Darwin Machin Penny

8/16/2019 Darwin Machin Penny

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The Darw in Machine:

Artificial Life and I nteractive Art

Simon Penny

First presented: 5th Biennale of Ar t and Technology, Connecticut College,Feb1995,

First published: New Formations UK, 1996

This paper is a consideration of the emerging discipline of Artificial Life, viewedfrom two perspectives. On the one hand, Artificial Life is considered from theperspective of the history and philosophy of science. I will examine the historicalrelationship between the new discipline of Artificial Life and the traditions fromwhich it arose, in order to point up continuities and discontinuites with thosetraditions. One the other, ALife is examined from the perspective of cultural

practice, particularly from the perspective of an artist concerned with theimplications of these ideas in the formation of an esthetic of interactivity. My goal isto establish a framework of cross-related artistic, scientific and philosophic ideas asa base for the discussion of the subject.

The paper then necessarily exists in two parts, these parts are entitled: `TheArchaeology of Artificial Life' and Àrtificial Life and Interactive Art: Putting theDarwin Machine to Work'. [1] The connection between the two parts is morecoherent than it may at first appear. The premise of the enquiry is that since therise of industrialism (if not before) artistic and scientific ideas have been presentedas antithetical, rationalism being dominant in one and in question in the other. Thecorpus of the `scientific' has been waging a tireless war of conquest upon the

tatters of the superstitious pre-scientific world. In this historical context, ArtificialLife is if great interest as it is, on the one hand, a clear perpetuation of thiscolonialising rationalism, made possible by the machine which is the pinnacle of therationalist èngineering world view', the digital computer. On the other hand,aspects of Artificial Life and related studies such as fractal geometry, non-lineardymanics and complexity theory which challenge basic premises of the scientificmethod and the enlightenment world view. [2]

The computer is by no means a neutral or ùniversal machine' when contextualizedin culture. A very specific ideology inheres which is promulgated across culture asthe computer encroaches into more and more diverse aspects of life. This ideology,the cultural baggage of the computer, forces debate on the precepts of the fields

into which it moves.

The Archaeology of Arti ficial Li fe

The Darw in Mach ine

Just what do we mean by artificial life? The name has been claimed by a group ofinterdisciplinary scientists: biologists, roboticists and computer scientists who haveheld several conferences by that name at the Santa Fe Institute for Non-LinearDynamics since 1988 [3]. Alifers are peripherally associated with the related,perhaps less deterministic fields of non-linear dynamics and complexity theory byvirtue of their common interest in self-organising systems and emergent order. The

applications of these techniques vary from the building of digital ecologies in whichthe dynamics of evolution might be studied, to the shaping and control of these


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systems to breed algorithms to do particular arithmetic, graphical or informationaltasks.

The Alife community includes:

1. Computational Biologists. Until now, natural selection, the mechanism ofevolution, has been limited to the organic. The realization of evolving, reproducingdigital species in silicon using genetic algorithms prompts the question: "Is italive?" This question divides Alifers into two groups:

1a. `Hard' Alifers hold that self replicating digital organisms are alive in everysense, and that biology must include the study of possible life, and must arrive atsome universal laws concerning wet life and digital life.

1b. `Soft' Alifers claim only that genetic and evolutionary simulations are useful inunderstanding biological dynamics, but remain simply simulations.

Around this central group cluster several others:

2. Builders of procedural systems, like Craig Reynolds `Boids' and Jessica Hodginsrobot flocks. More recently, these systems are self evolving, such as Karl Simsrecent work on evolving 3D morphology and behavior by competition, and JeffVentralla's evolving animated characters. [4 ](see below, Emergent Behavior in Art)

3. Subsumption and `bottom up' roboticists who utilise ethological analogies tocreate bottom up emergent behavior in mobile machines.

