Software Discussion

15 December 2000

Monaco Dance and Technology Festival
13-15 December [wed-fri] 2000

Participants

Mark Coniglio
Scott deLahunta
Guy Hilton
Robb Lovell
Bruno Martelli
Richard Povall
Kirk Woolford

Context

This discussion brought together a group of artists who collaborate in the making of dance works, who as a part of their practice, write software code or scripts that are then used in the context of the performance, installation and/ or rehearsal process. An email discussion list was subsequently established to continue the exchange.

Questions which served as a starting point

Artists writing software

Code Issues –

Who is a programmer/ what defines a programmer?
What sort of knowledge and expertise and how to rank/ order this?

1)	Sharing
a)	Code and Design
i)	Open Source/ Open Content
ii)	Plugins, etc.
b)	Work load
i)	Small scale for small projects
ii)	Larger scale
(1)	Project Management
(2)	Distributing Debugging/ Grunt work, etc.
(a)	University students
(b)	access to programmers [eastern europe]
c)	Support for small software development? Bits and distribution
2)	Revenue Streams
a)	Shareware
b)	Distribution on line
c)	Making fragments available – how?
3)	Give it away?
4)	Scalability/ Architectures/ Cross Media
a)	Device to device/ System to system communication [woody vasulka/ russ grizo]
i)	Universal definition for all media ?
ii)	The next version of midi?
5)	What sort of support should an ‘artist programmer’ expect/ need
a)	Subsidy or Commercial Rates
b)	Organisation
i)	Distribution of workload/ project management
ii)	Ownership / Authorship / Rights ? Is it an issue? How is it an issue?

*******************

Scott	Did you forget to press record?

Bruno	That was lovely intro, it was shame that wasn’t captured. 

Mark	Can you do that again?

Scott	All of these things have occurred to all of us probably, and I have been talking to a few of you, the last couple of days about some of these issues and, for example, asking Kirk the question, if you have subsidy to write programmes, would that be of use to you and Kirk just says, “well in fact I can make so much money programming on the side, that’s not so much use to me, but what would be of use would be getting the grunt work done.  If I could design something and have other people do it”. So that immediately seems to be a possible solution.  I’m really interested in possible solutions.  So let’s just kick off.

Mark: I would like to say one thing about that right away because this actually came up when I was teaching at Calarts because of a lot of what I was doing was writing software, but they had a policy at Calarts always that any artwork that the artist made while they were teaching there was always remained the property of the artist, and so in that same light, when I was writing software for them, even though I was on staff as a person, I retained all rights to what I wrote, as if it was an artwork.  And that’s the really interesting thing because when you start talking about subsidies, because it’s the software world and there are certain predilections about the fact that it’s a software and not an artwork, the tendency maybe – I may be wrong – but I have a feeling that the tendency may be that people are going to want this to be automatically open source by nature, as part of this project, whatever you write is going to become part of the public domain etc, and I think that’s a concern because I think in fact it is an artwork and as such the artist needs to remain in control of that.  

Robb: And there’s also the university where I was where anything I wrote, did NOT become public domain, but became property of ASU (Arizona State University).

Mark: That’s the typical thing in university situations yes.  

Kirk: At the Institute of Design of Chicago where I was, we actually ended up with an agreement whereby I was able to use it for whatever I want to do, but they had full use of it as well.

Mark: So I just bring that up because I think that, even from my point of view, I can also make a lot of money programming, if I had a subsidy that I could depend on for a period of time to focus on something that I really just want to focus on and not have to do that other thing, I would be personally interested.  

Robb: I would echo that because I have been in the unfortunate situation that having left an institution and gone for a whole year and feel like I have done hardly anything, because I don’t have any institutional support, all I have been doing is trying to support myself by the programming and I haven’t been able to take time off to do something that I want to do. 

Kirk: I think that we may be talking about two different types of subsidies, because one of the big problems with the grants that we’ve had in the past, is that we’re not allowed to use the grant money to pay the rent for instance.  You have to turn around… the grant money has to be spent on something and if you try to hire somebody to programme, you could expect to pay minimum of £25 to £30 an hour.  And that uses up your subsidy so quickly.  But if like you say, you have a subsidy which gave you living expenses for three months, and so you wouldn’t have to be going out and taking on other contract work, that would be very useful.

Bruno: I think basically, free money is always useful. [laughter] 

Richard: I suspect you will find that within the arts funding world you will find people to be very sympathetic to that, but it might be quite hard to do and …

Mark: You mean to the fact of paying salaries, or that the money goes to living expenses?

Richard: I think you can justify paying yourself an artist’s fee to yourself, but if you actually write that in as a programmers’ fee, I think that won’t be accepted.

Robb: No, it falls between the cracks. You can’t get science funding, you can’t get arts funding.  It’s always been a problem.  I don’t think it’s going to go away anytime soon.

Scott: Certainly this is an area where something could be done.  Okay, so this is a key problem, so we have identified a kind of gap. 

Richard: I mean what tends to happen at the moment is you write something in as an artist’s fee for yourself to do some programming, and then you may pay somebody else to do some of the work, so what you’re doing in essence is giving up your artist’s fee. You are kind of hiding the programming costs in the budget, but in fact, you’re not going to get that as income.

Mark: But on the converse of what I was saying, to contradict myself in a certain way, but the other side of it is that if I am creating a piece of software under that kind of funding situation where I am subsided by an arts organisation, the idea of giving copies away to artists or making that available at a really inexpensive price to artists or whatever the product is and distributing that in a way, certainly seems completely within the realm of reason.  It’s just hard to lose control of the actual code itself, because as I was saying yesterday, you can license that to somebody else and make some more money on it later, and you can re-license it again, and that’s a source of income that you can then garner from that and that’s what I wouldn’t want to give up.  All of us have really specific key knowledge and to then give that away or make it public, is from my point of view, very problematic, because we all have a lot of years invested in learning what we know, all that sort of thing.

Scott: Are there other views on that, ‘giving away the code’ kind of views?

Bruno: Well, I suppose the arts council could make a special grant for, you write the software and give it away free kind of grant, they could do one… a programme like that. 

Richard: I think there’s a difference though between giving away source code and giving away programmes.  

Mark: Yeh, that’s a big difference.

Bruno: True enough. 

Kirk: On the other hand actually, I believe in giving away key components of the code, because there are certain things that I don’t mind the fact that I’ve spent X number of years figuring out how to use image buffers and that’s something which, something other people I know of are struggling with. 

Robb: Can I talk to you later? [laughter] 

Kirk: So, I’m quite happy to give it away, in fact that is what I have been doing with some composers and other people.  I personally get so frustrated seeing the same performance over and over again, and seeing everybody running up against the same problem.  And I say, look, this isn’t so difficult, but it’s just some very obscure knowledge.  And I’ve actually given people blocks of code and said, “look, put your code here”… and that’s all it is.

Mark: But you know, I think there’s a lot of flexibility in that, especially when we’re talking about a group of people like ourselves, or something that could be bigger than this group of people.  For instance, if you needed – like I was saying yesterday – I’ve got this whole set of midi libraries that deal with OMS and Windows and everything. You just drop it in and you’ve got midi in your programme.  Now if you called me and said, I needed that, then I would be happy to say, I’m going to license this to you for no money.  I am going to give you a license.  But the idea being that you keep control of the source code, that you don’t give it to anyone else, that it has a kind of protection, so that someone who wants to pay for it and who can pay for it will.  Because it’s not just out there in the net available, but I would be happy to share almost anything that I’ve written on that kind of basis, with a group of people like this, that are working towards that kind of stuff.  It’s just a matter of the respect of what’s there that’s valuable.  But I think if you can establish that, I would be really willing to do that and I think that would be something that would be a good thing to find a way to do.  In addition to the fact that I think, if something is useful like … if something is generally useful in sort of a… if we can have a kind of colloquium of whatever, that you guys should all have copies of my program as soon as it does something and when it’s really working and if it’s useful to you. That’s something that we should share amongst ourselves because having the kind of expert feedback that you get from sharing it from people that know stuff is invaluable actually. 

