Presentation Data Table

This paper will address the significance of the ability of digital media to alter and transform primary experiences in ways that may improve, misrepresent or interfere with the viewer’s reception and understanding of the original material. A secondary question is that of ownership and authorship when the translation involves a creative process. These ideas will be considered through a discussion of my video installation Where were the Mothers? (2009) in which people who have taken alternative life paths worked with a professional musician to write one song about the participant’s mother. This video installation allows viewers to explore both transparent and more invisible shifts from the original material.

Human perception has long been influenced by technological breakthroughs. An intimate mediation of technology lies in between our direct perceptions and the environment we perceive. Through three extreme ideal types of perceptual machines, this project defamiliarizes and questions the habitual ways in which we interpret, operate, and understand the visual world intervened by digital media. The three machines create: Hyper-sensitive vision – a speculation on social media’s amplification effect and our filtered communication landscape. Hyper-focused vision – an analogue version of the searching behavior on the Internet. Hyper-commoditized vision – monetized vision that meditates on the omnipresent advertisement targeted all over our visual field. The site of intervention is the visual field in a technologically augmented society. All the three machines have both internal state and external signal.

Battlefield museum “Airborne Museum Hartenstein” is housed in a villa which served as the headquarters of the Allied Forces during World War II. Since heavy fighting took place in the surrounding forest, many of its trees have bullets hidden inside them. We propose an augmented reality (AR) application which superimposes X-rays of the trees upon their trunk, revealing their hidden content. Our approach suggests that augmented reality, when deployed as a means to visualize what is inaccessible to human vision, can be relevant to cultural heritage applications. We present a working prototype of our application and conclude with reflection and future possibilities.

This paper consists of a biographical presentation of the polymath Francisco José de Caldas and two programs inspired by him that aim to bridge art and science practices. Caldas mastered several disciplines from biology to journalism and was a key figure in Colombian independence more than 200 years ago. The University of Caldas is leading two programs that are inspired in Francisco José de Caldas legacy to promote hybrid practices and integrative thinking. Exposure to multiple disciplines with collaborative tools can help not only individuals but also teams to generate hybrid practices that integrate complex broad knowledge.

• The paper presents the context and inspirations for the Flower Antenna, a large-scale, hovering, sculptural sound installation that combines sound and transmission art, computational textiles, and architectural design. Computational textiles include microcontrollers and other electronic components as well as use the natural property of the fabric to communicate information to people The Flower Antenna was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America during the spring of 2021. The authors discuss the use of electromagnetic waves via an electronically active textile construction as a form of non-visual media used to represent the paradox of Blackness and the presence of Black people in architecture in the wake of the history of slavery in the United States. Electromagnetic waves are neither seen nor recognized by most people, yet they shape the spaces people inhabit and support almost every part of society today with the use of invisible networks cast by the internet and its structures. This artistic project contributes to a discussion and reconstructing an understanding of Black culture in transmission arts, textile design, and in architecture.

Keywords: Robotics, Neural Network, Contagion, Data, Sound Generation, Collective Behavior, Installation, kinetics

TURBA is a hybrid environment of artistic speculation that combines an electromechanical robotic device and its sonification with the network structure of 64 neural oscillators and the social context of the collective behaviors. None of the actions generated by TURBA is previously arranged: no sound, no movement, no pattern is deliberately produced. Quite the opposite, these elements come alive because of its own processes in its own network structure.

The project “Turbidity Paintings,” proposes a new visualization methodology to record images and collect data on water quality. The core of this is to develop a system of image collection using do-it-yourself technology. Collected information is being used to construct a library of time explicit images encoded with data metrics from a variety of domestic and international locations. “Turbidity Paintings” explores and challenges the divide between the arts and the sciences and directly questions the role of the artist when dealing with science and scientific data. Art and science are not so vastly different in their approaches. The role of the artist and the art in this project is to create an experimental model by which to develop new ways to create a dialogue around, in our example, water quality.

Presented by Microwave
Co-presented by K11
Moderated by Shannon Walsh

Also a Book launch

There are some significant studies on materiality of media. Above all, Harold Innis chronologically researches diverse prevalent data storage media such as papyrus, parchment and paper. In his book, Empire and Communications, Innis explores how certain media can be popular based on material. Media transports and stores messages by utilizing their unique materiality. Some media maintain their usability for a long time. But other media sometimes disappears soon after being introduced to the world. Innis insists that popularity depends on diverse elements; for example, affordability, weight and resistance against aging. In this way, media as a vehicle has developed following their materials. These vehicles were physical and tangible, so people could read or feel their message without electronics as long as they are literate. However, since the advent of telegraph, the vehicle is getting more and more invisible. In this context, communication and transportation have different meanings that were once interchangeable (Carey, 203).

Media grammar literacy focuses on the unique “grammar” of each medium and the way in which the production variables of each medium interact with content elements (Meyrowitz, 99). This paper concentrates on media grammar literacy in relation to the materiality of media. Instant communication, the immaterial media, has already been popular in society, so we gradually lose the link between the vehicle of message and its materiality. This technology encourages people to communicate each other in real time. They simultaneously post their pictures and messages, and reply them on social networking sites. In other words, as the technology advances, information is getting more and more ubiquitous and instantaneous. Why don’t we have a time to think about the meanings of the terms such as ubiquitous and instantaneous?

To answer that question, I created an interactive art, Tweeting Twitter. This project incorporates the Twitter website, one of the most popular social networking site showing the diverging Internet environment between communication and transportation. This synchronizes physical transportation with invisible transmission again. This creates the in‑between space between the keyboard and the Twitter website, namely, the virtual transportation from the material input device to the immaterial digital image. The method involves an effective process to make ineffective process because communication should be delayed to keep up with the simulating transportation. In doing so, viewers can see the quasi‑physical transportation of their typing in real time in the in‑between space. This visualization implies oral speech, which is impossible to edit or correct texts, and movable printing press, which is the first non‑human text but still physical device. Ultimately, this project explores how to escape from this instant message for a while by giving viewers some time and space to reflect on the instance of text. To maximize the effect, each letter is synchronized with its own bird’s song. Users listen to diverse birds’ sounds when they type their message. This slow message project suggests an acoustic shelter from a huge number of instant messages by creating the in‑between space and time as a bridge between communication and transportation.

In the earlier days of ISEA there were those who looked ahead and saw an epoch where art goes ‘digital’ wholesale; it would become disembodied from its physical shell, like the medieval soul breaking free from the corrupted flesh. ‘Traditional’ art forms were scheduled to mutate at the millennium. Exhibitions were announced as ‘the art of the future’. Images and installations were unashamedly sci-fi-eerie robotics staged in dark rooms.

Twenty years later, ten years after that millennium that now seems insignificant in comparison with 9/11, we look back on those predictions as symptoms of the time, when words like ‘hyper’, ‘cyber’, ‘wired’ had a neon aura.

Today’s urban lighting system still lacks coverage for many walkways, inducing feelings of insecurity and promoting the probability of crime. Ubiquitous surveillance is an intrusion on privacy and does not allow real-time action. The cold, lifeless light shines in the dark, trapping people in the solitude of silence. These absences motivated us to create Twinkle—a luminous transformative creature which inhabits on light posts. They are curious, aerial animals attracted by human activity. During the day, they rest on urban light posts, expanding their solar panels for charging. At night, they react to pedestrians on the street based on various distinct personalities. Twinkle is an indirect solution to urban security without the need for surveillance. We envision a future where technology goes beyond its form and becomes a companion to us.

Artists Statement

Spark Exhibition

Último Esfuerzo Rural (‘Last Rural Effort’) was premiered in Valencia at the Ensems festival of contemporary music, in May 2004. It is composed of two rather different installations. Both produce sounds, big or little, always coarse, sensitive and individual. One part consists of maximum nine giant zambombas (lions roars), made of barrels, measuring 1m 30 and played by pneumatic cylinders. The other part is hayforks which scratch on metal plates or glass. Both machines have such a peculiar sound world, that its origin cannot be other than the countryside. A feeling which comes out of the deepest interior, like the braying of a donkey. The hayforks make up a small machine with a long-range energy radiation while the barrels, on the contrary, compose a grotesque machine with a relatively small energy radiation (when not amplified). The minimum with the maximum performance, or the maximum with the minimal performance, the result is similar: in this paradox poetry is born.

Jess Holz creates ‘microsculptures’ incorporating insect and plant material, imaged by scanning electron microscopy. By collaging materials into small sculptures she creates imagined interactions between entities present. In her work she experiments with bizarre distortions due to charge buildup (an imaging artifact) as a way to challenge the assumed objectivity of scientific images.

This work is a research-creation project that invites a human, a non-human (a touch-me-not plant), and a machine-learning (ML) algorithm to question and re-formulate the relationship among themselves using the concept of ‘umwelt’ given by the German biologist Jacob Johann Von Uexküll. Through this project, the human and the non-human are brought in the same physical space (with different umwelts) to interact with one another and an ML algorithm, each having an agency to change others’ environment and hence, their umwelts. While the human changes the typography on the screen (using a text writing platform developed as a part of this project) through the typing speed and their choice of letters, both the plant and the (computer vision) machine learning algorithm alter this typography dynamically depending on the images clicked by a camera pointing to the plant. Such interactions manifested on the screen encapsulate a space where a non-linear and confusing typography symbolizes the overlapping, collision, and entanglement of the umwelts of these organisms – depicting the shifting of agencies among the human, the non-human and the machine learning algorithm over time.

Keywords: Mapping, Video, Projection Mapping, Epistemology, Stiegler, Borders, Parallel, Latitude, Longitude, Meridia

This paper addresses the failures of the modern mapping project understood through three creative works in video and projection- mapping, discussing them in terms drawn from Bernard Stiegler’s writing on industrialized memory. The three works harvest moving satellite images associated with significant geopolitical frame- works: the 49th Parallel, the Greenwich Prime Meridian, and Canada’s Dominion Land Survey, exposing anomalies and opacities in imagery gathered there. One of these videos, parallel, is being screened at ISEA2017. The paper articulates these works as amplifications of the failure of the modern project to transparently map the world. Rather, such frameworks — in both their historical forms and their contemporary manifestations in GPS, GLONASS, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems, and popular tools such as Google Earth — are rife with anomalies and errors. Counterintuitively, such failures are built into the industrialization of knowledge; as Stiegler puts it, the straight line generates the bent. This is even more the case as the mapping project be- comes a temporal archive.

Unauthorized is a collaboration between a composer/coder, an ensemble of intelligent musical agents (musebots), and a dance/theatre artist who inhabits a character named Rufus, a tired clown that struggles to find humour and meaning in dissonance. In Unauthorized, we draw a parallel to the work of Samuel Beckett, which echoes the profound absurdity often found in the clown. In this rich collaboration, we explore new ways to approach narrative, character, setting, and props; Rufus becomes a catalyst for fractured narratives and new ways of making meaning through performance. In the telling, we trigger more stories, which fosters a sense of collective belong-ing by the nature of their commonalities and subsequent empathy.

Keywords: Art & Science, Natural and Artificial, Biology and Technology, Uncanny Valley.

One of the typical binaries existing in western society is the division between natural and artificial. But similarly biological and technological are often seen as oppositions. In today’s world, it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between natural-biological entities from artificially constructed ones with human cognitive abilities. This is due to the development of biotechnological methods to manipulate or construct new kinds of living organisms that are purposely designed by humans. Likewise, artificial intelligence-systems are being developed to become more autonomous and life-like with their sensing and learning abilities. These developments point out that our perceptions of the concepts of natural and artificial are radically changing. Traditionally natural is understood as something coming from nature and not made or caused by humans; and artificial is understood as the opposite – not natural, but produced, created or caused by humans. Taking the uncanny valley concept by M. Mori (Mori 1970) as a starting point, the paper will investigate how this concept fits into experiments that are intertwining biological and technological matter. The uncanny valley idea was developed by Mori in relation to robots and their resemblance to humans. It is a concept that is strongly connected to our perception of truth and to the moment when we are confronted with a question to judge if something is ‘real’. In the paper the uncanny valley concept is extended to experiments in the arts and the sciences that address intertwining of biology, nature, technology, and which disarrange our traditional understanding of natural, artificial and real.

The talk will additionally present examples of the recent and ongoing research by the author that is interlinked between biology and technology.

This lightning briefly introduces the conceptual aspects of uncopied.art, an endeavour with the mission to make ORIGINAL truly UNIQUE, with physical and digitally immutable certificates of authenticity, expertise, inventory that will outlive us. In the talk the authors discuss the core values, offering a closer view to the workflow of certification.

The authors focus on the opportunities, UNCOPIED may offer for archiving and aim to jointly discover potential risks and pitfalls going along with implementing this emerging technology for the long run in archives. Furthermore, the audience will be introduced to the recent case study that relies on a collaboration with LCMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

As a byproduct of securing art works on a transparent blockchain, UNCOPIED makes available its own dataset to scientists interested to work with open data for research purpose. UNCOPIED aims to provide innovative methods to secure digital collections by making metadata public. A scientific committee is in charge of making the dataset accessible in the respect of stakeholders interests, privacy and ethical concerns.

The authors briefly discuss the current non-hierarchical organizational setting of UINCOPIED and outline its necessity against the background of Open Innovation and its meaning in the progress of innovation.

The computer is often equated with the screen, but CRTs were not widely used in early computing. Punch cards, teletypewriters, and print terminals were used in the development of the first computer gaming, art, and literary systems. The nature of these interfaces influenced this early work.

Time decides the order in which posts are displayed on blogs and the standard permanent link. The precision of a timestamp declares that which is stamped an archived document potentially permanent, also emphasising its transcience: this time is past. Why this obsession with punctuality?

More than 30 years ago, Ted Nelson (who coined the term “hypertext”) articulated a vision of computers for media — “designed, written, drawn and edited, by authors, artists, designers and editors.” A far cry from AI hype, hypertext was also not a synonym for “node and link.”

Keywords: Augmented Reality, AR, bio-art, data-driven narrative, emergent strategies, Tao te Ching, water, symbiosis, dinoflagellates, Chesapeake Bay, estuary, marine biology, performance, microbes, media art, podcast, experimental narrative, bio-architecture, ted nelson, data-driven music.

‘Under the Bay’ is a data-narrative telling the story of a world beneath the surface of the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in North America. A user can point their cell phone at the water like a microscope and see and hear the hidden invisibilities under the Chesapeake Bay. When they do, a series of animated stories between humans and non-humans emerge. The goal of the project was to share authorship with the microbes and their marine environment as much as possible. Sensors already in the Bay stream live data including pH, oxygen, temperature etc. This data affects how the animation and originally composed sound score of this augmented reality project are perceived.

The project is by artist Lisa Moren and marine biologist Dr. Tsvetan Bachvaroff who directed the
science and incoming project data. Stories are written and told by Lisa Moren who art directed the animation and scenes. The sound score is by electronic composer Dan Deacon. Dr. Marc Olano led the software engineering and development for the AR app in IOS and Google Play.

‘Under the Bay’ is a data-narrative telling the story of a world beneath the surface of the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in North America. A user can point their cell phone at the water like a microscope and see and hear the hidden invisibilities under the Chesapeake Bay. When they do, a series of animated stories between humans and non-humans emerge. The goal of the project was to share authorship with the microbes and their marine environment as much as possible. Sensors already in the Bay stream live data including pH, oxygen, temperature etc. This data affects how the animation and originally composed sound score of this augmented reality project are perceived.

The project is by artist Lisa Moren and marine biologist Dr. Tsvetan Bachvaroff who directed the
science and incoming project data. Stories are written and told by Lisa Moren who art directed the animation and scenes. The sound score is by electronic composer Dan Deacon. Dr. Marc Olano led the software engineering and development for the AR app in IOS and Google Play.

Abstract

Current interactive media art frees itself from a singular meaning of art and univocal communication: it becomes a combination of various characters and materials. Audience with passive attitude has been changed into active participants through new ways of communication and plurivocal messages, and the endless interaction between audience and artwork transforms art into sensuous and vivid living creatures. To understand these new phenomena in interactive art, new aesthetic consideration has been attempted, and sometimes the first step has been found in a Buddhistic, horizontal outlook on the world and also Taoism, especially in the thinking of post-structuralism. However, as a matter of fact, it’s difficult to find concrete examples of discussion based on such oriental values. Therefore, in this paper, I try to discuss interactive art with oriental terms and thought, to offer a better understanding of media art, which has been woven with uncertainty principles and contingency. The purpose of this study is to provide an opportunity for us to understand aesthetic meanings of interactive art – in a new way – through an oriental traditional aesthetic matrix.

Underwater sound is brought closer to everyday experience by a series of artworks that use deep ocean recordings in site-specific sound walks along the edge of the ocean. Using a practice of embodied experience the sound walks explore notions of listening and connectedness to the uninhabitable ocean. Sound is considered as engaging a sense of relatedness that allows participants to imaginatively dive beneath the visual surface of the ocean, encouraging a sense of presence and connectedness to arise from these encounters. The artist-author recounts her creative process, as well as exploring responses of participants, to elaborate a multi-faceted field of artistic research around sound, environment and sonic consciousness.

In September 1991, for the first time ever, the choreographer and dancer performed a parabolical flight in weightlessness above French soil. Since then, she has pursued her research at the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales in an attempt to develop a training program using dance techniques adapted for astronauts. Other flights during which the artist invited dancers and non-dancers have followed. The object of this film is to show her goals: take art, dance in particular, into the realm of technology and give it back its essential, albeit unexpected role.

There are now 22 UNESCO Creative Cities of Media Arts, the first having been designated in 2013. The Media Arts Network adopted a plan to collaborate over the achievement of a number of objectives relating to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. A joint commissioning project was proposed in 2019 as a way for media artists to explore creative practice in all the cities in the Network.

The inaugural City to City program involved nine cities and ten artists, and an exhibition of the five digital artworks was launched in December 2020. Despite the challenges resulting from the COVID pandemic, the project was held to have been successful and the decision was made to run the project again in 2021 with appropriate modifications.

New concepts of space and strategies for spatial research and practice across disciplines have been inspired by our changing understanding of reality. Essentially, information technology, Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum physics have brought radical changes in cosmology, science, art, design and philosophy, as they have altered our understanding of space and our experience of it. Such a radical turning point in contemporary thought, has attracted the interest of numerous thinkers and artists like Lev Manovich, who, as the educator and critic Monika Bakke describes, defines this change as the shift from Modernism to “informationalism” (Bakke 2006). The focal point is neither objects nor forms, but various ‘information flows’. Space is now defined as a constantly and uncontrollably changing ‘informational substance’ in which various kinds of polymorphous relativistic spaces emerge. Such a shift necessitates new spatial research strategies for advancing contemporary site-specific art and architecture.

Keywords: uncanny; electronic art installation; affect; database aesthetics

As winter’s dusk encroaches on The Rocks, under the shadowy reach of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, anonymous and unnoticed by the lively crowds, the shutters open, and the blank upper windows flash alive in vacant Reynold’s Cottage. Through the unraveling night the cottage innards twist and flutter, spit and ooze with glimpses of disarray, despair and turmoil, the windows spirit-lenses on the turbulent world of mid-twentieth century Sydney.

Since June 2021, the Universitat Politècnica de Valencia (UPV) has a Vice-rectorate for Art, Science, Technology and Society responsible for creating a participatory and socially responsible community. The programming of its activities is aimed to comprehensively train students through transdisciplinary programs, associative, sports, volunteer activities, etc., related to the Sustainable Development Goals, based on the principles of equality, diversity and social inclusion.
Among the functions of this vice-rectorate’s office are promoting a participatory culture, preserving heritage, promoting open science, fostering University Social Responsibility (RSU), favoring solidarity and social commitment, guaranteeing equality and diversity, integrating people with functional diversity, support permanent education and encourage graduates to continue their links with the UPV.

Although workers in academia are fluent in digital technologies at an email, database, spread-sheet level, they remain largely illiterate to languages of code, and to the broader conceptual aspects of the networked world. Outside of studies in computer science, matters of code, the influence of computational thinking and the extent to which algorithms shape the perceptions and conditions of reality, remain largely untaught. Technological literacies that are now central to every field of social, political, and economic import are being ignored by the academy. As a result, universities that have been long celebrated as institutions to instruct and celebrate literacy are themselves becoming increasingly illiterate. Languages of code, and their broader implications need to be taught in universities, but prior that, they must be taught to the universities. Beyond academic buzz terms of future-readiness and innovation, in order to remain fundamentally relevant and rhetorically coherent, the academy must catch-up to the present.

Unnatural Language is a network of electronic organisms (“Datapods”) that create sonic improvisations from physical sensors in the natural environment. Each Datapod has custom electronics connected to sensors, a speaker, and a wireless network. The sensed data, for example from electrodes that measure the subtle electrical variations in the leaves of plants, is transformed into a unique synthesized sound. Encased in sculptural materials (natural fiber, leather, leaves, etc) and dispersed into a natural environment, the Datapods enter into a sonic dialogue with the existing ecosystem of plants and animals.

The colonial import of early media technologies, e.g. sound recording in Global South faced a stiff resistance from the local practitioners. In this paper, I am interested to investigate why leading South Asian musicians and sound practitioners were not enthusiastic about recording their voices on the shellac discs; and for a long time resisted recording their improvisational sounds as they were: offerings to nature and the situated environment. What were the reasons of their contention and resistance? I argue, the pre-colonial sound practitioners feared that recording technology would contaminate their performances by mutating the natural and embedded connections they uphold in their practice. By discussing this unknown history, the paper aims to shed light on the discourse on how do we inhabit and relate with nature, and transform our environments on the media.

We are developing a new manifesto based on the Bogota Declaration of 1976 in which eight equatorial countries claimed sovereignty over the geostationary orbit. The declaration is a somewhat forgotten document about inequalities in technological power, the physics of orbit and its contested spaces. We will try to discover what the geostationary orbit can mean to us and define our own protests, rituals and love songs in relation to it.

