Bernard Gortais

The Garden of Chances: A Visual Ecosystem

The Garden of Chances is a computer-generated artwork that makes a link between the realworld climate and a virtual garden of abstract, colored shapes. When the artwork is functioning all day long and all year round, the spectator can see the evolution of the climate as the time passes. The software has been developed as a simulation of a real ecosystem and it relies on multi-agent techniques. In this article, the authors present the basic principles of the software and explain how they use it as a tool to explore both art processes and multi-agent issues of emergence and interpretation.

Grounding Virtual Worlds in Reality

We suggest in this article a new paradigm for the representation of data, which is best suited for the real-time visualization and sonorisation of complex systems, real or simulated. The basic idea lies in the use of the garden metaphor to represent the dynamic evolution of interacting and organizing entities. In this proposal, multiagent systems are used to map between given complex systems and their garden-like representation, which we call Data Gardens (DG). Once a satisfying mapping has been chosen, the evolution of these Data Gardens is then driven by the real-time arrival of data from the system to represent and by the endogenous reaction of the multiagent system, immersing the user within a visual and sonorous atmosphere from which he can gain an intuitive understanding of the system, without even focusing his attention on it. This can be applied to give life to virtual worlds by grounding them in reality using real world data.

Ambient cognitive environments and the distributed synthesis of visual ambiences

One of the current trends in computer science leads to the design of computing organizations based on the activity of a multitude of tiny cheap decentralized computing entities. Whether these chips are integrated into paintings or disseminated in open environments like dust, the fundamental problem lies in their cooperative operation so that global functions are obtained collectively. In this paper, we address the issue of the creation of visual ambiences based on the coordinated activity of computing entities. These entities are distributed randomly on a 2D canvas and can only change their own color and perceive their immediate neighbors.

Data Gardens: an artistic proposal towards the representation of distributed and dynamic data using multiagent systems

We suggest a new paradigm for the representation of data, which is best suited for the real-time representation (visual and sonorous) of complex systems, real or simulated. The basic idea lies in the use of the garden metaphor to represent the dynamic evolution of interacting and organizing entities. In this proposal, multiagent systems are used to map between given complex systems and their garden-like representation, which we call Data Gardens (DG). The evolution of these Data Gardens is driven both by the real-time arrival of data from the system to represent and by the endogenous reaction of the multiagent system, immersing the user within a visual and sonorous atmosphere from which he can gain an intuitive understanding of the system. The principles exposed may ultimately be applied to the representation of multiagent systems themselves.