Mutual Field
2025, Installation

Exhibited at

Patterns of Entanglement

Description

A cellular automaton is a grid-based system in which each cell updates from its neighbors, showing how simple local rules can yield complex behavior. Mutual Field runs an artist-designed, multi-species cellular automaton in real time: different colors function as different species, each with its own rules, producing ongoing cycles of reproduction, coexistence, and elimination as patterns continually form and dissolve.

A physical lens magnifies a portion of the display so viewers can isolate and observe a local region within the overall flow. A camera senses nearby human activity and feeds that signal back into the automaton to bias its rule dynamics: stronger activity favors faster, anisotropic "artificial" behaviors, while low activity allows slower, more isotropic "natural" behaviors to surface. As viewers lean in or the space becomes restless, observation itself becomes an environmental force. It resonates with the way local interactions cascade through social, informational, and ecological networks, where we are always already involved. To encounter a quieter, more "natural" state, one must still the body and calm the space.


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