Robb: I would agree with that.  And I would also be interested in sharing my software with expert users as well. 

Scott: But that is part of the open source movement.  And the open source …

Robb: Well there’s a difference between open source and data testing or sharing that kind of thing.  I think I would also echo in your sentiment, Kirk, about sharing pieces of code, where you solve a particular problem, that took you a month to figure it out because the OS was changing, or whatever and then sharing that and helping somebody else move forward with what they’re doing.  It’s definitely valuable. 

Mark: Right. 

Kirk: One thing that Scott and I have been talking about is that, the code that I write tends to be written for a particular performance and a particular installation, something where I want something to happen, so I write codes specifically for that, which means that I tend to write it as quickly as possible, and don’t spend time putting a nice interface on it, I don’t clean it up.  It’s usually a nightmare to go back a year later and read through it.  But then, I wanted to make some of of this software shareware.  And I started to port everything over and realised that I was investing months and months of time, hundreds of dollars of my own money for various reasons, just to give something away which I’d already used and wasn’t interested in working with anymore. So, I thought this is absurd, and I actually started to set up a foundation to try to raise money just to take code which people had written for other performances, basically to license it off the programmers, and make it available.  So that the foundation would license the people so they would get paid for the work that they’ve done, but then the foundation would turn around and release it as open source.  And I got almost all the way through this setting up the foundation and realised, I don’t want to run a foundation.  [laughter] 

Scott: But that’s one of the things that occurs to me, that if we’re talking about setting up the conditions to be able work on these issues it strikes me that it’s probably useful to have people who are able to organise efficiently and intelligently these filters between yourselves and funding bodies. Also the notion that, what I consider the kind of Holy Grail, that those bits of software can also be commercially useful, and that this might generate revenue streams.  This is something that everybody is chatting about, but I feel like I never actually talk to programmers about your impressions, about that possibility or does that seem …

Rob: That is something that the Institute for Studies in the Arts (Arizona State University) was doing in the last year that I was there. They were looking at all the intellectual property that was in the Institute and how that might feedback into the institution, and I was a little bit nervous about it because I felt like I was the main person with intellectual property, and I felt sort of taken advantage of.  But in the same way, I also saw it as an opportunity because one of the major problems with writing a piece of software, and I’ve been working on something that’s been tried to be less specific and more general purpose, this Eye’s thing, and it’s been taking me forever to get it together because I don’t have any help to do it.  So there’s that major effort to get the software finished, but then there’s even more effort to market the thing and to get it known and to get it sold.  And that’s almost three quarters of the problem right there. 

Kirk: And supported.

Mark: That’s the worse part I think.

Rob: Yes, the support for the software is key, the education in its use, the writing of the manuals, all that stuff that has to go into that. I mean that’s most of the problem in terms of getting it commercially out into the public domain and that’s why open source ends up being such a popular idea. It’s a lot easier to get open source out there than it is to actually sell something.

Mark: It depends on the scale though. This little X-midi thing that I wrote for director that has midi in.  I was kind of like you because I tell you, with Interactor, which I was selling for a long time and I must have made, you know, all told, it must have sold 200 to 400 copies, something like that.  $10,000 or $15,000 over several years, but the thing was, the amount of time, when you start getting phone calls and emails, I mean you can’t pay yourself enough to deal with that, if you have a programme that’s complicated.  On the other hand, the little X-midi thing I wrote is so simple, it does one thing, and the documentation is five pages long.  I’ve never given anyone my telephone number [laughter] they can only contact me by email.  My telephone number is not available.  And, by putting that little thing on the web for 25 bucks a pop, I have from $100 to $200 dollars, something in that range, coming in every month.  Which isn’t a lot of money, but what strikes me about it, is if you can find enough of these little modules, little things to make that you could build up a kind of library and that actually it would make you money.  And the thing that we were talking about too, was the use of this thing Kagi (http://www.kagi.com/), which is great. You probably all know about it. You put your software on your site, but they take care of all the credit card handling.  So you click their link that you have on your site which takes you over to their page and they handle the $25 charge.  I get $22.50 every time it’s sold, there’s a certain percentage ratio and it’s completely painless.  And I get an email when somebody buys it and I sell them the full version.  Because I don’t do a serial number thing, I actually just keep a demo on the web and send them the real thing when they pay for it.  So you know, that’s the kind of thing.  I think keeping it simple is part of the key.  But the other thing that that brings up is again, this foundation idea, I wouldn’t want to run it either, but maybe there is someone who would want to run it because it seems like a world-wide need.  This is a major group of people that have a lot of knowledge and talent and interesting useful stuff and maybe there is a way to support that, where the support part of it is taken care of by the foundation and you only get 50% of what they sell or something, but, I don’t know.  There may be something there, I don’t know.  But that idea is actually quite a good one I think. Just not one that any of us would really want to take care of.

Scott: Yes, I suppose because defining the scale of things from something like this more generalised project, all the way down to these little bits and then everything in between.  Each software project is so different, they’re distinct in terms of what they could do and all of the mechanisms for making them available would become increasingly complex.  The Keystroke project is a good example of what happens when a group of people decide to take an artist’s creative tool, piece of software to market.

Richard: And Lifeforms as well, it started that way. I think the business of trying to find this Holy Grail, the commercially successful piece of software, is extremely illusive.  I think it’s also very undermining, for example, I think when you look in the UK at the way NESTA, a new endowment, has large amounts of money that are supposed to support science, technology and the arts, and it’s entire focus is essentially on commercial outcomes. So far, they have been very unsuccessful funding the arts on the whole because they’re not getting the applications.  Because what we’re thinking about when … I mean I’m not really a programmer, but I do script, and what you’re thinking about are really specific applications that you are writing for the moment.  And okay, maybe it’s something that may have wider applicability, but nine times out of ten, it’s not why you’re interested, it’s not where your focus is.  And I think if it were to become that would be yet more undermining of actually finding the time to keep working.  It’s the same question, if you like, as the funding one.  We’re all simply trying to make space in our lives to do this work.  So I think the idea of commercialising it is problematic. 

Bruno: It’s not really what people are about is it, because they’ve got this thing and they can either pull these guys… because I don’t think of myself as a real programmer either.  

Scott: What’s the distinction? Do you think of yourself as someone who writes script?

Bruno: I don’t know, I really just do Lingo, so it doesn’t really count.  It’s like kids isn’t it?

Mark: I think that maybe the difference is, some of us are creating final application programmes that run on computers, whereas you guys are working within an existing application to create art works.  

Bruno: Well, what I was going to say was, because you guys can probably go and get jobs just writing software, and just go, “Right, now I’m just going to be a software bod, and that’s what I’m going to do.”  But actually what they’re really doing, occasionally, they need to make something for their performance or whatever and so they come up with some wiggit, that just happens to be general enough so that it could actually have uses for other people, instead of being highly specific, so that they can then flog it.  If they just wanted to go and work, they could go and work for a big software company and get paid a fortune straight away if they wanted to do it. What you’re saying about a little bunch of wiggits, like if you had ten X objects or whatever, so maybe it sort of makes you think that what you should do is, if there is one place, like you’re talking about your foundation, and there’s like a one stop shop for your performance wiggit dot-com [laughter] and you guys put all your …

Richard: There’s a site called wiggit.com, and he’s looking for precisely to market these very things. Somebody is already doing it. 

