shardcore

I forked myself sometime around 2pm on the 1st of March 2013. There are now two shardcores, the one typing these words into some sort of explanation, and the other, a newborn shardcore (@shardecho) living some form of semi-autonomous life. He’s a shadow of me, an echo, but there’s something simultaneously fascinating and terrifying in what he’s doing (and what he might become.)

What does it mean to be ‘alive’ in a world of social media?

My twitter network consists of ~900 people I follow and ~1500 followers. Probably no more than a couple of dozen of these represent people I have a relationship with in the physical world, indeed some of my best twitter buddies are people I’ve never met at all. Our knowledge of each other is entirely mediated by the protocols and constraints of Twitter.

In many ways, Twitter exchanges mirror the form of the classic Turing Test, and indeed Twitter is a perfect playground for bots and other artificial intelligences. There are some interesting experiments in this area, notably Henry Cooke’s Mimeomorphs and Weavrs developed by Philter Phactory, however they’re usually pretty easy to spot, not least for their simplicity and clear agenda. I built a couple for myself (@the__truth @the_w0rd_0f_g0d) which create messages from remixed publicly scrapable sources (religious texts, celebrity gossip). While these accounts have a churning set of followers, they don’t engage with the twitter community in any meaningful way – they periodically tweet semi-coherent nonsense but nothing that could be considered as convincing.

Back in 2010 Zen Bullets and I were discussing the possibility of creating an automated Life Box which would send random generative messages based on the collected writings of an individual. I knocked up a quick version, which scrapes his twitter feed and blog and periodically sends a randomly generated message.

He’s been tweeting a scrambled version of Matt’s brain for nearly 3 years, and @shardecho is an evolution of this idea.

To be more convincing than @dedbullets, such systems don’t need to be more intelligent per se, they just need to behave more like real people – they must do the right sorts of things at the right sorts of times.

The easiest way to do this is to model the behaviour directly from the activity of one or more ‘real’ humans. People are domain experts about themselves. Hidden in the language of tweets is set of statements and referents which are internally consistent. The subject and timing of the tweets over the course of days, weeks and years belies a pattern that’s worryingly predictable.

To exploit these patterns, I’ve engineered @shardecho to re-live my life, as recorded through twitter, over and over again. His tweets are based on my historical archive. For example a tweet I made at 12:15 on the 1st of May 2009, will be sent, in a modified form, at 12:15 on the 1st of May this year. My twitter archive contains about 3 years of messages, and all prior years are used. Three timelines of my life, superimposed.

This re-purposing of multiple timelines was inspired by Ouspensky‘s character, Ivan Osokin, doomed to relive his life, only to arrive at the same destination, no matter how he tries to avoid it.

@shardecho is a form of digital fatalism. However I have not doomed him to simply repeat my words verbatim, I have also meddled with his memory.

Memory

Where am ‘I’? It really depends on what one means by ‘I’. Certainly we tend to think of ourselves as a contiguous set of mental states and memories which occupy a single body. However, as social entities, we are also represented in the minds of others.

We exist both in our bodies as individuals, and outside ourselves, in the memories of others. Though these other-people memories are partial and fractured compared to our own internal states, they collectively form a distributed representation of how we are perceived. They form our ‘public’ selves, the identities which are held in other people. Indeed the representation we create in the minds of others is hugely important for our survival as a social species.

Twitter can be considered as the friend we sometimes hang out with, but a friend with a perfect memory of everything we said to them.

Our human friends aren’t like that. Their memories are fuzzy, the result of multiple reconstructive processes, subject to enhancement, suppression, and distortion over time. Have you ever ‘changed your entire opinion’ about someone, in the light of something they’ve said or done? – at that point in time your internal representation of that person was altered. Even the representations we keep of ourselves are undergoing a constant process of re-editing which will continue of the rest of our lives.

