I found out yesterday, through the magic of Google Alerts, the Bloomfield Hills AV team has released a video of that afternoon’s events. Here it is. I think they did a pretty good job of capturing, in around 30 minutes, all that occurred over a couple of hours that day. Sadly Vimeo does not let me embed the video so I am just providing a link to it here. Enjoy.

It was a great evening full of friends, food and devotional music. I am not a very religious person but there is something about devotional music (irrespective of which religion it may be) that always touches a chord with me.

Anyway, here are the pictures I took the other day. I particularly loved capturing the moon over the temple. Enjoy.

Ganapati Festival BTL 2011, a set on Flickr.

Steve Jobs retired as CEO of Apple this past week. The Wall Street Journal marked this event by creatingSteve Job’s Best Quotes compendium. There are all worth reading – but a couple stood out for their connection to this course.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something… It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

A large part of my creativity course, CEP818, (announcement here) has this idea of creativity as “connections” at its core. One of the goals of the course is to provide a set of trans-disciplinary tools that can help increase the possibility of making such connections.

And finally, here’s my personal favorite quote from Jobs that speaks to the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the work we do (be it design or teaching).

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through. [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

… although teaching students involves imparting knowledge, it is also a calling with other dimensions beyond the cognitive … It is about the formation of minds, the molding of destinies, the creation of an enduring desire in students not only to know, but also to care for others, appreciate beauty, and much more. In some sense of the word, teaching is a spiritual, although not necessarily religious, activity. When done well, it cultivates human intimacy and allows teachers to find creative self-expression in classroom community.

The authors define reverence as follows:

Reverence is comprehension of human limitation, imperfection, and our appropriate place in the cosmos as a consequence of the humility that arises from feelings of awe, wonder and admiration before something or someone that meets at least one of the following conditions: (1) Something or someone that cannot be changed or controlled by human means; something we are powerless to alter. (2) Something or someone we cannot create. (3) Something we cannot completely understand. (4) Something or someone transcendent; something supernatural.

Though I have not used the word “reverence” in my own writing / thinking I have often said the same thing about the role of the aesthetic in teaching in learning and the need for us to develop a language that allows us to include these dimensions of the human experience in our work. I have some reservations about the word “reverence” – mainly because of the religious connotations which can sometimes lead conversations into directions one may not necessarily want to go. (Though, I must add, that Garrison and Rud, take pains to write that “teaching is a spiritual, although not necessarily religious, activity.”)

Some examples from my previous writing on this blog that allude to similar ideas are provided below.

• A different language
• The one rule of teaching
• Bringing sensory richness to scientific texts
• Teacher as Filmaker
• Translations & Technology: Reflections on French Lieutenant’s Woman
• 2001, 4o years after

I want to end with something I wrote about the movie 2001 A Space Odessey:

2001 is a movie of big ideas: about what it means to be human, what is our relationship to technology, about our place in the cosmos, and our inability to answer some of these questions. 2001, thus, is a profound, deep and thoughtful attempt to use the medium of film to explore these ideas. And the style Kubrick chooses is intensely visual, deliberately paced, with minimal dialog. The first section of the movie has no dialog because there are no thoughts to express and no words to express them with. This is mirrored in the third and final section which has no dialogs because thoughts have far outstripped the ability of words to convey meaning. The section in between, set somewhere in the near future (as the 1960?s would imagine 2001 to be) has words, but even here it is amazing just how few, and ineffectual they are. Humans for the most part seem remote and disconnected from each other and, strangely enough, the most engaging character is the computer HAL!.

As is clear, 2001 is a ambitious movie (some would even say too ambitious). But it does do one thing right – it asks the right questions and tries to come up with an answer. And it does so in an ambiguous manner, allowing for multiple interpretations and readings. And that is its strength. It seeks, through the medium of film, to penetrate a “fundamental disparity between the way we perceive the world, including our own experience in it, and the way things actually are” (Dalai Lama quoted by Eberhart). That this is an effort doomed to failure is neither here nor there. In fact, the last line of dialog in the film speaks to this very possibility of failure: “Its origins and purpose [are] still a total mystery.” In the movie this dialog is about a black monolith – but works as aptly for the universe we live in.

