Fitness in Evolutionary Art and Music: A Taxonomy and Future Prospects

This paper is concerned with the idea of fitness in art and music systems that are based on evolutionary computation. A taxonomy is presented of the ways in which fitness is used in such systems, with two dimensions: what the fitness function is applied to, and the basis by which the function is constructed. A large collection of papers are classified using this taxonomy. The paper then discusses a number of ideas that have not been used for fitness evaluation in evolutionary art and which might be valuable in future developments: memory, scaffolding, connotation and web search

Automated compositions: artificial intelligence aided conceptual design explorations in architecture

The paper focuses on the challenges of the relationship between architecture and artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, the potential of this technology to support architects' creative design processes in the form of augmented intelligence. Conceptual architectural design is an intricate process that produces new concepts by using prior knowledge, experience, intuition, and creativity. Artificial intelligence should not be used during the conceptual design stage with the goal of solving a problem in a predefined search space. Instead, potential solutions and design requirements should be explored using this technology. The suggested approach avoids preconceived solutions and psychological inertia attributed to the designer's finite experience. The paper gives a brief critical review of the application of AI in an architectural context, especially in conceptual design. The review emphasizes changes in the design process brought about by cutting-edge strategies, methods, and tools based on AI. Further, research by design is presented to illustrate the possible use of biologically inspired algorithms in producing innovative design proposals. The applied strategy in architectural design production was based on the human-machine interface and interaction (HMI&I). Symbiotic human-machine interaction in the design process facilitates the emergence of automated compositions that display novel and unexpected forms, detail, materiality, structure, functionality, and aesthetics. This study allowed us to explore peculiar architectural design methodologies and the potential of digitally intelligent architecture

Application of Intermediate Multi-Agent Systems to Integrated Algorithmic Composition and Expressive Performance of Music

We investigate the properties of a new Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for computer-aided composition called IPCS (pronounced “ipp-siss”) the Intermediate Performance Composition System which generates expressive performance as part of its compositional process, and produces emergent melodic structures by a novel multi-agent process. IPCS consists of a small-medium size (2 to 16) collection of agents in which each agent can perform monophonic tunes and learn monophonic tunes from other agents. Each agent has an affective state (an “artificial emotional state”) which affects how it performs the music to other agents; e.g. a “happy” agent will perform “happier” music. The agent performance not only involves compositional changes to the music, but also adds smaller changes based on expressive music performance algorithms for humanization. Every agent is initialized with a tune containing the same single note, and over the interaction period longer tunes are built through agent interaction. Agents will only learn tunes performed to them by other agents if the affective content of the tune is similar to their current affective state; learned tunes are concatenated to the end of their current tune. Each agent in the society learns its own growing tune during the interaction process. Agents develop “opinions” of other agents that perform to them, depending on how much the performing agent can help their tunes grow. These opinions affect who they interact with in the future. IPCS is not a mapping from multi-agent interaction onto musical features, but actually utilizes music for the agents to communicate emotions. In spite of the lack of explicit melodic intelligence in IPCS, the system is shown to generate non-trivial melody pitch sequences as a result of emotional communication between agents. The melodies also have a hierarchical structure based on the emergent social structure of the multi-agent system and the hierarchical structure is a result of the emerging agent social interaction structure. The interactive humanizations produce micro-timing and loudness deviations in the melody which are shown to express its hierarchical generative structure without the need for structural analysis software frequently used in computer music humanization

Japonisme in Polish Pictorial Arts (1885 – 1939)

