C. Jacob et al. (Eds.): ICARIS 2005, LNCS 3627, pp. 1–12, 2005. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005 Fugue: An Interactive Immersive Audiovisualisation and Artwork Using an Artificial Immune System Peter J. Bentley, Gordana Novakovic, and Anthony Ruto Department of Computer Science, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK P.Bentley@cs.ucl.ac.uk, gordana.novakovic@btopenworld.com, a.ruto@cs.ucl.ac.uk Abstract. Fugue is the result of a collaboration between artist, musician and computer scientists. The result is an on-going project which provides a new way of communicating complex scientific ideas to any audience. Immersive virtual reality and sound provide an interactive audiovisual interface to the dynamics of a complex system – for this work, an artificial immune system. Participants are able to see and interact with immune cells flowing through a lymphatic vessel and understand how the complex dynamics of the whole are produced by local interactions of viruses, B cells, antibodies, dendritic cells and clotting platelets. 1 Introduction Science often involves abstract formalisms, typically mathematical, of the tangled com- plexity of the phenomena under study. Communicating these ideas is not easy, whether between colleagues or to the general public. To aid in such endeavors there is a signifi- cant need for scientists to employ more direct methods – audio and visual – of repre- senting the systems with which they deal. In scientific education, it has become clear that traditional formal methods of study are increasingly alien to students who have grown up in a world dominated by digital media; at least initially, they require more familiar means of accessing science. Likewise, in communicating science to non- scientists, the constraints of the printed page or the talking head mean that is often nec- essary to simplify the subject matter to the point where too much is lost or excluded. Our intention in this work is to examine a new approach. We propose that the best way of enabling both scientists and non-scientists to understand a complex function- ing system is not just to present it to him as a spectacle, but to engage him as a par- ticipant, and to enable him to interact with the system in a multisensory way, directly appreciating cause and effect, variability, intrinsic dynamics, periodicity, and so on. To achieve this, direct input from an artist and a musician is used to guide the visual and audio experience. In other words: we propose to exploit artists’ knowledge of the relation between interactivity and perception, and harness it in the communication of scientific complexity. Artists and scientists are both concerned with understanding the world and our be- ing in the world, but while the view of the scientist is rooted in consensus and en- deavors towards objectivity, the artist emphasises the values of the personal and sub-