Collapse + Super Intelligence = Sobriety

I imagined the performance Collapse + Super Intelligence = Sobriety as a dialog between multiple artistic mediums in a cinema. This idea is directly taken from OIIO, a concept that I developed years ago with La Sophiste.

The artwork takes life into visual and acoustic procedural illustrations, emerging from an interaction between the sounds, the images and the performer. The artist imagines a creation and initiate it with a midi controler ; the artwork animates, takes life and embodies into sounds and images ; it influence itself, becomes self-sufficient and then inspires the creator who reacts to those new stimuli. The performance evolve as a sequence of feedback loops, and slowly becomes a complex, intricated organic interactif netwrok.

The piece consists of three acts.

The first act, Collapse, illustrates the possible collapse of our civilization due to the multiple global crises (climat change, environmental disasters, financial collapse, migratory crisis, political authoritarianism, etc.) that humanity will face. First, the sequence evokes the construction of villages, then cities, then the hectic development of super structures and megacities. Gradualy, buildlings will dissolve, to eventually collapse in a chaotic atmosphere.

The second act, Super Intelligence, exploits the extra-ordinary and dizzying world of fractals to express the monstrous potential of a strong artificial intelligence (AI). This sequence is an dreamlike journey in a more and more strange, surprising and complex univers ; as unknown as the impenetrable scenario of a society ruled by a generalist AI.

The last act Sobriety is simple sober.

This triptych is an invitation to humility, reminding that futur is extremely hard to predict. Yet, the artwork proposes a reflexion about our way of living while facing the crazy futures that we will probably face.

I developed two shaders (programs executed on graphics cards) which I used for my performance :

• City Diffusion
• Fractal Mix

The magic in this immersive artwork lies in the progression of the animation, the fine graphic details, and the surprise of discovering entire organic worlds from very basic geometric rules.

The following images are very far from transcribing the essential feeling of the live performance.

You can run the app of the performance at ess.arthurmasson.xyz (works on Google Chrome), use the ‘n’ key to go to the next sequence, the sliders in the gui control the sounds and animations.