nettime: The Darwin Machine: Artificial Life and Art - Simon Penny

[Pit Schultz <pit@contrib.de> (by way of Pit Schultz <pit@contrib.de>)]

http://www.uiah.fi/bookshop/isea_proc/nextgen/penny.html
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The Darwin Machine: Artificial Life and Art

Simon Penny

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Complexity, Artificial Life and Art

Although I will cite specific artistic and scientific works in this paper,
my goal is to establish a framework of cross-related artistic, scientific
and philosophic ideas as a base for the discussion of the subject.

I want to examine the historical relationship between these new disciplines
and the traditions from which they arose, the better to point up
continuities and discontinuities with those traditions. I believe these new
fields have within them certain very radical ideas which challenge basic
premises of the scientific method and the enlightnement world view. I will
assume that my audience has a nodding familiarity with the development of
chaos theory and fractal geometry, as these fields were in some ways the
precursosrs of the topics under discussion.

I'll begin and end my paper with the subject of behavior. Between these
parentheses, I'll discuss the relevance of Alife and complexity to art, both
philosophically and technically, and in particular to the question of
behavior.

Esthetics of interactivity

I'll start by claiming that Western visual arts have no tradition of an
esthetics of interactivity, and I'll defend this claim with an inverse
taxonomic calculus:

If real time interaction is our starting point, then we can say that video
or film is a linear record of interaction, and painting or photography a
still frame.

We have a well established esthetics of the still image, of color and line,
shape and area, of representational geometry and perspective. We have an
estehtics of time based image, of camera angle and movement, wipe and cut.
But we do not have an esthetic langugage of real time interaction.

The performing arts are, from this perspective, only different from video
and film in that the viewer replaces the camera as the perceiving device.
Drama or orchestral music is not 'interactive' in the sense of real time
reaction, though improvisation is. Changes of form which occur in the
moment, according to the forces of the moment, define improvisation. In
conventional drama a director induces the actors to reproduce a version of a
script. From this perspective, I am interested in what we might call a
meta-script, a script that is the director, that defines in real time, the
scripts or roles or behaviors of the 'actors'. To use the improvisation
analogy, it is a system which understands something of the context, and
responds to the situation at hand.

Such a script can clearly be assessed according to systems of esthetic
analysis. It might be anthropomorphic or biomorphic, it might be literal or
associative, compulsive or schizophrenic, aggressive or retiring. If we are
serious about autonomous machine based interaction, then 'compared to what'
is a central question. Certainly the famous Eliza, and the Turing test
before it, are unselfconsciously anthropomorphic and mimetic in their
behavior. In their case, 'compared to people' is the answer. When we posit
synthetic agent doing work in cyberspace, such as locating references on a
certain subject at various sites, the environment of the agent is quite
alien to us. It is digital, with little equivalence of the geography and
geometry which we inhabit. And yet we must understand it and it must
understand us. So the interface becomes the glass of the aquarium in a more
dramatic way: we are looking at an alien species in its environment. The
interface is the zone of translation. As with neural nets, we will never
know how it thinks, how it evolved, we could never assemble it from
component parts. We understand only our image of it, which is to say, we
extrapolate from our cultural experience examples which carry some traits
which seem to have an analogous relationsship with what it is we think we're
seeing. What we're seeing is of course constituted by our cultural
experience. This regress leads those who have faith in any sort of cultural
universals spiraling out of control down an objectivity dissolving vortex.
[1]

The Darwin Machine

Prior to my brief excursion into the shallows of epistemology, I leapt
across the question of intelligent agents and artificial life in general,
and I should backtrack. Just what do we mean by artificial life? The name
has been claimed by a group of interdisciplinary scientists: biologists,
roboticists and computer scientists who have held several conferences by
that name at the Santa Fe Institute for Non-Linear Dynamics since 1988.
Similar events have since occurred at MIT, in Europe and in Japan. Alifers
are peripherally associated with the related, perhaps less deterministic
fields of non-linear dynamics and complexity theory by virtue of their
common interest in self-organising systems and emergent order, ideas which
arise from the study of chaos. The applications of these techniques vary
from the building of digital ecologies in which the dynamics of evolution
might be studied, to the shaping and control of these systems to breed
algorithms to do particular arithmetic, graphical or informational tasks.

The Alife community includes:

1. Computational biologists. Until now, natural selection, the mechanism of
evolution, has been limited to the organic. The realization of evolving,
reproducing digital species in silicon using genetic algorithms [2] prompts
the question: "Is it alive?" This question divides Alifers into two groups:

1a. Hard Alifers hold that self replicating digital organisms are alive in
every sense, and that biology must include the study of possible life, and
must arrive at some universal laws concerning wet life and digital life.

1b. Soft Alifers claim only that genetic and evolutionary simulations are
useful in understanding biological dynamics, but remain simply simulations.

