wallpaper animals

What is a creative process? How does improvisation relate to the creative process? As I always wanted to be a composer (and never really managed it), these questions have troubled me for a long time. Sometimes, I would ascribe my creative frustration to the time I was living in: the telly, the computer (in 1982), school work and family were all madly distracting. "It was never this difficult for Beethoven, Mozart, etc.. they didn't have these kind of distractions!" I would say in my teens. Having said that, I would reflect that if it hadn't been 'that' difficult, then there would have been an awful lot of Mozarts and Beethovens around - and there aren't! So it must have been difficult.

I think there is something in the distraction argument though. There is something about the time that we live which envelopes us in a manner similar to Walter Benjamin's description of the arcades. 'Envelopment' is now part of the human condition, and its whole principle is the difficulty in stepping outside it and getting "back to ground". As I waited for my family in Starbucks in Manchester Arndale the other day, I was thinking about the envelopment of my situation.

Sonically, this environment has a rich composition. Music blares from loudspeakers everywhere. But there are different spectral qualities depending on the kind of loudspeaker, its position relative to me, etc. Playing with formants in the sound spectrum can reproduce these kinds of effects - it is a particular property of loudspeakers. On top of this, the amounts of redundancy in the sound environment are remarkable. What actually is perceived are different rhythmic pulses in different spectral regions. Personally, I enjoy the experience of being immersed in this. I feel it "empties my head" - which I find pleasurable. I have no reason to feel that I am any different from anyone else. We all have our heads emptied!

But I want to be a composer. That means I want to say something with sound. This is not the world of Beethoven, and the country walks won't do it for me (pleasant as they are). And my attempts to compose flounder on my attempts to be like Beethoven (or Stravinsky, or Berio, or Tippett, or...) It's never good enough.

At least when I improvise, I am able to be in control of my own sound world within which my mind can wander. Indeed, I am able to create my own atmosphere and 'empty my head' in the same way that I might to in Starbucks. But too often, my head emptying makes empty music. I am not in control of what I am doing. I am not saying anything except "I somehow have to do this".

But then I think, that's the point. I have to do this improvisation because of all the distractions. What I am doing is creating my own sound environment within which I can empty my head. Saying something is to acknowledge this to be the case. If I really want to say something, then I have to articulate my struggle to say something in sound.

I am thinking of ways of doing this. It's not altogether successful yet. Tools like Ableton allow for the reproduction of the kind of sonic environment of a shopping mall. It's continuous loops provide an environment for stimulating thought - empty headedness and creativity work well together. Music I have started to feel bad about can become part of a landscape (manipulated by spectral effects) within which I can think of new music which I might feel less bad about. I can continually recreate the environment of my own creativity.

The key to this process is the absence of getting rid of anything. I can recreate the sonic richness of many things going on at once, gradually bringing into focus those things that emerge as the most important.

But I don't know if this is composing or improvising. It's different from anything I might have hoped to have done before. But the idea of composing as a way of articulating the struggle of composing tickles me. I wonder how long it will last...

Something which struck me from yesterday's post was the whole business of 'deletion' with technology. The absenting of something through destruction (like a fire) usually leaves some kind of trace. Although one might inspect the magnetic bits on a disk after a file has been erased (and sometimes recover it), the whole principle of a computer is the obliteration of things without trace. Indeed, erasure is more fundamental to computing than storage: it is the principle of erasure that makes storage possible. It may be to do with the binary nature of the computer, the flipping of bits - but with a bit-flip, the 1 that was there is absolutely gone. Not "crossed-out", not smeared with an eraser, but completely gone. Might it be because of the complete obliteration of things that its opposite, the complete permanence of things, also becomes possible. These are the fundamental principles of 'data'.

