(the teeming void)

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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A rare treat last night: some generative art in Canberra. The event was a one-night show at the Front gallery from Australian artist Pierre Proske, presenting the results of a residency at the ANU's Department of Archaeology and Natural History. Proske was embedded with the Paleoworks group, who do palaeo- and archeo-botany, mainly by way of using microscopes to look at ancient pollen.

The resulting works use micro-botanical images as poetic and aesthetic materials to reflect on the residency itself. In one series they're used to texture Superformula shapes, creating hyper-layered clouds that seem organically lumpy and mathematically crisp at the same time. In another series Proske used portraits of his Palaeoworks hosts to "seed" accumulations of tinted micro-blobs; they play on the edges of abstraction, at the same time evoking (for me at least) some big ideas about identity, multiplicity, and symbiogenesis.



Proske's blog of the residency is a wealth of detail. His previous work is worth checking out too - the Intelligent Fridge Poetry Magnets (pdf) attracted widepread attention earlier this year; and apparently they may yet appear on a home appliance near you...

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British artist Andy Gracie creates bio-robotic composites, systems that play out a tightly-coupled symbiosis between biological and technological elements. Gracie recently asked me to write about his work, and the text below was an initial response - a longer essay will be out later in the year.

New media art is overrun, now, with monsters, hybrids, chimera and cyborgs, with real and figurative mixtures of the made and the born, the "natural" and the "unnatural". Miscegenation - the archaic taboo on inter-racial breeding - is revived here in a kind of inverted form. The transgressive thrill of mixing "bio" and "tech" is a recurring theme, and while cyborg art is now relatively old (Stelarc), it maintains its visceral effect because it accesses a primal (turned cultural) mechanism of identity-formation. This is me: that is not me. Artists use this effect as a tactical hook, but by focusing on the cyborg / monster, work like that of Stelarc, Piccinini or SymbioticA can have a kind of renormalising effect; as long as the chimera is objectified, it remains (safely) other, over-there. My humanity is never at issue.

In the late 1960s, art practice began to come to grips with the emergence of post-industrial capitalism, a social order characterised by increasing connectivity and interdependence. Influenced in part by the emerging field of cybernetics, artists turned to the figure of the system - a dynamic, real-time, abstract network of causally intertwined entities and forces (more). In "Systems art" the work itself is a real-time system, a process that performs some quality of system-ness or "systemacity," and in doing so it alerts us to the complex, networked systemacity in which we continue to find ourselves.

Gracie's work reflects the concerns of the chimera tradition, contemplating technologised life, or living technology. However its great strength is that it does so through the methodology of systems art. It breaks open the monstrous figure and reveals it to be not a thing but a process, a coupling, a coming-together, a co-negotiation. Others, such as Ken Rinaldo, have explored similar hybrid systems; Rinaldo seeks to exemplify a mutually-beneficial symbiosis between biology and technology. Gracie's work is less idealistic, but potentially richer in its implications, for symbiosis lies on a continuum with parasitism, and the dynamic networks of real ecological relations operate not in pursuit of some overarching "harmony," but locally, specifically, functionally. Gracie's work plays out the externalised character of ecological relations; his robotics illustrate what is machinic about all ecologies: networks of functional connection. In Fish, Plant, Rack the connections are played out: fish (sound) robot (nutrients) plant (video) fish. None "recognises" or is "aware of" the others, but all are coupled into an adaptive network of mediated stimuli and response.


Here mediation is not a representational process, but a concrete connection, a way of coupling an agent with its physical envirionment. Gracie's earlier Samplebot demonstrates this, as its piezo-electric pickup transduces its physical environment into sound, and interprets that sound as instructions for its behaviour; the "program" here is only partly digital; it is largely embedded in, and comprised of, the robot's environment. This is the beginning of stigmergy, the biological phenomenon where the environment acts as a shared medium which shapes, and is shaped by, organisms within it.

Stigmergy, like symbiosis and parasitism, is beautiful in the way it obliterates conventional thinking about agency, subjectivity and environment. Agency is not local and internal, but distributed and external, embedded in the environment. Agents are not independent but interlinked, and not like the consenting adults of the social realm, but through partial, contingent, concrete channels of input and output. Agents don't recognise each other, but selectively and adaptively mis-recognise; nonetheless they become inextricably, functionally, coupled. Here is the real, important, monster: agency is systemic; systems have agency. Gracie's work diagrams the systems that we are ourselves enmeshed in, and explores the hybrid, emergent and collective agencies that must be latent in these networks.

update: for more on Gracie's work, including some technical detail on Small Work for Robot and Insects, see this paper co-authored with Brian Lee Yung Rowe.

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