Thank you.
Let's see whether this actually works.
Thank you.
Amazingly worked.
Is this working the way it's supposed to?
All right.
So, this is too loud.
Sounds very loud to me.
I'm a philosopher by training.
And I've been involved with technical disciplines around
philosophy like artificial intelligence and cognitive
science for a long time before I came to digital humanities.
So what I will try to do today is to present a kind of
comparative view of artificial intelligence and
developing artificial intelligence.
And what I see is the recent history of digital humanities
and try to draw some lesson from there with some art put in
the middle to spice things up.
So, basically, I will argue for three claims today.
My focus will be not just artificial intelligence per se
or digital humanities per se, but digital humanities per
se.
But artificial intelligence and digital humanities as two
forms of two historical patterns of interaction between
the humanities on the one hand and digital technology
broadly conceived.
In fact, as broadly conceived as we like on the other hand.
And my first claim is that these encounters as I call
them between humanities and the science of the artificial
these Monica recently called which I find very appropriate.
Have been one way appropriations that have left one
of the partners completely unaffected.
The second claim is that there certainly have been
significant results as the outcome of these encounters.
But this result, this mode of encounter does not exhaust
the space of possible mode interactions.
There are other ways in which digital technologies or the
science of the artificial and the humanities discipline
could interact.
And the reason I know, or at least I will argue, I know,
the reason I know that there are other ways is because
artists in their own practices have shown us different ways
of working with digital technologies.
So, the speculative claim I will put forward is that perhaps
humanities discipline broadly conceived including my own
home discipline of philosophy may follow the mode of artistic
practice which I will go into detail later by doing this
couple of things, namely focusing on theoretical objects
and adopting a pattern similar to the artist.
So, three sections, the takeover mode which is what happened
in history, in my view, the artistic mode, the alternative
and then the speculative extension to the humanities of
artistic practices.
Let's start with the takeover mode.
Now, artificial intelligence was a discipline that started in
the late 40s, early 50s, although the official birthday
is 1956 but was already maturing at the time.
And the traditional modus operandi of artificial intelligence
is as follows.
As an artificial intelligence scholar, you pick an open issue
from philosophy or psychology.
For example, the nature of thinking, what actually happens
when people make an inference, when people think or when they
solve the problem or when they learn a new concept.
And then you try to formalize this problem which typically is
presented in a very discursive informal way or it has been
presented in a very informal discursive way throughout the
history of philosophy or the history of psychology.
You formalize it into a theory which has to be, of course,
very, very detailed because then you want to transform that
theory into computer code.
And as we all know, that needs a lot of detail.
Then once you have this computer code, once you have formalized
the theory, you run it.
You run a simulation of the theory and you try to figure out
whether, in fact, what you get out of the simulation are the
results that a human would get out of the same problem.
If that is the case, then the theory validates.
You have produced a consistent satisfactory account of, let's
say, problem solving or learning.
Therefore, the problem is solved.
You go back to the first step, you pick another problem.
What if the theory does not validate?
What if what you get out of the simulation?
For example, what if you write a program that is supposed to
formalize the thought processes going on when a human chess
player plays chess?
This is the famous starting point of artificial intelligence
in early 1950 with Herbert Simon and Ellen Newell.
You do that and then you see the outcome.
Does this program play a good game of chess?
Well, if it does, then you have explained what happens in the
human mind or rather in the mind of the human chess player when
the chess player plays chess.
Does it play a poor game of chess?
Well, then you try different formulas.
This is, in fact, what happened in the history of automatic chess
playing.
The first chess player, automatic chess player, played very poor
games of chess.
So you try refining the formula, coming up with new theory,
et cetera, et cetera.
Now, here, from a philosophical point of view I am interested
in, is the issue.
Philosophy basically plays the role of reservoir of open
research question.
No further interaction with the original field is needed after
the initial selection of the question.
In particular, there is little or no interaction with philosophy
or with psychology.
That is, with the specific theories of problem solving,
let's say, or learning or thinking.
It is a takeover modality.
Artificial intelligence takes over the target field concern
and solves them the right way.
I'll give you an example, just one example.
For example, a certain point, artificial intelligence in the
70s came to storytelling.
Realizing human life is structured by storytelling and
story understanding.
So they wanted to write programs that would provide
satisfactory account of what happened in storytelling.
Now, from an abstract point of view,
if you're faced with this issue, you basically,
from my perspective, you have two open venues.
You can either look at what humanists did in trying to
understanding storytelling.
Notice, this is 1970, right?
This is the height of neurotology.