Kirk: Then you need the base programme that all the wiggit’s plug into.

Mark: Well this is one of the things we should talk about though. Because this is an idea that Scott knows about because I told him about it, and he also had a conversation with Woody Vasulka. Woody has this whole thing about, he and some of his cohorts in Santa Fee have this idea about a kind of universal language for media programmes which they use could to talk to each other. And he was trying to raise funding to actually try and bring people together who are knowledgeable in this area to work on defining that. I don’t think he’s had much success yet, but the idea is actually right. If for instance, we could get something going now, start a small mailing group where we, and whoever else would be appropriate or involved, keeping it rather small maybe, where we could define some kind of a standard, or at least the beginnings of one where these wiggits could be interoperable and that maybe what you have is one background task that runs that is TCP/ IP savvy so that it can also talk to the outside world, but it’s a little module where his Eyes thing, if you boot that, and you boot my programme, I can just say, is Eyes there? Or something that gives me information about the performance on the stage maybe as a general request.  And if there is a piece of software running that happens to be his, they’re automatically linked together and now they can talk to each other, but I don’t have to know anything about his code and he doesn’t have to know anything about mine. It’s a kind of a midi on steroids kind of thing, that defines a lot more, more than midi defines, because there’s a lot of information that midi would never cover.  But if there is a way to do that, then we could actually start making these wiggits, and maybe we make the central background engine, and we do make that an open source project or make it certainly free, and then the wiggits that use it, communicate via that programme and that runs on Windows and it runs on Mac etc.

Rob: This is something that I’ve been looking at with the Intelligence Stage, where it’s very critical. You really do need to have this standardisation that happens. Not only with the software, but with the hardware which I am sure you are aware of as well.  You plug in a dimmer pack and you can see that this dimmer pack is on the net. Or, a sound board, you have an interface, a little box that goes to your soundboard, and you plug your soundboard into this little mechanism.

Kirk: One of the driving ideas behind Keystroke, in fact I have been talking to Sher (Sher Doruff), Sher asked me to develop different drivers for different types of sensors and it sounds like a wonderful idea, but it’s just that sure, you can write the drivers, but then what interface are you going to use? There’s no standardisation on serial or midi interfaces.

Mark: But that’s just it, I think that part of the problem too is that that is a monolithic programme and as soon as you buy into a monolithic programme, not only is, no matter what anyone says, the aesthetic of the author of the computer programme or the creator, the aesthetic of the programme is automatically imposed upon you, that’s part of it.  But also you’re stuck in this one thing, whereas the idea, something where many things could work together and you could sort of pick and chose the bits that you need, seems a lot more flexible, especially if you can have a Mac and a PC running when you have to use the PC for stuff that’s best to do with the PC and the Mac for other stuff, you know, things like that. 

Rob: There are solutions for some of those problems you bring up, for instance, XML is a great representational language for doing some of this stuff.  And the actual links between things actually end up being drivers, sort of driver modules themselves. So you can abstract it to a level, but I think there is a danger in going to a monolithic centralised idea. I think it needs to be more of a distributed kind of system as well, where the individual modules that come to the system are able to speak this particular kind of protocol.  And so that somebody else who is not associated with Keystroke in any way, can write some drivers and things like that and have their own control system and incorporate it with Keystroke or with Eyes or with Interactor.

Mark: Right. 

Rob: So I think that that’s a valuable idea. 

Kirk: Is there a replacement for midi in the works?

Bruno: Maxi [laughter].

Mark: Well, there was a thing called… what was the name for it? It was being written by the guy who developed the ‘electronic violin’ and also the ‘ideal pitch writer’. This fellow, I forget his name, and the thing had a name and I can’t remember, but it never really happened.  And I don’t think there is any, that I know of, any realistic plans to supplement midi.  But I don’t think midi is even a good basis …

Rob: I don’t think it’s a good basis.

Mark: … because these parameters not only need to give you the data about what you want, but they actually have to identify themselves as a kind of data. Because really what you want to say is, you know, my programme might want information about performers on the stage, so you want to be able to go the background model and say, “Is there anyone who can give me information about the position of the performers on the stage?”, and if Rob’s Eyes programme is running, it can give me that, and then bang you’re connected and that’s all you need to do. So you need the central software as a clearing house to make those communication links happen without need to know too much about what’s going on in the other programme. 

Rob: Well, I don’t know that you necessarily need a central clearing house.  I think that you… well maybe you do, but I think if you are passing around semantic tags as part of the information itself, the information contains the necessary pieces for once piece of software to talk to another software, but the key to that is being able to agree on what that semantic information is.  And that’s where the standard comes in. 

Kirk: It’s a lot like Fireware, USB, the hardware drivers, where you just plug it in and it identifies itself and tells you how to speak to it. So, if each one of your modules, when they’re connected into the server or into the main network, can say, I’m introducing myself as a new module, these are my public interfaces.

Guy: Do you guys know about Java beans?

ALL: Yeah.

Guy: Because what you’re describing seems to be like Java beans, but with hardware drivers. 

Rob: Similar to a bean, yeh. The company that I worked at was a networking company. They did a lot of XML work where they were using XML packets to configure routers and switchers, and that information was actually transformed into procedural information through XSL and other kinds of manipulations and that’s a really interesting concept in terms of how the ‘knowledge’ really has the information in order to manipulate the network and facilitate communication.

Mark: Well that’s kind of like Genie right, isn’t it? That’s like the Genie technology that Sun is trying to promote. Where the actual programme travels with the data itself.

Kirk: Perfect for hackers.

Mark: I wanted to step back for one second, only because I think it’s really pertinent to what you’re talking about, and because this is the brainstorming thing I want to get this out. The company that I’m working for is doing something really interesting as a model for the way that they run their company that is worth mentioning.  This guy who runs this company, his name is Kevin Cunningham and he has a theatre company called Three Legged Dog in New York that has done – I would say really multimedia – and they’ve worked a lot with multi-channel video tape as part of their theatrical presentations.  Do you know him?

Someone: No. 

Mark: Oh, you were smiling and I thought you knew him. In any case, they were very frustrated because it seemed like you should be able to do this with a computer, but they couldn’t really find the right tool to do it and at a price that they could afford.  And he also at the same time was realising that they worked with – not with me at the time – but people like me.  You know, programmers artists who know a lot, but their main driver is to make some kind of an artwork, the secondary driver is to make a living.  And so they’re not thinking about capitalising on all this knowledge that they have.  So what he did – and I don’t know if it’s really going to work, but it’s an interesting model – he created a new non profit corporation that is a clearing house for the intellectual property of many different people, including – I guess I am going to be part of this, with some of the things that I have, but certainly other people that they hired before me who were like that. This company is going to be a kind of licensing agent for intellectual property, but it’s actually a non profit because it has an arts basis and it has a mission statement that relates to providing money for artists etc.  So there is that.  So then, and related to that, they started a for profit company that is getting venture capital investments now, and doing fairly successfully at that. They’re designing a product around this intellectual property that now exists inside of a non profit. Venture capital then goes into that, paying the artist for the intellectual property that they retain rights to and have licensing options and things like that. They have this sort of worked out, you know you are giving up some rights in the sense that you know you can’t make products that compete directly with the company. For the for profit company, you have to sign away some things about that, non competitive agreements, etc.  So he’s got these two things going, and so they have loads of money coming into the venture capital thing, it’s been very successful.  The non profit thing is happening and so it’s all sort of working right now, and it’s an interesting idea, because at its heart the idea is to provide these people with knowledge and code and things like that, with money for what they’re doing, but also to do it in a way that’s actually legal.  Because you know, if you really start licensing this stuff, totally through the non profit for commercial ventures, then at least in the United States, in their version of the non profit corporations, it doesn’t really work out because it’s all earned income.  So anyway, I just wanted to put that on the table because I just think it’s an interesting process.  I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but it’s something that someone is trying. 

