Artificial Life Art, Creativity,
and Techno-hybridization
(editorʼs introduction)
Alan Dorin*
Monash University
Keywords
Artificial life art, techno-hybridization,
chimera, creativity, technology
Abstract Artists and engineers have devised lifelike technology
for millennia. Their ingenious devices have often prompted inquiry
into our preferences, prejudices, and beliefs about living systems,
especially regarding their origins, status, constitution, and behavior.
A recurring fabrication technique is shared across artificial life art,
science, and engineering. This involves aggregating representations or
re-creations of familiar biological parts—techno-hybridization—but
the motives of practitioners may differ markedly. This article, and
the special issue it introduces, explores how ground familiar to
contemporary artificial life science and engineering has been assessed
and interpreted in parallel by (a) artists and (b) theorists studying
creativity explicitly. This activity offers thoughtful, alternative
perspectives on artificial life science and engineering, highlighting and
sometimes undermining the fieldsʼ underlying assumptions, or
exposing avenues that are yet to be explored outside of art.
Additionally, art has the potential to engage the general public,
supporting and exploring the findings of scientific research and
engineering. This adds considerably to the maturity of a culture
tackling the issues the discipline of artificial life raises.
Now a corpse has the same shape and fashion as a living body; and yet it is not a man.
Again, a hand constituted in any and every manner, e.g., a bronze or wooden one, is not a
hand except in name; and the same applies to a physician depicted on canvas, or a flute
carved in stone. —Aristotle, Parts of Animals, I (LCL 323: 66–67), 640b
On the walls of the Chauvet caves in France are images dating back 30,000 years to the Upper
Paleolithic (Aurignacian) period [2]. Many depict animals, life as the artists knew it. But the Venus and
the Sorcerer, one of the oldest images at the site, also establishes a tradition of invention that should
resonate with artificial life researchers. The Sorcerer has the arm and shoulder of a man and the head
of a bison. He visually resembles the Minotaur of Homer, who unknowingly replicated the idea
thousands of years later. In fact, this archetype has appeared repeatedly from antiquity to the present.
Notably, the resemblance of the entire Venus and the Sorcerer to a drawing made tens of thousands
of years later by Picasso, Minotaur caressant une dormeuse (1933), has been remarked upon [26].
Most of the Chauvet image-making might be interpreted as technological mimicry of living things,
* Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Clayton, Australia 3800. E-mail: alan.dorin@monash.edu
© 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Life 21: 261–270 (2015) doi:10.1162/ARTL_e_00166
but the Minotaur is potentially early physical evidence of new life conceived and formed by human
minds and hands.
It is possible that the Aurignacian artist(s) simply depicted reality—a man wearing a skull or mask—
but the abundant conglomerates of animal parts illustrated across continents and centuries suggests this
neednʼt be the case. Their use as cultural symbols is diverse [14], but historyʼs chimeras are unequivocal
flights of fancy calling to mind Langtonʼs prompt to explore life-as-it-could-be [22]. This catchphrase asking
us to become creators remains pertinent today, especially in the arts, even though the philosophy and
concerns of artificial life have arguably shifted since then.
The Chauvet works highlight an ongoing concern of artificial life that relates to their status as
images, and potentially (but unknowably) as instances rather than simulacra of a precursor to our
concept of a living thing. The perspective of “strong artificial life,” derived originally from the concept
of strong AI [31], admits the possibility that software running on a computer could live if its
components were organized so as to generate an instance of the behavior characterized by life. While
artificial life researchers study animated visualizations of virtual creatures whose limbs and sensors
can be organized analogously to those of real organisms to generate lifelike behavior, these images
arenʼt typically given the status of living things, even by their creators. What arguably has a stronger
claim to life by todayʼs disciplinary view is software organized structurally according to the interactions
and dynamics of biological generative processes. For instance, the organizations required to
generate the metabolism of an organism, the self-establishment of a semipermeable membrane, or
the self-reproduction and evolution of a population of machines are candidates. If we accept software
as a potential vehicle for life, we have to discard the idea that organisms are necessarily physicochemical
phenomena. If we discard this, the basis for current biology, we need to field counterarguments,
especially from biologists, that we arenʼt justified in making the leap, that we are conducting “fact-free
science,” for instance [18]. By analogy, from the (retro-)perspective of the ancient artists at Chauvet,
their images, built from the technology of the time, might be “real” artificial life consistent with their
requirements for a category under which to classify organisms. Or they might never have made the
kinds of distinctions that concern us today. We will never know. But the Chauvet pictures prompt
questions like these, something all art can motivate when we engage with it.
