The Life Tower is a 3D visualization of Conway's Game of Life.

Conway's Game of Life consists of a grid of cells that are assigned one of two states: alive or dead. The state of a cell in the current generation is determined by the state of the surrounding cells in the previous generation: Normally, this simulation takes place in two dimensions only. The Life Tower draws each successive state of the simulation below the previous state, creating a three-dimensional form that reflects the history of the simulation.

The large format prints generated from this program reveal in detail the intricate forms generated over time by two-dimensional cellular automata.

Cellular automata in one dimension are almost universally drawn in such a way that many different generations can be seen at once - they're always drawn in two dimensions. Two-dimensional cellular automata, like Conway's Game of Life, are drawn in such a way that only the current generation is visible. Because of this, when you run Conway's Game of Life, you get a sense of motion, but not a sense of structure. I was curious about what kinds of structure might appear when the simulation was run in three dimensions, so I made the Life Tower.

These images will probably have more resonance with people who are already familiar with Conway's Game of Life. I'm hoping, however, that they'll be visually compelling even to people who didn't already know anything about cellular automata.

The piece is a series of prints made from large screenshots that my application generates. I'm hoping to print a series of four to six.