Matt Kenyon has merged two pets into one design.
With his Tardigotchi artwork, the School of Visual Arts new media assistant professor has linked a microorganism to an “artificial life avatar,” Kenyon said.
After submitting his artwork to a competition sponsored by Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica (FILE), the project won first place in the Digital Language category of the international FILE Prix Lux competition.
Kenyon said the banquet for award winners, held in Brazil, felt like being at the Academy Awards.
Kenyon said he worked with Douglas Easterly and Tiago Rorke to develop the project.
He said Tardigotchi received its name from the Japanese “pocket pets,” which were toys for children.
“It’s similar to that except it’s a brass sphere, and inside of this sphere there’s a microorganism and there is also an artificial life avatar,” Kenyon said. “The little creature that lives inside is a water bear… They look like little gummy bears that move around — they’re really cute. One millimeter is as big as they get.”
He said that the artwork was made using digital fabrication tools to connect the real life to the artificial life.
“A big part of the project is social networking. The Tardigotchi has a Facebook page, and you can friend him and keep up to date with what’s going on in his life,” Kenyon said. “You hit this button to play with it and feed it, and when you feed the artificial life, the real life gets fed.”
Kenyon said the main reason the water bear was selected as the microorganism is because it hibernates for up to 100 years if it is not given food or water.
“We’re not too worried if something bad happens,” he said. “It might even outlast us.”
But Facebook is not the only social networking device that can be used with the project, Kenyon said.
He said the artwork is also connected to mobile phones with Android technology. SharkArm Studios Programmer Curt Kling developed the Android applications for the Tardigotchi.
“[There are] buttons that send information to a server telling it if a user can feed it at a certain point or play with it and that is interpreted by the physical part of the piece,” Kling (junior-computer science) said.
Though Kling said he didn’t have much influence on the development of the artwork, he said it “feels good” to be a part of a first place award-winning project.
“It’s a really good project that shows how something digitally can also affect the real world, so I just thought it was cool to be a part of it,” he said.