lithium flowers bloom

Overview

My thesis project is a software program that creates generative drawings on its own, one drawing per day, and updates its own drawing blog.

The program was built on the reverse of most generative computer graphics artwork or simulation approaches that creates realistic graphics; instead of creating complex visual graphics based on intensive computational power, it is trying to simulate human drawing in a very low-level approach of recreating emotion and gestures.

Rationale

I choose not to build another program to appreciate visual complexity because it comes down to the question of the value of the work of art, which in my opinion has a lot to do with mastery of skills and efforts put in it. So for me people appreciate complex visuals in computer graphics because those visuals are extremely hard to achieve by manual effort. However it is not always true for computers and that is why I am not super excited about computer generated complex abstracts. The real effort would be assigning emotion to fully automated process, and achieve humanity in the drawings produced.

In short, I am building this program in a way that is extremely hard for the computers to do, giving up the significance that could be easily achieved (compared to human effort) by a computer program. I would like to show the slow and painful process of this computer generated drawing and its evolution towards its own aesthetics.

There are infinite number of ways to build a program that draws on itself, and I am building it to mimic my own way of drawing/doodling. From the way the brush moves on the canvas, the shape of the brush strokes, to the composition preferences and training materials feed to the program for inspirations, all implementation would be following my own subjective choice. However the machine is running all by itself without constant intervention even by myself. Ideally it could live as part of my ghost in a different shell. The program could be an extension of the body, virtually. Would it be an even closer way to communicate directly through my ghost?

Goals

The goal of this project is to create new genre of computer graphic that expresses humanity by mimicking the doodling experience and generating drawing based on emotional factors and gestures.

It is not the goal of the project to produce tradition painting through simulation of painting tools and media. Drawings produced by the program should be visually recognizable as a computer generated artwork, while the content of the drawing can be subjective, emotional and less “visually mathematical”.

Technically, I would like to show the process of how a computer program would make sense of visual inputs and produce creative result out of it. And ideally it should also be able to publish its evolution from creating basic shapes and curves to being able to produce complex compositions (but not necessarily always doing so).

Audience and Location

The project is expecting a wide audience, essentially anyone that has prior experience of using a computer and interested in computer generated graphics. It would also probably draw attention of people that has particular interest in drawings.

This project itself is a very personal expression, meaning that I decide to design the algorithm independently without too much concerns about potential audience. While I am building the project not for particular target audience, I do expect different responses from different groups of people, and there are several that I am more interested in: a) generative graphics artists, b) illustrators, c) artificial intelligence scholars or engineers.

In terms of presentation, I would like the piece to be accessible online including the whole archive of the drawings it created. It is meant to be experienced alone than in a group. While it’s most preferred to be viewed through a web browser or a downloadable application running on one’s own computer, the project could possible still be suitable for public spaces like galleries or museums.

For now it seems that a website would provide a most complete experience for this project given its non-linear nature and technical difficulty to replicate its infrastructure. If I would have enough time to release the application itself to the public or make it easily deployable to other people’s website, and the copies of this project would be able to evolve independently, the final presentation of this decentralized artificial intelligence would have to be on the internet, or at least using internet to aggregate the productions/artworks from all copies.

Core Features and Functionality

The core of the project is a software that generates drawings. Every time the program launches, it creates a drawing and terminates itself. The drawing takes inspiration from the program’s external visual memories mixed with some “live” input that adds emotional factors to it. The drawing process is monitored and supervised by the composition and aesthetics assessment algorithms. The program determines the scale of the drawing and the moment to finish drawing.

There will be a few peripheral components to assist the core drawing module.

a) Visual Memory Storage, an important basis for building up the aesthetics preference of the program, as well as its raw material for inspiration. The memory is prioritized based on an arbitrary “impression” algorithm that puts the program’s most favorite visuals on the top.

b) Interface for Visual Memory allows the program to accept multiple source of external graphical inputs. The source could be a streaming video feed from a live webcam on justin.tv, or a favorite image feed from my ffffound.com image bookmarking account. The sources could be used as either positive or negative training material to build up the program’s aesthetic preference. The interface should be easily configured to maintain the input feeds which the program is listening to, and whether or not they are used as training materials. Ideally it could be easily accessible on the web.

c) Aesthetic Preference database, is a set of rules that the program collectively builds up over time through the process of learning, drawing and self assessment. The database is referred to during the creation of the drawing, and will be updated through training, drawing, and feedback on the published drawings.

d) Coordination Scripts that launches the program and publishes its creation to a website. Since the program itself is designed to be modular for future portability, some coordination scripts are required to help keep the whole thing running. They would help monitoring the visual feeds and compiling any updates to the visual memory, launch the drawing module at a preconfigured time, publish
the drawing created in this iteration and collect the feedback on the drawing to reflect into the preference database.

e) A website, technically a blog, that showcases the daily creation of the program.

People will be able to browse through the drawings the program created over time. They will probably not be able to search, since there will not be enough metadata associated with the drawing for filtering. If there has to be a filter or category, it could be based on timeline, emotion, or arbitrary themes (if the program evolves to name its creation).

For individual drawings, people will be able to:

a) watch a playback of the drawing process;
b) see the inspiration of the drawing, or the pictures that the program referred to in the creation;
c) rate the drawing, the result might or might not be used as training material;
d) (optional) order a print of the drawing;

This project is not intended to be instantly interactive because I would like to show the slow and painful process of creating a drawing, not to draw people’s attention to the coolness of computer generative graphics. I would like each of the drawing the program made would take a while for people to digest. I would like people to notice and appreciate the drawings themselves as work of art without knowing that they are created by a computer. This is already a very challenging task both in AI and fine art.

