"Bagdad, 1000: The Origin of the Pixel"

I have been looking at a recent book by Laura U. Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art.  Chapter seven is entitled "Bagdad, 1000: The Origin of the Pixel".  Did the pixel really originate in Bagdad around the year 1000?  Well, no.

From about the eighth century to the thirteenth the Islamic world was the place to be: the arts, the sciences and philosophy flourished in a manner not matched in the Christian West.  The West indeed learnt from the Islamic world: "algebra", "alkali" and "sugar" are Arabic words, as are the names of some of the prominent Northern hemisphere stars such as Algol and Betelgeuse.  One of the first mathematics books printed with movable type was Euclid's Elements (Venice 1482); the text was in Latin, translated from the Arabic, as a Greek text did not become available in Western Europe until after 1500.  The contribution of the Islamic world to Western civilisation has been under-appreciated, and attempts are now being made to better recognise this contribution.  Enfoldment and Infinity is a very well-informed addition to this discussion.

Marks's book compares two bodies of art, Islamic art and new media art, especially that based on computer algorithms; she calls both "aniconic": the perceptible image is not the most important part of the art.  Islam generally prohibited the use of images of people or animals in religious contexts; in some places (though by no means everywhere) the prohibition was extended to secular works as well.  An extraordinary aniconic art arose as a consequence, based on calligraphy, geometric forms and plant motifs, incidentally giving us the word "arabesque".  Marks's book makes numerous and striking comparisons between Islamic art and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including cinema and new media art.

How does the history of the pixel come into this?  In Chapter seven, Marks discusses two constructs in Islamic art and philosophy that might relate to the pixel.  One is an architectural technique based on the repetition of a single cell-like form and used to construct remarkable domes.  The other is an atomistic philosophy holding that the created universe consists of indivisible atoms, developed in the ninth century by philosophers known as the Mu'tazila.  At least one writer conceived of these atoms as square or cubical.  But this tells us nothing about the genealogy of the pixel, and Marks does not make any historical link between these developments in the Islamic world and the pixel as we now have it.  Nor does she discuss a much more obvious predecessor of the pixel, the mosaic tile.

So, let's make up another origin of the pixel.  A fundamental property of a pixel in a raster display is that it is addressable: I can specify a pixel with a notation like (2, 21), meaning a pixel that is two along in the horizontal direction and 21 down in the vertical direction.  Iannis Xenakis considered coordinate geometry to be a gift from music to mathematics: on a musical staff time is measured horizontally and pitch vertically.  Furthermore in Western musical notation both pitch and time are discrete; time is measured in multiples of some small unit (the semibreve in older music) and pitch in semitones.  I can specify both coordinates with a phrase like "the G (or, the note on the second line of the staff) on the first beat of bar 17".  So we have a two-dimensional addressable array of discrete entities.  I conclude that the pixel originated in Western musical notation of the thirteenth century.  Except that it didn't.  (And I don't think there is an Islamic link here.  Some Western musical instruments derived from Islamic sources, but the notation is indigenous to the West.)

In fairness, Marks warns us that her genealogies may be fictitious.  In the first chapter she says "I exploit ... unsought connections perversely, to behave as if there were a historical continuity where at times there is not".  Indeed she tells us that Islamic atomistic philosophy was not transmitted to the West.  She goes on to say: "if someone puts down this book believing that the Mu'tazila atomists invented the pixel ... that is fine by me".  A strange attitude for a scholar and teacher, but one that is necessary to bear in mind while engaging with the book; and it is an engaging book.

What’s in a name? (What is computer art?)

(Long post)

On my website I have called myself a “digital media artist”. I don’t like that name very much; I would like to call myself a “generative artist”, but that would require an explanation. What I have not done is call myself a “computer artist”.

This is on my mind because I have been reading a short book called A Philosophy of Computer Art, by Dominic McIver Lopes (Routledge, 2010). I agree with much of what is in this book: there are interesting discussions of various topics, including “What is an artwork?”, and a vigorous defence of computer art against various attacks; the discussion extends to computer games. My biggest problem with the book is with the title: it should be called A Philosophy of Interactive Computer Art.

Lopes makes two central definitions, of “digital art” and of “computer art” (more precisely of the “computer art form”).

Digital art: An item is a work of digital art just in case (1) it’s art (2) made by computer or (3) made for display by computer (4) in a common, digital code. (Lopes p. 3)

(Here “display” has a broad meaning, so it includes sound and other forms of output.)

Computer art form: An item is a computer art work just in case (1) it’s art (2) it’s run on a computer (3) it’s interactive, and (4) it’s interactive because it’s run on a computer. (Lopes p. 27)

If Lopes had called this the “interactive computer art form” I would have little quarrel with it. As it is, I have two main problems with this definition. Firstly, it is too late. For most people, “computer art” brings to mind works made using programs like Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop; indeed this is why I don’t call myself a computer artist. Lopes’s book will not change this.

