A dialog between Da Vinci and Norbert Wiener

The title of this post is the title of the picture you can see below. It is one of the first of a series of pictures exploring the power of HOCA library and its philosophy. Different levels of interpretation can be used to understand the picture. At a macro level Da Vinci is showing us his enigmatic Mona Lisa at a micro level Wiener is playing with cellular automata viewing them as a multi-agent system. Agents move on the picture and through a multitude of local interactions transform it into a new picture as much enigmatic as the original one.

At this point many questions arise and the very first one call for an explanation of the duality of the behaviors observed.

A dialog between Da Vinci and Wiener

With this picture we participated to the exhibition Paradoxes which took place between October 17th and November 8th 2020 in Vallauris. For the occasion we wrote some presentation text which can be found here (in French).

Author

Enrico Formenti

Professor of Computer Science

Keywords:

discrete dynamical systems
cellular Automata
higher order cellular automata
tilings

He got his PhD in Computer Science at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in 1998. He has been recruited as an assistant professor at the Université de Provence (now Aix-Marseille Université) in 2001. He got the habilitation thesis in 2002 from the same university. He was hired as full professor at Université Nice-Sophia Antipolis (now Université Côte d'Azur) in 2003. He is currently exceptional class professor at the Université Côte d'Azur.

Enrico is (co-)editor in chief of the international journal RAIRO-ITA. He is also associated editor for the international journals: Theoretical Computer Science, Natural Computing, Journal of Cellular Automata and Journal of Automata, Languages and Combinatorics. He is also the author of more than 100 scientific publications appeared in the best journals or conferences of his research domain.

His research interests comprise: discrete dynamical systems, chaos, tilings, and complex systems in general. He is also interested in computational complexity, computability and unconventional models of computation.

Since 2019 he started getting more and more involved in generative art where he explores the connections between art, population dynamics and tilings.

Exhibition 'Paradoxes'

The first official exhibition to which the G-ART group has participated. The theme of the exhibition is well-illustrated by the organizers:

"Our thinking needs to rely on the duality of opposites to characterize, conceptualize and evaluate what surrounds us: the true and the false, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly...
Beyond our perceptions and our thoughts, dualities do exist in Nature: water and fire, life and death, emptiness and fullness, the visible and the invisible, shadow and light...
However, don't we say that there is no light without shadow and that there is no shadow without light?
This exhibition proposes to deal with the theme of opposites, by showing how, beyond contrasts and differences, opposing elements can communicate, respond to each other or even complement each other, playing on sometimes unstable balances and paradoxes."