The Abstract Organism:
Towards A Prehistory for A-life Art
Mitchell Whitelaw
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,
University of Technology, Sydney,
PO Box 123 Broadway NSW 2007.
mitchell@symbiotic.org
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 Jon McCormack, Troy Innocent, Karl Sims, William
Latham, Simon Penny, Jane Prophet and Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau 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
installations. Asserting “a-life art” as a category or a genre may seem suspect, then, in that it
overlooks that diversity; however here it is intended as a very simple, very general indicator
of the particular conjunction that all these works share — between a-life science and art
practice.
This conjunction seems an unlikely starting-point for an historical analysis. Artificial life was
founded in 1987, with a Los Alamos symposium organised by Christopher Langton; it is a
young field, and like other fields reliant on contemporary technology it looks more to the
future than to the past. A-life art, like new media art in general, shares these characteristics
— its focus is generally on the technologically-charged present and its rapidly unfolding
future. The result is a kind of illusory historical vacuum which isolates contemporary
practice from a wider context and places limits on its critical analysis. This paper is an
attempt to indicate the presence of a historical context for a-life art. However it does not
plot a linear, progressive history or an ancestry; instead, it suggests a “prehistory” — a
handful of moments which anticipate the interests of a-life art and destabilise any sense that
it is a strictly contemporary practice. Rather than weave a-life art into a set of pre-existing
historical traditions, this prehistory is intended to provoke an altered interpretation of
current work, and a sense of its possible relationships with other lines of creative thought
and practice.
Towards a Prehistory: Organicism
The first stage in sketching this prehistory involves considering the distinctive approach of
Langton’s newly-minted science. Influenced by evolutionary theory, molecular biology and
theories of complex systems, a-life sees in the natural world a set of dynamic material
processes spanning all forms of living matter. It is these processes which it regards as the
stuff of life. There is no ineffable vital essence: life is, as Langton says, “a property of the
organisation of matter.” [1] This tenet enables a-life to do its central work, which is to
analyse and formalise this material organisation and the processes it involves, and
reproduce that organisation in an artificial medium — most often a computational medium.
If living things are nothing but matter organised just so, if they are as Langton suggests
“nothing more than complex biochemical machines”, and if it is their dynamic organisation that
gives them the distinctive qualities of living things, then a structure inside a computer with
the same dynamic organisation is truly artificial life.
A-life, then, is fundamentally concerned with understanding and formalising the underlying
dynamic structures of living things. A-life art, defined in the simple sense outlined above,
engages with the same ideas: it is a form of art practice which begins to take on, in various
ways, the abstract dynamics of nature. It is here, at this more general level, that a broad
prehistory begins to unfold: within the history of notions of art’s relationship with nature,
there is a prominent tradition which regards nature, and specifically the manifestation of
nature’s underlying form or structure, as central to art. Formal analogies between art and
nature are traceable to Plato and Aristotle, who use the living body (quite casually) as a
model of organisation and coherence in discussions of rhetoric and drama. (See for example
Osborne [2]) Around the turn of the nineteenth century poet, critic and amateur botanist
Wolfgang Johann von Goethe develops the same ideas. He commends artists to study nature,
not in order to imitate its appearance, but to gain an understanding of its structure: he holds
up the example of the naturalist, who “imitates objects by recognising and emphasising the
important and significant parts from which the character of the whole derives.” [3] The
greatest art “is based on the profoundest knowledge, on the essence of things... .” [4] The
artist should aspire to “...not only something light and superficially effective, but, as the rival
of nature, something spiritually organic... to a content and a form by which it appears both
natural and beyond nature.”[5] Goethe’s contemporary August Wilhelm von Schlegel is even
more direct, writing in Ritterbush [6] that art “must form living works, which are first set in
motion, not by an outside mechanism, like a pendulum, but by an indwelling power...”
At this general level, analogies between organic structures and works of art are widespread
throughout the arts: appear in literary criticism (Coleridge), musical analysis (Schenker) and
architecture (Lloyd Wright and Häring). However a-life art involves far more than a vague
organic metaphor: it involves a detailed engagement with particular processes and
structures, and their translation into technological media — into structures of code and
engineering, into explicit and formal rules and processes. The clearest predecessors for a-life
art practice, then, would combine this adoption of natural form with a tendency towards
rigour and systematisation — where life emerges from the interactions of formal elements in a
medium deliberately abstracted from nature. Examples of such an approach appear, oddly
enough, in the work of two prominent painters of the European avant-garde: Paul Klee and
Kasimir Malevich.
