 We're for here. I mean, you're not here to listen to me, you're here to listen to Naoto Hiera. He will has the nice talk title, Algorithm, Diversion. And when I read the abstract, I was really like, okay, this sounds interesting. It's something about neurodiversity and digital art, but I don't try to explain whatever this is about because this is his job. And so please welcome him with a big round of applause. Naoto, stage is yours. Good evening. My name is Naoto Hiera. My talk's title is Algorithm, Diversion. And this is the outline. No, I usually don't start with outline. In fact, my slides are made with my own program on processing and this is an actual part of the code snippet. So it might crash or it might behave weird because I haven't tried with this resolution, but this is part of the performance or presentation. And I hope that this is a safe space, of course, but I just say it over and over because then if I say it, then it's safe now. That I'm sure nobody's gonna attack anyone else based on race or gender or whatever, but just to say it. Because it's about myself and yeah, it's always needs a bit of courage to talk about myself. Oh, this is actually part of my code. It's called Lorentz Attractor. It's stuck over there, but basically it's particle behavior based on a few equations. And although it's set equations because of some how computer calculates, it won't converge and it makes this amazing shape or sometimes it's stuck at the top. I'm starting my talk with talking about autism. Because I'm on the autism spectrum and how I work with art is heavily related to the fact of my neurodiversity. This is a picture I took from Wikipedia and the caption is a young boy with autism who has arranged his toys in a row, which I really love. Just this text is amazing to me and how he arranged it is amazing and he's sleeping like everything's amazing in this photo I think. I don't know what you know about autism spectrum. You might think people who are not good at communication, who are good at math, but sometimes not. That's probably the idea. I think it's partly true, but also it's not always true. I found it interesting to work on being autism or high-functioning autism or whatever and work with art, because sometimes people think that we don't have emotions. Yeah, so it's not like because art is about emotions, like triggering others' emotions, autistic people cannot make good art, which sounds a bit logical, but it's not logical at all, because first of all, art is not really about emotions. Sometimes it's just shapes. Sometimes it's really irritating. And also we do have emotions. It's just that we lack cognitive empathy so that we have difficulty expressing our emotions. So right now I don't know if I'm happy to be here or I'm sad to be here or I'm nervous or I'm relaxed. I mean, people just, you can just say it. I can just say I'm happy to be here to be invited, but also at the same time, then I start thinking, but I kind of regret that I accepted this invitation. Or I'm so nervous, but also I like to be on the stage to perform, so that makes it a bit relaxing. So this is, this weird thing is, I think it really describes how autism is. And I knew about it when I was taking a dance workshop by choreographer Maria Hasabi and gallerist Jan Mot. They had this week-long workshop, it's a dance workshop. We were doing really weird stuff, like 20 of us walking in a street super slow and then we write about how we felt. And that was the key, we always had to have a notebook and we have to write from my own perspective how I felt this experience, which was really hard for me because I always observe shapes, numbers or patterns, but it's hard for me to say it was comfortable or uncomfortable, what I learned, even that's so hard. I can say at 2.50 I started walking and then at 2.45 I stopped walking, or this exact things with numbers, it's really easy for me. In fact, in my diary I have all these numbers of the numbers of the time when I arrived at a specific place and this has been my habit for the last seven years. So yes, I was talking about autism and then yes, the notebook, it was really hard for me to write from my own perspective and I look at someone else's notebook and he was really good at making like, even not his perspective, but it's like persona he made up because he's an actor and he's really good at thinking about like this first person perspective and how he felt through this person and which was like totally not possible for me to do it and then I started to think that I'm something wrong with my writing or perception and then interestingly after that workshop I started working in a neuroscience institution and then people told me about autism and then I Google it more and more and then I found that I'm on the spectrum but I don't have the proper diagnosis so I cannot actually, I shouldn't actually publicly say it but then what's the benefit of having a diagnosis that doesn't really benefit myself because I don't really get like a health insurance or whatever like a support from the government because there are quite a lot of high functioning autism people and for low functioning autism people there are support but for us it's like because we can talk like other people, it's a bit weird but we can talk, we can live by ourselves so they think that we are normal but anyways, so anyways I have my problem with my brain and this is actually a photo of my brain which is partly, it's half true and half false because you cannot really take a photo of a brain unless you open my skull. This is, well actually I took MRI of my brain and I 3D printed it, I was really fortunate that I got the data and I 3D printed and this is a photo of my 3D printed brain and I started working on type S3 work which is actually