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Art works generated and delivered using digital technology, particularly interactive pieces, challenge established notions of the identity of the artist, the curator and the gallery audience. By chronicling TechnoSphere, an interactive artwork accessed via the internet, I will address some of these issues. It is the development of a grammar of digital media that many practitioners, curators and theorists are engaged with now and some are focussing on the material characteristics of the medium. TechnoSphere is this type of Modernist project, but it also approaches the medium of the Internet from a more complex matrix of discourses in which issues around representations of landscape and artificial life remain important circuits.

The authors present an introduction to the new interdisciplinary area of aesthetic computing and proceed to define this area with examples from each of their own disciplines, practices and research. While several decades of publication and work have resulted in significant advancements in art as implemented through technology, less emphasis has been placed on studying the converse issue of art's effect on computing, or “aesthetic computing.” The authors present their individual work in this area and then follow with brief criticism of one another's work to elucidate different perspectives on the idea. By approaching the topic of aesthetic computing in this manner, the paper serves as an introduction to and survey and analysis of the field.

Drawing on our own art/science practices and a series of interviews with artificial life practitioners, we explore the entanglement of developments at the artistic edges of artificial life. We start by defining key terms from Karen Baradʼs agential realism. We then diffractively read artificial life together with agential realism to discuss the potential for interventions in the field. Through a discussion of artificial life computer simulations, ideas of agency are problematized, and artificial lifeʼs single purposeful actor, the agent, is replaced by agential, an adjective denoting a relationship rather than a subject-object duality. We then seek to reinterpret the difficult-to-define term "emergence." Agency in artificial life emerges through what Barad calls entanglement, in this case between observers and their apparatus, a perpetual engagement between observations of a system and their interpretations. The article explores the differences that this diffractive perspective makes to artificial life and accounts of its materialization.

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