Here we report the basic ideas involved or inspirating the works of Plancton Art Studio. More details of this mix of visionary and scientific point of views are reported in the papers.
Through the development of new languages, artificial life is going to be a new creative area of interference between art and science. Research and developments carried out around mathematical and physical models of the intelligence and of life itself, and the appearance of engineering practices for manipulating the biological dynamics, left us with a tremendous need of a cultural and theoretical basement.
The appearence of the first infohabitants on the network, the first intelligent toys, the prototypes of self-reproducing robots let we think that the era of the birth of the first world-wide artificial society on the web is not so far. Our culture is not still prepared in terms of concepts, language and interaction paradigms to this kind of events. Our effort would stimulate the discussion and imagination about fashion, danger and expressive richness of a new dimension of virtual life. In our experiments we recognize an impressive creation power in such environments and often we are in doubt if the digital life is simulation or real life. To move in this sense we are trying to leave the human-machine paradigm of interaction in favour of the local interaction in a hybrid ecosystem composed by real and artificial people.
One of the most interesting aspects we consider in our works is the relation between the artist and the artwork in a generative context. In most of the cases this relation is impredicible and many interesting aspects appear as emergent qualities. For this reason we would like enhance this concept in the definition of art of emergence we adopt for our approach. The idea is not the building of shapes or music but design and drive a generative environment able to produce shapes and music. In this way the relation between the creator and the artwork is going to be very dynamic and the artwork seems to have his own personality.
Another element which can constitute a real challenge in the expressive play is to open this relation to the people interaction. The interaction with single/few people or with the web community can open the evolution to an high dimensionality. The interaction can transform the artist-artwork system in an emergent relation between the artist, the actors and the artificial individuals. The creative process is a dialectical negotiation between the artist, the people and the artwork in order to drive, improve, select or simply open the final result.
An inspiring idea we like to follow in our artworks is to consider the artwork as a metaphor engine. In the paradigm of the complexity, complex systems constituted by multitude of individuals develop global behavioral properties on the base of local chaotic interactions (self-organization). In the installations the observer can perceive these phenomena as an hidden order without necessarily have a clear consciousness of it. The artificial societies are demonstrating a very high autonomous tendency to the emergence of metaphors for artificial worlds as virtual reflections of the real world. Particularly, we look for dynamics of the communication webs and the mechanisms of formation of collective messages.
We imagine the cultural systems and the communication webs as systems where nothing is pre-determined, but the system evolves through local mechanisms of interaction and fundamental events. With a jump in lower scale, intelligence, consciousness and psyche can be revised as self-organizing phenomena. Starting from the idea that the individual context is the emerging own configuration of psychic fragments, the interaction between two or more individuals is revised as the interaction of two or more micro-societies.
This topic is probably the most difficult one in term of implementation and reasoning. In the artificial societies the evolvability is the ability of the individuals to generate an incresing complexity, adaptation and evolution of their genetics, phenotypes and structure. In some words they are able to produce parts of itself (autopoiesis).
After the first experiments we have been able to build environments where the individual develop a spontaneous cooperative behaviour through the genetic evolution. Following this path, our effort in this moment is the building of societies where the individuals are able to develop a language negotiated with the real people interacting expressed in an aestethic way (sound rithms, colours, etc..).
The difficulties in such development is related to enhance the evolvability degree in the individuals. For these difficulties and for the enormous potential in term of application of these environments we are open to collaborate with art and research institutions and look for public or private financial support for these developments.