“Within this landscape of city data, artificial lifeforms are born, dwell, and die. The varieties of kinds of data in the city become resources of metabolism to the taste of each creature. Each one explores according to its unique neural network, through which it can carry ideas to share with others” (Ji & Wakefield, 2019).
Artificial Nature is series of interactive art installations and research collaboratively constructed by Haru Ji and Graham Wakefield, that explores the interaction between humans and the biologically-inspired complex systems experienced in immersive mixed reality.
The computational world of Artificial Nature consists of organisms interacting within an environment, generating continuous patterns of emergent beauty. Spectators can explore this world freely and endlessly, and influence it indirectly just as they might play in a stream or forest. It is proposed that Artificial Nature is the way forward with art, suggesting the future possibilities of art through its unconventional expansion. This is a vital role of contemporary art; to conceive and create the open-ended world in which we are about to live.
Infranet
Infranet is a generative artwork realised through a population of artificial beings with evolutionary neural networks, thriving upon a variety of open city data as their tools and canvas. When viewing the city as an ecosystem, these lifeforms form spatial networks through which associations can spread, in simple and more complex contagions, telling stories of possible patterns that were invisible, allowing viewers to experience a new spacetime within a real-time space where waves of light propagate throughout an elaborate data ecosystem.
