The Center for Computational Unknowing

A Jagged Orbit

This automated-art-system begins once a book, magazine, catalogue, or other printed matter, is placed within the bounds of its ‘reading area,’ where it is digitised through computer-vision. Some of the primary tasks assigned to this system can include calculating Newton’s n-body problem, tracking the artists’ tax receipts, and posting messages to social media.

The system attempts to chain these primary tasks recursively while mark-making across the semantic and aesthetic inputs it identifies on the page. These regions of interest may include figures / faces / objects / type / text / colour fields etc. Simultaneously, sensors in the machine measure data in the physical environment in which it is situated (movement, sound, light, human presence etc).

A Jagged Orbit Process Image, [Plotted orbits over found magazine cover], 2024, Digital file, 225 x 280, DSS.

Changes in the environment such as the approach of a human, a sudden sound or spoken conversation, may either ‘distract’ the system from its tasks, or they may ‘jolt’ the machine out of a ‘daydream’ state of apparent inactivity. Interrupting the current drawing routine and raising the ‘focus’ status of the machine will temporarily return it to the primary tasks. Other conditions will increase the potential for further ‘wandering’.

The system is designed to ‘wander’ or ‘drift’ while drawing with marker on the physical publication, both responding to the visual features of the publication & annotating the systems’ primary tasks and calculations. The mark-making is not predetermined, rather the result of blending multi-input weighted path-finding algorithms, generated in real time, with responses to the primary tasks, the en- vironment in which the system is situated and to the (transforming) publication it is drawing over.

A Jagged Orbit [Automated-art-system with magazine], [Installation view], 2024, Various, Various, DSS.

The primary material used in this automated-art-system is existing books and magazines, evoking literary and historic precedents of marginalia, redaction, and other creative/destructive defacing of books within post-digital publishing practices. These publications are ideal for such experimentations as they are readily found and ripe with rhetorically potent text and imagery. Furthermore, the glossy (cast-coated) covers of magazines offer an ideal surface for the machines to draw over, able to accumulate many layers of ink without deforming, and therefore permitting the system to operate autonomously for longer periods.

This research is presented as a response, or provocation, to assumptions of beyond-human computational capacity, and its increasing adoption in building meaning through cultural production.

Notes

Acknowledgements. The title of this work is taken from John Brunner’s 1969 novel The Jagged Orbit.3 In our artwork, the term is useful when imagining the relationship between human and nonhuman agents as if they are two bodies in orbit, the potential for these orbits to decay over time, ending in the event of the collision of both bod- ies, with the emergence of something new.

If as Smallwood et al. suggest, that “[mind wandering] is linked to the pursuit of ideas or problems that have, so far, eluded solution” (Smallwood et al. 2012, 1; Smallwood & Schooler 2006), then perhaps our AI agents could be tasked with longer term goals to follow in moments of tedium.

The physical outcomes of this work are singular edition artists publications, presented as derivative works (also called, ‘corrected ready-mades’). These outcomes can be viewed through the 'Artworks' area of this website. No attempt has been made to contact the publishers, authors, or artists of the original works for permission nor endorsement.

Open-Source Libraries and software used in this artwork: Python, OpenCV, Tesseract, Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), Vision AI, Goo- gle Speech-to-Text, SGPT, Librosa, cnc.js.

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A Jagged Orbit

Artworks by this System

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