"Biotope" photo

Here is a photo of my video Drum Mask playing on an external screen at Cube 37, Frankston Arts Centre, Melbourne.

Image courtesy of Jon McCormack

The video was also playing on an even bigger screen round the corner - the biggest screen I have ever seen my work on. This was part of the "Biotope" event showing works from the Centre for Electronic Media Art, Monash University.

"Biotope" at Cube 37, Frankston

Currently Cube 37, the large street display at the Frankston Arts Centre, is showing works from the Centre for Electronic Media Art at Monash University, including my new video Drum Mask.
A lot of the people involved have been out of town, so there will be a "closing" rather than an opening on Thursday 6th August.
"Opening": Thursday 6th August 6.30pm.
Frankston Arts Centre (Cube 37)
37 Davey St, Frankston VIC 3199
Works will continue to be shown until 9th August.
http://artscentre.frankston.vic.gov.au/

Back from Schloss Dagstuhl

I am still trying to assimilate the seminar on "Computational Creativity" at Schloss Dagstuhl.

The old buildings at Schloss Dagstuhl

There were two notable computer art pioneers present, Harold Cohen (San Diego) and Frieder Nake (Bremen); also the well-known philosopher Margaret Boden (Sussex), and quite a range of people who are predominantly computer scientists working on various ways that computers might behave creatively or generate output that we may consider "creative". A lot of them were also artists or musicians, and two informal concerts (one acoustic, one electronic and audio-visual) were organised during the seminar.

I have read papers by quite a few of the people there, and it was good to meet them in person. Unfortunately I came down with laryngitis, and could only whisper the whole time I was there. Nonetheless it was a great event to be part of, and it will undoubtedly influence my future work.

Schloss Dagstuhl

I'm off to Germany soon for a seminar on "Computational Creativity" at Schloss Dagstuhl in Saarland, Germany. Schloss Dagstuhl is a conference centre set up to hold conferences in computer science, though this particular conference crosses over into the arts and philosophy. The topics up for discussion centre around creative behaviour in artificial systems; the systems may operate autonomously or with guidance or collaboration from a human artist. A particular focus is on systems that are modelled on evolution in nature, and there is already quite a long history of "artificial life art", surveyed in the book "Metacreation" by Mitchell Whitelaw. There is also quite a long history of computer programs that can improvise music in concert with other (human) musicians.

The seminar is shaping up to be pretty exciting, and some well-known people will be there. The web page for the seminar is here.

Galanter's complexist manifesto

I recently came across an article by the generative artist, writer and academic Philip Galanter: an admittedly manifesto-like piece in which he proposes what he calls "Complexism - a new science-friendly paradigm for the arts and humanities".

Galanter discusses modernism and postmodernism in the context of complexity theory from science. He sees post-modernism as offering a corrective to some of the unfortunate aspects of modernism, but now post-modernism has fallen has fallen victim to its own problems. Galanter's Complexism is intended to reconcile the two via the theory and practice of complex systems, and he presents the following table:

Modernism	Postmodernism	Complexism
Progress	Circulation	Emergence and Co-evolution
Fixed	Random	Chaotic
The Author	The Text	The Generative Process
Authority	Contention	Feedback
Truth	No Truth	Incomplete truth known to be not fully provable
Pro Formalism	Anti Formalism	Form as public process not privilege
Hierarchy	Collapse	Connectionist networks

There is a lot to be unpacked here. Galanter expands on the table in the 20 pages of the article, which is online at http://philipgalanter.com/downloads/complexism_chapter.pdf. He has also started a blog in which he intends to further develop these ideas, at http://www.philipgalanter.com/complexism/index.html.

I am certainly pleased to see work like this proceeding beyond the now sterile debate of modernism versus postmodernism, and especially work that deals seriously with some of the extraordinary advances in scientific thinking of the last half-century or more.