Metacreation
Art and Artificial Life
Mitchell Whitelaw
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The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
Art and Artificial Life
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Mitchell Whitelaw
© 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Bembo and Meta by Graphic Composition, Inc., in Quark
XPress, and was printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Whitelaw, Mitchell.
Metacreation : art and artificial life / Mitchell Whitelaw
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-23234-0 (hc: alk. paper)
1. Artificial life in art. 2. Arts, Modern—20th century. I. Title.
NX650.A67W48 2004
776—dc22
2003059388
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Nicola and Thomas
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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INTRODUCTION
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BREEDERS
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CYBERNATURES
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HARDWARE
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ABSTRACT MACHINES
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T H E O R I Z I N G A - L I F E , A R T, A N D C U LT U R E
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EMERGENCE
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APPENDIX: ON-LINE RESOURCES
NOTES
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INDEX
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239
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Since they are its primary subjects, thanks go first to the artists who
have participated in the development of this book, through interviews, written correspondence and conversations, and in supplying
documentary material. Specifically, thanks to Mauro Annunziato,
Rodney Berry, Paul Brown, Richard Brown, Scott Draves, Erwin
Driessens, Nik Gaffney, Troy Innocent, Natalie Jeremijenko, Yves
Amu Klein, Robb Lovell, Jon McCormack, Simon Penny, Steven
Rooke, Ken Rinaldo, Karl Sims, Christa Sommerer, Maria Verstappen, and Bill Vorn.
Many others working in this area have also been invaluable in supplying feedback, references, and leads:thanks to Paul Bains, Margaret
Boden, Harold Cohen, Sean Cubitt, James Flint, Katherine Hayles,
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Stefan Helmreich, Annemarie Jonson, and Nell Tenhaaf. Warm thanks
also to Greg Battye and Christina Slade for reading the manuscript.
Thanks finally to Douglas Kahn, for his encouragement and support
throughout this project.
This book is based on a doctoral thesis written for the University of
Technology, Sydney. It draws on material from the following previously published papers and chapters:
“Tom Ray’s Hammer: Emergence and Excess in A-life Art,” Leonardo 31, no. 5 (1998): 377–381.
“The Abstract Organism: Towards a Prehistory for A-Life Art,” Leonardo 34, no. 4 (2001): 345–348.
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“Breeding Aesthetic Objects: Art and Artificial Evolution,” in Creative Evolutionary Systems, ed. Peter Bentley and David Corne (San
Diego: Morgan Kaufmann, 2001), 129–144.
“Morphogenetics: Generative Processes in the Work of Driessens
and Verstappen,” Digital Creativity 14, no. 1 (2003): 43–53.
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An image is projected on a screen: it is abstract and intricately,
impossibly detailed; luminous and smooth, its filigreed structures
recede toward computer-graphic horizons. On another screen, a
moving image is projected; a dense grove of synthetic foliage conceals a group of what appear to be insects. The viewer’s image, mirrored within this artificial environment, causes the insects to recoil
and retreat. On yet another screen, an animation shows an intricate,
geometric flower unfurling, extending snaky tendrils into a digital
void; it spins and writhes, filling the frame. In a gallery space a group
of intricate white sculptures stand on a table, forms made up of
masses of tiny cubes, three-dimensional pixels. On a nearby computer monitor, similar forms appear in an ever-changing series. An
artists’ statement describes how these forms arise as a cubic volume
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differentiates itself, splitting like a living cell but at ever finer scales.
Elsewhere a bicycle-wheeled robot rolls around a room in a nervous
interactive dance with the people gathered there: it advances and retreats, spindly body rocking back and forth. Another room is filled
with loud, skeletal machines that shriek and flail, seemingly attacking each other, menacing passersby with blinding lights and horrendous noises. In yet another, quieter space, three arms made from
grape vines and wire twist and pivot from the ceiling, “singing” to
each other in telephone touch-tones.
These are strange objects, embodying a series of contradictions and
ambiguities. They are technological objects, this much is clear;
made from the glowing points of light on computer screens, or
from metal, motors, and electronics. Yet unlike the technological objects we routinely encounter, they are unpredictable and apparently
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autonomous; something in their movement, their reactions, their
structure, reminds us — is clearly intended to remind us — of living things. They are art objects; we find them in galleries, at symposia and conferences, among other art objects made of computer
code and electronics. Yet some of them are hardly objects at all; they
refuse to sit still and be observed, but hide from us, play with us, or
invite us into their own virtual worlds. Clearly, these things are made
— they are the works of artists or others working artfully — but the
signs of the will of a creator are sometimes less palpable in these
objects than the manifestation of a “will” of their own. And while
these works can be found in galleries and festivals, under the banner
of art, they might also appear with their creators at conferences of
another stripe, alongside elaborate computer simulations of cellular
biology and crawling, multilegged robots, the technological objects
of the science of artificial life.
Artificial life, or a-life, is a young, interdisciplinary scientific field
concerned with the creation and study of artificial systems that
mimic or manifest the properties of living systems. It is a strange object in itself; its Promethean project to create new forms of life
arouses scepticism, fascination, and alarm in equal measures. Having
turned (in part) away from the task of analyzing nature and toward
its synthesis, a-life seems unlike a science in the conventional sense.
However, the objects just described are, if anything, stranger still.
While they apply the techniques and ideas of artificial life in a variety of ways, they present themselves as art objects rather than as
scientific artifacts. They are manifestations of a kind of transdisciplinary dissemination of artificial life, the results of its recent propagation through cyberculture and popular science writing. They
arise where artificial life meets contemporary practice in the new
media arts.