Sublime Ecologies and Artistic Endeavours: Artificial Life and Interactivity in the On-line Project Technosphere

Symposium:

• ISEA98: Ninth International Symposium on Electronic Art

• Evolution 2.0

• Sublime Ecologies and Artistic Endeavours: Artificial Life and Interactivity in the On-line Project Technosphere

• Jane Prophet

• The author chronicles her collaborative on-line project TechnoSphere, and interactive artwork accessed via the Internet, exploring some of the issues associated with the work. These include a discussion of the process of collaboration between artists, software engineers, animators and visitors to the web site, the thinking behind TechnoSphere’s computer simulated landscapes, and the focus on interaction with, and within, the project. TechnoSphere is an on-line project which enables users to design artificial life-forms and send them into a 3D virtual world where they interact with life-forms designed by other users of the web site. The 3D world has fractally generated terrain, trees self-seed at certain heights to make forests and there are desert and mountainous regions in which the cyber beasts artificially `live’. The current version is a prototype written between March and September 1995.

Category:

• Panel