abstractmachine

Short post just to mention that I’ll be speaking tomorrow, Friday the 26th, 09h30, at the École nationale supérieure d’arts Paris-Cergy, thanks to an invitation by Bojena Jake. Also, Jeff Guess has just taken on a new position there, which is great for me, but even better news for the students of Cergy. Also, Jeff and I have finally come up with some concrete plans on how to further coordinate our two ateliers, so we’ll be moving in that direction over the coming months. More on that later, but it’s a continuation of what we started discussing last winter in Mulhouse.

You can see some of what Jeff does with his students on his blog (Atelier Pratique Algorithmiques). As for his personal work, you can explore some of it here (Projects), and if you’re in Paris he’ll be giving a performance of his Ekphrastic Objects at the Pompidou Center on November 21st.

Several people asked me to post a copy of my talk from the Art-Oriented Programming conference (cf. Art-Oriented Programming++). As I mentioned at the opening of my talk, the conference itself was organized on such short notice that I had to write everything in English. I had originally planned to show a French translation on-screen (hence all all the flying letters) but just ran out of time as I was still writing the talk itself on the train. So this is a very hastily-written document.

I should also mention that during the talk I realized that many of my most important concepts were a little washed-out in the rush. A lot of the vocabulary I used in the talk should have been qualified. I’m thinking specificially about the uses of terms such as “abstraction”, “recursion”, and especially “simulation” which is proposed as an alternative to “representation” (cf. plotseme). This imprecision makes some of the arguments a little difficult to follow, or a little more banal than intended.

Algorithmic Writing Systems (pdf)

I will be speaking this weekend at the second conference organized by David-Olivier Lartigaud and Anne-Marie Duguet on programming in an artistic context, Programmation orientée-art 2. The last one was in 2004. There are some very good people on the list, so I’m honored. This conference will take place at the Amphithéâtre Richelieu of the Sorbonne on the 19th and 20th of this month. I will be speaking on the 20th (I’m busy elsewhere on the 19th).

Here’s the the official roster:

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• PROGRAMMATION ORIENTÉE ART 2

• Colloque international

• à l’Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris
• Vendredi 19 octobre 2007 de 15h00 à 20h15
• Samedi 20 octobre 2007 de 9h30 à 20h30
• Amphithéâtre Richelieu
• 17 rue de la Sorbonne - 75005 Paris
• Entrée libre (inscription gratuite)
• Colloque organisé par le Laboratoire des Arts et Médias LAM-LETA
• responsable du colloque : David-Olivier Lartigaud

Lors du précédent colloque « Programmation orientée art », en 2004, la question de la programmation en art était en pleine effervescence. Trois ans plus tard, les travaux continuent mais la visibilité des œuvres semble amoindrie. Est-ce dû à une baisse de la production artistique ? N’était-ce qu’une simple « mode » ? Et la programmation est-elle vraiment devenue un art ? Beaucoup d’œuvres ont été faites durant ces dernières années et peut-’tre plus encore de propositions théoriques. La nécessité d’un éclaircissement du champ est donc urgente. Dém’ler les enjeux, dégager un espace critique, faire un point objectif de la situation semble la condition d’un « nouveau départ » afin d’éviter la répétition ou la caricature de ce qui a déjà été fait.

Ce colloque propose donc, en cinq sessions de conférences réparties sur deux jours, de parcourir l’actualité de la pensée et de la recherche artistique en ce domaine, toujours vif et riche de promesses.

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• Art et Code : Exposer/conserver/collectionner

- vendredi 19 octobre - 15 h/18h - amphithéâtre Richelieu

• Inke Arns (Directrice artistique de Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund)
• Wolf Lieser (Directeur de la galerie DAM, Berlin),
• Stéphane Maguet (Directeur de la galerie numeriscausa, Paris)
• Gilles Rouffineau (Professeur à l’École supérieure d’art de Valence, LAM)
• Antoine Schmitt (Artiste, Paris)
• Nicolas Thély (Maître de conférences, Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, LAM)

Exposer des œuvres programmées - de m’me que la conservation de tels travaux - est un problème qui nécessite de nombreux ajustements avec l’artiste. Une œuvre ancienne qui tourne sur une machine récente ne perd-t-elle pas de son essence ? Comment gérer l’obsolescence des supports ? Comment donner un avenir à des oeuvres si tributaires de technologies et de logiciels en perpétuelle mutation. Quant au marché de l’art, va-t-il réussir à s’adapter ?

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• Art et code : Quelle histoire pour quel avenir ?

