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Descriptions & Essays
Panspermia is the name for the theory that life exists and is distributed throughout the universe in the form of germs or spores. This piece places the viewer in the
middle of a virtual world of an aggressively reproducing inter-galactic life form, and depicts a single life cycle of this unusual self propagating system.
Original software was used to create and animate forests of 3D plant structures. "Artificial evolution" techniques were used to interactively select from random
mutations of plant shapes until a variety of interesting structures emerged. The subject matter of the piece suggests the underlying biological methods that were used
to efficiently create an unusual level of complexity. Dynamic simulations and particle systems were also employed to achieve motions that are calculated
automatically.
Oliver Grau 07-10-2014
In 1990, Sims’s computer animation Panspermia, which used genetic algorithms, caused a sensation. Panspermia visualizes the theory that life can spread through the universe, or “seed” a dead planet, by the introduction of spores and bacteria. Sims’s spectacular animation, which was only two minutes long, showed a speeded-up cycle of intergalactic life forms that self-replicated aggressively, once they got started. According to random variation, the computer generates 3-D forests and plants with highly complex structures. Panspermia, which won many awards, is an elegant visualization of scientific concepts, such as chaos, evolution, complexity, and the origins of life. – Virtual art: from illusion to immersion, 2003, pp. 311-312.
Oliver Grau: Panspermia, 07-10-2014, in: Archive of Digital Art In 1990, Sims’s computer animation Panspermia, which used genetic algorithms, caused a sensation. Panspermia visualizes the theory that life can spread through the universe, or “seed” a dead planet, by the introduction of spores and bacteria. Sims’s spectacular animation, which was only two minutes long, showed a speeded-up cycle of intergalactic life forms that self-replicated aggressively, once they got started. According to random variation, the computer generates 3-D forests and plants with highly complex structures. Panspermia, which won many awards, is an elegant visualization of scientific concepts, such as chaos, evolution, complexity, and the origins of life. – Virtual art: from illusion to immersion, 2003, pp. 311-312.
Literature
Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
Sims, Karl. »Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics.« In SIGGRAPH`91 Proceedings, edited by , 319-328. : 1991.
Sims, Karl. »Particle Animation and Rendering Using Data Parallel Computation.« In SIGGRAPH '90: The 17th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, edited by , 405-413. Dallas: 1990.
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