Roger Malina

The Alan Turing Centenary Year Celebrations have Begun

http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/

The arts and culture activities can be found at:

http://web.me.com/annadumitriu/Alan_Turing_Year_Arts/Home.html

Alan Turing Year 2012 Arts and Culture Subcommittee
The Alan Turing Year 2012 Arts and Culture Subcommittee has been formed to develop and promote cultural activities inspired by the work of Alan Turing.

Roger Malina

Colleagues

I have drafted this text for the VIDA catalogue which celebrates the 25th anniversary
of the Artificial-Life Art movemement. COmment and suggestions welcome

Roger Malina

Artificial Life in Art and Science 25 years later: New Worlds and Virtual Humans

Introduction

VIDA this year is looking back at the 25 years since the first artificial life conferences. Fifty years ago the Macy Conferences led to a similar new emerging field of practice in Cybernetics (1). These two fields, artificial life and cybernetics, are of course ‘joined at the hip” in understanding how order develops in complex systems and more generally the understanding of intelligence, life and consciousness. These are big agendas in the sciences and in the arts and humanities; and each generation of scientists, scholars and artists deploys new tactics, tools and methodologies. So what developments over the past twenty five years have changed the discussion since the A-Life conferences? In this article I want to expand on two areas of current scientific excitement which I think will be among developments that will inform future A-Life and A-Life Art: the discovery of exo-planets and the new emerging science of complex networks.

Post Mechanical Reproduction

In the 1989 Supplementary Issue of Leonardo for SIGGRAPH (2) I reviewed the articles we had published since 1967 on work by artists using computers. Leonardo co-editor David Carrier had recently made the inflammatory statement in an editorial: “ … it is genuinely unclear to me whether any art made using computers is truly significant” (3). Today e-culture has developed to such an extent that we now have entire computer based industries in arts and entertainment, yet within the traditional fine arts institutions this question is still heard. In the article I developed a number of ideas, but focused on the assertion that the interesting computer art was the kind of new art forms that could not have been made without a computer. Though computers have been used in many forms of tradition art making, much of it could have been made without the use of computers, perhaps more slowly or more laboriously. Much of the special effects, graphics and animation arts are in this category. But new forms of art that could not have been made without computers are now established.

In the Leonardo article, I pointed to the work of Harold Cohen and Roman Verostko using AI algorithms as one area that seemed particularly promising, in particular because it enabled a form of creative collaboration between the artists and the software system. I also discussed the work in shape grammars by Stiny and Gips, Joan and Russell Kirsch, Ray Lauzzana and Lynn Pocock-Williams as fundamental in developing rule based systems for creation of art. Rule based generation of art, coupled to the science of complex systems in general, has become common. And as inter-active systems have become more sophisticated the ‘collaboration’ between humans and software systems has become routine and the work of the pioneers preceded the field of A-Life.

In 1989 the Santa Fe A-Life workshop proceedings began to appear (4). For the 1990 Leonardo Supplementary Issue for SIGGRAPH (5), my article was titled “ The Work of Art in the Age of Post-Mechanical Reproduction” I used the Santa-Fe text by Langton to argue that just as A-Life could locate life-as-we-know-it within life-as-it-could-be, an art agenda within the computer arts could now be delineated as locating art-as-we-know-it within art-as-it-could-be. One of the goals was creating an artistic or creative ‘other’ with the key issue of ‘post-mechanical’ or ‘generative’ reproduction as the new agenda. The reference to Walter Benjamin’s “post mechanical” term referred to an earlier time when new communication and media technologies were emerging; in general of course we see new art forms evolving rather than replacing prior ones. Roman Verostko had been arguing that software could be viewed as genotype (6). Software systems with learning, memory, extrapolation have proliferated and such art is often ‘post mechanical’ in the sense that it implements strategies that are also implemented by living systems. It is fair to say that this pioneering work has been a fruitful ground for many developments in A-Life Art. And in the new special effects industry we see the dream of ‘virtual’ actors beginning to be implemented; the more general term of “Virtual Humans “ has developed to refer both to the way on line behaviours affect and modify the behavior of humans in physical space, as well as autonomous on line avatars and virtual creatures. As the VIDA artists have amply demonstrated this agenda is now being implemented and the concept of Virtual Humans is now culturally embedded; the cultural dream of human-made ‘poeisis’ is taking form.

