Generating Creatures From Software: A Q&A With boredomresearch

Lost Calls of Cloud Mountain Whirligigs

Next week sees the Kinetica Art Fair roll into London town and bring with it an assortment of artworks loosely tied together under the umbrella of movement. We went down there last year and were met with all kinds of weird sights—from musical nests to an organ shaped like an owl.

This year artists Vicky Isley and Paul Smith, aka boredomresearch, will be there. Their artwork is computer generated, sometimes interactive, and the pair investigate and simulate natural patterns and behaviors. They do online work and gallery-based pieces that use custom, open source software to explore how generated patterns and forms change over time. So their work changes as time passes, evolving, mutating, and growing into new forms like it’s alive.

One of their pieces Real Snail Mail featured live snails carrying emails across physical space. Another featured moving, imaginary landscapes where creatures called whirligigs live—computer-generated life forms that live for a few days before dying.

We had a Skype chat with them to find out what they’ll be showing at this year’s fair.

The Creators Project: So what are you bringing to Kinetica?
Paul Smith: It’s a screen-based work called Fragments of Lost Flight and it’s based on scale formations of wing fragments. Each wing fragment is created using Turing rule-based machines to enable a vast range of unique pattern and color combinations. Within this tiny slice of diversity there are still more possibilities than anyone could view in a lifetime. They’re freewheelin’ type beings, it’s a bit like a cross between a Turing machine and ants where the head part of the machine is replaced by ants.

Vicky Isley: We have a library of different scales and pairs that we then map onto a kind of skeleton and it creates this kind of wing-like formation.

Fragments of Lost Flight

What’s the appeal of doing something that evolves?
Vicky Isley: It’s great to do things that are unexpected and surprising, when it goes beyond the control element and it gets to the point where you see an image and you think, wow, that’s really interesting I didn’t expect it to work like that—so it has that element of chance. And the real-time component also features heavily in our work. The idea that these systems are happening in real-time so effectively every viewer is seeing a unique experience that another viewer won’t be able to see.

Paul Smith: Sometimes it doesn’t represent exactly what our intentions were and develops outside of our control and that’s what we find interesting. Having a component that can bring about diversity is what makes the work what it is.

Vicky Isley: What we also find interesting is the online works, where an audience starts engaging with the piece and they become the diverse component of the work.

How would you break down the different works you do?
Vicky Isley: We see the online and some of the artifacts we do as public art work because often they can be publicly funded. And with Real Snail Mail it’s become a bit like that because we have the installation component of it as well, which is like a big enclosure and people come to see it and it very much feels like a public experience.

Fragments of Lost Flight

What is the appeal of the temporal aspect of your work? Do you like to see things develop of their own accord or just enjoy the randomness?
Vicky Isley: I think it first sort of stemmed from an early work we did, a piece called Possessed , where we were commissioned to produce a web piece. And we were getting a bit annoyed about how long people spent with art works in a gallery context, which is only a few minutes and then they move onto the next one. And we thought it would be fun to create an artwork where the experience would last for six weeks. And then thought lets extend this a bit more and we decided to have an experience for six months and we never realized that people would download the software and actually use it for six months. It was then that we realized people do want to spend a long duration with a piece. And with our computational works we’ve thought about how they could be much more concentrated and how people could be rewarded over an extended period of time.

Can you talk me through the whirligigs piece? That seems like an interesting idea.
Paul Smith: The whirligigs are sort of flying creatures we invented and they have a life cycle that they follow and they interact with each other. And they’re generated from a set of rules, which allows each one of them to be unique from the previous lot. And they have songs they sing which are unique as well. And they have different tails and propellers, so they’re made out of different building blocks, so they have a grammar if you like. They whole thing works very much like a game engine but without anyone controlling it.

Do you enjoy having the public interact with your work?
Vicky Isley: With the Real Snail Mail especially it’s been interesting following the journey of the project. The emails that are being delivered were sent in July 2008, so four years ago and often people forget what they wrote. And that’s been a really interesting relationship with the people using it because of that extended time period.

Paul Smith: But it’s meant four years of looking after and cleaning up after snails.

Kinetica Art Fair 2012 will take place from 9-12 February at Ambika p3, 35 Marylebone Road NW1 5LS

Images: Courtesy of boredomresearch & [DAM]Berlin/Cologne.