Vida3
dal 9/7/2000 al 28/9/2000
Segnalato da
9/7/2000
Vida3
Fundacion Telefonica, Madrid
LIFE 3.0 is the first international competition seeking to reward excellence in artistic creation that has embedded in it the practices of Artificial Life (A-life). We are looking for art works that are premised on the strategies of A-life research, its conceptual approaches as well as its methods of digital synthesis.
LIFE 3.0 is the first international competition seeking to reward
excellence in artistic creation that has embedded in it the practices of
Artificial Life (A-life). We are looking for art works that are premised
on the strategies of A-life research, its conceptual approaches as well
as its methods of digital synthesis.
At the end of this century we are facing redefined boundaries between
humans, animals and inorganic life. Some of the markers which
already signal our "post-human condition" are genetic interventions,
simulations of evolutionary systems and emergent behaviours,
nanotechnologies, surgical implants of machinic parts, the
implementation of automated systems of data capture and control.
We're interested in art that reflects upon the panorama of potential
interaction between synthetic "life" and organic life, for example:
- autonomous agents that shape and perhaps interpret the
data-saturated environment we have in common.
- portraits of intersubjectivity or empathy, shared between artificial
entities and us.
- intelligent anthropomorphising of the datasphere and its inhabitants.
- user-defined exploration and interaction that is designed to mitigate
fear and enhance curiosity in the face of emergent phenomena, which
are by definition beyond our control.
The international jury will grant awards to the most outstanding
electronic art projects employing techniques such as digital genetics,
autonomous robotics, recursive chaotic algorithms, knowbots,
computer viruses, avatars and virtual ecosystems.
Money prizes totalling US $10,000 will be awarded to three projects
selected by the jury:
1st Prize: US $5,000
2nd Prize: US $3,500
3rd Prize: US $1,500
There will also be 7 honorary mentions selected by the jury
Each project must be entered in the form of video documentation with
voice-over narration describing the artistic concept and technological
realization of the project submitted. The length of the video should be
between 5 and 10 minutes. The jury's decision will be based primarily
on the video documentation.
The competition requires a VHS tape (NTSC, PAL or SECAM) for
the jury to view. If the work is awarded a monetary prize or selected
for an honorary mention, a broadcast-quality copy of the videotape
will be requested (Betacam or 3/4 inch U-Matic) to produce a "Best
of LIFE 3.0 Video".
The competition is open to participants all over the world. Each
participant may enter only one work.
To enter, read the competition rules carefully, fill out and sign the
application form and enclose it along with the videotape to the
Fundación Telefónica by September 28, 2000.
For the LIFE 3.0 video documentation and website, we will also need
the following material:
- a short biography of the author(s) 150-200 words
- a description of the concept of the project
- technical information on the project
- 1 to 3 still images (slides or prints)
Please refer to the application form which outlines all the material
necessary for entry into the competition.
The entries will be judged by an international jury meeting in Madrid in
October 12 2000. The prize winners and honorary mentions will be
announced October 16, 2000 at a roundtable discussion with all the
jury members present. The jury's decision is final.
Jury Members and Short Biographies:
Nell Tenhaaf, Canada (Chair)
An electronic media artist and writer based in Toronto. She has
exhibited across Canada, in the U.S. and in Europe, and has
published numerous reviews and articles, most recently in Leonardo
Digital Salon Issue, Fall 1998, and in Immersed in Technology: Art
and Virtual Environments (The Banff Centre and MIT Press, 1996).
Her textual and visual work addresses the cultural implications of new
technologies, focusing on how digital representation links art practice
to the biosciences and to Artificial Life. Her recent work has also
been influenced by the Internet. She is an Assistant Professor in the
Visual Arts department of York Univerity.
Daniel Canogar, España
Born in Madrid in 1964. After finishing his degree in Image from the
Complutense University of Madrid in 1987, he goes on to complete a
Masters in Fine Arts from New York University. During his studies in
New York, he begins to experiment with different media, especially
sculpture, performance and critical theory; however the photographic
installation becomes his favourite medium. In 1992 he publishes the
book "Ciudades Efimeras: Exposiciones Universales, Espectaculo y
Tecnologia", a study on the architecture of spectacle in world
expositions. In 1993, he teaches "Virtual Reality: Social Impact and
Artistic Applications" as a summer course in the University of El
Escorial, Spain. Since then, he has taught numerous courses, seminars
and workshops on art and new technologies. In the last few years he
has been working with fiber optic cables as a means to project digital
photography. Works such as "Alien Memory", "Sentience" o "Bringing
Down the House" explore the paradoxical presence of the human
body in a digital environment. Daniel Canogar has shown his artwork
in galleries and museums in Spain, France, Holland, Germany,
Canada, Venezuela and United States.
