The Light of Day

Who’s down with .CPP

As an amateur programmer with the organizational skills of your typical guitar-beating neo-hippie, eventually one accumulates so much code that one starts to forget where to find such-and-such neat trick that actually worked once upon a rainy day. So I figured I’d better go through my files now and write up a little reference guide for myself, while I still have any mental faculties at all. (Sorry if the indentation makes you seasick.)

It’s good to see that most of what I found in my old brainstorms has actually been done since then. What’s a little unnerving is finding some older stuff, literally hundreds of lines long, and not having the faintest idea what it is or what it’s supposed to do. COMMENTS ARE FOR PUSSIES. Uh huh. Keep telling yourself that.

Amidst much old and embarrassing garbage, buried deep in a sub-folder named simply OLD, one lonely and neglected project called tunnel sparkled off my eye like the edge of a favorite old toy in an attic. It felt bittersweet to look it over and recall how much love I had invested in it. It was an ambitious way to distort perspective and create the illusion that you were going “through” an arbitrary series of still images. Each aspect of the project was a project unto itself. It’s not that I couldn’t revive it, but it seems unimportant now, like that idea you had for the ultimate band in seventh grade.

In glorious RGB

By the way …

… I’ve uploaded some of my code-generated art (or whatever you want to call it) to Flickr. I hit my monthly upload limit pretty quickly, so I may consider getting a paid account. We’ll see.

You’re still the artist

Reposted with permission from the Eu-gene mailing list:

I’ve been thinking about this a bit, and if I were to contribute yet another alternate definition of ‘generative art’ (not that I think it needs one) then it would be something like this:

“Generative art is the production of rules to define a fixed conceptual space as art. A rule-follower (such as a computer) then moves through the space in an arbitrary manner, but not beyond it. Furthermore the method for navigating the space does not change with time. What is presented is simply a single, unchanging conceptual space navigated by naive serendipity.”

I put it that way to underline the fact that generative art does not present a limitless, ever-changing stream of creativity. Instead it presents a model with some parameters, and those parameters define a conceptual space. Together those parameters might define a high dimensional space of possibilities, but they are have limits, and beyond a few iterations a naive approach to searching that space is unlikely to turn up anything of interest.

The output from generative systems looks samey after a short while, unless the system is modified. For example AARON would not produce interesting output if Harold Cohen didn’t keep modifying it. So once you divorce a generative system from its programmer it dies.

That’s not to say that something beyond generative art isn’t possible, for example evolutionary art takes a more intelligent approach to searching a conceptual space, and hopefully soon software art will start transforming the conceptual spaces it works upon.

alex

The feedback he received on this was largely along the lines of “why do you have to focus so much on what it can’t be”, which spiraled into debates about free will and determinism — but I like the way he put this, and think it’s a good way of dispelling any fear or fantasy of creativity itself ever becoming a non-human thing. Even if a given work has infinite iterations, it bears pointing out that “infinite” does not mean “everything”. (There is an infinite set of fractional numbers between three and five, but that set does not include seven. In fact, there are a heck of a lot more numbers that aren’t included.) As a process is designed to be more and more complex, it can appear that its own “conceptual space” is shifting, but all this means is that the artist (programmer) has put in the work to build a larger metaspace.

I don’t think any of this, either Alex’s post or my commentary, should be taken as a bitter attempt to deflate anyone’s dreams of making a machine behave more like a human. I just think it’s healthy and practical to know what you can and can’t expect from something.

In the can and out the door

Hooray — I finished the soundtrack before the (real, actual, absolute) deadline for the October festival!

The experience was insane but exhilirating. I invited Mike over for a few hours last night to supervise the finishing touches, and there was basically nothing else he could have been doing at the time because he was nervously waiting for his effects to render. In fact, I think it killed a second bird for him by being a healthy distraction.

As I’d posted earlier, I pretty much came up with the ending first and worked backwards. By the time I’d done all but the first scene, I was so far into the eleventh hour that I had to make an emergency raid of my archives for an old and neglected piano piece. I was afraid Mike would think it was all wrong — I felt like I was cheating — but he felt it made a nice contrast to the scarier parts that come up later. It also worked out well in two ways: it ended on the same chord that the second scene began with, and the notes that happened to fall on the title sequence were easily molded into a dramatic old-timey horror intro by doubling them with brass and other instruments.

Mike got a fairly real inside view of my way of working, or actually a time-compressed and “only 80% as perfectionistic as usual” version of it, as I experimented with ways to perform a suitable bass guitar part for the frantic, saucerfulesque mid-section.

The Other Gods will premiere on either October 6th, 7th, or 8th at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon. It looks like there are a lot of other interesting films that will be shown there as well. If you’re reading this, Mike, thanks for the experience and I hope all goes well!

Spaghetti western == bedtime

I’ve made a fantastic amount of progress on that film score since I last wrote. I’m only worried that my amount of progress isn’t fantastic enough. That’s okay — if anyone can pull this off, I can.

One neat bit of chance circumstance: some guy happened to be practicing on a flute just outside my window this afternoon. So now the mystery flautist features in a bit part in my score. And he doesn’t even know it.

Without really meaning to, I’ve pretty much been writing it from the end backwards. I still have nothing but absolute silence for the first minute of the film. It’s almost ready to ship AND I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW IT BEGINS YET.

My sign from the heavens that it’s time to give it a rest and go to bed for the night: the part I was just working on a few minutes ago is sliding down the slippery slope into … spaghetti western territory. Yep. I really need to back up and clear my head.

Keith scores! (a short film)

I’m working on my very first film score! It’s for a four-minute animated short by Mike Boas, and I just found out yesterday that his rough cut has already been accepted into a festival, leaving me only about three days to write and record the whole thing. Nothing like a short deadline to force you to get your feet wet!

Although I have many years of experience with composing — this would be extremely difficult if I didn’t — writing to a film is so completely different of an animal. I’m having a lot of fun, but it sure requires a different mindset. Normally I have a gut feeling for how long I want to hold or build up a tension of any kind before releasing it, and I’m totally focused on the kind of chord I’m either playing or implying, and where it would naturally want to go next, and either going there, or figuring out what the “next level” would be. Let’s not mince words here — the groove tells me where to go.

With film scoring, you sometimes have to just hang out in dissonance-land for a while. You have to keep it interesting, but not by way of getting ahead of what’s happening on the screen. Your muse rides shotgun; it can only make suggestions.

Fortunately, the music software I use can open up a movie preview window that stays in sync with my music project, even when I scrub back and forth on the timeline, so I can synchronize any sound to the exact frame something happens. You actually have to be careful to not have too many things line up perfectly, because it can look silly and awkward. I’m sure there are plenty of resources on the web that give professional quallity advice on the art of scoring, but frankly, I DON’T HAVE TIME TO READ THEM RIGHT NOW. Gotta just use my best judgement and get this one in the can.

The film is a take-off on early silhouette animation in the style of Lotte Reiniger, and will be billed as a pretend “restoration project” of an early film based on H. P. Lovecraft’s short story, The Other Gods.

I hope people enjoy it!