Picture this: you're an animated whirligig, three spinning tiers of starfish-like forms, adrift in an arid dreamscape bathed in pulsating sound. You dance a flirtatious duet with an abstract creature, traverse a flock of beings behaving madly, break free of the boundaries of your hilly world. Across three screens in a space the size of a small multiplex movie theater, your computer-generated alter ego leads a playful, kinetic existence. Then it's back to a more familiar reality-as the next viewer is handed the Nintendo-style gamepad and with it control over Rebecca Allen's interactive art installation, "The Bush Soul."

This work-in-progress, unveiled in its three-screen format this summer at SIGGRAPH, the international digital graphics conference, in Orlando, Fla., combines the traditional West African belief that the human soul can replicate in an animal in the bush, with computer technology representing a human on screen as a ghostly pixel presence. "I wanted people to experience a computer-generated bush, a world that's alive, with familiar, fluid motions and unfamiliar characters with their own feelings, their own likes and dislikes influencing their behavior," explains Allen, chair of the department of design at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her ambition required a technological leap beyond standard computer character animation, in which each movement must be painstakingly specified; in Allen's work, movement emerges spontaneously from the interaction of characters' programmed "personalities."