Presentation Data Table

Current discourses in urban computing explore the possibilities for new forms of sociality and aesthetic experience over networked media platforms, referencing practices that utilise the potential for geo-location, wifi coverage, and inter-device connectivity in urban space in order to consume, produce, and distribute diverse media content. The convergence of urban space, mobile actors and dynamic network topologies provoke new sociotechnical possibilities for the city dweller. While research in urban computing is frequently biased towards urban screens and visual interfacing, it can be argued that such an enquiry is particularly relevant to contemporary auditory experience. Increasingly, our everyday sonic experiences are interleaved with new mobilities, spatialities and networked infrastructure. It is relevant therefore to investigate how mobile sound and its exploration through media art and design practices could provide a platform for engaging with networked space, both in terms of possibilities for new cultural practices, but furthermore with regard to its critical engagement with network topology, often sonifying the complex interplay of social and informational networks that occurs with mobile media distribution in urban space.

This paper focuses on a the production of a digital artwork for mobile app (IOS). The work is titled “TechnoSpaces” and it is formatted as a digital game. The paper looks at the process of
building the work and some of the implications and possibilities of such processes. Key findings of the research are related to the construction of an artist’s framework for mobile artworks. Various forms of creative sound manipulation and synthesis can be structured into mobile games with the right approach and vision.

Abstract

Short Paper

Summary
A basic set of terms and models are developed to describe a range of possible sound-action models. Mention is made of how existing technologies could serve to implement these models.

Abstract

Most of the discussions concerning the rapid technological evolution of desktop and networked-based multimedia have focused on the domain of progress, a “progress” given by sets of numbers that are clearly greater in magnitude with every passing year. This numerophilia is understood palpably as a Being-towards-convergence, in particular, as the hope that multimedia over the Internet will, once we have conquered the problems of bandwidth and the right feature set, provide as flexible and useful a medium as desktop multimedia has been. Java, ShockWave, and a host of nascent networking technologies exist as the current emissaries of this hope, though they have yet to advance any real works of quality multimedia. Underlying this hope, however, is a fundamental myopia that reinforces a human computer interaction model derived from a conceptually sophomoric transactional client/server model of distributed systems. Akin to the assumptions about technology as progress raised by our Heideggerian post-atomic consciousness, we have no corresponding epochal awakening that the fetishization of progress in informational technologies is overshadowing the exploration of creative alternative interfaces by its own relentless and demonstrable gains in bandwidth and speed. Sound models, in particular, have only evolved in small steps from a simplistic, isomorphic and stateless action/response model. Little thought, if any, has been given to a detailed consideration of alternative models of sound/action interaction for networked multimedia. In making an inquiry intended to systematic and comprehensive, one must speculate intelligently upon the perceptual and psychological ramifications of different sound models upon the user. Since these effects are not obvious, experiments could subsequently be derived in which it could be seen how users would react to more complex or intelligent uses of sound in the context of their actions.This paper articulates a detailed taxonomy that adds another level of complexity to the simple and ubiquitous action/response model. This level explores the possibility of an added level of indirection, an agent, between a set of sounds and actions. This idea is developed with examples by examining potentially useful data structures to associate with the action, a consideration of models that recognize sound as both static sound objects and as dynamic sound streams (with modifiable real-time parameters), and a consideration as to the different levels (microstructure/macrostructural) that can be affected by the agent. Relationships and interaction with bundled visible objects (sprites) are also considered. This schemata, comprising seven possible models, proceeds from defining the different models, to discussions of how the models might be implemented in Director/Lingo, or on the web in HTML, Java, or ShockWave. Lastly, a perceptual model of reinforcement is examined in a speculation as to the perceptual ramifications of more complex sound/action relationships and the possible efficacy and uses.

Sound, Architecture and Catastrophe examines the nexus of historical relationships between sound-power and ideology by exploring the metaphoric structures of two sound-sculpture installations (one recent and one which I am currently developing).

“Oracle” (exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 1995) inhabits the nexus between the body and architectural space by proposing the voice as the carrier of both prophesy and of ideological imperative. In this fusion of corpus and polis the soundfield simultaneously operates as actuality, as virtuality and as metaphor, to create an architecture un-frozen! The second installation; “Silent Forest” (to be mounted at the San Francisco Art Institute as part of “SoundCulture 96”) proposes that we listen to a silence decreed by political and military power. The work is constructed as a tracing of colonial and (neo) colonial relationships linking cultural form with political force. The installation (& its accompanying Radio broadcast) weave a sonic web between a natural environment under chemical siege – to metaphorically link the creation of an Ecological silence (by the massive deployment of dioxin de-foliants in VietNam) with the High culture of Western Opera exemplified by the French built Ha Noi Opera House – here Opera is employed as both a sign and transmitter of the colonial process.

This poster describes “Sound: Volatile: Metopia”, a wireless sensor network using sonification to experience information of constant shifts in air pollution in our local environment. In this first prototype of “Sound: Volatile: Metopia”, (meta + topos), the relation between humans, technology, and the environment is addressed.

“Sound: Volatile: Metopia” is research in environmental hazardous dust using wireless sensor networks and sonification in the urban environment to examine and communicate complex processes as part of the Internet of Things framework. Microscopic matter, invisible to the human perception, traverses our human bodies, through the air we breathe and through our skin, such as data transmission via electromagnetic propagation, dust, virus, bacteria, and other airborne particles such as volatile organic compounds, both biological and anthropogenic.

What we humans breathe is the focus of the first iteration of “Sound: Volatile: Metopia”, and our exposure to health‑damaging pollutants, such as invisible particulate matter in the environment. When considering the Age of the Anthropocene and the growing climate problem, “Sound: Volatile: Metopia”, is about information about complex    occurrences in the environment using sonification. One third of the world population is exposed to biomass fuels, which cause respiratory problems. What we breath have a continuous impact on our bodies and on our behavior. In addition to this, the exposure to toxic clouds of dust caused by natural catastrophe, such as a vulcano eruption, or political conflict where fire arms and explosives are used, with a mixture of different particulate matter entering the human body, mostly anthropogenic, is a worst‑case scenario for the human respiratory system. One other aspect that is addressed in this project, is the economical and political framework around information of particulate and toxic matter, and quality of air, where political and economical concerns other than those of human safety influence how information is handled.

With “Sound: Volatile: Metopia”, these complex volatile processes in our environment is addressed through the use of sensor technology, including Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) sensors, to experience the data of the measured air pollution. The changes in toxic levels in the environment are used as meta‑data in a sound composition. “Sound: Volatile: Metopia”. The project consists of a mesh network, using ZigBee a routing protocol on top of 802.15.4, is a low‑power, scalable network, which may cover a large area of the city. “Sound: Volatile: Metopia”, is connected to the Internet and the environmental data is available as an Android app, in addition to the sonification. The data collected can also be available to be repurposed for other uses.

This talk will introduce methodologies and strategies associated with recent participatory sonic arts projects in the UK (Sounds of the City, Belfast), Brazil (Som da Maré, Rio de Janeiro) and Portugal (Sou Cigano, Castelo Branco). These projects explore how sound is related to ideas of place, identity and the everyday. Participatory strategies rooted in authors such as Paulo Freire and notions of relayed creativity (Georgina Born) inform this work which aims to assert sonic arts as a vehicle for social intervention, documentation and change. These projects have identified the power of sound when in comes to contested space, territorial politics and conflict. Belfast’s sonic histories reveal both segregated and shared conditions, articulated by sound memories and stories. Rio favela’s territorial conflicts manifest themselves in sound as events such as military occupations are meant to control local discourse and politics. The sonic arts function as an environment in which to explore these tensions of identity and territory in the context of everyday life. Field recordings, interviews, sensory ethnography, sound sculptures, immersive audio are all strategies which engage participants in revealing their own sound stories which are intrinsically rooted in space. The talk will share recent work in the context of two research projects funded by the Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research.

Feminist and gender studies in music began much later than similar discussions in other disciplines. Susan McClary, who authored one of the first texts to systematically explore the intersections of gender, music and sexuality – and this text was published in 1991 – says that for a woman musicologist to discuss these issues prior to the late ’80s would have been professional suicide, because there were so few women musicologists at that time that they were granted, in her words, only ‘tentative toe-holds’. Indeed, prior to McClary’s 1991 publication, it was a book authored by someone who identified herself as a literary critic that perhaps had most influence on many feminist musicians: Opera, Or the Undoing of Women, published in France in 1979, translated into English in 1988, and written by Catherine Clement.

What is it about music that has kept it so resistant to feminist and gender studies? Several theorists point to music’s association with the body and with subjectivity. Music makes us  dance, we listen to it for sensuous pleasure. It is the least visual of the arts-an audience can have a direct bodily experience of music with our eyes closed. Music moves through us without
boundaries: it cannot be framed, pinned down, or shut out by ears that can only be open. Music is linked to the rhythms of the body, of sexuality. Because of its ephemerality and visceral power, music has been classified as dangerous

The paper discusses the authors’ robotic artwork SONŌ (2019-), its artistic motivations, the artistic research practice underlying its development, and its technical realization. SONŌ is a soft robotic installation that interrogates the interconnections of soft materiality, sound, and subjectivity. It features a sessile soft artificial entity only capable of expansive movement, which is ceaselessly sounding itself and various environments using real-time generated audio.

The presentation is a progress report on the design and installation of SoundLab, a physical art/research space with a hemispherical loudspeaker array dedicated to high spatial resolution audio at the School of Creative Media [SCM] in City University of Hong Kong [CityU] began in November 2020. It also introduces a study on the local context of sonic art in Hong Kong and possible future directions for the genre in the region to which it aims to contribute through its research and art as well as teaching and outreach activities.

SoundLab, funded with an ACIM (Centre for Applied Computing and Interactive Media) Joint Fellowship and hosted at SCM (Creative Media Centre, CityU) since November 2020 is a physical laboratory space with a loudspeaker array dedicated to high spatial resolution audio. SoundLab enables and supports a range of research, artwork, and teaching activities. The Joint Principal Investigators Dr PerMagnus Lindborg and Dr Ryo Ikeshiro are setting out six objectives through which the SoundLab will be deployed in research, artwork, teaching, and outreach.

In order to better understand the local context of sonic art, (used loosely as an umbrella term to refer to electroacoustic music [EAM], experimental music, electronic music, sound art etc. for want of a better term) to which we aim to contribute, we have undertaken a study with colleague Dr Damien Charrieras on the topic in Hong Kong for a forthcoming publication. We have interviewed musicians and artists based in Hong Kong involved in sonic art. The socio-economic and political factors contributing to the current state of art and music both inside and outside academia in Hong Kong are considered along with the interdisciplinary nature of local artists and musicians and the place of sonic art and EAM in their practice.

Keywords: Soundscape, Colombian Coffee Cultural Landscape, Immaterial Heritage, Methodology, Pedagogical Tools, Re-Signification, Sonic Identity

The purpose of this paper is to present the theoretical framework, methodology, and results of a laboratory developed in the Coffee Cultural Landscape, which had as the main objective to positively influence the quality of life of the communities through artistic and cultural practices from its sound dimension. The Coffee Cultural Landscape was proclaimed by UNESCO in 2010 as Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This is a reference framework that defines a region of Colombia from an economic activity that has shaped it culturally. This spatial unit suggests new strategies and tools for the knowledge and appropriation of this heritage. Therefore, the sound dimension as a fundamental expression of the identity of the regions is an essential element in the conformation of a territory

Introduction
This article presents the theoretical framework, methodology, and results of a four-year Laboratory with the communities of the so-called Colombian Coffee Cultural Landscape from its sound dimension. The work was located in municipalities of Sevilla, Caicedonia, Riofrio and Trujillo, and carried out within the framework of the ‘Visual Arts Laboratories’ promoted and financed by the Ministry of Culture of Colombia, through which an interdisciplinary group of teachers and researchers linked to Icesi University developed a series of pedagogical workshops. Each laboratory has had the participation of very diverse groups: high school students, university students, artists and inhabitants of rural sectors. The diversity of participants has led us to develop particular methodologies that seek to understand the sensitivity of each group in order to appropriate the Coffee Cultural Landscape through listening and the representation of the sound. The overall objective of the laboratory program is to positively influence the quality of life of the communities through artistic and cultural practices. For the Ministry, it is fundamental to promote “cultural diversity, in the light of the contemporary artistic universe, particularly in relation to the concepts: artistic creation as a process of knowledge and research; aesthetic experience, artistic practice and interdisciplinarity; pedagogy as a source of criteria of value, management and social and cultural transformation” (Ministerio de Cultura, 2014).

Souvenirs (Corcovado series) is a collection of 3D printed sculptures made from virtual models of Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro’s famous monument. Each model was treated algorithmically from videos found on the Internet, representing the ways in which computer networks might understand an object based on the visual information they have access to. The work is part of Provisional Objects, a project that explores how 3D replication technologies articulate the existence of objects as images. The Souvenirs series in particular attempts to recover an image from other images; the monument from the many electronic traces it leaves behind.

A computer is fed with random videos of the piece and instructed to reconstruct it virtually, employing software that is normally used for precision cartography. This procedure results in a number of copies that, although absolutely faithful to the available information, are far from identical to the object-itself, putting into question their own ontological condition; the technological mediation of memory, religion, and city branding; and our confidence in computational representations of the world.

In this presentation, we will discuss this and other works related to Provisional Objects. We mean to address how the technical reliability achieved by 3D replication in fields such as prosthetic medicine and engineering has contaminated their uses in cultural heritage and the arts, promoting a sort of fetishist materialism at the expense of actual considerations for the materiality of these cultural systems.

As this is an artist presentation, I would like to focus upon questions upon space, narrative identity, representation, narrative concepts, research and organic container, which in the tradition of painting is a self-representational model. By juxtaposing architectural and timebased strategies, how do these strategies in contemporary art and mediaarts shift, alter and transform local/global cognition and perception.

Implemented will be samples of my work from 1987 till 2007 as paper/lecture/slide-presentation. The paper/lecture/presentation shall open into a workshop with students upon space, narrative identity, representation/territory, narrative concepts, research and organic container/maps.

The launch of Sputnik in 1957, humanity’s first satellite, ushered in a new era in the conquest of outer space; but it also marked the beginning of a new type of pollution invisible to our eyes, space pollution. Since then, our planet has surrounded itself with numerous satellites tasked with studying our climate, predicting disasters, helping us answer scientific questions important to human evolution, and keeping us continuously connected and monitored. The useful life of these satellites is threatened by the saturation of objects orbiting the Earth. Accidental collisions between objects orbiting outer space can produce debris clouds that move at high speeds; the greater the planetary connectivity, the more increase in space pollution.

Space Debris :: Waste Constellations, is part of an artistic investigation that combines art, science and technology. The project analyzes and evidences the huge swarm of space debris that revolves around the Earth in its four main orbits. Relying on data extracted from scientific sources, it identifies the eleven powers responsible for the exponential accumulation of space debris, classifies and categorizes the data, and shows how this entire constellation of space debris is distributed in the Cosmos. The artistic project is structured around two axes. The first, the conceptual one, reveals the data collected from scientific sources and produces graphs that try to clarify the analyzed information. The second axis, and the main one, is made up of a large interactive three-dimensional installation that interprets outer space and its four main orbits. A projection of the Earth acts as a center. Around it, 44 circular devices woven with fiber optic and activated by light sensors are distributed.

The space conquest has generated great advances on our planet, now is time to act, to assume responsibilities, and to avoid this exponential growth of space pollution.

Space Juxtaposition in Locative Arts suggests a discourse that analyzes digital artworks related to spatial practice. This paper discusses how arts transforms spaces and characteristics of locative artworks, such as the unstable relationship between spatialized narrative and its site, and the temporal shift in multilayered space.

Section One of this paper, Introduction, reveals the importance of the origin of locative art while presents a critical analysis of the art practice in the 1960s. Site‑specific art practice usually refers to artworks that exist in a particular space. A famous quote from the minimalist artist, Richard Serra, reveals the essence of this art practice. In 1985, after a public hearing to determine whether his work Tilted Arc needed to be relocated, he remarked:

“As I pointed out, Tilted Arc was conceived from the start as a site‑specific sculpture and was not meant to be ‘site‑adjusted’ or ‘relocated’. Site‑ specific works deal with the environmental components of given places. The scale, size and location of site‑specific works are determined by the topography of the site, be it urban, landscape or architecture enclosure. The works become part of the site, and restructure both conceptually and perceptually the organisation of it.”   _Serra, 1994

However, Serra’s definition of this practice remains controversial. Because many argue that site‑specific art could be ‘site‑adjusted’ as in the case with the above artworks, especially in terms of embracing different qualities that exist in the site. Whether the work can be ‘relocated’ depends heavily on how the word ‘site’ is defined in site‑specific art, important concerns include: ‘What is a site?’, ‘How has the site been constructed?’ and ‘Where is the site?’.

Vito Acconci’s Following Piece in 1960s is one of the pioneer works that blurred the boundary between spaces. His work created a contradictory experience for himself; he converted the public space into an art space as he followed someone in public but the person he was following was experiencing a normal everyday life.The multilayered space in his piece is worth paying attention to. When he was following his ‘targets’, he was aware that he was creating art. In other words, his space is an art space. However from his targets’ perspective, the space is a public space. In this case, the contradictory definition of space proves that action defines space.

Section Two, The Bonds, describes artistic approaches to everyday life and argues that elements from our everyday life in art projects as the bonds that connect each other. A more recent example, Serendipitor by Mark Shepard illustrates how art transforms space. Since users experience and create art spaces, together with the artist, these spaces are multilayered and overlapped. Furthermore, sites in this artwork could be anywhere in the world with an internet connection, hence its sites are hybrid in form.

In Section Three, Characteristics of Locative Art, it suggests a new art discipline, which originates from site‑specific art and provides a theoretical framework. This analytical structure manifests in technological advancement of mobile technology, spatialized narrative and its modular structure. At the end of this paper, it concludes by outlining how locative arts emphasizes the shift in space, and pushes this overlapping experience further with the assistance of mobile technology. Artists structure these events in order to transform the public space as well as the spatial relationship between the artwork and the audience.

The Columbus 500 Space Sail Cup. This imaginative project has as its goal launching into space in 1992 solar powered sails and an Americas Cup style, race to Mars orbit. International teams from the US, France, Canada, Italy, China, Japan and other nations are currently trying to raise money and public awareness in support of this visionary event. At an executive committee meeting of the Columbus 500 Space Sail Cup Commission Rob Fisher, Artist-in-Residence in Engineering at Penn State, proposed that his advanced computer graphics students produce, as Penn State’s contribution to the project, a promotional videotape that illustrates the program and the concept of solar sailing. Since part of the objective of the event is to stimulate an interest in space among young people, the commission gladly accepted the offer.

Space Sail teams of scientists and engineers supplied data, sketches, computer studies and sometimes only written descriptions from which the students derived the illustrations of the sails. Under the direction of several skilled animators, six advanced students from fields of art, physics, English, video, and engineering merged their talents in the first major production from the Visual Engineering Lab at Penn State.

Many different spaces coexist and interconnect for any listener to music played over speakers or other means where there is no visible source of the sound. These spaces could include the physical space of the concert hall, a representation of space conceived in the perceived knowledge of the social practice of people getting together to listen to music in groups; the social space of the listeners; the virtual space of the piece of acousmatic music; the representation of perceived, conceived or lived space in the piece; as well as the representational space of the sound work and the mental space the individual listener inhabits while listening, a space that is possibly unique to sonic experience. In this paper I shall discuss how these spaces are produced and coexist; how our embodied experiences of space can be used to produce new means of representation and new forms of expression through the production of space in sound works; and investigate spatial mimesis as a new area of discourse in sonic art. These developments will be discussed in the light of the specific history of the use of space in electronic and electroacoustic music composition.

Panel Statement

Across the world, developed and developing nations are racing to connect their citizenry via fiber optics. Electronic networking is being asked to carry the hopes of brave new digital societies into a new millennium. The dream is of an electronic democracy on a global scale: dissolving hierarchies; offering universal access, untrammeled creativity, unlimited knowledge, empowering connectivity. Utopian dreams of the late twentieth century reside in this transforming power of information technology. The Internet, a global network of networks with no center, has become the focus for hopes of a liberation through electronic interaction.
The Modernist hope earlier invested in Industrial technology has been displaced onto its post-industrial successor. Global connectivity relates in other ways to the long quest for Utopia. The dream of a common language haunts a system built on computer language. The very word Utopia, deriving from Thomas More’s book of 1516, means “no place”; the Internet is a world-wide no-place. This technology of the immaterial, traveling at the speed of light, stands in a complex relation to Utopia.

