Tardigotchi

Tardigotchi is an artwork featuring two pets: a living organism and an alife avatar. These two disparate beings find themselves the unlikely denizens of a portable computing enclosure. In one half of the brass sphere is the alife avatar depicted on an LED screen, and in the other half is a tardigrade which lives within a prepared slide.

A tardigrade is a common microorganism measuring half a millimeter in length. The alife avatar is a caricature of this tardigrade. Its behavior is partially autonomous, but it also reflects a number of the tardigrade’s expressions that are derived from daily activities like eating.

This portable sphere playfully references the famous Tamagotchi toy from the 1990’s. What is interesting about this toy is how it encourages pet-owner behavior through a device that is ostensibly more like a cell phone than a Chartreux. Does simple interaction engender emotional attachment? Can feelings of affection blossom from the ritual of assisting the persistence of a pattern? Does biological life make a difference?

A Tardigotchi owner tends to the real and a virtual creatures simultaneously. By pushing a button, the virtual pet is fed, which in turn will feed the tardigrade. Tardigotchi has a social web presence: Sending an email to the virtual character triggers a heating lamp that relays a momentary signal of warmth to the tardigrade. At the same time, the pixelated tardigrade is prompted to recline and soak up animated sun rays.

Tardigotchi applies a salve to our yearnings for care and nurture through a unique design that symbiotically merges biological and artificial life within a single interface and enclosure. It also serves as a reminder for the special place humans have in communing with other animals—and perhaps equally for artificial ones. We, along with the inhabitants of Tardigotchi and every other living being, are neighbors subsisting on a single, incredibly precarious ecosystem.

Exhibitions: Human+, ArtScience Museum, Singapore. The Creativity of Things – a CreateWorld exhibition,Human+, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, TED Exhibition, Vancouver, In Search Of The Miraculous, SIGGRAPH, Transitio_MX, Concurso04, Human + , Science Gallery, Dublin, TEI ‘11, the fifth international conference, File Prix Lux - Art of the XII Century, HUMlab, Fire Sale, MIC Toi Rerehiko Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand. Flash Crash, Katzen Arts Center, Washington D.C.

Collaborators: Doug Easterly and Tiago Rorke