Environments: Memories, Serpentarium, Village, Terrarium
By penetrating in OUROBOROS PLACES we experience the poetic existence in memescapes, inhabiting within artificial landscapes no longer made of earth, but of memory units. Interfaces and data extend gestures beyond the boundaries of the body, and our sensitivity can live in a new cognitive space as an extension of our sensory space. We have displacents in virtual worlds generating "interval zones" between the body and the technologies, by mixing artificial and biological signals. Interfaces and algorithmic processes expand cognitive processes through an amplified, electrified, computer-interfaced body.
Telematic reality in OUROBOROS is related to Brazilian rituals and the desire to incorporate animals receiving their powers. When connected, we reach another level of being: that of the reptile, live among snakes, what means to stimulate life in some level of dream and imagination. By hyperconnections, immersions, navigations, telepresence and robotic remote action, or creating artificial life and self-regenerations, we experience OUROBOROS principle: "My end is my beginning", or the cyclic nature of the universe, the lifes unending principle.
Three poetic environments are inspired in OUROBOROS, the great world serpent that encircles the earth, biting, devouring, eating its own tail.
SERPENTARIUM proposes a telerobotic event with telepresence and remote action allowing us the seamless condition by sharing the body of a robot-snake living in a serpentarium in Brazil. We live with real snakes, and a web camera is coupled to the robot and transmits in the scenes from the serpentarium. The remotely controlled robot-snake makes several trajectories by the participants orders that send movements using the keys of direction whose signals are interpreted and result in trajectories in the serpentarium. The robot is an agent that dwells and acts in the physical world.
VILLAGE offers teleimmersion and proprioception inside an on-line virtual reality, living with these legendary creatures. It bestows visual and sound in the snakes landscape. By using the arrow keys and mouse or a joystick we can move within the artificial world and the sensory stimuli allow proprioceptions to the body in some physical correlations with the virtual space. Displacements change images and moving around inside the environment we are reptiles, living between artificial snakes, always having a serpents point of view. Tunnels and topographies, sounds of snakes, images of snakes lives stimulate our serpents tours.
TERRARIUM explores the creation and the control of artificial life. By using the data structure and algorithms behaviors, we create, provoke, share and control life through the interactive systems. Concerning artificial life, by linking DNA sequences from twelve species of snakes, whose genetic code is given by experts of the University of Caxias do Sul, we generate virtual serpents. Parameters translated into algorithms, create artificial serpents controlled by genetic algorithm system prepared to execute and process calculations, simulating characteristics of organic environments The replication of another snake as a clone of memes is automatically sent to any other machine, as well the creatures created by the cross-over combination can be replicated in other networked machines as a collectif place. The organic simulated behavior of the environment is controlled by linking heat and dynamics, because the artificial temperature influences the speed of serpents displacements. By giving food, lifetime of serpents is enhanced. The selection of data results in the fitness function and the same process generates combinations of sets. Each serpent is an agent with autonomus behavior and certain level of spatial intelligence and relative level of multiagents systems because the collectif behavior. Penetrating into the virtual world and incorporating these virtual creatures we go up and down the topographies of the virtual landscape, we search for food, we go faster and faster because of the heat among other sensitive qualities simulating natural environment.
VILLAGE and TERRARIUM offer the second interactivity level related to the second Cybernetics, offering complex behaviors from technologies whose evolutions and independent responses are provided by complex systems. In this sort of interactivity, technologiesbehaviors are more refined becoming closer to organic, biological and intelligent systems. Interactions are no longer reactions or single responses but complex and evolutive situations working on many probabilistic and not deterministic ways. Using algorithms inspired in cognitive sciences and biologic sciences, connexionism and genetics, we explore some relationships processed by data structure. Artificial worlds change, evolving as natural worlds. The vocabulary of this kind of interactivity comes from genetics laws, physical phenomena, mental functions and correspond to the technology powers simulating some sort of life. Technologies are capable of partially perceiving, analyzing and evolving in some situations, responding with self-regenerations which determine new forms of life related to artificial systems.
Ouroboros in the web:
OUROBOROS PLACES: http://artecno.ucs.br/ouroboros/places
OUROBOROS: my end is my begining: http://artecno.ucs.br/ouroboros
(Diana Domingues)