So I'm an artist, but a little bit of a peculiar one. I don't paint. I can't draw. My shop teacher in high school wrote that I was a menace on my report card. You probably don't really want to see my photographs. But there is one thing I know how to do: I know how to program a computer. I can code.
我是個藝術家, 比較特別的那種, 我不畫畫, 我不會畫畫。 工藝老師在我成績單上 寫說我是一個搗蛋鬼。 我的攝影作品也不太能見人。 但有一件事我很會: 我懂怎麼寫電腦程式, 我會寫。
And people will tell me that 100 years ago, folks like me didn't exist, that it was impossible, that art made with data is a new thing, it's a product of our age, it's something that's really important to think of as something that's very "now." And that's true.
大家說一百年前 沒有我這種職業, 以前覺得不可能、 用數據創作藝術很新潮, 是這個年代才有的產物, 因為它真的很「新」, 所以它也格外重要。 這是真的。
But there is an art form that's been around for a very long time that's really about using information, abstract information, to make emotionally resonant pieces. And it's called music. We've been making music for tens of thousands of years, right? And if you think about what music is -- notes and chords and keys and harmonies and melodies -- these things are algorithms. These things are systems that are designed to unfold over time, to make us feel. I came to the arts through music. I was trained as a composer, and about 15 years ago, I started making pieces that were designed to look at the intersection between sound and image, to use an image to unveil a musical structure or to use a sound to show you something interesting about something that's usually pictorial.
但其實很久以前 就已經有一種藝術形式 也是利用資訊, 利用抽象的資訊, 創造出蕩氣迴腸的作品, 那就是音樂。 我們創作音樂已有上千年了,是吧? 想想音樂是什麼... 音符、和弦、音調、 和聲、旋律... 這些東西都是演算法、 都是系統, 隨著時間流轉展開, 音樂讓我們有所感受。 音樂使我接觸到藝術, 我接受作曲的訓練, 約 15 年前我開始作曲, 精心雕琢聲音和影像的交集, 用影像呈現音樂的結構、 或是用聲音來表現有趣的事物、 一些平常用圖像表示的事物。
So what you're seeing on the screen is literally being drawn by the musical structure of the musicians onstage, and there's no accident that it looks like a plant, because the underlying algorithmic biology of the plant is what informed the musical structure in the first place. So once you know how to do this, once you know how to code with media, you can do some pretty cool stuff.
所以現在各位在螢幕上看到的 確實是由舞台上音樂家樂曲 的音樂結構所擘畫出來的, 它們不出意外的看起來像是植物, 因為其背後的植物生物演算法 會啟發這樣的音樂結構。 因此一旦你知道這樣的手法, 一旦你會利用媒介寫程式碼, 你就可以做出一些很酷的東西。
This is a project I did for the Sundance Film Festival. Really simple idea: you take every Academy Award Best Picture, you speed it up to one minute each and string them all together. And so in 75 minutes, I can show you the history of Hollywood cinema. And what it really shows you is the history of editing in Hollywood cinema. So on the left, we've got Casablanca; on the right, we've got Chicago. And you can see that Casablanca is a little easier to read. That's because the average length of a cinematic shot in the 1940s was 26 seconds, and now it's around six seconds.
這是我為《日舞影展》做的案子, 概念很簡單:你把奧斯卡 年度最佳影片收集起來, 然後加速成一分鐘的版本, 再把它們全接起來。 所以在這 75 分鐘裡,大家可以 看到好萊塢電影的歷史脈絡, 而它所要呈現的就是, 好萊塢電影的剪接史。 所以左邊我們有卡薩布蘭加, 右邊則是芝加哥, 比起來這個速度下的 卡薩布蘭加還看得懂 因為 1940 年代的電影拍攝, 一個場景的平均長度是 26 秒, 而如今約為 6 秒。
This is a project that was inspired by some work that was funded by the US Federal Government in the early 2000s, to look at video footage and find a specific actor in any video. And so I repurposed this code to train a system on one person in our culture who would never need to be surveilled in that manner, which is Britney Spears. I downloaded 2,000 paparazzi photos of Britney Spears and trained my computer to find her face and her face alone. I can run any footage of her through it and will center her eyes in the frame, and this sort of is a little double commentary about surveillance in our society. We are very fraught with anxiety about being watched, but then we obsess over celebrity.
