Presentation Data Table

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.

The three artworks of the Hacking Monopolism Trilogy are “Face to Facebook”, “Amazon Noir” and “GWEI-Google Will Eat Itself”. These works have much in common in terms of both methodologies and strategies. They all use custom programmed software to exploit three of the biggest online corporations, deploying conceptual hacks that generate unexpected holes in their well-oiled marketing and economic system. All three projects were ‘Media Hack Performances’ that exploited security vulnerabilities of the internet giants’ platforms to raise media attention about their abuse of power. These performances were staged through the global mass media for millions of spectators worldwide. The processes of the projects are always illustrated diagrams that show the main directions and processes under which the software has been developed to execute the performances. Finally, all the installations we exhibited did not use computers or networks, focusing more on the display of the processes than on the technologies.

ISEA2013, in collaboration with Vivid Ideas, presents a keynote address from Italian media critics and hacktivists Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio, whose infamous online project Face to Facebook involved stealing 1 million Facebook profiles, filtering them with face-recognition software, and then posting them on a custom-made dating website. Conceptually hacking big online corporations has proven to be a symbolic, dangerous and revealing artistic process, challenging funding principles of the digital economy and of digital communication at large. Face to Facebook work is the third part in the Hacking Monopolism Trilogy which also includes hactivist projects centred around Google (Google will Eat Itself) and Amazon (Amazon Noir).

Abstract

It is a common assumption that, in using the Internet, one is taking advantage of a newfound freedom; to peruse vast streams of data, to engage in exchanges of conversation and information, to contribute (and therefore add one’s own) subjectivity into an ever-expanding field of disparate perspectives. The user is able to manoeuvre at will, at high-speed, and re-direct course in the instant of a thought. Throughout this process, however, there is always the possibility of return, to stable spaces and familiar formats, launching points for subsequent ventures. One is granted immediate, unrestrained access to anything, everything, whenever.

This kind of idealised language is, of course, true and false at the same time. The capacity of the internet to provide contact with an unprecedented wealth of information tends to obscure the hidden trajectories and hierarchies that are built into the system. Limitless movement does have its limits; sign-posts and roadblocks are often overlooked in the relentless rush onwards. Furthermore, one could suggest that the independence of the user is being gradually hedged in, narrowed and constricted, even as such developments maintain the illusion of freedom. In such conditions, this
ends up meaning only a series of multiple choice decisions; the user’s ‘free’ decisions to surrender, piece-by-piece, their autonomy in exchange for access to new innovations and applications.

The possibility – and the pleasure – of passing for some-one else did not emerge with social media. However, the fact that, as the saying goes, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”, has made building fictitious identities much easier. We will in this panel explore the hypothesis that beyond trivial experiments with pseudonyms, the option of experimenting with “versions of oneself” on social platforms has given rise to a new genre, that we term “fictional profiles”. Our study is based more specifically around digital native profile-based works: auto-fictional or heteronymous characters that, in some cases, write and publish alone, and in others interact within “metaverse” narratives. We will consider the fictional profile as a symbiotic agent, pointer and witness to contemporary society. After a general introduction to the genre and a critical discussion of methodologies to identify its specificities, we will focus on three re-enactments of historical figures in the form of sensory and affective performative practices on Facebook and Instagram. Our study of profile-based works is an attempt to grasp these ways of existing on social networks.

Our research-creation project explores a practice of montage in room scale VR. We invited users to live an immersive version of the plane sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”. We propose a montage that adapts in real time to the displacements of the body and gaze of the spectator, creating a new dialectic between narrative and body rhythms.

The House of Affects project is comprised of the construction of an interactive audiovisual environment, and its objective is to use several video projections in a dark room. The concept was developed with a consideration for cinematic narrative space, and so allows the user to navigate a virtual space constructed specifi cally by film, by means of projections. What is under analysis is the traditions of thought, both in terms of space and drama, that might help us to understand better the processes at hand in the conception of spatial narrative and henceforth guide and inspire new forms of moulding game, story and people in space. A proof-of-concept work in progress, the interactive cinematic narrative installation projected inside a responsive architectural space designed with the aid of the computer, House of Affects is a conceptual framework for human-computer interaction on narrative expressive spaces is presented. It offers some grounds for both discussion and practice of cinematic installations in structured exhibition spaces.

The installation is attached to the exhibition environment (host) as an epiphyte,1 and by doing so it correlates to the field of behaviour framing it as a field of performance. Epiphytes adapt their structural organization, and therefore their form, to their hosts. The flows of pedestrian movements on the exhibition floor are interpreted as guiding forces for responsive organization of the spatially correlated narrative experience and as dynamic patterns with performative potential that the structure of the installation seeks to engage with. The hereby proposed structure, which acts as a space delimiter — for the site of installation is meant to be a gallery space, usually characterized by its emptiness — is developed with a consideration to its self-referential narrative content. This is achieved by a design adapted to the performative qualities of the space and its programmatic attributes, by means of the formation of niches to accommodate the interaction between visitor and the narration.

Art can be called interactive if an intelligent response (in terms of changing lights, sounds, images, moving objects etc.) to an action by a performer or visitor or to a changing environment occurs. To add such interactive capabilities to their art or performances artists have to engage in a costly and difficult dialogue with highly skilled technical persons. A data acquisition and processing system based on MIDI and Opcode’s Max is proposed to facilitate, for artists, the design and creation of interactive art.

Many artists include some form of interaction in their creation (Atkins (1994). Crawford (1994), Demers (1993), Schiphorst (1992). Malina in Leopoldseder (1990)). An interactive art installation may have a response to an action of a visitor, or in a performance, the artist may control or interact with one or more media. To detect the actions of the visitor or performer sensing devices are required. In addition to this, it may be of interest to capture environmental variables, such as  room temperature or windspeed. Up to now artists had to fall back on existing, commercially available controllers or sensing devices, designed for specific applications, i.e. with little flexibility, to include such interaction. Before examining existing sensing devices, it is important to distinguish the levels of abstraction that can be used in describing events and changes in the environment and human behaviour. For example, the description of an event or change can be:

• physical (light level in lux is represented in voltage)
• signal (rate of increase of light level)
• gestural or environmental (hand moves away from light sensor, or lights are coming up)
• emotional or multimedia (tension increases in the currently playing sequence of sounds, lights. images etc.)

These distinctions are important because the aim is to interpret the events or changes in a given context so that they can be used to generate other events or changes. Therefore they need to be expressed in a similar representation as that of the context. This can be achieved by analyzing the events and extracting features, information, meaning etc.. For instance, if the system would describe touch as the amount of pressure exerted on a surface by a finger it is not apparent from the data, without further analysis, that someone is hitting the surface or stroking it. Transducers describe an event or change only at one level of abstraction, ie. in physical terms. They are devices that generate an electrical signal (voltage, current, charge, ..) as a result of an event. Sensors and detectors however address a variety of levels of abstraction. Sensors, transducers and detectors are all sensing devices. These distinctions are also very useful in the dialogue between artists and technologists, since they often communicate at different levels of abstraction.

The history of photography has produced a fascinating wealth of theoretical narratives. However, a surprising proportion of existing narratives relies on a problematic assumption the assumption that it is possible and apposite to equate photography and vision. In this article, I demonstrate that the equation depended on certain physical circumstances and particular technical-technological operations dictated by those circumstances, and mediated by various constraints of speed. I intend to dwell on a number of strategic moments in the history of photography in an attempt to make a critical reading of the circumstances, the applications and the interpretations of various types of speed and their relationship to photography. This article concludes with the claim that in recent decades one important type of speed, namely shutter speed, has undergone a transformation that now makes it possible to challenge the ontological model binding together vision and photography.

Moreover, the probable disappearance of the shutter in the near future also permits an alternative media history of photography renouncing the traditional hierarchy in which images created by photography (i.e. photographs) are less important than the technological and conceptual systems that produce them.

Keywords: Multimodal display, haptics, wearable electronics, responsive environment, first person data, sensory participation.

Utilizing the tactile sensory channel as a key sensory modality in a full body, cross media artistic installation presents unique challenges. In this paper we describe our experiences with the design and utilization of garments containing embedded sensors and vibrotactile actuators. We follow the garments from their conception through their use in a artistic installation experienced by over 300 visitors. In particular, we focus on the relationship between touch, hearing, and sight – both in the technological implementation as well as the artistic conception.

The paper examines the ‘conversion experience’, transformational life experiences defined by a sense of universality and communion, resulting in a catharsis that can produce profound life-changing alterations in perception and consciousness. Mondrian identified this as a ‘complete break with optical vision’[1]. The paper considers the construction of this affect, through the framework of aesthetics, employing moving image, virtual reality, installation, and encompassing artworks as well as a body of related artworks as examples.

There is the potential within emerging technologies to heighten the ‘conversion experience’ within spatial environments, to drive or overwhelm the emotional state through multi-sensory strategies in order to provoke an ‘illuminated’ state, a slipping of the bonds of classically-constructed perception through an emotional and sensory provocation. The paper argues that the encompassing or installation environment may be strategically modelled to initiate such states. The research is relevant to the efficacy of any encompassing setting including virtual reality environments.

Active participation of the recipient is one of the basic themes in 20th-century artistic production. In the 1950s and 60s, op art and kinetic art, on the basis of analogue media, already revealed the artists’ intention to involve the audience in the completion of the artwork. Interactive pieces of the 1990s bring new media to the fore and pose new challenges to the viewer. The dwindling distance between artist and viewer, adumbrated, for example, by the work of Sommerer and Mignonneau, “The Interactive Plants Growing” from 1992, can be observed today in numerous works that demand a high degree of engagement on the side of the viewer, e.g. “Messa di Voce” (Levin/Lieberman, 2003) or “Flick_KA” (Weibel/ Gommel, 2007).

Potential for the improvement of public space through technology is often sought in telephone applications. However, public space exists by grace of physical interaction between people and their environment, whereas smartphones often get in the way of such interaction. In contrast, Sensory Augmentation takes physical interaction as a starting point for applications. In this paper, we therefore explore the innovation potential of Sensory Augmentation for the improvement of public space. This was done by organizing brainstorm sessions aimed to yield design concepts for the application of sensory augmentation in public space. These brainstorms brought together experts in Sensory Augmentation with various stakeholders and resulted in 34 unique design concepts that addressed social interaction, play, health, navigation, and art, in public space. These concepts, for example, included a tool for the management of private space using a personal distance-to-vibration mapping, a sense for physiological changes that are indicative of hunger, and a proposal to improve the safety of ‘smartphone Zombies’. On the basis of our analysis of the 34 concepts, we conclude that Sensory Augmentation holds a broad potential to improve public space. As such, our research provides a first look into this innovation potential and may guide further research on it.

This paper reflects on an experiment in new media art and pedagogy that combined technical research with creative output through a collaborative large-scale project. Developed at the University of Virginia, the Institute for Interanimation provided a framework for faculty, students, and local artists to collectively build an audiovisual environment called Phase 3, exploring how new technologies continually reframe what it means to be (a)live. Virtual reality pods, interactive objects, and live animations examined the social and cultural implications of mediation, virtuality, and liveness across hybrid physical/digital spaces.

Outlining a conceptual and practical framework for collaboration, the authors discuss the shifting objectives of the Institute for Interanimation, an organization dedicated to exploring the unpredictable and continually shifting thresholds between ‘real’ life and ‘virtual’ life. This paper seeks to present a few frames culled from a much longer animation. It outlines a multifaceted and practical approach to new media pedagogy that moves between the technical and the critical, the classroom and the stage, the live and the live. The intention is to share an attempt at developing an institutional structure based on change rather than permanence without shying away from tensions and complications that emerged within the process.

This paper outlines a general drive in our species to anthropomorphism, and makes particular reference to the anthropomorphic machine. It traces a line forward from the Venus of Willendorf through Greek sculpture to Artificial Intelligence and robotics. The psychology of anthropomorphism is considered. The idea of the robot as personification of fear/fascination with the technological complex is considered in this context. The relationship of cultural production to technological change is examined.

Part of the NM2 research project: http://www.ist-nm2.org, The Interactive Village is a reconfigurable documentary production for broadband delivery. The production and the development of media tools (designed to deliver the documentary content) ran concurrently – cross-referencing and informing each other throughout the three-year project. The result is a human-interest viewing space, based on village life in the Czech Republic, through which users can navigate routes of their choice selecting scenes, interviews, activities and commentary. The production takes its frame of reference from three main sources:

1.  Visual: the narrative structures used in factually-based television programmes.
2.  Theoretical: issues, debates and guidelines derived from Visual Anthropology and ethnographic film
3.  Perceptual: users’ engagement with subject-matter informed by ‘ecological’ theories of perception

The production developed a unique shooting method for reconfigurable delivery gathering an ‘organic’ collation of audio-visual material. Clusters of inter-related and cross-referenced information were formulated into a loose framework from which users organise personalized narratives. The Interactive Village interface enables the following modes:

1. Observational: the end-user sits back and watches randomly assembled clips of village activity
2. Didactic: the user chooses explanations for the viewing material selected from a variety of sources: different inhabitants (e.g. mayor or newsagent) or from different experts (e.g. male or female, history or contemporary commentary).
3. Journalistic: the user assembles a documentary of their subject of interest from the available material (e.g. the village fire fighters or rural transport issues).

In turn, these modes are also available as Basic; Intermediate; or Advanced narratives that specify both the duration and complexity of the chosen subject(s). Finally, the paper looks to future developments of the production to include: an automatic registering and delivery of the user’s retrospections and anticipations and the setting-up of a European-wide network of Interactive Villages.

Today’s world of connectivity between humans and objects of all kinds – virtual and physical – is extending rapidly, as the experimental and pioneering work of pre millennium artists and creative moves into mainstream debate, development and usage. In the next 10 years the Internet of Things aims to link us to all the “stuff” around us, everything we need to work with and for us. Additionally we start to see the evolving linkage of our bodies directly to machine and virtual “others”, in particular opening up real-time looping of all our senses to the robots and avatars we create or choose to relate to. I call this the Internet of Bodies – physical and virtual, human and machine.

Synthetic emotions
I would like to examine on this panel how this affects the concept of love? How are we shifting this, the most universal of all human needs, into new belongings, attachments and fulfillments? Can we adjust to and fully accept the evolution of love into “synthetic emotions”? Using examples from topical curatorial practices, both my own co-curations and others (such as Lyst, Technophilia, Lovemetruly) plus recent mass viewed films and tv dramas such as “Her” and “Humans”, it seems that the next decade is destined for intensive ethical and moral debates on the human / machine loving – from love bots to synths, teledildonics to cryonics the debate is on its way. As implants and sensors shift realtime connectivity to the inside of our physical body, biogels, touch and gaze tech will deepen immersive environments. How will this effect our social abilities in the real-world – will the psychologies of confused identities and power play cause chaos? Or will these shifts only have limited negative repercussions, as we acquire 21st century skills of rapidly blending parallel virtual/physical realms for joy and positive release?”

The digital environment offers an opportunity to establish a museum model that supports contemporary museum thought in regard to: collective memory strategies; inclusivity; and equity of tangible and intangible culture heritage. Al Jazeera Al Hamra, a former coastal village in Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates, was abandoned at the time of the formation of the country in the late 1960s and 1970s. It is considered one of the last traditional fishing and pearl diving villages in the nation. As the buildings are now only remnants of a time past, not only does the architecture need to be documented and mapped, but also the stories and traditions of the people who once lived there need to be recorded. Creating a Web‑based virtual environment, which documents both the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of Al Jazeera Al Hamra can provide a cohesive physical and social record of a traditional fishing and pearling village for future generations after the buildings and the people who had inhabited the town are gone. In addition to presenting an intuitive and relatively inexpensive model to implement for digitally preserving and re‑presenting tangible and intangible cultural heritage using Al Jazeera Al Hamra, an at‑risk site, this paper will address: the kinds of “artifacts” that are to be collected and cataloged. It will also take into consideration the project’s long term digital sustainability and show how this computer‑based participatory model falls within the guise of socially engaged art. The essay will conclude with practical, useful recommendations to inform current and future initiatives in preserving tangible and intangible heritage using digital media within the Arabian Peninsula region and beyond.

The Laboratory Garden is a research project and events series in development that focuses on the emerging artistic practice of incorporating plants, or more generally organic systems, into contemporary artworks using current technology and media. The project investigates this practice against the background of a larger conceptual framework in which these artworks play not only a solitary role, but are part of a proposed living heterotopian laboratory; a garden realm creating relationships between the artwork, its surroundings and its viewers. Major focus points are art and artists working with living systems as a paradigm of unfinished interaction in the context of electronic arts, where experimental practice between human and nature is marked by its character of real-time slowness and its fragile and temporal products. The emphasis on the garden as a laboratory primarily focuses on the aspects of interaction between living and organic systems, as well as technical and technological ones, that enable a shift into augmented incidents and environments.

This paper focuses on the methodology undertaken and the lessons learned, to create the location-based Virtual Reality (VR) story-telling experience. The last play was initially staged in Limassol as a student exhibition show in May 2021 and then again in September 2021 at the Animatikkon festival in Pafos. The installation is for two people and takes place in two different sections, one physical and one virtual, and it can be experienced in either order. The experience aims to immerse and engage the users by utilizing mechanisms borrowed by immersive theatre and game-design such as spatial storytelling, agency, engaging multiple senses and telling the story through multiple mediums. The integration of these various practices seems to be an important element that complements the immersive qualities of the VR experience. Furthermore, the spatial storytelling methodology, the transmedia approach, and the integration of the various physical objects into the experience seem to positively con-tribute to the storytelling aspect of location-based VR installations.

Hello, my name’s Bruce Sterling, I’m a science fiction writer from Austin, Texas. It’s very pleasant to be here in Montreal at an event like ISEA. It’s professionally pleasant. As a science fiction writer, I have a deep and abiding interest in electronic arts. In multimedia. In computer networks. In CD-ROM. In virtual reality. In the Internet. In the Information Superhighway. In cyberspace Basically, the less likely it sounds, the better I like it.

These are topics that I dare not ignore. It would mean ignoring the nervous system of the information society. The laboratory of information science. The battlefield of information  warfare. The marketplace of the information economy. As well as one of the strangest areas of the art world. When Jules Verne invented science fiction, Jules Verne was a stockbroker. Almost by accident, Jules Verne discovered that nineteenth century France had a large market for techno-thrillers. Jules Verne discovered and fed the tremendous 19th-century cultural appetite for romantic, futuristic technologies like the hot-air-balloon, the electric submarine, the  airborne battleship, the moon cannon.

Today, at the close of the twentieth century, I feel a great sense of solidarity with my spiritual ancestor Jules Verne when it comes to topics such as virtual reality, and telepresence, and direct links between brain and computer. Even as I stand here before you, I can scarcely restrain my natural urge to inflate some of these big shiny high-tech balloons with the hot air of the imagination.

But ladies and gentlemen, I have seen this done for so long now, and for *so many times,* and to so many different technologies, that I can no longer do it myself with any sense of existential authenticity. I must confess to you quite openly and frankly that I am having a crisis of conscience.

In this panel artist and managing moderator, Renate Ferro, discusses the history and relevance of the listserv platform, -empyre- soft-skinned space, which emerged in art and technology networks in 2002. Originally conceived as an open networked community -empyresoft- skinned space includes nearly 2000 new media artists, curators, theorists, producers, and others who participate in monthly discussions via an email listserv. The online discussions facilitate global perspectives on critical topics revolving around networked media. As it enters its fourteenth year, -empyre- soft-skinned space continues to be a platform dedicated to the plurality of global perspectives encompassing Australia, North America, greater Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Originally designed and implemented by Melinda Rackham and coded to exist in the VRML and Java world of VNET, -empyre- beta version was launched at ISEA 2000 in Nagoya, Japan. It was envisioned as a utopic collective meant to foster discussions where many points of view could be heard. The listserv is currently archived online by the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), and its website is hosted by the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell University Library.

While the over-arching design continues to foster an open-community based network of participants who share their discourse through educational, commercial and independent venues, there is an intrinsic and cumbersome organic life span to –empyre-’s existence. The ebb and flow of the written daily posts sometimes come on fast and furiously while at other times the pacing is slow or even silent. Though the intension was always to strike a tone of informality to allow for intellectually and culturally diverse participants, realistically over the years, generations of subscribers have posted a blend of styles from casual conversations to at times lengthy treatises designed for conference formats. While the archive of topics has mirrored the evolution of new media practices and technology, the less than ideal physical logistics that are required for it to remain active remains a constant curatorial challenge.

The Listeners is an installation and linguistic performance – enacted by visitors with an Amazon Echo. The Echo embodies a voice-transactive Artificial Intelligence and domestic robot, that is named for its wake-word, Alexa. The Listeners is a custom software ‘skill’ built on top of this infrastructure. The Listeners have their own ‘interaction model.’ They listen and speak in their own way – as designed and scripted by the artist – using the distributed, cloud-based voice recognition and synthetic speech of Alexa and her services.

