PrimatePoetics!

Leonel Moura interview

- Posted: 29.May.2006.

This is an email interview done with Leonel Moura back in 2002, now republished. In the mean while we have had the pleasure of meeting Leonel in person while his work has been evolving . His work is truly inspiring.

* Can you tell me something about your background & how you became interested in complexity / a-life?

- Although my main activity is art, I have always been involved with architecture, politics, philosophy and science. One of the consequences of these broad interests is my regular involvement with the organization of events and conferences putting art and science together.

In 1997 the government asked me to conceive a Pavilion for the World Fair in Lisbon Expo’98. Task that includes architecture and content. The government idea was to represent the regional and traditional Portugal, but I have been able to change it and to create a space entirely dedicated to innovation. To achieve this I have looked for the most advanced research in my country and, in one of my visits to a lab, meet Vitorino Ramos (http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos), a scientist working with alife. I did know something about genetic algorithms, but not much about swarm intelligence. I was fascinated and from there we start to collaborate.

* can you tell me some more what youre work/research was about which leaded you to your current swarm paintings. Are there any examples on-line

- Our objective is to create a model to test the emergence of collective intelligence in human groups. The swarm paintings are just an experimental step with implications in the art problematic. My idea is to show these paintings in a Gallery or Museum and not so much in the net, exactly to avoid the lack of materiality when we see them in a monitor.

* your current research is about non-human painting aka swarm paintings. What's so fascinating about it?

- Art is for too long concerned with form. I believe it is time to change to mechanism. Therefore it is not important to be handmade. On the contrary, it is more interesting if it is machine made, be it a robot or a colony of virtual ants. The designation non-human art is provocative but also factual, because these paintings are the product of a small but autonomous intelligence. At most we have create the artist, but not the art.

* what technology do you use & how? do you use already available technology or do you develop your own? is this important to you?

- Our experiments are based on Vitorino’s algorithms. In this kind of research the technology is many times the target itself.

Basically our model conditions are:

We create an environment and drop artificial ants.

It is assumed that each organism emits pheromone at a given rate, and there is no spatial diffusion. Also global pheromone evaporates after all ants have moved at a given rate.

The ants are not allowed to have any memory and the individual's spatial knowledge is restricted to local information about the pheromone density.

The pheromonal field (cognitive map) contains information about past movements and decisions of the organisms, but not arbitrarily far in the past since the field "forgets" its distant history due to evaporation in time.

Toroidal boundary conditions are imposed on the lattice to remove, as far as possible, any boundary effects.

Nonlinear response or directional bias is introduced in order to form trails, or to persist on past trails that are already formed.

Thus the paintings in fact reproduce, with the help of a robot, the pheromone trails at a given iteration (time). More pheromone more paint.

* as an artist you use science to let art emerge outside your own control. What are your main objectives with this? to create new forms? to protest against the art-maffia & their doctrines of originality? to show something? to gain insight on what's the difference of being man instead of monkeys or machine? or otherwise.

- In art we live under the Duchamp’s paradigm. Basically it means that the object is not very important, it is its relation with a specific place that matters. Thus this paradigm suggests already a simple mechanism of emergence. By displacing an object from one place to another, both the object and the context change, and through this art emerges.

We want to go further. We want to introduce stigmergy.

Stigmergy is an indirect communication through the environment. It works like this. One agent changes the environment and by that creates a stimulus for other agents to keep on changing. They don’t relate to each other and don’t follow any previous plan.

Duchamp’s paradigm is not dynamic. After all, once the object gains its new place it becomes just another art object. Untouchable and static. On the contrary, we want to introduce interactivity in a multi agent environment. The art milieu is a good place to do it.

* the use of the word swarm suggests the existance of a colony that acts to our perception as one entity, how does this translate in your work?

- The paintings are the product of the colony, not of the individual ants. The model is based on stigmergy. The deposition of pheromone by one ant stimulates more deposition from other ants. The global map is essentially holistic.

* should art be regarded as more than images alone? are the personal history of the artist, the place of the artwork in art history, the interpretation of a artwork that the artist give, not as much part of what defines interesting art as the art itself? How does this socially constructed value of art tie in with your objectives with swarm painting?

- Art for me is not images, nor forms. Art is a cultural behavior, i.e. a specific human behavior, involving artists, but also, curators, critics, collectors, public and anyone that, in a way or another, is related to it. This collective behavior produces a kind of pheromone trails that work as a stimulus to all agents.

When we look at culture as a pheromone map everything becomes clear. Some works have a high level of pheromone deposition, because many people like them, and thus this attracts more and more concentration of pheromone. The same with, for example, Museums or other cultural buildings. The social value of art is not the result of anyone decision in particular, or institution approval, but emerges from a complex and intricate collective behavior.

* What are your plans for the future? which direction will your work take?

- We are starting with robotics. We feel the need to give a body to the ant swarm.

* Anything I missed? anything the readers of social fiction schould know?

- I am very interested in your experiments with Psychogeography, and I expect to see the introduction of some sort of interaction between the agents. Stigmergy is essential if you want to generate collective maps.