Participants:

• John Potts
• Maria Stukoff
• Chris Cheshner
• Andrew Murphy

The paper reflects on the issue of identity and intimacy in relation with local: social, cultural, and political context. All analysed works represent a sort of approach, which leads towards explorations of personal life rather, than formal investigations, the attitude rather than artefacts. The artists examine the problems of personal and social identity, reflect on the character of cultural and trans-cultural relations. Sometimes their productions are dramatic and emotional, sometimes distant and ironic. The works the artists produce are in the same time analytic and immersive. They present different ways of communication between the private and the social, between the inner space of perceptions, feelings and reflections, from one side, and the external world, from another.

The paper analyse works of five Polish artists: Kinga Araya, Anna Baumgart, Barbara Konopka, Jozef Robakowski, and Piotr Wyrzykowski.

As we generally experience on earth, there is no space without sound and there is no sound without space. Spaces That Perform Themselves proposes to expand the way we relate to sound and space by presenting a multi-sensory kinetic environment that morphs along with a musical piece and creates a dynamic space in constant flux. This augments our sonic perception through a crossmodal spatial choreography that combines sound, physical movement, light, color, and vibration. This project builds up a scenario to study the possible relationships between a human body and a robotic architectural body, throughout a dance/exchange of
perception and matter. The objective is to challenge our static structures and by doing that, stimulate our own plasticity.

This paper deals with the methodological and cognitive processes involved in how innovative ideas evolve in the human mind. It also addresses the principles and foundations of creating new ideas and the different phases of creative processes: participation, tendency, incubation, intuition, evaluation, actualization, communication, and participation. Also significant are the reactive, interactive, and emotional facets of the participation phase of the creation process. Hence, these aspects are analyzed in order to produce an in-depth reflection on the elicitation of emotions during the production processes of electronic artworks. Finally, the paper examines a number of techniques and resources used to elicit emotions in electronic artworks.

The use of light and shadow as natural compositional elements in art and architecture has been a tradition in the ancient and modern world, constituting part of the understanding of spatiality, the generation of environments and the relationship of the environment with the living space. In recent times, the emergence of technological resources has led to the use of artificial light, as a diversifying device that generates different possibilities of re-configuration of spaces. This has allowed spatial interventions to arise from the reflection of light altering the ways of how it is perceived, communicated and interacted with the architectural and artistic forms ordered by light. These manifestations allow that from the educative surroundings incentive spaces of experimentation that potentiate the spatial thought, from the handling and understanding of compositional criteria and the understanding of the representation of the light and the shade in the architectural space.

This paper discusses contemporary forms of photographic representation of space and, at the same time, new possibilities of making an objective spatial. Structured in two parts, it articulates an alternative model of photographic space in the form of a Spatial Photogram. We propose a novel photographic practice, based on traditional pre-photographic image-making and today’s digital image methods.
In the first part, we analyze the cultural-artistic context of the historic developments in photography to articulate an objective image of space through comparing the movements of Functional Aesthetics and Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivism) with the pre-photographic practices of camera-less photography – the photogram.
In the second part, we discuss the technical setup in the making of a Spatial Photogram focusing on comparing 3D printing and scanning methods, as well as the making of transfer tools between the digital methods and the chemical-based analogue cyanotype printing.
The result is a material-based image that introduces space as a density – a completely new method to articulate a representation of space in the context of photographic objectivism.

We describe a multi-speaker, smartphone-based environment for developing interactive, distributed music and art applications, installations, and experiences. This system facilitates audience engagement through participation via personal smartphones, potentially connecting with traditional computing devices via the Internet without additional software or special configurations.  The proposed approach has been inspired and motivated in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and builds on earlier works and technology.  It demonstrates a design approach that is more efficient and provides a new avenue for music composers and artists to design highly distributed, participatory, immersive music and art experiences, utilizing various input sensors and actuators available in today’s smartphones.  These include individual smartphone accelerometers, video cameras, and – of course – speakers. The use of smartphones also provides for relatively precise geolocation through GPS or simple social engineering approaches, such as using dedicated QR codes for different locations (e.g., seats in an auditorium). This allows for composing experiences to be rendered in the same room / auditorium, highly distributed across the Internet, or a combination of both.  The paper presents the technological background and describes three case studies of such experiences, in an attempt to demonstrate the approach and inspire new avenues for artistic creativity and expression towards highly immersive, participatory installations / performances of music and art works for the 21^st century.

Artist Statement

Concrete, steel, castors, wireless speaker system, computer, custom audio software

Specious Dialogue consists of a pair of movable, sculptural concrete forms that house wireless audio playback systems. Mounted on pairs of swivel castors the forms are designed to be played with – pushed, rolled, kicked and shoved around the exhibition space. They are physical audio curiosities with personality.

A presentation of the game installation Spectral Plain; an interactive artwork that intersects algorithmic, sensing, and gaming technologies to explore new forms of generative and co-creative world-building processes that seek to simulate multiscalar and pluralistic imaginations of the planet.

The article discusses the use of the proprietary spectrocartography research method to study the interdependencies between history, forms of landscape design, colonization mechanisms, green areas management, processes of ecological degradation, and urban policies. This method involves carrying out research using various data from the fields of sound ecology, biocommunication, botany, ecology, and environmental psychology, as well as methodology from the field of art-based research and art & science. The genesis and hidden ideology contained in the design of the artificial lake Elsensee-Rusałka, which was dug in Poznań by Jewish prisoners of war during World War II, as well as post-war and modern forms of the revitalization of the lake area and adjacent green areas, are analyzed in detail. The ultimate goal of the research project is to create an open experimental digital archive relating to the concept of hybrid space, digiplace, and augmented reality, in which all the data obtained during the research will be collected. These data will be used to create a new form of storytelling, taking into account historical asynchrony, nonhuman actors, and the space itself as a causative entity.

Panel: Assimilate This… Science Fiction and Media Art

Keywords: Speculative objects, Science fiction, Curatorial practice based research, Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art, Performance Space.

In this essay I propose the idea of the ‘speculative object’ as a way of understanding how some artworks and artefacts function in human experience as philosophical tools. I explore the way in which objects materialize science fictional structures, in particular the way they provoke and support speculative thought.

SPIRAL OF WORDS is a platform for creative writing in VR, based on an idea realized in 1998. Three authors from three locations (London, UK; The Hague, the Netherlands and Novi Sad, Serbia) sent texts at defined time intervals, starting from words to sentences over paragraphs to short stories, all this took place via e-mail/the internet, creating a common narrative in a defined location that built a spiral of words in a fictional space.

The VR project SPIRAL OF WORDS is a kind of ‘artistic recycling’ as well as an archive of the idea of a realized textual narrative performance.
The narratives in SPIRAL OF WORDS have been partially modified, they symbolize the original idea in different colors. The project is refreshed, enriched, and different in relation to the original performance, it is actually a reinterpretation of a creative collaborative idea, in a way that VR media allows. And that is the direct interaction of the users, where they freely communicate with the given words, choosing them, moving them, and creating their own meta-text, in any form they desire. Certain words in the spiral, when selected, activate short audio and visual effects that are symbolic to them. All selected words of the newly created narrative can be changed, rearranged, or rejected. SPIRAL OF WORDS is currently an unrepeatable experience, in which user’s meta-text only lasts for the duration of the session.

This text details a practice-based research project which was partially materialised within the art-installation Splitting Defense. Splitting defense is a mixed media artwork, comprising an audio narrative embedded within a physical installation. It places the recipient into the realm of a future society, remembering the horrors of the present. While evoking a languorous sense of belonging to the future, it casts an eerie light on current practices of feeling, empathising, caring, ignoring, and dividing. The artwork thus playfully engages topics such as gendered patterns of valuing and devaluing phenomena of emotional labour.

I worked with Kewalo Marine Biology Lab in Hawaii. While the scientists were studying the squid, I noticed that the squids in the lab sit in the boring white tanks all day long. So I wonder if I could make their environment more interesting by building a playground for them. I collect the white sand and black sand from Hawaii islands and make them into certain countries’ shapes. While the squid was living there. He carries the sand from one side to the other and spreads it around. He swims back and forth between the countries, across the borders without a Visa. He buries himself under the sand and uses his cute little tentacles to push the sand on his face as a camouflage.

Watching the squid reminds me of myself in many ways as an immigrant: moving between China and the US, carrying the baggage of two cultures, trying to assimilate to blend in, and found myself in this situation like the squid: he has white sand on his body but black sand on the top, sitting in the middle of black surrounded by white — but feeling perfectly camouflaged.

We build borders between our countries that can block natural animal migrations. Animals that would not care about the delineation between countries are forced to recognize the difference and take a side.

After a month, the squid completely reinterprets our human-made maps and borders from the squid’s perspective. The map humans have repetitively fought wars for, in the eyes of the squid, is drawn on their own terms.

Stand By/Me is an interactive installation that uses machine-learning models to generate speeches for Xi Jinping and Donald J. Trump, and uses randomness to build virtual conversations for political spectrum, while connecting the information flow with the lived reality of the Everyday. Visitors are exposed to narratives of both digital communism and digital capitalism that is randomly controlled. Next to the visual flow of randomly generated speeches, the work involves seemingly mundane, yet “super-charged” electrical household items, i.e., power sockets, as the actuality of human-technology confrontation. This work allows visitors to feel like they are on “stand by” and triggers questions about how technologism impacts individuals’ views and information consumption, while people face randomly generated political speech as a quiet, mundane confrontation.

Inspired by Carl Sagan and emerging from the ashes of a rejected design, Star-Stuff: a way for the universe to know itself is a unique immersive experience that transforms immersants into galaxies and constellations. The two-player hybrid experience can be used telepresently or in a physical installation, connecting anonymous strangers through abstract virtual bodies. In this paper, I describe my inspiration and the open, intuitive process by which Star-Stuff was developed. I outline design decisions made along the way and present observations made during the artwork’s first public exhibition.

The author addresses a number of issues related to the potential of computer graphics and animation systems to enhance or reenforce the process of artistic creativity and evolution. Various constraints imposed by computer graphics systems are explored and the major psychological characteristics of creative thinking are described. Issues are raised regarding the impact on these characteristics by the properties and process inherent in computer graphics and animation systems and their potential as agents for personal evolution in the arts.

In one respect you will probably find this paper rather unlike other papers being read at ISEA95: I shall not be speaking about recent technological developments. I would like to outline an aesthetical phenomenon arising from the union of two disparate musical media within the field of ‘high-art’ music: electroacoustic technology and folk instruments. This paper is a companion to the performance of music for charango and tape on Tuesday evening at the Pollack Hall. Attendance to that performance is necessary for full comprehension of the ideas which I shall be developing. However, it is not my aim to offer a programme note to that performance, nor do I intend to bore you with a technical analysis of the pieces concerned. Rather, my intention is to discuss the aesthetical background which gave rise to the composition of that repertoire.

Static is often used in electronic art to symbolise a metaphysical outside that is only perceivable with technology. A significant recent example is David Hall’s 1001 TV Sets (End Piece). In this paper I will explore the static as outside trope using numerous examples, with a focus on Hall’s work. I will show that the trope demonstrates how static can be meaningful and so functions as more than merely interference.

This paper describes a mixed reality participative game that uses the physical space with an embedded system and the virtual space of the Internet with a multi-user platform and a database. The game – Station “name to be chosen with the local population” Multi-user Platform – uses an embedded system in the physical space of a mangrove with nineteen RFID identifiable tags encapsulated as letters and three sensor points as microstations; and a multi-user platform with a database in the virtual space of the Internet. Each one of the microstations comprises in a GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) serial terminal; a long-distance tag reader; a multiple-parameter underwater probe; and a photovoltaic cell battery. The game has a permanent character as a multi-user platform and a temporary one as an art event. Its aims are: to locate nineteen RFID identifiable tags encapsulated as letters that form the phrase Mar Memorial Dinâmico (Dynamic Memorial Sea), dispersed in a mangrove; to supply the database with images, sound and videos collected by participants in the physical space using cell phones; and to map the mangrove area that will be chosen together with the local population and research institutes, where the embedded system will be implanted. The game aims at promoting environmental education, raising ecological awareness and showing the need to preserve the ecosystem. Besides environmental education, the game enables network collaboration; knowledge construction through participation and exploration of the concrete environment in the physical area; and the organization of the data, making them available to the community and collaborating with environmental programs for the mangrove.The participants are represented in the multi-user platform by avatars of the local fauna.

This presentation addresses some problems affecting physical and digital archives dedicated to video art in the Southern Cone, relating to matters of accessibility, preservation and dissemination of video-based art collections in the present. In an attempt to map such a complex situation, firstly, I look at some of the most relevant Latin American video art festivals. I take as case studies the Encuentros Latinoamericanos de Video, the Festivales Franco-Chilenos and Franco Latinoamericanos de video arte, VideoBrasil and Buenos Aires Video, which promoted the production, circulation and dissemination of audiovisual arts in the last two decades of the 20th century and, alongside, fostered the creation of physical archives or video libraries in the region. Secondly, I identify some institutional and academic projects that, since the mid-2000s, have carried out tasks of valorization and remediation of video-based art collections. Actions through which it has been possible to give visibility, accessibility and survival to some video art works, and documentation related to the above-mentioned festivals. Finally, under the premise of problematizing the initiatives that safeguard this audiovisual culture and its difficulties to endurance, I point out common challenges to audiovisual archives in the present, and the answers articulated by some research projects to face them.

Abstract

Steganography is the science that involves communicating secret data in an appropriate multimedia carrier. The ultimate goal is to conceal the very presence of the embedded data. Current work in the state of the art, whether in the spatial domain or the frequency domain, cannot tolerate any geometrical attacks, e.g., rotation, translation or cropping. This paper discusses a novel scheme whereby computer vision, particularly skin tone detection, is incorporated into the process of steganography to yield an object oriented embedding mechanism. Skin tone information is deemed to be psycho-visually redundant. The paper also discusses two applications of steganography in digital image forensics and the secure transmission of electronic patient records.

Introduction
For decades people strove to develop innovative methods for secret communication: steganography, as an example, came to life under the assumption that if the feature is visible, the point of attack is evident. Steganography is the art and science of hiding data in a transmission medium. It is a sub-discipline of security systems. Although the term steganography has existed for thousands of years, its digital version has come to public consciousness of late. With the boost in computer power, the Internet and with the development of Digital Signal Processing (DSP), Information Theory and Coding Theory, steganography has gone ‘Digital’. In the realm of this digital world, steganography has created an atmosphere of corporate vigilance that has spawned various interesting applications, thus its continuing evolution is guaranteed.

In recent years it has become ever more apparent that the demands media art places on museums and exhibition centres is greater than the usual degree of care traditionally provided by curators and conservators. Media art is difficult to define because it attempts to cover an extensive range of varying works of art which is difficult to quantify and furthermore in this decade terms such as “time-based” and “technology based” art have increasingly come in. It is nonetheless possible to come up with a set of characteristics to describe media art which enables clarification of the requirements for dealing with this type of art:

1. Transient: media art works possess a tangible link to the technology used at the time of their creation. Due to rapid technical innovation they are subject to the transient nature of materials which to a certain extent is comparable to the short life of organic materials in art works.
2. Installation-based: the playback and display equipment essential for media art works have a spatial presence and therefore media art works are often considered as installations.
3. Performative: media art works are based on a time frame determined by a number of display modes of the various image media and can therefore be perceived as performative art works.
4. Participatory: it is not uncommon for media art works to include an additional participatory dimension where the public actively participates in the functionality of the art work and for this interaction to function the preservation of the technical means is essential.

Images of artworks can be stored in media that preserve different characteristics of the original. Differences exist in the extent to which we can preserve color, three dimensionality, surface texture, fine structure, tonal gradations, temporal variations and other characteristics that lend uniqueness to individual artworks. Usually, we are willing to sacrifice some of these characteristics in exchange for the permanence and recoverability offered by storage media. Thus, a color slide (diapositive), which is a common medium for storing images of artworks, compromises all of the above properties to different extents but is nevertheless considered useful for the archival properties it offers for images of artworks. Digital storage media used in conjunction with computers offer new opportunities and demand new compromises in storing art images. An unusual challenge is offered by the possibility of providing intelligence to a computer. The authors make clear the sense in which we may ascribe intelligence to the computer and how this may be used to ‘perceive’ the image of an artwork. The computer then uses its knowledge of the artwork with respect to a large class of such works not only for archival storage but also to achieve economy in the use of the storage medium. The authors illustrate the achievement of storage economy as much as tens of thousands of times greater than storage without intelligence. The intelligence is provided to the computer as syntactic descriptions of classes of artworks. The syntactic descriptions incorporate insight from the art historian, critic or artist who uses innovative tools like shape grammars to provide the computer with a small part of the intelligence that the educated human viewer brings to the perception of the artwork.

With the flourishing of XR (VR, AR and MR) 360 narratives receive undivided attention. From hybrid experiences to multiplayer games, designers multiply attempts to reach out the maximum degree of “immersion”. Through the study of the experience Lone Wolves Stick Together, we will explore how combining tools from video games. theatre, live action role playing (larp) and installation art, allows artists to create uniquely engaging experiences, and how world building and horizontal co-creation allow richer fictional environments.

LIVEMEDIA is an artists’ project based in Barcelona that collaborates with cultural and academic centres in Spain and Latin America. Its aim is to exploit the platform of the Internet as a live environment for transcultural and interdisciplinarian artistic collaborations.

The digital technologies of the Internet signal the opportunity to both see and communicate in new ways. They permit an inquiry of new aesthetic paradigms for new kinds of artistic interactions, in both “online” and “offline” environments.

Central to this presentation is Felix Guattari’s observation, “But how, with […] this fragmentation of interfaces, can we still speak of Universes of value?”

The importance attached to Guattari’s sentence resides in two factors: the constant redefining of the Internet’s online<->offline interface, and the perpetually transformative space of the Internet (manifested by the ever changing W3C standard for HTML), where “value” is fragmented by infinite streams of emergences, manipulations and assemblages.

LIVEMEDIA investigates the Internet’s emergent “live topologies”, where communication is subject to advanced techniques of control, where experiences complexify and disperse, where assemblages populate and differentiate processes. Following the theorist of network culture Geert Lovink, and his call for a “distributed aesthetics”, the presentation will propose that live electronic art is itself being transformed from the “new” and “formal” to the “distributive” and “situated”.

Implicit to this change is the need for a heterogeneous conceptualisation of networks, one that rejects the cartographic tradition of “mapping networks”, for a potential architecture of “strategic transmissions”: where protocols, operative connections and nodes are at one moment, conditionally distributed on diachronic time, and on the other, situated within an “intensive space of depth”. From the theses of Gilles Deleuze [Difference and Repetition] and Manuel DeLanda [Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy], LIVEMEDIA’s network for distributive media will be presented as an Intensive Spatium.

This work is an extensive research survey on Video Art Collections in Latin America. The objective is to propose several paths for more systematic study and discussion in the future, which should include greater detail on the artists and their works, the preservation status thereof, and a critical understanding of their cataloguing, as well as the visibility of the works and creators that comprise the collections.

‘Stretch’ provided Aldo Giorgini (1934-1994) with a framework for manipulating vector primitives using his own mathematical model. Although ‘Stretch’ was technically reported in 1981, Giorgini had a prior body of work from 1976 that demonstrated the use of stretching algorithms to make art, resulting in works that resembled checkerboards, stripes, polka dots and swiss cheese. Despite exhaustive primary source research at Giorgini’s estate in Lafayette, Indiana, there is no evidence that the manuscript for ‘Stretch’ was actually published. However, the Stretch framework was found in a manuscript form, and this paper will unveil the methods that Giorgini created for his own artistic production. The program was written in Fortran IV and intended for a CDC-6600 computer.

Structures of Emotion is a performance artwork that explores a symbiotic relationship between humans and Emotion Recognition Artificial-Intelligence (AI) algorithms. The piece utilizes a wearable computing device designed to enable the wearer to recognize emotions through two different perspectives: their own organic senses and the AI apparatus, which serves as an extension of the mind, connecting the human mind to a ‘collective consciousness’. Participants interacted with two performers; one wore the AI device, while the other relied solely on their organic abilities. The performance demonstrates how AI emotion recognition systems are still immature. However, it invites us to speculate on its potential role when it becomes more sophisticated. Additionally, it explores the ethical complexities of our entanglement with emotion recognition algorithms and imagines the danger of becoming dependent on them within a transhumanist future.

1st version

Arguably, the last thing a critical theory of culture ought to have anything to do with is electronic art. It is not popular. It is not cheap. It is not influential. No matter how much well meaning people talk about how new technologies can empower people, it is still mostly white Americans who have their finger on the trigger. Yet there is something critically useful about electronic art, even if it does not always recognise this itself. Electronic artists negotiate between the dead hand of traditional, institutionalised aesthetic discourses and the organic, emergent forms of social communication. Electronic art is an experimental laboratory, not so much for new technologies as for new social relations of communication. This is why electronic art matters to critical theories of culture, be they the Frankfurt school or, in my case, the Birmingham school of cultural studies.