John Cayley introduces The Listeners and addresses certain contexts and circumstances surrounding The Listeners and the voice-transactive infrastructure on which they are built. Cayley believes that transactive synthetic language will reconfigure practices of language generally, including the arts of language, and that it will encourage the emergence of an aurature – practices of aesthetic languagemaking characterized by the fact that their artifacts exist – both archivally and in-the-moment – supported by aurality rather than by visuality: rather than by graphics, typography, and print, as literature.

Cayley’s talk will also touch on related issues and circumstances which are critical for our current historical moment. Transactive synthetic language and its art has statements to make about synthetic language and human embodiment; the robot imaginary; identity, integral embodied identity, and new modes of being; the voice and individuality; the ‘neutral’ voice; the inner voice; the voice of reading; artificial intelligence and identified artificial intelligences (AIs); network services and personhood; network services, AIs, and surveillance; artificial intelligence, AIs, and social relations; network services, AIs, and privacy; the ‘smart’ home; transactive synthetic language and domotics; the terms, control, and ownership of network services and their artifacts; the future of reading; the future of literature; the future of the archive as language. It is difficult to exaggerate the consequences of the developments that make The Listeners possible for the art of language and also for political economy and culture as a whole.

Nanotechnologies and Contemporary Art
The contemporary art proceeds from the premise that a new media phenomenon is in principle devised by the artist as an innovation; i.e. it is assumed that resulting from his activity there originates a reality with a complicated structure of decision space (antinomies, bonds and relationships). Based on this understanding is it rightful to speak of innovativeness or active development of a new media carrier.

In the territory of contemporary art, the process going “from research to formation” of a new medium is supported by the so-called “coevolution” strategies representing a synthetic form of scientific and artistic creative work that embraces not only interpretation but also constructive activity. To find out where the essence of “coevolutionary” development strategies in the nanotechnology field lies, we shall bring in a notion of metabola. By metabola [Greek metabole — change, metamorphosis] we understand an organization type of information physical carrier that mirrors compression of qualitative and quantitative characteristics of a nonorganic structure due to activating, modeling or taking into account metabolic processes’ influence. Thus far, among the examples of such metabolas that incorporate hybrid properties of a silicone world and those of biosystems one can name nanomotors, bacterial engines, quantum biosensors, DNA switches, etc.

It is known that in biology metabolic processes imply interchange of matter, energy and information. When we point out that the main system requirement of nanoart is structural compression of nonorganic matter, we imply thereby a necessity of formation of various forms of the inanimate at the cost of provision of media carrier with the properties of growth, variability, self-preservation and reproductivity. All those properties of metabolas help us to proceed from observation of discrete objects in a discrete area to the description of materialized dynamic systems in the area of relations. In other words, it goes about comprehending the phenomenon of a new media environment existing “on the brink of chaos”, duality and hesitation, when bonds and relationships that make up a unity of the inanimate in assembly are created by way of metabolic processes. The main medium analyzed here is the nonorganic life, and the main issue under study — release of the artistic message existence time at the expense of interest to encoding, conversion and changing of this message carrier itself.

It is evident that on the “nano” level we can no longer be sure of the correctness of subdividing processes into natural and artificial ones. In this mode, the organic merges with the nonorganic, and the material with the nonmaterial, revealing in so doing their technobiological or post-biological character. Therefore, by introducing the notion of metabola — implying metabolization of the non-living, transformability with preservation of severalty, integration on the basis of differentiation — we deliberately emphasize the existing proportions of ambiguity, thus upbuilding a methodology of artistic investigation in probability terms. This is just the way to enable thematization of a new art medium obtained with the help of advanced technologies that have nothing in common with the processes of life except that those technologies have appeared through the methods that life itself avails of.

V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, NL) orchestrates relationships and interactions between different media and in the relationship between art and scientific disciplines. The connections between art, technology, media and society are continuously explored, by bringing together artists, scientists and other actors and by initiating interdisciplinary collaborations. Over the past 30 years V2_ has succeeded in establishing an ongoing dialogue within a wide network of contacts that contributes to the development of specific projects for research and presentation. V2_ offers a critical perspective on the futuristic promises that new media technologies always seem to carry. An integral part of V2_, the V2_Lab is an instigator of artistic projects which interrogate and illuminate contemporary issues in art, science, technology, and society. Our mission is to produce works of art with conceptual clarity and high production values, provide frameworks for presenting these artworks, and create meaningful exchanges on artistic research and production methods. V2_Lab is an autonomous zone where experiments and collaborations can take place outside of the constraints of innovation agendas or economic and political imperatives. The activities of V2_Lab cover a spectrum ranging from Think-Tank to Do-Tank, from research to creation and presentation of art. To accomplish this, formats such as expert meetings, workshops, residencies, publications, conferences and exhibitions are tailored to meet the requirements of individual projects. Formerly working with mainly technology-driven themes, V2_Lab now works with methodologies instead of themes, for example: design fiction and re-enactments.

The Void book circulates idealiter in the Cabaret Voltaire Zürich as the historical site of the birth of DADA. The Ludic Society, who acts as “editor” of the book on the impossibility of emptiness and the conditions of void space als public play ground. The Ludic Society defined itself in its first manifesto, published in the European Game Studies magazine Eludamos (Real Player Manifesto, In: Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture, Vol 1, No 1, 2007 (online available) as loose group of affiliates applied a variety of individual game mechanics in order to develop methods of public play, presentation and creation. The vacuum pump of experimental research on absence can be best activated there in the collective absinthe ecstasy, at any moment or at the occasion of the Void book presentation as present for the 100th anniversary of Dada in 2016. Such a public event marks the launch of a real-time space patrol, as the writer Stanislaw Lem (1971) would describe a toxicologically induced flight in the emptiness of the mental A VOID space, brain-drain controlled, experienced as VOID level in the brain of the player.

The author explains how to create a film involving synthetic actors and describes in particular the making of the film Rendez-vous a Montreal. The scenario of the film and the construction of actors are presented. The animation of actors is separated into three parts: body animation, hand animation and facial animation. The choreography of the complete film is then explained: decors, cameras, lights and actors.

New Urban Maps
The times of typing a password before the jarring modem connects to the internet were the times when the metaphor of cyberspace was to spread most briskly. It felt like crossing a border after the passport check and entering a new space of text-only communication with people connecting from all over the world. Today’s spread of mobile communication and ubiquitous computing denounce the cyberpunk theories of the nineties that proclaimed the abrogation of physical space and the human body. Digital technologies and sensors inhabit urban space, parts of the digital documents and data along with virtual communities migrate back into geographical space. The internet merges with the geographical space instead of overriding it. This trend is characterized rather by the urban GPS chasing game “Can You See Me Now?” than Second Life.

As a consequence the classical cartographic paradigm hardly applies to urban space. The street map is not a fixed representation of the terrain anymore. While using GPS and mobile internet in the city we navigate through physical and virtual space, permanently redrawing the map. Spatial annotation systems’ maps can be referred to as new paradigmatic examples of urban mapping. Spatial annotation is mainly the attachment of any digital information, comment or message to a chosen point of geographical space. Tagging with stickers or any other physical tags is referred to as spatial annotation but the interactive maps combined with localization technologies become more and more dominant. Such maps: Bliin, denCity, Plazes, and Urban Tapestries. Depending which map we use, messages can either be attached to any point on the map or to the users actual location (which is generally the case when users are commenting on the actual situation). Further features might include manual or automatic localization, setting the group of people authorized to see the annotation, or the time interval for which the comment should be published.

With the onset of cloud computing and the increasing ubiquity of our technology we are increasingly consuming electricity and natural resources, with the relationship between our gigabytes of storage and our carbon footprints easily overlooked. Is the cloud the green alternative or a dark storm brewing? With avatars in Second Life generating a carbon footprint up to three times that of an individual in the developing world then perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at The Matter of Technology. The panel convenes artists, technologists and activists to present their practices and consider our complex relationship with technology.

Panel: The Matter with Media

An error seems to be that which gets be­tween the ideal being and the real being; the error ap­pears to be a sin­gu­lar­ity, a Non-be­ing that trans­forms and dis­torts the Being. Au­dio­vi­sual tech­niques, tech­nolo­gies, de­vices and media try to sup­press er­rors; how­ever, an ide­o­log­i­cal and aes­thetic pos­si­bil­ity hides be­hind the use of er­rors. A fail­ure in an ap­pa­ra­tus pro­gram often sends back a faulty image or a sound which can­not be oth­er­wise con­ceived. Lim­its are blurred, and we are faced with the naked truth,with­out at­tires or pre­tenses. We re­ceive data, waves, and ex­posed in­for­ma­tion ac­cord­ing to an ar­ti­fi­cial mech­a­nism which con­stantly de­fines it­self in its errors. This is what makes an error unique, rev­o­lu­tion­ary and beau­ti­ful, and there lies its value. A short cir­cuit in an ap­pli­ance builds a new and un­pre­dictable world that is em­braced by the artis­tic field as one more aes­thetic el­e­ment.

Panel: On the Persistence of Hardware

The Ma­te­ri­al­ity of the Dig­i­tal: The Prob­lem­atic Per­sis­tence of Hard­ware in Dig­i­tal Cre­ation.  The cit­i­zen cre­ator of the cur­rent age is ad­ver­tised to be em­pow­ered of un­prece­dented means for trans­form­ing the world.   Promises to ‘Make a smarter planet’ (IBM) and make.?believe (Sony) harken back to the po­et­ics Plato would expel from his Re­pub­lic.  This paper will at­tempt to eval­u­ate the ide­al­ism of the dig­i­tal age with re­flec­tion of the ma­te­r­ial cir­cum­stances of the hard­ware which is ex­pected to gen­er­ate it.

Poster Statement

Summary:

The McLuhan Probes is a web site (www.mcluhan.ca) presenting an ongoing sense of visually-organized and hyper-linked documents, made by students at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada and Connecticut College in New London, USA. The Herbert Marshall
McLuhan Foundation’s goal in supporting this project is to introduce McLuhan ideologies (through design projects and readings) to young designers. The authors invite the international art and design community to participate in the making of a bi-annual electronic
journal on McLuhan.

Abstract

The visual world is one of matching, or fragmentation, and of classification. The new multi-sensuous world is one of making in which space is not a cavity to be filled but a possibility to be shaped MM, 1967, Environment as aProgrammed Happening The McLuhan Probes is a web site presenting an ongoing series of electronic, visually organized and hyper-linked documents, made by senior visual communication students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and design students at Connecticut College in New London. The Herbert Marshall McLuhan Foundation’s goal in supporting this project is to introduce McLuhan ideologies (through design projects and readings) to young designers who may not yet know of McLuhan and his influence in media theory and to reactivate interest in McLuhan among the generation who remember him as a 1960s guru. In addition, it provides a service to the general public in making McLuhan more immediate and accessible, by focusing the content of the Probes on short the McLuhanesque ‘snippets’ which McLuhan himself called “probes.” The text of the Probes themselves is provided by the Herbert Marshall McLuhan Foundation, a nonprofit Canadian institution which holds the electronic rights to McLuhan’s work. This paper will address the theories and ideologies of Marshall McLuhan within an educational context reinterpreted by a young audience. The outline, design and pedagogical process for the Probes site will be described, with attention to technical elements of the project. In particular, it will discuss the difficulties associated with the Adobe Acrobat Page Description Format when it is placed in the context of HTML-based media; how important is ‘accessibility’ to the average Internet viewer, who may be interested in McLuhan but not have a computer capable of adequately displaying the Probes? Completed Probes (from current student work in progress) will be viewed online during the ISEA presentation. The selected Probes will illustrate interpretative image and hypertext works. The authors extend an invitation to ISEA participants (artists and designers) to submit probes for the 1996 McLuhan Probes project. All entries will be reviewed by the McLuhan Foundation in December. The results will be (funding pending) compiled onto a CD-ROM.

Over the past several years, I’ve been involved with authoring tools and environments in one way or another. Initially I had absolutely no use for the tools whatsoever. Then I became a user of the tools, and inevitably moved to programming them. Now I argue about and with them. On one hand I am thrilled about all the new developments and possibilities that are continuously emerging at an impossible rate, yet at the same time, of late, I’ve often wanted to just throw up my hands and seriously request a bit of a “time out!!”. Fact is though, both my experiences and those of countless others have brought a number of issues and questions to bear. For example, the question at issue in today’s panel – a painter needs many years to master the tools of painting; an electronic artist would not recognize the work environment after such a time span. How does one master the tools in such an environment: by programming them themselves?

Yes and No! Yes, by default one will have theoretically understood the possibilities and limitations of the tool if one has programmed it oneself. But no, that doesn’t necessarily imply a mastery of the tool, Using or applying it towards an effective artistic end may still require some time and experimentation. One still has to learn to use it. (A little aside…there are times one spends so long trying to get the tool they are building just right that the original intention is forgotten. But I suppose that’s all part of the process). One way or another, the artist must be involved!

Abstract

The vast majority of individuals in the U.K. would not be comfortable killing an animal. (It is often remarked that the U.K. is a nation of ‘animal-lovers’.) However, a large proportion of those same individuals choose to eat meat: herein lies an uneasy, ethical, inconsistency. It is not the case that individuals do not have a clear knowledge or understanding of the origins of this substance, ‘meat,’ (in which the act of killing is implicit). Instead, I suggest, the distance between the actual process of slaughter and, an often plastic wrapped, bloodless, product is wide enough to allow individuals to temporarily ‘forget’ their squeamish reservations and thus proceed to consume the ‘fruits’ of a labour they themselves would be unwilling to take part in: This forgetting entails a gesture of what is called fetishist disavowel: ‘I know, but I
don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know.’ I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don’t know it. (Zizek 2008: 46)

Contrary to the notion of immateriality and commonplace imageries such as the cloud, information and communication technologies (ICT), from individual devices to the general infrastructure, are grounded in the natural world, ranging from the materials needed for production to the e-waste that is produced through planned obsolescence and aggressive consumerism. Despite such entanglement with the material substrate, the environmental implications of ICT usage is overlooked by the ICT industry, as it continues to exploit natural resources and cultivate a culture of consumption. Such socio-political landscape warrants an exploration of potential counter tactics in the field of digital art. This paper examines the environmental implications of ubiquitous ICT manufacturing, deployment, and usage, using the theories of new materialism and digital materialism. Following these theoretical lenses, the paper proposes that a focus on the material is necessary in digital art, which functions as an antithesis to the abstracting act of information/data and its purported immateriality.

I am currently teaching in a film academy in Germany which has a very long tradition in the narrative and documentary film. My task and my aim is to bring the subject of new media closer to students, who research mainly the classical ways of creating a media work, like a movie or a TV feature. But not only under this educational aspect I try to establish in my teaching and research an evolutionary line between early media works and actual developments. The early avantgardist film theory at the beginning of this century offers in its excitement about new ways of expression a lot of parallels to the discussion at the end of the century. From the technological experiments the way to the drama had to be found, trying to gain the viewers participance and mental involvement. I will attempt to sum up a very wide and challenging field in brief main thoughts.

For Rudolf Arnheim the creation and reception of media and art is a very subjective action – as there is the subjective eye of the camera and in the following the difference between the “real” image of the world and the “constructed” image of the film – and the montage as an intellectual appeal to inner discussion and combination. Bela Ballsz talks of the imaginary immersion of the viewer with the help of subjective camera means, change of perspectives, the viewer is identifying with the hero, is falling over the cliffs. Walter Benjamin completes this intention of building up an exchange between media work and viewer, when he constates the loss of the aura of an art work by the mass orientated technological apparatus. Facing fascism he saw a democratic potential, because the distanced and menacing effect of the divine art work is dissolving and a link between the work and the viewer can be established. The unique object of
cult is replaced by the innovative search for acceptance, as an offer or request by the author.

Artist Talk related to the same-titled workshop. The Human Search Engine: a millennial toolkit 4 associ@ive explor@ion”

each and every one of us is seeking something they cannot find. but is algorithmic online searching really the best way to do it?

the workshop is aimed at participants looking for a middle-ground approach towards online-life. we offer a toolkit to those who wish to neither disconnect nor let habit-forming technologies run their lives. we believe we can “deprogram” these technologies in a way that empowers us

we will kick things off with a discussion on the ways in which habit-forming search technology shapes our daily pursuits. we will then split into pairs for two main exercise rounds—one per day. their goal: becoming a human search engine

ROUND#1“mapping things out”: using a new and disruptive, rank-free search engine called Shmoogle, pairs will turn their most personal online exploration into a free-associative game

ROUND#2 “cruising via proxy”: pairs from round#1 will go on an online date, using Shmoogle as their guide. together, they will explore each others neighborhoods in hope to rediscover them through a fresh pair of eyes and a little bit of unhinged free-association

we will wrap things up with a feedback round: “make the internet human again?” pros and cons

The Millennium Film Workshop is based in New York City, NY and is one of the longest running artist-run workshops for experimental cinema and media. The non-profit organization was invented, named, and founded in 1966 by filmmaker Ken Jacobs. Millennium was conceived as a community-based organization dedicated to providing open screenings, low-cost equipment rental, and training programs. These aspects flourished under the leadership of long-time Executive Director, Howard Guttenplan. This level of creative engagement made the Workshop a valuable resource for film and media artists across multiple generations.

In 2014, the Millennium archive was acquired by MoMA. However, by 2015, the Workshop had experienced multiple set-backs. It no longer contained a physical location. In addition, membership and community interest had dwindled. All of the remaining resources were maintained in a dusty storage facility in Brooklyn, NY. In a year when the organization would have been celebrating 50 years of ongoing operations, Millennium was on the brink of extinction.

With the arrival of a new board of directors, Millennium explored multiple steps for reinventing itself. This process included a recommitment to creative programing and educational instruction. In addition, Millennium participated in outreach efforts with film festivals, community organizations, and artists. These symbiotic actions allowed Millennium to move forward as an organization. The following presentation will highlight the creation of Millennium’s digital archive. It will also provide an overview about current programming efforts and the organizational vision for the next 50 years of operation.

This presentation will provide an overview of the previous ten years of operation for martart.org, or The Mixed and Augmented Reality Art Organisation, as we were originally launched as, as ISEA Sydney in 2013. Since our launch by the myself, Paul Thomas and Ross Harley marart.org has seen several conceptual transitions and a sound body of outputs, including exhibitions and symposiums in Adelaide, Munich, London, Fukuoka, Merida and Hertfordshire, exhibiting an evolving format that has progressed from defining augmentation and materiality through interface, body and archival politics and approaches, to fashion, privacy, ownership and identity, all in the context of mixed reality discourse. This presentation will showcase these outcomes and discuss how the organization has developed, our current status quo and future directions.

The Modern Midden, a small part of the big story of waste (2015) is an immersive visual data story that engages with waste generation and disposal in Australia. The project questions a reliance on landfill as a final destination for waste disposal and this being the predominant and relied upon solution. Central to the project is the recording and instigation of participatory experiences that build upon existing data to establish new evidence in order to question our relationships with waste. This paper discusses how data visualisation can be a strategy for exploring pathways of collective change through information design by making visible the data evidence of waste generation in new ways. Participants are asked to collect, sort, and categorise refuse produced by households over a set duration. By making the data evidence of “waste” visible and physical as the byproduct of wasteful systems and behaviours, we can share and witness the new nature of our own creation: “a world of objects without depth that leave no trace in our memories, but leave a growing mountain of refuse.”

This case study asks: What happens when data, materials and actions become a collective and shared experience? How do these new layered stories become important to nature? How do data and nature converge through these collective and shared processes?

Unlike the glass screens that now invisibly separate us from the emission of light, media history includes organic and natural materials used as display surfaces that were not benign but dramatically changed the meaning of the work. While developing the media installation series “The Moon is a Mirror”, the artist examined Eastern and Western screen traditions that embraced gradient opacity and textural diffusion caused by passing light through natural materials.

When the Apostle Paul wrote about “seeing through a glass darkly”, he used the obscured reflection of the pounded brass mirrors of his time as a metaphor for our imperfect vision of reality. While still a mirror, the media’s material qualities changed the perception of the content. Translucent natural surfaces that were deliberately designed to alter the light passing through them appear in both Eastern and Western screen traditions. Flickering candlelight passing through carefully carved materials can be seen in China’s 17th Century Qing Dynasty chiseled lanterns made of ice, Maori engraved gourds from 700 years ago, and the West’s enduring Jack‑o’‑lantern traditions. Using the textural variants within natural materials to reshape light is also core to Indonesia’s Wayan Kulit history in which the partial transparency of thin buffalo leathers and the translucent quality of linen contribute to develop character and scene design.

More recently, Expanded Cinema often mediated the projection of light through organic materials, eloquently illustrated by the translucent insect wings in Brakhage’s “Mothlight” or the dust on the lens in Paik’s “Zen for Film”. The content of the films is pure light, the distortion of natural materials the interpretation. Viola’s “The Veiling” mediated translucency in installation art, and increasingly designers like Chalayan are weaving fiber optics and LEDs into organic fabrics. While image clarity is a commercial ideal, the unpredictability of light dispersion has continually lured artists. Light’s complex    interplay with texture, now seen also in projection mapping projects, touch screens and fashion design, is generating renewed interest in the semiotics of limited transparency. “The Moon is a Mirror” uses translucent organic materials found in nature as a filter to an LED animation, allowing the innate variations in density to radically alter the digital image. In the artwork, the screen changes it role from display to participant in the creation of the image.

