Ken's Blog

On the recommendation of a friend, I started reading George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones”. I’m not sure I like it — in essence it’s “The Office” with broadswords — but there are moments where the deliberately archaic writing achieves a lovely poetry.

I especially like a line I just stumbled upon: “The ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones.” This sentence has an elegant air of wistfulness. It sounds like the reminiscence of a old knight who has known happier times. In fact it is spoken by a young boy, while recounting a dream.

One of the fun things about the fantasy genre is the permission it gives an author to blur the line between the actual and the poetically imagined. In a world where dragons are real, and a well timed magic spell might change the course of political history, there is no clear bright line between the dreams that trouble a character’s sleep and the waking world where he or she lives.

Unfortunately, this very freedom seems to create its own restrictions, by encouraging a set of genre conventions that are in some ways more rigid than the strictures of kitchen sink realism. Apparently when magic rules the world, then such considerations as class distinction — particularly the accident of one’s parentage — become as unyielding as fundamental laws of physics.

I wonder whether there is some sort of conservation law at work here. The more freedom of movement is allowed between dream and reality in a fictional world, the more rigid and unyielding is its social order. The castles in these worlds are lovely indeed, but the stables are full of bones.

A month is such an artificial construct. We don’t even give all our months the same number of days.

And yet … and yet. When the calendar makes that grand move from one page to the next, I always feel the motion, in a powerful way that my rational mind cannot quite justify.

It might simply be the power of labels. As long as it was still July, there was time remaining to do all my July things. The ball was in motion, the game afoot, the football not yet touched down within the end zone, the final juggling pin still in the air, the last fragile leaf of the season bravely hanging on to the tenuous tree of time.

But now, alas, to misquote Corinthians 13:11, “When I was in July, I spoke of July, I understood July, I thought of July: but when it became August, I put away July things.”

So sad. So very sad.

On the other hand, now I have a whole new month to do stuff! 🙂

There are many directions we can take when trying to build a programming language from the ground up specifically for the purpose of live performance for an audience that we expect to (1) be entertained by the process, and (2) understand reasonably well the performance by programming.

The approach that comes most clearly to my mind is to think in terms of a troupe of trained “actors” that know how to take commands. For example, if the performer wished to get those actors to line up in order, from shortest to tallest (essentially a sorting algorithm) then the programming language should allow the performer to tell each actor something like “if the person to the right of you is taller than you, swap places”.

Note that the language needs to deal gracefully with exceptions such as an actor being all the way to the right (so that there is nobody to that actor’s right). In such cases, an actor should know simply to gracefully ignore the command.

In the same spirit, the performer could issue a command like: “Follow the actor to the right of you. If nobody is to the right of you, then follow the leftmost actor” to get all the actors to form a circle.

If we think of actors as carrying colors, or numbers, or having the ability to play musical notes, then we can start to think of simple ways to command those actors in ways that would be interesting to an audience. For example, the performer can tell the actors “Go into a group with all the actors who hold the same color you do. Then everyone in your group sort yourselves from shortest to tallest, and then play your respective musical notes in order.”

I realize there are lots of details missing here (such as the actual syntax of the language) the basic idea has about the right feel to it.

I was introduced today to the music of The Strokes. As I watched their artful creation of a sound that looked accidental but clearly wasn’t, I realized I was seeing an example of an entire aesthetic. There are artists who put tremendous effort into making their work seem haphazard, while exercising so much control that the “accidental” results are invariably bravura and astonishing.

Jackie Chan is famous for this in the martial arts, through his various portrayals over the years of a “Drunken master” — a martial artist who careens around as though drunk, while somehow landing every throw and kick with deadly precision.

But the idea of the drunken master spans many genres in the arts. One that comes to mind is Gracie Allen from the old Burns and Allen show. On the surface she seemed daffy to the point of near insanity, and yet everything she “accidentally” said hit home with wondrous precision. Other examples are the aphorisms of Yogi Berra, the ingeniously sly “dumb blonde” performances of Judy Holliday, and most of the film performances of Peter Sellers.

It could be argued that the half-crazed Harlequin characters in American sitcoms are all drunken masters, from Ed Norton to Jim Ignatowski to Phoebe Buffay to Cosmo Kramer, as well as dozens of others. While their ostensibly saner friends struggle to find their mooring, these blissful agents of randomness always manage to effortlessly stumble upon the deeper truths that elude others.

In some way the drunken master is that ideal self we all secretly hope we have somewhere within us — the childlike part of us that bypasses mere reason to make direct contact with the sublime.

Suppose we apply the structure of composition → researsal → performance to computer programming? This has been a topic of conversation recently between Murphy Stein, Vi Hart and myself.

Currently, computer programming is generally thought of as a strictly compositional activity. A programmer generally creates a program in relative isolation, over a period of time, iterating until the program’s behavior is ready to be experienced by others. The programming languages and environments that have evolved to support this activity very much privilege this way of working.

But what if the semantic constructs of programming — sequences of variable assignment, iteration, conditional execution, defining procedures, building hierarchies of objects — were part of some sort of live performance for an audience?

Suppose we were to design a form of programming from the ground up, specifically to be a performative medium? It wouldn’t replace programming as composition, but rather would complement it. Much of the program would still be pre-written, as a compositional stage. In such a paradigm, one would also expect a rehearsal stage.

This splitting of computer programming into two such different modalities is not as odd as it might sound. After all, this is what happens with plays and music. While a playwright shares the medium of words — the semantic level — with the actor, their modes of expression are wildly different. The playwright expresses through typed or written words on paper, whereas the actor uses voice, facial expression and body movement. What they share is the underlying meaning.

Similarly, a musical composer writes down notes on a staff, whereas a musician plays a physical instrument. What they have in common is, again, the underlying meaning.

