What _is_ computational creativity, anyway?


computational_creativity sonification thinking-out-loud

It’s late at night, and I’m trying to pound out some words so that I have it on the screen what, roughly, I think is the/an answer to this question. I will come back to this over and over again during this project, I’m sure. Expect non-sequiturs.

In their introduction to the issue of Internet Archaeology devoted to digital creativity, Gareth Beale and Paul Reilly point out how archaeologists tend to downplay the ‘theoretical implications [of digital tools] and to characterise methodological transformation in terms of technological innovation’. When critique emerges that pulls out the theoretical implications, it is from outside field; the work of digital archaeology praxis is not part of the conversation. A creative digital archaeology therefore should ‘provide an impetus for archaeology to revisit questions of how we as archaeologists encounter things and manage the horizons of technological possibility’. The unconscious adoption of technologies from other disciplines, if it really is done as uncritically as is sometimes suggested, would mean that the entire structure of our thought is not what we think it is.

Few of us build tools from scratch. In which case, a digital archaeology has to break ‘em, to see in the edges what the possibilities are, what the constraints are, what the blinders are. The CRANE project involves some extremely high-powered applications of archaeological computing to questions of past climate change, of technological development, of entangled human-environment relationships. But it seems to me that one thing it could use is a jester figure, someone who pokes not fun at the whole edifice, but who breaks things, builds things, co-creates things that might pick apart.

Computational creativity is what happens when we try to use the machine as a creative partner, a shattered prism, a performance enhancing drug. It’s a wonderful partnership between the machine, art, and humanistic understanding of the past. One of the best examples I can think of right now is Ferraby and St. John’s Soundmarks ‘using sound and visual art to explore and animate the sub-surface landscape of Aldborough Roman Town in North Yorkshire, UK’. It’s not complete yet, but I’m looking forward to hearing what the geophysical representation of Aldborough sounds like.

I wrote a tutorial on sonification for the Programming Historian; I’ll just restate what I wrote there:

[…]often we forget what a creative act visualization is. We are perhaps too tied to our screens, too much invested in ‘seeing’. Let me hear something of the past instead.

While there is a deep history and literature on archaeoacoustics and soundscapes that try to capture the sound of a place as it was (see for instance the Virtual St. Paul’s or the work of Jeff Veitch on ancient Ostia), I am interested instead to ’sonify’ what I have right now, the data themselves. I want to figure out a grammar for representing data in sound that is appropriate for history. Drucker famously reminds us that ‘data’ are not really things given, but rather things captured, things transformed: that is to say, ‘capta’. In sonifying data, I literally perform the past in the present, and so the assumptions, the transformations, I make are foregrounded. The resulting aural experience is a literal ‘deformance’ (portmanteau of ‘deform’ and ‘perform’) that makes us hear modern layers of the past in a new way.

That’s the sense of computational creativity that this project is trying to capture. We will sonify things. But we’re also going to use neural networks to see things like machines. We’re going to make physical things that are not, normally, 3d - colour data. Vibrational intensities. We’ll listen to colour. We’ll print sound. We’ll hallucinate landscapes into plastic models from found images.

For more on digital creativity / computational creativity in archaeology, see the special issue of Internet Archaeology on Digital Creativity in Archaeology.