Photo via Anton Diaz CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

 

It happened by accident to me. I came across one YouTube of him — I don’t remember which one — and then fell into another, and then into another. Now if I don’t stop myself, I’ll find myself falling into one Jacob-shaped hole after another, and then two hours later I remember what I was going to be doing. I even went to his Boston concert a couple of months ago, the first live concert I’d been to since Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 in Toronto. (JC’s bond with his audience in the exact opposite of Dylan’s.)

 

Anyway, here’s the Intro Playlist:

 

This is an excellent one hour BBC documentary that I think gives a good overall view of why and how he’s special. It also will give you a sense of his genius-level multi-instrumentality, which the two songs below don’t highlight … although his guitar work in the next one is quietly astounding. (Hint: Always pay attention to his chord-work/harmonizing.)

 

Little Blue is a beautiful song from his new album. There’s an official video with him on multiple instruments (and Brandi Carlile!), but this version of him singing it with only his guitar and a small chorus I think is more affecting. By the way, the singers are simply fans who responded to his open invitation, not professionals. Also, in this version he turns them into a chorus by using hand gestures; that part is unrehearsed. (Leading his audiences in this way has become a signature part of his live concerts.)

 

Then there’s what I think is his magnum opus (so far): A version of a Bridge over Troubled Water. I’m not crazy about the original, but JC’s version of it I find exhilarating and moving. It’s purely vocal, with JC singing all the background parts. His 2-hour walkthrough of how he created it on his Mac makes you aware of the hundreds of  tiny decisions that went into it. And here’s a live version of it, with John Legend and Tori Kelly, that’s also astounding. JC is on a keyboard, called the harmonizer, he invented with Ben Bloomberg, an MIT Media Lab grad student, that turns what he’s singing into whatever keys he’s pressing. Also Tori’s runs were all written by JC, even though they sound like improvisations.

 

I hope you will long fall into your own Jacob shaped holes. And this is coming from someone who generally isn’t moved by music. (Some exceptions apply.)

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I just listened to an excellent Marc Maron interview with Jerry Seinfeld.

When I first saw Seinfeld’s post-series 2002 documentary, Comedian, I really enjoyed it, although like many, I was made queasy by the film’s portrayal of the far lesser-known comedian Orny Adams — talk about punching down! Seinfeld’s idolization of Bill Cosby also has not aged well, to put it mildly; I don’t know how widely known Cosby’s decades of drugging and raping women were — Tina Fey was making references to it by 2005 — and I don’t know the degree to which Seinfeld should have known, should have heard, should have listened.

So within those two large moral bookends, one of which is overwhelming, what I liked about the documentary was its portrayal of the craft of comedy. I’m not the biggest fan of Seinfeld’s stand-up, but “I admire his dedication to, and clarity about, the work of getting a laugh”I admire his dedication to, and clarity about, the work of getting a laugh. I’ve always been interested in this, and if you are too, in addition to Maron’s WTF podcast, I recommend Jesse David Fox’s Good One.

Maron’s interview revealed rifts between the him and Seinfeld. Maron thinks, I believe, those rifts expose weaknesses in Seinfeld. I think they’re strengths.

First, Maron wants comedy to make a difference personally, socially, and politically. For him, subject matter matters. Not to Seinfeld. He’s famous for “observational” humor that gets laughs about the little things in life. In fact, part of observational humor’s humor is its finding humor in the trivia of everyday life. As Seinfeld says repeatedly in the interview, all that matters is the laugh.

Second, Maron wants to be authentic on stage. He wants people to see who he is. Seinfeld just wants his audience to laugh. To Maron, that seems superficial. To Seinfeld, Maron’s style — which is more or less the style these days— is self-indulgent.

