August 6th, 2010
Twitter is the land of the dead. In this social networking microcosm the living, real human content generators; and the dead, automated bots/marketeers/spammers; share a peaceful coexistence.
Every day my account gains new spam followers and loses a few real people. Gradually the human agents of my readership are being replaced by automata, until one day soon I will be left babbling to a disinterested audience of the inert, passive and/or robotic, shuffling along behind me like Romero zombies [*].
Might this be the ultimate destiny of Twitter? Will there come a point where my following is entirely automata? Might it eventually devolve into a closed memetic feedback loop in which uncomprehending bots blindly retweet auto-generated content at each other at high speed, while the humans are all off partying on the moon.
Some days it feels like this has already happened.
Rudy Rucker, my favourite mathematician (we all have a favourite mathematician don’t we), has a concept he calls “the lifebox“. I’ve written about it before. He foresees a future where the dead live on through the data they have left behind. The content (text, audio, video etc…) they have generated during their lifetimes, bundled with some intelligent search software, could create a type of queryable data-entity, a lifebox.
In this scenario our descendants will be able to converse with their long departed relatives, in much the same way as they interact with the living, through electronic channels. The lifebox software would be able not only to return, but also extrapolate, meaningful responses to queries. In short, you could ask your dead great-grandmother a question and, even if she had not left record of her thoughts on that topic, the kind of response one might expect from her could be generated.
It is autobiography as a living construct. Our grandchildren will be able to enjoy the same quality of relationship with the dead as you might do now with your warm bodied FaceBook/Twitter chums. And as the sophistication of semantic tools develop, the lifebox could become capable of creating fresh content too, writing new blog posts, or copy-pasting together video messages. It is a much more feasible form of immortality than Walt Disney ever invested in.
Toying with this idea I decided I’d have a go at creating my own rudimentary lifebox. I was going to build it in Flash, just a basic text muncher that trawled my online writings, matched any cultural references from a dictionary, replaced that text with the trending topics of the day, then tweeted what it had generated. This way I would have a zenbullbot that could rant on the state of the world, without me having to do the hard work of getting grumpy about it myself.
It would probably have taken me a day or so to build, but after last night drunkenly pitching the idea to my anarcho-art-geek friend shardcore (we all have a token anarcho-art-geek friend don’t we), who also happens to be a shithot Perl coder, he knocked up an automated version of me in about ten minutes this afternoon, reusing an old Markov chain script he’d put together a few years previously to create a scarily convincing celebrity gossip bot (typical entry: “Justin Bieber showed his appreciation for members of band camp, that thick liquid rushing up your throat is called vomit“)
Ok, so this undead clone of me (follow him here) may not be as coherent or relevant as the flesh version (a belief I’m clinging to very tightly). But it sure sounds like the kind of shite I come out with.
Having just finished writing a book on the subject of generative art, which might be said to go some way toward devaluing human practitioners of the abstract visual arts, you might dismiss The Late Mr Bullets as a piss-poor attempt to do similar for the written word. But no, there is less allowance for abstraction with text, which is why the randomness of dedbullets betrays his inhumanity. Shardcore’s experiments along these lines are interesting though, see also his Word of God (mashing up the King James Bible, The Koran and the writings of L Ron Hubbard) or the Fortune Cats (who impart wisdom upon anyone who asks a question of them).
No, this is not a foray into generative text, this is more than that. Today I have done nothing short of achieving IMMORTALITY. For as long as shard’s server is around to run the Perl script, dedbullets will be talking to his bot (and human) followers on a social network somewhere. He’s alive I tell ya. ALLLIIIIVE!
* This, presumably, is what it feels like to be a presenter on Channel 5.
Posted in culture, generative art, tech, web, writing, wtf |
April 9th, 2010
More old media. French magazine Regards Sur Le Numerique, is running a well-cool two page spread on me in the latest issue. I’m so chuffed I can almost ignore the fact that it’s published by M*******t.
