Cellular
Automata, Undulating Jellies, and Pulsing Bonita:
A New Kind of Science & Art
Narration and notes for Short Film for NKS2003
By Tara Krause
Atelier Mangoworx (June 2003)
+1.714.827.4486
Opening
Class
1 and Class 2 cellular automata never allow any transmission of information
except over limited distances.1
Simple
rules create complex behavior.2
How
then can we ever expect in general to recognize the presence of purpose?3
All
is computation.4
There
is a threshold of complexity where all four categories of behavior appear.
Once crossed, further embellishments have little effect.5
Act I, Scene I:
South Asian traditional patterns (NKS class 1)
As
Stephen Wolfram noted in A New Kind of
Science, tribal and traditional folk patterns are mostly class 1 patterns of
repetition. It seems though, that
when grouped in repetition, they can also serve as narratives, as we can see
from these wall painting motifs from the state of Orissa in India.6
Individually,
the design elements were a group of mounted horsemen and men on foot.
In tiled repetition they become cavalry and infantry.
Then take this almost-female like Bengali design.7
In repetition and combined with the other two patterns, it creates a
force.
Observe
again when this information meets the spiral design from the Bharhut Stupa, one
of the earliest Buddhist structures erected in the period of the Emperor
Ashoka’s reign.8
In
totality, we could read this alternative narrative to the eve of Kalinga, where
the river did not have to run red.9
Act I, Scene 2:
Early Buddhist Patterns (NKS Class 2)
But
what of class 2 patterns those of nesting and repeating scale changes? 10
These individual early Buddhist designs from the Caves of Ajanta, dated about
200 B.C., when combined, approach a nested pattern.11
Yet
still, as Stephen Wolfram points out, we have yet to be able to perceive and
express class 4 patterns of complexity.
This
is our challenge.
What
would art based on class 4 structures and processes look like?
Some painters talk of our palette as a matrixed system whereby we
iteratively combine pigments of chromacity and luminance to tile up a canvas.12
Maybe
it’s more readily understood in terms of non-representational art. But what do
class 4 patterns mean to us in terms of say figurative art?
Consider
this Mongolian nasij tapestry of gold and silk. It was completed in 1302 in
Tabriz for the ruler Ghazan Khan. It
took 3 years to create and was hung in combination with other similar tapestries
to create a magnificent tent for the royal court.13
This
tapestry represented the zenith of the Mongol cross-fertilization of artisans
across the empire, as it combines Chinese and Iranian weaving methodologies with
Islamic, Chinese, Christian and Mongolian design elements and themes.
This fusion and
transmission/reception of information created “an extraordinary [new] artistic
language that unified Asia during the Mongol period.”14
According to NKS, class 2 patterns
do not transmit information except over short distances.
Only class 4 do. Yet
considering the cultural complexity of this tapestry’s creation and use, might
it also be a class 4 localized structure that maintains its coherence while
moving through its cellular space?15
Traditional
Indian aesthetics consider the function of art to evoke rasa.
Rasa means literally the juice and speaks to the essence of the aesthetic
experience.
This
state of heightened awareness is interrelated with the Vendantic principle of
liberation. Of the 8 main aspects
or emotions of rasa with love being the 9th, the 8th rasa is awe.
Understandably, the emotion of awe
from art goes to the core of the psychology, philosophy and neurobiology of art,
vision, perception and cognition.
When
we stand before the NKS code 1599, we can feel awe. Remarkably it is strikingly similar to the awe of
experiencing the purple nettle jellyfish undulating in the open sea’s eddies.16
We know that some jellies are actually self-organized colonies.
And we know that the marine biological system is self-organized.17
More
than just visual, there is a sense that perhaps each chemical transaction at the
cellular level could also proceed as a code 1599.
Could
this awe we experience be an intuitive glimpse of the elegance of an underlying
simplicity that generates such complexity?
When
I looked at the NKS graphics of active cell motion and code 1599 cellular
automata, I perceived color and motion.18
Was
it simply the graphic depiction being optimal enough to create an Ouchi apparent
motion illusion? And that perceived motion then triggered a follow-on color from
a spatio-temporal pattern illusion akin to Benham’s top?19
Or
could it be some sort of synaesthesia, the co-experiencing of senses?
Igor Yevin of the Russian Academy of Sciences explores this
co-experiencing as a result of the brain at criticality with a Wundt-curve
measured dimension of art at criticality.20
Perhaps
it had to do with the equi-luminance values within the graphs themselves, as
Margaret Livingstone has shown in her research on the neurobiology of vision,
low spatial frequencies and the ambiguity of Mona Lisa’s smile?21
What
was the neural basis of my seemingly subjective response to NKS?
The intensity had to suggest some underlying reason.
Why did my neural circuits fire? Why
did my neurons become hyper-activated?
Neuroscientist
V.S. Ramachandran of UC San Diego is working on a scientific theory of artistic
experience. He seeks to understand
the rules of the neural basis of art as a way of mapping the connections between
the 30 visual centers in the brain and the emotional limbic structures.
