This paper investigates a range of Australian Research Council funded projects recently exhibited at venues such as the Sydney Film Festival, ISEA Hong Kong, Chronus Shanghai and ZKM Karlsuhe. Realized through collaborative research across the domains of aesthetics, artificial intelligence and creative arts, these projects utilise full-body Virtual Reality cinematic environments in which the user transacts with an autonomous digital world. Through its discussion of the aesthetics and AI architecture underpinning these projects, the paper explores the concept of co-evolutionary aesthetics, a function of the mutually evolving relationship between human users and AI visualisation systems.
The paper explores this reciprocal aesthetic as a dynamic two-way process between human and machine intelligence with major implications for applications in the creative industries and beyond.