People on the Fly by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau @ Art House
Interactive digital animation with camera, custom software, computer, and projector
231 Delgado St., Santa Fe, NM

CURRENTS Opening Weekend . Friday and Saturday . June 7 / 8 . 10am – 5pm / free
Sunday . June 9 . 12pm – 5pm / free

Opening Reception . Friday. June 14 . 5-7pm

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s People on the Fly makes its U.S. debut at Art House, Santa Fe. In this 2016 interactive installation, the artists’ custom swarming algorithm attracts a virtual swarm of houseflies to a visitor’s captured image. Insect swarms provide artificial intelligence researchers with models for understanding how lifeforms make decisions on a particle level, because a swarm thinks cooperatively without a dominant leader. The networked intelligence of a swarm may help train software algorithms designed to simulate biological systems. With this algorithm, only bodies in motion will attract the flies.

Pioneering digital artists Christa Sommerer (born in Ohlsdorf/Gmunden, Austria, 1967; lives in Linz, Austria) and Laurent Mignonneau (born in Angouleme, France 1964; lives in Linz, Austria) are internationally renowned for their custom-coded interactive artworks. Since 1992 they have collaborated on artworks that have helped shape the field of digital art, especially at the intersection of biology and technology. As professors at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria, they publish scholarly essays about the “living algorithms” embedded in human, plant, and insect bodies. Their artworks, as interactive simulations, propose that living systems blossom when they come into contact with each other.

Photo: Christa Sommerer