"Aquatics" is a generative underwater world in which animated sea creatures swim around and interact with each other. The artwork explores the emergence of life through abstract shapes and movement. The audience can design their own creatures by means of a tablet and add them to the virtual ecosystem.

The interactivity offers a lot of creative freedom: by exploring the endless number of possible creatures, the participants become part of the artwork. They can choose the type and number of species, their size, shape, color and behavior. The sum of these individual choices forms the basis for the resulting outcome, which makes the artwork a shared experience of creative expression.

In its essence I see "Aquatics" as an artistic attempt to portrait life in its diversity and unexpectedness. It invites the audience to contemplate the flow of animal locomotion, to think about the relationship between nature and technology and to observe how complexity emerges from simple rules.

The aesthetic experience of "Aquatics" is immersive and soothing. Yet, there is something eerie about the man-made imitation of living beings. In this sense "Aquatics" can be seen as both, a utopia and a dystopia of how artifical ecosystems might replace real life in the future.

My fascination for the idea of a generative ecosystem in which creatures become alive and interact with each other is what guided me through the four-year long creation process. Even though I have been coding all the algorithms, the arising behaviour of the creatures is always a surprise – even for myself.

Technical aspects

I programmed 'Aquatics’ in Java and GLSL, using Processing as a code basis and for prototyping the algorithms. I then transfered the performance critical code (animation, physics and AI) to shaders running in OpenGL, so that they can be calculated on the GPU, making use of parrallel computing. This approach allows a massive amount of creatures to be rendered in real-time with an 8K resolution.