Excerpt of evolutionary simulation–February, 2010.
Character Sketch is a project that explores the expressive potential of animated characters whose morphology and behavior emerge from creatively calibrated computer programs. Like genetic code, the programming of these characters defines a set of physical and behavioral traits, predispositions, but not how the characters will react to a given set of circumstances. The situation for Walker is that he has twenty seconds to scramble as far as possible from the starting point. Next, nine siblings, each programmed a little differently than the first Walker, also endeavor to roll, strut, twist, flop, or lunge as far and as quickly as they can. The two most accomplished are selected and advance to another round where the challenge is repeated. They are joined by eight new Walkers whose capabilities are random mutations of the previous generation’s traits. This cycle is repeated thousands of times.
A scientist might instigate this simulated evolutionary process to measure a creature’s ambulatory fitness and efficiency. For artistic purposes, however, distance travelled is not the point. What matters to this investigation is how the characters devise locomotion, their improvisations of motion and idiosyncratic attempts to accommodate their circumstances. Their gestures, unrehearsed responses and spontaneous adaptations, evoke a surprising degree of empathy and resonate with ineptitudes and comic contradictions we might recognize in ourselves. These computer generated scenes, then, become metaphorical trial runs for learning to cope, or not, with imposed, difficult, and indifferent circumstances.