Discussion on Pseudorandom by Martin Greaves

Once again my colleague, Martin Greaves, has emailed in a very interesting text discussing my latest work Pseudorandom. Enjoy....

This is indeed a fascinating experiment in the Nature of creativity and the "randomness" that may or may not be found in a computer simulation of the creative act. One aspect of this that I find particularly interesting is (again) the exclusion of emotion in all aspects of computer simulation. No “creative” endeavor undertaken by a computer can, by its very nature, be described as Art; because there is that fundamental absence of theURGE to create. I think all art stems from either the irresistible urge to make your mark or the conscious decision to produce a piece of work that stuns, informs, shocks, educates or attempts to present aspects of the world and Man’s experience within it, in a new and enlightened way. A computer simply cannot feel such an urge; it will always mechanically reproduce its programmer’s ideas. Even if it is a computer of unimaginable complexity, capable of generating billions of random actions and marks per-millisecond, the ultimate spark that begins this chain of randomness will always stem from an outside (organic) thought process instilled by the human creator. A computer can create an ocean of complexity, but the spark that ignites that “Big Bang” of complexity will always be lit by the hand of Man.

Jackson Pollock underwent months of tortured thought and experimentation before alighting on his “drip” paintings and effectively forming Abstract Expressionism. Van Gogh, as you know, was so consumed with his art and his attempts to represent the world around him in paint, that he ultimately took his own life. I cannot foresee an age in which a computer will experience an emotional breakdown brought on by its inability to create a perfect sunflower; or one where an extremely complex mechanism destroys itself because it cannot adequately represent its thoughts in images. Can you imagine a robot that, consumed with jealousy, assassinates another robot and steals its work to claim it as its own? Jean Arp told the story of how, in 1915, when he was notified to report to the German consulate, he avoided being drafted into the army. He took the paperwork he had been given and, in the first blank, he wrote the date. He then wrote the date in every other space as well, and then he drew a line beneath them and carefully added them up. He then took off all his clothes and went to hand in his paperwork. He was told to go home. I cannot ever comprehend a computer thinking up such an act as this. This was randomness with a purpose, a complex act of subversion that at once attempted to show unbridled madness, but at the same time also displayed devious logic inasmuch as it successfully enabled Arp to avoid the military Draft.

Of such thoughts and feelings is true art created; this, I think, is where the urge lies. And it is exclusive to Man’s consciousness.


Martin Greaves

Analogue is the New Digital: Launch event

The 'Analogue is the New Digital' exhibitions (staged across various locations across Manchester) opened at the weekend. For more info on the exhibition click here. You can also get further info on the Manchester AND festival here.

Below are some images of my work, Pseudorandom, taken at the opening night...feel free to leave comments...

Analogue is the New Digital: Launch event

The Death of Contemplation (by Martin Greaves)

In response to my post entitled 'The Virtual Body' June 2010, my colleague at dinosaurmuseum Martin Greaves sent me the following text via email (as it was too big for the 'comments' box. Excellent work on this mate - a really well researched text!!

The Death of Contemplation

A very persuasive argument in reply to my question there Steve, but I have another few points to make regarding the development of computer interfacing and its effects on human development. Ofcom recently found that Britons spend an average of seven hours a day interacting with some form of media (television, computer, mobile phone etc.) and that smart phones especially are an expanding fixture of an increasing number of our lives (for “smart phone” read “mobile computer”). In fact, television accounted for a relatively small proportion of this time, especially within the 16-to-24-year-old age groups (i.e. the group that can be classed as the future of this country). The dominant media choice for this group is mobiles and computers, and of this group, two-thirds were found to be multitasking by operating up to two digital tasks at once.

Academics in the field are beginning to associate such fixation with digital interfacing as tantamount to an addiction (ever found yourself constantly checking email or updates on your phone?), and a development of a kind of twitchy anxiety at the need to remain “plugged in” to this ever-increasing, constantly updated cyber world of information and entertainment. Moreover, it is becoming obvious to many in the medical field that this relatively new form of digital interfacing has shown to be responsible for effectively rewiring the human brain to become accustomed to this constant flow of data and information nuggets in their briefest form. The brain, as you know, is an organ operated electrically as well as chemically and people who suffer brain damage in some form of accident can often benefit from their brain’s capacity to rewire the neural highway to bypass any dead or damaged synapses in order to increase its functioning capacity (this is termed neuro-plasticity). If the road is blocked the brain creates a diversion around the blockage so the traffic can keep moving. If you think of it this way, then the physical rewiring of the brain to accommodate this new development of data flow and information gathering can have potentially negative effects on human development, ironically depriving the human race of the very talents that drove our journey from caves to PC terminals.

