2009/7/20 Kassen <signal.automatique_at_gmail.com>:
> has anyone actually attempted to challenge our stance?
I've not seen nearly enough anger, maybe we haven't been provocative
enough. When Nick and I did a talk at a 'blip' night in Brighton
there was some angry questioning but nothing substantial. In my
experience people either like the music and therefore think livecoding
is good, or hate it in which case people think it is a stupid
diversion and ignore it.
> It's interesting here that the relative ambiguity of natural language is
> generally deemed to add to the artistic merrit. Dickens is generally held to
> have more literary value than -say- the article in UK traffic law governing
> who takes precedence at as crossing.
:D
> We might wonder about the artistic
> value of a novel written entirely in non-ambiguous language, I'm not sure
> such a thing exists; I doubt it since it seems hard enough to write a truly
> non-ambiguous language specification and have a parser/compiler that
> actually sticks to it; I know I have frequent disagreements on the
> interpretation of the specs with the ChucK compiler/VM....
I think Perl 5 doesn't have a spec, just one very wacky interpreter...
> I'm inclined to agree, but I do have to add that I'm not sure we could have
> "concepts" *without* language either. Teaching language to bonnobo monkeys
> certainly seems to add to their ability to deal with concepts. According to
> some experts in evolution and cognitive science we only have the
> intellectual abilities that we do thanks to the shape of our throat which
> enables articulation.
I understand that the throat has evolved to support speech but
research into sign languages and their users can readily discount any
such strong claims. In particular I think the idea of a speech
'module' tied to articulations of the vocal tract is nonsense.
> I'm not arguing that works like abstract paintings
> don't convey concepts but I am questioning whether they would hadn't we also
> developed language. There seems to be a strong link to say the least.
> Admittedly text feels like a clumsy tool for conveying concepts to me,
> whether writing to this list or to a compiler, but still less clumsy than
> many other tools.
I suppose it depends on the concept you want to convey.
> Perhaps somebody will reply to this debate solely using abstract images?
Are letters of the alphabet abstract images?
> Let's
> say I have a musical idea like "the guitar will play a melody which the
> keyboard will then play as well, except in reverse". With Livecoding I can
> express that idea directly, instead of inputting notes that form a example
> of this idea. To me that is "more conceptual", for some ideas it's also
> conveniently less laborious.
So if you have two descriptions for the same thing, the shorter
description is the most conceptual? That is, the 'more generative'
description is more conceptual?
> Personally I suspect that the awareness that the "concepts" are there being
> written on the screen leads to a sense of enjoyable anticipation about the
> music. In Livecoding performance -or so I'd like to theorise- it's the
> presence of concepts that can lead to a increased entertainment without them
> being literally understood.
I think concepts are informing the writing of code, so the code adds
extra evidence of concepts rather than representing or being concepts.
I agree that the code adds to the performance whether or not the
audience can understand it though.
I put my position paper on computational creativity here, which might
be relevant to this discussion:
http://yaxu.org/questions-of-creativity/
cheers
alex
--
http://yaxu.org/
Received on Tue Jul 21 2009 - 10:02:12 BST