This review of the First Iteration Conference held in Melbourne in December 1999 discusses several of the presentations made and includes brief summaries of the keynotes. Related issues like the problems of gender representation as well as shortcomings in the education of artists are also mentioned.

The author proposes possible ways for artists and cultural activists to use the Internet and other new media to help counter the currently devastating situation in Colombia.

This essay considers the relationship between science and mathematics and the social order that they both rely upon and reinforce. A peaceful and egalitarian world, the author argues, will require instilling a sense of responsibility in those who work with mathematics for the uses society makes of their efforts. Such an understanding of their social responsibilities would also require mathematicians to become more sensitive to history and to the social and psychological dynamics of the presentation of knowledge.

The author traces the evolution of her installations about the military-industrial complex during the 1980s and early 1990s and artworks that emerged as a result of her research. In addition to national and international data, maps, graphs and statistics about the industry, the author over time progressively added regional, site-specific information in order to empower viewers. The process of creating these works revealed the place of the nuclear industry in the author's own family, which ultimately facilitated the design of later installations.

The author applies aesthetic, emotional and empathetic selection to a derivative of Karl Sims's Evolved Virtual Creatures. The resulting Creatures can be beautiful or strange and provoke strong reactions in human observers. The author posits that it may therefore be possible to evolve virtual pets to which humans can form strong emotional bonds.

This paper focuses on the real-time 3D version of the artificial-life art piece TechnoSphere, a collaborative project by the author, Mark Hurry and Gordon Selley. It begins by positioning TechnoSphere's simulated landscapes in relationship to the English landscape and its tradition in painting and problematizes ideas of “the natural.” The TechnoSphere creatures are evaluated as both artificial wildlife and domesticated animals before the authors consider the relationship between creature and environment.

This article consists of two sections: the first provides a brief overview of artificial-life art and entertainment software, some of the main products and their peculiarities; and the second describes one of the authors' artificial-life software products, called Life Spacies II, which was created between 1997 and 1999. This system consists of a web page that allows users to create artificial-life creatures by simply typing in text characters using a web page “editor.” Written text is used as genetic code to model the creature's body.

A variety of digital pets can be found in Japan, from virtual pets on palm-top game screens to physical entertainment robots. They are successful because they succeed in promoting a sense of reality in users' minds. While visual reality is a familiar element of realism, a subjective sense of reality can also prove effective. By designing interaction in a mode that takes users' psychology into account, such a sense of reality can be enhanced, especially when a user perceives an independent personality in his/her digital pet.