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Category Archives: Inspiration
Computational Arts student builds A.I. orchestra to play Riley’s ‘In C’
More than 50 years after composer Terry Riley created the ever-changing ‘In C’ for an indefinite number of performers, an MFA Computational Arts student from Goldsmiths has designed an artificially intelligent orchestra which will allow musicians to play the piece solo.
Composed in 1964, Riley’s experimental and influential masterpiece consists of 53 short melodic fragments lasting from half a beat to 32 beats, with each phrase repeated an arbitrary number of times.
It has been performed with 11 musicians or up to 124, with each performer having control over which phrase they play and when. The piece also has no set running time – it could last 15 minutes or for hours.
With ‘In C++’ Gregory White has created a series of independent virtual performers who make their own decisions about which notes to play, when to progress to the next bar, whether to play hard or soft, and so on, through a form of artificial intelligence.
Each performer is aware of the others, correcting themselves if they start to lag behind or rush ahead in order to ensure what they play compliments the rest of the ensemble.
The program Gregory has written produces MIDI (digital) notes which are then sent to hardware instruments (physical digital instruments), software instruments, or any other MIDI controlled device – potentially including lights. He’s so far trialled it with chimes, a more droney version with heavy reverb, and a percussion-only virtual orchestra.
The artist explains: “I decided to choose the piece ‘In C’ for my MFA Computational Arts project for a number of reasons, but primarily because when performing Riley’s work, I realised that my thought process was rather algorithmic.
“I had 53 cells of information, each I would repeatedly execute until I decided that I had passed a certain threshold – at which point I would progress to the next cell. When all cells had been played, I would repeat the last until I decided to stop performing, or ‘terminate the program’.
“I thought it would be interesting to take the ensemble element out of the piece, and see how it could change, or what new ideas could be explored, when the decisions about which pitches to play were taken care of.
“What is the human performer’s role? They could perform with an instrument alongside the machine; they could act as a conductor, influencing volume, pattern changes, the texture of the piece, the timbre of each performer, effects processing, and so on. And how is one person’s interpretation of the piece different to an ensemble’s?”
“Plus, I just really, really, wanted to do this project so I could make the C++ pun.”
About the artist
Gregory White’s fine art practice includes photography, filmmaking, sound design, creative coding, and human-computer interaction, as he believes that each informs the other.
He attended the University of East Anglia, and received a Bachelor’s degree in Music Technology with a specialisation in Sonic Arts. Currently Greg (@gregwht) is working as a freelance video editor, photographer, and general sound guy, while studying MA Computational Arts part-time at Goldsmiths.
Gregory White’s ‘In C++’ will be on display at METASIS, the Goldsmiths, University of London MA and MFA Computational Arts show from 8-11 September.
This article, written by Sarah Cox, was first published in Goldsmiths News
Queens of Tech: Talks by inspiring c♀mputer scientists
15% of Goldsmiths Computing students are women. Although that’s double the national average for university computing departments, it’s nowhere near good enough. So we’re aiming for 50%.
Join us for Goldsmiths’ new Women in Computing speaker series. These remarkable computer scientists will talk about their work – and inspire you to be part of the next generation of amazing women in tech.
Thurs 16 June: Dr Kate Devlin _ My Life with the Sex Robots
Dr Kate Devlin is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. This evening she gives a lively overview of her career and her current research on sexual companion robots.
Kate has a background in both archaeology and computer science and has combined these with applied perception, focusing on digital cultural heritage. She is an active campaigner for mental health awareness and also for raising the profile of women in computing.
Where: Room 342, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths
When: 6:30 – 8pm Thursday 16 June 2016
Book your free ticket
Thurs 23 June: Susan Stepney _ Can slime mould compute?
If you have a PC, tablet, or smartphone, you have used a computer. But some people use billard balls, beams of light, sticks of wood, chemicals, bacteria, slime moulds, spaghetti, even black holes, as computers (although some of these only in theory!).
How can these things be computers? What can we do? Can they do things your smartphone can’t? And why are these people using such peculoar things to compute with, anyway?
Susan Stepney is Professor of Computer Science at the University of York, Department of Computer Science. In this informal lecture, she discusses her career and research in non-standard computation, biologically-inspired computational models, and emergent systems.
Where: Room 342, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths
When: 6:30 – 8pm Thursday 23 June 2016
Book your free ticket
Thurs 30 June: Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy _ Inventing the TV of the future
Vinoba is an R&D Engineer for the BBC, working within Broadcast & Connected Systems. She thinks up new types of synchronised companion screen experiences for connected homes. Currently, this ranges from building prototypes for new & archived content to running exploratory studies to gauge how our audiences might react to them.
Previously, Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy focused on building prototypes that combine content on social networks with programmes being played on a connected TV.
Where: Room 342, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths
When: 6:30 – 8pm Thursday 30 June 2016
Book your free ticket
Computational Arts graduate wins £5,000 Aspen Online Art Award 2016
Goldsmiths alumna Matilda Skelton Mace has been announced as the winner of the Aspen Online Art Award 2016.
