Maybe it's a sensible time to tell a bit what I've been up to for the past few months.
In September 2012, I founded Skrolli, a new Finnish computer magazine. This turn in my life surprised even myself.
It started from an image that went viral. Produced by my friend CCR with a lot of ideas from me, it was a faux magazine cover speculating what the longest-living Finnish home computing magazine, MikroBitti, would be like today if it had never renewed itself after the eighties. The magazine happens to be somewhat iconic to those Finns who got immersed to computing before the turn of the millennium, so it reached some relevant audience quite efficiently.
The faux cover was meant to be a joke, but the abundance of comments like "I would definitely subscribe to this kind of magazine" made me seriously consider the possibility of actually creating something like it. I put up a simple web page stating the idea of a new "countercultural" computer magazine that is somewhat similar to what MikroBitti used to be like. In just a few days, over a hundred people showed up on the dedicated IRC channel, and here we are.
Bringing the concept of an oldschool microcomputer magazine to the present era needs some thoughtful reflection. The world has changed a lot; computer hobbyists no longer exist as a unified group, for example. Everyone uses a computer for leisure, and it is sometimes difficult to draw line between those who are interested in the applications and those who are genuinely interested in the technology. Different activities also have their own subcultures with their own communication channels, and it is often hard to relate to someone whose subculture has a very different basis.
Skrolli defines computer culture as something where the computational aspects are irreducible. It is possible to create visual art or music completely without digital technology, for example, but once the computer becomes the very material (like in case of pixel art or chip music), the creative activity becomes relevant to our magazine. Everything where programming or other direct access to the computational mechanisms is involved is also relevant, of course.
I also chose to target the magazine to my own language group. In a nation of six million, the various subcultures are closer to one another, so it is easier to build a common project that spans the whole scale. The continuing existence of large computer hobbyist events in this country might also simplify the task. If the magazine had been started in English or even German, there would have been a much greater risk of appealing only to a few specialized niches.
In order to keep myself motivated, I have been considering the possibility that Skrolli will actually start a new movement. Something that brings the computational aspects of computer entuhsiasm back to daylight and helps the younger generation to find a true, non-compromising relationship with digital technology. Once the movement starts growing on its own, without being tied to a single project, language barriers will no longer exist for it.
I will be busy with this stuff for at least a couple of months until we get the first few issues printed (yes, it will be primarily a paper magazine as a statement against short-living journalism). After that, it is somewhat likely that I will finish the projects I temporarily abandoned: there will probably be a JIT-enabled version IBNIZ, and the IBNIZ democoding contest I promised will be arranged. Stay tuned!
Saturday, 5 January 2013
Thursday, 19 April 2012
The relationship between "New Aesthetic" and Computationally Minimal Art
A couple of weeks ago, something called "New Aesthetic" was brought to my attention. It is difficult to find any sort of coherent definition for the idea, but it seems like an umbrella label for a wide variety of visual things that somehow look computational, often in not-so-computational contexts. The main spreader of the meme is apparently a Tumblr blog that collects pictures of things such as pixellated glitches in textiles, real-life voxel sculptures, mugs decorated with website graphics, digitally glitched photographs, satellite images as well as all kinds of other things that evocate suitably futuristic associations.
Despite the profound vagueness of the umbrella term, it is not difficult to notice the general trend it refers to. Just a decade ago, a computationally inspired real-life object would have been a unique novelty item, but nowadays there are such things all around us. I mentioned an aspect of this trend back in 2010 in my article on Computationally Minimal Art, where I noticed that "retrocomputing esthetics" is not just thriving in its respective subcultures (such as demoscene or chip music scene) but popping up every now and then in mainstream contexts as well -- often completely without the historical or nostalgic vibe usually associated with retrocomputing.
As the concept of "New Aesthetic" overlaps a lot of my ponderings, I now feel like building some semantics in order to relate the ideas to one another:
"New Aesthetics", as I see it, is a rather vague umbrella term that contains a wide variety of things but has a major subset that could be called "Computationally Inspired".
"Computationally Inspired" is anything that brings the concepts and building blocks of the "digital world" into non-native contexts. T-shirts, mugs and other real-life objects decorated with big-pixel art or website imagery are obvious examples. In a wide sense, even anything that makes the basic digital building blocks more visible within a digital context might be "Computationally Inspired" as well: big-pixel low-fi computer graphics on a new high-end computer, for example.
