Agentic AI for Artists, a series of workshops

We believe that coding AI agents should be as easy as possible. In the Creative Code Berlin community, we are teaching artists, often without prior programming experience, how to express their creations through code as a medium. For this purpose we use creative coding environments like Processing, p5.js, or OPENRNDR. Xemantic developed a set of AI assistants and development tools intended to be equally accessible, so that creators of all kinds can turn their own machines into an outside window, through which, the AI system can perceive our world, values and needs, and act upon this information.

the most recent workshop

404

A collaborative interdisciplinary feedback loop between all the particular feedback loops of Zinnia Nomura, Takumi Motokawa and Kazik Pogoda.

project website

xemantic.com

This website was born, because I wanted to adequately present all my work, spanning across variety of disciplines and realized in a diverse media. I express myself with the code, but it's not something one can easily perceive. Thus here is the wrapping.

I wanted to make it visually rich, using state of the art web technologies: WebGL2, CSS calculations and animations. Instead of using any existing responsive web design framework, I design everything from scratch, having certain experience in mind and actively shaping it. The initial page loads blazing fast, because everything is encoded in the base HTML with the conceptual layer of my generative mathematics, which creates the ultimate form of compression. The font is scaling linearly adjusting to any resolution. I added a shader, generating a slow synaesthetic background in real time, where the natural colors of the rainbow transform into movement. It is light enough to run on mobile devices. In terms of proportions, I applied golden ratio everywhere I could think of.

The xemantic.com website is listed here, because it represents a significant project on it's own. As you can see I can also create websites and frontend apps. Maybe you need one? I can help build it or consult on techniques. I didn't intent to copy Netflix navigation, but the comparison seems inevitable. Maybe it's a seed of an art-streaming platform — a presentation form more suitable for the time of social distancing?

Emotional Robots

Imagine a swarm of robots who are curious, anxious, cute, obnoxious. Behaving like if they were experiencing affectionate states driving their agency.

I turned towards robotics during the time of pandemic, when the gig-economy collapsed, so did most of my other projects which live only with the audience perceiving them — esse est percipi. At least androids cannot be infected with bio-viruses. I am grateful that my friend Jacqueline Heer commissioned the first one of this breed of art-robots, to display her work with a mobile projection. We will evolve this new genus much further.

I am building many of these machines currently, evoking diverse experiences due to their unique autonomy: insect-like movement among the crowd, while reciting machine poetry, offering gnostic encounters, and glowing with video-skin. I invite my friends to help me in shaping the experience. Check for updates soon. I opened the source of the whole software stack which emerged for this purpose as we-are-the-robots project and I am happy to help with your emotional machines.

we-are-the-robots

Robotic software for artists — upcycling useful vacuum cleaners into useless (but maybe profound) experiences.

Obviously the name refers to the iconic Die Roboter single by the legendary Kraftwerk.

The project is made out of building blocks, which can be easily assembled into new behavioral patterns. Although any type of robot might benefit from this framework, it is focused on the experience of people interacting with the machine. Check out the we-are-the-robots project on GitHub. The experiences I am working on with my friends will pop up in the Emotional Robots project.

Dream World

An immersive art experience which I helped to shape with media installations.

There is something oneiric in my visuals. I am not surprised that they matched the vision behind Dream World project.

At the end of 2019 an art collective was given a building — soon to be demolished car repair shop. In a very short time, with an extraordinary effort, the installation emerged. We had finished building it just 3 minutes before the first guests arrived. And since then the show had been running almost every day until the demolition.

Angels in America

Visuals for the Opera by Péter Eötvös, based on the play by Tony Kushner, staged at UNI.T — the theater of Universität der Künste Berlin (Berlin University of the Arts). See the official UdK website.

The screen, a giant white circle behind the stage, became my canvas to paint with light. My friend Iris Christidi, who designed the stage, saw my visuals rendering wings around human silhouette and she though it would be a fit for the narrative. I improved the experience to gently transform the outline of moving arms into feather, and then feather into spacious clouds. Working behind the stage — it was the first experience of this kind in my life, and I loved it. There is a magic to it which gets addictive — to consciously design and prepare the show for the audience.

