This film was only available during the Computer Baroque online exhibition, which ran from 14 April-14 July 2009.

Software and Animation Karl Sims
Music David Grimes, Target Productions
Drums Jim Salem, Abbi Spinner, Ken Schachat and Seth Goldstein
Thanks to Peter Schroeder, Lew Tucker, Gary Oberbrunner, Matt Fitzgibbon and Dave Sheppard
Hardware Connection Machine CM-2

Primordial Dance is an experimental animation containing a progression of abstract textures and colors. It is a study of emerging and transforming mathematical equations.

These effects were created using an interactive process of "artificial evolution." The artist and computer collaborate to produce images and movements that neither could easily produce alone. The computer generates and displays a collection of experimental abstract images. The artist chooses the most aesthetically interesting images, and those survive and are "bred" to produce a new collection of images. The equations, or artificial genes, of the survivors are copied, mutated, and mated by the computer to generate new offspring pictures. This process of variation and selection is repeated, and with each cycle more complex and interesting results can occur. Finally, movements are created by performing "genetic interpolations" between these evolved images. This piece contains a series of these interpolations applied to various sets of evolved images.

Karl Sims was one of the first major figures to emerge in artists’ computer animation at this time. Particle Dreams and Primordial Dance are two less well known works that show how he was able to present his computer graphics research at MIT in a way that brought out what was both scientifically and artistically original about it. Particle Dreams shows some early 'sketches' of particle systems, while in Primordial Dance Sims developed a technique that 'evolved' mathematical equations to produce such breathtaking visual artifice that it seems to challenge our human parameters of what constitutes an image.

Karl Sims studied computer graphics at the MIT Media Lab, and Life Sciences as an undergraduate at MIT. He is the Founder and President of GenArts, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which creates special effects software for the motion picture industry.