The contemporary moment is defined by the appearance of artificial systems that mimic intelligent behaviours with uncanny skill: bots that you can converse with, machines that can act as pets, and even the algorithms that recommend ads to you. At times they appear as strange beings; alive. To make sense of this phenomenon, we are forced to reconsider our notion of the living state beyond what we are familiar with on Earth.
Calian is an infinitely zoomable and scrollable exploration of lifelike behaviour. It exhibits ambiguous natural-digital forms in a dynamic rendering. Species grow and compete; they get carried by the elements; they face boom, bust, and echo.
What makes something alive? To go beyond recognition of terrestrial biology we need to delineate general principles and apply them to new intelligent systems. Calian uses the fruits of my research into the origin of life to create persistent, complex systems that we can experience and study (*). We can identify properties of living matter but these fall short of a satisfactory and succinct criterion. When does agency begin? Or identity? Calian asks you to ponder this as you wander through its ecosystems.
Feel free to explore but be careful: although life is pervasive, living things are delicate. Your interactions affect the ecosystem, obliquely.
Calian continues a thread of my work probing deep scientific questions with artistic means. It furthermore connects to my previous Artblocks projects Mazinaw and Glass through the theme of ambiguity: while Mazinaw suggested the hand of an unknown creator, and Glass visualized the intrinsic ambiguity of our quantum mechanical universe, Calian's amorphous forms bear characteristics both of familiar organic matter and digital technology.
Interactive features allow you to explore each ecosystem, infinitely, both in depth and in scope. As you wander, the shader repopulates the world from its initial condition, while the physical laws governing the dynamics themselves evolve.
See Display Notes for Controls.
(*) For more on Calian's dynamics and its grounding in my research, see the Calian page on my website.
RELEASE DATE
1 Mar 2023
LIBRARY
js@n/a
DISPLAY NOTES
Calian is best experienced in Live mode on a performance computer with mouse control. It is GPU intensive and works best on Chrome or Firefox. Mobile devices will have reduced functionality. Recommended accompanying music: darkside / miles davis / chromatics / harold budd / brian eno Controls [ live mode ] [ mouse wheel ] to zoom in/out [ mouse click / drag ] or [ arrow keys ] to pan Controls [ embedded on webpage ] [ w/a/s/d ] to pan [ z/x ] to zoom out/in [ p ] to take a screenshot ( must be unpaused ) [ spacebar or mouse click ] to pause/unpause [ f ] to cycle through original / fit-to-screen square / fit-to-screen full The default world size is 512x512. In the generator this can be modified by appending ?N=1024 to the URL, to (for example) make it 1024x1024. Useful for taking still images.
CREATIVE CREDITS
I am grateful to Inigo Quilez and WebGL Fundamentals for shader references, and to Piter Pasma and Kim Asendorf for shader wisdom
RELEASE DETAILS
256 works released on 1 Mar 2023
CHARITABLE GIVING
15% of proceeds from primary sales will be donated to charitable organizations in the greater Toronto area
ARTIST SITE
https://eeedg.ca/Calian-1...
PROJECT ID
0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069-416
CONTRACT
Etherscan
LICENSE
CC BY-NC 4.0
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Eric De Giuli
b. 1983 Canada Lives and works in Canada
Eric De Giuli is a theoretical physicist and generative artist living in Canada. He is interested in the emergence of complexity in the universe, which he explores at the intersection of art and science. He holds a Hon. B.S.c. in mathematics and physics from the University of Toronto, and an M.S.c. in geophysics and Ph.D. in applied mathematics, both f...
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