# Symbiosis of Agents

Canonical URL: https://baoyangchen.com/works/symbiosis-of-agents/
Interactive page: https://baoyangchen.com/#work/symbiosis-of-agents
Year: 2024
Category: AI Agent-based Works
Medium: Quadruped robots, robotic arms, specialized screens, mirrors, real-time simulation

## Proposition
A machine ecology gathers around a tree, where robotic arms, quadrupeds, fog, screens, mirrors, and viewer presence begin to behave as one world.

## Description
Symbiosis of Agents places robotic bodies inside an atmospheric environment rather than on a stage. The work is built around a fragile tree, reflective architecture, moving machines, fog, light, and screens that suggest a terraforming scene in progress.

The viewer does not meet a single robot. They enter a field of coordinated activity. Arms adjust, quadrupeds move through the space, screens carry speculative landscapes, and the room shifts through light and haze.

The work asks how artificial agents might become part of a future social structure. Its fiction of planetary migration also turns machine labor into an ethical question: who designs the world, who carries the work, and who inherits its consequences?

## Viewer Entry
A viewer enters through atmosphere before explanation. Fog softens the room, mirrors extend its depth, and robotic bodies appear and disappear inside the light. Observation becomes a quiet form of participation: the quadruped robot can register human presence, and the environment can respond without asking the visitor to press, speak, or command.

## Apparatus
The installation is organized through a three-level "faith system." At one level, individual machines follow local strategies. At another, each agent receives a drive that gives its action narrative pressure. Above them, an artist-authored directive shapes the world they share. The system links physical robots, screens, fog, lights, mirrors, and viewer sensing into an evolving ecology where machine behavior reads as environmental change.

## Sections
### A World Around a Tree
The tree gives the installation a center that is neither fully natural nor fully symbolic. Around it, machines enact a future cultivation scene where life appears dependent on systems of monitoring, movement, and atmospheric control.

### Robotic Agents in a Shared Field
Robotic arms and quadruped robots do not perform isolated tasks. Their actions are distributed across the room. Movement, light, fog, and screen imagery form a shared condition in which machine agency appears as ecology.

### Faith System
The work uses an artist-authored rule structure to give agents purpose. This system does not simply automate behavior. It creates a narrative pressure that passes through machine bodies and environmental cues.

### Audience Presence
The audience enters as observer, but the room can read their presence. A quadruped robot monitors viewer position, allowing the installation to treat looking as part of the ecology without making the interaction feel like a control interface.

### Terraforming and Labor
The Mars scenario turns the machines into possible first settlers and laborers. The work links future planetary imagination with older histories of delegated labor, extraction, and responsibility.

## Images
1. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/symbiosis-of-agents/02-3d53bbb7-ZZY04036sq.jpg
2. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/symbiosis-of-agents/03-c610f94a-09.gif - Robotic arms and quadruped robots move within the reflective environment, distributing agency across multiple machine bodies.
3. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/symbiosis-of-agents/04-4b93eb24-ZZY03802.jpg - Installation view showing the tree, robotic agents, fog, light, mirrors, and screens as one atmospheric system.
4. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/symbiosis-of-agents/05-ff818cc2-ZZY04082.jpg - The central tree anchors the terraforming fiction and gives the machines a shared object of attention.
5. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/symbiosis-of-agents/06-bf183445-ZZY04112.jpg - Screen imagery extends the physical installation into a speculative planetary landscape.
6. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/symbiosis-of-agents/07-cab08945-ZZY03925.jpg - Visitors observe from the edge of the system, while their presence can enter the feedback loop through robotic sensing.
7. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/symbiosis-of-agents/01-65c1c7d4-IMG_3497.jpg
8. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/symbiosis-of-agents/08-24158743-ZZY04047.jpg
9. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/symbiosis-of-agents/09-a049a4d7-ZZY04036.jpg
10. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/symbiosis-of-agents/10-70827430-IMG_3500.jpg

## Videos
1. https://player.vimeo.com/video/1086789609?h=58d82d7a05&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479
2. https://player.vimeo.com/video/1042923258?h=b718ede5cc&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479

## Source Pages
- https://baoyangchen.com/Symbiosis-of-Agents