Creative Computing: transdisciplinarity, illogicality and ’Pataphysics.

Creative Computing is a transdisciplinary field that combines tacit and explicit knowledge in order to improve human creativity. Its processes are intentionally divergent and convoluted, resulting from encounters between the objective precisions of computer systems and the subjective ambiguities of human beings. Hugill considers some specific examples of creative attempts to misuse digital technologies in both music and computing. The common thread is ’Pataphysics, a set of ideas which have grown steadily from their inception in the energetic mind of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) to become a prevalent and energetic force in both science and art today. Professor Hugill will consequently discuss such key ideas as creativity, style, logic, flow, exceptions, contradictions, and the pataphysical clinamen.

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Crea%ve development of a compu%ng product refers to the way in which people work inthe process of so9ware development. This focus on people enables the deployment ofcrea%ve methods. In order to develop so9ware crea%vely, people focus on RequirementsEngineering, So9ware Design, So9ware Construc%on, So9ware Tes%ng and So9wareMaintenance (SWEBOK).

Development of a Crea%ve Compu%ng product, by contrast, focuses upon the productitself. The aim is to improve crea%vity and expressiveness in the so9ware itself. So9wareQuality is therefore the key indicator of this type.

The development of a compu%ng environment to support crea%vity requires a focuson So9ware Configura%on Management, So9ware Engineering Management, So9wareEngineering Process and So9ware Engineering Tools and Methods. The overall goal is tocreate a general purpose plaOorm for compu%ng products

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“Transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge.” (Nicolescu2002, 44).

Transdisciplinarity tends towards an active engagement and transformative praxis with constructive problem solving. It is sometimes called ‘Mode 2 knowledge’ (Gibbons, Nowotny et al)

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Structural Challenges, such as disciplinary and Faculty boundaries.

Cultural Challenges, such as differing research methodologies.

Linguistic Challenges, such as semantics and nomenclature.

Financial Challenges – finding funding for cross-disciplinary research is especially difficult.

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Quality (“aren’t you lowering the quality of what you are doing?”)

Transgression (especially between science and society)

Accountability (who is responsible for transdisciplinary research?)

Methodologies (which methods to use and how to mix methods)

Warning: just because it is transdisciplinary does not necessarily mean it is good!

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Crea%vity is a famously difficult term to define, despite the large amount of research from many different disciplinary perspec%ves. The commonly encountered defini%ons which stress novelty, surprise and usefulness o>en raise as many ques%ons as they answer (Boden 2004); Kaufman & Sternberg 2010); Runco & Jaeger 2012; Weisberg 2015). What is novel to one person may not be so novel to another, as Margaret Boden seems to indicate with her division of ‘P-crea%vity’ (short for psychological crea%vity) as the personal kind of crea%vity that is novel in respect to the individual mind and ‘H-crea%vity’ (short for historical crea%vity) as fundamentally novel in respect to the whole of human history (Boden 2004).

Usefulness seems to be allied to a poli%cal concept of crea%ve industry. If a crea%ve act produces something useful, so the argument goes, then it must be valuable. If it has value, then crea%vity itself shares that value and should be encouraged and rewarded. This argument is agreeably jus%fying to those of us who rou%nely work in crea%ve fields, but it does gloss over the reality that much crea%vity is useless, at least in the sense that it is unproduc%ve. The majority of crea%ve work of both ar%sts and scien%sts is discarded as poor quality. The amount of crea%vity in such work is roughly the same as work which is more successful, or some%mes a liZle more or a liZle less. In the end, it is not the crea.vity which makes it useful.

