Year: 2025
Client: Educational (Master's project)
Tags: 3D, Creative coding
gaia.exe is a real-time, interactive installation that simulates a synthetic biosphere—an adaptive system shaped by live data. The work integrates custom hardware, sensorial input, and creative coding into a self-regulating ecosystem that responds directly to the presence of its viewers and the subsystems driving its behavior.
Through microcontrollers, galvanic conductance sensors, environmental monitors, and a feedback-driven genetic algorithm, the installation continually recalibrates its internal state. Each visitor becomes a variable: their proximity, movement, or presence influences whether the system breathes, stabilizes, or unravels. The result is a nonlinear, non-repetitive experience in which each moment forms a unique ecological composition.
The work is, in essence, a visualization of the delicate interconnectedness that sustains life. Drawing from the concept of the web of life, the installation renders invisible ecological dependencies visible—through networks of physical cables, flowing data, and systemic feedback. Every element is linked: sensors trigger responses, responses reshape the system, and the system adapts in real time. This artificial ecosystem reflects the complexity of natural ones, where even small changes ripple outward through the whole.
Rather than displaying data passively, gaia.exe turns it into lived experience. It animates ideas such as co-evolution, fragility, and interdependence—not through explanation, but through embodied interaction. Every design decision, from its modular structure to its adaptive digital organism, seeks to dissolve the boundary between observer and system, positioning the viewer as a co-participant in a shared, vulnerable environment.
The project references Donna Haraway’s concept of response-ability—the ethical obligation to respond within systems of mutual dependency. In gaia.exe, this principle is embedded in the code, logic, and physical reactions of the system itself.
gaia.exe challenges the traditional separation of logic and empathy: Can care arise from code? Can systems be both technical and emotional? By merging computational design with ecological thinking, the project proposes that interaction can be more than functional—it can be felt. And that we might cultivate care through appreciation of beauty.
Photos by Elisabeth Vandyck and Gabriella Achadinha.