Life-As-It-Could-Be: New Worlds

In 1987 at the time of the A-Life conferences the only planets known to us were the planets around our solar system. In 1995 scientists Mayor with Queloz made the first discovery of planets around other stars (7). The discovery of 51 Pegasus was made at the Observatoire de Haute Provence, part of the Observatory where I work, and this discovery electrified the scientific community. For all of human culture, we had been limited to the handful of planets around our on sun; and indeed in human mythology these celestial messengers assumed ‘extra- human’ importance. Thanks to two space missions, the CNES COROT and NASA Kepler satellites, and a number of ground based telescopes such as the HARPS and SOPHIE projects, new exo-planets around other stars are being discovered at a rapid rate; at the time of writing over 1000 planets have now been discovered. It is now speculated that there are more planets in the universe than stars, and that many planets are ejected into interstellar space during the formation of planetary systems. This is a ‘galilean’ revolution’. The conditions for the appearance of life forms appear to be plentiful.

Many of these exo-planets have solid surfaces and are in the so-called ‘habitable’ zone around their star with the likelihood that liquid water exists on their surface. The search for evidence of life on these planets is now under way. It is fair to say that the ‘search for life as it could be’ is limited mostly by our imagination of what forms life might take and how to detect its presence at a distance. A-Life artists should contribute to this quest; the work of artists in robotics, bio-mimetic systems, self repairing and propagating art works are forms of ‘experimental’ exo-biology.

Even though there have been large advances in the sciences of artificial life, our understanding of ‘enabling’ structures and processes remains very limited. What makes the originating of self-sustaining life possible is still un-answered, Stuart Kauffman in his book “Re-Inventing the Sacred” (8) reviews the large advances in the sciences of complexity but fingers the ‘mystery’ of how emergence leads to self-consciousness as beyond the limits of current science. Recently the US research agency DARPA issued a call for proposals (9) to explore ‘physical intelligence’, or forms of intelligent systems not based on biological analogs. Nano-scientist Jim Gimzewski , one of the grant awardees, has discussed the need to understand ‘inter-facial’ intelligence (10), or how is it that when you keep adding atoms together at some point the physical system starts acquiring functionality that are building blocks of self-propagation and intelligence ( memory, anticipation, empathy etc). Gimzewski is a very prominent proponent of art-science collaboration as one way to overcome the roadblocks to scientific inquiry (10). A-Life Art is one strategy. In my 1990 Leonardo article (5) I referred to the ideas of Australian artist Sally Prior and her call for the ‘technologies of artificial compassion”. We are still very far from responding to this challenge and this is surely an artists agenda.

The new Science of Complex Networks

As stated above there is a basic open question; how is it that when you keep adding atoms together the system starts acquiring functionality that becomes part of intelligence? The science of complexity has contributed fundamental ideas to the general phenomenon of emergence but in recent years new discoveries in network mathematics has introduced new sources of motivation and inspiration. This new science of complex networks is beginning to provide some tools (11) that are of a trans-disciplinary nature since they apply to network topologies in widely differing networked structure from the internet, to genetic networks, to transportation systems. The topological structure of a network encodes inherently the enhancement and suppression of certain kinds of behaviors; many networks follow growth rules such as power law distributions; network growth and instabilities can be modeled predictively. Bruno Giorgini in his work on the Physics of the City, models the complex networks of human pedestrians and in the models developed a parameter for ‘free will’ is postulated (12). Is free will a result of network structures ? At the instigation of complex network scientist Laszlo Barabasi, Leonardo has initiated a series of conferences on Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks (13). Led by Maximillian Schich and Isabelle Meirelles, the Leonardo Day conferences confront the work of scientists, humanities scholars and artists to illuminate how the structure and organization of complex networks allow for trans-disciplinary understanding to be developed. Not only can mathematical tools be shared, but the research questions emerging in the arts and humanities can drive scientific inquiry and the direction of complex network research. And artists are among the researchers developing the applications of the new mathematical insights. In a sense it is a resurgence of some of the ideas of bio-morphism, but renewed by the understanding of A-Life through the sciences of complex systems and the science of complex networks.

