Codex Virtualis_ is a project by interspecifics that I saw at the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2024 in Geneva this afternoon. Here's how they define it on their website:

an artistic research framework oriented towards the generation of an evolving taxonomic collection of hybrid bacterial-AI organisms. With a subtle echo to the endosymbiotic theory, we propose a symbolic formulation of a style transfer machine learning environment as a host, in which to merge bacterial/archaea time-lapse microscopy footage along with multidimensional cellular automata models as endosymbionts, all under the orchestration of an autonomous generative non-adversarial network architecture. We aim, as a result, to encounter novel algorithmically-driven aesthetic representations, tagged with a unique morphotype and genotype-like encoding, and articulated around a speculative narrative encompassing unconventional origins of life on earth and elsewhere.

interspecifics

Why do I blog this? This is typically the kind of revamping of artificial life system that emerges these days. As they say in the documentation, the authors "seek to activate a self-generative system, Artificial Intelligence, and algorithmic approximation for generating virtual organism models based on morphology and rule modeling".. which is the kind of combo we have these days to generate new kinds of entities. Not exactly monsters, not strictly living beings either.