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An examination of how visualization has transformed the way humans perceive and understand their world uses a computer to gain insights into the origins of human creativity. Original.
Imagination is highly valued and sought-after, yet elusive and ill-defined. Definitions range from narrowly cognitive accounts to those which endow imagination with world-making powers. Imagination underpins our ability to speculate about the future and to re-experience the past. The everyday functioning of society relies on being able to imagine the perspectives of others; and our sense of who we are depends on the stories our imaginations create. Our soaring imaginations have taken us to the moon and allowed Einstein to race a light beam. Unsurprisingly, imagination underlies every aspect of human-computer interaction, from the earliest conceptual sketches, through the realistic possibilities portrayed variously in well-known tools as scenarios and storyboards, through to the wilder shores of design fictions. Yet, curiously, imagination is very rarely addressed directly in the design and HCI literature (and is wholly missing from virtual reality). This book addresses this gap in our accounts of how we imagine, conceptualise, design and use digital technologies. Drawing on many years of practical and academic experience in human computer-interaction, together with a wide range of material from psychology, design, cognitive science and HCI, seasoned with a little philosophy and anthropology, Imagination + Technology first considers imagination itself and the principal farthings of a new account. Later chapters discuss the role of imagination in the design, aesthetics, use and experience of digital technologies before the concluding chapter focusses on the provocative nature of imagination. The book will be stimulating reading for anyone working in the field of interactive technology and related areas, whether academics, students or practitioners.
This interdisciplinary volume introduces new theories and ideas on creativity from the perspectives of science and art. Featuring contributions from leading researchers, theorists and artists working in artificial intelligence, generative art, creative computing, music composition, and cybernetics, the book examines the relationship between computation and creativity from both analytic and practical perspectives. Each contributor describes innovative new ways creativity can be understood through, and inspired by, computers. The book tackles critical philosophical questions and discusses the major issues raised by computational creativity, including: whether a computer can exhibit creativity independently of its creator; what kinds of creativity are possible in light of our knowledge from computational simulation, artificial intelligence, evolutionary theory and information theory; and whether we can begin to automate the evaluation of aesthetics and creativity in silico. These important, often controversial questions are contextualised by current thinking in computational creative arts practice. Leading artistic practitioners discuss their approaches to working creatively with computational systems in a diverse array of media, including music, sound art, visual art, and interactivity. The volume also includes a comprehensive review of computational aesthetic evaluation and judgement research, alongside discussion and insights from pioneering artists working with computation as a creative medium over the last fifty years. A distinguishing feature of this volume is that it explains and grounds new theoretical ideas on creativity through practical applications and creative practice. Computers and Creativity will appeal to theorists, researchers in artificial intelligence, generative and evolutionary computing, practicing artists and musicians, students and any reader generally interested in understanding how computers can impact upon creativity. It bridges concepts from computer science, psychology, neuroscience, visual art, music and philosophy in an accessible way, illustrating how computers are fundamentally changing what we can imagine and create, and how we might shape the creativity of the future. Computers and Creativity will appeal to theorists, researchers in artificial intelligence, generative and evolutionary computing, practicing artists and musicians, students and any reader generally interested in understanding how computers can impact upon creativity. It bridges concepts from computer science, psychology, neuroscience, visual art, music and philosophy in an accessible way, illustrating how computers are fundamentally changing what we can imagine and create, and how we might shape the creativity of the future.
Computers and Creativity, Revised Edition explores the many ways people use computers to create software, invent new machines, and express themselves through words, music, graphic art, and multimedia. This updated, full-color resource also explains how computers enable people to collaborate over space and time on a scale never before possible without the use of professional intermediaries. Additionally, it examines the ways in which computer-enabled creativity causes us to rethink copyright and patent law, providing legal protection for the creative works of both artists and inventors. Chapters include: Writing: Farewell to Pen and Paper Music: Personal Computer as Piano Video: Recording, Editing, and Creating Special Effects Programming: How Software Is Created Inventing: Using Computers to Drive Innovation Collaboration: Bringing People Together Over the Internet Disintermediation: Cutting Out the Middleman Intellectual Property: Protecting Creativity in the Digital World.
The gap between theoretical ideas and messy reality, as seen in Neal Stephenson, Adam Smith, and Star Trek. We depend on—we believe in—algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations—the marriage vow, the shaman's curse—do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm—in practical terms, “a method for solving a problem”—has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking. Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things. If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of “algorithmic reading” and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.
