Generative Heritage - notes on Succession

I spent three months this year on sabbatical at Culture Lab, Newcastle University (UK). It was a privelege to spend time in such a vibrant research lab, as well as to get to know the city of Newcastle. One of the projects to come out of my visit is Succession, an experiment in generative digital heritage that uses Newcastle and its history to think about industrialisation, global capital, our shared pasts and potential futures. Personally, it brings together two strands of my work that have been separate until now - on generative systems and digital cultural collections. Hence you'll also find this cross-posted over on The Visible Archive. Here, some notes and documentation on the work, some musings on generative and computational heritage.

Much of my recent work with digital cultural collections has worked to create rich representations of these ever-expanding datasets. A key thread has been an interest in the complexity of these collections; the multitudes they contain, their wealth of potential meaning as complex, interrelated wholes, rather than simply respositories of individual resources. Visualisation can provide a macroscopic view of this complexity, but it can be just as vivid when sampled at a micro scale. Tim Sherratt's Trove News Bot tweets digitised newspaper articles in response to the day's news headlines, creating little juxapositions, timely sparks of meaning that can be pithy, funny, or provocative. Trove News Bot appropriates the twitter bot - the joking-but-deadly-serious computational voice of our age - and adapts it to work with the digital archive. We could call this generative heritage; using computational processes to create new artefacts (and meanings) from historical material.

Succession applies this generative approach to the digital heritage of Newcastle Upon Tyne. Newcastle has a rich industrial heritage; it played a major role in the Industrial Revolution that began in Britain and went on to remake global civilisation. Today Newcastle is a post-industrial or de-industrialised city: coal, steel and shipbuilding have given way to service industries: education, retail, entertainment and tourism. As an outsider exploring the city I was struck by the mixture of pre-modern, industrial and post-industrial eras in the fabric of the city. Different (often inconsistent) patterns of life, work and economy are accreted in layers as the city continues the everyday process of adaptation, experimentation with the possible; working out what comes next.

The city, like the digital archive, is a multitude; an unthinkably complex matrix of people, things, systems, narratives. Newcastle - more than many other cities - also speaks to the expansive dynamics of industrialisation, globalisation, extractive industry, fossil fuels; the whole modern trajectory that has brought us to our current predicament. This seems to be both urgent and unthinkable - or perhaps, unsayable. How can we speak back to this complexity; how can we make in a way that responds to this tangled, expansive mess? Here generative techniques offer a way to synthesise complexity and create multitudes, formations that might portray the city as it was, or hint at what it could be. Automatic juxtaposition and remix create nonsense but also, occasionally, glimmers of a new sense, or at least a texture or sensation that emerges from a random constellation of images, sources and contexts. Succession requires us to piece together fragments of history; and this is a work of imagination, as Ross Gibson writes, framing his own work of generative heritage (with Kate Richards, Life After Wartime

Our parlous states need imagination. We need to propose “what if” scenarios that help us account for what has happened in our habitat so that we can then better envisage what might happen. We need to apprehend the past. Otherwise, we won’t be able to align ourselves to historical momentum. Without doing this we won’t be able to divine the continuous tendencies that are making us as they persist out of the past into the present.

In practical terms, the work is based on a corpus of around two thousand images sourced from the Flickr Commons. Most come from the (wonderful) Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums collection; many more from the Internet Archive Books collection, with a smattering of others from UK and international institutions. Succession uses these ingredients to generate new digital "fossils"; composite images assembled in the browser using HTML Canvas. This generative process is extremely simple: pick five sources at random, and place them in the frame using some semi-random rules for positioning, compositing and repetition. Opacity is kept low, so that the sources blend and merge. The visual process often obscures the source images - they end up buried,  cropped or indistinguishable, squashed like fossil strata. But at the same time the source items are preserved and presented in context, so each composite retains references to its sources and their attendant contexts. Composites can be saved, acquiring an ID and permalink; the images in this post show some of my favourites, but there are over a hundred to sift through already.



As a generative system this is, in formal terms, incredibly simple. It's essentially a combinatorial process, in that each composite consists of five elements from a set of around two thousand. Yet already this adds up to 2.5 x 10^15 unique combinations - it would take eight million years to see them all, at one per second. Compositing and layout parameters are random within constraints - so this simple machine can produce an immense variety of unique results; I'm still surprised and delighted by the fossils people discover (or generate). But this computational variety is also strongly shaped by the human creative choices involved in making the work. This is what Bill Seaman (combinatorial media artist par excellence) calls "authored space" - a domain of potential that is expansive but never arbitrary. The corpus reflects a handful of coherent themes, seasoned with generous sprinklings of the lateral and miscellaneous; the aim is, in Seaman's words, a kind of "resonant unfixity." Also the corpus and the compositing process work in tandem; for example compositor treats the largely monochrome line-art and engravings of the Internet Archive material differently to other (largely photographic) sources. The generative machine is programmed in part by the textures and qualities of its material.


The Internet Archive book images are interesting on several fronts; for one, they are an amazing demonstration of the power of computational processes for generating and describing large collections (like 2.6 million items large). Given the right kind of source material, this computational leverage changes the logic of collections completely. When adding and describing items is expensive, it makes sense to be selective, and publish only what is most "significant". Automation makes it possible to simply publish everything - for who's to say (really) what is significant, or how it might one day be significant? In Succession the Internet Archive material plays a crucial role. The line art and diagrams - many from obscure publications like the Transactions of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers - offer evocative fragments of the machinery of mid-nineteenth century industrialisation.

As for generative digital heritage, it's a fairly open-ended proposal. What happens when we turn algorithms loose on our digital culture with makerly, synthetic, speculative or poetic intention? There are some pretty solid precedents in the digital humanities for these approaches; Schnapp and Presner call for a "generative" DH in their 2009 manifesto. Before that Drucker and Nowviskie outlined a "speculative computing" with a strongly generative flavour. Gibson and Richards' Life After Wartime is an early exemplar of generative heritage in the digital arts. More recently we've seen the rise of massive online collections, web-scale computing, and a proliferation of cultural, critical and creative bots, not to mention projects like #NaNoGenMo. If there is such a thing as generative digital heritage, then now's the time.

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Local Colour: Smaller World Network

Back in September I showed a little work called Local Colour at ISEA 2011. This project continues my thinking about generative systems, materiality and fabrication. It's a work in two parts: the first is a group of laser-cut cardboard bowls, made from reclaimed produce boxes - you can see more on Flickr, and read the theoretical back-story in the ISEA paper. Here I want to briefly document the second element, a sort of network diagram realised as a vinyl-cut transfer. The diagram was created using a simple generative system, initially coded Processing - it's embedded below in Processing.js form (reload the page to generate a new diagram).

