Art as Data Science: An Emerging Practice
Data scientists extract knowledge from data sets (ex. spreadsheets). Many people get into data science to solve complex problems with machine learning algorithms that make huge impacts on education and industry. As a PhD I do that work for STEAM education. However, I’m drawn to a particular cultural phenomenon called improvisation and seeing what that does to the data/code.
About 10 years ago scientists discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression and creativity flow. Charles J. Limb, M.D. states:
When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm… the musician is generating music that has never been heard, thought, practiced or played before.
The scientists also studied freestyle rappers. The asserted that creativity is a twofold process, in which an initial improvisatory phase, characterized by spontaneous generation of novel material, is followed by a period of focused re-evaluation and revision. James A. Snead came to a similar conclusion in his essay on black cultural production (improvisation). Snead identified jazz and other examples such as literature and funk music. About James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” Snead writes,
Another cut occurs when we hear punchy horns and Brown’s delivery of the song title: ‘I break out’ — bemp, bemp, bemp, bemp — ‘in a cold sweat!’ — bemp, bemp, bemp, tonktonk, BREAAAH. And we then return to the initial groove. The song’s pattern is A-B-A-B-A, with cuts as the markers of transition.
My hypothesis was that funk music was amenable to algorithmic design. Initially, I explored what would happen when I played “Cold Sweat” in music visualization software (sound generates the graphics). The music acted upon simple shapes and produced patterns that can also be seen in African and African American textiles. I grabbed stills from the animation, extruded them in Tinkercad and created a physical model of the visual.
I wrote the “Cold Sweat” chorus as a conditional statement, then took that a step further in Tinkercad Codeblocks, a computational design program where you can make 3D models using draggable blocks of code (like Scratch programming). After exporting the model as an STL file I brought it into Magic and this was the result:
Through improvisation, humans (coders, makers) can collaborate with machines to create things that were never thought of before. The human-machine call-and-response interaction shows that there are culturally relevant ways to create and teach computation thinking and action.