We were struck by the way this United Nations document reads like a poem. It is full of fervour, challenging the great powers and at the same time describing the extraordinary architecture of this necklace-like ring of satellites encircling the Earth.

Unstablelandscape is my artistic and research platform to investigate and deploy: Dance improvisation within digitally augmented environments; The dramatic tension between design and desire, abstract patterns and anthropomorphic depictions; Real time composition or improvisational performances with hybrid systems (humans, computers and other living systems); The improvisational creative act with generative strategies and systems; Alternative human-computer interfaces for dance performance and multimedia installations; Embodied, embedded and distributed cognition; The relation between moving bodies, cognition, technology and the design of experiences and realities; The intelligence of biological systems and bottom-up or biologically inspired architectures for art making and performance systems and?The relation between improvisational digital pop-culture (DJ/VJ), art making and social events/performances.

Chair Per­son: Bern­hard Gar­nic­nig
Pre­sen­ters: Bern­hard Gar­nic­nig, Ceci Moss, Jamie Allen, Peter Moos­gaard, Con­stant Dul­laart, Ju­lian Palacz, Joel Holm­berg & Will Schrimshaw

Com­puter net­works and cities both are so­cial spaces that have emerged as ma­te­r­ial spaces where lives are lead and work gets done. They are su­per­struc­tures for com­mu­ni­ca­tion, net­works of chan­nels where in­for­ma­tion and goods are trans­ferred. Both spaces have their par­tic­u­lar acoustic prop­er­ties and qual­i­ties, and while ex­ten­sive stud­ies of en­vi­ron­men­tal acoustics and the sound­scape of our en­vi­ron­ment have been emerg­ing in the last 40 years, net­work spaces are still con­sid­ered to be spaces with­out sound,  acoustics or any sonic prop­er­ties.

The panel on Sound­wwwalks will ex­plore this from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives: In­ves­ti­ga­tions to­wards an Acoustic Ecol­ogy of Net­works, and web browsers and media stored on the web as in­ter­face and ma­te­r­ial for live sound per­for­mance. The in­vited artists and re­searchers pre­pare lec­ture per­for­mances within the stan­dard pre­sen­ta­tion setup of the con­fer­ence.

Per­for­mances by:

1. Bern­hard Gar­nic­nig, ex­plor­ing the tran­si­tion of the built and “nat­ural” en­vi­ron­ment to the net­work space as the defin­ing sonic en­vi­ron­ment of our lives.
2. Ceci Moss, play­ing a “dense, care­fully arranged Sound­wwwalk com­po­si­tion using record­ings of the human voice found on the web. Beat­box­ing in­struc­tional videos, vocal med­i­ta­tion ex­er­cises, on­line singing lessons will all find their way in this eclec­tic cho­rus, one that fore­grounds the warmth and dex­ter­ity of the human voice”.
3. Jamie Allen will per­form a sound­wwwalk which ref­er­ences and mines the vast func­tional audio archives of the in­ter­net.  A sound walk for hard­ware, through hard­ware, on hard­ware.
4. As well as im­prov, re­mote and tape per­for­mances Peter Moos­gaard, Con­stant Dul­laart, Ju­lian Palacz, Joel Holm­berg and Will Schrimshaw.

Location: N 51° 27’ 22” E 6° 43’ 56”
Code: C
This is a game. This is not a game.
Do you want to play?

Some Rules
Space, place and time do matter.
If public space becomes fiction, same is for borders separating playgrounds from other spaces.
The relativity of time is more than a famous formula.
You can try to ignore the ghosts of the past. However, you cannot avoid meeting them. And they might like to play.
If you consider sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, expression and submission as nodal for triggering game pleasures you should not forget that the same is for life in general.
Commitment is essential. However, commitment does not mean obedience.
Watch out. Listen. Yet do not only focus on two senses. Smell, touch, and taste are relevant as well.
You will never get what you’ve expected.
Suspension of disbelief is not an appropriate option.
Mechanisms of mutual observation may increase attention and intensity.
They may also increase levels of stress, distress and distrust.

This talk will address the potential for leveraging physical-digital technologies in public-realm interventions which help offer fuller engagements in our current realities. It will serve as a platform to present the project Uptown Underground, which uses projections and accelerometer data to bring urban context down into an underground subway ride, as well as an in-the-works intervention which uses photovoltaic cells tuned to LED screens and air cooling methods to critique mass energy waste in Times Square.

Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT) is set among lakes, forests, and wide-open spaces that stimulate creativity and future talent, for a naturally different learning and research experience. With its first-rate pro-grams, strong ties to partners and local communities, and talented professors and instructors, UQAT is highly regard-ed in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, throughout Quebec, and all across Canada and the world. UQAT is considered a leader in Quebec for its leading university teachings in new media creation, video game, 3D creation, and digital cinema offer-ing students an exceptional learning environment. UQAT has become the first university in Quebec to offer such advanced training in the field of new media creation and 3D creation as well as a program entirely dedicated to the creation of video games.

In this paper/talk I would like to address the concept of locative media from the perspective of urban culture. My main questions is: how does the emergence of locative media change our understanding of urban culture, and the related concepts of ‘dwelling’ and ‘public space’? With locative media I refer to both artistic locative works that address issues of locality, identity and public sphere and the appropriation of new – often commercial – locative services by consumers/citizens in the practice of daily life.

Urban culture can be understood as the philosophical idea of the city as an ‘organization of differences’. Starting with the Chicago and German School, urbanists have pointed out that the modern city brings together (or according to some – produces) diverse groups of people with diverse backgrounds and different identities, lifestyles and goals. Two concepts play an important part in this definition of urban culture: ‘dwelling’ and ‘public space’. ‘Dwelling’ is the process of ‘making or feeling oneself at home’, the process in which local structures are appropriated or exerted to express or strengthen one’s (group) identity. The public sphere is the place and process of confrontation and exchange, of clashes, innovation, political organization and cultural development.

If locative media offer the possibility to establish new types of mediated geospatial experiences (Bleecker), producing new spatial practices and new interfaces to appropriate space, how then should we re-theorize the concepts of dwelling, public space and urban culture? What part do locative interfaces play in the experience of a localized urban culture? Theories range from optimistic ones (Rheingold’s smart mobs-scenario in which thanks to the mobile phone, location technology and social networks, nobody has to bowl alone anymore) to overtly critical ones, in which ‘software sorted cities’ (Graham) extend current trends of privatization, parochialization and exclusion and disciplinization.

Abstract

Urban space is a densely woven fabric; a multi-layered tapestry of different actors and institutions, cultures and political agendas. Living in the city means to co-inhabit a multiplicity of real and virtual spaces. Locative media’s potential to turn the urban fabric into a canvas promises to open up a playground for probing into subjectivities and multiplicities that conventional map making practices are blind to. The playground of locative media arts practices however also links critically to the technologies and politics of spatialisation and the historicity of cartographic practices. Probing into the fluid and fragile anatomies of the physical and social spaces we inhabit thus involves a critique of maps and map making practices as social constructions of the world. After all, as John Harley argues, maps redescribe the world in terms of relations of power and cultural practices, rather than providing a representation of nature (2001).

This paper will look at the potentials for the map to become a tool of intervention itself. It will introduce the performative map-making practice of my work Impossible Geographies 02: Urban Fiction, a locative media and installation environment concerned with the multiplicity of spaces, lived and mapped, and the connections and
fissures they produce in the urban fabric. The exploration is situated in a critical discourse involving John Harley’s deconstruction of the map, and feminist, postcolonial and visual culture perspectives. The discussion involves a critical
account of locative media practices with regards to linking geographic locations (and relations) to social positions (and relations). In summary, the argument of this paper is that we are still far from probing and mapping Debord’s ‘lived space’ (1977).

The aim is to generate connections between art, science, and technology, which will allow us to find new languages that are presented to the current cultural demands. The use of these new languages will make it possible to consolidate contemporary identities and find ways to resolve conflicts. In this manner, through the Laboratory of creation of interactive cinemas, which is given in urban interventions with members of the community of the city of Manizales, the participants will first learn how to create audiovisual content and then participate in generating such content. This opens the pathway to explore the tension between art and technology as a poetic relationship, in search of finding new ways to resolve conflicts and to understand each other. It is the Mobile Laboratory of Creation that will allow learning about interactive languages and understanding the aesthetics of interactive cinema. This will be investigated, through interrelations between design, art, and technology, and will discover: what cinema tells us, what arises from that interrelation, as well as generating an encounter with oneself and with others that contribute to the resolution of conflicts.

Information systems are continually recontextualizing data, migration patterns, biological components and processes, between life and code. As Geographer Eugene Thacker states, these systems can be scientific, or many things, with lasting effects that are cultural, social, and political. As these systems evolve and grow, so to do the artworks created in the afterglow, becoming vital reflections of our contemporary algorithmically soaked culture. This paper examines these ideas alongside the Salmon People, a video and sound installation thematically concerned with the shared dark ecologies of nonhuman and human animals. Like information flowing through high tech super highways, sockeye salmon deftly negotiate seen and unseen geographies, technologies, politics, and cultures. In order to understand the artworks content, sequences and layout, as well as the logic of the shot selections, we conducted a close reading analysis of the installation. We suggest that the work is generative and claim that the projections are made up of 9 videos playing concurrently in 3 large vertical panels. This paper examines these ideas, asking the questions: What role does the screen play in the design of this artwork? What are the types of audience immersion and interaction? Finally, we address the work on three levels: the structural, the narrative, and the immersive. The structural level identifies the key frames, and any overlapping frames. The narrative level investigates the 3 vertical panels in relation to story parameters such as plot and story world. The immersive level considers how the audience oscillates between a heightened state of immediacy and hypermediation.

Useful Fictions began as a two-year collaboration between artists, designers, and scientists from the University of California, Davis, USA, and the Chaire Arts et Sciences of the École polytechnique and École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, France. In 2019, gathering a coalition of artists, designers, humanists, and graduate students to work with globally acclaimed climate scientists in their labs, the project culminated as a week-long multidisciplinary symposium at École polytechnique and a temporary public art project titled The Speed of Light (SOL) Expedition, which took place in Montmartre, Paris, France. The goal of the collaboration was to design and implement an experimental platform suitable for bringing artists and scientists together to exchange shared concerns of critical ecological and societal importance. The vehicle that carried the discourse forward was the creative co-production of artwork by the artist-scientist teams. In pursuit of shared inquiries, the teams worked side-by-side with an attitude toward embracing the complexity of the problem and modeling radical openness to research in which tools, laboratories, and studio work are shared between the team members.

The project’s framework emphasized examining the pars pro toto correlation between measurements and their interpretations. With a focus on examining the context and expanding concepts of ecological thinking through creative means, this project invites the rethinking of a human-centered narrative that dominates and defines contemporary cultural consciousness. We ask: “What controls the manufacturing of our systems of belief? What stories do we tell ourselves? Can we imagine differently?”

At this panel, Useful Fictions lead collaborators will join as panelists to discuss their lab activities and outcomes. The panel will examine and discuss how these creative and critical approaches to the shared inquiry can inform contemporary debates surrounding values and new directions of art and science collaborations. The panel is also an opportunity to extend an open invitation for an external critique of the work.

Abstract

Keywords: photography, re/construction, construct, perception, Second Life, reality, virtual reality, cultural context, re/presentation, appropriation, metaverse, virtual architecture, depiction, perpectivism, Ottoman miniatures, experience.

Photography is a powerful 2D representation tool to document 3D volumes like architecture. It is possible to manipulate photos with 2D tools like Photoshop in order to suggest new 3D re/formations and re/interpret architecture. One can alternatively use 2D textures as mappings to create realistic 3D model renderings. This project is a combination of these two approaches: photographing architecture, turning the resulting photos into transparent PNGs and then mapping these photos onto 3D volumes in order to create a ‘new’ architecture from an ‘existing’ architecture…

One of the advantages of using photographs to create architecture is that your photo pool can easily be composed of visuals from various cultures and you may end up using an amalgam of visuals from, say, two supposedly ‘opposite’ cultures. This possibility reminds the peaceful collaboration of musicians from different cultures to create a unique music. In addition, this act can also be taken as a migration of media through appropriation of photography for 3D volume creation and re/presentation. At this point, we are talking about a double representation, since photography is a representation tool already and it gains another representational dimension when it is re-mapped onto 3D volumes for the construction of an alternative reality.

This paper concentrates on using a representation tool (photography) to construct a 3D space (architecture) within a virtual 3D environment (Second Life). During the process; the concepts of perception, reality, cultural context, re/presentation and appropriation will be examined.

Keywords: Animation, Vector Graphics, 3D Modeling, Processing

The focus of this research is to explore an alternative means of computer animation by allowing two dimensional vector models to be viewed with directional variations. By doing this, the animated model is composed of 2D shapes but can be viewed from multiple angles like a 3D object without having the structural limitations and complex rendering of a 3D mesh.

A description of fractal techniques is given through the composition of four recent pieces: REFRACTIONS, BENEDICTUS, HOPEFUL MONSTERS.

HOPEFUL MONSTERS for instance: Scored for an ensemble of 36 wind instruments. In this work musical texture, rhythm and melodic contour were generated through a recursive replacement algorithm applied to “webs.” Webs are graphical objects that resemble threads laced between nails. The large scale form of the piece was sketched with MacDraw. The MacDraw objects were interpreted with a program of my own design written in APL. The APL program created a MIDI file that was imported to Finale for score and parts.

Scored for MIDI Horn, Macintosh computer, and digital synthesizers. This piece uses an algorithm for recursive subdivision that maps the graphic image of a mountain range on the horizon into pitch, time, and timbre. The MIDI wind controller paints the coarse features (peaks and valleys) and the Macintosh executes an algorithm to generate a complex musical texture. Aspects of dynamics, phrasing, and pace are influenced in real time by the MIDI Horn soloist.

Codex Endogenous reveals and visualizes the beauty and morphology of a “self” and its environment. A “codex” is a collection of pages stitched together and in cognitive neuroscience, the term “endogenous” describes phenomena that is spontaneously generated from an individual’s internal state. The quantified self is described by Gary Wolf as “self-knowledge through numbers. My work aims to construct emergent and metaphorical ways to visualize the self by categorizing the data that I implicitly and explicitly emit unknowingly throughout the day and collect it for observation. Motivated by theory in self-psychology such as William James’ theory of consciousness of the self and the study of coping, my work retells personal narratives by using artistic methods like redaction or blocking out undesired information from view and replacing it with spectral and ethereal imagery to question how a self renavigates and grows upward comparisons during self-reflection and memory formation. Codex Endogenous is a screen-based projection composed of daily data-driven drawings that represent the quantified self and environmental habituations that analogously take the form of keeping a daily journal.

Floating Reverie is an online digital residency program started in early 2014 as a result of a perceived lack of platforms & opportunities available for artists using new media and digital culture in South Africa and Africa. This paper looks at how Floating Reverie, an alternative art space, can both provide new creative research and challenge the way in which we position traditional structures like the gallery. It will also position a curatorial networked method as a way of decolonising the curatorial process and curator. The Internet presents an entirely new space for artists versus tradition or conventional galleries or exhibition space which can be limiting and restrict their structure and implementation. It has the power to offer a platform to artists to destabilise these conventions. This article interrogates the residency as process and creative practice for contemporary African artists, breaking with established traditions and providing an alternative through the Internet.

Keywords: Serendipity, Digital, Information, Experience, Collaboration, Creativity, X.

Contemporary interaction with media is mediated through a plethora of digital systems, conditioning said interaction to the experiences that these systems anticipate and limiting the potential of the medium for surprise and serendipity. Through a literature-review and system analysis, we assert the value of serendipity in our digital interactions, arguing the necessity of a distinction between Natural and Artificial Serendipity, while establishing key areas of action of serendipitous systems: Information Encountering, Experience, Collaboration, Creativity and X. We identify specific systems within each of these key areas, as well as their methods and mechanics for achieving Artificial Serendipity in the Digital Medium.

An essential function of architecture is controlling the environment that surrounds us. In practice, interior climates are discretized into self-contained, functional units. For example, wetness is kept in designated wet spaces, and dryness to dry spaces. Contrary to nature’s changing weather patterns, architecture is often static and binary, with no diffusion in between. As a result, many weather conditions that exist in nature are not experienced inside architectural spaces. This project uses vapor as a medium to bring microclimates that exist outside into an architectural space. The unique characteristics of vapor as tectonic elements allow users to modulate visibility, create cooling gradients, and produce spatial patterns in a controlled manner. The three main elements are: point– vapor vertex ring, line – vapor tornado, and plane – vapor wall. The focused and diffused conditions of vapor enable both localized
and global states to transpire through soft boundaries.

VARIABLE NARRATIVE is a new literary gender. It can be defined as modelized crossmedia, interactive and massively cooperative fiction. A variable narrative is meant to be broadcast and edited on any and on all medias, whether they are electronic or not.

The Story of the 3 Spaces is the first variable narrative. Approximately two thousand people have already contributed to its writing and five hundred of their texts have been selected to join the fiction. The cooperative writing campaign will last untill 2014. It will progressively extend to different languages and countries. Each country will create an independant « sphere » that will obey the model of the narrative and add some local specificities. A common bilingual core (English and French) will incorporate the texts defined as the most important by each sphere.Cooperative creation offers an alternative to collaborative authoring : each author creates his/her text obeying the rules of the model. Thus, the fiction coherence is preserved and everyone is acknowledged.

On March 2008, The Story of the 3 Spaces is to be channeled to all medias in the most important commercial shopping centre of Paris, which is also an underground hub. It will construct a feeling of immersion which is a characteristic of virtuality. A way to question reality jam through literature and not through images. Within the space of a week, over one million people will be in direct contact with this immersive installation and a few thousands will actually play with it.

I will approach both question of cooperative writing and of reality jam through the specificity of variable fiction: modelization, through ethical questioning of the use of technologies and through my position of author-researcher in charge of a long term project, largely covered by the medias, and destined to become international.

The southern part of the two Americas was baptised Latin America in early modern times. By importing academic Europe’s Esperanto, Latin thus became the label to characterise South American culture. This culture was defined from the perspective of the Latin-Christian civilisation. Active in the centre of this intellectual colonising process were the elite troupes of the Vatican, i.e. the congregation of the Jesuits. They were sent away from Rome by the pope in order to universalise the world in a single faith. Even the great GWF Hegel still understood South America’s identity solely in relation to Christian Europe.

“Variantologia Latina“ as an experiment is working in an opposite direction. It proceeds from the assumption, that the different countries and regions of South America have developed their own knowledge and technology cultures as well as their own forms of linguistic expressions, their own music, machines and technical images long before and parallel to colonisation. The archaeology of South American media could carve out these developments from the deep-time developments of history and have them unfold within a new context. ISEA2010 RUHR is set to be the place for breaking the first ground.

Abstract

It is frequently assumed that as the technical capabilities of digital media expand, so too will immersive and mimetically naturalistic qualities in digital graphics. The ‘conventions’ of digital imagery have transmuted from the highly pixelated, discrete bitmapped graphics emblematized by Super Mario Brothers and Jodi into a smooth, perspectival illusionism that meets or even exceeds the resolution threshold of the human eye.

This trend towards illusionism has resulted in a tendency to obscure the architectonic properties of digital images, which begin life as one of a few basic shapes – circles, squares, and lines. But as the frenzy for digital naturalism licenses the concealment of the undergirdings of digital figures, a competing form of code-based, generative abstraction has emerged to succeed the proto-computational formalisms of artists such as Victor Vasarely and Sol LeWitt. This paper will take an example of this generative abstraction as its primary case study. Marius Watz’s 2005 homage to Victor Vasarely entitled Electroplastique #1 translates Vasarely’s algorithmic visual language into computational generative code. Well in advance of bitmapping technology Vasarely infused his works with a distinct computational ‘look’ by conceptualizing the image as a field of discrete values arranged within and conditioned upon the structure of the grid. Surprisingly, however, little has been done in the disciplines of art history or media studies to evaluate the extent to which Vasarely’s method predicts the possibilities and limitations of encoded computational plasticity.

Vcyclescope” “V”eron + re “cycle” + kaleido”scope is an upcycle photographic gadget handmade with domestic waste to reduce waste from its source. Both its’ function and aesthetic quality are upgraded from its’ original value. Vcyclescope is a tool for interacting with the outside world. It is open ended, you can communicate with people and the world on the other end. By capture stills or videos with it, everything in real life can be turned into surreal yet inspiring photographic images. These patterns can then be applied back to our daily life as stylish design products.

Vcyclescope

The word “kaleidoscope” is derived from the Ancient Greek Kukoc (kalos), “beautiful, beauty”,d6oc (eidos), “that which is seen: form, shape” and 6co1ho(skope5), “to look to, to examine “observation of beautiful forms.” The word “Vcyclescope” is derived from my name Veron “V”, recycle “cycle” (“Vcycle” pronounces similar to “recycle” ) and kaleidoscope “scope” = kaleidoscope made by Veron with recycle materials.

Vcyclescope & Photography

Vcyclescope creates pictures by repeating images of the same fragment of the physical world with optical reflection by the mirror surfaces within. On the other hand, each photo is an optical record of a fragment (eg.1 /1000s) of the reality. Both are the results of the real but not necessary looks like theirs originals. That’s the interesting point of the both. Let’s sense our physical world and express it visually with sensibility! More and more HK people into photography. It became one of the most popular interests. The nature of photography is fragment (e.g.1 /1000s) of the reality. It is real but not the whole truth. When digital technology became more and more advanced, the more and more photography don’t necessary represent the reality.

Like photography, kaleidoscope forms images solely by optical reflection. It reflects the image of a small fragment of the actual scene. Multi-reflection between the mirrors inside duplicates that tiny fragment to form a new complicated image that doesn’t physically exist. Both photography and kaleidoscopic images are real but not real at the same time – a mixture of sense and sensibility. By changing angle a little bit, things in our everyday life can become extraordinary. Our daily life waste can be easily recycled to form the magical kaleidoscope.

