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 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.