Presentation Data Table

Electronic space is a vacuum – it has no structure or architecture in which sound can resonate. This paper will discuss recent research in methods of articulating sound in electronic space using metaphors of structure, and will reference recent work.

Native peoples participation in modern and post-modern practices is often viewed as outside of what is considered traditional and therefore, when choosing to participate, questions around authenticity rise. But many of the Kai Tahu people of Southern New Zealand would argue against this. Generations of whanau (family) have participated in traditional practices of food gathering, particularly with the Titi (muttonbird) harvest. Elements of this have evolved. These have been managed through the adoption and adaptation of new technologies by the whanau involved in the practice. Underpinning all this are core concepts that inform practice: concepts centered around identity politics. While the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of practice may change, the basic concepts remain stable. Practices such as altered political economies, alternative transactional economies, and electronic art; all play their part in how the Kai Tahu people define themselves as traditional, at the same time being active agents for change.

Intro
New Zealand is a nation at the bottom of the world. It comprises principally of two main islands with many small outlying islands. It is often described as a very young country and the last country on earth to be settled. The indigenous peoples, now known collectively as Maori, arrived in New Zealand from Eastern Polynesia over a thousand years ago and settled in various parts of the country. They consist of many distinct groups, structuring themselves, socially and politically as Iwi (tribes). They often share geographic boundaries and certain understandings regarding creation stories and associated customs but consider themselves to be independent socio-political entities, akin to Clans in the Scottish high and lowlands or even nations, if we were to consider the North American experience. The Iwi that this story refers to is known as Kai Tahu.

“There’s no memory you can wrap in camphor but the moths will get in.”  _Elliot 1969: 49

At present we are witnessing the world-wide spread of remembering. For about twenty years, especially after the changes in East Europe from 1989 on, most countries, and ethnic or social groups have changed their traditional relation to their past. This change has taken various forms, such as criticism of official history; claims on abolished or confiscated traces of the past; the cult of roots etc. One of the reasons for this ‘movement’ is connected with the phenomenon of the ‘acceleration’ and ‘democratization of history, which also has to do with the expansion of visualelectronic memory in a globalized world. This has not only refined observation of the current reality, but also the view of the past.

Traditional and new media technologies allow for a reframing of cultural constructs through play. Play and games provide insight and expose culture. Though the two are not necessarily synonymous, both play and games function in relation to an understood context and set of rules. In this paper we will investigate the concept of a digital country through an analysis of our current project, Lokönenie, as well as consider how artists and designers historically have enlisted strategies of play and games to engage in a critical examination of borders, mapping and technologies of representation.

Through practice-based research involving the combination of performance art and game design, we follow in the genealogy of DADA, Fluxus, Surrealists, and the Situationists. We create playful experiences that address the intersection of art, site and digital technologies through performative interventions and webspace. Our current project, Loköneine, questions the meaning of nationality, nationhood and identity. Lokönenie is a portable and conceptually open source country whose only fixed location is an IP address.?The name means “place nowhere,” and highlights the transitory, dislocated nature of our country as well as our desire to promote a mobile, digital country that has no geographical, cultural or language barriers. The work is activated in the real world and lives in the digital where disparate locations can become connected in web space.

In addition to our own project, we will discuss the work of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, and Rafael Fajardo, as examples of artists and artist groups employing strategies of critical play and the revisioning of place.

Throughout this paper we will argue that performativity is essential to understanding and accessibility. As Allan Kaprow said, “As a four-letter word in a society given to games, play does what all dirty words do: it strips bare the myth of culture by its artists.”

According to ‘cyber-critic’ Sadie Plant, through the Internet future is already present, (-) ‘breaking through the endless deferral of human horizons short-circuiting history downloadinS its images into today. (…) Cyberrevolution is virtually real.’

Embededness of Internet and the digital media in the discourses of revolution; creation of new terrain, new configurations of time, space, and identity, is well documented by this point. What is perhaps more rarely touched upon is the discursive nature of this revolution, which is articulated with concepts derived from cyberpunk fiction. To put it another way, revolution is to a large degree a question of rhetoric. This rhetoric is more than word games: phenomena such as ‘cyberspace’ are being produced through language, along with fantasies and political agendas. These conceptual formulations are performative in creating the phenomena they describe. This, again, raises important questions of asency and answerability, on which the paper will focus here. Paasonen discusses rhetoric and agency, especially in the context offeminist theory on the revolutionary aspects ofdigital arts. What kinds of agencies and agendas are they linked to? What kinds of new worlds are being created?

Heinz von Foerster said that the listener, not the speaker, determined the meaning of an expression, and by this meant, both the listener and the speaker when facing each other instantiate an environment of conditions – a cybernetic ecology – where the two become one symbiotic organism, who once conformed tries to negotiate the meaning of its existence in a determined point of time and space. The subjectivity and objectivity, implied in a communication network, are nothing more than instances of the poetics of immersion that each movement, gesture, message contains.

Bioacoustics and Biomimetics help us approach the natural phenomena manifested by all social living beings on this planet: communication is learning by imitation and to imitate creativity is to listen and see in order to mimic a successful behaviour which produces a successful reward. We all imitate creativity from nature, we all depend on each other, and therefore, we are influenced by each other. Seeing and adapting transformations and mutations throughout the open source network of evolution is in fact evolution driven by feedback, and we can approach, embrace and imagine this evolution network through experiments within the fields of Bioacoustics and Biomimetics. To this extent, stridulation is perhaps one of the most underestimated communication mechanisms found in social and solitary insects, and it definitely needs to be revived, celebrated, amplified. The application of cybernetics and an artistic open mind, towards the understanding and analysis of stridulation phenomena, such as acoustic and vibratory messages shared by social communitarian beings, like ants and humans, have gained increased attention in the field of artistic research. Yet the cybernetics behind the system of self-organisation and emergence in ants and other social beings, is but a mere example of what have always been the inspirational ground for the human brain to imagine, create and produce, attaining technological and engineering achievements which come from the nature that surrounds us: aerodynamical cars, thermo-regulated materials, hydrodynamical swimsuits, traffic networks, peer-to-peer file sharing, are all examples of the mutated influence of nature on our creative minds.
A musical composition, played by piano, guitar, trumpet, a turntable, or any other electro-acoustical-vibratory instrument, constitutes in its essence a combination of patterns, in which each individual signal has an harmonic emergent quality, with the potential of interpretation focused on the actors and reactors of the contextual sphere in which everything takes place. Music is nonverbal communication and the use, or even abuse, of amplified sounds definitely belongs to the diverse array of biocommunication strategies we encounter in the world of living organisms, which we humans can learn from and apply

Panel: Serious Animation: Beyond Art and Entertainment

This paper will de­scribe a prac­tice-led en­quiry into the value of 3-D Com­puter Gen­er­ated Im­agery (CGI) in the vi­su­al­i­sa­tion and an­i­ma­tion of clin­i­cal ra­di­o­log­i­cal scan data. The aim of this work is to de­velop an al­ter­na­tive path­way to vi­su­al­is­ing clin­i­cal data that aug­ments and chal­lenges the ex­ist­ing med­ical imag­ing aes­thetic. It ques­tions the in­tegrity of the au­thors arts-based in­ter­pre­ta­tion of  ra­di­o­log­i­cal scan data and its rel­e­vance in the re­al­world con­text of en­hance­ment of doc­tor-pa­tient com­mu­ni­ca­tion and in­ter­ac­tion. Ex­plor­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ties for a new vi­su­al­i­sa­tion path­way that brings to­gether the vi­sual and nar­ra­tive ap­proaches of a 3-D com­puter an­i­ma­tion aes­thetic and the de­tail em­bed­ded in­clin­i­cal ra­di­o­log­i­cal scan data. A multi-method ap­proach is used to ad­dress the key re­search ques­tions. The meth­ods are in­formed by a col­lab­o­ra­tive two-year res­i­dency at Ninewells Hos­pi­tal, NHS Tay­side, Dundee. The de­signer’s tacit knowl­edge is dis­cussed in re­la­tion to pro­vid­ing a trans­fer­able model of work­ing, propos­ing ap­proaches for the fu­ture vi­su­al­i­sa­tion of med­ical scan data from a pa­tient cen­tric point of view.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Informality, metaspace, telematic, resettlement, communities, videoconference, urbanism, population, India, cities.

In megacities such as Delhi and Mumbai – and within one of the fastest growing cities within the world, Ahmedabad – more than 50% of the population live in informal urban settlements. 3×4 metres is the plot size seen to be provided in some resettlement colonies, a government initiative which relocates people within informal inner-city settlements to vacant land on the periphery. In a collaboration between Professor Paul Sermon at the University of Brighton, Dr Claire McAndrew at The Bartlett, UCL, Swati Janu a Delhi-based Architect and photographer Vivek Muthuramalingam from Bangalore, 3×4 looks at informal settlements differently where informality is not viewed as a problem, but a promising new model of urbanism for the global south. 3×4 uses an immersive telematic networked environment to provide a playful, sensorial exploration of new hybrids of digital space. Merging two 3×4 metre room installations in Delhi and London through mixed-reality, this transnational dialogue intends to set an aspiration for developing metaspace platforms in megacities of the global south. It builds upon practice-based research conducted as UnBox LABS 2014 Fellows in Ahmedabad, India; which used an immersive installation to explore the qualities and values built through selforganised communities that are lost in the resettlement process.

Our team proposes an artists presentation of a current project that investigates cinematic structure in light of our changing relationship with the animated image in Augmented Reality. 52 Card Psycho is an installation-based investigation into cinematic structures and interactive cinema viewership; the concept is simple: a deck of 52 cards, each printed with a unique identifier, are replaced in the subject’s view by the 52 individual shots that make up Hitchcock’s famous shower scene in Psycho. The cards can be manipulated by the viewer: stacked, dealt, arranged in their original order or re-composed in different configurations, creating spreads of time, and allowing a material interaction with the ‘cinema screen’— an object which normally is removed and exalted, and unchangeable in its linearity. The technology used is based on marker-based augmented reality applications, where special printed markers are recognized in the video feed, and pass data to applications regarding their unique identifier, their position, and their orientation.

A camera is mounted, either viewing the entire table-top scene of cards or is attached to a ‘heads-up display’ that the viewer wears. The video signal feeds in to a computer running an augmented reality application, which then feeds a display signal out to a projection or the heads-up display of the viewer, overlaying the video clips of each shot of Psycho onto the appropriate card and continually mapping their position and orientation.

The 52 Card Psycho project is an exemplar of the unique architecture of cinematic pieces, mapped on to the real world, made possible by AR technology. The medium of the animated image, in its wedding with the real world, loses the privileged linearity of the screen, and gives the opportunity to re-perceive cinema as the juxtaposition of its parts.

5th Future Mobility Roundtable

“Making Visible the Invisible” is a commission by the Seattle arts Commission for the new central library which opened in 2005 realized by artist George Legrady in collaboration with artist/engineer Rama Hoetzlein. The electronic installation was activated in September 2005 and is continuing until 2014 or beyond. It is located on the technology floor, on a wall of LCD screens behind the librarians’ reference desk giving patrons and librarians an insight as to where patrons’ interests lie. Between 12000 to 36000 books, movies and cd’s are checked out each day at the library. Since September 2005, we are receiving this amazing data every hour, approximately 10 million items checked out per year. Four animations that float across a wall of display screens interpret the data fed directly from the Library’s Information Technology department to the artwork, which is powered by four computers. At the time of ISEA2011 Istanbul we will celebrate the project’s 6th year of continuous operation. This paper will give an overview and analysis of the data, discuss the potential of the project as a historical document at a time of the massive transition to the internet, presented with animations and visualizations using the data, created by graduate students in the Media Arts & Technology PhD program at UC Santa Barbara and during workshops in the past 4 years.

I explore the sculptural, experiential and sometimes humorous possibilities of light and natural phenomena, often referencing devices from the history of science and optics in installations that include a machine for making rainbows, a camera obscura journey through the center of the earth, paranoid dinner-table devices based on a 17th c. Czech periscope goblet, an interactive computer/video rifle that references E. J. Marey’s photographic rifle of 1882 – and site-specific periscopes and camera obscuras.   Scientific visualizations and the devices that produce them (historical examples and contemporary innovations) have influenced my artwork and my teaching.

Several sculptural and photographic projects explore time making devices, including water clocks and sundials.  Several works involve tracing shadows over regular intervals: at the Roman Forum in Italy; over lunch in Rome, Shanghai, London, Berlin, Sydney, Seattle; at the Palo Alto Red Barn; and in the desert by moonlight. Skylight Aperture Sundial, a public art commission with the Seattle Public Library and the Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs tracks solar noon within the Montlake Public Library.  Also directly relevant to this proposal is 2 Dog Dial, a playful use of the heliodon and the Leech Barometer (in homage to the Tempest Prognosticator by George Merryweather, 1851).

Along with presenting examples of these devices and artworks – and of collaborations with a physicist, an astronomer and a meteorologist, I will discuss two related courses: Art and the Cosmos – Making Giant Sundials co-taught with Astro-Physicist Woodruff Sullivan and Black Holes, Grey Matter and White Cubes: Visualizing Science, a studio art course which considers the artistic possibilities of scientific representation and instruments.

The Science, Technology and the Arts initiative of the Digital Single Market (STARTS) is the result of a number of activities under the umbrella of ICT ART CONNECT. It all started in April 2012, at the first homonymous event. It compromised a large gathering of people working on European Union (EU) funded projects that in any fashion included the arts. The main meeting took place at the Berlaymont in Brussels. There were also an exhibition in a local gallery and workshops at the iMAL – Center for digital cultures and technology, in Molenbeek. A number of actors were mobilized to work on the development of the ideas of that first event and a first small Coordination and Support Action (CSA) was funded to organize that mobilization. It was funded under the Future and Emerging Technologies framework, and it was originally titled FET-ART.

2013 was a key year for the growth of ICT ART CONNECT. Taking advantage of the then ongoing restructuring period of transition from Framework Programme 7 (FP7) to Horizon 2020 (H2020), right after ICT 2103 in Vilnius, an event took place in Brussels that radically boosted synergies around potential EU policies on the integration of artists in the then forthcoming H2020 framework. ARTSHARE, was responsible for the organization of that event. It included debates in European Parliament (EP) sponsored by 3 Members of Parliament (MEPs) with the participation of about 80 constituents whom were then scouted as the most relevant agents on the ground in the field of the crossings of arts, science and technology. Furthermore and besides a performance and an exhibition in the heart of the city of Brussels, a big exhibition and networking dinner took place at BOZAR, in Brussels. The event hosted a number of highly relevant policy makers, including Director-General of CONNECT, Robert Madelin and the Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe Neelie Kroes.

The next highlight in the history of STARTS was the ICTARTCONNECT.study. It was actually in that study that STARTS was born as a brand, including its first visual identity. The study created the grounds and characterized the emergent field of science, technology and the arts in the EU.

In May 2015, a major symposium took place organized by the Lituanian presidency of the EU Council in the frame of Mons 2015, European Capital of Culture entitled “Crossovers culture and technology” with more than 500 attendees from the European Commission (DG Connect and DG Education Culture), private/industry sector, cultural sector and stakeholders. It presented best practices in the field of interaction between artists, technology and industry. A white paper to the EU was published by Mons 2015 with recommendations/outputs from the symposium.

As a consequence of the efforts put in place in 2013, the first H2020 topic dedicated to STARTS was funded. Its was titled ICT-36-2016 – Boost synergies between artists, creative people and technologists. That topic supported the projects: STARTS PRIZE, managing the award of prizes to the STARTS community, VERTIGO, coordinating STARTS in general and implementing the first STARTS Residencies and WEAR SUSTAIN, promoting business ideas resulting from arts and engineering collaborations. BRAINHACK, a FET funded project about community building around brain-computer interfaces and the one off Creative Europe funded STARTS Prize covered the transition in terms of activities between the end of the ICTARTCONNECT.study and the start of ICT-36-2016 funded projects.

CREATE-IoT, the CSA coordinating the Internet of Things (IoT) Large Scale Pilots of the European Union, has been also a crucial project to STARTS. It has been there that close
contact with industry has been taking place. It was also in the context of that project that a sound methodology for integrating artistic practices in creation and development cycles of Information and Telecommunication Technologies (ICT) has been developed. The graphic bellow matches activities such as artistic lead hackathons, artistic residencies, exhibitions and discussions with the four periods of the ICT creation cycle: identification, exposure, improvement and co-creation.

The VERTIGO project also produced and is producing relevant documentation about the co-creation process of the STARTS Residencies. The documents inform a better understanding of what worked and what did not work in the process of implementation of the STARTS Residencies. Such knowledge will allow S2S to better design the proposed seed activities.

At the ICT 2018 event of DG CONNECT, in Vienna, a number of artworks resulting from the STARTS Residencies, the WEAR SUSTAIN supported projects and others from artists in residence in BOSCH and TELEFONICA were showcased together for the first time. It then became clear that some of the STARTS residencies, not only had the desired effect on the course of the research and innovation processes within which they took place, but as well they produced relevant artistic contributions. Those artistic contributions are sustainable per se as artworks and they might find a place in the global contemporary art context, if properly framed. They could also be showcased with works that are STARTS related but were not funded by the EU. This was when the notion of a STARTS Collection started gaining shape. This is one of the reasons why S2S is coordinated by a renowned contemporary art institution, the Serralves Foundation.

More recently, a new CSA, entitled STARTS ECOSYSTEM is taking over the global coordination of STARTS, including the webplatform. Furthermore, two STARST lighthouse projects were funded, MINDSPACES and Re- FREAM. They are supposed to create references for others of how research and innovation actions integrating artists could be shapped.

On the 2nd of May of 2017, at 1500 a highly level meeting took place in the European Parliament in Brussels. It brought together 4 MEPS and about 25 highly-relevant players in STARTS from governance, business, industry, science and the arts. Concrete examples of how the arts can stimulate regional innovation in urban context were discussed. Actions that have happened in the following cities were presented and debated: Braga, North region of Portugal; Cluj-Napoca, Northwest region of Romania; Avignon, Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region of France; Barcelona, Catalonia region of Spain and Bologna, Emilia Eomagna region of Italy. This meeting triggered the idea of pilot projects in STARTS for regional innovation.

The first pilot project, entitled Regional STARTS centres, was kicked of in May 2019. It is coordinated by BOZAR and includes a number of partners with whom the S2S consortium has good links. The good relationship between both consortiums will allow for good cooperation and coordination in order to create synergies and avoid unsynchronized actions.

STARTS related EU policy overview

The moment is now. The actual context of the transition between H2020 and Horizon Europe is ideal to increment policy support to STARTS because it is the time when lessons learned from the implementation of H2020 can be communicated and adjustments can take place. S2S aims at creating excellent examples of innovative actions to serve as flagships supporting STARTS policy making at EU, National and Regional levels. More importantly to what concerns the strengthening of innovation at regional level through STARTS activities, the new Digital Europe Programmevii has very strong focus on cities and regional development, not only by the support it aims at bringing to the Digital Innovation Hubs Network (DIHs) but as well by closely interacting with the European Regional Development and Cohesion Funds.

Panel: Tyrannies of Participation

This pre­sen­ta­tion fo­cuses on the re­la­tion­ship be­tween record­ing, au­thor­ship and the idea of com­po­si­tion. Work­ing across three dif­fer­ent pe­ri­ods, I ex­am­ine the ten­sions be­tween in­di­vid­ual and col­lec­tive mu­si­cal cre­ation and look at music as a liv­ing so­cial prac­tice as op­posed to an ob­ject. West­ern no­ta­tion im­mor­tal­ized in­di­vid­ual com­posers and cre­ated a mu­si­cal hi­er­ar­chy in which music be­came a less col­lab­o­ra­tive so­cial prac­tice and more an in­dus­trial fac­tory re­pro­duc­ing the com­poser’s prop­er­ties. In the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury, record­ing tech­nol­ogy chal­lenged the in­di­vid­ual com­poser’s au­thor­ity by grant­ing the same im­mor­tal­ity to im­pro­vis­ing mu­si­cians and other live per­form­ers. Since the year 2000, new tech­nolo­gies have en­abled col­lec­tive tools for col­lab­o­ra­tive com­po­si­tion (e.g., Rocket Music, Ind­aba). Though these tools promise dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, they may also be re­in­forc­ing in­di­vid­u­al­is­tic ten­den­cies in mu­si­cal cre­ation, com­po­si­tion, and recog­ni­tion.

Is to love someone good? Or is to be loved better? Is love in the past or at the present passed? Or is love in the past or at the present really existent? Is love of the past better than love of the present? As T.S.Eliot argues, “…a synchronic view of history, where the past is always with us, and diachronic view, where the past is passed” (Eliot, 109). This paper mainly scrutinizes a sense of time over love affairs of four major characters in TV series titled Womanizer, P.S. Man which had been released in Taiwan earlier before long. And, the second part of T.S. Eliot’s essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” will be approached to explore a sense of time based on Modernist viewpoints. The issue of love affairs sounds cliche but it does not. Instead, I argue that four major characters, while facing and pursuing their true love in the past, present, and future, keep calculating how they could win over the battle of love. However, calculation, in turn, entraps them. Also, although some critics of TV series in Taiwan have argued that “Xia He-Jie,” for example, fits this typical type of man–womanizer–who regards his family, friends, girlfriends as his substitutes and affiliates as his emotional outlet,” I find, however, that his strategies of dealing with people does not construct upon self-confidence but his sense of loss on the identity of the self.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Creativity, computational creativity, generative art, style imitation, David Cope, Experiments in Musical Intelligence, postmodernism.

Computational style modeling involves building a computational representation of the surface of musical works, one that captures features of rhythm, melody, harmony, and structure within its patterns. While such models are useful for musicological purposes, the creative use of these models to generate new music consistent within a given style raises a critical question: can generative music based upon a corpus be considered creative? This paper addresses this question, examining how creativity has been historically viewed, and discusses recent research into creativity. Examples of computational creativity by the author using both rule-based and corpus-based systems will be discussed.

Panel: DON’T HATE THE BUSINESS: BECOME THE BUSINESS!

