This was written for Ars Electronica when we showed Loops there in 2005.

“Art is the imitation of nature in her manner of operation.”

This idea, often cited by John Cage and Merce Cunningham, led them to a deeper kind of realism, which aimed at mirroring not the world’s outward appearance, but rather its underlying processes.

One such process, which fascinated both artists, was what they called “chance operations.” They decided that by leaving many of their creative decisions to the roll of the dice, they could endow their artworks with true autonomy.

In Loops, we explore, question, and then extend these radical notions of realism and autonomy.

The computer performs random calculations at a speed many magnitudes faster than that of any manual methods, allowing us to work with a complexity of chance operations far beyond what was possible in earlier generations. Algorithms are by definition autonomous processes, and the computer can intricately nest, interact, and co-evolve such processes to achieve complex autonomy. These complex codes are based on many years of research into the creation of autonomous artificial intelligences, themselves inspired by nature.

Loops departs from Cage/Cunningham by rejecting the simplicity of chance operations. In real life, after all, is it ever the case that all outcomes are equally likely?

Missing from these earlier methods is any notion of complex contingency, which comes only by building networks of if/then relationships that require that the outcomes of chance effects ripple down through many possible branches. It’s not pure chance, but rather weighted probability that deserves our attention if we are to more closely mirror “nature in her manner of operations.”