Metacreations : Art and Artificial Life

Artificial life, or a-life, is an interdisciplinary science focused on artificialsystems that mimic the properties of living systems. In the 1990s, new media artists beganappropriating and adapting the techniques of a-life science to create a-life art; MitchellWhitelaw's Metacreation is the first detailed critical account of this new field of creativepractice.A-life art responds to the increasing technologization of living matter by creating worksthat seem to mutate, evolve, and respond with a life of their own. Pursuing a-life's promise ofemergence, these artists produce not only artworks, but generative and creative processes: herecreation becomes metacreation.Whitelaw presents a-life art practice through four of itscharacteristic techniques and tendencies. "Breeders" use artificial evolution to generate images andforms, 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 ascellular 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, aconcept central to a-life, and key, it is argued, to a-life art.