Animal experience is not naturally attuned to complete obliteration. Removal or absenting, always leaves a trace. It is through the trace that the passing of time can be marked, that the passage of events can be coordinated with. In the passing of events, and the destruction of things, we read the processes of each other, learn more about each other, and gradually learn to coordinate ourselves better with each other. In the computer, we have to remake this kind of passing of time through using storage, maintaining state, and presenting a consistent interface. In tracing the obliterations performed by others, we have to think in the way the machine 'thinks': we have to consider the behaviour at the machine that the person deleting something might have exhibited. But we know that this behaviour at the machine is something only somebody familiar with the machine would understand. Whilst the language of obliteration in the physical and animal worlds is a language immediately comprehensible to any other member of the species (think of a death), the language of the obliteration of data in a computer is a language comprehensible to those who know the software. We now live in a rarified and particular universe. It is remarkable how we have become accustomed to something so fundamental and yet so alien to our nature.

One of the major advances in computer technology is going to involve a transformation of this situation. I expect that the interfaces of the future will allow for the presentation of decay and "erasure with traces" in ways which we only yet know in the physical domain. When this is achieved, we will think about technology differently. Technology today is stressful - it leads us to commit to practices where we often feel hidebound to comply with (indeed, the managerial control of technology has largely turned it into a tool of corporate compliance!). The working-out, the process, the traces of thought, the sheer messiness is all gone. All we get are clean and sterilised forms to fill in. This is partly because we have a particular view on the causality of information: that decisions can be taken as a positive consequence of "being informed" (so the information is seen as a kind of billiard ball bouncing into a 'decision' ball).

But information isn't like this. What happens is more processual, and the causal relationship is one which involves the discovery of the nature of colleagues and others and their thinking. Decisions are forms of agency taken in the light of the likely impact on those who are important to us, and who we hope to know something about. Information causes decision through a negative process of constraint, not a positive process of deduction.

What is fascinating in this however, is that the future computers which do not erase, but allow for decay and "traces of destruction", may not even operate in a conventional way. With no erasure, what is also reconfigured is the very idea of storage. When storage and programs are separable entities in a Von Neumann architecture, storage and programs are one and the same structure. The kind of sophisticated weighted logics that we see in Neural Networks may well replace the binary logic of current technologies (this is not to say that neural networks will be the model - I have some reservations about that - but that the simple on-off will be replaced, possibly by something more analogue.)

More fascinating is the fact that the machine with decay is almost 'life-like'. This is not to say that this is AI. But it may be a kind of artificial life with which we become attached; not something which we simply "use". At the root of the attachment process will be greater coherence with primeval instincts for following the traces of destruction of a thing.

The computers we have today are like strange phantoms who fascinate us because they appear suddenly without warning and disappear equally suddenly. We have learnt a meta-language to describe their behaviour. But it is odd behaviour. Imagine if human beings were like that: that on dying, for example, people simply disappeared; There was no dead body to grieve over. It is hard to conceive of how we would relate to one another. But love and attachment would surely be changed in these circumstances.

But might  we love the computers of tomorrow?

I find composition very difficult. I start something in all enthusiasm and slowly I lose heart and can't get it to go anywhere. I usually benefit from the struggle though - I appear to need to try to compose! The problem, it seems to me, is that composing is such a slow process. I simply can't get it down quick enough. And computers get in the way rather than help. So I'm much fonder of improvising.

But lately I've become dissatisfied with improvising. Much of my improvising feels (and sounds) a bit 'lazy' (this is the improviser's curse). There isn't enough invention; not enough contrast; not enough grit; not enough structural coherence. Which brings me back to being 'composerly'.

A composer thinks more carefully than an improviser about what they want to say, and they plan carefully how they are going to say it. My experience is that I think about what I want to say, decide, but when I come to writing down my plans, my intentions change. I start to want to scrub initial plans and replace them. But then that changes the whole ball-game, and I spin out of control.

The emotional side of this is important. The spinning out of control is a process of disenchantment. That in turn might be a process of disorientation; a losing of one's way amongst the complex thoughts and ideas that emerge only slowly in the creative process, and which I can only turn to sporadically. What was enchanting (an initial inspiration) loses its enchantment through the drudgery of notation. So why notate?

Notation is a medium for working out intentions. It's not just the intentions concerning what other people (players) should do in one's piece. It's also the intention of what the piece is about.

