--DISCHARGE-- group exhibition, Lumen, 3rd and 5th March

-----DISCHARGE-----

Lumen Project Space, 34 - 35 Barkston House, Croydon Street, LS11 9RT

Wednesday 3rd March - 6 till 9 pm
Friday 5th March - 6 till 9 pm

For two nights at the start of March, three artists will be presenting a showcase of new work. Featuring experimental multichannel digital audio manipulation, sculptural recorded performance pieces, and installed multimedia sculpture.

Featuring work by
- James Hubble
- Fiona McKillop (http://www.fionamckillop.blogspot.com/)
- Eoin Shea (http://www.eoinshea.blogspot.com/)

All welcome. A limited amount of wine will be provided though BYOB is suggested.

A map to the event can be found here: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=leeds+rail+station&daddr=LS11+9RT&hl=en&geocode=%3BFde8NAMdzBro_ykHhsQVl155SDHFWEyZracZVA&mra=ls&dirflg=w&sll=53.794491,-1.553321&sspn=0.012776,0.026608&ie=UTF8&ll=53.79188,-1.557183&spn=0.012777,0.026608&z=15

It would take about 3 minutes in a taxi from the station which between a few people will cost next to nothing.

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Nymphomation- Sexy Knowledge

"One of the first artificial life systems. Cellular Automata. You set up a map, an environment inside a hard drive, design some creatures to live in it, give them some basic rules, randomise the pattern, and start the program."

This is nymphomation

"Knowledge gathered: a love labyrinth was a computer generated maze in which the wanderers could actively find the centre by falling in love with the pathways. This was called playing to win.
Some wanderers had a better chance of winning. These are the casanovas. Thay had a love for the maze.

The wanderers of these labyrinths were only packages of information let loose in the computers world. The more they wandered the maze the more they learned about it. They could then change there behaviour accordingly.

Hackle seemed to view these wanderers as being almost alive. He gave the different types of names - Chancer, Casanova, Warrior, Seducer, Caertographer, Jester, Sheep, Shepherd, Builder, Backslider - according to how they tackled the pathways of love. Special informants patrolled the maze, collecting knowledge and position. The more you loved the maze, the more it moulded to your desires. The more you hated the maze, the more it got you lost. But sometimes getting lost seemed good.

All this and more was nymphomation."

"All this information taking place inside a computer's memory. It must have been hard to fit it all inside the dumb, clunky machines of those days. There was, ofcourse, no reality application in 1968..."

Maze Dynamics and DNA Codings, A Special Theory of Nymphomation:

"This was the juice. Recent explorations in Hackle Mazes had discovered an interesting anomaly. Some of the wanderers were having sex, or so it appeared. In previous games the wanderers had reproduced by making exact copies of themselves. Now they were making inexact copies. Two of them would get together, merge, and a 'babydata' would be produced, with attributes from both parents. Already mutants had been observed, wanderers with bits missing, or bits added on. These were either killed instantly, Backsliders, or else became Warriors. Evolution was taking place."

Speculation on the possible future of the system:

"One can imagine a time when this kind of knowledge will be put into use in the real world. For instance, we could mate everything we know about mathematics with everything we know about flag-waving. The babydata would be the mathematics of flag-waving. A new Science! Let us mate this new baby with everything we know about ice-cream. The resulkt? The mathematics of waving flags made out of ice cream. Everything known about driving a car? Excellent! The mathematics of driving flags made out of vanilla-cars. Astronomy? Dominoes? No problem. The flag driving of numbered vanilla-bones on the moon.

"We must imagine a world filled with these new highly specialised disciplines. Most will be completely useless. Others will be all-powerful. They will mate in turn. I now no longer know whether to be excited or terrified by this prospect."

extracted from Nymphomation by Jeff Noon.

Yvonne and I visited this exhibition on Wednesday and were impressed. It has a powerful atmosphere; like walking into a David Lynch (the American one) film. The individual works go well together with photography and video semi-documenting performance, textual sculptural pieces, sound works and projection. It's a really good use of the Lumen space and shows how effective choosing to consider the dynamics of the space can be. Well worth the walk out to Holbeck for the final showing this evening. I hope the same three artists do something together again in the future.