Codeform: A Balancing Act between Variation and Utility in Evolutionary Art

This paper describes the artwork Codeform, an interactive, evolutionary ecosystem of virtual “creatures” created by scanning museum visitor admission tickets at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, in 2014. The paper first describes technical mechanisms used to realize the work and then discusses the issues of finding a genotypic representation that is terse but expressive—that is, one that maximizes the useful variations that the genotype is capable of expressing in phenotype space.