For this installation we wanted to create a highly formalised room, all right angles, straight lines and consistent colours of blue, dark grey and white. VIDA’s crew of architects and builders put in a lot of effort for us to achieve this, and were also very helpful tweaking it according to our strange requests.

During the opening event and later on, it was interesting to see different types of visitor. The older, perhaps more contemporary art focused groups had an extremely short attention span and so were not really engaging with the work much. The younger visitors however were tending to stay longer, even logging in to Facebook in order to try the game (and alarmingly, sometimes leaving themselves logged in). I think the initial hook for this engagement were the slogans on the edges of the bookshelves – for future installations we need to consider different strategies for setting the scene, as it will need to change with different locations and contexts.

One of the great things about these events is meeting the other artists (and VIDA award winners) who were setting up and exhibiting their work – Paul Vanouse with Ocular Revision, Sebastian Muellauer and Toni Nottebohm with Protei and Verena Friedrich with Transducers. These projects are an interesting combination, with more finished and specifically designed for installation work (Ocular Revision, Transducers) mixing with the more in progress, or conceptual things like Naked on Pluto as software art, or Protei, which is a large collaborative project still very much in active development.

Session organised in collaboration with Fundación Telefónica.

WORKSHOP: Facesponge with Aymeric Mansoux and Gerald Kogler. 10h-14h

Have you ever wondered what is going on “behind the scenes” on social networks like Facebook? In this workshop we will explore our so-called social data and get a glimpse at how it is viewed by the company and third parties who access it. In order to break several myths about Facebook applications, you will be invited to take part in designing small programs that extracts and manipulate you and your friend’s online information. Nothing will be written back to Facebook at any time, we will only be reading existing data. No data will be collected or viewable by anyone else.

No programming experience is required. Basic knowledge of javascript can be useful to explore more advanced possibilities of the Facesponge sandbox.

This workshop is part of the Naked on Pluto project, a critical text adventure Facebook game concerned with issues of online privacy and control within centralized commercial social networks, designed and written by Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths.

Facesponge is developed in collaboration with Baltan Laboratories.
All Naked on Pluto software is released under free culture licenses.

Schedule:

* Naked on Pluto presentation
* Gameplay session
* Anatomy of an FB app
* Introduction to Facesponge
* Breaking FB apps myths
* Group discussion

Practical information:

* The workshop will be taught in English.
* You will need to bring your own laptop.
* Places are limited.

DEBATE: Identity and simulation. Artificial life on the networks. With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. 19h-21h

Internet is changing our way of understanding the public space. The Web has become a dominant structure that covers all aspects of contemporary society. The proliferation of virtual agents, designed to stimulate non-fortuitous reactions and meetings, reconfigures the profile of individuals in dynamics that are innovative but also invasive, and generates new forms of control. In this brand new context, identity and simulation become decisive themes of behaviour on the Web.

REGISTRATION:

Workshop + Debate: 6€
Please send an email explaining the reasons for your interest to cursos@cccb.org
Limited capacity!

Debate: 3€
Tel-entrada (tel. 902 101 212 / www.telentrada.com)
CCCB page for the event

In the last days Dave and the whole VIDA team are putting together the final bits of the installations. Come and check the result from the 16th of the 19th of this month.

My first approach was to write a scheme bricks representation for Javascript objects, and see how bits of the game looked if rendered in this way.

This is part of the ArrivalLobby, and all the internal information is present with no explanations, which is great, but it results in very large images. The next thing was to try filtering the objects to remove most of this information:

function node_filter()
{
    this.filter=function(obj)
    {
        return {objects:obj.objects.map(function(object) {
            return object.name;
        })};
    }
}

This code provides a single method for filtering locations in the game – it simply returns an object consisting of a list of names of things found at that location. These filters can be easily changed over time, to include different information or process it in different ways. Rendered with the same code as before, this makes the location diagrams much smaller:

Add a few more locations, put them together in a circular formation (the projection will be onto the floor space in the gallery), add some bezier curves to indicate paths between locations and it looks like this:

There is also some relatively complex jiggery-pokery to detect when bots have moved from one location to another and animate them. The moving bots display more detail including what they are wearing and who has ‘liked’ them. In this image you can see the AdverBot004 moving to the HelpDesk, and the HyperClock and GreenwichClock on the upper right as they move from the Palace Garden.

Dave will be presenting the story of Naked on Pluto on Wednesday the 9th November at Pixelache Helsinki. From it’s original inspirations, how we present issues of privacy via a game and some of the technical details behind it’s implementation. This talk will begin Pixelversity’s theme of ‘Social Identity, Augmented Reality & Virtuality’ initiated by Owen Kelly, which will explore digital tools, interfaces between public / private, personal / social & real / virtual. Pixelversity is the outreach & education programme of Pixelache Helsinki. Location: Cable Factory, Tallberginkatu 1 C 15 (Ruoholahti Metro) . More info here.

The VIDA Awards were created by Fundación Telefónica in 1999 to promote artistic creation based on new technologies and artificial life. A total of 198 projects from 36 countries entered into contest in this edition

The works will be showcased at Fundación Telefónica’s stand in ARCO 2012

Madrid 24th October 2011.- Fundación Telefónica announced the winners of the international contest VIDA 13.2, which has become a worldwide reference for artistic research on artificial life. The contest is a reflection of Fundación Telefónica’s commitment to the promotion of research in the field of art and new technologies.

