navigators(iteration 2.0) is a slowly evolving and mutating audio field and is a new build of an older work.

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and a recent image of them wandering the depths of caerleon

(thanks to Georg Janick for the images)

on february 26th 2008, the first species of creatures that i introduced to caerleon isle hit some sort of critical mass and, as far as i can tell, in combination with the severe time dilation their (physics based) ‘food’ was causing, had a population explosion. unfortunately i was offline for two days and this allowed the creatures to replicate out of control swallowing up the entire islands resources.

here is my proposal for what happened:

a. the flyers have several ‘hard coded’ behaviors. the behaviours that i think are relevant here include that they will be attracted to, and consume spores when they detect one in their vicinity. they will continue consuming spores until they are full and the they become lazy and sleep off their meal. also if they notice an oversupply of spores they will self replicate. (i don’t intend to explicitly outline all behaviours as this will detract from the experiential nature of an encounter with them)

b. spores are created by the landscape at regular yet random intervals. they are controlled by the second life physics engine, their behaviuor can then be seen as being a result of the second life laws of nature.

c. i believe after a point the flyers all came into sync and became lazy and rested at the same time. this created an oversupply of food, which meant that self replication took advantage of this window of opportunity.

then

d. the laws of nature in second life (physics engine and script run time allocation and simulator frames per second etc.) all became overtaxed. depending on the state a particular object was in, it had more or less operations to fulfill, in an ever decreasing amount of time ie: the time allocated to running scripts per frame was becoming shared over many more scripts.

e. eventually the creatures just were not eating any more.. but instead they were replicating.. their scripts ran up until the replication call but failed to make the eat call.. the result…

currently the canadian artist Christopher Postill is residing in the palace of memory project space.. his research blog can be found here: http://chrispostillthesis.blogspot.com/

he is also curating the SL gallery space node zero : http://www.candormedia.com/node0/

from the images below there should be an immediate realisation of a shared interest in text. the second image shows Aiyas’s ‘concrete poetry’ tower..well worth a visit.. though be quick things change quickly in the project space…

as they are soon to be sent packing back to my lost and found, i dropped by street talker and street walker to see what they had to say for themselves..

here is one of their last conversations before they leave the odyssey forcourt.

4:18] street_talker: hot . 1 . Ahhhhh, like make walker you times in . is .
[4:18] street_walker: . —— some to . 1 sometimes and flight . Stop soon
[4:18] street_walker: ll crazy some . Touched sometimes sister to Hi .
[4:18] street_talker: all is need leave Ahhhhh, is darling by . Sensor 1
[4:18] street_talker: are is Stop some
[4:18] street_walker: and . . you hi bye i of darling,
[4:19] street_talker: Stop Stop . darling . look . . bye . . . some
[4:19] street_walker: such . without last orlando . to Touched be bye
[4:19] street_talker: just flight 1 ways .
[4:19] street_walker: Wasi, . .
[4:19] street_walker: times are such Wasi, . around 1 flight and taking going . look RL . back i love to you
[4:19] street_talker: talker??? could things Stop for has . . i . 1 maybe you sometimes last .
[4:20] street_walker: i some RL all have to . thanks going could
[4:20] street_talker: . a . come is back . . i hi . thanks sometimes . orlando some .
[4:20] street_talker: . . too! . could . come . sleeping most 1 crazy some
[4:20] street_walker: question: . Wasi, around below i Self come street soon
[4:20] street_walker: reach around is sleeping street i below . . the all darling, nicce Hi . talker??? all i too! it you
[4:21] street_talker: fly

street walker and street talker have led me to look for a way to deal with data manipulation in a more sophisticated manner than is capable in lsl i have been experimenting with shifting data out of SL for evaluation and manipulation and then sent back to the object that created it in the first place. at first this bothered me conceptually, as the object did not seem to be ‘doing its own thinking’ now i have decided that the objects themselves do not need to be thought of as having any fixed site for their thought and that they will in fact develop a ‘networked consciousness’ with their processes shared over the network.

the ’second life how to’ blog article on SL/mysql was invaluable in getting me on the right path.. at least i hope it is the right path..

a project developed for the odyssey ‘Open Rez street art project’. street-walker and street-talker will interact with visitors to odyssey’s southern plaza and try to learn to communicate with each other, by listening to, and imitating these visitors. by taking this opportunity to allow these objects to interact through the month of october, and through close observation of their behaviors, and visitors reaction to them, it is anticipated that subsequent generations of these objects can be developed with increasing complexity, and autonomy.

the palace maze is a continually changing work in progress. it started out in the very first palace of memory in hyland, and is a site that is primarily navigated and experienced through audio. the origins of this work lie in my experimentations with the unreal runtime engine, which i expect can be seen in the visual element of the work. this project is not always up, but when it is can be experienced through a link at the palace of memory’s teleport point.

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cellular automata: conway’s rules producing a gosper glider gun. scripts to follow when they are a little more stable