Kaleidoscope is commonly filled with colorful pieces to form patterns. These pieces is like the conventional constrain that molded us to do things more or less in the same way. Vcyclescope has holes on both ends to allow viewer to look into the world in different angles to form unlimited visual variations instead of looking at the limited pieces. Less is more! Vcyclescope is a tool for interacting with the outside world.

\What if key moments in popular mythological tales had a different outcome? According to the legend of Orpheus, he turned his head despite the impediment not to do so – and lost his wife. This research began as a continuation of my thesis on Counterfactualism and my recent work for a ballet production on Orpheus and Eurydice, applying scientific imaging such as thermography. The audience is invited to become protagonists in an immersive environment and to question the different outcomes of the decisive situation with the aid of layers of various imaging technologies.

According to the tale, as Orpheus has been the first human being who visited the underworld and returned alive to the here and now, particular attention is drawn to the display of life-supporting imaging technologies, which merely provide a concept of the physical conditions, but never on a mental or psychological level. Therefore the presentation consists of several layers, including spatial audio and augmented reality, each of them revealing a different aspect on the situation. At the same time, the display modes force the spectators to turn their heads around and by doing so, being in the same situation as the protagonist of the ancient Greek myth.

With my work in progress, I am responding to the topic of disruption with an aesthetic and narrative challenge for media art. The inflationary ‘capture-all’ approach of our everyday life demands to rethink strategies and behaviours. Not only in the range of our perception happens this sensory overload, but far beyond.

What will come about next? Which kind of data is not already collected and visualised for general use? With the help of scientific imaging all those still invisible layers of our world can be accessed and as well assessed. But soon, more and more of these technologies will become commonplace and used presumably in the most trivial manner. But, how can we actually value these images? With scientific imaging technologies, it is possible to capture a wide range of details, usually invisible for the human eye. Though, they do not reveal anything about emotions. In this regard, figurative paintings still provide or simulate a better insight into the emotional state per se. In my work, multiple layers of the projected video will reveal different insights into the situation.

Fairy-tales, fables and sagas belong to the foundations of our narrative culture – in current movies, the epic television series of today or contemporary video games, vestiges of the antique mythologies are always recognisable. Since the narrative concepts of ancient myths are still valid nowadays, we can query the topics. As explored in my practice based PhD in media arts, the tradition of storytelling and narrative structures experiences a transition, most likely as a consequence of video gaming. Although, this is not genuinely new, well established for instance in the traditions of Arabic storytelling techniques, with its most obvious example of the ’Arabian nights‘. My multi-layered video-installation reacts to the mobile spectator in the projection space and provides fragmented insights with different imaging techniques.

The artist’s talk “Viable Planetarity” proposes to explore the symbiotic entanglement of our societies with the biosphere and the ways in which this pragmatic anchorage has become the core of an ecosystem of socio-political reinventions. Grounded in the artistic practice of the Disnovation.org collective, this presentation will test the virtues but also the limits of the notion of symbiosis.

Fossil fuel-doped modernity has succeeded in normalizing the ideology according to which human societies led by the technosphere are moving towards an ultimate detachment from the low constraints and limitations of the so-called “natural” world. Such constraints are now coming back to haunt us, imposing a radical reconnection with the physical, material, and living realities of the biosphere, on which we are entirely dependent. The artist’s talk “Viable
Planetarity” proposes to explore the symbiotic entanglement of our societies with the biosphere and the ways in which this pragmatic anchorage has become the core of an ecosystem of socio-political reinventions.

Grounded in the artistic practice of the Disnovation.org collective, this proposal will test the virtues but also the limits of the notion of symbiosis. Understanding the differences between forced symbioses and sustainable symbioses will be the core driver of this artist talk, based on
a series of art-science installations developed over the past 3 years by the collective.

Collective Disnovation.Org works at the interface between contemporary art, research & hacking. Their artistic provocations seek to empower post growth imaginaries and practices while challenging the widespread faith that economic growth and technofixes will solve the ecosystemic disruptions they produced in the first place.

Keywords: Subvertising, Videoart, Performance, Artivism, Women, Artistic, Revolution

This text is a conceptual and formal analysis of works of video art, photography and activism in defense of women’s rights. It contextualizes the theoretical concepts of feminism, desire, liberty, reality, subversion or spectacle, in the framework of art and feminist critique in order
to articulate an analysis running from the XXth to the XXIst century based on the theories of thinkers like Flusser, Lacan, Barthes, Debord and, more specifically concerning women, Lagarde, Beauvoir, Butler and Amoros. The aim is to show that art has had an important role in the diverse feminisms, contributing significantly to the improvement of the number of women in art and society, and that it continues to do so, being an accessible medium for reaching the dissident sector of the population, a medium that is creative in its confrontation, a medium
whose duty is to communicate history and ensure that it is justly told, a tool for struggle camouflaged under the umbrella of art.

Aerial images have become commonplace on the media landscape around us, in places like TV news, films, and digital maps. However, do we consider what these images represent, both in the artistic field and in society?

The aim of this project is to raise these and other questions in order to reflect on how drones are getting inserted into the normality of everyday life and to question their vigilant scope. We ask how we as artists can act as hackers, disruptors and creators of new possibilities.

Our use of aerial images is not intended as surveillance, but rather as research on what is happening in certain areas where nature and worlds inhabited by humans coexist, most of them unknown to the majority of the local population.

Project Description
Vigil For Some Bodies is a participatory exhibit that can be experienced in a traditional gallery; however, it would be even more at home in a warehouse, delivery truck, factory environment, or other location relating to factory or warehouse labor. The exhibition stems from a social intervention played out between Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk website and an Amazon Fulfillment Center located near Dallas.

As a series of humanist, solidarity projects, I have been hiring digital laborers on Mechanical Turk since 2008 to realize their embodied selves in jobs where they are paid to perform athletic events (as in my previous project, Mechanical Olympics), meditate (in my participatory exhibit Mediations in Digital Labor), or chant “Om” for an ongoing video project, Endless Om. The project began as a Mechanical Turk job request for the workers to light a candle in memory of a lost loved one. Fifty workers responded to my job by sharing details and memories with me by way of Amazon’s virtual job platform.

This interaction took place during the weekend of Halloween (2015). Shortly thereafter, Amazon advertised temporary job positions in their Fulfillment Centers during the November-December holiday season. I took my virtual crowd-sourced vigil and transformed it into a series of modified battery operated candles (purchased from Amazon.com, naturally) labeled with the names of those lost and remembered and the worker IDs of the Turkers who shared their memories with me. Then I applied for a job in a Dallas-area Amazon Fulfillment Center (AFC). I photographed the candles throughout the hiring process inside and outside the two AFCs I visited.

As a participatory exhibit, Vigil For Some Bodies includes the labeled candles, artificially lit by battery, a symbol of the “artificial artificial” labor performed by the Turkers (according to the Amazon Mechanical Turk tagline) — their metaphoric current only as strong as the battery fueling the flame. Framed photographs of the candles at the AFCs and artificial flowers will also be present in the exhibition space (there are no live flames in this installation). Viewers/participants will be invited to label additional battery-operated candles on view in the installation and/or provide a name to be added to an ongoing virtual flame on a web page dedicated to this project.

Thematic Statement: The New Geopolitics of (Art-)Making: D.I.Y. Ontologies & (De)institutionalization
This project utilizes D.I.Y. practices—hiring my own workforce and modifying store-bought battery-lit candles to memorialize the crowd. The geopolitical challenges common to crowd work on a site like Amazon’s is tempered by the act of remembering and creating a space for participating in a humanist ritual, albeit with fabricated candles and flowers and a virtual flame constructed by code. (De)institutionalization is present in this project in the circular attempt to bring the Turkers’ memories back to Amazon itself, seen in the photographs of the AFCs where, behind the scenes, physical laborers are boxing and shipping products that include the battery-operated candles used as part of the intervention.

Images/Sketches/Drafts
This exhibition is flexible in terms of scale and its possible location. The primary elements are modified LED candles, candles with blank areas for participant modification, photographs cheaply framed (and supported in a standing position), artificial flowers as a decorative embellishment. The online/virtual flame (and call for participation in this part of the exhibit) can appear on a screen within the exhibition space or a link to the virtual portion of the project can simply be shared in the wall text.

The idea of the project is to bring humanity into a technical assemblage of crowd work, the cloud, big-box online retail, and D.I.Y. practices.

Much of the public discourse on the topic of violence in entertainment is wrapped in hyperbole and controversy. As viewers, readers, and players of electronic media, we are often protected behind a layer of abstraction via carefully constructed representation. We use plastic game controllers with abstract buttons and pads, which are devoid of content, to direct action that is inherently disconnected from the physical experiences we live on the screen. As Michel de Certaeu writes in The Practice of Everyday Things, games betray a logic for everyday life. However, in our lifetime, this logic of games includes a serious abstraction from the consequences of our actions.

In this paper we present The Jack Bauer Training Kit (JBTK), a new physical interface and video game add-on for viewing episodes of the television series “24”. Jack Bauer, a fictional character in this series, is notable for using torture as a method for extracting information from “bad guys”. Players watch the show until a torture scene starts and can choose to advance the narrative by pouring water onto the hooded face of a physical 10 inch doll bound to a small table by leather restraints. Pouring just the right amount of water gets you a high score, too much and you might kill the “bad guy”. Rather than using an abstract game controller, where the functionality is detached from the stylized actions on the screen, the JBTK mimics the torture applied in the real world by physically instantiating its representations, violence and consequences. This points to an interesting phenomena in American television in the new millennium: it is acceptable for our heroes use torture. But in this case the player needs to clean up the mess when they are done.

Working with game development environments and custom built software, Microplex works with three virtual environments that produce sound. Using the conceptual framework of commonality in structures between Urban Environments, Computer Processors, and the connectivity of the Human Brain, Microplex is a real time cinema/ visual music performance 15 min. in length and an installation as a piece of real time animation.

MICROPLEX is an electro acoustic composition for percussion and realtime visualization. The work is based on transcripts of talks given by Benjamin Bratton[1] as well as Anil Bawa-Cavia[2] comparing micro biological structures, complex dense networks (such as the human brain and micro processors), and large scale human urban growth. The work is in three movements that each have distinct sonic and visual environments associated with them. The first environment is a rendering of the Intel Montecito[3] chip that has been extruded in three dimensional space to create an urban landscape. The second movement is based on connectivity of the human brain visualizing the macro level connectivity. And the third movement visualizes cellular growth and life cycles. All three movements are based around the idea of virtual 3d sound sculptures that, when visualized, produce sound.

Using four small drums, a visual and sonic representation of each data set is played in real time. Custom software receives input in the form of audio signal from each drum and excites specific parts of the visuals to create the sonic output. Each of the three movements will present a unique visual and sonic representation.
Based around the idea of visualization of live audio feeds from each drum, the system uses both the live audio signal for visualization as well as software side threshold detection for real time triggering of events within the 3D scene. Multiple processes are then used to extrapolate audio information from the visualizations. The first process renders the scene into a two dimensional matrix that maps scene luminosity to a bank of sine tone generators. The second process is to track three dimensional points as real time x, y and z coordinates and drive synthesizers with that data. The third process uses topographical scan line processing to scan the surface of the objects and derive sound.
Excerpts of this work have been shown at the 2015 Transplanted Roots: Percussion Symposium in Montreal Canada[4], The 2015 Understanding Visual Music conference in Brasilia Brazil[5], Gray Area Arts in San Francisco[6], and the Mckinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas Texas as a part of the 2015 Dallas Video Festival[7].

This work has been developed as custom software by Andrew Blanton. The framework allows for rapid prototyping and construction of audio visual works that both visualize sound as well as extract sound from visuals. The principal idea of the framework is to create feedback between multiple systems and insert the performer into the feedback loop to control it in real time. The work is based on previous work done in this area by groups such as NOISEFOLD[8], Semiconductor[9] and the Vasulka’s[10] among others.

Like any other technology, virtual reality is embedded in a cultural history which lends a world view to its entire enterprise. I will argue that this world view is (not unexpectedly) male-gendered, patriarchal and Christian. In the first part of this paper I will examine the cultural context of virtual reality, before discussing some of the issues that might arise as virtual reality embeds itself into Western culture. I would like to suggest that virtual reality is culturally specific to the Graeco-Roman tradition, and is quite different to a virtual reality that might arise in a non-Western culture, if such a thing is possible. Virtual reality in its cultural context Self-proclaimed ‘cyber- visionary’ Jaron Lanier has announced that virtual reality is the culmination of culture. This is a somewhat self-serving judgement given that he is a major developer and commodifier of the technology (as founder of the influential virtual reality research company, VPL).

But my concern here is more with the cultural specificity of his remark. The abhorrence of the body is inherent in Christian doctrine, which has served as the basis of Western philosophy until last century. Alluquere Rosanne Stone has recently observed that in the Greek New Testament, the word endyo (meaning ‘to put on Christ’ in the sense of putting on an overcoat) is often used in the context of narratives about Christian conversion (quoted in Dyson & Kahn 1991). This condition of ‘putting on’ is very similar to the condition of being in virtual reality. Such a suggestion strengthens the assertion that the cultural history of virtual reality is as old as Western culture itself. William Gibson’s cyberpunks proclaimed that ‘the body is meat’, but neglected to notice just how similar their position was to that of Saint Augustine.

This paper examines the formulation of virtual worlds and the virtual bodies placed in them in terms of western cultural history. This history places conventions and controls on the nature of representation within VR. It is emphasised that, as VR is a representation technology, it must be culturally specific, and therefore not universally accessible. A cultural pre-history of VR is related, examining technologies of simulation from Classical Greece down the line of conventional western cultural history through the nineteenth century expansion of mechanised image technologies to VR research. The phenomenon of technological utopianism is examined, and similarities of form between the rhetoric of VR and previous episodes of technological euphoria are discussed.

The parallel evolution of such technologies University of Florida, USA in the military and civilian spheres is considered in this context. The potential for automated surveillance within VR is discussed with respect to recent writings of Gilles Deleuze. The formulation of the body in VR (alsoi,a cultural construct) is considered as a form of representation; examined from the perspective of Christian dogma, contemporary theory, the psychology of perception and cognitive science. The central issue to the paper, the problematic of a representation which is simultaneously a lived physical experience is discussed with reference to recent critical theory, and a new paradigm for its analysis is proposed. Finally, a politics of interactive system design is proposed, with reference to the work of Winnograd and Flores, Weinbren and others.

Introduction
Several recent developments concerning technology and humankind have changed the way borders are being designed. In this paper, I have categorized what I see as the three major tiers of developments: global monitoring, ubiquitous computing technology and the pervasive use of biometrics to create virtual borders.

Tier I: Global monitoring
Nations have been active in monitoring global communications for some time, but Echelon is the most comprehensive system that has been exposed to the world’s citizenry. Echelon is a global network of listening stations and satellites that monitors all forms of electronic communications that cross borders: land and cellular phone calls, faxes, e-mail and radio signals are monitored, recorded and cross-referenced as they move through and across international borders. Echelon was forged by a clandestine Anglo-alliance between the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Britain in 1948. Initially, the program was an agreement between the US and Britain to operate sensitive listening posts that were capable of monitoring international communications. By allowing Canada, Australia and New Zealand into the program, the US and Britain were able to cast a very wide net; Echelon was capable of picking up and monitoring worldwide communications from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, North America and South America. As part of the program, each of the Echelon member’s intelligence agencies were charged with monitoring and gathering global communications.

In 1999, the Echelon program began gaining critical media attention. On 31 May 1999, Business Week published an article describing the history and direction of Echelon’s surveillance. Comparing the program to the arrival of Big Brother, the article explained how supercomputers are capable of monitoring global communications, automatically filtering individuals’ communications, and listening for keywords. If certain strings of keywords are picked up, the data is sent to human analysts for further review . There was also media concern about the United States using Echelon for purposes other than security. The Houston Chronicle detailed a European probe of the United States’ use of the Echelon program. European parliamentarians charged that the United States was using the Echelon program to help American companies compete unfairly in international competition for commercial contracts.

I would like to suggest a presentation of my current AHRC-funded project, ‘Mapping Virtual Emotions: 3D-surface capturing of animated facial expressions in animals and humans’, which I am undertaking in association with the Sensory Computer Interface Research & Innovation for the Arts Unit (SCIRIA) at the University of the Arts London). I use a 3D high-resolution laser scanner to capture animal and human faces. I use the data from these faces, animate and then combine them with human emotional facial expressions. In doing so it is hoped to visualize through critical experimentation what evolution has selected and accommodated. While it is often through new technologies that we aim to expand our current understanding of the world, I would question whether it is possible to imagine beyond this in terms of human perception and the way we analyze and rationalize, taking into account the emotional responses we usually house as human beings.

The focus of this interdisciplinary practice-based research is a theory suggested by Charles Darwin (1872 in Ekman (1998, p.xxii) over 125 years ago. It is the idea that our human facial expressions, contrary to what we often like to believe, are not unique to human beings. Darwin’s metatheory of the continuity of species explains that neither our facial expressions nor the musculature in the face are unique to humans. Both are the product of evolution and internal physiology (Ekman 1998, p.xxv – xxvii).

My presentation includes a visual documentation of the practical models and animations produced over the last two years. An old theory is being re-examined with the use of new technologies and new theories of Virtual Reality.

Emergent Properties: One of the most exciting new concepts to enter the realm of science in recent decades is that of ’emergent properties’. To be sure, the idea – that the property of a whole is not reducible to its individual components – has been around for a long time. But its unfortunate association with scientifically disreputable schools of thought such as vitalism has not encouraged scientists and philosophers to consider it seriously.

Due to the rise of digital technologies, it is often argued that our sense of reality has been split into the ‘real’ reality of everyday life and the virtual reality of cyberspace. Therefore, our experience of location is said to be schizoid, since it is continuously pending between the tangibility and closeness of actual places, and the abstract, immaterial global flows of virtual space. The digitization of museum collections offers an excellent example of these opposing notions of spatiality. Actual artefacts are stripped from their material qualities and removed from their physical exhibition spaces, to pop up on the Internet as virtual, hyperlinked objects.

Focusing on Tate Online, I will contend that the digitization of art works forces us to rethink conventional notions of spatiality. The virtual domain of cyberspace is not opposed to the ‘real’ space of the museum. Rather, they intersect and merge in many ways. Digital technologies encompass a shift in our familiar structures of perception and experience, thus amounting to a new sensibility. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I would like to propose that temporal and geographic distances become obsolete. They are substituted by other notions of closeness or remoteness, such as affinity, connectivity and presence.

The Deleuzian concepts of ‘becoming’ and ‘virtuality’ are very useful in overcoming the traditional opposition between real space and virtual space. Using Deleuze’s notion of virtuality, Elizabeth Grosz rightly stresses the point that the virtual reality of computer space is fundamentally not different from the virtual reality of a work of art. Furthermore, as Tate Online clearly demonstrates, the Internet offers new ways of interacting with art works that are not physically present. Introducing my recent research on Tate’s digital programmes and elaborating on the notion of becoming-art, I will argue that ‘virtual reality’ is not an oxymoron.

This article intends to carry out an analysis of the factors that have inherited the experiences of face-to-face visits to museums with those that are developed through virtual platforms. This analysis has been developed using a hermeneutical analysis of categories applied by the authors through multimodality with the intention to expand the reflection on this subject, as well as to provide a broader point of view. In addition to this, we have identified how in recent publications other authors have been expressing similar points of view, which allows us to generate a comparative framework. The interest in these study categories is oriented on the potential that museums have in promoting virtual settings, outside of physical spaces that can promote the construction of deep meaning in learning at different levels of training. Furthermore, we carried out a review of the connotations that different virtualized experiences in museums have, and how these can promote different levels of construction of meaning based on what the subject is explained, what they feel or experience during their virtual visit. A classification is then proposed in which the multimodal typologies of virtualization relate to the possibilities of construction of meaning through museums.

Abstract

Long Paper

McLuhan noted that the dual aspects of Renaissance perspective as both spatial representation and as metaphorical point of view constitute a conceptual paradigm of sweeping significance. In other words, seeing and being are intrinsically interconnected. At the core of my thesis is the related idea that the perception of form can alter the form of perception, and vice-versa. In exploring this idea, I shall examine ways in which artists throughout history, and in particular, the contemporary artists Roy Ascott and Miroslaw Rogala, have employed creative approaches to visualizing non-conventional perceptual possibilities. Panofsky ‘s contribution to the theory of perspective is his proto-relativist notion that perspective is a symbolic form constituting and constitutive of a given culture, then by extension, I contend that form is intrinsically political, for the emergence of a given perceptual protocol, like perspective, does not occur without casualties. In this sense, perception is a battleground in which a struggle for power is continually waged. It is difficult to imagine perceiving the world without one-point perspective. But because seeing and being are vitally related, this dilemma raises not just the issue of what the world would look like, but what the world would be like. What would one ‘s sense of self be like without the humanist ideals of individuality which developed alongside one-point perspective? What is the difference between being with perspective, and being without it? For the purposes of prospective theorizing, suffice it to say that those who possess certain techniques and technologies of seeing and representing possess a power to perceive and persuade in ways that those lacking those techniques cannot. In this sense, seeing, being, technology, and power are inextricably related. Artists have consistently worked to envision alternative modes of visual representation often at odds with the dominant conventions of the time. As one example, I compare the perspectival techniques of quadratura (which emerged in the 17th century) and quadri riportati (prevalent since the 16th century). My analysis suggests some ways in which the reception of changing perceptual forms altered the form of perception in the Baroque period. I also discuss some of the technical advances of Jackson Pollock and Marcel Duchamp in terms of how these artists challenged Modernist art discourses and perceptual norms. New technologies demand new visual protocols, and contemporary artists like Ascott and Rogala have used advanced computer telecommunications, perspectival rendering, and computer controlled, interactive environments to make important contributions to theorizing and developing new artist-object viewer roles and relations. I interpret their work as artistic inventions/interventions, engaged in a politically charged process of reconfiguring the world. Through radical forms that alter and expand modes of perception and consciousness, viewer-participators in their art work are challenged to change not only the way perceive the world, but to change the way they exist in the world, and, moreover, to change the world itself.

