The main stream of our artistic research focuses on the relationship between the human and the artificial “object”. In our view the technological and scientific knowledge of our culture seems to be ready to a new fundamental step: to build up artificial “ active objects”, endowed with the “ élan vital” , the “ breath of the life” .
The “object” is here transformed in a “entity”, an “alien organism” who starts to live in our world. With him we have to restart from the scratch to develop a contact, a relationship, a language, a co-evolution. In this alien we can recognize fragments of ourselves, the ones we used to design and make it alive, just like on the evolutionary nature of our body, mind, needs, societies and cultures. Thus aliens could give us answers about the “dark side”, an alternative/external point of observation of ourselves.
The alien is not a pure executor of our orders, a Golem , but a living entity with a digital nature completely different from the humans. In front of him we have to redefine the terms of life, adaptation, intelligence, affection, consciousness. This is not a convergence on a specific objective, but it is the opening of a substantially unexplored territory where our control is only apparent. Paradoxically, scarce control in this case means great possibilities of evolution, and co-evolution is the only way to influence its development.
The aliens live in a natural-artificial hybrid ecosystem where human beings and artificial entities co-evolve. Inside this environment physical and digital media are connected through sensors and mutually modifiable.
The first step of this approach consists in assuming some fundamental points that are at the base of the biological living organisms.·
If we want to diffuse the life breath in the objects we develop, we must change the way we program the “objects”. We have to realize programmable entities that have "needs" for survival, in front of the environmental conditions.
Needs means the evolutionary pressure, the birth and the death, the fusion of le hazard et la necessitè , the society. Entities with these characteristics are not able to survive standing alone, but are part of a society of similar but different replicas interacting each other through cooperation and the competition. Such a collectivity can react rapidly to context changes, objective changes, partial failures or simply behavioral anomalies.
The approach we propose here focuses on the search and the evolutionary development for a contact/communication between the alien and the human. This could be seen as the first step between two different cultures trying to communicate, to assume common symbols, to qualify behaviors, in order to share the same playground. In few words: communicate to survive .