The process of evolution by natural selection explains how the species change and adapt in the absence of explicit goals or external help. Evolution is a fact. It shows how systems of complex life arise in an autonomous way, from low to high, without there being a central planner or controlling demiurge. In the field of art, methods and processes elaborated with computer codes precisely simulate this principle.
Jon McCormack is one of Australia’s most representative new-media artists, whose work has been shown throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas. He is codirector of the Center for Electronic Media Art of Monash University, in Melbourne, where he also serves as a senior professor of computer science.
A reflection on the themes dealt with in each of the editions of the cybernetic trilogy of Emoção Art.ficial – interaction, emergence and autonomy – gives rise to the proposal of a second trilogy: conversation, entailment and autopoiesis. And these three concepts, in turn, point toward another possible triad: consciousness, meaning and the being human.
Paul Pangaro studied computer science at MIT and earned his doctorate in cybernetics at Brunel University. He worked with scientist Jerry Lettvin in the field of neural models, with Nicholas Negroponte – one of the founders of the Media Lab at MIT – in the area of animation systems, and with Gordon Pask in the cybernetics of learning. Co- founder of CyberneticLifestyles.com in New York City, he creates product visions and innovation strategies for clients such as Nokia, Poetry Foundation and Intellectual Ventures.
See two works by Leonel Moura: Robotarium (the world’s first zoo for robots) and RAP3 – Robotic Action Painter (a robot-artist who produces abstract paintings).
See also The Mutation of the White Doe, a work by Nicolas Reeves which brings unexpected readings of a Scandinavian folk song.
This video is the result of a research that simulated Darwinian evolution by way of hundreds of virtual creatures – which “live” within a CM-5, a supercomputer elaborated in the 1990s by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the process of the experiment, each of these creatures really evolved, learning to execute determined tasks – such as swimming in a simulated aquatic environment.
Artist, scientist and entrepreneur Karl Sims is the founder of Genarts, a North American company that creates special-effects software for the filmmaking industry. He studied computer graphics at MIT and graduated, from the same institute, in life sciences.
The creature editor is an integral part of a computer game developed by the game company Electronic Arts. It is an epic of artificial life that involves the origin of a life, its evolution, the creation of a technological civilization, and eventually its end.
Will Wright is a creator of classic games such as SimCity and The Sims.
The printout of an artwork classified as software art. It involves the overlaying of 1.5 million colored lines, which recall the childhood game of Pick-Up Sticks. This artwork is the result of a computer program based on a simple geometric image, with the format of a tree. The artwork was elaborated to be applied to the façade of the Itaú Cultural Building.
Pascal Dombis lives and works in Paris, France. His artwork received an honorable mention at Ars Electronica in 1994, and has been featured at exhibitions of generative and fractal art throughout Europe and in the United States. In his artwork, he explores the paradoxical coexistence between ordered control and chaotic random forces.
An artwork involving artificial life composed of the two previous works Biomes and Randomseeds. It is formed by five displays resembling Petri dishes – glass recipients used in scientific experiments and for the culture of bacteria in laboratories – which are “inoculated” with two “seeds.” In the virtual biomes, artificial microorganisms are born, evolve and die.
Boredomresearch is an English artist collective formed by Paul Smith and Vicky Isley, researchers in the field of animation and computer art at Bournemouth University, England.
A sculpture in the form of a console composed of four displays arranged horizontally. A program simulates a vectorial field in which the particles flow according to the evolution of the field’s density. The initial interaction that unfolds in the field provokes the emergence of totally unforeseen behavior among the particles.
LAb[au] is a Belgian artist collective founded in 1995 by Els Vermang, Jérôme Decock and Manuel Abendroth. The group’s areas of interest range beyond architecture and urbanism (present in the abbreviated name) to also involve software art and VJing. Besides this, they hold symposiums and workshops with important talents such as Lev Manovich, Marcos Novak and Stanza.
A work of web art in which a dynamic model of autonomous agents – in the form of words in a grammatical network – eat each other. In this process, the “bacteria” exchange genetic information and give rise to the emergence of uncommon narratives.
Santiago Ortiz is an artist, mathematician and researcher in the areas of art, science, and fields of representation. He works with techniques of communication, creation and expression that combine narrative and literature as well as digital and architectural spaces.
