xv Foreword Two decades ago, I was at an international science conference in Japan where a few of the presentations there used the computer's emerging power for visualization. The response from the audience was mixed. "Eye-opening!" was the response of a tiny minority. "Irrelevant!" was the response from the greater majority. Of the latter opinion, what I heard was that, "Pictures don't tell us anything more than the equations can. In fact, they cloud and distract us from how we think." Fast forward twenty years later, and it's interesting that this body of work on biologically-inspired computing for the arts has been collected, because it represents a kind of reversal in the audience (from scientists to artists), and because the utility of visualization is no longer in question the way it was be- fore. The pragmatic usefulness of visualization is now more evident; and now the aesthetic, emotional satisfaction of visualization is coming into play. We are people, not machines. And we love to see things