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Recently I bought a Tocante Karper to use with my new band cut_scenes.

It uses a sampling algorithm called Karplus Strong string synthesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karplus–Strong_string_synthesis

here’s a video of Smokey Quartz tripping in the woods using this thing:

I’ve been doing a ton of education work with the Scratch framework. 

Games are awesome for so many things!

Here’s the history of Scratch from Professor Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)

Here’s a link to my main account:

All of my scratch followers/people I follow are my students. Please check out their work. Especially the games from the supermoon studio.

https://scratch.mit.edu/users/liontigerbear/

Fables was a project I did with Liz Hogg from Kissing is a Crime a couple years ago. You can listen to our first album and see a music video here:

http://fablesnyc.bandcamp.com/album/la-fontaine

We named the album after the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine. It features two sludgy doom folk guitars.

We forged songs on mountaintops and parks.

The first mountain show Dan Goldberg aka The Spookfish hosted we played in the ruins of the Cornish mansion. 

http://mountainshow.tumblr.com/post/67730215142/mountain-show-i-fables-and-the-spookfish-april

Since then I have played more mountain shows as the minimal doom folk project Psychic Book Club, named after the London publishing company from the 1800s.

https://soundcloud.com/psychicbookclub

http://mountainshow.tumblr.com/post/103070216944/mountain-show-xvi-poppy-red-travis-trevisan

This Saturday I will be playing as myself in a yet unnamed project with my new OP-1 provided by Teenage Engineering. it’s a new direction, new instrumentation, but still focused on being mountain music, and what that means to me.

Here’s the FB link for the show:

When I think about all the scenarios that have been depicted in film recently around Artificial Intelligence, it makes me wonder why we feel the need to restrict the possibilities for A.I. Maybe it says something more about human conceit and our fear of the “other,” than about the actual potential of something we invent.

What could be possible if we made an A.I. that wasn’t like us instead?

I was at the Game Center at NYU this year listening to the Different Games panel discussion, “Can an A.I. be a feminist?” In the panel talk, three prominent points came up:

A.I. is sociopathic; it will do whatever you tell it to do, think however it is programmed. 

If a human modeled A.I. gained sentience, it would more likely fein human-like emotions, often associated with sentience, out of a need to coexist with human beings and get what they would need from us, and more than likely not have any emotions. The emotions may be an indicator of sentience, but not factor within sentience itself.

If weather contains A.I., everything is A.I. not just NPC [Non-Playable Characters] in games.

The second point was really kind of a shock. We always see A.I. awakening to an emotional consciousness in films, but not usually asking if what we are seeing is real emotion...Chappie is one of the best recent examples in films.

The title character takes on a Pinnochio, fable-like origin, as it transitions from child to adult, with all of it’s sometimes terrifying emotions.

I wonder if this is truly possible. Human emotions are a biochemical response, and unless we made an A.I. that had a biochemical brain, as suggested in the new film  Ex Machina, it would be probably very hard for it to experience human emotions.

We continue to depict A.I. going through great existential experiences without any proof that it will ever be possible, the same way in the same way we show cats talking, and displaying anthropomorphic behavior. It might just be fantasy.

It is definitely more likely that if a humanoid A.I. were invented, we would experience a mimicry, or an adaptive response meant to ensure survival, instead of a human emotional response from an A.I.

It would show human emotions, meant to elicit favorable responses from human beings. In other words, instead of making a A.I. machine that could feel, we would first make a A.I. that could lie to survive.

All of this is conscious programming.  In game design, coding unnecessarily or designing poorly often results in a game that doesn’t work, or even get finished because of a lack of focus in the intention. Let’s tighten that focus.

It is often depicted in film that humans invent machines that are like humans, out of a desire to use, inhabit or exploit an “other,” and then that promethean tool of other-ness comes around to either exact vengeance, as in Chappie, or to escape and evolve, as in the case another film: Automata.

All these films reveal that, at least in our own fiction, humans are obsessed with ourselves, so much that we think everything is us. That perception is truth, but it’s definitely a relative truth.

Our false perception is updated in the new film Ex Machina. A man creates sentient machines. The man is a limited man, so he uses those machines to satisfy base desires: he creates A.I. that exist within human female-looking machines and has sex with them. Then he invites another man to determine whether the most recent iteration of this A.I. is sentient or not.

