It’s a great example of how meaningful, coherent complexity can emerge easily from a system when that system is ‘tense’ — interconnected, self-referential or recursive.
Imagine animating these beads by hand. It would take forever, and it would be extremely difficult to maintain a consistent logic. And forget about interactivity. It’s like writing music by sitting at the piano, trying things until something sound good, writing that down, moving to the next bar and repeating. This is the limitation of working on a low level of abstraction.
It is better to define a system: 1) define what a bead is, and (2) define its relationship to the next bead (that is, how force is transferred). Consistency is guaranteed, for any number of beads, given any input.
“System” is kind of a dirty word among composers. It is almost a trope that a composer will say “but I don’t use systems” to reassure others that their work is ‘human’ (read: agonized-over, labor-intensive == VALUABLE). A system is seen as an easy way to generate unconsidered music, and a relic of modernist intellectual self-indulgence.
It shouldn’t be. All work is done in a system, whether elegantly defined or perversely. Some don’t offer much to explore. Some sustain interest for multiple pieces. Once, a certain system of polyphony, based on observations of human cognition of dissonance, sustained the interest of both audiences and composers for over 500 years. Abstraction is a tool, and systems should be judged by their fruit.
Systems, Adam Stepinski: Study in Beads #2
September 29, 2008Adam Stepinski has built a beautiful simulation of a string of beads.
It’s a great example of how meaningful, coherent complexity can emerge easily from a system when that system is ‘tense’ — interconnected, self-referential or recursive.
Imagine animating these beads by hand. It would take forever, and it would be extremely difficult to maintain a consistent logic. And forget about interactivity. It’s like writing music by sitting at the piano, trying things until something sound good, writing that down, moving to the next bar and repeating. This is the limitation of working on a low level of abstraction.
It is better to define a system: 1) define what a bead is, and (2) define its relationship to the next bead (that is, how force is transferred). Consistency is guaranteed, for any number of beads, given any input.
“System” is kind of a dirty word among composers. It is almost a trope that a composer will say “but I don’t use systems” to reassure others that their work is ‘human’ (read: agonized-over, labor-intensive == VALUABLE). A system is seen as an easy way to generate unconsidered music, and a relic of modernist intellectual self-indulgence.
It shouldn’t be. All work is done in a system, whether elegantly defined or perversely. Some don’t offer much to explore. Some sustain interest for multiple pieces. Once, a certain system of polyphony, based on observations of human cognition of dissonance, sustained the interest of both audiences and composers for over 500 years. Abstraction is a tool, and systems should be judged by their fruit.