A recipe for surprise

Aesthetic experiences are often caused by natural phenomena. This is not a coincidence. Nature has emergent features that enable her to trigger our imagination in a positive way. Emergence is one of the intrinsic properties of nature's dynamic forces: non-linear matter-energy flows are capable of spontaneously generating order out of chaos. Under the right conditions, wholes that are more than the sum of their parts can emerge out of the local dynamics of their components. Small changes can sometimes lead to dramatic transformations. Although chaos research tries to explain the generation of the new, forecasting what will happen next remains uncertain.
Chaotic transformations are the only possible mechanism to generate something new. The aesthetic experience is also the creation of something new. It is a process in which suddenly something unexpected becomes sensible: the so called Aha-experience. The experience is like a walk on a mountain ridge in between chaos and order, in between the unformed and the petrified. An extract or repetition never has an aesthetic quality.

So, if artists want to make artefacts that will be able to stimulate new experiences, we have to be sure that they contain emergent features. But when we examine the products of human artists, they often lack these properties. In many cases the artist does have practical goals, that can be read off too easily of the work. The associative tendency of the artists mind often disturbs the unfolding of spontaneous, original and new possibilities. By following our intuition we often cut off the access road to interesting new results.

Every object, situation or process has an infinite potential of meanings. The artist Marcel Duchamp has articulated this vision very clearly with his readymades. The readymades implied that an aesthetic interpretation of everything is possible. This led to an invalidation of aesthetics in the traditional meaning of the word. The artwork lost its special status and art history seemed to have lost its motives.
The post-modern viewpoint also leaves us with the notion that there are no other possibilities than the appropriation of images from other cultures and former periods. There is a lack of a driving force that is able to generate further developments. Repetition, recombination, eclecticism, the end of history.

There are possibilities for circumventing these biological and cultural limitations of human art. We can try to generate artworks that are not constructed or developed by the subjective choices of humans but instead, generated by non-linear processes that we can construct. These processes are initiated by human artists but the results are undefined and unpredictable because of the implemented emergence. They should be able to create an infinite stream of ever-changing output. This approach shows that the awareness of the interpretability of everything can create a new starting point: the systematic exploration of everything.

It is a difficult, but at the same time exiting challenge, to aim for an art that systematically arouses emergent phenomena. This means that we have to find ways of expressing aesthetic ideas outside ourselves. But how can we fulfil the longing for an activity that explores the unseen, the unthought and the unknown? And how can we avoid complete arbitrariness if we do not want to be influenced by taste, style and meaning?

A possible answer to these questions lies in the concept of meta-creative systems, systems in which we try to formalize the process of creation. Most of them work according to a feedback mechanism and a combination of strict rules with freedom. In a feedback system each transformation is a reaction to the previous transformation. On the one hand this feedback creates cohesion, or in other words it avoids complete randomness. On the other hand this feedback remains unpredictable as a result of chance factors that are built into the process. Small alterations can sometimes lead to dramatic transformations.
These meta-creative systems are able to create complex images or situations, without determining beforehand what they would look like and without imposing any specific meaning.

Computer programs are able to generate forms on the basis of carefully defined prescriptions and offer very specific possibilities for creating detailed structures. The specific capabilities of a computer create the opportunity of providing it with an autonomous, unhuman way of thinking. Unlike the associative tendencies of the human mind, the computer by itself has no built-in preferences for one solution over the other. It is able to systematically explore the full set of possibilities, with a persistent consistency. It can execute complicated algorithms and manipulate large amounts of data at high speed. We are not interested in imitating or simulating existing processes. But instead, we wish to implement processes that make use of these specific capabilities in such a way that forms of Artificial Life are created. These systems are designed to exhibit emergent behaviour.

The Artificial Life and Artificial Evolutionary systems that we have designed show a kind of pure expression, an expression that shows in all possible variations, the intrinsic patterns of an artificial universe. We, the creators ourselves, are surprised by the results and this is what we were aiming for. However, after watching a system for a longer period of time, emergence seems to decrease. The range of distinguishable expressions stabilizes and the system is not able to evolve new features. Although still interesting, the new output looks somehow familiar, even when you are conscious of the fact that each new generated form is unique.

With faster, more advanced computers and deeper understanding of dynamic processes, it will be possible to develop more complex and more refined applications. These will enlarge the range of emergent behaviour and thus increase the opportunities for aesthetic reflection.