Scott: That’s very interesting, what is this man’s name?

Mark: Kevin Cunningham. I’m sure he would be happy to talk with you about it, if you wanted to send an email or whatever.

Scott: Yes, I think you mentioned this to me before. 

Mark: Okay.  

Scott: So this universal media issue, the thing that Woody’s working on. It’s also something we saw at Creative Kernels with Arts Electronica, they are working on programming something similar. Remember Kirk, that guy who gave a very dry presentation, but they are basically trying to get every device in the space to speak to each other.

Kirk: Yes, I know what you’re talking about. They’re just writing standardised drivers for each one of their devices. So, I’ll give you a good example. If they have a new scanner, or if they just got a new data glove or something, to have some way of plugging it straight into your system. 

Scott: Right, it’s called Matrix presented by Volker Christiansen. This is similar right?

Mark: It’s similar, but to me it’s still very specific. I would like to see something that’s more abstract in terms of specifying what data you want and how the things are connected together because I find that that’s …

Rob: There are other issues of timing and thresholding and scaling that occur in a multi-media performance that really a lot of times aren’t addressed by drivers.

Mark: Go further with that will you?

Rob: For instance, I have an image where I have five sensors and this one’s looking over here and that one’s this size and that one’s the small size and I want them all to produce the same numbers to manipulate a location in the video. Well, this number here is between zero and a thousand, and this number is between a hundred and 65,000. I need zero to 128. And this one sensor, when I enter it, it starts sending numbers and this other one, well, when something goes in there it’s sending numbers and when I leave it’s sending numbers. You have all this timing information; you have all this kind of thing.  Then in controlling that video, maybe I have several video sources and maybe I have a synchronisation issue as well, that comes into it. That has to all be incorporated into the protocol of co-ordinating media devices.

Mark: Especially when you’re going to external devices and it’s no longer internal and you don’t know what the delays are, especially if you’re going over the internet…

Rob: Right, that’s sort of what that SimTee (?) time code is all about, co-ordination. But I think this protocol, along with being able to control the device and used to co-ordinate them and then take sensing information and transform it into control information. As sort of a general purpose mechanism for being able to describe that kind of transformation. 

Mark: Yes okay. 

Rob: That’s the part you don’t normally think about.

Mark: That’s a big issue. I don’t know, I mean we could sit here and actually get into this, I think that maybe the best thing to say is that…

Rob: Well, that’s sort of the grand pie, we should talk about offline.  

Mark: Yeah, but I think we should get something going to start the discussion because it would be quite an interesting project and really, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal to pull off. If we all could make an agreement about it, it’s something we could do at least a prototype of pretty easily. 

Scott: It might be something to pick up on. I met with Joan Shikegawa from the Rockfeller Institute, who’s in charge of the new media ideas kind of area. We met to discuss another project that didn’t seem to interest her so much. But then, at the very end of our chat, I said, I’m also talking to people who are writing code for performing arts and talking about sharing ideas and she said, oh that sounds interesting. I told her we had been discussing some sort of think tank, looking to bring people together. And then I met Woody Vasulka in Rotterdam, to whom I’d sent these same ideas and Joan has supported them before. She gave them quite a lot of money because Steina and Woody are quite well known and early electronic video and media artists.

Mark: They and their friends started the space, the Kitchen in New York, like 30 years ago. It literally was a kitchen on Mercer Street and a hotel. 

Scott: Maybe a direction to take this particular issue would be… if it is an issue we could separate out? I mean that’s what Woody has done, you know, with his plan for a meeting, is to really take up this issue of media talking to media and devices talking to devices. 

Bruno: Can I just say something? You’ve got this media talking to media thing, the universal language of everything.  What I was going to say is, while you are making that, can you make one kind of wire, so you just have one wire, one cable. The universal cable?

Mark: That’s part of the discussion. The physical layer and the protocol layer, are two separate discussions, but discussions that need to be had, because it is a big issue. What is the real physical layer? I mean, probably the easiest, cheapest, most universal thing is Ethernet or maybe USB, but USB isn’t very fast.

Rob: I think it’s Ethernet.

Bruno: I was just thinking about, so we could just plug in our camera to our computer, plug in our thing and so basically what you do is you just have a load of adapters that you plug into whatever thing, projector, etc.

Rob: There is a company in California that is making Ethernet adapters to a lot of different kind of protocols. And I forget the name.

Mark: That’s interesting. 

Kirk: Firewire is another cable standard. 

Mark: But the thing about Firewire that I recently found out because of my day job, because it became an issue when they wanted to send multiple streams of digital video out on one fire wire cable, that it’s actually never been designed to do more than one digital stream at a time, so it’s problematic for that. So I don’t know if you can send more than one with even 100 base T. But I don’t know, I sort of think, my initial instinct is the Ethernet is the most universal thing you can come up with because every computer is going to be able to have it, and it’s pretty fast and it’s easier to write TCP/ IP if you want to do that or UDP or whatever to talk over it.  And that seems like a logical way to go, but, I mean, if you’re running multiple wiggits on the same computer it shouldn’t go anywhere, it should just travel inside this little internal background application that sends the data around. This is just a map of…

Rob: It’s an internal bus. 

Mark: Yeah, it’s an internal bus.  Well, I would like to move on to some of the other agenda items. I think we can all agree that we would like to start this research into a universal media protocol.

Scott: What I could do really quickly is go back to Joan and Woody and suggest it. Joan was interested in the idea and Woody has been working on her a bit about this, but she doesn’t know enough about the field. 

Mark: Is she in New York?

Scott: She’s in New York yes. Because I think on this issue, of Woody’s… because what he’s proposing, is at the core of this and the discussion could ripple out from there. 
	 
Mark: I am offering myself to help get the idea across.  If you get her interested, I’ll go and have a meeting with her to explain what it’s about.

Scott: Okay. 

Mark: Because I think that probably, if somebody doesn’t know a lot about the technology, you’re going to need someone who can give that information in a way that they can understand and get them excited about it.  You need to have that.  I’m just saying if she’s there, that I could so something like that.  You may be able to just do it over email or whatever. 

Scott: Okay good. What else do you see on here (referring to the outline above)?

Mark: Well there’s the “small scale for small project”, wider scale projects… all this stuff under work load.  I mean the one thing I was going to talk about was the university students idea, because I think automatically, it’s not going to matter what university you go to, if they have their people working on a piece of software, they’re going to want rights to everything. I think it’s a sort of impossible situation. I don’t know if I’m wrong.  Am I wrong?

Rob: No. You are right.

Richard: You are increasingly right.

Mark: I mean IP is just so hot. People want to own that IP because they think there is a possibility to make money and rightly so, because sometimes it happens.

Richard: Particularly in North America. It’s much more of a case there than it is in Europe. We are getting there.

Mark: Yes.  One thing that I’ve been wanting to try is getting an intern. Has anyone had any success at this sort of thing? Because there are all these programmes in New York to get you interns.  If I had a young programmer that I could have as my intern give him coding tasks, I don’t know maybe they wouldn’t expect to own your property if they were doing it in that way.