Technology ought to be able to help. But I've really struggled with it. It has made things very difficult. Not least because using pen and paper for composing (which may still be the best thing) seems anachronistic when all my other creative work goes through the computer. Also, it requires peace and quiet, space and the kind of organisational skills which I've never possessed. Computer are much more effective as organising tools. But computer notation packages are still clumsy.

But composing is also about making sound. Finding ways of notating sound is a secondary practice (for me at least). Technology is good at creating new ways of making sound. Ableton Live, PD, MaxMSP, etc are all pieces of software which I have found powerful in this respect. The question is perhaps how one can go from notes on the page, initial intentions, to the making of sound in ways where the evolution of intention is captured, not erased.  That seems to be the real problem with the computer - its complete erasure.

So my notation now begins and I keep going. The technology can help me keep everything - like a continually growing corpus. Yet through this process of growth, I can find the final balance between intention and the content that I eventually decide to bring through, using the content that I might have otherwise discarded in the background but still make it present.

Obviously composers of the past weren't able to do this. But then again, ours is a very different world to write music for...

Have things changed that much in the last 10 years? In 2003, we had smartphones (although not iPhones). It was the year of the 2nd Gulf war. Mass broadband was on its way. VLEs were well-embedded in education. There's little, apart from tablets (although what were called 'tablets' - which we now call convertible laptops - were available), which we have now that we didn't have then. But we didn't have an economic crisis. We even had a great summer!

But decades are not even. The decade between 1993 and 2003 saw the worldwide-web, the dot-com boom, the millenium bug (or rather lots of computing jobs trying to deal with it!), the election of Tony Blair and 9/11. That's quite a lot. Having said that, the gap between 1993 and 1983 is perhaps even more astonishing! So is the trend to  less change? What will we say in 2023?

This kind of comparison is a bit misleading. Not all change is visible on the surface. Between 1983 and 1993, many superficial changes were in evidence (personal computing being the most obvious), but the organisational substructure of society was only changing slowly. As superficial changes become less noticeable, it may be the case that organisational substructure transforms itself more profoundly. Between 2003 and 2013, there has been a dramatic technocratization of the management of institutions which has sat on the back of the wiring of everyone into an electronic network. The multinational corporations who control our networks increasingly operate with the economic force of superstates. What has shifted are balances of power, means of control and the distribution of risks. Increasingly the political sphere has become inseparable from the unrelenting political self-legitimation of technology. This has provided rich pickings for the rich.

The economic crisis, which is really the defining event of this current period, is a symptom of the kind of stagnation that always accompanies gross imbalances of power. The last time the world saw something like this was in the 1930s when the US government vaults heaved with the weight of European gold as it made its way over the Atlantic either in reparations from Germany, or debt repayments from the rest of Europe. Now it is multinational corporations whose vaults (and their executive's pockets) are swollen. It's a dangerous and one fears an unsustainable situation.

So what about 2023? The comparison with the 1930s is chilling - is the kind of destruction of capital (which Marx argued that in such a situation was necessary) possible? We can only hope that the answer is no. One possibility is the creation of new forms of capital which disrupt the old and create a refreshed dynamic within the economy. We should be careful what we wish for, but I think this can come about through a step-change in technology. I think the step-change will be a transformed way of thinking about computers.

By 2023 we will probably have quantum computers which operate at speeds which are as unimaginable to us today as our current processing speeds would have been to the computer pioneers in the 1950s. But what are the implications of all this speed?

One of the important shifts in our networked society has been a fundamental transformation in the nature of "tools". Tools are no longer only artefacts which through their material constraints help individuals reorganise their worlds. Tools still do this, but they also constrain users in the service of tool-makers who really have the power. Increasingly the environment within which we live is made both through our attempts to organise ourselves in it, and through the manipulations of our constraints by those who learn how to control us through our use of their tools. As computer power increases, so they will even learn how we feel: the efficacy of the constraints applied to people become more and more effective. Whilst this appears remarkably unequal, it may equally be a stable situation. So maybe no war - but it does appear to be a kind of  'information feudalism'.

