Presentation Data Table

Inspired by the ISEA 2014 call for work on the theme Location, (+/‑) Pendulum is comprised of an electro‑mechanically operated kinetic sculpture that is driven based on user input from a participatory smartphone application. The basis of the installation is founded on the mechanics of the Foucault Pendulum. Unlike a conventional pendulum, the arm of the installation will operate horizontally using the same physical properties as if gravity is still impacting it. The intent of the work is to reflect on the intersection of our digital lives with our physical lives. While the Foucault Pendulum was created in the mid‑19th Century to exemplify the Earth’s physical properties, we now live in an era where the aspects of physicality may not bear as much weight.(+/‑) Pendulum’s operation is thus based on user input from a smartphone application which asks the question ‘Where do you want to be?’. From collective user input, an average of all data points orient the pendulum to a collective desired location, which seeks to show that our world is not flat, round or oblong—it is malleable and democratic in the digital sphere.

In light of increasing social unrest and wars around the globe, a growing number of not-for-profit organizations and commercial businesses are trying to fill the gaps that befall cultural heritage sites due to bomb strikes and looting. 3D scanning and printing are among the main vehicles to restore cultural heritage by generating detailed copies of an artifact, building or even site. In terms of accessibility and preservation there are undeniable benefits, but in what ways do these technologies affect cultural heritage politics? While commercial businesses profit from selling copyrighted files, or by providing restricted access, several artists’ initiatives try to  counter these practices. Even though they use similar technology, their aim is to empower people by giving them control over their lost heritage.

These ‘decolonial’ practices signify a desire to overcome or resist a colonial conditioning, favoring collaboration and freely sharing over individual and/or monetary gains. In the process, such examples challenge the  conventional meaning of value, which is dictated by the market and based on copyrights around authorship and ownership. Instead what is valued and becomes valuable is belonging to a wider community in which control over (re)use is embedded in the network.

More-than-human beings are largely de-animated in Western cultures and perceived as the backdrop for human activities. At the same time, with the modern modes of consumption and production, customers often do not know how specific products have been created and which more-than-human beings have been involved in manufacturing particular consumables. As a partial response to such alienation, this text presents the book, Yeasts as We Do Not Know Them, as a means to learn about human-yeast interactions and the ways these fungal microbes are used to manufacture different products and substances. The book, therefore, (re)imagines yeasts as omnipresent, diverse, and symbiotic. Conceiving symbiosis as a set of interspecies relations, including mutualistic, pathogenic, and commensal ones, the project, Yeasts as We Do Not Know Them, as this article argues, maps diverse interspecies interactions and, by doing so, helps to navigate through material systems, thus invoking trans-corporeal ethics.

I’m pleased to present the project (ready)Media: Towards an archaeology of media and invention in Mexico, initiated almost two years ago by Laboratorio Arte Alameda in collaboration with a number of curators, artists and researchers. As one of the two spaces in Mexico City devoted specifically to media art practices or, as we prefer to say, those practices that engage a dialogue with the multiple relations between art and technology, Laboratorio Arte Alameda’s archive has a lot to say. Our archive was not organized, lacking even the form of one a few years ago. Being extremely active in exhibiting and promoting, but most of all, contributing to connect the several media arts’ communities in the country, systematizing was not a priority from the beginning.

It takes time for documents to be needed, and now, ten years later, we have the need to organize them. We wanted to deal creatively, critically and, above all, collaboratively with this task. First we set a specific physical space for it and begun to dig in to all the hard discs and drawers holding over ten years of intense production.

To immerse everyday storytelling into real-life contexts in digital interactions, we created a game that turns entities in a story into digital assets that have functional roles. Taking the classic folklore as inspiration, we created 1001 Nights, a co-creative, mix-initiative storytelling game using an existing AI creative writing system. In this game, Shahrzad (driven by the player) needs to tell stories through a dialogue interface, while the King (driven by the AI model) will continue the player’s story in turn. Text from the story is utilised in actual game mechanisms, so that weapon keywords in the game like “sword” or “shield” will turn into equipment that can be used for battle. The game aims to facilitate player engagement and creative interactions through “invading language”, which points to the text that will change the reality in game.

Whether in the heart of a cultural institution for 104factory or within an innovative platform for Paris&Co, how do incubators support young innovative structures in the cultural and creative industries? Discover two ecosystems described by their directors and some emblematic collaborations between innovative structures and cultural institutions. Symbioses are multiple, whether they are through imaginations, organizations or individuals.

This research paper examines at the possible evolution in domestic, household object design and its function using foresight methods as a primary mode of inquiry. The twentieth century industrial evolution changed how objects were conceived, made and mass distributed. In the current digital era objects have significantly shifted in how they are made and distributed from the industrial era in ownership, technology and function. Given changes in ownership, technology and function, what might objects look like in 2025?

This talk is about Bears as gay male subculture and on-line gender performance. It contextualizes definitions of new masculinities by analzying different fields of netporn research. The presentation will focus on socio-anthropological analysis of the end of Gay culture and Bear culture within by building a digital genealogy of its own represenations, from digital networks archeology of Bullettin Board Systems and Mailing Lists to today’s Internet porntube platforms and smart technology.

Approximately 2467 miles / 3970 kilometers separate West Lafayette (USA) from Medellín (Colombia). Although this distance represents geographic, cultural, and social differences, it also offers a bridge to creative possibilities that connect the two cities by an intercultural dialogue around new media. This paper describes the process professors Esteban Garcia from Purdue University (USA) and Isabel Restrepo from Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia) developed in 2013‑2014 to teach the course ‘Interactive Art and 3d Animation’ in the city of Medellín, Colombia. This interdisciplinary course deals with cultural questions related to location and society by integrating art and technology.

This course combines research expertise on interactive visualization and open source software to develop socially interactive projects. Following the idea of an open studio, and the pedagogy proposed by the artist Luis Camnitzer, in which students are in a horizontal relationship with the professors, students in the course played the active role of co‑investigators. Garcia and Restrepo developed the course as a research experience that integrates faculty members and students of both institutions to explore creative reflections about the topic of location in the city of Medellín. The continued methodology for the class integrates field trips inside and outside the city, brainstorming sessions, technical training, conceptual dialogues, and input from all co‑investigator participants. The planning and development process has been documented in a variety of media that combine analogue and digital tools, such as handmade sketches, digital modeling, audiovisual recording, and GPS mapping. The resulting projects were available for public view at the Centro Cultural of Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia), and online as multimedia interactive experiences accessible to people across the world.

In the early days of Multimedia MAD emergent art center was bringing the new media platforms to the city of Eindhoven and Dutch creative industry to foster new artistic practice, connecting to networks in society and reaching out to a broad public.

In 2000 MAD emergent art center transformed into a new phase: the name changed to MAD emergent art center. Collaborators are artists, designers, technologists, working as freelancer, volunteer, partner, together with interns and students.

Pioneering into new possibilities and exploring technologies is showing a track of fast changing perspectives and realities. Now in 2022 we see the term Digital Culture settled in academic, policy and economic realms.

MAD emergent art center has been catching up with sequential development of cultural implementations of technology, by creating ever new approaches. MAD ways of working shows a number of different activities.

Along the way we have seen paradigms change: from pure artistic autonomy to relevance for society; from technology focus to human esthetics; from economic niche to crucial ingredient in innovation. Having an optimistic view on the future we believe we can make a difference, and will imagine things no man has seen before.

New horizons unfold as we progress in time, unlocking metaverses, dreaming of quantum leaps, imagining AI enabled sustainable societies, where humans are key to a new balance between nature and artificial realities.

Next up is our focus on the urban ecosystems where the big issues of our times become apparent and urgent. Artists and scientists are on the forefront of new solutions and systemic change. We need to support and facilitate their research and operation.

Tidal Traces (2017) is a 360° dance film collaboration between filmmaker/media artist Nancy Lee and choreographer/dance artist Emmalena Fredriksson, with sound design/music composition by Kiran Bhumber. This paper accounts for the creative and technical differences of creating a dance film versus 360° dance film, and the conceptual, practical and ethical challenges the artists encountered throughout their interdisciplinary process where 360° video, film and dance intersect.

The ethical development of these technological parameters is paramount, as our entire made environment is created through interactions with computers. The stakes are environmental, geological, and political. As computers connect with making machines it is important to address issues within the automated future we are facing and have begun to live with (Bennett 2010, Vallgårda, A. 2009, Ingold, etal).

Examples include robotics and advanced manufacturing tools that rely on top-down desk-based instructions generated by a select few. This clay-first perspective on making seeks to realise a deeper understanding of the materials and processes involved in our daily lives and to describe the hybrid materiality we are part of. This approach is made possible by working with computer programmers to create disruptive innovations that affect the framework of how our fabricated environment is designed. In so doing, it is possible to ‘3D print in reverse’, allowing the digital to be touched.

In this article I describe how 3DP clay has served as a learning tool and conduit for a new digital expansion in my practice. I describe a way of making digital sculpture that directly originates from an experienced physical place through the blended interaction with clay and new technologies. The projects that I will describe are based at Grymsdyke Farm, the European Ceramics Work Centre (EKWC) and my home studio, expressing this hybridity in the form of hand-printed clay, digital models, robotically printed and 3DP clay and ceramics

“45 Revolutions” investigates the media archeology and cultural heritage of a revolving audio-storage and reproduction device, the record player, and its media: vinyl records. Vinyls have not only had been at the centre of (sub)cultural revolutions, like the flower-power movement, punk, German “Schlager” and DJing cultures, they have had a colourful history as revolving media themselves. Vinyls have had their experimental phase, gained the status of mainstream media (1960s), have been declared dead (around 1995), had a revival (2005) and seem to be considered hopeless once again now.

The story of success, oblivion and reincarnation of vinyls can probably nowhere on earth be seen clearer than in Hong Kong’s record store culture. Rapid changes in public favour, openness to new technologies, a faible for gadgets and a commitment to quickly follow fashion seem to constitute the breeding ground for the culture of vinyl records in Hongkong. This text also refers to the game art installation “33 1/3 Revolutions” that will be premiered at ISEA in Hongkong in 2016.

Archeology of Vinyls
In “Gramophone, Film, Typewrite“ Friedrich Kittler reminds us that Marshall McLuhan finds new media content in predecessor media. According to him, one medium’s content is always other media: film and radio constitute the content of television and records the content of radio. Digital media would create their content from pre-digital media. That is why vinyls can very well survive as content of CDs, sample-based synths, Mp3s, computer games and other more recent media.

This paper reflects upon mediatic reincarnations of vinyl cultures in a globalized digital cultures context by exploring traces of the predecessor medium in the streets of Hongkong. Famous Hong Kong record stores like the ones of Paul Au at 239 Cheung Sha Wan Road in Sham Shui Po or by Ho Hing Ming at Lamma Island are taken as a starting point for an investigation of how media can cannibalize predecessor media or foster mediatic reincarnations.

People today use new media, for creating identity, communication, social effects, fun or learning. Participation in cultural heritage learning not only means to integrate the “active visitor” into the museum, it means to generate an environment in which one can take part and can realize his- or herself in complex processes more easily – emotionally as well as cognitively – and in social exchange with others in-situ at place of origin.The 4D Virtual Urban Art is a solution based on a precise 3D model of an urban environment, in which the users can explore the past and suggest changes of the areas they live in and upload their ideas to the online database.

With the aim of reconnecting humans to their milieu, we propose a conceptual tool to think of architectural apparatuses as actors within a continuum composed of both artificial and natural agents. For this we look at the cognitive sciences and particularly the 4E cognitive (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended). We use examples from contemporary architecture to test our hypothesis and thus attempt to define what symbiotic architecture could be.

The author describes Sculptor, a three-dimensional computer modelling system that allows the use of sculptural methods for the construction of objects. These objects can be subsequently realised as physical sculptures through the use of a contour-slicing routine, though the major use of the system.

The aim of this study is to propose a new framework for interactive artwork through the Korean archetype. Based on the framework, we proposed a basic design for an interactive artwork called “Image Garden” by applying the Korean myth “Lady WonAng.” In the myth, Lady WonAng bloomed in a wasteland and saved the world, triumphing over adversity through her devotion. To turn the myth into an interactive artwork, we focused on two factors based on the text of the myth: a main activity of the character and a major emotion by development of the myth story by the character. To extract interactive activity factors, we analyzed the text of “Lady WonAng.” In an interactive artwork based on audience activity, the audience becomes a character in the myth and performs the narrative of the myth. Verbs in the text become actions of the character. And we adjust the extracted verbs to an Action Model by Activity Theory, a basic triangle model for analysis of the relationship between the actions of a character (personal) and society. The adjectives in the text are the states of the character. We extract the classifying patterns of the emotions in the myth. And then we adjust the classifying patterns of emotions to the “Pleasure Framework” of Brigid Costello. We completed thirteen emotions through the adjustment of thirteen pleasure categories. Based on the extraction of these two factors, we propose a new framework for an interactive artwork through the archetype. This framework consists of activities and emotions of the audience. The framework focused on the combination of two factors, which create an interactive artwork. The audience has an experience with the archetype narrative through its own actions and feels emotions during the interactive artwork installation. This framework creates an opportunity to produce an interactive artwork to attribute basic design, artwork structure, embodiment of contents and creativity. Using this framework, we propose a basic design for an interactive artwork called “Image Garden” by applying the Korean myth “Lady WonAng” using a narrative approach. The artwork involves an audience member performing in front of a screen as a character in the “Lady WonAng” myth, and the action of the audience member advances the artwork in three stages ‑ Floral initiation, Combination, and Spread (prosperity). The audience member makes the images of flowers bloom  through their own actions as Lady WonAng or as their own character in a wasteland, overcoming trials in an environmental crisis. In summary, we propose a framework to convert the text of the myth into an interactive artwork through character activity and emotion. The audience will have an experience of the world of the Korean myth and experience the meaningfulness of their own actions of making the flower bloom in the artwork, recognizing the devotion of human beings from the value of the traditional Korean story.

Artists Statement

The sense of taste is an important sense in ordinary life, but it has been ignored in media art. In the area of art the word ‘taste’ has usually been used to describe an appreciation of art pieces and to express artistic styles, though we never literally taste artworks with our mouths. This artwork is the author’s first step to ‘taste’ art in synesthetic ways. It also refers to the strong will that a visual artist uses in attempting to taste image and sound albeit not literally tasted by the mouth. In this artwork the author suggests the mixology of cocktail, and the context of cocktail bar, as a metaphoric methodology of mixing images and sounds, thereby enabling people to taste image and sound rather than see and hear them. Firstly, the author presents a set of tangible user interfaces with a network connection to blend image and sound: a bottle, table, and dish interface.

The displacement of refugees from their natural homes have caused violence and estrangement all over the world, to the detriment of victims who live in unbearable conditions outside their homelands. There’s misunderstanding amongst hosts and Western media that see refugees as destructive hoarders of resource. Educating two sides of a refugee-host divide have applied immersive filmmaking following the cinematic 2D approach, portraying static scenes with narratively voiced works that try to put us inside refugee camps to elicit empathy. Instead of this approach, we embarked on a refugee-centered journey-based approach to show the daily lives of Rohingya refugees in Balukhali, Bangladesh using dynamic movements in VR space, spatial audio that surprise, and collaborative filmmaking that involves the participants empowering themselves using 360 camera and phone as tools for exploration. Instead of investigating the hardships of refugees from a Western perspective, we enabled a boy and his family in the refugee camp to create a visual experience that represent their lives. The interactive VR film is an empowerment tool to enable self-expression in a corner of the world that have become used to being the observed as opposed to the observer, taking advantage of VR as a medium for immersion and capability to surprise.

As the spread of engineer culture is embossed upon the minds of those increasingly ordering and interacting with their lives and that of the lives of others (for the current zeitgeist of  technology is to mediate and interpose in rather than directly enable communication between people) the world is walking to the beat of a new drum of cognitive hegemony. Just as there is a vernacular in architecture, an awareness of the value of difference, locality and diversity in our shaping of our physical world. This paper proposes I that we can look to a future we would like, that we may prefer, that we may want to have the option to choose for our future environments. That we can conceive of a vernacular for the interaction design of the future of smart objects.

Using examples from a long-running VR-focussed artists’ studio program, Harle will illustrate how non-digital artists inform a critical understanding of technology, as experts in representational politics and history, while benefiting from the allowances of new technologies.

In this talk, digital media artist, educator, and researcher Dr Josh Harle will introduce the experimental virtual reality artists’ studio program he has been hosting since 2017. Harle will give a brief overview of the model, its significant outcomes, and illustrate through examples the value of the studio to a broad set of stakeholders. These examples will show how, as a symbiotic relationship, non-digital artists can inform a critical understanding of technology as experts in representational politics and history, while benefiting from the allowances of new technologies for their practice.

They will also show how the artists’ studies have engaged general audiences in both innovation in art, emerging technology, and the potential implications of these technologies, through
livestream artist talks, and have been used as showcases for both ‘demystifying VR’ and inspiring the expressive use of technology, through creative technology workshops delivered to 4 different age/skill groups. Harle will finish by pointing to the recent expansion of the project into game platforms as an interactive experience.

This paper examines the differences and similarities between practice-based research (PBR) and research-creation (RC) in media art. As case studies, two PhD research projects — one from Australia (Sojung Bahng, PBR) and the other from Canada (Stéphanie McKnight, RC) — are compared. The comparative analysis demonstrates that critical reflection and phenomenological awareness through creative practice are crucial in generating knowledge in both PBR and RC. Simultaneously, this study shows that research methods and approaches between PBR and RC differ due to different academic and socio-cultural factors. PBR’s main aim is to generate knowledge through practice in a broader sense, whereas RC, with its conceptual roots in fine arts, emphasizes social and community-based engagement.

Society has created the female robot in what we thought was the male ideal of pleasure and personal servicing. In response, the’Marionette constructed in Feu de Helene is an alternative to the robot cliche. de Helene is a story about a woman’s journey as she decomposes and recomposes herself through the use of a computer-controlled Marionette. The computer-controlled Marionette is used as a reflection into the very nature of the Performer. Out Of The Body Theater can be defined as a network of electronic devices that, through their interconnections, service each other in some defined manner.

A Different Engine.This paper examines the historical exchange of concepts, images and technologies between East and West via the overland and maritime Silk Trade routes. In particular the paper will focus upon the importance of the Arabic traditions of Astronomy, Mathematics and Navigation showing how these facilitated this trade, as well as prompting the Renaissance in Europe.By employing the metaphor of pattern making and the weave of fabrics traded along the silk route the paper will examine the provenance of computer control which can be traced to the early industrial practices textile     production, where loom operating instructions were encoded as a series of punch cards, in essence ‘digitising’ weaving patterns in Jacquard looms.The virtues of this novel punch card system were not lost on Charles Babbage who adopted them to drive his Difference Engine, from where they were rapidly adapted to automate mechanical music devices, the punch patterns becoming, in effect a form of graphical score capable of sequencing music boxes’ barrel organs and later Pianolas.The Pianola (or Player Piano) was the most sophisticated manifestation of this development and in terms of    reproduction quality was far superior to the nascent technologies of audio recording and transcription, such as the Edison Wax Cylinder or disc based Phonography, by virtue of being able to not simply encode musical pitch but also performance characteristics.Ironically it was the punch card and subsequent punch tape technology that enabled the birth of the modern computer and its entwined history with music.The first public performance of computer generated music was demonstrated at the Australian Computer Conference in 1951 by a team from CSIRAC (council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer) who fed their massive computer with spools of punched paper.

Panel: Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 1

In dystopian de­bates on dig­i­tal pri­vacy, it is sug­gested that pri­vacy can only be pro­tected if we hide our per­sonal in­for­ma­tion or prac­tice con­trol over it. Un­der­ly­ing this im­por­tant po­lit­i­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal turn is the fact that “my data = i”. Fol­low­ing this line of thought, com­puter sci­en­tists, com­pa­nies and other ded­i­cated per­sons from civil so­ci­ety have pro­posed a num­ber of tools to un­link or man­age the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the “i” and the data bod­ies that in­di­vid­u­als leave be­hind. These can be cat­e­go­rized under the title “anonymity tools” or “iden­tity man­age­ment” tools. If used cor­rectly, the for­mer guar­an­tees to some de­gree the anonymity of users traces, while the lat­ter pro­vides the in­di­vid­ual with “con­trol” over traces left be­hind. We are not new to anony­mous traces and the at­tempts to con­trol what we leave be­hind. “Anony­mous”, for ex­am­ple, is also a term used to refer to works with­out au­thor­ship or of un­known ori­gin. A pop­u­lar form of anony­mous works are folk songs. They are melodies that travel, which get a new life blown into them every time they move in time or space. In­ter­est­ingly enough, the lack of au­thor­ship and ori­gin in­vokes ques­tions of au­then­tic­ity and ev­i­dence, as it is shown in the film “Whose is this song?” from Adela Peeva. This also be­comes ev­i­dent in the film “I Love Alaska” where the query po­etry of an “anonymized user” be­comes the script of a film at the edge of fic­tion and non-fic­tion. Anony­mous has also been re­vived re­cently as the label of a dig­i­tal an­ar­chist move­ment, ques­tion­ing the bound­aries be­tween the phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal. In my paper I will look at the strengths and weak­nesses of anonymity in each case, both as a tech­nol­ogy as well as a strat­egy. I will also delve into its re­la­tion­ship to con­trol, mean­ing how it evades and re­places dif­fer­ent forms of con­trol.

This paper investigates the use of the ImmerGo spatial audio system and Ethernet AVB as a platform for the creation and deployment of immersive audio content. An analysis of Ethernet AVB and ImmerGo’s features is given. This is followed by a practical implementation of ImmerGo within an installation setting of a choreographed performance. This approach provided key features such as user control from a mobile device to render positions of audio tracks and control DAW transport. The Ethernet AVB network allowed for real-time synchronized audio streaming, audio device inter-operability, distributed endpoint processing and simple audio routing schemes.

Who tells history? We can find multiple versions of the new media art history, most of them with subtle differences. Still, until a few years ago, it has been unusual to find references pointing to countries out of a small group from Europe and North America. Several projects have been developed to change that situation. UNESCO’s Digi-Arts project, and the Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection, hosted by The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, are examples of the relevant role and the impact that the preservation and documentation of electronic artworks, together with its public access, can play in having another perspective on our recent history.

TI reflect on my artistic practice concerning generative sound from atmospheric processes. The work in progress called Augury: Divinatory interfaces builds upon the notion of hybrid listening to wind and natural radio. To sense the atmospheric dynamics and events of those phenomena, it requires both an embodied attunement related to sentience, and articulated technical systems that cognize and translate environmental signals into perceptible experiences to humans. Accordingly, a hybrid listening implies a deep-time perspective linking the atmospheric knowledge from con- temporary and ancient meteorology, as well as a symbiotic ensemble across human and technical systems in order to listen to more-than human scales and processes from atmosphere. In response to the question of ISEA 23 proposes “what constitutes a symbiotic imaginary?” Hybrid Listening sets forth a confluence of diverse ideas from meteorological knowledge that reassure human sentience, and implement technical cognition systems for attuning and listening to atmospheric processes from an embodied perspective. This investigation orients the crafting of interactive instruments designed for experiencing immersive sound, to match and invoke the ancestral experience and narratives of meteorology, and to reconcile with the atmospheric order, an ecological system of complex interplays across matter and agency.

