Life Spacies I & II

“Life Spacies” is an interaction and communication space, where remotely located visitors can interact with each other through evolutionary forms and images.

“Life Spacies” enables visitors to integrate themselves into a 3 dimensional complex virtual world of artificial life organisms that react to the visitors body movement, motion and gestures. The artificial life creatures also communicate with each other and so create an artificial universe, where real and artificial life are closely interrelated through interaction and exchange.

A “Life Spacies” web page allows people all over the world to interact with the system as well: by simply typing and sending an email message from the “Life Spacies” web site, one can create one’s own artificial creature. The creature will then starts to live in the “Life Spacies” environment at the ICC’s museum, where the on-site visitors directly will interact with it.

Supported by ATR Media Integration and Communications Research Lab, Kyoto, Japan and  ICC Intercommunication Center
Tokyo, Japan.

“Life SpaciesII” was originally developed for the ICC InterCommunication Museum in Tokyo as part of the museum’s permanent collection. It is an artificial life environment where remotely located visitors on the Internet and the on-site visitors to the installation at the ICC Museum in Tokyo can interact with each other through evolutionary forms and images.

Through the “Life SpaciesII” web page, people all over the world interact with the system; by simply typing and sending an email message to the “Life SpaciesII” web site, one can create one’s own artificial creature. We developed a special text-to-form coding system that enables us to use written text as genetic code and translate it into visual creatures. In a way similar to the genetic code in nature, letters, syntax and sequencing of the text is used to code certain parameters in the creature’s design functions.

Form, shape, color, texture and the number of bodies and limbs are influenced by the text parameters. As there is a great variation in the texts sent by different people, the creatures themselves also vary greatly in their appearance. As soon as a message is sent, the produced creature starts to live and move around in the “Life SpaciesII” environment. Depending on the complexity of the written text message the creatures body design and its ability to move is determined. Some creatures might move very fast whereas others might be slower.

Creatures also look for food and aim to eat text characters that can be interactively released by the visitors: creatures always eat the same characters as contained in their genetic code. For example “John” creature will only eat “J”, “o”, “h” and “n”. Since other creatures might want to eat the same characters as well, competition among creatures for certain types of food will occur.

Creatures also might starve and die if they do not succeed to catch enough text characters. On the other hand if a creature has eaten enough food (=text characters) it will look for a mating partner and bear a child. Offspring creatures will then carry the genetic code of the parent creatures and live and interact with the other creatures in “Life SpaciesII.” “Art as a Living Process” Based upon the insight that interaction per se and the interrelation between entities are the driving forces for the structures of life, we are investigating the interaction and creative process as such.

Creation is not any more understood as expression of the artists inner creativity or “ingenium,” but instead becomes itself an intrinsically dynamic process that is based upon the interaction parameters and the evolutionary image processes of the work.

Supported by ATR Media Integration and Communications Research Lab. Kyoto

More works

Interactive Plant Growing (1992)
A-Volve (1994-1995)
Life Spacies I & II (1997-1999)
Haze Express (1999)
The Living Web (2002)
NanoScape (2002)
MobileFeelings I & II (2003-2004)
Eau de Jardin (2004)
Life Writer (2006)
The Value of Art (2010)
Escape (2012)
Portrait on the fly (2015-2018)
Egometer (2017)
Neuro Mirror (2017)
Scavengers (2020)