Twelve Tickle Token - February 2023

Title: "Punctuated Equilibrium"

Bespoke artwork that also acts as a token for a yearly subscription to The Tickle - 12 monthly issues of the pre-eminent magazine for contemporary digital art and creative writing (@inwarhol@twitter.com). This special artwork for the February issue is created by Andrew Brereton (@aebrer@genart.social), entitled "Punctuated Equilibrium". Each monthly issue is airdropped on the first Friday of each month to holders of the token. Primary collection activates the subscription - secondary collectors simply adopt the existing subscription, receiving all remaining issues.

Holders also become members of The Tickle Subscribers Club, gaining access to exclusive airdrops of free art from our featured artists!

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Punctuated Equilibrium is a piece about Entropy Locking and searching infinite spaces. Roughly every 10 seconds, the current equilibrium is checked, and if it doesn't meet the right conditions, the random seed is incremented. Each search leaves its own trace behind, getting sucked into the final equilibrium which is reached (if a valid solution is discovered). This can happen right away, or it can take infinite time.

The seed is akin to the "conditions" of the world these pixels live in (due to the restrictions imposed by the entropy locking). Just like if our universe had different conditions, different life may have arisen; in this piece each seed provides unique conditions for the (brutally simple) automata rules that push the pixels around. This seed is what is changed when a solution fails.

Like I have done previously in "RGB Summoning Cycles", I am using a buffer to inspect the progress of the piece for a given seed. Unlike in RGB Summoning Cycles, this search is strictly destined to succeed: it will always find an equilibrium which modifies all of the displayed pixels in a consistent pattern. However, over time the consequences of the failed searches leave their trace, resulting in the full complexity of the final piece, which is designed to cycle and iterate infinitely within the stable equilibrium it eventually discovers.

In nature, solutions are not pre-computed: they are evolved out of an insanely complex mess. Often, this plays out via a phenomenon known as "Punctuated Equilibrium", or "Punctuated Evolution". Long periods of stability cycle regularly with brief periods of massive change. I think we see this pattern simply because it's a reliable way to shake up entrenched, complex, and random systems; after all, we only see the things that succeeded and the equilibria that survived to the present day. Everything else merely remains as traces buried in the noise.