ALife Art Award 2018

Born in Nagano, in 1961. Graduated from the University of Tokyo, Department of Physics in 1984 and also received Ph.D of the same university in 1989. While teaching at the University of Tokyo as a professor at Department of General System Studies, Graduate School of Art and Science, he has been playing active part in the projects to connect the realm of art and science, as a researcher of Complex Systems Science. His works encompasses both the arts and sciences and deal with complex systems and artificial life. He received his doctorate in physics from the University of Tokyo in 1989. Currently, he is a professor at the Department of General System Studies, at the University of Tokyo. His research is centered on complex systems and artificial life, a field which aims to build a possible form of life using computer simulations, chemical experiments and robots. Some of these results have been published in ”Life Emerges in Motion” from Seido Book Publishers in 2007. Takashi Ikegami most frequently attends the International Conference on Artificial Life, and gave the keynote address at the 20th Anniversary of Artificial Life conference in Winchester, UK. He is also a member and the editorial boards of Artificial Life, Adaptive Behaviors, BioSystems and Interaction Studies.

Victoria Vesna, Ph.D., is an Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI). Although she was trained early on as a painter (Academy of Fine arts, Belgrade, 1984), her curious mind took her on an exploratory path that resulted in work can be defined as experimental creative research residing between disciplines and technologies.
With her installations she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation (PhD, University of Wales, 2000). Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists and she brings this experience to students.
Victoria has exhibited her work in 20+ solo exhibitions, 70+ group shows, has been published in 20+ papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the North American editor of AI & Society and in 2007 published an edited volume - Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (Minnesota Press) and another in 2011 — Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. (co-edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy). Intellect Press, 2011.

Chris Salter is Concordia University Research Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses, Co-Director of the Hexagram network, Director of the Hexagram Concordia Centre for Research and Creation in Media Art and Technology and Associate Professor, Computation Arts in the Department of Design and Computation Art at Concordia University, Montreal. Salter studied economics and philosophy at Emory University and received his Ph.D. in theater directing and criticism with a second concentration in computer-generated sound at Stanford University where he worked with former Brecht assistant Carl Weber as well as pioneers of digital synthesis John Chowning, Max Matthews and Chris Chafe at the Center for Research in Computer Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
He was visiting professor in music, graduate studies and digital media at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) before joining Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in 2005. He was also Guest Professor at the KhM in Cologne in 2010 and Guest Faculty at the Masters program in Media Arts History. Institute für Bildwissenschaften. Donau University. Krems, Austria. October 2011. He was appointed Director of Hexagram-Concordia in 2011.

David OReilly (b. Ireland, 1985) is an artist working in design, animation and video games. Creator of the groundbreaking animated films ‘Please Say Something’ and ‘The External World’, his film work has won numerous awards and been the subject of several retrospectives internationally. He has served as writer for the TV shows Adventure Time & South Park, and created the fictional video games in Spike Jonze’s Academy Award winning film ‘Her’. In 2014 he released his first independent game 'Mountain' and followed up with 'Everything' in 2017. Everything won grand prizes at A MAZE & Ars Electronica and was featured as Game Of The Year by Wired, Polygon, AV Club, The New Yorker and others. It's trailer became the first interactive project to qualify for an Academy Award.

Ryuta Aoki is a co-founder of ALIFE Lab. & Alternative Machine Inc.
Engaging in concept design, creative direction, project production, and business development in art, science, and the cultural field. In 2011, he founded the design firm VOLOCITEE Inc., which specializes in community design and management. The same year, to provide ideas of value both to children who will shape the future, as well as the people who will nurture the environment for those children, he obtained a license from TED to begin a TEDxKids program in Japan. In 2014, he started Japan's first Art Hack Day hackathon, which focuses on sharing the value of artists with society as a whole. In 2016, he served as producer for The TEA-ROOM, a group of artists working with a master of tea ceremony Soryo Matsumura of the Urasenke, to discover new ways of experiencing the Japanese tea ceremony. Also, he was the producer for the research project TAICOLAB, an exploration of new ways to experience music, conducted in conjunction with the outdoor music festival TAICOCLUB. The same year, in conjunction with Takashi Ikegami, a professor in the field of complex science and artificial life at the University of Tokyo, and Mizuki Oka, an associate professor in the field of web science at Tsukuba University, he founded ALIFE Lab., a community designed to explore ways to apply the theories and technology of Artificial Life (ALife) to benefit society. In the following year (2017), with the same members, he founded Alternative Machine Inc., a company that develops a bio-inspired artificial intelligence and robot software.