Sun Oct 30, 2022
A digital life-form created in response to the ongoing Holocene Extinction.
Media: computer, software, 65" 4K vertical display.
A Life Cycle is a digital life-form created in response to the ongoing Holocene Extinction.
At a time when so many try to grab your attention by trying to be louder, and when some art tries to overload your senses, this works goes in the opposite direction by being slow and subtle.
If the viewer feels compelled to stay, what does that say about our capacity for sustained attention when given the right conditions? Does the experience of being drawn into a slow, mesmerizing world reveal a latent desire for calm that mainstream media suppresses? What does it feel like to be forced out of the habit of multitasking and into a single‑point focus?
A Life Cycle is a screen-based project featuring detailed, organic, life-like visuals with emerging structures that can remind us of natural phenomena and familiar behaviors. A show featuring a continuous cycle of birth, growth, decay, death and re-birth, with no beginning and no end. It uses a technique for modeling the observed behaviors of the slime mold Physarum Polycephalum as a brush to paint a living canvas.
The project features emergent behaviors arising from the interaction of a large number of agents following very simple rules, resulting in new visual effects that were not explicitly programmed by me. This surprises me time and time again.
It shows how simple algorithms can create something highly complex and mesmerizing. 100% AI-free.
Initially exhibited at Lighthouse.Berlin on January 2023 and, after a remarkably positive reaction, at Khroma Berlin from April 2023 to April 2024.
All five collector editions have been sold. Two editions remain available for exhibition purposes.
The work was funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media in the NEUSTART KULTUR program Module D - Digital mediation formats in 2022.