Article
TechnoSphere is an on-line project which enables users to design artificial life-forms and send them into a 3D virtual world where they interact with life-forms designed by other users of the Website [1]. The 3D world has fractally generated terrain, trees self-seed at certain heights to make forests (Fig. 1) and there are desert and mountainous regions in which the cyber beasts artificially ‘live’. The current version is a prototype written between March and September 1995 with funding from the Visual Arts and the Film and Video boards of The Arts Council of England, Film and Video Umbrella, Cambridge Darkroom Gallery, with additional support by Digital Workshops Ltd.

TechnoSphere has been produced by a team of people and is made up of four components: I am responsible for managing the project and for the Website design, which has CGI commands written by Tony Taylor-Moran. The artificial life engine has been designed and written by Julian Saunderson from the Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University, the rendering engine has been written by Gordon Selley [2] from London College of Printing and Distributive Trades and the email engine has been written by Selley and Saunderson. Andrew Kind, a computer graphics animator, models the component parts for the creatures.

On September 1st 1995 we opened TechnoSphere which runs over the Internet and is accessed via the World Wide Web. Users access the Website and choose whether to design a carnivore or a herbivore, they then ‘build’ these artificial life-forms by selecting from a limited range of body parts which are displayed on pages onogram, Creature Comforts, written by Julian Saunderson, defines each beast’s behaviour and monitors its interactions with other creatures. For example, a creature can splice digital DNA with another if they are similar, but only if both creatures are more than 50% full of food, otherwise cybersex is out of the question and the search for food takes priority. There is one sex in TechnoSphere and the creature which initiates reproduction becomes the carer of the offspring. At key moments in its existence, an artificial life-form will email its maker to inform them of important changes in its digital evolution. This is a bit like the Christmas cards that people receive on behalf of donkeys they have sponsored in sanctuaries, but in the case of the artificial life-forms the postcard is prompted by a significant development such as death or reproduction. These events activate the email engine which sends the email to the address that tags the beast. Where relevant these email messages also include the email address of whoever designed the other creature involved in the interaction, so it is possible for the Australian designer of Cyber Serpent creature ID2306 to email the German who designed Herbie ID 19087, the beast with whom Cyber Serpent reproduced.

Users can also see 2D postcard images of their artificial life-form (Fig. 3). When a user requests a postcard image of their life-form, Creature Comforts uses the ID number to trace its position in the 3D terrain and this information is passed to the renderer which renders the appropriate scene. Animations of creatures interacting are produced in a similar manner, we tag a creature with a virtual camera and follow its movements, rendering the landscape and all the creatures by referring to data from Creature Comforts at each frame.

When we first opened the project we created a stock of 30,000 randomly designed creatures which can be identified by their negative ID numbers. These all co-exist in a 16km square area of fractal terrain (Fig.4). Since then users have added a further 30,000. A few weeks ago the population peaked at 90,000 as many of the surviving stock creatures, and those designed by users in the first few weeks, reached sexual maturity and reproduced. Population is now declining as creatures die from old age, starvation or as a result of predatory action by carnivores. The dying process also triggers email messages to users, and it has an impact on the 3D environment. For example, when a creature dies it causes the grass to grow longer on the polygons of land where it falls. Grazing herbivores have to move on when they have depleted the grass in a particular location and we have noticed interesting herding behaviour evolving from the simple rules which define the creatures’ behaviour: herbivores tend to move in swathes back and forth across the terrain, forced onwards by the depletion of food.

Offering users different levels and forms of interaction with the project is one of the interests of the TechnoSphere team. Firstly, there is the interaction of the user with the design pages that they use to create artificial life-forms, with some users designing a number of varied creatures, and others making slightly different carnivores over a few months to see which is the most successful. When the project first went on-line we were still calibrating the artificial life engine, and during the first month carnivores were overly voracious and devoured all the herbivores. We explained this to users via postings on the Website and asked them to keep designing new creatures as we developed the system. Some responded by making creatures in quick succession to build ‘herds’ of identical herbivores, typically in groups of 6-10, in an attempt to thwart the carnivores.

