Phonosynthesis: a Digital Organism
Project information
Luckily we prototyped the Organism on a university open day, so there were plenty of people to feed it.
| organism n. 1. any living animal or plant including any bacterium or virus. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. 2. anything resembling a living creature in structure, behaviour, etc ----, organ'ismal or, organ'ismic adj. organ'ismally adv. |
The Organism project was designed and created by Simon Grout and myself. Originally we planned for our Organism to live by consuming RSS feeds, but with there being so many items in an unlimited supply of RSS feeds, it was hard to think of a way to show artificial-life (or a-life). It would never run out of resources and so therefore never 'die'. Also as it could constantly read RSS sources nothing would really change bar the characters of a feed - we really wanted some level of interaction.
It was our course leader, Chris Speed who came up with the idea of using Arch-OS as a replacement 'food' source. Arch-OS is an 'operating system' controlling and reading data from the University of Plymouth's Portland Square building. It can read all sorts of input values such as temperature levels, water levels, cooling systems status levels and even carbon dioxide levels. However, the data we were most interested in was the camera system, which fed out luminance levels.
'Processing' code for the Organism prototype.
We had always planned to use sound as our Organism's output, partly because we were more interested in sound design and manipulation, but mostly because none of us were very good at graphical programming! In the end we decided that the Organism would use camera data from the building to detect instances of people and convert each instance into a note based on their position in the camera's sight. To recognise a person, all the programme had to do was compare luminance levels with a previous recent reading.
After putting together a simple prototype to prove to ourselves that it would work, Simon started working on the part of the programme that would get the data from the Arch-OS server while I worked towards converting the data into sound.
On Wednesday 2nd October we presented the Organism to students, lecturer and members of the public in Atria B of the University's Portland Square building. The presentation, although short, was a success and people seemed to enjoy interacting with the Organism.
Two days later we presented a video documenta and sound examples to the project accessors (you can download the video below). We received a mark of 77% for our efforts.
Simon compares sound output with the layout of Organism 'food'.
On April 1st 2006, Simon and I were invited to present our Organism at the Barbican Theatre in Plymouth. We were very happy with the general response to the project, many people really enjoyed listening to the hypnotic sound of a security camera and some even thought it was a final year project!
Another common response was that it should be used commercially as an audiable security system for a security guard. Neither Simon or I are considering mutating our organism for this purpose at this time.
We are however considering a software re-write to allow the Organism to feed off any camera it is connected to, rather than just using Atria B of the Portland Square building. (7/4/06)
Downloads
- Organism Video Documentation (Quicktime Movie, 40Mb, 1m34s)
Contact me if you want a higher quality version.