Bio : Golan Levin is an artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. His work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into the formal language of interactivity, and of non-verbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. Through performances, digital artifacts, and virtual environments, often created with a variety of collaborators, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity.

Levin's work spans a variety of online, installation and performance media. He is known for the conception and creation of Dialtones [2001], a concert whose sounds are wholly performed through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience's own mobile phones, and for The Secret Lives of Numbers [2002], an interactive online data visualization featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Previously, Levin was granted an Award of Distinction in the Prix Ars Electronica for his Audiovisual Environment Suite [2000] interactive software and its accompanying audiovisual performance, Scribble [2000]. Most recently, Levin and collaborator Zachary Lieberman premiered Re:mark [2002], an interactive installation, and Messa di Voce [2003], a new-media performance. These projects use augmented-reality technologies to create multi-person, real-time visualizations of their participants' speech and song. Levin is now in the preliminary research phase of a new body of work, which will lead to audiovisual performances conducted on highly miniaturized, interactive robotic systems.

Levin received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the MIT Media Laboratory, where he studied with John Maeda in the Aesthetics and Computation Group. Between degrees, he worked for four years as an interaction designer and research scientist at Interval Research Corporation. Presently Levin is Assistant Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie-Mellon University; his work is represented by the bitforms gallery, New York City.1

Website: www.flong.com

Another one! Beautiful! And this one, astounding! Oh, marvellous! Miraculous! Dude, I could do this all day!" I was nauseated. His flower collages were good, but they were all equally good - and he failed to see that this made them all equally bad as well. It's one thing to endorse the beauty of unexpected outcomes, but we must confront the fact that our algorithms are capable of coldness and ugliness, too, or we will never learn anything.


C.Z. - Can you please tell me more about Floccugraph and the Yearbook Pictures projects?


G.L. - Both of these projects are aleatoric treatments of photographic source material. These projects use a photograph of a human face as a starting point, in which a person's face is treated as a probability-field for random operations. Specifically: in the Cellular Portraits, random points are scattered across the image surface, according to a probabilistic density field governed by the darkness of the face photograph. In other words, the darker a part of the face is, the more likely that random points will be placed there. These points are then used to generate the bubble-like Voronoi diagrams you see. In Floccugraph, the darkness of the face is used as a probability-field for generating random tugging or repulsion forces on a series of hairlike filaments. Both of these processes always turn out differently, each time they are executed.


C.Z. - While for JJ, and Yearbook Pictures you seem to be more in control (you selected the different faces for both the works), apparently Alphabet Synthesis Machine (a networked software allowing the user to generate a font-set starting from a hand drawn "seed") leaves the users more freedom to customize their font, (but they are still influenced by your algorithms). Can you please tell us something about its creation process? And can you, in brief, unveil to us part of the generative algorithms of the software?


G.L. - I think my works vary considerably in the extent to which I control their appearance, versus the extent to which their visual results are governed by autonomous algorithms, or guided by the interaction of some other user. The three projects you mention happen to lie at different extremes of this range. But it's a mistake to assume that my control, as an author, begins and ends with the extent to which I have pre-determined the precise manifestation of my works' visual results. This notion of providing or withholding control is really a sleight of hand - I may or may not have pre-determined the visual output, but I still selected and programmed the algorithms that relate the input to the output! Control has been supplanted by meta-control.

Put differently, much of the magic in creating interactive or generative art is in creating an illusion of control: the sense that the "artist" has relinquished authorship to the user, or to some clever algorithm. In fact, this is a myth. In a sense, generative artists are more in control than artists have ever been. Instead of authoring individual expressions, they now author systems for expressing. But with this power comes a greater critical burden. Traditional aesthetic criteria are not sufficient to evaluate the resulting expressions. The system itself must additionally be evaluated, according to the range and plasticity of its actual and possible expressions.

