Two Decades of Evolutionary Art Using Computational Ecosystems and Its Potential for Virtual Worlds

Abstract

We analyse works of digital art that use a technique from artificial life (ALife) called computational ecosystems (CEs). These are systems running on computers where agents are organized in a hierarchical structure (of a food-chain) and trade token units (of energy and biomass) as a way of promoting community dynamics. We analyse a collection of forty (40) papers communicating works developed in the last two decades. We classify each of these works according to an adapted taxonomy. We then produce a study of cumulative analysis to outline patterns and common features which might define the field. We conclude on the diversity and heterogeneity of the practice, to assert CEs as a multimedia generative tool useful in the construction of bio-mimicking ecosystems as well as in the animation of non-player characters (NPCs) with human-like behaviors in virtual words.

The Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Life

“…For example, following Ashby's law of requisite variety (Ashby, 1956), autopoiesis can be seen as the ratio of the complexity of a system over the complexity of its environment (Fernández et al, 2014). This implies that a living system requires a higher complexity than its environment to have a certain degree of autonomy.…”

“…Within artificial intelligence, methods have been developed to model creativity (Boden, 1998). This has also been the case in ALife (Rinaldo, 1998;Whitelaw, 2004), where computational methods such as evolutionary computation have been used for creating artwork (McCormack and d'Inverno, 2012;Antunes et al, 2014), mainly within design, the visual arts, and music.…”

On Writing and Reading Artistic Computational Ecosystems

“…Such heterogeneous material aspects combine in a Deleuzian mental automaton with the viewers accessing the work via their perceptual abilities, their awareness of the theory of natural selection, or their previous knowledge of computers. 6 The resulting dynamic conjugation of textual and generative elements produces an ever-changing and almost fluid landscape where meaning is generated from the articulation of the material and the conceptual dimensions.…”

“…These agents may also emulate metabolic cycles and eventually die and be removed from the simulation. Systems of this kind already have an established history in the field of ALife, going back at least to the early 1990s [6]. The artistic use of this technology exploits, for aesthetic purposes, the inherent dynamics generated by these communities.…”

“…This practice takes expression in an eclectic set of formats ranging from still digital imagery to full-fledged evolving environments (sonified, visualized in 2D or 3D, interactive) presented in large-scale installations. This is now a well-established (digital) art practice, which has been surveyed by a number of authors in recent years [29,7,25,8,19,6]. …”