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During the 6 years of our collaboration, we have worked at the borderline of art and biology and have used biological principles to create interactive artworks. When we met in 1992 at the Frankfurt Städelschule Institut für Neue Medien [1], we came from different backgrounds: Laurent had worked with video, improvisation and performance while my background was in biology and modern sculpture. In our previous individual works, we both had shown strong interests in the structures of nature: Laurent's video work was influenced by the shapes and formations of earth movements, and I had been working for several years on a system called "Phyllologia" [2], which drew upon the leaf classification schemata of Carl Von Linné. These leaf forms were static, and I used them in light boxes and cut-outs. When I joined the Institut für Neue Medien in 1992, I planned to animate these leaf shapes. However, when Laurent saw my animations, he suggested actually growing these forms in real time instead of modeling them by hand-and the idea for our first collaborative work, Interactive Plant Growing, was born. Through Laurent's background in improvisation and electronics, we were able to design the system to be interactive, and from my background in botany I knew that plants could be used as living interfaces.After joining our interests in 1992 we decided to collaborate further and since then have produced several interactive artworks. Our goal was to create works that would become like living systems, addressing the question of life on a biological, as well as artistic and metaphorical, level.

This article consists of two sections: the first provides a brief overview of artificial-life art and entertainment software, some of the main products and their peculiarities; and the second describes one of the authors' artificial-life software products, called Life Spacies II, which was created between 1997 and 1999. This system consists of a web page that allows users to create artificial-life creatures by simply typing in text characters using a web page “editor.” Written text is used as genetic code to model the creature's body. The body shape subsequently influences the creature's ability to move, which in turn determines the creature's behavior, survival and reproduction within the Life Spacies II environment. In addition, users of the system can feed the creatures with text characters and thus even more actively influence the creatures' survival and reproduction in their environment.

The Internet seems especially suited to interactions and transformations of data. Internet users can be considered entities or particles who transmit information (e.g. written texts or images). As these data or entities are transferred from location to location they could, in principle, change in status and value. One could imagine a system that could increase its internal complexity as more and more users interact with its information. Just like a genetic string or "meme" as described by Susan Blackmore and Richard Dawkins [1], these strings of information would change and mutate as they were transmitted by the users; they eventually could create an interconnected system that, similar to the models presented by Stuart Kauffman [2], features a phase transition toward more complex structures. Based on these considerations, we propose in VERBARIUM a prototype system for modeling a complex system for the Internet; we also introduce its construction principles and translation mechanisms and analyze how the data it produces have changed over time. CONCEPTUAL OBJECTIVEThe aim of the research presented here is to construct an Internet-based interactive artwork that applies and tests principles of complex-system and origin-of-life theories to the creation of a computer-generated and audience-participatory networked system on the Internet. Complex systems theory is a eld of research that studies simple subsystems as they increase in complexity. Such increases in complexity can take place as phase transitions, when particles in a network switch one another on or off to catalyze or inhibit one another's production. There are various de nitions and qualities that characterize complex systems, and this paper proposes to test whether some of these principles can be applied to an interconnected web of people who can transmit visual and written information over the Internet. As the information is transported from location to location, it would be transformed, creating an interconnected, open-ended system featuring phase transitions toward more complex structures. Before investigating how our prototype system was built, we present a short summary of the theories that ground this research proposal.

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