Artist  Statement

Presented by dLux MediaArts and ISEA2013. This mixed reality project evolves artificial life forms and a virtual audiovisual ecology based on participants’ geographic location. Participants use their mobile device to ‘check in’ anywhere throughout the City of Sydney, and can track and interact with the evolving ecology and its life forms. Each ‘check-in’ produces a ‘seed’ within the virtual ecology that starts an evolutionary process from its location mapped in physical GPS-located space. The virtual creatures evolving within the system have interrelated growth, network development and sonic algorithms which allows each of them to develop their own unique identity as visual and audio signatures. Combined, they create a real time, spatial, evolving, audiovisual ecology. Mobile devices give access to the local environment of the system – that which directly surrounds the viewer – and the aural ecology created by the artificial life forms can be heard as a live spatial audio experience through the mobile device (preferably via headphones). A web portal also provides an insight into the system, providing real time statistics and visualisations of the data as it is produced and evolves. The project can be accessed online at iuxta.cc
https://andrewburrell.net/projects/iuxta

• Dr. Andrew Burrell is an independent contemporary arts practitioner with ?a strong history in real-time 3D and interactive audio installation. He is exploring notions of self and narrative and the implications of virtual worlds, networked environments and artificial life systems upon an individual’s sense of identity. He holds a PhD from the University of Sydney, his research having focused on philosophical and poetic connections between memory, the collected object and narrative. Dr Burrell is a current board member of the Metaverse Creativity Journal. His networked projects in virtual environments, including mellifera (with Trish Adams) Virtual Macbeth (with Kereen Ely-Harper) and Augmentiforms (in collaboration with Warren Armstrong and presented at ISEA2011), exhibited both online and in physical gallery spaces, have received international recognition. https://andrewburrell.net