Jon McCormack

Niche Constructions takes its name from a biological process in which organisms modify their environment to create niches for themselves and their offspring, as beavers do when their dams reshape the flow of a river. Advocates of the idea argue that this feedback between organisms and their surroundings plays an important role in evolution, alongside the selection of genes. McCormack applies it to a generative drawing system. Line-drawing agents move across a virtual canvas, leaving a trail of ink; they reproduce, giving birth to new lines with similar behaviour, and die when they cross an existing line. Each species carries a gene for its preferred density of ink, and thrives or declines according to how well its surroundings match that preference, while reshaping those surroundings as it draws. ‘Founder’ agents, for example, often draw large closed boundaries that protect their low-density offspring from invaders. Eventually the canvas fills, every agent dies and, as McCormack puts it, ‘the drawing is complete.’ The work shows how many simple processes can give rise to ‘autonomous creative behaviour.’