Key Quotes and Key Visual Materials

Key Quotes:

1) ‘At the basis of many digital art projects addressing artificial life are inherent characteristics of digital technologies themselves: the possibility of infinite “reproduction” in varying combinations according to specified variables; and the feasibility of programming certain behaviors (such as ‘fleeting’, ‘seeking’, attacking’) for so called “autonomous” information units of characters.’

Paul, Christiane. 2003. Digital art. London; New York, N.Y.: Thames & Hudson.
‘Chapter 3: Themes in Digital Art’, p.140

2)‘Artificial Life is devoted to a new discipline that investigates the scientific, engineering, philosophical, and social issues involved in our rapidly increasing technological ability to synthesize life-like behaviors from scratch in computers, machines, molecules, and other alternative media. By extending the horizons of empirical research in biology beyond the territory currently circumscribed by life-as-we-know-it, the study of artificial life gives us access to the domain of life-as-it-could-be. Relevant topics span the hierarchy of biological organization, including studies of the origin of life, self-assembly, growth and development, evolutionary and ecological dynamics, animal and robot behavior, social organization, and cultural evolution.’

‘About Artificial Life’
MTS Press Journal
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/page/about/artl

3)‘Artificial Life is more than a new way of thinking about biology. It is a symptom and a source of mutating versions of “nature” and life” in an increasing computerized world. As such, it has a social, cultural, and historical specificity. The book is concerned with chasing down that specificity. I document how the local knowledges and artifacts Artificial life are produced in the institutional and imaginative spaces of the Santa Institute and in the cluster of computer simulation that it holds in its orbit. My argument is that Artificial Life scientist’s computational models of “possible biologies” are powerfully inflected by their cultural conceptions and lived understanding of gender, kinship, sexuality, race, economy, and cosmology and by the social and political context in which this understanding take shape. Ideas and experience of gender and kinship circulating in the homosexual cultural in which most researchers participate, for example, inform theories about “reproduction”, “sex”, “relatedness” and “sexual selection” in artificial worlds, and notions of competition and market economics in the capitalist West shape the construction of “artificial ecologies” in which population of programs vie to “survive” and “reproduce”.’

Helmreich, Stefan. 1998. Silicon second nature :culturing artificial life in a digital world. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. ‘Prologue: In Silico’,P.11
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/page/about/artl

4) 'Built by Nearlife, Inc. (www.nearlife.com) for the Museum of Science, Boston (www.mos.org), VirtualFishtank.com represents the dawn of a new era in educational entertainment. Until now, most museum exhibit websites have merely contained static descriptions of the exhibits. They have not included an interactive element. And they certainly have not been dynamically linked to the actual museum exhibit. VirtualFishtank.com changes all that and enables the highly successful Virtual FishTank(TM) exhibit at the Museum to transcend its walls to be experienced in homes and schools anywhere in the world. And, the Virtual FishTank experience continues to grow with the installation of another tank at the St. Louis Science Center. Now, users can send fish to either destination in Boston or St. Louis.

Virtual FishTank(TM) at MoS is all about building your own fish, releasing it into the gigantic 24,000 "gallon" virtual tank and watching YOUR fish interact with the others. VirtualFishtank.com lets you build your own fish online and release them directly into the Museum tank! You also can release your fish into an online simulated tank, or save your fish and go to the Museum to retrieve and release your fish there.

The Virtual FishTank(TM) exhibit teaches lessons about emergent behavior, group behavior and modeling. The rich functionality of VirtualFishtank.com will enable parents and educators to enhance the educational experience by planning pre and post Museum visit online exercises. '

'What is VISUALFISHTANK.COM?'(and why is it important?)'
Press Information (The name of the author is not stated)
http://www.virtualfishtank.com/press/

5) 'Alife, as a research and activity field, has some special attributes. It is new, very loosely defined, multi-disciplinary in the strongest sense, and its equipment (both laboratory and field) is the computer. Above all, it is fascinating and it seems (to some) to have a potential for breakthroughs. This is why it attracts curious people from all trades, both from the academic world and outside it. You need little more then a computer to perform an Alife experiment.

Alife activity involves programming. The laboratory of Alife is the computer, its tools are computer programs. When you need a new tool you can program it from scratch, but it is wise to look first at existing tools. In some cases it might be possible to use existing code and extend it or otherwise build upon it. Here enters the power of the WWW and the cross-platform languages: You can find pieces of code that suit your needs, in a language you can use directly, given free by people all over the world. '

Abstract form 'Code Sharing as an Alife Experiment in Memetic Evolution'
Artificial Life and Other Experiments (By Ariel Dolan)
http://www.aridolan.com/ofiles/ad/adcodesharing.aspx


Key Visual Materials:
http://picasaweb.google.com/quietpurple