CORE
Mikko Waldo Lautamo
B.A., California State University Sacramento, 2009
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
ART STUDIO
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
SPRING
2011
CORE
A Thesis
by
Mikko Waldo Lautamo
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Rachel Clarke, MFA
__________________________________, Second Reader
Ian Harvey, MFA
____________________________
Date
ii
Student: Mikko Waldo Lautamo
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the thesis.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator
Ian Harvey, MFA
Department of Art
iii
___________________
Date
Abstract
of
CORE
by
Mikko Waldo Lautamo
Core is the nexus of the visible and the internal; the point of contact between the
real and the inner real.
The work is words, crafted in code and fed into light. It is evolving, generative,
and alive. It nests in the eye, because only the eye has the speed and acumen to gather
the myriad shattered pieces of will and assemble, endlessly, the raw mechanisms of
human thought.
It is made plain in the revolving corridors of a single piece, hero. It is fracture,
game, and animal. It is person, my person.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Rachel Clarke, MFA
_______________________
Date
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
List of Figures .......................................................................................................................... vi
MY UNIVERSE ....................................................................................................................... 1
CONCEPTUAL UNDERPINNING OF HERO ........................................................................ 3
INFORMATION SYSTEM AS PERSON ............................................................................... 4
INDIVIDUALS IN HERO ........................................................................................................ 5
COMPLEXITY AND CHAOS ................................................................................................ 7
HERO’S ACTORS ................................................................................................................... 9
LITERATURE AND PROGRAMMING ................................................................................ 11
THE RIGHT WORDS ............................................................................................................ 12
GAME DATA……................................................................................................................. 14
CARTOON AND INTERPRETATION ................................................................................. 16
DERANGING HERO ............................................................................................................ 18
TIME…………. ....................................................................................................................... 22
TIME AND HERO ................................................................................................................. 24
FRACTURE AND POEM ..................................................................................................... 26
GAME GOAL AND RESOLUTION .................................................................................... 28
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 30
v
LIST OF FIGURES
Page
1.
Figure 1 Mikko Lautamo, hero (still), 2010……….………………………...…. 2
2.
Figure 2 the twelve characters of hero………….……………………………. ..10
3.
Figure 3 Genndy Tartakovsky, Samurai Jack, “Episode XXII” (still), 2002…. 17
4.
Figure 4 “apple core” from hero……...…...……………….…………………..20
5.
Figure 5 magenta “egg” from hero……...…...……………….………………..21
6.
Figure 5 Bill Viola, Emergence, 2002……...……………….………………….23
7.
Figure 6 twelve sequential stills from hero..……………….…………………...25
8.
Figure 7 Jason Nelson, i made this. you play this. we are enemies .……………27
9.
Figure 9 hero, detail…………………………….…………………………….. 29
vi
1
MY UNIVERSE
I work in code: computer code and metaphorical code. But it is a code with only
a working translation. It is a cross-compilation and a mutation. A living language
spoken at the eye as last resort. Our eyes are faster than our ears. Formal, auditory
language is a new thing in the life of the human ape, but eyes have been decoding since
the Cambrian. It is a godless organ, with a direct line to the brain. Sight is precocious,
damning the rational in favor of the brilliant. Sometimes the shine is real.
My code renders flat: on a projector, on a screen, on the Web. It’s small,
portable, and cross-platform. It’s Flash, for now. It’s often interactive but always selfpropelling. In addition to a heartbeat, it has sensory organs for judging itself and the
world around it. I repeat, it’s small. Several thousand lines of code compile into a Flash
playable file rarely over 900 kilobytes. A recent piece, hero, is 49 kilobytes. It can run
indefinitely, spawning thousands of coherent, aware individuals that vie for control of
each other; like a game, where the player is the game itself.
2
Figure 1 Mikko Lautamo, hero (still), 2010
3
CONCEPTUAL UNDERPINNING OF HERO
I cannot delineate thought processes for each of my pieces. The most complete
embodiment of their capability and meaning is held within the work as presented, not my
descriptions of its creation. However, there is benefit in discussing the path of one piece
in particular, hero, so as to provide a concrete glimpse of the conceptual process that,
despite its many tangents, is essentially the same from piece to piece.
Hero began as an emulation of a condition of the real world. I wanted to explore
the effect of social systems on individuality; specifically how sacrificing one’s
individuality (e.g. by joining a religious organization, or by following a government’s
laws, or even participating in a family or tribe where one is not the matriarch/patriarch)
could be beneficial to the individual, that is, serve a purpose the individual needs served.
