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project name: Universal Zoologies
artist name: Jon McCormack

artforms:
Computation

science engagements:
Evolution
Biology
Taxonomy

project description:

Universal Zoologies is an interconnected series of autonomous, self-generating, poetic spaces that are navigated by people experiencing the work. The project aims to represent emotive, abstract, artificial life digi-scapes, each based around a thematic metaphor evoking the qualia of the natural world. The work creates a rich and elaborate visual space - a 'future garden' of strange and numinous creatures that have been evolved through a complex process of rule-based selection. These spaces are generated by complex software authored by the artist as part of the production process. The efficacy of the work is to confuse the boundaries of space, time, place and process to offer a poetic re-interpretation of the natural worl and what it means to be 'alive'.

exhibition history:
This is the first time the project has been exhibited in this form, however exhibitions of earlier versions of the work include FLOW/ARUS, National Art Gallery (Balai Seni Lukis Negara), Kuala Lumpor, Malaysia, 2000 and Byte Me, Bendigo Art Gallery, Australia, 1999.

links:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jonmc/
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jonmc /Turb/turb.html

movies:
high bandwidth QuickTime - 952Kb
low bandwidth QuickTime - 420Kb
high bandwidth mpeg - 2Mb


Universal Zoologies Image One


Universal Zoologies Image Two