Peter Burr

Peter Burr is a master of computer animation who has centered his art practice on immersive cinematic experiences, primarily through animation and installation. His most recent work explores these concerns using tools and conventions from the video game industry. He creates experiences that are intimate in the way only interactive media can be, depending as it does on human input to sustain itself.

Pattern Language, built in a video game engine, is a rhythmic, strobing composition in richly patterned black and white. Employing cellular automata and crowd-simulation algorithms, Burr creates a fantastical vision of human life within a labyrinthine “Dirtscraper” – an inverted, underground skyscraper. Indistinct, nongendered figures in shades of grey walk through endless generative levels of lights and right angles, while others fill the screen with dots that bloom or wilt according to the classic “Game of Life” model developed by mathematician John Conway in 1970, in which each cell lives, dies, or revives depending on the “alive” or “dead” states of neighboring cells.

Part of a larger project of the same name that has appeared from Manhattan to Amsterdam, May’s Midnight Moment is a new edit including never-before-seen sequences. Viewers will be immersed in the endless labyrinth, which mirrors both the pointillist quality of Times Square’s LED billboards and the patterns we ourselves trace through the megastructure environment of New York City.

“Pattern Language is born from my ongoing practice designing modern day labyrinths; dense self-supporting structures that emulate living organisms. It was developed during a residency at 3-Legged Dog in Lower Manhattan where I spent time observing transit patterns through New York’s various megastructures. The building I created here is known as an arcology: a fusion of “architecture” and “ecology”. It is based on a set of design principles for very densely populated, ecologically low-impact human habitation developed by architect Paolo Soleri in the middle of the twentieth century. In this work, patterns emerge through the interaction of various algorithms. Pattern Language employs a popular cellular automata algorithm called Conway’s Game Of Life to encode a remarkably life-like system in simple black and white pixels. I’m interested in the way our own universe may operate on a similar set of discrete digital rules, bursting from a few small pixels into a life of patterns from screen to screen.”

- Peter Burr

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