What does the cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion of art mean? Joseph Beuys de­clared that “the si­lence of Mar­cel Duchamp is over­rated.” It is up to us to put value on this si­lence. How can you make art out of the con­ver­gence of the aes­thetic field (and aes­thetic judge­ment) with that of po­lit­i­cal econ­omy?  In the his­tory of art, artists have often ad­dressed this re­la­tion­ship both spec­u­la­tively and crit­i­cally. Andy Warhol went shop­ping. At the same time, the Bea­t­les made their own record label to as­sume full con­trol of the pro­duc­tion process (and al­most went bank­rupt). What seems to be the case is that not only af­fir­ma­tion but also cri­tique of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween art and busi­ness de­vel­ops new kinds of busi­nesses. After all, where would de­sign be with­out avant-garde (and Bauhaus)? Where would fash­ion be with­out punk?  Artists often crit­i­cally in­ter­fere and play with the con­ver­gence and trans­ac­tion be­tween aes­thetic cap­i­tal and fi­nan­cial cap­i­tal. The paper will pre­sent key ex­am­ples of this (from Mar­cel Duchamp to Christophe Bruno), and argue that the best crit­i­cal artists also po­ten­tially pro­pose the best and most in­no­v­a­tive busi­ness mod­els.

Panel: Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 1

Pro­files on so­cial net­work­ing sites make it eas­ier for al­go­rithms to an­a­lyze us, and the in­for­ma­tion we vol­un­tar­ily share with peo­ple can also be seen as a form of par­tic­i­pa­tory sur­veil­lance. Con­nected through con­stant up­date mes­sages, pic­tures and the pos­si­bil­ity of im­me­di­ate re­sponse, we be­come sub­ject to the feed­back of our cir­cle of friends. When com­mu­ni­cat­ing on­line we not only con­form to the rules of the plat­form we use, but also seem to con­trol and gov­ern each other by al­ways keep­ing an eye on each oth­ers thoughts and ac­tions. Just as we need to de­fine what we are com­fort­able with show­ing and shar­ing, we are also re­spon­si­ble for man­ag­ing our mul­ti­tude of iden­ti­ties be­fore and amongst a me­di­ated pub­lic. How­ever, within the mainly vi­su­ally ori­ented en­vi­ron­ment of so­cial net­works, we can never be sure who is hid­den, vis­i­ble and ac­tu­ally watch­ing. In­stead we are left to dis­cover our sense of pri­vacy through mak­ing choices within a set of bi­nary op­tions and as a re­sult ex­pe­ri­ence the lim­i­ta­tions of on­line so­cial spaces. Open­ness can be mis­taken for over-ex­po­sure and ret­i­cence might evoke sus­pi­cion. In an econ­omy of shar­ing and being shared, my talk will ask if screen-based tech­nolo­gies are the only key to our so­cial life or are there pos­si­ble ways of es­cap­ing the never-end­ing feed­back loop.

Intro

Students are learning to be artists in a time of radical transformation of the systems utilized for the creation of art. The emergence of digital technology is viewed by many to be heralding an age of flexible interdisciplinary utilizations of new tools which will seriously affect the relationship between artists and their media. University Art Departments are faced with the difficult task of integrating emerging technologies into their curriculum in order to prepare the artists of tomorrow with the knowledge and ability to utilize modern technology effectively in their art practice. The integration of art and technology courses within the University often raises problematic issues. These include the concerted lack of attention given to technology related issues and practices in Art Foundation and History courses. Students entering introductory courses in Computer Art of- 194ten lack any understanding of the context of the development of technology as related to the arts. Introductory computer courses generally focus on teaching large amounts of technical information necessary to utilize new tools. Unfortunately, this approach often creates students which are technically adept, yet conceptually and historically deficient. The author will detail a teaching philosophy which attempts to remedy this situation by creating an educational environment for the exploration of digital electronic systems through a balance of a strong critical, historical and cultural analysis and the development of technical skills through controlled experimentation. Functioning from a strong belief that it is only through informed and meaningful experimentation will the artists of tomorrow be empowered with the abilities necessary to avoid the creation of technologically masterful exercises which are meaningless as works of art. It is imperative to challenge students to move beyond the superficial utilization and understanding of technology to create art that forgoes fantasy in order to critically engage our reality. This is in part accomplished by challenging students to consider the larger cultural and historical implications of the technologization of art.

Contemporary, technoetic arts (art, technology and consciousness), that oscillate between analogue and digital technologies, often approach a situation, that in many ways resembles transdisciplinary research. It integrates elements from numerous fields of science, technology and philosophy in interactive environments, that can be a challenge to frame within a verbal interpretation. In this paper, I focus upon the relationship between technoetic interfaces and user contemplation. The Cybersemiotic framework is a theoretical approach (2005/English translation, 2008) to semiotics, which is based on a further development of Information Science, Cybernetics, Social Systems Theory, Biosemiotics, phenomenology and Peircian semiotics. Cybersemiotics delivers a range of new terms that can successfully address the multiple, looped, dynamic processes of communication that lie in the interfaces of contemporary technoetic art communications. This gives an opportunity not only to experience interactive arts at the level of embodied presence, but to also intellectualize and name a combination of multisensory and symbolic experiences in ways, that can contribute to the development of adequate vocabularies concerning the integration of art, science, technology and philosophy in general. I will present central terms from the cybersemiotic framework and demonstrate their use in “readings” of contemporary, high quality, technoetic artworks. The aim is to both extract knowledge from the works, as well as to broaden the potential of “self-understanding” that they present to us. The cybersemiotic framework has been developed by Danish Professor of Semiotics, Søren Brier, who is the founder of the Journal “Cybernetics and Human Knowing”, and who has received the Warren McCulloch Award from the American Society for Cybernetics in 2008 in line with Gregory Bateson, Gordon Pask, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and other central developers of the cybernetic paradigm. Artworks will be: Blue Morph (2007) by Artist Victoria Vesna and Nano Scientist James Gimsewski, and the electro-kinetic sculpture, Hylozoic Grove  (2008), by Architect Phillip Beesley.

This paper looks at a new database of interdisciplinary art in Russia that is currently at the design and development stage. The database is intended as an open resource providing description and documentation of events and projects in the 20th and 21st centuries that involve early experiments and works of technological art, media art and art-science. The paper shows the specifics and aims of creating the database in the context of existing archives dealing with contemporary art in Russia. The paper presents an approach to data collecting and establishing selection criteria for the database materials and their basic structure. The paper concludes by description of opportunities in data analysis for those studying convergence of art, science and technology.

Abstract (short paper)

This paper describes theoretical and methodological frameworks around aesthetic exchange in the virtual world. These frameworks hypothesize about the merging of social networks, avatars and online interaction, in what the author proposes as a future metaverse. This latter term refers to the technical, psychological and socio-cultural ways of living and interacting while being logged online permanently. This includes quotidian activities that already form part of our networked interactions, such as socialising, sharing and collective-content-production. Here it is important to deter other remedial solutions to the complexity and ambiguity of such hypothetical mergence: some of those solutions are defective at best and merely demean the rich transference between identity, self-representation and subjectivity experienced in the metaverse. The remedial solutions around the idea of uniformed and standardised representations of the self (or travatars) remain unhealthy. They merely serve to threaten the rich cultural production of subjectivity and the flux of multiple identities that constitute a small but highly influential part of the humanisation of virtual and digital technologies through aesthetic exchange in online interaction. Consequently, the design, use and cultural value of avatars and their equivalents in the virtual world will be critically examined in this paper.

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

Arthur Koestler’s 1964 book, The Act of Creation, puts forward a transversal, diagrammatic notion of creative activity. He referred to this diagram as a ‘bisociation’: an event in which “two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference” coincide.  Such an event, as he described it, “is made to vibrate simultaneously on two different wavelengths, as it were.” The outcome of this coincidence of independent matrices is either a collision, producing laughter, fusion, producing synthesis, or confrontation, producing aesthetic experience. This presentation traces the many ways that Koestler’s diagram can be found embodied within a series of critical events inside the developmental process and aspirations of the Transmute Collective’s award winning multi-user interactive work, Intimate Transactions. Specifically, I will discuss this through my own collaborative involvement in this project developing the haptic feedback system. It will be argued that the multiple instantiations of this diagram resonate to produce a diagrammatic ‘life’ –  signaling a way of thinking about the individuation of Intimate Transactions as a creature. More generally, Koestler’s diagram and this collaboration are discussed as a way to propose an idea of a transversal, distributed form of life that this has particular value in relation to ethical dimensions within creative practice research.

Panel: Media Art, Mediation and Contemporary Art

We engage with Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction to re-evaluate the relations between Mainstream Contemporary Art (MCA), New Media Art (NMA) and SciArt. Our diffractive reading highlights small but consequential differences between these art practices. We do not smooth over the tensions highlighted in earlier discussions of  NMA, MCA and SciArt in Prophet’s paper The Artist in the Laboratory: Co-operating (T)reasonably. Instead we suggest that there are entanglements, as well as productive differences between these practices, and we extend the debate by considering which differences matter, for whom (artists, gallerists, scientists) and how these differences emerge through material-discursive intra-actions.

Artist Statement

‘A Digital Rhizome’ is an interactive CD ROM exposing a multiplicity of sites and plateaus. Comprising of a series of 43 navigable images immersed in a interlocking (queued) post-constructed media sound fields. ‘A Digital Rhizome’ takes its background from the theoretical writings of Deleuze and Guattari, in particular Mille Plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et Schizophienie tracing the complex intermezzo of ideas and concepts that is the rhizomatic culture of becomings.

The internal construction relies on hypercard, integrating various command structures to call on a reservoir of QuickTime movies, graphics and sound. There are a myriad of fibers and filaments with which to read the various connections made by the act of navigating these conglomerations. There is no systemic hierarchy of connection, although islands may form within the rhizome. The perception of connectivity is initiated and intuitively sustained as an exercise in nanoscale pattern recognition.

Abstract (long paper)

This paper examines the role of digital détournement during Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in late 2014 through the prism of HK Protest Online Game, a conceptual art game made in response to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. Created by an undergraduate Hong Kong student, this work invites a critical reflection on playability by questioning the relationship between videogames, play, and “real time” violence. As an unplayable game, it reroutes the player to contemporaneous street demonstrations in Hong Kong, serving both as a détournement of police aggression and of videogames that commercialize violence. Reversing our expectation of games as playful and political action as non-playful, HKPOG presents its game as unreal and posits Hong Kong’s protests as sites of play. The paper considers related digital artwork and the use of détournement during the Umbrella Movement, including umbrellas themselves and digitalized “derivative works” also known as “secondary creation” (yihchi chongjok in Cantonese and èrcì chuàngzuò in Mandarin; 二次創作). As Hong Kong’s central government pushes for new legislation to regulate “derivative works,” this paper raises the concern that the creation of such works, whether in the classroom or not, may be restricted or prohibited in the future.

In this paper, we propose to reflect upon the practice of drawing  in the context of cyberformance. We present and analyse the project “A field of interconnected  realities” that was shown in Auckland, part of the public art Project Living Room 2010. The webcam operators, Paula Roush in Auckland  and Maria Lusitano in Malmo,  collaborated  through webcams  in  the development  of a series of networked  drawing performances, inspired in the artist’s book “A week of goodness” made by Max Ernst in 1934. In this collage book, Ernst had arranged and re-drawn cut-up  images of women, men, animals, dragons,  plants, and indoor /outdoor situations, to produce hybrid bodies and surreal landscapes, that presented a dark, surreal world addressing themes of sexuality, anti-clericalism  and war. These collages,  by dislocating the visual significance of the source material, tried to suggest what  had been repressed. Revisiting these  images, we produced new networked collages and drawings  in  a networked   performative process that included a collaboration with  the  public. Relying on  techniques such as hand drawing, drawing with the use of sketch-a-graph ( a machine that can both enlarge and reduce an image whilst copying it), water colour, acrylic  painting and collage,  we produced revised bio-tech versions of that book,  addressing the new unconscious phantasies, dreams,  fears and expectations  of our zeit geist.  The outputs of this project are the networked  drawings  and also the 5 films that resulted from  documenting the production of each drawing.

This collective project, which placed drawing into a disruptive new situation,  challeged the usual characteristics  atributed to this medium.  It addressed  the dream  fantasies of the past, placing them  into the  present  (through the mashing up of Max Ernst’s images  book with contemporary ones ), and revisited the various historical devices that have been commonly used to make drawings. The glitches, pixelisation and splitting of the images produced by the webcamstreaming device, introduced a new puzzling  time/space dimensionality to this experience and served as a trope/interface to the production of a contemporary dreaming space where  the new collages/ drawings revisit the collective  unconscious fears and fantasies of today.

Artist Statement

Video and the new media art in Russia are basically characterized as follows:

1. In the socialist idealized society (the mechanism remains unchanged even today), the media is considered as state-run mechanisms of power.
2. The means of media are extremely distanced from individuality, because they belong to the ‘anonymous Other’.
3. Video and the new media hold specific place in the consciousness of the Russian artists.

Visible analogies in the problematics of art theory in Russia and in the West in the field of new media and video:

1. The state of things in Russia.
2. Analogical processes in Western art.
3. Visible future perspectives.

The growing number of museum websites and web-based art content poses major challenges to museums, archives, and libraries in terms of their collecting, archiving, and preservation. If web content digital cultural heritage in its own right—as established by UNESCO in 2001 (31 C/Resolutions,2001)–should museums collect it and archive it? If so, which websites should they preserve, and how often? Since 2013 the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)—consisting of the libraries of The Frick Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum—has created a web archive that aims at capturing and preserving a wide range of online art-relevant resources, including museum and gallery websites, artist websites, digital catalogues raisonnés, online scholarly projects, art research webpages, etc. Web archiving refers to the practice of capturing websites as they appear on the live web at a given point in time and reproducing their appearance and functionality.

While working for NYARC’s web archiving program between 2015 and 2016, I focused primarily on the archiving of online exhibition content at MoMA in the form of microsites that the museum has created to accompany its exhibitions since 1995. While these exhibition microsites were considered at the time nothing more than complementary materials to the museum’s physical exhibitions, they often contained web-exclusive content that was otherwise not available in printed materials. Through the years, MoMA—like many other art institutions around the world—began to create online-only projects that were conceived of not only as supplements to exhibitions and publications but as virtual projects that informed, enriched and sometimes even replaced the physical museum visit. Seen as a whole, these microsites also tell a specific story in the development of interactive online content within the context of museums—from static information-heavy web pages, to the rise of the blog format and the explosion of Flash and interactive sites in the early 2000s.

Through an introduction to NYARC’s web collections, I briefly discuss the general need to archive web-based resources as well as the general problems associated with it. Additionally, utilizing MoMA’s online exhibition content as a case example, I argue that curated web archives can also serve as historical documents of the development of web content within museums and cultural institutions.

[Presentation video removed on request of the presenter]

Panel Statement

Panel: Futurics

Fireside Stories is a virtual performance. Starting from a quote by Laurie Anderson: “technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories”, this short presentation leads at the changing relationships between technology and culture. The text draws upon historical and contemporary sources – from Benjamin to Virilio – and personal anecdotes or observations.  Fireside Stories is a performance disembodied – only my image on screen appears before you.

The author discusses their creative projects Bodytext, Tower and Crosstalk, exploring how language and communication function in a context where human and machine are both responsible for the articulation and interpretation of texts. The dynamics of such a hybrid apparatus allow insights into the making of meaning and its reception as a socio-technical system. Bodytext, Tower and Crosstalk are language based digitally mediated performance installations. They each use progressive developments of generative and interpretative grammar systems. Bodytext (2010) was authored in Adobe Director and coded in Lingo and C++. Tower (2011) was developed for a large scale immersive virtual reality system and coded in Python. Crosstalk (2014) was developed and coded in Processing.
Bodytext is a performance work involving speech, movement and the body. A dancer’s movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented environment employing real-time motion tracking, voice recognition, interpretative language systems, projection and audio synthesis. The acquired speech, a description of an imagined dance, is re-written through projected digital display and sound synthesis, the performer causing texts to interact and recombine with one another. What is written is affected by the dance whilst the emergent texts determine what is danced. The work questions and seeks insight into the relations between kinaesthetic experience, memory, agency and language.
Tower is an interactive work where the computer listens to and anticipates what is said by those interacting with it. A self-learning system, as the inter-actor speaks the computer displays what they say and the potential words they might speak next. The speaker may or may not use a displayed word. New word conjunctions are added to the corpus employed for prediction. Words uttered by the inter-actor appear as a red spiral of text, at the top of which the inter-actor is located within the virtual reality environment. Wearing a head mounted display the inter-actor can look wherever they wish, although they cannot move. The predicted words appear as white flickering clouds of text in and around the spoken words. What emerges is an archeology of
speech where what is spoken can be seen amongst what might have been said, challenging the unique speaker’s voice and our memory of events.
‘Crosstalk’ is a multi-performer installation where movement and speech are remediated within an augmented 3D environment employing real-time motion tracking, multi-source voice recognition, interpretative language systems, a bespoke physics engine, large scale projection and surround-sound audio synthesis. Acquired speech of inter-actors is re-mediated through projected digital display and sound synthesis, the inter-actors physical actions causing texts to interact and recombine with one another. The elements in the system all affect how each adapts, from state to state, as the various elements of the work – people, machines, language, image, movement and sound – interact with one another. ‘Crosstalk’ explores social relations, as articulated in performative language acts, in relation to generative ontologies of selfhood and the capacity of a socio-technical space to ‘make people’.

Panel: The Big Bang of Electronic Art: Merging Abstraction and Representation in the Age of Digital Imaging

As a young poet turned painter and print­maker, I learned to paint at a time when my teach­ers wor­ried that “paint­ing was dead.” Dig­i­tal media was not yet on my hori­zon, but I was sur­rounded by film-mak­ers who were also grap­pling with the for­mal prop­er­ties of their medium, in­clud­ing pic­to­r­ial, ab­stract and con­cep­tual form. While I never made films my­self, by the time I started to work on the com­puter, I was al­ready look­ing for some­thing. I didn’t know it was time, but there it was, cre­at­ing a space for trans­for­ma­tion and a struc­ture for lay­er­ing all kinds of con­tent. Work­ing in the mid 80’s in the emerg­ing world of cable and broad­cast graph­ics, I was in­tro­duced to new set of tools which lit­er­ally set my work in mo­tion. It was an “aha” mo­ment. I began to make what I called video/ com­puter tone poems. It felt right–, now I could paint, draw and work with pho­to­graphic im­ages as ma­te­r­ial, through many more lay­ers of process. I was still feel­ing like a painter but think­ing like a print­maker. Sud­denly, I could in­cor­po­rate im­ages from my own life or the media, and com­bine it with ab­stract, painterly ges­tures. Sound be­came an es­sen­tial part of my work, and I started a long col­lab­o­ra­tion with the com­poser Gerry Hem­ing­way. This in­ter­play be­tween sound and image, tex­ture and form, is a nat­ural im­pro­vi­sa­tion.

A Little Better is a research art project that looks at cryptocurrency instant messaging platforms through the prism of the International Relations “aesthetic turn”, for which by looking at emotions and sensibility an additional analytical insight is given to world politics.

Panel: Curating and Collecting the New: Resistance is Futile

Every art exhibition is rich with the untold stories. Digital platforms offer new opportunities for us to see behind the scenes and to hear the voices of the audience in museum publications. The Living Catalogue is an experimental initiative by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia that explores the possibilities of rich media publication to discover new ways of engaging audiences. The first Living Catalogue was produced for 2012/13 for the exhibition Anish Kapoor – the first major solo showing of Kapoor’s work in Australia. The exhibition offered an ideal context for this experiment as the visceral perceptual effect of Kapoor’s work on the audience poses a challenge for any traditional publication about his art. The Living Catalogue for Anish Kapoor exploited the relational dynamics of networked reading, in which the downloading of a publication establishes a channel of communication between the museum and the reader (who is now also a watcher, listener and, potentially, speaker). The living catalogue appeared as a series of iterations throughout and beyond the duration of the exhibition. Each iteration included fresh content that responded to and included the reactions of the audience to the exhibition and the experiences of the staff who realised the show. Firsthand accounts of people’s experiences of the exhibition (including experts as well as members of the general public) were recorded and integrated into the final iteration of the catalogue, adding the audience’s voice to the in depth documentation and critical contextualisation of the exhibition.
Co-authored with Lizzie Muller

Compwriting will provide for a fundamental area of human evolution, the ability to write. Compwriting tools are linguistics algorithms that reorder letters, words, even languages, producing neo-meaning. But compwriting will also operate with previously written discourses, in a re-scripting strategy, challenging the copyright principle and its legal consequences. The web is re-scripting technology providing information as it correlates data. Newer technologies will utilize algorithms to creatively connect words and texts. Compwriting through networks will also defy national languages and the geopolitical scenario favouring transnational, translinguistic telecommunications. But for compwriting to develop information must be like a molecule, legally free to interact. Thus the need to amplify the work initiated in 1972 with “Semion: an international symbol for released information”. The Semion proposition states: “Any information, text, image, project, method, idea, bearing this symbol can be reproduced, diffused, translated, applied or utilized, provided that the authorship and the source are mentioned, the information is respected in its integrity, and the purpose is not exploitation”. Today the web suggests more radical possibilities for information sharing. A new symbol, entitled SemionR, was then conceived to mark works that can be re-scripted. The Semion proposition states: “Any information, text, image, project, method, idea, bearing this symbol can not only be reproduced, diffused, translated, applied or utilized, but also modified or altered, provided that the objective is the creation of new information.”

There are no new theoretical structures. There are moments which redetermine the dynamics of theoretical structures (history). One such theoretical structure is Revolution. As participants in this thing named the `Information Revolution’, we allow our productions to become propaganda (political rhetoric). Because of this naming operational and programmatic political and economic ideologies (institutions) determine the fields (such as that of ‘Art’) in which we articulate. The borders of these fields are the limits of cultural legibility. Institutional ideology limits the numbers of revolutionary fighters (Artists). It thus divides and weakens the Revolution. Spontaneous dialogue must not be compromised by ideology. It must occur in spaces other than the field of legitimate aesthetics, and in unconventional dialects. The concept of a ‘status quo’ when (over)determined by the field of aesthetics, is a danger to free dialogue. The challenge to the Artist, in our new moment of (Information) Revolution, is to create open dialogue, or discourse. ‘Quality’ must no longer be determined by the Institution (i.e. University) but must be redefined according to the genre and intent of each and every articulation. Every labourer in this field of Information must therefore be an Artist, and every Artist a labourer.

