Project Website: https://github.com/wwlr9/FALSACLivesinanEnvironment
ITP Thesis Archives: https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2022/?tiange-hou
FALSAC Lives in an Environment is a simulation art installation investigating the nature of agency and life.
In The Restless Clock, Riskin states that “a thing cannot be conscious without having agency, but it can have agency without being conscious.” What is the nature of agency and life? This question has been debated in many fields including philosophy and biology. With this question in mind, I conducted multidisciplinary research and made FALSAC Lives in an Environment, a simulation art installation. I explored to what extent a system could be alive and where a “seemingly existing agency” could exist, in the context of survival.
Supported by a relatively stable internal environment, living systems survive in their disturbing external environment. This statement describes a critical concept in physiology, called homeostasis. Inspired by several concepts in biology, from homeostasis to stress physiology, in FALSAC Lives in an Environment, I fantasize about the internal and external environment of FALSAC(Fantasized Artificial Living System Alike Centrolenidae(glass frog)) in its algorithm.
In brief, FALSAC is a living system and thus an open system. FALSAC's internal system maintains its internal environment in a relatively stable state through negative feedback. FALSAC's external environment is intrinsically disturbing with stimuli(beneficial or adverse). In three different states of its external environment, FALSAC exhibits four different states of its internal environment, resulting in either its survival or death. This narrative implies several critical abilities FALSAC owned.
The measure of key parameters of FALSAC’s internal and external environment is visualized.
At the installation site, two monitors are installed back to back. When visitors stare at the first one, they meet FALSAC, Fantasized Artificial Living System Alike Centrolenidae(glass frog), in its own environment. Visitors’ presence affects FALSAC’s external environment, making it disturbing, but those external stimuli could also be beneficial to FALSAC. If visitors come at different times, they are able to see FALSAC’s internal and external environment in other states. When visitors look at the second monitor, they see the measure of key parameters of FALSAC’s internal and external environment.
My Physical Computing project Flower: the love and hate from this flower
This project is developed in the game engine Unity3D, rendered with Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline (URP.) The logic that supports FALSAC’s life is coded in the programming language C#(a math model, simulating a simplified version of homeostasis). Others: Nomad/Blender for 3D modeling, Projection.