I'm very pleased to welcome Matthew Fuller and Dirk Vespasie. Matthew Fuller is Professor in the Centre of Cultural Studies here at Goldsmiths, where, as Director of Freedom Programs, he is involved in projects in art and media and software, the Digital Culture Unit. His published books include Media Ecologies, Materialist Energies in Art and Technical, which are published by MIT, Behind the Rift, Essays in Cultural Software, and Elephant and Castle, both published by Houtonno Media. With Usman Haag, he is co-author of Urban Visioning System, version 1, by Omni Press, and with Andrew Goffrey of Evil Media, published by MIT. Beatrice Farsi is finishing her PhD at the Centre for Cultural Studies here at Goldsmiths
and is working as a Societal Lecture at University of London. Her doctoral thesis concerns the aesthetic dimension of digital computation, exploring the centrality of abstract entities and processes for construction experience. Her research interests include digital aesthetics, content of philosophy, computation, cybernetic culture, and media theory. Please join me in welcoming Andy Fuller and David Spence. Thanks for bringing it to the terrible storm and the basement of this building, hopefully the root foot falling. What we want to do is present some kind of formulas that may be useful in understanding
the impact of computation broadly on aesthetics, but also think about these kind of phenomena as impacting more broadly on production of subjectivities, our economic forms, social forms, and so on, out of which, in relationship to which, is made or will be made. So what we want to kind of invite you to do is to try and think, although this work, This lecture is trying to address aesthetics in a broad sense, and not necessarily specifically artwork as a subset of that field. To try and think about how a computational aesthetics allows, or understanding of computational
aesthetics will allow for understanding some of the kind of forces of play in the present as they manifest through the kind of wider systematization of different scales and orders of reality through the computational. So why would this be of interest in terms of the kind of formulation of art practices? One of the ways we can think of is kind of a long duration of art history. If we think of the artist as individual emerging in the early modern period, the Renaissance period, with the emergence of capitalism. Modern art, in a sense, emerges in relationship and in kind of opposition to, in many cases, industrial, in the period of the Industrial Revolution.
Conceptual art emerges from the period of the emergence of mass media and information systems Present art, in a sense, therefore has to react And is composed by and in relationship to the computational So if you think of the kind of fundamental units of ordering present day society the computational ordering of modes of life and modes of existence is a fundamental shift in the order of things which Ark is dealing with and has to recompose itself to. If you think of something as simple as a supermarket, it looks like, ostensibly like a shop with
a bunch of materials, you can buy a bunch of objects, you can buy foodstuffs, pots and plans and so on but really the supermarket is inherently a front end to a database and so all the actions that are carried out in that entity in that object the supermarket are in relationship to a great systematization of the order of things so what we're going to do is in a way present some kind of ideas and some kind of probes into that kind of situation through the question of aesthetics and how computation changes that obviously these are you know thought experiments not necessarily kind of programmatic declarations of the state of things but hopefully there'll be some ideas
you can think with so we understand computation as a method and a force of organization quantification and rationalisation of reality by logico-mathematical means. The computational proceeds yet grounds the digital in both its technical, social and cultural manifestations. It finds in digital technologies a fast, efficient and reliable technique of automation and distribution, yet remains a notion wider and more powerful than the digital tools that it's obtained. Art, operating with a digital prefix and taking on many of the characteristics of the contemporary world, is inherently interwoven with the specific features of computational structures.
At the same time, though, it can be said that aspects of digital art have not sufficiently been considered from that perspective, and to some extent this is understandable, given the immense flexibility and often resulting opacity of computational systems. Digital art builds upon a work story of computational, sharing its limits and potentials, while also inheriting conceptual histories and context practice. For this reason we contend that an aesthetics of digital art is, at a fundamental level, a computational aesthetics. So, the crux of our argument can be summarised in a particular kind of medium specificity
of the aesthetics of digital art, a specificity that we see pertaining to art's primarily computational character. When making a claim for the computational specificity of digital art, however, we abstain from flattening this proposition onto openly modernist arguments or following on with sets of uneasy qualifications and rejoinders that come out to such positions. So when we're talking about the meeting specificity of the computational, we're wary of the essentialism that such an argument would imply. And it's our contention, however, that the risk of computational essentialism is diminished by the nature of computation itself.
In the case of computational aesthetics, the idea of a kind of modernist reduction of aesthetic principles to a simple understanding of matter is made more difficult because of the fundamentally abstract nature of computation as a mathematical-ological form. How is one to match the material promises of a medium if this medium does not have an idiotic substantial form such as canvas, paint, marble or mud but rather has to be understood as a method and as a force that through rules and strengths and capacities for expression continually renegotiates its own structures of existence?
In other words, what makes computation special in terms of its mediality and thus perhaps different from any media coming into composition with art, is the impossibility of describing it simply as an intermediary substance. Art, thankfully enough, is not simply communications. The relation of art with its media has been complex, a relationship that is disavowed as much as it is explored, and through which one can trace the histories of many modalities of kind of art that may themselves not cohere into a stable lineage. Art always propagates, rather than necessarily progresses, by disrupting and reinventing its terms of growth and domains of operation.
Computation, however, has in a certain sense been a more historically delimited domain. Think of the fields of computer art, digital art, and so on. And to some extent, this is due to the relatively young state of the field as an organised discipline. At the same time, we argue computation's development through mathematics, logic, philosophy and physical engineering give an equally rich genealogy, so it has a kind of cultural history of its own. With its folding out into culture and the social and indeed in its entanglement with art, computing is undergoing further mutation and its complex lines of invention and imagination find new forms of growth. Recognising this, critical discourse in recent years
has developed cultural and artistic understandings of some of the mechanisms and components, algorithms, values, parameters, functions, codes, and so on, through which computation operates, for instance, via the emergence of fields, such as software studies. We would like to supplement this discussion with the consideration of computation's mediality as a mechanism of ontological epistemological production. So in terms of our media specificity argument, this implies that competition is a medium insofar as it actualizes modes of being,
levels and kinds of agencies, and procedures of thought and configuration. The ontological and epistemological expressions of computation are concretized and become operative at various scales, in the cultural, the societal, the political, as well as in art and elsewhere. For double articulation, computation changes these fields, yet maintains its own specificity. A specificity is in turn affected in various ways by the imutational forces of this field's characteristic. So for us, calling for recognition of the medium specificity of computation in digital art means to take up the challenge of considering a mediality that surpasses the bounds of its
block screen material instantiation. In fact, it means acknowledging that the notion of matter itself should be remobilized to all the categories of the computational and in light of the ontologies and epistemologies the computational system initiates or participates in. Of course, a problem that initially immediately follows from the argument about the specificity is how computation can be understood and spoken of, and by which means its consequence in the area of digital art can be mapped out. In attempting to address these questions, we don't advocate for programmatic aesthetics by a way of understanding the things that are explicitly or implicitly taken into account when working with computational systems.