The clichés of the blank canvas, the unchiseled stone, and the empty page have all proliferated the popular idea that art begins with a vacant surface. However, as today’s slick transparent screens now shift towards tactile interfaces, translucent media reminds us that the relationship between moving image and texture is also part of media history. Gradient transparency can be incorporated into the creative strategy allowing the materials of the screen to strengthen the visual message. Media’s age‑old nexus between object and image can be reconsidered by privileging the display surface and allowing it to have partial control over the content’s reception. We look both at and through, a natural texture not distorting but enhancing.

“The Wishing Tree” is a sort of multimedia sensorial installations made in artistic workshops that have proposed anti-consumerism thought and practice by a mix of recycling assemblage, handcraft, visual art, interactive music and technological artistic experiences. They are initially aimed at art educators and elementary and high school students and promote, from the integration of different means of expression, the integration between the visual arts, the audiovisual and digital/sensorial systems. This article evidences some aspects of these procedural art series, such as critical protagonism, agency, pro-activism and other ethical and cognitive additions in the courses of these international workshops-installations held between 2012 and 2019.

Panel: The history of things to come

Keywords: computer music history, CSIRAC, research methods, computing history

CSIRAC was probably the first computer in the world to play music, although that was never developed. The music was never recorded, but it has been reconstructed to a very high degree of authenticity. A book documenting this, The Music of CSIRAC, included interviews of several of the original personnel involved with CSIRAC and the music. This paper fills out some of the stories and background left out of the book.

Computer music is the great musical adventure of the 20th and 21st centuries, even if it has always been a rather poorly-defined concept. Obviously it has something to do with computers and it has something to do with music. The question of why someone would want to use a computer for music was first asked (in print) in 1959 by Lejaren Hiller. Now, the use of computers for music production and reproduction is ubiquitous, for artists and consumers, so many others must have asked that question. For artists, computer music may still retain the aura of a separate field of academic or artistic endeavour. For consumers, the use of computers in music is a daily fact of life. The path that led to this usage is the result of many very small steps that were neither coordinated nor goal-oriented – steps that were not labelled as scientific, consumer-oriented, or artistic. Ideas concerning timbre creation, experimental music, complex compositional systems, musical instrument design, and the enthralling power of a computation machine all contributed to a climate where something called “computer music” was created. Based on these ideas, an historical narrative could be produced, joining all of these activities in a compelling story of inevitable advances. Perhaps an equally viable narrative would be the chronicle of engineering achievements that accidentally became musically useful. Digital computers are another example. In the case of CSIRAC, the hooter circuit could be added to this list, as having a loudspeaker driven by pulses allowed people with skill and imagination to make musical experiments. The technical challenges faced by all pioneers of computer music were enormous and difficult to comprehend today. Surmounting these challenges was a contribution to what is now a dominant musical activity. An artistic history might discount some of the initial ‘buzzes and squawks’ as musically irrelevant. But a history cognisant of the current artistic, scientific, and consumer-oriented reality, should take note of the effort and dedication that now can be seen as a piece of the overall puzzle, part of the grand musical adventure of the Twentieth Century: the use of computers in music.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, Innovation, Design Thinking, Entrepreneurial Design

In Colombia, a city called Manizales has made a commitment to entrepreneurship creating the “Manizales Más” project to foster an entrepreneurial ecosystem that allows the city to strengthen the six different domains necessary to create and grow companies in a small size city of under half a million people. Government, academia, and companies have found a way to do co-creation and adjust diverse standpoints to contribute to a bigger vision, a commitment to development and cultural change, a movement that invites to believe, create and grow. In this adventure, every stakeholder as made an effort to put in the table all their abilities to help entrepreneurs. Different multidisciplinary committees were created to propose activities, conduct workshops, boot camps and living labs to improve products and create new businesses. “Manizales Más” shows how through empathy, market test, and several iterations to define the product, entrepreneurs can create and grow a company taking advantage of everything the stakeholders offer.

While the purpose of most fake news is misinformation and political propaganda, our team sees it as a new type of myth that is created by people in the age of internet identities and artificial intelligence. Seeking insights on the fear and desire hidden underneath these modified or generated stories, we use machine learning methods to generate fake articles and present them in the form of an online news blog. This paper aims to share the details of our pipeline and the techniques used for full generation of fake news, from dataset collection to presentation as a media art project on the internet.

When filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch asked an interracial group of students in segregated 1960s Cote d’Ivoire to create a film about interracial tensions and then filmed the result, he raised questions that continue ring clearly today. How are the imagination of fiction and the truth of reality intertwined? How can the processes of making and viewing films create paths to new understandings? This paper approaches cultural misconceptions and conceptual change through cognition, visual anthropology, and the arts to show that transcultural film – that which transcends borders altogether – offers us a true opportunity to “see with new eyes.”

Abstract

Mobile and portable computers are increasingly enabling interactive art experiences away from desktop PCs and gallery installations. Meanwhile locative technologies such as GPS seemingly allow for more immediate connections to be made between artworks and locations. Pervasive access to networks at increasingly disparate as well as specific locations would seem to present artists with ways of engaging audiences in new and previously unavailable ways.

Many artworks described or labelled as ‘interactive’ aim to engage their audiences by requiring or allowing for a level of participation. However, central to the character of works which employ pervasive and locative technologies, is the ‘active’ role of the audience in experiencing them. Audiences are typically expected to operate the devices employed, navigate to locations or to provide content, often of a personal nature, in order to participate.

Abstract

While the 19th Century attributed the flat world to the dark Middle Ages and its primitive believe in the edge of our earth, the 21st Century is facing a strange comeback of this image. It was the French astronomer and, a late if not a retarded romanticist, Camille Flammarion, who is to blame for the simplified view of the middle ages as the period when people believed in a flat earth. He is the probable author of an anonymous wood engraving from his 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology) depicting a missionary who just discovered the end of the world and the point where it touches the sky. This influential misinterpretation ignored the fact that the image of a spherical world was not only known to the Middle Ages – as we can see from the name and the illustrations of the famous Johannes de Sacrobosco tractate from the 13th century, De sphaera mundi – but it was actually a more prevalent model of earth.

For this roundtable, we propose a debate about public policies of memory preservation based on the specificities of digital media culture. The ephemerality of these kinds of technologies and the intensification of personal and non-professional process of digital documentation bring unprecedented ways of understanding the collections and cultural heritage of our times. We are experiencing not only an overproduction of data, which proliferates in new formats of storage in the networks but also a documentary overdose. Nevertheless, this not performs a cumulative system. Due to the speed with which technologies are discarded in shorter and shorter periods of time, loss, change, and even replacement will be more and more part of our conservation practice. For all these reasons, it seems particularly important to discuss how to deal with the cultural ambivalence of this very moment. In our debate, we will concentrate in three main axes: the online counter-collector, the open-source heritage and the digital museum as the museum of the unfinished.

Keywords: Memory, Digital Museums, Digital Heritage, Open Source, Digital Art, Digital preservation.

Abstract

Long Paper

Although we do not always realize this, the shape of most of the visible world around us is to a great extent governed by the geometry of polyhedra. A polyhedron is a shape that is covered by many (= poly) flat faces (= hedra). Even curved surfaces can often be considered as a three-dimensional tiling of infinitesimally small plane faces. If we use in this context the term ‘polyhedron’ we are generally referring to the so-called Platonic and Archimedean solids, which are convex bodies that are covered by a closed pattern of regular polygons. They have a form that is so perfect, that they exert a great attraction to both artists and technicians. Also in architecture they have been applied in many ways and they form the geometric basis of most buildings and structures. This paper deals specifically with the architectural use of these forms and with their influence on our man-made environment. They can either define the overall shape of the building structure or its internal configuration. In the first case, the building has a more or less dome-shaped, centrally symmetric appearance, consisting of a faceted or gridded envelope. Such polyhedral shapes are often combined so that they form close-packing conglomerates as for instance in apartment buildings, in folding structures or in space frames. Their original shapes are often not always directly recognizable and it is therefore interesting to investigate common characteristics and to try to find out by what geometric laws these shapes are defined and how they can be influenced in order to make them fit more properly to the demands. A computer program is being developed, with the help of which the geometry of these structures can be analyzed. Three-dimensional information becomes available, either in alphanumeric or in graphical form, which leads to a better understanding and which is necessary for their visualization and realization.

The People’s Smart Sculpture – Social Art in European Spaces is a creative research and innovation project about the cultural evolution of the European city of the future. It addresses the growing complexity of life in today’s city spaces and imminent challenges to the development of the urban environment. Digital technologies not only play an important role in the The People´s Smart Sculpture project´s art activities themselves, but directly support the urban innovation process by offering new opportunities for empowerment and societal integration of people of all social groups and are basic for the design of new digital urban labs.

Technological convergence between biological and digital computing is enabling new forms of computation such as natural computing and programmable life-like matter. Persephone is a real world project, which is part of the Icarus Interstellar portfolio of projects that propose to construct a starship research platform in orbit inside 100 years. The aim is to build an artificial ecology for the starship that will indefinitely support its community, starting with the development of artificial soils from which both new life-forms and cities may emerge. Persephone takes a bottom-up, design-led, experimental approach towards this challenge by producing a range of prototypes that can be explored in terrestrial contexts. This far-sighted strategy explores how a range of modalities may be converged through a technical practice enabled through forms of artistic research that brings together digital and biological systems. Are these fusions new forms of ecology, life, community or cities? What degree of programmability, design, creative expression and control can be exerted in convergent systems?
Drawing on cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, experimental research practices, this panel will consider how arts research can help extend an innovation platform that draws together digital and ecological interfaces with a range of other media that are likely to produce experiences that are increasingly lifelike. Expert interdisciplinary researchers lead a debate that ranges from how we may evaluate and work with new kinds of computing – to the unique contribution of artistic research in the design and evolution of hypercomplex systems.

Conceived primary as a pedagogical tool, “The Planning Game” is a scale model game of socialist economies that aims to put at work a series of concepts and tools developed after the second world war in the socialist states, emulating the developments in the Soviet Union. The mathematisation of the economy, the introduction of national statistics, the development of the cybernetics, along with the fast industrialisation, the planification and the automatisation of the accountability as well as that of the production, were some of key elements that dominated the study of economics in the socialist countries. The game shows the interactions between political actors, technocratic elites and consumers in those contexts and brings into the discussion the pressures of the 5 years plan, the “socialist” economic competition, and the impact of “economic shocks”, and reflects on the present attempt to overestimate the use of big data and AI in different areas. Oriented as much towards the present, as well as towards the future (“reaching the communism”), the industrial plans were about allowing the socialist states to cover the needs of their citizens based on “scientific calculations” (see the “rationalised needs” for every citizen) and to “fight capitalism” in the international trade.

Although mimicking the institutional structure of a socialist economy, the game can easily be adapted to a diversity of contexts – such as, hierarchical monopolistic companies, financial markets and their reliance on audit companies, evaluation matrices in systems of academic merit, or systems using Big Data (predictive policing, social media, etc.) – being a performative device meant to demonstrate the emergent fictional dimension of statistical representations in some of the milieus where monitoring and control are supposed to be strict.

Taking as starting point “Utopian Cities, Programmed Societies” project, as well as “The Planning Game”, the panel reunites presentations related to cybernetics, socialist industry, AI & cybernetics archaeology within the ex-socialist countries, and looks to offer a platform of reflection related to games as method and tool of analysis and critical intervention. Apart from the historical and theoretical aspects of the intervention, the panel will discuss game as a form of reenactment, as performative intervention, as a method to unveil the multi-scalar technological condition of socialist industries and economies. It will allow the audience to learn about the organisation of socialist industry (and the institutional incentives for generating “precarious data”), but also about the way of functioning and the incidence of the individuals. Our aim is to address aspects related to the symbiosis and dynamics between data and users, between a centralised economy and the citizens of a state, as well as the competitions between states.

1. Tincuta Heinzel & Dana Diminescu – Presentation of “Utopian Cities, Programmed Societies” project;
2. Narcis Tulbure – “Data Poverty across Economies: The Dialectics of Information Disclosure”;
3. Yanina Prudenko – “Soviet Economy vs Soviet Cybernetics, or Lack of a Large-Scale Unit of Information in the USSR”
4. Maria Mandea & Tincuta Heinzel – “The Planning Game – Game theory, economics, game design”
5. Ioana Macrea-Toma – “Cybernetics and Dissidence: The case of Mihai Botez”
6. Lasse Scherffig & Constatin Vică – “On the relevance of AI and cybernetics archeology”

This paper addresses the role of chat functionality when included in online performances that do not fundamentally require it. The explanation that chats are included to reintegrate forms of co-presence is supported by a series of interviews but immediately challenged by the author. This papers argues that the need for co-presence is not a universal one, but is rather rooted in theatre practice. Online performers with a background in the visual arts tend instead to emphasise a purely visual relationship between audience and artwork. This study also elaborates on the use of chat logs as a form of documentation.

This paper explores our evolving relationship with smell at time when contemporary interactions are becoming ever more ocularcentric. Looking at the history of the perfume industry to the burgeoning air‑freshener and de‑odourizing industry, this research explores how olfaction can deeply effect the way we experience space, sense of place and one another. It examines the ways in which smell simulation technologies are impacting the olfactory landscape while looking specifically at how they are changing and challenging the nature of artistic practice, as artists in some cases not only use these technologies in their work but also lead their development. As daily exchanges become more immersed in remote, digital, often‑virtual experience the necessity to rely upon the full range of the senses to gather information devolves, yet they continue to influence perception. The unique nature of olfaction allows it to elicit feelings that are at once intensely visceral and emotionally potent while, at the same time intellectually elusive. Unlike other senses, smell operates outside of language and smell memories accumulate outside of awareness. They can trigger feelings of comfort yet equally as quickly set off a kind of squeamish disgust. And this reservoir of smell memories develops even without our conscious knowing. We need not intend to smell smells, or be attentive to the presence of them, in order for them to build up, become stored and influence us with every breath. At the same time, contemporary olfactory technologies are enabling us to ever more effectively dupe the senses—creating smells that are extraordinarily precise and entirely fabricated. Experiences are no longer simply mediated but can now be manufactured to reside deeply within our sense memory. While all of our senses become increasingly susceptible to manipulation, smell may actually be the most vulnerable. This research explores how advancements in olfactory simulation are being enlisted not simply by corporations as an elusive marketing tool, but also by governments to promote their agendas. And, as they embark on some of the most advanced research into smell, this paper looks at how artists are beginning to question and counter with research and propositions of their own. From smell simulation projects to immersive olfactory environments and community‑based practices these projects, examined within the history, nature and politics of olfaction, consider the profound influence smell may hold— capable to illicit fear, bind us together, locate us in our corporeal condition, or offer up a promise of escape.

Abstract

Keywords: Second Life, avatar, virtual skin, imaginary, phenomenology, virtual body.

With the recent growth in Massively Multiplayer Online Games and Virtual Worlds there are emerging opportunities to explore our understanding of the mind body relationship when moving between real and virtual space. How do we understand our avatar as our represented ‘presence’ in virtual space? What are we identifying with when we identify with an avatar? Do we have a phenomenological experience of the virtual body? In other words, do we experience the body of our avatar? Don Idhe (2002: 15) notes that virtual reality bodies ‘are thin and never attain the thickness of flesh’, although he does acknowledge that ‘one’s “skin” is at best polymorphically ambiguous, and, even without material extension, the sense of the here-body exceeds its physical bounds’ (2002: 6). Do we experience skin, virtually? Is virtual skin simply artifice, only a response to the visual and thus remains on the surface, only skin deep? Or does the imagination of virtual skin provide something else, an interstice between the sense of presence and our experience of absence? Can we have a sensory experience of virtual skin?

Drawing from Benedict de Spinoza and Gaston Bachelard, this paper explores the relationship between the post-human imaginary and the body of the avatar when interacting with virtual worlds, and in particular the virtual world of Second Life (SL), created by Linden Labs in 2003 with barely 1,000 users (Rymaszewski 2007: 5). A particular feature of SL is the accessibility of the platform to build and customise spaces. Using SL building tools to create objects and manipulate terrain, along with the application of the SL programming language, it is possible to have a high level of control of the creation and manipulation of an environment. This research has previously used narrative as a method to explore the posthuman imaginary in virtual worlds and to de-code the complex layering of conflict between the real and the virtual. The focus of this paper is our relationship to the body of the avatar and to the represented self in virtual space.

The practice of New Media Art: The roundtable will examine how new media art practice reframes our contemporary understandings of perception, cognition, and consciousness through a myriad of approaches. Innovation, accident, and crisis defined the perceptible qualities of new media artworks; invention, serendipity, and speculation catalyzed and altered the past, present, and futures of new media art practice. These practices – both individual and collective – frequently overlap with other aspects of art theory, curation, and exhibition. Perpetual increases in transistor density of integrated circuits drove artists working with digital technologies to revise their practices at an unprecedented rate. The roundtable speakers are participants in the development of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of New Media Art, volume 2 focusing on artists and practice. The provocations posed by the artists is to make sense from personal perspectives of what has driven their practice and its context within the evolution of Media Art. What were and are the achievements, failures, expectations, demands and dreams for art under the title of New Media Art. Each speaker will give a short presentation to identify key areas of focus that will stimulate the roundtable discussions. Discussion with Session Chair Patrick Lichty.

The notion of the artist taking on the role of the scientist is not without historical precedent. In the 1960’s E.A.T., Experiments in Art and Technology, led by Bell Labs’ engineer Billy Klüver, aided artists such as Robert Rauschenberg in pushing the avant-garde to integrate technology. Sullivan (2005) maintains that the time has come to examine art as data and artistic practice as research. The digital revolution produced a new artist model for today’s avant-garde and has been described as a Merlin, a trickster magician (Hickey, 1997). Today’s digital lifestyles provide opportunity for cultural study and perhaps a new model for the artist-researcher who is creating a paradigmatic shift, the digital aesthetic.

Panel: Diagrams, Formulae and Models: Aesthetic and Scientific Strategies of Visualisation

Keywords: Diagrams, Art, Quantum Mechanics

This paper will explore links between art and science by focusing on Richard Feynman’s 1979 diagrammatically enhanced lectures. These lectures explore various theoretical understandings of the quantum world, revealing new possibilities that insert different realities into the physical world. These different realities will be compared with Gilles Deleuze’s writing on diagrams revealed in the work of artist Francis Bacon. Feynman and Bacon were both drawn towards the diagram as a means to visualise and explore the probability of something occurring.

In this paper, I will trace a path in which the starting point will be the spoken word, made immortal through writing, and which will lead to the consideration of the word as the fundamental constituent part of today’s algorithms. This analysis will be carried out without losing sight of the fact that we are within an artistic research, in which it is necessary to deal with concepts that belong to other disciplines such as linguistics or computer science. The process of transcription will be the thread that connects the spoken word with the written word, allowing me to analyze how this transcription and its intrinsic characteristics have been used in areas as disparate as the world of art and the development of programming languages.

Subsequently, I will analyze the creation and evolution of the idea of algorithm –from its beginnings centuries before the creation of the first computers– and the link between them and the world of art, through the presentation of works that propose the use of pseudo-algorithms. It will be the algorithms that will allow me to talk about digital computers and how the technology behind them has served as a source of inspiration for contemporary artists.

This paper is based on my on-going artistic and theoretical research on the concept of projection. This concept has always played a central role in the development of my own artistic work and in this paper I will address the notion of ‘projection’, using its most common definitions and personal interpretations, as it pertains to the psychological, optical and pictorial fields. I will do so by analysing its role as a transference medium for intrinsic motivations that occur through thinking, projecting and drawing pictures. Stemming from these assumptions the paper also provides a framework that considers a return to the materiality of the intangible images.

In media art, how do we articulate the identity of a work after the media awareness and environment that connected artist to audience at the time of its presentation has been lost? This article contributes to the discussion related to the reproduction of Masaki Fujihata’s Light on the Net (1996), first presented as the internet came into widespread use.

It was Gifu Ogaki Biennale 2017 that first brought us such awareness. We co-curated the exhibition and a series of symposiums, which examined the expression of how computers and humans relate to one another in terms of art, music, and engineering through works of 3 artists. I tried to find out the significance of existence in the process of re-creation of work and the transition of evaluation through the display of materials rather than works.

The most important element of Light on the Net is that this work questioned the community the Internet is about to bring radically. That should be analyzed from the perspectives of sociology, the history of technology, and aesthetics in the future.