Secondly, there is the interaction between users and their creature: after designing a creature users receive email information from it about its life and can see a postcard image of each beast, but they cannot influence or control a creature’s artificial life or demand information or new images spontaneously. Our intention is that users should not be able to interfere with creatures by, for example, killing them or choosing their breeding partners. However, the interaction between user and creature is rather one-sided in Version 1, and as a result in Version 2 we aim to provide a number of extra features which will enable users to get more information about their creature’s life. These features will include the ability for snapshot images to be taken and rendered to the user’s browser on demand, a genealogy function so that users can trace offspring and build up a family tree, a statistical overview of the whole digital ecology, and a map function so creatures’ movements can be traced. We will also add a feature which enables users to influence the direction in which their creature moves at a given time (for example towards a specific beast or landmark).

The interaction between users and the design team has been very productive, and the developments which make up TechnoSphere Version 2 (which will be on-line from June 1996) have been prompted by the comments and suggestions that we have received from users (Fig. 5). We receive between 20 and 100 emails a day from users, ranging from requests for information to detailed critiques and suggestions. Responding to suggestions and implementing new features (such as the forthcoming Obituaries feature, requested by a user in Scotland, which will enable users to write an epitaph for their beast) expands the collaborative process from occurring between the core team, to a network of responsive users.

Ultimately the dynamism and look of TechnoSphere itself, its 3D terrain and artificial life, depends on the creatures interacting and on the artificial life programme that drives these interactions. The theme of interaction is played out from the bottom (the source code of the artificial life software) to the top (the end users).

Interaction between users is currently under-developed, but will be facilitated by the addition of a 3D graphical Multi User Domain (currently in development). This will provide users with a space to discuss issues raised by TechnoSphere and meet the designers of other creatures. The MUD is a development of the limited opportunity for exchange currently offered when we enclose email addresses of the other creature’s designer in messages about a creature’s reproduction or death at the jaws of a carnivore. It is apparent from some of the email that I receive that users often identify with the creatures that they have made to the extent that they see them as digital agents, as representing themselves, whether this is as a carnivore with a chains head or as one of a herd of herbivores. It is as though the process of designing a creature and the subsequent text-based and visual feedback that they get from it becomes a kind of rite of passage for users [3]. Traditional rites of passage rituals draw attention to the role of the social in many of the biological, cultural and technological changes that humankind has experienced. Rites of passage articulate human identities and bodies from one social position to another, for example puberty rites of passage articulate the biological and cultural passage from child to adult. Cyberspace can be seen as a mediation between human and post-human, between analogue and digital centred around the social and symbolic transformation of the body. A cyber-spatial rite of passage might be the assumption of a digital identity on the Net. Not only is this a rite of passage from organic to transorganic, from analogue to digital, but often it involves a key change in identity such as computer cross-dressing. Our intention is to build on this as we produce the MUD and include some knowbots (totally artificial creatures) in the environment. Our aim is to develop knowbots so that users can relinquish direct control of their avatar to a knowbot when they leave the MUD and then read its subsequent interactions with other users and knowbots on their return. The MUD is likely to appeal to a small percent of current TechnoSphere users, but may well attract new users to the project who are more familiar with using MUDs.

Delivering the project via the WWW has brought our work to a new audience and simultaneously denied access to others. On the positive side we have had many visitors (over one million ‘hits’ on our Website and 30,000 creatures designed by more than 18,000 different users) and we have received lively and challenging feedback from an international audience. These users range in age and include a significant number of children who email us regularly. On the other hand the audience is from an economically advantaged computer literate elite, for while some users do access TechnoSphere from public access points (during visits to museums and cyber cafes) these people often have no email address and therefore cannot develop a continuing relationship with the project (they can not receive subsequent email messages from the creatures that they design). On the two occasions that we have shown the piece in a gallery environment the lack of on-going email access proved disappointing to gallery visitors, although many voiced their interest in what was often their first experience of using the Internet. Our audience may be international but it is largely English-speaking and relates closely to coverage of the piece in mass media such as TV and newspapers. The restrictions of using English might explain why we have had few Japanese users even though the piece has been publicised in Japan. Recently the source of new users designing creatures has shifted as some popular Websites in America and UK have linked to the TechnoSphere homepage.

Engaging with levels of interaction, and the characteristics of the Internet are key themes in TechnoSphere. But our attempts to develop a grammar of digital media is equally important. This interest is reflected in our explorations of the paradox of computer simulations of nature (nature as symbolised by images of landscapes and via the use of artificial life).