Poster Statement

Summary:

Emerging digital cultures have to this point been more conducive to systemic analysis than to the close reading of individual art works. We must delineate objects, spaces, and sites worthy of consideration In their own right, rather than simply as manifestations or harbingers of things to come.
Jennifer Sternkamp’s site-specific projections – explorations of color, environment, and the conditions of spectatorship – open up spaces mental and geographic for the contemplation of the future present. Her work, which I categorize as ‘light In space,’ constitutes a remarkable project for an hyperaesthetic analysis.

Abstract

I propose to do a close study of the work of three artists — Jennifer Steinkamp (Los Angeles), Christian Möller (Frankfurt), and Rebeca Bollinger (San Francisco)– to determine how new media forms have shifted our apperceptive faculties, especially as they relate to the play of light in space. Steinkamps lush imagescapes immerse viewers in shimmering fields of color and form. Her site-specific projections are predicated upon a finely focused production process, which involves 3-D modeling of the exhibition space, the rendering of animations on high-end hardware, the melding of image and sound, and finally the transformation of inert white walls into extruded, pulsating abstractions. If Steinkamp reacts to architecture with site-specific installations, then architect Christian Möller actively shapes the spaces in which imagery will be deployed. In building hybrids of hardscapes and imagescapes, M?ller constantly return to the question of the body — as it exists in both real and virtual spaces. Where Steinkamp deploys light in physical spaces and M?ller creates physical spaces to house light, Rebeca Bollinger virtualizes both light and space. In “Dorothy’s Room” (1995), Bollinger has created a CD-ROM which explores the use of three dimensional software (here, “Quicktime VR”) to reflect and estrange architectural space and the very process of vision. Here, the flatness of interior light and the conventions of the cinema are deployed to investigate the very impact of the apparatus of new media forms on our apperception at the close of the millennium. This presentation applies the critical techniques I outlined at ISEA in 1993 in my paper “HyperAesthetics: Art, Speed, and Interpretation.” The discourse around art has concentrated on the concrete object: painting, sculpture, and architecture. The advent of the computer, however, has destabilized these systems — blurring categories and boundaries beyond even postmodern models. A dynamic object demands constant recalibration in focus, a shifting between three temporalities. Hyperaesthetics demands theorization in real time — which is what I will be offering here.

Born in 1952, in the middle of the Korean War, I am one of the rare species who has witnessed and experienced all of the major industrial revolutions (IRs) – the first represented by machines, the second by electricity, and the third by computing. In retrospect, it is interesting to observe that my perception on the IRs has evolved; whereas the first IR was all about the matter of survival, the second one was intertwined with political ideology. In the third IR, I was proud to be in the mainstream, as one of the actors who led the technological innovation. In the course of these developments, I noticed that many crucial social and economic indices which are supposed to be in the form of the normal (Gaussian) distribution polarized into binary form: the rich and the poor, right and left, natural and artificial, technology and culture. Of course art and science is no exception.

In this regard, I coined the term Culture Technology (CT) in 1994, to provide a stepping stone on which the techno-cultural studies and practices could be systematically approached with the goal of narrowing the gap between technology and culture, more specifically science and art. In this presentation, I will review some of my conventional and unconventional attempts in the context of Culture Technology (CT), with the hope that my storytelling will entertain (and hopefully stimulate) the audience who are interested in bridging the gap between science and art. As a bonus material, I will present some personal thoughts on the fourth IR in regards to HAI (Human-Artifact Interaction), claiming that 1) the fourth IR could be the last IR that we humans will ever experience, and that 2) the essence of the fourth IR lies in how we position humanities with respect to artificiality.

At the end of the 1960s the Centre for Art and Communication (CAyC) was founded as an interdisciplinary experimental project that explored the relationship between art, technology and society. We discuss CAyC’s pioneering work through three main initiatives: Art and Cybernetics, Systems Art in Latin America and the International Open Encounters on Video.

Based on projects from the exhibition Ecomedia. Ecological Strategies in Today’s Art (2007 at the Edith-Russ-Site for Media Art in Oldenburg) the presentation is devoted to the very relevant topic of ecological change, which, among other causes, has been brought about by human interventions in existing ecosystems. Environmental catastrophes and global warming are the results and consequences of a highly civilized and industrialised way of life. Ecological rethinking and long-term action are among the present day’s most important tasks if we want to avoid further damage to the environment and thus to our own living space.

The presentation, based on the exhibition Ecomedia, wants to show what art, and especially media art approaches and strategies are capable of contributing to these questions and problems. Works of art will be presented that deal with the complex field of ecology, with sustainability, with renewable energy, resources, global foodstuff transportation, as well as visionary approaches to solving the problems related to these subject matters. Various aspects of ecology, i.e. the science that examines the interrelation of organisms to each other and to their environment, will be demonstrated and discussed. The ambivalent and often paradoxical relationship between man and nature is at the forefront here, as is the role played by technological developments regarding the environment and how the electronic media can be responsibly used as a means to communicate information about the condition and demands of the ecosystem. In addition, our lifestyle, the wasteful dealings with fossil resources as well as recent social and urban developments will be critically examined and considered.

Works shown and discussed are devoted to the potentials offered by the use of the media to comprehend ecological questions. They draw on the methods and results of scientific research and utilize global communications technologies to actively integrate the viewers into the projects. In a society influenced by medial and electronic networks, artists increasingly provide insights into scientific technological world designs. They create action spaces – globally as well as locally – in accordance with visionary approaches and risk innovative looks at well-known facts and problems.

They invite the public to participate as well as to use technology to do research on social realities.

We describe the Time Space Scanner, a method of capturing living and dying organic matter that prioritizes neither time nor space but rather weaves them together into continuous coexistence, delving into the instability of memory, the insistence of being, and the constancy of change. The Time Space Scanner uses a 2D scanner programmed to scan spatially random small samples at regular intervals, collecting 25,000 to 50,000 images over a period of 3–5 days. These micro captures are then reassembled and animated in a real-time flow of constantly changing mixtures of growth, decay, time and space. Any frame of the animation contains pixels drawn from multiple times and locations of the scanner bed.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are an underestimated public health threat. It impairs children’s brain development, immune system, and hormonal systems. These impairments predispose children to various chronic mental and physical dis- eases. However, its negative impacts are not widely known by the general public. Chang Liu created a mixed reality (MR) installation based on her personal experience with ACEs and ACEs related Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which aims to provoke the audience’s reflection on ACEs and the influence of their upbringings on their mental and physical de- velopment. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 audiences, and their response to this MR installation was ana- lyzed using the thematic analysis method. The analysis proved that this MR installation is capable of eliciting the audience’s reflection on ACEs and their upbringing. In addition, The VR experience enabled participants to emotionally and somatically experience several symptoms of PTSD, and 75% of the partic- ipants demonstrated a high level of emotional self-awareness during the VR experience. Lastly, the analysis revealed that participants who had never encountered ACEs are more likely to sympathize with both the victim and abuser in a fictional narrative about ACEs than those who had undergone ACEs.

The cinema as an audiovisual form of art will undergo significant changes in the next few years. Today in the Internet we find only the first experiments based on interactive cinematic expression. The development of interactive cinema is far slower in its cultural process than in its technical development. Changes in the contents, form and narration of interactive cinema require extensive changes in the cultural and social media sense on the deepest levels of conveying, expressing and understanding messages interactively.

Intro

The technical solutions of producing and distributing the digital moving image are developing fast globally. At present, interactive cinema is taking its first steps in information networks, and digital television, with its new services, will replace the analogue television system entirely before long. The borders of traditional media are disappearing, as seen both from the technical and communicative perspective. The consumer will use more and more information and media services, such as interactive cinema services available in the digital information networks in future.

Waterways Past, Present and Future is an informative interactive media exhibition aimed at increasing awareness of the fragile relationship between people and water in the Okanagan Valley and catalyzing sustainable water practices among residents. The exhibition draws on the power of multi-channel sound and video media immerse, provoke, destabilize, transform and move participants to act responsibly and sustainability. We describe the system design toward a networked multi-channel audio visual system capable of generating sequences of environmental recordings and interview footage over an arbitrary number of modules in an installation.

The paper discusses the development of a practice-based research project by the artist. The research set out to question the possibilities of enhanced colouration and lighting effects exploiting optical fibres in conjunction with laser and digital technology. It questioned the use of laser techniques to enhance light and the incorporation of new lighting mechanisms using digital mix (DMX) lighting systems to address the possibility of programmable colour as novel, time-based aesthetics.

Research Context
The work is in response to an interest in the use of and available of new materials and technologies that are challenging the face of science, art and engineering. Within the context of design at the technology interface, fashion and textiles are providing an exciting platform for innovation, as promoted by the recent Materials Knowledge Transfer Network showcase exhibition, ‘Made in Future’ featuring UK smart fashion and textiles. There is significant market awareness and interest in light-emitting and colour-change materials and this can be seen across a range of market sectors and in today’s products and artefacts. The use of optical fibres within light-emitting textile products, has steadily gained a greater market importance over the last 15 years and their use and visual exploration the arts and lighting design continues to grow as the inherent properties of the fibre and its related technology offer many possibilities and much scope for creative exploitation. Lighting mechanisms include light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as well as conventional light projectors, which continue to be the preferred option although their use is limited to lighting standard fibre bundle sizes.

Underrepresented minorities (URMs) interested in digital art and visual computing as career paths face unique challenges that can redirect their futures away from design. These challenges can be social, economic, or cultural and have historically led to a lack of diversity in the digital arts industry. Our institutions aim to get a better understanding of these challenges. We then hope to design solutions from the resulting research to create a pipeline that diversifies the future of art and technology. Our goal is to build roadmaps for URM middle-school students who wish to  pursue art and technology in Higher Education and help overcome  challenges that can hinder their ambitions.

This project stems from an ongoing collaborative research project between the Digital Media Arts Program at Prairie View A&M University and the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M University with industry guidance from Gearbox Software and funding from the Simons Foudation’s Science Sandbox. The project’s primary focus is increasing enrollment in high school courses that lead to students being college ready, with a long-term goal on career readiness for digital world building, game development and other visual computing disciplines, for this project. This project aims to understand and build tools to address cultural and socio-economic barriers faced by minority students that wish to pursue the combination of art and technology as a career choice. The research data gathered from this study will be used to improve curricula and address issues that cause friction in pursuing digital art and visual computing careers.

This paper is a case study of a performance co-created in interaction with an autonomous virtual system. Our outcomes point to an essential production period where the creative team learns to know the virtual system through indirect interactions: the match-up phase. During this step, co-creation and co-evolution moments happened, indicating a possible symbiotic relationship. We discuss the implications and the outcomes of working with autonomous scenography in a performative context. We then expand the reflection to the potential creative associations between performance arts and autonomous technology.

Abstract
A Portrait of Bradbury in Gamer Space is part of an evolving series of installation and interactive portrait works that seek to address and heighten the broader disconnects we have in our current era as interactive 3D, gaming and communication technologies begin to confuse the line between education and entertainment, solitude and isolation, reality and play, skill and ineptitude. This presentation will explore the various (and conflated) thematic/technical aspects of my most recently exhibited work. The work being an interactive video art game portrait of Garry Bradbury, an iconic and pioneering figure in the history of Australian electronic/ experimental music and former member of the seminal electronic post-punk outfit Severed Heads.

Thematic Statement
The concerns of this particular work are layered within the context of installation, interactivity, “gamification,” simulation, documentary, video, history and portraiture. Being a work that occupies such a wide plethora of artistic modes, it is natural that the ideas presented within this work occasionally operate in a conflated manner. Bradbury is an iconic and pioneering figure in the history of Australian electronic and experimental music. Having been a member of the seminal electronic post-punk outfit Severed Heads, he is a unique personality that reflects an important period in Australia’s musical and avant-garde heritage. Bradbury’s practice has covered a vast amount of ground in terms of musical experimentation and performance and he is an influential figure in shaping the ideas and identity of experimental Australian music. Working from the sub-cultural mores of the post-punk and industrial movements that existed between the 1970’s and 1980’s, where skill in the context of musicality was of little value compared to the effect of industrial sounds (where the “ultimate end of the industrial object is failure”), [1] this particular portrait and installation seeks to explore and expose similar junctures that exist within the realm of simulacrum, portraiture, biography, digital decay, isolation and addiction.

Whilst assessing the politics and aesthetics of a connected digital age, one can witness the rise of similar concerns that were shared in part by Bradbury’s post-punk generation. This is the concern that humans were/are becoming increasingly disconnected from their natural/ immediate surrounds through a subservience to unthinking technologies and processes. However, where noise and experimentations with electronic audio were used in order to challenge and amplify the more discordant aspects of the Bradbury’s own era, A Portrait of Bradbury in Gamer Space seeks to address and heighten the broader disconnects we have in our current era as interactive 3D technologies begin to confuse the line between education and entertainment, solitude and isolation, reality and play. As we have moved beyond the age of mechanical reproduction into that of digital simulation, it is likely that these lines will become increasingly blurred. (timothyd.com/bradbury.php)

A project of disjunction and conjunction – the aesthetics of climate change

In a way it is all a matter of aesthetics. In a way climate change is all a matter of sense perception. Whether talking about changes in the level of CO2, variations or deviations in the Earth’s orbit, mountain-building, continental drift or solar radiation, the question about what to do implies a clear understanding of what is happening. That question is a question of aesthetics, that question is a question for art.

But if climate change is a matter of and for aesthetics, then what kind of aesthetics? What sort of aesthetics does art use to either establish connections or destabilize already fixed notions of sense perception when we talk about climate change? Are we talking about an aesthetics of the sublime, such as the one that has been proposed by the historical and neo-avantgarde for decades through their experiments with effects of shock, alienation or acts of detournément, or are we talking about an aesthetics of the beautiful, of that which doesn’t break with logical forms, notions of symmetry and delivers by providing the much needed constructed whole?

My starting point is the central question: how do we actually know that we are in fact at the beginning of a global culture which is more than a mere continuation or extension of a former, most likely, European/Western culture? In reference to this question, if one looks at the popular culture in Thailand (namely the apparent ease in seeking, using and appropriating foreign patterns, techniques and technologies) this seems to ‘support’ the thesis that it is only a mere continuation/extension of Western culture.

The Fine Arts Departments of Chiangmai University, Thailand Silpakorn University, Chulalongkorn University and Chiangmai University are pushing to establish media departments, which to date do not exist in Thailand. Only in the last five years have intensive contacts with foreign art institutions and artists been made — in terms of art exhibitions, artist residencies and exchange programs (which have increased steadily ever since). The internal discussion about these developments has been controversial. In dealing with foreign-cultured art within the framework of receptive processes concerning the entire culture, the central arguments are to do with a fear of loss of identity and tradition, which in turn raises questions about self-representation the readiness to develop old internal structures into something new, to gain equal access and actively participate in the global culture.

These contrasting standpoints are reflected in the three major directions of Thai contemporary art — a) to resume traditional subjects and forms and to develop them further, but not in conjunction with foreign art; b) to be strongly influenced by European art developments and at the same time to be critical towards their own tradition; and c) to try to establish a synthesis between their own tradition/history and foreign elements, which is neither a mere continuation of the old traditions nor a mere imitation of art directions from outside. Besides describing some of these problems, the paper will attempt to examine what it might possibly mean to gain access to new media and to ask what practical problems (e.g. language, access to information, art market, social status of artists) might arise in this context, for the artists as well as the art institutions.

Note: Title of paper has a different title: Under Threat from the West

Introduction
The history of technology is the history of developing techniques and inventing it is supporting devices. Knowledge and cultural background urges mankind to invent and just the opposite almost most scientist analyzes maters by reflecting on technology because the proficiency of technology will directly effect on economic efficiency and other traits. Photography as a form of development in mechanic procreation of art is a phenomena of art and technology in indisputable growth. At it is commence, the documentary purpose of photography has taken over the era of realism painted artworks. At this period the human demand for documentation is crucial. Photography extends and becomes a new form of visual reality. For instance, the conception of studio photography for European high society, mass media illustrations, nature documentation and other fields of study. After over half a century after it was introduced, photography has given important contribution to cultural progression of the modern human particularly during the 20th century when it created a revolution in terms of vision or the way of seeing. Photography does not only create accurate imagery, but also specified and objective in presenting reality.

In ‘The Aesthetics of Net.Art,’ Julian Stallabrass described, “The ‘objects’ of Internet art are far from being conventional art objects. They are not only reproducible without degradation but are almost free to transmit.” This point is concerned with the immateriality of art. The internet art can show artworks as almost perfect copies anywhere because of its immaterial nature. However, contemporary art is getting the immaterial nature and stepping on the Internet now. The immaterial nature of the Internet throws the art world into confusion. I want to show this disorder situation of the art form the viewpoint of the relationship between the Internet and the physical. I will examine 3 cases: Send me the JPEG by Winkleman Gallery, DISown by DIS, Internet Yami‑ichi by IDPW.

1. Send me the JPEG by Winkleman Gallery

Now, the physical place is equal to or subordinate to the Internet for the art world. “Send me the JPEG” is the exhibition which a contemporary art gallery tries to show the JPEG image of the artwork on the physical space while the JPEG image as the artwork has distributed on the Internet like net.art. This experiment is subversive of the relationship between the real artwork and the JPEG image. The art galleries have not addressed this situation.

2. DISown by DIS

DIS examines the “Internet‑ish” on the Internet and uses the Internet to revolt against art. The dichotomy between the physical space and the Internet is shifting to one between the art world, which is based on material culture, and the Internet, which represents immaterial culture. DISown is a “retail platform and laboratory to test the current status of the art object.” It opened as an exhibition using the format of a retail shop in the physical space; now, it has become an online store. DISown imported the “Internet‑ish” into the physical place, and, now, it has gone back to the Internet. The DISown online store suggests that DIS is trying to create an oppositional value against the art world on the Internet.

3. Internet Yami‑ichi by IDPW

IDPW downloads and installs the “Internet‑ish” into the physical place; the Internet Yami‑ichi is a flea market that deals with “Internet‑ish” things, face‑to‑face, in the actual space. IDPW evaluates the value of the real place via the Internet and makes use of it as a landing place for the “Internet‑ish.” Therefore, the relationship between the Internet and the physical space is twisted on the Internet Yami‑ichi. There is no big art market and art world in Japan like there is in America and in the EU; therefore, IDPW does not need to dis the art world as DIS does. Consequently, IDPW can focus on examining the relationship between the Internet and the physical space and hacking both the Internet and the physical space. The Internet Yami‑ichi shows the unique twisted connection between the Internet and the physical space. It becomes the location for bringing out many people from the Internet and linking them positively in the physical world.

Today I want to retrieve for audit, the sound of one event that existed for a time on that critical and fragile border between what we term virtuality and actuality. I want to take your memories back – a memory formed through media images – to the siege of 1993 at Waco, Texas. I want to try and recover the overlooked and repressed sound track. I don’t imagine this memory jogging will be too difficult a task, considering how Waco has been re-cited and re-sounded through the Oklahoma City bombing which can be understood as an aftershock of the Waco conflagration.

In the limited time available here, I want to re-perform a listening, a listening that depends upon a weak point in the system, a listening that has allowed me a way-in to what was to
become, WACO – the media/military Show, WACO, the tragedy, WACO, the melodrama, WACO, the ‘freak occurrence’, the ‘pulp fiction’. My radiophonic practice involved taking a profile of this
seismic moment and retrieving from the chaos of noise, (the shock waves still trapped in the system) some sense, some direction. In scoring Cankzfa of Fire, a radio ‘play’ on the ancient
idea of sound as weapon, I sought to track sonic fault lines, recording the tremors and murmurs, diagnosing the ratio of attack to decay. Inspired by a reading of urbanist/philosopher Paul Virilio’s work on how speed and the accidents of speed re-organize both real and virtually real (VR) spaces (this is the space, in effect, that we inhabit), I decided to investigate the events at Waco with the sonographic tools of my trade. What interested me was the curious way in which son-et-lumière performed together to in fact determine the course of events. For the T.V. cameras, hungry for ‘lights, action, exposure,’ there was little to develop here, little to be seen on the outside, except the boarded up white building (the compound) on a treeless Texas plain.

An austere reality of the 21st century human identity is denial towards the self-myth. Forces further than perception bestow surveillance upon Western and Eastern civilization to the effect of weaving simulacrum from the most tangible of artifacts we interact with. Narrative, dreams, and romanticism projected from new media often comes at an unseen labor. This taboo is due to dialogue between virtual realities and who is employing its mirage to shield a massacre in action. A complete work I propose for demonstration is a mobile game application that assaulted this reality from a political vernacular. For its efforts and a timeline of 900 work hours to this date, it received removal and censorship from the Apple iTunes merchandise store. Since the exodus of entitled In a Permanent Save State from distribution, it has received international tech and political media coverage throughout the viral blogosphere. It is an artwork heavily critical of the human rights violations surrounding electronic media devices produced by Apple itself, gaming outlets, and the Chinese labor campus Foxconn. In a Permanent Save State is a cerebral, fantasy driven application about these happenings. It serves as a game that falls into the evolving category of ‘serious games’ or if you will ‘games for change’. The interconnected narrative it tells sheds nameless perspective upon the Western spectacle vs. the Eastern dream. It chronicles the afterlives of seven migrant workers who died in the Foxconn factories. There is an effort to deconstruct the idea of where the games we cherish come from and an effort to deconstruct the video game form itself. Those who assemble the dreams of this world now have their own at a fatal cost.

This study aims to develop an integrated education program that allows future users of social robots to personally contribute to the design process of social robots through project-based learning. Toward this aim, we selected a theme for the program that is relevant in modern school environments by examining the latest trends in the subject area. This program enables users to understand robot interactions based on basic knowledge of electronic circuits and to develop cooperative problem-solving skills in the process of designing emotional interactions between the user and the robot through engineering procedures.

FP is a tool for the performing of music structures and their processing; the executed score is depending on the music patterns previously defined (music objects) and gestural acts we do during performance (music functions). The same sequence of gestural acts may give different results with respect to music patterns; particularly, if we only use the subset of linear functions, we have a kind of music which is consistent with the music patterns: if we define serial patterns we get serial music, if we define modal patterns we get modal music. Otherwise, we can use non-linear functions which modify the syntactic characteristics of the music patterns.

Music performance is traditionally made up by sequences of events (notes and chords, by example) as the basic objects. In this paper we show how music can be performed at a more abstract level in which the basic music object is a pattern of musical text (i.e. a chunk of a score).We have designed, implemented and experimented FP (Functional Performer), a software tool that allows the real-time processing of music patterns by means of music functions (e.g. tonal and modal transposition, specular inversion, juxtaposition, superimposition, time shrinking, etc.); functions are activated by the ASCII keyboard keys and are either deterministic or non-deterministic. Patterns obtained by functions may be arguments for other functions during the current performance. Music is generated as MIDI data and real-time executed by MIDI devices controlled by FP. Therefore, FP is a tool for the performing of music structures and their processing; the executed score is depending on the music patterns previously defined (music objects) and gestural acts we do during performance (music functions). The same sequence of gestural acts may give different results with respect to music patterns; particularly, if we only use the subset of linear functions we have a kind of music which is consistent with the music patterns: if we define serial patterns we get serial music, if we define modal patterns we get modal music. Otherwise, we can use non-linear functions which modify the syntactic characteristics of the music patterns.