In fact, as I think about it, 2001 is a deeply reverent movie. The question I have is whether we have created similar spaces for reverence in our classrooms? Have we even considered it? Or have we killed the idea with our focus on No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top?

There is only one rule: Astonish us! In all art we look and listen for what we have not experienced quite that way before. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way.

I read this quote and immediately realized that this rule applies to teaching as well. I have often described teaching as doing two things – making the strange familiar (an eclipse of the sun is caused by the moon falling into the earth’s shadow) or making the familiar strange (all matter is essentially empty space). What is common is the sense of surprise we experience in both cases.

It appears to me that very often we forget the value of astonishment and awe in teaching and learning. This is where the quote above really connects with my idea of teaching. Repeating the quote but by changing just one word—replacing “art” with “teaching.”

There is only one rule: Astonish us! In all teaching we look and listen for what we have not experienced quite that way before. We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way.

How do we as educators meet this goal of “astonishing us all.”

Dear Mr. Mishra,

I am currently working on a poetry research project for school, and one of the requirements is researching five different poets. While looking for people who wrote palindromic poetry, I found your website and decided to use you in my project. The only problem is that I can’t find much information about you for my research. If you could, please respond to this e-mail with a little information about your history (i.e.-date and place of birth, family relations, etc.) as well as your inspiration for writing your palindromic poems. Thank you for your support!!!!!
Sincerely, Jake

P.S.- I am an eighth grader from Colorado and an aspiring poet.

Now I don’t consider myself a poet in any serious sense of the word (my dabbling in mathematical poetry or palindromic poetry notwithstanding). But it is great feeling when something you create and put out there in the world connects with someone else, someone who you would never otherwise have met or gotten to know. Here is what I wrote back to Jake:

Dear Jake –
Thank you so much for writing to me. I am honored to make it to your list of poets and glad that you are interested in palindromic poetry.

As for my history: I am professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing MI. I am originally from India where I studied engineering and design before coming to the US and getting my PhD. My wife is a graphic designer and I have two kids: my son who is a freshman in high school and my daughter who is in 6th grade.

Ever since I was a kid I have always been interested in puzzles and mathematics and poetry and visual design. That I think led to a habit of playing with words and images… so I do a lot of doodling and sketching (specially when I in meetings). I am fond of asking questions and looking at things around me in new ways. For instance, I love photography, on my Flickr site you will find photos of silly things like finding alphabets in cracks, and faces in everyday things. See this link and this one…

• Alphabets in cracks
• Faces we see

Then there are the videos I make with my kids. For instance see the new year’s card we made recently.

This also led to my creating ambigrams, which are words that are written in a special ways so that they can be read multiple ways. You can find a bunch of such designs on my website.

So I guess, palindromic poetry emerged out this desire or propensity to see the world in weird ways. And the challenge of writing poems that read the same backward and forward was inherently interesting. I particularly enjoyed writing ones that flipped in their meaning when you cross the half-way point. For instance in the poem “Me as I sit” the poem switches from me watching you to you watching me!

Finally, as must have noticed, from the dates, most of these were written a bunch of years ago when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. I haven’t written too many recently but the fact that they are on my website leads people to them – and I form all kinds of cool connections – such as the email I just received from you. A year or so ago I heard from someone who uses my poetry to teach poetry to inmates in prison (how cool is that!). You can read about that here.

That’s all for now.. I would love to read any palindromic poetry you may have written, if you are comfortable sharing them with me. Thank you again for your interest in my work. I look forward to hearing from you and let me know if there is anything else you need to know.

take care ~ punya

Note: I got Jake’s (and his parent’s) permission to post our correspondence on this blog under the condition that I not include his email address or other contact information.

