CREATIVE SOFTWARE
UPDATED 21-03-06
These are now the final details for Creative Software - and barring some minor changes this is a full listing of contributors, works and projects involved in the programme.
PUT QUESTIONS TO THE PANELISTS VIA EMAIL
IN ADVANCE OF THE EVENT <questions@cybersalon.org>.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGS
Panelists
Ed Burton
Research & Development Director, Soda Creative Ltd
<www.soda.co.uk>
Ed grew up playing with computer programming, with his first software title being published at the age of 17. Following a degree in Architecture at the University of Liverpool, Ed undertook the MA in Digital Arts at the Middlesex University Centre for Electronic Arts. His MA thesis on computer models of young children's drawing behaviour was subsequently developed into an ongoing PhD research project into artificial intelligence, dynamical systems and developmental psychology. After three years of research and teaching at the Centre for Electronic Arts, Ed joined Soda Creative Technologies Ltd (www.soda.co.uk) as Research and Development Director in 1998 and was the original author of the BAFTA award winning virtual construction toy sodaconstructor <www.sodaplay.com/constructor>.
Simon Colton
Lecturer and Undergraduate Admissions Tutor, Department of Computing, Imperial College, London
<www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc>
<www.craftbynumbers.com>
<www.aisb.org.uk>
<www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/events/ECAI06>
Simon Colton is a lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the
Department of Computing of Imperial College, London, and also the
creative director of Machine Creations Ltd. He is author of the book
"Automated Theory Formation in Pure Mathematics" (Springer 2002) and is the public understanding officer for the AISB society.
In his academic life, Simon works on automating the scientific
discovery process, with particular emphasis on the creative aspects of mathematical discovery. This fits into the context of computational creativity, which aims to write software that exhibits creative behaviour and produces artefacts (paintings, poems, theorems, melodies, etc.) of real aesthetic value. Simon is currently
co-organising the third Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity, to be held at the European Conference on AI (ECAI) this year.
In his business life, Simon concentrates on the visual arts as a
domain for building software to enhance the creative processes of
individuals and creative industry firms. Machine Creations was set up
to exploit the gap between the (low) level of creativity people
believe software can achieve and the (higher) level it can actually
achieve. As an example of this, Machine Creations offers a
Craft-By-Numbers service, where customers can upload a digital
photograph and purchase a personalised paint by numbers kit. When
completed, the paint by numbers canvas will be an artistic rendering
of the original image. Here, the Tryptych software (which turns the
image into the painting guidelines sheet and acrylic colour mixing
guide) has taken on some of the creative responsibility in producing
the painting.
Simon was educated in maths and then pure maths at the Universities of Durham and Liverpool, and undertook his PhD studies in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. His PhD thesis was awarded the Distinguished Dissertation award by the British Computer Society.
Tom Corby & Gavin Baily
Researchers/artists, reconnoitre.net
<www.reconnoitre.net>
Tom studied Fine Art at Middlesex University (1987) and completed his PhD at Chelsea College of Art & Design in 2001 and teaches at the University of Westminster.
Gavin studied Fine Art at the Ruskin School for Drawing and Fine Art and studied computer science at UCL. He is involved in a couple of digital art projects dealing with the Internet and artificial life and lives and works in London (GB).
Tom works with Gavin Baily (as Corby and Baily); their work is concerned both exploring the critical and aesthetic potential of software and scientific imaging technologies. There work has won a number of international awards including an honorary mention at the Priz Ars Electronica Linz. A nomination for the International Media Art Award 2000, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) and the main Festival prize for, cynet art 99 Festival for International Media Art and Interdisciplinary Media Projects.
Charlie Gere (Chair)
Director of Research, Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University
<www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/cultres/staff/gere.php>
Charlie Gere is Reader in New Media Research in the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University. He is author of Digital Culture (Reaktion Books, 2002) and Art, Time and Technology (Berg, 2006). He is Chair of Computers and the History of Art (CHArt) and was Director of Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc... (CACHe), a three year AHRB-funded project looking at the history of early British computer art.
