worldmake

Big Old Science & the Emergence of Nonlinear Systems

2006-04-20T22:41:00.000-05:00

Many of the great leaps in science of the last century produced alienation, both social and from the natural world, due to their inherent specialization and the inability for people to develop meaningul intuition in their regard. In explaining the most arcane and remote (either inconcievably huge or tiny or long) facets of the natural world. Popular accounts of contemporary science rarely created new ways of understanding, often falling into traps of 'here is what we experts are figuring out for you' or 'here are my speculations on ways I can use current scientific ideas as metaphor to think about what i really want to think about'. Science seemed to have figured out certain key ideas about the very very large (the origin and fate of the universe, the origins of life) and about the very very small (the constituent particles of atoms, the genetic code) without really offering any idea of what these things were. Of course to attempt to ascribe meaning is the domain of philosophers; science remains neutral. But despite this there was a lack of meaningful medium-sized ideas that described to any great degree the apparent complexity of the percieved world. Nonlinear physical processes were not acknowledged as anything more than anomolies, and science sought answerable questions that it already knew how to ask.

"So docile are linear equaitons, that classical mathematicsians were willing to compromise their physics to get them. The classical theory deals with shallow waves, low-amplitude vibrations, small temperature gradients. So ingrained became the linear habit that by the 1940's and 1950's many scientists and engineers knew little else...Linearity is a trap. " {Stewart, Does go Play Dice? p. 83}

Ironically, or perhaps consequently, it was from pseudoscientific or applied fields that emerged the first hints of a language for describing complexity-- psychology (cognitive science and artificial intelligence), political science (systems theory), military engineering (cybernetics), meteorology ("chaos" theory and nonlinear dynamics). It each of these nascent fields it was some combination of accident and visionary intuition that inspired the shift towards commplexity:

Norbert Wiener's day job calculating trajectory tables for manned gun turrets which functioned as analog computers leads him to begin formulating the basic ideas of cybernetics (positive and negative feedback, man-machine interaction, demarcation of system bounds)

Alan Turing publishes a remarkable paper on morphogenesis (the physical foundations of biological form) while developing the first analogue computers for military purposes.

Jon Von Neumann develops the first digital computers, also for military purposes, in the 1940's, while inventing the idea of the cellular automata with pencil and paper and developing an abstract model for machine reproduction, resulting in a model very similar to the structure of DNA, but anticipating it by several years.

Edward Lorentz discovers the first known chaotic attractor by accident using an early computer to describe non-periodic behavior in the weather.

The importance of the computer in this brief history cannot be overemphasized. Mathematicians such as Henri Poincare had noted the appearnce of bifurcations (spontaneous divisions in possible states of a system) in the 1890's, but without adequate conceptual models nor computational systems to explore them, they remained nothing more than curiosities. Even Von Neumann did not live long enough to see the exploration of cellular automata on computers fast enough to provide experimental data on their behavior. Because analytic solutions to differential equations are often impossible, experimental calculation is the only way to study their behavior. Without the speed of digital computation, many of the most beautiful and important features of these equations remain hidden from view. But despite the advances computers bring to experimental mathematics, one of the key ideas in the initial formulation of ideas of complex systems came from attempts in early computer science to develop abstract models of essential processes such as reproduction and organismal self-maintenance. The computer was not merely a metaphor applied to biological or social systems: it was an abstract idea that permitted thinking about these systems in novel and productive ways. In a certain very real sense, these phenomena already existed as forms of natural computers, and it was only through abstraction and modeling that the essential dynamics of these systems could be ascertained.

What is worldmake?

2006-04-20T20:39:00.000-05:00

WORLDMAKE is an immersive and interactive environment for exploring the behavioral dynamics of video feedback, an astonishing and perplexing optical phenomena involving a video camera and monitor whose input and output form a closed loop. Although video feedback has been well known for its aesthetic beauty and abilility to generate complex recursive forms since the advent of personal video technology in the early 1970s, its use a model for studying certain innate features of dynamical systems has been limited by the difficulty in isolating variables and the intensely hyperdimensional nature of the feedback space and percieved general irrelevance.

However the past 40 years have seen the growth of a group of related methodologies for studying the natural world known as complexity theory which comprises a host diverse metaphors, concepts, analytical tools, and qualitative languages for describing the behavior of nonlinear systems, or systems in which multiple variables may interact in complex, often unpredictable ways. Recognition of the capacity for these systems to produce emergent behavior, or self-organizing phenomena arising out of lesser-ordered simple interactions, has been one of they key conceptual leaps in science in the latter half of this century. Moreover, the understanding that this process is not merely a curious anomoly in the dusty cabinet of physical processes, but an innate and generative property of matter at the heart of the most essential features of our experienced world marks this change as a paradigm shift in our understanding of the natural world. It offers us a profound opening of human consciousness to deeper levels of comprehension of the complexity and wonder of nature, whose domain has been rapidly expanding to include far more than wilderness.

The science of complexity draws from the ecological model, but revises it to include describe not just the interrelationship of species, nor the movement of essential elementals within these systems, but the abstract processes of energy movement and pattern formation that are the generative engines of the world, both physical, biological, social, and linguistic, and cognitive. We are on the brink of a far reaching incorporation of this deeper understanding into our culture, heralding a cultural transformation unprecendented in scope and scale, that promises radical re-alignement with the essential processes of nature.

Essential to this process of awakening is a pedagogy for cultivating the appreciation of complexity. The development of intuitive capacity precedes all other forms of knowledge.

To this end, the world make machine uses a novel yet responsive interface to allow realtime interaction with the complex artificial worlds generated within the video feedback environment. It allows seemingly magical alteration of the physics and initial conditions of these worlds by using a color tracking algorithm on a live video feed to effect real time parameter manipulation. At its most basic level, the worldmake machine is a hybrid analog/digital video feedback loop projected onto a tunnel like structure that surrounds the immersant. In this system, a digital video camera is mounted on a tripod directed at a television monitor which is displaying the incoming signal from the same camera. This is the most basic configuration of an analog feedback loop, in which the major parameters for manipulation of the recursively defined image are:

rotation [determines the harmonic symmetry of the feedback image harmonical]
focus [adjusts the diffusion rate of pixelation in the optical portion of information transfer]
gain [permits amplication or reduction of electronic noise on a local level and to a large extent determines overall stability of the system on a global level]
zoom [adjusts amplification or reduction of information within the loop. zoom less than one conserves information and draws it towards the center. zoom greater than one amplifies noise and projects it outward from the center in non-deterministic chaos. zoom at unity marks the edge of low order deterministic chaos (highest level of complexity) in which both local and global pecularities can be observed.]

The worldmake machine uses fixed analog parameters but allows their virtual manipulation through gesture within the environment. It crossfades this analog feedback signal with a digital simulation of the same process that seeks not precise modeling of the optical and electronic physics of the analog system, but abstraction of the basic schematic configuration of this system as a self responsive information processing (cybernetic) entity. Both the idealized digital version of the feedback system and the 'dirty' analog setup reveal interesting and unpredictable features, and the crossfading of the two with eachother reveals emergent features that are not present in either system alone. Certain special functions, such as a split screen mirroring function inserted into the feedback loop, alternative edge mapping for less than unity zoom, and realtime RGB color manipulation allow the exploration of specific interesting cases that do not model physical systems in a reductive sense, and yet display some of the most beautiful and interesting innate features of the feedback loop. The mixed signal is mirrored and projected onto each side of the tunnel.

Gestural interaction is attained by the application of a color tracking algorithm to an uncompressed video signal from inside the environment. A red and a green led wand are held in each hand and allow realtime manipulation of up to 8 parameters simultaneously based on x and y position of center and width and height of the color field for both colors. Two modes of input are defined. In Analytic mode, data inputs are mapped directly onto essential control parameters such as rotation and zoom of both the analog and the digital feedback loops. In Exploratory mode, data inputs are mapped nonlinearly onto control parameters, allowing both sequencing of various major types of global behaviors and permitting the emergence of unexpected behaviors which in turn elicit novel modes of interaction. The immediate responsiveness of the gestural interface is key; the system must be predictable not in its behavior, but in that it will behave in some way. The extent to which unexpected response is guarunteed is the degree of dynamic interactivity, which is the most fundamental component of developing the intuition of complex behavior.

It is vital to remember that intuition does not refer to ability to predict behavior but the capacity to appreciate with wonder and understanding the degree and dynamics of the complexity involved. The unencumbered perception of qualitatively chaotic behavior is overwhelming at first, and yet through practice and relaxation of as yet unidentified forms of pattern recognition, the acute perception of the underlying attractors can be attained. In this sense, the worldmake system offers an opportunity to practice a form of self-guided exploratory meditation into the depths of our own spatiotemporal faculties. The specific form of decentralized vision generated by the worldmake machine has much in common with internal vision innate to yoga meditation, here elucidated by James Whitney, quoting Heinrich Zimmer [Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, Harper Torchbook; New York: Harper and Row, 1946, pp. 141-142] describing his hand drawn analogue computer film Yantra:

"a yantra is an instrument designed to curb the psychic forces by concentrating them on a pattern, and in such a way that this pattern becomes reproduced by the worshiper's visualizing power. It is a machine to stimulate inner visualizations, meditations, and experiences."

A new kind of science?

2006-04-20T13:26:00.000-05:00

There exists a tendency in many current strains of critical theory to treat scientific knowledge as essentially a cultural production. The emphasis on studying the sociology of science treats the knowledge attained through scientific inquiry as essentially metaphorical in nature, often condemning it to a role of institutionalized mythological production. To a certain extent, the popular force of these relativizing narratives express a historical trajectory that includes a gradual disillusionment with the promises of abundance and security that would be attained through deepening knowledge of the inner workings of nature and the technological mastery that goes with it. But many of the critiques of the techno-scientific worldview that have pervaded cultural discourse over the past 40 years tend to treat science as a single homogeneous institution that has developed in a largely linear fashion since Newton (or Copernicus, or Aristotle). Even critiques such as those of Thomas Kuhn that emphasize discontinuity and competition of scientific paradigms tend to treat science as merely a sociological system, often without engaging the actual content of scientific models, in regards to how they reflect deep seated understandings of human being and nature, but more importantly, how they create contexts for meaningful positioning of the social self in the natural world. In an effort to deny the social neutrality of scientific institutions, many critiques deny the ability of science to produce positive metaphors for understanding the world, let alone redefine itself to ascertain a more "true" conception of nature and its processes.

Part of the popularity of this type of discourse has grown no doubt from the perception of pervasive technology wresting agency from increasingly alienated populace. Technologies that were originally envisioned as liberating (such as cinema, personal transportation, air travel, cell phones, the internet, virtul reality, biotechnology, etc.) are reinscribed as the culmination of long processes of cultural homogenization, exemplary of global cultural hegemony, or the final step in the complete proliferation of the western technoscientific worldview with its instrumental rationality, masculinized objectifing vision, and dehumanizing, disembodying social relations. It is increasingly difficult to know where to place blame, and efforts to historicize such technologies within trajectories of coercive power relationships with the enlightment become tempting. But there is a common and often tacit assumption that scientific knowledge produces or enables technology and since science is seen as the medium through which people understand and relate to nature, narratives of coercion and alienation are easily traced back to enlightenment scientific rationality, or often just to 'science'. There is rarely separation between the logic of domination at the core of the western secular technoscientific instrumental rationality, the institutions and constellations of power relations which sustain and mediate it, and the 'science' which legitimates and informs it.

BUT .... something about goethe, observation, naturalism, theological underpinnings of science....lag time in science in its application to technology. is this true? seems maybe institutions are at the cutting edge.

And yet despite this turn to general cultural skepticism of scientific understanding, the past century and the past 30 years in particular have seen a remarkable alternative narrative weave itself into popular scientific discourse. Heralding in 'a new kind of science' and professing more subtle and integral understanding of the essential processes at work in nature, this interdisciplinary field most broadly known as complexity theory (incorporating such diverse projects as nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, artificial life, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, evolution and population biology, ecology, and to some extent neomaterialist philosophy and the philosophy of conciousness) has gained some amount of notoriety in popular consciousness. By no means a coherent school of thought let alone a single 'theory' attempting some sort of universal explanation, the emergence of complexity theory as a methodology and often a descriptive language defines itself in reaction to a history of science that is reductionist and objectifying, and deliberately omits from of its picture of reality phenomena that lie outside of its realm of knowability. Proposing radical critiques of what is seen as traditional scientific logic habituated by 400 years of institutional compression, in some incarnations it attempts to redefine our ideas of such fundamental entities as life, nature, subjectivity, and time. Perhaps it is because these ideas cross over so fluidly into the realm of philosophy at a time of major cultural upheaval and search for praxis in a period of political and ontological destabilization that the science of complexity has captured the imagination of the public, been applied to fruitfully to diverse fields--sociology, economics, and linguistics-- and achieved such powerful, even mythological capacity, in the realm of art.

