Led by Artbreeder creator, Joel Simon

Stochastic Labs is opening applications to our summer residency subgroup for artificial life. As with last year’s program, we welcome proposals from exceptional engineers, researchers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and artists who stand to significantly impact this emerging terrain. This residency is part of Stochastic’s 2026 summer session: Liveness + Agency.

Artificial life spent decades asking questions the rest of CS wasn’t ready for: how to get open-ended behavior from simple rules, how to evolve systems instead of engineering them, how to harness emergence at scale? Now these questions are more relevant than ever. We’re interested in work across the full landscape: neural cellular automata, self-replicating programs, evolutionary ecosystems, morphogenesis and developmental dynamics, physarum-inspired simulation, and multi-species worlds at every scale. We’re equally drawn to projects that treat life as an artistic and conceptual lens, or that apply alife’s logic of growth, evolution, and self-organization to new domains: evolutionary harnesses for language models, open-ended search, quality-diversity optimization. And to projects that simply build strange new creatures and let them loose.

Residencies include work space, housing (for those traveling from outside the bay area), and shop access. Residents participate in weekly lunches and dinners with the cohort and invited guests. Applicants may request funds to support travel and other expenses.

Dates: July 8th – September 15th (alternative dates may be possible)