Mitchell Whitelaw: Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (2004)

“Artificial life, or a-life, is an interdisciplinary science focused on artificial systems that mimic the properties of living systems. In the 1990s, new media artists began appropriating and adapting the techniques of a-life science to create a-life art; Mitchell Whitelaw’s Metacreation is the first detailed critical account of this new field of creative practice.

A-life art responds to the increasing technologization of living matter by creating works that seem to mutate, evolve, and respond with a life of their own. Pursuing a-life’s promise of emergence, these artists produce not only artworks, but generative and creative processes: here creation becomes metacreation.

Whitelaw presents a-life art practice through four of its characteristic techniques and tendencies. “Breeders” use artificial evolution to generate images and forms, in the process altering the artist’s creative agency. “Cybernatures” form complex, interactive systems, drawing the audience into artificial ecosystems. Other artists work in “Hardware,” adapting Rodney Brooks’s “bottom-up” robotics to create embodied autonomous agencies. The “Abstract Machines” of a-life art de-emphasize the biological analogy, using techniques such as cellular automata to investigate pattern, form and morphogenesis.

In the book’s concluding chapters, Whitelaw surveys the theoretical discourses around a-life art, before finally examining emergence, a concept central to a-life, and key, it is argued, to a-life art.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262232340, 9780262232340
281 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-8-11)

Richard Doyle: Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (2003)

The mind of the machine, the body suspended in time, organs exchanged, thought computed, genes manipulated, DNA samples abducted by aliens: the terrain between science and speculation, fraught with the possibility of technological and perhaps even evolutionary transformations, is the territory Richard Doyle explores in Wetwares. In a manner at once sober and playful, Doyle maps potentials for human transformation by new ecologies of information in the early twenty-first century. Wetwares ranges over recent research in artificial life, cloning, cryonics, computer science, organ transplantation, and alien abduction. Moving between actual technical practices, serious speculative technology, and science fiction, Doyle shows us emerging scientific paradigms where “life” becomes more a matter of information than of inner vitality–in short, becomes “wetwares” for DNA and computer networks. Viewing technologies of immortality–from cryonics to artificial life–as disciplines for welcoming a thoroughly other future, a future of neither capital, god, human, nor organism, the book offers tools for an evolutionary, transhuman mutation in the utterly unpredictable decades to come.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2003
ISBN 0816640092, 9780816640096
235 pages

Keywords and phrases
SimLife, deterritorialization, Thousand Plateaus, Alan Sokal, Gilles Deleuze, ribotype, Dead Zone, autopoiesis, Robert Ettinger, wetware, nanotechnology, technoscience, Philip K, alife, information theoretic death, exotic derivatives, coma, Mike Darwin, ecology, brain death

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-3-9)

Sarah Kember: Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (2003)

Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life examines construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture. It takes a critical political view of the concept of life as information, tracing this through the new biology and the changing discipline of artificial life and its manifestation in art, language, literature, commerce and entertainment. From cloning to computer games, and incorporating an analysis of hardware, software and ‘wetware’, Sarah Kember demonstrates how this relatively marginal field connects with, and connects up global networks of information systems.

As well as offering suggestions for the evolution of [cyber]feminism in Alife environments, the author identifies the emergence of posthumanism; an ethics of the posthuman subject mobilized in the tension between cold war and post-cold war politics, psychological and biological machines, centralized and de-centralized control, top-down and bottom-up processing, autonomous and autopoietic organisms, cloning and transgenesis, species-self and other species. Ultimately, this book aims to re-focus concern on the ethics rather than on the ‘nature’ of life-as-it-could-be.

Publisher Routledge, 2003
ISBN 0415240263, 9780415240260
257 pages

Keywords and phrases
evolutionary psychology, epistemology, ALife, sociobiology, autopoiesis, posthuman, cyberfeminism, norns, Steve Grand, science wars, SimLife, feminism, ontology, SimEarth, Risan, natural selection, cyborg, connectionism, feminist, autonomous agents

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2013-3-16)