Just learned that Sniff received a special mention from this years Vida Awards.

VIDA 12.0 rewards works of art developed with artificial life technologies and related disciplines: robotics, artificial intelligence, etc. It is looking for works of art with emerging behaviours, which evolve over time, react with their environment and seem to have a life of their own. VIDA 12.0 is searching projects that relate technology with biology and that research synthetic characteristics of modern life.
In previous editions, prizes have been awarded to artistic projects created with robots, avatars, recursive chaotic algorithms, knowbots, cellular automata, computer viruses, virtual ecologies that evolve with user interaction, interactive architectures, augmented reality pieces and works that explore the social aspects of A-life.

Sniff will be a part of the Emergence exhibition and DAC09, Digital Arts and Culture conference at the Beall Center for Art and Technology in Irvine, CA

Emergence: Art and Artificial Life — Dec 12

Time: 6:30 – 9:00pm

Location: Beall Center for Art + Technology

Utilising Artificial Intelligence and genetic programming techniques, custom electronics, robotic and sculptural aspects, the featured works by international artists represent the current state of work in the interdisciplinary field of Artificial Life Art.

Since the early 1990’s, Artificial Life theory and technology has been a constant interest in the media art community. Works concerned with these ideas are common in the media art landscape, yet they are seldom identified as such. The VIDA prize for artificial life art, sponsored by Telefonica for the last decade, is a rare exception. The three artists in Emergence have been represented in VIDA, two of the works in Emergence were prizewinners. Each of these works offers an insight into a different dimension if Artificial Life Art.

• Propagaciones by Leo Nuñez (Argentina) is a sculptural realisation of one of the icons of artificial life, the cellular automaton. In Propagaciones, separate electro-mechanical sculptural ‘cells’ stimulate each other into mutual action, creating propagating patterns across the field.
• The Universal Whistling Machine, by Marc Böhlen and J.T. Rinker deploys AI techniques to present an amusing take on machine intelligence. Whistle to it and it will whistle back a tune in response, composed on the spot. It has been known to have extended exchanges with a canary.
• Performative Ecologies, by Ruairi Glynn consists of a trio of ‘dancing fools’ – devices that seek to demonstrate the most pleasing dance they can devise. The devices use gaze tracking with infra-red camera to determine how attenttive their audience is while performing each dance. In downtime, they breed new dances using genetic algorithms on dances determine to be most attractive, producing new dances to be tried out on the audience and shared with their fellows.
• Sniff, by Karolina Sobeck and Jim George is a virtual puppy which interacts with viewers via machine vision. Sniff has sophisticated animation (using Unity game engine) and persuasive behavior modelling, identifying both ‘primary’ and ’secondary’ interactants.”

http://dac09.uci.edu/events.php#emergence

http://www.beallcenter.uci.edu/calendar/0910.php

The show opens December 12th and is up until June 2010.