Presentation Data Table

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.

In our culture the anticipated future has replaced the historical past as the most fundamental and decisive reference. Web artistic activities is a typical example of such anticipated future. It is a science fiction object. Technically it can be realised today but psychologically our society is not ready for it yet. Seemingly trivial insight crystallizes more and more to the fundamental finding of scientific and philosophical search for an consistent view of life. The high speed of the process creates a situation: from one side the illusion of overcoming of psychic trauma of the meeting with a fake reality (and any meeting with any kind of reality becomes a trauma); and, from the other side the interweaving of human extensions into the common nervous network. Virtual reality constructs a future gadget that transposes beings from the present to the `reality’ programmed and controlled by the past. Controller and controlled are transitional notions; their interchangeability can be revealed in diachronic as well as in the synchronic systems. However, while it was previously possible to juxtapose the positions of controller and controlled, in the mass-mediatized society the face-to-face opposition is vanishing in the network of cables and wires.

Keywords: Generative art, Disruption, Tactile interfaces, Audiovisual poetry, Digital narrative, Tablet computers, European cultural history.

Antikythera is a tactile, generative and interactive audiovisual poetry artwork for iPad and other tablet devices. It is based on the Antikythera mechanism, the ancient analog computer from c. 100 BC Greece, found in the Aegean Sea in 1900. It links together poetry, new technology, visual and sound art, and researches and explores new forms and possibilities of digital narratives from broken chronology and randomness to determined paths of reading/viewing and lines which change their meanings by the reader’s touch.

antisocial notworking (running Rui Guerra’s www_hack), project.arnolfini is an online experimental production and management system that is linked to the physical spaces and the curatorial programme of Arnolfini (an arts organization in Bristol, UK). It is currently divided into the following main sections: the dump where all digital media is collected but remains unorganized; a number of tools, such as hierarchical blogs and wikis that are available to select and organize materials; an archive that also draws upon the materials in the dump and organizes them in a systematic manner; and finally, the curated collection of online projects. The sections correspond with levels of control and degrees of user feedback using common data.

Consistent with these principles, antisocial networking is a current project: an online repository for the submission of new and existing works that explore the pseudoagency of online social platforms. It takes a number of recent software projects as its inspiration to reflect upon the fashion for ‘participation’ with the arts sector and culture in general. The concern is how the Internet is increasingly characterized as a ‘platform’ (or collective machine) for ‘social’ uses, but to question what is meant by the terms in such descriptions. Emergent curatorial forms (using social technologies) are undoubtedly dissimilar to the ways in which social relations have been traditionally organized, but, in general, appear to reinforce existing power structures.

(Short paper)

Keywords: antonymic, algorithmic, dark data.

Antonymic Exchange is an artist-run operating system, an idiosyncratic means of developing “algorithmic literacy,” and an engine capable of generating rich swathes of cultural dark data. In this ongoing project, artists Carl Diehl and Lindsey French carry out a conversation through a daily exchange of images, retrieved using search engines, then shared over electronic mail. Exactly what aspects of an image will be decoded antonymically remains unspecified, and either artist might, at different times, respond in opposition to formal aspects, conceptual connections, cultural cues, or other vectors of antonymic analysis. Querying contemporary and non-traditional instantiations of “algorithmic culture,” the artists cast a wide net. Along with information theory and cultural analytics, the artists draw inspiration from the “writing machines” of the Oulipo, the estrangement of urban networks as envisioned by the situationist practice of dérive, and the “intimate bureaucracies” of mail-art. Quarterly reports are compiled every three months, exploring the relationships between images, the search terms and other terms of negotiation that each artist employed.

anyWare is an Internet of Things distributed sculpture comprised of three identical objects that are individually connected to the Internet and physically mirror each other. The anyWare sculptures are art objects that telematically connect three different locations in the world and enable distal physical communication. The objects simultaneously respond to people who interact directly with them, as well as allow them to interact with each other through the sculptures. Structuring these interactions are a number of games and puzzles that people may play or solve, either individually or collaboratively. The objects transform in the experience of exploration, and in so doing reveal different levels of interactivity and aesthetic experience. The mediated sentience of the anyWare sculptures through non-verbal, playful interaction provides a model for envisioning networked communication that circumvents age, cultural, and linguistic differences.

Panel:  Chasing Ghosts: Reactive Notation and Extreme Sight Reading

Since the 1950’s com­posers like John Cage, Cor­nelius Cardew, Mor­ton Feld­man and many since, have been putting ideas of no­ta­tional re­form into prac­tice. These ideas chal­lenge not only the de­ter­min­is­tic na­ture of tra­di­tional no­ta­tion but re­flect an al­ter­na­tive phi­los­o­phy be­hind the cre­ation of music. The use of graphic no­ta­tion re­quires a change in the com­poser per­former re­la­tion­ship and ques­tions the tra­di­tional con­cept of mu­si­cal­ity, cre­at­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for more ac­ces­si­ble music mak­ing for am­a­teur mu­si­cians. This essay dis­cusses the au­thors’ use of an­i­mated graphic no­ta­tion to en­cour­age col­lab­o­ra­tive music mak­ing for a wide range of per­form­ers with dif­fer­ent mu­si­cal back­grounds and lev­els of ex­pe­ri­ence.

This in­cludes an ex­am­i­na­tion of re­search car­ried out by the au­thor through an in­ter­ac­tive in­stal­la­tion that gives an in­sight into im­me­di­ate vocal in­ter­pre­ta­tions of mov­ing shapes and sym­bols by a range of pro­fes­sional and am­a­teur mu­si­cians. Un­der­stand­ing the com­mon human as­so­ci­a­tions be­tween vi­sual pa­ra­me­ters and mu­si­cal sounds is an im­por­tant fac­tor in cre­at­ing an­i­mated graphic no­ta­tion that is both ac­ces­si­ble and en­gag­ing. This use of mov­ing shapes, col­ors, vi­sual rhythms and tex­tures to en­cour­age in­di­vid­u­als and groups in cre­ative mu­si­cal col­lab­o­ra­tions will be dis­cussed with ref­er­ence to large en­sem­ble per­for­mances and in­stal­la­tion works by the au­thor.

Panel: Secure Insecurity

The An­titer­ror line in­stalled New York New York from March 2002. This ser­vice en­ables any phone to act as a net­worked mi­cro­phone for col­lect­ing live audio data on civil lib­erty in­fringe­ments and other anti-ter­ror events. You call in and leave a mes­sage. Mes­sage may be spo­ken re­port or in-progress record­ing of an anti-ter­ror at­tack. UP­HONE up­links your audio record­ing di­rect to the BIT on­line ter­ror data­base. An audio ac­cu­mu­la­tion of mi­cro- in­ci­dents which in­di­vid­u­ally may be in­ac­tion­able but en masse could pro­vide ev­i­dence for a de­fin­i­tive re­sponse. The bit UP­HONE is a dis­trib­uted, pub­licly read­write­able news­net­work de­signed to with­stand the mil­i­tari­sa­tion of your gov­ern­ment/the mar­tial takeover of your reg­u­lar broad­cast net­works. Sys­tem fa­cil­i­tates in­for­ma­tion col­lec­tion under con­di­tions that can­not be ac­cu­rately pre­dicted / for which you may be un­pre­pared, for ex­am­ple when an an­titer­ror event oc­curs you may be away from your Desk. The re­sul­tant audio files are held in an open data­base and can be mon­i­tored, syn­di­cated or remixed for your pur­poses. Bu­reau will pro­vide a full re­port and sys­tem main­te­nance.

In 1972, media theorist Rosalind Krauss described the new material for expression in emerging video art as a narcissistic circuit– a circuit that includes the performer and their own live mediation. With the current emergence of artistic expression in mixed and augmented reality, a new material for expression is offered that creates a circuit with the digital processor. This new circuit of expression both expands and frustrates the traditional relationship of artist to material: the translation of performance in to code forces the performer into relationship with the black-box of the machine, where the only true analogues occur in total failure: system crashes, noise, and other collapses. The embedding of the performer in the circuit of capture-process-render requires new attitudes for expression in media that can be found in a survey of current new media art practices; the filter as abstract expression, the virtual as the paranormal, and interactivity as identification are among the solutions found.

In 2009 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam started the project ARtours. This project aims at investigating and producing augmented reality tours around the collection of the Stedelijk and modern art in general. The project aims at both indoor and outdoor applications:

–       Indoor as a replacement or addition to the classic audio tour.
–       Outdoor as a new experience and new interactions with modern art

In both instances not only the current collection is used but also new developed art forms and new narratives will be incorporated in the project.

The project focuses on a wide range of aspects such as technical, user experience, creation and management of information, indoor and outdoor, young and older audiences

The presentation will cover three subjects:

1. Introduction to the Stedelijk Museum and why the innovative and suprising AR-project was started.  How do we engage the audience into new user experiences and how is it changing the museum space itself.

2. Explanation of the platform we are currently building. This platform will be used to create tours in and around our museum and also to commission artists to come up with  original AR artworks. During the process of platform development we will create and evaluate business models that will suit the public, the art community and its business partners.

3. Presentation of the following ARtours projects:

– Me on the museum-square: a virtual exhibition of original 3D art on Museum Square in Amsterdam.
– The ARtotheque as shown at Lowlands festival and PICNIC: an art-library where the public can borrow (virtual) masterpieces from the Stedelijk’s collection and place these themselves.
– The Design Tour: a: a walk through Amsterdam with design artifacts in historical context. b: Active participation redesigning the city’s beauty by covering up construction sites.
– Two AR exhibitions in the museum space itself. These are commisioned ARt tours.
– Newly developed tours that are currently in concept phase.

I will moderate this panel of artist‑experts in the fields of vision and perception. Discussions will emerge on the contributions of Arabic medicine to the field of ophthalmology, with its implications in photography, cinema, perception and misperception.

