Re: [-empyre-] Sublime

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

On 25/11/2004, at 11:50 AM, Christina McPhee wrote:
>  How might this
> spiritually organic art, both natural and beyond nature, cast a gloss 
> on
> Jevbratt's desire for a creative work that will instigates "intuitive
> understandings of the data", while still instantiating your own 
> interest in
> abstraction and miniaturization:  big data in a petri dish? Interested 
> in
> your further musings.

I've been puzzling over this... I think that (in current practice 
anyway) a-life/generative and data.art represent complementary 
approaches to thinking complexity. Data.art has an empirical bent, 
filtering and manipulating data from outside systems. A-life/generative 
processes seem to be fundamentally synthetic. They might have similar 
outcomes, in terms of evoking some kind of intuition of real complex 
systems, but one works from the outside in, seeking the system in the 
data, while the other works from the inside out (or bottom up), 
building a system and observing its behaviour.

Of course it's possible to use an artificial system, such as an a-life 
"world", as a source for data visualisation / sonification. Lovell and 
Mitchell did this in their work EIDEA - they traced the paths of 
creatures in an artificial ecosystem, and made "sand paintings" from 
the accumulated paths, which revealed long-term behaviours and dynamics 
of the system. This seems quite different to recent data.art though, 
where the data source is always something "real" "out there".

Mitchell