Computational Art

The PhD dissertation Cyberpunk and New Media Art: Digital Art and Performance aims to examine the literary and visual legacy of the Cyberpunk movement and to explore its ideas, concepts and methodologies in the context of New Media artistic practices. The goal of this work is to comment on a multidisciplinary level on the influence of Cyberpunk theory and aesthetics. Furthermore, it seeks to identify its practice in the construction of the creative mechanisms of contemporary digital art and media performance.
The Cyberpunk phenomenon is approached through the definition of its socio- historical, philosophical and aesthetic context as a science fiction genre. Likewise, New Media Art is defined through the characteristics of its language, its precursors, its pioneers and the state of the digital art currents. By focusing on the terminology and the creative expression of Cyberpunk and Media Art, this thesis sets off to examine the artistic results that emerge from their union. Special emphasis is given to the fields of virtual technologies, technology and mythology and the body as a technologically enhanced interface.

Language changes to satisfy the changing needs of society. We stand now at a unique time when further change seems inevitable. At the edge of reality and its virtual counterpart and at the end of philosophy (Wittgenstein) certainty (Richard Feynman) men (Hanna Rosin), history (Francis Fukuyama), capitalism (Frederic Jameson), democracy (Levitsky & Ziblatt) and postmodernism (Nicolas Bourriaud), I ask what is language today?

Recent studies have demonstrated that algorithmic bias exhibited by neural networks can amplify human bias and stereotyping in the interpretation of online content. But since algorithms determine public visibility of user-produced media content, algorithmic bias also has a curatorial role in determining whether content is seen by the public at all. This visibility bias has the potential to impact and amplify public perceptions of social media platforms and their content creators in aggregate. The internet livestream art project, What the Robot Saw, inverts this algorithmic bias by curating clips from among the least visible current YouTube videos, while using neural networks to playfully reinterpret the content itself.  This paper describes What the Robot Saw and the cultural and social issues of neural net-based algorithms that surround it.

This generative art project and research take forms in the analogous analysis between western process philosophical thoughts and Chinese Taoist symbolism as an analytic-interpretive strand to investigate self-regulating moving images as automation of “creativity”, which evokes the Taoist aesthetic called “confusion”. The twofold virtual system of Tao-machine is bifurcated into two interconnected subsystems representing “Actuality” and “Potentiality” in which “Potentiality” is computed as the regulating syntaxes guided by the semantics in Taoist symbolic logic. The art project “Confused Objects” produced by Tao-machine, arouses the aestheticization of this convergent model of both western speculative process metaphysics and Taoist symbolism through a series of dynamic visual abstraction.

Smart phones are ubiquitous; light, portable and indispensable. The spatial, perceptive and visual connections among scene, subject and photographer are different, compared to a regular camera. This fact enables the photographer to focus on different topics, try practices s/he has not tried before. Mobile devices change the way we create, edit, sequence and share photography. When you do street photography with a smart phone camera, one of the advantages is that people do not really understand where you aim at and what you photograph. They do not react as consciously as they would in front of a regular camera. The reason is; almost all people, including locals and tourists, own a smart phone and taking a snap with them is very common practice for all. Okabe and Ito (2006) argue that:
“The camera phone is a more ubiquitous presence, and is used for more personal, less objectified viewpoint and sharing among intimates. It tends to be used more frequently as a kind of archive of a personal trajectory or viewpoint on the world, a collection of fragments of everyday life.”
Ease of use seems to make smart phone recording as one of the "sine qua non" practices of photography. There are many documentary photographers, reporters, journalists, professional photographers and even artists, film directors who take this apparatus seriously and use it. Some camera makers, like Samsung, are aware of the power of mobile imaging (described as “quantum imagery” by Fred Ritchin) and started to produce cameras 3G / 4G connectivity.
Before the digital revolution, the percentage of the “amateur” photographers was relatively less as compared to the digital era. Shooting with film was more difficult as analogue processes allowed less room for errors. After the launch of cheap compact digital cameras amateurs generated more self-confidence in imaging since they were offered the possibility of fixing any mistakes by just erasing any faulty photo. The introduction of cameras into smart phones was yet another dimension at which people felt even more poised to take photos, since the tool is not a “professional” apparatus with which you are expected to create expert results. In the light of above facts, I think it would not be wrong to say that phone cameras give a personalized power to their users. Nowadays, with the possibilities offered by social media tools, regular people contribute to the making of their local and global histories with the “amateur” personal images they make, which partially shape their identities. This can defined as power of the individual, using visual imagination as a tool.
This paper aims to discuss how mobile digital imaging alters the creation, perception and aesthetics of visuality. Contemporary photographic culture is definitely more intricately intertwined with popular culture as compared to photography in the 20th century and this should not be interpreted as a weakness but strength, when used consciously.