These rifts meant that when Maron tried to get Seinfeld to talk about the psychology of comics, Seinfeld wasn’t biting. There isn’t any one psychology, Seinfeld responds. “Delving into comedy’s psychological roots therefore doesn’t tell you anything about comedy”Delving into comedy’s psychological roots therefore doesn’t tell you anything about comedy, although it does tell you something about the comedian. So long as you’re getting laughs, you’re a good comedian in Seinfeld’s book.

Focusing on craft is perhaps easier for Seinfeld — no, not because of his psychology, but because he is a comedy formalist. He likes to build a structure for his jokes so they are not just one-liners. The normal way to do this is to tell a comedic story that puts the joke into a richer context. Seinfeld doesn’t do that so much as build a structure in which the jokes are related by their ideas. It is a purer structure than most, just as Seinfeld’s process is purer than most: he writes jokes for two hours every day, or at least he used to.

I say all of this without counting myself as being much of a fan of Seinfeld’s standup. I was a big fan of his TV series, largely because of its formalist perfection, the stories folding in on themselves…and folding in on the characters’ exaggerated psychologies. You can probably guess how I feel about Hannah Gadsby whose formalism goes far beyond that of an exquisitely constructed farce; it is art and philosophy.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve appreciated craft more and more. I“ used to be ashamed of standing close to a great painting to see the brushstrokes” used to be ashamed of standing close to a great painting to see the brushstrokes that from further back turn into a sunlit church facade or a weary face. I like that magical transformation as much as I like feeling the painting’s sunlight or weariness. I am no longer ashamed.

This probably has something to do with my life as a working writer. As I’ve had the privilege to write what I want over the past twenty years, I’ve found that my main satisfaction is the process of trying to get sentences, paragraphs, or chapters to work. Publishing or posting them brings far more anxiety and remorse than pleasure.

As many have said, humor is as sensitive to words and rhythms as is poetry. In the case of a Seinfeld, we often laugh because of the joke’s formal perfection, even if all it reveals is our attitude toward Pop-Tarts. It seems I like watching craftwork purely formally as well. And as I write that, I’m only a little ashamed.

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It is fantastic that 14 Paris museums have put images of 150,000 artworks into the public domain. Go take a look. It makes the world visibly better.

But …

…The images are easily accessible one at a time for a human who is browsing. You can also click to download it, and then do whatever you want with it. But they are, apparently purposefully, difficult to batch download. That deprives us of the ability to set computers onto the images and their metadata so that they can discover relationships, and patterns of relationships, among them. That’s a lost opportunity.

I understand it’s hard for institutions to give up on the credit they deserve for maintaining these artworks. Items put in the public domain can be passed around and duplicated without any reference to the source that made them available, or even to the artist who created them. But in return, the culture gets to freely share those images, and to incorporate them into new works, which helps to preserve and extend our shared culture.

So I don’t want to be ungrateful for this enormous gift to the world. But one more step – say, an open API that enables batch download – and the world can benefit even more from these museum’s awesome generosity.

(Hat tip to Keith Dawson.)

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I’ve long wondered — like for a couple of decades — when software developers who write algorithms that produce beautiful animations of water will be treated with the respect accorded to painters who create beautiful paintings of water. Both require the creators to observe carefully, choose what they want to express, and apply their skills to realizing their vision. When it comes to artistic vision or merit, are there any serious differences?

In the January issue of PC Gamer , Philippa Warr [twitter: philippawarr] — recently snagged
from Rock, Paper, Shotgun points to v r 3 a museum of water animations put together by Pippin Barr. (It’s conceivable that Pippin Barr is Philippa’s hobbit name. I’m just putting that out there.) The museum is software you download (here) that displays 24 varieties of computer-generated water, from the complex and realistic, to simple textures, to purposefully stylized low-information versions.

Philippa also points to the Seascape
page by Alexander Alekseev where you can read the code that procedurally produces an astounding graphic of the open sea. You can directly fiddle with the algorithm to immediately see the results. (Thank you, Alexander, for putting this out under a Creative Commons license.) Here’s a video someone made of the result:

Philippa also points to David Li’s Waves where you can adjust wind, choppiness, and scale through sliders.

