Inhabitat is a mixed-reality artwork in which participants become part of an imaginary ecology through three simultaneous perspectives of scale and agency; three distinct ways to see with other eyes. This imaginary world was exhibited at a children’s science museum for five months, using an interactive projection-augmented sculpture, a large screen and speaker array, and a virtual reality head-mounted display. This paper documents the work’s motivations and design contributions, along with accounts of visitors’ playful engagements and reflections within the complex interconnectivity of an artificial nature.
Since 2007, Graham Wakefield and Haru Ji have looked to nature for inspiration as they have created a series of "artificial natures," or interactive visualizations of biologically inspired complex systems that can evoke nature-like aesthetic experiences within mixed-reality art installations. This article describes how they have applied visualization, sonification, and interaction design in their work with artificial ecosystems and organisms using specific examples from their exhibited installations.
The authors explore how current mainstream data-driven AI approaches can be questioned critically from a perspective of computational creativity and ecosystemic art. This centres on a critique of the future as being over-determined by the past; both from the data used, and in the questions or objectives assumed by training. The main contributions of this paper are to apply alternative creative approaches to nature-inspired artificial intelligence, and to detail some of these through their embodiment in the authors' artwork "Infranet". Infranet is a neuro-evolutionary art installation that exhibited at three international locations over 2018-2019. It uses geospatial data of the host city not as a training material but as a habitat for artificial life. In contrast to training-based AI systems, in Infranet there is no objective or fitness function and very little evolutionary pressure or competition. Moreover, it eschews the trend of a large and pre-specified neural network structure in favour of a population of thousands of small interacting neural networks, each with distinct structure, in a "liquid" process of continuous reorganization; resonating with some contemporary theories and models of non-conscious cognition in biological and ecological systems.
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