CONTRIBUTOR	invited speaker speaker	refereed paper artist/tech. talk	panel chair panellist	artwork music	co-authors collaborators
Rodney Berry

ATR, MIC lab Kyoto, Japan	{} {}
rodney@mic.atr.co.jp	http://www.mic.atr.co.jp/~rodney

TITLE: Have I Emerged Yet?

ABSTRACT: The idea of emergence is pretty much central to the area of art addressed by this conference. I am not going to confine myself here to a dictionary or technical definition of what constitutes emergence. I agree that it is important in the study of complexity and related disciplines to be clear about the terms one uses but I am more concerned with what emergence means to me and how that has changed over the course of my career as a maker of art.

My first memory of hearing the word 'emergence' was when I was about 9 years old and I was at home sick from school watching some educational TV shows on the ABC. This show was about theories concerning the origin of life on earth and presented a history of how these ideas have changed. One section was about Spontaneous Generation. There was a reconstruction of a mediaeval alchemist's laboratory with all the retorts, mystical symbols, bubbling flasks of gunge etc. The alchemist himself was staring intently into a big bowl of festering muck and, when asked by the narrator what he was doing, he answered, "I am waiting for the mice to appear!"

I read Steve Reich's Music as a Gradual Process [1]. It clarified for me some of the things I was thinking about as a student. "Though I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing the musical material to run through them, once the process is set up and loaded it runs by itself." I started playing around with sets of rules that might produce something that was not directly under my control. I think I was trying to express something about how I saw the world at the time. I guess it corresponded to the Newtonian view of the universe as a system of more or less uniform cycles linked together like the cog-wheels of a massive cosmic clock. At the time, I felt that the uniqueness of each new day was mostly brought about by the unique configuration of otherwise uniform cyclic processes, for example, the tide going in and out, night and day, the seasons etc. The music I wrote echoed this by combining repeated patterns of different lengths, separating out the pitch and the rhythm so they always fell in differently with each repetition. I saw these pieces of music as not having any beginning or end. Instead they were windows into a piece of music that extended infinitely before the piece started and after the piece ended. The duration of the piece had more to do with how long one chose to keep the window open than any sense of it being complete at some point. This led me to try to automate these processes to take this burden off the performers and then to make installations to allow the audience to choose the extent of the window through which they were to examine the process.

Later pieces used fairly uniform processes but were open to perturbation by other forces. For example, the Vital Organ, a set of PVC organ pipes each attached to weather balloons and hung from the ceiling [4]. The slowly collapsing chord was affected by air currents and people moving around touching the pipes. Other works were dependent on the sun's position and intensity for their sound [5].

Listening Sky (2001)

Once I began working with computers, I encountered chaos and complexity theory and artificial life became a major interest. The word emergence returned to my vocabulary. This makes me think about the difference between the definition of a word and the meaning of a word. For me, emergence simply describes whatever comes out of a process that was not immediately apparent from looking at the original ingredients. The meaning however has changed for me as my art practice and my life has continued. Originally, if you asked me, I would have said that emergence is 'whatever happens' or unexpected chance events when things just come together in a particular way, never to be repeated. Later, it moved from being extraneous, an added bonus, to the central goal of most of the work with almost mystical connotations, the mystery of life itself. Now, it is a bit of both and more connected to both the audience's and my subjective experience of 'whatever happens'.

ABOUT: My main interest lies in exploring the boundaries between animate and inanimate, technology and biology, art and science. This has led me through a variety of forms ranging from sculptural musical instruments to sound installation works and lately computer-based interactive visual and sound worlds inhabited by artificial life.

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