Scripting Boundary Negotiations

The following is a script written for a group Visual Studies project done with Lauren MacCuaig, Leslie Billhymer and Dan Affleck. The main objective for us was to be able to negotiate within, and actually rely on, boundary conditions.





















Main

Sub Main
Dim arrCurveSetIDs, arrCurvePts1, arrCurvePts2
Dim i, counter, arrAllPoints(), backCounter

arrCurveSetIDs = Rhino.GetObjects("Select Curves", 4)
If IsNull(arrCurveSetIDs) Then Exit Sub
arrCurvePts1 = Rhino.DivideCurve(arrCurveSetIDs(0),300)
arrCurvePts2 = Rhino.DivideCurve(arrCurveSetIDs(1),300)

backCounter = UBound(arrCurvePts1)
counter = 0
For i = 0 To UBound(arrCurvePts1)
If counter Mod 4 = 0 Then
ReDim Preserve arrAllPoints(i)
arrAllPoints(i) = arrCurvePts1(backCounter)
Else If counter Mod 4 = 1 Then
ReDim Preserve arrAllPoints(i)
arrAllPoints(i) = arrCurvePts1(counter)
Else If counter Mod 4 = 2 Then
ReDim Preserve arrAllPoints(i)
arrAllPoints(i) = arrCurvePts2(counter)
Else If counter Mod 4 = 3 Then
ReDim Preserve arrAllPoints(i)
arrAllPoints(i) = arrCurvePts2(backCounter)
End If
End If
End If
End If
counter = counter+1
backCounter = backCounter - 1
Next

Rhino.AddInterpCurve arrAllPoints

End Sub

Initial Diagramming of Program Relationships

This diagram is one of a few initial mappings of programmatic usage throughout a day at the retreat center. Shown here is the relationship between two scenarios: one of a person focused on having a physical experience while at the center, the other focused on a spiritual experience.

from "Emergence," Steven Johnson

"In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them."

Exactly the relationships that I am studying in cell biology - the way smooth muscle cellular edge behaviors rely on the status of their extracellular matrix. Similar to slime mold cells forming a community, I consider parts of the cellular edge acting independently at some instances, and together at others. The variety seems to be based on both external and internal signals and communications. (i.e. if another cell is sensed, if the cell itself is highly tensioned along one axis, etc.)

Continuity within Form_Work of Ruth Asawa

Continuity not only in movement of the forms, but of their construction via a continuous wire (or line).

Study on Monastery and Retreat Center Schedules_with Lauren MacCuaig

J. Scott Turner, "The Tinkerer's Accomplice"

"The essential difference between cognition and intentionality. Both involve conformity between the "real" world and mental representations of that world. Cognition involves building a mental world that conforms to the real world outside. Changes in the real world impose similar changes on the mental worlds that represent it. Intentionality arises when a discrepancy between the real world and the mental world is resolved by work being done to make the real world correspond to the mental world."
Inspiration towards the idea of intentional initatiations of change within complex systems, lying interstitially between two subsystems. The actual means of connection between subsystems and between heirarchies of systems is what interests me.

Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind"

"I suggest then that a healthy ecology of human civilization would be defined somewhat as follows: A single system of environment combined with high human civilization in which the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system, open-ended for slow change of even basic (hard-programmed) characteristics."

Sanford Kwinter from "Who's Afraid of Formalism?"

"Formalism demonstrates first and foremost that form is resonance and expression of embedded forces. The best local formalisms show that these embedded forces are themselves organised and have a preconcrete, logical form of their own. The dynamic relation between these two levels of form is the space where all indeterminacy or historical becoming unfolds. Extended or true formalisms are diferent only that they also describe relations of resonance and expression between local forms or form systems...The great formalists have always been able to peer into the object toward its rules of formation and see these two strata together as a mobile, open and oscillating system subject to a greater or lesser number of external pressures. The manifest form - that which appears - is the result of a computational interaction between internal rules and external (morphogenetic) pressures that temseleves, originate in other adjacent forms...Algorithmic formalism (the most dynamic, extendable kind) was an invention of Goethe's and remains the basis of all robust, generative formalisms (including those being used today in computational biology)."