E-volved Cultures triplet4 Original

E-volved Cultures (2006-2010) is an installation in which an artificial landscape grows in real time. The dynamic pixel-landscape is generated by virtual agents that leave visual traces in interaction with their environment. The audience is watching an (360°) screen image in the form of a panoramic projection that changes in atmosphere over time. The colourful abstract animations arouse associations with landscapes, geological processes, cloud formations, fungal growth, organ tissues or satellite photos, but ultimately they still avoid any definitive identification. The pixel grid forms the environment, the habitat, of eight artificial unicellular, pixel-sized agents. They are simple autonomous machines that operate according to a built-in program. The agents are able to change the color of the pixel they stand on and move to a neighboring pixel. The program describes how they do this, dependent on local circumstances: the colours in the immediate vicinity. During successive time step, all the agents execute the program and change their environment by leaving visible traces in their habitat. Innumerable scenarios for interaction and emergence are possible because the traces of one agent can influence the behaviour of all the other creatures. The behavior of the individual agents as well as the behaviour of the group as a whole is develop with the E-volver software. This interactive software applies artificial genetics and evolutionary techniques to search the huge space of possibilities for interesting phenomena. The process of artificial evolution is controlled like the natural process of variation and selection. Each breeding process begins with a “primordial soup,” a stage in which the agents usually generate an incoherent tangle of moving lines, points and coloured planes. On the basis of personal preferences of the software user, the selection process gradually evolves a group of agents that contains properties that generate intriguing, coherent images. Each time when the program starts, one of the cultures is chosen at random. The eight agents from this culture are then scattered on the screen randomly. At undefined time intervals, the agents of one of the other cultures are scattered on the field, and so on. This creates an almost infinite number of possibilities from which the process may develop, each time in a slightly different direction.