The world-class jury, which consisted of Mónica Bello Bugallo, Director of VIDA
(Spain), Jens Hauser ( Germany/France), Karla Jasso (Mexico), Sally-Jane Norman (England), Simon Penny (USA/Australia), Neil Tenhaff (Canada) and Francisco Serrano Martínez (General Director of Fundación Telefónica), selected the winners of this edition among the 198 projects submitted by artists from 36 countries.

In this edition of the VIDA Awards, 51 of the entries were submitted from Spain (representing the highest number of Spanish projects submitted in relation to other editions), 18 were from Mexico, 17 from Argentina and Brazil, and 16 from the USA. For the first time, artists from Cyprus, Croatia, Estonia, and Tajikistan also entered the contest.

The projects awarded in this edition blend some of the classic formulations of the discipline, with the most revolutionary developments in biology and environmental sciences. The awarded proposals stand out for their eclecticism, the interest of the distributed and open creative processes, the experimentation with complex simulations in virtual and networked environments, the possibilities of experimenting with live dynamic systems, the application of new formal strategies by means of performance and the development through the prototype.

Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk and Dave Griffiths (Netherlands/England), were awarded with the VIDA 13.2 award for their Naked on Pluto project, an on line videogame that reflects on the invasive means used in the development of “social software”. The game starts when the user subscribes to the webpage of the project and accesses a city called “Elastic Versailles”, where a community of 57 animated bots interact with the player capturing the data of his/her Facebook account.

The game starts with a prolific textual exchange between the player and the computer, during which bots mix and muddle up data, faces, profiles, generating a framework of strangely familiar relationships. The complexity of the exchange increases as the game progresses. The player can only free him/herself from the “harassment” of the bots by resisting and waiting until their resources run out, or the logic of the plot loses all sense.

Naked on Pluto exposes the mechanisms that lead us to become the stars in a simulated and deceitful reality, not unusual in social networks, and which is becoming increasingly important in contemporary social habits.

Ocular Revision by Paul Vanouse (USA) obtained the second prize in VIDA 13.2. This installation comprises two symmetric circular images of the Earth, similar to satellite views that serve the purpose of examining the notion of “genetic maps”. The DNA of the E. Coli bacteria is inserted in these images, by means of an electrophoresis system prepared specifically for the work, which is located at the centre of the installation.

Two twin images show the movement of the gel along the perimeter of the circular maps, in such a way that the DNA segments arranged in images simulate the shape of the continents in the representation of the planet.

The project reflects on the variations that take place within the core of life sciences between the so-called biological and post-biological periods, being the former the one during which the cell is defined as the basic unit of life, and the latter when the attention focuses on a non-living component, the DNA, which is considered to be a code instead of a material substance. The artist considers that this is not an appreciation of scale, but a substantial change in the way we look at organic life, and therefore a cultural shift, a subject that he had already addressed in Relative Velocity Inscription Device, also showcased in VIDA in 2002.

Protei took third prize at VIDA 13.2. It is the work by artist and project promoter, Cesar Harada (Japan/France), who has launched a collective initiative to design an “open code navigation drone”.

The objective of Protei is the global, distributed, and interdisciplinary development and production of a series of self-governing ships equipped with a structure that acts in environmental disasters, especially in the case of oil spills. Launched after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Protei team seeks to spread these mechanisms in all the Earth’s seas, as a way of raising awareness and establishing a global alliance that promotes their regeneration and the removal of polluting materials and human waste.

This project illustrates the global concern about impending environmental disasters caused by humans, showing the confluence of science, design, art, environmental activism, and an open code ethic that believes that an interdisciplinary alliance is the way to improve our environment.

The prizes were shortlisted along with seven Honorary Mentions, which this year corresponded to the works That Which Lives in Me by Bulatov and Chebykin (Russia); Zoanthroid –a Hybrid Entity, a Technile Organism by Hardmood Beck (Germany); Oh!m1gas: biomimetric stridulation environment, by Shen (Ecuador); Intelligent Bacteria: Saccharomyces Cerevisiae by Togar Abraham, Nur Akbar Arofatullah, Agus Tri Budiarto and Vincensius Christiawan (Indonesia); Back, here, below, formidable [the rebirth of prehistoric creatures] by Humeau (France); Growth Pattern by Kudla (USA); and Transducers by Verena Friedrich (Germany).

In the category of Incentives to Production, which sponsors projects pending development by artists working in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, the awarded proposals were Concerto fotosintético (Photosynthetic Concert) by Pin Lage (Spain); Faith (Molding Faith – The Shape of the Signifier) by Czibulka and Ivor Diosi (Spain/Slovenia); Institute for the Studies of Biological Enigmas-Mar Menor Research by Clara Boj Tovar and Diego Diaz García (Spain); Territorio Exquisito (Exquisite Territory) by Pía Vásquez Cepeda (Chile/Mexico); Pixel Bite by Suárez Bárcena (Spain) and SPEAK by the artistic couple Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo Crescenti (Brazil).

Most of the look and feel has been based on the small research on state controlled newspapers and blogs, as well as propaganda poster strategies. The latter led to the repurposing and adaptation of more than 60, mostly Republic of China’s, slogans that are now used as straplines from the Naked on Pluto news site.

Next step now is to make some ads that match the different activities going on in Elastic Versailles, and work on the data that is gathered by the bots which are authoring this propaganda site.