Joe Faith, UK
Researcher in philosophy at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
Co-organiser of the fourth European Conference on Artificial Life.
Curator of the "Like Life" exhibition of science-art collaborations.
Organiser of "Real Life" lectures in contemporary biology. Invited
Lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Art, "Fashioning Science"
event. Invited Lecturer at the University of Brighton, MA Fine Art.
Machiko Kusahara, Japan
Machiko Kusahara is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at
Kobe University Graduate School of Science and Technology in
Japan. Her papers in media theory are included in "The Robot in the
Garden" (edited by Ken Goldberg, MIT Press, 2000) and
"Art@Science" (edited by Christa Sommerer and Laurent
Mignonneau, Springer, 1997) among others. She has curated many
exhibitions internationally in the field of computer graphics and
animation, multimedia, virtual reality and alife while playing a major
role in the planning of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of
Photography and NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), and
serving as a program committee member for ALIFE IV and other
international conferences. Kusahara has been an on-line/off-line jury
member for competitions including the Interactive Media Festival
('94,'95), MILIA ('95,'96), Ars Electronica ('97 to '99), UNESCO
Web Prize ('98,'99), SFMOMA Webby Award (2000) and other
international competitions.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Mexico/Canada
Media artist, works in teleabsence, technological theatre, installation
and performance art. His work has been shown in over a dozen
countries, including the Musée d'art contemporain (Montreal), Ars
Electronica 92 and 97 (Linz), the ARCO art fair (Madrid), the Museo
de Monterrey (México), the European Media Art Festival
(Osnabrück), Experimental Intermedia (New York), Karlstad
University (Sweden), Music Gallery (Toronto), Musée du Québec
(Québec), Bienale Film+Arc (Graz) and SIGGRAPH'93 (Anaheim).
Sally Jane Norman, France/Aotearoa (New Zealand)
Cultural theorist/practitioner, holder of a Doctorat de IIIe cycle and a
Doctorat d'Etat (Universite de Paris III) in theatre studies. Director of
the International Symposium on New Images and Museology at the
Louvre (1993) and of technology-focused performance workshops at
the International Institute of Puppetry, Charleville-Mezieres; Centre
Interculturel de Pratiques, Recherches et Echanges Transdisciplinaires
(CYPRES), Aix-en-Provence; Zentrum fur Kunst und
Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karlsruhe. European ESPRIT i3 project
coordinator for the ZKM; co-organiser of the TOUCH festival at
STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music), Amsterdam,
December 1998. Currently, she is the director of the Angoulême site
of the Ecole supérieure de l'image in France.
If your work is awarded a monetary prize or selected for an honorary
mention, a broadcast quality copy of your videotape will be required
to produce a "Best of LIFE 3.0 Video" which will be aired on
specialty television programs and circulated at festivals worldwide.
The idea behind the production of a first rate video is to bring together
and showcase the prize-winning art projects specifically contemplating
the subject of A-life. The video will be edited after the jury has made
its selection and authors whose work appears in it will receive a
complimentary copy.
The video will not be on sale and no profit will be made on it. Authors
whose work appears in the video will be properly credited. Please see
the section RIGHTS for more information.
Participants grant the organizers of LIFE 3.0, the Fundación
Telefónica, the rights of use to present the submitted video and other
entered material for the following purposes:
- In order to publicize the competition in printed media, TV, radio and
via network.
- To be shown on the official LIFE 3.0 website and on the Fundación
Telefónica website.
- For inclusion in a "Best of LIFE 3.0 Video" to be produced after the
jury has met.
The organizers of the competition are under obligation to the
participants to use the entries only in the above described form. Any
commercial use is prohibited.
Participants are required to obtain the necesary licenses for material
used from third parties in their submitted work.
All artistic and commercial rights are retained by the participant of the
competition.