More than ten years ago we got to the point where bodies of water look stunning in video games. (Falling water is a different question.) In ten years, perhaps we’ll be there with hair. In the meantime, we should recognize software designers as artists when they produce art.

Good work, PC Gamer, in increasing the number of women reviewers, and especially as members of your editorial staff. As a long-time subscriber I can say that their voices have definitely improved the magazine. More please!

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At the PAIR Symposium, Golan Levin of CMU is talking about ML and art.

The use of computers for serendipitous creativity has been a theme of computer science since its beginning, Golan says. The job of AI should be serendipity and creativity. He gives examples of his projects.

Put your hand up to a scanner and it shows you hand with an extra finger. Or with extra hands at the end of your fingers.

Augmented Hand Series (v.2), Live Screen Recordings from Golan Levin on Vimeo.

[He talks very very quickly. I’ll have to let the project videos talk for themselves. Sorry.]

Terrapattern provides orbital info about us. It’s an open source neural network tool which offers similar-image search for satellite imagery. It’s especially good at finding “soft” structures often not noted on maps. E.g., click on a tennis court and it will find you all of them in the area. Click on crossroads, same thing.

Terrapattern (Overview & Demo) from STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on Vimeo.

This is, he says, an absurdist tool of serendipity. But it also democratizes satellite intelligence. His favorite example: finding all the rusty boats floating in NYC harbor.

Next he talks about our obsession with “masterpieces.” Will a computer ever be able to create masterpiece, he keeps getting asked. But artworks are not in-themselves. They exist in relationship to their audience. (He recommends When the Machine Made Art by Grant D. Taylor.)

Optical illusions get us to see things that aren’t there. “Print on paper beats brain.” We see faces in faucets and life in tree trunks. “This is us deep dreaming.” The people who understand this best are animators. See The illusion of Life, a Disney book about how to make things seem alive.

The observer is not separate from the object observed. Artificial intelligence occurs in the mind as well as in the machine.

He announces a digression: “Some of the best AI-enabled art is being made by engineers,” as computer art was made by early computer engineers.

He points to the color names ML-generated by Janelle Shane. And Gabriel Goh’s synthetic porn. It uses Yahoo’s porn detector and basically runs it in reverse starting with white noise. “This is conceptual art of the highest order.”

“I’m frankly worried, y’all,” he says. People use awful things using imaging technology. E.g., face tracking can be abused by governments and others. These apps are developed to make decisions. And those are the thoughtless explicit abuses, not to mention implicit biases like HP’s face scanning software that doesn’t recognize black faces. He references Zeynep Tufecki’s warnings.

A partial, tiny, and cost-effective solution: integrate artists into your research community. [He lists sensible reasons too fast for me to type.]

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At the PAIR symposium, Rebecca Fiebrink of Goldsmiths University of London asks how machines can create new things.

She works with sensors. ML can allow us to build new interactions from examples of human action and computer response. E.g., recognize my closed fist and use it to play some notes. Add more gestures. This is a conventional suprvised training framework. But suppose you want to build a new gesture recognizer?

The first problem is the data set: there isn’t an obvious one to use. Also, would a 99% recognition rate be great or not so much? It depends on what was happening. IF it goes wrong, you modify the training examples.

She gives a live demo — the Wekinator — using a very low-res camera (10×10 pixels maybe) image of her face to control a drum machine. It learns to play stuff based on whether she is leaning to the left or right, and immediately learns to change if she holds up her hand. She then complicates it, starting from scratch again, training it to play based on her hand position. Very impressive.

Ten years ago Rebecca began with the thought that ML can help unlock the interactive potential of sensors. She plays an early piece by Anne Hege using Playstation golf controllers to make music:

Others make music with instruments that don’t look normal. E.g., Laetitia Sonami uses springs as instruments.

She gives other examples. E.g., a facial expression to meme system.