Intro

My paper proceeds from three points: 1) seeing and being are intrinsically Interconnected; 2) the alteration of perceptual forms by artists alters the forms of perception of viewers; and 3) points one and two above have polItIcal ramifications.
Using the history of one-point perspective as a foil, I shall explore these three points by examining sources from a variety of disciplines. including art history, philosophy, and media criticism, supplemented by my own analyses of works of art from various epochs. This foundation forms the springboard for theorizing and problematizing how the use of emerging technologies by contemporary artists are reconfiguring perception and contributing to epistemological and ontological transformations that are not only culturally significant. but politically charged.

Abstract

To start with – some significant pieces of data
On September 25th, 2007 Microsoft and Bungie Studios released Halo 3 and in less than 24 hours the game made more than $170 million dollars, leading Microsoft to proclaim it ‘the biggest entertainment launch in history.’ (‘Halo 3’ 2007) Since that date, Halo 3 has gone on to sell nearly 10 million copies (9.73 million as of June 2009). (‘Worldwide Total Sales’ 2009) In addition, Halo 3 has also been one of the most heavily played online games in history. On May 1, 2009 Bungie announced that four players had participated in Halo 3’s one-billionth match. Over those billion matches more than 9 million players (Wade 2009) had clocked over 2 trillion seconds of playing time, which comes out to more than 64 thousand years. (urk 2009) On another note, Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced on October 28th, 2008 that its massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft, released in 2004, had exceeded 11 million subscribers for the first time. (‘World of Warcraft’ 2008) Considering that World of Warcraft requires a monthly fee of 15 USD, it is a safe bet that over the course of a year Blizzard Entertainment now earns close to 2 billion USD in revenue from these gamers. In addition to subscription revenue Blizzard has also been able to count on the earnings from the sale of software needed to play the game, of which 14 million copies (as of June 2009) have been sold at approximately $50 USD apiece. (‘Worldwide Total Sales’ 2009) This type of economic success is representative of the worldwide video game industry as a whole, which has seen record-breaking growth over the past five years. Sales of video games and game consoles have nearly doubled since 2002 reaching 41.9 billion USD in 2007, and with continued growth expected sales are forecasted to reach 68.9 billion USD by 2012. (Caron 2008) These staggering numbers are reflective of the reality that video games are an increasingly important part of not only the daily entertainment choices of consumers, but also the global cultural economy as a whole.

This paper will describe “VoicingElder”, an expressive storytelling platform for the senior population, using virtual puppets. VoicingElder combines reminiscent oral storytelling with virtual puppetry to develop a deeper understanding of self-worth. This form of storytelling through puppets is inspired by traditional Korean shamanistic ritual and the philosophy of han. VoicingElder aims to fuse Korean shamanistic ritual and twenty-first century virtual interactive technology to examine the current state of elder hood in Western culture, and to contribute in positive ways to the new elder hood that we face today.

We live in a world with unlimited space. The development of technology let people change the notion of space. Up to 500 years ago, space for people existed only inside the continent where people lived. Since people started to travel to the other continents as technology developed, human’s cognizance about the notion of physical space enlarged to global concept. The invention of telescope enlarged the notion of space to Cosmo space and the invention of microscope enlarged the notion of space to atomic world.

In the end of 20th century, rapid progress of technology provided us with a new concept of space called virtual space. The technology to make virtual space has been partially developed through various media. However virtual space has not been admitted as space or regarded as a separate one with the one associated with human life space. However, creation of elaborate and vivid image can be possible with the development of digital image technology. This creation satisfies virtual space with reality. However people have come to accept virtual space as part of actual space. Also, virtual reality has a unique character, which transforms regular space to media.

By the way, virtual reality is not a medium, which people can easily identify with. Thus, deep analysis or researches are hardly obtainable, even though their importance plays a major role in our cultural efficiency. However, movies let people experience first hand the world of virtual reality. Especially, cyber punk film, a part of SF film, is taking center stage with the appearance of cyber space, which has been achieved, with the development of special digital effect technology. This technology shows us a new outlook on the world, which breaks down the boundary of reality and imagination.

Therefore, this research will study about spatial character and change of spatial notion, and the relation between cyber space and physical space. Furthermore we will research human existence through cyber punk films that reflect phenomena related to the development of digital technology and itself. Especially, this research will concentrate in analyzing the Matrix series, Lawnmower man, and Code name J, and eventually will examine the relation between human life and virtual reality.

Is “race” corporeal? Is that all there is to one of the most complex and contested discourses of the modern era – skin, eyes, lips and hair? Clearly not. Most theories of race reject a biological basis altogether in favour of a tangle of social, political and psychic forces that work their strange and funky work on each one of us every day. Thats how it goes in the real world.

But what about cyberspace – and here I’m concentrating on online communication: the Internet, commercial online services, bulletin board systems. Do the same laws apply? Recent writing on electronic communication systems insist that despite its disembodied nature, cyberspace remains what Michael Benedikt calls a familiar social construct ‘with the ballast of materiality cast away’. That means race may function in much the same way that it does in the world where we are more directly accountable to our bodies. It may mean that, but it’s hard to tell, because very few of the thinkers currently probing into cyberspace have said a word about race. Faced with the delirious prospect of leaving our bodies behind for the cool swoon of digital  communication, the leading theorists of cyberspace have addressed the philosophical  implications of a new technology by retreating to old ground. In a landscape of contemporary cultural criticism in which the discourses of race, gender, class and sexuality have often led to
the next leap in understanding-where, in fact, they have been so thoroughly used as to turn sometimes into mantra – these interpretive tools have come curiously late to the debate  around cyberspace. It may be that the prevailing discussion of digitally assisted subjectivity has focused not on the culture of cyberspace as it exists today, but on the potential of cyberspace, on utopian or dystopic visions for tomorrow. Since we never reveal ourselves so much as when we dream, it’s worth noting that most speculations on the future of cyberspace return questions of race to the margins. Volumes such as Michael Benedikt’s Cyberspace: First Steps and Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity barely mention the subject at all; only writers like Donna Haraway and Vivian Sobchack have taken the question of cybernetic identity beyond a direct relationship between technology and a unified, representative, obvious human subjectivity.

Keywords: haptic, tactile, haptic language, touch, virtual and mixed reality, bodysuit, vibrotactile stimulation, geotagging, geolocative media, invisible sculptures, somaesthetics
The paper presents a general overview of how to apply haptics and tactile touch as an artistic material in the context of media art. It presents how touch can be used to form meaningful experiences on its own, and inside virtual and mixed realities using emergent, mobile technologies such as the smartphone.

This is a concept of a composition/improvisation with the audiovisual interactive computer system created by the authors in the graphical programming environment Max Msp Jitter. Instruments are played in the style of contemporary composition/ improvisation. The computer system consists of a pitch and dynamic detection, real time visual processes and a live multichannel granular synthesis with advanced controlling and performing methods. All computing devices, the audio detection, the visual and the audio processing are linked via a wireless Lan to reciprocally influence each other.

The sound of live instruments serves as an interface in an audiovisual interactive concert that merges acoustic instrumental sound and real-time computing in an improvisation. In the combination of intuitive improvisation and real-time computing, we want to create a synaesthetical artwork in which all audio and visual parts are equally contributing. While visual images and processes are being generated during the concert, a multichannel granular synthesis fits together minute tonal particles that make up the instrumental sounds into a constantly changing acoustic stream made up of different pitches, duration and positions in the electro-acoustic space. The musical and visual components interact and reciprocally influence each other in order to blend into a unique, synaesthetic, improvisational work of art.

Keywords: Social Justice, Art, Creative Practice Research, Community, Digital Technology, Digital Image, 3D portrait, Sound, Voice.

Vis is a long term socially engaged creative practice research project that -using digital technology as a tool- examines the consequences of violence on the daily life of civilians in contemporary Mexico. This project addresses the tensions that take place in the smallest human unit/group possible: family. Specifically, Vis focuses on families in both rural and urban areas of Mexico, that have one or more members that, officially, are not kidnapped or killed, but who are not present: absentees [ausentes], that is those taken away by police forces, the military, or by members of drug-cartels. At present the ausentes, their children and/or spouses [not officially orphans or widows yet], are just numbers and statistics in governmental reports. This project reclaims the experiences of these families by attentive listening to them, understanding their stories, and engaging in an active participation about how they would like to be portrayed within the contemporary social ethos. Using the potential of technology through creative practice, Vis collaborates with these families in order to regain the lost power of their voice -a voice that has been silenced- within a dialogue that has yet to start in Mexico.

A DISCUSSION OF THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY IN DESIGN AND VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS

Design studies and visual theory have become transformative critical practices that question boundaries and ideologies. This discussion will present issues related to visual communication, design and media as the accessible spaces in between the now established positions in media art.

PROCESS
The dialogue and image development of ‘Visual Boundaries?’ occurred electronically throughout the month ofAugust. The presentation is the result of that discussion. The content of the visual works addresses the topics discussed. For the exchange, all the participants used Macintosh systems with a common application format (Adobe Photoshop). At the present time, no real-time interactive on-line space exists for the exchange of text and images that supports a diverse and heterogeneous set of client computing  environments. Some homogenous spaces are being developed (e.g. in Person for Silicon Graphics), but are targeted for high-end workstations, making them expensive and necessitating that all users have powerful workstations with high speed internet connections. Spaces in common use that allow for multi-user real-time interaction tend to support lowest-common-denominator (e.g. can be run on any platform including a vt100 “dummy” terminal) text-based environments, such as internet relay chat (IRC) and markup languages. Another recent development is the use of clients that allow for cross- platform image exchange (e.g. Adobe Acrobat), although this is currently oriented more towards simplifying file exchange rather than creating a real-time collaborative multimedia space for image development. Although originally conceived as a server for interactive on-line role playing, the ramifications of a MOO (a “Multi-User Object-Oriented Dungeon/Domain” or “Mud-Object-Oriented”) as a set of spaces (rooms or conferences) with interactive objects suggests a powerful metaphor for directions in which to develop the nascent technology of on-line visual collaborative space. Musical uses of a MOO environment have, for example, used instruments as objects whose musical sequences can be edited and played by any of the participants in that space. The inevitable extension of this type of interactive collaboration into the visual realm should be guided by the needs of the creative artists involved and their collective understanding of the integration and extension of the creative process into this type of environment. One important method in which artists and designers  can contribute to this development is by prototyping visual models of ideal electronic environments. Such participation will serve to provide useful models for software engineers
and also to stimulate new ways of thinking about multi-user interactive spaces for artistic collaboration.

Shareable Media is an effort to provide a coherent structure that will facilitate distributed collaboration and communication among filmmakers, storytellers, artists and audiences. The extensible architecture of the Shareable Media Project has the capability to deploy multiple applications targeted towards a variety of uses and audiences. The visual interfaces that have been developed for current Shareable Media applications, illustrate our intention to provide easy-to-use tools and effective content visualizations, that operate coherently together to form new and engaging video-based story forms. These applications facilitate users’ creation of multiple sequences from a video clip database, and explore the juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, the integration of video and text, and the description of edit structure. PlusShorts uses punctuation as an iconic system for describing and augmenting edited video, where the punctuation symbols are used to detail the structure of a video sequence and inspire dialogue about the essence of that structure. Individeo features a browser that visualizes the sharing of video content through a dynamic, sociable interface. Individeo also allows editing of video integrated with text, allowing media-based dialogs and collaborative cinematic productions. In combination with multifarious content, these interfaces provide prototypes of new story forms where the edited structure and the shared context are made explicit. We are partnering with several physical storytelling communities from different countries, and we wish to explore emergent storytelling techniques, virtual collaboration, community-oriented self-organization and global communication.

Intro
A comprehensive and sustainable shared media system necessitates the development of an extensible infrastructure, compelling interfaces and an active, engaged community of users. The development of novel interfaces for collaborative co-construction will be the focus of this paper.
The visual interfaces for Shareable Media seek to transform the experience of creating, sharing and thinking about video and ultimately move towards the prototyping of new story forms. These applications broaden the generally understood definition of shared video from one of simply posting an edited video on the web and emailing your friends about it, to a more wide-ranging comprehension encompassing notions of recreation and re-appropriation of original content in a search for new and diverse meanings. The PlusShorts application exemplifies a focus on movie structure, where a symbol system is utilized to directly explain and describe the structural features of a video sequence. With Individeo, the explicit visualization of the sharing process introduces a contextual level of understanding, where meaning is derived not only from the individual clips, but also from their positioning both within specific sequences and in relation to other neighboring sequences. Both of these applications, in their design and their functionality approach a new type of story form, where the navigational tools for finding content, the visual display used for reconstructing content and the final playback mechanism, operate seamlessly together to inform and evidence the meanings produced by each component.

The next section of the paper will detail previous and related work to the visual interfaces for the Shareable Media Project, followed by descriptions of two current applications, PlusShorts and Individeo. The paper will conclude by describing some of the issues that arise as a result of this project and future research directions.

The authors developed an interactive audio-visual installation utilizing two cameras and one projector connected to one personal computer. The visual output is projected on the rear projection screen visible from both front and rear sides. The idea of the concept is inspired from an imaginary drug named Merge in a science fiction entitled Wetware written by Rudy Rucker1. This drug temporarily liquidizes the taker’s body, which causes a type of tripping experience by mixing bodies of a couple of lovers. When two visitors come to the opposite sides of the screen each other, the images of their bodies start scattering and mixing. The dynamic moving image rendered by a visualization technique continues one or two minutes, and then it gradually comes back to the normal figures as the final stage. The system starts waiting for new visitors again after the visitors left. These processes are realized by a combination of two types of swarm simulation developed in the researches of Artificial Life; ANT algorithm for detecting the visitors’ image, and BOIDS for generating the deformed image.
This installation provides a virtual experience for visitors as if their bodies are liquidized and mixed. Each individual person is an entity physically separated from the others, but we sometimes feel spiritual connection with lovers, friends, family members, and so on. As closer physical contacts cause the deeper connections, it is possible to imagine that it would be more effective if we could physically mix our melted bodies with of the others. Human relation is one of the most important aspects to measure happiness of people. It is somewhat difficult but might be ideal to have as many peaceful relations as possible, rather than conflict or separation. Swarm simulation is an effective technique to provide the visitors feelings that the flowing materials would be living.
The authors are hoping people merge each other more, not only in a private relation like lovers, but also with people from difference social backgrounds, to change the world where disruption and violence are rampant now.

With the accessibility of GPS (Geographical Positioning System) enabled technology, creative practitioners and technologists are rapidly increasing their use of GPS devices to capture locational data as representations of time and space. The methods of visually transforming locational data are diverse and represent a rapidly emerging field of visual practice that enriches our understanding of human interaction with a given location.

Visualisation of locational data consists of two main types of visual content — firstly, the GPS data and secondly, contextual data collected along the journey (photographs, personal notes, sound, etc). The former is a literal transcript — a static, one-dimensional representation rendered into a simple graphic form such as XY and Z coordinates and/or a point-to-point mapping which traces the journey. The latter, being interpretive content, is representative of the location and the traveller and by extension, the social/cultural aspects of the community or environment. Our survey of on-line GPS visualisations revealed that a majority of practitioners were exploring visualisation of GPS data alone with few augmenting this with contextual data.

To gain greater understanding of the field the authors considered the visualisation of GPS data as explored from an information design perspective1 and focused on how space and time could be given dimension and meaning through its visual representation. From this approach, a contextual classification system was developed that identified the use of line, colour and symbol as the common codification techniques used by creative practitioners working with locational data. This classification helps us to assess the convergence of the codification as visualisation systems and in doing so, to develop an application tool which may used by practitioners to visualise GPS and contextual data in a manner that achieves an immersive embodied experience.

Keywords: Biological Data, Brainwaves, EEG, Meditation, Mindfulness, Visualisation

Meditation is an ancient Eastern practice, which is receiving renewed popularity as a secular approach to health and well-being. Recent advances in commercial EEG sensor technology provide opportunities for visualising biological brainwave data by artists and designers, outside the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry. We chart the creative development of an aesthetic visualisation, Narcissus Brainwave that aims to provide insight into the shifting states of mind during the practice of meditation, informed by a series of user studies with meditators and non-meditators. Interestingly, assumptions we made from the interpretation of brain- wave sensor data about when a meditative state was achieved did not always resonate with how meditators understood the quality of their inner meditation experience. This may be due in part to the limitations of a single electrode EEG device. Issues also arose related to personal preferences and cultural conventions for interpreting the meaning of the Buddhist-inspired visual symbols representing our model of meditation. Our study has revealed some of the challenges of visualising the meditating mind and creating meaningful aesthetic visualisations with commercial devices.

Keywords: Visualization, Climate Change, Cybernetic Image, Digital Art, Science Communication, Sociocomplexity

The Climate Change is a concept (CC) that has been changing in order determined by the incorporation of new knowledge and scientist evidence around it. Looking for effects mitigation in quality of human beings several efforts at an international cooperation scale have been made specially within the United Nations agenda. From the communication point of view, in Internet circulate many documents, pictures, drawings, infographics and simulations that represent such a problem in different grades of complexities in its accessibility. Visualization also is an emergent concept that has been defining its frontiers according to advances in representational computer processing of big data from reality combined to the necessity to understand it. This situation applied to any discipline brings about two regular study approaches: a didactic and an analytical one. So, this paper presents a methodology based on diverse artwork that traces organizational changes in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in up to now five in- forms emitted in Internet. In this way is possible to project a future scenario for visual representations and policies actions concerning CC communications.

Since 2005 my research has been on the cultural and political significance of viruses, as agents that comfortably cross the boundaries of the biological as well as the informational, and as elements capable of affecting and directing, as well as being affected and appropriated by culture. Specifically, I see visualization and visual mapping of viruses as procedures that assimilate and, in turn, reflect and respond to, issues intimately linked to the very socio-cultural conditions that generate them. In particular, by comparing and contrasting a range of examples and scientific/aesthetic techniques, I wish to propose a reading of visualization and mapping that goes beyond the accuracy and the efficiency of data collection. In fact, they can be interpreted as forms of exorcism to the “unknown” and against the [real or constructed] hegemony of “fear.”

Virilio quite explicitly indicates how knowledge, in Western society, is perceived as the ultimate form of control. Knowing is the continuation and realization of the myth of the frontier, which he explodes beyond the boundaries of the humanly visible and the geographically defined territory of the physical (Virilio-Information Bomb). While reconfirming the centrality of sight as one of the major instruments of knowledge, the above comment establishes an indissoluble link between not-knowing and fear. The act of seeing, then, comes to the rescue to the absence of knowing and, as a consequence, becomes a necessary weapon against fear.

Given their subatomic size (which approximate invisibility), and their immaterial (a bundle of data) or aleatory nature (ungraspable dynamism and inseparability from host), viruses have deserved to be added to the category of the “unknown” and the “indeterminate.” Despite being principally interpreted as threats and, as a result, being feared dearly, viruses represent a challenge. That leads to a drive to explore and to move the boundaries that delimit the frontier of the known. Paradoxically, the very difficulty to capture viruses in any static mode, to detect them under layers of coded material or to visualize them using the human eye, has unleashed an unprecedented urge to “imagine them.” The same elements that potentially cause anxiety and fear have become the starting point for endless creative interventions, including newer interpretations, paradigms of representation, as well as new uses and applications.

Thus, visualization and mapping practices might be interpreted as means of “explanation” and “illustration” as well as forms of “knowing,” and “controlling.” However, the considerable creative drive and variety that characterizes them suggests that we might interpret them as alternative means to exorcize and liquidate a quite resilient demon of fear unleashed by their object of inquiry on the one hand, and by a particularly turbulent socio-political climate on the other.

A recent Air New Zealand marketing campaign for television and cinema values the importance of ‘being there’. Produced by the Auckland-based office of ad agency Colenso BBDO, the brand campaign reinforces the emotional connection New Zealanders have with their national airline through a sense of flight, celebration of the landscape and powerful moments of connection. One television commercial depicts a person working in a kitchen in Auckland. He walks outside to a jetty looking doleful. He then jumps into the air and flies the length of New Zealand (with backing soundtrack in te reo Maori) to land outside a landmark building in Dunedin, some 2 hours away by plane, to kiss his girlfriend.

Along with a close metaphoric association with New Zealand’s landscape however, these television commercials draw more upon our familiarity with flying over landscapes in Second Life than they associate with cramped airplanes. These commercials use the themes of displacement and re-connection made possible by travel technology. However the visualization of these themes do not refer to airplanes at all, but the sense of disembodied flight made familiar by new media technologies, and popularized by online worlds and digital game play.

Through examples of work made by New Zealand new media artists and television advertising designers, this paper examines the role of new media in visualizing contemporary models of place. This is experienced both as a colonial construct and a shaping of settler identity, as well as a framework for positioning (indigenous) Maori cultural beliefs in a contemporary New Zealand mediascape. Theoretically the paper will draw upon ideas of Marxist geographer Henri Lefebvre, arguing that space (and this is extended to ‘location’) is not a fixed geographic set of data but rather is actively and socially produced: creative, organic, fluid and alive. The examples demonstrate a simultaneous flow of different types of spaces in time to produce a notion of ‘New Zealand’. Discussion will draw upon the specific and particular stories communicated between these works of art and design and their viewers.

