Interference in Systems of Topological Self-Organisation

Particle systems are used among other things for the algorithmic dynamic simulation and reproduction of certain complex physical systems that represent phenomena like rain, water movement, explosions, etc. The seemingly complex and homogeneous behaviour of such systems at a macroscopic level emerges from the cooperation and interaction of their constituent parts, which are subjected to a set of some simple programmatic rules.

The presented applications are attempts that implement cases of particle-spring systems. The systems are composed of particles (nodes) interconnected with virtual springs that exert forces of attraction and repulsion to the particles they connect, as they tend to return to their ideal length when deformed. In both applications, the same rules of physics are adopted, but different cases of topological connectivity patterns are experimentally examined. In one case (app.01), a network that corresponds to a complete graph (every node connected to every other) is used and the springs exert both attractive and repulsive forces. In the other case (app.02), springs exert only repulsive forces and their connectivity pattern is being constantly redefined, as connections are established according to a node proximity constrain (when two nodes overlap) and being destroyed when the constrain is not violated. The latter case is essentially a system of freely moving and colliding disks within a confining boundary.

The particle system operates under a “bottom-up” scheme and emerges from the subjection of its constituent parts to certain rules of physics. It is gradually led to an equilibrium, where the internally developed forces tend to be neutralized. Its overall structure exhibits traits of self-organisation that depend upon the topological relationship of their parts. Both applications are meant to encourage user interaction. The user acts as an external agent and applies manipulations that form a “top-down” interference towards the system. The closed loop of the user-system interaction in the form of a game determines the dynamically generated visual result.

application 01 [download]



application 02 [download]



Tassos Kanellos is trained as an architect and holds a postgraduate degree in computation. His field of research includes parametric design and physical dynamic simulation. In this context, he has developed the presented applications in the Processing programming language.

“Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

Processing is an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It evolved from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab. The project is currently improved and maintained by a small team of volunteers.”


links

Ben Fry

OSA architects

MIDEN FESTIVAL - KALAMATA

Trip to Kalamata. The IN BETWEEN project meets the MIDEN Festival

IN BETWEEN: CREATIVE VIRTUAL SPACE FOR COLLABORATION

In-Between is part of the Delphus project that first started in 2004 at Delphi. Those projects’ activities are characterized by the creation of a virtual environment which contributes to the development of research collaboration and artistic experimentation. The main goal of In Between project and all other projects under Delphus umbrella is an attempt to merge forms with ideological symbolism and metaphorical correlations.

In-Between incorporates efforts of yielding virtual forms with concepts and creates a unique and constantly evolving multimedia hypertext environment for interaction. It aims to create an experimental environment for research and communication based on simple or complex concepts.

Through the development of new forms, resulting from the combination of conceptual references to three-dimensional shapes or/and short video, the main purpose results to the discovery of new kind of tools. Their role is to contribute to a larger field, and lead to complex configurations and intellectual frameworks.
Borrowed from philosophy where ontology is the science of existence, being and reality in general, the term ontology in the digital world is a bridge between human interpretations of reality and what the computer can be read based on a common terminology.

Given that ontology is a set of definitions for terms that describe the external world, Delphus project seeks for new relationships among forms and conceptual references. The purpose is the development of experimental embodied forms that contribute to a renascent time-space continuum. Essential ingredients are creativity, imagination, randomness arising from the collective cooperation.

For the purpose of Delphus project the creation of ontologies, as intellectual embodied structures, can be opposed to social constraint while the whole project is open to improvisations and accidental game-like opportunities that lead to new adventures of creating symbolic worlds, structured by multimedia tools.

Dimitra Gounari PhD researcher

hi!

Minutes from ASFA team discussion about the project

In the last years we have been working jointly on the creation of a digital environment for artistic collaboration, creation and research.

Previous attempts (like, the Delphous, MySquare, and now the InBetween platforms [1], [2]) were initiated by our need to overcome reality imitation and create new relationships and expressive means in the digital space.

Despite the fact that we rejected social and ethical conventions (thus defining in this sense a “non space”) we still kept some of the fundamental physical principles of the real world (like ground, gravity, Euclidean geometry), and in some cases expressive tools borrowed by traditional Arts (e.g. painting, cinema) and computer games.

This year, triggered by our need to discover a new, autonomous language of expressing concepts in the digital “non space” – an indeed ambitious goal – we try to completely degrade both the space and our thoughts, and come out with basic elements (audiovisual materials, concepts) and basic structures (like in the molecules) that can be integrated in order to give an evolving environment.

