Generative Art & Fun Game 

Tool

I.    Background

This project is inspired by a field trip held in Gen Space ,a biomaterial Lab. After the trip, I was fascinated by how the biomaterials were made of, especially how bacteria grow and change their forms based on living environment. When I feel the diversity of biomaterials, I also feel the potential power hidden inside the bacteria. Meanwhile, bacteria needs to be taken well care of, from which I learn how delicate they are.


Therefore, I want to create a interactive project that allows users to learn what bacteria's life cycle is, what their potentials are, and get the impression of how powerful and delicate bacteria can be.

II.    Sketch

After digging into more information* about how bacteria live and how they can be transferred into biomaterials, I listed several basic characteristics of bacteria cultured in BioLab and then transformed them into more understandable game elements that will be accepted by users.


For this project, I plan to build a interactive digital platform( Game ) that simulates bacteria's movement and revolution, and allows users to create their very own digital biomaterials and test it to see how their controls of environment affect the result of biomaterials processing.



*Reference:
Knobben BA, van der Mei HC, van Horn JR, Busscher HJ. Transfer of bacteria between biomaterials surfaces in the operating room--an experimental study. J Biomed Mater Res A. 2007 Mar 15;80(4):790-9. doi: 10.1002/jbm.a.30978. PMID: 17058211.

III.    Design

Bacteria can be considered as a population of cognitive cells, whose behavior is generated by self-production nutrients. In the meantime it will eliminate waste via passive diffusion to concentrate power.

So there are a lot of interesting behaviors and phenomenon in bacteria that worth exploring and implemented into this game. Based on Conway Game of Life, I plan to build my own "bacteria generated" algorithms, which will be added with new functions that personality settings for bacteria, more delicate rules of generation living, user-controlled the living environment(will correspondingly affect some parameters in the algorithm), and record every tracks of bacteria that will generally create a unique piece of biomaterials.



The basic rule of bacteria generation is that each cell represents a living bacteria. Different color of squares in a grid (‘cells’) means either ‘live’ or ‘dead’. Any live cell without two or thee neighboring live cells (including diagonals) becomes a dead cell on the next turn (or ‘generation’). Any dead cell with three neighboring live cells becomes live on the next generation.