Panel: The Matter with Media

It has often been said that the dig­i­tal is com­pletely void of ma­te­r­ial and sen­sual qual­i­ties, as phys­i­cal ob­jects are re­duced to a shared lan­guage of bits with­out colour, size, vol­ume, weight or smell. As a con­se­quence, the di­rect or in­dex­i­cal re­la­tion­ship with a tan­gi­ble and there­fore ‘real’ re­al­ity is bro­ken. This does not mean, how­ever, that the dig­i­tal is merely a realm of bi­nary code, math­e­mat­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion and il­lu­sory sim­u­la­tions, al­though dig­i­tal data is not in­dex­i­cal of re­al­ity ei­ther. Using quan­tum physics to ex­plore the ma­te­r­ial basis of elec­tronic art, Laura Marks sug­gests that the phys­i­cal­ity of the dig­i­tal is rather lo­cated in ‘the tiny dance of sub­atomic par­ti­cles’ or the wave forms of elec­trons. In a sim­i­lar vein, Jim Al-Khalili ar­gues that ‘noth­ing­ness’ is al­ways teem­ing with vir­tual par­ti­cles. In­ter­fac­ing the pos­i­tivist rhetoric of the nat­ural sci­ences with an un­der­stand­ing of art and media that is in­formed by no­tions of ma­te­ri­al­ism, af­fect and processes of doing and ex­pe­ri­enc­ing, I would like to ad­dress the phys­i­cal­ity of elec­tronic art by fo­cus­ing on the non­rep­re­sen­ta­tional, the non­hu­man and the nonor­ganic, thus down­play­ing the vi­sual in favour of other modal­i­ties of per­cep­tion.

This paper discusses a project that explores biodiversity at the intersection of ancient and contemporary science and technologies. It responds to the following questions: “Where is corn growing? Where is it going? And, why should I care?” It investigates current practices of resource conservation, environmental preservation, sustainable technologies and biodiversity protection in Mexico, the USA and Canada. Presented as a multi-modal project incorporating electronic media, the project is designed as a maze about maize, because nothing is clear-cut or simple when it comes to the pros and cons of agro-practices today. The complex foundational issues and convoluted stakes derive from history, ethnology, sociology, biopolitics, law and intellectual property, agronomy, ecology, science, and technology of maize.

The essay discusses the plant’s evolution from its status as Amerindian divinity, to its contemporary transgenic avatars in the Americas. The author draws on her knowledge of sacred native beliefs and rituals to grow bountiful maize in Mexico where she lived in the 80s, as well as those practiced by ancient Southwestern Amerindians. She also discusses how her interest in corn grew during her years in academia at a university in the heart of the Corn Belt in Illinois (USA) where she interviewed area specialists about the impact of monocultures on economies and livelihoods resulting from the expansion of fields of transgenic yellow corn that cater to a growing industry of feedstock for cattle, corn fructose for foodstuffs, and bioproducts such as corn plastics (PLA) and corn ethanol.

The author investigates several positions: maize as part of the spiritual, social and economic fabric bonding indigenous cultures today in Mexico (the center of diverse corn in Mesoamerica); maize as lucrative commercial product for exploitation by multinational industries; and finally maize as savior plant in a society polluted by its own waste and quickly depleting non-renewable resources. By investigating these cross-sections in time and place, the paper exposes why should one care about maize. It unravels the myths and realities behind the multiple viewpoints and discordant voices about the subject, and speculates on possible alliances.

Can computers understand what a space means to us? We think so, and demonstrate a system that seems to feel the same way. By making use of common-sense knowledge what an average person takes a way from a place we can build visualizations that aren’t dependent on what we put in a database—just what we can describe with language.

The convergence of ubiquitous computing and visualization technologies is creating unprecedented opportunities for engineering teams to respond more effectively to the increasing demand for sophisticated, customized and high quality products and services in industry. Ubiquitous computing allows people to move between gateways to the information world in ways that are appropriate to their current setting. Visualisation related technologies, from immersive displays to Augmented Reality (AR), are routinely used in industry, with huge potential in engineering, health, heritage and archaeology, Architecture and culture.

In this paper we will present an indoor augmented reality system for building services maintenance using motion tracking sensors within ubiquitous access to 3D models and services specifications including equipment location (fan coil, diffusers, etc.), pipe routes and technical specification using a variety of devices (HMD, PDA and Desktop computers). This mobile system is used by the engineers for building services maintenance using real time visualisation and co-location of the existing service equipment hidden behind ceiling or walls.

Robbert de Goede has been an interior architect for 12 years and thanks to the economic crisis started a career as an artist three years ago. ‘I have always been inspired by minimalist art and through the use of CAD-software as my daily tool I found a language bearing my own signature’. He manages this by creating powerful real life spaces using the most basic form of computer rendering: wireframe. His work is about the line between computer modeling and manual construction, where the sterile concept turns into touchable reality. As screen resolutions can not keep up with his work, the works themselves look like low-resolution constructions.

The issues surrounding equal access are pervasive in our culture (or collective world cultures). Although we often talk about diversity, and the desire to keep our culture open, growing, and free from singular standards of acceptability, the old issues of dominant culture keep emerging. Just how do we go about confronting this problem? In their infancy, the electronic arts appeared to be free from the biases that afflicted the established arts. ISEA especially kept exhibitions and performances opportunities open, and the organization, as a collective body of adventuresome individuals, stayed sincerely interested in the work of artists who for whatever reasons were relatively unknown. But a maturing ISEA cannot be so naive as to pretend to be untouched by the plagues of our time. The issues raised publicly at the plenary session of ISEA96, and privately in countless small discussions both inside and outside of ISEA, clearly and painfully point out that equal access for artists in the electronic arts is simply not there. Why is there not equal access, even if we all agree that this is desirable? (Since the very premise of electronic art is based on bringing diversity of the art establishment, we should take the step of assuming that few among us would limit what that diversity might be; those who disagree need to be confronted even greater issues). No matter how great our commitment of diversity, however, the obstacles that we face are many. And they all the more difficult to address because they are difficult to define, each dependent on the context of the others. To facilitate the discussion, we begin with the following break-down:

1. Sensibility and Subject Matter Basis: “Blind Juries”: plowing through mounds of submissions, bring biases to the process. Naturally people respond more strongly to work which speaks to their own experience and aesthetic concerns. And if juries do not do this, then they are left judging technical expertise alone, which brings us to the next point.
2. Access to Technology: Even as the price of computers drops, those individuals who are invited to use high end equipment, or who have positions which provide them with access, tend to be both artists who have passed some “aesthetic”tests and artists who, leading to the next point, are “plugged into the established art networks. Although no one wants to judge work by new technology alone, the “wow” factor often works.
3. Plugged-In to the Art World: A community does not have to be truly closed for individuals outside of the community to experience it that way. Artists with varying perspectives may be embraced by ISEA, they are hesitant to even submit because they do not see ISEA as a likely venue for exhibiting their work and for the exchange of their ideas, then the problem remains. Beyond ISEA, what does it take for artists to feel that other institutions and organizations (such as those which give grants for artists) are open to them? This easily returns us to the first question.

ISEA97 needs to discuss the issues raised in Helsinki. Although English is the official language of this symposium, it would be useful to consider an exception for this panel and to extend the discussion to French and Spanish, or in perhaps whatever language the speakers prefer.

What are the materials of thought? In a search for a physical basis we find neuronal networks, electro-chemical spikes traversing the networks, and a patterned and coherent flow of those spikes in time. From this activity consciousness emerges. Simple models can illustrate the processes and provide us metaphors for this emergence. Through metaphors we can understand (and explain) the power of these processes. One poetic model, a large flock of starlings also called a murmuration, parallels the structure of a simple neuronal network, and might point to aspects of mental activity and the emergence of something that transcends the simple behaviors of individual agents in a large well-connected group. A flock of birds has been traditionally modeled with each bird (agent) following three simple rules in flight: separation, alignment and cohesion. Birds as nodes in a network have connections (edges) to local flockmates. Individual birds move through space informed by their neighbors through attraction (alignment and cohesion) and inhibition (separation). Starlings can also see distant flock members and so are also informed by action at a distance. This suggests a structure of a small-world network. With a small change in flight rules, adding a small amount of distant information, the standard flocking model rapidly coheres into a murmuration and thousands of individual birds transform into one entity seeming to move with single intent though the twilight sky. This structure and this process are also what one would expect as thousands of neuronal spikes move through the dense, small-world network in our brains. At the very least we can see the beauty of emergence in the model, and wonder if the very act of imagining is itself the ebb and flow of thousands of simple actions in the process of becoming one thing—a human thought.

Poster Statement

The parametrically forced pendulum is a well-known subject that has been thoroughly researched and documented by physicists within the cadre of order and chaos theories. Parametrically forced pendulums are activated by the up and down movement of their hanging mounts. Since the behaviour of these pendulums depends on the oscillating frequency of these mounts, the use of a vari-speed electromotor is essential. As a consequence, the pendulums command an exceptionally wide range of movement; what can start off as a traditional to and fro swing can become an unpredictable and irregular motion leading to a startlingly vigorous full circum-rotation. The Electric Swaying Orchestra as shown at ISEA96 consists of six of such pendulums, each with a length of 1.50 meters. A microphone or loudspeaker is attached to the end of each pendulum. A computer controls the electro-motors and the musical process. However it does not have precise control over the consequences of its decisions. Although the movements of the pendulums are related to the oscillating frequency of their hanging mounts, at a certain point the behaviour of the pendulums becomes unpredictable and thus the musical outcome is unpredictable as well. The computer interprets the sounds received from the three swaying microphones and responds by playing new notes over the three swaying speakers. The main factors determining this live composed music are the unpredictable movement of the pendulums and the composition rules executed by the computer. It is a process which repeats itself endlessly; the computer is in fact constantly listening and responding to itself. Since 1995, we have been developing a new installation that furthers the concept of the Electric Swaying Orchestra: A machine that is capable of complex, chaotic behaviour and which produces music that is related to this behaviour. While the relationship between movements and sound becomes more sophisticated, it also becomes more apparent. The direction of movement and exact position of each pendulum will be measured as variables for the musical outcome, permitting greater control over the relationship between the movements of the pendulums and the music produced. Each pendulum might be assigned a specific parameter of one tutti live algorithmic improvisation density, pitch, dynamics, for example, or each pendulum could have its own independent musical world. All pendulums are equipped with a loudspeaker – microphones are no longer needed – and they are much longer, two to three meters, providing larger movements and thus resulting in more interesting spatial soundeffects. This work is planned for completion during the course of 1996.

From studies of scientists like Haeckel, Julia, Mandelbrot, D’Arcy, Turing and some others, Mother Nature is characterized at the root by a matrix of numbers and mathematical expressions involving a series of physical, optical, chemical-physical, electromagnetic and nanometric phenomena influencing its forms, species, colours, sounds and structures. If science is considered an organic complex of knowledge obtained through a methodical procedure, capable of providing a precise description of the real aspect of things and the laws by which the phenomena happen, and if the rules governing such process are generally called “scientific method”, then the experimental observation of a natural event, the formulation of a general hypothesis about such event and the possibility of checking the hypothesis through subsequent observations become fundamental elements in modern scientific research.

What it is today recognized as “immersive art-science” is a form of creative expression meant to rise above the notion of art as abstract representation, in behalf of a multi-sensorial experience.  Immersivity awakens a synesthetic awareness both in the mental and in the physic space.A myriad of vibrant phenomena, usually beyond the observer’s reach, are instead made reachable through an accurate psychophysical conditioning.

The purpose of this lecture is to give an historical and critical overview on the observation of sceintists and artists of energetic phenomena behind natural audiovisual forms, finding a connection with contemporary digital research, accompained by the screening Hidden Worlds that make evidence of the critical reflection upon the existing connection between audiovisual art, energy and science on the borders of cinema, video and digital. The goal here is to create aesthetical fascinating objects and also to invite the public to go beyond ordinary perception’s border.

Are artists and electronic technology in harmony with one another? What is the character of the interface between artists and electronic technology? It is clear that electronic technology has made available to artists new modes of expressing ideas, feelings, emotions, insights, events and information and thus has expanded traditional means of artistic expression.However, the author observes, the integration of this technology into the creative process also has led to the development of a new language that provides a context for artistic expression with new modes of communication. The elements, the vocabulary, of this new language translate the nature of electronic technology into the realm of the artist, allowing the emergence of new experiential art forms. The language consists of elements that describe the creative process and influence the character of the final artwork.By means of electronic technology, this language can be used by artists to express and communicate multidimensional experiences involving sound, image and movement, permitting the expression of previously impossible syntheses and transformations of ideas. The resulting art is alive, responsive and interactive. Artists become choreographers synthesizing the numerous dimensions of human experience. The issue of how to get the spirit and soul of the artist into the computer-and back out into the world-is manifest in new visions of artistic expression in the electronic arts.

If we accept that art has a role to play in the influence of popular opinion on issues of ecology and ethics, we can then also question the effectiveness of various approaches and methodologies that are at the disposal of the contemporary artist.

As we endeavor to extricate civilization from fossil fuel dependence and pull ourselves back from the brink of ecological disaster, the existential debate over the purpose of art deserves renewed attention. Is it possible for art to contribute actively to solutions to the problems that confront us? Can interdisciplinary solution-based art with hyper-constructivist relevance inspire social change?

As the trend in architecture sees buildings move towards zero-impact and positive-impact construction, and energy generation becomes more nodal and diversified, perhaps the trend in urban infrastructure will follow. Since the new means of energy generation do not pollute in their daily operation and can therefore be integrated into the fabric of our lives, will the design of public space, and therefore public art, also seek to incorporate renewable energy technology as we endeavor to create holistic urban ecologies?

What does art have to offer sustainable infrastructure and the future of city planning? And, more fundamentally, can art maintain its conceptual purity while fulfilling practical functions such as energy generation?

The relationship between art and technology is an ancient symbiosis. From the earliest tool-making that manifested aesthetics beyond pure utility, to the rich array of contemporary media works, both sides of the coin have gained riches from the company of the other. Art can use technology as a medium not only for the expression of ideas but also as a tool for the creation of solutions that, through their sublimation of the everyday, have a dual purpose role: both demonstrating while inspiring.

The organizers will present their work in the context of the Land Art Generator Initiative and host a panel discussion regarding the issues related to aesthetics and infrastructure, and interdisciplinary art.

For the last 10 years Anthony Head and Jeremy Gardiner have been exploring possibilities for the use of real-time 3d computer graphics as a medium for landscape painting. This quest has run in parallel to the technological developments and standards of 3D graphics that are used in computer games. By pushing the boundaries of available technologies the artists have striven to create virtual landscape paintings that combine multiple perspectives into a unique experience.

This paper is an analysis of the processes we have employed and the hurdles we have faced in using computer graphics in a creative and intuitive manner. Adopting a painterly approach to our work the paper analyses Purbeck Light Years (2003), and Jurassic Light Years (2009) and Light Years: Coast (2010).

Since 2001 3D graphics has become more sophisticated and computer processing has increased, both these developments have been matched by our technical ambition.  Using existing graphics engines customized with programming the artists have created a mixture of old and new techniques that combine painting, drawing, computer animation, immersive virtual reality, satellite data and ambient sound. In the proposed paper we discuss 3D graphics techniques that have been used such as fog, textures, bump mapping, transparency, shaders and cameras. We also analyse the creative and aesthetic decisions made in order to create experiences that engage the intellect, excite the emotions and capture the imagination.

In conclusion we have learnt many lessons about the scale and atmosphere of each location and the effect that has had on the resulting work. The modernist starting point of the paintings (that were used to create the virtual) can sometimes get usurped by the possibilities made available by computer graphics. However, CG also brings with it unique opportunities for experiencing landscape.

Intro

• In Silence John Cage refers to sound as a “transmission in all directions from the field’s center.”‘

• Stockhausen cites St. Thomas, who speaks of “The exaltation of the mind derived from things eternal bursting forth in sound.”‘

• Edgard Varese remarks that he likes “music that explodes.”

• For critic Herbert Ruscoll, it is no surprise that the era of electronic music should coincide with the atomic age.

There is a common trope beaming through these representations of aurally, and that is the trope of radiance. Radiance is a wonderfully synthetic metaphor – providing a bridge between sound as an individual, organic phenomenon present in the minute of the world and sound spread out across the vast expanse of imaginable and fictive space. This union between the micro and macrocosm, also combines differing and at times opposing ontologies. Radiance offers the security of the object, long held as the foundation of being and knowledge.’ At the same time, it suggests the fluidity and ephemerality of the event. By providing a compromise between the object and the event, radiance connotes a sense of organic process, of movement, change and complexity – the presumed essence of vitality itself – whilst maintaining a sense of identity and individuality. In an age where rigid structures are being replaced by malleable forms, where the borders of the object are beginning to bleed, sound, with its eventfullness, familiarity and security, becomes a very appropriate medium for the recognization of time and space integral to such massive transformations.’ In contemporary discussions of the body in space, of information highways and virtual realities, radiant sound establishes a ‘ground’ in the discourse of the future – be it utopian or dystopian – built from sound’s long history of transmission (telephony, radiophony) and ‘spirit’ (electrified by composers such as Cage, Varese and Stockhausen). This ‘ground’ has also been adopted to some extent by the contemporary philosopers Derrida, Baudrillard and Lyotard, who use aural, spatial and incinderal metaphors to raise questions about being, technology, and the future. Thus radiant sound becomes a figure in different but related cultural fields: as a trope for many of the great modernist reconciliations, its history in organicism, romanticism and individualism, provides a model for the individual dispersed across the electronic field. However, in the less beatifically inclined era of postmodernism, the representation of sound as radiant contains a strong cultural ambivalence towards the twentieth century, with its massive technological upheavals, its utopian promises and failures and its shameful record of war. In this context, the radiance of radiant sound is filled with darker connotations – for just as atomic warfare records the human form as shadows on a wall, the technological inscription and transmission of sound across space is seen to leave deathly traces of the body and of nature in the disembodied sound it produces.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Interactive Art, Musique Concrète, Nam June Paik, Random Access, record Shashlik, Participation TV

Nam June Paik is mostly known as the father of video art. At the same time, he can also be regarded as a creative pioneer of interactive art. Unfortunately, most scholars and art historians still neglect Paik’s remarkable achievement in interactive art with his musical background. Especially, Paik’s experience with Musique Concrète was a core springboard to develop his interactive pieces. However, among Paik’s artistic backgrounds Musique Concrète is hidden by well-known influences from John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Fluxus. Based on Musique Concrète, Paik created basic elements of interactive art such as database, nonlinearity and sensorial translation at Paik’s first solo show, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television, in 1963. These are still considered fundamental properties to make interactive pieces. In this regard, Paik as an interactive artist can be a significant contribution to finding an origin of interactive art since art theorists have started to explore its genealogy.

Besides natural scenery, which is its foremost and everyday notion, what can be meant by the term “landscape”? Obviously, it involves some notion of space, some spatial configuration, structure. In the sciences, the landscape metaphor is recurrent. Physicists for example speak of “energy landscapes” when they refer to a system’s potential energy as a function of space. This potential energy landscape contains information about the forces that act on the system as it evolves in real space, the forces that ultimately determine the system’s trajectory.

In this paper, we discuss the idea of an abstract dynamic landscape that represents a fictitious potential accounting for the trajectories of moving “agents”. Not only do the agents move, but also the landscape changes in time.  The agents can be people, moving in public space, or they can be—in a more scientifically inspired setting—laboratory rats chasing each other in a cage. What determines the latter’s course? Thinking of people, is there some hidden force that drives us (the agents) in a certain direction? As the movements continually modify the fictitious potential landscape, the trajectories are inscribed into another level of representation – energetic, mysterious, although constructed in a simple manner by analogy to real physical systems. It appears mysterious because we can not know the forces that determine us, what we see is only one of many possible reconstructions reminding us of uncharted influences on our actions. The visualization of this landscape triggers reflections on our relation to the physical; how we experience our free will as the possibility to escape total determinism; finally, how we relate to each other.

We present an algorithm to extract the potential landscape from trajectory data of moving agents; further research explores possible realizations of the potential landscape as an actual installation using camera tracking and 3D projection.

The dream of digital audio—including virtual audio—is a perfect representation of the sonic world. The dream of “the absolute sound” has become, in the digital age, that of “the absolute sound-space”. Digital audio seems to offer not only the means of simulating aural space, but of freezing time itself, snared in the digital delay of tiny sonic moments. Digital audio offers an infinity of choice, not to re-recreate the sound world, but to re-reinvent it.

Panel:  The Institute of Unnecessary Research

Al­though a grow­ing num­ber of sci­en­tists are now look­ing at the ef­fects of the in­ter­net on the brain, they are in fact just look­ing at the tip of an ice­berg. They are leav­ing un­ex­plored the rest of the com­plex fab­ric of the dig­i­tally en­abled con­tem­po­rary en­vi­ron­ment, which is in con­stant two-way in­ter­ac­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion with our bod­ies, and with our plas­tic brains, chang­ing them in an un­known man­ner. The spe­cific branch of neu­ro­science that stud­ies brain plas­tic­ity – the ways in which the brain can rad­i­cally mod­ify and re­con­fig­ure it­self through in­ter­ac­tion with the en­vi­ron­ment – has great po­ten­tial for help­ing us to un­der­stand the brain’s par­tic­u­lar sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies. This ap­plies not only to the in­ter­net and the broader dig­i­tal en­vi­ron­ment, but also to the multi-sen­sory ex­pe­ri­ences within the grow­ing body of process-based arts en­abled by dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies, and in par­tic­u­lar in­ter­ac­tive art. Can we be sure that neu­ro­science will one day look at the whole pic­ture, and pro­vide us with ex­pla­na­tions of these phe­nom­ena? Or might it be that there is a role left for in­ter­ac­tive artists, keen to re­search the very essence of their artis­tic medium and its ef­fects on their au­di­ences, to push re­search for­ward to pur­sue, pro­duce, and apply the nec­es­sary knowl­edge?

