Inspiration, News, Staff profiles and activity

Prof Mark Bishop in The Independent

ex-machina
Ex Machina (film still)

Mark Bishop, Professor of Cognitive Computing at Goldsmiths features in The Independent with an article about the limits of Artificial Intelligence.

He outlines three arguments that address the question of consciousness and computing. The first, by John Searle, dates from 1980 and is known as the Chinese Room; if a computer convinces a Chinese speaker that it understands Chinese by responding perfectly to their questions, it has passed the Turing Test. But does it really understand Chinese, or does it only simulate understanding? The second is Bishop’s own argument from his 2002 paper, Dancing With Pixies. “If it’s the case that an execution of a computer program instantiates what it feels like to be human,” he says, “experiencing pain, smelling the beautiful perfume of a long-lost lover – then phenomenal consciousness must be everywhere. In a cup of tea, in the chair you’re sitting on.”

This philosophical position – known as “panpsychism” – that all physical entities have mental attributes, is one that Bishop sees as Strong AI’s absurd conclusion. Shadbolt agrees. “Exponentials have delivered remarkable capability,” he says, “but none of that remarkable capability is sitting there reflecting on what very dull creatures we are. Not even slightly.”

The third argument Bishop makes is that there’s something about human creativity that computers just don’t get. While a computer program can compose new scores in the style of JS Bach, that sound plausibly like Bach compositions, it doesn’t design a whole new style of composition. “It might create paintings in the style of Monet,” he says, “but it couldn’t come up with, say, Duchamp’s urinal. It isn’t clear to me at all where that degree of computational creativity can come from.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/alex-garlands-film-ex-machina-explores-the-limits-of-artificial-intelligence–but-how-close-are-we-to-machines-outsmarting-man-9996624.html

Mark Bishop’s profile at Goldsmiths:
http://www.gold.ac.uk/computing/staff/m-bishop/

Events, Inspiration, Students

Christian Marclay at WHITECUBE, Bermonsey

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Christian Marclay has a new solo exhibition at White Cube. It features surround audiovisual multi-screen projection works using a configuration similar Goldsmith’s new ‘SIML’ space.

The work was produced with the assistance of two of Goldsmith’s MA & MFA Computational Arts students Haein Kim and Antonio Daniele and one of our PhD students Diego Macedodefagundes.

About the exhibition:

Continuing Marclay’s long-standing interest in the relationship between image and sound, the exhibition is comprised of a series of works on canvas and paper that feature onomatopoeia taken from comic books. Unlike earlier instances of sound mimesis in his work, these focus solely on the wet sounds suggestive of the action of painting. Combining cartoon-strip imagery and the dripping, pouring and splashing noises associated with gestural abstraction, the works ironically bridge a gap between art movements as distinct as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. This is also reflected in the method in which they have been made; a combination of painting overlaid with screen printing.

A further set of onomatopoeia is put in motion for the first time in a large-scale video installation which projects across four walls. To make the work, the artist collated a lexicon of the sound effects made by characters in superhero stories. The scanned swatches were then animated using the software programme After Effects in a dynamic choreography that suggests the acoustic properties of each word. ‘Boom’, for example, is no longer static on the page, but bursts into life in a sequence of colourful explosions, while ‘Whooosh!’ and ‘Zoooom!’ travel at high speed around the walls. The work fuses the aural with the visual, and immerses the viewer in a silent musical composition.

The aqueous motif introduced with the paintings runs throughout the exhibition, surfacing in a number of new works that allude to everyday life. In a new video installation entitled Pub Crawl (2014), the artist coaxes sound from the empty glasses, bottles and cans that he finds abandoned on the streets of East London, during early morning weekend walks. In a series of projections that run the length of the gallery’s corridor, these discarded vessels are hit, rolled and crushed, forming a lively sound track that echoes throughout the space.

http://whitecube.com/exhibitions/christian_marclay_bermondsey_2015/

computation and culture, Events, Inspiration, Staff profiles and activity, Women in Computing

Transmediale 2015 – Capture All

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Transmediale is a Berlin-based festival and year-round project that draws out new connections between art, culture and technology.

The activities of transmediale aim at fostering a critical understanding of contemporary culture and politics as saturated by media technologies. In the course of its 28 year history, the annual transmediale festival has turned into an essential event in the calendar of media art professionals, artists, activists and students from all over the world. The broad cultural appeal of the festival is recognised by the German federal government who supports the transmediale through its programme for beacons of contemporary culture.

At the ‘Predict & Command: Cities of Smart Control’ event featured our very own Sarah Kember, Professor of New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths. Her work incorporates new media, photography and feminist cultural approaches to science and technology. Experimental work includes an edited open access electronic book entitled Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars (Open Humanities Press, 2011) and ‘Media, Mars and Metamorphosis’ (Culture Machine, Vol. 11). Her latest monograph, with Joanna Zylinska, is Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (The MIT Press, 2012). Kember is in the process of setting up The Goldsmiths Press – a digital first University Press.

This particular conference addressed ‘post-digital urban life’ where every thing as well as every relation between things and subjects are potentially quantifiable and addressable, and thus rendered operational in a new way for economical and cultural (trans)-actions.

Questions which were raised included: What situations and relations of control over self, work, leisure and everyday life are emerging in the paradigm of the Smart City? What is the role of art in pushing such developments forward and/or resisting or altering their course? And how does civil society respond to these developments, for example in the form of citizen driven ways of outsmarting this new urban situation of technological ubiquity?

http://www.transmediale.de/

 

Events, MA/MFA Computational Art, MSc Computer games and Entertainment, News, Staff profiles and activity

Colliding Worlds

william_Latham

Professor Arthur I Miller and William Latham in conversation:

7:00pm, 10th February, 2015

Shoreditch House
Ebor St, London E1 6AW

Professor Arthur I Miller of UCL will be at Shoreditch House to explore exactly how cutting-edge science is redefining contemporary art, the subject of his latest book ‘Colliding Worlds’.

Arthur will explain the new and exciting era of digital contemporary art as artists strive to depict the wonders of our age of information – take a look at huge data sets worked aesthetically, sculpting with sound, folding together concepts of art with physics, using living matter to manipulate inert materials into new and beautiful forms, and artists who are striving to investigate what changes chip implants, gene transplants, and 3D printed organs make to our idea of what it is to be human.

Following his presentation Arthur will be in conversation with the pioneering computer artist Professor William Latham of Goldsmiths College.

If you would like to attend email Professor Arthur I Miller: a.miller@ucl.ac.uk

computation and culture, Inspiration, Staff profiles and activity

Michael Cook, named by Forbes in their Top 30 under 30

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Michael Cook, Researcher from the Department of Computing was named by Forbes in their Top 30 under 30  list. Mike is currently “making a creative AI called ANGELINA that can design its own original games.

Michael Cook is a PhD student at Imperial College in London, where he also studied for an MEng Computing. He’s also a Research Associate at Goldsmiths College’s Computational Creativity Group.

For his PhD project he asks questions like: Can we evolve entire games from nothing? Can we start with literally nothing at all, except a few basic ideas about what a game contains, and ask a computer to design levels, populate them with characters, and wrap it all up in a ruleset that is both challenging and fun?

Find out more:

Games by ANGELINA: http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/

Forbes in their Top 30 under 30 : http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mlg45ehell/michael-cook-27/

Goldsmiths College’s Computational Creativity Group: http://ccg.doc.gold.ac.uk/

BSc Creative Computing, BSc Digital Arts Computing, Inspiration, MA/MFA Computational Art

Creative computing courses at Goldsmiths

We are one of the top interdisciplinary computing departments in the country – working across art, music, journalism, gaming, and many other subject areas. This video features students and staff from our creative undergraduate and postgraduate programmes talking about how the culture of Goldsmiths makes us unique.

