Likes :: Apr 18, 04:56 PM
installation at CalArts – 20 April 2006
photography: 
-Text is laid out on a grid, one character per position.
-A specified number of Like objects (let’s say 500) are created and assigned to positions on the grid.
-As part of its creation (and at no other time), a pattern is generated for the object, determining what it ‘likes’. The object will look for this pattern in the text chunks it reads. The pattern consists of 3 sequential characters from the source text with a potential gap inserted between either position 1 and 2 or position 2 and 3. So, if ‘age’ is selected from the source text, ‘a.*?ge’ or ‘ag.*?e’ are the possible patterns. ’.*?’ means zero or more occurences of any character except newline. ‘a.*?ge’ will match ‘age’ and ‘a huge’.
-Each object reads a specified lookahead distance (let’s say 500 characters) ahead of itself in the text looking for its pattern, determining what it ‘likes’ in what it’s read. If the object’s pattern is ‘a.*?ge’ and it reads ‘ice age’, it will like ‘age’. If it reads ‘against geometry’, it will like ‘against ge’.
-If the object finds something that it likes in what it has read, it will print what it liked to the screenit and move ahead in the text to the end of that last chunk it read (500 characters) or will go to the beginning of the text if it is at the end.
-If the object doesn’t find something that it likes in the 500 character chunk, then it is unable to move. An immobile object waits for moving objects to enter its lookahead range. Of the objects in proximity, it chooses the one with the highest matchcount (the one that has found the most things that it likes) and copies a character from that object’s pattern to replace one of the characters in its own pattern. The object mutates itself in an attempt to continue progress through the text.
-If all objects are motionless, the reading is finished and the program cycles to a new text.
The idea is to create an environment for a text to read itself—to not only compare its potential patterns to its original presentation, but to execute those potentialities. An arbitrarily self-reflexive text. This project is also an attempt at modeling a system of self-regulating perception.
The environment consists of two programs. One running the text, objects, and sending reports over a network on the activity of individual objects. The second program receives report messages from the first and displays them on a different screen.
Code (Ruby):
like_loop
like_recv
like_class.rb