2nd version

The gulf war sparked off a long overdue examination of the impact of the globalisation of media vectors, and not before time, but the gulf war was hardly an unprecedented event of this type. Nor are many of the analyses that have been offered in conventional paradigms entirely convincing. This paper presents a summary of research on weird global media events of this type that I have undertaken since 1987. The gulf war, the fall of the Berlin wall, the Tiananmen Square massacre and the ‘Black Monday’ stock market crash are all examined as examples of a new type of singularity in media events. A theory of the kind of media space they operate in and its effects is advanced, building on Paul. Virilio’s concept of the vector. The concept of ‘global village’ is refuted, as are some of the entirely pessimistic responses, particularly in the US, to the gulf war. Concepts introduced in my TISEA catalogue essay, such as ‘third nature’ and ‘telesthesia’ are further explored in relation to spin-out transnational media events.

The Summit on New Media Art Archiving (SNMAA) is volunteer-based undertaking which operates on minimal selfsustainability. The goal of the workshop on strategic planning is to enhance the Summit’s organisational structure, its capacity of operation and effectiveness, as well as to enable long term sustainability.

This paper explores the impact of invisible and incomprehensible computational processes on human-technology relations via a series of multi-channel video installation art investigations. Historically, gaps in knowledge and understanding have been filled with mystic and superstitious systems of belief. The spheres of computation, from network technologies to machine-learning, are equally susceptible to mystic lenses. I explore how the use of metaphor both anthropomorphises and governs programming and systems design in ways that involve irrational thought systems, such as those associated with mysticism and superstition. The interplay between metaphor and the physical actualities of computational structures has informed my research in making the iterative networked video installations Summoning the Nereid Nerdz (2017) Access Remote Fervour (2018) and Dense Bodies and Unknown Systems (2021). How is the invisible and the unknown shaped by cultural attitudes? In contrast to conceptions of cloud technologies as being formless, quantised, wireless or ephemeral, I discuss how twenty-first century data architectures are housed and maintained by centuries old infrastructures, replete with excessive power draws and pollution. In jarring contrast to common conceptions of computing as an emblem of rationalist innovation, many core processes carry out functions that are unknown, invisible, impractical and confusing.

This paradox of the visible and the invisible in network architectures, of form and formlessness, and of rationality and wilful blindness in understanding computation was the premise for my development of Summoning the Nereid Nerdz (2017), Access Remote Fervour (2018) and Dense Bodies and Unknown Systems (2021). In a 21^st century context where art schools are being cannabalised and dissolved into larger amorphic institutional hybrids whilst, simultaneously, computer engineering faculties are staking claim as the rightful centres for creativity and imagination,  this paper posits that historically informed creative research remains a formidable toolkit in understanding this current moment of the connected condition.

Sun Eaters, a physical computing installation installed in plants, measures the invisible bioelectricity which is present in all living beings, and translates it into visible light for viewers to see. Through the exploration of art as sensing tool, I am exploring how we relate to the non-human plant world(s) around us. Can artworks act as an empirical interface for grasping our complex, interwoven, beyond-human ecologies of present-day Earth and ways of thinking about them? How do you imagine your relationship with a plant differently when you can physically see it?

Roundtable: Semipermeable

Keywords: Bio-art, Multimedia installation, Art and Science, Immigration Policy, Chemical Warfare.

The title of the work discussed in this paper, Supereste ut Pugnatis (Pugnatis) ut Supereste, is derived from the motto (Fight to Live) of the Chemical Defense Establishment located at Porton Down in the UK. The work is a mixed media installation that examines the intersection between the Visual Arts and Bio-Sciences and is conceptually focussed upon the development of metaphors that address the membrane in terms of biology, politics, language and culture.

ISEA2010

Suk Chon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Global School of Media, the graduate school of Soongsil University. He is majoring in media art.

The combined three-dimensional, stereoscopic space and embodied navigability of virtual reality foster a supra-dimensional perceptive space. They provide an opportunity to experience a four-dimensional, shifting landscape and acoustic, cinematic environment from within the fourth dimension. VR is uniquely positioned to visualize hyper-space as a mathematical construct in which the participant can experience four dimensions.

TesserIce is a four-dimensional, VR mediascape that utilizes these features, allowing one to enter the 4D space-time of glacial ice. The mediascape constructs a tesseract as an embodied cine-poem – a hyperspace of spatialized meaning and navigable time, examining the effects of climate change on polar ice. Within a crystalline, cinematic tesseract, a four-dimensional architecture composed of different scales, forms, sounds, and speeds of ice enacts the meta-dimensions of our contemporary data-world in manifold perspectives. Participants propel themselves through the hyper dimensions of this tesseract, unfolding unchartered vistas, juxtapositions, and timeframes – the space-time of Earth’s polar ice. The stark iconography of ice serves as a distinct access point into the overwhelming complexity of climate change and its ramifications, creating an embodied experience of the time, scale, causes, and effects of climate change.

This paper is about two pilot studies conducted in 2022 that aimed to develop a model for preserving and archiving new media art work in the context of a research project on the sustainable digital preservation of new media art that is being co-hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. As the works of art selected for the study by Slovenian new media art pioneers Vuk Ćosić (2000) and Srečo Dragan (2005) were technically obsolete or non-functional by the time of the study, the question of how to bring the artworks back into existence and what components of each artwork to include in the collection and preservation process constituted one aspect of our research. But this process of reconstruction also raised questions about how the preservation of media art is reshaping the practice of archiving within an institution whose holdings were, until recently, largely in traditional mediums. An interdisciplinary approach addressed the problem from different points of view, involving the practitioners, experts from art-history, museology, computer science, media theory and intellectual property rights.

ISEA 2018

We are on the brink of losing many cultural heritage sites around the world. Man-made and natural disasters have played a contributing role in these destructions. Museums, libraries, archives and other private and public institutions across the world have undertaken the tasks of preservation and conservation. The preservation progress is tremendous but also limited. The preservation of cultural heritage requires extensive collaboration within the community in defining accuracy and authenticity of historical information. It needs establishing cultural knowledge, what it entails, and how the community might best contribute. It demands scholars to establish preservation practices that are deeply ingrained in the cultural activities. This paper is an attempt to use the traditional and emerging technologies in digital preservation of a cultural heritage site in the Kathmandu, Nepal which was destroyed in the April 2015 earthquake. Working with a local community in Nepal, overcoming preservation challenges and visualizing of three-dimensional prototypes in a virtual reality environment, this paper explores in bridging the gap between the documentation and preservation practices.

In times of ecological emergency, solutionist fantasies of nature-free human existence promise salvation and repair. The innovative paradigm offers “products” such as lab-grown (animal free) meat and artificial automated surrogates to replace reproductive biological bodies.

These so-called innovations require special artificial environments to host, nurture and culturally articulate this “new” nature-free, decontextualized and colonised life. The entanglement of life with its surrogate environment/apparatus, echoing human relationships with living and semi-living agents; when control and care is employed to counter resistance.

Artists, scientists, designers and engineers all play their part in this transformation and its effects on human relations with life and the environment. This creates a range of ontological conundrums and fantastical expectations as to what technology can provide and to whom. Using examples of artistic research that deal with emerging technologies and new knowledge, I will narrate artists’ symbiotic and parasitic relationships with such post nature.

The talk is framed by the imminent closure of SymbioticA, the first artistic research laboratory based in a life sciences department. SymbioticA began as a symbiotic act, embodied in an academic institution, to enable critical, yet mutualistic, relations among artists and scientists. Many of SymbioticA’s alumni have continued to establish their own laboratories and artistic practice in other academic institutions around the world, leading to the growth of the field of Biological Arts.

SymbioticA is now being treated as a parasite by a changed host body. Is this a ‘natural’ survivalist rejection against a foreign body or can we detect symptoms of an autoimmune disorder?

In times of ecological emergency, solutionist fantasies of nature-free human existence promise salvation and repair. The innovative paradigm offers “products” such as lab-grown (animal free) meat and artificial automated surrogates to replace reproductive biological bodies.

These so-called innovations require special artificial environments to host, nurture and culturally articulate this “new” nature-free, decontextualized and colonised life. The entanglement of life with its surrogate environment/apparatus, echoing human relationships with living and semi-living agents; when control and care is employed to counter resistance.

Artists, scientists, designers and engineers all play their part in this transformation and its effects on human relations with life and the environment. This creates a range of ontological conundrums and fantastical expectations as to what technology can provide and to whom. Using examples of artistic research that deal with emerging technologies and new knowledge, I will narrate artists’ symbiotic and parasitic relationships with such post nature.

The talk is framed by the imminent closure of SymbioticA, the first artistic research laboratory based in a life sciences department. SymbioticA began as a symbiotic act, embodied in an academic institution, to enable critical, yet mutualistic, relations among artists and scientists. Many of SymbioticA’s alumni have continued to establish their own laboratories and artistic practice in other academic institutions around the world, leading to the growth of the field of Biological Arts.

SymbioticA is now being treated as a parasite by a changed host body. Is this a ‘natural’ survivalist rejection against a foreign body or can we detect symptoms of an autoimmune disorder?

As the Internet promotes participatory culture, contemporary network-driven participatory art, which I refer to as “postdigital participatory art” (PPA), has introduced additional revolutionary creative subjects. PPA induces a distinctive type of collective agency beyond mere collaboration among individuals by means of the participatory architecture of the web. These multiple participants distribute the authority power of creation throughout the network, transcending the limitations of time and space. In this paper, I attempt to theorize the attributes of these new creative subjects, which I refer to as “participant-superjects,” with the concept of superject serving here to indicate “power by modulation.”

I outline the attributes of these diffuse creative subjects and gauge their radical possibilities in terms of the agenda of experimental art. I argue that, based on the new sense of relationality, materiality, and ontological perception associated with the postdigital environment, these unique creative subjects are able to open up a new dimension of creativity that differs from the modernist model, which emphasizes the creativity of the individual. I hypothesize that the fluid power driven by this new creative subject exerts a latent force in building new social relations outside the logic of the capitalist system.

Symbiotic Interaction is an artwork that investigates,through artistic methodologies, about the symbiotic relationships between humans and plants. The work is addressing from an intimate and personalized approach, through the creation of two technological body-worn interfaces, which facilitate the symbiotic relationship between both living beings.

Throughout this paper, I will approach conceptual and methodological issues that have made possible the development of the project.

Looking across the art-science nexus, the contribution discovers an emerging symbiotic mutualism that goes against mere inter-species tolerance of the posthuman perspective. This new understanding of symbiosis may be described as a trans-action, both physical or factual in scientific terms, and arguably symbolical in the artistic sense.

Symphonic Infinitum is a new body of work consisting of hybrid wall assemblages that explore the perceptual relationship of visualization and sound through instrumentation and play. Revisiting John Cage’s idea of chance, the work relies on audience participation to activate a visual system, allowing variations of order and chaos to influence how the work is perceived. The artist describes the work as a type of “physics machine”, similar to the anatomy of a pachinko game or a children’s handheld maze toy, where gravity, kinetics, and centrifugal force, cause small balls to roll around inside a circular structure. As the balls hit various parts of the structure, random percussive sounds are emitted. Each piece offers a unique interactive framework and run in size from 18 inches to 7 feet in diameter. Rather than approaching sound from the vantage point of a musical instrument, this project investigates audio mechanics by creating a dialogue between visual aesthetics, embodied interaction, and the resulting effects on auditory perception.

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 in 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.

Emotion is hard to be depicted. It easily gets unfocused when it is verbalized, because emotion felt in our body is abstracted when it becomes a word. To minimize abstracting depiction of emotion, we use nonverbal expressions such as use of voice, touch, distance, and physical environments or appearance when we communicate with someone. The SyncDon II (Figure) attempts to have further expressions of emotion by biosynchronization. It aims to transfer emotion to someone by the heartbeat synchronization.

Heartbeats collected from a person in the past, which who had salient emotion, is recorded into the gift-box and is exposed to a person in the gift-box. The heartbeat synchronization is induced by the stimuli (sound/vibration/light) with heartbeat rhythms, and his/her emotion changes according to changes of circulatory condition brought by the synchronization. Validity of the heartbeat synchronization by external stimuli is investigated in [1][2]. In the SyncDon II system, heartbeat is collected through capacitive ECG sensor or earphone-type optical pulse sensor, respectively.

The reason why the gift-box is used as an indicator of the heartbeat is because it is a metaphor of a “gift”. A receiver gets emotion as a gift from someone in the past through heartbeats. Then the receiver becomes a sender of emotion he/she had, and gives to others. This relation resembles to the system of total prestations by Marcel Mauus [3]. The total prestation implies two important things; the obligation to give presents and the obligation to receive them. It constitutes our society system that is the base from which gift-exchange arose. “SyncDon II” expresses epitome of our society by gifting emotion through heartbeats, which is the symbol of the life. The SyncDon project is unique, which never attempted in the literature. We believe that the project will bring us entirely new sensations that we have never experienced.

Thematic statement
The SyncDon II corresponds to the theme: “Noise Contra Signal”. The artwork faces in the opposite direction to the modern communication technologies aims to minimize noise in signals, privileging ‘purity’ in the transmission of information. The aim of the SyncDon II is to transfer emotion to others that cannot be expressed as a word by inducing the heartbeat synchronization. It is based on the hypothesis that the assimilation of the body condition to the other brings us to have similar emotion that the person felt during the recording of the heartbeats. This composition is designed under the assumption that even if the perfect heartbeat synchronization is induced, the emotion cannot be transferred perfectly. It remains the individual linguistic interpretation of the emotion neutral.

This is based on the idea that the real human communication cannot be realized just by minimizing the noise, but to keep a room for noise contamination to have some misinterpretations. We believe that the SyncDon II will bring us a different perspective for the modern communication technologies

Artist Statement

This paper examines the strategies and theories involved in the creation of a virtual habitat; the island Syncretia located in the virtual world of Second Life®. The island is comprised of a series of narrative/play installations, which can also be considered as ‘artistic environments’. Syncretia should be seen as an endeavour for providing a context for play, storytelling and metaphor; involving an examination of virtual geographies, cyberpsychology/presence studies, ludology and their relationship to objets trouvé or ready-made art/architectural objects which have been utilized to a substantial degree in the structuring of the visual/narrative language of Syncretia.

Syndemic Sublime is an illustrated artist talk by transdisciplinary artist Laura Splan. Her research-based studio practice connects artifacts of science and technology to everyday lives through embodied interactions, tactile experiences, and sensory encounters. She will present recent projects and works in progress exploring complex systems and hidden labor in the contemporary biomedical landscape. Her Syndemic Sublime seriesexplores the interconnectedness of cultural and biological systems during the pandemic with data-driven animations, installations & videos created with molecular visualization software and coronavirus models. Precarious Structures explores liminal states of perception and interspecies entanglements with videos, animations & prints. Remote Disruptions explores invisible systems and poetic subjectivities of biotechnology with networked sculptures, Twitter activated laboratory devices, and recorded Zoom performances with scientists. Metanarratives engages viewers with unseen materialities of biotechnology with tactile sculptures created from the fiber of laboratory llamas who produce antibodies for human vaccines. Anticipatory Acts monumentalizes interstitial moments in cellular biology with neon and kinetic sculptures. Using both traditional and experimental media, Splan reconsiders representations of the body to interrogate cultural constructions of “self “and “other”. She uses uncanny combinations of materials and processes to invite an investigation of detail, calling into question how things are made and what they are made of while eliciting narrative interpretation and speculation. Her artworks and exhibitions attempt to reframe complex biomedical issues with provocations of curiosity and wonder that inspire audiences to think critically about the role of biotechnology in our daily lives.

Powerful new techniques, fMRI, magnetic encephalography, recordings from neuronal ensembles, visualizations of neuronal growth, and neuro-chemical analyses are elucidating brain/mind functioning — the process of experience. These techniques prosthetically extend us across technological platforms, shift our preferences to the synthetic, and our purely human evolution to human/machine evolution. For instance, Nicolelis uses implanted electrodes in volitional cortical motor neuron ensembles to enable control of a mouse cursor, or a robot, from thought alone. Similarly, audio recordings from implanted electrodes in rat brains, extend Matt Wilson’s sensorium, enabling him to “listen in” on rats’ dreams.

Brain evolution is a form of neuroplasticity, as are memory and individual brain development. In the fetus neurons proliferate, migrate into place and make an overabundance of synaptic connections. Used connections are selected and unused synapses are pruned. V.S. Ramachandran theorizes that aberrantly remaining (unpruned) cross-modal connections between the color and adjacent number area in the brain causes synesthesia, and furthermore that creativity results from a richness of unpruned cross-modal connections forming a high capacity for metaphor.

Paradoxically, memories are unstable during recollection. After removing a memory from storage, the brain reconsolidates it into stable form. Re-storage depends on protein synthesis which, if manipulated, alters the memory (thus explaining the ease of implanting false memories). Different forms of memory are organized distinctively in the brain, i.e. declarative (language based) and non-declarative (procedural/skill based) memory, episodic (personal experiences) and semantic (learned facts) memory, spatial memory, etc.

Mirror neurons, cortical neuron systems that fire both during one’s performance of an action, or expression of emotion, and during the observation of another enacting these, form the basis of empathy and art appreciation. Understanding what others feel occurs by the inner imitation of the observed action or expression. The representation is matched to an existing representation and used to modulate emotional experience. Empathic individuals exhibit unconscious mimicry of other’s postures, mannerisms, and facial expressions more than non-empathic individuals.

How consciousness is integrated into a stream of coherent experiences is called the binding problem. Neuroscientists hypothesize that two brain/mind systems control the stream of consciousness, the thalamocortical axis and the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Nearly all information from the sense organs passes through the thalamus. The thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) generates most of the internal activation of the cortex modulating its gates in “burst firing” or continuous (tonic) firing mode. In tonic mode, the simultaneous firing of broad neuronal populations leads to neuronal synchrony, triggering looping activation in cortical circuits, and amplifying one loop over others in a recursive process. Interacting re-entry loops reinforce and compete with each other, with the dominant loop(s) becoming conscious. The PFC integrates consciousness by controlling the focus of attention, picking the winner of the looping competition set up by the thalamus and updating representations in working memory.

I am going to explore the evolution of electronically generated images in video and animation leading to the now ubiquitous use of computer generated imagery in feature film production. I am intending to cover the period from the early developments of computer graphics in the 60’s through to the ascendancy of the Quantel video graphics systems and SGI based systems in the 90’s. This is effectively the first two generations of development. This is a tale of two pathways, the analog and the digital, winding their ways through the forest of technology, sometimes crossing each other, sometimes running together for a moment, often influencing each other and finally the one almost consumed by the other but for the interest of a new generation in the ways of the old. The two pathways are those of analog representations and digital representations. Analog representations reflect the actual value or amount of a voltage or a brightness while digital representations reflect some number in the range of possible values that the voltage might have, say from 0 to 255. For example, in video the analog of the brightness of a scene is the voltage of the video signal at that point of the image whereas the digital representation of it will be a number where say 0 represents black and 255 represents white. Obviously the difference in style is reflected in the different technologies that carry these representations.

Syren is a shipboard example of augmented audio reality, designed to operate with an array of surround sound speakers installed around the ship’s Helipad on the forward upper deck. Geo-spatial information is accessed as the ship navigates the electronic charts associated with each of the three ports of call.
Syren experiments with concepts of designing large-scale virtual soundscapes. For each of the ports we have designed a specific ‘sonic seascape’ – sound files, located in a digital cartography, are apparently positioned on, or around, the various features of the port and its navigational and maritime structures. Special attention is paid to local maritime narratives, histories and specifically maritime ‘keynote’ elements of the soundscape / seascape.

These sounds are interwoven with a unifying sonic narrative derived from both ancient epic voyages (as the title implies) as well as contemporary political and cultural life. As the ship manoeuvres through and around the port (on entry and departure) the software will call up elements of the soundscape and ‘place’ them in the appropriate direction and distance – simulating a real sound associated with the landscape/seascape. One of the principal effects of Syren will be to suggest a series of parallel audio realities that appear to overlay the visual seascape and open a possibility to acknowledge a historical and cultural axis pivoting on a geo-spatial point.

Owing to the potentially vast scale of the geographic area covered by the Syren project the system is designed to operate in and around each of the three ports that the ISEA ship will visit with some additional points en-route.

The Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, have been called “the Jonathan Swift of the Jackass generation” by author Naomi Klein. The Yes Men have impersonated World Trade Organization, Dow Chemical Corporation, and Bush administration spokesmen on TV and at business conferences around the world. They do this (a) in order to demonstrate some of the mechanisms that keep bad people and ideas in power, and (b) because it’s absurdly fun. As the Yes Men, they use humor, truth and lunacy to bring media attention to the crimes of their unwilling employers. Their second film, The Yes Men Fix the World, won the audience award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the Grierson Award for Most Entertaining Documentary, and went on to become a smash box-office sensation, only just barely surpassed by Avatar. Their main goal is to focus attention on the dangers of economic policies that place the rights of capital before the needs of people and the environment.

