This text has been originally published in "[the] XXXXX [reader]" edited by XXXXX and published by Openmute. A revised version of the text has been republished in 2008 in the catalogue of kurator's "After the Net" exhibition. --- Digital feedback as another state of matter. I remember I'm going to forget what I just remembered. 1. The sampling of one reality There is an essential difference between the analogue universe and its digital transposition. An analogue model is carried by a continuous signal while its digital alter ego codes the information in a symbolic way using a numerical system. The computer then processes the data as messages made up of a succession of binary digits. This information contained in the elementary choice of two states of a probable reality is the "bit" [1], sole and unique switch confined in its own world, far away from any "multiversal" theories. Digital technology allows signal processing by controlling the circulation of these messages. It makes the combination and recombination of any objects and material possible within the virtual frame of the machine, and as a consequence, permits a massive generation and development of abstract models. By extension, the access to unlikely forms and data dumps becomes possible and made perceptible to us. We transform the objects, we change nature while maintaining the form and vice-versa. Information leaves and returns by the means of transformations, making it abstract, yet possible to describe, freeze and store as patterns, and appear to us like an another crystallised state of matter. Next to that, the encoding of information adds another layer of abstraction. The clock, mother nature of virtual existences, imprisons the nature of the original model in its arbitrary rhythm, a complex yet minimal linear structure of dancing zeroes and ones. This binary code is not limited though. This versatile and bottom-up sequencing system is able to provide rich expressions which explains why it became today's preferred support of information. Like a demiurgic intervention [2], this abstraction does not have a fixed form but always appears as an intermediary entity between the conceptual model and its multiple realities. During the 19th Century, millennia after the clepsydra and the first reality shift [3], the virtual invasion in our perception of the physical environment and the encoding of natural models was reaching a key point. It would forever change and define our relationship and interactions with data-processed matter. Probably one of the first use of binary code by a machine, is the control system for the weaving of patterns in fabric inside Joseph-Marie Jacquard's mechanical loom [4]. This machine produced in 1801 was the first entirely automatic mechanical loom. The unit was controlled by a perforated card, also known as a punch-card. The presence or the absence of holes on the cardboard would directly lead the position of wires and then control the weaving according to the programmed pattern. The transposition of a model in another referential space is not accomplished using arbitrary rules. On the contrary, a strict set of correspondences needs to be elaborated to provide a working mapping of reality. By changing the reference frame, one could think at first we would loose the sensitivity of the original model. But the direct results of such a transformation is the apparition of a whole collection of anamorphic ghosts resulting from the constraints implied by the data mapping [5]. As a result our attention and understanding of the model is moved to a set of new characteristics, invisible so far, revealed by adding an extra degree of freedom in the process. During such a passage, one loses the nuance, tone and definition one used to know about a given model, but because of the new representation, it is then possible to observe, explore and study new aspects of it. Such a process does not reject the nature of the model but makes it possible by an effort of abstraction to release the essential forms, and to reach the heart of things. On the other hand, because of the nature of digital permutations, it is particularly easy to loose one-self in repeated re-mapping and transformations. Some focus will need to be achieved to not fall into the trap of another "pipe" [6]. 2. Software is not a tool An algorithm defines a set of rules that lead to the resolution of a problem. These rules can be represented by a succession of elementary symbolic operations that follow a logical sequence. A programming language is a set of syntactic and semantic rules which allow the description of the considered algorithm/problem into a human-readable context. This high-level human-friendly dialect is most of the time translated by a compiler into a lower-level language, such as machine code, which is more suitable to a machine that can carry out only a small number of hard-wired instructions. From the algorithm itself and the higher level abstractions, down to the machine code, there is a whole scale of creative opportunities which all offer their own definition of freedom. There is absolutely no steady state in these creative worlds, even though you are working with a limited set of rules, the artwork can be forever expanded by recombining its elements. In this Matryoshka system, it is possible to mix and combine the processing of information in both vertical and horizontal plans, from the software high level metaphors back and closer to the metal in the hardware binary symbolic representation. The consequence is the apparition of yet another transposition of the author conceptual model into a collection of digital patterns and computations, or just snapshots of the work and output samples. In a distributed and connected environment this work then spreads like digital germs, and represents many different pieces of its author and the work. With those data-processed objects, an artist becomes a significant source of data proliferation. These assembled packets become languages of their own and agents of the emitting author. They are human extensions of the body in a virtual shift which takes place in the reality dissolution. A data-processing artwork has a much larger aura than it seems. It delivers to the world the contamination seeds through its author's agents. It lives inside your private digital environment, infects your memory, cohabits with your personal data and definitively influences your audio-visual field or desktop. This attempt to develop independent autonomous creative processes and to abandon once and for all the interactive pseudo deterministic systems, is obviously something which is related to the contamination act, to the virus. This new process is the next step in the evolution of digital arts but at the same time a highly speculative quest for yet another Holy Grail. With the implementation of artificial neural networks, cellular automata, genetic