At present, the first version of FP is completed and is usually experimented at L.I.M. concerts; it runs on MSX computers. A second version is under development on the Macintosh II family of computers; it has many improvements on graphics, ergonomics, efficiency and functionalities and can import/export Standard MIDI File scores.

Humans have gone to great lengths in recent years to augment their bodies with wearable technology using commercial devices such as smart phones, watches, and jewelry. Wearable technology has also been incrementally shaping the future of the performing and fine arts. This research explores creating a device that can be worn on clothing or costumes that performers can interact with as a digital musical instrument. This device can be used as an extension to the body with built-in sensor systems and haptic vibrations for producing sounds. The work draws from multidisciplinary practices including, sound and music, digital technology, costume design, body movement combined with traditional forms of cultural practices. Creating and expressing sounds using gestures and body movements can allow the performer/wearer to engage in a more interactive movement experience. The practices of Spanish Andalusian Flamenco and the Mevlevi Dervishes of Turkey are inspirations for creating a performance with these devices that will morph these styles by creating historical links through music and sound, body movements and gestures. These devices will track specific movements while emitting sound compositions that are related to music performed in these traditions. The experience will be an embodied one; a new way of performing with sound that can entrance both the wearer and the audience.

An SSD (Single line Spiral Drawing) is a reproduction of a rare illustration technique through computer graphics. Expressions that were previously neglected were a technique that could be produced only by a few people through a long period of training. Through the SSD, I want to draw a lot of art works and expression techniques that have not been noticed, and communicate them to many people. In this study, we analyze existing line drawing cases and theories and extract features of spiral drawing through NPR.

Abstract

In this paper, a VisionArtTool (VAT) system that increases the ability of an interactive artwork is created in an interactive installation. The aim of the proposed VAT system is to widen the interactive range in order to provide a maximum freedom especially for young artists. In recent works, interactive installation relies on heavy participation from spectators. Due to this the quality of the artwork depends on the techniques the artwork deploys and represents instead of showing the intention from the artists. There is a common problem among interactive artwork and artists. A lot of interactive artists are restricted in their creativity to express an artwork, with a challenging task of allowing their artwork to be fully interactive from the perspective of the spectators.

Moreover, in-line with the progress, with information communication technology, many artists are not majoring in art but in computer technology with experience in programming as well1. Taking the technological background of a prospective artist into consideration, technologically innovative artwork has an advantage for this group of techno-savvy artists. Also, there are different goals for engineers and for artists. A goal for an engineer is to create a developed technology for artists to use, but this goal is not achievable if the artist is not techno-savvy as this may restrict their creativity to express an artwork.

The use of photographs for records is still being done as a significant medium for archives. The museum uses those photo-graphic records to organize exhibitions so that visitors can experience educational, aesthetic, and emotional experiences. However, the perception in a diversified digital medium has a form different from that of existing photographs. This is caused by common digital devices and by a visually stimulating form when exposed to the user by them. Therefore, this study aimed at proposing a display method using cinema graphs as a photograph that visitors can focus more on an exhibition consisting of photo archives. Art galleries and museums plan or archive exhibitions by using that collected pho-to graphs as visual materials.

Abstract

This study will discuss virtual restoration in cyber-space of Sungnyemun – one of the prime cultural properties which was ruined – through the creation of characters in cyber space.

On 11 February, 2008, the Korean number one national treasure Sungnyemum, an ancient historical gate in central Seoul, was burnt down by an arsonist with foolish anger. The incident damaged national pride and people felt very sad for the loss of one of the most important symbols of Seoul city. The architecture, originating more than 600 years ago, was a considerable part of Korean’s everyday life. This created a feeling of absence in daily life – yet its spirit was felt to remain. There was a huge desire to restore the national treasure in various ways, including a reconstruction plan, collecting funding and creating a virtual Sungnyemum on-line. In this study we will look at the simulacra1 of the building in Second Life, to consider how virtual restoration of Sungnyemum was created in cyber space. This restoration was completed through a process involving four levels of reproduction. In this paper the process will be explained. Also, more broadly, the characteristics of cyber culture will be discussed.

Introduction
This study and its works are for displaying alternative artwork through the augmented reality system. Most artists want to get results through the reactions of the spectators in their exhibition. Thus, the exhibition space is of utmost importance to them. But they must pay heavy costs and invest much labor for the installation of their works. So, we suggest that there be an alternative exhibition space for art works. We expect that these alternative forms might face various restrictions when there are complex configurations involving physical installation. However, we hope to represent more visual information than actual installation even though we incur lower expenses and use less labor.

Method and Implementation
The methods for implementation of the exhibition and artwork through AR can be divided into the 3D modeling for augmentation on screen, with suitable adaptation for the diverse features of the artwork, and configuration of the exhibition environment.

3D modeling is divided into plane work, solid work, and media installation. In plane work, we can render the plane image as orthogonal coordinates with patterns on the wall or the table and construct an environment similar to the real display. And we can render the image, play the movie as texture material, etc., responding to the user’s eye direction. Both static and dynamic images can be rendered. The solid form can be shown through 3D modeling. We can show various images according to the viewer’s angle by applying different materials to each side, using objects and animation. As we can include the text and sounds based on 3D within the image, the diverse effects of a display can be multiplied. We can install the work by configuring the space using a combination of patterns or by expanding various display devices.

These works are implemented through 3D modeling programs such as 3DS Max, MAYA etc. and applying the various algorithms such as OpenGL, DirectX, VRML etc. If it satisfies the phsical conditions, we can present more visual effects and simulate reality in the virtual environment. In particular, we can send represent more information in the work when we use human body animation throughout real-time interaction images as compared to using static images in the traditional method. Thus, we can deliver greater satisfaction to the audience who demand multi-level expriences.

Abstract

At the candle rallies in April 2008 protesting against the import of U.S. beef under Korea-U.S. FTA, the participants paraded in the street with a candle in one hand and a camcorder or digital camera in the other hand. Using their mobile phones and laptop computers embedded with high-speed wireless Internet, citizens broadcast, live, the scene of the rally to Internet portal sites ‘Agora’ in ‘Daum’ and ‘afreeca.’

The rallies took place, not only in the streets, but also at ordinary households throughout the country. Netizens who joined the candle rallies took satellite photographs of the scenes through ‘Google Earth’, reported the deployment and
moving routes of police, and estimated the number of participants by counting candles in aerial photographs using pixel measuring software. Citizens gathered and reported news online using advanced technologies unimagined by established media companies and they also collected donations through the live Internet broadcasting of the candlelight rallies through ‘OhmyNews’ raising 100 million won (US$100,000) in eight days.

Abstract (Intro)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the mode of visual communication in the electronically networked society, referring to the works of two artists: Ilya Kabakov (1933-) from Russia, and Miyamae Masaki (1957-2000) from Japan. While not directly related to Media Art or Electronic Art, there is commonness between their visual images and cyberspace.

Kabakov’s “Album”
The ARPAnet, which is the original Internet, was put into action in the end of the 1960s. Since the first node for that computer network was set in UCLA, the net grew rapidly during the 70s. We can say that the electronic network age began at that time. In the art scene of those days, we know well the “Art & Technology” movement. And it was also during the early 70s, before Perestroika in the USSR, that Kabakov produced and performed a series of works he called “Album”. “Album” was a stack of thick cardboards displaying drawings and text, performed by showing one by one while reading the text before a small audience. I only point out a few aspects about “Album.” Kabakov used a flat material as a support to make “Album.” Each flat cardboard is an independent artwork without bound, but the artist says that he can also imagine another scenes, which precede or follow it. This means that there exists a story in “Album”, and the story progresses as the artist shows the drawings. It is not to say that his works are visual, but we can recognize that the text supplements or excludes the visual expression.

Kamishibai and “Album”
I introduce Kamishibai, which Miyamae, a Japanese artist, used late in his life. Kamishibai is a medium specific to Japan, in which a story is read dramatically while a series of pictures illustrate its scenes. We can find its origin in “Genji Monogatari Emaki”, which illustrates the early 11th century Japanese classic roman “Genji Monogatari.” After a long history, Kamishibai was established as a medium in the early Showa Era, around 1930, and it was used a sort of spectacle to sell candies and cookies to the children on the street. I notice the similarity between Kamishibai and Kabakov’s “Album”. First, both are composed of independent drawings, which combine to make a story. So the story progresses by showing drawings one by one. Secondary, both use not only visual expression but also text.

In the light of profound human impact on planetary systems, the global ocean, as a main source of life, is fundamentally transforming its interactions, flows and ecologies. These critical changes raise questions of other-than-human cohabitation on Earth, beyond the terrestrial ground also below sea level. In response to these radical ecological struggles, the design discipline seeks to reorganize its methodologies towards forms of multispecies collaboration with/in environments of anthropogenic change. In this paper, I argue for activating the evolutionary theory of Symbiogenesis, disseminated by biologist Lynn Margulis, based on the preliminary work of Mereschkowsky and Kozo-Polyansky. I am highlighting, how Symbiogenesis can serve as a point of departure for challenging and reinventing our disciplinary protocols in design. The ocean, as a prototypical space for symbiotic system relations serves as my experimental contact zone for shaping these multispecies encounters. Alongside a young generation of designers, the presented design research seeks to evade an extractivist mode of production in favor of developing process-oriented methodologies for interspecies design. A design research practice in underwater environments, together with sponges, algae, electrical circuits, marine biologists, fishes, cameras, limestone, polyps et al., gives rise to a new design strategy, which I suggest naming Sympoïetic Design.

The paper reflects upon the integration of academic‑scientific methods and artistic strategies for art and technology projects that address user participation in socially defined domains. It addresses the difficulties in combining classroom teaching and experimental artistic project work in that each belongs to a different set of epistemology and pedagogical discourse. The paper describes its field of inquiry, namely art and technology student projects as being part of an extended art field. These projects deploy, firstly, artistic strategies and forms of expression that are the result of the cultural autonomy of art and secondly, scientific knowledge and methods from engineering, social science and the humanities alike. Consequently, these projects’ trajectories can neither respect the purposeless autonomy of art or the academic discourse of finding solutions to well‑defined problems. What kind of methodology can accommodate this seemingly paradoxical situation? The paper proposes Luhmann’s relative difference between medium (loosely coupled elements) and form (tightly coupled constituents) as a theoretical and heuristic tool for productive interferences between artistic and scientific methods. Art and technology projects operate within a field of existing forms (e.g., social patterns, urban and interior spaces, etc.), which must be de‑coupled prior to decisions related to novel forms. Art as novel re‑couplings is often considered as the artistic impetus per se, where form yields its own medium. But re‑coupling and new‑coupling is intrinsically bound to the decoupling process. Due to the complexity and aim of art and technology (or art and science) projects, the de‑coupling/re‑coupling/new‑coupling process necessitates a combination of various scientific and artistic methods. The paper elaborates upon and exemplifies the proposed heuristic through various art and technology projects as part of university teaching.

This paper examines the process of interfacing between organic and technical objects and how this might be utilized as a tactic to promote invention within new media art events. Raphael Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architecture is examined in relation to concepts of parasitic action and folding to show how the work develops a complex ecology of relation through interfacing.

The importance of the audience as part of the media art event is widely acknowledged, but although interaction and embodiment are well theorised, we are yet to achieve a well grounded understanding of audience experience. It is fundamental to defining the context around which an art work has been made and shown. The panel asks how we understand the concerns of audiences and how they respond to concepts of creativity and innovation in media art.

The premise of the panel is that understanding how an audience experiences media art is fundamental to understanding the impact of the art work. Too often the “idea” of the audience is invoked in media arts rhetoric in vague and general ways, and the effect that art works have is discussed in terms of expectation and supposition. This panel aims to move beyond these limitations and argues that we need to pay particular attention to the use and value of specific methods and approaches for studying experience. The panel aims to create an opportunity for practitioners and researchers from different perspectives to consolidate and develop a vibrant emerging body of knowledge about audiences of media art, which can empower artists, curators and academics.

As discussions around the necessity of archiving and collecting new media work expand, it is arguable that future iterations of such artworks can only have cultural meaning if we are able to provide information on the context in which they were experienced: how and why audiences responded to them. This also raises issues about the way such information can be recorded and incorporated within documentation of art works.

Keywords: Transdiscipline, Collaborative Research, Education, ResearchCreation, Training

The solution to complex problems is being explored, increasingly, from multi and/or interdisciplinary perspectives. However, those strategies are not enough in many cases and therefore developing a transdisciplinary approach becomes an essential tool. The traditional academic structure based on rigid disciplines has proven not to work well to face problems such as climate change or poverty, taking here only two among many multi-dimensional challenges we are facing. Can we really and effectively develop innovative useful ways to do research and apply our findings with a creative approach? This is an introduction to some experimental strategies used in transdisciplinary projects focusing on research-creation, aiming others could benefit and eventually emulate some of the experiences carried out.

Public Lecture Statement

The John Whitney retrospective will present the work of the late filmmaker in the context of his fifty years of developing core ideas concerning visual and auditory dynamics. In the 1930’s, Whitney was deeply influenced by life in Paris where he immersed himself in the music of Beethoven and Schönberg and the Bauhaus. Whitney was involved from the start of his career in the process of making tools to achieve his vision. A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Whitney was awarded its Medal of Commendation for Cinematic Pioneering in 1986. In 1964 he wrote of a time when the camera itself would be abandoned as an imaging making tool. He understood that mathematical principles of harmony apply to visual images moving in time just as mathematical principles underlie harmonic relationships in music. The retrospective evenings will illustrate the principles of “Digital Harmony” Whitney envisioned. A guided review of Whitney’s work will illustrate his hypothesis, discipline and the method he devised in service of “Digital Harmony”. Whitney’s last computer compositions, a series he called “Moondrum”, transcend pure technique. An interplay of an inner creative source with a mastered technique is evident in “Moondrum”. This final work is largely unknown outside of Whitney’s own composing studio. The “Moondrum” series will be played from Whitney’s computer instrument during the retrospective.

John Whitney Sr. was keynote speaker at the second ISEA symposium (SISEA, 1990)

MOONDRUM: PROGRAM NOTES

by John Whitney, september 16, 1995

Sixty years ago, in darkness and suffocating dust I drove to somewhere in the New Mexican or Arizona desert to observe U. S. Government proscribed Indian Ceremonial Dances. It was the impact of drums so loud they pound in the heart, as well as brief visions in random firelight – rattle snakes, rascal dogs, effortless, entranced dancing, all in patterns and momentary symmetries, it was the inhaled and quaffed hallucinogens of such a night. It is as if all this were exposed on a single photo-plate at the very core of my being. These impressions forever color my dreams and reflections. They’re the content of my American essays – a series called MOONDRUM. I have composed over a dozen pieces attempting to evoke the mood, the colors, sounds as well as an appreciation of the artifacts that were native to the peoples of the western world who flourished centuries before any modern nation existed. This is my best effort to find some reverent evocations of the feel and quality of objects of utility, decoration and religious mystery present in most of the possessions of our native predecessors. These compositions also explore newly emerging cross-cultural developments. They are the fruition of my fifty-year effort to dignify the role of technology in art. Only in the last decade of this century a new music, a new symbolism — a new kind of abstract expressionist action painting with light and sound is becoming accessible to a solitary individual artist/composer in his own studio. With a special composing program on my computer, I create musical design intertwined with color design tone-for-tone played against action-for-action. Between the two — tone or color — I can’t say which comes first. I don’t copy “real” Native-American artifacts literally. Neither is there a real image of an engulfed cathedral or postcard of Iberia in the descriptive, impressionist musical works of Claude Debussy. The many examples of musical “image making” by composers a century ago have been an inspiration for these early essays in this new medium of audiovisual complementarity. For my part, I expect to continue to reconstruct, revise and rediscover these twelve works that I have named MOONDRUM as if they were unfinished chapters of the single volume of one’s lifetime work. They must become my magnum opus the preoccupation of the remainder of a life. I see much still to be done whit them finally to round out this life work.

Come on down! Embark on a search for new aesthetic possibilities at the frontier of the digital revolution. Journey to the Edge, the place where art, science, entertainment and industry meet. See the Zone ruled by net cowboys, outlaws, digital revolutionaries and data surfers. The new breed of cyber-artist is exploring how mere images can be transformed into art-unique art. All with the aid of radically new tools! Stake your claim in cyberspace and help capture the imagination of the Entire Planet! Net SW! Skateboard to Cyberspace! Where Electronics and Art Converge. Entertainment enters a new dimension. And companies don’t want to ‘miss out’. If only myth and reality coincided. You may recognize this breathless hype as the cheerleader surrogate of the datasphere. It surrounds our interactions with electronic art, science and the computer industry. These verbal formulas have visual equivalents as well. It’s now almost a cliche to state that electronic art is cliched Everyone agrees. What does this mean?

Digital art has a “perception problem”. It promises much more than it delivers. Witness the science-fiction extrapolation about its boundless potential for “changing the way we think”. Ads create false claims about new aesthetics which spring into existence in barely a nanosecond. Electronic tools, with their highly specific “effects,” spawn their own sets of cliches. Not yet able
to grasp a vision of the electronic datasphere, artists unknowingly map new images into old formats and old images into new formats. This peculiar combination of cutting-edge technology and familiar images leads to cliche. The close connections between art and industry complicate this mix. Installations inadvertently function as marketing demos of new techniques; scientific illustration passes for both art and science. Image is mistaken for art.

The New Technologies foster a new kind of efficiency in the symbiosis of the traditionally differentiated economic, political and social systems, giving place to en entirely new situation which rather than constituting an even system, presents what Jose Luis Brea has come to define as a “fractal constellation of affinities” in an “immanence plane where differences play” and “a relational space in operation”; These fractal differences entail a new myriad of habits and urban concerns in an evolving participatory urban praxis. Far from established concept-based strategies, this unprecedented coexistence of subjectivities and disparities, such as transnational, local, individual, virtual, tangible and the spaces in-between, demands new spatial agencies and tactics.

This paper is a reflection on the changing situation of global cities from a city-dweller’s viewpoint. In contrast with new leading urban practices that further global competition through construction this article explores the productive capacity of the increasingly available virtual environments in the city dweller’s hands to stimulate urban life in the contemporary city. Taking the Japanese city as a case study, the methodology employed in this investigation entails looking at the nature of virtual environments as alternative space-times to inhabit and exploring the relationships between virtual and tangible forms of inhabitation through examples of situations found between the two, such as fiction, moving images, informatics, mobile phones, the web 2.0 and DV technology. In so doing traditional Architect’s tactics such as ideology and the concept, are put into perspective through the notions of participation and subjectivity. Lastly I look at specific tactics employed by some Japanese documentalists in virtual space-time to actualize reality and argue their attitudes as a benchmark example for an entirely new urban practice in line with today’s urban milieu and with the changing concerns of the majority of urban dwellers.

The OuCliPo research project (Ouvroir of Potential Climates) that proposes surrealist solutions to climate problems ; controversial proposals in an anxious ecological context and in the perspective of premature solutions such as geoengineering. The project underlines the scientific and ethical dimension of climate manipulation.

• Mariejulie Bourgeois (FR) is a digital artist an

a[d]dress.mov is a work-in-progress – a wearable screen for musicians. It is conceived to be a platform responsive to past and present environments – where the use of video projection, sampling technology and interactivity widens the performative range available to any artist who wears it.

I have just completed masters in cross cultural communication breakdown in Aboriginal health (combined with new media, Aboriginal knowledge & western knowledge of the anatomy of human biology) at the Northern Territory University. I have focused on the way health education has been delivered to the Aboriginal community (kidney failure & disease). Kidney failure has now reached epidemic proportions in Aboriginal Australia.

Expanding on Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of the Inoperative Community, this paper will draw from recent memorial practices and communication theory to argue for the importance of absence in the construction of sound networks. Blindly celebrated by dystopian modernists, and blissfully ignored by utopian technophiles, the experience of absence is crucial to a nonviolent and just approach to communion.

Over the past two years, I have developed several autonomous devices meant to act within natural spaces as part of the electronic art intervention  project Absences. This paper gives an overview of the challenges brought by this project. It gives actual and potential solutions as well as lessons learned through the research-creation process and opens up to the importance of adaptivity in future work.

Acting within nature
Electronic and natural systems have inherent differences. It is thus not surprising that introducing artificial autonomous devices in a naturally stabilized ecosystem is not as simple as it looks. The first challenge of artistic electronic intervention in nature is the mere “survival” of the device. Weather conditions such as extreme temperature, humidity and sunlight can harm components. In the context of using solar cells, such as was the case for all interventions so far, other factors need to be considered. Snow, dust and falling leaves can block the cells, while the shortening of days during Winter and the presence of clouds will reduce energy supplies.

In 1970 at the beginning of Chilean socialist pacific revolution in the Allende’s government, Fernando Flores, an engineer in charge of CORFO, the office which was in charge to manage the nationalized companies, knew the work of the cybernetician Stafford Beer on Management Cybernetics, and invite him to apply his VIABLE SYSTEM MODEL. Beer accepted the invitation and the project started with the configuration of a transdisciplinary team and a branch of several Chilean and foreign institutions, like INTEC (Institute of Technology), ECOM (Computer Company of Chile), together with important theorists, scientists and designers such as Raul Espejo, Gui Bonsiepe, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, among others. They developed the interface, software, technical implementation and the training of the people who will compile and transmit the data, a group compound by engineers and common workers.

When data analytics abstracts people today, it follows some of the routines of statistics. However, understanding statistics paired with machine learning technologies is not enough to grasp what these newly abstracted people are like and what they do to us. This talk engages with these processes to show how model frameworks and idealising setups are used to delineate data-crunching in cultural, political and aesthetic terms. Ideal people and model characters are results of the work of collective imaginaries and the exercise of power beyond computing. Their embodiment of a return of the ideal calls for a re-think of our time in history.

Moderated by Pau Alsina, general Chair at ISEA2022 Barcelona and professor and researcher in Arts and Humanities Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, where he coordinates and teaches courses on art and contemporary philosophical and scientific thought. He is also editor in Chief at Artnodes Journal. He is the author of books such as Arte, ciencia y tecnología, co-author of Monstruos y quimeras: arte, biología y tecnología, of teaching textbooks such as Estética y teoría del arte o Pensamiento contemporáneo.

The pressure to open archives and cultural collections is increasing. Not only the Open- GLAM movement (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) demands easy access to freely usable sources. Civil society and even in-house interests (e.g., communication during the pandemic) point to a considerable need for action. This paper therefore considers two types of accessibility: individualized access for humans and ways of (automated) access for machines.