based on the pattern of my brain. I just, I want to talk about the tapestry or textile because it has quite a lot to do with the computation. If you look at the history, the punch card of the programming came from the Jackard loom, these punch cards, the patterns and then they became Fortran or whatever programming language as punch card but this history is really interesting but for me it's more interesting to look at how we can translate one knowledge to another from like more, not just a surface, I don't say the punch card is only the surface of these two, this connection of these two things but there must be something more, like something deeper between computation and for example tapestry or I talk about other things but so this is a program I wrote to generate tapestry pattern based on computer vision, some kind of analysis of my brain shape and I made this automatically generate these patterns and I did weaving by hand, it took like a month to do it and this is not really finished yet, I mean this one thing is finished but I want to continue working on it and think about what's possible, like how I can translate knowledge from computer programming for example to weaving or vice versa. The other thing, well there are quite a lot of things that around programming I'm interested in merging together and one thing is movement, I'd like to be on a stage like now and I'd like to dance and if you look at the history there's also something with dance and let's say notation, not so much of a programming but notation that builds for example an algorithm. This is Laban notation made in like 1920s and basically what he did is I always find this figure really funny but basically the idea is he assigned different symbols to each part of the body, by the way this is from Wikipedia and so each part of the body has different symbols and based on the height or directions you could add some colors or like different feeling and then you can describe the position or the direction of the movement and with this like it's like a musical notation like in a time domain you can have more notations and describe a dance movement or dance piece but the idea is not to describe like a ballet movement for example it's just one way of looking at the movement and also people, I haven't learned this notation but people learned this notation can look at this score and do the movement which is really interesting because it's not really about archiving the dance movement but transforming the dance movement to something else and you can potentially do some kind of like run some kind of algorithm to morph it and play it again or like this gives like so many possibilities but I think so many things have been done by John Cage and these amazing artists so I wouldn't really propose something new here the other relationship between movement and computation or geometry is for example, Oscar Shilema I think artists here they are really tired of this Bauhaus thing this year but yeah, I had a project supported by this part in the frame of Bauhaus and Goethe Institute and Bloomberg to work with choreographer Raphael Hilebrand and dancers from Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts to create a 21st century version of Oscar Shilema and I can, I have a video so basically there's a video camera which actually shows, it's actually shown here is tracking, well capturing the dancers and we're using algorithm or the library called OpenPose to track 10 dancers and visualizing it on the screen and it's funny that like Shilema did the same thing without technology or technology like analog technology sticking these sticks on the body but we did a really complex computation to track bodies and showing it here which is not even like augmented which is like on the flat screen and you can see a bit delayed bodies moving in the screen with the lines okay, so that was like my interest with first one is tapestry the second one was movement and then but also like I'm really interested in just these lines like Shilema was interested back then on the stage but I'm interested with the pixels or screens and how to show or choreograph these dots at lines but this itself is not actually a new thing like in like 21st century we can download these amazing tools for computer graphics and make these things happen but back in 1982 there was this program called 10 print which is just one line of code in basic 10 is the address and print character at the address of 205.5 plus random which becomes either forward slash or back slash and go to 10 which is like a classical go-to loop and if you run it it shows forward slash shes and back slashes just in a random sequence and after a while you can see interesting patterns shows up well this is a recreated version with processing this is the processing I use processing to create these slides and I use this to make videos or the video that I showed with the 21st century of stick dance I used the processing to make it processing is made by Ben Fry and Casey Riss in 2001 and the idea of processing is to make coding easy for example if you want to show a triangle on a screen with OpenGL like C language you have to write all these lines and this is just a part of the code just to show a triangle but it makes more sense to have a draw function and have triangle function so this was like a revolutionary thing with processing that you don't have to think about this crazy things about OpenGL and you can just have triangle ellipse circle rectangle to draw shapes which actually shows a triangle with the same code and I started drawing things like grids or yeah like particles to make a star field I'm really obsessed with sine waves and more sine waves and also I'm interested in using the code with other modalities like I showed the movement