A Jagged Orbit (2023) is an automated-art-system which explores the computational equivalent of the human activities of daydreaming, mind wandering and distraction. At the heart of the system lies a custom-designed drawing machine programmed to calculate the orbital trajectories of celestial bodies (sometimes referred to as N-body problems) which it attempts to draw onto the covers of glossy fashion magazines with a marker.
The system may, however, become ‘distracted’ from its primary task, redirecting its attention either inwardly or outwardly. For example, it can use computer vision to identify objects, faces, colours, patterns, or words in the underlying image (including its previously plotted orbits) to generate and draw something reminiscent of a ‘doodle’ which it adds to the original orbit.
While the system is in this ‘daydream’ state, it can react to external stimuli which it detects through sensors, including sounds or speech made by nearby humans. In this case the machine can become ‘startled’ and immediately returns to its primary task of calculating and drawing celestial orbits. By combining these processes, the system continuously and recursively identifies and incorporates new forms into the constantly evolving orbit it is drawing.
Through this system, we are not only exploring our (human) need to daydream, but we are also speculating on the benefits of designing so-called ‘intelligent’ machines with the capacity for ‘mind wandering’ and other forms of abstraction.
What opportunities lie beyond existing approaches to working with and through increasingly ‘intelligent’ machines? How can we imagine more porous functions in digital processes, and what new slippages could these ‘distracted’ processes afford?
A live demonstration of the system occurred during the xCoAx Conference for Computational Aesthetics in Weimar, Germany, 2023, where the system autonomously produced a number of ‘jagged orbits’ on various found fashion magazines.
A final note: This artwork takes its title from John Brunner’s 1969 science-fiction novel “The Jagged Orbit”. The term is useful in the context of this new artwork when imagining the relationship between human and nonhuman agents as if they are two bodies in orbit, the potential for these orbits to decay over time, ending in the event of the collision of both bodies, with the emergence of something new.
