Universal Everything a parade of the digital fantastic

The world premiere exhibition by the international art and design collective employs generative technology that feeds off people's body shapes and movements to create ever-changing artworks.

It features 13 massive pieces including four new works and many of the collective's all-time favourites.

"It feels like we're putting out a greatest hits album, here at ACMI is the greatest hits of Universal Everything," Joel Gethin Lewis from Universal Everything told AAP.

Encountering a series of giant screens that transform movements into strange digital creatures, the popular response from students from St Brendan's Primary in Flemington on Tuesday was to dance.

Harry, 11, found his movements transformed into a shaggy digital creature.

"It's abstract and crazy how they can track you like that," he said, while fellow student Max, 11, said the exhibition was simply amazing.

"I have loved it. It's very real and smart," he said.

"We want to inspire joy and and play for everyone and we encourage you to just sit and be with it, or throw yourself around, however you're watching," said ACMI's Keri Elmsly.

One artwork best appreciated from a floor cushion was composed of a parade of digital animals - a shaggy red and yellow dog ran past, wagging its three tails, followed by what could have been a six legged rhino covered in leaves.

There were figures of fire morphing into rock on an unending looped stroll, and bulbous metallic creatures making their way down what must be the strangest ever fashion runway.

Maison Autonome is the collective's look at fashion, using 150 models in a computational fantasy fashion parade - although they don't look like models, their physical expression is unmistakably from the catwalk.

Universal Everything was founded in 2004 by Matt Pyke and has grown into a global group of architects, software engineers, animators and musicians, that has worked with the likes of Radiohead and Apple.

The exhibition marks 20 years since the collective began in England, and there have been huge leaps in technology since that time, explained Lewis.

When Universal Everything started out, images required rendering, a process that could take weeks to produce decent quality, but these days large scale images can be produced interactively and in real time.

Yet no matter how impressive the finished product, the exhibition also shows that each artwork begins with a simple hand-drawn sketch, with these drawings on public display for the first time.

Universal Everything does what it says on the tin, Lewis said. Thanks to having members all around the world, it makes artworks that are truly for everyone.

And the idea of the moving body is perhaps the most global concept of all, he said.

"The figure in motion is perhaps the oldest artistic subject ever, we're going back to someone sketching on a wall with a piece of charcoal from the fire," he told AAP.

Beings is on show at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne until September 29.

Australian Associated Press