這個專案的啟發自 2000 年代早期由美國 聯邦政府資助的研究 能夠在任何影片內 搜尋到特定演員。 我改寫了它的程式碼, 訓練出一套系統, 去識別一個在我們文化裡 永遠不需要被這樣監視的人物 也就是小甜甜布蘭妮。 我下載了 2000 張她被 狗仔隊拍到的照片, 並訓練我的電腦 去找出她的臉, 只呈現出她的臉。 透過程式我可以播放任何她的片段, 並且自動讓她的眼睛置於畫面中央, 表達我們對監視的雙重標準的省思, 我們很擔心害怕被受到監視, 但同時我們卻又很愛 監視名人的一言一行。
What you're seeing on the screen here is a collaboration I did with an artist named Lián Amaris. What she did is very simple to explain and describe, but very hard to do. She took 72 minutes of activity, getting ready for a night out on the town, and stretched it over three days and performed it on a traffic island in slow motion in New York City. I was there, too, with a film crew. We filmed the whole thing, and then we reversed the process, speeding it up to 72 minutes again, so it looks like she's moving normally and the whole world is flying by.
螢幕上看到的是我和藝術家 連.艾默利思合作的作品。 螢幕上看到的是我和藝術家 連.艾默利思合作的作品。 她的作品說起來很簡單, 做起來卻很難。 她所要呈現的,就是把 72 分鐘 「晚上出城赴約的準備活動」 拉長到三天的時間, 她需要在紐約街頭的一個安全島 用慢動作來呈現這一幕 我也在現場,帶著攝影團隊 錄下了整個過程, 然後把它倒放 再加速到 72 分鐘 所以她看起來像是以正常的速度移動 但整個世界卻是在飛速的運轉著。
At a certain point, I figured out that what I was doing was making portraits. When you think about portraiture, you tend to think about stuff like this. The guy on the left is named Gilbert Stuart. He's sort of the first real portraitist of the United States. And on the right is his portrait of George Washington from 1796. This is the so-called Lansdowne portrait. And if you look at this painting, there's a lot of symbolism, right? We've got a rainbow out the window. We've got a sword. We've got a quill on the desk. All of these things are meant to evoke George Washington as the father of the nation.
突然間我瞭解到 我做的事情是肖像。 提到肖像,各位通常想到的 是螢幕上這種東西。 左邊的人名叫吉伯特.史都華。 他可能是美國第一位肖像畫家。 右邊是他在 1796 年畫的 喬治華盛頓(美國國父)。 這被稱為「蘭斯道絨」的畫像。 仔細看看這幅畫中 有很多的象徵,是吧? 有一道窗外彩虹、 有一把劍、 有一支鵝毛筆在桌上, 一切的一切都意有所指。 喬治華盛頓, 是這個國家的國父,
This is my portrait of George Washington. And this is an eye chart, only instead of letters, they're words. And what the words are is the 66 words in George Washington's State of the Union addresses that he uses more than any other president. So "gentlemen" has its own symbolism and its own rhetoric. And it's really kind of significant that that's the word he used the most. This is the eye chart for George W. Bush, who was president when I made this piece. And how you get there, from "gentlemen" to "terror" in 43 easy steps, tells us a lot about American history, and gives you a different insight than you would have looking at a series of paintings. These pieces provide a history lesson of the United States through the political rhetoric of its leaders. Ronald Reagan spent a lot of time talking about deficits. Bill Clinton spent a lot of time talking about the century in which he would no longer be president, but maybe his wife would be. Lyndon Johnson was the first President to give his State of the Union addresses on prime-time television; he began every paragraph with the word "tonight." And Richard Nixon, or more accurately, his speechwriter, a guy named William Safire, spent a lot of time thinking about language and making sure that his boss portrayed a rhetoric of honesty.
