059

Authors:

 Draves , Scott.

Title:

 Inside the Bomb

Keywords:

Abstract:

 Bomb is a software system that produces visual music. It creates a
video stream with color, texture, shape, and rhythm. The graphics are
organic and interactive. Bomb is a form of artificial life, or alife.

On one level it uses the techniques of non-linear iterated systems to
produces the visuals. On another level it is free, living,
software. The source code is available on the web under GPL. Because
it can be freely copied it has the lowest possible friction in the
marketplace of ideas, and thus the highest rate of evolution.

Building software like bomb is a interesting programming problem, and
serves as inspiration to the author's research in programming
languages. Future bomb-like systems will incorporate the results of
this research, resulting in greater variety of visual effects and
higher performance. The idea is to use metaprogramming (programs
creating programs) to allow highly abstract manipulations of cellular
automata, which then become tractable to the genetic algorithm.

A common vision lies behind both the visual/conceptual/artistic
aspects of bomb, and the technical/scientific aspects of Bomb. The
vision involves the evolution of metasystems, abstraction, and life in
its most general sense.

The essential feature of life is creative expansion, In contrast to
behavior that is static, repetitive, random, or predictable, life has
the ability to keep doing new things. It cannot be quantified because
random is a relative term; you can never be sure there isn't a message
hidden in the noise. Life is not in balance or equilibrium. There is
a positive feedback mechanism at work, which converts time and energy
into creativity, which diverts more energy to conversion.

Bomb works because it is something new, something now available and
part of culture. It provides raw material for further manipulation and
creation. It disseminates an idea.


http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spot/bomb.html
Draves , Scott. spot@transmeta.com Independant http://www.draves.org Scott Draves was born in 1968 and first made eye candy with an Apple //e computer. At Brown University Scott worked in the Computer Graphics Research Group and received a BS in Mathematics in 1990. His first widely-circulated image series (Flame and Fuse) were created in 1993 in Japan. The first version of Bomb was released in 1994 and has continued to develop since then. Scott received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997, and now works for the Transmeta Corporation in Silicon Valley. Scott's work has shown in galleries and won awards, but most people experience it at home on their own computers, or at clubs, raves, and live performances. The software and images are distributed by the internet and CD-ROM all over the world.