The
Aesthetics of Generative Code
Geoff
Cox, BA, MA (RCA).
CAiiA-STAR (Science Technology Art
Research),
School of Computing, University of
Plymouth.
Alex McLean,
BSc.
State51, London.
Adrian Ward,
BSc.
Sidestream, London.
if
(
Abstract
Aesthetics,
in general usage, lays an emphasis on subjective sense perception associated
with the broad field of art and human creativity. Drawing particularly on
Jonathan Rée’s I See a Voice: A
Philosophical History (1999), this paper suggests that it might be useful
to revisit the troubled relationship between art and aesthetics for the purpose
of discussing the value of generative code. Our argument is that, like poetry,
the aesthetic value of code lies in its execution, not simply its written form.
However, to appreciate generative code fully we need to ‘sense’ the code to
fully grasp what it is we are experiencing and to build an understanding of the
code’s actions.
To
separate the code and the resultant actions would simply limit the aesthetic
experience, and ultimately limit the study of these forms - as a form of
criticism - and what in this context might better be called a ‘poetics’ of
generative code.
)
{
Aesthetics
‘The
taste of the apple… lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in
the fruit itself; in a similar way… poetry lies in the meeting of poem and
reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is
essential is the aesthetic act…’ [1]
From
the Greek ‘aisthesis’, aesthetics is broadly defined as pertaining to material
things perceptible by the senses, and is more precisely defined by Baumgarten
in Aesthetica (1750) defining beauty
as ‘phenomenal perfection’ as perceived through the senses; with aesthetics
‘pertaining to the beautiful or to the theory of taste’ [2]. Thereafter in
general usage, there remains an emphasis on subjective sense perception, but
with particular reference to aesthetics and beauty generally associated with
the broad field of art and human creativity. This applies despite Kant’s
attempt to distinguish beauty as an exclusively sensuous phenomenon and
aesthetics as a broader science of the conditions of sense perception [3]. For the purposes of our argument, we
will retain this broader use of the term ‘aesthetics’, and add the proviso that
there is an ideology to aesthetics that lies relatively hidden and difficult to
perceive critically. This ideological aspect lies outside the scope of our
paper but it is worth noting Slavoj Zizek’s evocative description of ideology -
the ‘generative matrix’ [4] – that analogously expresses the generative code
beneath the action. The suggestion, in keeping with this paper, would be that
this requires a certain transparency to open it to criticism. We hope that
revisiting the idea of the limits of aesthetic experience might serve to
resolve some of the oppositions between theory and practice, and
intellectual/physical division of labour involved in the production of generative
art works. These issues are all too easily overlooked in an over-concentration
on aesthetic outcomes that are all often reduced to subjective judgement and
taste.
Limits
In discussions of aesthetics,
the predominant philosophical legacy has been that any theory of art is
predicated on the ‘specific characterisation of the senses’ [5]. It is now
generally accepted that sense perception alone is simply not enough unless
contextualised within the world of ideas [6]. Similarly, the world of
multimedia is all too easily conflated with a multi-sensory experience (of
combining still and moving image, sound, interaction and so on [7]) as if
without a priori understanding of the integrated system (the body-machine) and
its underlying code - that would include social and discursive frameworks.
Aesthetic theory has tended to
collapse experience into what is perceived through the five senses, whilst
privileging sight and hearing over touch and taste, leaving smell ‘at the
bottom of the heap’ (Laporte’s History of
Shit comes to mind) [8]. Subsequently there has been a recognition that
this separation of sensual experience is inadequate and that a more systematic
approach is called for that recognises the body as a whole as an integrated
system. However, the legacy of the overall (able-bodied) reductive approach is
felt in the field of arts where the five senses are reflected in the
classifications themselves. It was in Diderot’s Encyclopédie in the 1750s, that the five ‘beaux arts’ were
established in parallel to the senses, as: architecture, sculpture, painting,
music and poetry. Where within such a schema would one place multimedia?