This talk, organized around five analytical vignettes, explores an Indigenous analytical approach to understanding the concept of the ‘Anthropocene,’ including why the present era is not quite everyone’s apocalypse: some Peoples are already post-apocalyptic survivors. In addition to drawing on Indigenous scholarship, two compatible ideas drawn from other decolonial and ‘multispecies’ literatures, ‘radical hope’ and ‘biocultural hope’ respectively, are offered as alternative foundational concepts to counter settler-colonial ideological responses to the current environmental crisis and to the denied/impending fall of US empire. Building from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous materialist critiques of human/animal divides and hierarchies of life, TallBear suggests that the concept of ‘genocide’ must be expanded to include other-than-humans whose lives and deaths are co-constitutive with human lives and deaths. Finally, TallBear examines the relationship between ‘life’ and ‘death,’ gluttonous lives and bad deaths

Thank you for your interest in a new technologist or programmer. While every effort has been made to bring you a defect free instrument with the latest technology, don’t bet on it. Communication between new media artists and the technology minded seems like a straightforward endeavor as they presumably share the same common language but, in truth, that’s not always the case. Like working with any evil genie or the devil, you will need to be very particular about how you phrase your request to the programmer or technologist. Using technical jargon can slow things down appreciably as the programmer/technologist is required to use such words with precision, and will be compelled to explain such terms at great length when they are not used correctly. Likewise, being much too specific about requirements can eliminate interesting possibilities or conversely, lead to an error condition whereby some elements will eventually found to require technology that “simply isn’t possible” with current (or even possibly future) technology. Erring in the opposite direction is even worse -– using a vague or general description tends to put any development on hold until a concrete goal becomes clear. Where’s the common ground then? The language many artists and technologists have in common is pictures. block diagrams, structural illustrations, charts, maps, schematics, stick figures, etc. Draw first, ask questions later. This gives way to a lengthy series of discussions and drawings, tests, fixes, and new features but expectations don’t always align – questions arise of creative input and when, for example, is the project is finally complete. This guide presents one limited perspective navigating the artist/technologist collaboration from the other side.

Videogames in the fostering age of spectator‑artwork relations, whether by a corporate stable of professionals or the lonely, budgeted indie developer, are biased towards the ‘social’. In the written words of Dr. Henry Jenkins, “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” Such an advent for the destruction of an original location, in favor of ‘everywhere’, makes for the lucrative being of virtual game worlds to critique the mundane spaces these games spread to. It would seem for the boding artist in new media waves that one should embrace interconnectedness, seek viral attitudes, and forego the last morsels of Modernism to be journeyed to. Location for the new media artist has been predetermined as ‘public’. Yet this location does not have to be default. This abstract and presentation theatrically covers an indie game in development which runs on Oculus Rift, a 3D virtual reality one‑on‑one interface, immersing in location(s) physical and virtual that bridge a burgeoning gap between distant continental locales. The title of this game in its second year of development is Story Generating Apparatus, with all models, environments, coding, voice acting, animation, visuals, and much more created by myself with software supplied.

The indie game tackles a brand new gaming interface with one of the most traditional devices known: self‑identity. The narrative of Apparatus is experimental in that I am telling the story of a fictional, ex‑videogame hero on his deathbed. The location of this character’s proverbial tomb is an economically distraught mall in Midwestern America, where the digital exchange of capital has rendered physical perception of location an empty declaration. Not to mention, a romanticized archival of the past has rendered nostalgia a destroyer of location as well. Yet, the memories this character has before becoming deceased are my own personal memories. The game serves as an experiment in just how far a self‑identity work can be taken, even at the expense of the artist’s own ethics or morality. This game values introspective player experience as a gameplay mechanic, rather than the social, mystifying itself from how a game is supposed to openly function in society.

This game follows iOS mobile title In a Permanent Save State, which followed the afterlives of seven real workers in Chinese Foxconn factories who committed suicide manufacturing the very devices the game was played on. In a Permanent Save State was given a lecture about at ISEA2013 in Sydney, Australia.

Abstract

Much of the information (data) about pre-Columbian and early colonial Latin America which has survived to our days has come to us in the form of reports and narratives created by civil, and scientific agencies under the auspices of the Spanish empire. It is a fact that in many cases the agenda that permeated the gathering of this data, was that one of maximum exploitation of resources in the colonies. Any attempt at understanding the process through which colonial history is encoded should begin with a deconstruction of the hierarchical structure in which the data is contextualized.

This can be done through the collection of a sample of data into a hypermedia ‘assemblage’ that allows for a network-like configuration of electronic space. The space in such configuration provides the ability to transverse the data in a non-linear, interactive, manner. Because we can forge our own trajectory, we can examine the data in an associative manner which fosters the creations, by the reader, of new relations among the diverse elements. Engagement in such task can enhance our ability to discern historical constructs which deviate from the established (or sanctioned) historical framework. Further investigation into the information-gathering techniques utilized, such as observation and representation via narration and illustration, and its incorporation into the network in a manner in which it can be accessed from any point in the system provides us with the ability to create a dynamic landscape in which the concept of point of view is no longer applicable, except as an identifier of our diverse paths through the data. In addition to these, acknowledgement of the technologies utilized for the production of this information, and their role in the process of hegemony, could lead to a disclosure of the conditions which create (and maintain) intellectual colonialism.

This paper describes applications of a client-server real-time sound synthesis software architecture.The architecture has been applied to produce synchronous sounds interactively to accompany silent computing applications. Silent applications are those that do not produce sound as their primary function, for example, computer graphics and animation applications, virtual environments, and internet browsers. Features of this technology include:

1. synchronizing sounds with graphics frame rates in real-time;
2. extracting data from silent applications and using that data to control sounds;
3. assembling continuous audio signals from multiple sources, using algorithms that create seamless mixtures and transitions;
4. transmitting sound control commands from a silent application without encoding detailed sound synthesis instructions in the silent application;
5. allowing the relationship between a silent application and a sound synthesis algorithm to be redefined without re-coding the silent application.

Sound authoring refers to the process of creating correspondences between synthesized sounds and the anticipated states of a silent application. A correspondence is defined by associating a state in the silent application to one or more sound synthesis control signals.These associations are created in advance of the run-time performance of the silent application. During run-time, control signals are generated automatically when the corresponding states occur.This paper performs a comparative analysis of sound authoring in distinction to off-the-shelf products for communications between computer graphics and sound production. It identifies problems of existing paradigms, presents sound authoring solutions and discusses working applications for animation production, virtual environments, and web browsers.

We present a low-cost, long-term storage solution which is currently being developed for the MISSION ETERNITY project presented at ISEA2006 by the etoy.CORPORATION. The persistence of data over time-scales much longer than that of typical storage media is achieved using a collaborative distributed network, similar to e.g. freenet or the OceanStore projects. In this paper, we provide an overview of the technical, social and usability challenges encountered during the development process and our approaches taken to solve or circumvent them.

MISSION ETERNITY, a project launched by etoy.CORPORATION at ISEA2006 aims to provide ultra-durable interactive portraits of selected individuals.

A central problem encountered in the implementation of this project is data storage over long periods of time (ideally hundreds of years). Currently used storage procedures typically involve storing a single copy on hard-disk or cd, and tacking on the occasional, often ill-defined, backup policy. The lack of reliability of this procedure is unacceptable in the context of MISSION ETERNITY and is even gradually developing into a real problem in digital day-to-day life. We have therefore looked for a storage solution which (i) would afford the required reliability, (ii) avoid the high cost of acquisition and maintenance of specialized hardware, (iii) be sufficiently simple to be easily usable and maintainable by everyday computer users (i.e. every single member of etoy.CORPORATION).

Collaborative software and the peer-to-peer paradigm as implemented in projects such as the freenet, OceanStore or BitVault packages clearly showed the way forward in solving (ii), but were, unfortunately, not themselves suitable solutions for MISSION ETERNITY: freenet, being focused on anonymity of information sources and consumers, deliberately forsakes storage reliability (i), OceanStore, a research project under progress at UC Berkeley seemingly has no ambition to develop into an easily usable desktop software package (iii) and BitVault, being a closed-source commercial product would be impossible to deploy by a third party (i.e. etoy.CORPORATION) in an open, social environment (iii) in addition to the risks inherent in basing a long-term archival solution on a product one has no control over (i).

Making “The Network is the Computer” come true imposes a healthy mix of constraints, which seemingly Sun itself (or anyone else for that matter) has so far not been able or willing to fulfill: To provide (a) a portable, easily usable software package which implements the required peer-to-peer functionality, as well as (b) implementing a trust and security mechanism which would enable arbitrary collectives of users to pool their storage resources easily and safely and (c) make this system available to everyone for free, essential for the virality of such a system, but implying that since the users then provide both the infrastructure and the content, there is no (direct) way to make money off it.

Clearly, etoy.CORPORATION, being a high-tech think-tank dedicated to the production of viral products, and willing to do so without necessarily making a (commercial) profit is in a unique position to launch such a system at the interface of the legal, social and technical problem complexes, and has started its development one month ago, with a working prototype expected to be available in april/may and a finished product presentable at ISEA2006.

This paper will be mostly technical, consisting of an overview of the storage problem encountered in MISSION ETERNITY, and then proceeding to discuss implementation details such as networking, encryption and trust models employed in our system, as well as detailing the integration with standard desktop systems (thereby affording an essentially flat learning curve). After the description of the employed data structures and algorithms we will discuss the tools, languages and libraries used in the development process and conclude with an outline of possible future developments and applications.

etoy.VINCENT, Zurich, Switzerland & etoy.MONOROM, Zurich, Switzerland. etoy.CORPORATION is art and invests in art. The firm represents the core and code of the corporate sculpture, and controls, protects, promotes, and exploits the cultural substance (intellectual property), particularly the U.S. trademark “etoy” and the etoy.ARTCOLLECTION. The firm shares cultural value and intends to reinvest all financial earnings in art—the final link in the value chain. By sharing risks and resources etoy.AGENTS, art collectors and fans invest time, knowledge, and ideas (or simply capital) in etoy.OPERATIONS, which focus on the overlap of entertainment, cultural, social and economic values. etoy.SHAREHOLDERS participate in a dynamic artwork that takes place 24 hours a day in the middle of society—on and offline.

This paper outlines the main tenets explored in a recently completed research program at Manchester Metropolitan University in which: Different approaches to typographic education are recognised. Qualitative data collected through a series of interviews with lecturers in UK educational institutions enables the production of a Taxonomy of factors effecting typographic education.

Further, an exploration into the field of higher educational objectives, and later hypermedia research provided the framework in which to produce a hypermedia progamme targeted specifically at undergraduate students. There follows an account of an experiment involving a sample of undergraduate graphic design students. An experimental condition aimed to test the program both in terms of short term (surface processing) knowledge retention, as well as recording students attitudes towards working within the hypermedia context. Working within the same project, the control condition subjected participants to the current student-centred methods as practised in the majority of current graphic design courses. Subsequently, students from both groups were required to participate in a short typographic workshop, after which their visual contributions (pertaining to depth processing of knowledge), were assessed and correlated with other findings. Finally, a discussion of results, the educational validity of the experiment, and suggested improvements to the program are set forth.

Panel: The history of things to come

This paper looks at the video synthesiser as a primary visual/audio source of abstract images in International and Australian video art. Video synthesisers are mostly analogue or hybrid devices having an analogue video signal as their output; they are not computer imaging systems, although several were controlled and patched by using a microprocessor. They can be played live, and are more like musical instruments than computers in their usage. The presentation begins by examining the variety of devices that were built and the techniques used in most video synthesisers, and looks briefly at some of the earliest video synthesisers from the U.S. and Britain. Video synthesisers began as colourisers; e.g. Eric Siegal’s device of 1968 – or manipulators of the colours of an existing image; e.g. the Paik/Abe video synthesiser of 1970. As audio synthesisers became more readily available they, or oscillator packages derived from them, began to be used as pattern generators; e.g. the EMS Spectre, of 1975, which also used digital shape storage devices in read only memory. Pattern storage using digital memory was also a feature of the Beck Video Weaver, of 1973, which used writable memory to store shapes and read them out to the screen. The presentation then follows up with more detail on a variety of video synthesisers built and used in Australia. These include John Hansen’s hybrid analogue and digital microprocessor-controlled video synthesiser that eventually became a fully-fledged 2D Computer drawing package, Peter Vogel’s specially designed collection of oscillators that he used to produce an enhanced Musicolour device, the EMS Spectre used at La Trobe University by Warren Burt, David Chesworth and other students of Burt, and finally the series of video synthesisers built in Sydney by Stephen Jones over the period from 1978 to 1982. The presentation will include short video excerpts from many of these machines.

This paper evaluates the emergent networking paradigm of cognitive radio and its connection to Body Area Networks (BAN) through the lens of performance, in order to explore the potential of these assemblies for creative expression. Through a taxonomy of entangled signals, we hope to address the potential of emerging material futures and the algorithmic complexity of signal processing for creative practice. The transdisciplinary space of feminist science and technology studies, alternative computer networking culture and artistic research reveals nascent eccentricities in emergent technologies’ relationship to somatic agency. As emergent technologies arise as key actors in our public sphere — especially through ubiquitous personal computing and mobile digital culture — we expand and speculate upon performance and its relationship to both computer culture and critical communication theory by presenting a new model for entangled, corporeal signals that can inform the design of networked experiences. Wireless networking is contemplated through a somatic framework, in order to consider how corporeal and computing signals are entwined; to assist us in developing enriching ways to act with emerging technologic entities and deploy performance research as a mode of inquiry into future scenarios of use.

Media authors, performing as content providers as well as designers, have indicated that the artist of the electronic age has to become a programmer, an architect of systems, a composer of processes. Historical experiments with this meta-linguistic, systemic expression have resulted in unheard forms of co-authorship and artistic collaboration. These works provide the basis for a theoretical proposition conceived to orient new media creative expression.

Abstract

The volcanic theory of culture is based on the “admittedly Jungian” idea that artworks and pop culture artifacts, as well as icons and styles, erupt at the surface of consciousness when the “crust of reality” is too weak to support the status quo. Reality is indeed a form of consensus supported not only by the goodwill and the language of the communities that share it, but also framed and maintained by the principal media of communication used by that culture. Art, on the other hand, is a product of collective unconsciousness, even if it takes the channel of a single conscious creator. The first question then is why does the so called “crust of reality” become weak? Because, fundamentally, the consensus surrounding and defining reality is technology-dependent and changes every time new technologies invade it. A worldview based on print is challenged and weakened by the appearance of television, just as a worldview based on broadcast television is deeply threatened by computer networks. Art erupts when a new technology challenges the status quo, also known as the State, or the state of things now.

This exploration will address three complementary realms, the structure of volcanic behavior, that of cultural behavior, and that of technological behavior. Technology changes the structure of culture well before it appears in the consciousness of the majority. It is important to learn about it quickly. The longer a society waits to find out about what is changing it, the more fragile and ready for war it becomes. A new tectonics of consciousness is being sought, that includes art and pop culture not as epiphenomena, but as essential correlates of a technological society. You can do without art in low-tech societies, but you surely need it for high-tech environment, if only to accelerate the adaptation of consciousness to each new major technological innovation. Failing art and pop culture, there is always war which accomplishes the same structural change, but at much greater costs.

Currently, Christiane Robbins is completing ‘(Death) A Vous de Jouer (death)’ your move, a revelatory project engaging the possibilities of narrative within an augmented environment and questions relating to chance and its relationship to the ubiquitous ‘gaming’ strategies inhabiting the W3 (ironically, one of the first computer games created was called Artificial Life by John Conway). Inherent to the gaming paradigms and technologies are the more absorbing and analytical dimensions of control, surveillance, tracking, voyeurism and simulated mechanisms of death that are also elemental to the W3 structure and audience participation.

 (Short paper)

Keywords: Wearable Technology, laughter, responsive wearable, psychophysiological mirroring, social mimicry, emotion contagion, prosocial behaviour, social convention

Based on a practical somaesthetics framework emphasizing the values of self experiences, this paper presents the design rationale of a responsive dress, Laughing Dress, which employs laughter as an agent to highlight the unobvious and unspoken social distance between strangers and inverting our cultural notion of public selfcontainment. The proposed wearable dress is used to investigate the concept, “disruption for reformation”. Throughout the design process, the prototype addressed the research question, “Can exposing self-representations through synthetic sound as inner voice and rhythmic light as somatic energy rattle and provoke reposition of us against existing social norms of private-public space?” The research instrument aims to break personal boundaries by magnifying wearer’s self-presence, enticing a psychophysiological mirroring of laughter in another entity, and evoking a sense of curiosity through a display of visual aesthetics. The unusual display and magnification of self-presence within public setting contributes to disruption of social expectation on selfcontainment in public, reflection upon the organic form of human-to-human interaction, and initiation to realign our behaviour.

Abstract (short paper)

This paper discusses a recent mixed reality interface developed within the collaborative art-technology project Senses Places, a participatory performance environment. The present webcam interface works by motion detection algorithms created through the frame difference method and responds to a critical need from the somatic-technological dance approach. Captured by a webcam, the participant’s movements are exported into a 3D Virtual World where they trigger pre-set animations in an avatar, according to choreographic improvisation principles. Senses Places fosters mixed reality performance events that gather performers and visiting physical and online participants from all over the world in a virtual place, where they engage kinaesthetically in new shared embodied mediated experiences towards expanding awareness to cross geographic, cultural, disciplinary, artistic and human boundaries.

A tribute to Mark Rothko and John Cage.

A reverie stemming from a ten-day trip to New York in the fall of 96, the real window is located in the Paramount Hotel on Broadway. The installation window wanders between sounds and photos recorded during the trip and the memory of two great New York artists, the painter Mark Bothko and the composer John Cage. The principle of the installation is to create a dynamic perception oÍ New York City The window is the metaphor: an opening onto the city which Íilters variations of light and sound, focussing eyes and ears. The authors shall outline the successive forms of the project, and the change-related issues, which led them from one version to the next. Issues driving these changes include the audience’s perception oÍ real time alterations in the installation, the coherence of the composition in response to accidental intervention, and finally the imaginary view of the city as perceived through an abstract or concrete construction. In this sense, the issues refer back to John Cage, who strove gradually to give indeterminism and interpretation a place in his work, and to Marc Rothko, who plays with perception of light in abstraction.

This paper describes the project, A.I. Ch’angga , that aims to simulate the music of the early 20th century’s Korea using machine learning. Ch’angga refers to the music that was educated in the schools in Korea mostly during Japanese Colonial Era in the early 20th century. This project has been initiated from the question: “What music would have been created in Korea in the early 20th century if there had not been Japanese colonial era?”. We built a music generation model using a LSTM network using music around the time from China, Russia, Japan, and Korea and had it generate music changing the degree of the influence from each country. Our preliminary results suggest that machine learning could be used to simulate the cultural products of an era based on a hypothetical history.

Founded in Paris in 1985 by the artists Katerina Thomadaki and Maria Klonaris, A.S.T.A.R.T.I. develops an interdisciplinary international project on media arts: film, video, computer art, multimedia performance and installation, 3D animation, virtual reality, interactive environments, communication networks, etc. Since 1985 A.S.T.A.R.T.I. has organized numerous events (exhibitions, projections, conferences and symposia) in France and abroad and presented innovative work by more than 300 international artists. In 1990 A.S.T.A.R.T.I. has premiered the International Conference on Media Arts (Rencontres Art cinema/video/ordinateur) at the Videotheque de Paris, with the participation of more than 20 international partner institutions and private companies, alternative and independent associations, etc. The first “Rencontres” has focused on the relationships between technology and imaginary and has proposed the breaking down of barriers between the different technologies of the animated image, thus questioning the new discriminative phenomena linked to the use of different media in the arts. The event crossed theories and practices, projections and debates: it was compsed of more than 30 thematic programs and 8 panels in which participated artists, philosophers, art historians, curators, institutional resposibles and industrials. A book was published as a catalogue of the event: “Technologies et Imaginaires”, edited by Katerina Thomadaki and Maria Klonaris, Dis/voir, Paris 1990. Organized in 1994 at the Videotheque de Paris, the second International “Rencontres” on media arts, entitled “Image Mutations”, has questioned the impact of image mutations on our cultural environment. Proceeding beyond the fascination connected with the advent of electronic and digital technologies, the second “Rencontres” has proposed a space of creative criticism and comparative analysis. Connecting lines have been drawn from early cinematic or pre-cinematic phenomena to abstract computer animations, digital effects, stereoscopic video, virtual reality. Some 150 artists and theorists from 20 countries have participated in the event, along with 25 international partners. A wide range of questions has been raised: not only aesthetic and technical, but also philosophical and social, like for instance: “What do the technological arts reflect of the political, social and cultural upheavals at present affecting Europe and the world?”. The book accompanying the second event is “Mutations de l’image” edited by Katerina Thomadaki and Maria Klonaris, A.S.T.A.R.T.I, Paris 1994. The second “Rencontres” has been prize winning at the Kaleidoscope programme of the European Communities Commission. The “Rencontres” is now developing into an International Trienial on Art and Technology and the third event will take place in 1997 in Paris.

In 1992, a technical high school in Buenos Aires decided to create a special program joining music with sciences and new technology studies. This was fitting in such a natural way for the students that they were going from their “sound-oriented” biology classes (focusing on the human hearing system and our phonatory capabilities) to their mathematics classes (where logarithms were used to explain musical scales) to their history classes (including both a broad human history approach as well as specific links with music in different periods) to the music and multimedia lab (with specially designed workstations where students were learning, discussing, analyzing  and creating).

In 1996, the Multimedia Communication national program started to be developed at the National Ministry of Education of Argentina, an it was applied in schools around the country, as part of a new educational system. The Multimedia Communication program, with over 1500 hours of specific study through three years, is a competencies-based modular structure, using several intertwined streams with multiple deliveries. It created the teaching/learning basic standards to approach image synthesis, video, new media, and sound art/music production and creation with a new level of freedom in terms of creativity, use of resources and knowledge, unthinkable only a short time ago. In 2000, the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTreF) started offering a five-year long Electronic Arts program, including two streams, one focusing on electronic image, the other focusing on sound production/music creation using new technologies. The same University also created the Electronic Arts Experimenting and Research Centre (CEIArtE) whose focus is on new media arts research, and creation and dissemination projects. This Centre is a pioneer in media arts research in the region.

Interdisciplinary team-teaching has been in the core of these projects where artists, engineers and scientists worked together to get a rich variety of results. New media arts learning have been a goal in itself, but also a way to help in educating young generations about new teaching approaches, research paradigms and job models able to open a different, creative, appealing and productive world.

Panel Statement

ALL DAY PANELS

UNIVERSITE DE PARIS 1, U.F.R. d’Arts Plastiques et Sciences de l’Art,

Panel 2

No more than a spontaneous generation regarding living organisms, there is no appearance ex-nihilo in the Art ! There are forms of art which prepared the emergence of the Web Art and of network, such as these forms develop and impose themselves today. Concepts like those of combinative, interactivity, network, remote presence, remote action, ubiquity, transfer of the statute of the author, like that of receiver, which are fundamental elements of the art of today, had already a historical «existence» even before the uses of the computer and those of telematics appear and spread. Some functional «mechanical» data became, with the time, today, true «ideologies», of which those, for example, the «interactivity» and the «relation» which don’t owe anything, in truth of their existence at the beginning, nor with data processing, not more than with the Internet… Indeed, the interaction existed well before the appearance of such technologies, as first condition, as basic condition, of the development of any form of life on the ground.

