Jason Van Anden - The Smile Project

Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon, San Jose Museum of Art

Neil and Iona are currently at the San Jose Musuem of Art in Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon, which examines the development of robot iconography in fine art over the past 50 years. Curated by JoAnne Northrup, Robots includes the work of Clayton Bailey, Chris Cunningham, Feric, Nemo Gould, Amy Hicks, Eric Joyner, Chico MacMurtrie, Mars-1, Michael McMillen, Michael Mew, David Pace, Nam June Paik, Alan Rath, Michael A. Salter, Lisa Solomon, Jeff Soto, H.C. Westermann, Gail Wight, Kow Yokoyama, and Thomas Zummer.

Robots runs from April 12th through October 19th, 2008 and will coincide with the Zero1 Festival which takes place at the Museum and all over San Jose June 4th-8th. Neil and Iona made possible thanks to the generous support of the Finishing Fund. You can read more about Robots in the The San Jose Mercury News.

BubbleBeats

BubbleBeats is Online

Have you ever considered what life would be like if every time you listened to your favorite music it sounded amazing but different? Even if you haven't, BubbleBeats.com offers you this new musical reality. Leveraging the technology he invented to give Neil and Iona improvisational behavior, BubbleBeats is software for creating an entirely new form of living music. BB began when Jason Van Anden and musician Nat Hawks met by chance and discovered they shared a common interest in accidential art. Jason modified his software for Nat to create music with, Nat was so pleased with the outcome that he invited nine other musicians to experiment with it. This led to an interactive CD titled "Compiled" and performances at Monkeytown in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. BubbleBeats.com lets anyone in the world share and create their own kalediscopic musical experience.

ASCII Chewy

Creatures

The internet is full of artificial life, as you surf the web you might happen upon some of these invented beings. Or you could visit www.folly.co.uk/creatures, where we have brought together the work of six artists who have created their own virtual creatures for you to play with. These creatures all live in cyberspace, where you can pet, tease, manipulate and connect with them. Once you've visited and fallen for these creatures, you can talk about them in folly's specially created online forum.

ASCII Chewy at folly.co.uk
ASCII Chewy at The Smile Project.

BubbleBeats^®

What do you get when you combine probabilistic programming paradigms, computers with feelings and an entire generation of the gifted and talented raised on video games? BubbleBeats started off as an invention to create dynamic improvisational behavior to be used by robotic sculptures such as Neil and Iona (above). It has evolved into an aural social network of sorts which enables pretty much anyone to create and share a new form of kalidescopic music online. IntelligentDesigner® (ID) is software that enables pretty much anyone to control things in an uncontrollable way. Invented to provide improvisational behavior for life-size emotive robots Neil and Iona, its current iteration can be used to easily create multilayered living music from sound samples.

Eleven amazing musicians each created new compostions with IntelligentDesigner that were presented for the very first time at MonkeyTown in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The show was a blast - a software CD titled Compiled will be available as a limited edition soon - in the meantime follow the link below to check images taken at the show.

Pictures from Monkeytown