This may be a bit abstract for non-shape rotators out there. We’ll try to ground it as much as possible!
As generative system designers, we develop digital objects that grow and mutate in response to live and multi-contextual data flows. Meaning: lots of complex information can be processed into objects humans can see and which tell a story about the data that ’generate’ it.
Essentially, next level data visualization.
Like a clouds that form from atmospheric inputs and which can be interpreted by meteorologists to return very precise insights on the weather.
One example of these next-generation objects is ORA’s Protostar system, a structure that processes data into a generative world hologram - mimicking the way cosmic protostars build from a molecular cloud in space.
Below is the schematic from our patent application, but you can also see the video and product brief, here.
So think of the molecules that coalesce into the molten core of the cosmic protostar as units of data that flow into the digital protostar’s central sphere and are processed into terraforming elements.
With current graphic processing software, this means the data can be converted into a simple red light strobing in the protostar’s central sphere…
…or that sphere can generate detailed terrestrial simulations of climatic or, for example, mass migration events. The protostar can be a crystal ball or a Pandora-like simulation of a fantasy world.
So fundamentally, the protostar is an engine that takes information and converts it into matter (on the digital plane). This is the definition of programmatic design, also known as code art, or, generative art - which is described in this piece.
Put simply, generative designs are coded with algorithms that induct any capturable data inflow (from nature sounds to human biorhythm to unstructured financial market indices) and transform them into patterns, surfaces, and objects.
There’s a reason to stress this point.
It is because the evolution and emergence of generative design represents a signal that we are undergoing a paradigm shift in the fundamental understanding of the nature of reality.
Which is saying a lot, so let’s just unpack it:
What is our general understanding about the nature of reality? At its most basic, and in terms of what the broadest cohort of humanity operate their lives in accordance to, we can say:
It is a materialist-reductionism which posits that the material plane - i.e spacetime - is the primary dimension from which all experiential phenomena are generated; from the atoms in a person’s finger to a political or economic event in reality.
Further: that the best way to understand the material world is to document a reductive study of its components, which can only be viewed through the lens of the agreement that nothing is generated from any other plane than the material.
There are obviously pages that can be written about how this general agreement came to be the dominant world paradigm, but for the sake of brevity, the point is that the materialist-reductionist worldview is critically challenged by development of theories about the nature and features of the quantum field.
Continuous transitions between particle and wave states in both classical and quantum scenarios
It challenges the materialist worldview by offering (the potential) that all atoms, which comprise all matter, are generated from a wave-to-particle conversion that occurs at the transition point between the quantum field and spacetime.
And so… generative design, with its core driver algorithms that ‘bring into being’ visual artifacts of multiple dimensions from flows of data, is a mimic of the generative nature of the quantum field.
If we apply this to one generative object, like the protostar, we can imagine that this immediately offers the constituents of a protostar the simulation of a new level of personal and collective agency in the formation of a world from our core values and behaviors. A kind of superpower that is not available in our agreed-upon materialist-reductive paradigm.
ORA Protostar schematic with generative terraform overlay
Think of it as a parallel layer for wizards, while spacetime remains, affectionately, the domain of muggles.