While the scientific community working with ideas of complexity often does not address aesthetics per se, much of the work done by these scientists, especially in the realm of artificial life, has converged starkly with certain movements in contemporary art. This is due for a large part to the formal beauty and complex nature of these systems, which are very fundamentally visual, but attention must be paid to the importance given in these fields in establishing a language of dynamics, or qualitative analysis, that reconstitutes the observational naturalism, wonder, and intuitional subjectivity of past centuries of scientific inquiry. Moreover, the non-trivial philosophical and social implications of the ideas developed in the study of complex systems provide a rich substrate for the production of relevant and non-trivial art in a culture that is questioning the basic function of creative action in a world rife with uncertainties. While much of what has come to define connectionist (interactive, immersive, behaviorist, technoetic, telematic, virtual, or cybernetic) art in the last few decades has rooted itself in a kind of technological optimism that has often been labeled as an extension of modernist projects of liberation through technical mastery through the transcendence of the individual, but recently an equally potent minority has based its work in critique of these projects and sought to problematize questions fundamental to our cultural development such as the mutually constitutive nature of our relationship with technology, the border between the artificial and natural, and between nature and culture. Moreover, some of the newest and most promising work seeks to do away with the dualism of technological optimism/pessimism (is there a word for this?) without reviving any sort of claims to technological neutrality and attempts both critique and social effect simultaneously. Such work can be inscribed in a larger project that reconfigures the boundaries of the social, the scientific, and the artistic and thus some of the most basic constituent relationships of our culture. Whether these projects succeed in their macroscopic aims remains to be seen, but the effect on individuals proves quite profound and the intercallary nature of this movement essentially uncontainable. If we take the lessons of emergence to heart, we can only begin to predict the changes this will have on our development as a whole.

from Ed Shanken on the work of Roy Ascott (art & cybernetics, Bergson, the noosphere)

2006-04-19T20:27:00.000-05:00

Technology and Intuition: A Love Story? Roy Ascott's Telematic Embrace
Edward A. Shanken
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/articles/shanken.html

Ascott's applied Norbert Wiener's ideas on cybernetics to his artistic practice and in a instance of wordsmithery common to the field, dubbed it telematic art, a term used to:
" designate computer-mediated communications networking between geographically dispersed individuals and institutions...and between the human mind and artificial systems of intelligence and perception."
Roy Ascott, "Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?" Art Journal 49:3 (Fall 1990) p. 241

Cybernetics offered the ability to think about systems as compositions of relationships, and the way in which these relationships are able to regulate one another through feedback to effect a specific outcome. Crucial to this process is some sort of sensing mechanism that enables the system to gather information about its status and communicate this information to other elements in order to enable regulation of the system as a whole.

At time he designated his art behaviorist, alluding to the re-allignment of communication as crucial to the generation of novel behavior and interaction. This type of art exists in contrast to the work of genius model of modern art functioning at the time, in which criticism or at least reflection is requires to interpret the prefigured meaning of an art-object in a forward only informational loop. Behaviorist art attempted to resituate the subject in a position of creative reciprocity, instigating situations of play and dynamic interaction that rendered the art-object obsolete-- the interaction became the art. In this vein he produced texts, objects, and pedagogical formations that theorized art in the cybernetic model, as a inter-connecting system of space, perception, and action, in which consciousness and response take on a role as important to the piece as the situated object itself.

furthermore, his theorization of individual works of art as a cybernetic process allowed extrapolation of these relationships to the institution of art as a whole, redefining it as a

"participatory process (as opposed to a discrete object or event) defined not by formal parameters, but by behavioral relationships in which artist, observer, and environment (including global telematic networks) are all integrated in an emergent, interactive system of morphological relationships. "

Creative Evolution, written in 1907 by French philosopher Henri Bergson, is paramount among these sources [12]. Bergson argued that as scientific reason enables the accumulation of knowledge about physical matter, so metaphysical intuition enables the knowledge of spirit. He theorized that the union of reason and intuition (what he called duration) conjoins past, present, and future, dissolving the diachronic appearance of categorical time, and providing a unified experience (or conscious awareness) of the synchronic relatedness of continuous change.

"[N]etworking provides the very infrastructure for spiritual interchange that could lead to the harmonization and creative development of the whole planet". The transformation he proposes is akin to the ideas of global consciousness expounded by French paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who theorized the "noosphere" and by futurologist Peter Russell, who theorized the "global brain."

Teilhard's model of expanded consciousness, the "noosphere" (from the Greek noos, or mind) represented the dawning of a new stage of human evolution. According to Teilhard's reasoning, just as matter gave rise to life (from which consciousness emerged) so consciousness itself would be succeeded by the noosphere, his concept of the ultimate stage in human development: "With and within the crisis of [self]reflection, the next turn in the [evolutionary] series manifests itself . . . a higher function -- the engendering and subsequent development of all stages of the mind, this grand phenomenon . . . is the noosphere" [19]. While Teilhard's teleological notion of evolution is unpalatable to the postmodern mind (and was scientifically unacceptable to many Darwinists at the time of its publication) his characterization of expanded consciousness embodied in the noosphere is, nonetheless, a coherent account of a prospective condition and a visionary model for contemplating the future of the human mind in a global context [20].

The import of Ascott's theoretical writings and telematic projects lies not in their technical achievement, nor in their practical application as a means to attain their theorized aspirations, but rather, I believe, in their conceptualization and transmission of alternative realities, artistic models for the future.

The Writing of Char Davies on Immersants & Virtual Space

2006-04-19T19:54:00.000-05:00

Virtual Space
by Char Davies
Published in SPACE in Science, Art and Society. François Penz, Gregory Radick and Robert Howell, eds.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge Universty Press (2004), pp. 69-104, illus.
http://www.immersence.com/publications/char/CDavies-VirtualSpace_2004.html

"What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the impalpable source of sensations."
- J. Gasquet, Cezanne, quoted by Merleau-Ponty, 'Eye and Mind'

What is immersive virtual space?
"I think of virtual space as a spatiotemporal "arena" wherein mental models or abstract constructs of the world can be given virtual embodiment (visual and aural) in three dimensions and be animated through time. Most significantly, these can then be kinesthetically explored by others through full body immersion and real-time interaction, even while such constructs retain their immateriality. Immersive virtual space is thus a philosophical and a participatory medium, a unique convergence in which the immaterial is confused with the bodily-felt, and the imaginary with the strangely real. This paradox is its most singular power. The firsthand experience of being bodily immersed in its all-encompassing spatiality is key: when combined with its capacity for abstraction, temporality, and interaction, and when approached through an embodying interface, immersive virtual space becomes a very potent medium indeed."

As Roger Jones wrote in Physics as Metaphor (1982):

The modern notion of space is a compound metaphor that embodies all our concepts and experiences of separation, distinction, articulation, isolation, delimitation, division, differentiation and identity. The laws of perspective and of geometry for us are a codified summary of our normal experience of alienation, unique identity, and un-relatedness. It has all been abstracted, externalized, and synthesized into the cold, empty void we call space. This metaphor of space is our modern mechanism for avoiding the experience of oneness, of the chaos, of the ultimate state of unity to which the mystic seers and philosophers of all ages have referred.

Conventional ways of thinking about and producing immersive virtual space faithfully mirror this metaphor. 3-D computer graphic techniques, as commonly used in VR environments, tend to rely on 3-D Euclidian geometric models, Renaissance perspective and the xyz coordinates of Cartesian space, all applied in a never-ending quest for visual realism. The resulting aesthetic/sensibility (what I call the "hard-edged-objects-in-empty-space" syndrome) reflects a dualist, objectifying interpretation of the world. When these techniques are combined with what have already become conventional methods of user interaction (such as hand-held joysticks, pointers, gloves, etc.) the effect — regardless of content — reinforces a particular way of being in the world in terms of mastery, domination and control.

It is important to understand that virtual space is not neutral. The origins of the technology associated with it lie deep within the military and western-scientific-industrial-patriarchal complex.

virtual reality can thus be considered a "literal re-enactment of Cartesian ontology" as Richard Coyne wrote in "Heidegger & Virtual Reality: The Implications of Heidegger’s Thinking for Computer Representations" (1994). In conventional VR, the participating human subject is represented as an omnipotent, disembodied and isolated view-point, maneuvering in empty space

my work could be interpreted as an ongoing attempt to articulate a vision of nature perhaps closer to how Heidegger (in Heraklit) described the Greek’s "physis" - as "outside of all specific connotations of mountains, sea or animals, the pure blooming in the power of which all that appears and thus "is’".

The function of the artist in correcting the unconscious bias of a given culture can be betrayed if he merely repeats the bias of a culture without readjusting it. In this sense the role of art is to create the means of perception by creating counterenvironments that open the door of perception to people otherwise numbed in a nonperceivable situation. . . .
[erratum noted by artist Char Davies - this is actually a quote by Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker taken from 'The Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting'. New York: Harper & Row (1969), p.241]

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Rethinking VR: Key Concepts and Concerns
by Char Davies
Published in Hybrid Reality: Art, Technology and the Human Factor
Hal Thwaites, ed. (Ninth International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia)
International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, Montreal, Canada (2003)
http://www.immersence.com/publications/char/CDavies-RethinkingVR-N.html

By default, 3-D digital technology not only reflects but reinforces such values. In this context, the striving for mimetic representation that characterizes the field can be interpreted as a reinforcement of Lefebvre’s supremacy of the Eye. Similarly, conventional 3D computer graphic techniques that rely on the xyz coordinates of Euclidian space and artificial linear perspective embody a particular concept of space, which Roger Jones in Physics as Metaphor (1982:61) describes as a compound metaphor embodying all our concepts and experiences of separation and isolation. According to Jones, the laws of perspective and geometry are a "codified summary of our normal experience of alienation, unique identity and un-relatedness", all of which have been "abstracted, externalized, and synthesized into the cold, empty void we call space".
[see heidegger in being dwelling thinking on algebraic space]

Most user-interface techniques associated with interactive digital media conventionally rely on hand-based interface devices such as joystick, mouse, keyboard or game console: by encouraging users to “do this to that”, such methods reinforce controlling and dominating behavior. All of these design techniques, whether graphic or interfacial, uphold a culturally-biased view of the world, in effect reducing it to a “standing reserve” of things for human use, to use a phrase by Martin Heidegger.

[can this technology be used as antidote, and how would it function as such?]

"in terms of reaffirming our embodied participation within the natural world rather than our instrumentally objectifying conquest of it."

In her anthology Rethinking Technologies, Verona Conley (1993:ix-xiv) writes that the post Renaissance surging of instrumental technology coincided with a Heideggerian techné or means that reduced the three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional diagram, instituted a separation between subject and object and inaugurated the “quest of the rational, self-possessed subject that soon expands and colonizes.” This stance, she says, led the West to develop a techné in the sense of an “instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain”. [4]

[What then is vr possessing/enframing? Our capacity for imaginative visualization? ]

Conley suggests that “without simply ignoring or simplifying technologies, we now need to emphasize the necessity of thinking the subject not only its relation with other subjects, but also in, and with, the astonishing complexities of, the world" ( Conley, V., 1993. Preface, and “Eco-Subjects” in V. Conley, ed. Rethinking Technologies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.)

Merleau-Ponty in Eye and Mind “I do not see space according to its exterior envelope; I live it from the inside; I am immersed in it.” Emphasizing the experience of being spatially enveloped, he concludes: "after all, the world is all around me, not in front of me." Seen in these terms, to be fully immersed in the world is to relinquish distance, relinquish the frontal gaze, giving up one's stance as a disinterested so-called objective observer surveying a world separate from one’s self, and instead, to inhabit it, as an corporeal subject, as a lived body, from the inside. ( Merleau-Ponty, M., 1964, “Eye and Mind”, in The Primacy of Perception. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern U. Press.)

In the Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1969:206) wrote: "By changing space, by leaving the space of one’s usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating […] for we do not change place, we change our nature." (Bachelard, G., 1969. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.)

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From Virtual Reality & Artificial Life to Real Life:
The Emergence of Bio-Tech Art
by Ernestine Daubner
published in Hybrid Reality: Art, Technology and the Human Factor
Hal Thwaites, ed. (Ninth International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia).
International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, Montreal, Canada (2003), pp. 186-193
http://www.immersence.com/publications/2003-EDaubner.html

"Within this spatiality, there is no split between the observer and the observed. The withdrawal of the sense of sight, of visual acuity - which so dominates the human relationship with the world and is so tied to the Cartesian paradigm - allows another way of sensing to come forward, one in which the body feels space, very much like that of a body immersed in the sea.

