lifeSigns is a world that generates iconographic languages. It explores the idea of ‘emergent language’ through computational processes, where both human and digital agents contribute to the formation of meaning. This work combines two areas of research - artificial life, the coding of life processes into software, and computational semiotics, the study of systems and codes of signification in digital media. The hybrid space that is formed by this intersection could be described as a ‘generative meaning system’.

The lifeSigns web site supports the gallery installation of the work by archiving and documenting popular and successful signs and symbols that have been generated by the world. Users may search networks of meaning within a database and influence the meaning of icons by voting on their ‘meaning vectors’. The web site is an ongoing ‘research tool’ for exploring the languages that emerge from the lifeSigns world.