ALife became a coherent recognized scientific discipline in the late 1980′s although it’s intellectual roots go back in the early stages of Cybernetics and the first artificial life model (without referring to it as such) using Cellular Automata.

C. Langton , a pioneer of the Artificial Life research program,  envisioned a study of life  ” beyond life-as-we-know-it into the realm of life-as-it-could-be.” ALife is a highly intedisciplinary field concerned with the emergence of macro-intelligent-behavior from micro-non-intelligent parts.

Maturana and Varela first introduced the autopoietic theory in the late 1970′s as an attempt to provide a solid definition of the process and organization of all living systems. The specific approach is strictly mechanistic and allows us to examine autopoiesis not only in terms of living systems but also as a theoretical framework for artificial systems.

One of the most interesting and important concepts of the autopoietic theory is that of structural coupling. Structural coupling can be described as a mutual specification between the system and the system’s environment. It has strong links with Varela’s notion of enaction i.e. cognition as embodied action. Maturana and Varela examine the mind as an emergent and autonomous network which cannot be separated from our sensorimotor capacities.

This is where lies the most fundamental difference between an autopoietic approach of ALife and the classical models of AI. Artificial Intelligence research began around 1955 with A. Newell and H. Simon. The basic hypothesis of the specific research program is that every process, cognitive included, can be seen and be formalized as a set of symbols and rules for manipulating these symbols.

The philosophical ground of the specific approach is the dualistic system that Descartes first introduced. Descartes believed that there are two separate domains of reality: one corporeal (body) and one non-corporeal (mind). For Descartes the corporeal domain plays no significant role in the understanding of the world as we perceive it and it is just a physical object like any other.

For a more analytic comparison of these two research programs you can find the full essay here.

Sound as Interface is a reactive sound installation for public spaces and it was implemented as a group project for the EEmTech module.

The aim of the specific project is to create the potential of social interactions through the use of digital technologies with sound as the medium and also to examine, if there exists, any connection between these interactions and the surrounding spatial properties.

For a full description of the project you can read the extended abstract that we submitted for the MediaCity Conference 2010 which is taking place this October at the Bauhaus-University Weimar.

This was the final project for the Digital Ecologies module.

The aim was to investigate how we could use intelligent behavior found in nature, as an inspiration, in order to create intelligent environments that communicate and interact with each other and the space around them.

For a more detailed description of the project please see the poster below:

The project was done in collaboration with Angelos Chronis and Eleni Sotiriou.

The TriG project was implemented as part of the Digital Studio module, during the first term (Octomber-December 2009) of the MSc Adaptive Architecture & Computation, The Bartlett, UCL.

The objective was to experiment with Processing programming language in a creative and performative way.

The program utilizes Minim sound library.

TriG follows light. Light also determines the frequency of the sine waves that are being produced and controls panning.

The different shapes and colors are related to the produced sound frequencies.

Best viewed…with headphones