Fifty years on, the mathematician’s best known (and, to him, least favorite) creation confirms that “uncertainty is the only certainty.”
<< Brian Eno— Musician, London
I first encountered Life at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1978. I was hooked immediately by the thing that has always hooked me — watching complexity arise out of simplicity.
Life ought to be very predictable and boring; after all, there are just three simple rules that determine the position of some dots on a grid. That really doesn’t sound very interesting until you start tweaking those rules and watching what changes.
Life shows you two things. The first is sensitivity to initial conditions. A tiny change in the rules can produce a huge difference in the output, ranging from complete destruction (no dots) through stasis (a frozen pattern) to patterns that keep changing as they unfold.
The second thing Life shows us is something that Darwin hit upon when he was looking at Life, the organic version. Complexity arises from simplicity! That is such a revelation; we are used to the idea that anything complex must arise out of something more complex. Human brains design airplanes, not the other way around. Life shows us complex virtual “organisms” arising out of the interaction of a few simple rules — so goodbye “Intelligent Design.” >>
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As a cohort within Digital Futures, we took part in an algorithms [rules] workshop that has begun the decision making for our February show title or theme for the show.
We all choose between 3-5 phrases that embodied our initial research into data generation. The list formed is what drives the shows theme. We then split into 2 teams and set among deciding a selection process or system that will create parameters for the title / themes as the output.
The parameters we set are a simple series of instructions. Test the parameters and see what we get....
(Figure 5. A. A lace/Cyanophyte hybrid biomaterial. The cyanobacterium first infiltrates the fibres of the textile and then spreads from it as curling green tendrils. Where does the manmade material end and the biology begin?)
Recently I watched two movies, The Matrix (1999) and TRON (1982), which I thought predicted the future of some technologies and demonstrated issues that we have in today’s world. Incase if you are not familiar with the movies, here is a quick and broad summary. The Matrix is about a computer hacker, Neo, who is searching the truth of reality. He later finds out that life on Earth is nothing but a facade created to manipulate humans. In the real world, humans are basically being used as batteries to power a machine (The Matrix). The movie TRON is about a programmer/hacker, Kevin, who is trying to prove that one of his former colleagues stole his ideas for some of the popular arcade games that he came up with. He believes that if he can hack into ENCOM he can find the stolen codes to prove that his program is stolen by his colleague.
Something that was extremely similar in both of these movies was the prediction the future of virtual reality. Although we are nowhere near the concepts of the virtual reality in the movies, we are getting close. Instead of going into another dimension, in today’s world we have technology that allows us users to experience and interact with the virtual world visually. We have the oculus rifts, Vive, Playstation VR, and google box that allow us to visually interact with the virtual world. I believe that one day in the future, we will be able to access our five scenes in a virtual world. So far we are able to see and hear, but sooner or later, I think we will be able to taste and smell. In Tokyo University, they did an experiment where they alter the taste of food and the amount you eat by changing the image of the food you see though a VR device, the image size of the food though a VR device, and the smell of the food though tubes. The experiment was successful, they were able adjust someone’s taste buds and amount they eat by changing the image and the size of the food. Basically, just like the steak we see one of the characters from The Matrix was eating in the virtual world and the water the characters from TRON were drinking, we probably will be able to manipulate taste and smell of food or things though virtual reality.
Some current debates that are still happening today are rather if World Wide Web should be a generative systems or a non-generative system. Why might a non-generative system be bad and why might it be good? From my point of view, the only good thing about a non-generative system is that prevent people from stealing and tinker around with your personal work you may be trying to sell to other users. Some examples of companies who are non-generative are Microsoft, Apple, and video game developers. This may be a good thing for the companies, but can be bad for the users. Users aren’t legally allowed to do anything with any of their programs. Imagine if our World Wide Web was a non-generative system. We wouldn’t be able to do what we want too freely on the internet. That’s not all, we most likely would have to pay for the browsers and get publishers to publish contents you may have created. For example, in both movies it demonstrated how the world might become if programs and the web was a non-generative system. In the Matrix, we see that humans were being controlled by machines and were not free to do what they want. They were being tracked down if they were found messing around with the matrix. That’s basically how things would be like if the World Wide Web or programs were a non-generative system. We wouldn’t have as much freedom to access or controls on the web. Only the owner of the web or program can do what they want with it. They are pretty much the ones that monitor the users on how they use the web or the program. We also see that in the movie TRON. The main character in the movie had an extremely hard time getting access to the ENCOM because the master program in the system is kicking any suspicious programs out of the system.
