Re: [-empyre-] Defining metacreation...

["Aliette Guibert" <guibertc@criticalsecret.com>]

Dear all, dear Mitchell,

Saddened my friends, I speak badly about your language but I am all the same
going to try to make me understand...

I stay in my idea of metacreation following creation that appears to be more
innovator (we do not know of it, we wait to discover it as a new gesture, a
primitive event as singular - not avant-garde) ; but the idea of creation of
creation (self-referentiality), which appears regarding the epistemology of
creation (of the creative methods) as a meta-art, I accept it : could be
structuralist, could be deconstructivist, and in any case could be high but
could never be a primitive event, even it would be in matter of life-art or
artificial life (which are meta in the dual appropriate sense -yours and
mine - which follows/which epistemological self-regards) could they
integrate the sciences and the generative languages.

More I think of this term applied to life-art or artificial life, more it
does not appear to me as a relevant global name (I mean as concept) but only
showing to a part of your object.

Or you would tell of organic creative conmittment? "the practice of creating
systems which are
themselves (somehow) creative" do you mean by a generative structure (as a
creative langage of the process not depending of the matter of fact), or an
organic structure (without divide between the content and the creative
process)?

And I have another question: where do you place the environment of the
creation? Is it about the very computer, about the society, etc.? make they
part of the creation " méta " or not? For example, is it about tools, about
constituents or components, about addressees? Etc....

Regards
Aliette

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mitchell Whitelaw" <mitchell.whitelaw@canberra.edu.au>
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Friday, November 05, 2004 11:24 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Defining metacreation...


> re. Metacreation... the term is stirring up some reaction; below is a
> grab from [spectre] which briefly explains my intended meaning..
>
> >> Melinda, something could appear abusive in the term "metacreation"
> >> stricly
> >> applied regarding to life-art and more to artificial life.
> >>
> >> Don't you think so ? "Meta" literally : what comes after, what
> >> succeeds...
> >
> > Aliette I think my intention was simpler than your critique! In the
> > book, metacreation is used to refer to a particular tendency within
> > a-life art - something that I argue is a characteristic motivator of
> > this practice. "Meta" here relates to recursion or
> > self-referentiality. Metacreation is the creation of creation. For
> > a-life artists this is the practice of creating systems which are
> > themselves (somehow) creative. This is an ideal, an aspiration, rather
> > than a reality, for there are real limits on the extent of that
> > metacreation... but it's an important desire in this field (and
> > actually, I would argue, in almost all generative art).
>
> re. a-life as art/science: Paul has already made the point about the
> shared / merged history. It's also true that a-life is far from a
> 'hard' or establishment scientific practice. I'd suggest that its roots
> are in West-coast US culture & Santa Fe Institute interdisciplinarity;
> and that most mathematicians and physicists would still regard a-life
> as a fairly way-out endeavour. This is apart from the basic artfulness
> of a-life science methodology (based on synthesis rather than
> analysis). Nell Tenhaaf's writing is useful on this point; like Paul
> she characterises a-life as an artful and post-modern science.
>
>
> Mitchell Whitelaw
> Program Director, Media / Multimedia Production
> University of Canberra
>
> On 05/11/2004, at 9:00 PM, Jose-Carlos Mariategui wrote:
>
> > Dear Friends:
> >
> > I do believe we must seriously and rigorously define "metacreation".
> > What
> > does Mitchell exactly means with his title.  There are a lot of
> > wordings
> > that we normally impose when the thing is not the same as it was
> > before.
> >
> > In that sense I do believe Artificial life works (or creations, or
> > 'metacreations') are relevant when we take it to analyze some future
> > premises for our society or when we develop a new kind of order or
> > micro-cosmos-inside-the-computer.
>
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