Primordial Dance by Karl Sims

Karl Sims unveiled this important work in the development of artificial life-based art, Primordial Dance, an experimental one-minute and 35-second code-based animation exploring abstract textures and colors. Sims worked with the computer to generate images and movements that exceeded their individual capabilities through an interactive process known as “artificial evolution.” Sims explains how his “artificial evolution” is essentially a slightly more manual GAN process. There is a clear connection between the AI of today and Sims’s work, as he explains his process himself: “The computer generates and displays a collection of experimental abstract images. The artist chooses the most aesthetically interesting images, and those survive and are “bred” to produce a new collection of images. The equations, or artificial genes, of the survivors are copied, mutated, and mated by the computer to generate new offspring pictures.” Thus, this evolutionary work of Sims can be considered proto-GAN 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.