Artificial life

Patterns form and fall apart.
We have created the homunculus and I
have seen the monstrous being. Forty days
the sperm lay buried in manure
and each day at noon the Master turned his magnet
across it, muttering foreign words.
Then, on the fortieth day
he showed me the resemblance of a man,
but it was transparent, without a corpus.
He told me we should feed the loathsome object
for exactly forty weeks, and all this time
allow it to lie in its bed of manure
in a continual and even temperature,
so that its every member might develop.
This we did, much against my will.
And it grew into a human child,
though much smaller than any born of Woman.
Now, my friends ask me to make one for them
That they may be as horrified as I.
I would do so for their admiration, except that
I am merely the apprentice of the Master,
and I am afraid.

---Evan S. Connell, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel

"It's life if it dies when you stomp on it"; but then a steam engine or a pendulum, even, is alive. (Actually, W. Ross Ashby used to say things like that in all seriousness.)

Artificial Life the journal, and its web-site, Alife Online, of which I once the co-editor.
Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology [Review: Hume on Wheels, or, One Must Imagine Frankenstein Happy]
Daniel Dennett, Brainchildren: Essays on Desiging Minds [and organisms. Review: An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Mode of Reasoning into Moral Subjects]
Christopher Langton (ed.), Artificial Life [first conference proceedings]
Stephane Leduc, Mechanism of Life [1911. No, I'm completely serious.]
Levy, Artificial Life

Stefan Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature [Anthropological study of artificial life researchers at Santa Fe during the 1990s. Stefan is a friend of a friend, a cool guy, someone I always enjoy talking to, and, in my humble opinion, a truly inspired musician. But, in all honesty, I think everything in here is either trivial, wrong, or impossible to check. I realize that's a very broad and very harsh claim I'm not supporting at all. You might, however, look at his on Steve Lansing's work, followed by Lansing's reply, and see what you think.]

Josh Bongard, Victor Zykov and Hod Lipson, "Resilient Machines Through Continuous Self-Modeling", Science 314 (2006): 1118--1121
George Dyson [son of Freeman], Darwin Among the Machines
Emmeche, Garden in the Machine
John Jonston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI [blurb]
Sarah Kember, Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life
Pier Luigi Luisi, The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology [Blurb<]
Jessica Riskin (ed.), Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life [Blurb]
Geoff Simons, Are Computers Alive?
Michael Whitelaw, Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life

Notebooks

Artificial life