The Jury for the Life 3.0 Art and A-Life competition –Daniel Canogar,
Joe Faith, Machiko Kusahara, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Sally Jane Norman and
Nell Tenhaaf– reviewed 40 artworkss that utilise artificial life
concepts and techniques. These pieces were pre-selected from a group of
61 submissions received from 14 countries.

The winners of the Life 3.0 competition include two interactive
sculptural art works –the first prize awarded to "Autopoiesis" by Ken
Rinaldo and the third prize going to Ken Feingold's "Head"– and a
screen-baased work called "The Appearance Machine" by Willy LeMaitre and
Eric Rosenveig, which obtained both the second prize and the public's
choice award. The two sculptural works are based on sophisticated
materialisations of Alife principles and they both rely on human
intervention to "come alive", while The Appearance Machine ironically
veils the servomechanisms used in generating it.

Ken Rinaldo's networked robotic sculpture Autopoiesis involves viewers
in a subtle and fluid interaction that manifests as a cybernetic ballet.
It consists of fifteen robotic sculptures whose form has been derived
from grapevines, and these friendly shapes respond to the presence of
the public both in their movements and through sound. A system of smart
sensors detects a viewer's location, which first affects the behaviour
of the closest sculptures and then also modifies the whole group as they
exchange data serially in a process of constantly evolving collective
behaviour. A voyeuristic element is inserted through tiny cameras on the
ends of the robots that project their imagery onto the walls of the
room. The interface and the evolution of the system are both clearly
understandable and contribute to a strong sculptural aesthetic.
Meanwhile, the subsumption architecture underlying the work is key to
Alife robot-building, and here it is innovatively used to structure the
whole system's individual and also group behaviour.

Willy LeMaitre and Eric Rosenveig's The Appearance Machine, the winner
of the second prize, is an autonomous system for the continual
transformation of input, made up of locally gathered detritus, into
"global media" output in the form of a live video/audio stream. The
system is composed of cameras controlled by motors, a spinning and
vibrating platform holding bits of garbage that form a sort of virtual
landscape, and a computer that analyses the camera imagery of the
landscape. The computer data established a soundtrack, which is then fed
back into the system as further instructions for its behaviour.
Servomotors activate the lights, fans and vibrators on the set. The
feedback loops among all aspects of the system are the embodiment of its
networked intelligence: "the machine invents in continuous response to
its self-created accidents." Not only is this a kind of Bachelor Machine
in its perpetual and solitary activity, but in its understated way
subverts the industrial entertainment complex it is designated to mimic.
The machine is physically located in New York City, but virtually it
extends to whatever site it is networked into. The piece received the
largest number of votes from the public at the presentation of the
candidates and thus is also the public's choice award.

One of the qualities we are seeking in art works is a certain critical
distance from the tools and techniques they employ, and the social
contexts in which these tools and techniques are habitually
unquestioningly used. As science and industry target the Bigger, the
Better, the Faster, art has an increasingly vital role to play, offering
a unique place for reflection, interrogation, irrational prospection -
some people call this dreaming - and doubt. A-life's development of
humanoid agents is driven by the desire to optimise human simulation, to
develop streamlined, reliable counterparts to facilitate and enhance our
lives. Third prize winner Ken Feingold, with his freak-show Head,
chooses rather to explore the zones of non-response, of mischief and
misbehaviour, or distortion, of scrambled and failed communication. The
Head makes us question the basis of everyday dialogue we tend to take
for granted: how far is our exchange with others conditioned and limited
by our own, thoroughly encoded eccentricities, our own programmed bugs
and quirks? When indeed true communication occurs, how much is this just
a matter of chance?

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Honorary Mentions

Sandlines, by the Australian artist Paul Brown, is a quiet and
minimalist computer-based piece that uses cellular automata to drive a
changing pattern of tiles. The result is a simple but very beguiling
network of lines that wrap and unwrap, knot and weave, drawing the
viewer in. The jury was impressed by how Paul Brown managed to create so
much visual interest from such simple elements, and also by how he had
re-thought and re-presented one of the oldest and most familiar Alife
technologies. Cellular automata, such as Conway's Game of Life, have
been used for 30 years to model the emergence of macroscopic order in
living systems, and are a basic part of any Alife scientist's toolbox.
But the artist has managed to throw a new light on such systems by using
them to manipulate tiles patterned with connected lines. The result is
not only visually compelling but also of genuine interest to scientists
working in the field.

