All of the villagers run to help fight the big Sra. da Graça’s fire.
On their way, the kids are scared by the innumerable snakes that cross their path, escaping the fire. Screaming, the children run through the burnt land, searching for refuge in the distant chapel. They know the fields very well, since they made this path on their way to the river, during the endless summer days. Sra. da Graça was what they called those fields next to the river too; it was their summer playground.
Many years later, these kids will become part of the brigades that build the dam and erase the place, flooding the entire valley.
Na minha infância e adolescência havia para todos nós, os miúdos do Sabugal, um local de excelência para as longas tardes das férias de Verão. O rio, a Sra. da Graça. Aquele era o nosso playground de preferido. O rio também passava junto à vila, mas a Sra. da Graça tinha algo especial. Todos a preferíamos. Ficava suficientemente longe para não ser já aqui e ter de haver um propósito no ir. Os anos passaram e com eles as memórias da Sra. da Graça foram-se confundindo com o tempo e foram-se tornando mito. Difusas e mágicas fazem-me sorrir de olhos fechados. A Sra. da Graça onde crescemos foi inundada para ali construírem uma barragem. Quando lá voltei, no ano passado, por mais que tentasse nada mais consegui reconhecer do que a capela que preservaram no cimo do monte e que fica agora junto ao leito do rio. Mas está bem assim.
Motivations
Sra. Da Graça is a virtual world where an ecosystem was designed and modelled upon the images of a place sharing the same name. These images however, are becoming unrecognisable. Despite images of the place's former condition of twenty years ago, they aren’t attached to a fixed instant anymore. They are applied as textures in the strange creatures that populate the world and evolve and are ‘alive’. They still represent the place; however unrecognisable, they present themselves emptied while photographic object. With a pictorial signifier in chromatic compositions, they are rebuilt every instant through computational processes that render the world. Ultimately, Sra da Graça is a concatenation of images inhabiting a static present shown in an illusion of continuity. However, the images are shadows of the place they evoke. Evolving, they are shadows of the initial images which mediate the evocation; shadows with life that did not get attached to the past. Losing their legitimacy, the image is as the place of Sra da Graça. A place where the memory of the memories occurs.
Objectives
The aim of developing this work is exploring the figurative features of Virtual Worlds; to explore Virtual Worlds as pictorial landscapes while addressing the impermanence of memories, reflecting on the ever-changing nature of physical places; developing an Avatar based Virtual World, distributed via the internet, and sustaining an auto-regulable ecosystem, with a population which morphologies are genetically determined and where behaviors are learned form previous generations and evolved through autonomous interactions; also investigate how homeostatic mechanisms of environmental control emerge from living populations.
Description
The creation of Virtual Worlds opens the door to new forms of artistic expression. Their conceptual context, and architectural and population designs are crucial in the final reading and interpretation from users, thus providing new means of expression using an inherent power of metaphor and representation.
The Virtual World that described here is a representation of Senhora da Graça (Our Lady of Grace). The physical location of Senhora da Graça was submerged with the rising waters of a newly constructed dam. Sra da Graça is a virtual world where an ecosystem was designed and modelled upon the images of the place sharing the same name. These images however, are becoming unrecognisable. Despite images of the place's former condition around twenty years ago, they aren’t attached to a fixed instant anymore. They are applied as textures on the strange creatures that populate the world and evolve and are ‘alive’.
The population has their morphologies and traits described by genetic encoding. The system builds on the tables described in (Latham, 2008)’ Form Growth to translate codons (from real DNA) into morphological shapes. The plants and moving creatures share the same genetic structure and mechanisms of translation; however, the translation tables used are specific to each species. The evolution of the morphologies is produced during reproduction when the genetic information of the parents is mixed using functions of crossover and mutation. A simplified form of epigenetics was introduced in the system. As a result environmental conditions affect the morphologies. Depending on the amount of available memory these translation tables are transformed and consequently the morphologies of newborn creatures’ are also affected.
Resources scarcity and competition are implemented as to promote the selection and evolution of the fittest elements of the population in a Darwinistic model of evolution. Rain energises the soil from which plants feed. The creatures pollinate plants as they seek for food. They also feed their offspring. This nurturing time is crucial, as a table of preferences is acquired by imitation from their parents. These preferences determines the behaviours of creatures and are then evolved through lifetime using a reward system inspired by (McCormack, 2003)’ Performance System, itself which is based on the classification system of (Holland, 1995).
From this briefly summarized set of rules, an ever-changing visual representation of Senhora da Graça will emerge, evolving in time according to the agents’ interaction.
