those who, 2019

Those Who is a virtual world simulation, consisting of artificial life forms that evolve, grow, and decay over time, a set of self-propelled resource particles, and their environment. The underlying framework is intended as a playground/tool for the free exploration of behavior and emergent forms of intelligence.

Agents are trained to collect resources by a neural network using reinforcement learning, and their performance in doing so varies depending on their genotype. The simulation is implemented in Unity (with development by Alessia Nigretti), using the ML-Agents toolkit to train the agents first to navigate the environment with intelligence, while a genetic algorithm works in real-time to evolve new forms and behaviors as the simulation progresses.

The quantities and values of resources in the virtual world can be linked to real-world inputs, such as the market for rare-earth minerals. Focusing on the conceptual relationship between reinforcement learning and natural selection, the project poses fundamental questions about the similarities between processes of learning and evolution, as discussed by Leslie Valiant in Probably Approximately Correct.

Exhibitions

2021 / Spatial Affairs: Worlding, online

(Opening April 29) The digital version will be included in Spatial Affairs: Worlding, an online exhibition accompanying the exhibit Spatial Affairs at the Ludwig of Contemporary Art in Budapest, part of BEYOND MATTER, initiated by the ZKM Karlsruhe.

2021 / World on a Wire, Beijing (and online)

A new installation version of the piece, as an immersive two-screen projection, was included in World on a Wire at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, a group exhibition organized by Rhizome and the New Museum, exploring simulation as an artistic practice. The digital version is included in the accompanying online exhibition.

2019 / Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

Those Who was originally commissioned by the Garage Museum from the late Sascha Pohflepp, who enlisted Alessia Nigretti and me as collaborators, and was informed by Sascha’s research into Moscow’s State Darwin Museum, Post-Rational Nature. We worked closely together on the project up until Sascha’s unexpected and untimely passing, and Alessia and I finished the piece in his memory soon after.

The original version was installed as an immersive dual-screen projection, as part of the group exhibition The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics. 2030-2100.

2019 / Garage Digital Platform, online

We developed an interactive web-based version of the piece for Garage’s online platform, in which the world can be navigated using the keyboard arrow keys.

2019 / NeurIPS Conference AI Art Gallery, online

The digital version was included in the AI Art Gallery as part of the Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design at NeurIPS 2019, the Thirty-second Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.