Case Study: New Nature by Marpi
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New Nature was an exhibit I visited at a technology-focused art gallery called ARTECHOUSE when it was on display there this past year in Washington, DC. It was created by digital artist Marpi as his first large-scale solo exhibition, and was inspired by the biology, ecology and underlying mathematics of the natural world.
About the Artist
Marpi is a Polish digital artist based in San Francisco with a focus on 3D worlds, AR and VR, interactive art and storytelling. He is interested in creating works where viewers have the opportunity to participate in the creation of the artwork, accomplishing this through creating interactive, scalable and multiplatform pieces.
About the Work
New Nature was essentially a representation of different creatures or organisms but in a very mathematical, geometric and almost futuristic visual aesthetic.
The main room of the exhibition included large screens displaying a giant creature that visitors could interact with by using an app on their smartphones to feed it. From there, the viewer was able to see how the creature moved and interacted with the food it was fed.
Another section of the exhibit, my favorite part, included smaller screens with smaller individual creatures. Each screen had a Kinect sensor attached to the bottom that would detect how the user moved their hand, visually displaying their hand and its interactions with the creature on the screen.
The exhibit incorporated machine learning so that the more the audience interacted with the creatures, the more complex behaviors the creatures would perform.
Overall, New Nature aimed to explore the intersection between the stiffness of technology and the more fluid nature of the natural world. The implementation of machine learning supported Marpi’s goal – through machine learning, he was able to give the creatures in his artwork a more realistic behavioral pattern. His creatures were able to learn and adapt just as how a real organism would.
Sources
- https://www.dc.artechouse.com/new-nature
- https://www.marpi.studio/exhibitions/new-nature