Keywords: metaverse, virtual world, avatar, immersion

In the first year of the twenty first century I was sitting in a virtual three dimensional environment courtesy of Active Worlds. In this online computer generated world of cubes and spheres my presence was identifiable as an avatar; literally and figuratively an avatar is an incarnation of the Hindu god  Vishnu when he is on a mission to earth. My conversations were commonplace “Hello how are you ” but I make no friends but next day invite my friend H who lives in Paris to come and join me and we sit and talk among the spheres and cubes about philosophy. The experience is exhilarating and I propose to my then head of Department that I hold a virtual seminar with my photography students, he confers with his superiors and their reply is “We have other plans for online education.” For a college which at that time didn’t even have a web site I realised this was going to be a long haul.

Today we know the internet is the backbone of the global economy and without it our industrial infrastructure would collapse within hours, but a decade ago people would ask “Why do I need a website” Today nobody asks that question, they may prefer a Blog or  Facebook page but whatever format they choose an online presence is a recognised door which connects to other people. Today the contemporary question is “Why do I need a virtual world”.

Archipelagos of Art considers the rapidly growing metaverse and it’s implications for a post industrial society with particular reference to the new art forms specific to this new medium.

Architectural Organ I / Skin is part of my ongoing body of work which are explorations into the relationship between architecture and the body. Architectural Organs are not techno-prostheses, but a vision for the architectural capacity of our body. The first piece in the series is presented as a combination of an operatic performance, an interactive cinema, and a responsive environment allowing audiences and visitors to unfold the fantastical narratives.

Archive or Alive: Digital Archiving Development of a Solo Dance by Shou-Yuo Liu was a project dedicated to applying contemporary digital technology to the methodological construction and R&D of non-material archiving technique concerning performers’ body movement. Breaking away from previous practice of single-perspective recording, this project provided a sweep panorama of the performer’s whole body, insofar as to give the spectators a 3D stereo view of the performer’s body movement. This paper assumes that, apart from collecting existing objects, this archiving technique can be applied to comprehensively and objectively preserving works from different periods and the body languages that have not been systematically handled by the other archiving techniques yet, so that we can channel unprecedentedly vigorous energy of art into our archival display with new technologies of data restoration and presentation.

Premised on the aforementioned assumption, this paper seeks to investigate the digital technology R&D and technological culture analysis accomplished in “Liu’s Solo Dance”, thereby explicating how this new performing arts genre transformed ephemeral art into a virtually archived work affording timeless admiration.

This session came out of two projects that intersected in practice. Archiving as Art coordinated by Karen O’Rourke, a collective artists’ web site, and the AI& Society special issue ‘Database Aesthetics’ edited by Victoria Vesna. The archives constituted or used by artists participating in this panel are of different kinds, as are the technologies they have chosen to exploit them.
Despite their often contradictory approaches, each artist has built from these raw materials a coherent artistic statement. The ensuing discussion will allow them to confront results, methods and perspectives.

Panel proposed by Karen O’Rourke.

Moderator : Karen O’Rourke.

Speakers:

1. Patricia d’Isola, Christophe Le Francois – RDV-Murmures de quartier. Activites microbiennes.
2. Eduardo Kac – Time Capsule
3. Georges Legrady – Des souvenirs dans les poches
4. Lev Manovich – Freud-Lissitzky Navigator
5. Karen O’Rourke – Archiving as Art

Australian media artworks from the 1990s are at risk digital artefacts. This funded ARC Linkage Project “Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a Method and a National Collection” (LP180100307) aims to develop a best practice preservation method and Standards Document to facilitate the adoption of techniques and knowledge by end users within the wider GLAM sector. The project aims to deliver social and cultural benefits by making collections accessible, building workforce capacity and a community of practice in the specialised field of born digital preservation, thereby reducing the risk of loss of digital cultural heritage.

The project is focused around the archives of several community-based organisations which were pioneers of the media arts scene in Australia: dLux Media Arts, Experimenta Media Arts, the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), and Griffith Artworks. Taken together, the archives of ANAT, Experimenta, and dLux constitute an invaluable and extremely rich record. A distributed national collection of media arts archives is crystallising with cultural institutions recently accepting stewardship of these archives. The dLux archive is with the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW), Experimenta’s will go to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), and the ANAT archive is at the State Library of South Australia (SLSA).

SLSA has long collected the papers of important South Australians, and holds the archive of the seminal Polish-Australian artist, Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski. Griffith University Art Museum is custodian of Queensland’s second largest public art collection, which includes a collection of 1990s CD-ROM art.
As well as seeking to develop a best practice method for stabilising the artworks from selected case studies in the archives of the three media arts organisations and related institutional collections that we partner with, the project is also collating information about the distributed national collection to address a local knowledge gap, building a more comprehensive picture of the distributed national media arts collection. The dataset will provide the information needed to inform future collecting, and to develop a realistic budget for imaging at scale, for subsequent funding bids.

Due to limited exhibition spaces, art has been mainly consumed with specific documentation formats. Books or catalogs were key media to experience painting and sculpture. Later on, in addition to print media, video became a major platform to document installation art and performance art. However, documentation techniques of those formats do not fit for archiving interactive art due to its multifaceted properties including emerging technologies, audiences’ participation, and spatiotemporal environments. This paper stresses that current documentation for interactive art needs an interlocked archiving system including conceptual, technological, and phenomenological approaches.

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

The lec­ture will pre­sent cur­rent re­search and en­gage­ment in the Arc­tic and Antarc­tic in the frame­work of the Arc­tic Per­spec­tive Ini­tia­tive (API) with the spe­cific focus on the use of un­manned aer­ial sys­tems and other on-the land map­ping and sens­ing tech­nolo­gies by artists, hunters, sci­en­tists, tac­ti­cal media work­ers and car­tog­ra­phers. The Arc­tic Per­spec­tive Ini­tia­tive (API) is a non-profit, in­ter­na­tional group of in­di­vid­u­als and or­ga­ni­za­tions, founded by Marko Peljhan and Matthew Bi­der­man, whose goal is to pro­mote the cre­ation of open au­thor­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion in­fra­struc­tures for the cir­cum­po­lar re­gion. API’s aim is to em­power North­ern and Arc­tic peo­ples through open source tech­nolo­gies and ap­plied ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing. By cre­at­ing ac­cess to these tech­nolo­gies while pro­mot­ing an open, shared net­work of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and data, with­out a costly over­head, API en­ables sus­tain­able and con­tin­ued de­vel­op­ment of cul­ture, tra­di­tional knowl­edge, sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy, as well as pro­vides ed­u­ca­tional op­por­tu­ni­ties for peo­ples in the North and Arc­tic re­gions. Con­cep­tual de­ci­sions be­hind the cur­rent API pro­jects and their fu­ture paths will be traced.

Panel Statement

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

ALL DAY PANELS

Panel 1

BEGINNING – MIDDLE – END – CONFLICT – PROGRESSIVE COMPLICATIONS -DEVELOPMENT – RESOLUTION – OVERTURE – THEME – VARIATIONS – FINALE

These are some of the structures of narrative. But what happens to these structures when a viewer can impact on the story and affect its flow? Are there alternative ‘multi-linear’ paradigms that suit the interruptible story? Is interactive narrative possible? Some theorists believe that all narrative is structured by closure, that it is closure, or at least the possibility of closure, that keeps the reader/viewer/spectator riding along with the story. Once the audience can interrupt the narrative, the need for endings is thrown into question. If one can always interrupt the story-teller, when does the experience of story come to an end? Does a reader finish with a work before it has finished with him?

A proposal from Grahame Weinbren.

Ethics, by definition are neither electronic nor revolutionary. Ethics represent a society’s moral code which has been developed indigenously throughout its history or modified through contact with neighbouring cultures. Ethics represent a society’s mores, often more theoretical than practical. Even if carved in stone, the practice of a people’s ethical system wavers according to circumstances. Examine what happened to the Euro-American copyright ethic, the advent of software piracy and the rapid popularity growth of personal computers. 0r look at the early Internet, whose users developed an appropriate ethical/etiquette and how, due to the broader based tidal wave of general and commercial use, that code is suffering from serious erosion. Changing circumstances can create a short-circuit in a society’s ethical system which may favor the practical values over the ideal. As we see with sub-cultures such as those ofcommerce or the military which have their own ethics. The widespread explosion of media in global communications has created other sub-cultures which establish their own mode of ethics adapted from the parent societies’ code. To date these have been western and relatively homogeneous, a situation that will be changing through interaction with very different cultures.

Today’s “aesthetic” of digital art originates from a carefully applied amalgam of a myriad of new creative options. Does digital art have its own “look and feel”? It can and often does, but since the improvements in image resolution with the resultant shrinking of the blocky pixel, even a computer-based painting is not limited to that pixellated “look” any more. I believe that the digital aesthetic, the beauty of digital art, lies in its capacity to surpass the traditional limitations of previous media and its ability to allow the merging of aspects or techniques that used to be the exclusive domain of distinctly separate media. The digital aesthetic is most readily experienced in the images that successfully integrate effects from previously divergent sources. Ideally, these new creations should be enjoyed at face value. That is, as new unified works, appreciated for what they express about art, or other important matters. The most important thing to remember is that art in any form is not created by the tools but by the imagination and skill of the operator, the artist! The digital aesthetic merely echoes a gift from the twentieth century: that the sky is no longer the limit!

Fun is central to the success of digital media. The dour tentacles of dull, gray theory are virtually useless to tease out the essence of why people actually plop themselves down in front of monitors, keyboards, and consoles. The question boils down to how to exploit the potentials of new media to expand our capacities for play and pleasure, without simply recapitulating the gendered genre models that have played themselves out into smoldering embarrassments at the close of the millennium.

We present a work-in-progress titled Aria (HK), a socially participatory public artwork featuring a procedurally generated virtual ecology of colour, movement and sound responsive to human gestural interaction. Key features of the projects background and development are highlighted with an analysis of Aria’s (HK) intended affective connections between people, their environment, participation, data and play.

This paper seeks to address a number of issues that impact upon the relationship of the gallery to the advance of electronic arts practice. The discussion centrcs on notions of fear and control and is based on research carried out in 1996/97. The gallery has and continues to function as a controlled broadcast channel where content is defined and verified by a select few. With fixed or linear works the curator has been able to control the nature of presentation within the gallery and consequently the nature of audience interaction. This has further reinforced notions of creative authorship as artists and curators collaborate to build up cultural capital within an established hegemony. The advent of multi-channel global broadcast systems and the exploitation by artists of interactive technologies represents a major challenge in terms of the gallery curatorial response.

