On Wonder and Betrayal: Creating Artificial Life Software to Meet Aesthetic Goals

This paper examines the way in which works of generative computer-based art, specifically those which reference Artificial Life, may gain aesthetic appeal through instilling a sense of “wonder” in a viewer. This idea is examined from its roots in our fascination with natural phenomena and the sublime, through its representation in terms of the basic elements of drawing off and on-screen, and into the computational realm in which Artificial Life software finds its form. This paper explores the artistic potential of the approach which takes computationally-realized works with a single level of emergent organizational structure, to those capable of giving rise to interactions built yet again on top of these in an ever-increasing hierarchy of added complexity. The difficulties of coding such software systems successfully will be briefly discussed.