"Computationally Minimal" is anything that uses a very low amount of computational resources, often making the digital building blocks such as pixels very discernible. Two years ago, I defined "Computationally Minimal Art" as follows: "[A] form of discrete art governed by a low computational complexity in the domains of time, description length and temporary storage. The most essential features of Computationally Minimal Art are those that persist the longest when the various levels of complexity approach zero."
We can see that Computationally Inspired and Computationally Minimal have a lot of overlap but neither is a subset of another. Cross-stitch patterns are CM almost by definition as they have a limited number of discrete "pixels" with a limited number of different colors, but they are not CI unless they depict something that comes from the "computer world", such as video game characters. On the other hand, a sculpture based on a large amount of digitally corrupted data is definitely CI but falls out of the definition of CM due to the size of the source data.
What CM and CI and especially their intersection have in common, however, is the tendency of showing off discrete digital data and/or computational processes, which gives them a lot of esthetic similarity. In CI, this is usually a goal in itself, while in CM, it is most often a side-effect of the related goal of low computational complexity. In either case, however, the visual result often looks like big-pixel graphics. This has caused confusion among many New Aesthetic bloggers who use adjectives such as "retro", "8-bit" or "nostalgic" when referring to this phenomenon, when what they are witnessing is just a way how the essence of digital technology tends to manifest visually.
There has been a lot of on-line discussion revolving New Aesthetic during the past month, and a lot of it seems like pseudo-intellectual, reality-detached mumbo-jumbo to me. In order to gain some insight and substance, I would like to recommend all the bloggers to take serious a look into the demoscene and other established forms of computer-centric expression. You may also find out that a lot of this stuff is actually not that new to begin with, it has just been gaining a lot of new momentum recently.
Despite the profound vagueness of the umbrella term, it is not difficult to notice the general trend it refers to. Just a decade ago, a computationally inspired real-life object would have been a unique novelty item, but nowadays there are such things all around us. I mentioned an aspect of this trend back in 2010 in my article on Computationally Minimal Art, where I noticed that "retrocomputing esthetics" is not just thriving in its respective subcultures (such as demoscene or chip music scene) but popping up every now and then in mainstream contexts as well -- often completely without the historical or nostalgic vibe usually associated with retrocomputing.
As the concept of "New Aesthetic" overlaps a lot of my ponderings, I now feel like building some semantics in order to relate the ideas to one another:
"New Aesthetics", as I see it, is a rather vague umbrella term that contains a wide variety of things but has a major subset that could be called "Computationally Inspired".
"Computationally Inspired" is anything that brings the concepts and building blocks of the "digital world" into non-native contexts. T-shirts, mugs and other real-life objects decorated with big-pixel art or website imagery are obvious examples. In a wide sense, even anything that makes the basic digital building blocks more visible within a digital context might be "Computationally Inspired" as well: big-pixel low-fi computer graphics on a new high-end computer, for example.
"Computationally Minimal" is anything that uses a very low amount of computational resources, often making the digital building blocks such as pixels very discernible. Two years ago, I defined "Computationally Minimal Art" as follows: "[A] form of discrete art governed by a low computational complexity in the domains of time, description length and temporary storage. The most essential features of Computationally Minimal Art are those that persist the longest when the various levels of complexity approach zero."
We can see that Computationally Inspired and Computationally Minimal have a lot of overlap but neither is a subset of another. Cross-stitch patterns are CM almost by definition as they have a limited number of discrete "pixels" with a limited number of different colors, but they are not CI unless they depict something that comes from the "computer world", such as video game characters. On the other hand, a sculpture based on a large amount of digitally corrupted data is definitely CI but falls out of the definition of CM due to the size of the source data.
What CM and CI and especially their intersection have in common, however, is the tendency of showing off discrete digital data and/or computational processes, which gives them a lot of esthetic similarity. In CI, this is usually a goal in itself, while in CM, it is most often a side-effect of the related goal of low computational complexity. In either case, however, the visual result often looks like big-pixel graphics. This has caused confusion among many New Aesthetic bloggers who use adjectives such as "retro", "8-bit" or "nostalgic" when referring to this phenomenon, when what they are witnessing is just a way how the essence of digital technology tends to manifest visually.