- vendredi 19 octobre - 18 h/20h30 - amphithéâtre Richelieu

• Andreas Broeckmann (Historien d’art, Directeur artistique de TESLA, Berlin)
• Geoff Cox (Artiste, Lecturer à l’Université de Plymouth)
• Darko Fritz (Artiste et commissaire d’exposition, Amsterdam/Zagreb)
• David-Olivier Lartigaud (Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, LAM)

Les créations des « pionniers » du « computer art » des années 60 et 70 retrouvent une vitalité†: célébrées de nouveau, appréciées pour leur rigueur tant formelle que conceptuelle, ces œuvres semblent d’une lisibilité toute contemporaine. Mais « l’art programmé » n’est-il pas trop jeune pour se pencher sur son passé ? N’est-ce pas le signe d’un repli, d’un besoin de s’inscrire dans une généalogie pour justifier de sa valeur ? Ce retour aux sources n’est-il pas, au contraire, une mise en perspective nécessaire au renouvellement du propos ?

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• Art et Code : Urbanité codée / cartes programmées

- samedi 20 octobre - 9h30/12h30 - amphithéâtre Richelieu

• Maurice Benayoun (Artiste, Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, Directeur artistique du CITU, LAM)
• Wilfried Hou Je Beck (Artiste, Utrecht)
• Karen O’Rourke, (Maître de conférences, Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, LAM)
• Tania Ruiz (Artiste, Paris)
• Jo Walsh (Artiste, Londres)

Le code, la programmation semble épouser très directement des questionnements en rapport avec l’urbanité. Cartes dynamiques et cartographies 3D font écho à une nouvelle approche de la ville, considérée comme une base de données, un potentiel dans lequel l’artiste puise son inspiration mais aussi son matériau de création. Plus que l’écran, la ville n’est-elle pas le nouveau lieu de l’art programmé ?

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• Art et Code : Esthétique / culture / société

- samedi 20 octobre - 14h/17h - amphithéâtre Richelieu

• Wendy Chun (Professeur, Brown University, Providence)
• Matthew Fuller (Critique, Center for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, Université de Londres)
• Alexander Galloway (Artiste, professeur asssitant à l’Université de New York)
• Olga Goriunova (Critique, co-fondatrice de runme.org, Moscou)
• David Zerbib (Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, LETA)

La question de la programmation en art se fond - ou prend son sens - dans un contexte plus large, de l’ordre d’une « culture numérique ». Mais qu’entend-t-on exactement par cette expression ? Cette culture a-t-elle une réelle existence ? Si oui, la programmation artistique a-t-elle participé à définir cette culture ou en est-elle le produit ? De manière récurrente se pose également la question d’une « esthétique » propre à cette «  culture ». Est-elle étayée ? N’est-ce pas qu’une construction théorique ?

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• Art et Code : Langages

- samedi 20 octobre - 17h/20h30 - amphithéâtre Richelieu

• Samuel Bianchini (Artiste, Maître de conférences, Université de Valenciennes, LAM)
• Christophe Bruno (Artiste, Paris)
• Philippe Codognet (Professeur à Keio University, Tokyo)
• Jacques Lafon (Directeur de l’École européenne supérieure de l’image, site d’Angoulême)
• Miller Puckette (Professeur à l’Université de Californie, créateur de Max et Pure Data)
• Douglas Edric Stanley (Artiste, http://www.abstractmachine.net)

Les logiciels libres et/ou open source ouvrent une nouvelle approche de la création sur ordinateur. Le succès de Pure Data, par exemple, montre que la gratuité n’est pas le seul moteur de cet engouement puisque ces logiciels semblent mieux répondre à certaines attentes artistiques ? Mais jusqu’à quel point ? Les productions qui en sont issues font-elles vraiment la différence avec des œuvres élaborées à partir de logiciels ou de langages commerciaux ? Mais la question du langage ne se limitera pas à la programmation. Le Web 2.0, en particulier, ouvre de nouvelles problématiques passionnantes ou inquiétantes, selon l’angle choisi, dans lesquelles le langage tient la place centrale.

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• Master Class PURE DATA
• avec Miller Puckette

- Dimanche 21 octobre 2007 de 10h00 à 17h00

• à L’École nationale supérieure d’art de Nancy (ENSA Nancy)
• 1 avenue Boffrand - 54000 NANCY
• tél : 03 83 41 61 61
• Places limitées (inscription gratuite à l’adresse : poa2aop@orange.fr)

La Master Class Pure Data, qui se tiendra à L’École nationale supérieure d’art de Nancy, permettra d’entrer en détail dans les possibilités offertes par ce logiciel grâce à une rencontre directe avec son concepteur.

This nice post over at Music Thing about my Rubik’s Cube project has lead to a lot of traffik and linking (cf. here and here, for example). I’ve been a Music Thing reader for years, so that was nice to see. But for their readers, I thought they might be interested in this video, shot by Artfuture last summer during the ZeroOne festival in San Jose in which I demonstrate — in all my true geekiness — the functioning of the first physical prototype. More will indeed follow at a later date, when I’ve finished all my current duties.