4. Builders of autonomous digital agents to do work in the digital realm.

5.Wet Alifers. Wet Alifers are molecular biologists who are breeding or constructingreplicating or behaving groupings of proteins, enzymes and nucleic acids. Theinstrumentalization of natural selection carries not only for the digital Alifers, butequally for the Wet-Alifers. [5]

Eliza's children, Frankenstein's grandchildren.

Tom Ray, a biologist and designer of the Tierra system, recently made a proposal topromote biodiversity in the net, a distributed digital wildlife preserve on theinternet, in which digital organisms might evolve, circumnavigating diurnally toavailable CPUs. [6] These creatures would evolve good net navigation and cpusensing abilities, among other things. Predators and parasites would emerge. Ray

notes that "Evolution just naturally comes up with useful things" [7]. He argues forthe proposal in the following way: "you couldn't imagine a silk worm, even if youcould, you couldn't guide evolution to make it. But evolution did make it, we cantake it, cross breed it, neuter it, delete its poisonous properties, domesticate it".

This proposal is emblematic of paradigm shifts which characterize Alife. Accordingto the traditional christian outlook which functions as a foundation for the ideologyof industrial capitalism, we humans, (and particularly westerners) could harvest theproducts of biodiversity and harness them as components of the industrial machine.In the post-industrial, Alifers are harnessing the mechanism of biodiversity itself. Asomewhat insidious example of this tendency is a Japanese project to build ArtificialBrains for the internet. This conception sees the internet as a nervous system, and

draws upon evolutionary and anatomical narratives to validate its claims that, asnervous systems developed prior to brains, so it is only logical that the internet will


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grow a brain. The central technique in this research is referred to as the DarwinMachine and has more than passing resemblance to the Frankenstein theme. LikeDr Frankenstein, the developers of the Darwin Machine are seeking to cobbletogether a quasi-human machine.[8] Like most cutting edge `techno-science'research projects, including the exercise of Alife in general, the researchersconveniently and almost unnoticeably omit any mention of just what this

technology might be used for.

Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich has noted that the Alife community is statistically30-40 years old, straight white males who are agnostic or atheist of judeo-christianbackgrounds. Within this community, subjective and value laden assumptions of theresearchers themselves are disguised as axioms. As an example of theseassumptions, Helmreich quotes Tom Ray as saying "I'm omniscient to the physicsof the world I create" and notes the similarity of this position to that of the judeo-christian notion of the omniscient creator.

A greater cause for concern is the particular `flavor' of Darwinism which is enlisted.The very simplistic, individualistic and mechanisitic evolutionary narrative chosen

has a decidely nineteenth century ring to it, and implicitly supports socialdarwinism.[9]

Central to the ideology of Alife is the conception of the feasible separation of the`informational' from its material substrate. Alife avoids the aspects of cell dynamicsand evolution in which the informational and the material are "deeplyentangled"[10] thereby endorsing the simplistic DNA = algorithm generalisationwhich was the keystone around which Watson and Crick's conceptualization of DNAwas originally based.[11 ]Thus Alifers maintain that there is no reason why `life'cannot exist with silicon as a substrate, rather than carbon. It must again beemphasised that this is a rhetorical device, a narrative construction which takes asits basis the nature of the digital computer, in which hardware and software are

separate. This separation is the defining quality of the computer, a machine whichis the quintessential reified form of Cartesian Dualism.

This separation is then `naturalised' by the nomenclature Artificial Life, and thenature of the computer is applied to organic life. This induces the (quite wrong)assumption that modern computational techniques are structurally similar to thedeep structure of biological life. This phenomenon is similar to the trendFranciscoVarella (et al) calls `cognitivism' in cognitive science.[12] Proposing adivision between matter and information in biological systems is yet anotherinstance of a narrative construction rooted in Enlightenment precepts. It serves toreinforce other such contrived dualistic structures as mind and body, form andcontent.[13]

Elsewhere I have discussed the similarity between the attitudes of St Augustine andDescartes to the body, and those of cyberpunks, epitomized by Gibson's words "thebody is meat"[14] It is through examples such as these that we can see just howclearly so called `objective science' can be heavily value laden, perpetuatingdualistic and colonialising ideologies[15] . High tech enterprises, such as ArtificialIntelligence and Top-down robotics validate and reinforce these dichotomies withthe rhetorical power they derive from being scientific, high tech and futuristic.

