Artificial Life: A Living Instrument

Gravity Trails Chaos

Shape how the piece looks, drive it with sound and MIDI, and project it.

Look

Performance Mode

Themed colors, motion and a matching background. Turn this on for shows; leave it off for the raw red simulation.

Project

Fills the whole screen for projection. Move the mouse for the live control bar; press Esc to exit.

Text & Logo

Center text

Text borders Your logo Upload logo Show logo Match theme colour Logo size

100%

Sound & MIDI

React to your music

Use your mic or line-in so the visuals move with the music you play.

How it moves to the sound

Reactivity Spawn

Audio input ready

No signal

MIDI keyboard & controller

Play a MIDI keyboard and each note sounds a synth voice and spawns life; knobs and pads map to chaos, population and visuals. Works with Arturia, iRig, M-Audio and any class-compliant device.

Waiting for a MIDI device…

Synth Spawn FX

Camera off

No hardware needed. Step in front of your camera and you enter the piece. Works with your built-in webcam, or your iPhone via Continuity Camera (which works best in Safari, since Chrome often won't list the iPhone).

Camera device

Searching for Shadowlink…

An Xbox 360 Kinect reads real depth for the sharpest, most volumetric result. Needs the free Shadowlink app.

Download Shadowlink macOS · free
Plug in your Kinect and open Shadowlink. This page finds it automatically.

First launch: if macOS blocks it, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → "Open Anyway". Windows version coming soon.

Detection distance

1200mm

Advanced

Shadowlink address

Camera aim: quit Shadowlink, run python3 kinect_tilt.py 15 to tilt up (negative tilts down), then reopen it.

Presence

How your body is rendered into the piece.

Style Color Invert

FPS 0

Presence cells 0

Controller

Connect a PS4 DualShock via USB and press any button and it's detected automatically. Press the PS button to enter Guardian mode and play inside the simulation.

Status Not connected

Device not connected

Info none

Mapping · Normal

✕ Spawn lifeforms · ○ Cull half · □ Reset · △ Dance mode
L1 / R1 Gravity / Trails · Share / Options Pause / Start
D-Pad Chaos & formation · L2 / R2 Shadow count / speed
Sticks Grid & chaos · PS Guardian mode

Mapping · Guardian

Left stick / D-Pad Move · R1 Shield · R2 Shoot
□ Speed boost · ✕ Restart · PS Exit

Survive the night. The red entities are chaos trying to break the seal. Banish them, collect the mysteries, and hold the line as long as you can.

What this is

A tiny colony of digital lifeforms living on your screen. They're born, they move around, they bump into each other, they breed, they mutate, and they die, over and over, never the same way twice. And you can reach in and affect them.

Where the idea comes from

In the 1940s a scientist named John von Neumann asked a simple question: can a machine make a copy of itself, the way living things do? He showed it was possible, using a grid of little squares that turn on and off by simple rules.

Then in 1970 a mathematician named John Conway asked the next question: what are the simplest rules that still make something act alive? He found them: just a few rules about whether each square lives or dies based on its neighbours. He called it the Game of Life. You can try the original at playgameoflife.com.

Then something amazing happens: from those tiny rules, living-looking things appear on their own: shapes that crawl across the screen, and shapes that give birth to other shapes, none of it designed by anyone. This is called emergence: simple rules, nobody in charge, adding up to something that feels alive. It's the same thing behind a flock of birds moving as one.

That idea turned out to be huge. A machine that can copy itself could one day be sent into space, land on a faraway planet, build copies of itself from whatever it finds, and keep spreading, carrying life across the universe without us. Simple rules, enormous consequences.

Here's Conway telling the story himself:

How ours works (and why it wanders)

Conway's version is strict: squares on a grid follow one fixed rule, and the same start always plays out exactly the same.

Ours is looser and more alive. Each organism is its own little creature with its own random "DNA," a few numbers that decide its colour and how it moves. It walks its own path, turns when it hits something, breeds and dies when it touches another, and mutates now and then. So it moves in its own way because it really is making its own little choices, and no two runs are ever the same.

Why music

You can nudge the colony with almost anything: step in front of your camera, use a game controller, a keyboard. But the one I love most is sound. Play music into it and the life moves with it: it speeds up, spreads, reacts.

It's a nice way to actually see something we already feel: that music moves living things. Play a track to this little colony and watch it change, and it's the same idea as playing music to a room full of people and feeling the whole crowd move with you. Same energy, just tiny and glowing.

Make it yours

Put it on a screen, a wall, or a projector. Add your own text or logo, pick the colours and the motion, then step in front of the camera, play a sound, or grab a controller, and affect the life.

Want to go further? It's open source. Fork the code, change whatever you like, and make it your own.

Credits

Built on the open-source Artificial Life project by 314reactor, first made for a tiny Raspberry Pi computer (314reactor blog). Rebuilt here as a living thing you can play with right in your browser.

Original open-source project · 314reactor

0alive now

0born

0died