Bill Seaman

Pattern Flows: Hybrid Accretive Processes Informing Identity Construction

How is it that persons, places, things, and language elements come to have unique identities? In particular, how do notions of the hybrid play into our understanding of identities? In what way does the computer change the way we communicate about and come to understand these entities? How does embodied experience play a part in identity forming? The paper explores concepts surrounding spatial/temporal patterning as a generator of emergent meaning. Identity is here considered as linked to an embodied recombinant gathering of abbreviations of experiental pattern residues. It is a collage-like construction arising out of fragments of associated pattern flows. In this sense identity is always the result of a construction process built of pattern reinforcements and pattern updating. Identity as a product of human understanding draws on an ongoing constructive assembly of processes inherent to meaning-becoming. In this definition there is no such thing as an invariant pattern - only accretive patterns that are similar but different. Here understandings are constantly recombined to address the nature of emergent context. Thus, understanding is always an accretive, hybridising process. An expanded linguistics arises as an ability to fragment, combine and recombine particular pattern instances in the service of evocation and exchange - articulation through intra-action. I am proposing a non-logocentric (or non-word-centred) linguistics, with which we can bring a series of sensual instantiations and media forms into language study, not mimicking the functional nature of words, but exhibiting their own patterned qualities. The complexity that arises out of this re-interpretation is profound yet it is none-the-less necessary to clearly understand an accretive, non-dualistic approach to meaning production.

Emergent constructions: Re‐embodied intelligence within recombinant poetic networks

Abstract Computer‐mediated networks present an artistic medium that heightens the potential for an intermingling of the knowledge of the viewer with the ‘re‐embodied intelligence’ of an author or authors. Given that computers can house ‘recombinant’ digital elements of image, sound and text, how can the artist become an ‘author’ of responsive, self‐regulating systems which enable ‘intelligent’ emergent poetic responses to viewer interactivity via the encoding, mapping and modelling of operative poetic elements?

OULIPO VS Recombinant Poetics

This paper compares and contrasts approaches to combinatorics in OULIPO and Recombinant Poetics. OULIPO, also known as Ouvroir de Litrature Potentielle, is a literary and artistic association founded in the 1960s whose combinatoric methods and experimental concepts continue to be generative and relevant to this day. Recombinant Poetics is a term that I coined in 1995 in order to define a particular approach to emergent meaning that is used in generative virtual environments and other computer-based combinatoric media forms. Combinatoric works enable the exploration of sets of media elements in different orders and combinations. The meaning of such work is derived through dynamic interaction. Another group exploring combinatorics uses digital audio techniques. The abbreviation VS (versus) is often used in techno-audio remix culture to designate the remix of one groups music by another, often having only an oblique relation to the original.

Stepping beyond the Newtonian Paradigm in Biology

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers.

The Engine of Engines – Toward a Computational Ecology

Our knowledge related to the entailments of functionalities of different biological processes as they enable sentience to arise in the human is still limited due to the biological complexity of the body. There are two interrelated research paradigms that can be developed to approach this problem– one paradigm seeks to study the body and articulate its entailments (intra-functionalities) at multiple scales over time; the second paradigm seeks to glean knowledge from this study of biological processes and create new forms of computation to enable us to transcend the limitations of current computational modes. The nature and scope of the question necessitates an transdisciplinary approach to research through the development of a multi-perspective approach to knowledge production. Here, key solutions can in part arise at the interstices between disciplines, and potentially enable us to define and ‘chip away’ at the problem set. Central is observing the body as a distributed network of computational processes that function at different physical scales as well as across time-dependent, process-oriented accretive frames. We can articulate the study of the body by calling it an electrochemical computer— a computer whose deep functionality is not yet fully entailed. Historically the nature of the problem has been to isolate a biological system and study its entailments to ascertain its functionality. Yet, the nature of sentience asks us as researchers to take a more holistic approach, despite the complexity at play. These two paradigms then become a long-term problem set that a network of high-end researchers can collaborate on, by bringing different areas of expertise to the table. The notion of developing a biomimetic/bio-relational Engine of Engines— A Computational Ecology (Stengers 2005) derives from observing computational systems at work in the body and approaching them through observation— through technological, mathematical and/or computational abstraction. Where the body has been described as functioning as a computational system that transcends the Turing limit (Siegelmann 1999)(Maclennan 2003)(Penrose 1989) new approaches to computation need to be undertaken to reflect this deep complexity.

Exchange Fields: Embodied Positioning as Interface Strategy

The work Exchange Fields was commissioned by the exhibition Vision Ruhr, held in Dortmund, Germany, in 2000. The work was a collaboration between the Dutch dancer/choreographer Regina Van Berkel, myself and the programmer Gideon May. The central question dealt with the generation of a new kind of interface how might an embodied experience of interface be layered into the content of an interactive media/dance comprised of video, text, a sculptural installation and music? Exchange Fields sought to develop a novel interface strategy by eliciting culturally determined environmental ’behaviour in relation to objects’ as a grammar of gesture that could be used as input to the reacting system. The physical interface system functioned as an embodied intuition. The work sought to tap into prelinguistic environmental knowledge related to the use of particular varieties of objects. A series of furniture/sculptures were developed. Each furniture/sculpture was designed with a unique implied ’suggestion’ of how the body might be positioned in relation to that