Beyond building new things, what are the consequences, she asks?

First, faster creation means more prototyping and wider exploration, she says.

Second, ML opens up new creative roles for humans. For example, Sonami says, playing an instrument now can be a bit wild, like riding a bull.

Third, ML lets more people be creators and use their own data.

Rebecca teaches a free MOC on Kadenze
: Machine learning for artists and musicians.

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At the PAIR Symposium, Doug Eck, a research scientist at Google Magenta, begins by playing a video:

Douglas Eck – Transforming Technology into Art from Future Of StoryTelling on Vimeo.

Magenta is part of Google Brain that explores creativity.
By the way:

He talks about three ideas Magenta has come to for “building a new kind of artist.”

1. Get the right type of data. It’s important to get artists to share and work with them, he says.

Magenta has been trying to get neural networks to compose music. They’ve learned that rather than trying to model musical scores, it’s better to model performances captured as MIDI. They have tens of thousands of performances. From this they were able to build a model that tries to predict the piano roll view of the music. At any moment, should the AI stay at the same time, stacking up notes into chords, or move forward? What are the next notes? Etc. They are not yet capturing much of the “geometry” of, say, Chopin: the piano-roll-ish vision of the score. (He plays music created by ML trained on scores and one trained on performances. The score-based on is clipped. The other is far more fluid and expressive.)

He talks about training ML to draw based on human drawings. He thinks running human artists’ work through ML could point out interesting facets of them.

He points to the playfulness in the drawings created by ML from simple human drawings. ML trained on pig drawings interpreted a drawing of a truck as pig-like.

2. Interfaces that work. Guitar pedals are the perfect interface: they’re indestructible, clear, etc. We should do that for AI musical interfaces, but the sw is so complex technically. He points to the NSyth sound maker and AI duet from Google Creative Lab. (He also touts deeplearn.js.)

3. Learning from users. Can we use feedback from users to improve these systems?

He ends by pointing to the blog, datasets, discussion list, and code at g.co/magenta.

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Naomi Alderman makes a compelling case in The Guardian for looking at video games to find the first examples of digital literature.

Authors of articles don’t get to write their own headlines, and the Guardian’s headline goes too far: Naomi doesn’t claim that games yet have turned out “great works of digital literature.” Her own claim is more modest:

…are there video games experimenting with more interesting storytelling than any “digital literature” project I’ve seen? Yes, certainly. And if you want to think of yourself as well read, or well cultured, you need to engage with them.

I agree. There are many video games I enjoyed but am embarrassed about; these are what we mean by “guilty pleasures.” But the best of them deserve to be taken seriously. “Games are where digital art will emerge. And has emerged.”Games are where digital art will emerge. And has emerged.

I don’t know that we have examples of digital “high art” yet. Perhaps we do and I don’t know about them or don’t appreciate them. Perhaps it’s a silly concept. Or perhaps we won’t think we’re playing a game when we experience it. But it’s likely at least to come out of the rhetorical forms games have already created:

• It will be a space in which the user dwells, not simply an object or experience unfolding in front of the user.

• It will be interactive.

• It will require the user to make choices that affect it in significant ways.

• It won’t be the same for everyone.

It is a sign of the originality and importance of games that it’s not always clear what to compare them with.

For example, most digital games lend themselves to comparisons with movies. After all, they are composed of sound, flat visuals, and movement. That’s the apt comparison for Portal 2. (Naomi cites Portal, but I think the sequel is a better example.) Portal 2 is loads of fun to play. But it is more than that. The story that unfolds is as clever and well worked out as any movie’s. The characters are broad, yet reveal subtleties. We care about them. Most famously, we care about a particular inanimate cube. The “set design” is stunning. The voice acting is world class, and in fact includes JK Simmons who went on to went a Best Actor Oscar. “…the details are fully imagined, right down to gun turrets that coo.”Perhaps most remarkable is the extent to which the details are fully imagined, right down to gun turrets that coo plaintively. (You can see them rehearsing in this Easter egg.)