Editorial for Unlikely issue 2 (2016) (http://unlikely.net.au/), which focused on the theme of artistic fieldwork:

This issue of Unlikely explores creative practice beyond the studio. What opportunities for the creation of new knowledge are “out there, in the field”? What new methods for artmaking are born when artists venture outside the art world - or indeed, take the artworld itself as field? How do documentation, reportage, and writing help make field work visible and intelligible? How do artworks define their own fields?

Artists and researchers have widely explored the use of computational technology in artworks. This technology has shown the potential for aesthetic expansion when applied to other creative fields. For the perspective of computational creativity, the use of programming to explore traditional techniques within the craft practice appears to be enticing, due to its vast possibilities of exploration, which goes, for example, from woven fibers to sculpted artifacts. But in these practices the characteristic that stands out is the iterative process of craftsmanship. In this paper, we discuss the poetic practices that explore traditional techniques through computational approaches. Using a Cellular Automata algorithm that generates crochet lace patterns, we use the generative pattern and its materialization to illustrate and visualize the poetic practices that use repetition and reproduction as the
base for their existence and survival.

On the field of Evolutionary Computational Art, artists frequently adopt a top-down process of creation, employing the algorithms only as a mean to express a previously conceived composition. In this sense, the present paper aims to discuss the use of Genetic Algorithms for the development of systems with greater level of emergence, running towards the increase of its effective complexity, understood as suggested by Gell-Mann. In this context it is presented the system Morphogenesis. It was developed as a Multi-Agent Adaptive System, built with Genetic Algorithms to generate movement, feeding, fighting and reproductive behaviors. All these behaviors are programed at the individual level, from which emerge the macro patterns of the groups, simulating the evolutionary process. The system analysis suggests that the fitness function should not be focused at the arrangements of the agents' genotype, but at the adaptation of the phenotype itself. It is expected that the use of algorithms that allow expressions closer to the evolutionary process has a greater affinity with the aesthetic notion proposed for the field of Evolutionary Computational Art. Hereupon, a qualitative exploratory study was conducted to compare the perception of the high effective complexity arrangements against random arrangements. Preliminary results show that the evolutionary process could be associated with a greater evaluation of intentionality of the compositions and could be also related with a deeper aesthetic evaluation.

Creativity is stochastic and assumptive in nature. The importance of randomness in the creative process must not be ignored, underestimated or intentionally disregarded in a condescending way. Notions of chance, randomness, or unpredictability are much important, especially when it comes to artistic creation.

Smart phones are ubiquitous; light, portable and indispensable. The spatial, perceptive and visual connections among scene, subject and photographer are different, compared to a regular camera. This fact enables the photographer to focus on different topics, try practices s/he has not tried before. Mobile devices change the way we create, edit, sequence and share photography. When you do street photography with a smart phone camera, one of the advantages is that people do not really understand where you aim at and what you photograph. They do not react as consciously as they would in front of a regular camera. The reason is; almost all people, including locals and tourists, own a smart phone and taking a snap with them is very common practice for all. Okabe and Ito (2006) argue that: "The camera phone is a more ubiquitous presence, and is used for more personal, less objectified viewpoint and sharing among intimates. It tends to be used more frequently as a kind of archive of a personal trajectory or viewpoint on the world, a collection of fragments of everyday life." Ease of use seems to make smart phone recording as one of the "sine qua non" practices of photography. There are many documentary photographers, reporters, journalists, professional photographers and even artists, film directors who take this apparatus seriously and use it. Some camera makers, like Samsung, are aware of the power of mobile imaging (described as "quantum imagery" by Fred Ritchin) and started to produce cameras 3G / 4G connectivity. Before the digital revolution, the percentage of the "amateur" photographers was relatively less as compared to the digital era. Shooting with film was more difficult as analogue processes allowed less room for errors. After the launch of cheap compact digital cameras amateurs generated more self-confidence in imaging since they were offered the possibility of fixing any mistakes by just erasing any faulty photo. The introduction of cameras into smart phones was yet another dimension at which people felt even more poised to take photos, since the tool is not a "professional" apparatus with which you are expected to create expert results. In the light of above facts, I think it would not be wrong to say that phone cameras give a personalized power to their users. Nowadays, with the possibilities offered by social media tools, regular people contribute to the making of their local and global histories with the "amateur" personal images they make, which partially shape their identities. This can defined as power of the individual, using visual imagination as a tool. This paper aims to discuss how mobile digital imaging alters the creation, perception and aesthetics of visuality. Contemporary photographic culture is definitely more intricately intertwined with popular culture as compared to photography in the 20th century and this should not be interpreted as a weakness but strength, when used consciously.

CrossTalk explores the ways in which control affects relationships between performers, performers and their audience, and of the audience members amongst each other. Details about how this interactive musical performance developed over the course of three performances are discussed.

