Xenoplex

A 2023 studio project (Darren Zhu, Connor Cook): a hypothetical "coupled chemical-computational array" that simulates prebiotic-Earth and speculative-astrobiological conditions so that biotic agents and abiotic selective pressures adapt to each other, compressing evolutionary time to run experiments impossible in the real world. Its philosophical claim is that computation has pushed biology not toward "living things are computers" but toward life as a replicating process that is "fundamentally technological," because living matter survives by transforming its niche with abiotic matter. Ends on "what if the whole experiment is alive?" — the earliest corpus statement of the life/intelligence/technology convergence later developed via assembly theory.