Reichle, Ingeborg. “Art and Digital Evolution.” In Art in the Age of Technoscience , pp. 193-211. Springer, Vienna, 2009.
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One of the earliest responses of contemporary art to artificial life research as represented by investigators such as Christopher Langton are artworks like the interactive installations Interactive Plant Growing (1992) and A-Volve (1994) by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. Sommerer and Mignonneau’s activity at the institute of the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in Ogaki near Gifu in Japan, where the artists conducted research from 1997 until a few years ago, and their participation in the CAiiA-STAR Ph.D. program at the University College of Wales in Newport, has enabled both artists to gain access to laboratories and scientific facilities all over the world. The CAiiA-STAR Programme was one of the first options that opened artists a pathway to gain a Ph.D. This platform is a product of the combination of two fields of research: the CaiiA (Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts) at the University College of Wales in Newport, which was set up in 1994, and STAR, the Centre for Science, Technology and Art Research at the School of Computing at the University of Plymouth, set up in 1997, to expand the multimedia area of research with new fields of study such as artificial life, robotics, and cognitive science. Parallel to this, a new Ph.D. study program was established, which is aimed especially at artists working in media art.