algorithmic design...or art

So, I really really like that algorithmic city builder site.
www.complexification.net/gallery/machines/substrate/appletl/index.html
I can't tell if you would call it design or art...it's a program, which makes it design-ed. but the effect is (kind of) random, which gives it the feel of art.
And i especially like it because, and as the name says, it's another example of how something logical and relatively simple can become abstract and complex when interpreted through a process.

For some reason it made me think about this article i read a while ago about some dirty dj who's hands were so grubby that when he touched a cd fungus grew on it. But then he played the cd and the fungus had altered the tracks so that some awesome new kind of music was created.
Not quite the same thing...but it's one system interfering with another to create something new.
Which is interesting.
And from a design point of view...getting some degree of randomness through logic is for very interesting. We need something functional, so it's logical...but it's got to have aesthetic value, so there's art. Granted, function and simplicity can be beautiful, but..you know.
hooray fractals...I'm gonna go water my:
Here's the article about the cd. The site it was on was all messed up so I just copied it here for convenience.

Grow bacteria on your CD for new sound

Thursday, 11 September , 2003, 09:10

Paris: Want to listen to something really different? Smear yoghurt on your favourite CD. Let it dry. Slide the disc into the player. Crank up the volume. And hear that music in a completely fresh, possibly spine-chilling way. The bizarre innovation -- an "optical biocomputer" if you must know -- is the brainchild of an Australian scientist, Cameron Jones, who as well as being a mathematician with a record of published research also owns a nightclub and bar in Melbourne, New Scientist reports. Jones' pet area of research is how signals can be transmitted through biological cells, which grow in a so-called "fractal" way, like tree branches. He became intrigued by experimental musicians and DJs who, from the mid-1980s, sanded, varnished or even slapped paint onto CDs to create new sounds to sample. Music on CDs comes from tiny etched pits in the tracks that represent binary digits, the "0" or "1" that make up a computer code. The code, reflected back by the laser in the CD player, is then processed back into an electronic signal and converted to sound. Mutilating the surface, so that some of the pits are missed, thus changes the sound. But Jones found that much subtler sounds could be achieved using fungal or bacterial growth, rather than scraping or coating the disc's surface. This is because these life forms introduce tiny errors, on a micron on nanoscale level rather than the far bigger millimetric scale. In addition, the way fungus and bacteria can shape the sound in weird ways. Bacteria grow by cell division, while fungi grow by branching. Both processes can be controlled by adding malt extract to the disc as food. Jones told New Scientist that he came across the discovery quite by accident, when he was DJing in his bar. "I often change CDs when my hands are wet with beer," he told the British weekly. "One night I must have changed the CDs, touched the data surface, then left them for use on another night." The following week, he put on a CD by Nine Inch Nails and found that it would not play properly because fungus had grown on it. But the fungus had not ruined the disc. The original audio sequence was there, but it would sometimes change in pitch and there were small staccato noises in the background. He asked himself: "What would happen if I purposely grew fungi, yeast or bacteria in direct contact with the media, and manipulated their fractal dimensions?" Yoghurt-on-a-disc was born! Jones says that he has yet to damage any of his discs or players with his pioneering work, but warns that the technique does crash CD players on computers because the software cannot cope. Judge the sounds for yourself on (www.swin.edu.au/chem/bio/fractals/refslist.htm), which has details of his work and samples of "fractal" music.

So this is a constant interest for me. don't hold back with anything else you find, let me suggest a few key words:
evolutionary art / algorithmic design / evolutionary architecture / evolutionary design / hippie spirals / the Parthenon ...I'm sure you can think of many more.