Creativity and Information Technologies Plenary Lecture: Oct 17, 2005

1. Creativity and Information TechnologiesPlenary Lecture: Oct 17, 2005 Prof. Michael Century century@rpi.edu

2. Introducing AARON • The most elaborate artificial intelligence artist so far is called AARON, by artist-programmer Harold Cohen • Consider Aaron’s “Creations” • Visit website, and answer questions: • Is Aaron’s art “creative”, why or why not? • Formulate a principle to permit this question to be answered objectively.

3. How to decide if Aaron is creative… • Creative = “pleasing” • Creative = “impressive” • Creative = cognitive: model-manipulation • Creative = the program, not just the pictures • Other possible responses?

4. AARON and Creativity • Aaron is programmed by Harold Cohen to make pictures, following explicit rules • “Cohen created an algorithm that will produces pictures of value. It’s not a creative algorithm but a mechanical algorithm. The creativity was in whatever it is in Cohen’s brain did to generate those algorithms” S. Harnad • http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/KCATaaron/STAFsample

5. Creativity and self-modification • If the crux of creativity is self-modification, changing one’s outlook or approach as one progresses through a series of works, then Aaron is not creative. • “I think a human being is creative if she is capable of reformulating their mental model of the world” (Harnad). • By this standard, most human artists are also not creative.

6. CREATIVITY IN THE 20TH CENTURY ARTS From Avant-Garde to Experimentalism Oct 17, 2005

7. CSIK From Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, “A Systems Theory of Creativity”

8. CSIK 1 Minimal retention Total Rejection of tradition - Avant-Garde From Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, “A Systems Theory of Creativity”

9. CSIK 2 Absorption process Partial inclusion Of new elements From Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, “A Systems Theory of Creativity”

10. The International Avant-Gardes heyday, from 1910 - 1925 • Organized as movements, with correspondence and travel between countries • Compare this with the political revolutionaries, living in exile, like the Russian Bolsheviks before 1917 • Ignited by the senseless carnage of WW I. • The artists’ message of revolt was a mixture of • artistic (attack conventional forms of art) • political (attack on wars, governments, policies) • Technological (celebrate new modes of travel, communication) • Anarchistic, more than constructive: from this period came the slogan “art as life”

11. Futurist manifesto, Marinetti. 1909 • Simultaneity • Dynamism • Speed • Danger

12. Mots en liberté

13. Russolo “Art of Noises” 1913 • “I have imagined a great renovation in the Art of Noises” noises in nature and in machines will revitalize music • Scathing on traditional European music: • “we sip, from measure to measure, two or three different sorts of boredom, while we await an unusual emotion that never arrives…we are revolted by the monotony of the sensations experienced, combined with idiotic religious excitement of the listeners. . . Intoxicated by the thousandth repetition of their hypocritical and artificial ecstasy” • What is the logic of this revolt? Does Russolo have something to say, or is he is mainly concerned to negate? • See last line: I am not a musician, but a futurist painter, so I’m not competent to make this new “Art of Noise” myself. “I have imagined a great renovation in the Art of Noises” • But he did, in fact make performances…listen

14. Russolo

15. Edgard Varese, the ‘music-scientist’ • Varese epitomizes 20th c. avant-garde composer, deep belief in the need for artists and scientists to collaborate in expanding the realm of musical sound, and strong belief in the close links between creativity and experimentation

16. Varèse on new Instruments and direct Transmission • … “will allow me to write music as I conceive it, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes” • “There will no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as a river flows. . . . • I need an entirely new medium of expression: a sound producing not sound reproducing machine • whatever I write, whatever my message, it will reach the listener unadulterated by "interpretation".. . after the composer has set down his score onpaper by means of a new graphic notation, he will then, with the collaboration of a sound engineer, transfer the score directly to this electric machine. After that, anyone will be able to press a button to release the music exactly as the composer wrote it - exactly like opening a book.

17. Musique Concrète • French term for construction of music from recorded sounds, whether musical or not, using editing (splicing) filtering and other processing. • Pierre Schaeffer was founder of this style, around 1945.

