Cybernetic Field: Responsive Algorithm (2021)

This project considers W. Ross Ashby's model for cybernetic architecture and seeks to create a homeostatic machine through Processing and the use of projection mapping. Cybernetic Field was completed incollaboration with Joshua Cao. Cybernetic field begins with a scene of randomly-generated points that are influenced by an underlying vector field. They gradually find a dynamic stable loop or orbit within the field, collectively reaching homeostatsis.

Flattening the depth image of a three-dimensional space to the projector plane with a Kinect, the algorithm captures objects and actors in the scene. From these environment elements, contour information is extracted and used to recalculate vector directions and amplitudes within the field. The points are then affected by the change in vectors, reaching many states of disorder in the process of restabilizing themselves.

Balance will always restore itself and the system will return to stability, always in a new fashion. Throughout the entire process, human actors are motivated to interact with the system, affect the pattern in the vector field, and have agency to be creative with a series of experimental different movements.