There has been a lot of on-line discussion revolving New Aesthetic during the past month, and a lot of it seems like pseudo-intellectual, reality-detached mumbo-jumbo to me. In order to gain some insight and substance, I would like to recommend all the bloggers to take serious a look into the demoscene and other established forms of computer-centric expression. You may also find out that a lot of this stuff is actually not that new to begin with, it has just been gaining a lot of new momentum recently.
Saturday, 17 March 2012
"Fabric theory": talking about cultural and computational diversity with the same words
In recent months, I have been pondering a lot about certain similarities between human languages, cultures, programming languages and computing platforms: they are all abstract constructs capable of giving a unique form or flavor to anything that is made with them or stems from them. Different human languages encourage different types of ideas, ways of expression, metaphors and poetry while discouraging others. Different programming languages encourage different programming paradigms, design philosophies and algorithms while discouraging others. The different characteristics of different computing platforms, musical instruments, human cultures, ideologies, religions or subcultural groups all similarly lead to specific "built-in" preferences in expression.
I'm sure this sounds quite meta, vague or superficial when explained this way, but I'm convinced that the similarities are far more profound than most people assume. In order to bring these concepts together, I've chosen to use the English word "fabric" to refer to the set of form-giving characteristics of languages, computers or just about anything. I've picked this word partly because of its dual meaning, i.e. you can consider a fabric a separate, underlying, form-giving framework just as well as an actual material from which the different artifacts are made. You may suggest a better word if you find one.
Many programmers seem to believe that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis also works with programming languages. Edsger Dijkstra, for example, was definitely quite Whorfian when stating that teaching BASIC programming to students made them "mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration". The fabric of a programming language stems from its abstract structure, not much unlike those of natural languages, although a major difference is that the fabrics of programming languages tend to be much "purer" and more clear-cut, as they are typically geared towards specific application areas, computation paradigms and software development philosophies.
Beyond programming languages there are computer platforms. In the context of audiovisual computer art, the fabric of a hardware platform stems both from its "general-purpose" computational capabilities and the characteristics of its special-purpose circuitry, especially the video and sound hardware. The effects of the fabric tend to be the clearest in the most restricted platforms, such as 8-bit home computers and video game consoles. The different fabrics ("limitations") of different platforms are something that demoscene artists have traditionally been concerned about. Nowadays, there is even an academic discipline with an expanding series of books, "Platform Studies", that asks how video games and other forms of computer art have been shaped by the fabrics of the platforms they've been made for.
The fabric of a human culture stems from a wide memetic mess including things like taboos, traditions, codes of conduct, and, of course, language. In modern societies, a lot stems from bureaucratic, economic and regulatory mechanisms. Behavior-shaping mechanisms are also very prominent in things like video games, user interfaces and interactive websites, where they form a major part of the fabric. The fabric of a musical instrument stems partly from its user interface and partly from its different acoustic ranges and other "limitations". It is indeed possible to extend the "fabric theory" to quite a wide variety of concepts, even though it may get a little bit far-fetched at times.
In the world of computing, difficult-to-notice fabrics come out as standards, de-facto standards and "best practices". Jaron Lanier warns about "lock-ins", restrictive standards that are difficult to outthink. MIDI, for example, enforces a specific, finite formalization of musical notes, effectively narrowing the expressive range of a lot of music. A major concern risen by "You are not a gadget" is that technological lock-ins of on-line communication (e.g. those prominent in Facebook) may end up trivializing humanity in a way similar to how MIDI trivializes music.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with standards per se. Standards, also including constructs such as lingua francas and social norms, can be very helpful or even vital to humanity. However, when a standard becomes an unquestionable dogma, there's a good chance for something evil to happen. In order to avoid this, we always need individuals who challenge and deconstruct the standards, keeping people aware of the alternatives. Before we can think outside the box, we must first realize that we are in a box in the first place.
