Artificial Life Art

I am presenting the project Art & Science
Meeting, carried out by the Laznia Centre for Contemporary
Art in Gdansk since the beginning of 2011
(I developed the concept in autumn 2010 and run until now), by first discussing
its framework and the context which shaped
it, then describing its essential characteristics and,
finally, up-to-date history and completed projects.

"In Silico - Vida Artificial" es una tesis de licenciatura que trata el tema de la vida artficial en el arte digital. Primero se revisan algunos antecedentes históricos como los orígenes del arte electrónico y la relación arte y ciencia. Después se tratan algunos autores o corrientes que han tratado la relación filosofía y tecnología; en particular Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Richard Dawkins y Fernando Broncano; también se hace un recorrido histórico de los fundamentos científicos de la V.A, desde definiciones de vida en la biología y su evolución en la ciencia moderna, hasta los planteamientos necesarios para su implementación, como sistemas complejos, autorreplicación e inteligencia artificial. Posteriormente se hace un rastreo de la vida artificial como propuesta artística, analizando piezas para entender si utilizan esta tecnología como tema de las propuestas artísticas, casi como una ilustración o si lo hacen como medio, es decir, utilizando propiedades, comportamientos o procesos para construir la propuesta, independientemente de la problemática que aborde la pieza. Y por ultimo se utiliza la pieza in silico como estudio de caso para ahondar en las características y problemáticas del tema.

Este documento intenta determinar si es o no posible la creación de vida artificial, aunque más complejo, también tratará sobre la creación de consciencia artificial y sobre todo, establecerá si existe o no una preocupación por la ética del científico de la computación y mostrará la necesidad de una ética que guíe este proceso incluida en la formación académica.
No es fácil definir la vida o la conciencia, la vida no ha cambiado pero si la forma de vivirla. A parecer estamos envueltos en un proceso de digitalización de nuestra forma de vida, por lo tanto, como toda digitalización nuestra nueva forma de vida puede verse como una aproximación, con algo que quitamos obteniendo a cambio ventajas como la velocidad, el control, la facilidad de transmisión, la compresión, durabilidad etc.
Crearemos un programa que pueda generar una protoconciencia artificial pero con herramientas comunes y que pueda ser ejecutado en un dispositivo móvil disponible masivamente. El objetivo tras este intento es testear que tan lejos estamos de crear conciencia y sobre todo de disponibilizarla al público en general. “Lo haremos y veremos hasta donde nos lleva”.

This talk approaches the Goethean Morphology as the forerunner of contemporary techniques of pattern generation via natural computing and computer graphics. I propose to read Goethe’s Morphology as an original device of reduction, departing from the phenomenological realm to intuit nature’s self-generating processes. In this sense, I understand Goethe’s main gesture as an attempt to comprehend the logic of nature from within, instead of merely trying to represent or mimic it. I show how this very methodological gesture paved the way to some of the most innovative branches of natural computing and Artificial Life: namely, how the use of computer graphics and computer simulation in natural computing context can be seen as a contemporary actualization of Goethe’s research program. Finally, I ask how the later can contribute to change the definition of the notion of life itself and to blur the nature/culture divide.

This panel, comprising artist practitioners, takes a new materialist approach to considerations of nonhuman animals and the computational (the practices of computing, calculation and information processing). We reconsider instrumentation as apparatus by thinking through visualisation technologies, such as GPS and remote cameras, developed to document animals. We address the material-discursive consequences of apparatus that monitor, observe or produce computational nature. The panel focuses on how the animal is inscribed with, and by, new technology and the theoretical perspectives that we need in order to take seriously the participation and entanglement of nonhuman animals in computational systems. In considering nonhuman animals we introduce and problematise ‘artificial life-forms’, or Alife, that have historically been divided into three entangled categories: wet-ware (artificial biological life and augmented human and nonhuman animals), hardware (specifically robots) and softwa...

There have been a number of interesting applications of A-Life in music, ranging from associating musical notes to the cells of cellular automata, to forging genotypes of musical parameters for generating music using genetic algorithms. From the three approaches surveyed in this paper, only the cultural approach allows for the study of the circumstances and mechanisms whereby music might originate and evolve in virtual communities of musicians and listeners. This approach considers musical systems in the context of the origins and evolution of cultural conventions that may emerge under a number of constraints, such as psychological, physiological and ecological constraints.

One of the most interesting-if frustrating-aspects of charting the history of computer art is trying to understand the intersections of specific technologies and artistic experimentation. It is rarely as clear-cut as a simple linear influence of one to the other, partly because artists are able to envision all kinds of possibilities that technology might enable them to realize in some kind of form, but as they do so, the technology is itself shaped, especially in terms of how it is perceived by others. Do artists find a way to give technologies an aesthetic outlet, or do some technologies possess-or facilitate-a characteristic aesthetic that finds its expression through specific artists? Certainly, in the history of computer art it would seem that particular aesthetics, technologies, and artists are closely intertwined in certain periods. This intertwining of art, technology, and ideas stolen from the natural world has never been so arguably merged as the period in the history of computer art from 1980 to 1993. We take as the defining start of this period the initial work of Mandelbrot on fractals that became known as the Mandelbrot set and led to his famous illustrated art-science book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. In 1993, this first highly creative period in evolutionary computer art came to an end with major publications by pioneers Karl Sims, Stephen Todd, and William Latham.