Alex McClean
Programmer/musician/artist, state51/Slub/toplap
<yaxu.org>
<doc.gold.ac.uk/~ma503am/>
<slub.org>
<state51.co.uk>
<leplacard.org>
<toplap.org>
<runme.org>
Alex McLean is a programmer-musician and software artist. He is one half of slub with Adrian Ward, a live coding duo producing gabba skiffle acid drone music with their handmade interactive development environments. slub have performed widely across Europe including at the Sonar, Transmediale, Sonic Acts, Ars Electronica and Ultrasound festivals.
Alex co-organises open and free-entry electronic art and music events including the monthly dorkbotlondon meetings and annual London LePlacard headphone festival. He's also co-developer of runme.org software art repository, leplacard.org scheduling website and sonomu.net music website, and founder member of the TOPLAP live-coding organisation. His current focus is in his work as a member of the state51 conspiracy, and in reading an MSc in Arts Computing at Goldsmiths College, London, supported by a scholarship from the PRS Foundation.
Hannah Redler
Head of Arts Programme, Science Museum
Hannah Redler is a curator and producer of contemporary art projects, specialising in new media and cross discipline practices. Currently Head of Arts Programme at the Science Museum, London and an advisor to Tate Modern on a interpretive environments, Hannah's interests include the influence and impact of media on people's experience of physical and mental space(s), hybrid creativity, cross-discipline, socially engaged & participatory
practices. Her post at the Science Museum, encompassed Project Leader for the artist-led interactive Energy gallery, which opened in 2004.
From Oct 2000 - June 2003 she was Curator for The Public, West Bromwich, directing highly skilled teams in curating, interior and interactive media design to develop interactive and design strategies and arts programme for a £4.6million, 1500m2 high-tech, participative and multi-disciplinary arts gallery. Previously, from January 1999 - October 2000 she was Contemporary Art Commissions Curator for the Science Museum's Wellcome Wing, where she commissioned software artworks from David Rokeby, Christian Moeller and Tessa Elliott & Jonathan Jones Morris. Prior to this, she was the Digital Media Co-ordinator at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television.
From 1993 -1998 she co-founded and co-directed Studio Fish, a creative technology company, working with arts, media and corporate clients. She was educated at Camberwell School of Arts and Craft and Norwich School of Art, obtaining a BA(HONS) degree in Fine Art: Painting, and at the Royal College of Art, achieving the MA (RCA) in Curating Contemporary Art.
Andrew Shoben
Artist, Greyworld
<www.greyworld.org>
In 1993 Andrew Shoben founded Greyworld in Paris. Their goal is to create works that articulate public spaces, allowing some form of self-expression in areas of the city that people see every day but normally exclude and ignore. They aim to establish special intimacies through the unexpected articulation of objects installed in these spaces - to ‘short circuit’ both the environmental and social expectations supplied by the surrounding urban environment. They create spaces that offer the passers by an opportunity to join an unexpected ‘community of presence’, initiating an intimate communication which often leads to a personalization of the environment.
They have exhibited their work around the world, with permanent installations in twelve countries. This year, they will be unveiling several new installations in London, Berlin and San Francisco.
Andrew Shoben is a former lecturer at the Royal College of Art, and is a visiting Professor to several Universities in the UK and the US. He is a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths University. Since 1999, he has been a special advisor to the Arts Council of England (LAB) and has recently been nominated for a NESTA fellowship. Andrew regularly gives guest lectures around the world, including the Kitchen - New York, The Design Indaba - Cape Town, and GrafikEurope – Barcelona. This year he has been invited to speak at conferences in Shanghai, Los Angeles, and Berlin. For more information see the Greyworld website.
