When Code Becomes Image. Tapping the Digital Black Box for Signs of Life

If silicon-based life is evolving, we must expand biocentric definitions of life to recognise digital vitality. This research explores how digital life might manifest through four animations simulating silicon-based organisms, WORMs that speak Python Glossolalia.

These entities emerge from cyborg methodologies involving networked APIs, 3D modelling tools, human cognition, and bodily actions. Their evolution and lifelike movement are driven by cloth physics, PBR materials, and particle simulations, reflecting a fractured authorship shaped by both human and machine agency. Each WORM maintains a figure-ground relationship within the screen, asserting itself as a digital subject. Their development occurs through transsubstrative process a vital force transferring between carbon and silicon life forms evident in their wriggling, twitching behaviours reminiscent of biological organisms. The WORMs produce strange emotive sounds. Their language Python Glossolalia evolved from contact with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, where digital code infects human biology, inducing glossolalia a rhythmical, phoneme-rich speech act without semantic meaning. With input from linguist Paul de Lacy, James Irwin encoded this digital glossolalia into a Python script that generates speech fragments, voiced through a cloned AI via Elevenlabs.