14 Conversations with Computer Artists
Ernest Edmonds
This chapter presents a set of conversations with artists who use computer-based systems in various ways, primarily via writing of computer programs. Following short introductions, the conversations are presented in full for readers to develop their own understandings from the point of view of the artists’ voices.
14.1 Art and Computer Programming
I had conversations with eleven artists who use computer code in their art, in art forms that range from drawing to performance. The conversations were informal, and I asked basically the same questions of each of them, as is apparent. But the conversations went in unexpected directions, each developing in response to the artist’s inclination—as well as my own, of course. I have also talked with many other artists in preparing this chapter and, in the past, on the subject of this book. All these exchanges have influenced the earlier chapters but there are many views, and not everyone agrees even about some of the most significant issues. This chapter, then, both gives artists’ perspectives and raises questions that we hope will stimulate thought that can find a firm grounding in the earlier parts of this book and perhaps reach beyond them.
Minor edits have been made to the conversation transcripts for clarity, but essentially they are printed as a direct transcription of the conversations that took place. In this way the reader is able to sense the feelings and mood of each artist as well as know the facts and opinions.
One of the pioneers that I talked with was Harold Cohen. It is particularly interesting to see how he came to use computers in his art. Back in 1967, just before he started to program computers, he went to EXPO67, in Canada, and reported on it in Studio International. Contemplating the exhibits and, in particular, the use of the latest technologies, he mused about what we might see in the next EXPO and remarked that “when the new machines, the even more complex computers, get going next time round, would I want to be in front of them or behind them?” (Cohen 1968).
It was not very long before his decision became clear. In 1968 he went to the United States and first programmed computers. In a 1983 conversation that I had with Cohen (Cohen 1983), he recalled that time in interesting ways. “I started programming by accident. I never intended to do it, it’s just that I found it rather curious. … I had no notion that I would use it for anything at all.”
He soon found computer programming interesting in the context of his art. Harold Cohen was already an internationally well-regarded artist by this time. One of the reasons he is important in the context of this book is that he brought a successful artist’s sensibility to computer-based art and used code to push the boundaries of his well-developed practice. It is worth quoting his explanation to me, from 1983, at some length:
My work had changed through the 60’s in a very particular way. there are a number of problems central to painting mostly having to do with the nature of representation in a conventional sense, but the central mystery of painting always had to do with the fact that one can make marks and some people believe that they stand for something and, as the 60’s proceeded, I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated in trying to handle that—it was as if all the painting that I was doing simply constituted a larger and larger dictionary of the way things can stand for other things without ever allowing me to generally, as it were, feel the theory of representation and, in that state of mind, of being frustrated by the act of painting itself.
My painting actually moved further and further away from that until the time I went to the States in ’68 I was really doing some formalist things, almost like colour-field paining. I was becoming more and more frustrated. They were very beautiful and everyone said they were wonderful and I was selling them, but I kept wishing that someone else had done them. I thought they were nice but I didn’t know what they had to do with me.
When I first decided that programming could do something in relation to art making in a rather simple-minded way, I said let’s see if I can formalise what I am doing in painting. The first paintings, in fact, were formalist in the same way that my painting, at that time, was formalist. It was an attempt to rationalise the distribution of colours onto a flat surface. In a very simple minded way, what is a painting? Well, it’s a set of coloured shapes. Then, as I got further and further into it my memory started breaking up and I started to realise that had never been my definition of painting. In fact, the marks stand for something other than themselves. The fact is simply physically, being marks on the surface is not really what I was involved in. I realised that interesting games were games of meaning or games of form and that was the point that I was lucky enough to get myself invited back to Stanford. From the time I went to Stanford I was involved much less in the art aspect than in simply trying to discover what people do when they make representations of things. That’s really the thrust of the work.
So we see that Cohen was not just exploring computing, he was exploring approaches to art making, on which he said in the same conversation, “You can’t really approach art making by looking at the appearance of art. You have to approach it by finding out how art got to have those appearances.” As we see in the chapter, this last remark could be taken as a guiding principle behind most of the work discussed.
Of all the pioneers represented here, Aaron Marcus was the first to make art using computer programs. Already, Michael Noll had been making line drawings on a Stromberg Carlson SC-4020 microfilm plotter (Noll 1994). He did this at Bell Laboratories, where Marcus managed to find a post with Noll, who was not himself an artist but who had a strong interest. From 1962 Noll was drawn into making art within the very open and equipment-rich world of Bell Labs. He worked with others and, in 1965, Noll and Béla Julez showed their drawings, generated from code, in the Howard Wise art gallery in New York (Patterson 2015). This was the second exhibition of computer-based art, the first being earlier in the same year in Stuttgart.
Frieder Nake, who I have also talked with many times, had written the computer code that enabled a graph plotter in Stuttgart to be controlled by a computer (code known as a device driver). The graph plotter, called at the time a drawing machine, was a Zuse Graphomat Z64. It was a large flatbed machine with four changeable pens, designed to work with a Zuse computer. The Stuttgart group wanted to use the greater power of their Standard Electric computer, however, and hence Nake’s task of writing a device driver. So now they had the capability of writing code to make drawings. Interested in art and naturally curious Nake used the plotter to explore art making with algorithms. His work included making drawings for his 1964 Christmas cards, which was a very early public outing for computer art drawings.
Nake found programming conducive to his attitude to art: “I had already, before encountered the computer, … thought of art as being built up of parts, elements, objects, discrete entities, and not so much of movement, expression” (Nake 2014). From this point of view, the New York Times review of the Howard Wise 1965 show was much less negative than intended when it predicted that “the artist would eventually be reduced to the producer of mathematical formulas” (Patterson 2015, 28). As the interviews that follow suggest, some artists have found mathematical formulas and computer code as much a way of releasing their creativity as constraining it.
As another artist who wrote code from the early days put it, “Software is an exploratory device: it allows one to speculate on the generative potential of a field of concurrent options. Most of the options are unknown to the programmer; they have not revealed themselves, but they exist in a largely subconscious personal search space waiting to be discovered.” Furthermore, “The functionality embedded in the program exposes itself to the programmer and the system talks back” (Beyls 2015, 231).
Even simpler formal devices than computer code are often important in the art-making progress. Take, for example, the grid, which we see in Paul Klee’s work, Sol LeWitt’s work, and in many other cases. A decade before Brian Eno became a beta tester of the generative-music software Koan, one of the ways that he was laying the ground was by employing a grid: “Things like ‘Warsaw’ and ‘Subterraneans’ started very mathematically, which is to say I just thought, okay, I’m going to put a grid down—I’d divide a piece of blank recording tape up like a tape measure and say, okay, something’s going to happen on event number three” (Williams 2009, 248). Sometimes a grid is used but never seen. A painter friend of mine, Alun Leach-Jones has told me about his use of intuition and instinctive judgment in front of the canvas for years. He has always expressed doubts about the use of formal methods and computer programs. In 2015, however, in his studio he picked up a piece of charcoal, drew a grid with it, and said, “That’s how I start a painting.” He then explained that charcoal was perfect because he could remove any trace of it. Looking at the resulting painting you would never know that it started with a grid.
Aaron Marcus furthered his computer programming experience by chance when he obtained an internship at Bell Labs in 1967 (Marcus 1976). Art trained but not at that time a figure in the art world, he used the computer to push his art forward as Cohen was soon to do. To him it was not a barrier to his art but a partner. Whereas Nake has based much of his work on the exploitation of random numbers, Marcus came to see mistakes and failures in his code writing as random stimuli to his creative processes—“they made you think.” In contrast, Manfred Mohr is made to think by the very act of writing code and by the required precision. He does use random numbers but only to “make the machine go.” He is very clear that there is nothing random about the core of his work.
Among the younger artists, although they do not talk explicitly very much about randomness or error, some clearly see the unexpected as an important element of using code. Mark Fell talks about the value of “messing about.” Julie Freeman talks about discovery, stepping back, and “losing control” as positive features of her approach to coding. As mentioned in chapter 10 different programming languages and environments encourage different working styles, and we have seen a shift in the process of programming from the 1960s to today. In some contexts programming is done in the well-established orderly manner, clear specifications preceding the writing of code, whereas in other, more recent ones, the specification evolves during the coding process. The former approach tends to be associated with precision and clear thinking about what is to be coded; the latter with the coding itself leading to the clear thinking. Both approaches can be used to stimulate an artist’s creativity, but as the conversations demonstrate, different artists use quite different processes.
One obvious difference among the artists is a function of their age. For example, Cohen, Mohr, and Roman Verostko can identify the changes that discovering the computer made to their art. Many of the younger artists grew up with computers and even with writing code. For them, because the computer was already a part of their lives, when they came to make art it seemed natural to use it. Alex May, Andrew Brown, and Mark Fell, for example, are in this category, and it is interesting to notice that they tend to see writing code in making art as both a natural and a unified process. They do not even think in terms of exploiting computers in art. The computer and programming are simply normal elements of doing many things and so quite natural to use in art.
Perhaps Alex McClean provides the clearest example of someone in this younger category. In a sense, he sees his programming as the music. He cannot think about it as a means to an end. Code is simply the most suitable way that he knows for thinking about music.
Rather than elaborate further, I let the artists speak for themselves and encourage the reader to listen to the artist’s voice.
14.2 The Art World and Computing
I return to the concerns of chapter 8 the art world, in relation to the artists in this chapter. Beyond having the reported conversations, I discussed this subject with several of the artists represented. Not surprisingly, their views were not quite the same as the curators and dealers and, also not surprisingly, they tended to be even less encouraging.
None of the artists made work for the market, and even selling work is seen only as a necessity for living at best. So in one sense the commercial art world does not figure as all that important. As Harold Cohen put it, “I’ve never thought of making money as a worthwhile goal. It’s never been the issue. I’m very happy if I make enough money to keep my operation going.”
Recognition, at least by peers, does of course have a place and reviews fall partly within that area. However, reviews are often not produced. Cohen again: “Art critics as a race will never do anything to show that they don’t know something. And you know I almost never come across a critic who would risk showing that he didn’t understand what I was doing. So getting reviews anywhere has been problematic.”
Mohr was quite active in the art world prior to finding the computer, but the shift in his work was accompanied by a rather negative shift in his relationship to that world: “[In] the midsixties, I lived in Paris and I had, you would say, success. I had gallery shows, I sold things, and people wrote about me. So that seemed to be a good start for a young twenty-five-year-old. When I started with a computer, everything changed. All the doors closed, the galleries threw me out, the newspapers wouldn’t write anymore about what I was doing, because the word ‘computer’ was absolutely no-no!”
Things have changed since the 1960s, of course, particularly with the formation of a few galleries that actually specialize in this area. But in general, artists are finding that they are only at the beginning of the acceptance process. As Paul Brown put it, “The commercial sector is now saying ‘Well, maybe we better get on board. Maybe this is something that’s interesting.’ ” There is hope, but the earlier attitudes are still often encountered, as Julie Freeman noted, “I find there’s a little bit of dismissiveness about people working with technology. And I don’t think they see that it’s difficult or complex, or that it’s a craft or a skill. … If you get a really good painting, they can appreciate the skill in it. If you present something that has got really complicated algorithms and coding in it, … they don’t understand what’s gone into it. … The reason that there are so many digital art systems and media art festivals and stuff like that for us to show our work in, is because the traditional art market doesn’t show it. So we’ve had to create our own.”
So the artists in this area often find themselves operating, performing, or exhibiting in contexts that are on the edge or outside the art world. Kate Sicchio said, “I find myself much more comfortable in media arts or technical computational arts. Because they seem to understand the place where I’m coming from.”
In music, things are a little different from the visual arts. This is largely because of the importance the Internet for music distribution. Mark Fell said, “If you search for me on the Internet, you’ll go to loads of file-sharing websites, where you can get my music for nothing, and actually, now, I’ve even started pointing people to them. If they say ‘Where can I get your record?’ I just say, go there. Because I’ve given up trying to make money out of selling records.”
Many of these comments on the art world may well echo artists’ remarks from earlier times concerning developments in art practice and media. However, taken together with the views from curators and dealers reported in chapter 3, it seems clear that the acceptance of computers, as an integral part of the mainstream visual art world, still has quite a way to go more than fifty years into its evolution. On the other hand, if we look at what artists are actually doing and what the public is engaged with, computers are everywhere.
14.3 Conversation with Aaron Marcus, April 30, 2014
Aaron Marcus grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, in the 1950s. He was always interested in both science and visual communication. Before college, he learned drawing, painting, photography, and calligraphy. He obtained his BA in physics at Princeton University in 1965 and his BFA and MFA in graphic design at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture in 1968. At Yale, while a graphic-design graduate student, he also began the study of computer graphics, which was extremely unusual for the time. He learned FORTRAN programming on his own time at the Yale Computer Center in 1966. In 1967, Marcus spent a summer as a graduate student intern researching design with computers and making computer-based graphic art at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He may be the first graphic designer in the world ever to work full-time with computers. During 1968 to 1977, at Princeton University’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning and in its Visual Arts Program, he taught color, computer art, computer graphics, concrete and visual poetry, environmental graphics, exhibit design, graphic design, history of design and visual communication, information design, information visualization, layout, publication design, systematic design, semiotics, typography, and visual design. In 1971–1973, while a faculty member at Princeton University, he programmed virtual reality art and design spaces, the first professional designer to have done so. After teaching in Jerusalem and researching visual communication in Honolulu, he moved to Berkeley and, after teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and researching user-interface design at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, in 1982, he founded Aaron Marcus and Associates (AM+A), a user-interface design and consulting company, which was one of the first such independent, computer-based design firms in the world.
Ernest: I’m most interested in the work you did in the early days of computer technology. Could you say something about where programming and computing came into your art and design, what were you doing before you discovered the computer, and how did your use of the computer begin?
Aaron: My university education originally was in science, so I studied physics, mathematics, and philosophy at Princeton University. At that time I didn’t use computers at all. They were too new; in fact, I used to earn money plotting data charts for scientists, the very computer graphics that computers first produced. When I decided “to achieve escape velocity” and moved from physics to art and design, I landed at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, specifically in the Department of Graphic Design. There, the faculty introduced me to color theory, typography, visual design, composition, publication design, etc., topics in which I’d always been interested, but in which I never had any formal training. It was a magnificent experience to work sixteen to eighteen hours a day in this new world.
Figure 14.1
Aaron Marcus. Evolving Gravity. 1972–1974. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artist.)
I didn’t use computers in my first year, 1965 through ’66. For some reason, I can’t quite remember why, I had a feeling that I, as someone from the sciences, now in an art school or design school, should know about or have something to do with these new computers. I took advantage of being a student to take a course in the fundamental logic of computers. I loved the idea that I could understand the basic operations of a central processing unit and a mathematic/logic unit, from which all computing derives. That study gave me a thrill, I suppose appealing to the systematic, scientific, and logical in me.
In the following year I continued my studies of graphic design and visual communication. I’ve always drawn since early childhood, and I’ve always been involved with calligraphy, photography, poetry, and later, visual poetry. In the spring of 1967, I learned about job interviews for positions with AT&T Bell Labs that were taking place on the Yale campus. I thought, well, why not? I went and met with two interviewers, Michael Noll and Peter Denes, who were then involved with acoustics research at Bell Labs.
Peter was a brilliant man, Hungarian, odd, and intense. Michael, also, was odd and intense. They seemed, in retrospect, like the two secret agents in the movie Men in Black, two people in dark suits, white shirts, and thin ties. As I came in a small room for the interview, I said, “I have no idea why you would want to hire me. I was studying physics for four years, quantum electromagnetic theory and so on, and now I’m cutting out pieces of colored paper in an art school, studying graphic design, and wondering if I’m just in psychotherapy somewhere in an asylum. Can you do anything with that? Do you want me for any reason?” thinking, no they didn’t. They turned, looked at each other, smiled, then turned back to me, and one of them said, “Well, actually, we’re looking for someone exactly like you!” I was astonished. That moment began my future career, first as a summer intern at AT&T Bell Labs, which exposed me to state-of-the-art computer graphics equipment.
I spent the summer playing with computers, learning how to program their machines, producing art as well as thinking about design uses. I thought I should experiment with producing artwork, and I was influenced by one researcher there, who was visualizing quadratic equations formulae. I adopted some of his approach and produced my own complex dot patterns exhibiting the mathematical properties of quadratic equations spread out graphically. They were quite beautiful, intriguing, mathematical visual objects. I was satisfied. I also realized I could interject randomness in such images so that they were not perfectly ordered, because then they would seem to me to be a little boring and merely a mathematical depiction. And so I did further experiments, and sometimes when I miscoded, the mistakes, the failures, were often surprisingly intriguing images, and I said, oh, actually, I like that better than what I was trying to do. I will declare that image my work, and thanks to the computer, which interrupted my intentions, I produced something that is a bit of a jarring discord and a surprise for me and for the viewer.
Ernest: Did that affect quite what you did next? Did you sometimes …?
Aaron: Try to achieve mistakes?
Ernest: Well, not exactly, but I wonder if your making a mistake made you think, well, actually I could have done it a bit differently.
Aaron: There would be occasions when I would think, oh, that went far awry from what I wanted, but, actually, I like the results better. Now let’s see, how can I achieve that kind of result in a more systematic and controllable way, and also [how can I] develop other kinds of images by learning from that error. I would say also as a computer artist that I was interested in typographic forms in artworks, coming in part from my studies of graphic design and my interest in signs and symbols, in fact, phonogram symbols. I would try to incorporate these symbols into my artwork.
So in 1967, I did that first experimental work, and I later exhibited some of those works. I continued at Bell Labs in 1969 through ’71 to be a consultant. I would also continue, sort of on the sly, to create visual artworks that were not part of my official assignment, which was to program an interactive page-layout system for the Picturephone, a sort of desktop publishing system about ten years ahead of commercial products, a case study of which I published in the Journal of Visible Language in 1971. Back at Princeton in ’71 to ’73 I continued to explore computer art and computer design using an LDS-1 [Line-Drawing System-1] computer graphics system in the Biology Department. I experimented with 3-D interactive environments, inspired by engineering research examples of flight simulation, e.g., take off from and landing on an aircraft carrier.
As a result, I created the first virtual reality displays designed by an artist or professional designer. They were quite simple: stick-figure human beings in a three-dimensional space. The computer graphics system could display two thousand vectors in a real-time display, and I could enable a viewer or a visitor to my space to traverse a large empty landscape, find a symbolic highway, move along that highway, view Burma-Shave-like slogan-signs along the highway that gave philosophical thoughts, find a dynamic, spiraling sculpture of signs in space, and encounter a random actor-dancer who was moving around in the space. I was inspired by and adapted something with which Michael Noll had experimented: computer-generated dancers.
I exhibited those Cybernetic Landscapes, 1971–73 and many other artworks around the world, and I published them in many journals, books, and magazines, especially Soft Where, Inc., volume one and two, monographs documenting my own work in computer art, visible language experimentation, and conceptual art. During a sabbatical from teaching at Princeton, I went back to Yale in 1972, where I had the opportunity to program artworks using a Linotype phototypesetting machine controlled by a PDP-10 computer. That system at Yale was among the first programmable phototypesetting machines connected to medium-sized computers. Most recently, these works of Cybernetic Landscapes and other of my computer artworks were purchased by the San Francisco Museum of Modern art in 2016 and displayed in an exhibit called From Typeface to Interface.
Ernest: Sounds good.
Aaron: During my years making computer art in the 1970s, the mistakes were interesting, and I tried to develop them further. I have a series of serigraphs and lithographs that were created from those 1972 black-and-white originals. In 1974, several of them were later translated into color images for a bank’s annual report, because the bank representatives wanted some artwork that was futuristic. Also in 1974, I transformed black-and-white images through the Pratt Graphic Center in New York City, which commissioned me to do two serigraph editions, Noise Barrier and Evolving Gravity. I still have and sell signed copies of these editions. Now, I’ve mentioned about four different computing platforms that I have used, and four different contexts in which I had access to computer technology, all of which I certainly could not have afforded personally.
Ernest: Were they four different physical realizations as well? Did your work start with a plotter, for example, or was it screens?
Aaron: I did create some ink-plotter-generated art, but not much. I recorded my images at AT&T Bell Labs originally on computer-generated microfilm. I also printed out many artworks on line printers and on phototypesetters. The phototypesetter, by the way, was paper-tape driven, with eight-bit holes, and the output was on phototypesetting paper in black on white. The two serigraph editions that I mentioned were in color achieved through standard, conventional color manipulation of the photo originals.
Until recently, I still had all of my computer art and also some of the programming decks of input cards, stored in my garage. However, during 2016 and 2017, I have donated almost all of my computer art and design works to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert collection in London, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the Letterform Archive in San Francisco, and the RIT Vignelli Archive at RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology] in Rochester, New York.
Ernest: So when exhibited these would have looked, how?
Aaron: Originally, the LDS-1 images of 1971–73 could only be viewed stereoscopically in real time using whirling disks of filters held in front of one’s face. To record them, I photographed the screens and exhibited a photodocumentation of a trip through the space as white-line-on-black-background photos. Many of the works have appeared in museums and computer graphics exhibits as black-and-white, high-resolution, high-contrast photoprints. For most of my work, I never had an opportunity to generate multicolor original media. As I mentioned, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibited last year one of my Cybernetic Landscapes, 1971–73, which is now in their collection, together with a print out of the program that generated the artwork.
Ernest: In all of that work, could I ask you, when were you writing the programs in order to create the works, and before you were using computers, you were just using scissors, pencils, or whatever medium was at hand to make artwork?
Aaron: Yes, before computers, I used traditional materials to make art (and designs). Even after starting to use computers, I continued to make other artworks with Helvetica-font Letraset, i.e., press-on letters, and graph paper, and other traditional media but not using computer graphics.
Ernest: Okay, so in the beginning you were mixing it, as I still do actually. The question is, did you feel that doing some of the work by writing programs changed your attitude to making art, or did it just make some things easier to do?
Aaron: Well, having access to programs certainly changed some of the kinds of art that I could produce. For example, I would never have had the patience to draw out little circles or dots of images to create visual patterns, I would have produced something quite different without the mechanical regularity of the mathematical imagery that I was producing.
Ernest: So, did you?
Aaron: Hold that question for a moment. So the amount of effort required, which was reduced, was very important for being able to do this kind of art. Being able to produce, even with precision, certain forms and shapes was valuable. In fact, I wanted to find ways to create things that looked like they were natural manifestations or artifacts. I was using the computer to try to simulate them—for example, trying to simulate strange hieroglyphics or hieratic writings from some unknown civilization—and I would arrange things so that the computer would generate some random forms that, in assembly—that is, in group appearance—would look as though they were created by hand maybe by some strange people writing some strange language that we didn’t know. I could have done it by hand, but I doubt if I would have had the patience to do it.
Ernest: Did you think of different things to do because of the programming that you perhaps wouldn’t have come up with as a concept?
