Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau are the artists/programmer couple that I was trying to remember the name of today through my flu-enduced haze. (I almost spelled their names correctly!) To find out more about their artworks, check out: http://www.interface.ufg.ac.at/christa-laurent/WORKS/index.html
The specific artwork(s) I was thinking of in particular are “Life Spacies”, “Life Spacies II” and “Verbarium”. But you’ll probably also enjoy having a look at some of the other A-Life inspired artworks that they’ve developed. Don’t forget to give the concept documents for each artwork a good read, it might trigger off some new ideas!