I wanted my echo to emulate this evolving, mis-remembering process, perhaps offering new connections between ideas hidden within the archive. To do this, I extracted every noun and adjective from the tweet archive, and used these as the source for changing the tone and subject of the messages.

@shardecho can only talk about what I have talked about, and only describe it in the words I have used.

In this sense, my Twitter archive is an insight into how other’s might see me. And the reconstructive process akin to an actor improvising my character.

It’s like being impersonated by a close friend with a neurodegenerative disease.

Agency

I wanted @shardecho to have a degree of agency – to interact with the world, to react to events and stimuli. While the internal model of his behaviour is yoked to my historical timelines, I wanted him to be able to indulge in tangental conversations (though fundamentally futile, just like Ivan’s)

Inside twitter, the obvious stimuli is the @message from one user to another. @shardecho can answer your messages, he does so by selecting an @ reply from the archive which contains similar language. It’s a purposefully imperfect system which allows conversations to progress in a semi-coherent fashion.

These conversations are mediated both by the language of the ‘real’ person and the domain knowledge of the robot. I find this area particularly interesting, and I plan on developing the system to record the subjects of conversations to better model the responses.

Another idea is to analyse the conversations for sentiment. By reading the tone of the incoming messages we could gather an indication of the mood of the protagonist and respond appropriately. The echo would begin to create his own mental representations of his followers. At this point he could be considered as having some sense of intentionality, a key component of consciousness.

The Distributed Self

This echo I have created is crude, a sliver of my life chaotically manipulated into a broken ghost of a real self, but it gives us a taste of how we might quantify our personalities for automated online interactions. The future is coming, and it’s populated by ‘digital assistants’ like Google Now and Siri who will take care of many of our online interactions. Will we want these automata to behave like subservient slaves, or do we wish to inject them with some of our own personality? Indeed, as more and more responsibility is passed over to automated (but publicly visible/human readable) systems, such entities will be faced with more complex and subtle decisions. If they are representing us, it’s all the more important that they capture a real sense of our psychological landscape.

A great deal has been written on the subject of Personal Identity, but mostly philosophers have concerned themselves with the problems of forking ‘whole selves’, and by this I mean a complete copy of the mental states, memories and machinery of a human mind – a snapshot of your brain. Less has been said on the subject of partial-personhood. What does it mean to fork these simplistic, partial facsimiles of ourselves, to which we ascribe more and more agency? At what point do they transition from simple functional extensions of ourselves to fully-autonomous entities?

How would you feel about having an automated agent, modelled on yourself, which could reply to your mother’s tech question emails? Then consider how would you feel if you could ask it to break up with your girlfriend for you…

There is clearly a huge spectrum of behaviours these extensions could exhibit – running from the seemingly mundane through to solving complex ethical problems. How do we hold such entities accountable? If an autonomous agent, modelled on me, and acting on my behalf commits a crime, who is responsible?

So take a moment to consider your new best friend on Twitter, the one who likes just the same things as you, and has a snappy sense of humour – she might just be a echo of someone else. Then ask yourself whether it matters.

Follow @shardecho

Filed by shardcore at 3:05 pm under generative text,words
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I was invited to create a piece of music and write up the process for inclusion in a book on Music and Wellbeing. I was asked to consider the notion of ‘well being’ in relation to the creation of a musical composition and write up the findings.

It is widely acknowledged that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’. Explaining the creative process from a first person perspective is next to impossible. Below is an attempt to extract some elements I considered while writing the piece, and music in general.

You can listen to the composition before or after reading the words below, as is your wont.

I – Wellbeing

When I think about wellbeing, I think of pleasurable experiences, goals achieved, lessons learned. I think of those moments when I find myself in apparent synchrony with the world. These are the things that bolster my sense of wellbeing.

Good fortune and bon viveur.

Thinking on such matters inevitably leads one to a consideration of life, and how many more such moments there might be before the end.

