[-empyre-] Defining metacreation...

[Jose-Carlos Mariategui <jcm@ata.org.pe>]

Dear Friends:

I do believe we must seriously and rigorously define "metacreation".  What
does Mitchell exactly means with his title.  There are a lot of wordings
that we normally impose when the thing is not the same as it was before.

In that sense I do believe Artificial life works (or creations, or
'metacreations') are relevant when we take it to analyze some future
premises for our society or when we develop a new kind of order or
micro-cosmos-inside-the-computer.

There is also here a point that I believe is very important and needs to be
extensively discussed: since Alife is usually considered as part of a hard
science (the people that work on that area are mainly computer scientists,
mathematicians or physicists interesting in synthetic forms of life) why is
that art is much more directly related with it than with mathematics,
physics?  Is it because of its profound social connotations, or because of
its multidisciplinary characteristics?  If that is the case, are artists
doing works in relation to social or critical thematics in artificial life
or is it just PUSH (Public Understanding of Science and Humanities).

A third issue that needs to be rised here is until which point do scientists
and specialists on the area of Alife find relevant the work that Alife
artists do?  I had seen little evidence that scientists even think that
artistic works on that area are relevant for the advance of such a
multidisciplinary practice.

I hope to begin a dialogue on these issues in the following days.

All the best,

Jose-Carlos Mariátegui


 


on 11/5/04 1:54 AM, Melinda Rackham at melinda@subtle.net wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre