Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life. Mitchell Whitelaw. (2004, MIT Press.) 281 pages.

Abstract

Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life. Mitchell Whitelaw. (2004, MIT Press.) 281 pages. For millennia artists have been actively involved in a collective endeavor to produce autonomous artifacts. Evidence for this exists back to the very earliest examples of human artistic expression. Archaeology has shown us a stream of representations of organisms in rock art and sculpture stretching tens of thousands of years into prehistory. From clay, ochre, and paint to hydraulics, mechanics, and clockwork automata, from electricity harnessed in robots to the abstract realm of computation, humans have represented organisms according to the philosophy and technology of their time. Artificial life is a current stage in our fascination with the characteristics that distinguish life from nonlife. The title of Mitchell Whitelaw’s book, Metacreation, refers to this desire of scientists and artists alike to construct generative systems that exhibit an autonomous, creative spark of their own. Autonomy, particularly when it is expressed as an ability to creatively solve problems, is a notable trait of organisms. Arguably the highest expression of this trait is the human ability to produce and interpret games, art, and literature. It is therefore not surprising that previous examples of artificial life, such as Kempelen’s chess player and Jacquet-Droz’s writing automaton, should have arisen when technology facilitated their construction. In the current era, we often think more abstractly than did our forebears. When combined with a symbol-manipulating behemoth like a modern computer, mathematics and computation provide us with the means to realize our abstractions in concrete form and thereby assess their implications. Our philosophy and engineering reflect this abstract thinking in artificial life as they do in many other disciplines. How have artists used these tools and abstractions to realize the latest computational automata? Whitelaw explores their answers, those of the theorists who have commented on their work and the thoughts of the researchers with whom they frequently cooperate. Metacreation is primarily a selected survey of contemporary new-media artificial life artists and their works. What exactly is an artificial life artist? A passable list includes anyone who has been influenced by recent artificial life research and who has adapted it to meet their own creative needs. In his text, Whitelaw focuses specifically on visual artists, leaving aside sonic art and music composition. An important element of the book is the commentary offered by Whitelaw and various theorists he cites on artificial life art. To my knowledge this is the first text to treat artificial life art specifically. The serious consideration of artificial life art and the comparison of its practitioners’ ideas sets Metacreation apart from the many texts that examine new-media art, and the few that treat only the artificial life research community. The survey successfully draws together a number of artists’ ideas that have, until now, been available only in the form of individual monographs and occasional chapters of edited books, journals, and conference proceedings. Metacreation begins with a general introduction to artificial life and the new-media art that it has inspired. It touches briefly on the precursors to artificial life art, in particular linking current thinking with the ideas expressed in the literature on art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, more recently, with the cybernetic art of the 1950s and 1960s. Manifest from Whitelaw’s investigation is the identification of artificial life as the latest phase in a long-running, collective, and creative endeavor to construct autonomous machines. That art has always been central to this endeavor, and that it continues to play an important role, is an implicit thesis of the author and a common theme among the theorists he cites.