Constrained programming has long traditions in a multitude of hacker subcultures, including the demoscene, where it has obtained a very prominent role. Perhaps the most popular type of constraint in all hacker subcultures in general is the program length constraint, which sets an upper limit to the size of either the source code or the executable. It seems to be a general rule that working with ever smaller program sizes brings the programmer ever closer to the underlying fabric: in larger programs, it is possible to abstract away a lot of it, but under tight constraints, the programmer-artist must learn to avoid abstraction and embrace the fabric the way it is. In the smallest size classes, even such details as the ordering of sound and video registers in the I/O space become form-giving, as seen in the sub-32-byte C-64 demos by 4mat of Ate Bit, for example.
Among both human and programming languages, there are experimental languages that have been deliberately constructed as "mind-benders", having the kind of features and limitations that force the user to rethink a lot of things when trying to express an idea. Among constructed human languages, a good example is Sonja Elen Kisa's minimalistic "Toki Pona" that builds everything from just over 120 basic words. Among programming languages, the mind-bending experiments are called "esoteric programming languages", with the likes of Brainfuck and Befunge often mentioned as examples.
In computer platforms, there's also a lot of variance in "objective tightness". Large amounts of general-purpose computing resources make it possible to accurately emulate smaller computers; that is, a looser fabric may sometimes completely engulf a tighter one. Because of this, the experience of learning a "bigger" platform after a "smaller" one is not usually very mind-bending compared to the opposite direction.
Popular fabrics are often perceived as neutral, although they are just as arbitrary and biased as the other ones. A tribe that doesn't have very much contact with other tribes typically regards its own language and culture as "the right one" and everyone else as strange and deviant. When several tribes come together, they may choose one language as their supposedly neutral lingua franca, and a sufficiently advanced group of tribes may even construct a simplified, bland mix-up of all of its member languages, an "Esperanto". But even in this case, the language is by no means universal; the fabric that is common between the source languages is still very much present. Even if the language is based on logical principles, i.e. a "Lojban", the chosen set of principles is arbitrary, not to mention all the choices made when implementing those principles.
Powerful computers can usually emulate many less powerful ones, but this does not make them any less arbitrary. On the contrary, modern IBM PC compatibles are full of arbitrary desgin choices stacked on one another, forming a complex spaghetti of historical trials and errors that would make no sense at all if designed from scratch. The modern IBM PC platform therefore has a very prominent fabric, and the main reason why it feels so neutral is its popularity. Another reason is that the other platforms have many a lot of the same design choices, making today's computer platforms much less diverse than what they were a couple of decades ago. For example, how many modern platforms can you name that use something other than RGB as their primary colorspace, or something other than a power of two as their word length?
Diversity is diminishing in many other areas as well. In countries with an astounding diversity, like Papua-New-Guinea, many groups are abandoning their unique native languages and cultures in favor of bigger and more prestigious ones. I see some of that even in my own country, where many young and intelligent people take pride in "thinking in English", erroreusnly assuming that second-language English would be somehow more expressive for them than their mother tongue. In a dystopian vision, the diversity of millennia-old languages and cultures is getting replaced by a global English-language monoculture where all the diversity is subcultural at best.
Now, go to the world and embrace the mind-bending diversity!
I'm sure this sounds quite meta, vague or superficial when explained this way, but I'm convinced that the similarities are far more profound than most people assume. In order to bring these concepts together, I've chosen to use the English word "fabric" to refer to the set of form-giving characteristics of languages, computers or just about anything. I've picked this word partly because of its dual meaning, i.e. you can consider a fabric a separate, underlying, form-giving framework just as well as an actual material from which the different artifacts are made. You may suggest a better word if you find one.
Fabrics
The fabric of a human language stems (primarily) from its grammar and vocabulary. The principle of lingustic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, suggests that language defines a lot about how our ways of thinking end up being like, and there is even a bunch of experimental support for this idea. The stronger, classical version of the hypothesis, stating that languages build hard barriers that actually restrict what kind of ideas are possible, is very probably false, however. I believe that all human languages are "human-complete", i.e. they are all able to express the same complete range of human thoughts, although the expression may become very cumbersome in some cases. In most Indo-European languages, for example, it is very difficult to talk about people without mentioning their real or assumed genders all the time, and it may be very challenging to communicate mathematical ideas in an Aboriginal language that has a very rudimentary number system.Many programmers seem to believe that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis also works with programming languages. Edsger Dijkstra, for example, was definitely quite Whorfian when stating that teaching BASIC programming to students made them "mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration". The fabric of a programming language stems from its abstract structure, not much unlike those of natural languages, although a major difference is that the fabrics of programming languages tend to be much "purer" and more clear-cut, as they are typically geared towards specific application areas, computation paradigms and software development philosophies.
