Primitives

Alan Warburton

8 April 2016

Audiovisual installation on crowd-generating software

During his time at humain Trop humain in Montpellier, Alan worked with dancer Anya Kravchenko to capture a series of movements using Microsoft Kinect. The motion data was then fed into a program called Golaem Crowd to generate a series of experimental 3D renderings that explore the possibilities and limits of crowd simulation software.

Crowd simulation software is increasingly being used to create grandiose and spectacular computer-generated scenes of conflict, disaster or carnage for film or television. No longer is it necessary to hire, feed and pay masses of extras; now, using a set of customised frameworks, programmes and parameters, a simple click is all it takes to create and manipulate an army of digital bodies. This project focuses on the proto-human digital crowd to question these parameters and, in doing so, aims to understand how software redefines concepts such as freedom and agency – the ability to take intentional, potentially transformative action. In this film the artist attempts to humanise and (paradoxical as it may seem) individualise the crowd by confronting the design of software and its limits.

This experimental project takes place at a time when artificial intelligence, chatbots, supercomputers and deep learning algorithms are constantly under scrutiny. We are talking about entities that are not human, but have been designed by humans to give the impression of humanity. And when humanity is coded as a set of parameters, we have no choice but to question the representational power of AI software and, in projects like this one, to imagine what these primitive beings might one day become.