I first came across ‘life’ when I was a student at The Slade School of art in the 1977-79. I had previously been fascinated by the storyboards generated by an artist John Crabtree (known as Chris at the time) and work being done at UCL on studying how to generate homeostatic patterns of population growth. The game got me interested in emergence and as I had already been interested in the way we appear to make sense of phenomena by looking for patterns that we recognise (or perhaps projecting patterns into phenomena) I was really taken with the idea.
Conway’s Game of Life
Mapping Behaviour 