Eran Raitzes Launches Verse27

11.19.2010

Verse27 - "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."  Genesis 1:27

On November 17th, much revered Rabbit, Eran Raitzes lauched his latest project  - Verse27.  Inspired by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkin's Sucker/Cheater/Grudger Simulation,  Mr. Raitzes has programmed a more painterly interpretation to further illustrate, as Dawkins did,  that "there can be no true altruism in nature".   He's since moved on to more fantastic - and even less altruistic - biological scenarios.  His Creatures reproduce like rabbits, mutate into a variety of subspieces, and make food out of their enemies.  Incest is not entirely forbidden, and there's talk of a zombie rising on the horizon.

An accomplished painter, Mr. Raitzes has created a digital society of Creatures encoded with a distinctly colorful DNA.  Like most living things, these Creatures burst to life, feed, reproduce, get sick and die.  All the while, a repeated procedure of randomly sequenced numbers and spaces leads to generational mutations allowing the Creatures to evolve independently of their creator, Mr. Raitzes.

Mr. Raitzes offers us two windows into the lives of the Creatures.  The window on the right gives us a view into the daily grind.  Lifetimes are spent migrating across the screen in search of food, or a mate.  Epidemics spread through some enclaves, while others thrive with good health.  Populations wax and wane as generations unfold.  As with watching exotic fish in an aquarium, its easy to get lost in a reverie.

The window on the left provides the historical account of the Creatures from the first generation to the last.  Every bit of color is the record of a time, a location and an event - one gave birth here at this moment, another died here at that moment, these became sick, these found food.  This is the unfolding of a history encoded into color and lines on a two dimensional canvas, each layer informing the next.  This tangled web of color and light is often the cumulative narrative of millions of lives.

In the end, Mr. Raitzes leaves us with a layered experience, as intellectually challenging as it is aesthetically pleasing.  He's injected a playful sensuality into Dawkins' simulation leaving us to digest the evolutionary implications while wafting in the visual elegance derived by those same implications.

Verse27.com