Gestures of the Possible Life
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Gesture of the living performer is the movement to express an idea or meaning. What kind of meaning can emerge from the gesture of artificial performers? Scientists from various fields of study call these entities digital organisms, or programs capable of performing mathematical operations to simulate and study living systems. They offer the opportunity to test generalizations about living systems that may extend beyond the organic life that biologists usually study. Also computer artists employ the biological concepts of living systems in manipulating the code. They create programs to generate data, visualizations or to demonstrate the reproduction processes in a particular ways. Digital artists are not limited in creating art objects, but can make dynamic art objects that can themselves become autonomous entities. In this context, Frank Malina highlights the plasticity of digital information, when an image can be processed, visualized, simulated and networked. According to him, a different kind of reproduction is made possible within computer by software: he calls it post-mechanical reproduction (or more descriptive term is generative reproduction – similar to biological one). The artificial organisms with their autonomy perform their genuine roles in the artificial life narratives. They can do gestures similar to the human ones, because they dispose of technical skills but on the other side as Auslander reminds, they do not have potential to exercise interpretative skills. Here we enter the problematic situation, when the "artificial" in AL refers only to the component parts, not the emergent processes: "[…] the processes are genuine – every bit as genuine as the natural processes they imitate" (Langton). Should these life-like performances be understood as the living gestures? This problem of the theoretical biology deals with the living material structures of organisms and their inherent "logic" counterparts at the same time. |
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