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The purpose of creative computing is to get computers to help humans be more creative. My hypothesis is that to do so we need to embed creativity in the computer systems themselves. I do believe that creativity can be taught. Indeed, I have spent a great deal of my career doing exactly that. But teaching it is not at all straightforward. I generally observe that people are far more creative than they realise, but that convergent thinking (constrained by practicality) usually wins out over divergent thinking (unconcerned by practicality). To be creative requires a mix of these two, with a strong sense of timing. There has to be sufficient divergence to entertain unlikely possibilities, but sufficient convergence to know when and how these may become a reality. To my mind, this is a matter of bringing tacit knowledge into the procedural domain. And that is a statement that requires an explanation.

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What is the knowledge that is encoded by, for example, a musician when playing their instrument? And if it is non-verbal, how may it be expressed?

There are several commonly agreed ways of classifying knowledge (Chisholm 1989). A full discussion of this rather large area of epistemological theory is beyond the scope of this paper, but the classifications can be simplified into three broad knowledge types: propositional; procedural; and tacit. Propositional knowledge is, broadly speaking, facts, such as the declarative statements “2 + 2 = 4”, and “Napoleon was exiled to Elba”. Of course, such propositions may be true or false, but the nature of the knowledge is the same in either case. Indeed, the falsifiability of propositional knowledge is a defining aspect of its status as knowledge (Klein 1971; Ichikawa & Steup 2001; Adams 2009).Procedural knowledge may be summarised as the “how to” knowledge that accompanies the performance of some task (Nozick 1981; Pollock 1986; Fantl 2009). Computer algorithms are one example of such knowledge, articulating the conditional steps by which a given result may be accomplished. The artistic process is another, involving the materials, conditions and steps necessary to deliver an artistic outcome. This kind of knowledge is a staple of cognitive psychology and neuroscience, as we try to understand the ways in which people engage in such processes. Much recent debate about the acceptability of different types of knowledge in academia has focused on this topic. Assessment by coursework rather than final examination carries an implicit assumption that procedural knowledge has

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a value that is at least equivalent to that of propositional knowledge.

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“Tacit knowledge” was first defined by Mike Polanyi, most notably in his book The Tacit Dimension (1958), in which he famously declared “we know more than we can tell”. Tacit knowledge is the knowledge we have without understanding how we have it, such as the ability to recognise a face or ride a bicycle (Fodor 1968). Tacit knowledge has a number of characteristics that distinguish it from the other two forms of knowledge. It is acquired through experience rather than conscious study. It is subjective, varying from person to person. It cannot be codified and is always transferred in an intuitive way. Tacit knowledge is sometimes seen as the origin of creativity, perhaps most enthusiastically in the field of Knowledge Management, where it provides organisations with a competitive advantage through innovation. In their book, Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation, Nonaka et al argue that “recognizing the value of tacit knowledge and figuring out how to use it is the key challenge in a knowledge-creating company” (von Krogh, Ichijo & Nonaka 2000, 7).

Universities are rather less proactive in recognising the value of tacit knowledge. While always evident in the students, it has been viewed as inherently beyond the fair implementation of objective standards. This becomes an acute problem in creative disciplines such as the arts, where tacit knowledge is an important part of the origination and production of work. Academics working in these fields have perforce become skilled at harnessing tacit knowledge in the pursuit of more procedural and propositional goals. They are thus, in effect, teaching creativity. Yet the question of

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the question of tacit knowledge itself is only indirectly addressed. To acknowledge its importance immediately throws up problems of fairness and prejudice, since it would appear, in this context, that one individual’s tacit knowledge is better than another’s.

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We can divide knowledge into three main categories. Propositional knowledge is ‘facts’ – commonly agreed certainties. Procedural knowledge concerns processes. The third category was identified by Mike Polanyi in the 1960s as “tacit knowledge”. This is the knowledge that we have without knowing how or why we have it. As Polanyi famously said: “we know more than we can tell”.

Consider the Great British Bake Off. 10 people are given the same ingredients, the same recipe, the same time, the same conditions. They produce ten different cakes. Each cake is a proposition. The process by which they created the cake is procedural. But the differences in quality and style – these are the evidence of tacit knowledge. Perhaps the individuals learned something from their family background. Perhaps they read something, or saw someone baking in a way that registered. Or perhaps something else is going on. At any rate, it is the translation of the tacit knowledge into the process that delivers the proposition.