Computational aesthetics is certainly part of the computing machine. And in many particular works, some of which you see, is founded on a very specific articulation of that interlacing. Yet the existence of computational aesthetics is not exclusively tied to a particular past, present, or future technology. So, I think this is an important point. Computation will contend the systematization of reality by discrete means such as numbers, digits, models, procedures, measures, representations, and highly condensed formalization of relations between such things. To compute involves abstracting operation of quantification and of simulation,
as well as the organization of abstract objects and procedures in their expression that can, but cannot be ignored, be thought and perceived, or carried out. Attending to competition and aesthetic then puts in question the forces of all degrees and kinds that participate in this abstraction, or not, and inquires what level of autonomy one should assign to such forces and abstraction. Similarly, immediate specific competition and aesthetics computational aesthetics addresses the way in which other techniques and technologies language science mathematics and art itself conjoined contribute to the contrasting computation and this result in often
irreconceivable compulsive or conversely reductive in the relation of other aesthetic approaches the impact of computation on these distinct fields to a large extent constitute the status of the problematic of contemporary forms of life. We can therefore conclude that computation is as much a condition as it is a medium problem. Okay, so it's in light of these and related issues that the condition of computational aesthetics has to be understood, not as given, but constructed. This claim, however, comes two important qualifications to construct is to build up to compose to
compile a construction requires in varying measures a dose of planning and an amount of improvisation the laying the foundations the addition of decoration the work of an engineer and the effort of a craftsperson in this sense a construction is less straight the straightforward manufacture of a result or an output than a heterogeneous process of creation. Constructing a computational aesthetics is a similarly inventive procedural endeavour. It is, we claim, alongside the recognition of ecology and the invention of economists, a requisite for contemporary thought, imposing key issues prop to 21st century culture. For example, questions such as how to define numerically determine rules, the analysis, codification, prediction of the world, how
to account for digitally interface modes of sensing, how to theorize new spaceship temporarily distributed and network prospects for cognition. If it's truism that computational technologies have brought about a fundamental epistemological break, constructing a computational aesthetics needs to come to terms with both the disruptions and the opportunities that this break initiates in modes of perceiving, acting, and cognising. In fact, it involves coming to terms with these conditions while looking for an articulating computational aesthetics internal epistemological validations, those that are inherent to the theorists and practices of computation itself. the construction of computational aesthetics
therefore calls for a reworking of many of the conceptual categories, classes types and criteria involved in aesthetics noting that aesthetics is in turn understood here as a theory of construction, again of what constitutes experience in other words we're arguing on the one hand that to understand art in terms of the aesthetics and computation is key to the status of contemporary culture, which indeed is a computational culture. On the one hand, however, the very notion of computational aesthetics for us goes well beyond the theory of art made with computers and becomes an investigation of the more foundational and formative aspects of the reality of the computational itself.
And in this respect, the reworkings of the aesthetic that we're advocating here are acts of both discovering and inventing the unfamiliar, the nameless, that which has been forgotten and is yet known. Computational aesthetics must and will construct its own concepts. Our first qualification of computational aesthetics mode of construction should be read in light of what we consider the restrictions or limitations of a traditional constructivist epistemology for addressing the potential for conceptual discovery and invention. So we'd like to take distance from the socio-cultural constructivist addendum, the idea that technology is simply a readout of a pre-existing political or social form.
We would like to take the idea of construction also from an epistemological level to an ontological one, which is to say that when constructing computational aesthetics, one creates not only ways of knowing reality, but reality itself. To be more explicit, we understand the construction of computational aesthetics as a process that is internal to the notion of computation, and should therefore not be approached from any particular disciplinary ground. Computer science alone cannot fully account for the mode of existence of the aesthetics of computation, but neither can cultural theory, philosophy, or art. To say that computational aesthetics is not inferred from some particular disciplinary area, however, also means that its actuality cannot be subsumed under individual categories such as the societal, cultural and economic.
Computational aesthetics does not arise from a void. It is, of course, part of society, culture and economy. And if we can for a moment accept the rules that these things are adequately nameable. At the core of this issue lies for us the following point, to understand construction as the methodology proper for an imminent investigation of computation. We believe that the social and cultural constructivism in wanting to accommodate and assimilate differences reiterates instead a transcendental take on computational practices and technologies. From this transcendental perspective, human social histories or human cognitive processes are equally relative amongst each other, yet still causally superior to the events they
are said to construct. We argue for another view that the construction of computational aesthetics is not solely based on the determinism of a particular identity-forging coordinate, such as time in history or as group of people, but that this construction is in fact incidental to computation's capacity of being an imminent operation of production of its own as well as other entities' modes in existence. Computational aesthetics is not produced by the social, but it is social. Similarly, it's not the result of a certain culture, it is culture. The diversities of planes into which computational aesthetics cuts, and not the transcendent cause of the aesthetics.
These planes and multiplicities of contexts, intentions, norms, actions, perceptions, etc., must themselves to appropriate to those in what Therese claimed, be made. With this assertion that computational aesthetics must be constructed, is not given, of course we don't mean to say that any aesthetic, we don't mean to say that aesthetic investigation of computational media is equal to anything else. We are not making here a relativist argument at all. I guess we are both quite keen to stress that. On the contrary, we affirm that the realities of computational aesthetics are produced in
the expression that aesthetic of computational finds for itself. So to some extent we could we would say that the construction of such aesthetics is always in the vent. I will never talk to that. So, as you say that, we should also note that when we are wary of simply such a cultural constructivist approach, our position also differs from what one could call an auto-voietic constructivist. they will find construction as a self-producing, self-organized operation of subjective experiences. And here appearing to auto-pagliacist in the sense of Maturani and Panella. This is then our second qualification of computational aesthetic construction,
a qualification that perhaps can help us to clarify our proposal for an imminent investigation of computational aesthetics. According to the auto-polytic dialectics between an observer and an observing system, everything relates to the environment and so far as it establishes and stabilises itself in relation to it. The observer does construct a wrong word self-reflexively by positioning itself in relation to an environmental situation. We don't want to, of course, to disavow the importance of such studies in certain fields, especially for cognition, in the field of the standard mind, for instance.
But we think that in the same, this type of constructivism, this type of, we call it anthropoietic constructivism, becomes particularly problematic when applied to computational life-standings. This is because in our opinion, auto-poietic approaches to digital art seem to overlook the fact that computation is full with encounters between levels of expressivity and actuality that cannot interact in the terms of a subject and an object, in terms of reasons of perceiver and unperceived, and within confines of an environmental outside or inside of the system. Many of these encounters, in fact, and many of these denominations as well, concern more the human users of computation and non-computation itself.
