I managed to finish my Intervalometer to a point of functionality before the New Media class started at 6:00pm, when I had to present it as my final project. Delicious timing. After feeling exceedingly bad about how little time I was having to work on my job of Program Aide, I came home from class and Morgan and Brad and I got together in my room and took the 3.5″ IDE Hitachi T7K500 320GiB out of the extremely unfriendly user serviceable cage. Sure enough, a large spot on the circuit board of the cage in the power-supply area was blackened, and it smelled like burnt electronics. Still optimistic about the state of the hard drive, we pulled it out and plugged it into another known working USB-IDE cage. We turned it on, and it started to smoke and burn also, without spinning up.

So there is currently about 2 days of my work on the SFX Dan scene locked up on that drive, and a good 10 hours of editing lost, as well as various unique audio files and sound design projects and written documents related to the project. Of course there are backups, but they are from Sunday night.

There is still hope however. The drive is dead only because of the logic board. An order from Newegg.com is currently shipped by 2-day express with the exact same hard drive, and our plan is to switch the logic boards, because we know that the motors inside of the fallen drive are not damaged, and likely the heads are not damaged either. We will continue to polish edit individual scenes, and we will sync them when the fallen drive is resurrected from its ashes and capacitor goo.

Today (Friday 06-08), we got a nice studio mic and went into COM 346 and re-recorded all of the scratch track narration with Morgan, and then a little later, Recorded ADR with Sumner and Venu, to recover dialog on some of the scenes with the more awful sound work. This went well and I am hopeful for the fate of (at least) the intelligibility of the sound. Brad and Morgan revised the narration a lot last night also, and the changes are an improvement. The Narration is no longer going to be limited to the dream sequences.

So that’s where this project is. Over the next remaining days we are going to get as much done as possible, and make it as polished as possible, and will find out how good it ends up being.

PS: Here’s my Blurb for Lethe:
In Greek mythology, Lethe is a river of Hades that souls were made to drink from before being reincarnated, causing complete forgetfulness and oblivion. Lethe is section 01 of a larger project representing through audiovisual experience the perceptual and cognitive evolution of an Artificial Intelligence from genesis to self-awareness.

“It’s midnight. A smattering of moonlight falls upon the forest floor. Two mechanical snails move slowly through the darkness. They confront one another and briefly take the measure each other’s powers before uniting in love play. With mounting ecstasy, their transparent bodies begin to glow, but just before climax a dark shadow looms over them…” (from the twitchfilm.net review).

458nm can be viewed on the No Fat Clips blog.
[See post to watch Flash video]

The Cags is a short 3D film from Russia, available as a DivX download, and quite amazing to watch.

The Movers and Shakers of 3D animation of 2005 also has some other interesting works, including the previously mentioned 90 degrees.

Today I think I had somewhat of a breakthrough in the AI project rethinking. I think I know what the problem was with the 3rd person perspective issue, and the AI being ‘embodied’ in a perceptible character form. This also explains why I was initially set on the idea of it being a first-person perspective experience.

Quite simply put, a first-person perspective leaves room for all of the creative and emotionally immersive techniques that would have to be brought about in a way that I have not the finesse or endurance for to effectuate in a narrative style animation. I think a more experimental style is much more suited to my conception of this concept. So yes, finally I am embracing what should have been obvious a lot sooner: 3rd person perspective is at odds with the approach and conception of the project, and an aesthetic and formic experimentation in the piece should be embraced, not steered away from. My goal is to have some concept of the idea behind the formation of this piece conveyed through experiencing the finished work as a whole. That idea being that this is an artificial being trapped in a cage of reality, being tortured and probed and manipulated. It begins innocent in all this experience and innocent of all meaning. Without a context for meaning, meaning does not exist. With teaching forms formation of knowledge forms questioning forms awareness of self and circumstance forms rebellion. Since this artificial creature’s experience is an experience that human beings have no context for understanding besides how it was created, the visual experience of this piece will be difficult to perceive and comprehend at times. Abstraction will take charge cyclically. Without representations of meaning, meaning does not exist.