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In her paper “The Morphophonetic Universe of Ubu”, Linda Klieger Stillman discusses the phonetic articulation of the morpheme pata, observing that “all phonological criteria point to the opposition between the consonants /p/ and /t/ and the vowel /a/”. Citing Jakobson and Halle, she asserts that “these oppositions are fundamental to phonemic patterning and stratification” because “ordinary child language begins, and the aphasic dissolution preceding its complete loss ends with what psychopathologists have termed the “labial stage” (Jakobson and Halle 1956, 438). She concludes: “it is axiomatic that pata is the most fundamental, universal speech act, the segmentation of the primary phonemic triangle”: a

p t (Klieger Stillman 1977, 593)

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Pataphysics is the science of the particular, rather than the general. In other words, the staple of conventional science - the repeatable experiment - is inadmissible in pataphysics. Each configuration of creative matter is unique and not just to the individual but also to an instant. It is nevertheless the result of accumulated wisdom, for even if we cannot explain our decisions, that does not necessarily mean that they come from nowhere. The animal drinking at the waterhole, jumping up in reaction to a menacing sound or smell, does so because of the embodied knowledge of collective experience over many millennia. The musician inflects a particular phrase in a certain way based on their knowledge and experience (both verbal and non-verbal) which shapes a performative utterance that seems to convey meaning and, to an aesthetician, an interpretation.

These issues arise repeatedly in the borderlands between Art and Science. As we move from one discipline into another, we often find ourselves confronted by contradictions and exceptions whose challenges impact upon our creativity. A scientific understanding of these will prepare us better to realise creativity. Since pataphysics is the science of the laws governing contradictions and exceptions it will provide a fertile ground for this endeavour.

The word “pataphysics” was coined in the early to mid 1880s by a group of schoolboys in Rennes, a city in the east of Brittany in northwestern France, who tried to find ever more inventive ways of mocking their science teacher. M. Félix-Frédéric

Hébert was a classic target for schoolboy humour, being fat, ineffectual, and rather ridiculous. The leader of the group, Alfred Jarry, would mercilessly expose Hébert’s weaknesses by asking increasingly difficult questions until he was utterly flummoxed. A classmate, Henri Hertz, recalled: “[…] there was the distinct feeling that his sarcasm went beyond the general unruliness, that something deep down inside him was taking part in this battle, something different, that his tactics arose from some powerful impulse” (Beaumont 1984, 14).

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Alfred Jarry absorbed vast quantities of both art and science in his progress towards ‘pataphysics. He mixed them with personal life experiences and alcoholic delirium to produce the stream of literature that was his sole purpose for existence. The sciences included mathematics, in which he was certainly expert, and physics of course, as well as more arcane sciences such as alchemy. The art included everything from Breton folk tales to avant-garde Symbolist writing and the plays of Ibsen, the painting of Gauguin and the Nabis group, and the music of Claude Terrasse and others. In literature, Rabelais was foundational, Lautréamont was inspirational, and he knew most of the leading writers of the day, including Rachilde, Mallarmé and Valéry. He had a good knowledge both of classical philosophy and more modern philosophy, absorbing Nietzsche and studying with Henri Bergson in Paris.

The symbol of pataphysics is the spiral or gidouille that decorates the distended belly of King Ubu, a vortex that simultaneously sucks you in and spins you out, whether forwards or backwards through time. Ubu’s “strumpot” over-inflates to accommodate both the physical and metaphysical worlds, while the scientific imagination of Doctor Faustroll unpicks logic through a series of accidental swerves, revealing collisions, unexpected alignments, vigorous contradictions and exceptional particularities. Seen through the opposing lines of the gidouille our contemporary distinctions between Art and Science become wafer thin. The poetry of mathematics is revealed in modern physics, where light is both a particle and a wave, where objects exist in more than one place at a time, and where the universe is predominantly made of ‘dark matter’,

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something that cannot be observed or detected. Jarry’s mathematical definition of God as “the tangential point between zero and infinity” becomes more than just a joke and Dr Faustroll’s epistolary critiques of the “luminiferous aether” of Lord Kelvin are strangely prescient (Jarry 1998, 100-105).