The software program shares my attitude on computer generative graphic art. While it is capable of creating complex generative visuals, it chooses to (as I choose to make it ) take the hard way and to apply its own (as my own) preference of visual beauty to its creation. It is a very personal critique on current computer generative art.

The core drawing module will either be written in Processing or openFrameworks, depending on my research on the portability of each option. I would like the program to be able to executed on a command line tool that does not require user intervention in the drawing process, so that it would be easily automated after it is deployed to a linux server.

For visual memory storage, couchDB seems a competitive choice for my data structure given its document oriented concept and flexibility in data types. MySql will be a safe but second choice since I’m more familiar with it.

Housekeeping scripts will be a compilation of a set of tools written in combination of shell scripts, python and php. It is most likely that I will build the website in php or just hack around the wordpress CMS framework.

As a software program, it does not have a user interface. It should not even require an input. It could be simply described as an application that generates one drawing at a time.

The showcase website, as the final presentation of the program, does have a user interface. I have in mind a blog site with clean minimalist design, highlighting latest drawing created by the program. And it should be easy enough to navigate through the archive of drawings to see how the algorithm evolves.

Success Measures / Future Plans

The goal of this project is to achieve machine intelligence in artworks, meaning that it should essentially create drawing that is visually or emotionally appealing to its viewers. Although the concept of machine intelligence evolution made public is as important, I would like to make the project beyond just being conceptual. The diversity of the drawings that it creates and the fact whether or not people appreciate those drawings will be also very important and valuable information for me.

For thesis, of course I would like to build the whole project to its greatest completion. However given the time constraints and technical challenges, I could still sort out some of the components to be lower prioritized than others.

The core drawing module is first priority, but it does not mean that the evolving algorithm needs to be perfect. The most important thing is the self driven composition process.

Secondly important is the infrastructure that automates the program and publish the drawings. Even if the algorithm is not perfect, it still makes a lot of sense if the whole evolution procedure is online and accessible to all.

Next will be the external interface of the program to the outside world, which makes it easier to feed training materials, to supervise the training process and to apply the feedbacks.

For future I will be most interested in making it portable enough so that there could be multiple instances of this program evolving individually and people could observe how different they are becoming over time.

is here: http://bit.ly/thesis-workplan

I have always been paranoid keeping my different online identities separate. It has been a while since I found it easy enough to put up several google searches and get a pretty complete profile of a person, if he or she does have an active online identity. It is not to say I think keeping a clear online identity is a bad thing. On one hand it is inevitable to maintain an active and valid identity either for clearer public recognition or promotion, just like in real life, on the other hand it is also a safer approach to have separate identity and sometimes anonymity for different online tasks, especially under circumstances where online surveillance and censorships happen a lot. However with any currently available web browser and the current way most modern websites are built, to keep a clear separation of different identities is extremely difficult and effortful. Using same username or email address leaves a clear and accurate trail of one’s online activities.

There are several different approaches out there trying to either simplify or solve the identity mess online, such as OpenID protocol, integrated user profile management in web browsers and also ongoing research on privacy models that could apply to computer programs for them to classify private information. Yet in reality there is always a balance between security and usability, and at this point most of the approaches are still geek toys that require a more advanced/simplified interface to gain wider acceptance. My personal take is just to use different browser for separate profile settings, more or less a hack on the loose cookie systems.

Nevertheless, even those approaches all successfully get to general acceptance and accomplish their goals, a wider exposure of private information remains unchanged and I do not have any problem with that. You get better control on the information online, but they are still (and should be) trackable.

One concern I really have regarding this trend, along with the very slow semantic web movement, is that while the internet is getting better and better understanding of human activity and the collective intelligence would actually gain consciousness of its own presence. I am seeing this issue not as science fiction but a practical matter and would like to see while surrendering too much information about themselves how would human beings deal with the intellectual machine(s). That would be a too broad future to predict so that I would like to start my research from how would the transition start, before this really big change actually happens.

Thesis Abstract

We are producing much more information online than ever. Ubiquitous computing is practical enough to blend the borderline between physical world and the internet. The revolution of user interface is around the corner, much more user-friendly screen-based and tangible interfaces encourage people to get connected. Whatever interface they are collected through, the data are not going nowhere. All information are stored together with trails enough to reveal people’s identity. Furthermore, the moment they are public on the internet, even just for a short period of time, they get replicated by crawlers from all kinds of search engines, aggregators and other software agents. Information could be removed from their original source, but practically they will be public on the internet, however difficult to reveal, for good. Another category of information are less publicized yet as important is the transactional data created through people’s interaction, most service providers keep these information which could be extremely valuable for marketing purposes. These information, due to the channels they are collected through, are usually much more sensitive and much easier to leak identity.

Corporates and service providers normally provide unilateral privacy policies that keep highly sensitive data out of public accessibility, organizations such as Electronic Privacy Information Center are also working hard to drive digital privacy protection through legitimate methods, technically there is still very little effective ways to prevent private information from getting into public attention, given the surprising pace how computing technology evolves. I would like to look at this problem under a slightly broader presumption that eventually much more of our personal information would reach the public, and we would have to adapt the new situation where we have to redefine what “privacy” really is.

The final product of this project would be an interactive software/installation or animation that drives awareness of this social change on privacy. At this point I am not exactly sure about the presentation of the project, but preferably I would be able to foresee the new situation and how the transition is going to happen, therefore create a convincible narrative on this topic. I would like to define the new boundary of privacy by a) studying what categories of information the majority of current online service providers are collecting, b) examining behavioral changes those services cause on people’s daily life and whether those changes are temporal or permanent, and c) creating a practical scenario in which there maintains a new balance after people are used to publicizing information that they considered private before.