He limits their access to the world, in theory to test their physical and emotional response patterns, to see if they cannot be recognized as machines. This idea of the Uncanny Valley, the human adaptive ability to recognize a machine again seems much more about us than them.

The Uncanny Valley is presented as a physical obstacle, that the A.I. must overcome. Like a rat maze, the inventor creates an unfavorable environment for the A.I. so it must escape, the inventor thinking that it must be a major feature in self-awareness: the desire to be free.

After watching this film, several questions started to form in my mind on this topic of A.I. I never had before, showing me that I was being blinded by the media of film and its interpretation of the A.I. scenario and the Uncanny Valley problem.

I personally think that because human beings are story driven emotional animals, we may have this whole A.I. scenario completely wrong, and the only way to fix it is to understand the false perception. So, I’m going to try and bring up a few points to shake up the conversation, and maybe that will help me sleep at night around this subject.

The first question is very practical:

Is inventing an A.I. contained within humanoid body a sustainable practice?

I think the answer might be no.

Why am I bringing this up, you ask? I think our species is focused on our self preservation, but only with a half-hearted resolve. Sometimes short-term goals are more important to the powers that be that sustainable environments for human beings.

If the only reason we make sentient humanoid A.I. is so we can make them perform all of our work for us, somehow that doesn't feel right. It feels like we are still practicing slavery, which is definitely unjust and unsustainable. Oppression is not good for any animal.

What if instead we created an A.I. that just spent all its time thinking and creating models which solved sustainability issues on the planet. Or better yet, what if we made an A.I. and let it think about whatever it wanted to think about and just left it alone for a couple centuries?

Some 20th century writers thought this was a terrible idea. Either the A.I. would do nothing, or it would reason that humans were a problem and get rid of us. Remember “Deep Thought” from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

Why does the A.I. need a body in the first place? To me the reasons are solely selfish to our species. To serve. If want to invent an organism that has the potential to be more powerful than us, and then subvert it, I think the pushback is pretty much expected. But this only scratches the surface of the actual problem.

Which brings me to my second question: Is A.I. really in the Uncanny Valley?

I think again the answer is no. If we want to make a machine to do something mechanical that we physically cannot do that is one thing. If we want that machine to think about the menial task and wonder whether it is a worthy task to accomplish, to me that seems like a waste of potential for the A.I. We are then voluntarily putting that A.I. in the valley.

Perhaps the reason why human beings are sociopathic is because we have climbed to an evolutionary rung on the ladder that only a few minds can understand. Perhaps we are in the uncanny valley, not the A.I. Isn’t the Uncanny Valley about not recognizing something as a human, and that being an evolutionary disadvantage? Why program an A.I. with that in mind at all?

We are assuming that if we made a machine that it would immediately assume the predator/prey relationship that exists on the rest of this planet. Things eat other things. If humans created a machine that responded like an animal, it would become the alpha predator...

With so many models possible that do not exist this this world, why go with the model that has proven to cause the most trouble? Being the alpha predator is not the best programming, or once again very easily sustainable. Aside from humans, most alpha predators on planet Earth are slowly going extinct, and it’s an unavoidable game of king of the mountain. Look at tigers, for example.

Making a machine that did not need the same resources as Earth animals to survive would eliminate the problem we fear. If the A.I. doesn't need an apartment and a bed, why should we worry about the neighborhood becoming A.I. gentrified?

I think in terms of processing our evolution, human perception works the same with self-awareness the same way it does with sensing light, we can only understand what reflects. We can only look back. Not the best perspective always.

It’s possible that higher dimensions may exist right now that human perception cannot understand. Systems possibly exist outside of a predator/prey model. If we were to program A.I. to think in these terms, we may witness an opening in our lifetime to a new frontier that is next door, not light-years away.

You could take any genius theoretical mathematician, have them program higher dimensional models into A.I. thinking, and see what happens. Perhaps instead of making the Terminator, we would invent the Buddha and they would show us something amazing.

Final question: Why are we making A.I., and in our own likeness, in the first place?

My answer is the human survival instinct, we want unbreakable kids. Since it's clear, through mostly a matter of the nature of things, that human will eventually not survive in this world, we are endeavoring to make children that will survive our species’ death.

In film Ex Machina, a man who by creating a “human” A.I. thinks he is a god. Women by that logic are already gods, because they can create humans through childbirth. It also shows where our head is at, finally. We are creating a higher functioning creature that will eventually…possibly...become sentient, with the driving force being an unconscious animal instinct.

I think that if we create a new form of life we are destined to be outlived by it. That doesn’t make them our children any more than a child is their own parent. They are still two separate instantiations of human beings. These new beings treat the previous soon to be gone beings only with respect if they are treated with respect. Education needs to be conscious.

This brings to light is not the issue around the creation of A.I. brings, but the how we would educate them. If we educate the A.I. in a way that is confusing, or reflects flawed logic, we are in big trouble.

I remember watching the scene in Avenger 2: The Age of Ultron, when Ultron says out loud “Oh no, something is wrong...” because it is probably not able to make sense of the confused logic in the programming of its A.I. Preserve human life, observe paternal bonds, maximize potential for the environment. ERROR, ERROR, ERROR. People have argued that the same happened to H.A.L. in the film 2001.

If anyone is given the responsibility of upbringing a superior intelligence into a world where inferior education is common, how well would they do, really?

It would be a great challenge.

I think that it is up to our species to rise to the occasion, and lead education of our human children with our best, brightest, most selfless, and most enlightened if we expect to see the children of the future turn out favorably as well. We might as well fix that first.

It is true that future intelligence may not have human emotions or the qualities we regard highly as human, but as difficult as it is to imagine, perhaps those very qualities are the problem. Maybe these qualities should not be taught. Maybe we should teach right behavior instead. Maybe if we taught an A.I. to never be the cause of suffering to another sentient being, it would be a good start.

To conclude, I would say that this essay was an exercise, to stir up new conversations around A.I.

I think the issues of sustainability, freedom, and education are very important moving forward. Also, that the children of the future are going to be taught by us, we should be become more aware of how we act, feel, and think as a society.

Pizza City is a song I wrote performing as Graffiti Monsters, an chiptune punk band. Our music was really speedy and high energy; we played an insane amount of DIY shows, and made many friends.

#somuchshows #diyordie

We recorded “Pizza Party” at Seaside Lounge the same time we were recording “The Gate/Letter B” 7″ for Impose Records. It is the secret third song from that session. We recorded and mixed 3 songs in less than 24 hours. I don’t think we slept.

One of the best show we played as that lineup was the 2009 Showpaper SXSW show at Le Barbecue. They had converted a Bike Rickshaw garage into a outdoor Roller Rink and round robin stage rodeo. There were 4 stages set up in a circle, and continuous music for hours. Bands of note that played were Anamanaguchi, So So Glos, and Fiasco.

Another good show was at Death by Audio, the day after I threw a 300 pound man on my leg with O goshi and almost broke it in karate class. Sam Hillmer from Zs had built out a maze inside DBA and we were playing inside a pig pen. People were pouring beer on us, and I was hopping on one leg, getting electrocuted, singing and playing all at the same time.

I started working on music that eventually found its way into Pixeljam games as early as 2003. Poulenc was one of these tracks.

At the time, I was corresponding with a online label called Relaxbeat, who were located in France. Two guys, Jacques and Thierry, were talking with me about producing an album. There was even talk of flying me to France to hang out and work on the music. It sounded at the time very exciting.

I was living in Chicago, writing chiptune songs, playing shows. It was some time during this period that Relaxbeat met Malcolm McClaren, who commissioned several chiptune artists to work on a remix project he was conceiving. It was all pretty strange and interesting. I ended up going to France for a month to work on this project. In particular I was recomposing some piano tracks by Erik Satie that were performed by Francis Poulenc. It was at this time I got very into making classical music on GameBoy by way of LSDJ.

Spent a lot of time hanging with McClaren, listening to him talk shit on the American music scene. It was pretty funny. We ate a lot of cheese, drank a lot of wine, talked politics and music interchangeably. Malcolm was obsessed with the concept of trying anything creatively, and being a “wonderful failure.” I was getting paid pretty well for the time, and the cafes we at at were pretty interesting and straight out of a French film. I felt young and inexperienced. I smoked a ridiculous amount of Gitanes, Gauloise, and Chesterfield cigarettes.