I then asked a question I always ask: in what way is a person like a computer?
4
INFORMATION SYSTEM AS PERSON
Computers, and the programs therein, are essentially information systems. They
are little more than gateways through which data can be moved, carefully aligned, so as
to produce functionality. So are humans. A person perceives all the necessary data for
living through a combination of external, mechanical organs (eyes, ears, etc) and internal
monitoring networks (nerves, neurons, etc.). The human brain is perhaps little more than
a binary computation machine, but that’s largely a metaphysical question that I don’t seek
to answer with words. Instead, I submit that information systems are sufficiently
analogous to human beings as to be indistinguishable from individuals within the
confines of an art piece.
The programs I write seek to generate a “person” by means of interior, discrete
“individuals.” The person is the organism, the individuals are the interior autonomous
cells. These individuals owe their existence, their functionality, to the continuity of the
work, but they function independently of the work’s greater will. By burying
independent agents within a larger whole, I create the kind of multi-dimensional
tunneling that, arguably, is present in any work of substance from painting to
performance. The difference with code is that the mechanisms of thought are objectively
demonstrable in the form of machine instructions. While the thought that propelled an art
piece has evaporated, a residue in the form of ordered, actionable code remains. It is the
flesh, or at least the shadow of concept, that remains concrete after my hands have ceased
to impact the piece. It remains real.
5
INDIVIDUALS IN HERO
It is cogs and wheels. Each of the individuals in hero is an instance of a “class.”
A class, in the programming language I write in (Actionscript 3, a close cousin of Java) is
a kind of template for the behaviors of “instances,” distinct objects, of that class. Each
one of these discrete individuals is associated with a circular figure on screen. Though
they vary in color, position, size, etc., each possesses an identical subset of sensory
apparatus I term “organs.” These organs are responsible for gauging the relative position
of an individual with respect to others, and to define and execute behavior accordingly.
They are like the eyes, mind, and heart of a human being, responsible for perceiving and
judging while being influenced by the desires, the “personality,” of the individual.
The personality of each individual is a loose confederation of four values
representing eight traits arranged in diametrically opposed pairs. The pairs were chosen
to be intentionally obscure, so as to create a novel cosmology and increase
unpredictability. They are: “Greed” and its opposite, “Pain” and its opposite, “Resist”
and its opposite, and “Order” and its opposite. The polar nature of these four (each rating
from 0 to 100 with 50 representing neutrality to either pole) collude to form the “behavior
strategy” of each individual.
This inward-turning mechanism continues a bit longer; the “behavior strategy” is
comprised of smaller “actions” that are triggered in a randomized sequence according to
a “book” each individual holds. The book is a catalog of possible actions, some taken at
predetermined intervals, some triggered in response to the actions of others. Each
individual responds and interacts according to its own abilities (e.g. an individual with a
6
high Pain attribute will attempt an action that is a metaphor for an “attack.” If the
“victim” of this attack has sufficiently high Resist, the victim may survive, or even
counter-attack). If an individual executes its desired actions successfully, it will “devour”
the autonomy of others, adding a diminished circle to its mass. Circles gathered under
the control of a central figure are like subjects under a monarch.
The singular action of any given individual is only a tiny fraction of the state of
the program at any given time. As the program advances, innumerable agents each
attempt hundreds of actions, to varying success, creating a world within the piece that is a
gestalt image of desires fulfilled, dreams denied, and lives spent.
7
COMPLEXITY AND CHAOS
I want to surprise myself. That is, I want to create work that is significantly
complex and decentralized in its functioning that it routinely exhibits behaviors that I, as
the creator, the knower of all variables and behind-the-scenes mechanisms, cannot
adequately comprehend. Essentially, I want to create a mechanism capable of both
designed and emergent actions. I want to feel as if the piece is functioning both as I have
conceived it and in ways beyond what I thought possible given the nature of its code.
An emergent property is a property of a system that is greater than the simple sum
of its components, it is a property unique to the aggregate. The key to meaningful
generation of emergence is resolution. Resolution is the depth to which actions feed into,
and are bound only by, the internal workings of the system. At a certain point, the
resolution of a piece must give way to uncertainty. Random numbers bivouac the borders
of my work, turning back the indecision of determinism. Like so many quantum effects,
they subtly influence the larger, classically mechanical macro-universe.
