Biopoiesis

Introduction

Biopoiesis is a series of experiments exploring the relationships between structure, matter, and self-organization, in what might be described as a computational "primordial soup". This work builds on cyberneticist Gordon Pask's research into electrochemical control systems that could adapt to certain aspects of their environment. This work examines the interactive and computational possibilities of natural processes and the potential for natural processes to serve as an alternative to the commonplace digital forms of computation, which might help (re)establish a dialogue between cybernetics, mainstream science, and the arts. Biopoiesis has provided a great deal for my research into subjective interpretations of complexity, ambiguity and emergence as factors of co-evolutionary experience.

Biopoiesis represents an exploration into alternative models of interactive arts practice. Specifically, there is the exploration of the underlying mediums employed in the interactive arts. Few would dispute that digital computation has pervaded most aspects of our existence and transformed our very thought processes. New media artists sometimes make the implicit assumption that digital forms are the only avenues for exploration. The digital is often taken as a given. Rarely is the underlying paradigm embedded in the very material substrate on which the digital work exists ever seriously questioned. Seen in this context, Biopoiesis represents an experimental approach to re-imagining cultural production with non-traditional (non-digital) computational methods as a medium and exploring alternative models of electronic arts practice. Biopoiesis and Pask’s electrochemical assemblages both serve to redirect our attention to the very material forms of the works and how they add a certain dimension of materiality and tangible presence that is often lacking in digital and even robotic works. The work displays at least a hint of a certain kind of agency that can only come from non-symbolic (i.e. non-digital) material forms grounded in processes of organic or quasi-organic growth. Biopoiesis allows us to directly apprehend and experience self-organizing, emergent processes by virtue of their growth and their sheer materiality. In studying the growth and adaptation of an "inorganic" system, Biopoiesis also serves to question the traditional dichotomies of organic vs. inorganic and biological vs. non-biological. By standard scientific definitions, the Biopoiesis system is inorganic. Yet, we have commonly observed patterns of bifurcated growth and dissolution that have qualities classically reserved for organic biological systems. Accordingly, we wanted to test the boundaries of the inorganic and organic, the non-biological and the biological, by attempting to show that our "inorganic non-biological" system could manifest properties comparable to those associated with a biological system that is learning about aspects of its environment (e.g., neuronal and glial plasticity, or long-term potentiation/depression of synaptic communication). We feel that this may open up new ways of thinking about sensing, intelligence (environmental, collective; not just cognitive), and memory (mutable electrochemical traces).