In my previous work, I’ve been interested in processes of imitation and variation. For this project, I am aiming to develop some of the ideas I’ve looked at previously in this course.

To start, consider the following:

John Cleese explains the Dunning-Kruger effect, which says that the same skills needed to be good at something are needed to know that you are good at it, with the humorous corollary that if you are no good at something, you can’t know that you’re no good at it.

Much of human life consists in trying to learn to do things competently, perhaps to survive or otherwise to try to impress ourselves and other people.

A reasonable question to ask is therefore where we get the feedback to know if we’re any good at something.

Copying and learning from other people is an obvious answer, as in “Monkey see, monkey do”. Given this, a design question can be asked: how can we use imitative processes to improve our knowledge of our capacities, and thereby improve the capacities themselves…

Another way of thinking about this question is that, when we learn to do something, we need to learn to perceive (and so monitor) our actions (senses), as well as to act (muscles). Both matter in this process: as in the delightful experience when entering a new domain (new language, new colour, new art, new people…) of learning to perceive and understand things one didn’t understand before.

Clearly, if we can only act based on our perceptions, and we only perceive ourselves doing something badly, we can never learn… there are at least three possible solutions: acting randomly and hoping for good results; setting an external goal (getting the ball in the basket); and imitating someone else’s actions. My interest here is in paying attention to the latter, since goals become limiting and tedious with repetition.

These notions can be related to CONVERSATION THEORY, as done by Paul Pangaro (see here or read Conversation Theory in One Hour

Therefore, a statement of my aim in this project might be to implement a system which serves develops ideas and the ability to express them through imitative and conversational processes. I’ve already done various elements of this in previous work, so here I’m aiming to produce a more complete system, combining elements of previous work, and more fully reflecting conversation theory - or otherwise being more engaging and fun to use.

If this is all a bit vague, try looking at Imitation Lab and combine it with this and / or this. The final project will be similar in form to these (i.e. a web application of some kind), but hopefully more complete.

The project will therefore be a REMIX of my previous work that helps a user produce AND LEARN TO PERCEIVE, DISTINGUISH and EXPRESS remixes of existing ideas (such as melodies). This will draw on CONVERSATION THEORY (and so CYBERNETICS) and will ask obvious questions of the boundaries of COPYRIGHT and AUTHORSHIP (related therefore to MEDIA LAW on copyright).