This week’s Throwback Thursday post revisits a 2009 project by PhD student Rui Filipe Antunes, PhD Student.

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)

Rui Filipe Antunes has undertaken a significant number of curatorial projects and exhibitions, including the Festival of Digital Arts at Watermans (2012) and a solo exhibition at London’s Tin Shed Gallery (2013).