UAL CCI: Introduction to Creative Computing Intensive 2022: ➰ & 🐣: Lecture 9: Feedback and Emergence.
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The two things I want you to keep in mind this morning are Feedback and Emergence. Both are very powerful ways of creating interaction and media. Feedback is when the output of something is fed into the input of something and Emergence is when new properties emerge when the complexity of a system gets past a certain point.

Let's start by thinking about Feedback.

• Feedback is when you feed the output of a signal into the input of it. It's a very powerful technique that can be used in a variety of fields:
• Audio feedback. Jimi Hendrix used this to great effect.
• Video feedback, the video equivalent.
• Nam June Paik, TV-Buddha. Media Art Net is a great resource.
• Douglas Trumbull, 2001 Star Gate Sequence.
• An Informal Catalogue of Slit-Scan Video Artworks and Research by Golan Levin. Slit Scan p5.js demonstration by Daniel Shiffman.
• Going around the corner piece by Bruce Nauman.
• Tell the story of making audio reactive visuals for Massive Attack in 2008.

Now let's think about Cellular Automata, a graphical way of simulating things using grids or cells.

Conway's Game of Life, Cellular Automata and rules 30 and 110.

• Conway's Game of Life was invented by John Conway in 1970. Conway created it to simulate simple biological life with four rules.
• It turns out you can even make Game of Life inside of Game of Life.
• There was an existing field called Cellular Automata which began in the 1940's. Nils Aall Barricelli was a pioneer in this area. A demonstration of his work.
• Stephen Wolfram did further work on CA's in the 1980's discovering several interesting systems - including Rule 30 (which is unpredictable) and Rule 110 (which has been proven to be Turing complete).
• There is also The Game, which I just lost (again).

Finally, let's move onto Emergence.

Boids, Evolved Virtual Creatures and emergence.

• Boids was an artifical life system developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. It simulated realistic flocking with just three simple rules. Compare the simulation to this murmuration.
• Evolved Virtual Creatures was a film created by Karl Sims in 1994 that showed how virtual creatures could evolve the ability to walk.
• Both are examples of emergence - or the idea that "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts".
• A great interactive essay on complex systems, how things spread - from viruses to knowledge. This area of interactive essays is interesting in itself - a good Twitter thread on the subject. More here and a great list here.
• Learning JS Data - "this guide teaches the basics of manipulating data using JavaScript in the browser, or in node.js." - very useful tutorial on reading in data in JavaScript.

How you can use p5.js to simulate different systems

https://p5js.org/examples/simulate-wolfram-ca.html

https://p5js.org/examples/simulate-spirograph.html

https://p5js.org/examples/simulate-l-systems.html

https://p5js.org/examples/simulate-recursive-tree.html

https://p5js.org/examples/simulate-stepping-feet-illusion.html

https://p5js.org/examples/simulate-particles.html

I'm really interested in the use of simulations to help people understand things. A great example of this is Nicky Case's project on the evolution of trust, they have many other examples on their website.

An area that I'm particularly interested in at the moment is something called Wave Function Collapse, which is very useful for generating maps or landscapes.

Thanks! Time for a short break!
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