I am seeking to emulate life and, by extension, the universe that surrounds me by
grasping its essential complexities, then warping and distorting them to fit a closed
system founded on a collection of metaphors that themselves reference reality. It is as if
the piece were a globe representing Earth, then millions of lights are placed inside to
emulate the positions of stars, then the stars are electrified to suggest the functioning of
the human brain. Metaphor is stuffed into analogy and then sprinkled with simile not as a
method to confusion but as an earnest, (mis)guided attempt to approach a fraction of the
universe’s complexity by taking symbols of what I have on hand and doubling them into
8
each other, mercilessly, over and over, again and again.
9
HERO’S ACTORS
The world’s a stage, and a stage needs actors. The actors of hero are the
individuals who show their faces. An individual exists in two forms: one where it is just
a colored circle and possesses no autonomy and another where its personality is
embodied in a black and white “character.” There are twelve characters in total, each
representing a few disparate slices of the human condition. The “pig,” for instance, is a
putrid coward. He’s prone to takeover by characters that employ violence as their
primary strategy (e.g. the “skull” or the “snake”). But, he is expert at negotiation, able to
capture individuals without harm coming to him. The pig is a dual reference to the
repugnant animal aspects of man, as well as our mercantile cunning, and, on the far end
of that scale, our tendency toward all-encompassing avarice. Individuals that exhibit the
pig visage begin life with enhanced Greed and reduced Resist and Pain. But an
individual can change. Each action a character undertakes from their pre-described
“book” of abilities affects their four virtues, making them more or less capable of
succeeding in subsequent actions.
These characters are archetypes. Like a work of fiction, the “narrative” of the
piece is dependant on the evolution of the character: success, failure, and change.
However, hero is an aggregate narrative, with a thousand actors sharing the same stage,
with thousands more that have left, and millions more yet to come. It is an infinite
narrative, set at high speed, that relies on the reinforcement and the subversion of both
archetype and expectation. It is a historical document, relaying the birth and death of
countless digital lives.
10
Figure 2 the twelve characters of hero.
11
LITERATURE AND PROGRAMMING
My first conduit into fine art was writing. I studied fiction and poetry
concurrently with drawing and painting. The words made more sense.
Literature is essentially a reductive act: the “visual” world is condensed into
language that, through some form of alchemy, is unpacked and re-imagined as one reads.
Words are temporal, they do not spring forth all at once as a painting might. Words must
be taken, one by one, and activated by the reader’s mind. They are programmatic.
Language is the machine code which feeds our brains. Some run in English,
others French, German, etc.; it is the operating system which renders the other actions of
concrete thought possible. English encompasses my thoughts and I only have original
words for things encoded in English. The rest is translation.
12
THE RIGHT WORDS
William H. Gass and William Faulkner exemplify the rules I try to follow. Both
are authors, writers of fiction and narrative. Gass is about the lavishness of tight
economy. Faulkner is about the irreducibility of the human phrase and the word-madeact. My work is a narrative in this sense: what it draws from the broader field of human
experience it derives from the single, specific progression of its independent elements.
The meaning and power of a fiction is held in the enactment and evolution of character
and setting. The plot and the meaning are only an implication of the concrete visual
aspect of the words.
Though paradoxical, a minimalist presentation allows for the maximum
multiplication of meanings. In the short story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,”
Gass butchers the narrative into topological chunks. The effect is a kind of epistolary
unfolding of information that, while superficially akin to diary entries, draws its form not
from the direct connotations of the structuring but from the materiality of language itself.
Reduction to the level of material also condenses the meanings into fewer words,
allowing for a greater degree of complexity and implication within a smaller space:
WIRES
These wires offend me. Three trees were maimed on their account, and now
these wires deface the sky. They cross like a fence in front of me, enclosing the
crows with the clouds. I can’t reach in, but like a stick, I throw my feelings over.
What is it that offends me? I am on my stump, I’ve built a platform there and the
wires prevent my going out. The cut trees, the black wires, all the beyond birds
therefore anger me. When I’ve wormed through a fence to reach a meadow, do I
ever feel the same about the field?
Nothing is told; events are only enacted because it is through the strictly visual capacity
of language that real meaning exerts presence. The melding of art and medium creates
13
the vessel for meaning.
