Turbulence
Interactive museum of un-natural history • 1994 (30th anniversary edition, re-mastered, 2024)
An interactive laserdisc installation of evolved virtual life
Who dwells in a realm, magical and barren,
Without a before or an after or a when...
To be forever, but never to have been.
— Jorge Luis Borges, "The Enigmas"
TURBULENCE is an interactive media work that travels deep into the computer space of Artificial Life. A video laserdisc (in later versions, digital video was used) contains around 30 minutes of procedurally-generated computer animation – a menagerie of synthesised artificial life – created using software written specifically for the work. By abstracting processes used in biological morphogenesis and natural evolution, artificial forms are evolved within the machine and made discernible by computer visualisation.
Jon McCormack, "Turbulence: an interactive museum of un-natural history", still from interactive installation, 1994.
People interact with the work using a touch screen. By touching words and symbols on the touchscreen, different sections of the videodisc are played on a large, immersive screen in front of the viewer. The work is a poetic interpretation that draws upon the philosophical implications of evolutionary theory. As an interactive, it is a collection of abstract thoughts, simulations, ideas, information and poetry, multiplexed into an interactive web of computer-synthesised imagery.
Exhibition at the Nagoya International Biennale, Nagoya, Japan, 1997 (left) and at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in 2004 (below). The ACMI exhibition was part of a retrospective of the work of Jon McCormack.
Production of the work began in late 1990, thanks to generous funding from the Australian Film Commission's "Interactive Videodisc Initiative", conceived and championed by AFC project officer Gary Warner. After over 3 years of writing code, evolving forms and painstakingly rendering every individual frame of animation, the work was completed and premiered at the 1994 ACM SIGGRAPH Art Show in Orlando, Florida.
The "Solitary Hydroid" sequence from TURBULENCE.
TURBULENCE was a defining moment in my professional career – from the initial exhibition at SIGGRAPH in the USA in 1994, in the decade that followed there were over 40 exhibitions of the work all around the world. The work was acquired by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in 2004, coinciding with a retrospective exhibition of my artistic practice, curated by Alessio Cavallaro.
As much as the work was defined by the technology and its limitations at the time, the conceptual and poetic ideas – that life is a process, that as a species we continue to destroy that which is irreplaceable – have remained central to my work throughout the 30 years since.
You can read my original catalog essay here which was written for an exhibition at the Ian Potter Gallery, University of Melbourne, 1994.
Technical Development
Overlayed frames showing how complex animation, such as walking or running gaits, can be achieved using the procedural modelling system developed for TURBULENCE
The technical basis of the work comes from custom methods I developed for the procedural specification of 3D form. Based on biological models of morphogenesis, a symbolic developmental system takes a simple specification (just a few hundred bytes of information) and generates complex 3D geometry that grows and develops as the simulation progresses.
A running form, evolved in the computer, from TURBULENCE. © 1994 Jon McCormack
Procedural generation makes creating herds of creatures very easy
This developmental sequence shows an individual flower head opening. Due to the slow speed of computers at the time of developing the work, it was faster to preview individual elements in "wireframe", since full colour final renders would take up to 3-4 hours per frame.
The software interface ("Evolve", 1991) for evolving new forms via the interactive genetic algorithm. Evolve manipulates instances of the underlying developmental model, using crossover and mutation.
The sliders in the interface allow fine tuning of different genetic mutation rates. The software ran on Silicon Graphics workstations and was written in C++.
Instances of the "twin-headed boykinia" from TURBULENCE. © 1994 Jon McCormack
Production Credits
Concept, programming, animation & sound
Voice
Production
Producer
Jon McCormack
Marion Harper
CIPAG, Monash University
Australian Film Commission, 1990
Turbulence was produced with the assistance of the Australian Film Commission.