Write your artist statement in this file (max 500 words).
The work is named Mutated Game of Life. It is an extension and a colorfulized version of the original Convey's Game of Life. To over simplify then summarize the idea of the game, "Being alone would be lethal, too crowded would cause it, too." In the work, audience could put cells (the white dot, or other color dot) on the board, observe how those cells behave and trying to descover the hidden rules (whatever way they use, maybe summarize themselves or search online). The user interface design employs the priciple and idea of the Universial Language, which is design UI using pictographic symbols, let every audience could understand it easily, without specific language background (i.e. first-language, educated, etc.). The learning of interactions also a part of experience I would communicate.
The original idea, Convey's Game of Life, is a "zero-player game", or a "cellular automaton" devided by John Horton Convey in 1970. It could evaluate by the initial input and continue to the next generation. In the game, each grid is a "cell", has two state that either being live or dead, each generation the state could be changed. They obey some simple rules. You could find rules on wiki or my introduction in my storyboard article.
The interesting and "fearful" I found in the Game of Life, that the behaviours of multi-cell structures. If we take it very fast, it would generate like fireworks. If we think the word "cell" and "life" a little further, we could find some sensory relations between the automaton and other real-world phenomenons and theories, such as the idea of entropy, rules of thermodynamic, biology (the basic shape "seed" in the GOL, it would bloom then leaves 4 other seeds). Try to think from our neuron cells, they have similar (forgive my word if you are expert in neuronscience) simple stuctures and rules. As the high complexity of our neuron cell groups, we even evolute our "free will". This is also the point I found "fearful". As the basic physics research forward, we may (or already) discover rules guiding elementary particles simple like that.
To present it more "fearful", represent amaze of life, I add a few constraints and introduce idea of gene produce into my work. The four different color gives work better on visual effect, and represent 4 different type of cells. I would gives a detailed description in the interact statement. There are some choice at the bottom, you could draw different initial input structure see what happened after few generations. Moreover, I add some random positioning on rendering each cells, to make it looks "living". For the idea of symmetric, I try to represent in the rule that effect the generation. Rather than the reflect about some line or node, each cell actually "copy" themselves and generate new stuctures. It is more like the symmetric in a broken kaleidoscope each cell are mirror itself. The "fearful symmetric" rules generate a great complexity and visual effect.