Alex McLean

I’m very happy to have a paper “Bricolage Programming in the Creative Arts” accepted to this year’s PPIG (the Psychology of Programming Interest Group).  You’re probably better off reading the PDF version, but I’ve put it here too:

Abstract:

In this paper we consider artists who create their work by writing algorithms, which when interpreted by a computer generates their plotted drawings, synthesised music, animated digital video, or whatever target medium they have chosen. We examine the demands that such artists place upon their environments, the relationships between concepts and algorithms, and of cognition and computation. We begin by considering an artist’s creative process, and situating it within the bricolage style of programming. An embodied view of bricolage programming is related, underpinned by theories of cognitive metaphor and computational creativity, and finally with consideration of the bricolage programmer’s relation to time.

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Here’s a tech demo of my current Haskell live coding environment, an emacs mode adapted from Rohan Drape’s haskell supercollider mode, with flash on eval adapted from the syntax tail highlighting minor mode.

Source coming soon here…

haskell 2 minute acid tech demo from yaxu on Vimeo.

A few people on twitter found this useful so here it is in full:

I’ve been writing a few papers lately and going through the cycle of write -> print -> proofread -> write, generating a lot of paper.  I’ve text to hard to read on screen, and raw LaTeX somehow feels too malleable to read as a document.  Then I thought the obvious; why not format the document for the screen.

I came up with this, two columns with minimal margins:

%\documentclass[compact,twocolumn]{article}

%\usepackage[top=0.1in, bottom=0.1in, left=0.3in, right=0.3in, paperwidth=11in, paperheight=7in]{geometry}

%\setlength{\columnsep}{30pt}

This fits nicely on my laptop screen but adjust for your particular aspect ratio and so on.  Then view in full screen or presentation mode and hey presto.  Evince in linux is great in presentation mode (rather than full screen mode, which keeps a menu bar), and automatically picks up changes when you recompile your PDF.

If you still find yourself with eye strain, rather than reading from paper, consider adjusting the position of your monitor.  There’s a lot of hype around e-paper, and it does look lovely, but I’m unsure that the evidence shows that LCDs are significantly worse for eye strain if at all…  Is light really that different when it reflects off something rather than emitting from something?  I reckon distance between eyes and monitor is a bigger factor at least.

Without interpreters, we wouldn’t have software, but yet interpreters are also software.  This is why we talk about `bootstrapping’, where software pulls itself from the floor by its bootstraps, a paradox settled by the existence of hardware microcode.

Any piece of software exists as a combination of two parts, some instructions in a computer language and an interpreter of that language.  Alone they do nothing, put them together and they can notionally do anything.  Often there are intermediary steps, commonly interpretation into another language called `bytecode’ to produce `binaries’, but these are just translations into another language, which still needs interpreting for the magic to happen.

Interpreters are fantastic, they allow us to try out ideas beyond our imaginations, adding some instructions, interpreting them to get output rendered as sound or light to our senses, perceiving otherwise impossible worlds, and returning to the source code to twist the encoded structures into new contortions inspired by the results so far.  We humans expand the realms of perception through computation, not creating things but writing about things in order to magic them into existence.  We’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible, artistic and otherwise, from marrying high speed computation with embodied human experience.

It’s a shame then that the freedom of thought that interpreters give us happen to threaten business models of large companies, who are accordingly searching for the power to make free access to them them illegal.  `Console’ computers (a misnomer if I ever saw one) are those where the end user is not allowed access to an interpreter, without paying for a restrictive license and/or expensive hardware.  You are not allowed to modify code, certainly not allowed to modify the interpreter, and so must be satisfied with using whatever programs the manufacturer allows you to.

What is frightening is that these business models are spreading — from computer games, to handheld computers and now to tablets.  The iPhone (and now iPad) was a particular shock as a device from a company producing hardware traditionally marketed at the creative.  You certainly can be creative with an iPad, but only using a surface level interface; you can touch the screen to make a mark, but you can’t write a program about touch, or about marks.  iScratch, a project that allowed children to interpret their programs on the iPhone, has been rejected from the apple store.  Such interpreters have been banned from the iPhone from the start (apart from the concession of a javascript web browser VM without access to, for example, sound synthesis), but a big media stir has only been made since interpretation was locked down on the development side too, having impacts on some crappy tools by a large company.