but for example like text and oh sorry this was a different slide no okay I was doing this experiment to have a little bit of meditation every day and think about the shape in myself and I was drawing shapes with handwriting or processing and at the same time I was doing some movement exercises which is kind of funny to look at it now because I was just recording whatever movements back then and it was not really made for showing to other people so it's really funny to see some screenshots from these movements but these movements were like meant to describe the same shape as I drew in processing or with the handwriting and drawing and then I was also interested in text or poem and how I see poem is not always based on text but often it's based on like it evokes like shapes or patterns, colors so I started to like draw shapes that was evoked and this is why I started this is because there was interesting workshop about machine learning where we were asked to categorize different poems and it was really hard like you can just categorize them based on the style or I don't know whatever emotion it's triggered but I decided to first convert them to a shape and then based on these shapes I can easily categorize them is it a circle or is it more square or triangle and for example this shape is more like a rectangle or like more like a grid other ones are like more like 3D shapes I also collaborated with writer or dancer Jenning Harrington to make this kind of interactive videos with text okay so it was like going to different directions but now I want to go back a bit to the diversity part about programming this is P5JS which is a spin-off of processing and it's started by Lauren McCarthy in 2012 and the idea is to make processing like creative coding environment but on the web because processing you still have to it's really easy to use but you still have to download the program processing IDE and then you have to use that one and you cannot easily share your program unless you take a screenshot or screen recording of the video to put it on Instagram for example but if it's on the web you can just send a link and then everyone can see it or you can either use platforms like open processing where you can just start writing your code with P5JS and it's going to show up in the gallery and people like each other's sketches and even people fork your sketch to make something new based on your sketch what is interesting about P5JS is its community I'm going to read it, it's a bit long but I mean it's not long text but this is the longest text in my slide P5JS community statement P5JS is a community interested in exploring the creation of art and design with technology we are a community of and in solidarity with people from every gender identity and expression sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, language, neuro-type, size, ability, class, religion, culture sub-culture, political opinion, age, skill level occupation and background we acknowledge that not everyone has time, financial means or capacity to actively participate but we recognize and encourage involvement of all kinds we facilitate and foster access and empowerment we are all learners we like these hashtags no code snobs because we value community over efficiency new kid love because we all started somewhere unassumed core because we don't assume knowledge and black lives matter because of course so this is like a different direction a bit different direction from processing because processing was still lowering the barrier to start coding for everyone but it was more like a white man dominated based on this media art old media art culture but P5JS is explicitly breaking this thing and assuming that everyone is a learner and for example if you ask questions on the Github like this doesn't work usually in most of the projects they will just close your issue and they say just look at the document but P5JS has a different approach for example if people ask something on the issue then they think that that means the documentation is not good enough or they have to point them to the proper documentation and don't just kick them out and that's the inclusion which I like about P5JS and quite different from the past examples with lines and dots I really like this example from Processing Community Day Basel made with P5JS which I have this well if you go to their website you can see the real-time version and it's just a particle system it's the same thing as doing dots and lines but it shows the emojis of different people and this really makes different I really think that the examples in Processing and P5JS is quite different in this aspect and I said Processing Community Day Basel but what is Processing Community Day? it started in 2017 Processing has quite long history as a programming language they only started an official meet-up in 2017 and that was the first Processing Community Day in Boston and this year they started a worldwide movement so that people in different communities they host their own chapter of Processing Community Day and the nice thing is written here in the PCB organizers kit for PCD is the day to celebrate art, code and diversity around the world so it's not only about celebrating art and code but it's about art, code and diversity so I was really interested in doing PCD bringing that in Tokyo because I participated in Boston and then I really thought that we had to do this in Japan because I'm from Japan and at that time I was not living in Japan and I felt that I have to go there and I have to organize this thing and last February it happened there were three organizers Yasuto and Ayumu and myself and we had nearly 150 people coming to the event we had keynotes we had workshops I particularly like it it's hard to see it in the