Computer simulations help advance climatology, astrophysics, and other scientific disciplines. They are also at the crux of several high-profile cases of science in the news. How do simulation scientists, with little or no direct observations, make decisions about what to represent? What is the nature of simulated evidence, and how do we evaluate its strength? Aimee Kendall Roundtree suggests answers in Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination. She interprets simulations in the sciences by uncovering the argumentative strategies that underpin the production and dissemination of simulated findings. She also explains how subjective and social influences do not diminish simulations’ virtue or power to represent the real thing. Along the way, Roundtree situates computer simulations within the scientific imagination alongside paradoxes, thought experiments, and metaphors. A cogent rhetorical analysis, Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination engages scholars of the rhetoric of science, technology, and new and digital media, but it is also accessible to the general public interested in debates over hurricane preparedness and climate change.
Computers, Internet, and Society is a six-volume set that examines the field of computer technology and how its extraordinary development has affected the ways in which the global environment communicates and interacts. The paradox of today's computer technology is that it is both ubiquitous and invisible. The books in this set, designed to complement science curricula, make this technology "visible," so that it can be examined and provide students with the ability to think critically and responsibly about the role it plays in their daily lives. Computers and Creativity explores the ways in which people use computers to express themselves through words, music, graphic art, and multimedia; create software; and invent new machines. The book illustrates how computers enable people to collaborate not only over space and time on a scale never before possible but also without using professional intermediaries. Computers and Creativity concludes with overviews of the challenges that computers and the Internet pose for intellectual property law and the proposals that the world's leading experts have put forward to amend relevant legal statutes for the computer age. The volume also includes information on computer-generated music eBay, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube editing and sharing digital photography evolution of the typewriter and word processor intellectual property laws Internet and collaboration programming and software publishing and news media The book contains more than 30 color photographs and four-color line illustrations, sidebars, a chronology, a glossary, a detailed list of print and Internet resources, and an index. Computers, Internet, and Society is essential for high school students, teachers, and general readers who wish to learn about the present and future impact of computer technology on the world around them. Book jacket.
Someday computers will be artists. They'll be able to write amusing and original stories, invent and play games of unsurpassed complexity and inventiveness, tell jokes and suffer writer's block. But these things will require computers that can both achieve artistic goals and be creative. Both capabilities are far from accomplished. This book presents a theory of creativity that addresses some of the many hard problems which must be solved to build a creative computer. It also presents an exploration of the kinds of goals and plans needed to write simple short stories. These theories have been implemented in a computer program called MINSTREL which tells stories about King Arthur and his knights. While far from being the silicon author of the future, MINSTREL does illuminate many of the interesting and difficult issues involved in constructing a creative computer. The results presented here should be of interest to at least three different groups of people. Artificial intelligence researchers should find this work an interesting application of symbolic AI to the problems of story-telling and creativity. Psychologists interested in creativity and imagination should benefit from the attempt to build a detailed, explicit model of the creative process. Finally, authors and others interested in how people write should find MINSTREL's model of the author-level writing process thought-provoking.
"Creative computing covers the interdisciplinary area at the cross-over of the creative arts and computing. Issues of creativity include knowledge discovery. Computers have also had a reflective impact in popularizing and disseminating mathematical insights that would be other-wise limited to a small community of scholars. For instance, although Poincare and Hadamard almost 100 years before had a truly modern considerate of chaos and sensitive dependence on initial conditions, it wasn't until the prevalent availability of computers permitted easy numerical simulations that these ideas led to a wholesale shift in our view of dynamical systems, deterministic chaos, and the loss of predictability. It goes without saying that computers are invaluable tools in carrying out research. Computers have always been important in helping to formulate hypotheses and check theoretical calculationseven when a computer was a person. There is a general harmony that computers can transform and inspire human creativity in considerably different ways than any other artificial or human made device. The range of possibilities is obvious in this volume, which contains many exciting efforts describing the computers use in developing art practices, music composition and performance. This Books brings a broad range of views on computers and creativity. It proposes a number of questions that we think are important for future research in relation to computers and creativity. It shows how computers can enhance human creativity; whether computer art can ever be properly valued; what computing can tell us about creativity; and how creativity and computing can be brought together in learning. The contributed chapters are written by leading researchers, theorists and artists working in artificial intelligence, generative art, creative computing, and cybernetics, the book examines the relationship between computation and creativity from both analytic and practical perspectives. The book will appeal to students, researchers in artificial intelligence practicing artists and musicians, and any reader generally interested in understanding how computers can impact upon creativity. "