Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Twenty years of artificial life art

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14626261003654640

1744-3806

Simon Penny,

Architecture and Computational Design

Abstract 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 A more extensive study of the theoretical history of Artificial Life can be found in my paper 'Artificial Life Art—A Primer', in the Proceedings of DAC09 and also at http://www.ace.uci.edu/Penny. Excerpts from that essay are included here. Keywords: Artificial LifeArtificial Life Artmedia artdigital artinterdisciplinaritycyberneticsEmergenceinteractivityautonomous agentgenetic algorithmevolutionary programming Notes A more extensive study of the theoretical history of Artificial Life can be found in my paper 'Artificial Life Art—A Primer', in the Proceedings of DAC09 and also at http://www.ace.uci.edu/Penny. Excerpts from that essay are included here. Emergence was co-curated by myself and David Familian. It opened concurrently with the opening of the Digital Art and Culture 2009 conference, and was conceived as a component of the conference, held at University of California, Irvine, 12–15 December 2009. The exhibition itself runs for several months. This did mean the field had a fairly high nerd quotient, and the dividing line between nerdy demo and artwork was often blurry. The phenomenon of long-standing collaborative partnerships involving an 'artist' and a 'technician' were comparatively common, and these partnerships tended to produce good work. On the other hand, cases where relatively non-technical artists were paired with technical 'guns for hire' tended to produce less successful work. Ruairi Glynn's 'Performative Ecologies' is informed by Pask's work. See, for instance, http://www.isss.org/projects/gordon_pask; http://www.pangaro.com/published/Pask-as-Dramaturg.html. Gregory Sholette (2006) Sholette, G. 2006. News from nowhere, activist art and after, [online]. Available from: http://www.neme.org/main/354/news-from-nowhere [Accessed 10 February 2010] [Google Scholar] notes: 'Shapolsky et al. consisted of maps, written descriptions and 142 photographs of New York City real estate holdings owned by landlords Harry Shapolsky and his family. Haacke's mock-scientific approach offered viewers the facts about something the artist described [at the time] as a "real-time social system," one that was invisible 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.' If there was ever an argument for radical interdisciplinarity, this is one. See Penny (2008) Penny, S. (2008) 'Bridging two cultures—towards a history of the artist–inventor'. In D. Daniels and B.U. Schmidt, eds. Artists as inventors, inventors as artists, Hatje Cantz, Linz: Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, 142–157. [Google Scholar]. The Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council recognises the professional designator 'research-creation'. See http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca. http://90.146.8.18/en/archives/prix_archive/prix_projekt.asp?iProjectID=2465. http://doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01whl/index.html. http://www.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~yoichiro/profile/profie.html. 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' 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. http://www.ventrella.com/index.html; http://www.Swimbots.com/. http://www.bernd-lintermann.de/. 'Technosphere' (previously shown at the Beall Center UCI, in the Control Space exhibition of computer games curated by Robert Nideffer and Antoinete LaFarge; http://beallcenter.uci.edu/shift/games/technosphere.html. http://nlp-addiction.com/eliza/. MUC stands for Manchester University Computer. In 1951, Strachey developed a program for the game of draughts for the Pilot ACE, a computer designed in part by Alan Turing. Strachey also wrote a music program for the MUC which performed 'In the Mood', 'God Save the Queen' and 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', so he deserves due credit for pioneering work in computer music, computer gaming and computer literature. The MUC emulator by David link runs Strachey's 'Loveletters' program. See http://alpha60.de/research/muc/. ISBN 0-446-38051-2; http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/oz/web/worlds.html#woggles. http://www.interactivestory.net/. http://ace.uci.edu/penny/works/petitmal.html. http://ace.uci.edu/penny/works/sympathetic.html. http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/arteytecnologia/certamen_vida/en/index.htm.