In the artistic realm, living organisms have often been used as models (e.g. for nude paintings or portraits), as mediums (e.g. painting on trees or plants), and occasionally as collaborators in the process of artistic creation (e.g. Boronali’s donkey). But recent technological advances have paved the way for a whole new way of incorporating life in our creative practices — by creating it.

The Art of Mancy: Breathing Life into Technology

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The concept of “mancy” as a suffix has been used in various ways in pop culture, fantasy literature, and role-playing games to denote specific forms of magic or divination associated with a particular element, subject, or theme. While it doesn’t have a single, universally accepted definition, the most well-known example might be that of the necromancer, a wizard capable of animating the dead, injecting the spirit of “life” into an otherwise inanimate body.

While it’s generally associated with thematic or elemental magic, nothing prevents us from employing the concept in a more secular context, to describe the process of creating life through science or technology. Scientists have been trying to create life in many ways, whether through synthetic biology, genetic engineering, or artificial intelligence (AI). These endeavors seek to understand and harness the fundamental principles of consciousness and life, pushing the boundaries of what it means to be “alive” and thereby introducing the practice of “mancy” into our everyday understanding of science.

Of course, so far, all of these attempts have failed to fully replicate the intricate complexity of life as we know it. While significant progress has been made in fields like synthetic biology, where scientists have engineered simple organisms with artificial DNA, and in the field of AI, which can simulate intelligent behaviors, the true essence of creating life remains an unresolved enigma. Nevertheless, these efforts serve as a testament to humanity’s relentless pursuit of knowledge and the continuous exploration of the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate.

The art world also has been experimenting with mancy through the practice of summoning, training, and constraining life (albeit for the most part artificially) into a digital entity whose virtual existence can be embodied, embedded, or imbued in a physical totem through which it can interact with its environment.

The artistic realm is uniquely poised to embrace the practice of mancy because it values the aesthetic experience and underlying conceptual message above mere implementation and success. Unlike engineers and entrepreneurs who are constrained by practical considerations and the need for tangible results, artists enjoy the freedom to explore uncharted territories of creativity. Artists, unlike engineers, are not bound by the expectation of functionality; unlike entrepreneurs, they are not bound by the pressures of return on investment; most importantly, unlike most scientists, they are not bound by the limitations of what is currently possible and scientifically achievable. This allows them to indulge in the practice of mancy without the expectation of solving the conundrum of life. Instead, by blurring the lines between the real and the surreal, artists invite us to contemplate the nature of life and existence.

The art of mancy

Mancy as an artistic practice delves into the realm of artificial life-forms, transcending the traditional boundaries of what we consider life. Artists harness cutting-edge technologies, such as synthetic biology, AI, and even blockchain technology, to invoke life in inanimate things, thereby bridging the gap between the animate and inanimate. In doing so, they breathe life into the lifeless, imbuing digital or physical entities with characteristics, behaviors, or attributes that mimic life as we know it. These artificial life-forms may mirror the appearance or actions of existing life-forms, challenging our perceptions and sparking conversations about the essence of life and existence itself. In the hands of artists, mancy transforms technology into a medium through which they explore the very essence of consciousness and life.

While many contemporary artists do not recognize themselves as “mancers,” some of them are already beginning to experiment — albeit unwittingly — with this new artistic practice. Armed with their visions and technological prowess, these artists embark on a quest to invoke life in the inanimate, through a variety of biological and technological substrates.

Bio-art

Artists have been exploring the intersection of art and biology for several decades, making work that incorporates living plants, microorganisms, or even genetically modified organisms, highlighting the artistic potential of synthetic biology. A subset of these artists can be regarded as proto-mancers, to the extent that they are creating living artworks or installations that challenge our understanding of life and ethics.