A kind of performative programming is done now in the avant guarde music community. Performers manipulate programs written in Max/MSP (or its open-source counterpart PD) to create live variations in the procedure controlling an algorithmically generated or modified composition.

Personally, I’ve never found the experience of attending such concerts to be entirely satisfying, since Max/MSP was never written for this purpose. Max/MSP programming on stage usually remains relatively opaque to the audience, even if audience members can see the computer screen.

It would be fun to design a programming language and environment specifically to be a medium for performance in front of an audience — with the understanding that much prior composition has already been done to scaffold what the audience is seeing.

A programming modality that privileges performance would be useful not just for music, but also for dance or theatre. One could imagine an evolving performance acted out by robot actors or dancers. As the performance progresses, the human performer modifies the procedural behavior of the actors. The audience experience consists not only of observing the actions of the robot actors or dancers, but also of understanding the rules those “performers” are following.

Theatre, dance and musical performance generally share the following structure: There is an initial stage where the work is composed, then a period when it is rehearsed, and finally the work is performed one or more times in front of an audience.

Each of these three stages has its own distinct properties. Composition is often (although not always) done by one individual, generally over a long period of time. For example, a work that an audience will experience for ninety minutes might require months or even years to compose.

Researsal is interesting, in that it takes place in an intermediate time-frame — generally performative, and yet not at all optimized for an audience. For example, a group researsing a work of theatre or music might repeat the same passage many times.

The audience on some level senses all this prior effort at the time of actual performance, but those efforts cannot subsume the performance itself. In the implied contract with one’s audience, the considerable sweat and toil of composition and rehearsal need to remain offstage.

One of the exciting qualities of of this three part structure lies in the rich opportunities it affords for feedback and iteration. Either researsal or performance can lead to modification of the composition itself. Unlike, say, a film, a theatrical, dance or musical performance is never entirely fixed — each performance is unique, and is subtly influenced by that evening’s audience.

What if we apply this structure of composition/rehearsal/performance to other domains? That’s a topic for tomorrow.

My ISP had technical problems the day this post was created, so apologies if you are only first seeing it the following day.

This evening I was walking along the street in Greenwich Village, minding my own business, when suddenly my eyes were pleasantly assaulted by an exhibit in a nearby window — a retrospective of drawings by Al Hirschfeld.

Now, this next part will either make perfect sense to you, or it will seem completely nuts. For the next half hour, like a kid in a candy store, I stood on that sidewalk drifting happily from drawing to drawing, in a state of utter bliss, counting Ninas.

I remember exactly the day, when I was twelve years old, that I was first initiated into the mystery of Nina. On that fateful Sunday morning, somebody pointed out to me that in every brilliant Hirschfeld caricature on the cover of the New York Times Arts and Leisure section, there was a little number to the right of his signature. And they explained just what that number meant.

From that day forward my teenage soul was hooked. Each week I would wait faithfully for that weekend’s paper. When it arrived, the very first thing I did, before doing the crossword, before checking out movie reviews, even before reading letters to the editor in the NY Times Magazine section, was worship at the church of Nina.

I could explain more about this, but that’s what Google is for, right?

I have been reading The King in Yellow, Robert Chambers’ masterful collection of gothic short stories from 1895. It is odd to finally read something that was such a powerful root influence upon authors whose works I have known for years, from Lovecraft to Heinlein and Silverberg to Neil Gaiman and Stephen King. Also, quite evidently, Harlan Ellison.

A unifying theme behind some of the stories — the existence of a text that makes its reader go mad, simply through the sheer seductiveness of its ideas — seems to post deep questions about the nature of literature, communication and human interconnectedness. Could mere words and expressed thoughts indeed have the power to drive us insane, to separate us from whatever hold we may have upon objective (or at least collective) reality?

Whatever side you come down on in answering that question, the implications are profound. I suspect Jung would have responded in the affirmative, whereas most thinkers today would say no.

Could such a text in fact exist? I find the question interesting, but I’m not going to, you know, go crazy trying to figure it out. 🙂

It always amazes me when people say, upon hearing that I work with computers and technology: “oh, that must be so complicated!”

I can’t help wondering, when I think about how complicated we humans are, and how complex the relationships between us, just what these people are talking about.

A computer is, in fact, eminently learnable. If you put in the time to study a computer language, technology or interface protocol, you will indeed master the instrument. No matter how complex it might seem, technology is predictable — if you poke it in a particular way, it will respond the same thing every time.

People, in contrast, are utterly unpredictable, capable of immense generosity and equally immense venality, often in the space of a single breath. Just when you think you know what’s going on, human minds will charge off in some completely unexpected direction. It is both our tragedy and our glory.

To paraphrase a grand old quote: Technology is easy. People are hard.

I find it heartening that so many people weighed in on the question of children learning a second language through the aid of on-line communities, and related questions.

It’s becoming clear that this is not one question but a web of related questions. For example, experiences for teenagers (like the one John Nordlinger started around W.O.W.) are clearly going to be vastly different from experiences for six year olds, in almost every conceivable way.

Also, as Manooh points out, there might be much opportunity simply in making the right resource available to kids, and letting them build from there, as a community of peers. The wonderful thing about that, if we can get it to work, is that we might be able to achieve a transformative level of change out of an affordable investment in resources.

Personally I find myself drawn to creating the fun exploratory environment that promotes multilingual capability for children who are still in their language acquisition age range (seven and younger). There is something so cool about tapping into that powerful potential. Besides, it gives me more excuses to play with cute little fish characters. 🙂

By the way, people I know at Google have told me that they are not actually phasing out the experiments in Google Labs, but rather just reorganizing how they roll them out. As long as these wonderful experiments keep coming, I’m happy!