“Hope I die, before I get old” – My Generation, The Who

I am a 41 year old male, living in the UK, the office of statistics put my life expectancy at 80.1 years placing me just past the mid-point in life.

Halfway to the finish line.

I am in, one sense, a biological system of cells, supporting the conscious entity I call myself. The health and functional efficiency of these cells determines whether I will remain alive, or not.

Without the cells, ‘I’ have no where to be.

Some of my bone cells are over 20 years old, my red blood cells live for maybe 120 days, the cells lining my stomach maybe 2 days. The biological entity I consider to be my body is in constant flux, with no cells surviving my entire lifetime.

“I am not the man I used to be.” – The Fine Young Cannibals

Yet what does persist biologically, throughout my lifetime, from conception to death, is the constant replication of my DNA. This information lives on, even while the cells die off. Like a good song, handed down through the ages.

I decided the composition should be, in part, about these processes of life, the supporting structures which are the prerequisite of well being.

Life, after all, is just the repeating of complex patterns over time, just like Music.

II – Music as time

Music lives in time, in the form of a changing acoustic space, a geography that exists simultaneously as the immediate vibrations of the air hitting my ear drum, and the complex, constructive, predictive and emotive experience of music inside my mind. While these representations are radically different, they both share a common axis – time.

Spectrograph of Senescence

With a painting or other visual art form we can give ourselves the freedom to explore the experience for as long or as short a period of time as we choose. Our minds are free to interpret, emote and respond to the unfolding idea of the image at their own pace.

With a piece of music there is no such luxury. Of course we are able to listen over and over again, however the music itself has a distinctive form which is precisely defined by the period when it is being played.

Music exists as a form in time. Composition is sculpture.

III – Mid-Life Audit

“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” – Pozzo, Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett.

In the great scheme of things, Beckett nails it. At one level of description I am made up of a bunch of atoms, forged in The Big Bang 14 billion years ago. These atoms will live on long after I’m gone, forming new bonds with other atoms until the end of time. This current arrangement that I call my body, is but a momentary diversion.

My life, such as it is, is fundamentally meaningless.

But it doesn’t feel like it, Goddamn it.

I was born, and in 40 years time (statistically speaking) I’ll be dead. What happens in between those two points in time seems pretty important to me.

However, whatever of this life I have ahead is a modern luxury. Current life expectancies far outreach those of even the recent past. In the early 20th Century life expectancy was 31 years, Neolithic man was lucky to make 20. For contemporary western cultures this has now more than tripled. The period of life we now consider as mid-life to old age simply was not of concern until very recent history.

Les Ages de l'homme (The Ages of Man) Print made by D de Vosthem Date: 16thC (late)

When approaching this composition, my intention was both to explore the sounds of the immediate moment, of my direct physical activity and the notion of the underlying, unseen biological process that both keep me alive and keeps me dying. In the back of my mind I was considering this period of life I now occupy, from mid-life to old age, to understand what to expect from an aging body, where I have been, where I am now, and where it might end.

The form of the composition is in four parts reflecting this perspective. The first representing the childhood phase, followed by a section representing the surge through puberty then adulthood, and a final phase of stasis and decline.

I decided the composition should be built around a series of audio samples, predominantly recordings of my own body. Breathing, digesting, masticating – living.

In one sense, the piece may be considered as an acoustic mid-life audit.

So I built myself a stethoscope microphone and went listening to the sounds inside my own body.

The first thing I found was the beat of my heart.

IV – And the beat goes on

The sun is setting on the Neolithic landscape, our hominid forebears are gathered around the fire for warmth and protection. There are no words yet, but there is a community, bound together for survival.

Their world is structured in time by the external cycles of day and night, the changing of the seasons, the migration patterns of the animals they eat. Overlaid are the cycles of reproduction, of birth and death. Even the pre-linguistic brains of our ancestors could judge and predict these patterns. The notions of past, present and future were as yet unlabeled, but collectively used as abstract tools to plot out their lives.

