Genetically Sonified Organisms: Environmental Listening/Sounding Agents

This paper presents the Genetically Sonified Organisms (GSOs): environmental listening and sounding agents that evolve over long periods of time in call and response with their given acoustic environment. The conceptual and ethical implications of employing these sustainable, solar-powered devices within an established natural acoustic ecology are discussed, as well as a report on their behavior in a long-term public land-art context. The GSO design is explained, with behaviour that includes a welcomed discrepancy that was discovered between their theoretical evolutionary functioning and unexpected divergent behaviors that emerged in the field, through their relationship to solar energy among other environmental conditions.