Cellular Forms: An award winning project

Cellular Forms: An award winning project Were a creative bunch here at The Foundry, so we decided to catch up with some of our talented team members.

Andy Lomas, KATANA Product Manager's 10 year obsession' has been collecting both awards and interest from artists and the science community alike. Evoking fascination and causing opposing reactions, Cellular Forms is a glorious example of when science and art combine with a mesmerising outcome.

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With an interest in biology and visual imagery, alongside a degree in math and a masters in 3D animation and graphics, Andy's been editing films, creating artwork and coding alongside each other for as long as he can remember. He spent 18 years in TV and film production, working on documentaries such as the BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs, the huge Matrix film franchise and Avatar.

The first thing that comes to mind when chatting to Andy about this project is how on earth can he fit this all in? It's hard to say when the project started. It's been going for 10 years as a complete obsession, with 7 years on the Cellular Forms project specifically.

It was a book by DArcy Wentworth Thompson called on growth and form' that ignited the question What sort of rules result in these organic results? . To explore this, Andy has created and is continuously tweaking his own code to simulate organic growth within cells. His Aggregation series was shown at SIGGRAPH in 2005 and 2006. The following year, Andy's Flow series was also showcased, attracting more interest. This led to thoughts about how to create complex organic results that were less coral like and more animal like structures.

The big difference is cellular growth. Cells can split and that's something I tried to come up with a system for . The simulation and rendering is all Andy's own code, taking years of tinkering and seeing which settings produce interesting results Most of the settings produce a random mess, which is realistic really. If you threw random DNA at each other you probably would just get a blob. It's a bit like having an ocean and trying to figure out where to find what's worth finding at the bottom.

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Cellular Forms is a gigantic passion project that is effectively a collaboration with the computer running thousands and thousands of variations. By the end of the simulations there are over 50,000,000 cells in each structure. You set it off at a very low resolution with a set of parameters and then pick out the ones that have surprised you. It's very similar to a scientific project using petri dishes, coming back to see how the elements have interacted with each other and then exploring those directions further.

Since putting Cellular Forms online, it's won the Lumen Prize Gold Award, received an honorary mention from the Jury at this years Festival Ars Electronica, featured in exhibitions and been re-worked for a Max Cooper music video. A beautifully realised film, with a compelling storyline and emotional resonance, that epitomises the power of abstraction that can engage the heart and the head. An art and science tour de force. - Michael Fukushima, head of the National Film Board of Canadas Animation Studio and Lumen Jury Panel Member.

If like us you're intrigued to see what's next for Cellular Forms, Andy will be collaborating further with Max Cooper on his Emergence Tour as well exploring the interaction of two cells together and programmed cell death. Not exciting enough? The project is also heading in some other very interesting directions, which we don't want to spoil. Watch this space!

LINK:	http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/about-us/news-awards/cellular-forms-an-awa...
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