Golan Levin: Good evening. And wel­come back to the pre­sen­ta­tions of Shall Make, Shall Be. This is our final evening, but the first of five pre­sen­ta­tions this evening. And our first pre­sen­ter tonight is Peter Bradley, whose project con­sid­ered the Sixth Amendment. 

Peter Bradley is a con­cep­tu­al artist whose recent work is about com­put­ers and meta­physics. Applied first to music and the con­cept of keys, and now to lan­guage and the notion of seman­tic sim­i­lar­i­ty, his prac­tice aims to test the lim­its of com­pu­ta­tion, to cap­ture the mean­ing of an idea as its being is reduced to quan­ti­ty. Peter lives in New York City and tours as a mem­ber of Japanese Breakfast. Peter Bradley. 

Peter Bradley: Hi Golan. Thank you for that intro­duc­tion. Hello everyone. 

As you men­tioned, my day job is not real­ly as com­put­er sci­en­tist or a game design­er per se, or even as an artist real­ly. I’m a gui­tarist in a band. And my back­ground from a uni­ver­si­ty per­spec­tive is real­ly in the human­i­ties. I stud­ied French and com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture, and I stud­ied phi­los­o­phy and aes­thet­ics. However, I got inter­est­ed in this line of work and in game design a few years ago when I had an idea for a board game which was about music. And specif­i­cal­ly the con­cept of a key in music. I read a real­ly fan­tas­tic nov­el by [Tomas Ma?] that told the sto­ry of a fic­tion­al com­pos­er in the 20^th cen­tu­ry. And it inspired me to cre­ate this game which I call Leverkuhn. I’m gonna show a trailer. 

[nar­rat­ing from 1:49]

So in that game you select a home key here. And you’re pit­ted against a com­put­er oppo­nent who is play­ing for its own key as you go back and forth, trad­ing chords, cre­at­ing a song.

At the end of the game, you end up with this kind of mini rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the lit­tle song you put togeth­er. Then you take that down­load and cre­ate some­thing [inaudi­ble].

[nar­ra­tion ends at 3:10]

The thing that real­ly inter­est­ed me in work on Leverkuhn was this idea of a game as an essay. Like, a game that some­how takes a posi­tion or a theme. Like in this case, the code actu­al­ly embod­ies some ideas that I came to have about the con­cept of the key, how it func­tions in music, what the lim­its of one key are into another. 

When I fin­ished that work, I became inter­est­ed in a sub­set of com­put­er sci­ence called nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing. And I knew that the next project I want­ed to work on would deal some­how with lan­guage. Within that space there’s an idea called a word vec­tor, which is an impor­tant con­cept in the idea of how we rep­re­sent words com­pu­ta­tion­al­ly, how they might be reduced to num­ber in one fash­ion or anoth­er so that the com­put­er can work with them if you’re doing some kind of like AI research on human lan­guage. It’s used in all sorts of dif­fer­ent approaches. 

And as I was read­ing up on this con­cept of word vec­tors, I start­ed to think about how we might rep­re­sent lan­guage in space. And that became sort of…just the inkling of an idea for my next project. There’s a lin­guist called Saussure who is an impor­tant 20^th cen­tu­ry thinker who cre­at­ed this idea of dif­fer­en­tial net of mean­ing. Which means that a word sig­ni­fies in such a fash­ion as it’s relat­ed to all the oth­er words around it. 

Take a word like ​“cat,” for instance. It’s anchored in lan­guage along cat­e­gories of sim­i­lar­i­ty and dif­fer­ence. And cat­e­gories above it and items, or the cat­e­go­ry of ​“types of cats” under­neath it. To kind of sim­pli­fy the whole idea. So you know, a cat is a pet. In our cul­ture a cat is the oppo­site of a dog. You bring to cer­tain words your own psy­cho­log­i­cal for­ma­tion and per­son­al his­to­ry that also con­tributes to that meet­ing. So for me ​“cat” is con­nect­ed to this Baudelaire poem that I stud­ied in col­lege that I real­ly love and it has all these asso­ci­a­tions about like 19^th cen­tu­ry Paris or some­thing like that. 

And I want­ed to sort of just dis­till this idea of a seman­tic net—that is the way that one word is ingrained with and meshed with all of the oth­ers in the way that it acquires meaning—and present it in a spa­tial fash­ion that peo­ple could just traverse. 

That’s about the time that I became aware of the Shall Make, Shall Be pro­pos­al. And I took a look at the amend­ments and I guess the First Amendment was in some ways a kind of nat­ur­al com­pan­ion to this idea of lan­guage and what I want­ed to do. But, at the same time I was real­ly cap­ti­vat­ed by an old philo­soph­i­cal metaphor, which is the prison-house of lan­guage. It’s some­thing that Nietzsche said and Jacobson took up. The idea being that when you’re enmeshed in lan­guage in the fash­ion I’m talk­ing about, you can’t escape it. It’s just this sort of like Kafkaesque house of sig­ni­fiers that are con­stant­ly relat­ing to one anoth­er. And I thought that there was some­thing just real­ly poet­ic and inter­est­ing about that that could serve as the fun­da­men­tal theme of the game.

So, I hit on the Sixth Amendment, which deals with the rights of the accused in crim­i­nal pro­ceed­ings. And set about work try­ing to get to the back end of what would be an enor­mous dic­tio­nary, more or less, that would serve as a way to nav­i­gate this lin­guis­tic space.