A multi-perspective cinematic story recounts a day in the life of four fictional characters. Story bits are distributed in space according to the characters point of view and in time, as the action progresses. collecting data at different locations and times, each person edits her own version of the story according to their passage through the space.

Braintec is an American technology company specialized in brain implants. On the website Memoires of a Testee, recorded recollections at Braintec, Rosanne van Klaveren and some other test subjects write diaries about their experiences in memory research. This way, Rosanne represents the oldest art of human history: telling stories.

Sunjeong Hwang is an ISEA2023 selected artist

Premiered and exhibited at ACC (Asia Culture Center), 2021. Also exhibited at New Art City (online) by the Arts Council Korea Art Museum, 2022.
Mycelium is an organism on earth that occupies most of the earth’s geological period, far beyond the geological period called the Anthropocene. Artist named this to ‘metabolic organ,’ and through them, the coexistence explores from a natural and global perspective. Contains the human and mycelial ontological synthesized as an experience, this work includes the organic metabolism of the fungal system and the artist’s perspective on metabolizing the earth.

While researching mycelium fungi, the artist unravels the relationship and network of fungi and the ‘indeterminism’ development of their growth process as a generative medium using new media and neural rendering, Ai and neural networks. And through this organism, the ecology system reveals the view that Eastern time implied.

Tanhamnu Warp Drive Single Channel Video 14’05” 2021 _The Tanhamu Project begins with research on the network system of mushrooms (fungi), ecology metabolism, and symbiotic relationships, and contains thoughts about Earth-human metabolism in the current geological era. Through this project, named ‘Tanhamu’, which is a combination of the ancient Sanskrit words ‘Taṇhā’(desire)’ and ‘舞mu(dance), the artist has been working on symbosis and synthesis with species, connection of differences and Reflecting on the meaning of encountering through transformation. Tanhamu unleashes the posthuman interest in metabolism and organic communication through media works, both as a natural-artificial institution that extends human network system and symbiotic relationships.

Director Creative Visuals / Cinematograph / Writer / Voice: Hwang Sunjeong
Sound design / Genertive AI: Hwang Sunjeong,
MoonGyuchul Neural Randering: Hwang Sunjeong, Sergio Bromberg
human Cast: LeeJeongmin

Abstract

The Context
The Techno Viking project is an example of the reordering, re-editing and remaking of an ‘original’ video on the internet. The original video is in analogy with genes called a meme. As such, the original and its first clones, start to circulate within social networks, where the original mutates, competes with other originals and inherits. Becoming multiplied in this way, the original video becomes successful by reproducing itself, through various recycling techniques.

In this way the Techno Viking project questions the creation’s origin of such an Internet hype. The popular result is not the beginning, but the original + n, after being altered and filtered several times through a chain of actions and reactions.

The potential of public attention that such clips raise, brings attention also to the role of such major companies as Google. Google, as the owner of YouTube, provides the basic technological structure not only to enable and control, but also to profit from such creations. If the creation is based on ‘free’ social information networks, the product is commercialized through a monopoly company. In this way the Techno Viking is a perfect example to illustrate such new ways of production and distribution within user generated networks.

Keywords: 3D Scanning, Cyborgism, Contemporary Education, Interdisciplinary Industrial Design, Human Body

In terms of sense terminology, it is possible to make use of Digital Technology to expand and modify the perception of humans’ environment. The approach to design Cybernetic Extensions to expand the senses of the Human Body is being analyzed throughout this article. Under the debates on the dialectical interaction between technology-body, species-environment, creation-biocreation and human-bonding, the concept of Prosthesis presented by Tomás Maldonado is proposed as the starting point for the Cybernetic Organs design. It is predicted that these Smart Prosthesis will be designed by using 3D printers, and the patient’s own cells, which will be created in Fab Labs laboratories. It will go from designing objects to designing the Human Body as an object.

200.104.202 (2016) and Listening Mirrors (2019-ongoing) are two sound art installations and techno-nomadic-imaginaries that in their engagement became new musical instruments
for collective expressions. Both instruments are built in collaboration, 200.104.202 with Andrew Duff and Listening Mirrors with Chris Kiefer.

An artist talk on how building sound art installations leads to make real techno-nomadic-imaginaries

First published in 2003 by founding editor Roy Ascott, Technoetic Arts is a peer-reviewed journal that explores the juncture of art practice, technology and the mind. Drawing from academic research and often unorthodox approaches it opens up a forum for trans-disciplinary speculative frameworks.

In 2020, with the support of the publisher Intellect, Ascott entrusted the editorship to what he defined the editorial organism, an international assemblage. [composed by: Claudia Jacques, Claudia Westermann, Dalila Honorato, Iannis Bardakos, Tom Ascott and Yong Hu. ]

The Editorial Organism of the Technoetic Arts Journal is considered an extitution. The term extitution relates to a radically dynamic form of organisation, differentiating itself from the dominant form of organisations, typically conceptualised as static institutions. Extitutional theory is an emerging area of research that provides a set of conceptual tools for describing and analyzing the underlying social dynamics of a variety of social arrangements, such as communities, businesses, organizations, or any other structure.

An extitution is an open, flexible, dynamic and diachronic multiplicity and, in this sense Technoetic Arts, combining academic research and artistic expression throughout the years, has established a unique journey. Within this presentation, we explore the reinvention of the editorial process through an organism that is composed of interdependent conscious units that coexist and apply decision-making in a decentralised way.

This panel undertakes a critical discussion on the altered agencies between the User, Viewer, research-based artist & praxis-led researcher. Various uses of VR, AR, A.I and other smart technologies are discussed by each panel member, particularly technologies that also act as vessels to occupy multiple hyperspaces.

As tools to maintain kinships with other-bodies, exo-spaces, exobiomes, hyperobjects, speculative-histories, datafied atoms, the labor of using VR, AR, A.I & smart technologies should always undertake a deep meditation, in constant flux amongst a myriad microbiome, forever cemented in constant archeological reinterpretation, inhaling & becoming one with dust particles, while dancing with the data from its lunchtime, pre-snack bowl of yogurt.

My paper investigates how an affect of place is constituted through a combination of senses, and in particular through remote sensing of the location. , I am arguing that some network culture theories extend that notion over geographic space. The resulting spatial imaginary already familiar from “cyber space” is re-enacted through location based spatiality as a trace, an ephemeral signifier often unable to grasp the affect of sociability, mobility, and place that participants in network practices experience.

In this presentation, I will focus on few works that deal in particular with location as a central axis around which media is authored, and games are played. Uncle Roy All Around you by Blast Theory combines a social play scenario with mobile performativity by its participants. A recent project by the same authors titled Rider Spoke sets participants on a dangerous bike ride in London with abstract questions to be recorded in a place where one can hide. While both projects are imaginative scenarios, I will discuss in detail how they fail to create an affect with place, but rather operate with abstract geolocations.

There are many types of pictures and many uses for them ranging from practical applications to experimentation and to decoration. Which of them is appropriate to the electronic media and to digital computing? Some picture makers have long since embraced the electronic media and depend on it economically such as those who work for practical and commercial ends. those who make pictures for wall decoration or for status collecting may be hostile to it as it undercuts their economic base. One might be tempted to say that the practical arts have pioneered the use of computing and that the stodgy Fine Arts are still hiding in their ivory studios. It is important to note however, that the practical arts and the so called Fine Arts should not be seen as unconnected categories. They differ only in their relationship to production. Some pictures are intimately linked to production such as industrial and technical drawings while others are a little less directly linked such as architectural or medical illustration. Pictures for entertainment, decoration, and illustration, though they seem to have no relationship to production, serve it indirectly. After all we educate and entertain the young so that they too can start working. Still yet there are other pictures which are experimental and their connection to production is similar to that of research and development.

Thus ultimately all pictures, regardless of their distance in relation to production, serve its functioning to fulfill our needs. Where do I as an artist locate myself in this continuum? Like many other painters, I define my artistic intentions as a search to expand the language of pictures. This follows the principles of the avant-garde and modern abstraction in the twentieth century. With such an ambition it is essential to experiment with new media. We begin by learning its technical basis so that we can discover what forms are possible based on these techniques and what new content these forms might convey. If we succeed, then our discoveries permeate all pictorial uses and become beneficial to our practical needs in production. Therefor, the artistic use of form suitable to a new technique is a progressive choice.

In technology design, aesthetics happen on the surfaces of objects; an elegant computer is a computer with an elegant form and an elegant skin, typically a form and a skin that is rectangular, smooth, and hard. There are good reasons why this is the case – the components that make up interactive devices (circuit boards, processors, sensors, and screens) are hard and rectangular themselves, and, perhaps more importantly, they’re fragile. They can’t be bent, they can’t get wet, and they’re sensitive to light, dust, and static electricity. Given these constraints, is it possible (or desirable) for aesthetic design to move away from the surface of interactive devices? What might this mean and what would it entail? This paper briefly examines three opportunities for rethinking the aesthetic and material design of interactive objects. We explore how three simple but critical components of such devices – connectors, sensors, and actuators – can be realized in unusual ways in a wide range of materials, thus expanding the aesthetic and expressive palette of technology design.

Brazilian production in the field of digital culture indicates an emerging technophagic tendency, a process that devours and grinds technology and which is mediated by a critical, creative use of the media. Such tendency appears in alternative economic models, artistic practices that promote other actions, and pirate systems devoted to collective uses of telecommunications. Technophagy is not a movement, but a conceptualization that I’ve developed to refer to operations that mix tradition and innovation, unusual arrangements between scientific knowledge and artisanal lore, and micropolitical actions on the appropriation of technologies. That tendency can be an initial version of a political and aesthetic practice that operates by means of the combination and the remodeling of equipment, the revalidation of the notions of hi and low tech, and the production of devices capable of promoting other forms of creation. Its context is the globalization and the process of digitizing culture at all levels.

The term “technoshamanism” has been used to refer to a broad range of social and cultural manifestations, including healing modalities and spiritual rituals, rave culture and electronic dance music (EDM), and various digital arts practices. I take technoshamanism to join together a combination of traditional shamanic technologies with emerging technologies based in silicon (dry), biology (wet) and hybrid (moist), all in the service of healing and sustaining life. This paper explores how contemporary artists pursue expanded forms of consciousness by symbiotically combining technoscientific tools and shamanic techniques. As this area of artistic practice remains a nebulous and undefined proposition, I describe some key artistic monuments to help demarcate this amorphous arena. Today there is no greater artistic calling, no greater aesthetic necessity than helping to heal and preserve Earth’s biodiversity for posterity. Technoshamanism, I propose, is a potent strategy to move in that direction.

This institutional presentation introduces TEKS – Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre – a non-profit organization founded in Trondheim, Norway in 2002. TEKS’s main activities include a) Meta.Morf – Trondheim international biennale for art and technology; b) TEKS.studio – a space for exhibitions, concerts, performances, seminars, lectures, and workshops; c) TEKS.press – a platform for publishing books, exhibition catalogs, and other publications; d) Norwegian Media Art Library – a collection of printed publications that cover the Norwegian media art field; e) and FAEN Academy – a pilot project supporting the development of new artworks by young female artists working with experimental art in Norway.

TeleAgriCulture is a community platform, providing a crowd/cloud data exchange network for information, stories, Art and innovation. Modular sensing kits are offered and are adaptable to most geographic locations and ecological conditions, providing real time sensory data that can be used to monitor and optimise conditions or for artistic production and scientific inquiry. This presentation will provide an overview of the TeleAgriCulture platform, its conceptual and organizational development and the artists’ works that have so far been produced, along with current and future projects.

In this piece, I intend to participate in the 2019 Chilean uprising by using interviews and field recordings of the manifestations posted on social media. The recordings are split into sound snippets, sound features are computed, and dimensionality reduction is performed so that the sounds are mapped into a bidimensional performative space. A motion tracker device is used to capture and map hand positions into the sound space, and sound snippets in this space are concatenated. This interface allows me to participate telematically in the manifestations by creating layers of other people’s sounds on top of rhythmic and intense music as if I were fighting in the streets.

In the last decade different paradigms attempt to explain the relationship between humans and machines, in this analysis there are studies that relate men and computer interfaces: HCI (Human Computer Interaction). This way there is set an analysis that focus on: technological developments, as models like GRID or Streaming in the design or the natural interaction and emotional design, and art such as net art or collective art, to mention only some of the proposed positions from different areas or disciplines. While technological advances influence the way we interact with it, they also depend on how we take them and how we understand and use its features. The aim of this paper is to address some of these questions and understand turning points that occur to crosslink the creative and design fields with the technology, and those with visual, acoustic, sound, spatial and object‑based elements mixed in one space‑frame supported by a temporary‑space and telematics and telepresence technologies. All of this from the perspective of interaction design. This can be achieved thanks to the opportunities provided by telematics networking.

Thus analyzed from technological and multimodal interfaces from interaction design telematics looking to find elements that link the relations given in HCI type models in networks that pose forms of communication and creation, also, varying models for collaborative work, such as the ubiquitous computing posed by Poslad Stefan (Poslad, 2009) who introduced the concept of the invisible, where technology such as computer and other technological devices are incorporated as part of the environment that are perceived and naturally moving the space and the concept of telepresence. Also proposals as multimodal interfaces, which seek interaction with systems that do not require specific skills and become more effective and natural as the voice , gestures, and other human expressions (Manovich, 2013) .

From the relations and inflections found, doctoral research uses telematic performances and explores the concepts raised in order to assess and validate the various models of collaborative structures and creation of real‑time network, allowing not only new approach types of interfaces and interaction, but also exploring our own approaches or the application thereof to our Colombian and Latin American context. For this, we intend the implementation of applications on networks, proposed such as streaming services, and the development of physical computing contemplating the use of sensors, computer vision characteristics , synthesis sound and environments including three‑dimensional representation. The project then proposes the development of models based on analysis of telematics type and their evaluation, thus strengthening expertise in telematics development, collective sound and visual creation and design of interfaces and interaction works.

Based on this research, this paper presents how to configure telematics based works and proposes work structures of collaborative creation as means to make easier the work and build bridges between the various creative and technology disciplines that can also structure the design of performative network environments making use of audio‑visual‑haptic collaborative network elements, defined here under the term tele‑active spaces.

Telepresence is an eight-minute, 8.2 channel surround sound VR performance experience where audience members are seated in rotating chairs in the center of the sound system and performance space, each wearing an Oculus Go VR HMD, as a trumpet player performs around them. In this paper, we explore the relationships between culture, presence and choreography, and how they are constantly in feedback with mediated technologies. This is followed by our methodology, which outlines the musical composition and sound choreography, and the technical and artistic development of VR components. Lastly, we conclude with artistic reflections based on our 17 performances from ourselves as creators, our creative collaborators and audience members.

Video conferencing has become an essential part of everyday life for many people. However, traditional 2D video calls leave much to be desired. Eye-contact, multiple viewpoints, and 3D spatial awareness all make video conferencing much more immersive. We present TeleWindow: a frame with mountable volumetric cameras that attaches to a display for immersive 3D video conferencing. The full system consists of a 3D display and a frame with up to four volumetric cameras. Our system was flexible conceptually as well as physically. We intended our research to be “unfettered” rather than focus and directed, e.g., for anything directly entrepreneurial and commercial: “art as unsupervised research”.  In contrast to similar work, our focus was on making an accessible system for exploring immersive teleconferencing so cost of materials and required technical knowledge is kept to a minimum. We present a technical baseline for immersive, easily replicable 3D teleconferencing.

Artist Statement

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know”.   _St. Augustine

For millennia before Saint Augustine puzzled over the illusiveness of time human beings have struggled to understand the nature of time. What is time? What does it mean to live in time? Does time have a beginning and end? When does the present cease to be present? How is it that we have a sense of self over time? Does time flow from future to present to past, or, is it more like the static sequential frames of a strip of film running through the projector of the mind?

Telling Time is a collection of films and a media art installation exploring human experiences of time. Melding experimental film/video with documentary interviews and fiction forms, Telling Time employs time as a medium and as a subject.

Interviews with artists, scholars, scientists and average people explore the fissure between how we experience time and what we know about time: while original footage shot in various locales imagines time narratively and poetically. Video interviews for the project were contributed by (among others) conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper, performance artist Marina Abramovic, physicist and historian of physics Peter Galison, artist Jan Fabre, theoretical physicist Julien Barbour, and choregraphers Ralph Lemon and Eiko Otake.
Both the film and the installation are structured around the temporal properties of the world (passage, duration, direction, order, pace) as thematic categories. Thereby, exploring narrative time from a phenomenological perspective rather than by means of narrative storytelling structure. While time in Telling Time is examined visually through cinema the temporal properties of the world are explored sonically in an original music scored for small ensemble and voice by composer Paulo Chagas.

To effectively structure time with abstract visual materials requires a visual grammar – a time-based formalization of line, shape and color. Color is especially problematic. Turning to the dynamic of tension-release, to the idea of neutral, balanced and weighted color domains, and to the discrete nature of computer raster images, it is possible to devise and implement a syntax for structuring time with color. We can measure and create color domains that have a dynamic relationship and hence create time-based color compositions.

This paper discusses two practice-based research projects produced during 2018 that explore how augmented reality (AR) can be used to re-imagine past and future possibilities of the natural world. The two artworks discussed use an innovative approach to the technique of image target detection in AR to transform natural objects into hybrid entities of static and dynamic components comprising both natural and digital elements. Second Nature/Wasteland (2018) is an AR installation with a virtual reality (VR) counterpart, that imagines a world where nature emits digital signals. Sediments (2018) is a site-specific artwork of augmented rocks in the natural landscape. Both works investigate how image target detection can be manipulated to enliven objects in ways that inform imaginative considerations of the complex temporal scales and potential affordances of natural objects in the context of environmental change.

Keywords: Libraries, Publishing, New Media Art, Preservation, Online platforms, Digitalisation, Online Libraries

The central role of the library as a central cultural system is transforming into a still undefined new type of cultural body influenced by the spontaneous creation of different types of DIY libraries interconnecting at some point (or not) to the centralised library system. Libraries should evolve from their historical and “monumental” role, which delivers socially relevant services, into an extended, networked and shared infrastructure of knowledge, rivalling the online type of “instant” knowledge in facilitating social and cultural exchange. Two of the possible approaches to start this kind of process, which would be meant to open and socialise even more the library system, is to create “temporary libraries”, in order to fill specific knowledge needs during cultural events becoming then permanent, and “distributed libraries”, in order to integrate relevant collections of specialised knowledge accumulated elsewhere in the traditional library system without structurally intervene in it.

Terminal is an expansive architecture conceived and designed for the existence, conservation, and dissemination of Contemporary digital art and culture. Born at the intersection between art, science, technology, and research, it is formed by three pillars (practical, theoretical and experimental): TetraArt (a system specially designed for the conservation, preservation, archiving, dissemination, and art market of digital art objects); ODA (the theoretical system that defines and describes what is meant by an Auratic Digital Object); and RECC (the collaborative system of communication and creation of contemporary art and culture in first generation). It is currently formed by researchers, artists, or engineers belonging to different artistic and research institutions/contexts in Spain. We are also exploring and looking for new partnerships at the European/International level.

Terrainor is a live performance work in which field recordings are processed and spatialized accompanied by a single channel of video. The material cycles through a number of scenes each of which provides a distinct and particular method of navigation through it. The structure and pacing of the material is designed to encourage a sustained and focused experience, one that makes use of both micro and macro scales. This approach results in recordings that are not traditionally representational, but instead reflect the experience of moving into the sites’ geographies in ways that are idiosyncratic and reference the experiential definitions of site as much as physical ones.

Chair Per­son: Michel Dar­tel, Crit­i­cal Re­spon­dent: Va­lerie La­m­on­tagne

Pre­sen­ters: Kasia Molga, Julie Legault, Sey Min, Jelle Valk & Olav Huizer, E-Tex­tile Work­space, Boris De­backere, Piem Wirtz & Jan Misker

Every year, V2_ In­sti­tute for the Un­sta­ble Media in­vites a small group of up-and-com­ing artists to spend their sum­mer in the V2_Lab for an in­tense short-term res­i­dency. Dur­ing these so-called Sum­mer Ses­sions, the se­lected artists are given the op­por­tu­nity to de­velop an art­work in close col­lab­o­ra­tion with V2_’s ex­pert de­vel­op­ers, cu­ra­tor and pro­ject man­agers.  This year’s Sum­mer Ses­sions will wel­come an­other se­lec­tion of up-and-com­ing artists into the V2_Lab to work on pro­jects in the fields of aug­mented re­al­ity, wear­able tech­nol­ogy, and ecol­ogy – the three cen­tral re­search themes of the V2_Lab. By hold­ing these Sum­mer Ses­sions res­i­den­cies in par­al­lel, V2_ aims to pro­mote a cre­ative syn­ergy be­tween these up-and-com­ing artists.
In this spe­cial edi­tion of V2_’s Test_Lab pro­gram at ISEA2011, the out­come of the Sum­mer Ses­sions 2011 will be pre­sented. As it is cus­tom to V2_’s Test_Lab, the pro­jects will be demon­strated live and the au­di­ence will be in­vited to as­sess the art­works hands-on.