Many moons ago I had written about the idea of the web as small pieces loosely connected (read Gandhi, ambigrams, creativity & the power of small pieces loosely joined) that allow people to pursue their passions and share it with the world at large. This is what gives the web its power, and this is also why I am not as comfortable with the barricaded worlds created by Facebook, which would not have allowed someone like Jake to easily find me, (but that is a rant for another day).

To understand the significance of April 2, 2011, I have to go back 28 years, back to the summer of 1983.

I had just finished 10th grade, and that summer I took a trip to the hills of North India, as a part of a social work volunteer effort. I remember sleeping on the floor in this little unfurnished hut up in the hills, spending the days digging what would be the foundation of a village school. We had no electricity, no TV, the our toilet was to go out in the woods.

We did have a tiny transistor radio and we used that to listen to the Prudential Cricket World Cup, taking place in far away England. The West Indies were favored to win, the English were pretty good, and Australia and New Zeland weren’t too bad either. But India was no where in the picture, and no one really expected anything from our team. Our record, before this date had been dismal at best. But amazingly enough, India, led by Kapil Dev, this young Jat from Harayana, somehow made it to the semi-finals where we were facing England. There was little hope that we would go any further. The fact that we had made it that far was victory enough!

I remember, one late night, in this little room, with a bunch of kids my age, from different schools from around North India, crowded around the little radio, listening to the commentary of this semi-final game being played half-way across the globe. I don’t remember many of the details but two things do stand out. I remember hearing the commentator describing this young Indian batsman, Sandeep Patil, destroying the English bowling. And I remember, after the game was over, and India had won and made it to the finals, all of us, 16-17 year olds, standing up, in our pajamas, in this candle-lit room, spontaneously, beginning to sing the Indian National Anthem. Loudly, surely off key, but with gusto and pride.

A few days later I was back home in Delhi, watching the finals on our black-and-white TV. I remember West Indies destroying the Indian batting and then just as they started batting, the TV transmission died. (This was actually quite common back then.) I ran back to my radio, to keep up with the game, while keeping an eye on the TV, just in case the game came back on. I missed seeing the great catch by Kapil Dev that got rid of Viv Richards (who single handedly could decimate any opposing team). And then the West Indies wickets started to fall, and the TV came back, and I watched, what was the most amazing sight, the mighty West Indies collapse, and, wonder of wonders, India winning the world cup!

That was a defining moment for my generation and I remember it as clearly as it was yesterday. I doubt you can meet any Indian of around my age for whom this is not an unforgettable memory!

India, as a nation, had been going through a tough time. The Indira Gandhi government’s usurpation of power in 1975 (with the declaration of Emergency) was not too far from our memories. The government that had come after that had been woefully underwhelming, not even lasting a full term. Punjab was in flames, due to an insurgency that would (a few years later) consume Indira Gandhi herself. In the middle of all this was the world cup! It pulled us all, across India, together in ways that cannot be described. This victory was a turning point for all of us, a way of saying that our time had come. After this, there was little that we could no do!

Well a lot has changed in India since then. But India has never repeated that feat. India had never won another world cup.

Till today.

It took 28 years, but after a great game against Sri Lanka, in the 2011 world cup finals, India has done it again. Emphatically, and with grace India has won the world cup. Along the way India knocked out Australia (the winner of the past three competitions) and Pakistan (arguably as big a game as the final). As Joe Biden said, in a slightly different context, this is ****ing huge!

A new defining moment for a new generation.

May years ago I wrote an essay titled On becoming a website. It was about my experience on teaching online and I suggested somewhat facetiously that in order to be a good teacher online I needed to actually “become” the course website! I started the essay by describing the idea of a cyborg:

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism — a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. It has been argued that we are all cyborgs now (Haraway, 1991). Be it a pacemaker installed in our hearts or a pair of contact lenses in our eyes, technologies are now an integral part of our bodies and our consciousness. … Of course these socially (and increasingly biologically) embedded technologies often become transparent and, in some sense, so deeply intertwined with our existence that we don’t even realize they exist (Brooks, 2002).

