.

SHARED FIRST PRIZE (4,250 euros each)

France Cadet
Dog [Lab]01
France

One of the most unsettling aspects of molecular biology is the ability to manipulate behaviour. Many experiments have shown that the behaviour of one animal may be placed into another. For instance, in 1999 neuroscientists altered a mouse by inserting a gene from a prairie vole, a different animal known for its fidelity and sociability. The normally solitary mice now showed the social behaviours of the gregarious prairie vole. While most of us have no idea how to even think about these issues, France Cadet has undertaken her own experiment in signification. Her Dog[LAB] project is a monstrous hybrid, merging children’s toys, hacked electronics, and social and political concerns into robotically enacted dramas. Cadet performed surgery on several robotic dogs, customized their forms, and reprogrammed them with unusual behaviours. Her new dogs are genetically manipulated animal combinations, plastic chimeras. For instance, one is the “ultimate” domestic pet, a mixture of equal parts cat and dog. This earnest Frankenpet alternately wags its tail playfully, grooms itself, does feline stretches and, eventually, falls asleep and dreams dog dreams. Another is a cowdog, and as a result is prone to robotic BSE, twitching and collapsing while whining like a sad puppy. Cadet’s work reminded some of the jurors that the more life-like robots become, the more prone they’ll be to neurosis and illness. We all admired the unusual way that Cadet addressed weighty issues of science and society while keeping her tongue well in cheek.

Stanza
The Central City
United Kingdom

This net art work, made over four years, is an impressive collection of interconnected environments created using generative procedures. The focus is on urban environments, resulting in a vast web site of interconnected idealised spaces and polyphonic neighbourhoods. These environments explode with ideas from art, architecture, design and urbanism. Visuals from live web cams and pre-recorded audio are controlled by the user to make spaces that fragment and are reconstituted in real time. The ever-changing nature of the city is foregrounded in the way that its features flow through the site; streets and buildings seem to change right before our eyes in visual compositions reminiscent of Dziga Vertov’s avant-garde documentary “The Man with the Movie Camera.” Users of The Central City interact with the piece by selecting from multiple menus based on an iconic language. Starting from recognizable imagery that is either pre-recorded or live, viewers can morph images and algorithmically change sounds. Through these processes, ordered and grid-like cities slip into disorder, and surveillance systems are subjected to processes that make them “bleed”, that “torment” them and subject them to “earthquakes”. The sophistication and subtlety of the image generation reflects Stanza’s earlier paintings, and provide a sophisticated, adult alternative to SimCity. The user is encouraged to take a painterly approach to image transmutation, resulting in a subtle and ironic convergence of art and civic issues.

THIRD PRIZE (1,500 Euros)

Ethan Bordeaux, Ben Recht, Noah Vawter and Brian Whitman
Concrete Music
USA

The project Concrete Music gives life to a song. Instead of a permanent recording on a CD that is reproduced exactly every time you press “play”, this musical composition is in constant evolution. Its creators developed a hardware music processor from commodity hardware, an algorithmic music language robust enough to last 30 years, and a synthesis framework capable of composing timeless textures. Starting with initial parameters of tone, texture waves, rhythm and critical duration, the song composes itself by gradually mutating from its base state. Because of this large scale of compositional drift, only time will tell what the music will grow into as it progresses. Concrete Music also has a sculptural component: the generator of this algorithmic music is encased in rough-hewn concrete. This unusual shell appears to guarantee its existence for some time, as if it were a time capsule that could be found and listened to in a remote future. The song in this sound sculpture acquires a life of its own and refuses to die, and, in this way, Concrete Music materializes one of humanity’s great longings: immortality throughout time. At the same time, it serves as a nod to the “musique concrete” of the 50s.

.

Peter Bosch / Simone Simons
Aguas Vivas
Spain / Netherlands

Much research in artificial life is visualized on computer screens; for instance, cellular automata are often represented as fields of changing pixels that look like fluid waves or schools of fish. These digital representations have become so ubiquitous that we associate artificial life art with the digital screen and virtual worlds. Bosch and Simons have produced an installation piece that confounds this assumption. A projection displays a white cross and circle on a black background, reminiscent of a target; a cinematic countdown sign; or TV test card. As we watch, this image becomes progressively and chaotically disrupted. We assume that these are non-linear images generated digitally, using algorithms and pixels. Then the source is revealed: A metal container sits on eight springs that are agitated by an oscillation motor, above it is a white neon light in the shape of a circle and cross. Aguas Vivas uses a ‘Heath Robinson’ structure comprising of the oscillating container that sends vibrations through its cargo of oil to present us with a convincing and rich variety of real-time images. The simple and effective structure of this piece is the result of a series of works, or iterations, made over seven years.