A proposal from Fred Forest.

Panel: An Alembic of Transformation: Virtual Reality as Agent of Change

Com­put­er­ized/Vir­tual re­al­ity (VR) tech­nolo­gies allow us to ma­nip­u­late, ex­tend, dis­tort and de­form in­for­ma­tion as well as ex­pe­ri­ence of the outer and inner body/world. They are ve­hi­cles that en­able us to ex­tend and color work in many dif­fer­ent ways, some of which are not pos­si­ble in the phys­i­cal realm and/or by any tra­di­tional means. They offer a way to aug­ment and ex­pand the magic of per­for­mance, thus in­tro­duc­ing new pos­si­bil­i­ties cre­atively, ex­pe­ri­en­tially, spa­tially, vi­su­ally, son­i­cally, and cog­ni­tively.

VR tech­nolo­gies tend to blur dis­ci­pli­nary bound­aries by chang­ing the na­ture of what and how art­works are cre­ated, re­al­ized, and per­formed. Be­cause one must cre­ate a com­put­er­ized ‘world,’ open to user in­ter­ven­tion and ex­pe­ri­ence, the work ne­ces­si­tates a non-lin­ear, open-ended, al­most frag­mented like com­po­si­tions.

The process of cre­at­ing a work in VR led my col­lab­o­ra­tor Diane Gro­mala and my­self to far more ques­tions, and opened a great deal of artis­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties. For in­stance in such an in­ter­ac­tive en­vi­ron­ment that is con­tin­gent upon the in­ter­ac­tion and pref­er­ences of oth­ers, how is the no­tions of cre­ator and au­di­ence blur? Is the very na­ture of art, de­sign and dance al­tered by these new pos­si­bil­i­ties? Just where does the per­for­mance occur — within VR it­self, in dis­trib­uted sites, in cy­ber­space? Is some of the par­tic­i­pants rel­e­gated to being pas­sive au­di­ence mem­bers and oth­ers took on the chal­lenge of be­com­ing ‘co-cre­ators’? How does one de­ter­mine who gets rep­re­sented in the VR en­vi­ron­ment? How can this tech­nol­ogy be ac­ces­si­ble to larger au­di­ences ca­pa­ble of in­ter­act­ing di­rectly with the sim­u­la­tion? When do the mul­ti­ple cause-and-ef­fects of user par­tic­i­pa­tion be­come mere chaos?

Science and Philosophy share motifs, metaphors and models with the arts. As well, the level of interaction between the arts, sciences, and technology in the past two decades has been steadily increasing, which can be read as an indicator of the tendency of artists to assume the roles of the Renaissance period, or the first decade of the twentieth century. Perhaps even more telling than the actual mastery of scientific and technologic processes is artists’ greater awareness of the necessity for collaboration with scientists and technologists.

Historically, these sorts of parallelisms between arts and sciences go a long way back, and can be traced in our modern times in the well known cases such as Picasso and Braque coming up with the concept of Cubism, and Einstein with the concept of Relativity, in around the same period. The influence of Henry Poincare’s writing Science and Hypothesis, on the artists of the age, and especially the chapters on the origins of geometry, seem to tell us that the origins of cubism are not completely rooted in the arts. This has been thoroughly researched by Arthur I Miller in Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art where he rightly notes that the joint question of both the arts and sciences has been how to interpret the unseen world and go beyond conventional constraints of visual imagery and language to dramatically transform the concepts of visual imagery.

The British artist Lei Cox in his work “Teleportation Experiment” enters into a discourse which has been a popular one among philosophers, scientists, sci-fi writers, and the general public. The basic idea taken by Lei Cox, is that of travel through time and space-travel in which one’s body is dissolved into its sub-atomic form of pure information and reassembled at its destination. Important issues that seem to surface are questions of the understanding of time and space, reality and fiction, as well as of visual imagery and language. Scientists such as Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen, have come up with a “working theory of quantum teleportation”. The famous experiments, such as the “Philadelphia Experiment”, and the role of Nikola Tesla, have sparked the imagination of generations. Art, especially the moving image, has followed a history of involvement with Teleportation (here remember not only Star Trek, but Cronenberg’s The Fly, The Matrix, etc). Their common denominator is that they all depict certain equipment allowing teleportation to happen. By contrast, Lei Cox’s ‘teleportation’ is accomplished without visible use of technology, but by using psychic powers. Lei Cox, the director, has assigned Lei Cox, the actor, to present to us the concept of ‘teleportation’, depicting various dramatic changes endured by the body before disappearing and, subsequently, reappearing on another wall in the gallery. Lei has additionally attempted to avoid the sci-fi and narrative aspects of this theme, which has in turn led him to tackle more directly the concept of teleportation.

What does this mean essentially? Isn’t this claim supported by Quantum Physicists, who tell us that quantum teleportation doesn’t engage in repositioning the object in a different location, but in replicating the original to a different place? It basically copies the original. This theory, sadly, also considers the destruction of the original. So, is it Lei Cox, himself, being transferred to a different location, or is just a perfect copy of Lei Cox being moved to a different time and place, and thus, in return, leading to ‘the death’, and ‘rebirth’ of Lei Cox?

Teleportation? Indeed, are we now close to an understanding of the myth of the Phoenix, the mythical bird that dies, but rises from its own ashes?

Panel: Short:Circuit:  Cross Border Communications in New Media Between US and Turkey

In this pre­sen­ta­tion I will dis­cuss three works: “RTUK”, a browser ex­ten­sion that en­ables users to col­lec­tively black out any text on the Web, “Dar­win’s Birth­day”, a col­lec­tion of Google’s main pages as they were lo­cal­ized in 100+ dif­fer­ent coun­tries in one spe­cific day, and “Del­e­ga­tions”, an in­ter­ac­tive in­stal­la­tion show­ing view­ers’ re­con­structed faces using sta­tis­ti­cally ex­tracted face fea­tures of the host coun­try’s mem­bers of the par­lia­ments. These pieces ex­em­plify my in­ter­est in the ten­sions be­tween the local and the global within the larger frame­work of micro vs. macro processes that can be en­coun­tered in many fields such as econ­omy, man­age­ment, so­ci­ol­ogy, com­puter sci­ence, lin­guis­tics where top-down and bot­tom-up ap­proaches are used in con­junc­tion, e.g. in urban de­vel­op­ment or­ganic and planned ar­chi­tec­ture func­tion to­gether to form cities and in human brain an­a­lytic and syn­thetic think­ing to­gether help us make sense of the world.

ABSTRACT

This presentation will outline the new Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology (ACAT) at the Canberra Institute of the Arts which concentrates its efforts in the fields of computer music and computer animation. ACAT is somewhat unusual in that it grew out of an established electroacoustic music studio rather than a computer graphics and animation centre. As such it specialises in time-based interractions in the aural and visual domains. The presentation will detail the research and development work in the area of music composition, animation and electrospatial art, leading to the establishment of the Centre and will outline its directions in the areas of education, performance, recording, publishing, consulting and research and development.

Rick Prelinger, keynote speaker for the Power: Gridlocked theme, is an archivist, writer, filmmaker and outsider librarian. He speaks about our dependency on the networks that connect us. He says “The networks offering power, water, mobility, commodities and communication have turned into a drunken spiderweb full of broken connections. All of us depend on networks that are growing unreliable. Identifying the utopian kernel that once resonated in our minds as these networks accelerated, is a starting place for examining nodes in emergent networks and our connectivity.”

The editors would like to thank the following individiuals without which the ISEA2016 Hong Kong exhibition and this catalogue could never have been made:
city university of hong kong /school of creative media
Richard W. ALLEN / Maurice BENAYOUN /Charmaine CHAN / Damien CHARRIERAS / Eastman CHENG / HU Sihan Garbo / David Jhave JOHNSTON / Tobias KLEIN / Alice KONG / Michelle KWOK / Ying KWOK / Jims LAM Chi Hang / Olli Tapio LEINO / Ann MAK / Fion NG / Lisa PARKS / Doris POON / Jeffrey SHAW / Iris TSANG / Justin TSANG / WANG Ruolin / Terry WONG

hong kong polytechnic university design
Cees de BONT / Hanna WIRMAN / Rhys JONES / Pierre TAM

hong kong university museum and art gallery
Florian KNOTHE

zurich university of the arts / artists-in-lab program
Irène HEDIGER / Flurin FISCHER

connecting spaces zurich – hong kong
Nuria KRAEMER / LAM Jessica Pui Ying

reviewers of the juried exhibition
isea2016 hong kong
Espen AARSETH / Thomas APPERLEY / Jonne ARJORANTA / Josef BARES / Manuela de BARROS / Janet BELLOTTO / Tim BOYKETT / Jonah BRUCKER-COHEN / Jon CATES / John CAYLEY / Daniel CERMAK-SASSENRATH / Amy K.S. CHAN / CHEUK Sze Wing Chloe / CHUNG Wai Ching / Kathy CLELAND / Ian CLOTHIER / Andres COLUBRI / Patrick John COPPOCK / Marco De MUTIIS / Sebastian DETERDING / Heather DEWEY-HAGBORG / Teresa DILLON / Angela FERRAIOLO / Sonia FIZEK / Rob La FRENAIS / Charlotte FROST / Sue GOLLIFER / Helen GRACE / Lindsay GRACE / Stefano GUALENI / Ian HATCHER / Tim HECKER / Yue-Jin HO / Olaf HOCHHERZ / Ingrid HOELZL / Brian HOUSE / Daniel HOWE / Jason HUFF / Nevena IVANOVA / Margarete JAHRMANN / Alice Ming Wai JIM / Ryan JORDAN / Noa KAPLAN / Veli-Matti KARHULAHTI / Aya Natalia KARPINSKA / Caleb KELLY / Graeme KIRKPATRICK / Tobias KLEIN / Wilhelm E. J. KLEIN / Rune KLEVJER / Tomi KNUUTILA / Raine KOSKIMAA / Tatjana KUDINOVA / Seppo KUIVAKARI / Tomas LAURENZO CORONEL / Sam LAVIGNE / Vanissa LAW / LEUNG Hok Bun Isaac / Suzannie K. Y. LEUNG / Bjarke LIBORIUSSEN / Philip LIN / LIN Wenli Vivian / Thorsten LOMKER / Alessandro LUDOVICO / Tapio MAKELA / Paul MARTIN / Kathleen McDERMOTT / Melissa dela MERCED / Bonnie MITCHELL / Sebastian MÖRING / Judd MORRISSEY / Francois MOUILLOT / Adam NASH / Antony NEVIN / Kingsley NG / Ben NICHOLSON / Simon NIEDENTHAL / Allison PARRISH / Philippe PASQUIER / Ellen PEARLMAN / Thomas PENNEY / Mike PHILLIPS / Claus PIAS / Martin PICHLMAIR / Helen RITCHARD / Jane PROPHET / Michael PUNT / Morten RIIS / Hector RODRIGUEZ / Cynthia Beth RUBIN / Chris SALTER / Audrey SAMSON / Joseph SANNICANDRO / Manthos SANTORINEOS / Mika SAVELA / Gordan SAVICIC / Gareth SCHOTT / Miguel SICART / Tanja SIHVONEN / Roberto SIMANOWSKI / Alan SONDHEIM / Winnie SOON / Minka STOYANOVA / Victoria SZABO / Wendy TAI / Harold THWAITES / Eija TIMONEN / Susana TOSCA / Ragnhild TRONSTAD / Jessica ULLRICH / Clement VALLA / Wim VAN DER PLAS / Danja VASILIEV / Daniel VELLA / Arne Kjell VIKHAGEN / Pau WAELDER / Tamàs WALICZKY / Lawrence WALLEN / Martin WARNKE / Sarah WATERSON / Annette WEINTRAUB / Emma WESTECOTT / Hanna WIRMAN / Samson YOUNG / Kaho YU / Andreas ZINGERLE / ZHU Feng / ZHU Kening

reviewers of the open sky project for icc
Maurice BENAYOUN / Doo Eun CHOI / Nina COLOSI / Caroline Ha THUC / Ellen PAU / Christiane PAUL / Susa POP / Jeffrey SHAW / Tony W. M. TANG / Tanya TOFT / Li ZHENHUA

for exhibition and catalogue design Trilingua Design
for exhibition production: power professional production (hk) ltd Stanley YIU / Tony LUN / Eunice HU

And all the participating artists of ISEA2016 Hong Kong.

Panel Statement

The position of an activity that is generally seen as neither art, nor science, is a tenuous one, particularly if the outcomes are unpredictable and open ended. Specific pedagogical issues emerge from a course that promotes an algorithmic approach to computing in art and design. The current educational strategies have arisen, over the years, out of acts of faith in – the potential of the discipline; the ability of students to disseminate and integrate their expertise; the support of the administration. The implications of this situation will be discussed with
reference to current work, the history of the department and future developments.

Beginning in the 1960s Vancouver’s hyper active media art scene was a hotbed of experimentation, collaboration, technical play and radical engagement, with a proliferation of organizations engaged with media art. Contributions to the scene included feminist collectives, artists’ cable television, artist-run media arts centres, university labs and programs, electronic art exhibitions and more. This talk will excavate formations, institutions, actions and activism and point to their relevance in our complex times.

A fusion of art installation, choreographed multi-media performance, and public engagement constructed for both live performance and participation – echo::system is a project that looks to mediate a connection between art and science. Each ‘action station’ creates a speculativefiction, a space to promote aesthetic and physical reflection on how and where we live. The project is a response to our current global environmental crisis caused by contemporary humans’ inability to reflect on our own impact to the natural world. Lead by artist Grisha Coleman with a collaborative team of ethnographers, performers, designers and technologists – the goal is to examine intersections of art, environmental sciences and technology; information and place; performance and public engagement through the practical realization of the work.

Session: Cinema after the Digital

We attempt to utilize an interactive multimedia environment to aid in the design of a cinematic aesthetic by creating our movie in a simulation environment. By combining a technical interface with an aesthetic interface we have created a movie that is adjusted in real-time by the viewer. Leveraging archetypal motifs we push the visual narrative to express extremes of variety more suitable to the given user experience. Our system utilizes multimodal tracking interfaces: facial tracking and brain computer interface (BCI) and a graphics display system. Built upon studies conducted on the meaning of image with attempts at quantifying the emotional impact of imagery and motion we discuss our attempt to quantify aesthetics designed to facilitate the construction and understanding of a given cinematic experience. We contend that by creating a system that updates a cinematic statement we can optimize the viewing experience creating more compelling cinematic works. Extending this technology further we propose a method to accentuate media experiences by producing causal imagery, visuals that occur as a result of the viewer’s state of mind.

Active Listener is an automated listening treatment in which machines fulfill all listening roles, rendering the human listener superfluous. Two computers face each other. The first computer begins speaking the original text of the Wikipedia entry on active listening, while the second takes dictation. At the conclusion of the entry, the computers exchange roles. They continue to practice active listening skills, taking turns listening and speaking until the system inevitably breaks down.

To the end, they faithfully attempt to take dictation, even as all semantic meaning is lost. Active Listener explores the practice of active listening in a post-human context, one in which a repeated ‘mishearing’ of individual words leads to the decimation of the original text into gibberish and to the earnest exchange of semantic content that is increasingly devoid of semantic meaning.

This lack of meaning is of no concern to the machine listeners. On the other hand, it is central to the experience of the human observers, for whom the loss of meaning becomes the central experience of the work. The more that semantic meaning—or signal—is obscured by gibberish—meaningless text, or noise—the more interesting it is to listen: careful semantic listening by human observers, over time, is rewarded with an increasingly absurd and humorous text.

The relationship between theater and the world of digital visualization is marked by mutual inspiration. The defined field of meaning of cyberspace has appropriated, explicitly or implicitly, theatrical principles, while contemporary theater and the meaning of such concepts as interactive and co-presence are informed by the meanings of computerized virtual worlds. The architectonic nature of cyberspace, with its main principle of “being there,” places the various participants in a single fluid space. Throughout the entire history of theater, the nature of the communication between spectator and actor-character is the product of, among others, space convention. A traditional theatrical situation occurs in a divided actual-fictive space of action — Bspace. In this space of action, communication takes place within a fixed hierarchy. Where there is active interaction the actual-fictive space of action becomes dynamic. This dynamic feature does not affect the hierarchy between participants, which remains fixed. The paper seeks to locate and decipher possibilities of dynamic interactive communication in a theatrical situation. This interaction will be examined as a product of the perception of space composition — actual, fictive and virtual. That is, an interactive theatrical situation will be presented as it occurs in an integrated, fluid space of action, in a space of ?liquid architecture? whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder. The interactive communication channel between the world of digital visualization and theater will be examined not only within a theoretical discussion based on comparative study, but also as conclusions drawn from the study of a project to be presented during “The Festival of Fringe Theater” held in Israel (Oct. 2002).

We conceptualize place beyond the domain of architecture or planning per se, invoking instead a more flexible and user-driven orientation towards space. Learning from the cultures of the counter-establishment and remix innovations in art and digital media, we invoke the idea of “Multi-use Playspaces”, a public space facility exploring technological infrastructures, mobile technologies and materials, and placemaking community interactions that are designed to be freely extensible. Multi-use Playspaces aim to spark creativity and engagement through the cultivation of robust forms of play, learning, and engagement in public space. Here, we present our design-led development process in creating an exemplar Multi-use Playspace in the Adressaparken public park in Trondheim, Norway.

This paper demonstrates the results of the authors’ Wacom tablet MIDI user interface. This application enables users’ drawing actions on a graphics tablet to control audio and video parameters in real-time. The programming affords five degrees (x, y, pressure, x tilt, y tilt) of concurrent control for use in any audio or video software capable of receiving and processing MIDI data. Drawing gesture can therefore form the basis of dynamic control simultaneously in the auditory and visual realms. This creates a play of connections between parameters in both mediums, and illustrates a direct correspondence between drawing action and media transformation that is immediately apparent to viewers.

The paper considers the connection between drawing technique and media control both generally and specifically, postulating that dynamic drawing in a live context creates a performance mode not dissimilar to performing on a musical instrument or conducting with a baton. The use of a dynamic and physical real-time media interface re-inserts body actions into live media performance in a compelling manner. Performers can learn to “draw/play” the graphics tablet as a musical and visual “instrument”, creating a new and uniquely idiomatic form of electronic drawing.

The act of live drawing, though here removed from its traditional reference to a produced “drawing” (either on-screen or in print), is one that allows for dramatic gesture in a way that pressing keys on a computer keyboard or moving a mouse could never hope to achieve. In addition the fact that the graphics tablet can unite five degrees of control over live audio and video makes it an ideal tool to consolidate the roles of the DJ and the VJ under one control interface.

The paper also discusses how to practically program the application and the authors will present examples of its use as a media manipulation tool.

Is Negativland a “band”? Media hoaxers? Activists? Musicians? Filmmakers? Decide for yourself in this presentation that uses films and stories to illustrate some of Negativland’s creative projects, hoaxes, pranks and “culture jamming”. Their work spans media literacy, audio and visual collage, creative activism in a media saturated multi-national world, file sharing, intellectual property issues, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in the digital age.

The Aeon instrument is an expressive visual music instrument used for live media to support interdisciplinary performance practice. The Aeon instrument enables generative animation, editing and compositing, tailored for improvisational expression of projected visual elements and spatialized audio. In this paper, we discuss the design of Aeon in terms of its conceptual, design and performative aspects both in aural and visual domains. Our instrument presents the performer with a large set of techniques that enable flexible media manipulation and generation. The paper also addresses issues related to the tensions between narrative structure and performative expression, live and recorded media, image and sound and the structuring of improvised media.

Seven tenths of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. Evidence of our maritime heritage can be found in the thousands of historic shipwrecks that lie beneath the oceans on the seabed around our coastline. The majority of them are virtually invisible to the public gaze due to their inaccessible nature. However, recent developments in sonar technology have provided opportunities for high resolution data to be gathered which can be used to produce accurate 3D images of these important shipwreck sites.

This paper describes how a novel aesthetic approach to visualising this data can make our submerged maritime heritage more accessible to the general public. It describes how re-tasking 3D animation techniques can improve the viewer’s understanding of complex underwater scenes. Comparisons are made to how scientific data can often be aesthetically ill-considered, adopting a traditional “that’s how we have always done it” approach rather than attempting to focus on clarifying the data.

Many of the case study shipwrecks described are of environmental significance, either containing unexploded munitions, nuclear materials or large quantities of marine oil. The paper describes how an aesthetic approach to improving the visualisation of the data can help to inform risk assessment for recovery or containment of these hazardous materials.

In summary, the proposed aesthetic visualisation methods are evaluated alongside traditional industry approaches. Can art save lives?

Session: Code and Generative Art

The creation of expressive styles for digital art is one of the primary goals in non-photorealistic rendering (NPR). In this paper, we introduce a swarm-based multi-agent system that is capable of producing expressive imagery through the use of multiple bitmap images. At birth, agents in our system are assigned a digital image that represents their aesthetic ideal. As agents move throughout a digital canvas they try to realize their ideal by modifying the pixels in the digital canvas to be closer to the pixels in their aesthetic ideal. When agents with different aesthetic ideals occupy the same canvas, a new image is created through the convergence of their conflicting aesthetic goals. By varying the inputs and parameters of our multi-agent system we were able to emulate a variety of painterly styles including Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism and Montage. The ease of implementation and variety of results created through minor changes in variables and inputs makes a compelling argument for more research using multi-agent systems for NPR.

Art throughout the XXth century has advanced towards an increasingly large place to interactivity, performance, installation, and appearances by the public. The emergence of an aesthetics of Media Arts where networks, machines – interfaces, the sensors play an increasingly significant role in the processes of creation raises the question of the statute of the artist and the nature of work. Erasing the old aesthetics and cultural categories, the technological interfaces, mainly in the fields of Visual Arts, are disseminated according to sensory and extra methods’ sensory, using multi-mode processes where productivity, tactility, emotive, attitudes, become forms, new indices of the return to senses. The multimedia installations do not rest any more on one medium, but on processes in action, feedback, becoming. It is then, with a disappearance of the support, material substrate which one assists. Where is gone Painting, when machines are going to paint? What becomes the work of art at the era of its data production? How these art forms contribute to the emergence of a new aesthetics?

Artworks with biosensors could be called biofeedback artworks. Our intention is to discuss the changing landscape of practices and research in the area of art where biological information of spectators/interactors is used as input for the functionality of artworks. We would like to ask about new challenges in the design of artistic-technical devices and art historical implications. As technology for artists becomes more available and cheaper, do we see new emerging trends in building biofeedback artworks? How to contextualise the effect of these works in research on aesthetic experience?