This is just a Python library that I wrote to begin this process. And you can see here this idea of seman­tics sets. So that’s what I was try­ing to explain per­haps a lit­tle bit poor­ly ear­li­er. If we have a giv­en word, there’s an axis of sim­i­lar­i­ty, and an axis of cat­e­go­ry. Which I took to be like the fun­da­men­tal orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple to get towards the meaning. 

Once that back­end was built out, I could do some­thing like this, which is just kind of a shell rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what hap­pens in the actu­al game. Given a word like ​“abuse,” I’ve gone and mined from a zil­lion dif­fer­ent sources all of these closely-related words. Either on that cat­e­go­ry axis or on the simil­i­tude axis. And you can just see how they’re kind of relat­ing together. 

And then, I got this game engine called Godot. It’s like an open source ver­sion of Unity. This is just an exam­ple of all the zil­lions of lines of code that are nec­es­sary to cre­ate a video game. And it’s a great tool, though. You can sort of have your world, and it keeps all of your resources nice and well-organized for you as you’re build­ing out your idea. 

Now we’ll tran­si­tion into some actu­al game footage. This is the intro­duc­tion. The con­ceit is that you’re a ball of ink on the nation­al mall and you’re try­ing to get to the Supreme Courthouse in order to sort of argue your case. 

But as the game says, you move seman­ti­cal­ly. It’s kind of a hard con­cept to explain quite quick­ly. So we get into this tuto­r­i­al which I hope makes it nice and clear to players. 

In real life the game is one long sequence, but I had to chop it up just for the sake of screen­caps. So, a syn­onym is gonna move you to the right, and an antonym will move you to the left. Jumping or mov­ing for­ward, which in a hard­core lin­guis­tic sense is called a hyper­nym, is accom­plished by sort of sup­ply­ing a cat­e­go­ry. So in that sense ​“size” is a cat­e­go­ry that con­tains ​“small.” Or the oppo­site, ​“length” is con­tained in the cat­e­go­ry of ​“size.”

You can also change parts of speech in place, or sub­mit words that’re con­tained in oth­er words or that con­tain words in them. And then the gav­el is a key con­cept here, as it sort of bridges the gap between the amend­ment and this more free play of just lan­guage. They occur through­out the dif­fer­ent lev­els, and they come back to the key con­cepts of the Sixth Amendment, or what I’ve iden­ti­fied as the most impor­tant words that con­tribute to its mean­ing, one of which is ​“coun­sel.” And then, just like in quite a lot of video games like this there’s a time ele­ment and a life element. 

Once you move your way through this lit­tle tuto­r­i­al and the lily pads, you get into sort of a time tri­al com­po­nent which I think is real­ly fun. You’re up against the clock here, and you’re try­ing to avoid these obsta­cles by sup­ply­ing new words to that head­word on the screen, which I call the seed word. A crea­ture is an organ­ism, type there­of. We get anoth­er gav­el so we get into this world of counsel/attorney, what that real­ly means. 

The next seg­ment is the stairs. Once I kin­da had this con­cept we’re just run­ning with dif­fer­ent iter­a­tions of how we can put those lin­guis­tic moves togeth­er. So where­as the time tri­al is kind of more about the simil­i­tude axis—supplying syn­onyms or antonyms as you try to under­stand the word on the screen—this one is very much about the cat­e­gor­i­cal axis and what you think about the con­tain­ing cat­e­gories that some­thing like ​“jus­tice” or ​“rec­om­pense” might fit into. 

There’s anoth­er lit­tle room in here. This one is kin­da like a tile game with an over­head look, and you’re attempt­ing to avoid black tiles as you make your way through the room. 

And then this is the final lev­el, or seg­ment if you want, in which you final­ly make it into the Supreme Court. Still kind of work­ing on the archi­tec­ture. I think it sort of looks like a cheap megachurch at the moment. It’ll get there. That’s ink.

And then this last game, the idea is that you move from one word to another—so here from ​“snow” to ​“friend” in nine moves or less. I think I’ll prob­a­bly relate these clos­er to those key terms that I was talk­ing about in the amend­ment before: speedy, pub­lic, nature, cause, wit­ness. Although I am quite inter­est­ed in just these sort of unas­sum­ing but very full, sim­ple words and how you might be able to move from one to another. 

So that’s the game where it stands. Development is real­ly close to being fin­ished. I think that in a lot of ways it enacts legal his­to­ry. Just like, if you are tuned into Supreme Court oral argu­ments or Supreme Court papers at all, they spent a ton of time try­ing to fig­ure out what is the mean­ing of a term. Like I was lis­ten­ing to a case from this term about trans­porta­tion work­ers. And the whole three hours of oral argu­ment were devot­ed to the idea of like what is a steve­dore, which is a per­son who moves car­go to and from ships. And whether or not ​“steve­dore” could be con­tained in the cat­e­go­ry of trans­porta­tion work­er. And sim­i­lar­ly I think that the case his­to­ry of the Sixth Amendment is like what I was say­ing about these key terms. Like what counts as speedy. How do we under­stand that word?

So my hope is that ingrain­ing peo­ple in this sort of seman­tic nexus as they try to asso­ciate their way around a word like ​“speedy” or ​“pub­lic” or ​“nature” ulti­mate­ly brings them clos­er to the mean­ing of those terms and kind of enacts that lawyer­ly or jurispru­den­tial type of seman­tics. Thank you.