Melding has always been the craft of art. A highly crafted work will meld effect
and form seamlessly until the materiality of the medium becomes invisible. Faulkner
achieves this by linking thought and word at the level of the syllable. The Sound and the
Fury is a treatise on emersion through use of only the barest material. Much of this effect
is won by the first chapter where the narrative inhabits the mind of a man, Benjy, with
severe mental disabilities and a tenuous grip on both time and reality. The opening
sortie:
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster
was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were
hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the
other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from
the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and
I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.
"Here, caddie." He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the
fence and watched them going away.
From the beginning, the reader is accosted with the consequences of a persistent foreign
reality and must learn to interpret the piece without the benefit of conventions as basic as
linear time, rational thought, and clear narrative. The brutality, the hardness of this kind
of entry point forces the reader to acquire new tools quickly, or else shut their eyes and
turn away.
I seek this kind of hardness in the initial read of my work. The first moment
should tear down preconception. Reduction to the bare necessities of light and time
creates the widest possible field in which to grow the new world.
14
GAME DATA
I’ve been a gamer most of my life. The mechanics of games, their successes and
failures, their intimate and expansive universes have been my playground since
childhood. In many ways, the games I’ve played have been self-contained: the opus of a
team of programmers, artists, and designers that functions in a pre-described way for a
certain effect, often no more than “enjoyment.” But, what I find most enjoyable about a
game isn’t its ability to impress me, to give me an experience, but the degree to which an
experience can be impressed upon it.
The most successful games in this regard are the ones that exhibit the correct
balance of limit and permutation. SaGa Frontier (Square, 1998) is an open-ended roleplaying game (RPG) that I still go back to from time to time. While the assumed goal is
to “reach the end” of each of the game’s seven varied “storylines” (a feat that takes about
50 hours, all told), it has always been the acquisition of the game’s materials that drives
my sessions.
Like many RPG’s, the player in SaGa Frontier is tasked with assembling a
“party” of in-game characters. Not all characters are created equal, and party size is
limited, so composition becomes a major factor for finding a preferred “state” for one’s
game. A “state” in this sense is a collection of all the more-or-less persistent game
variables at a given point, the most important point being just before one attempts to
“beat” the game. The evaluation of one state as superior to another is not predicated
upon any explicit or implicit goal within the game. It is an aesthetic judgment, based on
the interplay of all past events and possible futures that may impact the current state.
15
What makes SaGa unusual is how time, vastness of choice, and chance leak in to
mutate the state of the game outside the player’s control. The key elements of
acquisition: characters, equipment (inert materials emulating weapons, armor, etc.), and
abilities (player issued commands uniquely distributed amongst characters) are tied
asymmetrically to plot events, random encounters, and player actions. Furthermore, the
pool of possible characters is slightly different for each storyline, and each character has
a unique class, growth rate, learning rate, etc. that layers on further and further
complexity. Lastly, the state of the game world progresses with the time one has spent in
a particular storyline. The literal seconds of play make the acquisition of certain
equipment, abilities, and characters more or less likely.
Even in my leisure activities, I chase complex systems. I make judgments about
the merit of virtual worlds. I direct the “lives” of fractured virtual avatars. I disperse my
“I” into a state of “we.” The character of inhabiting a complex system is a sensation of
dispersion to each corner and surface of the world. It is a meticulous construction of a
personal narrative from an otherwise inert combination of numbers, aligned data, and
limiting mechanisms, all set in motion by the human experience of time and a need to
categorize and empathize.
It’s just living, but on a cruder, more conscious scale.
16
CARTOON AND INTERPRETATION
Vision is an interpretation of information, about light phenomena, gathered by
cells of the eye. A drawing or a painting is a reinterpretation of that data directed
outward. Because that data takes physical form it can be re-visioned, and reinterpreted
and regurgitated back into the physical object and then back into the eye. When
reference ceases to come from the initial observation and starts to come from the
generative seeing of the mind, something momentous occurs: the eye, the mind, and the
piece develop their own language for communicating and creating. The result is not
entirely unlike a cartoon.
Samurai Jack is an animated series that takes the interpretive visual mode of
cartoon-making to its lavish, geometric extreme. Every inch of the world is crafted in
stylized geometry, but the essentials of the observed remain. The result is a world not
disconnected from our own, but regenerated from it. Samurai Jack is a simplification and
an amputation in the same way and for the same purpose as the literature mentioned
earlier: to constrain the extraneous in order to allow for the expansion of world-making.
