Nebula III

Dennis Del Favero's collaborative research program comprises work across the fields of art, humanities, engineering and science, exploring the theorisation of interactive aesthetics and its application in intelligent visualisation systems. Nebula III explores emergent aesthetic of Georg Buchner, the 19th German dramatist and scientist. This aesthetic is characterised by its emergent dialogic spatial aesthetics, namely its approach to space as a two relationship between things where it is not simply a linear connections between entities. It foreshadows the aesthetics of Karen Barad, the contemporary theoretical physicist and philosopher who conceived of the concept of 'intra-action' to conceptualise how all spatial matter never pre-exists, but is always shaped and formed through the interactive relationships between its constitutive elements. Using this intra-active spatial aesthetic as its inspiration, Nebula III presents a 3D particle world that explores this notion of space as constructed through intra-action. Here 3D particles, while displaying elementary clustering spatial behaviour, are simultaneously single-minded and resistant to control. The user, by controlling an onscreen ball of light through the use of a tablet, can learn to assemble the particles. Gradually, depending on the user's ability to control the particles, the particles are attracted to the light, like moths to a bulb. On successfully assembling all the particles, a particle sphere emerges from the clustered particles, then dissolves into one of a series of different spatial worlds, depending on how the user interacted with the particles --- a rotating planet, a mountainscape, falling snow and a storm.