We believe instead that the construction of computational aesthetics also involves incompatibilities. In computation, there are many particular cases, of course, but there is also at least an implied purpose to universality. The different speeds of eternity and fracture are often disjoint and the diverse scales of what is too big to see, too big to come sorry, or too small to see are frappling to their own subjective perception. So in this sense the construction of a computational aesthetics needs to be radicalised from within the limit of the potentiality of what computation can do and what it cannot do.
So, um, okay, it should not be imposed upon the experiential position of a observer, so you cannot edit from the outside, so, as to say. In other words, what we are advocating here is the capacity of computational aesthetic not to simply represent reality, but also constructing reality itself. Okay, so then what we want to do is propose some different aspects of computational aesthetics, to give you some kind of roots into this. It should be stressed that we're not looking for the ultimate qualities and values of either
computational or aesthetics. Rather, these characteristics, aspects and features we take as modes of existence of computational that infiltrate and in some cases pervade and direct its ontological and epistemological productions in other words these features and characteristics inform computational modalities of being levels of agency and procedures of thought and experience that mark the medium specificity of art in a computational era there is therefore no claim that the list we're proposing is either an exhaustive itemization of the conditions of computational aesthetics or the aspects or combinations that are exclusive to
computational aesthetics and do not surface in other contexts in kind of art or aesthetics more broadly what we suggest instead is that computational aesthetics brings the modes that will present into a sharp focus and degree of compositional strength. So if aesthetics can be understood very broadly as the theory of how experience is constructed or a form of knowledge proper to that understanding, then this list attempts to account for some of the modalities of computational that partake in such constructions. The examples we offer are meant to provide an illustration of how a computational aesthetic produces, regulates, but also points beyond its own ontological and epistemological validations
and thus all has to be found and investigated in the computational event. First of all, abstraction and concreteness. Computation sets in motion some fundamental reorientations of culture and of the circumstances in which art occurs, in which it endures a joint condition of the abstract and the concrete. On the one hand, computation is a technique of abstraction. Layers of abstractions are piled up from the hardware and machine language right up to the graphic user interface. They manage the in-betweens of electronic circuits and symbolic procedures and thus safeguard the operability of computing machines.
In this respect, abstraction is the self-contained dimension of existence of the computation. historically and conceptually computation draws upon the formal abstractions of logic and mathematics abstract mechanisms of inference drive it while formal languages and symbol manipulation are among the abstract means that ground the very possibility of algorithmic effective procedures on the other hand however, computation is as concrete as the world in which it participants. Computation not only abstracts from the world in order to model and represent it, through such abstractions it also partakes in it. In this sense, computation is a technology
of material agency. There are the actions of algorithms, organising commercial warehouses, air traffic and administrative records. There are the social associations of network practices which aggregate and shape both the technological and the cultural. There are the solid effects of software applications which intervene in and bring about modes of knowing, trading, writing, playing, perceiving, interacting, governing and communicating. The qualities of an abstraction and concreteness have innumerable effects in terms of the constructivism and meeting specificity of computational aesthetics. One of these is that the abstract structures of computation can move fast from one instantiation or occurrence to another.
An algorithm can be used for sorting rice grains, faces, or patterns of pixelation, for instance. The movement across multiple sites and occasions of work is one way of tracing the variable characteristics of computational aesthetics across social forms, and to highlight some of the ways in which the computational is often built into the latter. Tracing aspects of such a genealogy, the work of Johar, which is Mutsko Yopokoji and Graham Harwood, epitomised in this installation Lung, Slave Labour, in 2005 with the artist-collected Mongol, or their work, a piece of code written in Pearl,
rewriting William Blake's poem London as London PL or coal-fired computer projects made in 2010 amongst others works with the abstractions of relational database systems to both concretize their schema and establish relational calculus as a grammar of competition composition rather that links labor primary accumulation mechanisms of power and the materialities of organic and non-organic forms of life. So to explain briefly this installation took place in Karlsruhe in an ex-munitions factory. During the 1940s slave labour was used to produce the weapons, to produce the armaments.
looking through the logs of this factory at the time, the archives of this factory, the artist calculated how many people were there, found out their age, found out their height, found out their body weight, calculated the average number of breaths they would take during that time and then used the relational, turned those logs into a relational database which then pushed out using these particular kind of speakers which are, they can displace a certain quantified amount of air to breathe the same amount of air back into the space
that the people who were used as slave workers in the armaments factory had breathed out during that period. So it was a kind of reenactment of the process of breathing, using the record-keeping system of the factory as its basis to kind of remobilise the control mechanism as a mechanism for reasserting memory and inhabitation of space by those who'd been destroyed by it. Our second characteristic or aspect or feature of computational aesthetic is universality. Universality in computational is established at the conceptual level of the machine and
I think it was one of the readings for today if you have a chance to go through it, it was a reading about Alan Turing. It was indeed Alan Tuning that in the 1930s pioneered the notion of computability by developing a thought experiment that used the mental activity of computing in mechanical and finite terms in order to make a universal device, which is subsequently known as the universal Turing machine, that would be able to replicate the behavior of any other Turing machine. So, anything mechanical computable could and would be computed by such a universal device, as it would be capable to process any algorithm into it.
The universal machine is a basis of the von Monomann architecture for stored program computers. And this is the foundation of present day computer devices, which are in fact general purpose and can be programmed to emulate each other. So in theory, this desktop computer could do what a super computer in a NASA lab is doing when programming a mission of Mark. Of course, it will mean a lot of rewiring, it will be then slow, but in theory, it's the same logical principle. The universal through machine, such function of generality is perhaps the most basic, also the most crucial conceptual premise of modern computing technologies.
Moreover, the amplification of functional operation also underpins the possibility of understanding computation as a technique of abstraction, this is already geared towards diversality. If we think of abstraction as a method, a technique geared towards generalization, and this generalization in turn as a technique tending towards universal applicability. So computation generates and disseminates they are general and inclusive. In its irreconnition of structures of existence, computation aims to encompass and produce but the universality of formal methods of systematization and of
all formal methods of reasoning. So artists may respond and indeed I have responded to this universality by telling to the specificity of particular instantiations of computational forms, as in the for instance in the wave of attention that has been paid to retrocomputing platforms and to game ball hats. The artist group page, for example, has looked for constraints in order to address the question of universality and thereby revealed universality nature, but not in its particular historical of concretion in styles of design, development of games, genres of games, and so on. Alternatively, the nature of claiming universality itself may be a foundational part of the exploration
of certain narratives such as the demographics. This multifarious and rigorous work probing a life with the various ways in which algorithms and other procedural and interpretive acts of computers shape and condense spaces and behaviors. Okay, so here, I mean, Rokabee's work is, um, it's kind of a very foundational piece of work that's been developed over many years, looking at the way in which, using very basic senses, interactions with the space can produce new, modern experience of space. What he argues is that sensors push algorithms out of the computer into space and change the way we behave around them.
