BOTS, CELLS, AND HUMANS WATCHING

Part digital, part physical, fully alive. Symbiosis.live is an estuary website where microscopic organisms meet their digital equivalent, internet bots. Together, they begin to develop a symbiotic ecosystem, bots travel the world through underwater cables to deliver food, oxygen, and light into the bioreactor. The cells, in turn, modify servers to lure or repel internet bots. Humans are invited along, but only as observers.

Symbiosis.live has been supported by:

Part digital, part physical, fully alive. Symbiosis.live is an estuary website where microscopic organisms meet their digital equivalent, internet bots. Together, they begin to develop a symbiotic ecosystem, bots travel the world through underwater cables to deliver food, oxygen, and light into the bioreactor. The cells, in turn, modify servers to lure or repel internet bots. Humans are invited along, but only as observers.

Symbiosis.live has been supported by:

What does it mean to be alive?

We are not asking about the meaning of life but about what makes something living vs non-living? Turns out the answer is complicated, in part because every definition is full of exceptions, in part because definitions tend to oversimplify to classify. If we relax our definitions, loose down our mental scheme, then Internet bots are living organisms. Inorganic, living, organisms.

Just like cells, they are primitive, they came to life shortly after their world was created, they have been evolving ever since. Symbiosis.live, is a bridge between these two organisms, giving them a place to mutate together. Perhaps in the future, a new branch of biology will develop.

What are Bots?

If you ever looked into a website's traffic logs you probably noticed a lot of visits that went nowhere, or maybe the visits went to strange places, places people normally do not try to reach. You may have ignored them, or labeled them as spam.

You may have heard of them as crawlers, fetchers, scraper, spammers, hacking bots. I call them bots for short. They are all over the internet, in fact, there are more bots than humans out there. Back in 2017, Imperva Incapsula published an in-depth analysis of internet traffic over the past couple of years.

Bots show up in many places, and you have most likely seen their traces as comments in social media sites. In our case, we mostly see them as lines of code. But what they look like as important as how they behave, how they respond to stimuli and how they communicate among themselves. 

Symbiosis.live as part of DIgital Resonance- Gwangju Korea

Screen capture of website with live cells and bots within the estuary

Selected Videos:

Symbiosis.live trailer

Five minute introduction to Symbiosis.live

Sebastian presenting Symbiosis.live at Radical Networks. 2019 NYC