Helio Santos
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2012

Pet

Interactive table installation · artificial life · Twitter

Pet: a network of light projected on a wooden table
Pet, 2012

An organism that lives between physical and virtual space and keeps information flowing through the network by eating and excreting it. Its food is Twitter posts that refer to violent deaths and murders. Pet searches for them, chooses what to eat, and uses them to grow and reproduce; what it has digested decomposes and goes back into the network as waste, posted by its own account.

In the gallery, Pet appears as a network of light projected onto the surface of a worn wooden table, growing as it feeds.

Produced with the support of PAPIAM 2012 (Programa de Apoyo a la Producción e Investigación en Arte y Medios), Centro Multimedia, Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico.

Pet installation view in the gallery
Installation view
Pet on the table, with a tweet being eaten
Feeding on a tweet
Pet's network, early stage
Growth, early stage
Pet's network, later stage
Growth, later stage