Artificial nature and the sublime
The appearance of both TechnoSphere’s terrain and artificial life-forms has emerged from my interest in the relationship between landscape and art, combined with Selley’s “impressionistic” approach to modelling trees and shadow and Kind’s experience of character animation. To begin with we wanted an abstract looking environment of, for example, shifting colours, populated with artificial life-forms which might be modulated sounds or geometric shapes. While the project may still move towards this model, we decided to start with the straightforward visual metaphor of a landscape and creatures with body parts as we felt that this would make the resulting project more accessible and of interest to a wider group of users.

The look of the landscape was influenced equally by our discussions and critiques of modelling techniques and the aesthetic of the sublime. In the late seventeenth century there emerged a new and sweeping feeling for nature and natural beauty. Alongside art, nature became a subject worthy of aesthetic contemplation. With its vast scale, sweeping landscapes and impenetrable mountain ranges, nature partook of, and indeed largely sustained the aesthetic of the sublime. An overwhelming sense of overpowering scale felt by those contemplating nature was thought to prompt consideration of the Infinite God who had created it, allowing religious experience to share blurred boundaries with the aesthetic sublime. In contemporary Western societies, ideas of nature as sublime have eroded somewhat as we have been able to “conquer” even the highest peaks, and have lost most of our opportunities to view vast expanses of landscapes through the expansion of building and an increase in air pollution which renders the horizon less visible. Paradoxically computer simulations of nature highlight our current dilemma allowing us to experience a nostalgia and yearning for a sublime, unconquerable nature. Simultaneously we revel in our ability to reconstitute an “improved” awesome wilderness through digital technologies.

In the fractal landscapes of TechnoSphere’s terrain we are not striving for a digital Eden which replicates the natural world in an ordered form. Nor are we attempting to perfect nature via geometry to accelerate the natural sublime. Mathematics has offered frameworks through which to redefine artistic practice by using mathematics harmonic structures to reveal previously hidden cosmic structure (Euclidean and Pythagorean mathematics in particular tried this). By contrast we are using fractal mathematics, not just to create a complex-looking terrain, but as an embodiment of anti-reductionist approach to the production of images. Unlike Pythagorean and Euclidean geometry fractal mathematics does not offer a simple equation for creating natural variation, instead it describes dynamic systems themselves. In the nineteen nineties chaos theory is having an impact on aesthetics and taste similar in magnitude to the impact of the sublime in the seventeenth century. Chaos theory provides a rationale for those events previously inexplicable and random which were traditionally given form through art and poetry.

The aesthetic sublime of the seventeenth century included an element of divinity. Most of our definitions of life continue to have a mystical and supernatural component, despite the increasing use of empirical methods to recognise life [4]. When we first discussed TechnoSphere publicly [5] some people interpreted it as an attempt at taming sublime nature to new notions of proper mathematical order, and saw TechnoSphere as a Utopia where we, the designers, and the on-line users, play God. Our surprise at this response seems naive in retrospect, but is, I believe, partly related to the fact that the TechnoSphere design team is based in Europe, where Creationist views are not widely expounded. There are some important differences to be drawn between the design and implementation of artificial life-forms and any attempt to play at being a deity. Firstly, if we accept this analogy, there is no single ‘God’ in the production of TechnoSphere, every user that sends in a design has the ability to ‘create’ a life-form. Secondly, the life-forms develop via unnatural selection rather than being paired off or destroyed by us. Users cannot interfere with the development of the life-form that they sent in once it is in the virtual world. At the most we provide a mathematical model which has rules, this is not a God-like activity, more social one, such as the making of laws or rules of behaviour. As there are opportunities for users to make suggestions for changes or additions to these rules by emailing, or leaving messages at the Web site, the development of the rule system is evolutionary and collective.

Through the dissemination of fractal images and the greater realisations of the aestheticising implications of chaos theory, there is emerging a renewed interest in detail, and a sense of the “sublime” having its equivalent in cyberspace - particularly as cyberspace is so frequently hyped as an unexplored, unconquered and unknown realm of the digital world of electronic signals, networks and remote human presence. Although traditionally the sublime is connected with the overwhelmingly large, we seem to be experiencing a cultural shift in taste which is parallel to an intellectual response to theories expounded by physicists like Stephen Hawking [6], who see a kind of sublimity in the microcosmic world of particle systems. It is the very small and the very detailed which now prompt the “great thoughts and passions”. We are challenged by the microscopic scale of things, just as vast expanses of nature once challenged philosophers of aesthetics like Shaftesbury [7] who wrote prolifically in the eighteenth century on the sensibilities of his contemporaries. While Shaftesbury’s sublime was too big for us to grasp comfortably, Hawking’s is perhaps too small.