We have been investigating the term ontology both from its philosophical perspective, and the engineering one.

In Philosophy, ontology [3] deals with the nature and organisation of reality, the Science of Being (Aristotle, Metaphysics, IV, 1). It tries to answer the questions:

· What characterizes being?

· Eventually, what is being?

The term ontology has also been adopted by Artificial Intelligence and recently by the Semantic Web terminology [4], for defining taxonomies of knowledge (which is machine interpretable!).

“The Semantic Web is not a separate web but an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in co-operation.“ [Berners-Lee et al., 2001]

Scientists of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering have defined the term ontology in many similar ways (you can check in [5])

Some of these definitions are:

· An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. (Gruber, 1993)

· Ontologies are defined as a formal specification of a shared conceptualization. (Borst, 1997).

· An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization (Studer and colleagues, 1998)

In any case, an ontology – in its scientific and not philosophical meaning – is a tool for formally and explicitly defining concepts and properties of the real world in such a way that they can be machine readable (not only human readable) and can be easily shared.

Generally, ontologies may be composed of the following elements:

Classes: Concepts of a field usually organized in a taxonomy (e.g. humans are such a class).

Properties: ears, legs, hands, etc (all humans have them)

Relations: A kind of interaction between concepts (e.g. subclass-of, is-a) (e.g. women are a subclass of humans)

Functions: The n-nth element of the relation is uniquely determined by the (n-1)-th elements (I can’t think of any right now – you can check [6] – “The Digital Human Ontology”)

Axioms: They represent clauses that are always true. (e.g. all humans die, a man and a woman is needed for reproduction)

Instances: Specific elements of a class (e.g. George, Mary, any of us)

The most currently known language for writing ontologies for the Semantic Web is the OWL [7]. But, there are many other ontology languages, targeting other fields of knowledge [8].

Ontology languages are usually declarative languages, and are commonly based on either First-Order logic [9] or on description logic for reasoning [10]. Reasoning is the process of validating that a certain piece of knowledge is consistent with the ontology.

More to come after out tomorrow meeting!

References

1. 7th IEEE International  Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies,

Towards  Defining a Suitable Environment for Teaching Digital Arts – 

The Delphous Experiment, 

Manthos Santorineos, Stavroula Zoi, Nefeli Dimitriadi, Chu-Yin Chen             

July 18-20, 2007, Niigata, Japan

2. The In-Between project – www.medialab.asfa.gr/inbetween

3. Ontology - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology

4. Semantic Web - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

5. Ontology scientific definitions - http://okeanos.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/what-is-an-ontology/

6. Digital Human Ontology - http://www.ercim.org/EU-NSF/DIGHUM.pdf

7. OWL - http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/

8. Ontology languages - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_language

9. First Order Logic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic)

10. Reasoning - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason

IN BETWEEN PROJECT IN ( MIDEN FESTIVAL ) KALAMATA

Manthos Santorineos has been invited by the creative team of Video Art Festival Miden in Kalamata, to lead a workshop in the context of Urban (R)evolutions, a project realized by Festival Miden this year.

A week before Festival Miden 2009 annual screenings in Kalamata’s Historic Centre, this introductory seminar, which has more the form of a meeting with young artists and creative youngsters of Kalamata, will set the basis for a continuing collaboration for a future project, organized by Sea Level (the non-profit organization that runs Festival Miden) entitled “Dreaming of my city: an open social web action for art and culture in urban environment”. The project will extend “Urban (R)evolutions”, which begun as a collective video and images screening, to a wider communication platform for urban environment on the web.

In this context, Manthos Santorineos and Voula Zoi will make an introduction to the IN BETWEEN PROJECT. The participants of the workshop will create new entries to the In-Between project, which is a collaborative project for the creation of multicultural virtual neighborhoods on the Web.

IN BETWEEN PROJECT started as an initiative of the Multimedia - Hypermedia Lab of the Athens School of Fine Arts, and has gradually become an open platform for artistic experimentation, including participants from different Universities. The participants can insert an audiovisual description of their house, different audiovisual elements as well as other information, to the dynamic database and their house automatically becomes member of the endless neighborhood.

The introductory presentation and the workshop will take place at the Environmental Training Center of Kalamata, from 4 to 6 of July.

For more information
http://www.festivalmiden.gr
info@festivalmiden.gr
msantori@otenet.gr

X dimensions

Hypercubes and Plato's Cave - The best video clips are right here