A more common-sensical
approach might suggest multimedia in the role of binding together the other
arts, and senses. It has long been recognised that there is some organising
mechanism at work in what Aristotle called ‘common sense’; somehow distributed
amongst the other five senses - not a sixth sense as such, but more of an
operating system perhaps. In philosophy, one approach to reconciling this dogma
was to conclude that the sensory apparatus converged in the brain, and
furthermore that mental ‘ideas’ combined the entirety of experience (Descartes
thought this and therefore was, c. 1630). However, this approach, like much
multimedia practice and theorising, stops short of providing satisfactory
detail on the senses, intellectual or operational apparatuses. Nevertheless, it
might be equally reductive to offer a synthesis of sense perception and the
organising function in terms of the computer – emanating from the same legacy
of an over-reliance on audio-visual codes. If this is where this line of
argument seems to be heading, more background is required.
Rée in I See A Voice explains that Kant’s ‘Critical philosophy’ managed to
resolve some of the established divisions between a ‘rationalist’ approach (eg.
Plato, Liebniz) that broadly argued for knowledge emanating from the intellect
and therefore before sensory experience, and a ‘empiricist’ approach (eg.
Aristotle, Locke) that argued for the senses producing knowledge, therefore
making universal truth unreliable (and this is what mathematics and computer
science is predicated on). Kant aimed to resolve this dilemma in the following
manner: ‘The intellect can sense nothing, the senses can think nothing; only
through their union can knowledge arise’ [9]. This does not suggest a
relativist compromise but serves to stress that the intellect structures these
processes. Or to put it more affirmatively, through Hegel: ‘There was nothing
in our senses, that had not been in our intellect all along’ [10]. If we were
to use this as an analogy for generative systems, it might similarly serve to
stress the programming procedures that lie behind the raw code that in
themselves can sense or think nothing.
Poetry
In the tradition of this line
of thinking, Hegel elevated the ‘art of sound’ to the realm of the spiritual,
and concluded that the ‘art of speech’ was ‘total art’ – ‘the absolute and true
art of the spirit’ [11]. Despite later criticism against this ‘Phonocentrism’
as the legitimising voice and source of all meaning and authority (Derrida et
al), the limits of traditional aesthetics are emphasised in the problem of
defining poetry. Poetry throws sense-bound classificatory distinctions into question
as it is both read and heard; or written and spoken/performed. Hegel suggests a
way out of this paradox by employing dialectical thinking; as we do not hear
speech by simply listening to it. He suggests that we need to represent speech
to ourselves in written form in order to grasp what it essentially is. Thus
poetry can neither be reduced to audible signs (the time of the ear) nor
visible signs (the space of the eye) but is composed of language itself. This
synthesis suggests that written and spoken forms work together to form a
language that we appreciate as poetry. But does code work in the same way? Is
the analogy productive?
Disappointingly,
this appears not to be the case with ‘Perl Poetry’. Take, for example the ‘Best
of Show’ by Angie Winterbottom from The
Perl Poetry Contest, and then compare to the original text supplied
alongside:
if ((light eq dark)
&& (dark eq light)
&& ($blaze_of_night{moon} == black_hole)
&& ($ravens_wing{bright} == $tin{bright})){
my $love = $you = $sin{darkness} + 1;
};
If light were dark and dark were light
The moon a black hole in the blaze of night
A raven’s wing as bright as tin
Then you, my love, would be darker than sin.
[12]
All that has been demonstrated is an act of translation from an existing text, simply ‘porting’ existing poetry into perl. It produces poetry in a conventional sense, possibly expressing some clever word order and grammatical changes, but does little to articulate the language of perl in itself. When you execute perl poetry in this way, it simply repeats itself but does not acknowledge its execution. It is this operative function that is an essential of part of the experience of poetry.
