Leave No Trace

The public lecture at Wolverhampton University last night, on ‘Building Intelligence:  Autonomous Characters in Virtual Environments’ wasn’t quite what I expected. I had interpreted the phrase “interactive multimedia applications” to suggest a wide variety of contexts, possibly including art installations. The lecture, however, after listing different types of environments and purposes, focused entirely on games. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, and The Guardian coincidentally points out today that games tend to be overlooked by critics.

The University claims to be researching artificial intelligence, but something troubled me about the descriptions used in the lecture. It was aimed at a non-specialist audience, so I assume that they do far more than was described, but it seemed to me that the examples given were of merely evaluating options from pre-defined lists until a successful outcome was found.

I know that the definition of intelligence in this context is debatable, but I had hoped to hear some discussion of systems reaching logical conclusions from basic precepts, even if that’s still a distant goal. At the end, I asked if they’d had any experience of unexpectedly complex behaviour spontaneously occuring, but all he responded with was a brief description of the concept of emergent behaviour and mentioned flocking.

I’m no expert in the subject, but there seems to be potential in the cross-over between genetic algorithms and neural networks to allow systems to experiment at random and learn from the results, which could then inform future experiments. I’d like to explore this further, but at Wolverhampton they write a lot of code in C++, which I wouldn’t dream of learning. Life’s too short for that.

The Decode digital art exhibition has opened at the V&A in London, and Create Digital Motion has posted a slideshow of photographs taken at the exhibition. I’ll be going next week, but in the New Year there’s a whole programme of associated events, activities and conferences. One of the opportunities is to adapt an artist’s programming code (known as Recode Decode), and have your work featured on the London Underground. Download the source code and user guide here.

Here’s a link to Body Paint which is one of the items in the exhibition, and to onedotzero’s events website page, which lists all of the works.

There’s a free public lecture at the University of Wolverhampton at 6pm tomorrow (Wednesday) on Building Intelligence: Autonomous Characters in Virtual Environments:

This talk aims to shed some light on the current research and techniques that can be employed in the creation of challenging and sophisticated autonomous artificial intelligent characters used in interactive multimedia applications.

It’s part of a programme of lectures that included one examining criticisms of the lack of craft in contemporary art. I didn’t know about that one in time, but it sounds interesting. I’ll certainly be going to the one on Building Intelligence.

(the teeming void) has just published an interesting essay that touches on the philosophical implications of the nature of digital media, with reference to the work of HC Gilje. I like Blink, with its connotations of distorted squash court markings and glowing reflections on polished wood surfaces, but I’m not convinced by the rest of the work discussed. Nevertheless, the analysis of the aesthetics of digital media is interesting:

The aesthetics of digital media flow from a related generality, where sound and image are encoded as fields of data. If a pixel is a number, an image is a grid of pixels, video a stream of images, and each of these numbers can take any value at all, then formally, an aesthetics of digital video is only a matter of finding the right values – fishing around in a space containing all possible digital video. If digital media creates this generalised space, anything at all, the media arts are faced with unavoidable questions: not only what to make – which values to choose, but how to choose them, and why?

It’s a subject that appears to fascinate the author of (the teeming void) because he’s touched on it several times before. I particularly like the phrase: “…the digital is just the analog operating within certain tolerances or threshholds.”

Visitors Studio is an online collaborative space for live interactive creativity, though I’ve no idea how useful it is. Has anyone any experience of this?

Some people say that the most interesting work is created when working within severe constraints, because it forces you to be more creative. Well, how about these for constraints:

No easy easy key-frames or curves aceleration

No gradients

No feathers

No perspective or 3d space

Forget Third-party plugins

The result is surprisingly interesting.

I received a request from zenbullets, in response to my post the other day about his work, asking to see some images of our gallery space, because he’s interested in submitting a proposal for the exhibition, which is good news. He lives far from Stoke-on-Trent and is therefore unable to travel here for any meetings, so I thought it a good idea to post some on the blog, taken from the presentation we gave earlier in the week:

The creators of this music sequencer (based on light levels from a webcam) describe it as too compex but a fun experiment, and I’d have to agree – but I couldn’t resist posting a link to something described as “what might happen if Terry Riley did chiptunes”.

Given what Marcel Duchamp famously did to the Mona Lisa, I’m not going to claim that this version created with Processing isn’t art, but I’d say the most interesting effect is the tiny variations make it look like the texture of tapestry.

I posted yesterday about zenbullet’s video projection on a church in Brighton. Some people expressed an interest at the meeting the other night about external video projection, so here are a few more examples:

• theatre facade
• grain silos in Quebec
• church in Utrecht

There’s a lot of other good work around, including a fantastic piece inside a cathedral in Holland, where the organ pipes appear to float off into space, but I can’t find the link. If anyone knows the piece, please post it in the comments.

If you’re interested in video projection, you should check out Create Digital Motion. They frequently blog about vj equipment and performances, both outdoors and indoors.