In tracing the history of computer-generated poetry, Klobucar identifies the agreed-upon earliest computer poetry as Theo Lutz's 1959 "Stochastiche Text"; the first machine-written book as William Chamberlain's 1984 "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed".
In the same issue of TCR, Jim Andrews in his essay "The Body of Net Art" writes "I do think that the edge of net art will continue to be strongly involved with trying to do funky shit with an internet connection. Why? That's a crucial distinguishing characteristic of net art versus other types of art..." (p.99)
Jim accurately describes this practice as the 'edge' of net-art. What of the other contours? It is my feeling that investigations of the medium dominate the early phase of art's relationship with a new technology. Since the web continues to change, these conceptual investigations of the media/technology itself continue to have relevance. But there is a significant portion of the technological infrastructure of the web (the basic network structure, URLs, html, Flash) which have matured and now offer what constitutes normative service. No one is amazed by their email anymore, or blogs, we read them for their content; and every other technological innovation will follow a similar path. A spike of interest in the device in-and-of-itself followed by a dissipation of that interest as interest in 'what it can do' and 'what it delivers' becomes ascendant. Eventually media become invisible, as the technology of language has for the most part become. Investigations of network media as media will still play a role in net-art. From Jodi to the Electronic literature Organization, engagement with networks as networks and code as material is a core aspect of the digital aspect of art practice. I feel however, it should not and is not exclusively the only path that interesting net-art will take. A substantial space exists for the exploration of lyric and mythological artistic practice in digital poetry. The metabolism of humanity, our neurological inheritance is tuned to feed on lyric and myth which transduce emotion and cosmological questioning into language. Incorporating these venerable traditions into contemporary net-art constitutes an enormous opportunity for a digital poetry.
Labels: digital poetics, emotions, net-art, orality
[+/-] A Gap in the current Theory Currently, there is a gap at a theoretical level in dealing with aesthetics, intuition and emotions in digital poetry. This gap exists due to several convergent factors. First, academies privilege that which can be discussed. Intuition, emotions and aesthetics are intimate, qualitative and complex; they do not render easily in the language of formal research. Second, Lev Manovich (builing on Innis and McLuhan) stresses how new media is radically distinct from previous media. This insight which has swiftly consolidated into axiom, encourages an exclusive critical focus on work which investigates the materiality of media. Digital poetic work that simply utilizes new media as expressive tool risks being stigmatized as naive.
I argue for an inclusion of naive, intuitive, emotional and aesthetic approaches, and a sustained engagement with the issues that arise from emotional and aesthetic complexity. New media is, apart from its distinctive features, an aspect of computational technology; and if technology's evolution is analyzed comparative with biological life, technology is interpretable as the 7th Kingdom of biological life (Kevin Kelly, 2005). Technology is therefore connected to a continuum of tools which have been utilized for millennium by humans to build expressive forms. The motivation for the creation of these art-forms arises from a collective existential ignorance about death and love. Myth was the classical tool humans used to consolidate memory. Our existential ignorance remains the same: both love and death are mysterious apparatuses. New media art which deals with these fundamental thematics is neither retro or obsolete.
Labels: aesthetics, complexity, digital poetics, emotions, theory
[+/-] Art Thesis Argument (Poetry as pattern representation) Hypothesis: Art is the information visualization of emotions.
In order to establish the relevance of art as a legitimate method of research in academia, it seems necessary to ensure its legitimacy in scientific terms.
Let's define the terms.
What is emotion?
Emotion according to Marvin Minsky is a 'suitcase word' which refers to "large networks of processes inside our brains" [1]. In other words there are numerous diverse concurrent, sometimes contradictory, biochemical processes occurring in our mind-body envelop, and emotion is the word we use to describe the turbulence that arises from the intersection of these processes. Emotion recognition according to Rosalind Picard is a multimodal pattern recognition problem [2]. Therefore it seems plausible to suggest that emotions are patterns. Combining Minsky's and Picard's viewpoints with the idea of emotion as pattern, it is possible to define emotions as complex superimposed patterns that occur in bodies.
What is art?