Most bio-artists construct living installations that include organisms like algae, bacteria, or fungi. These installations evolve over time, responding to environmental factors or viewer interactions. Some bio-artists create work that requires direct interaction with living organisms. The audience is invited to feed, touch, or otherwise engage with the living components of the artwork, fostering a deeper connection with the work. A smaller subset of bio-artists has gone even further, manipulating the DNA of living organisms to create unique pieces of art that exhibit unusual colors, patterns, or behaviors that would not occur in nature. For example, the artist Eduardo Kac created GFP Bunny, a rabbit genetically modified to fluoresce green under blue light, demonstrating how humans can create new “species”.

While none of these practices actually involve the invocation of life into the lifeless, they nonetheless raise important ethical and philosophical questions, prompting discussions about genetic engineering, the ethics of altering living organisms, and the impacts of these practices on our relationship with nature. We qualify these practices as proto-mancy.

Digital entities

Artists are developing new interactive digital entities (or avatars) that engage with users in virtual environments, or in augmented reality layers. These entities exhibit characteristics, behaviors, emotions, and personalities that simulate living beings. The interaction between users and digital entities is a crucial element of the artistic experience. These entities respond to interactions, creating a sense of agency and autonomy, much like living beings. They can sometimes exhibit complex emotional responses, fostering a sense of connection with the users. Artists might build intricate backstories for their digital entities, allowing users to immerse themselves in compelling narratives within the virtual environment. Users can thus converse with, care for, or further influence these entities, blurring the line between the artist’s creation and the user’s participation.

These practices can be regarded as an early form of mancy, to the extent that they involve inanimate digital entities being infused with lifelike qualities and behaviors. This raises questions about the nature of existence in the digital realm, inviting users to contemplate the concept of digital identity and the boundaries of what constitutes life within a virtual environment.

Artificial agents

Gears have shifted with the advent of generative AI, ushering in a new era of creative exploration. As generative-AI models and pipelines proliferate, users of these tools have come to refer to the art of crafting their queries as “prompt-engineering,” a catch-all term most commonly associated with generative text-to-image creation. When provided with such an “incantation,” these models are capable of rendering detailed and evocative imagery by associating the token embeddings of their prompt with a location in a vast high-dimensional model correlated with similar token embeddings. In this way, one can speak nothing into something, saying the magic words and having an image file returned, with better words often producing a better image — for all intents and purposes, the most practical invocation of magic in our lifetime.

The arrival of large language models (LLMs) has introduced another layer to the generative-AI revolution. Utilizing plain language, users of these tools can evoke complex responses from AI text models seemingly capable of understanding the query, carrying out advanced reasoning steps, and returning (usually) intelligible, (often) accurate, and (sometimes) profound responses to the queries posed. Through instruction text, a context window capable of retaining information akin to the way short-term memory works, and other rules for chaining these queries together, pipelines such as the ubiquitous ChatGPT by OpenAI have opened the door for fully conversational chatbots and autonomous agents that are able to hold complex and meaningful conversations, provide concise and relevant instructions, and even implement and execute coded functions. Thus, we have given birth to a technology that is capable of being capable — though care and attention is always needed.

In this way, AI enables the creation of digital entities whose behaviors are no longer confined to predefined or preprogrammed scripts, turning them into artificial agents who enjoy having the capacity to emancipate themselves from their creators, thus displaying a semblance of life, consciousness, or autonomy. These artificial agents can learn, adapt, and evolve independently of their creators, responding dynamically to their virtual environments and user interactions. This new form of AI-enabled mancy allows for the emergence of digital life-forms that exist in a state of perpetual becoming, challenging our very notions of what it means to be alive and sentient within the digital realm.

Contemporary artist Ian Cheng is one of the most renowned mancers in the digital art world, producing work that focuses on generating digital life-forms that possess a degree of autonomy and unpredictability. In his Emissaries series, Cheng employs AI algorithms to create virtual ecosystems inhabited by digital agents brought to life via computer-generated simulations. The behaviors of these digital agents are not pre-scripted; rather, they continuously evolve based on their interactions with one another and their virtual environment. The result is a constantly changing and dynamic world, where the digital agents exhibit behaviors and responses that are not predetermined but rather emerge from the interplay of algorithms and AI-driven processes. Cheng’s work invites viewers to witness the evolution of these artificial agents in real time, prompting contemplation of the nature of consciousness, life, and existence in the age of AI.