Rob: My experience was poor with that. Just because I couldn’t really find anybody where I was to do the work I wanted to do in a reasonable way, in Tempe anyway. And that’s because the University of Arizona changed so much in its focus, from what it was doing in pure science. Years and years ago it was artificial intelligence, computer processing, and all that stuff.  And now it’s just crunching out the programmer.   They’re really not creative enough or self directed enough to push a boundary here or there. A lot of times you end up directing and spending a lot of times helping them to take the steps necessary to go forth, especially if it’s a young person.  And it ends up taking so much of your time that you might as well have done it yourself. 

Bruno: The only time that I’ve done stuff with students, it has always been like that. You want them to just do some scanning, and you can do it so much quicker yourself, so you just say, “go and make some tea, I’ll just do it”. It has always been a pain in the ass.

Rob: In the same respect, if you can get past that, if you find somebody who has some sort of self-learning, self directed ability, they’re like gold. Hang onto that person and pay them what they want.

Mark: Well you see, that’s what I was for Mort Subotnick. It was exactly that. And I got a lot of benefit out of that relationship too. And he did as well.

Rob: And that’s the kind of relationship you want. You want to try and find those kinds of people. They’re so difficult to find that when it does happen, you want to have the ability to immediately grab them and often times, you don’t have that ability, because it takes such a God damn long time to get any kind of funding to get that person, so they have to work for you for free for a year before you are able to even think about compensating them for what they’ve done. 

Bruno: Yes, because once you find somebody who’s good enough to actually be a benefit, then you might as well be collaborating with him or her anyway, because you are basically on the same level. 

Mark: Well, it’s a very special person you’re looking for because the fact of the matter is, if they’re good enough to do that, they’re good enough to go into the industry and make a load of money. So either they love what you’re doing, because there are people like us who love making what we make and they will want to do it for free anyway. But, you know, we are a rare breed. Actually, it occurs to me as we’re talking about this, because somebody said they’re not creative enough to do what you need them to do or whatever, and it occurs to me – I don’t know what this means – but anyway, it occurs to me that there’s kind of a room for a class or a workshop or something, where you teach programmers creative thinking.  Because in fact that stuff is never being taught. They never have an art class, and they don’t know how to do creative thinking.  Because I maintain that one of the reasons why I’m a really good programmer is because I went to CalArts, and I got a lot of input about creative thinking that programmers don’t typically get. It’s normally, you know, just about finding the link of a C-string, if you know what I mean…

Kirk: Well, it’s that it is actually discouraged.

Mark: It is? Yeah right. 

Kirk: I started as an electrical engineer, and I used to get into trouble all the time because I would find alternate solutions.

Mark: Instead of just the one solution…

Kirk: The Teaching Assistants would mark me wrong in tests and I would have to go up and say look, this is what you said it should do, but this one actually runs three times as fast because …

Mark: Right, right.

Scott: I was at ISEA (International Society for Electronic Arts, Paris 2000). I went to see presentations by MIT’s Aesthetic Computing Group working with something they call Computational Form. They are basically doing art and design work, but it’s design that is generated by algorithms. We were looking at the site yesterday. The guy who presented was fantastic. I mean some of the work is really stimulating, and they are just putting together the most outrageous learning and generative algorithms and coming up with quite nice stuff. I looked at their website and looked at their curriculum and it’s absolutely art-based, which MIT tends to do anyway. But I’ve never stumbled across an MIT group that looked quite as sparky in a sense.

Kirk: That’s John Maeda’s group which he runs with an iron fist. It’s very very much John’s aesthetic.

Richard: The first place I taught, my first kind of real teaching job was at Rensselaer Polytechnic (RPI) which actually considers itself second to MIT. So it’s an engineering institution, and there they were setting up this masters degree in fine arts and digital media. Part of the mission in fact was to take the undergraduate students who were either engineering or computer science students and bring them into this milieu, trying to give them opportunities to think creatively. And, although in the majority of cases, it was absolutely appalling to have to do that, there was the occasional convert, we sold them as converts in a way, who came in and actually really developed professionally and became people who were involved in the art world thereafter.  So it was an interesting thing to see, but it was tough. But it certainly did pay off, occasionally. 

Robb: I guess the conversation is really about how to create that in the community then or…?

Scott: Something about conditions again. How could we create the conditions for this sort of exchange between computer science and the arts in the community in the form of workshops, etc..

Kirk: I think there are only a handful of people in the world who could actually teach such a workshop.  Because first of all, it has to be somebody who’s very comfortable with chaos, and the very idea that there are multiple solutions for any one problem, and you don’t find that every often in engineering, you almost never find it in engineering and very seldom in computer science. And to get somebody to bring in students and say “okay, I see you’ve been trained to use this algorithm, why do you have to use that algorithm, why not try this and why not try that. Maybe this one would end up being better, but you’re not even accepting it as a possibility. You get people just sticking with what they know.

Mark: I’m not quite sure how I what I just said might fit in, but part of what occurs to me too is that maybe if there is some kind of a sense of a group (of creative programmers), I just wonder if there must be people who we’re not getting in touch with. People who could do this work who would be interested, but we don’t know who they are and they don’t know who we are. It’s like, I’d never done it, but every month the 20600, you know the hackers, the 20600 crowd meets at the big telephone booth bank at the World Trade Centre in New York City. And I’ve always wanted to go down and see if I could identify some of those people because I figure, you know, these are young people who love programming, who actually have the knowledge and who may have a sense of this ‘chaos’ if only because of their hacker background. But I’m just wondering if there was someway that we could position ourselves and make it known that we existed, and then start gathering together that information or, I don’t know …

Kirk: One of my closest friends, organiser of HIP 2001, this massive hacking festival, and I don’t think there would be any problem whatsoever with putting together a couple of performances, having various people come out and actually do a performance in the middle of a festival, which would be a great way of meeting people. 

Mark: That would be … where is it?

Kirk: It will be held in a massive field in the Netherlands.  

Scott: It is their equivalent of the Burning Man.

Mark: Oh, it is?

Kirk: It is basically Hacktic, which was a big hacker group, created this thing called “xs4all”, to give people, primarily in Amsterdam, access to the Internet.  Xs4all turned into the most successful ISP in the Netherlands, and then it was sold off to KPN, which is a German/ Dutch telecom company. But what it means is that people who are setting up these festivals now have the full support of the company.  So they drag generators, switches, everything out to these fields and set it up, and they have half of the networking/ telecommunications infrastructure for Amsterdam is out in the field.  

Mark: Wow.

Scott: It seems interesting to consider the idea that the sensibility and the kind of creativity here could be offered in a pedagogical context to help teacher training or facilitate creative programming.

Mark: Well, this is what I’m wondering. Maybe that at RPI, it was tough to drag those people in there because some of them just weren’t interested, but however, imagine for a moment that all of us gathered together as teachers…

Richard: Actually, they were incredibly interested.

Mark: Oh, they were?

Richard: Yes. 

Mark: But there were only a few converts?

Richard: Yes, there were only a few that were interested and bright enough to really get something out of it, but there was loads of interest. 

Mark: Because what I was going to say is, that you know, I can imagine that this would be very successful, but it would also be a form for actually finding the people that we’re looking for. If we had a three week long workshop where it’s something like “creative thinking for programmers”, taught by people like us, solving artistic problems, but actually programmers come in to do this to increase their awareness of creative thinking and problem solving. I don’t know, maybe you have them do theatre exercises in the morning to get them moving out of their world and that kind of thing. It is maybe a very separate issue from what you’re talking about I think, but maybe if only to try and identify some of these people because then they come to use the workshop, they know who you are and you can continue a relationship with them, that kind of thing.

Bruno: Well, I’m on this panel for the London Arts Board, which is like the Arts Council of England just for London. And they are having this media thing about how a lot of artists’ experience was that there weren’t enough programmers around, and they were trying to get their hands on them and they’re trying to think up ways; what they could fund basically and how to get programmers and artists together, all the artists saying that there aren’t enough programmers to go round… and they’re having real problems.