Francisco Javier Fernández Herrero
Artificial Architecture, 1.0
Spain

The field of Architecture has always had two types of practitioners: On one hand, pragmatic architects whose priority is to pile up dirt and glass, on the other, dreamers who place concept over concrete. These later are often referred to in English as “paper architects.” In the late 1970’s, a new branch was added, as paper architects went “paperless” and started using computers to express their conceptual interests. Fernandez Herrero’s “Artificial Architecture” is a significant contribution to this field. Using algorithmic processes, this loquacious software spits out hundreds of floor plans per minute, producing sinuous, curving structures for which all the IKEAs in the world could not provide enough furniture. Parametric controls allow for various aspects of the synthesized plans to be adjusted, from length of walls to number of rooms, though it is still apparently impossible to make anything rational, normal, or easy to build. When Fernandez Herrero stacks these floors on top of each other, the resulting virtual buildings are at times exquisite, at times horrific. Artificial Architecture is like an automated idiot savant of postmodern buildings, an oracle speaking in compositional tongues, a design generator capable of capturing abstract blocks and dealing with incomplete states of information. But unless the artist also manages to automate the town council, don’t expect to see any of these structures on your street any time soon.

Hanna Haaslahti
White Square
Finland / Belgium

This work was the "public choice", as it was the most voted piece in the presentation of the nominees at the awards ceremony.

The shadow is our alter ego, a double mystery that accompanies us throughout our lives. Its phantasmagoric projection onto our surroundings gives us visual confirmation that we exist. Yet, how do we confirm our existence in virtual space? The installation White Square by Finnish artist Hanna Haaslahti invites us to reflect on this notion by making use of a technological shadow. Participants enter a darkened room where they see an empty, white square of approximately 3 x 4 metres projected on the floor. Upon entering the illuminated space of the white square, several shadows appear and start dancing around the feet of the participants. This image invites us to contemplate the existence of parallel realities usually hidden to us. The shadows respond to the velocity, direction and position of the participants. When a shadow touches a border of the square the image starts to pixelate, as a way to metaphorically indicate the body’s lived space or lebensraum. White Square is especially effective when several participants are in the space together. In this case, the shadows begin to interact with each other to create dynamic movements that remind us of the virtual interaction that takes place in electronic spaces. With this installation, Hanna Haaslahti proposes new ways in which to experience our bodies in digital space.

Mina Langstrom
The Chinese Room
Finland

The Chinese Room looks at the problem of interpreting new forms of visual evidence that arise in surveillance culture. In this participatory installation, the viewer sits at a control panel with a console of ten surveillance channels that look into a virtual world with two polygonal animated characters. The viewer can select cameras, allowing them to peer into the world. In a nice turn of reflection, the viewer is simultaneously scrutinized via a real video camera, bringing them into the simulated environment. But none of the people here ever makes real contact. They find out about each other only through hearsay and virtual camera tracking. The artist's critical interest in techno-utopias is visible in several aspects of this work. The theme of watching and being watched suggests the allure of technologically mediated intimacy, but at the same time it speaks to the threat of inescapable surveillance. The 3D animated characters that populate the narrative invoke the animation industry ideal of simulated actors, which has arisen from a research agenda driven by the goal of doing something purely because it can technically be done. Yet in "real world" terms it could come to displace working actors. The epistemological problem of what we can know about each other which is posed in this work, extends in a continuum from everyday interpersonal contact that is turned into fodder for reality T.V., into the social realm where alienation and paranoia result.

George Legrady
Pockets full of memories II
Hungary / USA / Canadian

Most people come to an exhibition to appreciate something created by the artist, but the traditional paradigm of art appreciation does not apply to interactive art. George Legrady has said that "interactivity is about creating self-consciousness, or consciousness about one's presence". The artist has worked on the theme of archiving memories in three-dimensional interactive space for many years. In this work, the familiar objects that visitors carry around form the body of the work -- a visual database of personal memories and identities. A visitor to the exhibition, carrying only necessary objects, is invited to submit one of these belongings to the database. The object is scanned and archived according to a description attached to it, which is prompted by questions the system asks as to what it means to its owner. Submitted objects include mobile phones, photo ID, or one's hand or other body part. For a visitor the process is about redefining what these "personal" belongings mean, which inevitably leads to thoughts about one's identity. The item is immediately sorted in the database based on a self-organizing mapping program (SOM), which simulates processes that take place in our brains. Hence each object and the memory it triggers becomes part of a networked space of memories. One can view the object entered and see how it is connected to other people's memories and thoughts, or just enjoy how people think similarly or differently toward the same object. We still don't know exactly how memory works, but Pockets Full of Memories II allows us to explore its associative processes through familiar things.