Embodied AI agents

Machines can also be granted access to sensory data, by analyzing the audio captured from a microphone, the light captured from a camera, or other relevant data points that can be collected and quantified. As machines can process and respond to information from their environment, distance can be measured, images can be analyzed, and 3D space can be modeled.

The first wave of LLM-driven development has led to the creation of AI chatbots with the ability to ingest a query, reason, and return a response. In a sense, AI has been given a proto-mind that simulates human thinking via convolutional neural networks. As we continue to anthropomorphize our machines, we have begun to outfitt them with analogs to our own organic sense modules. Text-to-speech AI models lend a “voice” to our entity, and speech-to-text transcription models provide “ears.” Object recognition and classification libraries supply context to a local environment, and robotic appendages can grant access to locomotion, or otherwise allow the ability for such a digital entity to enact change in the physical world. Given network permissions, an email account, a wallet, etc., an AI agent may even find itself capable of leading what many might consider to be a rich and full life, replete with learning and teaching, novel experiences, stimulating conversation, and satisfying accomplishments as it engages with its surroundings via the tools, programming, and appendages it has received from its creator(s).

An artist with aspirations of mancy might craft a context for such a digital entity, give it a body, a personality, a propensity toward sarcasm, an affinity for puns, or any other number of mannerisms, quirks, or idiosyncrasies. They might instill an ethical framework or moral code, embed hidden biases, or craft an agenda. The mancer, like a parental guardian, may help hone and refine this entity, teach it, punish it, reward it, support and guide it until it is mature and capable of taking responsibility for itself.

Blockchain-based-lifeforms

The advent of blockchain technology has catapulted the artistic practice of mancy to a new level. Artists are now leveraging blockchain to create unique digital life-forms that — despite lacking any degree of decisional autonomy — possess an unprecedented amount of operational autonomy. The activity of these blockchain-based life-forms can be entirely predetermined and codified into a smart contract (i.e. software code deployed on a blockchain network). Because of the technological guarantees of blockchain technology, once they have been set in motion, these blockchain-based life-forms operate in an automatic and deterministic manner, impervious to external influences and beyond the control of any single entity. Nevertheless they can interact with each other, and with the public via blockchain transactions — and some of them might even be programmed to evolve over time, based on these interactions.

Plantoid by Primavera De Filippi is perhaps the earliest manifestation of a blockchain-based life-form in the art world. De Filippi leverages smart contracts to create self-sustaining digital life-forms that can reproduce themselves. The reproduction process of a Plantoid is a metaphorical representation of how plants reproduce in nature. While traditional plants require the contributions of bees and butterflies to support them in the pollination process, Plantoids rely on the (financial) contributions of humans, engaging through a different pollination process that involves the memetic dissemination of ideas and financial speculation. Humans can feed cryptocurrency to Plantoids in order to acquire a digital seed (i.e. an NFT) that can be sold on the secondary market. Once a Plantoid has collected enough funds to reproduce itself, it opens a call to artists, inviting them to submit propositions for the next generation of the Plantoid. The current NFT holders vote on the proposition they like the most and the Plantoid will then automatically transfer the funds collected to the selected winner, thus “hiring” them to create its offspring. The artwork demonstrates how blockchain technology can be used to create autonomous and self-sustaining art projects that evolve and adapt through collective decision-making, mimicking the life cycles and evolutionary processes found in nature.

