* Fragmentation
Reading and re-reading your comments (especially Ji's) and ideas,
thinking further, I am more am more intrigued by the idea of
introducing some "moments" or controlled segmentation or, trying to
find another word, /fragmentation/. That is, moments in which
something is stopped and then restarted, for instance. Or a clear
change in the disposition of the organization of the segments.
My intuition here is that, while, /probably/, our processes will engage
somehow in a rather continuous or more or less smooth transformation
of the aural space (and of themselves), these clear "cuts" could be an
interesting change of gesture.
Also, I think that this start/stop, pause/reset could even contribute
in making the transformational process of the single segments and the
installation as a whole, more clearly audible. Maybe it could
contribute in making the algorithm even more "present" or tangible? In
any case I think that these moments should be really clear, well
perceivable, that is, not just "technical" in the sense that their
effect would remain rather internal to the installation.
Further it would us to start composing on a different formal level, to
think in (bigger) temporal forms.
A sort of cross-over between and installation form and multiple
pieces.
At the moment I can think of a few "types" of cuts.
1. A clear stopping of all the sound and a restart.
2. A reordering of the segments' positions: the segments would then
exchange the floors on which they appear
3. A sudden opening and closing of some "bridges" of exchange between
the segments.
I'm sure we can come up with more possibilities or combinations of them. ↗
To be clear, I do not think of a /complete/ restart such that it
somehow erases or the new instance "forgets" or neglects what has
happened before. I think that maybe parts of the segments' processes
should /survive/ the cut, not being touched by it, the parts that
"listen to" and determine the long time evolution of the installtion.
Questions are for me:
When do those moment happen? How is the decision taken to "cut" /now/?
Is it the result of a negotiation between the segments? Is it an
external, so to say, super-imposed process that decides /when/. And
in, approximately, which temporal ranges (minutes, hours, days) should
those cuts happen?
I would (of course) ten towards a /negotiation/ model, but I see there
could be many difficulties there. Maybe a combination of a negotiation
and a parallel, deciding process?
{keywords: [fragmentation, segmentation, bridges, communication, stop, restart]}
{hhr, 200211}
I would see the function of these cuts similarly, and that they be audible. Reordering the layers in space, I think unfortunately is technically not feasible (to rewire the 32 analog output signals and 4 analog input signals while running the computers). We might install all four layers on each computer, so that when booting up, we can change the ordering. Not sure there is any other way…
* Synchronization
As I've also written elsewhere, I would like to focus on processes of
synchronization in my work. On different levels and different temporal
scales, in articulation and in frequency.
Processes of synchronization are, for me, tightly related with their
formulation as dynamical systems in physics or mathematics. What is
really interesting about these kind of systems, what makes them so
"special" to me, is that they require an "external" environment in
which they are placed and from which they receive input. Usually in
physics, in order to simplify things, one always considers the studied
system as /closed/, disjoint or separated from any external
environment. On the contrary, synchronization /require/, or maybe more
clearly, always happens /between/ systems that have a specific
activity or dynamic, but that are /open/. Synchronization is about
/open/ systems where interaction with something else is form giving.
Contrary to what stated by Hanns Holger in his comments,
synchronization, as it is modeled in physics, /requires/ that both
systems share the medium through which the interact and "listen" to
each other. There is no separation between the media of sensing and
acting.
Also, I do not regard synchornization as systems only able to
"mimic". On the contrary, there are systems that while having a
specific "personal" behaviour, are able to attune to the environment,
not mimic, but resonate and, since they share acting and listening
media, deform, change the environment. After all, as you probably all
bodily know, one of the best ways to move or deform something very
heavy, is to find its resonance....
{keywords: [synchronization, dynamical systems, environment, openness, open systems, form]}
---
meta: true
author: DP
artwork: ThroughSegments
project: AlgorithmicSegments
keywords: [questions, responses, proposal, comments]
---
* Fractalization
The more I think of it, the more I like the idea of the "fractal"
structure of the algorithm. By here I'm not sure how to get from the
intuition to the concrete.
The idea is that of a scale invariance: that is, looking at the
process from different "distances" one would always "see" or read a
similar structure. But how can this be done? Ideally I would think of
some kind of recursive, reentrant system, a system that re-enters
itself at different scales... but that is not feasible.
Maybe it is a system with a sort of temporal circularity in the sense
that, processes acting on long time frames feed back into fast
processes and viceversa. I will explore in this direction for the time
being. Maybe someone has another intuition?
{keywords: [fractal, recursion, circularity]}
* Memory
An important question is always, for me, the role, the function and
the construction of the memory in for the algorithmic process I'm
working with.
I try to employ a "radical" enactive approach and look at memory not
as a passive storage that is somewhere "else", a storage that, in
principle, may be separated for the process that writes to it and
reads from it. Rather I try to look at memory as an "emergent"
property of an aptly composed process. From this perspective, memory
is Part of the of the processes that produce sound and listens to its
surroundings. A part that is not "optional" or added on, that could be
removed or changed (e.g. in size) at any moment. A part that is
integral to that process, entangled in / with it such that it would
not exist without.
This kind of memory is therefore not simply "passively" receiving or
exactly recording some input. Rather it "metabolizes" it, eats is up,
makes it part of it. I think of a process of sedimentation of the
input into the algorithm. A sort of "engraving" of resonances into its
space of potentials, into its /phase space/.
Questions regarding memory are of course very important in this
project: we are working on potentially very long temporal frames. And
I would like the temporal evolution of the space to play an role in
the how "my" segment listens to and acts on the space.
Again here I would like to use synchronization processes as building
blocks. There is some research on neural networks (biological) that
hypothesizes that synchornization phenomena between neurons could be
the basis of memory construction. Here, neurons are modeled as
(relaxation) oscillators: networks of neurons as meshes of oscillators
which continuously synchronize/interact/react with the phase and the
amplitude of other neuron they are connected to. Some models of simple
synchronizing sinusoidal oscillators are for instance used to model
how the low frequency neural oscillations (alpha, beta, theta etc)
wave may emerge.
So, also in the spirit, of fractalization, I would like to use such
kind of mesh in my segment. I'm however not so clear on how the input
enters into this mesh and how the output is extracted or "recomposed"from the mesh's behaviour.
Maybe the mesh is the fractal I was thinking of?
{keywords: [memory, reading, writing, process, temporality, scale, sedimentation, synchronization, neurons, fractal]}