wk5 10.21/10.23 Systems Art, Generative Art, Algorithmic Art, Bio Art, Biometrics, Bio Data

[hyuncho]

This week, I explored the works of Sabina Hyoju Ahn and Ryan Millett. Their most recent project, Plasphere, is an audiovisual installation that examines the coexistence of altered natural environments and the living organisms that have evolved to adapt to them under human influence. The artists focus on the phenomenon of plastiglomerate, a recently observed global occurrence in which discarded plastic waste fuses with rock and organic matter to form new composite structures.


Ahn and Millett collected plastiglomerate samples from islands in Korea, documented them through photography, and then trained an AI model to generate new virtual life forms inspired by these hybrid materials. At the same time, field recordings from coastal areas were re-synthesized through an autoencoder, and these reconfigured sounds were presented together with the visuals.

While experiencing Plasphere, I was reminded of the concept of emergence, the idea that when A and B interact, the result is not simply A plus B but an entirely new form, C. This notion challenges the binary opposition between humans and nature, suggesting instead that both are mutually transformative agents within a dynamic system. Plasphere visualizes an emergent ecosystem where boundaries between entities dissolve, revealing a network of continuous transformation.

Another work that caught my attention was Microbial Mindscapes (2024), an interactive audiovisual installation and performance that explores how the human gut microbiome affects emotion and mental health. Inspired by Ahn’s personal experience with anxiety disorder and depression, the project traces the changes in her microbiome as her environment and diet evolved. Through data visualization and sound composition, Ahn transforms this biological record into an expressive representation of the mind–body connection.

Through this work, I reflected on the symbiotic relationship between humans and microbes, a reminder that we are not autonomous beings but ecosystems shaped by countless nonhuman agents. It expands the notion of subjectivity beyond the human and positions the self as an emergent product of biological, environmental, and technological interrelations

[felix_yuan]

From Algorithm to Artificial Life
Computation technology has evolved rapidly from algorithmic era to nowadays AI era, and artists has never stopped to explore the beauty that comes with the new computation technique to create artwork that are otherwise impossible to implement.

Algorithmic Art and Hyper-rationality
Artist’s exploration into algorithmic art often comes with a sense of hyper-rationality, a feeling of order and solemnity that’s inborn with the mathematical essence behind algorithm, computation and the geographical outcome.

Agnes Denes’ Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space--Map Projections series is a bold movement of using isometric projection to render the world map onto different shape, and conveying the 3D information into a 2D format. The series include The Doughnut, The Hot Dog, The Cube, The snail and The Pyramid. It provided an interesting perspective of how the world could be and how our ancients could perceive the world before the Age of Discovery.

Agnes work also includes a lot of experiment on abstracting the object or nature with a computational method to a standardized geometry form. Some of these interesting works are Tree Mountain, The Pyramids and the Teardrop.

Tree Mountains

The Pyramids Series

The Teardrop

She also did some conceptual designs based on a similar approach, which reflect strong hyper-rationality sense of aesthetic like the North Waterfront Park in Berkeley, some conceptual philosophical sketch and some reconstruction imagination of pyramids, including flying pyramids, snail pyramid and oval pyramids.

Berkeley Water Park

Early Philosophical Sketch

The Abstraction of Pyramids

The idea of Agnes Denes is partly inspired by the Dymaxion Map by Buckminster Fuller, which is a opened 2D plane of world map.

Sol Lewitt, discover the variation of open cubes by digitally fabricated installation, sharing similar spirit with Manfred Mohr. With 122 open cubes, Sol revealed the mathematical and aesthetic relationship of the cubes in the series. Where one may look aloof, but together are “an army of soldiers”.

AI and Artificial Life
As AI kicks in, artists began to explore the order inside artificial lives, which sometimes gives unpredictable outcome due to the self-evolvement and learning of the complex system, and reveals a different kind of new hyper-rationality.

Karl Sims’s Evolved Virtual Creatures is an early exploration of artificial life. By giving the creatures different shape and structure and a virtual underwater environment, some learned to swim and jump, some struggled to manage to move, some failed, and some fight with others. The behaviors behind is complete decided by the computation, and the system becomes self-emergent after the first input, and the unpredictable outcome turns to be not chaotic at all, instead it’s a self thriving system of the artificial virtual characters.

Ian Cheng’s work BOB is a interactive installation of an evolving artificial life. Through the audience’s continuous input, the creature moves, eats, and grows out of it’s own decision making process. And through the words displayed above in the screen, the system express itself and say its words back to the audience. The work revealed the possibility of artificial life as not only it’s own computational process, but to also involve with the human society and the real world, just as the naturally evolved species of the earth.

[zixuan241]

"Thousand Layers of Drift," a visual installation piece, was produced by Jeju Biennale, a group of artists. This artwork utilizes data about ocean currents' pathways in a way that immerses the viewer in a visual experience of data as flow, light, shadow, and rhythm. Entering this data-filled gallery is equivalent to entering a living environment, as the viewer experiences data in a colorful way that is essentially immersed in flow, light, shadow, and rhythm. Through this artwork, artists decode data about the environment to experience drifting in the natural systems that are not human-perceivable."
This artwork utilizes data about the environment in a powerful way, as data that is not tangible, such as "current, flow, and energy of the oceans," is translated into something tangible and perceivable in a concrete way. This effectively captures a notion of "our experience interwoven in the environment."

A Thousandfold Drift (2024): Ulsan Art Museum, South Korea, 2023

A Thousandfold Drift (2024): Ulsan Art Museum, South Korea, 2023

A Thousandfold Drift (2024): Ulsan Art Museum, South Korea, 2023

A Thousandfold Drift (2024): Ulsan Art Museum, South Korea, 2023

This concept of visualizing the invisible aligns with Heather Dewey-Hagberg's artistic vision in Stranger Phantoms (2012-13)—a project that reconstructs facial sculptures of strangers using genetic material collected in public spaces.
The DNA Project reveals how personal data—our DNA, saliva, or hair—can be easily collected and used to generate portraits that speculate on identity. While both Thousand Drifts and Stranger's Illusion transform intangible information into visible forms, they carry distinctly different emotional and ethical implications. Dewey-Hagberg's work exposes humanity's biological vulnerability in an era of surveillance and genetic sequencing. His art provokes unease, warning us that traces we leave unconsciously can be reconstructed, analyzed, and even aestheticized without consent. In contrast, Thousand Drifts uses data to evoke empathy and awareness, employing immersive aesthetics to rebuild a sense of belonging within natural systems.

"Stranger Visions" Courtesy Heather Dewey-Hagborg/Fridman Gallery, New York

"Stranger Visions" Courtesy Heather Dewey-Hagborg/Fridman Gallery, New York

Ian Cheng's BOB (Bag of Beliefs) is a fairly singular piece of artwork in this respect. Both of the two works that I mentioned had taken virtual data and manifested this as a tangible object. BOB examines how belief and behavior arise from code. As a digital serpent that is scrolled across a virtual environment, BOB is a developing "artificial life" whose "beliefs" change according to external stimuli. Cheng explains that BOB is a "collection of competing 'demons' or sub-personalities that engage in strategy games to try to win each other over," reflecting the fragmented state of human belief. As time passes, BOB will develop new behaviors, emotions, and response systems via this algorithmic process.

BOB (Bag of Beliefs)

BOB (Bag of Beliefs)