In last week’s blog I mentioned Douglas Bagnall’s Video Game Machine which was shown at Te Tuhi earlier in the year. Due to the uncontrolled sprawling ways of the Internet, where for every one thing you look for at least three things are found, I came across another great work by Bagnall which was exhibited at Enjoy in 2006.
The Cloud Shape Classifier is a machine that Bagnall created, charitably, for people who “lack the spare time in which to look upwards”. Fully excercising his wonderfully wry sense of humour, Bagnall’s Classifier is designed to help time-poor people efficiently enrich their lives through assisted cloud-watching. The machine records cloud activity during the day and allows users to not only review what it has recorded, but to ‘train’ it to focus on their personally preferred cloud type.
Users adopt a login and password, and by identifying their preferred clouds from a given selection, input data which the software then uses to gauge which clouds they will be most interested in viewing: thus considerably streamlining otherwise time-consuming cloud-watching activity. It is possible for people with a more casual attitude to cloud-watching to use an open-access Classifier, but as Bagnall sagely notes:
“If you don't give your classifier a password, it becomes a public or shared classifier, and other people can help train it. The advantage of this is that your classifier can learn well with little effort on your part. On the other hand, other people might train it to like ugly clouds.”
The idea of training a piece of software to share your aesthetic sense sounds as absurd as the notion that some clouds are beautiful, whereas others are ill-favoured (or even downright tacky), but it does have an interesting resonance with ideas that Sherry Turkle has discussed about artificial intelligence. Bagnall presents his robot-assistant Classifiers in a way that clearly personifies them:
“Classifiers start off in a confused state, and need to be taught to recognise good clouds … At first its opinions will fluctuate, and will often be terrible. But if you persist, it should be able to catch the drift of your taste.”
Like a wayward child or a naughty puppy, your Classifier must be taught right from wrong through discipline and diligence. Turkle traces the evolution of popular ideas about personal computing and artificial intelligence in her 1995 book Life on the Screen. The attitudes of the early 1980s, where “people were often made nervous by the idea of thinking about computers in human terms. Behind their anxiety was distress at the idea that their own minds might be similar to a computer’s ‘mind’ ” (page 24), had shifted within two decades to the normalisation of digital/organic interaction, where “machines were touted not as logical but as biological, not as programmed but as able to learn from experience” (page 24), and the comfortable characterisation of an artificial creation as something capable of thinking and understanding while remaining a tame, or even cute, assistant.
Bagnall’s Cloud Shape Classifier, like his Video Game Machine, also investigates the idea of artistic collaboration through technology. Bagnall creates software to act as his ‘stand-in’ as co-collaborator with his audience. As the user interacts with and instructs the Classifier, they are in effect enacting a series of pre-programmed instructions which Bagnall orchestrates through the movements of his mechanised prosthetic ‘student’: the user being guided as much as they are guiding the machine.
[Cloud illustrated is cloud #36849]
The Cloud Shape Classifier is a machine that Bagnall created, charitably, for people who “lack the spare time in which to look upwards”. Fully excercising his wonderfully wry sense of humour, Bagnall’s Classifier is designed to help time-poor people efficiently enrich their lives through assisted cloud-watching. The machine records cloud activity during the day and allows users to not only review what it has recorded, but to ‘train’ it to focus on their personally preferred cloud type.
Users adopt a login and password, and by identifying their preferred clouds from a given selection, input data which the software then uses to gauge which clouds they will be most interested in viewing: thus considerably streamlining otherwise time-consuming cloud-watching activity. It is possible for people with a more casual attitude to cloud-watching to use an open-access Classifier, but as Bagnall sagely notes:
“If you don't give your classifier a password, it becomes a public or shared classifier, and other people can help train it. The advantage of this is that your classifier can learn well with little effort on your part. On the other hand, other people might train it to like ugly clouds.”
The idea of training a piece of software to share your aesthetic sense sounds as absurd as the notion that some clouds are beautiful, whereas others are ill-favoured (or even downright tacky), but it does have an interesting resonance with ideas that Sherry Turkle has discussed about artificial intelligence. Bagnall presents his robot-assistant Classifiers in a way that clearly personifies them:
“Classifiers start off in a confused state, and need to be taught to recognise good clouds … At first its opinions will fluctuate, and will often be terrible. But if you persist, it should be able to catch the drift of your taste.”
Like a wayward child or a naughty puppy, your Classifier must be taught right from wrong through discipline and diligence. Turkle traces the evolution of popular ideas about personal computing and artificial intelligence in her 1995 book Life on the Screen. The attitudes of the early 1980s, where “people were often made nervous by the idea of thinking about computers in human terms. Behind their anxiety was distress at the idea that their own minds might be similar to a computer’s ‘mind’ ” (page 24), had shifted within two decades to the normalisation of digital/organic interaction, where “machines were touted not as logical but as biological, not as programmed but as able to learn from experience” (page 24), and the comfortable characterisation of an artificial creation as something capable of thinking and understanding while remaining a tame, or even cute, assistant.
Bagnall’s Cloud Shape Classifier, like his Video Game Machine, also investigates the idea of artistic collaboration through technology. Bagnall creates software to act as his ‘stand-in’ as co-collaborator with his audience. As the user interacts with and instructs the Classifier, they are in effect enacting a series of pre-programmed instructions which Bagnall orchestrates through the movements of his mechanised prosthetic ‘student’: the user being guided as much as they are guiding the machine.
[Cloud illustrated is cloud #36849]
1 comment:
This is another great write up! Reminded me of Julius Popp's "Bitfall" (well it took me a little while to remember his name) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avGZoKnw8sI
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