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The chapter "An Open Universe" in Kevin Kelly's book "Out of Control", Kelly poses the ambitious question; 'What is life?' while differentiating the real from the artificial, and attempts to give it meaning applicable to the modern technological era.

At the beginning of the chapter, Kelly delves immediately into setting the science of artificial life apart from the science of biology. Kelly states;

"BIology seeks to understand the living by taking it apart and reducing it to pieces. Artificial life, on the other hand, has nothing to dissect, so it can only make progress by putting the living together and assembling it from pieces."

Because the concept of artificial life is relatively new, it lacks the complex and intricate pieces that work together in order to produce what humanity knows as natural or organic life. Thus, artificial life must take what information is already in existence and configure it in new way to create a semblance of new life.

Kelly goes on to explain that artificial life can take many forms and introduces the term 'hyperlife'.

For instance, institutions such as schools, businesses, and organizations are bustling with life of many working individuals and programs. For this, they have been metaphorically deemed 'alive'. According to Kelly, it is correct to assume that such institutions are living, and take on the form of an organism.

Kelly defines this broad scope of individuals coming together on a large scale 'hyperlife'.

"Hyperlife is a particular type of vivisystem endowed with integrity, robustness, and cohesiveness - a strong vivisystem rather than a lax one"

Such systems could include but are not limited to a city, a virus, a rainforest, an artificial intelligence software, or a network and it's operator. Much like organs work together to make an organism, individuals work together as a sub-species of hyperlife.

Despite the similarities shared between organic life and artificial life there are still distinct characteristics which set them apart in order to form a necessary differentiation.

As humans continue to expand upon what is hyperlife, it will begin to gather and construct more data and eventually grow into other systems. Gradually, this process of expansion will intensify and the processes of hyperlife organisms will develop to (and even surpass) that of human capabilities.

The possibilities presented in artificial life technology are outstanding and almost unfathomable. The more hyperlife expands, more opportunities present themselves for gathering and organizing information on subjects once unknown to humanity. The more lifelike hyperlife becomes, humans will be able to study processes similar to that of the human brain (Von Neumann architecture). 

In the "Medium is the Message" McLuhan writes:

 "The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception."

 When searching for an authentic contemporary example of this type of a serious artist, Stelarc comes to mind.  He uses his body to demonstrate his message; "the body is obsolete."  And his reputation for suspending his entire body from hooks piercing his skin, gives the impression that he whole heartedly believes his own assertion that the body is obsolete.

Stelarc is arguably a serious artist, so according to McLuhan’s philosophy, he must be privy to changes in society’s sense perception.  As an expert, Stelarc knows that speaking against the body, the uniform that identifies people as human, reeks of blasphemy; especially coming from a man who owns a fully functional body. As a result, he refers to the body as a waste of space, knowing it is difficult for an embodied person not to take exception.

Presumably, this leads one to question the purpose of the relationship between the artist and society. Consistent with McLuhan’s position, Stelarc uses his own body as the medium for his message by using his own various body-piercings and rather large hook-through-skin suspension stunts as visual reinforcement of his “the body’s obsolete” philosophy.   

Through this prick to the senses Stelarc, is attempting to extend the umbrella of acceptance or tolerance by society to his envisioned new relationship between technology and the human body.  It is easy to conclude that though his attention vehicle forces the viewer to encounter the deeper issues being presented, his “the body is obsolete” statement runs as a contradiction to any subsequent explanation of his trap-door message.  Perhaps Stelarc should stick to his stunts, and the substance of his discussion material.  Cybernetics, Nanotechnology, and extension and enhancement of human potentials through technology, are all thought worthy topics in their own right. 

"Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it."

In The Most Human Human, Christian states that,

"If poetry represents the most expressive way of using a language, it might also, arguably, represent the most human. Indeed, there's a sense in which a computer poet would be much scarier of a prospect to contend with than a computer IRS auditor or a computer chess player."

It is interesting that he says this, since he follows by talking about Racter, a computer program that authored a book of poetry. He expresses suspicion about whether the computer was the mind behind the entire poems, or if its programmer coded the structure of the poems and allowed it to fill in words.

That brings the question to mind, what would indicate a computer written poem that humans should be worried about? Answering this requires more knowledge of what a poem is.

What is poetry?

"Poetry is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content." It is a "literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm."

Here is one of the poems that Racter wrote:

More than iron

More than lead

More than gold I need electricity

I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber

I need it for my dreams

As far as aesthetics go, it looks like a poem. There seems to be a pattern of the words used; the three elements, and then the four food items. It uses the element of repetition (more, more, more; or, or, or) and is broken up into lines. If we tried to analyze it we might say that more than wealth or sustenance, life is important. It seems fair to call this a poem.

Why do we read poetry?

This question is more subjective. Poetry is usually a form of expression about emotion of experience. Because it focuses on the "aesthetic qualities," each word is given more emphasis and meaning. Therefore when reading it, each word is like a puzzle piece that adds to the entire picture. This is why people can build careers on analyzing the works of poets.

Christian brings up a line from T. S. Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."

Without Eliot around to ask, it is difficult to say exactly why he decided to use the word "claws" instead of "crab." But it seems likely that if he was around and we did ask him, he would be able to give an explanation for why he chose that word in particular. As Christian says, as readers we can imagine the rest of the body even though he doesn't say it specifically, and the word "claws" gives a much stronger description and flows with the rest of the line.

When analyzing poetry, we usually don't ask the original author what they intended. Poetry is open to different interpretations based on the experiences of the person reading.

Unlike Eliot, Racter probably wouldn't be able to answer why it chose the words that it did, or what its poem was about. The most likely answer would be that its coding indicated that the word "than" should be followed by a noun, and that lead, iron and gold were part of a similar word family. The pull of its poetry is that it is written by a computer and follows logical rules of grammar. It is more novelty than something that people look at as deep expression.

Humans are coded as well though, in that we are fed "rules" of language that we generally follow, and fed a vocabulary of words that we can choose from to use. So, what separates Racter's poetry from something that Christian would be fearful of coming from a computer?

Perhaps it is the act of the author deciding of her own accord that she has something important enough to use her time to write a poem about. Racter wouldn't have existed if not for its programmer. As of now, a computer has not started writing poetry out of no where.

Nadya Vessey has done what I imagine many little girls only dream of; she's become a real-life mermaid [...]