Interactive artwork commissioned by Nottingham Trent University to launch their new flagship Design & Digital Arts building in Nottingham city centre. 

Every Part is an interactive, real-time digital artwork, in which the audience participates to generate novel dynamics in an emergent system. The artwork is an extended ‘reaction-diffusion system’, which produces ‘Turing patterns’, due to their origin in Alan Turing’s 1952 article “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis”. In this article, he describes how patterns in nature such as spirals, spots and stripes arise naturally from a uniform state.  Here, we have developed the system to vary within defined ‘Voronoi cells’, which are controlled by independent players in a multi-player canvas.

The audience becomes  part of the system, with their ‘individual differences’ contributing to a global composition of dynamics and patterns. The result is an unpredictable system in flux; microscopic cells absorbing and emitting, a battle between a bacteria and phagocyte, primordial entities in a nutrient-rich soup communing with molecular waves.  The work is inspired by the possible emergences enabled by the D&DA building, through dynamic relationships between students, researchers and a space rich in resources. The project aims to create a simulated world of organisms with unpredictable and stimulating results, rewarding ‘tuning in’, with patience and delicate interaction.