AllFallDown depicts a creature coping with feet that are stuck to the ground and a body that grows uncontrollably. (in progress)

View larger version here. 1st viewing may be rough; subsequent viewings will be smooth.

Excerpt of evolutionary simulation–February, 2010.

Character Sketch is a project that explores the expressive potential of animated characters whose morphology and behavior emerge from creatively calibrated computer programs. Like genetic code, the programming of these characters defines a set of physical and behavioral traits, predispositions, but not how the characters will react to a given set of circumstances. The situation for Walker is that he has twenty seconds to scramble as far as possible from the starting point. Next, nine siblings, each programmed a little differently than the first Walker, also endeavor to roll, strut, twist, flop, or lunge as far and as quickly as they can. The two most accomplished are selected and advance to another round where the challenge is repeated. They are joined by eight new Walkers whose capabilities are random mutations of the previous generation’s traits. This cycle is repeated thousands of times.

A scientist might instigate this simulated evolutionary process to measure a creature’s ambulatory fitness and efficiency. For artistic purposes, however, distance travelled is not the point. What matters to this investigation is how the characters devise locomotion, their improvisations of motion and idiosyncratic attempts to accommodate their circumstances. Their gestures, unrehearsed responses and spontaneous adaptations, evoke a surprising degree of empathy and resonate with ineptitudes and comic contradictions we might recognize in ourselves. These computer generated scenes, then, become metaphorical trial runs for learning to cope, or not, with imposed, difficult, and indifferent circumstances.

More info at: http://www.videodoc.ncca-kaliningrad.ru/eng/

The reason or motivation for the character’s fall is unclear–was she pushed, did she slip or jump? As she falls, she collides with invisible obstacles that make her body slump, recoil, twist, and contort uncontrollably. She is helpless yet resilient; her fall pitiful but mesmerizing. As the sequences continue, it becomes apparent that although each fall is different, there is no change, nothing develops or suggests a narrative progression that might eventually  arrive at a culmination or conclusion. Fallen is not an event or circumstance but an endlessly variable condition.

Fallen_Suspension presents stills from the animations as a vertical line of small, contorted 3D figures.

CREATIVITY IS PRESENT IN ALL WE DO

The 7th Creativity and Cognition Conference (CC09) embraced the broad theme of Everyday Creativity. This year the conference was held at the Berkeley Art Museum and focused on a series of presentations and performances aimed at addressing what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi has described as creativity with a small “c” and creativity with a big “C” (more about Csíkszentmihályi in a bit).

First impressions:

After fifteen years of attending academic conferences, this was the first time I have participated solely as an attendee and not as a presenter or organizer. I highly recommend it. My motivation for attending came from a desire to better understand the processes involved in acting creatively, particularly to inform my teaching as one of the faculty involved in the new Creative Process course. I am also currently working with computer science and biomedical engineering professors to put together an application for funding from the NSF’s CreativeIT program. Many of the Creativity and Cognition presenters are current recipients of CreativeIT grants, so attending the conference served as a way to become familiar with the kinds of projects the NSF is supporting.

As someone (like you) who makes creative decisions regularly and for whom creativity is something to be engaged in rather than a topic of study, seeing charts—lots of them—attempting to accurately name and map out the stages of creative process was both intriguing and informative. Some resonated reassuringly with my own experience while others were foreign and seemed intent on draining creativity dry, leaving it labeled and quantified but lifeless. Many of the presentations investigated the potential for digital technologies to support or enhance creative process. Generally speaking, the primary take-away point is reinforcement of a simple observation with complex implications: computers and computation have and will in the future substantively influence how we teach, study and model creativity, how we act creatively, how we experience the artifacts resulting from creative efforts and how those artifacts are manifest.

Mitral Valve Repair and Drawing

More specific highlights included artist Jane Prophet describing two collaborative projects, one with a biomimetic engineer and the other with a heart surgeon. The collaborations bring into focus some of the surprising similarities (and differences) in the patterns of creativity used by each practitioner in their respective practice. A visual that burned quickly into my memory came from a video Jane showed documenting a heart surgery performed by her collaborator, cardio thoracic surgeon Francis Wells. Having finished the operation but still bedside, the surgeon began to describe to Jane what he had done. To illustrate the stages of the surgery, he picked up a white surgical paper towel and forceps, dipped the forceps into the patient’s still-open chest cavity and drew a detailed diagram of the procedure in blood. For his medical peers in the room, what was novel was the innovative valve repair technique the surgeon had performed. For Jane, and for most of us watching the video, what was extraordinary was the setting, the surgeon’s casual use of blood as a medium, his visual acuity and skill as a draftsman, and the unexpected beauty of the drawing. It all added up to a startling example of “everyday creativity” in the surgery theatre.