Fear is particularly evident in relation to online interactive installations where what appears within the gallery space is out of the curators control. The evidence from our research leads us to believe the fear of losing control of the presentation content limits the gallery to a closed channel when in fact the space could be seen as a unique ‘device’.

Augmented Reality in Open Spaces (AROS) explores culture and creative technologies in the open spaces of Albuquerque by working with local youth to create a mural that links to content on the web via Argon, an Augmented Reality browser developed at Georgia Tech. Participants use Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDTs) developed at RPI to learn standards-based math and computing as they simulate designs that are combined to produce an outdoor mural. The experience of interacting with the mural through touchscreen, camera-enabled mobile devices blends virtual and physical spaces and results in a greater appreciation for STEM learning, culture and art.

“Media res” or “media in res”, meaning into the middle of things, is a Latin phrase concerning a narrative technique in which the story (image and/or text) begins most of the times in the mid-point in which the narrative reaches its most critical point.

In his book “Ars Poetica” (The Art of Poetry) Horace ( Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Rome 65 – 8BC) used the terms “ab ovo” (from the egg) and “in media res” when he was describing the ideal epic poet: “Nor does he begin the Trojan War from the egg, but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things. ..” By the term “from the egg” Horace referred to the myth of Leda who, as a swan, gave birth to Helen of Troy from an egg that she kept in her chest until it hatched. Undoubtedly the “egg” as well as the series of Leda’s metamorphoses are conceptual equipments that governed the entire imaginative sphere of that time.

Antiquity imagery captured a moment in media res in which all phenomena whose nature is suddenly to break out, departure and arrive again, simultaneously, in another mental stage, performing as a unified composition in an unconditional and unchanging duration.

This operation, similar to a gestalt effect, seems to be profound and flexible enough to meet out recent ICT’s imagery strategies. Even if it has suffered scant attention and discontinuity from Renaissance’s and Enlightenment’s axioms such as rationalism and realism, it reappears in recent imagery practices like virtual, telematic and immersive artistic techniques.

ABSTRACT

The presentation gives an outline of the development of the ‘Festival Ars Electronica’ from 1979 onward and the aim of the ‘Prix Ars Electronica’ as a prize contest for comouterarts: graphics, animation, music and interactive art. Furthermore, the presentation will particularly note the changing context in which the relation between art and technology is developing, and analyses, in connection, the changing possibilities for forms of presentation and the changing concepts of artistic projects.

Location based media and in particular the so called locative arts discourse make claims for reconfiguring public spaces through participatory uses of mobile and wireless technologies in urban settings. In this paper I am questioning the degree to which location based media can challenge existing configurations of public space. Instead I suggest to “read” these acts, on the one hand as metaphoric or conceptual acts which address the discourse of public space, and on the other hand as private yet shared practices within public spaces, new forms of ars memorativa. In the paper I also consider the role of new technologies as a sublime.

The session describes the development of the robotic artwork – PETIT MAL – with video documentation and demonstration with the artwork itself.

Founded in 1988, Art 3000 is the first French creative artists association in France dedicated to new technologies. It promotes and disseminates new forms of creation by organizing events, publishing NOV’ART magazine and managing a Minitel site (3615 ART 3000). It supports computer graphics art, multimedia and virtual reality through workshops and it develops numerous partnerships with industry leaders and research laboratories. Its “Author’s Rights Laboratory” closely follows the evolution of copyrights in the area of new technologies.

Historically, notions of art and science have fluctuated in the degree of their [in]compatibility. With the re-emergence of art as a tool through which biological knowledge is being explored, unexpected relationships between traditional scientific and artistic practices are beginning to materialize. Beyond the incorporation of scientific imagery into works of art, the increasing commercialization of research technologies within the fields of molecular and cell biology now permits artists to use biological research methods in their pursuit of artistic form and expression. From transgenic chimeras to semi-living ‘bio-constructions’, artists are producing works that transcend the boundaries of these two cultures of inquiry, allowing artists to explore ethical and social implications surrounding scientific research. This idea of a ‘third culture’ further raises the question of whether art and science practices can inform each other in a more mutually symbiotic way; notions of the ‘performative’ in science (exemplified in the work of Hans Diebner), as a methodological tool for exploring behavior in simulated complex biological and mathematical systems, represents one such striking direction.

Within the increasingly diverse body of Art-Science inspired work, boundaries are being crossed at the levels of conception, method/process, publication as well as reception. To better understand these points of cross-over in contemporary work, a new ontology is required that effectively captures these multiple conceptual, contextual, content and time based properties and processes, something we are currently developing. For this project we will be building on V2’s research on ‘Capturing Unstable Media’ (2004), as well as the research of Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.?Art.?Research.

For artists, and indeed scientists, active in this area, a greater awareness of such relationships may be highly beneficial not only in the development of new works but also in devising new methods for the communication and re-exploration of the scientific process; its premises, processes and observations.

In 1975 Aldo Giorgini developed a software program in FORTRAN called FIELDS that was a numerical visual laboratory devoted entirely to art production. Working extensively as both artist and scientist, Giorgini was one of the first computer artists that combined software writing with early printing technologies, leaving an aesthetic legacy in the field of the digital arts. His individual process was innovative in that it consisted of producing pen plotted drawings that were embellished by the artist’s hand with painting, drawing and screen-printing.

This paper is the product of a multi-year study of Giorgini’s primary source materials that were provided by his estate. We examine the methods used by Giorgini during the 1970s that allowed him to create computer aided art. We publish this work to ensure that future generations of digital artists, technologists and scientists can be educated and inspired by Giorgini’s contribution to the field of computer graphics.

This paper describes biocybrid systems in ontological levels of creative reality and the  reengineering of  life.  Collaborative transdisciplinar research in  Art and TechnoScience at LART focuses on the biocybrid life,  meaning the symbiotic zone where the biological, cyber and physical worlds interact. One of the main aspects is the development of enactive interfaces, which allow intertwined affordances between human bodies, environments and networks. The  Ouroboros’ mythical   principle and  Gibson’s ecological perception are confirmed  and ecosystems propitiate the  co-existence and co-location in biocybrid worlds,  abandoning the original idea of separation between synthetic worlds and concrete worlds. What is landscape now? What is body now? What is urban life now? In particular, our  embedded systems  combine developments in biomedical engineering, software engineering, in order to  communicate information coming from biological signals and  other sources. Transparent interfaces provide the ubiquos and mobile communication in biocybrid narratives for urban mixed life. Peripheral perception using locative and mobile interfaces  and the virtual reality  in augmented reality modeled  scenes , by tagging and geotagging  synthetic objects, everywhere, create a   biocybrid  geography  that changes  radically our landscapes.  Datavisualization and computer vision in  AR mobile   allow the  post biological extrusion of human vision, by the act of seeing shared with the satellite eye in the sky and the handled eye of the mobile phone camera. What is vision now? Neuropsychophysiological  act of seing is a modified perception  which characterizes that biocybrid human condition. The recent implementation of microcircuits with biosensors for wearable art systems (BWAS) measure frequencies of  body heat, heartbeats, electrical biopotentials, breathing and skin resistance  combined with biofeedback, resulting in perceptive, cognitive and affective expansions, as well as a supplementation of the human body. Finally, we present  three artworks case studies in urban mixed life and domotic spaces, as well as a biocybrid environmental  system of a Bioma in the remote Brazilian Pantanal-Mato Grosso.  Datavisualization of sonic landscape, the frogs’audio signals; voice recognition techniques and  frogs’  signatures  classification of species,and  the interaction between humans and the remote ecological sanctuary trough teleproxemy, emphasizes  the sense of human  presence and nature preservation .

Abstract

This paper – based on research for an art-practice based PhD at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (University of Dundee) in Scotland – examines current trends in graphical tagging, particularly in art practice where it can be used as a vehicle for exploring conceptual issues such as the ephemerality of the digital medium, de- or re-materialisation of the art object and how artworks can be augmented and viewed in their settings.

The author chronicles the history of Mexico’s Centro Nacional de las Artes (National Center for the Arts) in Mexico City, and in particular the Multimedia Center, a space dedicated to the creation and teaching of the arts and preservation of cultural heritage through the use of new technologies such as CD-R0Ms, the Internet and teleconferencing, as well as exhibitions. After 10 years of operation, the Multi-media Center faces new types of challenges as the new technologies become successfully integrated into creative practice. In response to the changing
environment, the center is moving toward collaborations with similar institutions internationally and toward new funding models.

This paper will examine how three recently developed, art-related, video projection projects approached the issues of user control, viewer participation, collaboration and artistic expression differently, while emerging from a common starting point within academic research. The three projects all involved the authors, but they each demonstrate different modes of collaborative, team-based conception and development:

Tentacles is a large public projection with game-like user controls accessible through an iPhone. Tentacles was a collaboration between faculty, staff and students in three academic media art, design and entertainment labs.

Trio, an interactive video art installation displays three folk musicians playing a song together. Viewers dialling in on mobile phones can swap in different musicians to create different arrangements of the song. Trio was largely a solo production, but used tools and techniques developed in a university media lab.

The Art of Waiting is a collaboration between researchers at a kids rehabilitation hospital with undergraduate design students to create engaging, calming and social user experiences for children waiting for clinical appointments. The interface includes a video projection wall in the waiting room and 100 in-floor sensors making it accessible to users with all levels of physical ability.

These three productions share many common elements. They all present video projections to a non-specialist audience with software controlled interactivity. Each is meant to be discovered, enabling individual viewers, players or passersby to participate in a multi-user, location-specific experience in a public space. Although they share some features with simulations, they all avoid standard gaming conventions. There are no levels, no overt objectives, no winners or losers.

At the same time, these three projects started with different assumptions about the user, different communication goals and different production and collaboration strategies. Additionally, the core requirements of each project were linked to the contexts they emerged from: experience design, healthcare delivery and art practice.

