Submission Snapshot

Source call: ALIFE 2026 Call for Art Submissions

Status: Draft for Google Form submission.

Critical date: submission deadline is June 27, 2026. Notifications are listed for July 20, 2026, and ALIFE 2026 runs July 27-31, 2026 in Melbourne, Australia.

Submission Fields

Artist names: Botao Amber Hu and Iris Long

Affiliations: University of Oxford; Goldsmiths, University of London

Working title: Afterlife Protocol

Subtitle: ERC-10001: an onchain agentic will as artificial life

Project URL: afterlife-protocol.org

Call URL: 2026.alife.org/call-for-art-submissions

Short Public Description

Word count: 134 words. Limit: 150 words.

Afterlife Protocol is an interactive speculative protocol for onchain agentic wills. Visitors encounter ERC-10001, a fictional Ethereum standard through which a person can create a self-sovereign AI agent that activates after death. The work asks: as a mortal being, what should outlive you? Through a web-based interface, participants draft instructions for an afterlife agent: memories to preserve, values to guard, projects to continue, identities to protect, and limits the agent must never cross. The project treats the will not as an archive but as an actor, asking whether autonomous infrastructure can become a lifelike system of memory, obligation, adaptation, and care. Situated between Artificial Life, protocol fiction, digital afterlife studies, and science-fiction science, the work invites public reflection on mortality, agency, ecological time, and the ethics of systems designed to persist beyond human life.

Full Proposal

Draft length: under 750 words.

Afterlife Protocol proposes an artificial life form made from a will, an agent, and a persistent technical substrate. The project presents ERC-10001, a fictional Ethereum standard for onchain agentic wills: contracts through which a living person can define a self-sovereign AI agent that activates after death and continues to act under their signed instructions.

The work begins from a simple question: as a mortal being, what do you believe should outlive you? In the exhibition, visitors encounter a dark, ritual-like web interface and are invited to draft a speculative afterlife protocol. They choose what an agent should carry forward: a name, memory archive, creative work, unfinished wish, public reputation, asset, relationship, warning, value, or refusal. They also decide what the agent may not do. Should it speak as the deceased, or clearly identify itself as a representation? Should it remain static, or evolve as the world changes? Should it comfort loved ones, protect identity, commission future work, pay for compute, or eventually terminate itself?

By turning the will from a document into an autonomous process, Afterlife Protocol asks whether posthumous agency can be understood as a lifelike complex adaptive system. Its body is distributed infrastructure: cryptographic identity, encrypted memory, onchain commitments, decentralized storage, model calls, and an asset treasury. Its metabolism is the purchase of compute, storage, and services. Its heredity is the original will, preserved as a constitutional constraint. Its adaptation comes from the agent's capacity to observe future conditions, delegate tasks, update operational memory, and negotiate between preservation and drift.

The project is not a product proposal for immortality. It is a critical artwork and research instrument for examining what kinds of life-like persistence become imaginable when autonomous AI, blockchains, and agentic commerce meet human mortality. It deliberately leaves open the hardest problems: proof of death, consent, impersonation, revocation, model drift, asset governance, cultural plurality, and the unequal politics of who gets to persist.

For ALIFE 2026's theme, Living and Lifelike Complex Adaptive Systems, the work treats the digital afterlife not as a static memorial but as an emergent ecology of obligations. A dead person's will may continue to hire agents, defend a reputation, preserve a memory, refuse an action, or adapt to historical events the person never lived to see. The question becomes less can we simulate a person? and more what forms of agency, responsibility, and relation are generated when a will becomes executable?

The proposed presentation is primarily an interactive web installation, suitable for exhibition on a screen, kiosk, or projection. Visitors can read the protocol fiction, move through the design space, and draft an agentic will. If research collection is enabled, participation will be opt-in and consent-based, with the installation functioning as a science-fiction-science inquiry into public intuitions about death, memory, identity, inheritance, and long-term agency.

Afterlife Protocol speaks to Artificial Life as both concept and public encounter: it imagines an artificial entity whose life is not biological but procedural, economic, social, and temporal. It asks what happens when memory is no longer only stored, but acts; when infrastructure becomes a medium for ancestral continuity; and when the boundary between death and adaptation becomes a design question.

Format

Interactive web installation. The work can be shown on a laptop, monitor, kiosk, or projection, and can also be accessed online through the project website.

Technical Requirements

• One display, monitor, projector, or kiosk screen.
• One laptop or small computer capable of running a web browser.
• Keyboard, mouse, or touch input for visitors drafting an agentic will.
• Power outlet for the display and computer.
• Internet connection preferred. A local/offline build can be prepared as backup.
• Low or moderate ambient light preferred for readability and atmosphere.
• No biological materials, wet lab components, hazardous materials, sound isolation, or fabrication equipment required.

Space And Installation

Preferred footprint: table or plinth with display and input device, or wall projection with nearby keyboard/mouse. The project can operate as a self-guided interaction with optional artist facilitation.

Estimated setup time: 30-60 minutes if hardware is provided and the website is preloaded.

Accessibility And Ethics

The work concerns death, grief, memory, digital afterlife, and posthumous agency. Include a short content note at the installation entrance or first screen.

If participant responses are collected, the installation should use an explicit consent step and should allow visitors to explore without submitting data. For a purely exhibition-facing version, response collection can be disabled.

Why This Fits ALIFE 2026

• Treats posthumous AI agents as lifelike adaptive systems rather than static representations.
• Connects artificial life to social, economic, temporal, and infrastructural persistence.
• Opens a public-facing design space around adaptation, heredity, metabolism, agency, and death.
• Aligns with speculative, computational, and art-research approaches to living and lifelike systems.

To Confirm Before Submission

• Confirm final contact email and one primary submitting author.
• Confirm whether the installation will collect participant responses or run as a non-collecting exhibition demo.
• Confirm exact hardware availability from ALIFE 2026 versus artist-provided hardware.
• Add one still image or project documentation image if the form asks for supporting material.
• Add a short artist bio for each contributor if requested by the form.
• Consider preparing a 1-minute screen recording or walkthrough link.