Attribution of Communicative Capacity Among Agents in a Hetereogeneous Population

In this paper, we describe our work developing A-life sculpture: art works that are interactive and that incorporate be- haviours that are not explicitly explained to the human interactants. In interacting with A-life sculptures, human interactants discover the system's behaviours, a process that results in a co-constru ction of the artwork (and of the art work's meaning), in the sense that exp erience of the work is different for each participant, and many facets of the work are not immediately available, but appear during the time spent with it. During the interaction, the sculpture is also respo nding and reacting, in a meaningful way, to the interactant. Our work incorpo- rates both artistic and scientific goals, and we have integra ted these two perspectives during the development process, which has entailed broadening our design framework beyond traditional performance- based approaches.