Please see the Goldsmiths website for further details about the courses that we offer: http://www.gold.ac.uk/computing/studywithus/

If you wish to pursue undergraduate study, please note that the UCAS deadline for application for September 2015 entry is 15th January 2015.

Digital Journalism, News, Students, Women in Computing

Marta Portocarrero, wins The Guardian’s Student Digital Journalist of the Year

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Marta Portocarrero a recent graduate from the Goldsmiths MA in Digital Journalism has just won the Student Digital Journalist of the Year.  We talk to her about her promising plans for the future in multimedia journalism and her upcoming internship at The Guardian.

Firstly many congratulations on winning the award. Can you tell me a bit about the piece you submitted for the award?

For this award I submitted three different pieces, which were all my assignments on Sandbox (a module of my MA). One was a long piece of writing about how it is to live in a hostel for a long time. It’s called “Settling Down in a Hostel“ and, apart from writing, includes photography, video and parallax scrolling. The second one is a data-driven piece on Bike Theft in South East London. I have created a WordPress blog for that and analysed bike theft in different boroughs of South East London. It was useful to understand a bit more of data and play around with visualizations. The last one, is, again, a long piece of writing on a guy who has built his own houseboat and community in Deptford (“Living in a Floating Community“). This one is more “stylish” in what concerns to digital elements. It has a video banner and different pictures displays. I tried to explore my video skills and, as a result, there are two videos which are fundamental in the piece too.

What research did you undertake for the project during your time studying at Goldsmiths?

Since all the projects were part of my work for Sandbox, I worked hard and tried to apply all the skills I’ve learned in class but also to push a bit my boundaries each time, although I was far from thinking I could submit them for any award. For the first project (about the hostel), I interviewed a friend of mine who was living in a hostel for over three years and who had a great life story and allowed me to publish it. The research was basically finding a good topic and a great character to illustrate it. The second one was slightly more technical. I have decided to write about bike theft because there are a lot of people who cycle in London and because my bicycle was also stolen once, so I could somehow relate to the topic. I looked for data and found out that Metropolitan Police have a good database on that, so all I had to do was scraping their website, querying the data, building visualizations and writing a story according to my findings. The third one was similar to the first one and based on a good community story and a strong character. I also researched a bit on data related to houseboats moored on the Thames, but ended up not including it in the project.

Can you talk a little bit about why you chose the MA in Digital Journalism at Goldsmiths?

I did my BA in Journalism in Portugal and, then, I struggled to find a job there. So I went travelling for a while to clear up my mind a bit and decided that I would like to study some more. I quickly understood I wasn’t particularly interested in politics, economics, culture, etc… so the way wouldn’t be necessarily related to the content, but more to the shape. At the same time I was feeling more and more curious about how some digital pieces I could find online were built. When The New York Times published the Snow Fall, I understood that there were people actually doing what I had in mind. So, I emailed some of its journalist and asked for advice. They told me which skills I should aim to achieve and I started researching. I knew that the UK was a country where digital journalism was appreciated and I have found some interesting universities here. In the end, Goldsmiths was the most attractive one and, so far, seemed to have been the best choice.

Where are you currently working now?

I keep looking for a job. I’ve submitted some applications, here and abroad, and I am waiting on their answer, mostly multimedia/digital positions. Meanwhile, I keep doing some freelance projects similar to the ones I have done during the MA or some journalistic videos and short documentaries. I’ve recently done an internship at the interactive desk of The Financial Times. Since I’ve finished the MA the times haven’t been the easiest ones, but they have been essential for me to understand what I really want to do and which areas are not so much of my interest.

Whats on the horizon for the future?

First, I will do the internship at the multimedia desk of The Guardian, which I am really excited about. Then, depending on the results of my job applications, and if everything goes well, I may end up working on a multimedia desk of a media company here or abroad. If nothing goes as planned, I may try to look for some funding to do a web-documentary, which is an area that really fascinates me, given it’s combination of filming and technology (web designing, coding). In any project, I tend to prioritize storytelling, so in either way I think I would be happy.

Creativity, independence and learning by doing.