Paul Klee
More than a hundred years after Goethe and Schlegel, European painting was still grappling
with the shift away from realism and towards abstraction; Paul Klee, by now a lecturer at
the Bauhaus, was articulating a wide-ranging theory of composition which in part addressed
this shift. Klee was influenced heavily by Goethe’s romantic natural philosophy , but was
also inspired by the physical sciences. His lectures and essays from this period adopt the
language, scope and systematic style of scientific thought — enquiring into the general
mechanics and dynamics of art and the picture plane — but also manifest the artist’s
fascination with a natural creative energy.
Klee’s natural philosophy is best articulated in his 1923 essay “Ways of Nature Study”. Like
Goethe, he advocates an intimate relationship between the artist and nature: “For the artist,
dialogue with nature remains a conditio sine qua non. The artist is a man, himself nature and a
part of nature in natural space.” [7] Klee describes the traditional artistic approach to the
study of nature as “a painfully precise investigation of appearance.” “In this way excellent
pictures were obtained of the object’s surface filtered by the air; the art of optical sight was
developed, while the art of contemplating unoptical impressions and representations and
making them visible was neglected.” These “unoptical impressions” are cultivated through
close study and an intuitive perception that “can transform outward impression into
functional penetration...” — an understanding of function and process, as well as structure:
“Anatomy becomes physiology.” At the culmination of this process of nature study the
artist attains a new vision, and a new creative capacity.
His growth in the vision and contemplation of nature enables him to rise towards a
metaphysical view of the world and to form free abstract structures which surpass schematic
intention and achieve a new naturalness, the naturalness of the work. Then he creates a work,
or participates in the creation of works, that are the image of God’s work.
One lecture from 1923 illustrates the way Klee pursues this natural ideal through close
formal analysis; headed “Primary forces of form production, form-creating and formarticulating
nature”, it is a lesson based on the forms and dynamics of the leaf and the tree.
Klee begins with a sketch of the articulated unity of the tree: “[a] leaf is part of the whole ...
an organ” — these organs are “again articulated in themselves.” [8] Klee notices the tree’s
fractal quality, its self-similarity across scale: “articulate ideas and relations prevail that
reflect on a small scale the articulation of the whole.” The leaf itself is analysed in terms of a
motivated branching line, emerging from the leaf stem: “[n]ote that the line is charged with
force especially at the point where is must produce as many branchings as possible, namely
at the beginning, close to the stem.” The form of the leaf emerges as this force is exhausted;
the branches of the central vein become smaller towards the leaf tip; “[t]he intervals and
dynamic forces dwindle to the point of no return.”
Figure 1. Paul Klee, “Figuration example for an exercise set on Tuesday, 30 October 1923.” From Klee [8], p.22. ©
Paul Klee,1923/Bild-Kunst. Permission of VISCOPY Ltd,Sydney 2000.
Klee set a graphic exercise after this lesson which clearly illustrates the final, synthetic or
creative stage of this pedagogical process: it was entitled “Imaginary leaves on the basis of
the foregoing insight into basic rules.” Klee describes his own example of a solution to this
exercise as a “free geometric-aesthetic effort”; an artificial leaf with ruled veins extending in
all directions, and wavy, amoeboid lines indicating several possible contours for the leaf’s
edge (Figure 1). It is a very clear demonstration of the way an analytic understanding of
natural processes and structures informs the “free abstract structures” of Klee’s work — and
note here that this artificial leaf diverges from its natural model: it has no stem — it has
separated itself graphically and metaphorically from the larger plant, forming an abstract,
self-contained structure. Klee’s visual analysis of the leaf involves a translation of its
morphogenetic forces into a two-dimensional diagram: it comes to be understood in an
artificial universe which consists of lines, planes and tones. Elsewhere in Klee’s work it is
clear that he imagines the picture plane as a kind of contained, artificial world. Throughout
his Bauhaus lectures on form and composition, Klee can be seen to be exploring a kind of
artificial physics for the picture plane — or more, an artificial cosmogeny. “Abstract formal
elements are put together like numbers and letters to make concrete beings or abstract things;
in the end a formal cosmos is achieved... ”. [9] There is a strong sense that the artificial
world of the artwork embodies not only metaphysical natural laws, but more basic, formal
rules: “The work grows in its own way, on the basis of common, universal rules...”. [10]
Finally, the realisation of these rules in the picture plane gives rise to a form with its own
“face”, “physiognomy” and “posture” — if the form seems organic but somehow unearthly,
Klee explains, “Entirely different forms may well have arisen on other stars.” [11] Here the
artist is travelling “the paths of natural creation”, paths that for Klee lead, as Christopher
Langton puts it, not only to life-as-we-know-it, but to life-as-it-could-be.
