Jeffrey Ventrella

Jeffrey Ventrella is an algorithmic artist, software developer, and author known for his research in artificial life, virtual worlds, fractal curves, evolutionary art, and avatar body language. Ventrella was principal inventor and, with Will Harvey, co-founder of the virtual world There.
Career
Ventrella began his career in the late 1980's in scientific visualization at Syracuse University. In 1992 he taught computer graphics at the University of California, San Diego under the direction of artist Harold Cohen.
Ventrella co-founded the virtual world product There.com in 1998. He motivated the conceptualization and implementation of "avatar-centric communication" at There. Ventrella subsequently worked as a Senior Developer at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. While researching non-verbal communication in virtual humans at the School of Interactive Art and Technology in Vancouver, Ventrella wrote the book, Virtual Body Language. Speaking on the official Second Life blog, former Linden Lab CEO Cory Ondrejka referred to Ventrella as "one of the world's experts on avatars and 3D communications." One of Ventrella's core projects in Second Life was "avatar puppeteering," an area where he has also published scholarship.
Ventrella is also known as the author of GenePool, an artificial life game demonstrating Darwinian evolution. He has published several articles in the artificial life community. Prior to his career in virtual worlds, Ventrella joined Rocket Science Games in 1995, where he prototyped games and designed the artificial life simulator Darwin Pond.
Ventrella taught at the Centre for Digital Media at Great Northern Way Campus, in Vancouver, British Columbia. He frequently appears on the Biota.org podcast.
Ventrella is a frequent author and reviewer with the Bridges Organization (which oversees an annual conference on mathematical connections in the arts). He has published research on fractal curves, including a technique for generating space-filling curves with five-fold rotational symmetry using complex numbers.
Education
Ventrella holds a master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab and a Master of Fine Arts in Computer Graphics from Syracuse University.
Publications
* "Evolving Vestibular Bipedal Locomotion with Spring-Mass Tetrahedra" Artificial Life Conference Proceedings, 2023
* "The Family Tree of Fractal Curves -A taxonomy of plane-filling curves using complex integer lattices" EyeBrain Books, 2019
* "Brain-filling Curves - a Fractal Bestiary" EyeBrain Books, 2012
* "Avatar Physics and Genetics," Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000
* "Evolving Structure in Liquid Music," The Art of Artificial Evolution, 2008
* "GenePool: Exploring the Interaction Between Natural Selection and Sexual Selection," Artificial Life Models in Software, 2005
* "Emergence of Morphology and Locomotion Behavior in Animated Characters," Artificial Life IV, 1994
* "Gliders and Riders"
* "Evolving the Mandelbrot Set to Imitate Figurative Art"

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