The Living and the Life-like: Art and Artificial Life

For a comprehensive overview of artificial life art see Juan Romero, and Penousal Machado, eds., The Art of Artificial Evolution. A Handbook on Evolutionary Art and Music (Berlin: Springer, 2008); Mitchell Whitelaw, Metacreation. Art and Artificial Life (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004); the chapter “Künstliches Leben: die Kunst des Lebens in silico” in the book by Claudia Giannetti, Ästhetik des Digitalen. Ein intermediärer Beitrag zu Wissenschaft, Medien-und Kunstsystemen (Vienna: Springer, 2004), 148–166; Ingeborg Reichle, “Artificial Life Art—Transgenic Art. Zur Verschränkung von Kunst und Biotechnologie in der Medienkunst der Neunziger jähre.” ZIF Bulletin 24. Cyberfeminismus. Feministische Visionen mit Netz und ohne Boden? (2002): 87–102.Google Scholar

Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture. The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968). On Burnham’s propositions see Sabeth Buchmann, “Die Drehung des Kunst-Wissenschaft-Syndroms,” in Geld, beat.synthetik. Abwerten bio/technologisch er Annahmen, ed. Susanne Schultz (Berlin: Edition ID-Archiv, 1996), 231–247.Google Scholar

Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 209ff.Google Scholar

See Karl Gerbel and Peter Weibel, eds., Genetic Art—Artificial Life, Ars Electronica 93 (Vienna: PVS Verleger, 1993).Google Scholar

Every year, the VTDA LIFE institution appoints a jury which selects and evaluates a number of works from among the entries submitted (www.telefonica.es/vida/). In the first year of the competition the Canadian artist Nell Tenhaaf was Artistic Director. There is a first, second, and third prize plus honorary mentions. In the first year the first prize was awarded to Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen for Trickle, the second went to Bill Vorn and Louis-Philippe Demers for La Cour des Miracles, and the third to Scott Draves for Bomb; see Nell Tenhaaf, “Art Embodies A-Life. The VIDA Competition.” Leonardo 41.1 (2008): 6–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Mitchell Whitelaw suggests a different, four-part typology: First, Breeders, which focus on processes of artificial evolution; second: Cybernatures, interactive computational systems that mimic the tangled interrelations of organic life, addressing the tension between organic life, or nature, and its technological double; third: Hardware, is work that centers on a physical manifestation as well as interactive robotic systems, including biorobotic composites that involve a coupling between biological life forms and electromechanical systems; and fourth: Abstract Machines, the life in artificial life recedes momentarily in works in which the analogy implicit in these techniques is less important than their generative properties; see Mitchell Whitelaw 2004, 20–21.Google Scholar

In this connection the following artists should be mentioned: Joel Slayton and his installation Telepresent Surveillance, Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn with works such as The Scavengers, Gerard Boyer and Machine Palmipede, Matt Heckert (in collaboration with Survival Research Laboratories) and his Mechanical Sound Orchestra, the early telerobotics works by Eduardo Kac, Eric Paulos, Marc Pauline, the artist duo Erwin and Maria Verstappen and Tickle, Nell Tenhaaf and her installation You Could Be Me, and The Robot Group. On the historical background to the interlinking of art and robotics see Eduardo Kac, “Origin and Development of Robotic Art.” Art Journal 56.3 (1997): 60–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Francisco J. Varela, Humberto R. Maturana, and R. Uribe, “Autopoiesis. The Organization of Living Systems, Its Characterization and a Model.” Biosystems 5 (1974): 187–196; Francisco J. Varela and Humberto R. Maturana, The Tree of Knowledge. The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

On the theory of the self-organization of living systems see Angelika Saupe, Selbstproduktion von Natur. Die Autopoiesistheorie: Herausforderung für eine feministische Theorie der Gesellschaft, in Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur, vol. 6, ed. Ulrich Eisel and Ludwig Trepl (Freising, Weihenstephan: Technische Universität Berlin, 1997).Google Scholar

In the early 1970s the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze und Felix Guattari formulated in Anti-Oedipus the concept of the “autopoietic nexus” of machines, and developed Maturana’s concept of autopoiesis by extending his idea of autopoietic machines as closed and self-reproducing systems that are defined via the totality of their components to include social and cultural systems; see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’anti-Œdipe. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1984); Angelika Saupe, Verlebendigung der Technik. Perspektiven im feministischen Technikdiskurs (Bielefeld: Kleine, 2002), 220ff.Google Scholar

Kenneth Rinaldo, “The Flock. Artificial Life Sculpture.” online: www.ylem.org/artists/krinaldo/works/flock/flock.html (2.1.2003).Google Scholar

See Yves Amu Klein, “Living Sculpture. The Art and Science of Creating Robotic Life.” Leonardo 31.5 (1998): 393–396.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

See Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts, 1904); new edition in English: Ernst Haeckel, Art Forms in Nature. The Prints of Ernst Haeckel. One Hundred Color Plates (Munich: Prestel, 1998). The sculpture Octofungi especially is very reminiscent of the forms of jellyfish that Haeckel shows on Plate 16, Fig. 1 (Narcomedusae—Spangenqualle), Plate 48, Fig. 7 (Stanromedusae—Becherqualle), and on Plate 88, Fig. 1 (Discomedusae—Scheibenqualle); on Haeckel’s work see Olaf Breidbach, Visions of Nature. The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel (Munich: Prestel, 2006).Google Scholar

Simon Penny, “Artistic Practice, Body Knowledge and the Engineering World View,” in Memesis. The Future of Evolution, Ars Electronica 96, ed. Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schöpf (Vienna: Springer, 1996), 190–207.Google Scholar

Simon Penny has written extensively on the linkage of art, robotics, and artificial life. He has warned repeatedly about overestimating new technologies applied to the context of art, and pointed out that the emergence of new technologies is invariably associated with Utopian rhetoric; Simon Penny, “The Darwin Machine: Artificial Life and Interactive Art.” New Formations. Technoscience 29 (August 1996): 59–68.Google Scholar

Simon Penny, “Embodied Cultural Agents: At the Intersection of Art, Robotics and Cognitive Science,” in Socially Intelligent Agents: Papers from the 1997 AAAI Fall Symposium (8–10 November), ed. American Association for Artificial Intelligence (Menlo Park: AAAI Press, 1997), 103.Google Scholar

Kenneth E. Rinaldo, “Technology Recapitulates Phylogeny. Artificial Life Art.” Leonardo 31.5 (1998): 371ff.Google Scholar

See Hans Moravec, “Die Sinne haben keine Zukunft,” in Der Sinn der Sinne, ed. Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen: Steidl, 1998), 322; more generally see Hans Moravec, Mind Children. The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Hans Moravec, Robot. Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

Roy Ascott, ed., Art, Technology, Consciousness: mind@large (Bristol: Intellect, 2000); Roy Ascott, ed., Consciousness Reframed. Art and Consciousness in the Post-Biological Era. Proceedings of the First International CAiiA Research Conference, Convened at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (Newport: University of Wales College, 1997).Google Scholar

Simon Penny, “Artistic Practice, Body Knowledge and the Engineering World View,” in Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schöpf 1996, 198.Google Scholar

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).Google Scholar

Stephen Todd and William Latham, Evolutionary Art and Computers (London: Academic Press, 1992), 209.Google Scholar

Interactive Video Kaleidoscope (1987) was Karl Sims’ first work to incorporate evolutionary image processes. It was exhibited in 1988 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Siggraph’ 88 in Atlanta. Particle Dreams, an animated waterfall and snowstorm, followed in 1988. His work Panspermia (1990) was exhibited from 1997 to 2000 at the ICC in Tokyo. These early works were followed by Primordial Dance (1991), Liquid Selves (1992), Genetic Images (1993), Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994), and Galapagos (1997).Google Scholar

On genetic programming see John R. Koza, Genetic Programming. On the Programming of Computers by Means of Natural Selection (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992).Google Scholar

See Karl Sims, “Genetic Images,” and “Interactive Evolution,” both in Karl Gerbel and Peter Weibel 1993, 119–121; 401–407; Karl Sims, “Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition,” in Artificial Life IV Proceedings, ed. Rodney A. Brooks and Pattie Maes (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994), 28–39.Google Scholar

On Karl Sims’ genetic images see Karl Sims, “Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics.” Computer Graphics. Siggraph’ 91. Annual Conference Proceedings (1991), 319–328; Karl Sims, “Evolving Virtual Creatures.” Computer Graphics. Siggraph’ 94. Annual Conference Proceedings (1994), 15–22.Google Scholar

Karl Sims 1991, 328.Google Scholar

Cf. Louis Bee, “Prolegomena,” in Karl Gerbel and Peter Weibel 1993, 172–180; Louis Bee, “Zoosystemiker,” in Kunstforum International, vol. 97, Ästhetik des Immateriellen? I. (Ruppichteroth: Kunstforum, 1988), 136–137; Louis Bec, “Vorläufiger Versuch über die Upokrinomenologie oder: Eine verheerende zoosystemische Expedition durch ein Glossar,” in Digitaler Schein. Ästhetik der elektronischen Medien, ed. Florian Rötzer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 397–416.Google Scholar

Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec, Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Instituts Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturallste (Göttingen: Immatrix, 1987).Google Scholar

On the Nerve Garden project see Bruce Darner, “The Cyberbiological Worlds of Nerve Garden. A Test Bed for VRML 2.0.” Leonardo 31.5 (1998): 389–392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Jon McCormack, “Art and the Artificial,” in Impossible Nature. The Art of Jon McCormack (Melbourne: Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 2004), 7.Google Scholar