In this examination the interdisciplinarity of these three, linked projects will be highlighted through their commonalities and differences, their relationships to the envelopes of art, design, engineering and healthcare, and their adoption of  co-creation, play and social collaboration as elements within their participatory frameworks.

Abstract

Short Paper

This talk will focus on the strategies and artistic performances of Colin Piepgras, whose work deals with the interface between the individual and a fast forward, mall-mythology culture. Piepgras, who is employed by the Field Robotics Center of Carnegie Mellon University, attempts to reconcile high-tech employment with a low-tech artistic production. Through the manufacture and performance of mechanical exo-skeletons and insulating super-suits in quasi-public settings such as airports and train stations.

Art and Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI) began as a grass-roots arts organization based in New York City in 1991. The purpose was two-fold: to champion art that is either inspired by or uses science and/or technology; and to find ways to encourage collaborations between art and science communities. ASCI provides access to information and resources via a monthly ASCI Bulletin, referrals to curators, commissioning agents, and the media. It serves as a fiscal conduit for public projects, presents a public lecture series on “Art & Technology” at Cooper Union (New York City), and distributes the bi-annual newsletter, Movements, as well as an annual ASCI Directory.

Water is the essence of life on our planet and yet, due to climate change and multinational politics of profit, water and access to clean drinkable water are diminishing on an unprecedented scale. The art&science Mist Collector project addresses water shortage by looking at a new paradigm of collecting water from fog. In my presentation I will use Karen Barad’s theory of ‘agential realism’ that inspired by quantum theory, considers ‘matter’ as an active agent that dissolves boundaries of dualistic thinking (matter/mind, animate/non-animate, human/non-human, sentient/non-sentient), to demonstrate how through art and science “intra-action” – which means onto-epistemological inseparability, we can bring forward imaginative solutions and produce poetic messages that are able to create a more acute awareness of the global water situation.

I consider our research as a platform of “dynamic relationality”, in which the public is invited to enact an “ethical response-ability” by engaging with the artworks’ space, time and matter processes. Mist Collector, by bringing ‘humanity’ to the scale of a single drop of water and by embarking the visitor aboard an Earth sized vessel sailing in the fog, states the necessity for all sentience – human and “inhuman” (outside the binary of human/non-human) to start building a shared narrative, an uncertain shadow of an ever failing ecosophic Future/Present/Past that may still be shaped and imagined together.

Abstract

The status and understanding of technology in the computer epoch is very different from ‘optic-engine based technology’. As opposed to the human body, an engine is a different body/construction. The human body was understood as a unit, as an undebatable organism. Computer technology can’t be separated in reflective categories from the subject and, in a way, from the body. A machine now is not a structure that is alienated from the subject. (Structures don’t go on the streets! slogan of 1968). Technology is intermingled with intimate human life as a part of the ‘molecular structure’. Technology seems to be saturated with desire, seduction, ‘automata of the body’. It is supposed to be combined with desire with functions of the body and the filters of perception.

Assemblage of Representations, Body
When making a comparison between the body and the subject we work on the side of the subject. Making analyzable the bodily practices and the unconscious, we are continuing to dissociate the body, from one side and to incorporate it into forms of representations from the other side. The only territory of the body is the terrain of transgression, affect, death, sex. The body is incorporated into language and viewed through a multitude of practices. The practices could be understood as an assemblage of verbal and visual possibilities taken from past and present (marginal and dominant) culture.

The Art of the Disembodied Subject
a) Dislocation. A virtual portrait (in VR games, for example) could include the following: mind, age , character, temperament, style, design, sex. Everything that was articulated, analyzed inside the subject could be terminated and artificially used. A subject is a landscape, open for a multitude of subjects, that can be recombined or segmented for different needs and functions. A subject can’t live beyond the cultural media: literature, film, TV. It needs to be disembodied, moved to interfere with other life forms and to be dislocated from the automatic ‘natural’ body. It has a multitude of images and a freedom of recombining and choosing itself.
b) Segmentation and interactivity. Interactivity is different from communication and information. An interactive technology needs a special subject and a tactic, that avoids stable codes and emphasizes the process of collaborative acting.
The paper will be illustrated with conceptual and video installations by Russian artists and by experts from experimental TV in Russia and the Piazza Virtuale in Kassel, Germany.

Institutional Presentation Statement

The art and Technology Studies Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the United States. This interdisciplinary program includes a wide range of electronic, mechanical and computer-based areas of study including computer imaging, digital video, interactive media, computer animation, holography, digital sound and music, electronic media-based installation, telecommunication art, neon, kinetics, electronics, microprocessor and computer programming, and algorithmic composition. Recently, the department has reworked its curriculum with a goal of including more cross-disciplinary advanced courses, as well as a team-taught introductory sequence which provides abroad yet complete foundation for further study within the department. A general overview of the department as well as this new curriculum will be presented.

For a long time I have been sometimes fascinated and involved, but more often annoyed by the use of electronic media in art. The annoyance was such a frequent experience and reached such heights that I tended to refuse to enter into discussions about the place of electronic media as a whole. Rather, I engaged individual artists. “The place is art,” I said.

The basic reference for me remained the one to painting and its disposition to extend beyond itself. In Documenta quite a few of the referential pieces were actually videoworks. Their attitude was one of enveloping the observer rather than encountering him.

A medium can only become a message when it is internalized. Every new area needs time to become familiar. In its first phase the power of the inherent possibilities is often overwhelming, and most of the people using it are adepts of the technology rather than artists for their own sake. At the same time there are the true pioneers, developing a sensible indication of the possibilities, intertwining the medium with their own subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The paradigms, then, often remain linked to another area, like the first ceramics to the calabash.

This period seems to be over for many of the areas of electronic possibilities, now legitimized areas in their own right. The glamour of the novelty is no longer the prime seductive adventure.

PolyU Design opened its doors to an ever wider range of international and local initiatives as we moved to the Jockey Club Innovation Tower designed by Zaha Hadid in 2014. Building on both strong commercial collaborations and significant social innovation projects, we aim to better the world by themeans of design. It is our great pleasure to be part of ISEA2016 team this year as we see value in workingside by side and collaboratively with artists with overlapping values and goals. Artists have the powerto push latest technologies, while our goal is to find
sustainable and practical uses. Design and art can goside by side when major corporations invest in experimentationand interactive and electronic art oftenserve as inspiration for our students workingwith technology. We find ourselves sharing the goalsof various artistic pursuits when the local societyand social concerns are addressed by creative processesof the two kind – art and design. Developments in all kinds of technology fieldsare providing a mere-a-boire of possibilities to enrich our lives and to save the planet. Compared toany other discipline, the art field remains to be the most liberal of any types of conventions, with the exception of the mastering of some technical skills, in terms of selecting the topics to work on and in terms of choosing the form of expression. Artist, be it in film, poetry or installations, have always been able to carve out human feelings and emotions and they have been most sensitive to changes in society. The marriage of art and technology, as we will see in the ISEA conference, will inform us about who weare, about what we feel and about our common future. In the 2016 ISEA conference, CityU with a strength in media art and PolyU with a strength in design are the hosts. The conference provides a platform for the two universities to collaborate on bringing the marriage between art and technology to Hong Kong. Where media art is a source of inspiration, design thinks about how to take the inspiration further in to valuable products, services and systems further to the benefit of individual, organizations and society.
Hong Kong is a special place with its own characteristics. Technologies are universal and travel for that reason, but art and design often have a local touch to it. They are about creating meaning that is embedded in social and cultural layers. Hong Kong being one of the most densely populated cities in the world, with a creative reputation that was built from the 70’s and 80’s of the last century is going through major changes in the transformation from a British colony to becoming one of the many cities in China. It fights to keep its identity and its uniqueness. The2016 ISEA will be a massive expression of feelings,emotions and it will also show and inspire many new possibilities. That will stimulate many discussions on the real issues, with inspirational pathways to a better future.

Ars Sine Scientia Nihil
-Jean Vignot, 1392

Advances in-computer graphics have made it possible to visualise worlds of form never before seen by the human eye. Artists have been creating art derived from these unseen worlds. In this paper we are interested in works generated by algorithms which the artist under-) stands and employs as an integral part of a form-making idea or procedure. Scientists, artists and philosophers have been drawn into an intense dialogue over the aesthetic value of these art forms. Prototypes for such procedures appeared historically when canons of form based on number and measure evolved from philosophical or religious ideas about cosmic order.

Consider the work of the 15th Century humanist and architect, Leon Battista Alberti. Following classical tradition he employed proportion in relating architectural members to each other and the whole to achieve the harmony referred to as concinnitas. This harmony was likened to a cosmic harmony and constituted an essential part of his ‘form-creating’ process. In a similar way, there are artists today who employ an algorithm —a step by step calculation, of form— in their art making process. This paper proposes that such algorithms can embody essential features of an artist’s art-making process and that there are artists today whose work is substantially algorithmic and aesthetically successful. The precedents for this assertion permeate the history of art. Artists, musicians and architects have repeatedly and untiringly sought the cosmic secrets of number and proportion for their work.

A PROPOSAL FROM MAINS MIL/RES, HIC&NUNC, VECAM AND LE MONDE DES DEBATS

What type of recognition do our societies give artists who use digital techniques? How is it conveyed on an economic level? Who can meet the massive financial needs of these new artistic systems which require complex financial set-up? What role can businesses play in this field and what are the risks connected with the construction of a public good by private parties? In this context, can independent places of cultural innovation join hands with artists to form a privileged interface for building new relationships between art, science and industry? Much more than corporate patronage, they could be privileged points of contacts between private and public sectors for putting into place ethical and aesthetic partnerships and a transitional model of the new societies we will attempt to imagine.

