Regine art in Madrid, robots, VIDA

Winners of the VIDA awards (Part 2)

Previously: Winners of VIDA 11.0 announced (part 1)

The second Prize of the VIDA competition was given to Performative Ecologies, a work by young artist, architect and too rare blogger Ruairi Glynn.

0aaruairirio.jpgPerformance Ecologies © Ruairi Glynn

0aaglynnnn.jpgPerformance Ecologies © Ruairi Glynn

Performative Ecologies is made of 4 independent ‘creatures’ that observe the public and dance for them. At the beginning of the exhibition, the creatures are rather dumb, they have little understanding of the way to move their heads and react to visitors. The only instinct they have is ‘to be looked at” so they search their environment for people. As soon as their camera has detected that someone is watching them, they start dancing in order to keep the attention on them. In the beginning, they perform randomly. As time passes however, the little machines learn which kind of dance is more successful with observers, they improve their movements and choreography. They become increasingly smart and informed.

The dancers learn and behave as individuals. In fact, they even compete with each other to get your attention. But they also form a community. When foreigners are out of the room, the dancers share what they have learnt. Just like what happens in real life, their relationships is based on mutual understanding but also on disagreement.

Glynn believes that his role is not to come up with a pre-choreographed set of ‘interactions’, he merely built an environment for these creatures and gave them the ability to develop their own individual personality. Instead of working on the usual action-reaction mode that characterizes many of the so-called ‘interactive installations’, Performative Ecologies evolves through a series of experiences that generate genuine and new information, unexpected results and multiple layers.

The third prize of the competition went to Chico MacMurtrie‘s Sixteen Birds.

0acchicquitit.jpgSixteen Birds © Chico McMurtrie

0aacchhihiihiho.jpgSixteen Birds © Chico McMurtrie

The inflatable robotic birds extend and move their wings in a coordinated flight-like motion as they sense the presence of visitors. But beware! If people come too close and in too high a number, the birds suffocate and deflate, as if deperishing. A strong environmentalist position is already implicit in the bio-mimetic shape of the birds, and is reinforced in other features of the work. For example, in the first exhibition of Sixteen Birds, the configuration of the sculptural group as a whole suggested the flow of the local river, threatened by over-development.

Ruair Glynn made a brilliant little video about the VIDA exhibition:

The list of Honorary Mentions is full of small jewels. Here’s just two of them:

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Meet the two robots of Sobra La Falta: the “dibujante” (sketcher) is in charge of drawing sketches on the floor using rubbish thrown on the floor by the audience. Dibujante collects the rubbish and arranges it on the floor to create a drawing of a stickman, a “@” symbol, or other iconic symbols. The second robot enters when the drawing is over. It’s the “barredor” (sweeper) and it will diligently undo the drawing by collecting the rubbish and storing it to one side. With this work, Argentine group Proyecto Biopus questions the point of creating a work of art using technology in a country like theirs, which has to face so many social problems.

0aaaaflsolfor.jpgAllison Kudla‘s Search for Luminosity stars six living shamrocks, arranged on a disc; an array of six lamps above, and in the center, a rotating custom optical scanner. Because it has a programmed memory, or an endogenous rhythm, the Oxalis plants open up their leaves in the morning in preparation for the sunrise. The scanner detects this movement and switches on the lamp for that plant. The plants have been prearranged such that they awaken in a clockwise sequence over 24 hours. The lighting of a lamp, based on the respective plants behavior, also switches off the lamp diametrically opposite, putting that plant to sleep. Viewers are therefore able to see in one look the plant in several periods of its cycle from fully awake to fully asleep. An ironic echo of those dreaful floral clocks found in old gardens.