screen but it was an introductory workshop in P5JS to draw flower patterns which is really colorful and also we had interesting lightening talks for example this one was about teaching grade four kids to write processing and it is difficult not just because of learning programming but they don't know how to type to begin with so he explained us different ways for them to type actually he doesn't really introduce how to code interactive programs but just to start with this line commands or triangle commands so that you can draw something like a static image on the canvas and then you can go to more complex examples and we'll have a PCD Tokyo 2020 next February first so if you happen to be in Japan please check this out and this cover image we just made it with amazing artist Reona she did this square like this wave texture thing in the square Takao he did tiling and Chinyuri she did post editing of this thing with the logo so it's really like a collaborative thing and it's not like there's a guru in processing and everyone follows that person but it's more about making a community and working together and finding something new and also I don't have a slide for this but I organize weekly meetup in Cologne right now creative code Cologne or but the acronym is not good so we call it creative code current so CCK every Thursday so if you are in the area please check that out and in this PCD 2020 we will have a new session for live coding live coding is can be interpreted in different ways but for us it's a performance to be on the stage and write program and perform at the same time and for example this is a photo of Cody I think they are based in New York City and they make visuals and sound together at the same time with manipulating the code on the stage and this is really also interesting community this live coding because it's still really small community and it's really widespread across the world and there's no like hub right now and which makes people all the artists really know Matt and they know each other they respect each other that makes really diverse community which I really like and I think I still have quite a lot of time and I want to introduce you my website this is a archive of sketches I'm making and recently I started to write about Hydra it's an online book I just started as an article Hydra is live coding environment web based and you can make visuals really quickly and if you open Hydra interface you can start with the example it shows up with the example and then also you can just start from scratch simple oscillator and you can add modulation chain them and it goes crazier and crazier and this is really nice because I'm just now live coding and performing and it's really nice to do it on the fly and it goes like crazy and crazier but because I'm interested in algorithm I started to think about how to make this more systematic like not just randomly like finding crazy patterns but how can I make more like a theoretical understanding of this language because this is really interesting and by the way Hydra is made by Olivia Jack she's a really amazing artist from Colombia sometimes she's in Berlin so you might happen to meet her so the idea of this book is to start with basic textures and discuss like different filters and how to make it like a systematic way or like understanding what is actually happening in the code or like how is it these code interpreted and why sometimes doesn't work, sometimes things work like why like this is my interest like my interest is often not about making pretty visuals which is maybe not which might be the reason why I'm not the great artist that I'm not really focusing on the the appearance but I'm more interested in what is happening behind but it's interesting to think about for example like if you start with square yeah it's okay you can repeat the pattern and you can layer them with a bit of offset I actually don't know you can make these patterns and then what I proposed in my book is extending this idea to make a RGB pixel like pattern and also chaining this with another oscillator to make it really look like low resolution RGB LCD just paste it and run it it works I can add some animations adding here so it's like also like a cookbook that you can just take this snippets and modify it I try to explain what's behind HYDRA but if you're interested please look at this online book and I also have some sketches that are maybe not this one maybe this one this is made with P5JS and I took a code from P code which is made by Akiro Kubota and Yosuke Hayashi and basically this little line of code is evaluated into musical notes which is kind of like really like an old synthesizer but I added like P5JS reactive visual and you can also this yeah you can do live code with this as well it sounds really broken but it's actually working properly this is also a fun part of live code because it's not always about success you get some weird results and that might lead to a new discovery but in this case of HYDRA we're writing this online book to compensate this trial and error part by analyzing it and I think both has to happen at the same time like sometimes you need to really analyze it but sometimes you just have to give it a try and see how it goes okay so next I want to go to another of HYDRA which is also made by Olivia it's called Pixeljam it's really amazing I hope it runs here because it needs online connection it's starting basically Pixeljam is a collaborative live coding environment online live coding environment you can add more things but basically it's like a chat you type your name and I asked people to join around this time but no one's here I should say hello from so basically the idea is someone modifies the buffer here and then someone else edits here