Untitled Tent Project
project | Interactive installation
Jul. 2025—Aug. 2025
This interactive installation uses a depth camera to map visitors’ bodies as a 3D growth surface for neural cellular automata (NCAs)—simple AI agents that self-organize into complex organic patterns resembling roots, leaves, and flowers. Both movement and stillness produce distinct visual results, rewarding dance and contemplation alike. Trained on natural imagery over millions of simulations, the NCAs echo the phenomenon of emergence: how simple local interactions give rise to large-scale complexity. Integration with the Shroomiverse installation allows additional interactions that alter NCA styles, colors, and behaviors on screen.
This video installation transforms human presence into a living canvas for contemplating the nature of intelligence—both natural and artificial—through the real-time growth of neural cellular automata (NCAs). A depth camera captures the 3D surface of visitors’ bodies, which serves as the growth medium for these simple artificial creatures. As they spread across the human form, they self-organize into intricate organic patterns: roots, leaves, flowers, and other natural formations.
NCAs are a recent advancement built on the foundation of cellular automata, a classical framework for studying emergence. The most famous example, Conway’s Game of Life (Gardner, 1970), demonstrated that very simple rules governing elements on a grid can produce unexpectedly complex behaviors—locomotion, predation, and reproduction emerging from nothing more than local interactions. NCAs, introduced by Mordvintsev et al. (2020), take this a step further by incorporating neural networks, enabling the cells to learn their own rules rather than having them prescribed. Each cell perceives only its immediate neighbors, yet through training over millions of simulations, they coordinate to reproduce arbitrary large-scale patterns.
For this production, “neural styles” extracted from images of nature were used as training targets. The result is a system where digital organisms bloom across the human body in formations that are unmistakably organic yet entirely artificial—a direct visual metaphor for the relationship between natural and machine intelligence.
Interactivity
The installation is designed to reward both movement and stillness with different visual outcomes. The depth camera faces a stage area, while a projector casts the results onto a separate projection surface several meters away. Dancing produces one kind of visual response; calm, contemplative poses produce another. This duality encourages visitors to explore the full range of interaction, from energetic to meditative.
The installation also integrates with the Shroomiverse. Interactions with the Shroomiverse are reflected on the projection—activating mushrooms can alter the style, color palette, and behavior of the NCAs, creating a connected ecosystem of responsive visuals.
Emergence as Theme
Emergence is the phenomenon whereby systems composed of simple components interact to produce unexpectedly complex behaviors. It is fundamental to all living processes: atoms form molecules, molecules form cells, cells form organisms, and organisms form civilizations. This installation makes emergence tangible and personal. Visitors watch as minimal computational rules, played out across their own silhouettes, give rise to the same kinds of organic complexity found throughout the natural world. The question the piece poses is implicit but persistent: where does the boundary lie between the intelligence of these simple learned rules and the intelligence that built them?
Technical Setup
The projector, depth camera, computer, and network router are housed in a single weatherproof assembly. Power consumption totals approximately 15A (BenQ TH681 projector at 10A, Beelink SER5 computer at 3.5A, RUTX11 router at 1.5A). The projection surface is designed to move beyond the conventional white rectangle—options include tent walls, suspended canopies, or a ring-shaped screen to better suit the installation’s organic aesthetic.
