Academic Engagement Open access

Art, AI, strategies of biomimicry: mimiphenia, the ambivalent mimicry

Authors

  • Ioannis Melanitis Corresponding author Email Artist, Associate Professor, Athens School of Fine Arts, Athens
Published
January 16, 2025
Section
Academic Engagement
DOI
10.4081/peasa.47

Abstract

This paper examines interactions between animal and human patterns of biomimetics to state that ‘all art is biomimicry’ on the basis of information exchanges. Similarities between biomimicry, Art, and AI are methodologically apparent; advances in AI self-coding computation might be reconsidered alongside artistic interpretations of evolutionary patterns in animals. Purposefully misleading signals, blended with more accurate or comprehensible ones, intertwine the web of mimetics. In these treacherous artistic, adaptive, or coding processes, conjecture states emerge, questioning the precision of signal conception. ‘Apophenia’ is defined as the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas), while ‘pareidolia’ as the “tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/). ‘Mimiphenia’ is a neologism we propose as a paraphrase of apophenia and pareidolia, terms related to perception. This ‘apparent-ambiguous’ mimicry imposes on viewers and predators a half-aware state, an artistic dilemma. By observing this phenomenon in Ophrys orchids, we propose new hypothetical bee-resembling patterns by applying Turing's morphogenetic formula to a parent orchid using AI. The resulting patterns closely resemble those evolutionarily occurring in nature.

Keywords

References

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