Remember from Aristotle that in Greek 'poiesis' is making [3]. From this root meaning of 'poetics', artists and poets are makers. What do artists and poets make? They make patterns: visual patterns, rhythmic patterns of words, sonic patterns, embodied patterns (dance) and conceptual patterns. Art-making is pattern-making.
What do these 'art' patterns represent?
They represent lived experience. What is experience? It is is the accumulated bodily memory of many instantaneous patterns and state-spaces of the body: experience is by definition an aspect of emotion. In other words, art experiences are records of body-mind state-spaces (patterns of biochemistry).
What is Information Visualization?
A design science arising from computationally enhanced interpretations of data: graphs, charts, flowing particles. Wikipedia :" computer graphics and user interface design that are concerned with presenting data to users, by means of interactive or animated digital images." Visual membranes between numbers and intuited knowing.
Is Digital Poetry Information Visualization?
Poetry is information visualization because it transduces emotional patterns into words; in conjunction with an interface it becomes an epistemological tool: the skin. The skin of networked body is the interface. Embodied patterns which are too complex to currently be analyzed quantitatively, which evade scientific knowledge (consciousness, love, sacrifice, transcendence, ecstasy) these patterns are emotions; emotions are a research domain of digital poetry. It transcribes analog experience into digital code.
Why?
Lets use a word that is very problematic: soul.
Let's give it an arbitrary axiomatic and contingent definition:
Soul is the totality of the body-mind state-spaces both potential and actualized.
Let's go too far.
Poetry is the information visualization of the soul.
*******
I agree with Minsky that emotions may not be different than thought. What is referred to as qualitative or 'emotional' is perhaps understandable as the meta-pattern extracted from a mass of biological quantitative processes: all that boiling bodily data builds up until it aggregates and becomes labeled. Art becomes necessary and relevant for all humans as a methodology for understanding and researching problem domains that are untenable to scientific scrutiny. The lineage of art emerges out of mythology, mythology emerged out humankind's search for meaning around death. Although science may validly claim that much of mythology and art are understandable as imaginative projections of our existential ignorance (confabulations provoked by our fear of the unknown onto an immense dangerous universe), it can also be claimed that only by voyaging into the unknown and slowly and tenaciously extracting little vivid glimmerings of insight will humankind advance in its evolution. Art is authentic research.
Example research questions:
What is love? Why death?
- Marvin Lee Minsky, The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). p.2.
- Rosalind W. Picard, Affective computing (Cambridge, Mass. ; London: MIT Press, 1997).
- Aristotle, Aristotle's Poetics (Montreal [Que.]: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997).
- Ben Bogart pointed out in the hallway today that knowledge representation might help evade the possibility of ocularcentrism posed by the info visualization terminology. He is correct; but knowledge representations have their own set of problems,
Labels: art, emotions, information visualization, making, pattern, poets
[+/-] Passion Maps Narrative tension is a product of its discharge in our physiognomy. Where it discharges (the adrenal glands, the neurological modules of fear or love) is the author's choice. Most contemporary plots leverage sex and death; these are easy pathways. Who will kill who when where or how? Who will fuck who when where or how? The style of killing or fucking may differ over genres, but the mssg is the same: struggle reproduce slaughter ejaculate. Occasionally the need for comfort predominates: we develop appetites for soft, fuzzy, gentle nurturing stimulus. But between the primal violence and primal nurturance there is a similarity of style: orientation in time space, calculation of potential futures, assessment of wants, needs, desires, actualities, fantasias. These are the quanta at the root of behavior. Innate knots of intrinsic tension in the programming of the body.
Grief, ecstasy, comedy, yearning: roles intertwined with strategies, planning, creative perturbations of possible paths, choices cascading to choices. Disguise, pretense, destruction, rejuvenation, reverberation, and resilience. Ceaseless restless waves of rapturous reflex.
Most image, speech and action (in art as in life) is designed to disguise; even sincerity is a disguise of doubt. Narrative interest arises for the audience in guessing what characters might be thinking but not saying. Others are potential sites of deceit. The mythology of our contemporary civilization is that of a gift, a betrayal and ultimately vengeance.
