Art and Artificial Life – a Primer

Simon Penny University of California, Irvine penny@uci.edu

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 overview, and
by providing background in the ideas which helped to form the Artificial Life movement in the late
1980s and early 1990s. This essay is prompted by the exhibition Emergence –Art and Artificial Life
(Beall Center for Art and Technology, UCI, December 2009) which is a testament to the enduring and
inspirational intellectual significance of ideas associated with Artificial Life.


INTRODUCTION 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 overview, and by providing background in the ideas which helped to form the Artificial
Life movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This essay is prompted by the exhibition Emergence
–Art and Artificial Life (Beall Center for Art and Technology, UCI,

December 2009) which is a testament to the enduring and inspirational intellectual significance of
ideas associated with Artificial Life.   Artificial Life could not have emerged as a persuasive
paradigm without the easy availability of computation. This is not simply to proclaim, as did
Christopher Langton, that Artificial Life was an exploration of life on a non-carbon substrate, but
that Artificial Life is ‘native’ to computing in the sense that large scale iterative process is
crucial to the procedures which generate (most) artificial life phenomena. The notion that
Artificial Life is life created an ethico-philosophical firestorm concerning intelligence,
creativity and generativity in evolving and adaptive non-carbonbased life-forms.  Unfortunately but
inescapably, such debate was often muddied by Extropian rhetoric asserting that in computers and
robotics, humans were building the machine successors to biological (human) life.  Artificial Life
burst onto a cultural context in the early 90’s when artists and theorist were struggling with the
practical and theoretical implications of computing – that is, it was contemporaneous with virtual
reality, bottom-up robotics, autonomous agents, real-time computer graphics, the emergence of the
internet and the web and a general interest in interactivity and human-computer interaction. In
part due to the interdisciplinarity of the moment, it was a time also when paradigms accepted
within the scientific and technical communities were under interrogation – dualism, reductivism,
cognitivism, and AI rooted in the ‘physical symbol system hypothesis’ among them. There were
inklings of a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the wind.  Amongst the (small) community of
interdisciplinary computer artists, a smaller subsection were highly attentive to the emergence and
activities of the Artificial Life community because in these techniques was promise of a kind of
autonomously behaving art which could make its own decisions, based on its own interpretations of
the (its) world. That is, the methods of Artificial Life promised the possibility of the holy grail
of machine creativity. The artist would become a gardener, a metadesigner, imposing constraints
upon the environments of his creatures, which would then respond in potentially surprising ways. In
some cases this activity was clad in obvious religious terms of ‘playing god’. One of the enduring
fascinations of Alife is that simulated evolutionary systems did and do produce increasingly well
adapted, efficient forms, which solved their problems in surprising ways, and in many cases, are
structurally incomprehensible to programmers, that is, are resistant to reverse engineering. Before
discussing such artwork, it is necessary to recap some of the technical and philosophical
pre-history of Artificial Life.



BIOLOGY, COMPUTING, AND ARTIFICIAL LIFE. Vitalism, Emergence and SelfOrganisation

The question of what it is that distinguishes the living from the non-living has been a constant
theme in philosophy and science. Henri Bergson posited the idea of an ‘élan vital’ or life force.
This idea which was subsequently received with ridicule by mechanist scientists, characterising
Elan Vital as the phlogiston of the life sciences. The spirit of vitalism has recurred in various
discourses around emergence and self organization, ideas which have been central in cybernetics and
artificial life. G H Lewes used the term emergence in its current context as early as 1875,
indicating the philosophical context for Bergson’s élan vital. J.S. Mill embraced such ideas. In A
System of Logic (1843) he gave the term “heteropathic causation” to situations where an effect is
the result of the combined multiple causes. In his writings of the 1920s Samuel Alexander proposed
a general theory of emergence which purported to explain the transition from non-living to living
and from non-conscious to conscious. Such ideas were influential in fields as diverse as sociology
and embryology. Hans Driesch, one of the founders of experimental embryology subscribed to a notion
of entelechy, a form of emergence. The mechanist/vitalist tension persisted throughout the
twentieth century, and is easily detected in Artificial Life discourse .

