Bio Art and Emergence

This project serves as the first phase of what may become my final project, a proposal of sorts. 

Using live plants as the most prominent medium of the piece, this will also be one my first steps into bio art.  Most examples of bio art are primarily focused on the use of live tissues in experimental biology studies.  My project falls beneath the broader concept presented by bio art: the use of organic materials, living organisms, and life processes.  

That said, my project will also be a means for me to explore systems theory, as presented by biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy.  

"...real systems are open to, and interact with, their environments, and that they can acquire qualitatively new properties through emergence, resulting in continual evolution..."  

For when plants of various development rates and characteristics are grouped in such close proximity, they are sure to affect the growth of their neighbors and vice versa.  I'd like to document this process over time.  My artwork will be dynamic, continually growing and changing. I would hope that the emergent patterns will be just as exciting to viewers.  For optimal effect, I would like my work to encompass a whole wall, or in a more likely scenario, consist of a number of smaller installations distributed across a large wall.

Simple B-Z reaction sims created using Netlogo, since I'm more familiar with the program now, will be used to create the basic blueprint for initial planting patterns. 

If I were to make a series of small experiments, I'd like to use repurposed materials.  This will serve to save costs and contribute to the overall aesthetic of the work.  Organic and rustic I think pair very well together.  

(theses images aren't mine)

The virus...lives!

After rewriting a few conditions and checks, my virus lives!  

Now, if this virus were a stand in for the lupin parvovirus(LPV), sanguinarians, or individuals exhibiting mutations like psychokinesis, less evolved or uninfected humans can rest assured that these populations would never be completely overrun.  We can all live harmoniously.

So the virus..what?

My main goal for the virus was to completely change the composition of the human population over time.  I imagined two main scenarios: completely decimate the current population of healthy people over an extended period of time, or reach a stable composition of the healthy, the sick, and a number of carriers.  

After messing around in my code last week..the results were not at all what I expected. 

No matter what my initial values for each parameter, the population would continuously be overrun by completely healthy people in a matter of weeks after the initial infections.