His
theory is that good art as in good genius hyperactivates our neurons, evoking
intense responses or qualia in our brains.22
The
work of experimental psychologist Richard Gregory of the University of Bristol
raises a provocative question in relation to NKS class 4 pattern recognition --
Does the brain receive or make these sensations?
His
research shows that the perceptions or sensations of consciousness are created
by the brain, and that perceptions are 90% based on stored knowledge.23
So
then in returning to NKS class 4 structures, how can our brains be able to
perceive these patterns, if we’ve only seen class 1 or 2 in art, as Stephen
Wolfram says?
Yet
perhaps, just perhaps, we’ve always been perceiving them, or why do our
neurons fire before code 1599?24
Is it just that we as mark-makers, as artists, we have not learned to
express this complexity?25
How
does this impact the way we perceive our role and our world?
In
his Convergences book, Octavio Paz meditated on the craft of translation and
meaning across languages. He wrote:
“Between
meaning and meaninglessness, between saying and silence, a spark is struck:
a knowing without knowing, a comprehending without understanding, a
speaking while remaining silent. We
can still hear, in what we say, the meanings we do not voice.
We can still contemplate.”26,27
Such
a glorious challenge.
Tara Krause is a visual artist and filmmaker, who
studied in New York at the Arts Student League.
Her work includes oils, printmaking, graphic novels, and puppet design.
Her eight part human rights film series, Women Hold Up The Sky, premiered at the
United Nations in a collaborative project with human rights groups and
filmmakers in Zanzibar, Argentina, New York and Senegal.
Currently based in LA, she is represented by Daniels Young & Co.
in the UK. She is a graduate of
West Point and NYU and a veteran of the nuclear Cold War and first Gulf War.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to:
Dr. Dale C. Krause for his generosity, intellectual rigor, unswerving
support and ground-breaking work on self-organization and the marine biological
system (MBS); Stephen Wolfram for the NKS catalyst and opportunity to explore
and integrate what I’ve been working on and thinking about over the last 18
months; David Hockney for reclaiming
the grand fun of artists and scientists collaborating; the How May I Help You?SM
development team from
AT&T Labs and Dr. Avi Tilak of ATD, Inc. for their industry-first efforts in
natural language applications and my immersion into algorithms and cognition;
and of course, my family, who as always goes to the wall for my adventures.
NOTES
1.
The context
of this film revolves around my initial reaction to Stephen Wolfram’s A New
Kind of Science in December 2002. I
was thunderstruck by the cellular automata, especially the class 4 type
behaviors. I perceived color and
motion out of the black and white images. Was
this merely synesthesia, an Ouchi apparent motion illusion, or something else?
That perception launched a whole new artistic path of exploration that
builds upon my previous work in patterns, filmmaking, oil painting and natural
language.
2.
This film is
intended for academic use only, and is not for commercial use. It is created and shared for the purposes of engaging in a
dialogue between artists, scientists and engineers on A New Kind of
Science for the NKS 2003 Conference, Boston, MA, 26-30 June 2003.
3.
Credit for
Jellyfish footage: Monterey
Research Institute and Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation, Jellies and Other
Ocean Drifters.
4.
Credits for
music in opening: “Cloning
Overture,” (Chris Thomas King), Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues, 21st
Century Records, mixed with “Solo Whale,”
(Dr. Roger S. Payne), Songs of the Humpback Whale, Living Music.
5.
Whispered
quotes in opening from Wolfram, A New Kind of Science.
6.
Music credit
from South Asian patterns scene: “Big
Brother,” (T. Gurtu), Tabla Beat Science, Tala matrix, mixed with
“Solo Whale,” (Dr. Roger S.
Payne), Songs of the Humpback Whale, Living Music.
7.
Original
individual design elements of the Orissi men on foot and men on horse from
Mookerjee, pp. 198, 199.
8.
Original
individual Bengali design element from Mookerjee, p. 159.
9.
Stupa spiral
from detail in photo of Bharhut Stupa from Goetz, p. 39.
10.
Note that a background video is a charcoal drawing
of Code 174826 rotated 90 degrees clockwise as it progresses through steps 1000,
2000 and 3000 from Wolfram, p. 929. This
was done by actually filming the drawing in real time (stoke, step back, stroke,
step back) and then editing it out the artist in the frames. This “stone age
filmmaking” technique is an exploration in the manner of world-class South
African artist, William Kentridge. Inspired
by the work of Dr. Orly Lubin of Tel Aviv University in the mid-1990’s in
which she combined human rights educational pedagogies and feminist film theory,
I experimented with the technique of weaving traditional folk motifs into a
human rights narrative during a recent children’s book project, Eve of
Kalinga. The story by Satya
Palit was a modern retelling of a Bengali folk tale, set in the time of the
Mauryan Dynasty Emperor Ashoka in India (c. 273-236 B.C.E.)
