Paintings as complex dynamic systems

Abstract

This chapter deals with the description and analysis of an artistic experiment: the Matrice Active project that aims to transform a work of art by Wassily Kandinsky painted according to the rules set forth in his treatise on pictorial composition Point and Line to Plane into a dynamic system. Details about the process of creation and realization of this project allow to present how the Distributed Artificial Intelligence technologies and more specifically agents based computer modeling used by scientists for the simulation of complex systems, provide new ways of expression to the visual artist and different modes of perception, participation, and action to the viewer. For the artist, it is to depict reality, not as a set of visible and stable forms but as a dynamic phenomenon of self-organization in which the form is emergence of behaviors and interaction processes. The shape emerges from a field of informational data, allowing the system-image viewer an enacted position that simultaneously locates him/her inside and outside this simulated reality. The painting image, in the Matrice Active project has moved towards the creation of a 3D dynamic virtual scenography composed of Agents in interaction inside a complex system, bearing witness to a paradigmatic shift in the economy of representation.