Network diagrams are one of the most powerful visual tropes in contemporary digital culture. Drawing on the credibility of network science they promise a paradigm that can be used to visualise everything from social networks to transport and biological systems. I love how they oscillate between expansive significance and diagrammatic emptiness. In this work I was curious to play with some of the conventions of small world or scale-free networks. A leading theory about how these networks forms involves preferential attachment: put simply it states that nodes entering a network will prefer to connect to those nodes that already have the most connections. In visualising the resulting networks, graph layout processes (such as force direction) use the connectivity between nodes to reposition the nodes themselves; location is determined by the network topology.



This process takes the standard small-world-network model and changes a few basic things. First, it assigns nodes a fixed position in space. Second, it uses that position to shape the connection process: here, as in the standard model, nodes prefer to connect to those with lots of existing connections. But distance also matters: connecting to a close node is "cheaper" than connecting to a distant one. And nodes have a "budget" - an upper limit on how far their connection can reach. These hacks result in a network which has some small world attributes - "hubs" and "clusters" of high connectivity - but where connectivity is moderated by proximity. Finally, this diagram visualises a change in one parameter of the model, as the distance budget decreases steadily from left to right. It could be a utopian progression towards a relocalised future, or the breakdown or dissolution of the networks we inhabit (networks in which distance remains, for the time being, cheap enough to neglect).

The process running here generates the diagram through a gradual process of optimisation. Beginning with 600 nodes placed randomly (but not too close to any other), each node is initially assigned a random partner to link to. Then they begin randomly choosing new partners, looking for one with a lower cost - and cost is a factor of both distance and connectivity. The Processing source code is here.

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Master of Digital Design / Grow Your Own Logotype

Over the past year or so I've been working on a major new offering here at UC. So, I'm delighted to finally launch the new Master of Digital Design online. This course will offer something quite unique in the Australian context: a trans-disciplinary coursework Masters focused on digital practice for designers and creative practitioners of all sorts. The key practical approaches are generative techniques, data visualisation and design, and physical computing; and we'll be using these to address three core themes or questions: the urban, the public, and the sustainable.

As readers of this blog will know, these themes and approaches are right in line with my own research and creative interests; so frankly, I'm thrilled to be leading this course. Teaching with me will be a crew of talented designers, artists and researchers including Stephen Barrass, Sam Hinton and Geoff Hinchcliffe. Finally, we'll be drawing on the wisdom and experience of an international advisory panel whose work exemplifies what we mean by digital design - a practice that engages deeply, and critically, with digital processes, digital materials, and digital contexts: Karsten Schmidt, Rory Hyde, Nervous System, Anthony Burke and foAM.


The course launch has also provided a great excuse (er, opportunity) to play with some ideas around generative branding and marketing. I've been tinkering with this logotype for ages; it uses the same basic algorithm as Limits to Growth but artificially constrains the growth to a letterform (in the guise of a hidden bitmap image). Lately I've extended the logotype into a little generative marketing gadget; a Processing applet that lets you grow endless variations, and receive the results as a PDF file, attached to an email. The aim is to provide a little taste of the power - and pleasure - of generative design.

Behind the scenes this project was yet another demonstration of the brilliance of Processing and its community. The key technical challenge was the upload-and-email functionality. Seltar's "save to web" hack provided the template; upload image data over HTTP, and have a PHP script catch and save the file. From there it was relatively straightforward to have PHP generate the email, with the help of the Pear MailMime package. The final step was uploading a PDF, rather than a bitmap. This seemed impossible, because the built-in PDF library needs to write a local file, which means the extra annoyance of a signed applet. I posted a query on the Processing forums and within 24 hours PhiLho saved me with a solution that extends the PDF class to allow access to the PDF data as a Byte array, without first saving the file. Amazing: thank you! Add the super-useful ControlP5 for the UI sliders and buttons, and the whole thing is built on, in and with free, open-source software. Again, a demonstration of why digital design is such an exciting field of practice right now.

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JCSMR Curls

This post is (belated) documentation of a project I worked on in 2007-8, creating an audio-responsive generative system for a permanent installation for the Jackie Chan Science Centre (yes, that Jackie Chan) at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, on the ANU campus. Along with some Processing-related nitty gritty, you'll find some broader reflections on generative systems and the design process. For less process and more product, skip straight to the generative applets (and turn on your sound input).

In mid 2007 my colleague Stephen Barrass and I were approached by Thylacine, a Canberra company specialising in urban art, industrial and exhibition design. Caolan Mitchell and Alexandra Gillespie were designing a new permanent exhibition, the first stage of the new Jackie Chan Science Centre, housed in a new building - a razor-sharp piece of contemporary architecture (below) by Melbourne firm Lyons. Instead of just bolting a display case and a few plaques to the wall, Mitchell and Gillespie (wonderfully) proposed a design that hinged on a dynamic generative motif - a system that would ebb and flow with its own life cycles, and echo the spiral / helix DNA structures central to the School's work, and already embedded in the building's architecture.


My initial sketches (below) took the spiral motif fairly literally, drawing vertical helices and varying their width with a combination of mouse movement and a simple sin function - the results reminded me of the beautiful spiral egg cases of the Port Jackson Shark. At that stage we were talking about the possibility of projecting back onto the facade of the building, which has big vertical glass panels; this structure informed the vertical format. I made a quick video mockup of the form on the facade - which was incredibly easy, thanks to the robust, adaptable, extendable goodness of Processing (a recurring theme in the process to come).


These sketches meet the simplest criteria of the brief (spiral forms) but do nothing about the more interesting (and difficult) ones: cycles of birth, growth and death, and dynamics over multiple time scales. Over the next couple of months I developed two or three different approaches to this goal.

The phyllotaxis model blogged earlier was one attempt. Spurred on by the hardcore a-life skills of Jon McCormack and co. at CEMA, I built a system in which phyllotactic spirals self-organised spontaneously. Because in Jon's words, anyone can draw a spiral, what you really want is a system out of which spirals emerge! The model worked, but I had trouble figuring out how phyllotactic spiral forms might meaningfully die or reproduce. Also, by that stage I had two other systems that seemed more promising.

From the early stages I wanted to make the system respond to environmental audio. The installation would be in a public foyer with plenty of pedestrian traffic, so audio promised a way to tap in to the building's rhythms of activity at long time scales, as well as convey an instantaneous sense of live interaction. In the two most developed sketches audio plays a key role in the life cycle of the system.

