Artificial life, remembered and reimagined.
Biota's Artificial Life Podcast follows unrushed technical conversations with artificial life people and longtime community figures. The episodes move from code and models to philosophy, conferences, origin-of-life theory, and the strange persistence of old projects.
PRESS PLAY
Biota's Artificial Life Podcast is a deep archive of conversations about artificial life, simulation, computation, and the people who keep returning to those questions. It has the feel of a field notebook shared out loud. The episodes are often intimate, technical, and digressive, moving from travel, illness, family, old conferences, and software tools into some of the biggest questions in artificial life research. Open-ended evolution comes up as a recurring pressure point. So do simulated brains, artificial creatures, emergent behavior, ecology, computation, and the difficulty of measuring novelty or complexity. The show is especially interested in work that has accumulated over decades. Projects are not treated as product demos; they are treated as long relationships between people, machines, ideas, and constraints. A discussion with Jeffrey Ventrella can move from colorful visual systems and fractal curves into open evolution and user-shaped artificial organisms. A conversation with Gerald de Jong can connect computation, Bitcoin, satire, old shared stories, and the energy cost of simulated life. Talks with Imi Kahn bring conference reports, COVID-19 modelling, Craig Reynolds, academic culture, and the politics of artificial life into the same frame. Steve Grand's appearance reaches back to early computing, Grand Droids, children's minds, and the long arc of making artificial life forms. Bruce Damer's conversation widens toward SETI, the Drake equation, urability, and origin-of-life research. The result is less a polished science program than a candid record of a community thinking in public. It rewards listeners who like precise technical tangents. It also rewards those who enjoy hearing people remember how their ideas changed over time. The show can be loose and reflective, but it rarely feels generic. Its best moments come when practical implementation detail meets philosophical unease. Biota's Artificial Life Podcast suits people who want to hear artificial life discussed by people who have lived with the work long enough to doubt simple answers.
Made for: For listeners interested in artificial life research, simulation, AI history, computational creativity, and philosophy of mind. It especially suits people who enjoy long-form technical conversation with room for personal history and field culture.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by preserving candid, decades-spanning conversations with artificial life figures rather than compressing the field into polished explainers. It treats simulations, conferences, code, theory, and personal memory as one connected story.
Tom Barbalet interviews artificial life developers about their previous, current and future development and artificial life theorists about the history and direction of artificial life
Tom Barbalet makes artificial life feel like a reunion where you discover the simulations kept evolving.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A thoughtful look at whether novelty, complexity, and user participation can make artificial life truly open-ended.
Artificial life is treated here as a design problem rather than a slogan. Jeffrey Ventrella returns to Vestibular Walkers, a project that reached the Alife Conference Proceedings but then sat mostly quiet as other work took over, before widening the frame to open-ended…
A loose, thoughtful conversation links Bitcoin's buried future to energy, computation, and artificial life.
Gerald de Jong's single-episode conversation ranges from the complications of Bitcoin mining to a gold-price analogy for computation, scarcity, and a future that cannot simply be skipped ahead.
A thoughtful return to artificial life as technical craft, social responsibility, and a challenge to the definition of life.
Artificial life comes through as both a technical field and a test of social responsibility. The host and Dr. Emi Kahn connect simulations, cultivated monkeys, neural network models, and related work to the philosophical strain these projects place on the definition of life.
Reynolds' camouflage work anchors a clear look at Artificial Life's widening scope.
Artificial Life's widening borders come into focus as Tom Barbalet speaks with Imi Kahn after the Artificial Life Conference in Sapporo. The discussion moves through the field's community, Hiroki Sayama's accessible PDFs, and Craig Reynolds, who received the Lifetime Achievement…
Atari 8-bit history, still booting.
Lambda calculus from the driver’s seat.
Particle accelerators, compost piles and Queen's guitarist, all explained.
Steven Novella and a rotating panel dissect weekly science news and debunk pseudoscience claims.
Long interviews with neuroscientists and philosophers on consciousness, decision-making, and whether AI is anything like a brain.
Host Tom Barbalet catches up with veteran artificial-life artist and programmer Jeffrey Ventrella, who screen-shares his 'Vestibular Walkers' project: tetrahedral, spring-based creatures that evolve central pattern generators via genetic algorithms to approach a target ball.
Tensegrity sculptor and former artificial-life researcher Gerald de Jong joins Biota's Artificial Life Podcast for a video call from his Rotterdam studio, giving a tour of hanging tension structures before pivoting to a wide-ranging conversation.
Podcast host Tom catches up with returning guest Dr.
Host Tom Barbalet debriefs with returning guest Imy Khan just back from the Artificial Life Conference in Sapporo, Japan, discussing Japan's distinct cultural embrace of artificial life as a serious discipline and the conference's 'Ghost in the Machine' theme.
Steve Grand, creator of the 1996 life-simulation game Creatures and now working solo on 'Grand Droids' in Unity, describes his new game's alpaca-like creatures who 'wish they were dashing white steeds' and calls them 'Peruvicorns,' set in the fictional English village of Frampton Gurney.
Imy Khan, a PhD researcher whose thesis examiner told her 'you need to start watching these simulations like an ethologist,' joins an unnamed host who has spent 27 years building the artificial-life simulation now called Ape SDK, originally the Nirvana Project and then Noble Ape, for the relaunched Biota podcast feed.
In this Biota podcast update, host Tom talks with artificial life researcher Jeffrey Ventrella about his recent work, from fractal curve art built for aperiodic tilings to spring-and-point-mass robots that walk by correcting for tilt, a project he traces to a bout of vertigo he experienced in Japan and to research going back to his 1994 MIT Media Lab dissertation.
Origin-of-life researcher Bruce Damer returns to Biota's Artificial Life Podcast to describe the hot spring hypothesis he developed with the late David Deamer, work now backed by a new Genesis Engine lab launched with the SETI Institute.
Tom Barbalet interviews Anton about his current work at Adobe and past artificial life projects, including an artificial clock.
Tom Barbalet interviews Gerald de Jong about his recent work in artificial life using modern web technologies like WebAssembly and TypeScript.
Tom Barbalet interviews Liz about her chapter in a forensics book and discusses artificial life research.