The negative effects I am citing here are the oft-quoted effects of “dumbing down”, or to put it another way, the rewiring of our brains and the way we interpret news and information will, it has been said, become biased towards the quick-fix soundbite, the three-minute YouTube video and the eventual inability (or desire) to study in-depth analysis of any given event, the wish to invest days of time on a large novel or the enjoyment of watching a three-act play. In short, the very act of contemplation and deep thinking may be a trait (and a very human trait) that becomes lost to future generations, like the ancient rite of some long-dead pagan religion.

In his book, “The Shallows” author Nicholas Carr writes:

“If, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the internet.”

The timescale for this “redesign” of the human brain is not as long as some may think. In 2008 at UCLA, psychiatrists, led by Dr. Gary Small, researched the effects of digital interfacing on the human brain by obtaining two groups made up of 12 experienced web users and 12 digital newcomers. These groups used Google whilst their brains were scanned. The results, published under the (humorous, I think) title Your Brain On Google pointed up a key initial difference between the two groups. In an area of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which deals with short-term memory and decision-making, the newcomers showed hardly any activity, whereas the web veterans displayed plenty of activity in this area of the brain scan. Six days later, after the novices had been asked to spend just one hour a day online, the two groups’ brains were re-scanned. The activity in the same area of the brain was now very nearly identical. Five hours of digital interface had effectively been enough to begin to rewire the brain.

Dr. Small also cites the digital revolution as being a central cause for the decline of human-contact skills in younger people. This can be seen in the lack of maintaining eye contact during conversations and the increasing inability to read non-verbal cues (or body language) when socializing within a group. He fears texting and instant email are also dampening our ability to be creative and think outside the box by ourselves because we are constantly vetting our thoughts and ideas through instant and regular contact with friends and peers. The effect of digital multitasking is not an increased skill in coordination (as previously cited) but a tendency to do things faster but, crucially, sloppier and without due consideration. Indeed, this is a problem that big US corporations like the engineering company Boeing are seeking to address in their new young apprentices.

The effect of the 24-hour news, the laptop, the mobile phone; the constant interference of digital media and interface in our modern consumer lives, can have wonderful, information-sharing benefits, where an experienced doctor might instruct a novice surgeon a thousand miles away, and guide him through a step-by-step procedure to repair a damaged artery via a satellite computer link. But the rewiring of the brain as a result of all this might be to our detriment. As Carr states it in his book, “We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls” and as the years go by and we routinely ping-pong from blog to website to Twitter in a matter of minutes, there shall be no-one sitting somewhere on a melancholy beach, watching as the sun slowly goes down. The horizon turning from yellow, to orange and finally to blood red, as day turns to night.

Proposal for Pseudorandom at the AND festival

This is proposal that I sent off to Andrea and Simon for the catalogue of the Analogue is the New Digital festival in October...hope they like it!!!

Title: Pseudorandom

Pseudorandom is a series of autonomous drawings that have been produced by a mechanical robotic device. These generative images display the aesthetic qualities of digital code that allows a computer to act with varying degrees of freedom, choice and randomness.

These original pen and ink drawings attempt to visualise the process of pseudorandom number generation by creating a visual landscape and sense of physicality from the otherwise entirely digital nature of code, machine consciousness and artificial intelligence.

Similar to the way Jean Arp produced his ‘chance collages’ as a method of relinquishing control, the drawings of pseudorandom can be seen as a depersonalization of creative practice. By instructing a computer to make the important decisions of composition the drawings are experiments of digital spontaneity and irrational artistic creation. Acts of computational randomness and choice are merely a simulation – a pseudorandom process that originates from an arbitrary starting point. To what extent can this be described as a ‘random’ process may be addressed by the drawings of Pseudorandom, as it maps out a physical representation of a computers ability, or inability to think in a truly random fashion. Just as Arp’s collage ‘According to the Laws of Chance’ appear relatively ordered, (which suggests that the artist retained a certain degree of authority) these drawings are an examination of the contrast between control and chaos.

