Simple Rendering Complex

December 25th, 2005

Some of my recent work has attempted to create and/or organize simple objects with complex behavior. My beginning investigations have been personal explorations to derive rules and “feelings” by using simple algorithmic ideas and combinations. What I ended up creating is a problematic, inflexible, and non-scalable solution that scratched a rather large surface in creating objects which change over time.

Clay Shirky was kind enough to recommend an excellent online resource on one dimensional cellular autonomy entitled A New Kind of Science. Its a rather fantastic, and easy read into shallow explorations of simple objects rendering complex aggregate information.

Throughout the text, Stephen Wolfram explains concepts of cellular autonomy, and then approaches mobile autonomy as well as turing machines. What fascinated me about each of these systems, is the simplicity of each simple object used in his demonstrations. Also, his concept revolves around the notion that you need to use information of surrounding objects to determine the future state of that object.

This concept blends well with the complexity of networks, in that network’s complexities scale exponentially by the number of nodes, as each node attempts to connect with every other node (n * n, etc). In the same way, some of the examples explored by Wolfram have very limited results, because their amount of connections are limited, but when given a broader ruleset or the ability to change those rulesets based on second order rulesets, the chance of new relationships becomes much more achievable.

My curiosity is overflowing, with combinations and iterations that could be explored through these explorations in relation to other ideas I hope to combine: decay, performance, ephemera, and interaction with real life just to name a few. The inate connection between these concepts and networks also intrigues me, as I can see how each of these objects can be effected by others in close proximity. Exploring which of these “nodes” in the network are artificial, and which are human beings, may render some magnificent connections and new content, that is interesting to viewers as well as members of the nodes.

Additional Links
Mobile Automata
Turing Machines - 1 | 2

Entry Filed under: Concepts and Thoughts, Thesis