Marshall McLuhan who wrote that the role of the artist was to create counter-environments in order to expand perceptions and correct "the unconscious bias of a given culture,

Virtual reality is philosophically retrogressive. "a relation of instrumentalization, of specialization of' parts, that shows it to be the technology at the end of the Enlightenment.

The one tree project and morphological difference:
To cast a light on these issues, I wish first to examine Natalie Jeremijenko's One Tree(s) project. Because it consists of cloned trees, first displayed as 100 seedlings in 1998. it is an artwork that has possibly brought her the most notoriety; yet this work is consistent with her desire to challenge institutionalized knowledge.

Jeremijenko's One Tree(s) is a paradox in both the figurative and literal sense. It is literally so because thousands of trees were cloned from a walnut tree called the Paradox. Planted in 1904, this particular Paradox tree, currently with a circumference of about 30 feet, grows in California, in front of a house owned by a Mr. Vlach. Exhibited in various stages of growth, Jeremijenko's Vlach clones may have disappointed those expecting to see science fiction versions of perfect replicas. As genetically identical clones, the trees paradoxically represent sameness (in their DNA) but also manifest physical differences. Even as young seedlings, the clones displayed unique properties: distinctive branching patterns, varied numbers of leaves, and diverse growth rates. What is significant is that the differences displayed in the cloned seedlings are not a result of variations in external or environmental factures. On the contrary, the One Tree(s) project serves to subvert the common notion that genes are "the Book of Life."

From remarks on Consciousness Reframed (language, immersion & geometry)

2006-04-19T19:04:00.000-05:00

Towards a Philosophy of Virtual Reality:
Issues Implicit in "Consciousness Reframed"
By Stephen Jones.
published in "LEONARDO, Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology",
Vol. 33, Number 2, 200, pp. 125-132 ill

"To "humanize" technology, we have to take into account the biological and emotional aspects of our being. Notions of feedback and self-organization allow us to account for the consequences of what we do."

Mark Pesce (the inventor or Virtual Reality Mark-up Language [VRML] ) in his paper "Ritual and the wirtuaul" suggests that the networks or cyberspace are essentially incomprehensible. For Pesce, cyberspace is mythological space, dreamtime or "faerie," a space or magical reality. "The forms or magical reality, ancient to humanity's beginnings, shape our vision in the unbounded void or electronic potentiaul" [12]. He suggests that our current relationship to cyberspace is analogous to our primary ancestors' relationship with language and with their world at the time when their cultures were still isolated. It is as though cyberspace provides a dream-like, almost hallucinatory configuration of our perception, becoming a screen for the projection of our spiritual desires and interests. "In a world of unbounded complexity, [we] compress and complexify symbols into the barest essentials of meaning: in this way the ancient narratives become myths" [13].

Joseph Nechvatal in "immersive implications"
"The classic Cartesian duality between subject and object becomes omnijective, iridescent, shimmering and porous in its inversions" [21] . Immersion is enveloping, physical rather than cognitive, and different from one's absorption in a book or the cinema. For Nechvatal, immersion in VR implies a unified total space, a homogeneous world without external distraction, striving to be a consummate harmonious whole. Identifying "two grades of immersion. . . (1) cocooning and (2) expanding, within which, when these two directions of psychic space cooperate. . . we feel. . . our bodies becoming subliminal, immersed in an extensive topophilia . . . an inner immensity where we realise our limitations along with our desires for expansion."

According to Nechvatal, the immersant in VR is cut off from the world in a fusion of sight and sound where a "radical unity and aesthetic transcendence through totality. . . provide a complete alternative reality to the viewpoint for exploration and contemplation. . . immersive art striving towards a consummate harmonious whole" [27] . The experience of VR is one of omni-perception transcending formerly known territories. As Davies amply demonstrates in Osmose, the world visually perceived becomes one of multiple layers as well as one of fluid viewpoint: worlds layered as sheets of knowing through which we can navigate, each sheet providing its own enveloping omni-projective space.

In her paper "Perception of Individual Time," Ackers points out the role of geometry and mathematics in our perception. She asks how this has altered over the history of art and how it appears in VR work. "Geometry played a crucial role in the development of Gothic architecture. Today, we easily perceive the numerical harmonies in a cathedral's facade or interior space. What about our perception of the numerical harmony in digital images?" [28]. For example, in Osmose the visuals "can be seen in the context of pictorial tradition, the dimension or time is an addition which has only been made possible by the complex use or numbers, and or computer programming" [29]. The interval or our immersion in Osmose provides a perspective that is time-based as well as spatial; this perspective constantly perturbs our usual sense or locus in space and time. This is a new kind or aesthetic experience where time plays an important role in our view or the work.

The Politics of Immersive Space

There is certainly as much paranoia that surrounds the discourse of virtual reality and cybernetic art as technological optimism. The postmodernist fixation on the proliferation of simulacra and the meaning of the real has resulted in the very tangible cultural conception of the dystopia of disembodied human automata living stark meaningless lives in simulated realities. These narratives can just as easily tie into fear of artificial intelligence and robotics, as seen in the matrix, as with fantasies of experiential hyper-consumerism in which the tangible qualities of our human emotional relationships become obscured behind hypnotic artificial experiences of the screen. Essential to these subconscious fears are a loss of what is means to be human, predicated on an inability to distinguish between experiences that are real and those that are virtual, an idea that remains surprisingly cloudy despite its drastic overuse.

Both critics and proponents of virtual reality have described it as the culmination of a unique historical trajectory. In one strain of thinking, it is the completion of the historical project of total cinema, the the gradual move towards authentic recreation of sensory experience, from murals to opera to smell-o-vision to gloves and goggles. It is about the itinerant reconstruction of a convincing reality through technological means, traditionally through the strange boundary between art and popular entertainment, comprising both spectacle and promise. Another effort seeks to inscribe the virtual environment in the genesis of a specifically western technology of spatial imperialism that has had a central role in the development of our culture and how it sees. This is based on a social critique of the history of spatial relations, from the architecture of gothic cathedrals to the invention of renaissance perspective to Cartesian coordinate system and subject object relations to Newtonian mechanics to military ballistics to satellite mapping. Specific power relations and dictates of subjective identity are conserved and reproduced through the geometry of sight.

What is so special about this specific technology that it should occupy such a privileged position at the end of a history?

Interogative Outline

2006-04-19T17:27:00.000-05:00

Section I Is Video Feedback Alive?

What is life?
Is life a property of matter or of form?
What is emergence?
What is artificial life and what does it permit us to do?
hard vs soft AL
history of the field (turing, von neumann) use langton
relationship to artificial intelligence (classical AI vs connectionism)
What is emergence? What is self organization?
the science of complexity
basics of dynamical systems theory
modeling and simulation
importance of qualitative dynamics
Is emergence a defining characteristic of life or a quality of it?

What is video feedback (general description)
physical features
salient features
Is video feedback alive?
does vf exhibit self organization (auto-organation)?
does vf exhibit gtype/ptype behavior?
is vf evolutionary?
first glance-no, but rewarding if we make some assumptions
how is evolutionary self-organization different from internal dynamic so?

section II: The Politics of Immersive Space
What is immersive virtual space?
What is conventional space?
How does the typical application of VR reproduce conventional spatial relations?
politics of simulation and military history
How does interface in general construct social relations?
Can these relations be considered coercive?
What is virtual reality possessing/enframing?
How can connectionist art provide a corrective for this form of coercion? Can this tech. be used as an antidote? How would it function?

Manifesto time
what is decentralized vision?
brakhage, softening of the field, metaphors on vision
how does this constitute a renewed or redeployed subjectivity? how can intuitive grasp of emergent behavior rehumanize technology and reconnect us with fundamental processes of nature?

Slight thoughts

2006-04-19T15:22:00.000-05:00

I want the subject to experience a profound sense of wonder based not explicitly on aesthetic appreciation, although the supple beauty of these forms will certainly play a part in the cultivation of numinous feeling, but due to the magical and ethereal interaction between movement and intention on one hand and the responsive environment and its emergent properties on the other hand.

What does the user of the worldmake environment need to know about cybernetics in order to fully appreciate the subtelty and import of what they are experiencing? Basic explanation of the fundamental features of first order cybernetics, along with relevant points on their history will allow mapping of the idea of system interaction onto the experience of the piece. Positive and negative feedback as formal behavioral properties of cybernetic systems must be clearly defined. Consider greg's question on why feedback has caught popular imagination, why it betrays an essential feeling of human freedom, of agency? The history of computing and military technology is not really relevant except in the extent to which it demonstrates the incorporation of biological metaphors into socio-technological systems. Macluhan and media technology will be important to this, as will the history of avant-garde cinema and computer films.

What does the user need to know about the history and practice of artifical life to fully appreciate this piece? basic ideas such as emergence, self-organization, auto-catalysis, etc. as well as exploration of some of the practice of artificial life art. will this be the fundamental metaphor of my piece though? hard to say.

definitely begin with the general case of feedback and then discuss the specific case of video feedback, what makes it unique, what makes it important. use crutchfield.

In what sense could video feedback be considered alive? In what sense could it be considered natural? How have we come to define the criteria by which we may judge these qualities/categories, and do they even remain useful in light of such forms which so deeply complicate them?

http://www.transphormetic.com/

Emergence of L-Cellular Morphogenesis
http://www.generativeart.com/papersGA2004/3.htm

The Art of Emergence
http://www.generativeart.com/99/2399.htm

fishes
http://image.sl.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/ebindshow.pl?doc=mrb_f597/a970;thumbs=1

Self-Organization, Autopoiesis, and Enterprises
http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigois/auto/Main.html

Sociocybernetics
ftp://ftp.vub.ac.be/pub/projects/Principia_Cybernetica/Papers_Others/Geyer-SocioCybernetics.html

Syllabus for Evolutionary Systems & Artificial Life
http://informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/ss504_02.html

Experimental TV Center
http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/

Selected Self-Organization and the Semiotics of Evolutionary Systems
http://informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/ises.html

DATA IS NATURE
http://dataisnature.com/

Feedback & the Evolutionalry Analogy

2006-04-17T19:28:00.000-05:00

A major problem still remains in whether or not I am justified in classifying my feedback systems as technically alive, metaphorically alive, or analogically alive. "Bedau ascribes life first of all to evolving populations, and only secondarily to individual living things, as single organisms, whether micrboe or mammal, are rarely felxible in adapting to new circumstances even if ádapting' is interpreted as 'learning',and are never adaptable in the sense of being able to evolve." The video feedback loop does not function genetically, nor does it model genetic evolution, because it does not allow for the existence of multiple entities. However, there is a type of evolution innate to it, in the sense that weather evolves. Is genetic evolution computation because it is discrete? But there is another way in which we can view it as more traditionally evolutionary, reproducing at 60 cycles per second, involving both forms of mutation (idiosyncratic elements embedded in the physics of the monitor electronics, and the non-discrete nature of optical information transmission) and selection certain morphological structures contain greater propensity to propagate themselves through the feedback loop, while others tend to lead dissipative life cycles. In dynamical systems language, these would be semi-stable structures, or low limit cycle oscillations. Rotation constitutes another form, translational reproduction, which is strictly non-genetic. Can we think of the image as an organism and the physical system of the feedback loop as the environment?

In one sense, I can determine if it is alive by going through and seeing if video feedback exhibits each of the properties generally agreed to demarcate living systems.

how is evolutionary self-organization different from internal dynamic so?external selection criteria pose a problem which the GA (a search procedure) attempts to solve through variation applied to description. introduces the concept of memory.possible application of the genetic algorithm to video feedback simulation. create genetically determined seed structures that enter different environments in the feedback loop and select either for aesthetic reasons, complexity, beauty, or some more quantitative feature such as endurance in the feedback loop given a certain set of environmental parameters. this would require extenral computation of the genetic algorithm. to some extent this is already ocurring within the feedback environment but in a memoryless fashion. what if there were a way of sampling the output, screen capture, and reinsertionhow much of evolution is a result of natural selection and how much is a result of the self-organizing characteristics of its specific materiality?

Introduction to Artificial Life & Philosophy

2006-04-17T16:30:00.000-05:00

Fundamental Questions in AL

What is the definition of life? Most agree that something is alive if it possess most of these : self-organization, emergence, autonomy, growth, development, reproduction, evolution, adaptations, responsiveness, and metabolism.

Is life described better by dynamical or computational systems?
a dynamical system is one whose states change over time according to some rule. discrete (computational) systems are a subset-- most are continuous (ex weather) and can be described using differential equations. They respond to themselves over time. Often very difficult to differentiate the bounds of different systems, as they can be very closely coupled and their behavior very closely interrelated.

