&ldquo;The File Room&rdquo; is an illustrated archive of cases of cultural censorship, conceived by artist Antonio Muntadas, and produced by Randolph Street Gallery (a non-profit artist run center in Chicago, IL, 1979-1998). 

It was presented as a public interactive installation at the Chicago Cultural Center (May - Sept., 1994) and continues to exist as a WWW project housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Maria Roussos served as Production Coordinator for &ldquo;The File Room&rdquo; project and continues to maintain the WWW version. Roussos designed and implemented the archive in early 1994 and then customized it for the public art installation at the Cultural Center, which was visited by approximately 80,000 people in a period of 4 months. 

&ldquo;The File Room&rdquo; has since been seen as a physical installation in Lyon (1995), Paris (1996), Barcelona (1996), and Hamburg (1996). Presentations on the project have been made at Ars Electronica &rsquo;95 (Linz), ISEA &rsquo;95 (Montreal), Medienbiennale &rsquo;94 (Leipzig) and other venues. The internet version continues to receive approximately 8000 accesses per day.

File Room Archive

The File Room

Alife centers around a Genetic Programming library, developed by Terry Franguiadakis in the summer of 1992. The GP library is a C++ implementation of John Koza&rsquo;s techniques described in his book, Genetic Programming. 

Franguiadakis was originally interested in evolving images using the same technique developed by Karl Sims. A discussion of the technique can be found in Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics in the Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 91. 

Franguiadakis developed an image evolver that worked well well on SGI machines and from the two dimensional images he moved on to doing three dimensional shapes, eventually using the same library to do behavioral experiments.

Art - 1993

The File Room

Alife

Contact