So something is described, the other kind of quality we want to talk about is discreteness. The idea of things being discrete. Something that is defined as discrete, if it's disjointed, separated, distinct, detached or discontinuous. Discreteness is arguably the hallmark of the digital. Digital systems by definition are discrete systems. They represent, store and transfer information in terms of discontinuous elements or values, binary digits for example or letters of the alphabet. The computational, as we explained above, is not synonymous with the digital. The digital should be understood as an automation of the computational. Computation itself, however, is also marked by discreetness.
As a rule-governed activity, computation arranges calculation procedures through the sequential succession of countable and separable states. The valid reasoning that computational mechanisms are meant to encapsulate and model is explicated by the manipulation of quantifiable entities into a finite sequence of well-defined steps. The time and memory that such a sequence employs in order to perform the computation are also finite. So too are the input that sets in motion and the outcome that it generates. The discreteness of computation is often at odds with the continuity of interactions proposed by effective philosophers, systems theorists and cognitive phenomenologists,
which in art, culture and science focus on the dynamic becoming of relations and connections. discreetness prompts questions about the recognition one is willing to give to computational entities on one side and computational processes on the other and invites further investigation of whether a theoretical and technical reconciliation between the two is possible. The discreetness of a computational object may also be used for comedic effect as in the game Surgeon Simulator where patients, body parts, surgical tools, transplant organs and the paraphernalia of an operating theatre are all to be worked on by interacting with the first-person shooter-style interface.
The game is a device-based grand guignol that reaches the levels of slapstick and the clashing, clumsy interactions with the handled object's level of discreetness. discreetness also allows for the recomposition of things in their fixture in new positions thereby generating both new kinds of commodity form and new commonalities this potential is illustrated for instance by Uri Patterson's E. Inc. O. Memory of last year in which discreetness is employed as a means of disrupting the transcendental role of the commodity and in instituting various forms of sharing or creating a common We think of the work of Arcadia Misser as a gallery project to try and work through some of these kind of issues.
But also the latter aim of creating a commons is a prominent aspect of numerous computational initiatives, but becomes most obvious in free software and ventures such as the Pirate Bay. There's different levels of discretion alongside the ability of computing bowls or parts. Combined with computing resources such as memory or bandwidth, Discreteness plays a part in the development of expressive styles and modes of computing at multiple scales, including the determination of degrees of granularity in the resolution of images, for instance. Discretion, the ability to keep things separate, is by necessity a key factor of the ethico-aesthetic dimensions of computational technology's political nature, determining what they reveal,
and they're tractable, as well as what they hide. The regimes of what links can be analysed, what pulls together and what remains apart, are called to the nature of this shift. This is a very dear, I believe, to me. The computation, we should say, is axiomatic. I probably should add a full scope here. We are in the text, in fact. The modes of abstraction in the diversity and the greatness that we have just looked at are key features of this axiomatic character of computational systems and of the many parallels between computation and logical mathematical reasoning. By its axiomatic character, it is parallel distinguished past and present conception.
The machines are taking over. Well, we can discuss this as an example of axiomatic rationality. It is axiomatic character, this parallel distinguished past and present conception of digital computing machines. So, as it's well known, Alan Turing, him again, established the notion of computability after having discovered a particular class of numbers that cannot indeed be computed, they need computable numbers. Turing demonstrated however, and this was his genius, that what is computable can be determined algorithmically. That is, through a mechanized principle of deductive inference, was a mathematician, like you say,
with every time step of reasoning in place. So what has been up to time an informal notion of computation when has formalized into maximatic parameters of logical mathematical reasoning of correct inference. In this sense, to compute became to manage discrete quantities, and to do so by following abstract and finite inferential rules the universal applicability. Today, the axiomatic nature of computing subsistence and thrives on its many formalism. The axiomatic method is central to symbolic notation and procedural execution for any calculating processes, whether a basic operation or a more completed
function. The computational system engages and then engages again and again and again in a sort of iteration, with the general problem of determining consequences from a handful of valid symbolized premises. So for us it's because the inevitability of axiomatic in computation, the digital art and the digital artists and digital theories cannot leave the formalization of computation to the computer scientists. Instead, what we argue is that is that we need to take up the challenge of thinking and creating an aesthetic of computation that takes into account, if not limiting itself to, the inferential and rule-based character of computational system, while also remaining aware of the ways
of which computation borrows methods from mathematics and logic. Okay, so slide 17 in numbers. Computation holds a multifaceted and profound relationship to numbers. Of course, contemporary computers are what Levmanovich calls metamedia, capable of accomplishing much more than merely crunching numbers. However, the computing machine's relation to the numerical remains intimate. This is due partly to computation's discrete and quantitative nature, and partly to the fact that a computing machine has to operate within the parameters of a calculation. The very idea of number has continuously changed over time, stretching and convoluting to encompass
new categories and attributes, and has become something different again in its encounter encounter with the medium specificity of computation, a means of establishing relations among abstractive methods, formal systems and concrete tasks that are governed in turn by the operation of numbers. Although this recursion to some degree existed before in techniques such as the calculus, it's fundamentally different in computation in terms of the quantity and density of operations. Numbers in computation show various qualities and behaviours. As a As a unit of measurement, numbers are used, for instance, to portion pixels, megahertz for registers in memory. As a mathematical entity, numbers are the objects of the many types of counting the computers carry out, counting of amounts, of sequential steps, of variables, of inputs,
of time, and so on. As an incommensurable quantity, numbers approximate the risk of intermittent loops within recursive functions. As a digital representation, they mirror electronic binary states into binary digits. As a symbol, numbers are elements of codes and scripts and cement the possibility of encryption while also being the means of organizing, prioritizing and enacting such qualities and behaviors. Limits. Limits. Computation is limited in a quite fundamental way. These limitations are intrinsic in the axiomatic nature of the computational system. So in mathematical logic they talk
about the acceptable proposition, in computability theory state there is six problems that cannot be solved by purely mechanical procedures. The formal notion of computation itself is is founded upon the discovery that some programs will not help, that some function will not be calculated. Some things, and we know that from experience, just cannot be computed. The existence of limits in computation is unsettling, but we believe it's also very empowering. Amongst the most troubling consequences of this limitation is the compression and the understanding in why computer machines do indeed process many things and many tasks They don't process just anything. So this means that technical cultural agendas proposing an all-embracing and all-solving rationality,
algorithmic rationality, as to spulting at their very upset. Error, bugs, glitches, maybe more or less probable depending on the specific case. Yet they are always logically possible, as it's a formalism and subpreension of a situation or a condition. One of the most interesting outcomes of the lens of computation, however, results from turning, this is to be considered an internal failure, into the very method through which computation operates. This is also, in my opinion, what makes computation very interesting, the fact that historically, conceptually, practically, the discipline was founded not by discovering what computers what computers can do, but they want to discover what they cannot do.