"Self-organization involves the emergence and maintenance of order, or complexity, out of an originan that is ordered to a lesser degree. Not superficial change, but fundamental structural development that is autonomous, according to the instrinsic character of the system itself (often, in interaction with the environment). "

Classical AI and Connectionism
classical AI starts with a general purpose machine and attempts to write a program to make the machine perform the task required. Early attempts at AI sought to program computers to exhibit intelligent behavior (ex play chess, medical diagnosis). "Connectionist systems consist of networks of simple interconnected units, wherein concepts may be represented as an overall pattern of excitation distributed across an entire network. These networks are parallel-processing systems, in the sense that ll the units function (exciting or inhibiting their immediate neighbors) simultaneously." (3)

2 Tangential Questions
How can we create situated robots that respond not top-down to internal world models or representations, but bottom up to environmental cues? How does animate vision coordinate bodily movments and perceptual feedback?

Origins of Artificial Life
Alan Turing
initiated computer science as study of machines as abstract entities, initiated fundmental questions of artifical intelligence and contributes much to the development of computers in military technology during WWII. Also publishes and seminal and still relevant paper on morphogenesis, the emergence of biological forms from essentially physical processes.

Jon Von Neumann
design of the digital computer in the 40's, early work on AI experiments, research on cellular automata and self reproducing systems. studied the "logic"of reproduction, defining its functional (computational) features, resulting in a model very similar to DNA and the genetic code, discovered later. He realized that part of the self-replicating system must fucntion both as instructions and as data (a self description).

"a Cellular Automaton is a computational space made up of many cells. Each cell changes according to the same set of ruels, taking into account the states of neighbouring cells. The stesms moves in time-steps."

Both of their contributions to artificial life at least, remained theoretical, as the computational power to gather experimental evidence did not yet exist.

Langton and the Birth of Artificial Life
"one cannot give necessary and sufficient conditions for anything on the basis of one example. All the living things we know of share the same basci biochemistry, and a common genetic descent (the DNA code is biologically universal) Moreover, they have all evolved in response to local historical accidents, so that general principles are difficult to identify. Even if we could od this for terrestrail life, we could not be sure that ll living things must hav the same properties. but A-Life might enable us to synthesize new systems recognizeable as alternate life-forms. We could then distinguish life-as-it-is from life-as-it-could-be. "

"Langton sees life as an abstract phenomenon, a set of vital functions implementable in various material bases. Life consists of dynamic processes, organized in certain ways. Among the genearl principles: self-organization, self-replication, emergence, evolution, and the (epi-genetic) unpredictablity -gap between genotype and phenotype."

"Like von Neumann, he sees information processing as fundamental to life. This is not mere flight of hermeneutic fancy. information, communicaton, and interpretation are real computational properties of certain formally describable systems. (Life as "matter with meaning") "

How far does the informational metaphor take us? does this revert world to computer? does manual de landa's neo-materialist philosophy do this? Cybernetic ideas pervaded the discourse of biology throughout the 2nd hand of the century (genetic code, reading interpretation, transcription, programs and instructions for cells, chemical messages between neurons, and feedback and oscillation as forms of biological control.) We need to ask to what extent these metaphors have been culturally and rhetorically conditioned or whether they alter our fundamental conception of what life is and how it operates (closer to a flow of information model).

"many biological processes are arbitrary with respect to biochemistry" Many serve different purposes at different times, species, contexts. There must be some way to identfy what the relevant information is. Meaning is conferred by causal powers in evolutionary histories, gives rise to a form of intentionality.

Linguistic and programming metaphors are rejected in favor of cybernetic and information theory concepts outlined by dynamical systems theory. Reductionist in that it reduces high level phenomena to aggregations of simple interactions between lower level processes. But at the time time is recognizes these higher phenomena as real and distinct from those that created it, and must be interoogated at their own level. These properties are known as emergent.

"Through his experiments with cellular automata, Langton seeks a measurable property that helps us illuminate 'what life is'. Qualitative distinction between different types of complexity already existed [homogenous, periodic, chaotic, and complex (low order deterministic chaos)], but Langton poses the first quantitative definition of order/disorder by matching the relevant type of complexity with the numerical values his statistical measure, finding that interesting complexity (in which life is possible) arises only within a very narrow range. "

Synthetic Biology & Tierra
A prominent strain of artifical life research is the creation of artifical evolutionary environments in which a virtual world is created and entities allowed to compete for resources and reproduce within this world. Simplied algorthms for genetic reproduction and the speed of computer processing allow formal mechanisms of the evolutionary process to emerge. Some rely on virtual environments in which creatures forage for food, hunt eachother, reproduce, and die, while others allow small bits of self-replicating computer code compete for CPU time.

[Discussion of Tierra] .... Starting from just a single 80-instruction ancestor, and some procedures for artifical mutation (imperfectly executed or transcribed instruction, environmental noise that randomly flips bits), remarkable variety of interactions emerge, including speciation, different lifecycle timeframes, different sizes, and different ecological relations (exhibit parasitic behavior, symbiotic behavior, co-evolution).

Because it allows precise control of a variety of complex probability distribution parameters, and in interface for comparing consequences of such variations, Tierra provides a "experimental medium for quantitative studies of evolution, but their creators go further, claiming that not only is this a powerful analytic tool, it actually producees life. They argue that "biochemical metabolism is inessential" (12); a living system must only be "self-replicating, and capable of open ended evolution." These computer species are literally alive.

Stuart Kauffman & Origins of Order
In a search for the morphological origins of complex behavior, Kauffman has abstractly defined information processing systems consisting of many small units conducting many small interactions. Probabilities are used to allocate logical states to different units and simple rules, similar to those used for cellular automata systems, elicit specific responses. He models actual complex systems such as ant colonies, market economies, and neural networks, creating streamlined versions of physical parameters that govern interactions in order to see what generic types of dynamic order arise from the interaction of simple components. Whereas the Tierra project somewhat problematically grants the status of life to any self-replicating and evolving system, Kauffman's work leads away from the primacy of the genetic algorithm and towards the idea that the "potential for generating life is an inherent property of matter." (13) "biological order as a natural consequence of basic physical laws." There are more processes at work besdies genetics and natural selection. "that an ordered organism develops at all, out of releatively homgenoues, unstructured beginnings, is due to the inherent self-organizing properties of complex systems.

2 More Tangential Questions
What is the difference between plant and animal life? Is there a schema in which states interacting in a feedback environment could be considered artifical flora, if not artifical fauna? ["while classical AI attempted to use a general purpose computer to analyze information, sort relevance, and make decisions, it is now recognized that there are no general purpose animals, that each being behaves appropriately wihtin its specific ecological niche. animal requries reflex, not detailed planning, relatively direct reactions to environmental (and body-internal) factors." (15) ]

Difficulty in Defining Emergence
broadly refers to a situation, type of explanation where some genuine novelty arises out of a lower level, but defining novelty is problematic. One way of thinking refrains from relying on the unexpected, nor even that which requires a different conceptual vocubulary to describe than that which describes lower level components. "For Clark, emergence involves behaviors (or internal system properties) that are not cuased by any directly controllable part or environmental interaction, but which are side-effects of directly controllable actions and or interactions." (19)

[Clark denies the unexpected as necessarily emergent based on the argument that competent mathematicians could anticipate generally unexpected behavior, but perhaps this is not strong enough to disqualify it. It merely narrows the definition of what is emergent if we define it as that which is unexpected. People can be trained to expect more, to know what to expect. This is the development of intuition, and is what we saw in the mid century military exploration of cybernetic technologies of man-machine symbiosis. But these systems predated our understandings of complexity, and focused more on analogies useful to robotics and artificial intelligence, such as the cognitive filtering of noise to extract relevant information, than complex biological and pseudobiological systems. ]

[Think about emergent sound, and nonlinear bus mapping in hipno, as a simulation of emergent systems that can be percieved acoustically. The key is responsiveness... the behavior must be predictable not in its behavior, but in that it will behave. The extent to which unexpected response is guarunteed is the degree of dynamic interactivity]

Short and bastardized history of the military genesis of the computer & systems theory

2006-04-17T15:22:00.000-05:00

World War II, efforts to increase mehcanically the feeble accuracy of anti-aircraft guns...gun directors, electromehcanical analog computer able to calculate the palnes probable future position and servomechanisms, devices that controlle the guns automatically based on the gun director's output signals. (45) building these directors required careful calculalation of trajectory tables in which physical and state dependant variables were interrellated (caliber of gun, size of shell, characteristics of its fuse. norbert wiener began his career as one of the "computers".

Vanevar Bush and and the genesis of the MIA-complex (47).
war effort instigates massive government research into new technologies, large central laboratories, massive government funding of academic instituttions and their expansion. radical interdicsicplinary mixing, industrial scientists, ballistics experts, logicians, etc go to work with theoretical scientists.

"computers were used first to automate calculation, then to control weapons and guide aircraft, and later to analyze problems of command through simulation. "

While one strain of the institutionalization of science was often responsible for creating engineering problems and the development of technologies, with an emphasis on the practical, an alternative strain of computational thinking emerged that framed itself in its own "discourse of grand-scale systems, communicaton, and control." (114)

Alan Turing - Theory of computers as universal machines, able to solve any precisely formulated problem, that could be systematized, mathematized, modeled, and reduced to an algorthm. Operations research, cybernetics, information theory, communicat0on theory, game theory, systems analysis, linear programming allow control of highly complex systems. Exploited by business --> inventory control, workflow, optimization --> the control revolution. emergence of administrative rationality. Wieners theories seem abstract and universal enough to be applicable to problems in business, telecomunications, sociology, government, etc. Hope and power through the mathematization of business and social problems. hope for technical contorl of social processes rivaling those currently held in mechanical and electronic systems.

operations research : application of mathematical analysis to observational data of war. antisubmarine warfare, soon applied to logistical and tactical problems, bomber formations, mining of harbors, armoring and arming of airplanes, emplacement of antiaircraft weapons. modeling allowed isolation of significatnt avriables, often with surprising results.

RAND corporation, mathematical techniques become central paradigms for strategic thought. founded 46 as air force joint venture with Douglas Aircraft to study techniques of air warfare. $10 million funding. Major contribution was "systems philosphy of military strategy". "rand supported interdisciplinary study in operations research, systems anysis, game theory, etc.

systems analysis: while OR optimizes use of existing equipment for given objective, systems anal. speculates on confluence of equip, logistics, and tactics for optimization of mission, but more importantly, determination of outcomes. Begins to incorporate costs. It generated options for policymakers. Allowed cost-benefit anlyasis. Began realizing that not all problems can be forumalted to have single solutions, or solutions at all. no clearly defined objectiveds that can be optimized or maximized. Still, relied heavily on quantification, even of those objects "not clearly defined." Intense unreality of intense financing and need for answers to essentially non-numerical problems. they ïnhabited a closed world of their own making, one in which calculations and abstraction matter more than experiences and observations, since so few of the latter even existed to be applied."(120) the think tank, a hermetic world of thought and possibility. "Nuclear war existed only as a simulation, a game a computer model. "

"this is why the cold war can best understood in terms of discourses that connect technology, strategy and culture it was quite literally fought inside a quintessentially semiotic space, existing in models, language, iconography, and metaphor, embodied in technologies that lent to these semiotic dimensions their heavy intertial mass."

Game Theory (Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern) how do rational players of zero-sum games behave in their best interests? maximize gains, minimize losses. abstraction of socio-technical problems to specific generalized cases. classification of types of decisions, behaviors.

Systems Research Laboratory (SRL) seeks to augment the systems analysis approach:
"OP and SA often need to consider the effect of the human factor on system performance. Usually a "degradation factor"is used to qualify the predicted effectiveness. In an effort to better understand the human element in systems, Rand set up the SRL to study man's performance in complex man-machine systems. (123)

Tacoma simulation project sought to epxlore the psychological and technological dimensions of hte man-machine interface. need to teach operators to distinguish between ipmortant and unimportant information and to shortcut their data-processing procedures.

ït might be possible to obtain the predictable features of a "closed" system be exploiting mans capacity to seek nad find problem soluctions. That is, if man could be motivated to seek the system's goal, and if he were provided knowledge of the operations results, a disparity between actual and desired preformance might serve as an effor feedback to trigger adaptation of operating practices to improve effectiveness." cybernetic human-machine intergration is the result. simulation, not just computation, computer as symbolic processor (simulation of radar attacks)

From a RAND report to 1957 simulation symposium: "A real time simulation approach to man-machine systems fairly heavily depends upon the system being largely an information processing or contorl system--or perhaps more basically, it depends upon the system's being one that deals with symbols-- symbolic represenations of things tinstead of things." (125)

"Computers linked other technologies to human beings by constituting systems--conceptually, practically, metaphorically, as information processors. They created a closed world of semiotic values in which future wars could be imagined, their soldiers trained, their outcomes deduced.