I will be participating this Friday in a round-table discussion on the subject of open-source initiatives at the Friche bel de mai at 18h30. This is the opening volley in a series of debates to take place in the « panier » district of Marseille later in the month, around the subject of « hacking culture », with the notable invitation of McKenzie Wark author of A Hacker Manifesto, and (« sous-réserve ») Pekka Himanen who also has many publications on this subject.

For this Friday, they asked several local « acteurs » in this field to come and talk about their work and (apparently) begin the process of coordinating all this activity. As usual, I have no idea what I really can contribute in any practical sense, but since we have fairly active on these issues over the last few years at the Atelier Hypermédia, and since they did ask me, I figured what the hell. I’m busy enough as it is — might as well add another date to the list.

Apparently Radio Grenouille will be recording all this, but I have no idea to what extent.

I’ve been experimenting with the idea of complexity recently, and over the past few hours with Gestalt-esque tensions between form recognition and visual overload. This is related to a series of questions I’ve been asking myself about the relationship between perspective and recursivity in algorithmic machines. I’m interested in the nature of all those lovely spindly lines we see populating so many Processing sketches, and how they relate with code stuctures. Complex forms come cheap in code; all you need is an iterator: it costs almost nothing — from the programmer’s perspective — to draw 1 line and n lines, especially when you take performance out of the equation. But beyond the economy of drawing hundreds of thousands of millions of bajillions of lines, what about the perceptive field that emerges from this code? If there is a machinic relationship between the visual forms and the code forms (one our basic tenets), what do these code structures generate in terms of perceptive structures? And does computer code — if treated as a series of recursive abstractions (at least in practice) — form new perception-fields at each stratum of abstraction, synchronized to the code abstraction layers?

There are several ways to explore these questions. As a quick experiment, I built this somewhat simplistic diagram in a few minutes to describe one of these perceptive fields (source code). Often 3D shapes make no sense in a 2D plane unless there is movement; even when you add shadows, shaders, and camera effects, etc., there is often that problem of render mode ambiguity. This diagram plays with this ambiguity, making the code form more visible with movement. Otherwise it tends to resemble a formless 2D field. Here, the addition of an extra plane (i.e. movement) renders a form visible, just as Google Earth renders visible historically ambiguous relationships between the U.S. military and Nazism or reveals Roman ruins by looking at unnaturally shaped mounds from space. By the addition of one simple « dimension », a form emerges. What is interesting here is how the extra dimension can be mapped to a specific line of code: rotate().

Actually, there is an additiontal relationship in this diagram between the 3D functions « translate » and « rotate » : the translation movements of each mini-cube makes the meta-cube more visible (by revealing more of its contours), but only when viewed in conjunction with a rotation movement.

It is important to keep in mind that this is a simple example intended to illustrate the principle, and not its effect in the real-world. For that, we would have to look elsewhere; to give just a few examples I’ve been working with recently, I could cite Masaki Fujihata’s Field-Works or, from a more media analysis perspective, Ben Fry’s Mario Soup, Dismap or Martin Wattenberg’s Shape of Song.

This might be totally left field, but now that I think of it, there’s a great passage in Italo Calivino’s Leibniz inspired « reading a wave » from Mr. Palomar:

« Mr Palomar sees a wave rise in the distance, grow, approach, change form and color, fold over itself, break, vanish, and flow again. At this point he could convince himself that he has concluded the operation he had set out to achieve, and he could go away. But it is very difficult to isolate one wave, separating it from the wave immediately following it, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; just as it is difficult to separate that one wave from the wave that precedes it and seems to drag it towards the shore, unless it turns against its follower as if to arrest it. Then if you consider the breath of the wave, parallel to the shore, it is hard to decide where the advancing front extends regularly and where it is separated and segmented into independent waves, distinguished by their speed, shape, force, direction. In other words, you cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other equally complex ones that the wave itself originates. These aspects vary constantly, so each wave is different from another wave, even if not immediately adjacent to successive; in other words there are some forms and sequences that are repeated, though irregularly distributed in space and time. » (p.3-4)

For ultimately, all of these questions of abstraction and gestalt are in fact questions about our relationship to complexity and the role algorithmic machines (will inevitably) play in negotating our increasing complexity malaise :

« [A]t each moment he thinks he has managed to see everything to be seen from his observation-point, […] something always crops up that he had not borne in mind. If it were not for his impatience to reach a complete, definitive conclusion of his visual operation, looking at waves would be a very restful exercise for him and could save him from neurasthenia, heart attack, and gastric ulcer. And it could perhaps be the key to mastering the world’s complexity by reducing it to the simplest mechanism. […] Only if he manages to bear all the aspects in mind at once can he begin the second phase of the operation: extending this knowledge to the enitre universe. It would suffice not to lose patience, as he soon does. Mr Palomar goes off along the beach, tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything. » (p.5-7)