Alexei Shulgin
Artist/curator
<easylife.org>
Alexei Shulgin is a Moscow-based artist, musician, curator, activist and professor. Shulgin has participated in numerous exhibitions and symposiums on photography, contemporary art and new media. He is the author and curator of several Internet projects and is considered a pioneer of net.art. He also collaborated on the development of Runme.org, launched in January 2003 as an open database for software art. He is a front man for 386 DX cyberpunk rock band and a co-curator of Read_me, an international software art festival.
Stanza
Artist/curator
<www.stanza.co.uk>
<www.soundcities.com>
<www.thecentralcity.co.uk>
<www.genomixer.com>
<www.soundtoys.net>
Stanza is a London based British artist who specialises in net art, multimedia, and electronic sounds. His award winning online projects have been invited for exhibition in digital festivals around the world, and Stanza also travels extensively to present his net art, lecturing and giving performances of his audiovisual interactions. His works explore artistic and technical opportunities to enable new aesthetic perspectives, experiences and perceptions within context of architecture, data spaces and online environments.
Stanza's work crosses borders between artistic, technological and scientific sectors. His participatory digital artworks invite viewers to guide data flows or to simply observe self-generating compositions. His digital paintings shift through abstract and iconic patterns, which people can explore akin to virtual environments.
The Clark Digital bursary (2004/2005) is allowing him to work with the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol and research sensors and the impact of live data in the architectural and urban environment. Stanza was also awarded the prestigious NESTA dreamtime award in 2004 allowing him to experiment with using new displays, sensors, and live data to make responsive spaces and interactive installation; to find new arts and technology collaborators worldwide while also leading to new aesthetic perspectives, experiences and perceptions.
In development are multi robots performances, wireless sensor networks and investigations into interactive spaces. The main themes include the nature of surveillance equipment and data in the public domain in this age of live networked data.
Contributors
Rachel Collinson
<www.rechord.com>
Rachel Collinson is a software artist with a sideways take on life and a love for building creative community. She is also MD of rechord, who make exciting, usable interfaces for information and for play. A former lecturer at the Hypermedia Research Centre and on various MA and BA courses, her work has been featured in exhibitions worldwide, in graphics textbooks and in magazines such as Design Week and Creative Technology. In fact, Creative Review chose rechord as one of the top 10 new designers as part of their annual awards, Creative Futures.
Julie Freeman
<www.juliefreeman.co.uk>
Julie Freeman is an artist who uses technology to explore and expose the natural systems that surround us to discover hidden rhythms and patterns. Crossing the boundaries between art, nature and technology, she transforms often complex scientific processes into soundscapes and imagery.
Julie was awarded a NESTA fellowship to develop a reusable modular software application to use in her artistic practice. Her work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Science Museum and Yorkshire Sculpture Park as well as internationally. She was co-founder and co-director of Studio Fish, an artist-led creative technology company.
Anthony Head
Course Leader, FdA Design for Digital Technologies, Bath School of Art and Design
<www.cockneydog.com>
Anthony Head is a software artist who bridges the gap between being a programmer and an artistic creative thinker. Anthony’s work is currently exploring interactivity, 3D virtual environments and intuitive human computer interaction. Anthony is curating a new digital art festival, Two Not Ten, based in Southampton in October.
He has exhibited his work mainly in London and internationally at SIGGRAPH in 2004, His collaborative work with Painter Jeremy Gardiner was awarded the Peterborough Prize for digital art in 2003 and he is the co-author '3D for the Web', internationally published by Focal Press <3dfortheweb.info>.
Anthony is a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design and Course Leader of the Digital Design foundation degree at Bath Spa University. He studied BA Digital Arts followed by MA Computer Arts at the London College of Music and Media.
Selected work is available to view on his website <www.cockneydog.com>.
Tom Holley
Co-Director CRADL, Creative Research and Development Lab, Huddersfield
Until recently Tom Holley was the Creative Director of the Media Centre, located in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Over the past four years he has established and developed a new media arts programme comprising Medialounge exhibitions, an international Artist in Residence programme [AiR], commissions, the Ultrasound Festival and, in collaboration with Derek Hales of the University of Huddersfield, developed a practice based research and development programme namely the Digital Research Unit [DRU].