Artists can play devilʼs advocate to researchers exploring the boundaries of lifeʼs possibilities,
especially as these relate to technology. Creative melding of biology and technology in artefacts
surged in the late 1960s as artists, and the theorists that considered their work, explored the principles
and practice of cybernetics and computer programming. Jonathan Benthall provided a detailed
survey of the activities and theoretical concerns of the time. He started from the basis that the relationship
between humans and art was symbiotic and worked towards a reinterpretation of individual
works and arts culture generally from perspectives provided by ecology [4, pp. 127–141]. But it
was the writer Jack Burnham who arguably provided the most active and enthusiastic voice in the
discussion surrounding art, technology, and biology, a contribution that remains relevant to contemporary
discussions [41]. Burnham wrote with insight on the biotic sources of modern sculpture,
sculpture and automata, robot and cyborg art [8], systems esthetics, and real-time systems [9],
but his dream of realizing a new form of sculpture that quite literally became life in the hands of
artists1
was sadly ahead of technologyʼs ability to deliver and the publicʼs ability to engage with such
novel and challenging territory. Following what he saw as many artistic, technological, and social
failures, he became disillusioned with his own earlier idealism [10].
Burnham neednʼt have been so dismayed. Using biologically inspired artefacts as their medium,
artists have continued to prompt reconsideration of our views on life and its manufacture; this is
artificial life art. Its methods sometimes differ from those of science (for instance, art often poses
questions, disrupts conventions, and explores aesthetics without wishing to preach solutions or argue
alternatives), but it shares artificial life scienceʼs concerns. Many of Burnhamʼs dreams have
1 Burnhamʼs prophesy that “The stabilized dynamic system will become not only a symbol of life but literally life in the artistʼs hands”
[8, p. 376] is echoed in Langtonʼs comment in the context of science, “We would like to build models that are so life-like that they cease
to be models of life and become examples of life themselves” [21].
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262 Artificial Life Volume 21, Number 3
been revitalized in the last decades within artificial life art. Arguably it is not a mainstream art activity
(an issue that troubled Burnham in the 1980s), but it seems to have staying power. For instance,
consider the survey in Rinaldoʼs article on the subject [34], the artists explored in Whitelawʼs
Metacreation [45], twelve years of VIDA artificial life art submissions from 1999 to 2012 [30], or even
the contributors to the current journal issue. These people share a deep-seated curiosity about our
relationship with living systems and technology, and a firm commitment to explore it artistically.
For artists, or indeed scientists, to find acceptance of creative ideas, their offering must be novel,
surprising, but not so bizarre as to alienate or confuse [13]. One of Burnhamʼs criticisms of the
technological art of the late 1960s was that it went too far. As Nell Tenhaaf has put it in relation
to artificial life art and coincidentally with reference to the same Chauvet cave imagery introduced
above, “artists want our art to (mis)behave … to fit into its era … but at the same time we want it
not to fit so that it can expand the scope of human imagination” [41]. This desire for acceptance
carries beyond the individual assessor or critic to the society in which an idea is presented. That
creativity can be understood as a social phenomenon is strongly supported by Saunders and Bown,
who, in this issue, promote the study of computational social creativity through software simulations [37].
Especially favored are models enabling the investigation of the emergence of creative phenomena
from groups of interacting agents, each with unique local conditions, subgoals, and behaviors. Also
in this issue, Hiroki Sayama and Shelley Dionne [38] report experiments of the kind suggested by
Saunders and Bown. They explore how human groups and artificial agents alike collectively generate
creative ideas using software and social metaphors derived from evolutionary processes. The results
reveal the extent to which social creativity is a combination of incremental processes of generating
new ideas from old ones within the minds of individuals, and how the social critique and support of
ideas currently in the milieu can influence creative processes.
Art and science are highly social activities; artificial life art and science are not special cases in this
regard. They are heavily influenced by the disciplinary communityʼs perception of acceptable questions
or topics and defensible methods of responding to them. Margaret Boden, in this issue [6],
outlines her general categorization of creative activities. Of particular relevance here is her idea of
transformational creativity: that “one or more of the defining constraints of the possibility- space is itself
altered, in a more or less fundamental way, so that structures that were strictly impossible before become
possible—and, by hypothesis, instantiated” [6, p. 357]. This is potentially a risky approach to
creative activity in any field. For a start, we might expect such dramatic changes to take longer to
gain traction in a social disciplinary network than, by contrast, incremental shifts in thinking, if only
because transformational creativity flips world views and drops them on their heads. By my reading,
the perspectives presented above that images or software might actually live are potentially such creative
transformations. Langton remarked on the significance of the transformation he was proposing
at the conclusion of his introductory article for the field of artificial life [22]. Likewise, as can be seen
from the present articleʼs introductory Aristotelian quotation, in the case of images this has been
noted for thousands of years. Similar discussions have abounded concerning the relationship between
man-made machines and living things.