Aaron: Well, it’s an interesting point. You say “programming”; you could ask that, but it’s also the computer graphics display mechanisms. They were also instrumental in making me realize, oh, I could do certain things that I might not otherwise have thought to do, because of the computer graphics hardware platform.
Ernest: So treat my question as that broader question.
Aaron: Well, so first we’ll go back to software. Software dealing with algorithms and repetitive do-loops meant I could think about creating little things and repeating them, and it might tempt me to think, what other little things could I create and repeat and play with in a way that might have occurred to me. But as I just mentioned, think about the sheer effort of producing these marks, even to make one of them. I might say, Oh, well, I don’t want ever to do that again; it took me ten hours or fifty hours to do it. I thought, Oh, it’s good that I have this device to let me envision and try things quickly and then decide, No, that’s not good, or, Oh, there’s something I can pick up and take further. Seeing works in progress was certainly a pleasure and would give me insights into effects, into processes, into forms that I might not otherwise have had time or the ability to explore.
Ernest: And you made the interesting point that the display mechanisms themselves were important.
Aaron: Yes. They offered unique phenomena, like, for instance, with the phototypesetter, the machine is taking an image of type fonts, and then with lenses, mirrors, adjustments, [it’s] focusing them line after line in a particular place on the phototypesetting paper for typesetting. When I understood and looked carefully at the mechanism, I realized, well, this is all very good, I like that, and I did some things with those symbols, but I also want something that’s more calligraphic. How can I do this? And I realized, well, the phototypesetter is using a glass plate with the images of all those carefully designed letterforms that someone had spent a lot of money and time in creating. I realized that I could take blank sheets of glass, cover them with black ink or candle-flame carbon and scratch away random symbols and line elements, then put that glass plate into the phototypesetting machine. The phototypesetter would have no awareness of what it was phototypesetting, and out came computer-generated “chicken scratches,” which delighted me.
I thought they had quite a lot of character, and I tried to judge best what would work out, and that led to one of my works, called Noise Barrier, which otherwise might have been a text that someone had typed and printed out. I forget even what text was driving the phototypesetting machine, but out came line after line of chicken scratches that made a wonderful texture. Also, I had messed up the program, and the output image came out with a completely black stripe, providing the right visual contrast to these lighter, more “hairy” line elements, so there was a gap and then some more chicken scratches, which altogether created a composition or rhythm, of an interruption of something and then continuation. In the end, it was, to my judgment, acceptable and what I wanted to show. So playing with the device revealed capabilities of which I took advantage. It had limitations that I would play with and distort, as people in decades past might have taken magnets to an oscilloscope screen to produce strange images. Mine was maybe more drastic and permanent in terms of what one could do.
Ernest: Well, you could almost argue that you were inventing a new medium.
Aaron: Well, I wouldn’t say an entirely new medium, but I was certainly, as an artist, playfully, willfully, and dramatically distorting the intended purpose of this device.
Ernest: Yes.
Aaron: Like Bob and Ray, two US comedians from the 1960s, who once convinced two independent television stations in New York to broadcast them from one television studio. They urged all viewers at home watching their weekly show to set up two television sets, close to each other, and to tune in to the two different TV channels. Bob was on one, Ray was on another, and they played ping-pong with each other, with space in between the two television sets. Viewers at home saw something they had never seen before, as the ping-pong ball seemed to travel through the space in their rooms between the two sets.
Ernest: Wow, yes.
Aaron: Or another media artist, Ernie Kovacs, a playful US television comedian who was an artist in the 1950s and ’60s, a visionary who broadcasted a skit for his show in which an entire room was shown that was tilted dramatically. Viewers were amazed that he poured milk on live television and the milk went at an angle and didn’t hit the cup.1 So playing with the laws of expectation, playing with the rules and boundaries, well, artists do that a lot.
Ernest: All the time, most of us.
Aaron: And that’s what I was doing when I substituted chicken scratches for typefaces. So I wouldn’t say it was a new medium, but I was certainly distorting and finding new possibilities for a given medium.
Ernest: Good. I want to come back to an earlier point and to see if there’s anything more to say about it, which is that you talked early on about making mistakes and that leading to something that was actually of value and that maybe you even carried forward. Could you think of any other kind of examples?
Aaron: Well, I would say that I’ve always been interested in sign and symbol systems. And that’s what motivated me to try to create semiautomatic, semi-computer-generated writing systems, as though I wanted to come into contact with the writing of a civilization that no one had ever known about or seen. How could I do this? And I would say that some of the compositions that I created were based in the computer’s helping me to do that, because I couldn’t generate as much fast, innovative, crazy, yet systematic imagery as I could with the help of a computer. And so that kind of influenced me over a period of a couple of years to try to create images that had that quality or that feeling.
It’s like creating computer-generated Paul Klee symbol paintings that are strange, mysterious, subconscious, or evocative of symbolic imagery, so that you can say, oh, that came out of the play in his mind, and we can see the influence of X, Y, or Z or maybe some contemplation with Miro’s work or of someone else, but in this case, it was computer-generated, somewhat autonomously created notation or sign-language artifacts that represented the look of some strange, distant, or unknown civilization.
Ernest: I’m very, very interested in this point, and I’ll explain my interest, and then I can ask you about it. My interest is this: to my knowledge, in the past, that when Michael Noll first showed in New York in ’65, that was kind of roughly speaking in parallel with the Germans showing in Stuttgart.
Aaron: Yes.
Ernest: And the people in Stuttgart were very influenced by semiotics, which, of course, came from America really, first, might I say?
Aaron: Yes, I mean, American semiotics came from America, French semiologie came from France …
Ernest: Yes, but I think they were mostly influenced by the American, I think.
Aaron: It’s interesting that you bring up semiotics and semiologie, because I was very much intrigued by and influenced by these disciplines. Umberto Eco, the great semiotician came to Princeton in 1975 or ’76, when I first met him, that was late in the game, but I had already been interested, in ’72 or so, in pasigraphy, universal writing systems. I even had one of my students at Princeton, Peter Laundy, investigate the entire Yale library collection of books on the subject to create a bibliography of pasigraphic systems.
Ernest: Now that you say it, by the way, it’s obvious that semiotics is central to your work in general.
Aaron: Yes, did I forget to mention that? [laughs]
Ernest: No reason, but it’s obvious to me, now that I think about it, obviously, yes, but I was just thinking in the context of this digital art where I had always been thinking that the Germans were very influenced by semiotics but the Americans were not, but you contradict my expectations.
Aaron: I was definitely interested in semiotics, and the questions would be, Where did this come from and When did it start?
Ernest: Yes, that’s a good question.
Aaron: Well, when I came to Princeton in 1968, right out of graduate school, to teach, I was first introduced to the semiologie of Roland Barthes. When did I first encounter Charles Sanders Pierce? I don’t know. Probably at the same time. Buchler’s book about the writings of Pierce, chapter seven, was one which I assigned to all of my students beginning in 1969, I think, and I used this reference and Pierce’s definitions of sign frequently in my writings. I would have to go and check my own bibliography to remember when I started to do semiotic analysis of concrete poetry, for example. I think it was 1974.2 I also did a semiotic analysis of our team’s project from the East-West Center in Honolulu to visualize global energy interdependence in 1979.3 Now I should say, also, that I’ve been involved with the concrete poetry movement for years.
Ernest: Well, I was going to come to that, yes.
Aaron: I exhibited in those collections, part of my Soft Where, Inc., Vol. 1 and 2, which are monographs about my computer graphics, concrete poetry, and conceptual art. The works are all involved with sign systems. For me, one of my most enjoyable works in conceptual art was An X on America, in which I instigated, with AT&T’s help, four public telephones ringing in four cities of the United States. I was at one location, and random people answered the phone on the street, unable to resist the ringing phone. I talked with them and said, “I’m doing an artwork, a conceptual artwork; would you want to talk with me for a few minutes?” They replied, “Sure, who are you?” And so we conducted a conference call, which was somewhat unusual in those days, especially among random pay phones. While the phone call was in operation in New York; Washington, D.C.; Omaha, Nebraska; Los Angeles; and San Francisco, an “X” three thousand miles wide was conceptually drawn across America.
Ernest: Beautiful.
Aaron: I wanted to make a trace in space, signing my name at a very large scale, the scale of the entire USA. Where could I find a piece of paper large enough or enough ink? I could only accomplish my objective through computer-based telecommunication systems, with which I could manage only an X for my signature. I was also not in favor of the president of the US at the time, Richard Nixon, and of corporate influence on the nation, corporations like Exxon. In the work I was also “crossing out” a Nixon America. The alternative readings of An X on America were “a Nixon America” and “an Exxon America” and “a nix on America.”
Ernest: That’s a brilliant example. I’m very sympathetic to all of this because in the sixties I was writing concrete poetry.
Aaron: Ah!
Ernest: So some of my work was conceptual at that time too.
Aaron: Weren’t we all at that time?
Ernest: Yes, exactly.
Aaron: So I was in contact with and met on a visit to Indiana University in about 1971 Marie Ellen Solt, the nun at Indiana University who promoted concrete poetry in her book, as well as Thomas Sebeok, an esteemed polymath and semiotician. I published [in] many small journals, exhibited my work, and corresponded in the 1970s with Richard Kostelanetz, E. F. Higgins, and Emmet Williams, I believe.
Ernest: So this is all very interesting.
Aaron: It was all interrelated and all fluttering about, like bees around a flower of theory, and what I considered [that] I did in my practical work was applied visual semiotics.
Ernest: So this is great. I’d like to ask you how the process of, I presume you could say, terminating the making of computer-based art happened.
Aaron: Why did I stop?
Ernest: Why did you stop? Was it technology?
Aaron: No, not at all. I can’t remember the last time I programmed. I was at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory as a staff scientist during 1980–81. They didn’t know what to call me, so staff scientist seemed to fit. I worked on user-interface [UI] design, UI standards and guidelines, writing some of the first user-interface guidelines ever written, for the Department of Energy’s SEEDIS project, the Socio-economic Environmental Demographic Information System, which was being constructed by Lawrence Berkeley Lab computer scientists. About that time I must have pretty much stopped, I’m trying to remember, I think I did do some things in ’82 or ’83, but by ’83, I had started my business, became divorced, and left academia. It was all rather overwhelming, and it was all I could do to figure out how to survive as a businessperson.
Ernest: So it was really nothing to do with art or computer-based art at all; it was life.
Aaron: Yes, it was life impinging on me, with a limited time to sleep and be awake and take care of children and so on, and so I had to support my family, and I was trying to create this business of a kind that pretty much had never existed before, which was a computer-based design firm, and all that had come to absorb my intellectual and physical life.
Ernest: Well, I think most people here would say that what followed was a very successful and important venture.
Aaron: Yes, but even though I devoted so much time to research and design in human-computer interaction, you know, I still love to draw. I do draw. I have very little time to do it, but every time I do, it gives me intense pleasure to be able to do so. In fact in the past few years, I have started to draw a series of cartoons based on weekly portions of the Torah, in the style of R. Crumb, and incorporating drawings of my grandchildren into the episodes. I also continue to take photographs (perhaps 115,000 in Apple’s Photos currently, not counting others elsewhere in my computer), but I don’t manipulate the photos or do collages as I did before, and I don’t use computer-based systems to create computer art—not from lack of interest but lack of time. Nevertheless, I am happy that I could accomplish what I did in computer art, and I am pleased that SF MoMA has purchased many of my works, that several museums and archives have collected my work, and that plans are under way to publish and exhibit my work further.
Ernest: Okay, thank you. I think that’s perfect, and very, very interesting.
14.4 Conversation with Harold Cohen, July 15, 2009; Margaret Boden Also Present
“Harold Cohen’s work as a painter has been exhibited widely both in galleries and in major museums. During the 1960s he represented Great Britain in the Venice Biennale, Documenta 3, the Paris Biennale, the Carnegie International, and many other important international shows. After moving to San Diego, Cohen became interested in computer programming and particularly in artificial intelligence. Much of his work since that time has been concerned with building a machine-based simulation of the cognitive processes underlying the human act of drawing. The resulting ongoing program, AARON, has by now been seen producing original ‘freehand’ drawings in museums and science centers in the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the Los Angeles County Museum, Documenta-6, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Brooklyn Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, and the IBM Gallery in New York. He has a permanent exhibit in the Computer Museum in Boston, and he represented the United States in the Japan World Fair in Tsukuba in 1985.”4 Harold Cohen died in his studio in 2016.
Figure 14.2
Harold Cohen. Coming Home #2. 2007, permanent pigment ink on panel, 57.5 × 169.5 cm. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artist.)
Ernest: Actually, you may have forgotten, but we had a recorded discussion like this maybe twenty-five years ago … [laughter]
Harold: Must have forgotten.
Ernest: Yes, you will have forgotten, but I recently found a copy of it, and so that was quite interesting. I wouldn’t hold you to whatever it was you said in those days, but I do remember you actually drew, so it was quite interesting in a way that, to talk about what you were doing, you found it helpful to draw things. So you explained yourself partly through drawing not just through language. However, the first question is, has the computer or software opened up new avenues for you as an artist? In your case maybe it’s obvious, but what I meant by that was has it led to you doing things as an artist that are quite different?
Harold: Well, yes, I think so. I think perhaps I should try and remember why I got involved in computing in the first place. And I think, at the lowest level, it was because, after twenty years of painting, I thought I didn’t know anything more about image making than I had when I started. And I thought, rightly or wrongly, at that time I thought I saw in computing a way of learning something much more objectively about images and how one goes about making them.
Ernest: I was interested, and excited, when I saw your Tate show in 1983. The pictures were from your program AARON, but I saw Harold Cohen’s works on the wall.
Harold: It’s interesting that you say that. I mean, you know, a lot of people said, oh Harold, we’d know your hand anywhere.
Ernest: Yes.
Harold: What hand are we talking about? In fact there was an even more pointed case of that when I was doing the show in San Francisco. What I thought would be the whole show was backdropped by a gigantic painting on the wall, maybe 130 feet long. I was told by the director that one day, when myself and my team had gone out to lunch, some New York art critic came in (actually, to look at something else), saw the half-finished mural on the wall, and said to the director, “Who did that? I mean it reminds me of what Harold Cohen was doing, but I haven’t seen his work in a long time.” Now I don’t find that quite as mysterious as perhaps I should, but I mean, the notions that informed art making when I started doing it were exactly the same notions that I’d had then.
Ernest: The need to be able to look, for example?
Harold: Yes, yes.
Ernest: And if you know how to look, then you can see Harold Cohen’s hand.
Harold: Well, actually, I didn’t see it at time. I was, I mean, my reaction, the take was, oh well, very clever; we’d know your hand anywhere. There’s a bloody great sign outside saying Harold Cohen, you know. But I didn’t actually see the implication.
Ernest: Let’s move on a little bit. Programming—does programming matter to you? Does the software itself matter to you, or is it just like something you have to do?
Harold: I think it must matter to me, because I spend quite a lot of time on stuff that may superficially appear to be irrelevant to the end product. I do spend a lot of time rewriting code.
Ernest: It is a critical part of the art. It’s not just a means to an end. And yet you don’t necessarily show your code to anyone.
Harold: Well, they couldn’t understand it if you did.
Ernest: No, no. Whereas with the live coding music people, they actually show the code on the screen. Although I don’t know that it helps very much.
Margaret: But why do you bother to clean it up? Is it because the formal part of you, the formalist part of you, wants it to be as elegant as possible, and that’s why you do it? Or is it … because once you have tidied it up, you can understand it and think about it more easily? So if you want to change it and push it forward, it’s easier to do that if it’s an elegant piece of code in the first place?
Harold: That’s certainly part of it, no doubt. You know, the program is big enough now that there are parts of the program I haven’t actually looked at in five years. And if I have to go back and alter it, I frequently have to read it like I’ve never seen it before.
Margaret: Yes.
Harold: And you’re quite right. I mean, if you’ve written it cleanly and elegantly, it’s much easier to understand. So there certainly is a practical aspect of that. There’s also, I recognize, an aesthetic aspect to it. I just don’t like to look at sloppy code.
Ernest: You said to me in London that you’d produced this new program with much smaller number of lines of code. Was that conciseness a quality that mattered? Is the art in part in the code?
Harold: Give me an example.
Ernest: For example, in poetry, where is the poem? You know, I can have the poem in this book, printed in this typeface on this particular piece of paper, or in this book printed on a different piece of paper, or a different typeface, but it’s still the same poem. And the poem exists even behind that. So there’s a question, in our case, about whether the software has some merit or meaning, if you like?
Harold: Well, I’m not sure. It seems to be a similar situation, but I don’t in fact think it is. You could make the same argument about whether music exists in the abstract.
Ernest: Exactly.
Harold: The difference is that anyone can read the text of a poem; any musician can read the score. But almost nobody could read the code and come out with the slightest idea of what would happen when you ran it. Including me. You know, I have to run it to find out what it’s going to do.
Ernest: Yes. And do you find that important in your work, that actually the discovery of new things arises from running the program?
Harold: Of course. Yes. I mean, that’s why we were talking about it.
Ernest: Yes, that’s right. So I think it’s important to be specific about it. That, you know, it’s kind of experimental. You could say that art practice is a kind of experimental process. What you do is make stuff and then you look at it.
Harold: Right. But at that point you have to worry about misunderstanding in the other direction. A lot of people think experimenting is just a question of throwing things together and see what happens. You know, as a scientist you never do an experiment unless you have expectations.
Ernest: Right.
Harold: I think of it more in terms of a dialogue than in terms of an experiment.
Ernest: Dialogue is a great word, yes.
Harold: I’m talking to the program, and the program says Oh you mean this?
Ernest: Yes. So I have another question, which kind of leads on to that, which is, do you find that the kind of work you do distances you from the object in a way? That you’re working in the software, and the object is somewhere more distant?
Harold: It is not the same relationship to the object as you had when you spent three months or six months working on a single canvas. Nothing comes for free, and that’s part of the price I pay.
Ernest: One of the things that interests me in your work is that some people find the time-based element quite exciting. I don’t know whether it’s still around, but you used to have that program that basically was painting the image …
Harold: The painting machine.
Ernest: I’m aware of quite a few people finding the actual time-base process of it exciting aesthetically, not just the object that it generated. And I wondered how you feel about that?
Harold: Well, I’m not sure that I feel anything very special about it. You know, the most obvious example right now is the installation: slowing it down is really rather coarse. I was quite concerned, actually, that the one here would be so damned slow that everybody’d die of boredom before they saw it. I was very surprised at how fast it is. It’s actually running too fast to run a test.
Ernest: Oh, okay.
Harold: But in a way that’s no more the case than back in the 60’s, when I was getting commissions to do tapestry design. I paid quite careful attention to the nature of tapestry. And I think any artist would say, well, you know, if I’m working in this medium, I have to pay attention to what the medium is like. What, you know, what you can or cannot hope to get away with. And I don’t think it’s any different from that.
Ernest: No. So you do see software as a medium?
Harold: Oh, yes, certainly. Yes.
Ernest: Good. Yes. And in a way, maybe what you’ve done all the time, well for a long time anyway, is explore the implications of that medium?
Harold: Well, in the context of what else I’m doing. If you’re painting, you pay a good deal of attention. I think one should pay a good deal of attention, of course. But as I said, that’s true in any medium.
Margaret: In respect of a time issue again, with the painting machine. Did you make an attempt at all to make the time course of the placement of the paints of the different colors and the different paint pads, and so forth, similar to what you would have done if you had been doing it yourself by hand or not at all?
Harold: No, I had absolutely no control.
Margaret: That’s what I thought.
Harold: It was as much as I could do to keep my head above water with that damned thing.
Ernest: Yes, but you made judgments about how quickly the dye got dry, and stuff like that.
Harold: That’s a good point. I mean, the problem of the application of the dye actually resulted in my inventing a filling algorithm designed to stop the stuff drying in one place while it was busy painting somewhere else. So I had to do a work-around on that particular problem. So the medium very much affected the way the whole process was designed. But certainly, with issues like timing, it was a long way beyond my control.
Ernest: But in that work you presumably chose a certain palette of colors. Now [that] you’re printing, you have much more flexibility about the palette. Do you use that flexibility?
Harold: Yes. It’s also not exactly true that I chose the palette. I took what was available.
Ernest: Yes.
Harold: I’d actually used those same dyes for coloring drawings, you know, computer drawings which you then fill in with color. And some of the colors are very beautiful, actually. But when you come to look at them, in order to try and, you know, get some reasonable coverage of the complete spectrum, it’s very uneven. There’s a lot going on there, and then there’s a big gap. You know, so I finished up with, if I remember correctly, with seventeen colors.
Ernest: Which is quite a lot.
Harold: But when you came to use them, there were probably three or four blues, almost no bright reds. So it was a fairly limited palette. And there was also the problem of the screen. If I had tried mixing those things, I would have just used pure colors. You know, you can have blue there and yellow there, instead of which I tried to simulate a fuller range, and it was very, very difficult. I spent a lot of time doing that.
Ernest: But now it’s a more complex problem, really. In printing you can choose the color black, for example, and so in a way it’s harder.
Harold: You know, it’s not entirely true, actually. When I’m printing, in fact, now I always do a lot of proofing before I make a work. And I’m not talking about proofing before making a run of a particular edition. I’m talking about before I make a single print.
Ernest: Right.
Harold: Because printing is always a compromise. You want to differentiate between two very different dark colors here, but you’re going to find that you just lost that color differentiation over there. So you know, you try to pick a path that gives you optimum results.
Ernest: Yes.
Harold: It’s not true that you can print anything that you can specify.
Ernest: No, no. Aren’t you trying to do the impossible, really?
Harold: Yes, predicting what’s going to happen from a mixture is extraordinarily tricky.
Ernest: I asked you the other day about spraying. Just tell me about that again. This is a technical question. You were saying that you use a spraying technique over your prints.
Harold: Well, in the first place I wanted to be able to use the images in an orthodox traditional context. And you know, there are some motivations behind that. I’ve always felt that the computer art game has never been accepted in the art world. But in fact, it’s never tried very hard. And I wanted to take on the art world in its own terms. So the decision to exhibit things in galleries, which I walked away from for many years, involved having objects that could be shown in galleries. And that meant that they’d have to be physical things that had the same characteristics as paintings. I felt they had to be permanently mounted on a rigid surface, and the surface had to be protected. I didn’t want to have to put Plexiglas over them.
Ernest: Right.
Harold: So now we have this big frame that’s supposed to move backwards and forwards, and the gun was supposed to move up, a bit like an X-Y plotter. The varnish being as dense as will go through the gun, which of course then leaves a very glossy surface, which I don’t want. Then that gets what, in the trade, they call a sacrifice coat, a spirit-based varnish, which comes in a matt form. So you spray a coat over the varnish and suddenly all the varnish disappears, but you still have the depth of color. Which is the crucial issue.
Ernest: Yes. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the amount of effort is so great. It’s true in art practice in general, very often, that the core of the work is in some code, for example, but there’s a massive amount of work in actually generating the object.
Harold: Think about stretching canvas.
