Immersive Intelligent Aesthetics

Extreme weather events, such as mega-wildfires, have increased in their frequency and scale around the world. Science grapples with these dynamically unpredictable phenomena, investigating their fundamental processes.

Yet, the increasing body of knowledge remains experientially opaque to many stakeholders because current visualisation aesthetics are unable to embody their performative dynamics while fragmenting highly complex fire events into linear functions of individual variables, such as wind, fuel load, or moisture content.

This chapter outlines the development of iFire, an intelligent wildfire visualisation system that assimilates scientific wildfire data into a 3D visualisation engine using performative scenario modelling. It can immerse users inside 1:1 scale evolving landscape scenarios, enabling them to interactively engage with artificially intelligent wildfires that perform according to their own complex logic, independent of human expectations.

Drawing on theories of intraction (Barad) and terrestrial agency (Latour), the chapter considers the value of an intelligent performative aesthetics for reconceiving the visualisation of wildfires and explains how iFire translates this through integrating scientific data visualisation and artistic scenario modelling. The text closes with a discussion of iFire’s ability to create a new artistic/scientific visualisation paradigm that can explore the interactive dynamics of wildfires through intelligent immersive environments.

Authors: Susanne Thurow, Dennis Del Favero, Jason Sharples, Khalid Moinuddin, Charles Green