Preserving Artificial Life
Excerpt from "Preserving Artificial Life," in Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006)
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Culture on the cutting edge is not there for long, especially in this age of rapid technological progress and the seemingly equally rapid precession of aesthetic fashion. For traditional plastic art, this has exacerbated the difference between success and failure: sanctification in a hallowed hall of culture, or banishment to obscurity in an attic or garbage dump. A painting by Malevich that has served its tour of duty on the frontline of artistic research earns a final resting place on a wall at the museum of modern art in a major urban center. But what of the works in this book that are not by the avant-garde as defined by art historians but from the great ocean of the Internet and quasi-scientific research? The previous chapter surveyed new recognition networks which can attract attention to these radical works faster than traditional validation mechanisms; in theory, this discursive matrix may also sustain their memory for future generations. But memory is second-hand. New-media artists who want their works to be known more directly have to choose the final form their research will take with that in mind. And they have two diametrically opposed choices: to cast their work in traditional genres like ink or bronze, or to trust code to survive by means of its executability.
This chapter examines an emerging field in which the contrast between these two alternatives is greatest: so-called 'a-life', or artificial life, the creation with a computer of organisms that exhibit lifelike behavior. To complement this animate software, we'll examine parallel experiments with animate 'wetware': E. coli, rat brains, and other 'semi-living' entities confined to Petri dishes rather than hard drives. Many of these works have convincing art-like functions: they are executable as either digital or biological code (or both); they are revelatory of evolutionary mechanisms and even aesthetic taste; most of all, they are polymorphously perverse in their proliferation of new forms with no obvious utility.
In the domain of computer and biological scientists, a static visual record is rarely the expected end result of research. To satisfy the art world's predilection for colorful images to display in a gallery, however, a number of researchers investigating the expressive potential of artificial life have transmuted their algorithms into real-time images of biomorphscavorting on video monitors or in wall projections. Others have even trained their synthetic organisms to print out pen-and-ink drawings, render Iris prints, and otherwise feed the art-gallery system inert formats it can recognize. But do these static end-products best preserve the volatility, and hence the immunological function, of live art? Or are they merely aesthetic vaccines--dead versions of once virulent originals that confer only partial and short-lived protection? If so, then it's not at all obvious how to preserve art whose medium is E. coli or rat brains. Nevertheless, the most potent biological immunity takes the form of somatic memory left by antibody responses to live pathogens. Likewise, the best art leaves a cultural memory--in this case, of encounters with technological assault by biological, digital, or ideological viruses--that perseveres and thus protects society. The degree of this perseverance is directly related to the extent to which the radical and dynamic nature of the original work is preserved over time and space.
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