Simon Schiessl
Haptic Opposition
Germany / USA

Artists as well as engineers have been experimenting with machines that have their own "mood" and thoughts. Sony's AIBO is an example of how such an approach is welcome in pushing the borders of human machine interaction. We are on the cusp of confronting machines that have personality. While such personality is overtly designed in the case of entertainment robots, the logic of the machine itself and its more chaotic features may result in some unexpected moods. "Haptic Opposition" explores "moody" interaction between a machine and its users within a humorous setting. On a flat wooden box is mounted a slim LED display at eye level, which is movable horizontally. It shows a flow of text that contains philosophical thoughts, and travels to the left and right if there is no interaction. When a visitor arrives and starts pushing the display, it interrupts the machine's ability to continue displaying the text. The machine detects the force and resists the induced movement. Thus the visitor encounters the physical resistance of the machine. As the machine becomes annoyed it turns either nervous or aggressive, showing its will to keep on expressing its thoughts, eventually displaying its own program code. While the piece demonstrates an interesting approach to research on haptic interfaces, an important field in virtual reality and human interface research, its original approach and its sense of humour are significant for alife related art.

Jaime Del Val - Proyecto REVERSO
Morfogénesis
Spain

The physical body is enveloped within a magical visual and auditory dream world in this live performance work that blends electronic art, interactive dance, virtual architecture and electro acoustic sound. A dancer who is moving behind a transparent screen controls the real time generation of projected images and sounds. A camera picks up the dancer's movement, then this video is digitally processed and the resulting imagery is projected onto the screen showing the dancer's shape morphed within trails of coloured light. The software used recursively modifies and re-modifies the visual information tracked by the camera. Real and virtual space are brought together convincingly in this work by resisting the photorealism commonly found in virtual 3D environments. In fact the artist refuses the technological temptations of both spectacle and mystification, in favour of simplicity of movement and clarity of structure. Here the dancer moves in a constrained almost 2-dimensional plane that respects the projection screen. Whereas most interactive dance often leaves the viewer puzzled as to what effects the dancers are initiating, and why, at certain points in this piece floating wisps of colour and abstract shapes appear to be pulled and formed by the dancer's gestures. The moving body in Morfogénesis with its generic look and smooth flowing motion achieves a liquid integration with the transformed image of itself, a body in the process of constant becoming.

.

Diana Larrea
(in collaboration with Javier Velasco)
HAL
Spain

Diana Larrea has spent many years researching myths from the world of cinema and how they influence the social dimension. For example, Larrea has constructed models to recreate classic moments from time-honoured movies, including scenes from Planet of the Apes, and Goddard’s A Bout de Souffle. In the project presented to the jury of Life 6.0, this artist proposes to build a model of HAL, the famous artificial life entity from 2001: A Space Odyssey. With the aim of faithfully imitating the outer appearance of the authentic HAL, Larrea’s installation will consist of 13 television monitors set into a black, metallic structure. A variety of sensors controlled by a microprocessor and custom software will provide an interactive element to the installation. The software, to be developed by a company that constructs systems for intelligent buildings, will simulate HAL’s behaviour and allow for different kinds of interaction with the public. With this proposed remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Diana Larrea alludes to the myth of the creature that rebels against its creator. This universal myth has arisen in numerous narratives of classical mythology and in literature, including Oedipus and Frankenstein. In cinema, the notion of machines rising up against their maker has also become a recurrent theme, as can be seen in classic movies such as Metropolis, Terminator and Blade Runner. Diana Larrea proposes to show us how we now project this collective myth onto the world of artificial life.

INCENTIVE FOR INVESTIGATION (2.000 Euros)

Mario Humberto, Diego Bustamante y Ariel Bustamante
Cultivo
Colombia

The EXP media group proposes a robotic sculpture with contagious movements controlled by A-Life algorithms. The Jury decided to award 2.000 euros to this group so that they can continue developing and designing this proposal further.

HONORARY MENTION as a pioneering work

Theo Jansen
Artifauna

Since about ten years Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventualy he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.

MORE INFORMATION

A videotape of the ten winners will be produced and distributed to non-profit art centres, libraries and academic institutions. For this, please contact Ana Parga <fat@telefonica.es>.