Early Computer Cinema

2006-04-14T12:44:00.000-05:00

Jack Burnham in "System Esthetics":
"Scientists and technicians are not converted into artists, rather the artisst becomes a symptom of the schism between art and technics. Progressively, the need to make ultrasensitive judgements as to the uses of technology and scientific information becomes 'art' in the most literal sense."
To construct the analog graphics computer used to produce his abstract films, John Whitney adapts the M-5 antiaircraft gun director, a seminal device in the history of cybernetics, and illustrative of the extent to which early computer technology grew out of military needs and designs.

Music & Time:
p>"Da Vinci talked about an art of color which would be dealt with as musical
tones. Wilfred and Remmington in England at the turn of the century were
building color organs. They were so hung up with parallels with music that
they missed the essence of their medium. People talk about abstraction
in graphics as being cold or inhumn. I just don't see that at all. What
is a musical not? It's totally abstract. That's the essential point and
that why I use the musical analogy. The essential problem with my kind
of graphics must resemeble the creative problem of melody writing. Its
perhpas the most lhighly sensetive task of art, involving as it does
balance, contrast, tension, and resolution all brought into play with
minimum expenditure.

Music really is the art that moves in time. The many statements about
artchitecture being frozen notwithstanding, here we are truly looking at
another art that moves in time. Someone once said about musical
compositions: "Time and tone compleetely fill each other...what the
hearer percieves in the tones and rests of a musical work is not simply
time but shaped and organized time...so the conventional forumula
recieves its final interpretation: music is temporal art because,
shaping the stuff of time, it creates and image of time."

Against arbitrariness: "I expect to make a lot more progress in the driecti on of having more and more levels of formal organization -- therefore it should be more and more human and multi-structured.

_____________________________________________

James Whitney: Cybernetic Philosopher's Stone

expanded cinema is an attempt to approximate mind-forms.

Serialism...the intent was a unity of structure which would result in a whole expereince.

Yantra is an instrument designed to curb the psychic forces by concentraing them on a pattenr, and in such a way that this pattern becomes reproduced by the worshiper's visualizing power. It is a machine to stimulate inner visualization, mediations, and experiences.

Lapis, for the hermetics, was midway between perfect and imperfect bodies."

For this strain of cybernetic art, the goal is to use the computer to align inner and outer vision. "

"an inadvertent spin-off from technology will transform man into a transcendaental being. Nothing we can conceive now will gie sus a clue to what that spin-off will be. But I suspect that vision will play an important role. The eye will have a lot to do with it.""

_________________________________________________

Stan VanDerBeek: Mosaics of the Mind

"We're just fooling around ont he outer edges of our own sensibilities. The new technologies will open higher levels of psychic communication and neurological referencing."

the paleocybernetic age...avoid the linear trajectile figures moving in simulated 3d space, insead compelx syncretistic 2dimensional tapestries of geometrical configurations in mosaic patterns.

"the eye is a mosiac of rods and cones"

the newer films involved semi-random gneeration of graphic noise, hwose patters are reflected several times to produce intricate mandala grids....

Quotes from Stan VanDerBeek & Marshall Macluhan

2006-04-12T19:28:00.000-05:00

Stan VanDerBeek
«Culture Intercom: A Proposal and Manifesto»

[Excerpt]
It is imperative that we [the world’s artists] invent a new world language, that we invent a non-verbal international picture-language. I propose the following:
* The establishement of audio-visual research centers, preferably on an international scale. Thes centers to explore the existing audio-visual hardware. The development of new image-making devices (the storage and transfer of image materials, motion pictures, television, computers, videotape, etc.)
* The immediate research and development of image-events and performances in the Movie-Drom. I shall call these prototype presentations:Movie Murals, Ethos-Cinema, Newsreel of Dreams, Feedback, Image Libraries.
* When I talk of the movie-dromes as image libraries, it is understood that such life-theatres would use some of the coming techniques...and thus be real communication and storage centers, that is, by satellite, each dome could receive its image from a world wide library source, store them and program a feedback presentation to the local community that lived near the center, this newsreel feedback, could authentically review the total world image ‹reality› in an hour-long show.
* Intra-communitronics, or dialogues with other centers would be likely, and instand reference material via transmission television and telephone would be called for and received at 186,000 m.p.s., from anywhere in the world. Thus I call this presentation, a newsreel of ideas, of dreams, a movie-mural. An image library, a culture de-compression chamber, a culture inter-com.

Source: Excerpt from Stan VanDerBeek, «Culture Intercom, A Proposal and Manifesto», Film Culture 40, 1966, pp. 15–18, reprinted in Gregory Battcock, The New American Cinema. A Critical Anthology, New York, 1967, pp. 173–179, quoted by Jürgen Claus in Leonardo, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2003, p 229.

Marshall McLuhan
«Media is the Massage»

[Excerpt]

[...] All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political. Economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understnading of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

All
media
are
extensions
of
some
human
faculty—
psychic
or
physical.

[...]
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world.
When these ratios change, men change.

[...]
The ear favors no particular «point of view.» We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say, «Music shall fill the air.» We never say, «Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.»
We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from «above,» from «below,» from in «front» of us, from «behind» us, from our «right,» from our «left.» We can‘t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids. Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.

[...]
Listening to the simultaneous messages of Dublin, James Joyce released the greatest flood of oral linguistic music that was ever manipulated into art.

«The prouts who will invent a writirig there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects.

Joyce is, in the «Wake,» making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all the phases of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both, Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious.

[...]
Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dyriamics of Western civilization.

In television there occurs an extension of the sense of active, exploratory touch which involves all the senses simultaneously, rather than that of sight alone. You have to be "with" it. But in all electric phenomena, the visual is only one component in a complex interplay. Since, in the age of information, most transactions are managed electrically, the electric technology has meant for Western man a considerable drop in the visual component, in his experience, and a corresponding increase in the activity of his other senses.

Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. lt will not work as a background. lt engages you. Perhaps this is why so many people feel that their identity has been threatened. This charge of the light brigade has heightened our general awareness of the shape and meaning of lives and events to a level of extreme sensitivity.

lt was the funeral of President Kennedy that most strongly proved the power of television to invest an occasion with the character of corporate participation. lt involves an entire population in a ritual process. (By comparison, press, movies, and radio are mere packaging devices for consumers.) In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. This creates a sort of inwardness, a sort of reverse perspective which has much in common with Oriental art.

Source: Marshall Mc Luhan, Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, Bantam Books, Inc., USA/Kanada, 1967, S. 26, 41, 112, 120, 125.

The Aesthetic Machine

2006-04-12T19:26:00.000-05:00

"it is the belief of those who work in cybernetic art that the computer is the tool that someday will erase the division between what we feel and what we see."

"aesthetic application of technology is the only means of achieving new consciousness to match our new environment."

The vision of cybernetic art is based on an certain teleological technical understanding of the history of computing and its direction. it projects its image into the future.

"it is quite clear in what direction man's symbiotic relation to the computer is headed: if the first computer was the abacus, the ultimate computer will be the sublime aesthetic device: a parapsychological instrument for the direct projection of thoughts and emotions."

These folks have a difficult time figuring out where in this projection the artist will stand:

"the artists emotional state might conceive ably be determined by the computer processing of physical and electrical signals from the artist (for example, pulse rate and electrical activity of the brain).

The computer still still optimization, the artist and his temperament still the originator, the art still a conveying of emotion.

Robert Mallary presents the evolution of the computer's participation in the creative act, from extension of existing media to "pure disembodied energy".

the problem of "true creativity" :

AM Noll: "most certainly the computer is an electronic device capable of performing only those operations that it has been explicitly instructed to perform. this usually leads to the portrayal of the computer as a powerful tool but one incapable of any true creativity. However if creativity is restricted to mean the production of the unconventional or the unpredicted, then the computer should instead be portrayed as a creative medium....an active and creative collaborator with the artist.

Why is it significant when a computer draws a line? cognitive acts that are quite trivial even for children and animals can be virtually insurmountable for computers seeking instruction in a top down fashion. the work of cognitive science over the past few decades has been how to meaningfully understand the essentially decentralized nature of perception and how to recreate this distributed functioning to give rise to meaningful artificial perception, and thus artificial behavior.

Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback, James P. Crutchfield

2006-04-12T19:23:00.000-05:00

This article describes the basic features of discrete time modeling of the physics of the analog video feedback system and offers a continuous time differential equation to describe continuous time models based on reaction diffusion equations well known to the study of dynamics. It goes on to describe some of the qualitative behaviors of the feedback system in the language of nonlinear dynamics, both temporally spatially, using ideas such as periodicity, limit cycles, chaos, attractors, phase space, etc taken from the study of dynamical system and nonlinear oscillators. It then offers possible extensions and the import of studying feedback as a simulation of complex systems, also mentioning divergences between the two.

I think a fundamental thing to realize from reading this article is that there I must avoid making blanket statements like "everything is feedback" or over-stressing the importance of this type of feedback. This is a particular case, that happens to be very compelling for a number of reasons: cheap fast intuitive responsive. If I am really banking on an adaptation of de landa's materialism, "everything is pattern" "not chaos but state space" etc, i need to specify exactly why this type of feedback is worth studying, what it reveals and what it does not do. some elements of this are purely aesthetically compelling, because they are not akin to complex systems we already know. studying these systems which exhibit multiple and nonheirarchical examples of attractors working simultaneously are precisely the places we kneed to be looking to gain a more thorough understanding of nonlinearity of nature. Video feedback is a hyperdynamical system. I can learn from his use of schematic language, his description of states, his ideas on bifurcation and state space. I dont want to mirror his simplifying physics approach, I can discuss why it is not sufficient for me. while it helps a specific kind of understanding and allows us to approach simulation, it does not begin to approach the complexity of the system itself. It can begin to explain only 1 source of nonlinearity. be careful in critiquing things you dont really understand that well. he is well aware of the complexity and i need to look at his intention. he makes good links to turing, pattern formation in nature, etc.

Painleve, Julie Murray, the avant-garde & scientific cinema

2006-04-09T20:33:00.000-05:00

This requires a reworking of what we consider cinema, of our understandings of how we see and understand nature, but it also requires an expanded science, to complement our expanded cinema. Painleve's films were never accepted by the scientific establishment despite the fact that what he was doing was more a form of visual naturalism than experimental film. And yet he in turn eschewed the scientific community, claiming "science is fiction" (marina mcdougall, introduction, hybrid roots), and delighting in ironic visual juxtapositions and puns to make his films more enjoyable to a generalized audience. Although the 1960's saw a heydey of educational and scientific documentary cinema, by the time he was doing his most rigorous exploratory work in the late 60's and 70's, the use of film as a scientific apparatus had gone out of fashion and most of his work was ignored.

There is a hidden history of avantgarde scientific cinema that questions our ideas of the natural, radically interrogates preconcieved subject/object oppositions, and disrupts cultural associations. What does it mean for cinema to be scientific? It certainly doesn't mean that science is the subject matter of the film. Even this use can often lead to transcendant moments in which recorded vision is employed as a means of interrogation of the world and its processes. This use of film has often been subsumed into the world of the avantgarde, and indeed it shares many of its sensibilities, but the inscribing of these films in the realm of the purely artistic, and thus authorial, does violence to the extremely radical ontological critique inherent in their creation. While many of these films rely on associational intuition in their composing, the type of vision employed once accepted on its own terms is quite analytic, treating all visuality as essential equivalent, devoiding it of aura/value, and ignoring distinctions between organic and inorganic, human and animal, nature and culture. The causal formations of the human, natural, & material worlds are reorganized in an orgiastic liquification of their ordinary configurations. And yet because they are devoid of the structuralist formal of much of the history of avant-garde, they approach a more subtle and decentralized visual ecology, allowing poetic association to function not as the symbolic content of the film, but as its catalyst. These films function as psycho-visual experiments, sharing much in orientation with the praxis of psycho-acoustics, not as a type of music, but as a way of using our perception of sound and pattern (and thus often including music) to investigate the phenomenal world of what it is to listen. In this formulation, listening stands in opposition to hearing, a cognitive function ocurring inside the brain, and incorporates critically both symbolic culture and human subjectivity into the realm of inquiry. In the same way, "if you stand with your back to the slowing of the speed of light in water" strips individual visual moments of their cultural and material links, and recategorizes them from the bottom up according to their morphogenetic cognitive properties. She allows the intrinsic pattern, the abstract machine at the basis of of these moments, to emerge and to link up organically with other such moments. She breaks down object oriented vision and subtely brings one's attention to the formation of patterns themselves, both physical and representation, anthropic and mineralistic. She liquify cultural associations and creates visual ecologies out of the leavings of cinematter, allowing new constellations of meaning to regenerate.

