Panspermia by Karl Sims

This standout generative film by the icon Sims depicted an artificial world and remains an example of an early animation born from artificial evolution. Sims’s work with artificial life can also be thought of as a continuation in the development of AI art. It inspired the work later in this decade of Scott Draves, a machine-learning art pioneer, and many others.

This evolutionary work of Sims can be considered proto-machine learning art. According to Sims: “This botanical form of life, reproducing itself from planet to planet through space, is in many ways analogous to other self replicating systems including organisms, entire species, or even ideas.” These evolving, breeding features of the program—drawn directly from cybernetics and its feedback loops—are the predecessors of machines processing data to perform instructionless tasks, modern machine learning.

As for Panspermia itself, Sims created the piece using original software, in which he created a virtual universe teeming with 3D organic plant structures. Employing chaos, complexity and self-replication, the animation mirrors the biological world, suggesting life’s interstellar distribution through spores. Dynamic simulations and particle systems animated these digital life forms, displaying Sims’s self-propagating systems. Panspermia not only showcases the potential of artificial evolution in computer graphics but also prompts contemplation about life’s interconnectedness and propagation on a planetary scale.

Thomas Dreher describes it as such in History of Computer Art:

“Karl Sims presents in the short film “Panspermia” an artificial world of biological forms as an autonomous cosmos with recurring parallels to the evolution of geology and fauna on earth” [Dreher 180].

This major work by the legendary Sims continues to influence the work of generative artists today (ciphrd) but had a profound impact on the decade of the ’90s and the rise of artificial intelligence art.