這是我的版本。 它像是一個視力測量表, 只是我把字母換成了單字, 這 66 個單詞是 喬治.華盛頓在國情咨文演說中 比其他總統用得還多的單字。 像是「諸君」這個詞 有其獨特的象徵和修辭意義。 這個字也很能代表他, 因為他很常使用。 這是小布希總統的視力測量表, 我做出這件作品的時候, 他是當時的總統, 你可以了解 從「諸君」到「恐攻」 只歷經了 43 個簡單的步驟, (43屆選舉) 這道盡了美國的歷史, 以一種不同的觀點來呈現、 欣賞一系列的畫作。 這一系列的作品, 透過美國領導人的政治語言, 為我們上了一堂美國歷史課, 雷根總統最常提到的是「赤字」。 柯林頓總統花很多時間強調 這個世紀已經不再是 他當總統的世紀, 但他的夫人可能會是。 強森總統是第一位 在電視黃金時段上 發表國情咨文的總統, 他的每段話都是以「今晚」開頭。 尼克森總統,說得更精準一點, 他的演講稿撰稿人 名叫威廉.沙法爾, 花很多時間字斟句酌, 以確保他老闆的演講「字句真誠」。
This project is shown as a series of monolithic sculptures. It's an outdoor series of light boxes. And it's important to note that they're to scale, so if you stand 20 feet back and you can read between those two black lines, you have 20/20 vision.
這個專案則是呈現 一系列的巨型雕塑—— 戶外大型燈箱, 必須特別強調的是 他們是等比例縮小的 所以如果你離 20 呎遠 還看得到兩條黑線間的字 你視力 2.0 啊!
(Laughter)
(觀眾笑)
This is a portrait. And there's a lot of these. There's a lot of ways to do this with data. I started looking for a way to think about how I can do a more democratic form of portraiture, something that's more about my country and how it works. Every 10 years, we make a census in the United States. We literally count people, find out who lives where, what kind of jobs we've got, the language we speak at home. And this is important stuff -- really important stuff. But it doesn't really tell us who we are. It doesn't tell us about our dreams and our aspirations.
這就是人像描繪, 還有很多像這樣的作品, 有很多呈現這些資料的方式, 我開始尋找一種方法, 用一種更能讓大眾 接受的形式來呈現 更多有關於我的國家 和它的運轉方式。 美國每十年會做一次全國普查, 真的一個個去調查, 調查誰住哪裡、你做什麼工作、 我們在家說什麼語言? 這些東西很重要,真的非常重要, 但這卻無法說明我們是怎樣的人, 它無法說明我們的夢想、 啟發我們的思想是什麼。
And so in 2010, I decided to make my own census. And I started looking for a corpus of data that had a lot of descriptions written by ordinary Americans. And it turns out that there is such a corpus of data that's just sitting there for the taking. It's called online dating.
因此 2010 年, 我決定來做我自己的人口普查。 我開始尋找那些 由一般美國大眾寫的 有大量描述的語料庫。 結果我發現, 的確有這樣的語料庫存在, 就在那燈火闌珊處, 那就是線上約會網站。
So in 2010, I joined 21 different online dating services, as a gay man, a straight man, a gay woman and a straight woman, in every zip code in America and downloaded about 19 million people's dating profiles -- about 20 percent of the adult population of the United States. I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is going to become really freaking obvious. Just go with me.
所以 2010 年,我加入了 21 個不同的約會服務, 同性戀的、異性戀的、 男的、女的、 包括美國各地區碼都有, 我下載了 1900 萬人次的 約會檔案, 也就是大約 20% 美國成人人口。 我有強迫症, 你們很快就會發現我不是開玩笑的, 再忍耐一下...
(Laughter)
(觀眾笑)
So what I did was I sorted all this stuff by zip code. And I looked at word analysis. These are some dating profiles from 2010 with the word "lonely" highlighted. If you look at these things topographically, if you imagine dark colors to light colors are more use of the word, you can see that Appalachia is a pretty lonely place. You can also see that Nebraska ain't that funny. This is the kinky map, so what this is showing you is that the women in Alaska need to get together with the men in southern New Mexico, and have a good time. And I have this at a pretty granular level, so I can tell you that the men in the eastern half of Long Island are way more interested in being spanked than men in the western half of Long Island. This will be your one takeaway from this whole conference. You're going to remember that fact for, like, 30 years.