Summary of De Landa's lecture on Deleuze and Design

2006-04-09T14:20:00.000-05:00

Computing, Philosophy, & Design
Computer as artistic tool. Process: procedural design. Partnership with computer as calculator of flows. Elements of design must be specified as process. Small programs engage eachother through interaction, function as genes. Stop pointing at things with your little mice!

what philosophical resources must be incorpated to make this viable? Renewed materialism that moves away from treating everything as representation, as existing purely in our minds, moves away from essentialism and reductionism, leaves behind the idea that there are abstract essences existing behind things as objects and having faith in the morphogenetic properties of matter-energy itself.

He combines the neo-materialism of Gilles Deleuze with the idea of the genetic algorithm as design tool. Genes are not blueprints, iconic representations of what will come out. They bring out the morphogenetic potential of matter. Complexity is teased out of matter. Population thinking from evolutionary biology (1930's, darwin & mendel combined), Intensive Thinking (thermodynamics), Topological thinking (mathematics). Philosophy synthesizes. Combines these new ways of thinking, disrupts disciplinary boundaries. Philosophy counteracts specialization.

Population Thinking
need large reproductive community. evolution destoyed aristotalian essentialism. perfect zebra that consists of its idenity. earthly zebras are imperfect. pop thinking says imperfections are crucial. homogenization stops evolution in its tracks. emphasis on heterogenity. natural selection is mechanical filter (let certain genes pass) Value in variation, allows transcendance of bad cliches of darwinism such as survival of the fittest to see the more subtle workings of evolution (symbiosis, coevolution, bifurcation). There are multiple equilibria and there is no such thing as the FITTEST. evolution is an automatic search procedure. searches are ubiquitous, but at the same time, evolution cannot seek out a proto wing and bank on its development in a Lamarckian fashion. [how can feedback be thought of in terms of search? How can art be thought of as search procedure? Attempts to find visual language through evolutionary exploration. This is based on constraint] Collectivity seraches blindly a space of formal possiblity.

Intensive Thinking
Distinction from extensive properties, which can be divided in space, from intensive properties which cannot be divided (temp., pressure, etc.). Deleuze: reintroduce the idea of DIFFERENCE. Intensive differences drive processes, give birth to form. (ex: weather map versus political map. shows things for what they are: places where processes occur.) Extensive processes define things, but they are dependant on time (example: continents appear fixed but are really gigantic conveyor belts fueld by the intensive differences of magma flows beneath the earth) Difference is not lack of resemblance. Deleuze wants positive use of difference. Difference in concentration as generator of form. The phase transition emerges between these at critical points of intensity. A world charged with differences and morphogenetically pregnant.

Topological Thinking
Different conception of space (Gauss and Riemann create differential geometry in the 19th century as alternative to Cartesian coordinate system) Differential calculus is the most powerful modeling tool to capture the dynamics of material processes of the world. Focuses on rate of change (the speed at which it is becoming different) Focuses on RELATIONSHIP. Instantaneous properties. Gauss asks: how fast is a surface changing its curvature? space becomes of field of rapidities and slownesses. [spatialization of acceleration] Riemann solves the n-dimensional case, destoys newtonian absolute space. Einstein incorporates riemann into theory of relativity, think about the shape of space in terms of local properties. In modelling, they also represent spaces of possibilites. Possible state of system. Is that space a structure? Differentials of possibilites. Point which attracts different possibilities. Attractors are features of topological spaces which represent tendencies in physical systems. What is the genetic process searching? A space of possibilities. (abstract vertebrate not defined in terms of metric space, length of neck, but in terms of connectivity, how bones are connected to one another.) Use topological spaces to represent groups. An incredible explosion of designs once the space is opened (example of mammals in the age of reptiles).

Artist is interested in design search spaces. Designing final product is a loss, limitation. This is recovered through the explosion of form made possible by letting nature (the morphogenetic properties of matter-energy) explore the topolgocial space for you. What are the political consequences of this type of thinking?

Form is different than style. But styles didn't need us either. Nature has styles. the style of mammals vs. style of insects.

Artists are the probehead at the tip of the search process of representational space. Dont hide behind funky words. use words that mean things. Avoid pseudo explanation, casting your art in the latest terminology, or the more arcane metaphors

A key to speciation, more than natural selection, is reproductive isolation, which is not an essence, it is a historically contingent barrier. The fact that there is no ZEBRAHOOD makes extinction an ethical question.

[how can we think of of video feedback topologically. how can we link spatialization of acceleration to aural spatialization? individual image is a temporal slice of a larger behavioral cycle emerging in phase/parameter space. Each attractor in phase space is a subset of the possible behaviors of the morphic properties of the system overall. what is important to realize here is not only sensitive dependance on initial conditions, but the fact that even with identical initial conditions and identical attractors, different images will emerge! there are definitely some holes in the thinking here. this is thinking in terms of behavior of dynamical systems, how about in terms of topology. Morphic properties of the system create differentials through which optical informational energy flows. There are basins of attraction and repulsion. Their shape is determined by the innate genotypic properties of the system. (Genotype is not just black box: worldmake machine creates a cybernetic loop that lets you alter the genotypes in realtime, adjust parameter space, bend the manifold, to coax out the emergent properties of these flows.}

Manuel De Landa: Metaphor & Phase Space

2006-04-09T13:49:00.000-05:00

Manuel DeLanda, 'Interview with Manuel DeLanda'

interview by Brett Stalbaum et al in SWITCH, Vol 3, No 3, Winter 1997, San José State University

http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v3n3/DeLanda/delanda.html

Q: (B.S.): In your writing, chaos theory is central to your analysis of the historical foundations of military history. If we imagine that a continuum exists between the allegorical use of chaos theory and mathematical models of the social physics of chaos, then at what approximate point on this continuum is your research best described?

A: Well, I try to be as literal as possible, to use as few metaphors as possible, and instead try to use diagrammatic thinking, such as thinking in terms of phase space and the attractors that structure it. So I am trying to do serious social physics. Philosophically, however, the important question is to discern the nature of attractors in general, and not chaos in particular. The key is to think of phase space as a space of possibilities for a dynamical system (whether geological, biological or social) and attractors as special places in this space that trap systems and hence reduce the number of possible behaviors. It is this reduction that we as observers see as the emergence of order . If a system wanders all over phase space, it would look to us as random, but if it's behavior is pinned down to a few states, then it will look ordered. Hence, for an attractor in general to produce visible order it needs to be small relative to the space in which it's embedded (e.g. a 3D attractor in a 100 dimensional space). Also, attractors trap systems in a completely deterministic way (they are destinies for the system) yet because they always come in bunches, there are always alternative destinies. These are the issues that matter philosophically, hence the need to never speak of "chaos" and always use the term "low-dimensional deterministic chaos". (Only a small chaotic attractor can produce order, and this is the key to this theory, not any butterfly effect or stuff like that.)

Manuel DeLanda, 'Replicators and Interactors'

posting at the Ars Electronica 96 Memesis Symposium, 28.05.96

http://www.aec.at/meme/symp/panel/msg00049.html

The point is that unless we are very specific about both replicators and
interactors when talking about non-biological fields, we risk falling into
mere metaphor. (Not that metaphors are useless, they are not. But the point
that Dawkins is trying to make is precisely that the relation between 
memes  and  genes  is not  one of metaphorical analogy but of *deep
isomorphism*. That is,  the  engineering diagram  which describes the joint
action of genes, enzymes and natural selection can be instantiated in many
different ways.

Invitation to make a world

2006-04-09T13:08:00.000-05:00

WORLDMAKE : Generative Explorations in Optical Ecology

BEHOLD, the WORLDMAKE machine, self-designed expressly for the purpose of intuiting new and outlandish biologies!

RELAX your gaze deep into the optical unconscious and EXPERIMENT with forms alien to human understanding yet eerily natural in their emergent qualities.

TOUCH & INFLUENCE the morphogenetic properties immanent in matter-energy.

EXPERIENCE spatialized sonification of these self-generating flows in 4.1 dimensions.

INHABIT your rightful place in the psychic feedback loop of the natural.

Introduction-type & paper sections

2006-04-07T14:12:00.000-05:00

The overall function of my project is to

a)develop an immersive and intuitive environment for exploring the behavioural dynamics of a hybrid (analog & digital) video feedback system.

b) Develop alternative modes of pattern generation and recognition through possible sonifications of this environment, using the optical feedback loop as an engine to process complex iterative functions in realtime. Sonification is achieved through motion tracking of various visual entities in the feedback world, treated heuristically as individual objects, but analyzed specifically through their relationship with other objects. The sound is spatialized in 5.1 to simulate 3 dimensionality and create greater perceptual distinction between objects.

c) engage the distinct historical, scientific, and artistic lineages that have come to inform this type of art, placing it within a cultural context of redefinition of our conceptions of nature and our way of relating to it. This takes the form of a paper divided into three sections: the first section traces out the development of the cybernetic model of interaction and information technology, drawing heavily on Norbert Wiener and Marshall Macluhan. It asks what feedback is, and how it has informed our ideas of life and mind, organism and environment, self & other. It explores how the institutional development of early computing technology and explorations of artifical intelligence created new models for understanding the behavior of complex systems, from social networks to the human brain, and how paradigms of decentralization and parallelism functioned as metaphors in the development of new paradigms for thinking about these "emergent" processes, and also how they revealed key processes actually at work. It looks at the relatively recent field of artificial life, and the incorporation of nonlinear dynamics and chaos into ecology and the science of mind to attain a more comprehensive and arguably revolutionary vision of nature and our ability to both know it and understand our place in it.

The second section of the paper discusses the worldmake environment and elucidates some of the key structural features that make it unique. It creates links with the previous section and demonstrates how iterated feedback systems are examples of examples of massively parallel computational engines and how these can be seen as alternative biologies. While not relying explicity on the genetic paradigm of genotype and phenotype to model evolutionary processes, as is attempted in the great majority of artificial life art, we explore the relevance of these concepts as abstract machines, drawing on the work of Jon Von Neumann and later Christopher G. Langton to show how the careful studying of the behavioral dynamics of visual feedback systems can function as a working ecology, demonstrate innate processes at work in all energy flows, and contribute to a more subtle understanding of the behavior of nonlinear systems in general, but specifically those of an artificial biology not based on organismal self-interest and species optimization, but the maximization of complexity and autopoeisis, that is, self-generating and self catalyzed pattern formation.

The third section of the paper is a philosophical meditation on the ways in which autopoetic and interactionist art can help bridge the cultural gap between artistic knowledge and the realm of aesthetics, and scientific knowledge, specifically the popular undestanding of what nature is and how it works. It asks whether such art which dynamically engages the subjective experience of these natural processes and allows users the ability to interact with such auto-catalytic forms can foster an increased appreciation for the immense complexity of the natural world, and indeed foster a deeper recognition of the patterns that surround us, in our social organizations, in our brains, in the lives of insects, in our economies, in our language. It returns to the metaphor of decentralization but focuses on the decentralization of vision, and a shift to the aural, the delocalized, the de-objectified to provide a more reciprocal relationship with the world that allows subjectivity to emerge.

music, language, figure in environment

2006-04-06T11:11:00.000-05:00

So how do the lessons of the bark beetles help us foster an increased appreciation for nature. How does this work investigate the boundaries of the artificial and the natural. The real question here is what is my project a visualization of? Of itself? Why sonify the visualization…for increased (syn)aesthetic impact? For an alternative mode of pattern recognition. To draw from Heidegger, to allow the being to emerge from his environment. We treat these things heuristically as beings, but it is obvious that they are not, that they REALLY are flows of energy, conglomerations of information. Is their replication genetic. Do these things breed or are they chaotic like the weather. How do I analyze for periodicity? I can and will do a qualitative analysis of these figures. A mixture of analog and digital feedback…I need to understand the physics of the system while concealing it.

So does this stuff deal with language after all. No, it deals with music. Expressive and computational but non-representational. In the way that dolphin language is more like human music than human language. We are not searching for a universal language, we are searching for the universals of language, or the transcendent hyper dimensional language that does not conceal and create boundaries but reveals and creates beginnings.

The figure in environment motif is crucial, non-incidental here. The image of the person generating the flows actually feeding back on itself and immersed in the flows, generating them through its being and through its action, this is what I want to convey, the subtle but profound revealing of the essentially entrained placement of the figure in environment, as the figure engendering environment, creating world.

cybernetics, feedback systems as simulation of alternative natures, & the politics of decentralization

2006-04-05T11:33:00.000-05:00

I am inherently distrustful of the futurism prevalent in much of the writing that attempts to politicize [cybernetic/telematic/technoetic/interactive/a-life] art. It seems any attempts at making this type of art relevant require a utopian techno-optimism that is sometimes unwarranted. I am trying to discover the relevance of the worldmake portal and inscribe it into a distinct lineage, not just of art that deals with interaction and complexity, but into a cultural matrix in which these ideals have shaped and often determined the development of technology and systems of social interaction. I have been having a hard time figuring out what this thing that I am making actually is, let alone what it can do to/for people. Everything I read and think about seems another method, another system of interpretation that can be applied to it, without really reaching the essential nature contained in the swoops and folds of the feedback space. Perhaps this is because these systems were metaphors all along.

