Generative theatre of totality

Generative art can be used for creating complex multisensory and multimedia experiences within predetermined aesthetic parameters, characteristic of the performing arts and remarkably suitable to address Moholy-Nagy's Theatre of Totality vision. In generative artworks the artist will usually take on the role of an experience framework designer, and the system evolves freely within that framework and its defined aesthetic boundaries. Most generative art impacts visual arts, music and literature, but there does not seem to be any relevant work exploring the cross-medium potential, and one could confidently state that most generative art outcomes are abstract and visual, or audio. It is the goal of this article to propose a model for the creation of generative performances within the Theatre of Totality's scope, derived from stochastic Lindenmayer systems, where mapping techniques are proposed to address the seven variables addressed by Moholy-Nagy: light, space, plane, form, motion, sound and man ("man" is replaced in this article with "human", except where quoting from the author), with all the inherent complexities

The relationship between evolutionary biology and religion

Belief in creationism and intelligent design is widespread and gaining in significance in a number of countries. This article examines the characteristics of science and of religions and the possible relationship between science and religion. I argue that creationism is sometimes best seen not as a misconception but as a worldview. In such instances, the most to which a science educator (whether in school, college or university) can normally aspire is to ensure that students with creationist beliefs understand the scientific position. In the short term, the scientific worldview is unlikely to supplant a creationist one for students who are firm creationists. We can help students to find their evolutionary biology courses interesting and intellectually challenging without their being threatening. Effective teaching in this area can not only help students learn about the theory of evolution but better to appreciate the way science is done, the procedures by which scientific knowledge accumulates, the limitations of science and the ways in which scientific knowledge differs from other forms of knowledge

Embodying Artifact Production Knowledge

On a modified view of embodied cognition, I argue that the conceptual structure of some present-day’s abstract artifact concepts such as PIECE OF MUSIC or PIECE OF ART can be effectively explained if it is taken into account that “visual recordings” of first observed result objects played a major role in developing abstract artifact concepts

Proximate and ultimate factors in evolutionary thinking on art

Art is often described as an evolutionary adaptation, but not enough thought has been given to arguments in support of this claim. This can lead to a variety of explanatory issues, such as unjustly describing artmaking as an adaptation, not recognizing its complex nature, and its potentially even more complex evolutionary trajectory. This paper addresses one subject in particular, which is the conceptual distinction between ultimate and proximate levels of explanation. More specifically, this brief analysis investigates to what extent functional, adaptive explanations and proximate mechanisms might be confused, leading to strong adaptationist claims that may not be in accordance with the available evidence. In this paper, two hypotheses are discussed from this perspective, and it is argued that both of them, upon closer and more extensive analysis, might not stand the adaptationist test

A Planning-based Approach for Music Composition

. Automatic music composition is a fascinating field within computational creativity. While different Artificial Intelligence techniques have been used for tackling this task, Planning – an approach for solving complex combinatorial problems which can count on a large number of high-performance systems and an expressive language for describing problems – has never been exploited. In this paper, we propose two different techniques that rely on automated planning for generating musical structures. The structures are then filled from the bottom with “raw” musical materials, and turned into melodies. Music experts evaluated the creative output of the system, acknowledging an overall human-enjoyable trait of the melodies produced, which showed a solid hierarchical structure and a strong musical directionality. The techniques proposed not only have high relevance for the musical domain, but also suggest unexplored ways of using planning for dealing with non-deterministic creative domains

Working memory and working attention: What could possibly evolve?

The concept of “working” memory is traceable back to nineteenth century theorists (Baldwin, 1894; James 1890) but the term itself was not used until the mid-twentieth century (Miller, Galanter & Pribram, 1960). A variety of different explanatory constructs have since evolved which all make use of the working memory label (Miyake & Shah, 1999). This history is briefly reviewed and alternative formulations of working memory (as language-processor, executive attention, and global workspace) are considered as potential mechanisms for cognitive change within and between individuals and between species. A means, derived from the literature on human problem-solving (Newell & Simon, 1972), of tracing memory and computational demands across a single task is described and applied to two specific examples of tool-use by chimpanzees and early hominids. The examples show how specific proposals for necessary and/or sufficient computational and memory requirements can be more rigorously assessed on a task by task basis. General difficulties in connecting cognitive theories (arising from the observed capabilities of individuals deprived of material support) with archaeological data (primarily remnants of material culture) are discussed

Coevolution of Firm Capabilities and Industry Competition

This paper proposes that rival firms not only search for new capabilities within their organization, but also for those that rest in their competitive environment. An integrated analysis of these search processes at both firm and industry levels of analysis shows how their interaction makes industries and firms coevolve over time. To contribute to an enhanced understanding of the concept of coevolution, a dynamic and integrative framework crossing meso and micro levels of analysis is constructed. This framework is applied to a longitudinal study of the music industry with a time-span of 120 years. The first part, a historical study, covers the period 1877 - 1990. The second part, a multiple-case study, covers the period 1990 - 1997. We conclude that search behavior drives coevolution through competitive dynamics among new entrants and incumbent firms and manifests itself in the simultaneous emergence of new business models and new organizational forms.coevolution;competitive regime;longitudinal research;multilevel research;music industry

Back to where we came from: evolutionary psychology and children’s literature and media

In 2010, The New York Times ran an article which announced that ‘the next big thing in English [Studies]’ was ‘using evolutionary theory to explain fiction’. This announcement may be considered somewhat belated, given that the interest in the potential relevance of evolutionary psychology to literary studies might be traced back to a considerably earlier date than 2010. Joseph Carroll first published on the subject as far back as 1995, and by 2002 Steven Pinker could claim that ‘within the academy, a growing number of mavericks are looking to Evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to re-establish human nature as the center of any understanding of the arts’. Nevertheless, The New York Times’s announcement may be taken as a measure of an increasingly visible trend in both popular and academic thinking. We argue in this chapter that this trend is motivated specifically by nostalgia, or the longing for a past which seems forever lost. A second aspect of this nostalgia will also be discussed to do with the way that we argue that this supposedly ‘new’ area of research repeats exactly a long history of prior claims of many eminent children’s literature critics with respect to ideas of childhood, language and children’s literature and media. Despite the repeated, insistent claims of several of the Literary Darwinists, including, for instance, Joseph Carroll, one of the founders of this way of thinking, that they are working in heroic opposition to a dominant, obscurantist and anti-science ‘literary theory’, we argue here that in fact there is a high degree of convergence between the claims made about childhood, language and children’s literature in Literary Darwinism and much children’s literature criticism. We therefore see Literary Darwinism and (children’s) literature studies as not being in any sense about an opposition or separation between science and literary or humanist studies, but about a convergence underpinned and driven by the same nostalgia for a singular, stable, uniform and universal past, leading to a singular, stable, uniform and universal present. Finally, we suggest that it is not just in these two fields in which this nostalgia operates, but that this can currently be seen in sub-streams within many disciplines – in both in arts, sciences and humanities -- as a founding, powerfully political, driver

Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes

I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively simpler and more beautiful. Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising not in the traditional sense of Boltzmann and Shannon but in the sense that it allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known. This drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and (since 1990) artificial systems.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figures, based on KES 2008 keynote and ALT 2007 / DS 2007 joint invited lectur