Artistic Automata

Kristoffer Myskja built a machine to synthesize Cellular Automata rule No.# 30 among other things...

The Click Click machine below, is what I had in mind in Vito's Master Project studio review when I imagined Matthew Wilson building a machine that could in a second synthesize his work, only instead of clicks, I imagined it making several thousand strokes.

Afterwards I kept thinking about what it means to create and then synthesize that creativity mechanically. Reading Rosalind Krauss' The Optical Unconscious today I came across a a passage about a praying mantis, an insect that can play dead to fool it's pray. But more surprisingly, with it's head cut off it can play alive as well as play dead when it is in fact dead. Is that a twisted metonyn or metaphor?  or simply rambling on my part?

(links by way of Social Fiction then Data is Nature, an endless source of inspiration... a true time killer.)

Koolhaas Kube

Rem Koolhaas discusses his winning proposal for Taiwan's new Taipei Performing Arts Centre. The theater looks to bring with it his love of the generic bigness, as the cube is convertible to over 8 arrangements. The cube shape remains generic, it's the audience sections that reveal, conceal, expand and contract... Details in Chinese, sorry.

P.S. Let's hope the Taiwanese keep the ceremonial fireworks at a good distance from this one.

P.s. 2 This is for the 1st years, Acconci's Aesthetics of Information and Versteeg's Design Workshop contain readings by and about Koolhaas...