[The activator-inhibitor arnt-swarming CA of William Kentridge's film art] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum

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The activator-inhibitor arnt-swarming CA of William Kentridge's film art

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Posted by: Tara Krause

I just got back from South African artist William Kentridge's new exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art/Los Angeles (MOCA-LA, http://www.moca.org/museum/exhibitiondetail.php?id=364).

The exhibition is entitled "WIlliam Kentridge: 7 Fragments for George Melies" with a 9 film installation in homage to French filmmaker Georges Melies (1861-1938), curated by MOCA associated curator Alma Ruiz.

But beyond the hypnotic poetry of his 2003 film "Day for Night", what struck me was the simple program he used to create this complex art was actually a activator-inhibitor CA, a morphogenetic computation.

He filmed a live swarm of ants using Trufffaut's inverse tonality technqiue. The images were created by the ants behavior. Kentridge used drawings of chalk to inhibit the movement of the ants and then sticky dribbles of sugar (or maybe sweet expresso coffee) to activate the ants behavior.

Here is the exhibition text for his 2003 film "Day for Night": "Day for Night records a drawing in progress, made by allowing ants to crawl across a sheet of paper lined with trails of sugar. Using the light-filtering process employed by the great French filmmaker Francois Truffaut in the film of the same name, the artist applies the same reversal technique by changing the tonality of the film. The white paper becomes black and the color of the ants becomes white. Kentridge describes this work as a screensaver because of its semi-static quality, but the work reveals a stream of frenetic movement created by hundreds of moving ants. The insects’ movement becomes spectral as they scramble and swirl across the blackened space of the film."

So brilliant and so cool.

Hop a plane, you gotta see it,
Tara


Posted by: Tara Krause

I meant to add that some of the images look remarkably like the bottom 2 activator-inhibitor systems in Figure 58 (p. 164) of Rudy Rucker's book, The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, The Meaning of Life, and How to be Happy.

Even more remarkable was that these images were echoes of a particular Kentridge charcoal pattern he uses throughout his work.




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