Any discussion of nature is inextricably linked to the data politics of environmental catastrophe. After the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and tsunami it seemed that no amount of data or statistics could ever encapsulate the true ecological impact of the most powerful earthquake to hit Japan in recorded history. Thinking about art in this context offers an imaginative and real space in which people can process the horror of abrupt disasters such as this. An understanding of the aesthetic energies of nature and their entanglement with the scalar forces of nature is the stepping off point for Japanese-Australian artists Ken and Julia Yonitani. Using uranium glass to construct Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nuclear Nations (2013) Ken and Julia Yonitani use a granular scale to map the correlations between potential and actual disaster. Under UV lights thirty-one glowing chandeliers represent the thirty-one nuclear nations of the world; the size of each corresponding to the number of operating nuclear plants in that nation. Some of the glass used in the chandelier is recycled antique glass produced with natural uranium. Others are made from contemporary uranium glass, produced with depleted uranium, a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process, needed to produce uranium reactive enough to use in nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Considerations of scale and causal relations contribute to the question of what makes a difference amidst the atomic fallout. Natural disasters are never isolated events, they form equivalences that create social, cultural and technological catastrophes. [7] As disaster mutates, the path from human nuclear energies to inhuman equivalence starts to glow amidst the flows of nature. This case study suggests that we construct a molecular tracery that journeys from artist responses to the ongoing Fukushima disaster towards the realities of climate extinction. In the retelling of the relationships between data and nature, and as countries consider the radioactive ecologies of nuclear energies, the case study suggests we enter a new data politics of nature.

In this paper, we introduce the Re-Inventing the Wheel project as an archaeological approach for making things alternatively. The project aims to concretize probable “presents” by re-reading the history of media technologies with the help of computational tools. Based on media archaeological surveys of sound and image media, we have invented several techniques for producing works of art by using personal fabrication machines. Through the paper, we explore the intersection of media archaeology and personal fabrication. We explain four of our techniques that we applied and their respective outcomes. After sharing our investigations and practices along the way, we offer reflections on our initial intentions along with the observed difficulties.

Abstract

It is the contention of this paper that posthuman creativity is already taking place, rather than solely existing in the domain of a biomechanical cyberpunk dream. Manifesting work in both cyberspace and meatspace, the posthuman in this case is understood to be someone who embraces digital creative technologies (both hardware and software) taking advantage of the artistic opportunities they afford. The effects of Moore’s law over the last two decades has led to a profuse amount of cheap and obsolete computer equipment, both open and closed system. These castaway gadgets have become an abundant raw material, sparking the burgeoning movement of creative hardware hackers. The Internet has enabled the creative subversion of technology, through the dissemination of new creative tools and techniques. Closed video games consoles are being repurposed into new expressive platforms and tools. Indeed, the retro video gaming movement has grown beyond the digital domain, bringing pixels to oil painting and new flesh to performance art. The posthuman aesthetic, conceived in science fiction and nurtured online, is now very real and tangible.

This study explores the digitization of Chinese traditional shadow arts, for making them into the form of mobile applications, in order to protect and conserve the intangible cultural heritage. The research has summarized the artistic characteristics for traditional shadow art from the perspective of semiotics. Then, combines it with modern life and design a modern shadow art database for users to participate in shadow art designing. Finally, according to the modern database, give three aspects of achievable mobile phone APP design scheme: character modeling, interactive control and animation. Furthermore, from the perspective of user experience, design an open, interactive and entertaining digital platform based on shadow art protection, which enables users to participate in the characteristics selection and action plot design of shadow art, let the shadow art evolve in the process of re-creation to achieve cultural preservation, inheritance and continuity.

The exploration of architectural space, its conception and articulation is so far mostly modeled on a static understanding of structure and material, in relation to its inhabitation and use. Contemporary buildings are mostly frozen entities, enveloping organization and activities of its inhabitants through physical mass and form. Interactive Media embedded in architectural settings can create new forms and organizations of mixed reality environments: enjoyment of the immediate physical nature of our built environments can be blended with the ephemeral nature of animated and interactive digital content.

What does it mean to be human in a more-than-human world? How do we relate to our digital representations and can facial recognition technology contribute to a new digital sensibility in a truly shared space? Now organic entities no longer have a monopoly on seeing, we can ask ourselves: does the graphical language of machine vision enable communication between the human and the more-than-human?

The South Asia that I invoke is not a bounded space but a networked entity that straddles various cartographic imaginations in different ways. The ‘New Media’ that I talk about is unglamorously analog, occasionally hand powered, sometimes framed by bamboo supports and usually sheathed in organic resins, and the Antiquity I refer to (with an important exception) does not go back much beyond the nineteenth century.

Keywords: Wonder, enchantment, Robotics, Speculative Philosophy, Enlightenment, Metamodern, Art, Lively.

This paper tracks the critique/reconfiguration of wonder as a mode of critical engagement, with our contemporary condition and the current philosophical paradigm shift towards theorizing the nonhuman; a resurgence in speculative wonder. Comparing the aesthetic language and actions of the Steve Daniels’ robotic art work Device for the Elimination of Wonder, 2015, this text unpacks the historical shift from enchantment during the pre-Enlightenment period towards the post-Enlightenment disenchantment of magic, wonder and speculative fiction. Employing Daniels’ Device as a metaphor for an evolution of theory this text draws comparisons between contemporary philosophical trends and the lively, expressive and whimsical creations of robotic art.

This paper describes entanglements between human and non-human actants from the perspective of creativity, interdependence and contemporary anthropology. Drawing from experiments on self representation and swaps from object to subject of study, the author reflects on the potential of the vegetal world and distinct forms of intelligence to propose a subversive anti – anthropocentric view in a planet terraformed by plants and other beings.

Global culture: one, many or none? Social scientists throughout the world are raising questions concerning the impact of telecommunications on the development of a global culture. While some theorists take the position that telecommunications will erode cultural differences and leave museums as the sole purveyors of cultural history, other experts propose the emergence of not one, but several types of global cultures.

The Nonhuman Rights Project is working through the mechanism of lawsuits to establish nonhuman animals as persons. A living being with the status of personhood possesses fundamental legal rights to life, liberty and well being. In the United States, the corporation is a ‘nonhuman’ entity that enjoys such rights. In 1886 the U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad let stand the assertion that corporations are persons. The corporation was thereby given the very same legal status and rights as real human beings. Animal rights activists reason that if we confer personhood to a nonhuman entity like the corporation then why not grant the same for animals? Today we see the rise of new artificial life entities. Some are embodied as robots and others as non‑corporal Artificial Intelligences in devices, interfaces and games. A long line of research and commentary suggests that we (humans) will have nonhuman, artificial and virtual companions, co‑workers and even lovers. For more than a decade many have called for a bill of rights for cyborgs, avatars and their close cousins. There is a long history of those who have been excluded from personhood and thereby could be exploited, discriminated against or ignored (slaves, women, LGBT). Will the various species of artificial life one day be included in Peter Singer’s expanding circle? Will those entities that pass the Turing Test, persuade and convince us that they too shall the full legal protection under the law as persons? This paper will give a brief overview of the     emergence of the notion of the ‘Lockean’ person and its expansion to nonhuman and artificial entities. The paper will conclude with a Declaration of Rights for Artificial Life. Thus begins the Right to Artificial Life as a social movement.

The Rojava Center for Democratic Technologies is based at the University of Rojava in Qamishlo, Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. It investigates and develops visions and practices for a technological culture that builds on the principles of democratic confederalism. Democratic confederalism is a form of libertarian socialism that constitutes the backbone of the Rojava Revolution. It is based on decentralized, stateless governance, gender equality, cooperative labour, ecology and direct democracy. The Center is formed by a fluid group of engineers and artists from in- and outside the University and focuses on two main themes: the development of so-called ‘intermediate technologies’ and innovation through incorporation of ‘mythological knowledge’.

To date, artistic research projects have been conducted into post-digital propaganda in public space and decolonial domestic technology. In addition, a reader with key texts has been published in Kurmanji, Arabic and English.

This paper discusses evaluation in the context of public art and specifically of interactive digital art. The study reported is of ‘Light Logic’, an exhibition of retrospective and current drawings, paintings and interactive digital works by the second author. The study was conducted by Site Gallery Sheffield in association with UK and Australian researchers. A survey of evaluation practice amongst artists and groups working in digital art is described briefly.

A growing amount of designers wants to create mediating objects that contribute to a participatory relation between people and space, like RFID toolkits, mobile augmented reality applications, often referred to as locative media or Internet of Things (IOT) applications. Raessens states that:

Negotiated, oppositional, and deconstructive readings (more so than dominant ones), configuration and selection (more so than exploration), and construction (more so than reconfiguration) are all, in their own specific way, part of what I call participatory media culture.  (Raessens, 2005).

Literature and expert interviews in the framework of my Phd research in the field of Cultural Studies suggest that risky objects offer a good framework for designers of IOT applications, since they trigger a kind of sociality which fits well in the definition of participatory culture. Latour states that the Space Shuttle Columbia was a risky object on the moment of the disaster on February 1, 2003. It talked for itself, about the technical and organizational problems that led to the disaster, when it transformed from something complicated, automatic and autonomous into a more transparent rain of debris. The shuttle seemed silent and autonomous in a ‘normal’ situation, but became critical and a full-blown mediator in this context, putting a social situation under pressure, while stimulating alternative conversations about it (Latour, 2005).

Keywords: Agriculture, Natural Energy, Art, Music, The Internet, Local Festivals, Local(ity), Recycling-Oriented Society, Ecosystem.

The Sagamine Satoyama Plan is an initiative underway in the Sagamine district of Nagakute City in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. This is a comprehensive undertaking, aiming at the preservation of the agriculture rooted in the natural environment of the area, the creation of a distinctive local culture and enhanced human interaction between local residents. The initiative is carried out on the understanding that the locality’s natural environment and agriculture form a single ecosystem, along with such elements as local festivals, the internet, and renewable energies.

This is a comprehensive initiative that includes: the construction of a self-built house on the premises of Aichi University of the Arts in Nagakute City in Aichi Prefecture; the use of renewable energy with this house being the central point; the growing of vegetables on a natural farm; workshops where regional citizens get to have experiences with nature; the creation of an informational network for regional citizens; and the creation of festivals that allow for exchanges between regional citizens. In the 1960s, cyberculture arose from the counterculture movement, and the Internet and personal computers started to be developed. Even now, this has grown into smartphones, the Internet, and renewable energy. The abilities of individuals are being cybernetically expanded, and the networks have pushed the human spirit beyond the physical form. Also, the current era is moving towards the dream of coexistence that could not be accomplished by the counter culture in the 1960s. This project is creating connections between citizens in the same region by leveraging its self-sufficient spirit and using the power of music, art, and networks, and it is bringing back a traditional lifestyle that coexists with nature.

Contemporary art criticism is deeply rooted in modernist and postmodernist theories. Modernism, which drew on the formalist theories of critics like Ad Reinhardt and Clement Greenberg, was a period of art-for-art’s sake that called for ‘pure painting’ that was free of illustration, distortion, illusion, allusion or delusion?’. For Clement Greenberg, the physical dimensions of the medium defined ‘pure painting’ and ‘pure sculpture’. Artists stripped their paintings of three-dimensional illusions and embarked on academic studies that emphasized “the flat surface, the [rectangular] shape of the support, the properties of pigment”. Greenberg’s formalist theories sought to establish objective criteria for the evaluation of art based on this interaction of form and medium. Modernist theory, however, was highly deterministic with only one approach to evaluating the aesthetic quality of artwork.

As formalism reached a peak in the 1960’s, body, performance, pop, and conceptual art rejected the modernist doctrine and ushered in the era of postmodernism which challenged all restrictions on form and aesthetics. For many theorists, the fragmented pluralism of postmodernism led to ‘…depthless styles, refusing, eluding, interpretation’. Out of this aesthetic chaos, new forms of artwork emerged including artworks that use computer graphics as an integral part of the design process. However, much of this art is criticized for its lack of aesthetic quality, with critics maintaining that the work merely imitates earlier art forms.

Serendipity is increasingly becoming a concern in the design of interactive systems as an alternative to the echo chamber effects being felt in the medium. However, the concept of serendipity is one shrouded in ambiguity, which limits our abilities to regard it as an achievable goal in interaction design. Based upon literature review, as well as empirical research, we propose a Serendipitous Pattern that identifies the core moments of serendipity, as well as the role of the human agent. Through this pattern, we are able to lay the groundwork for establishing a framework that enables the design of serendipitous systems.

This institutional presentation focuses on the innovations and interconnections in the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Art Archive. Bonnie Mitchell and Jan Searleman have led a team of undergraduate students developing the back-end infrastructure and enhancing the content for this archive of SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, and the Digital Art Community Art Shows from 1980 to the present. In addition to adding innovative connections between the data, the archive now has the ability to create curated Collections of Art content from the archive resources. The latest achievement is the ability for artists to access the data to create custom visualizations.

ACM SIGGRAPH is a Special Interest Group of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, and each year since 1981 they have held a digital art show at their annual conference. Most of the exhibitions have been documented in catalogs but are not readily available; therefore our team developed an online archive that collates all the material in a single place. The archive contains the artworks, scholarly papers, abstracts, videos, audio and presentations from the SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia conferences, as well as the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Art Community Online Exhibitions. Academics, students, independent artists, and people working in visual art and animation benefit in a myriad of ways from access to these historical materials. The archives contain over 4000 images, 4000 people pages, and 200 writings that are accessible in a myriad of ways.

In 2019, we added the ability to create Collections therefore enabling curators to recontextualize the materials in the archives in thematic ways. The first Collection was curated by Everardo Reyes and focuses on the artwork from the SIGGRAPH 2019 Art Papers. Over the next few years, we hope to add additional Collections such as the Traveling Art Shows and on Women Pioneers. One of the exciting new features is the ability to export the data as CSV and JSON which enables data visualization artists to create works that reveal trends and relationships between the data. The ACM SIGGRAPH Art Show Archives is now one of the largest collections of digital artworks, and the team is working with ISEA to create an infrastructure that enables the two archives to share resources. The SIGGRAPH Archive is part of a larger consortium to cooperate with other digital art archive developers around the world. One of our goals has been to improve the accuracy and completeness of the archives as well as add the new DAC, SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia exhibitions. This work will continue into the following year and we will be adding unique standard name identifiers, gender identification, and other assets that enable researchers to understand the development of an innovative movement that changed the world.

This paper presents “The Sonic Body”, a research-creation project conducted between May-September 2021 that studied methods of creating embodied sonic performances and installations within an extended reality (XR) context. I explain two prototypes created for the project, outline the strategies I used and rationale behind the design choices, and summarize the results of my research. The prototypes explore contrasting methods of engaging with sound in an embodied way: one employing the use of head-mounted augmented reality (AR) and the other muscle sensors and material interaction. As my methodology relied on a self-reflexive approach, I focus on my personal experience as an artist designing these prototypes. Two research questions guided this project and inform this paper: How can new types of interactive audio affected and enhanced by bodily movement and gesture affect the experience of listening and connection to the environment? How can such interactive listening systems be designed to better encourage this sense of connectedness? Ultimately, this paper showcases “The Sonic Body” project, conveys the findings of the research questions from the research results and offers insight into how AR and muscle sensing technology might be used to create a real-time, embodied sound art installation and performance.

In discussing Immersive sound environments we find ourselves at the mercy of a phalanx of aqueous metaphors, saturated in an inescapable lexicon engulfing our senses, saturating our frames in the fluid medium of sound. So be it; let us be carried away on the flood to be inundated in the ocean of sound.

This text is concerned with concepts of spatiality, of location and the interactions of sounding bodies that articulate and activate the soundscape; how we as auditors experience the sonic domain and how we as authors compose and construct compelling, immersive audioscapes.

We will consider strategies and methodologies for the design and composition of sonic narratives in non-linear environments; for example the design of immersive soundscapes, within installations that employ multiple parallel soundtexts; and in particular new compositional methods for building terrain-based mobile location sensitive audio experiences.

This presentation will examine the construction of sound narratives, together with the mechanisms for engaging with and experiencing, spatially distributed audioworks. I shall use my own creative and research projects that exhibit various forms of Immersion to tease out these issues, using four basic approaches that are categorised as follows:

1. Three-dimensional speaker arrays with dynamic spatial audio.
2. Environmental and public sound art projects.
3. Interactive multi-channel projects.
4. Location sensitive terrain-based spatial audio research.

These four categories of sound art projects each deal with issues of immersion and with the construction of narrative and modes of interaction in a variety of ways. Each work category describing different strategies for composition and content development for immersive environments and identifies varying auditor experiences, highlighting concepts of Linearity and Non-linearity and changing perceptions of locale and
locatedness.

The works also allude to the changes in concepts of sonic immersion particularly in reference to Public Space by indicating how the technologies of audio transmission and reproduction have increasingly enabled and encouraged forms of privatized and selective hearing effecting a withdrawal from the Sonic Commons.

Keywords: Data, Data Aesthetics, Sonification, Decentralization, Optimization, Smart Grid, Smart City, Sharing Economy.

Pervasive technologies in socio-technical domains such as smart cities and smart grids question the values required for designing sustainable and participatory digital societies. Privacy-preservation, scalability, fairness, autonomy, and social-welfare are vital for democratic sharing economies and usually require computing systems designed to operate in a decentralized fashion. This paper examines sonification as the means for the general public to conceive decentralized systems that are too complex or non-intuitive for the mainstream thinking and general perception in society. We sonify two complex datasets that are generated by a prototyped decentralized system of computational intelligence operating with real-world data. The applied sonification methodologies are largely ad-hoc and address a series of concerns that are of both artistic and scientific merit. We create informative, effective and aesthetically meaningful soundworks as the means to probe and speculate complex, even unknown or unidentified, content. In this particular case, the sonification represents the constitutional narrative of two complex application scenarios of decentralized systems towards their equilibria.

Keywords: music, composition, sonification, memory, audio-visual, mobile media.
The ubiquitous and portable nature of recording devices has changed the way society remembers and communicates. The prosthetic nature of device located memories in the form of text, still and moving image media constructs a digital self and not exclusively a clone of the organic self. The digital memory of this digital life is the entity that is under musical examination with The Sound of Memory, which intends to create a sonification of the digital life of the audience. This paper discusses the interdisciplinary space being investigated by The Sound of Memory project. This project aims to develop an interpretive compositional framework to generate music from the digital memory of, that is the digital media carried by, the audience. The project deals with music, issue of memory in contemporary technological ecology, the democratisation of creativity, questions around creative authorship and also explores the notion of a digital life.

The Sound Space is a new musical instrument. In a similar way a sampler is an empty box to be filled up with sound files, the Sound Space turns the physical space around the performer as a key-area to place and to play his own voice samples. With the Sound Space, a performer literary spreads his voice around him by the gesture, creating an entire sound scene while playing with it. The gesture association of time and space makes this instrument also suitable for dancers and body/movement artists, and for various applications.

The Synekine Project brings together performance and scientific research to create new ways to express ourselves. The neologism “synekinesia”, is built from the Greek terms “syn”, (union) and “kinesis” (movement). By analogy in “synaesthesia”, the phenomenon in which two or more senses of perception are associated, the “synekinesia” would reflect our capacity to associate two or several motor senses. In the Synekine project, the performers develop a fusional language involving voice, hand gestures and physical movement. This language is augmented by an interactive environment made of sensors and other Human-Computer Interfaces. The Sound Space is one of instruments stemming from the Synekine Project: Hand Sampling, Wired Gestures, Gesture Scape, Hyper Ball, Body Choir and Spatial Sampler.

In an interview in 1981, the pianist Glenn Gould commented to his interviewer that one of the things he found most moving about the final Contrapunctus in The Art of the Fugue was that J.S. Bach was writing this music against every possible tendency of the time.’ This rigorous observation suggests something at work in the way in which we now think about music, and as a consequence, about sound, that bears directly on the question of art’s relation to technical processes, to industry, to economy, and also, to thought. Raising the aesthetic and political spectre of “the times,” Gould forces us to consider the degree to which our claims for, and fetishism of, the new communications media as a revolution in art, and therefore, of life, actually function to undermine the very possibility for the invention of a radical art of sounds.

Bach wrote The Art of the Fugue at the end of his life during a period when the structure of Baroque musical thought was undergoing a transformation from a polyphonic modal or horizontal plane to the mechanical or orchestral imperatives of a vertical harmonic order that saw the fugue as an increasingly redundant form. It is of no surprise then, that Bach should abandon, or withdraw from, the new musical order, proceeding instead with, what might be called an “idealized world of uncompromising invention“. For, according to Gould, there was always“… a constant proximity of fugue in Bach’s technique. Every texture he exploited seems ultimately destined for a fugue“.

The Spanish Network of Art, Science, Technology and Society (named in Spanish RED-ACTS) is a project that started in 2022 with the purpose of contributing to articulate the Spanish ecosystem of individuals, collectives, institutions, agents and projects working in the art,science, technology and society intersections. The project was created during ISEA 2022 in Barcelona as a long -claimed need by the community in the context of a country where there is a highly complex, diverse and heterogeneous set of characteristics in this transversal field.

This is a project co-funded by the Carasso Foundation and the institutions involved in its development such as the UOC university and the Hac Te, hub of Barcelona, together with the Hangar Research Art Center and the Contemporary Cultural Center in Barcelona (CCCB) in Barcelona, as well as Tabakalera in San Sebastian and many other partners in Spain. The objective of this institutional presentation is to explain why, how, with whom and what is the RED ACTS doing in Spain as a network that aspires to help articulate the entire ecosystem while learning from its current and past successes and failures at a local, regional and international level.