One sketch moved into 2d, and started with a pre-existing model for growth, by way of the Eden growth algorithm (this system would later be adapted again into Limits to Growth). I had already been playing with an "off-lattice" Eden-like system where circular cells could grow at any angle to their parent (rather than the square grid of the original Eden model). This system also made it easy to vary the radius of those cells individually. The next step was to couple live audio to the system; following a physical metaphor, frequency is mapped to cell size, so that larger cells responded to low frequency bands, and smaller cells to high frequencies. Incoming sound adds to the cell's energy parameter; this energy gradually decays over time in the absence of sound. Cell reproduction, logically enough, is conditional on energy.


The result is that cells which are best "tuned" for the current audio spectrum will accumulate more energy, and so are more likely to reproduce, spawning a neighbour whose size (and thus tuning) is similar to, but not the same as, their own; so over time the system generates a range of different cell sizes, but only the well-tuned survive. The rest die, which in the best artificial life tradition, means they just go away - no mess, no fuss. In the image below cells are rendered with stroke thickness mapped to energy level. The curves and branches pop out of rules sprinkled lightly with random(), resulting in a loose take on the spiral motif, which is probably the weak point in this sketch. I still think it has potential - nightclub videowall, anyone? Try the live applet over here (adjust your audio input levels to control the growth / death balance).


The third model takes this approach to energy and reproduction - about the simplest possible a-life simulation - and folds it back into the helical structures of the first sketches. In this world an individual is a 3d helix, built from simple line segments. Again each individual is tuned to a frequency band, which supplies energy for growth; but here "growth" means adding segments to the helix, extending its length. Individuals can "reproduce", given enough energy, but here reproducing means spawning a whole new helix, with a slightly mutated frequency band. All the helixes grow from the same origin point - they form a colony, something like a clump of grass.


This sketch went through many variants and iterations over the next month or so; in retrospect the process of working to a brief, within a design team, pushed this system further than I ever would have taken it myself. At the same time I was testing the system against my own critical position; I've argued earlier that the generative model matters, not just for its generativity but the entities and relations it involves.


From that perspective this system was full of holes. Death was arbitrary: just a timer measuring a fixed life-span. "Growth" was a misnomer: the number of segments was simply a rolling average of the energy in the curl's frequency band, so the curls were really no more than slow-motion level meters. Taking the organic / metabolic analogy more seriously, I worked out a better solution. An organism needs a certain amount of energy just to function; and the bigger the organism, the more energy it needs. If it gets more than it needs, then it can grow; if it gets less than it needs, for long enough, it will die. So this is a simple metabolic logic that can link growth, energy and death. Translated into the world of the curls: for each time step, every curl has an energy threshhold, which is proportional to its size (in line segments); if the spectral energy in its band is far enough over that threshhold, it adds a segment - like adding a new cell to its body; if the energy is under that threshhold, it doesn't grow; and if it remains in stasis for too long, it dies. Funnily enough, the behaviour that results is only subtly different to the simple windowed average. Does the model really matter, in that case? It does for me at least; if and how it matters for others is another question.


Next, the curls developed a more complex life-cycle - credit to Alex Gillespie for urging me in this direction. In line with the grass analogy, curls grow a "seed" at their tip when they are in stasis; when they die, that seed is released into the world. Like real seeds, these can lie dormant indefinitely before being revived - here, by a burst of energy in their specific frequency band. After several iterations, the seed form settled on a circle that gradually grows spikes, all the while being blown back "down" the world (against the direction of growth) by audio energy (below). As well as adding graphic variety, seeds change the system's overall dynamics. Unlike spawned curls, seeds are genetically identical to their "parent" - attributes such as frequency band are passed on unaltered. Because each individual can make only one seed, that seed is a way for the curl to go dormant in lean times; if it gets another burst of energy, it can be reborn. The curls demo applet demonstrates this best (again, adjust your audio input and make some noise).


A few technical notes. One big lesson here was the power of transform-based geometry. Each curl is a sequence of line segments whose length relates to frequency band (lower tuned curls have longer segments); each segment is tilted (rotateZ), then translated along the x axis to the correct spot. A sine function is used to modulate the radius of each curl along its length; frequency band factors in here too; this radius is expressed as a y axis translation. Then the segment is rotated around the x axis, to give depth. I iterate this a few hundred times to get one curl, and repeat this process up to twenty times to draw the whole world - each curl has its own parameters for tilt, x rotation increment, and frequency band.

In the live applet audio energy ripples up the curls, from base to tip. This was added to reinforce the liveness of the system and add some rapid, moment-by-moment change. It was implemented very simply. I used a (Java) ArrayList to create a stack of audio level values; at each time step, the current audio level value is added at the head of the list, and the ArrayList politely shuffles all the other values along. So each segment's length is a combination of three values; the base segment length, a function to taper the curl towards the tip, and the buffered audio level.


The graphics are all drawn with OpenGL - following flight404 I dabbled with GL blend modes, specifically additive blending, to get that luminous quality. The other key visual device here is the smearing caused by redrawing with a translucent rect(); instead of erasing the previous frame completely this fades it before overlaying the new frame. It's an easy trick that I've used before. But as Tom Carden explains, in OpenGL it leaves traces of previous frames. I discovered this firsthand when Alex and Caolan asked whether we could lose the "ghosts." I was baffled: on my dim old Powerbook screen, I simply hadn't seen them. Eventually, juggling alpha values I could reduce the "ghosts" to almost black (1) against the completely black (0) background - but no lower. Finally I just set the initial background to (1) instead of (0), and the ghosts were gone.


The adaptability of Processing came through again when it came to realising the installation. The final spec was a single long custom-made display case, with three small, inset LCD panels. These screens would run slide shows expanding on the exhibition content, but also feature the generative graphics when idle; the case itself would also integrate the curls as a graphic motif. For the case graphics, I sent Thylacine an applet that output a PDF snapshot on a key press; they could generate the graphics as required, then import the files directly into their layout.

The screens posed some extra challenges. The initial idea was to have the screens switch between a Powerpoint slideshow, and the curls applet; but making this happen without window frames and other visual clutter was impossible. In the end it was easier to build a simple slide player into the applet: it reads in images from an external folder, allowing JCSMR to author and update the slideshow content independently.

So to wrap up the Processing rave: it provided a single integrated development and delivery tool for a project spanning print, screen, audio, interaction, animation and even content management. Being able to burrow straight through to Java is powerful. Development was seamlessly cross-platform; the whole thing was developed on a Mac, and now runs happily on a single Windows PC with three (modest) OpenGL video cards. The installation has run daily for over six months, without a hitch (touch wood).