Ernest: Yes, exactly. That’s my usual example. Yes, stretching canvases and stuff is a big part of life. Nothing much to do with creativity, but it kind of enables it.
Harold: I’m not sure that it’s nothing much to do with creativity.
Ernest: Okay, tell me.
Harold: When I was teaching at Saint Martin’s School of Art I’d walk around the studio [of a wonderful painter, who is dead now,] and there were these dreary looking objects. He was an absolute magician with materials, but his teaching must have been appalling because the student [I saw there] didn’t know anything. She was painting on a piece of absorbent cardboard, and then wondered why she couldn’t get any sort of vibrant color.
Ernest: So who were you teaching with? I just wondered who you mixed with in those days.
Harold: Well, who I went round to the pastry shop for coffee with?
Ernest: Well, I suppose that’s right, yes. It matters.
Harold: It does. But I really don’t remember who I was with. Like, I remember at Ealing I was with a bunch of people including Ron Kitaj, for example; he was teaching there. But once again, our contact was mostly going out to lunch together.
Ernest: Sure. But that’s an interesting thing. We were talking earlier about collaboration and so on. And I didn’t quite agree with you in this sense, that although art practice is very much an individual thing …
Harold: I think an essential element in art practice is an ongoing dialogue about the nature of art.
Ernest: Yes.
Harold: And you conduct that dialogue partly through your work, partly through conversation, partly through reading.
Ernest: Yes.
Harold: No, I have absolutely no doubt about the social implications there.
Ernest: I met someone at your recent London opening who didn’t realize that the works had anything to do with computers.
Harold: Most people don’t, you see. Most people don’t.
Ernest: Maybe it doesn’t matter, in a sense.
Harold: Yes.
Ernest: That’s your business, that’s how you generate it.
Margaret: Skill, and it’s a huge skill. Part of your skill is having succeeded in the task of putting your aesthetic sensibilities onto the page via computer, which is an amazing thing to have done. And you’ve done it amazingly well. Is that not something that you are rightly proud of as an artist?
Harold: Yes, I’m proud of it.
Margaret: And so, in that sense, wouldn’t you prefer that somebody knew that that was the way that it was done, rather than it was done with a paintbrush?
Harold: No, I’d rather people knew about it, but not because it would stimulate my ego. I’d rather people knew about it because I think the significance of my work goes further than the appearance of the individual piece.
Margaret: Well, exactly. Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say, that’s right.
Ernest: Yes, exactly. Yes.
Harold: You know, I’m trying to say something about the future.
Margaret: So when Ernest said, you know, some of them didn’t realize it was done by computer and you said well that doesn’t matter, I mean, it sort of does matter, surely, to you?
Harold: No, I don’t think I said it doesn’t matter.
Ernest: No, you didn’t quite say it. Well, you said something like that, but, yes, it does matter anyway, I think. It’s odd. In a way, your works as objects are important, but also the process that you’ve used to make them.
Harold: And I got some pleasure out of being able to say, no, I’ve got a machine at home that did all that. But you know, given that we’re entering on very clearly an age in which robots will play an increasingly large part in our existence, computers already play an astonishing part.
Ernest: Yes, when you drive a car, or look at your watch …
Harold: Everywhere, everywhere. I mean, every science today is 50 percent computer science.
Ernest: Yes.
Harold: All of the breakthroughs we’ve seen in genetics, in space programs, in medicine; they all rest upon computing. And given that we seem to be on the edge of an age of robotics, I think the fact that I’ve got a program that can do something that we normally assume, not merely that human beings were needed to do, but actually, rather talented human beings were required to do it, is really interesting.
Ernest: Well, that’s what’s so special.
Harold: Yes. So, no, I’d much rather people understood that they were done by computer. I think what I meant before if I said it doesn’t matter, I think I meant that it doesn’t matter to them.
Ernest: Yes. So how do you feel about the code? I would have thought many computer scientists would have wanted to see it.
Harold: Well, in fact, one of the program officers at the National Science Foundation had $100,000 to give to somebody to do some work just documenting the program.
Ernest: Right.
Harold: She couldn’t find anybody to do it.
Ernest: Wow.
Harold: And I said, well, I could do it. Can I have the $100,000 …? [laughter]. No, you can’t have it. No, I mean, I’m not actually quite telling the truth. There was one correspondence from somebody in the open software game who made a perfectly legitimate point that, you know, when I die, Aaron stops developing. But if I made it open source then there would be programmers all over the world who could carry it forward. To which my reply was, No, my real ambition is to leave the program in a state where it can carry itself forward.
Ernest: Exactly.
Harold: But I mean I think it’s a fantasy anyway. If I were to give my program to even a skilled programmer, it would probably take him about a year before he could figure out what’s going on. A casual remark was to the effect that I would be the first artist in history to have a posthumous exhibition of new work. Which was made ironically, because I knew damn well that nobody would want an endless collection of my work. If it hasn’t got my signature on the back it’s valueless anyway.
Ernest: You’ve homed in on LISP as the language that works best for you? You find it most expressive?
Harold: Yes, yes. I was stuck on the problem of coloring for a long, long time. And all my friends in the AI world will tell you, well, you should really use it.
Ernest: Yes.
Harold: I hadn’t, because at that point LISP was extremely expensive. I don’t mean in money. But it took twice as much memory as any other language. It was much slower than any other language, and I was using it for doing sort of real-time exhibitions. So I was still working in C. Finally, I don’t remember exactly why, it broke down. I suppose I simply recognized that I certainly wasn’t going forward in C.
Margaret: Did you not use LISP in the early days, when all the AI people then were using it? Because C didn’t exist, did it?
Harold: My very first few programs were written in FORTRAN, actually.
Ernest: I’ve still got one of your drawings from the Tate Gallery.
Harold: They would have been done in C. I started off with FORTRAN, and then I persuaded the university to buy me a computer. And I got one of the original vanilla-flavored Novas, and that had 8K of memory.
Ernest: Really big, yes.
Harold: And only paper tape. It would in fact run BASIC, but that was all. So I think I did two exhibitions with this machine running programs written in BASIC. And then I went up to Stanford. I think at Stanford I was writing in Algol, actually. I’m pretty sure I was running in Algol briefly when I came back, and I stayed with C in fact until I finally changed to LISP.
Ernest: Well, C does everything. But it’s a lot of effort writing in C compared to LISP, I think.
Harold: In one sense, any language can do anything. But in another sense, it’s very difficult to express abstract concepts in C.
Ernest: Yes, it’s only theoretically true that any language will do anything. Anyway, so there we go. We have done. I’ve got through my questions, Harold.
Harold: Should I eat my peach now?
Ernest: Yes, why don’t you eat your peach. So thank you. Actually, I forgot it was an interview I was just having a nice conversation with you. Thanks again.
14.5 Conversation with Manfred Mohr, October 30, 2011
“Manfred Mohr is a pioneer of digital art. After he discovered Max Bense’s information aesthetics in the early 1960s, Mohr’s artistic thinking radically changed. Within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer-generated algorithmic geometry. Encouraged by the computer music composer Pierre Barbaud, whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969. Mohr has had many one-person shows and retrospectives in museums and galleries. His work is represented in many international collections, including
- Centre Pompidou, Paris
- Joseph Albers Museum, Bottrop
- Victoria and Albert Museum, London
- Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
- Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen
- Daimler Contemporary, Berlin
Among the awards he has received are the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art, 2013; d.velop Digital Art Award (ddaa), Berlin, 2006; Artist Fellowship, New York Foundation of the Arts, New York, 1997; Golden Nica from Ars Electronica, Linz, 1990; and Camille Graesser-Preis, Zürich, 1990.”5
Ernest: Going right back to when you began with a computer, was it software itself that opened up new avenues for you or was it some other things that led you in that direction?
Manfred: No, it wasn’t software that inspired me. I come from abstract expressionism; that means emotional expression. In the early 1960s I came upon the German philosopher Max Bense whose philosophy profoundly influenced me. I went through a radical change in attitude of my artistic understanding. I became interested in controlling things with my mind rather than with my feelings. My conclusion was to create a systematic, a rational art where I know what I want to do before I start doing it. But that was long before I had the idea of using a computer to make art. It took me another five years to get to the next step. Only in 1967 in Paris when I met the composer Pierre Barbaud, who already wrote music with a computer since the late 1950s, I realized that that is exactly what I have to do: learn how to program. So I did, and the rest is history.
Ernest: So in a way it came as an answer to what you needed?
Manfred: Yes, I was looking and looking, and suddenly I understood that’s the logical thing to do.
Ernest: So you had to learn to program.
Manfred: Yes.
Figure 14.3
Manfred Mohr. P155c. 1974, plotter drawing. 60 × 60 cm. (Reproduced by permission of the artist. Photograph Winfried Reinhardt, Pforzheim, Germany.)
Ernest: Both then and up to now, have you found that programming itself mattered a lot? Was it or is it central to the art?
Manfred: Yes. If you write a program, you have to order your thoughts, you have to really crystallize exactly what you want to do. You suddenly see everything in a different light, and in a sense, my whole world turned upside down. If I look nowadays at other people’s artworks with the knowledge I have acquired, I look at everything through a logical eye—my mind-set has changed. It is the process of programming that changed my mind, not the program itself.
There’s also another aspect to programming, that one should program very elegantly and beautifully, but the general law in programming is that you make it work, and then you make it better.
Ernest: And do you do that? Do you care about the elegance?
Manfred: No, not really. But if I look at old programs I wrote forty years ago, I say “My God how could I have programmed so awkwardly?”
Ernest: So whether you cared about it or not, you have in fact probably got more elegant in your programming.
Manfred: Well, a little bit. I like it, and that’s fine. But I’m not looking for the best way. If it works for me and does what I want it to do, that’s fine.
Ernest: Have you shifted in the programming languages that you’ve used?
Manfred: I shift around constantly. All my old programs were written and still are written in FORTRAN, so I’m not throwing them out. I always keep them, and use them, in whatever I have to do. So FORTRAN is still a language I’m using. But I use other languages for certain things and certain machines.
Ernest: Because FORTRAN is quite interesting, because it’s in a class of language where you really have to have composed a whole program before you see what it does.
Manfred: Yes, exactly. But in the end all the programming languages do the same things. Some are more elegant, like we have just said; some are easier to use.
Ernest: But some of the languages that young people use today, you can run the program and change the program while it’s running, which you can’t do in FORTRAN: extreme programming. But to change the program while it’s running wouldn’t match what you described as the important thing, because it doesn’t actually help you clarify your thinking. It’s more like hacking, and you’re obviously not a hacker.
Manfred: No, I’m not into this direction. It also goes a little bit into the direction of interfering, what you would call interaction. I’m not into this. I decide what I want to do, and then the program has to do that.
Ernest: I guess the central part of your work is dealing with geometric entities in different dimensions and so on. So I see two aspects, and I may be quite wrong. One is constructing the structures, the geometric structures, and the other is the ways of viewing those structures.
Manfred: When I started in 1969, I wrote a different algorithm everyday. It was very easy for me to invent new things, but at one point I felt, that can’t be it, it’s too easy. Since I come from the abstract world of music, I always think of music when I write programs. I thought, why couldn’t I invent an instrument, like a musical instrument, for graphics, so I can play graphics? And that’s when I got to the idea of the cube, because the cube is an absolute structure in itself. I mean, you see when there is something wrong. So that became my instrument. And now, with this instrument, I invent my questions, my algorithms. So now I’m playing on a cube; I can cut the cube and fracture the symmetry, which was a very important aspect of my thinking.
After a certain point I began contemplating a higher complexity, and I asked myself what would happen if I move into the fourth or even higher dimensional structures, a hypercube. It’s not the fourth dimension as a mystical element but the mathematical structure, the complexity that fascinated me. A fourth-dimensional cube is in reality eight cubes logically connected to each other, making my vocabulary multifold larger.
So every few years, my questions became more and more challenging, looking for more and more complex structures. I was never interested in the spatial aspect nor the complete structure itself. I was only interested in showing aspects of a hypercube. Like our alphabet, which has twenty-six letters, we do not show all of them at once as the complete structure but choose certain letters, a subset, to form a word. Similar to this, I use subsets from the hypercube as a system. Already with the cube, I wasn’t interested in the fact that you can see any three lines with certain angles three dimensionally. I’m interested in a flat sign, the semiotics aspect of it. I’m interested in a flat sign where the ambiguity of this sign is the idea. It’s the ambiguity that makes it an interesting sign, where front and back is unimportant. So I have a visual sign, and that’s my operating element. I sometimes explain my work to people: when one opens a bottle of champagne there’s always this wire cover on top and it sort of looks like a cube. I take it off and stamp on it with my foot and now it is a flat object, I say, “That’s what I’m doing.” I want to find new constellations through my algorithms.
Ernest: When I was a student and I did mathematics, one of my main courses was n-dimensional geometry. So that aspect of your work, it’s interested me from that point of view too.
Manfred: With respect to complexity, yes, I’m working with n-dimensional geometry.
Ernest: But then you produce what I call a projection.
Manfred: Yes, after all calculations are done, I flatten it out by projecting it into two dimensions. The thing is, to be honest, as an artist I am interested in finding visual solutions which I did not know or even could imagine. I’m not too interested in the mathematical part. My use of mathematics is like the four wheels on a car: if you want to move, you need the four wheels. The signs I create have to be strong and independent in themselves as an entity. They should not provoke in you the question What is it, where does it come from? You know, you go in front of any painting; you don’t ask Did you do it with your left hand or with the right hand? The work has to talk for itself, and the past, how it came to be, is something you can explain, but it’s not important for the visuals. If I look at you, I don’t ask who were your father and your mother. You are the entity, I deal with you, and not with your father and your mother. In our field, computers in art, people think they can ask those questions, and sometimes it’s good if they want to know more. But it’s not the first importance.
Ernest: There’s maybe another aspect of that, so I could ask this question. In the systematic area, people often produce series of works. So I could imagine that you might make one structure and then you might flatten it in different ways, slightly different projections of it.
Manfred: Well, I did series of works from the beginning. Each dimension has a defined number of 2-D projections. For example, I can look at you, in three dimensions, from the front, from the side, and from the top. I can have three 2-D views of you. The piece on the wall is based on a six-dimensional hypercube, which has fifteen views. So what you see is the same segmented line, which I call a diagonal path, seen in its fifteen different projections. One has to admit it’s like a wonderful poetic language. And it’s just one diagonal path seen in different aspects.
Ernest: And when you produce this latest work,6 I mean, it’s an example of exactly the same thing. But what’s happening, I think, is the view, or the flattening, is changing.
Manfred: What’s happening is the visual surprise of what kind of forms the algorithm can create. In my screen-based moving images you can see here on this wall, the calculation slowly rotates these sets of lines, rendering never-ending solutions.
Ernest: Because, once you’ve set it going it can change forever.
Manfred: Yes, it changes and never comes back to the start, because in the algorithm there is a random injection into the rotation routine, so it can never find its way again. Also, each time it starts with a different random number based on the time and date, thus it never repeats. A real mathematician would say it’s impossible: even in a thousand or ten thousand years, it might repeat itself. I’m not saying no, but I may say it will not come back in my lifetime.
Ernest: Yes of course, it may not, but that’s not your concern, obviously. So an interesting thing there is that you could make several works which are essentially the same in the inside.
Manfred: Yes, but that’s the whole point: that you write a programming logic and then you can have, maybe not endless, but many, many different possibilities.
Ernest: So this set of works might be very, very similar in many respects.
Manfred: Yes, in fact when I was first programming in Paris in 1969, I had a friend from New York who came to visit and saw me struggling to write my programs. I could not conveniently visualize the results because I had to draw them by hand. He said, “Give me your program. I’ll run it back home in Long Island” on a large CDC (Control Data Corporation) computer. And then he calculated a set of light-beam-plotted drawings for me. He had a microfilm plotter and he plotted them directly on photo paper, without negatives; these were all originals. He sent them to me, and I laid them out on the floor. I could not believe my eyes. My dream of writing an algorithm of my ideas—and look at all these possibilities from the same logic—it was overwhelming.
Ernest: So it’s also that the programming brought a kind of discovery process.
Manfred: Yes, completely. That’s why I said at the beginning that it changed my mind-set in how I look at things. Because, you know, it’s true that you can look at something and say “Oh I want 15 percent more of these lines.” It’s a whole new attitude. No painter can say “Oh, I would like to see my painting with 10 percent less black lines”; he doesn’t know what to do. But I can do that, and look at the results.
Ernest: Another question I have is what kind of impact has writing programs had on your thinking?
Manfred: I can’t go back; knowledge is irreversible. Emotions are fantastic, but you can’t define them. Having an idea, if you want, is also an accident, an emotional accident. You think of something, you develop that idea, and in the end that idea is not emotional anymore, it becomes a clear and rational idea. I’m always thinking when I look at other people’s work, Did he or she really understand what they are showing?
Ernest: So they weren’t really making rational decisions a lot of the time?
Manfred: A musician like Steve Reich is really thoughtful, absolutely. But some others, I don’t think they are as clever.
Ernest: Yes, that’s very interesting. But there’s a sense in which there is some arbitrariness in choosing this cube rather than that one. At some level there’s a judgment.
Manfred: Well, there are definitely moments in a program where decisions have to be made, but these decisions sometimes are not very important. If you’re talking of ten degrees or fifteen degrees, it doesn’t really matter. For example, my work is, since the very beginning, always systematic. I do series of linear transformations. I do series showing combinatorial possibilities and other developments where no randomness is involved in the logic, but even here sometimes questions arise: “Should it go this way or that way?” You have to make a decision. These types of decision are called parameters. They are not aesthetic decisions or value judgments; they keep the program running.
People sometimes think my work is all about randomness, because it sometimes has that flair, but it’s not. If you take John Cage, for example, he works exclusively with randomness. That’s something completely different. His work demonstrates the power of randomness, whereas I’m not demonstrating randomness. My use of it has a completely different purpose.
Ernest: It was the essence of a lot of John Cage’s work. What you’re saying is, everything that’s important is rationally decided upon in your work.
Manfred: Yes.
Ernest: This leads me to another question. Most of the important work is actually done in the software, but there are also, of course, the objects.
Manfred: Since the beginning, it has always been the question that people ask. Is the software the artwork? For me, I’m coming from the arts. The program is a very essential part, but this is not the art. For me, it’s the content of the art, but the art itself is visual. And that’s why I’m a visual person. A lot of people can see this when they look at my artwork, that I’m making visual research and not programming research. One also could argue that the code of a program and the visual result are just two different states of the same thing, like ice and water.
Ernest: So using software and doing all that abstract stuff has not distanced you from the object; your art is still centrally in the object?
Manfred: Yes, exactly. It’s because there are many people who think if they visualize mathematical formulas, that’s art. It might be accidentally a fantastic picture, but you cannot just visualize math and expect it to become an artistic thing, it’s just luck if it works out. You have to come from the visual side; you have to develop some visual ideas. For mathematicians my visual results are largely unexpected, because I do not prove anything mathematically.
Ernest: Another aspect of the object is that you have in more recent years been making these time-based objects where we see the process of the software running. Can you comment on that?
Manfred: The software is still the content part, but it’s the visual object which moves. I’m a minimal maximalist in a sense. My work became so minimal that one day, showing my work to someone, I could not explain why these five lines were complex. He just laughed in my face and said, “So what?” So I was up against the wall, and I did not know how to continue, how to show that I’m not just making five random lines, it’s something that comes from a really complex system, a rotating hypercube. So I started using colors, random colors, but using them only as distinctions to visually reveal some of the complexity.
Ernest: Colors, almost like codes, to distinguish this from that.
Manfred: Yes, when I let them rotate systematically, even though you can’t understand the structure, you feel that there is something very strong holding everything together and moving within a system. And then I thought, Maybe that’s the idea: I have to show it moving because the movement has always been in my work, since the beginning, but I never bothered to show it, because I didn’t want to make movies. I wanted to show it, let’s say, frame by frame, to draw it so that the observer can go at his own speed, forwards and backwards: “I like this sign, oh, then it becomes this.” That’s what bothers me in the movies, that you sit there and you have one second to look at something and then it’s gone. Thus, I never liked this aspect. I wanted to be free to go forward and backward and choose my own time of observing. This was at the beginning. But then when the system got so complex, like it is now, the best way to show it is with the movement, I do not have a choice anymore. Sometimes in life you contradict yourself, I have to admit.
Ernest: Do you still make static works as well?
Manfred: I still make static plotter drawings, but the structure is so complex that one can’t really understand what’s going on. At one point I made an installation with two screen-based works next to each other. One with continuously moving images, so you can observe the movement, the structure, but you can never catch it. And then on the other screen, the program projected every ten seconds a frozen image from the moving image. Therefore the viewer is able to observe the stable image and explore the sign if he or she wishes.
Ernest: Summarizing, we see the moving image on the screens, this is the object, the art, and it’s not the software.
Manfred: It’s always the object. In music, for example, the software is what the composer writes down, in a sense. So one can look at the software and observe it or can look at the music score, one can read it and hear it. But in the end it’s the sound itself which becomes the music.
Ernest: So in music, for example, would you say that if someone uses software or they, for example, write a fugue and use the fugue structure or something, these are really ways of making work, ways of making music?
Manfred: Yes, in a way, but music theory is full of laws, especially in classical music: you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you can do that but then you can’t do this. So it’s like programming. And in twelve-tone music it’s even more complex: you can’t have this before you can do that. So everything becomes implied. For me, music is very important in my visual thinking. I consider my work as visual music. Anton Webern was for me a composer who gave the pause in music a distinct value; he composes elements and lets them connect in the silence, in space. Likewise, Henry Moore places a stone here or a stone there, and the space in between becomes part of the sculpture. That impressed me always very much, that doing something or not doing something can be equally important.
Ernest: They go together.
Manfred: Oh, absolutely. All my early paintings, I mean the emotional paintings, were black surface with white ink. You can really hear them, you know, if you look at them.
Ernest: But your work grew to be closer to Webern in spirit, in a sense, as you became more systematic.
Manfred: Not really. I come from there, and I still like Anton Webern, but my work cannot be compared to Webern. There was obviously some influences, but in all modesty, my work “sounds” different.
Ernest: That’s wonderful; thank you.
14.6 Conversation with Paul Brown, July 16, 2009; Margaret Boden Also Present Part of the Time
Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has specialized in art, science, and technology since the late 1960s and in computational and generative art since the mid-1970s. His early work included creating large-scale lighting events for musicians and performance groups (such as Meredith Monk, Musica Elettronica Viva, and Pink Floyd), and he has an international exhibition record dating to the late 1960s that includes the creation of both permanent and temporary public artworks. He has participated in shows at major international venues like the Tate, Victoria and Albert, and ICA in the UK; the Adelaide Festival; ARCO in Spain; the Substation in Singapore; and the Venice Biennale. His work is represented in public, corporate, and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, Russia, and the United States. From 1992 to 1999 he edited fineArt forum, one of the Internet’s longest established art zines, and from 1997 to 1999 he was chair of the Management Board of the Australian Network for Art Technology. In 2005 he was elected chair of the Computer Arts Society (CAS) and served in this position again from 2008 to 2010. In 1996 he won the prestigious Fremantle Print Award. During 2000/2001 he was a New Media Arts Fellow of the Australia Council, and he spent 2000 as artist in residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. From 2002 to 2005 he was a visiting fellow in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he worked on the CACHe (Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc.) project. Since 2005 he has been an honorary visiting professor and artist in residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, Department of Informatics, at the University of Sussex.