Meteoros are things in the air like clouds, fog, mists, rain, snow, thunderstorms, rainbows, air pressure, humidity, and wind directions. The study of these things also looks to elements from beneath and phenomena from beyond. The interactions between these things are continually changing and inherently unpredictable.

Weather forecasting practises an aesthetics of prediction that combines measurements of these things in the past (such as climate averages) with data readings of the present (such as synoptic charts) to present a future scenario of the highest probability: 7-day forecast, seasonal outlook, and long-range prediction. In this way, climatic and meteorological sciences are able to move forward in time; proposing climatic models by reaching back in time (analysing ice-core samples). The motivation to figure the oikeoumene—a nature inhabited by humans, non-humans, living, and nonliving things – is to provide a predictable environment. Today, this modelling is derived from quantifiable data gathered through precision instruments. In the past, inductive predictions were based on an entirely different set of data: observations (red skies at sunset) and sensing (onset of rheumatism), encoded into lores and cultures.

The Illustrated Almanac of the Illawarra and Beyond (2011- ) works with such an aesthetic framework, akin to chorography: “an art as much as a science […that] combined mapping, landscape art and literary description.”[8] The project uses the ancient Chinese Almanac to map the southeastern coast of Australia over one calendar year. The resultant series of temporal maps formed from the interaction between this narrative framing and an eclectic collection of data: weather statistics, meteorological records, tidal predictions, astronomical observations, migratory species sightings, seasonal harvests, and anthropogenic rituals.

Overlapping with citizen science, this project combines quantifiable data with narrative data to suggest how a different set of selection criteria can transform our dialogue with the changing oikeoumene.

In my paper at ISEA94 a parallel concept for the masculine “inter-face” was suggested: the feminine “inter-skin”. That concept resulted from the critique of the current interface technology capable only of producing a Cartesian masculine subjectivity. However, as long as the “inter-skin” is understood in reference to the physiological body it retains its status as the object of Cartesian knowledge. Therefore, in order to construct a radically different conceptual foundation for an interface, we need to study another kind of “skin”: the surface of a hysterical body onto which meaning inscribes itself in an endless actualization of pleasure. The supporting slides consist of images by artists who elaborate the concept of the body as a surface in their work.

Intro

Could a concept like “inter-skin” provide any real space for femininity? When challenging the Cartesian representation of space as the metaphor of knowledge, do we unavoidably recourse to the space of the physiological body? As long as “inter-skin” is considered in the Cartesian framework, it cannot escape the mind-body duality. It will reproduce the surface of the body that is other to the Cartesian mind. If the face of the interface represents conscious mind, does the inter-skin cover the surface of the unconscious physiological body? If vision communicates directly with the mind, is the body under the skin a blind body? I believe we need to define a body that is not an object of Cartesian knowledge and then make an effort to imagine how that body might see. In Cartesian tradition the mind and the body are two completely distinct entities. The body does not think, it carries out the commands of the thinking mind. The body does not speak either, the mind speaks through the body. However, the history of psychoanalysis knows several cases in which the body has directly participated in a discourse. One of these is the case of Elisabeth von R. who suffered from hysterical pain in her legs.  During the analytic sessions “her painful legs began to ‘join in the conversation’ “. The patient was free from pain when the session started, but the pain was aroused when she was under the influence of her memories. Yet, since psychoanalysis was not immune to the Cartesian mind-body duality either, as the French psychoanalyst Monique David-Menard has pointed out, we can designate the discovery of the hysterical body as that which called the Cartesian duality in question.

This paper presents The Tapestry, a mapping of the history of magic.  It describes a system that lets users create lifelines and map them using GoogleEarth. Each lifeline, or thread, is laid over the globe, showing the trace of the person’s historical travels, locations, and activities.  By successively laying these threads over one another, users can see points of intersection, suggesting historic interactions and influence. It is hoped that such graphic presentation and users’ pattern recognition will lead to discovery of previously unsuspected influences in magic’s historical development.

In a contracting world, real-time visual telecommunication may become a ‘hologrammatic’ nightmare. As high-tech applications proliferate, they threaten to accelerate the eradication of cultural difference. Each new system’s material reality makes claims on its users; each new wave impacts proportionately on the language, ritual, influence and power among communities. Borders change, territories diminish. As distances diminish, the collision of social forces disrupts, fragments, and eventually destroys contingent customs and practices, particularly those predicated on earlier, now outmoded, networks of time and space. While technology may destabilise frontiers, does high technology inevitably destroy tradition?

Erfurt – a city in the former German Democratic Republic is the focus of this cross-disciplinary collaborative, visual arts project that sets out to collect visual evidence of a decade of Stasi surveillance methods by documenting the 500 conspiratorial meeting places that were found in a copy of a lost file at the Central Archive for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democatic Republic, Berlin.

Like other manufactured goods, technological audio devices originate from global production systems that are historically exploitative, environmentally unsustainable, and are beholden to the expectations of continuous technological improvement and obsolescence. Unlike musicians who perform on a finite number of cherished instruments that are used for decades, electronic musicians’ tools are very often subject to the whims and relentless change associated with technologically-driven economic forces. Computer musicians especially, must consistently adapt to and purchase new software and hardware to avoid losing critical functionality and compatibility. The electronic musician’s position in this process opens questions of principle, regarding the ethical defensibility of self-expressive acts relative to the net negative effects caused by their contribution to technological production methods that promote suffering and global destruction.

In response to this dilemma I offer a view toward technological objects that sees these  technologies as individual sites within larger systems of activity, and encourages the application of a limited sense of anthropomorphic identification with these devices. Seen in this way, sound technology that was once subject to the whims of constant development, becomes imbued with a personal sense of vitality, making it more difficult to be perceived as a disposable and obsolete.

Classic media theory, from Bergson to Stiegler, from Freud to McLuhan, is in the main an organological theory of media. Media are interpreted as extensions of the sense organs, with each new medium redefining the relationship of the senses to one another. The synaesthesia of the turn of the century (from Skrjabin to Kandinsky) has opened up the new chapter of „Seeing Sound“ in the avant-garde film of the 20s and 30s, which eventually led to the MTV mainstream. Now we are on the threshold of a material revolution radicalizing the synaesthetic programme in which one sense organ (the eye) partially takes over the function of a different sense organ (the ear): Any given sensory organ can take over the functions of any other sense organ. The brain appears to be sufficiently adaptable to allow the networking of all sense organs with each other. What was once seen as a paranormal phenomenon has today entered a phase of technical realization, due to the promises of biotechnology and information sciences. The discredited Nobel prize laureate Professor Brian Josephson, Director of the Mind-Matter Unification Project of the Theory of Condensed Matter Group at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, has been proven right by the experiments of neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita. In molecular chemistry and in nanotechnology, the utilization of natural resources, including the human being, is continuously advancing on the micro level of matter. How neuroaesthetics and molecular aesthetics can open up new horizons. And fields of action for media art is the subject of this lecture.

This is a brief summary of a creative electronic artwork called the Unbearable Lightness of Meaning. The game is a playable adaption of Kundera’s literary work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The game attempts to explore heuristically the ambiguity of meaning presented in making a playful experience through abstraction of meaning and representation. This brief summary explores the motivations, philosophical underpinnings, and resulting work as a first exploration into how such themes can be manifest in a creative electronic work. It is offered as a case study in meaning, perceived meaning and the translation of literary works into non-conventional play experiences.

NOTES ON TEACHING, TECHNOLOGY, AND ART
My students and I are crammed in a small computer lab, waiting. We are always waiting: for computers to restart, for computers to recover, for projects to load, and in some cases, not load. I have learned that these interruptions are not wasteful, but precious; they are the only moments when I can devote myself entirely to teaching, instead of troubleshooting. If the time spent in front of a functioning computer counts as the waking time of a class, I imagine the time spent between the crashes and recoveries as the sleeping time, so the conversations and exchanges that occur, whether they are casual or curricular, can inform the class like a dream.

We are waiting to look at a final art project by a student we will call Postmodernity. She launches her project on the computer. A square of white light, centered and small, appears. I won’t describe the whole project, but I will give you the highlights; a young couple walks on a deserted beach (the appearance of a beach signifies love); a camera spinning violently in circles in a busy city intersection (a favorite metaphor of hers that refers to the general confusion of contemporary life); a collection of flat shapes bouncing across the screen (telling me she has mastered the animation software we have in the computer lab); finally, large white type that reads, Postmodernity, copyright nineteen ninety seven.

Her piece looked technically impressive and very familiar. Postmodernity’s pieces always do. The class creeps into a critique session. Before long, a student tells me the reason behind my lingering sense of familiarity with the piece: Postmodernity had made it last semester, in my Digital Video I class, only now it is a quarter of its original size. Incredulous (and slightly embarrassed that I didn’t recognize it sooner), I ask her why she did not make something new. Postmodernity replied shyly and sincerely, Because everything is been done. There is nothing new anymore.

Of course I blamed myself. Time is precious in any classroom or studio. I failed to balance the allure of learning new technology with a curriculum reorganized and reconstituted their experience with the technology into something more meaningful. But I am not the only one at fault; I blame Avid for making propriety video software that is not compatible with other software; I blame Adobe, for making their applications increasingly less user-friendly; I blame Macromedia for upgrading their applications every six months; I blame that Cisco ethernet router for having network problems on days that I teach; I blame Microsoft, for being Microsoft; I blame Apple, for not evaluating third party software that run on their operating systems in order to minimize the amount of computer crashes. There’s plenty of blame around.

Abstract

In 1961 Foucault wrote in the First Preface to Histoire de la folie, that the modern man and the madman no longer communicate; there is no longer a common language connecting the two; there is only silence. According to Foucault, the language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason on madness, was able to establish itself only on the basis of such a silence:

“[…] the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already acquired, and thrusts into oblivion all those imperfect words, without a fixed syntax, and a little stammered, through which the exchange of madness and reason took place.”

Foucault stated that reason is the cultural standard against which everything is measured up. Everything that falls outside of this standard falls inside what he describes as a void. Yet this void constitutes culture as much as everything that culture itself is made up from. Foucault concluded that therefore, there can be no reason without madness. He set out to write an archaeology of the silence that exists between the man of reason and the man of madness, because interrogating what is outside a culture is to question a divide that constitutes a meaning in itself.

This is an evaluation of the web 2.0 collection of Digital Non-Fiction user Generated Content for the Aung San Suu Kyi project, ‘Present for Suu’. This has been designed by an experienced foreign correspondent, now MA student, and is done in collaboration with Peter Popham of The Independent newspaper (the writer of the substantial Forward). Also participating is a major UK publisher and the thousands of visitors to the site. The project has been designed to produce a book, or a number of books, to commemorate the 20 years of turmoil in Burma, the anniversary of which is August 2008. There is to be a launch in the ‘real world,’ but also in Second Life and possibly other entities in the Metaverse.

This paper is an analytical assessment and critical evaluation of the Laboratory methodology in this project from October of 2007 until June 2008 when the print book will be published.

Two blogs and a wiki wiki are involved, one from the Managing Editor/Presenter of the project (analyzing the academic research involved). The other, by the same author but with extensive collaboration, is designed to attract contributions from people, from all walks of life and from all nationalities, to the wiki wiki with RSS feeds, to hear podcasts and to read other multi-media content.

The research criteria discussed in this paper will include but are not confined to:
The analysis of the collection, editing and publishing of UGC to produce a) a vibrant wiki and b) the production of print media from UGC in web 2.0; the viability of the use of SMS to text in Second Life for the collection of UGC material; the effectiveness of New Media in activist publishing and also, discretely, of viral activism in New Media.

The artist/programmer needs to solicit user feedback and observe users in the system in order to check whether the goals of the project are being realized and to refine the interaction. This paper is a case study of this process as it unfolded during the development of a virtual reality, interactive fiction piece, The Thing Growing, built at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), University of Illinois at Chicago, between 1997-2000. The goal of The Thing Growing is to create an interactive story in which the user is the main protagonist and engages at an emotional level with a virtual character, the Thing.

Intro

Creating interactive work is an iterative process. The artist/programmer needs to solicit user feedback and observe users in the system in order to check whether the goals of the project are being realized and to refine the interaction. This paper is a case study of this process as it unfolded during the development of a virtual reality, interactive fiction piece, The Thing Growing, built at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), University of Illinois at Chicago, between 1997-2000. The goal of The Thing Growing is to create an interactive story in which the user is the main protagonist and engages at an emotional level with a virtual character, the Thing.

In this paper, the process of remixing is analysed through the evolution of machine- driven text transformation approaches. Starting from semi-random early techniques for the composition of poetic or experimental literature, the process of associating and composing preestablished pieces of text, sourced from analogue and then digital repositories, will be investigated. A continuity emerges from the combinatorial experiments realised by the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (OuLiPo) group in the 1960s to the later software that has advanced remix possibilities up to the contemporary attempts to establish an almost autonomous “automatic publisher.” The increased sophistication of the algorithms and the growth of available sources have affected the plausibility of the produced texts, including a technical analysis of style, laying the foundation for its simulation. More recent tests, using unusual or different technologies to produce texts, will be included. In the essay, I will analyse the remixes of text’s evolving structure since the early experiments in the 1960s, the role of machines in effectively emulating a writer’s style and their essential support to generate credible fakes, particularly deepfakes.

This presentation provides an overview of some exciting directions new media artists have explored in Australia in the last few years. The paper is a case study on how the creation of a certain institutional environment results in the production of certain kinds of work. Both the strengths and weaknesses of Australian work will be discussed—its theoretical and self-critical sophistication as well as the technological dependency that results from being on the periphery of the emergent military-entertainment complex. The peripheral location of Australian artists has traditionally been a strong theme in Australian literature and visual art, but in new media art, this ‘tyranny of distance’ on the physical terrain is doubled and re-configured as an awareness of relations of centre and periphery in the mediated, virtual relations of transnational media.

Intro

Multimedia: nobody is quite sure what it is, or why it is so sexy, but everybody wants to get a piece of it. The Australian government’s Creative Nation cultural policy statement promised to pump over $60 million into it. About 150,000 Australians already own computers equipped to run the stuff. Educators, film makers, artists and con-artists are rushing to make interactive multimedia titles.

Yet nobody really knows what it is that the public is supposed to want out of it. To be educated? Why not read a book. To be entertained? Why not watch TV. To be engaged ‘interactively’? Well, why not go down to the local bar, coffee shop or laundromat and chat somebody up? When the Australian Film Commission held a conference in Melbourne on ‘multimedia and interactivity’, over 500 people turned up. Everybody wants the phantom multimedia users who are supposed to be populating this new market to want something from it, but what? The arrival of a new medium provides the opportunity to think again about what it is the user of the medium wants. How is the desire of the film goer or the interactive user engaged by the form? It also provides the opportunity to think again about what the resources are that are buried in the great traditions from which contemporary media draw. Let’s take the second issue first. It is usually the job of a critic to rank works within their genres, and to rank genres too in order of significance. It is also the traditional business of the critic to define what it is that constitutes a good novel, for example, or a classic movie. Now, all that is fine if one presumes either that the ‘platforms’ upon which culture – and critics – stand is stable, or ought to be stable. But if it isn’t stable, and one has no interest in it being so, then the job of the critic looks quite different. So rather than try to nail down what a novel is, and why it is in some sense better than the lyrics to pop songs, it’s time to reverse the critical engine and produce something quite different. This is a cue for something like cultural studies, with its open minded approach to issues of how culture works and who benefits from it. But the cultural studies mob, with a few exceptions, stick to the margins of present and past cultures. Regardless of what the newspaper columnists say about it, it really is a pretty traditional outgrowth of scholarly knowledge about culture.

The ambition of this initiative is to build a transversal “object-oriented” field of research, under the title “Avatarial Studies and Creations”, which can bring together various artistic and scientific theorizations and experiments in order to constitute a virtual laboratory of the Virtual, i.e. a techno-social breeding ground of inventions and emergences.

Smart devices in the home, like Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri, form a non-human but increasingly present audience in our daily life and activities. This hidden audience expresses a certain voice, in the agential sense, by cultivating and shaping how we address it. This is an acousmatic voice in  Michel Chion’s sense of it, and is worth thinking about as a rhetorical form, with such media devices shaping and coaxing our behavior, blurring the line between speaker and audience, human and non-human, agent and machine.

Virtual Reality (VR) has become a popular new medium, but few realize that it has a very long history of development emerging out of early prototypes by research labs, artists, and inventors. Although the wave of immersive media projects that came about after 2014 has been recognized on a mainstream level, the majority of projects have been ignored by institutional archives.

Archiving virtual reality has a particularly unique challenge because it is designed with interface, hardware, and software in mind. Some of the key challenges of the complex nature of this undertaking involve the intricate ecosystem of hardware and software and how the rapid obsolescence cycles continuously challenge efforts for conservation. As we enter a new era of virtual reality with metaverse platforms increasingly becoming more popular, continuing to build knowledge and community engagement in this field is crucial to deal with the immediate problem of caring for VR artworks. We know that archives are not neutral. They are a product of their culture, oftentimes the dominant culture. In this case, big tech is the gatekeeper when it comes to deciding what gets to be kept and what gets lost within the virtual reality community. As companies like Meta take further control of the industry, people will surely not get a clear understanding of the systems of oppression within the history of immersive media, let alone a virtual reality archive for future students to reference from the past.

The VR Archive Project is focused on developing concepts and prototypes for a VR Archive that restores and re-presents these VR experiences and visions. Similar in concept and function to a Film Archive or Internet Archive that collect, restore, and conserve a wide range of media, the objective here is to provide users an interactive, first-person, immersive experience of the VR medium throughout its evolution with links to a rich context of historical background and archival materials for deeper exploration.

This paper presents the Symbios art exhibition characterized by various art works that sprout from a paradigmatic mapping in between symbiosis and cultural sincretism, and, through a web of relational ontologies, proposes a complex yet holistic methodology for simultaneous art making and curation.

This is the Pergamon museum in Berlin. It houses the ceremonial walkway brought back from Babylon by German archaeologists late last century. Like a lot of museums, you can hire a cassette player with an audio tour, which provides a running commentary to the exhibits. It’s a very simple way to tie together moments in time with places in space. The information on the tape is also there on cards beside the exhibits to be read, but the majority of people take this tour and prefer to be led around the place rather than spending time with each exhibit and letting the stones speak for themselves.

What does this mean when we see that all these people want to make their non-linear experiences linear? Unfortunately it seems to say that most people still like to be told things in a sequence. Perhaps this has a little to do with the centuries of television that people have watched, and we might start to unpick this as television’s hold is lessened. But what I think people appreciate from these tours is not so much the sense of order, but the sense of duration. The experience has been made linear, but it also has been made finite. For two marks, you can get closure on four thousand years of Assyrian history. I want to talk about how the interactive form can begin to create more deeply emotional experiences than we are currently
used to, and what may in fact be stopping us from reaching the depth of experience that, for example, the cinema offers. I like this image because it offers an example of an oscillation occurring between the roles of observer and participant. I think that we need to grasp the paradox of these two seeming opposites and draw them together if we are to create deeper and more emotionally affecting experiences within the interactive form. For the purpose of this talk, I’m only concentrating on those screen-based works on the spectrum between the video game and the interactive movie.

Rhizome’s award-winning digital preservation program aims to support social memory for internet users and networked cultures through the creation of free and open source software tools that foster decentralized and vernacular archives. Its key role is also to ensure the growth of and continuing public access to the Rhizome ArtBase, a collection of 2,000+ born-digital artworks started in 1999. ‘Born-Digital’ is a term which aids in understanding the media support structure these works were made with and rely on for their experience. These works may not be accessioned as in a museum collection, but in many cases Rhizome remains the only point of access to them. Current digital preservation solutions were built for that earlier time and cannot adequately cope with what the web has become – dynamic, with embedded video, javascript, and other variable elements – in many ways, more rhizomatic.

Rhizome is about to undertake the comprehensive technical development of Webrecorder, an innovative tool to archive the dynamic web. Webrecorder will be a human-centered archival tool to create high-fidelity, interactive, contextual archives of social media and other dynamic content. The interesting feature of Webrecorder relevant to this discussion is the way in which the free (open source) service will allow users to archive dynamic web content through browsing, and to instantly review that archived content and download their own copy of it. By permitting users to host a public or private archive collection on the site, Webrecorder lets us all become art historians of net art. In this presentation one of Rhizome.org’s team of gurus will describe and demonstrate Webrecorder with reference to the ways it will support the rapid archivisation of unstable media.

