OFFSPRING

Offspring is a visualization of the pair bonding process of a theoretical robot colony.

Each robot is assembled, ages through youth, comes into a reproductive stage, and eventually dies of fatigue. If a robot is lucky enough to find a mate during it’s reproductive stage, baby robots may be assembled.

Visually, the Offspring image is a historic graph of robot colony size and distribution. Males of the population are represented by single horizontal lines while Females are shown as double lines. The vertical position of the line indicates the robot’s time of assembly, and the horizontal position of the line shows it’s location in an abstract physical space. Faint diagonal lines connect parent and child. In this manner, older generations of robots are shown on the bottom of the image while their descendents are supported above them.

Robots can only mate with robots near them in both space in age. To encourage dissimilar permutations, robots are not allowed to mate with siblings.

Not all robot colonies survive. Harsh extraplanetary conditions and a reproductive period overcrowded with work and government keep the robots from flourishing…

1000 …even when times look good