Today, we will have a workshop with the MishMash work package leaders, and for that I thought it would be useful to run a new version of the RITMO coauthorship exercise. The goal is to make contribution expectations explicit early, and to practice making fair decisions when contributions differ in type, timing, and visibility. Since MishMash embraces both artistic and scientific research and development, this version is designed for teams working across arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, design, and engineering. ...
I started up Oslo Mobile Orchestra (OMO) in 2009 (originally named Oslo iPhone Ensemble), expanding on Oslo Laptop Orchestra. This was part of teaching courses in sound and music programming at the University of Oslo. We used some ready-made mobile phone apps, including Brian Eno’s Bloom, but also programmed some patches in Pure Data, which we wrapped in MobMuPlat. Now, with the support of Cursor, I have ported a bunch of the old patches to web apps. In this blog post, I explain the process. ...
I participated in the event WISE x HOUSE OF NORDIC VISIONS at the Nordic Embassies in Berlin yesterday. During the opening speech, Philipp Grefer mentioned various numbers for the size of the cultural and creative industries in Europe. His argument was tht the cultural and creativ industries are often treated as a “soft” policy area. However, economically speaking, they are not soft at all. Here is a blog post summarizing some numbers. ...
Earlier today, I wrote about AI and photography based on an interesting panel conversation at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo. During the Q&A session, a musician in the audience said that he felt that the AI systems he had tried behaved so properly and asked if an AI can be “drunk” and whether we could “pour some alcohol into the machine” to make it a little freer and less “stiff” in its creative output. That is a very interesting question, hence this little reflection. ...
Today, I took part in an interesting panel conversation at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo in connection with the exhibition What We Call Real by Camila Urrego. This was the first time they had invited a photographer to exhibit works explicitly made “with AI,” and I was invited to contribute thoughts on the potential of AI for creative practice (in this case, photography). As MishMash picks up speed, I receive many requests for talks and panels on AI and creativity, and I try to say yes when I can make it. I have found this to be an excellent way to think about various AI use cases outside my core focus areas and to meet interesting people. Here are some thoughts based on my preparatory notes and reflections after the event. ...
Earlier today, I attended a lecture by Antonio Somaini at the University of Oslo’s seminar series on aesthetics. There were many interesting things in the lecture, which apparently was based on the manuscript of a forthcoming article. Here, I will focus on one thing that caused my interest: the thinking of latent spaces as an “anarchive”. Latent spaces A latent space is a mathematical representation used in machine learning where complex data (like images, text, or sound) is mapped into a lower-dimensional coordinate system so that similar items are positioned closer together. Instead of storing explicit labels or complete files, models encode underlying features and relationships, enabling interpolation, clustering, and the generation of new outputs by moving through that space. ...
Back in 2012, I published what has become my (by far) most-read blog post: Disciplinarities: intra, cross, multi, inter, trans. There, I introduced a figure based on a combination of Stember’s textual description and Zeigler’s sketch. Making a vector version I published the figure “properly” in my book Sound Actions, and, as described in this blog post), made a vector version (PDF) and source file (ODG) available on GitHub with a CC-BY license. Making a SVG version Recently, I have tried using AI tools to create SVG versions of various illustrations. This has worked remarkably well, including “SVG’ing” the MishMash emblem and the MishMash Cube. One of the cool things about this is that it opens for creative things, like making the MishMash bubbles blink. ...
I am at the Movement Computing Conference (MOCO) in Montpellier and have been discussing motion capture and analysis all day. Someone asked about my work on video visualisation, and this reminded me about a long wish for creating a browser-based visualiser. I have been developing video visualisation tools for more than two decades. In the beginning, I did it with Max/MSP/Jitter, then moved on to Matlab, and later Python. Until recently, web technologies were not advanced enough, and hardware was not powerful enough to do anything in the browser in real time. And, I didn’t have the programming skills to make it work. Now, with the help of CoPilot, I have finally made it happen: VideoViz is here! ...
After concluding that it is not viable to use institutional person pages to build a “Who’s Who” directory for MishMash, I yesterday found that NVA can be a good solution. However, it would only cover affiliated (Norwegian) researchers, which may be too restrictive for MishMash, where we also want to list non-academic, non-affiliated, and international researchers. Then, ORCID may be a better solution. This is an international registry where researchers can register themselves (check my ORCID profile). However, what information is available there and how can it be retrieved? ...
I have seen that it is possible to build a complete CV from NVA data, the Norwegian research registry. As part of my quest to collect data of researchers connected to MishMash, I am looking for the best data source(s). Starting with a quick check of my own personal page at UiO, showed that institutional person pages are not the right solution. But what about NVA? Perhaps that is a viable solution? ...