[images driven by CA output] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum

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images driven by CA output

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Posted by: inhaesio zha

These images are just a slight variation on straightforward turtle-type interpretation of CA history. I'm planning to try to make a CA-based painting system that will make 2d art driven by CA output (and will post here if that ever happens). Wouldn't it be cool to make an iTunes visualizer based on CA history?


Posted by: inhaesio zha

..


Posted by: Tara Krause

I've been fascinated by the images you've been creating.

Could you explain the underlying mechanism/function/CA of your Jan 15 ant turtle?

The reason why I ask is that this "imagery" --- growing out of the totalistic CAs--- has been the basis of vocabulary in some of my abstract painting experiments.


Posted by: inhaesio zha

I looked at your web site (wow...looks like I have some reading to do!). Do you have a text or html version of your "Insights into a Cellular Automata Model of Abstract Painting (2005)" paper? I'm very interested to read it but am lacking the tool needed to open the linked .doc file (sorry).

As for the "ant turtle" scribbles, the steps I took to make each of them were:

1. Run an ant-style CA for a couple thousand time steps. By "ant-style" I mean a CA where each cell has 6 inputs: the 3 that an ECA has, plus one moment worth of memory for each of those cells, like shown in one of the diagrams here:

http://forum.wolframscience.com/sho...15&pagenumber=2

2. Set up a field of somewhat Logo-ish Turtles that work something like what's described here:

http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-founda...ogo/turtle.html

(Well, okay, these "turtles" don't really work like Logo Turtles, but the way they work seemed close enough to me to refer to them as some type of turtle.)

I gave each of the turtles a shade of gray to use when displaying the trail it had traveled upon, except I made one of them have a red trail.

3. I used vertical columns in the CA history, taking 2 moments of history at a time, viewing those 2-cell pairs as 4-way switches that instructed a particular turtle whether to move north, south, east, or west on the 2-dimensional output field. Each turtle was linked to its own column of the CA output (no two turtles shared history from a CA cell, and each turtle only knew about history from one CA cell). For every 2 rows/moments of CA history, each turtle moved one step either north, south, east, or west, generating a squiggle, line, or jagged step that is characteristic of the bit sequence of that cell through time.

For the 2 images attached to this post, I told some turtles to move 1 step in the requested direction, some to move 2 steps, some to move 3 steps, etc, which is what makes some of the thin squiggle patterns appear instead as thicker, cloud-like squiggle patterns.

If the CA output was driving something less like a simple turtle and more like a paintbrush (or a Photoshop API), then the resulting images could contain a more diverse visual vocabulary, as you put it. Seeing cell history as a sort of painting DNA, perhaps sequences of instructions would drive the visual interpretation system to do things like {copy the selection described by the following coordinates} and {apply the following filter to the selection} and {switch the foreground and background colors} and {select a differently-shaped brush}. And for stuff like that I would think one would likely pull information for a single painting instruction from multiple cells, somewhat like the Kiehl/Methot software, that I read about following a link from your site, does:

http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/m/...e%5Fmethot/nks/

I hope this reply isn't any more or less detailed that you required, and I am very excited to read your papers and, in general, learn more about systems people are driving with CA output.


Posted by: Tara Krause

I've posted that document as an .htm file off my site. (apologies for the lame .doc format)

Your explanation is interesting, especially in framing the simple rules as instructions. And your on-going discussions with Seth Chandler are shedding new light for me.

In making my short video for NKS2003, I experimented with photoshoping CAs. But it was until I filmed my hand charcoaling an evolution, that I felt perhaps it's possible to bodily create a complex generative result. This insight and follow-on experimentation led me to the papers as a medium for articulating the process.

Seeing your work and explanation, one could extrapolate --- a painter's visual vocabulary/grammar consists of stored memory plus real-time unconscious instructions (ex: move palm and baker's tool down to right two steps, allow that particular burnt umber pigment stream to flow through its course/end, etc.)

Regardless of being able to describe it in scientific CA terms, the process is juicy enough that it becomes the vocabulary. Art historian and Pollock biographer, Francis V. O’Connor remarked in August 2005 in his review No. 95 about the Whitney Remote Viewing exhibition:

"What is most encouraging about all eight of the new painters at the Whitney is that they all seem to be following a process that leads to their imagery. Although half of them are still remembering older art, all are allowing their own imagery to come through and try to dominate. They give a sense that you are looking at something happening, growing, expanding from a point below to many points on and across a surface. This is in sharp contrast to the often static art work of the last half of the 20th century -- with its pattern making, conscious pastiche and all-consuming irony. These eight artists come across as serious people engaged in something that can get away from the obvious and take on a life of its own -- like one of Stephen Wolfram's original algorithms, refusing to play out the expected geometry and finding its way down a computational devolvement to a pixilated picture of genetic organicism."

See: http://members.aol.com/FVOC/reviews.html for all of his reviews.

I so enjoy this nexus of art and science,
Tara

http://tarakrause.com


Posted by: inhaesio zha

Thanks for the html link to your paper; I'm reading it now (it's my not being able to open a .doc that is lame, I'm afraid).