“The body is as immediately abstract as it is concrete; its activity and expressivity extend, as on their underside, into an incorporeal, yet perfectly real, dimension of pressing potential.” _Brian Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect (1995)

Creative live art work with live processing interface that explores identity and representation, African American and mixed-race positionalities and queer sexualities. Work uses a Kinect and MAX interface to offer playful exploration of how labels adhere to people in motion. Soundscore created through processed deconstruction of music by Thelonious Monk and Irving Berlin. Created by LIPPAGE:Performance|Culture| Technology: Sound discoveries by Jamie Keesecker; MAX development by Kenneth D. Stewart, concept and performance by Thomas F. DeFrantz.
“The Weight of Ideas” is an excerpt of a larger work, “where did i think i was going? [moving into signal]” (2014). This work engages five separate interface designs gathered to underscore the vagaries of contemporary life reflected through prisms of digital scale. Digital cameras, Kinect cameras, and wireless microphones will record gestures by the performers and process the images and sounds through MAX, Isadora, and Ableton Live software. The work wonders at the physical and emotional cost of incessant movement resulting from job changes, natural disasters, and shifts in available technology.

This paper presents the design and set up of the robotic media arts installation ‘Accept All’. We discuss how this art piece bears legacy of previous work in both media arts as the academic field of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI), and touches upon contemporary topics of political awareness, trust and data representation. Accept All covers five different aesthetic design choices for robot design, each contributing to the topic in its own way. The last part of the paper proposes to explore the paradoxical stance that media artists have to adopt when dealing with issues such as dark patterns.

This presentation explores various frameworks of embodiment at work in performance projects that use sensed movement to control live media. Engaging a cause-and-effect relationship between the physical and the virtual, such performance works propose alternatives to a centralized, unitary notion of embodiment. At the same time, there is a range of different ideas about embodiment across projects and practices, and within each work. My presentation provides the opportunity to sort through these different ideas, and to look at the implications for how these works use interactive technologies to trouble or relieve the vocabularies of embodiment that underlie everyday life.

The Posthuman subject is a new ontological entity and in work-in-progress: they emerge as both a critical and a creative project within the posthuman convergence along posthumanist and postanthropocentric axes of interrogation. The article relates theories by Braidotti and Ferrando to the artistic experiments with nonhuman others, trees and fungi.

The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe was founded in 1989 to provide artists with access to the latest technologies as well as a public space where exhibitions, events, and publications would allow the public to explore and discuss the potential impact of technological change on art and society.

As part of a comprehensive restructuring of ZKM, the Department Wissen (Knowledge) was founded in 2017 comprising the collection, the archives, ZKM’s public library, as well as the Laboratory for Antique Video Systems and the digital art restoration team. The archives thus include not only the history of the institution and archives of pioneers of media art,
but also the constantly expanding archives documenting the restoration of the collection’s media artworks.

The paper gives an overview of the structure and contents of the archives, as well as the potential advantages of the department’s specific structure combining the expertise of collection, archives, library and restoration.

Innovative virtual technologies foreshadow new ways of discovering worlds through simulations as well as new forms of interaction. New virtuals societies and spaces, populated by hybrid beings associating human beings and digital entities in which they will be able to incarnate, bring us a new form of bodily and cognitive symbiosis and of inter-dependence which pushes us to ask ourselves and push us to wonder how we will manage to exist and last in these new worlds that we simulate. The use of the avatar represented in the 3rd person, as a point of view and a vector of embodiment and immersion, has many advantages when evolving in a virtual environment. The external point of view offers a better perception of the environment allowing the development of new use cases for the production of VR applications. Also, an avatar allows us to obtain visual feedback and a cognitive analysis of the actions we perform in the virtual world. This form of avatarization allows the materialization of the double of oneself, being able to make the self-image evolve, thanks to the mirror neurons (Rizzolatti & al., 2006), by linking perception and action (Berthoz, 2004, 2005)

The rich paradoxes of two conflicting economies (capital/debt and information) are contrasted for the profile they yield of art in the information age. Sherman provides a framework from which he projects the relative roles of the artist and audiences well into the twenty-first century, a time when it will be necessary to constantly update works of art. The current obsession with multimedia and interactivity encourages audiences to update the art works they behold.

Intro

At the close of this century we are witnessing a major change in how value is determined. The value of material wealth is giving way to the value of information. In this time of transition, these apparently incongruous value systems mix and form hybrid systems for determining value. Unique, precious material objects still hold their value; some actually increase in value in a relatively short time. Information that is useful but scarce is also valuable. Scarcity, even in an era marked by an abundance of information, is still a key factor in determining value. Those who hold valuable information may still wish to maintain exclusive, proprietary control-to increase the life of the information. Information is subject to decay or aging. Information is not inexhaustible. It may revert to data, the raw material from which it is formed. How and when information is maintained and released is determined by those in control; those who initially recognize its value, manage it and operate with it accordingly.

Contemporary art is part of an emerging sector of the economy called information and knowledge. Knowledge-workers create information for others to use. Worker in this case does
not imply those who act only upon the instructions of others, knowledge-workers think for themselves. They know things that others do not know. They solve problems or help others solve problems. Knowledge- workers produce information, they transform data into information distinguishing key aspects of disorder through the discovery and/or imposition of form. Artists fit niceIy into this description of knowledge-worker. Contemporary artists, curators, critics and art historians are the knowledge-workers who form the contemporary art domain of the new sector of the economy called information and knowledge.

The goal of this presentation is to discuss and analyse viewer-sensing artworks and the reversed situation in the exhibition space where artworks ‘look’ at the viewer. To answer these questions I firstly looked at the topics of machine vision, computer vision, biovision and the evolution of vision.
Dividing interactive artworks into four categories (distant, contact, chance-based and bio-based/symbiotic interaction) enabled me to illustrate developments in feedback systems which became evident in recent decades.

The author uses symbiosis as metaphor and tool to create food-related projects that critically examine the anthropogenically induced impact of global warming on food-chains. She argues that ‘art-for-food’ projects promote an alternative worldview informed by the utopian premise that art can facilitate reflexivity and influence behavior to prevent future massive starvation by safeguarding the future of food.

Les Planètes is a “FullDome” immersive concert generated entirely in real time. The concert is made possible by the “Pianoof-Lights,” an instrument that enables a visual dialogue with pianist Louise Bessette during a novel performance of the work Les Planètes from composer Walter Boudreau. The Piano-ofLights’ dynamic constellations of small spheres are projected across the space of the satosphere of the Society of Art and Technology (SAT) in Montreal. The visual shapes are based on an analysis of the different sections of the score. During this process, the Piano-of-Lights emits light particles, becoming a catalyst for the dynamic constellations distributed across the dome. The project blends the tradition of colour organs and the live A/V approach of digital technology, bringing together an analogue piano, digital recording and immersive projection. The originality of this research primarily lies in the use of a colour-piano, which was designed to create a synthesis of the colour-sound association in an immersive format.

 The NewArtFoundation is the consequence of the activities developed by the Beep Collection, an international reference in the field.

The Beep Collection started its activity linked to the ARCO-BEEP Electronic Art Award in 2006. Since then, more than 70 works by artists from around the world testify to a set of good practices. With a philosophy rooted in the collaborative origins of the Internet, it has developed grant, production, and patronage programs, aware that being an active agent in the community implies supporting it.

In 2015, the Collection, with the participation of prominent Catalan agents such as professional associations, universities, companies, and individuals, founded the NewArtFoundation. The ultimate objective of the Foundation is to transfer the collaborative programs of the Collection to the community and society, contributing its efforts to the development of a more productive and sustainable society, based on research and development.

Ils ont regardé la mer! is a visual and interactive installation programmed in Pure Data. The participant is invited to put a pulse sensor around his finger. The pulse of the heart control the movement of the waves in the ocean. It’s a very serene and contemplative experience; people are connected to the nature and really feel the movement of the ocean threw their body. I’m using old material of construction to do mapping of the images. In this way, it creates a contrast between the rigid of the material and the freedom that wildness bring. A mysterious introspection that reminds us the strong link between the human body and the magnificent of nature. Most of the videos were shot in New Brunswick and in east coast, USA.

Thief of Truth is a VR comic that explores the relationship between humans and AI. To test the expandability of VR comics, the work focused on three problems: designing the comic with the viewing control effect of VR, enhancing immersion through VR controller-based interaction, and creating a method to increase accessibility to VR comics.

I have been an enthusiastic computer artist/animator/programmer since the early 80’s. I’m fascinated by the new forms of artistic expression, communication, simulation, extension of the senses and pleasure that are made possible by computer graphics and animation and concepts such as virtual space, interactivity, artificial intelligence and networking. As an ex-biochemist, I’m also hopeful about the potential of these areas to form a kind of a bridge between the arts and sciences, although this certainly will not happen overnight. What I’d like to explore here is the somewhat disembodied landscape surrounding the human and the computer, a landscape in which the computer Is increasingly used as the metaphor for the self. These interests arise directly from my experience last year of developing symptoms of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) – pain, heaviness and weakness in my tight an and hand.

Throughout history, the metaphor for the self echoes the latest technological advances. Today, as the boundary blurs between technology and the body, people seem to be shifting almost unconsciously from a mechanical model of themselves to one based on the computer.

The research explores what it means to think with tides in order to problematize the relation between humans/technology/ecology, with the scope of producing, through computational methods and art practice, what can be thought of transversal beings. In other words, the production of spaces that are composed of a community of bodies.

Third Life Project is networked international art-based research collaboration on the topic of “third life” – exploring the potential of virtual actions to transgress directly into reality and perform extravirtual actions. This hybrid project generates mixed performative environments in which physical and digital objects cohabit and interact in real time. It initiated by the artists Milan Loviška and Otto Krause in April 2014 when they approached Prof Carsten Griwodz to collaborate on a work that would involve computer games and performance art. He then invited both Dr Herman Engelbrecht and Prof Gregor Schiele to form the core of the team.

In October 2015 they presented the results of their work in three performance lectures at WUK Vienna focused on avatar interactions with performers and objects in the real world. In the WIP talk the artists will offer their insights into performing Minecraft gameplay and treating virtual and real objects as dramaturgical tools to structure such a performance for
a viewing audience. They will briefly talk about the complex technological interface behind the project to be able to move beyond it and towards collaborative interactive practices in mixed reality performances that they envision for the future of Third Life Project.

The paper discusses the curatorial concept of “thought exhibition” coined by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel and developed in collaboration with curators, artists, and researchers during four exhibitions at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (Germany). Thought exhibitions transgress the distinctions between philosophy, art, and science by testing ideas in an art museum, a space of discourse, representation, and participation. They engage visitors in a spatio-aesthetic thought experiment by bringing them into a position where preconceptions derived from epistemes of European Modernity are explicated and where alternatives are suggested. The analysis focusses on the most recent exhibition, in the preparation of which the author was involved: “Critical Zones. Observatories for Earthly Politics” (May 23, 2020 – January 9, 2022) mapped the symptoms and origins of the “New Climatic Regime” (Latour) of the late Anthropocene. In this paper, Critical Zones is framed within its theoretical context (Descola, Haraway, Margulis, Whithehead, among others) and discussed as relational spatio-aesthetic approach (Dikeç). The analysis concludes with Sarah Sze’s installation “Flash Point (Timekeeper)” (2018) as one of the exhibition’s central works – a representation, or “cosmogram” (Tresch), of a common planet that may provide an alternative to the globalized world of late capitalism.

The three-dimensional representation of “reality” has suffered from chronic misconceptions over the years. In this last decade of the twentieth century, new media arts are evolving from a joint metamorphosis resulting from the merging of computing, communications, and imaging technologies.

I was looking at a Windsor Newton painting products catalog recently and the photographs in it show hands mixing paint with a mortar and pedestal, no where in it is any hint of a production line or the large powerful computers this company must own, certainly much more powerful than anything I could afford. The painting crowd is still in denial. The arguments about whether artists should engage with computer technology or not, are dead. Affordable computer technology has been in the hands of the general public and artists for fifteen years. Computers are old tech. The discussion about whether artists should engage with high technologies or not are now in the hands of those artists dealing with bio/medical art, Orlan, Joe Davis and  Stelarc. The only determining factor on the popularity of electronic art is whether electronic technology is in current public moral favour, and the coverage of the gulf war certainly has put computer technology in a favourable light in the west. Now that our field has aged significantly and we are secure in our place in art history we can look forwards to openly discussing the factions within eIectronic art, the In Your face artists and… I guess we would have to call them the In Your Machine artists, the political artists and the apolitical artists. One thing that this field has sorely lacked is critical friction and critical friction is what will make or break technologically
based art works.

My work is concerned with issues in technology where the inability to control is at the heart of the matter. I will show work (the Katonah Museum project) which exhibits behaviors that are determined jointly by the internal logic of the software, the participation of the viewer(s), and by environmental circumstances. The work does not relinquish control to either the public, the environment, or the software, but sets up a condition where the confluence of the three results in a particular behavior. It seeks to use rather simple technologies to explore issues that are raised by the larger contemporary technical environment in which we find ourselves.

Panel: Visualising Gesture and Effect

Keywords: Animation, Dramaturgy, Motion Capture, MxCAP.01, Representation, Scale, Visualization.

This paper theoretically situates research that explores motion capture data visualization using customized software tools such as MxCap.01. The value of software like MxCap.01 lies in its visualization capabilities including the ability to scale the re-presentation of the force, direction and intensity of movement but also do so within a temporal and emotive structuring.

This paper presents the motivation, background, and implementation of Through the Aleph: A Glimpse of the World in Real Time, a net art project offering an unprecedented visual and interactive experience where many places on Earth and in space can be seen simultaneously in an instant. Built in an open source environment with live data, this project visualizes the  diversity of human civilizations (microcosm) and the unity of humanity without borders in the ever-changing universe (macrocosm). With an unexpected approach to surveillance cameras and global networks it draws the connections between individuals and the global environment, Earth and outer space, eternity and time, and art and science. In a virtual world, this meditative web project merges multiple layers of dynamic imagery related to culture, cosmology, and technology in a globalized society into an abstract landscape. It not only embraces the dream of peace on Earth but also explores the bond between humankind and nature through time and space in the present moment.

Abstract

Historical records suggest that movie exhibition was a very autonomous practice in the first years of Cinema. The simple fact that film reels were sold to the exhibitors, instead of rented, implies that the industry had a very different organization in the beginning of the last century. The act of moviegoing was constituted more as going to the movies than as going to see a movie – partly because the ‘movie’ itself only existed during its screening, as pure cinematographic experience. The owner of an exhibition venue had a great editorial control over its programme. The projectionist, in turn, could either use tricks of lighting or adjust the speed of the projector, in order to give or correct the meaning of the images. The score, played in synchronicity with the film, was not truly part of the work, being just applied along its process of consumption. Therefore, in as much as a movie could be replayed, it was never watched in the same way twice.

Poster Statement

Everyone who ever saw the film ‘The Time Machine’ from H.G Wells, knows the scene where Rod Taylor sits in his machine and looks in the window of a women’s fashion shop. Because he is traveling through time you see the dressed puppets in the windows rapidly changing clothes. A change of fashion during years can be seen in one minute! This method of time-lapse creates a special feeling and notion of time. You see something that you probably never would see in your life-time and it creates a special knowledge. I strongly belief that the ‘new visual language’ everyone is talking about, will be one where time will play a more important role than we think of now. In VR products because people can virtually travel through time-related databases e.g. seeing how things evolve in time (the growing of plants in a timeframe while you walk around in the forest in real time!). In interactive products the ‘real time’ can be used to literally design the user interface people look at. To give an example. When you start-up the Albert Heijn TeleCD-i (of which I was the designer and art-director.) TeleCD-i made it possible to buy grocery goods at home and have them delivered, it depends on the time (the internal clock in the CD-i player) what you hear and see. In the evening you have another background and more easy listening music than during the daytime, (this was only implemented in the main menu). Currently I am working on more examples of ‘designing with time’. One of them is a CD-ROM where time will be one of the major factors, influencing virtually every aspect of the surroundings, buildings and events the users ‘walk’ in. Subject of this poster-session will be the following statements / items:

1. The use of ‘time’ for knowledge is an underdeveloped subject.
2. Time can be divided in ‘subjective time’ and ‘objective time’
3. Time can be a trigger to introduce new situations and surroundings
4. Time will be a navigation tool in interactive and VR productions of the future (time machines as navigation tools)

Since 2009, photobooks featuring teenage models in sexy poses have become standard provisions in the annual Hong Kong Book Fair. The images of scantily-dressed women sparked controversies in both mainstream news media and social media. An analysis of such pictures found that the production of erotica was a careful calculation of a host of factors, including the consideration of traditional Chinese attitudes toward sex, legal constraints on sexual representation and expectations of the target audiences (Chu, 2013).

In 2015, a six-year old girl participated in the production of a photobook which was to be sold in the Hong Kong Book Fair. The photobook soon caught the attention of critics who questioned about the sexual connotations of a few pictures. It eventually led to the recall of all available copies. Despite the decision, the incident has provoked debates on sexual representation and child pornography, as well as issues related to sexual agency, sexual expression and repression. This study has identified and studied competing discourses in mainstream news media and social media. They reflect unspoken assumptions about various kinds of consent and resent in sexualities in today Hong Kong. With these revelations, how this predominantly Chinese society responds to sex matters are further discussed.

Lev Manovich states that when we categorize a screen into “classical”, “dynamic”, “real time” and “interactive”, what is displayed on a “real time” screen is not an image in the traditional sense, since the image displayed on the cathode-ray tube (CRT), the first real time screen, is constantly and continually updated at a sufficient speed. Here, Manovich clarifies the transformation in the nature of the “image” that we see. However, it is likely that this points to another important change. It means that light which makes it possible for us to see the “image” is changing. Since the CRT, we have been able to control electrical light freely and we have continued to look at it. That is different to looking at light reflected from the conventional environment and it means that we are looking at the light source created by electricity. In other words, the change in the nature of what we see is likely to be deeply related to the fact that we have been able to see the light source itself. Moreover, this change in light is believed to have drastically changed even the nature of behaviors including our interaction, i.e. drawing, with the environment which mankind has been carrying out since ancient times.

In this discussion, we will first present the specific qualities of the first computer graphics system, Ivan Sutherland’s “Sketchpad” because it gave us the original experience of drawing with the computer. Secondly, we will refer to G. Berkeley and J. J. Gibson’s theory of vision and G. Seurat’s paintings in order to define what the radiant surface of the CRT is showing us. Finally, this presentation will show Sketchpad was the first system which reset the senses ration of vision and touch in our drawing act by controlling the electrical light source.

Panel: Slowness: Responding to Acceleration through Electronic Arts

In­ter­ac­tiv­ity per­me­ates the de­sign and con­tem­po­rary art worlds more and more every day.  The phrase “in­ter­ac­tive art” is still un­fixed, its form still novel, and yet cer­tain tropes have al­ready fallen into place.  One prob­lem seems to recur over and over: view­ers very rarely en­gage in slow, thought­ful ex­plo­ration of in­ter­ac­tive work.  Tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems in­vite fas­ci­na­tion with their ma­te­ri­al­ity and un­canny abil­i­ties, and pro­duce a dom­i­nant urge to re­veal or de­code the in­ter­ac­tion it­self, rather than the mean­ing of its en­clos­ing work.  We could call this the “hand-wav­ing ef­fect”: a viewer’s first im­pulse is to “fig­ure it out,” su­per­fi­cially en­gage with it in order to pro­duce the re­ac­tion, and then all too often sim­ply move on.  In other words, it’s over too fast.  Is this the view­ers’ fault, the art­works’, or some­thing deeper and more in­trin­sic? This pre­sen­ta­tion will ex­am­ine this issue in two parts.  First, I will frame a the­o­ret­i­cal de­bate about what is and is not un­avoid­ably in­her­ent to tech­no­log­i­cally-en­abled work.  A com­mon and jus­ti­fied crit­i­cism of such work is that it is over-con­cerned with the new; is it the role of the artist to grap­ple with this?  Sec­ond, I will show ex­am­ples of my own work that at­tempt to work with and against the chal­lenges of in­ter­ac­tiv­ity.  Sev­eral sculp­tures and works of in­stal­la­tion art will be shown that use tech­nol­ogy to­gether with tra­di­tional ma­te­ri­als to en­cour­age slow­ness in the viewer while re­tain­ing the dy­namic in­volve­ment of in­ter­ac­tiv­ity.  The pre­sen­ta­tion will con­clude with a syn­the­sis of sorts: an open dis­cus­sion of how the the­o­ret­i­cal over­laps with real-world human be­hav­ior.

We live on a planet in flux–with warming waters and land, chaotic weather, and unknown futures. Our adaptability and ingenuity are crucial to our survival, and our planet’s. In response to this condition, we are exploring new tools for understanding, engaging, and responding to our current and future environment. Bringing together artists, designers, scientists, and activists, this crowd-sourced piece focuses on ‘tools’, as a call for action, access, and collective engagement. New tools are needed to build more adaptable, resilient communities, as well as to imagine new ways of living on a fragile planet.

Tools for a Warming Planet is focused on the idea of tools–tools of collection, translation, engagement, connection, and care–which directly speaks to a time of climatic flux. Through display of physical and digital objects, as well as narratives on the use of these tools from the participating artists, the installation is a living archived of methods for working and living together. The project will develop over the course of the exhibit, allowing attendees and the larger global community to contribute tools to grow the collection.

