Defective Computing

Listening Equipment "Waalsdorp"

2007-02-28T15:18:00.000Z

This may well be the coolest thing I've ever seen, early military acoustic detection technology in the form of gigantic card and paper ears.

Little People

2006-11-08T16:42:00.000Z

http://little-people.blogspot.com/

A lovely project involving handpainting tiny people and leaving them around London.

Pink PS3!

2006-10-25T10:38:00.000Z

Sony Announces Pink PS3! In a somewhat bizare move, Sony have announced they are producing a limited number of Playstation 3 consoles in pink colour, opposed to the standard black, white and silver.

This is a bold statement for Sony, following the announcement of the P!nk PSP in August of this year in what I guess an attempt to make gaming more appealing for a bigger demographic of people. (Full Gamespot article here: http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6156244.html?sid=6156244>

Here is a photoshop impression of what the pink PS3 will look like:

Amy Youngs

2006-10-11T09:40:00.000Z

Interesting artist who uses living animals in her work, a regular collaborator with Ken Rinaldo. Much of her work attempts to model the future possibilities of genetic engineering.

Link to her webpage

Grey Goo

2006-10-09T14:34:00.000Z

The post on wikipedia about the 'grey goo' doomsday scenario in which self replicating nano machines destroy the universe and everything in it is fun. Contains some interesting observations about the nature of bacterial life.
The best bit is the quotes by the man who coined the term, Eric Drexler;

"We cannot afford certain types of accidents", Eric Drexler, Engines of creation, 1986
"I wish I had never used the term 'grey goo'", Eric Drexler, Nature 10 June 2004

In the article about 'ecophagy' meaning the consumption of an ecosystem- theres this silly but wonderful quote.

"They call it "global ecophagy". That's "eating the Earth" to you and me. Rumour has it that this is what replicating nanostructures might do, and according to one estimate, they could gobble up the entire planet in about three hours flat."
Philip Ball

Stuck?

2006-10-08T08:32:00.000Z

Feeling a bit daunted by this project? Perhaps your having trouble generating an imaginative response? Or are you not sure where to start with code?
Try to keep in mind that a-life is as much a project of art as it is of science, and that you can make you response as personal, idiosyncratic and bizarre as you want.

About the brief

-Try and expand on the brief if you can, subvert the task, a clever answer to the project might not need complex programming. One group are working on a project that focuses on how ideas (rumours) spread on the internet, and the idea that they might be considered a form of life.

-Take another look at the concept of life as structure, self repliacting object or organised entity.

-The work can simply show one element of 'life'- such as growth or reaction to stimulus perhaps- the work can be expressive and individual as you want.

-A vey complex idea could have a simple implementation.

Programming

-Break down you project into managable chunks- and persue one chunk every four or five days.

-Work out exactly what you need each chunk of code to do.

-Is there code you have used already that you can modify or combine?

-Maybe work with something else like maxmsp, java etc... Its what you choose to make that really counts.

-Once you know what information you need- it becomes much easier to ask fellow students or staff for pointers. Many of you will have similar issues and coding tasks- and theres no reason you shouldn't co-operate and share information.

Use your imagination, play to your strengths, break the work down into managable chunks and have fun. All at once.

Saving from flash

2006-10-06T14:22:00.000Z

I know I'm not meant to help you guys with tech stuff, but so many of you have asked me about this that I thought I'd post it up.
It a tutorial on the Kirupa website that shows you how a php script can allow your flash movies to save information to a file on your server. So now you can create flash content that develops with every visit.
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/hitcounter.htm

Lowtech Sensors and Actuators

2006-10-05T16:58:00.000Z

Just thought I'd stick this up- its not really relevant to most of you- but some of you are looking at making organisms with interfaces/bodies.

Theres a ton of interesting uses of simple sensors arrays in the PDF available on this page.

Yenova Chen's cloud

2006-10-05T12:21:00.000Z

Yenova Chen, the games designer who created Flow, has also made a game called cloud- I'm just posting it here becuase the graphics are quite original and might help some of you to think about how your going to present your organisms/ enviroments etc..... Heres a link to his flickr photoset documenting it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenovachen/sets/382166/

Johnathon Yen

2006-10-05T12:17:00.000Z

A nice example of drawing living creatures in flash.
http://www.jonathanyuen.com/

Flow Game

2006-10-05T11:53:00.000Z

http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/black.html
A few of you have been looking at this very nice game. The design comes from simple first principles, but has been developed into a complex system. Careful-its pretty hypnotic.

