Breeding Aesthetic Objects: Art and Artificial Evolution
Mitchell Whitelaw
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney;
mitchell@symbiotic.org
Abstract
This paper presents an account of the work of visual artists applying artificial evolutionary techniques, addressing
the implications of these techniques for artistic practice. It examines the forms of artistic or creative agency found within the
field, the nature of the evolved aesthetic object, and the possible limits to this work.
1 Introduction
Computer science investigates, theorises and formalises
the operation of the paradigmatic technology of our
time. It also pursues the applications of that
technology; the ways in which it is used, and might be
used. The products of computer science make their way
in the world, and are applied and mis-applied according
to dynamics of individual whim and collective desire;
the Web is one work of computer science which has
made a dramatic impact on (Western) society at large,
thanks to the collective interest which it has attracted. A
standard for online information delivery has given rise
to an entire culture, or sub-culture — one which will
continue to influence successive waves of technological
and cultural development.
An important premise of this paper, then, is that the
objects of computer science are actively involved in the
wider dynamics of Western technological culture. Here,
a very particular instance of this involvement is
considered: the application of techniques of artificial
evolution in the creation of works of art. Upon close
examination this small, somewhat obscure intersection
of artificial evolution with art-making raises a variety of
interesting issues. Within this intersection we can
observe implementations of artificial evolution with
peculiar properties; systems which reflect the creative
aims and aesthetic imaginations of the artists who use
and design them. We can also observe the more abstract
structures that surround and inform these systems — the
notions of evolution, creativity and the aesthetic object,
the biological metaphors, the ideas of creative agency
— as well as the aims and desires which propel them.
From the perspective of a student of art and culture, we
can ask, what kind of creation is this? How does an
evolved aesthetic object operate as an artwork? In what
sense is the “breeder” of such an object an artist?
An analysis such as this is more usually found in a
humanities context, under the label of “cultural studies”
or “new media theory.” It is presented here as a kind of
field report: artificial evolution has moved beyond the
discplinary boundaries of computer science, and become
involved in the melee of cultural and artistic practice;
what follows is an attempt to return an account of its
cultural and artistic implementations (and implications)
to the scholarly community most closely involved with
the invention and development of the technique.
2 Breeding Aesthetic Objects
2.1 An Overview of the Field
The historical lineage of artificial aesthetic evolution
begins with Richard Dawkins, who devised “Biomorph
Land”, a program in which the user can guide the
“evolution” of generations of graphical stick-figures.
Dawkins describes his experiments in “Biomorph Land”
in his popular work on Darwinian evolution, The Blind
Watchmaker (1987, p51-74). While the evolution of the
Biomorphs is based solely on their graphical appeal,
this breeder is well outside the context of art practice.
Within The Blind Watchmaker it is used to support
Dawkins’ argument for the power of cumulative
selection, as a digital demonstration of the capacity of
the evolutionary process.
Nonetheless, Dawkins’ Biomorphs were to help inspire
a succession of artists to take up artificial evolution.
During the late eighties and early nineties William
Latham, in collaboration with programmer Stephen
Todd, created software for synthesising, mutating and
evolving three-dimensional forms — in the artist’s
words “ghosts of sculptures” — which he exhibited
internationally as cibachrome prints and video
animations (Todd and Latham, 1992). His first major
exhibition of evolved work, “The Conquest of Form”
(1988-89), organised by the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol,
toured UK and German galleries and museums including
the Natural History Museum in London and the
Deutsches Museum in Munich. Despite gaining wide
critical attention, Latham has declared himself
“dissatisfied” with the art scene and is no longer active
within it (Computer Artworks, 1998). After a second
touring exhibition in 1991-92, and the publication of a
book on his work with Todd (1992), he co-founded
software and animation company Computer Artworks in
order to develop his work “in a popular form for the
mass market.” (Computer Artworks, 1998)
Inspired in turn by the work of both Dawkins and
Latham, American animator, artist and a-life researcher
Karl Sims developed software for the evolution of twodimensional
images around 1991. Sims presented
Genetic Images, an artwork using this software, in 1993
at Austrian electronic art festival Ars Electronica, and in
an installation at the Paris Centre Georges Pompidou
the same year. Running in real time, Sims’ work
allowed museum visitors to act as a collective “selector”
for generation after generation of evolved images. The
images themselves showed that graphic objects of
remarkable complexity, and some of remarkable beauty,
could be generated using evolutionary techniques — see
for example Sims (1991, 1993a).
