2009
A recent post was about Mitchell Whitelaw’s jewellery incorporating data visualisation. The sheer variety of his work is interesting in itself – he’s created time slice composite photographs, for instance – but he’s also written the fascinating Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (reviewed here, with an interview here).
Not surprisingly, the book covers pioneers such as William Latham and Karl Sims. I was reminded of this because Create Digital Motion recently posted a 1994 animation of Sims’ work on evolving creatures. Yes, the graphics are crude by today’s standards, but that’s not the point. There are several clips of artificial life on YouTube here, here, here, here and, perhaps most impressively, here.
You’d need several things to run simulations like these, including a 3D environment and a physics engine as well as an understanding of how to apply the theory of genetic algorithms to grow self-propelled creatures. I’m still grappling with the last of these before even beginning to consider the others.
[...] [the teeming void] rarely posts on his blog, but it’s always interesting when he does. I’ve linked to his blog several times already: on digital theory, jewellery based on weather data and his book on art and artificial life. [...]