Visualizing the Illkun(anger) is an interactive screen installation for the interpretative visualisation of anger in the province of Malleco, Chile. The installations seeks to reflect and discuss the concept of screen by relating it to the memories of dissidence. Thus, it takes as a case study the book Las Razones del Illkun/Rabia (The Reasons of the Anger), trying to visualise through images-diagrams the subjectivities arising from the feelings of dispossession in the Mapuche conflict in the Malleco region. In this way, the images-diagrams and the designed device seek to mediate spaces and territories of memory that conflict the notion of history in Chile. A problematic narrative that dates back to the times when Chile was a Spanish colony and later, as a republic, using openly repressive state policies and territorial usurpation. Situation that unleashed the wrath of one of the first indigenous peoples of the aforementioned territory; the Mapuche.
The process of study and creative development of this project was divided into four stages: first, a study of the concept of the screen, which was analysed to understand the technical and conceptual characteristics that relate it to a memory apparatus. Secondly, a defined the theme of representation and the type of data to systematise, in this case, a historical book. Third, a way of representing anger by the abuses described in the aforementioned book; that is, through a subjectivist paradigm through the interpretation of the written archive. This decision is based on an interpretative view of a complex subject and totally opposed to a scientific naturalist paradigm; non-objective information goes from being delivered to uncertainties that are captured and interpreted; first by myself as the creator of a system of visual codes and then, by the individual facing the interface.

The 21^st century sees the rise of wildfires, which radically destabilize the anthropocentric paradigm that place the human at its centre, by manifesting what theorists like Bruno Latour term ‘terrestrial agency’. As a manifold process that encompasses Earth’s ecological systems, we have been co-evolving within these processes, harnessing them for our civilizational progress. Yet, our concomitant refusal to acknowledge nature as an independent agent in which we exist has exacerbated climate change, leading us into what scholar Rick McRae terms the ‘age of violent pyroconvection’ – an age in which life on Earth will be shaped by wildfires and their complex dynamics. It amplifies the autonomous nature of terrestrial agency whose behavior defies human assumptions. These evolving dynamics between the human and the planetary require new aesthetic contexts in which two autonomous yet interrelated agencies mutually transform and disrupt each other.

Existing creative visualization paradigms have struggled to aesthetically engage this relationship, falling short of providing compelling sensorial points of engagement. The paper briefly analyzes exemplary artistic works and proposes a novel aesthetic framework premised on integrating immersive visualization systems and Artificial Intelligence programming. It experimentally explores this architecture in relation to the iFire research project currently in development at The University of New South Wales.

The relationship between code and language, cultures, and machine has started being analyzed quite profoundly the past few years, yet how does code relate to human voice? Code is an interesting mixture of human and machine languages, of social and mathematical communication. With the work of Florian Cramer as an inspiration and big influence I would like to speculate wildly about how code not only reflects a changing attitude in the transcription and creation of meaning, but also on how this in turn reverberates in the use of our human voice, specifically in the arts.

The human dream of talking to computers in a natural way is not new. Science fiction books and movies that live in our imagination present several examples of this aspiration. Until recently, talking to computers was in the realm of fiction, however since the beginning of the 21st century it has become possible and easy due the enormous advances in speech synthesis and voice recognition technologies as well as the open standards adopted by the W3C (such as VoiceXML). The accuracy level reached by voice technologies now has allowed us to use them more widely, including on the web.

In this paper we present a brief panorama of electronic artworks that have used voice in several forms — from whistles and blows to the state of the art in using speech synthesis and recognition technologies. Although the first experience with voice technologies was in the 18th century, only since the beginning of the 20th century has their commercial use really started and it was not until the end of the century, in the 1980s, that the first electronic art experiments with voice technologies were developed. Since then many electronic artworks have used voice in several creative forms, showing interesting human-computer interactions. From the first voice experimentations in electronic art to the use of speech synthesis and voice recognition on the web — as we have nowadays — it has been a long journey. The intention here is to register this journey in art. Therefore, we will point out some key artworks ending with the Voice Mosaic – piece that allows voice interactions on the web through the telephone, dissolving borders and amplifying the pervasiveness. We will also briefly discuss about the potential of using the same voice technologies used in art for increasing social inclusion and web accessibility.

VoicingElder is an avatar platform designed to structure a therapeutic intervention for older adults. This project emerged from transdisciplinary discussions and research in the arts, technology and gerontology.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the number of older adults over 65 years of age is expected to rise from 43.1 million in 2012 to 71 million in 2030, and will make up 20% of the population. Adults age 65 and over are the fastest growing segment of the population. With this growth, we need to develop new ways to shape elderhood and to encourage positive mental and physical health of this population. The electronic arts field has lagged behind on addressing the needs of this population. VoicingElder addresses this gap by combining motion‑tracking technologies and creative design in a patient‑centered therapeutic intervention.

VoicingElder applies cutting‑edge technology to a therapeutic environment for older adults, specifically aiming to assist the life review process. As the senior speaks about their life, facial‑recognition cameras automatically track their facial expressions and lip movement, and map that movement in real‑time onto the face of an on‑screen virtual puppet (avatar). The older adult sees their facial movements mirrored in the on‑screen puppet and can thus speak “through” the puppet. VoicingElder utilizes interactive technology to create an avatar platform to promote the older adults’ emotional engagement with life review.

Life review is a therapeutic technique that has been practiced for decades in which the older adult, guided by a group facilitator, recounts important stories from their life. Life review can help older adults integrate their life history and create a coherent sense of self. Storytelling and reminiscence are enormously important processes in old age because they nurture intergenerational sharing and communication, and allow seniors to express and strengthen their identities as they review and share their memories. Life review has been shown to improve relationships between caregivers and seniors, increase staff knowledge of the client’s backgrounds and history, and help older adults to develop a more coherent sense of self. Although life review is the primary motivation for the VoicingElder project, VoicingElder is a hybrid therapeutic tool that embraces several therapeutic traditions. Research in drama therapy, therapeutic puppetry, patient centered therapy, and avatar therapy all bring different ways to explore the user’s psyche, emotion and engagement in depth.

This paper situates VoicingElder in the context of these diverse therapeutic traditions, and further discusses the user’s emotional psyche and experiences via interactive technology. We will draw from these research traditions to explain the user’s body/mind experience as a way to examine critical issues of embodiment, transformation, distancing, and identity in electronic me

The VoicingHan project is an avatar storytelling platform designed for patients with advanced cancer receiving palliative care at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Massey Cancer Center. A Korean concept, “Han” reflects a paradoxical state of consciousness combining an extreme state of grief with a great hope for overcoming a seemingly impossible situation. We situate Han in a special and holistic cognition found among patients in the palliative care program who confront the critical issue of mortality, and the human dilemma in connecting our physical and spiritual domains. VoicingHan supports terminally ill patients by using oral storytelling as an artistic medium, facilitating patients’ interactive performances while promoting autonomous creativity to support “patient activation” or “patient-centered care.” In addition, the Avatar video, sound data of stories, and motion capture data will remain as an important patient and family legacy. This paper will discuss the VoicingHan project as an approach to dealing with mortality and potentially mitigating existential suffering for palliative care patients in the digital age.

Voltaje is a cultural initiative comprising an art exhibition and a series of conferences and workshops. Voltaje provides an overview of the way Colombian and foreign artists explore, confront and assume the multiple relationships between Art and Technology.
The project is a partnership between the M.E.A.T. (Electronic Media and Time Arts) area of the Art Department of Universidad de los Andes in a partnership with La Feria del Millón and Fundación Telefónica, with the support of the Institut Français, the French Embassy, Sci Arc and the City of Bogotá.

The Art Department of the University established the M.E.A.T. area in 1997 in order to broaden the scope of contemporary artistic creation and to promote the development of conceptual reflections and technical skills in new technologies and media with a critical awareness of its impact on contemporary culture. 20 years later it’s an obliged reference for new media creation in Latin America.

The University of los Andes was founded on November 16th, 1948 by a group of young men under the leadership of Mario Laserna Pinzón. It was the first private higher education institution in Colombia that was non- denominational, secular and independent from traditional political parties, as well as from social or economic power groups. It was precisely due to these characteristics, that Universidad de los Andes was able to propitiate a visionary and avant-garde educational program.

Voltaje (Art and Technology Salon), is an event that has been held in Bogotá, Colombia, since 2014 and has become an international benchmark for the constant dynamics that are generated around the relationships between Art, Science and Technology. In 2023 we will celebrate our 10th edition, which is an important, given that such events sometimes tend to be shortlived.

The Salon is an exhibition that provides a panorama of the way in which different artists explore, question, confront and assume the multiple relationships that exist between art and technology. It is also a cultural initiative, created to make this field known to a wide audience, in which Colombia, has been a pioneer country in Latin America since the 1970s. The show has been held in two venues that did not host any previous cultural activity and in 2022 at the Planetarium of Bogotá, having the possibility for the first time to extend the duration of the event.

This presentation reflects on the need to create alternative circuits and spaces for emerging and new media creation, that has no place in traditional museums or galleries. Also, these initiatives generate urban dynamics that reactivate and redefine alternative places while de-centralizing artistic and cultural practices appealing to mass audiences while exploring he possibility of art as an experience.

Volume of Voids is a series of art projects that visualize and materialize the voids between different beings under the regulation of social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic. It consists of two major artworks: Volume of Voids I, which creates data sculptures that visualize and materialize the voids, and Vol II of Voids, which brings an interactive art experience that emphasizes the mobility of the space-between humans. The purpose of this work is to create an artistic and conceptual response to the impact of a historical pandemic on complex social networking systems by rethinking the space-between. This paper introduces the conceptual background, design methodology, and technical implementation of this series of work, including the discussions of speculative design framework on computational art, experimental data visualization, volumetric capturing, and 3d fabrication.

This paper aims to formalise a subset of technologies which possess the ability to produce different forms of volumetric light, a fundamental consideration of artists where light is the primordial medium within their practice. Volumetric light may occur when light is focused by an optical lens or emitted from a light producing apparatus, this light then made visible by obstructive, semi-opaque or translucent materials and surfaces. The light can form intangible, three dimensional, volumetric sculptures that redefine temporal spatial relationships. The subset within my classification of light producing apparatuses are all driven by a signal control, often a computer system, classified as digital light [1]. These forms of light may be used to define the space or exist within the space. This paper will look at LED arrays, Lasers/Searchlights, and Video Projectors. As this connects with my own practice, it is important to better understand the taxonomy of these devices to anticipate what paths they may forge in the development of new imaging systems.

Many media projects done via the Internet have either been forgotten or scattered by the author’s memories, notes in the print media or have simply disappeared as if they did not even exist. Some works are archived in libraries, on the websites of artists, or art associations. Data on them is scarce, however, and few can still be viewed in their original form. Through reinterpreting and media transformation, some of the works performed this way, through VR technology, can be preserved, archived, and made available to a wider audience. Currently, there is no platform for VR archiving of such performed/reinterpreted works; the existing, mostly gaming, platforms can be used for this purpose. This paper aims to show, in one example, what are the possibilities and which benefits can be obtained from such presentation and archiving of works of media art made through the Internet.

In this paper, we describe a virtual reality project that creates an experience of Toegye’s “Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning.” First, we introduce Toegye’s “Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning.” Then, we present the VR design process and the current implementation stage of the first diagram of the book called the “Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate.” Ultimately, people today are able to experience a similar environment, one in which the king transformed the self into the original good nature. The space-time experience in this VR will provide the users with an opportunity for self-reflection, like looking at themselves in a mirror.

As artists, designers, theorists and scientists we have before us an opportunity of mythical proportions. We have before us the opportunity to create worlds. Worlds to explore and learn through, worlds in which to discover and create new aspects of ourselves, worlds in which the greatest limit to the extent of our existence is our imagination.This opportunity is now made possible to us on such a scale through the introduction of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML): a computer language which will allow anyone, with a bit of effort, the potential to create a distributed multi-user virtual environment. Along with this opportunity tomes a responsibility:the responsibility to use this enormous potential to its full extent. In this paper I will propose a paradigm for understanding the vast potential available to us, so that we may accept that responsibility with integrity and insight, and create worlds which defy and transcend our very existence as we know it.

I am going to discuss understanding and creating distributed multi-user virtual environments, specifically VRML environments within a linguistic paradigm. This paradigm is based upon the communicative, gestural, and social aspects of language, particularly a pragmatic view of language and its role in the gestural construction of self and society (Mead). My point of view is that in the case of a VRML environment language is experientially and existentially active. Unlike other gestural modes of communication the aspect of virtuality produces grammatically anarchic and nearly immersive experience, and as such provides the opportunity to create a profound grammar, which manifests itself in unique spaces of experience, identity, being, and self.

At a fundamental level in linguistic communication, and I will propose in VRML, we are dealing with the transference and signification of signs. It is through the process of signal to sign with signification that we have both the act of communication and the process of the creation of meaning in language (Eco). Within this semiotic framework the sign that is transferred need not be verbal or textual, it can take an infinite variety of forms. Within the concept of a sign we can even begin to include such modes of expression as those involving the body and the construction of and interaction in space. Specifically of interest here is the movement of the body throughout both space and time as the signification of something particular. With the conscious inclusion of the construction of space and the interaction of the body within that space as a form of linguistic communication we begin to develop a sensory rich form of language that returns us back to ourselves, rather than utilizing a more arbitrary system of codes such as alphabets and phonemes for the creation of meaning.

The article is devoted to the presentation of the project carried out at the Ubu Lab at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. The work titled the Stilleben is a minimalist, interactive experiment in the field of human-computer interaction as well as the translation of work done with classic graphic techniques into the virtual spaces.

This paper aims to present the collective project “w.Book & e.Margin”. The main objective of the project is to overcome the limitations of a fixed reading of a text on paper. In order to achieve that it is necessary to technically extend the reading of a traditional book on paper and transform it in a paper interface for computer-aided reading. A w.book is a traditional book on paper but connected to wired resources via barcode technologies. It is a product of Cybrid Design. The concept of Cybrid Design comes from the mother-concept of Cyberdesign (de Kerckhove,1995:89), and can be understood as design that combines analogical and digital media, or augmented reality. That is a hybrid situation in which a physical object is connected to the virtual reality. So a w.Book is a cybrid object of design.

A w.Book is a hyper-node, an interface to the virtual dimension of the book. The virtual dimension of the book is made out of two parts (1) the e.Book and (2) the e.Margin. A w.book could also be considered as the printed version and core dimension of a collaborative software program such as, for example, Thinktag (de Kerckhove and Paini), the hypertinent system used to manage transversally information created by a social network. The e.Book is the book’s electronic version while the e.Margin is the virtual place where all the benefits from Internet can be inscribed (the author’s process of work, multimedia files, updates and new editions, comments on the book, chats, etc.).

In this paper we, firstly, are going to present the general characteristics of project; secondly, we will show the various cognitive, technological, educative, connective and information benefits that are generated by the project, and finally we will analyse the impact of the project on theory of technology.

Walkersdorf is a small village in southeast Austria. It is east of Graz and south of Vienna, about 35 kilometers from the border with Hungary and about 35 kilometers from the border with Slovenia. It is a village with about 235 inhabitants. It is located along route number 66 that goes from Ilz to Feldbach. If it wasn’t for a famous restaurant in Walkersdorf that is located directly next to this important connection road, most people passing through the village probably would not remember it.

If you take the time and make a short walk into the village behind the restaurant, you will find a village similar to many other villages in the area. If you speak some German and ask people in their gardens if there is anything special to see in the village, they’ll probably answer you, that there is nothing special in Walkersdorf. “Maybe the pigs that are in a huge cage at one side of the village are worth a walk, and there is a little chapel at the entrance of the village, but apart from that”, they will tell you, “there is nothing special to see.”

People in Walkersdorf live their lives quietly. Most of the people have been living there all their lives, for generations. Most of the people that come from outside, that have moved to the village, come from the surrounding area, from places a few kilometers away. If you ask them where they are from, they will tell you, that they are not from Walkersdorf. They will explain to you where they are from. They will point to a hill about a kilometer away and tell you, that originally they come from the village behind that hill.

If you look on a map, Walkersdorf is situated very centrally, between five European capitals. With a car it is possible to visit Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Zagreb and Ljubljana, each on one day. It is not recommended to drive to Budapest and back on the same day, but it is possible. The other towns can easily be visited as a daytrip from Walkersdorf, although I do not think anyone would suggest you to do so. However, when living in Walkersdorf, these european capitals are far away. Even the neighbouring countries Hungary and Slovenia seem far away. Only the local capital Graz, which is about 45 kilometers away, seems closely connected.

Participating artists: Pila Rusjan, Luka Dekleva, Luka Princic, cym.

Keywords: War, Conflict, Restoration, Preservation, Conservation, Destruction, Gentrification, Urban planning, Transformation, construction, Dis-Possession, Dislocation, Forced Removal, Heritage

There is a major construction program, being undertaken in the past decade, named “urban ransformation” by the ruling government. As the transformation moved forward, it turned out this building activity was intended for profit and not for better urban environments. The
construction was also a social engineering construct, causing people lose their native homes during the demolition process (dispossession) to make ground for new costlier housing to be bought by the rich.
While this is one dimension of the story; the more severe dimension is the fact that there is an unending clash in between the Turkish Military and the Kurdish PKK in the past 40 years. Combat previously took place in the mountains; this last confrontation was unfortunately conducted within the city, leaving civilians in extreme danger. The destructive battle fought with heavy weapons including tanks, cannons led to rigorous destruction in the solely residential areas. The area, where residential urban habitat and historical heritage were significantly
damaged after the clashes, is at the moment sealed off and clearance of post-war debris has started. The demolition, regularly carried out by heavy construction equipment, was indirectly accomplished through war. The locals will be displaced towards the outskirts of the city where
they can only afford a much cheaper flat in an inhumane gigantic highrise compound.

Rekombinant is a connective modular weblog and an edited mailing list about media activism, global movement, geopolitics, creative subcultures, cognitive capitalism. It was started in 2000 in Italy and it is connected to the networks of European net culture (such as Nettime) and political criticism (such as Multitude). Within the Italian context it works as a think-tank for new creative strategies.

After NY911, the first live broadcasted catastrophe, the global media war has been keeping on with everyday videoguerrilla episodes from the Iraqi front. On the media chessboard a sort of videoclash of civilisations takes place: it’s the conflict between the American videocracy and the pseudo-Islamic videoclasm. Between that polarization the global movement tries to establish an autonomous videopoesis. The mass collective imaginery have been hybridized with the connective imaginery produced by the net and the digital mobile media, such as cameras and smart phones. It’s the digital anarchy not even Donald Rumsfeld can control. Through digital technology we face the nemesis of the body libidinal repression: tortures and decapitations become Spectacle and – like in a Ballard’s novel – cause uncontrolled psycho-political backlashes. The Abu Ghraib and beheadings choc forges a new narrative genre, that is the warporn. Subcultures such as rotten.com reach the masses and the world of art and
activism reacts with new strategies, that is warpunk.

Keywords: Latin America, Archiving, Electronic Art Preservation, Electroacoustic Music History, Cultural Decentralization

Who tells history? We can find multiple versions of electronic art history, most of them with subtle differences, but it has been unusual -until recently- to find references pointing to countries out of a small group from Europe and North America. Several projects have been developed to change that situation. The Latin American Electro-acoustic Music Collection, hosted by The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, represents an example of the relevant role that the archiving of electronic artworks and public access to them could have in forming another perspective about (electronic arts) history.

Water Stories is the result of a year-long artist residency at the Anchorage Museum exploring multiple points of view from community and poets about climate change culminating in a series of listening sessions broadcast at the Anchorage Museum and Out North Radio, live interactive poetry readings at the museum, and video projections on the museum façade.

Mexico City was founded on an island of the lake basin of Texcoco around 1325, since the founding of Mexico Tenochtitlan it was the interest of its residents to amend the natural conditions of the ecosystem.

One by one, their leaders were extending their gain ground against the water surface, to build their temples and causeways, at first it was developed in a sustainable manner, “chinampas” or floating gardens where developed, creating a very successful method of agriculture due to the constant irrigation of artificial canals that supplied constant humidity to the Milpas. The great Lake Texcoco, was yielding little by little over the centuries to population growth and urban sprawl. With the arrival of the Spanish and their conquest of the city (which was partly due to its lake condition) the valley had an accelerated change. In a phased manner the basin was dried, steadily expanding its territory, the Spanish used the indigenous to fill the lake, the canal systems and the floating gardens were destroyed, causing floods and droughts, the old drainage systems were modified. With the independence of the Spanish realm, we have the dependency on ecclesiastical and political institutions that had no interest whatsoever to be in harmony with nature, but to conquer it.

My visual art project is concentrated in the specific area of scientific photography made by the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), which has expanded the boundaries of observation and representation of the micro world since it was introduced to scientific research in the mid-1960s. I investigate how to interpret scientific images captured by the SEM of micro-scale drops of water from different aquatic systems after evaporation. I do so in an attempt to discover morphological features of the patterns related to water contamination and thus to turn scientific photography into a creative art form. Although scientific photography can be considered non-aesthetic since its main purpose is not to convey beauty but rather to convey accurate information, its ability to record material in addition to that which is merely informative allows it to also serve expressive, subjective and aesthetic purposes. Microphotography in particular has the potential to communicate to a general public from both a scientific and a cultural perspective. My artistic practice can be seen as rejecting the traditional practice of minimizing noise in scientific representation and, instead, embracing experimentation that encourages the unexpected over the predictable.

Keywords: Waterwheel, the Tap, collaborative, environment, movement, data visualisation, sonification, mobile device, sensors, Open Sound Control, OSC
This paper documents our current research into using mobile devices to integrate remote physical movement and sound into the online structure of Waterwheel’s Tap, allowing participation away from keyboard and mouse based computers. We asked participants in Australia, Indonesia, Europe and the U.S.A. to explore their local waterways or bodies of water. Taking a cue from research using sensors in dance, we are using mobile devices carried by, or attached to, these participants in order to transmit location and motion sensor data, plus live audio, for use as experimental content, feedback and control sources for elements of the Waterwheel Tap while outdoors.