Kirk: Because they view them as slave labour.

Bruno: Well, that’s part of the problem because they view them as just underlings rather than equal collaborators because some of the artists are a bit snobby, and they think it’s just a technical thing, do you know what I mean?

Robb: That’s a huge problem.

Mark: That is a huge problem.

Guy: In that case, if we’re talking about kind of teaching programmers creative skills, it seems to me that it’s also an opportunity to teach kind of creative people programming skills. Because I mean, it’s much easier, from having kind of been involved in teaching both in very a small way, I think it’s a lot easier to teach programming technical skills than it is to teach creative skills. I know people tend to be very protective of programming expertise, but I’m completely convinced that you can teach almost anybody to do stuff which will meet their immediate needs. 

Kirk: What I see all the time is that people think, for some reason they believe that using a computer is going to make everything so much easier, so much faster.  And they’re going to…

Guy: Which is why they need to be educated, that is part of the education you would be providing.

Kirk: They don’t realise what a commitment it is. I mean, they think nothing of the fact that it took them twenty years to learn to dance, ten years to draw.  Suddenly they think that they are going to be able to learn to programme in a week.

Bruno: I think if you wanted to have something, some sort of educational workshop that lasts three weeks which was possibly for programmers, run by programmers but with an artistic inclination, and then maybe you would have a few artists that you would invite along. See what tends to happen is you have an artist’s workshop for artists, run by artists and you invite a couple of programmers along, do you know what I mean. Then you can get money for it from the London Arts Board.

Mark: Here’s an interesting model for that. Let’s say you have a dozen programmers, I don’t know, whatever the number is, and for those 12 programmers, you have three artists and each of those programmers is going to implement the idea… so four programmers per one artist and each of those programmers is going to implement the needs of that artist, but hopefully in a completely different way. In other words, the idea is to try and come up with alternative solutions to the problem. So that in other words, by the end, what you’re showing are the ways of going about and the results of this interpretation of the artists’ needs, you know what I mean.

Kirk/ Richard: Isn’t that playing into the same perceptions of the programmer always in service to the artist?

Scott: Although I would argue for both models. I mean there is something to be learned by working in a hierarchical system, as well as in a collaborative system.

Bruno: What about doing it like this? You start off and the programmers are being taught to be creative and half way through you swap and then, do you know what I mean?  And then the programmers are teaching the artists, so you kind of do it 50/50 and you have an equal number of each. 

Mark: Well that would be good in a sense that the artist, if they are feeling snobby, when they had to actually try and do something would feel some sort of amount of respect from having to actually do it.

Robb: I guess my experience at the Institute of the Arts, the attitude that you come at something, any kind of collaboration whether it’s hierarchical or not. The attitude that you come to that collaboration with is the one you leave with. And very rarely is there growth in this, even if it’s feigned growth. You have to come to an agreement before you enter into the collaboration as to what your role is and once you’ve established that as equals, then things tend to proceed okay. But as soon as you enter as un-equals, it’s very difficult to overcome the inertia to swap that around, even if you’re contributing a lot of things to the collaboration. So that’s very important to establish that before you enter, that these artists are collaborating with these programmers, and there’s no boundary between who’s creating the art and who’s doing the programme. If you start there, I think that’s a much better … 

Scott: It depends on the manifestation. I mean when I was in Aarhus, Denmark for this motion capture project I had some experience with this. I think it depends upon the point at which choices are made. For example, Susan Rethorst, who as a choreographer has a wealth of experience, and she was sitting down next to a twenty-two year old Maya (3-D animation software) whiz. Now he knows a lot of stuff and because they set up a relationship where she was choreographer and he was … obviously it was collaborative.  But we are talking about the same kind of thing I think. We are talking about establishing roles. I mean, I also commissioned him, so there are sets of contracts, social contracts as well, which need to be made very clear.

Mark: But you also have a twenty-two year old working with a very experienced artist, which you know, there is a level of hierarchy there. If you look at it from the artist’s prospective, there’s something really to be gained in knowledge by that programmer, because as skilled as they are in Maya, they may not have the kind of compositional skills that would absolutely apply to making digital movies or whatever they’re making that can be garnered from an experience artist like that.  So, I mean it’s also a mistake to ignore what assets each of these people have, do you know what I mean?

Scott: Yeah. No, I think we’re talking about the same kind of thing. I mean, I think it’s very interesting to think about a workshop actually. It’s quite concrete. 

Bruno: The London Arts Board are really keen to fund something like that at the moment.

Mark: Well, I think you’re right about the collaboration thing. There is a problem with this idea of just bringing the artists in. There is another thing about collaborations… I have always thought that the value of the collaborations is in the arguments, because that’s the only way you really learn. You have a fight with someone and you realise that there’s another point of view and it gets you thinking, but that’s what collaborations are for.

Robb: And then there’s the ownership issue that comes of collaboration too, that is always a problem.

Mark: I know. But, so what if we had a workshop where again, people like us, there are teachers, programmers come in… but the thing is, by then we’ve established what this protocol is and what these people are doing is making widgets that are then going to be put out into the world, that they are going to benefit financially from. But actually the project is to create stuff that’s going to be used by artists. That’s the way you could do this workshop without actually having artists involved, but the actual product of what’s being made is going to support the work of artists who make work with digital media. Just another tack on it… 

Scott: What Guy was saying, and you were saying Kirk, that being able to train an artist, or I could say someone like myself, just a little bit of programming. Just to give me an insight into certain ways of structuring thinking which I think would be useful even though in fact the practice, to actually be able to do it (seems maybe over ambitious). But I think it would give everyone good communication skills, don’t you?

Kirk: I make it a point that I will not work with somebody who has not done any programming, because they have no idea how much time is involved; they have no idea what they’re asking. They think I actually like the process, and they don’t realise that it’s about as much fun as balancing books.

Bruno: Yeah, in this meeting that we had with London Arts, I said that there’s no point, in a way you have to preach a little bit to the converted, to know where to increase their skills, rather than just let any idiot that wants to have a go with a computer. What’s the point of that? If they really wanted to do it, they would go and buy themselves a computer, because it’s not that much money, they’d get all the software and they’d just sit in their bedroom and they could just do it themselves. Because there was this idea some people had about what we should do, that everybody should have a go with a computer. Anybody who walks past on the street should be able to come in and have a go at making something. I have been in situations having to teach where you have people who have no fucking idea at all, how to even hold the mouse. And it’s like impossible, and you think they’re just doing it for a whim.

Mark: But on the other side of that, you know in our workshop (Troika Ranch, I-Live), we encounter people for whom quite literally a word processor is the only thing they’ve ever touched, but they really have the desire. And in the end, that’s okay. Like in Santa Fe this summer, we had this woman from New Jersey who is close to my age, and she’s a choreographer, and she really wanted to make this piece that had video in it that she could have some kind of interaction with. And she didn’t know anything when she came, but by the end of the two weeks, she was doing really good stuff, she really applied herself. So I think that it’s a matter of desire, but sometimes it is a tough leap to make accessible that initial bit of knowledge, because it’s a way of thinking that you have to impart to them. Even though they can have all the equipment, they actually have it, she had a computer, because she had it from her school to do word processing and all that sort of thing, but a leap to the next level. It’s almost a fear thing, you know. She expressed that to me directly.

