#scott draves

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‘I was fascinated by the ability of the computer to do the unexpected.’

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Generative Protest: The Emergence Aesthetic of Occupy Wall Street

I wrote this last fall just as the fervor around Occupy Wall Street was waning, so I never really got a chance to publish it. In the spirit of May Day and the supposed reawakening of the movement here is my appraisal of Occupy Wall Street in relation to generative art and emergence. Let me know what you think.

Perhaps the most striking, and contentious, feature of Occupy Wall Street has been its ever-evolving, amorphous nature. In my eyes, the most interesting way to approach the quality of the movement in relation to a culture of people demanding to be heard is to think about OWS as analogous to a self-propagating generative system of emergent thought and behavior. From its inception the self-proclaimed leaderless movement has refused to limit itself to a specific 'top-down' hierarchy of organization. Instead, it is more the product of a decentralized network of individuals participating in an ongoing conversation through which actions and ideas naturally emerge according to consensus. As it continues to expand, the dialogue is bolstered by its organic adaptation, and subsequent evolution, to various sub-movements and localities. 

The original ire aimed at Wall Street becomes a single node in a more complex network in which the original parameters of the movement itself begin to evolve with its own growth. Its inclusive variety rather than stifling discourse and creativity through a predefined system of thought instead leads to a proliferation of ideas and actions. The protest, then, elicits generative behaviors predicated on a loosely designed set of parameters that evolves responsively to its present moment. The results is a variety of different causes being taken up in surprisingly different ways. 

Generative Aesthetics

To take this analogy further and to make it much more simple, let's take into consideration some tropes that are often representative of generative systems. 

One of the most simple and well known is the cellular automata. A cellular automata is a fixed grid in which cells alternate between 'on/off' states in accordance to a set of rules and in relation to their neighboring cells. The result of these restraints is a series of surprising, yet finite patterns within the limits of the grid. Since the cells are 'dumb' they can never evolve beyond the grid and are only aware of their immediate neighbors. It propagates with limited expressivity and the cells can never 'learn'. 

Examples of Conway's Game of Life

http://vimeo.com/32915668

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcuBvj0pw-E

Coincidentally, and in fact, even literally, this idea was appropriated in 2000 by the artist Matthew Fuller into the public performance art piece Human Cellular Automata . He took one of the more famous instances of the CA, Conway's Game of Life and replaced cells with entities that are actually capable of co-evolving with their environments – humans. As he explains, it operates by keeping the crowd “networked, communicating and aware of itself.” 

In his book on artificial life and art, Metacreation, Mitchell Whitelaw expands upon Fuller's initial statement, explaining, 

"when computation is (once again) a human operation, it is opened to the flows of experience and social space. At the same time, performing this formal rule set — playing at being a computer — is an exercise in human connectivity, group awareness, and emergent dynamics."

Video explaining OWS General Assembly

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odFygPMwbIM

What does this sound like? Think about the correlation to this explanation and to both OWS's use of the human mic and the General Assembly. All people are equally capable of speaking up, at any place, at any time, to change the sway and direction of a conversation and even the entire protest. The human mic reverberates through crowds and can shift a group's entire dynamic. As it moves to different spaces it not only spreads ideas but cultivates them among its participants as they are parroted. It continually connects people, through the emergence and evolution of ideas, in a hyper-aware manner.

This connection among individually expressive people that are still otherwise self-aware of themselves and their membership among a group is similar to the typical generative aesthetic of the 'flock'. In a flock, individual elements all behave discretely yet without disruption to the rest of the group. OWS is much like a flock insofar that different people have different agendas yet its organization allows for each of them to be accommodated and supported.

Examples of "Flock" aesthetics

http://vimeo.com/17693219

http://vimeo.com/197323

Closely related to the concept of flocking is an idea of emergence. We have mentioned several times the notion of "emergent" ideas, thoughts, actions or behavior. With a flock we have myriad discrete objects eliciting individual behaviors that generate complex interactions when among a multiplicity. Their cumulative expression is at most incidental to their micro-behaviors yet they each can be integral to the resulting whole. This is known as 'emergence' and it is not so much a characteristic of a body of objects as it is a process where the interaction of the objects result in new observable properties that are irreducible to the individuals. 

The plurality of actions and ideas that emerge from the consensus based movement are a result its distributed and non-hierarchal membership. Just as the flow of conversations supported by the human mic and the general assembly cannot necessarily be predicted neither can how the protest itself manifests nationally, or even globally. 

The People United, Will Never Be Restricted

Now, let's return to the more basic non-human CA and contrast that one with the human one. Depending on the complexity of a system, a CA can exhibit enough variety that it can essentially at least simulate emergence. But for the sake of argument imagine that the simpler CA's are analogous to what OWS is in opposition to. Imagine a 'democratic' or 'capitalist' system as the parameters in which any pattern of thought that emerges from it is representative of that title. All thought, then, is restricted. 