Moderator:

• Julien Brunn

Panelist:

• Pierre Oudart
• Jean-Baptiste Barriere
• Jean Gagnon
• Pierre Lavoie
• Homer Corlaix

This paper presents a framework for what is termed the emergent imagination (developed through a recent PhD thesis) that arises out of the transitional spaces created in avatar-mediated online space. Four categories of transitional space are identified in artworks developed and presented in the virtual world of Second Life: the surreal, the fictional/poetic, the emergent, and the spatio-temporal. Through the writings of Gaston Bachelard, Elizabeth Grosz, and Edward Casey, this paper examines how the contemporary notion of the virtual has changed our framing of the imaginary. It takes up the challenge laid down by Grosz suggesting what Bergson ‘did for time’ should also be ‘done for space’. Referring to the heterogeneities of space explored in virtual worlds the paper argues that as the virtual remains connected to time, the imagination becomes connected to space. The shared characteristics of the virtual and imaginary reveal a dimension of materiality to each, and further, they demonstrate that both can be seen as a field of becoming. The analysis of the imaginative effects of the artworks presented in the two virtual (and physical) gallery exhibitions of the Kritical Works in SL project demonstrates a mode of artistic exploitation of the particular combination of user-generated and avatar-mediated spaces. A further analysis of a phenomenology of practice of artists in avatar-mediated online spaces utilising a method of imaginative variation analysis reveals that the imagination is experienced as embodied. Further to this, a materiality to space is identified through an imagination of the senses that responds to the presence of the (imagined) body of the avatar. This paper argues that the conditions for the emergent imagination are best generated in avatar-mediated online spaces, where the experience of space as heterogeneous and where the plasticity of time-space relationships is articulated.

Panel: Travels Through Hyper-Liminality: Exploring the space where digital meets the real

The ease in which we ex­pe­ri­ence the lim­i­nal through tech­nol­ogy me­di­ated vir­tual space is even more pro­nounced when the space is avatar-me­di­ated cre­at­ing an os­cil­lat­ing state of ex­is­tence be­tween the vir­tual and the phys­i­cal. Yet both con­scious­ness and the imag­i­na­tion de­pend on this lim­i­nal­ity of space. With a focus on the ‘thresh­old’ this con­tin­ual ‘about to be­come’ is al­most a nec­es­sary con­di­tion of being. Some vir­tual en­vi­ron­ments (or worlds) de­lib­er­ately play with this ‘ex­is­ten­tial over­lay to the phys­i­cal’ (Lichty 2009: 2). Work­ing with a new frame­work of the emer­gent imag­i­na­tion con­sid­er­a­tion is given to the tran­si­tional spaces cre­ated in art­works in vir­tual world spaces where as­pects of the lim­i­nal come to the fore. This paper con­sid­ers to what ex­tent we can ex­am­ine imag­i­na­tive or lim­i­nal states that are, as Ed­ward Casey notes, ‘re­mark­ably easy to enter into’, yet their ‘very ephemer­al­ity ren­ders [them] re­sis­tant to con­cep­tual spec­i­fi­ca­tion of a pre­cise sort’ (Casey 2000: 6- 7). The paper con­sid­ers to what ex­tent tran­si­tional spaces share sim­i­lar char­ac­ter­is­tics to the lim­i­nal. Does the lim­i­nal al­ways find the point of the thresh­old? Does avatar-me­di­a­tion (re)space the imag­i­na­tion to a place ge­o­graph­i­cally dis­tant from the body? Do we ex­pe­ri­ence lim­i­nal­ity in a sim­i­lar way? Or is the lim­i­nal more closely bound to the tem­po­ral? To what ex­tent are both con­di­tioned by the vir­tual? The re­la­tion­ship be­tween the tran­si­tional and lim­i­nal, and the avatar ex­pe­ri­ence, sets out a par­tic­u­lar view of the imag­i­na­tion and its elu­sive, and some­times lim­i­nal, qual­i­ties.

Spectacular art that touches people’s emotions will leave a lasting impression. Whether in public space, indoor space or on the Internet, the ability of technology and social media to instantly deliver art content or people’s enthusiasm for an art experience to millions of others makes it a powerful communication vehicle.

For stakeholders with varying motivations for reaching a massive audience, creating a lasting impression of their product or idea is critical. Aligning with spectacular, meaningful visual arts programming is the best way to achieve this. Understanding how the selections of visual imagery inspire and effect human perception involves looking at the science behind how people process image, color and ideas, and how their perception of the image is related to their beliefs and cultural background.

Taking its point of departure in a series of art works produced from the mid 1990s to today, this paper will argue that tool discourse provides an productive way to talk about contemporary software culture. Compared to the predominant notion of media, the notion of the tool offers a more specific conceptualisation of the use of computer technology. It is concerned with human engagement with an environment. The software tools we use in both everyday situations and for professional purposes constitute interfaces to the environment of software culture. As such they activate certain intelligences and sensibilities that influence how we as users perceive and act towards software cultural matters.

Most mainstream software tools tend to encourage a rational, utilitarian and techno-positivistic forms of interaction with software culture but through the examples of so-called artistic software tools, which includes applications such a web browser and text editors as well as complete operating systems, the paper demonstrates that art represents an apt form to develop otherwise critical intelligences and sensibilities and furthermore a critical software environmental consciousness. Essentially, the paper suggests that the development of conceptual, cultural languages to think and talk about software is as important as the technological development. It emphasises the importance of continually expanding such languages in response to the technological expansions and propose a closer exchange between these two levels of contemporary software culture from the point of view of a critical engagement that is both resistant and inventive in terms of software politics. In the context of artistic software tools, the paper suggests that this exchange can be conceived as a kind of science fiction, a vision of a possible future, about the emergence of a new type of insubordinate, reflective and inventive software tool users.

Mediation in the current art discourse is the process in which the different disciplines are employed in questioning, challenging and experimenting with new models and forms that propose social and political change. This presentation describes artistic strategies and methodologies developed over the past five years in conjunction with the US Department of Art & Technology, a virtual government agency created as a critique of the role of the artist in society and politics.

Abstract

Concept:

Triggered by September 11th, political conditions have been exacerbated by efforts of US government leaders to focus on military solutions to resolve cultural crisis. As the rupture has deepened, artists have proposed alternative models that exist to confront cultural divisiveness through artistic means. This presentation, ‘Art as Mediation in the Age of Global Communication’, is proposed for ISEA 2006, providing a reference point for describing forms of artistic exchange and mediation that bridge social, cultural, and political concerns globally, as demonstrated through recent new media projects, including the presenter’s US Department of Art & Technology.

Mediation in the arts:

Modernism placed the artist on the pedestal of mediation to transmit utopias through sublimated artworks. Mediation in contemporary art has become an instrument by which a relationship and a critical environment can be set up engaging artists, artworks, curators, and its viewers in the form of exhibitions, publications, workshops, etc.

Mediation in the current art discourse is the process in which the different disciplines are employed in questioning, challenging and experimenting with new models and forms that propose social and political change. It has been the expression of the artists who tried to create a platform of dialogue that intend to help societies think about the possibility and potential for social improvement. In the current art discourse, the narration, analogies and metaphors are not any more representative ? artists now use these techniques proactively as mechanisms of mediation.

Mediational art in the age of global communication:

Contemporary artists are using art as mediation for discussion, criticism and transforming public opinion. In the age of global communication, the meaning of art is more closely related to mechanisms of mediation; it is more often produced, upheld or reconfigured within the realm of mediation and its link to the public. Political systems influence and are influenced by the media and on its themes, methods, techniques and strategies. Therefore, it is necessary to examine, question and criticize the intent of the media that in recent years has been highly suspect regarding truth and reliability of information.

In many ways, the global information network is the ideal way to bring about this critique to initiate systems of mediation because they are non-hierarchical and thus empowering to the individual, bypassing the mainstream media. For example, it is the process of how a peer-to-peer network might invite participation and empowerment through the creation of a collective knowledge base. If the message of the artist is to encourage the individual to act, such that the individual can participate in complex social and political situations, then the Internet is in fact an ideal medium for organizing and providing systems of self-organization to individuals.

Artists are using electronic systems to intervene, ultimately reshape dialogue as a mediator that counters or disrupts stereotypes and dangerous ideologies. Global information systems allow collective action among artists, curators, viewers, etc.

This presentation will outline these concepts as well as discuss their execution through techniques developed in the ongoing project, the US Department of Art & Technology. The presentation will also reference other new media projects by an international rostrum of artists that seek to initiate social and political change through techniques of parody, cultural appropriation, emulation of government/corporate systems, and live performance. Ultimately, the objective of the presentation is to articulate a role for the artist in society as one whose reflections, ideas, aesthetics, sensibilities, and abilities can have significant and transformative impact on the world stage.

Leading edge artistic research often acts as “intelligent probes”, implanted at the spatial and temporal boundaries of human physical and mental viability. These probes tell us about the nature and adequacy of our assimilative capabilities and our potential inventive adaptability. Tied closely to technology, they become a most fundamental extension of the living through logics of proliferation, of biodiversification and exploration which respond to the vital and essential principles of self-reproduction, regulation and learning… This short presentation will attempt to clarify some of their symptomatic aspects.

Art at Science—The New Collaboration is an article which describes and analyzes recent new collaborations between scientists and artists. In 1996 Sommerer & Mignonneau organized an international symposium on art and science called the”ART-Science-ATR” symposium at ATR Kyoto. International renowned scientists and artists were invited to give presentations. In continuation of the symposium they edited a book, called Art @ Science (Springer editions, Vienna, New York). The article Art at Science—The New Collaboration gives a short overview and summary of the fields discussed at the symposium and in the book and summarizes the areas in which recent collaboration between art and sciences occurs and is being developed. The phenomenon of the scientists-artists and the artists-scientist as well as the socio-cultural aspect of this merger in continuation of The Two Cultures of C.P. Snow shall be discussed.

Machine-generated drawings of very high density are explored as vehicles for experimental approaches of an artist.The universe of hand-generated drawings is compared to the universe of machine generated drawings. It is argued that the richness of the universe of machine-generated drawings reveals esthetic properties which rival those of the universe of hand drawings. A number of examples are used for illustration and a unique mathematical model is presented to describe and generate such drawings.

Intro

Computer Aided Art will open new areas for the visual artists in the near future. This paper explores some of CAA’s potential in fluidics, the search for intelligent life, crystallography, thin screen TV, and art in space. Experience, however, is made conscious by fusing old and new meanings. In art the past and the future continually fuse, new concepts become old certainties.

