Michael Mateas

Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
michaelm@cs.cmu.edu

Phoebe Sengers

Media Arts Research Studies
Institut fuer Medienkommunikation
GMD
Schloss Birlinghoven
D-53754 Sankt Augustin Germany
phoebe@viswiz.gmd.de

People are narrative animals. As children, our caretakers immerse us in stories: fairy tales, made-up stories, favorite stories, "Read me a story!" Even when barely verbal, we begin to tell our own proto-stories. "Phoebe! Pizza! Phoebe! Pizza!" was the excited story of a 2-year-old friend Addie when one of us happened to arrive simultaneously with the pizza delivery man. This story means, approximately, "Can you believe it? Phoebe and pizza came into the house at the same time!" As children, narrative frameworks become an important part of the way we learn to approach the world (Nelson 1989). As adults, we continue to surround ourselves with stories, furnishing our worlds not just with data but with meaning. We say to one another, "Have you heard? Frank
and Barb had a fight. She's sick of him letting the dog on the bed. I always told him he'd get in trouble with his permissive ways with that beast." By telling stories we make sense of the world. We order its events and find meaning in them by assimilating them to more-or-less familiar narratives. It is this human ability to organize experience into narrative form that David Blair and Tom Meyer call "Narrative Intelligence" (Blair and Meyer 1997) and around which AI research into narrative coalesces.

Kerstin Dautenhahn

Department of Cybernetics
University of Reading
U.K.
kd@cyber.reading.ac.uk

Christopher Nehaniv

Cybernetics & Software Systems Grooup
University of Aizu
Japan
nehaniv@u-aizu.ac.jp

This paper speculates about 'stories' as potentially useful units to construct historically grounded artificial life forms. We draw our motivation from the structure and organisation of biological life forms and the organisation of human memory and sociality. A fresh approach towards historical artificial life creatures is to develop story-telling systems supported on situationally grounded, discrete dynamical systems. This involves creating autobiographic agents which, by telling through remembering, by constructing stories, might 'understand' the world. We address these issues using methods from the area of Algebraic Engineering, growing out of algebraic theory of automata developed by Krohn and Rhodes. Our apporach affords mathematical methods for expressing events during the existence of an agent in an associative multiplicative structure that adequately acptures the notion of irreversibility of events in life histories. Furthermore, story-telling and autobiographic re-construction are supported within this framework by appropriate historical expansions (which are themselves amenable to algebraic manipulation). Upcoming implementations of this framework in simulation and robotic agents have to demonstrate the validity of this approach.

Michael Mateas

Artist and Computer Scientist
Computer Science Department and Studio for Creative Inquiry
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
michaelm@cs.cmu.edu

Expressive AI is a new interdiscipline of AI-based cultural production combining art practice and AI research practice. This paper explores the notion of expressive AI by comparing it with other AI discourses, describing how it borrows notions of interpretation and authorship from both art and AI research practice, and by providing preliminary desiderata for the practice.

artificial intelligence research as art
information arts: art as an independent center of research

Stephen Wilson

At its core, artificial intelligence research is about much more fundamental issues than construction of the next year's model of expert system. The culture desperately needs the definitions of research agendas, the generation of hypotheses, and the pursuit of research questions in this field to reflect the perspectives and wisdom of people from a wide range of disciplines, including the arts and humanities. If we are going to have artificially intelligent programs and robots, I would have sculptors and visual artists shaping their appearance, musicians composing their voices, choreographers forming their motion, poets crafting their language, and novelists and dramatists creating their character and interactions. To ignore these traditions is to discard centuries of experience and wisdom relevant to the research questions at hand.

Computational Modelling of Mechanisms of Creativity

Bipin Indurkhya

Department of Computer Science,
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
2-24-16 Nakacho, Koganei, Tokyo 184, Japan
email: bipin@cc.tuat.ac.jp

How can computers be used to model creativity? We address this issue in this article by starting with an examination of the two main cognitive mechanisms of human creativity: juxtaposition of the dissimilar, and deconceptualization of the familiar. We argue that a primary hurdle facing human creativity is in trying to step outside of our habituated conceptual associations. However, since computers do not have such associations, we argue that is some important sense they are naturally predisposed towards creativity. Taking this viewpoint, we outline an approach to incorporating both mechanisms of creativity in a computational system.

