The Poietic Generator is a social-network game designed by Olivier AuberOlivier Auber, independent researcher, member dof the research cluster of the P2P foundation, affiliated since 2012 to the interdisciplinary research group "Evolution, Complexity and COgnition" (ECCO), Vrije Universiteit Brussel and to the Global Brain Institute. in 1986; it was developed from 1987 under the label free artPrior the free art license (2000), the Poietic Generator had its own free license: https://web.archive.org/web/20020605145918/http://perso.enst.fr/~auber/sommaireA.html#statut. thanks to many contributors.Poietic Generator's contributors : http://poietic-generator.net/blog/?page_id=91 . The game takes place within a two-dimensional matrix in the tradition of board games and its principle is similar to both Conway's Game of Life and the surrealists' exquisite corpse.
However, it differs from these models in several respects. It is not an algorithm like Conway's, but human players who control in real time the graphic elements of a global matrix, based on one unit per person. Unlike the exquisite corpse, in which there are always hidden parts, here all the players' actions are visible at all times by each of them. Unlike board games, there is no concept of winning or losing, the goal of the game is simply to collectively draw recognizable forms and to observe how people create them together.
The name "Poietic Generator", derived from the concept of autopoiesis in life sciences (Francisco Varela), and of poietic in philosophy of art (Paul Valéry, ), illustrates the process of self-organization at work in the continuous emergence of the global picture. Since its inception, the Poietic Generator has been designed as part of a wider action research to create an "Art of Speed".Esquisse d'une position théorique pour un art de la vitesse, Olivier Auber, SPEED 1997.
Rules of the game Every player draws on a small part of a global mosaic formed by the dynamic juxtaposition of those parts, which are manipulated by all the participants (eventually it will be possible for several thousand players to play simultaneously). Every player can therefore change the sign in their square, depending on the overall state of the image, which itself depends on the actions of all the individual players. Out of this cybernetic loop emerges a kind of narrative: autonomous forms, sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, appear in a completely unpredictable manner and tell stories.Olivier Auber, in Poietic Generator reloaded, l'aventure peut (re)commencer !
In practice, each player can draw (using a graphics tablet) on a very simple image. This image is limited in size (20×20 pixels) by design. This was done to prevent a single player from drawing figurative signs by themselves. The overall image is continuously formed in the style of a spiral, that is to say the sign of the first player occupies the whole image, and the signs of the newcomers are juxtaposed in the first winding around it, and so on. If a player forfeits the game, their sign immediately disappears and its position remains empty until another player occupies it. A zoom in/zoom out feature ensures that the image, constituted by the juxtaposition of all signs, is permanently visible to all the players.
Versions The Poietic Generator runs on two types of architecture, a centralized network (for versions 1, 3, 4), or an ad hoc distributed network capable of implementing the multicast protocol (case version 2). Therefore, no location in the network plays a particular role and according to the rules of the Poietic Generator, an "all-all" interaction may take place without the intervention of any kind of control center.
Videotex version, developed in C for the French Minitel system (1987)Vidéotex version for the Minitel system (1987): deprecated. IP Multicast version, developed in C for the Internet Mbone (1995)"gp" IP Multicast version of the Poietic Generator, developed in C for the Internet Mbone (1995): (Telecom ParisTech server ) IP Unicast version, developed in Java for the Web (1997)IP Unicast version, developed in Java for the Web (1997)(Olivier Auber's server) Mobile version developed in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript (2012)Mobile version developed in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript (2012) (Github)
This latest version is available on the web,Play over the web : http://play.poietic-generator.net/ via Android mobile phone, iPhone / iPad, via Facebook, and has a reference site.Reference site: http://poietic-generator.net/blog/
Experiments Since 1987, the Poietic Generator (various versions) inspired many experiments in diverse contexts. The first public experiment was at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1990 as part of the "Communication and monumentality" exhibition. Other museums, art galleries, digital public spaces, festivals,Festival X-00, Lorient, France, 16-19 mars 2000, Théophanie assistée par ordinateur BREAK21 festival - Ljubljana, Slovenie, 11 mai 2000 and international conferences,Musée Royal de Mariemont : art en ligne · art en réseau · art en mouvement, 6 juin 1999, ARTMEDIA VIII (Paris 2002) - Texte d'Olivier Auber in Dossier Artmedia VIII, in "Ligeia", Paris, 2002, pp. 21-245 (CNRF journal, including Artmedia VIII Proceedings), ARTMEDIA IX (Salerno 2005) - Annonce - Mario Costa (ed.) (2005), Phenomenology of New Tech Arts, Salerno: Università di Salerno (Catalog, pp. 56), WJ-SPOTS#1 (Paris 2009) - Web etc. then followed, including the 1991 "Communicating Machines" exhibition by the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie (Paris).Jean-Louis Boissier, Catalogue de l'exposition « Machines à communiquer faites œuvres », La Communication, Lucien Sfez (éd.), Paris, Presses Universitaires de France et la Cité des sciences et de l'industrie, (1991)
Several experiments were performed on the periphery of academic research. For instance, experiments were conducted in particular at Telecom ParisTech (where Olivier Auber was a guest artist between 1994 and 1997), during the Internet Mbone experiment (with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Xerox PARC), and at other laboratories. The subjects of the experiments were diverse: network protocols, the process of emergence of forms, human-machine interfaces, collective intelligence,ProspecTic, nouvelles technologies, nouvelles pensées, Jean-Michel Cornu, FING & Fyp Editions, oct. 2008. (Web) group behavior,Elisa Giaccardi, Center for LifeLong Learning and Design (L3D), Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado : Mediators in Visual Interaction: An Analysis of the “Poietic Generator” and “Open Studio” (PDF ) etc.
