One of my favourite works is from Karl Sims – Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994). This shows how an evolution algorithm works. Basically you run a piece of code for thousands of iterations with small mutations and those iterations create similar children based on how well they do. Do this for hundreds of generations and very complex behaviour starts to appear. This is kind of how nature does it. Only inside a computer we can speed up the whole process. Most of the time the failed iterations are hidden away. It’s the part that is deemed not interesting and only the best of each generation is shown. This feels quite sad for some reason and with my installation I wanted to show the actual complete process. So on the left side you see the best generation living its life inside a mini ecosystem trying to survive. and on the right side you see the thousands of failed iterations trying to get better so they too can be sent to the real world.