Developed in close technical and creative collaboration between Itaú Cultural and the High Performance Computing Center (HLRS) of the University of Stuttgart, Germany, as of the partnership agreement signed in 2016, this work faced the technical challenge of going beyond local possibilities and using the resources offered by an international center of excellence for scientific research involving cutting edge technology. The artistic challenge was to create a work that would be a reflexive and poetic experience.

Odisseia is a journey under an open and infinite daytime sky, where a large cube acts as a transparent spaceship. With entrances and exits on each side and a changeable availability of paths, the idea is for visitors to feel as if they were walking inside a glass labyrinth, where it is possible to walk toward the cube/spaceship’s possible exits without the pull of gravity.

The definition of labyrinths, their location and size – an aesthetic choice – was left up to genetic algorithms executed by the HLRS’s Cray XC-40 supercomputer. The condition of not being able to backtrack over the traveled paths is caused by the participants themselves since their steps break and smash the transparent surfaces that make up the labyrinth’s interior as they seek an exit that would take them back into the sky. The game is simple, but difficult: enter into the cube/spaceship, cross the maze and find the way out to the sky…

Technical coordination and genetic algorithms: Marcos Cuzziol Virtual environment: Odair Gaspar Sound: Eduardo Verderame 3D studies: Rodrigo Barbosa Programming: Kenzo Okamura