Processes of Life/Painting IRL

The artwork is an installation of the prints that show the collage images generated in a custom-made generative algorithm based on Game of Life, which is a mathematical game from the 1970s. This game simulates a kind of artificial ecosystem, and it has become a prototypical symbol of biological simulation. A set of the prints (that the artist calls “cells”) can be acquired, and the owner can allocate them in the layout patterns generated by Game of Life; the owner becomes a game player to configure the installation layout of the artwork, and “grow” the artificial life forms in the space of their liking.

The artist is interested in the blurring of the boundaries between art, life, and technology. In the age where technology can grow synthetic, biological bodies and simulate a brain of a small organism, the idea of artificially created life seems to be becoming more and more real. The images of the artwork were born as data, inhabiting on screen. Subsequently, the images were migrated into an online habitat by the artist. And, the immaterial artificial creatures become embodied when they are put into the physical form as prints: being “propagated” in a new habitat, through an economic flow. The artist questions whether this type of engagement (that is physical, narrative, gamified and given value,) makes the artificial life “more real” in any sense.

[This artwork is developed as a part of the project Processes of Life/Painting]