Is it possible to give the Cellular Animation function an initial condition of an nxm matrix with specified ones and zeros? Or does it only work if the input is a single “row” of data?
Of course you can always program your own Cellular Automota function to do whatever you want, but if you’re talking about the CellularAutomaton function, there are several examples in the documentation showing it being used for 2D set of initial conditions.
You can find these examples in the documentation for CellularAutomaton under Scope > Multidimensional Rules
A good example of this is the implementation of Conway’s “Game of Life”:
http://www.wolfram.com/language/gallery/implement-conways-game-of-life/