Keynote : Ernest Edmonds – Art and Influence: Learning in Augmented Worlds

Speaker : Ernest Edmonds

AI is important in interactive art. The art reaches beyond the computer game paradigm to explore lifelong evolution and the building of relationships. Working in a distributed connected world a new art of evolving and connected systems is emerging. The worlds in which these new art forms exist extends to virtual and augmented realities and the physical environment. I begin by describing my “Shaping Form” series of dynamic works. Images are generated using rules that determine the colours, the patterns and the timing. A camera captures movement that changes the generative rules. The future behaviour of each “Shaping Form” evolves as a result of its interaction with the world. But what do we really mean here by interaction? With the evolving nature of these works, the words influence, stimulus or interchange are more appropriate than interaction. I show how the methods used have been extended to make a distributed sets of interactive nodes form a networked art system. The community made up of the work’s distributed audience collectively influence the progress and development of the art system. Finally, AI describes how the concept is being extended again, this time into a dynamic distributed augmented reality world.