A Mass of Radiant Flies and a Body

A Mass of Radiant Flies and a Body

Self-playing. Visuals drawn over the results of AI text-to-image prompts.

F toggles full-screen. Note that ratios wider than 16:9 will have problems with presentation.

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Decomposition and recomposition, forces that consume and combine, create this procedurally-generated environment. The non-playable character walks straight ahead through the forest and fields, the invisible parts of which are activated by the sound of rain. The visible flora and human/animal remnants of the landscape have been extracted from the results of AI text-to-image prompts, hand traced and animated as black silhouettes. 

Prompts from which I derived trees, flowers, bushes, mounds and structures included, “bone formation under water”, “driftwood shaped like sleeping person”, “tree with sudden strong wind disappearing on water”, “moss ruin brain stem”, “wildflower nodding rattling”. These also inspired glimpses of humans created by the landscape.

There are other entities that wander the simulation as animals: sleeping, searching, eating, scratching (via an original game AI algorithm). Visually, they are blades of grass, bushes, moving and crying out like cats and rodents, creatures literally living on through the plants, decomposition exposing the permeability of separate existences.

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The software was selected for an online exhibition as part of Everywhen, the 2024 conference of the International Symposium on Electronic Art. It also showed in-person and online in the AI Art Gallery at the 2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Conference in Seattle. 

Video capture of the software was selected for the Non-Human Human exhibit at the Czong Institute of Contemporary Art Museum in Gyeonggi-do, Korea, 2025, the online 2025 mowna biennial, as well as the Videoart Festival Omnibus in Virtual Reality, Dresden and online, 2024.