In TechnoSphere’s rendering of the terrain traces of the seduction of using the computer to create mimetic images of lost and ideal sublime landscapes can be seen in the fractal mountains and mists, but these are deliberately as we make explicit the landscape’s artifice and digital origin, as illustrated by the three levels of rendered land (Fig. 6). This type of rendering was a response to our wish to find digital alternatives to the use of cinematic devices such as depth of field and focus which are so often used wholesale, and without being problematised, in computer graphics to attract the viewer’s attention. Combining three types of rendering in one view, to draw attention to the fully rendered part of the image, is our algorithmic alternative to focus and depth of field.
In many computer images pure information and the relationship between information is frequently represented in a highly plastic form (we don’t see the code on screen). To counter this the TechnoSphere programme code will be mapped onto whirlwinds as a texture alluding to the binary and algorithmic nature of the landscape’s origins. Another way of emphasising TechnoSphere’s artifice can be seen in our choice to make the artificial life-forms non-biological in appearance. It has been said that a work of art is as much about relations of tension as it is about attempts to resolve them [8], with this in mind we are trying to embed traces of these tensions and fractures in the imagery of the virtual world.

Artificial life in TechnoSphere
Central to artificial life programmes is the assertion that life depends on a certain level of complexity. This might seem obvious to us now, as we live in an age where chaos theory has been popularised, but it was a radical proposition when first expounded in the 1950s. This dependency on complexity was a key step away from the reductionist approach to discovering the principles of evolution of biological organisms which was common in the physical sciences, and an interest in these areas underpins the TechnoSphere project and can be seen in Gordon Selley’s applied research into fractal mathematics and the problems of using computers to model complex natural structures such as trees and fog.
A movement away from reductionist theories and towards ideas of synthesis again fits in with larger cultural shifts in the West which have seen us discard metanarratives as viable interpretations of the world and move towards a postmodernist synthesis or eclecticism. Importantly these complex systems can emerge from a relatively simple set of rules. The design of the artificial life engine in TechnoSphere was very difficult as we all struggled to decide the activities and parameters to focus on in our attempt to reduce the behaviour of the creatures to a simple set of rules. Our intention was not to create a ground-breaking artificial life environment, but rather to produce a project which made certain aspects of artificial life accessible to a wide audience. We hoped that complex and unpredictable behaviour would emerge from these rules, but as TechnoSphere is our first foray into artificial life we were concerned that we may end up with a digital ecology which either drifted into stasis or was prone to wild fluctuations in population. Stasis is partly avoided by the influx of new creatures designed by users visiting the Website. The numbers of these creatures varies from week to week, sometimes only a few hundred are made each week while at other times users add nearly a thousand a day. We have recently added an extra element to the project in the form of a digital whirlwind which travels through the terrain destroying every creature in its path. The whirlwind’s route is unpredictable as it is defined by a random fractal walk.

After some initial calibrating, the simple rules which define the behaviour of artificial life-forms in TechnoSphere have resulted in some surprising moments such as “vending machine valley”. In this example, carnivores formed a huge semi-circular group at the mouth of a sealed valley flanked on three sides by mountains. Trapped in the fractal corral, herds of herbivores grazed until the lack of grass drove them inevitably out of the valley and into the virtual jaws of the waiting carnivores (which had not ventured into the corral but merely waited outside).The notion of self-organising artificial life systems which we have used in TechnoSphere depend on a ‘bottom-up’ approach, with behaviour emerging as artificial creatures interact, rather than us imposing a ‘top down’ control on behaviour. This idea of ‘bottom up’ evolution has been applied to the whole project and carried through to the design process. By taking the calculated risk of developing the project on-line, starting with a simple version on the Internet, we can engage in bottom up development in conjunction with the thousands of users who access the web site and send us emails about the project.

