With a Rhythmic Instinction to be Able to Travel Beyond Existing Forces of Life (2014) is an automaton composed of hundreds of drawings created by Philippe Parreno, each depicting the same insect: a firefly or luciola (small light).

The work is governed by an algorithm inspired by the “Game of Life,” a cellular automaton developed by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970, where complex patterns emerge from the implementation of simple rules.

In Parreno’s work, the repetitive drawings follow an automatic process of their own, where the lifespan of each animated sequence is determined by the rules of cellular automata. A sequence can 'live' for minutes or, at most, a day. As each sequence ‘dies,’ one drawing of a firefly freezes, before the system reboots and a new sequence begins. As well as creating its own life, the automaton creates its own soundtrack, as light intensity is turned into noise.

Parreno’s visual subject is inspired by “The Power Void in Italy” (1975), an essay in which Pasolini uses the disappearance of fireflies to frame the persistence of fascist ideology within industrial capitalism of the post-war 1960s. The repetitive process of Parreno’s drawings takes on an automatism of its own, as the depiction of the firefly improves through reiteration.