[eu-gene] systems on a scale

[douglas irving repetto]

Whew, I was away from email for a few days and I came back to a 
gazillion interesting eu-gene emails. A pleasant surprise!

I just completed a large new "generative" piece (a giant physical 
painting machine), and while watching people watch/"interact" with 
it, was coincidentally thinking about many of the things in this 
thread.

One thing I'd like to mention is that I find it useful to think about 
art systems in terms of other existing (non-art) systems, rather than 
trying to assign them to a somewhat arbitrary 
reactive/interactive/generative/random/etc. category. Giving artworks 
labels like "reactive" or "interactive" often seems to be an attempt 
to make value judgements about them ("interactive" implicitly being 
better than "reactive"). Yet there are plenty of good reasons to use 
a simple switch, if that's what the work calls for.

Here are some interesting real-world systems (along a non-linear, but 
somewhat logical scale):

* light switch (on/off. but what if the bulb's burnt out?)
* microwave (can act in the future. can change behavior, make 
decisions (food's hot enough, stop cooking!))
* mars rover (action at a distance. occasional autonomy. self-monitoring.)
* ant colony (doesn't really care what you think. will "react" 
locally to your input, but globally you're mostly just an annoyance.)
* cat (impenetrable.)
* human (even more impenetrable, but with language, which often 
doesn't really help!)

I tend to be interested in making systems in the mars rover/ant 
colony area. The painting machine I made was pretty ant colony-esque, 
having human-activated inputs that didn't really do much other than 
introduce some extra entropy into an already pretty entropy-heavy 
system. These kinds of systems are often less-immediately gratifying 
for a casual, short-term observer, but are (to me) endlessly 
compelling if you're willing to give them some time. (Where to 
present such systems is another issue altogether...)

I can think of interesting, compelling works that fall all along this 
scale, as well as many more strange and exciting data points to add 
to the scale (which is really more like a multi-dimensional space). 
The slippery, multi-dimensional nature of this kind of work is part 
of what makes it so exciting to me.


douglas


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