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Work001 → Mimicry
Title: MimicryArtists: Ziwei Wu, Xiyu Tian, Wanchao Su
Acknowledgment: Lingdong Huang
Year: 2024
Materials: Flowers, Cameras, Screens, Raspberry Pi, Generative Adversarial Network
Description:
Mimicry is a multi-screen video installation powered by computer algorithms and inspired by mimicry in nature—the unique way species protect themselves by changing color and pattern in response to their environment.
This mimicry behavior is also relevant to human society. As Walter Lippmann describes in his book Public Opinion, people construct a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world. To some degree, everyone’s pseudo-environment is a fiction.
In this experimental art piece, cameras will record plants in real-time, and through a computer algorithm, the pattern and texture of virtual insects will be generated and evolved, with the ultimate goal of visually blending into the recorded background. The pattern and texture are produced by the generator, trying to synthesize a new appearance similar to the environment. The discriminator tries to distinguish between the synthetic appearance and the real environment, which plays the role of predators in the adversarial evolution.
The installation setup is an homage to Nam June Paik’s TV Garden. Paik imagined a future landscape where technology is an integral part of the natural world. We find that perspective compelling even today, and it’s an interesting combination to add ALife creatures incorporating AI into the landscape after 50 years.