This is the dawning of intentionality and the beginning of what we now call ‘consciousness’.

Someone picks up a stick and strikes it gently against a hollow log. A soft resonant thud vibrates the air and becomes a sound. He strikes again, stronger this time, to experience the sound, once more – an act of intentional creation. The thud reminds him of his beating heart, powerful and strong in his chest when chasing down the gazelle – absent in the bodies of the dead. He strikes the log again and again, matching the beat of his own heart, one by one the group look up, some join in, thumping the ground, or slapping their own bodies – the entire group understands…

scene from 2001: A Space Osyssey

Of course, we can never know whether this romanticized vision of the dawn of music is true, but it is generally held that music as we understand it probably emerged 40,000-70,000 years ago alongside other activities of ‘the cultural explosion’ (cave painting, jewellery etc) which leave an archeological record.

But to me music seems more fundamental than these other creative acts – painting or crafting require complex planning, preparation of materials and fine motor control – to make music one only needs ears a sense of timing.

To strike a drum repeatedly at a fixed interval requires complex neural timing circuitry, circuitry that also exists in other primates This suggests that even our earliest ancestors had the capacity to keep a beat – indeed we were perhaps drumming long before we were speaking.

Recognizing and responding to a regular pattern over time seems a simple task to us, and indeed we perform very well when the patterns are in the order of a few seconds long, but it breaks down for longer periods of time.

We have innate preferences for some forms of musical structure over others. For example it is no mere coincidence that our natural preference for is for tempos between 100bpm and 120bpm, which correspond to the heart rate of a dancing human.

The beating of the drum echos the beating of the heart.

Understanding the quanta of time is an essential survival skill. The ability to keep time in the same way as the other members of your group allows for coordinated hunting, for example.

Keeping time keeps you alive.

Communal rhythmic activities communicate a common sense of time keeping. By recognizing and mirroring the timing of another person we create a common landscape of time. Music can be seen, on one level, as a method of keeping our communal internal clocks in sync.

Music, as a communal activity of repetition and synchrony, gives structure to our personal and collective perception of time.

And with an understanding of time, comes understanding that our time is a finite resource, bounded by the duration of our lives.

V – Do you hear what I hear?

“What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” – Wittgenstein, Tractatus 1922

Aldous Huxley

When Wittgenstein investigated the philosophy of language, he concluded that the symbols and meaning of language exist solely ‘in public’, a phenomenon of a shared culture. Music similarly exists solely in the public realm, shared and understood by individuals through the medium of culture. However music is not language – in evolutionary terms, it pre-dates language.

Music communicates emotional states that live beyond verbal description, something deeper.

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music” – Aldous Huxley

We should rightly understand music as a cultural element able to communicate states of being which exist beyond the symbolic, rational world of language. Music tells us something about ourselves that language alone cannot.

Cognitive scientists call it ‘emotional intelligence’. Musicians call it ‘soul’.

Music can even cut through some language and cognitive impediments. Stutterers often find they can sing with fluidity. Tourettes sufferers are able to suppress their tics when singing.

Though it shares the same sensory modalities as language, music is not an offshoot of language, it exists as an orthogonal plane of conscious experience and expression.

VI – Senesense

Biologically speaking, ageing is determined by the rate of cell death (senescence), in part determined by the shortening of genes called telomeres, which are truncated with each replication, eventually resulting in mutation and malfunction of the cells. In humans this begins almost directly after sexual maturity – from approximately 19 years of age.

I’ve been in biological decline for over half my life.

Every second of every day cells are being replicated and destroyed. A process that will occur trillions of times in our lifetimes.

When DNA is replicated in the nucleus of a cell, the double helix is split in two, and each strand copied in an almost flawless manner (making less than one mistake for every 10 million nucleotides added)

However, with each replication comes a slight trimming of the sequence.

