A presentation at Clojure/conj in in Austin, TX, USA by D. Schmudde
Aesthetics and Narrative: Programming What Cannot Be Programmed Clojure/conj 2016 @dschmudde http ://schmud.de
Functional Programming Reason About Code Finance (Quantitative) Data (Quantitative)
Quantitative Reasoning Soft: Cogitating Behavior Improvements Hard: Mathematically Provable Correctness Performance
Functional Programming Long History in Abstract Domains Aesthetics Story
Art
Artist: Mostly Qualitative Chaos and Surrender Decisiveness and Agency
The Decisive Artist Know the Rules Before You Can Break Them
The Decisive Programmer Know the Rules Before You Can Write Them
We Don’t Always Know the Rules
AARON Development: 1968 - 21st Century Fortran → C→ Lisp (CLOS)
1983
1992
Color Composing a Small Number of Primitives
Programming Autonomy Aesthetic Choices
Harold Cohen (1 May 1928 – 27 April 2016) Paintings by AARON (1968 - ?)
Zork Development: 1975 - 1982 Fortran (Adventure) → MDL (PDP-10) → ZIL (Z-Machine running Zork I-III)
1975 Colossal Cave Adventure Verb-Noun Commands go west
1977 Zork Prepositions and Conjunctions Direct and Indirect Objects fill the bottle with water
MDL <DEFINE AXE-FUNCTION () <COND (<VERB? “TAKE”> <TELL “The troll’s axe seems white-hot. You can’t hold on to it.”> T)>>
ZIL <OBJECT LANTERN (LOC LIVING-ROOM) (SYNONYM LAMP LANTERN LIGHT) (ADJECTIVE BRASS) (DESC “brass lantern”) (FLAGS TAKEBIT LIGHTBIT) (ACTION LANTERN-F) (FDESC “A battery-powered lantern is on the trophy case.”) (LDESC “There is a brass lantern (battery-powered) here.”) (SIZE 15)>
Parsing and Language Small Number of Primitives
Autonomy Narrative Guide Natural Language
Qualitative Reasoning Unknown Quantities Exploration of the Idea
Exploration Agent Autonomy → Intelligence? → Creativity?
Making a Movie
Film Script: A Technical Document Clarity and precision for interpretation: Production breakdowns Camera shooting scripts Direction for actors and directors Basis for novelizations
blueprint ≠ bridge code ≠ execution script ≠ film
Script Pure Narrative
Film Result of Autonomous Agents Making Aesthetic Choices
Creating Agency Pure Functions Composition
Borderless Kinect Overtone
Abstract Domain
Transducers → Input personEntered personUpdated personWillLeave
→ Input 0: pid; 1: oid; 2: age; 3: centroid.x; 4: centroid.y; 5: velocity.x; 6: velocity.y; 7: depth; 8: boundingRect.x;
→ Input 9: boundingRect.y; 10: boundingRect.width; 11: boundingRect.height; 12: highest.x 13: highest.y 14: haarRect.x; - will be 0 if hasHaar == false 15: haarRect.y; - will be 0 if hasHaar == false 16: haarRect.width; - will be 0 if hasHaar == false …
Output → vca (loudness) reverb (timbre) vco (pitch) attack (timbre) sustain (timbre) release (timbre) gate (loudness) silence (loudness)
A/V Flow → Input: Kinect Vision Δ Internally: Clojure: Operate on Primitives → Output: Overtone Sound
Δ Operations osc/person-enter ∈ @person-sound{id-1 “vowel-1” id-2 “vowel-2” …} (osc/person-updated ‘(id age)) ∃ @person-sound{id …} × (vowel (map #(* age %) [amp verb osc])
Complexity (definst drone-ae-sus “I make the ‘ae’ vowel sound at a given frequency. I start/stop with the gate set to 1 or 0.” [freq 100 gate (synth-defaults ::gate) amp (synth-defaults ::vca) verb (synth-defaults ::reverb) kr-mul (synth-defaults ::vco)] (let [kr-mul eq-freq hpf-rlpf q synth-unit (:value kr-mul) [270 2290 3010] [600 8000 0.6] 0.1 (synth-unit-layered freq eq-freq q kr-mul)] (synth-filter-chain synth-unit amp verb gate hpf-rlpf)))
Art Qualitative Reasoning
Know The Rules Before You Can Break Them
Constraints Breed Creativity
Trust Your Instinct
(REPL is God)
spec Scientific Constraints (s/def ::frequency (s/and number? #((control-range 20 20000) %) ))
spec Aesthetic Constraints (s/def ::vca (s/and number? #((control-range 0.4 1) %))) (s/def ::reverb (s/and integer? #((control-range 0 1000) %))) (s/def ::vco (s/and integer? #((control-range 0 25) %)))
Autonomous Decision Making testable experiment-able with spec
Autonomous Decision Making Designing its own timbre over long periods of uptime
Autonomy & Authorship
Objectivity Subjectivity
Art
Aesthetics and Narrative: Programming What Cannot Can Be Programmed @dschmudde http ://schmud.de Licensed under a Creative Commons license.
Declarative programming has been the style of choice for implementing countless creative applications, from “Zork” to Harold Cohen’s “AARON.” We’ll explore why it helps to reason about machine creativity in this way and use Clojure’s Overtone toolkit and clojure.spec to illustrate abstract concerns and domain intelligence.
The content of this talk will be based on my successes and missteps building art installations and writing software concerned with aesthetics and narrative.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
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