Cybernetics and Biology Biological and ecological metaphors were the stock-in-trade of cybernetics,
as it was preoccupied with the integration of an entity within a context, and with the study of
such systems of entities. In 1937, biologist Ludwig Bertalanffy first presented his General Systems
Theory,  and this  became central to the emerging field of cybernetics during the formative Macy
Conferences of 1946-53. Ross Ashby coined the term ‘self organising system’ in 1947, it was taken
up by Norbert Weiner among others.  The term self-organization refers to processes where global
patterns arise from multiple or iterated interactions in lower-levels of the system. Canonical
examples are the organisation of social insects and the emergence of mind from neural processes.
Other cybernetic luminaries such as Stafford Beer, Heinz von Foerster and others were preoccupied
with self-organisation, and idea grouped in the early cybernetic literature with ‘adaptive’,
‘purposive’ and even ‘teleological’ systems. As a meta-discipline, cybernetics wielded significant
influence in the ‘60s, in biology (systems ecology), sociology (Luhmann), business management
(Beer) and the Arts (Burnham).

Systems, Information, Software

As I have discussed elsewhere, two qualities of computing paradigms and emerging discourse made
cybernetic approaches increasingly incomprehensible. First, an increasing commitment to the concept
of intelligence-as-reasoning (the physical symbol system hypothesis of Newell and Simon), as
opposed to intelligence-as-adaptation. Second, an increasing commitment to the hardware/software
dualism which made the idea of the integration of intelligence within (biological) matter itself
problematic. The clear distinction between information and matter was not part of the cybernetic
paradigm.


In 1948, Claude Shannon published his "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in which he
formalized his ‘information theory’. [18] Earlier, he had done fundamental work applying Boolean
logic to electrical engineering, and had written his PhD thesis developing an algebra for genetics
(!) and had worked with Alan Turing during the second world war. In the context of this discussion,
it is important therefore to note that the very concept of ‘information’ was in the process of
being technically formalized at the time (the post-war years). Arguably, the most significant was
the formulation of the notion of ‘software’ as a (portable) information artifact without material
existence which became axiomatic to the construction of computer science. The ramifications of this
reification were slow to occur. The idea of ‘code’ (a computer program) as something other than
custom and handcrafted was also slow in developing, as was the notion of ‘platform independence’.
Software as a ‘stand-alone’ information artifact was not reified as a commodity until well into the
80s. 1  The influence of Cybernetics waned in later decades, in part due to the ascendancy of
approaches related to the development of digital computing. Cybernetics went undercover, so to
speak, as systems theory and as control theory. Ideas of self-organization and emergent order
percolated through the more systems-oriented parts of the Alife community. Many of the ideas
central to cybernetics reappear under slightly different terminology in artificial life discourse.
Central to cybernetic thinking were questions of self organization and purposive behavior, the
relationship of an entity to its (changing) environment, its real time response and adaptabilty -
interactions characterised as ‘feedback’. In artificial life, these ideas are clad in terms of
autonomous agents, reactive insect like robots, simulated evolution in fitness landscapes,
emergence and self-organizing criticality. And indeed, theorists like Peter Cariani [6] and others
explicitly bring systems theory and cybernetic theory to bear on Artificial Life.

Biotech and Alife.

In 1953, Watson and Crick first announced the structure of DNA, building on work of Linus Pauling,
Rosalind Franklin and others. Analogies from both cryptography and computer programming are
everywhere in genetics language, and seem to have been from the outset. (Note that a Univac, the
first ‘mass produced’ computer, was installed in the US Census bureau in 1951.) Watson and Crick
made explicit analogies between computer code and genetic code, with DNA codons being conceived as
words in DNA codescript. They explicitly described DNA in computer terms as the genetic ‘code’,
comparing the egg cell to a computer tape. The human Genome project began in1990, and was headed by
none other than James Watson.  Like any structuring metaphor, computer analogies doubtless had
significant influence on the way DNA and genetics is thought, particularly by laying the fallacious
hardware/software binary back onto biological matter - constructing DNA as ‘information’ as opposed
to the presumably information-free cellular matter. What is seldom noted is that the conception of
computer code and computer programming in 1950 was radically different from what it became 50 years
later. The analogy of DNA to machine code has some validity. The analogy of bio-genetic operations
to contemporary high-level programming environments is rather more complex and tenuous, and
certainly demands critical interrogation. The treatment of DNA as computer code laid the conceptual
groundwork for mixings of genetics and computing, such as genetic algorithms and biological
computing – deploying genetic and biological processes as components in Boolean and similar
computational processes. This unremarked historical drift of denotation has also permitted
not-always-entirely-principled mixings of biology and computing, such as the construction of the
possibility of living computer code (ie artificial life).