(Long paper)

Keywords: Aesthetic experience, paratext, bio-art, new media art, science, conceptual art, fiction, narration.

The claim of the paper is that in many cases new artforms that make use of new, advanced science and technology, paradoxically, prompt aesthetic experience by means of simple text. The paper investigates the difference between the technical media of, for instance, works of bio-art, and the concrete material that the audience of such works encounter in the gallery. In relation to new artforms, the ‘simple’ paratextual descriptions of the works’ technical media take on a significantly different role compared to the paratexts accompanying traditional artforms. While the paratexts’ primary purpose is one of simply conveying information on the works’ technical media (such as DNAmaterial, brain cells, digital software etc.), which are often hidden from the human sensory apparatus, in reality the paratexts simultaneously take on a second, but more important function: that of being the prime catalyst of aesthetic experience – thus substituting the work itself. The paper analyses the mechanisms of this new role of the paratexts accompanying scientifically advanced art and concludes that an important component is the conceptual character of allographic, informational paratexts. Curiously, this conceptual character is also a key feature of the advanced science at work in the new artforms.

Wearable technologies for self-knowledge and selfimprovement are predominantly data-driven, whereas tools for somatic self-reflection based in sensory stimuli are less explored. Our research investigates the question of how do we facilitate access to aesthetic experiences for bodily awareness using heat and vibration as art and design materials? This paper presents a user study on the use of wearable props transmitting heat and vibration, integrated into the somatic technique Focusing. From our analysis, we discovered a series of aesthetic qualities categorized as heat as an embodied relation, and vibration as an immersed extension. These aesthetic qualities were reformulated as considerations to guide the design of wearable technology for self-awareness using heat and vibration as sensory focus on the body, facilitating the emergence of personal meaning making in the process of inner discovery.

Abstract

It is envisaged that intelligent robots of the next generation be equipped with various sophisticated capabilities endowing them with desires and intentions, enabling them to perform hypothetical and defeasible reasoning, to solve problems creatively, to appreciate works of art, to achieve some form of cyber-pleasure, etc. Understanding and the ability to develop explanations for observations and facts are fundamental for the realization of these capabilities. In fact explanation and understanding are ‘two sides of the same coin’ in both art and science.

Our objective is to highlight techniques used in Artificial Intelligence which could provide mechanisms for modeling the aesthetic response of an intelligent robot, based on the causal explainability of complexity manifested in media such as electronic art. Leyton [3] argues that art is related to explanation, in particular that the aesthetic response is the mind’s evaluation of causal explanation. He maintains that the level of aesthetic response to art works is proportional to the level of complexity [5] that an individual observes. He goes further arguing that the desire for art works is part of a general desire that the human mind has for complexity. Barratt [1] also claims that humans seek to explicate complexity, and since the brain is finite, there must be a maximum degree of complexity that the mind is capable of explaining at any one time. If the degree of complexity is increased past this level, it exceeds the mind’s capacity to explain it, artistic chaos is reached and consequently the viewer deems the art work to be incoherent. He concludes that the limit is set by the ability to give causal explanation, it is not complexity that is appetitive, but causal explanation itself.

Clearly, if our aim is to develop intelligent robots with truly human-like characteristics, then they must be capable of artistic appreciation. For electronic art, appreciation must occur at the conceptual level and not at the physical (pixel) level. In the area of Artificial Intelligence the notion of explanation has been well explored. The complexity of explanations is often a reflection of the richness of the agent’s background knowledge, and its ability to discern its surrounding world. Indeed, the aesthetic response to artistic chaos is equivalent to an explanation of a contradiction. Central to such an explanatory capability is the need for mechanisms supporting the modification or revision of knowledge, that is, learning. Belief revision [2] models the process of accepting new information in such a way that an intelligent agent’s epistemic state remains logically consistent, or coherent. Frameworks for explanation within the area of Artificial Intelligence can be used to support the aesthetic
response of an intelligent agent. In particular, two important parameters of an explanation may assist in gauging an aesthetic response, namely the plausibility [6,7] and the specificity [4] of the explanation. In summary, if aesthetic response is the evaluation of causal explanation, then we can endow an intelligent robot with aesthetic responses which ebb and flow in accordance with the complexity of the causal explanation achieved.

References
1. Barratt, K., (1980), “Logic and Design: The Syntax of Art, Science and Mathematics”, Eastview Editions, New Jersey.
2. Gärdenfors, P., (1988), “Knowledge in Flux”, A Bradford Book, MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts), London.
3. Leyton, M., (1992), “Symmetry, Causality, Mind”, A Bradford Book, MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts), London.
4. Poole, D., (1988), “A Logical Framework for Default Reasoning”, Artificial Intelligence 36, pp 27-47.
5. Walker, E.L., (1980), “Psychological Complexity and Preference”, Monterey, California: Wadsworth (Brooks/Cole).
6. Williams, M.A., “Explanations and Theory Base Transmutations”, in the Proceedings of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 341-346, 1994.
7. Williams, M.A., (1994), “Transmutations of Knowledge Systems”, in J. Doyle, E. Sandewall, and P. Torasso, editors, Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference (KR’94), Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, (to appear)

Since the post-war era, a number of artists have been exploring the use of embodied, artificial agents, in parallel to scientific research associated to Computer Science in domains such as Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life. While notions of adaptation and learning have been an extremely important component of that research, artists and media theorists seem to have focused on the concept of emergence. Whereas emergence offers a rich ground for artmaking, adaptation is an equally important, yet complementary dimension of it. In an effort to re-position adaptive systems within the theoretical and practical field of agent-based artworks, an aesthetics of computationally adaptive artistic installations is proposed in this article. To do so, I examine (1) the historical context surrounding adaptive systems; (2) its relationship with the concept of emergence; and (3) the aesthetic potential of Machine Learning algorithms by examining their intrinsic characteristics. An aesthetic framework based on the morphological aspects of the temporal unfolding of agent behaviors is offered as a tool to comprehend both adaptive and non-adaptive behaviors in works of art.

FISEA Artists are using technological advances in their art making processes and are concerned about the difficulty of getting their work exhibited. The author discusses the aesthetics of exhibition and the nature of computer-aided art as seen in recent important exhibitions, as well as the problems associated with mounting these exhibitions. A brief history of computer-aided art exhibitions is presented, including the earliest exhibitions, the developments of the 1970s and recent major museum exhibitions. The author compares concepts and traditions in exhibition design to those that will be needed in the future, and finally discusses why certain art forms are exhibited.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Immersive installation, aesthetics of immersion, immersive Consciousness, audio-visual, case study.

This paper examines the aesthetics of immersive experience in Light Strings, an interactive immersive environment. One of prominent aspects of Interactive Art is the notion of immersion. The concept of immersion is generally defined as a viewer “forgetting” the real world outside of the virtual environment and by a sense of being in a make-believe world generated by computational hardware and software. As an interactive artist and researcher, I conceive of immersion as any experience where integrated bodily, conscious, and pre-conscious states thoroughly intertwine with the world. Moreover immersion is where mind, body and environment interweave and communicate with each other inside of technically-mediated, spatially enclosed, and sensuously-interactive computational environments. Light Strings was created based on my previous art practice and research into immersion as a way to study participants’ experiences with the artwork. In the participant study of Light Strings, participants were encouraged to describe the felt experiences of the installation through phenomenologically oriented research methods. As a result, an experiential model of the participants’ experiences was developed by exploring bodily, spatial, and contextual consciousness with temporal considerations.

As an Interactive Artist and researcher, I am interested in the phenomenon of immersion created from physical interactions within interactive immersive environments. This paper focuses on the question: what is the aesthetics of immersion in interactive immersive environments.

I acknowledge immersion as a primary aesthetic phenomenon not just because it’s created within artistic environments but because the experience is fundamental to our senses, realized through bodily interaction in its wholeness, and actualized in collaboration with artists. (Fraleigh & Hanstein, 1999) In this paper, I use Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s definition of aesthetics as a “theory of sensuous knowledge, as a counterpart to logic as a theory of intellectual knowledge.” (Johnson, 2007) I conduct research on the aesthetics of immersive experience in interactive immersive environments because it involves the whole person and not just one sensory modality. From my pilot study and other researchers’ study (Davies, 1995, 1998; Laurel & Strickland, 1994), the adjectives: “meditative” and “playful” are most often associated with immersive experiences. In my dissertation, I expand beyond these traditional associations to suggest other qualities and meanings of immersion, and explore in detail meditative and playful experiences as steps toward a phenomenological interpretation of immersion.

Since one of the major findings from my preliminary research is that immersion can be created in Interactive Immersive Environments without requiring complex or scientific hardware (HMDs, CAVEs, Virtual Reality Environments, etc.) and only minimal components (light, sound, etc.) are necessary for immersion, my interactive immersive environments are comprised of only minimal – though interactive – elements such as light, sound and tactile forms. To reveal how these preliminary findings arose, I will discuss one of my interactive immersive projects: Light Strings(2011).

The goal of my research is not to create a technical framework for immersive environments or an ideal one; instead the research is focused on the multiple meanings of immersion, how meanings are constructed through human experience which itself arises on a spectrum between artist and participants views using phenomenological research methods. This research will begin to fill a gap between art practice/research and science research that previously separated the terms of aesthetics and immersion.

What are the aesthetic characteristics of play, and how do they relate to art? In this talk, I discuss ways in which play is approached in aesthetic theory [1,2,3], and understandings of the aesthetics of play as they occur within game studies [4,5,6,7,8]. I propose an alternative view, regarding play as a medium in its own right, to which a particular kind of aesthetic is attached. Typically today the term “games” denotes the multi-medial phenomenon of video games, in which a number of modalities, techniques and aesthetics are implied. To isolate a “medium of play” in midst of these modalities (all contributing to the aesthetic experience of play) is an exercise that provides us with greater analytical clarity, which is exactly what we need to be able to pinpoint the specificities characterizing the medium of play. Identifying a conflict that, arguably, complicates the often presumed close relationship between art and play, I suggest a conceptual approach to the aesthetics of play that is rooted in sensuous perception rather than in art theory. Applying this perspective, the relationship between play, interactive and non-interactive art is discussed [9], as is the playfulness of art games [10, 11]. Finally, I introduce the concept of beauty [12] in play, and ask the fundamental questions: Why is play a pleasure? Can it be a burden?

 (Long paper)

Keywords: Digital ruins, Glitch, Media Art Museums, Planned Obsolescence, Aesthetics of Memory, Digital archive.

This paper is a shortened version of “Corrupted Memories. Aesthetics of Digital Ruins and the Museum of the Unfinished” presented in Uncertain Spaces: Virtual Configurations in Contemporary Art and Museums (Lisbon, 2014). It addresses the aesthetics of memory emerging on the horizon of digital culture, aiming to understand their critical potential towards the proposition of new parameters for historic conservation, archive and museum systems in the digital age. Based on art works by myself and other artists, I suggest that glitch, recyclism and other similar movements/genres point to critical views of contemporary culture and memory. Instead of celebrating a progressive stable future, their peculiar “ruinology” allow us to deal with the social and emotional perception of loss, without betting on an imminent process of disappearance and planned obsolescence. I contextualize my approach in the contemporary “documentary overdose” produced in social media environments, and the “forgetting architecture ” that prevails in it, due to permanent updates and discontinuities.

Panel: Voicing Electronic Arts

This paper in­tro­duces the panel’s key themes in re­la­tion to vocal aes­thet­ics: voice as in­ter-sub­jec­tive, para­dox­i­cal, un­canny,  in­ti­mate – de­ter­mined by, and de­ter­min­ing of, spa­tial re­la­tion­ships. It dis­cusses in­ter-dis­ci­pli­nary the­o­ret­i­cal ap­proaches to voice and uses spe­cific ex­am­ples from media arts to dis­cuss modal­i­ties and tech­niques of voice. Fi­nally, it looks at how the cur­rent dig­i­tal and net­worked mo­ment is open­ing new pos­si­bil­i­ties for artists work­ing with voice on the one hand, and how on the other hand, at­ten­tion to vocal aes­thet­ics is help­ing us to un­der­stand such cur­rently ubiq­ui­tous phe­nom­ena as au­then­tic­ity ef­fect and per­for­ma­tiv­ity.

Afropixel

This paper explores the sexual reconfiguring of self and space which is underway in a society of surveillance. Focussing on our desire for surveillance technology, This paper will suggest that surveillance society has less to do with crime prevention and more to do with erotics than we are led to believe. McGrath will investigate bodies which are already re-imagining themselves as organisms which incorporate the camera, the microphone and even the database, sexualising surveillance’s temporal and spatial disruptions. Material will include the example of gay gogo dancers in New York who perform for hidden cameras, analysis of the structural similarities between CCTV crime footage and hard core pornography, and an examination of the British media response to the film Crash in relation to the phenomenon of speed cameras.

I will develop the argument that new kinds of spaces are being created under surveillance, spaces inhabited by prostheticised selves which are bursting through the binaries of public/private, live/recorded, body/technology. These surveillance spaces and electronic selves are performative, radically unstable and potentially revolutionary.

Arguably, the most important aspects underpinning artistic experimentations in the broad fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (A-life) lie at the intersection of autonomy and agency. Autonomy is the foundational element of any living system. Defined as the property of being self-determining with no outside control over actions and internal states, autonomy refers to a system’s ability to assert its existence and to simply be. Through their interactions with their environment, autonomous systems achieve what noted biologist, neuroscientist and philosopher Francisco Varela called the “shap[ing of] a world into significance.”

This notion of autonomy as being assertive, ties right into the notion of agency. Defined as the ability to take action in the world and influence others, agency is how autonomy is exercised, articulated and maintained, via capacities such as adaptability, viability and sentience. With this in mind, this panel will bring together practicing artists and researchers who will discuss their work through the lens of agency and autonomy. How are AI-based tools and methods such as machine learning/deep learning, evolutionary computing and agent-based approaches currently being utilized by artists? The panel participants will discuss their work and individual approaches to these topics, followed by discussion.

Panel: NeuroArts

In the year 2000 The Sym­bi­ot­icA Re­search Group (SARG) em­barked on a pro­ject that in­tended to cul­tur­ally scru­ti­nise the pos­si­bil­ity of em­body­ing en­gi­neered neuro-as­sem­blies. The idea that neu­rons cul­tured over elec­trodes can act in the world, and that the world would have a di­rect af­fect on the neu­rons, sug­gest that with in­creased com­plex­ity these en­gi­neered neuro-as­sem­blies will re­quire eth­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion. This paper will de­scribe the con­cept of the semi-liv­ing, in par­tic­u­lar that which re­spond;  Neu­ronal tis­sue can be cul­tured and grown in­de­pen­dently from the con­text of the bi­o­log­i­cal body and then en­gage in rudi­men­tary two way in­for­ma­tion ex­change with the world around it.  Some of the main is­sues that this no­tion raise will be ex­plored by fol­low­ing the tra­jec­tory of the neu­ro­engi­neer­ing re­lated re­search at Sym­bi­ot­icA – from SARG’s Fish & Chips to Neu­rot­ica’s Silent Bar­rage.

We, city inhabitants, step by step create a memory map. Memory is supposed to be vanished when we, memory bearers leave the world, but spaces are life witness. Trough augmented reality markers installation, QR codes an another mechanisms, we will show you significative places in-between Manizales and let passerby get closed to those memory bearers that had lived in this place. The person who scan some of this markers could know an instant about the person and events took place to make it alive and make a new self-experience becoming it in a memory circle AHÍ.

Artificial Intelligent (AI) agents are exponentially increasing in power and sophistication. With the addition of Open AI’s breakthrough new algorithm GPT-2 into the toolbox of developers the ability to mimic human dialogue and produce fake, but believable interactions between humans and computer-based agents is fully upon us. As I develop “AIBO” (Artificial Intelligent Brainwave Opera), an emotionally intelligent artificial intelligent brainwave opera, I am implementing a biased, or ‘sicko’ AI as one of the two main characters. This development has been created in response to one of my research questions, “Can an AI be fascist?” This paper explores the construction a ‘sicko’ or perverted AI for artistic use as part of the overall process based work of developing an AI brainwave opera.

The expressive garments of Montreal designer Ying Gao are made of air and light.  Bridging art, science and technology, they materialize the immaterial as a kind of sheath mediating between the real and fantasy, the body and its environment. Their poetic effects are developed through computational systems, motorized sensors, pneumatic and interactive technologies, electronics – and distinctive aesthetic grace.

My presentation centers on the conceptual core of her practice and on the specific property of the ‘immaterial’ in her work – the significance of air, light, water, transparency, breath and related animating features and interfaces.

Ying Gao’s works react to their immediate environment; a focus on the urban and its cultures, social character and transformations is central to her work.  In the pneumatic garments of Walking City – influenced by Japanese origami – triggers such as wind, movement and touch activate each of three dresses, which expand, contract, unfurl. Index of indifference (2006) uses a software program that compiles statistical data concerning Internet users who declared themselves “indifferent” to political, economic or cultural issues; Gao manipulates this data to modify the basic structure of 10 men’s shirts over time to reflect this “index of indifference”, made visible through the shreds of the shirts that still remain after the statistically relevant percentage of fabric is excised.  In the installation Living Pod, one garment, equipped with micro-motors and light sensors, breathes when a viewer-activated light source triggers the sensor, while a second garment ‘mimics’ the first.  Her recent research has been on “modulatable” garments that integrate microelectronic technology, and is inspired by transformations in the urban environments of Berlin and Nagoya.

Ying Gao is a professor at University of Quebec in Montreal. Her pioneering work is positioned along 3 axes: within the art world in its aesthetic and conceptual foundations, as a professional engagement within the fashion industry and operating a ‘laboratory’ model of research. Her critical and poetic garments contrast with the instrumentality of the field of industrial research in wearable and smart fabrics, while also challenging stereotypes within fashion.

The National University of Singapore sponsored ISEA2008’s Artist In Residence programme. What does this mean for Singapore, that its premier university funded these artists? This generates a new kind of dynamics for NUS and for Singapore. In this keynote, Sam Furukawa will discuss how the artist can work with society and corporations. In today’s world, how can artists work together with corporations to obtain funding, yet create meaningful and innovative art? He will speak about how Japan became an exporter of art and culture and what this means for Asian countries and the world.

Albedo Prospect is a set of media works that explore the polar imaginary using video, still images, audio, sculptural elements and text. The project is based in part on the 1931 airship flight to the high Arctic from which the writer Arthur Koestler filed wireless reports. The piece reimagines Koestler’s reports and updates them with a contemporary perspective and an acute awareness of how personal, journalistic, and scientific narratives function to shape our knowledge and readings of polar geographies.

(Short paper)

Keywords: presence, dance, phenomenology, choreography, awareness, Simona Bertozzi, performance methods, motion capture, interactive media arts, Alea (iacta est), Homo Ludens

In this paper, I present an overview of the notion of presence in dance works. I give an analysis of the dance piece Alea (iacta est) – the die has been cast created by the Italian choreographer Simona Bertozzi, then follow with a comparison of dance productions that utilize motion capture. In my analysis I define, or perhaps redefine, the concept of presence in performance within technology and human interaction, specifically Mo-Cap. The definition of presence that I propose is related to the notions of intention, attention and memory of the performers, as well as their relationship with space. The phenomenon of presence can be defined as an expansion of the body, rather than an overlapping of it; hence, my argument is that presence requires a physical body as a starting point. To be present means to maintain a certain degree of tension between the dancer’s body, his or her intention and the performance space. The research is driven by several theoretical and methodological approaches, such as: phenomenology of Maurice MerleauPonty, historical explorations, and my own experience as a dancer.

ISEA1994:

Panel Statement

Panel: Algorithms and the Artist

I am interested in producing work which is realized through engaging the audience in active physical participation. In a general sense it can be said that I have been producing work by proposing rules for the generation of images but leaving significant parameters open to change. The form of the work is defined by the limits imposed by the rules and the degree and manner of control over the parameters afforded to participants. An algorithm can perform a role in creative activity similar to that of any other constraint used in art practice; the self-imposed limits within which one works in order to free oneself to indulge in creative play and experiment and yet at the same time ensure our focussed and hence enhanced attention. It is in this way that I use algorithms in my work. As I have been using computer graphic workstations the rules are encapsulated in an appropriate computer programming language. Computers are very useful control devices and the programming languages which have been developed to determine how they behave are effective, if somewhat limited, in enabling one to describe rules for the interactive real-time generation of the kind of graphic images which I am interested in: representations of the interactions of programmed automata with each other and the audience-participants. I would like to hope that we can interpret the word ALGORITHM in a relaxed way. It is our prerogative as humans, particularly as artists, to interpret language fuzzily, not to define the meaning of a word for eternity but to exploit its value in passing, in a dynamic interchange of ideas and notions with fellow humans in which it plays a significant yet ephemeral part. The word ALGORITHM in the context of the panel will, I hope, be as a catalyst for lively and diverse discussion rather than a straight-jacket. That is, after all, the value that I have found in using algorithms in art practice.

I propose to discuss the idea of abstraction as a necessary condition of art that aspires to universal truth. This was the lofty goal of the Modernists. The works and writings of artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian reflect this aspiration. Abstraction allows art to transcend national or cultural biases and so establish a truly global perspective. Today, many visual artists using electronic media are involved with realism, appropriation, social and political commentary — rehashing old themes with new tools. The issue of finding new ways to abstract information, new paths to universality, has been abandoned by many and is now more aggressively addressed by scientists. From the efforts of these scientists has come the ubiquity of tputer, Center, USA scientific visualisation.

The main tool used in visualisation being the algorithm. Just as the scientist uses the abstract language of mathematics to model the natural world, they now use an abstract visual language, built from the computer algorithm, to investigate these models. Some artists have adopted these methods and continue on the Modernist path. Heisenberg said, “In art, as in science, we can discern a striving for universality. In the sciences we are endeavouring to interpret all physical phenomena in a unified way, to understand all organisms in terms of a single point of view, and we have already come a long way (upon this road. In art we are seeking to present a basis for life common to all men on earth. This striving for unification and bringing together necessarily leads to abstraction, in art probably no less than in science.”

This presentation presents a new approach to “intelligent” algorithmic decision-making in the composition of musical structure. Basic problems of conceiving and composing large formal structures algorithmically when traditional tonal theoretical models no longer suffice are addressed, and a new computer algorithm for producing a variety of generalized temporal structures is proposed. The computer generates a “morphology” (shape) over time which incorporates both static and transitional elements applying one or more such morphologies to different musical parameters.

