UAL CCI: Introduction to Creative Computing 2025: ➰ & 🐣: 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.
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.
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
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.