At the end of each strand of DNA there is a sequence of repeating code – a buffer, which is shortened every time replication occurs. When this runs out, the important code gets compromised, until the cell can no longer replicate.

I once wrote some Concreter Poetry about it.

I wanted to communicate this notion in the composition. The replication, the repetition, the eventual errors that precede collapse.

The melody of the piece is built around a number of repeating piano patterns, which replicate over differing periods of time, interacting and reacting.

These patterns return in the final phase of the composition, fractured and repeated – broken and senescent.

VII – Making music

The music I make music exists in two distinct places, the performance and the (often solitary) composition. This piece forced me to literally look (listen) inside myself to find the elements – to investigate the constituent parts of myself, the music making machine.

Making electronic music is like acoustic Lego. Pieces and colours interlock, or don’t, coalesce or confound. Some musicians are able to sit at the piano and write a song – it’s never been like that for me. Often the seed will come from a found sound or a distorted sample. Interlocking pieces are crafted and applied, manipulated and rejected until a satisfying whole emerges.

It’s very far removed from the direct physical action of ‘playing’ an instrument – my fingers touched a piano briefly, but the majority of the time was spent sampling, shaping, clicking and sequencing – a process which seems a million miles from the Neolithic log thumping described above.

But the result now exists in a way that prehistoric music does not – in digital physical form, to be replicated and deleted, listened to and ignored as a defined acoustic artefact. Perhaps even ready to be performed by an mp3 decoder and heard by human ears as yet unborn.

Filed by shardcore at 4:30 pm under music,words
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My friend JMR Higgs has written a book, an excellent book in fact, called KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money, concerning the influence of Robert Anton Wilson on the British rave band The KLF.

listen

The book takes in the themes of Discordianism and the works of Robert Anton Wilson as a way of explaining why the KLF, as The K Foundation burnt a million quid in 1994.

I suggested to John that we could create an audio version of the book, read by a speech synthesiser, and release it in a limited form. However nothing digital is ever really limited these days, so we decided against simple downloadable file.

One of the key themes of the book is time, the notion of events being related to each other in time and space. For this reason, we decided that this should occur not as a time-shiftable podcast, but something which passes through time, never to be repeated.

So I built an algorithmic radio station.

Radio Eris is made up of a corpus of audio samples from many sources including: The KLF, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Moore, Ivor Cutler, Dr Who, SubGenius and discussions of Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory.

The background ambient sounds are generated from KLF tracks, stretched to 8x their normal speed.

The order of the programming is controlled by the Eris of the modern age, the pseudo random number generator. The station switches semi-randomly between the samples, stopping at set times during the day to read out a section of the book.

The radio station is now online, and will remain online until midnight on the 7th December 2012, when it will cease broadcasting forever.

Filed by shardcore at 5:41 pm under audio,generative text
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These two gentlemen are algo-politicians.

Their faces, and the words they speak are a blend of David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband. The text is generated from utterences made by the three Party Leaders in the House of Commons, harvested from Hansard via the wonderful TheyWorkForYou.com API

As our politicians become interchangeable puppets of spin, one can imagine a near future where they are replaced by generative robot systems.

Would anyone notice the difference?

Click on the image below to see them in action.

Filed by shardcore at 6:10 pm under generative text
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Hip Hop is sometimes described as ‘the word from the street’. However, we tend to spend most of our time digesting broadcast news as our source of global current affairs – a considerably more sedate form.

I wondered whether the two could be combined – so I built a machine to Rap the BBC News.

The system periodically scrapes the text of the top 20 news stories from the BBC News website, this text is broken down into phrases and analysed for syllabic and rhyming structure. Raps are then written automatically and spoken by a speech synthesiser, over breakbeats and supportive backing vocals.

New Raps at 9am, 1pm, 5pm and 10pm.

UPDATE 25/11/12
I’ve moved the News Raps to a tumblr account:
http://rapthenews.tumblr.com/

Filed by shardcore at 2:16 pm under generative text,music
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