Game of Pollen

Conway’s Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The game evolution is determined by its initial, typically random, configuration, requiring no further input. The game evolves by applying simple local rules to the cells. The purpose of the game is to show how complex behaviors similar to life can emerge from simple rules of interaction between many bodies. We applied the Game of Life to four bitmap images representing different permutations of grains of pollen. The effect is as if images are invaded by a colony of artificial life that feeds of pixels, expanding along unpredictable paths, apparently never ending, and mutating the vital yellow color of the grains into a funeral black.