Department of Multimedia & Digital Arts lifeSigns project

The lifeSigns  project, which received major funding from the Film Victoria’s Digital Media Fund for its development, is an interactive installation that combines two separate views of space.  A large projection shows a map of this world, accompanied by a generative soundscape. Four workstations placed around the edges of the map enable players to navigate and influence the world, which is populated by electronic signs, symbols and icons.

“Icons appear throughout the lifeSigns world,” explains Troy.  “They have been generated by a system of rules that govern features such as symmetry, form, colour and sound.  These rules also define each icon, and drive their behaviour.”

“Each icon also has a ‘meaning vector’ that defines its meaning in the world. These come from a list of sixty-four words that describe actions, attributes and structures that are possible in the space. The players may affect these meanings, and the cumulative input of all players is collated to determine the final meaning. This process, combined with the system for generating icons, can be described as a ‘generative meaning system’. It combines the capacity of the computer to generate multiple forms from the same system with the collection of data from human participants to interpret the meaning and significance of the forms generated.”

Troy’s work combines two major areas of research - artificial life, the coding of life processes into software, and computational semiotics, the study of systems and codes of signification in digital media. Also exploring the idea of emergent language, lifeSigns may be seen as a model for the generation of digital media languages, an abstract world of form and colour, a representation of the cosmos, or a simulation of quantam-scale reality.