William Latham and team showed their latest Mutator VR (developed at Christchurch Studios and Goldsmiths by William Latham, Stephen Todd, Peter Todd and Lance Putnam. HTC Vive Pro VR equipment provided by HTC VIVE Arts) experience at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

The Mutations/Creations 4 installation, part of the "Neurones, les Intelligences Simulées" (Neurons, simulated intelligence) exhibition, saw the Centre Pompidou transformed into a laboratory for creation and innovation at the frontiers of art, science and engineering.

Each year, the programme brings together artists, engineers and scientists.

Mutator VR immerses the viewer in a multitude of alien worlds with evolving forms resembling sea anemones, ancient ammonites and multi-horned organisms with which they can interact.

Bred and crossbred in software from multiple parents, the bizarre forms are created by a process of artistic evolution driven by human aesthetics. The aim is to give viewers a surreal and immersive experience in which their own body movements shape the evolving virtual world around them.

William Latham says: “In VR, the artist can put the viewer in the artist’s own personal immersive space, where the viewer is entirely focused on the artistic content, with no distractions. Once in that immersive space the artist can then play with the illusion of space, creating a synthetic reality for the viewer where the ‘surreal’ appears ‘real’. This enables rich interaction for the public including enabling them to play with the physics of the forms in ways not possible in reality.”

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/29643