Figure 14.4
Paul Brown. Builder/Eater. 1977 (re-created 2014), real-time computational generative artwork, size variable. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artist.)
Ernest: How do you think the computer has actually influenced your view of your art practice? Has it changed it?
Paul: The answer to that has to be yes. I’ve been using computers for so long that it seems like the whole of my life has involved digital systems. But I remember that there was a point in the early seventies when I was learning to program, and what I did was automate the kind of systematic artworks that I’d been doing previously. So the computer enabled me to work a lot faster and produce many more examples. This was very tedious, finicky, system-oriented work, and so I was using the computer as an automation and productivity tool. Then, my work began to depend on programming more, and I became more competent. This was when I was at the Slade [School of Fine Art] with Chris Briscoe. A really wonderful environment, and it was there that I realized that the computer had a lot more value as a creative assistant and that it offered new and unique opportunities to the arts.
Ernest: That leads immediately to my second question, which is, how much does programming matter to you?
Paul: It’s absolutely essential. Well, no, not perhaps essential, but I’m very concerned about the number of people who simply use computers from a point of view of preexisting packages, like the many people that use Photoshop. I’ve seen a lot of work that I like come out of that process, but it seems to me that if I had to define a term like “computer art” or “computer-assisted art,” or whatever you might want, that kind of work wouldn’t fit inside that term. It’s really stuff that could’ve been done with traditional media if you really wanted to, although it might take a million years to do it.
Ernest: Yes, exactly.
Paul: I have to really know what a computer is and how it works. This is where I get into lots of problems teaching students, because basically a computer is so simple it’s ridiculous—it’s just a machine that opens and closes switches. What makes it appear so magical is that there are an inconceivable number of switches, and it’s opening and closing them at inconceivably fast speeds. I think that the only way to get a handle on that knowledge and understand the technology is through programming.
Ernest: So, for you, software is central and programming is essential to the art? Which is like me, actually.
Paul: I use Photoshop all the time. I use Illustrator. I use these packages, and they are very useful. But I can’t use them for the core of my work. I’ve looked at the code-generation apps, and I’ve looked at Max/MSP and stuff like that but, at the end of the day it just feels a lot more natural and right for me to just go down to a level of actually writing code. I’m currently using Java.
Ernest: So you really want to be close to the machine.
Paul: I became very closely involved with digital systems and learned how to design and built digital circuits and home-brewed computer systems. After getting to know a few other artists using computers, but before I became proficient with their use, I can remember consciously thinking, “And this was all to do with the systems aesthetic, or the aesthetic governing that kind of sixties art production.” Let the artwork speak for itself. So the flat-field color painters didn’t frame their work, they painted the sides of the stretcher, to emphasize that this is an object on the wall and not a window into the universe. It’s not trying to reveal anything apart from its own internal working methods. I can remember having this very conscious thought that by sitting at a terminal and typing in FORTRAN, which is the only language I knew at that time, I could distance myself from the work and enable the work to develop its own character and autonomy, these things we’ve been talking about today. I think in the late sixties, 1969, whenever it was, that decision was perfectly valid. In retrospect, it was hugely naïve to think that I was abstracting myself from the work. What I’ve actually done is create a whole body of work that is instantly identifiable as mine. I recognized this in the 1990s, and I was quite happy with that realization, and I’m still continuing that sort of work, but that was also the beginning of the DRAWBOT Project, of trying to think of a way to destroy signature—or not destroy, but attenuate signature. Asking myself what kind of methodologies might be available that would achieve that.
Ernest: Both are two different things aren’t they, to destroy and to attenuate?
Paul: Yes. I guess I was still very interested in the whole idea that Nicolas Schöffer defined when he spoke about his cybernetic sculpture CYSP 1. He said, “Spatiodynamic sculpture, for the first time, makes it possible to replace man with a work of abstract art, acting on its own initiative, which introduces into the show world a new being whose behavior and career are capable of ample developments.” He introduces this new autonomous, nonhuman entity—which again was hopelessly naïve but in 1956 was perfectly valid.
Then, about ’97 or ’98, I read an article in New Scientist about what Phil Husbands and his colleagues were doing at Sussex University. I think it was about Adrian Thompson’s work in evolutionary hardware and electronics. I contacted Phil, and that was quite a remarkable thing as well, because I can remember my email to Phil. I began, “You won’t know who I am. …” But he did! Largely through the work of the late Edward Ihnatowicz, an artist who is now recognized as a pioneer of cognitive interactionism, Phil was aware of this crazy bunch of artists at the Slade School way back in the seventies, long before Langton formalized the discipline of artificial life, who had come to this understanding through systems art. What we were actually identifying with were the foundation blocks of computation and art. But, equally, you could say we were also building a foundation for artificial life.
Ernest: Yes.
Paul: And it was wonderful that Phil actually recognized that. He’s married to a sculptor and was a musician before he went back to university, so he’s very open to the arts and could have that perception, which was great. So that put me in touch with the mob at Sussex. I had this idea, well, if you can’t design something that’s autonomous—if you design the process, however much you try and abstract it, it will inevitably carry your signature through to the artwork.
Ernest: You can’t avoid that really.
Paul: And you can’t avoid it. So this is a really good argument against autonomous creation. However, I was interested in the possibility that you could maybe create an evolutionary process that would lead to emergent autonomous behavior. We discussed this a lot in Malcolm Hughes’s group at the Slade thanks to visitors like Ed Ihnatowicz and Harold Cohen.
Ernest: Even though Malcolm didn’t—well, actually, he did use computers a little bit, but not much. But he was really essential in terms of enabling so much to happen.
Paul: Yes, absolutely. It’s interesting that very few of those systems people, Malcolm’s colleagues who taught at the Slade, used the computer. In fact, quite often they’d ask us to do work for them. Chris Briscoe ran the Experimental and Computing Program at the Slade, and if they wanted something made, it might be some kind of sine wave, then Chris would get us to code it up. But not as artwork, we would just assist him to help the artist. It was Chris and our group that really brought systems art and computation together. I think that was an amazing convergence, because that’s what you were saying about those experiments in Russia and Constructivism. All of that coming through de Stijl, up to Systems art, and then the computer comes into that picture.
Ernest: In a way, quite naturally.
Paul: Absolutely, yes. Completely natural. I always felt as if I was connected to the modernist thing. I say this to audiences with postmodernists, and they just fall over laughing. But I think that I can go back to Giotto and beyond and look at art history and draw a graph that goes through Giotto to Cézanne, and I consider what I’m doing to be on the extension of that line.
Ernest: Exactly.
Margaret: And correct me if I’m wrong, I get the impression that Harold didn’t come out in such a strong way as I feel that both of you did, from that formalist and minimalist constructivist thing. That wasn’t what was turning him on, and so it wasn’t that the computer was a natural thing for him, as it was for you two. It’s just it’s an interesting thing, and he did wonderful things with it. Which is a different thing.
Ernest: Absolutely. I think that’s correct.
Paul: I think it is. What Harold has done is absolutely amazing, he’s managed to externalize his creative process so AARON is now capable of producing original Harold Cohen artworks, he can go away, and as he says, once he’s dead he’s still going to be able to have exhibitions of new work. Now, what is interesting is that, whereas the group that Ernest and I would identify with may be pushing the envelope with the technology further, they haven’t been anywhere near as successful as Harold in actually producing autonomy in the artwork. Because Harold can go this way, he can leave AARON working and it produces 100 percent, genuine Harold Cohens. I really don’t think that people working in the area of autonomy have been that successful. I’m not saying they haven’t been successful at all, of course.
Ernest: Have you been influenced in some way? Has the computer had an impact on your thinking?
Paul: What the computer has done is introduce me to symbolic logic, Spencer Brown’s work on boundary grammars, analytical philosophy—things that I might not otherwise have encountered and which I hold very dear now. Wonderful things that truly influenced me.
Margaret: Try saying that at a postmodernist conference. [laughs]
Ernest: What changes have you seen in this world?
Paul: I can remember—and you probably were there at the Slade in the late seventies, maybe the early eighties—I felt, and a I think a lot of us felt, that this future revolution was coming, that the art world would fall at our feet, that there’d be a huge paradigm shift in the art world and all of this new stuff we were involved with would blossom and flourish. And [Jack] Burnham felt the same. If you look at his book Beyond Modern Sculpture,7 he says, “Our future looks very systems oriented.” But it never happened—the art world turned to postmodernism, embedded itself in the fashion industry, and rejected the formalist and computational explorations of modernism. So instead we became outsiders, setting up our own organizations such as Leonardo, ISEA International; formerly Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, Ars Electronica. All of these things were set up as artist initiatives, in spite of the mainstream art world, and they gave us a venue, not only to exhibit our work but to come together at meetings like this to discuss our work. So we had a comprehensive community, a very well networked international community that allowed us to continue and ignore the art world. I don’t think any of us for that period up until the nineties had any intentions of wanting to exhibit artwork in the mainstream art world. We didn’t think that we had any engagement with it at all. We belonged to a completely different community. Now, I think one thing that’s happened to me, let’s say in this decade, from the turn of the new century, concerns this issue. John Lansdown died at the end of the old century, I think he died very late in ’89. By then I had got a New Media Fellowship from the Australian government, for two years. I spent the first year, 2000, at Sussex and I went to see John’s widow, Dorothy, and asked “What’s happened to all his stuff?” What we then discovered very quickly was that we weren’t alone. That there were a lot of people around the world who came to realize that this very important period of our history, primarily because of the fact that it had marginalized itself, was in danger of being forgotten.
Margaret: And the people were dying off by then, too.
Paul: Exactly. John had died, you know; a lot of people died. And so the main premise of our CACHe project, the research project that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, was to preserve and document that legacy.8 So this was my first realization, after giving the finger to the art world for thirty years, that really we had to get back on board, because the only way to sensibly preserve this stuff was to achieve some kind of mainstream recognition. We spoke to people at the Tate but then we discovered the Victoria and Albert. To be honest I used to think the V&A was a bit old fashioned, you know, into the Arts and Crafts movement and all of that. But, in fact, the CACHe project went in with them, and I think that was the best decision we could have made. It seems to me that what Catherine [Mason] does in her book9 is point out that one of the roots of the computer arts is the foundation of the Arts and Crafts movement. We went around collecting it, analyzing it, and documenting it and exhibiting it. And so, I think, the CACHe project played a major role because we got Patric Prince to donate her collection to the V&A and we arranged the donation of the Computer Arts Society collection. Then they got another grant to continue the work. But I think what’s happening now—Bernard Jacobson signing up Harold is one instance. I hear rumors that Michael Flowers at Flowers East is just beginning to look seriously at the area, and I think this is because they’ve looked to the V&A. A lot of those galleries in Bond Street have set up smaller, more experimental operations in the East End. One is Flowers East, where they’ve had some really good exhibitions. So the commercial sector is now saying “Well, maybe we better get on board. Maybe this is something that’s interesting.” Anyway, forty years later. … And I find that now quite exciting, from my point of view. The interesting thing there, is that they still haven’t come to terms with the fact that this stuff is really virtual. You know, it’s not an oil painting. It’s not pencil on paper—it’s not unique. The artist’s touch and those things are what they value. Now my response to that, and this is because I’m old, is to start painting again. Putting paint on canvas, but essentially just making computer images by hand.
Ernest: Me too, actually.
Paul: And instead of printing them, I can paint them on canvas. I’m actually hand painting them on canvas. I was very impressed by Bridget Riley’s show, the big show she had in London a few years ago. And, oh, I’ve never seen more beautiful work in my life. And it was all hand painted you know, very carefully hand painted, and lovely.
Ernest: It was a lovely show. They moved it to Sydney, so I saw it twice.
Paul: Did you read the review in the Melbourne Age?
Ernest: Yes.
Paul: The reviewer interviewed her and he assumed that she used assistants because she didn’t want to do the tedious work herself and that she could produce more work that way. She replied that the reason she used assistants was because she didn’t want to engage with the sensuality of the medium. What a wonderful reply! Over the past few years I’ve done a little. It’s hard to find time to do it because it’s very time consuming and laborious. But part of that is also realizing that if I do want to get into the commercial art world, that’ll probably be more useful to me, and I now have no objection to that. But this reminds me of the head of graphic design at Middlesex who was close to retirement when I began teaching there in 1984. He said, “I’ve turned into somebody in my sixties who I would’ve hated when I was twenty-one,” and I now know exactly what he meant!
Ernest: Perfect. Thanks!
14.7 Conversation with Roman Verostko, November 15, 2011
Roman Verostko pioneered coded procedures for expressionist brushwork. He is known for his richly colored algorithmic pen-and-ink drawings and has been an active exhibiting artist since 1963. Although schooled as an illustrator at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (1947–1949) he was attracted to monasticism and entered monastic life at Saint Vincent Archabbey in 1952, where he studied philosophy (BA), theology, and was ordained a priest in 1959. He followed postgraduate studies at Pratt (MFA), Columbia and New York Universities, and S. W. Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris. Artworks from his monastic period are, for example, New City Paintings and a series of concrete reliefs that include an eight-foot load-bearing wall, BROTHER, for the new Saint Vincent Monastery (1966). This period included his first electronically synchronized artwork, the Psalms in Sound and Image (1967). In 1968 he left monastic life and joined the humanities faculty of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In the summer of 1970, as a Bush Fellow at MIT, he set out to “humanize our experience of emerging technologies.” He studied FORTRAN at the Control Data Institute (1970) and exhibited his first algorist work, The Magic Hand of Chance, in 1982. This program, written in BASIC, grew into his master drawing program HODOS, generating art with both ink pens and brushes mounted on drawing machines. His Algorithmic Poetry exhibition celebrated generative art as visual poetry (DAM, Berlin, 2010–11). He currently works with mergings of hand and machine. He has received many awards and distinctions: 2009 SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art; Artec ’95, Recommendatory Prize, Nagoya, Japan; Golden Plotter Award, Germany, 1994; Prix Ars Electronica, Honorable Mention, 1993; Bush Fellow, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, 1970; Outstanding Educators of America, 1971, 1974.10
Figure 14.5
Roman Verostko. Flowers of Learning, Black Elk. 2006, plotter drawing with pen-and-ink, 76 × 101 cm. One of seven units in a twenty-five-foot installation. Spalding University, Louisville, KY. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artist.)
Ernest: The first question really is, has the computer or software opened up new avenues for you as an artist? What do you feel about that?
Roman: I was totally seduced by computers when I learned how coded form generators worked. My first experience watching my plotter’s drawing arm was awesome, hypnotizing, and magical. Computing power gave me the leverage to execute coded procedures generating form beyond anything I ever dreamed I could achieve; we have only touched the tip of the iceberg. Computing power, in the hands of artists who create and control their own algorithms has been transforming the arts and bringing radical change to our experience of life. That’s my view.
Ernest: Are you making a different kind of art to what you might have done before?
Roman: I am working with some of the same art-making ideas but at a different level. My algorist work allows me to continue exploring the resolution of opposites with code at a different level. My prealgorist artwork grew from art-making ideas pioneered by first-generation concrete artists. This would include artists like Piet Mondrian and the Pevsner brothers. Their new reality was part of what I was seeking. Do you know that manifesto on the new realism spelled out around 1920 to 1921 by the brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner?
Ernest: Yes.
Roman: That attracted me. Algorithmic procedure in the hands of an artist extends our ability to explore regions of a new realism in all the arts. For me the new realism could also be explored by working with spontaneous expression and structure in the same picture field. My prealgorist work employed abstract expressionist gesture and constructivist elements in the same painting. I wanted to create works that brought opposites into a visual resolution. This concept grew from Mondrian’s concept of dynamic equilibrium. The idea was to create dynamic equilibrium between structure and spontaneity. Eventually I learned how to achieve this with code.
Ernest: That relates very much to my own perspective that we’re really working in the constructivist tradition.
Roman: I see my algorist work has grown directly from my past work. And the computer, with my drawing machines, has become a kind of prosthesis for exploring art-making ideas that drove my work. With computing power, I get visual leverage that I never had before. Regardless of what path our art-making ideas follow, this leverage gives us tremendous advantages that were not available before. When I revisited my paper on epigenetic art I identified three features that I draw on in my plotter drawings.11
Ernest: What are they?
Roman: Well, for one thing, my plotter can draw extensively and tirelessly, so it’s okay if my art idea requires forty hours of continuous drawing in a coded sequence of loops. Secondly, extensive algorithmic procedure can be achieved with tireless precision that exceeds what I can achieve by hand. And thirdly, I can achieve self-similar structures with recursive procedures that I can’t achieve otherwise. There’s no way I would be able to do that by hand, and I know that. Now, on the other side of the coin, I can do things by hand that I can’t do with the aid of my computer.
For example, a structure like Black Elk in my Flowers of Learning project [2006] was generated with a very lean piece of information. Every relationship in this form structure is derived from the code for one initiating pen stroke. That is, the initiating line was achieved with about five or six controlling coordinates. The relationship of those coordinates to each other control everything that happens in this drawing—and that applies to every one of its hundreds of lines. I could never have achieved this kind of visual form if I tried to do it by hand. I might spend a year drawing it, but to have arrived at a form structure like this, by hand, is unlikely. There’s a precision and self-similar relationship that permeate the work; there’s a lot of things going on. That’s the same with every one of the works in the Flowers of Learning project.12
At the structural level, as in life, two opposites converge. In my code, works are initiated and executed with random decisions operating within controlled parameters. For example, each of the controller coordinates in Black Elk was chosen with a throw of the dice, as it were. The decision bit achieved through control and uncontrol drives my art just as surely as the decision bit in the chaos and order of my life. Control and uncontrol operate at every level in my code. This is the spiritual core.
The procedure improvises on scale, angle, and position using the information from the initiator coordinates. The visual form achieves an in-depth self-similarity, so I get something that’s Aristotelian at root. Aristotle in Ars Poetica emphasized the necessity of achieving variation on a theme. What I strive to do is create many variations with a single core visual idea (theme). Every variation has a core relationship with every other variation. This is what I mean by in-depth self-similarity. That’s interesting.
It would be the same case with each of the brush works in the Algorithmic Poetry Series.13
Ernest: Tell me about that.
Roman: Well, each Algorithmic Poetry brushstroke is a robotic stroke managed with the same loop as every other stroke. These brushstrokes were influenced by abstract expressionism and my experience teaching in China in 1985. I was trying to get spontaneous expressive strokes with a piece of code guiding the brush. And that’s essentially what it was. For this show. I had decided that I wanted to come back to the brushstroke and exploit it more. As in the pen strokes, the controllers are achieved with random decisions within controlling parameters. My robotic brush work demonstrates that one can code a stroke and get some of the qualities achieved with spontaneous gesture, but maybe not as much. It’s the ability to improvise with brushstroke coordinate controllers that provides visual leverage.
Ernest: This is the center of it.
Roman: Yeah, that’s what I think. For the brushed works in my Algorithmic Poetry Series, my code remembers the brushstrokes. Each brushstroke is restated and arranged vertically like characters for visual poetry. So if you look at one of the small black characters arranged vertically, you will see that it identifies one of the large expressive strokes. One large stroke may be a yellow one and the next one may be red. I was trying to get evocative qualities in the spontaneous brushstroke generated by code. These works have seventeen strokes intended to mime the seventeen syllables of Japanese haiku.
Ernest: It raises a question in my mind as to whether the possibility of making a work—I’m thinking more of a work like this one really—is conceptually or practically impossible without using computing power?
Roman: It’s a tough question. You’re going to have to take a hard look at Channa Horwitz, who was a superb algorist and craftsperson. She did all her work by hand. She did not want her work identified with computing technology. Reluctantly, she agreed to exhibit with J. P. Hebert, Hans Dehlinger, and myself at Santa Barbara[, California] in our first algorist exhibition.14 We invited her to join us, as she exemplified the power of code without the aid of a computer. I’m still of the opinion, though, even after seeing her work, that algorithmic procedure, coupled with computing power, does achieve a lot of work that exceeds what you can achieve by hand. I hasten to add that Channa’s work achieves qualities that exceed what we can achieve with our drawing machines and our code. You could also go down to the Alhambra, and see some algorithmic Islamic art that is truly awesome. And you wonder how they achieved all that by hand. I could say the same for the algorithmic achievements of the mannerists. Complexity and self-similarity is not limited to algorithmic art achieved with computing power. I mean, you can do some pretty fantastic things algorithmically without a computer. There’s no question about that—yet every path has its limits.
Ernest: Of course. I have found that myself.
Roman: But the question you’re asking is whether I could have achieved this work without computing power, and I say no. I think I would never have found this on my own. I often hear people say, “I see, it was made with a computer.” I say, yeah, Mozart did piano-generated music too. You understand me?
Ernest: So some people talk about software art, and that’s kind of similar.
Roman: Well, that’s an interesting one. As you know, I wrote a paper titled “Epigenetic Painting: Software as Genotype.”15
Ernest: I do know that.
Roman: Well, maybe I should revisit some of those ideas—but not at this moment. The biological analogues are there, and that’s well understood today. But when you say software art, I think we do have to distinguish between someone who is going to look at the structure of the code for the art of writing code as distinct from, let’s say, the form generated by the code. I look at musical scores as algorithms. I think there is an art to writing code. And someone may have such a masterful algorithm for something they’ve come up with that, if you understood it, for the art of writing a piece of code, then that would be a form of software art. And I think that’s different from what we do. I’m interested in showing the art that my code generated.
Ernest: That was another question I was going to ask you. What is your view of a relationship between the code and the art object?
Roman: The way I got to the art object, by the way, was interesting. My Magic Hand of Chance [1982] was presented as a visual sequence on the monitor, and it was animated. There are sequences in the Magic Hand that include the “Sayings of Omphalos” and my first “Cyberflowers.” I have a sample sequence available on my website.16
Ernest: I’ll look at it.
Roman: I’ll give you access to the program. I did exhibit it in several venues in the early 1980s. The Magic Hand of Chance and other works I exhibited with computer monitors presented the same problems I had with my synchronized audiovisuals in the 1960s. Technical failures before or during a presentation frustrated both the audience and myself.
I came finally to the point where I yearned to get back to the art object as a drawing or painting. I discovered the pen plotter. I love paper, I love books, and I love manuscripts. I settled on drawing and said to myself, “We’re going to use high-tech to generate it and create it, but once it’s done, the work of art is independent of tech.” No more tech failures at exhibitions.
Ernest: So it doesn’t matter how it got to be what it is.
