Q&A with Ross Goodwin
Welcome to Q&A, a new series from the editors of Artists + Machine Intelligence.
Each week, we’re featuring collaborators working at the intersection of art and technology. This April, in celebration of National Poetry Month, we’re spotlighting artists, writers, and poets exploring computational creative writing. Follow us on Medium to read new posts every Thursday.
Ross Goodwin is ‘not a poet’ (his words), but he is a creative technologist, hacker, and a gonzo data scientist. He’s also a ‘writer of writers,’ using machine learning, natural language processing, and other computational tools to realize new forms & interfaces for written language. In 2017, Ross outfitted a Cadillac car with a surveillance camera, a GPS unit, a microphone and a clock, and wrote a book. Now, he’d like to do the same with a weather balloon. We spoke with Ross on where he’s finding inspiration, how not to make a Rothko painting, and why research matters. You can find Ross on Instagram, Twitter, and right here, on Medium, in his series, Adventures in Narrated Reality {I, II}.
What is your current state of mind? I’ve been very distracted by the news lately, and I’ve been trying to limit my consumption of it. Covid-19 has disrupted everyone’s routine. Even if you were working out of your own studio before this, just the lack of ability to interact with other people in person, it’s been really hard. I’ve definitely been glued to my phone a lot, which, for better or for worse, you know, on video chats with other people, that sort of helps a little bit.
Describe a typical Tuesday: I wake up and usually drink a lot of coffee and read the news. And then, I sit in front of a very large computer screen for most of the day. It sort of differs depending on what I’m working on. But the sedentary typing and staring at a glowing rectangle is probably the common factor. Structuring my time is something that I’ve never been great at. I fall into a lot of Internet k-holes. That’s because I use a lot of different sources for my research, so I don’t stop with the links on Wikipedia. I’ll look at newspapers from the 19th century and other original sources. You know, if you’re reading about Beowulf, there’s the annotated version of the old English. (You should look at the old English.) If you’re reading about an algorithm or a particular innovation in computer science, you should look at the paper with the formula. Ultimately, if you don’t go to the source, everything you read is being filtered through someone else’s perception. … There’s studies that show that you get a dopamine surge when you see something you didn’t know on the Internet. And I’ve been addicted to that for a long time.
Currently reading: Pink Mountain on Locust Island by Jamie Marina Lau, an Australian writer I met at the Google Creative Labs’ Australia Writers Workshop in 2019. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by Tom Wolfe, which is about car culture in the 50s and 60s in America. Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith, which I’ve been getting through as well. Kenneth is someone who I’ve had the pleasure of knowing a little bit. He’s definitely an iconoclast in the poetry world.
Just started watching: Avenue 5 on HBO, Tiger King on Netflix
Your favorite place on ‘the Internet’: Lichess.org is the best chess website for playing chess with other people online in real time. It’s free and open source. And I’ve also been playing with Ken Perlin’s Chalktalk lately. (Ken is the inventor of Perlin Noise, which is a way of making organic-looking visual noise; it’s used a lot in movies. He actually won an Academy award for Technical Achievement many years ago.)
Which came first for you: art or tech? Art and writing. I was really into computers when I was a little kid, but I took a break from them probably between the ages of 12 and 25. Getting into computers took me a little while, and then, they took me down some paths that I didn’t expect. I’ve always been interested in things that are not necessarily related, at least not in the way most people study them. For example, when I was in high school, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to major in English or physics. I chose physics, but then I switched to economics, because I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was doing political internships at the time, and that felt like a kind of halfway in between quantitative stuff and policy. It’s still useful, because the math is pretty much the same as the math in machine learning.
What are you working on? The project is…writing a book with a weather balloon. So sort of like “1 the Road”, but in 3D space. The trip would be shorter in certain ways, and longer in other ways. But, you know, a weather balloon is a really effective way to get something really high above the earth for a very small amount of money. And it’s sort of a slow journey, too. I want people to be able to contribute to the balloon as it rises, and I want the balloon to have cameras, because part of the experience is going to be very visual.
Artwork you’ve been thinking about lately: Mark Rothko’s oil paintings. My wife really likes his paintings, and so, for our first anniversary, I was thinking about making her a fake one. Then, I did some research about how Rothko actually made his paintings. Faking one would take like a year or something crazy like that, because you have to use many, many layers of oil paint and heavily diluted turpentine. The layering techniques he used are so sophisticated! It reminds me of Margaret Boden’s Three Types of Creativity. Whenever someone actually manages to push the framework of some kind of creativity forward, it creates this entirely new possibility space that other people can fill in with their ideas.
Advice you wish you heard 10 years ago: There’s so much advice I wish I’d heard earlier… I tell people who are getting started as artists:
If you want to be a professional artist, you can’t make things that people have made before. Like, you can, but you probably won’t get as deserved attention, even if you do an incredible job. Because the public cares about new things, about seeing something that hasn’t been done before. You have to be provocative. That doesn’t mean you need to offend people. But it means that you need to make people care about your work for a particular set of reasons. If that set of reasons isn’t instantly absorbable through the osmosis from the work, or otherwise communicated, or blatantly obvious, then it’s just not going to connect with people the way that you might expect or want. So, be provocative. Make original stuff.
Don’t undervalue (or underestimate) the stupid ideas. Or ideas that might seem silly or dumb. All of the time, people come up with their best ideas when they’re just messing around. My favorite hackathon is the Stupid Hackathon. It’s just stupid, shitty, and dumb ideas nobody needs. It’s liberating to not make things that are useful, or to deliberately try to make something that’s going for a laugh, because it’s so dumb. One of my favorite projects from [the Stupid Hackathon] was an app that tells you when you’re holding your phone. You pick up your phone: “you are now holding your phone”. You put it down: “you are no longer holding your phone”. I like it not only because it helps you think of good ideas, but it helps expose the underlying gimmick within a lot of things out there and helps you see what’s actually valuable.
In 2020, I want to see more: projects that give people new kinds of experiences that they didn’t know they could have on a computer. This is an unprecedented time to experience digital space (since physical space is sort of uninhabitable right now). So I want to see more projects that take advantage of that, at least until this coronavirus thing ends. Also, more decentralized hackathons. Whatever it takes to convince engineers or people with code skills who are staying at home that they could be putting stuff up on the Internet that can help people. I think that’d be a good thing.
In celebration of National Poetry Month, tell us about a poem that speaks to you: Alan Gilbert’s Late in the Antenna Fields. It’s about how human consciousness changes and how memories change, and advances in technology. And it’s surprisingly not sci-fi or anything, it’s very poetic.
Artists + Machine Intelligence (AMI) is a program at Google that invites artists to work with engineers and researchers together in the design of intelligent systems. Questions? Feedback? Tweet us or email: artwithmi@google.com
