Creative Codes: A Conversation with Golan Levin

Abstract

Though aptly dubbed the godfather of creative code and Geek Superstar'' by techie art bloggers for his individual contributions to the digital arts. Golan Levin's work and interests have always had an inclusive and collaborative tone. So it will come as no surprise to his audiences that Levin's most recent projects reveal a more overt rebellion against software monopolization and the homogenizing tendencies of commercial visual culture. Levin aims his myriad personal artistic projects precisely toward the current technological and cultural moment. His engineering and computer science savvy allows him to create work that responds just-in-time to the very latest digital impact on human life. Levin's work reflects our initial marvel at the devices of the day. While playful, the underlying exploration of digitally mediated gesture and human-machine interaction is thought-provoking and impeccably designed. His signature style has involved creating and coding a highly technical device toward a time-based and visually poetic audio-visual performance or artifact. A classic early example, Dialtones (A Telesymphony) (2001), involved orchestrating a program to systematically dial and ring the varied tones of the audience members' cell phones in a symphonic hall not as the embarrassing interruption it was considered at the time, but rather as a musical recital. A composer's sensitivity to timing is also essential to the humor linking Levin's works, such as in Double-Taker (Snout) (2008), where a larger-than-life, one-eyed robotic creature mounted on the rooiof an academic building reacts with simulated surprise as people approach the door. As one of a number of prolific digital artists nurtured early in their careers by John Maeda's Aesthetics and Computational Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Levin has already made a marked impact of his own in media education. He promotes a radical clemystification of artistic coding and an insistence on the possibilities of universal skill access. From his students at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he is currently an associate professor of Electronic 1 ime-Based Art, to the diverse attendees of the ongoing ART && CODE conferences he spearheads, Levin debunks the stereotype of data hoarding and academic infighting with the generous sharing of resources and knowledge. In the following Skype-mediatecl conversation from December 2011, Levin considers the impact of some of his latest collaborative projects and educational efforts that fall outside the more commonly published academic and commercial gallery contexts. JOANNA HEATWOLE: Looking into your new work, I was particularly interested in QR_HOBO_CODES (2011) as an example of one of your Free Art & Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) collaborations. GOLAN LEVIN: The F.A.T. Lab is my posse. When I want to work quasi-anonymously and when I want to work with people my age who are really juvenile, then I work with these guys. A lot of these projects are intended to tweak the media and be provocative almost for the sake of being provocative. Their main mission is to create new work at the intersection of pop culture and open source. What that means in terms of pop culture is that they really are engaged with creating viral media--work that grabs people's attention because it deals with current issues and things people care about. Dealing with open source means creating and sharing free tools that people can use to engage and mash up and destroy--pop culture. JH: At first that particular series seemed like a different era of work for you. But I remembered that you'd done graffiti-themed work before. Has that been a long-time interest of yours? GL: I think it's an important phenomenon, but I don't necessarily think it's beautiful. That may be funny to say given that there was a time in my life when I got very into the aesthetics of graffiti. As a twelve year old I was interested in the formal aspects of typography and color and what seemed to me as a very energetic, vibrant, and youthful form of play. …