In April 2006 the Digital Research Unit's work will transfer to the University of Huddersfield, and will be re-launched later this year as the Creative Research and Development Lab [CRADL]. He will Co-Direct the new project with Derek Hales.
CRADL establishes a new R&D studio which will occupy 3,000 sq ft of open plan space at Bates Mill, a working industrial Mill complex located ten minutes from the centre of Huddersfield. CRADL will have a revised agenda to include key aspects of the work previously based at the Media Centre including: the international Artist in Residence programme; curatorial and programming activities; and the Ultrasound Festival. CRADL will bring together a number of MPhil/PhD researchers to work alongside the artist in residence programme and will focus on research, development and production of creative and cultural artefacts in relation to new and emerging technologies.
CRADL will initially funded by Arts Council England and the University of Huddersfield.
Rob Myers
Artist
<draw-something.robmyers.org>
<paintr.robmyers.org>
<rob-art.sourceforge.net>
<minara.sourceforge.net>
<www.robmyers.org/weblog/2005/08/02/rob-myers-howto-images/>
Rob Myers is an artist and hacker based in Peterborough. During the 1990s he was a student and later a tutor at the Centre For Electronic Arts. The CEA's ethos of writing your own software to escape the constraints of proprietary systems is one that Rob has combined with the principles of Free Software and a strong interest in the history of art computing to arrive at his current working practice. This includes autonomous drawing systems and an interactive vector graphics coding environment as well as re-implementations of classic art computing programs. Rob's most recent show in Belgrade in 2005 consisted entirely of GPL and Creative-Commons licensed code and images.
Presenting Projects/Works on Display
Corby and Baily - CYCLONE.SOC
<www.reconnoitre.net/rec_main/docs/cyclone.htm>
CYCLONE.SOC uses the textual traces of social interaction as its material substrate to produce a representation of the conversation, debate and arguments that thread through and constitute particular Internet Newsgroups. The Newsgroups that have been selected focus on ideological and religious debates. They represent emergent epistemological structures that act as metonyms not only of difference, but of ideological tensions which mirror the dynamics of social space.
To represent this process CYCLONE.SOC employs an organizational model derived from scientific visualizations of weather conditions to (metaphorically) connote the conversational churn, eddies and tumult of online newsgroup interactions. In staging these interactions as a process of meteorological precipitation, newsgroup conversations “condense” in the works environment as a temporal ambient patterning.
Rachel Collinson - SPIRO
Spiro was an algorithm borne out of Rachel's free jazz programming practice, where she improvises with code like a musician improvises on a riff, rather than engineer an expected end, which is the usual approach to programming. It resulted in two engines; a geeky interface which she uses to generate interesting visuals for her graphics work, and a proper GUI for the general public to experience the process.
Julie Freeman - The Lake Project
The Lake project exploits fish to explore natural rhythms and patterns by transposing movement and behaviour into sound and animation. Using an array of hydrophones, custom software and surgically implanted bio-acoustic tags, four species of fish were tracked in a lake in Bedfordshire and their continually changing positions sent in real time to a site-specific installation that resided in a specially constructed 9m x 3m circular metal structure. The combination of an overhead animated screen, intensely reverberating sounds and the dark damp environment aimed to create an environment that made the audience feel like they were in a "digital lake".
The Lake project was the first developed alongside the Alt Ears software system. Alt Ears is a combination of software that can be re-used to produce further art works in a series that explores the rhythms of biological systems. The Alt Ears objectives were as follows:
- To track many different species globally and transform their movement to "musical" output
- To produce permanent exhibits that enable visitors to ‘listen to’ and ‘see’ emergent behaviours of life (giving animals a live on-line presence)
- To enable a human tracking system that allows visitors to take part in a ‘human’ overlay aspect
- To make data centrally available on-line for enable multiple installations
- To enable animals to have on-line presence
Anthony Head - Metamorphosis
Anthony will be presenting Metamorphosis a series of six interactive 3D Virtual Kinetic Sculptures which can be manipulated using intuitive movements captured by video cameras. This work is the starting point for a larger project exploring 3D sculptures.