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I titled my book on the subject ‘Pataphysics: A Useless Guide, not just because of its many and evident shortcomings as a book on pataphysics, but also because of its impossibility as a concept. There can be no useful guide to a science of exceptions and contradictions other than one which is exceptional and contradictory. It is this sense of perpetual elusiveness which provides both the intrigue and the energy and hence the stimulus to creativity that pataphysics still represents.

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The apostrophe that precedes the word pataphysics was used only once by Jarry, in the definition quoted above, “so as to avoid an obvious pun”. It remains unclear exactly the pun might be, and debate still rages about the “correct” usage of the apostrophe. Some argue that it should only be used when referring directly to Jarry’sown ‘pataphysics, hence its omission here. Pataphysics without the apostrophe, then, becomes the general pataphysics experienced and encountered by the rest of us, whether knowingly or unknowingly.Several lines of evolution may be traced from Jarry through to the present day (Hugill 2012). These lines are not just historical but also geographical, as pataphysics has made its way from France into the wider world. There are now pataphysicalorganisations in China, Mongolia and Japan, in the USA, Canada, and Latin America, in Australia, Indonesia and across Europe. My book was even published in Russian earlier this year. This is a global phenomenon, carried in part within academic institutions (where it remains a persistent secret) and in part by groups of non-academics. Any evolutionary taxonomy of pataphysics is inevitably provisional and incomplete, but we may observe two complementary tendencies: an Ubuesquetradition of extravagant incarnation and a Faustrollian tradition of scientific scholarship.

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The atomic units of creativity are formed somewhere in this pre-verbal and illogical chaos. Just like the “atoms” of the pre-Socratic philosophers, they are imaginary solutions. What evidence we have for their existence is not the atoms themselves but rather their materialisations into concrete forms. They materialise through the processes of creative decision-making and problem-solving with which everyone is familiar. Some people may call this emergence “spiritual”, while others eschew such loaded terminology. Either way, the results of the combinations of these immaterial and imaginary units seem to encode some kind of knowledge which provides both energy and direction, giving rise to notions of intuition ex post facto.

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Example: There is no absolute truth. (the statement itself seems to be an absolute truth)

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With Jim Hendler I proposed the Syzygy Surfer, a new kind of search engine which takes you not where you thought you wanted to go, but somewhere you didn’t expect to go but are pleased you have reached when you get there! The results are not random but linked poetically. We will see some examples of applications of this technology later.

Jarry said: pataphysics is to metaphysics as metaphysics is to physics.

So I say: patadata is to metadata as metadata is to data.

The Syzygy Surfer benefits from the ambiguities thrown up by the process of metadata creation, precisely those human ‘shortcomings’ identified by Cory Doctorow (2001) in his ‘Metacrap’ thesis: lying, laziness, error, subjectivity, plurality, and so on.

We insert our pataphysical declensions into the metadata harvest in a way that enriches creative interaction, rather than just delivering a series of obvious mistakes.

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Consider these definitions of animals in a Chinese encyclopedia described by Jorge Luis Borges in his story ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’. Making a categorisation like Borges’ cannot be done via statistical regularity nor can it be achieved using traditional categorical knowledge. We need something that can permute knowledge about the regularities in the world, but in a not-totally-random way. We must exploit connections among concepts in a new way so as to generate relations that seem interesting, but unusual.

The Syzygy Surfer expands Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia by exploiting the evocative relations that the categories depend on.