The history of computing is one of asymptotic projection and path triangulation, the culling of prophecy for meaningful metaphors and their unabasehed application to current arcs of technological development. I seek grounding in how the metaphor and practicality of cybernetics and feedback systems have been woven into the institutions and technologies that have culminated in the current emergence of a massively parallel and self-evolving information networkc known as the internet or ocassionally more cryptically as the noo-sphere. I cannot at this point craft an alternative history of the internet or of the computer, but I can trace how biological and evolutionary metaphors have informed the development of these systems and how they are currently opening them up to a change in the evolutionary structure of human culture. Modular software, google earth and distributed realtime mapping, evolutionary algorithms for taxonomical and lexical mapping of the internet, parallelization of personal computing and its incoroporation into mobile devices, wireless information networks. This isn't what people anticipated virtual reality would look like, and yet its effects perhaps go far deeper than imagined. At the same time, the appearnance that these changes are occuring only in the late capitalist consumer computer culture realm is deeply troubling. Will folksonomy merely allow Froogle? Is this whole thing merely optimization, or technology at the service of economics? To what extent do these technologies once again offer the prospect of liberation, how does web 2.0 allow reclamation of the internet project to begin with, and does the inscription of the internet as something inherently liberating even acknowledge its original source as a military defense communication protocol?

A possible way out of this problem is idea that consuemr technology is the bastard child of a pure science that lie at the heart of these changes. I dont want to write about blogs, I want to write about chaos. The interest in nature, or the emergence of the natural even in the most profound depths of what we understand as the artificial, lies at the heart of this project and at the most positive and least chintzy aspects of technological optimism. If decentralization merely brings more accessible cellphone technology, what's the point? We seek some sort of apotheisos. If we dont, our faith is surely unfounded. Whats the problem with seeking liberation through technology? We have always done that and it is perhaps the most essential component of the modernist project, even modernist art in its essentialism, its search for pure language through form as form that would reveal the heroic ego-istic sublime. Can we discount the project than because its old news? If there really is some sort of teleological principle to what we are experiencing, we should be in a better position now to understand the transcendental object at the end of the line that we were when the modernist project was actually a meaningful and productive cultural tool. Perhaps I have written it off too quickly. I guess the question here is whether Kurtzveil and his idea of the singularity (as exemplary of current thinking about the tech. momentum and the possibilities of liberation) are part of the tradition of modernist technological optimism.

{I fear that I am conflating a number of ideas about what the modern is, from general optimism that things will be better in the near future thanks to technology, to american capitalist consumer culture ((exemplified by the Jetsons), to futurist art and cinema at the beginning of this century.}

I guess one of the main questions as it relates to my project is how does vision play a role in this? Does the softening of vision, even drawing inspiration from ecofeminist critiques of the masculine gaze and obectification of nature offer prospects for positive cultural change? Abstraction is crucial here. Is the appreciation of abstract, that is non-representational) forms always a search for a universal language? Has our ability to engage these forms changed since abstract expressionism? If so, are these changes incidental or reflections of changes in culture or do they mark a turn, even an opposition?

We must also remember that not all abstractions are non-representational. My treatment of google earth deals with a very large and coherent abstraction that is fundamentally representational. Can this idea of the softening of vision help us understand what is at stake here? Does google earth represent the current culmination of the patriarchal objectifiction of the earth by technoscientific rationality? Or can it be seen as a move towards decentralization and thus democritization of of mapping. Does it undermine the psychogeographical project (in its emphasis on subjectivity, on space as a determinant of social patterning) or assist it in more complex visualizations of these patterns? This seems a rich area to critique.

Complete Structure and Input Considerations

2006-04-03T22:25:00.000-05:00

I completed the frame for the tension fabric structure today and am very happy with the design which is both structurally sound and quite elegant. Tomorrow I will be experimenting with the fabric (jersey cotton sheets with 2 way stretch). Sewing all the sheets into a large canopy and stretching it over the structure, then staking it down would be the easiest at this point, but I am afraid may compromise the strange beauty of the structure. The frame will still be apparent from the inside but certain elements of the design will not show well, such as the diamond like spaces along the sides. I may need to purchase more sheets of fabric too. I think it will suffice however and should be done by the structure by tomorrow and ready to test projections at night. I also still need to install a stand for the camera in the center of the portal area, which will probably be a length of pvc, threaded on one end, attached to the head joint, extending upwards, with a tripod mount on it. I must leave some room for adjustment once the image is capturing to get the best angle of vision. I could also add another 3 way connector, make both ends threaded and introduce a curve into the pipe design. I should use the thinnest pipe available, which is 1/2".

Jackie and I talked for a while today about the problems of control. She suggested headlamps in lieu of colored wands, which have too many subcultural associations, but I am very much tied to the idea of this machine as an analytic and exploratory tool in addition to an aesthetic experience for the participant, and am reluctant to give up the added articulation introduced by the wands, which offer x and y position, distance between eachother, even rotation. 2ndary characteristics, which could be inferred through differentiation could include velocity.

I designed an experiment today that would test the ability of the analytic capabilites of jitter to determine distance based on the separation of 2 colors. Double sided wands with different colors could be raised and lowered in a system of 2 cameras placed on differing axes. One above and one straight on. The above camera would measure the actual distance of the closest points on the wands, while the vertical camera would calculate this distance by approximating the relative distance between the two points. There would definitely be a need for calibration, but this could easily be done using math operators. That is, move the wand a set distance, measure the distance gained between the points, and convert the measured distance by some operator to the actual distance moved. I suppose the relationship would not be linear; the distance calculated by appearances would become larger the closer to the lens one got, but these are so close anyway, and thus the distances so far apart, i think it would be fairly accurate. This could allow the interpolation of a z axis provided the wands were held at the correct angle, so that both colored lights were visible to the center eye. If this parameter were even fairly accurate, the z position could be used to control zoom, the x and y position used to control centering (for triangulation of viewpoint, the other point would be the center of the screen), and rotation angle could be controlled by the relative rotation of the wand. This is ideal for the double sided light saber with different colors on each end. If I could arrange the view angle correctly with the slope of the hill, even from very far back, all parameters could be collected easily.

Need to look into whether two colors would actually be necessary for tracking or if all parameters could be derived from 2 positions of the same color. I suppose this could be done by doing some sort of crude preliminary tracking, averaging the horiz. difference between the ends, splitting the matrix in half and then doing color tracking on each object. This might lead to trouble around when the wand is held vertically however.

Emergent Sound

2006-03-31T01:06:00.000-05:00

for the sound to be more than aesthetic, to be more than personal choice on my part, it must be emergent, it must exhibit complex behavior divorced from my input and decision making process. it must rely on the internal dynamics of the system, responding to flows of information, be linked dynamically to the energetics, apparent and internal, of the feedback loop. it must arise from the image and not from the actions of the participant. it must be given the structural capacity to exhibit the fundamental behaviorual properties of complex systems: stasis, periodicity, chaos, complexity. Granular synthesis with multiple and self organizing levels of feedback, using purely synthetic voices, responding dynamically to the internal dynamics of the image. this can manifest genotypically or phenotypically. phenotype reaction will have more direct links to the image as displayed, genotypic reaction will more represent the information flows at work behind the outward appearances. there may be a level at which the structural coding of this world is not divorced from its outward appearance, in wihc the difference between g and p dissolve. i need to create a world with the most open metaphysics possible, that is the most possible states. this inherently limits aesthetic choice. ahah this is the question on which you are centering. Teh problem is productive: how to crate a scientific tool for stuyding these dynamics, to use the patterns as more than production of images and sounds and experience, to study natural phenomenon versus crafting experience, creating subjectivity. subjectivity emerges through perception of impartiality, of a clean metaphysics, of degrees of freedom. the more i impose a structure onto this the more compelling the art, the less compelling the science. but this may not be true. there is a way out. the ideal system will allow all states to emerge, will require experience musician to play the instrument. i am merely the architect and the tuner.

Synthesis: Meditation on Theoretical Portion of Project

2006-03-29T21:43:00.000-05:00

There are a few places I am working from here. I can intentionally posit this project in various traditions of artistic and technical production: multimedia, virtual reality, artificial life, a scientific tool for studying nonlinear dynamics. I need to figure out what it actually is, what my influences were and how the project arrived at this place. That said, the exposition is a historical description, not a personal one, so these linkages and how well they create a meaningful trajectory with my project at the end are very important to explore. The main historical questions I am addressing regard the politics of virtual reality the liberatory capacities of "technoetic" (or telematic, to use 2 of Roy Ascott's phrasings), the metaphysics of artificial life and nonlinear systems and how they intersect, often quite profoundly, with different aesthetics and philosophies of new media. This project will have to trace these divergent histories in both the art worlds and the scientific worlds, perhaps showing that these strands far from being divergent have reflected fundamentally similar sets of values and oppositions. This idea would posit that our modes for scientific inquiry and artistic production are based on very deep seated assumptions about the nature of reality and metaphors to describe it. In this sense, we must evaluate whether we really are producing a new kind of science, or a new kind of art, and whether the changes embodied in such turns offer any more promise towards the liberation of humans and a deeper, wiser understanding of the nature of reality.

A significant portion of this project must describe in both qualitative and analytic terms the formal processes of the feedback system, drawing from the work of Wiener, Gleick, Crutchfield etc. This includes modeling of the classical system as well as schematic representation of the augmented feedback system mixing digital and analog forms of optical/algorithmic interaction. Another portion should discuss the shift from a mechanistic understanding towards a qualitative or behavioral understanding of complex processes. Links are drawn to pattern formation in biology, geology, linguistics. Discussion of the difficulties of fluid dynamics. Discussion of Norbert Wiener and information flows/noise. Positive and negative feedback loops. Self regulation and homeostasis. Attractors, strange and periodic. A qualitative analysis with examples could do much to strenghten the thesis, but only if the thesis includes the importance of understanding this behavior as representative or exemplary, and not just metaphoric, of natural processes of energy conservation.

In what ways is this natural?

(virtual) Reality Check

2006-03-29T20:32:00.000-05:00

With the possibility of the show being in 1 month, an even headed assessment of the work still needed is very much in order. Pressing firmly on my mind are questions of location, equipment concerns, physical structure, program architecture and parameter interpolation, and sound.

1. Location
ubs studio
pros
good symmetrical effect, very clean presentation, lots of viewers, getrdone date
cons
possible interpersonal tension, can't begin setup immediately, sooner date
ubs loading dock
pros
no interpersonal problems, very large, flexible, lots of viewers, getrdone date
cons
not as clean presentation, weather problems?, have to move shit, no design at hand
integrated arts room
pros
large and flexible, possible clean presentation, available
cons
not that available, must wait for setup, not symmetrical
avery outside
pros
available, immediate setup, electricity good, serene nature
cons
not symmetrical, weather problems
old gym
pros
large, black, symmetry, punk as fuck
cons
nonflexible dates, short time frame for setup, take down, etc.

it seems ubs studio and old gym are the best options for now. so...
get owen's number from patrick and call and ask about 2nd ubs show use
email julie rossman and get dates, info on old gym use

2. Equipment concerns
a. new graphics card is working properly but still awaiting dual tv out dongle to allow hookups to projector and to incorporate the analog feedback loop. this is on backorder, no word yet when it will arrive. projector and webcams are still in friends car, need to contact him get them back.
b. magic wands are set to arrive soon shipped out today (wednesday) by priority mail
c. need to send back old graphics card to address given
d. possibly need to buy long firewire cable, some sort of camera housing
e. need to obtain 2 similar projectors for experimentation and use of show weekend.
ivan in film or matt in a/v (possibly circumvented somewhat if its in integrated arts room)
e. need to figure out software situation. if i am in the ubs show, i can use the one month free trials starting now and getr over with. If i want to push back the date, continue working on this project after this term, I need to purchase student license for 60 bucks. need to look at hipno architecture and test it out, see if beep is really that annoying.

3. structure is still somewhat dependent on location, but they are mutually dependent so i need to put some thought here. It appears the tent structure is still feasable. Use jersey cotton sheets from bed bath and beyond or purchase wholesale. This is wrapped around tent poles, which i need more of. can be purchased at gander mountain as replacements; dont have to worry about threading nylong stringing, as they wont have to be recollapsed often. Need to figure out projector situation, whether i want to focus on the center eye, with the camera in the middle, or have symmetrical projections facing one another in the cone tunnel shape, camera in center. this is dependant on if i want the mirroring effect to be prominent or not have it.

