Based on a model of how the brain learns to recognize faces, each pixel in an Autoimage portrait learns where it belongs in the image as a whole based on the activity of the pixels around it.

Autoimage brings the age-old medium of the portrait into the era of the network. Self-organizing portraits respond to the modern metaphor of life as the sum of complex interactions among many small independent agents.

*Description*
Background: This project has its heritage in the study of networks, graph theory, complex adaptive systems, and place of art in the age of mass reproduction.

Complex adaptive systems (CAS) is a relatively new field of study (early 80’s) that attempts to unite findings in science with observations in nature. It appears that many chemical, biological, social, economic, and physical processes have remarkable similarities. CAS is the study of those likenesses.

One of the major revolutions of thought to come from CAS are the inter-related ideas of agent-based interaction and emergence. Many complex systems (e.g., the brain) can be thought of as independently acting agents (e.g. neurons) whose collective behavior (e.g. the mind) is somehow greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Autoimage is an artistic representation of this new network metaphor for life that is spreading from physics and computer science, where it originated, to most other disciplines.

*Audience*
People interested in networks, the philosophy of science, emergence, cultural perspectives, network theory, new metaphors for life, and of course art.

*User Scenario*
User is instructed to use camera phone to take a picture of themselves and send it in an email to the Autoimage engine. Autoimage then assembles a self-organizing portrait of the user on the plasma screen. Afterwards, the user can go to the Autoimage website and see their self-organizing image linked for viewing at their leisure.

*Technical System Description*
Camera phone takes snapshot and sends it to Autoimage email address. Perl script extracts the photo from the email, posts a link on the website, and launches the Java applet which displays the self-organizing autoimage on the plasma screen.