Now this idea of a cyborg was somewhat of a rhetorical move, to generate interest in the topic I was writing about. So imagine my surprise when I read the following paragraph.

They gave her The Device when she was only 2 years old. It sent signals along the optic nerve that swiftly transported her brain to an alternate universe—a captivating other world. By the time she was 7 she would smuggle it into school and engage it secretly under her desk. By 15 the visions of The Device—a girl entering a ballroom, a man dying on the battlefield—seemed more real than her actual adolescent life. She would sit with it, motionless, oblivious to everything around her, for hours on end. Its addictive grip was so great that she often stayed up half the night, unable to put it down.

When she grew up, The Device dominated her house: no room was free from it, no activity, not even eating or defecating, was carried on without its aid. Even when she made love it was the images of The Device that filled her mind. Psychologists showed that she literally could not disengage from it—if The Device could reach the optic nerve, she would automatically and inescapably be in its grip. Neuroscientists demonstrated that large portions of her brain, parts that had once been devoted to understanding the real world, had been co-opted by The Device.

What a terrible terrible story. How and why did the parents give the device to a 2 year old! Is this kind of brain damage reversible?

So what IS this device? Well turns out it is a book!

Go back and read the passage again, making that switch! How does that feel?

I had written earlier about Douglas Adams’ rules about technology

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.  (p. 95).

It seems to me that this quote, which incidentally is taken from an article in Slate Magazine, reviewing Sherry Turkle’s latest book, captures the manner in which new technologies are often seen to go against “the natural order of things.”

Whether we like it or not, we are all cyborgs now.

Happy Diwali  2010

Readers of this blog know that every year I provide a link to the same
interactive Diwali eCard. Why change anything this year? So follow the link below,
turn your volume way up,  and remember to click on the sky
above the Taj Mahal for some fantastic yet
environmentally friendly fireworks

Take me to the
Interactive Diwali Card … .

Here is the poem.

Sweat

Sticky, icky, ew!
I wipe it off, and it trick-
les, right back again!

“trick-”

“-les”

down the page. Reminds me of one of my favorite poets, e.e.cummings and how he plays with words. For instance here is a poem by him

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

It takes a bit of effort to read but it is worth it. With some thought you will see that in the parenthesis is the phrase “a leaf falls,” broken up so that it runs down the page, rather than across it. So instead of “a leaf falls” you read

(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)

Of course breaking it all up forces you (the reader) to read the lines in slow-motion, with pauses as it were. Also the shape of the letters comes through now as do the alliterative / symmetric “le” “ll” and “af” “fa” sounds. There is a visual and audio pattern here… a verbo-visual pun maybe. Sort of what Shreya did with the word “trickles.”

But there is more…

Outside the parenthesis is the word “loneliness” broken up so that you can see the words “one” sandwiched between two “L’s.” The “L” is written in lower-case, which again makes it look like the number “1″ or capital “I.”

l
one
l
iness

So the repetition of the idea of “one” or “I” (once as “one” and twice as the number or the “I”) emphasizes the solitary nature of this experience. It could be 1 leaf falling, or one person watching one leaf fall… And all the pieces come together to set up a sad mood of one lonely person watching one leaf fall

How clever of mr. cummings. And how cool that Shreya, discovered something similar in breaking up “trickles” into two parts, showing how the sweat actually

“trick -

- les”

down.

To me it is an indication of her increasing comfort with language. It is only when we are comfortable with the rules that we start to break them, and it is there that true creativity and one’s one “writerly” voice emerges. So I would argue, despite Shreya’s thinking that it is a glitch, that it is not. It actually her noticing a pattern, imposed on her by the syllable count required by the Haiku structure itself, and then using that constraint for a creative purpose.

