Georg Trogemann (ed.): Code und Material: Exkursionen ins Undingliche (2010) [German]

Algorithmen und digitale Informationsprozesse sind allgegenwärtig – sie nisten in den kleinsten Objekten und durchdringen alle Lebensbereiche. Die digitalen Codes, diese „Undinge” (Flusser), die unsichtbar und im genauen Sinn des Wortes „unbegreiflich” sind, galten anfangs auch in der Kunst als Inbegriff des Immateriellen. Mit ihrer Hilfe sollte der Widerstand des Materials überwunden und die alte physische Welt ersetzt werden durch eine neue virtuelle, die es erlaubt, die künstlerische Idee unverfälscht zu realisieren. Wer sich als Künstler auf die inneren Strukturen des Computers einlässt und zum Beispiel selbst programmiert oder Platinen lötet, für den verwandeln sich die abstrakten Algorithmen und digitalen Codes in reales künstlerisches Material. Die in Code und Material versammelten Arbeiten zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass Codes, Algorithmen und digitale Informationsprozesse nicht nur für die Umsetzung einer künstlerischen Idee verwendet, sondern die inneren Strukturen der digitalen Maschinen selbst untersucht werden.

– Auswahl aktueller Arbeiten der Medienkunst
– Einführung in das Spannungsverhältnis von Materialität und immateriellen Codes
– Künstlerische und theoretische Positionen zum „Unding” Information

Publisher Springer DE, 2010
ISBN 3709101204, 9783709101209
190 pages

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Lucy Suchman: Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd ed (2007)

“This 2007 book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. The question then shifts from debates over the status of human-like machines, to that of how humans and machines are enacted as similar or different in practice, and with what theoretical, practical and political consequences. Drawing on scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and computing, the author argues for research aimed at tracing the differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are constituted.”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2007
Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives series
ISBN 052167588X, 9780521675888
314 pages

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Peter Hoffmann: Music Out of Nothing? A Rigorous Approach to Algorithmic Composition by Iannis Xenakis (2009)

“GENDY3 (1991) by Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) is a piece of computer generated music. But it is more than just ‘computer music’. GENDY3 is the culmination of Xenakis’ lifelong quest for an ‘Automated Art’: a music entirely generated by a computer algorithm.

Being a radical instance of a pure algorithmic composition, GENDY3 is, in a precise mathematical sense, a computable music: every aspect of its sonic shape is defined by an algorithmic procedure called ‘Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis’ (‘Génération Dynamique Stochastique’, or GENDYN for short).

The GENDYN Project, started by the author in 1995/96 with a research at CEMAMu, then the composer’s research center near Paris, exploits this computability for developing and documenting the GENDYN concept, in order to understand its various ramifications and to make it accessible for further research and production. To this end, the author implemented Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis in a new program called the ‘New GENDYN Program’ which, in addition to ‘recomposing’ GENDY3 in real time, makes it possible to inspect and control the algorithmic composition process, thereby opening up new perspectives both in Computational Musicology and in computer music creation.

For music analysis purposes, GENDY3 has been completely resynthesized. The simulation of the genesis of GENDY3 ‘in vitro’ made possible by the New GENDYN Program permits the systematic exploration of the ‘decision space’ of the composition model, contributing to a deeper understanding of both its potentials and limitations, and the complex interaction between ‘material requirements’ and compositional freedom within which the composer navigated.

The study of the GENDYN compositions provokes many fundamental questions about computing, listening and understanding, of creation, interaction and computer music aesthetics. It is shown that Xenakis, unlike many computer music composers, had no ambition whatsoever to emulate traditional musical thinking with the computer. Instead he realized his sonic vision in an abstract physical model of sound pressure dynamics yielding higher-order musical structures as emergent epiphenomena. This unusual approach addresses the medium of electroacoustic algorithmic music, i.e. the physics of sound, as well as the computability of sound as subjects of artistic creation. This approach seems to the author to be of a higher value for the foundation of a ‘true’ computer art than the widespread ambition to emulate human creativity by computers and to build up an artificial brave new world of music.” (Abstract)

PhD thesis
Fakultät I – Geisteswissenschaften, Technische Universität Berlin
Vorsitzender: Stefan Weinzierl
Berichter: Christian Martin Schmidt
Berichter: Helga de la Motte-Haber
346 pages

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