The A-Life sculpture displays a heterogeneous population of agents:

• the agents’ embodiments are characterized by minimal “articulators,” in the form of clusters of LEDs and abstract electroacoustic sound — what we term low-fidelity embodiment
• human interactants acquire a presence in a population as human-representative agents, i.e. a cluster of LEDs that behaves under the interactant’s control
• artificial agents are instantiations of a Java-implemented architecture and have autonomous behaviours
• human interactants are colour-coded to differentiate them from virtual agents
• all of these agents engage in “conversations” with free exchange of turns
• there are two kinds of sound identifiers: ambient sounds prior to interaction are unpitched, i.e. percussive; the sound, or “voice,” of both the human-representative agent and of the artificial agents is pitched, i.e. tonal, as musical notes are, with specific timbres so as to differentiate among several agents
• the ambient sound is based on samples taken from the natural world or from the media world, but micro-sampled (broken down into very small segments) and extensively processed.