 talked today about a few key figures at work at Bell Labs, mostly during the 60s, but a little bit earlier as well, who kind of embody the spirit of Keeper v. Weird. So I work for Thoughtbot. This is my Twitter, this is my email, and this is where I'm from. So those two have been to Denver. If you land at the airport, you're in for a treat. Wonderful horse, just kind of waiting to greet you. So something I should also mention is all these stories take place in the best day of the country. Of course, I'm talking about New Jersey. All these stories take place in the old headquarters of Bell Lab. Wow, that is a terrible word pollution. In Murrah Hill, New Jersey. And for those who don't know, Bell Labs is a research lab founded in the 1920s that made huge development in the field of computers, electronics, engineering, and communication technologies. Some of the many things created and invented at Bell Labs include lasers, transistors, evidence for the Big Bang Theory found through radio astronomy, UNIX-C, C++, so many other things. And if I could choose one person to represent Keeper v. Weird, it'd be this man, Claude Shannon. He was the father of information theory. He was a mathematical engineer who created the founding groundwork for modern computing as we know it. He made huge impacts on the world of computers and engineering with communication and information theory, compression. He developed compression, cryptography, artificial intelligence, and even automatic artillery during World War II. He was considered to be a brilliant man by his peers, his teachers, everyone he came across. But he was kind of an eccentric guy. He had a lot of hobbies, like juggling, unicycle writing, building or solving Rubik's cubes. He played the clarinet. He also enjoyed gambling, but from a completely nerdy perspective, he just really enjoyed math. And he would be found during the breaks at Bell Labs, basically doing as many hobbies as he could, just sort of to pass the time. He would ride down the halls of Bell Labs on his unicycle. He would, he once had a pogo stick phase where he was riding up and down the halls on a pogo stick. He also tried to incorporate a lot of engineering into his hobbies. So this picture that you see here, which is a little bit frightening, this is a juggling machine that he created when he was during, when he had his juggling phase. He even went so far as to start writing a paper about juggling and all the sciences and physics behind it. But, so he was really into chess and he often challenged his coworkers to chess games and often beat them because he was sort of obsessed with chess during that phase. He wrote a paper describing a chess machine that could make the best decisions at each point of the game and could theoretically beat the best chess player in the world. And while chess wasn't an important problem to solve, his argument was that a machine that could solve a chess game, that could win a chess game, could also solve other problems that they encountered at work. Like intelligently routing lines of communication to make phone calls or to make sure that phone calls were routed as fast as possible. And he also theorized that this machine that could win chess games could also make decisions to translate languages. These are problems that are still encountered today in a lot of companies, tech companies that deal with these things. He also made other, he didn't make other electronic games and these games were a place for Shannon to explore machine-human interaction, which he was really fascinated by. And the way he would test this was, he would test this on humans and he constantly trolled his coworkers a little bit who designed games to, and make his coworkers play them. And occasionally he would design games that would pause or just take a very long time to make a decision, kind of giving the player who's playing against the computer a false sense of security. So it would make the player think that they made a really good move and perhaps letting their guard down and perhaps losing even faster. So he received, one Christmas, he received an erector set from his wife. For those who don't know, an erector set is kind of, they're kind of like Legos, but they're made of metal and they come with bolts that, and so you can create these little machines and they also come with mechanical parts like pulleys and wheels and gears and also electric motors. And so he received this set and he was immediately making stuff. What he created at home was a little robotic turtle that could walk around and of course when the turtle hit a wall it would turn around. So he was already acknowledging that machines can kind of work by themselves. And this led to his electronic mouse experiments which he spent a lot of time doing research on at Bell Labs. This electric mouse was made with the same, sorry, was made with the same hardware as telephone searching technology. And this mouse needed to go find cheese in this maze that was powered by electric relays. When it couldn't find the piece, it couldn't always find the piece of cheese very quickly. It would kind of follow this crazy path that you see in the top right left corner. But it would eventually find its way out. And after it learned how to get its way out he could place the mouse any point in the maze and the mouse would be able to find its way out quickly. So this was actually one of the first examples of artificial intelligence. And this was just through an experiment that he decided to put together. And it also made his coworkers and a lot of his peers at Bell Labs see the potential of machines and computers. These experiments that Shannon did helped shape Shannon's writings on information technologies and help formalize a study into legitimate science. Shannon's bosses and the legal department and the accounting department at Bell Labs were less excited about these experiments because they couldn't see the value in doing machines that could play chess or electric mice or other of Shannon's crazy experiments. He eventually left Bell Labs after he was offered a position at MIT even though he really enjoyed working at Bell Labs and enjoyed