Beyond programming languages there are computer platforms. In the context of audiovisual computer art, the fabric of a hardware platform stems both from its "general-purpose" computational capabilities and the characteristics of its special-purpose circuitry, especially the video and sound hardware. The effects of the fabric tend to be the clearest in the most restricted platforms, such as 8-bit home computers and video game consoles. The different fabrics ("limitations") of different platforms are something that demoscene artists have traditionally been concerned about. Nowadays, there is even an academic discipline with an expanding series of books, "Platform Studies", that asks how video games and other forms of computer art have been shaped by the fabrics of the platforms they've been made for.
The fabric of a human culture stems from a wide memetic mess including things like taboos, traditions, codes of conduct, and, of course, language. In modern societies, a lot stems from bureaucratic, economic and regulatory mechanisms. Behavior-shaping mechanisms are also very prominent in things like video games, user interfaces and interactive websites, where they form a major part of the fabric. The fabric of a musical instrument stems partly from its user interface and partly from its different acoustic ranges and other "limitations". It is indeed possible to extend the "fabric theory" to quite a wide variety of concepts, even though it may get a little bit far-fetched at times.
Noticing one's own box
In many cases, a fabric can become transparent or even invisible. Those who only speak one language can find it difficult to think beyond its fabric. Likewise, those who only know about one culture, one worldview, one programming language, one technique for a specific task or one just-about-anything need some considerable effort to even notice the fabric, let alone expand their horizons beyond it. History shows that this kind of mental poverty leads even some very capable minds into quite disastrous thoughts, ranging from general narrow-mindedness and false sense of objectivity to straightforward religious dogmatism and racism.In the world of computing, difficult-to-notice fabrics come out as standards, de-facto standards and "best practices". Jaron Lanier warns about "lock-ins", restrictive standards that are difficult to outthink. MIDI, for example, enforces a specific, finite formalization of musical notes, effectively narrowing the expressive range of a lot of music. A major concern risen by "You are not a gadget" is that technological lock-ins of on-line communication (e.g. those prominent in Facebook) may end up trivializing humanity in a way similar to how MIDI trivializes music.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with standards per se. Standards, also including constructs such as lingua francas and social norms, can be very helpful or even vital to humanity. However, when a standard becomes an unquestionable dogma, there's a good chance for something evil to happen. In order to avoid this, we always need individuals who challenge and deconstruct the standards, keeping people aware of the alternatives. Before we can think outside the box, we must first realize that we are in a box in the first place.
Constraints
In order to make a fabric more visible and tangible, it is often useful to introduce artificial constraints to "tighten it up". In a human language, for example, one can adopt a form of constrained writing, such as a type of poetry, to bring up some otherwise-invisible aspects of the linguistic fabric. In normal, everyday prose, words are little more than arbitrary sequences of symbols, but when working under tight constraints, their elementary structures and mutual relationships become important. This is very similar to what happens when programming in a constrained environment: previously irrelevant aspects, such as machine code instruction lengths, suddenly become relevant.Constrained programming has long traditions in a multitude of hacker subcultures, including the demoscene, where it has obtained a very prominent role. Perhaps the most popular type of constraint in all hacker subcultures in general is the program length constraint, which sets an upper limit to the size of either the source code or the executable. It seems to be a general rule that working with ever smaller program sizes brings the programmer ever closer to the underlying fabric: in larger programs, it is possible to abstract away a lot of it, but under tight constraints, the programmer-artist must learn to avoid abstraction and embrace the fabric the way it is. In the smallest size classes, even such details as the ordering of sound and video registers in the I/O space become form-giving, as seen in the sub-32-byte C-64 demos by 4mat of Ate Bit, for example.