Of all the subfields of digital media, gaming and game design is specifically important for multiple reasons : “Games can’t be listened to as music or read text, they must  be played” says Espan Aarseth. The act of playing is in itself a heightened version of interactivity . Again within the scope of “algorithmic games” as Alexander Galloway describes computer based games , play is a collection of interactions , interaction with the game,  through its rules, connection between player and the game, such as challenges  and overcoming them or player’s connection with the plot, interaction between the player and the machine , social interaction between players etc. Interaction is based on action , the machine and the player has to “act” to create and sustain the play.

The act of playing also involves a heightened version of multimodality. Vision, audition and haptic modalities are constantly at play to facilitate the gaming experience. Feedback, navigation, core elements of the narrative structure such as characters are generally conveyed through a sensory cocktail of sounds, changing imagery, vibrations on game controllers etc. From a bare biophysical viewpoint, one can claim that this heightened version of multimodality activates a denser network  of neural connections , a larger section of cortical areas than just reading a text or listening to music.
In his book “Gaming” Alexander Galloway calls algorithmic games an “action-based medium”. According to Galloway what used to be primarily the domain of eyes and looking is now more likely that of muscles and doing, what used to be the act of reading is now the act of doing or just the “act”. This marks a paradigm shift not only conceptually but also physically, with gaming we’re moving from the sensory domain of singular modalities that are sensed/perceived passively to multimodal experiences where active participation through neuromuscular activity is a must.
In this paper, the transformative potential of gaming as an expressive medium will be discussed from a neuroscientific viewpoint.

At the some time that the new media provide significant opportunity for original and creative artistic innovation, they pose a challenge to the traditional legal concepts of copyright, fair use, moral rights, trademark, free speech and licensing. This presentation discusses these concepts as they affect the artist and the art world.

This artist presentation involves a case study about ART IN PROCESS (Austria/ Australia), a partnership based in Fremantle, Australia. Our work is a critical engagement with a number of issues specific to cross-cultures, consumer culture and behaviour. We work together on the intersection of installation, video, new media, performance and live art.

The presentation will address the growing inter-human and artistic communication through interdisciplinarity and our work throughout the past decade.

We currently work on a monograph (spanning the past ten years of work), which will be part of the presentation.

The presentation will further give some deeper insight into current projects by ART IN PROCESS based on discussing, how the use of New Technologies led to the creation of new work and could enhance our artistic profile in reaching out for another and wider audience. (These projects are addressed in the Proposal for Artwork Presentation).

Another objective of the presentation is how New Technologies and Interdisciplinarity can increase the transportation of artistic message today and lead to transformed, extended and even enhanced work-conglomerations between artists from various disciplines and a wide international audience. This opens up for completely new forms of expression, extended varieties of working on participatory projects, linking artists from around the world. Over the years we have started to grow cyber-work relations with individual artists and institutions around the world that result today in various projects and still grow and develop further.

New Technologies enable us to look across borders, to increase the awareness of the various traditions, languages, cultures and individual people that live in this world. It has become one of the main tools of our artistic work to communicate cross-cultural issues.

All our digital work is distributed by CAM (www.?artfilms.?com.?au), one of the leading suppliers of films and books for Arts Education worldwide.

Panel: The Data Landscapes of Climate Change (FARFIELD 2)

“Logic, there­fore, re­mains bar­ren un­less fer­til­ized by in­tu­ition.”  _Jules Henri Poin­caré
“The aim of music is not to ex­press feel­ings but to ex­press music.”  _Pierre Boulez

Many sci­en­tists be­lieve not only that art has no place in sci­ence, but also that the two are ba­si­cally in­com­pat­i­ble and if art might exert any in­flu­ence on sci­ence, this would bedrag­gle sci­ence. On the other hand many artists feel that sci­ence is dull and is thwart­ing their cre­ativ­ity and artistry. How­ever, I am con­vinced the re­al­ity is more com­plex than that- that art, as well as sci­ence, are in­ter­linked more than is gen­er­ally ac­knowl­edged and could mu­tu­ally ben­e­fit from each other. Draw­ing from my per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence as a sci­en­tist and once mu­si­cian, I will dis­cuss how much sci­ence is art, and how much sci­ence can bring to art in a sub­jec­tive col­lage of thoughts and ideas, mostly draw­ing from the topic cli­mate change.

In 2018, the world of commercial art has a renewed talent for making headlines. From its self-shredding canvases (Banksy) to record-high prices for works by living (Jenny Saville, David Hockney) and non human (Obvious) artists alike. Often we accept an idea of the ‘art world’ as private collectors and those artworks which disappear into their off-shore storage facilities. We must aim to re-capture the term ‘art world’ for art which exists in the space which we call the world.

Art which takes place in the world of the public commons is without the context of the gallery and largely without the consent of the viewer. It must physically cope with unexpected weather, issues of public safety and negotiate a highly democratic reaction. These works participate in the identity and memory of the city, such as in Jeremy Deller’s “Procession” which recycles tradition into something relevant and powerful for today, and create new living monuments such as with Ryoji Ikeda’s “Spectra” which creates a tower of light in the city skyline, whilst extending eternally into outer space.

In Korea, Permanent public works in the city are often commissioned through the 심의 (Shim-eui) judgement process which is famously troubled with non-artistic intentions, perhaps evidenced by a set of problematic examples of public art in the city today. The confusion of ‘what is public art?’ in Seoul is highlighted by the 400 million KRW publicly commissioned golden Gangnam Style artwork outside the COEX complex, contrasting with the citizen-rejected Shoes Tree of 2017’s Seoullo opening. This talk will aim to consolidate these issues and demonstrate new artistic acts which cannot be collected, but belong to the space of the city itself.

ABSTRACT

Computer graphics have thusfar been difficult to distribute in any quantity, due to the fact that graphics files require considerately more digital storage space than other datatypes. CD ROMs, which are optical discs, and identical to the better known music CDs, now represent the newest storage technology for personal computers. Since one such ‘compact disc’ can hold the equivalent of more than 600 800K floppy disks, and weighs less than one single one of those 3.5 inch floppies, it is a very attractive distribution medium for large volumes of digital art.

High-tech media production often passes the bounds of human capacity for perception: a stream of circles and sports in Ulf Langheinrich’s «Semisphere» (exhibited in Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 2008) moves on the spectator and overwhelms him, even in the case of eyes closed; experiments with electronic music from Pierre Henry to Ryoji Ikeda try the threshhold of audibility… Media art including animation has driven to an extreme the sense of tragedy and horror caused by the fact of machine’s growing role which is considered to leave less and less place for humans (or, as F. Kittler puts it, media do not have «people» as presupposition for their existence, at all). It proposes a specific «embodiment» of that feeling, like in «The Substance of Earth» by Jin-man Kim (South Korea, 2007). Such works demand a «big narrative» to be their interpretation, and this interpretation has to deal with apocalyptic understanding of technique. But having tested the variaty of expressive forms which became possible with technological development, having come to forms that are hurdly devidable into genres, art seems to now develop less «formal» approach and to come closer and with more accuracy to the intimate in man. It could be characterized in terms of «new sensibility» or «new honesty». It doesn’t mean that art is going to be an a-technological nonconformist. Rather, it uses technical means differently so that to create a special space of exchange — between artist and viewer, between «work» itself and conditions that make it visible/audible — a space, medial to them all. These works may not show anything special or quickly eye-catching, they just invite those who come to see or hear them to fell close to someone’s activities, to fell in-common.

 (Long paper)

Keywords: Art, Design, Media_art, Aging, Dementia, Health, Wellbeing, Affect, Ethnography

As the median age of the global population increases a larger proportion of the population will be what is considered old. The aging process causes physical, cognitive and emotional changes and shifts the individual’s perception of their world. Artists and designers are increasingly working with practices that intervene, interact and bring about transformation. They engage with publics that operate as participants and co-creators and as such are increasingly likely to engage with older people. Western culture has increasingly pathologized aging with a focus on countering its impact and delaying the inevitable end. The individual is addressed as a less able version of him or herself and assessed in terms of deficit, lack and loss. Art and design projects with older people often get caught up in the pathologizing of aging. They are viewed and assessed in terms of art therapies or positioned as assistive technologies within medical, scientific and technological discourses. This critical analysis explores how aging can be addressed in terms of the capacity and potentiality of older people. It investigates how, by employing ethnographic, person-centered approaches focusing on personhood and affect, artists and designers can challenge and transform accepted views of aging.

The artist speaks up, the designer lends his voice… Is it that simple? The designer responds to specifications while dealing with constraints. But in the process, he also impacts on aesthetics. The artist, on the other hand, chooses his subject and the setting of his discourse, but his intention also defines specifications : is he the designer of his own creation? These both reflect the same mastery over matter. However, they relate to different trades, practices, economies and even different communities.

For the past two years The Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) has been advocating and developing a model for working commercially with creativity, a model where artists aren’t diminished in their creative work and yet are able to generate a broad range of revenue from their activity. This Ancillary IPs model theorises that, despite myths to the country, artist regularly work in trans-disciplinary teams and this way of working is analogues to the entrepreneurial team found in business. The model predicts that if this trans-disciplinary team is recognised while the relationships and commercialisation processes are managed within specific criteria, artists can successfully commercialise intellectual property embed in their artwork while enhancing their artistic output.

Through the analysis of research under taken by the Australian Network for Art and Technology and Adelaide Universities ECIC and exploration of the case of Rezon8 the hypotheses proposed by the Ancillary IPs model is tested.

In 2010 ANAT partnered with Adelaide University’s ECIC to undertaking a preliminary survey into attitudes of artists to commercialisation of IP and the concept of working in trans-disciplinary teams. The survey found that an overwhelming number of respondents where positively disposed to both concepts. Concurrent with the survey this trans-disciplinary way of thinking about art and cultural activity was proved through the development of Rezon8. Rezon8 is a company formed out of the artistic partnership of artist Jimmy McGilchrist and programmer and ICT professional Darryn van Someren. Within a complete ecosystem of trans-disciplinary skills including chip designers, artists, audience, advertising agencies, digital animation, finance and business experts Rezon8 developed a product and business from the IP embed in an artwork, while undertaking significant art projects that open up unique R&D opportunities for the business.