Civilization is now highly habituated and addicted to war.
Conventional society has opened war on all fronts. One is the war on drugs. Yet, endogenous chemicals secreted by our own blood internally in situations of extreme stress (war, loss, death) are not considered to be drugs: not yet at least. Society misdiagnosing its own addiction to the endogenous chemicals elicited by war as justice, exports guilt on those addicted to exogenous chemicals (known as street drugs). This makes for a social atmosphere perpetually inflamed by passionate tensions.
Art is an addiction to the external information visualization of internal glandular disruptions which occur to humans in their most passionate moments. Art is, in other words, a passion map. Sometimes, it is the passion of extreme boredom, utter inertia, despair, sensuality, innocence. Each of these constitutes a state space of chemical parameters. In the age of L-dopa and diverse neuro-leptic pharmaceuticals, the Passions mapped by artists are being directly manipulated by scientists. Passion maps allow others to navigate emotions. Such maps do not only occur internally to the tribe, they are secreted by masses of organisms, diffused throughout space. Where no cognitive capacity exists for converting perception into meaning, it will be labelled simply pattern.
Passion is spatio-temporal: it evolves. Passion maps must be updated in real-time; that is why culture evolves relentlessly. Appetite, food. Language licking the land.
Labels: discharge, emotions, narrative, passion
[+/-] Emotion Creation as Pattern Creation Looking at art-research from a strictly scientific perspective, a rigorous observer might be tempted to challenge the efficacy and verifiability of claims that emotion, ethics and aesthetics are entwined both metabolically and metaphysically. An objective viewpoint might find grounds to challenge the idea that emotion is generated from perceptions of beauty, and computational systems that present beauty are in effect synthesizing emotion. So on what basis can these claims be made?
The theoretical justification for understanding emotion synthesis as pattern creation is achieved by inverting an axiom of affective computation. One of the central premises of Rosalind Picard's Affective Computation (1998, MIT) is that emotion recognition is a pattern recognition problem. Picard emphasizes how multi- modal signals contribute to give a complete set of patterns from which emotional states can be inferred. Her fastidious quantitative research verifies that this hypothesis is valid. [Picard, 2003] .
My argument is simple: if emotion recognition is pattern recognition, then emotions are patterns: neurologically, conceptually, and metabolically within our bodies. Art which consists of visual and audio signals (unless randomized into pure noise) is pattern; therefore fluids patterns in dynamic disequilibrium (like the videos used in Thoems)are feasible emotion synthesis devices. Emotions are generated by seeing and hearing patterns; art makes patterns; art is thus emotional synthesis. This conclusion is validated by millenniums of artistic culture acting as a cathartic mechanism in all societies.
Now if a computer creates patterns, or displays audio-visual material that contains recognizable content then that constitutes emotional synthesis. I am not claiming that art is (or needs be) conscious or aware of its emotional state; but that art (like Kismet) is capable of evoking and emulating patterns which humans recognize and attribute as emotional states. Digital poetry (and computational art in general) therefore is potentially a valuable adjunct to scientific research into affective computation. By creating patterns, artists have developed a comprehensive intuitive implicit knowledge of emotion creation.
This viewpoint of emotion as pattern does not foreground the anthropomorphic taxonomies which have been developed by numerous commentators (LeDoux, Panksepp, Daiglesh) and thus nimbly avoids the controversy of what emotions are primary in humans. Instead, patterns are patterns until perceived by the human emotional classification apparatus. This implies that as artist-researchers, it is possible to explore patterns without naming what it is we are exploring. As John Cage said in conversation with Richard Kostelanetz, "We do very good work when we don't know what we are doing." [Cage, J., & Kostelanetz, R. (1978). For the Third Time. Manhattan Cable Television, Artists Television Network. Retrieved March 21, 2007, from http://www.ubu.com/film/cage.html.]
Labels: art, emotions, research, synthesis
[+/-] Emergence If emotions are an emergent feature of systems that include motivational drives, then it is probable that a cybernetic intelligence will arise spontaneously on this planet sometime in the next 20 or thirty years as numerous futurists have forecast.
