User:Fako Berkers/project3

History Will Repeat Itself

Both in the essay and in the practical assignment I want to study how re-enactment relates to simulation. I think these concepts are very similar, but they are also different in a few ways. By creating an enacted simulation and writing about what others have said about these two phenomena I hope to learn a great deal about how computers and performance art can relate to each other.

Theory

It took me a while to formulate the theory around re-enactment and simulation. Now that I have it dramatically influences the practice making my older description obsolete.

It comes down to the following. Re-enactment is used to fill in the gaps of history. To make a smooth narrative people need to interpolate the evidence that the past has left us. Re-enactment is a way of checking whether the interpolation is possible at all and indicates how likely it is to be true. This is at least the definition of re-enactment by Collingwood. History is always an abstraction of the events that have taken place. By re-enacting something the abstraction disappears and this can reveal things that were not as evident as they were before the re-enactment in the more abstract state of history.

As with history, simulation relies on an abstraction, because it is not possible to take all of reality into account when creating a virtual world. It is my theory that the enactment of a simulation and making the virtual concrete as accurate as possible, will reveal certain aspects of the simulation. These aspects may very well be design choices that have a particular proposition which has a thorough influence on the system as a whole.

Since ambiguous computing is developing rapidly and simulations and similar systems are having an increasingly bigger influence on our lives I think it's good to practice the enactment of such systems for a critical analysis of designer choices and/or biases. In the practical part of this trimester I will enact a simulation and probably device a theatrical event that will discuss its design.

Practise

An older description of my practice can be found here

In the end I decided to do the “re-enactment” of a simulation made with Breve software. Read more about it on this page [1]. A video of the simulation can be found on Youtube at the page here [2]. The source code of that particular simulation resides here [3]

The simulation works with a similar model as Karl Sims’s “Evolving Virtual Creatures” in the sense that it takes on the notion of “fitness” as a selection criteria. I explained in my essay that this proposition in relation to evolution may be oversimplifying reality.

The “re-enactment” (although embodiment is a better word) of the simulation puts the simplifications done by the modeling into contrast with the real world. This gives the audience an opportunity to reflect upon design choices that are made in the simulation. I don’t believe that this analysis will happen spontaneous and if it does then I don’t think the work adds to this spontaneous analysis in any way. That’s why I stimulated discussion between audience members proactively after every performance to encourage analysis. I do this by asking questions only, because I do believe in the validity of the following quote: “tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand” (source ambiguous). By asking questions and letting the audience think I hope to increase involvement instead of achieving a more passive less productive attitude in my audience.

In practice it was not easy to guide the thinking power of the audience towards the subjects that I had in mind. I don’t think that this is bad, because the discussions that took place instead of my envisioned talks were interesting in themselves. However it may be good to look for forms of embodiment where there are realizations that have an instantaneous, more shocking quality. I had such an experience when I watched the re-enactment of the obedience to authority experiment. It will not be easy to sort such an effect, but it’s a nice challenge.