Authors: Emiliano Causa / Tarcisio Lucas Pirotta / Matías Romero Costas
Made with Processing
CONCEPT
Sensible is an interactive installation provided with a sensible touch-screen which allows people to control a virtual environment and from this action produce real time music. In accordance with the different kind of interventions participants make, artificial life algorithms, virtual environments develop producing simultaneously different musical ambiances.
Sensible’s environment is formed by three different kind of virtual organisms: vegetables, herbivores and carnivores. The vegetables (circles) are unable of moving or eating other organisms. The herbivores (triangles) can move and need to eat vegetables to stay alive. The carnivores (rectangles) can move and need to eat herbivores to live. All organisms consume energy which can be recovered by herbivores and carnivores when eating. When an organism moves it consumes lots of energy. These laws oblige each organism to make decisions while moving and searching for food.
Sensible’s environment is a “closed system” and as such quickly tends to unbalance. The only way of keeping balance is throughout a great deal of energy achieved outside the system, this means, through visitors’ participation. That is why people are in charge of regulating this environment and its evolution.
For creating each type of organism, people must contribute with different gestures on the sensible screen.
Sensible’s music is generated by real time composition algorithms which consider different variables of the environment in order to produce sounding material. Population density, the amount of energy the organisms spend in their actions, the levels of pleasure and displeasure of each organism (in accordance with achieving their goals, feeding or escaping form a predator), are the environment variables that regulate the evolution of the music design.