For interpersonal communication a curation tool for the exhibition context is presented that can be used quickly and is easily deliverable to different online and offline places. The automation aspect is structured according to the so-called FAIR-Principles. Here, too, a digital service is described that makes it easier for those archives and collections to become FAIR (Finable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and capable of (information) dialogues that would otherwise have to retrofit the existing systems.

This paper frames the conceptual workspace and development documentation of the art project titled Accumulated-Memory-Landscapes (AML). This project is an inquiry on how technology can mediate and enhance human memory by expanding the possibilities of interaction, experiencing and sharing of this. AML appropriates the 3 main steps involved in human memory (Encoding → Storage → Retrieval) and traces parallels between the biological human process and the technological devices and algorithms used for capturing, storing and recalling data. Using a portable wireless electroencephalogram (EEG) and a smart phone, we have built a wearable system able to measure attention levels in any given time. The device records significant moments of the wearer, in the form of image sequences and audio clips, which are then sent, in real-time, to a server that algorithmically processes them. The result is an immersive 3D procedural landscape built from these memories; a space where the wearer and any other individual can experience and share these accumulated memories in more abstract and spacial ways.

This institutional presentation introduces the ACM SIGGRAPH Art Papers programs 2019 and 2020. The 2019 edition marks the 11th version of the program and our main goal is to highlight its principal novelties and projections onto 2020. At this occasion, we will discuss the main scientific and artistic contributions of art papers, but also different ways of accessing, experiencing, and enhancing the published content.

ACM SIGGRAPH stands for Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group Graphics; the annual SIGGRAPH conference is on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.

ACM SIGGRAPH’s mission is to foster and celebrate innovation in Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. The organization promotes its vision by bringing people together in physical, on-line, and asynchronous communities to invent, inspire, and redefine the many creative and technical artifacts, disciplines, and industries that are touched by computer graphics and interactive techniques.

ACM SIGGRAPH strives to be the premiere community and catalyst for the creation, promotion and dissemination of information on computer graphics and interactive techniques. ACM SIGGRAPH purpose is to foster a membership community of people whose core values help them to catalyze the innovation and application of computer graphics and interactive techniques.

The Digital Arts Community is a vibrant, international group within the Association for Computing’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH). Our mission is “to foster year-round engagement and dialogue within the digital, electronic, computational and media arts. Facilitate dynamic scholarship and creative programming within the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. Promote collaboration between artists and the larger computer graphics and interactive techniques community.” We maintain an online community throughout the year, organize juried online exhibitions, and gather together at the annual SIGGRAPH conferences in North America and Asia.

We coordinate our activities with the juried Art Papers and the Art Galleries presentations organized for the annual conferences, as well as partner with Leonardo/LEAF and ISEA on the annual Art Party and reception at SNA. We are also the home of the SIGGRAPH Art Show Archives and organize special sessions and exhibitions devoted to topics of interest to the digital arts community. We encourage the ISEA community to join us in Washington DC in July 2020 for the conference organized around the theme of ‘Think Beyond’ and in Daegu, South Korea in November 2020, where the conference will be organized around the theme of ‘Driving Diversity.’

The ACM SIGGRAPH organization is developing an online archive showcasing information about presentations and experiences as well as artifacts and the organization’s history. A physical archive was also established to supply information necessary for the online archive. In August 2023, SIGGRAPH will celebrate its 50th conference and the materials in the archive will be used in displays of collectables and other artifacts, visualization posters, interactive kiosks and an immersive, interactive time tunnel.

The ACM SIGGRAPH History Archives is a team effort involving students, interns, volunteers, and computer graphic pioneers. In 2022, it expanded from an online archive to include a physical archive of SIGGRAPH publications and artifacts. These archives include information about presentations, exhibitions, screenings and events at the annual conference as well as information about SIGGRAPH communities and committees. With such a vast array of information, developing a robust infrastructure was essential. Team members researched, digitized and entered tens of thousands of entries and programmed innovative features that enable users easy access to this valuable resource. The SIGGRAPH History archive team is also preparing the archive to be part of the world-wide distributed network of new media art archives.

This institutional presentation focuses on the ACM SIGGRAPH History Archive and how it evolved from the ACM SIGGRAPH Art Show Archive. This massive project involved a rethinking of the information architecture as well as programming the interface and adding new functionality. Thousands of new entries were added, along with images, abstracts, and additional information. After a year of hard work by a group of volunteers and student workers, we have made tremendous progress but much more still needs to be done. When completed, this new archive will encapsulate the evolution of a fringe research endeavor to a visually rich technology integral to our daily lives.

The ACM SIGGRAPH History Archive is a comprehensive reflection of the evolution of the field of computer graphics from a niche research and creative endeavor to an integral aspect of our daily lives. This institutional presentation focuses on the ACM SIGGRAPH History Archive and the progress made over the past year. The expansion of the archive from containing only digital art and art-related papers to now showcasing information about animations, emerging technology demos, virtual reality experiences, technical papers and so much more has amplified the workload as well as expanded the audience for this vastly informative resource. Over the past year, thousands of new entries were added, along with images, abstracts, and additional information. With the goal of showcasing this archive at the 50th SIGGRAPH conference celebration in Los Angeles, USA in Aug. 2023, we have amplified our efforts. Thousands of entries still need to be added and we are still missing many primary source materials. Our ultimate goal is to not only complete the data entry but also add the coding necessary to connect to other new media art archives around the world.

Sound can be a tool for physically capturing the human body. This work seeks to investigate something we are largely unconscious of in our daily lives—our very presence—through the use of acoustic response. A number of pipes of different lengths suspended within a space each contain a microphone and are equipped with a freely movable speaker assembly beneath them. The distance between each speaker assembly and microphone is expressed in the “howling” acoustic response. Having divided the space with pipes, moving This series of phenomena seeks to make audible the normally inaudible material of space. Moreover, this work goes beyond transforming sound into information or data to imagine its exploration through a physical filter. This work employs space itself as an acoustic material representing people’s physical presence and makes it possible to experience a series of musical works by understanding the transformation of spatial properties as musical performance.

This paper is an attempt to formalise definitions of different types of performance common to computer-generated (CG) characters in feature films, and to create a taxonomy of modes of performance among these characters. Terms such as a “virtual actors” (vactors), “synthespians”, and “digital doubles” are frequently, but incorrectly, used interchangeably due to a lack of established definitions. What is the relationship of these terms to each other, and how should they be understood from both technological and performancebased perspectives? By articulating clear definitions for these terms, it is possible to theorise a variety of performance types specific to CG characters in feature films. These categories provide an expanded understanding of how performance is created among CG characters, and draws into question whether classic examples of synthespians are really synthespians at all.

V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media is an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology in Rotterdam that strives to build a ‘living archive’ of electronic art, based on documentation of more than 40 years of activities by V2_. This short presentation reflects on the work of three researchers who were commissioned to do archival research connected to the V2_archive in 2022. They presented their findings both in the form of a text and as part of a monthly radio programme by V2_. These commissions were part of V2_’s effort to show that it possible to tell different and diverse histories of electronic art.

Round Table Statement

This roundtable would ideally be presented as a discussion forum AND a kiosk. The kiosk would make experimental artists’ CD-ROMs of relevance to the discussion available to individual viewers. The roundtable is intended for practicing artists with experience of, or with an interest in, interactive media, especially interactive performance media. Artists, authors, and experimenters are invited to bring work examples to illuminate the discussion (by prior arrangement with the roundtable conveyor). The terms “realtime systems” or “interactive systems” beg a host of compositional questions. Just what do we mean by interactive? What can interactive compositions possibly be? How does interactive performance affect our sense of the composed or designed time domain, our perceptions of how time is organized and how it passes? What are the aesthetics of interactive work — do they differ from aesthetic value judgements in more conventional frameworks? There are, of course, many realtime interactive systems, ranging from a simple MIDI keyboard with preset sounds, to the most complex multi-CPU systems. For the purposes of this debate, a certain level of complexity is assumed. Crucially, the systems implied here involve a certain degree of automation or machine knowledge a light operator in a stage booth could be said to be operating a “realtime interactive system”, and possibly with some validity but it is not what we mean for the purposes of this forum. All too often the role of the artist is rarely questioned within these interactive systems. Certainly, within score-driven interactive music systems, the composer is still at the top of the creative hierarchy, creating a interactive sonic environment controlled by a performer’s playing only in the sense that it responds to the interpretative gestures of the musical performer. A score, nevertheless, is regurgitated with a high degree of repeatability. In looser environments, an artist will often cede certain sections of a piece to a performer in the guise of improvisation. Working with environment-driven interactive systems takes this one step further: the composer creates not just improvisational sections, but environments in which the performer plays/moves/gestures/speaks. In turn, these approaches call for new ways of making work new creative and compositional methodologies that are likely to be a centre of discussion at this roundtable.

Present at the Round Table:

Peter Coppin, Carnegia Mellon University, USA
Todor Todoroff, Faculty Polytechnique de Mons. Belgium
Martine Corompt, artist, Melbourne,Australia
Joran Rudi. Norwegian Network for Technology ACOUSTICS and Music, Oslo, Norway
Keith Brown, Manchester Metropolitan University. UK
MartIn Spanjaard, artist, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Niranjan RaJah, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia
Unknown1, student from Utrecht, NL
Unknown2, artist from Denmark

Virtual reality, telepresence, haptic devices, advanced networks and surround sound offer greater means to visualize the complexity of the world and create new conceptions of reality and identity. These new conceptions expand traditional aesthetic principles of art making into other dimensions in depth and time requiring new aesthetic principles.

This text describes the relationship between traditional and digital aesthetics in the virtual reality art project Rutopia 2 built for the CAVETM and C-Wall virtual environments. The project explores the aesthetics of virtual art in relation to traditional Russian folk arts and crafts such as wood sculpture, toys and the decorative painting styles of Palekh, Khokhloma, and Dymkovo. Their crisp easily recognizable style of expression is characterised by generalized outlines, crisp emphasized details, bright colours, subjects, materials, and forms. Rutopia 2 generalizes those aesthetic principles and transmits their culture into virtual reality. The project studies how the aesthetics can affect the intuitive navigation, perception, and emotional experience of the user inside the virtual environment.

Computer graphics techniques used for the real-time development of virtual artwork study how colors and shapes can influence and lead the navigation and interaction of the user in the virtual environment. The research of user’s perception and emotional experience gained from immersion and interaction with aesthetics of the virtual environment teaches that aesthetics can induce and control emotional responses. The aesthetics of the virtual environment can be orchestrated to control the communicative power of the project, maximize a sense of immersion and ultimately “presence” in the virtual world.

Discussing virtual reality with another artist recently, I was asked incredulously “What do ethics have to do with aesthetics?” I might have dismissed the question as coming from someone whose roots are strongly attached to the modernist tradition. He doesn’t grasp, I might have said to myself, that things have changed, that now, in this period considered by many to be postmodern, aesthetics is no longer regulated to a matter of form or style, but rather once again encompasses a philosophical stance towards the a making process. But that response would have missed an opportunity to develop an answer to another and central question about virtual systems. That question involves what the aesthetics of virtual systems have to do with ethics. My one word answer to both questions is, “Everything” The longer answer is less presumptive, more inquiring, and the subject of my ongoing research and this paper.

In my interviews with various artists, educators, cultural theorists, computer researchers, software and hardware developers, questions about the ethics of virtual systems often materialize as ambiguous but pressing matters. Finding substance in particular worries such as virtual sex, political and corporate domination, military uses, and mind-numbing, violence oriented entertainment, these questions continue to indicate the possibilities of directing the development of virtual systems in building virtual worlds. Ethical questions, after all, involve judgment. How should we act? The idea of judgment in ethics is an all-encompassing function. Involving our entire being, it is the way we choose among many possibilities. Those choices commit us to paths which are more less consistent with our nature and the rest of our lives. The accountability of our judgments is “part of the condition of our existence as social, integrated, affectionate, language using beings” and touches on questions about the nature of knowledge.

On what do we base those actions? How can we know if the knowledge on which we base those actions is true? Decisions about what is right or wrong are inextricably linked to a grasp of what is real and what is true. We approach an understanding of reality and truth through a variety of means. Historically, philosophical thought has offered us various positions on whether attempts at making ethical decisions are based on stable or shifting grounds. Current technology offers us countless means to reevaluate our perceptions of what reality and truth consist. Consequently, this attempt to suggest aesthetic frameworks for the design of an ethical interactive technology includes a brief, hopefully succinct, unraveling of the intricate connections among pertinent systems of ethics, the ontological and epistemological assumptions on which they are based, and the influence technology has had on those assumptions.

How to present knowledge as a visible shape? How to visualize it as a space to enter? Looking from a perspective of media art, the artists’ presentation examines the notion of knowledge space. The staging of information structures and the procedure of interactive perception will be exemplified by the authors’ own works.

Introduction
Knowledge is understood as something that originates in processes of interacting with the world and is actively constructed by the individual. “You can’t manage knowledge — nobody can. What you can do is to manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, transferred, adopted, adapted and applied,“ say Knowledge Managers Collison & Parcell. As artists we produce artistic environments in which knowledge can be created. Inspired by art historian Aby Warburg and his notion of the Denkraum, we do research on the Virtual Denkraum and the aesthetics of staging knowledge space to enter — between experience and expertise. By knowledge space we understand architectural space furnished with data. Thus physical space transforms into a data landscape to walk-in — an interactive environment connecting data, space and user. The visitor of such an environment is not only the protagonist, but also the producer of knowledge through interaction. For the human it becomes an enlarged action space that is experienced fourfold: through perception of the spatial (and other attendees), by exploration of data, production of knowledge through active experience, finally, through communication with others. In this article we introduce media art examples of staging knowledge, driven by different paradigms of interactivity — and as a public space of knowledge.

The borders between games and art have always been blurred. Several theorists have made connections between art and play, from conceptualizing the reception of art objects as an interpretative play (Gadamer) to arguing that computer games should be seen as an art form (Crawford). Phenomena such as interactive art on the one hand and ubiquitous games on the other, make the connection between art and games even tighter. What is the essential difference of a game such as Cruel to be kind and one of Allan Kaprow’s 1970ies happenings? If there is no essential difference, why is the first termed a game while the latter is thought of as art? And what does this difference in terms do to our perception of the phenomena? Already Kaprow realized that framing his works as play instead of art would make them more available to people, and thereby more likely to affect people’s lives. Could the act of framing them as games also make the works more ‘fun’ to people, providing them with a more intensely engaging experience?

In this paper, I want to examine interactive works of art that require the audience to interact with machines or technology, much in the same way as we are required to when playing a computer game. Comparing these interactive experiences with the way intensely engaging interactive entertainment (e.g. Tetris, Dance Dance Revolution) may make us forget time and place, quite literally “concentrating on what is appearing”(Seel), I want to investigate further into the relationship between play and aesthetic experience. My focus will be on one characteristic of play, namely when it is experienced as ‘fun’, or ‘intensely engaging’, which, I want to argue, can be seen as the optimal state of play.

As digital culture and media develop and re/shape experience, they also colour e.motions. The aim of this paper is to explore e.motions in media(ted) experiences of digital culture. Emotion, or e.motion, can be understood as the movement of embodied affect– within and between bodies– as feelings that are in bodies and that move bodies. We jump with joy, we recoil with fear and when sadness weighs down our hearts, our limbs turn to lead. E.motions also move between bodies and machines and relay through networks, perturbing everyday life. We will engage with these perturbations through two or three case studies of electronic and new media artwork, including our own work in the pataphysical new media art project, The Perpetual E.motions Project.

In this project, we have set up a fictive institute –the Institute for the Study of Perpetual E.motion. The Perpetual E.motions Project involves both a networked performance and an internet art work, which take as their starting point an understanding of e.motions as physical as well as cultural. We are also interested in the way recent neurobiological attention to emotion is reminiscent of an earlier concern with measurement of motion; in particular the work of Etienne-Jules Marey. Many of the e.motional machines in the internet work are Marey machines that re-map the e.motions which were left out of Marey’s original motion studies. The Perpetual E.motions Project also involves a networked performance, Sea.nce, which focuses on emotions in networked relay. Seances and ouija boards, which historically were popular ‘parlour games’, can also be understood as ‘networked’ events (networking across the ether between the living and the dead). In the discussion of The Perpetual E.motions Project we will focus on the ways that networking and media(tion) perturb and are perturbed by the relays of e.motion.

For the past ten years, media researchers have focused on online erotica and cybersex, the possibilities of sexual self-expression, experimentation and play online (‘e-rotics’ and ‘cyborgasms’), while relatively little attention has been paid on the massive and highly profitable field of online pornography. Online porn, varying from live shows to webcams, videos, photo and text galleries, is increasingly part of everyday Internet use, finding its way to inboxes as html spam, and forming the most popular search words on the WWW. There is little doubt that pornography is both affective and effective, but there is less agreement over its meanings and implication. Porn relies on ‘gut reactions’ in terms of arousal as well as disgust, and these reactions are inseparable from the workings of gender, class and race. This presentation, basing on analysis of 366 html porn spam messages, argues for the need to consider porn both in terms representation and affect in order to achieve a fuller understanding of the meanings of, and reactions towards pornography.

In my PhD research on fat embodiment in the media, I look at different kinds of images of women and men who are defined fat by the contemporary body standards, and these images almost always provoke strong feelings. Some of the images tend to annoy me or even shock me at first. Most of the popular, mainstream images of fat bodies seem to support very conventional power relations in terms of body size, gender, sexuality and ‘race’. During the process of interpretation the feelings and attitudes towards the images necessarily change. In the presentation I will discuss how my feelings, interpretations and ways of looking as a feminist researcher meet and are constructed in the research process. I am especially interested in the cultural constructions of distance and proximity between the researcher or the viewer and visual material, and how the variations in distance can be of use from a feminist perspective.

Distance and proximity are produced through bodily experience as well as research objectives and conventions. The assumed bodily similarities or differences between the viewer and the image are important factors in producing different ways of identification. However, through feminist reading and interpretation some images that have first felt distant to me have become closer; sometimes images that have felt uncomfortably close have become distanced. To illustrate how the consideration of embodied distances can be useful, I compare my interpretation process of pornographic images of fat women on the Internet with some other typical representations of fatness in the contemporary popular media.

Abstract

New developments in real-time computing and body-worn sensor technology allow us to explore not just visible gestures using inertial sensors, but also invisible changes in an individual’s physiological state using bio-sensors (Kim & André, 2008). This creates an opportunity for a more intimate interaction between the observer and technology-based art (Gonsalves, 2008). We present a technical overview of the AffecTech system; a bio-signal based interactive audio-visual installation commissioned as part of the pre-ISEA symposium in November 2008. Observers were invited to sit on one of 2 sensor-enhanced chairs (Coghlan &
Knapp, 2008), which transmitted physiological data about the occupant to a central control system. This data was used to control and modulate interactive visuals, live video feeds and a surround sound score, with events and interactions dependent on the observers’ affective/ emotional state and the disparity or similarity between the bio-signals of the chairs occupants. This technical overview is followed by an examination of the outcomes of the project, from both the artistic and technical viewpoints, with recommendations for modification in future implementations.

Encompassing a series of experiments with atmospheric scenography the following paper maps out the relationships between different materials and energetic flows as part of a spatial design. These investigations emanate from the assumption that poetic relationships between material and immaterial processes can induce new meaning to the ways we inhabit our environment. In diffusing the boundaries between elemental dependencies connected to water use or airflow and the perceiver, unfolding atmospheric processes on scales that usually remain unnoticed are made sensually perceptible. The focus shifts from the concrete to the in-between. The visualization and enaction of flows that make up our surroundings suggest a greater involvement of oneself with the environment. Through these experiments we demonstrate 1) how spatial continuity can be achieved in relating attributes of dynamic behavior of water, vapor, air, sound, and light to significances in space; 2) that the indifferent role of the human perceiver is challenged in making their impact and responsiveness to the environment part of the spatial composition itself; and 3) how the expressive qualities of atmospheric variables could be used to experience layers of meaning in spaces, that are usually not comprehensible (such as ecological dimensions of water use).

Keywords: Virtual reality, media archaeology, closed-circuit video installation art, media art, Dan Graham

After Dan Graham is a mixed reality art installation that employs an experimental media archaeological art methodology to bring closed-circuit video installation art into dialogue with emerging creative practices in virtual reality (VR). Recent work by immersive media artists have employed an archaeological approach to the creation of a variety of media art. Concomitant with these creative practices are studies that employ an archaeological method to re-examine the history of immersive media technologies. Both the scholarship and creative practices have explored fascinating connections between emerging technologies and the technologies of the past. After Dan Graham extends the archaeological approach to VR by re-creating and expanding an early form of closed-circuit video installation art within a virtual environment. In doing so, this project foregrounds the corporeal data that drives the VR experience and theorizes closed-circuit video installation art as a form of proto-VR.

Journalism, and Fiction In the mid-2000s, a new “third-party gaming services industry . . . grew rapidly . . . as MMO games grew in popularity”. According to a 2008 estimate, “China has around 80-85% of employment and output in this sub-sector”.  The production of MMO currencies, items and services is commonly known as “gold farming”, and stories about gold farming in China proliferated in western news media from 2006 to 2009. Meanwhile, scholars commented on Chinese gold farming and its reception by western players by analytically linking it to Third World stereotypes, anti-immigration discourse, and social aspects virtual world ownership.  The figure of the Chinese gold farmer also found its way into western novels. The size of the gold farming industry in China is assumed to have peaked. Although empirical basis for this assumption is weak, the literature tentatively suggests determining factors such as rising wages, and the spread of subscription-based software, which allow private users to automate gameplay for financial gain.
This paper draws together existing western scholarship, journalism and fiction dealing with the Chinese gold farming phenomenon and frames coverage in these distinct yet interconnected fields as a case study of how discourses around video game economics resonate with broader discourses, in this case western perceptions of China and its role in the global economy. The primary theoretical framework is Vukovich’s update of Said’s orientalism thesis for a world in which China is seen to play increasingly important and diverse roles in the global economy.  Dissatisfied with its status as the world’s factory, China seeks a broad shift from “made in China” to “created in China”, as seen in the Chinese leadership’s importation of “creative industries” policy. The notion of China as a creative country jars with a western sense of China as an industrial and economic superpower, which due to a deep-seated lack of scientific curiosity, a “lack of wonder”, has to rely on hacking and shanzhai copying for innovation. At first glance, gold farming would seem to fit this pattern. I argue, however, that the fictional trope of the gold farmer found in novels by Doctorow and Stephenson, in contrast to the journalistic stereotype, embodies the character trait of cleverness (conming in Chinese), or “practical cunning”. Such “Chinese” cleverness disregards the theory application binary so fundamental in western thinking, and by extension also the related science-technology binary. Taken as a whole, then, western discourses around the Chinese gold farmer bring together a range of divergent techno-orientalist imaginings, from Third World proletariat over parasitic copycat to the embodiment of an alternative to western thinking about science and technology.

