Life Support Systems explores ideas of a future existence for living organisms. Today, specialized companies offer primitive longevity by digitally archiving documentation about a person, organizing it in attractive user interfaces which can be browsed by later generations. In the near future, it is predicted that virtual animatronics will assume the role of these archives, recreating personalities based on the collected documentation.

The next milestone is a scan of the brain to directly create a virtual personality which exists in the virtual domain—i.e. uploading a personality. The Life Support Systems project attempts to achieve this milestone, starting with an organism which has both an inspirational beauty and behavioural simplicity. The project centers around efforts to upload the behavioral characteristics of the orchid Vanda Hybrida into computer memory.

The result is a virtual organism which can exist indefinitely, kept alive inside computer media such as hard disks, servers, networks.

A virtual organism is a data structure based on current ai technologies such as neural networks and hidden Markov models. After the live individual is disconnected, its virtual counterpart will continue to generate signals which mimic the patterns of the original. The virtual Vanda is visualized in 3D space as a self-organizing structure which adapts continually to its changing states. At even intervals, the structure is queried for its current characteristics, and the output of this query is used to produce image or sound.

The virtual organism has a structural build quite unlike the organic counterpart, yet when shown as a simple self-organizing graph in 3D, a sense of organic presence emerges. Does an avatar have to be made to look like its inception? Part of the research for this project is on how to visualize a virtual organism so that its inherent properties (character) are visible without pasting preconceived visual notions. One may expect that a virtual existence signifies completely different visual/aural experiences from life outside the computer. As an example, scientific visualization software produces images which sometimes are not unlike what one may expect of a virtual organism, yet retain their very own character.