Education becomes crucially important in an 'information feudal' society. In order to maintain the dynamics of information flow which feed the controlling forces bearing upon the population, it is necessary to have a technically educated population whose behaviour can be continually stimulated into new patterns, and who can be continually manipulated by the constraints that are constructed for them. The flow of new patterns of tool-driven behaviour, stimulated by education, becomes the new dynamic of economic flow. "Education" will, by 2023 have transformed itself into something entirely complicit with the controlling multi-national forces.  The transformation will be so complete that it will be impossible to remember that education was ever anything else. In the same way that the pathological control of the Catholic Church governed all aspects of life in Europe in the Middle ages, so education will operate a similar "information monasticism". There will be a blind faith in education which delivers economic obeisance.

The spanner in the works will be, as always, authenticity and novelty. The patterns of behaviour which stem from love and attachments may become well-known to the tool-makers (as indeed they are beginning to be already), but most of this behaviour is based on fears (the loss of loved ones for example): it is possible to overcome this. The greatest threat to a controlling society is the divestment of fear. Whilst it might have been forgotten that the original mission of education was precisely this loss of fear, there is a hope that this might be rediscovered.

It is this rediscovered education that offers us hope. Maybe rediscovery will come from the realisation of the profundity of the human and mysterious connections that bind us together. It may be that the speed of computers contributes to an empowering of individuals in the face of controlling forces: after all, these are machines which now have the capacity to analyse how we feel. It may be that personal insight in the light of technological power assists in the divestment of fear. All these things are possible. But if the alternative is the destruction of capital, then perhaps we should be grateful that our technologies may steer us to a future that, whilst not being ideal or free any more (and perhaps a little less) than we are now, maintains the possibility of freedom.

Bibliometrics now dominates the academic landscape. Government research resource allocation, measures of academic status and professional development all now depend on a bunch of statistical measures that supposedly track merit. It is an international game that has turned intellectual effort into paper production factories, publishers into 'credit rating agencies', and academic against academic in blind peer review processes.

Unsurprisingly, given the stakes for individual careers, people game the system. Rather than concentrating on the kind of deliberative self-critique and doubt that is ultimately necessary for intellectual progress, many academics now concentrate on strategies for publishing as soon as possible in the highest impact factor journals that they can. What matters is increasingly the badge of publication, supported by statistics for impact and citation, rather than the intellectual content of any contribution. There are some academics who exploit the peer review process by suggesting particular citations in submitted papers (with which they have a stake) as a condition of publication. Others simply try to push out as many papers as they can. The actual content of these papers is often terrible.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Universities, in their drive for increasing their own league table position, recruit staff on the basis of a quantitative measure of 'number of articles published' and 'impact factors' - this all done often without reading the work! Indeed, the advantage of bibliometrics (and the principal reason why it has caught on) is the fact that it empowers managers, not academics, to make decisions from a perspective which is not scholarly, but administrative: show me the score, and I'll make the decision. Consequently, good and thoughtful teachers with poor academic publication rates are sacked. More importantly, deeply thoughtful academics who are slow to produce output, or whose output doesn't fit the normative expectations of peer review (by virtue of the kind of originality that makes for transformative research) are also shown the door. Universities are becoming no longer places for thinking. Often, those recruited on the back of 'number of publications' are recruited to institutions where a good teacher, not a publication record, is necessary.Unfortunately, good teachers tend not to be made from being immersed in a publication factory; they are made through dedicated experience of teaching.

The deep problem is the fact that the statistical measures mask a way of making meaningful distinctions about real academic quality: not the kind of academic quality that a manager might see, but the kind of academic quality that other academics would recognise. This is very similar to the problem of the slicing-up of debts where traders could not tell the difference between good debt and bad. What happened? Eventually, there was a crisis of confidence. Institutions were shown to have been exposed to things which they thought were of approved high quality, only to find that in reality the quality was  poor, resulting from gaming the system which produced the measure of quality. We had it in banking, we had it in eggs: now we have it in academic papers!