我把這些資料依區碼排序, 然後做字詞分析, 2010 年的約會檔案 我們把「寂寞」這個詞畫重點, 然後與地圖整合, 顏色由深到淺代表 這個字的使用量, 大家會發現阿帕拉契山區 是十分「寂寞」的地區。 還可以看到... 內布拉斯加州沒什麼幽默感, 這是一張”怪癖“地圖, 我想告訴大家的是 阿拉斯加的女生需要和 南新墨西哥州的男生 一起好好地出去玩一玩。 而且我的資料相當仔細, 我可以告訴你長島東半邊的男人 比西半邊的人更熱衷於被「打屁股」。 這是你們今天在會場上最大的收穫, 你會記得這個事實,記 30 年!
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
When you bring this down to a cartographic level, you can make maps and do the same trick I was doing with the eye charts. You can replace the name of every city in the United States with the word people use more in that city than anywhere else. If you've ever dated anyone from Seattle, this makes perfect sense. You've got "pretty." You've got "heartbreak." You've got "gig." You've got "cigarette." They play in a band and they smoke. And right above that you can see "email." That's Redmond, Washington, which is the headquarters of the Microsoft Corporation. Some of these you can guess -- so, Los Angeles is "acting" and San Francisco is "gay." Some are a little bit more heartbreaking. In Baton Rouge, they talk about being curvy; downstream in New Orleans, they still talk about the flood. Folks in the American capital will say they're interesting. People in Baltimore, Maryland, will say they're afraid. This is New Jersey. I grew up somewhere between "annoying" and "cynical."
如果我們依地區展開, 還可以玩一點類似視力測量表的把戲。 我們把美國地圖上的城市名字 置換成他們用得最多的字彙, 你和西雅圖那邊的人約會過, 就會同意這多有道理。 他們有「正妹」、「心碎」、 「表演」、「香煙」, 他們玩樂團、抽煙, 上面還可以看到「電子郵件」。 那是華盛頓州的雷德蒙, 也就是微軟總部的所在地。 有些大家都猜得到—— 洛杉磯是「演戲」, 舊金山是「同志」。 有些就比較令人心碎, 在巴頓魯日,他們大談「胖妞」、 但在下游的紐奧良說得是「水災」, 美國大城市的人們 說他們喜歡什麼, 但馬里蘭州巴爾地摩的人, 則是說他們害怕什麼。 這是紐澤西州。 我是在「討人厭」和 「憤世嫉俗」之間長大的,
(Laughter) (Applause)
(觀眾鼓掌笑)
And New York City's number one word is "now," as in, "Now I'm working as a waiter, but actually I'm an actor."
紐約市的第一名則是「現在」, 譬如說「我現在在當服務生, 但其實我是一名演員。」
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
Or, "Now I'm a professor of engineering at NYU, but actually I'm an artist." If you go upstate, you see "dinosaur." That's Syracuse. The best place to eat in Syracuse, New York, is a Hell's Angels barbecue joint called Dinosaur Barbecue. That's where you would take somebody on a date. I live somewhere between "unconditional" and "midsummer," in Midtown Manhattan. And this is gentrified North Brooklyn, so you've got "DJ" and "glamorous" and "hipsters" and "urbane." So that's maybe a more democratic portrait. And the idea was, what if we made red-state and blue-state maps based on what we want to do on a Friday night?
或「我現在在紐約大學當工程學教授, 但我其實是一個藝術家。」 往北邊看,可以看到「恐龍」, 那是西拉鳩思。 紐約州的西拉鳩思最好吃的餐廳, 最棒的地獄天使燒烤, 店名就是「恐龍燒烤」, 必然的約會聖地。 我現在住在曼哈頓中城, 介於「無條件」和「仲夏」之間, 這是都更後的北布魯克林, 會有「DJ」、「五光十色」、 「嬉皮」和「都會」等字。 我想這應該是更普世自發的肖像畫, 方法就是,把周五晚上我們想做什麼的基礎 套用在紅藍兩黨的城市地圖上。
This is a self-portrait. This is based on my email, about 500,000 emails sent over 20 years. You can think of this as a quantified selfie. So what I'm doing is running a physics equation based on my personal data. You have to imagine everybody I've ever corresponded with. It started out in the middle and it exploded with a big bang. And everybody has gravity to one another, gravity based on how much they've been emailing, who they've been emailing with. And it also does sentimental analysis, so if I say "I love you," you're heavier to me. And you attract to my email addresses in the middle, which act like mainline stars. And all the names are handwritten.
