Figure 10:
Page 1 of the animation table for a new work chromos where family member 1 inbetweens via 10 stages to each of the eight members of the family.

These drawings of animation tables are so interesting in themselves that I’m planning to exhibit the work in an installation which will include a large format projection of the time-based component together with wall-hanging and book format working drawings and other related material.

In all of these time-based works I process the family of tiles using the filters and image processing facilities of Adobe PhotoShop in order to both colour and texture their appearance. Although this is sometimes merely decorative or playful it can be used more significantly to anchor analogical or structural references that are otherwise contained in or implied by the work. For example this mechanism can be used to both increase and decrease ambiguity or to lock into a graphic metaphor. In Infinite Permutations V1 the colour has been specifically chosen to make it difficult for the viewer to resolve the foreground/background or negative/positive conflict inherent in the pictorial representation of the work. In SAND LINES the image processing has been selected to consolidate the stone/sand identification and create a conflict with the animation which does things that the materials represented could not.

In 1992 as professor of art & technology at Mississippi State University I was able to use an Iris ink-jet printer for the first time and was amazed at it’s resolution, surface integrity and colour fidelity. More recently Iris together with third party suppliers have introduced a variety of archival inks that can print on acid-free watercolour papers. Since 1995 I have been making limited edition prints of images that begin as timeslices of large format tile automata like those used in the time based pieces. I often get lost in an oceanic orgy of image processing whilst producing these images and occasionally even undermine or disguise the CA foundation of the work.

Current & future directions
At the time of writing I have just begun a year as artist-in-residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics and the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex. For some time now I have been following work in evolutionary computational methods and have become convinced they have an important contribution to make to my future work. The thick mists shrouding these particular stepping stones make it difficult for me to predict just how these processes may relate to my practice. I’m also concerned that prediction often prejudices the outcomes of a project and want to keep an open mind.

However I can foresee one way that this technology could be integrated into my current system and it’s likely that this will be the focus of my work for the coming months.

It would involve the addition of a pre-evolved or a dynamically evolving “observer”. This should be able to analyse: the bitmap array and/or; the symbolic graphic array and/or; the “actual” raster graphic display data for each frame or timeslice. It would then be capable of dynamically modifying: the generating CA’s rules and/or; the graphic interpreter’s mapping rules and/or; the display generators image processing filters.

This would be a learning system that would be capable of evolving certain kinds of graphic behaviours (fig. 12).

figure 12:
Proposed schematic for an evolving time-based system.

I indicated in my opening paragraphs that the far shore of my life’s work is completely invisible or may not exist! However as I have implied in the later text I do have some long term ambitions. The main one is to contribute to the development of autonomous creative behaviour. I look forward to automata that can create artworks that a peer group of either humans or other machines will accept as legitimate creative activity.

The singular and remarkable success of artists like Harold Cohen is his achievement in externalising his own personal creative drawing behaviour. Aaron, the automaton he has created, produces 100% genuine Harold Cohen drawings. I believe that we will eventually be able to create automata that will make artworks that do not bear the signature of the creator of the system. That the system will be capable of evolving it’s own personal style.

I leave the reader to ponder the problem of just what the words “own” and “personal” might mean in this context.

My own feelings are that the every growing realm popularly referred to as cyberspace is an ecosystem and that creatures must evolve to exploit that space. Since a primary fitness characteristic would be to hide from humans (who would almost certainly try to destroy them) they may already exist! Such entities would have access to an vast repository of information from both real-time sources and from archives. I find it inconceivable that creatures with such a broad bandwidth of input “sensations” will not develop behaviours that are analogical to human art making.