Exploring the Creativity Code – investigations into the use of Fuzzy Logic and Artificial Intelligence in the composition of hypermedia performance.

This paper will reflect on several practice-based investigations that examined the transformational effect of performing artists collaborating with thinking machines.

A series of works have been created that forefront the laptop as performer. Embedded within the algorithmic logic of these machines are aesthetic choices that contribute to the fluid realisation of each work. In a sense, these machines are endowed with the composer’s aesthetic choices, which are realised live through performance and their interaction with humans.

Piece 1: Three Last Voices (2012) was commissioned by Vale of Glamorgan International Music Festival uses generative algorithms and networked communications to present scores to improvising musicians. Piece 2: Black Cats and Blues a hypermedia concerto for cello and digital technologies (2013-4) uses camera analysis of the performer’s motions. Piece 3: QuickSilver for dancer, cello, Kyma and digital projection technology (2014) uses audio and video tracking to generate scores and visual design. Each of these are considered as hypermedial organisms in which the boundaries of individuality are blurred through the interaction of digital technology, and creativity is fused selflessly within a lived understanding of a whole instrument.

This paper will reflect upon the human computer relationship between the corporeal performers with the technological performers, and review existing work on mapping human creativity (e.g. H Zedan et al 2008). Furthermore, it will ponder on the Turing Test nature of these findings, by identifying what it was in the code that the humans understood to be ‘exhibiting intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human’. In short, is there such a thing as a Creativity Code?