Galapagos by Karl Sims

Karl Sims continued to pioneer evolutionary art with his work Galápagos, blending audience interaction with computational evolution. Viewers could influence the survival and reproduction of virtual organisms by selecting preferred forms via step sensor pads. Sims' approach combined genetics, neural networks and physics simulations to create lifelike animations based on Darwinian evolution. Sims’s use of of plant-like abstract imagery and virtual creatures demonstrated how algorithmic art could contribute to the fields of artificial and evolutionary life and their impact on emergent systems. This work was first displayed at the ICC in Tokyo from 1997 to 2000.

Sims like Primordial Dance earlier in the decade is using evolutionary principles to recreate what is essentially a slightly more manual GAN process. In Galapagos, Sims increases the complexity of Dance by including audience participation and including an immersive environment. There is a clear connection between the AI of today and Sims’s work, as he explains his process in this piece himself:

“Twelve computers simulate the growth and behaviors of a population of abstract animated forms and display them on twelve screens arranged in an arc. The viewers participate in this exhibit by selecting which organisms they find most aesthetically interesting and standing on step sensors in front of those displays. The selected organisms survive, mate, mutate and reproduce.”

This evolutionary work of Sims can be considered proto-AI art. Artists in the upcoming decades would continue to automate the process until now these tasks are done “under the hood” and instantly. But this is a hugely important step in the development of AI-art-as-we-know-it-today.

To further display how instrumental this work has been in the development of contemporaneous AI-art, in 1999, Scott Draves’s legendary early AI-art was inspired by the immersive, gallery-bound approach of Sims’s Galapagos.