Research experiences with code, combined with an arts background, led me to discover generative art.

By Kenneth Vaden, Ph.D.

While art and science may seem like vastly different pursuits, good science and good art both require many of the same elements. These include creativity, discipline, patience, mentorship, and following your curiosity. My art practice adapts many of the computational skills that I learned for research, to craft algorithms that create a unique type of artwork.

My research experience involved the development of fluent code writing, over many years of data analyses and plotting results for publications. Mentors like Dr. Forrest Young, Dr. Sliman Bensmaia, and Dr. Stephen Wilson shared their calm, inquisitive, and methodical mindsets during code trouble-shooting sessions with me, which reshaped my frustration while fixing stubbornly broken algorithms. Their influences helped me see the fun and art in coding.

My postdoctoral research phase saw a transition to code-writing as a creative medium, when I started to write completely new algorithms almost as quickly as I could think of new statistical analyses or simulation models. While new hypotheses would often fail the test, my enthusiasm was fueled by composing new ideas and seeing the machines come to life.

These skills and the scientific opportunities that provided them to me were only possible because others helped me to figure out coding, so I have always appreciated the importance of teaching. I’ve advised many students that no matter what direction they choose to take, programming skills will open more doors than they could ever imagine.

Science

My scientific research is focused on age-related changes in brain function and peripheral changes in hearing that affect listening difficulties. I have characterized an adaptive control system in the frontal cortex, which is theorized to adjust behaviors and optimize performance for challenging tasks that include speech recognition in noise.

I have performed neuroimaging studies that suggest a role for adaptive control during word recognition, gap detection, and memory encoding in noise and how these may change across the lifespan. As a recipient of an Emerging Research Grant in 2015, I performed neuroimaging studies that linked this activity to changes in how much information will be collected during speech recognition in multitalker babble (e.g., cafeteria noise) by middle-aged and older adults.

A few years ago, I was writing a tricky algorithm in the R Statistics Language to plot white matter pathways in the brain from an MRI diffusion imaging dataset collected at my institution, the Medical University of South Carolina.

First, I plotted lines as a flat representation of the three-dimensional coordinates for pathways. Coloring the lines and adding a dark line underneath each (like a shadow) allowed the flowing white matter bundles to be visually individuated, and their mass trajectory could now be appreciated.

Next, all of the pathways were broken up into segments and plotted based on depth, which created strong interposition cues. When the tracts were plotted this way, the beauty of these brain structures was striking—and I realized the creative possibilities of precision plots. Soon afterward, I began to experiment with similar techniques at home (with random numbers rather than data) to draw noisy 3D structures. I slowly reinvented code art, completely unaware that there was a fresh art movement called generative art.

Art

Generative art is defined by the use of an autonomous system that can produce imagery with minimal intervention by the artist, after writing the algorithm. The dual challenge of composing generative art algorithms is to produce beautiful output while ensuring that there is sufficient variation to make all of the output interesting.

Traditionally, generative artists curate and select the best images created by their algorithms. Long-form generative art is an even more arduous test—running a system without any curation, with sufficient quality and variability to produce hundreds or thousands of unique outputs for collectors. I have developed three long-form algorithms and released one publicly so far.

With modern computing and the arrival of cryptocurrencies, generative art has gained interest, although this art tradition goes back to the earliest computers with pioneers such as Lillian Schwartz, Herbert Franke, and Manfred Mohr. During the pandemic, I was fortunate to meet (that is, chat online) with many of the most prominent artists in the current generation by sharing my artwork on social media—including Aaron Penne, Jens Clarholm, Itzel Yard, Jeff Ipps, Andrew Strauss, Piter Pasma, Tyler Hobbs, and many others.

This international artist community became an essential resource to deal with positive and negative issues related to social media, and when collectors of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) turned intense attention to generative art in the summer of 2021. Briefly, NFTs are digital artworks that can be collected online through verifiable cryptocurrency transactions, also online.

My generative art process begins with nearly empty code and a blank image output file. The image slowly evolves over many iterations of writing code, executing, and viewing the results. I like to share the output online to see what people respond to, which can be surprising because of the nature of subjectivity in art.

Part of sharing my artwork online is writing plain-language recipes that allow nontechnical audiences to better appreciate the artwork and give fellow nerds a chance to replicate or create variations on interesting algorithms. In this way my teaching has extended to other communities.

With advice from my wife, Haley Doty Vaden, an expert in fine arts and museum studies, I started creating fine art prints for collectors. The algorithms I compose can produce high-resolution images for prints or NFTs, which was supported by collectors who taught me how to “mint” my artwork, create digital collections online, and even release a long-form artwork titled “WORLDS.”

Life

Art was important to so many people during the pandemic; it helped to deal with the constant dread that pervaded everything and took away so much from everyone. Code art was something that I could work on, over sleepless nights, and share without leaving the house.

Through generative art, I found new friends among artists, collectors, and galleries. I’ve had fascinating conversations online with artists and collectors and look forward to more with many of these new friends.

In the spring of 2022, I traveled from Charleston to Los Angeles, and it was amazing to meet many of my online art friends for the first time. I was also fortunate to work with individuals at Art Blocks, whose philanthropy inspired me to donate proceeds from NFT drops to local and national nonprofit organizations. Cryptocurrency can make a positive change in the world, even though the system is new and volatile.

Since my Emerging Research Grant project completed, I have continued to develop novel techniques to study how brain systems enhance speech recognition in noise. I have also written new manuscripts, submitted new grant applications, and mentored new students. Like my artwork, each new study provides an iteration that can lead to a better understanding of how the brain supports speech recognition in noise, and how older age and hearing affect those functions. My long-term research goal is to characterize brain systems to enhance communication and guide rehabilitation strategies for a range of patient populations.

As a middle-aged person, with a few more gray hairs from parenthood during the pandemic, I better appreciate that life does not slow down with increasing age. Passions and interests bloom like a garden full of growing plants. Cognition does not slow as much as it is overrun by the vines, leaves, and flowers of every kind bursting into thought. Some corner of my mind is always occupied with thoughts of my parents, my kids Sabine and Remy, or myriad news stories and scientific reports. Endless possibility is what science, art, and life mean for me.

A 2015 Emerging Research Grants scientist generously funded by Royal Arch Research Assistance, Kenneth Vaden, Ph.D., is a research assistant professor in the department of otolaryngology–head and neck surgery at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). His art has been selected for the permanent art collection at MUSC, the juried annual art publication MUSC Humanitas, and the Piccolo Spoleto Annual Juried Art Exhibition. For more, see vadenart.com. 

This appears in the Fall 2022 issue of Hearing Health magazine.

Applications are now open for the 2023-2024 Emerging Research Grants cycle. See hhf.org/how-to-apply for more information.

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