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Billboard in full bloom

5 July 2006

This image created by Dr Jon McCormack is currently featured on Australia's largest public art billboard.

A software-driven artwork by Monash Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA) co-director Dr Jon McCormack is currently enjoying huge exposure, both literally and figuratively, on Australia's largest public art billboard.

Dr McCormack's original image was enlarged 3000 per cent to fit the 45 metre long, nine metre high billboard that stands above a Brisbane freeway at Queensland University of Technology's creative industries precinct.

The commissioned work, 'Bloom', shows five giant computer synthesised plant forms, created with software written by Dr McCormack. The plants are fictional cross-breeds -- mutated hybrids of real species native to the local area.

Dr McCormack said the mutated plant species were created by simulation software that mimicked the growth and development of plants.

"The program accepts a short sequence of instructions, analogous to DNA, and then it builds the forms automatically," he said. "As the artist, you don't paint the picture; you do the equivalent of gene splicing ... you can make different plants that could never mate with each other in reality and get these hybrid forms."

Dr McCormack, a leading Australian new media artist with formal IT training, said the software could inform the disciplines of art, IT and biology.

"Biologists were traditionalists in terms of computers, so they mainly used them for statistical and data-gathering purposes. But people are starting to understand now that there's a value for simulation in terms of asking 'what if' questions," he said. "A group at CSIRO uses similar methods to model insect attacks on plants."

Dr McCormack said 'Bloom' represented technology and research, the focus of the precinct, but was also a creative project. There were also references to environmental destruction in the piece, he said, which showed both living and dead versions of the same plant.

"There are references to the lost nature that has been cleared away," he said. "There's a big freeway, and obviously people are becoming conscious about the impact of burning fossil fuels and human activity in general on the natural environment."

CEMA originated within the Faculty of Information Technology and has grown to include researchers from the faculties of Art and Design and Arts. Researchers explore the theoretical, creative and technical possibilities for electronic media art through a multidisciplinary engagement with science, technology and art.