David Stout - Interactive Video-Sound Artist

Cory Metcalf - Programmer

Luke Dubois - Programmer

David presented the first HotHouse as part of the Currents exhibition at the ART/Santa Fe International Art Fair in July 2005. The HotHouse project is a series of interactive video-sound works in the form of evolving artificial environments inhabited by self replicating audio-visual structures resembling fictional architectures and artificial organisms. The underlying ideas are predicated on the investigation of the principles of chaos and artificial intelligence, the enhanced potential found in a new generation of audio-video signal and data based feedback systems and the Gaia principle as reflected, in part, through the timeless cross-cultural retelling of creation myths. The theme of creation remains a powerful if time-worn artistic metaphor. The potential to move beyond outward metaphor by employing a genetic engine capable of generating an evolutionary synthetic cinema, recasts the artist as a co-determinant within a dynamic system. The implication of the direct "hands on" play with the dynamic variables of creation itself leads us toward objects and experiences that lay outside the limits of the artists original conception. In this example the artist is a meta-designer who opens the door to emergent morphologies, sonic gesture and kinetic behavior.