On TechnoSphere see Jane Prophet 1996, 339–344; Jane Prophet, “‘Real’ Time, “Artificial” Life.” Leonardo 34.4 (2001): 309–312; Simon Yuill, “Jane Prophet: The Double Landscape: Image, Place, Cyberspace, and the Work of Jane Prophet.” Transcript 3 (2000): 73–78; Ingeborg Reichle, “TechnoSphere:. Körper und Kommunikation im Cyberspace,” in Bildhandeln. Bildwissenschaft, vol. 3, ed. Klaus Sachs-Hombach and Klaus Rehkämper (Magdeburg: Scriptum, 2002), 193–204.Google Scholar

Jane Prophet, “Sublime Ecologies and Artistic Endeavors. Artificial Life and Interactivity in the Online Project TechnoSphere.” Leonardo 29.5 (1996): 341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

http://cern.ch/Info/Announcements/CERN/2003/04-30TenYearsWWW/ (19.8. 2008). On the history of the Internet see Jeffrey A. Hart, Robert R. Reed, and FranVois Bar, “The Building of the Internet: Implications for the Future of Broadband Networks.” Telecommunications Policy 16.8 (1992): 666–689; Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community. Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 65–109; Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates, “The Ancient History of the Internet.” American Heritage 4.6 (1995): 34–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

See Söke Dinkla, Pioniere Interaktiver Kunst von 1970 bis heute. Published by ZKM Karlsruhe (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1997).Google Scholar

Gordon Selley’s contribution to TechnoSphere was part of a research project at Coventry School of Art and Design, which was funded by the Rediffusion Simulation company (now Thomson Training & Simulation) and supported by John Vince and Clive Richards. The software Trees and Woods Image Generation System, was developed by Selley to simulate images of natural phenomena on the computer; Gordon Selley, Trees and Woods Image Generation System, Ph.D. thesis, Department of Graphic Design, Coventry University, 1991.Google Scholar

Jane Prophet, “Sublime Ecologies and Artistic Endeavors. Artificial Life and Interactivity in the Online Project TechnoSphere.” Leonardo 29.5 (1996): 341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Jane Prophet, “TechnoSphere. “Real” Time, “Artificial” Life.” Leonardo 34.4 (2001): 310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Particularly relevant in this context are Edmund Burke’s (1729–1997) writings on aesthetics: Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful with an Introductory Discourse Concerning Taste (London: Scott, Webster & Geary, 1757).Google Scholar

Jane Prophet, “Sublime Ecologies and Artistic Endeavors. Artificial Life and Interactivity in the Online Project TechnoSphere.” Leonardo 29.5 (1996): 342.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Jane Prophet 1996, 342.Google Scholar

Jane Prophet 1996, 341.Google Scholar

The German philosopher Sybille Krämer sees the increasingly prevalent perception of networked computers as an artificial communication network as closing the Utopian gap which opened up with the waning of the suggestive power of the vision of computers as artificial intelligence, and describes this transition from artificial intelligence to artificial communication as a change in orientation; see Sybille Krämer, “Vom Mythos “Künstliche Intelligenz” zum Mythos “Künstliche Kommunikation” oder: Ist eine nichtanthropomorphe Beschreibung von Internet-Interaktionen möglich?” in Mythos Internet, ed. Stefan Münker and Alexander Roesler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 83.Google Scholar

In the discourse that accompanies the rise of any new medium time and again gender attributions can be observed that function as ordering and hierarchizing elements. For instance, the telephone: Lena F. Rakow, “Women and the Telephone. The Gendering of a Communication Technology,” in Technology and Womens Voices, ed. Cheris Kramarae (London: Routledge, 1988), 207–222; Ann Moyal, “The Gendered Use of the Telephone. An Australian Case Study,” in Media, Culture, and Society 14 (1992): 51–72; James Everett Katz, Connections. Social and Cultural Studies of the Telephone in American Life (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1999). The central aspect of actual dissolution of the sexes and thus the overcoming of gender dichotomies, however, appears to be genuinely attributed to disembodied communication praxis in cyberspace and to gender construction in cyberspace: Jenny Wolmark, Cybersexualities. A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

Cf. Anne Balsamo, “The Virtual Body in Cyberspace,” in Research in Philosophy and Technology. Technology and Feminism, vol. 13 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1993), 119–139.Google Scholar

See Jörg Müller, Virtuelle Körper. Aspekte sozialer Körperlichkeit im Cyberspace (Berlin: WZB Forschungsschwerpunkt Technik, Arbeit, Umwelt, 1996), 96–105.Google Scholar

Myron Krueger cited in Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991), 215.Google Scholar

On The Internal Organs of a Cyborg see Jane Prophet, “Imag(in)ing the Cyborg,” in Desire by Design: Body, Territory, and New Technologies, ed. Cutting Edge. The Women’s Research Group (London: IB Taurus, 1999), 51–59.Google Scholar

The Landscape Room (2000) was exhibited in 2000 at the Optical Allusions show in Norwich Arts Centre, Norfolk, U.K. The work consists of five digital prints in which photographs of landscapes are combined with fractally simulated landscapes. The first print was purchased by Castle Museum, Norfolk. The fractal landscapes were created in collaboration with Gordon Selley.Google Scholar