"Interactive Life" is a ri-elaboration of the installation "Relazioni Emergenti" where people can interact with an evolving environment of artificial life. See "Relazioni Emergenti" for details about the alife environment.

The basic difference is in the interaction paradigm between people and "living" filaments. In "interactive life" people interact over a large stone of black marble where an alife image has been laser-engraved.

(A picture of the stone. The laser engraves has been filled with fosphorescent colors. In the instalation, the stone is lighted with UV light)

The metaphore is a vision about the next future when the humans will largely use artificial life, specially for web applications and power plant control. This technology is more powerfull than the artificial intelligence approach in order to develop intelligence and adaption.. Today AL (alife) and AI are converging and this fusion will represent a really powerful technology to solve (or create) important human problems. At this moment it is really difficult understand which kind of impact this technology will have on our societies.

The stone of "Interactive Life" represents a "picture" of the today level of development the alife environments. It has been impressed over the marble in order to be an example of the first "digital fossil" leaved to the people of the next 100 years.

People visiting the installation can touch the stone, transmit some life energy to the artificial filaments which start to live, reproduce and play over the screen creating shapes, colors and sound architectures. It is the visualization of the dream of creating organic life from inorganic. A dream that populated the minds of the ancient alchemists, the research of robotic or clonation scientists, the visions of filmmakers and writers. Forever this dream has fascinated and terrorized the human imagination.

Images extracted from the interaction of a very creative "visitor".

Here you can see the movie (images + music, 5.3 Mb, ~30 seconds)