what would be interesting I can add colors oh there's someone what I don't know these guys but they just came at the right time that's great yeah I don't know how to continue this talk because I was thinking about just starting to live code I think it's really interesting to live code talk about it oh there's someone that's great there's quite a lot of people so maybe I can just let them play and I can talk through this is really an amazing idea because live coding on the stage is already really amazing because you see people coding in a way it's more intimate because you get the process and it's you just see what's happening behind and this is like so amazing because you don't have to go through the live coding performance you just have to sit on a couch at home and then you can code with others and it becomes really amazing performance I don't know I like this idea I don't know some of you are doing this but you can just modify the code and you can play with it just add layer and again like shout out to Olivia because she made this and she's maintaining all these things she's just amazing but this is not really crazy yet I don't know but they're not like new people they know how to do it if you don't know the syntax it's so hard to write now I'm really this is actually I think this is really amazing performance or talk because now I don't know what's happening but it's just amazing but that's something I wrote before I think someone took from the history I don't know is it possible to do the Q&A questions and this simultaneously or is it so distracting I just like to be freestyle but I think this place I feel there's a bit of a structure that doesn't allow me to freestyle too much or I can just leave it like this and move on to the Q&A I think that works so big round of applause thank you so much that's when you do live demo things which people can join in this will happen at congress people will join in they will find your character there's a lot of errors so now you have the chance to ask a question we still have a bit of time if you want to ask a question we have the microphones we have three of them so you have the choice we have somebody at mic 1 please start thank you so much for your talk really really inspiring a very small question and that is how does that whole thing relate to the demo scene is that like the 2019 version of the 80s demo scene is it something completely new or you know like this live coding thing the live coding as well as kind of the combination of visual coding and sound and all these things this is nothing new people doing this quite like this has a really long history and I think I really have to learn it but I think it's just we just have to keep reinventing because as soon as it there's a saturation right now it's really nice but maybe after 10 years me and Olivia is just doing this or something like that and then we become kind of grew and it becomes really hard for other people to join this community for example and I think it's we have to keep rebuilding so noticing what who's in the community and it has to like this metabolism or it has to keep the community really healthy which is I think really interesting and important I don't know if that answers but that's what I think about this p5.js or processing community day or this live coding scene that is really interesting about the aesthetics or the audio visual thing okay question from mic number 2 yes did you ever try to work with translation from dance notations like the Laban square notations and put them back into code into these live coding environments and then somehow create a feedback loop between this and maybe actual physical movement not specifically with Laban notations but I think that's really interesting idea but I always like a bit I'm always a bit careful about doing this feedback loop because as a concept it's really interesting like adding different things but as soon as it gets really like too many components and you don't know what's affecting what it's just become chaotic and sometimes I just then I was doing like machine learning to understand movement and how to relate to visual and these things I've tried a bit but then I started to think that my brain is more interesting than machine learning so why not just think about take one movement or take a shape and relate it to something else and also I have a new project upcoming web residency so I'm going to reside in on web to create online archive so it's continuation of my archive but making a bit more thinking about curating and doing exhibition of my work online and then maybe do another exhibition of exhibition or exhibition of exhibition of breaking this current politics around galleries, museums and how people sell artworks like physical, in a physical way. Sorry I think it went somewhere else. That's fine. We have a question from the internet please. Is this working? What do you think is the easiest way to get started and getting ideas for programming something graphical with processing? I think that's really interesting question that for me I think I'm not a good example because I studied engineering and I already knew how to code but I think it depends on the level if you already know programming then it's easy to just look at examples on processing like if you download processing it comes with examples like bunch of nice examples and you can mix them play with them and to understand what you can do but if you're new to programming there's really amazing YouTube channel called The Coding Train by Daniel Schiffman and I recommend you to watch this YouTube channel. Question number one. Thanks for the cool talk and the cool tools that you introduced. I was playing around with Hydra when you told us so I missed the rest of the talk but I have quite