todd

The Static City (Or: "Grand Cell Auto")

My statement on the semester project:

This piece serves what I hope to be a first step in my study of emergent virtual environments. My goal in this particular piece was to design a virtual space that grew and changed its appearance, shifting in detail yet providing a landscape that looked eerily familiar. I wanted to create an environment where a users could get lost and not mind. Many of the spaces in my dreams have this quality, a mesh of familiar elements arranged in strange, mercurial ways. Yet, for some reason, I never notice these qualities until I awaken. The minimal, greyscale aesthetic also reflects my idea of a vague landscape, inviting the user to invent or assume detail on the changing buildings, and navigate through the dense, obscuring fog.

Using the classic cellular automata, John Conway's "Life", I've transcoded, or digitally reinterpreted patterns that arise from this system and used these patterns to generate architectural imagery. The usual two-dimensional "cells" are placed on a street, Even with this fairly simple algorithm, interesting and believable urban forms are created, and the given ruleset offers a fine balance between chaos and stability. Many of the same rules that govern biology also govern architecture...even the term "cell" in both studies comes from a common root.
Given no other force, the buildings will grow as they age, and can age indefinitely. However, an invisible presence also shares the space with the user. This presence can be heard (its volume and pitch increases as it approaches the viewer) and its effects seen, but it itself has no visual form. Whenever this presence crosses a city block, the block withers and sinks back into the ground, only to randomly "seed" its sub-blocks and begin growing once more. As its actions are directly dependent on the viewer's position, the viewer can use it to influence the dynamic landscape, and on its own the presence adds a balancing factor to the normally unrestricted growth of the architecture.
Finally, there exist street signs at intersections of a regular grid of streets. The streets are generally named after trees and plants, while the avenues are generally named after states, and both sets of names follow a rough alphabetical order. These generalities exist to draw attention to their exceptions. For instance, I've placed two of the most common street names, "Second" and "Park" in the city layout. For the most part the street names are ones you would expect to find in any city, while providing a linguistic anchor to an otherwise fairly abstract piece.

-Todd Furmanski
5-04-04