Matilda Skelton Mace graduated from Goldsmiths’ MA/MFA Computational Arts programme in 2015. She is a London-based artist and designer, working with the building blocks of reality- space, light, and geometric form. She is interested in the ‘in between’, exploring ideas of implied, imagined and virtual space, the dissonance that can arise between real and virtual and the way we perceive it.
Last year she was shortlisted for the HIX Award and has exhibited installations at galleries, nightclubs and festivals. This year her work is centred on providing visuals for music events by promoters including Gottwood festival, Inverted Audio and Blueprint Records.
As winner of the Aspen Online Art Award, Matilda has been commissioned to create a virtual world based on the unique digital ‘fingerprints’ of visitors to their website.
Drawing on the phenomenon of ‘Sky Islands’ – mountains with unique flora and fauna caused by climatic isolation from the surrounding lowland – users’ metadata are used to create particular landforms with their own plants and weather systems. Visitors with matching characteristics (for example using the same hardware or operating system) generate landforms in a similar location to eventually build up a mountain range corresponding to correlations in metadata. Their weather and plant life reflects the geographical location of the user. Visitors can explore this expanding world and a visual representation of metadata profiling emerges, with its implications for anonymity rights and freedom of expression.
Launched in 2014 by Aspen Insurance Holdings in association with the Contemporary Art Society, the Aspen Online Art Award is the first of its kind in the UK.
The judges, who included Attilia Fattori Franchini, Curator, and the Aspen Art Committee, selected Skelton Mace from a shortlist of seven artists to win a commissioning prize of £5,000 and the opportunity to create a new online-based work for Aspen’s renowned art collection.
Attilia Fattori Franchini said: “This award is a fantastic opportunity for an emerging artist and the strength of Matilda’s proposal shows that she is one to watch. It will also sit particularly well within Aspen’s collection as her ideas around data privacy and cyber risk are particularly pertinent to our contemporary culture.”
Lanny Walker, Art Consultant at the Contemporary Art Society, said: “Matilda’s artwork explores many themes relevant to current debates within contemporary art and beyond, where identity, data privacy and our virtual footprint are continuous concerns. In this she follows in the footsteps of artists including Hito Steyerl, Oliver Laric and Heath Bunting, who touch upon these issues in their own practices.”
This year’s shortlist was dominated by Goldsmiths’ 2015 Computational Arts graduates, with Lior Ben Gai and Angie Fang also nominated.
Aspen Art Award shortlists three Goldsmiths graduates
Three MA/MFA Computational Arts graduates have been shortlisted for the prestigious Aspen Online Arts Award 2016.
Angie Fang, Lior Ben Gai and Matilda Skelton Mace all graduated from Goldsmiths in 2015, following their degree show exhibition EXCEPT/0N.
Angie Fang is a UK-based Chinese digital artist who works in digital media, audio visual performance and interactive installations. Her online video work is created entirely in C++, making use of complex 3D OpenGL and digital signal processing techniques entirely of her own devising.
Her work focuses on the tension between sound, space and visual elements, and also the subtle experience between the technology synthesized and the reality. Her works, Nito , L-Pattern, Bud and Organic Flow were exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum; and the immersive installation Under the Water installed in Hotel Elephant gallery. Outside of her academic research, she also gained experience working for Studio XO and United Visual Artists. bongbongsquare.com
Lior Ben Gai is an Israeli digital artist, working in various digital mediums since 2008. His work explores potential intersections between artificial life and synthetic biology, examining notions of ‘lab aesthetics’ whilst creating experiences that rely on his strong visual sense.
As an independent artist, Lior explores generative strategies and computational creativity to produce expressive software, animation and sound. He is emotionally drawn to computer generated graphics, strongly believes in project based learning and enjoys thinking about things he never thought about before. His commercial works include museum installations and exhibits, mobile games, web applications and custom interactive software. soogbet.net
Matilda Skelton Mace is a London-based artist and designer, working with the building blocks of reality, space, light, and geometric form. She creates her own interactive systems in C, C++, Processing, Java and HTML5.
Her work features strong use of projection and materials to transform physical space, creating sculptural interactive digital artworks. She is interested in the ‘in between’, exploring ideas of implied, imagined and virtual space, the dissonance that can arise between real and virtual and the way we perceive it. This year she was shortlisted for the HIX Award 2015 and has exhibited at galleries, nightclubs and festivals. belikeotherpeople.co.uk
Art project uses ‘Snooper’s Charter’ surveillance tech to data mine your life
A downloadable plugin that mines your browser for data – then builds a profile of your personality and lifestyle – has been created by Goldsmiths Digital Arts Computing student Joe McAlister.
Joe’s project, entitled You Probably Live in Horsham, asks: If the government’s ‘Snooper’s Charter’ legitimises mass surveillance, can we use the same technology to study ourselves?