As for the mis-spelling of “glich” – I hope she doesn’t correct it. Because the poem now does have one glitch, the mis-spelling of the word “glitch.” How self-referential!!

All in all, what a wonderful way to begin a Sunday, reflecting on creativity and writing, inspired by a poem written by 11 year old Shreya. How very cool!!

As a part of our activities today I had all the participants crate i-Images. I have written about i-Images on this blog before (see here and here).

i-Images are the brainchild of David Wong and you can find his page on i-Images here.

Anyway, here are some of the i-Images created today. I do think they are pretty cool and thought provoking, each in its own way. Click on the images below to see what the workshop participants created. Enjoy.

Kristine M Kamper	Lynn Mittler	Chris Rappleye	Stephanie Madlinger
Lisa Huxley	Sean Nash	Sean Nash	Sean Nash

Over the past few years I have been thinking quite hard about the idea that creative people are not creative in just one area but rather tend to play within and across multiple disciplines or areas. Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein have in their book Sparks of Genius often talked about how the most creative scientists are polymaths, often having artistic and other interests that go beyond their immediate professional interests. In fact they argue, and I would tend to agree with them, that creativity cannot be forced into one box or domain. Creative individuals are curious about everything and often engage in creative activities in multiple areas, though they may specialize in just one area (usually the domain they are most known for).

This is true for the most creative people I know. For instance, consider Douglas Hofstadter (best known for his book Godel, Escher & Back and is work in Artificial Intelligence) dabbles in everything from mathematics to music, wordplay to art. Similarly Scott Kim (best know as a puzzle game designer) creates ambigrams and composes music, plays the drums and teaches mathematics using dance!

In my own way I have tried to do the same. Everything I do, from creating ambigrams to teaching, from photography to developing keynote presentations, from being a parent to advising students on their research, seems to me to be connected and inter-woven. I think my success as a researcher and scholar (to whatever extent I have been successful) derives from this “dabbling” across disciplines.

What is sad, however, is how much such “dabbling” is frowned upon. Through high-school and college, through graduate school and even as a faculty member, I have been advised, always by by well-meaning people, to focus, to find my niche, to become an expert on one thing. I have resisted it, mainly because knowing just one thing, seems, at least to me, such an impoverished way of being.

And I understand why I have received the advice I have. We live in a specialized world. A world where expertise is valued.  And an expert, after all, is someone who knows more and more about less and less. There is no space for dabbling in this world of.

But I wonder about that. I have a friend who is a successful professor of civil engineering. Turns out, that as he was growing up, what he really wanted to be, was a chef! I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about this but I wonder how his vision of being a chef influences what he does as a researcher and a teacher? Does it contribute (in some subconscious manner) to his work? Or has he suppressed it completely?

Either way I see it as a tragedy, in the first case because we haven’t developed a way of speaking of these influences, and in the second case because a possible, fruitful career was nipped in the bud.

The sad thing is that I am seeing school do the same thing to my kids, in fact to most kids I know. NCLB has not helped either. Don’t get me wrong. This is not an argument for some form of dilletantism (dabbling for the sake of dabbling). Not at all. What I am recommending (thanks to the Roob-Bernstein’s for this term) is polymathy. One of my students, Danah Henriksen, is currently working on a dissertation on looking for polymathy in teachers. As she says:

“Polymathy” may be thought of as an informed enthusiasm for more than one field of knowledge or expertise, or excellence in several realms that might seem distant from each other.  It has been suggested that what makes polymaths so successful and fluidly creative is an ability to cross-pollinate ideas and information.  People who open their minds to, and who learn from, multiple knowledge areas can apply new information and unique ways of thinking from one discipline into another.

This for me is the biggest reason for supporting such playing around in multiple areas. These experiences at the fringes (so to speak) of our professional lives, provide us with newer ways of being in the world. They allow us to see the world in new ways. They allow us to question things the field may have taken for granted. Just as Tufte says at the end of the piece, my goal, is to “make people see a little differently.” Turns out one of the best and easiest ways of doing so is by seeing through different disciplinary eyes.