Kasimir Malevich
In Russia, Klee’s contemporaries in the avant-garde were infused with utopian zeal: after the
1917 revolution, art became involved in a wave of social transformation. The
Constructivists, perhaps the movement most strongly identified with this period, looked to
industrial production and the machine as agents of change. Suprematism, the movement
declared by Kasimir Malevich around 1913, was founded on a rhetoric that was equally
utopian, but far more esoteric. Writing in 1919, Malevich describes Suprematism as a “hard,
cold system, unsmilingly set in motion by philosophical thought.” [12] It aspired to the
creation of a new, “non-objective” reality based on the dynamic interrelations of pure forms
— figures presented in Suprematist painting with a strict, utilitarian economy. Malevich
pursued the reduction of form to its logical conclusion, showing a canvas in 1915 consisting
of a single black square on a white ground — a Suprematist icon, a reduction, as fellow
Suprematist El Lissitzky writes in 1922, of all painting to “zero”. [13] Suprematism is most
commonly identified with this extreme abstraction, a pursuit of painting’s absolute endpoint.
However in the writings of Malevich and Lissitzky this “hard, cold system” is interwoven
closely with ideas of organic form; the organism appears as a metaphorical figure, but also,
remarkably, as another absolute endpoint for art: the creation of a structure so perfectly
refined that it attains living autonomy.
Suprematist a-life emerges, rhetorically, just as it does in Klee: a process of abstraction or
analysis gives rise to a notion of the underlying form or dynamic of life, and this dynamic is
then applied in an artificial medium. Like Klee, Malevich takes outward form as an
indication of an underlying dynamic, and once again he anticipates the incorporation of
these natural dynamics into Suprematist art. In “On New Systems in Art” (1919) he argues
that the artist, observing a natural landscape, sees not a pictorial scene but “painterly
masses in motion and in rest... the composition of nature, the symmetry and harmony of
contradictory elements ... . He stands and exults in the flow of forces and their harmony.”
[14] Later he writes simply that “[f]orm clearly points to the dynamic state of a situation...”.
[15] Malevich denounces realistic or imitative painting, which he labels “dead”; instead,
Suprematism renders this “flow of forces”, imagining its paintings not as framed-off
representations, but as objects in their own right — instances of a “non-objective” reality.
Instead of imitation, Malevich announces “absolute creation”, whereby this adoption of
natural dynamics comes to its culmination: “a work of pure, living art.” [16] “Creating means
living, eternally creating newer and newer forms. ... Forms must be given life and the right to
individual existence.”[17] Where Malevich parts company with Klee is in imagining the
ultimate implications of an art pursuing natural dynamics: the artwork is no longer a
representation of nature, but a new, artificial-natural object. “The ... living picture will be a
real part of the whole living world...”. [18] In “Infinity...” (1919) he writes that the “highest
and purest artistic, creative structure ... does not possess a single form of the existent. It
consists of elements of nature and forms an island, appearing anew.” [19]
In an extraordinary, extropian flourish, Malevich also imagines the Suprematist conquest of
interplanetary space: the pure forms of painting give way to a “Suprematist machine”, a
spacecraft which is propelled “not by means of engines, ... but through the smooth
harnessing of form to natural processes, through some magnetic interrelations within a single
form”. [20] In fact, “[E]very Suprematist body constructed will be incorporated into a
natural organization and form a new satellite ...” These organic machines are destined to
leave the planet: the forms of Suprematism
... have nothing in common with the technology of the earth’s surface. All technical
organisms are nothing but small satellites, a whole living world ready to fly away into
space and take up a particular position. Indeed, every such satellite is in fact equipped
with reason and prepared to live out its own personal life.
