“For bicycles are messengers. Picasso recognised that they carry meaning when he made a saddle and handlebars into a bull’s head, and Duchamp (in his case, non-meaning) when he put a bicycle wheel in an art gallery.”
Category: media & arts – Page 124
“The subtitle to this post is a variation of William Gibson’s famous remark: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” An obvious follow up question is: if the future is already here, where can I find it?”
Oh Japan, how I love your beautiful insanity. wink
If you’re a fan of virtual musicians with computer-generated bodies and voices, and you live in North America, then do I have news for you.
Hatsune Miku, Japan’s “virtual pop star,” is coming to the US and Canada next year for a seven-city, synth-filled tour—her first tour in this neck of the woods. Miku herself may be a digital illusion, but her unique impact on the music industry is very real.
Her bio describes her to her 2.5 million Facebook fans as “a virtual singer who can sing any song that anybody composes.” She debuted in 2007 as software called Vocaloid developed by Crypton Future Media, a Sapporo-based music technology company. Vocaloid software generates a human-sounding singing voice, but without any actual humans.
“The Sundance Institute—the organization responsible for the annual film festival that has given rise to the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Ava DuVernay—is looking to nurture a whole new kind of talent: virtual reality filmmakers.”
To many people, the introduction of the first Macintosh computer and its graphical user interface in 1984 is viewed as the dawn of creative computing. But if you ask Dr. Nick Montfort, a poet, computer scientist, and assistant professor of Digital Media at MIT, he’ll offer a different direction and definition for creative computing and its origins.
Defining Creative
“Creative Computing was the name of a computer magazine that ran from 1974 through 1985. Even before micro-computing there was already this magazine extolling the capabilities of the computer to teach, to help people learn, help people explore and help them do different types of creative work, in literature, the arts, music and so on,” Montfort said.
“It was a time when people had a lot of hope that computing would enable people personally as artists and creators to do work. It was actually a different time than we’re in now. There are a few people working in those areas, but it’s not as widespread as hoped in the late 70’s or early 80s.”
These days, Montfort notes that many people use the term “artificial intelligence” interchangeably with creative computing. While there are some parallels, Montfort said what is classically called AI isn’t the same as computational creativity. The difference, he says, is in the results.
“A lot of the ways in which AI is understood is the ability to achieve a particular known objective,” Montfort said. “In computational creativity, you’re trying to develop a system that will surprise you. If it does something you already knew about then, by definition, it’s not creative.”
Given that, Montfort quickly pointed out that creative computing can still come from known objectives.
“A lot of good creative computer work comes from doing things we already know computers can do well,” he said. “As a simple example, the difference between a computer as a producer of poetic language and person as a producer of poetic language is, the computer can just do it forever. The computer can just keep reproducing and, (with) that capability to bring it together with images to produce a visual display, now you’re able to do something new. There’s no technical accomplishment, but it’s beautiful nonetheless.”
Models of Creativity
As a poet himself, another area of creative computing that Montfort keeps an eye on is the study of models of creativity used to imitate human creativity. While the goal may be to replicate human creativity, Montfort has a greater appreciation for the end results that don’t necessarily appear human-like.
“Even if you’re using a model of human creativity the way it’s done in computational creativity, you don’t have to try to make something human-like, (even though) some people will try to make human-like poetry,” Montfort said. “I’d much rather have a system that is doing something radically different than human artistic practice and making these bizarre combinations than just seeing the results of imitative work.”
To further illustrate his point, Montfort cited a recent computer generated novel contest that yielded some extraordinary, and unusual, results. Those novels were nothing close to what a human might have written, he said, but depending on the eye of the beholder, it at least bodes well for the future.
“A lot of the future of creative computing is individual engagement with creative types of programs,” Montfort said. “That’s not just using drawing programs or other facilities to do work or using prepackaged apps that might assist creatively in the process of composition or creation, but it’s actually going and having people work to code themselves, which they can do with existing programs, modifying them, learning about code and developing their abilities in very informal ways.”
That future of creative computing lies not in industrial creativity or video games, but rather a sharing of information and revisioning of ideas in the multiple hands and minds of connected programmers, Montfort believes.
“One doesn’t have to get a computer science degree or even take a formal class. I think the perspective of free software and open source is very important to the future of creative programming,” Montfort said. “…If people take an academic project and provide their work as free software, that’s great for all sorts of reasons. It allows people to replicate your results, it allows people to build on your research, but also, people might take the work that you’ve done and inflect it in different types of artistic and creative ways.”
““I would be in school and that’s when I would socialize with kids, but it wasn’t a huge part of my life. I had a very rich imagination and a rich inner life. There are 100 acres of forest. So from a very young age, I just learned how to entertain myself.””
“Wolf went for a walk over the world from the Mir Space Station in the late 1990s and saw the Earth seemingly vanish. His recollection so moved New York-based artist Rachel Rose when she heard it on NPR that she went to considerable lengths to track him down for a personal retelling.”
Photographs taken by astronaut Scott Kelly from the International Space Station are beautiful – but could a robot do better?
InVisage filmed in challenging, bright sunlight conditions to test the dynamic range, and shot fast moving subjects (RC race cars) to show off the global shutter. The resulting footage (below) is surprisingly cinematic, considering that the sensor is smartphone sized. (It’s also a bit soft, which the company chalked up to the sensor being an early prototype.) The tech looks intriguing, though the level of hype in the press release and making-of film is a bit over-the-top. Still, if it can be refined further — perhaps by a sensor company like Sony — it could result in strikingly better smartphone and camera images in the not-too-distant future.
Adam Alonzi has made another excellent film about the power of gene therapy.
Narrated and produced by Adam Alonzi. Music arranged by Leslee Frost. Sponsored by BioViva Sciences Inc.
Alzheimer’s Disease.
Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder. It is the leading cause of dementia. Typically the condition affects short-term memory, but as it advances it can result in disorientation, mood disorders, language difficulties and behavioral issues. Over time, body functions are lost, leading to death.
Current treatment options are extremely limited and the outlook is poor for sufferers with the average life expectancy being 3–9 years from diagnosis. According to RAND Corp, the average annual cost of care for someone with Alzheimer’s disease is $41,689 to $56,290.
BioViva’s Therapy — Telomerase AAV gene therapy.
We are exploring therapies with the gene that creates telomerase to rejuvenate the microglia cells that support the Neurons with the aim of combating Alzheimer’s disease and restoring healthy function to the brain once more. There is mounting evidence to indicate this gene plays an active role in protection from Tau Pathology and various experiments have encouraged us to pursue this therapy with the goal of eliminating the suffering this disease brings.