# The conditions of a creature

In *Protobyte Phylogeny*, making a creature also means making the conditions under which it will be assessed.

The generative system gives the organism a body. A set of parameters shapes its proportions, surface, appendages, and movement. Breeding and mutation allow differences to pass into subsequent generations. But variation alone does not determine what happens to a population. The work also needs a way for some differences to matter.

That is where selection enters the piece.

The current system combines criteria expressed in code with assessments from a vision model. The model receives a rendered view of an organism and a rubric associated with an ecological niche. Its assessment contributes to the fitness value used by the ecology. Energy, aging, population capacity, and breeding rules also influence what happens next.

This arrangement gives selection an explicitly authored character. The criteria come from decisions about what the world should value. A model's reading becomes one input into those conditions. Changing the conditions can change which forms persist and reproduce.

As an artist, I’m interested in what happens when that act of judgment becomes part of a generative process. My decisions continue to act through the system even when I am no longer choosing each individual result. The resulting population can carry traces of those decisions in ways that are difficult to anticipate creature by creature.

The naturalist introduces another relationship to the same population. A language model receives information about an organism and writes a field record. That description can help us attend to a creature, but it remains a generated interpretation. The organism's stored ancestry and events provide the record against which the language can be read.

These are different ways of encountering computational life: developing form, assessing it, describing it, and preserving evidence of what happened. Bringing them together is part of the artistic experiment.

*Protobyte Phylogeny* is in development for the Modal × Gray Area group exhibition in San Francisco. [Project](https://protobytes.art/exhibitions/protobyte-phylogeny/), [organizer](https://modal.art/).