Paradigm Busters

Scientific ideas have been a powerful influence in shaping western culture. The

power of influence of the hard sciences has encouraged social sciences andhumanistic disciplines to become more `scientific' (and therefore, by definition,


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more rigorous, more respectable) by the adoption of scientific tropes.[16] As Inoted at the beginning of this paper, ideas arising in complexity and Alife challengesome traditional scientific ideas and the Enlightenment frame in general whilesimultaneously reinforcing traditional attitudes. What follows is a partial list of suchideas.

Sensitive Dependance. The ideas that Chaos theory brought: strange and chaoticattractors, bifurcation and fractality, and particularly `sensitive dependance oninitial conditions' revealed vast jungles of unpredictability in the heart of newtonianphysics.[17] The adage that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon will causea typhoon in India has achieved the status of a cliché, but it underlines the oft-elided fact that classical physics is capable of dealing with only a small subset ofphysical phenomena and ignores the rest.[18]

Fractality. The significance of fractals will not be found in any number of computerrenderings of the Mandelbrot set, nor in their application to computer graphicsimulations of fictitious valleys, islands and planets. Fractals show us a geometrywhich approximates the logic of natural growth: recursive, multi-scaled, infinitely

detailed, with symmetry across scale[19]. This idea not only replicates thegenerative (and recursive) geometries of biology, but exposes the roots of Euclidiangeometry in Platonic abstraction. The geometry of Euclid, premised on linesinfinitely thin and points infinitely small, is steeped in intellectual abstractionpredicated on the notion of an 'ideal'. Newtons mechanics is itself predicated on thisstyle of abstraction.

Entropy and Self-Organisation. Since the mid C19th, the second law ofthermodynamics has held western culture in its nihilism-inducing grip due to theunderstanding that the dissipation of heat could be generalised to predict theeventual `heat death of the universe'(the moment at which energy is evenly andsmoothly distributed throughout the universe, at which point all atomic movement

stops). This in itself indicates just how powerful the grip of science and particularlyphysics has been in the last century. Experientially we know that life is anti-entropic. New science, in the form of the ideas of self-organisation and emergentorder has validated this intuition and liberated us from the defeatism of the 2ndlaw. That is not to say that the 2nd law is no longer, but that extrapolation of itsimplications into the life sciences and humanities has been shown to be misplaced.As Beckers, Holland and Deneubourg have persuasively demonstrated, randombehavior amongst simple animals or machines can result in an order producing,anti-entropic outcome. [20]

Emergence and Reductivism. Perhaps the most far reaching implication of selforganisation and emergent order in complex dynamics is the demise of the entire

method of reductivism. Reductivism is a keystone of the scientific method.[21] It ispremised on the assumption that to understand a complex object, one breaks itinto component parts and examines those parts in controlled settings, then addsthe results of those examinations together. The basic principle of emergence is thatorganisation (behavior/order/meaning) can arise from the agglomeration of smallcomponent units which do not individually exhibit those characteristics. Emergentorder implies that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts, that higherlevel behaviors cannot be disassembled into their component lower level buildingblocks. Examples include the generation of mind from individual neurons and thecomplex behaviors of colonial insects and organisms. Inherent in this phenomenonis a critique of reductionism, the major tool of science, which is premised on theassumption that to examine a complex object, one breaks it into component parts

and examines those parts in controlled settings. Complete understanding ariseswhen those parts are added together. Emergence throws that method in the trash.As Manuel De Landa puts it: "The road to reductionism has been permanently


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blocked. If the properties of matter and energy at any given level of organisationcannot be explained by the properties of the underlying levels, it follows thatbiology cannot be reduced to physics or anthropology to biology" [22] Or, onemight add, psychology to physiology, or knowledge to information.