Poetry at the point of its execution (reading and hearing), produces meaning in multitudinous ways, and can be performed with endless variations of stress, pronunciation, tempo and style. With this in mind, Surrealists and Dadaists used arbitrary patterns, rhythmical noise, and mere chance arrangements of words and sounds – particularly in brutist and simultaneous poems where texts in different languages were read at the same time, and in other automatic or generative experimentation. In this way, they rejected aesthetic conventions of perfection and order, harmony and beauty, and all bourgeois values and taste. From the Dada manifesto of 1918, Tristan Tzara said: ‘I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none...’. Famously, Tzara advised aspiring poets to cut a newspaper article into words and make a poem by shaking them out of a bag at random, revealing the hidden possibilities of language, and clearly undermining notions of creativity, genius and authority. He explained: ‘in these phonetic poems we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted’ [13]. Thus, the idea of Poetry’s universality as well as logic, reason, and aesthetics are brought simultaneously into question. Whereas the automatic text reduced the significance of the poet making the text a transcription or discovery rather than a production or invention, we are keen to stress more purposeful arrangements of code by the programmer.
# Extract from walk1/start.pl
my $walk1_beat=0;
my $foo;
sub on_clock {
return if($foo++ % 4);
my $beat = $walk1_beat + 1;
if (($beat-1)%4 eq 0) {
playnote(7,47+$pitches[$bassctr]-(int($beat/4)*12)) # on-beat
}
if (($beat-1)%3 eq 0) {
playnote(7,35+$pitches[$bassctr]-(int($beat/6)*12)) #
syncopate!
}
for (0..$#pitches) {
if (abs($beats[$_]) eq $beat) {
playnote($_+1,59+$pitches[$_]);
}
}
$bassctr=($bassctr+1)%$#pitches;
if (rand(50)<25) { $beats[rand(@beats)]++ }
else { $beats[rand(@beats)]-- }
if (rand(50)<25) { $pitches[rand(@pitches)]+=$pitches[rand(@pitches)]
}
else { $pitches[rand(@pitches)]-=$pitches[rand(@pitches)] }
for (0..$#beats) { $beats[$_]=wraparound( $beats[$_],16) }
for (0..$#pitches) { $pitches[$_]=wraparound($pitches[$_],12) }
$walk1_beat = ++$walk1_beat % 16;
}
Rather than chance
arrangements, attention to detail is paramount when it is encountered in
written form and in terms of its execution. For instance, significant portions
of the code are ‘conditions’ which dictate
when the subsequent indented parts are to be executed. In terms of form, any
indenting and other visual patterning is a technique to visualise the flow of
logic – whereas the same code could be expressed in any shape or arrangement
and would run the same output. Some conditions are evaluated inside other
conditions to create infinitely complex responses - the indenting programming
technique visualises the boolean logic that forms the major core of the code.
The language is used in a highly controlled manner
and with subtle nuances.
For instance:
$walk1_beat = ++$walk1_beat
% 16;
One might add parenthesis to make this clearer, or not.
$walk1_beat++;
if ($walk1_beat eq 16) {
$walk1_beat=0 }
This executes much the same
output as before but through a different operation, and requires specialised
knowledge of perl to realise that ‘eq’ is a string comparison
operator and not a numeric one. The ‘eq’ and ‘==’ equivalence is a subtle play
of language.
Crucial to generative
media is that data is actually changed as the code runs. In the example, the ‘++’ and ‘—-‘ symbols are used to
increment and decrement numbers - this, in association with the modulo
mathematics operator '%' reveals how the numbers are
constantly changing. Although these numbers could be calculated by hand and
plotted onto something like a musical score, the power of code allows this to
happen in ‘real-time’, and the effects are largely unknown until execution. The
code could run forever, and it would always be producing new arrangements.
Evidently, code
works like poetry in that it plays with structures of language itself, as well
as our corresponding perceptions. In this sense, all poetry might be seen to be generative in
that it is always in the process of becoming. Even for the Surrealist Paul
Valéry, a poem ‘entails a continuous linkage between the voice that is, the
voice that impends, and the voice that is to come’ [14]. It is generative in
the sense that it unfolds in real-time.