Existing research into contemporary machines, or in other words ‘robots’- captivating through a more humanoid oriented definition- generally complexes on a superficial unknown exploration of human senses and communication practices. Contemporary society is shaped by numerous technological communication disputes that initiate throughout a unique immersion of our portable devices, our sexual intersubjectivities and gender affinities. However, this relationship between individuals and their artificial counterparts routes back to the ancient Greek eras where ‘antikithira’ mechanism was used to communicate data. That formed our future and therefore our emotional response to machinery.

Prevailing stereotypes
Certainly, our world is not only about stereotypes but also it is about fixed, prearranged patterns that allow us – or not – to be more creative in our non-creative existence. Hundreds of online apps operable through the Internet, tolerates us to reconnoitre emotional qualities that can mirror our human essentials in prescient terms of artificial responses. We use these technologies thinking that we could communicate more, and we could aid this communication by rethinking and reshaping our physical life. We use the online apps to text to someone that we think is there to listen and respond to us, however the response we get doesn’t necessarily mean that a real human is on the other side of this interaction. There is a well-defined distinction here that lies between a physical and a virtual life. However this correlation is still blurred and not yet  discovered. What kind of creative approaches appear possible for dealing with these complexities? But just as we getting along with ‘blind’ communication and uncertain emotions into future technology, we become less precautious with the openness around sexual identities emotions and communication with the ‘other side’ of our machine a practice that social torture part of our society. Within this panel I would like to discuss the impact of the screen based communication process through the individual portable devices and explore ‘our’ no-gender attitude. Consequently robotics and there fixtures mechanisms (apps) allows us to further explore our restricted by the society nature, and offer us the chance to be as exposed as we think we want to be. What is the role of art in this exploration?

Artists Statement

The intention with the installation is to give visitors to The (Irish) Linen Memorial – a dedication to those killed as a result of The Troubles (hereafter referred to as The Memorial) – an experience designed to exploit a psychological phenomenon known as the ‘cocktail party’ effect, achieved through the delivery of almost 4000 names of the dead (hereafter referred to as The Names List) within a relatively short timeframe, approximately twenty minutes. Lycia Trouton’s memorial is that of an intervention of a ‘modest witness’ and is created in the medium of an historically iconic Northern Irish and globally traded, product, namely linen. This paper is about the 2009 digitization of The Memorial, with a new Soundscape, based solely on a reading of The Names List of those killed in the conflict. The Memorial is finally being used, as has been my intention since its inception almost a decade ago, to illustrate both a) serious public talking points which reference current political issues in post-conflict Northern Ireland, and b) the promotion of healing from trauma.

For example, this past month, Belfast’s Patrick Corrigan, Programme Director of Amnesty International, blogger and micro-blogger, illustrated his article on ‘Truth versus Justice’ with a photograph of The Memorial and a digital version of The Memorial was unveiled in The Canada Room, Queens University, Belfast, for the third ‘annual’ Day of (Private) Reflection, June 21st to over sixty visitors, with the opening speech by journalist-broadcaster, Rowan Hand and Martin Dunphy, a grassroots activist, and former member of The Peace People, from the mid-1970s.

This paper describes a new immersive, interactive sculptural installation as experienced with The Soundscape. This eight-channel soundscape uses a completely randomized Names List and is based upon contemporary auditory spatial localization research. This installation version helps fulfil the experience of visitors who come to the memorial in search of a loved one’s name. The paper is in two parts: a description of the material culture of The Memorial and The Soundscape, and both works as based on art-sound concepts underpinning contemporary immersive-interactive sculptural installation.

Abstract

Keywords: aesthetics, cyborg, posthumanism, transhumanism and futurism

Old futuristic dreams and utopias
Over the course of one hundred years, humanity has moved from the visionary and fantastic description of a new futuristic human to the contemporary actualized realities of cyborgology. The aesthetic of the human body has changed from the futurist’s ideal – a world based on a merging between the human and the machine for the creation of a new being able to supersede the limitations imposed upon the body by nature and society – to the contemporary realities of bioengineered prosthetics that are used to overcome physical limitations and mutilations (Poggi 1997: 19-20).
Humanity is no longer relegating the possibility of a cyborg to the realms of illusion and wondrous utopia. The existence of beings that are in part machines has become a fact of life with the increased possibilities of exchanging and replacing organs and limbs for prosthetics and mechanical devices. The ethical question to be asked is no longer whether a human being with an artificial heart or with artificial limbs is still human, but how much of a human body can be artificially reconstructed before the human element is overtaken by the nature of the mechanic.

Keywords: Aesthetic Experiences, Interaction, Event, Digital Art, AR, VR, Augmented Space

In the digital age, we create new technological forms and media artworks that define new relationships between the environment and us. Artists and actors are increasingly using their own mobile computing devices and AR to create artworks. When we experience an artwork in an “Augmented Space”, we can consider it as an interactive event. As a result, we can treat interaction, immersion and realization as three components of the events within augmented space. In this paper, by using the dynamic event concept and through analyses of famous mobile AR artworks, we reach three major conclusions of aesthetic experiences in AR artworks: the event of real time interaction is the aesthetic manner; the immanent event of the fuzzy boundary immersion is the aesthetic distance; and the immanent event of augmented realization is the aesthetic purpose.

Due to its processuality and multi-modality, interactive new media art presents a challenge for the humanities. Not only is it a hybrid of visual and performative arts, it even exceeds both fields of research through its foundation of aesthetic experience on action as opposed to contemplation. Interactive art is, on the one hand, a technical system designed by an artist (or any entity that can be considered author of the system). This system has a (more or less) permanent existence as material or coded interaction offer, independent from its actual realization by the visitor. This characteristic determines two basic parameters of interactive art: It is usually presented in the context of an exhibition (not as a scheduled performance), and it can age, i. e. become a historic “work of art”.

The author was often reflexively inspired by his own creative outputs in coding that may suggest mysterious hints in our universe. The presentation will trace his twenty years of creative journey as both multimedia designer and art educator, in two different regions, Hong Kong and Taiwan, through the exploration of mathematics, computer coding, visual design and musical performance.

Being an early pioneer of interactive media design in the Hong Kong creative industries, the author traced the historical development of both the aesthetics and technology of professional web design in Hong Kong, with his substantial portfolio. While bringing his skills and knowledge to the education sector, the author also compared and contrasted the use of creative coding between the commercial environment and the education communities. As a part-time lecturer in Tainan, he would further elaborate the cultural differences in the reception of computational creativity between the Hong Kong and Taiwanese audience.

Our idea of the public has been informed by political and social constructions ever since Greek antiquity. It was in its apparent heyday in bourgeois society that the term “public” was defined by a whole range of social exclusions. Under the post-war era’s systemic pressure to consume, the notion of a bourgeois public disintegrated and its communicative space became mythical, i.e. “a secondary semiological system in the Barthesian sense” (Habermas).
The question today is what (public) effect art can achieve in this situation.

The presentation questions the meaning of the interface by analysing works in which, instead of using so called “friendly” interface for making interaction easy and intuitive, artists create “trammelized” interfaces to initiate a critical discourse on the nature of interactive art.

In my presentation, an interactive installation, Marina’s Garden, which is currently in its development phase, is studied as an example of research-based practice -case focusing on narrative, poetic and dramatic aspects of interactive design. Marina’s Garden is a multilayered narrative space, physical as well as virtual, following an associative poetic structure. The work challenges the participant viewer to become a subject of responsibility in an intimate relationship with the poet, Marina. In my presentation Emmanuel Levinas’s thoughts on dialogue and responsibility and poetic notions on caesura are looked at as conceptual background for creating the conditions for an intimate narrative experience in the art work. With my presentation I want to emphasize, that in the interactive drama the role of the
participator should be considered as a position enabling such an agency, which can lead the person to become aware of his or her responsibility for the development of the narrative and its characters rather than just creating a sense of heroic freedom in a fictive world.

“Il vecchio mondo sta morendo. Quello nuovo tarda a comparire. E in questo chiaroscuro nascono i mostri”.
[“The old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And in this chiaroscuro monsters are born”]
Antonio Gramsci

Almost without realizing it, we have become addicted to images. The old world (photography as a commitment to truth and remembrance) is dying and the new one (images created by artificial intelligence) is striving to emerge. From document to speculation, from natural to synthetic images, we now need to trawl through the chiaroscuro, pointing out their emerging monstrosities: monstrosities of language, of technology, of politics.

From the ruins of photography – archive pictures and family albums that decay and become amnesic – to predictions of potential futures and algorithms, with which we don’t know if we are dealing with nightmares or guarantees of progress. What is clear is that algorithms and artificial intelligence are taking the place of the eye and the camera at the core of visual culture.

Moderated by Jorge Luis Marzo, art historian, doctor of Cultural Studies, curator of exhibitions, audiovisual director and professor at BAU Centre Universitari de Disseny de Barcelona. He has developed several national and international collaborative research projects, in exhibition, audiovisual or editorial format, often in relation to image policies.

The Algae Society is a global collective of interdisciplinary researchers working together to establish a new community with algae as a non-human international research partner. As a working group of artists, scientists and scholars, we’ve focused our efforts to collaborate, cooperate, experiment, design and exhibit with algae. Our collaboration is a novel approach aiming to benefit and educate the public on the importance of symbiotic human-algal relationships, highlighting algae as the unsung hero of the planet responsible for producing 50% of our oxygen. We seek to ignite new research and communication across the globe that transcends disciplines and invites compassionate connections with these living organisms. Each exhibition includes new works created and curated by The Algae Society with the intention to spark effective actions of change that shift human behavior. We create interdisciplinary, multimedia bridges for understanding these more-than-human organisms, generating curiosity and wonder among participants and viewers. We endeavor for these interactive educational experiences to ignite societal behavioral shifts and direct action in response to the challenges that algal-human ecosystems face under climate change.

The presentation give an overview of the Art and Technology Bachelors program offered at Aalborg University (AAU) in Denmark. The study is 8 years young, unique in Scandinavia and still in the making. Overall the study offers a comprehensive and intense hands-on and practice based approach to research in the field of Art and Technology. Much emphasis is given to provide the students with the necessary skills in order to produce functional prototypes, interactive designs, artworks and architectures. Several challenges have been encountered, such as both cultural and technological changes in the wider field relevant to art and technology. Job opportunities are another crucial measure that impacts the formation of studies within art and technology. Educations at Aalborg University is obliged to follow the Danish Ministry of Educations demands to educate students for the job market. Such demands impact how one can and must think in the short terms, but an open question remains whether such demands are also therefore short sighted. Technological as well as cultural and societal parameters make it hard to foresee what is going to happen within the field even a few years from now. How to prepare students for such instability of the future?

Recording engineers and music producers face particular challenges when picturing the ambient sound of large ensembles and concert performances of classical music. Throughout the development of recording technologies over the last 130 years different solutions have been proposed and applied. In the 21st century high-definition audio techniques allow innovative immersive sound recording and virtual acoustics to be explored in order to create the ultimate listening experience.

Abstract

Keywords: locative, pervasive, media, art, design

“Locative media emerged over the last half decade as a response to the de-corporealized, screen-based experience of net art, claiming the world beyond either gallery or computer screen as its territory. Initially coined as a title for a workshop hosted by RIXC, an electronic art and media center in Latvia during 2002, the term is derived from the ‘locative’ noun case in the Latvian language, which indicates location and vaguely corresponds to the English prepositions ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘at’, and ‘by’.”   _Tuters, Marc and Varnelis, Kazys, Beyond Locative Media

This paper will examine and critically align a number of projects using mobile and pervasive technologies, which have challenged the design and delivery of mobile services from around the world, as documented on the author’s weblog and forthcoming book Mobile Audience. The examined range of artist’s work in locative media also raises key questions on the underlying conceptual frameworks necessary for an effective locative experience.

The climate emergency has led to a growing recognition of the need for a socio-ecological transition. This recognition has strong cultural dimensions, shaped by representations and narratives as potential vehicles of change. Cultural mediation is a way of connecting these realms. It can stimulate ex-changes between actors (citizens, organizations, policymak-ers), and ultimately help produce dynamics of change and new solidarities.
ARTENSO, a research centre in art and social engagement, explored the possibilities of these intersections by conducting documentary research on the relationship between artistic and ecological interventions. It illuminated the relationships be-tween art, culture and social-ecological change, both in their conceptual dimensions and through practical considerations. It developed a tripartite typology to map initiatives that bring about transformations in the current social and environmental context.
This study suggests that artists and cultural organizations can become agents of social change by exploring new methods and processes. Often conceived and presented separately, en-gaged art and ecologically responsible practices are neverthe-less dimensions that, when articulated together, can challenge society on environmental issues, question the relationship be-tween populations and the environment, and advance the fight against climate change

ARTENSO is a center for the transfer of innovative social practices affiliated with Cégep de Saint-Laurent based in Montreal (Quebec, Canada). Its mission is to promote the general interests and specific issues related to research and innovation in art and social engagement in the field of cultural mediation. In fall 2021, the LAB_ARTENSO Incubator starts its activity to support teams/projects wishing to explore the connections between cultural mediation, digital devices, and collaborative processes. Selected through a call for projects, the proposals come from artists, mediators, and representatives of organizations wanting to find an innovative response to issues involved in relationships between the cultural field and the social field. The theme for this first year is geolocation, mapping and storytelling through the use of interactive and participatory positioning and mapping technologies. The selected projects are diverse, but all speak of links between culture, city and citizenship. ARTENSO is extending the incubation and support project in digital cultural mediation with a research aimed at documenting collaborative practices at the heart of the cohorts. While digital culture approaches (living labs, hackatons, creative sprints) are increasingly getting attention for their democratizing force in the field of cultural mediation, in Quebec, few studies have investigated them.

This presentation aims to share the characteristics and effects of cultural Labs based on the model of the ARTENSO center. We are strongly interested in sharing learnings on how to support novel processes of carrying out digital cultural projects. The presentation falls into the theme of “Educations and societies” by asking questions about contemporary ways of learning and transmission in a complex, open and interdisciplinary world.

Julius Popp’s intricate multimedia installations are manifestations of an artist’s view on digital culture. To grasp formation processes of human consciousness and knowledge within an electronic environment, the artist develops interdisciplinary works in which art and science converge. They explore the digital paradigms of signification and systems of distribution. At the intersection between art and science the works of J. Popp redefine the notion of  interactivity. In his Micro-series human cognitive adaptation processes are investigated whereas the Bit-series create metaphors for these same processes.

Abstract

The Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) has been working with art, science and technology for 21 years. It has only been relatively recently that the innovation potential of the arts, particularly those working with technology, has been understood. Myths relating to artists not wishing to be commercial and the active marginalising of the arts in intellectual property (IP) development has meant that the arts are overlooked as a source for commercially viable IP. Through my work at ANAT I have experienced artists going through the patent process, rapid prototyping, engaging in scientific research and producing new applications in digital media. These old myths do not hold true. In this environment of innovation, models better suited to how artists work are needed. This paper argues that there is a much greater benefit to the arts, culture and artists through aligning the arts to research, innovation and entrepreneurial contexts, rather than in traditional cultural funding activities.

Location and cultural identity are two of the key concerns in the works of contemporary artists in Singapore. However, these art makers are often unaware that artists working in the same geographical area in the past were grappling with similar issues. In this paper, I will discuss the notion of “Asia” in the art works of two Singapore-based artists – painter Liu Kang (1911-2004) and video/interactive media artist Tan Kai Syng (b. 1975) – whose practices are some fifty years apart, suggesting that both artists attempt to come to terms with an “Asia” whose meaning is continually reshaped by political, social and cultural forces. Focussing on Liu’s paintings in the 1950s, and Tan’s videos from 2004 to 2006, I hope to show that central to the works of both artists is the idea of a “pan-Asia” that is made up of human communities presumed to have primordial commonalities. While Liu relied on the notion of an “Asian bloc” to enable him to create an art form that was simultaneously relevant to China (the country which he identified strongly with) and Singapore (the place where he lived), Tan critically examines the idea of a homogenous Asia by revisiting the rhetoric of “Asia for Asians” used by the Japanese Imperial Army to legitimise their occupation of Singapore during the Pacific War. Thus, my proposed paper aims to address issues of regionalism, location and modern Asian identity as they pertain to the works of the two Singaporean artists.

[also artist talk]

We all know the sound of a guitar, a piano or a trumpet. And with those rather traditional Instruments, the observer easily understands how sounds occur, which are created by. Yet, contrary to a drumkit or a theremin, most of the motion happens hidden in detail. Only the audience physically close to the musician gets to associate the movements of the hands and fingers with the produced notes. Who isn‘t near, won‘t be able to do that, simply because of not seeing what the musician is doing. And the more senses are involved in perceiving a situation, the more intensely it will be experienced. Therefore we intended to create an interface that demands exuberant gestures of the musician.

This paper outlines a new funded project which aims to conserve and render born digital artefacts widely accessible by establishing an Australian Emulation Network. High value cultural collections from university archives and the GLAM sector requiring legacy computer environments will be targeted. The project expects to generate new knowledge across media arts, design, and architecture. Expected outcomes include stabilising and providing researchers with emulated access to born digital cultural artefacts, sharing legacy computer environments across the network, and establishing an Australian software preservation community of practice, building skills in preserving and emulating digital cultural artefacts with substantial future applications also in scientific preservation.

We seem to have a difficulty dealing with our past, mostly we ignore it, certainly no one has written a historical/critical textbook that I can use in my art history class. If anyone knows of one please tell me.

We seem to have adopted this future perfect/past imperfect stance from the people that engineer our tools for us. This medium, the computer medium and the people that use it seem to be mesmerized by the future potential of it, it is rarely backwards looking and thus rarely reflective. A medium totally numbed out by it’s own reflection and of course apolitical. Being apolitical is a choice but it is difficult to have freedom without a history to reflect upon. We have come along way since the mid 70’s when the field was totally open and untainted by the territorial markings of other artists and the dogma of other media. So surely we should have, by now, come to terms with our present condition. But no, we seem to be stuck in some future place were everything about technology is OK. This seems to born out in the relationship we have with our audience, I’m sure we have all had the experience in which a person at an opening takes you aside to inform you that you could make a lot of money off your product if only you would make certain changes to your piece. Or in your piece they see a brave new world, rarely do they see the work itself. But somehow the work is a point of departure into the near future. Even our public refuses to concentrate on that which is in front of them.

The idea of disobedient machines is developed from the perspective of artificial intelligence, rather than fiction. Misbehavior in humans and machines is presented as a one of the skills which are indispensable for natural intelligence. Different approaches to AI are presented, from symbolism to emergism. The limits of computational formalism are presented, together with Hofsdtader’s theory of consciousness. It is argued that a machine cannot reach human intelligence unless it is also able to disobey. Hence, an exploration of algorithmic misbehavior is urgent for further development of AI for the arts and society in general.

In the context of the Mixed Realities (MR) paradigm (half atoms, half bits), mixture is related to augmentation operations that bring new dimensions into our experience, a whole that cannot be thought of as a purely physical or purely virtual environment. Is it possible to conceive augmentation as arising only from the mixture between the physical and the virtual? Or are other factors necessary for augmentation to happen and for experience to be perceived as a unified whole?

My research, at the crossroad of aesthetics and cognitive sciences analyzes the experience of interactive art installations, which particularity is to arouse the movement senses or the viewer movement. The artworks I refer to destabilize or stimulate the movement senses and offer an embodied aesthetic experience (Stern 2013) and imply a body extension.

The body in\verse is an online, interactive performance that combines biophysical sensing, emotive state sonification and visualization, and generative poetry to create the scene. The performance provides a deep dive from the world outside of ourselves, that is dissociated by mediated technology, into the interoceptive abyss of our emotive sea. Audience members are invited to participate in a focussed conversation that becomes the basis for the activity that follows. Questions will be on the rise of a technological culture, and how it has left us wanting, consciously or not, for identification and awareness of “essential rhythm”, that we continue to lose track of now that we live mostly in cities as the aboriginal environment recedes from view. The performance environment provides the ability to control the presentation of stimuli and monitor the physical reaction based on the interpretation of nuanced emotional state, blurring the line between auditory and visual real-time content and physical experience.

A biophysical sensing system measures the emotional affect of the performer, and then uses that data to drive the sound, abstract imagery, and a generative poetry algorithm. Emotional affect of the performer is assessed through arousal and valence measures derived from correlation of the performer’s heart rate and heart rate variability. An algorithm generates poetry using conversations that take place with the audience as source material. The poetry source material is then algorithmically organized according to its sentiment (positive to negative), and mapped to the emotional affect of the performer driven by the emotional affect assessment from the biophysical measures as described above.