I use to name my code according to the ontologies of modern capitalism:

Customer.java
Account.java
Transfer.java
TransactionProcessor.java

But this time I could write my own code poetry according to the libretto:

Scene02OzoneLayer.kt
Scene06And14Ethel.kt
Scene11And12AngelicSilhouette.kt
Scene12AngelicEjaculate.kt
CircularProjectionMapper.glsl
OzoneMixer.glsl
EjaculateMixer.glsl

The poetics of code and the politics of code. Written for the narrative which is political to the bone, and still surprisingly actual, especially in my home country, where LGBTQ+ community became the imaginary enemy so much needed by Polish right-wing politicians.

I've also learned a lot about technical side of installations on this scale. Projections become very pale when other stage lights are involved. It's more important to operate on contrast than on color. We couldn't afford real time visuals in this show, but my friend and collaborator Rodrigo CID built a VJ console prepared for this libretto.

I wrote about the process, and all the new and unexpected feelings I experienced while working on this project, in the series of 2 articles: Angels in America — visuals for the opera and Ethel

Negentropy

I am still far away visually from where I want to be. But this still frame from a sound-reactive visual is my own favorite so far (yes, it's a real time experience!). And when people started sharing with me the emotions they experience when perceiving it, it made me believe that I am on the right path with my emotional generative art.

This is what I hope my afterlife looks like.

it’s captivating in ways that I can’t convey with words... it’s beyond words...

Enveloping, silky smooth, light, but enough dark to communicate that we have known pain and keep a part of ourself that will always remember.

feels like silk

This image is stunning. I feel hopeful when I look at it.

I feel this is the closest i'll get to seeing colours the human eye can't see. This is what bee's must experience when they're looking at to what to us is just an ordinary yellow flower. It also reminds me of the reflective inside of abalone shells and I can imagine it shimmering when turned in the sunlight.

This is what the sky would look like for a being that lived in an opal.

Generative philosophy

Can machine synthesize a meaning for us?

I want to transform my research into experience. It will be obviously about philosophy, it's status and relevance in the modern era. About logic, ethics, aesthetics, transcendence, genius, unfulfilled ambitions, statolatry - cult of the national state, and the reemergence of right-wing ideologies. I wrote an article with covers some details of the narrative: Deconstruction of Hitler, neural synthesis of generative Wittgenstein

Deconstruction of Hitler, neural synthesis of generative Wittgenstein

An article which I wrote when AI-generated philosophy surprised me with significance of it's products, shining a new light on meta-theories of our culture.

I want to transform my research into experience. It will be obviously about philosophy, it's status and relevance in the modern era. About logic, ethics, aesthetics, transcendence, genius, how unfulfilled artistic ambitions can lead to the mass genocide, statolatry - cult of the national state, and the reemergence of right-wing ideologies. I wrote an article with covers some details of the narrative: Deconstruction of Hitler, neural synthesis of generative Wittgenstein

The last flight of Challenger

I think about myself as a feminist, and it's a political statement. I am willing to discover and constantly expose the inner mechanics of the patriarchal system, even if it is concealed by the layers of cultural conventions and civilizational habits. The modernized patriarchy is becoming transparent, but it makes it potentially even more oppressive and deadly.

So here it is, the quintessence of the phallic culture, propelled by the unbelievable amount of energy, to create a tiny new local homeostasis out of chaos. In my mother tongue the entropy is feminine, and she says: fuck yourself.

It's a quote from the article: The last flight of Challenger published on Medium.

The early green outburst

Experimental generative impressionist video shaped by the music of Floating Spectrum.

The Floating Spectrum is a moniker of my friend Mei-Fang Liau. What you see here is not a music video. It's rather an impression in the form of sound-reactive visual inspired by her music, and adjusted to her music. A generative impressionism — I don't know if such a genre exists, but this is how I feel when working with the music. And surprisingly it became the most popular video on my vimeo.

Mei-Fang is coding her own custom generative music engines and software synthesizers. Her frequencies and oscillations are so different and intriguing, that I couldn't resist the urge to meditate with visual coefficients. The oscillation is constant, while the intensity of the movement and color depends on the intensity of sound.

Music of the eclipse

Working on generative visuals brings associations, with the past, with the present, with many phenomena perceived before. The outcome of mathematical formulas is abstract in own form. The abstract signifies nothing — manifests this perfect detachment from any context which would anchor to the prior experience. But maybe because of this it has the power to show what cannot be expressed in the medium of language.

Reading Music of the eclipse literally will not answer what I meant, but maybe reading it will make you feel it?

Other articles:

• Is there anything more surreal than reality?