DEVELOPING THE BLACK SHOALS STOCK MARKET PLANETARIUM

While developing the project we were been approached by hundreds of interested specialists from all over the world, from many different research areas, professions, institutions, companies, political convictions and cultural backgrounds.

We initially set up thematic discussions around the project on our developer website where many contributed ideas on how to develop the project. Based on these discussions we invited a group of nine artificial life researchers to join us for a weekend brainstorming at the musician Peter Gabriel’s Realworld Studios, near Bath in England. The outcome of this weekend worked as the backbone for the implementation of the project. Based on our original ideas and the research of English Alife researcher Cefn Hoile, we defined the first sketch ideas for the design of the ALife and the architecture of the system.

It became necessary to develop innovative collaboration strategies and to write new collaboration software in order to coordinate the many people who advised us and worked on the project, as well as the large community of interest that built up around it. The programming of the first stage of the project took most of a year, and was carried out by a network of programmers who developed the project over the internet. Since mid 2003 we have been working on the second stage of development, with a much larger projection system, constellations and improvements to the ALife creatures.

System Architecture for the planetarium.

Drawing from a brainstorming session at Realworld Studios in 2000