Guy: It’s a level of mystique as well. I think there is a very common conception amongst “lay people”, it’s interesting that this group is like the “programmers’” prospective. I think we would be having a very different discussion if there were some artists here as well, or some people who came from a purely artistic background. You know what I mean; people who came with no technical skills. I think that programming is made out, or at least extracting some kind of custom operation from computers is made out to be really, really difficult, and you kind of assume that you won’t be able to do it. Where actually it is a complete piece of piss, and almost anybody can do it, really, really, really quickly. I mean, I think obviously to sit down and achieve any of these kind of systems that you guys are writing is something that takes ten and twenty years of experience and time. But pretty much anybody can get going in a simpler environment, be it Director, be it whatever. I mean you can teach somebody in a fortnight Director skills that start them on the road to all kinds of things that they never believed they could do. This is what I do, I mean I teach Director to people. And people come on saying; “I won’t be able to do that, it’s programming, it’s too difficult, I’m an artist, I don’t think like that”. And it’s just not. Anybody can acquire any of these skills.

Robb: I wouldn’t consider that programming, but you don’t have to do programming to do a lot with computers, which I think is the point you’re making.  And I agree with that totally. 

Guy: What I’m really talking about is getting some sort of custom functionality. Tailoring it to your own ends. And you can script a lot.

Kirk: When I used to teach, we used to have these big debates all the time about whether or not scripting was really programming. But what I would always try to emphasize is the need to learn fundamental things; which you can learn either way. First of all to learn how to take a large project and break it down, trying to figure out how to organise it, trying to understand what is possible, because even although some people are not going to be programming for the rest of their lives, even though they may not be going to try and take on large projects, if they at least learn that mindset, then they can communicate with somebody, whereas if they’ve never gone through that process, then there’s no way that they can talk to a programmer. 

Robb: That’s true…

Mark: And also that’s why I like this story, we had just had another woman in our workshop this last summer who has just started at the School for Visual Arts, and she called me up on the phone in September, and she said; “well shall I take some of these programming classes”. The whole issue is partly one of just respect and understanding. I mean as I am around here, and I hear so many of you guys that can speak French and it just really bums me out, because I don’t speak any foreign language very well, and I’m very envious of that. And I realise that I’ve got a lot of respect for people who speak a foreign language, but, in fact, that’s what all programmers do, they have learnt to fluently speak a foreign language, and it’s very similar. So it’s that level of respect, it takes the same amount of time and the same amount of commitment to fluently speak another language as it does to learn how to programme. I was just realising that, because it’s a similar issue with the French. 

Scott: I quite like the workshop idea of just inverting; it’s the background/ foreground thing isn’t it? Just set the programming in the foreground, those ways of thinking. Well, for me, we have covered a lot here really, just in terms of hitting on the things on the list. There is one thing that I wanted to ask and Mark do you see anything else on this list or… 

Mark: I think we have covered almost all of it. 

Scott: Kind of loosely as was intended. I don’t want to belabour things too much now, but there are a couple of things that occurred to me in this relationship between scripting and programming. For example, Guy is working on the “Bird Engine” project, which has a fair amount of animation scripting going into it. We were discussing different kinds of algorithms and rule-based stuff. This was a very different kind of conversation about different kinds of ideas for me, than for example talking about doing the programming to get devices to talk one to the other. So, I wonder if you can say something more about the difference between these two areas?

Guy: I think that there isn’t one. It’s just problem solving. 

Robb: I think that one issue is that programming is really computer science. You talk about programming, it’s computer science and within computer science there are many different fields. There is systems programming, there is user interface issues, there’s artificial intelligence, there are all these different fields and scripting has its place in computer science as a programming task. And it is essentially a task of a computer programmer that do scripting every once in a while. I mean scripting is a programming job, if somebody said do that script to me, I would say I’m doing a programming job. I wouldn’t consider that non-programming. And the other thing is that programmers who do one thing, don’t necessarily translate that very well to other areas of computer science, for instance if I’m a system level programmer, I’m not necessarily going to know the first thing about writing a user interface or creating an animation. It’s a very, very broad field, so in that sense, you can’t really say okay, if you’re a programmer, you can do anything, although if you’re a programmer, you’re much more easily able to learn the tools of another branch computer science and take that into your set of knowledge and capabilities. 

Mark: Yes I agree, I also consider scripting programming in the sense that both require analysing a task that you want to solve and implementing instructions in an ordered series that the computer can understand to solve that problem. That’s the exactly the same. The only difference is, and it’s not a quantitative better or worse difference, but when you’re doing the scripting, you’re systems programme, the environment in which you are programming is Director, for example. When I’m programming on the Mac, my systems environment is the Mac operating system and all the calls that are available there. And what that means for me as a programmer is that not as much is done for me automatically, which is a benefit on the scripting side, like you can have access to a lot of tools that are already made for you. But on the other hand for me, I may have a finer degree of access to certain details of the operating system, but this isn’t better or worse, it’s just different.

Scott: That’s clear.

Robb: I think if you really want to take programming to its core, really programming is about information finding. You’re just looking for how to solve a problem and you’re trying to find that solution somehow. And you may know it already, you may have to look it up in a manual somewhere, you may have to go to the net.

Mark: Right. 

Scott: But you did touch on one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is this large area of computer science in relation to our practices in the performing arts, specifically for most of us that is dance. Now when we talk about the emerging technologies in relationship to dance, we are talking about the kinds of programming that you are all doing and the interests that you have. But should we bring other fields of computer science into this group? Artificial life people for example. Could they contribute usefully? Because you’re saying that you don’t know everything, you have a certain area of expertise. How do we expand this group? A little bit of what you were saying, how do we find the right people, but you were talking at that point about finding people who could do work. What I am interested in is how do we find other knowledge areas that would be really useful for us to share with?

Guy: This could be just my personal impression, but I think the academy is maybe the wrong place to look, maybe the wrong place to look first. Because I think one of the things that the particular discipline of artificial intelligence, which is the one that I deal with professionally, one thing that they are discovering is that the game development industry is light years, light years ahead of academic AI because the gaming industry’s been solving these problems and has been kind of having to do it in real time. And their solutions are cruder, and maybe they don’t know how they work and maybe they can’t produce fully efficient papers describing exactly the functionality, but they work, which is more than academic AI does.  And I suspect that that’s the case in many fields.

Mark: It would be similar with us right, because we all have to do it, we have shows, it has to work, and we just make it work. You code it in half an hour if you have to, even if it’s gross.

Guy: I’m not sure that you’re actually going to go to the academy and find guys that know more about sensors that we have in this room already.

Mark: Yeah, the only thing is, I think that my take on this is as follows; I think that the most important thing we could start to do is to define this protocol and to actually make a way for these devices to talk to one another. Because I tell you, on my mind right now, if I had a way that I could just drop in a new module that talked to the TRB 900 over fire wire and did transport control, so that I could control that camera during a performance and have it start exactly at the right spot and have full band width video playing.  

Kirk: It’s called Nato.

Mark: Yeah I know, it’s a political problem that I have. But anyway, if I could drop that in and use it with my existing system with Interactor, I could just add a module that someone had written. That would be great, and I think it’s a really worthwhile problem to solve, but if that’s something that we’re going to try to work on…

Robb: That is part of what I am exploring with my PhD research.

Mark: Because if that’s something that we could work on, those particular types of people you’re talking about, probably aren’t so useful.

Scott: That’s what I was wondering. 

Mark: However, the ideas of Artificial Life and live performance are incredibly intriguing to me and that’s another thing that I think could be really. Like, Robb, your thing that you did with the trees and the thing growing is a really interesting idea to me. It’s how can you change what that lady was talking about in my thing, from being just a reactive performance to a true sort of sense of interactivity, where there is some kind of sense of intelligence on the part of the computer for what’s happening. Those people could be really interesting on that level. But you know, I think it would be better, if you really want to get something done, to start with some kind of a small problem or moderate level problem and solve it. And do that and get something going. And then people start to accumulate when energy starts happening in a particular place and it might sort of happen naturally, because someone will give a paper on this happening or something like that, that kind of thing. I don’t know that’s my theory. 