Mind-benders
Sometimes a language or a platform feels tight enough even without any additional constraints. A lot of this feeling is subjective, caused by the inability to express oneself in the previously learned way. When learning a new human language that is completely different to one's mother tongue, one may feel restricted when there's no counterpart for a specific word or grammatical cosntruct. When encountering such a "boundary", the learner needs to rethink the idea in a way that goes around it. This often requires some mind-bending. The same phenomenon can be encountered when learning different programming languages, e.g. learning a declarative language after only knowing imperative ones.Among both human and programming languages, there are experimental languages that have been deliberately constructed as "mind-benders", having the kind of features and limitations that force the user to rethink a lot of things when trying to express an idea. Among constructed human languages, a good example is Sonja Elen Kisa's minimalistic "Toki Pona" that builds everything from just over 120 basic words. Among programming languages, the mind-bending experiments are called "esoteric programming languages", with the likes of Brainfuck and Befunge often mentioned as examples.
In computer platforms, there's also a lot of variance in "objective tightness". Large amounts of general-purpose computing resources make it possible to accurately emulate smaller computers; that is, a looser fabric may sometimes completely engulf a tighter one. Because of this, the experience of learning a "bigger" platform after a "smaller" one is not usually very mind-bending compared to the opposite direction.
Nothing is neutral
Now, would it be possible to create a language or a computer that would be totally neutral, objective and universal? I don't think so. Trying to create something that lacks fabric is like trying to sculpt thin air, and fabrics are always built from arbitrarities. Whenever something feels neutral, the feeling is usually deceptive.Popular fabrics are often perceived as neutral, although they are just as arbitrary and biased as the other ones. A tribe that doesn't have very much contact with other tribes typically regards its own language and culture as "the right one" and everyone else as strange and deviant. When several tribes come together, they may choose one language as their supposedly neutral lingua franca, and a sufficiently advanced group of tribes may even construct a simplified, bland mix-up of all of its member languages, an "Esperanto". But even in this case, the language is by no means universal; the fabric that is common between the source languages is still very much present. Even if the language is based on logical principles, i.e. a "Lojban", the chosen set of principles is arbitrary, not to mention all the choices made when implementing those principles.
Powerful computers can usually emulate many less powerful ones, but this does not make them any less arbitrary. On the contrary, modern IBM PC compatibles are full of arbitrary desgin choices stacked on one another, forming a complex spaghetti of historical trials and errors that would make no sense at all if designed from scratch. The modern IBM PC platform therefore has a very prominent fabric, and the main reason why it feels so neutral is its popularity. Another reason is that the other platforms have many a lot of the same design choices, making today's computer platforms much less diverse than what they were a couple of decades ago. For example, how many modern platforms can you name that use something other than RGB as their primary colorspace, or something other than a power of two as their word length?
Diversity is diminishing in many other areas as well. In countries with an astounding diversity, like Papua-New-Guinea, many groups are abandoning their unique native languages and cultures in favor of bigger and more prestigious ones. I see some of that even in my own country, where many young and intelligent people take pride in "thinking in English", erroreusnly assuming that second-language English would be somehow more expressive for them than their mother tongue. In a dystopian vision, the diversity of millennia-old languages and cultures is getting replaced by a global English-language monoculture where all the diversity is subcultural at best.
Conclusion
It indeed seems to be possible to talk about human languages, cultures, programming languages, computing platforms and many other things with similar concepts. These concepts also seem so useful at times that I'm probably going to use them in subsequent articles as well. I also hope that this article, despite its length, gives some food for thought to someone.Now, go to the world and embrace the mind-bending diversity!
Friday, 30 December 2011
IBNIZ - a hardcore audiovisual virtual machine and an esoteric programming language
Some days ago, I finished the first public version of my audiovisual virtual machine, IBNIZ. I also showed it off on YouTube with the following video:
As demonstrated by the video, IBNIZ (Ideally Bare Numeric Impression giZmo) is a virtual machine and a programming language that generates video and audio from very short strings of code. Technically, it is a two-stack machine somewhat similar to Forth, but with the major execption that the stack is cyclical and also used at an output buffer. Also, as every IBNIZ program is implicitly inside a loop that pushes a set of loop variables on the stack on every cycle, even an empty program outputs something (i.e. a changing gradient as video and a constant sawtooth wave as audio).