The fully interpreted world of Jack is a world of hard lines and corners. Words
are few and far between because the language lies in the selective distortion of the
expected world into a new, chosen world. If Jack were filmed, each living tree and
breathing human would be an incursion placed by exterior forces. The exterior effects
would have to be mitigated by subtleties and adjustments, by costuming and fading, and
endless retakes in real-time. With animation, and especially with Jack, the only extant
reality is the reality of line and color. Everything was placed and became self-sustaining.
17
There is no exterior, but there is an endless constructed interior.
Hero is able to exist within its own rules because it cuts away the outside. Like
Jack, it boils down to solid planes of color. The third dimension is irrelevant and
harmful. The fourth is fuel. Everything in between is the province of mind.
Figure 3 Genndy Tartakovsky, Samurai Jack, “Episode XXII” (still), 2002
18
DERANGING HERO
At the center of each free individual, there is a hand-drawn character. Hero’s
imagery is a combination of color-rich geometric objects and drawn grayscale “icons.”
The icons were chosen through a kind of solitary free association. It would begin with a
word phrase such as “apple core.” I would think of the ideas associated with “apple
core” and craft a digital drawing that embodied as many of those connotation,
simultaneously, as possible. So, the “apple core” would be both the core and the apple.
It would be the red, or the green, or the golden apple. It would be a hint of both the worm
that hid inside and the teeth that bit. It would be the fragile center and the waiting seed.
It would seek melding.
This process is most akin to what André Breton would call “automatic writing.”
In “The Automatic Message,” Breton states that “verbo-auditive automatism creates for
the reader the most exalting visual images” leading to a “derangement” of the senses that,
if sufficiently complete, can spark hallucination. I attempt to transfer the auditory effect
of automatic writing to the visual realm through the use of simplified symbols. By
capturing the initial sentiment of the automatic thought in a few stylus strokes, I record
subconscious data in a permanent state: the digital drawing is ever-fresh, always
containing and expounding the exact vector data engraved at the time of its creation.
But, this creates a paradox: the devices I’m using are all designed to reduce my
inputs to usable data that can be transferred and compressed. In effect, my thought is
reinterpreted three times: once, when I condensed it into an object phrase (“apple core,”
an interpretation of English). Again, when I rendered that word into pen strokes (an
19
interpretation of the hand). And a final time when the pen data is compressed and fed
through a number of programs to create the final image on screen (an interpretation of
mathematical formulae that, in the best scenario, only approximate a nuanced line). The
goal then becomes not the mitigation of this verbal evisceration, but its acceleration. In
the future, the machine alone should make the images: the thoughts will be rendered into
words and words alone will power the machine.
The implications are maddening, but appropriate. Because I see my images as
stemming from thoughts that are chopped into words, it is fitting that the tools I employ
should divide my images into machine language before translating them into images on
screen. The goal now is to speak more clearly: to define image with just word, machine,
and screen.
But why the color? My palette is all the colors of the numerical rainbow, treated
as equally as the machine knows how. The circular, colored back pieces of my icons are
given a numeric color at birth. This color is random, but it is stationary: an individual
will carry the same “true” color throughout its existence, but will most often be overrun
by the representative color of more strident, successful individuals. The color is the
leaking in of uncertainty and the natural order: the oblivious, unregulated exterior that
places one state as equally acceptable to another.
The grayscale of the central characters is antidote to this: it is hard and
unyielding, determined and specific. The white, gray and black is a nod to pure form in
the draftsman’s sense: it describes volume but is ambivalent to the softer qualities of
light.
20
The shape strategy of the back pieces is an intermediate between the free
geometries of code color and the stringent word/thought/volume of the central icons.
They are more highly regulated: dependant on a circular shape and forbidden to alter
value without also affecting transparency. They are a mathematical reevaluation of the
same symbology of the character icons, but driven one level deeper and removed from
the immediate moment of the word-thought.
Figure 4 “apple core” from hero
21
Figure 5 magenta “egg” from hero
22
TIME
I can’t get away from it. It’s counted on tools as “frames per second,” but that’s
not right. There’s no finite refresh rate for the eye, and especially not for the mind. The
only point at which the machine screen becomes homologous to the eye is at infinity.
I’ve tried to look at my work as clips or works of definite duration, space or
shape, but it won’t do anymore. I made paintings, on canvas and on the cams of hard
disk drives, and they still became dead and finite. I’ve made videos, and died each time
they looped, knowing the end had been expressed and glossed over, and now it was just a
repeat.
