Agents is an interactive installation dealing with the behavior of living organisms and artificial life that I made together with Santiago Tula and Mariano Rivas in the context of the study of life and artificial intelligence at UNA (National University of Art)  Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the class of new media art.

 

For this work we developed a vertical display structure in form of a reactive table.

 

A pointing-up camera located inside the installation captures the movements of the user in the glass. This data is converted by the program into location variables and allows the interaction with the user.

We used openFrameworks and Open CV to track the movement and interaction of the hands in the glass sending this variables to Processing in order to stablish a connection between the physical world and the program itself.  

 

In addition we used these variables to trigger sounds in Pure Data adding a further dimension to the work.

We used four elements to make our artificial intelligence system, based in a Game of life configuration.

The rules of the Cellular Automaton are:

 

Red Cells / Predators: They gain weight eating black and yellow cells.  

 

Yellow Cells / Healers: They help the black cells eating red cells and losing weight in the process. Also, they can feed/heal a black cell touching them.  

 

Black Cells - The Searchers: They eat food avoiding predators.

 

Food: The user can change the position of the “food”. All cells, especially the black one, react to these movements.

 

Also, the user can add cells touching the surface of the reactive table.