Codex Virtualis. Courtesy of Codex Virtualis.
Aliens, art, and artificial intelligence are about to collide at the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Institute (SETI) in Mountain View, California, which has awarded Mexico City artistic research studio Interspecifics its first artists’ residency.
Selected from an open call announced last September, Interspecifics plans to use A.I. to generate a lifelike organism in a project named
Codex Virtualis. The idea is to simulate the ways in which life might arise on other planets, creating speculative symbiotic relationships between microorganisms and algorithms.
“The Interspecifics collective is a fantastic choice; we could not have asked of a better fit for the residency,” Bettina Forget, director of the SETI Artists in Residence program, said in a statement. “The
Credit: Interspecifics
April 15, 2021, Linz, Austria / Mountain View, CA The SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA and the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz, Austria are announcing that Interspecifics (INT), an independent artistic research studio founded in Mexico City, are the winners of the AI Lab residency, SETI x AI. Interspecifics (INT) project is called Codex Virtualis. With Codex Virtualis, Interspecifics will build a systematic collection of AI-generated hybrid organisms that will emerge due to speculative symbiotic relationships between microorganisms and algorithms. The goal is to conceptualize and simulate life-like, self-organizing autonomous organisms that could provide insights into how life might originate in extraterrestrial habitats. They would manifest in both morphological and algorithmic forms. What might they look like in an AI setting fed by microbial intelligence? What would a computational symbiosis produce?