Overview
The first detailed examination of a-life art, where new media artists adopt, and adapt, techniques from artificial life. Artificial life, or a-life, is an interdisciplinary science focused on artificial systems that mimic the properties of living systems. In the 1990s, new media artists began appropriating and adapting the techniques of a-life science to create a-life art; Mitchell Whitelaw's Metacreation is the first detailed critical account of this new field of creative practice. A-life art 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.Whitelaw presents a-life art practice through four of its characteristic techniques and tendencies. ""Breeders"" use artificial evolution to generate images and forms, in the process altering the artist's creative agency. ""Cybernatures"" form complex, interactive systems, drawing the audience into artificial ecosystems. Other artists work in ""Hardware,"" adapting Rodney Brooks's ""bottom-up"" robotics to create embodied autonomous agencies. The ""Abstract Machines"" of a-life art de-emphasize the biological analogy, using techniques such as cellular automata to investigate pattern, form and morphogenesis.In the book's concluding chapters, Whitelaw surveys the theoretical discourses around a-life art, before finally examining emergence, a concept central to a-life, and key, it is argued, to a-life art.
Full Product Details
Author: Mitchell Whitelaw
Publisher: MIT Press Ltd
Imprint: MIT Press
Edition: New edition
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 1.90cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.386kg
ISBN: 9780262731768
ISBN 10: 0262731762
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 17 February 2006
Recommended Age: From 18
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: No Longer Our Product
Availability: Out of stock
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Reviews
A detailed and wide ranging view of artificial life (a-life) in art. - Real Time Provocative, literate, subtle, and knowledgeable: Mitchell Whitelaw tells us what the new media artists have done - and why. His book's not about gizmos. It's about artists' meditations on the nature of life. - Margaret A. Boden, Research Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Sussex, and author of The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms
A detailed and wide ranging view of artificial life (a-life) in art. Real Time
Author Information
Mitchell Whitelaw is Lecturer in New Media at the School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra.
