The Cambrian Game, by Toshihiro Anzai and Rieko Nakamura, is a game in which players submit their own “leaf” to a “tree.” You then link a new leaf to the existing leaf that inspired you to create the new one. This game is typically played by multiple players and generates a tree that grows according to how ideas propagate, transform, and evolve through the players’ interactions with a social media space. The game could be played using different kinds of digital and analog media like drawings, abstract shapes, camera phone photos, haiku poems, etc.

At Aichi Expo, the artists organized several sessions of the game, one of which is done using camera phones.

[a tree of camera phone pictures generated by the Cambrian Game players at Aichi Expo]

It’s fun to take a look at this to see, for example, which pictures generated many new pictures and which ones did not.

The artists are also known by their previous work on Face Poiesis, that models portrait pictures using the concept of genes and automatically remixes and generates many different faces.

thanks to elisa!