Let's expand on this using another analogy from generative art: the genotype/phenotype. Early examples of computer animated generative art , including the work of Karl Sims and William Latham,  were inspired by biological or genetic processes and would create a code that acted as a blueprint for a specific type of outcome. A genotype is the genetic make up of something that results in its "phenotype" or the observable characteristics of a living organism. Each result is unique but always retains a familial similarity. The genes of an apple will always result in an apple, even if every apple doesn't look exactly the same. 

Examples of Work by William Latham:

http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01whl/themes/return.htm

Occupy Wall Street desires a non-deterministic breeding ground for ideas where the genetic makeup itself changes along with what is produced. In short, they want a system that continually generates unclassifiable fruits of action and thought. The more defined a system is, the more determined its outcome will be. Instead of continually producing the same 'democratic' or 'capitalist' or even 'socialist' or 'communist' results it desires something that is not limited to a single economic or governmental system but is equally representative of the ideas of each participant even if the product is incidental to each. Think about it as continuously programming new softwares within an open source programming language rather than being limited to the features of proprietary software. 

Matt Pearson perhaps puts this notion best when comparing Generative Art, in his book of the same name, to an ant colony,

The role of the queen is as perfunctory as that of every other ant with a job to perform within the greater whole. There is no trickle-down command; the ants’ organization is from the bottom up. It is grass-roots. Emergent.

Do Occupiers Dream of Electric Streets

Initially it appears problematic to say that OWS is built on top of a system such as a CA that is characteristically limited in its ability to express itself. However, depending on the complexity of the initial code and what it is programmed to do, it can tease out more potential aesthetic results than could otherwise be predicted. OWS is obviously predicated on the freedoms built into a democratic and economic systems that allows it to persist yet butts heads with its very existence at the same time. However reigned in, OWS 'code' rather than strictly defining its formal results instead dictates its ability to continually evolve. If a system has adequate access to new dynamic environments and people it should be able to 'evolve away' from its original CA. 

That being said, If there were to be one work of art that was both literally and figuratively representative of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Scott Draves' open sourced/crowd sourced project Electric Sheep makes the most sense. The art work propagates itself through screen savers stored on people's computers. Its form evolves according to either a voting system or a users own interaction with the code itself. "Sheep" created by different users interact with each other and breed new results. It continually evolves and adapts itself to various levels of participation among a distributed network of users. The emergent 'sheep' are constantly surprising, the result of a specifically designed code that is also open-sourced. It is an ongoing project where user interaction and evolution never cease. New sheep continue to grow as long as code continues to run and people continue to interact with it. 

Videos of Electric Sheep:

http://vimeo.com/27688359

http://vimeo.com/1231369

Protest on the Digital Frontier 

This is not the first time (and probably not the last) that Occupy Wall Street has been analogized with a digital trope. Douglas Rushkoff has stated that it is not a protest but a prototyping for new ways of living. Alexis Madrigal thinks OWS is more interesting as an API with a set of instructions that can be called according to what is required of a particular protest. Both of these ideas somewhat miss the point, though. Its not the resultant prototypes that are important nor a set of predefined instructions that can be dynamically appropriated and combined that are interesting. It is the co-evolutive self-propogating nature of the movement the continues to produce those prototypes and those different instructions that must not end nor be stifled. 

It is not enough to compare Occupy Wall Street, as many people have, to a hydra for to do so would to suggest the movement had a central body from which new heads would emerge. No, this is not a hydra movement but a 'liquid one' – whose architecture is more akin to the T-1000's form from Terminator 2. It has no 'original' shape or form but it is capable of absorbing forms and subsequently taking them on in a rather complex way. These result in multifaceted combinations of dialogues and ideas that are both random and surprising leading to emergent actions that are adaptive to any movements, beliefs, theories, localities or people. 

Noise vs Meaning

To conclude, it is important to understand that for as 'random' or 'pseudo'-random as generative art may be, there is still a desire for meaning to be either intended or to emerge naturally. If the art work is over-determined it is uninteresting and lacks any dialogue with its participants or appreciators. If it is too random its ability to communicate gets lost in the resulting noise of the work.  It has to find a "sweet spot" between order and disorder. 

Occupy Wall Street can succeed at their continuous, emergent dialogue among a decentralized network of individuals as long as they do not dip into chaos. To succeed it must continue its process of producing and evolving meaningful protests that stand for specific causes that are championed equally by any number of its participants. 

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Electric Sheep by Scott Draves. Off Book: Generative Art.