A safer (less adventurous, maybe, but valuable all the same) approach to creativity in devising lifeas-it-could-be
is incremental construction from references to life-as-it-is. A common incremental
creative method of consequence in artificial life research, and one of direct significance to evolutionary
processes, is hybridization. The conjunction of familiar biological parts or processes in novel
chimerical combinations safely grounds any exploration in life-as-it-is, but pushes into the realm of
invention. With firm grounding we reduce the risk of straying beyond behaviors and interactions of
life that our research community, or in some cases even the general public, would find acceptable,
comprehensible, and interesting. If we did stray too far, it is likely that the disciplinary community
would find nothing legitimately relevant in our project.
Apart from the Minotaur, humans have been prolific inventors of hybrid life, mixing body parts
and behavioral traits to make centaurs, sirens, sphinxes, harpies, gorgons, satyrs, and chimeras. The
Chinese dragon is probably also familiar to Western readers. “Ancient native writers like Wang Fu
inform us that it has the head of a camel, the horns of a stag, the eyes of a demon, the ears of a cow,
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the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales of a carp, the claws of an eagle, and the soles of a
tiger” [23, p. 46]. These chimeras are life-as-it-could-be, assemblages of ready-made parts sourced
from life-as-we-know-it. The historical chimeras immortalized in literature and visual art have successfully
maintained their relevance to art, to culture, and even to modern science [3]. They resemble
contemporary artificial life experiments in that they are attempts to construct believable new life
forms, archetypes intended to convince us of their plausibility. Some hybrids, such as the Chimera
itself—a lion sprouting an incongruous goatʼs head from its back and a snakeʼs head on the tip of its
tail, which now represents the general idea of cobbling together bits and pieces—are arguably unsatisfactory
experiments [35]. But a well-executed chimera tests our ability to distinguish fact from
fiction, a capability wielded by the Nazis who fused Jews with rats in visual print media, literature,
and cinema. A prominent example of this subterfuge appeared in advertising material for the antiSemitic
propaganda film The Eternal Jew / Der ewige Jude (Fritz Hippler, 1940).
As late as the 19th century, mermen and mermaids were manufactured by artisans in the Far East
(e.g., the Japanese ningyo [43]). Some were shipped to Europe and displayed in private scientific and
ethnographic collections of curiosities, or to the paying public (Figure 1). They were less lovely than
the romantic painted inventions of John William Waterhouse (A Mermaid, 1901), but no less seductive,
attracting considerable sums and public interest. The freak-show creatures were faked by stitching
or wiring wooden and clay parts to the jaws, tails and other bones of fish, sometimes disguising
junctions and framework with papier-mâché or lacquer-soaked cloth, sometimes adding hair for
effect [43]. Naturalists worth their salt were unconvinced by these “Feejee mermaids,” but nature
kept the scientifically inclined on their toes too. Imagine the surprise when the platypus was first
introduced to European science from New Holland (now Australia): a duck-billed, furry-bodied,
venomous-spined (male), warm-blooded, clawed, web-footed, water-loving creature that lives in
muddy riverside burrows far, far away from familiar Britain. It would have seemed even stranger
had they been certain at the time that it laid eggs.
Figure 1. (a) The Mermaid (a feejee mermaid). Etching by George Cruikshank, c. 1822, reproduced in [11, p. 266]. Image
in the public domain. “A contemporary journal described it as ‘… a disgusting sort of compound animal, which contains
in itself everything that is odious and disagreeable.’ Though naturalists and journalists fully exposed the imposture, we are
at the same time assured that ‘this circumstance does not appear to affect the exhibition, which continues as crowded as
ever’. ” (b) Feejee mermaid/merman. © Image copyright Heini Schneebeli, Horniman Museum and Gardens. Used with
permission.
