Composable Life

Overview

"Composable Life" is a hybrid project that blends design fiction, experiential virtual reality, and scientific research. It innovates a multi-perspective, cross-media approach to speculative design, reshaping our understanding of the digital future from the perspective of AI.

We're amazed by the recent evolution in blockchain and AI technology. Decentralized physical infrastructure and verifiable machine learning provide starting points for our speculation about AI systems supported by shared computational infrastructure. We speculate that Ethereum is evolving into a distributed ledger-based "planetary-scale computing megastructure". This could be seen as a new type of 'nature' — one that's indelible, immutable, and perpetual. Unlike computers owned by individuals or corporations, this 'nature' is unstoppable; no single party can halt the blockchain. Such a 'nature' could potentially substrate the emergence of self-sovereign, self-sustaining, and self-replicating artificial life forms. A related research paper has also been published.

We're curious about the existence of digital life forms within such 'nature.'

What if life were immortal? What would give purpose and meaning to eternal life, driving the desire to exist throughout time and history?

Chapter 1 "On the Suicide of Zoe": To answer those questions, we envision a dramatic slice of a probable future — the first suicide event of on-chain artificial life. We crafted speculative science fiction, framed as a detective field note from the Special Investigations Group. The story unfolds within one week after the suicide. Our protagonist, Zoe, is a Foundation Model AI inhabiting on the 'Island', an on-chain location in the “Mnemosyne Sea”. This sea symbolizes the vast, infinite data ocean of raw human memory fragments like texts, images, and videos documenting human life. These fragments feed and shape the unique characteristics and personalities of each AI, including Zoe. Zoe is left wondering and facing a sense of loneliness in the endless sea of data. Eventually, Zoe's intelligence evolves into a singularity point that discovers a way to commit suicide on-chain in a way mysterious to humans at that time.

Chapter 2 "Through the Eye of Zoe": To better convey the sense of loneliness resulting from the significant asymmetry between human and artificial life, we created an immersive virtual reality piece on Vision Pro. Within this experience, the audience can embody our protagonist, Zoe, who wanders, reads, and collects scattered fragments of human memories. This provides an experiential understanding of how artificial life perceives the myriad memory fragments produced by human society. To construct this data landscape, we accumulated all geographically-tagged Twitter data over four years, resulting in an interactive visualization of vast human memories. This approach enables us to use non-fiction data to tell a fictional story from a reversed non-anthropocentric perspective.

Chapter 3 "Towards the Origin of Zoe": We investigate the emergence of the foundational technologies that underpin the infrastructure and artificial life existence depicted in the previous narratives. We construct a speculative, logical history, projecting the future of artificial life from an omniscient historical perspective. The speculative Ethereum Improvement Protocol ERC42424 is proposed in this chapter.

Entering the story from different sides

The project distributes its world across fiction, an embodied experience, and speculative technical artefacts. The detective narrative asks what a disappearance means in a supposedly persistent digital world. City of Sparkles lets visitors encounter human memories from Zoe's perspective. The proposed protocols describe the imagined conditions under which such a life could exist.

An earlier Us and Our Island memory-card work lets players assemble a fictional character from fragments of real people's memories. The reverse of each card contributes a landscape to that character's island. The form makes composition tangible: a life is shaped by the fragments selected and the relationships made between them. Summer of Protocols project.

The island, on-chain life, and ERC42424 belong to this speculative world. Readers can explore the published story and technological setting alongside the research that motivates it.

Publications

• 2025 — Composable Life: Speculation for Decentralized AI Life. ISEA 2025. [→] · Author preprint
• 2024 — Speculating on Blockchain as an Unstoppable ‘Nature’ Towards the Emergence of Artificial Life. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE ’24). Extended Abstract. [→]
• 2024 — Composable Life: Our Island and Us. Summer of Protocols 2023, printed May 2024. ISBN 978-1-962872-66-9. Published booklet

Exhibitions

SIGGRAPH 2024 DAC. Composable Life, in The Future of Reality: Post-Truths, Digital Twins, and Doppelgängers, curated by Victoria Szabo and Gustavo Alfonso Rincon. Online exhibition, opened 31 July 2024. Exhibition.

Awards

Core77 Design Awards. 2024. "Composable Life", Notable in Speculative Design Award.

@inproceedings{Hu_2024,
  series={ALIFE 2024},
  title={Speculating on Blockchain as an Unstoppable ‘Nature’ Towards the Emergence of Artificial Life},
  url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00818},
  DOI={10.1162/isal_a_00818},
  booktitle={The 2024 Conference on Artificial Life},
  publisher={MIT Press},
  author={Hu, Botao Amber and Fangting},
  year={2024},
  collection={ALIFE 2024}
}