E-volved Formulae - Art exhibition on Feral File

It’s unsurprising that evolution, the most potent and pervasive generative process we know, challenges our habits of thought. Richard Dawkins figured evolution as a Blind Watchmaker, embodying it in a fumbling pair of cosmic hands, even as he argued against intention or design. “Theory of mind” — our capacity to attribute and model the agency and motivations of others — seems to trip us up here. It’s hard to think about evolution without asking, what does it want?

But first, there’s no “it”: evolution is not a singular force but a vast set of massively parallel and distributed live experiments. Second, it doesn’t want anything. The name of the game is not desire, but persistence.

As everything becomes a chatbot and “artificial intelligence” passes seamlessly from theory, to branding, to technological commodity, it’s useful to consider our models of intelligence. James Bridle argues that one danger of AI is not that it falls short of its goal of human emulation, but that it narrows our view of what intelligence is, and blinds us to other ways of being.

Discussing E-volved Formulae, Maria Verstappen says “intelligence is one thing, but evolution is next to it: it’s a different way.” Like many of Driessens & Verstappen’s earlier works, the Formulae visualize this — these artefacts are cryptic yet coherent. Where many coded generative artworks explore narrow bands of variation, the Formulae are startlingly diverse. Patterns arise and disperse; figure becomes ground becomes figure; crisp geometries are smudged, glitched, and bent; accidental compositions unfold with uncanny self-consistency. As Verstappen observes, some formulae have parts that seem redundant; they do nothing, or cancel each other out: “junk” DNA. Again, evolution shows us the power of the unintentional. This is not junk but a latent capacity, an influence which may only be realized in future generations.

As a cultural concept, evolution gets mixed in carelessly with themes of development, learning, or improvement — even invoked to bolster modern notions of inexorable progress. This is inaccurate, but also irrelevant here. Instead, this evolution is senseless, purposeless, inscrutable, and no less creative. It is a different way.

In Driessens & Verstappen’s work, evolution operates as part of a library of decentralized or “bottom-up” form-generation processes across digital and physical systems. In The Factory (1995), molten wax drops into water and solidifies into a bulbous blob before being melted down and reformed again. Here the bottom-up engine is the viscous flow of the material itself. Similarly, Sandbox (2009) is a real-life particle system of sand grains that form shifting dunes in an enclosed diorama. The digital sculptures of Breed (1995-2007) and Accretor (2012) both use local interactions between cells in a three-dimensional lattice to grow enigmatic forms that range from crystal-like aggregations to fractalized, brutalist architectures. Like the Formulae, these shapes are both strange and strangely coherent, all driven by the distributed logic of a single complex underlying rule.

Breed also uses artificial evolution, though here the process of selection is automated, testing the generated forms for their spatial coherence — only joined-up forms can be 3d-printed. The artists select candidates from the generated forms to be fabricated, and here the process is much like their long series of Morphoteques, which catalog and reproduce the weird morphologies of icicles, potatoes, or carrots, among other things. For Driessens & Verstappen, bottom-up complexity might be framed through time-lapse photography of a changing landscape, as in Frankendael (2001), or engineered through software. In either case, the artists set up or tap into systems that peel away from control and intention.

The evolution of the Formulae is human-guided, a process of selection where the artists assign a score to the variants of each generation, steering the process over many cycles. This sounds goal-directed or purposeful, but in reflecting on this process, Verstappen tells it differently:

It takes a lot of time before all the things are coming together in the right way... something happens so that at a certain point, it comes alive [and] suddenly becomes separated from me as a breeder. It's like it has its own identity.

So once again, if the artists have a goal here, it’s for any personal goal or intention to be exceeded by the generative system they have created. The process seeks out a moment of emergence or surprise — a central theme for many artists working with artificial life, and what I have earlier described as “metacreation”: where creative practice extends itself to develop creative systems.

In 1993 I saw Karl Sims’ Genetic Images installation at the Pompidou Centre. An arc of sixteen screens sat beside the monolithic cube of a CM-2 supercomputer. The screens displayed an array of colorful abstract images. Just like the Formulae, these were generated by complex mathematical functions spliced and mutated through interactive evolution. Sims’ work was remarkable, and influential within a certain geeky art milieu, though it seems now to come from several eras ago, before “creative code,” and long before the oozing tide of “generative” AI.

Driessens & Verstappen revisit Sims’ techniques in their Formulae, but this isn’t a remake. Instead, it is a paring-back. In the new visual economy of AI, each new picture is nothing but a statistically calibrated derivative of a million other pictures, and what results is a stale, queasy self-referentiality. By contrast, Driessens & Verstappen’s vibrating monochromes feel crisp and (paradoxically) deliberate, inexorable; where AI hallucinates and interpolates, the Formulae are refreshingly precise and distinct forms. AI is destined to offer us more of the same — a terrifying proposition, if we’re talking about cultural practice. On the other hand, these works (and the many artefacts from Driessens & Verstappen’s back catalog) are code-based objects from the edges of intention, born out of the seed-beds of something else. They show us — what a relief — that the strange is still possible.