The Darwin Project is an online interactive conceptual art project. It documents the creation of poetry through a digital process that mimics genetic evolution. The part of natural selection is carried out visitors to this site, and the definition of "fitness" for survival depends on the aesthetic preferences of visitors to this site.
The poems are created in sets of six called generations. A visitor to the site reads the six poems and simply chooses which two he or she finds most aesthetically pleasing, enters the numbers corresponding to these two poems into two text input fields, and presses the reproduce button. The program behind the site causes these two poems to reproduce with one another six times. This creates six different offspring that have characteristics of the parent poems. This new set of six offspring forms the next generation. Each new generation is recorded to the server and visitors to the site will view the last generation created by the last visitor to the site. Thus a continuing evolution of aesthetic and coherency is expected.