Conference PaperPDF Available

Creating Black Boxes: Emergence in Interactive Art

Authors:
ISEA2011, the 17th International Symposium on
Electronic Art
September 14-21, 2011, Istanbul, Turkey
ISEA2011 and ISEA International publish these conference proceedings as a
collaboration between Sabanci University, Leonardo/ISAST and Goldsmiths
College, University of London.
ISEA2011 was organised by Sanbanci University
Lanfranco Aceti, ISEA2011 Artistic Director & Chair
Ozden Sahin, ISEA2011 Programme Director
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

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
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










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


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


2285




References and Notes:
 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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... The idea of a system exceeding the expectations of its own designer can be illustrated with the metaphor of the "unpredictable black box" [31]: the idea is that there is a part of the system that may remain invisible (or un-scrutinized) even to its own designer, as the concern is only in how the behavior of the system relates to its readings and how these relations change over time in creating new behaviors. ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Emergence appears in the literature as related to self-organization and novelty. For many authors it is the result of multiple interactions among agents within a system, which generate phenomena that could not be understood, nor anticipated, through the analysis of the elements and their behaviors in isolation. For others, emergent phenomena are related to fundamental novelty and, thus, to creativity. These two formulations of emergence can be traced back to the experimental work of some key early cybernetic experimental devices by Ross Ashby, Grey Walter and Gordon Pask. As a group, the devices illustrate the potential of both formulations of emergence and of its combination. As such, they can help with the elaboration of a framework to understand emergence in the context of interactive art and communication, both to analyze its presence in interactive systems and to design systems that aim to generate them.
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, a semiotic framework for natural and artificial adaptive percept-action systems is presented. The functional organizations and operational structures of percept-action systems with different degrees of adaptivity and self-construction are considered in terms of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic relations. Operational systems-theoretic criteria for distinguishing semiotic, sign-systems from nonsemiotic physical systems are proposed. A system is semiotic if a set of functional sign-states can be identified, such that the system’s behavior can be effectively described in terms of operations on sign-types. Semiotic relations involved in the operational structure of the observer are outlined and illustrated using the Hertzian commutation diagram. Percept-action systems are observers endowed with effectors that permit them to act on their surrounds. Percept-action systems consist of sensors, effectors, and a coordinative part that determines which actions will be taken. Cybernetic systems adaptively steer behavior by altering percept-action mappings contingent on evaluated performance measures via embedded goals. Self-constructing cybernetic systems use signs to direct the physical construction of all parts of the system to create new syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic relations. When a system gains the ability to construct its material hardware and choose its semiotic relations, it achieves a degree of epistemic autonomy, semantic closure, and pragmatic self-direction.
Article
This essay begins with discussion of four relatively recent works which are representative of major themes and preoccupations in Artificial Life Art: ‘Propagaciones’ by Leo Nuñez; ‘Sniff’ by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George; ‘Universal Whistling Machine’ by Marc Boehlen; and ‘Performative Ecologies’ by Ruari Glynn. This essay is an attempt to contextualise these works by providing an overview of the history and forms of Artificial Life Art as it has developed over two decades, along with some background in the ideas of the Artificial Life movement of the late 1980s and 1990s.1
Article
This essay has two goals. The first is to define the behavioristic study of natural events and to classify behavior. The second is to stress the importance of the concept of purpose. Given any object, relatively abstracted from its surroundings for study, the behavioristic approach consists in the examination of the output of the object and of the relations of this output to the input. By output is meant any change produced in the surroundings by the object. By input, conversely, is meant any event external to the object that modifies this object in any manner.
Article
Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present. The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.
The Darwin Machine: Artificial Life and Interactive Art
  • Simon Penny
Simon Penny, " The Darwin Machine: Artificial Life and Interactive Art, " in New Formations, no. 29 (1996): 59–68.
  • Peter Cariani
Peter Cariani, "Emergence and Artificial Life" in Artificial Life II, eds. C. Langton, C. Taylor, J.D. Farmer and S. Rasmussen, 775-789 (Redwood City, CA: Adison-Wesley, 1992).
Strategies for Creating New Informational Primitives in Minds and Machines Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server
  • Peter Cariani
Peter Cariani, " Strategies for Creating New Informational Primitives in Minds and Machines, " Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server, 2009, http://drops.dagstuhl.de/volltexte/2009/2192/ pdf/09291.CarianiPeter.Paper.2192.pdf (accessed July 8, 2011).
  • Peter Cariani
Peter Cariani, "Strategies for Creating New Informational Primitives in Minds and Machines," Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server, 2009, http://drops.dagstuhl.de/volltexte/2009/2192/ pdf/09291.CarianiPeter.Paper.2192.pdf (accessed July 8, 2011).