You are warmly invited to a private view on June 13th, 6-8 pm at the Summer Show, Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design, Central House, 59 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 (tube: Aldgate East)...

ambient_light
Annie Spinster and Carl Collins

At the centre of ambient_light is a virtual ecosystem containing a number of classes of organism. The creatures form a complex food web with interactions between individuals leading to emergent properties such as flocking and population cycles. This environment is linked to that of the gallery via a system of pressure sensors which send signals to the program through a microcontroller. The system is fed information about which of six chairs is occupied at any time - certain patterns of chair occupation cause various species to be unleashed. The overall balance of chair occupation also leads to a reactive drift of organisms across the environment.
The work is called ambient_light because of the way the background reacts to everything that happens within the environment. These reactions are not really emergent properties as such - they are more like visual clues to hidden emergent patterns in the overall flow of energy.

details:
http://anniespinster.co.uk