We often take for granted the amazing and wonderful forces of this world, forces that are at work all around us. The graceful journey of a bird’s flight is one of the most amazing natural phenomena. The metacosm project explores the beauty of that graceful journey using color and shape to produce a detailed record of flight.

The metacosm project is a system that simulates the flight of a bird. Nearly every aspect of the simulation is randomly chosen from a limited pool of options. The flight from this simulation is then recorded and represented as color and shape.

Because of this, the moving images that it produces contain an unlimited amount of variability.

The project is designed to be installed in a gallery environment. Once the system has created a video, it sends it to be viewed and then goes back to work on a new video. Every couple hours after simulation, rendering and compositing, a new video is presented and the old one is cataloged. This creates a truly dynamic video installation.

The project was designed to live within a gallery environment. The goal was to get exhibited. I would setup a computer that created and displayed new works for an allotted amount of time. That never happened, not just because I never found anyone to showcase it, but also because it took way too long to create one minute of animation (with one computer, it took a couple days to render).

This project was not conceived as a generative art piece. It was originally planned to be a fully narrative, hyper-realistic (yet stylized), animated short showing the lifecycle of a drop of water and its effect on nature.

This turned out to be more than I could handle for a quarter long project, so it needed to be distilled. I had a theme that I wanted to explore. I wanted to visualize natural forces in our world in a way that was novel, or at least in a way that I have never seen before. I decided to strip everything away and focus on birds and their flight.

It was at this time that I met Ken Huff, a professor at SCAD in the visual effects program. I attended his Introduction to MEL scripting class, and he really helped me to flesh out my concept and create something that had some meat to it. He provided something that I was desperately looking for while at SCAD, some authentic artistic direction.

The MEL class moved me to think outside the box that I had constrained myself in, the box of narrative motion graphics. Could I create something with programming and logic that could be compelling? Could I use pseudo-random numbers to introduce variability that could give richness to a visual project? These were the questions that I stared asking myself. At this point I decided to create a generative art project. The name metacosm came from the idea of visualizing physical properties to show that we live in a world that contains worlds of energy, and movement.

After a couple months of work, I had nailed down a look, modeled, rigged, and skinned my bird model, and kicked out a rough idea of how I wanted the dynamics to work. Here are some tests that I presented as goals for the look of final simulation:

Once all the tests were working, all that was left was to put everything together and get Maya to output a flying bird render without my help. It was a challenge and I pushed Maya to places that it was not made to go, but it finally got there. The project was exhibited in at an inspire 2008 after party. Since it was only going to be up for a couple hours, I had to pre simulate and render the videos. I have posted the 27 videos on vimeo.

Call me strange, but I absolutely love watching visual effects breakdowns. I am always blown away by the insane amount of effort and detail that goes into mere seconds of footage. I too created a breakdown to show how the metacosm project was put together. During the inspire exhibition, this video (well, longer version with the artist statement included) played alongside the actual project:

I am pleased that the output of this project is aesthetically pleasing, but really, the conceptual content is what I am most proud of. I am always searching to find new and different ways to explore natural phenomena. I am also very interested in generative art and how randomness and data can be utilized to create compelling images.

The challenge of creating a system that was driven by randomness, generated high resolution images, and also satisfied a high level of aesthetics was incredibly rewarding.

My favorite part during this whole process was when the system would surprise me. Perhaps the randomized colors it output were interesting, or the selected camera angle was dynamic. The computer was using chance to produce directions that I would have never attempted.

It's in those moments where I feel as though I have moved from pushing pixels into creating something dynamic, something that is living. That, to me, is far more interesting than just a video of a bird with trailing sashes.

I have indefinitely shelved this project. It had its chance to shine during the inspire event. I am now working on an extension of the metacosm project based on the concept. If you would like to view more videos, there is a whole slew of them up on vimeo and I have also embedded a couple below that I think turned out well.