Accelerating the scalable city

The creation of a contemporary artwork –The Scalable City—explores the possibilities and implications of new technologies in general and the Cell processor (CP) in particular. In general, new technologies provide new methods for describing and acting in the world. Creating new forms of art can be a means of understanding and furthering this process; however, this has not been the typical relationship between the leading edges of cultural and technological experiments in the 20 th century. The approaches taken to create The Scalable City provide an example of how these goals can correlate in an effective way, as its aim is the creation of a 3D interactive graphics application, highlighting the ongoing algorithmicization of the world at large. In its creation, computational bottlenecks have been encountered, which compromised its aesthetic and conceptual goals. The core component of this work is a world depicting transforming landscapes, networks of roads and emergent structures. Within the operation of the artwork, each is transformed by interactions of the viewer, algorithms and the initial data. The computational demands of some of these transformations exceed the capability of standard methods using a single host compute environment. Sheldon Brown and the members of his Experimental Game Lab at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UCSD developed means of using CP compute servers to overcome these limitations. The authors detail their encounters with Cell processing, from initial efforts, discovery of the affordances and limitations of Cell processing, and its eventual application to the project. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.