Categories
Generative Art

Pure Computation

Art computing has settled on consumer hardware and software, the PC or iBook and Flash or Processing for the most part. Using consumer hardware and software may simply be like artists using gloss house paint to make work, the use of a convenient and referential medium. There’s nothing wrong with it. But it also fails to differentiate art computing from design computing and consumer computing. I think that in addition to appropriating consumer hardware art computing should pursue the kind of access to non-consumer systems that were the hallmark of early computer art. I do not mean GPS systems, wearable computing or any other gadget fetishry. I mean technology that expands the artist’s means of pure computation, of running an interesting algorithm for interesting output. Such as beowulf clusters, massively parallel systems, neural and biological systems, and even early quantum systems and their simulations.

I am not arguing for techno-snobbery or the fetishism of raw computing power. I am arguing for an art computing that continues to differentiate itself by engagement with the possibilities of advances in pure computation.

On that note:

The Transterpreter an open source Occam system (paralellism).

libquantum a library that simulates a quantum computer.