The Game of Life

Emergence in Generative Art

Due to great success the show has been extended until the end of April 2021!

Complex Worlds From simple rules

This online exhibition is in part a tribute to the mathematician John Horton Conway who recently passed away from COVID-19. Among Conway’s many gifts to the world was his famous “Game of Life” popularized in a 1970 article in Scientific American. The game uses four simple rules to create a seemingly infinite amount of complex behavior and visual patterns. Conway’s work on cellular automata along with others like Stephen Wolfram has been inspirational for many of this generation’s most talented Generative Artists. This exhibition explores how complex visual systems can emerge from relatively simple algorithms to create art than can reframe the way we see the world. For this show, we have included four generative artists: Jared S Tarbell, Alexander Reben, Kjetil Golid, and Manolo Gamboa Naon. We will hear from each of them in a series of interviews to be released over the next several weeks.

Manolo

Alexander Reben

Jared S Tarbell

Kjetil Golid

The Game of Life is an example of cellular automation, a collection of black and white squares, or "cells'' on a grid, that evolve through several steps according to a set of rules. These very basic rules trigger astonishing behaviors, so unpredictable and so complex that they can make a small set of black and white squares on a grid appear to "come to life." This unpredictable and complex behavior is called emergence.

Emergence happens when small things form bigger things that have different properties than the sum of their parts. What does that mean? Think of an ant colony. Each ant is pretty dumb, defenseless, and guided by basic rules. But when combined with hundreds of other ants in a colony, a new intelligence emerges at the colony level that allows them to adapt, defend themselves, and find food. These properties or behaviors emerge when the smaller parts interact in a larger system. And this larger system, the colony, appears to have higher intelligence than the sum of its parts would imply. The world is full of examples of emergence.

What does emergence have to do with generative art? When artists program a large number of entities on a computer screen to follow basic rules and interact with each other, intricate lifelike patterns emerge. These artists are not creating images of our world, but instead, programming rules for producing their own worlds, complete with emergent behaviors. While we doubt John Conway considered himself an artist, his Game of Life is itself an emergent system and has inspired many generative artists due to the complexity it can produce from relatively few rules. Instead of ants in an ant colony, Conway has squares on a grid. Like ants, the squares are simple and only have two states: "live" or "black" and "dead" or "white." The squares can establish if the eight neighboring squares surrounding are "living" or "dead," as well.Depending on that information, each square then changes or stays the same based on Conway's famous four rules:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if caused by underpopulation.

2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.

3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.

4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

You set the game up by selecting some squares on the grid to start as "living." Once you run the code, the network animates based on the execution of Conway's rules above. Below is an example of the Game of Life on a relatively small grid.

In his work puritan_communion, artist Alexander Reben plays with the rules of the Game of Life on a much larger scale. With his interpretation, Reben cleverly programs in new rules that change the colors of the squares over time rather than just using black and white. He explains:

In regular Game of Life, a cell can be either "alive" or "dead." In the case of this code, that means black or white. In this version, the colors are created by storing a history of the "world" wherein a new cell becomes yellow when "alive," and when that cell "dies," it changes color over time, eventually becoming black again.

Pretty awesome, right? That tiny amount of code contained Conway's complete set of rules (plus some additional conditions added by Reben). It was capable of producing an artwork that slowly unfolded over time with vivid visual detail and evolving lifelike motion and interactions.

Artist Manolo Gamboa Naon from Argentina is one of the most talented and prolific generative artists working today. He puts out work almost daily without ever repeating himself, and his images confound and surprise even the most experienced and skilled computer programmers. For his interpretation of the Game of Life, he layered several versions of the game playing out simultaneously, giving the illusion of depth and increasing its visual intricacy and dynamism. As Manolo explains: '

‘I love when simple rules become really complex ... I feel that they even explain the world in a very reduced way. The videos that I made are several layers of Game of Life with different sizes. At first, I wanted to explore the patterns that remain static, live for a while, and reach a point where they do not mutate anymore ... and disappear with time, and new ones appear. I made this work a video because it seems that time is an essential element in the Game of Life. Initially, I thought to use Game of Life to find interesting images (there are aspects that remind me of a lot of pixel art -- I can't stop seeing characters from Space Invaders). But ultimately, I think "life" appears with movement/evolution/time. So I liked the idea of having two moments. First, they evolve and come alive, and then they die and disappear, and in time others are born, on and on like this forever.’

The Game of Life is only one particular kind of cellular automata. It is unique in that it is two-dimensional and unfolds frame by frame over time, producing what looks like an animation. Unlike the Game of Life, one dimensional (or elementary) cellular automata are designed based on rows.  

It’s interesting how generative artists developed their skills in both traditional art and programming. Golid started school as a design student before switching direction and earning a Bachelor of Cognitive Science degree. He continued his education, earning a Master of Computer Science degree. He developed a fascination for structures and systems, like Turing machines, regular language, and deduction systems, which were the focus of his thesis. He found himself using programming to help himself understand and visualize these systems. However, it was actually at design school where he first started learning to program using the Processing programming language. 

Not all generative art is inspired by cellular automata. Artists often develop their algorithms from what they observe in the world around them. Artist Jared S Tarbell produced many of our favorite generative artworks of all time, including a well-known and much-loved work called Substrate. Perhaps his best-known algorithm, Substrate, was inspired in part by the desert sun. As Tarbell explains: 

‘I was sitting in a coffee shop in Sante Fe, and there was this sticker in the window that was just blasted by the sun every day. It started to separate into these cracks, and I just saw the algorithm right there. Okay, there that first crack formed and got wider, and then another crack came off of it. I wrote the algorithm right there in the coffee shop. The desert sun is pretty brutal.’

Tarbell was encouraged to make art in the home he grew up in by his mother quite a bit. However, his college studies focused on mathematics and computer science. He shared that while he viewed the world in a computational way, he wasn't afraid to express himself or try to find beauty in the computation. 

Trying to understand and position ourselves within nature by understanding its algorithms and producing our own systems through the making of art can be a profoundly spiritual experience. We see Tarbell as a generative shaman-like figure unlocking new connections between us and the natural world around us -- and those connections are not always purely logical or fully explainable. As Tarbell shares:

‘I don't know if emergence describes everything. In fact, I kind of don't believe it does. I think there still are some very spiritual, mysterious elements to the universe. But certainly, thinking about problems computationally, you can get pretty far in understanding what's actually happening.’

Some Final Thoughts

It's been a difficult year for people all around the world. Art can seem trivial in times like this but we believe this is when we need art more than ever. We chose to create this exhibition with the hope that it can play a small role in helping us better understand the healing patterns hidden in nature that unite us all. 

Thanks for reading and for your support and to Kate Vass Gallery and team for all their support!

You can read the full essay on Artnome here.

Sincerely,

Senior Curator at Kate Vass Gallery, Jason Bailey

and Manolo Gamboa Naon ‘GAME OF LIFE’ INSPIRED WORKS available on SuperRare