Lifeforms (composition v2.6) in cooperation with Hania Najbar

This video is basically a documentation of experiments that were conducted jointly with my colleague Hania Najbar in 1999-2000. At the beginning of the 2013 I decided to return to the project and bring it to a finite form. We were looking for a new methods of the imaging and animation.

Taking inspiration from experimenting filmmakers (Walter Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter) we created our aparatus "from scratch" by writing software that transforming various mathematical models of biological processes into images. We did not have access to advanced commercial technologies (and we did not want to use them) - rather we wanted to create our own workshop and toolbox...

The project was a laboratory work (in the spirit of garage based, grassroots, DIY activities), but recently I decided to put together some archival videos - a few minutes of life in a simulated ecosystem - avoiding post-production tricks and with no sound. So the result almost raw record. Working mainly with algorithms of artificial life (i/a/ the famous Conway's "game of life"), genetic algorithms, and all available to us at the time techniques of simulation life (and occasionally physical) processes.

For the project we developed a special simulated environment. By repeating simulations, several times, including different algorithms and modifying the parameters we received a few hours of video footages (because started more than a decade ago, using the limited technology resources that we had to create our own software for video storage with good image quality, including its own lossless video compression technology).

It seems to me that today, in the era of new wave of interest in using the processes of life in art, in the age of inclusion in the language of art medical technology and biology, be a good time to go back for a moment to the project. Also, due to the progressive degradation of nature, I am concerned that the biological source of inspiration for our art and technology will become a thing of the past...