Thursday, September 28, 2000: Deadline for applications
October 12 - 15, 2000: Jury meets in Madrid
October 16, 2000: Announcement of winners and roundtable
discussions
The following are the LIFE 2.O first competition winners . These are
examples of the type of art works which would be eligible for this
competition.
"Tickle" is a beautifully designed and crafted autonomous robot that
navigates the surface of the body on its rotating rubber-padded
wheels, run by finite state software and tickling as it goes. It knows to
avoid slopes that are too steep, but its "smartness" is also in its
tongue-in cheek acknowledgement of the kinds of accoutrements that
are the promise of an encroaching but ever-elusive cybernetic future.
"La Cour des Miracles" is a dystopic portrait of the future turned past,
a hall full of clanging dysfunctional robots that refer to the occupants of
a medieval cripples and beggars' court. The robotics of these two
works meet criteria of a-life research in their claiming of space, which
is fundamental to all life forms (La Cour), and perfect autonomous
adaptation to environment (Tickle). Moreover, their life-likeness elicits
feelings that range from a strong sense of empathy to revulsion.
"Bomb" is an instance par excellence of the capacity of a-life
algorithms to computationally generate imagery in such a direct way
that the user can experientially grasp some a-life principles without
even knowing it. Its pixel patterns, which are constantly in formation
and can be driven by sound and/or by the keyboard, are generated by
custom software built from non-linear iterated systems. Bomb is also a
"visual parasite", growing versions and offshoots, downloadable onto
virtually any platform and with its source code available to other
programmers.
Marc Böhlen and Michael Mateas, USA, for "Office Plant", a
desktop sculpture that is an instance of "intimate technology": a robotic
plant that responds in slow rhythmic motion to data fed in from its
owner's monitored e-mail activity.
Gérard Boyer, France, for "Machine Palmipède", a truly abject
machine creature, a kind of anti-robot in that it is all body, a headless
flippered gearbox body tragically attached to its power source and
flailing about blindly on its stage.
Troy Innocent, Australia, for "Iconica" which is an interactive, evolving
world constructed from a customised language of icons and symbols
designed by the artist. Users can communicate with entities that they
build in the world, which also evolves through connectivity to a web
site.
Diane Ludin, Ricardo DomÃnguez, Fakeshop, USA, for "Genetic
Response System", a website whose artificial life form is a Viroid that
seeks out information on genetic developments such as the flow of
biotechnology stocks or the current state of DNA harvesting in the
Human Genome Project.
Simon Penny and Jamieson Schulte, Australia/USA, for "Sympathetic
Sentience Three", a developing audio installation made up of a
community of chirping, communicating, units, creating an ambient
ecology which responds to the movements of the audience.
Asa Unander-Scharin, for "The Lamentations of Orpheus", an
installation whose compelling aesthetic relies on the sophistication of
its principal element, an industrial robot whose choreographed
movements are attuned to music from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo.
Doris Vila, for "A Flock of Words", an audio-visual performance
created in collaboration with composer Robert Rowe, in which words
from Elias Canetti flock like birds whose motion is algorithmically
triggered by the music of a live ensemble.
At the public presentation on February 1st of Life 2.0 competition
results in Madrid, we screened a number of groundbreaking works
and techniques from a-life. In particular, "Technosphere" by Jane
Prophet, Gordon Selley and Mark Hurry, one of the first examples of
an online a-life ecosystem, received a special mention for pioneering
work in the area.
The VIDA 3.0 / LIFE 3.0 Competition is made possible by the
Fundación Telefónica of Madrid, Spain:
Roberto Velázquez MartÃn, Managing Director
LIFE 3.0 Artistic Director:
Nell Tenhaaf
Original Concept and Organizers:
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Susie Ramsay
Coordinator:
Ana Parga
For questions concerning theme, links, bibliography and eligibility of
entries:
Nell Tenhaaf tenhaaf@yorku.ca
All other inquiries:
Ana Parga fat@telefonica.es
Ana Parga
VIDA 3.0 / LIFE 3.0
International Competition 2000
Fundación Telefónica
Gran VÃa, 28. 2ª planta
28013 Madrid, Spain
Tel: 34 91 548 3728
Fax: 34 91542 7412
The entry form can be downloaded from here evida3impreso.html or
sent to you by mail or fax by requesting it here fat@telefonica.es