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SHARED FIRST & SECOND PRIZE

Erwin Driessens, María Verstappen
Tickle
Holland

"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.

Bill Vorn, Louis Philippe Demers
La Cour des Miracles
Canada

"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.

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Scott Draves
Bomb
USA

"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.

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Marc Böhlen, Michael Mateas
Office Plant
USA

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.

Gerard Boyer
Machine Palmipède
France

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
Icónica
Australia

"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 Domínguez, Fakeshop
Genetic Response System
USA

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, Jamieson Schulte
Sympathetic Sentience Three
Australia /USA

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
The Lamentations of Orpheus
Sweden

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
A Flock of Words
USA

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.

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Jane Prophet, Gordon Selley, Mark Hurry
Technosphere
United Kingdom

One of the first examples of an online a-life ecosystem.
http://www.technosphere.org.uk