Louis Bec

Louis Bec (FR): We are all extremophiles.

Louis Bec with Vilém Flusser [c-lab.co.uk]

Louis Bec, born in Algeria and living in France, is a biologist and zoosystematician who extends his scientific field with a fabulatory epistemology based on Artificial Life and Technozoosemiotics. In this field he has specially collaborated with his life long friend and philosopher Vilém Flusser, who first introduced him to artistic research on artificial life, and who wrote about Bec’s Vampyroteuthis infernalis in his book with the same title.

In 1972, Bec founded the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, where he studies the incapability of living beings to understand their own existence: Upokrinomenes and Upokrinomenology. Within his paranaturalistic research, Bec has developed a series of potential beings, which he endows with chimerical and fictional characteristics. This extension of biological evolution and simulating new life forms, emphasizes on how these could bring forth evolution, a unique search for new zoomorphic types and forms of communication between artificial and natural species.

Bec is both artist and scientist in the field of artificial life and 3D technologies. He is as much a biologist, artist, curator and educator, and has been a ministry officer for new technologies in arts. Bec is Director of CYPRES (Centre Interculturel de Pratiques et Echanges Transdisciplinaires) in Marseille.

He has presented his ideas in many exhibitions, such as From animals to Animats, and articles: for V2_ he published the essay Squids, Elements of Technozoosemiotics: A Lesson in Fabulatory Epistemology 1 of The Scientific Institute For Paranatural Research in the 1997 publication TechnoMorphica.

http://mutamorphosis.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/we-are-extremophiles/