Some installation shots below, though it's hard to photograph, being a glass fronted cabinet in a bright foyer - reflection city. I'll add some better shots when I can get them. If you're in Canberra, drop in to the JCSMR - worth it for the building alone - and see it in person.





And very finally, photographic proof of the Jackie Chan connection - image from The Age.

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Fabricated Growth Forms (Processing to Ponoko)

Like many others playing with generative techniques, I'm fascinated by the potential of digital fabrication. Getting beyond the screen and into the world of objects is a significant move for a field that has, until the last few years, reveled in its own immateriality. There's a lot to think about in this material turn, but that's for another post. Here, a quick report on my first experiment with generative fabrication.


I don't have a laser cutter handy at my workplace (though as William Turkel writes there are lots of good reasons why I should) so I decided to check out Ponoko; I wanted to see what was involved in generating, uploading and fabbing a small project. I started with the Processing sketch from Limits to Growth, and tweaked it to turn out much smaller forms (a few hundred nodes, rather than tens of thousands). I used the built-in PDF export, then opened the PDFs in Illustrator. (Illustrator is the only commercial/proprietary software step in this process, so I'd be interested to hear of any alternatives). The forms are drawn as linked line segments of varying stroke widths. Ponoko needs an EPS with only the outside edge of this form, so I used Illustrator to merge it into a composite path, then set the stroke colour and width as instructed (0,0,255 and 0.001mm).


The upload to Ponoko took a few tries - I was getting some strange errors as their system failed to "see" the cutting paths on the template - but after some swift and cheerful technical assistance it all worked. Pricing was also trial and error; the first design I uploaded was more complex than these, and of course these branching forms pack a long cutting path into a small surface area. I simplified the design, packed four forms onto a sheet, and opted for 4mm ply rather than acrylic. Final cost including (expensive) shipping to Australia was about $A60 (currently around $US40). Not what I'd call cheap, but not prohibitive either. There are intricate discussions of the economics of the business - shipping, exchange rates, local vs global, etc - on the Ponoko forums.

Eighteen days later, they arrived. Novelty counts for a lot here, but still, I'm totally charmed by these objects. A few surprises, but all good: they are smaller and finer than I imagined, and they smell very slightly of charred wood (excellent!). The cut edges are dark with a nice smooth, burnished surface, and the ply surface is clean. The scale and intricacy of the things seems to entice people to touch and handle them. I find them far more satisfying than the (much more detailed) laser prints I made with the same system.


Immediately it's clear how the fabbing process, and the materials, can reach back up through the production chain and influence the design and the generative system. One flaw in the design is a product of how I'm drawing the shapes: there are small rounded "shoulders" at the joints between line segments, caused by the overlap between one rounded line cap and the next segment - this is obvious in the physical forms. Better to draw the segments as tapered rectangles, and avoid the shoulders. Also, the branching topology is structurally risky; how to introduce more joins without breaking the generative model? This interplay, between computational process, manufacturing process, material and form, seems really promising. Ponoko seems to be an excellent, affordable way to try this out, and the built-in fab-on-demand shopfront is great, if you want to sell your wares. But it's still, ironically, working with a mass-production paradigm of one design, n copies. With hooks for a more dynamic, generative front end, it could get really interesting: designers like the wonderful Nervous System are doing this already. More documentation of the growth forms over on Flickr.

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Limits to Growth

A new generative work that has just fallen into place; I'll be showing prints at the upcoming Dorkbot CBR show (CCAS Manuka, in November). Made with Processing. More will accumulate here.


Economic growth is a central tenet of contemporary capitalism; but the logic of endless growth seems increasingly difficult to sustain. Limits to Growth, published in 1972 (the year I was born), was commissioned by the Club of Rome to report on the economic implications of exponential growth, and used an abstract "world model" to predict the behaviour of the global economic system. This artwork experiments with growth in another model world: a simple generative system in the form of a computer program. In this two-dimensional system, growth has the ability to constrain itself, creating boundaries that define a formal and graphical whole. These forms are utopian diagrams of self-limiting growth.

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Draw a Straight Line...

Instruction Set is an embryonic open software project with a simple process, gathering different code implementations of a given "instruction." The format reminds me of two Whitney Artport projects - CODeDOC (2002), and Casey Reas' {Software} Structures (2004). It's good to see this approach being updated and opened out for a wider community.


The initial instruction was La Monte Young's wonderful Composition 1960 #10: "Draw a straight line and follow it." Implementations range from the abstract and conceptual to the more performative, in languages from Python and Javascript to Supercollider and Processing; web2.0 nerds like me will appreciate markluffel's Twitter version. Anyhow, I've just posted a belated implementation of "Draw a straight line..." (screengrab above). Nothing amazing, more just filling in a gap and solving a pragmatic problem - how to wring some generative juice out of the instructions - by manipulating the space, rather than the line.

That follow up post on transmateriality and hardware practice is coming soon, really. Off-task productivity is an amazing thing.

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Strange Ontologies

Another piece of work from my time at CEMA; this one a paper, co-authored with Mark Guglielmetti and Troy Innocent. This paper started with some discussions about models in generative systems, and a feeling that certain kinds of models, or rather certain ontologies - formally defined networks of entities and relations - play an important role in defining the generative outcomes of formal systems. Troy and Mark are also very much into gaming (more than me anyway, my peak gaming experience occurred about twenty years ago and involved an Amiga 1000); as we talked it seemed that these generative ontological structures might also be at work in some of the more interesting games and game art projects around. Mark made me sit down and play Portal (below). Then we started discussing social software...


So in this paper we consider both philosophical and computational senses of "ontology", and propose that computational ontologies (or data models) actually implement philosophical ontologies (notions of what "is"). What's more these ontologies become dynamic, interactive processes; and that's when things get interesting. We focus on "strange ontologies": where default, common-sense or conventional ontological structures are tweaked or hacked, or where emergent phenomena pop out from apparently straightforward structures of being and relation. We draw on examples from social software, gaming (including Portal and Warcraft), art games or game art (including Julian Oliver's Second Person Shooter), new media / generative art (Guglielmetti's own Laboratories of Thought (below) and Jonathan McCabe's Origami Butterfly Method).


The paper has been submitted to an upcoming issue of ACM Computers in Entertainment; for now, grab the pdf and cite it via the permalink for this post. We're seeking feedback on this too - let us know your thoughts.

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Self-Organised Phyllotaxis

Like Mr Smith, I'm being a bad host, but trust me, there's some good stuff in the works. Meantime, like Smith, here's something else entirely. In this case it's a little generative sketch I recently dusted off, some source code, and a side observation about Processing culture on the web.

