“Additionally, all artistic structure is essentially polyphonic; it evolves not in a single line of thought, but in several superimposed strands at once.”
from The Hidden Order of Art” by Anton Ehrenzweig
The idea of maze or trails of options is an interesting comparison to what it is ants do best, forage. Ants are fairly simple creatures who manage to complete ultimately complex tasks. Imagine a bunch of ants wandering around each independently making decisions and each leading a trail of pheromones behind them. Now say one ant stumbles into a picnic, completely by accident as ants don’t have senses which lead the to food, and then a second ant also completely by accident comes to the same picnic. The pheromone trail they both walked is now doubly active and a third ant and a forth ant follow and are lead to food. This continues until there is a nearly singular path and all the food is eaten or gathered and taken to their nest and then the process begins again with blind searching and chance. Art it seems may begin in the same way perhaps clumsy at first and without a plan in mind equipped instead with the ability to make simple decisions (equivalent to that of the ant deciding to walk right or left) until you have stumbled into something that is a success for the time. And perhaps another person is making the same discovery making it easier and easier for more and more people to join until the thing everyone has been working on is exhausted and the process starts all over again.
An applet which demonstrations the formations of paths in foraging ants can be found here.
“An artist in a sense does not differentiate experience into objects. Everything is a field or maze, and you get that maze, serially, in the salt mine in that one goes from point to point. The seriality bifurcates: some paths go somewhere, some don’t. You just follow and what you’re left with is like a network or a series of points, and then these points can then be built in conceptual structures.” —
from Fragments of a Conversation by Robert Smithson from The Writings of Robert Smithson edited by Nancy Holt
I want to come back to this quote and write about the relation of this concept to one prevalent in emergence theory: langton’s ant
“In particular, it examines the concept of emergence, looking at its historical origins and salient issues surrounding its classification and meaning for developing generative art.” —
Found here.
From the abstract for the paper Art, Emergence, and the Computational Sublime by Jon McCormack and Alan Dorin… next on my reading list.
LINK: audio from WNYC's radiolab on emergence -
I first listened to this episode of radio lab probably three years ago and have since heard it more than a dozen times and it remains my favorite. Included in the episode is a bit about fireflies in Thiland which sync their flashing until they are all in unison. Order it seems created out of nothing.
Random flight of Pteroptyx males, taken from firefly trees in Thailand and releases in a darkened bangkok hotel room left streaks visible in this time-exposure photo.
Scientific American, May 1976
Synchronous Display of male fireflies in a “firefly tree” in Southeast Asia
Scientific American, May 1976
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LINK: PBS video on emergence -
The theory of emergence has been on my mind since the first class and I think it is probably the best place to begin my journal. The way that something huge can appear out of something tiny is completely fascinating.
The transcript of the video can also be found here.
In planning to start my visual verbal journal for Metaphorical Aspects of Contemporary Art, starting a separate back up journal seemed like a good idea. So, this will be that journal—-a place to generally gather information about generally everything. The task at hand is to take back Art History and make informed decisions for ourselves as opposed to memorizing what it is Art Historians have to say. I have some ideas about where this search might take me, but for the most part I honestly have no idea.