Secondly Lopes’s use rules out works that are computer art under any reasonable definition. Black Shoals by Lisa Autogena and Joshua Portway (http://www.blackshoals.net/), which is not discussed by Lopes, is a work that has virtual creatures breeding and evolving, feeding on real-time stock-market data. The work would be inconceivable without a computer, it changes in real time, and it is unpredictable, but according to Lopes’s discussion of the term “interactive” Black Shoals is not computer art, so by implication is lumped in with Photoshop collages and the like under “digital art”.

The difficulty arises because Lopes wishes to identify computer art as a new art form, as different from (for example) photography and painting as they are from each other. For Lopes, an art form is an appreciative art kind, defined as follows:

Appreciative art kind: A kind [of artwork] is an appreciative art kind just in case we normally appreciate a work in the kind by comparison with arbitrarily any other works in that kind. (Lopes p. 17)

Lopes goes on to argue that digital art is too broad a category to be considered an art form in this sense, which is surely true, and that (interactive) digital art is an art form in his sense; here I think he has drawn his boundaries too narrowly. Black Shoals can surely be appreciated by comparing it with a work like A-Volve by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/a-volve/), which also involves virtual creatures breeding and evolving, but where visitors can specify “DNA” for the creatures and interact with them once they are “born”. Yet for Lopes, A-Volve would count as belonging to the computer art form and Black Shoals would not.

If there is an art form that Black Shoals and A-Volve both belong to, what is it? I approach this via two more questions:

1. What is the most important characteristic of the computer? My answer: the computer autonomously carries out complex calculations and data manipulations. Interactivity is certainly not the most important characteristic; interactive computing only became widely available at least 20 years after electronic computers were introduced.
   
2. Is there an art form that has complex processes carried out autonomously as a defining characteristic? Yes: it is generative art.

Philip Galanter has given the following widely quoted definition:

Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art. (Philip Galanter “What is generative art? Complexity theory as a context for art theory”, available at http://www.philipgalanter.com/downloads/ga2003_paper.pdf)

Two generative artworks, then, can be compared via a discussion of the rules or “procedural inventions” involved in the work. Black Shoals and A-Volve use very similar rules: they both make use of evolutionary ideas concerning breeding, mutation and survival of the fittest; altogether clearly they are similar works and are appreciated as such. The fact that one is interactive and the other isn’t is a relatively minor consideration in this case, and surely does not make the works so radically different as to force them to belong to different art forms.

Not all generative art is computer-based: for example Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings made according to systems of rules are generative art under Galanter’s definition. But the ready availability of computers has lifted generative art to a new level and, in my view, has made it visible as a distinct art form. (I also note that Lopes concedes that theoretically a work of computer art in his sense could run on a human brain rather than a silicon machine.)

Most unfortunately, Lopes does not discuss the concept of generative art at all. If one is looking for an art form that makes essential use of the characteristics of the computer, and that has been given both an enormous expansion of possibilities and recognition as a distinct kind of art by the availability of the computer, generative art is a strong candidate.

Art Incorporated

[Slightly edited to remove typos]
  
I have been reading a small book by Julian Stallabrass, who lectures at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The edition that I have is entitled Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction, (one of a series of Very Short Introductions from Oxford University Press) but it was first published in 2004 under the title Art Incorporated, which better reflects its contents. The book discusses the period 1989 to about 2002, covering the collapse of the Communist states in Eastern Europe and the emergence of the U.S. as the sole superpower, the stockmarket crash of the late 1980s, the boom in the 1990s and the dot-com crash of 2000. The book contains a sustained discussion of the relationship of the art world to globalisation, neoliberal ideology, rampant capitalism and consumerism, with reference to a substantial number of individual artists and artworks.

A few quotes from the book:

"Art prices and the volume of art sales tend to match the stock markets closely, and it is no accident that the world's major financial centres are also the principal centres for the sale of art."

"Corporate culture has thoroughly assimilated the discourse of a tamed post-modernism. As in mass culture, art's very lack of convention has become entirely conventional."

And, even more strongly:
"The daring novelty of free art - in its continual breaking with conventions - is only a pale rendition of the continual evaporation of certainties produced by capital itself, which tears up all resistance to the unrestricted flow across the globe of funds, data, products, and finally the bodies of millions of migrants."

In the context of the proliferation of biennales in the 1990s:
''Just as business executives circled the earth in search of new markets, so a breed of nomadic global curators began to do the same, shuttling from one biennale or transnational art event to another ..."

"[A biennale] performs the same function for a city ... as a Picasso above the fireplace does for a tobacco executive."

In discussing an exhibition of Chinese art in Hong Kong in the context of globalisation, making the point that the welcome for "exotic" artists in the international art scene is very selective:
"... such works [in more traditional Communist and realist styles] were genuinely different from Western productions and therefore invisible to the global art system".

And a rather depressing conclusion:
"To break with the autonomy of free art is to remove one of the masks of free trade. Or, to put it the other way round, if free trade is to be abandoned as a model for global development, so must its ally, free art."

Despite the conclusion, I found the book refreshing!