While at CEMA last year I was working on a project with spirals as a kind of required element. I was talking to Jon McCormack about this, when he said something like "Oh, anyone can code up a spiral. What you want to do is make a system where spirals emerge." This is a classic a-life approach, of course, but also for me seemed technically daunting. Jon pointed me to Ball's The Self-Made Tapestry as well as to the literature on spiral phyllotaxis, a fundamental structure in plant morphogenesis. Douady and Couder published a brilliant paper on this topic in 1995 [pdf], so I set about implementing their model.


It's a beautiful thing - buds, or "primordia", are spawned by a central ring of "base" points. Douady and Couder show that you can create phylotactic spirals with a model where primordia inhibit the budding process in their neighbourhood; the result is that when a primordium forms, the next one to emerge will pop out some distance away. By simply changing the growth rate and the inhibition threshhold, you get a variety of self-organised spirals, but also other less predictable complex systems traits.

As it turned out I didn't use this for the "spiral" project - more on that soon - but rediscovered it recently when I was asked to reproduce an old drawing of a sort of abstract lotus-flower structure. In the image above the bases are invisible, and the primordia are drawn as circles that expand over time - instant lotus generator (more images).

Have a play with the applet, or just grab the Processing source. Let me know if you use it, too.

Which leads me to a side point. What's become of the applets-on-the-web side of the Processing community? Maybe it's just me, but it seems to be diminishing; instead there's tons of (web-compressed) video, with relatively sparse documentation and source. Is it because of the increased interest in using Processing for generative motion graphics (and other exotic, large scale, non-applet-friendly things)? Maybe I'm over-reliant on ProcessingBlogs, which now seems to be all Vimeo, all the time. Any thoughts?

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Murray McKeich - Generative Gothic

While I'm in Melbourne I've been trying to catch up with some of the artists who have made this town a new media hotspot over the past decade or so. I recently met up with Murray McKeich, an artist who came to prominence in the 90s here through the amazing (and sadly departed) Australian magazine 21C. He's refined a signature style, imaging urban detritus on a flatbed scanner, then grafting those elements together into surreal-gothic hybrids. In the hyped-up, Wired-style 90s, McKeich's images in 21C were startling; artefacts from a far more unsettling future.

In recent years, as I mentioned a while back on Generator.x, McKeich has discovered generative art. His approach, and the resulting work, are interesting in part because they are so different to a lot of what goes under that banner at the moment. At the core of his practice is a kind of heresy I find really appealing: McKeich doesn't code. He cheerfully admits to being "hopeless" at programming, and has no inclination to start. I had to fight the urge to talk him around, the way I do with students sometimes, leading them gently into the joys of Processing. But I had a feeling it would be futile, and besides, the processes McKeich has devised are coding, of a sort, and they are working beautifully.

Having accumulated a massive library of scanned-in source material, and discovering Photoshop's actions, McKeich began to experiment with automated processes; macros that would randomly pull source files into large multi-layer compositions. Hierarchies and groups of layers and sources provided a mix of control and randomness. He ran batch processes that would output many thousands of stills, then hand-picked the best to form very large image sets, with works like A Thousand Pictures of Footscray and DVN (detail above). The artists's motivation here, he insists, is pragmatic, not conceptual; he's interested in the specifics of an image, the moment of its impact, not in process for its own sake. For him generative techniques are essentially a matter of externalising aspects of his own process; computational studio assistants.

McKeich's next step was his discovery of AfterEffects, which he describes as "a superior imaging tool" to Photoshop - even for stills. With a more procedural approach, nested compositions, and powerful automation, AfterEffects remains his generative platform of choice. As a kind of bonus, it produces video. McKeich's procedural motion graphics use his signature palette of materials, but feel lighter, more ephemeral. In Maddern Square (above) we seem to skirt the edge of some dense conglomerate of street flotsam which is forever dissolving into itself.


Most recently McKeich has begun a new line of work - in one sense another brilliant heresy in the super-abstract context of generative art. He's been making faces, or rather, zombies. pzombie is from "philosophical zombie," a term for a hypothetical non-conscious human in a cognitive science thought-experiment. Like digital Golems, McKeich's pzombies (above - hi res) are cooked up from junk and grime, articulated by recursive coils of AfterEffects scripting. Smoke and mirrors, in a sense, but they have that visual impact McKeich is after; he shows them in large groups, which adds to the uncanny effect. The apparently infinite variety of these faces makes them both more intriguing and more unsettling than the usual science fiction clone-armies. While the artist might deny it, there's a conceptual hook here too; who are these portraits of, after all? Aren't these zombies the faces of those studio assistants, who work tirelessly through the night, those macros within macros. This time, they've been rendering themselves.

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More is More: Multiplicity and Generative Art

Douglas Edric Stanley wrote a nice post recently on complexity and gestalts in code and generative graphics. In it he wonders about "all those lovely spindly lines we see populating so many Processing sketches, and how they relate with code stuctures." I've been wondering about the same thing for a while, and Stanley's post has prodded me to chase up a few of these ideas.

Stanley makes some astute observations about the aesthetic economics of generative art; the fact that it costs almost exactly the same, for the programmer, to draw one, a hundred or a million lines. Stanley pursues the machinic-perceptual implications - how simple code structures contribute to the formation of gestalts; but he only hints at what seems like a more interesting question, of how these generative aesthetics relate to their cultural environment: "all of these questions of abstraction and gestalt are in fact questions about our relationship to complexity and the role algorithmic machines (will inevitably) play in negotating our increasing complexity malaise."

I actually don't think complexity is the right concept here. For me complexity refers to causal relations that are networked, looped and intermeshed (as in "complex systems"). These "lovely spindly lines", and Stanley's gestalt-clouds, show us multiplicity but not (necessarily) complexity. Simple, linear processes are just as good at creating multiplicity. There's certainly a relationship here - complex systems often produce multiplicitous forms and structures; and causal complexities embedded in "real" datasets seem to be a reliable source of rich multiplicities - but complexity and multiplicity aren't the same thing. For the moment I want to focus on the aesthetics of multiplicity.


Multiplicity is the uber-motif of current digital generative art - especially the scene around Processing. Look through the Flickr Processing pool and try to find an image that isn't some kind of swarm, cloud, cluster, bunch, array or aggregate (this one is by illogico). The fact that it's easy to do is a partial and not-very-interesting explanation; to go one step further, it's easy and it feels good. Multiplicity offers a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure. There's probably a neuro-aesthetics of multiplicity, if you're into that, which would show how and where it feels good. Ramachandran and Hirstein have suggested that perceptual "binding" - our tendency to join perceptual elements into coherent wholes - is wired into our limbic system, because it's an ecologically useful thing to do. Finding coherence in complex perceptual fields just feels good. The perceptual fields in generative art are almost always playing at the edges of coherence, buzzing between swarm and gestalt - just the "sweet spot" that Ramachandran and Hirstein propose for art in general.

