Emergence in the Expressive Machine

Abstract

The ''Expressive Machine'' is a series of interactive artworks which explore a machine's-eye view of the world. The machine- an assemblage of hardware and software-provokes sensual interaction with viewer-participants, playing with transduction across multiple modes: from touch to sound, to word, to vision, to taste, to uniquely machinic states with no particular human analogue. These stimuli are processed in various interpretations, elaborations, in a relatively unstructured ''data soup''. Asynchronous processes consume data from the soup. When trigger conditions for a particular expressive process are satisfied, the machine produces externalised outputs in various forms: sound, shift of attention, fragments of narrative, and so on. What can be considered as creativity arises as an emergent property-a serendipitous by-product of the machine working through its experiences, rather than an explicit creative process. To make this conceptual exploration possible, an adaptable, extensible, decentralised system is presented: its requirements, architecture and some implementations as interactive artworks. Each new site and context gives rise to a unique instantiation of the machine, as it explores and expresses its experiences.