SEVEN EXPERIMENTS IN PROCEDURAL ANIMATION

Karl Sims

FILE SÃO PAULO 2026: Inter-creativity – Art and Technology – Randomic Dimension
Electronic Language International Festival

Seven Experiments in Procedural Animation – United States

Animated textures and patterns created from custom computer code employing various fractal algorithms, procedural noise, and reaction-diffusion techniques. The moving images are purely defined by mathematics, but are meant to evoke a biological aesthetic by resembling sea creatures, neurons, or other microscopic structures that transform from one emergent pattern to another.

BIO

Digital media artist and visual effects software developer. He founded GenArts Inc., which created special effects software tools for the motion picture industry. Karl studied computer graphics at the MIT Media Lab, and Life Sciences as an undergraduate at MIT. He is the recipient of various awards including two Ars Electronica Golden Nicas, a MacArthur Genius Grant, and an Emmy Award.

ARRELS #64

Anna Carreras

FILE SÃO PAULO 2026: Inter-creativity – Art and Technology – Randomic Dimension
Electronic Language International Festival

Arrels #64 – Spain

Arrels has a strong relationship to the Spanish landscape, connecting drawing, code, and repetitive loops to the environment through a cycle of growth and decay.

With nature as its inspiration, it becomes a carefully choreographed generative animation. In Arrels, growing roots in the colors of earth and sky collide in a vibrant dance. New growth in the arid soil overtakes the old, and the cycle continues.

BIO

Anna Carreras is a generative artist focusing her work on the use of algorithms to create visuals that depict generic concepts, foster memories, and evoke new discussions.

Working from scratch, she codes “dumb” minimal procedural systems that explore the intrinsic characteristics of the medium, showing how simple rules can produce complex, unexpected, beautiful results that question our understanding of technology, life, and relationships.

Digital Origami: Exploring Procedural Animation

John Otero

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – WORKSHOP
Electronic Language International Festival

Digital Origami: Exploring Procedural Animation – Brazil

This workshop introduces procedural animation, a technique that uses mathematical parameters to create automated movements. Using the free version of Houdini software, participants will learn how to digitally assemble and animate origami, exploring the software’s features to simulate movements and behaviors. The creative possibilities of this approach will also be discussed, highlighting applications in animation, generative design, and visual effects.

BIO

João Otero is a visual artist, illustrator, animator, teacher, and visual arts graduate student at ECA-USP. He is a member of the Realidades research and outreach group. He holds a scholarship from the CAPES Teaching Initiation Program in the arts field; he also received a PUB scientific initiation scholarship, researching digital techniques applied to comic book production.

Speculative Evolution, Prototype 1

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Speculative experiment on a future ecosystem under strict control. The narrative takes place in a simulation, 30 years in the future, where artificial intelligence and synthetic biology collaborate to optimize an environment for cultivated species. An AI-powered simulator helps visitors generate new species to balance the ecosystem. Inspiration comes from the book Under the White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert and artists’ stories about life on a damaged planet.

Bio

Marc Lee is a Swiss artist focused on real-time rendered audiovisual installations, AR, VR and mobile applications, critically exploring creative, cultural, social, ecological, political and speculative themes. His work has been exhibited in important museums and new media art spaces. Shervin Saremi is an Iranian musician and audio engineer specializing in sonic computing, procedural sound design and production. Currently researching immersive audio at UdK Berlin.

Kati Katona est une artiste multimédia basée à Budapest. Son travail est axé sur la génération, animation procédurale et 3D, art de l’installation interactive, mappage de projection et conception sonore. Kati s’inspire fortement des éléments de la nature, des structures biomorphes et des algorithmes trouvés dans la nature. En tant qu’artiste visuelle, elle a participé à divers projets audiovisuels, tels que Zagar AV Experience et se concentre constamment sur l’expérience des dernières technologies.

Procedural cloth V//002
“I’m continuing experiments with procedurally generated structures. This time I’m implementing algorithm assembled in Houdini over female body. All meshes generated in Houdini. Then uploaded to sketchfab.  All images made from sketchfab model. You can check it in 3d in any browser by the link in my profile.” Oleg Soroko

Transfiguration (2020)
Transfiguration (2020) is a reworking of the Universal Everything studio classic from 2011, The Transfiguration. The Transfiguration was first shown at the studio’s first major solo exhibition Super-Computer Romantics at La Gaite Lyrique, Paris. Now completely remade using the latest procedural visual effects software, the updated CGI artwork brings new life to the ever-evolving walking figure, with a new foley-based soundtrack by Simon Pyke.

Glitch art
Finding his own niche between new media arts and conceptualism, Adam Ferriss creates unique digital coding that manipulates, distorts, and engineers images into psychedelic terrains. At times, his technicolor abstractions feel organic despite their technological roots – an ambiguous craft born of the RGB Tricolor separation process and pixel sorting algorithms he so carefully employs. Using these “procedural mechanisms,” Ferriss initiates iterative changes in light and pixel structure of his given source material – creating a literally infinite array of compositional possibilities that grapple with human perception during an era of ubiquitous manufacture.

Everything
FILE GAMES 2017
Everything is an interactive experience where everything you see is a thing you can be, from animals to planets to galaxies and beyond. Travel between outer and inner space, and explore a vast, interconnected universe of things without enforced goals, scores, or tasks to complete. Everything is a procedural, AI-driven simulation of the systems of nature, seen from the points of view of everything in the Universe.