I don't find this explanation very satisfying either, because it doesn't seem to tell us anything much about the processes involved - it's a "just because," and a fairly deterministic one. Another way in is to think formally about the varieties of multiplicity in generative art. I rediscovered Jared Tarbell's wonderful Invader Fractal (below) in the Reas/Fry Processing book recently. It shows a kind of multiplicity that's the same but different to the "spindly lines" aesthetic. Each invader is the product of a simple algorithm; the whole mass is a visualisation of a space of potential - a sample (but not an exhaustive display) of the space of all-possible-25-pixel- invaders. Multiplicity here is a way to get a perceptual grasp on something quite abstract - that space of possibility. We get a visual "feel" for that space, but also a sense of its vastness, a sense of what lies beyond the visualisation. John F. Simon's Every Icon points in the same direction; towards the vastness of even a highly constrained space of possibility (32x32 1-bit pixels).


Perhaps current aesthetics of multiplicity are actually doing something similar. The technical differences are fairly minor; basically a switch in spatial organisation from array to overlay; a compression of instances into a single picture plane. The shortest (and my personal favourite) path to multiplicity in Processing is aggregation: turn off background() and let the sketch redraw. Reduce the opacity of the drawing for an accumulating visualisation of the space of possibility that your sketch is traversing. Multiplicity here isn't an effect or aesthetic for its own sake; it's intrinsically linked to one of the defining qualities of generative systems - their creation of large but distinctive spaces of potential. Multiplicity is again a way to literally sense that space; but also, since it almost never exhausts or saturates that space, it points to an open, ongoing multiplicity; it actualises a subset of a virtual multiplicity, and shows us (as in Every Icon) how traversing that space is only a question of specifics and contingencies. Multiplicity says "and so on"; an actual gesture towards the virtual.

Multiplicity refers to the specific space of potential in any single system, by actualising a subset of points within it; but it also metonymically refers to an even wider space of potential, which is the one that all computational generative art - and in fact all digital culture - traverses. Because of course any system can be tweaked and changed, no chunk of code is immutable or absolute, the machines of the Processing pool are ever-changing things that collectively sample the space of all possible (generative) computation. Just as it refers directly to the space of potential of its own (local) system, generative multiplicity alludes to the unthinkable space-of-spaces that contains that system - a space the system gradually traverses with every change in its code.

This, for me, explains the aesthetic and cultural charge that multiplicity carries. It's a gesture towards an abstract, unthinkable figure; an aesthetics of the virtual, in the Bergson / Deleuze sense of the word. What's more this particular form of virtuality, or possibility - the one accessable through code and computation - is at the core of digital culture and our contemporary situation. Generative multiplicity is, quite literally, a visualisation of that figure.

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Pieces of PerthDAC

Final catch-up post from Perth, this time focusing on the DAC conference. It was probably fortunate that most presenters ignored the theme - "The Future of Digital Media Culture" - and as a result there was a wide diversity of art and thought presented. You can read some other (more punctual) responses from Mary Flanagan and Kristy Dena among others. Here are a few of my impressions.

Fox Harrell's GRIOT system is a generative poetry/narrative engine modelled on African diasporic orature. Harrell's work crosses cultural, linguistic and formal/computational domains with impressive ease, and offers a reflective and constructive response to the philosophical critiques of computing culture presented by Phil Agre (for example). He shows how a generative model or ontology can be constructed reflectively or critically, without losing sight of the pleasure and poetics of generativity itself.

Su Ballard gave an interesting paper on the work of New Zealand artist Douglas Bagnall, who was news to me. In Bagnall's Film-Making Robot (2004) webcams mounted on on Wellington buses collect video, then upload it wirelessly to a central server, where the "robot" - neural-network software - analyses the composition of individual frames, classifying them on the basis of some seriously received aesthetic wisdom. Out of this tongue-in-cheek Modernist engine comes abject, jittering, mundane "films" that nonetheless reflect the compositional training of the robot. Bagnall's deadpan, AI-powered deconstruction of the project of aesthetics continues in Cloud Shape Classifier and the latest Mimetic Television, a device that "watches" soap operas and synthesises new video based on frame-difference statistics. Sort of like Jason Salavon's Everything, All at Once, but with an embedded artificial agency; see also Nicolas Baginsky's connectionist robotic musicians, The Three Sirens.

Other generative-flavoured presentations included Jason Lewis of Obx Labs, who presented his interactive / generative digital poetry projects and the NextText library, a Java library for real-time dynamic typography apparently coming soon to Processing. Karl D. D. Willis presented his elegant interactive environment Light Tracer, and TwelvePixels, a pixel-art app for mobile phones; his related paper on "open interactions" is also worth a look.

Keith Armstrong presented a manifesto for "grounded media," a media arts practice that seeks to respond to an ecological crisis "perpetuated by our sense of separation from the material and immaterial ecologies upon which we depend." Armstrong's work foregrounds our material commonalities as well as their articulation with and through digital mediation and representation. His 2007 work InStep illustrates this elegantly; a foot bandage embedded with soft sensors transduces walking into haptic impulses sent to a separate, hand-held sculptural form. Working in pairs, participants gain a sense of another's "imprint upon the ground." Perhaps Armstrong's philosophy addresses the question I put to Toxi recently about sustainability and generative design?

Finally, Simon Penny's paper "Experience and Abstraction" made one of the strongest critical statements of the conference. It continues Penny's sustained critique of the ideologies embedded in technology, focusing especially on its tendencies towards disembodiment, abstraction and generality. Penny sets these against a sense of art as embodied, concrete and specific, and questions the ability of art practice to effectively work against this technological grain. Penny's position is a bit glass-half-empty for me, but it stood as an important challenge to some of the more technophilic tendencies at PerthDAC.

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The Self-Made Tapestry - Philip Ball

I'm currently in Melbourne, working with the CEMA group at Monash Uni. Among other things, we've been talking about artificial ecosystems, growth, morphogenesis and self-organisation - and I've been working on a generative art piece that has had me casting around for models and mechanisms. Jon McCormack passed me Philip Ball's 2001 book, The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature.