In recent years, Tuomas A. Laitinen’s artistic practice has revolved around other-than-human lifeforms, focusing on octopuses in particular. This body of work builds on Laitinen’s previous works with questions of ecology, symbiotic processes, and various paths of tentacular knowledge production. In the presentation, Laitinen will give an overview of his research and future works emerging from this endeavour.

Works:

A Proposal for an Octopus (2016-ongoing) is a series of twisting glass sculptures with tubular chambers and amorphous apertures. Not only do the architectures evoke the tentacular and malleable forms of cephalopods, but they provide potential habitats for boneless bodies. The video Haemocyanin (2019) follows an octopus as it plays with, investigates, and squeezes through one of Laitinen’s vessels. The video’s name derives from the types of proteins, which contain copper atoms that transport oxygen through the bodies of cephalopods, imbuing their blood with a bluish tinge.

A glyph typeface Ctongue (2018) is derived from research and observation on octopus arm movement. The work exists both as glass sculptures and a functional typeface drawn by the artist, creating a mutating body of speculative language.

Breath ~ Inhalation, Utterance, Spirit, Wind, Water

An art, ecology and technology project comprised of an interactive sound + screens + landscape installation that is networked, in real‑time, with a remotely located water irrigation/filtration system.

The Breath project was originally conceived as a creative nexus for addressing issues of shared resources among conflicting cultures by focusing on the unifying action of an ethical relationship to the environment. Environmental stewardship is a key mandate of the UN and other global leadership organizations as climate change, water scarcity and  other ecological challenges grow in complexity and urgency.

Environmental science, in combination with art and technology is a means to make things happen. Recognizing the urgency to create change, artists are integrating art processes into daily life. New cultural practices indicate a new social order – ways of life that emphasize participation, challenge power structures, and span disciplines ranging from ecology to community engagement, visual arts to scientific innovation. This project will bring recognition and response to the urgent need for respectful cooperation between conflicting values and beliefs at a time of critical social and environmental crisis.

Our consideration focuses on the Jordan River and Valley – the Fertile Crescent of ancient times, where civilization began, giving birth to technological innovations such as writing, glass, the wheel and the use of irrigation. Situated in the Great Rift Valley, the region is of great significance for its cultural, religious and geographic importance. The Jordan River is rich in symbolic value to three of the world’s major religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam, which makes the region one of the greatest of the world’s tourist attractions. The Jordan River and Basin is the ecological and zoological junction of three continents: Asia, Africa and Europe, and is the center of a wetland ecosystem that is the biological heart of the region.

Sadly, the river is under enormous threat by excessive water diversion and severe pollution. Ninety‑six percent of its fresh water is redirected and the area has been the dumping ground for untreated sewage that threatens to irreversibly damage the river.

The Breath project consists of an installation/living landscape with sound and responsive screens for visual display in one location. A remotely located, site‑specific, water filtration and irrigation system will co‑occur at a second locale. Air metrics within the primary installation space will measure the changes between the O2 and CO2 ratios of human breath and plant respiration. This data will drive the technology associated with the remotely located water system, providing the energy source to drive the circuit. The media in the installation is affected by real‑time data drawn from both sites that cause it to alter and transform while sound shared from one site to another creates a synesthesia of spatial experience. This networked system is adaptable for use in multiple situations. The pairing of two locations by connecting the breath of a person in one location with irrigation and plant growth in a distant other underlines the true interdependence of all living beings.

BUKAS is a physical space and collaboration platform for pluridisciplinary and intersectoral initiatives in art, design, technology, and futures literacy centered around the context of the sustainable development and socioeconomic justice in the context of the Philippines in particular and the Global South in general. In this institutional presentation, we describe the constitution of BUKAS and a sampling of its current and past projects and initiatives.

The aim of this paper is to expand the existing critical discourse of AI art with new perspectives which can be used to examine the creative attributes of emerging practices and to assess their cultural significance and sociopolitical impact. It discusses AI art projects that explore creative agency and associated topics such as authorship, authenticity, intellectual property, and labor. The focus is on works that exemplify poetic complexity and manifest the epistemic or political ambiguities indicative of AI science, technology, and business. By comparing, acknowledging, and contextualizing their accomplishments and shortcomings, the paper outlines the possible directions to advance the field.

Pathological narcissism represents a dominant form of subjectivity in postindustrial societies. (Žižek 1987, Lasch 1982) When the subject, characterized by the culture of narcissism, enters cyberspace, it becomes immortal. The body  becomes obsolete and the game of immortality begins. The anthropological understanding of culture, in which culture represents a “natural environment” for humans, can be reinterpreted: cyberspace is the perfect natural environment for pathological narcissism. “Cut off from the real body, we construct a substitute body: ourselves online. We treat it as if it were our actual self, our real life. Over time, it does indeed become our life.” (Ullman). Digitalized bodies represent a “historically constructed Western individualist subject” (Green). Furthermore, ironically, this new digital Cartesianism, initiated by a rhetorical cheerleading of the mind/body split as a desirable aim of CMC, ultimately results in the invocation of stereotyped bodies in order to confer authenticity and signification to textual utterances. (Boler).

The Computer Art and Technocultures Project is a resource enhancement project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, running jointly between the Department of History of Art and Screen Media at Birkbeck College and the Word and Image Department at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Our initial brief was to catalogue, digitize and explore the Patric Prince archive of computer art and related documents, with a remit to investigate the major exponents of computer art from 1975 to 2000 and better understand the evolution of this new field of art. A more pragmatic aim was to undertake the preservation of a new media archive, albeit one that was mainly paper-based, at a major museum and use it as a test-case for  future acquisitions in this area.

Abstract
Evoking the visual and philosophical complexities of the “Cat’s Eye Nebula”, this non-local interactive video installation is part of the series “Performing Quantum Entanglement: Subtle Appa-ratuses for Extrasensory Affectiveness” by Clarissa Ribeiro, and integrates the Exhibition “Museum of Endo-Luminosity” of Mick Lorusso, together with the Art|Sci Collective. The work is an invitation to reflect about the invisible bonds that links man and the universe, and that are the ones that keeps affectiveness alive, no matter the distance. Questioning the main stream goal for smoothness and predictability in communication, Cat’s Eye Neb-ula is conceived as a noisy, fuzzy logic and unexpected commu-nicational experience involving humans and computers in their surprisingly instable vibrational realm.

The Cat Knows
The subtle apparatuses that integrate the work consist sim-ultaneously in a memory and an actualization of possible entanglements between the two artists that are collaborat-ing for its production – Clarissa Ribeiro and Mick Lorusso. The actual “Cat’s Eye Nebula” (NGC 6543), according to NASA, is a visual ‘fossil record’ of the dynamics and late evolution of a dying star, and is one of the most complex planetary nebulae ever seen, captured by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The structures of the Cat’s Eye are so complex that astronomers suspect the bright central object may actually be a binary star system – a bipolar geometry produced by two stars surrounded by cocoons of gas blown off in the late stages of their stellar evolution.

The stars that produced as a memory the “Cat’s Eye Nebu-la” were in the processes of becoming two giant diamonds, silently entangled in faraway skies. Being installed at the same time in Shanghai, at the Roy Ascott Studio Gallery, and in Los Angeles, at the Art|Sci Gallery, the work con-sists of two black boxes were the complex geometric pat-terns generated by the irregular reflection of a red laser beam, when crossing a diamond-like prism that moves according to visitors’ vibrations captured by a piezoelectric sensor, are captured by a hidden webcam and send, via live streaming video, to the entangled exhibition space.

As a synthesis, it could be seemed as a manifesto for a quantum approach to the communicational processes in interactive media art projects. This effort implies in investigating, theoretically and in the practice as an independent artist, ways and processes through which we affect and are affected by each other and the world around by means of interacting in a quantum level that is vibrational, potential where consciousness can be viewed as a complex dynamic event, constantly engaged in the act of self-creation.

“The Censorship of Dreams” is a multidisciplinary theater piece investigating the complex and ever-evolving relationship between our bodies, technology, language, and surveillance—in both content and form. This piece explores how technology can be used for oppression or expansion, and the struggle to express truth after language has been rendered meaningless. We are exploring theatrical representation of Brain-Computer-Interface systems and how to not just inform, but implicate and involve the audience in a new mode of society where the human mind is directly linked to technology. We believe that by bringing together artistic concepts at the forefront of technological innovation and brain science with the work of creative technologists and the ancient forms of theater that are rooted in the human body and imagination, we can offer a unique and provocative experience of symbiosis between humans and technology.

‘The City Island’ is a feature documentary depicting the united effort of the Island residents, who protected the Toronto Parks System from flooding in 2017 and 2019, and their historic acts of resistance that protected the remaining Island homes.

Comprised of interviews with the residents, artists from Artscape Gibraltar Point, and the parks supervisor, the narrative unfolds through cinéma verité of their united conservation efforts, interwoven with archival footage and artwork depicting the timeline, representation and history of the Toronto Islands. This psychogeographic portrait of the Island is a testament to the Islanders’ political will to protect their park homes from razing, floods, and an expanding airport.

Manovich asserts that complexity is the new visual art paradigm and supports this with reference to digital art that transfers ideas and techniques from scientific research or is inspired by the “historically specific imagination” of 19th and 20th century art and science. A factor related to the rise of complexity is literacy. We suggest that the traditional sense of literacy is fundamental to making, and making sense of, digital art.

Dobson and Willinsky claim that the written and printed word is ubiquitous. “What is literally digital about literacy today is how much of what is read and written has been electronically conveyed as binary strings of ones and zeros, before appearing as letters, words, numbers, symbols, and images on the screens and pages of our literate live […]. Yet what we see of this literacy is remarkably continuous with the literacy of print culture, right down to the very serifs that grace many of the fonts of digital literacy.”

Flagship cultural institutions such as museums have long been significant sites of cultural exchange and the urban experience. But as the number of museums worldwide increases, there has been a considerable change not only in their mission and orientation, but also in the contribution they are expected to make to the social, urban and cultural agenda of localities as they are routinely called on to be key elements of local place-making and community cultural development strategies. Increasingly, the contemporary museum must foster connections with its locality as both a place and a community, which requires an approach that is imaginative, collaborative and locally specific.

Thus, to be successful, new cultural infrastructure developments must be embedded in their physical and social environments from the outset. Despite this necessity, there has been no systematic research into what such embeddedness might entail, nor any guidance as to the measures of success. What is needed, therefore, is an engaged and interactive analysis of the ways in which a major cultural facility is founded in dialogue with its local communities. Our research project offers a unique opportunity to examine, and contribute to, the process of embedding a new museum into physical and community space in real time.

This panel will present the first stages of a longitudinal research project to undertake a detailed study of the innovative ways in which a new museum seeks to become a leading collaborative museum. The discussion will present an approach that simultaneously probes what the development means for the diverse communities of the museums location and examines the collaborative initiatives and projects instigated by the museum and the community.  Three methods of the thematic strands of the research project – cultural infrastructure, cultural mapping and research collaborations with arts, science and technology industries.

Acknowledgement: The presenters acknowledge their project colleagues in the development of the text for ARC LP200301481 The Collaborative Museum: Embedding Cultural Infrastructure in the City: Chief Investigators Distinguished Professor Ien Ang, Professor Deborah Stevenson and Dr Malini Sur of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University.

When composers began using computers to make music, the relevant computing conditions were in a state much as they are today for computer graphics. In order to achieve the level of realism, expressive control, and timbral nuance necessary for a satisfying and successful musical art, real-time control was out of the question. Compute ratios of 100 or 200 to 1 were not uncommon, especially when computeintensive qualities such as digital reverberation were included. But back around 1976 when I began my doctoral work at Stanford, the excitement and satisfaction at working in a pioneering and futuristic medium was great enough to make us abandon good sense and spend the small hours of the morning computing a few tens of seconds of music.

Sculptors today have the opportunity, if they choose, to explore human/machine interaction by employing new technologies in a “traditional” art form. This exploration accommodates a breadth of experience and approach, from Stewart Dickson’s sculpture of mathematical surfaces to Timothy Duffield’s fantastic landscapes; from Rob Fisher’s crystalline spaceframe sculpture to Helaman Ferguson’s direct carving celebrating mathematics; from Frank McGuire’s sculpture derived from principles of genetic evolution to David Morris’ “river crystal” fountains and cascades. In the work of these sculptors, the computer is both tool and inspiration. In the work of these artists, the boundaries between disciplines begin to dissolve.

Thinking about computer graphics? What about computer art? No time to learn complex software? Introducing “computer artist in a box”. No fuss, no messy manuals to tie you down; “computer artist in a box” gets you up and running fast, letting you produce amazing works of electronic art, quickly and easily from our extensive image libraries and data sets. In graphic terms, what distinguishes much computer graphics work is the lack of aesthetic difference. My work is an attempt to address this critical issue.

This presentation covers some of the historical and aesthetic questions raised by the fine arts community regarding the use of computers by artists. Before addressing issues related specifically to the computer, the author gives a preamble that provides a context and creates a texture for the comments relating to the computer and its role in the visual arts. Comments are offered on the role of technology, science, mathematics, the humanities and aesthetics in the visual arts.

Keywords: interactive, empathy, performance, somatic, touch, intersubjectivity, physical computing, sensorial, trauma, relational.
This paper investigates the role of performativity, intersubjectivity and empathy in relational, participatory or computational art. Through the creation of sensorial, kinesthetic and immersive interfaces for the public to ‘perform’ the work, participants can expand their somatic experiences to include looking, moving, touching, listening and other forms of sensing. They can enter into a sensuous continuum with the artwork, oscillating between the representation of another’s experience and reflection on their own, so as to reconstitute new subjectivities.

George Soros, the successful American investor of Hungarian origins has been an active philanthropist since the seventies. In 1979 he established the Open Society Fund in New York, an organization that supports activities in more than 50 countries worldwide. The aim of this initiative was to promote the “open societies” concept originally proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper. In the following years when the Soros Foundation and the network of the Soros Contemporary Art Centers (SCCA) became a reality, lavish praise as well as harsh criticism was regularly heaped on the organization and the people associated with George Soros.

The unique beginnings and the subsequent operation of the SCCA network including the Center for Culture & Communication (C³) cannot be fully appreciated without considering the regional socio-cultural context. What follows is not intended as a critical evaluation of the SCCA network and C³, Budapest. Such a study would require in-depth research into decades of relevant cultural history. Instead a cultural narrative is presented in the context of documented evidence and personal experience.

In 1984, after lengthy negotiations with the authorities, a compromise was reached to establish the Soros Foundation in close collaboration with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The stated goal was to support fresh contemporary intellectual deliberations and initiatives tied to developing autonomy. From the beginning, the Soros Foundation aimed at bringing a new working moral, new informal style, creativity and most importantly transparency into the sociopolitical landscape, thus introducing a tool of pluralism unknown in the last forty years. It is essential to record the significant aid provided to many other causes such as health, the oral history program, English language education manager education, student exchange programs, publishing, environmental and ethnic minority causes including the Roma, etc. It is crucial to note that no pre-existing plans or precedence were available at that time.

Abstract

Long Paper

Summary
A distinction between two kinds of communication: transmission and interaction, based on the concept of shared space (physical or virtual), leads to another distinction: face-to-face communication and mediated one. The latter can assume one of three possible variants: mediated transmission, quasi-direct mediated communication, or indirect mediated communication. The most of types of the interactlve art are related to the last of those three models. The context of interaction – the product of the artist, which plays at the same time the role of partner of recipient’s interaction – is the only message in the mediated indirect communication. The interaction creates an artwork – a result of creative behaviour of the recipient. A contact and the interaction have been separated. Between the recipient and
the artifact/context occurs the interpersonal communication. It can also appear in the
space between the artist/sender and his/her product – artifact.

Abstract

Interactive art can be recognized – in the framework of classic theories of communication with their three unit model (sender – message – receiver) – as a medium that is unable to communicate. The more active a recipient becomes, the less possibility for communication an artist/sender can keep for himself/herself. On the other hand still treat the interactive media as medium of expression, and their works beckon  in spite of the medium’s interactivity, or whether the interactivity creates a new way (and a new model) of communication. In the latter case we have to consider once more what are the functions of all elements involved in the process of an artistic (and non-artistic) interactive communication. We should also examine classic theories of communication to find out if any of them can be used to describe the model of interactive art communication. Among them the Roman Jacobson’s model seems to be promising, with its chance to consider the context as a message in the communication process. This [takes into] account that the identity of a recipient’s partner of communication is different than the one of interaction. The first role is played by the artist/sender, the latter – by the hypertext which is a base for the artifact. We must also analyze the way in which two models of communication: interpersonal and mediated interpersonal create together interactive art communication.

This institutional presentation investigates how the preservation of past ISEA digital artifacts influences the future, defines the present and contributes to the international exchange of knowledge. The process of constructing an innovative content management system containing 30 year’s worth of data has been met with challenges as well as rewards. This presentation will critically analyze the state of the ISEA archive and discuss the innovative engine which was custom built to manage the ISEA data. It will discuss the process of dealing with thousands of digital artifacts and the connections created between archival systems. The project’s ultimate goal is to envision a unified system of knowledge within the international Electronic Arts community and the construction of the ISEA archive is a key component to realizing that goal.

The creation of the MediaLab Madrid Archive arises from the need to contribute to the preservation of transdisciplinary media art practices and the shaping of the new narratives related to an extended media archeology, in the context of the project Medialab Madrid as a model of transversal laboratory: art, science, technology, society + sustainability for the digital agenda (H2019/HUM-5740 (MediaLab-CM) within the call for Social Sciences and Humanities (2019) of the Community of Madrid co-financed with the European Social Fund. The proposal is conceived as a panel discussion with the participation of four researchers who are involved in and experts on the subject, structured along different axes of discussion focused on the challenges of cultural innovation as of twenty years ago and its preservation and dissemination in an open, dynamic and relational archive structure, able to convey the relationships among biological, social, technological and cultural systems, and proposing an extension and enrichment to the consensus terminologies of media art.

We developed “zen_Farm” through waste recycling and makers, with the aim of guiding people to practice how to calm their minds. Utilize the concept of “Every drop of calm water makes all things green” to remind the world to cherish the natural environment and live in peace with all things. The main purpose of zen_Farm is to emphasize the calmness and concentration of “Mind Meditation”. Its special feature is that people use the stability of their heartbeats to drive the water source of zen_Farm. In recent years, the world has gradually developed a new form of creative community that combines digital media to gather community awareness and improve the current situation of the community, which can bring new energy and stimulate new thinking in urban areas. We practically integrate zen_Farm into social practice, including:

(1) The installation is located at Dharma Drum Mountain, the most important Buddhist unit in Taiwan. Let the Buddhist masters in the park use the concept of plant irrigation to reflect the natural environment to be sustainable and green. Guide them to finally become one with nature.

(2) The installation was installed at Shakeng Elementary School in Taiwan, allowing students to renovate the campus together and irrigate the plants through their own heartbeats to create a common memory on the campus. The zen_Farm is not only an interactive installation art work made by makers, it makes the campus of Buddhist parks and rural schools more friendly and beautiful, and it also supports the concept of environmental protection. We also hope to achieve the long-standing goal of digital art creators – “Media Transparency” through the creative design and social practice of zen_Farm. Participating in meditation activities can connect the emotional memories of the community together and establish a shared memory in the campus.

Visual documentation of media art installations are frequently peppered with pictures of happy children. A child interacting with an artwork is presented as the ultimate sign of its success. But do we want children to be our critics? Is the ‘kid-factor’ a defensive strategy on the part of the media art community, a regressive internalisation of arts funding agencies’ desire for accessibility? Are we infantilised by interactivity – just as Theodor Adorno warned that popular culture infantilises because it removes our critical capacity and eventually banishes seriousness itself?

This paper explores critical ambivalence to the playful dimension within media art. Specifically it addresses the major, audience-focused biennial exhibitions held by Melbourne-based organisation Experimenta Media Arts, such as Vanishing Point (2005) and Experimenta Playground (2007). These exhibitions have included a wide range of ‘playful’ Australian and international media art with relatively little concern for political content or critical reflection on the technology utilised. With an organisational mission of presenting the space ‘where creativity and technology meet’, Experimenta have, in recent years, essentially focused on mediated theatricality in visual art (fittingly, their major exhibitions begin their tour in a darkened performing arts centre). In contemporary art more broadly, critics have identified an increasingly fine line between the fun park and the conceptual display of utopian logics. Can play be critical? Can it liberate us from the routines of everyday life? By engaging the body in space in unexpected ways, can it be ethical as well as aesthetic pleasure, drawing attention to the antagonistic, performative, interdependent and embodied basis of our social relations? Or does play merely imitate a consumerist logic? And is it useful to generalise?