It's a sort of paradoxical foundation of the discipline itself. And limitation, just like the previously discussed principle of inner society, are established at the conceptual level of the computing machine. In the sense, it's when the computing machine is formalized, it's realized there are intrinsic limits to it. In the necessary provisions, however, the form of reduction of computational system have been turned into systems of unprecedented instrumental power. To the cultural theorist, the philosopher, and one of the artist, such mismatches ambiguities surrounding promises of delivery and pretensions for machine breakdown of misrecognition, after equally finely textured occasion or speculation, and are also one of the qualities of computation in the art in the exercise of power.
So I guess for us, the incomputable is not really, it is a challenge, and we need to think and work and theorise confronting this challenge, not in despite this challenge but in the future of this challenge I would say. Ok, so the next aspect we want to talk about is speeds. So are stages different relations to time? For instance in the way a dance slows, speeds, accentuates, draws attention to the or raises it to the level of the cosmic. A relationship to modulation and creation of time and of timings characterises a work and articulates a mode of being in the world. Computational aesthetics enters into relations with such articulation by intervening in time
in certain ways. The intensity of computational speed is characteristically emphasised as being called to its novelty and its world-making capacities. while the audience is supposed to pay attention to rapidly unfolding of complex process in computer graphics saturated machines the scenes are often rendered to film in great slowness as if to suggest that in order to yield something comprehensible to the human sensorium, what passes in less than a moment in computational terms must necessarily be drawn out over minutes computational speed is thus about experiential intensity as much as it is about strict measure, yet it is also about the mobile threshold of the capacities of computing itself, of structuring its own modes of existence. The speed of calculation
of a computer was, from the very outset, in monstrous disproportion to the capacities of humans, just as machine weaving had been to the movements of earlier generations of hand weavers. This scale of disproportion is fluid, and forms a complex set of texturing or expression that manifests in anything from interaction times and musical instrumentation to meteorological concerns regarding speed of execution or bandwidth in the conservation of aesthetic objects. This issue connects the subsequent characteristic of speed within computational aesthetics, mainly its constructivist nature. As a consequence of the universal Turing machine, the timing of many kinds of processes can be brought about within the machine.
computing has no inherent native speed but provides means of staking out and arranging relations to speeds while intensification of speed is one mode in which computational expression is staged extension of a work over time is also a significant tendency especially in works such as Jeff Finder's Longplay which you can see a version of here but also Gustav Metzger's 1965 five screens of the computer where the unfolding of a work is in relationship to monumental time. This was an auto-destructive work which would gradually decompose over a period of centuries. Scale effects are core to the development of computing in the present era.
The scale effect will mean that the ways in which a specific kind of structure or process can be associated both across a relatively small number of instances and for a tendentially infinite part of the event. System design, navigating on multiple scales such for instance the golden ratio or composer modular from 1954 exist with numerous aesthetic forms as a means of arranging elements or making and assisting a judgement about this form of efficacy of beauty. Computing however allows for this system of judgement and composition to be integrated into the technology in which these systems themselves are realised. In systems such as the World Wide Web, limitations of scale due to material consideration tends
towards the negligible, resulting in the use of the term scale-free to describe the web's pattern of network growth. The specific quality of scale-free nature of such a system contrasts with other aspects of computational aesthetics. This is due to the quality of universalized systems such as finance state machines, which which have a very small scale that can co-exist alongside system or larger scale. Most notably, however, there may be transitions across the scales. A multitude of small scale finite-sized machines, for instance, can be conjoined in order to generate a system of great complexity that can be described as scale-free. This is something that is done for products such as computational resources such as time, speed,
speed, for instance in the science for procedures that are quite complicated like folding or approaching to simulate that nature does it in a safe way but to simulate that with our contemporary computers it will take hundreds and hundreds of years. So the scale of smaller finite system are connected together to create a massive parallel computation. So computational Aesthetics include, as this core constituent, the movement in and out of scales of reference. Concomitantly, the tendency towards a scale-free aesthetic in certain works operating on the basis of these networks can be observed and is to be expected even much sooner in the future.
The scale-free nature of certain computing forms is coupled in dynamic ways with currents such as the meditation, which was explored in the early internet art, present by Shuri Chen in that project such as By One Get One from 1997, beginning of that, and Yuliel. Artists such as Ai Weiwei have used this condition in creating a global proceedings for their work, in a period in which the artist, perhaps this goes to demise and reputation of other figures such as the politician or the banker. the artist becomes a potential candidate for the role of moral hero. Other artists, in groups such as the Yes Man, Peter Morgan, or Paolo Chirio, abuse the unstable conditions implied by the scale-free networks,
in this specific case, World Wide Web networks, and globalization as a partial point for exploring such a technical expressions of the work of forms, as they mention various political and instituted configurations. The question of scales, however, is also linked to development of platforms for cultural expression, since the potentially scale-free nature of a project in technical respects aligns with the capacity of expression of specific social and cultural forces and individual histories embedded in them. The development of platforms such as the video analysis and combination side part-line, that you see here in the background since 2008,
and it's run by a coalition of groups based in Moon Bay. One example could be the picture shared platform nine from Monkert from 2003, or the text is Russian state, the site R.org. So these sites, in their combination of inventions, specific in their amalgamation without the groups, history, and resources, is to simplify such condition of meaning about scale-free network. Okay, one of the last kind of aspects we want to draw out is the ideological equivalence. So, in earlier discussions of digital media, much attention was paid to the question of whether or not
whether or not a particular experience or living thing qualified as real or virtual. Recognising the medium specificity and the constructivism inherent in computational aesthetics suggests that it might be more fruitful to pay attention to the discussion of forms of logical equivalence. A system can be said to be logically equivalent to another if it yields the same behaviours and functions, independent of each system's underlying material structure. Logical equivalent is a quality that's foundational to computing as a thought experiment, arising out of the need to equate computing activity with the mental processes of a person. Alan Turing describes the procedure of making a calculation
as a series of mental processes and note-making, abstracting the procedure to a formally describable set of steps that can then be instantiated in a machine. The result is an axiomatic procedure that can be universally applied to any computer problem. The a priori limits of the axiomatic procedure itself remain, however, as yet intractable. Simulation is one effect of establishing logical equivalence between systems. An entity or process may be ordered in such a way that it is rendered more or less behaviourally identical to that which it models. At the same time, there may be played within the kinds of equivalents that are operative. At a certain scale, for example, a system may display logical equivalents to another,
yet be composed of substantially different materials. There may also be interplayed with the subjective experience of each different instantiation of a logically equivalent event or performance. The musicological concept of interpretation may be pertinent here. The translation of behaviours and entities from other contexts into computational words implies the evaluation of what constitutes meaningful forms of equivalence, and thereby the intensification of the aesthetic along with ethical judgment. The interplay of these conditions has proven to be a very active conjunction for many artists. In his ongoing status project from 2005 onwards, for instance, he sets out to establish a logically equivalent description
for the process of obtaining membership in various kinds of social formation, such as nation states or video libraries. By following certain set and defined procedures, one may acquire a position that can be computed as verifiable within a logically describable system of veridiction a statement that is true according to the worldview of a particular subject. The condition of logical equivalence has also driven much work in the field of bioart, where the reduction of the characteristics of DNA to its phase pairs, timine, cytosine, adenine and guanine allows for the re-articulation and the handling of the amino acids that they signify and partially render tractable. Our last category or aspect or feature of computation is memory.
