The Bureau of Creative Commerce

I made a slightly more involved model which describes the rise of modernism a little better. In this case the shade of the agent stands for a painters treatment of the picture plane: the darker the agent the more naturalistic the painting, the lighter the agent the more flattened the picture plane and the more abstract.

Early on the ‘Avant Garde’ starts to flatten out the picture plane, and second tier painters start to adopt their style to a lesser extent. Eventually, as increasing numbers of ‘fine art’ painters start abstracting there is a backlash. Perhaps we can think of one of the spots where black and white agents are adjacent as the simultaneity of ab-ex and pop art in NYC. Eventually the landscape becomes increasingly striated.

The next iteration will add 3 traits: flatness of the picture plane, use of color, and canvas size.

Okay, so I have spent a lot of time thinking about the implications of the Axelrod Cultural Dissemination Model, particulalry the tendency towards monoculture when the forces of globalization are put into effect.

However, built in to the dynamics of that model is a reward for agents being similar to their neighbor. I was interested in a subculture (High-Modernism in the Western Art tradition) that priveleged difference, novelty, and being the ‘first’ to do something.

Ezra Pound said ‘Make it New’.

This is an interesting cultural situation to model because it runs contrary to many of the assumptions we might make about cultural production and dissemination that are predicated on sharing a similar language or trait to converse across. While I understand Modernism is much more complicated than just being ‘different’ or doing something that has not been ‘tried before’ lets begin this experiment with the assumption that there is a desire or reward given to an artist who can distinguish herself from her peers.

First, lets look at a simple model where agents look at its Moore neighbors, and moves in the OPPOSITE direction of the average of each its neighbors:

What is interesting about this, is that each of the agents, in racing for the extremes create a fairly heterodox landscape, with long strips of extremists wrapped around each other.

That actually makes a lot of sense, when you think of an individual 3×3 matrix with an agent that we are interested in the center. Having like agents at the north and south squares and unlike at all 6 others, means that the agent is still moving away from the majority of its neighbors, but that interlocking lines of opposite neighbors best support each others existence.

Just for kicks we could flip the equation and tell agents to look at there Moore neighbors and become MORE like their neighborhood. In this case we get:

What is interesting here, is that although the configuration of the agents is quite different, the agents have all moved towards the extremes, and the system has become locked in duocultural state.

So how is it that wanting to be the same as you neighbor, and wanting to be different than your neighbor both lead to homogeneity?

Perhaps if the dynamics of the system were more specific about HOW the agents could distinguish themselves from their neighbors. This time the rules have been changed so that the agent looks to its neighborhood and sees if the spot 1 below or 1 above is taken. If not it changes to that status. If neither is taken, it moves with the crowd. If both are taken, it stays the same.

You can see that these dynamics lead to a very heterogeneus situation, but there is still lock in:

I saw a very interesting thesis proposal today that went a little something like freecycle.org (”changing the world one gift at a time”) + emachineshop.com (”Welcome to eMachineShop - where you can instantly design, price and order your custom parts online!”) = some sort of rapid prototyping make magazine mash-up.

While thats all a mouthful, and I am interested to see how he pulls it off, I suggested he come up with something a bit more concise to describe it: Cottage Industrial Ecology.

Are there other examples of Cottage Industrial Ecology? Make magazine? Is this metaphor useful?

Has anyone done a comparative history of Nigerian 419 scams and the ‘49er gold rush in the U.S.? If not, they should.

Two kids play some kind of noise music in front of Urban Outfitters, plugged into their electricity outlet. But who has the last laugh? Can one spontaneously create music on the street, without inadvertently contributing to consumer culture?

Would make it easy to do impromptu DJ sets anywhere.

Exploring the streets for open electricity outlets.

Still working what exactly this means but I feel it happening.

Could be that the you-tubing of society is just the spectacle and more so, but there is something about the long tail of the this spectacle that makes it lovable and possibly liberating.

Is it possible that with everyone acting for the cameras that permeate our lives we become more coscious and thoughtful about our actions ? It could all descend into jackass-gross-out-positive-feedback loops, or a coevolution of corporate co-option of bottom up remix of corporate content to build buzz and street cred. On the other hand, if there are models worth copying and they get injected into the meme pool all this copycat and copyleft stuff could coincide. YouTube could be seen as Make magazine for the masses, and we could all use a little diet coke and mentos action if it gets us out of the house and doing some kitchen chemistry.
Anyways, I am interested if anyone has anyother thoughts on this panopticonfidence business?

A sketch for a color copyright wiki can be found here.