Roman: Yeah, so I was less interested in showing the software. However, when we published the limited edition of George Boole’s Derivation of the Laws I did have a show of pen-plotted drawings. While creating one drawing I saved all the information my code sent to the pen plotter to make the drawing. We printed all the coordinates that resulted in a huge sheaf of paper—a stack about this high [touches the ceiling]. You know how the paper came with holes?
Ernest: Yes, I remember.
Roman: I attached the paper on the ceiling, and I let it hang down, and fold into a stack on the floor. And next to the stack I displayed the painting. I was trying to show the digital information that generated this art. So I was sort of anxious that people know about the code, and I still am. When you asked that question “Software or art?” I think you could look at it two ways. You could view your software as art and the forms it generates as art. Software as genotype, like the acorn, is not the tree. But it can be viewed as an example of the art of writing software.
Ernest: The worry that I have is that I don’t understand where the art is, sometimes. For example, in poetry, I read a poem on a piece of paper in a particular font, but I could read the same poem on different paper and in a different font and it’s the same poem, so there’s something kind of there.
Roman: Yeah, you’ve got a point there. That’s interesting.
Ernest: I wonder how that affects your kind of work?
Roman: I wonder if maybe you might look at it like the cartoons that were made for the Renaissance paintings. The cartoons already, now, have become another kind of subject. I think the software is a subject. I’m certainly going to put a copy of my software in Bremen [Museum].
Ernest: Are you? Good.
Roman: But I’ll leave it anywhere, I think. I don’t have any secret. It’s so old and so difficult to run. It’s like spaghetti and nobody would be able to use it. They wouldn’t understand it, but it is interesting.
Ernest: Is Frieder [Nake] collecting stuff like that? Because that’s a very interesting enterprise.
Roman: Frieder has been creating an archive that is all digital rather than hard copy. He has helped the Bremen Museum acquire one of the world’s largest collections of digital art. His archive has a lot of information on my algorithmic work that reaches back to 1970. One of his graduate students was interested in my experience at MIT. With a Bush Fellows Grant I worked with Gyorgy Kepes at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies [CAVS] and prepared a report for the CAVS on “The Changing Roles of the Artist in Our Society.” I had come to know Kepes during my New York years and was present for the dedication of the CAVS.
I lived in New York in the early sixties to pursue graduate studies in both studio work and art history. I was a monk and a priest in residence at Saint Michael’s rectory in midtown Manhattan, where I had a studio. Influences from my New York experience are considerable. I was there at the zenith of Abstract Expressionism and experienced the unfolding of POP, OP, Happenings, Minimal and Neo-Dada. Andy Warhol and I were born the same year [1929] in the Pittsburgh-area coal and steel industry. I recall being invited to a Harper’s Bazaar party in New York and there’s Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, and others and our hostess gets people to mix and talk. Artists in NY who became friends included Barney Newman, George Brecht, and Alan Kaprow. Alan Kaprow wanted me, as a monk and Catholic priest, to celebrate a Eucharist Mass in a hot dog stand. Now they’re all gone …
Ernest: I’m very interested in Kaprow because I’m very interested in the origins of interactivity. I never met him, though.
Roman: I liked him personally.
Ernest: But I’m interested in his attitude to art and participation.
Roman: Well, he was one of the key artists creating happenings, events, and performance art. He was also associated with found objects. I had a representative, Steve Joy, who handled my work when I was in religion, and for sometime afterwards. He worked for Martha Jackson, whose gallery was renowned in those years. I recall that Steve mounted the Environments, Situations & Spaces [1961] that featured Kaprow’s famous Yard of used tires. So from him I learned a lot. In my New York years I went to openings and loft parties. Occasionally some attendees thought I was wearing a uniform.
Somehow, I survived, and I went on to Paris. And then I went back to the abbey at Saint Vincent where, for example, we staged a George Brecht “Vehicle Sundown Event” that had never been performed before.17
Ernest: This is really exciting. I’d imagined that you came out of priesthood into art but it wasn’t like that at all.
Roman: I had brought a lot from New York to Saint Vincent. The project I envisioned for myself was to create a religious art center at Saint Vincent. We had the Archabbey Press that I wanted to keep active with limited editions. But unfortunately, my belief had been undergoing change, and I had to leave monastic life and create another life. My spiritual journey underwent radical change, and it was okay. When I think about those days, I recall how we wanted to reform the church, bring it into the twentieth century and work for social transformation. Towards the end of my years there I had become a follower of Teilhard de Chardin. But I think that’s another kind of conversation. But I hope that helps you see where I’m coming from.
Ernest: That helps a lot.
Roman: In the 1960s, as a monk, I created electronically synchronized audiovisual programs that led me later to take an interest in computers when I moved to Minnesota. In 1969, I filmed a linear cube spiraling to infinity and back in a Univac lab in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Seeing that algorithmic sequence led me to follow a course in FORTRAN at the Control Data Institute in 1970. I didn’t have access to a mainframe, so I didn’t really achieve much with my code in the 1970s. I created synchronized audiovisuals in the seventies because I couldn’t do much with my code until I had my own machine.
Ernest: So when you could have your own machine, that was the big changing point.
Roman: Absolutely, that’s it. Then, I didn’t know that I would ever actually get so serious about it, but I did. There was no question in my mind. I was going to make a personal expert system that would generate art. I was rather ambitious.
Ernest: So, actually, being able to program and have your own machine was crucial.
Roman: Your own computer in your own studio, so you didn’t have to stand in line somewhere.
Ernest: Was it crucial?
Roman: Absolutely. There was no way you’re going to tear me out of my studio to go to some place once a week or something. My studio had to be part of my daily life.
Ernest: Do you feel that changed your view of art making or just enhanced it?
Roman: At the beginning there were moments when I almost gave up because it was so frustrating. After working on a coded routine for weeks, the software would sometimes fail in the middle of a drawing. Or the plotter connection failed or my pen changer needed recalibrated, etc. It was tempting to pick up my pen and go back to drawing.
I recall spending a couple of months developing a routine that would allow me to interact with the plotter, so I could make brushstrokes. I felt very stupid, because I became the servant of the machine. The machine would say, “Insert a brush.” I’d insert a brush in the drawing arm. It would make the stroke, then stop and advise me to “remove the brush.” I thought, This is crazy! and I thought to myself, It’s so easy for me to make that stroke. Why am I doing this? I kept going, and I said, There is some reason why I just have to do this. It isn’t that I’m going to do a lot of these, it’s just to make a point.
I remember once, for the college president, that I set up the plotter at the college and gave a presentation to our board of directors. We were trying to convince the board about the future of computer graphics, and one of the board members said, “Roman, why don’t you just draw with your hand? Why are you so obsessed with this thing?” Well, I was dumbfounded and had no easy answer. As I recall it was an awkward moment for me. But I kept seeing this power of the algorithm. I knew I had “drawing power.” That’s what drew me. I knew I could remember the brushstroke. I knew I could flip-flop it. I knew I could do all these things, and I thought to myself, “Well, I couldn’t do that by hand.” Don’t you see?
Ernest: Yes.
Roman: I realized that I was gaining drawing power. And I said, “Stay with it, Roman, because this is the future and just stay with it.” This flew in the face of my training, as I was schooled as an illustrator: I could draw. I did landscapes. I did portraits.
Ernest: That personal question was a crucial question.
Roman: Anything you mention, I probably did it. I studied at the Art Institute, Pittsburgh ’47 to ’49, and I was going to be an illustrator. This was my ambition. I was going to be like Rockwell, for example. You got it?18
Ernest: Yes.
Roman: So, when I came to this later in life, this was a big time for me. I realized the more I got involved with it that, yes, I could do it. I quit drawing by hand for the next thirty years, up until I did the Upsidedown Mural two years ago [2008]. And l wanted to share this with you. This is resurrected stuff I did back in the seventies. And I used software to blow things up, make adjustments, and scale drawings. I don’t know if you ever got a copy of this. This Upsidedown Book includes some of my best automatic drawing of the 1970s.
Ernest: I didn’t.
Roman: Well, I’m going to give you a copy of that, and I’ll sign it for you.
Ernest: Thank you.
Roman: Getting back to algorithmic art. At some point early on, I came to realize that this would be important in the future of art practice. I was going to do it, no matter what. People laughed at me. They couldn’t see that computer graphics would revolutionize typesetting, printing, layout, design, etc. Some colleagues didn’t want me showing this to students. I taught humanities not studio art. But there were some students who would come down to my studio anyway, and I would sometimes take a computer to school and meet with them after class.
Ernest: So in a sense, am I right in thinking that you’ve taken a line of art practice forward, and what you’ve done is you picked up this opportunity the computer offers to push it forward?
Roman: Yes.
Ernest: You might have done something else if the computer hadn’t been there.
Roman: Probably something in new media. Initially, I wanted to humanize emerging technologies. I wanted to find ways to join emerging technology with fine-art traditions—especially drawing and painting. I looked at my studio as a kind of electronic scriptorium that grew from my interest in manuscript illumination. Here in London, my favorite manuscript is the Lindisfarne19 up at the British Library.
Ernest: The British Library is wonderful, isn’t it?
Roman: So a lot of my work mimes manuscript illumination. I have added some gold leaf to the text as I did with the illuminated universal Turing machine. I wanted to develop drawing that represented the information revolution. It would join or merge art traditions with emerging electronic technology. I decided around 1985 that I would become a master pen-plotter artist. There was enough here for me to explore with my master program HODOS for the next twenty to thirty years. So I decided that I’m going to become the master of pen-plotter drawing with brushwork enhancement.
Ernest: You’ve achieved it.
Roman: I have hundreds of pens, seven pen plotters, and lots of paper. I’m at my home and that’s what I do. People come into my studio and ask, “Why don’t you get the gee-whizz printing thing?” No, I say, this is what I do. “Yes, but you could make this 3-D.” No, but that’s not what I do. You understand?
Ernest: Absolutely. I think that’s wonderful, and it’s completely correct. And you are a master of this, as you had plans to be.
Roman: When I did the mural Flowers of Learning for Spalding University I thought to myself that was the moment for me.
Ernest: There was another thing I was going to ask you about, the programming languages that you used.
Roman: Okay. I studied FORTRAN but I never mastered it for my art. But I’ve never mastered anything other than just BASIC. My Magic Hand was written in IBM BASICA but now everything is in GW-BASIC. My master program is not compiled. I run it directly as written.
Ernest: There’s nothing wrong with BASIC, by the way.
Roman: Well, BASIC is a universal Turing machine too. It’s interpretative, so you can test run bits of code as you go. I could even show you some things working. I’ll show you a program. This is my interface.
Ernest: So you studied FORTRAN but you never used it, really?
Roman: Well, I did a little bit. And I did a little bit with punched cards.
Ernest: What happens today?
Roman: Here it is [opens his laptop]. This is the interface I built. I wanted to show you my interface. If you went, for example, to my file manager up here you can see how many variables I have in my program. I invented all of these variables for drawing routines— a total language. It has a variable for every kind of action I need to make a drawing or do brushstrokes. It gets quite large, but the final data for executing a routine is very lean, almost nothing, just one or two KB. The drawing routines are chained to the master program as needed, and then they are dumped from memory. But I thought you’d appreciate just getting an idea.
Ernest: Absolutely.
Roman: I don’t want to waste a lot of time on this with you, but I’ll just give you an idea. For example, I have a lot of options. I can write a routine tomorrow when I get home and chain to it from my interface because everything is compatible. So once I’ve built about ten of these routines I have hundreds of lines of code with many options available. The entire procedure can be automated or controlled, step by step. For years I intended to rewrite everything in an object-oriented language. I stayed with it, and now it’s antique, and unique. I was embarrassed to show people, but I’ve discovered that it wakens memories of earlier days.
Ernest: Yes, there’s nothing embarrassing about it at all.
Roman: I almost didn’t want to show what I do because I’m not a computer scientist.
Ernest: You’re an artist, come on.
Roman: I’m a humanist and a historian. At my age, if I really wanted to do one more thing, if I set my head to it, I might still do it. I have a plan for the last work I hope to do for the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.
Ernest: So what’s your big thing? Tell me.
Roman: I plan to make a folio of original cyberflower drawings. The drawings will be of a modest size, in the tradition of naturalists’ drawings of plants and animals. These cyberflowers formatted in a folio for the Arboretum library will include algorithmic titles based on the coded controllers for each specific drawing.
These code-generated cyberflowers would belong to Kevin Kelly’s proposed “hyperspace of form.” I proposed a Gallery of D’Arcy Thompson for a hyperspace of form embracing all rigorously concrete (nonrepresentational) art as noted in my 1994 web page on algorithmic art.20 So I think that these code-generated cyberflowers for the arboretum can be viewed as primitive bits of flora in an emerging hyperspace of form. And that is indeed a vast space.
Ernest: Absolutely.
Roman: So you heard it from me.
Ernest: Yes, I did. Thank you.
14.8 Conversation with Julie Freeman, April 18, 2012
Julie Freeman translates complex processes and data from natural sources into kinetic sculptures, physical objects, images, sound compositions, and animations. Her work explores relationships between science and the natural world, questioning the use of technology in how we translate nature—whether it is through a swarm of zoomorphic butterflies responding to air pollution levels; a lake of fish composing music; a pair of mobile concrete speakers that lurk in galleries spewing sonic samples; by providing an interactive platform from which to view the flap, twitch, and prick of dogs’ ears; or enabling a colony of naked mole rats to generate animation. Julie’s focus is the investigation of data as an art material, using it to create work that reflects the human condition through the analysis and representation of live animal data. A mix of computer scientist and artist, Julie is a connection seeker, sniffing out potential correlations between disparate concepts and systems and combining them. She often works collaboratively and experimentally with scientists.
Ernest: How has the computer affected your art making? Has it opened up new avenues in your art? Or was it there before?
Julie: I would say that the computer was there before my art was. I first built a computer when I was about twenty, in university. I got fed up with not being able to get access to a computer, so I just got hold of all the bits and built my own. A 386 DX or something. Put it all together. And I really enjoyed it. And I found that whatever I was doing I would end up using the computer to do it with. I found that I started using it in unusual ways, in a more creative way. But I never thought of myself as an artist for many years. It took a long time, actually. I used to call myself a technologist. I struggled with that term, because I didn’t know what I was doing, apart from I was playing with computers to use them for purposes they weren’t designed for.
Figure 14.6
Julie Freeman. A Selfless Society. 2016, online animation with sound. JavaScript with HTML5 canvas element, real-time data from a colony of naked mole rats, variable size. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artist.)
Ernest: What was it that you dropped out from at university?
Julie: It was a BSc in Design Technologies in the Mechanical Engineering faculty. There was a lot of physics in the course plus commercial process design. But I found that it was too straight. It was too manufacturing-world oriented for me, and it wasn’t letting me be creative enough. And when I was at school I wasn’t allowed to do art. I had to do technical drawing, because art wasn’t seen as vocational enough. So there was a bit of pressure not to do it. So I ended up finding my artistic streak through the computer in a different way.
Ernest: So actually you became consciously an artist, or concentrated on art, using the computer, and it was a platform for you to do that?
Julie: Yes. I do sketch, and I draw. And everything starts in my notepad. It never starts on the computer. It always starts as ideas. And I make up little plans and systems of things and then start working out how I can make it. But there is always an underlying need for technology in the artwork. And I think it wouldn’t exist without it. On paper they’re impossible systems, or impossible things that need the technology.
Ernest: Has your art mostly consisted of making things? You might say sculptural rather than painting?
Julie: Some of my work is graphically visual. But there’s a real variety. Some of it’s sculptural. Some of it’s screen based. I’ve done a lot of Internet-based work. Videos and also sound art. But I think there is always a strong visual art thread.
Ernest: Separating out sound and vision doesn’t make sense for most people. What about programming? Has it made a difference to you whether you could or couldn’t do that?
Julie: Yes and no. It’s an essential part of the making process. I think it’s essential. Because I don’t believe that you can work with any material as an artist if you don’t know that material inside out, or if you don’t want to explore it inside out. So even if you’re working with paint or clay or anything, you need to fully understand what you can do with that material. So to be able to use computers, I think, is pretty essential for my own work, anyway for my own satisfaction, that I’m doing the work myself. To be able to code, or even if I’m using proprietary software, like Flash or MAX/MSP, that’s already a layer, I still need to know that I understand what’s going on underneath the user interface. I only know code to the level of C programming. I don’t code in assembler [language] or anything. But I think there’s an importance of knowing why the computer is doing what it’s doing, and how it’s displaying things, and why it’s processing sounds in a particular way. You need to understand the set of instructions being carried out to be able to disrupt them.
Ernest: Actually, I would say that writing in MAX/MSP is programming. I know that some computer scientists don’t agree. But with one hat on, I’m a computer scientist, [and] I would say it is. It’s just that it’s graphical programming, rather than textual.
Julie: It’s visual. And in fact I find it easier to write in Java or C or something like that than I do in MAX/MSP, because I find that I get more caught up in the logic loops. It tends to be long winded when I’m doing it in MAX.
But I also really love coding. I think it’s essential, but I also love it. I really like the challenge of it. And I don’t know—whether if you were working as an artist trying to make something visual or sonic with technology—I don’t know where you would buy something that could do that for you anyway. How would that work if you wanted to make something original?
Ernest: So that’s another factor? Apart from the fact that you might enjoy it? There’s a need, because there’s not much chance of going to buy something that does what you want?
Julie: Yes. It doesn’t exist. I mean, I think there’s no point in me trying to make a piece of artwork if it exists already. So I think that my works tend to be quite complicated, in terms of using lots of different types of technology to do what they do. Even though the end result might be quite a simple aesthetic.
Ernest: So obviously your work consists of many elements, as it were?
Julie: Yes.
Ernest: One of those elements is software, I guess. Where do you see that? Do you see that as a peripheral? Central? How does software fit in?
Julie: It’s in the middle. That’s boring, isn’t it? But the software is in the middle. The software is in the middle and the software is the thing that is driving how the hardware behaves. So if I’m making things that have got a flapping motion, the way that I’ve coded that determines the movement and the speed and the frequency and what it responds to. So the software is integral to all of it, it connects. And even in terms of how something looks, so if I’ve got a graphical element to it, like in the lake project, that’s all coded. The actual look and feel of it is all vector graphics and the movement of those vectors is algorithmic. Software is fundamental.
Ernest: So it’s central? It’s one of the central elements, would you say?
Julie: It is probably the central element in the realization. But otherwise the concept is probably the central element. If you didn’t have the concept you wouldn’t even be doing the coding in the beginning.
Ernest: Could you have the concept without the software? Or without knowing about the software? Are the concepts that you use in your work somewhat dependent upon the software?
Julie: That’s really hard to unpick. That’s difficult. Because I know what I know, I don’t know if I could come up with the idea, if my ideas would be the same, if I didn’t know the possibilities of what’s available. And I know that sometimes when new technologies become available, then they sort of seep into my work. Because there’s something else going on. Like when I found about Muscle Wire, the shape memory alloy. And then I ended up making a piece of work that had that in it. Whether I would have made the piece of work in a different way if I didn’t know about that I can’t answer. … But in fact I had the idea of that work before I knew about the hardware I was going to use. I can’t unravel, because I’ve been so in love with technology for long before my art practice, so I absorb new technical directions like a sponge; they excite me. I don’t know if that makes sense!
Ernest: Yes. It does. I mean, it’s an integral part of your thinking really. So the question is hard to answer or maybe impossible to answer.
Julie: I guess if I thought about it in terms of, Did I come up with the idea for a big bronze sculpture without knowing what the property of bronze is? That kind of thing. I don’t know if I would. I would come up with something different to someone who’s a bronzesmith.
Ernest: Yes. So in working with computers and working with software, do you come up with new ideas or modify your ideas about the work in that process? Or do you know what a program should do, and all it is is a matter of just implementing it?
Julie: Yes and no. It always changes through the process of coding.
Ernest: So there’s a dialogue through the ideas and the coding?
Julie: Yes. But I start with an idea of what I want to happen. And then that’s generally quite open ended. And I work in a really process-oriented way. So I’m very interested in how I get there—more than the end result, often. So I have a vision. I have a vision of a framework. But I rarely have a vision of the final installation or piece of work. That’s never very clear, because I know that when I’m making it, depending on what program I use or what systems that I use, it will always come out differently. I think this process also pushes my boundaries. Because if I’m programming, there’s some things that I will struggle to do. And either I’ll push through that and I’ll have learned something new, and then I can push my artwork further, which is great. And sometimes I get completely stuck and have to go, Okay, I’m going to have to compromise and try something else. And both of those things will affect the final outcome.
Ernest: Could that be true if you were using clay? You know, “This bit is too heavy. It’s going to fall off”?
Julie: Yes.
Ernest: So that’s not an unfamiliar problem.
Julie: Yes. But I like the challenge of having to write something to make something work; whether I’m making a sculptural piece of work or whether I’m making a sound or a particular theme. I like the challenge of that. And particularly with sound. If I get stuck, there’s often things that emerge that I could never have predicted, but I really like the way they’ve turned out. And so I’ll just stop and go, Ah, no, that’s working, even though it’s not how I thought it might work. So that happens through the development of the code as well.
Ernest: That’s a good example. It’s the sort of thing I was wondering about. So is any of your work what I would call generative? That’s to say that the work does stuff and gets to a stage that you hadn’t explicitly programmed in?
Julie: There’s a project called The Lake, which is data generated, that I think looks generative but isn’t. Because it’s just continuously working with real-time data. But a lot of the sound pieces I’ve done are fairly generative. Because I work with cut-up sounds, musique concrète style, where I use a lot of mixed-up tiny sound samples and then program in a lot of random behaviors. So different behaviors trigger each other. And every time that I play it, you get a different sequence of sounds, and it comes to different points. So that’s generative in that way.
Ernest: And are you interested to see what they’re going to do next?
Julie: Yes. Yes. I love that.
Ernest: So whatever anyone else thinks, it’s interesting to you, anyway?
Julie: Well, yes. Sometimes I’m not very audience focused. But I really enjoy—with the sound particularly—using vocal snippets; I can sit and listen for ages because sometimes it turns into something quite [like] comedy. Often it’s just very surreal. And it’s quite compulsive listening. If I’ve written something that does that, then that’s a really satisfying thing to have done. But I also like, and I’ve thought about this a lot, is that, the way that I work is by setting up these systems. So this piece of software will talk to this, and take some data from here, will output this thing here. And I feel in control of that. And then I feel like I step back and lose control. So I don’t know how it’s finally going to sound or look. And I think when I was less confident as an artist—and I don’t know if artists ever get wholly confident about their work—it was really important to be able to say, “Okay, I’m about to show this to a hundred people, or launch a new piece of work,” and I felt like there’s a little gap where I’m not responsible. I’ve set the work up, and I’ve enabled it to happen, but if you don’t like it or if it looks rubbish, then that wasn’t me. You know? Of course, it was me, because I’ve written the program and designed the entire work, but that gap where the data or the algorithm flows through is a curious window of relief.
Ernest: Well, you’ve started to answer my next question, actually. Which is, does the use of software distance you in any way from the object?