the people that he was surrounded by because at MIT he had the freedom to experiment and play during his work days without pressure from the higher ups. Without Shannon's curiosity and creativity computers may be totally different tools from what they are today. I'm gonna fast forward many years of computer development to the 1960s and I wanna talk about A. Michael Knowle. During the 1960s, Bell Labs graphics departments pushed forward the development of computer graphics much further than it had ever been before. Before that time computers were mostly used in research labs by scientists and many of the computers of that time didn't even have displays. But Knowle had this vision of computers being used beyond the labs. So he focused a lot on, so to prove his point, he focused on using the computer to create visual pieces of art. The screenshot I showed before and this piece that you see on the screen is a piece called Gaussian quadratic. If you're wondering where the name comes from, the lines you see here are calculated on an XY plane with a quadratic formula. The Y coordinate increases by one after every iteration but the X coordinate is a random number generated by a random number on the Gaussian distribution which kind of looks like a bell curve, thus the name Gaussian quadratic. And if the X or Y coordinates get too large, they just wrap around and create this, they just wrap around the canvas. And Knowle plays with this concept a lot. He plays around with different increments, different random distributions and different ways to create pieces of art. Something I found pretty interesting about Knowle and his writings is that he makes arguments for artists to do their art with the computer. Knowle was actually considered one of the first computer artists of his time and it's implied in his writing that he got a lot of pushback from artists questioning whether or not his mathematical prints were actually considered art. And to sort of defend his point, he uses an influence from another artist. This is a piece of art called Current by Bridget Riley who does a lot of geometric arts. Who does a lot of geometric art. And this was done entirely by hand. Knowle mentions how much easier this particular drawing would be done, would have been for the artists if they used a computer and a bit of math because the idea of the art lives in the artist's mind and they just need to get it out on paper. These days, it's completely normal for an artist to use a computer as a medium for their art. And according to Knowle, computers were never meant to affect the creativity of an artist. I really enjoyed this quote that he gives. The creative process takes place in the mind of the artist. The final painting is only the artist's tradition of his mental image. Knowle was also curious about how computer displays could show 3D shapes. He'd played around with 2D shapes for a very long time and he wondered if the human eye could actually perceive or could be tricked to perceive 3D images on a flat screen. So his next step was to start creating 3D drawings and he tried a lot of variations. And like a scientist, he did a lot of testing. So he presented these pictures to over two many subjects and let them write the picture in order of aesthetics and categorize the computer drawings as 2D and 3D. And what he thought was 2D, what he thought represented 3D was totally different from what most people perceived as 3D. And he also, using the rankings of aesthetic pleasingness, he was able to basically use or test art and help him find the best pieces of art to display in the gallery. And after he was successfully able to produce 3D images on the screen, he decided he wanted to create a series of 3D images and create movies. And so the sequence that you see above turns into this, this sort of hypercube that just moves over and over. And he kind of became obsessed with making movies for a while and he created a couple opening sequences for a few documentaries using these graphics that he creates just using math. Null was also inspired by New York City Ballet in the production of a Stravinsky Ballet and wondered how to incorporate computers into ballet. He wrote an article called Choreography and Computers where he just talks about this hypothetical performance, dance performance and the problems with trying to incorporate computers in dance without using prerecorded dance movements and while still trying to capture the spirit of life performance. The picture that you see here is screenshots from his prototype where he would control dancers using external control. These stick figures that you see on the stage or on the stage where the dancers on the performance side would be projected. His writings make it clear that the motivations for creating these pieces of art and for exploring other areas of art and trying to incorporate computers with them was to lessen the divide between humans and computers and make them less intimidating to people who didn't usually work with them. He imagined a world where not only scientists would be using computers to do their job but artists as well. And these pieces of art helped let artists understand the advancement of computer graphics and opened the world to them. He opened up the world of computer animation and computer user experience during this time. His works of art and his passion for computer art have had a profound impact on how we use computers today. While Noel was trying to incorporate computers into visual art, other artists were also trying to incorporate technology into their art. This is just a piece of a larger piece of art called Omashe New York created in 1960 by an artist named John Tung Lee with a Bellat engineer, Bill Hoover. And I'm just gonna go play a clip. So what you see here is actually a machine that's just breaking down and it's actually on fire right now. So that was an entirely intentional, entirely, let me go stop this. So Omashe New York was about a machine that could theoretically destroy itself. It's literally made from garbage found in New Jersey and also made with electric circuits that were designed to short-circuit and burn itself out. And so what you see