BIODIGITAL ORGANISMS: TAXONOMIES OF ARTIFICIAL LIFE
2024-2026
BioDigital Organisms: Taxonomies of Artificial Life explore what life may become when biological principles, computational design, and machine intelligence converge. Working in silico, the project establishes initial conditions and evolutionary rules through which AI-generated forms develop, differentiate, interact, and transform computationally. These works function as conceptual models and ethical probes through which to examine emergence, complexity, and the shifting boundary between organic and synthetic systems, and to consider how life-like computational forms may be imagined in natural ecosystems and understood within broader ecological contexts.
Positioned between artificial life and computational design, the work asks how life and intelligence may be understood in an era when biological, digital, and artificial systems increasingly shape one another. It considers how life-like organization may be modeled in computational environments and how such models may influence our understanding of agency, ecology, embodiment, and evolution. The work invites consideration of the implications and responsibilities involved in imagining and designing possible futures for synthetic biology, bio-inspired systems, and life-like computational systems.
In this phase, the series is organized as an atlas of artificial evolution. Each work is presented as a specimen within an expanding taxonomic framework, allowing the project to be read as a structured field of artistic research. The taxonomy gives the series long-term scalability, while making visible a deeper question: if intelligence can emerge across cells, code, technology, and hybrid systems, what kinds of life-like forms are we beginning to model, imagine, and normalize, and what futures are we designing through them?
This phase expands BioDigital Organisms through taxonomy, artificial life, hybrid intelligence, and ecosystem futures.
For the earlier studies and foundational phase of the project, explore Phase 1: BioDigital Organisms at: www.amykarle.com/project/bio-digital-organisms/
The taxonomy organizes BioDigital Organisms as a speculative atlas of life evolving in silico, while also functioning as a shared framework for modeling, comparing, discussing, and developing organism-like systems across disciplines, providing a rigorous conceptual and structural system for describing how such forms emerge, differentiate, stabilize, and become more structurally and behaviorally complex through computational processes. Within this framework, each work can be understood simultaneously as image, model, evolutionary phase, and taxonomic specimen within a broader artificial ecology. In this way, the taxonomy creates a precise structure for observing, comparing, and discussing how life-like organization may be modeled computationally, and for building a common language across art, science, technology, ethics, and design.
This phase extends the project from computational life studies into a broader inquiry into artificial life, hybrid systems, and ecosystem futures. It examines how biological principles, computational generation, and AI-based adaptation may converge to produce new organism-like forms and new conceptual frameworks for thinking about life. In this sense, the work is not only representational, it also operates as a research scaffold and dialogic interface through which scientists, technologists, designers, artists, and broader publics can consider how emerging systems may reshape our understanding of agency, intelligence, adaptation, relation, and environment. It sits in active dialogue with artificial life, bioart, computational morphogenesis, biodesign, synthetic biology, and regenerative futures. In doing so, the project asks how life may be understood when biology and computation increasingly co-shape one another.
We are entering a period in which the boundaries between natural, artificial, and hybrid systems are becoming less stable, and this shift carries scientific, technological, philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical consequences. These works function as simulations, conceptual instruments, and frameworks for inquiry that make complex questions newly visible. They invite deeper dialogue on bioethics and on how life-like systems may be modeled, named, valued, governed, and eventually situated within broader ecological, technological, and embodied contexts as such systems increasingly interact with and shape one another.
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Emerging from a body of work at the convergence of biological principles, computational design, and machine intelligence, BioDigital Organisms: Taxonomies of Artificial Life offers a shared taxonomy and language for understanding how organism-like forms are generated, differentiated, related, and situated. Organized through a multi-axis taxonomy, the framework is intended not only to classify works within the series, but to support broader dialogue and application across art, science, technology, design, and future ecological thought.
The taxonomy does not classify living organisms. It provides a shared framework for modeling, comparing, and developing organism-like systems across disciplines. Each work is defined through six layers: developmental phase, morphological family, computational regime, ecological mode, application domain, and specimen identity.
A visual artwork with its own aesthetic and material presence.
A conceptual model for studying emergence, adaptation, and complex systems.
A moment within a developmental arc of artificial life evolving in silico.
An individual entity within a broader artificial ecology and expanding atlas.
| PHASE IInitiation | PHASE IIDifferentiation | PHASE IIIPattern Stabilization | PHASE IVMorphogenesis | PHASE VInterface Formation | PHASE VIAdaptation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Radiataradial forms | ||||||
| Axialisaxis-dominant forms | ||||||
| Vesiculatamembrane-bounded forms | ||||||
| Reticulatanetwork forms | ||||||
| Filamentafilamentary forms | ||||||
| Orbitalisvoid-centered forms |
Below is the standardized specimen plate format. Each work in the atlas is documented using this structure, recording its developmental phase, morphological family, computational regime, ecological mode, and application domain alongside the specimen image.
What the form is (Morphological Family) from how it develops (Developmental Phase) from how it is generated (Computational Regime) from how it relates (Ecological Mode) from where it applies (Application Domain) from what it is called (Specimen).
The framework is intended to both classify works within the series and offer a shared taxonomy and language for artists, scientists, technologists, and designers working on organism-like systems, adaptive structures, and future ecologies. The separation is what makes the taxonomy rigorous and usable by other disciplines as a shared research and design language.
Featured in:
Issues in Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences, January 2024
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Volume 46, Issue 2, Mar-Apr 2026
