Spime Watch: Building Bacteria in Second Life

(((I don't wanna come off all stiff-necked about this, because nobody's happier than me to see weird design ideas getting attention, but, okay, look: strictly speaking, self-replicating software models of bacteria in Second Life are not "spimes."

(((Not that it's easy to tell. There used to be this rather handy canonical definition of "spime" over in Wikipedia, but the Wikipedian cadres rashly purged that article because they couldn't believe that anybody was gonna actually do stuff like this.
Since I was the only guy who regularly used that word "spime," they had it figured for some kind of sci-fi writer vanity project. I don't blame 'em.)))

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Spime

(((Except it's been four years since that word was invented, and people keep using the term. I can't go out and police that neologism – any more than I can police self-replicating Second Life bacteria. But to date, there really aren't any "spimes." Spimes are speculative, they do not yet exist.
They're a visionary design concept. They're still well beyond our technical ability to create. They may even be impossible to create. The idea and description of "spimes" will likely sound hopelessly outdated well before spimes become practical.
I hope that's clear.)))

((( Here, look. If you don't wanna read the SHAPING THINGS
book, I got a little movie and some drawings here to try and clarify the scheme.)))

http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/titles/shaping/shaping_book.html
http://www.toshare.it/spime/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/sets/72157594354415159/

(((So: be that as it may.
People do talk about spimes nowadays – and rather more than they used to.
Still, this new locative-tech company based in my former home town of Madras, I mean Chennai – this isn't a "spime.")))

http://www.spime.com/

(((And this Italian cellphone-app company that named themselves after
"spimes," they're nice guys, but that's not really a spime, you know.)))

http://www.openspime.com/

(((These RFID artists Regine hangs out with – most of 'em have read my spime book – those electronic art projects are not spimes.)))

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007915.html

(((And these fake giant bacteria aren't "real" "spimes" either.
But those are great. Those are something else. This may be the flat-out weirdest thing that notion has yet provoked.
This totally kills me. I look at a scheme like this and I can't stop grinning.)))

(((Even though Matt Biddulph is a very ingenious guy, that's not a classic "spime" – any more than the stuff we used to call
"cyberspace" is "real" Gibsonian cyberspace like in the sci-fi novels.
Still: what the heck, go for it. Surely our collective life is richer for the existence of giant simulated self-replicating bacteria that scientists can wade around in.)))

http://www.mediamatic.net/article-14683-nl.html

Link: Mediamatic.net - Building Bacteria in Second Life.

We’ve been fortunate to have Matt Biddulph around Amsterdam a lot recently. Describing himself as a creative technologist and freelance software developer, tonight he spoke to an intimate audience at Mediamatic about programming self-replicating bacteria in Second Life. Here are some notes.

Matt introduced his talk with an overview of Bruce Sterling’s little design book shaping things. The book is a vision of an age when objects are active and aware. Sterling calls them spimes.

Spimes have identities. They know their origins, locations and best uses. First spimes will exist in the virtual world. They will begin on the computer screen and from the drawing board.

Spimes will then get to the physical world through 3D printers, which are getting more affordable and are ubiquitious in design practice and industry. They can easily take objects from the screen to realization before the investment and risk of massive production runs.

Spimes allow the tracking and optimization of cradle to cradle object lifecycles. With a search engine of all objects, you can track the progress of objects and repurpose and assign them to where they are most needed. (((Uh, sort of.)))

So the universe of spimes is an informational universe. The logical first step in creating spimes is creating them as pure information. (((Well, er, no. But never mind.)))

Where better to do it than Second Life, the online world, a system we can use to understand the operation of digital objects. Second Life is an environment where you can make things. Every object is made by users. It isn’t a narrative experience like World of Warcraft.

And every object in the virtual world can have a script attached to it. The first bit of Second Life hacking Matt did ( with nice video ) was to take the API from Flickr and feed it onto the surface of objects in Second Life. He took data from the 2D web and put it into the 3D virtual world. You could call up a subject or object through a Flickr tag and have the most recent picture projected onto a virtual object.

Matt was then contacted by the esteemed Nature Publishing Group to conceptualize and derive centers of sociality for the scientists in their readership. The goal was to start and maintain conversations amongst scientists. Every scientist has seen a 3D visualization of a cell, but none have been able sit in them and walk around them.

Matt realized that the tomography software that models cells is inaccessible and expensive. If only you could model cells in Second Life, you could facilitate widespread interaction around virtual scaled-up models of cells.

It turns out that scripting and making things in second life is quite easy. You can set up an object that is self-replicating....