The book looks at morphogenesis - the self-creation of form - in physical and biological systems, and computational models. It updates the work of D'Arcy Thompson, whose 1917 book On Growth and Form showed that natural forms could often be explained as products of dynamic physical interactions as much as adaptation or evolution; for example, a seashell spiral emerges as a result of the growth rate of the organism living inside it. Ball takes a similar approach to morphogenesis, in that he treats physical systems and living systems as fundamentally interlinked, often examining the material mechanisms in biological form. Unlike Thompson though, he has a modern reservoir of complex-systems science, biology and physics to draw on. In a great piece of pop-science writing, Ball knits together a wide range of work under a useful set of headings, and the text is full of enticing illustrations. The image below is by Eshel Ben-Jacob, whose bacterial growth work is featured extensively in the book.


It's a treasure trove for the generative artist/designer; flick through until you find an illustration that catches your eye - maybe a bacterial growth form, a reaction-diffusion system, or fracture patterns - and then read up on the morphogenetic models involved. Generative clip art? Not quite; Ball's text explains the principles and processes clearly, but links them organically to each other through systemic properties: symmetry breaking, bifurcation, fractal dimension and so on. While there are verbal descriptions of plenty of generative algorithms, understanding them really requires coming to grips with the underlying models and their shared characteristics.

Ball also talks explicitly about the use of computational models, which play an important role in the book. This is especially important for anyone using the models as (generative) ends in themselves, rather than empirical devices. Ball clarifies the scientific sense of "model" as something selective and partial, rather than representational or exhaustive: there are plenty of things that such models omit, either because it's too hard to include them, or they don't seem to influence the outcome. Along the same lines, some (maybe all) phenomena can be modelled effectively in several different ways, using different assumptions and techniques. Conversely, the interrelations between morphogenetic systems often come down to shared models, cases where pattern formation in different domains (say, fracture patterns and plant growth) can be modelled using similar, often very simple, techniques.

I've been critical in the past of the simplistic models used by generative artists - but also argued that generative art's ability to play with models (creatively and intelligently) is what makes it interesting. So my recommendation here is half creative and half critical; in other words it's got eye-candy (bacterial eye candy even) as well as substantial model-y goodness.

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Generative Art, Virtuosity, and the Neo-Baroque

In her book Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Angela Ndalianis argues that "mainstream cinema and other entertainment media are imbued with a neo-baroque poetics". She draws parallels including an emphasis on sensation, pleasure and the spectacle, serial narrative forms, immersive intertextuality and cross-platform "story worlds," and an aesthetics of virtuosity drawing on scientific and technological change. I'm still digesting these ideas but I'm interested in how they could be applied to generative / data art. I owe the link to Timothy Jaeger, who pulls the neo-baroque into his (free!) book on VJ culture. Jaeger suggests that the virtuosity, technical self-consciousness, and affective qualities Ndalianis sees in fx-driven cinema are also present in VJ culture and practice.


For now I'll focus on virtuosity. Ndalianis analyses the quadratura ceiling paintings by artists such as Andrea Pozzo, which use perspective techniques to make illusions extending architectural space into the heavens. Pozzo's work is a virtuoso application of one-point perspective, a then-new technique. The image above shows his ceiling at the Church of S. Ignazio (1691-1694). The illusion is both a sensory delight and a display of technical mastery; those two moments coexist in our response. Ndalianis draws parallels with the "technological bravura" of Jurassic Park, which also indulges in spectacular but reflexive illusions.

Could we draw a similar parallel with generative art? I'm thinking mainly of the lush, maximalist strain pursued by artists such as Robert Hodgin and Marius Watz - but perhaps more generally as well. On the surface at least there are some similarities. These works are all about sensory pleasure - especially audio/visual interplay, which links up to the embodied pleasure "networks" of the club environment (eg Watz' Illuminations for club Transmediale (below)). Definitely neo-baroque. Visual density and complexity is another hallmark; like Pozzo's ceiling these are immersive, teeming spatial fields. What about reflexivity? This scene is marked by the artists' open interests (and pleasure) in technique; and its aesthetics are also displays of both construction and skill. This is 3D that is quite happy to look like 3D (unlike some of the more imperceptible Hollywood fx). Yet some features of generative art don't seem neo-baroque by Ndalianis' formulation. Illusion, a clear link between baroque painting and digital cinema, doesn't feature in generative art - unless we consider the toy worlds of (for eg) Magnetosphere as a kind of illusion without an original; if Hollwood persists in stitching the constructed into the photographic "real", maybe generative art (along with gaming) has crossed over into pure simulation?


Among other things this analysis questions my own theoretical line on generative art, which has emphasised the underlying system and the structures of (rather than the act of) simulation. Susanne Jaschko has written (approvingly) of the "retinal" quality of generative art, and this seems aligned with a neo-baroque perspective, focusing the pleasures of the generated surface. Virtuosity offers one link between system and surface - where the system is a cool-for-its-own-sake display of technical skill. I think there's more to it than that, but perhaps there need not be?

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Procedurally Hip: Generative Motion Graphics

The title sequence for the latest Bond film Casino Royale is one of its high points (which admittedly is not saying much). It's a stylish motion graphics confection: stencilled rotoscoping, shatters with simulated physics, prominent Saul Bass references. More interesting for me, some of it appeared to use classic generative techniques, shape grammars and branching recursion. Playing card iconography grows into curvy tendrils and later, Mandelbrot-like blobs. There's some general info online but not much on specific techniques - are there Inferno plugins for doing recursive geometry? Did the designers do some custom coding? The sequence was directed by Daniel Kleinman and designed by William Bartlett and Adam Parry at Framestore CFC.


Procedural aesthetics in motion graphics are nothing new - Saul Bass used (analog, optical) procedural techniques. But the Casino Royale titles coincide with a recent trend towards custom coded generative and procedural elements in commercial motion graphics. See for example the Nike 'One' ads by Motion Theory and more recently the Audi TT teaser from Universal Everything & Toxi (which now has a making of video). I'm certainly not the first to observe that code-based tools like Processing are gaining a foothold in genres dominated by proprietary tools like AfterEffects and Shake.

I've started talking about this trend with my students, as a way to argue for why they need to learn to code (and initially at least, learn Processing). It works as an argument because motion graphics as a form is, for many of my undergrads, the sexiest thing around. It's the high-speed flagship of commercial visual culture - where new styles emerge, proliferate, and are superseded within a few weeks. Which is why this generative trend (if that 's what it is) is all the more interesting: is motion graphics going to chew through generative techniques like they're last year's hottest AfterEffects filter? Or will tools like Processing actually change the practice in this field? Custom code holds the potential for more aesthetic diversity, but how will that fit with the trend-driven visual economy of commercial motion graphics? What about the open source ethos? Whatever, it's bound to look really cool. And that's the main thing, right?