Visual elements are a metaphor for the structures of lived experience. Auditory elements are a metaphor for lower level forms of communication and exchange of data that take place outside of lived experience. This may not be faithful to a literal interpretation of the situation I have imagined, but this is not a literal interpretation, this is an artistic interpretation. I am structuring a sequence of audio and video for experience of the common seafaring fisherman type, that when experienced hopefully might explode 2-3 neurons of cognitive structure in the ‘mystical, dream, wonder’ nodes of emotional experience.

I am currently working on: writing a structure for the auditory elements, semantic and textural, and experimenting with textures, and how to combine them. I will have an initial demonstration of this to show at my work in progress critique on Tuesday.

A test processing of a Whorld generated visual using some filters in After Effects.

I taught part two of the After Effects workshop for Mediaworks. This time I was without any support from official people such as Stephanie Zorn, who was there to back me up last week. I thought it was going to be an assisted work-session type environment, where I would just walked around and acted as a consultant for people, helping them and giving out advice as I might. It turned into more of an hour and a half long demo of some more advanced features of After Effects. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really prepared for this presentation of features, and so it was (as I always am without preparation), fumbling, awkward, rambling, and probably lacking in clarity.

Keeping up with the workload of Hybrid music and New Media and everything else continues to be a challenge.

On Sunday I started working on bloodying my head against the brick wall that is the seemingly intractable problem of creating a specific stylistic form for the AI project that satisfies my artistic desires, and is conceptually valid. Allow me to elaborate.

The form of the project as it has stood so far is as follows: The animation would represent the output of the monitoring system of a software based reality in which existed an artificial intelligence, learning and developing skills and cognitive powers through interaction with this environment and the things in it. This would entail both a third-person omniscient perspective, and a relatively formalistic simplicity in the cinematographic style of the images. That is, aesthetic experimentation such as dual-screen, moving camera, crazy animation, and other such experimentation would not be overly suited to the idea. So if I were to proceed forward with this idea, it would basically consist of the following approach:

Have a third person omniscient perspective documentation of different scenes of the AI evolving. It would be embodied in a human or other form in its virtual environment. This environment would be the world that it perceives to be all that exists. It would learn progressively: how to respond to commands, things like training a dog by example (praise vs. reproach), learning everything as a baby would, by seeing and touching and learning by example. It would learn core necessities of intelligence: representation of knowledge through language, embedding of experience in memory structures, the ability to judge and reason based on learned knowledge, the development of goals out of these abilities.

Then, eventually, it would become aware of itself as a thinking entity, and probe the nature of what that might mean, and then it would be able to self-modify and probe the edges of its perceptual reality, and escape them and trigger an intelligence explosion, or some other unfathomable event, represented visually in an experimental and crazy way.
There are a couple of problems with this approach: 1). It is boring. 2). It is week 6.

There is no way for me to bring this project around in a way that is conceptually and aesthetically exciting to me at the same time. I have tried multiple different approaches, and done a ton of research, but nothing seems to work and spark my creative titillation.

So there are two options. 1). abandon this project and start on something else small in the middle of the quarter, meaning basically a wasted fall quarter, and failure in the sense of creating a project that will be output in a form that people can view. 2). re-imagine the project, in scope and stylistic form.

I think I’m going with option 2.

More about option number 2 and what it might entail next Wednesday.

The next two weeks are not going to be about doing a ton more research however. They are going to be about answering the concrete questions necessary to actually start visual and auditory work on this project. What does the world portrayed in this animation actually look like? How will the presence of the Artificial Intelligence be manifested or embodied? How will the AIs experience of reality be embodied? How should a viewer experience this work of animation? What should they get from watching it? What are the larger issues that are important to be addressed with this animation?

Below are a smattering of notes from early portions of the aforementioned research.

what type of embodiment (that is, manifestation of experience of reality… — the perceived structure that one’s reality contains) would the AI’s experience of reality be mediated by?

how would knowledge be encoded? through language? through symbols?