During ISEA95, the Tunnel Under the Atlantic presented an artwork that Maurice Benayoun conceived at the time as a manifesto supporting virtuality as a medium. 25 years later, we propose a new understanding of the work and its emergence along with a reconfiguration of the ontological status of contemporary media art. Rather than mere object, as defined by normalized code of representation, the artwork can now be characterized as a subject with operational sensitivities that allow complex reactive behaviors. Real-Time processing of information has played a major role in this mutation. Virtuality – understood as design of the potentialities of the work – sensors and other input devices keeping the work aware of the existence of its ‘public’ and environment seem to have converted the interactive artwork into a sentient entity, empowered with perceptive functionalities and new cognitive capacities: memory, artificial intelligence, and intentionality.

This transductive process leading to the evolution of the original art-object into the art-subject announces an expansion of what is considered the artwork’s milieu and potentiality. More recent works of Benayoun help us to envision the next steps in this evolution: opening the ontology of art further towards its subjective capacities and possible dynamic implications in society.

Aheilos is an interactive 3d virtual environment functioning online and allowing the creation and presentation of dynamical interactive 3d content to many users. The idea of the Aheilos world is to promote creative, educational and informative activity profiled for art and touching various aspects of culture functioning on the edge of art, science and technology. The virtual space shared for development in the Aheilos world was divided to several areas with different functional profiles in wich several projects were launched, exploring the potential use of such type of environment.

Projects initiated in the Aheilos world that will be showcased on the ISEA symposium.

1. Virtual reconstruction of the White Eagle Square in Szczecin in its form from 1938 year. Virtual 3d environment as a potencial platform for sharing historical knowledge associated with architecture and urban development.
2. Remote artistic education in virtual space. Based on examples of classes that took place in Exhibition design workshop on the Visual Arts Department of the Academy of Art in Szczecin.
3. Virtual and hybrid exhibition space. Based on examples of ongoing and past exhibitions that were utilizing Aheilos virtual environment and its tools, such as 2‑way real time multimedial communication, remote presence, capability of displaying dynamical interactive content.
4. Virtually aided architectural design. Presentation of the potential of virtual dynamic 3d online environments for enhancing contemporary architectural design process.
5. Experimental artistic projects utilizing the specifics of the interactive online 3d environment. Artistic creations in teleinformation space with the use of tools available in Aheilos environment, such as: scripting, adding media, 2‑way streaming of content, modelling, texturing, deploying art online, remote presence, remote interaction, dynamical data processing.

Aheilos environment is running on OpenSimulator engine and New World Studio 3D creation kit.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies seem novel in an artistic context yet, by exploring certain proposed new terms, I aim to demonstrate that the practice of ‘relinquishment’ of creative activity has its roots in art history. The following questions will be addressed in the paper: can such a ‘relinquishment-technique’ be considered a universal mechanism for artistic inspiration? Can we find something similar in surrealistic techniques? Is the author disappearing or becoming ‘transparent’ when abandonment of creative activity occurs? Does AI-based art assume the transparency of the author and is it possible that artworks can be created by other artworks? The terms ‘linear’, ‘circular’ and ‘closed-loop’ concept transfer will be analysed with regard to interactive artworks.

While stories provide an effective and concise way to share experiences, visual content acts as a more comprehensive and universal communication tool that transcends barriers between user groups with different cultural backgrounds and physical preferences. However, the meaningful learning process for coherent story visualization is a challenging task in AI studies. This paper proposes AI.R Taletorium, an intelligent artistic fairytale visualizer that interacts with users in real-time. Furthermore, language and mental development are key aspects of early childhood education.

Our system is collaborative and enables common creative experiences between groups of children at remote locations. We aimed at offering an entertaining and imaginative platform for children to communicate with each other, improving their psychological health, especially under extreme circumstances such as the COVID- 19 pandemic. The system comprises two novel modules, a character-centric storyline generator and a visualizer in the form of doodlers. We connect the modules with characters and build a bidirectional link to allow kids to participate in the fairy tale creation process by simple adding their drawings.

Our key contribution is as follows:

– A novel multimodal fairytale co-creation interface based on interactive text-to-image transfer and vice-visa.

– The system presents a novel fusion method between a learning-based language model and rule-based graph update, allowing for more flexibility in story generation and visualization with limited data.

– Proposing a CLIP transformed story graph as an intermediate representation to transcend the barrier between digital storytelling content and insufficient illustration data (automatic AI fairy tales storytelling case).

We fuse the rule-based language model with a learning-based generation model into a unified visualization system to allow for more flexibility during generation. AI.R Taletorium can visualize complex fairy tale scenes with stylized characters and rare relationships with our fused framework.

AI.R Taletorium: is an artificial intelligence-based collaborative storytelling system that offers children with inclusive needs an opportunity to experience a remote interactive AI fairy tales storytelling experience while actively involving them in creating a story’s narrative with their normal peers. We use artificial intelligence, facial characteristics, computer vision and playful interactive collaboration. We aim to provoke positive social interactions between children, help develop social, creative and communication skills in the early childhood stage, and improve their imagination and social competencies. In the art project AI.R Taletorium: Artificial Intelligence 1001 Cyber Nights, we are inspired by “One Thousand and One Nights” collection of Middle Eastern folk tales and its vast cultural influence on world exchange between East and West.

Furthermore, in this project, we are developing the concept of Artificial Intelligence Reality (AI.R) as a novel reality paradigm designed with robot creativity and artificial intelligence processed data collected via sensors and cameras from the environment. Besides textual dataset and visual data analysis, we use the users’ facial recognition features, and emotional data as inputs for total user immersion into AI created realm.

Our platform’s key novelty is the use of artificial intelligence, facial characteristics, and visual content generated by users to conceptualize and direct fairy tales created by a trained AI storytelling agent. The system is operating online and in real-time. Users can invite more participants to make fairy tales or start a new one upon invitation. The AI agent also creates dynamic illustrations of the generated storyline and allows the user to draw additional objects or characters that are integrated into the story afterwards. The system offers a collective entertaining and imaginative experience without location and time limitations, helping children stay together, improving their psychological health, and creatively collaborating.

Can Artificial Intelligence be a creative tool for better understanding the social changes we are facing? Through a two-years journey – ending in September 2022 – an international network of urban labs is exploring what artists, computer scientists and young activists can do when they work together. Co-funded by the Creative Europe programme, AI4Future is contributing to improve the knowledge on new possible meanings of Mobility after the emergence of the Covid. This is, in fact, is the first social challenge chosen by the partners: Mobility in its various meanings, that is mobility across national borders, green & sustainable transportation, mobility in a phygital world or connected to gender equality issues. Each partner is shaping with its community a corner of “local” history in order to investigate different perspectives on the issue.

The young activists have been involved since the beginning for the design of the whole journey. Four statements, one for each hosting cultural center, have been produced with them during dedicated workshops: they represent the challenges they are advocating for with their associations.

Four artists among the ninety candidates have been selected for answering these challenges. Chunju Yu, Nino Basilashvili, Bernat Cuní and Luca Pozzi are working in residencies in Rotterdam, Cagliari, Barcelona and Milan. They are developing AI-based works, cooperating with young activists on their local mission. At the end of the residency period the AI-based works will be presented to the local community. With this approach, art and new technologies become ways to help dialogue and consciousness, creating relations, empathy and wonder.
The exhibit in Barcelona, hosted by Espronceda during ISEA, will be used to test the prototypes made so far. The final artworks will be presented in September in Milan, together with scientists and humanists, for an attempt to redefine the concept of mobility in the post-covid era.

We observe the success of artificial neural networks in simulating human performance on a number of tasks: such as image recognition, natural language processing, etc. However, there are limits to state of-the-art AI that separate it from human-like intelligence. Humans can learn a new skill without forgetting what they have already learned and they can  improve their activity and gradually become better learners. Today’s AI algorithms are limited in how much previous knowledge they are able to keep through each new training phase and how much they can reuse. In practice this means that it is necessary to build and adjust new algorithms to every new particular task. This is closer to a sophisticated data processing than to real intelligence. This is why research concerning generalisation are becoming increasingly important. Processes such as intuition, emotions, planning, thinking and abstraction are a part of processes, which occur in the human brain. Abstraction allows for making analogies, coding relations and relations between relations.

Analytic cloudbased speech-to-text engines like the Google API and IBM Watson function through semantic analysis of speech. This is accomplished by assigning weighted values based on the force of an emotional statement, or its magnitude, and an emotional analysis of its score, meaning if the sentence is positive, negative, or neutral. These same analytic qualifiers can be deployed by speech-to-text or text-tospeech chatbots, and developed into analytic engines that are tasked with critical decision making power about customer service, healthcare, jurisprudence, social sorting, employment, and migration, among others. Private corporations like Facebook’s Building 8 and the U.S. Military’s DARPA Agency [1] [2] are funding research to develop semantic analysis of thoughts in the brain capable of interacting directly with computers. AIBO, a work-in-progress emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence brain opera presents a rapid prototype of a built feedback loop between EEG signals from a human brain and an emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence entity driven by machine learning. It explores the hegemony of algorithmic decisions vs. a human being’s messy emotions, both as a performer’s brainwaves are displayed on their body as flashes of varicolored light, and through the projection of a colored graphic indicating a semantic analysis in a connected feedback loop.

This paper investigates how sound transmission can contribute to the public understanding of climate change within the context of the Poles. How have such transmission-based projects developed specifically in the Arctic and Antarctic, and how do these works create alternative pathways in order to help audiences better understand climate change? The author has created the media project Sonic Antarctica from a personal experience working in Antarctica. The work combines soundscape recordings and sonifications with radio-style audio interview excerpts. This work will be examined in the context of the other sound transmission science and art works.

During 2022, both transformer-based AI text generation systems such as GPT-3 and AI text-to-image generation systems such as DALL•E 2 and Stable Diffusion made exponential leaps forward and are unquestionably altering the fields of digital art and electronic literature. In this panel a group of electronic literature authors and theorists consider new opportunities for human creativity enabled by these systems and present new works produced during the past year that specifically address these systems as environments for literary expressions that are translated through iterative interlocutive processes into visual representations. The premise that binds these presentations is that these systems and the works generated must be considered from a literary perspective, as they originate in human writing. In works ranging from a visual memoir of the personal experience of a health crisis, to interactive web comics, to architectures based on abstract poetic language, to political satire, four artists explore the capabilities of these writing environments for new genres of literary art practice, while a digital culture theorist considers the origins and effects of the particular training datasets of human language and images on which these new hybrid forms are based.

Keywords: interactive cinema, expanded cinema, panorama, immersion, narrative space.
Alberti’s Window v2.0 is a novel interactive cinema platform for the expression of stereoscopic 3D panoramic and multi-viewpoint spaces of representation, in which participants embark on an embodied journey of discovery. In this paper, the author outlines the conceptual and technical framework, exemplified through a work specifically made for this platform, the interactive cinema project Juxtaposition. An introduction to the history of immersive imaging, presentation modalities and innovators contextualises this work within the wider field.
Intro
Since Leon Battista Alberti’s first scientific study on perspective as an instrument of artistic and architectural representation, the term ‘Alberti’s Window’ has become a metaphor for linear perspective. Version 2.0 is an interpretation and extension of the conceptual ‘window to the outside’. It utilises modern technology and digital imaging to create a vision-machine, which allows for: the spatial correspondence between the real and the representational space, the expansion of the perspectival model, and an interactive experience where participants embark on an embodied journey of discovery.

Algae Chorus is a sound installation that collaborates with living algae, in real time, transforming their movement and photosynthesis process into sounds. The algae utilize the audience’s collective carbon exhalations within the exhibition space, revealing the mutual dependencies between humans and photosynthetic organisms.

Algae are a diverse group of aquatic photosynthetic organisms that produce around 70% of the earth’s oxygen. They also assimilate most of the carbon dioxide on the earth. As we face the climate emergency, algae are critical organisms that we imagine ways to make their role in the carbon cycle more visible.

In this project, three species of algae live in disparate domestic containers in various growth stages, including single-cell cyanobacteria: Spirulina, microalgae: Nannochloropsis, and Chlorella Vulgaris. This installation explores the visual perception of the varied green shades of each algae colony, formed by degrees of density, and it embodies humanity’s affection for green aesthetics and the essence of color originating in nature.

The algae’s growth and movements are manifested by light sensors in their biological time. While audiences inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, the atmosphere in the exhibition is slowly affected and also gets detected by a carbon dioxide sensor. All these data are translated into sound synthesis and tune the chorus.

Through a rich visual and listening experience with algae, this project provides a space for contemplating oxygen and carbon dioxide circulation, and raises questions about our habit of anthropocentrism and the hierarchy of biological taxonomy. While not providing a solution, this project aims to open a discussion on our relationship with organisms living on the earth toward a sustainable future.

Urban environments and manicured nature, with no sight unseen of native organism diversity, have led to forgotten evolutionary histories and a reduced understanding of ecosystem relations. The aquatic plant biosphere especially bears a collective amnesia  from the humans of its evolutionary roles. It wouldn’t be erroneous to use ‘out of sight, out of mind’ in the context of the biosphere of aquatic plants. While the contributions of these early species have been tremendous to shaping higher plants, they haven’t received a lot of focus in their role from non-scientific communities.

Our work refocuses the attention on algae species and reflects on the role of these species in climate change in specific coastal regions, through very specific micro-capabilities. We were first inspired by algae sounds recorded underwater in the bay and river waters at the East Coast (East River / Hudson River) and West Coast (San Francisco Piers, Sausalito, Point Reyes) areas in the US. These microalgae traditionally form and release oxygen near their macroalgal filaments. When this oxygen is released, the relaxation of the bubble to a spherical shape creates a sound source that ‘rings’ at the Minnaert frequency.

Keywords: Big Data, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Singularity.

Algoricene is a concept and subproject of the Metabody project. This project proposes to explore, both through theoretical research and through artistic creation, the impact, history, ontology, aesthetics and politics of algorithmic modes of organization that may be traced already in old cultural formations such as grided urban plans in Mesopotamia and ancient Greece, or perspectival vision in the Renaissance, and which currently undergo an explosion in the context of Big Data systems.

This article proposes to analyze the definition of the human being through the ‘eyes’ of machine learning models dedicated to the recognition and classification of people. For this, the image of a dialectic of surveillance and social control is offered based on the constant visibility of those affected and the invisibility of those who benefit from this system. The algorithmic vision emerges here as a privileged place to exercise this power, but at the same time as the place of vulnerability, from where it is possible to transform this dialectic and the power relations that it determines. The article then proposes a reflection on the different counter-surveillance strategies that take advantage of creativity and aesthetic experience to think about other power relations, that is, about other possibilities to think about what a human being is today.

In 1939, the Austrian trained architect / scenographer Frederick Kiesler authored an essay entitled “On Biotechnique and Correalism: A Definition and Test of a New Approach to Building Design” in which he posed the question “at what point does inanimate matter pass over and become alive?” Kiesler was referring to a 1912 experiment by the Nobel Prize winning surgeon Alexis Carrel in which cells from the heart of a developing baby chick were removed by Rockefeller Institute researchers and healthily grown and sustained inside the technically constructed environment of a test tube culture for over 34 years. As Kiesler wrote, “The experiment confirms the view that, while life only comes from life, it is also dependent on its technological environment” (Kiesler 1939).

Since 1989, alire1 has been offering, in private reading, that is to say at home, poetic works created on computer and designed to be read on this medium. She thus anticipated a movement now common to the Internet, considering that the screen would become a reading medium as normal as the book. But she did not just advocate a change of text support. It took into account the dynamic character that ensued, introducing, through animation, temporality as a natural syntactic dimension. It also considered that the display device is not reduced to a screen, but that it consists of a much more complex machine for performing calculations, logical operations, processing and storing information. not intended for reading, so many possibilities absent from classical literary devices. The most important point, in this second remark, is the voluntary addition of information not intended for reading. This simple fact suffices to assert that the computer device introduces some opacity for the reader. A gap is growing between the author and him; the device increases the distance between them. Such an upheaval can only engender a change of textual archetype and bring out new literary forms. But it takes all its importance in private reading, a situation that allows time for the reader to integrate the work, and therefore to rub his potential opacities, to experience them. It seemed obvious to us in 1989 that an editorial system favoring private reading at the expense, perhaps even of a spectacularity adapted to public presentations, would lead to productions of a different type. The electronic journal on diskette, then on CD-ROM, seemed to us at the time to be the appropriate vector for such a project.
We did not think then to discover a behavior of the works as it appears to us today, of kind to move a little more still the definition of the text. The text can not be limited to observable objects, it is above all functioning, and even constitutes a complete system endowed with the three faces of the system: ontological, functional, organizational.

I propose to present the main characteristics of this private reading, as they have been treated by the authors published in ALIRE.

The performance installation ‘Alphabetic pleasures – when signs mate’ uses artificial intelligence to relate the latent spaces of visitors’ phonemes with their oral microbiome to reveal the complex symbiosis between a future language and the mating of our oral microbiome. Based on the artists own scientific laboratory data, the performance suggests that the oral microbiome balances its own mating and death rate by encouraging humans to speak the vibrating vowels A E I O U in appropriate combination with the tonal consonants F P T K S SCH. Using a bioreactor-based lab, audience voice splitting, Deep Learning and an artificial voice articulator, ‘Alphabetic Pleasures – when signs mate’ proposes new phonemes that enable the mutual protection of sign systems and the replication rate of the oral microbiome.

The repetition of phonemes in ‘Alphabetic pleasures – when signs mate ‘ which are necessary to trigger physiological changes becomes the artistic practice of a political ec(h)olalia sustained through literal resonance with other beings, creating a shared habitat of sounds and marginalised oral beings as post-anthropocentric solidarity. Echolalia in ‘Alphabetic pleasures – when signs mate’ goes from meaningless repetition to Ecolalia, a co-constitutive relationship and ethical intimacy with the oral microbiota that disrupts colonial, speciesist and capitalist rhythms of sociality, communication and space.

Most importantly, the resulting ‘feverish’ phonemes are interwoven with the reproductive activities of the oral microbiota. Thus, the performance offers a sensory imaginary/sensory to explore an ecosexual symbiosis between signs, sounds and non-human sexualities that might make us aware of the correlated linguophonetic and microbial erasure process that has been ignored so far.

Altered Landscapes is an artist talk where Daniel Miller will discuss his recent projects: Malignancy, Floodwaters also referencing earlier projects. In Floodwaters materials flow, meander and randomly generate new forms only to be controlled and manipulated by a humanmade system. Malignancy is an artwork where animations of a blue moulin ice lake is projected onto a frost covered metal cooling plate. The video animation of the moulin will enlarge as viewers approach and possibly touch the frozen plate. For many years now Daniel Miller has used to robotics and electronics to investigate environmental issues in his artwork. His recent projects explore relationships to the physical world through mimicking landscapes.

The limitations of scientific thought, restricted to rigid paradigms, prevent new proposals from being conceived, devised, or absorbed.

Alterscience designates a confluence of philosophical perspectives, aesthetic, spiritual, moral, and physical; it combines emerging theories, such as ecology, feminism, decolonialism, class struggle, negritude, anti-racism, and anti-speciesism, resituating the  science in a process of theoretical, experimental, philosophical, moral and paradigmatic reconstruction, breaking with its ideological territories and unquestionable epistemologies.

It aims at an investigative stance open to a different knowledge construct, with continuous reflection, sociopolitical engagement and consequential pedagogical practices. It institutes a paradigmatic revision, intending to interweave logic, philosophy and spiritual traditions, current and potential modes of intelligence.

Alterscience is proposed as a science that respects life implying the acceptance that living beings, whether human or non-human, are sacred and therefore have inalienable rights. This vision creates an inevitable confrontation with the foundations of the dominant science, historically governed by positivism, determinism and technological rationalism and mechanisms of colonization and control that allowed the subjugation of a multitude of beings, the manipulation of animals, plants, and the planet itself.

This behavioral logic of exploitation of life, implicitly validated by science, is insidiously extended to the treatment of human beings, tacitly considered as machines, devoid of sacredness, without rights to life, dignity, respect, and therefore available to be controlled, experimented, exploited and exhausted. The proposal stimulates a broad reflection on Sciences and Alterciences, for identify new topics of knowledge, alternative objectives, modalities or methods of knowing; to unveil other objects and dimensions; to experiment with different languages, agencies, instruments, modalities; to conceive multi- and inter- visualities and dimensionalities; to examine new forms for knowledge legitimation, to implement non-proprietary processes of information dissemination, application and transformation; to absorb additional subjects of knowledge and to reach and augment the beneficiaries of science.

The 20th century saw various approaches to expanded cinema performance, including color organs and mixed media “psychedelic” light shows. These practices were difficult to document technically and were, to various extents, based on performance in the moment. Technically, archival 20th century visual performance documentation and preservation ranges from the non-existent to the surprisingly future proofed. But expanded cinema historian William Moritz summed up the unrepeatability of performance experience in a 1969 review of the mixed media performance ensemble Single Wing Turquoise Bird: “always only once.” Contemporary performative digital practice shares some parallels with these earlier performative practices: the work may be performed live by a performer, or an algorithm may perform the work automatically. In either case, preservation faces the paradox of recreating moments that were intended to happen “always only once.” Examining 20th century attempts to preserve the ephemeral can inform not only how we approach preservation of performative and process-based digital works, but also which works we attempt to preserve.

Amateur Lithopanspermia is an experiment in lichen-human hybrids for the purpose of space travel. Rather than focusing on making space travel amenable to the human form, I pro-pose that we merge aspects of ourselves with an organism, lichen, that can deal with the ravages of space. The collection of human materials that will sustain the lichen will occur from those who are often excluded from space activities, such as women, people of color, the differently abled, and LGBTQ+ people. The consensual collection of materials, as well as the offering of these materials to the lichen, inverts the usual relationship between humans and other living entities. These lichen-human hybrids will be encased in fallen meteorites, thus launching from earth what has already come here from the cosmos. The rocks and hybrids will travel to Mars, or elsewhere in the solar system, using solar sails as their means of propulsion, obviating the need for chemical propellant in space. Workshops here on earth will weave new tales about non-anthropocentric space travel. These stories become technologies themselves, as they allow us to make manifest new desires for our more-than-human lives in outer space, pushing against colonialist and extractivist narratives.

Generative ambient art in public space has been developed by the researcher as part of their creative practice. Case studies of the presentation of such art works informed the design of an ambient installation in State Library Victoria (SLV) in the Melbourne CBD over 2 weeks. This installation provided the setting where ethnographic methods facilitated public encounter. Interpretation of qualitative data generated from this encounter is considered in relation to Malcom McCullough’s notion of the Ambient Commons. The research concludes that generative ambient artworks on digital displays in public settings can have a positive impact on a sense of place and intuitive place making practices and in this way supports the use of generative media as a creative way to provide public amenity and to foster the Ambient Commons.

In my recent work, I combine techniques borrowed from bioengineering with images of cultural and political icons and maps. The process results in an unusual hybrid: the scientific “visualization” with overtly sociopolitical content. Currently, I am working with a graduate student in the bioengineering lab at Clemson University to create images using several cell imaging processes including a system that allows us to place and observe live neuron cells as they grow to form connections and “communicate” with each other, and a soft lithography technique which allows cells to be printed in precise shapes. The lithography process is a more refined version of a process I developed within my studio practice and which I used to create works like McCarshcroft: a morphology of extremism and stay the course. A new work-in-progress is American Vectors, in which I use the bacterium Serratia marcescens and the soft lithography method to represent airbases, currently in use by the American military in Iraq. Images of these “micro airbases” are streamed via live web cam on the American Vectors website. A blog component provides a forum for the discussion and interpretation of the work.