DNA, matter and information Cybernetics and digital computing deployed differing metaphors from
biology, and as we have seen, the conception of genetic information owed much to the conception of
the computer program. The conception of the genetic program as deployed by Watson and Crick did not
specifically dissociate the genetic ‘information’ from its materiality, but by the late 80s, it was
possible for Artificial Life adherents to speak in these terms. A basic premise of Artificial Life,
in the words of one of its major proponents, Christopher Langton, is the possibility of separation
of the ‘informational content’ of life from its ‘material substrate’. Contrarily, embryological
research indicates that the self organising behavior of large molecules provides (at least) a
structural armature upon which the DNA can do its work. That is: some of the ‘information’
necessary for reproduction and evolution is not in the DNA but elsewhere, integrated into the
‘material substrate’. Alvaro Moreno argues for a ‘deeply entangled’ relationship between explicit
genetic information and the implicit self organising capacity of organisms.


Hard and Soft Artificial Life

Chris Langton, an outspoken spokesman for Artificial Life, referred to it as "a biology of the
possible", and was wont to make proclamations such as : “We would like to build models that are so
lifelike that they would cease to be models of life and becomes [sic] examples of life themselves”.
[12] In what may have been a rhetorical push-start to the Artificial Life movement, the community
purported to divide itself into hard and soft factions. The Hard Alifers maintained that silicon
based ‘life’ was indeed alive by any reasonable definition. They argued that biology must include
the study of digital life, and must arrive at some universal laws concerning "wet life" and digital
life. A major case example for these discussions was Tom Ray’s Tierra system, created around 1990.
Tierra executes in a ‘virtual computer’ within the host computer, small programs compete for cpu
cycles and memory space. Tierra generated a simulated ecosystem in which species of digital
entities breed, hybridise and compete for resources. Tierra would be set to run, overnight, and
inspected for new forms. While Tierra was framed in ecological and biological language, it does not
employ Genetic Algorithms per se,  its code was in fact based on the early and esoteric computer
game Core War. The major significance of Tierra was that not only did forms evolve to compete
better, but various kinds of biological survival strategies emerged, such as host/parasite
relations, and cycles of new aggressive behaviors and new defensive behaviors.  Some years later,
Ray made a proposal to promote “digital biodiversity" : a distributed digital wildlife preserve on
the

internet in which digital organisms might evolve, circumnavigating diurnally to available CPUs. He
noted that "Evolution just naturally comes up with useful things" 2 and argued that these creatures
would evolve unusual and unpredictable abilities (such as good net navigation and CPU sensing
abilities) and these organisms could then be captured and domesticated. [17]