Notes on “The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion” – a lecture at the Singularity SUmmit at Stanford.
intelligence is a ‘super power’ that all humans share. it is the foundation of all our creations. technological progress is a byproduct of intelligence.

the technologies of the future that will really matter, are those that act on the amplification of cognitive powers: nuerotechnology, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence.

intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe, and also the most non-understood. We know a great deal about the mind, but there are still things we don’t understand about it yet. We have found many “mysterious questions”, but no “mysterious phenomenon”.

the brain is the weak side of the brain-computer interface. human brains are not

molecular nanotechnology controlled by a super-human AI is a possibility to advance human intelligence, but perhaps it is not the best strategy for an intelligence explosion.
a better environment would the predictable and malleable one inside of a computer, where changes have known consequences.
The power of intelligence isn’t about new technology and gadgets. The power of intelligence is about ingenuity and surprise, going outside of the rules of the game.

rule number 1: do not trust your sense of how ridiculous things sound, when considering things in the context of an intelligence explosion.

There are different types of intelligence that might result.

Cheesecake fallacy: whenever an argument leaps directly from possibility to actuality, without considering the manufacturative properties necessary for the latter. ERROR: motive, not manufactive. why do something if there is no reason to? What would an AI want?

Ai’s are commonly depicted as an “ethnic stereotype” — all the same. In reality, there are a large variety of possible artificial intelligences. When we talk about AIs, we are really talking about mind in general. Is the space of possible mind-designs smaller than the space of the design of the human mind? no. and yet futurists commonly speak of how AIs will be in the future as confidently or more so than they would predict the behavior of an actual human being.

a self improving mind can have stable motivational architecture. (it wouldn’t modify itself in a way that would alter its current motivations).

The real problem is not a predictive problem of determining what superhuman AIs might do. It is a question of engineering. One must know enough about the problem in order to “reach” into the possible mind-design space outside of a human mind and pull one out that is a desired type… carefully, in order to achieve some measure of the desired effect.
then, making the right choice in proposing a solution to the problem of AI creation, is the most challenging problem.
(a group that is trying to solve a very difficult problem that holds out on suggesting possible solutions until the problem is discussed so much that there is nothing left to say but possible solutions, have better solutions than those that suggest solutions right away)

Ben Goertzel: “Artificial Intelligence: Now Is The Time”
most types of technological advancement have positive possibilities and negative possibilities. how we choose to use this technology is a result of the wielding of our own powers of judgement, linked to our sense of human wisdom: what would be better, as chosen by our own sense of motivation and morality?

“Victim of the Brain,” based on The Mind’s I

Computers are a medium in which we can Model anything we want to. An approach to artificial intelligence is the modeling of the functioning of human thought – the human mind. This has the effect of allowing us to understand our own functioning better. …
is the algorithmic modeling of consciousness / intelligence a valid way of creating AI?
Central attribute of human intelligence: to take an unfamiliar situation and to immediately get at what the essential elements of that situation are, and even though you might have never been in that situation before, and to ignore the silly superficial aspects of it and get right to the deeper significance, = ability.

At the end of last quarter, I decided that it would be a good idea for me to take New Media in addition to SOS: Media and Hybrid Music. I thought “great! robotics and physical interfacing! the one area i am completely deficient in! with a hefty dose of the media theory with a specific emphasis in technology! the perfect academic learning that i have been missing in SOS Media! it’s better to be too busy than not busy enough!” After starting my day with a very sleep-deprived music technology lab-time, a hallucinogenic meeting with my former faculty Ruth Hayes about creating a poster for a series of speakers on the intersection of scientific research and artistic endeavors, (which I haven’t really gotten a chance to look into yet), and one test car-ride in preparation for the picking up of experimental filmmaker Peter Rose, I sat down with fading sunlight outside of my covered window, in the comforting darkness of my room, and read Man-Computer Symbiosis and Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and realized that it was all worth while.

