In 2019, Amay Kataria was invited to represent the Art & Technology Studies department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago at Ars Electronica. There, he presented Nest - an interactive artificial-life system, inhabiting synthetic agents that have life-like behaviors. It is an ecosystem driven completely by computation rules and algorithms that map the creature’s desires into realistic behaviors like attraction, repulsion, stretching, pulling, etc. Every creature is sensitive to other creatures around it and senses its environment through red circular detectors on their body. Whenever they come close to another creature, they either attract or repel based on their current state of desires.
This project was developed using an open-source creative coding library called Open-Frameworks.