SFI Fellow and ecologist Jennifer Dunne is co-director of a project with interactive video-sound artist David Stout exploring a unique form of multimedia expression that relies on the quantitative principles of ecology.
The project, called Archipelago, is the brainchild of Stout, a professor in the College of Santa Fe’s Moving Arts Department, and Cory Metcalf, a moving image and sound artist in Santa Fe.
Archipelago is envisioned as a multisite interactive exhibition of immersive displays. To create an interactive cinematic experience, its creators plan to combine large video screens, networked laptops, sensors, and software. The system displays abstract, organism-like on-screen visual forms that react to each other and the audience.
Infused within the exhibition’s software are fundamental principles of ecological systems that will, depending on interactive circumstance, allow the fictional life forms to interact, adapt, and evolve in their artificial environment. Movements or sounds introduced by the audience might cause the organisms to flock, flee, or exhibit other behaviors within this ecological framework.
“From a scientific perspective, we hope to embed ecological models within a more sophisticated visual and audio framework and gain insights not available through traditional means,” says Jennifer. “This is a great platform for generating and testing new hypotheses.”
Stout says the project is an aesthetic vision grounded in the need for new approaches to scientific problem solving. “As computers have become more powerful, our ability to model more dynamic and compelling processes has improved,” he says. “In my mind science needs a new way to capture the public imagination, and this seems to be one way this could happen. Technology has enabled us to dream bigger.”
“As computers have become more powerful, our ability to model more dynamic and compelling processes has improved.”-David Stout.
Separate exhibition nodes in Santa Fe, Chile, and France would, initially, represent ecosystems with distinct environments. Population and evolutionary dynamics, along with audience inputs, would drive niche construction and ecosystem change. Nodes would then be linked allowing niche interaction. Over time sophisticated ecological relationships might evolve.
Stout, whose art has long been inspired by science, contacted SFI External Professor Jim Crutchfield (UC Davis) a few years ago while working on The Hundred Monkey Garden, a networked interactive exhibit on which the Archipelago concept is built. Jim, a physicist, referred Stout to Jennifer, whose work as co-director of the Paci c Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab (PEaCE Lab) in food webs and ecological dynamics that Stout’s need for “more poetic, biomimetic, and temporal forms,” says Stout.
Jennifer and Stout recently submitted a proposal to the NSF seeking support for Archipelago as a two-year pilot project in the NSF’s new CreativeIT program. Although portions of the Archipelago project are underway, NSF funding would allow for a fuller involvement of the scientific community, she says.
Other collaborators include Luke DuBois (interactive sound/video performance instructor at Columbia and NYU), Neo Martinez (PEaCE Lab director), Pablo Marquet (former SFI international fellow), and Rich Williams (Microsoft’s Computational Ecology and Environmental Science group).
“We don’t know what the final outcome is going to be,” Jennifer says. “The project is as much about the process as the product.”