The Top-Down Artificial Intelligence paradigm has come in for its fair share of

bashing in recent years, one of the earliest and loudest whistle blowers beingHubert Dreyfus[23] who refers to the paradigm as GOFAI : `Good Old FashionedArtificial Intelligence'. The Top-Down paradigm, exactly replicates the dualisticstructures outlined above, like the hardware/software pair, the Top Down methodcentralises ìntelligence' in a central processor, into which data is fed from(unintelligent) sensors, and which in turn instructs actuators, having meantimeprepared a master plan. The problem with this method is that it is computationallyintensive and causes processing bottlenecks in with real world problems withoutformally bounded domains. [24]

The observation that a cockroach is better at crossing a road than the best TopDown robot, (the cockroach can eat and reproduce into the bargain) led to a variety

of research projects which searched for alternatives to the Top Down paradigm.These include parallel processing and connectionist computer architectures, thedevelopment of Brooksian Subsumption Architecture, a revivial of study of neuralnets and the exploration of emergent order. Parallel processing and connectionistcomputer architectures propose alternatives to the production-line-for-data modelof standard serial processing. Subsumption, emergent order and other approachesshare a `Bottom-Up'strategy. The distinction between Top-down and Bottom-up isnot consistent, but can be characterised in terms of dualism. Top down embracesthe notion of a panoptical mind-proxy in control, bottom up stategies (in differentways) make a less clear distinction between `mind' and `body'. Subsumptionarchitecture does not centralize processing, often the behavior of a robot isorganised by several unconnected processors! Similarly in the exploration of

emergent order is based on the notion that a group or multitude of simple units cangenerate complex phenomena àccidentally'. There is substantial political force inthis trend, as bottom-up theories implicitly oppose authoritarian power structureswhich dualistic structures reinforce.

Another techno-scientific paradigm which has caused havoc when ported into thehumanities and particularly into telematic arts is is Claude Shannon'sCommunication Theory. This entirely technological theory assesses communicationin terms of a match between bits sent and bits recieved [25] In humancommunication, ìnterpretation' is everything.[26] Horst Hendriks Jansen offers anexample from Piaget which suggests that Shannon's communications theory is notparticularly relevant to the study of human communication. One such example

concerns the behavior of a suckling infant which trigger responses in the mother byappearing to be intentional. This `bootstraps' the child into meaning.[27] Thesignificance of such èxchange' is that the message received was never sent!

Artificial Life and I nteractive Art:

Putting the Darwin Machine to w ork.

The Esthetics of I nteractivity.

Artists are confronting unexplored territory: the esthetics of machine mediatedinteractivity. Contrary to the industry-driven rhetoric of freedom and liberation,

freedom in machine interaction is an entirely constrained affair. As Sarah Robertssuccinctly puts it: "Interactive is not a bad word, but the illusion that goes along


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with it is of a kind of democracy, ... that the artist is sharing the power of choicewith the viewer, when actually the artist has planned every option that canhappen...its a great deal more complex than if you [the user] hadn't had a sort ofchoice, but its all planned"[28] Indeed, it is a great deal more complex. Designingthe interactive experience adds an entire dimension to the esthetic endevour, onewithout precedent in the visual and plastic arts. In the west, the visual arts have no

tradition of an esthetics of interactivity. Six hundred years of painting has resultedin a rich esthetics of the still image, of color and line, shape and area, ofrepresentational geometry and perspective. One hundred year of moving image hasgiven us an esthetics of time-based image, of camera angle and movement, wipeand cut. But we do not have an esthetic language of real time interaction.Interactive media artists do not create instances of representation, they create avirtual machine which itself produces instances of representation based on real timeinputs.

The machine, of course, has no idea that its interacting with anyone. It has no ideaof anything. So how are we to concieve of this machine mediated interactivity, withrespect to the artist, and with respect to the user? Winnograd and Flores argue that

computers simply facilitates human interaction.[29] So can we say that themachine is a proxy for the artist? This seems just a little simplistic. The interactiveartwork is not conversation precisely, it is an encapsulated cultural act. Interactionmay occur with that cultural capsule even after the maker is deceased.Theapproach of Winnograd and Flores veils a subtle anthropomorphism: the machine`represents' the artist. But does a user (say of a video game) imagine s/he is inconversation with the artist through the narrative and the characters? In the earlydays of AI and interactivity, the goal was the emulation of the human. Certainly thefamous historical examples: `Eliza' and the Turing Test before it, wereunselfconsciously anthropomorphic.[30 ]It seems no longer necessary to requirethat the interactive work is anything more than a machinic system which simulatesresponsiveness. A reflexive idea of emulation arises here: in order to function, the

work must sucessfully trigger associations in the user which make the experience ofthe work meaningful. For a user to recognise a machine event as a response, s/hemust `re-cognise' it, by comparison with previous experience.[31] But thisexperience is not necessarily of the organic world, we are already attuned to aplethora of machinic responses, from traffic lights to ringing telephones to the dosprompt.

When we posit a synthetic agent doing work in cyberspace, such as locatingreferences on a certain subject at various sites, the environment of the agent isalien to us. It and its environment are digital, with little equivalence of thegeography and physics which we inhabit. We could not emulate it because it isentirely unfamiliar. Yet it must be represented in some way that allows for

information to be exchanged, for work to be done The interface becomes the glassof the aquarium in a dramatic way: we are looking at an alien species in itsenvironment. The interface is the zone of translation.. We understand only ourimage of it, which is to say, we extrapolate from our cultural experience exampleswhich carry some traits which seem to have an analogous relationship with what itis we think we're seeing. [32]

As Erkki Huhtamo has noted: "One might argue that the proliferation of forms ofcomputer mediated interactivity in our everyday lives has already given rise to anew subject position in relation to modes of audio-visual experience."[33]

Emergent Behavior in Art


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What bearing do ideas of emergent order and techniques of Artificial Life have oninteractive art practice, as ideas or tools? The most profound, as I see it, is that itoffers an alternative to the current all too deterministic paradigm of interactivity aspre-set responses to user navigation through an ossified database. This paradigm isfirmly within the Top-Down camp. Emergent interactive behavior would not bederived from a set of pre-determined alternatives. Rather, behaviors might arise

through a contingent and unconnected chain of triggers. In the behaviors oftermites (described by Grassé) highly complex building behavior arises when asimple behavior produces an action or a product which then triggers a higher levelbehavior. [34] This is a new paradigm of interactivity, radically different from thenotion of a pre-linked database. Simply regarding this method as a possibilitypoints up the presence of deterministic top-down strategies in current interactiveart practice. This must lead us to consider just how much of interactive art theory(such as it is) is predicated upon Shannonesque and Top-Down approaches whichare quite questionable in our context. An interactive work, like any work,consciously or unconsciously embodies a value system. Particularly in the realm ofcomputer art, we are always subject to the insinuation of the very C19th valuesystem of engineering. Considering an emergent approach to interactivity is a way

of bringing those value laden basic assumptions into visibility.

Does complexity and Alife offer us as tools for an esthetics of behavior? Acelebrated and early appllication of self-organising behavior is the now wellestablished field of procedural modeling. Craig Reynold's Boids are perhaps the bestknown example, in which, rather than draw a flock of birdlike images and animatethem, he equipped a virtual space with a terrestrial physics and equipped individual`boids' with some basic flocking behavior and voila! a virtual flock flew through thespace and around obstacles. More recently Jessica Hodgins has used similartechniques to generate a `herd' of cyclists. Jeffrey Ventrella, Karl Sims and othershave combined the notion of procedural modeling with simulated evolution,`breeding' new characters according to the strictures of their enviroment.