At the height of his empire, he led his forces into the Battle of Kalinga
(now in the modern state of Orissa in India) to suppress a general revolt.
Historians point to the resultant carnage as his reason to begin
practicing Buddhism. He went on to
be an active patron of Buddhist art, architecture and monasteries throughout his
empire (creating 84,000 stupa shrines and monasteries) and sent emissaries to
Sri Lanka, Burma, Kashmir, Nepal and the Mediterranean.
11.
Individual Buddhist design elements of the Caves of
Ajanta from pp. Jones, 270-271. Music
credit for Buddhist patterns scene: “Maha
Pirit,” Sri Lanka Buddhist Chant, Jecklin Music of Man archive, mixed
with “Hanshan Temple,” Buddhist Chants and Peace Music, Music
Collection International.
12.
See Galuszka.
Santa Ana (CA) artist Harry Hamlin uses the illustrator Frank Reilly’s
technique of a 5 tiered matrix of mixed oil paints and proceeds to render the
canvas by tiling the tonalities of the last tier of paints mixed in the matrix.
13.
Photo and catalog of tapestry from Komorall et al,
p. 45, 261. It took 20 days with
200 men to erect the tent for the royal court in Ujan, roughly halfway between
Mosul and Baku. The weaving method
itself is probably from China as are the design element patterns of the coiled
dragons in the lobed roundels and ducklike birds in the medallion frames.
The rooster motif is from early Islamic periods, and the top elements
were commonly used in eastern Iran. The
Mongol Dynasty stretched from Central Europe to China, and lasted from
1256-1353. Our common Western
perception was that it was a time of pillage and destruction.
But it was also an incredibly rich time of cross-cultural fertilization
in the arts, architecture and craft, due to the Mongol rulers’ policy of
forcible relocation and conscripting artisans and artists, as well as providing
them a complicated set of incentives for collaboration.
14.
The tapestry was part of The Legacy of Genghis
Khan exhibition in the Spring of 2003 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
It was hung adjacent to at least 6 similar tapestries in an alcoved
recess to create the effect of one of the grand royal tents.
It was fascinating watching people step up close inches away from the
tapestry to read the details then back up twenty feet to take in its grandeur.
An interesting project would be to create a 5 to 8 foot tall intaglio
print of NKS code 1599 (see Wolfram, p. 740) with sufficient resolution to see
the lacy details for the same effect in an almost emanation of the goddess of
the Green Tara. I conceived of this
detail while watching the exhibition patrons’ reactions to the tapestry and
then later in my studio working on some marquette preliminary studies to hand
render the NKS code 1599 details. Surprisingly,
when one holds up a magnifying glass to the Code 1599 printout from NKS
explorer’s algorithm, numerous design elements can be read such as bells,
tiger faces, various types of crosses, anthropomorphic eyes, arms, nuclear
clouds, etc.
15.
Music Credits for the Mongolian patterns scene:
“Dawn,” (Shaheen and Bhatt), Saltanah, Water Lily Acoustics.
16.
Credit for Jellyfish footage: Monterey Research Institute and Monterey Bay Aquarium
Foundation, Jellies and Other Ocean Drifters.
Music credit for Jellyfish scene:
“The New Year After…” (David Krakauer), The Twelve Tribes, Label
Bleu, mixed with “Solo Whale,” (Dr.
Roger S. Payne), Songs of the Humpback Whale, Living Music.
Code 1599 design element from Wolfram, p. 740.
17.
See Krause.
18.
Tuna footage from Monterey Research Institute and
Monterey Bay Aquarium, Behind-the-Scene.
Music credit: “IGN,”
(Tord Gustavsen Trio), Changing Places, ECM Records.
19.
See Bach. I
find it interesting to ask these questions in the spirit of an artist exploring
the rich new contributions of science to the field of art and the brain.
Just as postmodernism and deconstructionism created new dimensions and
opportunities for artists to explore over the last twenty years, new findings
today in neuroscience and biology represent tantalizing horizons for artists to
investigate and express our humanity.
20.
See Yevin.
21.
See Livingstone.
22.
See Ramanchandran.
In fact, during one of his Reich BBC lectures in April 2003, he even
raised the notion of trying to understand these neural laws for the basis of art
and then specifying them in a sequence of steps for an algorithm to produce
aesthetically pleasing images.
23.
See Gregory.
24.
The looping cycle over the Pacific Blue Fin Tuna is
an animation of the active cell motion (g) from with period 4032 after 405,941
steps from Wolfram, p. 887.
25.
The animation is from the mobile automaton at 400
steps from Wolfram, p. 75.
26.
See
Paz. The graphic sequence is a
radial look at the mobile automaton of trying to perceive being inside the
automaton as the single cell over the time and space of its evolution.
27.
Music
credit for closing: “Worst band
in the Universe”, (Graeme Base), The Worst Band in the Universe, Harry
N. Abrams.
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