Mimesis, Art and Artificial Life

One of the major preoccupations of western art has been mimesis, the desire to create persuasive
likeness. Although the modern period saw a move away from this idea in the fine arts toward various
notions of abstraction, mimesis is the preoccupation of popular media culture: cinema, television,
computer games. "Abstract" television is a rare thing indeed! For the fine arts, the prototypical
mimetic moment is the story of Parrhasius and Zeuxis: "[Parrhasius] entered into a competition with
Zeuxis. Zeuxis produced a picture of grapes so dexterously represented that birds began to fly down
to eat from the painted vine. Whereupon Parrhasius designed so life-like a picture of a curtain
that Zeuxis, proud of the verdict of the birds, requested that the curtain should now be drawn back
and the picture displayed. When he realized his mistake, with a modesty that did him honour, he
yielded up the palm, saying that whereas he had managed to deceive only birds, Parrhasius had
deceived an artist." Although we regard classical Greek sculpture as a high point of mimesis, I
contend that at the time, the static nature of sculpture  yet entirely accessible through public
records. The artist’s accumulated evidence presented a pattern of social neglect typical of New
York’s invidious real estate market. Shapolsky et al. also resembled, if not in fact parodied, the
conceptual or information art being made in the early 1970s by artists such as Mel Bochner, Adrian
Piper or Joseph Kosuth. After canceling Haacke’s exhibition just prior to the opening Thomas
Messer, the museum’s director, summed up his opposition to Shapolsky et al. by stating, “To the
degree to which an artist deliberately pursues aims that lie beyond art, his very concentration
upon ulterior ends stands in conflict with the intrinsic nature of the work as an end in itself.“
Defining what did lie beyond the art’s “intrinsic nature” was to become the central question for a
new generation of activist artists.” Submitted 18 Feb2006 at
http://www.neme.org/main/354/news-from-nowhere 8 Such as the Canada Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council. www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca

was not regarded as an esthetic requirement, it was purely a technical constraint. The Greeks
stuccoed and painted their sculptures in a highly lifelike manner. 9 My guess is that if the greeks
could have made soft fleshy sculpture, they would have. Hero of Alexandria was renowned for his
pneumatic automata which combined static sculptural mimesis with human-like (if repetitive)
movement. The famous clockwork automata of the C17th were capable of much more complex behavior
than the Heros' pneumatic automata. The "scribe" by Jacquet Drosz could dip its pen and write lines
of elegant script. Vaucansons famous Duck is said to have been able to flap its wings, eat, and
with a characteristically duck-like wag of the tail, excrete foul smelling waste matter!  It is of
note, not simply that these clockworks were contemporary with the first programmable device, the
Jacquard weaving loom, but also that their behavior was constructed from mechanical "logic" much
like that which Babbage used for his difference engine. We should further note that these automata
were not regarded as fine art but simply as amusements. The industrial era equipped the automaton
with reliable structure and mechanism and the possibility the autonomy of untethered power sources,
first steam, then electric. The image of the mechanical man became a cultural fixture. Literature
was populated with a veritable army of mechanical men (and women). from pathetic representations
like the tin man in the Wizard of Oz, to the mechanical girlfriend of Thomas Edison in Tommorow's
Eve by de L'isle-adam, and the distopic portrayals of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Fritz Lang's
Metropolis and Karel Capek's RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots), the dramatic work in which the term
"robot" originated. It was the move into the electronic that began to offer first the simulation of
reflexes, then a modicum of intelligence. In the context of this historical trajectory, we must
consider Artificial Intelligence as a continuation of this broad cultural anthropomorphic and
mimetic trajectory. Indeed, Alan Turing defined the entire project as anthropomorphic with his test
for artificial intelligence, now referred to as the "Turing Test". Simply put, this test says that
if you can't tell it's not a person, then it has human intelligence.

ARTIFICIAL LIFE AT 21

Roughly speaking, Artificial Life and Artificial Life Art has existed for two decades. Over that
period, the computational capability of consumer computer technology has advanced profoundly, as
has our acculturation to it. Daily, we casually do things on our phones (and complain about them)
that were out of reach of million dollar supercomputers two decades ago. We must bear this changing
reality in mind when viewing early Artificial Life Art. The ongoing lively interest in this
interdisciplinary field is testified by the fact that the VIDA Art and Artificial Life Award is now
in its 13th year. 26 As is the case with much research in computational techniques, much of the
basic Artificial Life Art research has now found its way into, or influenced larger scale and
commodity products. As mentioned above, the computer game Spore (Will Wright/Maxis) is a clear
descendent of numerous similar art projects. But less obvious is the fact that
the                                                             vast array of techniques for
generating synthetic but natural looking landscapes, weather patterns, vegetation and plants,
animals and synthetic character and crowds (and their autonomous and group behaviors); which we see
in movies, computer games and virtual environments: all these have some connection to the
Artificial Life research of the 1990s.    The foregoing is but a cursory introduction to the
history and theory of Artificial Life Art. I hope that it creates interest and provides a context
for further research.

Simon Penny August-November 2009