Flow, Systems, and Pianists in FMRI Machines

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, author of Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, was the final speaker of the 3-day conference. He distinguishes between creativity with a small “c”—private creativity, which enriches ones life without necessarily being recognized, and creativity with a big “C”—public creativity, which changes the way a culture sees the world, understands how it works, or goes about living (defns. from one of his slides). He also presented the Systems Model of Creativity. This model “views innovation or creativity as not primarily an individual trait or process, but as a confluence of processes taking place in three related sub-systems: the Domain, or the knowledge base in which the innovation/creativity takes place; the Field, or persons who act as gatekeepers to the Domain; and the Person, who introduces a change to the Domain that is accepted by the Field” (quoted from the proceedings). There’s a lot to unpack there, so I’ll just paraphrase a couple of points. Creativity, according to Mihály, is a social construct, not a “thing,” and it is only apparent when it is valued—as determined by those who are influential in the relevant field of knowledge. As a parallel, he used the example of a suggestion box. One can leave a suggestion in the box, but that doesn’t mean those with the power to act on the suggestion will do so. The suggestion, the will of those who receive the suggestion, and a “readiness” of the general community involved must all align at least to some degree before the suggestion even has a chance of impacting society and thereby being recognized as “creative.” This view reinforces the recent shift of emphasis (in art and design) from creative individuals to creative practice as a situated, mediated, contextually dependent endeavor. Mihály’s argument still relies on knowledge domain silos, however, and it certainly could be argued that the knowledge domain “gatekeepers” he refers to are increasingly decentralized and more broadly dispersed in a loosely structured social realm of overlapping interests.

Finally, Mihály recently participated in a study of 30 concert pianists who played a two octave plastic piano while their brains were scanned in an FMRI machine.  Each pianist was first asked to play a simple tune projected on a screen in front of her or him. The pianists were then asked to improvise that tune. The FMRI scans revealed that different portions of the brain were active when reading and improvising music. The part of the brain most active during improvisation (presumably the more creative activity) is the same area activated when people play poker. It is an area of the brain associated with making decisions in the face of insufficient information. In such a circumstance, if this area of the brain is not activated, one responds to needing to make a decision with panic and fear. The area is located in the front upper portion of the right brain.

These are just a few ideas culled from two of the thirty-six talks presented at the conference. In addition to the talks, there were 35 posters, 15 demonstrations, a small art exhibition and seven live performances. A very full three days leaving little time to enjoy the warm Berkeley weather.

In order to have both more control and more options for simulating expressive creature movements, I’ve been considering a couple of alternatives. One is a more sophisticated version of the Breve creature simulator developed by Lee Spector called SuperDuperWalker. The code includes a window of sliders for adjusting parameters, which is both convenient and helpful for tracking changes. Number of legs, segments, length, etc. can be adjusted as well as the rate and kinds of mutation.

At present, the stages of the process are:

1. design a character
2. design a base mesh (cubes, spheres, cylindars) version that can be duplicated in Breve
3. run the simulation using the basement
4. import simulation results (the position coordinates for each of the base mesh parts) back into Maya to animate the base mesh
5. rig the base mesh so that it drives the original design to animate it
6. texture, light, and animate the original design

With SuperDuperWalker, the process could change to:

1. run the Breve simulation
2. design a Maya base mesh to match the body form evolved by the simulator
3. derive a new character model that will fit the base mesh closely enough to be animated (this is the most significant part of the change–the character’s form is derived from evolved data rather than from my imagination)
4. rig the base mesh so that it drives the new character model and animates it
5. texture, light, and animate the new character model

Meeting with Stephen (code master) this week to set up importing the new walker settings into Maya and to see how much work would be involved in making the changes needed to get SuperDuperWalker data imported into Maya.