Preface to Biotica

At a time when digitally mediated appearance, spin and gloss seem to dominate our collective cultural output, Biotica stands out as an art/science collaboration determined to penetrate below the surface. This book presents the findings of a small research team at the Royal College of Art working with experts from Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence. The project is documented with admirable clarity and honesty and gains greatly from the essay contributions from Jonathon Mackenzie, Igor Aleksander and Joe Faith. Biotica is the brainchild of Research Fellow Richard Brown and explores the question of what it means for a ‘thing’ to be ‘alive’ using the scientific notion of emergence as a focussing issue.

If we look at the relationship between art and science in history we find that this era is bringing together these strands of human endeavour in an unprecedented way. Although some find the thesis of Leonard Schlain’s ‘Art and Physics’, that artists have always anticipated the findings of science, to be overstated, the evidence is compelling. Francis Bacon is often considered to have been the father of the empirical strand in science, dying, we are told, as the result of an attempt to demonstrate that a frozen chicken would keep without putrefaction. But this empiricism, first brought into real fruit by Galileo, had been advocated nearly a hundred and fifty years earlier by Leonardo da Vinci. At a time when Europe was rediscovering the classical world Leonardo was more interested in looking for himself, and not through the eyes of antiquity. Although the way that Leonardo investigated the natural world was bound up with the medieval concept of the microcosm (and he has been attacked for this by some contemporary scientists), his painstaking research and documentation of natural phenomena heralded the Enlightenment in a way that the mere revival of Hellenistic thought could never have done. If Newton represented science in its first flush of unchallengable authority, Galileo in its infancy, Bacon in its womb, then Leonardo is the twinkling eye prior to conception. And we note that he was an artist.

It is with considerable satisfaction then that we understand that Richard Brown’s project is located in a subject area called ‘Art as a Mode of Enquiry,’ and that the digital technologies are used here to probe and explore, instead of to add the surface shimmer we have already alluded to. I have long held that both art and science can represent a systematic and open enquiry into the deep structure of human experience, and what better question to pursue than the nature of ‘aliveness’. ‘Man as microcosm’ may be a concept that the materialist scientific community fights shy of, but ‘computer as microcosm’ is a daily reality as we use supercomputers to model all aspects of our life in the universe. Two research communities are thus brought together over the same set of chips and peripherals, and collaborate to explore aspects of our human experience. Richard Brown, as an artist, has access to an extended set of metaphors in constructing his enquiry, and can range over any contemporary or medieval imagery to delineate his argument. Hence we find terms that Leonardo would have been familiar with (and for that matter, Newton), such as ‘alembic’ and ‘philosopher’s stone’. Science of course could only progress by abandoning medieval worldviews, but has turned full circle in seeking out the fluidity and poetry of artistic metaphor in order to go deeper. For if science cannot penetrate the deep structure of human experience then it remains a tinkering at the edges — useful but unengaging.

Artists are good at spotting the scientific silences, and one of the deafening ones is the problem of morphogenesis, the problem of form. (The lone voice articulating this issue for many years has been biologist Rupert Sheldrake.) Artists have long understood the visual phenomenon of ‘emergent forms’, and hence have been fascinated to find that scientists are now also talking of emergence as a property of complex system, whether biological or computational. Biotica tackles this issue head-on.

Artists have of course been using digital computers and even their analogue predecessors to make art, but only a handful of pioneers have learned to programme, and of these only a few have ventured into artificial intelligence and artificial life. The names Conway, Cohen, Simms and Latham spring to mind, and have been the subject of a fascinating study from psychology-based Margaret Boden. However, Harold Cohen, Karl Simms and William Latham have made their priorities to be artistic ones, never abandoning the basic showmanship of the artist/performer. Biotica is different in that, although an art project, it refused to back down when the visual results lacked the usual audience-friendly criteria. Instead it focussed on the difficult research question – emergence – and stuck to it. 

Emergence research involves the construction of a system with simple rules that are profound enough to allow for a community of elements to evolve an unpredicted yet coherent behaviour. This book tells us that this is a difficult task, hampered by the unwillingness of researches to publish their failures, and hence guide others to success. In both scientific and artistic terms there will be large spaces and long periods of time in which nothing of ‘interest’ seems to happen. This could be used as an argument to dismiss the research as an anthropomorphism in the first place, but what it really does is raise some vital questions regarding the deep structure of human experience. Our intrinsic desire for drama, evidenced in the impatience for emergence in our art/science experiment, is balanced in nature by long periods of waiting – soldiers for battle (ask any veteran), mothers for childbirth, predators for prey, and individuals for success. How is it that incredibly simple rules give rise to this complexity? And how do we understand the inherent coherence of the emergent form? As artists and scientists we can construct our own rules for systems and put them through some virtual millennia of evolution, but how do we then view the rules laid down by the Universe? If we say to a chemist that the numerical sequence 2, 8, 8, 16 and so on has determined the chemistry of every element they will nod in agreement, but when we ask, why those numbers? they can only shrug and say, well they come out of quantum equations. And so we go deeper into the structure of our experience and come up against the prior given, or rules of engagement, from which our experience emerges.

As William Latham found when conducting his research into evolutionary art at IBM Winchester, the hard part of emergence is to pick survival criteria that yield interesting results. He quickly found that his emerging forms disappeared or settled into artistically unprofitable cycles, and chose instead the route of intervention. This book informs us that with life on earth we also had aeons of very slow progress, yielding mainly bacteria, and it was not until predation was established that things speeded up, and did so by enormous leaps. Does this tell us that the drama of hunting is crucial to emergence? Karl Simms seems to have found this with some of his work; the Biotica team have their own suggestions.

I once asked Harold Cohen, creator of the AI painting system called Aaron, why so few young artists seemed to want to take up his baton and push such systems further. ‘Simple’, he said. ‘It’s just too much hard work’. Richard Brown and his team seem to be an exception, and they will certainly understand the magnitude of personal investment as an artist if they are to write software (Cohen tells us that the source code alone of Aaron has reached 3 Gigabyte – a staggering achievement for a single programmer). We hope then that artists, even if in small numbers, will continue using the computer to probe the deeper artistic questions, despite the rigours involved. We also hope that scientists like Professor Aleksander will continue to use the computer to ask such questions, as he has, in the building of his machine ‘Magnus’ – built to answer the question, ‘what is it like to be Magnus?’ 

Although Biotica is a small-scale endeavour, there is no doubt that it is, within its remit, probing the question ‘what is it like to be human?’ Whatever the scale of the answers arrived at, they deserve serious consideration.

Mike King, Reader in Computer Art and Animation, London Guildhall University, October 2000