18. DUCHAMP Nude descending 2 1912

19. Bottlerack, 1916

20. Bicycle Wheel, 1916

21. Fountain 1917

22. Mona Lisa L.H.O.O.Q.1919

23. Sigmund Freud &Surrealism • The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900 • Radical challenge to treatment of mental illness and neurosis, by locating driver of all mental life in the Unconscious. • The key to this treasure chest is the interpretation of dreams • Cultural implications were profound • Artists began to seek a new balance between conscious and unconscious • New methods - chance, automatic rather than conscious willed process, dream as inspiration, collective rather than individual creation

24. First Surrealist Manifesto, Breton 1924 • Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the true process of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of any control by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupation. • ENCYCL, Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. it leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution fo the principal problems of life.

25. John Cage (1912-1992) • Understand Cage and his School as a vast expansion and institutional triumph of European Dada & Surrealism (ready-made, automatism, chance operations, anti-Ego) in USA • Introduces percussion orchestras “noise” in 1930s • Cage’s early, “beautiful” music for prepared piano • The move to indeterminacy, after 1948 • Theater Piece No 1, the “Lecture on Nothing” • Cage exemplifies a revolt against the “Abstract Expressionist Ego” (Zen Buddhist, Hindu philosophy)

26. Serialism - the strongest most influential formalism of 20th century arts • Arnold Schoenberg (1875-1951) followed early atonality with a systematic way of going beyond tonality. • The 12-tone system codes its pitch material C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 • Then the composer sets a unique order, e.g. • 11 5 7 4 6 10 3 2 8 9 12 1 • Then this order has to be followed, directly, reversed, transposed, or backwards • Was then applied to any parameter, including duration

27. Cage influenced by the strict formalism of serialism • But he preferred to concentrate on duration, rather than pitch or harmony. Why: • Pitch and harmony, the traditional structuring modes, exist outside of time. Duration by definition exists in time. Therefore, Cage said, duration based structuring is correct. • Examples - rhythm-based serial structure, with highly simplified pitch

28. Seattle, 1938 • John Cage first “prepares” a piano • Screws, rubber, felt radically alter sound • But not changing pianist’s performance gestures (tacit knowledge is conserved) • A conceptual innovation primarily - born out of necessity (no orchestra available).

29. Notation stable; sound changes • What’s New here? encoding scheme mapping the new onto the old… • High creative “leverage”

30. Cage’s Credo on the future of music (Seattle, 1937) • All sounds can become instruments • Everyday noise, plus new technological means like electronics. • An early example is the Theremin. Cage wrote Theremin provided an instrument with genuinely new possibilities….the instrument is capable of a wide variety of sound qualities, obtained by a mere turning of a dial. BUT …..

31. The “Thereministes” act as censors [They] do their utmost to make the instrument sound like some old instrument, giving it a sickeningly sweet vibrato, and performing on it - with difficulty - masterpieces from the past... Thereministes act as censors, giving the public those sounds they think the public will like. We are shielded from new sound experiences.

32. Imaginary Landscape #1 1939 • Seattle, spring 1939 • Instrumentation:For 2 variable-speed phono turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano and cymbal; • To be performed as a recording or broadcast by 4 performers.

33. Cage on Art and Science • From Hindu religious author Coomeraswamy Cage based his belief that “the traditional function of art is to imitate nature in her manner of operation”. • This led me to the opinion that art changes because science changes -- that is, changes in science give artists different understandings of how nature works" • Silence 194. Preface to Where are we going? what are we doing? , a 1961 lecture

34. The future of Music: Credo" (1937) • ”…centers of experimental music must be established. In these centers, the new materials, oscillators, turntables, generators, means for amplifying small sounds, film phonographs, etc., available for use. Composers at work using twentieth-century means for making music. Performances of results. Organization of sound for extra-musical purposes (theatre, dance, radio, film).

