Dear friends, if you are in Madrid this week come to visit the exhibition of VIDA 13.2 showcasing some of the projects awarded in the last edition of the Art and Artificial Life International Awards. You will find us at the Fundacion Telefonica stand at Arco Madrid.
Naked on Pluto, by Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths (First Prize) Naked on Pluto proposes a playful yet disturbing online game world, developed with Free/ Libre Open Source Software, which parodies the insidiously invasive traits of much social software. The city of Elastic Versailles is animated by the quirky combinatorial logics of a community of fifty seven AI bots that glean Facebook data from subscribers to the game. Players attempt to override the game's restrictions, teaming up in order to ultimately crash and escape from the system. Disconcertingly familiar faces and information from one's personal and associated profiles are indiscriminately blended in a brash prosumer landscape which, like the original Versailles, is designed for promotional parades of inseparable personal and ideological attributes. Naked on Pluto caricatures the proliferation of virtual agents that harvest our personal data to insidiously reshape our online environments and profiles, highlighting the ambivalent hallmarks of major social networks. Ocular Revision by Paul Vanousse (Second Prize) The uniqueness of this provocative live installation lies in the biotechnological creation of DNA images that are radically different from the abstracted banding patterns now familiar from media images. Ocular Revision turns this “genetic mapping” on its head, remediating it in the sense of both restoration and opposition. Vanouse proposes a return to the more holistic view of biology that was promoted within the sciences prior to the late twentieth century characterization of DNA as code. His technical strategy was to build an entirely novel circular (rather than rectangular) gel electrophoresis apparatus. It still uses electrical current to pull DNA through the gel; here, the DNA moves not across linearly, but from the perimeter toward the centre of the rig. Segments from E.Coli DNA are selectively processed so that, in the gel, they coalesce into images resembling hemispheric pictures of the earth’s continents. Ocular Revision is exhibited in the form of twin circular projection screens that show time-lapse footage of the creation of these unorthodox maps. Protei by Cesar Harada (Third Prize) Protei is an open source sailing drone, is an ambitious, open and distributed interdiscipilinary design project directed at an issue of global environmental concern – ocean oil spills and the limitations and toxicity of conventional clean up methods. The goal of Protei is the development and production of autonomous sailing vessels which trail long oil-absorbent tails behind them. Protei thus combines ‘green’ motivations, a net-distributed collaborative design process, and an open source ethos with a conception of autonomous machine agency. Instigated by Cesar Harada after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Protei involves an international network of specialists. The project has developed a number of sailing prototypes and several unique innovations in naval architecture. Protei blurs distinctions between science, design, art, environmental activism and political activism. Transducers by Verena Friedrich (Honorary Mention) This installation, which mimics the machinery and procedures of bioscientific research, consists of a set of custom-made tubular glass devices suspended vertically at eye-level from a metal rod construction that supplies power. The core component of each of the glass housings, staged so that observers can move between them and experience them from all angles, is a single human hair. Each of these glass "transducers" also contains a set of minute mechanical devices, comprised of a trigger and a reader made of customised printed circuit boards equipped with electronic components, and the means to produce audible vibratory output based on the capillary DNA reading from the hair. The biological specimens thus generate a soundscape where uniquely individual vibrations can be heard by deambulating amongst the transducers contributing to this human hair polyphony. Visitors can offer their own encoded samples for future showings, registering their donations in a consultable archive. Hair as a repository of identity is literally instrumentalised in this pseudo-scientific aesthetic mantra. Mónica Bello Artistic Director of VIDA Art and Artificial Life International Awards www.fundaciontelefonica.org/vida
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