The work of Sims and Latham continues to be
influential; the years following publication of their
work have seen a number of artists and computer
scientists pursue the approaches their work sets out.
Projects following Latham’s use of procedural/iterative
constructive geometry include Australian artist Nik
Gaffney’s Mutagen, a form-breeder which allows both
user-driven and autonomous evolution (Gaffney, 1998).
Also in this category are Andrew Rowbottom’s FORM
software (Rowbottom, 1998) and Cybertation and
Dancer DNA by UK multimedia collective The Zen
Room (The Zen Room, 1998). Others including
American artist Stephen Rooke, veteran “algorist”
Kenneth Musgrave (Musgrave, 1998), Dutch a-life
researcher Peter Kleiweg (Kleiweg, 1998), and American
computer scientist John Mount, have followed Sims’
image-based approach. Mount’s “International
Interactive Genetic Art” project virtualises Sims’
Genetic Images installation, allowing web users to act
collectively as aesthetic selectors by evaluating the
images displayed (Mount, 1998).
2.2 A Case Study - Stephen Rooke
These breeders can be treated, as they are above, as
technical objects with particular characteristics, and art
objects (or art processes) with names and dates. They
can be readily identified, described in this way. However
as suggested earlier, there are more detailed structures to
be considered, and more interesting interplays of the
technical and the creative. In an account of the work of
one contemporary artist working with artificial
evolution, some of this detail is made apparent.
In 1991, equipped with a graphics workstation, an
interest in ecology and a background in geology and
graphics programming, Stephen Rooke set out to create
a graphical ecosystem simulation. Quickly realising the
enormity of the task, he turned instead to the artificial
evolution of images. Rooke describes himself as an
image-breeder “in a tradition inspired by evolutionary art
pioneer Karl Sims.” (Rooke, 1998a) Like Sims, Rooke
uses a “genome” constructed from a grammar of
mathematical functions which are evaluated to produce
an image; variation is induced in successive generations
through random variation (“mutation”) or the
combination of two existing genomes (sexual
reproduction). The only significant technical differences
between the system used in Sims’ Genetic Images and
Rooke’s work are in Rooke’s larger grammar of
mathematical functions, including some which generate
fractals.
This grammar is clear in Rooke’s images: many of
them resemble fantastic landscapes, with the familiar
swirls and filigrees of Julia and Mandelbrot fractals
sweeping into the distance. They are brightly coloured
and extremely detailed, layered with complex,
intersecting structures receding into infinity. Their
names are just as expansive: “In the Beginning”,
“Primordial Yearnings”, “Through Caverns
Measureless”, “The Rapture of the Deep”. (Rooke,
1998b) While Sims seemed interested in
communicating a sense of evolutionary process with the
open interactivity of Genetic Images, Rooke’s practice
is solitary, focused on the resulting image. The personal
nature of Rooke’s approach distinguishes him within
this field; rather than a calm aesthetic exploration,
Rooke’s search is a passionate process, strongly linked
to a mystical or metaphysical vision:
Images evolve that look like places I see in my
dreams, sometimes complex landscapes I can fly
through, sometimes evocative forms that seem
familiar, just beyond the edge of recognition. ...
I have seen these shapes and places before, in
dreams, in altered states, in rocks, landforms,
forests, arthropod shells, galaxies, in
microscopes. (Rooke, 1998c)
Rooke frequently describes his process in terms of
familiarity and its own urgent momentum:
I can’t stop. There is something compelling
about this process. It feels as though the images
are trying to break out of their hyperspace into
the physical world. Sometimes I’ll be two or
three days into a run — dozens of generations
with one or two hundred individuals in the
population — when Wham! there’s something
familiar staring back at me from out of the
computer screen, demanding to be made real.
