Art and Artificial Life – a Primer

2009

It was not until the late 1980s that the term 'Artificial Life' arose as a descriptor of a range of (mostly) computer based research practices which sought alternatives to conventional Artificial Intelligence methods as a source of (quasi-) intelligent behavior in technological systems and artifacts. These practices included reactive and bottom-up robotics, computational systems which simulated evolutionary and genetic processes, and are range of other activities informed by biology and complexity theory. A general desire was to capture, harness or simulate the generative and 'emergent' qualities of 'nature'-of evolution, co-evolution and adaptation. 'Emergence' was a keyword in the discourse. Two decades later, the discourses of Artificial Life continues to have intellectual force, mystique and generative quality within the 'computers and art' community. This essay is an attempt to contextualise Artificial Life Art by providing an historical ...

Digital Creativity, 2010

This essay begins with discussion of four relatively recent works which are representative of major themes and preoccupations in Artificial Life Art: 'Propagaciones' by Leo Nuñez; 'Sniff' by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George; 'Universal Whistling Machine' by Marc Boehlen; and 'Performative Ecologies' by Ruari Glynn. This essay is an attempt to contextualise these works by providing an overview of the history and forms of Artificial Life Art as it has developed over two decades, along with some background in the ideas of the Artificial Life movement of the late 1980s and 1990s. 1

2007

Annals of Science

Design, User Experience, and Usability: User Experience in Advanced Technological Environments, 2019

On the field of Evolutionary Computational Art, artists frequently adopt a top-down process of creation, employing the algorithms only as a mean to express a previously conceived composition. In this sense, the present paper aims to discuss the use of Genetic Algorithms for the development of systems with greater level of emergence, running towards the increase of its effective complexity, understood as suggested by Gell-Mann. In this context it is presented the system Morphogenesis. It was developed as a Multi-Agent Adaptive System, built with Genetic Algorithms to generate movement, feeding, fighting and reproductive behaviors. All these behaviors are programed at the individual level, from which emerge the macro patterns of the groups, simulating the evolutionary process. The system analysis suggests that the fitness function should not be focused at the arrangements of the agents' genotype, but at the adaptation of the phenotype itself. It is expected that the use of algorithms that allow expressions closer to the evolutionary process has a greater affinity with the aesthetic notion proposed for the field of Evolutionary Computational Art. Hereupon, a qualitative exploratory study was conducted to compare the perception of the high effective complexity arrangements against random arrangements. Preliminary results show that the evolutionary process could be associated with a greater evaluation of intentionality of the compositions and could be also related with a deeper aesthetic evaluation.

Leonardo, 2002

The new interdisciplinary science of artificial life has had a connection with the arts from its inception. This paper provides an overview of artificial life, reviews its key scientific challenges, and discusses its philosophical implications. It ends with a few words about the implications of artificial life for the arts.

Drawing on our own art/science practices and a series of interviews with artificial life practitioners, we explore the entanglement of developments at the artistic edges of artificial life. We start by defining key terms from Karen Baradʼs agential realism. We then diffractively read artificial life together with agential realism to discuss the potential for interventions in the field. Through a discussion of artificial life computer simulations, ideas of agency are problematized, and artificial lifeʼs single purposeful actor, the agent is replaced by agential, an adjective denoting a relationship rather than a subject-object duality. We then seek to reinterpret the difficult-to-define term “emergence.” Agency in artificial life emerges through what Barad calls entanglement, in this case between observers and their apparatus, a perpetual engagement between observations of a system and their interpretations. The article explores the differences that this diffractive perspective makes...

Wonderful Life. Laurent Mignonneau & Christa Sommerer, 2012

Leonardo, 2001

An examination of historical precedents for contemporary art practice using artificial life, in particular in the work of Paul Klee and Kasimir Malevich. Similarities are identified between artificial life and the philosophical tradition of organicism; specific examples from Klee and Malevich indicate that those artists were engaged in a form of creative organicist thought which imagined the realisation of living structures in artificial media. Over the past decade artificial life has attracted the interest of a significant number of new media artists. The work of artists such as is relatively well-known within the field. Artificial life was chosen as the theme for the 1993 Ars Electronica festival; more recently, a juried competition for a-life art -"Life 2.0"attracted a wide field of international artists. Just as a-life science has entered the consciousness of cyberculture in general, in part through the accounts of popular writers such as Stephen Levy and Kevin Kelly, it has become part of the conceptual and technical landscape of new media art. Of course a-life ideas have been taken up in a wide variety of ways and with diverse creative intentions. Sims, Latham, Steven Rooke and Jon McCormack all use artificial evolutionary processes, but for different aesthetic and conceptual purposes. Simon Penny and other roboticists such as Ken Rinaldo and Bill Vorn and Louis-Philipe Demers use similar bottom-up techniques, but once again their artistic agendas, and resultant aesthetics, are diverse. A-life techniques are applied in a wide range of media forms -virtual worlds, generative systems, still images and animations, online environments and robotic

Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2014

For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. 3 Beginning in the mid-1980s, artificial life has studied living systems using a synthetic approach: 4 build life in order to understand it better, be it by means of software, hardware, or wetware. 5 This review provides a summary of the advances that led to the development of artificial life, its 6 current research topics, and open problems and opportunities. We classify artificial life research 7 into fourteen themes: origins of life, autonomy, self-organization, adaptation (including evolution, 8 development, and learning), ecology, artificial societies, behavior, computational biology, 9 artificial chemistries, information, living technology, art, and philosophy. Being interdisciplinary, 10 artificial life seems to be losing its boundaries and merging with other fields. 11 12 13