Beneath the real, physical floor that people are standing on there
exists a virtual world alive with small creatures. In El Ball del
Fanalet - Lightpools by Perry Hoberman, Roc ParEs and Narcis ParEs,
participants discover and interact with such a virtual world. As if
lighting up the surface of a pond with a lantern and finding a fish,
participants can find the virtual creatures with the Fanalet, can
nurture them and train them to dance until they start dancing by
themselves. The Jury appreciated the matching scale of the virtual and
real worlds, creating the social quality of the piece, where human
participants seem as artificial as the synthetic creatures they share
space with.

The Institute of Applied Autonomy is located in one of the hottest spots
on the planet for robotics development. This anonymous group of leading
R&D figures has crafted a number of major Alife breakthroughs.
Pamphleteer, alias Little Brother, offers an eminently pragmatic
solution to a key issue facing the development of information and
communication technologies: how to effectively communicate strategic
data to the huge populations currently deprived of Internet access. How
to cater to the offline world. Little Brother's low-end design tackles
this problem ingeniously: as a neighbourhood presence, the Pamphleteer
is a benign agent whose qualities lie somewhere between those of the
friendly local police officer, and the ice-cream vendor. He thus
productively breaks with ominous surveillance robot culture. But we
shouldn't be fooled by this whimsical surface: Little Brother occupies a
distinct socio-ideological niche, defined by well-planned social
strategy. His deceptive street-corner innocence makes him the perfect
communications vehicle for new forms of activism, feeding vital
information to whole population sectors previously untouched by
propaganda and subversive issues.

The centrepiece of Genesis, by the Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac, is an
artificial living creature, in this case a bacteria that glows when
illuminated in ultraviolet light, of the kind routinely used in
biotechnology experiments. Into this organism the artist has inserted a
scrap of DNA whose sequence is a translation of the passage from the
Bible where God grants Man control over nature. The resulting mutant is
then presented in a petri dish like a holy relic: the word of God
embodied in flesh. Genesis is a complex and conceptually difficult work
that plays on our fears about the power of biotechnology, about the
threat it poses to our own biology, and the changing relationship of
control we have over nature. But it also points to an alternative, since
the artist has also made it possible for the audience to use the
Internet to induce mutations in the carefully genetically engineered
bacteria. The illusion of biotechnological control is never absolute.

Genetically speaking, we are all designed with the alphabet of Nature,
the letters of our DNA code. This is a key concept that bridges real
life and Alife. In Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau's Life
Spacies II, an artistic representation of the way life is related to
information, participants can send texts over the Internet to eventually
design virtual creatures that live in a virtual world. Users can see how
different texts or letters result in a difference in body structure and
behaviour of the creatures. Users can also feed creatures with letters,
because each creature can "eat" letters that are already included in
their genetic code. This piece provides us with an arena for
entertaining and educational collaborative experience over the Net.

Modelling human emotions or at least capturing human emotions as an
element in a machinic interaction, also called Emotional Computing, is
an area with some recent pubic visibility. The challenge of modelling
emotional states and emotional behaviours within virtual entities is
taken up in Japanese artist Naoko Tosa's Unconscious Flow. The piece is
highly entertaining because of the engaging animated mermaid and merman
characters that are used as agents or surrogates for the human
participants. The interface in this work, which involves tracking
heartbeat and hand motion in water, is somewhat challenging to read
because one's own emotional state is not readily understood in relation
to what biosensors may be gathering physiologically. Also, the
synchronization of emotional state between two viewers is what is being
measured and for relaxation and level of interest. This work raises some
provocative questions as it diverts and amuses us.

Although most of the videotapes received for the Life competition are
documentation of art works in various media, ranging from sculpture
through Web art through audio, some are works in themselves. In
Australian Linda Wallace's video art work Love Hotel, the medium is used
to great effect in that it merges imagery taken directly from the Net,
including some chat line and e-mail texts, with footage of the
contemporary urban environment. Love Hotel is a narrative about a
virtual character whose life is on the Net. She is Gash Girl, the
creation of Francesca da Rimini –a well-known Net activist with VNS
matrix. In this beautifully textured video work, Wallace is stepping
into the character oof Gash Girl, then setting up a two-way flow between
her experiences in cyberspace and in real space. The interest of the
work is in its evocation of parallels between these two spaces, and
experiences one can have in them: constant flow of images,
globalization, identity confusion, sexual adventures.