Being in French, it’s kinda difficult to tell what they are saying about my work. So I asked Babelfish:
Matt Pearson, alias Zenbullet, programmer in Brighton the day, is explorer in “abandoned” creation the night. He asserts this term of “abandonment” on two accounts. “I experienced my programs the night and gives up them, with the clean of term, front direction to be wearied about it. In addition, I approach these creations ‘with abandonment’, without restriction nor inhibition.” Its work, which raises of art generated hair, consists in using mathematical algorithms to produce random forms that model Matt and that it divides on line, thus opening them with other creativities. It does not expose, but dream to make use of a webcam and projectors for other projects.
Posted in culture, generative art, generative art book, old media, tech, web, writing |
March 15th, 2010
Quick update on the book. It’s been kinda quiet since xmas, as I’ve been busying myself with client work, trying to replenish my battered bank balance (the first brutal reality of writing a tech book – it doesn’t pay the bills). But I was around 2/3rds finished by then, and now I have a new editor onboard who is promising to whip that final third out of me by the end of next month. Then we are still on track for getting the sucker published by the summer.
The writing hasn’t been done entirely in a bubble for the last few months. The book has been through a review process, and a number of people have read various drafts. The feedback has been mostly very positive, although not entirely. Obviously, the more savage the criticism the more useful it is to me, but so far there has been nothing to make me tear it up and drag it to the roaring fire icon on my desktop.
Soon the book will be made available as part of MEAP, The Manning Early Access Program, which will give readers the opening chapters for free, and encourage feedback which may influence the rest of book. And if you pre-order it you will continue to receive chapters in this way as they are approved ahead of publication. There is already a green paper, a 10 page introduction, available as a free download here.
The title is now Generative Art: A Practical Guide Using Processing. I don’t have a cover to show you yet, as this is one element that has been proving a bit of a battleground. I’m so grateful to the various authors I spoke to before agreeing a deal who all advised me to ensure any contract I signed gave me some kind of say in the cover. Something a first time author might just assume to have, but is apparently quite rare.
Cover aside, the content is coming together nicely. The writing is shaping itself into two main threads, a mix of tutorial and theory. The didactive sections teach Processing with a gentle touch, from “hello world” through to OOP, maintaining a focus on the creativity. The theoretical thread complements this, allowing me to explore some of the crazier tangents that may be familiar to readers of this blog, putting the art of programming into a real world context that I always find absent from coding books. There are also plenty of pretty pictures too of course.
The main thrust of the book, my intention anyway, is to make Generative Art something that is both accessible and fun. I believe that the artistic potential of creative coding is barely off the ground yet. It is still stifled by being too exclusive a skill, the main work being done by a rare subset of talented individuals who have an aesthetic sensibility intersecting with hardcore coding skills. Generative Art is only really going to get interesting once it is more widely practised, once the programming can become more intuitive and naturalistic, and less of a barrier. If my book makes even a small step in this direction I will consider it a success.
Posted in culture, generative art, generative art book, old media, writing |
September 11th, 2009
I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to announce this, but it’s finally sorted – I’ve just signed my first book deal! My Generative Art book will be on real and virtual shelves sometime next year. Contrary to reports it will be published by the lovely folks at Manning Publications, not the equally nice folks at Apress (as they rather prematurely announced).
It’s been over three months since I was first invited to pitch an idea, and has taken a lot of negotiation to get a contract I was happy with. But rather groovily I have managed to get consent to release a significant portion of the book under a Creative Commons license, so some chapters can be reproduced and distributed as widely as the winds will carry them. This means I will be able to publish large extracts here as we get closer to publication, as will anyone else who wants to.
Already I’ve got a list of people I need to thank for getting my idea this far, but I’ll save it for the book. But to those who know who you are; cheers to you, you and especially you, I feed on your enthusiasm.
Watch this space, and my twitter, for further updates.
Posted in culture, generative art, generative art book, literature, old media, open source, tech, writing |
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