xTNZ is focused on the exploration of the possibilities of using artificial life in the context of art. The aim was the development of an ecosystem based on a real-time three-dimensional PC based system sustaining a “living” virtual environment. The entities populating this virtual world have been designed to be active and responsive. They behave and interact with each other, they reproduce according to eventual interactions and they change their own properties (such as visual appearance or dimensions). An unpredictable visual representation of the world will emerge, shapes will evolve in time according to the creatures interaction. All creatures textures and sounds are initially from human origin (such as bones or muscles tissue images as the creatures skin or kissing or chewing sounds as the creatures screams)
"In contemporary digital culture, the social status of the computer has risen as a response to the development of its performance. From video games, media interface and day-to-day working tools, the computer has gained in the last decade a growing influence in a social context where visual information is privileged rather than other senses. In the visual arts domain, new powerful tools are emerging through the creation of visual effects, live performances, human detection in interactive works, and a wide range of artistic approaches. The integration of these new techniques, on the one hand, offers a renewed pictorial richness to explore. On the other hand, by using its own language, integration widens the possibility of developing artworks which are sociologically relevant in the present cultural context of a spreading dependency on computers and videogames. In this context, artificial life or real time three-dimensional images are symptomatic examples of these new techniques available nowadays simply in personal computers. By placing a personal computer in an exhibition space, this object is by itself charged with different connotations and significations. As objects, personal computers - as in the case of television in the late 60’s-, have become an ordinary element in our houses. Users/viewers have integrated the design of computers in their lives. They know what to expect from them and how to manipulate them to obtain certain results. However, despite all the cultural and productive richness introduced by the Information Technologies revolution, this increasing influence (mostly caused by Internet and video games) is prompting a new sociological phenomenon: computer alienation. Humanity is creating new worlds, extensions from the empiric reality. The problem would be that while we experience these virtual dimensions, we are loosing touch with empiric reality. These virtual experiences prevent contact between the body, in its whole sensitive experience and its environment. Baudrillard, a “theorist of the computer screen”, describes an audience that is absent, absorbed into the PC-monitor, loosing their own image and predicting the disappearance of reality. Within the “extended body” we have access to a rich network of all kind of databases and sensations promoted by mental stimuli. However, a price is paid by neglecting the whole experience of the organic body. Human civilization is heading toward Moravec’s nightmarish vision of a future of brains imbedded in computers, in contradiction with enactivist theories conceiving the whole body as a source of cognition. As a principle, when a medium is explored, the nature of the tool is part of the final work. An art piece using three-dimensional virtual environments suggests an interrogation of the status of a ’virtual world’ as a material entity. According to Grau, a virtual world is simply an algorithm producing a continuous flow of images (approximately between 15 to 30 frames per second) in order to create an illusionary cortical effect of an existing living thing. In the conceptualization of this work, I have retained two concepts from this idea: firstly, that a computer based database manipulated through an algorithm produces an imagery; and secondly, that it produces an illusionary space on the screen - with virtual reality, this illusion is more notorious for the fake three-dimensionality on a flat surface. Let’s take the idea of the computer as an object that produces and hosts a database to create images, World agents have both a numerical and internal representation in the database as well as a geometrical and external visual representation. Interacting with the virtual world, the users/viewers are interacting with the database itself. Indeed they are visiting a database in its formal representation of geometrical shapes. The virtual world is a living database; a continuous visual representation of data. Following Manovich’s argument of a content-interface understood as a conceptual unified whole, I have chosen to present this work in a personal computer. Since, xTNZ is a database residing in a computer and running on its memory, I believe that it should be presented in this manner to the public - directly through a computer not mediated by any other device. Moreover, the fact of having an object in the showroom, the computer, offers an outside/inside duality between a viewer outside the object and a database inside it. This duality creates the perfect conditions to develop an art piece which works with the concepts introduced previously of an external reality accessed via a computer and the body detachment involved in this action. The symbolic world I have chosen to represent the extended reality offered by computer technologies is a symbolic three-dimensional world with living creatures in a utopian ecosystem. These creatures have human sounds such as kissing or chewing; and are visually represented with images from human tissues - from internal organs, muscles and bones - digitally manipulated and applied as textures; ironically emphasizing the disembodiment I have been referring to. On designing xTNZ, I am using the common cliché of creating organic forms to compensate the machine’s logic and mathematics. I am implementing the natural behaviors of natural life such as breeding, reproducing and dieing. In this way, I can play with the immediate metaphor of a world and the idea of an external disturbance (the user/viewer). I have been inspired by real life ecosystems, where external agents introduce disturbance on the natural habitats, bringing about disturbance of the natural balance. This can be extended from biological habitats to urban habitats where the contemporary reality of global politics, culture and tourism induces external sociological changes. Thereby, I have incorporated in this work the idea that original places are disturbed by external visits. The user (viewer) is considered an intruder to the system. His presence (as moving by touching the keyboard) disturbs the overall balance disabling the agent’s reproductive cycle. If staying too long, the intruders can even provoke the system destruction."