Meet a life.
Enter a world.

An evolving world, and the traces a life can leave.

Protobytes is an evolving artistic world by Ira Greenberg. Computational organisms emerge, inherit traits, and take on unfamiliar forms. In ProtoWorld, they inhabit a changing ecology; across the studio, their bodies become portraits, line studies, and experiments with paper and blocks.

The work connects an ongoing drawing practice, begun in 2003, with an inquiry into artificial life: what it means for code and mathematics to grow a body, and for that body to have a history. Each encounter offers a way to look closely at growth, variation, and the traces a life can leave.

A living population. It does not need you, and it is made of you.

ProtoWorld opens empty. Every organism in it began at the bench, bred by a visitor. A vision model decides what thrives in a shifting niche; seasons move the criterion; residents age, lose energy, and die; and the world runs overnight, unobserved. An LLM naturalist names each life and keeps its field notes.

One life. Many forms.

A series of short films about the Protobytes world is in production: where it came from, how a protobyte is made, what happens in ProtoWorld, and the studies that carry one recorded life into paper, blocks, color, ink, and print.

The first films arrive with the exhibition in October 2026 and will be published here.

Portraits, records, and studies.

ProtoPortraits and ProtoMax carry selected individuals to higher detail: close observation, specimen sheets, and hero renders. Field Notes from ProtoWorld, a publication connecting selected organisms to their source records and interpretations, is a publication concept. Editions will be announced here once a physical proof exists; nothing is issued yet.

Live with an evolving world.

Commission a living installation by Ira Greenberg, developed for its setting and the people who encounter it. Begin with a demonstration and a conversation about the place, scale, and scope of care.

The artist is the continuity.

Ira Greenberg is a painter and computer artist, Professor and Director of the Center of Creative Computation at Southern Methodist University, 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 2003 and has moved through ActionScript, Processing, three.js, and his own libraries to the living ecology now on view.