This is the period in which Levis Troas, Grey Masque,
Paul Bremond, et cetera, et cetera, wrote extensive
theories, very abstract, certainly,
but very extensive theory about storytelling.
Or you could start from scratch and invent your own
theory of storytelling, completely ignoring what
neurotologists and literary scholars have done.
In fact, that's exactly what happened with early AI research
from the 70s on, for example, with a program by me
and others.
So, takeover.
Now, my claim is that what I've seen,
and I'm here mostly to learn from,
as I said, I've been engaged with digital humanities
for a relatively short time, what I've seen in digital
humanities is the reverse side of this attitude.
Whereas in the case of artificial intelligence,
the takeover was over problems.
In the case of digital humanities,
the takeover is over tools.
And I'll go a bit quick through this.
So, one way of approaching what, at least at the beginning,
digital humanities did, was to go through these five steps,
which I patterned on the five steps of artificial
intelligence procedure.
You select a classic humanities issue,
diffusion of canonical literary text, et cetera, et cetera.
You pick a mature digital tool for the time and space
in which you're working, concordance building tools,
web technology, there is a long, long list here.
You apply the tool to the issue at hand.
If the problem is solved, you move on, you move back.
Actually, to step one, you pick another issue.
Is the problem not solved?
You pick a better technology.
A great illustration of this, in my view,
is what happened with the Index Domestiguz and Father Bousa
from the 50s on.
Father Bousa, Roberto Bousa,
built the Index first on note cards.
Then, by working with IBM within the framework
of the Marshall plan, on punch card,
they move to tape, then to disk, then to the web.
And here, I think we see a similar pattern.
Digital technology plays the initial role
of the reservoir of available mature tools,
no further interaction with the original field
after the selection of tools,
no concern with digital technology on interaction
with the humanities concern.
In short, the digital humanities takes over
the target field's digital technology tools
and applies them to its own problem.
So, here is what I'm speculating.
We have this takeover mode here,
exemplified by these two historically formed disciplines,
AI and digital humanities.
And then, I've been very schematic, of course,
there are ways in which digital technologies
have made that approach more interactive.
And I've put a couple here,
one for artificial intelligence,
one for digital technology,
the Terra project at Osna Brook, for example.
There are many more examples to put here.
Back towards another one.
But my question as a philosopher is,
well, is there a pattern here?
Is this one extreme of a continuum?
And in order to answer this question,
we need to know the other extreme of the pattern.
Now, my claim is that the other extreme,
the other end of this range,
is offered to us by the artist, or by some artist.
So, that is the overall claim.
Let me show you what I mean by the artistic mode.
Here's my example.
The micro-sound approach to music,
pioneered by Curtis Rhodes in the late 90s,
early millennium.
He started out by noticing that
elementary musical objects, that is, notes,
have a duration between a few hundred milliseconds
and a few seconds, and several static properties,
like pitch, timbre, dynamics, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, his approach is the following.
Well, let's try to come up
with a different kind of sound object,
which is positioned at a lower time scale,
the time scale of microseconds instead of milliseconds,
which is intermediate between the time scale of the samples,
the digital sample used for CDs,
the traditional time scale of musical notes,
and also objects which have time-dependent dynamic properties
and not fixed static properties.
I won't go into this.
So, he created a new object called micro-sound,
or music grains, which are microsecond-level sound objects,
which can be aggregated.
Of course, these are very, very short.
We can aggregate it temporally or spatially,
producing lines, which would be the equivalent of notes,
or clouds.
And I now want to give you an example,
a very short example of what this means.
What does it sound like?
This is a micro-sound composition by Curtis Rhodes.
Forget the visualization which I did later by an artist.
Okay, enough.
Why did I want you to hear a little sample?
Because it is quite obvious, even in the first hearing,
that this music is not just a random collection of sounds,
but it has textures, it has patterns,
it has, in other words, structure.
Structure, however, which cannot be described
with the traditional tools available in music theory,
because you cannot capture the micro-sound object
in traditional musical theory.
Musical theory talks about notes
and everything you can do with notes,
chords, arpeggios, sequences, cadences, etc., etc., etc.
There is no way you can literally talk
about micro-sound in musical theory.
But there is structure, so there must be a theory
capable of describing those objects,
therefore you need to develop it.
So the next step is, in fact, to develop,
once you have identified this object,
to develop a new musical lexicon, a new grammar,
and new forms different from those previously existing
within the Western musical tradition.
Now, the interesting thing, though,
is that there are no software tools there available, either,
because the traditional tools available for musical production
piggyback upon Western musical theory and harmony.
