Future Ideations Camp Vol.5 Keynote Lecture “Agency Emerges! Approaches in ALife”

2025.01.25(Sat)

Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT]

Date & Time: January 25 (Sat), 2025 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Venue: Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT]
Capacity: 40 (First-come, first-served basis)
Admission: Free
Accessibility and Support: Japanese-English simultaneous interpretation will be provided.

Lecturer: Ikegami Takashi

A five-day camp exploring AI and the future relationship between humans and technology. Leading ALife scientist Ikegami Takashi will give a keynote lecture as a public event.

Civic Creative Base Tokyo (CCBT)’s Future Ideations Camp is a series of intensive workshops bringing different kinds of people together to work collaboratively and creatively with art and digital technologies.With a focus on concepts of autonomy through ideas and issues related to artificial intelligence, this camp explores and proposes new approaches to the future relationship between humans and technology. Leading ALife scientist Ikegami Takashi’s keynote lecture examines his ALife research and practice, and what lies at the heart of that, the relationship between agency and life.

My forty years of research on ALife has investigated the extent to which agency can be integrated into cyberspace, robots, or chemical reactions. Is a fundamental, not superficial, form of agency possible? Agency can’t be randomly replaced. As such, agency cannot be configured in chaos as a dynamical system. But how about in a robot powered by a network of artificial nerve cells? And if that isn’t allowed, what ultimately divides nature and the artificial? I would like to discuss these points in my lecture.

Ikegami Takashi

DSc in Physics, Professor / Department of General Systems Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo

Ikegami Takashi specializes in complex systems science and artificial life. His writings and co-writings include Movement Makes Life (2027, Seidosha), Between Human and Machine (2016, Kodansha), and ALife That Makes and Moves: Introduction to Artificial Life Model Theory through Implementation (2018, O’Reilly Japan). His other activities and projects include “filmachine” (2006, YCAM) and “ScaryBeauty” (2018, National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation), both with Shibuya Keiichiro, and “ALTER the android KAGURA” (2020, Mutek Japan) and “MTM2” (2023), with Alternative Machine Inc. and the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Technology).

Organizer: Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT] (Arts Council Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)

Future Ideations Camp Vol.5 Keynote Lecture “Agency Emerges! Approaches in ALife”

Ikegami Takashi

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