RICHARD POWERS by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page A

and Hsieh Ho. Ten video channels, in real time. Were talking real rendering overhead. Every object that we want to paint is an entire community. A whole ecosystem of polygons for each light-face. The better you want it, the smaller your polygons have to get, until your complex object is nothing but vertices. Hundreds of thousands of vertices, smack up against what the hard-cores call your polygon budget.
    Couldn’t we just go out and shoot 360 degrees of film around some actual leaf?
    Could. But youd still want to translate the picture back into data points. And youd have to do that by hand, or something like it.
    Why? Adie asked. Why turn a continuous image of the real thing back into jagged little chunks?
    Because, Spiegel began, running the logic through his own internal simulation, like sunlight through foliage. Because well want to give your leaf real qualities. Behaviors. Well want to run operations against it. To subject it to gravity, fire, wind. A photo of a leaf wont ooze when cut. We want a clone that will do everything the original does. Catch rain or shrivel up in heat. Turn gold in a cold snap.
    The Cavern would settle for nothing less. Every community of polygons needed its catalogue of affordances: pliant, pulpy, wet, burnable, breakable, taut... And that behavioral catalogue itself decided how the described object glinted in twilight, how it aged and altered, how it floated on the sea of wider rules all around it.
    Every fully modeled object became a machine. And every change in an object's catalogue altered the way that machine ran. Leaves programmed the light that fell on them. And every scar of light that leaves accumulated along their way fed back into the living inventory. A branch in the air modeled the wind that waved it, and wind bent that bough through the arc of its own prediction. For there was no real difference, finally, between property and behavior, data and command.
    How smart an image was —how much it embodied. Whole volumes of words could not contain the information locked up in one road map. The art and design people knew this instinctively, from a lifetime of looking. The heft and feel of a thing, its list of nicks and bruises, the deed of its actions and of all the actions upon it: in the long lens, these rays met at a single focus, the Maker's outline. But art knew these facts only by other names, other procedures, methods lost in translation .. .
    Spiegel came clean. There's another way we can make you a leaf. The oldest process going, even though we're still pretty new to it. We can build the leafs description the way a real leaf gets built. We can grow it.
    Over the course of more makeshift sessions, he showed them how. He drew up genetic algorithms: fractal, recursive code that crept forward from out of its own embryo. He worried over their sapling, a RAM-cached Johnny Appleseed. He spread the best iterative fertilizer on the shaded texture until it flung itself outward into a living branch. His commands no longer called for products but processes. They ceased to stipulate the stipule. The leaf grew itself, from the self-organizing rules arising along its lengthening blade.
    Physical law alone laid down this palisade layer. The push of petiole, the stomata's maw, the closest-cubic packing of chloroplast and cuticle and conducting tube: the whole serrated sprig sprung its surprise from out of hidden inevitabilities.
    The ad hoc committee of artists and technicians tested their successive grafts in the Cavern greenhouse. The blackness that these graphics primitives floated in was not yet the air. The planes of the confining flower box did not yet compose a volume. The Cavern walls were not even empty. They were whatever came before empty. But in that flat void, just below the front screen's midline, a leaf hung twirling.
    And there Klarpol and Loque stood, shoulder to shoulder in the simulator, where their sprig of laurel turned on the mute breeze. Adie stared at the spinning wreath