Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are.
Gregory Maguire
The first Research Paper tutorial was a sounding out of the initial outline. It was helpful in thinking about the way the narrative might go and how to apportion space to each component. My responses so far are:
There is a dialogue between the literal and metaphorical manifest as the biological and the cultural.
This leads me to think that I am dealing with three different ecosystems: biological, cultural and machine;
embedded in the Cambrian explosion, Early Bronze Age and the age of digital (for now) machines.
We are currently living in the cultural age which is on the threshold of the cultural-machine thinking period.
Useful worker to look at is William Latham.
Comparison between biological systems and machine systems – for now the human element is still the predominant one and machines are used as ‘intelligent’ tools.
The tutorial helped me in re-evaluating what I have done so far and how to place the historical knowledge element as a contextual framework for talking about the contemporary state of things. This will need a great deal of focussing but I think I can condense the historical elements into just a few hundred words.
The paper really touches on the philosophical ontology of current biology-computational art in relation to truly biological systems… in the context of culture.
Useful worker in the field of computer generated life: Eric T. Olson at Sheffield. He looks at the relationship between animals and humans at a philosophical level.