The Hybrid Invention Generator

The Hybrid Invention Generator (HIG) is a generative artwork that enables the creation of new inventions through a computer-based hybridforming mechanism. Some 70 inventions generated by me in 3D are presented to a participant. Any device can be “mated” with any of the other inventions in the system (Fig. 1). Ten “genetic hybrids” for each “mating” inventions, including drawings, plans, photographs and movies, and we developed a series of media tests and experimental visualizations exploring the potential aesthetics of the system. The model for the functioning system was highly ambitious. It functioned as a metaphor for an even more ambitious concept, the creation of an actual Hybrid Invention Generator. A threeyear research gift from Intel was central in facilitating this process. There are few systems that enable people to brainstorm about the visualization and creation of new inventions. The HIG system produces differing kinds of results: serious, humorous, surreal—yet by interacting with a series of visualizations/conceptualizations in real time, the participant is potentially able to imagine the actual solution. Even the broad expertise of the researchers involved could not solve some of the more intrinsic research problems. Gideon May, a computer programmer and artist, was then solicited to bring the work to fruition. One of the most difficult problems to solve was developing the mechanism to form the “genetic” offspring of the initial invention models in real time. This problem proved to be non-trivial. Yet May rose to the task. Thus the Hybrid Invention Generator could only come into being through processoriented research—a collaborative interaction among artists, designers, programmers and engineers as facilitated by industry support. The Hybrid Invention Generator premiered at the Museum of New Zealand—Te Papa Tongarewa, in Wellington, 2002. It has been discussed in a variety of essays, including “OULIPO | vs | Recombinant Poetics” [1].

Emergent Relationality System/The Insight Engine

The Emergent Relationality System is a work in progress that enfolds multiple research agendas. The system seeks to define a new wholistic approach to CyberArcheology including new forms of multi-modal sensor hardware to work in conjunction with current sensor systems; a new software/search paradigm; and a novel generative virtual environment; to empower the user to bring media materials into “intelligent” proximity/juxtaposition. This system seeks to include the visualization of multiple kinds of sensor data relevant to CyberArcheology as it is brought into dynamic relation with media elements that might not normally exist in the same associational virtual space. Here polysensing systems (parallel multimodal sensing over time) enable the creation of a form of media object that can be given additional meta-data, and can be explored via state of the art search algorithms, new meta mark-up methodologies, and virtual visualization. The system is modular and non-hierarchical and hence a potentially combinatoric modular format is explored in the following text.

Generative Works: From Recombinant Poetics to Recombinant Informatics

Seaman has been active in the creation of differing Cyber worlds from the early 90s onward. This paper will cover historical approaches including The World Generator / The Engine of Desire (1996 to present) a generative virtual environment-exploring Recombinant Poetics, The Architecture of Association (with Daniel Howe), Engine of Engines (Howe | Seaman) (2011 - present), the more recent generative Cyber world systems - A China of Many Senses (2011/2012), and The Many Senses Engine (2013 - present), and The Insight Engine (2014) exploring Recombinant Informatics - an explatory approach to bisociational transdisciplinary research. He will discuss his collaboration with John Supko - including the co-leadership of the new Emergence Lab at Duke University in the new Media Arts and Sciences program. Seaman also has long term plans related to an integrated network of focused sensing, dynamic virtual environments, recombinant Informatics, and speed of light computation - The Light-Data Domain, A collaboration with Tuan Vo-Dinh, head of the Duke Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics.

Book review:: Cognition, Emotions and Culture Towards the Ultimate Communicative Experience. by Amsterdam:IOS PressUS

The range of papers is rich in terms of references and thus this work proves to be an extremely valuable research compendium. Reading it gives the feeling that we are on the cusp of a research paradigm shift, potentially opening new kinds of research methodologies. There is a particular set of texts that could be valuable for this research community that I believe have not been mentioned. Lewin (1936) in Principles of Topological Psychology, suggests that one can potentially join multiple differing topologies together—topological psychological spaces, simulation spaces, and physical/actual motion spaces. Lewin discusses how a series of psychological vectors might form a topology (p. 54). Certainly we can apply this concept to an n-dimensional approach to the subject of communication/presence. Another seminal book that might be considered is Agre’s (1997) Computation and Human Experience. From Communication to Presence at times situates the complexity of its subject in a similar manner to that of Agre—“Critical reflection on computer work is reflection upon both its material and semiotic dimensions, both synchronically and historically” (p. 15). One might add some additional categories of presence to those discussed by Riva—proto presence (self vs. nonself); core presence (self vs. present external world); and extended presence (self relative to present external world). Two additional categories and their relevance to this chapter are bio-presence and a physics of presence, although my suggestions might potentially fall under extended presence. Where the author presents a form of dichotomy between self and nonself, I would like to point to a nondualistic stance—or a subject/object unity as derived through a greater specificity about how space is parsed. The notion of bio-presence suggests that we are bio-environments nested within larger environments. We are “far from equilibrium” systems that have a strong relation to different ongoing exchanges with the environment, for example, breathing, attending to energy sources, generating waste, and so forth. This posits that the body is in dynamic relation to the environment. More importantly, we might say that our understanding of environment co-arises with our enculturation, language as a framing mechanism, and a buildup of similar but different pattern flows (see Seaman, 2005) or pattern games (see Wittgenstein’s 1958 notion of The Meaning is the use; p. 20). Our ability to differentiate actually depends on embodied perception and thought, thus we cannot so easily parse this notion of inside and outside—the outside is always dependent on embodied perceptual/conceptual processes—or again a subject/object unity. Although one can make functional distinctions, it is perhaps important to point out the complexity of the situation. Another designation is a physics of presence, where all information must have a physics to bring about its propagation. Through Heisenberg we come to know that we