Within computing, the fact that both data and the structure of the act of that data are themselves stored as data, has significant consequences. Not the least of this consequence is that since a computational machine can be completely copied with great ease under the condition of logical equivalence, the condition of an effective digital commons can be produced. The fact about the computer and the data that runs on it, including the imperative and executable data software, can be caught and copied, creates interesting situations in politics and economics, situations that also have consequences for and contribute to the social and economic forcing of computing at large.
Memory also introduces other conditions and forms of computational aesthetics, possibility for both all action and interaction to be locked in order to be restaged or analyzed and, within different configuration, for the partial or full reversibility or irreversibility of an action. Moreover, memory presents condition of delay and storage, so that our event might unfold in computational time at a different moment. Related to the question of speed, time, as it manifests itself in the relation between processing and storage and in interaction between a computational system and a subject, such as position, a dancer, or a game player, time becomes a crucial factor in the development of the aesthetic modality of what's the secret
system and computational system as a whole. Memory, understood as the extent of the capacity to process data, also a significant effect for digital art. These effects are readily observable in aesthetics, as was brilliantly described by Olga Gurlanova, or were constrained that architecture adapt or simulate the potential of the nostalgic or simplified form however it can always be seen in the use of any constraint computing system that is to say any at all we could also argue the memory is amplified in an interplane in learning and the relentless lack in computing and elsewhere christopher can tear up human scale robot revolution from 2005
It is put ahead and will sit over and over and over against the wall. This is however not a generative error as a glitch would be, but a machine capability to repeat without reflection. It's very interesting in so far as with computing that there's a lot of decision making, but without really a reflection of criticality from the decision. decision is taking the computer but there's no well we can say our reflection there's not learning as such machine learning is today okay so just to wrap up so clearly this is the kind of ten aspects of computing
you could probably, of computational aesthetics, you could probably add some more of your own. Our aim is not to be complete. Indeed, part of the question of the aesthetics of contemporary digital media, particularly as they're developed by artists, is to advance and proliferate frameworks from recognising further modes for the computational. And the task of so doing is a collective one, and will cannot be reduced to a schematic list qualities or to a set of conditions imported into art directly for an understanding of different forms of computer science. Once again we'd like to stress the computational aesthetics and the imminent investigation of it resides in the computational event. Computing and aesthetics are no longer owned by the disciplines of the field that grew
up closely in and around it. The computational mundane of everyday objects and processes such as that we've all probably got in our pockets or purses, as well as the more explicitly critical and speculative modes of computational forms may be interrogated by means of characteristics that we've discussed in the last hour or so. At the same time, the nature of the computational may be changed by bringing more conditions and forms of existence into its purview. all of this together along with the very flexibility of computational realities means that these considerations can only ever be a provisional and partial mapping there is much to invent
and to be dazzled by much texture to be found one might discover a strange, dull as yet unnameable familiarity to certain repetitions and compulsions that may indeed travel unremarked from plant installations to office work and to social forms To go beyond such a list, we need to engage in a preliminary process of recognizing and operating the aesthetic dimensions of computation. As critical experimental work moves more substantially in this direction, the force and method of computation may become more open to understanding, discovery and invention. Thanks, good patience. Okay, thanks.
So we're open for any questions or discussion or... ...wherever you will. Can I start with a little bit? Some of the work we've shown... that concedes that there's less the analogy between these areas, the traditional categories of my own, the individual settings. And I'm not aware that the extent to which computers are often engaged in producing simulacra of things in the world that's really modern,
much more generating music. Does that portrayal of these categories you put out there? Or is it an extension of these criteria? Is it in that sense a concession to, and I know you said that as a category to share, but not a sort of inoculation of the context. I think it's a complex question. In one sense, there was an earlier version of this debate where there was the real versus virtual reality argument which followed on through the discussion of the simulator and so on. And in a way, what we're trying to do is try and think what comes after that debate
when computation is not systematically used, not novel, but it's something that's woven into everyday life, woven into politics, woven into social formations, and in a sense is the place of the everyday. So it's no longer something that just simulates what happens, but it's something that instantiates and is woven into what happens. At the same time, I think you could say that with certain form of modelling, simulation there are other possibilities for novel forms of aesthetics to arise novel forms of knowledge novel forms of engagement with the world you know game theory
at one hand or kind of weather prediction as as ways in which this occurs so that the weather predictions runs on simulation towards weather or specific locations weather and and produces the experience and knowledge of the probabilistic understanding of whether it is due to occur. So that's a simulation. It is into and also it acts with our experience of the model. To some extent we do make a very realistic argument. For our reputation task it's real, it's not a simulation, if the architecture is not a simulation of natural way so what is interesting for us is addressing computation
aesthetically means to see how computation changes and transforms and then tumbled with such experience and abstractions there are are fundamental to art, but fundamental to any investigation into reality. So, the traditional aesthetics, of course, has a lot to do with the art made with computers, but it's more an investigation of how this category of abstraction and experience gets turning upside down by this structuring of the world that competition offers. So in that sense, yeah, we're moving from a simulation debate.
We're making a quite realistic argument of things that exist and they are real. I have a question on this notion of scale and scale free. I was thinking because at the end, the internet is maybe in its alcohol and computationally scale free, but it's really tied to energy and that center and all these things. So it's not really scale free, it's really a lot of scale together, connected. You have the feeling that it's scale free, but it's not really scale free, right?