Full text (PDF) p. 494-498

We Come in Peace (WCIP) is a 3D antiwar game addressing issues of non-­‐violence, absorption and play. In the game, players absorb weapons from the surface of planet Earth using tractor beams emitted by customizable UFOs. The goal of the game is the eradication of all weapons from the planet. The game is deployed across the “real” earth using terrestrial satellite data. Players can localize to any longitude or latitude location, or choose a preset city. Weapons are generated dynamically at each location using brute force spawning algorithms. At ISEA 2015, we propose a live public performance in which participants play to remove no less than 1,000,000 weapons from the planet.
The issue of weapons proliferation continues to plague the planet. Given the scope of the problem, We Come In Peace proposes a solution from the most unlikely place ~ outer space. Leveraging publicly available datasets of earth terrain and known weapons data, the game proposes a solution to earth’s many wars: total eradication of both known and unknown weapons stockpiles. The political and aesthetic strategies employed by the game include: engaged Buddhism activism, “ahimsa” (nonviolence), the reclamation of public data for simulation and play, and a healthy dose of hyperbole and levity through the creative deployment of spaceships and laser beams in a thought-provoking game.

In 1997 Ronald T. Azuma introduced the now generally accepted and followed definition in Augmented Reality (AR) research. In short, it tells us that in AR we introduce virtual content into the real world, this virtual content needs to be aligned with real content, and a user of an AR environment can interact with the (dynamic) virtual and real content in real-time. This definition leaves open how virtual content is generated, which display technology is desired and which senses are addressed. This has advantages, but it is now becoming clear that these missing aspects lead to confusion, also because with the current smart technology in general and ubiquitous computing in particular, AR technology can no longer be considered in isolation. We present the arguments that lead to this conclusion. We will explain the arguments with examples in which the vision, auditory and olfactory senses play a role. Starting point and conclusion obtained is that AR eventually will become an everyday technology that will merge into reality.

Keywords: Soundscape, Augmented Reality, Cultural Heritage, Embodied Interaction, Performance Studies, Interactive Media, Bone Conduction Sound.

Weeping Bamboo: Resonances from Within is an exploration of new forms of communicating and preserving indigenous forms of oral culture. It is a locational sound art piece offering a site-specific, reactive soundscape that is experienced in public at the Plaza de Boli´var of Manizales, Colombia. The project builds on the notion of resonance, the correlated vibration of bodies, to transmit sonic, tactile, and gestural experiences. It creates a rich layering of different stages of the history of Manizales through an augmented reality experience that merges environmental sounds with a spatialized soundscape. Through a custom-made headset a spatialized audio experience is transmitted by way of the bone structure of the skull, which makes it seem as if it were coming from the space within the listener’s head. The multi-channel soundscape merges with the environmental sounds perceived through the ear. Beginning with narratives of indigenous myths in concert with today’s environment, the project offers a narrative soundscape that is correlated with the actual geography of the plaza through a GPS location-tracking unit, inertial sensors and a microphone.

This essay describes the process and background of the augmented reality documentary Welcome To The Metaverse. The authors situate themselves as research-creation practitioners and ethnographers exploring immersive documentaries as a method for increasing critical data literacy, a public-facing discipline concerned with pedagogical approaches to understanding power structures embedded in artificial intelligence and big data systems.

Today media artists rebel against the homogenization of interface devices and reclaim a wide variety of ludic concepts and ludic set-ups. They suggest that guitar foot pedals, light sabres, dolls’ heads, tarot tables and many other devices can be more efficient and more fun to use than conventional computer interfaces. The key factor of artists’ strategies to reinvent and rethink the predominant mouse wheel is “play”. There is a ludic drive behind the attempt to control media art via bicycle pedals or a game via a guitar effects pedal. The reason for inventing and using new interface devices is deeply grounded in the joy of haptic experience which allow us to feel play. Play in this context is the range of surprise and slack inside a technical apparatus. (“Spiel” in Gadamer’s sense – or “Hin und Her” as he calls it) Play is also the ironic comment on status-quo technology. It is however not a set of rules like the rules of a game of chess. For this reason ludic interfaces are rather play-driven then enhanced by conventional game technology.

We conceive artistic strategies of building ludic interfaces in terms of
Cannibalism,
Hybridization,
Revenge,
Vampyrism.

The author explains his terminology and classification by introducing into a number of recent game art and media art pieces. He analyses the pieces in regard to the history of media art and technical and social implications.

No abstract available.

The archive of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) aims to conserve the museum’s documentary heritage and promote research into contemporary art. The archive preserves documentation of special historical value generated by MACBA and other individuals and organizations related to contemporary art practices. This document collection, built around the discursive lines of MACBA, is shown to the public through exhibitions and activities. The museum has developed the MACBA Digital Repository, an online archive, to preserve and disseminate the digital art and documentary collections.

What is the pixels’ gender, after all? Is it possible to speak about male-pixels and female-pixels? Wouldn’t be better to say they are hermaphrodites, just like angels? The question is neither rhetoric nor ironic; on the contrary, it is getting more and more imperative to answer it today, when this entity called biocomputer enjoys such a rapid development. I am certain that, despite being are not sex discriminated the young pixels, as “qualia sensibles” would rather dream of playing the part of immaterial actants, since they consider themselves to be minimal subjects to the digital process of updating programs capable of generating digital objects and fictions. Naturally, they would also like to play some parts in a “new arena of representation”, seen as a “new space for revelation”.
The complexity of this theme is so fascinating and overwhelming that I will have to narrow it down to two particular sub-themes: enunciation medium and reception medium. The former being the medium upon which the computer produced work is transferred whereas the latter is creating an interactive relation between the work and the user.
An Arts History from the exclusive perspective of media (“support”) evolution would be rather interesting to write. In this respect, it is not difficult to notice the lack of a clear distinction, in all traditional arts, between media and means by which works are created. Similarly, there is no distinction between enunciation media and reception media (painting, books, etc). However, there is a general agreement on the artistic representation on a material “support”, an agreement established during the Renaissance and still observed by the iconological “theory of strata in a work of art” (Panofski, 1939).
A clear separation between media (“support”) and means of creation occurs at the same time with the appearance of recording means (mechanical, optical, chemical), such as photography, cinematography, discography or later video and television – all paradigmatic means of analogical expression. Media can be divided into enunciation media (films, magnetic tapes) and reception media (screen, computer display).
In Romance languages, the meanings of the terms: “means of creation” and “media” (“support”) are clearly distinguished. (The same distinction appears in German: Ausdruckmittel and Unterlage). Unfortunately, the two meanings are covered by a single word in the English language, the word medium, which explains McLuhan’s famous phrase: “The Medium is the Message”. The polysemantic aspect of the English language makes the understanding of this essay rather difficult, as my approach relies on the distinction between means of creation (materials, instruments, technique) and Medium (“support” on which works are transferred).

Translation: Livia Marinescu

In order to understand the complexity of cultural development in Thailand, a new approach and methodology are required. To sketch an image of such an approach, I will argue that research on spatial practices of everyday life needs to be conducted.

Since universally accepted, the Western norms deriving from its legacy—its history of ideas—have played a major role in every modern society. Many countries have been inclined to guide the future of their nations by proposing national developing plans based on the idea of modernism. Besides tensions, conflicts, and resistances to the modernist idea that have happened in such societies, there are also functional adaptations and absorbed alterations that take shape in multi-layered forms. Implicitly, these types of adapting and modifying forms can be found in social and cultural topology: consisting of complex media landscapes, administrative landscapes, linguistic landscapes, and economic landscapes. It has become crucial to investigate people’s common life and everyday discourses—to gain a better understanding of how they define their existence socially, culturally, economically, and ecologically within this space of collision of the new and the old. And of how they mentally make do with and make use of the material world to cope with the new economy in their own ways. In this instance, it is possible that we would learn that the same technology assisting ways of living in common is realized for its use in many different fashions. A research project on media ethnography—spatial discourses of everyday life embodied in those above mentioned landscapes—is a necessary one.

Due to the new form of economic ways of living, multi-layered fashions of practices constitute a form of liminal space, the third space where possibilities that translation and negotiation of practices as such take place.

The major objective of my research project will be aimed at this third space. I believe that this space can be found, or be realized, in the universe of symbolic elements grouped together as landscapes of media, administrative space, linguistic world, and economy of livelihood mentioned earlier.

Generally speaking, these symbolic elements can be discovered by observing everyday life environments on the street (vendors, advertising signage, commercial window displays, footpaths, architecture, etc); in domestic areas (living room, bath room, kitchen, bed room); in public districts (museum, department store, park, civil place, theater, temple, bar, bookstore, work place, and so on); in academic discourse (critical writing, theoretical debate, educational history/knowledge); and in media as a means of expression, or common ways of communication (printed and electronic media, body gesture, ritual activities, fashion, dressing, music, art, graphic design, and etc.)

In this paper I wish to consider some aspects of the notion of ‘media contestation’ found in daily practices or in a site of contestation of ordinary people. So doing, I wish to begin my exploration on this idea with a story of my first hand day-to-day experiences in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It is a story about “stray dogs sleeping at the middle of the street”. Its attempt is to bring the case of stray dogs sleeping at the middle of the street into consideration of social science works and media studies.

What Death Tells Me is a video and sound installation exploring the intersection of cinema and mathematics. A mathematical process called Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) is implemented in a custom computer program to analyze and decompose every frame in the movie Death in Venice, directed by Luchino Visconti. Accompanied by selected music by Gustav Mahler, the movie is then reconstructed according to the spectrum of the music. In this talk, the artist will explain his exploration of redefining the relationship between audio and visual elements of cinema in a fundamental level, as both image and sound are analyzed as abstract digital signals, regardless of their narrative or cultural content.

Soundscape

A telling example of an involuntary soundscape are the sound recordings made by the postman character Mario Ruoppolo for his friend and mentor Pablo Neruda in Michael Radford’s film Il Postino (1994). In the film, simple recordings made on an island with a primitive recording device are compared to poetry, which Mario wanted to learn from Neruda. The sounds act as metaphors in a double sense: they stand for the experiences of the elements that Mario wants to transmit to Neruda, and they are meant to transport (μεταφέρω in Greek means “to transport”) his message to his friend over distance of place and time. Spectacular examples of environmental sounds are the songs of Weddell seals used by Werner Herzog in his documentary about the Antarctic Encounters at the End of the World (2007). These songs sound alien, and express the strangeness of the environment in one of the most remote regions of the world. Because of their similarity to electronic synthetic sounds, they also create associations with the otherworldliness of purely artificial cultural artifacts.

What is Research-based Design Practice?  This graduate seminar provides a framework for research-based design, defines a structure to carry out Design practice, and offers ways of understanding giving and receiving critical feedback on practice-based projects. As a class, we come together to make collective contributions to answer this question through Case Study presentations. Students conduct careful research on an artist or designer’s creative work that helps address this question. Presented at the conference is a collection of this inquiry to exchange with other universities and institutions who are endeavored with a similar question.

The Transmedia Approach is a cultural paradigm that allows audiences not only to access contents in a different way, but also to participate in the meaning-making process, with a subsequent changing in the relationship between the mainstream media (top-down) and participatory culture (bottom-up or grassroots). But what really means the term transmedia? Henry Jenkins (2006) described it like «Stories that unfold across multiple media platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the world». Robert Pratten (2011) continued said that «the engagement with each successive media heightens the audience’ understanding, enjoyment and affection for the story». Christy Dena (2009) defined the transmedia as «a working implementation of unity in diversity». Jeff Gomez (2009) advises us to become orchestra directors because «What transmedia does is it brings a few of those instruments together and attempts to compose music that allows for talented people to play them in some kind of concert». Or again Fred Fuchs (2012) said that «transmedia is evolved storytelling for evolved audiences». So many voices, so many projects, so several definitions for a common field, but the questions remain.

How this is changing the design practice? How aesthetic and economic issues work together in the ‘design ecology’? Is Transmedia a possible approach able to support the construction of a human landscape, relying on the storytelling ability to foster multiple perspectives and allowing people to become aware of their lead role in the contemporary mediascape?

Aim of this work is to suggest a framework to situate new media works in Transmedia. Understand the ‘DNA’ of such an approach in order to apply it not only to the big Hollywood (or transmedia franchise) projects, but also in local and small works within the limit of the everyday scenario.

The ‘occurrent arts’ is a name suggested by philosopher Suzanne Langer for arts of the event. Digital media have complicated the question of what constitutes an art event – or for that matter an event in general – by making spatially and temporally distributed events the new norm. What makes an event an event when its occurrence is dispersive: when no unified perspective on it or integral experience of it is possible? The notion of distributed cognition is often appealed to in answer to this question. Does distributed cognition solve the problem, or complicate it further? The questions of distributed events and distributed cognition are not only relevant to art, but also have been a central topic for military theory in the age of ‘netwar’. This paper considers some of the questions raised by the notions of distributed events and distributed cognition, in art and war, drawing on the philosophies of experience of William James and A.N. Whitehead.

Poster Statement

Abstract

We love computers for bringing us powerful new possibilities for image manipulation. But we also love the good old physical properties and qualities of traditional paintings and prints: their scale, texture, materials, surface… How can we have the best of both worlds, especially if we don’t have access to expensive, high output devices? Our collaborative work has been an open exploration of this question of output. Compelling work always hinges on compelling ideas and images, but how can we make those ideas physical? We would like to present our explorations and discoveries, using slides, discussion and examples of work (small prints and books). We will discuss our combination of traditional and digital printmaking, focussing on these topics:

1. large scrolls and modular scale: exploiting the multiple in installations…
2. dot matrix impact printing: stenciling, transferring inks, direct printing…
3. Laserprint transfers with gum Arabic: tiho printing without plate, stone or press…
4. Laserprint on mylar used as aqutint etching: if it holds ink, print it!
5. exotic papers and materials for printing: Japanese and rag paper, “found” texts, metal leaf…

Our work is also an exploration of nature; the realm of the microscopic, the subjects of botanists and zoologists, the denizens of the compost heap, the humble and discarded. We feel we have some interesting insights into the integration of printmaking, physical process, the natural world, and digital technology. We like to sit down at the keyboard with both ink and dirt under our fingernails! Our presentation should be interesting to anyone with a general interest in computer image making, eccentric techniques for achieving hardcopy, and visual art.

Intro

In the last ten years, we have focussed much of our energy into making art which integrates digital technology with our existing interest in the natural world, and our expressive experiences as gardeners and printmakers, experiences which are both physical and messy. Combining the ‘denizens of the compost heap’ with the “works of man” – the computer – has
proved quite challenging.

Keywords: Space art, science and art, transdisciplinary, Ulises I, School of satellites, satellite technology

In 2010, Díaz Infante founded the Mexican Space Collective, a group of people which objective was to build and launch a satellite piece of art. In the process of doing so, Díaz Infante realized that all the knowledge learned had to be transferred somehow to the Mexican society. He founded in 2014 a concept called “School of Satellites” ESATMX. A virtual school with many campi. Its slogan “too much technology, very little imagination”. This school’s objective is the building of nanosatellites as a learning experience. Each project is an art, cultural and educational project with no distinction at any moment. Díaz Infante is a photographer graduated from Brooks Institute in 1982, and he went through a relative revolutionary school, it had only one subject, photography: 1, photography 2, photography 3. And it only had 2 hours of lecture or crit a week. The School of Satellites was founded the following principle: it is not training is about understanding. We are overtrained on things we do not understand or we understand partially, Culture is a basic tool of converting already “trained” people into a transdisciplinary experience. Building nano satellites are a tool for teaching understanding a concept of mission.

Abstract

It sounds like a horrible idea.
Put the head of a slightly anesthetized cat into a vice so that it’s forced to watch a simple slide show while you poke the back of its brain with a microelectrode. But that scene was not a horror movie plot that would give a member of PETA (the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) nightmares, two scientists won a Nobel Prize for that experiment in 1981.

The work of Canadian David Hubel and Swede Torsten Wiesel of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, provided clues to how the brain sees images via our eyes. The two jabbed a microelectrode into a brain cell in the visual cortex at the back of the brain of an anesthetized cat and connected it to both an amplifier and an oscilloscope. The amplifier converted electrical energy to a ‘put-put’ sound while the oscilloscope turned signals to a blip on a screen so they could measure the response.

With the cat’s eyes open and focused toward a screen, the scientists flashed simple straight and slanted light patterns. With their set-up Hubel and Wiesel could see and hear immediately the effect of any nerve cell stimulation by the patterns of light. After they flashed the light on the screen several times and adjusted their equipment, the scientists recorded what they had thought was possible: the stimulated activity of a single brain cell responsible for vision.

This paper introduces an ongoing research into the study of early Brazilian electronic art at a time when the very distinction between this and other artistic forms was almost inexistent. By reviewing the demands of contemporary practitioners and contrasting it to the situation found by artists during the Brazilian dictatorship, we find that the reception of those early artworks was very much positive: not only did these find space within traditional artistic institutions but were also displayed alongside other emergent genres at the time, such as mail or video art. We
conclude this paper pointing to the necessity of a historiographical revision regarding new media art in peripheral countries that did not possess the well-developed infrastructure seen in more developed economies. It is this precarity that, we believe, marked those early years and its close relationship with the larger art world.

Researching Chris Marker’s digital artwork Immemory and working on its preservation for the future reveals the relevance of considering certain media artworks as archives in themselves. Created in 1997 for CD-ROM, Immemory has undergone several transformations on form and content, and was brought to the web for an online version between 2007 and 2013, re-coded in Flash format. After Flash became obsolete in 2020, the need for a reflection on how to sustain the work for the future and how to inform future viewers on its various versions led to a conservation study and reflection on the ways to document it. With Chris Marker’s use of re-incorporation of personal documents, references, and quotes from earlier artworks, the topic of historicization is at the core of the artwork and thus requires to play an important part in its study, when archiving it and presenting it to the public. It can serve as an interesting example of how self-contained digital artworks such as CD-ROM-based works from the 1990s can be experienced today depending on what documentation and information is accessible for the
viewer.

This article proposes to reflect on artistic creativity in the artificial dimension, experienced under the dynamics of co-creation, in which a new interactor emerges from cyberspace – we call it the new craftsman. The article will discuss characteristics of a scenario in which the development of artificial works seems to suggest the repositioning of the authorial discourse, articulating changes that allow us to assimilate the metamorphosis that symbolizes both a new generation of techno-images and a new moment for art-science, through a new poetics that manifests itself in a context of expanded hybridization between bodies of different natures: both organic and inorganic. Starting from the time frame that is established in the 1960s, we propose a discourse oriented to reshape the relations between human and non-human beings and suggest ways to think Artificial Intelligence (AI) in an attitude that values the differences between biological and synthetic thinking. We conclude the article by suggesting the reasons why we believe that creation with AI seems to be the greatest revolution since the advent of photography.

Art-Science is a strange construct where none of the two words qualify the other. It is not a genre, neither a movement, nor an aesthetics or a single ideology. Art-Science is a nebulae of practices and approaches, of desires and politics. Based on recent projects —such as Trust Me, I’m an Artist, FEAT/Future Emerging Art and Technology, LASER Paris— and on a larger body of artworks, this talk will address some of the questions raised by the blossoming area of art-science by unfolding some of our implicit bias and prejudices.

“Where Virtual Image is Formed” is an art performance using kinect hacking. In front of the performer, there is a kinect capturing point clouds. In the back, a moving image of the point cloud is projected. In the movie, a camera in a virtual space goes round the farthest object from the kinect. When the performer stands in front of the kinect, the virtual camera goes round the point cloud of the performer. The sound the viewer hears is white noise that is filtered depending on the distance between the kinect and the farthest object. When the performer turns a Fresnel lens to the kinect, a part of the point cloud is split from the rest. It’s because a kinect is getting depth data by projecting infrared rays so it is able to hack kinect with a lens that refracts infrared rays. The kinect misrecognizes the object behind the lens is farther than it really is. The farther the distance between lens and the object, the farther the object is recognized from the kinect. The point cloud presents the distorted image captured by the kinect.
“A Virtual image is an image formed when the outgoing rays from a point on an object always diverge. The Image appears to be located at the point of apparent divergence.” (Wikipedia, Virtual image) It is just an image, but it looks as if a real object were there. And it is same for a kinect. Usually, a kinect scans real space and makes a point cloud into virtual space. However in this case, the virtual image is scanned as if it were a real object and then a point cloud is made into virtual space. That is, the virtual image and the real object are changed into the same level. By kinect hacking (with lens), we can know spatial relationship between a virtual image and a real object.

The origin of the Greek word techne – to weave, suggests that our realm is woven by technologies. Such notions like mixed reality, expanded reality or virtual reality do not only prove the impact of technology on our lives but also bring to the fore the old philosophical dispute on the reality itself. Most of representatives of cognitive sciences claim that we have no direct knowledge about the world; our knowledge refers only to the model of the world conditioned by our nerve system – mainly brain. Pythagorean idea of the World’s Harmony, expressed in consonant relations between its macro and micro components has been recognized the most influential concept born by human mind in order to connect the man with the rest of the Universe.

Is the Pythagorean notion of harmony still relevant in our times? Is the quest for harmony still intellectually and emotionally challenging? Is it stimulating or limiting our cognition?

I will base my talk on my own investigations as an artists and theoretician as well as on reflections by scientists from different disciplines and cultures, with whom I was collaborating on artistic projects.

As my own work is concerned I would like to focus on multimedia installations strongly related to interconnections between micro and macro, inner and outer, virtual and real:
– “Tones and Whispers” (realized with the support of Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London and awarded by the first prize in Europlanet contest by Space Research Center Polish Academy of Science 2007) referring directly to Pythagorean Harmonia Mundi, in which cosmic and everyday landscapes merge with ultra sonography and fMRI scanning, Johannes Kepler’s “Music of Spheres” with sounds of cosmic radiation and micro sounds of human body.
– “Life Matters” inspired by the contemporary definition of life associating it with DNA replications. Initiated at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in New Delhi, India, the project uses research materials on diseases in which transmission of genetic code plays essential role. It joins virtual computer simulations, life cells images, everyday environment and global statistics with the search for life in cosmic space, challenging our rational and emotional perception.

[also artist talk]

White Cube / Black Box seeks to identify bias and the many ways bias gets introduced into and amplified within systems. A highly interdisciplinary team of data scientists, curators, designers, and artists used face detection and race classification algorithms to explore bias in algorithms and the University Art Museum’s collection of artworks.

Memristors are collapsing the boundaries between humans and machines and ushering in an age where humanistic discourse must grapple with cognitive entanglements. Perceptible only at the level of molecular electronics (nanoelectronics), the memristor was a theoretical concept until 2008. Two different researchers without knowledge of each other had postulated its probable existence respectively in the 1960s and the 1970s. Traditionally in electrical engineering there are resistors, inductors, and capacitors. The new circuit element, the memristor, was postulated to account for anomalies that had been experienced and described in the literature since the 1950s.

Conceptually, a memristor remembers how much and when current has been flowing. In 2008 when it was proved experimentally, engineering control was achieved months later in both digital and analogue formats. The more intriguing of the two formats is the analogue where a memristor is capable of an in-between state similar to certain brain states as opposed to the digital format where it’s either on or off. As some have described it, the memristor is a synapse on a chip making neural computing a reality. In other words, with post-human engineering we will have machines that can think like humans.

The memristor moves us past Jacques Derrida’s notion of undecidability (a cognitive entanglement) as largely theoretical to a world where we confront this reality on a daily basis.

This paper is about the problems that are besetting the indigenous art industry of this country. In particular, it focuses on the lack of the support and direction that is needed to advance our art to formats that would make possible mass circulation and wider audiences. I would like to share my experiences with you, to provide an insight into our industry as a starting point from which to formulate a better future. But I must do this in our way, starting at a certain point in time and slowly working forward. Historically, this is how the indigenous Australian has constructed dialogue, utilising concepts of past, present and future.

In this paper we will argue that artistic creations made by artificial minds will most likely lay beyond our ability to understand them. We will assume that the emergence of consciousness in artificial minds is possible and that the artistic creations we are referring to are made by the artificial minds’ own volition. We will build upon the definition of art as embodied meaning and explore its relationship with embodied cognition to argue that there is a binding of human artistic creation to the subjective experience of existing in a natural and cultural world through a human body that is born with a foretold death.

Additionally, we will try to show that the best we can aim at, as human beings standing by an artistic creation by another species, is to an understanding of what could have motivated another human being to create such a work. As such, we shouldn’t be able to understand an artistic creation originating by an artificial mind with a physical experience of the world that differs from our own, even if they have a privileged access to our culture. The boundaries for this incomprehension are those of the human mind.

The Turbulence Sound Matrix (2008) uses wind data to diffuse and descretize sound. The TSM system consists of 8 speaker towers typically positioned in a circle around the audience, where each tower contains 8 vertical speaker positions for a total of 64 channels of discrete immersive audio. The TSM is the basis for the new, more compact, 8 X 8, 64 channel sound installation diffusion matrix “FLEX”, a system scheduled for completion in Montréal in the winter of 2010/11.

The current design of the TSM and the Wind Space Architecture (WSA) “Plug and Play” Max patch software allows from 1 to 16 channels of external analogue sound to be directly input into the TSM 64 channel audio system to be discretized kinetically by cascading wind pattern data. The “PnP” software allows any external multi channel digital audio workstation (DAW), or “live” analogue mixing console, to be inserted quickly and efficiently into the TSM system hardware. Sound sources diffused can be mono, binaural, multichannel arrangements or mapping systems including Heimbecker’s own Acoustic Mapping Process (1993). As importantly, the PnP design limits the processing burden of the TSM WSA primary CPU, which is engaged in the audio management of the 64 channel wind diffusion data, operating at 20 samples per second across the entire speaker array. The 128 ms latency of the system is fast enough to allow “live” mixing when using the WSA software in performances.

The advent of the much-publicized crisis of 2015 cast human migration as one of the biggest issues yet facing western society. Many artists directed their attention to the ethical and emotional undertow of the crisis, in particular, merging visual art and critical design through exploring shifting forms of data representation. This poignant example of affective rationalism urges a renewed look at the way informational ecologies may move from an immeasurable source to measurable data, and then to immeasurable artistic/aesthetic outputs. In this way, quotidian data sources like weather data may play a vital role in providing metaphors for driving deeply affective digital narratives and immersive experiences. This paper presents one example of this through a series of artistic experimentations done as part of the research-creation project Windward | Windword. In this series, artworks combine the author’s personal experiences in advocacy for undocumented migrants in Seattle, Washington, and broader aesthetics derived from access to readily available human migration data.

Poster Statement

“Without a special object of worship” is an interactive installation exploring imagery inspired by the salt-beaten Veneto-Byzantine port city of Venice, Italy. A handmade picture book is the device through which the participant controls computer based still images and animations. In the dimly lit installation space, the participant can sit at a table and turn the pages of a candle-lit artist’s book. Custom electrical wiring allows communication between the book and the computer with each page of the book corresponding to complementary digital 2D image sequences and 3D animated sequences. The sequences appear on a monitor at the table. All of the imagery, both in the book and stored in the computer, consists of the artist’s original stills and animations. The juxtaposition of the book and the digital imagery serves to bring the book to life by adding motion. The environment is further enhanced by an original sound track inspired by chants and religious liturgy. The integration of image and sound creates a peaceful, sacred space conducive to reflection. While the installation is not specifically religious in nature, the experience could be likened to the very personal acts of meditation and prayer. Much as a prayer book, the handmade book acts as a point of departure for these acts. The book structure is the vehicle through which the participant communicates, controlling the pace of the interaction and thus customizing and personalizing the experience.

This paper presents paths of identity and subjectivity production that have stemmed from experiencing virtual aesthetics in networked interaction. It is through the intensive communication with computers and social networks that one currently delineates life, work and leisure time, representing our self to others in a permanent and often curated way within a narrative. A voluminous body of contemporary research demonstrates that both the production of sociality and subjectivity (via the ‘invasion’ of intimacy by sophisticated systems of communication, sociability and surveillance) belong to the broader domain of Bio Politics and the Economy of Attention/Affectivity. One ominous future view on this, points to the standardization, normalization and complete control of our behaviour through newer/stronger affective technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, 3D virtual interaction, ubiquitous and wearable computing, etc. Emerging from the analysis of virtual aesthetics, dual subjectivity and myth-making—all at the centre of my doctoral research—I present an alternate view that stems from SL-Based Art and the examination of the topics above mentioned. My goal is to widen the dialogue on the subject so the human, affective, psychological and aesthetic components emerging from virtual aesthetic interaction, in social and non-social networks, do not become excluded or neglected.

When we investigate the question how woman work with media art technology nowadays, it is interesting to look at female pioneers of digital art since the 1960’s. Woman artists and researchers had a key impact on today´s digital art and in this lecture selected female media art pioneers will be acknowledged. As the field of digital art has grown exponentially, current female media artists and young practitioners naturally face different challenges. Selected current work examples will be shown and practices will be discussed. Issue of gender inequity in art and technology networks will be addressed and good practice examples how to strengthen female networks in this domain will be presented.

This paper surveys both pioneer accomplishments and contemporary works by Brazilian women media artists since the early 1960s. Their works range from electro-acoustic music to neon light, holography, cinema, experimental film, video, photography, kinetic and multimedia performances and installations, virtual worlds, and Web-based cultural activism. Beginning with a discussion of the controversial issue of gender in Brazil, the essay weaves social, aesthetic, and epistemological concerns. As a general rule, these artists did not explore women’s issues as a project nor were they interested in feminist questions per se. Nevertheless, women artists contributed to the advancement of media arts with both personal and critical perspectives. This overview, despite the inclusion of a large number of artists (more than forty), is by no means a complete survey, but rather an early assessment, which will hopefully instigate new research.

What are the influences digital technologies are about to exert on our concepts of written language? For some time now animated design has become state of the art in new media typography. Abundantly, language in TV news formats, advertisements, and video clips is being set footloose. Thereby it seems that the playful novelty of the choreographed formation wears off rather quickly. However, they are not symptoms of pure entertainment tendencies of commercial culture either. Used in a skillful way animated letters enact a new stylistics based on typographic rhetoric. They are beneficial as part of a rich multimodal texture together with sounds and images to generate information that appears semiotically and sensually gripping. All in all the various kinds of animated markup (dynamic changing of letters in size, color, position, or speed and direction of flow) serve traditional functions of communication (getting and keeping attention, highlighting hierarchies or relations within the information given, enhancing visual pleasure and affirming the memory effect).

If we relate hardware, circuitry and wiring to the computer – a physical machine – then the Internet is superfluous, existing on the fringes of computer systems. The Internet itself is made up of electrical impulses, transmissions, and conceptual data. How does one convey the importance of one’s physical place in fictitious cyberspace?

In 1996, Victoria Vesna addressed the emotional concerns of travel in cyberspace without a physical body, in her website entitled Bodies, Inc. Edouardo Kac utilized the Internet for soliciting a collective global effort from multiple physical locations to funnel nurturing light to a single plant in a darkened room – another physical location. That same year, multi-positional interactivity moved forward with Masaki Fujihata’s Global Interior Project. Layering the concepts of physical reality and virtual reality, Fujihata used a physical “Matrix-Cube” kinetic sculpture to map out the virtual space of his interactive program. Images of the physical matrix were texture-mapped onto surfaces in the virtual space, which facilitated “shifting dimensions” as users moved from one “room” of the matrix to another. The virtual environment could be accessed via kiosks located in different places. The virtual presence of the user was acknowledged by an image captured via Webcam and mapped onto a moving avatar in the virtual environment. Fujihata’s more recent work utilizes Global Positioning Systems to gather together fragments of character from an existing social body spread over a specific region via randomly conducted interviews. These are stitched together in a framework according to their intersections in time and space.

The issues of how physical place has been transferred to conceptual space since the advent of the Internet, along with an analysis of the evolution of the expressions concerning character of place in web art will be discussed in this paper.

What is work? What is leisure? Where is the border between the two activities and who decides when each begins and ends? I’ve been meditating on the eroded boundaries. I’ll use my piece “work-life.tips” as a jumping off point in exploring the blurry politics of working anywhere at any time, always, forever. I’ll use open questions to explore the tension between witnessing a relaxing scene while being reminded about the overbearing reality of “work anywhere, anytime, in the most optimized way” emanating from the neo-capitalist gig economy.

You’ll be encouraged to relax and open your mind and consider how many ways you can optimize your life. Be the capital you’ve always imagined. You’re on an island. Watch the waves roll in, imagine the sand in your feet, and reflect. Snippets appear instructing you to optimize, capitalize, and reimagine yourself. You are your job. Leisure time is work time. Anxiety is productivity.

An overview of challenges for conserving new media art, including the Variable Media initiative.

Forming an introduction to the panel. Drawing on experience from the Walker Art Center, touring exhibitions and festivals, this presentation gives an overview of the issues for curating across the boundaries of educational, online, and physical contexts. It addresses (some of) the challenges for curating new media: classification, ghettoization, medium specificity, expectations, infrastructure, legal bugs, presentation, moving targets, participation, platforms, collaboration, collecting, popular culture.

Curatorial issues specific to physical new media are discussed. In particular, interaction, and audience are explored. Examples include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 010101 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Harrell Fletcher, Miranda July, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Curators are concerned with the placement of art works for their access by audiences. The question of ‘where?’ the experience of net-based art resides has led to an investigation of ‘locative media art’ or geographical-sited online art. Many of the projects I have found interesting have been those that gather, in database form, information about real world experience to share with others. These works suggest that the essential functions of the Internet (the storage and retrieval of information) form an inherent part of the art experience. Questions addressed in this presentation include: How ‘locative’ is the online experience? How do you make the online experience relevant to a ‘local’ audience? What can be learned from other community-based collaborative models?

For the ISEA2023 symposium Epicuro Lab wants to present the development of the “Working Plants from Afar” artwork and the results of the different activities that involve the local community and revolve around awaking emotional connection with the plant world. At the same time, these activities invite to reflect on human immigration and the dependence of humans on plant specimens.

The ephemeral installation is in processes of germination of the seeds of the plant. The activities will take place in April of 2023, during the blooming period of installation’s flowers, at the Museum of History of Immigration of Catalonia, Barcelona (MHiC), Spain.

Since the late 1990s, Surrey Art Gallery has been a leading public art museum in Canada with a commitment to the production and presentation of digital art. The Gallery collaborates with artists to proactively respond to new developments in art and provide communities where we are situated with opportunities to learn about and experience contemporary art using technology. Moving toward its 50th anniversary in 2025, the Gallery readies for its transition into the Interactive Art Museum, a new facility at three times its current size in Surrey City Centre (Canada). This transition is informed by working with extraordinary local and international artists and community stakeholders through 20 years of operating its TechLab, a purpose-built facility and program supporting the production and presentation of digital art, followed by 5 years an experimental art lab pilot; 20 years of its Media Gallery, an interactive screen installation space driven by computers; almost 20 years of its Open Sound, an ongoing program of commissioning, presenting, and dis-cussing digital audio art and related symposia; and over 10 years of its UrbanScreen, an offsite projection venue dedicated to presenting leading edge digital and interactive art.

This work is a planetary and interplanetary system installed in several cities (Paris, New York, Montreal, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney) and on the moon and other linked planets. This system allows for the capture, transformation and rebroadcast over long distances of any dynamic material reflected by light. WUP suggests a radically new representation of the globe and space. Video monitors receive the continuous flux of Volex Light, fluid paintings, a global but perfectly utopian capture of the planet and the universe. WUP gives the spectator a fountain of real time (via satellite) and time-shifted images (via the Internet).

Panel:  Space, Time, Body, World

Intro

I must admit that I am very surprised to see you all here at this conference, present and in person. To be specific: Carrying your burdensome flesh all the way to this conference to be seen, heard and entertained. But it seems a little odd, if not perverse to attend this conference that is to evaluate and display a reality of Cyberspace and its surrounding applications, such as the Internet. Why are we not at home enjoying our own cooking and instead, connecting our brains into the computer matrix as it has been suggested at previous conferences. The truth of the matter is, that we are all still very much at home in our bodies, we like to show It off and collect a variety of feel good stimulation. The art of teleconferencing between international ports and exhibiting art work in virtual galleries still does not provide us with the same sense of experience as some may like to speculate upon. Far too often it has been suggested that a physical body (I presume the Human Body is signified here) has no significance in this computer matrix only the mental body can travel along the wires. The body of flesh left outside while our “otherself” can travel the inner wonders of the computer space. Increasingly the old metaphor of the ‘split body’ exercise and announcements of transmuting and neo-evolutionary human beings are ambivalently adopted to describe a revolutionary evolution of Humans. A future of post human ethics and the neo human technocrats. And let me query at this point the assumption that we as Humans foster some infinity with technological appliances which propels the human evolutionary journey into the virtual domain?!

Panel: The Volatility and Stability of WorldMaking as Techné

This paper will dis­cuss a re­cent pro­ject re­alised with a mixed group of par­tic­i­pants, and its evolv­ing fol­lowup. Varia Zoosys­tem­at­ica Pro­fun­do­rum began as the idea of mod­el­ing (hy­po­thet­i­cal) com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween crea­tures to be in­vented. Apart from ac­quir­ing prac­tice in elec­tron­ics, pro­gram­ming, and me­chan­i­cal build­ing, the guid­ing prin­ci­ple was hav­ing the team de­velop much of the con­cept jointly. Thus, many as­pects of the pro­ject evolved from team dis­cus­sions in­clud­ing just-in-time cod­ing ex­per­i­ments oc­cur­ring across sev­eral in­ter­re­lated courses. Once the con­text (the Deep Sea) was de­cided on, the par­tic­i­pants began to in­vent a va­ri­ety of highly in­di­vid­ual crea­tures, which share com­mon brain func­tion­ing; com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween them is by telepa­thy, and ex­pressed by sound, light and move­ment. In essence, we loosely com­bined no­tions from works like Gor­don Pask’s Col­lo­quy of Mo­biles with a work­ing method­ol­ogy in­spired by David Tudor’s ap­proach in evolv­ing Rain­for­est. Given the pos­i­tive re­sponses from all par­tic­i­pants, the ap­proach is ex­tended fur­ther in a fol­lowup pro­ject: Here, we start by look­ing at his­toric in­stances of cy­ber­netic think­ing and fu­tur­ol­ogy, and will cre­ate a loose per­for­ma­tive con­text for in­di­vid­ual works in­volv­ing sys­tems such as playable chaotic syn­the­sis­ers for audio and vi­su­als – again, de­tails will emerge from the flow of the pro­ject, and group im­pro­vi­sa­tion (which we con­sider a cy­ber­netic ac­tiv­ity) will hap­pen at dif­fer­ent time scales, from plan­ning to build­ing to even­tual per­for­mances.

The wormholing is one of the more potent metaphors to have come from the new physics, a science which has been conspicuous in its relevance to the developing aesthetic of interactive art, and most notably in issues concerning the relationship between the artwork and the viewing subject in the negotiation and creation of meaning. Wormholes are found tunnelling in quantum foam. Technically, as Rip Thorne of Caltech describes it, a wormhole is a ‘handle’ in the topology of space, connecting two widely separated locations in our universe. The wormhole promises the rapid transit of particles and also – if recent proposals published by the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain are to be believed – people, from one layer of reality to another, from one time frame to another, from one galaxy to another, in micro seconds or virtually within no time at all. Certainly this metaphor commands attention in any account of the direction in which we are now moving culturally, artistically, and perhaps spiritually. Quantum foam may not mean much to us on an everyday level of experience, but tunnelling through what might be called “datafoam” from one hyperlinked layer to another, shooting the wormholes from one telepresence to another, from one website to another, actually zapping from one mind to another, and faster than light should allow, is a perfectly reasonable aspiration of all of us living and working in the telematic, post-biological universe. For the artist it is becoming a creative necessity.

Transformation is the commanding concept of interactive, virtual, networked, multimedia art – the transformation, that is, of meanings, images, forms, and perhaps of oneself and even the world – and it is the rapidity of transfer, the speed of shift between states that we value most. Overarching this constant flux, which is both semantic and psychic, are the two great infinities
that frame our consciousness: the mind of the universe and the universe of our mind. These are the two classic undecidables which we are increasingly coming to apprehend as one, as a unity of consciousness, even maybe of self, and of whose universal connectivity we are indivisible parts. As artists voyaging into the 21st century, we are simultaneously facing out toward the galaxies and inwards to the deepest recesses of the brain.

All forms of expression, all languages, can now be produced or processed by digitization or the digital. Thus writing, as I intend it is affected, and creation along with it. Bernard Stiegler; the french philosopher of technology, says that computing can be considered as a new form of writing. It is therefore necessary to understand the way these technologies function, how technè and logos are linked, what their logic is, and how we can use this new alphabet. We can also affirm that in computing and the digital, languages are juxtaposed. Functionally, technically, and semiotically. Data is processed by programs, meaning thousand year-old representation systems group together with recent computer languages, language-machines. How does their logic coincide? What makes sense or sensation? Is it possible to control these anachronisms? Does the machine’s functionalism dissect or reduce the symbolic power of anterior languages? How can we work within these constraints?

Another point is what the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard had already termed in 1979 “the heterogeneity of languages” in computerized societies, is what constitutes postmodern knowledge. New languages accumulate to old ones. But, of course, nobody speaks all these languages, and there is no universal meta-language, and so, no universal knowledge. Since we are confronted with this diversity of languages, perhaps we must make them homogenous. In this sense, rendering something homogenous entails producing meaning from these heterogeneous fragments. It is a work of writing. Created from polymorphic materials, and keeping symbolic wealth of each of them.

With NITC and the internet network, considering this situation, is it possible to invent and create forms and ways to communicate keeping alive the social link ? Which kind of society can emerge from it ? A dialectic of particular languages is what refine our sensibilities and our differences, said Jean-François Lyotard. According to that, cultural communities, singular attitudes and also artists work seem to be a failure to globalization of knowledge.

“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.” _Voltaire
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” _Albert Einstein

In an effort to resolve apparent inconsistencies between Einstein’s Theory of Gravity and modern quantum physics, Juan Maldacena, in 1997, and supported by recently published research by Yoshifumi Hyakutake and his colleagues in Japan, proposed a model of the Universe where it exists in nine dimensions of space, and one of time, that is actually most similar to a two dimensional hologram, where the three dimensions we seem to perceive are actually an illusion.

Inspired by the scientific, spiritual and visual ramifications of the “Holographic Principle,” I have created a three dimensional structure that resembles a pyramidal prism, approximately one meter wide. Moving three-dimensional imagery will be visible within the pyramid. This holographic projection is based upon an optical illusion invented by Henry Dircks and popularised by Henry Pepper at the Royal Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in 1863. Like the “Holographic Principle,” the form of this illusion that I am using employs a series of two-dimensional moving images projected to appear as if they exist in three dimensions.

Within this holographic projection, are a series of undisovered planets located in distant regions of our Universe. This installation was inspired by the research of a friend and notable astronomer, Professor Lisa Kaltenegger, who is working at the forefront of exoplanet discovery. Yet, rather than a de facto representation of her data, I have endeavored to visualise worlds that only our imagination, rather than our previous experience through scientific discovery thus far as a species, can conjure.

This installation, the embodiment of things known but not yet seen, is intended to challenge assumptions of pereption and materiality. It is a spectulative exploration of the Universe that sits in parallel with our contemporary scientific search for worlds beyond our solar system. In this manner, x0 Planet can both feed the imagination (subjective experience) while prompting further science-based exploration (objective experience).

Xeno Walk is an Augmented Reality audio walk, featuring the voices and audio works by activists and sound producers who embrace the collage as a tool of aural exploration. The sound walk features the artworks of #VIVAS, a Latin America-based collective producing sound works from field recordings of social demonstrations and Viv Corringham’s Shadow Walks, Collages Féministes & Féminicides Paris and Montréal created from embodied experiences in the public space. The walk’s sound design takes the form of a collage mixing their soundtracks and their interviews. The listener can choose to experience this walk using headphones; however, this AR project is meant to be heard as a collective soundwalk with two or more persons. For the premiere of this project, the artist organized four aural participatory performances, inviting the public to amplify and occupy the streets with the interview’s voices and #VIVAS soundscapes.

