Today, I attended Sam Wolk’s Replica Praesens: A Lecture on
Synthetic Life. To be completely honest, I was pretty lost in the first half of
the lecture. As a business economics major, I really had no clue as to what he
was talking about when he showed us strips of DNA, different types of genes,
nutrient fields, phenotype, etc. on the TV screen. Sam went into great detail
about plants being able to sprout, grow, and mutate, but it was a bit too
abstract for me because he visualized the plants as strips of DNA on the
screen.
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| Strip of DNA of a Plant |
Sam’s lecture became extremely interesting when he
introduced the universe he created on the screen. With the red nutrient field,
he was able to produce plants. Furthermore, he created creatures that could eat
the plants, socialize with each other, and have sex with each other for
reproduction. I found this to be intriguing because Sam and his team generated
an artificial universe with creatures that acted on emotions and physical needs
– albeit everything was computer programmed. In one of his slides, Sam
intentionally inserted a bug that crashed the universe. And he said that once
he started the program up again, the creatures in this computer universe would
never know it crashed because they are just moving from one frame to the next.
Sam then related this concept to our daily lives, as a comment or question to
whether there may be a higher order of power in our universe.
I saw the pinnacle of the intersection between science and
art in Sam Wolk. Sam is a sound and visual artist, yet he has so much knowledge
of math and science. He had to learn everything about DNA and genes and life
sciences to understand the growth and needs of plants and creatures. In
addition, he had a deep understanding of statistics, when he explained how he
used the Gaussian distribution with 9 degrees of freedom to be able to
introduce different types of species through standard deviation. Also, Sam had
to learn how to code to generate fluid visualizations onto the computer screen.
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| A Creature's Neuro Network |
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| A Community of Creatures Socializing |
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| Sam Wolk in the Back With The Black Laptop |
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