Fractal Chaos, permutation: 11am
(image courtesy Clifford Pickover)

Fractal Chaos, permutation: 12noon
(image courtesy Clifford Pickover)

AL+NL -->ART I N F O

Two things changed the ranking of Colynne Roherts in the history of art. First was the collapse of the idea that art could advance only by the reiteration ("appropriating") of existing forms and second, and more interesting, the ideal that "modern" can mean appropriating statements not yet made. "Sculpting Information" Roberts calls this, the press calls it "Art-Info."

The duty of art is to say everything.

Roberts, a mature sculptor, was certainly one of the least-known artists to ever get a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Until her utilization of AL* her recognition was slight, a complete loner... The change took place seven years ago. In mid-career, she began a soul-scorching re-evaluation of her art. She felt she had strayed too far into retardaire mainstreaming and lost sight of what she felt was art's traditoinal role: "social radar." Art, forewarning and thus forearming, "ought to attempt to constructively transform man's biological status, be an integral part of evolution, not rely on the past, on stable relationships of unseen forces, rather, express the dynamics of things to come. Nothing less than an entirely new medium is required for this."

*AL:computer and chemical combinations whose changes and permutations strongly resemble those of living organisms.
We have seen the future and it is us.

Roberts thought deeply about now, about the future, about art. She resolved her art must survive, adapt, and regenerate as biological forms do. The logical result was to lead her to the study of Artificial Life (AL).

"I try to claim the intelligences of my viewers and involve them in an aesthetic dance with my art." -Roberts

AL existed then only in experimental forms; evolving patterns on computer screens, flasks of self-replicating polymers. They exhibited life-like behavior. Were they alive? Almost **

Enough life-like replication and evolution took place, however, to inspire Roberts to commence a years-long artist-in-residency at the Santa Fe Institute. The Institute, pioneered by AL, had already developed the well-known ArtAnt program, the Connection Machine, BOIDS, robotic cockroaches and other cellular automata. They welcomed an artist; "an entirely different point of view." She would develop the first truly living sculpture ...

**There is no clear definition extant of what constitutes Artifical Life, or for that matter, Natural Life.
Nothing is certain except the past.

The rest is history. It has culminated in her monumental "Fractal Chaos." Installed dramatically on the plaza in front of the new General Protodyne building, "Fractal Chaos" dominates its surroundings. Still replicating, it does not grow any larger but evolves in eerily slow metamorphoses. One day a sickly, quivering organic form, the next a brutal metallic monolith...

Its changes are nourished by the information it gathers. Sensors ingest crowd and traffic sounds, radio and television broadcasts, air quality, temperature, passing conversations, airplanes overhead ... Signage encourages viewers to add to this their own anecdotes, poetry, readings from their newspapers ... All is melded by swift parallel computers and translated into endlessly changing form -- congealed information. Familiar fragments, unnameable, appear, and vanish. The surface changes: brilliant color, inky blacks, dazzling iridescences, calm transparencies, gloss and then roughness. The whole seems to respirate, fed by constantly changing information flowing from the environment, and from passers-by. Sometimes heroic, sometimes delicate, it symbiotically cooperates with its reality, its viewers, AL+NL

Can we see the future here? Roberts thinks so -- she constantly videotapes every transformation, searching for: "I know not what..."

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