Event: Sam Wolk

Last week, I attended a lecture where Sam Wolk talked about some of his current projects, focusing on synthetic life.  The appearance of these pieces he was creating did not resemble those of actual biological systems that they were based on.

 

Genes of many different plants

The main project he showed us was called Replica Praesens, a synthetic “universe” which contained plants, animals, and nutrients, created using a programming language called Processing.  The nutrient levels were shown as red, green, and blue pixels on the screen.  His plants were concentric circles that changed in radius over time.  Each plant had its own genome, which he represented as a strip of genetic material, with many different “genes” of different shades of grey connected together.  Each plant had an odor radius, which was how far its smell could travel.  Wolk used iterations of random mutations to introduce genetic variation into the species.  He used a Gaussian distribution and changed the standard deviation about the species average to control the gene distribution.  

Wolk also had creatures in his universe which could smell, see, and eat plants, travel, and reproduce.  Besides eating, these creatures also liked to socialize, and Wolk represented this using lines drawn between creatures.  He also showed us a model of a neural network of a creature, which made decisions based on its knowledge of its environment, self, and emotions.  Then, Wolk showed what would happen upon introducing predators into the universe.  Finally, he showed us a universe with many different creature populations.  In the code, there was a bug that was intentionally put there.  The bug caused the universe to stop functioning and saved all the information at that moment, so that upon running the code again, the universe would start exactly where it left off.  Wolk said he did this to explore what it was like for someone in that universe when it stopped running.  He concluded that they would have no idea about it stopping because it would continue on where it left off.

Movement of creatures when they were only socializing

 

Sam Wolk used a significant amount of science and technology in his art, namely many biological concepts from genetics, as well as computer programming.  His project was interesting because it was a visual representation that was very different from real life.  However, I wish he had told us more about the vision and purpose of his project.

Sam Wolk seemed pretty busy, so we didn't get a chance to talk to him in person.
Fortunately, me and my roommate were still able to get a photo with him.