Aesthetics and Narrative: Programming What Cannot Be Programmed

Functional programming has been the style of choice for implementing countless creative applications, from “Zork” to Harold Cohen’s “AARON.” We’ll explore why it helps to reason about machine creativity in this way and use Clojure’s Overtone toolkit and clojure.spec to illustrate abstract concerns and domain intelligence.

More broadly, we’ll discuss how to reason about abstract domains, the relationship between quantitative and qualitative thinking, and the core concepts of functional programming. The content of this talk will be based on my successes and missteps building art installations and writing software concerned with aesthetics and narrative.