Ways of Seeing: Visualization of Artificial Life Environments

Jon McCormack and Alan Dorin

Centre for Electronic Media Art
School of Computer Science and Software Engineering
Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800
Australia
{jonmc, aland}@csse.monash.edu.au

This paper investigates the significance of cultural assumptions associated with the methodology and epistemology of visualization in simulations. Starting with ideas from art theory on ‘ways of seeing’ in the context of painting, we look at the concepts of truth and representation in the visual image. Example images on the subject of evolution and artificial life are examined to reveal the assumptions and implicit knowledge used by the creators and viewers. We use examples of visualization from other cultures to clarify the means by which knowledge influences conventions in representation, and how alternate modes of visual representation may offer new insights for visualization of artificial life systems.

MusicBlox: a Real-time Algorithmic Composition System Incorporating a Distributed Interactive Genetic Algorithm

Andrew Gartland-Jones

Computational Creativity Research Group, The University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
drew@atgj.org

This paper discusses the motivation, design and construction of a generative music system, 'MusicBlox', (by the author) that utilises a domain specific, knowledge rich Genetic Algorithm (GA). The paper begins by describing the functionality and musical aims of the project, and goes on to detail the implementation of a GA as part of the project's compositional sub-system, including a discussion of the suitability of using a GA for compositional tasks. The paper concludes that the developed GA is able to produce musically successful results, but that significant additional work still needs to be undertaken before it achieves all the aims outlined.

Can a Genetic Algorithm Think Like a Composer?

Andrew Gartland-Jones

Computational Creativity Research Group, The University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
e-mail: drew@atgj.org

There has now been a substantial body of work utilising Genetic Algorithms (GA) for the purpose of musical composition. A common point of discussion is how far GA’s can simulate not just the musical output of human composers, but also the process of composing itself. This paper begins by discussing the suitability of using a GA for composition, and goes on to describe a generative music system (by the author), that utilises a domain specific, knowledge rich GA. The system acts on a supplied 2-bar musical phrase (up to 4 parts), and evolves musical fragments towards a supplied target. The aim is to provide interim points on the evolutionary path, which represents a ‘new’ musical ideas audibly based on the supplied fragments. The paper concludes that the system is able to model at least part of the creative process of composition, and is effective at producing musically successful results. (Audio download sources of its output are included to support this conclusion). The system was used to generate music included in an interactive installation work, exhibited at Brighton Arts Festival 2002, and other applications under developed that use the algorithm are discussed.

HUMAN-ARTIFICIAL ECOSYSTEMS: SEARCHING FOR A LANGUAGE

Mauro Annunziato, Piero Pierucci

Plancton Art Studio
Rome, Italy
www.plancton.com
plancton@plancton.com

The most recent advances of artificial life scientific research are opening up a new frontier: the creation of simulated life environments populated by autonomous agents. In these environments artificial beings can interact, reproduce and evolve [4, 6, 15], and can be seen as laboratories to explore the emergence of social behaviors like competition, cooperation, relationships and communication [3, 5, 7] . It is still not possible to approach a reasonable simulation of the incredible complexity of human or animal societies, but these environments can be used as a scientific or artistic tools to explore some basic aspects of the evolution [1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]. The combination of these concepts with robotics technology or with immersive-interactive 3D environments (virtual reality) are changing quickly well known paradigms like digital life, manmachine interface, virtual world. The virtual world metaphor becomes interesting when the artificial beings can develop some form of learning, increasing their performances, adaptation, and developing the ability to exchange information with human visitors. In this sense, the evolution enhances the creative power and meaningful of these environments, and human visitors experience the emotion of a shift from a simplified simulation of the reality to a real immersion into an imaginary life. We may think that these realization are the first sparks of a new form of life: simulated for the soft-alife thinkers, real for the hard-alife thinkers, or a simple imaginary vision for the artists. The key aspect of artificial societies is the potential to develop an internal knowledge in the community. This knowledge can be expressed through the ability to modify their behavior and relationships creating structures and complexity in the society. In this paper we refer to several experiments where a community of artificial individuals, equipped with a personal neural network, autonomously develop a common set of symbol-meaning associations. Furthermore we illustrate the state of the art of development of the E-Sparks project. Goal of the project is the realization of a symbolic interactive installation where artificial beings can communicate with the humans. In this installation the creature progressively develop the ability to learn and classify the words pronounced by the humans and diffuse in the community up to the emergence of a common and autonomous vocabulary.

