A Moeda

A MOEDA (The Coin) is an app that contains a digital artefact – a ‘coin’ – that wants to travel around the world.

Every download creates a unique digital coin which is associated with the user, thereby originating a human/coin team.

The mission of each coin is to circle the world and return to its human owner. The coins travel by swapping hosts.

Human hosts seek to improve the chances of receiving their original coin by exchanging coins with other users.

Coins can travel in two ways: they are either swapped by their hosts or initiate their own swaps and escape.


The journey

Seen from the coin’s perspective, the app records and visualizes every step of an individual coin’s journey around the world and displays it to the user for as long as they host that coin.


City editions

The A MOEDA software is released in three city-centric editions: Lisbon, Liverpool and Berlin. Which of these editions the user receives on download is random. Each of the three editions has a specific visual language that displays the diary of the coin’s journey. Through swaps users host other editions.

Features

— shake your device to swap with other coin/human teams
— browse back and forward to access a visual diary of your hosted coin’s journey
— pinch to zoom in and out of visualizations
— save an image of the visualization at any time.


Background

A coin is a semi-autonomous object passed between human hosts, on a journey defined by a desire to return home. Influenced by a combination of individual, social and geophysical forces, hosts are left to wonder how much of its movement is defined by their behaviour or the coin’s ‘free will’.

A MOEDA presents a model where humans are vehicles for coins, and coins are vehicles for humans.

The project asks the questions: how do we imagine sharing everyday life with semi-autonomous machines; and how much autonomy are we prepared to let objects have?

A MOEDA is a digital artwork created and developed by CADA. A first software version (2013-14) was supported by the Portuguese Directorate-General for the Arts. In 2015 the project received EU funding to extend its storytelling potential with two European partners, Broken Dimanche Press (BPD, DE) and FACT (Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology, UK).

www.amoeda.eu
www.cada1.net

Support: [email protected]