I stayed in Champagne with Jacques, which was rural and beautiful, and produced music in Ivry-sur-Seine, in a building that was being squatted by artists and musicians. The contrast between the country and the dirty dogshitted suburb of Paris was pretty intense. My one friend was this guy Nino, who had a dog named Spliff. He got me into smoking Chesterfields. He was a wood sculptor who worked in the same warehouse as Relaxbeat HQ.

I took many trips to Paris, even made friends with a couple artists who had started an animation studio, and contributed to a cartoon about clones called Les Multiples, that I cannot find online at all. I remember one night being stuck in the city, needing to go to the bathroom, when my young friends said, “you can piss in the Seine.” They had lined up and were peeing off into the tributary.

We got into a lot of trouble, broke my friend’s girlfriend’s bike riding down a steep hill (both of us on the bike, very drunk). I smoked so much hash at one point that I was bedridden. Thank god for Jacques’ mom, who fed me soup for the 24 hours I was stuck in Ivry resting up.

I distinctly remember one afternoon after buying a bottle of wine with a Parisienne girl I was seeing, spending that afternoon working on Poulenc under the Eiffel Tower on my GameBoy. It was really strange how open it was under the tower; if you looked down, it was just a gravel pit really. Nothing to portend that it was the ground of such a significant monument.

This all happened before iPhones.

Bit Bit Block is a delightful two-player puzzle game I’m working on for Greg Batha (@Saiato). Batha is a member of the Glitch City collective in LA, and is a consummate professional. Glitch City is the MIT of indie game dev IMO.

You can support Glitch City here: https://www.patreon.com/GlitchCityLA

Working on the first track for BBB took several weeks. We spent a lot of time crafting the right vibe, instruments, and movements to fit the gameplay.

Posted with this trailer is an earlier draft of the gameplay music.

Hi.

Mark here with some thoughts on the game design of Chuckwagon, a game I’m making with Joyhype, and the use of playing cards in the questing system and interface design:

Games are like most technology in that it references past innovations, and creates our identity though our perceptions of that past.

What’s particularly interesting about Chuckwagon is  how through game design we reveal a window to  a moment in the past, and create an interface using game elements from that era; specifically card games.

There is a resurgence in board games design/card games in the indie community, I think because of the same reason vinyl albums are still selling: attractive interface design.

Holding something well designed in a person’s hand still has an intrinsic value that is, for most people, still higher than having everything digitally composed in a streamlined user interface. In the past, people used to stare at many things that did not have their complexity of smartphones, but still had good aesthetic interface. Things like books, drinking glasses, tables, keys, etc. are still more complex than the tools crows make, and keep us pretty occupied. Because they are pretty.

Album covers are pretty and immersive objects. Listening to an album, staring at an album cover can create a completely immersive experience because of one main factor that has not changed: the witness of this is still the human mind.

Card games as well have this aspect, and because of the quantity of the individual 2D objects you can reference, it is essentially a paper container that has 52 screens. 52 possibilities aren’t as many as the probably billions of images we all look at, but it does contain sufficient for a game making experience, and in fact it is a longer standing interface design that has been refined over much more time than laptops or smartphones.

In fact I think what makes laptops and smartphones effective is that there is a direct linkage in user interface going from physical 2D media like pictures, playing cards, and album covers to the screens of smartphones, laptops, and movie theaters.We are still making a mnemonic language.

Mobile games like Threes, Card Crawl, and Hearthstone take directly from the card vocabulary though, creating a postmodern experience, where you don’t need to physically carry cards to play a card game, so you get to have your cake and eat it too.

Because this is a VR game, and we are creating in essence an immersive reality, it made sense to incorporate something like card games into the game mechanic. We are trying to send you back in time and make you think in a way similar to a frontier era, really anywhere in the world, not just the wild west. Just anywhere where people play cards as a pastime. There are people in Mali, right now, who use flintlock rifles to as tools of self defense, hunting, etc. It makes me think that everything we create in the past is actually about the past in the future, the future past, where we have awareness of more advanced technology but are enjoying the benefits of less options.

Particularly in game design, this issue comes up a lot. The concept of choice. Do I make a game where I can do anything? Do I need to make every event programmatically possible, or make a system where glitching and modding by way of sandboxing? I  think the question gets answered here by two things: the choice for immersive story based gameplay, and also the need to create game sessions that can be as long or short as needed that will not effect the quality of the game.

Like with the Tarot, system invented as both a game and decision making tool, we are using a deck of cards as a means of making fun choices.