This creep towards centralised control over interpretation is deeply worrying, and arguments that end-users get confused or threatened by higher order thought are frankly sinister.  Can we have our languages back, please?

UPDATE: If you needed convincing on the point of interpreters allowing higher order creativity, check out Dave’s latest work: http://www.pawfal.org/dave/blog/2010/04/lazybotz/

It’s Ada Lovelace day today, and it turns out my main influences lately have been two women.

One is Sherry Turkle, via her book The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, and her work on Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete together with Seymour Papert.  Two decades on, some aspects of this work are dated, but the main drive reads like a message from the future; to fully accept computer programming in our creative lives we should consider the feminine, do away with purity and black boxes and work within our code rather than upon it.  Computer programming languages and culture is biased towards abstract approaches and against anthropomorphism.

Perhaps live coding is a swing back towards a more feminine approach, where humans are immersed in the same time flow as algorithms, fully engage their perceptual and aesthetic faculties while writing code, and have their whole program before them ready to be manipulated, rather than abstracting parts in black boxes according to grand designs.

Here’s a choice quote from the epistemological pluralism paper:

The conventional route into formal systems, through the manipulation of abstract symbols, closes doors that the computer can open. The computer, with its graphics, its sounds, its text and animation, can provide a port of entry for people whose chief ways of relating to the world are through movement, intuition, visual impression, the power of words and associations. And it can provide a privileged point of entry for people whose mode of approach is through a close, bodily identification with the world of ideas or those who appropriate through anthropomorphization. The computational object, on the border between the idea and a physical object, offers new possibilities.

My other recent influence is Laurie Spiegel, in particular her writing on the manipulation of musical patterns.  I’d already found myself making a pattern language when I found her paper, and found it a great inspiration.  In this 1981 paper she recognises computation as pattern transformation (which after all is all that it is, a Jacquard loom head that transforms), and applies this insight directly to music; computation then becomes music pattern transformation, the structure of computation forming the structure of music.  There’s much more inspiration for musician-programmers to be gained from her other writings.

Conceptual metaphor theory holds that our understanding of the world is largely structured by metaphor.   This presumably includes our understanding of computer programs, which is the basis of Metaphors we Program By: Space, Action and Society in Java, a paper by Alan Blackwell. The paper shows analyses of documentation for some standard Java libraries, looking for the metaphors that structure human understanding of the library components and their interactions. I’ve taken the liberty of extracting the metaphors related in the paper but if you’re interested you should go and read the whole thing, it’s a good one. I feel I could meditate on this list for some time, and I’d love to see comparisons with the metaphors used in the documentation of other languages.

• Components are agents of action in a causal universe.
• Programs operate in historical time.
• Program state can be measured in quantitative terms.
• Components are members of a society.
• Components own and trade data.
• Components are subject to legal constraints.
• Method calls are speech acts.
• Components have communicative intent.
• A component has beliefs and intentions.
• Components observe and seek information in the execution environment.
• Components are subject to moral and aesthetic judgment.
• Programs operate in a spatial world with containment and extent.
• Execution is a journey in some landscape.
• Program logic is a physical structure, with material properties and subject to decay.
• Data is a substance that flows and is stored.
• Technical relationships are violent encounters.
• Programs can author texts.
• Programs can construct displays.
• Data is a genetic, metabolizing lifeform with body parts.
• Software tasks and behaviour are delegated by automaticity.
• Software exists in a cultural/historical context.
• Software components are social proxies for their authors.

I’ve written about Alan Blackwell’s research before.

Then this morning I saw this tweet:

<laputean> “hello world” programm is the ‘perfect’ starting point of fastidious and wrong epistemological assumptions that one carries for all life

A neat reminder that the ways in which we perceive the workings of computer `agents’ and source code is very much within a particular social context.