Incremental God is a self-organizing virtual world whose evolution can be influenced just by looking at it. The public’s facial features are translated into emotions in real time and used to generate the growth or decay of the digital environment that is the habitat of a virtual female. This virtual persona continuously redefines her vital space in order to survive and reasserts her identity to exist in symbiosis with her environment. The project starts from a set of initial conditions and evolves according to the input of the viewers. The artwork is inspired by the principle of computational irreducibility that states that the only way to determine the response to a computationally irreducible request is to actually perform, or simulate, the computation. Incremental God takes this idea further to the concept of lived space. The work uses the diversity of user behavior combinations to create an environment that comes into existence incrementally, while experiencing it. The perception of Incremental God world is simultaneous with the observers’ emotional reactions that influence it, making understanding impossible in the absence of performing.
