No replies to this topic

[emilienne]

My chaotic systems seminar at the Santa Fe Institute today talked about chaotic variations on movement sequences. That is to say, we have some sequence of movements and then these individual movements are encoded in symbols and then are mapped onto some arbitrarily defined chaotic trajectory (defined using a chaotic ordinary differential equation). The idea here is that with a chaotic trajectory, the variations that are created from the original movements "resemble one another in both aesthetic and mathematical senses" (Bradley and Stuart, Chaos 8:800).

We can quibble about what a "variation" is and whether that variation is in fact similar to the original in aesthetic. Mostly it was presented as a pretty interesting computational problem, particularly as programmers had to take into account the difficulty of simulating combinations of steps while taking into account the biological limitations of the human body (it's an NP-hard computation problem and can kill computers).

Anyway! The seminar ended with a discussion of Forsythe's One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000) as encoded in computational notation. It's worth a look! (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with this website)

Link here: Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced