EIS at UC Santa Cruz

We can build a computer system that could generate a surprising event, and we can build a computer system that would recognize it.

When Mary Lou Maher said these words at the Media Systems gathering at UC Santa Cruz, she wasn’t talking about hypothetical systems working in sterile domains like block stacking. She was talking about the already-demonstrated power of computational models in rich areas of human creativity, like music and humor… creative domains in which strong expectation is key to our experience.

Maher’s wide-ranging talk encompasses examples of the simulation, synthesis, evaluation, augmentation, and enabling of creative behavior by computational systems — in domains ranging from dance to architecture to crowdsourcing. All of these can be productively framed as “operationalization,” a major theme of Media Systems also addressed in Nick Montfort’s and Ian Bogost’s talks.

Maher’s talk, and the discussion it inspired, also serves to highlight some of the differences between the engineering and art/humanities cultures that it bridges. Read More »

As Ian Bogost explains in this video from the Media Systems gathering at UC Santa Cruz, his work in procedural rhetoric is not “operationalizing” particular rhetorical tropes (the way Nick Montfort’s work operationalizes elements of Genette’s Narrative Discourse) but rather:

It’s a theory or a design philosophy. It’s a way of making things. A way of thinking about the process of translating systems in the world into representations of those systems in the computer…. It gives you a framework through which to ask questions about what a particular situation might demand.

In other words, Bogost’s procedural rhetoric is a theory about how and why to do operationalization, or other forms of procedural representation, rather than a project to operationalize certain elements of pre-existing rhetorical practice. Read More »

Among those doing computational media work, the concept of “operationalization” — as Nick Montfort discusses in this video from the Media Systems gathering at UC Santa Cruz — involves the formalization of theories from the humanities, arts, and social sciences and the implementation of these in a computational system, where they can be effective in new ways and “tested” in certain senses. This has proven a very powerful approach. For example, the entire field of 3D graphics could be seen as operationalizing arts knowledge about visual perspective and other knowledge from the visual arts. Or, more specifically, Facade (generally seen as the first interactive drama) is explicitly operationalizing concepts from arts and humanities theories of dramatic writing.

But operationalization is not that often practiced. One might speculate that this is, perhaps, due to a lack of respect, or a difficulty in translating, between the types of knowledge found in these theories and the types that go into engineering system building. However, at the end of this video, Michael Young suggests what I believe to be a more compelling explanation: The work of operationalization almost always involves novel scholarship. Read More »

In this video from the Media Systems gathering at UC Santa Cruz, Alex McDowell — one of the most influential designers in the world today — talks about how computational media are transforming storytelling. We are moving from the linear, auteur-oriented storytelling model of the printing press and industrialized film production to a collaborative, non-linear approach he terms world building.

He uses the film Upside Down to demonstrate the process of world building. Beginning from an image, a moment, and creating a world and its interior logic. The terrain, society, politics, culture, history, and geography are all realized. Creating connections to our world, like using rich and poor areas of Montreal as starting points for the up world and down world. Developing new techniques, like those needed for the eyelines of characters situated in spaces where the world is over itself. All of this — from technology development to cultural analysis — as part of a coherent, collaborative process driven by the goals of the artwork. Read More »

One goal sometimes pursued by interdisciplinary programs is to move beyond the arbitrary divides in knowledge represented by the schools and divisions of universities. One way of accomplishing this is to report to multiple deans, or to no dean at all (perhaps directly to the provost level). This sounds appropriate in theory, but at the Media Systems gathering we discussed the difficulties such models of interdisciplinary organization have presented for pioneering programs such as Animate Arts at Northwestern and Arts, Computation, and Engineering (ACE) at UC Irvine.

In the talk we’re posting today, Ian Horswill offers a postmortem of two major efforts at Northwestern. The first was relatively easy and inexpensive to put together, but didn’t result in deep interdisciplinary engagement by students or faculty. The second was much deeper — and in some ways a model of how to jumpstart interdisciplinary learning using a set of disciplinary faculty — but required ongoing agreement and funding from four deans and five department heads. Neither program is operating any longer.

Horswill also discusses research, introducing a topic — protecting “making as a mode of inquiry” — that became a touchstone for the rest of the gathering. Read More »

At the Media Systems gathering Janet Murray made a clarion call for deeper fundamental research in computational media, moving forward interdisciplinary understanding through the creation of new genres:

There has to be someplace where you say, “How do we reconfigure knowledge?” Because that is what happens when you have a new medium of representation, as with the printing press. And we’re not making fast enough progress there, because nobody’s getting rewarded for it, nobody’s being paid to do it.

Unsurprisingly, this was an applause line in our room of interdisciplinary investigators — digital humanists, digital artists, and media-focused computer scientists. Such calls were embedded in a talk deeply grounded in Murray’s experiences as part of MIT’s Project Athena, with AFI’s experiments in the future of film scholarship and commentary, with Georgia Tech’s developments in future pedagogy and interactive television, and as the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck and Inventing the Medium. She combined lessons learned (ranging across issues of gender, copyright, education, design, and more) with often-amusing “lessons refused” (from computer scientists’ assumptions that they would swallow the humanities to humanists’ own assumptions about “the robot of death”). Read More »