Since 1997, the Poietic Generator is accessible to everyone on the web as a work of free art (under Free Art License from 2002). At the request of various groups of artists, teachers or researchers, this led to several hundred recordedSome records: (perspective-numerique.net) game sessions, some of them commented.Some comments: (Transactiv.exe) In several of these sessions, 70 players participated simultaneously. Several experiments were in kindergarten, elementary and secondary schools (including one experiment linking multiple classrooms).
The most recent event was in the spring of 2011 when 70 people responded to a call on the France Culture radio stationFrance-Culture, Place de la Toile, 2011.04.10 (Audio) to finance the mobile version of the Poietic Generator via the crowd-funded platform. A call to finance the mobile version of the Poietic Generator (KissKissBanBank crowdfunding platform) This version is currently online (2012).
Position in art history Several art historians and theorists, including Don Foresta,Don Foresta : Chronologie historique résumée d'échanges artistiques par télécommunications. Les précurseurs, jusqu'en 1995, avant l'Internet (PDF) Gilbertto Prado,Gilbertto Prado: CRONOLOGIA DE EXPERIÊNCIAS ARTÍSTICAS NAS REDES DE TELECOMUNICAÇÕES (Web )Gilbertto Prado: Arte telemática: dos intercâmbios pontuais aos ambientes virtuais multiusuário (Itaú Cultural:São Paulo, 2003.) (PDF) Mario Costa,Mario Costa: Internet et globalisation esthétique. L'avenir de l'art et de la philosophie à l'époque des réseaux, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2003. (Google books) Caterina Davinio,Caterina Davinio: Tecno-Poesia e realtà virtuali / Techno-Poetry and Virtual Reality, essai (Italian/English). Préface par Eugenio Miccini, Sometti. Collana: Archivio della Poesia del 900, Comune di Mantova, Sometti (I) 2002. Jean-Paul Fourmentraux,Jean-Paul Fourmentraux: Art et Internet. les nouvelles figures de la création, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2005. Louis-José Lestocart,Louis-José Lestocart, Epistémologie de la complexité et art contemporain, Collège de France / PLASTIR, 2007 (PDF) Elisa Giaccardi,Elisa Giaccardi : Interactive Strategies of Network Art, Proceedings of CADE '99, Third Conference on Computers in Art & Design Education”, University of Teesside, 7–9 April 1999. PDF Edmond Couchot and Norbert Hillaire,Edmond Couchot et Norbert Hillaire: L’art numérique, Éditions Flammarion 2003 Annick Bureaud,Annick Bureaud: Art and Minitel in France in the 1980s, in Social Media Archeology and Poetics edited by Judy Malloy, MIT Press, 2016. Judy MalloyJudy Malloy: Networked Art Works in the Formative Years of the Internet (2019) recognize the Poietic Generator as one of the historical works of digital art, interactive art, generative art and Net.art. Note that the Poietic Generator was born at the time of Minitel, before the invention of the Web (1994), and implemented from 1995 onwards on experimental Multicast networks foreshadowing IPv6. The introduction of the Minitel in France, offered, for the first time in the world, an easy way to implement telematic art. Several French artists attempted somewhat similar experiments,Example of telematic art using Minitel : Image-la-Vallée, vitrail monumental dessiné collectivement par minitel, (Jean-Claude Anglade) 1987. (Web) but none of them had the durability of Poietic Generator.
Anne Cauquelin, who deals with the mechanisms of the "system of art" in several of her works,Anne Cauquelin: Fréquenter les incorporels, PUF, collection « Lignes d'art », 2006. Que sais-je ? L’art contemporain, PUF, 9eme édition, mai 2009. considers the Poietic Generator to be the prototype of a new "cognitive art". This new "cognitive art", following Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein and Andy Warhol, re-institutes the task of questioning again, and in a more radical way, the "doxa of art".
Like in the Renaissance, art becomes (a) heuristic, a type of probe with the task to explore a continent.Anne Cauquelin, à propros of "cognitive art" in L'art contemporain, PUF (2009), p. 123.