Proposal 003

General Idea

Can you make a work that could only be made now, and not in the future? Who should receive it? And under what conditions? What exists now, that may not exist then? This is open to any media. The big idea is that your audience is not HERE, or NOW, but a distant time in the future.

Instead of a still work, I will make a time-based artwork to distant future for people to discover and appreciate. Rather than literal execution, this project will demonstrate the possibility.

Almost all time capsule are either still life or non-visual. This might due to the physical hardness of any intricate device that could produce controlled animation. This project shows how it can be done through cellular automata.

Cellular Automata executes with simple rules and therefore very easy to interpretate. It assumes no other prior knowledge, such as language, signs, and mathematics. In fact, an alien society can guess the rule sets with high certainty just by providing a few example runs or generations. Although it is computational heavy, one could reproduce the entire animation on pieces of paper. Being proved turing complete, it can produce animations with little constaints. All these properties made CA a good candidate for sending animated time-based artwork to the distant future.

Progress

Above is a 46 period printer, consists of 3 90-degree-reflectors, 1 duplicator, and 1 glider-to-lightweight-spaceships-converter. gliders could be "print" out from the printer to make pixels of images.

I would like to use this basic concept to produce an animation for the future people. I might make a general purpose initial configuration generator for any animations with some periods.