ABIOGENESIS on Sunday/Monday!

ABIOGENESIS march18-19 2007On Monday 19 March it will have been 8 years since Michael and I launched our first mutual website (entropy8zuper.org, which was the merger of entropy8.com and zuper.com). To celebrate, we are inviting all deer to join us in The Endless Forest for another edition of ABIOGENESIS – Twin Gods Festival!

Time:
San Francisco: Sunday, 18 March, 5 PM
New York: Sunday, 18 March, 8 PM
London: Sunday 18 March, midnight
Brussels: Monday, 19 March, 1 AM
Moscow: Monday, 19 March, 3 AM
Tokyo: Monday, 19 March, 9 AM
Sydney: Monday, 19 March, 11 AM
Other time zones

Discuss… 😉

The Endless Forest part of the Gawker Artists network

kotakugawkertefsighting.jpg

Not too long ago we got the bright idea to look into the Gawker Artists network. Basically, it is a link list of artists curated by Gumshoe. They oversee the distribution of artist ad banners through blogs like Gizmodo, Treehugger, Kotaku, Lifehacker etc., not to mention private bloggers who’ve signed up to get the ads on their pages. If you’ve ever been surfing through some of these bigger tech or game blogs you may have seen these ads. Its like a sudden non-sequitor in the middle of an article… at least they always caused me to do a double-take. I think it’s a pretty nifty idea to give free ad space to artists, it decorates the page and give people something to think about instead of asking them to become another link in the consumerist chain. So, it was pretty straightforward to sign up for and we’ve been getting a decent number of hits from it. Plus it is pretty cool to see banner ads for The Endless Forest “in the wild.”
Click here to see all the banners…

lifehackergawkertefsighting.jpg

Ten Thousand Deer In The Virtual Woods

We sent this out yesterday…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Ten thousand Deer in the virtual Woods
The Endless Forest crosses the 10,000 registered users mark

Today, the number of confirmed registered players of The Endless Forest has exceeded ten thousand, while the artistic game project has been downloaded over 64,000 times since its first release in September 2005.The Endless Forest is a social screensaver. A multiplayer game without goals or chat. A peaceful environment where every player is represented as a deer, running around, rubbing trees and sleeping in the sun. And casting Forest Magic on each other or partying under a night sky filled with floral fireworks during ABIOGENESIS, a spectacle created in realtime by authors Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn whenever the mood hits them.Tale of Tales is a Belgian games development company founded by former internet artists Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn, better known as “Entropy8Zuper!”. Their goal is to explore the potential of the games medium as an artistically expressive form of entertainment.

The Endless Forest is supported by MusĂ©e d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxemburg, Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds and Design Vlaanderen.

The Endless Forest can be downloaded for free from
http://Tale-of-Tales.com/TheEndlessForest/

Exhibition: Night Garden, Mediamatic, Amsterdam

The Endless Forest will be featured in the Night Garden, an exhibition in the form of a sub-technical indoor garden, links new technology, next nature, contemporary art and its consumption.

Night Garden will be at Mediamatic in Amsterdam from 3 November 2006 to 7 January 2007.

Other participating artists include Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, Felix Hess, Mateuz Herczka, Ralf Schreiber & Christian Faubel, Debra Solomon and Petra Blaisse.

We’ll be attending the opening so soon as we have images from the show we’ll post them in the forum.

Also, the next day, at the occasion of Museumnacht in Amsterdam, we’ll be performing about 4 hours of ABIOGENESIS in the Forest on Saturday 4 November between 7.30 and 11.30 in the evening. Don’t expect as intense a performance as usual, but more of an ongoing stream of little fun things happening once in a while.

Exhibition: Mediaterra, Athens

The Endless Forest was featured as an installation at Mediaterra a festival of Art and Technology, October 4-8th, in Athens, Greece. This year their focus was on alternative games.







During the festival we also had the opportunity to present our Realtime Art Manifesto, a provocative set of guidelines for artists and game designers. Much of our philosophy on how we use the Realtime 3d medium has been developed during the making of The Endless Forest. We are pleased to be able to discuss these ideas publicly.

Exhibition: Pixel Me, Belgium

Welcome some new players into the forest… the Fawns are here! For this traveling art exhibition for young teenagers we have created fawn avatars to represent the players at the physical locations where The Endless Forest will be played on special gaming consoles. Pixel Me features The Endless Forest next to works by Wim Delvoye, Pina Bausch and Chantal Akerman, Guy Rombouts, etc.

If you are in Belgium the show runs from October 2006 to November 2008 and it will be stopping in cultural centers across the country. Check the wonderful Pixel Me website for details!

If you want to see the new additions to the game for yourself you’ll need to download and install the latest beta of The Endless Forest version 2.1.