Can Digital Objects Behave Well (if we let them)?
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Spaces, Bodies, Emergence, and Data in Interactive Art
Presentation Title:
- Can Digital Objects Behave Well (if we let them)?
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Within my research-led art practice I continue to explore ways of delivering complex concepts in an immediate and engaging way through digital mediation. I therefore pursue a computer-based practice that can support complexity through the associative trails permitted in semantic media. I persist with my interrogation of the ideas of Marcel Duchamp that formulated the trajectory to a contemporary Conceptual practice. Earlier works have moved from projected interactive pieces with mouse-click and roll-over access to a hard-linked hypermedia system, to more intuitive interfaces with open directional choices and less obvious connections between the digitised Duchampian objects. These latter works have involved endowing those objects with ‘flocking’ behaviours to observe them clustering into families of sense.
The idea of ‘flocking’ digital objects gave rise to that of giving ‘animal’ behaviours to virtual objects, and a change of focus from Duchamp to Darwin. From the convoluted ideas of Duchamp re art’s function and future, it was a natural progression to the current culture and human activity to which art responds. Thinking around Darwin’s ‘big idea’ in light of our future as a current pathway to self-destruction via climate change, the hands-on installation ‘Shift-Life’ arose. Shift-Life is a virtual world of bug-like ‘candy’ creatures that exist quite contentedly if left alone, however physical human intervention can alter their environment into a volatile state where they have to adapt to survive. There are many computer games that let you play God in letting life-forms live or die -starve, thrive, fight, procreate, overpopulate or become extinct, but my intention is always to explore the complex concept and exhibit this in an accessible way.
The limited behaviours given to the Shift-Life fantasy creatures would be enough to allow them to evolve if left uninterrupted in their everyday existence, we might, for instance, be able to witness patterns of sociability emerging. However, the participatory nature of the work means that without interacting with the piece, that understanding cannot be brought to bear, here human intervention causes basic survival behaviours only. Our meddling nature prevents us from seeing the creatures and their world developing as one sustainable life-system.