The term ‘tool’ is used to focus on action: from hand craft, to care and repair, to data mapping, to digital filters, to community engagement. New tools posited across the works represent new possibilities of working and open up a conversation about our role as cultural and social activators. Tools for a Warming Planet brings together global voices into a visual dialog across languages and cultures that all must adapt to a changing climate on planet Earth. These global perspectives will allow for both localized perspectives and universal experiences, advancing a collective conversation with endless possibilities.

Toshio Iwai, who has been internationally acclaimed as a leading Japanese new media artist since the mid-1980s, and Hiroko Kimura-Myokam launched the “Toshio Iwai Archive & Research” project in 2021.

This project aims for digitizing and for organizing archival materials which has been stored by artist himself. Due to non-public papers, it is difficult to access to them and research has not progressed. Although in recent years Iwai has been known as an old media artist; a picture book artist, until the early 2000s, he was an artist not only in the field of new media art, but also in a variety of other “new media” industries including video games, virtual sets for television programs in the early 1990s, and the electronic musical instrument “TENORI-ON” (2007, Yamaha). While his various achievements have had a high impact on the next generation, there are currently few opportunities to see his past works. In addition, A comprehensive evaluation of his work has not been conducted due to the interdisciplinary knowledge required to contextualize and understand his broad range of activities.

Usually, what is required of an archivist is to be as objective as possible and to organize the materials for any future reevaluation. In this project, however, the artist himself is engaged in organizing the materials, and Kimura-Myokam is rather seeking ways to push Iwai’s subjective viewpoint as an archivist.

An automated teller machine is perhaps the most ordinary example of information technology’s presence in everyday life. In addition to its financial aspects, however, ATM usage is also a sensory experience: screens and buttons are touched, symbolically extending of our sense of touch and entangling us in a dense weave of financial, demographic, travel, biological, sensory and other threads. Through a discussion of my work with ATMs, I will pull various strands from this weave, focusing on networked notions of identity and social relations.

Intro

Scads of baby boomers no doubt get weak in the knees with this nod to the pinball wizard Tommy who pleaded some twenty years ago “See me. Feel me. Touch me. Heal me.” But this appropriation of the Who is far from the anti-establishment, touchy-feely sentiments that are now attributed, rightly or not, to the 60s. The reworked refrain is actually a recent advertising campaign for Citibank ATMs. The campaign’s shameless new-age component no doubt served its purpose well by stirring the nostalgic impulses of those boomers who sang along with Tommy. It was a brilliant new context for this hippie anthem – a psychologically packed site of technology, especially so for aging boomers who often feel literally blind to the impact of information technology on their own lives, and whose children often know more about it than they do.

But the decor on Citibank’s ATMs was also part of a much wider campaign by this bank and the rest of the financial industry to make information surfing both pervasive and user-friendly – and of course to make a lot of money. From the recent wave of bank mergers -including the one between Chase and Chemical, creating the largest bank in the United States – to business  section stories describing new “relationship” banking strategies, to op-ed cartoons showing ATM customers watching Disney’s “Pocahontas” while  they’re performing transactions, it’s becoming more and more clear that our future will be mediated by financial instruments like ATM cards, credit cards, debit cards and other financial/demographic currencies. Playing into this dynamic is the World Wide Web’s enormous interest in insuring the security of credit card transactions. With all the anticipation of a mission into space – or, dare I say, cyberspace – stories seem to break almost daily that count down to when a secure credit infrastructure will launch us into a new age of “safe” web transactions. Where’s the cyberspaceship headed anyway? But more importantly, what kinds of experience does touching an ATM screen activate? It’s all kind of touch and go, actually.

The underlying research for this paper recalls the development and presentation of telepresent installations ‘Telematic Dreaming’ and ‘The Telematic Séance’ from 1993. Twenty-five years on I produced the installation ‘Touched’, exhibited in the Digital Encounters Show for the British Science Festival in 2017. Technically, ‘Touched’ worked in exactly the same way as ‘The Telematic Séance’, its layering of keyboard projection, text and image explores a new telematic experience of intimacy where the meaning of the type becomes dependent on the richness of touch. The paper compares this with Myron Krueger’s founding ‘Metaplay’ experiments in the late 1970s involving touching hands on a telepresent screen and the findings of the proprioceptive ‘Rubber Hand Illusion’ developed by Psychologists Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen. These comparisons concur with the phenomenological outcomes participants experienced in ‘Touched’ where a greater sense of empathy emerges through a shared space of mutual presence.

This paper will explore the emergence of a post-ocular culture created by the ubiquity of lensless sensing technologies that manifest the things that lie outside of the normal frames of reference. The hegemony of the eye, which for centuries has defined how we know the world, is fading. The invisible and obscured, the infinitely big or nanoscopically small, hover on the fringes of our collective cultural perception, things we have always known were there but never witnessed. This unseeable (im)material world has traditionally languished in the domains of the paranormal or the spiritual – forces so delicate that they require a leap of faith to believe that they are actually there. Whilst our science readily embraces this domain (stumbling around in the sub-molecular dark, lurking between atoms, feeling its way through the atomic forces that bind matter) our cultural philosophy struggles to believe and clings nostalgically to lens-based media-technologies for knowing and capturing the world.

Abstract

The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into new transcendent fact. It is the flying dart of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world.        _Alfred North Whitehead, Adventure of Ideas

When Whitehead writes about the creativity of the world he is not discussing human creativity. Rather he is directing our thoughts toward the actual creativity of every moment of the world. He is indicating that each instant in time – and everything that exists in that instant – is a new creation; the world is a process of continual becoming (Whitehead 1978: 18-22). So when Whitehead talks about the ‘past hurling itself into new transcendent fact’ (Whitehead 1967: 177), he is proposing that the transcendent fact, which, in his terms, is the becoming of the present moment, takes form as the past transfers information to the present. This is what Whitehead terms prehension, the present’s grasping of information from the past in order to use this information in its own becoming. This is the essence of process and the way in which we may begin to think about a philosophy of the interactive event and, more generally, a process philosophy for digital aesthetics.

Although VR is opening numerous new possibilities, the current widely used way of presenting works of art in virtual reality-based exhibitions is not much different from the way of presenting works in physical galleries. In this paper, we propose a method that transforms the viewer’s artwork appreciation experience in virtual exhibitions from “viewing” to more “experiential”. Also, we introduce a case study made by applying the proposed method. It aims to provide a more immersive aesthetic experience to visitors in virtual exhibitions.

Online new media art archives exist throughout the world and contain a rich history of the research, events, artifacts, and people that helped to define the field of new media art. The purpose of this round table discussion is to brainstorm the idea of developing a world-wide network of online new media art archives. This distributed connection among archives would enable easy access to related information and benefits both users and archive administrators. This effort raises many questions and presents unique challenges but through the input of the new media art archiving community, solutions and a path forward will be forged.

Bacterial living tissues operate in a symbiotic ecosystem with the external environment. This research question: Can we draw inspiration from their behavior to design and manufacture body skins that can adjust to variations in internal metabolic processes? This project investigates the use of bacteria cellulose with 3D printed bodily anatomies literally grows a series of ‘body architectures’ developing a framework for architecture as an interface and extension of the human body achieved through the implementation of biofabrication processes and sensing technologies that utilize and integrate internal body signals and atmospheric flows in determining body-machine-environment relationships.

The paper discusses the early stages of the development of a methodology for co-creating artistic acoustic ecologies with the Great Lakes. It explores some initial philosophical, technological, creative/musical, and ethical concerns involved in my PhD research-creation project entitled: “Sounds Like Music, To Me.” In the paper, the artist askes how we might come to understand these bodies of water as animated actors in their own rights, with their own unique subjectivities. In doing so, he hope to facilitate a greater understanding of human impact on, relationships to, and responsibilities toward the lakes and all other waters.

Co-located interaction occurs when the interaction between the audience is integral to the interactive artwork. This paper proposes a relational model that focuses on describing the properties of each interacting element and the various communication at play, so as to understand co-located interactivity and conceive new forms of interaction.

In this paper we acknowledge the agency of non-human entities and argue against the binaries of subject/object, mind/body, nature/culture, science/art towards a new materiality. Technology has given us the opportunity to characterize and analyze material systems not only by their properties, but also by their potentialities. This leads to a sympoietic relation boundary between human-matter-machine interactions.

This paper addresses state-of-the art and prehistory of machine learning technologies as they pertain to the moving image. It discusses the challenges and potential hazards of these technologies, before showing how artists and image-makers are using these techniques to create a new relationship to the space of the cinematic in the age of big data. This paper strives to interrogate and overcome technologically deterministic accounts of this new technology. Accordingly, it situates examples within the discursive fields from which they emerge and favors diachrony over synchrony in outlining four clusters of media-archaeological inquiry that intersect in the application of machine learning techniques to the moving image. I believe that this approach is a necessary intervention into the hegemonic discourse on machine learning that has emerged from the technology sector which obscured deep ideological problems within the algorithms themselves, and also overlooks the potential of these technologies.

We are in the midst of a transformation, from a world of screens and devices to a world of immersive experience _Brian Krzanich

This panel contribution will examine new paradigms for transforming digital cultural archives into these immersive experiences through research in data creation, virtual environment design, interactivity, and information visualization — transforming public engagement with intangible and tangible heritage.

Cultural heritage is under increasing threat from destruction forces spanning iconoclasm to climate change to mass tourism. Within this context, digital documentation technologies play a vital role in the sustainability of both tangible and intangible heritage (from laser scanning and photogrammetry to motion capture and motion-over-time analytics). The creation of repositories of high fidelity digital data derived from heritage – open-up opportunities for re-staing and reimagining the object of study. As post-processural archaeologist Michael Shanks described, new digital archives demand “prosthetic architectures for the production and sharing of these archival resources — an animated archive emphasising personal affective engagement with cultural memory”. The research presented in this panel explores strategies for creating and translating the new abundance of digital records in the cultural archives into narratives of engagement by which museum visitors virtually re-embody and ‘perform’ the archive. This embodied museography is defined by attributes of immersion, interaction and participation and necessarily asks us to re-examine our notions of aura, authenticity and authorship. At the core of these experiences is a series of bespoke large-scale omnidirectional, omnispatial, panoptic and hemispheric interactive visualisation systems which promote human to human as well as human to machine interactions.

The intelligent.museum project is prototyping an intelligent IoT (Internet of Things) system for art and cultural institutions, utilizing data analytics from sensors and the internet to enhance the museum experience. The system will offer machine recommendations and data analysis for human decision-makers and also provide a technological framework for artists.

Keywords: Best Practices, Transdisciplinary Collaboration, Art and Science

Transdisciplinary, as opposed to inter or multidisciplinary, practices are increasing in many areas in industry, government, academia and civil society. The benefits of such practices have been proven in areas such as health, engineering, or business. However, in wide collaborations, collaboration bridges diverse fields such as art and design, humanities, science, technology, and medicine; these pose specific challenges. Institutional contexts bridge those of self-employed practitioners, to profit and nonprofit sectors both in civil society and government; training practices are less clear and specific difficulties can be anticipated. In this paper, we review some best practices and didactics for teamwork collecting relevant sources from different fields. Our conclusion is that it is possible, and necessary, to train individuals and teams for transdisciplinary collaboration practices. Depending on the field of application some approaches are shared, but also different approaches will be required. The authors recommend new research and development adapted to particular transdisciplinary fields such as STEM to STEAM.

The TechnoScience territory for artistic experimentation at LART propitiates collaborative networked practices of Brazilian high-level researches in the context of New Leonardos collective intelligence and practices. The focus on radical digital domain applied towards enactive affective systems, related to human experience facing technologies, expand art manifestations to fields of embodied cognition and body apparatus living in. The sense of presence and actions in daily life for transformations allowed trough technologies are the main secret topics that must be analyzed when envisioning the creative technologies and innovation for the expanded sensorium and aesthetic responsive changes of the sensorial apparatus.

Knowledge, methodologies and practices mixed to ethnographic issues and objectives look for the integration of body sensors, computer vision, GPS and networked connections, environmental laws, and mutual and reciprocal responses in data visualization. We developed an affective cane prototype, which has been designed to enable the active participation of people with disability or reduced mobility supporting their autonomy, independence, improved quality of life, and social integration, using the idea of affective enactive systems together with mobile technology. Enactive affective systems mapping affective narratives collaborate for the end of “nature itself” and the emergence of a “future healthier engineered reality”.

The biomass of disassociated living cells and tissues is in the thousands of tons. These fragments do not fall under current biological or cultural classifications. The notion of the extended body can be seen as a way to define this category of life, while at the same time attempting to destabilize some of the rooted perceptions of classification of living beings. The extend body can and is an amalgamation of the human extended phenotype with tissue life—a unfilled body for disembodied living fragments, an ontological device, set to draw attention to the need of re-examining current taxonomies and hierarchical perceptions of life.

To act, humans first need to make sense of the world. Thereby, sensemaking goes beyond accumulation of pure information of objects or rational knowledge production, but it encompasses additional information such as meaning, mindful engagement, socially embedded knowledge, cultural and work contexts.

To navigate in diverse environment sensemaking becomes central to social settings, also to en-gage with technologies and understand dynamics in ecological environments. In a complex world where technologies are added components of everyday life and are envisioned as partial means to approach global challenges, social, technological, and ecological environments become intertwined. This meshwork of environments also means to bring together different kinds of knowledge as a base of sense-making through experience.

In the Digital Sensemaking project we specifically look at digitization processes, the interaction with IoT Elements and Digital Twins through the lens of performance art to elaborate on the non-cognitive core constituents of sensemaking processes: em-bodiment, action-sense nexus, and temporality. We show that aesthetics can be found as an important dimension to bridge the cognitive and non-cognitive process and explore the role of art in this kind of research. It facilitates process and technological development in organizations entangling the social, technological, and ecological.

This research aims to define and establish the sonic laboratory, a hypothetical concept that has not been widely explored, although there are already some examples named as such. This research also investigates the sonic laboratory’s creative potential. Analysing different typologies (science lab, media lab, hacklab, and others), this research presents an open and inclusive description of the laboratory that opposes a technoscientific perspective, following Lori Emerson’s laboratory studies which state, “Labs have never been static, unchangeable, unitary entities with clear-cut histories.

Panel: Site Specifics: Mobile Media Art and the Contexts of Place

Glob­al­iza­tion and de­vel­op­ments in tech­nolo­gies and new mo­bile media have brought about a ‘spa­tial turn’ that has changed spa­tial con­cep­tions and ge­o­graph­i­cal imag­i­na­tions. The cur­rent ‘spa­tial turn’ echoes the crit­i­cal con­cepts of space de­vel­oped by Lefeb­vre, de Certeau and Fou­cault in the 1970s with an em­pha­sis on the pro­duc­tion, prac­tices, and pol­i­tics of lived spa­tial­ity. These con­cepts be­came ‘guides’ to a crit­i­cal analy­sis of the de­vel­op­ments and po­ten­tial of loca­tive new media art in the age of mo­bile media. Today’s de­vel­op­ments in map­ping and GIS tech­nolo­gies allow for a new ‘spa­tial think­ing’ about a so­cio-spa­tial di­alec­tic: the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the ways in which so­cial processes and so­cial ac­tion shape and ex­plain ge­o­gra­phies and vice versa. Loca­tive media and per­va­sive com­put­ing have  re­con­fig­ured our un­der­stand­ings and ex­pe­ri­ences of space and cul­ture—from the mi­cro­cosm of the every­day to the macro­cosm of spa­tial flows. The new ge­o­graph­i­cal pur­suits of loca­tive new media art are site-spe­cific ex­plo­rations of a human ge­og­ra­phy.

This paper ex­plores the po­ten­tial of loca­tive new media art as a strate­gic cat­a­lyst for urban re­vi­tal­iza­tion and com­mu­nity de­vel­op­ment. Loca­tive media allow for ac­tive com­mu­nity par­tic­i­pa­tion and ex­pres­sion; for urban and cul­tural nar­ra­tives to be dis­cov­ered and ar­tic­u­lated in urban lay­ers; and for aug­men­ta­tion of past or fu­ture re­al­i­ties and vir­tu­al­i­ties. Loca­tive media can en­hance civic en­gage­ment and in­ter­cul­tural cit­i­zen­ship, fos­ter a sense of lo­cal­ity, and thus cre­ate a sus­tain­able com­po­nent for the local com­mu­nity and so­ci­ety at large. These ideas are un­fold­ing in a field that merges or os­cil­lates be­tween loca­tive media and me­di­ated lo­cal­i­ties. They en­cour­age local cul­tural in­no­va­tion by fos­ter­ing site-spe­cific cul­tural un­der­stand­ing. This paper ad­dresses ques­tions such as, what kinds of so­cial/spa­tial re­la­tions are made pos­si­ble through loca­tive new media art pro­jects? And how can these pro­jects be adopted in a cul­tural plan­ning frame­work as cat­a­lysts for local urban and com­mu­nity de­vel­op­ment?

Keywords: traces, implicit, peripheral, multimodal, interaction, environment
This paper looks particularly at informal and implicit sources of information in our environment, how we can read this kind of information, and how the information has come about. The paper focuses on implicit information and ‘reading the environment’, with examples from practice, and presenting an art project that investigates this notion through an interactive video installation. This installation, called ‘Traces’, presented interactive videos and photographs of two types of human-made traces, revealing past behaviours and/or intentions. It took for instance the skidmarks of cars on roads as input for a process of video manipulation and a recorded sonification.

Locative media has been attacked for being too eager to appeal to commercial interests as well as for its reliance on Cartesian mapping systems. If these critiques are well founded, however, they are also nostalgic, invoking a notion of art as autonomous from the circuits of mass communication technologies, which the authors argue no longer holds true. This essay begins with a survey of the development of locative media, how it has distanced itself from net art and how it has been critically received, before going on to address these critiques and ponder how the field might develop.

“interference” is a video about the intricate relation between the backbone internet system and its increasingly important role in society. Corporations do absolutely everything to avoid power failure in the system, as we depend in many different ways on the stability of data transmission. The visual construction suggests some kind of interference through the use of flashing images of both Dubai and New York on a background of slowly moving cloud formation. The background being a long five minutes “plan sequence”. Waves and cooling fans are used in the soundtrack in order to suggest the cyclic, constant and never ending flow of information. The distance between the Dubai and N.Y. skyline with their emblematic towers, serve as the ultimate symbol for air to ground connectedness and capitalist ambition.

It is part of a larger body of work including other videos and large format photographic images of internet servers. Reference to this work is available at http://www.denisfarleyart.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi

We describe an animation system for Karagöz, which is a shadow theater. It is one of the most important traditional arts of Turkish culture. The animation system uses hierarchical modeling to animate two dimensional characters, like Karagöz and Hacivat. Hierarchical modelling animates the characters by using model parameters related to the different parts of the body and the joint parameters between these body parts. The system uses texture mapping to realistically render these characters since the body parts are modeled as two-dimensional polygon meshes. The animation system functions as an authoring tool creating keyframe animations, by editing the character parameters such as position and orientation for different keyframes. These animations can then be played back by reading the animation parameters from disk and interpolating between the keyframes.

Intro
The first performances of Karagöz (Karagheus), the traditional Turkish Shadow Theatre, date back to the 16th century. It was one of the most popular forms of entertainment right up until the cinema replaced it in the late 1950s. The opening of each play references a Sufi leader, Mehemmed Küşteri, as the patron saint of Karagöz. Legend has it that Karagöz and Hacivat were two masons working on the construction of a mosque in Bursa, then the capital of the Ottoman State. They were an odd couple, whose unending conversations were so entertaining that the other workers often stopped work to listen to them. When the Sultan learned why the mosque could not be completed in due time, he ordered that they be hanged, an order which he later regretted deeply. Seeing the Sultan in distress, one of his advisers, Küşteri, designed an apparatus which he thought might console him. He stretched a translucent screen (perde) across two poles and then placed a light source behind it. He cut out two figures which resembled Karagöz and Hacivat and manipulated them behind the screen. We do not know if this really worked for the Sultan, but the story reveals another example of how art functions as a substitute for loss, an experience that is fundamental to the human psyche.

Chinese traditional painting is highly regarded throughout the world for its theory, expression, and techniques. It is different from western painting, and although since the turn of the century, China has experienced great technological, economic, and cultural changes, Chinese traditional brush painting has maintained its own principles and style of beauty. On the other hand, technology never stops changing and today’s computer technology has the capability to operate simultaneously as a medium, tool and context, in addition to its organisational and interactive elements. The computer’s technical vocation enables images to simulate almost totally the traditional artistic techniques. It can even improve on them, and many artists use computer for this reason. These same techniques of simulation are also likely to propose to artists new means of changing the conditions of artistic creation and supporting innovation. As a Chinese computer artist, I am fascinated by creating computer art in the traditional Chinese style. This involves not only simulating a Chinese painting using computer technology, but also using computer animation, 3D models, and so on to present a full concept of Chinese art in order to facilitate artistic innovation from traditional beauty.