here is the machine catching on fire and that was not entirely supposed to happen but it was kind of like in this fortunate accident. I think that's actually the fire department that were caught. And so while this piece of art was displaying an actual failure of technology as this was breaking down, it wasn't supposed, it was actually supposed to be symbolic of New York City like it was New York City, the artist wanted to represent New York City as this unpredictable and machine that was constantly overloading itself in a self-destructive way. And so there's a reference. And so this machine, this piece of art is actually a reference. So the engineer who worked on this piece of art, Billy Glover, mentioned that there's a direct reference to Claude Shannon in this piece of modern art. In information theory, a perfect machine would also have the ability to turn itself off and even it destroy itself. And so this ultimate machine was actually, this particular machine is a direct reference to one of Shannon's little side inventions of a machine that with a hand that would just turn itself off as soon as it turned on. So in 1966, several years after homage to New York, Billy Glover and another engineer at Bell Labs, named Droshenberg, found an EAT or Experiments in Art and Technology. I also want to mention that Bell Labs completely funded this group and were really supportive of this group. This group allowed artists to attend the labs after hours and work on pieces of art using Bell Labs technology with the assistance of Bell Labs engineer employees. And so it got engineers involved in modern art as well. And there were classes offered for artists to learn something about computer basics and to get familiar with the things that Bell Labs is working with. One of the major outcomes from EAT was a show called Nine Evenings Theater and Engineering. It featured 10 artists, 30-ish engineers who worked on the projects, presenting avant-garde theater, dance, and new pieces. One of the pieces that was premiered that night was John Cage's Variation Seven. This piece mostly uses amplifiers and recording devices. However, there was no prerecorded audio. John Cage wanted all the artists to walk around and collect sounds from the audience. They also used FM radios and tried to find live feeds that they could incorporate into the music. It was, or noise. And there were actually also open phone calls to various places in the city. Like they had phones that were just hanging off points in the city. And the performers and the piece would actually take those sounds and try to alter them so they would sound even crazier. And there was one performance on this piece that actually required a brainwave reader and the artist tried to modify sounds through that. And there was also an interactive component. All the performers of this piece walked around the stage and they triggered these sensors that would trigger lights and sound generators. And so this would increase the randomness and uniqueness of each performance, which John Cage was a huge fan of. If those of you who know, four minutes and 33 seconds, his piece was basically the audience's reactions to a performer just walking on stage and doing nothing. So it definitely incorporated the spirit of John Cage. Another really cool piece that came from that night is called Vendanian, which I might have pronounced it wrong, I'm sorry. But a Vendanian is a instrument kind of like an accordion. And so what they did with this instrument, there's in an accordion, there's a lot of different buttons, there's air chambers, and they attach, engineers at the labs attach a bunch of sensors and circuits to this instrument. And these, whenever the instrument would play, it would trigger these electronic signals and direct them into amplifiers or light sources. And while that was happening, other performers were controlling custom devices that engineers at Bell Labs designed. One of the most notable ones, I think, was this small remote custom light board that allowed the performer to draw on the light and then it would show up on the screen. And I can show you a picture, it's a top picture right there. And that's the inside of the instrument. That's kind of how they got all those electric signals. So so many technologies that were being developed and had been developed at Bell Labs and elsewhere were used for the first time in this way on stage. And it allowed for, and it was kind of like this new thing, cage pieces used wireless FM transmitters and various open telephone lines for the first time on stage. David Tudor's piece modified a lot of the existing television technology to produce his piece. And there was another piece, a dance piece that used an infrared camera to capture dancers dancing in complete darkness, but it would be transmitted to another device and displayed. So this group continued to produce more pieces and smaller shows, and all of the projects, what they had in common was that they were filled with this technological optimism, focusing on the theoretical possibilities of technologies and pushing the known limits of engineering. And what's amazing is that Bell Labs was successful for so many years because it let engineers, mathematicians, and scientists collaborate in their fields of expertise in one place. And this was essentially doing the same thing, but branching out into modern art. And so it opened up so many more possibilities. We all have things that are weird about us, passions that lie outside of our regular jobs, outside of our computers. I mean, why else would we be at this conference called Keeper Be Weird? The engineers that I talked about were all incredibly brilliant people, but more importantly, they were all optimistic and curious. They took their outside passions and applied it to their jobs, pushing the limits of computers, and they helped shape them into the tools that they are today. Bringing code together with their outside passions helps us keep that optimism for our craft and brings fresh perspective to problem solving. So I hope learning about these historic figures and these stories encourages you all to bring your own weird to your code.