The Nerve Garden: Plant A Seed in Cyberspace

ARTISTS' STATEMENTS The Artists' Statements section o/"Leonardo is intended to be a rapid publication forum. Texts can be up to 750 words in length with no illustrations, or up to 500 words in length with one black-and-white illustration. Artists' Statements are acceptedforpublication upon recommendation of any one member of the Leonardo Editorial Board, who will thenforward them to the Main Editorial Office with his or her endorsement. THE NERVE GARDEN: PLANT A SEED IN CYBERSPACE Bruce Darner, DigitalSpace Corpora­ tion, 343 Soquel Avenue, Suite 70, Santa Cruz, CA 95062, U.S.A. E-mail: . Web site: . Received 9 November 1997. Acceptedfor publication by Roger F. Malina. When as children we were presented with the gift of a terrarium, aquarium, ant farm or chemical garden, we were given much more than a toy. We were given dresser-top universes that gave us admiration and passion for the natural world. Cyberspace is becoming an in­ creasingly rich space for the evolution of form. Nerve Garden seeks to express natural forms by allowing people to plant a seed in cyberspace and populate a virtual terrarium (Fig. 1). Nerve Gardeners use aJava applet to germinate compelling models of plants from L-systems, a kind of fractal genetic algorithm. Users can mutate their plants' forms and even generate ani­ mals that possess branching or seg­ mented body plans (such as arthropods). The user's final step is to place their virtual organisms into a col­ lective garden, expressed in a three-di­ mensional Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) scene. The next version of Nerve Garden will feature a neural network system (called "Nerves") that will enable the contin­ ued growth and decay of plants, as well as a simple ecosystem of tokens that represent water or photons and "polyvores," creatures that consume the polygons that make up plants. Nerve Garden is designed to prove that one can build a compelling cyberspace us­ ing generative methods. It makes no sense to send large models or sounds over the thin pipes of the Internet when algorithms that will generate the models at their destination can be sent instead. Well into the next century, die off­ spring of synthetic ecosystems such as Nerve Garden will harbor autonomous forms that are arguably alive. If life is just a matter of data structure complex­ ity, metabolism and evolution, then it is immaterial whether organisms are con­ structed of atoms or bits. What does life seek by entering digi­ tal space? With the ultimate demise of the Earth, the evolution of complex and beautifully adapted forms will come to an end—that is, if life remains trapped at the bottom of Earth's gravity well. Life expressed in bits is massless and can travel at the speed of light with low energy expenditure toward a re­ ceiving station at the other end. Soft­ ware uploaded to enhance the simple brains of spacecraft such as Galileo pro­ vide us with twentieth-century ex­ amples of the extension of the Earth's biota. Deep into the twenty-first cen­ tury, distant nanofabricators will spin matrices supporting digital biota on the vast energetic surfaces of the solar sys­ tem. Nerve Garden can be experienced at . Acknowledgments This project was created by Biota.org, a special in­ terest group of the Contact Consortium. We also thank Aristid Lindenmayer and Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz for pioneering L-systems and giving us the book TheAlgorithmic Beauty ofPlants. Fig. 1. Nerve Garden. Flight of the bumblebee over one of dozens of Nerve Gardens planted inside three-dimensional virtual worlds in cyberspace, 1997. ^i'Wf/fri© 1998ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 277-280, 1998 277 ...