The context of the project is Chinese philosophy. Elements of the project are common objects of Chinese brush painting, such as lotus flowers, bamboo, rocks and rivers. All objects were created using the computer 3D modelling software, 3D Studio Max and Maya. Some other software, such as Macromedia Director, Flash and Adobe After Effects, are used to create interactivity and animations.

The work “Suspicious Behavior” shows a world of hidden human labour, which builds the foundation of how ‘intelligent’ computer vision systems interpret our actions. Through a physical home office set-up and an image labelling tutorial the user traverses into experiencing the tedious work of outsourced annotators. In an interactive tutorial for a fictional company the user is motivated and instructed to take on the task of labelling suspicious behavior. The video clips in the tutorial are taken from various open machine learning datasets for surveillance and action detection. Gradually the tutorial reveals how complex human behavior is reduced into banal categories of anomalous and normal behavior. The guidelines of what is considered suspicious behavior illustrated on a poster series and disciplined in the tutorial exercises are collected from lists of varied authorities. As the user is given a limited time to perform various labelling tasks the artwork provokes to reflect upon how easily biases and prejudices are embedded into machine vision. “Suspicious Behavior” asks if training machines to understand human behavior is actually as much about programming human behavior? What role does the ‘collective intelligence’ of micro tasking annotators play in shaping how machines detect behavior? And in which ways are the world views of developers embedded in the process of meaning making as they frame the annotation tasks?

Composed City
In 2008, Staalplaat Soundsystem and Lola landscape architects started to collaborate on projects that are at the interface of public space design and sound art under the name of Composed City. Sound art as a piece of landscape, and sound design of public space in order to create local identity, evoke play or contemplation, form the main subject of this collaboration. From an architectural point of view, there are very few good examples of permanent art in public space, let alone permanent sound art in public space. Therefore, these projects feel as artistic experiments rather than works of art. And no experiment can stand without a critical review. In this article, two projects are described and reviewed. Although they are very different, the projects share the love for the sound of trains, cars and trees.

“The problem with the fragility illusion is that it encourages a misplaced purism, leaving no room for compromise or negotiation, and it leads to ‘fortress conservation’ – the idea that the only way to protect ‘fragile’ ecosystems is to exclude all people. In Uganda, when a national park was established to protect biodiversity, 5,000 families were forced out of the area. After a change in government, those families returned in anger. To make sure they were never forced out again, they slaughtered all the local wildlife”.
_Peter Kareiva

“I want to explore here how public spaces take shape through the habitual actions of bodies, such that the contours of space could be described as habitual. I turn to the concept of habits to theorize not so much how bodies acquire their shape, but how spaces acquire the shape of the bodies that inhabit them. We could think about the ‘habit’ in the ‘inhabit’”.
_Sara Ahmed

“Habitat” has acquired a greenish brown tinge, purely a locale for flora and fauna. The word pairs with “diminishing”, “endangered”, and “frail”, in news and in oft-unheeded liberal cries. Commonly, it signifies curvy lines and clusters. Habitat – the third-person singular present tense form of the Latin ‘habitare’ means ‘it inhabits’. Trans-species habitat proposes a habitat phenomenology – a theory of space no longer divided between us and them, urban and wilderness, nature and culture, human and other (species), rooted in whole experiences.

Blood is a substance burdened with impedimenta– simultaneously a vital fluid, one’s heritage, identity, a common bond, and a symbol of salvation. Medical practitioners from the ancient to the modern have studied the therapeutic potency of blood. As Ancient Egyptians believed bathing in blood was a source of rejuvenation, so too do contemporary physicians seek live-restoring therapies through mesenchymal stem cells and blood transfused from the young to heal patients with Alzheimers. Owing to its rich symbolic associations, in addition to its biological significance, blood naturally draws controversy when used to create works of art.

A number of contemporary artists have defied cultural taboos to dissect the complexities of our modern relationship with our blood. In 1997, Eduardo Kac and Ed Bennett created the “phlebot”–a robot that provides its human symbiote with dextrose in exchange for the oxygen it needs to sustain a visible flame–for their event A Positive to explore the “emerging forms of human / machine interface…[through the production of new creatures and organic devices that populate our postorganic pantheon, be they biological (cloning), bio-synthetic (genetic engineering), inorganic (android epistemology), algorithmic (a-life), or biobotic (robotics).” Helen Pynor and Peta Clancy produced The Body is a Big Place which explored the cryptic boundaries between life and death through the sustenance of a pig’s heart ex vivo within a gallery setting. Mark Quinn has explored a diversity of ways in which to produce a self portrait using his own biological material, including his DNA, feces, and blood. Beginning in 1991, he produced a series of self portraits from nine pints of his blood poured into a mold of his head made in a block of ice. The result, he claims, is a complete “self portrait-ness” that also represents the “impossibility of immortality.”

Then, there are artists who use their own blood in performance to indicate fragility, vulnerability, such as Kira O’Reilly and Franko B. Yet, these works tend to extend the current narrative of the blood as a token of identity and vitality, and exploit its capacity to ellicit a strong visceral response as the basis of provocation. My research diverges from these previous works as the aim is not to simply utilise my blood talis qualis, but rather its metamorphic potential. Moreover, it subverts the status of one’s blood as a substance standing in reserve for medical purposes, only to be handled by those qualified to study its objective properties.

This research unpacks the biopolitics of our corporeal matter, using the material transformation of blood into artwork by and for the artist herself as a case study. Through the use of DIY phlebotomy and microscopy, the artist isolates and transforms the material state of their own blood purely for creative, rather than biomedical, purposes. Her work proffers the body as terrain for exploration and exploitation, pushing the aesthetic limits of blood as a creative medium.

This presentation introduces motivation, main concepts and practical implementation for the artwork series that map time-sequenced change of multiple values (e.g. financial trading data) in sensorium-intensive real-time “audio-visualization” manner. Although there has been a range of historic and more recent examples of 3D visualization and ‘auditory displays’ of financial or stock data as efforts to enhance professional trading interfaces, this project tries to bridge extremes of unaesthetic usability and “sublime dysfunctionality” within aesthetic experience. This experimental environment is intended as interactive VR/AR installation and/either audiovisual performance interface.

Interactive media, especially the internet, have a strong business component where interactions are actually transactions. In this research we will investigate how artists reflect business practices in their works. To refer to economic principles with artistic means is not limited to new media art, but has been pursued by artists such as Yves Klein, Carey Young, Santiago Serra, Chris Burden, Christine Hill, and many more. We may subsume these works under the more general concept of “Art about Business”. Within the field of interactive art in general and netart in particular, artists have also developed various approaches. Etoy and RT Mark e.g. act as corporations, issuing shares in order to raise capital for their activities. So called auction art uses online market-places such as Ebay to convey rather conceptual artworks. The Yes Men (Bhopal Project) mimic corporate communication for their critical position on capitalism and promise massive transactions. We will consider artistic approaches, where the interaction is related to some sort of transaction as “transactional arts”.

We assume that media art has always been the creation, design, structuring and control of possibility spaces. With possibility space we mean the set of choices due to the use of a non-linear medium. Artists have attempted to continuously expand these possibility spaces. We claim that the trend towards transactional arts is another artistic strategy of extending possibility spaces leading to some sort of “meta-art works”.

Following A. Galloway we agree, that today’s internet protocols are “synonymous with possibility” and that the internet facilitates the economic form of market places. From here we make the connection to the current discourses around the role of the concept of the market place as an organizing principle for societies (e.g. D. Westbrook). In the current globalized economy (with its decline of the influence of the nation state as some claim) market mechanisms seem to be more powerful than ever. Therefore reflecting these mechanisms with artistic means seems to be a justifiable task. In this context we will introduce some new artistic works, where offers and bids are considered as media of expression and incentives become artistic material.

Death, decay, and transcendence are transformed if interpreted from a microbial perspective. This paper constructs a non-anthropocentric approach on a microbial scale through the concept of microbiopolitics, an expanded notion of biopolitics with the inclusion of zoe, a postanthropocentric interpretation of ecological relations, focused on the life of microorganisms and introducing an ecological thought for the microbial planet. This research explores, in particular, the work of Latin American artists Ana Laura Cantera and Gilberto Esparza as a form of material speculation that opens up alternatives of thought grounded on the accountability of biological and technological matter, its limits and possibilities.

My talk mainly examines two important queer-feminist online activities the Young Feminist Activist Group had made in China: “Nudity against Domestic-Violence” in 2012 and “Take Feminist Five to Travel around the World” during the well-known case of Feminist Five’s Detention in 2015. I will argue that the Young Feminist Activist Group has transformed the social media, such as Weibo and Facebook, into their new stage for activism so as to challenge state-patriarchy and to conduct creative resistance that could not be realized in the offline activism in China. I will also point out that Young Feminist Activist Group’s online activism is featured with “queerness” that is de-centered, de-organized and theme-shifting with different netizens’ participation, so that such feminist activism could transcend the boundaries beyond hetero-patriarchal system and framework of either gender or sexuality, and form a widely open coalition with participants from both inside and outside the gender/sexuality movement in China for their creative resistance.

While playing a video game, the player‑machine interaction is not solely characterized by constraints determined by which sensors and actuators are embedded in both parties, but also by how their actions are transcoded. This paper is focused on that transcoding, on understanding the nuances in the articulation between the player’s and the system’s actions, that enable a communication feedback loop to be established through acts of gameplay. This process is established by player actions directed at the system and by system actions aimed at the player. Taking these into account, we propose four modes of transcoding in which the first three consist of intangible articulations while the fourth explores tangible ones, portraying how the player becomes increasingly embodied in the system, up to the moment    when the player’s representation in the system is substituted by her own actual body. These modes can be summarized as arbitrary articulations – moments when there is no correlation between player and     system actions, and that are established through proper instruction and learning, in which many are supported by conventions; symbolic articulations – moments where the articulation is partial, where performativity is analogous but not the same, where the actuations of one suggest or resemble the actuations of the other; mimetic articulations – when there is a direct mapping between the player’s physical performance and her virtual representation, where the actuations of one consist in a reproduction of the other’s actuations; and tangible articulations – when virtual representations of the player’s body are dismissed and substituted by her actual body, either in direct contact and/or operating in the same space as the system. The relationship between the first three can be seen as a progression towards verisimilitude, regarding the actuations being performed by both parties. The fourth represents the moment when that verisimilitude stops being applicable, because both player and system are actually operating within the same space; when the player doesn’t require a representation of herself within the game, because her body directly acts on the game world, or is even enveloped in it. Here, the relationship between space and the body assumes a defining role.

This ongoing study aims at an understanding of the relationship between the interactant and the system’s operations, raising the awareness on how the former’s organic body and the latter’s hardware are entangled in a communication process that allows the system as a whole to develop. This cybernetic relationship shapes our interactions and its relevance goes beyond the scope of video games, being found in all sorts of interactive media.

Over the last ten years, alternate reality and locationbased technologies have rapidly transformed in response to the adoption of mobile and social computing. In tandem with the rise of these technologies is an ever-increasing community of people with 21st century media literacy skills for deconstructing and reconstructing narratives that have the potential to equally influence the flow of mainstream media.

For this panel section I will discuss the findings of a multiple case study comparing the practices used by designers to produce alternate reality games. I report how these methods facilitate cross-discipline collaborations. In addition, how designers work with non-profit organizations to build awareness campaigns that support larger philosophical goals and future thinking

The paper will discuss how contemporary artistic engagements through technological tools in the realm of transcultural public art – particularly when based on contemporary media technologies – are forms strictly depending on and intertwined to the genius loci and the cultural context of the place to which the artworks refers.

Technology – when conceived and used as an aesthetic form of electronic transcultural negotiation – is not the only defining element of the artwork or the most important one. An artwork – even if technologically based – when moved from its original cultural context, is eradicated from and becomes unrelated to the place of origin. The artwork and its aesthetic are reduced to a reflection and transformed in the expression of an aesthetic artistic choice – explicable only within the framework of the chosen technological medium – that by globalizing the context purges any cultural specificity.

The present panel seeks to problematize what constitutes transdisciplinary collaborative practices in contemporaneity. We will examine their increasing emergence; their methodologies, their challenges and propositions, and what it means to work jointly and why it is important. The aims of this panel are to open discussion on facillitating creative collaboration between different areas of knowledge; on heightening social inclusion in scientific and technological development; and on stimulating pertinent collective local actions based on transdisciplinary collaborative work.

We intend to discuss some practices and methodologies used on the development of an artistic board game about the city of Salvador, Brazil; to describe the alternative forms of financing culture characteristics and explore what they can contribute to fostering the cultural commons, while also pointing to possible developments and new collaborative financing forms that can evolve in the future; and to question how we can really and effectively develop innovative and useful ways to do research and apply our findings having a creative approach. Thus, we look to dialogue based on the multiplicity and diversity of expression inherent in the minor and the socially micro-political which differ from identity posturings that are polarized and proprietary and which serve the interests of totalitarian development models.

This study explores the aesthetic value and its new media-mediated pronunciation of Chinese traditional oiled-paper umbrella. As a traditional Chinese household item, the oiled-paper umbrella has a long history and combines practical and aesthetic functions. It is rich in aesthetic, spatial and decorative beauties. It has rich historical and cultural connotation and aesthetic values crystallizing the Chinese wisdom. At present, under the impact of the machinery industry, the traditional oiled-paper umbrella is gradually replaced by the steel frame umbrella or the new material and new technology, and is gradually withdrawn from people’s lives. As a new art form that combines technology and art, new media art is an effective medium for transforming and regenerating the traditional techniques and cultures, enabling the life of traditional oiled-paper umbrellas to be activated and regenerated, so that traditional techniques and cultures can be activated, inherited and developed in the new era.

We are a network of researchers, developers, educators and librarians working on transforming the way literature is experienced, by exploiting digital technologies to provide new ways to access literary texts. The aim of our activities is to cast a different light on cultural heritage, making people engage with literature in new illuminating ways.
Currently we are based in South Korea, Italy, USA, and Netherlands, bringing together academia, public institutions, creative companies, and no-profit organizations. Our desire is to enlighten how the experience of literature can still be engrossing in a time in which people are more attracted by audiovisual and interactive stories.

The equilibrium between a healthy environment, the energy our society needs to maintain or improve this lifestyle, and the world’s interconnected economies, could pass more quickly than expected from the current complex balance to an entirely new reality where human beings would need to be more creative than ever before to survive. The frequency and severity that certain weather and climate-related events are having around us are increasing, and the ability of human beings to modify our adjacent surroundings has turned into a power capable of altering the planet. Do the electronic arts have a role in all this? Do [electronic] artists have a responsibility in this context?

Traditional disaster management approaches are not enough to deal with the rising risks, and new forms of collaboration are needed to inspire people and organizations to link knowledge with action. We need to develop innovative ways to facilitate a paradigm shift toward a sustainable future. Three initiatives were launched aiming to use electronic art as a catalyst, with the intent of engendering a deeper awareness and creating lasting intellectual working partnerships to help with solving our environmental crisis: The Balance-Unbalance conference series, the “art! ? climate” contest, and the online EChO network.

This paper suggests how a ‘research-oriented’ and ‘research-based’ approach can help undergraduate students engage creatively with new and emerging media technologies, as well as creating a critical and less disciplinary focused approach. It also proposes a way in which arts practice, and specifically practice-led research, can inform pedagogy, improving satisfaction for tutors and students alike. The authors reflect on their experience of modifying the module ‘Media Frontiers’ on a media arts undergraduate degree programme, presented as a case study. It sets out how the changes made transformed students’ means of engaging with emerging media technologies and developing new artistic insights.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Taiko, Machine Learning, Dance, Choreography, Expressive Movement Recognition, Sound Recognition, Movement Classification, Musical Gesture, Interactive Installation, Kinesthetic Awareness, Visualization.

We describe our approach to collecting, analyzing and visualizing expressive movement data to support the creation of an interdisciplinary performance and installation work, 3 Movements in Translation. We seek to understand how three perspectives (the performer, the audience, and the machine) can inform one another to create a cross-cultural performance that allows a broad audience to kinesthetically engage and empathize with expressive features of taiko performance. Taiko is a Japanese artistic practice that combines stylized movement with drumming technique. We share initial results in machinelearning analysis of taiko sound and movement. These results are used, in combination with a performer’s perspective, to inform artistic visualizations of important expressive features within taiko. Through this process, we explore how multiple perspectives of taiko can inform the translation process between the performer, the audience and the machine.

Travellab researches on society’s questions in a digital age, with an epistemological interest in artistic basic research, experimenting with the generation and the incompatibilities of cultural systems. It works on the creation of models for active participation in societies changing demands from the arts, on shared and mobile resource development, through researching topics of identity, networking and economy. Main members of travellab are: Manuel Bonik (D), Chris Chroma (D), Mic Mikina (AT), Juergen Moritz (D), S.D.C. Marquardt (USA).

The Rodríguez Foundation was created in 1994. It formed part of the Basque Selection of Concept Art (SEAC) until 1999, when this group disappeared. Since then it has operated as an artistic body organizing, coordinating and developing different projects that are primarily related to contemporary culture and the new media, always understanding its activities to be an extension of its artistic work.

It has worked indistinctly on creative practice, basically audiovisual media, as well as on theoretic production, both the new forms of commissioning as well as aspects related to the production, diffusion and distribution of contemporary artistic works. Last projects: e-tester.net, intervenciones.tv, arteyelectricidad.net, web-side.org 1.0

Keywords: Memory, Transmedia, Postconflict, Collective, Hypermedia Narratives.

In the context of Colombia’s reconciliation process, and in light of the dynamics of country reconstruction in which post-conflict is framed, it is necessary to create spaces for the construction of collective memory and future scenarios that allow the rapprochement between the actors of the Conflict to be able to consolidate a new vision of its reality. In this sense, alternatives should be sought that, in the light of the new forms of representation, allow the formation of narratives and facilitate the participants of this type of process to understand the new scenario that they pose and of which they are art and part for the consolidation of Truth and trust.

The development of transmedia scenarios, allows the generation of a re-dimension of the reality of a collective, and thus build a proper sense of narrative that facilitates to the actors of this type of conflicts the search of the channels that more conform to their Situation, the media that actually identify them, and the possibility of varying the information systems that serve as a sieve for the evidence of situations that in themselves have been difficult and should be ex- pressed for conciliation.

The association TRANSMEDIA IMMERSIVE UNIVERSITY (TIU) was created in 2011 by French audiovisual producers in order to widely promote transmedia works in France abroad. As such, TIU’s objectives are to bring together media professionals, particularly from the audiovisual, videogame and live action world, to promote their digital transition; to reveal young talents of webcreation through the TIU Lab – a pedagogic laboratory to professionalize the sector and accompany throughout the year the creation of student projects and their insertion into the market; and to introduce digital creation to the greatest number of people through the festival I LOVE TRANSMEDIA, which is held every year at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. On the occasion of the 2017 France-Colombia Year, TIU holds an exchange program on webcreation to develop collaborations between French and Colombian creators and producers and promote their work in both countries. In June, the French delegation will be present during ISEA2017 and next October I LOVE TRANSMEDIA festival will highlight Colombian webcreation in Paris as well.

The invention of technologies that transmit signal, image, letter, sound, moving image, live sound, live image, sense and action, intersense and interaction, presence, interpresence, telepresence, underscores our desire to transcend the narrow here-and-now. However, until this moment, the technologies that would allow the transmission of space have been unimaginable. A barrier has broken: not only have we created virtual communities within nonlocal, transphysical, public realms, we are now able to exercise the most radical gesture: distributing space, transmitting architecture.

Intro: Techno Chronology
May 20-24, 1994. 4CyberConf: At the Banff Centre For the Arts in Alberta, Canada, under the auspices of the Art and Virtual Environments Project, the last virtual chamber created for “Dancing With The Virtual Dervish: Worlds in Progress” affords viewers the world’s first immersive experience of phenomena involving a fourth spatial dimension.

9 February 3-4, 1995. The trans Terra Firma project is launched. Two Silicon Graphics Onyx/RealityEngine2 graphics supercomputers, one at the University of Texas at Austin and the other at the Electronic Cafe in Santa Monica, connected to one another via ethernet, give audiences the opportunity to navigate through and interact within shared virtual architecture. Even though the two sites can communicate via live audio and video ISDN connections, people prefer interacting in the virtual worlds to simply seeing and speaking to one another directly.  April 3, 1995. ‘Webspace”, a three dimensional browser for the worldwide web (WWW), is announced by Silicon Graphics and Template Graphics Software. Built around the VRML (virtual reality modeling language) and OpenInventor graphics formats, designed to work on all the major computer platforms, and integrated into the functioning of Netscape, the most widely used WWW browser, Webspace creates the first widespread opportunity for the transmission and exchange of virtual environments.

May 20-28, 1995. At the Tidsvag No11 ~2.0 (Timewave Zero) art and technology exhibition in Gbtheborg, Sweden, the trans Terra Firma project continues. A series of worlds are constructed that can be transmitted over the web and visited by anyone with internet access and a VRML browser. URL http://www.ar.utexas.edu/centrifuge/ttf.html

l July 1995: RealityLab, the Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments is established within the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. It is the first facility devoted to the study of virtual space as autonomous architectural space.