The Rezon8 case proves how this approach can simultaneously unlock new business and artistic opportunities. The paper also finds the initial criteria of the Ancillary IPs model are constraining and that unpredicted extra befits arise for the artistic career of those working in an Ancillary IPs team.

Over the past two decades the appropriation, modification and subversion of digital games has developed as an ongoing practice amongst artists. This has been discussed by a number of theorists but less attention has been given to historical precedents auguring this trend. Through the example of the game of chess, this paper discusses some of the key elements of association that have defined the interrelation of art and games from the early days of the twentieth century through to our contemporary era. The game form, whether digital or non-digital, will be considered a medium whose tool value is intricately interconnected with game mechanics. Specific examples will be discussed with attention to how they mark ruptures with tradition in game design and demonstrate a critical play impulse that is shared by artists of yesterday and today.

We have been able to build cathedrals by overcoming problems of thrust; in its early days photography was mostly a question of chemistry. Inversely, was it not a ‘poetic’ vision of Man’s place in the universe that inspired the Renaissance, opening onto an era where science and technology have triumphed? The history of our cultures is made up of exchanges between art and science and the mastery of the digital medium is clearly establishing itself in this perspective. But are these exchanges anything more than exchanges of good techniques between users of the same ‘object’? Does the researcher, who puts objectivity in the heart of his approach to universal knowledge, and the artist, who attempts to give his subjectivity universal range, exchange harmoniously, or more prosaically, barter? Cannot an exchange be made only when each of them steps out of his usual ways joining together simply to contribute to the meta-project of progression of the ‘conscience’?

Moderators: Florent Aziosmanoff and Karine Douplitzky

Panelists: Jean-Francois Colonna, Edmond Couchot, and Jacques Perriault.

You have to fall in love. Not necessarily with each other, although that helps — but with a vision of what you are trying to do together. Mistress of brushes, catgut physicist, ballet biomechanic — every artist’s practice involves rigor, knowledge, precision and curiosity. Painter of light, code composer, algorithmic alchemist — every technologist’s practice involves beauty, harmony, intuition and protean transformations. We are more alike than we are different.
Somebody has to be on top. Like directing for theatre, the central task is creating the shared vision. Good guidance in visioning means getting people with vastly different skills to see pictures of the finished whole that converge as they work on it. First, agree on how it looks, tastes, feels. Then go away and apply individual expertise to describe how it is made. Come back and explain it to one another. Iterate. Collaborative process and leadership are not mutually exclusive. Know when it is time to make a decision. Make it. Bad communication will kill you — not listening to people with different expertise than yours, not bothering to translate your ideas into a common tongue, thinking you are a specialist, being secretive or territorial.

The flipside: thinking it’s not your business and holding your peace, avoiding conflict by avoiding communication, being afraid to ask stupid questions, waiting to express yourself until you’re angry or alarmed. The most important thing you will do together in the course of any project is to design tools. The technologist’s tool seems indirect and arcane. What is he seeing when he uses it? The artist wants a capability that seems uncomfortably obscure. What kind of precision is she seeking? Good tools will be there long after the piece is forgotten and the team is dissolved. They will influence the medium more strongly than any individual piece ever could. Good tools are the enduring fruit of successful collaborations.

Constructing an art history of new media in terms of extent historiographical practice is problematized by rapid change, new epistemic structures, and a broad heterogeny of forms. This essay considers analytical strategies that are structurally reflective of new media through Manovich’s principles of new media, Ippolito’s Variable Media Initiative, and Hakim Bey.

Whereas Gender and Technology are at root quite fuzzy concepts leading to the utmost ambiguity and often de (con) structive confusion, Artificial Gender, Natural Technology, and Emergent Mind are quite concrete and offer us the possibility of triangulating ideas into an entirely constructive field of discourse.

Can three-dimensional digital works, so smooth and perfectly geometric, without hair, without sweat, etc. be totally lacking any expression of sexual desire? Is the very nature of computer creation — so logical, abstract, geometric and remote — so free from sensuality that it prohibits any imaginary projection of contact?

The long list of so-called «adult» sites, and all the recent research into cybersex, show that individuals are still as interested as ever in this intimate and passionate subject, even when it is through the computer. The expression of sexuality in a work cannot be totally avoided, even when working with the computer, it just changes form. By analyzing several different works, the author demonstrates how three-dimensional productions speak of sexuality, sexed and sexual relations between individuals represented, but he also shows how these works express the sexual desire of the author and his intimacy.

Over the last 5-6 years, there has been a strong resurgence in artificial intelligence (AI) art. Through this talk, I want to talk about this new form of art. While artists and researchers have long tried to create art with autonomous systems (e.g. AARON [3]), I refer to this as a new form because of the use of certain specific techniques today for creating AI art, using algorithms relying on deep learning. I call this the evolution of the cyborg artist, because I agree with the argument of us being naturally born cyborgs [1], and I see the capabilities of deep learning to do ‘imaginative’ tasks by understanding patterns in large datasets as a direct evolution of how we will continue to think about and make art. With AI, I’m particularly interested in the creativity-continuum between humans and machines, where the human continuously adapts to how technology responds to their intentions, and for part of the art process, the creative agency is transferred to the machine.

Artificial Life has been enthusiastically adopted by artists and scientists alike, each rushing towards their own interpretation of “life-as-it-could-be”. Notions of machine intelligence, artificial consciousness and digital nature are popular speculations in the new vocabulary. There is something nihilistic, something strangely familiar/familiarly strange, something “more than us” about the creations of such techniques. Are these aesthetic chimeras essentially an example of our dexterity at image creation, rather than an expanded definition of life? The “post-human” phantoms of Artificial Life will be more than we can imagine, but will they ever be more than us?

My critical research on emotionality towards machines is based on affective influence on viewers to give them a hint of being manipulated, to bring reflections on the present technological pursuit. People rely on technology more than on themselves. We begin to treat technological gadgets as individual beings with their own rights. In a contact with semi intelligent technology we tend to give up the common sense and easily treat them like sentiment beings. We tend to believe technology even if we don’t understand how it works.

Art questions consequences of speeding technological development. Technology becomes unseen, and makes us shape our behaviour to match it up.

What if interface creates invisible borders for a human subjected to the robot and prohibit independent actions in the world? What would have happened if the AI limit our decisions making possibilities? And what if it will perfect itself with manipulating on our emotions?

This text surveys artistic exploration of the boundary between the physical and virtual electronic worlds and considers developments in the research world likely to be significant. The last two decades have marked the ascendance of the virtual. Artists have rushed to create computer-mediated worlds. As our public and private lives are dominated by electronics, theorists suggest the physical world decreases in importance. For example, in Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte suggests the focus has shifted from moving atoms to moving bits. Radical constructivists suggest our concepts of physical reality are so shaped by underlying narratives that we can’t have access to an authentic ?reality?. In recent years, however, some technological artists have begun to question these developments. They have become interested in the intersection of the physical and the virtual worlds, which some call ?mixed-reality?. For example, they have created events in which physical events shape what happens in the computer generated world. This paper briefly surveys this mixed reality art and identifies trends and underlying themes. It also identifies scientific and technological research that suggests the growing importance of this inter-penetration.. The paper is based on research from my book Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. This paper can only offer a few examples of an enormous body of art works; please consult my web site for full categorized links to world wide artistic experimentation. Note that the distinction between the physical and the virtual is not as clear cut as it might seem. Usually the virtual refers to electronically created worlds – images and sounds generated on screens and speakers through analog and digital synthesis and manipulation. The physical refers to the 3-d palpable world of bodies and things that take up space and can be touched. Yet, even the virtual world is created in the physical space of the phosphors of the screen and speaker cones and the movements of mice and keyboards are necessary for its creation. Also, the virtual existed long before digital technology – literature, art, drama, and cinema created artificial worlds that drew in audiences. This text surveys art that explores several different categories of mutual influence: the electronic world’s influence on both human and non-human physical realities and the converse.

Panel Statement

Panel: Nethics?

In 1992 the Casino Container was built as a mobile futuristic Café des Artistes by German designers and in collaboration with Axel Wirths, Ulrich Leistner and Sabine Voggenreiter the architectural structure of the Container changed into a network hobo for the ECI. During a journey from Cologne via Kassel to Venice and back to Cologne the crew started to work on experimental solutions for public spaces in the media age by redefining them as an extended virtual area and elaborating electronic nomadism as an upcoming way of life.

About 80 projects were developed in cooperation with network partners in Los Angeles, Toronto, Paris, Lyon, Helsinki, Aarhus, Cologne, Graz, Sydney, Fukui, Tokyo, and others. As a meeting point and Café des Artistes the Casino Container offered hospitality to the electronic travelers, the artists and the people in the different cities. Trying to combine the real and virtual world, the crew entered new areas which were never touched before. In times of a global information society with its growing tyranny of privacy in closed chambers of one-way-communication the necessity for breaking through the barriers of fear against the alien into a real travelogue is more evident than ever before.
The possibilities and experiences of artistic electronic networking can be presented by making clear what is possible and what is mere media mysticism, what is interesting for public and what should have happened better inside an institutional media lab, and of course what could be the future for an international cooperation in art-networking. More than 50 artists from all over the world have worked on these different materials and they represent the state of the art of network-art.

As the net continues its exponential growth, it attracts more and more cultural experimentation in collective design and creation. In this context of “groupware”, what is the future of individual artistic identity? This panel interrogates the value of transient identity, of anonymity within datascapes, and the future of the distinct, unique artistic point of view.

As the net continues its exponential growth, it attracts more and more cultural experimentation in collective design and creation. In this context of “groupware”, what is the future of individual artistic identity? This panel interrogates the value of transient identity, of anonymity within datascapes, and the future of the distinct, unique artistic point of view.

