“A Mass of Radiant Flies and a Body” by Aaron Oldenburg

Filmmaker, Video Artist, or Animator(s):

• Aaron Oldenburg

Decomposition and recomposition, forces that consume and combine, create this procedurally-generated environment. The non-playable character walks straight ahead through the forest and fields, the invisible parts of which are activated by the sound of rain. The visible flora and human/animal remnants of the landscape have been extracted from the results of AI text-to-image prompts, hand traced and animated as black silhouettes.

Prompts from which I derived trees, flowers, bushes, mounds and structures included, “bone formation under water”, “driftwood shaped like sleeping person”, “tree with sudden strong wind disappearing on water”, “moss ruin brain stem”, “wildflower nodding rattling”. These also inspired glimpses of humans created by the landscape.

There are other entities that wander the simulation as animals: sleeping, searching, eating, scratching (via an original game AI algorithm). Visually, they are blades of grass, bushes, moving and crying out like cats and rodents, creatures literally living on through the plants, decomposition exposing the permeability of separate existences.

In the Styly link, the audiences is surrounded by video capture on four sides. The realtime software can be found here: https://aaronoldenburg.itch.io/flies