One of my all time favourite works is from Karl Sims – Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994). This work shows how an evolution algorithm works. You run a piece of code for thousands of iterations with small mutations and those iterations create 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 works as well. 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 useful or interesting and only the best of each generation is shown. This feels quite sad for some reason and with this installation I wanted to show the complete process. On the left side you see the best generation living its life inside a mini ecosystem trying to survive. 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.