Once again this autonomy is a result of the extremely refined nature of the forms:
“Suprematist forms have achieved utilitarian perfection. They are no longer relevant to the
earth, and they can be treated or studied like any planet or complete system.”
The Suprematist canvas, following this organic line, appears not so much as a pure formal
essence or metaphysical icon, as an abstraction of natural dynamics; Malevich imagines a
manifestation of those dynamics so perfect that the work moves off the canvas and into
interplanetary space, propelled by the “natural processes” of its internal articulations.
Malevich foreshadows the completion of the Suprematist pursuit of “pure creation” in the
form of an autonomous “technical organism”.
A Prehistory?
Klee and Malevich offer an anticipation of a-life art which is at times uncannily close: their
writings develop a notion of an inner natural dynamic — one that involves a particular
understanding of natural structures. They pursued, by their own accounts, a creative practice
which abstracted, formalised and adopted that dynamic, applying it in an artificial
(pictorial) medium, and in the case of Malevich, imagining its ultimate manifestation in
living, autonomous works of art. There are also some very detailed premonitions: Malevich
anticipates the manifestations of “natural processes” in a machine, a “technical organism”,
traversing the opposition between the mechanical and the organic long before Kevin Kelly.
Malevich’s desire to radically amplify or extend the artist’s creative capacity is evident in
the contemporary use of artificial evolutionary techniques, where the user/artist navigates a
vast space of aesthetic potential. (See Whitelaw [21]) The Suprematist imagination of an
autonomous “technical organism” is likewise echoed in the aspirations of contemporary
artists such as Yves Amu Klein [22] and Kenneth Rinaldo [23]. Also evident in
contemporary work are traces of Klee’s organicism — a sense that a-life art entails a
heightened understanding of nature: Australian artist Rodney Berry [24] comments that his
work “fosters an interest in an aesthetic of systems and processes, rather than objects and
images”, and links this aesthetic to a changed appreciation of nature, one which is ultimately
expansive and ecological. Similarly, Jon McCormack [25] remarks that experience with a-life
processes triggers “a wider appreciation of natural systems...”.
In as much as these correspondences simply indicate the presence of an uncharted prehistory
for a-life art, they are valuable in themselves. They destablilise conventional assumptions
about the very contemporary, techno-centric nature of a-life art by suggesting an alternative
approach — a proto-a-life based in oil painting and philosophical speculation. Similarly,
simply playing art-historical “snap” here is less useful than considering the ways in which
this history seems anachronistic even as it feels familiar. The thinking of Klee and Malevich
reminds us of a-life, but predates it by over sixty years — and in comparing it with
contemporary a-life art, one element is obviously misplaced. By definition, contemporary alife
art involves applications of a-life science — it borrows and implements a-life’s repertoire
of computational techniques and formal templates. However for Klee and Malevich, there
was no such relationship: as Henry [26] and Douglas [27] show, they borrowed conceptual
elements from the science and philosophy of their time — Romantic vitalism, evolutionary
theory and physics — but had no single, pre-existing body of thought and technique to draw
on. Their “proto-a-life” is itself a kind of synthetic mixture, one which incorporates these
scientific and philosophical influences but is fundamentally an approach to art and artmaking.
For both Klee and Malevich, the notion of a creative process somehow inherent in
the formal structures of nature is central, and they imagine art’s appropriation of that
process as an ultimate point in its progression. For Klee, that point is mystical or
metaphysical — an approach to the divine; for Malevich, it signifies “absolute creation”,
endless generative novelty, a transformed reality. Thus both artists can be seen to provide
not only a premonition of a-life art, but more basically, a premonition of artificial life as an
activity fundamentally concerned with creation and creativity. This is a prehistory of a-life
as an artistic practice — one which in fact projects artificial life as a kind of ultimate
achievement for modern art.