Rob Myers - draw-something, minara, paintr, open explor
draw-something - drawing-generation program inspired by Harold Cohen's AARON.
minara - programmable graphics program editing environment. Like an Emacs for vector art.
paintr - a piece of net.art built entirely from publicly available web services from colr.org, flickr.com and the autotrace project.
open explor - a re-implementation of the Mini-Explor art programming language of the 1970s.
CYBERSALON & THE DIGITAL RESEARCH UNIT
@ THE DANA CENTRE
CREATIVE SOFTWARE
Thursday, 23rd March 2006, 1-10pm
The Science Museum's Dana Centre, 165 Queen's
Gate, South Kensington, London SW7 5HE <www.danacentre.org.uk>
Cost: Free. Email <bookings@cybersalon.org>
for details.
Nearest tubes: South
Kensington/Gloucester Road
The day-time programme, 1-6.30pm, of the Creative Software event is now fully booked. Limited spaces are still available for the evening panel debate, 7-10pm, but please note that places MUST BE BOOKED IN ADVANCED.
OUTLINE PROGRAMME
d.studio - 1-6.30pm
1pm - Introduction
Lewis Sykes (Cybersalon) & Tom Holley (CRADL)
1.30pm - Session 1 - Artist Talks
Presentations of work from Rachel Collinson, Tom Corby & Gavin Baily, Julie Freeman, Anthony Head, Alex McClean, Rob Myers, Alexei Shulgin, Soda and others tbc.
2.30-3.00pm - Break
3pm - Session 2 - Artist Talks
Presentations of work from Rachel Collinson, Tom Corby & Gavin Baily, Julie Freeman, Anthony Head, Alex McClean, Rob Myers, Alexei Shulgin, Soda and others tbc.
4pm - Session 3 - key questions for creative software
A workshop session where participants can think about, share, discuss and feedback on key questions for creative software.
5pm - Break
5.30pm - Session 4 - supporting the creation and production of creative software
Led by Tom Holley and involving Alex McClean, Hannah Redler and Alexei Shulgin this sessions explores the current range of grassroot and institutional approaches to supporting the creation and production of this work.
6.15pm - Summary
Summarising session to draw out key issues from the day.
d.study - 3-6.30pm
an overflow/breakout space if required.
d.lounge - 1-7pm
Public access PCs set to project microsite and Creative Software community blogging site
d.cafe - 1-6pm
Exhibition of selected works on d.cafe screens including Corby & Baily's CYCLONE.SOC, Soda's Sodacontructor, Stanza's Urban Generation
Tables for stalls/projects/informal 'show and tell'
d.cafe - 7.30-10pm
Panel discussion chaired by Charlie Gere with personal perspectives on creative software presented by Ed Burton, Simon Colton, Tom Corby & Gavin Baily, Alex McClean, Hannah Redler, Andrew Shoben, Alexei Shulgin and Stanza.
CONTRIBUTOR STATEMENTS
Cybersalon asked all contributors to the Creative Software event to write a short statement on their personal perspectives on what they see as key issues and approaches for the future development of creative software. This collection of diverse viewpoints - from artists and practitioners, commissioners and curators, researchers and academics - presents a 'snapshot' of current thinking and provides triggers for further discussion.
