Artists' Statement
How does artificial-life art adapt to its environment? What is the significance of a computational ecosystem proposed as contemporary art? These are some of the ideas examined in this bio-inspired immersive art installation.
The computational world of Artificial Nature consists of organisms interacting within an environment, consuming flowing energy and matter to grow and survive, generating continuous patterns of emergent beauty. Spectators can explore this world freely and endlessly, and influence it indirectly just as they might play in a stream or forest. Sensory data collected through a camera-eye and microphone-ear, and sometimes tactile touch, become the environmental conditions to which organisms must adapt.
[ a, c, d: Screen Captures, b: at the SOMA Museum of Art, 2009 ]
Artificial Nature is an infinite game. It invites you to play and create, as continuation rather than toward a termination. It actively fuses intuition, artistic expression, and personal awakening with knowledge of complex systems, thermodynamics, physical biology, and computer science. In this way, art, research, and play are inte- grated into one aesthetic and creative experience of infinite depth, inspiring the growth of the art work, the spectators, and the artists in a symbiotic circle.
Artificial Nature is proposed as 'art-as-it-could-be', suggesting the future-possible of art through its unconventional expansion. This is a vital role of contemporary art: to conceive and create the open ended world in which we are about to live.
Artist Bios
Haru Ji is a TransArtist and researcher exploring the subject of life in art through Artificial Life Worldmaking: a form of computational generative art creating and evolving virtual ecosystems as immersive environments. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts & Technology at the University of California Santa Barbara and is an assistant professor of Art & Technology in the School of Consilience at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea. She attained a Master and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Seoul National University, and studied image engineering, computer graphics and 3D animation at Chung-Ang University, both in Seoul, Korea. She has exhibited computational installations, digital sculptures, virtual architecture, video installations, sculptural objects and 3D animations at exhibitions and art festivals worldwide including ISEA, EvoWorkshops, and SIGGRAPH, with corresponding publications. She is a co-creator of the research project and immersive ecosystem "Artificial Nature", exploring the expansion of media art towards ‘art-as-it-could-be’. It is an amalgam of play, research, and art, which raises novel and significant questions regarding the trans-disciplinary interpretation of both subjective beauty and objective truth in art and biology.
Graham Wakefield is currently exploring the creation of music and art through the computational embodiment of creative becoming. This work expands upon his musical practice to re-asses computational composition from its natural grain towards the generation of open-ended environments for exploratory discovery, engaging with enduring questions of creativity, emergence and experience. It is informed by process philosophies emphasizing continuation over closure and integrates bio-inspired computation and run-time code generation. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California Santa Barbara USA and a Master in Music (Composition) from Goldsmiths College, University of London UK and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Warwick UK. He is currently employed as a post-doctoral researcher for the AlloSphere (a multi-user spherical immersive instrument in the California Nano-Systems Institute) producing interactive environments for art-science research and co-developing an open-source multimedia framework (LuaAV). He is a software developer for Cycling '74 (Max/MSP) and lecturer at the Southern California Institute for Architecture (SCI-Arc). His works and publications have been performed, exhibited and presented at international events including SIGGRAPH, ICMC and ISEA.