The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Puttin’ on a Natural Interface : Interactive Festival Combines Biology, Art, Computing

Each of the 16 screens displays a different abstract image. Surveying the semicircle, you run to the one you like best. The sensor delivers the message, and the genetic algorithm running on the supercomputer off to the side kicks in, generating 16 new images. Those you select continue to mutate, mate and reproduce, until you stop.

You might call it creationist Darwin meets Rorshach, inventor of the inkblot test. Or interactive art. Karl Sims, its Cambridge, Mass.-based creator, calls the mutating screens “Genetic Images.” They are one of 25 works on display at the Interactive Media Festival at the Variety Arts Center in Downtown Los Angeles this week.

In its second year, the festival--endowed by Motorola Inc.--is devoted to showcasing interactivity as an emerging form of creative expression.

At a time when the commercial applications of new technology are much touted, the festival focuses on artists who are helping to drive technological innovation and using new tools to interpret the fast-changing world.

The pieces on display were selected by a 15-member jury via a competition process based on cyberspace’s World Wide Web, and a theme that emerged this year is the combination of biology with art and computers.

Take “A-Volve,” for instance. Trace your finger over the touch-screen display, draw a starfish, a circle, a many-tentacled medusa, whatever you want. In the pool of water nearby, a three-dimensional computer-generated creature is born bearing the shape you’ve drawn. It has one minute to live, during which it competes to mate and reproduce--based on its computer-generated characteristics--with other creatures conjured by gallery browsers.

“We wanted to create a natural interface,” says artist Christa Sommerer, who has studied biology, sculpture and computer science. “Behavior in space is an expression of form.”

*

Other displays include a biodiversity reserve for digital organisms on the Internet, a CD-ROM called “Burn Cycle” that has gained an international cult following, and T-Vision, which allows you to navigate around a virtual globe modeled from high-resolution satellite images.

The festival’s winner, to be announced Tuesday night, was not available at press time. But the smart bets were on “Bar Code Hotel,” which covers an entire room with printed bar code symbols.

Guests at the hotel are required to wear 3-D glasses, choose a computer-generated character to be represented on a projection screen, and wield a light pen that can scan and transmit the bar code data into the computer system. The information is then used to control the actions and interactions of the avatars on screen.

Each bar code has an action associated with it. A combination of “spin,” “puncture” and “suicide,” for example, can have an interesting effect on “Plastic Man.”