Emergent Relationships

Mauro Annunziato and Piero Pierucci

Plancton art studio, Rome, Italy

Through the development of new languages, artifcial life is going to be a new creative area of interference between art and science. This paper describe the background of an interactive audio-visual installation based on an artificial life environment where individuals can interact, reproduce and evolve through the mechanisms of genetic mutations. The people can interact with the artificial individuals creating an hybrid ecosystem able to generate emergent shapes, colors, sound architectures and metaphors for imaginary societies, virtual reflections of the real world.cial individuals creating an hybrid ecosystem able to generate emergent shapes, colors, sound architectures and metaphors for imaginary societies, virtual reflections of the real world.

Experiments with Reactive Robotic Sound Sculptures

Sam Woolf

Interact Lab
Dept. of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
Sussex University, Brighton BN1 9QH
samw@cogs.susx.ac.uk

This paper describes two robotic sound sculptures produced in collaboration with Danish artist Tine Bech. 'Echidna' and 'Boundless in Space'. The sculptures were exhibited at the Aarhus Kunstbygning gallery in Aarhus, Denmark from the 3rd to the 25th August 2002. I will describe the sculptures and also defend the use of simple reactive robotics in interactive art.

Consciousness Reframed 2003
On Making Music with Artificial Life Models

Eduardo Reck Miranda

Our planet is a pulsating body inhabited by vibrating creatures and things. We are oscillatory beings resonating in a myriad of vibrating frequencies: both natural (brainwaves, heartbeat, ocean tides, and so forth) and artificial (telecommunications signals, radio, etc.). I am interested in the acoustics of the interplay between the artificial and the natural worlds, and in particular with the idea of composing music with the aid of a computer. To this end, I am investigating ways to make computational models of biological systems audible in order to make music with them. This paper introduces two systems of my own design, which uses cellular automata to compose music and synthesise sounds.

A-Life and Musical Composition: A Brief Survey

Eduardo R Miranda

Computer Music Research, Faculty of Technology, University of Plymouth, Drake
Circus, Plymouth, Devon PL4 8AA, United Kindgom.
eduardo.miranda@plymouth.ac.uk

Peter M Todd

Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Adaptive Behavior and
Cognition, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
ptodd@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

There have been a number of interesting applications of A-Life in music, ranging from associating musical notes to the cells of cellular automata, to forging genotypes of musical parameters for generating music using genetic algorithms. From the three approaches surveyed in this paper, only the cultural approach allows for the study of the circumstances and mechanisms whereby music might originate and evolve in virtual communities of musicians and listeners. This approach considers musical systems in the context of the origins and evolution of cultural conventions that may emerge under a number of constraints, such as psychological, physiological and ecological constraints.

ALGORITHMIC COMPOSITION AS A MODEL OF CREATIVITY

Bruce L Jacob

University of Michigan
blj@eecs.umich.edu

There are two distinct types of creativity: the flash out of the blue (inspiration? genius?), and the process of incremental revisions (hard work). Not only are we years away from modeling the former, we do not even begin to understand it. The latter is algorithmic in nature and has been modeled in many systems both musical and non-musical.

Algorithmic composition is as old as music composition. It is often considered a cheat, a way out when the composer needs material and/or inspiration. It can also be thought of as a compositional tool that simply makes the composer's work go faster. This article makes a case for algorithmic composition as such a tool. The `hard work' type of creativity often involves trying many different combinations against each other and choosing one over others. This iterative task seems natural to be expressed as a computer algorithm. The implementation issues can be reduced to two components: how to understand one's own creative process well enough to reproduce it as an algorithm, and how to program a computer to differentiate between `good' and `bad' music. The philosophical issues reduce to the question who or what is responsible for the music produced?