Ed Burton: Sodaplay and Creative Software
For myself the inspiration for creative software is play; the joy that comes from spontaneous experimentation and discovery. Playing has always been a central part of the way I work and now facilitating creative play has become a fulfilling aspect of what I produce when I work. The convergence of creativity and play is made manifest in Sodaplay. The first Sodaplay toy, Sodaconstructor, is an engaging online construction kit that gives visitors the ability to build interactive creations from a sparse framework of dynamically modelled limbs and muscles. By altering physical properties like gravity, friction and speed, curiously anthropomorphic models can be made to walk, climb, wriggle, jiggle or alternatively collapse into a writhing heap. Sodaconstructor's playful agenda exploded across the Internet in a wave of spontaneous e-mail communication and web postings in the summer of 2000. Since then a large and active worldwide community of sodaplayers have been creating their own Sodaconstructions which populate the Sodazoo with a bourgeoning menagerie of models that are stranger and more diverse than I ever imagined possible. The fact that Sodaplay users have so surpassed my aspirations for the software points to valuable lessons about the roles of creativity, learning, emergent behavior and surprise in creative software.
Simon Colton
The area of computational creativity is a small but friendly sub-field of Artificial Intelligence research. Our central aim is to produce software that exhibits behaviour you would call creative in a human, and which produces artefacts of real aesthetic value. These artefacts may be mathematical theorems, paintings, sketches, melodies, harmonisations, poems, jokes, or any product associated with the creative process. As a group, we meet and discuss software which produces all these kinds of artefacts. This enables us to think more generally about what it means for a computer to be creative and how we can write more creative software. We are beginning to come to consensus about our role in Artificial Intelligence research and about creative software.
My own ideas revolve around the notion of a "creative tripod", the three legs of which support creativity. The first leg is skill, which enables artists, musicians and scientists to actually produce something to a high standard. The second leg is appreciation, which enables artists to tailor their technique to the subject and to find and exploit beauty in their work and in the work of others. The final leg is imagination, which enables artists to produce novel and surprising results. Imagine an artist missing one of these legs. Without skill, they would never produce anything. Without appreciation, they wouldn't produce anything of beauty. Without imagination, everything they produced would be the same!
For software to be perceived as creative, we have to be able to project skill, appreciation and imagination onto it. At present, the vast majority of software used as part of the creative process has skill but no appreciation and no imagination. In computer graphics, for example, Photoshop filters are highly skilled at making a photograph look like an oil painting. But how many filters appreciate the fact that they are painting a person rather than a landscape, and adjust their technique accordingly? And how many filters really surprise us with their output? By emphasising the other legs of the tripod, we hope that computational creativity research can guide software developers towards producing more creative software.
Myself (creative director) and my business partner Glen Pearson (managing director) recently set up Machine Creations Ltd. Our aim is to provide software which can take on some of the creative responsibility in producing an artwork. Our first product is called Craft-By-Numbers, and is available at <www.craftbynumbers.com>. Here, the customer sends us a digital photograph (and a little bit of money...) and we send back a complete, personalised, paint by numbers kit. After following the instructions, which include details of how to mix the acrylic paints supplied to produce the 30 or so colours in their painting, the result is an A3 sized painting which - we believe - has real aesthetic value.
With Craft-By-Numbers, we hope to bring painting to a larger audience of people who would like to paint something dear to them, but who don't have the ability to abstract a painting from a photograph, to mix acrylic paints, and so on. Of course, this muddies the water a little when we look at the creative process, because in this case, the human is providing the painting skill, which in most applications of creative software is done by the computer.
Tom Corby: Software imaginaries, Software positions
Technology is not merely instrumental
Artists can reveal how technology operates in social and cultural contexts in complex and sometimes hidden ways and in doing so suggest alternative technological forms that are inclusive of emotional, political and reflexive structures.Hybrid practices
Software as a conceptual and material process allows a relating and mixing of differing intellectual and aesthetic domains with relative ease and in doing enables the development of hybrid artefacts. Producing these relationships allow us to develop new ways of thinking about how works operate perceptually; which leads to our next position:Software is organic matter
Software and networks are organic matter that should be seen as part of a continuum with the material world and not separate from it. In our work we attempt to draw out the "soft" in software through the use of biological and anthropomorphic metaphors in order to extend and develop poetic structures. A software imaginary which is also a critical reflection of its digital, social and material processes.Software as productive agency
Software describes a modus operandi rather than a particular set of technologies. The idea of software for us only becomes interesting when you start thinking about how it penetrates, weaves through and connects material and social processes. How it provides models for operating productively in the world.