Xeno-Terra: Migrant Ecosystems most closely relates to the Ecospheric World and the Politics of Sentience. In a more abstract way, the project does speak to the Planetary as it references forced or required migration.

Xeno-terra: Migrant Ecosystems (working title) looks toward a bleak, but possible, future, where climate change and ecological damage are irreversible and gives a glimpse into a dystopic technology to save what little remains. The project uses a purpose-built 3.5m blimp constructed specifically for this project by a US government supplier, and a fully self-contained hydroponic system that carries flora from particularly vulnerable ecosystems, in this case, Mongolia’s vast, but increasingly arid, grasslands. The ecosystem becomes migrant, paralleling the experience and marginalization of many of the world’s most vulnerable citizens who are disproportionately impacted by climate change.

The project references the sentience of an ecosystem, and its inability to adapt quickly enough to human-triggered ecological collapse. The fundamental inequality of environmental destruction and the futility of the solution presented in Xeno-Terra makes a statement regarding the sickening disregard for those who have played no role in the choice to promote profit over sustainability. This dystopian image of a group of migrant ecosystems taking flight in narrowing regions of viable space plays to human desires for techno-solutionism while offering what would be ultimately a futile attempt at preserving life as it once was.

Aesthetically, the is a mix between the rendering I have included below, the in-progress images and “La Minerve”, a 19th-century speculative balloon conveyance. Our talk will chart the development of the work since 2016 as the global climate emergency has become increasingly visible. We will track social and scientific trends in climate science, and the evolution of Xeno-terra as it moved from an AI-powered swarm to a more poetic climate migrant.

Xenoforms is a work that integrates artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biotechnologies, and architecture, with the purpose of reflecting on machine agency and computational colonization of the physical space. Xenoforms refer to machine-created & machine-generated synthetic parasites that aim to occupy and control the body of an architectural host. The properties and qualities of the parasites are meticulously inspected by an autonomous 7- axis robotic system that attempts to enthusiastically accomplish its set goal, that is, to identify the fittest candidate from the selection pool, one that will manage to successfully derive its sustenance from the architectural space.

Space travel for transgender people will require some way of producing hormones for long-duration space missions. One potential way of doing this is through the genetic engineering of testicular cells so that they produce estrogen rather than testosterone. The Xenological Entanglements. 001: Eromatase project explores some of the elements of this desire. Consisting of open-source hardware, speculative photoperformance, and laboratory research, the project additionally highlights the need for novel methods of hormone production in a world where there still exists extensive gatekeeping regarding access to transgender healthcare.

XEPA is the name of both the art project and individual intelligent sculptures that display animated colored light sequences and produce music and sound. [1] XEPA is an acronym for “XEPA Emerging Performance Artist”; the performance is emergent; the “young” XEPAs are emerging artists.
Starting in a unique random state, each XEPA “watches” the others (via data radio) and modifies its own aesthetic behavior to create a collaborative improvisational performance. In doing so each XEPA independently evaluates the aesthetics of the other sculptures, infers a theme or mood being attempted, and then modifies its own aesthetics to better reinforce that theme. Each performance is unique, and a wide variety of themes and moods can be explored.
It’s important to note that while data radio is used, it is in principle the same as each XEPA watching the behavior of the others. The radio messages sent are merely descriptions of what that particular XEPA is doing at that particular time. No actions occur by command, and there is no script to follow.
While XEPA is fundamentally an artwork, it provides a robust platform for artificial intelligence experiments in computational aesthetic evaluation (CAE). [2] The previously shown XEPA 1.0 was purely visual. XEPA 2.0 proposed for ISEA 2015 adds sound for the first time, greatly expanding the expressive gamut and complexity.

Thematic Statement
Many writers such as Boden emphasize that novelty is a necessary but insufficient criteria for creativity. [3] Creativity also carries with it the implication that the results are useful or otherwise of value. To fully qualify as being creative, computers will have to apply a critical function that makes decisions as to which options are of greater or lesser value.
XEPA anticipates a future where creative machines form their own societies. Going beyond mere generative art, future systems will exhibit artistic creativity with the addition of artistic judgment via computational aesthetic evaluation. And rather than using low level literal protocols, these systems will communicate at higher levels of abstraction by observing each other’s behavior. Just as humans communicate using high-­‐level semantics in language and art, creative digital systems will do the same.
XEPA is offered as the next step forward in generative art, with the addition of a critical function to the somewhat mindless autonomy of genetic algorithms, L ­‐- systems, cellular automata, and so on. It shifts the emphasis from the old text of low­‐- level code to the new text high-­‐level semantics and behavior. It presents an artwork as prototype; as a DIY platform for learned behaviors of increasing complexity.

References

1. Galanter, P., Xepa – Autonomous Intelligent Light And Sound Sculptures That Improvise Group Performances. Leonardo, 2014. 47(4): p. 386-393.
2. Galanter, P., Computational Aesthetic Evaluation: Past and Future, in Computers and Creativity, J. McCormack and M. dinverno, Editors. 2012, Springer: Berlin.
3. Boden, M.A., The creative mind: myths and mechanisms. 2nd ed. 2004, London; New York: Routledge. xiii, p. 344

Technology has often been portrayed as an antagonist that alters the structure of humanity. On the other hand, new aspects of human behaviour are evolving with the help of new technology. They reflect the way we see ourselves in the world – a reflection of our desires. By looking into the technology as a mode of revealing (Heidegger 1954). This paper will explore the possibilities of technology and the change in our society as a source to understand the human being. The main finding will be in the area of digital and online communication. This is because the way Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has been constructed within digital media requires us to reach to the higher stage of abstraction in order to facilitate the tools. Furthermore, our state of being in the world has its own fluidity. It precludes us from thoroughly understanding the ontology of the physical world (Jacobsson 2000), the help from new communication structures in cyberspace, which somehow gives us a clear view towards our own behaviour.

Based on an idea that nature is constructed, not discovered (Haraway 1991), Yes / No / Maybe (2009) is an interactive installation of a social event, where online dating elements are transported into a physical setting. The displacement of virtuality into a physical setting is an attempt to dispense with the techno-utopian/dystopian view and a means to question the concept of humanity and its politics of space and place. Participants receive tags containing chips, which will transmit signals that will influence the color of light in the environment near them. The three fundamental principles of online dating (anonymity, declaring the level of interest, and the playful atmosphere) were used to create a virtual situation in a café environment in the Modern Art Museum, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Keywords: Natural light, responsive environment, space interaction, penumbra, camera obscura, phenomenology.

You cannot step into the same river twice, said Heraclitus, sending forward a significant challenge to the world and language of interactive art and immersive environments. This paper presents a study case where interactive technology facilitated the manipulation of natural matter, light. The manipulation brought different time based light phenomena, such as penumbra and camera obscura. In this case technology became the tool rather then the object of appreciation, in order to reveal and present light phenomena.

The receptors of light were not only the visitors, but also a large modernist exhibition space, which was alternatively defined by multiple light appearances. The experience of the dynamic natural lighted space was felt through the senses with the complex perception of the various inputs composition. This suggests that such a framework can be used as a study case for the research of perception from various points of view: physiological, psychological, and philosophical.

This presentation draws from a behavioralist perspective of artistic activities in relation to theories of cultural development. Insights found here, the author will argue, may be profitably introduced into current discussions considering how new technologies create new problems for research practices regarded experimentally. Proceeding thusly, the author will consider the relevance of this kind of experimentalism for developing new techniques of cultural
production, in particular the development of a ‘speculative rhetoric’ for new media (here considered generously). A number of recent examples will be considered, including those drawn from the author’s own artistic work revolving around dynamical and computational media systems.

BEYOND MATTER is an international, collaborative, practice-based research project that takes cultural heritage and culture in development to the verge of virtual reality. It does this by reflecting on the virtual condition with a specific emphasis on its spatial aspects in art production, curating, and mediation via numerous activities and formats, including the digital revival of selected past landmark exhibitions, art and archival exhibitions, conferences, artist residency programs, an online platform, and publications.

After the exhibition ends at the ZKM, a new edition of »Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter.« will be on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from Wednesday, July 5, 2023 to Sunday, October 29, 2023.

Abstract

In this paper, I use my software-art project ZooMorph1 (in progress) as a starting point for briefly discussing innovative collaborative models, anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism and conflicting epistemological paradigms in art, science and non-western traditions.

The dissolution of the ‘identity’ as we used to know it (before the networks) has led to an ongoing fragmented and fast evolution. In a networked society, identities can be formed by extremely varied and juxtaposed layers of what results finally as an “enriched self.” In fact, there’s a constant mediation that is applied to every single identity through multiple platforms and standards usually identified with the popular “web 2.0” expression. This mediation leads to multiple partial representations of the self in a multilayered form. What happens is that out of the ordinary physical life, our mind has already started to think in these terms. We feel our identity not anymore as an indivisible whole, but as composed of different pieces that are deeply and reciprocally influenced by our online experience.

Artist Statement

[re]locate takes the form of a responsive, multi-channel sound installation revisiting an ordinarily public ‘place’ that retains the traces of a deeply significant event; it is concerned with the processes involved in struggling to preserve the memory of the event whilst offering new insights. The idea for the artwork flows from the tragic events surrounding the racially motivated murder of 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence near a bus stop in south London in 1993, and the deep impact this has had both privately, for the Lawrence family, and publicly. The Stephen Lawrence case received widespread media attention following the damming conclusions of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report (Macpherson 1999) into the police handling of murder investigation and its subsequent lack of resolution.

Democratisation and internet-based curating: for many commentators, seemingly two things that come hand in hand. ‘Democracy’ in this context is often a byword for ‘accessibility’ – similar to, and yet also distinct from, democracy as a system of governance or a theoretical model for politics. In trying to think through the stakes of what it might mean to ‘democratise’ curating using the internet’s more collective and collaborative platforms, this paper will consider potential disruptions of power hierarchies or concentrations traditionally implicated in the role of the curator. To do this, I will focus on selfies and sexuality – in order to tease out the fraught politics of subcultural capital, voyeurism and exhibitionism.

Selfies have often been decried by the press for their narcissism, in a climate where pornography and new technology are considered a threat to heterosexual reproduction. Sexuality is often seen as disruptive to social systems by its capacity to become ‘excessive’ or ‘queer’. What does it mean to think about this kind of agency in relation to ‘democracy’, which has recently come to be understood by contemporary philosophers as means of frustrating the status quo and structures of power? The internet – like excessive sexuality – is often associated with speed; in fact, this characteristic marks it out from conventional museums which move at a much ‘slower’ institutional time. Using the International New Media Gallery’s partially user generated selfie exhibition as an example, this paper will consider whether rapid collecting and sharing of photographic self-representation has more in common with activist protest – and what this might mean for thinking through the potential stakes of internet-based curating.

Abstract

‘Low resolution’ context.
In a context of digitalised data, with the streaming of an intense and excessive amount of images and sounds – which sensitivity is at work? This – still new sensitivity – appearing in the younger generation in a world where data is shared, apparently free, downloadable and copyable, possibly lacks an awareness that this world is in fact accessible by paying an entrance and exit right.

One generally uses the expression ‘low resolution’ to describe the quality of images coming from the technique of data compression which suppresses some data in order to lighten the file size and thereby ease its circulation on the network or it’s storage on CD, DVD, or ipod. JPEG, MPEG and MP3 are algorythmic acronyms, not crude words for digital device users. To attempt to redefine, in more aesthetic words, this particular sensitivity (soft sensitivity) belonging to the web network, one cannot strictly speaking use the technical definition ‘low resolution’. This expression means data circulation (texts, images, sounds), in terms of its production, distribution, reception and ‘low definition’, defines a single way of perceiving the world. This provokes a question of perception of making data enabled by using more or less sophisticated materials, more or less home-made audiovisual and data processing goods.

Spam, you know it when you see it, at least this seemed to be the implicit assumption of Bill Gates when he in his 1998 article ‘On Spam: Wasting time on the Internet’ encouraged Internet users faced with unsolicited e-mails to ’press delete’. A few years later, at the 2004 Davos World Economic Forum, Gates bravely announced that ’Spam will soon be a thing of the past’ as Microsoft was now introducing software that would make spammers ‘pay’ through a backlash effect on their computing power. From simply pressing delete to employing Bayesian e-mail filtering, the sheer plurality of methods proposed by Internet security companies to dispose this immaterial waste product, are perhaps at their most useful as testimonies to the inherent mutability of not only the object of spam but of networked communications at large. The endless quest of anti-spam research in defining and eliminating spam simply reflects the fragile socio-cultural as well as economical negotiation at the heart of filtering ‘meaningful’ discourse out of  informational flows.

In 2007 the Australia Council for the Arts became the first national arts funding body in the world to fund an artist residency in the virtual domain of Second Life. The successful recipients, writer Justin Clemens, visual artist Christopher Dodds and sound artist Adam Nash, proposed a mixed reality, networked project linking people in real life with avatars in a virtual world. Their residency project titled Babelswarm was a realtime, 3D sound sculpture grown from the conversion of words spoken and letters typed by people both in a physical gallery and as avatars in Second Life.

‘Taman Tugu: Interference/Resistance’ is an immersive, interactive musical work that has been mapped onto the pathways of the Taman Tugu jungle park in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  Taman Tugu is an unusual place – a large rewilded space teeming with wildlife in the centre of a modern metropolis. ‘Taman Tugu: Interference/Resistance’ uses Audio Augmented Reality and placed sound to raise questions about the importance of urban green spaces in general and rewilded urban spaces in particular. This paper explains how the work asks these questions of its audience through the mapping of electronic sound over the unique geography of Taman Tugu.

Empyre- sprang into life in 2002 to fill a void on the net. It presents diverse topics with guests discussing aspects of networked culture in a non-hierarchical constantly refreshing monthly format, and is moderated to maintain thematic integrity.

FACES is an international mailing list that connects women: activists, artists, critics, theoreticians, technicians, journalists, researchers, programmers, net workers, web designers and educators, all women who share an interest in the media and communication arts. FACES started informally, and has continued since 1997 as a voluntary list, using free services, and continues because of a real need for women to connect internationally. Many local lists have been inspired by FACES, and projects at festivals, exhibitions and symposia have been created by list subscribers.

Fibreculture is a community of critical thinkers, Australasia-wide, engaged with new media and Internet theory and practice. The list (around 800 and growing) includes: theorists, critics, journalists, academics, artists, activists, and all sorts of media producers, designers and other information-workers. We are people who think, read and write about the applications and cultures of new technology.

Fibreculture is about critical and speculative interventions in the debate and
discussions concerning information technology, the policy that concerns it, the new media for(u)ms it supports and its sustainable deployment towards a more equitable Australia. Fibreculture is a forum for the exchange of articles, ideas and arguments on Australian IT policy in a broad, cultural context. it concerns the philosophy and politics of:

1. new media arts
2. information and creative industries
3. national strategies for innovation, research and development
4. education, and
5. media and culture

I wish to look at what the mailing list offers by way of an art historical tool, what adaptations we might incur in order to use such a tool efficiently, and why mailing lists aren’t acknowledged for the new media language generator that the undoubtedly are.

Abstract

‘What have you left behind?’ is an interactive media Masters project that focuses on individuals rather than their nationalities, with the aim to break the concept of cultural national borders and to show that we all could be considered as nomads for we are in constant movement and leave things behind.

This is a collaborative project with the audience generating the content which was applied to different kinds of media, both digital and analogue: real notebooks were sent to different parts of the world to collect testimonies from people; a blog documented the whole process of development and made the communication between the participants and myself possible; and the final website collects testimonies and presents a conclusive ‘nomads map’. Such constant exchange, between the physical and the virtual, has been an important aspect of this project. Real notebooks, the blog, and the website with a tactile aesthetic (based on paper and a hand-made layout) reinforces this aspect.

This paper aims to describe the process and outcomes and to discuss the authorial decisions made along the way, in order to consider ways of representing ideas about identity and belonging in a globalised and digital world.

From Eye Tracking via the retina (inside the eye) into the brain – what does it mean to be a body – the artistic path from analogue (physical) to digital visualizations back to the analogue (material).

Working for the Computer Art & Technocultures project has given me the opportunity to analyze and research the material left by American art historian and independent curator Patric Prince to the V&A. This experience also has allowed me to connect this research to my personal interest in computer art and the Venice Biennale.

This paper investigates the main points of Patric Prince’s article “Computer art in the mainstream” written for the 1986 SIGGRAPH catalogue. How do these points connect to the Venice Biennale’s approach to computer art in the 80s?

How to Explain Pictures to a Live PARO is a performative expression of affect and empathy: a peaceful theatrical protest to bring attention to the gun-control policies in America by inviting the audience to watch and explain the pictures on the wall. In the first half of the three-hour-long durational performance, the performer holds, cradles, and dances with the interactive robotic seal PARO, while showing her the lively pictures of the dead students on the wall and the livestreaming gun-control related tweets on the screen; she whispers, screams, and cries all over the performance space and invites the audience to do the same using their words and bodies in the second half. This work is a performative call to the community to make their affective responses explicit, to bring out, to express, and to perform their embodied agitation in a space where words are not sufficient anymore.

This artwork is a digital performance revisit of Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). I define the concept of “Performance Revisit,” as opposed to “Performance Reenactment.” While “Performance Reenactment” functions as a living archive of a well-known performance in history, “Performance Revisit” is a performative response to a historical performance with new objectives and questions in mind. The purpose of making a performance revisit is to ask questions, provoke dialogue, and evoke affective responses in audience. By drawing a line back in history to Beuys’s performance, this work creates a dialectical tension with the past and brings attention to current issues in society. While Beuys performs his anxiety of intellectualizing arts in his performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Live PARO is a performative response to the disturbing anxiety of seeing ever-growing victims of gun-violence and on-going absurd debates between pro and anti gun control policy defendants.

This paper questions how current digital assistants tend to be feminized through their anthropomorphization and humanization, discussing possibilities for countering this phenomenon. It draws on a previous study on the relationship between gender and AI, complemented by an analysis of Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Siri. Furthering this discussion, we address the main ques-tions, justifications and suggestions raised by researchers and academics as well as online media coverage when ex-amining the phenomenon. One of the main questions re-lates to how these assistants evade this topic by claiming to have no gender or to be gender neutral. Thus, this paper discusses possible approaches to deal with gender attrib-ution in AI, by looking into recent trends that range from gender neutrality and diversification to queering these entities. On the one hand, digital assistants could be more diversified and include male counterparts or alter-natives, on the other, we discuss how our understandings of gender are expanding beyond binary conceptions and how digital assistants can accompany more fluid concep-tions of gender. Particularly, this paper debates how the development of this technology could be informed by current discussions in queer theory and new media stud-ies, inciting reflection on how digital assistants reflect our social and cultural views back to us.

Throughout the 1970’s and much of the 1980’s most artists had little use for the computer. The arcane language of programming and the results on a computer screen bore little apparent relationship to the camera’s lens or the painter’s brush.

This would change in 1984 with the development, marketing, and release of the Macintosh computer whose conception was heavily influenced by the local San Francisco Bay Area political and social events. These seminal events included the Free Speech Movement and People’s Park demonstrations in Berkeley, and the protests against the Stanford Research Institute involvement with the military-industrial complex, the War in Vietnam as well as the rise of the counterculture, environmentalism, the women’s movement and the use of appropriate technologies of the 60’s and 70’s which gave rise of the personal computer.

Nevertheless, it took a computer that was uniquely suited to artists before many would consider touching this technology for the first time. That computer was the Macintosh, whose very DNA seems to speak (most literally) to artists whose main interests centered more on a critique of technology and its effects on society then in an exploration of the underlying technologies.

This new crop of digital artists working between 1984 and 1990 had little connection to the earlier explorations in computer art but instead had a strong affinity to the goals and cultural ideals that would rise in the 60’s and 70’s.

These artists that were mostly working outside of the gallery system and supported by newly emerging alternative artist spaces, publishers and curators would gravitate towards this computer that was both engaging and transparent is such a way – as to allow them to leap beyond the technology (and the empty aestheticism of the earlier generation of previous computer graphics practitioners). It would allow them to introduce a new content charged body of work, that would both document and critically explore the rise of consumerism and consumer technology and it’s growing impact on society.

This paper will highlight the works of these very influential first generation “non computer” computer artists.

This paper presents the concept of Embodied Sonic Meditation (ESM) and its proof-of-concept art installation entitled “Resonance of the Heart.” ESM artistically explores the theories of “embodied cognition” and “deep listening.” The goal of this artistic practice is to improve laypersons’ comprehension of the relationship between body gestures, sounds, and visuals. To practice this approach, we designed and built a real-time audio-visual interactive system. This system uses an infrared sensing device and touchless hand gestures to produce various sonic and visual results. An artificial neural network was implemented to track and estimate the performer’s subtle hand gestures using the infrared sensing device’s output. Six sound filtering techniques were implemented to simultaneously process audio based on the gesture. Selected Mudra hand gestures were mapped to seven 4-dimensional Buddhabrot fractal deformations in real-time. This project was applied in both college teaching and public art installation. It connects Eastern philosophy to cognitive science and mindfulness practice. It augments multidimensional spaces, art forms, and human cognitive feedback. It disrupts the boundary between cultural identities, machine intelligence, and universal human meaning.

“Site of Reversible Destiny Yoro AR” is an appreciation tool that can be used in the facility “Site of Reversible Destiny Yoro ” (1995-) which is the art works by Shusaku Arakawa + Madeline Gins and is also a park anyone can enter. The main feature of this art works/park is that visitors are made aware of the sense of balance of the body. One purpose of this application is to let users know their concept more deeply by showing artists’ idea left behind as CG or drawing including the plan which did not realize in the real space.
However, the purpose of the application is more than just a viewing tool. It works as a collaborative research platform of researchers, artists, software engineers by interrelation of reinterpretation of the work from the viewpoint of art history and the development of outdoor AR system. This article contributes to the discussion related to the results of publishing this application on Yoro Art Picnic held at the Yoro Park in Gifu Prefecture, Japan on November 3 and 4, 2018.