Situational Agency: The Framework for Designing Behavior in Agent-based art
This provides a contextual foundation for artists and researchers in artificial life art to design agent behaviors, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories.
The paper tackles the problem of designing agent behaviors in agent-based art by proposing a framework that integrates the environment as a context for behavioral design, developed through analysis of artworks to explore computational systems, audience participation, and artistic strategies.
In the context of artificial life art and agent-based art, this paper draws on Simon Penny's {\itshape Aesthetic of Behavior} theory and Sofian Audry's discussions on behavior computation to examine how artists design agent behaviors and the ensuing aesthetic experiences. We advocate for integrating the environment in which agents operate as the context for behavioral design, positing that the environment emerges through continuous interactions among agents, audiences, and other entities, forming an evolving network of meanings generated by these interactions. Artists create contexts by deploying and guiding these computational systems, audience participation, and agent behaviors through artist strategies. This framework is developed by analysing two categories of agent-based artworks, exploring the intersection of computational systems, audience participation, and artistic strategies in creating aesthetic experiences. This paper seeks to provide a contextual foundation and framework for designing agents' behaviors by conducting a comparative study focused on behavioural design strategies by the artists.