I look at the work of Bill Viola, the slow-motion, breathless waiting of a piece
like Emergence (2002), but I think about when it’s going to loop. He’s heightened the
awareness, and the significance of the moment. He’s resisted the end and the drowned
redemption, but it still cuts and repeats itself. Nothing real repeats. It is a poem, not a
convincing fiction where I believe the lives extend before and beyond the happening. It
is a noun, an object. It is not in flux anymore than an un-shuffled deck of cards. It has
dilated and captured motion in one particular way, but it has not captured time.
Viola exploits and embraces the ambiguity: life, death, redemption, end,
beginning, drowning, soaring. I cannot be ambiguous with time. It stops and starts, it
doesn’t loop.
23
Figure 6 Bill Viola, Emergence, 2002
24
TIME AND HERO
Hero will run indefinitely. Well, practically, that’s not true: no computer that
exists now or, indeed, will ever exist can run forever, but it has the potential for
indeterminacy. It achieves this, ironically, by being a closed loop. It is slave to a clock
cycle and an iteration pegged, inalterably, to run thirty times a second. It possesses no
instructions for how to stop, so it cannot. It can only shift and cannibalize its own
material to push its internal state one way or the other. It is a mass of logic gates,
rendered from human-readable programming language. But all its features and
“abilities” are repercussions of determinist logic. It is lightning in a jar: a curiosity and a
simple expression of natural law.
What’s human about it? Everything, probably. Nothing, maybe. What more is
mind than lightning in a jar, an expression of natural law?
All instances of the piece, and every second of each instance must be distinct,
unique, and new to the world.
A digital work is as close to immutable as human endeavor.
25
Figure 7 twelve sequential stills from hero
26
FRACTURE AND POEM
Jason Nelson makes work from my location. He is a “net artist” and “digital
poet.” I am not that. His work is fractures; poetics is fracturing. It is a direction away
from wholeness and toward enclave. He takes from the outside. He is a conduit, I am a
generator. He has more energy because there’s more on the outside.
I made this. you play this. we are enemies. chews up the experiential. I admire it,
but I wouldn’t make it. It’s based around a “platformer,’ a classic genre of video game.
It’s made of digested net properties. It’s infected and celebrates its cancers while
lamenting them. It deceives to become a game, but is a game beside and before its
deception.
We are enemies. Opposites with the same agenda, tools, and methods with
different makings. I can’t fracture. The endeavor and the infinite is the act of making.
The piece is agent and verb, his is noun and object.
27
Figure 8 Jason Nelson, i made this. you play this. we are enemies
28
GAME GOAL AND RESOLUTION
The universe of a game world is meant to simulate some aspect of the real world.
“Simulate” is a qualitative judgment about the purposes of reality. A simulated stone that
must be lifted is given weight, otherwise it is weightless. If it is meant to be an obstacle,
it will obstruct, otherwise it is substanceless. But, in the universe of the simulation, the
simulated stone is in all ways the equivalent of a “true” stone in the context of the real.
Simulated reality is predicated on goal and purpose, it is stingy with texture where it can
serve no higher directive. In contrast, the “real” is textured down to infinite resolution,
but is itself without purpose. The meanings of the real, then, must arise from an interior.
Hero is an emergent machine, it is designed to seek its own configuration: it’s
components have basic “needs,” desires they must fulfill or else face extinction, but
nothing is built with a purpose. Success or failure is allowed equally in the cosmos of the
piece, but the aggregate expresses a tangential will: it desires to live. It wants to become
real.
In as much as hero began as an emulation of an observed state (the interaction of
social systems) it is a simulation. However, in design and actuality it is more like a
“simulator.” Its province is verb, rather than noun, and in this province hero is possessed
of multi-fold capability. Hero is an interaction of individuals and society; hero is also an
organism: a colony of bacteria or a slime mold; hero is a cosmos, a panoply of stars and
planets, super novae and deep, black void. It is a history of warfare, casualties and
parading heroes. It is an incantation, a Mandala and a meditation. In short, it is a
metaphor, with all the implications and powers thereof. It is an act of language divided
29
from speech.
Figure 9 hero, detail
30
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Breton, André. “The Automatic Message” in Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000,
ed. Jon Cook. (MA, Blackwell Publishing, 2007) 188-191.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. (New York, Vintage Books, 1990).
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