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going DEAF: Sound, Image, Matter, Form

I'm in Rotterdam, briefly, for DEAF07 - a little taste of the European new media festival scene. Synaesthetic media has been a minor theme - primed perhaps by the train trip from Amsterdam airport to Rotterdam; I had a hunch that minimal European techno would go nicely with the gliding green planes of the Dutch landscape. I was right: superb - though no doubt the jet lag helped, and of course I probably got the idea from Michel Gondry in the first place. My soundtrack was by The Field and Ellen Allien and Apparat.


A kind of material synaesthesia from Canadian artist Thomas McIntosh, whose Ondulation is one of the standout works in the DEAF exhibition. The work uses water as a connective medium between sound and light. Amplified tones create standing waves in a large shallow pool of water; lights reveal and reflect the wave patterns. Ondulation parallels earlier work exploring sound, vibration and form, especially Hans Jenny's cymatics and the late-60s cybernetic sculptures of Wen-Ying Tsai. The documentation of Ondulation is nice, but the scale and material presence of the work is much more powerful; it's an elegant, non-computational way to achieve the kind of tightly fused AV that many other artists are currently exploring. It feels deeply retro - it's essentially a programmatic son-et-lumiere show - and very contemporary; the visuals reference (and totally surpass) digital sound visualisations.


Roman Kirschner's work Roots, another dynamic / generative sculpture, also stood out for me. More cybernetic influences here: Roots draws on cybernetician Gordon Pask's experiments with growing conductive metal filaments in a solution. Pask showed that a device can "grow" a new sensor adapted to its input - something that remains beyond the capacity of most computational systems (see this paper from Peter Cariani). Roots mines the aesthetic potential of Pask's technique: filaments branch, curl and intersect, suspended in an orange-brown haze and streaming dark, viscous clouds. As Kirschner points out their growth and disintegration both shapes and is shaped by changes in the electrical current flowing through them. There's material synaesthesia here too: the voltage at each filament drives a simple analog sonification of those electrical transformations. Unlike Ondulation, the scale of the work is small and intimate, but both works have the same feeling of encounter, a sort of physical self-evidence often absent in computational, screen-based work.

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Computational Nature Studies

The ABC's new arts show is about landscape painting; in the first episode aired last week, John Wolseley worked with three Bendigo artists at an old mine site. For mainstream arts TV it was actually pretty good, thanks largely to Wolseley's eccentric persona - somewhere between British naturalist and deep ecology shaman. His ethos also struck me, based around an experiential and material immersion in the landscape. At one point he scraped his canvas over some charred saplings, "collaborating" with them to arrive at a scratchy charcoal underlayer of the developing work.

Over the weekend I visited the coast and wondered about generative art as a medium for responding to landscape. I can't grind up local ochres for a nice impasto, so where does that leave me? Alienated, blinking in the sunlight, laptop plein-air? I did a quick experiment, studying the textures of the surrounding casurina forest and coding up a simple drawing machine in Processing. As in drawing, I worked from close observation, but it was synoptic, rather than specific; looking for patterns, tendencies, signatures, rather than tracing details. And to respond the generative artist has to find a procedure or algorithm, rather than an image - a way of making something. That gap between observation and procedure is productive in itself. Observation constantly challenges the representational ability of the algorithm: the lichen that grows on the casurina trunks is a crucial visual element in that texture, but the procedure I wrote was focused on growing trunks, not lichen. One path leads towards more detailed simulation; another could be to treat the model as a sketch or diagram - a looser and perhaps more poetic representation.


Jon McCormack's work has been exploring this territory for years; Eden, Morphogenesis (pictured) and the latest Bloom are all responses to a specific (Australian) landscape. The audio ecosystem of Eden was inspired by a visit to Litchfield National Park in the Northern Territory. Morphogenesis and Bloom come from more detailed studies of native plants, which are modelled then slightly mutated. McCormack's earlier Turbulence was an all-out digital hypernature; these latest works are crypic variants, rather than fantastic monsters. By "detuning" the model, these nature studies interact with their originals to set up a kind of uncanny interference pattern.

Way back in 1994 McCormack argued for the role of the computational medium as a way of knowing about the world: "You might expect that my ideas about the world are introverted around the machine, in fact the opposite is true. The computer has shown me things about the world that I could not have known, understood or seen any other way. I see and appreciate nature in a fundamentally different way than before." (Wild essay) Is this still true of the Flash/Processing generation of artists? The current aesthetic seems to reflect an environment that is predominantly urban, networked and social. Any exceptions come to mind? Where are the new computational nature studies?

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Jonathan McCabe - Very Cellular Automata

A new year, and another exhibition from Jonathan McCabe at Canberra gallery/cafe The Front. The show, Travelling Wave, was shared with painter Luke Nilsen; it included some collaborative canvases, with Nilsen painting over McCabe's digital patterns, and new works from McCabe's Butterfly Origami and Nervous States processes. But also on the (very crowded) walls were images from a new McCabe process, based on cellular automata. In themselves the images are chunks of psychedelic maximalism, similar to McCabe's earlier work. But once again the real hook here is the mind bending and unusually rich generative process.

The generative system involves four linked cellular automata - think of them as layers. "Linked" because at each time step, a cell's state depends both on its neighbours in that layer, and on the states of the corresponding cells in the other three layers. Something like a three-dimensional CA, but not quite; the four layers influence each other through a weighted network of sixteen connections (a bit like a neural net). The pixels in the output image use three of the four CA layers for their red, green and blue values. (The images here show the full image on the left, and a 1:1 detail on the right)



As in a conventional CA, each cell looks to its neighbours to determine its future state. This is a "totalistic" CA, which means each simply sums the values of its neighbours, then changes its state based on a table of transition rules. Now for the really good part: each cell also uses its recent history as an "offset" into that transition table. In other words, the past states of a cell transform the rules that cell is using. The result is a riot of feedback cycles operating between state sequences and rulesets; stable or periodically oscillating regions form, bounded by membrane-like surfaces where these feedback cycles compete. Structures even form inside the membranes - rule/state networks that can only exist between other zones.



The images reinforce the biological analogy, but philosophically (ontologically?) this system is even wilder. It's inspiring to see a formal system where "the rules" are local and variable, rather than global and static. The way things are (or have just been) controls the rules that determine how things will be next - that much is historical relativism I suppose. But here we see regions of self-perpetuating but incompatible realities, competing for space - even states of being that only emerge where two or more reality-attractors meet. An ecology of ontologies, if you will.

McCabe has put up a page with lots of these images, including full resolution (2048x2048) jpegs.

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