Julie: Yes. Sometimes. Sometimes it really does. From the end result. But I think the use of software brings you an intimacy with what you’re working with. So I just created a project that’s got these little flapping objects. And once it was built, and then it needed the software to control the behavior. And when I was playing with the software I found myself, not falling in love, but becoming really attached to these little objects. To the point where even though there was twenty-eight of them, I know now that they all move slightly differently, because they’ve got different lengths and different mechanical constructions. And so when the code was written to do the behavioral stuff, they came to life. And I think that if I had made a static sculpture, or a sculpture that was just plugged in and then just did something that I hadn’t written myself, I wouldn’t feel that closeness. I wouldn’t feel like I’ve hatched this beautiful thing. It would be very different. So it does both. It brings you closer and allows you to step away a bit and let it get on with itself.
Ernest: What languages are you typically using when you make a piece like this?
Julie: For that piece I used an Arduino, which is C code. That was all the behaviors in Arduino for that. Some of it’s in Processing [computer language]. And the Processing is Java. They tend to be my weapons of choice. And then Max/MSP for the audio. I never use Java for sounds. And in the past, and I haven’t for a long time, I have used Flash for animation, for vector-based animation.
Ernest: And when you look at a piece of Processing or Java or something, do you care much about how it looks as a piece of code?
Julie: If I’ve written it?
Ernest: If you’ve written it.
Julie: Yes. I do. I don’t always succeed, but I really like it to be succinct. And I like it to be understandable, but very personal. So if you look at it, it definitely belongs. I don’t tend to write generic stuff. The names that I use for my variables and things like that tend to link into the work that I’m making. So if you read it, it would link to it. If I’m talking about flapping, or butterflies, or fish, or whatever, that’s in the code as well. It’s not just “object one.”
Ernest: So there’s an aesthetic of the code as well as an aesthetic of the object that the audience see?
Julie: Yes. Massively. And I think it’s interesting with the code. I think there’s some sort of dogma around code and how people write it and what they think about how it should be written. But actually it’s a really personal, creative process. I was sitting next to someone coding: we were both working on a Java thing, and we had to do the same piece of coursework. And my solution was completely different to hers. And we had really different techniques. I don’t often get a chance to do that, sit next to someone to write the same thing. I was like, “Wow! That’s interesting!” And I felt I could read mine. And I looked at hers and I struggled to get my head around how she’d realized hers. It’s a very personal thing. And I think it’s really intriguing to see how other people do it. That’s why things like the code-sharing open-source world is interesting, not only from a learning point of view but to see how other people approach things. Where they’re coming from, different logics.
Ernest: But that says to me that to you the code isn’t just, “It’s got to make it do this.” Code is a part of the work …
Julie: Yes.
Ernest: … just as you would care how you put the paint on, you care about how you write the code? That’s what I hear you saying.
Julie: Yes. I would definitely agree with that. I think it’s kind of precious in its own right. It really is a part of it. Yes. I was going to say unless you’re doing something simple, but actually you rarely do anything simple; you are always going to be altering and adapting.
Ernest: An open-ended question: Do you think software or computers in general inform your practice in any other ways that you can think of?
Julie: I think technology, the development of technology and how it moves forward, affects my work, just because when there’s something new that’s available, and when things are changing …
Ernest: You keep your eyes on what’s happening?
Julie: Yes. Yes. I try to. To see if something is going to filter back into what I want to do.
Ernest: One of the advantages of your research at Queen Mary [University of London] is that you will have a line to what the latest things are.
Julie: Yes. Although sometimes I think the Arduino particularly has been a massively helpful new technology that has made doing some of the work I have wanted to do much easier and quicker. When I did some early projects, where we’ve had to make our own bits of hardware, that’s been a really long and drawn-out process. So cutting corners like that has been really useful.
Ernest: What is an example of a good corner cut that you’ve had?
Julie: Not having to get somebody else to make a particular tagging system, or to actually have to send off for someone to make the circuit board, put all the pieces together. It was just beyond my knowledge. But being able to do that myself now is great. If I only work with an Arduino and I can build my own circuits, that’s really nice. In a way it’s opened up a little black box.
Ernest: Is it extending what the programming does, in a sense?
Julie: Yes.
Ernest: It’s only the scope of influence, if you can call it programming, which you could.
Julie: It kind of is.
Ernest: It’s specifying, anyway.
Julie: Yes. And I think in some ways it brings you back to being able to be even more personal about what you’re creating rather than using any generic off-the-shelf stuff. For me, the less generic things that I have to use, the better. Because I feel like the more handcrafted it is, the more special it is.
Ernest: So that’s an aesthetic of your practice in a way, isn’t it?
Julie: Yes. I think so.
Ernest: Which not every artist would agree with?
Julie: No.
Ernest: But some would.
Julie: Yes. It depends what you want from your work.
Ernest: Well Damian Hirst wouldn’t agree with that.
Julie: No. I don’t give a toss what Damian Hirst wouldn’t agree with. His reason for being an artist is a very different reason to what I think my reason for being an artist is. And I want to explore and have a really intense, intimate, curious relationship with technology and what I can do with it, and it leads me to link with the natural world and biological systems.
Ernest: And how do you see that? Do you see it as a process of discovery or learning or anything of that sort? Do you use any such words?
Julie: I don’t know if I would say it was a process of discovery. It’s all driven by curiosity to see whether I could. So if I’ve come up with a concept that on paper might be one of these doesn’t-exist, almost-impossible ideas, What if I could get fish to make music? And then I achieve that. And I get a really big sense of self-satisfaction, but also I’m creating something novel. That is really interesting to me and I hope will be interesting to other people. The challenges are in that. So it’s a chase. It’s more of a chase.
Ernest: And I can see that the word “discovery” doesn’t fit that properly. It’s not quite right.
Julie: Not really. Because “discovery” says that there is something out there that I’m looking for.
Ernest: Which is not the case?
Julie: Yes. Not necessarily.
Ernest: No. You’re inventing something or bringing something into existence that didn’t exist?
Julie: Yes.
Ernest: You’re not finding something that is already there?
Julie: No. And I’ve been learning that bringing something into existence that doesn’t exist is really nice. I’ve been learning taxidermy, and one of the things that I find quite remarkable about that is when you put the animal back together afterwards it’s got another life. All of a sudden it’s doing something else, it fills another place in the world. And I get the same buzz from doing that that I get from completing an artwork.
Ernest: Great. Thank you very much.
14.9 Conversation with Alex May, July 16, 2012
Alex May is a British artist exploring a wide range of digital technologies, most notably video projection onto physical objects (building on the technique known as video mapping or projection mapping by using his own bespoke software), also interactive installations, generative works, full-size humanoid robots, performance, and video art. He has performed live video mapping at Tate Modern in London and for the inauguration of Serre Numérique in Valenciennes, France, and exhibited internationally including in Britain at the Eden Project (permanent collection), V&A, Royal Academy of Art, Wellcome Collection, Science Museum, Bletchley Park, Watermans, Goldsmiths, and One Canada Square in Canary Wharf; in Venezuela at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas; in Ireland at the Science Gallery in Dublin; in the United States at Princeton University and the Beall Center for Art + Technology at the University of California, Irvine; and in Canada at the University of Calgary (international visiting artist 2016). He gives talks about many aspects of digital art, digital preservation, and public engagement with social robotics through art (e.g., at the University of California, Los Angeles; Chelsea College of Art; Waag Society in Amsterdam; Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, Scotland; British Film Institute in London; and Ahmed Shawky Museum in Cairo) and runs workshops for artists using his own software (e.g., at UCLA, for Fluxmedia at Concordia University in Montreal, and International Symposium on Electronic Art in Istanbul), and gave the 2012 Christmas lecture for the Computer Arts Society. Alex has been a visiting research fellow, artist in residence, with the computer science department of University of Hertfordshire since 2011 and a digital media arts lecturer at the University of Brighton since 2012.
Ernest: Has the computer influenced your view of art practice?
Alex: It was always a very natural partner to it, because I was introduced to computers fairly early on, and actually my dad is a journalist and writes books. He was into it even before I was, so he was getting all these lovely photographic prints sent over from America of the latest flight simulator graphics of the Rocky Mountains, and I was just like, “Wow, that’s great.”
Figure 14.7
Alex May. Digital Decomposition. 2017, interactive digital installation, variable size. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artist.)
Ernest: Did it actually influence your interest in art; was it maybe the other way round?
Alex: Probably, yes. I was very interested in the processing capabilities of computers as it relates to art. You can do things that are just so far beyond what a human being would be prepared to look at, so it’s almost akin to like some of Pointillism; to achieve that effect they had to spend hours and hours doing these tiny little dots. And that’s not to take away from that effort and to say, “You could easily do that with the computer,” but it’s that level, that you can do something that’s so mind-numbingly boring to a human in a fraction of a second, it just kind of opens it up. So yes, I’ve never really separated the two.
Ernest: In your practice, how much does programming matter to you? Does the software itself matter?
Alex: Very much. I ran a sort of talk panel thing the other week, which was “Code as Art,” about the actual code itself, whether there’s an aesthetic thing. I program mostly as a very functional process, just to make the thing work and make the end result, but I like my brackets lined up in a certain way, and I hate people who put their brackets in the wrong place, so I must have an aesthetic side.
Ernest: You mentioned brackets, so that suggests a particular kind of language?
Alex: C++, but it also applies to things like LISP, so I have done lots and lots different.
Ernest: But do you mostly use C++?
Alex: Mostly. And there’s a functional aesthetic, because if I see the brackets lined up, then mentally I can scan down the code, and it has a much more pleasing feel. And I feel that the code isn’t right—even if the end result is right—I don’t feel the code is right until it looks [right].
Ernest: There is an argument that some people have put forward in relation to literature: for example, a poem isn’t what you see on the page; that’s a manifestation of the poem. If you have a different typeface, you’ve still got the same poem, and I wonder if that has any analogy?
Alex: I’ve written articles and books, and I like text, I like how it looks. And obviously with the web you have the fluidity which drives traditional people who work with print absolutely mad, because they want the line widths to be exactly “that,” but to me it’s quite pleasing, and it’s very much required to impart the information.
Ernest: So following on from that, do you find that the work you do with software distances you from the object? How is that relationship?
Alex: Obviously, I work a lot with video projection and the idea of augmenting objects, changing the perception of the physical object using nothing but light. Light is why we’re all here and it affects our light divisions and whatever. It affects us more than we realize; it’s just our brains are very, very good at processing all that information. So it’s a very intrinsic relationship that I’m trying to modify, the experience of people, and so a wall might be an integral part of the piece that I’m doing, or it could be an object, or it could be you’re projecting on people, or you’re using them as input; it’s totally integrated.
Ernest: So if I understand you right, the software is an integral part, and it may be an essential part, but not the only part?
Alex: Well, no, because even if I’ve got a screen-based form, I don’t do many of those. How it’s presented, or the screen itself, the quality of the screen, the technical specs on the screen, everything is integral. But going back to what you’re saying about text, you can have it in different fonts, and does it affect you? And of course it does, a good font is a readable font.
Ernest: You probably realize very well that I agree with that. I’m not prepared to show my piece on some standard screen; I want control of that.
Alex: Yes, and although I find it very interesting to create a piece which is flexible enough to allow people to experience it in ways that you haven’t first encountered, and especially with the interactive stuff, in ways that just allows them enough room to feel that they’ve had some input into it, because they’re an integral part too. I do like that idea, and it’s a bit of a tired thing, but if nobody is around, is the art still art? Because then you’re just dealing with the physics and the physicality of it, and part of the work I do with lasers and projections and programming, none of it exists, and I’m going to spend my whole life creating nothing, but people have seen it, and I love that!
Ernest: So in your case, there’s more than the software that has this issue around it, because of the kind of work you do?
Alex: Yes, very much, absolutely. When … I’ve got the output that I want, I stop working on the code, but nobody really gets to see the code and I’m still really working on that idea at the moment, because I don’t really want to release my stuff open source, just willy-nilly, and I’ve done the prep work. To me it’s a weird stage which doesn’t have a direct analogy to something like painting. I mean, I drew up all these little tables of light and the code in itself. If it’s a compiled language you can compile it to an application, and you throw the code away, essentially. Whereas something like a Python script, obviously, you required a code to be there, and it’s a similar function. So the fact that there is this intermediary stage is kind of weird, and people should have a chance to see it and have a look at its aesthetic qualities.
Ernest: Because it’s quite interesting, because actually if you think of painting, for example, Francis Bacon famously said he didn’t do sketches and things, and then it turned out he did, but he hid them! Whereas other people have been quite open about it, so it’s not a new issue in that sense. What do you think about live coding?
Alex: I’m doing a bit at the moment, because I’m very interested in taking the sometimes forgotten historical context for digital stuff, because a lot of the time people go, “I’ve done this digital thing, and it’s really cutting edge,” and it’s like, “Well, no, actually some guy did it eighty years ago on film, and he did it much better than you did,” and there’s tons of it which is forgotten. There’s that lovely book, Film as Subversive Art, which is documenting all the experimental film stuff, and it’s amazing, and the painting from 1532 with the anamorphic skull. Yes, people have been playing about with stuff, and even all the projective geometry stuff, all the theories of perspective were not really settled until to the seventeenth century. So there are all these kind of parallels of this thing, so it’s just sort of realizing that all this has gone before, and to put it into context, realizing that I’m not being really cutting edge and cool, it’s like I’m part of this long path, a long piece of string, and the fact that music has in some ways been ahead of visual art.
Ernest: The piece that I showed when I was talking just now [referring to an abstract time-based computer work] was very much like early abstract film, actually.
Alex: Yes, very much.
Ernest: But just computer generated.
Alex: Early animation, and even interactive stuff is not new, but I like that historical placement of it.
Ernest: So in the historical thing, there was something that was mentioned during the talks today, about producing a tool, and some people will say it’s a medium. How do you stand on that?
Alex: I don’t know. Somebody asked me, “Is programming the new literature?” the other day, and I don’t know, maybe people use it as a medium, maybe people use it as a tool.
Ernest: And do you know how you do it?
Alex: I suppose technically I use it as a tool. Again, I was trying to figure this out—is the code the medium, is the computer the studio that you’re working within and the languages or the software in the system, because that’s all part of it.
Ernest: Did you come to any kind of conclusion in that discussion that you organized, which I couldn’t get to?
Alex: No, but it was nice, we had a nice range of input. You have the computer guys who were really trying to tie down where was the art in computing and at which point does the art happen, and that was lovely. And then the more art side of it, almost a philosophical thing. It feels like sort of trying to justify the use of computers and words, and I don’t see what the problem is!
Ernest: So do you think that the way you see art is influenced by your knowledge of computers and your use of computers?
Alex: I think, fundamentally, it’s far more influenced by the fact that I’m an artist; I’m terrible in art galleries, because the work that I’m doing with the time-based pieces where you really have to stand there, you really have to stand there for a couple of minutes to really get the full thing, and I realize that’s obviously quite a short time, but when I go to an art gallery I’m racing around, because I look at things in relationship to my work and it’s very difficult for me to look at a piece and completely look at it without my art brain or my technical brain kicking in and going, “Well, how does that relate to my thoughts?” Maybe I’m trying to make a penance, or doing my penance, and this time-based works to sort of slow myself down, to stop myself from, stop people like me doing it, because I suppose I might be the person that comes in and says, “Oh, there’s nothing happening.”
Ernest: You might be interested in some of the articles in that book I showed, because we’ve done a lot of research on this and on engagement. And we talk about the three stages of engagement: one is attraction, like, do you bother to look for more than three seconds, which is what museum and gallery people tend to worry about. And then there’s sustained engagement, do you look for three minutes or maybe half an hour? And we have found people who are doing that. And then the third thing is forming relationships: do you come back tomorrow, do you bring your aunt or your granddaughter or something, and do you go and see Macbeth lots of times throughout your life, this kind of thing. And it’s quite interesting, because it turns out that the works that have the different kind of engagement models have different characteristics, so you almost need to know what you’ve achieved, and you might build the work differently.
Alex: You wouldn’t necessarily change the work. If the work would be attracting the flashy attractive thing, then that is just the work. Again, with all the slow stuff, we showed the robot in Kinetica [Art Fair], and it was a five-foot-tall real robot, with a big glowing face, and people just wandered by like nothing was there. It was amazing. But it worked really well there because people were looking for quite immediate feedback, and we’d speeded it up a little bit to counteract. I mean, we had people coming back, or people would take a photo of it and then that would be their Facebook profile.
Ernest: That’s very nice.
Alex: It’s lovely, because suddenly, after the Kinetica Art Gallery, we started seeing them everywhere!
Ernest: Another question: Although art is typically seen these days, and maybe in the romantic provision, as an individual activity, in fact, in our game, there’s a lot of collaboration. How important is collaboration to you?
Alex: Yes, it’s important. I suppose because I’ve reached a level of coding where if I have an idea I can code it and I’ve got video objectives and I can pretty much, single-handedly, just come up with a piece, execute it, and, money aside, I can execute it. Whereas I know, obviously, people collaborate, because, in some instances, they need skills from other sources. I collaborated for a long time with a sound artist and we created some very nice audiovisuals, some environment stuff, and it added this whole different dimension to the thing, and we collaborated with Anna Dumitriu and her interest is in mainly viral and bacterial. So it was lovely to be able to learn more about that and take elements of bacteria and say, “Well, okay, I can take things from that and it definitely relates in some ways to the work that I’m doing.” And it’s nice to be able to facilitate other people’s visions, because people have these ideas for projecting all over buildings and stuff, and it’s difficult, and it’s costly, and sometimes you have to break it a bit gently to them: “What you’re planning is going to cost the other side of £100,000, but I can do it!” So yes, it’s nice to make these things up and it’s enjoyable to work under somebody else’s ideas sometimes.
Ernest: Thank you.
Alex: Thank you very much.
14.10 Conversation with Kate Sicchio, June 12, 2013
“Dr. Kate Sicchio is a choreographer, media artist and performer whose work explores the interface between choreography and technology. Her work includes performances, installations, web and video projects and has been shown in Philadelphia, New York City, Canada, Germany, Australia, Belgium, and the UK at venues such as Banff New Media Institute (Canada), V&A Digital Futures (London), FoAM (Brussels) and Artisan Gallery (Hong Kong). She has been written about in The Guardian, Dazed Digital, El Diarios, and Imperica Magazine. She has presented work at many conferences and symposia including International Society of Electronic Arts (ISEA), ACM Creativity and Cognition, Digital Research in Humanities and Arts, Congress On Research in Dance, and Society of Dance History Scholars. She has given invited talks at places such as EU Parliament (Brussels), Node Code (Frankfurt), and Resonate (Belgrade). Her research has been published by Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Computer Music Journal, Media N and Learning Performance Quarterly. Her book Intersecting Art and Technology Practice: Techne/Technique/Technology was recently published by Routledge. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Integrated Digital Media at New York University.”21
Figure 14.8
Kate Sicchio. Hacking Choreography. 2014, performed by Philippa Lockwood and Elissa Hind at Waterman’s Art Centre, London. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artist.)
Ernest: I want to start with how the computer and how computer programming came into your art practice, treating the word “art” in the most general sense.
Kate: I think growing up I always had an interest in both dance and computers. I studied dance, ballet and modern dance in particular, and then I also had a job as an intern at a web design company. We were called HTML Monkeys. We had to take these big Photoshop documents and encode them into HTML.
So I was doing that simultaneously. I went to university for dance, and halfway through my undergraduate degree I was injured and couldn’t dance for six months. I had three knee surgeries during that time. But instead of putting my studies on hold, I just went to the multimedia department and said, “I have these technical skills, what classes can I take here?”
Then when I was well enough to dance again, the head of the dance department, I think she wanted me out, because I wasn’t their ideal dancer. I wasn’t actually that interested; I was more interested in making dance than dancing.
So she said, sort of briefly, like, “Why don’t we find a way so you can combine them both, and that will be your degree?” And I think what she meant was, “Leave the dance department and finish your degree in multimedia,” but I heard, “Combine both.” So that literally became the rest of my degree. I split my credits, half in multimedia and half in dance, and I made work that started to explore how to combine both studies. I made it one stream.
Ernest: So actually this all began from a student base?
Kate: Yes, really early. And I started with a lot of video practices, yeah.
Ernest: Could you give an example of an early thing that you did, perhaps as a student, that made that combination work?
Kate: One of my first things was around video. I started using the software Isadora, which is like an object-orientated programming environment, to put effects on live video. That was projected within the performance. And … I still work with variations of that now. But that was one of my first things … like, “Right, the computer actually can see things if you attach a camera to it, so how does it see dance and how do I put that back into the piece?”
Ernest: So let me understand that. Was the camera used during a performance?
Kate: Yes. It was all happening in real time.
Ernest: And also projecting images?
Kate: Yeah.
Ernest: So you had the dancer, the image analysis and the projection all …
Kate: All on stage.
Ernest: And how about the sound? Was there sound, and was it integrated?
Kate: It wasn’t. And I work with sound infrequently to this day. Recently I’ve worked more with sound, but sound then was just an additional soundtrack over the top. And I went through a period after that of not using sound at all. So, yeah, the sound only recently has been integrated into the system.
Ernest: So how do you think computer programs, in the broadest sense of what a computer program is, how do you think computer programs influence your conception of the kind of work that you could do?
Kate: I think most recently I’ve been looking at just that idea of code as a score. And how programming can be used as scoring for dance. So I’ve recently made a fake programming language. But it is based on JavaScript. It almost is identical to JavaScript, actually. And I’ve been giving that to dancers to learn as a dance score.
Ernest: So that sounds very interesting. So does that mean this is a pseudocode?22 So that the dancers can understand this?
Kate: Yes.
Ernest: And that you can take that pseudocode and actually make it real code?
Kate: Yes.
Ernest: And so the pseudocode is a way of you communicating with the dancers?
Kate: Exactly.
Ernest: So okay, that’s very interesting. So you’ve used the code as a kind of score, so that the essence of the piece is embedded in the code?
Kate: I would say so. Because the instructions themselves for the dancers …
Ernest: Including the instructions for the dancers?
Kate: Yes. And those tend to be very open to interpretation. So there are words like “push” or—I use a lot of just “left” or “right” as well. Or “rotate” is a good one. And then so it’s—yeah, the essence of the piece is in those sort of words. But then it’s still interpretative.
Ernest: Do you know an English guy called John Lansdown?
Kate: No.
Ernest: Who used to do this kind of thing back in the seventies and even late sixties? I think these two aspects are very interesting. So that the whole piece you compose in code, really. That’s what I hear you saying. So you’re composing in code. And you’re composing and choreographing in code, actually. And then part of—now I’m putting this to you to see whether I understand it, so I may get it quite wrong—so what I think I’m hearing is that that code covers more than what the computer does, because the pseudocode includes instructions to the dancers, which actually the computer program doesn’t need to know.
Kate: Yes.
Ernest: So in a way you’re writing a total thing? In code and pseudocode. So you now have a description of the work. And then part of this can then be put into the computer to do its part, and part of it can be given to the dancers?