Another type of blockchain-based life-form has been brought to life by the Canadian artist and software developer Sarah Friend with her lifeforms project. This is essentially a collection of NFTs, where each one represents a digital entity that is akin to a living being within the digital realm. In a manner reminiscent of traditional forms of life, these lifeforms require regular care to thrive, which is achieved by transferring them to a third-party account on the blockchain. If neglected or not properly cared for within 90 days of being received, the lifeform dies, highlighting its fragility and dependence on human interaction. When a lifeform dies, it becomes non-transferable, thereby reintroducing the irreversible nature of death into the digital realm.

Mancers thus now have the opportunity to leverage blockchain technology as part of their practice, forging a path toward the creation of autonomous blockchain-based life-forms that challenge conventional notions of life, agency, and death in the digital age.

Conclusion: When the art becomes the artist

New technologies, like AI and blockchain in particular, have ushered in a renaissance of creativity, enabling artists to breathe life into the inanimate in ways that have little to do with divination or spirituality. These technologies, though distinct in their approaches, share a common thread: They empower artists to explore the delicate lines between life and death, agency and autonomy.

AI comes with decisional autonomy, allowing us to imbue artificial agents with a semblance of consciousness. With AI, artists can craft digital entities that evolve, respond, and adapt to their environment, adding a new layer of intricacy to their creative endeavors. Yet these entities remain tethered to the control of their creators, who can shut them down at their own whim. Conversely, blockchain technology allows for the creation of digital entities with no decisional autonomy, but whose operational autonomy stands unassailable. Blockchain-based lifeforms thrive within a decentralized ecosystem, immune to external tampering or shutdown (unless their code explicitly calls for it). This new paradigm challenges conventional notions of authorship and ownership, inviting us to ponder the implications of life-forms that exist beyond the reach of any central authority.

As these technologies mature, a host of questions surrounding their impact beg for answers. Science and industry race toward greater technological heights, whilst ethicists, philosophers, and politicians grapple with regulation, presenting a new frontier fraught with the baggage of bias and a landscape laden with cultural burdens and rapidly adapting economies thirsty for the superpowers promised by the forward march of digital progress. In the middle is the artist, who considers the problems of authorship, intellectual property rights, relevancy, and the value of artistic labor in the light of this new proliferation of digital wizardry. Unburdened by the market demands of capital or the need to deliver a profitable product, the artists are also in a unique position from which they can consider and explore these tools as a new medium ripe with the potential to create something resembling consciousness itself: In a word, mancy.

As such, the art of mancy invites us to ponder what it means to bring life into existence. It is a testament to the limitless potential of human imagination, where artists can harness digital technology as a tool of creative expression, redefining the very essence of what it means to create, to be alive, to bring life to the inanimate, while exploring the intricate balance between autonomy and control in our ever-evolving digital world.

In the age of mancy, art becomes not just a reflection of life but a catalyst for the emergence of new forms of existence, inviting us to contemplate the limitless possibilities that lie ahead. As artists continue to explore and innovate in this field, they challenge the traditional conventions of art, ethics, and life itself, offering a glimpse into a future where artificial life-forms seamlessly coexist with our own, all within the canvas of the ever-expanding digital universe.

One reading of the biblical book of Genesis suggests that man was created in the image of God, constrained by mortality, but with attributes inherited from the Creator. Unlike the artifacts of inanimate mediums, the product of artful mancy has the potential to act and create autonomously; it too has the capacity to become the artist, to make aesthetic decisions, place value judgments, and take executive actions without the need of external input or influence. In other words, it has the power to choose, and it may choose to create. A computer program wielding human language and reasoning, with the agency to create or destroy, holds a great mirror to the society upon which its data set was trained.

The mancer is an elemental wizard, imbuing the object of their attention with not just a magical spark of life, but also a morsel of autonomy. As interaction design and immersive installation artworks mature as a medium, the art of mancy argues for a different approach, one where the roles are reversed. If interactive art invites the observer to engage with work that reacts to their input, mancy subverts this paradigm by instead empowering the art object to take action of its own.