Still Moving life

ARTWORK

A single computational agent is seeded in one of a series of illustrated cacti by botanist Charles Lemaire (1841). This agent absorbs energy from the image’s pixels and advances towards the most similar color in its surrounding. As the agent progresses, it unveils the image that it feeds on. After a certain energy level, the agent generates offspring with the same behavior. The agent dies after a certain time and cannot reproduce in overcrowded areas. These conditions make possible for a single agent to generate a colony that maintains itself with population growths and declines. The emerging behavior of the colony as a whole creates an evolving rendering of the cactus’ image, one that is always moving, and that is always different.

—