Drawing with flash.

2006-09-28T17:27:00.002Z

Theres some great code and effects implemented in flash and offered as open source to download that include a whole bunch of ideas for a life projects and creature design. A lot of the images in these are completely generated by the flash drawing API, or from very simple graphical shapes that are then manipulated and recombined in flash.
Brilliant- and it looks nice too.

http://www.levitated.net/daily/
Get on down to the Lev website right now- and no ones got any excuse if their work doesn't look nice...

Click on the little bugs to change their characteristics.

These are totally cool, a cross between coy carp and a freshly hatched alien.

Biomorphs java applet.

2006-09-27T19:03:00.000Z

Richard Dawkins, genetic theorist, created the biomorph algorithm in his book "The Blind Watchmaker", in order to explain his theory of genetic determinism. Although they can look very complex, the images that the program creates actually have a very simple set of instructions.
An implementation of the algorithm in a java applet is here.
http://www.phy.syr.edu/courses/mirror/biomorph/

Each biomorph in the Blind Watchmaker algorithm has the following 15 genes:

genes 1-8 control the overall shape of the biomorph,
gene 9 the depth of recursion,
genes 10-12 the colour of the biomorph,
gene 13 the number of segmentations,
gene 14 the size of the separation of the segments,
gene 15 the shape used to draw the biomorph (line, oval, rectangle, etc).

These kind of drawing rules could be very easily put into play by the flash drawing api.

Blackshoals Project

2006-09-27T18:44:00.001Z

Blackshoals project is a realtime graphical representation of the stockmarket in a planetarium. Each star corresponds to a different trading company, and they move and grow dependent on real time information streams coming into the simulation. Artificial life forms live within the simulation feeding the light from these stars.

The project website has some interesting observations and materials relating to a-life.
http://www.blackshoals.net/

Ernst Haeckel illustrations.

2006-09-27T18:00:00.000Z

Heres some examples of some lovely illustrations of different biological specimens by Ernst Haeckel. He was a biologist and responsible for a number of important theories about evolution (and some pretty dodgy ones too).
You can see some really nice subtle variations on forms and simple shapes that might inspire you thinking about biological bodies.
Heres a link to a huge collection of very large high quality scans of his work at Berlin Natural History Museum.

Haeckel Scans

I'll admit that I'm not sure exactly what creatures that these images are of- but they're certainly organisms.

Organism Project Materials

2006-09-27T16:15:00.001Z

Thanks to everyone for great input so far, already some great ideas taking shape.
I’ll be sending out a group email to confirm our meetings for next week, the timetable changes are a tad confusing.

I'm going to post any interesting and relevant projects here for you to check out as the project goes on, as well as anything good you find yourselves- I'm posting the main sections of the lecture notes as a quick reference here if you need it.

Project Brief
The project brief is to design and create an organism, so below we'll look at the ideas that surround this in more detail.
An organism is a life form or structured entity that resembles a life form. The aim of this project is to take an open an creative approach to your conceptualising your idea for the organism, idea first, technology later.
Your organism- or organisms- should demonstrate 'lifelike' qualities such as physical body, it should change over time, react to elements in its environments or other objects around it and should have variable qualities.

Forms of Life

Amoebas and protozoa,
Cells,
Simple invertebrates,
Insects,
Reptiles and Mammals.
Plants and plankton.

Also there are some that are unsure-
Prions and viruses- self replicating structures - systems - artifical life forms

Larger forms of life are actually collections of these things-
for instance- a human being is actually made up of a number of co-operating groups of different cellular life forms.

"It would not be too far-fetched to say that the extermination of mankind begins with the extermination of germs." [ Jean Baudrillard ]

Is something that self replicates alive?
Henrietta Lacks
Viruses
Computer Viruses
Prions

Some attributes of life to consider in your designs;

Complex - they often have multiple levels of different structural organisations, such as a hive of bees, cells, structured to create individual bees, that then create the hive that then operate as part of an ecosystem.
From micro to macro levels.

