procedural metaphor

I was cleaning up my dev archive and looking through some old idea files today, and I found a note labeled ‘procgen.txt’ from a few years ago.  It had some provocative quotes from a talk that Brian Eno (who I mostly know tangentially through his association with Underworld) gave in the mid-90s, exploring the merits of procedurally generated music.

Like a good theory in physics or a profound piece of art, roguelikes can offer a powerful simulation for safely exploring radical new ideas.  But generally these metaphors point inwards, revealing deeper insight into roguelikes themselves.  Can they be turned outward?

“I think what artists do, and what people who make culture do, is somehow produce simulators where new ideas can be explored.  If you start to accept the idea [of procedurally generated music] you start to change your concept about how things can be organized.  What you’ve done is moved into a new kind of metaphor.”

 

“Evolving metaphors, in my opinion, is what artists do.  They produce work that gives you the chance to experience in a safe environment … what might be quite dangerous and radical new ideas.  They give you a chance to step out of real life into simulator life.”

 

“We’re saddled with a whole set of [old] metaphors … about how the world works, how things organize themselves, how things are controlled, what possibilities there are.  Generative art in general is a way of not throwing those out; we don’t get rid of old metaphors, we expand them to include more.  These things still have value, but we want to include [new] things as well.”

 

“My feeling about artists is that we are metaphor explorers of some kind.  An object of culture does all of the following: it innovates, it recycles, it clearly and explicitly rejects, and it ignores.  Any artist’s work is doing all those four things and is doing all those four things through the metaphors that dominate our thinking.”

 

— Brian Eno

A talk delivered in San Francisco, June 8, 1996