Musician Max Cooper collaborated with artist Sabine Volkert to create the accompanying video, which features symmetrical delightful creatures morphing and overlapping. Volkert's hand-drawn style makes it a fine complement to the music.
Via Max:
For this chapter of the Emergence story I wanted to escape the computational and data-driven approaches often used in other parts of the project, and try something more humanised. I found an amazing artist called Sabine Volkert, who hand-draws every frame of her videos, which creates a very particular sort of feeling, and one that seemed to me to fit with the feeling of the music and of the concept involved – the tinkering of animal development via random mutation to create a rich variation of forms on which natural selection can act – the mechanism of Darwinian Evolution.
Sabine told this story with warping morphologies, exploring the range of animal structures we see around us. All of these different structures have many shared underlying principles, such as segmentation (units built around analogues of a spinal cord), modularity (organs as individual units), and bilateral symmetry (mirrored body structure to give directionality for senses). There are many more of these common principles shared amongst animal forms, which are coded for and created by shared molecular mechanisms like the genetic code and gene regulation, which guide the process of development to create each different animal.
• Organa (official video by Sabine Volkert) (YouTube / Max Cooper)