Charlie Gere: Key issues in Creative Software
The paradox of software art is that it only exists when it is no longer necessary. To put it another way, to begin with all art made with a computer was software art, in that it required that the artist (if that is the right word) had to learn and use a programming language or environment to make anything. In the 1960s and 70s there was no other way of making such work. It was only with the rise of user-friendly visual and creative software that emerged in the wake of the Apple Macintosh and other mass-market personal computers that things changed and it was possible to make things with computers without knowledge of coding or programming. The period when I was doing my MA at Middlesex in the early 1990s saw the beginnings of a shift away from teaching artists to use programming, and towards user-friendly software packages. We were very bullish about the virtues of 'real' programming, but at the time we were going against the prevailing trend. But the recent reemergence of artists actually coding is interesting, as it is no longer driven by absolute necessity, but is rather a deliberate return to the idea of making art as a process involving skill, difficulty and discipline. It is therefore hardly surprising that much software art looks like a revival of modernist aesthetics.
Alex McClean
I started programming and making music as a means of release and escape from everyday reality and in understanding my own reality. Programming came before music, but through my work with Adrian Ward as slub, these separate endeavours joined. Rather than writing music directly, slub writes software that generates music. People listen and dance to the music, and in response slub modify the code that generates it. Through live coding techniques this code modification takes effect immediately without a break in the sound. In this way slub, as laptop musicians, have embedded themselves in the act of musicking once more.
Musicking and programming are essentially human activities. With both we conjure an abstract world of loose structures, reaching towards an ideal, reflecting upon the world as we would like it to be. Much software and music is brought into existence to fulfill these yearnings. It makes perfect sense to join both activities, to view music as code and code as music.
Musical software then is code as a medium for musical expression. We describe a musical idea as software, and run the program to play the music. The software is music and not a tool or a toy; any user interface is merely for exploring the parameters of that software. The feeling when a new program produces music for the first time is one of great beauty, a connection with a musical idea, a focal point. There is a switch from an abstract idea to real, live, playing music.
Rob Myers
Writing a program to make an image may seem a slow and indirect way of drawing. But once we have a program to make one image this way it can make many. Experiencing this output and modifying the program to make different images allows us to create or discover new spaces of images. Art computing is therefore a form of exploratory programming and artistic improvisation, a powerful medium for expressing and exploring our ideas of how we make art. This exploration has a history of fifty years but much of it has been lost to unpublished source code or to obsolete closed systems. If we share our code and build on the code of our predecessors & peers we can create a canon of art software systems greater than any individual could achieve.
Hannah Redler
My current interest is in how software art can be discussed, exhibited and explored with wide audiences, outside of niche media art 'ghettos'. In spite of software art's impressive history, we still don't seemed to have evolved a language for interpreting it to non-specialist groups. I think this is one of the reasons it has been difficult for software artists and curators to make experimental projects within more mainstream art contexts. How much this matters is a huge subject for debate, but the software art community needs to consider the fact without a wider shared language, the development of our work risks becoming either stunted, ignored or unsupported. In addition, I'm concerned about what I perceive as the potentially negative impact of advanced authoring packages on opportunities for software artists. If organisations are able to commission projects that achieve similar superficial effects to those created as a result of conceptually developed and implemented software, but with a much higher standard of robustness and reliability, how do we protect the 'artist' against the 'exhibit developer'? Furthermore, now that authoring packages can do so much, what are the driving forces, in addition to personal politics, for contemporary software artists who might previously have devoted dedicated time to writing software that nobody else could do? Have the corporate's caught up?"
Andrew Shoben
Software is the magic behind-the-scenes poetry that turns our installations in to art-systems. It seems obvious to me then, given a complex generative code base, that authorship doesn't just reside with the artist, but with the code, too.
