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).