Aquatics II
Philipp Artus
Berlin, Germany
Inside the Installation
Materials: Projectors, scaffolding, wood, and rear-projection foil
- Interaction and self-regulating ecosystem. Every creature is created by a visitor. At a touchscreen, visitors choose what to add — a single large animal or a swarm of small ones — and the creatures then move on their own. Creatures from different groups lose energy when they collide; a wounded one is recognizable by its restless, zig-zagging line. They recover slowly, but die if they lose too much energy too quickly. The system is self-regulating: more creatures mean more collisions and shorter lives, fewer creatures mean longer ones. Because creatures never harm their own kind, at least one species always survives.
- Construction system. Every creature is built from the same system. Instead of connecting blocks to blocks like Lego, it connects lines to other lines, and two algorithms animate all of them — the spine of a fish, a dolphin's fin, a jellyfish's tendrils, a starfish's arms. The principle is to express the greatest possible variety with the least possible code, paralleling how nature builds complexity by recombining a small set of basic elements (as atoms do).
- Origin. The work began as a side task: the artist needed a few animated background fish for a scene in his animated short film Ocean Twist. Coding a few generated fish grew into a full interactive ecosystem and took about four years. Ocean Twist remains unfinished, with completion planned for 2026. Related German saying: Umwege erhöhen die Ortskenntnis ("detours expand your knowledge of the terrain").
- Real-time engine. The ecosystem is rendered 60 times per second at 8K resolution (8640 × 3840, over 33 million pixels). Each frame computes thousands of creatures — each with a body geometry of hundreds of joints, swim physics, and a behavioral decision — plus a four-million-particle system that reacts to the current in real time. This is possible because the work runs on a custom engine, written from scratch, that executes entirely on the GPU using parallel computing: graphics chips designed to process many pixels at once are repurposed to run physics and animation.
- Species and U.S. premiere. Aquatics began with two species - fish and jellyfish. Aquatics II adds two more - dolphins and starfish. Furthermore, the second iteration of Aquatics includes a refined particle animation and features a couple of more abstract and experimental motion patterns. GLEAM is its first U.S. showing.
Artist Bio
Philipp Artus
Philipp Artus is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Berlin, Germany. His experimental animations, light installations, and drawings explore the manifestations of life through movement, sound, and imagery, uniting playful elements with minimalist structures and turbulent acceleration with contemplative silence. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, France, he taught himself animation, physics, and music theory before completing postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. His work has been shown in museums, festivals, and galleries worldwide, including the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery in Los Angeles, Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, the Setouchi Triennale in Japan, and the Vimeo Awards in New York City.
