Image Processing Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 13.1 Examples of output from an iPad application utilizing the Fluid Automata system
showing the wide range of aesthetic possibilities generated by the system when using different
fluid profiles defined by customizing the fluid, visualization, and noise parameters
In a series of essays about the rise of new media art in the 1960s, Edward Shanken
explores the ways in which the first media artists developed art installations that
were influenced by “cybernetic systems“ [52]. These cybernetic works encouraged
viewers to think about the relationship between hardware and software, and the
metaphorical parallels between the physicality of structure and the emergence of
consciousness [53]. Conway's “The Game of Life” explicitly invokes the idea that
emergent, like-like structures emerge over time out of simple rules, similar to the
way that human consciousness, through a much more complicated series of steps,
evolved over of millennia of mutation and selection.
An attractive aspect of CA is its simplicity. Through their discretization, time
and space are simplified; everything happens simultaneously, in uniform steps, and
within a small uniform grid. Thus the complexity that emerges from the simple
rule set governing the system is, in a sense, more tractable. An array of unexpected
structures with seeming agency and life-like behaviors (e.g., breeders, gliders, rakes,
replicators, etc.) can be explored, analyzed, and modified. For instance, the re-
searcher Dave Greene recently indicated that he successfully built a CA system (in
agridof14
990 2
,
826
,
cells) that creates a complete copy of itself in 237
,
228
,
617
iterations [34].
Some artists have directly incorporated CA systems into their work. These in-
clude Dale Millen's Cellular Automata Music [42] and a series of compositions by
Peter Beyls that explore the mapping of CA systems to musical structure [8]. Iannis
Xenakis used CA in some of his later compositions [54, 67]. Surveys by Dave Bur-
raston and Ernest Edmonds provide a more thorough review of the history of CA
systems and composition [13, 14]. Philip Galanter, Margaret Boden, and Ernest Ed-
monds discuss how CA is more generally situated in the context of “generative art,”
demonstrating that other processes with emergent behavior are similarly inspira-
tional to artists, including: Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions [19]; fractal geometry;
chaotic attractors; Lindenmayer systems [45]; flocking algorithms; and many other
 
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