"Origin of Species", 2015
Dimensions variable
"Origin of Species" is an illuminated sculpture that is passively interactive. It positions a book on a pedestal that is near a wall-mounted camera. As viewers walk up to the piece, their likeness is represented in a colorful sampling of the book's imagery. Live portraits appear as a projection onto the pages, which flip through a collection of animal illustrations that were captured from Darwin's book.
This piece is the fourth in a series of Darwinian Software Mirrors by Daniel Rozin. In these pieces, programmed “evolutionary pressure” pushes the artwork to resemble the viewer. Engaging the audience with live interactive response, each work from this series varies the formal properties of line, luminosity, and tempo, as screen-based pictures are built improvisationally. The basis of the software in this series is Darwin's theory of random mutations followed by natural selection as the basis of evolution.