Do you consider Alife a tool like a paintbrush, or is it more abstract?
The Alife approach is only a painting tool or utilitarian expression in its manifestation. For me, my work with Alife is an abstract way of doing philosophically based art. Cyborg imagery in pop culture, I suppose, fruitfully fertilized this aesthetic effort by imaginatively inviting me to experience my ontology through losing track of my body and becoming what seems to be pure viral consciousness. The critique of the sexual/racial body and the problems it poses are now widely understood, but I was bored by the constant stoppage, as every conceptual model of the body can be made to seem a fall-back into an older politics or metaphysics – and hence a backhanded re-affirmation of them. Thus you see the benefits of an aesthetic Alife viral ontological full of complexity via apparently autonomous computational self-modeling systems. I found this discourse interesting because it embraces such diverse fields as advanced computer graphics, evolutionary computational systems, and the simulatio