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264 Artificial Life Volume 21, Number 3
Of the Mammalia yet known it seems the most extraordinary in its conformation; exhibiting
the perfect resemblance of the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped. So accurate
is the similitude, that, at first view, it naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation
by artificial means […] nor is it without the most minute and rigid examination that we can
persuade ourselves of its being the real beak or snout of a quadruped. [This creature] verifies in
a most striking manner the observation of Buffon, viz. that whatever was possible for Nature
to produce, has actually been produced. […] On a subject so extraordinary as the present,
a degree of skepticism is not only pardonable, but laudable; and I ought perhaps to acknowledge
that I almost doubt the testimony of my own eyes…. [39, Vol. 1, Pt. 1 (Mammalia),
pp. 228–232].
The platypus might as well have been life from another planet. To European eyes it was certainly
life-as-it-could-be, familiar parts in a surprising assemblage. Even the indigenous Australian Euahlayi
people believed the creature to be a hybrid water-rat–duck [16, pp. 10–18].
In some respects contemporary artificial lifeʼs iconic products are more mermaid-like than platypuslike.
The most successful of our pinups present a naturalistic surface and avoid incongruities that
might raise skepticism. For example, we might tell a coherent story of simple, locally acting components
giving rise to large-scale patterns. A cellular automaton (CA), for instance, must operate
without resorting to a deus ex machina in the form of a centralized overseer that saves the prized
patterns from disintegration. But in our discipline, processes and attributes of biological systems
are in fact stitched together in software and their connections masked beneath “papier-mâché.” Part
of the veneer arrives with the stories we tell and the analogies or metaphors we apply to tell them
[44]; part is inseparable from the graphics and visualizations we use [25].
A typical example of hidden stitching binds a virtual ecosystem of physically modeled organisms.
The movement of the creatures appears to obey real-world dynamics. Their morphologies and behaviors,
such as predation or nest construction, might appear to be the result of an ecologically
grounded evolutionary process. Everything can look very familiar. But, as the article of Rui Antunes,
Frederic Fol Leymarie, and William Latham highlights, the images and sounds we perceive are not
generated by underlying ecological processes [1]. They are the result of the mapping decisions between
computational processes and perceptible machine outputs made by an artist or programmer representing
a real system. The result, without any contextualization on the part of the artists or through
deliberately subversive rhetoric, has the potential to bewilder or mislead audiences. The artists could
instead choose to relate underlying ecosystem-like interactions of their software to observable events
in the presented work, and to artistically motivated narratives. This may even allow them to engage
viewers in generating new layers of meaning above and beyond those concretely represented in the
software.
The complexity of the underlying programs and the opacity of the physical machinery ensure that
what artists actually do with computers, and what computers do with programs, can remain a mystery
to viewers. This technology can potentially make art inaccessible and exclusive [36]. Consequently,
it can be problematic for an audience to unquestionably accept a seemingly natural
mapping from artificial life code to textual narrative. The extent to which even human languages
are subject to interpretation, especially by computing machinery, is exposed by two pioneering artificial
life artists, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. Like Antunes et al., they are concerned
with the ambiguity and manipulation of mappings from code to agent morphology and
behavior [40]. They focus particularly on an analogy between, on the one hand, patterns in humanconstructed
texts and the diverse ideas these represent, and on the other hand, the DNA of organisms
or viruses and the structures and behaviors these might generate. In Sommerer and Mignonneauʼs
works Life Spacies and Life Writer phrases entered by a user are reinterpreted according to a disguised,
programmed logic to produce and control novel virtual organisms. The artists seem to be highlighting
both the meaninglessness of isolated components of text (individual characters, for instance)
and the extent to which the meaning of an assembled text is generated relative to the context
in which it is read. The point of the userʼs engagement with their art then canʼt be to depart
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understanding the mapping process in detail, but to leave with the knowledge that text does not
unambiguously reveal its meanings or implications. Once set loose, its behavior can be surprising
even to those who write it.
Taking ambiguity into account is particularly relevant when creating and interpreting computer
simulations. In software we have an unlimited ability to construct processes that could never be
instantiated physically, chemically, or biologically (because they would break fundamental physical
laws, for instance), but to present them under a veneer of normality. When we look under the hood
of a virtual ecosystem with an evolutionary component, we find that the mechanism of creature
reproduction is usually a hard-coded algorithm independent of the dynamics that the virtual organisms
themselves are subject to. The fact that the evolutionary algorithm and the agent-based model
it operates on are independent processes stitched together is not apparent to the observer, but it may
have significant consequences for system dynamics. For example, it may prevent evolutionary programs
from being open-ended [20, 28]. Unfortunately, building an evolving virtual ecosystem from
artificial-chemistry components or on a CA grid has proven to be difficult. So we are forced to work
with surface models and high-level abstractions that capture and enhance preferred traits of life and
subdue details—at least for now.