Here Rooke also indicates the scale of the evolutionary
process and something of his own role as patient
selector, who in the quote above is rewarded — struck
— by an image.
Rooke’s background in geology is evident in the
language he uses to describe the image-evolution.
Rather than start from primordial “scratch” for each
image, Rooke begins with “digital amber” — genomes
already evolved to a certain degree of complexity. He
likens this genetic honing-down to the evolutionary
“shakeout” that reduced biological diversity after the
proliferation of the Cambrian period. Metaphorically,
Rooke is locating his work within a progressive
evolutionary flow: rather than the fast, cheap diversity
of an initial evolutionary boom, he is interested in the
long haul, the slow evolution of higher orders of
complexity. As the quote above indicates, the scale of
this evolutionary process, the number of “generations”
an image embodies, has its own appeal.
This evolutionary language illustrates one of the two
dominant metaphors involved in Rooke’s work. The
other involves a space — or rather, a number of spaces.
The notion of parameter space is often used in
discussing the products of artificial evolution; given an
artificial genome with a certain number (n) of variables,
the potential results can be imagined as occupying an ndimensional
space. This spatial metaphor is used
throughout the lineage of artificial aesthetic evolution
— notably in Dawkins (1987) and Todd and Latham
(1992). In Rooke, the static, finite notion of parameter
space becomes a more expansive “image hyperspace”.
This change is technical as well as metaphorical: in the
open, algorithmic genetic structure Rooke uses there is
no fixed number of variables; a mutation can add or
remove variables and alter the dimensionality of the
genome’s parameter space. In Rooke’s writing however,
“image hyperspace” becomes far more than a
mathematical figure. He links it to Terence McKenna’s
notion of an “invisible landscape”, an inner, imaginary
space. In a discussion of a sensor-driven interface that
would allow a more intuitive process of image
selection, Rooke suggests that “Something like this
should lead eventually to ... a much more fluid,
interactive, richer way to pull images out of [people’s
heads | image hyperspace].” (Rooke, 1998d)
3 Breeding and Creation
3.1 Creative Agency and the Breeding
Process
Rooke’s work begins to raise some interesting
questions regarding the evolutionary process, the role of
the artist and the relation of the two. What kind of
creative agency, or creative will, is at work in these
breeders?
In the work of artists such as Rooke and Latham,
creative agency seems initially to operate in a fairly
conventional way. Artificial aesthetic evolution is the
“process”, and the aesthetic result, in the form of a
digital print or video tape, is the “product”. However
further investigation reveals a more complex relation of
process, agency and “artist” status, here and in other
breeders.
Todd and Latham (1992, p209) discuss the way their
“evolutionism” “changes the role of the artist in
creating an art work.” Here that role is twofold,
involving “the creation of generative systems and
structures” on one level, and “the selection of specific
forms and animations” on the other. While the authors
anticipate that these roles might be performed by
different people, such that the artist’s role becomes “less
clear”, they vigorously distance themselves from any
such confusion. Latham reactively stakes a claim for
ownership of “evolutionism”, and a kind of
conventional artistic status. Todd and Latham (1992,
p12) also introduce an analogy for this twofold artistic
role which suggests another important side to the
constructions of agency operating in these systems.
“The artist first creates the systems of the virtual world
... then becomes a gardener within this world he has
created.” The authors frequently refer to these roles
simply as “artist creator” and “artist gardener”.
This “artist creator” role suggests a kind of amplified
creativity at work in artificial evolution: here the artist
creates vast “gardens” of aesthetic potential. Kevin
Kelly makes the implicit explicit when he concludes an
article on Sims announcing “The artist becomes a god,
creating an Eden in which surprising things will grow.”
(Kelly, 1994a) To one reviewer Latham’s work suggests
“anxiety... in the face of a pervasive god-like
omnipotent fantasy, provoked by the possession and
control of powerful technical equipment.” (Barter, 1992)
Latham’s depiction of himself as the “creator” of a
virtual world replete with organic form certainly
suggests such an “omnipotent fantasy”.