Reproduction - Genetic systems - Life forms change throughout generations in response to environmental factors. Natural selection does this by mixing the gene pool with each generation in the hope that particularly successful hybrids will result.

Self organising - Emergence - very large groups of very simple beings can demonstrate very complex behaviours- such as nest building insects, using a simple system of rules they create large and intricate structures.
Swarm theory.

Responsive - Many animals have none or very small brains, and simply respond automatically to stimuli- however that response can appear to have clear intention.

Metabolism - Relies on food or other fuels - converts one substance into another, consumes other life forms or material from them (amino acids).

Growth- resulting from the metabolisation of material.

Movement- Almost all life forms have the ability to move under their own will.

Internal agency- Intention and intelligence.The intelligence of a being may be contained in its structure and also in mental tissue and heigher level processing.

Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence Research.

A-life and AI research usually have one of two purposes, the generation of novel, interactive, complex or beautiful artworks or the understanding of life by modelling it- attempting to re-create it.

Steve Grand's Lucy project is all about creating intelligent life from the bottom up. Steve thinks that artificial intelligence will be impossible without a body for the mind to use.
http://www.cyberlife-research.com/people/steve/

Ken Renaldo's work with robots.
Autopoesis is a robotic work which responds to humans using an array of very simple sensors. However the group of robots working together in tandem gives the viewer the impression that they have internal agency and intention.
http://accad.osu.edu/~rinaldo/

Paul Brown
Paul Brown is an artist who uses cellular automata to control time based drawings.
http://www.paul-brown.com/

Cellular automata are mathematical games that display interesting patterns and behaviour. The first, and most famous of these is Conway's Game of life, created by mathematician John Conway whilst trying to discover a life like mathematical system that would display self replicating properties. The game of life was originally painstakingly played out on a paper grid, with one sheet for each turn, or on a go-board.

Game of life rules
For a space that is 'populated':
Each cell with one or no neighbours dies, as if by loneliness.
Each cell with four or more neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
Each cell with two or three neighbours survives.
For a space that is 'empty' or 'unpopulated'
Each cell with three neighbours becomes populated.

http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

Nick Collins

2006-06-13T16:46:00.000Z

Went to see Nick Collins speak at Plymouth today about his PHD research towards Autonomous Musical Agents and Machine Listening Technology for Concert use. I was pleasantly surprised when he almost immediately started playing breakbeats at us.

Nick is the creator of BBcut, which was later adapted into LiveCut, a very handy squarepusher emulator. His latest version of this, BBCut2 provides event analysis of live audio streams, inferring beat structure and creates a database of events with which the track is processed. Mmm, glitchy.

From what he showed us BBCut looks to be a extrememely effective tool, and can be used with Supercollider, so I'll be downloading that this evening.

Nick has also been woking on systems for machine listening that analyse live audio streams, and track beats, and can analyse notes and their features such as pitch, attack and timbre. He showed en excellent AV clip that had been processed in this way, and was being replayed - in a Tom Jenkinon stylee.

Clever....

Heres his website
He's also a member of TOPLAP who do life coding as audio performance Their WIKI is here and also Klipp av, Well cool.

Singing Machines

2006-06-13T15:08:00.000Z

My current project, preliminary to the final work for this is to create a simple program which will allow macs to sing.
Heres one example of using the command line with the system voice.

Electricity as interface.

2006-06-09T11:57:00.000Z

"Electricity has another special value. We now know that the neural signals that control the body, carry sensory information, and are related to thought itself, consist of electrical impulses sent from nerve cell to nerve cell. This is not a purely electrical phenomenon because the impulses are produced and passed on by chemical means, but neural activity has a strong electrical component, which is why it is possible to create physical interfaces between a living nervous system and electronic devices." From Digital People; form bionic humans to androids, Sidney Perkowitz. p.63.

Voltaic Pile, the first battery.

2006-06-09T11:52:00.000Z

A breakthrough that Volta announced in 1800—the Voltaic pile, a stack of alternating zinc and copper disks, separated by cloth or cardboard soaked in salt water. That was the first electrical battery, a device to produce a steady flow of current. Within a year, Humphry Davy of the Royal Institution in London attached two carbon electrodes to a massive battery and obtained an intense white glow, thus discovering the carbon arc, the earliest form of artificial electrical lighting.