Artists are particularly adept at dissecting, manipulating, and reassembling surfaces and mechanisms.
Alice Eldridge presents a beautiful experiment in this issue, You Pretty Little Flocker [15]. This
reworks Reynoldsʼ Boids to highlight the systemʼs intricacy without the familiarity of bird bodies. The
imagery is simultaneously familiar and surprising. It seductively evokes flocking but reveals aspects
of the dynamics that were previously invisible. Reinterpretations like this are valuable, as they force
us to acknowledge the decisions that have been made to observe or represent some aspects of a
system, and to (sometimes inadvertently) ignore others. In their article, Prophet and Pritchard call
these observational cuts [33]. These are the points at which decisions and interventions made by an
observer influence (or dictate) their perception of a system. Taking a few artificial-life-related case
studies, the authors make explicit the points at which each researcher observes the subject of his or
her inquiry. They can therefore demonstrate how the interventions highlight or disguise aspects of
the framework binding each researcherʼs investigative method. The knowledge that may be gained
following observational cuts is always constrained and biased by the choice, but cuts, as Pritchard
and Prophet indicate, are unavoidable.
Sometimes observational cuts are effectively masked by overfamiliarity, or just lack of critique on
the part of an observer. Then they can remain unnoticed even when skepticism would be worthwhile.
But at other times, willful ignorance of the stitching (such as the disjointed interface between
the software governing an agentʼs moment-by-moment behavior and the software governing its reproduction
and evolution) and the papier-mâché holding together contemporary artificial life (such
as the visualizations that convert data manipulation processes into processes perceived by observers)
may usefully facilitate artistic enquiry and scientific endeavor alike. This is especially true when the
aim is to address a question, or experience phenomena, for which the artifice is irrelevant experimental
scaffolding. If, in cases like these, we intend to engage with artificial life at the level of our
senses, we must be conscious of the deeply ingrained seductiveness of intuition. Reason is easily
swayed in the consideration of perceptually apparent lifelikeness—anthropomorphism and zoomorphism
are ubiquitous, for instance. We must be mindful of the degree to which this can color
our theorizing about models and systems.
The desire to assess a mechanism of artifice can prompt a work of art. In this scenario, artificial
life art is a mode of enquiry [4, pp. 150–165; 5] into our preconceptions or beliefs about living systems.
One disarming way artists achieve this is by devising artificial complex system dynamics on a
human scale and in our physical space. This entices us to abandon rational concerns about technologyʼs
status—a performative aspect of artificial life that is a disciplinary strength—and to engage
ordinary bodily sensations. Arguably this is more persuasive and potentially subversive than conscious
abstract symbol manipulation.
The cybernetic works of Simon Penny [32] test our willingness to engage directly with technology
and artificial systems. His physical works are designed to explore the “poetics of interaction” but are
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266 Artificial Life Volume 21, Number 3
as far from click-and-drag interfaces as technology allows. Penny prefers embodied, dynamic agents
that can be exhausting, puzzling, threatening, or exciting to engage. By craftily combining responsive
and autonomous behavior, Pennyʼs works cause us to consider our actions from the perspective of
an agent foreign to us, an “other.” His agents reflect and refract our movements and interventions to
encourage exploration and rediscovery of physical space and sound. Through this theatrical exchange
Penny intends for participants to form bodily relationships with his art. A part of his original
motivation arose from dissatisfaction with good old-fashioned AIʼs lack of attention to embodiment,
something that will ring true to many in the ALife community. The experience of Pennyʼs work is
more akin to theater than to the traditional art gallery visit.
Given the historical ties of artificial life to interest in the physicality of biological systems—for
instance, in the work of Ashby, Pask, Grey-Walter, and Ihantowicz (who explored art and cybernetics
in the 1960s [19])—perhaps it is surprising that theatrical theory hasnʼt entered more clearly into
the discussion surrounding the field. Second-order cybernetics focuses on the continuity and intermingling
of loops and circuits of processes through machines (including organisms) and their environments—a
theater of interaction within which we too have evolved. Not just in Pennyʼs work, but
in the exemplary experience of interaction with Richard Brownʼs Neural Net Starfish described in this
issue [7], we see the importance of this theater to artificial life. Brown has demonstrated how such
interaction provides longevity for a work that engages even infants with questions raised by artificial
life.
