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Landscape photography in address space.
Artist- and collector-curated hashes & vantages.
Controls:
click to look, mouse around and zoom in/out
w/s/a/d fwd/back/left/right
c/v roll CW/CCW
shift to go fast
ctrl to fine tune
'r' to reset your altitude (useful if you get lost in the chaos)
t/g to pan up/down
'u' to cruise forward at a constant speed
'i' to cruise to the right at a constant speed
'p' to save an image
Atlas is a collection of interactive abstract kinetic paintings illustrating the paradoxical unity of living creatures. Beneath a dynamic but integrated whole, competing cells bubble in disquiet. As perhaps we all do.
Colour is used to represent the cellular dynamics, each piece evolving under its own laws. Cells are rendered in various palettes and several shapes - from round to square, luminous, and Escher-like. Zooming in you can see the wild nature of individual elements.
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes."
Controls:
mouse wheel / z / x / pinch-drag - zoom
click-drag / a/w/s/d (iframe) / arrow keys (generator) - pan
double-click / spacebar -pause
f - toggle full-screen options
Append to generator links
?frm=60 to change maximum frame rate (default = 30)
?a=1.667 to fix the aspect ratio of cells
?N=512 to change the number of cells
Atlas is a collection of interactive abstract kinetic paintings illustrating the paradoxical unity of living creatures. Beneath a dynamic but integrated whole, competing cells bubble in disquiet. As perhaps we all do.
Colour is used to represent the cellular dynamics, each piece evolving under its own laws. Cells are rendered in various palettes and several shapes — from round to square, luminous, and Escher-like. Zooming in you can see the wild nature of individual elements.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.”
Controls:
mouse wheel / z / x / pinch-drag — zoom
click-drag / a/w/s/d (iframe) / arrow keys (generator) — pan
double-click / spacebar — pause
f - toggle full-screen options
cathedral study is a series of experimental, generative, living paintings. Continually evolving pixelated landscapes evoke ruins, fantastical cityscapes, and cathedrals. Best viewed running in real-time on a large screen. Press ‘f’ to cycle through full-screen options.
The contemporary moment is defined by the appearance of artificial systems that mimic intelligent behaviours with uncanny skill: bots that you can converse with, machines that can act as pets, and even the algorithms that recommend ads to you. At times they appear as strange beings; alive. To make sense of this phenomenon, we are forced to reconsider our notion of the living state beyond what we are familiar with on Earth.
Calian is an infinitely zoomable and scrollable exploration of lifelike behaviour. It exhibits ambiguous natural-digital forms in a dynamic rendering. Species grow and compete; they get carried by the elements; they face boom, bust, and echo.
What makes something alive? To go beyond recognition of terrestrial biology we need to delineate general principles and apply them to new intelligent systems. Calian uses the fruits of my research into the origin of life to create persistent, complex systems that we can experience and study (*). We can identify properties of living matter but these fall short of a satisfactory and succinct criterion. When does agency begin? Or identity? Calian asks you to ponder this as you wander through its ecosystems.
Feel free to explore but be careful: although life is pervasive, living things are delicate. Your interactions affect the ecosystem, obliquely.
Calian continues a thread of my work probing deep scientific questions with artistic means. It furthermore connects to my previous Artblocks projects Mazinaw and Glass through the theme of ambiguity: while Mazinaw suggested the hand of an unknown creator, and Glass visualized the intrinsic ambiguity of our quantum mechanical universe, Calian's amorphous forms bear characteristics both of familiar organic matter and digital technology.
Interactive features allow you to explore each ecosystem, infinitely, both in depth and in scope. As you wander, the shader repopulates the world from its initial condition, while the physical laws governing the dynamics themselves evolve.
See Display Notes for Controls.
(*) For more on Calian's dynamics and its grounding in my research, see the Calian page on my website.