Overall, these were just some of the things I had to say about the movies. The movies connected to today’s issues and today’s technology. But who knows what will happen 20 years from now. Also if you are interesting in the experiment performed in Tokyo University, here is the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7zpDGN5B2A
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Paula Ruiz checks in from Madrid to see Vladimir Todorovic's DISAPPEARING LANDSCAPE, a meditation on travelling that takes the Serbian director to Singapore, the USA and Barcelona.
What does a landscape mean? What make us belong to a landscape? When does a landscape belong to us? For Serbian director Vladimir Todorovic (1977), the answers to all these questions might be found in grammar: a landscape could be some place here or could be some place there, some place now or then, some place of yours or some place of mine. It's not a matter of geography but a matter of where you place yourself. In time and space. The syntax of the landscape is what his film, DISAPPEARING LANDSCAPE, ultimately is about.
It is not by chance that Todorovic works with computer code and generative systems to produce narrative structures for different media. He is the co-founder of a media art collective called SYNTFARM, which studies our planet and our nature by digitally collecting and processing data from different environments. He also works as an Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, in Singapore. And he is not a newcomer in cinema. Three years ago, his short film SILICA-ESC (2010) was awarded with a Special Mention for the category Computer Art at the Japan Media Arts Festival, and two years ago, he made his debut at International Film Festival Rotterdam with the feature WATER HANDS, a story about a journey from Singapore to Montenegro.
It is not by chance either that in DISAPPEARING LANDSCAPE Todorovic repeats the motif of the journey: the movie tells three stories about what it means to be an immigrant nowadays. The first story follows a couple in present-day Singapore; the second is about a man who comes back home to Serbia after having lived in the U.S.A. for the last ten years; and the third looks to the future by presenting a young couple from South America in their new settlement: Barcelona, Spain. Perhaps because cinema has been always linked with the idea of travel, we see the characters of DISAPPEARING LANDSCAPE as the spectators of their owns lives, trying to attach themselves to these landscapes that surround them in the same way that we, the real spectators, watch them on the screen, trying to empathize with their experiences.
Unsurprisingly, 'In the present', the first story of the movie, draws up comparisons with Antonioni's masterpiece L'ECLISSE. It should not be seen as an easy reference. As in that film, Todorovic tells the story of a young couple somehow suffering from the loneliness of modern life. But unlike the characters played by Monica Vitti and Alain Delon, those played by Machida Hiroyuki and Bobbi Chen insist in finding a way to survive together and not feel alienated by of their environment. At the end of the story, the couple travels to an island neighboring Singapore where a coral plantation miraculously survives. This beautiful image stands, of course, as a metaphor for the main characters: isolated and trapped yet resistant in the middle of an industrial and violent landscape.
The second story of DISAPPEARING LANDSCAPE, 'From the past', jumps backwards to show us the souvenirs of a man who is returning to his homeland. It's not difficult to see here Todorovic's own emotions, as he has been away from Serbia for a long time. Later on, when the closing credits roll, we find out that the story is based on a letter addressed to the filmmaker by his relative Marko Todorovic, but while watching it, the audience would trespass the screen to live in an oneiric landscape with a wide open sky and the laughter of children playing all around. This segment is probably the most enigmatic yet evocative and complex in the feature. We hardly see the main character as an adult during the story – only in a few frames where he is biking around his hometown – so, in a way, he disappears from the landscape he is showing to us, a landscape that no longer belongs to reality but to his memories, his past, the stream of his imagination.
The last story of DISAPPEARING LANDSCAPE touched me deeply because it takes place in my hometown, Barcelona, a city whose landscape, like the character of 'From the past', now belongs to my memories. 'Hacia lo desconocido' shows a trip to the countryside of a young couple from Colombia and Chile that lives in Barcelona. Actually, nothing really happens during this trip, just a few conversations about finding a job and the uncertainty of the future, but the apparent lightness of those talks reveals a transcendental experience: the very moment before facing some decisions. Some might describe this trip as a landscape of a holiday. I'd rather think of it as a landscape of a hiatus.
If you are a film industry professional, you can watch DISAPPEARING LANDSCAPE on Festival Scope