algorithms and alike, the artist appears as a digital alchemist seeking the ultimate quine [7] that will live as an independent data entity in a micro-, macro-, or meta-sea of living information and memes. In that regard, Abraham Moles [8] proposes three key points in order to build the core of this quest for an autonomous artistic process: - Anonymity, the creator becomes anonymous. The creation then loses the characteristics of its individualistic form to become a collective symbol. - Redundancy, acting as its own feedback, the creation, even if it can generate different results, must remain confined in a non innovative process while creating constant revival of the permutations. - Balance between the original algorithmic form and the injection of artistic emotions. While the Anonymity component of such an autonomous artistic process could be indirectly achieved in the dissolution of the artistic ego in a speculative massively joined open source software art project, the redundancy and balance prerequisites shows some problems that seems much harder to overcome. For example, the redundancy question can be arguable or at least needs to be revised to explain that this is refering to cybernetics closure and as such limit the definition of autonomous creation in the context of the original framework in which the autonomous creative process has been defined. There is no way out, and no magical autonomy beyond what has been defined by the author of the system. On the other hand it is good to note that because of the nature of this digital matter and the matryoshka effect, although there is no way out of the system, there is always a way "in". For each procedural issues there is always a possibility to add another degree of freedom to escape the limitations of the running system. Said differently, inside a virtual machine, you can always write and bootstrap in a more fitted virtual machine. The most delicate dilemma undoubtedly remains the balance. While the artwork is built based on a conceptual design, the need to develop technical systems will rise throughout the process leading to a key stage. However, the insertion of such systems has a dramatic influence on the main creative process and the artistic intention. The survival of the process depends then on the ability of the system to correctly dose the previous diagram influence at each stage of its regeneration. This is a dialogue between the author and the code that is complex and fragile and which seems today impossible to simulate beyond the obvious use of anthropomorphic tricks because we are facing the limits of a machine that can only evaluate the structure of an object without being able to attribute a man-made qualitative value to it, other than a simple statistical report [9]. Consequently, not only such an artwork would need to act like an autopoietic [10] machine, but its roots have to be fed by a set of artistic rules providing a complex enough environment [11]. From this point of view, creating an art relying on processed, or generated data implies the need to both work on the encapsuler and encapsuled, on the operating system and its processes. As of today, this work still heavily relies on the relationship between the computer and the artist. As a matter of fact it is much more than classes and instructions which are transmitted, it is also a part of the author, his thoughts, his algorithmic vision, his sensitivity to solve and eventually create new problems, or simply discard the notions of problem solving and meaningful code for a human or machine interpreter, turning software as a medium to express his intention. In such a situation the artist is not replaced by the machine but moved to a position where he initiates and develops a digital chemistry where processes can mutate and crunch data on their own within a carefully pre-defined artistic environment. --- End Notes [1] Binary Digit, binary number. It is the measuring unit of the quantity of digital information. This concept results directly from the work of Claude Shannon who in 1948 wrote "a Mathematical Theory of the Communication" in which he posed the first stones of the concepts of digitalisation. [2] A demiurge is the god-like entity that shaped the world from a perfect model to an imperfect reality either because it was made using flawed matter (platonic interpretation) or because the demiurge was imitating the supreme act of god creation (gnostic interpretation), hence downgrading the original model. [3] The clepsydra is a water clock. It has been the first device used to measure time by letting water regularly flow out of a container. Invented around 3000 BC it represents the first shift of Humanity into an abstract environment that would rule human existence based on virtual information and not on natural references. [4] Thanks to Bouchon-Falcon early experiments with semi automatic loom systems. [5] Starting to appear in the 15th century paintings, an anamorphosis is an image that has been deformed by changing the perspective referential. Using the term anamorphic ghosts, we refer to the collection of entities copied from the original model and deformed by the change of referential occurring in the data-mapping. [6] Very present in UNIX-like Operating Systems, a pipe, or anonymous pipe, is a "First In First Out" communication channel that may be used for one-way communication between different processes. Creating a pipeline is a trivial, yet powerful way to stream and manipulate data extensively. [7] Named after philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, a quine is a program that can produce its source code when executed. [8] Moles, Abraham. Art et ordinateur. Paris: Casterman, 1971 [9] For example, a working system is a system that works, disregarding the fact it is working well or not. [10] "An autopoietic machine is a machine organised (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." (Maturana and Varela 1980) [11] With complex environment, we mean the richness defined as a Langton phase transition occuring between periodic and chaotic behaviours, as defined in some automata systems. --- Bibliography Shannon, Claude Elwood. "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423, 623-656. Randell, Brian. "The Origins of Computer Programming." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 16, Issue 4 (1994): 6-14. Bratley, Paul and Jean Millo. "Computer Recreations; Self-Reproducing Automata." Software -- Practice & Experience 2 (1972): 397-400. Moles, Abraham. Art et ordinateur. Paris: Casterman, 1971. Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis and Cognition. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980. Langton, Christopher. "Computation at the Edge of Chaos: Phase Transitions and Emergent Computation." In Emergent Computation, edited by Stephanie Forest, 12-37. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991.