This video is the result of a research that simulated Darwinian evolution by way of hundreds of virtual creatures – which “live” within a CM-5, a supercomputer elaborated in the 1990s by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the process of the experiment, each of these creatures really evolved, learning to execute determined tasks – such as swimming in a simulated aquatic environment.
Artist, scientist and entrepreneur Karl Sims is the founder of Genarts, a North American company that creates special-effects software for the filmmaking industry. He studied computer graphics at MIT and graduated, from the same institute, in life sciences.
The creature editor is an integral part of a computer game developed by the game company Electronic Arts. It is an epic of artificial life that involves the origin of a life, its evolution, the creation of a technological civilization, and eventually its end.
Will Wright is a creator of classic games such as SimCity and The Sims.
A virtual character balances itself on a tightrope, and reacts to the movements of the human observer. At the same time it tries to reproduce the posture of the participant, the character seeks balance on the virtual tightrope.
This work applies aesthetic elements to the world of materials engineering. A ray of nitinol – a material with super elastic properties – is connected to a terminal. This way, the participants can “stimulate” the surface of the rubber creature on a computer terminal and see its undulating movements projected onto a large screen.
Tânia Fraga is an artist and doctor in communication and semiotics from the Catholic Pontific University in Sao Paulo. She has carried out Post-PhD research with a scholarship from Capes at the Interactive Arts Research Center at Plymouth University, CAiiA-Star, England. She was coordinator of the master’s degree program in arts and a professor at the Visual Arts Department of Brasilia University where she is an associate researcher and at the Integrated Systems Laboratory in the Polytechnic School of Sao Paulo University. Her research focuses on the development of interactive poetics.
by Jeffrey Shaw, ZKM Center for Art And Media (Germany, 2000)
In this installation a rotating platform allows the viewer to rotate a projected image within a large circular projection screen and explore a three dimensional virtual environment constituted by an emblematic constellation of panoramic locations and cinematic events.
The work presents a virtual landscape containing eleven cylinders that show particular sites in the Ruhr area. The viewer can navigate this 3D space and enter these panoramic cylinders, inside each of which a surrounding cinematic sequence fills the projection screen and presents a 360 degree pre-recorded situation and acted event.
The identity of each of the eleven sites is defined by its environmental scenography (both actual and composited) conjoined with the time based events that have been staged there.
On the platform there is a column with an underwater video camera. This device is the interactive user interface, its buttons and handling allow the viewer to control his movement through the virtual scene as well as cause the rotation of the platform and of the projected image around the circular screen. A small monitor within this housing also shows the ground plan of the virtual environment with reference to the user’s location there.
A microphone on top of this interface camera picks up any sound that the viewer makes, and this causes the release of continuously moving three dimensional words and sentences within the projected scene. Originating in the center of the screen, the physical arrangement of these texts in the virtual environment is determined by the path of the viewer movements while they are being generated. These texts have a temporal five-minute life span; becoming more and more transparent until they disappear they constitute traces of the viewer’s presence there.