4. program archicecture.
this will be the main focus of my work once the structure is in place, location is secured, and basic setup has been completed. this is ludicrous, it should be occupying my full attention now. basic problem is this: i do not want static or predictable interaction, the realm of magic tricks. i want a truly subtle and diverse communication with this world, and while generative, i want it to be unpredictable, occasionally uninterpretable. ways of going about this:

have some sort of novelty or complexity score, which quantifies uniqueness of the image and adds it to a numerical counter. when the counter reaches a certain point, it alters the input/parameter parsing chain to create new forms of interactions. for example, whereas x position of green wand used to control zoom, the screen has reached a fractal dimension greater than 2 and the x pos of green wand now controls rotation. Or input could stay the same, and it simply morphs to a new configuration preset. but must be actually generative, not just static motion based on my presets. thus the inputs must controls things zoom, rotation, allowing user to play the space like an instrument. the hard part here is counting. Its easy to say, if it rises above a certain zoom number, stay there and start rotating, but this is not interactive as much. need to be viewing some sort of objective, seemingly qualitative function. perhaps user voice could trigger the change.

second innovation is some sort of parameter interpolation such as the type implemented in hipno. this would pan not only between parameter values, but between parameter interactions. need some sort of abstraction of input to parameter parsing, or some mapping section that variably assigns influence of certain values to certain parameters, such as crossfading between 2 input spaces, or averaging the values of 2 inputs, or weighting them in accordance with some other variable.

5. sound
this is another area that should require some major attention. at this point i am looking at 2 options: surround sound speaker system with 8 monitors, utilizing mara's help to spatialize using ep.binSPAT and the ambipan max objects. Or using wireless headphones with said objects for binaural synthesis, virtual spatialization, leaving the actual space silent, open to recording. this allows voice to be a much more prominent element in the interaction. Dont really know how to decide this.

Enactive Cognition

2006-03-07T21:55:00.000-05:00

In the forward to New Philosophy for New Media, Tim Lenoir traces the influence of recent developments in nourishing and phenomenology on Mark hanging treatment of embodied forms of media.

Francisco Varela argues that mental acts are characterized by the concurrent participation of several functionally distinct and topographically distributed regions of the brain and their sensorimotor embodiment. All forms of cognitive act arise from coherent activity of subpopulations of neurons at multiple locations. They are dynamic self-organizing patterns of widely distributed regions of the brain rather than organized as sequential arrangements as the computer metaphor-- information flows upstream-- would model it. At the deepest level the relation and integration of these components gives rise to temporality.

Understanding of temporal cognition shifts away from models of consciousness influenced by information theory and cybernetics, and towards both emergent and radically subjective patterns of perceptual integration. Barely himself writes: "these various components require a frame or window of simultaneity that corresponds to the duration of the lived present."

Varela treats the emergence of time as an endogenous bodily framing process grounded in self-organizing neuronal assemblies rather than an externally applied "technical" frame.

The primary contentions of Varela's work are:
1. time as an endogenously generated flow based on layers of dynamical self-organizing neuronal assemblies
2. temporal flow is bound up biologically with affect, which precedes it and sculpts the dynamics of time flow.

Ideology of Interaction

2006-03-05T19:03:00.000-05:00

Art that is not based in critique can not be more than aesthetic and can not be more than repition of existing codes. To create new experience we must identify and subvert THE OLD with cunning and restrained ferocity. What is the ideology of the new versus the ideology of the old? Ideology is a system, or a way of looking at the world, it is not so much based on belief as projection, it is a method of interpretation of the essentially chaotic. It gives meaning and congruence to disparate concepts, events, and processes. Theories of new media that seek disembodyment, that profess alienation, that focus on the cognitive, on ever integrated forms of experience, that are not critical of the IDEOLOGY OF INTERACTION, never achieve more than repeating and confirming the theory of media that has been at work during the past century. The ideology of the new may not be so new after all.

A true futurism casts of the intepretation systems of the past and allows new patterns to emerge, it looks at things historically but does not seek teleology, although teleology may emerge. Integration of sensory experience does not run counter to alienation. Alienation is only meaningful when viewed through a system. We can claim that television is more alienating than radio, which is more alienating than printed text, which is more alienated than speech, which is more alienated than thought, which is more alienated than direct sensory experience, but this is merely creating a heirarchy of experience, which is inherently ahistorical, as it assumes a natural, an external, that there is a core unmediated experience behind, or at the base of other mediated experiences. This could be true, but it is important to recognize that it is an assumption.

Far too much art that engages issues of politics, agency, technology, mediation, etc. approaches critique through appropriating tools and techniques of power it wishes to destroy. This was Bill Brown's critique of so much of what passes as surveillance art. In its attempt to explore the cognitive repercussions of this form of mediation, it assumes the gaze of the observer, rather than the observed, it assumes it must examine the subtleties of its workings through its practice and through this act fetishizes and aestheticizes the instrumental power of this apparatus.

Of course, this is only relevant for art whose purpose is critique of (or drawing attention to) media technology and its cultural implications, and even that art which canonizes and aestheticizes the alienation of technological systems does so through paranoia. Another alternate way of thinking about technological and new media art exists that posits this very technology as a tool of transcendence, claims that these forms of experience are in fact new and valuable and creative and afford the possibility of self realization, if not outright liberation. This is what Roy Ascott refers to as the shift from PARANOIA to TELENOIA. "Is there love in the telematic embrace?" he asks.

More than the capability of technologically based art to evoke emotion and complex experience, it is important to ask what primitivism we are harking back to when we deny technological art on its own grounds? The most obvious argument is its imbrication in systems of capital, its priveliged status, both in development and accessibility, its commodification, its supporting cognitively similar but more overtly oppressive institutions of advertising and consumer identity. And of course the response is necessary that these things will exist whether or not artists and designers take up the challenge to create experiences and techniques subtle and variegated enough to engage people, to counter the process of technological alienation, to impart agency and wonder, to complicate instead of streamline. We have a grave responsibility in the face of an ever dematerializing public sphere to permit the evolution and interaction of systems of meaning divorced from the hegemonic forces of global capital and the centralized planning of culture and sensory experience.

Process, Cultural Reproduction, the Loneliness of Feedback Space

2006-02-28T23:13:00.000-05:00

I realize that to be thinking of this continually as product, as design, is -issing the really productive elements of it-- this is PROCESS. Not something that occurs in the mind of one to establish a unique experience, the heroic or visionary designer creating transcendent art, living up to the old mythologies of compounded sensation, of MULTIMEDIA, of immersion in the weak sense, as TOTAL CINEMA. I've been reading Kodwo Eshun recently and he talks of the evolutionary genetics of sonic reproduction:

"The sampler doesn't care who you are. It's
only using you to reproduce."

Sonotronic Manifesto
http://www.fringecore.com/magazine/m7-2.html

It is a process of spatialization, of rhythmic induction. This is not entirely divorced from the found footage and appropriation experiments from the Situationists to Animal Charm. That this practice spans the aesthetic reaches of postmodern (sub)cultural production has little to say to anyone more than theorists, those looking to socialize it. The forebrain of artistic production is not in the avantgardes, not in the margins, but firmly in the middle of the social sphere, leaning over the front edges.

This is not virtual reality at all in the old sense, the gloves and goggles model, and I was too quick too induce a linkup with the traditions of integrative multimedia. This project is much more firmly about communication. Abstract does not mean modernist and immersive does not mean totalizing. Whether I choose to posit this project as interactive or subtly critiquing the posibilites of interactive art (or gestural linguistic communication, or the aesthetic prospects of artificial life) interests only the theorists, those who seek to socialize it.

We are looking for new ideas -and we are finding them. We are looking for new experiences and we are making them.
Not emulation but interface. There is a profound impersonality to all this, not subjugated but exacerbated by the loneliness of the installed sapce. Only in feedback space (is there no sexier term I can throw around?) is one truly alone, floating in awe at the indifference with which it treats you, who has created it.

Link to Many articles by Manuel de Landa

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/delanda/

Space Considerations

2006-02-27T20:31:00.000-05:00

As technical considerations gave way to more practical concerns in accordance with the time frame I have to work with, my attention has been shifting to the actual space in which this project is to be carried out. Technical considerations cannot and should not determine design, although it is delightfully relieving when decisions are made by specs.

I have been experimenting with a number of designs and with projecting onto curved space, projecting through things, deep focus, immersive projection, etc. I have also been thinking of about organic architecture a lot. What would design inspired by feedback look like? How can recursive structures be incorporated into the design of spaces and experiences? Is this mere metaphor modeling or could something deeper be taking place. There is a long history of biologically and organically inspired design and architecture, from soap bubble forms to Buckminsterfuller's geodisc domes, to the Gehry building on the Bard campus. But it seems like only now, approaching the shadow of artifical life and massively distributed computing process, have the possibilites of iterative and dynamic design come into the fore. An important thing to understand here is that the virtual space is an extension of the physical space, and human interaction inhabits the domain between these two. Thus it is not metaphor to design a space that "looks" similar to one persons conception of feedback. We move away from the individualist visionary designer. The idea here is for the space itself to require nonlinear design to be fully realized.

I have been playing around with tension fabric structures made of spandex and fiberglass tent poles. They are very modular and flexible and offer a truly astonishing variety of organic forms. Spandex is suitable for both front and rear projection but diffuses ambient light. The structure I have been working on is a series of nested hemi-tents culminating in a double arched pod shape. This is an image taken from a corporate website illustrating vaguely the type of design I am describing. In my design the poles cross to form smaller spaces between them. There is rear projection into the center of the podlike structure at the terminus of the tunnel. The projection is vertical, and is as large as a human, enhancing the mirroring aspect of the space. The entire design is intended to designate a feeling of approaching, which contains the subjectivity of the explorer. This is contrasted with the naturalistic tendencies of the environment itself to be emerging, which contain the objective elements of the forms and behaviors within the space to function as beings. These three phenomenal tendencies complete the productive trinity, and are always in generative conflict with eachother.

Manipulation of the space triggers disturbance, which lowers the beingness of those experiencing artificial life within the space.
Contemplation of the space pauses approach and allows the beingness of the entities within to achieve greater subjective weight.

The space can be thought of as a portal which is to say, it is an interface, a border, between two radically different domains. Participation in the space is both generative (linguistic in its production of meaning, its attempts at communication, its recognition of the mirroring of subjectivity) and experimental, in the experience based sense of the word.

What is it like to simultaneously perceive and create a world? Need to read more about uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics. What would it mean to let this project be an exploration of scale, of the micro/macroscopic?

I want to impart the feeling of communicating with an alien intelligence. I want to talk to something on the other side. Televolutionary Synaestheology.

Links, Signpost, Specifications

2006-02-23T12:54:00.000-05:00

Technical Consdieration
Video Input Options
http://www.bensoftware.com/ss/help/faq.html

Firewire Webcam
http://www.pcnation.com/web/details.asp?affid=305&item=677258

Synaesthesia and Simulation Part 1

2006-02-23T12:52:00.000-05:00

I dont seek simulatation I want to explore, to generate, and need to define more crucially the link between natural language, voice, mystical properties of enunciation. but at this point the project is purely synaesthetic and i have shown little interest thus far in actually creating some sort of meaning production/recognition system. this is where the social feedback element comes in. what sort of communication do i want to bring about? what do i want the defining elements of the experience of this to be?

http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html
http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/
http://www.casdn.neu.edu/~dmiller/

What is the worldmake life function?

2006-02-23T12:32:00.000-05:00

This will be my first attempt at MAKING A WORLD. Artists have long been intrigued by the idea of synesthesia (and many have in fact utilized their own experiences to inform their artwork). Much of the art which can be thought of as multimedia, or leading up to integrative sensory experiences, from opera to cinema to virtual reality, has been influenced by not only the idea of multi-sensory experiences, but that the senses themselves become conflated; the meaning of perceptual cues becomes subordinate to their syntax, to their ability to contain meaning, their ability to delineate the perceptual boundaries of a world.

What is the worldmake function? It is not to describe, nor imply. It is not to simulate or emulate. It is to achive first complexity, and then integration, then completion. It is to to create not merely interaction but communication. It is not to allude to life, but to create life, to create processes and phenomena that are not just responsive to their environment, but inseparable from their environment, and yet still retain their own identity, purpose, and individual behavior.

Central to this concept is the idea of feedback, manifesting recursively at every level of design and interaction. The idea of feedback grew out of the theory of cybernetics in the middle of this century, which attempted to describe the behavioural workings of complex systems. It deals primarily with design and description of systems that are self-responsive, that is, that can recieve sensory input from their environment, respond to it, and alter their behaviour (and thus the environment) accordingly.

What types of feedback are possible?
How can feedback be incorporated recursively, at many levels of interaction?