The drawings of Pseudorandom have been created by means of a robotic appliance that interprets and responds to a computer which is programmed to display colour in an apparently random order. The element of choice is given to the computer by means of a programmed loop that instructs the machine to randomly choose and display a colour on its monitor. The device that plots this event watches the screen using its color sensor, which in turn drives a mechanical arm holding a pen. The movement of the pen is dependant on the hue and saturation of the colour that it sees.

Background on pseudorandom numbers

A pseudorandom number generator (PRNG), is a computer program algorithm for generating sequences of numbers that appear random in their inception. Pseudorandom numbers are an important practice for simulations (e.g. of physical systems with the Monte Carlo method - such computer simulation methods are especially useful in studying systems with a large number of degrees of freedom, such as fluids, disordered materials, strongly coupled solids, and cellular structures), and are central in the practice of cryptography (practice and study of hiding information) and procedural generation.

A Pseduorandom number can be started from an arbitrary starting state using a seed. It will always produce the same sequence thereafter when initialized with that state. The maximum length of the sequence before it begins to repeat is determined by the size of the state, measured in bits. However, since the length of the maximum period potentially doubles with each bit of 'state' added, it is easy to build Pseudorandom numbers with periods long enough for many practical applications. Although PRNGs will repeat their results after they reach the end of their period, a repeated result does not imply that the end of the period has been reached, since its internal state may be larger than its output.

Most pseudorandom generator algorithms produce sequences which are uniformly distributed by any of several tests. It is an open question, and one central to the theory and practice of cryptography, whether there is any way to distinguish the output of a high-quality pseudorandom number from a truly random sequence without knowing the algorithm(s) used and the state with which it was initialized. The security of most cryptographic algorithms and protocols using PRNGs is based on the assumption that it is infeasible to distinguish use of a suitable PRNG from use of a truly random sequence.

Pseudorandom

This is a new piece that I'm working on at the moment. Its called Pseudorandom and it will form part of the AND festival (Analogue is the New Digital) curated by Andrea Zapp and Simon Blackmore. The Exhibition opens at the Mad Lab (Manchester Digital Laboratory) on 1st October and will run throughout the month at various venues (TBA). These drawings are merely prototypes at the moment, as I'm still to put the artwork together.

The piece is about how computers can attempt to think in a random and disordered fashion, in contrast to their natural purpose of machines that make accurate, ordered and literal calculations. With this being an 'Analogue' festival, I had to think of a way of representing this digital process in an analogue fashion. The way it works seems a little long winded, but I think it'll be sympathetic to the brief in the end - its basically a drawing machine that watches a computer screen as the computer chooses colours at random (I'll get on to how it does this later). Once the device has 'seen' a colour on the computer monitor (by means of its colour sensor that is pointing at the screen) the machine moves its mechanical, pen holding, arm around a piece of paper. Depending on what colour the machine sees, determines how the arm moves. What we should end up with is a beautiful generative algorithmic drawing, and not a big mess that looks like a spider has walked all over it!!

The drawings at the top are sketches of the machine that I plan to build, and the circular patterns below them are simulations of how I think the end result may look. It is a 'random' process though, so we'll just have to wait and see.

Here's some images taken at our end of year show on Wednesday 7th July. The show was held at 52 Princess St, Manchester and featured the work of MA Media Art and MA Photography. The photo on the top left shows part of Katy Suggitt's installation that makes use of glass vase's and sound and other stuff to explore domestic spaces (you may also be able spy some of Lucy Ridges photography in the background).

The photo on the top right is a shot of the gallery space...and a jolly nice space it is too.

My work is seen in the bottom left and middle. The picture on the left is me attempting to calibrate the movements of the puppet prior to the show (which isn't that easy when you're using a £20 webcam from PC world in really poor light). The picture in the bottom middle is of a visitor looking, in what seems to be a rather confused manner, at my work. Perhaps if she had stood in front of the webcam and jiggled her arms to operate stooge, she would be confused no more.