Can you have a memory without photographing it? Where does a memory live? How do we make sense of them? If it’s online, who owns it? What is association at a global scale? What are the conventions of western time and how might that be visualised or utilised? Can you live forever in the cloud? This paper examines these questions through the media art installation augment_me.

augment_me is a responsive visual database; a memory machine of sorts but a live and developing one. The images that constitute the database are a sequence of photographs and videos, collected over the past 8 years and tracks my relationships with people, things, places, scenarios (all of which are viewable on the photo-sharing site Flickr®). They are sequentially embedded with contextual associations arranged (initially) by time and date. This, combined with being able to access and make those images move, appear and disappear – by anyone or anything within view of the camera/sensor in the space where the installation is exhibited, makes manifest the metaphor of memory.

These images can take on a particular and slightly voyeuristic significance. For others, I imagine, it is the generic face anyone. We recognise these compositions, these tableaux vivants, these experiences – the urban middle class individual’s photo of leisure and tourism. All that distinguishes this collection from the endless expanse of similar imagery is their artist. The vector of all these moments is the artist own existence, “which they affirm and erase simultaneously. We are seeing his life through the eyes of an invisible protagonist. Or are we seeing his life flash before his eyes? Is this how it will be at the moment of death? The ordinariness of our existence spread before us. The objects, people and places that have made up our lives flowing, like data, away from the organizing principle of our own subjectivity.”

“The ultimate promise is that the flow of data may restore the flow of life when it is temporarily halted. Biological death becomes a small death, data becomes the through-line that joins old subject to new.”

Panel Statement

We address a number of problems related to viewing algorithms as the formulation of artistic statements. We analyze the nature of the algorithmic approach as opposed to direct physical action. Here are some of the basic questions that will be raised. Why do artists choose to express themselves indirectly, by way of formal descriptions of their ideas and what are the sources of inspiration for algorithmic activity. How does current algorithmic work relate to formal methods in an art-historical context. What is the relationship between paint systems and a pure algorithmic approach and is there a way to integrate both. What determines the beauty and effectiveness of an algorithm. What is the relationship between an algorithm and the nature of the physical results it produces i.e. how to externalize (materialize) algorithmic processes.What is the role of interaction in the development of algorithms. Do algorithms allow for progressive optimization or do they require fully preconceived ideas? Finally, and most pertinent, does computer programming force a focus on the surface component i.e. perceivable structure, or does it allow for the manipulation of deeper components such as meaning and emotion?

Panel Statement

Panel: Algorithms and the Artist

I have always thought of computers as dynamic tools for introspection, exploration and discovery. Computer programming is instrumental in the externalization of ideas and algorithms are formal descriptions of what one hypothesis constitute the production of creative statements. The computer is a playground to speculate on the generative potential of ideas. As a matter of fact, the physical, tangible management of purely conceptual constructs becomes possible. However, the paradox is that while algorithmic specification allows the artist to touch the essence of his ideas it also creates a distance since all specification is indirect and seems to exclude spontaneous action.                                                                        The idea is to view computers as partners in the process of creative decision-making. By way of algorithms we can explore various man-machine relations in this partnership: from studying total autonomy in computer programs to systems designed for explicit interaction. The development of personal algorithms is the key to exploration and the gradual specification of objectives from incomplete knowledge, in sharp contrast to view the computer as slave, as a medium for deterministic visualization. I have characterized the interactive method where man and machine collaborate in a common effort and with common objectives as conceptual navigation; the artist-programmer gets feedback, his expectations are confirmed or contradicted by the program’s behavior.  Eventually, unexpected results may signal new and promising routes exposing unknown territories. Thus, man and machine contribute both to the creation of a computational climate that favors invention and to the development of a critical attitude towards the often complex relationships between programmed intention and actual result. Writing algorithms has also forced me to evaluate experience vs. speculation. If one relies on models that have proven to be successful in the past, one confirms what is already known. Algorithms that use rules reflecting this knowledge produce predictable results. Otherwise, designing processes with the greatest possible freedom in pure speculation is like working outside of any known context making evaluation very hard indeed. The creation of new contexts for growing algorithmic activity mixing memories of the past and an open imagination is, I think, perhaps the most interesting challenge to algorithmic art.

Abstract (long paper)

The recently published Xenofeminist Manifesto re-fashions accelerationist politics into radical feminism. Arguing for a universalist xeno-politics borne out of alienation, xenofeminists see in nature an arch-enemy, aligning with the algorithmical intelligence of technology instead, celebrating artifice and strangeness as the foundation of revolutionary politics to come. In this paper, I argue that nature is but a phantom limb tied to the decaying body of post-Enlightenment modernity. Following the ontological turn in anthropology, I argue that by legitimizing constructed dualisms of nature and technology, xenofeminism fuels the very logic that it seeks to overrun. Enlisting only with nonhumans that it perceives as technological, xenofeminism excludes a number of allies, such as nonhuman animals. Passing beyond the limits of this nature/culture dualism could open xenofeminism up to a full spectrum of nonhuman confederates and lay foundation for speculative aesthetics for all alien subjects.

Panel: Media Art, Mediation and Contemporary Art

The recent ‘new materialist’ shift that Janis Jeffries refers to in this panel that is taking place in the arts, humanities and social sciences seems at first radical: a new kind of “ontological theatre” in a world of continual becoming (Pickering) ; a universe in which self-sufficient objects “withdraw from us” and our “correlationist” bent of defining the world in relation to human subjects (Harman and Meillasoux); and finally, the confrontation with “vibrant matter” and the “politics of thingness” (Bennet) seems poised to remedy the longstanding obsession with discourse, language and theory without grounding that has long plagued the humanities (and indeed, with conceptualism, the arts). Indeed, if the recent discourse of Documenta 13 is any indication (a focus on ‘artistic research,’ the objectless of objects and the nonhuman), it seems we have entered a new world. But this new world may be deceiving for, as  Tim Ingold writes, “the growing world of literature that deals explicitly with the subjects of materiality and material culture seems to have hardly anything to say about materials.” Moreover, discussions about the discourse of materiality are not the same as dealing with what curator and historian of science Thomas Soderqvist calls “the bony materiality of things themselves.” When looked at more closely, the new materialism is indeed a misnomer: a conglomeration of different intellectual traditions that have little to do with each other and have radically different political and epistemological stakes, yet seem to be called forth as a new kind of turn. This intervention will briefly pick up a current ethnographic project entitled Alien Agency which examines how it is that artists actually work with unstable ‘nonhuman’ materials embroiled within techno-scientific practices – tissues, sound and the technological registers of the sensorium. Is materiality really what is at the centre of artists working with techno-scientifically stamped instruments, techniques, procedures and institutional settings? What levels of reflexivity occur when dealing with the material agency of things and processes in artistic practice? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what are the stakes (if any)  for the new materialist and, indeed, sensorial turn from the perspective of artists and makers themselves, particularly if we view artistic acts, as Guattari argued, as the ability to “generate far off balances from everyday life.”

Alien WebMD is an Internet zine that visually expresses a collective consciousness about various topics, mediated through the unique and self-referential language and framework of the Internet, using illustrations, audio, gifs, memes, video, prose, popups, essays, and images collaged together. The zine further explores virtual renditions of real and imagined places as interpreted through the lens of DIY web technology, and invites a non-hierarchical exploration of interactive webpages. The zine’s issues are generated by the collective efforts of digital artists whose work is based on a unifying theme. In a world in which our perceptions are constantly informed by the technologies we use, our memories are created by the way we curate lives over Internet media. This zine serves as a sort of memory archive, collective journal, and exercise in digital world building, with a nod to a pre-Web 2.0 ethos. In this respect, Alien WebMD showcases an intellectual and artistic heritage of media in a global, amorphous, yet distinct and celebrated place: the web.

Ever since the Lumiere brothers created Cinematography at the end of the 19th century, motion pictures have undergone various advances in both technology and content. Today, motion pictures, or movies, have established themselves as a composite art form in a wide domain that extends from fine arts to entertainment. Interaction technology provides movies with much greater inherent possibilities than the current forms of movies, because it allows each viewer to get involved in the movie world, metamorphose into the main character in a movie regardless of their age and even gender, and enjoy a first-hand experience. Based on this concept, we have developed an interactive movie system. This system has two basic characteristics. The first characteristic is the use of CG technology and the generation of three dimensional imagery to create a cyberspace in which all participants obtain a feeling of immersion. We can developed multi-person participation, emotions recognition, gesture recognition, the participants the feeling of actually contributing to the development of the story in the cyberspace, we use a system that shows avatars as the alter egos of the participants on a screen. Also, the system to we have produced an interactive story based on this system. We selected “Romeo and Juliet” by Shakespeare as the base story. The main plot of the story is as follows. After their tragic suicide their souls are sent to Hades, where they have no recollection of anything. Then, each of them starts on a journey to rediscover who he/she is and what relationship they shared.

The Automatic Information System ‘Allofake’ is an information phone system simulation (‘800’-numbers). It offers touristic routes in Paris and reproduces in real time the interactive choices with a speaker based in the geometrical center point of Paris. In the new communication technologies, the net – center opposition is very important. Allofake represents this opposition: it takes advantage of the net and at the same time, it is anchored in the center. What is done in the virtual by the person is published by the speaker. The project is about the automation of displacements in the cities. It tries to compare the experiences of functional digital memory with the functional analog memory.

As the economy forces us to continue searching deeper into our pockets, more sustainable systems of exchange and cultural production are being created, shifting public consciousness on how we think about money, labor and community. From crowdsourcing models of microfinance and productions based on collective pooling of ideas and resources to swap shop styled innovations on more traditional models of barter, exchange and cultural production are being re-evaluated on a global scale. What new paradigms are emerging and how they can be evaluated will be highlighted in this roundtable session of rapid fire presentations by artists, designers and cultural producers, followed by an open discussion with both presenters and audience.

Abstract

Alternate Reality Games are structured around interactive narrative that uses multiple media – text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity – and game elements to engage players, encourage collaboration and tell a story that can be affected by the players’ ideas or actions. They are typified by the idea of ‘Game as Platform’ where there is not one specific platform that the game is played on. Instead it uses numerous elements, both online and offline to tell the story and the game itself is the uniting factor.
These games have been used successfully in the advertising and entertainment industries to promote brand awareness and to absorb viewers in the settings and themes of films and television shows. They can also be used to engage diverse groups of people in discussion on global issues such as the environment and politics.
In May 2008 we ran Ireland’s first Alternate Reality Game to a successful conclusion. Using our own learning through this experience and drawing from the experience of others, the aim of this paper is to explore the various factors that influence the relative success of these types of games. The paper will look at their previous usage in entertainment, advertising and conflict resolution and their potential applications as both a social and educational tool.

How is knowledge represented in the media and the physical environments that surrounding us? What messages are best funded, most promoted, or presented in the most sophisticated ways? Which ideas become culturally resonant and affective? The impact of our knowledge environments is coming to the surface as economies become increasingly information-driven and as facing our global challenges relies on informing political will with good data and analysis. On another scale, there are implications for the personal relationships to knowledge that drive life choices made by individuals. A transdisciplinary approach is suggested to reinvent our knowledge environments to best serve both individual and societal aspirations. This paper will share findings and perspectives, generated over ten years of research to discover new possibilities in this area.

A working partnership between the US-based Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and InfoCulture, a media research and development studio has produced promising results with an approach that leverages some timeless qualities of art (i.e., the use of metaphor, ambiguity, story and other ways of making meaning out of raw information) to re-imagine non-fiction communication in a variety of venues and using a range of technologies. These efforts can be differentiated from trends in activist and relational art practice in that their impacts are measured using sophisticated quantitative and qualitative methods—often contributing to new thinking in those science domains. Findings suggest that discourse, informed by approaches that originated in the arts and the social sciences, and which takes form in combinations of both new and old media and communication technologies, has the potential to increase people’s engagement with knowledge that holds value for them. Projects to be discussed include: a feature film that used public sculpture practice to create metaphors for science-based ideas about what produces wellbeing; a social network that used films created by a collaboration between adolescent and professional filmmakers to drive conversation about what young people think helps them engage in learning (or not); a health blog that quickly built membership by telling stories that revealed the cultural conflicts inherent in discussions about health.

Panel: Latin American Forum #1: Alternative History of Computer Music

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

Abstract

This paper will outline the creation of Altogether Human, a project which allows users to gain an overview of what people were feeling in the last 24 hours as reported by their internet personas in the forms of blogs and social networking services. The project attempted to both provide an overview of how people reported they were feeling in the last 24 hours, and also provide users with a means of accessing the individual ’emotional stories’ which made up the overall picture. The project provided a service whereby users could gain an overview of people’s emotional states in the last 24 hours, browse individual emotional stories, compare emotional trends over time, and create graphical visualisations based on this emotional data.

The paper is divided into four sections (with further subsections). The first section will introduce the project and the motivation behind its creation. The second section will outline the content of the project and outline how Altogether Human gathered its content – where it looked for it, and how it filtered relevant from irrelevant content. The third section will outline the functionality which Altogether Human provided its users. It will examine how the project’s design goals were transferred into concrete functionality. The fourth and last section will briefly outline the future of the project.

The concept of the sublime has been widely appropriated within the technological arts and culture: as the computational sublime in relation to autopoeisis in generative art (McCormack, Dorin), in immersive systems, as digital sublime (Mosco), anti-sublime (Manovich). The uncanny feeling of being confronted with the limits of comprehensive abilities, with the unpredictable and the unknown often works as a sort of litmus, testing the “seriousness” of the produced effect, the transformative potential that reveals through nonattachment and groundlessness.

Marge d’indetermination – “margin of indeterminacy” – this point by Gilbert Simondon in description of characteristics of machines (as open and dependable on a human creator) is also an opening towards the problem of (in)determinacy and ambiguity in our own actions as well as towards the broader paradoxes of structural and ontological causality (quantum indeterminacy).

Theories of distributed intelligence, emergence, and complexity present challenges for newer types of representation of reality as a self-organizing flux, with a role of the observer as a measurer of the operations of chance.

In my paper I will focus on the examples and the effects of media artistic representations of ambiguity and uncertainty in perspective of the classical aesthetic question of presenting the unpresentable and “negative capability”. The examples will include illustrations of conceptual dualism of complimentarity in works that collide the virtual and physical reality (like the work-in-progress by a Russian group “Where the dogs run” “Quantum Mouse” that visualizes the double-slit experiment in a form of interaction between the movements of an alive organism and its virtual doubles). Other examples will address the reactions of anxiety and perplexity in relation to the qualities of equivocality and vagueness like in such natural and social phenomena as (respectively) the immune system, colonial organisms, cellular metabolism, spontaneous order in economic systems, social networks, etc.

The concept of the sublime reveals how representations of indeterminacy and ambiguity in relation to decentralized systems are capable of creating a temporary gap in cognition, a disruption of conventional contexting cues, and thus enhancing the feeling of potentia, opening towards the reality of nonconceptual mind and interconnected being

Donna Legault’s interdisciplinary practice acknowledges non-human entities as sites for sensorial investigation and explores opportunities afforded by technology to extend the limits of human perception. Her work includes sound, electronic installation, sculpture, and performance. The intersection of these practices investigate the resonance of sound as a dynamic extension of everyday actions. Donna’s talk details investigative strategies for exploring the materiality of sound at the intersection of visual practice.

Her projects and installations, including Cymatic Imprints, Subtle Territory and The Drone Project investigate strategies for perceptualizing “immaterial” sounds through experimentation with sound generation, spacial extensions and tangible sonic interaction. The use of custom electronics and Pure Data in these projects will be discussed for their potential to transform or augment immersive environments with the intention of provoking an empathetic response through tangible sound and further, to explore sound as it may be experienced by other species.

Cymatic Imprints offers participants the experience of physically engaging with their sonic environment. Microphones are hung in the exhibition area to capture ambient sounds. These sounds are transformed by a Pure Data program to into silent speaker motion. Viewers experience the physical affect of their sonic surroundings through the oscillation of fine ball chains that drop from the centre of each speaker cone. As the ends of the extensions make contact with the floor they produce their own audible and visual translation of the ambient sounds in the room by displacing and redrawing remnants of activity through the gradual erosion of piles of sand. The resulting sounds of the chains motion, mingle with those of viewers and peripheral ambient noise to generate activity with limitless variation. In this way, the work renders the immateriality of sound as a tangible event by silencing and reinterpreting the data of everyday life.

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

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

ABSTRACT

The artists recently completed an interactive Music/Theatre piece (Electronic Purgatory) which combines the forces of computer generated visuals, computer controlled multi-image slide projection, computer controlled electroacoustic music, and “live” performers. From the inception to the completion of their project, the artists developed the piece on three equally important parallel levels:

1) HARDWARE LEVEL:
They decided that a proper network had to be developed which would give each artist his/her own control station (input terminal). The system had to be readily available, inexpensive and portable. For this purpose they decided to employ two Amiga computers, which would share the burden of the systems operation as follows:

1) The music computer which runs “M”, an intelligent music software package, SoundScape, a music sequencer, and MIDlmouse which is used to control parameters in both “M” and SoundScape.

2) The visual computer, which runs Mandala, and is used for interactive detection, image sequencing, and control of the multi-image slide system. Multi-tasking with Mandala is MIDImouse, which is used to synchronize visual events to the music sequencer. The artists connected the two computers to a two-way MIDI communication network which would allow them to exchange crucial cueing and timing information.

Our project takes a look at certain statistics about specific locations in Durban. These will be represented through dance and broadcast in highly populated areas in the city for public consumption. The public will be given the opportunity to vote whether they agree or disagree with the statistics via answering simple questions that should show what their interpretation or experience has been. This will then show how similar or different public perception is to specific data. In this way we hope to encourage the public to become more aware of their environment and engage with statistics that are readily available but hardly ever given the time of day.

Abstract

Prior to the advent of the phonograph, cultural concepts of amplification were dominated by figures of the scream and loud or far reaching voices, subtended by a divine and anthropocentric aurality. Because the phonograph could record non-human sounds as well, the notion of all sound grew, as did the relational figure of a non-expressive dispersal, i.e., sounds deployed spatially throughout the environment and not situated by acts of human utterance. This phonographic birth of hearing was anticipated by a decade in Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldodor, where the protagonist’s scream upon confronting the violent monstrosity of the Creator created the sense of hearing. This one scene of the effects of amplification can be understood as the veritable Big Bang of modernist aurality. The loud sounds of modernity, especially the military sounds during World War I, imposed themselves upon the discourses of the avant-garde. Microphone and radiophone assured that sounds need not be imposing in themselves. Technologies for amplifying smalls sounds and transmitting others to great distances, created a new modulation of spaces, objects and bodies. They were also key in Varese’s unrealized telecommunication works and at the crux of Cage’s entire aesthetic. The denouement of modernist amplification arrived with the paradigmatics of La Monte Young, where the barely audible sustained at length becomes a way to assert aural acuity and loudness at the threshold of pain a way to assert corporeal, social and environmental presence.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Artivisim, net art, activism, occupy movements, Gezi, language, information age, aesthetic experience.

This article is an essay for a theoretical reading of the contemporary online contents in light of the contemporary aesthetic theories. It focuses on online artivist productions and website projects which are related to the resistance movement in Turkey, just before, during and after the Gezi movement period (June 2013). This paper tries to analyze some of the online projects and to discover creative aspects and new trends in internet aesthetics. It also observes participatory quality of online artivist projects and common language in those projects.

This creative and constructive process is based on a different approach toward thinking, in admitting if the image to build expects to determine what reality is and what amorphous reality is, or to produce a series of “images” with a correlation into an amorphous concept. The possibilities are endless, because amorphous thinking in visual terms is inextricably bound up with sensation and perception. In many ways, how we think is how we see and vice versa. The same mechanisms operated on both the perceptual and the intellectual level, so, these inevitably terms like concept, judgement and conclusion, have to be applied to the work of senses on the use of a method for an amorphous image creation.

Process art attitude may be direct as far as possible toward the perception of “image as such” and closer as possible toward a perception of “amorphous”, to visualize a conception of boundary and form, a brewing scenario for an intuitive vision of an amorphous space, a lapse of time of constant flux where energy and information coming into existence, light and shadow, harmony, a form of animism, the unpredictable on the observer visual sense, the emptiness of absolute identity, an ‘inherent existence’ – perceived and thought to exist ‘from their own side’ exactly as it appear.

In the process of creating, the image environment has the constructive idea of “amorphous space”, to create the capacity of finding different approaches, generating themes around space and time, thus springing the changes where the image shape is subdued by the external elements that make it.

Amorphous *thinking* in the form of amorphous images, will transform those amorphous spaces resembling a boundary that never exists inside of it; observer only will see a bit of an image that causes his senses to produce images that make visualize amorphous image shapes.

An amorphous image process as the beginning of an endless line of continuous transformation of an image place, a mirror image space for everyone image event, continuing without stopping, or being interrupted in space or time.

Abstract

We consider music composition not only as the putting together of pre-existing sounds, but also composing (i.e. synthesizing) the sounds themselves. When synthesizing sounds composers have an intuition about the depth of possibilities of how these sounds should be organized into a musical structure. In attempting to obtain the desired sound the composer explores a variety of possible solutions trying out possibilities within a certain personal aesthetic style or idiom.

New computer technology offers the most detailed control of the internal parameters of  synthesized sounds. Nowadays composers have the opportunity to deal with an infinite variety of sounds with considerable precision. However the effective use of this new technology increases the complexity of the compositional task. The computer can theoretically be programmed to synthesize any imaginable sound. This can get composers into trouble though. Besides the ability to design the appropriate synthesis program, he or she also needs to master a programming language in order to implement it and to ‘play’ with it. In such a situation we come to believe that musical imagination becomes vulnerable to extra-musical computer technicalities. Our research work in Artificial Intelligence-aided sound design is working towards a system which explores the possibility of using the computer as an assistant which works co-operatively with the composer. A prototype system, called ARTIST (for ARTficial Intelligencebased Synthesis Tool), has been implemented so far. Here the composer is able to design sounds by means of sound descriptions using English rather than by means of low level computer programming and numerical coding. In order to offer AI-based support for sound design we provided the system with machine learning mechanisms which, on the one hand, allow the user to teach ARTIST the vocabulary for sound descriptions and, on the other hand, enable ARTIST to automatically update its knowledge about sounds through user interaction.

