youniverse

Sevilla, Granada
Bienal de Arte Contemporaneo de Sevilla

The Seville Biennial will be — indeed, cannot be otherwise today — a global Biennial. Contemporary art production is not restricted to Europe and North America (Euramerica), but takes place all over the globe, from Chile to Korea. The Biennial will make a new map of Global Art, World Art. The Biennial will try to initiate a shift of paradigm: from the Euramerican paradigm to the Eurasian and Eurabian paradigm. This could be achieved by addressing this shift through the specific aspect of media and technology, that technology is transreligious, transgender, transnational and transracial. ...
Peter Weibel


Beitrag von Christa Sommerer und Laurent Mignonneau
Life Writer, 2006 - Interactive Computer installation

Sommerer and Mignonneau’s interactive artworks have been called epoch making for developing natural and intuitive interfaces and for often applying scientific principles such as artificial life, complexity and generative systems to their innovative interface designs. Among their groundbreaking interactive computer installations like A-Volve [1] is Life Spaces11, 1999, an artificial life environment where on-site and remote visitors interact with each other to create artificial creatures via a text-to-form coding system. In this artwork, inputted text functions like genetic code and translates into visual creatures that then start “to live,” move around, duplicate, and eventually dissipate. [2] In 2005 Sommerer and Mignonneau created Life Writer a continuation of the Life Spaces 11 concept. Life Writer is an old-fashioned typewriter interface through which users can type text using the normal functions of the old-style typewriter which was transformed into an interface.

The typewriter is interactive and stands on an old-style table with a projection from above directly onto the paper of the type writer. When users write text on this typewriter, the text transforms into artificial life forms that appear on the real paper of the type writer as if they would directly emerge from the machine. The creatures will run around trying to frenetically find text to eat. When users type some more letter, the creatures will quickly snap it up and once they have eaten enough text they will reproduce and fill the whole paper. Creatures are programmed with genetic algorithms, so they are semi-autonomous and follow their own internal rules of metabolization and reproduction. The whole process of writing text through “Life Writer” has become a process of giving life to thoughts and have thoughts themselves evolve, escape and reconfigure.

In “Life Writer” text becomes alive and the system is designed to be very seamless, connecting the real with the virtual space. Life Writer is an extraordinary project, not only in the application of groundbreaking new technologies to sculptural form, but as an example of a totally new artform, one in which art becomes fused with “artificial life” forms and begins to evolve towards a “living” art form. Sommerer and Mignonneau’s creation and manipulation of fascinating visual images in an interactive environment where participants also engage in the act of creation raises fundamental questions about human interaction with increasingly “intelligent” machines and possible levels of human-machine symbiosis

Book: 387 pages, with pictures
Publisher: Biacs
Published: 2008
Language: English
Legal Deposit: M-45200-2008