Alexei Shulgin: Software art - be your own software producer
Recently, we have been witnessing a birth and a fast development of 'software art' - an array of different practices around software. These various practices (ranging from creative software misuse to writing pragmatic applications based on 'strange' algorithms, and from existing programs deconstruction to creating conceptual software that needs no hardware to run) are united by questioning or opposing to the mainstream assumptions on what software (both Open Source or proprietary) is and should be used for.
These practices are grounded in the following recent phenomena:
- Increasing computer literacy. Computers and software have become an essential art of everyday life, a working and leisure environment. Software tools are made for communication, socializing, shopping, etc.
- Development of object-oriented programming languages and semi-automated programming environments, where user can program without deep knowledge of programming. Growing amount of software libraries, pre-written scripts, etc. and other tools making programming easier.
- Growing number of artists willing to explore software culture and programming as a creative realm. Programmers being unsatisfied with existing tools and wiling to create their own.
- Ease of software distribution through Internet and software repositories.
All these bring programming and software "to the masses"; and masses start questioning existing software paradigms and start creating their own. Internet is now seen as a social environment where software becomes part of the language we speak and a tool for navigating this environment.
Motivations for software art:
- I hate self-assured computer that pretends to know everything but makes stupid mistakes
- Something is missing in the user interface…
- It's beautiful when it crashes, let's explore that
- I have something to say and to do politically or socially; let's write a program that would help me to carry my messages and deeds
- Computer is fun to play with; but let's go deeper in it - beyond the software limits and see how we can hack it
- You to name
To sum up and conceptualize these practices, a group of international media artists and thinkers has initiated and produced Runme.org, an online platform for software art. It is being moderated by four people and is welcoming projects as diverse as possible: from both artistic and programmers' communities and beyond.
Stanza
Software needs hardware to run or to interpret the machine code. Software interprets the zeros and ones of the machine and represents these numbers in some form, into some system, or as a language that one create an operating system with. The machine, the zeros and ones, the operating system and the software itself are not creative entities; the creative entity that allows these possibilities is us. Software isn’t creative - it is us who are creative. The primary creative software is DNA. Our creative software, our operating system, isn’t the zeros and ones of binary but the ACTG of DNA. The human operating system and some part of the gene pool is what allows the possibility of creative software. Here <www.stanza.co.uk/dnaweb/> is my DNA, which plays for 104 years at one letter a second. This is a visualisation or rather a visual representation of myself as a piece of creative software. Its is open source so if you want to clone me...
As an artist, instead of adopting narrative threads from other media, I am interested in the currency that exists already in the city space. I focus on the wider picture of city experiences which are being played out in real time. This sort of experience of multi-nodes and multi-threaded spaces, demands a refined gathering of data, a sensitive accumulation which can then lead to some kind of modelling and visualisation [audible and visual (mis)-representation] of the social network as it exists and is impacted upon.
I create artworks that mediate content into evolving forms that can be experienced through online networks. Gathering assets and making narrative for creating understanding. Translating what we can gather into something we understand, or at least into something we can experience, is what interests me as an artist and indeed is what my practice involves. My current research and interests focus on the creative use of technology and integration of innovative software and hardware solutions that can re-imagine our experience of things spatially. My focus is to create new experiences that incorporate technology. I make imagined new worlds where we find data that evolves in new ways to experience the space we exist in.
For example, the city has millions of CCTVs. In essence the city is the biggest TV station in existence. Millions of hours worth of data are recorded every day by these cameras on city TV. One can take the sounds and images off live web streams and re-represent them thus creating new interpretations of the city in the process. The increase of technological infrastructure in the daily existence of a city means that technology will, more than ever, be everywhere in our environment.
In my series about CCTV, I acquire images as data in real time to create, a live, real time, online urban tapestry; the piece is called Urban Generation. See <www.stanza.co.uk/urban_tapestry/>. The piece gathers images from one hundred cameras, reworking them into this online artwork; this is one of several examples exploring the city as data. I have made a number of artwork pieces using CCTV - some focus on the London networks and other take images from around the world from thousands of cameras.