Δrtificial Life
Chuan Tsai
Δrtificial Life is an interactive installation that explores what remains after AI generation. Rather than focusing on intelligence or autonomy, the work attends to how AI-generated artifacts continue to exist across digital and physical systems when they are no longer novel, in use, or fully erased. Through a feedback loop between physical interaction and digital consequence, artificial life is framed not as intelligence, but as a mode of existence unfolding between data and matter, use and neglect, systems and their consequences.
Base Introduction
Genre
Concept
Experience Time
Installation
AI generation
Lingering Presence
Approximately 2 min
Tools Used
Demo Video
Experience
Viewers are invited to pick up any of these models to start the interaction.
Viewers can then open the door and place the model into an L-shaped slot. By closing the door, the object will dropped inside the box.
On the screen above the box, viewers can see the selected object enter the digital system and observe how it interacts with other models already accumulated within the environment.
Δrtificial Life originates from my conflicted feelings toward AI-generated creations within the contemporary art context. On one hand, AI tools have made creation faster, more accessible, and more open than ever before. On the other hand, the overwhelming volume of generated images is often dismissed as garbage—works perceived as “effortless” or “soulless.” This tension raised an anxiety around artistic value, and a question that became central to the work: what happens to the creations that are denied recognition?
Over time, my computer accumulated countless imperfect AI-generated images—failed outputs, distorted figures, unfinished attempts that were saved, forgotten, or discarded, yet never fully erased. Rather than treating these images as errors or waste, I began to see them as displaced artifacts: creations without a home. Δrtificial Life emerges as a response to this condition, imagining a shelter for AI-generated forms that have been dismissed or overlooked.
Inspiration
AI-generated images in my computer
The visual language of the work draws inspiration from both real-world trash chutes and biological petri dishes. When humans throw something away, it does not simply disappear; it decomposes, transforms, and gives rise to new forms. Mold became a central metaphor for this process. Like mold, AI operates as an unconscious system of growth—it lacks awareness and creative intention, yet it expands and reproduces through the accumulation of environment or data.
trash chute in my apartment
mold
By translating these residual images into physical objects and reinserting them into a responsive digital environment, Δrtificial Life reflects on artificial life not as intelligence or authorship, but as a lingering presence shaped by neglect, accumulation, and unintended consequence.
Process
Fabrication
3D modeling
Arduino
Unity
