Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life [Paperback]

Mitchell Whitelaw (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Blending a secret history of one of the more obscure intersections of science and art with a thoughtful critique of artificial life's techno-bestiary, Mitchell Whitelaw's Metacreation is rigorous yet playful, like much of the groundbreaking work he so ably discusses." Peter Lunenfeld, Media Design Program, Art Center College of Design, and author of User: InfoTechnoDemo

"A detailed and wide ranging view of artificial life (a-life) in art." Real Time

From the Inside Flap

"The search to understand and create artificial life is one of the grand interdisciplinary quests of our times, stretching from art through computer science to biology. Mitchell Whitelaw's *Metacreation* is its most complete study yet - cataloguing the full range of research, exploring the underlying science and art, and offering theoretical tools to understand the cultural context of these inquiries." --Stephen Wilson, Professor of Conceptual and Information Arts, San Francisco State University, and author of *Information Arts*

"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, author of *The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms*

"Blending a secret history of one of the more obscure intersections of science and art with a thoughtful critique of artificial life's techno-bestiary, Mitchell Whitelaw's *Metacreation* is rigorous yet playful, like much of the groundbreaking work he so ably discusses." --Peter Lunenfeld, Media Design Program, Art Center College of Design, Author of Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (February 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262731762
• ISBN-13: 978-0262731768
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,320,270 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a-life or alive?, October 18, 2005

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This review is from: Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (Hardcover)

From Conway's Game of Life and efforts by other people, artificial life has been a fascinating field. Whitelaw shows how this has been extended by artists, into fabricating creations that blend computing into art.

Some of you may have known about such things as cellular automata and how structures might propagate, and well as the use of fractals for renderings of irregular objects. The book shows how this is taken further, with some lovely results. There is certainly an undercurrent that something seems to be alive in these works.