# Extract from
nuane/start.pl
sub on_clock {
return if ($foo++ % 4);
return if (++$beats < $aTime);
$beats = 0;
$client->ctrl_send('note', "$aNote, 1, 0") if
$aNote;
$aNote=47+$notes[$ptr];
$aTime=$times[$ptr];
$ptr=($ptr+1)%8;
$client->ctrl_send('note', "$aNote, 1, " . (80 +
rand(40)));
}
Commands can be
executed in a variety of ways. The first two lines of the ‘on_clock’ subroutine are ‘return’ statements,
which prevent the rest of the code from executing if the supplied condition
becomes true.
return if (++$beats < $aTime);
is functionally
similar to
if
(!(++$beat < $aTime)) {
# …
}
In this example,
an ‘alternative’ word order has been chosen. An obvious parallel to poetry can
be made in that word order can help to express what is most important in a
particular statement - the condition or the action.
By
analogy, generative code has poetic qualities, as it does not operate in a
single moment in time and space but as a series of consecutive ‘actions’ that are
repeatable, the outcome of which might be imagined in different contexts. Code
is a notation of an internal structure that the computer is executing,
expressing ideas, logic, and decisions that operate as an extension of the
author's intentions. The written form is merely a computer-readable notation of
logic, and is a representation of this process. Yet the written code isn't what
the computer really executes, since there are many levels of interpreting and
compiling and linking taking place. Code is only really understandable with the
context of its overall structure – this is what makes it like a language (be it
source code or machine code, or even raw bytes). It may be hard to understand
someone else’s code but the computer is, after all, multi-lingual. In this
sense, understanding someone else’s code is very much like listening to poetry
in a foreign language - the appreciation goes beyond a mere understanding of
the syntax or form of the language used, and as such translation is infamously
problematic. Form and function should not be falsely separated.
Poetics
Code itself is clearly not
poetry as such, but retains some of its rhythm and metrical form. Code is
intricately crafted, and expressed in multitudinous and idiosyncratic ways. Like poetry, the aesthetic value of code lies in
its execution, not simply its written form. To appreciate it fully we need to
‘see’ the code to fully grasp what it is we are experiencing and to build an
understanding of the code’s actions [15].
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Curses;keypad initscr;nodelay 1;box qw{|
-};($l,$d,$k,@f)=(1..3,[10,10]);&
n;while(){refresh;@f=([$f[0][0]+$d%2-($d==1)*2,$f[0][1]+$d%2-1+($d==2)*2],@f);
select$f,$f,$f,.06;($c=getch)+1and$d=4-($c%2?2:0)-($c<260);addch@{pop@f},'
'if
@f>$l;$l+=$_=inch@{$f[0]};if(!/ /){/\d/||die;addstr 0,
60,$l;&n}addch@{$f[0]},
'O'}sub n{while(){@v=(rand 24,rand
80);inch(@v)eq' '&&last}addch@v,''.rand 10}
This is decidedly not to say
that the code should be privileged (as implied by Adorno’s comments on music
being a by-product of the score) but that the code and the execution of the
code need to be experienced in parallel. This is both necessary and impossible
for generative or autonomous systems. Any sense of code’s autonomy is subject
to its place within its operational structure. In this way, code reflects human activity and human activity is coded
within social and discursive frameworks - thus authorship is characterised in
terms of (social) responsibility to the operating system and language
structures [17]. Clearly generative media operates in this way too and
appears to encapsulate the paradox of autonomy. Generative art needs to
acknowledge the conditions of its own making - its poesis (from the Greek poiesis,
poetic art or creativity from poiein
- to make). This needs to be made transparent in the spirit of open process, and open source.
#!/usr/bin/
$power
= 8;
sub fission {
fork or $child = 1;
--$power if $child;
if ($child) {
exit unless --$power
}
return $child;
}
while (not &fission) {
print 0;
bomb:
while (&fission) {
print 1
}
}
goto 'bomb';
[18]
In
this example, the program splits in two with every iteration. The code is
relatively lengthy as the basic instruction could be reduced to one short line
of code:
fork while 1;
The instruction is simply to
‘split this process in two for ever’ - thus, after the first iteration you get
two processes, after the second you get four, then eight, and so on
indefinitely. However, the output of the first example is significant in that
it is a visualisation of the execution of the process in a more complex
performative manner. On a technical level, the computer is under such a high
load that it fails to comply to its instructions - after a while the fork calls
fail to split the process in two, and. the ordering in which the task scheduler
does things becomes less-ordered the harder it is pushed. In this way, the
output is a visualisation of the computer’s performance during the program's
execution. The output would look very different on different computers, thus
providing a ‘watermark’ of the processor and operating system. The code and the
resultant actions are intricately linked in poetic dialogue.