However the shift that Latham describes from “creator”
to “gardener” is equally revealing. In formal terms this
switch in roles implies a shift in frame of reference: the
“systems” that for the creator were explicit
constructions become for the gardener implicit,
expressed in the particularities of form they allow; the
gardener works inside the created world. It seems that
the rewards of aesthetic evolution come when the artist
gardener breeds something new, interesting, or
somehow unexpected. The joy of the “gardener” comes
from being surprised in the garden, confronted with the
autonomy of the evolved form - but the “creator” at
once recognises it as one of “his” own, a manifestation
of the structures already set down.
In Sims’ Genetic Images the artist’s agency is less
actively constructed. Control of that process is
reliquished, turned over to the work’s audience: Sims
stays in the “creator” role, defining the formal structures
underlying an aesthetic space which others explore. The
composite or collaborative agency this suggests, the
same complex agency that threatens Latham’s sense of
his own status, is something Sims explores with more
enthusiasm. He describes his installation as “an unusual
collaboration between humans and machine” which
“permits the creation of results that neither of the two
could produce alone.” (Sims, 1993b, p404) Sims
actively questions the resemblance between more
conventional creativity and artificial evolution,
ultimately identifying Genetic Images with evolution’s
paradoxical designer-free creativity, a creativity of
“accident” rather than “good”. He speculates that the
work will “challenge yet another aspect of our
anthropocentric tendencies” and demonstrate the “power
of the evolutionary process in general—in simulation,
as well as in its many forms in the world around us.”
Sims’ appeals to a generalised evolutionary creativity
begin to dissolve the role of the individual user or
selector — just as in Genetic Images, an individual’s
sequence of preferences might be absorbed by a longerterm,
more collective process of evolution. The
importance of the subjective process of “breeding”
aesthetic objects cannot be neglected, however. As
Stephen Rooke has indicated, the process begins to
assume its own momentum: “I can’t stop. There is
something compelling about this process...” (1998c).
The response of the normally staid Richard Dawkins is
even more remarkable: “I cannot conceal from you my
feeling of exultation as I first watched these exquisite
creatures emerging before my eyes. ... I couldn’t eat,
and that night ‘my’ insects swarmed behind my eyelids
as I tried to sleep.” (1987, p60)
Clearly, this process engages those who use it in a
remarkable way; we might speculate as to how this
engagement operates. In Sims’ discussion of Genetic
Images he explains how the variation occuring in
image-breeding differs from the creative alterations
involved in more conventional image-making. (Sims,
1993b) Here, creative variation is “succinctly executed
by the computer” in the form of a random mutation. It
is this computational mutation which is the key to an
understanding of the kind of creative agency at work in
these breeders — one which operates through preference
and selection rather than active construction. The
passive position of the artist/user is particularly
important: as Sims says, the computer tirelessly,
“succinctly” varies the aesthetic object, and can do so
quickly, easily and endlessly. Propelled at speed through
generation after generation, the artist enjoys an
exhilarating excess of choice, as new objects/creatures
appear and are left behind. With the effortlessness of
“mutation” comes an accelerated loop of change and
selection which can continue indefinitely: the “creative”
process is extended into an endless deferral of its object.
An analogy can be made with the psychology of
shopping, an activity which in affluent cultures offers
not so much neccessary material objects as sheer desire,
the endless promise of more. Similarly the psychology
of breeding aesthetic objects is caught up with the
process more than the object, a process driven by a
spiral of variation, desire and selection without apparent
limits. Perhaps the strength of the desiring-loop these
works set up explains the responses of Rooke and
Dawkins.
3.2 The Evolved Aesthetic Object
How then do the peculiarities of this creative process,
and the creative agency it involves, influence the way
that the products of artificial evolution are interpreted as
works of art? As this rush of “accelerated evolution”
feeds itself, it risks rendering its aesthetic objects
meaningless. In this overflow of image-material, how
can one mutant claim more significance than another?
