Cultblender: Virtual Nature

The Virtual Nature project is a spin-off from the Human >< Nature project and will, eventually, also be a part of it.

Nature is something which we, human, can influence and change, but we cannot control it. On a philosophical level you might say that the reason for this is that we are part of nature ourselves. In 'the land of software' and especially the digital universe we are creating, which we call Internet or WWW, we can stil -in a way-  control everything. The webcreators and website builders might let go of part of the control and let us, webusers, create their sites further, it is still a fact that humans are in control.

The Virtual Nature project seeks to let go of that human control in the digital world. A lot of scary cience fiction books and films have been written and made hat revolve around computers taking over. And the fear people have of handing over control to computers has been widely documented. But the VN project is not about giving the control over the bits and bytes to computers, that would be like giving control over plants and animals to earth. That would be nonsense. We would like to give the bits and byets control over themselves.

We are researching the idea to create graphical computer software that has the ability to grow, evolve and interact with other such programs, just like nature in the real world. This means it all has to be open source software which others can adapt and adjust. We understand that software that can 'grow' and in some way 'learn' already exists, but the graphical component is very important to this project; it may not be controled by humans, it is made for humans. The Virtual Nature world must be visually and audibly accesible for human visitors.

If you are interested in participating in this project, send us an e-mail or join our forum.