Around this central group cluster several others:

2. Builders of procedural systems, like Craig Reynolds' Boids and Jessica
Hodgin's robot flocks. More recently, these systems are self evolving, such
as Karl Sims' recent work on evolving 3D morphology and behavior by
competition, and Jeff Ventralla's evolving animated characters.

3. Subsumption and 'bottom up' roboticists who utilise ethological analogies
to create bottom up emergent behavior in mobile machines.

4. Builders of autonomous digital agents to do work in the digital realm.

5. Wet Alifers. Wet Alifers are molecular biologists who are breeding or
constructing replicating or behaving groupings of proteins, enzymes and
nucleic acids. the instrumentalization of natural selection carries not only
for the digital alifers, but equally for the Wet-Alifers, the closeness in
attitude between Alife and the new genetics and reproductive technologies,
and nano-technology, should not be elided. [3]

Eliza's children, Frankenstein's grandchildren.

Tom Ray, a biologist and designer of the Tierra system, recently made a
proposal to promote biodiversity in the net, a distributed digital wildlife
preserve on the internet, in which digital organisms might evolve,
circumnavigating diurnally to available CPU's. [4] These creatures would
evolve good net navigation and cpu sensing abilities, among other things.
Predators and parasites would emerge. Ray notes that "Evolution just
naturally comes up with useful things". [5] He argues for the proposal in
the following way: you couldn't imagine a silk worm, even if you could, you
couldn't guide evolution to make it. But evolution did make it, we can take
it, cross breed it, neuter it, delete its poisonous properties, domesticate
it.

This proposal is emblematic of paradigm shifts which characterize Alife.
According to the traditional christian outlook which functions as a
foundation for the ideology of industrial capitalism, we humans, (and
particularly westerners) could harvest the products of biodiversity and
harness them as components of the industrial machine. In the
post-industrial, Alifers are harnessing the mechanism of biodiversity
itself. A somewhat insidious example of this tendency is a Japanese project
to build Artificial Brains for the internet. This conception sees the
internet as a nervous system, and draws upon the evolutionary narrative to
validate its claims that, as nervous systems developed prior to brains, so
it is only logical that the internet will grow a brain. The central
technique in this research is referred to as the Darwin Machine and has more
than passing resemblance to the Frankenstein theme. Like Dr Frankenstein,
the developers of the Darwin Machine are seeking to cobble together a
quasi-human machine. [6] Like most cutting edge 'techno-science' research
projects, including the exercise of Alife in general, the researchers
conveniently and almost unnoticeably omit any mention of just what this
technology might be used for.

Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich has noted that the Alife community is
statistically 30-40 years old, straight white males who are agnostic or
atheist of judeo christian backgrounds. Within this community, subjective
and value laden assumptions of the researchers themselves are disguised as
axioms. As an example of these assumptions, Helmreich quotes Tom Ray as
saying "I'm omniscient to the physics of the world I create" and notes the
similarity of this position to that of the judeo-christian notion of the
omniscient creator. The evolutionary narrative chosen implicitly supports
social darwinism, and other less tasteful social models, such as racism.

Alife avoids the aspects of cell dynamics and evolution in which the
informational and the material are "deeply entangled" [7], thereby enforcing
a simplistic DNA=algorithm generalisation. Alife is predicated on the
computer-science inspired dictum that the informational content of life can
be separated from the material substrate in the same way that software can
be separated from hardware. This induces the assumption that modern
computational techniques are structurally similar to the deep structure of
biological life. We must be clear that this is a rhetorical device, a
validation by back-formation with reference to a presumed natural or
authentic condition. It is one example among many, of computer technology
functioning as the paradigmatic technology or our era, to use J. David
Bolter's term. [8] Proposing a division between matter and information in
biological systems is a very old- fashioned and familiar narrative
construction rooted deeply in Enlightenment precepts. It serves to reinforce
other such contrived dualistic structures as form and content and ultimately
mind and body.

Elsewhere I have discussed the similarity between the attitudes of
St.Augustine and Descartes to the body, and those of cyberpunks, epitomized
by Gibson's words "the body is meat" [9] It is through examples such as
these that we can see just how clearly so called 'objective science' can be
haevily value laden, perpetuating dualistic and colonialising ideologies.
High tech enterprises, such as Artificial Intelligence and Top-down robotics
validate and reinforce these dichotomies with the rhetorical power they
derive from being high tech and futuristic.

Paradigm Busters

Scientific ideas have been a powerful influence in shaping western culture.
In many cases, the power of influence that the hard sciences have had, has
encouraged social sciences and humanistic disciplines to become more
'scientific' (and therefore, by definition, more rigorous, more respectable)
by the adoption of scientific tropes. The theory of relativity and quantum
theory are examples which have been ludicrously mis-applied in the popular
science and the social sciences. It is arguable that the modernist tradition
in art itself is a highly scientized world view, privileging as it does
ideas of experiment and progress.