When evolution is this fast, and this easy, how do we
evaluate its results?
It is not only the nature of the process that begs these
questions: taken at face value, the images produced by
Rooke and Sims’ breeders are lurid bits of abstract
computer art. The formal-procedural grammar that
underpins their images is a-scalar; a single image is an
arbitrary, infinitely detailed window in an infinitely
large co-ordinate plane. While a rendering of an image at
a certain resolution might produce something
resembling a kind of decorative abstract painting, it will
have neither the materiality or the gestural quality, the
mark of human action and agency, of such a painting:
like a fractal, it recedes forever within the frame and
extends indefinitely outside it. These products of
aesthetic selection represent a strange coupling between
an a-scalar, a-human generative process and a human
aesthetic perception. Kelly (1994a) describes Sims’
images as “mirages... of an alien beauty”; however
significantly the “beauty” these artists breed often
involves a move away from the inherent strangeness of
their generative language and towards more conventional
modes of representation. Sims’ face-like example seems
to demonstrate an urge to find an image of the human, a
mirror, in these vast abstract fields. In one sense
Rooke’s account of his move towards more
illusionistic, landscape-like images shows a similar
desire to find a familiar pictorial language. Images such
as In the Beginning and Skaters, found on Rooke’s
website, illustrate the tension between formal generative
elements (the distinctive fractal curls, flattened and
stretched throughout the images) and representational
convention (the horizon line, the sense of illusionistic
depth). Rooke’s work also shows very clearly how the
metaphors attached to the breeding process inform its
products. The increasingly “spatial” nature of Rooke’s
images resonates strongly with the other linked spaces
he discusses — image-hyperspace, inner imaginary
space, and McKenna’s “invisible landscape”. In fact it
seems Rooke is trying to depict in his images the very
“space” he imagines them to inhabit. As well, his
images operate literally as spaces, spaces in themselves.
A vast, high-resolution print of the image swallows the
viewer up:
I suppose I am known as something of a fanatic
about image resolution, or detail. For me, there
is never enough. I want to print these images at
the largest size, with the finest resolution and
quality available. ... Picture seeing a large mural
from a hundred feet away. As you walk closer to
it, you see increasing detail - right up to the
limit of your vision 12 inches away. (1998c)
The same sense is evoked as Rooke projects slides of
his works onto a group of dancers: “When people enter
the images, sometimes a phenomenon happens where
the dancer feels like they’re snapping into and out of the
image. (‘am I in the image, or is it in me?’)” (1998e).
Rooke refers to this technique as “slide immersion”
(1998d).
It seems that as we try to ascribe significance to the
evolved aesthetic object, it returns us to the
evolutionary process. The biological and spatial
metaphors which frame the work of Rooke and Latham
come from the process itself; their artworks are perhaps
best interpreted as self-referential explorations —
mystical depictions of the imaginary spaces of genetic
potential, in the case of Rooke, and slightly grotesque
meditations on organic form, in Latham’s work. In one
sense Latham is unusual here in that he offers a subtext
to his own work that works against the positive,
expansive sense of evolutionary potential that
characterises the work of other artists. He describes his
work as “a parody of genetic engineering” and a
comment on “the wanton destruction of the natural
world.” (Todd and Latham, 1992, p207-8) Elsewhere he
is quoted as arguing that his work “reminds people of
things that they’d rather forget” such as “viruses, cancer
[and] bodily processes.” (McClellan, 1998) In a strange
inversion, Latham uses images of an artificial biology
to “remind” us of the real thing.
4 Limits
Throughout this field there is a sense of excitement at
the potential of aesthetic evolutionary processes. All of
the artists discussed here remind us in their writing of
the extent of the genetic spaces, and hyperspaces, which
their systems explore. Kevin Kelly , writing on Sims’
work, describes his system as accessing “a universe ...
of all possible pictures.” (1994b, p340) This universe
supposedly contains “all shades of rose ... the Mona
Lisa, and all Mona Lisa parodies ... the blueprints of
the Pentagon” although of course the evolved images
Kelly sees are “amorphous blotches, streaks, and
psychedelic swirls of colour.”