Though critical, the work is less a critique of science and more a form of science fiction, in which the technologies of bioengineering stand-in for all brave-new-world-making enterprises, from the microscopic recombination of cells to the macroscopic reassembling of cultures. For example in the work TJMAQS I map elements of globalization’s infrastructure (Maquiladoras in the Tijuana region of Mexico) using bacteria. Thus, like biological entities such as viruses and biochemical materials, the infrastructure of globalization, which simultaneously which perforate as it connects cultures, is presented as a living entity which grows and spreads as it consumes resources around it.

[also artist talk]

Artists Statement

AmeXica skin questions the worldwide migratory flux in collaboration with international artists who join the dialogue through on line web events and off line performances set into the installation.

‘AmeXica’ refers to the border zone between Mexico and the U.S. I resent the binary conception of the border as a separation between two worlds. ‘AmeXica’ points to a transforming, hybrid culture. This presents a challenge for an emerging artistic, transcultural, and collaborative form which is a necessity response to overcome violence.

In the open space of the multimodal and inclusive work AmeXica sKin I am putting at stake my commitment to history as an artist: how can I shape my testimony, my point of view as an artist, beyond the clichés of mass media, of politics and cultural and aesthetical habits? ‘I have chosen to witness the crossing of the border as a succession of trials, the symbolical image of the maze, the materialization of the threat of death but also of the quest of life.’ (Sylvie Marchand) ‘sKin’ The frontier is sensitive and alive, changing, capable of feeling the world and it’s flows just like the skin. The skin-frontier metaphor guides the creation of the scenography, offering a complex, porous and receptive interactive space.
Sylvie, with Gigacircus, uses today’s technologies of the ‘increased body’ to carry further the range of her voice and that of the migrants’ she met, thereby extending and activating a network of artistic reflection. Fieldwork, migrating art and mobility ‘Of Gold and asphalt’, ‘Temps d’Histoires pour Compostelle’, ‘Tsagaan Yavarai, may the road be white…’, ‘Transhumances’, ‘Passages to Ostabat’ or ‘Passeur’, are previous wandering web performances, installations, and collaborative events made by the Gigacircus Media Art Group. Like ‘AmeXica sKin’, these works were created in the process of action, on foot, on the road, in a truck or a caravan of the Gigacircus mobile lab, in the course of nomadisation …
Each of these particular scenographies questions the digital technologies and the tools of network communication, they obey the fluidity of travelling, the rhythm of the body, and focus on exchange and dialogue with local or distant audiences.

The artist talk will present The power of the spill, a multidisciplinary performance that responds to the tracks: “Animality” and “The Ecosophic World”. Working at the intersection of digital and imaginary technologies, the performance includes live video feedback, algorithmic processes of image and sound, as well as a movement-choreography informed by somatic practices. The power of the spill is a study on visual perception and how it affects our ways of making sense of the world, aiming to create an alternative lens that acknowledges the vitality of objects, a topology that is cross-species, the ways seemingly separate entities are in constant exchange, towards a more ecological way of being. The artist talk will oscillate between describing the piece and demonstrating the algorithmic processes live.

The original concept of a publication is to include a limited amount of content in a manageable space in order to be retrievable, mobile and possibly consistent. But as soon as humans have been accustomed to the dimension of the single publication they have tried to overcome its limits and expand it, possibly including as much information as possible in a printed form. Multi-volume works and then encyclopaedias have helped dividing what couldn’t be bound in a single still manageable (printed) space, but after the dematerialisation of the publishing space the boundaries has been first blurred and then just vanished, giving room to prototypes, visions and artworks

As technology and science continue to break down phenomena previously held to be whole, artists are presented with new methods and concepts with which to work. Life and intelligence, two areas currently under the scientific gaze, are of particular interest to the author. After giving a survey of his work, the author responds to criticism of the attempt to create intelligent entities.

Intro: Creating Entities
For the last four years I have been creating works of art which are aesthetic experiments in autonomy. These experiments investigate, or attempt to redefine, boundaries of  humanity, nature, and technology. The actual things I build, which I call either autonomous entities or familiars, generally have some sort of behavior within a particular context. It is in this relationship of behavior to context where I situate my art. In order to work in the medium of autonomous entities, I’ve been following and applying current research in such areas as artificial life, genetic algorithms, and neural networks. ’m learning and using these tools not because I’m fascinated with these topics and the debates around them – though in fact I admit that I’m far more interested in these debates than, say, most literary or psychoanalytic theory. I’m not creating pieces using these tools because of the tolls’ implications for our species, although they will have serious implications. I’m doing it because I think people and animals, autonomous entities I have contact with, are by far the most interesting things in the world. Far more interesting than Venice in three point perspective, than sculpted bodies without animus, than the interplay of abstract ideas within culture. As I see it, animals are the most interesting things in the universe, and I’ll be lucky if I can create something with the complexity of an animal. Of course, that’s impossible now. I’ve been gambling, so far, five years of my life that certain developments in scientific research will eventually allow me to build truly complex entities, or, rather, to allow them to emerge from components which I build. Central to this notion are the strategies of Brooks (Steels & Brooks, 1995) and his ideas of emergent behavior and behavior-based robotics.

This paper is a follow up to some of the authors’ ISEA 2017 paper “Towards an inventory of good practices for transdisciplinary collaboration”. A key issue identified there was how to develop training methods for teams that bridge very different research, development and assessment methodologies. In this paper, we propose design methods to improve transdisciplinary collaborations, with a particular discussion on the emerging community of practice that seeks to enable art-science collaboration. An ISEA workshop is also proposed to make explicit the methodologies described.

The current pandemic is forcing us to move many of our activities online. Digital technologies, such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), are becoming the latest examples of the trend toward digital excursions in the metaverse. Their ubiquitous impact on our lives requires us to rethink how we view and collect information. With the advent of the post-pop era, virtual reality was previously developed by art museums and institutions, not as a substitute for offline (offline) tours but as an enabler and aid. And VR systems can also enable information retrieval, allowing users to access and navigate information in an immersive virtual environment quickly. In this paper, we propose a multi-screen information retrieval branching system that enables users to distinguish between priority and secondary information in VR environments by the screen’s distance—improving the efficiency of information acquisition.

// … it is unreasonable to
// assume that any finite number of samples can appropriately
// represent an infinite continuum of spewage, so we can bound
// the certainty of any meausre [sic] to be in the range:
//
// limit: [ 1/featurecount+2 , 1 – 1/featurecount+2].
— crm_markovian.c, crm114-20070810-BlameTheSegfault.src

“Norbert Wiener said if you compete with slaves you become a slave, and there is something similarly degrading about competing with spammers.” The writer is Paul Graham, the prominent Lisp programmer; the quote is from his 2002 essay, “A Plan for Spam”, one of the most influential documents in the the anti-spam movement. (Graham 2002) Influential for three reasons: first, because it suggested a way to get to grips with spam, to turn it into an object; second, because it won, effectively destroying spam as it then existed, sidestepping its social complexities to attack it on a precise technical point; and finally, because it lost, the pure and elegant technical attack being based on a new set of design values and social assumptions, interstices into which spam moved, transforming itself in the process, and accidentally producing a literary experiment on the grandest scale in human history.

Introduction
An artificial intelligence (AI) manifests itself as an environment that links the virtual and real. The AI provides a mechanism for collaboration, but has its own motivation. Avatars can move objects in the real world and vice versa. Border crossing between virtual worlds implies a meta-logical system that transcends all worlds. Providing collaboration between real world people and avatars (where the avatars and the real people are equal players) leads to insight into the meta-logic. The AI emphasises the meta-logical barriers.

Media
It is a multimedia installation utilising of the following:

1.  Electro-mechanical devices
2.  a 3D webcam
3.  SecondLife or other global, multi-user, immersive virtual environment

Description
The manifestation is a physical space with a wall projection that bridges the real and virtual worlds. Humans entering the space see the projected virtual world (VW) space. Avatars in the VW space see the humans represented by avatars: their movements in real life are tracked by a 3D webcam. The humans and avatars work on an apparatus, parts of which are in “real life”, and parts of which are in the VW space. Once the apparatus is arranged into a configuration, the apparatus performs a series of actions that move between the VW and real life.
Avatars and humans are rewarded for participation.

The AI has its own logic and motivations that are autonomous of the actions of either set of participants. What neither side knows is that the software which controls the space can also set off special effects, making it appear as if one side has attacked or threatened the other. The AI may decide to interfere (cause a grievance) or to help.

In a staged presentation representatives from several professions will make inquiries on the nature of space – specifically in the light of current media technology. It will include artists, architects, interface designers and theorists. They will be present both physically and via remote, Internet transmission. Space, represented by one of the participants, has been captured and tied to a chair. The darkened stage resembles an interrogation room lit by one bulb and a swiveling lamp aimed onto the face of the blindfolded prisoner. Two interrogators, a good cop and a bad cop, question Space’s character and complicity with Time, Culture and Media. Remote inquisitors ask-questions appropriate to their fields. Space responds in terms that are specific, yet elusive and ambiguous.

Moderator: Peter Anders

For over 30 years, ANAT has been a catalyst for experimentation and innovation across art, science and technology. We broker opportunities for artists to work with partners drawn from the science and technology sectors be-cause we believe that artists are essential to how we imagine and shape our future.

ANAT on Country foregrounds Indigenous-led and artist-led research into Country and the challenges arising from land management practices and climate change. ANAT on Country is delivered through ANAT’s core programs, as well as through a number of new initiatives.

Current projects include co-commissioning artists’ work, and a suite of art/science residencies, with a view to expanding these in coming years. The participating artists, scientists and other knowledge holders will present about their work at Spectra art/science biennial in 2020, and be supported to realise the diverse outcomes anticipated.

The presentation will introduce ANAT on Country and draw out how the program and the participating artists and knowledge holders are engaging with the symposium theme, Sentience.

Taking the Fatberg as a metaphor of a new artificially created intelligence, the work represents an instant game of chance, where the only winner is the Fatberg itself. By clicking the “flush” button, the Fatberg is fed by our digital database: combining wastewater quality data and a vast number of analytical data taken over from the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia. It is a collection of our own heterogeneous by-products collected for over 20 years, from data on microbes to astrophysical measurements, toxins in the Danube, but also data on employment, bank accounts, calls within the telecommunications network, data on newborns, divorces and drug addicts in our country, amount of food consumption, on the value of dinar, on housing, on migration and tourists, on city traffic etc. Everything that makes life around us and everything that leaves garbage and floats further, refining new data and making possible for the Fatberg to (re)form.

Abstract

Short Paper

Summary
The paper is a cross-cultural comparison of two models of human memory, namely the Art of Memory practiced by the ancient Greeks, and ltoloca and Xiuhamatl. the memory systems of the Nahua/Aztec people of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

Abstract

Neither physical, nor situated at any specific location, memory is somehow intimately associated with our ability to learn and to, therefore, process and understand reality. A selective filter, memory has been a co-participant in our journey through the ages. As we advanced from the prehistory, our tools no longer limited to survival utensils, we fashioned technologies to supplement and extend both our internal brain and memory system. The study of the technologies of ancient memory systems has recently become a topic of discussion among the theorists of electronic media. At the expense of ignoring other methods, the discussion and research has mostly focused on Ars Memoria, an ancient memory system derived from the art of rhetoric as it was practiced in ancient Greece. The idea of selecting and forming mental images of the things one desires to remember, and the subsequent storing of these in conceptual spaces, reflects the primacy that the ancient Greeks bestowed on the sense of sight. Yet our knowledge of myriad different memory techniques that form part of the heritage of humanity is proof that sight is not the sole purveyor of meaningful memories. The concept of memory as a tool that can be learned and skillfully deployed to carve mental and ideological spaces, has indeed a long history. That this history is one that cuts across cultural borders is the scope of this essay. In it I will present and compare historical descriptions pertaining two ancient, and radically different, models of human memory. The models that will be discussed are Ars Memoria and Itoloca and Xiuhamatl, the memory system of the Nahua/Aztec Indians of Mesoamerica. In the presentation I will focus not only on the engagement of the senses, but also on how the body is utilized throughout the process of information transfer. In addition, I will comment on the distinctions between mimetic and ritualistic communication exchange. As a conclusion, I will utilize Marshall McLuhan’s theory of ‘Ratio of the Senses’ to do a cross-cultural comparison between the different memory systems presented.

Keywords: Climate, Land, Landscape, Sea, Seascape, Tipping Point, Solostalgia, Video, Installation, Drone.

A tipping point is a critical threshold at which a tiny change can dramatically alter the state of development of a system tipping past a point of no return. Exploring these thresholds through artworks provides an experience for the audience that encourages engagement and contemplation on the catastrophic effects of climate change. Human beings form bonds with the landscape in which they live, but losing a surrounding landscape while we still live in that same place creates a form of homesickness for which we had no word until recently. A new term was coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht (2005) after interviewing citizens living in farming areas surrounded by encroaching coalmines. The term “Solastalgia” means an emplaced or existential melancholia experienced with the negative transformation of a loved home environment. “Solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’”. This state of mind is being reflected in a new global genre of artworks. “and the earth sighed” is an immersive media art installation that re-imagines the relationship between nature and culture by presenting aerial views of landscapes dynamically manipulated in ways that reveal their underlying fragility. The artists filmed landscapes and seascapes using drone technology and used post production techniques to create large-scale visual and sound environments.

In the late 1980s, the Canadian Pacific Railway abandoned a rail yard on the outskirts of Montreal’s Mile End district. Within a few years, the return of animal and plant species encouraged the citizen community to reinvest this site known as Le Champ des Possibles. Despite community efforts to rehabilitate this wasteland, hydrocarbon and heavy metal pollution persists in the soil and thus needs rethinking the engagement with the imperceptible mutations of ecosystems. Symphony of the Stones was created in response to this context. This research-creation project consists of several urban art installations that activate residual metals in soils by their magnetic characteristics to make these imperceptible pollutants visible. The following paper unfolds the different processes, methodologies and strategies that led to in site interventions blending art installation, collaboration with different communities and associations and leading to a rethinking of art practices in the urban environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic poses challenges for students and faculty in educational contexts that focus on collaborative and creative practice. Courses that involve working in large teams and interacting in the field require new approaches to cope with limitations on in-person instruction. Building on the concept of chained animation, the case study The Invention of Numbers (2021) will be used to discuss how the concept can be adapted for hybrid teaching. In chained animation, students develop a common concept, realize individual parts in small groups, and assemble them into a short film, rather like an omnibus film. The core element is on-location exchange, especially in the animation studio. Covid-19 regulations have placed limits on these kinds of meetings and exchanges. To deal with those limitations, the creative method of cadavre exquis has been applied to the concept of chained animation. Animated cadaver exquisfeatures a systematic form of collaborative filmmaking that requires little or no coordination between teams, making it particularly well-suited to the new classroom situation. This analysis demonstrates how to set up creative processes for large collaborative groups in distance and hybrid teaching and how the concept of chained animation can be adapted using the cadavre exquis method.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the premise that documentary has always made use of new technologies, specially those that allowed greater access to reality. Generally speaking, we can observe every thirty years a technological turning point. These changes bring new forms of access to reality. Therefore, the paper argues that animated documentary, which is a 1990’s and 2000’s tendency, helps to assert the documentary as a field of experimentation. In order to do so, it resumes some technological changes that allowed the documentary to develop new

Iconic urban neon has been replaced by the sign of our times, the LED screen, with increased light pollution, wasted energy, environmental damage and stress on the populace. Smart Glass is electronic film switchable between transparent and white. Safe, low voltage and highly durable, it’s one of the emerging class of reactive materials becoming more commercially available yet relatively unexplored for creative potential. Smart materials are binary, switchable and often contiguous. These properties align with the first design tool, the stencil, which has revealed potential in nearly every new media from cave drawings to nanotechnology. In Art History, the brush and chisel get all the glory but the lowly stencil preceded both. Combining the switchable capabilities of Smart Glass with stencils laser cut into frames of animation, a moving image can traverse through physical space, inverting the paradigm of current technologies which present 3D images on 2D surfaces. The paper will present media-archeological approaches to reveal low-energy dimensional signature alternatives to benefit urban environments by exploring ambient, low-energy display that’s more integrated, sustainable and less visually invasive. Poetically, an animated stencil is sequenced light in physical form, like our vanished neon.

THE ISEA98 SUMMIT at the ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC Chaired/hosted by Anthony H. Wilson of Factory Records, Granada TV, and the Hacienda. INCLUDING ANNOUNCEMENTS ON FUTURE ISEA SYMPOSIA

ISEA, the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, is a non-profit international organization whose membership and collaborators consists of a wide range of individuals and institutions involved in the creative, theoretical and technological aspects of electronic arts.

ISEA’s Mission:

The aim of ISEA is to establish and facilitate inter-disciplinary communication in the field of art, technology, science, education and industry. ISEA advocates a culturally diverse community, which stimulates a global promotion and development of electronic art practices. The Inter-Society fosters such communications by means of an International Advisory Committee, an on-line network; a monthly newsletter and endorses the International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA’s most vibrant and visible activity.

ISEA’s Symposium:

The founding of the Inter-Society was the result of the First International Symposium on Electronic Arts that was held in Utrecht, Netherlands in 1988. Since then, year after year the ISEA symposiums have attracted a gathering of international participants to present new media research, exhibit artworks and actively debate and exchange on art and technology. The symposium became an annual event in 1992 to fulfil the growing need and interest from the ISEA community. The symposium has developed into a successful vehicle for the emergence and circulation of philosophical, social, artistic and scientific discourse. Hosted by a different city each year the location of the symposium is selected by the ISEA Board of Directors based on application by potential hosts.

1. Utrecht, Netherlands (FISEA, 1988)
2. Groningen, Netherlands (SISEA, 1990)
3. Sydney, Australia (TISEA, 1992)
4. Minneapolis, USA (FISEA, 1993)
5. Helsinki, Finland (ISEA94)
6. Montreal, Canada (ISEA95)
7. Rotterdam, Netherlands (ISEA96)
8. Chicago, USA (ISEA97)
9. Liverpool & Manchester, UK (ISEA98 )

ISEA Headquarters:

Founded in the Netherlands in 1990, ISEA moved its Headquarters to Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1996. The HQ is committed to reflect the multicultural and multidisciplinary activities of our members by extending its networks and providing a diverse range of benefits to the membership. The HQ has a dynamic, multilingual staff who coordinates and administers ISEA’s virtual and physical presence. Our team manages the membership network, provides information on international activities and upcoming symposiums, manages ISEA web site and newsletter as well as develops projects in collaboration with our growing network. The doors are open to all proposals or initiative going along ISEA’s main goals. Do not hesitate to contact us!

– Director: Alain Mongeau
– Information & Administration: Isabelle Painchaud
– International Relations: Maria Stukoff
– Development & Promotion: Eva Quintas
– Online Projects: Jodoin Isabelle Maria Valerie

International Board:

The ISEA HQ is under the constituency of an International Board whose members are voted by the membership. For the duration between 1997-1998 the Board members are: Peter Beyls (Belgium); Amanda McDonald Crowley (Australia); Tapio Makela (Finland); Alain Mongeau (Canada); Simon Penny (USA); Wim van der Plas (Netherlands); Cynthia Beth Rubin (USA); Patricia Search (USA); and ex-officio John Brady (UK), Shawn Decker (USA), and John Hyatt (UK). Two additional committees shape the organizational guidelines: the ISEA International Advisory Committee (IIAC) and the Cultural Diversity Committee. Membership Support ISEA’s activities by becoming a member!

Benefits for members:

– ISEA’s monthly newsletter;
– more than 10% discount on ISEA Symposiums registration
and proceedings;
– inscription on ISEA’s web repertory listings;
– access to ISEA’s electronic databases and archives;
– 20 % discount on subscription to Leonardo Journal, the
Journal of the Society for the Arts, Science and
Technology (ISAST).

Fees:

Membership good for one year. All taxes included. Regular Individuals 80 $ Institutional (Including 3 memberships) 270 $ CDN Students 40 $ Your membership contribution will in part be directed to our Cultural Diversity Fund supporting multicultural and multilingual initiatives. Our listsery is also available for open discussions for members and non-members.

The Advent of the Internet
What is the newest media in history, “the Internet” trying to tell human beings? Why did this dimension open right in front of us at our turn of lives? On the Internet, we do not own a body, but only our spirits flow in the newly cultivated dimension. All people are “anonymous” online. In the world of the Internet, there are no borders between one another. Only our spirits repeat connecting, forming a greater another. The Internet has given us a deeper meaning to the concept “anonymity”, and it has also made it extremely accessible to us. The essence of the Internet is to remind our true existences as anonymous beings, the integration of oneself and others, and to move humans to the new frontier of greater aggregation. This is the
hypothesis of the concept, “Anonism.

What is “Anonism”?
Introducing “Anonism”, it is a coined word that indicates anonymous activities. This demonstrates the idea of devoting one’s consciousness to anonymous activities throughout their daily lives, whether online or offline. Under this idea, it undergoes social experiments to update human minds to realize the “coexistence of technology and human beings”. “Anonism” has initially acted as an experimental “meme” online, which infects like virus to various media (mainly via a Japanese twitter account holding 220K followers: @sazae_f), and human minds. Currently the twitter account (@sazae_f) is also part of “Anonism” ’s media art that depicts universal reality with some element of critical thinking.

“We shape our tools and then our tools shape us” said Marshall McLuhan, similarly this bot which initially started out as a mere account, now it somehow serves as a tool that shapes human beings. Through the anonymous activities in the digital community/real world, Anonism’s activities aim to make humans conscious of our need to free ourselves from status and titles, and our need to express speech and actions with more consciousness, especially when we are anonymous, which is when our soul is close to the naked state. Anonism aims to spread memes in order to expand the Internet’s dimension from a mere tool used in daily lives, into a form of thought.

Eastern Origin
Respecting the eastern thought of 間 (pronounced ma-) or “emptiness” in art, the practitioner of Anonism activities remain anonymous in order to leave space for the viewers’ expanding infinite imagination. This way the thought will continue to aim for its completion along with the mass of participants’ endless active imaginations. Anonism is an eternallyunfinished
existence.

Goal
By receiving the real voice delivered to humans via the advent of the Internet, we realize that being anonymous is our true selves. All humans are anonymous before birth and after death. Therefore, our anonymous activities will affect directly to our world. Anonism’s central concept is to realize that “the world is you”.

ISEA2016
The presentation for ISEA will be a real-life experiment on how people react to being completely anonymous (which is how we all are online), and how their state of mind influence the world, under the concept of “the world is you”.

This paper describes practice-based research in the reflexive dimensions of cinematic VR, using alienation and disembodiment as rhetorical devices. Cinematic VR currently focuses on immersive illusion rather than inducing self-awareness, but VR can also create reflexive contexts for eliciting self and social reflection. Anonymous is an interactive cinematic VR that explores solitude and mortality, specifically people living and dying alone. The work plays on the technical limitations of VR technology as a narrative medium to create a sense of disembodiment and alienation, eliciting embodied reflexivity.

