2.UMWELTNOISE

UMWELTNOISE is a real-time audiovisual system that borrows the behavioral logic of slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, as its organizing intelligence. The organism has no brain, yet it solves spatial problems by laying down and following chemical trails, and the piece treats that trail-making as a way of sensing a world.

The title points to Jakob von Uexkull's idea of the umwelt, the self-centered world an organism builds from only what it can perceive. The work asks what a system's umwelt looks and sounds like when its senses are reduced to attraction and decay.

Accompanied by an academic paper in ACM format. [Link the paper.]

The simulation runs as a custom GLSL shader system. Thousands of agents deposit and sense a chemoattractant field and steer by local gradients, and the trail map is fed back each frame, producing the branching, self-organizing structures characteristic of Physarum.

The same field drives both audio and image, so sound and visual read as two views of one process rather than one reacting to the other. [Add: how audio is generated or mapped from the field, agent count, frame rate, and any performance tuning.]

Solo work.

[Add any showings or screenings.]