.

In the written thesis for my MFA exhibit I quoted Golan Levin:

His flower collages were good, but they were all equally good — and he failed to see that this made them all equally bad as well. It's one thing to endorse the beauty of unexpected outcomes, but we must confront the fact that our algorithms are capable of coldness and ugliness, too, or we will never learn anything.

Levin seems to be taking an aesthetic position that real beauty comes from a mixture of ugliness and prettiness. Or perhaps the real objection is that the outcomes aren't all the unexpected; that the algorithm for the flower generation had a narrow range of variety, so as to ensure a consistently beautiful outcome. In effect, the randomness of the flower generation is a bit of a cheat--the artist is using loaded dice.

It strikes me that there may be a sweet spot in framing how randomness manifests itself in art. If the result is too random, it is just noise. If the randomness is too constrained, it no longer is really an element of the artwork.

I've tried to come up with three simple examples of "too much variety," "not enough variety," and "just right!" The "too much variety" example is an algorithm that creates a grid of squares, each of which has an equal chance to be any one of 16,777,216 different colors. The "too little variety" example fills each square with one of three shades of blue. The "just right" algorithm fills the first square with a random color and then for each following square shifts the color by up to 0.00006% (I think I did my math right in calculating that percent... I take the current RGB hex value and add up to plus-or-minus 5).

I'm wondering, though, if my examples are stacking the deck... is this an intellectually honest analysis? I'm particularly suspicious of my "not enough variety" example. Is there a better algorithm to demonstrate that? See the three images below:


Too much variety


No enough variety


Just right!

onKawaraUpdate(V2)

onKawaraUpdate (V2) is a new internet-based artwork by the MTAA guys (M. River & T. Whid). Here's what they say about the piece

This art work updates and automates (via software) the process-oriented nature of On Kawara's date paintings. The artist's labor is essential to process-oriented art. What happens when that labor is removed?

If this web site is visited by anyone on a particular day, a date page is created. If no one visits on a particular day, no date page is created. Click the large date for news clips from that day. Click the 'more' link for archives.

Popcorn & parrot art

Here are two interesting works, both dealing with language.

Talking Popcorn by Nina Katchadourian interprets popcorn popping as Morse code. A text-to-speech program provides simultaneous translation. Since popcorn doesn't have short & long popping sounds, the duration of the silence between the pops create the short Morse code "dots" and long "dashes."

I can see how this could create a series of random letters, but I wonder how it is turned into coherent words. Perhaps it waits until a word appears in the gibberish? The problem with that is you might pop an entire batch of popcorn and only get a couple of words. Perhaps the gibberish is translated into the closest matching word (in the same way that spell-checkers work).

In addition to the popcorn machine, Katchadourian has a nice series of spin-off works including The Popcorn Journal which consists of bags of popcorn along side their text output and Talking Popcorn's First Words which are bronze popped corn from the first batch (which was translated as "we").



may-por-e' is a work by Rachel Berwick in which she attempts to teach them the Maypure language. The Maypure were a South American tribe that were wiped out by the Carib in 1799. Parrots were among the items that the Carib's looted after the attack. A few days later, the German naturalist Alexander von Humbolt acquired one of these parrots. Realizing it was the last speaker of the Maypure language, he phonetically recorded the parrot's language. Using that sole record of the language, Berwick teaches contemporary parrot the Maypure language.