The program is interactive - both within its own world and with the viewer. During run time rules and laws are being modified, depending on events that have occured within the object world. When a viewer steps close to the projection screen he or she becomes an object and his or he movements become part of the calculations.
The program is the result of an on-going investigation into the
possibilities of motion control programming techniques and how they could be
used as a tool for automated art production.
The artist implementing and using such a tool builds a virtual world with its
objects, their properties and a set of rules and laws.
This way of working should be thought of as being conceptual, but in contrast to the conceptual art of the seventies its realization is not carried out manually by the artist and/or a group of assistants, but by a machine.
Inspiration for this work came from two books: Klaus Theweleit, "Objektwahl" and Valentino Braitenberg, "Vehicles, experiments in synthetic psychology".
Technical description:
A video beamer is projecting the graphics output of a real time program which
is running on a Silicon Graphics workstation. The image is projected on a
transparent screen, where people can view it from both sides. On one side of
the screen there are contact mats on the floor sending information to the
computer when somebody steps on them. This information is then incorporated
into the calculations of the program, causing changes in the output. The
software was written in C, using SGI Graphic Library.
Software: Akke Wagenaar
Contact mats: Bob O'Kane