This thesis chronicles the development of Polish Japonisme between 1885 and 1939. It focuses mainly on painting and graphic arts, and selected aspects of photography, design and architecture. Appropriation from Japanese sources triggered the articulation of new visual and conceptual languages which helped forge new art and art educational paradigms that would define the modern age. Starting with Polish fin-de-siècle Japonisme, it examines the role of Western European artistic centres, mainly Paris, in the initial dissemination of Japonisme in Poland, and considers the exceptional case of Julian Fałat, who had first-hand experience of Japan. The second phase of Polish Japonisme (1901-1918) was nourished on local, mostly Cracovian, infrastructure put in place by the ‘godfather’ of Polish Japonisme Feliks Manggha Jasieński. His pro-Japonisme agency is discussed at length. Considerable attention is given to the political incentive provided by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, which rendered Japan as Poland’s ally against its Russian oppressor. The first two decades of the 20th century are regarded as the ‘Renaissance’ of Japonisme in Poland, and it is this part of the thesis that explores Japanese inspirations as manifested in the genres of portraiture, still life, landscape, representations of flora and fauna, erotic imagery, and caricature. Japonisme in graphic and applied graphic arts, including the poster, is also discussed. The existence of the taste for Japanese art in the West after 1918 is less readily acknowledged than that of the preceding decades. The third phase of Polish Japonisme (1919-1939) helps challenge the tacit conviction that Japanese art stopped functioning as an inspirational force around 1918. This part of the thesis examines the nationalisation of heretofore private resources of Japanese art in Cracow and Warsaw, and the inauguration of official cultural exchange between Poland and Japan. Polish Japonisme within École de Paris, both before 1918 and thereafter, inspired mainly by the painting of Foujita Tsuguharu, is an entirely new contribution to the field. Although Japanese inspirations frequently appeared in Polish painting of the interwar period, it was the graphic arts that became most receptive to the Japanese aesthetic at that time. The thesis includes a case study of Leon Wyczółkowski’s interbellum Japonisme, and interprets it as patriotic transpositions of the work of Hiroshige and the Japanese genre of meisho-e. Japonisme in Polish design and architecture is addressed only in the context of the creation of Polish national style in design (1901-1939). Art schools in Britain and America became important centres for Japonisme at the beginning of the 20th century. The thesis considers the case of Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, which due to radical changes introduced by its new director Julian Fałat, became an important centre for the dissemination of the taste for Japanese art in Poland

The Sound of the hallmarks of cancer

The objective of this research is to create a mixed portfolio of data-driven composition and performance interfaces, fixed Electroacoustic/Computer music compositions, and live-improvised musical and audiovisual works reflecting cancer as a disease. The main methodology in generating the raw sonic material is the sonification of high-throughput, protein/RNA fold-change data, derived from the bio- molecular research of cancer cells. This data and relevant insight into the field are obtained as part of a collaboration with Barts Cancer Institute, in London, UK. Furthermore, for the purpose of musical effectiveness and reaching wider audiences, a focus has been placed on balancing the use of data-driven sonic material with composer-driven musical choices, by drawing upon the narrative of the Hallmarks of Cancer (Hanahan and Weinberg, 2011) which is a widely accepted conceptual framework in the field of cancer research for understanding the various biomolecular processes responsible for causing cancer. This method is adopted in order to inspire musical form, and guide some of the syntactic and aesthetic choices within both fixed and improvised works. In addition, this research also reflects upon the use of data sonification as an artistic tool and practice, while also addressing the contradictions and contention that arise as a result of scientific aims and expectations regarding sonification, resulting in a proposed original model for framing and classifying artistic works incorporating this approach

Subject and Aesthetic Interface - an inquiry into transformed subjectivities

The present PhD-thesis seeks new definitions of human subjectivity in an age of technoscience and a networked, globalized, Information Society. The perspective presented relates to Philosophy of Science, which includes the Human, the Natural, the Social and the Life Sciences. The project is directed at addressing, and aims to participate in, the further development of Philosophy of Science, or rather, the philosophy of knowing, which leaves a perspective broader than that of science. Methodologically, I combine readings of technoetic artworks, which I approach from a hermeneutical-semiotic perspective, with transdisciplinary research into existing theory concerning the human subject. These readings form my case studies. I keep a particular focus on holistic biophysics (Mae Wan Ho, James Oschman, Marko Bischof). Furthermore, Søren Brier's cybersemiotic theory of communication, cognition and consciousness, which combines a cybernetic-autopoietic and a Peircean semiotic perspective, plays a central role in the project. The project has three parts. Part one contextualizes the study within philosophy of science. It discusses relevant epistemologies, and places the case studies in an art categorical context. It further discusses the philosophical problems involved in writing an academic thesis in the form of a linear, argumentative, critical style, and how it affects the process of meaning making in a way that has consequences to my research. The second part consists of four case studies, each under an overall theme, which applies to the question of human subjectivity. Here I build the concept Extended Sentience, and the concept of an Ideal User. The Ideal User functions as a conceptual frame, which allows me to gradually add more elements to a theory of an altered human subject and knower. The third part presents new ontologies under three basic themes: Time and Relativity, The Life Cycles of Metaphors, and Logos Philosophy and Virtual Grids. These ontologies strongly affect ways of interpretation made in part one and two. Part Three allows more space to my subjective thought processes, which will take precedence over the literature applied. Thus, I, as a post-objective subject observer, will become more transparent. Finally, I will seek an overall conclusion to the project, which should clarify areas where it is evident that the human subject must be reconsidered at a pre-scientific level. It is my thesis that the foundation for human knowledge generation is changing drastically today, and that it has become crucial to reconsider a common understanding of what constitutes the human knower

