multi-player game world displayed on 4 LCD screens and as a single-channel projection; stereo audio and 4.1 surround sound
interactive; colour

Software development: Nicholas Sandow, Shee Zon Chen, Leng Hou Tan
Interactive sound design: Jeremy Yuille
Sound design: Steve Law
Database design/coding: Steve Taylor, Harry Lee
Thanks to: Alessio Cavallaro, Elena Popa, Alyssia & Angelina

lifeSigns is part of an investigation of virtual worlds as vehicles for new forms of communication and expression. Working with the idea of the computer as a machine for processing and manipulating symbols, the lifeSigns world evolves multiple digital media languages. This space combines three areas of research - artificial life, the coding of life processes into software; computational semiotics, the study of systems and codes of signification in digital media; and digital games, particularly the idea of play with process and artificial space. This hybrid is expressed as a virtual world – through form, structure, colour, sound, motion, surface and behaviour.

In lifeSigns you ‘play the world’.

Through this play, the work explores the idea of ‘emergent language’ – the idea that new meanings may be generated through interaction between human and digital agents.