We present an overview of the interactions of Oceanographers with an artist who wandered into their midst five years ago, focusing on the current project from Antarctica. Concerns of climate change drive this work for both artist and scientist. How do we create intuitive empathy for the largely unseen and unnoticed life that makes possible our life on this planet?

Antarctica: Scientists on a Mission
The video Antarctica Underwater is largely constructed from incidental footage collected in icy cold Antarctic waters, hundreds of meters below the surface, as a seal bumped into an underwater camera and a serene jellyfish floated by, as did a ctenophore. The scientists knew that what they filmed was interesting, but the footage was short, flat, and dull in raw form. The five to ten second vignettes were like phrases waiting to be put into a coherent sentence, not yet carrying full weight.

Relative Realism
Woven into the video are the barely visible shrimp-like krill, that serve as food for seals, penguins and whales, and the microscopic plankton that produces half of the oxygen in our environment, and thus essential to human survival on Earth. We quickly agreed it is impossible to convey the sense of the variety of microscopic and tiny life in the ocean next to large animals while maintaining relative scale, and thus creating the sensations of teaming interdependent life won out over scientific realism.

Technical Challenges
Working with video collected for other purposes meant green-screening an ice-fish, sharply contrasting light and dark, and slowing down a diving seal. Above all else, it also meant using a software spotlight to digitally relight the raw footage, to both eliminate the straight edges of the video rectangle, and to make visible the seal, jellyfish, and krill that happened to swim out of the range of the physical real spotlight. It was a long adventure to become familiar with this harsh environment, and the work continues.

In the next phase, this will be a video in color. It may lead to an Augmented Reality work, and/or still images. The impetus of working for ISEA 2016 Open Sky forced limitations that brought out a new familiarity with the raw source material. It became clay to be molded into sensations of the underwater life that must be preserved for the survival of life.

Keywords: Figurative Sculpture, Puppetry, Robotics, Uncanny, Lifelikeness, Presence, Human Condition.

This poster presentation displays visual documentation of my practice-research investigations into the forms and materials that evoke the uncanny with the illusion of presence. I found that such uncanny experiences of presence are evoked by objects that are human in form and proportions, by objects that are placed within a narrative structure, by objects that move autonomously, and by objects whose motion is responsive to the viewer. I also argue that uncanny experiences are an important subset of aesthetic experiences because such experiences challenge us to face our fears and deep-rooted assumptions, thus forcing us to question our presumptions about what it means to be human. The question that informs my practice is: what elements push an object toward forming a seemingly sentient identity? This question is addressed through theoretical investigations, through experimentation within studio practice, and through observations of the artwork and its viewers. The culmination of this study is a series of human-sized uncanny objects (which I describe as sculptural puppets or minimal robots) that disrupt our perception of lifelikeness.

“They discovered that there was another world on this planet, where the cloudy sky produced a milky green light that reflected off an icy ground, uniformly illuminating the air around them as if the landscape were glowing in the dark. It was a landscape without matter, only light. There was neither luminous source nor shadow, only reflection and incidence”  _The Association of Freed Times (AFT) 2005, 299.

“Now that the cloud was there, I began to doubt my memory, and to be uncertain whether it had been more than a blue line of distant vapour that had filled up the opening” _Butler 1985, 56.

In summer 2005 The Association of Freed Times (AFT) published an article in Artforum. “El Diaro del Fin del Mundo: A Journey That Wasn’t” described environmental damage to the Antarctic ice shelf and the subsequent mutations occurring within the Antarctic ecosystem. One of these mutants is rumoured to be a solitary albino penguin living on an uncharted island near Marguerite Bay. The article documents French artist Pierre Huyghe’s journey to find the island and its mysterious inhabitant, and forms the first part of an event that culminated in a musical on the Wollman ice rink in New York’s Central Park, where “in accordance with a principle of equivalence, a symphony orchestra ‘plays’ the form of this island” (Leydier 2006, 33). The expedition, film, installation, narrative and performance A Journey that Wasn’t documents European imaginings of elsewhere, while at the same time suspending relationships between fiction and reality. Questions remain over whether Huyghe and his team undertook the trip, and if so, what it was they found there. “Perhaps, they reasoned, desire itself might produce the island” (AFT 2005, 299).

In 2004 Australian artists David Haines and Joyce Hinterding undertook a residency in Dunedin New Zealand where they filmed source materials for their installation Purple Rain. Purple Rain documents the destruction of a virtual (yet real) montage of New Zealand’s southern alps by analogue broadcast frequencies. The artists describe the effect as a “mountain falls through radio waves” (Haines and Hinterding 2003). In the installation large television antennas hang from the ceiling. Reading the electromagnetic energies passing through the space, the antennas generate waves of sound which motivate an avalanche on the projected mountain. In a literal correspondence, the sound both causes and prevents the snow to fall. The actual material disintegration of the image is dependant on the off screen radio energy. The mountain itself is also not present, but created though logarithms of data. This is no longer a specific mountain but a generated amalgam of digital memories of mountain-like forms. The visual image is nothing more than information made visible and set into motion by the shifting surfaces of the sound waves, which corrupt and control its obedience to gravity. The work then largely occurs off screen in the interstitial spaces of transmission. The sound is tremendous, yet the damage is minimal.

This paper maps two divergent trajectories within a narrowly defined sphere of short-form, time-based, digital media—specifically music videos, design-oriented short films and motion graphics—of the past ten years. I am particularly interested in considering this work’s potential for understanding emergent relations to the perception and construction of space, time and bodies; the status of narrative; relations between technology and material culture; and shifting conceptions of the roles played by producers and consumers.

Introduction
The Soundscape Reconstructor (SR) is a new technology first announced in the International Symposium of the Society of Music and the Computing on June 2007 (SMC07)1 by the author and Dr. K. Papadimitriou. SR allows the reconstruction of the Soundscape of a given study area and takes advantage of a sampling methodology developed by a research of the Greek Society of Acoustic Ecology which was supported by three major Greek universities (Ionian, Aristotle and Crete) and the EEC program “Pythagoras”. One of the characteristics of SR is its capability to be used as the engine for the realization of a series of interactive installations with educational, entertaining and artistic purposes. The addition of motion tracking technologies to the SR system for the extraction of the coordinates of a user moving in a virtual map (usually projected or printed on the floor of a virtual space) resulted in a series of installations based on SR, the typical structure of which we will present here.

This research investigation aims to experiment with forms of data visualization to uncover ways that they can be useful tools in studying the salsa dance and other cultural practices that involve body movements. The cultural phenomenon the investigation will examine is the complexity of the dance community surrounding the salsa. Of particular interest is the way dancers improvise new styles of a dance and the way those styles are adopted by one dancer from another. By visualizing motion data collected from salsa dancers, the investigation attempts to create a new way to study the cultural significance of gestures and movements. This technique may provide a supplemental perspective to the traditional participant‑observer method in cultural study.

Keywords: Cultural Identity, Ancestral Culture, Technology for Peace, ManMachine Interaction, Interdisciplinary, Museography, Astronomical Observatory, Interaction Design, User-Centered Design

This work develops an applied research that engages methodologies from the Interaction design field (IxD) and user-center design (UCD) methods for building an interactive installation in the astronomical observatory and museum, Kosmos, located in Villa de Leyva, Colombia. Taking as a starting point the construction of an artifact that could efficiently adapt itself to the environment of Kosmos Museum and its surroundings. We construct an artifact that motivates the user to interact with it, promotes cultural identity dialogues and usage of technology on first hand.

The result is the construction of an interacting intervention as the enhancer of dialogues and guidance about a prehispanic megalithic monument, transcendental for the creation of mental imaginaries about the Colombian ancestral cultures. The design concept manages to express itself in an artifact consistent with digital and analogous elements which act as an information processing container by which the museum guides and the visitors can generate dialogue around this chosen topic. Being a source of an attractive and active experience around the topic of the ancestral astronomical observatory built by the Muisca pre-Hispanic culture, 2200 year ago. User to interact with it, promotes cultural identity dialogues and usage of technology on first hand

Introduction
The purpose of all the work was to develop a multimedia system, which would allow the implementation of interactive exhibition procedures for the communication, explanation and dissemination of elements related to the Museum and astronomical observatory Kosmos. We applied methodologies Known as User-Centered Design and Design Thinking, in order to create an own methodology that would be adapted to the project. Its main objective was to highlight the most typical aspects of the context, highlighting the ancestral cultural identity of the region, to explore the environmental and social factors and to work on an artisanal, analogue and mechanical-technology point of view. This methodology was divided in 8 phases for its execution, which focused on: Customer and environment recognition, user definition, requirements definition and analysis, system design and ideation, prototyping and testing system and finally the implementation process.

Generative art provides new opportunities for creating sustainable and resilient communities. We discuss three key elements important for the relationship between generative art and sustainability: Dynamic composition, Interdisciplinary development, and Community. Each of these elements is analyzed in relationship to exemplary artwork. We conclude with a discussion of the artwork Journey of a Pod that demonstrates how these three elements play a key role in the artwork development.

Artist’s talk Aquaforming in the age of Aquatocene will address interspecies sensing/sounding and communication in the context of human interaction with other creatures and forms of life in the new (ecological) realities of the marine Anthropocene.

Over the last decade, her projects have explored aquatic habitats from the perspective of the Anthropocene era, and our widespread impact on the oceans, seas and rivers and on creatures living in these environments.

Abstract (long paper)

This paper examines the aesthetic and connective properties of arcade videogame interfaces. It considers the arcade videogame interface as a communicative and creative link that extends beyond play orientated input and feedback mechanisms. With the correct emulation and homebrew tools, videogame platforms that were originally designed as consumer only devices become malleable forms that can be interfaced at artist and developer levels, allowing previously closed hardware and software systems to function as reconfigurable digital materials.

This paper results from my participation in an interdisciplinary research project focusing on the Meso-american city of Teotihuacan, initiated by the Museum of Anthropology at Arizona State University in the US. The aim of the project was to present daily life in this bustling city at the time of its peak, around the year 250 AD, when it was the 6th largest city in the world with a population of more than 100,000. I was involved in the conceptual development of the project as well as the exhibit research, and was enlisted to create soundscapes depicting the sonic ambiance of certain central locations in the city for presentation in a purpose‑built listening environment utilizing advanced 3D surround sound technology.

Sound has a unique ability to evoke, delineate and describe different spaces and trigger memories and associations to activities and situations, and thereby offer unique insight into time, place and culture. Utilizing digital audio technology, especially technologies for immersive sonic spaces, complex acoustical features such as directionality, distance,    movement, perspective and envelopment can be manipulated in ways that put the audience in the midst of an archaeophonic setting, and transforms how archaeological data is presented, experienced and understood.

This paper describes the rationale for using sound on its own to present archaeological findings, with a particular focus on the research and original design of this project, titled City Life: Experiencing the World of Teotihuacan, as well as how my involvement in the project has shaped my thinking in subsequent work. The paper finds support in an interdisciplinary inquiry into relevant fields such as soundscape studies, archaeoacoustics, archaeology, anthropology, spatio‑ecology and material culture. These fields provide insight and context with which to set up sonic spaces that enrich the representation and understanding of ancient times and places from a dynamic, non‑traditional entry point.

Can architectures of play disrupt our behavioural patterns and produce new forms of social interaction in urban space? How can play help us transform our often quasi automatic quotidian actions (Bourdieu)? Can responsive environments produce new bodily movements or challenge the established ones (Mauss) ? From the hidden group events in grottos, follies and labyrinths of Italian and French gardens to open activities of Fun Palace project, architects understood the spaces of play as opportunities for exploration of phenomenological and social experiences. The uncertainty of play allows us to probe new behaviours, to poke the boundaries of subjectivity and to engage into new becomings together with people, things and systems participating in play. This opportunity to reinvent the world through play has been the source of various artistic, architectural and theatrical projects. Through analysis of the latter this essay explores how the design of material context (intangible and tangible one) and responsive technologies embedded in architecture may foster playful activities in public spaces, particularly those forms of play which enable us to critically embrace and transform our everyday life. Paper will discuss how theoretical ideas and practical proposals of artists and architects such as R. Schechner, C. Price and J. Littlewood (Fun Palace) provide foundation for creation of contemporary responsive playgrounds.

Introduction by Reynaldo Thompson                                   

This panel tries to open a discussion on the history of the hybridization of art and technology in the last five or six decades, with reference to any specific country, in the Latina American region. It consists of 33 countries of all sizes, from the extensive Brazil to the small islands of the Caribbean. The idea and main purpose of the panel is to address the under-representation of this new form of art in the global discourse of the art – something that arises out of neglect and assumptions about the world order.

Panelists focus their attention on the sunrise of an experimental art that began to embrace more and more of the new technology since the 50s; at times we witness the incipient promises of the art technology hybrid as early as in the 40s just as much as the phenomenon energy oriented art were visible in labs established in other regions of the developed world.

From Argentina, Ricardo Dal Farra, speaks of his experience of rediscovering, in a junkyard of the past, some of the most innovative electroacoustic music composers and creators of new forms and the new aesthetics of sounds and music. Dal Farra who has been closely working with the Langlois Foundation in Montreal has put together perhaps the most important archive on electroacoustic music of Latin American.

Our other panelist from Argentina Andrea Sosa complements this history with a discussion of the visual art of light effects from the same period, namely in the works of Julio Le Parc, active from the same era as when the Torcuato Di Tella Institute began functioning as the most important supporter of these emerging trends in art world.

The beginnings of art and technology in Brazil, the largest country in size and population of the region, are represented in the presentation of Andres Burbano who analyzes its artistic scenario. He finds the seed for electronic art and digital photography in the works of Geraldo de Barros who used punched card to modulate abstract photography and whose photography now remains as Burbano shows a pioneering landmark in computational art.

Representing the same geographical context, our other panelist Rejane Spitz brings into the discussion the work of three pioneers in Kinetic and electronic art, namely, Waldemar Cordeiro the precursor of electronic art in Brazil, Abraham Palatnik a precursor of kinetic art, and Otávio Donasci known for his theatrical video performances in the psychological dimensions of social relations. No doubt on about Spitz’ argument that electronic art in Brazil has found a fertile ground to grow and flourish.

Another important perspective in the evolution of kinetic, electronic or digital arts, as well as in evolution of a critical turn in art in Latin America, is valorized by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda’s presentation. Her objective is to highlight on women artists from Mexico. Aceves anticipates the importance of Telematic Art of the seventies, Lorraine Pinto (born in New York and working in Mexico since 1959) working with sound and light during the 60s, and Pola Weiss a pioneer of video art.

From Peru we have Jose-Carlos Mariátegui who studies the contribution of the Swiss born pioneer electronic artist Francesco Mariotti who is an established artist now in both, Switzerland and Peru. In his analysis, Mariátegui focuses attention on two works: the Project Geldmacher-Mariotti presented at the Documenta in 1968 and the Circular Movement of Light shown at the X Sao Paolo Biennial in 1994 representing Switzerland together with other three artists.

Speaking of recent developments in the new media arts, Jose Manuel Ruiz-Martin analyzes the evolution not of the work of any specific artist from Ecuador, but of the laboratories of digital experimentation, the first one of them being inaugurated in 2012. With that context in mind, it is meaningful to start documenting the history of those media labs that will most likely reap the harvest of the new art for the generations to come.

Thus the panel stands unique in its diverse range of interest and analysis of art and technology through the entire span of our geographical region and of our cultural identity in the new world.

The Third Edition Variable Media Questionnaire (VMQ3) is an information system based on a seemingly paradoxical goal: it seeks to preserve artworks by describing how they can be changed. Implicit in this goal is the acknowledgement that the physical components of any artwork, regardless of medium, will eventually degrade and lose their power; the only variable is time. Unlike a traditional museum collection management system that takes a physical artifact to be the point of greatest fixity in an artwork and thus focuses on preserving the artifact, the VMQ3 suggests that there are other aspects of an artwork that may be at least as important to preserve as the artifact itself. If the traditional system is premised on a fixed physical artifact, the VMQ3 is premised on a fixed experience of an artwork.

The average time to stay on a web page is about 15 seconds. In the Tik-Tok generation, how do users utilize new media art online archives? Without any browser menus including the address bar, Archiving New Media Art Archives only allows visitors in a gallery to use the mouse to navigate online archives with hypertexts and hyper-images. Whenever users click the mouse button, the computer takes a picture of a small portion around the mouse cursor and places it on another screen, which is invisible to users. This project visualizes how online users access new media art resources in a collage way. When they click five times to surf the online archive, the computer automatically turns to the next archive website. Users visit Prix-Ars Electronica Archiv first, then ACM SIGGRAPH Art Show Archives and ISEA Symposium Archives in order. In the end, this project generates a collage image based on the users’ search activities on those three archive websites. After each exhibition day, this project posts the final collage image on social media. In non-real time, as a spatial collage image, this project documents how users consume those archive resources and how users can reach different resources. This project is based not on scientific research about users’ online activities, but on an artistic method to visualize users’ history of access to online archive resources and examine users’ surfing consumption patterns on archive websites. As a delayed interactive art project, Archiving New Media Art Archives provides viewers with a certain time to appreciate the original purpose and function of digital art archives. This will contribute to not only showing how online new media art archives work, but also making creative spatial collage images with time-based online activities during the Second Summit on New Media Art Archiving at ISEA2022.

As an innovative solution to the challenges of documenting, indexing and researching new media art, this proposal proposes the creation of the Video-Policy media library (from now on MeViPol) within the framework of the research group HUM-1062: Policies of the audio-visual image and its technological environment in artistic practice. This project focuses on two lines of research. On the one hand, curatorial strategies for archiving works developed in Media Art and Data Art. On the other hand, we consider that the artistic trends encompassed in these two blocks have characteristics of obsolescence due to the rapid advance of technology, so MeViPol proposes a virtual space in which both the programming code with which these works are developed and the records generated for their development, both technical and conceptual, is collected.

ONB-Labs is the platform of the ONB (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek/Austrian National Library) for scientific and creative use of digital collections. In addition to the general opening of selected digital collections as images, texts and metadata, the ONB-Labs actively seek the exchange with young as well as established artists since the beginning of the ONB-Labs in 2018. Currently, in collaboration with the University of Arts Linz, Austria, ONB-Labs is now going a step further by critically questioning the artistic/scientific engagement with digital collections and archives as well as their potential of expanding knowledge spaces through and with the work on data.

This paper analyzes and highlights recent results of artistic-scientific processes and contextualizes the potential of working on the processes of “archiving the in-between” via artistic/scientific means and therefore highlighting relations and connections between data, objects and spaces in archives in order to gain new knowledge and open new ways of understanding and engaging with digital collections. Based on the archiving strategies and experiences of the Interface Cultures Department at the University of Arts Linz in relation to forms of representation of an artistic oeuvre in digital space (as presented last year by Tiago Martins, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau), this paper refers to the digital original in the digital inter-spaces and critically examines the procedural, artistic and scientific gain of knowledge in the process of ordering, connecting, translating and contextualizing the in-between of the digital archive realm.

The Expanded Animation Symposium, an annual symposium at Ars Electronica, has addressed computer animation in the  context of media art since 2013. Based on the early discussions at the media festival and in conjunction with the Prix Ars Electronica’s category Computer Animation, the symposium tackles animation at the intersection of art, technology, and society. The symposium serves as a hybrid between practice and theory and features talks, panel discussions, workshops,  and artist presentations at various venues (i.e., museum, university, festival, cinema). 164 international experts presented  and discussed current positions and future trends in the last nine editions. Due to the pandemic, the previous two editions took place online. All these activities have been documented and archived in various forms. This paper discusses challenges and concrete proposals for archiving the Expanded Animation Symposium and collaborating with Ars Electronica’s archive and international partners.

In 2020, I created an artwork on the state of truth-telling crisis during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. The project is titled Project Echo. It is a multi-modality and multi-disciplinary new media artwork involving Twitter data and took two and a half years of extensive research collaboration with a political scientist and a computer engineer to develop. When the project concluded shortly after the Capitol insurrection, we realized that we had compiled a significant database of Tweets. It has become a valuable historical record of Twitter disinformation activity relating to the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. As an artist unfamiliar with how archives are established, I am interested in figuring out how to provide public access to the database and its associated visualizations. I look to cultural institutions to help establish an archive of the database and provide the public with the opportunity to access this piece of American History.

I’m not the one who has qualms about ‘on line’ or ‘off line’ art, Diguiden is! Here is the chance to enter into dialogue with this wandering web entertainer this wizard endowed with the gift of omnipresence, and to learn more about ‘2001, the 0dyssey of the Dragon of Ten Thousand Icons’. But beware, even though he may have a long nose, don’t call him Pinocchio, that throws him into such a fit of rage that no algorithm would be capable of calming him.

In an artist-berry alliance an artistic research practice is developing that arguably provides a case as part of a wider attempt by practitioners to broaden the field of embodied cognition. This implies the acceptance of a view on cognition that includes plant life. Examples of the artistic practice describe how it drives -and thrives- in a time spatial matrix of ´merely happenings`, unreflective and reflective normative actions and embraced failure. A dynamic coupling, interspecies interaction system that is enactively named a ´Leaky Loop System´.

Keywords: Embodied cognition; Plant cognition, Enactivism, Artistic research, Ontology, Philosophy of Science, Technology.

The Ars Electronica Archive contains documentation of content since the start of Ars Electronica in 1979. A huge number of artists and researchers from the field of art, technology and society were part of Ars Electronica activities during more than 40 years. They have left their traces in the archive. The presentation provides a glimpse into what the Ars Electronica Archive is and stands for, and what the current achievements and challenges are. Part of the archive is accessible online (Online Archive), part of it only internally (physical Archive & Internal Database).

The Ars Electronica Archive contains documentation content since the start of Ars Electronica in 1979. A huge amount of artists and researchers from the field of art, technology and society were part of Ars Electronica activities during more than 40 years. Part of the archive is accessible online (Online Archive), part of it only internally (physical Archive & Internal Database). The presentation provides a glimpse into the current developments and plans of the Archive.

Panel: VIDA: New Discourses, Tropes and Modes in Art and Artificial Life Research

The his­tory of media art in Latin Amer­ica dates from the avant -garde move­ments of the early 1920s, in which Latin Amer­ica played a key role both lo­cally and in­ter­na­tion­ally. To give a full ac­count of this his­tory some ex­per­i­men­tal sci­en­tific pro­pos­als that lat­er­ally ex­panded the di­men­sions of media art in Latin Amer­ica need to be in­cor­po­rated. For ex­am­ple, in the 1970s the Chilean bi­ol­o­gists Hum­berto Mat­u­rana and Fran­cisco Varela in­tro­duced the con­cept of au­topoiesis which de­fines and ex­plains the na­ture and com­plex­ity of liv­ing sys­tems and which today has be­come a fun­da­men­tal tenet of ar­ti­fi­cial life.

