Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau
www.interface.ufg.ac.at/christa-laurent

“LIFE WRITER” is an interactive typewriter that produces artificial life. The input text functions like genetic code and translates into visual creatures that follow their own internal rules of metabolization and reproduction.

The artificial life forms appear on the real paper of the typewriter as if emerging directly from the machine. The creatures run around frantically, trying to find text to eat. When users type some more letters, the creatures quickly snap it up. Once they have eaten enough text, they reproduce and fill the whole page.

The whole process of writing text through “LIFE WRITER” becomes a process of giving life to thoughts and having the thoughts evolve, escape and reconfigure.

“LIFE WRITER” applies new technologies to sculptural form. Art becomes fused with “artificial life” forms and begins to evolve towards a “living” art form.

Sommerer and Mignonneau’s artwork raises fundamental questions about human interaction with increasingly “intelligent” machines and possible levels of human-machine symbiosis.