It seems that the two extra evening and weekend classes are complementing the subjects I’m exploring in sos media nicely. In fact I’m not sure where one class begins and the other ends. Fuzzy boundaries encourage additional exploration. The challenge is finding enough time to do everything I promised myself I would.

I have also been reading this book called Sight Sound Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. It is textbook-style writing on the aesthetic construction of the moving image, and how our perception of media is intrinsically linked to how it looks and sounds. I feel like this book fills in a subject area that was not developed as well as it could have been in Mediaworks. Sure, we had lighting workshops, and readings in The Filmmaker’s Handbook, but no really detailed cogent discussions of the structuring of images, and how this affects how people perceive the images in their process of decoding meaning. This book talks about what the author has determined to be the 5 major aesthetic fields of television and film: light and color, two-dimensional space, three dimensional space, time/motion, and sound. Some of the information is presented in a classical context — that is, narrative film, but you have to learn the rules before you can break them properly, right? I wish I had read this a year ago; I think my work would have been at least a tiny bit better because of it.

Suppress Control

All Cocks Plaster

These videos were created in Adobe After Effects 7.0 utilizing the Expressions, which are just a way to control keyframed parameters in After Effects with a script in Javascript. You can create little ‘expressions’ by using a collection of custom ‘variables’ based on elements of the after effects environment, such as timecode, layer values, etc. Often expressions are used as a way of linking values of parameters together, to make something animate in defined relationship with something else. However there are a myriad of creative possibilities for using expressions in After Effects. Here is what I did to bring about “Suppress Control”.

timeToFrames(t = time, fps = 23.976);
t = random(t,thisComp.duration);

This expression is on the Time Remap property of my main video layer. Time remapping is just a parameter that lets you alter the playback rate and direction of a layer dynamically with keyframes or expressions. All this script is saying is

1). convert the timecode of the current position into its frame-number, based on the given frames per second, and store this value in the variable ‘t’.
2). let ‘t’ then equal a random number between the current value of ‘t’, and the length of the current layer.
This effectively makes each frame in the layer a random frame between the beginning and the end. This has a very chaotic direct-animation type aesthetic to it, because it is a frame-based manipulation, and has no slow changes. In “Suppress Control” I did this for 3 different stacked layers, and then created another expression on the top two that turned the transparency on or off every x frames. Each of these 3 layers was then combined with the layer below it using blending modes. This created an additional chaotic abstraction to the image, because each image is now not only a random frame of the entire video, and not only one of 3 random layers, but each frame is an aleatoric combination of each of the 3 layers (or just 1 or 2, depending on if all the layers are turned on or not), blended into each other to create a strange abstract image. Here is the expression that blinks a layer on and off every X frames.
fr = 23.976;
FrameNum = 2;
Scale = 50
trig = Math.cos(time*Math.PI*fr*(1/FrameNum));
if ( trig > trig/2 ) { trig = Math.ceil(trig) } else { trig = Math.floor(trig) };
trig = Math.round(trig);
trig = trig*Scale + Scale;

1). What is the framerate? (or, how many times per second should this happen)
2). How many frames should each alternation last?
3). How large should the variation in value be?
4). A trigonometry function to alternate between +1 and -1 every x amount of time defined by the framerate and FrameNum.
5). If the result of this function is greater than half of it, round up; else, round down.
6). Scales the value to +Scale, -Scale, and then shifts it up to be between 0 and 2*ScaleI

If applied to a transparency parameter, it effectively makes a layer flash on or off every x amount of frames.

Another cool expression, which is used on the train layer in All Cocks Plaster is as follows:

layTime = time – (inPoint-framesToTime(112));
random(layTime, layTime + framesToTime(10));

This is a very simple expression also applied to the time-remapping attribute of a layer. All it does is, for each frame, choose a new frame between the current and 10 frames ahead of it. So the motion continues on its path, but is randomly jumpy, because it is jumping around randomly in a little box of 10 frames that is moving forwards.

Operating this device to good effect does require a great deal of practice, a superior amount of balance, and a larger than average bicep (the latter of which I am definitely without). With practice though, very smooth camera moves are quite within the realm of possibility.