Of course, you can breed anything, a physics, a joke, if you establish the payoffsand taxes, the right `rugged fitness landscape' and manipulate your mutation rateto avoid becoming stranded on local fitness peaks. [35] You could have a selfevolving user interface, in which the environment it adapted to was the habits andinterests of the individual user. Such an interface might hide little used functions insub-menus or mutate a new floating palette. Use of the palette would reward thatmutation, allowing its progeny a better rate of survival in the next generation. Thiscould be fun, you'd never know quite what your interface would look like, though Iguess the mutation would be fairly conservative, given the trained and habit boundnature of user activity. Radically novel mutations would be nipped in the budbecause the user wouldn't understand them.

If procedural modeling will replace figure animation, perhaps genetic algorithms willbreed not only creatures, but storylines as well! And indeed, this is possible now,not simply in screen-based simulation, but in the more difficult case of mobilerobotic platforms where power and computation are limited, as Luc Steels hasrecently demonstrated [36] This presents a curious prospect that art practice mightbecome a kind of virtual horticulture as evolutionary models are adopted. The roleof designer then becomes one step further removed from the surface of the work.The artist is not making the work as it appears, nor is she making a rule base whichgenerates the work. She is building an ecology-like model with environmentalconstraints within which variation can occur.

Behavior and mimesis


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I've previously observed that mimesis has been the focus of western art since theGreeks, and historically, has advanced by utilising the most advanced technologiesand techniques available. [37] The abstraction of modernism is an aberration inthat historical flow. Certainly the history of popular media followed the mimeticpath. From automata of the seventeenth century, such as Vaucanson's famousDuck, a mechanical automaton which could flap its wings, eat and excrete foul

smelling waste matter, mimesis has been the guiding principle. This trajectorycontinues through photography, C19th visual novelties such as Wheatstonesstereograms and Daguerre's Diorama, to cinema, TV, computer animation andtheme park attractions.[38]

Now interactive media and artificial life offer a quite new type of mimesis, onewhich combines the trajectory of technological mimesis with ideas influenced by the`systems art' of the 70s. The representationalism here tends to be not so muchoptical as systematic. It is the dynamics of biological systems which are modeled.This change of order is akin to the move from harnessing the products ofbiodiversity to harnessing the mechanism of biodiversity which I discussed earlier.Numerous works employ `nature' not as a representation but in the structure of the

systems: biological growth algorithms, simulated ecosystems or communities,genetic algorithms, neural networks. [39]

The parallelism inherent in Paul Cezzane's early modernist dictum that Àrt isharmony parallel to nature' is very like the goals of Alife research. This makes Aliferesearchers àrtists' in Cezzanes terms. The discussion of mimesis is complexifiedby the intrusion of this goal of a parallel order. If the Alife researcher seeks acondition parallel to nature, then this is in a sense, very like the goals of themodernist artists following on from Cezzane, whose goals (in the words of PaulKlee) were not to represent the world, but to `render visible'. One of the activeissues in an esthetics of interactivity, then, is a question of mimesis andmodernism: Is the artist concerned with simulating or interactively representing an

existing being, or with inventing another possible being.[40]

Conclusion

The new ideas in Complexity and Alife seem to have great potential in art, both astechniques and as food for philosophical thought. But several cautions must benoted. I've tried to show that while the disciplines I've discussed do take radicalpositions with respect to traditional ideas, in other ways they perpetuate a view ofthe world which is deterministic and instrumentalizing, and are thus themselves,ripe for critical examination. Foremost among these, in the case of Artificial Life, isthe instrumentalization of a very particular notion of èvolution'.

New scientific ideas powerfully inform the value systems and world view of ourculture. New technologies are almost always clad in utopian rhetoric. Anytechnology which is trumpeted as a `liberation' should be examined extra-carefully.Historically, those technologies have transpired to be the most oppressive. Artistsmust be careful not to unconsciously and unquestioningly endorse the valuesystems and narratives hidden in scientific discourses, where they often lie hidden,disguised as axioms.

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Darwin Machin Penny