To separate the code and the
resultant actions would simply limit the aesthetic experience, and ultimately
the study of these forms - as a form of criticism - and what in this context
might be better called ‘poetics’. Generative code encapsulates these issues:
‘Its output would be… that is
to say [like] poetry correctly defined; Language so well chosen and aptly arranged
that, even when expressing tedious or distasteful subjects, it would remain
vivid and lively and “pleasing to the ear”.’ [19]
We propose that the production
of generative code should be undertaken with similar critical reflection and
panache.
}
References
All perl scripts are written by Alex McLean and Adrian Ward of Slub, http://www.slub.org/
[1] Jorge Luis Borges, Foreword to Obra Poética, quoted in, Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, Polemics, London:
Academy, 1996, p. 6.
[2] T. F. Hoad, The
Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986, p. 7.
[3] Raymond Williams, Keywords:
a vocabulary of culture and society, London: Fontana, 1988, p. 31.
[4] Slavoj Zizek, ed., Mapping
Ideology, London: Verso, 1997.
[5] Georg W. Hegel,
Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (1823) trans. B. Bosanquet,
London: Penguin, 1993.
[6] For more on the limits of aesthetics, see Andrew
Benjamin & Peter Osborne. eds., Thinking
Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics, London: ICA 1991.
[7] One suitably named attempt to try to engage with digital
systems beyond mere design issues is Sean Cubitt’s Digital Aesthetics, London: Sage 1998.
[8] Dominique Laporte, History
of Shit, London: MIT Press, 2000.
[9] Kant, from ‘The History of Pure Reason’ in Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787),
quoted in Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: a
Philosophical History, London: Flamingo 1999, p. 330.
[10] Hegel, from Logic (Encyclopedia), quoted in Rée, Ibid., p. 342. This is not to say that the senses are not crucially
important as they structure our interpretations through space and time (what
Kant distinguished as ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ experience – as spatial and temporal
accordingly). Rée proceeds to chart the history of this by pointing to the
importance of Husserl’s Phenomenology. For more on this, see Rée, ‘The Five
Senses and the History of Philosophy’ in, Ibid.,
pp. 329-345.
[11] Rée, Ibid., p. 356.
[12] Kevin Meltzer, ‘The Perl
Poetry Contest’, in The Perl Journal,
Volume 4, Issue 4, 2000, http://www.itknowledge.com/tpj/contest-poetry.html
Meltzer explains: ‘This short entry, by Angie
Winterbottom, was the most interesting. Her style was fresh and unique, and her
use of visual representations in the text are clever. Consider the following
excerpt:
($blaze_of_night{moon} == black_hole)
“The moon, a black hole in the blaze of night.”
Marvellous! Angie tells us that this entry is
from Jim Steinman’s song The Invocation,
on the Pandora's Box album Original Sin.’
[13] Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto’ (1918), in
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Art in
Theory: 1900-1990: an anthology of changing ideas, Oxford: Blackwell 1998,
pp. 249-253.
[14] Rée, quoting Valéry,
Ibid., p. 361.
[15] The potential for embracing this could be
expressed in software development like
MPEG-4 Structured Audio that specifies sound not as sampled data, but as a
computer program that generates audio when run. Computer scientists call this
approach ‘Kolmogorov’ encoding. It combines a powerful language for computing
audio (SAOL, pronounced ‘sail’) and a musical score language (SASL, pronounced
‘sassil’) with legacy support for the MIDI format. MP4-SA also defines an
efficient encoding of these elements into a binary file format suitable for
transmission and storage.
John Lazzaro and John Wawrzynek, MPEG-4 Structured Audio: Developer Tools,
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/
[18] Cover graphic and source from Pimmon's invalidObject
Series ('while') http://www.fallt.com/invalidObject/while/index.html
[19] Rée, Op cit., p.349, paraphrasing
Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry.