organism: making art with living systems

Medialab-Prado is launching the latest of its increasingly successful interactivos? calls for the presentation of projects.

A maximum of 8 projects will be selected for their production in a workshop that will take place in Madrid on January  28 to February 14, 2009. Happy project leaders will count with the help of instructors, assistants and collaborators. Pending application, Medialab-Prado will provide lodging in a Youth Hostel for participants residing outside of the city. They will also cover travel expenses wholly or in part for one person per selected project.

The theme of this edition of Interactivos? is Garage Science and its keywords include: critical design, bio-art, mechanical devices, impossible machines, Rube Goldberg machines, pataphysic, free hardware, fabbing, recycling, biocomputing, biology, biohacking, biopunk, “license to fail”. Software, hardware, wetware! The selected projects will show innovative ways to make science, technology and art converge.

Now comes the best part: the Critical Art Ensemble will take part to the workshop.

Deadline for entries: December 14.

The Eleventh International Art and Artificial Life Competition VIDA 11.0
Accepting Entries until 6 October 2008. Last year they opened up their scope a bit and awarded the second prize to Symbiotica so i thought some organism readers might want to give it a try.

One of Telefónica Foundation’s main objectives is to promote the relationship between art and the new technologies. As a part of this goal, Telefónica Foundation is announcing the eleventh edition of the international VIDA competition to recognize artistic excellence in the field of artificial life and related disciplines.

The competition is open to art projects that explore the interaction between “synthetic” life and “organic” life as a reflection of the field of artificial life. 572 artists from 32 countries have participated in the ten previous editions and prizes have been awarded to more than 100 projects which included robots, electronic avatars, chaotic algorithms, cellular automats, computer viruses and virtual ecologies.

VIDA 11.0 will award a total of 80,000 euros to winning projects in two categories: one open to already-finished projects and another as an incentive for production in Ibero-America, Spain and Portugal. The winning works of art will be exhibited, as usual, at the Telefónica Foundation stand at ARCO.

The works of art submitted will be reviewed by an international panel made up by Mónica Bello Bugallo (Spain); Daniel Canogar (Spain); José Carlos Mariátegui (Peru); Sally Jane Norman (France-New Zealand); Simón Penny (United States-Australia) and Nell Tenhaaf (Canada). Terms and conditions of the competition, which is open to participants from all over the world, are available in Spanish, English, German, Portuguese, Korean and Chinese.

Entry Period: 15 June to 6 October 2008