Megan Delianne is a designer and 3D generalist based in New York. With a background in digital and interactive media, she delves into traditional and digital art tools and practices to explore the intersections of culture, art, and technology.
My interest in this course focusing on cellular automata was driven by my desire to discover a new perspective in coding while also meeting and collaborating with inquisitive and creative thinkers. I had only a vague understanding of cellular automata prior to taking this class and wound up being completely amazed by how much it’s changed the way i see patterns and functions.
Moving forward, I believe my new understanding of cellular automata will undeniably influence the work I make moving forward, especially in terms of developing generative work and how rules can speaker to the larger contexts and histories of by which they are devised.
More research and exploration! I enjoyed the paper weaving and the gradual evolution of our hands-on work with cellular automata and wish we could have kept going further. Everyone else’s approach to the work made me look at the prompts differently and hearing their reasoning behind their approach led to an even deeper understanding of how cellular automata can be employed to tackle interpersonal histories and cultural oppression. In a sense I wish the course was longer to give us more time to convene and explore, or possibly more out-of-class engagement that’s more conversational as opposed to posting.
Though this is an example from Yadira’s prompt, fermentation and it’s incorporation in cellular automata is absolutely something I would have loved to explore. I also would have loved a class delving into the 3D explorations of CA as that a particular interest of mine and a demo in Blender would have been very fun and as well as eye opening to the potential uses of DCC’s beyond their typical intended use. I feel I was hitting a stride in my understanding of CA and would have loved to explore a bevy of the possibilities together.
My worst memory is my slow understanding of the concepts sometimes haha. Sometimes I felt as though I was slower to pick up on the concepts and when explaining my reasoning and experience in the assignments that I was only admitting how slowly I was digesting the information. Though I’m not sure if it was actually slow or if it’s me overthinking (as I tend to do), I just hope my enthusiasm for CA and everyone’s explorations with it shone through.
My favorite memory of each week was hearing everyone talking about how they approached the assignment and the lectures that revealed even more ways CA has been used in the past or is currently being implemented and explored!
I felt most lost when it came to creating the grid-based rules. I remember thinking everyone seemed to understand it much sooner than I did and in that moment I struggled to really grasp how to devise and execute them. It wasn’t until I rewatched the lecture a few times that I finally began to realize where I disconnected and began having fun with it.
Creative moments - I felt most creative after the lectures due to the contagious enthusiasm towards the possibilities for CA. I think this came though for me the most when working with Splatycode because I felt I had grasped the concept of rules and CA much better at that point and it felt exciting to approach the assignment with a greater sense of confidence in my execution.
Absolutely, connecting with people who’re just as excited about learning CA and channeling it through their own artistic practice was a treat to see and it’s deconstructed my staunchly digital approach and understanding of of coding and rule sets.
Nay’s discussion on oral histories and narratives was absolutely insightful
Burcu’s musical automata was such an inspiring implementation of CA and the elementary machine
Wiley’s thesis project absolutely blew me out the water and made me think of ways many ways CA can be implemented as a component in games beyond function