Red Activa

Red Activa is a three-dimensional environment composed of hundreds of nodes that move, vibrate and connect with each other, generating a structure in constant transformation. There is no fixed composition, what appears on the screen is the momentary result of a dynamic system that is recalculated frame by frame, creating a space that seems alive and constantly breathing.

The user can walk through the space, get closer, farther away and observe from different angles, but their intervention does not determine the work; It only changes the way it is perceived. Pressing the space bar causes the nodes to temporarily expand and then contract again, reinforcing the sensation of a luminous organism that never fully stabilizes. Aesthetics seeks to ensure that the digital does not imitate the organic, but rather produces it through simple rules: oscillation, displacement, radial force and connections between nearby points.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

Red Activa is built as an autonomous system in WebGL made up of approximately six hundred nodes, each with its own parameters: initial position, speed, size, phase and oscillation amplitude. These values ​​are constantly updated frame by frame, generating a continuous and non-repetitive movement, where the network is permanently organized and disorganized. Connections between nodes are established only when they are close enough, producing a luminous fabric that appears and disappears, like an electrical organism in constant vibration. The work does not depend on the viewer’s interaction to exist; its flow and behavior are autonomous. The user can rotate the camera, move through space or activate temporal expansion with the space bar, introducing variations on a system already in operation, but without controlling the whole, which allows experiencing the difference between an active system and a passive tour.

My main inspiration comes from Christiane Fricke’s analysis of The Legible City by Jeffrey Shaw and Dirk Groeneveld, where she notes:

“Installations such as The Legible City (Jeffrey Shaw and Dirk Groeneveld) require the user to perform a physical activity (getting on a bike) to navigate a virtual space in three dimensions… which means that the outcome of the work depends entirely on the user’s intervention.”

This idea helped me think that, in my work, it is also the user who activates the experience; Without its movement, the work does not happen. Unlike Shaw’s installation, where the journey depends entirely on the physical action of the viewer, in Red Activa the user alters perception without determining an outcome, interacting with a system that is already in operation. Likewise, Inke Arns’ perspective on code as a performative act reinforces the idea that each line of code executes real behavior in real time, and is not just a visual representation. The vibrations of the nodes, the pulsation of the core and the expansion of the system are actions generated by algorithmic rules, which produce an emergent and always changing result.

Aesthetically, we worked with a palette of neon purple, blue and turquoise tones, soft lights and orbiting rings that reinforce the feeling of energy, flow and continuous movement. The work is located at the intersection between the algorithmic and the perceptual, the important thing is not the final form, but the dynamics of the system, the life that arises from the interaction of nodes and their connections. The constant transformation of the network constitutes the core of the experience, inviting the viewer to observe a digital organism in perpetual reconfiguration, where the autonomy of the system and the perception of the user are in balance.

Literature

FRICKE, Christiane. (1999). “Nuevos Medios”. En “AAVV. Arte de siglo XX. Vol. II. ARNS, Inke. (2005). “El código como acto de habla performativo”. En Revista Artnodes