As I noted at the beginning of this paper, ideas arising in complexity and
Alife challenge some traditonal scientific ideas and the Enlightenment frame
in general. In some cases they also reinforce traditional attitudes.

The ideas that Chaos theory brought: strange and chaotic attractors,
bifurcation and fractality, and particularly 'sensitive dependance on
initial conditions' revealed vast jungles of unpredicability in the heart of
newtonian physics. [10] The adage that a butterfly flapping its wings in the
Amazon will cause a typhoon in India has achieved the status of a clich�,
but it underlines the oft-edited fact that classical physics can deal with
only a small subset of physical phenomena and ignores the rest.

Fractality. The significance of fractals will not be found in any number of
computer renderings of the Manderlbrot set, nor in their application to
computer graphic simulations of fictitious valleys, islands and planets.
Fractals show us a geometry which approximates the logic of natural growth:
recursive, multi-scaled, infinitely detailed, with symmetry across scale
[11]. This idea not only replicates the generative and recursive geometries
of biology, but exposes the roots of Euclidian geometry in Platonic
abstraction. The geometry of Euclid, premised on lines infinitely thin and
points infinitely small, is steeped in intellectual abstraction, predicated
on the notion of an 'ideal'. Newtons mechanics is itself predicated on this
style of abstraction.

Entropy and Self-organization. Since the mid C19th, the second law of
thermodynamics has held western culture in its nihilism inducing grip. This
in itself indicates just how powerful the grip of science and particularly
physics has been in the last century. It's strange because experientially we
know life is anti-entropic. New science, in the form of the ideas of
self-organization and emergent order has validated this intuition and
liberated us from the defeatism of the 2nd law. That is not to say that the
2nd law is no longer valid, but that extrapolation of its implications into
the life sciences and humanities has been shown to be misplaced. As Beckers,
Holland and Deneubourg have persuasively demonstrated, random behavior
amongst simple animals or machines can result in an anti-entropic outcome.
[12]

Emergence and Reductivism. Perhaps the most far reaching implication of self
organisation and emergent order in complex dynamics is the demise of the
entire method of reductivism. Reductivism is a keystone of the scientific
method.[13] It is premised on the assumption that to understand a complex
object, one breaks it into component parts and examines those parts in
controlled settings, then adds the results of those examinations together.
The basic principal of emergence is that organisation
(behavior/order/meaning) can arise from the agglomeration of small component
units which do not exhibit those characteristics. Emergent order implies
that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts, that higher
level behaviors cannot be disassembled into their component lower level
building blocks. Simple examples include the generation of mind form
individual neurons and the complex behaviors of colonial insects and
organisms. Inherent in this pheonomenon is a critique of reductionism, the
major tool of science, which is premised on the assumption that to examine a
complex object, one breaks it into component parts and examines those parts
in controlled settings. Complete understanding arises when those parts are
added together. Emergence throws that method in the trash. As De Landa puts
it: "The road to reductionism has been permanently blocked. If the
properties of matter and energy at any given level of organisation cannot be
explained by the properties of the underlying levels, it follows that
biology cannot be reduced to physics or anthropology to biology" [14] Or one
might add, psychology to physiology.

The Top-Down Artificial Intelligence paradigm has come in for its fair share
of bashing in recent years, one of the earliest and loudest whistle blowers
being Hubert Dreyfus [15] who refers to the paradigm as 'good old fashioned
artificial intelligence' or GOFAL. Its inability to deal with real world
problems without formally bounded domains led to the development of
Brooksian Subsumption Architecture, the entire Bottom-Up trend and the
exploration of emergent order. There is a substantial political force in
this trend, as Alife opposes authoritarian power structures. The Top-Down
paradigm, on the other hand, exactly replicates and reinforces very
traditional tropes of lord and serfs, boss and workers and more abstractly,
body/mind, form/content and hardware/software. Distributed and parallel
computing, connectionism and subsumption all point to demise of the
Cartesian dualism as a useful analytic idea.

Another techno-scientific paradigm is Claude Shannon's Communication theory.
Ported into the humanities and particularly into telematic arts, this
technologically validated paradigm entirely ignores the question of
interpretation in communication. Hors Hendriks Jansen, in his discussions of
situated robotics and what he refers to as interactive emergence, argues
that the methods of ethology which emphasize the importance of observation
in the environment rather than the reductivist methods of controlled
experiments in the lab, offer new insights into the complexities of human
communication. Several of his examples from early childhood psychology
indicate that early childhood actions trigger responses in adults by
appearing to be intentional. This 'bootstraps' the child into meaning. [16]
The significance of such 'exchange' is that the message received was never
sent! Such real life examples suggest that Shannon's communications theory
is not particularly relevant to the study of human communication.

Emergent Behavior in Art

So what can complexity and Alife offer us as tools for an esthetics of