So finally, let me address the problem, or at least begin debate, on ways in which we can escape the container and, as my title promised, "visualise the impossible".

The short answer is, as you have probably guessed by now, is that we cannot. While artists have been useful in bringing this to our attention, what strategies can now be offered not to dismiss the container, but to make it at the very least less prosaic?

In terms of scientific development, at least in the popular imagination, and through the hermetic discourses of ecology, nature is now seen to be defined more by process than product. This idea is infiltrated and extended by Artificial Life. Alife theory states that the carbon based life we know (Blife), as studied by biology, is only a narrow form of enquiry, one which sets the stage for a more complete study of life in many media, that of “life as it could be”. Theoretical Biology's new goal therefor is seen as the investigation and understanding of life's many processes: life defined by its mechanisms, not by any particular materialisation. Artificial life attempts to abstract the logical principles underlying biological phenomena in the real world.