The Project

Before I describe anything, a bit of background information is necessary.

I, Cory Hughart, am a T.I.M.E. major at the Cleveland Institute of Art. T.I.M.E. stands for "Technology and Integrated Media Environment"; it's a fancy way of saying "Digital Art major." My emphasis is in Game Design.

Jackie Watson, my partner in this project, is a Biomedical Art major. She goes to the cadaver lab every week and draws dead peoples' insides, among other less gory things. She is also interested in digital art, and decided to take a T.I.M.E. elective in which I am also enrolled: Media Integration & Interactivity, which is a fancy way of saying "Interactive Web Art."

The assignment for this class is this: Team up with other people to plan and create an interactive web piece that reflects a semester's worth of research, planning, and production.

Jackie and I went through a couple different ideas, one being a subversive, glitchy website about a hoax medical conspiracy or another site offering in-depth tutorials about self-surgery. However, we settled on a more serious, but no less playful, idea:

We will be applying the scientific concepts of genetics and evolution to digital, interactive art.

Yes, this has been done before, varying from pictures evolved by the user to dancers that learn new moves by natural selection. We feel, however, that we may be able to bring something different and interesting to the web, along with documenting our process so that others interested might be able to follow all of this relatively complex theory and programming. After all, both of us are relative newbies at programming, and all of this genetic algorithm stuff is new to me. So you, lucky reader, get all of our hard-earned knowledge about how to make sense of it all for free.

That is, if we manage to figure any of it out at all.

We'll be programming in a language called Processing, designed specifically with artists and other creative people in mind. It's open source and free to download; it's definitely worth checking out if you have any interest in making programmed art.

I'll be posting updates on our progress, as well as providing links to all of our sources in the "Resources" box to the right.