We need to provide better opportunities for our students to do the same.

Martin Gardner died five days ago. Gardner was an influential writer about mathematics and was one of the greatest influences on me (and my friends) as I was growing up. His recreational mathematics column was the main reason I subscribed to the Scientific American back in high school. A few years ago a couple of my high-school friends wrote a mathematical novel (see my posting about Suri & Bal’s A Mathematical Ambiguity) and the high point for them was the fact that Martin Gardner agreed to write a blurb for the back cover. (My point of pride was that I was thanked in the acknowledgments page, putting me cheek-by-jowl with Martin Gardner!).

More personally, it was through Gardner’s writings that I was introduced to authors like Douglas Hofstadter, Raymond Smullyan, Scott Kim and James Randi — people who in turn ended up becoming immense influences on my thinking and way of looking at the world.

Martin Gardner, through his writing, his sense of humor and playfulness, his emphasis on rationality as a tool for understanding the world, his love of mathematics and learning, will always be with me. I know that in some  powerful, deep and fundamental way, he made me who I am today.

What is the relationship of information technology and cognition? What about human creativity? What role does technology play, if any, in getting us to be less or more creative?

One aspect of creativity that is often discussed with reference to technology is that we live in a culture of remixing. This was brought home to me recently while reading an article in the NYTimes titled Author, 17, Says It’s ‘Mixing,’ Not Plagiarism, where Helene Hegemann’s award willing bestseller (Axolotl Roadkill) was shown to be plagiarized from other books and blogs. What was interesting was what the author had to say about this. After apologizing for not being more forthcoming about the sources of her ideas, Hegemann defended herself as being

… the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

Incidentally, I took this quote from Hagemann and made if my Facebook update. It was interesting to see just how many people agreed with it (either by pushing the “Like” button, or by actually commenting on my status), and that bothered me somewhat – because I wasn’t sure I totally agreed with it. As an academic I make a living through my ideas – and their value comes from other people quoting and citing me. No citations, no tenure, if you know what I mean! I have also taken a very public stand against plagiarism on this very blog by catching and publicly humiliating a plagiarist. (An overview of that entire saga can be found here).

On the other hand I have also indulged in the pleasures of remixing. See this spoof of Harry Potter (Hari Puttar & the Magic Wand on Youtube) that I had created with my kids a couple of years ago. I have also written positively about initiatives that allow students to “cheat” (by using the Web) during exams. I would be the last person to claim that there is something like true creativity – as in an idea that never existed before. I have read enough of the creativity research (psychological and historical) to know that ideas always emerge from older ideas, that have been remixed together. In that sense our brain is the ultimate “remixer.”

That said, we have to agree that actual physical remixing (as opposed to the “in brain remixing”) has become vastly easier with the advent of digital technologies. In that sense, Hagemann is right, we live in a remix culture – a culture where mixing and matching from diverse sources leads to creative products. And creating such remixes is becoming easier by the day.

And living in the remix culture has consequences of how we think about authorship, and creativity.

But I think there is more to it than just the ability to “cut and paste” from existing media (be it print or music or video). The kinds of tools we have today can take us one step further – towards computers becoming partners in the creative activity itself. For instance read this post Exploring visual space with mathematics where I argue that “a designer with a good visual sense AND a knowledge of programming and mathematics is going to be much more efficient and generative (in terms of total ideas) than one with just the former.”