In his forward essay for The Event of Art (described below) Mathieu Borysevicz writes about Lafia's early computational works wherein Daniel Coffeen in the follow up essay takes on his relational work , The Post-Media, Post-Relational Work of Marc Lafia

...Lafia's work foreshadow the instantaneous transmission of the image and the omnipresence of the social network that digital technology was ushering in. Marc was aware that the picture, moving from emulsion to code, would initiate an entirely new relation to photography, one in which our bodies, knowledge, and time would unfold. It was in this envelope of technological transition that Marc’s work found its solid ground. Yet while his interest is in the power of the image and its changing universal nature, he also constantly endeavors to make the image one’s very own. His pursuit is about the changing notion of subjectivity, of self, against the assault of representation.
... While Marc’s pursuits were very much informed by his meanderings in
deconstruction theory, his real creative impulse was dictated by his coming
of age with MTV. Variable Montage, Loops and Iterations, Computations and Permutations were some of his earliest and most mesmerizing exploits that came after the artist’s introduction to the programming software engine MAX/MSP.

...Marc would take his interest in recording to interrogate new modes of creating a personal archive and self-organizing computational system. Here recording is not only memory, and a data structure, but a permutational instrument and ever-changing horizon of iterations.

The Event of Art
(forthcoming Punctum Books, winter 2020) presents the work of art as a complex material and societal event. The event is multiple, a continual becoming of perception, being, materiality, participation, a coming to one’s own senses. The work of art is the event of becoming present to one’s embodiment. Lafia traverses and self examines how his early strategies of cultural reading of photography and film, of interface and network culture and social media transform to an investigation of materiality itself. His interest becoming the realm of the sensible and the sensate. Here he presents the idea of art as a medium itself, giving us wide permission to explore and examine our deepest feelings and senses, our world and its becoming.

This paper questions how computational art can be interpreted as creative by humans and the theoretical implications this may have. It explores how the affordances of computational art lead to radically new aesthetic experiences. The computational is manifested sensuously but it is nevertheless nonperceptual as although it requires a physical substrate, it is nevertheless not located there. It exists within, between and beyond its material instantiations as tangible objects and the process of that articulation. The computational is deterministic, which may appear to counter any potential for creativity, but it is often also irreducible, and as such its outcomes are impossible to anticipate. This paper undertakes an analysis of computational arts as spectral phenomena, ghostly in the sense that they are non-localisable, irreducible, situated between an algorithmic past and a futural becoming. Through this lens, computational arts offer glimpses into the possibility-and aesthetic potential-of autonomously creative systems.

This article reflects on the action of making art as an activity that is, and should always be an instrument of opening the doors of perception, of showing new poetic and aesthetic assemblies, of unveiling sensibilities, of fighting against stereotypes, of expanding sensory aspects and of intensifying the cognition of the lived moment. In this way, by emerging at the level of consciousness, these aspects can cause transformations. Such transformations will be effective if they are based on the techniques that propitiate the action of making things. In this context it is important to reflect on the outcome of this production thinking of how to present it to the public, in space and time. In the article computer art, architecture, drawing, and sculpture are considered as different aspects of the poetic reality enmeshed in them, aiming to make visible the potential latent in the body, in the materials, in numbers and their relationships, in interfaces inter-weaving body and machines,  among many related aspects.

Our individual existence, our bodies, our minds, are embedded within and artificially augmented by technology; we interact with similarly extended others. These interdependencies pose urgent ethical and cognitive questions. When looking into these complex relations and ethical urgencies, claiming that the individual, society and technology are separated from one another, may feel counterintuitive. Separation however, does not imply causal isolation , or complete independence but instead that one system does not directly control the other, however eligible they may be to influence one another. Social and individual existence is tied to digital technologies. Informed by patriarchal power structures, their design and investigation both extends and creates new forms of oppression and alienation. As such, they become feminist agendas. Rather than refraining from participation in the technological sphere, radical-ised exclusivity can be used as an operable device to increase inclusivity – a conclusion derived from the text " Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation " by the group Laboria Cuboniks. In the recognition of one's own alienation, one can find identity and liberation; and by actively increasing alienation there isn't simply reconciliation with the exclusionary status quo but the freedom to construct a different world. With this focus, this paper examines the importance of acknowledging the social and political implications of programming, and the limitations of this acknowledgment within theory and the discursive spaces it happens within.

Laptop orchestras have much in common with video games, such as utilization of networked play, singular [solo] and cooperative [ensemble] modes of play, and hardware that is multipurpose and widely available. In this talk, the composer will outline the project goals and iterative design process that have lead to the creation of Stethoscope Hero, a sci-fi multiplayer “choose your own adventure” game-composition for networked laptop orchestra that is designed to be inclusive and accessible to participants who may be unfamiliar with laptop performance and/or musical performance, while still offering a challenging and rewarding experience to those who have already performed with such an ensemble. Stethoscope Hero is part of ongoing research on the social and design parameters that contribute to meaningful play and fun in the context of networked laptop orchestras, and is supported by a grant from the Concordia Undergraduate Summer Research Award, and supervised by Dr. Eldad Tsabary under his Interdisciplinary Networked, and Telematic Laptop Orchestra Project (INTLOP).