[-empyre-] Welcome to Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@subtle.net>]

Following last month, the only thing we can be certain of is that life will
go on and new forms of art will emerge in response to our social, political,
technological and cultural contexts.

This months discussion on the field of Artificial Life or a-life Art
practices, looks at how some of those forms are evolving. Theorist Mitchell
Whitelaw will be joined  by eminent a-life practitioners Paul Brown (UK),
Mauro Annunziato (IT),  Ken Rinaldo (US), and Maria Verstappen (NL). Jon
McCormack (AU) will also be joining us as a peer interrogator/respondent.

Whitelaw's recently published book "Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life"
(MIT Press) has been described as  "provocative, literate, subtle, and
knowledgeable" [1]. It is the first detailed critical account of the new
field of creative practice of a-life art. This artform responds to the
increasing technologization of living matter by creating works that seem to
mutate, evolve, and respond with a life of their own. Pursuing a-life's
promise of emergence, these artists produce not only artworks, but
generative and creative processes: here creation becomes metacreation.

Over the month Whitelaw and guests will expand upon  the book's concepts,
including  how artificial evolution alters the artist's creative agency;
the  complex interactivity of artificial ecosystems; the creation of
embodied autonomous agencies; the use of cellular automata to investigate
pattern, form and morphogenesis; and well as examining the key tenet of
a-life, emergence.

_________________________________________

Mitchell Whitelaw (http://creative.canberra.edu.au/mitchell) is an
artist, writer and researcher in new media and audio art and culture.
He has written extensively over the years on New Media, Sound and
A-life Art for journals such as Leonardo, Artlink and Digital
Creativity, and his new book, Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life,
was published in 2004 by MIT Press
(http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10080&ttype=2) He
is currently Head of Program, Media / Multimedia Production, School of
Creative Communication, University of Canberra.
_______________

[1] --Margaret A. Boden, Research Professor of Cognitive Science, University
of Sussex, and author of The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms
___________________

Dr Melinda Rackham
artist | curator | producer
www.subtle.net/empyre
-empyre-  media forum