Artificial Nature: Fluid Space

artificialnature.net

The Fluid Space world is an infinitely explorable world sustaining populations of organisms from particles flowing in a 3D fluid simulation. You may remember experiences from your childhood, such as playing with your fingers in the flow of a river, or in the path of small marching insects, to alter their emerging patterns. Such play is a direct interaction with complex systems, provoking deep insights and aesthetically fascinating natural patterns; ludic investigations that may be considered an infinite game. We approach this subject through a trans-disciplinary research project drawing upon bio-inspired system theories and the aesthetics of computational world-making, incorporating the development of engaging immersive ecosystems as art installations. Our motivation is to develop a deeper understanding of emergence and creativity as a form of art, study and play, by taking inspiration from nature’s creativity while recognizing the potential of natural creation beyond the known and the physical.

Key faculty, postdoctoral, and graduate student researchers associated with the project: Former ARG researchers Dr. Graham Wakefield and Dr. Haru Ji.

Publications

Exhibitions outside the AlloSphere

Artificial Nature: Time of Doubles

Time of Doubles is an immersive interactive art installation. It invites visitors to experience mirror existences of themselves taking upon new roles as sources of energy and kinetic disturbance within a perpetually changing virtual ecosystem, a uniquely created computational world. Visitors encounter their doubles in an immersive world through 3D depth cameras, a surround array of active loudspeakers, and projected images. This world displays some characteristics familiar from our own, but is populated by unfamiliar life forms singing, swimming, and breeding through sensitive motions of dark fluids.

The visitors’ doubles are energy fields, which emanate myriad bright fluid particles, food sources to be eaten by the virtual organisms. Visitors see, hear, and feel how they are fed to unknown species in this virtual ecosystem. Without visitors, the world-fluid is filled with life seeds that cannot grow, but with human presence the populations explode into alien orchestras of evolutionary growth. Larger organisms hunt smaller ones, leaving physical residues and films behind as they pass, which constrain the fluid flows, and which can be sculpted by visitors’ doubles as they approach them.

Key faculty, postdoctoral, and graduate student researchers associated with the project: Former ARG researchers Dr. Graham Wakefield and Dr. Haru Ji.

Publications

Exhibitions outside the AlloSphere