To what extent, then, can contemporary work be understood as a continuation of this formal
organicism? To what extent does it share the goals articulated by Klee and Malevich, their
aspirations to “absolute creation” or a mystical affinity with nature? In the thinking of Klee
and Malevich there are certain stable categories which, in a postmodern present, we may
imagine are no longer viable: notions of art and the artist as involved in seeking some
metaphysical natural truth, or some pure or absolute creative state. Contemporary artists
often use a-life knowingly, even playfully, and largely in the absence of such an overt
metaphysical drive. The rhetoric of an organic ideal is set aside in favour of a more reflective
approach: the work raises questions about the status of nature and its simulation, the
concept of autonomous agency, our relationship with technology. However that organic
thinking somehow persists — for all the reflexive framing, a basic creative interest in the
generative capacity of natural structures remains. Contemporary thought tends to avoid the
visionary style of artists such as Klee and Malevich, but it seems that elements of their
thinking, and of a broader organicist tradition, are unwittingly reworked by contemporary
artists using artificial life.
References
[1] Christopher Langton, “Artificial Life”, in Christopher Langton (ed.) Artificial Life, Santa Fe
Institute Studies in the Science of Complexity, Proceedings vol. 6, (Redwood City, CA: Addison
Wesley, 1989) pp. 2-5.
[2] Harold Osborne, Aesthetics and Art Theory: An Historical Introduction, (London: Longmans,
1968) pp. 191-2.
[3] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Introduction to the ‘Propyläean’”, in Goethe on Art, ed. & trans.
John Gage (London: Scolar Press, 1980) p. 6.
[4] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Simple Imitation of Nature, Manner, Style”, in [3] p. 22.
[5] Goethe [3] p. 6.
[6] Philip Ritterbush, “The Art of Organic Forms” (Washington: The Smithsonian Institution, 1968)
p. 18.
[7] Paul Klee, “Ways of Nature Study” in Paul Klee Notebooks: Volume 1: The thinking eye, ed. Jürg
Spiller (London: Lund Humphries, 1961) pp. 63-66.
[8] Paul Klee, “Primary forces of form-production...” in Paul Klee Notebooks: Volume 2: The nature
of nature, ed. Jürg Spiller (New York: The Overlook Press, 1973) pp. 5-22.
[9] Paul Klee, “Creative Credo” in The thinking eye [7], p. 79.
[10] Paul Klee, “Objects in nature investigated with regard to their inner being. Essence and
appearance” in The thinking eye [7], p. 59.
[11] Paul Klee, “Survey and orientation in regard to pictorial elements and their spatial
arrangement” in The thinking eye [7], p. 93.
[12] Kasimir Malevich, “Non-objective Art and Suprematism”, in Kasimir Malevich, Malevich:
Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910-30, ed. Larissa A. Zhadova (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1982) p. 282.
[13] El Lissitzky, “New Russian Art: a lecture” in El Lissitzky: Life-Letters-Texts, ed. Sophie
Lissitzky-Küppers, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968) p. 337.
[14] Kasimir Malevich, “On New Systems in Art” in Essays on art 1915-1928, ed. Troels Andersen,
trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus & Arnold McMillin, vol. 1, (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968) p. 85.
[15] Kasimir Malevich, “Infinity...” in The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished writings
1913-33, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Hoffmann, vol. 4, (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978) p. 40.
[16] Kasimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting”
in Essays on art 1915-1928 [14], p. 19.
[17] ibid., pp. 24-25
[18] Malevich [14] p. 93.
[19] Malevich [15] p. 40.
[20] Kasimir Malevich, “Suprematism. 34 Drawings” in Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in
Russian Art 1910-30 [12] p. 284.
[21] Mitchell Whitelaw, “Breeding Aesthetic Objects: Art and Artificial Evolution”, Proceedings of
the AISB’99 Symposium on Creative Evolutionary Systems (Edinburgh: Society for the Study of
Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, 1999) pp. 1-7. Available online at
http://www.spin.net.au/~mitchellw [April 2000]
[22] Yves Amu Klein, “Living Sculpture: The Art and Science of Creating Robotic Life”, Leonardo
vol. 31 no. 5 (1998), p.393.
[23] Kenneth Rinaldo, “Technology Recapitulates Phylogeny: Artificial Life Art”, Leonardo vol. 31
no. 5 (1998), p.371.
[24] Rodney Berry, interview with the author, October 1997.
[25] Jon McCormack, interview with the author, November 1997.
[26] Sara Lynn Henry, “Form-Creating Energies: Paul Klee and Physics”, Arts Magazine vol. 52 no.1
(September 1977), p.119.
[27] Charlotte Douglas, “Evolution and the Biological Metaphor in Modern Russian Art”, Art
Journal vol. 44 no. 2 (Summer 1984), p.153