Eroding Emergence

From The Islands by Louise Cotnoir translated by Oana Avasilichioaei.

Place can't escape
Weathering
Words no longer write
On cave walls
To azure lakes
They float on the screen

Take this poetic excerpt which seems to evoke digital decay and bit dust and most importantly a sort of reassembly. Set it beside this description of modelling in AI and you almost get a plateau effect à la Deleuze and Guattari.

The model for artificial intelligence was altered from one based on thinking processes to one grounded in behaviors. Rather than creating a system that would move through a 'sense-model-plan-act' (consciousness emulation) sequence, a number of rudimentary but tightly coupled sensor-actuator behaviors were run in parallel with simple asynchronous communications between them. This is a stroke of pragmatic brilliance for it allowed for the testing and debugging of a number of simple behaviors which, once perfected, could be left untouched while attention was turned to higher order structures that are concerned with the mediation or coordination between simple behaviors in order to produce a more complex activity. It was assumed that there would be conflicting information, missed communications, and the occasional failure of a mechanism or behavior module. But, the failure of a single element wouldn't bring the whole robot to a halt, although it may have to revert to a more primitive level of behavior or adjust itself to the loss of a sensor. Modularity and robustness are central to this approach.

Ted Krueger "Like a Second Skin" (c. 1996) originally accessed from http://comp.uark.edu/~tkrueger/metadermis/meta.html where it was housed when he was the E. Fay Jones Visiting Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture, University of Arkansas- Fayetteville. Now Lost ... but one conducts a search and finds a similarly named piece by Ted Krueger appearing in Integrating Architecture Spiller, Neil (ed.) Architectural Design Profile no. 131, December 1996. This bibliographic detail is to be found in Reframing Consciousness: Art, mind and technology edited by Roy Ascott. If it were not for erosion of one resource I would not have stumbled upon what appears to be a very interesting collection. Dancing in the particles of the screen.

And so for day 351
30.11.2007