Book on Australian experimental music

A book about Australian experimental music, Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia (UNSW Press) has just appeared. It is edited by Gail Priest and has chapters by quite a few well-known names in the Australian experimental music scene. On the whole the book focuses on the last 10-15 years, though events from as early as the 1970s are mentioned. The accompanying CD has tracks from as far back as 1971 and as recent as 2007. My piece Peer Pressure (2001) is included.

Gail has also started up www.experimentalmusicaustralia.net, a website related to the book. It contains a growing list of Australian experimental musicians. People are invited to submit themselves for consideration.

A sonic history of computing

I have been reading the book The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich (MIT Press, 2001). In the early part of the book, Manovich has some scattered comments about the history of computing, and he tries very hard to find connections with visual media.

Of course Manovich refers to the punched cards used to control the Jacquard loom, which is certainly a connection with visual media. But he goes on to discuss Turing's abstract machines, and to say: "[a Turing machine's] diagram looks suspiciously like a film projector. Is this a coincidence?" Manovich then discusses Conrad Zuse's use of old cinema film to make punched tape to control his machine. Manovich's two examples of computing machines in these comments are Babbage's Analytical Engine, which was never built, and Zuse's machines, which as far as I know had minimal influence on subsequent developments. Von Neumann misses out completely.

(And, by the way, I don't think Turing's original paper had a diagram. The paper is "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Ser. 2, Vol. 42, 1937. There is what I believe to be a photographic reproduction of it in the book The Undecidable, ed. Martin Davis, Raven Press, Hewlett, NY, 1965. There is no diagram in this reproduction.)

Let me make a case along Manovich’s lines for the importance of sound culture in the history of computing.

In functionality the tape part of Turing’s abstract machine is like an audio tape recorder; is this a coincidence? The BBC began using audio recorders in 1932; they used a steel tape. Turing submitted his paper in 1936.

The modern stored-program digital computer originated from several lines of investigation in the period 1937–1950. The first design that fully implemented the features of modern machines was EDVAC (initial design 1945, came into operation in 1951); this machine was far more important for subsequent developments than any of the examples Manovich refers to. The design used magnetic wire for input and output, a system based on audio magnetic wire recorders. For memory it used a mercury acoustic delay line, where data was stored in the form of sound pulses circulating in a tube of mercury.

Thus sound culture could be said to play an important part in the history of computing. Of course this has no more validity than Manovich’s statements about visual culture and computing.

Musicophilia

My father, I believe, was tone deaf. He certainly showed no interest at all in music, and once, when I played him a major and a minor chord, he said he could not hear any difference. I have had people tell me that there is no such thing as tone deafness, but now I read in the latest book by Oliver Sacks that perhaps five percent of the population is tone deaf. The book is entitled Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Picador, 2007), and covers an extraordinary range of conditions and phenomena.

Some of the conditions Sacks describes are very rare or unique, such as the extraordinary case of a composer, who, after being seriously injured in a car crash, lost her ability to hear harmony. She describes listening to a Beethoven string quartet: "I heard four separate voices, four thin, sharp laser beams, beaming in four different directions". Other conditions discussed in the book are commoner, such as tone deafness. My father had a good sense of verbal rhythm, enjoyed poetry and wrote it himself. According to Sacks this is certainly neurologically compatible with tone deafness, as rhythm is "represented widely in the brain". Another condition that increasing numbers of us can look forward to as we age is musical hallucinations: hearing music that apparently comes from an outside source. At the onset, people who get this think that someone is playing a radio or CD nearby; the experience is quite different from that of mentally singing a tune. Musical hallucinations are associated with going deaf. The explanation is apparently that those parts of the brain receiving aural signals expect a continual stream of input, and if they don't get it, they produce activity anyway. With normal hearing, silence doesn't produce these hallucinations, as the auditory system actively reports silence. It is only if the communication is broken that the hallucination-generating mechanism kicks in.

Sacks doesn't only consider defects in musical perception or appreciation. He also describes unusual positive abilities, including perfect pitch (something I don't have a trace of). Sacks reports studies by Diana Deutsch showing that native speakers of a tonal language will pronounce words with close to absolute pitch, and that Chinese music students are much more likely to have perfect pitch than U.S. students. Sacks also describes cases of musical savantism, where people who are seriously disabled in many ways display some extraordinary ability, such as the man who knew by heart more than 2000 operas and all the Bach cantatas. These savant abilities usually come at the expense of abstract thought. Sacks mentions the intriguing work by Allan Snyder and others in artificially producing temporary savantism by magnetic stimulation of the brain: inhibiting the activity of the part of the brain responsible for abstract thought can release savant-like abilities in at least some people.

There is a lot more in Sacks's book. It isn't a neurological treatise; as the subtitle Tales of Music and the Brain indicates, it is largely anecdotal. It raises questions rather than answering them, and I think in that general there aren't any answers yet as to why we as a species have such an extraordinary sensitivity to music, though Sacks mentions speculation about the intertwined origins of music and language. Anyone interested in music is likely to be fascinated by this book.