Alo Allik: Audiovisual Composition with Three-Dimensional Continuous Cellular Automata

Still live blogging the supercollider symposium
f(x) – audio visual performance environment, based on 3d cellular automata. Uses objective X, but he audio is in scserver.
the continuous cellular automata are values between 0 and 1. The state at the next time step is determined by evaluating the neighbours + a constant. Now, a demo of a 1-d world of 19 cells. All are 0 except for the middle which is 1. Now it’s chugging a long. 0.2 added to all. The value is modulus 1, to just get the fractional part. Changing the offset to 0.5, really changes the results. Can have very dramatic transitions, but with very gradual fades. The images he’s showing are quite lovely. and the 3d version is cool
Then he tried changing the weight of the neighbours, This causes the blobs to sort of scroll to the side. The whole effect is kind of like rain drops falling in a stream or in a moving bit of water in the road. CAn also change the effect by changing the add over time.
Now he’s demoing his program and has allowed us to download his code off his computer. Somehow he’s gotten grids and stuff to dance around based on this. “The ‘World’ button resets the world.” Audience member: “Noooo!”
Now an audio example, that’s very clearly tied in. Hopefully this is in the sample code we downloaded. It uses the Warp1.ar 8 times.
This is nifty. Now there’s a question I couldn’t hear. Alo’s favourite passtime is to invent new mappings. He uses control specs on data from the visual app. There are many many cells in the automata, thus he polls the automata when he wants data and only certain ones.
More examples!