Re: [-empyre-] making a meta-living / a-life & generative art

[Mitchell Whitelaw <mitchell.whitelaw@canberra.edu.au>]

On 21/11/2004, at 10:33 AM, Marius Watz wrote:
> The importance of code in recent generative art (and its applied twin, 
> compuational design) is definitively ideological. The goal behind 
> projects like Processing etc is to teach a new type of software 
> literacy, i.e. artists should be ablt to both read (== use) and write 
> (== program) software.

Yes. Jon McCormack has been arguing the same thing for quite a while, 
re software literacy. I support the concept completely, and it aligns 
with a broader push to understand software as cultural/political. What 
strikes me is the contrast between this quite savvy project, and the 
actual work it produces, which sometimes seems quite introverted. I am 
interested in the potential of this kind of work to engage more 
strongly with its "outside", rather than noodling away like old C64 
graphics demos. An example, on the topic of Casey Reas (whose ears must 
be burning), there's an older work which processes a live video feed 
(he used cable TV) but simply analyses an average colour value for each 
frame, and fills the frame with that colour. The result is a "one pixel 
tv" which decimates the content but reveals temporal / visual patterns 
and makes a strong comment on its source.

If this movement heads towards a hermetic "purity" of code, it seems to 
me it's retracing some well worn Modernist tracks (we've already 
discussed LeWitt) - and actually really recapitulating the history of 
computing in the arts, especially computer music, which has long had a 
fascination with the algorithm as pure "seed" for the work.

A-life systems sometimes share this hermetic tendency, but they always 
seek to escape it, either by making the internal "world" increasingly 
complex, in the hope of emergent outcomes, or (more often recently) by 
opening the work up to outside influences, coupling it to its wider 
environment. Both Ken and Mauro's work are examples here... another one 
I like is Scott Draves' Electric Sheep, in which the graphical outcomes 
are really a residue of a human/machine "ecology" of 
distributed-processing clients. (http://www.electricsheep.org)

Mitchell Whitelaw
http://creative.canberra.edu.au/mitchell