The ideology of individualism requires the maintenance of some semblance of interpersonal difference. The horror produced by the idea of cloning, or the imagined forced conformity of communist society, is surely tied to a certain attachment to the idea of difference. At the same time, conformity exerts a strong influence and difference is disciplined away.

Clearly the desire for the same is operative in various ways in many domains: at the level of nationality, within the social, in terms of class, or by political identifications, subcultures, etc. Just as frequently, the desire for the same is challenged by its opposite: the desire for the different.

... by a Free Play of Algorithmic Patterning. In modeling the game Chutes and Ladders on a computer, we gain insight into the nature of both games and computation. The computer version, unlike the rule bound cardboard version, is unfixed, thus allowing for the displacement of a moral overlay by a free play of algorithmic patterning. The abstraction of the model preserves a structure but unleashes a principal of variation: the computer makes every constant a variable (as Marcos Novak observes as he describes the liquefaction of architecture). The arbitrariness of particular rules becomes evident.

A culmination of the work with harmonographs, this piece incorporates a sound track which was constructed using techniques analogous to the curves, and a voice-over which makes links between the abstract forms and social, sexual, and computational concepts. It is the first step in a narrativizing thrust of the work.

1000 numbered curves in a continuous tweened loop inhabit two reams of office paper. In the gallery, visitors were invited to take away pages from the stack and interupt the continuity of the tween.

The following animation shows all 1000 curves as if the stack of paper were used as a flip book:

In addition to the superimposition of images, there is a time-based strategy of accumulation of variation in sequence. These two pieces use this technique. They also embed the curve within other systematic relations.

This series investigates the effects of accumulated random figures. As in the work of abstract expressionists like Pollack, the aggration of rendered gestures define a characteristic mood that adheres to the nature of the media rather than seeking to transcend it.

Because these curves have a kind of double ontology–they exist as figures, i.e. lines with a certain shape that can be drawn on screen or printed out on paper, and as a set of parameters within a complex parametric equation, i.e. a set of constitutive numbers, not unlike genetic material, from which they can be generated–they have specific manipulable properties. One of these is the ability to measure and interpolate the distance between any pair or set of figures.

Each of these panels contains a set of 4 images selected from a superset of 1000 randomly generated curves. This piece focuses on the interface between the machinic process of generation and the subjective process of selection. The grouplings formed on the basis of percieved similarity have little relation to the actual parameters which produce the work. The projective tendencies of the mind attribute characteristics like curliness, roundness, or even femininity, energy or wierdness to what are merely inert lines.