Its 'consciousness' will arise from the coalesced intricate knots of functionality scripted into it at diverse layers through its distributed architecture (an idea which is almost as familar as a cliche).
The arising emergence might prove necessary, since in the last 20 years, state of the art affective computation has not succeeded in simulating anything but the exterior physiological indicators of emotion; the genuine lived sense of an emotion as humans know it (autonomously distinct from cognition) remains beyond the grasp of all implementations. The computational ability to recognize 'emotions' is limited to trained biometrically invasive laboratory situations; and computers only 'seem' to have what humans call emotions.
Research has only scratched the surface of the mystery. A skilled programmer can still spend all day configuring rudimentary perceptual capabilities; Eliza still represents a relatively skilled chatbot.
A limited capacity for self-reflexive thought demonstrated by the humans species might be hindering the creation of an autonomously intelligent non-biological entity; in other words, if the creation of computational emotion was dependent on our emotion then probably it will not emerge anytime soon; but if it is a product of our instincts and somehow an unanticipated side-effect of our day-to-day activity, then non-biological intelligence seems imminent.
As Rosalind Picard notes emotions are complex aggregates:
- “The term ‘emotion’ is perhaps best thought of as an umbrella. under which a variety of processes cluster”(Affective Computing, p.225)
Labels: affective, computation, emotions
[+/-] Language, Emotions, Computation: an argument for the role of art in AI In a 2006 debate on "Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics", Ray Kurzweil distinguishes between apparent consciousness and actual subjectivity: "Mastering human emotion and human language is really key to the Turing test, which has held up as our exemplary assessment of whether or not a non-biological intelligence has achieved human levels of intelligence. And that will require a machine to master human emotion which in my view is really the cutting edge of human intelligence, that's the most intelligent thing we do....".
Digital poetry is at the confluence of language, emotion and computation. The questions and processes it explores constitute a subset of humanity's ongoing research into non-biological intelligence. How is meaning moved and influenced by emotion? What lessons can be extracted from traditional poetic forms (rhythm, prosody, metaphor) that have relevance for design in computational interfaces? As we begin to understand how humans react to visual mobile language; how emotions shape and guide our responses to the world, how interfaces enable or disrupt engagement, art operates as a research platform where qualitative insights accumulate and exploratory ideological interventions emerge.
To generalize, objective observation is the domain of science; subjective consciousness is the domain of art. Due to the immeasurable quality of subjective consciousness it is often excluded from scientific debate. Yet, as Kurzweil points out, neurological studies are rapidly mapping and simulating regions of the brain. In spite of these rapid advances, the actual nebulous emotional volatile soft subjective self that humans 'know' as themselves remains far beyond any scientific analysis: non-locatable and in many respects unverifiable or shareable.
What methods exist for humans to discuss and communicate this fundamental subjective emotional aspect of their experience? Art. Art has throughout its existence been a medium for humans to share data and information about the apparently private intuitive modulating sensual aspects of subjective experience. A large corpus of texts and visual expressions testify to the efficacy of art. Visual language combines text with imagistic expression; in that fusion, a very potent medium (multimedia) for research into the mind emerges.
Digital poetry goes farther: utilizing the computer as the delivery methodology for the art introduces an extraordinary range of flexibility in how the art is experienced. Interactivity permits the user to influence the art. Expression is thereby customized to the activity of the user: a duplex mode of communication arises. Frthermore, 'participatory' poetry opens the potential for recursively inclusive modes of aesthetic experience. Digital poetry concerned with investigations of the materiality of the medium often develops methods for generatively creating literature; for foregrounding the machine's capacity as algorithm mechanism capable of emulating at a rudimentary level our massive parallel processing personalities. All these trajectories are being explored in the contemporary digital poetry domain.
Art is therefore contributing to the epistemological exploration of emotions and experiences which are at the forefront of affective computing.
Source:
Kurzweil, R., Gelernter, D., & Brooks, R. (2006). MIT World : Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics: Public Debate. Retrieved March 8, 2007, from http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/422/.
Labels: consciousness, digital poetics, emotions
