Art and Artificial Life in the 12th edition
of the International Vida Prizes
Fundación Telefónica, since its outset, has sought to support art-related technological innovation and has therefore paid close attention to new media art. In this context we find VIDA, an international competition which rewards electronic works of art produced with artificial life technologies. Artificial life, or Alife, is an interdisciplinary science which studies and creates artificial systems by imitating the properties of living systems. Although the discipline may seem removed from our lives, much laboratory research on Alife is very much present in everyday consumer products, such as children's electronic pets (Tamagotchi, Dogz, Catz and many more), video games with characters that evolve over time, or in intelligent interfaces for mobile telephones and other electronic devices which "learn" about the user.
The term "Artificial Life" was coined in 1987 in Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico under the auspices of a workshop set up by Christopher Langton. Since then, this discipline has used computer science to simulate living systems. Artificial life uses complex algorithms to create, for instance, digital creatures which evolve in virtual spaces, or program robots to have human reactions. A key concept of artificial life is that of "emergent behaviour”, a behaviour that evolves over time. The programmer gives life to a system that seems to take on a life of its own and evolves in unpredictable ways, just as a biological system would do.
Artificial life is a multifaceted field that artists have been using creatively over the last fifteen years. The art of artificial life addresses the growing technologisation of reality, by producing works that seem to mutate, evolve and respond with a life of their own. An example of an artistic Alife creation might be a colony of digital creatures that survive in a virtual environment. On the screen we can see how these creatures look for food, compete with other species in the virtual ecosystem, couple in order to have offspring and finally die.
Through these works of art, creators are raising important issues regarding our promiscuous relationship with technologies and our future identity as human beings. These artists are not seeking to create artifacts with a specific functionality, but work conceptually, using art in order to reflect on how in our culture the technological and the biological are increasingly indistinguishable. How far should we go in our technological absorption? When do we stop being human and become technological mechanisms? These artists take a stance before this new reality, a fundamental step if we want to take the reins of the technological race taking place rather than feel we are being dragged along by a runaway horse.
Pioneer in this field, the VIDA Competition has become an international reference point. As it is unique in the world, this competition not only rewards excellency in the field of Alife art but has over the past decade become a fundamental archive of the evolution of electronic art in one of its most significant aspects. In order to enhance its commitment to archiving the evolution and history of the field, Fundación Telefónica has created a Virtual Gallery which, transcending the boundaries of the traditional gallery, houses the winning works of past and present editions.
Over the years, VIDA has awarded automata that dance around the public, a screensaver that responds to the sounds around it, a robot that tickles our bodies, a virtual ecosystem inhabited by creatures which the public creates and then contemplates as they fight for survival, plants which are watered in proportion to stock market fluctuations, a community of robot dogs which have been reprogrammed to act like hybrid creatures, etc. It remains to be seen how the selected projects in this year’s competition, VIDA 12.0, will surprise us, make us laugh, or induce us to reflect on our everyday technological reality.
Daniel Canogar