In that sense. Yeah, that's a very good point in the sense that when we're talking about the search systems, they're inherently tied up with the colleges of other forms, such as, you know, natural resources and so on. In this case, the term scale-free means kind of mathematically scale-free. So there's no inherent, so this thing we showed, Padma, which is a video database, is being produced by a group from Mumbai, but also working with certain times of hospital studies to produce a video archive for. video archive for and the project is scale free in the sense that there's no inherent limit to it. So the same system can hold ten videos or it can hold ten million. In the
same way that forms of governance now are scale free in many senses. So the register that everyone supposedly has to sign when you enter the room can encompass all the students in the institution or it can encompass just the people in the class. So it's that sense of scale free. So the table row form of the register is a scale free form. Well you should resist however. If you keep signing it and keep kind of obeying that system it will be will be interrogated not simply as scale free and as anything within the scale free system
but things that can be removed from the country for simple violation of bureaucratic protocol. So I do think about these systems as very active in this space. Okay, sorry, there's one there. In terms of art, specifically, I recently identified an aesthetic application with out-mode technology, things like graphics, for example, things like digital which are already out-mode, it's like the idea of retro and beat-mouse and it's gone into the digital world. How do you see that idea of things that are no longer the most recent technology available coming into these ideas because obviously that's almost like a further abstraction
because we can look back with other technologies available which looks different and see that sort of time coming past. No, I think it's a very complex question. I mean, Richard Hamilton, for instance, made some computer-based work with very outmoded computers, one of which is held by the tape. They can't even afford to switch it on because they don't know whether it'll break as soon as they put an electric current through it. So this kind of sense of outmodedness, the time he made it, it was actually very up to the day in the e-computer, B2P10.
At the same time, we showed Paul's work from Beige, which is addressed at modern technology, Nintendo Game Boy, which at one time was absolutely the cutting edge of the invasion of computation into the everyday sensorial. So there's a way in which I think art has been relatively slow in certain cases in addressing the impact or registering the impact of computation. But at the same time there's also been very fast and very sensitive to the way in which
specific aesthetic forms really kind of epitomized in particular modes of restructuring reality. So for instance in this work there is a kind of great sensitivity to texture, to speed, to the way in which the machine itself is a kind of participates in vision, in sensing, in prehension, and also it has its own kind of specific, specific aesthetic texture, which is something to be, something to be worked through. In a way, the retro aspect is,
is partly because it's at the moment when things are just like, you know, kind of a game move, where you say, you only recognize something, at that point it's already over, you know? and I think by bringing these things into the present there's a way in which that kind of more general condition of being over can be recognised so I think it's but I think this is probably another there's a stage in which the generalisation of computation now has to be addressed in the artist and it's been done so Okay, question?
Yeah. Yeah, something . Can you get back to that and tell me exactly what you did in relation to this? Our ambition was in relation to computational abstraction where we say that the aesthetic of the simulation for us has to be imminent and for that we meant that it has to take place within the computational event. It means that we were making an argument there against social constructivists. Social constructivists generally tends to look at situations, our situations are constructed.
But for us, it tends to do so by imposing an outside principle of Olinet, whether it would be like history or a certain class determination and so on. So this is somehow the causes of a certain situation are determined from the outside. While for us computational aesthetics has to be emanating the sense that it's sort of causes of itself. It cannot be imposed from an outside discipline.
Okay, art can give us measures and ways of addressing the aesthetics of computation. and computer science gives an other way, and cultural theory and philosophy gives other way, but at the end, the analysis of what is aesthetics, what computation comes from the study of computational things, computational events, so there's always been somehow we cannot impose an outside look, an outside causation, but has to come from within the practice itself. And I'm using practices in a quite a used sense because I don't want to make a distinction between theory and practice. And transcendentally, it transcended in that respect, it could be referred to a specific type of explanation of how things come about.
And when they are imposed from, when the cause of something is external to the thing itself. It's a term that is used a lot in theology, in philosophy, to express the fact that the order, the reason, the meaning, the finality of something is determined by something else. Does it explain? I'm making it more complicated than it was originally? Thank you. In many sense, doesn't computer consider this another tool that added to other things? It's not just we can say that computer is abstract just from itself.
It's just another tool that implies other things that was devoted to the history, to technology and the power. And it's just another tool that added to other things, like the supermarket, instead of the paper and other things, it just became another extra tool, not just independent mechanism that includes everything. I guess it depends. It goes back to what you consider technology, whether a tool or a way of creating different types of reality. So technology, of course, is in a sense, is pretty much a tool.
But competition, please for me, is not just a technology. It is a way of structuring things. So it's a method of structuring reality to quantities, to steps, to discreetness, to a sequence of inference and procedures. To that extent, coming beyond specifically a tool becomes more, I think, a computation as a structure. So whether this is like the structure of structuralism or the structure of post-structuralism, I don't know. this is something that I want to investigate in the future, this is the abstract or form. Maybe to an art audience I should talk of computation in terms of form. Computation is a form more than a tool. And it actually has been used as a tool.
But I guess part of the aim of this paper was to see if it could be used, if computation could become formative of art in the sense of giving in a way of addressing structural means and things like that. I think the question of the tool in the kind of culture of technology or philosophy of technology is an old problem in a sense. It's in the sense about the kind of, is the tool simply an extension of the person? person you know some kind of clue heidegger etc or is it something that completely changes the nature of the nature of the human or is it something that's inherent to you know this
is the original technicity argument is inherent to the genesis of the human itself you know so people like their own their own or um but our steamer would make this kind of argument that the evolution of the human is inherently caught up with tools, technologies, language, which means you can't distinguish it and turn it into something that is simply an extension of man in the Cluence terms. I think our argument is more fundamental than that in a sense that this creates a new condition, that it's not simply about the old ink and paper ledgers. is also that the record, if we take the example of the supermarket,
gets turned into a more fundamentally complex machine, which coupled with things like globalisation and others, produces a new condition. You can look at, say, Harun Faraki's films about supermarkets as an example of the way in which the whole supermarket becomes a computational environment. working out which products people want to buy, where to place things, what kinds of lines of sight to array things in, and so on, in order to generate the most kind of throughput, the most activation of purchasing decisions, and so on. the same same
the the with the expansion of the there was in another way, but then it's like the market is becoming bigger, it's another type of... Yeah, I mean I think that's true to some extent, but I think it's important not to conflate computing with capitalism. There's a kind of, like if we take a look inside the programs that produce for photography or video that take views from the other media and then think the problem to simulate the other media.
