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Descriptions & Essays
Galápagos is an interactive Darwinian evolution of virtual "organisms." Twelve computers simulate the growth and behaviors of a population of abstract animated forms and display them on twelve screens arranged in an arc. The viewers participate in this exhibit by selecting which organisms they find most aesthetically interesting and standing on step sensors in front of those displays. The selected organisms survive, mate, mutate and reproduce. Those not selected are removed, and their computers are inhabited by new offspring from the survivors. The offspring are copies and combinations of their parents, but their genes are altered by random mutations. Sometimes a mutation is favorable, the new organism is more interesting than its ancestors, and is then selected by the viewers. As this evolutionary cycle of reproduction and selection continues, more and more interesting organisms can emerge.
This process of interactive evolution can be of interest for two reasons. First, it has potential as a tool that can produce results that can not be produced in any other way, and second, it provides a unique method for studying evolutionary systems.
Karl Sims
Oliver Grau 07-10-2014
Sims’s nonimmersive installation Galápagos (1997), now in the permanent collection of ICC in Tokyo, visualizes Darwin’s mechanism of evolution, selection. The system consists of twelve color monitors on pedestals arranged in a panoramatic semicircle each displaying a brightly colored virtual organism. A viewer picks one by standing on a step sensor in front of its monitor. The particular image’s algorithm undergoes random alteration and eleven “offspring” appear on the other monitors. These new generations of images are both copies and combinations of the parent image, with greater or lesser mutations. The viewers choose images according to their own subjective preferences, for example, the most outlandish or the most aesthetically pleasing creature. The successive generations of artificial fauna tend to get more complex. Unattractive forms are not selected by the users, which means instant and final annihilation. More creatively, users can also pick and breed two organisms, that is, they can direct the avenue of evolution to be explored by Galápagos. Through its infinite varieties of virtual creatures, the installation succeeds in giving its users an intimation of possibilities that evolution holds for life, a hyperspace of the possible, which can be described most aptly with the aesthetic category of the sublime but can never be grasped intellectually in its entirety. It is the visualization of this abstraction that sets Galápagos apart from the majority of recent interactive installations. – Virtual art: from illusion to immersion, 2003, pp. 312-313.
Oliver Grau: Galapagos, 07-10-2014, in: Archive of Digital Art Sims’s nonimmersive installation Galápagos (1997), now in the permanent collection of ICC in Tokyo, visualizes Darwin’s mechanism of evolution, selection. The system consists of twelve color monitors on pedestals arranged in a panoramatic semicircle each displaying a brightly colored virtual organism. A viewer picks one by standing on a step sensor in front of its monitor. The particular image’s algorithm undergoes random alteration and eleven “offspring” appear on the other monitors. These new generations of images are both copies and combinations of the parent image, with greater or lesser mutations. The viewers choose images according to their own subjective preferences, for example, the most outlandish or the most aesthetically pleasing creature. The successive generations of artificial fauna tend to get more complex. Unattractive forms are not selected by the users, which means instant and final annihilation. More creatively, users can also pick and breed two organisms, that is, they can direct the avenue of evolution to be explored by Galápagos. Through its infinite varieties of virtual creatures, the installation succeeds in giving its users an intimation of possibilities that evolution holds for life, a hyperspace of the possible, which can be described most aptly with the aesthetic category of the sublime but can never be grasped intellectually in its entirety. It is the visualization of this abstraction that sets Galápagos apart from the majority of recent interactive installations. – Virtual art: from illusion to immersion, 2003, pp. 312-313.
Literature
Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
Frauenfelder, Mark. »Do-It-Yourself Darwin. Karl Sims Invites You to Play God Among the
Machines.« Wired Magazine 6.10 (1998).
Fifield, George. »Art by Natural Selection.« Art New England (August/ September 1997): 5.
Exhibitions & Events
2000
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