Kate: I haven’t actually put any of it into the computer. I’ve just been giving it to dancers so far.
Ernest: So what you’ve done is you’ve used the metaphor, almost, of code? As a way of developing a language for a dance?
Kate: Yes. And part of why I know Alex McLean is because I started doing it live as well. Like typing the code for the dancers live.
Ernest: And they could see it?
Kate: Yes. And the audience as well. And also they have to—sometimes I change the instructions or the order, so they have to respond to that. They become a computer in a way.
Ernest: So in fact they’re interpreting the code in real time?
Kate: Yes.
Ernest: Okay. That’s beautiful. So the live coding notion is directly translated into this performance work?
Kate: Yes.
Ernest: And so if you work with Alex, is he working with his live coding, which is controlling the sound at the same time?
Kate: Yes.
Ernest: And how do you and Alex work together when that is happening?
Kate: Our collaborative piece that we’ve been doing, it tries to make a feedback cycle. It does feedback, I would say. So we both, for that piece, have visual language coding that we’re using. So mine is dance instructions. They’re really … “up,” “down,” “right,” and “left,” I think, and then the numbers one through six. And that gets connected in a web. And that—I have a series of gestures, and I sort of move around in the space. And that’s being tracked by a camera. And then where I am in this space, and also the size of my gestures, actually changes Alex’s code.
Ernest: So that your code is sent to his …
Kate: Well, how I interpret my code is sent to his code. And that creates the sound.
Ernest: And he interprets it in some way?
Kate: Or I interfere and he has to readjust! [laughs] And then the sound that’s coming out is analyzed by another computer, and that changes my code.
Ernest: So your code isn’t always written by you?
Kate: In this case, no.
Ernest: In this case. So sometimes it could be modified by another programmer?
Kate: Yes.
Ernest: That’s brilliant. And do you constrain what modifications could be made? Presumably.
Kate: Yes. And we try to give it a structure as well. Just for the piece in general. So it actually grows more complex, and more and more instructions over time come on my score. To the point where, about ten minutes in, it completely overloads, and I have to just make decisions on the spot about what instructions I’m going to follow. Because there’s far too many for me to ever do. We get to this point where I have to fail.
Ernest: Tell me about the camera. Now, you mentioned when you were a student using a camera, but you’re using one still, sometimes? Tell me how that works.
Kate: I do really simple sort of background subtraction in order to do computer tracking. Normally I use the CCTV [closed-circuit television] camera, and I’ve used a couple of different software where you take a background image and then it just does the subtraction.
Ernest: What software do you use?
Kate: It varies. Sometimes I use Isadora. I’ve worked with the software Eyecon and Kalypso, and I’ve done it in the language Processing. Whatever I can get my hands on.
Ernest: And so can you take me through a scenario of what might happen? If I’m watching a piece, what would I be seeing? And what would the camera—what would the image analysis be doing?
Kate: I did a whole series where I used that to make visuals. They tended to be really abstract representations of the movement that was being captured. Usually gradients of a color that would sort of—maybe if I moved right and left across the stage it would sort of travel with me. But it would be—there’d always be some sort of remnants of it left that would slowly fade out.
Ernest: So if I see a dancer moving, or some dancers moving, I also might see on a projection an image that was a transformation of their movements in a way? And would it be in real time and sent? Or would there be delays?
Kate: Usually it’s real time. I have worked with delays as well. It’s an interesting idea of expanding time. But usually it’s real time.
Ernest: So now there are two ways you’re using code, then? One is as a score for the work, and another is to handle the image analysis and image processing?
Kate: Yes.
Ernest: Let’s just talk about that image side for a moment. When you’re doing that, does the—how does the writing of the code influence the work? Or does it? Does the kind of language that you’re using and so on affect your thinking about what might be done?
Kate: Yes. Because I’m both creating the dance and the system for the images, I see them really all as part of the choreographic process. And sometimes the movement is more determined by what I’ve just designed in the software or sometimes I work opposite. I’ll have this idea for movement and then I’ll try to make the computer respond to that. So they’re really integrated into my own process. Where I don’t really divorce the two when I’m working like that.
Ernest: Ah, so you might be working with the image, let’s call it image transformation, you might be working with the image-transformation code and the choreographic code at the same time to build the work?
Kate: Yes.
Ernest: And in principle the one could influence the other? Technically it’s possible?
Kate: Yes. I think it does. Like in my PhD research, I looked at it as a kind of topology. It’s continuously transforming the other. The only way to separate it is to stop one. Yeah.
Ernest: Well, just say something about your PhD; that might be interesting.
Kate: I looked at, particularly, these image transformations and my process of making them, and I identified sort of the score spaces that have to be choreographed. I called it the physical space; the camera space, which also included the programming; the projection space; and the compositional space. And then I said the relationship between those four spaces was topological. And then I, in my PhD I talk about the process of choreographing all those spaces together as choreo-topology.
Ernest: So you developed a conceptual model of the use of code, actually, for this kind of work? With these four spaces? And the interrelationships between them?
Kate: Yeah.
Ernest: Okay. So it sounds as if code is not an add-on to your work but is actually at the very core, is that …
Kate: Yes. I would say that.
Ernest: Would you be doing anything like you’re doing if there was no such thing as code or you hadn’t come across it?
Kate: I really doubt it. Like, it’s always—from very early on it’s been—yes, my choreographic approach has always been this—down to the code. And the computer. So I think I’d be making—well, to my own eyes—very boring dance work if I didn’t have the code.
Ernest: Your work is of course very much concerned with procedures and process? Formalized process, actually?
Kate: Yes.
Ernest: So that’s a step further, isn’t it? Not just conceptual?
Kate: Yes. It’s how the work’s made.
Ernest: Maybe I should ask you what your dream is next. Where would you like to take it?
Kate: That’s a good question. I think the programming language–choreography thing is the thing I’m really interested in developing further. And I can see that becoming quite a substantial piece. Because I have the piece with Alex, but then I have my other programming pieces. I have four or five of the smaller ones, and I can see it becoming a much bigger directional type event. So I guess that’s my current dream. [laughs]
14.11 Conversation with Andrew Brown, November 30, 2011
Andrew Brown studied music, both classical and jazz, at the University of Melbourne. He was a keyboard player in touring bands through the 1980s. His interest in electronic keyboards grew into a passion that fueled his academic career in teaching and research at the University of Melbourne, Queensland University of Technology, the Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design, and Griffith University, where he is now a full Professor. His current practice is laptop live coding. He also works in a range of digital arts arts. Andrew’s research focuses on augmenting our creative intelligence through interactions with computer systems, about which he has published widely and for which he has been the winner of numerous research grants.
Ernest: First of all, if you could think back as a musician-composer, you must at some point or another have come across a computer. I would like you to reflect on the beginnings of that. The question is, how did the computer or how did software affect your work? Did it open up new avenues from the beginning?
Andrew: My first introduction to computers in this way was at university and my music degree. Interestingly enough there was a computer in the music studio. It was at undergraduate degree time. There was an Apple II computer in the studio running some music software. The thing which intrigued me about it was the fact that you could program and customize it. That really intrigued me, because the instruments that I’d been playing up until then—traditional musical instruments, particularly the piano—I was always fascinated by how they worked, but you never had the opportunity to tweak them. I originally got into the studio on analogue synthesizers where you could patch things together, so there was some level of programmability. But it was the customizability of the computer which really excited me.
Figure 14.9
Andrew Brown. Connections. 2013, developed in the Impromptu environment and exhibited as part of the [d]Generate exhibition of digital generative art at the Gympie Regional Gallery. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artist.)
Ernest: That’s almost immediately into my second question, which is, does programming itself matter to you?
Andrew: Absolutely. It was interesting that I got into computers at a time where you almost needed to program. It was the early 1980s. There were some applications, of course, but it was the fact that you could program it and get it to do almost anything you wanted it to do which was fundamental.
That really has stayed with me. When we move forward to other things that I’ve done, programming has always been quite central. But there was another pivotal moment to me, which is when I went to work at IRCAM in the late 1990s. I’d always understood that programming was really important, but at that time it became clear to me that it was essential if you wanted to have independence as an artist.
Ernest: It was interesting that one thing that [Pierre] Boulez said to me was that he thought it was very important that people could work at home, program at home, I guess, which is part of that point.
Andrew: Yes, although in one sense the IRCAM experience for me was almost a reaction against it, because IRCAM had this model where composers would work with the technology. So Boulez would work with Andrew Gertzso. In one sense I saw that, which was the IRCAM model, and almost thought, I don’t think that’s right. But really the thing for me was you really had to invent your own tools if you wanted to break new ground. I think this was the other lesson.
Ernest: In terms of the software, how do you feel about it? Does the software itself matter to you or is it just a way of doing all this stuff?
Andrew: It’s more than a way of doing things. I would say the musical practice is certainly primary. The coding is secondary in that sense, but it does matter, so I like to do it well. I like to develop my technique. I’m interested in reading coding books and patterns of musical coding practices. It’s certainly not frivolous. I see it as technique. I think having good technique is important to be able to be very expressive.
Ernest: So it’s a bit more than a tool.
Andrew: It’s certainly a lot more than a tool.
Ernest: Has it influenced your thinking? Do you think about music differently?
Andrew: Yes, for sure. That’s one of the interesting things about looking at programming in particular and the differences between different programming paradigms. You think differently in those ways. For example, in the last few years I’ve been programming in LISP, which as you know has a particular way of structuring the world. There seems to be a really nice fit between the way it is organized and the way in which my musical ideas are organized. So that seems to fit well.
Ernest: Some of the stuff I saw of yours earlier was LISP-like, I thought.
Andrew: It was Scheme, actually, to be precise. Scheme is a LISP. It’s usually the way they say it.
Ernest: Do you find that the kind of work that you do distances you at all from the final object, the sound? If you’re playing a piano, if you’re improvising on a piano, for example, then of course it’s a very direct relationship between what you do and the sound; whereas if you’re writing LISP, you’re further away, in a sense. Do you notice that?
Andrew: It’s true that I’m further away from the sound, but I’m not further away from the music. This is an important distinction. Music in a sense is organized sound, so I’m closer to the organization and I feel more in control of the organization, even though you are technically correct that you’re one step removed from making a noise.
But in a sense my interest has often been a compositional interest, an interest in musical structures as well as in musical timbre but almost primarily in musical structures.
Ernest: So could you put that the other way round, that programming helps you be closer to the structure of the music than you could have been without it?
Andrew: Yes, and I feel as though it’s more powerful as a structuring tool than ten fingers on a piano keyboard—unless maybe I was Keith Jarrett.
Ernest: Yes, of course. Every pianist’s favorite pianist. It might be that Bach or Schoenberg or Webern might have been very interested in programming, for this very purpose.
Andrew: I think absolutely. Those composers you mentioned, who were very interested in musical structures, either polyphony or serialism or minimalism or any of those kinds of structural aspects would be very, very interested in programming as a way of thinking about it.
Ernest: Which interests me in another way, which is that maybe you could argue that you can give more thought, you can be more rational—maybe that’s not the right word—more thoughtful about the structures of the music using programming?
Andrew: Possibly. I’m not so sure about that. There are some contradictions possibly in that. One is that through programming maybe you can be more thoughtful because you can defer decisions. But in one sense you also can hand over in generative systems responsibility for parts of those things. So in one sense you can be less thoughtful or thoughtful at some metalevel and hand over responsibility. So it’s intriguing, isn’t it, when you say we’re further from the sound of live coding. We’re doing generative structures, so we’re further from the service-level pitch and rhythm decisions. So you’re moving to a new level, a metalevel of organization in a sense.
Ernest: Would you say in live coding in particular that you are actually manipulating the metalevels of the structures?
Andrew: Absolutely, Yes. You’re designing those structures.
Ernest: So you have generative music and then you’re changing the structures during the performance?
Andrew: Correct. One of the really interesting things is that one of the craft aspects of that is to have an initial structure which affords manipulation in interesting ways. So it’s not good enough just to have any initial structure. You need an initial structure which then itself can be modified in interesting ways. That’s what you do when you’re experimenting and practicing and so forth. It’s searching for those kinds of interesting structures which are forward evolution during the performance.
Ernest: So is your thinking about that matter rather than the quality of sound?
Andrew: Yes, that’s right. It’s almost practicing music theory, and looking at musical structures, and using theories and models of music making, and how do I articulate them in a succinct fashion.
Ernest: How do you deal with sound itself?
Andrew: Typically, we have commercial synthesizers, virtual synthesizers, which are triggered by notes. But we also control those timbres. I’ve painted a fairly simplistic figure, but I’m describing to you where the kernel is, but of course all of these things relate.
Ernest: One way that I look at it, and I don’t know whether this conforms to your view, is that you have structures that deal with what happens over time, and then you have mappings from those structures to the physical realities. Those mappings might be using the sound samples or whatever it is, whatever you happen to do, and they are two different sets of decisions.
Andrew: Yes. One of the things which I’ve developed in interaction with Andrew Sorensen—he and I have done this practice together a lot—is a set of primitives, if you like, at that very abstract level, which we’ve worked out how to map both structurally and directly to timbre manipulation and pitch manipulation. These are actually pretty simple things like periodic motion and gas-heat distributions; these kinds of things which we find widely applicable at all sorts of levels, from the surface level detailed through the deeper structure.
Ernest: Do you find that some of those things need to be relatively simple because of the complexity of what you’re doing?
Andrew: Yes. This gets back to your earlier comment about contemplation. The thing about live performance, the live coding, is of course, there is very little time for contemplation during the performance. So it’s unlike a compositional process in that sense. It’s like a jazz improvisation. You have to commit on the fly, now. But I think when you rehearse you build up patterns of behavior just like a jazz improviser does.
Ernest: Maybe you have to take the advice that Charlie Parker gave Miles Davis, which was, if you remember, if you make a mistake, do it again and then do it again and then do it again.
Andrew: Totally. This is where it shares all of these things with other music practices. This is why it seems foreign in one sense, but you draw an awful lot from other instrumental performance practices.
14.12 Conversation with Mark Fell, August 7, 2012
Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield (UK). After studying experimental film and video art at Sheffield City Polytechnic he reverted to earlier interests in computational technology, music and synthetic sound. In 1998 he began a series of critically acclaimed record releases on labels including Mille Plateaux, Line, Editions Mego and Raster Noton. Fell is widely known for exploring the relationships between popular music styles, such as electronica and club musics, and typically academic approaches to computer-based composition with a particular emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. Since his early electronic music pieces, Fell’s practice has expanded to include moving image works, sound and light installation, choreography, critical texts, curatorial projects and educational activities. He has worked with a number of artists including Yasunao Tone, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Okkyung Lee, Luke Fowler, Peter Gidal, John Chowning, Ernest Edmonds, Peter Rehberg, Oren Ambarchi and Carl Michael Von Hausswolff. The diversity and importance of Fell’s practice is reflected in the range and scale of international institutions that have presented his work which include Hong Kong National Film archive, The Baltic (Gateshead), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Laboral (XIxon), The Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), The Serpentine (London), Raven Row (London), The Australian Centre For Moving Image, Artists Space (NYC), Issue Project Room (NYC), Corcoran (DC), Curtis R.Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (NY), Lampo/Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), Hanger Biccoca (Milan) and others. Fell’s work is in the collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna) and has been recognized by ARS Electronica (Linz).
Figure 14.10
Mark Fell. 64 Beautiful Phase Violations. 2013, installation view at BALTIC 39. (Reproduced by permission of the artist and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Photograph by Colin Davison.)
Ernest: The first question is, has programming opened up new or different avenues in your practice?
Mark: I guess the first time I was in the same room as a computer it was in the physics department at school. It was a ZX80, and there were all these physics nerds who were kind of sat round it and typing words into it. And I just thought, what on earth is this? So I didn’t touch it or use it, but I became really fascinated with it. Then the next year I got a ZX81. I think the difference between computers now and then is that when you got a computer in 1981 you didn’t have a choice about whether you were going to program it or not, you had to program it. So it’s like from the beginning getting a computer wasn’t about let’s download this app and have a go on whatever. It was about let’s start to program it to do something. So that’s kind of how I started, and then I got a Commodore 64 and the first thing I did was to write software that would make sound and generate graphics. But the thing is, my cassette recorder for the Commodore 64 didn’t work, so once I’d done something it was a complete loss, I’d spend about four hours typing something in and then my mum would shout “Tea’s ready!” and I’d turn it off and then it’d be gone.
Ernest: Was that really frustrating? Did it matter to you at the time?
Mark: I guess what was really frustrating was when you could buy books with code in it that would take literally like six hours to type in. That was frustrating, but when you’re a kid you kind of accept things, I guess. So it never really occurred to me that there might be an alternative. So I guess my ideas as an artist have always been absolutely connected to computers in that sense. Because when I was a kid I painted, and I kind of messed around with synthesizers. But although when I was at school I was quite good at drawing, my ambitions, what I liked, was clearly way better than what I could ever achieve. And the same with music, I never really studied music. So it’s not as if I could play a piano or use a paintbrush, so I had to find some other device that would actually do the thing for me, and computers just seemed like the way to go. And the way I got into it really, I think, is through doing music and messing around with analogue synthesizers. With a modular synthesizer, you could set up something that played a strange sound when you pressed a key. But I was never really interested in that. I was always interested in how can you set up a system that will generate the music itself, and you can change a dial and it’ll somehow alter.
Ernest: So that means you’re not using it as an instrument really, in a conventional sense?
Mark: Yes, you could say it wasn’t an instrument, but you might say it was. I don’t really get hung up on where that definition is. There is a difference of use, or it belongs to a different category in terms of how it functions. Just for the sake of having normal conversations, I think that distinction makes sense. It makes sense to say this is a different kind of thing to a guitar. Anyway, that led on to me using computers, and being able to develop those ideas in a digital kind of domain. The first thing I got was a piece of software, called Generator, that Native Instruments made. It was the first thing they made, and that was the first time I could really mess about with the things I couldn’t try on analogue synthesizers. So I guess all this is the background?
Ernest: So when you left school did you go to art school?
Mark: I studied graphic design. The reason is because it wasn’t making lots of mess with paint, but there was a room with a BBC computer, and then a room with an Apple Macintosh in there.
Ernest: So actually, the existence of computing in that course was an attractor to you, as against a painting course?
Mark: Yes. It wasn’t necessarily that the computers were present when I went for the conversation, but I could tell by the things I was saying that every time I mentioned computers the guy who was interviewing me seemed to like it. So I just thought, yes, this is the way for me to go.
Ernest: So in a way, computing was there from the beginning and you’d got into some kind of programming, at least, from the beginning?
Mark: Yes. And when I started graphic design I was the only one that used the computers. I’d get the key off the technician and just stay there in this room just making stuff and just dreamt of possibilities.
Ernest: So when you were studying was most of your work done using computers?
Mark: There was a divide, because the structure of the course was essentially to take a pretend brief from a client, and make a piece of work to fit that. But there was no way of getting the work off the computer screen and into some kind of form that you could submit. So all the stuff on the computer was really just me messing around, and not formally part of the course.
Ernest: I really want to ask you about how you see life now. Does programming, not computers, matter to you beyond the fact that you have to do it?
Mark: Yes. Well, in the first place it enables me to do what I do. If we’re making music on a computer there’s a few ways you can do it. For example, you can place notes on a grid, which is really boring to me. The only option for me is to program. I mean I don’t necessarily call it programming because I don’t really think of myself as a programmer. And I tend to use things like Max/MSP, and a lot of people say it’s not a programming language.
Ernest: Well, for my purposes writing Max/MSP patches is programming.
Mark: Yes, you’re setting up systems and dealing with the logic of the system. So that enables me to make better music, and the music I like to hear. Without that I wouldn’t be able to make the music I make.
Ernest: So where is the software, where is the programming within your practice?
Mark: Well, I wouldn’t say that the software is the work. Although I definitely feel that the systems generate the music, for example, the software has an equal status to the music in terms of how I feel about them. But then I wouldn’t actually release the software. So the software is very much a way of making something, rather than a thing in itself. I am quite choosy. When I write software there’s often several ways of doing the same thing, and I’ll choose a way that fits ideologically with the values that I like, so they are aesthetic choices in a way.
Ernest: I would call that caring about the software. So can you give me an example?
Mark: Well, because I’m not from a formal computing background, I’ve just wandered into it and messed around, I’ve never been taught how you create algorithms, or how you structure complex things. So, for example, getting a system together to deliver a live performance. The first thing I did was create an environment, and everything that’s common to all the tracks I’ll put in the environment. So there were things that dealt with outputs, things that dealt with fader devices and things, and they all sat there. And then the track was a tiny thing that was inserted into that, so I could just send a number one to this output module, and it’ll trigger sound number one. But actually now, I’ve completely changed that. So now the environment is minuscule, there’s nothing there really, it’s a sort of adaptable framework. And then the track, or piece of music that happens within that, deals with all the outputs itself. But there’s quite a big ideological difference between these ways of developing systems.
Ernest: So the second approach takes you longer to make a piece than the first one—or does it?
Mark: It doesn’t actually, because it’s a lot easier and you’ve got much more control of what happens. It’s not like you have to go into something else to change what you’re doing. Instead of sending a number to trigger a certain sound, I might send a list, the note number, the duration, etc. It just means there’s a lot more flexibility.
Ernest: So it sounds as if in the second case the environment is more flexible. And a way of putting that is that there are more variables in it, more things that you can control from the top level.
Mark: Basically, yes.
Ernest: So in fact the second approach is cleaner?
Mark: Yes, but I thought the first approach was cleaner when I did it.
Ernest: These kinds of aesthetics of software, how clean it is, could be one of the criteria you care about?
Mark: Yes, in fact Jeremy Bernstein, who worked for Cycling ’74 [maker of Max and MSP software], saw some of my patches and I was nervous because he really knows his stuff. And he said, “Mark, these patches are so beautiful,” and I was surprised but pleased. Looking at them, they are quite logical, as though everything’s given a space.
Ernest: You prefer that?
Mark: Yes, just because it enables me to understand things. So it’s almost like arranging furniture in a room. It’s giving each thing its space, so you’re able to understand it more clearly.
The other thing is, I work with Mat Steel on this project SND, and we do many live performances. Because of the amount of work it takes when you’re in a collaborative thing, we’ve basically had three incarnations of how we work. The first one was the environment that I mentioned, but it was so complicated. And then in the second one we streamlined it a bit, and tried to deal with the problem of how two people can interact with the same system at the same time. Because at first when we played live there would be one physical device, and we’d be arguing over it, and so we developed a way of enabling two people to load different things and we used two computers. So basically my computer would be the thing that generated all the timing data, and then also there were two separate input modules, one on Mat’s computer and one on my computer, but rather than try and synchronize the timing from Mat’s and from my computer, which a lot of people try to do, I just thought, let’s take the interface away from the bit that does the hard work and then that could be anywhere. So that was a big jump that seemed to make total sense once we’d done it. That happened in the second incarnation of our live set, which was a result of all the problems we’d encountered with the first one. And then for the third incarnation, which we just did in Japan in … March, I think, I developed that even further. This was related to the live stuff, the environment I’d developed for my solo performances.
