intro

When the conditions are right, global scale complexity can arise from local scale simplicity. Frank Lloyd Wright believed that once a building was ready, you should wait for a year before paving the paths. The walkways should be let to emerge spontaneously according to how people use the space, where they walk, and eventually see the formed paths in the landscape.

This kind of attitude has been adapted in the field of artificial life research, where the systems are designed on a ground level, the supervening patterns being left to form according to the local rules.

Generation Gap explores this kind of approach as an exhibition installation, where real life meets artificial life. Where understanding the local rules only does not tell you much of the emerget behaviour of the whole.

This revelation has profoundly also affected the way we see ourselves, by definition, A-life has strong parallels with real life, and can shed some light to understanding it better.

John Conway’s Game of Life is a beautifully simplified example of this kind of "cellular automata". He wanted to explore how simple rules could give rise to life-like structures and behaviours. The lifelike properties are abstracted to moving patterns of two colours, that arise from three simple rules relating the individual cells to its immediate neighbours. Conway developed the rules over several years in late 60s and early 70s with a pile of counters, that he would arrange on a large checkerboard, experimenting with different rule sets.


The aggregation of slime cells according to decentralised process developed within MIT’s Mitchel Resnick’s StarLogo project illustrates the ground-up emergence quite efficiently.

The rules of the game of life are as follows:

Survivals: Every counter with two or three neighbouring counters survives for the next generation.
Deaths: Each counter with four or more neighbours dies from overpopulation and a counter with one or none neighbours dies from isolation.
Births: Each empty cell having three neighbours is born.

IIt is hard to see from looking at these simple rules the complexity it can create on a larger scale, when the number of iterations grow to hundreds or thousands – various forms of moving patterns, "gliders", "guns", oscillators and such are formed over generations. For Conway this kind of speeded up processing was only possible later, when his friends helped him program the Game of Life in a computer. In fact, it was one of the very first computer games.

These images describe a simple history of a form initiated with four cells alive. the shape reaches static state after four generations.

Generation Gap is an exhibition piece, that presents the game of life to modern audience, relating it back to its roots. Computational version of the game of life is displayed on a checkerboard grid on a table. The users are encouraged to take part by exploring the rules with real counters, placing a pattern on the projection, and arranging the counters according to the rules. The digital version reacts to the physical by firstly slowing down significantly, and secondly, by detecting the physical counters, and triggering corresponding digital bits on. So, the user is overriding the synthetic game’s rulesets.

Generation gap can be interpreted on two different levels:

A user manipulating the counters is very slow, it enables one to understand and see the effects of the local scale rules clearly, but gives no indication on what the larger scale influence is. The digital game of life is running thousands of times faster, and gives an overview, a global perspective on what the rules can achieve. Gliders crawling across the screen, multistep blinkers oscillate vividly. But when user interaction is detected, it slows down to two iterations a second; just enough to enable the user to intuitively understand small area’s behaviour, but too fast for one to be able to think through the moves consciously.
These three different time scales are overlaid on top of each other, bridging the understanding of the slow and local, to the fast and global.

Game of Life was coined on a checker board with counters, by reintroducing them into the computational form reuniting the digital manifestation to its historical origins in the late 60s.

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The game of life is an old concept, and the aim of the project was to revitalise it to a wider public. It is essentially an exhibition piece, making a theoretical concept more tangible to non-expert audience.
When observing people interacting with the piece, they were very engaged with the physical interaction, the way how manipulating the counters would be visibly indicated in the projection, and how the simulation reacted to the placement of the counters.

It however, was not self-explanatory enough, and begged for further description and clarification. This might work the best as a kind of intro screen, on the projection itself, animating the principle before letting the user in. Indeed, the piece ran continuously, and people could decide either to participate, or to remain as passive viewers.
Because of the overdrive function of the physical counters, the simulation displayed some quite interesting, ordinarily impossible patterns. I found myself playing with it for hours, just to see where these new avenues might lead. The downside of this was that if the stage was left full with counters, the simulation would never reach any homeostasis, but would run indefinitely in seeming chaos.