cairn.com projects feed
a generative musical year-clock, after John Cage (1947) John Cage built The Seasons from a fixed palette of chords (the gamut) and a nine-part rhythmic structure following the traditional Indian view of the year: winter as quiescence, spring as creation, summer as preservation, fall as destruction. This piece extracts the gamut and its recurring phrases from the music, then lets them recur and…
Two small windows glow on top of a black box: a yellow on one side, a red-and-green mixture on the other. The device is calibrated and tests run from the website at https://anomaloscope.cairn.com/ . Drag the slider on the 'calibrate' page until the mixture looks exactly like the yellow. For most of us a whole range of mixtures will pass as a match. For a rare few who carry a fourth kind of cone,…
Vibecoding shaders is a classroom and a playground for writing GLSL shaders with a large language model as a code collaborator. It was built for Vibecoding, a Spring 2026 CalArts class in the Experimental Animation program that asks a specific question: how can artists use language models without becoming curators of finished images? Most AI tools for artists end the work at a prompt. You describe…
In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum unveiled ELIZA, a groundbreaking experiment in natural language processing at MIT. Using simple pattern matching and substitution rules, ELIZA simulated conversation so convincingly that some users believed the program genuinely understood them. Its most famous persona—the “DOCTOR” script—parodied a Rogerian psychotherapist, reflecting back questions and comments with…
Temporal Music: Sonifying Time Through Binary Encoding and Non-Tonal Scales This project explores the intersection of time, binary mathematics, and algorithmic music by creating a musical clock that translates the passage of time into evolving harmonic drones. Inspiration The concept emerged from student presentations in my CalArts Unconventional Computing course, where students discussed clock…
DOUG GOODWIN: Thank you, everyone. Thank you to Swissnex. Thank you to all of you for being here today. My name's Doug Goodwin, and I've had the unique opportunity to be teaching AI to students at three very different places, I guess, very different communities. I taught a class here at UCLA in AI last term. I teach a class in AI—as we just heard about—experimental animation at CalArts, and I've…
Small experiments techniques I learned in 2024.
There are many ways to record a journey. Let’s try making our own paths through points around the Scripps College campus. A songline is one of the paths across the traditional land of the Aboriginal cultures in Australia. Songlines mark the route followed by "creator-beings" in the Dreaming. These routes serve as crucial connections between individuals and their ancestral lands, carrying intricate…
Companions is a thought-provoking exploration of the emotional bonds between humans and artificial intelligences. The film invites viewers to reconsider the nature of friendship, humor, and emotional connection in a future where artificial intelligences play an integral role in human lives, challenging the boundaries of what it means to be a companion.
Thousands of my cyanotypes prints burned in the Eaton Canyon fire. I printed them last summer and was working out the best to scan them. These tests show the “calving blue glacier” that many people in my family have visited on their way to the hereafter. Also a bit of road visited by mysterious aircraft, and the destruction of a power station.
Nearest Neighbor is an essay film that explores the relationships and intersections between humans, birds and artificial intelligence. Playfully intertwining associated experiments in image and sound generation using AI, the film focuses particularly on language acquisition and mimicry between humans, birds and machines, asking fundamental questions about consciousness, learning and understanding.…
I discovered lost and untried paths in photography while teaching classes on the technical bases of photography from Neolithic tomb projectors to the first digital camera. These photos came from these investigations.
I started with a snap of Untitled (Ocean) by Vija Celmins and drove it towards Hokusai's "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" using text prompts in stable diffusion. The imagery in the center is completely synthetic and contain no parts of the end points. Finally the woodblock was cut by a computer-controlled CNC mill.
We may be unsure about gender, how can it be so easy for computers? I found a dataset of 90k gendered synthetic images and started playing around with joining them back into single faces to see how the model had "gendered" each image. These mirrored pairs are a step along the way. These faces are not real people. They are the children of tens of thousands of Flickr photos. I think of them as…
Leika, Polaroyd, Hassleblade, Pentacks. They grow extra lenses in odd places.
Falling by David Masters. With music by Loscil with Kelly Wyse. Narration by Lucy Ashford. Winner Super Short Drama, 2019 Berlin Flash Film Festival Selection LA Shorts International Film Festival, 2018
Artifact #1 is the first is a series about the perceptual systems employed in cinema. Here the interruptions between source frames have been filled in with light and color from neighboring frames. This procedure emphasizes the flow of sound and imagery we experience in the world. The abstractions revealed by this procedure happily distract us from the business of speeding cars, landscape and…
LA Metro Transit Innovation Projects Real-Time Vehicle Tracking Visualization (2008–2009) Overview As the lead developer for LA County Metro's Web and Mobile group, I developed a real-time visualization system to track Metro's entire fleet of vehicles. This project aimed to address rider anxiety about arrival times and create transparency in transit operations. Technical Implementation Built using…
Kerouac's ear is writing new novels. The teleprinter machine is monitoring chat-rooms for writing that passes for Kerouac. When text of sufficient Kerouac-ness is found, it’s typed onto a long roll of paper. Over the course of approximately three weeks the roll is filled and a new one is loaded into the machine. The chat- rooms which provide the text have names like #allnitecafe, #depression,…
In Baron and Goodwin's Lossless series the "materiality" of the digital becomes the source-code for experimental execution. The artists' renditions of appropriated films are certainly not "lossless" (i.e. a copy of the original in which nothing is lost), but rather gainful: through various techniques of digital disruption–compression, file-sharing, the removal of essential digital information–the…
Nonsense nor Sensibility was generated using Stylometric analysis. Stylometry is an analysis of linguistic style typically used to attribute text to famous authors. For this piece the analysis was inverted in order to produce new text with a 99% chance of having been written by Jane Austen. The synthetic text was broken into appropriate paragraphs and chapters, printed, and bound into a book.…
Text produced by reverse stylometry was given to a calligrapher who created a document with a 100% chance of being attributable to Jane Austen.