Stating that these relationships exist is not a problem, but defining the features of them unambiguously would be arbitrarily hard. The obviously creative categorisation of Borges is difficult, if not impossible, to directly build in such a way that a web system, when reasoning using these, could do its job.

But I would argue that this very dichotomy can be used to enable the sort of creative encounter on the web that we are looking for. The trick is to find precise, unambiguous algorithms that the computer can apply to the growing metadata-based knowledge on the web, but which when realised can enable a human to envision the existence of relationships that the machine would not be able to represent or use directly. This behaviour, properly done, should enable the machine to produce a non-random encounter that the human may see as either logical or surprising or both, but which will let the human conceptualise the inherent ambiguity that the machine is incapable of directly creating.

This has significant implications for the emerging technology of the Semantic Web, which creates machine-readable annotations that can be used in defining relationships between items on the web.

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Nietzsche: “pure logic is the impossibility that grounds science”How may a computer think illogically?Uboolean Logic in PRASCAL

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A silence is a duration containing no intentional sound.

•An intentional sound is that sound which is intended to interrupt a silence.

•Unintentional sounds

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may have local intentionality but are made without awareness of the silence.

A silence in a forest may include the singing of birds who make intentional sound but without awareness of the silence.

Two lovers falling silent as they gaze into one another’s eyes in a crowded restaurant sustain their mutual silence despite the many unintentional sounds around them until they are interrupted (perhaps by a waiter bringing a menu).

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•A person disrespectfully calling out as a rugby union player tees up a kick at goal intends to disrupt the silence.

The extent to which an interruption successfully breaks a silence is a matter of common agreement. In some instances, a silence is deemed to have continued despite an attempted interruption. In this case, the intentional sound becomes absorbed into the silence.

•A duration may be

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specified or unspecified, but silence will always have a duration.

The limits of the duration of a silence are set by the intrusion of intentional sound.A duration may be measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, lifetimes, or eternities.

Silences may be real or ideal.

A real silence is an experience which can be either recorded or unrecorded.A recorded silence is not the same silence as that which was experienced, but is rather a new, mediated silence.Recorded silences have a Recording Type, which refers to the conditions under which the recording was made.

An Accidental Recording is an unintended silence on a recording.An Ambient Recording is a silence in a given space.A Concert Recording is a silence in a musical concert.A Field Recording is a silence recorded in a specified location.A Personal Recording is a silence recorded by an individual for

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private use.A Studio Recording is a controlled silence recorded in a studio situation.

An unrecorded silence is an actual experience that may be represented in any medium other than recorded sound or may not be represented at all.The typology of unrecorded silences is: Image; Music; Verbal; Written; or Unrepresented.

Image Types of unrecorded silence represents silence in an image, that may be: a movie; a painting; a photograph; a sculpture; any other image.Music Types of unrecorded silence include both silent pieces of music and music that otherwise attempts to represent silence. They may be either composition or performance.Verbal Types of unrecorded silence represent the silence through spoken words.Written Types of unrecorded silence may be either poetry or prose.Unrepresented Types of unrecorded silence are silences that are experienced but not represented in any way. This type exists but is necessarily void.

An ideal silence can only be evoked, but not experienced.An ideal silence is the one described by the dictionary definition of silence as: “a complete absence of sound” (OED, 2017).

The silence in a vacuum is ideal, because it cannot not be experienced by a human being, but only evoked.The “silence of the grave” is similarly ideal, because it cannot be experienced but only evoked.

The evocations of ideal silence are: Gestural; Imagistic; Sonic; Verbal; Written; Unclassified.

A Gestural Evocation conveys the ideal silence through gesture.An Imagistic Evocation conveys an ideal silence through image.A Sonic Evocation conveys the ideal silence through sound.A Verbal Evocation conveys the ideal silence through spoken words.

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A Written Evocation conveys the ideal silence through written words.An Unclassified Evocation uses some other means than gesture, image, sound, or words (written or spoken) to convey the ideal silence.