The Alphabet Synthesis Machine is an online system which allows users to "evolve" their own personal alphabet. I think it's important to mention that the resulting alphabets are nonsense-writing, which is to say, they hopefully evoke the alphabets of unfamiliar civilizations, and they probably are not readable in any customary way. These alphabets result from a process in which the user first provides a hand-drawn "seed", as you mention, and then guides the evolution of a genetic algorithm which generates the alphabetic characters. It's very similar to Darwin's idea of "Survival of the Fittest": there is a population of about 1000 alphabetic characters, each of which is a little physical simulation of a hand-drawn scribbly mark. These scribbles are continually breeding, mutating and swapping genetic material. But only the "fittest" ones survive, and it's the user who stipulates the fitness metric with my graphical interface. After enough iterations, the alphabet hopefully looks pretty unique. With respect to your questions about randomness in software art, the Alphabet Synthesis Machine is a combination of a random process and a user-guided process: there is randomness in the mutations that affect the population, and in their sexual reproduction process, but at the same time, the whole system is (slowly) shaped according to the goals of the user. It's a lot like breeding a new kind of dog: it takes many generations, and some luck. It's worth mentioning that several other people have made related projects with very different techniques; for example, Matt Chisholm's Alphabet Soup project uses a set of pre-rendered glyph components, like serifs and posts and hooks, that snap together to create new letterforms. His project looks more typographic, while the Alphabet Synthesis Machine looks more handwritten, because of the physical simulations behind the marks.


C.Z. - How do you personally manage randomness? I'd like to hear about your "style" using this unusual "material".


G.L. - Of all of the pitfalls facing a designer of interactive systems, I think the use of computationally-generated randomness is one of the surest. The appeal of randomness, in theory, is that it can be used to introduce new "information" in order to keep an interaction fresh. Unfortunately, the problem with randomness is that it contains no information at all-and can therefore be misinterpreted as actual information by an unsuspecting human user. The user suffering from a random system may ask: "Did I just do X, or did it just happen by itself?" "Am I controlling this, or is this behavior a coincidence?" In such cases, randomness is a confusing distraction which makes it more difficult for a user to understand and master an interactive system. This can be especially problematic for systems whose fundamental appeal is predicated on a tight cybernetic coupling between human and machine. I have found that, in many cases, the use of human gesture itself eliminates the need for randomness. Human gesture, in particular, is already such a rich source of input, with its own stochastic and irregular properties, that additional randomness is hardly ever needed! Randomness can also be avoided through a deeper examination of the gesture: the use of signal analysis techniques, for example, can tease apart additional expressive dimensions latent in the user's gesture, such as its latent periodicities, or the precise character of its frequency spectrum.

For a while, I was almost religiously committed to avoiding randomness in my artwork, and I took pride in not using it. But there was a turning point, one day when I was a student at the Media Lab. I was invited to give a demonstration of my software art to the Prime Minister of Austria. He was an enormous, towering man with a crushing handshake and a glowing, unquestionable authority. As I showed him my software, I made a point of indicating that there was no randomness in the algorithms: everything he was seeing was entirely a direct function of his own gestural movements with the mouse. He turned to me and said, "But what's wrong with randomness? Life itself is random." I thought this was a great piece of wisdom. So after all my exhortations, I somewhat embarrasingly admit to using randomness, especially in the form of low-amplitude, high-frequency statistical noise. It's basically essential for creating any kind of organic texture. Without it, most generative systems would seem lifeless, overly-regular, and dull.

These days, my opinion about randomness is in line with that of John Maeda, who wrote in Design By Numbers that "if you are going to use randomness, you should at least know where it comes from." Generative artists and designers ought to be aware that the randomness generated by a computer is NOT true randomness! "Random number generators" are actually totally predictable algorithms, and these mathematical tricks are nowhere near as perfectly chaotic as Mother Nature. The different imperfections and regularities of algorithmic random number generators, moreover, dramatically color the character of any generative artworks that use them. Unfortunately it seems that most generative artists are not aware of this. I contend that artists who use random number generators owe it to themselves to research the properties of different random-generating algorithms. They ought to know that there are many different flavors of random number generators, such as Cauchy, Exponential, Assymetric, Gamma, Pareto, Kotz and Johnson Continuous Univariate, Discrete, Poisson, Binomial, and Linear Feedback Shift Registers. Each of these algorithms generates completely distinct kinds of randomness! I get a little upset when generative artists just rely on the standard Random function provided by Flash. It's as if there's a sale on Red paint at the art supply store, and so that's the only color people are painting with. It's one thing to use it because it's cheap and expedient, but we've gotten to the point where artists seem totally unaware that there can be other colors of randomness at all.

Notes
1 : cf. www.flong.com/resume/index.html.  

Interview by Carlo Zanni

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