by Aaron Wolf Baum, Ph.D.

How shall artists relate to computers? Many artists employ musical software, video and image manipulation software, internet technology, and many other software products. Others shun the use of computers, or protest the effect that they have on society. But computers are designed to be Turing machines — devices capable of executing any sort of logical instructions. In theory, the only limitations to what a computer can do are the number of computing cycles available and the connected peripherals. These limitations are expanding at fantastic rates, so any image of what computers are or can do cannot cover their true potential.

Most artists use existing software as their entry point to computer use. But all computer-based work created in this way carries with it the metaphors expressed in the software — generally control, editing, and automation — extensions of the industrial metaphors originally used to create the computer. These are the metaphors that have come to dominate our society. How delicious, then, to turn the universal power of computing toward the exploration of metaphors that explode such linear thinking?

I have always been attracted to metaphors in which something seems to come from nothing. The metaphor of the origin of life, how single-celled organisms emerged from non-living matter. The metaphor of multicellularity, how cells form a body. The metaphor of mind, how thought emerges from a mass of neurons. The metaphor of culture, the arts, sciences, customs and religions emerge from groups of humans.

When viewed from a mathematical standpoint, all of these systems have a common underlying structure. In each one a network of many simple units cooperatively create the system behavior. In living beings, genes interact through proteins. In the brain, neurons network through synapses. Ecosystems arise from webs of organism interaction. Culture result from the networks of human communication.

Can we use our mathematical understanding of these systems to explore the generalized aesthetic nature of this type of system? Can we use them to discover new forms of organicity, and of beauty? To explore the boundaries of the human sense of the beautiful, to find something of its essential nature, even to influence it — to learn to find beauty in the alien?

My installation work "Eternal Novelty Machine 1" (1998) creates self-generating alien ecosystem of sound by networking together its own sound spectrum. Complex sound patterns arise spontaneously, bringing the listener a direct experience of the alien. The human aspect of the work is the design of the interconnections between past and future sounds through their sound spectra.

I have more recently been working on much tighter human-system feedback loops through motion capture gloves to interact with other self-organizing audio and video systems. With these gloves, all the nuances of gesture can be expressed and complemented by all the nuanced interdependencies of self-assembling systems. The self-assembling aspect of the system pushes the metaphor from that of player and instrument to one of collaboration. For example, my visual works create new frames at movie rates by digitally manipulating and combining previous frames. The recursion gives the output tremendous range and organicity; however it makes it very complex to control. This is where the gloves come in, allowing the collaborator to span a vast range of space in the most intuitive way possible, The gloves prevent broken eye contact, and the mind quickly learns hand position; the learning is greatly accelerated by the immediate feedback. As the patterns evoke emotional and intellectual reactions, these influence the way the user moves the gloves, completing an aesthetic feedback loop that naturally starts to tell a human story — a journey through a strange universe which can be experienced by an audience at the same time. The human and the alien are brought together in creative symbiosis.