Poietic Generator

The Poietic Generator is a social-network game designed by Olivier Auber in 1986, and developed from 1987 under the label free art thanks to many contributors. The game takes place within a two-dimensional matrix in the tradition of board games and its principle is similar to both Conway's Game of Life and the surrealists' exquisite corpse. Every player draws on a small part of a global mosaic formed by the dynamic juxtaposition of those parts, which are manipulated by all the participants (eventually it will be possible for several thousand players to play simultaneously). Every player can therefore change the sign in his/her square, depending on the overall state of the image, which itself depends on the actions of all the individual players. Out of this cybernetic loop emerges a kind of narrative: autonomous forms, sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, appear in a completely unpredictable manner and tell stories.Illustration of the concept (1988)Each player draws on one element of the total matrixInterface, Multicast version (1994)Announcement of a session on the Mbone (February 1996). Screenshot of the 'session directory' (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)Recording the first real-time group interaction without any center (1996)Recording of a web experiment, X-00 festival (2000)Recording of an experiment with the 'Elmediator' digital public space (2005-03-23)Mobile phone user interface(2012)Poietic Generator classroom experiment in Brussels (2013)First permanent urban display, Rue du Chien Marin, Brussels. Dec. 2013.Like in the Renaissance, art becomes (a) heuristic, a type of probe with the task to explore a continent.Attempts like this are crucial to emancipate the technology from the status a mere instrument for defined purposes, and to recognize the role that it should have as a creator of culture and practices. The Poietic Generator is a social-network game designed by Olivier Auber in 1986, and developed from 1987 under the label free art thanks to many contributors. The game takes place within a two-dimensional matrix in the tradition of board games and its principle is similar to both Conway's Game of Life and the surrealists' exquisite corpse. However, it differs from these models in several respects. It is not an algorithm like Conway's, but human players who control in real time the graphic elements of a global matrix, on the basis of one unit per person. Unlike the exquisite corpse, in which there are always hidden parts, here all the players' actions are visible at all times by each of them. Unlike board games, there is no concept of winning or losing, the goal of the game is simply to collectively draw recognizable forms and to observe how we create them together. The name 'Poietic Generator', derived from the concept of autopoiesis in life sciences (Francisco Varela), and of poietic in philosophy of art (Paul Valéry, René Passeron (in French)), illustrates the process of self-organization at work in the continuous emergence of the global picture. Since its inception, the Poietic Generator has been designed as part of a wider action research to create an 'Art of Speed'. In practice, each player can draw (using a graphics tablet) on a very simple image. This image is limited in size (20×20 pixels) by design. This was done to prevent a single player from drawing figurative signs by himself. The overall image is continuously formed in the style of a spiral, that is to say the sign of the first player occupies the whole image, and the signs of the newcomers are juxtaposed in the first winding around it, and so on. If a player forfeits the game, his/her sign immediately disappears and its position remains empty until another player occupies it. A zoom in/zoom out feature ensures that the image constituted by the juxtaposition of all signs, is permanently visible to all the players. The Poietic Generator runs on two types of architecture, a centralized network (for versions 1, 3, 4), or an ad hoc distributed network capable of implementing the multicast protocol (case version 2). Therefore, no location in the network plays a particular role and according to the rules of the Poietic Generator, an 'all-all' interaction may take place without the intervention of any kind of control center. This latest version is available on the web, via Android mobile phone, iPhone / iPad, via Facebook, and has a reference site. Since 1987, the Poietic Generator (various versions) inspired many experiments in diverse contexts. The first public experiment was at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1990 as part of the 'Communication and monumentality' exhibition. Other museums, art galleries, digital public spaces, festivals, and international conferences, etc. then followed, including the 1991 'Communicating Machines' exhibition by the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie (Paris). Several experiments were performed on the periphery of academic research. For instance, experiments were conducted in particular at Telecom ParisTech (where Olivier Auber was a guest artist between 1994 and 1997), during the Internet Mbone experiment (with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Xerox PARC), and at other laboratories. The subjects of the experiments were diverse: network protocols, the process of emergence of forms, human-machine interfaces, collective intelligence, group behavior, etc. Since 1997, the Poietic Generator is accessible to everyone on the web as a work of free art (under Free Art License from 2002). At the request of various groups of artists, teachers or researchers, this led to several hundred recorded game sessions, some of them commented. In several of these sessions, 70 players participated simultaneously. Several experiments were in kindergarten, elementary and secondary schools (including one experiment linking multiple classrooms).