Artists and engineers have devised lifelike technology for millennia. Their ingenious devices have often prompted inquiry into our preferences, prejudices, and beliefs about living systems, especially regarding their origins, status, constitution, and behavior. A recurring fabrication technique is shared across artificial life art, science, and engineering. This involves aggregating representations or re-creations of familiar biological parts—techno-hybridization—but the motives of practitioners may differ markedly. This article, and the special issue it introduces, explores how ground familiar to contemporary artificial life science and engineering has been assessed and interpreted in parallel by (a) artists and (b) theorists studying creativity explicitly. This activity offers thoughtful, alternative perspectives on artificial life science and engineering, highlighting and sometimes undermining the fields' underlying assumptions, or exposing avenues that are yet to be explored outside of art. Additionally, art has the potential to engage the general public, supporting and exploring the findings of scientific research and engineering. This adds considerably to the maturity of a culture tackling the issues the discipline of artificial life raises.

We discuss approaches to agent-based model visualization. Agent-based modeling has its own requirements for visualization, some shared with other forms of simulation software, and some unique to this approach. In particular, agent-based models are typified by complexity, dynamism, nonequilibrium and transient behavior, heterogeneity, and a researcher's interest in both individual- and aggregate-level behavior. These are all traits requiring careful consideration in the design, experimentation, and communication of results. In the case of all but final communication for dissemination, researchers may not make their visualizations public. Hence, the knowledge of how to visualize during these earlier stages is unavailable to the research community in a readily accessible form. Here we explore means by which all phases of agent-based modeling can benefit from visualization, and we provide examples from the available literature and online sources to illustrate key stages and techniques.

Playthings are often engineered to replicate the character of real organisms. In the past, inventors lavished great expense on their lifelike automata, their constraints being typically related to the mechanical technology they employed and the amount of time and effort they were able to commit to the enterprise. The devices that are currently produced are usually intended for the mass market. The cost of production therefore is a major concern, even though the technology is more sophisticated and highly automated than in the past. Consequently, toymakers and engineers, as well as artists, of the past and present alike have had to think abstractly about living systems in order to construct their simulacra economically. This essay examines a number of lifelike toys to discover the properties of real organisms that their designers have attempted to recreate. That we, as users of these devices, so readily recognize in them a degree of lifelikeness demonstrates the extent to which intuition may sway our intellectual reasoning about real biology. As a result, an innovative toymaker or artist is able to manipulate us to zoomorphize even the most extreme abstractions—at least momentarily—despite our rational reluctance to accept the trickery.

The views of some artists on what constitutes life are explored, with the aim of challenging those within the artificial life research community to rethink and perhaps expand their own views about the term and its meaningful application. The focus is on the musical works of Steve Reich and the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky. The role of the observer in determining when it is appropriate to label a thing as living is also discussed.