This talk introduces the authors latest work of automatic evolutionary art that produces an infinite series of abstract animations and synchronized sound effects in real-time on site. The machine generates and selects short pieces by means of a genetic algorithm utilizing statistic aesthetic measures for fitness evaluation. The project includes fully automatic daily production that is exhibited on the internet by innovative Web technologies. The author is also engaged everyday. This talk will give a subject for discussion about the possible creativity by machines and relation between humans and the complex wild artifacts out of our control.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a novel mobile interface under the form of an emotional compass.  The interface has been created using the possibility to access large number of geo‑located user generated contents across multiple social networks, which have then been processed using Natural Language Analysis techniques, to understand the emotions expressed by Internet users in urban environments. This possibility gives rise to the innovative interface for urban navigation presented in this paper, and opens up the opportunity to conceptualize and implement novel forms of services.

Can artworks help to reveal a latent “intent to communicate” in architecture, urban landscapes, financial markets, and computer source code? Ben Rubin will discuss his latest public artwork, San Jose Semaphore, and place it in the context of his other recent projects, including Dark Source, The Quiet Ticking of Dreams, Checked Out, Open Outcry, and Listening Post.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Collaborative Commissioning, Expanded Curating, New Media Art, Contemporary Art, Commercial Creative Media, Collaboration.

This paper examines the steady rise in collaborations between the contemporary art field, commercial creative media and technology industries and the new media art field and reflects upon how collaborations of this nature are reshaping the ‘realm of the curator’. Ways in which theorists, and practitioners have approached collaborations between art and industry are considered and a curatorial project, Binaudios, commissioned by the author, is used a case study for analysis. Here, the project reveals some of the similarities and frictions inherent within the developing relationship and evolving terms of engagement between these three sectors. This paper explores the impact of these tensions upon the evolving curatorial role, the curator’s broadening theoretical context and methodologies and practices developing within the proliferation of new sites of distribution and engagement of art.

This paper addresses a case study into viewer interaction in the five-screen interactive dance film installation An Invitation to DANCE. Literature on the experience of dance suggests that dance film is set apart from dance performance due to the relative passivity of viewers of film. It is claimed that essential characteristics of dance are lost when dance appears on and for the screen, instead of being performed live. This paper questions that claim through an in-depth analysis of viewer behavior in the art installation An Invitation to DANCE, based on a case study that took place at TENT Rotterdam in May and June 2019. Our findings show that when dance film is distributed over multiple screens, which cannot be observed from one single position, viewers actively interact with them. As such, they allow for the participation, feeling, proximity, and corporeal relationship typical to dance performance. Therefore, this paper underscores that if strong distinctions between experiencing dance on film and in theatre can be made, they are more complex than viewership being active in the latter and passive in the first. Concluding our case study, we observe a necessity for more detailed situated audience research during artistic production processes of interactive artworks.

Abstract (short paper)

Nam June Paik is recognized for being known as the father of video art. However, some recent research about Paik focuses on his early interactive art. Since Exposition of Music – Electronic Television Revisited in 2009 represented his first solo show in Wuppertal in 1963, the study of his early interactive art has gained momentum. Nevertheless, regarding Paik a pioneer of interactive art is still a minor opinion in art history. This paper explores Paik’s rich background about his early interactive pieces. When he studied musicology and composition in Germany, he wrote several articles about new music for Korean readers from 1958 to 1959. These still remain unexplored materials for both Korean and Western scholars. Among them, “Chance Music” was written right after meeting John Cage. It reveals significant clues to articulate his fundamental concept about interactive art. Based on the music background, Paik found how to appropriate musical instruments to make interactive art in his own way.

Panel Statement

Since ISEA93 in Minneapolis a group of art educators have been participating in a private InterNet conference called F-Burnout. The conference addressed the problems associated with teaching new technology in art and design education. Due to other commitments during this period my contribution to this dialogue has been minimal. However I have “listened in” with interest and am pleased that a series of recommendations have been formulated to address these problems. Elsewhere I have aired my own concerns on a number of occasions. referenced below. In particular:
* Subject specialists should accept responsibility for teaching new technology within their own area. Sculptors should teach sculpture, interior designers should teach interior design and so on. It is unreasonable to expect a small number of ‘art and technology specialists’ to accept responsibility for acquainting students from many areas with high-technology processes and tools. This implies that ALL teachers of art and design have to accept responsibility for teaching their students about technological developments within their field of specialization.
* Specialists in new technology in the arts should be placed in positions where they can maximize their contribution to their academic community. Employing them to run basic introductory computer courses is a waste of their talents and of a valuable (and possibly essential) resource.
* The acceptance of new paradigms of art & design and art & design production are a necessary prerequisite for the development of adequate opportunities for work in the area. If the establishment believe that new technology is about using user-friendly application packages to make ‘traditional’ art objects then opportunities for change are unlikely to exist.

This project consists of an interactive archive and multimedia map that illuminates the constellation of locations mentioned by Walter Benjamin during his radio broadcasts. Between 1929 and 1933 the media theorist wrote and produced radio lectures and dramas to educate and entertain the German public. He discussed history, literature, and frequently described the urban experience, especially in Berlin. Although archival audio has never been found, some of Benjamin’s scripted broadcast notes remain. This research maps the locations mentioned in these notes, enhancing them with archival material and recreations of the broadcasts (conducted by Heather Contant). It produces a multi‑sensory, spatial representation of Benjamin’s Berlin that users can navigate. Our project uses the Urban Research Tool (URT): an open source, web‑based mapping platform for geospatial digital humanities research created at Parsons the New School for Design. This tool (implemented by Rory Solomon and colleagues) allows researchers to define data models and spatialize their findings via map‑based argumentation. URT enables virtual reconstructions of the paths outlined during Benjamin’s tours of toy stores, street markets, and puppet theaters, as well as demarcations of the broadcast zones where Benjamin’s depictions of Berlin could be received. Audiences will re‑trace the philosopher’s radiophonic footsteps, encounter archival audio and images of the places he described, and understand how Benjamin utilized the unique characteristics of radio to ignite listeners’ imaginations. Benjamin’s descriptions and discussions of specific urban locations during his radio broadcasts formed a constellation place – an image of the modern city transmitted throughout Germany via the new medium of radio. ‘An Urban Radio Portrait’ reframes these representations in the context of an innovative digital humanities research tool, resulting in an immersive form of scholarship that creates new perspectives and avenues for engaging with this historical location.

Intro

Keywords: location based entertainment, Augmented Reality, mixed reality, interactive spaces.

Throughout the years, Augmented Reality has become more and more popular due to its usefulness in many applications for different areas: entertainment, education, interactive media, and simulation. At the core of Augmented Reality is the ability to accurately register virtual objects in all dimensions of the real world. It is essential to track accurately physical locations and orientations of real world objects with respect to the observer’s viewpoint.

Keywords: Media Activism, Guerrilla Television, IndyMedia Center, Culture Jamming, Digital Storytelling, Cancer Treatment, LGBT Health, Experiential Knowledge, Coded Infrastructures, Aesthetics

Our 21st century media environment has grown more immersive and predominant with the invention of communication technologies such as telephones, satellites, video cameras, and computers. We are all now electronically connected, able to communicate, observe, and react to what is happening anywhere in the world in an instant. How do we make sense of these myriad electronic messages and messengers? Can we trust or understand the monetization processes behind the code that creates and designs our mediated contemporary reality? More importantly, how can we disrupt and transform the mainstream media’s dominant control over most of these messages? During this panel, we shared our knowledge of disruptive media activism, presented in three parts: a) Examining its historical origins; b) Merging cultural and technological processes to undermine a code-controlled Internet; and c) Populating our shared public social networks with culturallycompetent media artifacts, transcoding experiential knowledge into short digital stories.

Presentation abstracts:

1. Robin Oppenheimer – Be the Media: Media Activism Tactics                                                     Like today’s Millenials who grew up on the Internet, early media activists were the first generation to grow up watching the “new” technology of Television. They were mostly college students radicalized by the counterculture politics of the late 60s who also read McLuhan and understood the power of mass media to inform and shape their lives
2. Victoria Moulder & Michael Heidt – Coded Infrastructures                                                      Victoria Moulder & Michael Heidt discuss their aesthetic strategies for relating the formal traits of code with the situational requirements of concrete activist practice.
3. Lorna Boschman – Experiential Knowledge in Cancer Narratives                                               For the past three years, I have been the Project Coordinator and a Post-Doctoral Researcher with Cancer’s Margins, a cross-Canadian research study. We use a community-and arts-based approach to exploring sexual and gender diversity, and experiences of cancer health, support and care. We look at how LGBT people locate and share knowledge after they’ve been diagnosed and treated for breast or gynecologic cancer. Our research-based approach to digital storytelling combines professional mentorship with peer knowledge exchange to create powerful and personal digital stories.

Claire Jervert describes her Android Portrait project, which examines the historical traditions of portraiture in relation to recent developments in robotic science; international nature of android robot projects, and efforts to achieve extreme human verisimilitude; historical portraiture’s goal of conveying the uniqueness and psychological depth of the individual human being; applying these traditional elements of human portraiture to the depiction of contemporary androids, as a metaphor for the questions of human uniqueness raised by the development of humanoid robots; and the future of portrait traditions in relation to increased integration of androids into everyday life.

Fritz Haeg’s work has included edible gardens, public dances, educational environments, animal architecture, domestic gatherings, urban parades, temporary encampments, documentary videos, publications, exhibitions, websites and occasionally buildings for people. For the Wildlife: Trans-Species Habitats theme, he speaks on his Animal Estates project, a housing initiative for native animals in cities around the world which debuted at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Panel: New Environmental Art Practices on Landscapes of the Polar Regions; Politics, Emotion and Culture (FARFIELD 1)

This per­for­mance lec­ture is based on Judit Her­sko’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists and her ex­pe­ri­ence in Antarc­tica as a re­cip­i­ent of the Na­tional Sci­ence Foun­da­tion Antarc­tic Artists and Writ­ers Grant. Her­sko ex­am­ines polar ex­plo­ration and sci­ence from the per­spec­tive of a fic­ti­tious, un­known, fe­male ex­plorer, Anna Schwartz, who trav­els to Antarc­tica with the 1939 Byrd Antarc­tic ex­pe­di­tion. Her­sko in­serts Anna’s char­ac­ter into real events and sci­en­tific quests, thereby spawn­ing a nar­ra­tive that re­flects on the ab­sence of women from the his­tory of Antarc­tic ex­plo­ration and sci­ence until the late 1960s.

She pre­sents a lay­ered story that ad­dresses the his­tory of Carte­sian sci­ence as well as cur­rent cli­mate change data in the con­text of pre­sent eco­nomic and po­lit­i­cal re­al­i­ties, while her in­ser­tion of alter egos such as Anna Schwartz, who con­nect closely and per­son­ally with the polar land­scape, ren­der the sci­en­tific data emo­tion­ally en­gag­ing. Anna Schwartz is a pho­tog­ra­pher and a nat­u­ral­ist ob­sessed with the mi­cro­scopic and trans­par­ent plank­tonic snail the Li­macina he­lic­ina and its preda­tor the Clione antarc­tica. Her in­ti­mate re­la­tion­ship with these tiny crea­tures is in con­trast to the heroic no­tions of ex­plo­ration of her day, while iron­i­cally, her focus on the minute and in­vis­i­ble lay­ers of the Antarc­tic land­scape is more rel­e­vant to cur­rent re­search in polar sci­ence. These plank­tonic snails, stud­ied by Her­sko’s col­lab­o­ra­tor, bi­o­log­i­cal oceanog­ra­pher Dr. Vic­to­ria Fabry, func­tion as ca­naries in the coal mine when it comes to ocean acid­i­fi­ca­tion – one of the most in­sid­i­ous as­pects of an­thro­pogenic cli­mate change that is rapidly al­ter­ing the food chain and ecol­ogy of the oceans.

Panel: SENSORIUM: Interdisciplinary Practices of Embodiment and Technology

“What makes for a liv­able world is no idle ques­tion. It is not merely a ques­tion for philoso­phers. Some­where in the an­swer we find our­selves not only com­mit­ted to a cer­tain view of what life is, and what it should be, but also of what con­sti­tutes the human” (Ju­dith But­ler Un­do­ing Gen­der)

“In fact, all my work em­anates from one big ques­tion: how can we live in a world that we don’t un­der­stand?”

_Annie Abra­hams, in in­ter­view with Maria Chatzichristodoulou

This paper ex­plores the work of French-based pi­o­neer of net­worked per­for­mance art Annie Abra­hams, in re­la­tion to no­tions of in­ti­macy in me­di­ated per­for­mance prac­tice. Specif­i­cally, it ex­plores two of Abra­hams’s pieces: Shared Still Life/Na­ture Morte Partagee (2010) and L’Un La Poupee de L’Autre (One the Pup­pet of the Other) (2007). The paper sug­gests that, un­like a plethora of other tech­nol­o­gised prac­tices, Abra­hams’s work re­sists the cel­e­bra­tion of utopic no­tions of the tech­nolo­gies of con­nec­tiv­ity and in­ter­ac­tiv­ity. In­stead, its focus is on bro­ken links and mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tions, that is, the fail­ure of both tech­no­log­i­cal and human con­nec­tiv­ity. The ar­ti­cle ar­gues that the ac­cep­tance of fail­ure as an el­e­ment that is em­bed­ded in the make-up of net­works is what ren­ders Abra­hams’s In­ter­net em­bod­ied and vis­ceral, “an In­ter­net of feel­ing” (as termed by Ruth Cat­low in her essay ac­com­pa­ny­ing Abra­hams’ If Not You Not Me ex­hi­bi­tion at the HTTP Gallery in Lon­don). It fur­ther ar­gues in favour of a “ba­nal­ity” that char­ac­terises Abra­hams’s work. This ba­nal­ity is not the safe zone of in­ti­macy iden­ti­fied by Do­minic John­son in his re­cent lec­ture Live Art and Body Mod­i­fi­ca­tion, but a far more trou­bling man­i­fes­ta­tion of it. Fi­nally, the ar­ti­cle pro­poses that Abra­hams be­longs to a gen­er­a­tion of fe­male artists who, as Morse has sug­gested, seek to chal­lenge their very artis­tic medium.

Anokua is a three-part project which combines different forms of storytelling and experiences to convey the cosmogony of Columbia’s Sierra Madre people to the public. Written and co-produced by a Franco-Colombian team, Anokua a multiplatform experience: proposes a documentary, in the shape of an initiation story, a web series which engages philosophy, science and spirituality in a communal discussion, and a virtual reality experience, expanded into a museum installation, to delve into the cosmovisions of the Sierra’s people.

Panel: Without Sin: Taboo and Freedom within Digital Media

‘‘We will stop at noth­ing until we’ve achieved our goal. Per­ma­nent de­struc­tion of the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion role.” _ Anony­mous
The rev­o­lu­tion of so­cial media has been her­alded in by utopian ap­peals to rein­vig­o­rate democ­racy.   West­ern media at­trib­uted the suc­cess of dis­si­dent move­ments in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya to twit­ter, face­book, wik­ileaks, and var­i­ous other so­cial media plat­forms.  So­cial media not only pro­duce rad­i­cal spon­tane­ity in the form of Flash­mobs, swarms, or mul­ti­tudes needed to or­ga­nize and demon­strate sol­i­dar­ity, but also glob­ally dis­trib­ute ev­i­dence that ex­poses the bru­tal­ity and cor­rup­tion of var­i­ous coun­tries’ re­spec­tive regimes (e.g., China’s ‘human flesh search en­gine’ group).  But at the same time these same tech­nolo­gies can be co-opted by gov­ern­ments, se­cret ser­vice or­ga­ni­za­tions and their neme­sis, global ter­ror­ist or­ga­ni­za­tions and rogue states to mon­i­tor, cen­sor, track and con­trol users, whis­tle-blow­ers, pop­u­la­tions and the traf­fic of in­for­ma­tion (as in the case with China, Iran and Egypt), thereby un­der­min­ing the very de­mo­c­ra­tic ideals and calls for free­dom upon which such ap­peals were pred­i­cated. As a re­sult the dis­course of ethics and ac­count­abil­ity be­comes more and more en­tan­gled with pol­i­tics.  The one thing that is clear is that so­cial media have ren­dered in­di­vid­ual pri­vacy and gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate se­crecy al­most im­pos­si­ble to sus­tain.  In this game of ex­po­sure, being iden­ti­fied has be­come an­other form of vul­ner­a­bil­ity. The eva­sion of gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate sur­veil­lance has lead to al­ter­na­tive mod­els of think­ing about so­cial media and its re­la­tion­ship to agency, pol­i­tics, and per­cep­tion.

This paper will look at the re­la­tion­ship of the group Anony­mous to Wik­ileaks spokesper­son Ju­lian As­sange. The media has re­duced the dis­cus­sion of Anony­mous’s at­tacks on those com­mer­cial ser­vices that (under pres­sure from the US gov­ern­ment) de­nied ser­vice to As­sange to an eth­i­cal ques­tion — one that im­plies in­di­vid­ual re­spon­si­bil­ity and crim­i­nal ac­tiv­ity.  In­stead, I will con­cen­trate on how Anony­mous mim­ics net­works (like the free soft­ware and open source move­ments or the Cre­ative Com­mons) or crowd sourc­ing pro­jects (like Foldit) in its dis­si­dent and con­tro­ver­sial po­lit­i­cal ac­tions.  By mim­ic­k­ing gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate tac­tics it ques­tions the cri­te­ria for a eth­i­cal dis­course in re­la­tion to so­cial media, and it points to the lim­its of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of sub­ver­sive groups that de­pend on mul­ti­ple users rather than lead­ers or fig­ure heads like As­sange him­self.  Rather than at­tempt to pro­duce some au­then­tic group iden­tity, Anony­mous has bor­rowed the mask of Guy Fawkes from the graphic novel and/or film, V for Vendetta.  In this re­spect iden­tity func­tions more like a meme, that is passed peer-to-peer, and sub­ject to in­fi­nite mod­u­la­tion.

For the Transportation: Dynamobilities theme, Chip Lord gives a lecture. He is best known for his part in the Ant Farm Collective and the creation of Cadillac Ranch. Lord’s work intersects with a number of themes significant to Machine Wilderness including transportation, media and communication and land art. Chip Lord’s talk presents several recent projects and includes a historical introduction to the radical art and architecture group Ant Farm, 1968–1978. In 1970 Ant Farm travelled cross country in a “Media Van” shooting video and networking with other artists. Ant Farm Media Van v.08 (Time Capsule), an interactive sculpture made in 2008, invites users to leave a “donation” to a digital Time Capsule, but also functions as a small video theater showing works made in 1970. This on-going project migrates across time and space and intersects with new ubiquitous technologies.

This project integrates knowledge and methodologies from sculpture, puppetry, and robotics to explore the uncanny and create aesthetic experiences of ‘presence’. The outcome of this practice-­‐research are a series of humanoid creatures, with human dimensions, and some autonomous motion, that convey the illusion of a living presence, as well as personality and character. In addition to being performative, my works are interactive. I found that I was able to generate playful situations for those who encountered my creations. My sculptures were created with a Camp sensibility. Camp’s naïve outlandishness can cause discomfort, as does the sense of the uncanny, and here in this work, I have amalgamated the two by examining the uncanny with a Camp sensibility. The result was a series of quirky objects that evoke some sense of presence or character.
These works disrupt how we relate to inanimate objects; by creating a momentary illusion that they are alive, they evoke an uncanny sensation. My performative works disrupt the social environment by inserting the inanimate object into the social realm, disguised as human; my gallery works disrupt our sense of the living with their motion and interactivity. This disruption is a point on which to begin an exploration of how inanimate objects, embodied as robots, relate to us socially. Technological advances have made it possible for robots to fulfill ever-­‐increasingly human functions, such as providing companionship to autistic children (KASPAR), and to the elderly (PARO), as well as help for everyday household tasks (JIBO). The role of art in light of these technological advances is to reflect on the various aspects of social companion robots. Such reflection can provide cultural criticism of social relationships, it can sharpen our emotional perception of how we relate and react to humanoid forms and gestures, and it can lead to insight into how to optimize their design.

The Present continues, as a time of transitions. Time that smears over the Past and the Future, blending them in the present moment. No need for nostalgic yearning for the chronicles of the past colonial museum in flames. Culture in transition has its own aesthetic forms: eatable books in networked performances, data-tattooing of avatars, poetic enactments of terroristic graffiti, Freytag pyramid devoured by hypertext-viruses, formulaic episodes rising as architectural patterns, interwoven M00-textures: in digital storyScapes traditional dichotomies converge. Digital and physical realities merge together into hybrid forms of social and aesthetical contacts. When virtuality becomes tangible, even stable grounds of the physical world seem to be fleeting and unreliable. Vision is blurred by the inestimable focus, linear time exploded into a web of space-time linkages, authority and hierarchy loosing control over their credibility. This instability and frictions between the two worlds might be the strange attractors for contacts between remote concepts and communities. The question is how do we weave the fabric of a language in transition, while the fibre still rips open randomly, through system crashes, censorships, copyrights and incompatibilities? What impulse can tie a knot and bridge the ruptures? The answer could be: Touch.

Panel:  The Institute of Unnecessary Research

“…as art col­lapses into sci­ence, cen­tral­ized con­trol dis­si­pates into net­works, and cul­ture mi­grates be­yond man, the old mod­els of ex­pla­na­tion, clas­si­fi­ca­tion and dis­cus­sion are ren­dered ob­so­lete.”     _Vir­tual Fu­tures Con­fer­ence (1996)

In an en­vi­ron­ment of in­creas­ing in­for­ma­tion com­plex­ity and emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy should art’s role be to merely rep­re­sent cul­tural de­vel­op­ments or in­stead com­mit it­self to cul­tural en­gi­neer­ing? As pace of change in tech­no­log­i­cal in­no­va­tion oc­curs in a pre­sent of ter­mi­nal ve­loc­ity and fu­ture of in­creas­ing ac­cel­er­a­tion are we in a state in which an an­thro­po­log­i­cal analy­sis of our cur­rent vir­tual state seems im­pos­si­ble? Where tra­di­tional acad­e­mia may fail can per­for­mance based re­search take up the chal­lenge of en­gag­ing a new pub­lic in the dis­sem­i­na­tion of this com­plex­ity? This paper will ex­plore the his­tor­i­cal work of the Uni­ver­sity of War­wick’s Cy­ber­netic Cul­tures Re­search Unit in de­con­struct­ing, de­ter­ri­to­ri­al­iz­ing and de­volv­ing the work of aca­d­e­mics to allow for a new level of artis­tic un­der­stand­ing. I will be look­ing at what we can learn from this cult mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary group, who chose to track con­ver­gences in the post-hu­man­i­ties through artis­tic ex­pres­sion.