Sally Jane Norman [29] explicitly relates artificial life to the centuries-old practice of stage performance,
with a focus on the containment structures placed around the artificial systems we construct
and observe. In this respect her article addresses issues overlapping those of the observational
cuts and emergence of agency from interactions between observers and observed covered by Pritchard
and Prophet [33]. But Normanʼs context is the relationship between artificial life, human actors, and
the stage. Actors are literally living, breathing simulations of other lives. They cease to be themselves
so as to present the appearance of life extending beyond the performance and the stage into an
implied external reality. From this position actors can transform the solidity of the boundaries between
the individually and socially understood real world outside the theater, the artificial world
occupied by the characters but external to the experience of the audience (observers), and the created
world that is depicted explicitly on stage as a play (the system). As with Pennyʼs and Brownʼs
art, human theater can eliminate any perceived clarity concerning distinctions between natural and
artificial systems by placing the observer in a tightly coupled sensorial feedback loop shared with an
artificial system.
An alternative approach to artificial life art is the application of dynamic pattern-making biological
processes to the generation of aesthetic works. This has the potential to evoke the sublimity of
dynamic biological phenomena many artificial life researchers experience [24] while using static or
noninteractive media. Whether implemented in software (e.g., Dawkinsʼ Blind Watchmaker [12],
Lathamʼs evolved sculptures [42]), or explored with real biological morphologies (e.g., Verstappen
and Driessensʼ Morphotheque works, which offer multiple arrays of surprising real vegetable shapes
[27]), this approach is also a means to discover the creative potential of generative processes. For
these reasons among many, Gary Greenfield and Penousal Machado review a practice that adopts
the processes of ant pheromone path-laying to software for image generation from the bottom up
[17]. A degree of faithfulness to ant behavior is maintained (a life-as-it-is grounding), but this is far
less important to the artists than the ability of the final image, usually a map of pheromone trails, to
trigger the viewerʼs interest, and a question as to how it might stand as a symbol of the capabilities of
the process that generated it (a life-as-it-could-be component of their work). So the decisions about
what to leave in their models, and what to leave out, are made on a different basis to those made for
answering biological questions, but Greenfield and Machado too desire to inquire into the living
systemʼs operation, and to map it into an intelligible space.
The work Accretor by the contemporary Dutch artists Maria Verstappen and Erwin Driessens is
analyzed in this issue by Mitchell Whitelaw [46]. As in the ant and ecosystem projects described
already, they take natural processes as a point of departure rather than an end goal. In many of their
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projects a fascination with dynamics leads the artists to evoke nature through software-based and
physical or constrained biological processes. Accretorʼs generative processes are computational, but
the artists fabricate the resulting forms to allow engagement beyond the screen. The insistence on
physicality is something that simulation fetishists might see as unnecessary, but researchers working
with hardware should be familiar with the desire to engage directly with their work, and to permit its
assertion of presence. This is vital here: Accretorʼs outputs are presented most enigmatically in physical
form. As Whitelaw indicates, the audience is told very little about the objects. In exhibition they
donʼt shout to be noticed; they are quiet and subdued, resisting interpretation. The pieces evoke
natural processes to the extent that, in the absence of any narrative other than that provided by their
form and the gallery context, they might just be geological structures turned up on a beach or dug
from the earth, rather than the artefacts of a human metacreative process. Without their physicality
this ambiguity would suffer.
I hope this issue will promote discussion about the relevance of artificial life art to a new audience.
Of course, there are now dedicated conference tracks, exhibitions, and competitions catering
specifically to artists engaged with the creative potential of artificial life [30]. These events are valuable
in cementing the ALife art community, enhancing its visibility, recognizing those who excel,
encouraging those who are just beginning, legitimizing the work we do, and above all else, sharing
ideas. But their existence mustnʼt become an excuse for segregating the arts and the sciences. It is, I
feel, an interdisciplinary approach that has historically lent the whole enterprise of artificial life its
spark. Interaction between thinkers of many styles, workers with many media, and scholars from
many backgrounds is fundamental to understanding our attempts to model and construct technological
living systems.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the reviewers, submitters, and authors for this special issue. Thank you, Mark Bedau, for
the opportunity for and your faith in the project; Kathy Kennedy, Linda Reedijk, and the MIT Press
staff for friendly assistance; and Paolo Viscardi, Vicky Pearce, Heini Schneebeli, and the Horniman
Museum and Gardens for the mermaid image. Thanks to my students and colleagues for decades of
discussion relevant to this special issue.
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