An art piece with a strong political theme, Joe has combined a visual spy-like aesthetic with the programme’s ability to generate eye-opening reports on the user’s mind-set, creating a feeling of shock, awe, and a slight sense of unease.
Designed to promote discussion around the paper trail we leave on the internet, and how safe that data is online, You Probably Live in Horsham also asks the user to compare their online identity with how they see themselves in real life.
“In our materialistic society many people’s lives have become intertwined with the internet to such a degree it’s become hard to imagine the boundaries between virtual and real,” says Joe – a first-year Digital Arts Computing undergraduate who’s set to graduate in 2018.
“I want to prompt people to look at their lives from a new perspective. When important elements of your identity appear in a list in front of you, it becomes de-humanising. You become just another person on a piece of paper, or in this case, a computer screen.
“I want people to see it, step back a second, and consider a completely different side to their identity which they might not have previously seen.”
“The Home Secretary’s Investigatory Powers Bill demands web and phone companies log the IP addresses, URLS and connection times for every citizen for a year. Theresa May has emphasised how ‘terrorists’ are using the internet to evade detection and by using blanket surveillance they can help prevent this. But at what point does this ‘harmless’ state surveillance become the precursor to something resembling a totalitarian state?”
Behind the scenes of You Probably Live in Horsham it’s a complex system: after the user installs a plugin, it injects a Javascript file into every website that’s visited. This script will then use JQuery, Javascript and Ajax to collect the IP address, URL and timestamp of every web address.
The data is then formatted into a storable format, and individual parts of it analysed. Given the project’s purpose in raising awareness of data security, all data is stored locally in the user’s browser, with only small elements sent temporarily via encrypted ‘https’ to remote servers run and secured by reputable companies.
Install the plugin
Click here to download the plugin. Once loaded simply press ‘add to chrome’. The extension should now be installed and the eye icon should be visible in the top right hand side. The eye will move when it analyses a page. You don’t need to do anything to prompt the analysing of a page just browse like normal. To view your paragraph as it generates click the eye icon. The longer you use the plugin the more accurate the data will be. I suggest using it for a few days before taking what it says seriously.
After running the program for a short time on his own computer, Joe’s report proved remarkably accurate, guessing among other facts that he went to Goldsmiths, travelled from Horsham in around 72 minutes, worked a lot late at night and was probably thinking mostly about “Southern Rail or big data”.
The gathering of data then allows further assumptions to be made manually, even by people who don’t know you. For example, the programme shows that Joe owns a Mac and travels a lot so it’s likely a lightweight version like a MacBook; he likes the artist Yayoi Kusama so it’s likely he also likes other installation art; he’s a computer programmer, appreciates art and goes to Goldsmiths, so he’s likely to be studying Digital Arts Computing.
“The personas we display to people across our idealistic online lives and our more realistic lives can be very different,” adds Joe. “This programme might generate a report for you that reflects your online escapism, or you’ll find more of your real personality comes out.
“From just a few dozen URLS, You Probably Live in Horsham can generate huge amounts of data, and the longer you use the plug-in, the more accurate that data will be,” adds Joe. “And unlike your inclusion in the government’s data retention scheme, it’s entirely optional and easy to stop.”
Adapted from a Goldsmiths News story published on 20 April 2016.
- Goldsmiths’ Digital Arts Computing show SYMBIOSIS runs from 28-29 April 2016
- Find out more about BSc Digital Arts Computing at Goldsmiths
- Explore Joe McAlister’s website
Goldsmiths mentors winning team of robot-builders
A team of London schoolgirls have scooped four prizes at the national VEX IQ challenge, thanks to mentoring from Goldsmiths Computing.
The Cyborgs – four Year 9 girls from Henrietta Barnett School – competed in the VEX IQ challenge to design and build a robot.
Early in the process of constructing the robot, one of the girls – Elli Gaver – came to Goldsmiths and talked with post-doc researcher Perla Maiolino. Perla helped Elli figure out how to make the basic design she wanted. This was a great foundation for later improvements – and by the time Nationals came along, the entire robot had been made and remade several times over.
After qualifying at the regionals in London, the Cyborgs travelled to Birmingham to compete against 40 of the top UK teams who had qualified at their regional competitions. The Cyborgs ended up winning four of the ten top prizes:
- Excellence Award for the best robot in the competition
- Teamwork Challenge, for amassing the highest total of points in a series of trials that involved being paired randomly with other teams to cooperatively try to clear a field of balls
- Driver Skills, in which they got the highest number of points driving alone in the same ball-clearing challenge
- Programming Skills for programming their robot to autonomously do the same task
The girls are now busily improving their robots’ hardware and software in preparation for their trip to Louisville Kentucky to compete in the Internationals on 20 April – 23 April 2016.
Goldsmiths Computing have contributed to the team’s travel expenses – and we wish them the very best luck!