PROTOTYPING PLATEAU GEHRY_CONNECTIVES : Reading Frank Gehry’s experiments through Deleuze and Guattari

This thesis attempts to describe and interpret the design practice of an American architect, Frank O. Gehry through concepts developed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator, French psychotherapist, philosopher and activist, Félix Guattari. At the same time, prototyping a website-based interactive project called PLATEAU GEHRY_CONNECTIVES, it explores an alternative form for the Doctoral thesis. In addition to connections with visual arts, such as painting and cinema, the experimental project PLATEAU GEHRY_CONNECTIVES includes references to concepts and phenomena from various areas of knowledge revealing distinctive, unusual qualities of Gehry’s creative approach in the production of design artefacts. The thesis documents and discusses means of representation in architectural design fused into the specific creative culture of Frank O. Gehry. It notices that the discourse in architectural theory and practice, often neglects what occurs on a particular molecular level of the architectural design process. It shows that elements of micro-level of design procedures render Gehry’s idiosyncratic design phenomena intelligible and perceptible in a new way. It claims that it has been possible because Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts become perceptibly operational in the interpretation of such phenomena, at the level of elementary units of Gehry’s design procedures. Moreover, through this close-up perspective, the thesis’ investigations identify certain similarities in the operational modes of the architect and the painter. It demonstrates how Gehry, who has anchored his interest in painting, and specifically in what he defined as ‘immediacy in painting,’ was able to transform the practice of architectural drawing from projective to a cognitive one. It also shows, how the architect re-defines the commonly applied projective geometries from passive, arbitrary role to an active agent, and how the architect links drawing practice with the construction process on a new, almost palpable level. While stressing its the manual character, the thesis demonstrates that Gehry’s explorative culture of challenging means of representation employed in architectural design production facilitates the re-disciplining of architecture culminating in the integration of the CATIA system in the design procedures. This study of Gehry’s design actions and strategies can help the reader to understand the significance of experimental and intuitive design practices. The thesis proposes the Deleuzian interpretation of Gehry’s experiments in the aesthetics of design thinking and acting. It renders perceptions of patterns, according to which, other design practices can operate

Resonance & Resemblance: Sound Perspectives of a Pluralistic World

As we mature into the 21st century the world is experiencing increasing instability in environmental, geopolitical, economic and social realms. To support a more equitable and sustainable politics, feminist new materialist theorists have proposed constructs that reframe our engagement of nature, agency, political and social realms. They work to challenge nature/cultural and subject/object binaries to emphasize a distributed, pluralistic, impactful and interconnected world. However, they have an epistemic blind spot in that their theorizing lacks a diversity of the embedded and creative animation they advocate for. The following dissertation Resonance & Resemblance: Sound Perspectives of a Pluralistic World attends to this need. Through an interdisciplinary methodology this dissertation discusses my proposition that the phenomenon of resonance can be, and has been, engaged to theorize a diverse field of material agency and interconnectedness. It addresses my approach to a component of my research, which was conducted through artistic research practice with the composition Resonance & Resemblance (2017) commissioned by the Russel Wright Historical Foundation. This dissertation also presents work from interlocutors Maryanne Amacher (1943 -2010), Pauline Oliveros (1932 - 2016), and Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon (b. 1982). Each of these electronic music composers have adopted resonance as a mode of creative engagement to know the materials they work with and their surrounding environment. I analyze the composite of my research through a critical framework that intersects feminist materialisms with agent-environment cognition theory. This intersection of theory progresses an intertextual reading that allows me to locate resonance as a cross-modal mode of interpersonal and intermaterial negotiations to render what I call resonant materialism, an embedded, sensual praxis that reframes issues of difference, material effect and accessibility without separation