Swarm Music: Improvised Music with Multi-Swarms

T. M. Blackwell

Department of Computer Science
University College London
Gower Street
London, UK
tim.blackwell@ieee.org

This paper outlines Swarm Music, an improvisational musical system based on the dynamics of insect swarms. It is proposed that the interactions amonst performers in a freely improvising ensemble can be modelled using the self-organisational abilities of swarms. In a multi-swarm, each swarm is a musical entity which interacts with a target group. Each swarm is comprised of particles and each particle corresponds to a musical event. The targets are derived from other swarms, or from collaborating humans. The indirect interaction between swarms and humans is an example of stigmergy and can be expected to lead to temporal organisation. It is also proposed that the self-organisation of particles within a swarm leads to pleasing note patterns, so that each swarm is itself an interesting muscially source.

Ten Steps to Make a Perfect Creative Evolutionary Design System

Peter J. Bentley

Department of Computer Science
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
P.Bentley@cs.ucl.ac.uk
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/P.Bentley/

Una-May O’Reilly

Artificial Intelligence Lab
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge
MA, 02139
unamay@ai.mit.edu
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/unamay

A perfect creative evolutionary design system is impossible to achieve, but in this position paper we discuss 10 steps that might bring us a little closer to this dream. These important problems and requirements have been identified as a result of both authors’ experiences on a number of projects in this area. While our solutions may not solve all of the problems, they illustrate what we regard as the current state of the art in creative evolutionary design.

Modeling Emergence of Complexity: the Application of Complex System and Origin of Life Theory to Interactive Art on the Internet

Christa SOMMERER & Laurent MIGNONNEAU

ATR Media Integration and Communications Research Lab
2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun
61902 Kyoto, Japan
christa@mic.atr.co.jp, laurent@mic.atr.co.jp

The origin of this paper lies in the fundamental question of how complexity arose in the development of life and how one could construct an artistic interactive system that can model and simulate this emergence of complexity. Based on the idea that interaction and communication between entities of a system are the driving forces for the emergence of higher and more complex structures than its mere parts, we propose to apply principles of Complex System Theory to the creation of an interactive, computer generated and audience participatory artwork on the Internet and to test whether complexity within the system can emerge.

Generative and Evolutionary Techniques for Building Envelope Design

John FRAZER, Julia FRAZER*, LIU Xiyu**, TANG Mingxi, Patrick JANSSEN

Design Technology Research Centre
School of Design
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China SAR
*Architectural Association
School of Architecture, London
**DTRC and Shandong Normal University, PRC
John.frazer@polyu.edu.hk

The authors have been involved in the use of generative techniques for building envelope design since 1968 and the use of genetic algorithms since 1990. Recent work has focused on incorporating optimisation functions into form generating processes in order for new forms responding to varied design environments to be created and determined. This paper will summarise the authors’ previous work in this field and explain the theory behind this approach, and illustrate recent developments. While the initial implementation of a new building envelope design system is reported in more details in a related paper at this conference, this paper outlines its main features and points out the direction at which it is to be fully developed and further improved.

Colouring Without Seeing: a Problem in Machine Creativity

Professor Harold Cohen

Department of Visual Arts
University of California at San Diego

Design Principles for Intelligent Environments

Michael H. Coen

MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
545 Technology Square
Cambridge, MA 02139
mhcoen@ai.mit.edu

This paper describes design criteria for creating highly embedded, interactive spaces that we call Intelligent Environments. The motivation for building these systems is to bring computation into the real, physical world to support what is traditionally considered non-computational activity. We describe an existing prototype space, known as the Intelligent Room, which was created to experiment with different forms of natural, multimodal human-computer interaction. We discuss design decisions encountered while creating the Intelligent Room and how the experiences gained during its use have shaped the creation of its successor.