Terminal Time

Digital Salon Artists’ Statements 445 numerical capabilities come fully into play. Mathematica is a commercial software package and is the tool I use to create my graphics. As with the images in the third group, many of the programs that are visualizations of mathematical functions and equations are in some sense completely deterministic. But of course one has a choice which polynomial or more general function to visualize. Thus often in the evening I might choose some such function to explore, feed it into the Riemann surface-generating program or some other tool, and in the morning look at the results. This procedure results in some of the most pleasant surprises. Each of the four groups of pictures has its own challenges, enticements, and rewards. Pictures of the first two groups require more creativity, while those in the last two typically require more programming. The pictures from the last two groups, though, are fascinating to me. The form of the resulting picture is already nearly completely predetermined in the equation(s); one “only” has to unveil it into a picture. This unveiling can, from time to time, require some nontrivial amount of coding. That I could produce so many images of such intricacy and mathematical accuracy is a reflection of Mathematica’s deep understanding of symbolic and numerical mathematics. Without Mathematica, these pictures would be impossible to produce. Images like these show, in a new way, some of the intrinsic beauty of the underlying mathematics itself, beauty that can be uncovered only by this kind of visualization. A reflection of that duality of approach can be seen in a quote by the German mathematician Karl Weierstrass (1815–1897). In German, the word Darstellung is used to mean “mathematical representation”; for example, the word for the power series representation of a function is Reihendarstellung. But Darstellung also carries the less rigorous meaning of “depiction.” With that ambiguity in mind, the spirit of my graphics can be encapsulated in Weierstrass’s words: “Das letzte Ziel ist immer die Darstellung einer Funktion”: “The final goal is always the representation/depiction of the function.” MIKE MATEAS,STEFFI DORNIKE, PAUL VANOUSE Terminal Time Terminal Time is a machine that constructs ideologicallybiased documentary histories in response to audience feedback. This history machine uses the last 1000 years of human history as “fuel” for thousands of custom-made cinematic stories. The audience interacts by answering multiple-choice questions through an applause meter. The answers to these questions influence which historical events are chosen from a knowledge base, how these events will be slanted to embody the bias implied in the audience’s answers, and how the events will be connected together to form a historical narrative Once the narrative has been generated, video and sound clips are selected from a term-indexed multimedia database. The resulting documentary, consisting of the newly generated narrative spoken by a speech synthesizer, and the video and sound clips, is then presented to the audience. By creating histories that clearly and instantly respond to changes in audience makeup, the project can help the audience to ask fundamental questions about the relationship of point of view to constructions of history, particularly at the close of the millennium. Each history is approximately thirty minutes long; each audience should ideally participate in the construction of at least two stories. Intention With Terminal Time we explore the naturalizing tendency of the documentary form, the rhetoric of utopian navigation surrounding the computer, and the extremes of rigid ideological reasoning. Documentary Form The popular model of the documentary form in America today, most clearly exemplified by Ken Burns’ “Civil War,” has the familiar structure of Western narrative: each program has a distinct dramatic arc, a beginning, middle and an end. The rhetorical structure—also familiar and now almost universally expected— invariably involves a crisis situation, a climax, and a clear resolution. Generally there is one prevailing narrative, one interpretation of the historical facts presented. Most usually, the narrative is delivered to the audience by an unseen, yet obviously white, male narrator. With Terminal Time we intend to imitate the model of this cookie-cutter documentary with a machine that produces and reproduces it, until the model itself is...