Open-ended systems, outdoors
What it actually takes for an evolutionary or developmental system to keep generating novelty when nobody is watching, the temperature swings, and the substrate refuses to behave.
A workshop at ALIFE 2026 · Waterloo, Canada
Artificial Lifein the Wild
For decades artificial life has thrived inside simulators, lattices, and clean rooms. This workshop asks what happens when we let it loose — into ecologies, soils, oceans, cities, swarms, sensors, and other people’s problems.
01
The theme
A call from life as it could be to life as it is becoming. From the closed simulation — the petri dish — to the open environment. Artificial life has left the lab, and the question is no longer what it might do, but what to do with what it is already doing.
ALIFE 2026 in Waterloo gathers the community around the theme Living and Lifelike Complex Adaptive Systems. This workshop sits at the field end of that question — concerned with the open-world behaviour of artificial life: embodied agents in real environments, generative ecologies that share space with other species, LLM-driven agents loose on the internet, biohybrids in soil and water, and the strange new science that emerges when an ALife system has neighbours.
We are interested in the messy parts that the closed simulation tends to hide: failure modes that only appear after week six, evaluation when there is no ground truth, ethics when the agent is alive, and the methods — borrowed from ecology, field biology, and art — that let us study artificial agents the way we study real ones.
We invite contributions that are speculative, unfinished, weird, or empirically grounded. We especially welcome work that did not survive the lab.
02
Important dates
Milestone
Deadline
Notes
Submissions open
15 May 2026
OpenReview portal goes live
Submission deadline
30 Jun 2026
Extended abstracts (2–4 pp) and artefacts
Notifications
24 Jul 2026
Decisions and reviewer feedback
Camera ready
7 Aug 2026
Final PDFs and demo plans
Workshop
17–21 Aug 2026
One day during ALIFE 2026, Waterloo (TBA)
All deadlines anywhere on Earth (UTC−12). Workshop scheduled day within ALIFE 2026 will be set by the conference programme committee.
03
Topics
Embodied & situated agents
Robots, biohybrids, and soft systems whose behaviour is inseparable from their environment. Morphological computation, in-situ adaptation, energy and repair.
Ecologies & co-existence
ALife systems that share space with other species — including humans. Multi-agent ecosystems, eco-evolutionary feedback, and the politics of introducing artificial life into an existing one.
Environmental computing
Computation that uses the world as substrate: chemistry, weather, mycelium, light, sound. Sensing as participation rather than measurement.
Evaluation in the wild
How do we know a wild ALife system is working? Long-horizon metrics, reproducibility under non-stationarity, failure-mode taxonomies, and honest reporting of negative results.
Ethics, art, and afterlife
Releasing artificial life into shared environments. Stewardship, decommissioning, and the artistic and speculative practices that ask what it means to make something live.
04
Call for participation
We invite extended abstracts, artefacts, and field reports for the Artificial Life in the Wild workshop at ALIFE 2026 in Waterloo, Canada. All accepted contributions appear in the open-access ALIFE 2026 workshop proceedings.
Extended abstracts
2–4 pages · single-blind · ALIFE template
Position papers, late-breaking work, and contributions describing field deployments or works-in-progress in the wild — embodied agents, multi-agent ecologies, LLM-driven agentic systems, biohybrids, environmental computing. Selected abstracts will be presented as short talks at the workshop.
Artefacts & demos
1-page description · video or live demo
Robots, sculptures, instruments, code, datasets, organisms — anything you can show. We have a small space for physical artefacts and a remote demo slot for things that cannot travel to Waterloo.
Field reports
2 pages · narrative format encouraged
What broke. What surprised you. What you learned that the paper did not let you say. We particularly welcome reports of systems that did not behave as predicted, and ethologically-styled observation studies of deployed AI agents.
All accepted contributions appear in the ALIFE 2026 workshop proceedings (open access).
05
Invited speakers
Speaker 1
Affiliation · Field
To be announced. We are confirming a keynote on long-horizon open-ended systems deployed outside the lab.
Speaker 2
Affiliation · Field
To be announced. A practitioner working at the intersection of ALife, art, and ecological fieldwork.
06
Organisers
Botao Amber Hu
University of Oxford
Helena Rong
New York University Shanghai
Joel Lehman
University of Oxford
Programme committee
To be announced. The committee will be drawn from the ALife, robotics, ecology, art-science, and unconventional-computing communities. Get in touch if you would like to review.