So you need to invent the software tools as well.
So the mode of interaction is very different.
You start by picking a new object,
perhaps according to previous musical concern,
this case was music on craft by Schaeffer and Xenakis and others.
We don't need to be concerned with that.
And then you need to provide a new theoretical structure.
So this is the non-digital part.
And then you need to ask the digital counterpart
to provide new tools to manipulate them,
to manipulate these new objects.
And now the first step is actually the most important one.
In fact, you never stop looping between two and three.
That's what happened to Curtis Rhodes.
You start out with an idea, you start producing
some theoretical construct, you implement the tools,
the tools show you something you have not understood
about your concept, you go back to new concepts,
and so on and so forth.
And here is an example, I mean a structural view
of what, in fact, you do.
I also have another example which I cannot show you
because I'm running out of time.
Now, the question is, for me, can we export the humanities,
this mode of interaction with digital technologies
that the artists have used quite effectively
and for quite a long time?
There are two issues here.
One is, the first issue you come up, at least the first issue
I as a philosopher come up, is theoretical objection.
You can say, oh, wait a second, those are artists.
We are humanists.
Artists, as we know from Aristotle, do things, that is.
Remember the old Aristotle classification
of the way humans interact with the world,
either through poises, through the production of things,
through praxis, the social interaction,
or through theoria, that is, contemplation.
And typically, artists, art, thinks of itself,
and we tend to think of art as essentially poetic.
Artists make things, like Curtis Rhodes.
He makes objects, he makes musical objects.
But the humanities are fundamentally theoretic,
like after truth, or after picking a part of someone else's truth.
So artistic digital practice could rely on the deviation
of new objects that art can be with because of this poetic character.
But the humanities have no poetic character,
therefore the road is closed, is the dead end.
I, of course, have a reply to this,
otherwise I will not present the objection.
Now, I think this classification, as worthwhile as it is,
is nonetheless incomplete or nonetheless too schematic
because it's not true that art is poetic only,
and the humanities are theoretic only.
It's too also, the opposite is also true.
Certainly, art is not merely and always time-bound for uses.
Otherwise, there would be nothing like aesthetic value.
Aesthetic value cannot be completely time-bound,
cannot be just the expression limited to a certain time and space.
Using Heideggerian terminology, we could say that art could be worth disclosing.
You see something you hadn't seen before
and we should take home with you
when you are faced with a successful work of art.
That's not poetic, that's more akin to theoria than to poetic.
And conversely, it's not true that humanities are always theoretic.
In fact, this is the opposite.
Failed humanities are in fact time-bound poetic events.
That is, when you look at, let's say as a philosopher,
at a particular philosophical work that, let's say,
was written in, I don't know, the mid-17th century
and has no other value for me than as an expression
of the way people thought in the mid-17th century.
Well, that's just what it means to look at an artifact as a pure poetic artifact.
It's just an expression of its sign as no theoretic component left.
So it's not true that humanities are merely theoretic.
As well it was not true that the artworks are merely poetic.
So theoria employees are not incompatible
and we as humanists could perhaps follow in the artist's path
if we just make one simple change.
Namely, we take as basic starting block the concept.
If we reinterpret our work as the work of building concepts,
producing concept, concept-bound poises,
it would be a long discussion to have here.
I'm not completely making this up.
I'm partly making this up.
I'm not completely making this up.
But the reference here is Deleuze and Gattari's theory
of philosophy and classical philosophy.
So I'm coming to the end.
General strategy for digital theoretical poises, as I called it.
Identify a new object, which has to be a concept,
whose articulation requires, one, the construction of a new grammar
for short, a new theory around it,
similar to what Curtis Sound did when he came up
with the idea of granular construction.
But a new grammar, which depends on the elaboration of digital
or the construction, if you want, of digital manipulation tools
and results in the production of a theory,
because as humanists that's ultimately what we're interested in.
So summary.
Encounters between humanity and digital disciplines
have traditionally followed the takeover mode.
But some artists have practiced an alternative,
object-oriented cooperative agonistic mode.
This moniker here I came up with is meant to capture
that tight loop I was showing before while going through
Curtis Rhodes, the summary of Curtis Rhodes' mode of operation,
namely this going back and forth between disciplines,
coming up with a new musical theory
and then trying to see whether the digital counterpart
can implement it in tools.
And then going back, this is what I call cooperative agonistic,
because at the same time a cooperation and mutual challenge
between the two rival fields.
And finally, humanities may profit from following the artistic example.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE