Rhea Myers

Blog

  • Image

    In cultural studies, all the world’s a text and all the men and women in it are but signifiers. Art is a poor cousin of text, as text is more like text than art is.
    In computing, when a program is copied from memory to a disk so it can be restored later, it’s called an image. When an entire computer disk is copied for a backup or to be moved to another computer, it’s called an image (or sometimes a mirror). Programs do have “TEXT” sections, but those aren’t the important bits.
    So hackers have got it right, anyway. 🙂

  • Creative AI

    Margaret Boden described true, historically-unprecedented creativity (“H-Creativity”) as adding an additional dimension to the search space (I think – I’m paraphrasing badly here). Everyone should read “The Creative Mind”, especially me as I can’t remember the section I want to quote from. 🙂

    Edward DeBono describes creativity as “making novel associations” IIRC, and came up with a theory of how this works in the 1960s. I recommend “Serious Creativity” as a good introduction to his work. His techniques will be familiar to the artificial creativity researcher: random association, conceptual slippage, working backwards, etc., but he describes them for human beings to use rather than AIs.

    Douglas Hofstadter describes a system that build, rebuilds, analyses and operates on its own descriptions of its problem space in “Fluid Analogies”.

    There is no reason why we cannot create an AI (or whatever) that combines these approaches. If we take a set of weighted low-level concepts (like role-playing game skills: strong 75, blue 11, breakable 4, bendy 120), assemble sets of them to describe concepts, map these onto points in the search space and then allow the search space and the concepts to be modified we’re away. The Tony Buzan book with the 40,000 concept personal memory system indexed on what look like AOL passwords might be a good model for a re-mappable memory space that allows novel associations.

    So how do you modify the search space? How do you add an extra dimension? Well, it depends what you regard as a dimension. And there’s the problem that creating new state spaces to search becomes a state space search for state spaces, at which point I have to confess that there’s no escape. 🙂 Two schemes for adding dimensions spring to mind. The first is just to encode the entire state space in a one-dimensional array. Extra dimensions become extra slices of the array, which is grown to accommodate them. The other is to take the “a bicycle is seven dimensional object” view and declare the search space’s dimensions to be the combinations of atomic concepts that values can be assigned to. It’s easy to see how to change the dimensions in this scheme, even if to a non-mathematician like me it feels like cheating. 🙂

  • Processing

    Dave Bausola recommended “Processing” to me. Processing is the sequel to DBN, and if you know java or JavaScript/ActionScript you already know it. Ed from Soda is using it to write moovl, the sequel to SodaPlay.
    I’ve had it on my hard disk for a while now but I’d not really had a look at it. It took me all of an hour to be writing three-dimensional animations in it this evening. I’ll be converting The Cybernetic Artwork Nobody Wrote to Processing, and I think I’ll do Ghosts/Subjects using it as well.
    Processing

  • Music/Response

    Check whether that small label is just a front for a megacorp.:
    RIAA Tracker
    Find similar groups to old favourites:
    musicplasma

  • Genetic Aesthetic Determinism

    NewScientist is asking whether we all inhabit the same sensory universe (“In The Realm Of Your Senses”, 31/1/04). Yes, that old chestnut. There’s interesting new evidence on genetic variations in the senses such as taste and smell. And of course we learn from our senses, so this may have some bearing on the construction of our self.
    But, as NewScientist recognises, once you get the data from your senses you have to process it. And then all bets are off. The processing may vary genetically, or the brain may converge on a coherent and normalised view of the world.
    I wouldn’t mind having orange-receptive eye cones, though, which are a very uncommon bit of genetics. I think I have trouble with orange. I can see it, but I’m never convinced I’m seeing what everybody else is seeing. I tend to see a reddy yellow or a yellowy red, very rarely an orange. Maybe it’s just a mental block from one of my tutors accusing me of being colour blind one time when I was using deliberately horrible colours. I can see the numbers, anyway…

  • Grafittibot

    I love this grafitti-drawing spraycan robot:
    Hektor
    It’s like a grunge version of AARON.
    Art & Language’s idea that painting could be justified if its products couldn’t be created any other way applies to drawing machines as well. There are scales and complexities a human being couldn’t draw at speed (Nobson Newtown being a case in point) but that might be relevant to a contemporary realism. A drawing machine could achieve this and allow a more iterative creative process rather than a painstaking postconceptual rendering ritual.

  • Freedom From, Freedom To

    Freedom to is suffering in the name of freedom from. Manufacturing enemies for people to want to be free from doesn’t really cover removing their freedom to publicly question this.

  • Minara

    Minara is going well. Basic graphics and buffers are implemented so I’m onto the Lisp code for event and tool handling now. I’ve written utilities to convert to and from Minara format and PostScript, and Minara can render its own logo. 🙂 Just lots of testing to do now…

  • Atheism

    As the prefix indicates, atheism is the absence of belief in God rather than the belief that God does not exist. It’s therefore not contradictory to be an atheist and to be open to proof of the existence of God or anything else should it ever come along. It’s simply rational.
    Article on this aspect of atheism.
    Being an atheist has its comforts. When bad things happen to good people, you don’t have to look for a reason why. You just have to help them deal with whatever random misfortune has befallen them. You also don’t need any motivation beyond basic human sympathy for doing so (or enlightened self-interest if you’re cynical). Whatever I do in life I don’t expect eternal life as a reward, so I have to do the best I can while I’m alive.

  • The Difference Between hackers And Painters

    A collection of Paul Graham’s essays is going to be published by O’Reilley under the title “Hackers and Painters”.
    Book announcement.
    The title comes from a lecture/essay of Graham’s.
    Original Hackers and Painters article.
    The art/science commonality (both order signifiers) was made in an article in Leonardo many years ago, and it wasn’t new then (Constable said that “Art is a science…of which paintings are but the experiments”). Graham makes the correct point that hacker culture is vanguard at the moment. So for social history of art, hacker culture is currently very important, although not for the reasons new media dilettantes and their sponsors claim.
    The difference between hackers and painters is what they drink. Hackers drink caffeine, painters drink alcohol. Both suppress seratonin (IIRC), but alcohol is a relaxant whilst caffeine increases stress levels. Go figure. Go ground.