Aesthetics and Narrative: Programming What Cannot Be Programmed

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.