It’s developed even further, but has become even more streamlined and really good. So we can actually now work on different parameters of the same system quite easily, or the same parameter, and that’s brilliant. For example, he could be generating patterns and I could be manipulating the timing that those patterns are played back with. So it’s a really new way of working. What’s interesting is, you know when musicians talk about when they play a guitar they get a certain kind of headspace or they really get into it? Although that’s a bit New Age for me, you can kind of see the truth in it, or the sense in it. And what’s interesting is that with this thing that we’ve managed to make happen, there is that sense of really feeling the presence of someone else in a quite tangible way, even though it’s quite abstract. Obviously, there’s a lot of other people who’ve done that. I’m just talking about in our case.
Ernest: Yes, exactly. But this does sound to me as if the software, including the software architecture, which is the phrase I would use for what you were just talking about, is pretty integral with the work. I don’t think you could say, We could make the same music in completely different ways. Well, you might, but in principle the music itself comes partly from these software structures.
Mark: Yes, we wouldn’t have thought of it without that. Now we’ve made it, we could say let’s go to a time line and re-create it. But what you can imagine is informed by the machines you use, if you know what I mean.
Ernest: Another question is, does writing software change your thinking about your work? Does it lead to new ideas? Is it a driver?
Mark: Yes. There’s a really famous quote from Thomas Dolby. When I was a kid he was on some kids’ program. And he said what he wants is a synthesizer where he can sit down and imagine any sound and the synthesizer will make the sound. And at first I thought wow, that’s really cool. But even as a kid, I remember thinking, but hang on, then he’s just trapped by what he can imagine, he’s not actually messing around. Because from an early age I realized all my ideas came from messing around. Oh, when you turn this dial it does this, etc. So it’s all about discovery. And if you’re just sat there, just limited by what you can think of, nothing actually evolves. The biggest discoveries or advances in music, I think, are done when you can’t imagine what’s about to happen, and then the machine, as you’re using it, just throws something out, and you think, ah, that’s amazing.
Ernest: I think this has some relationship with what Arts and Crafts people talk about in terms of being in a conversation with the medium, carving wood or something, and it’s actually the same kind of mental process.
Mark: Yes, I think so. It’s responding to what you’re dealing with. So I’m really into this idea that you don’t really need a plan and you don’t really need to know where you’re going. You don’t have to go away and formulate the idea and then make it happen using the technology.
Ernest: Is making software something you could not subcontract?
Mark: Yes, and I’ve even gone further than that. I don’t even use the words “using technology.” I don’t say this piece of music was made “using Max/MSP”; I’ll say this piece of music was “made with Max/MSP.” Because I think even the words and the structure of the language you use to describe this is so geared up to reinforcing this belief that somehow you have the idea elsewhere, and the technology’s just there for building it and making it happen.
Ernest: Yes. So you couldn’t use the famous sculpture notion of making a phone call. Donald Judd makes a phone call and says, “Make me this piece of sculpture.” You can’t do that?
Mark: No, but Donald Judd’s evolved through encounters with materials. So now I could make a phone call and say make this track and put these notes here, but I couldn’t have done it before I actually did the experimentation.
Ernest: Maybe I could come at another point, which is that part of your work, certainly things you’ve done with me, are generative, and there are generative processes, I think, in most of your work, whether they’re played with or modified in performance. In generative art, in the generative component, what you’re doing is setting the parameters of the process and then the system works with it. Do you feel that distances you from the object, the sound?
Mark: Well, people accuse me of that. People tend to assume that. There’s a closeness to the sound in playing the piano, although I don’t play the piano, but let’s say there was a distance between the artist and the generative process. Either I do nothing, or I just put up with that distance. But how do you quantify what that distance is, anyway? Who’s to say the distance between me and the generative thing is X amount of units, and the distance between the pianist and his sound is another amount? Where’s that come from, what is that measurement? It’s not something that exists. But in terms of subjectively feeling engaged with it, then obviously I feel as engaged with it as the pianist feels.
Ernest: A composer is obviously more distant than a pianist in this sense, or could be said to be more distant, because they write their notes and someone else plays it.
Mark: Well, again I’d just say how do you measure that distance? What does it mean to talk about distance? I don’t know; I’m not a composer in that sense. But I can imagine that lots of them will think, wow, I was so engaged in what I was doing, they might feel a closeness. So the opposite description could be true. But when you think of composition you think of the pianist with the notepaper and stuff. I don’t know how a composer does what they do, but I’m sure they do lots of different things in order to make a piece of music. So when you ask that question it frames the answer in terms of, now imagine a person sat there at a piano with some music, but really that’s not what they do. And also when I do what I do, it’s not as if I’m doing one thing, I’m doing lots of different things. In the course of a day making a piece of music, it’ll go from me working on a problem in minute detail and being oblivious of everything around me, you could say that’s incredibly close, or it could be me going downstairs and making a cup of tea whilst not even being aware of being in the kitchen and just thinking about the problem that I’m trying to deal with upstairs. So this kind of idea of closeness, for me, I’d just like to reject it.
Ernest: One more step in this direction. It could be said that you don’t actually know, in the case of music, what it’s going to sound like exactly.
Mark: But that’s a good thing. I mean did Jimi Hendrix imagine guitar music before picking up a guitar? Not knowing, for me, is the key to the creative bit. The famous example is DJ Pierre at the birth of acid house, messing around with a TB303 bass line and saying, “I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing, but it sounds fantastic,” and then from that a whole kind of genre evolves. If he’d known how to work the TB303 bass line, he wouldn’t have invented acid house, he would have done some really lame kind of whatever, disco or slightly electro type thing. So for me the not knowing is the important bit and I think it’s something that happens in probably a lot of practices that aren’t necessarily related to computers. But then there’s the other thing, the issue of control. So there’s not knowing what you’re doing, and then there’s the issue of controlling what you’re doing.
Ernest: Those are two different things, I think.
Mark: Yes, I think it’s again this kind of myth that creativity happens by going away and locking yourself in a room, thinking really, really hard and having some flash of inspiration and then expressing it, or putting it into some kind of tangible form. For me creativity isn’t like that. It’s about messing around with stuff, and seeing what happens, and thinking, I like that, and pursuing it and then …
Ernest: So art making is more about discovery than expression?
Mark: I don’t even know what “expression” means. And it feels quite arrogant that someone will come up to me and say, “Oh, what are you trying to express, or what’s your inspiration?” and the honest answer is I’m really sorry but I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, I could answer in their terms, but then I just feel really denigrated that I’ve done that. So I just say it’s not to do with inspiration or expression and things like that. I’m not expressing anything. When you talk about expression, it’s “I’ve had the idea over here and now I want to express it in this physical way,” using something to put that into a tangible form. So for me, I’ve actually nicked your idea, which is that it’s not to do with expression: I use the word “construction.” So it’s not to do with the expression of meaning, it’s to do with the construction, if you’re talking about meaning.
Ernest: As you know, we agree about this. Maybe people wouldn’t make generative art if they didn’t have this point of view.
Mark: I haven’t got anything to express. If I’ve got something to express, I’ll have a cup of tea and have a chat or something like that.
Ernest: A cup of tea isn’t a bad idea! Great. Thanks.
14.13 Conversation with Alex McLean, July 2, 2014
Alex McLean is active across the digital arts, developing a creative practice centering on live coding and improvised music since the year 2000, co-founding the TOPLAP and Algorave movements, and the International Conferences on Live Coding and Live Interfaces. He applies live coding techniques in research into ancient textiles, as post-doc researcher on the European PENELOPE project, hosted by the Research Institute of the Deutsches Museum in Munich. He is based in Sheffield, where he curates the annual festival of Algorithmic and Mechanical Movement, and is trustee of the local Access Space charity working in arts, technology and education. He performs solo as “Yaxu,” releasing music on Sheffield label Computer Club.
Ernest: I wanted to start with where programming and your art practice, your music, came together for you? Were you programming first, or did you come to programming after you committed yourself to music?
Alex: Definitely programming first: very enthusiastic programmer from a young age. Obsessive really. Programming is really what I’ve mainly done through my life, more than anything else. So I suppose programming is my way of interacting with the world. I had a career as a software developer for ten years, mainly in the music industry. I was always interested in the creative aspects of programming, and my collaborator Adrian Ward encouraged me into the world of software art. I think this path is less common in the world of live coding: usually it’s musicians wanting to explore code rather than programmers wanting to explore music.
Figure 14.11
Alex McLean performing at Algorave Karlsruhe, 2015. See color insert. (Photograph by Rodrigo Velasco.)
Ernest: But you were early in the game, I guess. Was that because you were programming with and for people before you even started making music yourself?
Alex: Yes, I guess. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events. I’ve always been interested in programming as a culture and so naturally fell into doing generative music and software art.
Ernest: Tell me about the generative music, what sort of stuff did you do?
Alex: Experimental electronic music. I worked closely with Adrian Ward, and in general he’d be more interested in the chordal and timbral aspects of sound and I’d be more interested in rhythm generation, the usual things like polyrhythms and simple cellular automata, down to just very simple modular arithmetic, but exploring rhythm through the code. We were so interested in the programming side that the programming really was the music. It’s not just using programming as a means to an end, but really thinking about music in terms of abstraction and composition, the same kind of thing you think about when you’re writing a program.
Ernest: Let’s concentrate on this point for a moment, which is the way in which the program itself related and still relates to the music: not a means to an end but an integral part.
Alex: Yes, code is a key part of my creative process. I see programming as enabling me to reach beyond my own abilities, my own imagination. To some extent now I’ve come to the opinion that I don’t fully understand my code, I just experience its output and have a number of ways in which I manipulate the code as a live interaction, to explore the rhythm that it’s making. This isn’t about having an idea, then implementing it, it’s more just starting programming, hearing the results and then working with the program to sort of mold it.
Ernest: In the live coding work the performance is actually part of that exploration itself, in a sense.
Alex: Yes.
Ernest: Is that a motivating factor, actually exploring the world of programming and music with the audience? Or could you equally well be doing that in a studio and generating something and then playing it?
Alex: Either would work. I’m just not very good at working in a studio, I never really come up with particular tracks or anything like that, so when I’m performing I’m not thinking about particular themes. I might have a particular idea I want to play with but I don’t have pieces of music that I perform, and so when I try and write things in the studio on my own it doesn’t work. It’s more like developing the software than developing particular pieces, particular recordings.
Ernest: Do you think that’s because you listen to it differently with an audience present? Some kind of feedback?
Alex: Yes, I think there’s just a lot of focus that you don’t get on your own. It’s down to motivation. Also, when people are dancing that changes it again. I am focused on the code but at the same time am sensing people reacting physically to it, dancing to the algorithms.
Ernest: So when you see people dancing to your algorithms do you respond to that?
Alex: Oh yes.
Ernest: So there’s a feedback going on between what these people are doing and what you’re doing.
Alex: I think it amplifies the feedback. I’m sure it’s always there in an audience but when they’re dancing it becomes very physical. And somehow I think coding is very physical as well, or live coding is at least, because even though I’m dealing in the abstract world of code, the actual live experience of it is very physical, because hearing becomes a very physical, perceptual aspect of the programming process.
Ernest: And does it make a lot of difference to you what language or environment you’re working in, how that works? Is it a very delicate matter, or does it not matter?
Alex: Well, I only use my own music systems, so what I tend to do is create a language, and learn how to use it through doing a series of performances. I’ve made a language called Tidal and my first performance was in London at a preconference gig, and it didn’t go very well. It was the first time I’d used it; I didn’t really know what to do, which is quite a shame because some people had traveled quite far. But then through performing I’m learning too and in a sense that’s part of the performance, that kind of very active exploration where you’re learning how to use the software you’ve made.
But then after a while I start getting bored with a system, with its limits, it’s like I’d explored the constraints, I’m going through the motions, it starts feeling predetermined, and that’s when I feel like making a new system. In a sense, in performances I am learning to use the system, but once I’ve learnt it I want to make a new one.
Ernest: So you need a tension? A tension between the facility and the difficulty. You need a certain level of difficulty or else your adrenalin isn’t lifted enough.
Alex: Yes. That’s Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow, isn’t it, optimum experience between the boundaries of boredom and difficulty.
Ernest: But people don’t often talk about that in the context of writing code in art, so that’s an interesting special case, I think, where you’ve drawn that out in the way you’re working.
Alex: Yes. With laptop performances, people often say how bored people look while they’re using their interfaces, and perhaps that’s true when it’s a fixed user interface, but with live coding I think people look very intense, very fixed stare. For me this switched on, engaged flow means that laptop performance is less of a problem, because it’s clear that there is a very strong physical engagement with the code, even though it is so abstract.
Ernest: How about the displaying of code, is that partly a good thing for that reason? What’s the rationale or what’s the aesthetic, do you think, behind it?
Alex: I think it’s a difficult one. I’ve performed both with and without projecting code. I’ve been in the situation where I’ve been stood at the back of a performance or with people dancing in front and not projecting the code, and that was a really nice situation because people were reacting just to the music and to each other, and we were at the back just watching it all, it was quite nice. That was fine. I’ve also been in a situation where people are staring, watching the code, and it’s hard to know what they’re thinking, there’s no real reaction to it, maybe they’re getting bored, maybe they’re interested. So I don’t know.
But I think there is something about seeing the code appear before you and develop in complexity along with the music it represents, that you can hear. There’s also something about exposing code to people who haven’t seen code before, yet use software all the time and have software that has a lot of control over their lives. Seeing someone engage with code in a very creative way, I think means that they see a different way of interacting with technology, and I think that might switch them onto the music.
So I suppose the answer is that I’m not sure; I don’t know if it distracts from musical engagement or whether it opens it up, and really it needs an ethnographic study or something like this to maybe get to the bottom of it. Also, it’s quite a young way of performing and there’s very little in the way of reviews or any kind of critical engagement, so it’s an open question really. I suppose the reason I do it is because the alternative is not showing anything, and it seems better to show something than show nothing.
Ernest: Do you feel potentially it would be interesting to look at the degree to which people are likely to better understand something about the code or not?
Alex: Yes.
Ernest: It can just look completely mysterious to some people.
Alex: Maybe the challenge is to develop new languages which are more easily understood. For music I think that means just making more declarative languages that are more about the structure of music, perhaps even something that has a kind of prosody, like a natural language. Then the audience may be able to engage with it more.
Ernest: It might be that it doesn’t matter whether they understand the details, but it’s getting the general drift in a sense, and if it’s declarative, they’re perhaps more likely to get the drift of it.
Alex: Yes. They should be able to see a change, and hear a change, and connect them. I think that’s true of any instrumental performance as well, if you’re a nonguitarist you won’t understand the technical things that are going on, but you’ll still be able to make a connection.
Ernest: So you could compare it to watching a band or an orchestra play while you’re listening, and you can see something about what’s going on even though you may not understand all the details.
Alex: Yes.
Ernest: You said you started with generative music, but of course the live coding is generative; it’s just that you’re changing the generative processes during the time, isn’t it?
Alex: Yes. Which I think changes a bit.
Ernest: It’s just another layer?
Alex: Yes.
Ernest: I had another question about that. Do you feel a distance between yourself and the music, the sound, because what you’re working on is the generative process rather than the sound?
Alex: Yes, I think so. I play the guitar a little bit although I’m not an instrumentalist, but when I go and see a band I realize there’s something very different going on that’s very direct, very instantaneous, very embodied Live coding does feel distant in comparison. But that distance from the notes means you get closer to the composition. If you’re describing musical relationships with code then you’re very close to those structures even though you’re quite far away from the sound. So it’s choosing a layer of abstraction really. By getting close to these constructs you’re necessarily further away from the physicality of making each sound.
Ernest: But it does mean perhaps that you don’t necessarily know what it’s actually going to sound like in detail. The texture of it—maybe something that might sometimes be a slight surprise.
Alex: I think you are opening yourself up to a lot of surprise with generative music or art. I think that surprise is always good in creative exploration—it’s your means of pushing the boundaries.
Ernest: Has that got something to do with what you said earlier about it all gets too sorted out, or it gets boring and you want to move onto the next thing? Is that maybe because you’re not getting enough surprises?
Alex: Yes, definitely. There are people like Dan Stowell, though, who are doing beatboxing and live coding at the same time, so managing to engage both with the instantaneous sound, then sampling that, and then adding filters and things by live coding.
There’s ways of also working with instrumentalists at the same time, so having a guitarist making music while you’re live coding. Different approaches but still managing to collaborate.
Ernest: Can you have two live coders interacting with one another on the same piece?
Alex: Yes, that’s what I usually do, actually. It works well to have more than one because then you still get pace of change, you get people exchanging ideas, and it becomes more much more engaging, for me at least.
Ernest: So that pace of change is another issue because in the improvisational world it’s particularly slow. Do you regret that, or do you foresee that as a positive?
Alex: I think it’s something I work hard to improve, so I suppose in a way I wouldn’t say regret, but yes I basically agree with you. I think through practicing live coding and developing new languages it can be reduced, and that has to be a positive thing, that little bit of latency. I started live coding with Perl and then moved to Haskell to make Tidal and found my rate of change was reduced from maybe a minute to maybe ten seconds or less.
Ernest: In some different contexts I’m aware of people’s saying that they value that thinking time, and if the latency is reduced, they lose it and in a way that’s not always a good thing.
Alex: Yes. I suppose though a traditional improviser would still have thinking time while they are playing. So maybe it’s the same for a live coder except they don’t have to physically continue playing around the current theme while they think, because the computer does it for them.
Ernest: Technically how does your system work? What is the structure of your system? Are you operating a text file that’s being constantly interpreted?
Alex: I’ve got my Tidal language running in a text editor, and I’m just sending blocks of code to the interpreter which is updating some mutable variables, global variables I suppose you could call them, which a separate thread is then turning into trigger messages for a synthesizer. I’m just working on the compositional level in that I don’t do any synthesis really. It’s just triggering samples and transforming patterns.
Ernest: So you’re working on these blocks of code. If we’re watching you do it on a projected screen, we’re watching you add that text and then at some point you submit it to the interpreter.
Alex: Yes. So I’ll do a particular control sequence and then you see the screen flash around the code I’m sending, and then the music would change.
Ernest: So it’s an update of the file, an update of the system, and then we’ve got a new revised system.
Alex: I call Tidal a pattern language, in that you just define sequences or functions like sine waves and then add functions that manipulate that—for example, rotating that sequence every third repetition, or adding something to it every now and then, or some kind of transformation using some preprepared algorithm. You’re just stringing together functions, really. Tidal is getting increasingly simple the more I develop it, which I think is positive for live coding.
Ernest: Let me just understand this a bit more. There is a block of code that the interpreter is interpreting that it’s using all the time.
Alex: Yes.
Ernest: If you do nothing that’s what it’ll do?
Alex: Yes.
Ernest: And when you do something you’re basically updating that code in some way, adding new function or redefining one that’s there already.
Alex: Redefining, yes. I’ll have a pattern, which is itself a function, and I’m just redefining the patterns all the time.
Ernest: So you’re changing the program. Do you sometimes also change the data, like maybe some list it’s using, that you might in addition—I don’t mean instead of—sometimes turn that list round or something?
Alex: I’d quite often start off with a simple sequence and then add functions to that, so I might go back and change that sequence. And while the sequence looks like a list, it is in fact represented as a function from time to events. In my current system I have it so I can have arbitrary subdivisions of time, so I’m not constrained by sixteen beats to the bar, which I have been until a few months ago. I am now getting interested in more varied time signatures, embedded time signatures.
Ernest: Obviously, writing code is completely integral with this work. What I’m trying to explore is what the range of aesthetic issues are that are affected by the code? Could you conceive of now making music that wasn’t generated from code?
Alex: I think if I did, it would probably sound fairly similar. I think it wouldn’t be live; it would have to be presequenced music. I’d probably still be following algorithms but manually.
Ernest: So the whole concept of computation and code influences everything really pretty much about the work?
Alex: Yes. It’s the way of thinking about it. Code is the most suitable way of thinking about music in that way. You could do it just with writing out by hand but …
Ernest: It would take forever to do.
Alex: Yes.
Ernest: How do you find it in terms of the world you live in, in terms of getting performances or being commissioned to do anything? Is it hard, do you find?
Alex: Well, it’s mostly within the academic world, I suppose, and art festival world that I’ve played. I’ve played in quite major venues and major festivals like Sonar and STRP Festivals and Ars Electronica and this kind of thing. It’s not mainstream, though.
Ernest: All these are places where computers are accepted in some sense? What do you think is the most successful thing so far in terms of exposure? What are you most pleased with?
Alex: Don’t know. I did some really good performances at Sonar. I think the most successful thing’s been when people dance.
Ernest: What’s your next big thing? What are you looking forward to?
Alex: Well the fellowship, just spending two years developing my ideas and collaborations. The PhD was fantastic, actually. I was trying to get away from live coding then, I was trying to branch out and expand my horizons. I found out I expanded them but then narrowed them back down to live coding again.
Ernest: Good luck with that. Thanks very much.
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1. “Ernie Kovacs—Kovacs in Color, the Tilted Table Sketch,” Kovacs Corner, video, 1:44 December 27, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PefS8tY_gnI.
2. Aaron Marcus, “An Introduction to the Visual Syntax of Concrete Poetry,” Visible Language 8 (4) (1974): 333–360.
3. Aaron Marcus, “Visual Rhetoric in a Pictographic-Ideographic Narrative,” in Semiotics Unfolding, Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, vol. 3, pt. 6, ed. Tasso Borbé (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1983), 1501–1508.
4. From http://
5. Taken from http://
6. From the parallelResonance series. See http://
7. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968).
8. Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Lambert, and Catherine Mason, eds., White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960–1980 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
9. Catherine Mason, A Computer in the Art Room: The Origins of British Computer Arts 1950–1980 (London: Quiller Press, 2008).
10. Roman Verostko at http://
11. See “Roman Verostko Participates in Code: The Language of Our Time,” Roman Verostko: Artwork since 1947, accessed July 10, 2018, http://
12. Flowers of Learning at http://
13. Algorithmic Poems at http://
14. Four Algorists in the Land of Newton at http://
15. Software as Genotype at http://
16. Links for Magic Hand at http://
17. Vehicle Sundown Event at http://
18. Coalfields to Art Institute at http://
19. Lindisfarne Gospels at https://
20. Added note by Roman Verostko: “Writing on the new biology of machines, Kevin Kelly identified The Library of Form, a frontier hyperspace of form being pioneered by Karl Sims (Out of Control, 1994, Chapter 14). I propose to identify the parameters for a Gallery of D’Arcy Thompson to embrace computable abstract art that is rigorously non-representational, i.e., nonobjective, concrete, pure abstract art. Unveiling art within the hyperspace of forms with these parameters was certainly the dream of artists like Frantisek Kupka.”
21. From http://
22. Pseudocode is a simple notation that looks like computer code, but cannot actually be run on a computer. It is used to aid the design of software.