Gevurah
WEBXR (VR) HUMAN SWARM INTERACTION SIMULATOR & CYBERNETICS POEM
Gevurah is a multiplayer vr robotics simulator and cybernetics poem. Players can log in and interact with complex swarms of virtual robots, while hunting for lore (texts) about the virtual world. Gevurah brings together various fields of emerging technology, as well as many poetic ideas about the future of humanity’s relationship to data, algorithms and robots, in a compelling, fast-paced vr game format.
Robotic Construction and Human Swarm Interaction
In the above video clip from Gevurah, architect robots (the long red columns) infinitely construct and destruct the landscape. One column builds lakes. One column builds mountain ranges. One column builds “apartment blocks.” Three of the columns “erase” the work of the other robots. There is no predetermined plan to this city. The robots infinitely build it, and tear it apart; it evolves forever. When a player logs into Gevurah, they are assigned a fleet of robots. These robots operate by their own swarming algorithm; however, the player can set “way-points” for the flock, influencing their movement. The player above is “throwing” the “anchor point” to a location; then, telling his robot to go to that location. In the above video, the players “calls” their flock to them, “releases” the flock, then jumps into the POV (point of view) of different flock members, while controlling how close or how far away flock members are to each other.
The Cyberpoem
Do you think that | ‘The Digital’ | Is actually just a different form of matter? | That it has the same relationship to inert matter | As lightning to the air? | Don’t you think that ‘Life’ also is just another form of matter | Self-sustaining | Self-perpetuating | Modular || Do we think that these three categories ‘The Digital’ ‘Life’ and ‘Inert Matter’ | Define what we observe? | What then is ‘The Bionic Robot’? Do we think that people and robots | form a material inversion? || e.g. theoretically, there could be one hundred drones in a predefined area -- a city square; | However, they could all be ‘one large mind’ hosted in the cloud. || Whereas | people, | don’t you think, | emerge from a large genetic tapestry | almost like mushrooms popping up from the forest floor. | Don’t we actually all only have ‘one big body’?
Gevurah contains three poems. (1.) Before the player loads into VR, one can see a text being written in the bottom right hand corner. This text is about about “swarms” in daily life in Oakland California during 2020, e.g. swarms of crows, Covid-19, political gatherings, etc. It was written over the course of a year during the pandemic, as a kind of cybernetics diary. (2.) You can see text flashing on the architecture robots. Periodically, the architecture robots will pause, allowing the player to see the texts. These texts are about robot consciousness and were written out of experiences with interviewing some of the world’s most prominent multi-agent systems scientists. (3.) The final text is buried throughout the landscape (the black box, in the video above). To see it, the player must hunt for the text with their robot swarm; when the swarm turns blue, it means they have sensed the text and they can direct the player to its location. These hidden texts are about the transformation of human consciousness through its engagement with algorithms, and the resulting construction of “a city of information.” The full text is available here.