Naomi doesn’t mention Bioshock, but I’d count it as a hybrid movie and novella. The premise is original and political. The setting is beautifully done. The science fiction is well-imagined. And the plot contains some meta moments that reflect on its form as a video game. (Those who have played the game will recognize how non-spoilery I’m being :) The third and last in the series, Bioshock Infinite, has a premise, characters, plot, and setting that could make a successful movie, but the movie is unlikely to be as good as the game. For one thing, we get to play the game.

Other games work as reflections on the medium itself, a sign of the forming of an artistic sensibility. Naomi mentions The Stanley Parable and Gone Home. I’d add Spec Ops: The Line and even the Saints Row series. These are all successful, well-known games. All, except the last, can be taken seriously as statements inspired by artistic intentions. (Saints Row is self-aware, bad-taste burlesque.) The ferment in the indie game field is quite spectacular.

If movies can be an art form, then why not digital games? And all this is before virtual reality headsets are common. I have no doubt that digital games as immersive worlds in which users have agency will blow past movies as the locus of popular art. And from this will emerge what we will call serious art as well. We’re already well on our way.

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We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its amazing, bottomless collection, but while we were there we visited the Madame Cézanne exhibit. It’s unsettling and, frankly, repellant.

Please note that I understand that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m the sort of museum-goer who likes the works that he likes. I can’t even predict what is going to touch me, much less make sense of it. Which is, I believe, more or less the opposite of how actual criticism works.

The Met has assembled twenty-four paintings and sketches by Cézanne of his wife Hortense. As compositions some are awesome (he is Cézanne after all), but as portraits they seem technically pretty bad: her face is sometimes unrecognizable from one picture to the next, even ones that were painted within a couple of years of one another.

But what does that matter so long as Cézanne has expressed her soul, or his feelings about her, or both? Or, in this case, neither. You stare at those portraits and ask what he loved in her. Or, for that matter, hated in her? Did he feel anything at all about her?

The exhibit’s helpful wall notes explain that in fact there seems to have been little love in their relationship, at least on his part. The NY Times review of the show musters all the sympathy it can for Hortense and is well worth reading for that.

We know little about Madame Cézanne. And we learn little more from these portraits. It is fine to say that Cézanne was interested in shape, form, and light, not personality. But the fact that he had her sit immobile for countless hours so he could paint a still life made of flesh is a problem, especially since Cézanne seems to have loved his peaches and pears more than he loved this woman.

Here’s a little more eye-bleach for you: a quick Picasso painting of a woman who sleeping is yet more alive than Madame Cézanne as represented in her husband’s careful artistry:

On the far more positive side, we also went to the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit of Matisse’s cut-outs.

I’ve always liked Matisse, but have never taken him too seriously because he seems incapable of conveying anything except joy — although a full range of joy, from the sensuous to the spiritual. I’m sure I’m not appreciating him fully, but not matter what, oh my, what a genius of shape and color. I didn’t want to leave.

If you can see this collection, do. So much fun.

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I enjoy isometric projection. You all know the isometric cube from video games:

An isometric cube’s lines are all the same length and shows all three sides equally. It is thus unnatural, assuming that seeing things from a particular perspective is natural.

This makes isometric cubes similar to Egyptian paintings, at least as E.H. Gombrich explains them.

Paintings in the Egyptian style — face in profile, torso turned out towards us, legs apart and in profile — are unrealistic: people don’t stand that way, just as cubes seen from a human perspective don’t show themselves the isometric way.

Gombrich talks about Egyptian paintings to make a point: our idea about what’s realistic is more infected with cultural norms than we usually think. The Egyptian stance seemed to them to be realistic because it shows the parts of the human form in the view that conveys the most information, or at least what the Egyptians considered to be the most distinctive view.

And the same is true of isometric cubes.

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