TechnoSphere 1995

Artificial life environment accessed via a website

The online digital environment, TechnoSphere, was launched in 1995 as an Arts Council funded website created by Jane Prophet and Gordon Selley. It attracted over a 100,000 users who created over a million creatures. TechnoSphere was a virtual world’, populated by artificial life forms created by users of the World Wide Web. The digital ecology of the 3D world, which was housed on our server, depended on the participation of an on-line public who accessed the world via the Internet.

TechnoSphere supported many tens of thousands of competing life forms, typically 20,000 creatures are alive at any one time. The proprietary technologies that support the website were scaleable, and could have been developed to support a much larger community of creatures. Users created artificial life forms, building carnivores or herbivores from component parts (heads, bodies, eyes, and wheels). Their digital DNA, or genetic specification, was linked to each component part, determining speed, visual perception, rate of digestion and so forth. Once a creature was built, users named and tagged it with their email address and put into the 3D world. As the creatures grew, gave birth, moved, evolved and died they sent brief email messages, postcards ‘home’ to the users that designed them, telling the essential events in their artificial lives. 

Users made hundreds of their own website to commemorate their creatures, some of which are still online today. Users could visit the website and see 2D snapshots of their beast at any time, and check family trees, world statistics and trace other creatures and the users that designed them. For example users might be interested to find out more about a creature which their beast had interacted with, they used the ID number of the other creature which was shown in the email messages to track that creature down. By typing in an ID number users could see where a creatures was on the map. The white marker meant that this creatures was DEAD.

TechnoSphere was a not-for-profit project that we ran in our own time from our back room, lack of funding resulted in us closing the website, but we made a real-time 3D version of the project in 1999 for a museum.