When will the crisis of confidence come? My guess it will be disgruntled students. It will only take a mis-placed 'esteemed' academic to upset a cohort who will then express their anger through critiquing the quality of that academic's work. It won't be long before the press get hold of it. Then the questions will come... "did you not read their papers?", "how could a university be taken in?", etc.

As the current phase of reduction of diversity in the education sector takes hold in the UK and many institutions aim for 'Oxbridgification', the stage is being set for an embarrasing fall. Students will want great teaching. Oxbridgification is unlikely to deliver this. The ensuing disruption may be dangerous for many institutions. What follows it, however, may be a revaluation of what really matters in education.

The pursuit of truth matters to both great teachers and great thinkers.

Someone who leads a learning technology firm that has specialised in school-based technology asked me the other week how to break into the higher education market. I answered that one of the most important things is to understand institutional politics. Blackboard, for example, send their salespeople to sell to Vice-chancellors. They give the "big-spiel" about tracking students (and staff), about monitoring success rates, student engagement, etc. They know this is the kind of language Vice-chancellors want to hear. They absolutely DON'T want to talk to the IT people, because the IT people will know that all these 'solutions' are just flashes of light on a screen - like any other piece of software, with all their faults and miseries to be imposed on hard-pressed teachers.

That Vice-chancellors are so important in this kind of process tells us something about where things are in Universities, the challenges for technology and the deeper challenges for students and teachers. The marketing strategy of any software company is to solve the problems of the person buying the system. So Blackboard aims to solve the VC's problem. But (despite the fact that Blackboard is meant to be a learning system) the VCs problem is not a learning problem. It is a 'retention' problem, or a 'monitoring' problem - a control problem of one sort or another. So the 'learning' system inevitably becomes sold as a control system because the dominant problem of the person buying it is a control problem.

But where are the learners and teachers? They have different kinds of problems. Typically, both learners and teachers suffer from a 'constraint' problem: the 'right thing to do' often lies outside the range of permissable things that can be done. The permissible range of things that can be done are constrained in order to solve the control problem of managers. This is not to say that there shouldn't be constraints, but that the problems of teachers and learners take second place to the control problem of managers. There is a hierarchy of problems in institutions.

There are deep pathologies of positive feedback that kick-in here. Managerial attempts to solve a control problem produce new constraints on teachers and learners, which in turn can introduce new control problems. If a control system objectifies teachers, and functionalises what they do, it can become a barrier to authentic feedback of the organisational situation on the ground. Taken too far, the only feedback that is possible is the feedback that is capable of being carried by the system itself; all else is lost and authenticity goes out of the window.

Is technology to blame for this? After all, technologies allow for 'control' in the form of a centralisation of power on a large-scale. They encourage autocratic idealisation of the functions and roles of individuals in institutions, instrumentalising practice and introducing constraints in the name of technocratic procedures like 'quality'.

The reality is that this isn't control! Things are never under control in a centralised system. The person at the centre may enjoy their moment of power but this is a symptom of blindness or delusion. A hierarchy of problems that makes one person's problem more important than anybody else's will inevitably collapse for the simple reason that the person at the centre does not possess sufficient capacity to absorb the complexity of the institution and its operating environment. All is attenuated as operations, strategy and identity become confused. Only complexity can absorb complexity - and no individual is complex enough to do the whole thing on their own.

But like Icarus's chariot, technology lets people think that this can work. What is missing in our understanding of technology that we haven't learnt this? Or is it something missing in our understanding of ourselves? Is there a technology that we have yet to see which will not allow us to think like this? I hope so.

Ivan Illich called for 'tools for conviviality' after he called for 'deschooling society'. The deschooling arguments were at once arguments for personal autonomy and convivial action. It may be because we see 'information' as something possessed by an individual, rather than something emergent from a community that we have merely seen 'personal technologies' used in ways which serve to give tool providers greater power. But what are truly convivial personal tools? Maybe there is yet a revolution to come...