Third Iteration (design: Troy Innocent)

[Toshio Iwaii, Electroplankton ->http://electroplankton.com/]

The Iteration conference series began in 1999, organised by the Center for Electronic Media Arts at Melbourne’s Monash University. This year’s Third Iteration was a three-day event, and while the event has a big Australian focus (it’s the only such conference in .au) there was a large international presence, with keynotes from Peter Bentley, Machiko Kusahara and Casey Reas, as well as several international presenters in the main program.

I’ll cover the keynotes in this post: Peter Bentley’s opening keynote, which made a convincing argument that Von Neumann / Turing style computers are basically all wrong, and that computation should be more organic – distributed, asynchronous, robust, component-based, embodied, and so on. I browsed Bentley’s (edited) book on computational models of growth and development on the book table – definitely worth a look for those seeking more complex & subtle generative systems.

Machiko Kusahara’s keynote was an immersive tour of digital animism in Japanese culture: all manner of digital-media creatures and robots, from Tamagotchi to Post Pets and Aibo. Best of all was the chance to play with Toshio Iwaii’s beautiful Electroplankton on a Nintendo DS. This is a great (but isolated?) example of an artist moving onto game platforms – I hope we see more in this line.

Final keynote was from Casey Reas, who talked about his own artwork and Processing. Casey’s presentation was quiet and spacious, lots of time to take in beautiful full-screen versions of his process drawing pieces. Despite acknowledging the (perhaps temporary) emergence of a Processing aesthetic, the examples Reas presented showed the platform’s increasing breadth and diversity (from custom hardware to machine vision and soda’s Moovl)

Next post: more from the papers and forums…