*ReBioGeneSys—Origins of Life*: a hybrid installation (process) that combines sculpture, chemistry, alchemy and conservation to create autonomous extreme minimal ecosystems capable of autopoetic evolution.

*ReBioGeneSys* utilizes the processes and materials of science to ask fundamental questions about how all life seems to proceed from previous life and yet had to emerge from inorganic materials. Is life something special or is the possibility of life inherent in matter itself? Can the artist’s approach to such questions help to resolve the conundrums that have stymied scientists?

*ReBioGeneSys* is a fully functioning scientific experiment capable of being reconfigured into any real or imaginary world, be it Venus, Titan, our prebiotic Earth or Middle Earth. By combining all the scientific research on the origins of life in one set of integrated processes, *ReBioGeneSys* creates “mashed-up” extreme minimal ecosystems theoretically capable of forming the self-organizing chemistries necessary to produce semi-living molecules and perhaps even protocells.

Artistically, *ReBioGeneSys* draws on the legacy of artists, such as the myth of Pygmalion and Jacques de Vaucanson’s attempts to create “living” sculpture. But *ReBioGeneSys* is the first installation that actually does have the ability to evolve itself. A system that can evolve by means of natural selection must incorporate a means of not only producing living matter, but also of selecting what is best adapted to that minimal ecosystem from the matter it produces.

The evolution of *ReBioGeneSys* is inherent in its materiality and the processes it carries out, independent of the human beings that sculpted it, unaffected by the transience of the audiences that view it. An incarnation of new materialist philosophy that nonetheless is designed to produce a vitalistic outcome, *ReBioGeneSys* is an artifice designed not to mimic, but to produce nature itself through self-sustaining, ever-recursive autopoesis.

Links: http://adamwbrown.net/projects-2/rebiogenesys-origins-of-life/

Automated control design: Barry Tigner

Supported by: National Science Foundation Michigan State University

Special Thanks: The Physics and Astronomy Machine Shop, MSU Scott Bankroff – Laboratory Glass, MSU

Adam Brown (US) is a conceptual artist whose work incorporates art and science hybrids including living and biological systems, robotics, molecular chemistry and emerging technologies. His art takes the form of installations, interactive objects, video, performance and photography. Brown’s creative research is informed by a background in intermedia, an approach aiming at breaking down disciplinary boundaries and combining disparate fields of knowledge. Adam Brown is an associate professor in electronic art and intermedia at the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University.

Bob Root-Bernstein (US) is a professor of physiology and MacArthur Fellow at Michigan State University, USA. His laboratory research concerns the origins and evolution of metabolic control systems and autoimmune diseases. He also explores the intersections of arts and sciences through historical, philosophical and experimental studies. He is an editor of *Leonardo: The Journal of the International Society for Art, Science and Technology*, and the author of four books including *Sparks of Genius*, a study of the ways in which artists and scientist think alike.