35. Works for Prepared Piano • Music for Marcel Duchamp, 1947 • Sonatas and Interludes, 1949. • Cage’s prepared piano masterpiece • 10 movements, each based on the emotions of Indian tradition - Cage’s first time influenced by Eastern religion.

36. Black Mountain College • Alternative college, 1936-56, in rural North Carolina • Educational philosophy: interdisciplinary, exploratory, learner-centered (very new at the time!), and strongly tilted to the arts • Many European artists, from Bauhaus especially though more spontaneous, “experimental” - joining the arts, like painting and music • what BMC now is famous for the first “happening” - 1952.

37. Cage’s chance operations and Indeterminacy • Following Surrealist methods to “defeat” conscious desire, Cage codified his own method using the I Ching, or Book of Changes. How it worked: • Having already selected basic shape, especially duration, number of voices, he would ask the “oracle” intelligent musical questions: • When the should next event occur? In what instrument? For how long, on what pitch, etc. • His intent, to make music • “free of individual taste and memory and also of the literature and traditions of the art. The sounds enter the time-space centered within themselves, unimpeded by service to any abstraction.”

38. Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1949), The Artist’s Club, NYC • "I saw my function as an inventor and research worker rather than as an artist. I had been very much influenced by .. . the need to apply modern technology to music.” • Influenced by mysticism and oriental religion, Cage called for "close anonymous collaboration of a number of workers” leading "not to self-knowledge. . . but to selflessness” • Cage’s “silence” is seen by scholars now as opposing the isolated angst-ridden male genius, alternating between bouts of melancholic depression and volcanic creativity

39. Pollock Cage’s “anti-ego approach is a direct reaction against the expressionism of his peers, then led in painting by Pollock

40. Rauschenberg, 1951

41. Theater Piece No. 1 - the “first Happening”, BMC 1952 • Cage, Merce Cunningham (dancer), David Tudor (pianist), Robert Rauschenberg (painter) • Cage set time brackets for each action, but they were all independent from one another. Influenced by surrealist Antonin Artaud’s idea of a theater “free of text” • Two hours in length, during which • Cage lectured on Zen Buddhism and music, a movie was shown, old records played on ancient phonograph, dogs run across stage barking, babies screamed, 12 persons danced without previous rehearsal. . . • Summer 1953, Merce Cunningham Dance Company established, at BMC

42. 4’ 33” • Cage’s silent piece 1952, performed first at Black Mountain College. • Cage acknowledge influence of Robert Rauschenberg’s all-white and all-black painting

43. Cage’s post 1948 method of composing with durations and chance operations • In collaboration with other performers - Dance most often, with his collaborator and life companion Merce Cunningham - Cage would determine a rhythmic structure within which music and dance could be composed independently and then brought together. There was NO attempt to link or coordinate the separate “tracks”.

44. Experimental Music 1957 • Experimental in regard to music: “an act the outcome of which is unknown”. Cage declares we must be open to what is intended in a composition (notated by the composer) and to what is not (environment). • There is no empty space/time - both subjectively (we can see or hear or otherwise construct meaning from within) or objectively (in an anechoic chamber, "silence" is overcome by sound of our own circulatory and nervous system) • Experimentalism requires "removal" of self from the activities of sound they make. How? • Chance operations - like tables of random numbers, use of I Ching • Acceptance of accident - like the imperfections on a piece of paper determining notes. “In this case, the composer represents the maker of a camera who allows someone else to take the picture”.

45. Experimental Music 1957 • Where do we go? ‘toward theater’. That art more than music resembles nature. We have eyes as well as ears and it’s our business while we are alive to use them • Cage masters Duchampian paradox, staged ambiguity. The “purpose” of writing music is Purposeful purposelessness, or a purposeless play…an affirmation of life, not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we living which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

46. Cage on Sound and Music • Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it,it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck of fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.

47. Cage: Purpose of music • And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation…

48. Expression and intention of composer • The activity of movement, sound, and light, we believe, is expressive…The novelty of our work derives therefore from our having moved away from simply private human concerns towards the world of nature and society of which all of us are a part. Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord."