MoltenMaster and Distribution of Generative Art

First, the news: I’ve released a SuperCollider Quark (called MoltenMaster) that attempts to simplify the playback organization (synchronization of resource allocation, playback initialization and resource deallocation across multiple pieces compiled in a bundle) of generative (and/or interactive) music/media pieces.

Generativity and interactivity in art is a hot topic and it is only going to get hotter. When such a work is experienced by the audience in a live setting (a concert or an installation), the artist – audience communication is somewhat lossless; the artist composes a process, and the result is not necessarily a static entity on spatial or temporal domains. The output is the result of the composed process and if there is any external and/or stochastic input present in the system, the output is different in every iteration. It is the limits of these differences that creates the composition. It’s not about the single output anymore (it actually never was, we had no other choice).

This situation challenges the standard notions of the society about what an artwork really is. To give a simple example, some people still discuss if computer games can be considered as artworks or not (let me point out here that I’m not a gamer at all). An artist draws a gorgeous chapel on canvas and it is considered as an artwork by default whereas another artist(s) creates a just as gorgeous environment using a computer where you can move around and interact with the surroundings (which arguably creates stronger emotional attachment, and more effective communication) but the value other than entertainment quality instantly becomes questionable.

In my opinion, discussions over “artistic quality” of some creation is a vain endeavor to begin with, but it seems this kind of controversy is needed to force people to think about these issues (and creating these types of controversies are in part, responsibility of artists), and my hope is that this perceptional distortion caused by the dominance of our old and static mediums will get reformed over time. This won’t happen by itself for sure.

Anyway, back to the core of our topic… The dominating mediums for media distribution for the past century was all static mediums… Wax cylinders, vinyl recordings, cassettes, audio CD’s, video DVD’s and so on… All the legible interaction these mediums provided for us was skipping back and forth, as the content inside them was static in nature. That means they’ve gone “Gold Master” at some stage in production and all you can do is to experience that static entity in different environments, and your interaction opportunities are rather limited. On the other hand, tools for procedural content generation, creation and effective/intuitive usage of generative and emergent processes in art is becoming a standard part of artists workflow. But when things come to distribution stage, we simply render one iteration of the work on a static file and burn it to a CD or DVD or put it somewhere up for download, whereas the original ideas of the artist can provide different variations of the process in every iteration. This is a very huge transmission loss between the artist and audience. And also there is this interactivity issue; for example in music, the listener can already set the volume, or EQ levels to his or her own hearts content, so why can’t we provide more controls that defines the shape of the generated structures in more fundamental ways? I’m talking about the same controls the artist tweaks to tune his or her own creation. The idea of this type of interaction might not be the preferred choice for everyone for sure, but we can still have it, it makes no harm.

One of the main things that is preventing us from doing so is that our current media players still follow the “static medium” paradigm despite virtually all of them being computers capable of providing interaction on aforementioned levels. MoltenMaster (as opposed to Golden Master) tries to provide a simple back-end to the SuperCollider environment that tries to simplify and encourage creation of computer programs that exhibit the behavior that I’ve been talking about.

Every MoltenMaster instance is a collection of pieces, each piece being an instance of MoltenPiece. Each MoltenPiece has slots for an allocator, player and deallocator that are to be filled by the composer. The MoltenMaster system tries to provide the synchronization of these processes to provide a familiar media player interface. Then there is the MoltenPlayer, a simple GUI application that plays back MoltenMasters which can be used as a base for creating more advanced and interactive playback interfaces.

This system, obviously will only work in our regular computers for now. There is some more ground to be covered before the usage of these systems become painless for composing and distributing works; and some more time is needed for them to find their ways into our pocket computers / media players in somewhat natural ways. We shouldn’t forget though that we are living in exponential times, this is my own stab to the issue.

I’ll be releasing a work in a day or two that uses this system to procedurally create sound content realtime and provide controls for some of my sound creations/pieces.