Schedule

Content: Introduction to course, Syllabus, Organization, Theories of Creativity
Videos:

• Creativity & AI: Asking the Right Questions, Margaret Boden, University of Sussex
• AIART 2020 Keynote: The rise of Creative AI: Computational Creativity and Generative Art at the Metacreation Lab, Philippe Pasquier

• Boden, Margaret A. 2009. “Computer Models of Creativity.” AI Magazine 30 (3): 23–34. (Available online via RIT Library)

• Music of Changes, by John Cage
• Searcher & Watcher, James Seawright

• Stephen Wilson, "Artificial Intelligence Research as Art", SEHR, volume 4, issue 2: Constructions of the Mind, Updated July 22, 1995 (available as part of Stanford Humanities Review) (alt PDF)
• Paul, Christiane. 2016. "Introduction: From Digital to Post‐Digital — Evolutions of an Art Form." In A Companion to Digital Art. Chichester, edited by Christiane Paul and Dana Arnold, 1-20. [England]: Wiley-Blackwell. (Available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Burnham, Jack. 1970. “The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems.” In On the Future of Art, 95–122. New York: Viking Press. (PDF)
• OPTIONAL: Sol Lewitt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art"

• Proposal for theoretical research (1 page maximum)
• Information about your background and motivations (posted in course Slack)

Content: Machine Learning (Pt. 1) - Supervised & Unsupervised Learning, Neural Networks

Videos: Neural Networks for Artists

Readings:

• Machine Learning for Artists (in-progress online book). Read the first three chapters.
• Legrady, George. "Pockets Full of Memories." In Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, edited by Vesna, Victoria, 243-48. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. (Available online via RIT Library)
• Snyder, Jeff and Ryan, Danny. 2014. "The Birl: An Electronic Wind Instrument Based on an Artificial Neural Network Parameter Mapping Structure". In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 585-88. (available online).
• OPTIONAL: Aggarwal, Charu C. 2018. “An Introduction to Neural Networks.” In Neural Networks and Deep Learning: A Textbook, edited by Charu C. Aggarwal, 1–52. Cham: Springer International Publishing. (Available online via RIT library)
• OPTIONAL: Andrey Kurenkov, “A Brief History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning”, Skynet Today, 2020.

Deliverables:

• Revised proposal for theoretical research (1 page)

Slides: PDF (~1.5MB)

Content: Machine Learning (Pt. 2) - Instance-based Learning, Clustering, Bayesian Learning

Readings:

• Castellanos, Carlos, Philippe Pasquier, Luther Thie, and Kyu Che. 2008. “Biometric Tendency Recognition and Classification System: An Artistic Approach.” In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts, 166–73. Athens, Greece: ACM. (Available online via RIT Library)
• Tatar, K. & Pasquier, P.  2017. “MASOM: A Musical Agent Architecture based on Self-Organizing Maps, Affective Computing, and Variable Markov Models.” In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Musical Metacreation (MuMe 2017). (PDF) (web page)
• OPTIONAL: Aggarwal, Charu C. 2015. "Instance-Based Learning: A Survey." In Data Classification: Algorithms and Applications, edited by Charu C. Aggarwal, 157-85. Boca Raton: CRC Press. (available online)

Deliverables:

• Final project proposal (1-2 pages), reflecting the link to your research

Slides: PDF (~12MB)

Content: Machine Learning (Pt. 3) - Deep Learning (Convolutional Neural Networks, Generative Models)

Readings:

• Convolutional neural networks (from Machine Learning for Artists online book).
• Akten, Memo, Rebecca Fiebrink, and Mick Grierson. 2018. “Deep Meditations: Controlled Navigation of Latent Space.” In 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2018). Montreal. (available online)
• McCormack, Jon, and Andy Lomas. 2020. “Deep Learning of Individual Aesthetics.” Neural Computing and Applications, October. (Available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: OpenAI, Generative Models
• OPTIONAL: Crawford, Kate, and Trevor Paglen. 2019. “Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets.” -. 2019. https://excavatingai.com.
• OPTIONAL: Zhu, J., T. Park, P. Isola, and A. A. Efros. 2017. “Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation Using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks.” In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2242–51. (Available online via RIT Library) (web page for paper)
• OPTIONAL: Engel, Jesse, Kumar Krishna Agrawal, Shuo Chen, Ishaan Gulrajani, Chris Donahue, and Adam Roberts. 2019. “GANSynth: Adversarial Neural Audio Synthesis.” In International Conference on Learning Representations. (available online)
• OPTIONAL: Salimi, Mahsoo, Nouf Abukhodair, Steve DiPaola, Carlos Castellanos, and Philippe Pasquier. 2020. “Liminal Scape, an Interactive Visual Installation with Expressive AI.” In International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 2020), 365–71. Montreal, Quebec, Canada. (PDF)

Deliverables:

• Refine Final Project Proposal:
  • Add a technical specification (1 page minimum )
  • Send me a 2 pages (min), PDF; good idea to include images, diagrams, etc (if appropriate)

Slides: PDF (~36MB)

Content: Machine Learning (Pt. 4) - Deep Learning (Recurrent Neural Networks)

Readings:

• Rajcic, Nina, and Jon McCormack. 2020. “Mirror Ritual: An Affective Interface for Emotional Self-Reflection.” In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. CHI ’20. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. (Available online via RIT Library) (video)
• Karpathy, Andrej. 2015. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks.” (Available online)
• OPTIONAL: Perlman, Ellen. 2021. “AIBO - A Sicko AI Brainwave Opera”. In IEEE 4th International Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR). (Available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever. 2019. Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. (available online) (web page for paper)

Slides: PDF (~6.5MB)

Content: Machine Learning (Pt. 5) - Reinforcement Learning

Readings:

• Chan, M. T. K., R. Gorbet, P. Beesley, and D. Kulić. 2016. “Interacting with Curious Agents: User Experience with Interactive Sculptural Systems.” In 2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 151–58.  (Available online via RIT Library)
• Ha, David, and Jürgen Schmidhuber. 2018. “World Models.” ArXiv:1803.10122 [Cs, Stat], March. (available online) (web page for paper)
• Mance E. Harmon, Stephanie S. Harmon, Reinforcement Learning: A Tutorial, 1996. (available online)
• OPTIONAL: Collins, Nick. 2008. “Reinforcement Learning for Live Musical Agents.” In Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference. Belfast, Northern Ireland. (available online)
• OPTIONAL: Huang, Z., S. Zhou, and W. Heng. 2019. “Learning to Paint With Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning.” In 2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 8708–17. (Available online via RIT Library)

Slides: PDF (~61MB)

RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS

Content: Cybernetics, Emergence and Adaptation in Media Art

Videos:

• What is Cybernetics?, Paul Pangaro
• Foundational Principles of Cybernetics, Paul Pangaro
• Origins of AI in Cybernetics, Paul Pangaro
• The Future of Cybernetics, Paul Pangaro

 Readings:

• Audry, Sofian. 2021. “Behavior Morphologies of Machine Learning Agents in Media Artworks.” Leonardo 54(3) 269-73. (Available online via RIT Library)
• Cariani, Peter. 1993. “To Evolve an Ear: Epistemological Implications of Gordon Pask’s Electrochemical Devices.” Systems Research 10 (3): 19–33. (PDF)
• Burnham, Jack. 1968. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7, no. 1: 30–35. (PDF)
• OPTIONAL: Galanter, Philip. 2003. “What is generative art? Complexity theory as a context for art theory.” In GA2003 – 6th Generative Art Conference. (PDF)
• OPTIONAL: Galanter, Philip. 2008. “What is Complexism? Generative Art and the Cultures of Science and the Humanities.  In GA2008 – 11th Generative Art Conference. (PDF)
• OPTIONAL: Audry, Sofian. 2016. “Aesthetics of Adaptive Behaviors in Agent-based Art.” in Proceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2016), Hong Kong. (PDF)
• OPTIONAL: Davis, Tom. 2012. "Complexity as Practice: A Reflection on the Creative Outcomes of a Sustained Engagement with Complexity." Leonardo 45 (2). 106-112. (Available online via RIT Library)

Slides: PDF (~8MB)

Content: Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (Pt. 1) - Cognitive Agents, Reactive Agents

Readings:

• Dorri, A., S. S. Kanhere, and R. Jurdak. 2018. “Multi-Agent Systems: A Survey.” IEEE Access 6: 28573–93. (Available online via RIT Library)
• Boersen, Ronald, Aaron Liu-Rosenbaum, Kıvanç Tatar, and Philippe Pasquier. 2020. “Chatterbox: An Interactive System of Gibberish Agents.” In International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 2020). Montreal. (available online)
• OPTIONAL: Pasquier, Philippe, Eunjung Han, Kirak Kim, and Keechul Jung. 2008. “Shadow Agent: A New Type of Virtual Agent.” In ACM International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technologies (ACE 2008), 71–75. Yokohama: ACM. (available online)
• OPTIONAL: Tatar, Kıvanç, Mirjana Prpa, and Philippe Pasquier. 2019. “Respire: Virtual Reality Art with Musical Agent Guided by Respiratory Interaction.” Leonardo Music Journal 29 (September): 19–24. (Available online via RIT Library)

Slides: PDF (~11.5MB)

Content: Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (Pt. 2) - Flocking and Swarm Intelligence, Cellular Automata

Readings:

• Greenfield, Gary, and Penousal Machado. 2015. “Ant- and Ant-Colony-Inspired ALife Visual Art.” Artificial Life 21 (3): 293–306. (Available online via RIT Library)
• Brooks, Rodney A. 1986. “A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot.” IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation 2 (1): 14–23. (Available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Reynolds, C. W. 1987. "Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model". Computer Graphics 21(4) (SIGGRAPH '87 Conference Proceedings). 25-34. (available online)
• OPTIONAL: Correll, N., Farrow, N., Sugawara, K., & Theodore, M. 2013. "The Swarm-Wall: Toward Life’s Uncanny Valley". In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. (available online)
• OPTIONAL: Brooks, Rodney A. 1991. “Intelligence Without Representation.” Artificial Intelligence Journal 47 (1–3): 139–59. (PDF)
• OPTIONAL: Miranda, Eduardo Reck. 1995. “Granular Synthesis of Sounds by Means of a Cellular Automaton.” Leonardo 28 (4): 297–300. (Available online via RIT Library)

Slides: PDF (~8.5MB)

Content: Evolutionary Computing and Artificial Life - Genetic Algorithms, Creative Ecosystems

Readings:

• McCormack, Jon. 2019. "Creative Systems: A Biological Perspective." In Computational Creativity: The Philosophy and Engineering of Autonomously Creative Systems, edited by Tony Veale and Amilcar Cardoso, 327–52. Computational Synthesis and Creative Systems. Springer International Publishing. (Available online via RIT Library)
• Penny, Simon. 1996. “The Darwin Machine: Artificial Life and Interactive Art”. New Formations 29, 59-68. (Available online)
• OPTIONAL: McCormack, Jon. 2003. "Evolving Sonic Ecosystems." Kybernetes 32 (1/2): 184–202. (Available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Whitelaw, Mitchell. 2004. Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• OPTIONAL: Sommerer, Christa, and Laurent Mignonneau. 1998. "The Application of Artificial Life to Interactive Computer Installations." Artificial Life and Robotics 2 (4): 151–56. (Available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Holland, John H. 1995. Hidden Order: How Adaption Builds Complexity. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
• OPTIONAL: Langton, Christopher G. 1986. “Studying Artificial Life with Cellular Automata.” Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual International Conference, 22 (1): 120–49. (available online)

Slides: PDF (~9MB)

Content: Methods, Evaluation & Validation in Art & AI

Video: Jürgen Schmidhuber: The Algorithmic Principle Behind Curiosity and Creativity

Readings:

• Candy, Linda, and Ernest Edmonds. 2018. “Practice-Based Research in the Creative Arts: Foundations and Futures from the Front Line.” Leonardo 51 (1): 63–69. (Available online via RIT Library)
• Galanter, Philip. 2012. “Computational Aesthetic Evaluation: Past and Future.” In Computers and Creativity, edited by Jon McCormack and Mark d’Inverno, 255–93. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. (available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Ritchie, Graeme. 2019. “The Evaluation of Creative Systems.” In Computational Creativity: The Philosophy and Engineering of Autonomously Creative Systems, edited by Tony Veale and F. Amílcar Cardoso, 159–94. Computational Synthesis and Creative Systems. Cham: Springer International Publishing. (Available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Wiggins, Geraint A. 2019. “A Framework for Description, Analysis and Comparison of Creative Systems.” In Computational Creativity: The Philosophy and Engineering of Autonomously Creative Systems, edited by Tony Veale and F. Amílcar Cardoso, 21–47. Computational Synthesis and Creative Systems. Cham: Springer International Publishing. (Available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Cariani, Peter. 2012. “Creating New Informational Primitives in Mind and Machines.” In Computers and Creativity, edited by Jon McCormack and Mark d’Inverno, 383–417. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. (available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Cohen, Harold, Frieder Nake, David C. Brown, Paul Brown, Philip Galanter, Jon McCormack, and Mark d’Inverno. 2012. “Evaluation of Creative Aesthetics.” In Computers and Creativity, edited by Jon McCormack and Mark d’Inverno, 95–111. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. (available online via RIT Library)

Slides: PDF (~4.5MB)

Content: Critical Analysis of Art & AI, Ethical Implications of AI

Readings:

• Adam, Alison. 2000. “Deleting the Subject: A Feminist Reading of Epistemology in Artificial Intelligence.” Minds and Machines 10 (2): 231–53. (Available online via RIT Library)
• Sengers, Phoebe. 2002. “Schizophrenia and Narrative in Artificial Agents.” Leonardo 35 (2): 427–31. (Available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Adam, Alison. 1998. Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. Routledge. (Available online via RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1992. What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (physical copy in RIT Library)
• OPTIONAL: Brooks, Rodney A. 1990. “Elephants Don’t Play Chess.” In Designing Autonomous Agents: Theory and Practice from Biology to Engineering and Back, edited by P. Maes, 3–15. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (PDF)

Deliverables:

• Demo In-progress projects

Slides: PDF (~8MB)

Content:
Presentation of student projects.

Final Papers Due