Stakra is a choreography for video space that has been processed mainly with a raster manipulation unit also known as wobbulator, first prototyped by Paik/Abe. It is inspired by Nam June Paik’s “Dancing patterns” created during the 60s and his later collabora-tions with Merce Cunningham in the late 70s/80s. The single channel piece is part of a wider choreography for machines, a work in progress, which processing the original choreographic sequence for a solo performer with different combinations of analog video synthesizers, will culminate in an installative ex-panded choreography.

Abstract

The use of the human body as a canvas for artistic expression has been deployed throughout the history of mankind. The adornment and marking of the body is a facet of humanity that distinguishes us from other beings. With the development of digital media and emerging technology the human body has become a site for projected motion imagery, thus visually hybridising the virtual and real worlds. Instead of projecting indiscriminately onto the dance stage in mere mimicry of the cinema form, choreographers are working with projection artists to synchronise the moving image with the moving dancer physically immersing the performer within the digital world.

The technical difficulties of synchronising the projected imagery with that of the performer in the past has been tedious, frustrating and fraught with risk. Up until recently one of the biggest disadvantages has been that pre-rendered animation locked the performer into the choreography. It was argued that some of the spontaneous aspects of the actual, live performance were lost because the projections dictated the performer’s movements. A solution to this problem is through the technology of motion-sensing, where the dancer is able to control the projections through his or her movements, making the projections a live interactive prop. Rather than being a separate entity, the performer becomes a vital agent of the projected digital imagery, hybridising the human form with technology.

This article will refer to Elizabeth Grosz’s definition of the cultural body as a site of culture itself and Donna Haraway’s definition of the cyborg as a means of establishing a relationship between the digital moving image and the performer. Bringing these two theories together to show how projecting onto the body is a natural evolution in contemporary dance, bearing a new type of collaboration through the use of digitally mediated technologies.

The works of three different contemporary artists will be discussed to exemplify how technological developments over the past decade have dramatically changed the relationship between the performers and the projected image on stage forming a new kind of contemporary dance performance.

While incredible amounts of information on the Universe have been gathered in the last decades using optical means and have dramatically sharpened our understanding of the Cosmos, the outcome is that the overwhelming fraction of our world remains invisible, either through the limitations of our senses (whether natural or technologically expanded) or because those invisible domains simply do not interact with light. Photographing, imaging or otherwise apprehending these and thus overcoming the limitations linked to our reliance on light requires re-evaluating our assumptions, broadening our toolkit and reconsidering what we mean by seeing, as will be exemplified via a range of explorations of these invisible domains and the occasional conceptual consequences of such attempts.

The discussion of our panel of the Dark Side of Making takes up specifically the perspectives of software- and biohacking, do-ityourself (DIY) practices, education, and open networks. Members of the panel represent a range of perspectives from an international group of academics, artists, and makers, including the local South African maker scene. The recent years have seen a growing interest and increase of practices that embrace a DIY attitude and Maker Culture. But there are also controversies attached to these practices that question their legitimacy, sustainability, and intentions: How is it better to build your own electronic device instead of buying a mass-produced one? Does it really make sense to self-build the automated watering, light and temperature control system for your house plants? And why do we all repeat the same experiments in a DIY biolab, e.g. the creation of transgenic fluorescent e-coli bacteria, which will be killed after we have seen it glow under a fluorescent lamp? These and other questions reference a possibility that there exists a dark side to these practices; but what and where is it?

NFTs are often imagined as the initiators of a democratic revolution in the art world and their advantages for the artists are undeniable, but they also give way to a chaotic art ecosystem. This paper argues that artists need new systems of collaboration to sidestep these negative effects, overviews promising attempts and discusses potential solutions.

Keywords: Motion Prediction, MPEG, Digital Video, Video Compression, Statistics, Ballistics.

Prediction theory emerged during the WWII in order to improve anti-aircraft artillery and resulted in algorithms devised to statistically predict airplanes and missile paths. Although today predic- tion is the backbone of the video compression, the historical and technical connection between this mathematical theory and contemporary imaging technologies has not been sufficiently determined. Using a media archaeological approach this paper discusses how the implementation during the 1990s of prediction algorithms to video compression has generated an entirely new type of moving images. I argue that the consequence of turning each displayed picture into a rigid grid and its construction into the statistical prediction of the pixel’s values is dramatic because it renders the temporal coincidence of all pixels within the frame unnecessary. On the surface there is no change. Yet, using prediction a video codec such as H.264/AVC has turned the frame into an address where chunks of pixels coming from different moments in time are put together. At the coding level, prediction has banished the frame. The elimination of that basic unit of all moving images, not only miniaturized video but it also has had ontological consequences for the image that are not yet fully understood.

THE DEVICE IN INTERACTIVE ART: Interactivity, Gesture and Sense.Given contemporary works of art that make use of technology (be it digital, electronic or even analog), the emergence of an artistic practice distinguished by the construction of an unfinished, potential configuration has become evident; its evolution is determined by contact with the public, who is invited to an interaction that is not just interpretative anymore (the secret dialogue in which every work engages its audience) but deliberately material. The audience participates in the process of giving tangible existence to a work that bears in its genesis the expectation for this encounter and the manifestation of an ever latent and provisional form.

However, while these descriptions manage to identify inherent features of Interactive Art, they prove to be too general to spot the differences various works present in their evolution; furthermore, establishing the final result indetermination as a feature of this type of platforms per se, associated to an apparent unpredictability of the public’s actions, leaves wide areas of uncertainty, failing to interrogate the specific ways they manifest that indetermination in a particular work. The aim of this paper is to explore the specificity of Interactive Art focusing on the concept of device, present in Philosophy and other arts, from the perspective of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, and the notion of gesture from the author Vilém Flusser. Taking this theoretical approach, we examine the modes of articulation of an Interactive Art work and the different ways of creating sense that are expressed in the public’s behavior. Through the analysis of two interactive works of the artist Rafael Lozano Hemmer, we explore the nature of gestures in interaction and the factors that prompt them as part of the device created in the work of art.

V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media is an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It strives to build a ‘living archive’ of electronic art, using its own documentation from over 40 years, made accessible on its website. This presentation outlines some of the strategies to bring out the different histories of electronic art that narrate the art form’s critical role in giving meaning to and (re-)interpreting the real-world effects of technology.

During the last year (2009-2010) we have witnessed a big wave of interest in the climate crisis building up towards COP15 and quickly fading again after the failure to reach a binding agreement. Digital climate art was part of this wave, but is digital climate art only a politically correct, green-washing court jester, or does it have a more essential role to play? Does media reflexive digital art have a special role in the climate debate, and how can the climate crisis be articulated through digital art as an artistic and aesthetic problem? Is there a new genre of digital climate art, and if so, how can it be characterized and critically discussed?

This paper considers how uses of scrolling and panoramic interface in interactive filmmaking can integrate visual research and cultural representation in ways that draw viewers into the media arts/scholar’s process. The technique I have been developing in the use of panorama is found in Cultures In Webs (2003), Something That Happened Only Once (2007), Outside/Inside (2007) and Voyage Into The Unknown (2008), and in my latest project, CANYONLANDS: Edward Abbey In The Great American Desert. In Another Way of Telling (1982), in which John Berger and Jean Mohr develop text-image works that are part exposition, part narrative, and part poetic evocation, Berger describes the kind of viewership or image-reading that using photographs in sequences provides:
Eisenstein once spoke of “a montage of attractions”. By this he meant that what precedes the film-cut should attract what follows it, and vice a versa… In a sequence of still photographs, however, the energy of attraction either side of a cut does remain equal, two-way and mutual…. The sequence has become a field of co-existence like the field of memory.

I was struggling to envisage a Rodney King computer game. Initially, one would be confronted with an interface asking you to choose one of two options, to be a Controller or to be a Transgressor. However, in response to your privileged position as custodian of the system, the role of Controller is set as a default, whilst transgressor is ghosted and inactive.

As the game opens on the first level you are alerted to the fact that your system has been infiltrated by a rouge ‘virus’, which you perceive to be crammed with transgressive algorithms. The ‘virus’ is moving at high speed along a communications bus, and you fear for the security of the cherished resources and privileged information stored in discrete locations elsewhere in the system. In response to this perceived threat you dispatch a series of devices programmed to ‘protect and serve’ and this level of the game develops into  a scenario of cat and mouse. The object of the game at this point is to apprehend the ‘virus’, and to return it to the part of the system which has been labelled the ‘Trashcan’, a location within which all redundant, inconvenient, unsightly and transgressive elements are deposited, out of sight and out of mind. Once the ‘virus’ has been apprehended, this stage of the game is complete, and you are at liberty to move on to the second level. The second level of the game borrows elements from ‘Street Fighter II’. However, as the controller you have up to eight agents at your disposal, arrayed against the single transgressor. The object of the game is to determine an adequate response to transgressive gestures on the part of the ‘virus’. If for instance, the virus raises itself to an angle of 20 degrees or greater, you are presented with a choice of options ranging from administering a swift blow to the side of it’s head with a long handled baton, shocking it with a electrified prod, or placing your heel onto the back of it’s neck. This stage of the game is over when the ‘virus’ either assumes a position of absolute passivity, or lapses into unconsciousness,
On the third level of the game, you are confronted by the uncomfortable knowledge that the tactics employed on level two have been scrupuIousIy logged in the systems memory, and you
are called upon to defend your choice of responses as measured against the perceived threat to the system posed by the transgressive ‘virus’. If you succeed on this level, if you are able to
create an argument which sufficiently demonizes the transgressive ‘virus’ and amplifies the danger which it potentially posed to the continued smooth running of the system, then you are at liberty to play another game.

All digital forms of media – from art to entertainment to raw information – have undergone radical changes in systems of production via the personal computer. Equally important to this change in systems of production, however, has been an attendant change in the systems of distribution for all forms of data. This transformation of distribution systems is restructuring the economics of digital media creation and ownership while presaging a reformation in the aesthetics of digital art and entertainment. These changes signify a global diversification in the production, distribution, and consumption of media. Accompanying this economic and aesthetic reformation is an expanding evolution and diversification in means of production for all media forms. The presently transpiring restructuring of the predominant media industries that had constrained the scope of art, entertainment, and information for most of the 20th century suggests the emergence of a “new media order”, a diverse and extensive world of created digital media with correspondingly distributed economies. An examination of the impact of these changes on the music industry can illustrate what is at stake for producers and consumers, and where things might be headed: individualized hyper-economies and an authentic manifestations of the borderless economy that is so often disingenuously espoused by classical transnational corporations. Because data doesn’t need a passport, this shift in means of production and distribution creates the possibility of a less privileged global economy.

Many people worked on synesthesia with audio and video. The age of information moves to an age of physical information using conceptual and intelligent softwares, robotics and real digital fabrication. This last year, I have been interested in materializing music. Writing a traditional score is most of the time not adequate because time and its perception are not behaving the same way as in instrumental music. Frontiers between creative process and performance process merged thanks to non linearity of time with algorithmic arts. Also, a generated piece does not have one single timeline. It is something much more complex that could only be described and written linearly until the combinatory pieces of Stockhausen in the 60’s. Thus, representation and score combine in many cases and the need to write or describe music is very different from the one for instrumentalists.

While online practices for learning and creative production have captured the attention of artists, arts educators and cultural organizations worldwide, techniques for highly collaborative and dynamic peer-to-peer forms remain an area of great potential for academic and artistic conferences. Randall Packer provides an analysis of The Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium he organized and co-chaired in the spring of 2015 in the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The event served as a forum for sharing emergent strategies that advance the network in a free and open dynamic space for creative dialogue and artistic exchange.
The Art of the Networked Practice | Online Symposium was held online and onsite, uniting local and remote participants in presentation and dialogue via Web-conferencing. The symposium demonstrated how networked space could be used to stimulate creative dialogue and the open sharing of knowledge through an online global exchange. The symposium events combined performance, exhibition, online discussion, social media, chat, keynotes and panels to explore and debate the role of the network in our individual and collective practice as artists, scholars, and arts educators. The project was sparked from my ongoing exploration of live, trans-global communications as a catalyst for collective art and discourse.

The tendency to muddle temporality in digital media in order to create an immersive experience hints at a change in the psychology of vision from a linear axiom to a disjunction that occurs in the difference in durational rhythms. This spatialisation of time creates a spectacle of visual pleasure. Catherine Clement argues that there is an element of ecstatic rapture about the suspension of time. This hyper-realism found in digital cinema follows Deleuze’s idea of the ‘time-image’ as it recalibrates the psycho-visual to a discontinuous temporal rhythm of destabilised images. It is a suspension of mental acuity. The ability of the hyper-realism to seduce is in the interval that characterises the digital media. In the terminology of Virilio (1991:16), ‘[t]echnical chance has created the desynchronising circumstances of the picnoleptic crisis…’ The crisis is the momentary lapse in consciousness that exposes absence. It is violence that seduces the conscious rhythms of the digital observer. The fluidity of thought is disrupted as the conscious awareness disappears, there is an absence of the self. Time flickers like a cursor on the screen as broken repetition distorts rhythm. The interval is always unexpected. Caught unaware, a rhythm is born out of the absence. A moment of syncope, a moment of rapture: this is a digital rhythm.

In my paper I will discuss my practice with art and particle physics, focusing on the panel’s central theme of “Singularity”. I will argue that the “singularity”, a point with no dimensions, cannot exist in any meaningful sense as a physical entity, yet it underpins much of quantum physics. Although it is a hypothetical entity, yet which becomes more manifest as we get closer to it, it will never be fully realized. I believe that the singularity can be understood as a “coherent” entity, to borrow from the concept of “quantum coherence” – in the interaction between the coherent entity and the physical world (i.e. as soon as we attempt to measure it) it “decoheres” from a theoretical form into the physical forms of space, time, energy and matter. Like Zeno’s arrow, the nearer we get to the singularity, the harder it becomes to get there.
I was inspired towards this position whilst undertaking an “art@CMS” collaboration at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at CERN. During my time at CERN I heard (as yet unsubstantiated) rumours from the coalface of the Large Hadron Collider, that the recently discovered Higgs Boson (a.k.a. the ‘God Particle’), postulated as the most fundamental particle, may actually be a composite entity, made up of other higher energy particles. This empirically suggests the concept that the journey towards the “singularity” is like a Zeno’s arrow of ever-decreasing scales and increasing energies.
I will augment my discussion by presenting one of my projects, Edge of the Observable (2014). This is an audiovisual artwork that explores the limits of materiality and knowledge through an experimental manifestation of data taken from experiments at CMS. The work seeks to manifest the sublime and dynamic parameters of particle collision event data by enhancing the formal material and energetic qualities of such data, using an experimental optical physics setup I developed. This enhances the area in the core of the collisions, which is a tiny black void-like sphere, technically termed the ‘vertex of kinematic undetectability’. Like the event horizon around a black hole, we can see the dark edge of its form but perhaps never access its heart. Thus the “singularity” becomes a symbol of our striving for ever increasing knowledge, pulling us ever closer towards what is an ultimately unattainable goal.

Increasingly the use of computer graphics technology in the world raises questions about its effectiveness as a cross-cultural means of expression and communication. This paper discusses the effect of culture on cognition, and how this may affect the way artists and designers from different cultural backgrounds perceive and use computers in their work.The complexity of the use of pictorial codes in different cultural contexts is highlighted, leading to a discussion on the existence of a universal pattern of communication based on iconic representations. The extent to which cultural differences may influence computer graphics’ aesthetics is examined, and examples of Brazilian Computer Graphics works will be presented. It is argued that, in spite of a trend of continuous internationalisation of computer graphics softwares and equipments, culture still plays a fundamental role as it affects computer graphics’ artistic approach, methodology and results.

Note: The title of the paper is different from the presentation title: Computer Graphics as a Cross-Cultural Experience

In linking the historical term ‘Bauhaus’ with the contemporary term ‘electronics’ and speaking of the ‘Electronic Bauhaus’, the author wishes to emphasize the continuity of the new and challenge it to discussion. Walter Gropius’s guiding conception of the Bauhaus as a pioneering school, founded on the idea that the urge to create is “an integral part of the substance of life in a civilized society”, included the grammar of creation. Today immense efforts are still required to arrive at a grammar of creation pertinent to our own time, efforts that include knowledge of media technology. This paper focuses on three main topics: the ISDN for art: towards an architecture of communication; ecotechnology: design with ecology; and the expert system artist: fifth-generation computer culture.

The Electronic Garden is made up of nine freestanding units or ‘plants’, each consisting of a cluster of similar ‘flowers’ with the tallest being close to human height. The installation is exhibited in a darkened space of sufficient size to allow spectators to stroll from one plant to another, much as they would in nature. Since the Garden is activated by sound, spectators are encouraged to clap, whistle or sing, or talk to the plants as they would to a pet Some even arrive prepared with their favorite musical instrument. The sculptures are constructed of acrylic plastic, (the ‘blossom’ of each flower) and stainless steel, (the ‘stem’). Employing the principles of fiber optics, incandescent bulbs concealed within the opaque ‘ovary’ of each blossom transmit their light through the translucent ‘petals’ and ‘stamen’ causing them to glow and shimmer. The lights are arranged in three separate colour circuits, each responsive to a different frequency, while their brightness is determined by the volume of the input stimulus. At the base of each stem, an electromagnet is positioned so that when activated it exerts a pull upon it.

The pulsing of this magnet causes the sculpture to tremble and sway much as dws a real flower stirred by the breeze. Finally, the sounds emanating from each cluster are generated electronically and manipulated by the same three frequencies that determine the colour of the lights. This produces small but infinite variations similar to the repetitive yet ever-changing rhythms heard in nature. Activating these responses is the feedback system, whereby the spectator sounds already mentioned are picked up by microphones, amplified and fed to the various switching devices that control output to the lights, electromagnets and sound synthesizers.

Hopefully this brief description is sufficient to introduce the reader to the Electronic Garden and provide a basic understanding of how I made it. In fact this always seems much easier to explain than why, which I find I’m often asked in a slightly skeptical tone of voice as though there was something perverse or contradictory about the concept, that in this world of already ubiquitous technology, a garden surely should be sacred and made of good old-fashioned dirt. I can even imagine myself being ironic, were it not I who had devised it. So it’s with some care that I have retraced the path I took that led me to my switched-on garden.

Amongst the thematic schemes of the CYENS CoE is the fostering of art & technology synergies, and the development of infrastructures and archival practices to support the great volume of data under the cultural and creative sectors, powered by emerging technologies like Virtual, Augmented, and Extended Reality (VR, AR, XR). While this scheme is still in its genesis, it poses a distinct opportunity to establish an in-house and country-wide digital archive of new media art that develops simultaneously with the artworks and art & technology projects it hosts.

This paper delves into the key considerations that are necessary to effectively collect, preserve, and provide access to new media art in a way that meets the needs of various stakeholders such as artists, scientists, and cultural producers. It also provides a methodological outline that incorporates state-of-the-art approaches in line with the ISEA Summits for New Media Art Archiving aims of archival connectivity; additionally, it employs the affordances of emerging technologies from parallel archival projects of the centre. By combining these affordances into an agile strategy, a reflexive archive can be developed from the growing database of CYENS’ art & technology related activities that will serve both as a preservation tool and an active repository for artists and scientists. This archive could additionally assist the contributors to further develop and disseminate their artworks and practices, across cultural, scientific and industry circles.

The goal of the proposed archive would be to become a local and regional documentation hub of new media art, preserving it for the future and making it accessible to an international network of institutions and archives.

Premature over-promotion of any and all artworks created with computers has caused the critical establishment to draw parallels with the tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Simultaneously, computer artists accuse the art critical establishment of being uninformed, myopic, and hopelessly out of touch with the new media concerns. Artists disdain the oft-exhibited science fiction grotesqueries masquerading as art: bad critical reception is blamed on the inclusion of this “nerd aesthetic” in their art shows. On the other hand, some more technical-minded factions also wonder when computer artists will actually learn to program, or produce something besides canned paint system imagery and indecipherable, bad video tapes. Such squabbling and shifting of the blame from one group to the next is not the way to correct the problem.

Many of the standards by which we have evaluated computer art have evolved outside of the high art community. Yet the standards in our own computer graphics infrastructure tend to be much lower. Often the concepts of science and tools of technology are merely appropriated and exhibited as art without any authentic artistic transformation or social context. Work, when it refers to contemporary art world trends, often does so as a form of commentary rather than genuine individual expression. Without true understanding of either art or science and technoiogy, this work can hardly help being superficial. We need to fairly evaluate work using standards as high as those by which the rest of the arts are judged. We need to extend beyond the isolation of our small community and address broader issues. Most importantly, we need to take advantage of the uniqueness of computing, and push those properties to their extreme limits. Only as these issues are addressed and resolved will computer art gain in significance and authenticity.

We present the storytelling of the Enigma project and explain how producing a matrix of 3D environments, which can be deployed on a very wide variety of media, supports the proposal of the Agnostic Media Environment (AME) concept.