All of these issues came to a head (in my mind at least) when I read this absolutely fascinating article Triumph of the Cyborg Composer which profiles composer David Cope and his experiments with writing computer programs that create original music. This article is a must-read for anybody interested in issues of creativity and technology, so go ahead, click on the link above, and come back here when you are done. More relevant to the argument being made here is what David Cope says about what his experiments with digital creativity had led him to believe about all creativity. As the article says,

In his view, all music — and, really, any creative pursuit — is largely based on previously created works. Call it standing on the shoulders of giants; call it plagiarism. Everything we create is just a product of recombination…

“Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

So who makes the music? This is what Cope says in answer to that question:

He just thinks of her as a tool. Everything Emmy created, she created because of software he devised. If Cope had infinite time, he could have written 5,000 Bach-style chorales. The program just did it much faster.

“All the computer is is just an extension of me,” Cope says. “They’re nothing but wonderfully organized shovels. I wouldn’t give credit to the shovel for digging the hole. Would you?”

As it turns out, Cope in a while got tired of his first program, successful though it was in composing pieces in the style of several composers (including himself). He felt that these compositions were not “special” enough. So he deleted the software and the databases he had generated… and began experimenting with a different kind of virtual composer. This time he wanted to build something “with its own personality.” This program

… would write music in an odd sort of way. Instead of spitting out a full score, it converses with Cope through the keyboard and mouse. He asks it a musical question, feeding in some compositions or a musical phrase. The program responds with its own musical statement. He says “yes” or “no,” and he’ll send it more information and then look at the output. The program builds what’s called an association network — certain musical statements and relationships between notes are weighted as “good,” others as “bad.” Eventually, the exchange produces a score, either in sections or as one long piece…

He compares the process to a sculptor who chops raw shapes out of a block of marble before he teases out the details. Using quick-and-dirty programs as an extension of his brain has made him extraordinarily prolific. It’s a process close to what he was hoping for back when he first started working on software to save him from composer’s block.

These partnerships, to me herald a new form of human-computer partnership. It will be interesting to see how this evolves in the future.

I would like to end with an example (far simpler than David Cope’s programs) that I have been involved with. A few years ago my partner in crime, Matt Koehler and I wrote a computer program, called Inverso, to create Haikus. Essentially, Inverso was a simple (almost trivial) computer program that created haiku-like poems by randomly combining pre-existing lines of poetry and presenting them dynamically in different fonts and layouts (again randomly selected from a range of possible fonts and layouts). Being academics we also wrote a journal article about it in which we situated Inverso in a historical frame that looked at the role of randomness in creative works and questioned how it problematized issues of authorship and creativity. You can read the article here:

Koehler, M. J., Mishra, P. (2002). Art from randomness. How Inverso uses chance, to create haiku. Interactive Multimedia Electronic Journal of Computer-Enhanced Learning. Note: You will need the ADOBE Shockwave plugin to view Inverso, which you can get as a free download from here.

Students in my Learning Technology by Design seminar read this article and are asked to discuss the following question (paraphrased slightly for this posting):

Inverso writes poetry by reordering words and as Douglas Crimp says in his book On the Museum’s Ruins (1993, p. 71), “the artist invents nothing. He or she only uses, manipulates, displaces, reformulates, repositions what history has provided.” Are we creating something new when we design existing knowledge in a new way, or just using standard design conventions to organize and present? Who would you credit with authorship of a poem created through Inverso? And finally, how does this affect the way you might view yourself as the author of your project web sites (or your lesson plans)? What does this mean for your role as a designer of learning?

Often when we speak of art we describe it as “the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.” What we mean by this is that the the piece of music is more than merely placing individual notes and pauses one after the other.  There is a certain integrity and completeness to a creative work that goes beyond the mechanical – that we often consider as being mystical or beyond reason. However, it appears that our view of the mechanical as being dull or uncreative may not be the entirely correct. Maybe the what we need to be asking (taking an idea from Douglas Hofstadter’s book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) is whether “the soul is greater than the hum of its parts?”

I think as we continue to work with (and co-evolve) with our machines, these questions regarding originality and authenticity will continue to trouble us. They will also provide insights into the very nature of creativity – even while, maybe, revealing its mechanical nature. I will let Cope have the last word:

“The question,” Cope says, “isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.”

Hmm…