louie hext
Complex Ecologies and GLSL Ants
Playful exploration of complexity and self-organisation through interactive agent simulations.
Complexity is a broad phenomenon in which a system displays macroscopic properties that emerge from many simple local interactions. Examples of this include flocking birds or shoals of fish where each individual creature is guided only by the movements of its immediate neighbours and yet they produce vast dynamic shapes as a group. The simplicity of the rules and the resultant organic beauty has attracted coders and artists to emulate the behaviour - with a famous example being Craig Reynolds' "Boids". A step further from this is "Self Organised Criticality" where simple local interactions cause a system to move into a steady state, resulting in the formation of macro structures. Examples of this would be termite and ant colonies, as well as the famed physarum slime. In this piece, a system of creatures that move and leave a pheromone trail behind them is created. The direction of each creature's movement depends on the intensity of "pheromones" in their immediate vicinity, allowing for each creature to guide and be guided by the other creatures. This feedback loop emergently creates a structured pheromone map purely from the small interactions. Crucial to this and the natural systems mentioned above is the amount of creatures in the system - with too few creatures, the system will be unstable and random; but with enough creatures, the randomness falls to spontaneous structure. By interacting with the piece your motion and presence will unavoidably disturb the natural process of the creatures and their environment until they are no longer able exist within in it. How many species will be encountered and how many will have their habitats destroyed?
Louie Hext is a computational artist and developer, whose recent work involves creating physically generative systems and exploring complexity through interactive technologies. He is interested in producing organic structures through maths and code, and investigating how the rise of technology will influence visual culture and our perception of it. He has a degree in Theoretical Physics and currently works as a software engineer at a generative architecture studio. He also enjoys bouldering, analogue printing, and making audio reactive visuals.