Stooge - Video

Here's a small video of stooge in action. Its the first prototype of what I hope is going to be a larger scale work - possibly with more puppets, and I'd like them to be operated through the web via the audiences own webcam.

Stooge was recently exhibited in Marmara University, Istanbul in June 2010 where he formed part of the The 5th International Triennial (more photo's of this coming soon)

Stooge (the telerobotic puppet) 2010

Meet stooge - I created him in February 2010. Stooge is a computer generated puppet who responds to visual movements (a human-machine interface of sorts). The name Stooge relates metaphorically to the subservient nature of computers within the complex symbiotic relationship between man and machine: Stooge is the viewers henchman or willing sidekick who waits patiently before being called into action. The gestures are captured via a webcam and interpreted by software to control the appendages.

Initial investigations with Stooge at the development stage were focused around the technical or practical questions relating to the project - typically “how on earth do I create a remote interface that allows a machine to be operated at a distance?” In the case of stooge, computer vision was employed as the interface, with the role of the machine being fulfilled by a computer generated (Adobe Flash) puppet. Computer vision can be broadly defined as the science/investigation of machines that can see, and it is this area of science and technology that appeared most sympathetic with the concept for stooge - since vision has played an important role in the techno-organic theories of the late twentieth century. We only have to refer to the achievements of artificially enhanced vision enterprises (such as the development of sophisticated surveillance systems and apparatus similar to the Hubble space telescope) to realise its importance to Western hypothesis concerning man/machine transformations.

Reflecting critically on the achievements of stooge results in a number of questions surrounding the debates into cyborgs/human-machine interfaces/teleoperators. Stooge was designed to comment on the human interface with machines across distance (we have already defined the principles and concepts of a teleoperator) It is a fundamental assumption that teleoperators always have man at the centre of the control loop - Stooge, however, appears to turn on its head this anticipated dominance by the human participant. Instead of mirroring the viewers kinematics (as one would presumably expect from an installation of this type) stooge grins defiantly in the face of the audience as he responds to the movements but interprets them in apparently random and unorthodox manner. The irony being that in contrary to Stooge mimicking the ‘puppeteer’, it is stooge who emerges as the master. The audience, apparently confused and somewhat frustrated by the rogue movements of the puppets apparent disobedience to carry out its instruction, begin to replicate Stooge’s projected activity. The machine has manipulated itself into a position of control and just as N. Katherine Hales wrote in her essay The life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the posthuman “Humans are becoming more like androids, just like androids are becoming more like them”

Perhaps more alarmingly, the resulting scenario of a machine influencing the decisions of man is not a far cry from what many feel will herald the apocalypse - as the denizens of the Sci-Fi realms will testify by citing cyborg bodies such as the Terminator and the artificially intelligent machine consciousness’ of Larry and Andy Wachowski’s Matrix. I am not convinced for one moment that Stooge will be a harbinger of the Four Horsemen, but there are important debates that are (albeit incredibly simplistically) raised through this relatively unsophisticated puppet.

Teleoperators and Human Augmentation

Thats right, I said "Teleoperators and Human Augmentation"

“These machines perform as appendages of man, particularly his hand, arms, and legs. Radio links, copper wires, and steel cables replace nerve fibers and muscle tendons...weather they are the tongues used by the old fashioned grocer to retrieve a cerial box from the top shelf or the mechanical hand that may repair some future nuclear-powered space vehicle...the prefix ‘tele’ in teleoperator describes the ability of this class of man-machine systems to project man’s innate dexterity not only across distance but through physical barriers aswell” - Edwin G. Johnsen and William R. Corliss in their essay published in the Cyborg Handbook, 1995

The Virtual Body

“The Virtual body is a body of great potential. On this body we can reinscribe ourselves using whatever coding system we desire. We can try on new body configurations. We can experiment with immortality by going places and doing things that would be impossible in the physical world. For the virtual body, nothing is fixed and everything is possible. Indeed, this is the reason why hackers wish to become disembodied consciousness flowing freely through cyberspace, willing the idea of their own bodies and environments.” Flesh Machine: Critical Art Ensemble 1998.

If you've not read the book Flesh Machine you can download it for free from the Critical Art Ensemble's website. It's definitely a must if you're interested in Cyborg/Posthuman theory (along with other issues such as Eugenics, Pancapitalisn, and the Net)