Leave No Trace » artificial life

Fly, my pretties

Alec — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 08:38:13 +0000

People are using 3D printers for all sorts of things now, such as unique pieces of jewellery, but these wings for a micro-robotic insect seem particularly interesting. Imagine linking it with yesterday’s post about art and artificial life and adding some form of goals such as food or mating…

More art and artificial life

Alec — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 07:08:45 +0000

Fundación Telefónica in Spain is calling for submissions for artistic projects exploring artificial life (.pdf file in English). There’s no mention of an exhibition of the winning entries, but the organisers request the right to use the submitted videos and other material on their website, so perhaps we’ll be able to see the results.

I’ve posted before about this topic, which I still find fascinating. Since that post I’ve been exploring the use of genetic algorithms as a programming technique, so I plan a couple more posts on the subject in the near future.

Art and artificial life

Alec — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:43:46 +0000

A recent post was about Mitchell Whitelaw’s jewellery incorporating data visualisation. The sheer variety of his work is interesting in itself – he’s created time slice composite photographs, for instance – but he’s also written the fascinating Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (reviewed here, with an interview here).

Not surprisingly, the book covers pioneers such as William Latham and Karl Sims. I was reminded of this because Create Digital Motion recently posted a 1994 animation of Sims’ work on evolving creatures. Yes, the graphics are crude by today’s standards, but that’s not the point. There are several clips of artificial life on YouTube here, here, here, here and, perhaps most impressively, here.

You’d need several things to run simulations like these, including a 3D environment and a physics engine as well as an understanding of how to apply the theory of genetic algorithms to grow self-propelled creatures. I’m still grappling with the last of these before even beginning to consider the others.