Real silence is full of sound

Since “a complete absence of sound” (OED) is an ideal condition, there will always be some sound in a real silence. Even an anechoic chamber reveals the involuntary sounds of the human body that enters (Cage 1952). One purpose of an ontology of silence is therefore to encourage greater awareness of the sounds that characterise real silence.Another purpose is for silence to act as a buffer between people and the world around them.Where ideal silence is concerned, the purpose of an ontology of silence is to show to what extent it may be imaginary.

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The effect of a silence is defined by its frame (that which surrounds the silence in time and/or space).

Absolute Silence is the effect of a total absence of sound in a period of time or a given space.Electronic Silence is the effect of an absence of signal in an electronic medium.Environmental Silence is the effect of silence in an environment.

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A Hush is the effect of a silence that is collectively willed.A Silent Interlude is the effect of a silence that occurs during some event.An Outer Silence is the effect of a silence manifested by an individual or group.A Silent Postlude is the effect of a silence that follows some event.A Silent Prelude is the effect of a silence that precedes some event.Quiet is the effect emanating from a silent source. Radio Silence is the effect of no signal from a broadcast medium or a normally communicative group.Ritual Silence is effect of a silence that forms part of some ritual.A Still Silence is the effect of stillness.Silent Space is the effect of silence in a given space.

The character of a silence is determined by its affect.Affect is a subjective perception of the personal or emotional consequences of a silence. Although affect is an individual perception, there are nevertheless commonly agreed affects of certain silences.

An Ambient Silence surrounds you.An Amiable Silence is friendly.An Amusing Silence makes you smile.An Angry Silence is an expression of rage.An Anticipatory Silence makes you expect something.An Anxious Silence is a troubling experience.An Attentive Silence is the respect shown by a listener.An Awkward Silence is when words will not come.A Bittersweet Silence produces mixed emotions.A Boring Silence seems to never end.

A Brooding Silence suggests that something is going on.A Cheerful Silence is a happy one in which sound is unnecessary.A Contented Silence occurs when all sonic needs have been fulfilled.A Crepuscular Silence feels like the “still of the evening”.A Deafening Silence is a notable absence of response.A Disgusted Silence occurs when it is better that no

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sound is made.A Dramatic Silence is a silence used for effect in some performance.A Fascinating Silence is one which does not wish to interrupt.A Fearful Silence is afraid of the consequences of making a sound.A Good-natured Silence is the natural product of wellbeing.An Incidental Silence goes unnoticed by most people.An Inner Silence may be achieved through meditation or religious contemplation.An Interested Silence is polite but nevertheless engaged.An Interrupting Silence is intended to interrupt sounds.A Joyful Silence is when there are no sounds left to express the joy.A Longing Silence awaits fulfilment.A Meditative Silence accompanies some inner process of spirituality.

A Mindful Silence attends only to the present moment.A Moody Silence occurs when one’s emotions get the better of one.A Musing Silence is quizzical yet contemplative.A Mute Silence cannot make a soundA Mysterious Silence is inexplicable.A Performative Silence is perceived to have a function within a performative setting.A Polite Silence will eventually be broken by the need to utter.A Political Silence is both the suppression of a voice and a strategic form of resistance.A Silly Silence is unnecessary and ridiculous.A Stunned Silence is a reaction to a shock.A Sullen Silence is a reluctant response to some perceived oppression.A Surprising Silence jolts one into a reaction.A Sweet Silence is seductive and delightful.A Tense Silence creates a palpable atmosphere.A Transformative Silence changes a situation.

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A Valedictory Silence bids farewell to something.A Visceral Silence is raw, emotional and affecting to the core.A Volatile Silence behaves unpredictably and wildly.A Whimsical Silence is some kind of joke.A Wistful Silence is full of a vague sense of regret.A Witty Silence is all about timing.A Wry Silence is used to mock.

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