Incremental God

Incremental God is a self-organizing world whose evolution can be influenced by looking at it. The online public is asked to interact with this virtual world simply by allowing the browser permission to open their camera while watching it. The viewers’ facial features are translated into emotions in real time and used to create the virtual world. The cumulated emotions of the onlookers determine the growth or decay of the digital environment where another observer lives: a virtual female, whose internal organs are physically connected to the negative space surrounding her body, deciding her survival.

The project starts from a set of initial conditions and evolves according to the input of the viewers. The artwork is inspired by the principle of computational irreducibility that states that the only way to determine the response to a computationally irreducible request is to actually perform, or simulate, the computation. Incremental God takes this idea further to the concept of lived space. The work uses the diversity of user behavior combinations to create an environment that comes into existence incrementally, while experiencing it. The perception of Incremental God world is simultaneous with the observers’ involuntary emotional reactions that influence it, making understanding impossible in the absence of performing.

Incremental God v 0.2 is about defining the boundaries of a system; the viewers influence the internal state of the virtual character through their emotional reactions while watching it. The dynamic, permeable membrane is the principle of existence of any cell, the basic condition for autonomous life. The virtual female continuously redefines her membrane to survive and reassert her identity and exist in symbiosis with her environment. Her physical and emotional boundary becomes a negotiation space between physical and virtual, between acting and understanding, between the now and the implemented memory.

The work has been presented as a work in progress to Ars Electronica part of UNATC-CINETic Bucharest Garden in September 2020, then to (im)possible bodies, Holland in October 2020 and to Madatac Digital Biennale in November 2020.

Project acces link: https://igod.byvarty.com/

Authors: SAINT MACHINE & SERGIU NEGULICI

Collaborators: MITOȘ MICLEUȘANU (sound), RĂZVAN VASILACHE (Unity), ALEXANDRU-FLORIN VARTIC, SORIN OLEXIUC (OpenFace, ML.NET & AspNetCore2 (C++, C#)