Kelly prompts the question, do the image hyperspaces
of Sims and Rooke actually contain all possible
images? Given the open-ended structure of their genetic
code, this may be difficult to determine formally — in
any case such a determination is outside the scope of the
current investigation. However the images themselves
suggest that, so far, a fairly limited portion of this
image space has been explored; no Mona Lisa has yet
emerged. Rather the images retain a distinctive
algorithmic aesthetic; the generative raw materials of
their “genomes”, the libraries of functions they employ,
combine (and recombine ad infinitum) but the aesthetic
quality of the images remains relatively unchanged.
Instead of a boundless genetic space, access to “all
possible pictures” (or forms), it seems that these
systems set out their own specific aesthetic domains.
The structures of the artificial genome, its rules of
mutation and reproduction and its means of expression
combine to give rise to a particular aesthetic. While this
phenomenon makes the expansive evolutionary rhetoric
that appears around these systems less credible, it
should not be taken as an artistic failure. Rooke’s work
shows how the aesthetic qualities of the evolved
algorithmic image interact fruitfully with the artist’s
own imagination. The fractal structures in Rooke’s
images are related to the sense of landscape which he
pursues; the landscape metaphor links in turn to the
figures of inner imaginary space and computational
image hyperspace. Similarly the infinite detail of the
algorithmic image-surface feeds into this mixture of
spaces, as each image becomes a boundless space in
itself.
The evolved forms of William Latham’s work provide
another example of this phenomenon; here the genetic
structure has been designed to give rise to particular
phenotypic forms: twisting spirals, branching and
recursive structures, tentacles and ribs. The evolved
results are limited in their variety, but have a distinctive
emergent aesthetic; a combined product of the artist’s
design of the underlying generative structures, and the
aesthetic selection guiding their evolution. The
considerable success of Latham’s work shows that a
specialised, and in many ways limiting genetic structure
can give rise to a highly individual aesthetic.
Nonetheless the sense of potential that the evolutionary
process offers remains palpable in this field. Rooke
continues to work on a new genetic structure, one based
on Sims’ later work on the evolution of behaviour and
locomotion (Sims 1994). This directed graph genome is
a more dynamic structure, resembling a genetic
network; Rooke suspects that it “will be capable of
much richer evolution.” Rooke’s plan suggests another
interesting limit for aesthetic evolution; in a quest for
aesthetic richness and variety, the formal models
involved seem to become more complex, more
dynamic, and more similar to the biological structures
they imitate. As aesthetic evolution becomes more
powerful, and its evolved artefacts become more
complex, they may also become more life-like. At
some mythical point, the artwork may attain a kind of
autonomy, a kind of life: the human artistic process
will have finally exceeded itself.
5 Conclusion
A computational technique — artificial evolution —
becomes an artistic technique. Out of this transition a
set of concrete artefacts, artworks and software, emerge.
However less concrete structures emerge as well: the
concepts, the metaphorical structures and the creative
aims and ambitions which surround and inform its
application. Through these more abstract structures, we
can observe the ways in which artificial evolution
intersects with artistic practice, with the conventional
categories of “work” and “artist”, with notions of
creativity. We can also observe some of the paradoxes at
work in the field, the tensions between its expansive
rhetoric and its aesthetic results.
Even as it functions, in part, within artistic practice,
artificial evolution challenges it on a number of fronts.
The role of the artist alters dramatically; the individual
creative will is complicated by its engagement with the
evolutionary process; the evolved artwork itself
functions in an unconventional way. At its limit, it
seems to promise an art which moves beyond human
will entirely — one which may be impossible to
understand as “art” at all.
Acknowledgements
This project has been assisted by the Australian
Commonwealth Government through the Australia
Council, its arts funding and advisory body, as well as
by the Conference and Workshop Fund of the Australian
Network for Art and Technology, a devolved grant
program of the Australia Council.
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