Abstract

Since the beginning of the ‘80s, new media have entered the artistic scenario of continental Southeast Asia (Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam). New concepts and technologies, ideas, styles and values from global culture have started to interact and merge with specific traditional artistic meanings and expression of local culture.

From the very beginning of Southeast Asian civilization, the body has played a central role as a coherent and living expression of codified aesthetic, artistic and philosophic values. In visual and performing arts, use of the body and the dynamics of gesture are emblematic of the identity and transformation of socially-shared meanings. After a several decades of informal pictorial experimentation, owing to the influence of Western artistic movements (Poshyananda 1992), new media arts have given back to the body its primal role. Indeed, digital, video and performing arts – due to their specific ephemeral and transitory status – can be considered as some of the best media for representing the ‘changing body’, faithfully reflecting the dynamics of contemporary Southeast Asian metropolitan culture.

Abstract
This talk describes the ideas behind, and the practical realization of, the artwork The Inexhaustible, Exhaustive Philosopher.

Overview Description
The Exhaustive, Inexhaustible Philosopher is an installation work for a gallery or other public space. It consists of a large number of toy robots that speak cod philosophical statements gleaned from internet searches for certain linguistic patterns based on the pattern “I _ therefore I __”.

Thematic Statement
The Artist believes that with the rise of the Internet, the Shakespeherian–Monkey singularity has finally come upon us, and that all valuable Profound Philosophical Statements have already been made by users of the Interwebs. Thanks to the munificence of Google™, Bing, Ask™ Jee™ves™ (and in loving memory of Magell™an, InfoS™eek, Sna™p and that crowd) He believes that all that is required to realize the remaining works of philosophy are a large number of toy robots appropriately modified with Arduino boards and the Latest speech-synthesis technology.

Practical Realisation
The installation consists of a large number (around 20-30) toy walking robots of the kind shown in the figure (this particular model is about 30cm high). They move around a space via a random walk – ideally a site-specific location would be found for them, such as on a little balcony, or they could be placed within a pen in a standard gallery space. They have been adapted via the use of the Arduino board and a speech synthesizer to speak texts that have been derived from a large-scaleGoogle text search for the phrase-template “I _ therefore I ”, with the exception of phrases that being “I think” or which end with “I am”. Every few minutes each robot begins a vocalization consisting of a large number of phrases which either begin or end with the same phrase; for example, if the search term was “eat” some sample spoken output would be:

I eat therefore I think.
I eat therefore I think.
I eat therefore I think.
I eat, therefore I live!
I eat Therefore I Ham.
I eat therefore I think. I
I eat therefore I think.
I eat therefore I cook.
I eat, therefore I care.
I eat, therefore I cook
I eat therefore we are.
I eat therefore I run
I eat therefore I run
I Eat Therefore I Poop
I eat therefore I SPAM
I Eat Therefore I Cook.com
I eat, therefore I pout

One robot, bearing a badge with the words “I am René Descartes” just repeats “I think therefore I am” constantly. Approximately every hour a plotter (situated behind the robots) holding a piece of chalk writes on to a chalkboard one of the statements, randomly chosen. At the end of the hour it exchanges its chalk for an eraser, and deletes the statement.

Keywords: Digital Games, Digital Art, Exhibition Room, Arcade 

The purpose of this work is to think about the exhibition room (gallery) based on the presence of digital games. This proposal is a specific development of a research project that studies the exhibition space towards the presence of digital technology. In order to achieve the goal, we will focus here on the Interactive Space of Life Sciences (EICV), which is part of the Museum of Natural History and Botanical Garden of UFMG, in Belo Horizonte/MG. Specifically, this article discusses the exhibition space and its curation when digital games are shown in it. Considering that, we debate about the configuration of the contemporary exhibition space, bringing up the relation among art, digital games, technology and science.

Image apprehension is a dynamic biological process where our brain receives data and converts it according to previous memories. To experience and understand images, we take simultaneously the role of observers and subjects in action. Our perception is embodied and situated in a world that can be both real and virtual. We receive images all around us and we anticipate movements and project our actions in the world. The role of interaction and plasticity in live-wired and embodied experiences, together with augmented technologies, are shaping and expanding human perception. Anna Unterholzner’s and Diana Carvalho’s artworks explore invisible and expanded imagery to reflect about arts-based research as knowledge creation, production, and dissemination.

This paper suggests evolution as an alternative to explicit design. The main ideas are: viewing research as an evolutionary process inspired by Darwinian theory of natural evolution, modeling musical composition as a process of optimization, seeing musical engineering as the exploration of the emergent properties of a complex dynamic system, and modeling this complex system as a one-dimensional cellular automaton. The interactive evaluation of the visual representations and their mapping to polyphonic MIDI streams involves selection, the application of genetic operators, and reproduction. A selective approach is implemented as part of a framework for musical experimentation written in HMSL.

This paper outlines the creative process and the immersive approaches undertaken to create the location-based story- telling experience The Fall of R’Thea. The installation revolves around the theme or Artificial Intelligence, digital humans and artificial life and aims to immerse the users into a hybrid environment of a physical and virtual nature. The experience is told through multiple mediums, and the story needs to be carefully pieced together by the audience. As this experience requires participants to engage in various activities, the immersive qualities shift in type and intensity. The authors, through this paper, aim to share the approaches they chose to immerse the participants into their spaces, as well as highlight the challenges and the lessons they learned.

I created the artwork Shiver to poetically talk about my ideas concerning the relationship between architectural and bodily space in creating a sense of the self.  In this paper, I will review my theoretical research and discuss how that research informed technical decisions I made in designing Shiver.

Shiver is an immersive, interactive environment.  The title refers to the chill or slight tickle felt on the skin if activated by light touch or closeness.  Upon entering the artwork, visitors initiate trickling flows of water.  These cling to, and seek paths along, the walls’ minor topographies.  A sensor matrix tracks the direction and speed of people’s movement in the room.  The information is used to move the curvy, crawling water rivulets along the wall’s surface.  The reaction of the water flows gently bring visitors into a conversation with the artwork, encouraging them to move slowly and change perspectives in order to cause the room to react.

Skin is used as a mechanism and a metaphor for shifting boundaries between self and space.    My premise is that there are fluctuating borders between body and space. Our skin encases the viscera of our physical body. Our senses extend that border beyond our corporeal selves.  Skin is incredibly sensitive and helps us gauge the size and ambiance of space.  Boundaries between the self and space shift with psychological, physiological and environmental fluctuations.  Various organic elements in my installations, such as wind, water, heat, light and motion, serve to create subtle shifts of air movement, humidity, temperature and vision to activate the body surface and bring it into direct relationship with its environment.

Through activating the skin, a connection between our inner and outer ecosystems is made palpable.

This talk presents our installation in progress The Fluidity of Breath, based on studies of the reciprocal mechanism of oxygen/Co2 exchange between humans and oceans – in essence, the breathing of the world. We include how our distinct disciplines synergize a new experience of environment, and earlier collaborations in VR, installation, video/sound.

Symbiosis occurs when distinct entities engage in long-term interaction. This artist’s talk by collaborators Deborah and Richard Cornell considers the shaping and rationale that inspires autonomous artists to meld independent expressions into new occurrences of medium and expectation, using the bridge of technology. It will discuss three works from the 20+ year trajectory of Deborah and Richard Cornell’s collaborations, in VR/animation, installation, video, and sound, and how interpretations from their distinct disciplines synergize a new experience of environment.

It also introduces the installation-in-progress, The Fluidity of Breath. They envision the reciprocal mechanisms of oxygen/Co2 exchange in humans and oceans – in essence the breathing of the world – based on the work of scientists studying marine phytoplankton and botanical systems and consider the impact climate change has on the highly interconnected systems of human existence. They imagine a meta-structure to express the overarching symbiotic shape of this immense breathing world.

The work is installed in a darkened space, with two-channel video projected over a 3 x 6-meter mural, with sensor elements that combine satellite data from CO2 levels with the number of viewers in the room. This data then alters the work in real time.

The Friendship of All Nations investigates the possibility of realising an old Soviet propaganda in a contemporary world through a network of real people and their existing or forming friendships.

The notion that all nations in Soviet-block countries (expanding to all nations globally if their anti-Soviet governments would be removed) are friends was a fundamental aspect of official Soviet propaganda. It was celebrated through Nations Friendship Days, “Rainbow” festivals and other means such as naming collective farms or universities to reflect the idea.

As a teenager at school in Soviet Estonia I learned to sing in Georgian, Latvian, Ukranian, and other languages of Soviet nations. However, I did not know how to say the simplest things in those languages, nor did the teacher. I had no real friends in those republics. Neither had I visited them all. To perform the songs we sometimes dressed up in the national costumes of those other nations. It was an alienating experience as, firstly, we did not understand what we were singing. Secondly, as teenagers we did not care to be friends with strangers 2000 km away about whom we knew nothing. Thirdly, as it was forced upon us we naturally rebelled against the whole idea. In contemporary ex-Soviet Union, to talk about the friendship of ‘all’ nations is a laughing matter. Even if it is discussed with the contemporary world in mind whilst trying to forget the old propaganda, it is hard to influence people to think tolerantly about those who belong to different cultures and/ or religions. Moreover, certain conflicts within the ex-Soviet-block seemed to be the result of forced friendships.

My experience in Western Europe has revealed a different type of ideology for tolerating others. Nation(alism)s seem to be something to be ashamed of because issues of race, gender, and religion are presented as being intrinsic. Here there are similarities between western political correctness and Soviet propaganda.

The Friendship of ALL Nations is a networked sound installation, which is realised by establishing real connections with real people in different parts of the world. These people will become contributors/donors to the work: each donating a song of their personal choice, which by their personal opinion is somewhat characteristic to their nation. They are also asked the reason, why that song and those letters/stories become part of the on-line work. In the gallery, several mobile objects played streams of those songs depending on a location of the object in a space. At any time only a selection of songs was played, ideally using the songlist generated by on-line users. In the gallery one could hear individual songs, online users will hear only a mix of songs on selected playlist, but they do have the ability to choose songs from the overall list into the songlist, this way the on-line users have the ‘power’ to form friendships between nations.

Everybody can also become a contributor/donor to the project by sending a song of ones choice for ones country.

This article is the culmination of an intervention designed to improve active engagement with emerging technologies at a public mixed reality event. An opportunity arose to experiment with the design of interactive audience experiences at the The Fun Palace: Carnival of Mixed Realities—an event that took place in 2019 and featured 10 installations with close to 400 attendees. A number of strategies emerged to increase attendee engagement that may be useful for xR developers, museum curators, and event producers that present interactive technologies and installations publicly.

According to media reports, 2014 was the year of the unmanned aerial vehicle or drone. The increasing normalisation of drone surveillance and warfare has caught the attention of the general public. During a recent artist residency at Bundanon Trust, NSW, Australia, we worked with dancer Alison Plevey to explore aspects of our relationship to drones, mounting a camera on a quadcopter to record site responsive performances in the natural environment. In the resulting videos a young woman exhibits a range of different emotions, including curiosity, agitation, engagement and resignation in response to the persistently intrusive drone.

This work is one aspect of a larger project, Augmented Terrain, supported by the Australia Council to develop an immersive video installation that reimagines the relationship between nature and culture. Augmented Terrain, is an immersive audio- visual installation where we present highly detailed aerial views of landscapes and waterways in the Asia pacific region that we dynamically manipulate in ways that reveal their underlying fragility. Through collaboration with Slovenian artist Marco Peljhan, co-founder of C-Astral, we are using their fixed wing drone system to photograph these zones in crisis. Our vision is to configure the land as active and to imagine it being able to speak and make comment about human impacts upon it.

Art museums are committed to expanding the digital display of their archives by using digital technology, diversifying the types and forms of their exhibitions, increasing archival formats, and promoting repeated visits anytime, anywhere. Many museums have also begun to use virtual reality (VR) display platforms such as Google Arts & Culture, which is intended primarily for viewing art in high-resolution images and video. More than 2,000 cultural institutions, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Orsay Museum in Paris, use this platform to provide virtual content. It is reasonable to infer from this that the rising popularity of VR technology and of online VR platforms targeting the art sector should also have potential applications in archival work. For example, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul already utilizes VR technology for documenting its physical exhibitions. However, despite the growing application of this technology, few studies have comprehensively studied the forms and content of the artworks archived in traditional museums (i.e., paintings and photographs) and by comparison to electronic art archives that utilize modern VR technology. By analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of virtual reality technology, this study aims to explore the potential of such applications in the context of digital archiving. In this paper, we take several major modern and/or contemporary art museums as examples for analysis and comparison. We show that virtual reality technology has brought advantages to the archival work of contemporary art museums, such as enhanced immersion and expanded diversity of exhibits. Further, it appears likely that the increasing commodification of VR technology will further possibilities in the future.

The challenge of the unready and the unforeseen. The omnipresence of technology dares artists to find their voices using new media.

While there is plenty of discussion about ease of artwork distribution, the reproduction of existent art in 256 colors and the economic implications of digital copyright, the crucial question remains the nature of art. As a practicing artist and interested spectator of biology, I’ve found the metaphor of artistic development as a genetic development intriguing and practical. Often, a change in the our angle of thought allows us to capitalize on the unexpected. Art, like all other human activities will develop by trial, error, and inexorable serendipity independent of analysis. Yet reflection in situ offers an orienting chronicle of our hopes and fears. The questions raised by this paper are equivalent to the inscriptions of ancient cartographers who wrote, “Here be monsters” on the seductive blank spaces bordering their known world. Facing a new technology can be disorienting for artists who have the habit of entrenching themselves in a medium to
perfect it. Role models for approaching new technology include Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Along with the Bauhaus movement aligned towards the machine, Duchamp appropriated the ready-made and Warhol, the commercialized mass production of objects. They responded to the technology of production by kidnapping it and calling it art. Following their appropriating precedent, artists can sleep well, to paraphrase Duchamp: as artists, we define art. Nam June Paik has also pioneered efforts to synthesize artistic and technological creativity. By presuming an interaction between viewer and work, he has highlighted the importance of interactively for the artist and audience alike. His optimistic view of technology tames the specter of machines to a friendly means of expression for everyone. New media requires a unique process of constant learning the latest developments and forgetting the obsolete. Everyday, artists exploring with technology glean anew what is useful to their work from past, present and future alike. The metaphor of biological development for artistic development interests us on two levels: the first, recontextualizing the history of art, and the second, a different level, extrapolating the Internet as an organism. In conclusion we use this metaphor as a method to help us understand the topography of the present.

Panel: Imaging Capabilities of the Future

Keywords: Resolution, Frame Rate, Dynamic Range, Electronic Digital Cinematography

Whilst at the Universities of Bristol and the West of England, in collaboration with BBC R&D, I have been responsible for the production of the first higher dynamic range, higher resolution and higher frame rate experiments to measure which combination of these developing parameters of image capture and display best engages the audience. What is essentially happening here is the mapping of the capabilities of imagining equipment to the sensory levels of the eye/brain pathway. But what do the expanding parameters of the digitally captured moving image mean to the viewer and how will this affect future patterns of production, consumption and understanding of moving images?

At UoB, initial experiments were carried out to see what level of immersion 3D footage produced in relation to 2D. These tests showed that the particular kind of 3D used (binocular stereopsis) was only 7% more immersive than regular 2D. Worldwide the audience has expressed its dissatisfaction with this form, innately realising that it is a form of sensory trick. We now have greater enhancements to our computational abilities that allow us to uplevel the parameters we are testing, and more importantly, this increase in itself speaks of what is to come. Our tests have revealed the creation of a sense of depth, without sensory tricks. We have to ask, if currently a camera captures light but is also now being re-conceptualised as being capable of capturing spatial relationships and delivering meaningful data to produce models of environments – must that capacity then be tied to the existing Cartesian grids of bitmap displays, or can we look forward to truly navigable image-space? If so, what might this mean to the idea of ‘interface’ or ‘tool’ that controls our experience in this space? Might this also have to change so as to be unrecognisable as it moves further from hand and eye, touch or gesture, to become an extension of mind? This presentation will finally ask: might the design of that experience change the nature of aesthetics out of all recognition?

I WANT TO PROCLAIM SOS AGAINST ILLEGAL EXPERIMENTATION ON HUMANS BY USING  BIO/NEUROTECHNOLOGIES.

– The crime category: medical experiments (clinical trials without consent) – crimes committed with innovative scientific tools. (Combined  multidisciplinary sciences – medicine, psychiatry, physics).
– The recidive: victims home and bed becomes the place of a cruel regular crime – clinical trial.
– The body: human – is like an animal, abused by criminals for medical experiment needs.
– Implantable neuro-electronics started to be used for human functioning-operating control.

Research object. Globally, many people are suffering from newly invented technologies, approximately 2000 to 10,000 people worldwide, could even be more. Some of them call themselves TI (Targeted Individuals), some of them TI cyborgs, TI neurorobots. Some of them have implants with remote influences 24 hours per day. Therefore, they have no privacy, they are 24 hours per day tracked, 24 hours per day tortured (with UV laser, micro waves,  and so on), discredited, forced to have no authenticity, no future, no social lives. This is like the “Second Life”, except this “virtual reality game” is controlled by criminals. The victims can’t get help – scientific and competent medical, adequate police and media response. Human Rights, in their case, do not apply.

In a world overwhelmed with data, we have to rethink the way we produce and handle information. Above all, we have to rethink the way we display it so that it becomes cognitively accessible. Can we give it a more intuitive form that would better lend itself to retention and understanding? Can we give it a form better adapted to human cognition? How can we convert a database into a story, a narrative? How can we make it useful, interesting, and appropriate while still allowing for memory and recollection to take hold ? That is the challenge we have set before ourselves in investigating posthumanism.

Abstract

The global data palette                                                                                                                              For film/video and music/sound arts practice there is an emergent production reformation that represents a significant shift away from the intrinsic and fundamental restrictions of twentieth century models of time-based image and sound composition. After 100 years of incremental advancement, current moving image and sound production developments offer a radical shift not only in production technologies but also distribution and delivery systems, and what may prove most significant – aesthetic values and paradigms. Not only how we create, but how we acquire, own, store, and engage with visual and sonic materials is clearly changing. The global data palette proposes that time-based media artists will move away from the resource intensive aspects of content capture and redirect production emphasis to the post-production construction of projects by working primarily with existing content from massive databases. Such a shift places digital media creators in a substantially altered environment of creative practice, and offers greatly changed production, economics, and aesthetic engagements previously unavailable. Several technological developments have initiated this reform, particularly access to means of production (cameras, computers, etc.) and access to means of distribution (the Internet). As access to means of production and distribution becomes ubiquitous, three emerging developments function as a critical subset in the transformation of production practices. These subset changes are:

1. the affordability of massive data storage;
2. the restructuring of data ownership; and
3. the malleability of data.

Through these three developments in storage, ownership, and malleability, a fundamentally changed production model may be decisively enabled.

In this paper, we outline how we have embraced the unique aesthetics of purposefully flawed photogrammetry and ambisonic sound to provide an impressionistic experience for a virtual heritage application. Over the last decade, photogrammetry has become particularly useful for 3D reconstruction in the context of virtual heritage applications. Although even inexperienced users can achieve impressive results, flawed reconstructions still occur when, for example insufficient data is being provided. Also, the capture of non-static objects, such as plants, presents manifold challenges. Usually, one would discard such imperfect reconstruction, but arguably such glitches embody a certain aesthetic, by telling a different story.

Artist Statement

The Grafting Parlour is a fluid, growing, performative space between hybrid organisms and human worlds. The GfP is an emerging collective of artists and researchers who exchange and combine methodologies through thoughtful experimentation. Through collaborative enquiry and shared research, the GfP design communications models for interacting with different living organisms. This includes experiments with distant microorganisms and real time performances with varying views of the ecosystem, from the level of arctic bacteria, to the broad sky in Northern Finland.

Grottspace is a computer game environment where each level is an instantiation of a grotto art gallery, populated by an exhibition of Australian artists from the artist-run community. I have created exhibitions for Claudia Nicholson, Sarah Poulgrain + Llewellyn Millhouse and Philippe Vranjes. The medium of this project was a conglomerate of software that allowed for a specific location, artworks and supporting media to be kidnapped, and reassembled into something that I call an art gallery, that can be downloaded and played on a personal computer. Grottspace seeks to offer an art gallery that highlights its own lack of neutrality, and uses its history to enrich the presentation and reception of Australian contemporary art. This virtual grotto has been modeled and textured based on a 19th century grotto that still exists under a car park in inner Sydney. This site exemplifies the connection between the British invasion of Australia and the Picturesque theories of landscape that influenced the aesthetics and ideology of this process. In Grottspace I created a gallery that was overtly contaminated by history and context. I thought this might be an interesting way to present the work of my community — to put the art and the gallery together in a machine that amplifies a feedback loop of culture and context.