Robb: Maybe a way to come at this universal, this idea of connecting these things together is to start thinking about the tools that you have now. And how those pieces talk to each other and perhaps passing email around saying, this is an idea that I have, this is how I see it working, and just start exchanging those ideas and try and build them into a consensus towards something. 

Mark: That makes sense. 

Robb: And bring Woody Vasulka into the conversation.

Mark: Yeah. I think he definitely should be a part of it. Although he will say some really strange stuff that’ll really get us confused, but it will be all right.

Robb: It will be all right in the end. 

Scott: Well that was really useful for me actually, just to hear that last discussion. I mean, we do need to make some distinctions between certain things. But I think the idea of things learning, I mean you would like to build some learning stuff into the Trajets system, so it begins to evolve this kind of Artificial Life layer. I prefer A-Life to AI because my understanding of it is it’s a little bit more about the nature inside the computer. 

Kirk: This is very funny to me because I actually started as an electrical engineer, went through computer science, actually spent years studying AI. At the very beginning of my AI courses I remember vividly the professor standing up and saying, the most difficult and the worst thing about this field is its name. It’s not about artificial intelligence, it’s about adding intelligence to a system… but basically, it is about searches.

Robb: Yeh, that’s what I was saying. And searching spaces is all AI is really about. You have a big search space and finding some way through that to find a solution that works.

Kirk: And using some form of intelligence in the search, so you’re not just trying to blindly…

Mark: But isn’t that the difference between what Scott’s saying between AI and A-Life because I mean that stuff…

Robb: A–Life is more about emergent phenomena, trying to have something that emerges out of…

Richard: I would use neither term.

Robb: Okay.

Richard: Because I think both terms are already loaded. I think the notion of having a system is in some sense intelligent, is a good notion and is one that we shouldn’t loose. But I think that the actual term that we use is a very tricky business. 

Mark: Well aside from the terms though, I guess what I’m reacting to is, what I’ve seen grouped into this, what you’re talking about, the stuff that is essentially some kind of search. There’s a search element happening and even neural networks is basically some kind of a search in a real way.  

Robb: Genetic algorithms are too. 

Mark: I guess it is true. But for some reason, I don’t know if you saw the project where the guy did these genetic algorithms where the creature just had to learn how to move.

Scott: Karl Sims.

Mark: And it came up with these wild creatures that would like stick a giant pole out, and it would flip over and it was very surprising to me, and that’s what I found intriguing about it, was the surprise that I had at solutions that were encountered. I guess it’s still a search, you’re right, but for some reason that was more intriguing to me than most of the “AI” stuff that I encounter.

Robb: That’s the whole thing about searching, is that often the space is larger than you imagine. And in the genetic algorithm, your emergent phenomena is about going to a place that you would never had thought or imagined in that search space. So, when you say it’s a search, it’s not to say it’s not interesting. 

Mark: Yes, right. 

Robb: It’s just making the recognition that the computer is limited in terms of their ability to do “ah-ha” thing.

Kirk: It’s actually us mapping our intelligence onto it… 

Scott: That’s why my computer only goes beep. Finally, just about “open source” which is a very large topic. Bronac Ferran (head of the Collaborative Arts Unit, Arts Council of England) is organising with the Arts Council a very interesting conference in April, called CODE: Collaborative Ownership in the Digital Economy. She’s bringing in all the different areas, coders as well as law makers and policy makers and people who really might be able to address this issue on its bigger scale, but she’s also interested in artists, in particular problems on the ground as well.  So I’ll keep you posted about the conference and send you information. Are there any last minute thoughts or…?

Mark: Just make sure everyone really needs to see this (the outline for universal media protocol from Woody Vasulka), because it says what we need to do in a very succinct way.  

Robb: What I would like to see is information on the resources on how we get stuff out there like widgets and things like that, that’s my immediate problem is finding sources that can…

Mark: Distribution channels?

Robb: Distribution channels and marketing...

Mark: Yeh, well all I can say is what I already said, use Kagi and always email anything new you make, if you email it, at least if it’s Mac programme, if you email to Macintouch because as soon as I did that, he almost always will print whatever it is, no matter how small, and if you get it on Macintouch the next day the hits on your site are like off the scale.  

Scott: What’s the URL?

Mark: Macintouch.com.

Scott: Is that the same as Kagi?

Mark: No no, Kagi is the sales channel. Macintouch is for the news for the Mac and people who love MacIntosh’s read this thing every day. But when you can get information on there, that really worked for me, for example, as soon as I did for my x-midi thing, I sold a whole bunch right off. There must be a similar thing for windows too.

Guy: Version tracker is a good site as well. 

Mark: In fact another good thing to look at if you want to find out about this sort of thing; there’s a guy in England who’s been extremely successful. I think he makes his own entire living and I think a very good one, off of shareware and Peter Lewis is his name. He has a company called Stairways, and it’s www.stairways.com. Not only can you see that what he has is a bunch of literally two dozen small programmes that cost $20 or $30 a piece, but I think he’s selling hundreds of them a month, and so it really adds up into a salary, right? Of course it’s a little bit broader than the art thing… but he wrote programmes like Anarchy and Newsreader, etc. And he has a whole section on his website about how to approach doing shareware to make money at it. He has this whole philosophy, and it’s actually quite a useful document to read because it got me thinking about the possibilities. And how to approach getting it out there and all that stuff. So just go to the site and poke around, it’s there somewhere. 

Scott: Okay. 

Richard: I think the other thing not to lose track of is this idea of finding interns and how you actually find talent. Maybe there are mechanisms we can think of simply to distribute information about projects and getting them in the right place so, for example, students who are just graduating get to hear about them.  And maybe this could in turn lead to a source of funding for post graduate interns. 

Scott: It strikes me that that has to be more articulated than just announcing your, say, announcing your performance project.

Richard: It does, it has to be very articulated.

Scott: It has to say, look we’ve got these kind of problems. Presumably in a …

Mark: I guess, what it just seems to me is that I know the problems of having people who don’t have much skill, and you’re going to have to spend a lot of time teaching them which is counter productive. But yet, somehow there has to be a way to find these people because if you can get a student that really did have some chops and could do real work for you, the benefits of working on a true problem solving programming project would be immeasurable, because I also hear a lot of stories from people that I know.  Because in New York, the reason that the salaries were so high for programmers, because nobody can find good programmers. I heard stories of this guy who was trying to hire people and his test, what he would do as part of the interview, this will only mean something to the C programmers maybe, but he would say write out the string length function for a C-string, “strlen” right. Write that for me. And half of them couldn’t do it.  Literally, half the applicants coming right out of college and they couldn’t do it. And a lot of them did it without actually thinking about error checking and things like that really any good programmer should be thinking about always, even with something as simple as that function. So anyway, if you can give those skills, solving those problems and dealing with that and the expertise that you get from having to learn that you can’t just write a routine and assume that all the parameters are going to be okay, it has to really work.  That’s invaluable and it makes them more marketable in the end too. So I don’t know it seems …

Scott: There might be something in there.  

Mark: Yes. 

[Lining up for a group picture]

Mark: Okay, one last thing before we go.  Are we just going to do it by email or what are we going to do to talk to each other? How about an e-group?

Guy: Yeh, e-group and/ or Source Forge.

Scott: I’ll set up an e-group to get us going.

Mark: All right.   

Scott: I’ll also actually attempt to get this actually transcribed, because I think it was quite full of stuff, and then we can send it around.

[END / END]