Art and Artificial Life in the 11th edition
of the International Vida Prizes
Though art and science were inseparable in the past, nowadays it is hard to find a dialogue between the two disciplines. One of the few places where this exchange happens in a fluid way is in new media art. The creators working in this sector, also called electronic art, produce works of art with technological means. They use technology to reflect on the present-day computerised society. Fundación Telefónica, since its outset, has sought to support art-related technological innovation and has therefore given close attention to the art produced by new media.
One of Fundación Telefónica’s central projects is the VIDA Competition. It is an international competition which rewards electronic works of art produced with artificial life technologies. Artificial life 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 artificial life is very much present in everyday consumer products, such as the new 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 programme robots to have human reactions. A key concept of artificial life is that of “emerging behaviour”, which refers to the kind of behaviour that emerges from an evolution of the original programme. The programmer runs the system, but from then on the system seems to take on a life of its own and evolves in an unpredictable way, just as a biological system would.
Artificial life is a multifaceted field which creators have been using artistically over the last fifteen years. The art of artificial life addresses the growing technologisation of reality, by producing creative works that seem to mutate, evolve and respond with a life of their own. An example of artificial life artistic work might be 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 artefacts with a specific functionality, but to work conceptually, using art in order to reflect on how in our culture the technological and the biological are increasingly indistinguishable, a culture in which machines behave in an increasingly human way, and humans more mechanically. How far should human beings go in our technological absorption? When do we stop being human and become technological mechanisms? These artists take a stance before this new reality, an essential step if we really want to take control of the technological race taking place in the upcoming future instead of feeling that we are being borne 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 has not only the aim to represent a standard of excellence internationally but also to constitute an inestimable collection documenting the evolution of electronic art in one of its most significant aspects. In order to enhance its commitment in this task of promotion and documentation, Fundación Telefónica plans to create a Virtual Gallery which, transcending the boundaries of the traditional gallery, can house the winning works of past and future editions.
As every year, the forthcoming edition of VIDA will host the most innovative artistic productions of artificial life. A prestigious international jury will meet to carefully study the projects submitted.
Over the last years, VIDA has displayed robots which choreograph their movements around the public, a screensaver that responds to the sounds around it, a mechanism which runs over our body and tickles us, 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 hybrids between dogs and pigs or dogs and cats, etc. It remains to be seen how the projects selected this year in VIDA 11.0 will surprise us, make us laugh, or make us reflect on our everyday technological reality.
Daniel Canogar