這是我的自畫像, 根據我的電子郵件, 20 年來約有 50 萬封, 你可以把它想像成一張 「量化」的自拍照。 我把我的個人資料代入物理公式, 想像一下,所有我聯絡過的人, 從中間開始,向外爆炸延伸, 而每個人之間互相都有引力, 引力大小取決於他們之間 發送電子郵件的頻率 這也有做語意分析, 所以如果我說「我愛你」 那麼你對我的引力就越大。 你就會被我中央的 電子郵件所吸引 就像是一線明星一樣。 而且所有的姓名都是用手寫的。
Sometimes you do this data and this work with real-time data to illuminate a specific problem in a specific city. This is a Walther PPK 9mm semiautomatic handgun that was used in a shooting in the French Quarter of New Orleans about two years ago on Valentine's Day in an argument over parking. Those are my cigarettes. This is the house where the shooting took place. This project involved a little bit of engineering. I've got a bike chain rigged up as a cam shaft, with a computer driving it. That computer and the mechanism are buried in a box. The gun's on top welded to a steel plate. There's a wire going through to the trigger, and the computer in the box is online. It's listening to the 911 feed of the New Orleans Police Department, so that anytime there's a shooting reported in New Orleans,
有時候你會用即時性的數據, 來突顯某個城市的問題。 這是瓦爾特 PPK 9 釐米半自動手槍, 那是一把兩年前因情人節的停車糾紛 在紐奧良法國區發生的槍擊案手槍。 這是我的香菸。 這是槍擊案地點的房子。 這個專案用到一點工程學, 我用一個電腦驅動裝置 帶動腳踏車鏈條來驅動攝影軸, 整個電腦和機械被包在一個盒子裡, 手槍被焊在一片鋼板上, 再用繩索穿過扳機, 盒子裡的電腦連線到 紐奧良警察局的 911 報案電話, 所以紐奧良只要有槍擊案上報,
(Gunshot sound)
(槍響)
the gun fires. Now, there's a blank, so there's no bullet. There's big light, big noise and most importantly, there's a casing. There's about five shootings a day in New Orleans, so over the four months this piece was installed, the case filled up with bullets. You guys know what this is -- you call this "data visualization." When you do it right, it's illuminating. When you do it wrong, it's anesthetizing. It reduces people to numbers. So watch out.
就開槍一次。 那是空包彈,不是真的子彈, 有強光、很大聲, 更重要的是,又有槍擊案發生了。 紐奧良每天約有 5 件槍擊案, 所以這件作品展示的四個月間, 這盒子被子彈填滿了。 你們都知道這是什麼: 你們稱之為「數據視覺化」。 你做得好,它發光發熱, 做得不好,只會使人麻木, 它把人命簡化成數字。 所以要當心這點。
One last piece for you. I spent the last summer as the artist in residence for Times Square. And Times Square in New York is literally the crossroads of the world. One of the things people don't notice about it is it's the most Instagrammed place on Earth. About every five seconds, someone commits a selfie in Times Square. That's 17,000 a day, and I have them all.
最後一件作品, 去年夏天 我以一名藝術家的身份 駐紮在時代廣場 紐約的時代廣場 確實是世界的十字路口, 但大家沒有注意到的是, 它是全球上傳 Instagram 最多的地方。 幾乎是每 5 秒鐘就有人 在時代廣場自拍上傳, 也就是每天有 17000 次, 我把它們全抓下來了。
(Laughter)
(觀眾笑)
These are some of them with their eyes centered.
這些是把他們雙眼置中的照片。
Every civilization, will use the maximum level of technology available to make art. And it's the responsibility of the artist to ask questions about what that technology means and how it reflects our culture.
每個文明, 都會用最高階的科技來創造藝術, 所以藝術家有責任要提出質問, 思考科技的意義, 科技如何反應我們的文化。
So I leave you with this: we're more than numbers. We're people, and we have dreams and ideas. And reducing us to statistics is something that's done at our peril.
最後我想告訴各位的是: 我們不只是一些數字, 我們是「人」, 人有夢想、有理念, 把「人」簡化成統計數字 是將我們自己至於險境。
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
非常謝謝大家。