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As the process proceeds, the conceptual representation could also include accu-
mulating existing parts of the material form of the work. As an example, consider
that when a painting is finished, all we have is the actual material form of the work—
the conceptual representation is gradually transformed into a material representation
during the creative process. It is then up to the viewer to form his own conceptual
representation of it.
8.4.3 Re-conceptualisation
The process of re-conceptualisation is a parallel to what an art-consumer does when
observing an artwork—looking at the material result, possibly trying to recreate
the process and the concepts behind it. Since the material form
is
the artwork, as
it appears to others, nothing can be ignored: faults, context, imbalances, and so
on. With both description and instruction included in the conceptual representation,
the re-conceptualisation process would consist of an evaluation and modification
of the previous conceptual representation, with respect to the material result. The
process could involve, for example, perceptually based fuzzy pattern matching and
feature detection, such as detecting entities, transitions and regularities in the mate-
rial. There may be different kinds of discrepancy between description and material:
•
Feature extraction may recognise a pregnant idea that is the result of a coincidence
between results produced by different parts of the instruction;
•
Emergent features in the material may not be explicitly represented in the con-
ceptual representation;
•
Computational or human mistakes may have distorted the result;
•
The conceptual representation may not be visible at all, due to ambiguity, com-
plexity and the nature of the generative process (an irreversible many-to-one map-
ping), and the re-conceptualisation step will have to be carried out from scratch.
A useful strategy for the implementation of re-conceptualisation would be to use
double-linked representations, with pointers between the part of the implementation
components of the conceptual representation and the material result, in both direc-
tions. In the material representation, a layer of pointers tell which part of the con-
ceptual representation was involved in generating it: e.g. a node, an object, a branch
of a tree, a block of generative code. This could help indicate coincidental material,
as detected features or entities consisting of material emanating from widely sepa-
rate parts of the conceptual representation. Borders between results from subpart of
the conceptual representation can help distinguish entities that could form a basis
for the next iteration of the conceptual representation, or help indicate which part
of the conceptual representation needs modification. However, if implemented too
strictly, this could counteract the idea of creative misunderstandings in parsing. But
with overlapping of material coming from different parts of the conceptual repre-
sentation, it may still allow sufficient ambiguity, since the pointers for overlapping
