by Alex Reben
WebGL fluid simulation, cellular automaton, motion sensing.
Browser-native generative artwork, unique software artwork.
Ownership includes the original software work together with contractual participation in future licensed software editions.
Ed. 1/1.
Explore the artwork in your browser HERE.
Somewhere in here, life is running. Conway's Game of Life, the oldest and most famous of the cellular automata, born and killed by four rules, has been drawn as glowing pixels for fifty years, so I rendered it in negative. The living cells are the black marks, small voids that take light in and give none back, and what you actually see is what the life does to the world around it: every birth a burst of ink and pressure, every death a spinning vortex, all of it carried off as smoke. The automaton is the dark figure and the weather is its voice.
I made that choice because it is how we meet every other mind, including our own. We only ever get the weather, what gets disturbed, what gets left behind, how a room changes when someone walks into it. Emergence works the same way. Nobody has ever stared at a rule and found a glider in it. You learn what a system is by living downstream of it for a while.
This one is crowded. Weather drifts through in long moods, calm for stretches, then gales and cyclones, then spells where the physics go strange and the smoke stiffens into a lattice or runs backward. Travelers wander in from the edges and stir whatever they cross, and every so often a meteor falls and restarts the world in one corner. Nothing repeats and nothing resets. It behaves like a climate, with moods you cannot summon, only wait for.
Then it turns toward you. The piece senses the room, and your movement enters the same fluid as the storms, tuned so you can never quite prove which currents were yours. I wanted that doubt. A cursor pushing paint around would have made you the operator and turned the piece into a demo, whereas here you are one participant among many and nobody in the room is in charge. You share an atmosphere and the smoke holds the negotiation. Somewhere in that exchange, watching turns into being with, and a system that cannot want anything starts to seem like it is answering you. People hand agency to machines long before machines earn it, and I wanted a place where you could feel yourself doing that and decide whether you mind.
Exhibited at EMERGENCE, Kate Vass Galerie, Zürich, Switzerland, 2026.
by Alex Reben
WebGL fluid simulation, cellular automaton, motion sensing.
Browser-native generative artwork, unique software artwork.
Ownership includes the original software work together with contractual participation in future licensed software editions.
Ed. 1/1.
Explore the artwork in your browser HERE.
Somewhere in here, life is running. Conway's Game of Life, the oldest and most famous of the cellular automata, born and killed by four rules, has been drawn as glowing pixels for fifty years, so I rendered it in negative. The living cells are the black marks, small voids that take light in and give none back, and what you actually see is what the life does to the world around it: every birth a burst of ink and pressure, every death a spinning vortex, all of it carried off as smoke. The automaton is the dark figure and the weather is its voice.
I made that choice because it is how we meet every other mind, including our own. We only ever get the weather, what gets disturbed, what gets left behind, how a room changes when someone walks into it. Emergence works the same way. Nobody has ever stared at a rule and found a glider in it. You learn what a system is by living downstream of it for a while.
This one is crowded. Weather drifts through in long moods, calm for stretches, then gales and cyclones, then spells where the physics go strange and the smoke stiffens into a lattice or runs backward. Travelers wander in from the edges and stir whatever they cross, and every so often a meteor falls and restarts the world in one corner. Nothing repeats and nothing resets. It behaves like a climate, with moods you cannot summon, only wait for.
Then it turns toward you. The piece senses the room, and your movement enters the same fluid as the storms, tuned so you can never quite prove which currents were yours. I wanted that doubt. A cursor pushing paint around would have made you the operator and turned the piece into a demo, whereas here you are one participant among many and nobody in the room is in charge. You share an atmosphere and the smoke holds the negotiation. Somewhere in that exchange, watching turns into being with, and a system that cannot want anything starts to seem like it is answering you. People hand agency to machines long before machines earn it, and I wanted a place where you could feel yourself doing that and decide whether you mind.
Exhibited at EMERGENCE, Kate Vass Galerie, Zürich, Switzerland, 2026.
