Cellular Performance is a realtime visual and sonic exploration of the state space of an elementary cellular automaton. Cellular automatons were invented by Stanislaw Ulam while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1940s to study the growth of crystals. They are simple lattice-based generative systems that exhibit emergent behavior, between repetition and chaos. John von Neumann, who like Ulam also worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, used them to study self-reproducing systems. In the 1950s, Nils Aall Barricelli, working on bionumeric evolution, used similar lattice-based systems to study early forms of artificial life.

Cellular Performance is part of an ongoing exploration of lattice-based emergent systems, non-conscious cognition, and article life, which I have explored in projects such as Rechnender Raum (2007), Interface I (2016), Random Access Memory (2016), Putting The Pieces Back Together Again (2018), and Floating Codes (2022).