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"Relazioni Emergenti" ("emerging relations") is an environment of artificial life where the individuals, represented by graphics filaments, are endowed with own intelligence and character. They can interact, exchange information and reproduce. Through the mechanisms of genetic mutations, the population evolves developing progressively ability of adaptation. The emerging behaviour is rendered as continuously new shapes and graphical patterns. The installation consists in one retro-projected screen which represents the artificial life environment. In front of the screen the observers can interact with the artwork itself transmitting "energy and life" to specific zones of the environment. A video-camera detects the positions of the observers who transmit "energy and life" to the environment. The locations approached by the observer become zones of life germination. Each filament is a bearer of a sound message and the sound strings are sent to a sound synthesiser. Mode and tonality of the sound generation is tied to the character of the individuals. The global result is a whole of parallel sonorities which progressively organise creating coherent sound architectures. The main objective of the artwork is to build a metaphor of the world of the communication webs and the mechanisms of formation of "collective messages" and the new aesthetics. The work is grounded on the complexity theory and self-organisation (Asbhi '62, Prigogine '70-'80, Kaufman '90) as a new area of interference between art and science. In this paradigm, complex systems constituted by multitude of individuals develop global behavioural properties on the base of local chaotic interactions (self-organisation). The results derived by these positions characterise the expressive elements as "emergent behaviours" or relationships between the artist, the artwork and the observers. In this sense the artificial world metaphor produces hypothesis for the real worlds. Starting from the idea that the individual context is the emerging own configuration of psychic fragments, the interaction between two or more individuals is revised as the interaction of two or more micro-societies. The installation is able to produce a high level of structured complexity both in graphical images and acoustical tissue. In this sense the installation is a place where "metaphors" are generated. By translating the graphical phenotypes into the sound dimension and producing acoustical phenotypes, the self-organisation is enhanced by the synchronic presence of the two media and completed in the mind of the observer. His perception is able to reconstruct the hidden order without to have a clear consciousness of it. Technical description All the software utilized in the construction of the interactive installation has been developed by the authors and it is based on a SGI O2 hardware platform (Open GL standards). The artificial live environments the core of the installation and it represents the most important part by a scientific-technical point of view. The images represented on the screen are the rendering of the 2D life space where the individuals move and live. Each individual has a genetic map where many information are recorded about colors, character, irrationality, dynamics, growing, reproduction, sound, behavior, life, energy, generation, etc... Every graphical variable (hue, saturation, value, width of the line) is connected with some specific features of the individual recorded in the genetic map. A sort of selection mechanism emerge in the evolution connected to the individual behavior. The sound generation is based on the MIDI standard. The best individuals of any species are selected on the base of a fitness indicator depending on the energy they catch from the interacting people. A different instrumental timbre is assigned to each specie and the note dynamics is mapped on a sparse musical scale selected among standard musical modes and chords (Chromatic, Major, Minor Melodic, Minor harmonic, Pentatonic Major, Pentatonic Minor, Blues, Major, 7th, 7th dominant, Diminished, etc...) The sound amplitude is also used in combination with the interaction tracking mechanism described in the following. This mechanism translates the proximity of interacting people to the installation screen into sound loudness, i.e. if somebody approaches the screen, the sound gets louder. The tracking system has been developed specifically for this installation. It requires a very fast 3D reconstruction (4 times/sec.) of the map of the distance between the observer body and the screen. to obtain this goal we used two video-cameras located at the bottom and on the left side of the screen. the observer activity is normalized and transformed in the energy map which determines the life activity in terms of higher filament dynamics and higher reproduction rate. The setup of the installation requires two rooms separated by the retro-projected screen: one for the equipments (5x4 m) and the other for the people interaction (same size). A setup with two adjacent screens (6x2 m of images and interaction) has been realized for the Virtuality conference/exhibition (Turin, 2000) using two alife connected worlds. This setup allows the possibility to work also with two (or more) remote alife worlds (connected by internet). |
