Tardigotchi is an artwork featuring two pets: a living organism and an alife avatar. These two disparate beings find themselves the unlikely denizens of a portable computing enclosure. The main body for this enclosure is a brass sphere, housing the alife avatar in an LED screen and the tardigrade within a prepared slide. A tardigrade is a common microorganism measuring half a millimeter in length. The alife avatar is a caricature of this tardigrade. Its behavior is partially autonomous, but it also reflects a considerable amount of expression directly from the tardigrade’s activities.