How does it work?
To illustrate how IBNIZ works, here's how the program ^xp is executed, step by step:
So, in short: on every loop cycle, the VM pushes the values T, Y and X. The operation ^ XORs the values Y and X and xp pops off the remaining value (T). Thus, the stack gets filled by color values where the Y coordinate is XORed by the X coordinate, resulting in the ill-famous "XOR texture".
The representation in the figure was somewhat simplified, however. In reality, IBNIZ uses 32-bit fixed-point arithmetic where the values for Y and X fall between -1 and +1. IBNIZ also runs the program in two separate contexts with separate stacks and internal registers: the video context and the audio context. To illustrate this, here's how an empty program is executed in the video context:
The colorspace is YUV, with the integer part of the pixel value interpreted as U and V (roughly corresponding to hue) and the fractional part interpreted as Y (brightness). The empty program runs in the so-called T-mode where all the loop variables -- T, Y and X -- are entered in the same word (16 bits of T in the integer part and 8+8 bits of Y and X in the fractional). In the audio context, the same program executes as follows:
Just like in the T-mode of the video context, the VM pushes one word per loop cycle. However, in this case, there is no Y or X; the whole word represents T. Also, when interpreting the stack contents as audio, the integer part is ignored altogether and the fractional part is taken as an unsigned 16-bit PCM value.
Also, in the audio context, T increments in steps of 0000.0040 while the step is only 0000.0001 in the video context. This is because we need to calculate 256x256 pixel values per frame (nearly 4 million pixels if there are 60 frames per second) but suffice with considerably fewer PCM samples. In the current implementation, we calculate 61440 audio samples per second (60*65536/64) which is then downscaled to 44100 Hz.
The scheduling and main-looping logic is the only somewhat complex thing in IBNIZ. All the rest is very elementary, something that can be found as instructions in the x86 architecture or as words in the core Forth vocabulary. Basic arithmetic and stack-shuffling. Memory load and store. An if/then/else structure, two kinds of loop structures and subroutine definition/calling. Also an instruction for retrieving user input from keyboard or pointing device. Everything needs to be built from these basic building blocks. And yes, it is Turing complete, and no, you are not restricted to the rendering order provided by the implicit main loop.
The full instruction set is described in the documentation. Feel free to check it out experiment with IBNIZ on your own!
So, what's the point?
The IBNIZ project started in 2007 with the codename "EDAM" (Extreme-Density Art Machine). My goal was to participate in the esoteric programming language competition at the same year's Alternative Party, but I didn't finish the VM at time. The project therefore fell to the background. Every now and then, I returned to the project for a short while, maybe revising the instruction set a little bit or experimenting with different colorspaces and loop variable formats. There was no great driving force to insppire me to finish the VM until mid-2011 after some quite succesful experiments with very short audiovisual programs. Once some of my musical experiments spawned a trend that eventually even got a name of its own, "bytebeat", I really had to push myself to finally finishing IBNIZ.
The main goal of IBNIZ, from the very beginning, was to provide a new platform for the demoscene. Something without the usual fallbacks of the real-world platforms when writing extremely small demos. No headers, no program size overhead in video/audio access, extremely high code density, enough processing power and preferrably a machine language that is fun to program with. Something that would have the potential to displace MS-DOS as the primary platform for sub-256-byte demoscene productions.
There are also other considerations. One of them is educational: modern computing platforms tend to be mind-bogglingly complex and highly abstracted and lack the immediacy and tangibility of the old-school home computers. I am somewhat concerned that young people whose mindset would have made them great programmers in the eighties find their mindset totally incompatible with today's mainstream technology and therefore get completely driven away from programming. IBNIZ will hopefully be able to serve as an "oldschool-style platform" in a way that is rewarding enough for today's beginninng programming hobbyists. Also, as the demoscene needs all the new blood it can get, I envision that IBNIZ could serve as a gateway to the demoscene.
I also see that IBNIZ has potential for glitch art and livecoding. By taking a nondeterministic approach to experimentation with IBNIZ, the user may encounter a lot of interesting visual and aural glitch patterns. As for livecoding, I suspect that the compactness of the code as well as the immediate visibility of the changes could make an IBNIZ programming performance quite enjoyable to watch. The live gigs of the chip music scene, for example, might also find use for IBNIZ.
