By Lucian Scher
Artificial intelligence. Transmodal meta composition. Life, and the beauty of strange attractors.
Diarmid Flatley is a UC Santa Barbara Media Arts and Technology (MAT) Ph.D. candidate working on the cutting edge of advanced technology in his research and teaching.
Flatley is also guiding a new Media Arts and Design (MAD) Summer Minor program, teaching Fundamental Concepts of Media Arts and Design in the first summer session and Enacting the Metaverse later this summer.
In a recent interview Flatley discussed his research in the technological arts and the complexities of writing a dissertation in his field. He also shared his front seat perspectives on the global Artificial Intelligence revolution.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What is MAD, the new Minor offered by the Media Arts and Technology Program? Who should take the MAT Minor?
A: MAD — Media Arts and Design — is a new summer minor program that can be completed over one to two summers. This Media Arts and Technology initiative is a collaborative effort among several departments, including Art, Communication, English, Film and Media Studies, German, Linguistics and Music. The minor is intended for any student interested in exploring the intersection of art and technology. The goal is to help students develop a blend of creative and technical literacies.
This work, by Diarmid Flatney, is a visual representation of the path of light. It is based on a mathematical equation that produces increasingly random results on a set trajectory.
Our contemporary culture is saturated with media and continual shifts in technology. It is vital for all of us to directly engage new technologies as empowered makers lest we become passive consumers. Students in the arts and humanities can develop their technical literacy by using digital tools to analyze and present information and produce original creative works. Students in the sciences can enhance their creative design skills and gain practical experience through project-based learning.
Q: Would the MAD minor help a young person navigate the modern world?
A: Properly deciphering the world requires recognizing the design principles behind the tangibly mediated artifacts we encounter. The rapid progress of AI makes this kind of media literacy even more important. Understanding and confronting the technological background, creative applications, cultural impacts, and ethical considerations of such technologies is a fundamental challenge.
For students interested in a minor but already overwhelmed by yearly academic work, the summer provides an opportunity to pursue a minor without adding additional stress to the standard academic year. The summer MAD minor courses offered by MAT are (in part) extensions of MAT courses offered during the school year. For students already exploring Media Arts and Technology during the year, the summer courses provide a way to continue their engagement with these topics during the summer.
Q: What is your Ph.D. research project in the MAT Graduate Program about?
A: My background is as a composer. Composers deal with how you structure things in time, usually sound. But your perception of one sense evokes a sensation in another sense. I’m interested in trans modality, different modes of either sensory information or different modes of communication. This prefix trans, is indicating across or beyond. Finding ways to link sight and sound or sound and smell is trying to figure out how to work across modalities and how to work across media. If composing makes a work, then meta composition produces a structure that produces works. The idea here is something inherently generative. So, if you stick this together, then the core idea that I’m trying to unpack in my dissertation is the notion of transmodal meta composition.
An example of an AI algorithm.
Q: How does Transmodal Meta Composition work, and what can it produce?
A: I usually work with mathematical concepts that I map to sound, image, video, sculpture, etc. These different representations of the same compositional idea are dynamical systems. A simple example is a pendulum, a simple harmonic oscillator that eventually fades out to zero because of environmental friction. That’s a deterministic system in the sense that if we know the starting position and velocity of the pendulum, then we can use a set of equations to calculate every point it shows up. There’s a special set of dynamical systems that deal with chaotic behavior. If you start the system twice, once at one location and once at another minutely different location, over the course of time, their paths are going to diverge wildly. A special class of those systems is called strange attractors. The trajectories are impossible to predict, yet they still follow a general pattern…From the standpoint of trying to make music or art you get things that are close to repetitions, but not quite repetitions.
Q: What’s it like writing your dissertation while AI takes hold in the world?
A: My struggle right now is: How do you tie all this together in a coherent way for a generative artist trying to finish a dissertation in the face of this massive tide of AI-generated work? Once you start to get into these things, they start proliferating. I’ve already been working on this for a long time, but need to write a dissertation at some point. The dangerous part of a PhD is getting lost in these little trajectories. At some point, you have to put the blinders on to get it done. Otherwise, I’ll be here for another five years.
An example of Ph.D. candidate Diarmid Flatley’s chaotic system generated art.
These AI algorithms and how they get to their output, is not the same way a human gets to their output. Therein lies hope for the saving grace for human artists’ work. You feed all the text on the internet, then it [the algorithms] gets good at predicting what the next word might be. That’s not creativity in the same way as humans use creativity.
Q: Why is it important to study AI’s relationship with music?
A: I’ve been reading, with respect to my dissertation, the topics of semiotics…What we’re talking about is where language breaks down. For example, you can hear some piece of music that moves you. And it’s evoking emotion in you, but it might be an emotion you can’t even put your finger on or say the word for. Part of the reason is that the music is communicating something that language cannot communicate. Part of the benefit of musical expression is that it gets at something that language doesn’t.
Q: What inspires your area of research?
A: As a maker, life is one of the most generative things we know of. This simple molecule seems to produce a huge amount of variety. Every species on the planet uses that same thing – carbon. One of the great things about nature is there will be a sunset every day, but it’s a different sunset every day. Different sunsets contain different kinds of beauty, depending on all these atmospheric factors. One of the coolest things is to be surprised by what the system gives me when running.
Lucian Scher is a third-year student at UC Santa Barbara who is majoring in Environmental Studies and pursuing the Professional Writing Minor. He wrote this article for his Writing Program course Digital Journalism.