Scroll through the media landscape as image creatures compete for engagement ressources. Like, unfollow and post new image hybrids to manipulate the simulation and watch it emulate the algorithmic feed by killing, growing and generating image communities from the interaction.
Image Ecology Simulation explores the algorithmic relationship between players/humans, content and technology, by procedurally creating vast rhizomatic media landscape populated with displaced images, memes and other artefacts of remix culture from the collective pool of creators’s online experience. Each image searches for similar images to reproduce with and dissimilar images to consume.
Creators participate in a generative workshop where Game Developer & Artist Esben Holk instructs a qualitative research and analysis of their personal social media feed, to uncover and reproduce the pervasive cultural/memetic/communal icons of their online existence and share them into the simulation.
Through conversation, introduction to new digital tools and a meme workshop, Holk guides the participants into their playable metaphor that posits online users as “parts of a vast ecology”.