Meet a life.
Enter a world.

Is code a material?

For more than two decades, Ira Greenberg has asked whether code can be a generative medium the way charcoal, paint, and clay are: something you work with, push against, and discover through, rather than a tool that executes a plan. Protobytes is the long answer: bodies grown, not drawn.

Generative AI reopens the question. Here it enters as one more material in that lineage, judging bodies against their niches and writing as the world’s naturalist, while the creatures themselves are still grown from code and mathematics.

Forms emerge. Histories accumulate.

ProtoWorld brings computational organisms into a shared ecology. Generative code shapes their bodies; breeding introduces inherited variation. Selection brings model assessments together with authored rules. A language-model naturalist offers another way to read their forms and histories. The current population is part of the work’s development.

A particular life, kept.

ProtoPortraits are portraits of individual residents, each grown from its recorded genome and life and mastered at 9,600 × 12,000 pixels for 32 × 40 inch prints. Preview Edition 01 gathers fourteen residents from eight genera. Physical editions will be announced here once a proof exists; none has been issued yet.

New on-chain Protobytes collections are planned, building on Ira’s 2022–24 generative editions ↗. Field Notes from ProtoWorld, a publication pairing selected organisms with their records, is in development.

Bring the world to your city.

Protobyte Phylogeny is available to exhibition and touring partners from 2027, for runs of six weeks or longer and for large-scale display and projection.

Research

The life behind
the form.

A body, a way of moving, a world to move through.

Walking studies, maze navigation, and experiments in environmental adaptation connect Protobytes to evolutionary computing and the scientific study of form. Follow the ideas, the experiments, and the working method behind the creatures.

The artist is the continuity.

Ira Greenberg is a painter and computer artist, Professor and Chair, Center of Creative Computation, Division of Design, SMU, and a Visiting Research Fellow in Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He wrote the first major book on the Processing language and has exhibited with Gazelli Art House, Bright Moments, Feral File and Strata Gallery. The Protobytes inquiry began in 2004 and has moved through ActionScript, Processing, three.js, and his own libraries to the living ecology now on view.