Art-Science Collaboration

The Artificial Life, and Complexity, research communities at their beginnings in general were exceptional in their open-ness to the involvement of artists in their conferences and discussions. The success of VIDA has in many ways emerged from this open-ness to culturally driven scientific research agendas. Since 1987 the art-science landscape has been transformed both in terms of creative practice and institutional platforms. A-Life Art is an ‘exemplar’ in the sense that the work of artists has influenced the work of scientists as well as the more usual influence of science and technology on the work of artists. As e-culture has developed, the cultural and entertainment industries have become significant drivers of research and development in science and technology not only in the computer sciences, but also in robotics, mathematics and we are beginning to see this in the life sciences as the bio-arts expand and appropriate biotechnologies in the same way that artists appropriated and re-directed areas of computer development.

In the united states, a recent discussion within workshops organized by the US National Science Foundation and the US National Endowment for the Arts have begun to articulate a new agenda of converting STEM ( Science,….) to STEAM (14) ( or coupling the arts and humanities within STEM education). This recognizes the fact that the cultural imagination is often a productive entry point for young people, and driver motivation of careers in science and technology.

A major challenge remains the institutional contexts that make it possible for artists and scientists to collaborate on joint research agendas. The work recognized by VIDA has been produced in a bewildering variety of institutional settings from artist’s studios, to cultural to scientific to industrial settings. The ‘make’ and hacker communities have provided new forms of enabling social structures. Part of the challenge is the heterogeneity of practices that need to be accommodated. Creative practices within the arts (whether visual, sound, literary, performance etc) vary with deployment differing individual and collaborative approaches. Within the science areas covered by artificial life, there are very different scientific cultures in genomics, ecology, cognitive sciences, biology. Approaches of experimental scientists often differ from those of observational sciences.

As a result of this heterogeneity, a rich ecology of institutional platforms is developing within and outside of academia. Organisations such as Symbiotica, Sci-Art in Zurich, IMERA in Marseille, Science Gallery Dublin use anchoring within institutions of higher education. Non profit sector organizations such as ANAT, Arts Catalyst, Leonardo, Zero-One, Le Laboratoire broker art-science collaboration anchored in the cultural sector. Cultural institutions such as ZKM, Ars Electronica, FACT, Future Everything , Art Science Museum in Singapore have developed mixed programming and research structures. And competitions and prizes such as Ars Electronica, VIDA continue to play an important role in advocating and promoting work that involves actual collaboration between artists and scientists. The creation of institutional frameworks that enable self generating sustainable creation of art that drives science and engineering agendas is perhaps the new frontier of A-Life Art.

References:

1) Macy conferences; American Society for Cybernetics: http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacySummary.htm
2) Roger F Malina, Computer Art in the Context of the Journal Leonardo, 1989 Leonardo SIGGRAPH Supplemental Issue, p 67.
3) Editorial: The Arts and Science and Technology: Problems and Prospects, David Carrier, Leonardo , Vol. 21, No. 4 (1988), pp. 341-342
4) Chris Langton, Artificial Life II , Proceedings of the workshop on artificial life held February, 1990 in Santa Fe, New MexicoAddison-Wesley, 1992
5) Roger F Malina, Digital Image-Digital Cinema: The Work of Art in the Age of Post Mechanical Reproduction, 1990 Leonardo SIGGRAPH Supplemental Issue, p 33.
6) Epigenetic Painting: Software as Genotype, Roman Verostko, Leonardo , Vol. 23, No. 1 (1990), pp. 17-23
7) Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (1995). “A Jupiter-mass companion to a solar-type star”. Nature 378 (6555): 355–359.
S. Kauffman, 2008, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. [Basic Books]
9) DARPA Physical Intelligence Program: http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/DSO/Programs/Physical_Intelligence.aspx
10) James Gimzewski, : What Art can do for Science: Learning to Learn ,Consciousness Reframed 11, Trondheim, 2011, http://www.scribd.com/doc/56513746/226-2010-TEKS
11) See in particular the work of Laszlo Barabasi: http://www.barabasi.com/
12) Bruno Giorgini: http://malina.diatrope.com/2011/09/25/free-will-theory-of-the-mind-and-the-physics-of-the-city/
13) http://artshumanities.netsci2012.net/
14) http://stemtosteam.org/