highlike

RASA SMITE & RAITIS SMITS

Atmospheric Forest
Atmospheric Forest is a large scale VR point-cloud installation that visualizes and sonifies the relations between the forest and climate. It reveals the interaction patterns between the pine-tree emissions in Pfynwald, an ancient Swiss Alpine forest, and weather conditions in this valley, effected by drought. The trees do not only produce oxygen, but they are living bodies who breath too. I.e., they emit part of carbon dioxide, sometimes even up to 20 perc. from what they have consumed. When trees die, they release all the carbon they have collected during their lives back into the atmosphere. Atmospheric Forest explores the effects of drought on local forest ecosystems, and how such stress situations influence production of resin and volatile emissions (such as usual pine-tree scent).

Michael Sedbon

CMD
Here are 2 artificial ecosystems sharing a light source. Access to this light source is granted through a market. Each colony of photosynthetic bacterias can claim access to light thanks to credits earned for their oxygen production. The rules driving the market are optimized through a genetic algorithm. This artificial intelligence is testing different populations of financial systems on these 2 sets of Cyanobacteria. Like so, the photosynthetic cells and the computer are experimenting with different political systems granting access to this resource. The system oscillates between collaborative and competitive states. The genetic algorithm pictures the rules of these proto-societies as genes. By breeding populations of societies, new generations of markets arise. Like so, the sum of microscopic series of events determines the status of the system at a macroscopic scale.