Jon McCormack (AUS) studied animation at the Swinburne Film & Television School (Melbourne, Australia). He has developed artist's computer software. His work examines and interprets nature and natural systems through computer algorithms. Currently a lecturer in Computer Science at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

What would life look like if it were made from computer algorithms rather than flesh and blood? "Moments of TURBULENCE" is a menagerie of computer synthesised forms and ecologies, based on the new science and philosophies of "Artifical Life" - the digital formation of life-like forms and processes from materials other than those found in nature.

To create the work, artifical organisms were evolved within the computer using a parody of the process of natural selection, implemented in software written by the artist. But rather than survival of the fittest - Darwin's "life-as-we-know-it", within the machine it is survival of the most aesthetic - "life-as-it-could-be". In many ways "Moments of TURBULENCE" is a type of futuristic natural history film, made visible through the synergetic combination of mind and machine - a document of a type of life that exists only within the abstract pluriverse of computational space. A place that never was in a time that has never been.

Technical Bacckground

HW: SGI
SW: Artist's Proprietary