I'm attaching a "hand-painted" detail of one of the {ant} systems.

What about digitally printing CA output on canvas and using that as a starting point for manual painting/drawing? Perhaps you've already done this?


Posted by: Tara Krause

I haven't done it that way, per se. But I did make solarplate etchings of Rules 110, 54 and a mobile automata. Some of your ants, crows and turtles would be fantastic as subjects for this technique. You need a high res image on mylar or acetate to begin with. They would also make great fabric designs...wall paper... what else?

I believe that artists Guy Birkin (UK) and Simon Ingram (Austrailia) have worked with transferring CAs to the canvas and then painting them.

Tara


Posted by: inhaesio zha

They'd make great bathroom tile.

This one's pretty much a painting as-is:
http://inhesion.com/zha/ca/snapshot...etail.cgi?a=856


Posted by: Tara Krause

Here's to a universe of breath-taking beauty and awe!


Posted by: Guy Birkin

Some interesting processes and images you've got there Inhaesio Zha!

As Tara mentioned, I have painted cellular automata. I've also used mosaic tiles, needlepoint and Lego bricks to render the evolution of simple programs. Although I do use a computer, the things I make by hand are always based on CAs calculated by hand as well. Obviously, this can be a slow process, and I tend to use basic CA rules for the job (mainly 110 and block CA 39).

I'll be posting some images of this work on here soon. In the meantime, I've attached a "hand-painted" image made with Mathematica and Photoshop (the colours were derived from a scannned thistle leaf).

Guy


Posted by: Guy Birkin

Maybe it'll attach this time. I think the other one was too big


Posted by: Tara Krause

Guy,

I'm intrigued that you used the thistle leaf as your spectrum. What was behind your choice? Could you elaborate/riff?

I've been experimenting with organic vs. synthetic pigments, nature based vs. computer based. During NKSS2003, Ed Pegg Jr., Wiktor Macura, and I had discussions about this. We even found a cool Mathematica trick that let you define colors using some historical pigments.

The palette(s) of most net art and NKS art seem to be based in the computer range. Anyone care to discuss this? I'd be interested in hearing what others think and have found.

Tara


Posted by: Guy Birkin

The thistle leaf I saw whilst having a cigarette and coffee break at work (my day job is biology technician at a college). I remembered an artist scanning moths instead of photographing them, so I thought it would be good to see how the prickly and uneven surface of the thistle worked when scanned. I was interested in scanning as a process because unlike photography it is 'aperspectival'. [The 'cultural philosopher' Jean Gebser described a model of evolving consciousness, the latest phase of which he called the Aperspectival. Much of my work has foundations in Gebser's model, and on trying to show that Wolfram's NKS is an example of this aperspectival mode of consciousness, which is partly why I decided to use CAs in the first place!]

One of the best findings was not the parts of the image that showed the leaf, but the 'grey' areas of the scanner lid that turned out to be made of many subtle hues. I had been thinking a lot about greys at that time: I'd been looking at the work of Gerhard Richter, one of my favourite artists, who has used lots of grey in his works (for Richter, grey is the ultimate non-statement).
Studying colour theories, I learned that greys are equal proportions of primary colours - as opposed to being the colourless shades they appear. This is also what the scanned image had revealed.

I had been struggling with colour because the source materials from which I drew were cellular automata - programs, which have no intrinsic colour. My choices therefore seemed arbitrary, and this frustrated me. But I loved the colours of the leaf scans, and realised that you can't really go wrong with nature's colour schemes. I made a painting of one tiny prickle on the leaf, enlarging the image until the pixels were clearly visible. Attached is the enlarged portion of the scan upon which I based the painting.

That painting was the 'main' work; the image I posted earlier was just a doodle really. I generally don't use computers in my 'proper' work, because of their tendency to drain away the aura of the handmade. But when I do, I try to use them for their computer-specific qualities, whereas many people spend a lot of effort getting computers to do things that look like they weren't done by a computer!

Sorry - I didn't mean to rattle on for so long!


Posted by: Tara Krause

Gorgeous painting, Guy, and a rich post -- scanning as an aperspectival process, Richter's greys, the paradox of handmade and nature-based experimentation. It also helped me understand your paper and approach better (I think.)

What makes scanning aperspectival? In addition to the physics of the process, what is the impact of this on our experience of the result? I tried an experiment this last December in scanning versus shooting one of my monotype windhorse "CAs". I was surprised that it got more toward my intent of experiencing the Rudy Rucker "paratime" of the piece.

Richter and greys that speak. I was so moved when I saw Richter's October 18,1977 cycle at MOMA in New York. Definitely a Stendhal moment. Your comment about greys being more than "just" black and white (on and off) touches something that I've been trying to understand in terms of vision biology & neuroscience: is it in the dimension of "layering" the information, as composer Katarina Miljkovic does in her work? Does this in fact "complexify" (mindful of the pursuit of the simple program), or...?

Hand made and nature based. How does this fit in your model? Is it an artistic choice, or an integral aspect of the process? Lately I've been reflecting on the paradox of my defined rigor in using nature-based pigments in the use of acrylic polymer medium.

Tara




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