Creative Ecosystems - Computers and Creativity - page 48

Fig. 2.2 The author's Eden installation: an evolving ecosystem of virtual creatures learn new
behaviours based on interaction with their environment and with their human audience
tenuation. Evolving, learning agents modify and adapt to their surroundings. Inter-
estingly, the agents learn a number of behaviours not explicitly programmed into
the system, including hibernation during winter months when food resources are
scarce, predation, and primitive signalling using sound. A computer vision system
links human visitor presence to the generation of biomass (food for the agents), and
over time agents learn to make interesting sequences of sound in order to keep vis-
itors attracted near the work, thus increasing their supply of food and chances of
reproductive success (McCormack 2005 ).
Over the last twenty years, Dutch artists Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen 9
have been experimenting with generative “processes of production” in their art prac-
tice. This has extensively encompassed the use of ecosystem metaphors in a number
of their works. For example, E-volver is a generative visual artwork where a small
collection of agents roam a gridded landscape of coloured pixels, choosing to mod-
ify the pixel underneath them based on it's colour, and those of the neighbouring
pixels. Each agent has a set of rules that determine how to change the colour and
where to move next (Driessens and Verstappen 2008 ). Through the interaction of
these pixel-modifying agents and their environment (the pixels which comprise the
image), E-volver is able to generate a fascinating myriad of complex and detailed
images (Fig. 2.3 shows one example), all of which begin from a uniformly grey
canvas. The images, while abstract, remind the viewer of landscape viewed from
high altitude, or an alien mould overwhelming a surface, or electron micrographs of
some unidentified organic structure. Importantly, they exhibit details on a variety of
scales, with coherent structures extending far beyond the one pixel sensory radius of
9 See their website at: http://www.xs4all.nl/~notnot/index.html .