Peter Luining: Rationalizer 4

Here is an interesting new piece by Peter Luining of the Netherlands:
Rationalizer 4 ( http://www.lfoundation.org/engines/ratzio4.html ).

I asked Peter to comment on the piece and the behaviors/functions:

Peter> "1st of all I wanted to make an easy clickable interface so that action
& response is easy to explore. With most artificial lifeform works
you see there are no possiblities for user interaction or endless series of
parameters with which you can tweak shapes & life. Which makes the
last ones in my eyes more scientific models than games or art.
To go deeper into relations of shapes & function/ behaviour
would take me too long at this moment. What I can say is
that the shapes and colors I used were in the first place aesthetical
choices based on traditions of minimal painting. This is why I think
the piece has a different feeling than most other lifeform pieces.
Furthermore there's everything in the piece to create and sustain life,
simply said:
1st button below left lets you create life forms
2nd button below left lets you create forms that will sustain life
3rd button below left lets you erase life forms
4th button below left lets you create blocks that can give birth to life"
(from the Dirgames-L list)

The site I'm most familiar with of Peter Luining's is http://www.ctrlaltdel.org ; this has much
of Peter's Shockwave work on it; but http://www.lfoundation.org has a lot of his Shockwave work
also.

The nature of the work I've experienced of Peter's involves minimal rectilinear graphics, the
type of audio you hear in the new piece (which is kind of analogous auditorially to minimal
rectilinear visuals), and concise, simple, interactive interface.

Part of what I like about the new piece, Rationalizer 4, is how the emphasis is not so much on
the visuals or sound so much as the algorithms. How does it happen that the emphasis falls on
the algorithms? Perhaps by virtue of their doing lively things, interesting things, their
provision of the 'character' of the entities in the piece. In the case of this particular work,
there's an explicit emphasis on "artificial lifeforms"; but I suspect that even if that isn't
the case in a work, yet the algorithms are lively, do interesting things and make interesting
decisions, are suggestive of some manner of lively, decision-making 'animation', that the
emphasis would fall to some extent on the algorithms as objects of attention in the piece. The
behavior can, in such case, provide quite a bit of the 'character' of the objects. In this way,
interestingly algorithmic work is often concerned with "artificial lifeforms" whether it is
explicitly stated or not.

ja
http://vispo.com