About some design choices and future plans
IBNIZ was originally designed with an esoteric programming language competition in mind, and indeed, the language has already been likened to the classic esoteric language Brainfuck by several critical commentators. I'm not that sure about the similarity with Brainfuck, but it does have strong conceptual similarities with FALSE, the esoteric programming language that inspired Brainfuck. Both IBNIZ and FALSE are based on Forth and use one-character-long instructions, and the perceived awkwardness of both comes from unusual, punctuation-based syntax rather than deliberate attempts at making the language difficult.
When contrasting esotericity with usefulness, it should be noted that many useful, mature and well-liked languages, such as C and Perl, also tend to look like total "line noise" to the uninitiated. Forth, on the other hand, tends to look like mess of random unrelated strings to people unfamiliar with the RPN syntax. I therefore don't see how the esotericity of IBNIZ would hinder its usefulness any more than the usefulness of C, Perl or Forth is hindered by their syntaxes. A more relevant concern would be, for example, the lack of label and variable names in IBNIZ.
There are some design choices that often get questioned, so I'll perhaps explain the rationale for them:
- The colors: the color format has been chosen so that more sensible and neutral colors are more likely than "coder colors". YUV has been chosen over HSV because there is relatively universal hardware support for YUV buffers (and I also think it is easier to get richer gradients with YUV than with HSV).
- Trigonometric functions: I pondered for a long while whether to include SIN and ATAN2 and I finally decided to do so. A lot of demoscene tricks depend, including all kinds of rotating and bouncing things as well as more advanced stuff such as raycasting, depends on the availability of trigonometry. Both of these operations can be found in the FPU instruction set of the x86 and are relatively fundamental mathematical stuff, so we're not going into library bloat here.
- Floating point vs fixed point: I considered floating point for a long while as it would have simplified some advanced tricks. However, IBNIZ code is likely to use a lot of bitwise operations, modular bitwise arithmetic and indefinitely running counters which may end up being problematic with floating-point. Fixed point makes the arithmetic more concrete and also improves the implementability of IBNIZ on low-end platforms that lack FPU.
- Different coordinate formats: TYX-video uses signed coordinates because most effects look better when the origin is at the center of the screen. The 'U' opcode (userinput), on the other hand, gives the mouse coordinates in unsigned format to ease up pixel-plotting (you can directly use the mouse coordinates as part of the framebuffer memory address). T-video uses unsigned coordinates for making the values linear and also for easier coupling with the unsigned coordinates provided by 'U'.
Right now, all the existing implementations of IBNIZ are rather slow. The C implementation is completely interpretive without any optimization phase prior to execution. However, a faster implementation with some clever static analysis is quite high on the to-do list, and I expect a considerable performance boost once native-code JIT compilers come into use. After all, if we are ever planning to displace MS-DOS as a sizecoding platform, we will need to get IBNIZ to run at least faster than DOSBOX.
The use of externally-provided coordinate and time values will make it possible to scale a considerable portion of IBNIZ programs to a vast range of different resolutions from character-cell framebuffers on 8-bit platforms to today's highest higher-than-high-definition standards. I suspect that a lot of IBNIZ programs can be automatically compiled into shader code or fast C-64 machine language (yes, I've made some preliminary calculations for "Ibniz 64" as well). The currently implemented resolution, 256x256, however, will remain as the default resolution that will ensure compatibility. This resolution, by the way, has been chosen because it is in the same class with 320x200, the most popular resolution of tiny MS-DOS demos.
At some point of time, it will also become necessary to introduce a compact binary representation of IBNIZ code -- with variable bit lengths primarily based on the frequency of each instruction. The byte-per-character representation already has a higher code density than the 16-bit x86 machine language, and I expect that a bit-length-optimized representation will really break some boundaries for low size classes.
An important milestone will be a fast and complete version that runs in a web brower. I expect this to make IBNIZ much more available and accessible than it is now, and I'm also planning to host an IBNIZ programming contest once a sufficient web implementation is on-line. There is already a Javascript implementation but it is rather slow and doesn't support sound, so we will still have to wait for a while. But stay tuned!
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