a stupid question when you 3D printed your brain what color did you choose? That's super important actually because I didn't really choose I was working at the university and I just sent the G code to whatever available 3D printer and it was light blue and it turned out that recently I do my nails and that's light blue and I like this color now and I also like my brain and my printed brain. We have one more question from the Internet Did you manage to find other autistic people with similar interests through your art? Sorry, can you say it again? Did you manage to find other people on the autism spectrum with similar interests through your art? Yes I think this was really important for me because at first when I noticed that I'm autistic I was really discouraged like maybe I shouldn't do art because I'm good at programming but maybe this art thing is not art is not my thing but I met an artist who is working with brutal movements and autistic brutal movements which I don't really understand but she's really like positively analyzing understanding the neurodiversity and I still don't know how she's managing to relate these art and neurodiversity but I learned that it's possible it's not it's possible at first I was really having difficult hard time like how to relate it I was interested in EEG like brain waves and somehow relate this because it's brain signals and media art controlled with brain waves and then at one point I thought I should just do meditation and think about shapes and movements and this is already interesting way of connecting this neurodiversity and art or digital art so yes there are not many artists but for example Erin Manning from Corda University in Montreal her books are describing about art and autism and I highly recommend her books I have a question for myself that's a nice thing I have also a chance to get a question out have you saw it about doing something like this as an art installation at congress so that it's like a short introduction so I'm saying that people can play around during congress I mean we have a lot of art installations which are programmable in a way and people love them so yes sorry it was not refreshing so I restarted it yes I'd love to do it and please invite me yes like right now this is my third I honestly don't know what I'm doing but this is what I made before so it's not this person's creation this is my quote anyways no no but this is actually the important part like remixing someone else's quote and doing something else sorry going back to the question yes I'd love to do something this year like I was it's first time here it was really like short notice like yesterday I was asked to give a talk so yeah I was not really prepared but or maybe like tomorrow maybe I can show something somewhere yeah like maybe it's possible everything is possible we have another question at microphone number two yeah well during your talk yeah I saw that you have a lot of interest in dance movement and in creating these really weird visuals I came up with the thought of how would it be to combine those both skills with a green screen which weathermen use you know it how would that be if you could block yourself out or if someone else could well if you wear green just green appears on the screen you're away or I mean you're blocked out or just an idea my brain came up with that yes thank you for that I think I done something similar but it was not we didn't have enough time to explore it but I'd love to not this link I'd love to work on it because I think I want to work more on the physicality of and oh what sorry I want to work with physicality and also about digital thing I think this is what you said it's not myself but I was working with dancer he was wearing something green and hiding inside the digital world yeah I think there's like so many ways I would say the next thing I really want to do is with my nails I want to really I really want to have like a generative pattern nails but I don't know how like what technology I need I really don't know like I mean technology okay like I just need a small display or something but that's not the point and I have to think about it but thanks for the suggestion we have enough of the question microphone number one thank you and thank you for your talk I was just interested I mean you mentioned buto and you talked about life coding and I would really appreciate if you could think about like how you would draw a connection between buto as a form of dance life coding there's actually another artist she is working exactly on buto well like she studied buto and she performs with her body and also life coding and this one also I really don't know much about the concept but there are people working on it and maybe one day I'm also interested in working in this topic but buto itself is like I kind of I'm afraid to touch this topic because it seems like I have to study a lot about buto about history and yeah like who's doing what and how I interpret buto because I think there are too many artists who don't really know much about buto but they pretend that they know buto and I think the real buto dancers are kind of tired of this but I'm really interested in the idea of buto for example like imagining like a fish inside the body and move it which is actually kind of related to the meditation idea that I had to think about the shape and visualize it but not always with my movement okay thank you very much we are running out of time so we have to end this here but thanks for your talk thanks for these amazing impressions and you'll see more from your art at congress perhaps this time or next time, there's always a next time and so also thanks for answering patiently all the questions and please another big round of applause for our know-it-all