The sci­en­tific con­tri­bu­tion of Chile is com­ple­mented by the con­tri­bu­tion of the coun­tries in the Ama­zon basin, which have a strate­gic ge­o­graph­i­cal lo­ca­tion and rep­re­sent the biggest lab­o­ra­tory of biotech­nol­ogy in the world. My pre­sen­ta­tion is in­tended as an ac­count, within the con­text of ar­ti­fi­cial life, of the last decade of artists and pro­jects that form part of the elec­tronic art scene in Latin Amer­ica. I will offer a time­line of the de­vel­op­ment of Latin Amer­i­can elec­tronic art in the last decade based on a group of VIDA pro­jects that have won awards and in­cen­tives for pro­duc­tion. Most of these pro­jects offer an in­no­v­a­tive stance that ex­pand the field of ar­ti­fi­cial life: the chaotic as­sem­blage of large cities that in­spires and re­veals com­plex urban and in­for­ma­tional processes, the con­text of re­cy­cling tech­no­log­i­cal waste and the de­vel­op­ment of an­tag­o­nis­tic ways of life that cre­ate hy­brid ecosys­tems where both bi­o­log­i­cal and syn­thetic species co-ex­ist. I will dis­cuss how the as­sim­i­la­tion of ar­ti­fi­cial life is often af­fected by so­cial and cul­tural pat­terns that process and an­a­lyze it in dif­fer­ent and com­ple­men­tary ways, al­low­ing not only a crit­i­cal per­spec­tive but also an in­no­v­a­tive path.

This article approaches the linkages between technological art and biotechnology as places of conversation between philosophy of technology, politics and curatorship. Based on the literature reviews and experiences accumulated during the process of curating of the first digital art biennial of the digital art festival, held between 2017 and 2018 in Brazil, it was possible to produce reflections on the role of curatorship in technological art and its implications for decision-making amid an era of biotechnology where political, ethical and artistic processes are intensified under the sensitive eyes of artists and curators.

It was Simon Nora who coined the term telematics to describe the new electronic technology derived from the convergence of computers and telecommunica-tions systems. His report to the President of France, L’Infor-matisation de la Societe, published in 1978, is perhaps one of the most influential documents in this field to have been published in Europe—influential in that it led to the swift establishment by the French government of the Programme Telematique, which has resulted in the transformation of many aspects of French culture. This process of telematisation is most dramatically seen in the ubiquitous and rapid spread of Minitel, the public videotex system that enables widespread interaction between users and databases across an enormous range of services. Nowadays on the Paris Metro, for example, it is enough to see a poster of an island in the sun, a new household appliance, or racehorses pounding the turf, inscribed with a seven-figure sequence of numbers, to know that another Minitel service is being advertised. At home, at one’s Minitel terminal (distributed by the PTT in place of volumes of telephone directories previously provided) one can interact in electronic space with friends, colleagues, institutions and organisations of all kinds. Artists, too, have not been slow to assimilate the medium.

Interactivity is the essence of the videotex system, as it is of all telematic systems, giving us the ability to interact in electronic space, via computer memory and beyond the normal constraints of time and space that apply to face-to-face communication. The concept of interactivity also has an important place in recent theories of communication, in contrast to the one-way linearity of older models. The new approach is found, for example, in the network analysis of Rogers and Kinkaid and in research into biology and cognition by Maturana and Varela. Neither of these studies is centrally concerned with electronic systems or telematic technologies. Both, however, deal with human interaction, language, meaning and memory, which is of value in our understanding of the potential of telematic systems to enrich visual culture.

This study seeks to deepen the understanding of interactive processes in the field of technological art. For such, it will search in the studies of Mark Johnson and George Lakoff the necessary elements for the production of a perspective able to offer a deeper understanding of the processes that involve the production of meaning and aesthetic experience.

Introduction
It does not go unnoticed that we experienced an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of culture. The dilution of the limits between some activities in the field of the studious and critical arts is evident and has constituted a challenge for scholars and crisis. Hybridization between before well-defined forms of artistic expression characterizes contemporary art and these interborder transgressions puts complex conceptual issues, which some critics believe that art today is beyond the historical determination, conceptual definition and critical judgment (Rebentisch, 2011; p. 219). Flores (2011), aware of this challenge, seems to search for new perspectives to face her to wonder if photography and painting are, in fact, two different means. Contemporary culture would be better understood if it was considered beyond just from the diversity of its products among which we must include those arising from the art. Recent advances in the neuroscience point the aesthetic experience as central aspect in the cognitive effect generated by the products proceeding from the artistic sphere of the culture, and that this originates in the sensorial stimulations that the concreteness of these products can produce. The aesthetic in art “relates to what is perceived as beautiful and rewarding,” it is the conclusion reached by Ishizu and Zeki when they talk about the inadequacy of the idea of “significance of the form” proposed by art historian Clive Bell (1914). According to Bell, the visual beauty guesses some quality common and peculiar to aesthetic objects. What Ishizu and Zeki realized is that the aesthetic experience is a cognitive phenomenon of subjective nature, independently from particular properties of objects and includes those constituted inside and outside the formal beauty standards. It is known from these studies that there is an objective form to understand and to measure the conscientious and aesthetic experience through the observation of the state of excitement of the neurons situated in a cortical structure of the brain called medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC) (Ishizu and Zeki, 2011) From a different bias, however convergent, the philosopher Juliane Rebentisch argues that it is advantageous to consider the contemporary art from two main aspects: the blurring of limits or “boundary- crossing” and the experience. For the author, these are more adjusted notions for the task to understand the contemporary art and to consider its production than the “post-history” or “culture of the spectacle”. Such categories are important, as they point to fundamental changes in the artistic theory and practice, changes of which are equally fundamental for the understanding of the contemporary art.

The Edith Russ Site for Media Art is an art institution dedicated to the presentation and discussion of media art. In 1993 school teacher Edith Russ made an endowment to the city of Oldenburg associated with the demand that an institution is going to be established, that focuses on “art on the transition of the 21st century”. With its focus on art and media the Edith Russ Site has an outstanding position in the German museum landscape. It’s a place for presentation and communication, dealing with the use and reflection of media in contemporary art practice as well as the increasing digitization and virtualization of our society and the influence of media on our lives. In a regularly changing exhibition program innovative and experimental positions in contemporary (media) art are shown.

This panel brings three different projects to discuss possible relations of art and nature. We plan to present, think over, and bring about questions on how artists are dealing with climate change issues and how we can create new possibilities of living in balance with nature. Art projects of sensing the sea, of creating narratives of a salty lagoon and of rethinking ecologies of hops are introduced as a starting point of the discussion.

Abstract

This essay explores how scientific knowledge is diffused into society through the medium of scientific visualization, taking the late eighties phenomena of Chaos Culture as an example.

I will compare two recent approaches to the problem of finding a place for scientific visualization as a cultural artifact. Vivian Sobchack’s reading of Chaos Culture in her 1990 Artforum article gives a cultural critique of chaos imagery as a postmodernist metaphor in the worst sense, of a refusal of bodily scale and the historical situation. In Donna Haraway’s recent work she tries to construct a way of contesting scientific knowledge or stories for the creation of public meanings without sacrificing scientific values. This takes the form of a program of scientific literacy in which science is seen as a series of situated knowledges subject to political and social accountability. A problem of applying this to the Chaos story is that the situation is complicated by its diffusion through imagery and media. This telling of a scientific story in visible form allows Sobchack to give a particularly aesthetic critique of chaos theory. But both approaches are needed. Chaos theory gives a dramatic indication of how new scientific approaches have made simulation the dominant mode of knowledge – the allegory that lives its own meaning. This gives related imagery an explanatory power beyond the merely imitative or even aesthetic. We explore this role of imagery as the most appropriate way to exercise this change in perception and the possibility of a more phenomenological way of contesting science. We conclude that a
deeper level of cultural readings of scientific visualization are needed, especially in the context of art, readings that address changes in scientific discourse more thoroughly and attend to how it now operates through imagery

The integration of artistic practices that connect art and technology in the context of compulsory education is a complex issue that highlights the need to activate school practices in connection with  the  changing and technologised reality of contemporary society from a critical and generative approach. This panel introduces  a selection of projects promoted by the Red PLANEA Arte y Escuela developed in schools in Spain’s  regions of Andalucia, Madrid and Valencia. Introducing different methodologies and specific techniques, these  projects address the critical analysis of information and communication technologies, both from their creative and facilitating dimension of new spaces of thought and interdisciplinary intervention as well as  in terms of the analysis of their effects on the forms of relationship and experiences in contemporary society. Through different contributions this panel explores the potential of these projects as replicable strategies for other educational contexts and also introduces ANIDA, a Journal specialised in educational resources which, in its volume n2, focuses on these issues by compiling artistic and educational resources related to today’s technologies.

Platohedro is a community laboratory in Medellin (Colombia). Since 2004 it has served as an independent platform for a grand diversity of learning experiences. Art, technology and communities contributing to the creative wellbeing of the youthand social transformation. The Residency program is open all year and we receive artists from many countries, that work with pedagogy, research and experimentation in art and technology with the local community.

This paper examines how experiences with digitally expanded realities – familiar as virtual, augmented, mixed, and other modes of mediated reality – are tendentially designed to convince us of their ‘reality’ by smoothly integrating with our cultural habits and neurosensory systems, by mirroring our expectations, intuitions, and neuronal patterns. The leitmotif of the paper is the ‘mirror’ as a both figure and metaphor in negotiations of human relations to reality. I particularly problematize the mirror’s recent recurrence as a productive, mimetic motif in neurosensory based design that cues perception to mutate in reflection of cultural and neurosensory pathways we already know. I approach this from a technogenetic perspective with reference to the works of N. Katherine Hayles, Catherine Malabou, and Bernard Stiegler. The technogenetic perspective concerns how we change with technology and involves an attention to emotional-biological implications of experience. This perspective leads us to deal with perception as a construct of cultural as well as cognitive and neurologically complex natures and patterns, cuing our ongoing and potentially fatal negotiations between real and artificial, truth and fiction. I propose that, instead of reproducing the mimetic mirror motif, art can pursue an alternative, ‘broken’ mirror motif. This continues ideas put forth by the avant-garde artists concerned with perceptual instabilities but engages more deeply with the technologically challenged natures and patterns of perceptual experience today.

Defining art is a difficult, maybe an impossible, task but it can be said that the nature of art has close connections with unpredictability, uncertainty and paradoxes. While the artistic process heads for zones of tension and mystery, science filters the noises of reality in order to predict and control. Decades of positivist methodologies have lead the actions of science towards an increasingly reductionist approach.

The challenges of a new quantum phenomenology have guided several researchers to rethink this process of discretization of the world and to adopt methodologies that disclose reality from within a holistic framework.

The creative use of photo multipliers and highly sensitive CCD (charge-coupled device) cameras by biophysicists have shown living organisms as an intricate networks of photons exchanging information at light speed. Due its quantum nature (wave–particle duality) the so-called bio photons indicate that organisms are under the influence of a meaningful field and express themselves through it. For some spiritualistic schools bio photons are thought to be an interface between the body and its more subtle dimensions.

From this perspective this paper investigates the hypothesis that at a macro level we are part of a meaningful field that interconnects living and non-living things. It proposes that art and its entangled relationships with science and technology has nourished the creation of artefacts and could be understood under the concept of art as a field phenomenon. We are looking towards an understanding of the aesthetic experience as the perception of a flow that collapses into objects, systems and organisms.

This paper reflects on the current state of the author’s Ph.D. research in which he analyses the symbiosis of organic and synthetic systems in the context of art experience.

Art’s recent infiltration of stock markets, courtrooms, and mobile phones marks a seismic shift in the role it plays in society. The once-academic question “what is art” has acquired new urgency now that society depends on this collective immune system to confront technology’s increasing encroachment into daily life. Drawing on case studies from our 2006 book At the Edge of Art, this paper examines the special powers granted art of the Internet age, which—no longer content to sit on a pedestal or auction block—can respond aggressively to the ethical crises caused by technology’s infection of society.

Art Center Nabi has focused on warm-hearted robots which can comfort human, and developed various creative projects over the past few years. 8 times of international Hackathon with different creators from Korea, China, Japan and Taiwan had been hosted such as H.E.ART BOT(Handcraft Electronics Art Bot) Hackathon in 2014 and E.I.(Emotional Intelligence) Hackathon in 2015. Nabi also held a big international festival in 2015 where robots and human enjoyed each other by sharing their lives. Through international group exhibitions, hackathons, and performances, various kinds of companion robots, social robots, and musical robots had been represented.

ARt chat is an application that enables museum visitors to place their own opinions, knowledge or even questions as comments virtually in the exhibition space. They can also discuss the artworks with others and interact even after leaving the exhibition. The application combines augmented reality, art and communication.

Archiving media and digital art pose non-trivial challenges to everyone involved in the art process. Operating and cooperating on different continents, Anna Frants, Janine Randerson, Alexandra Dementieva, and Natalia Kolodzei will share their experiences with archiving and documenting new media while searching for a sustainable global platform for archiving processes and ways of collaboration among transnational institutions. Panelists will discuss how the artist, the curator, and the institution that organizes digital art exhibitions and events reason at each stage of the archival process: from the artist’s conception to the recording in the conditional archive card, to contemplating on the ways of preserving the digital art heritage.

The possibilities of a unified digital art archive, such as the Connecting Archives project, are significant. Addressing the interoperability of analog archives, and reconsidering and bridging binaries regarding the global ‘centers’ of new media art practice versus the so-called ‘periphery’ are other essential issues to be discussed. It is also important to focus on users’ expectations from such an archive and how to improve the experience of such an archive on both sides – authors and users.

The panel discussion is focused on the speakers’ exchange of knowledge and practical experience, each of whom looks at the problem of preserving and presenting digital-based art from her special perspective. Ultimately, the panelists will outline points of contact by which the easiest and most comfortable path to preservation and representation can be established for all interested parties.

When celluloid was replaced by sensors twenty years ago, the photographic image became bilingual. The digital im-age, now being shot, shown, stored and shared by one device, lives up to (and beyond) expectations of analogue mnemonic technologies. Satisfying the human urge for visual traces, the easy-to-use digital apparatus tempt us to produce photographic images. Yet the current ubiquity of images demonstrates not only our ‘analogue’ needs to archive and share memories, it also points towards a ‘digi-tal’ hunger for data. The photographic image, both data and imagery, speaks to different audiences. The human audi-ence, with its growing need for visual updates of other peoples’ lives and the non-human audience, gathering data to index, recognise and categorise patterns in order to pre-dict future developments. Pointing towards past and future at the same time, in between ‘narrative-based stories’ and ‘data-based story-telling’ the data-image serves both needs. We, seduced by the digital device, feed the data-hungry and the image-needy more and more. And now “Life is experi-enced as increasingly documentable, and perhaps, also experienced in the service of its documentation, always with the newly accessible audience in mind,” a seemingly irrelevant transition changed the human role in image pro-duction forever.

Art for Spooks is an augmented book that takes a poetic angle to electronic surveillance. It combines texts and images from “leaked” NSA documents that evidence mundane concerns of NSA employees with grooming etiquette, gossip and surveillance at the work place; the development of encryption and psychological profiling tools modeled on alleged historical links between magicians and the military; and a delirious imaginary steeped in the world of modern folklore, populated as is with UFOs, popular media archetypes of evil and good, as well as (apparently) a taste for buffalo meat, high art, and orientalist and gendered themes. These materials are juxtaposed with graphics read through a tablet interface. The act of reading generates randomized data in the forms of new images and texts which are concurrently uploaded to various social media platforms. The traces of this data are refracted through algorithmic manipulation. Art for Spooks suggests that the intense categorization and cataloging of facts, phenomena, and life under current modes of surveillance, demands the invention of new ones that resist the stultifying effects of this kind of instrumentalization. With this in mind, the project concerns the creation of feedback meant to augment the paranoiac impulses of the spy (unburdened by such trivialities as plausibility or verification) through the fabrication of evidence for unprovable verification and the grafting of this evidence on the world. We will discuss the concept, process, context, and ideas behind the project.
The app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store

We search for new and more specific connotations inside the artistic and scientific matrix. For me, such basic connotations – indeed a new paradigm – are related to the fact that:

1. “organic” machines are made by artists/engineers/scientist
2. using electronics/technology on its highest, most advanced level including responsive interaction
3. in an ecologically clean, reasonable way
4. to serve human and natural survival and/or vital reconstruction – as metaphors and symbols and realities.

The history of copier technology may begin with the earliest human efforts to create mechanical records of images in their environment. Numerous devices were employed over centuries of experimentation. The camera lucida was refined by the 16th century, with photography and photomechanical printing processes introduced during the 19th century. Related tools emerged when A.B. Dick marketed Edison’s mimeograph in 1887, and 3-M marketed its Thermo-Fax in 1950. Of principal note is the production of the first electrophotograph by Chester Carlson in 1938. Carlson’s original patent (1939) described the ‘electrophotographic copying apparatus’ which would evolve into the first commercially successful photocopier. Carlson spent years trying to sell his idea to numerous companies. The Haloid Corporation accepted and developed Carlson’s process. Haloid Xerox released the Xerox Model D in 1950, the famous Xerox 914 in 1959, and became the Xerox Corporation in 1961.

Artists experimented with photocopiers as soon as commercial plain paper copiers became available, and responded with increased interest when full color copiers appeared.

Art in the Age of Networks – a response to Julian Assange. The panel Art in the Age of Networks takes up concepts introduced by the final key note of ISEA2013 by Julian Assange and aims at correcting Assange’s rather limited understanding of art by introducing a broad variety of socially and politically engaged networked art. Art is not a fixed     concept but rather continuously undergoes mutations on the basis of permanent social negotiations and media shifts. Since the end of the 20th century the modernist conception of art has been challenged through global networks. The increasing production and relevance of immaterial goods, the ease with which they can be copied and modified questions traditional notions of authorship, work and property and requires a new aesthetic toolset. A plethora of contemporary art practices no longer takes place in the white cube or in dedicated areas but plays an active role in designing and building a new society. By taking on an active function, these art practices expand what we consider as art and what the role and function of art is in society.The panel brings together outstanding experts in the field of digital networked art. Coming from various backgrounds (art practice, curating, network theory), the speakers are going to discuss the changing notion of art and its relevance in a digital networked environment. Instead of taking a modernist approach and looking at media specificity, the panel discusses networked art in the tradition of the historical avant‑garde understanding art as a forming element of society. The questions discussed include: How can art contribute to building a new society? How can the values from free software be implemented in cultural production? How do artists contribute to building independent infrastructures? The panel aims at contributing to a new understanding of art as an agent for social and political change on the basis of digital networked technologies.

1) Sensuous works that can hear, see, feel, touch, smell, know where they are, who is in the room, where their owner is, what’s going on and what went down.

2) Reactive works that can change their skins, activate motors, laugh, cough, blow bubbles, make sounds, sing and tell jokes.

3) Communicative works that whisper, lie, conspire, kibitz, talk and gossip together. These works exchange information, knowledge, insults, truths, untruths, random thoughts and tall-tales.

4) Tacit works that are invisibly embedded in daily life, Works that become habitual and relied on, forgotten about (like riding a bicycle) or deeply integrated (like a contact lens).

5) Colonizing works that inhabit all of our daily goods, camouflaged as it were, in simple commodities and enspiriting the landscape with minor gods, clever deities and unusual ghosts.

Art in the age of Ubiquitous Computing will not be in galleries; rather, we will live within its general hubbub.

A paper in three sections:
I. THE BIOSPHERE INTERFACE
II. MIRRORS OF THE SUN
III. FROM PLANET OCEAN TO SOLART SCULPTURES

I. THE BIOSPHERE INTERFACE

The quest for a Solar Age is defined by a general change in ecological consciousness, by declining resources of non-renewable energies, by the extreme increase in global and local pollution, by a strong demand for decentralization in political as well as energy decisions, by the rising demand of the underpriviledged three quarters of the world to participate in a higher quality of living. This quest for change cannot be based on traditional, non-renewable energies. The Solar Age in this respect is defined by a new policy of installing and using technologies that harvest the sun’s radiation in a more direct way. But: All plans for reforming our energy situation must be put into practice now, to be fully effective in 2025. (I just focus on the first quarter of the next millenium.)

The estimated 10 Billion people in 2025 cannot live a human life on our present Western standards of energy consumption. This is far more than a technical problem and this is why I am talking about a new definition of art in the and for the Solar Age. A loosly connected group of artists today are fully aware of the necessary changes in contributing to new solutions, new materials and new strategies for an Art in the Solar Age. The aim of Solart Global Network which I?m preparing for 1995, is to bring some of these artist together in working with outdoor solar artworks. These might be outdoor holograms, light work depending on direct use of solar power, reflection of Sun light etc.

Highlights of this Solar Festival are positioned on different parts of the Planet in July and August 1995. Every artist works in her/his own autonomy, sharing a common catalogue and a common film & video documentation of the events. Exhibitions are planned to show the resulting art works and their documentation. Network, for me, means a value-oriented networking of people who share the same vision of the Solar Age. Technology is used at the most advanced level but only to strengthen the underlying values of a critical and creative redefinition of art in the Biosphere.

While the advances in artificial intelligence in recent years have been astonishing, we are still quite far from the inception of an mechanical intellect that could perform like the human mind. The human qualities which are most challenging to replicate are exactly the ones related to art production and reception: metaphors, analogies, misbehavior, embodiment, contemplation. Will the route to an artificial general intelligence necessarily call at the realm of art? Can we think of a particular type of intelligencerelated to art that has not yet been obtained by machines?

In this article we discuss on how museums, as a knowledge institution, can achieve the public using virtual reality as an instrument for exhibitions. Nowadays, most researches are about integrating Virtual Reality (VR) into the traditional frame of a museum in order to enable a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the displayed artworks. It happens due to a narrow view of the concept of “reality”. In order to start this discussion we are going to broaden the concept of “reality”, and go beyond the most commonly used terms of real and virtual. We will study some cases applications of virtual reality in museums and the way it is understood, to then bring about the amplitude of possibilities it has beyond the common use. We will work with the most widely accepted theories on museums and based on Roy Ascott’s works we will bring a deeper discussion onto the matter of realities.

Throughout the past six years my sculptural work has embodied abstract notions of technology by recirculating, technological objects and methodologies within the realm of the biological and decorative. Historical and cultural sources, materials employed and forms on which the work are based, are all integral to one another.

Recent work has explored the hybridisation between formal iconography of dress (as expressed in a range of traditional cultures) and woven textiles with contemporary iconography and functions of electronic media. A key metaphor linking these two divergent areas being the emblematic use of decorative inscription, of rank or gender in the former, juxtaposed with the caricatural, symbolic structures of electronic media. This metaphor has continued in most current work, historically relating the trade of goods between Europe and Asia and its subsequent effects on cultural and technological development.

I am also curious in exploring apparent taboos which often prevent technologically based arts forms from addressing cultural, spiritual or ritual aspects of the social world. The conventional orientation of technologically based work, in its critique of the body for instance, often refers to it as a set of physical limitations to be extended by prosthetic devices and VR systems. My work however, regards the body as an expressive, social being existing within a culture, within a history.