dynamic movement: the organism project (idat 204)

I decided to be in Darrel’s group for the organism project, Darrel already had an idea, although we discussed possible alternatives, and tried hard to think about what an organism actually is. The ideas that I thought of such as animations or a type of film weren’t really digital enough.

We decided to stick with Darrel’s idea of programming something in flash. In the English oxford dictionary it says that

“an organism is a living complex adaptive system of organs that influence each other in such a way that they function in some way as a stable whole”

Therefore as long as we make it adaptive, complex and independent then we are keeping to the right guide lines in terms of making the organism.

We came up with a sample version, which would follow the mouse around the page. The next step was getting it to blow bubbles. Once this was done, we had to think about further ideas to change it.

I got talking to Darrel about what everyone else was doing, and whether it needed to be more dynamic, perhaps by using rss feeds or something as with last years flash project. The idea that it could be made generative, and potentially never stop changing is quite appealing. We talked of the idea of a forum or large screen where people could add there own orb to a chain of existing orbs, and they could feed it…or perhaps that the persons message left on a forum would affect how big the organism would get, ending up in a snake of orb/ball organism things.

The next step was coming up with our own spec; a list of things that It should be able to do and in keeping with being adaptive, complex and independent; in a way that would represent real organisms. If the organism was fed then it should change size accordingly and if you didn’t feed it enough then it would eventually die, hence making it adaptive and complex.

It would duplicate and each organism would have its own identity, therefore independent, also that the organism you clicked on would display name and follow the mouse, the program would only feed one organism at a time. It environment would be a square box, coloured blue and when duplicating the cell in a different colour background the organism would be a different colour, green for example instead of white.

In the end after a struggle with adding new organisms that were independent and using procedural coding instead of object orientated (which may have made things easier), and debating what sort of soundtrack should be in the background (maybe massive attack if the back ground was red and aphex twin for green) the project got finished and looking pretty nice in my opinion.