In the 5th grade, I devised my own language; for I could think of no better or more fascinating challenge. For my Master's thesis at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, I could think of no better or more fascinating challenge than to invent language-inventing machines. What resulted was The Dawn Chorus, a group of electronic sculptures that do just this—emergently, and autonomously. Using a suite of custom hardware and a simple neural network for each device, the individuals learn from each other and are thus able to converge on common, conventional "words" for their experiences, such as a flash of light or sudden noise.
The project was a great technical, and personal, success—the "Dawn Chorus" really do develop their own rudimentary language. But it is just the beginning of a passionate quest for the meaning of "meaning," for the mechanisms and forces behind interpretation, communication, and even poetry. I intend to continue this larger project by investigating emergent grammars, giving these entities the ability to construct sentences and respond to each other better and more intelligently, and seek out what lies behind the powerfully creative impulse of language.
I am prepared to demonstrate The Dawn Chorus in its current state, in which the devices start out their lives with random words and in a short period of time begin to use the same words for the same events. If accepted, I will expand the design of the neural network to allow for temporal pattern recognition, the basis for understanding the order of words and their significance. The pleasure of emergent studies is giving them this ability and seeing where they take it, what they are able to do and what their limitations are, and ultimately, to see what they can teach us.
I've had a passionate curiosity for language my whole life—I always wanted to figure out how it is that we can exchange so much information so efficiently yet misunderstand each other so easily, or find sublime pleasure in a stanza of poetry. These questions of meaning and interpretation have informed all of my work since. In my undergraduate architecture program, I asked how spaces mean, and how poetry can inform buildings and vice versa. At ITP I invented a slew of different devices to explore human-computer interfaces with bearings on music and the lyricism of art, and have put my programming and engineering skills to use investigating the intersection of semiotics, information theory and cognitive neuroscience.
The role of technology in art is, I feel, still in a pre-adolescent stage, a time of great experimentation, success, and failure, and yet I see its burgeoning maturity on the horizon. As great advances in technology become ever more accessible, the artworks that use and respond to them have the opportunity to reach an ever growing audience. And as our cultures become more and more literate with these technologies, we have new and unique opportunities to reflect upon and criticize them.
I very much intend to foster this growth and give more people the chance to experience something beautiful, something sublime, something poetic in ways never before possible.
