In 2021, together with Interspecifics, we started developing Codex Virtualis, a multi-stage project. Codex Virtualis is an AI-art-science research framework oriented towards the image synthesis and evolution of an open-ended taxonomic collection of new-to-nature speculative life forms. An aesthetic journey through an ecosystem of neural networks and algorithms.
Codex Virtualis imagines ways of living together by transforming our perception of microorganisms from pathogens and utilitarian items into subjects, as inspiration for change as models of forms of living, of deep interspecific relations that may enhance our possibilities of survival.
Codex Virtualis is Artistic practice as research stretching conventional definitions of life, experimenting with a semantic coupling of algorithms that is comparable to the mechanisms of life of microorganisms, progressively fitting novel delimitations of life. The project belongs to a cultural and artistic history of automata, humanity’s age-old quest for mechanical life, and its contemporary renditions in the field of soft artificial life (ALife) as computational simulations. It also focuses on values of collaboration and exchange in the quest for diversity and survival both in algorithms as in microbial life.
You can read all about it in the booklet Booklet codex smaller