I think it's interesting that case. So this Photoshop, for instance, would be the example of what's called a skeuomorph, taking the metaphor of the dark room and applying it to digital image manipulation. However, if you go through, if you look at this paper by Ladmanovic published in issue one of Computational Culture, it's a journal concerned with this area of cultural theory and computing, goes through that application and kind of shows how that doesn't work anymore, it doesn't hold. So the metaphor doesn't predetermine, the metaphor of the darkroom doesn't predetermine
how languages are made now. So if we're constantly looking for this kind of reassuring return to some originally metaphoric state of the physical kind of discrete normal mid-sized objects then we're missing actually what's what's happening in terms of in terms of how computation is producing new grammars and new forms of relation between different kinds of instances so i think this is i think it's a very good point you're making but it kind of ultimately obscures the the real change that's happening. Hi. So I think that, if I grasp on this correctly, that a lot of your project is about a kind of a realism without,
you call yourself realist, a realism without representation. So you're looking at computational aesthetics from this perspective of producing a kind of realism that isn't just representation or is outside of that. But I wonder about the choice of, and this is a very common thing that I wonder when people from other disciplines talk about contemporary art, about whether some of the choice of what you're showing us actually is almost pure representation. Like I think about the thing hitting its head on the wall and how that's almost like a pure metaphor. That's a kind of about. Whereas surely with computational aesthetics, you would want to be able to take that aboutness out. And the ideas of scale and a lot of the things that you've talked about seems to be proposing an aesthetic model in which aboutness is something that we might want to avoid or representations.
So I'm just wondering about how you might kind of think through other kinds of practices, some maybe more contemporary post-internet practices. I don't know if that's a difficult term to bring in, but practices that are kind of self-replicating that do what they're saying. So I'm just wondering in terms of, or even for me, if I think about a writing practice in these terms, it might be a more appropriate way. I'm just kind of worried about using art in a way that is an image of what you're talking about which is kind of ethically an antithesis to what you're talking about or you're proposing as an aesthetics does that make sense so kind of like do these images how do these images that you choose fit into the model that you're talking about or do they not really are they are they actually maybe representations instead of just yeah I guess I mean again a good
I think Christopher Quintero's revolution is a robot that smashes his head against the wall. It has no memory of that process and you can compare it to, I don't know, Chris Burden's Goliath sculpture which gradually kind of knocks down the AI institutions part of it. Except this is a robot that destroys itself effectively. I think within the works we've looked at there is to a certain extent a representational aspect but it's not a representation that fits our criteria in a sense that for instance if you look at
London.pl by Harvard. It's really about using, it's a functional piece of code that can be written in language pearl. That is also something that mixes that mode of language with the form of Blake's poem, and also the way in which that was then printed as a broadsheet or as pages within books of poetry. So something that works across these different levels, some of which can be interpreted as representation, but they can also be interpreted as material entities in themselves. so I think there's a way in which we're trying to draw attention to
non-representational aspects but at the same time say a that the representation can be mobilized in this in this relation and that I think there's a way in which a strong claim strong claim for the non-representational non-representational aesthetics would also work on and allow us to kind of revisit modes of modes of art modes of figuration that are by and large traditionally thought in representational terms so you know I think this is also part of what we're we're thinking about is the way in which the kind of non-representational aspect of computation which relies itself on forms of
representation such as code, such as the binary, such as symbolic systems, also has kind of material dimensions to them. You know, there's a kind of long history of cultural theory or philosophy looking at that aspect. I mean, you can look at back teams writing a language, for instance, as a way of thinking about languages and material. So I think there's ways in which, I think your argument is a correct one to ask, but your questions are correct to us, but in a way, the term, the kind of shift to the non-representational, in a sense, means that the kind of artworks we're looking at are not really about representation of these phenomena,
but embodiment of them in certain ways. And it's these particular ways in which artworks tease out relationships to these dynamics and these cultural currents that we're specifically interested in. How do you feel about esoteric programming languages? I mean, I'm just thinking is this kind of like, that's quite maybe a good metaphor of something that takes pleasure in a representation that also does something that is completely unreadable, though, if you can, you know, well, it works on maybe levels of visibility that are quite interesting. Yeah, yeah, so esoteric programming languages would be something like Mindfuck or, sorry, BrainFuck or Mouthbulge or Whitespace. Whitespace is a programming language that only uses
the empty set in the characters available on the keyboard. So the space, tab, stuff like this, as a way of producing these code. That certainly is fantastic. Yeah, very interesting as a way of... And if you look on GitHub, which I'm sure most of you are very familiar with, it's a code repository, you can find sorts of these languages and pieces of code written within them. So it's GitHub, G-O-T-H-E-B, you can find online. But yeah, a number of artists working with those obscure or esoteric or weird programming languages. I was just wondering what relationship I wanted to do in maybe your idea of computational aesthetics and maybe network aesthetics.
It struck me that a lot of the examples that you showed actually could have been made almost in a pre-networked era just with computers. computers. So you know, the Blake intern or the surgeon, the studio, there's certain things, you know, in the robot, they seem to speak more of computational processes like the limits, like the scale of the environment and network paradigm. So I'm just interested in how it's too connected. Yeah, that's definitely an overlap, but I guess possibly the way to answer your question is that we say that some point in the paper that computation is differentiated in the
computing machine and it's how it gains much popularity and much efficacy. but it's as a technique, it's something that comes from other types of histories in the sense that it's not only tied to the computing machine, like some will argue in the biology that ants compute, or like the motor of the sky, the stars in the movement will produce a form of computation, or again types of calculation like the abacus or other are still forms of computing. So in the sense that they offer a procedure to solve a problem
through these straight means, through these straight steps. So in a sense, yes, these works, the principles of these works could be addressed also without computers in the sense that we got a set of procedures of interconnections of street is always as to face the problem of continuity of the fact that we experience this thing that continuous manifestation experience based on procedures they are very screen so I wouldn't say that we want to talk about digital computational aesthetics because that's the work we're living in.
But it could be made an argument. An argument could be made in the computational studies. It's not something from 1936 on, from when the principle of the computer were laid out in the mathematical paper from Turing, but it's something that can be found also in other types of procedures. Like people have talked about urbanist fractals. There's a really lovely book, African fractals, of how the urban in African villages will, the constitution of the towns and villages will express the forms of competition in their arrangements and their procedures. So yeah, definitely, I wouldn't say that computational aesthetic results,
that it's a computing machine. That could be a aesthetic of networks, could be a aesthetic of concept. There's a lot of it. in that sense? Yeah, specifically network aesthetics like mail art for instance. Some of these have been outside of computers but there's obviously a lot of ways in which there's a very algorithmic level to mail art. You think Ray Johnson or Ray Sinkin Cohen's work which are very much instruction based. algorithmic processes which at the same time are not strictly computational.
Well thank you very much for a really quite good talk. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We've really extended the boundaries of our lectures. It's great that we can do it. And invitation as usual, to the democracy. Thank you.