The work took over three years to produce; the production process included authoring of a large body of special purpose software to evolve the artificial life forms contained on the disc. Turbulence was produced in association with the Australian Film Commission.
Here is a complete description of the work which includes exhibition requirements and equipment list.
Here is a short essay about the work.
A Gallery of images.
More information on Turbulence is available in the book: Impossible Nature: the art of Jon McCormack.
Turbulence relies on custom software developed specially for the project. Technical information on these developments is available in the papers listed below (see the research section for more details).
McCormack, J. 1992, 'Interactive Evolution of Forms' in Cavallaro, A., R. Harley, L. Wallace & M. Wark (eds), Third International Symposium on Electronic Art, The Australian Network for Art and Technology, Sydney, Australia, p. 122.
McCormack, J. 1993, 'Interactive Evolution of L-System Grammars for Computer Graphics Modelling', in Green, D. & T. Bossomaier (eds), Complex Systems: From Biology to Computation, ISO Press, Amsterdam. pp. 118-130.
McCormack, J. 1994, Turbulence: An Interactive Installation Exploring Artificial Life. Visual Proceedings: The Art and Interdisciplinary Programs of SIGGRAPH 94 (Orlando, Florida, July 24-29, 1994). In Computer Graphics Annual Conference Series, ACM SIGGRAPH, New York, pp. 182-183.
McCormack, J. 2003, The Application of L-Systems and Developmental Models to Computer Art, Animation, and Music Synthesis, Ph.D. thesis, School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University, Australia.
McCormack, J. 2004, 'Aesthetic Evolution of L-Systems Revisited', in Raidl, G.R., S. Cagnnoni, J. Branke, D.W. Corne, R. Drechsler, Y. Jin, C.G. Johnson, P. Machado, E. Marchiori, F. Rothlauf, G.D. Smith & G. Squillero (eds), Applications of Evolutionary Computing (Evoworkshops 2004), Vol. LNCS 3005, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg. pp. 477-488.
McCormack, J. 2004, 'Generative Modelling with Timed L-Systems', in Gero, J.S. (ed) Design Computing and Cognition '04, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. pp. 157-175.
McCormack, J. 2005, 'A Developmental Model for Generative Media', in Capcarrere, M. (ed) Eighth European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2005), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #3630, Springer-Verlag, Berlin; Heidelberg. pp. 88-97.