In conclusion, TechnoSphere is the result of each team member sharing an interest in the potential of the Internet for developing graphical networked interactive spaces, which can be seen as part of a larger cultural development. Interconnectivity has become one of the paradigms of the late Twentieth century as our interpretation of the world has been dramatically affected by scientific discoveries, such as chaos theory which has provided us with a model which recognises the importance and power of interaction. There seems to be a dilemma inspired by TechnoSphere, a concern about its metaphors of landscape (Fig.7) and our metaphoric use of terms like ‘creature’ to describe the artificial life-forms, the code that drives it as a database. Also, there is a larger cultural dis-ease with computer simulations of nature which is subtle but persistent . Rather than a dilemma, it seems to us that TechnoSphere could be seen as having a kind of gestalt effect: of being simultaneously metaphoric or allegorical, and mimetic. It is mimetic in that as you look at it the 3D terrain seems recognisable, there is a pleasure in that recognition although the recognition is not total, the mimesis is interrupted by a flat facet or an improbable life-form and we are reminded of the digital source of the image.

References and Notes
1. TechnoSphere 1995. WWW project. Internet address: http://www.lond-inst.ac.uk/technosphere/index.html
2. Gordon Selley. Trees and Woods Image Generation System. PhD Thesis, Department of Graphic Design, Coventry University (1991).
The renderer is an extension of Selley’s research work carried out at Coventry School of Art & Design which was sponsored by Rediffusion Simulation (now Thomson Training & Simulation) with the support of Prof. John Vince and Dr Clive Richards. The software, Trees and Woods Image Generation System (TWIGS), was developed to produce images of natural phenomena.
3. David Thomas. From Euclidean Space to Cyberspace. In Cyber space: First Steps. Ed Michael Benedikt. (London: MIT Press, 1991)
4. Steven Levy. Artificial Life: the Quest for a New Creation. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992)
5. Technophobia, one of the Institute of Contemporary Arts conferences in the series “Towards the Aesthetics of the Future”. (London: April 9th 1995)
6. Stephen W Hawking. A Brief History of Time. (London: Bantam, 1988)
7. Anthony Ashley 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times Etc., Ed Robertson (London, J.M., 1900)
8. Peter Osborne. Adorno and the Metaphysics of Modernism: the Problem of a ‘Postmodern’ art. In The Problems of Modernism: Adorno and Benjamin. Ed Andrew Benjamin. (London: Routledge, 1992)
Figure Captions
Fig.1 TechnoSphere: scene from the fractal landscape. The trees have been placed in the TechnoSphere landscape by a seeding algorithm written by Gordon Selley that walks from one end of the terrain to other and back again, testing the height of the terrain at semi-random spacing. Trees are planted between certain altitude levels, we have none on the flat plain as yet and limit them to the hills. We have had many requests from the users of TechnoSphere to develop Artificial Plant Life that will interact with the other creatures in TechnoSphere. We may well include plants and bird life in TechnoSphere III.
Fig. 2 TechnoSphere: one of the pages on the World Wide Web which users use to design artificial life- the Website (Fig. 2). Each body part carries with it certain behavioural characteristics, for example bodies store different amounts of food and each head varies as to the rate at which it can eat and how effective it is when used to defend itself or attack another creature, eyes define viewing ranges and angles of vision. Once users have built their cyber beast they then name it and tag it with their email address. Clicking on the submit button saves the data description of that creature and a CGI program allocates it a unique identification number which is immediately displayed in the user’s browser window. It is necessary to give each creature an ID number as many creatures are either unnamed or similarly named (“Herbie” and “Binkie” are especially popular, names like “Leon the Cleaner” are used less frequently).
Once placed in TechnoSphere, the creatures become part of the artificial life program which controls their behaviour and traces their position in the 3D virtual landscape. The artificial life prforms by selecting from a choice of components. Creature components modelled by Andrew Kind.
Fig. 3 TechnoSphere: a virtual postcard. Users view postcards on the Web site before downloading them or making links to them from their own Web sites.
Fig.4 TechnoSphere’s crowded plains showing some of the 77,000 creatures.
Fig. 5 TechnoSphere: the Comments page. Between 20 and 100 comments a day get sent to the design team via this interface.
Fig. 6 TechnoSphere: scene from TechnoSphere showing experiments with rendering techniques to find digital alternatives to cinematic devices to attract the viewers gaze.
Fig. 7 TechnoSphere: scene from a fractal valley, with mountainous regions in the background.