Environment and spectator as evolution agents
The "reader" is excited by the new freedom of the work, by its infinite potential for proliferation, by its inner wealth and the unconscious projections that it inspires. The canvas itself invites him not to avoid causal connection and the temptations of univocality, and to commit himself to an exchange rich in unforeseeable discoveries.
(Eco, 1989)
Living room Plankton is an interactive installation where a virtual organism grows and behaves according to the surrounding environment.
Initially a main node starts to reproduce differentiating into child nodes through information input from the physical environment, through a network of humidity, temperature, light and sound sensors connected to an Arduino microcontroller. The values received define the size, color, growth speed and number of child nodes.
User interaction is driven by sound so, the organism, according to it's development phase, reacts differently to this input, hiding, changing size, color or leaving a ghost behind.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: this work wouldn't be alive without the patience and mastery of Gonçalo Tavares that so wisely helped and taught me to code Processing and to implement Pro xml Library.