<<Life Spacies>> is an interaction and communication space, where visitors located at a distance from each other can interact through evolutionary forms and images. << Life Spacies >> enables visitors to integrate themselves into a three-dimensional complex virtual world of artificial life organisms that react to the visitors' body movements, motions, and gestures. The artificial life creatures also communicate with each other and thereby create an artificial universe, where real and artificial life are closely inter-related through interaction and exchange. A <<Life Spacies>> Web page allows people all over the world to interact with the system as well: by simply typing and sending an email message to the <<Life Spacies>> Web site, one can create one's own artificial creature. The creature then starts to live in the <<Life Spacies>> environment at ICC, where on-site visitors can directly interact with it.

The artificial creatures are created in two different ways:

1) By incoming international email messages, which are translated into a genetic code for the various creatures

	-	one message creates one creature
	-	complex messages create complex creatures
	-	different levels of complexity represent different species

<<Life Spacies>> is based upon the idea of evolutionary design, which means that the design of the creature really depends on the interaction of the visitors and the evolutionary process itself, rather than the artists' pre-design. Messages sent from people all over the world and the reproduction and evolution of the creatures themselves decide the creatures' appearance.

Thus, one can not really predict how the creatures will evolve and what kinds of creatures will appear in <<Life Spacies>> . It will all depend on how many people send messages, how complex these messages are, and how the creatures reproduce among themselves in the <<Life Spacies>> environment at ICC. As the exhibition will be held for one year, the commission of << Life Spacies>> for ICC is therefore a great opportunity to see how the piece and the species will evolve over time.

<<Life Spacies>> a system where interaction, inter-relation, and exchange happens on a human-human, human-creature, creature-creature and human-environment, creature-environment, and life-artificial life level.

There are two types of human interaction involved in <<Life Spacies>>

1) Creating creatures:
users all over the world send email messages, which then build the genetic codes of the creatures

2) Interacting with the creatures at ICC:
the on-site visitors' gestures and body movements will be tracked and will influence the creatures' behavior: the creatures may exhibit curiosity and come to the visitor; they may become frightened if the visitor is too aggressive; they may be killed if the visitor steps on them; or, the visitor may also help them reproduce.

As the interaction rules are non-deterministic and multilayered, an open system is created where each entity, whether a real life or an artificial life, whether present (at ICC) or virtually present (the users on the net, or the creatures as code), is regarded as an equally important entity of a complex life-like system.

The universe, according to BOHR is an indivisible dynamic whole with parts essentially inter-related on a subatomic level. Significant is the dual character of the subatomic particles; they are two complementary descriptions of reality, both of which are partly true. Based upon the insight that interaction and the inter-relation between entities are driving forces in the structuring of life, our work attempts to investigate interaction and the creative process as such. Creation is no longer understood as the expression of the artist's inner creativity or "ingenium" (according to HEGEL), but becomes itself an intrinsically dynamic process, based upon the interaction between the human observer, his/her consciousness and the evolutionary dynamic and complex image processes of the work, which in turn are based upon principles of artificial life, evolution, and dynamic non-local inter-relations (="Art As a Living System").

<<Life Spacies>> (an evolutionary communication and interaction environment) supported by: ATR-Media Integration and Communications Research Lab, Kyoto