Abstract (short paper)

The proliferation of information and network technologies has led to a situation where at least some degree of technological skill has become a precondition for social participation. The challenge of facilitating technological literacy has been addressed differently from various players, from the commercial providers of software and hardware, the official educational system, the ‘maker movement’ as well as from the critical approaches of ‘open knowledge’ communities. Do we all have to be ‘makers’? What does technological critique mean in the 21st century? Artistic Technology inquires the “artistic” in technological arts, in a world which is largely dominated by technology. The conditions of technological interventions are questioned, with artistic-technological research and practice. The focus is on the engagement of communities of artists and interdisciplinary researchers with the intention to facilitate technological literacy and to inspire a critical understanding of the social consequences of technology.

In 1966, Bell Telephone Company gave engineer Billy Kluver access to premises, scientific equipment and a large sum of money to create a festival of Theater and Engineering. Oliver thus found himself in charge of the Experiments in Art and Technology movement, better known as E.A.T. “EA.T.’s objective is to promote cooperation between artists and engineers through practical actions It has been decided that the group will operate as a type of ‘matrimonial agenct’. When an artist encounters a technical difficulty or wants to undertake a project involving sophisticated technology, E.A. I puts that artist in contact with an engineer who has the right skills and is interested in the project. 1.. .1 Why bring artists and engineers or technicians together? Because today’s artists want to work with today’s techniques and turn them into materials for their art. Technology also needs artists. It needs their sensual approach and creative autonomy, which is fully responsible for their works. Artists are vital to technological progress. […] The artist provides a new content for technology, and allows us to redefine our relation to the technological environment […]. The engineer provides knowledge, expertise and access to the contemporary world.” Painters Oyvind Fahlstrom, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman; musicians John Cage and David Tudor; dancers Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and Deborah and Alex Hay joined Kluver. Thirty engineers, physicists, electronic engineers and chemists took part in the project. The goal of Experiments in Art and Technology was to raise public awareness of changes in our society. It thus organized the series of 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering at the Arsenal (the venue of the famous 1913 Armory Show). These evenings had a fundamental impact in every respect. The artists became aware of the potential of new technologies. During these evenings, the following works were performed: Bancloneon by Tudor, Variation VII by Cage, Vehicle by Childs, Grass Field by A. Hay, Kisses Sweeter than Wine by Fahlstrom, Solo by D. Hay, Physical Things by Paxton, Carriage Discreteness by Rainer, Open Score by Rauschenberg and Two Holes of Water by Whitman, using the possibilities of laser technology. Rauschenberg opened the series with a tennis match, Open Score. Franck Stella et Mimi Kanarek started to play, their rackets wired for light and sound. The lights were synchronized with the balls. The game ended in total apparent darkness. The room was bathed in infrared lighting and every time a racket hit a ball, a light would go out, leaving only the infrared lights which are not visible to the naked eye. For Grass Field, Hay used sound recording equipment to amplify the slightest sounds coming from Paxton’s body and the latter’s face was projected and on a large screen. Paxton built an huge inflatable polyethylene structure with spaces connected by tunnels. The audience could move around inside and watch slide shows while listening to a sound track. Upon leaving the structure, members of the audience received a small electronic device containing an amplifier, a speaker and a magnetic system. Twenty emitting antennas were suspended from a fishing net high over people’s heads and connected to a tape recorder. The magnetic fields created in the antennas were taped and transmitted by the transmitters. The different signals included a presentation on non-smokers, whispered words, quotations from the Bible, bird cries, an introduction to hockey and extracts from Mahler’s Song of the Earth. The last evening featured Fahlstrom’s Kisses Sweeter Than Wine which involved an object that changes color, people surrounded in smoke, singing pillows that bounce off the floor and float in the air and an actor chased by remote controlled monstrous object.

Panel: From New Media to Old Utopias: ‘Red’ Art in Late Capitalism?

“The tran­si­tion is al­ready in process: con­tem­po­rary cap­i­tal­ist pro­duc­tion by ad­dress­ing its own needs is open­ing up the pos­si­bil­ity of and cre­at­ing the basis for a so­cial and eco­nomic order grounded in the com­mon.”  _Michael Hardt & An­to­nio  Negri (Com­mon Wealth, 2009)

Hardt and Negri in their lat­est book Com­mon Wealth dis­cuss the im­por­tance of the re­cur­rent no­tion of the com­mons high­light­ing its role  es­pe­cially in the era of post­fordism and late cap­i­tal­ism. Knowl­edge, in­for­ma­tion, af­fec­tion, codes, so­cial re­la­tions, the “new ar­ti­fi­cial com­mons”, as they frame them, are not in­her­ited but rather pro­duced and shared by the posse of the con­tem­po­rary mul­ti­tude. Pro­duced in the con­tem­po­rary metropoleis as well as in the net­worked spaces we have come to in­habit, the new com­mon wealth seems to be dy­namic and vul­ner­a­ble at the same time, pre­sent­ing an oxy­moron which is known from the past: Isnt this com­mon wealth based on the sur­plus of knowl­edge and gen­eral in­tel­lect the very ob­ject of ex­ploita­tion today?

In this con­text, in the net­worked era and es­pe­cially in the last decade, a great num­ber of artists, thinkers, pro­gram­mers  and cul­tural work­ers have started de­vel­op­ing their work and re­seach on the basis of the com­mons. The new emerg­ing com­mons’ cul­ture pro­poses not only plat­forms and ini­tia­tives that em­brace col­lab­o­ra­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and shar­ing, or crit­i­cal re­flec­tions on the very fea­tures of the net­worked world, but first and fore­most a dif­fer­ent  mode of  think­ing, work­ing and being. While it is still to be shown if we are look­ing back to an old utopia or rather to a fea­si­ble al­ter­na­tive, a num­ber of ques­tions arise: How does the role and the iden­tity of the artist change within this con­di­tion? What hap­pens when the  so called au­di­ence is re­placed by in­di­vid­u­al­i­ties that be­come in­volved in processes and prac­tices that may no longer need to be de­fined as art? Do in­sti­tu­tions still have a role to play?  The pro­posed paper and talk will aim to an­swer these ques­tions through a pre­sen­ta­tion of two pro­jects com­mis­sioned and hosted by the Na­tional Mu­seum of Con­tem­po­rary Art, Athens in 2010: the on­line plat­form of Esse, Nosse, Posse : Com­mon Wealth for Com­mon Peo­ple and the pro­ject Map­ping the Com­mons, Athens by the span­ish col­lec­tive Hackitectura.org.

Current research at the School of Art & Design, University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign.

This panel, inspired by the autonomous train projects such as Los Ferronautas (the Railnauts) (Mexico) and HeHe (France) seeks to examine the way in which artists might take on ‘big’ infrastructures such as personal transportation. The Railnauts question the ideology of progress, instead exploring the two poles of the social experience of technology – utility and disuse. Their ‘SEFT1’ rail module is currently exploring abandoned railway tracks in Mexico and Ecuador and is heading for ISEA. HeHe’s mischievous public art interventions include their ongoing ‘Train Project’, criticizing the car as the only option for autonomous transport and proposing personal rail travel as a temporary, imaginary prototype, building individual rail vehicles for different cities around the world, including Istanbul, San Jose, NY, Paris and most recently Manchester. The panel also investigates the dream of alternative air transport (airships) as a slower, more sustainable method of transport breaking the deadlock of incessant air travel.
Rob La Frenais speaking on behalf of HeHe – Helen Evans & Heiko Hansen.

 (Long paper)

Keywords: Hybrid art, Artscience, Bioart, Installation, Generative Art, Computational Creativity, Interactive Arts.

I would highlight one more parameter encountered in art: creative distinctiveness and creation of a “trademark”, “personal style”. This is the use of a common visual element or theme that makes the artist and the art recognizable, distinguishable. A “trademark” can also be created for substantive or commercial reasons. The question is: to what extent do we see this “trademark” in technological art and hybrid art approaches? Works by Eduardo Kac, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Thomas Feuerstein, Paul Vanouse, Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch, Julius Popp, Timo Toots are discussed.

Our project creates a new dimension between permanent new media art festival and visitor participation and exchange in museums and between other museums and their visitors and between media artist. It is an open source, permanently increasable collection of documentation of artistic events, exhibitions and performances.

The tool to be used is an interactive stele, consists of six multi-touch screens, called European Corner, which creates a new dimension of visitors participation and artists exchange in the museums. Regional aspects of European culture gives the historical background that will be explored. It will link to facts and ideas about history and future and with the question, how to take part in the design of our cultural or art processes. The project generates the missing link between the common aspects of old industry culture and new media culture and art, with interests and necessities of today.

One aim of the project to joint contemporary art and industry, as the leading and most progressive artistic practices nowadays are strongly dependent on digital, to be exact already post-digital revolution. In the European Corner new media artworks will be presented with digital tool, what the artists themselves use as well. This revolutionary kind of presentation approach is adequate for its content.

The stakeholders form an interdisciplinary group of European institutions and artist with the Industriemuseum Textilmuseum in Bocholt, DE, the Museum Industriële Archeologie en Textiel, Genth, BE, the National Polytechnic Museum, Sofia, the National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, DK, the Nordwolle – Nordwestdeutsches Museum für Industielle Kultur, the Hochschule Bremen, Institut fuer Informatik und Automation, the M2C Institut fuer angewandte Medienforschung at the University of Applied Sciences Bremen, DE, the Municipality of Bitola, FYROM, the Museums of Bitola, FYROM, the City Galery Gdansk and new media artist from all these regions.

Our project is funded by the participating institutions, the EU Culture2007-2013 Programme and several private foundations.

Institutional Presentation Statement

Arts Alliance Laboratory conducts experiments in digital media. It’s parent company, London-based Venture Capital firm Arts Alliance, conducts experiments in funding innovative Internet entrepreneurs. The Lab is an experiment in whether high art and high finance can successfully learn from, and prosper along with, one another. As the technology continues to advance, the key factor in creating successful products will be the nature of the user’s experience of that product. By focusing our work at the intersection of art and technology, we hope to create both unexpectedly compelling and unexpectedly useful pieces that help illuminate the future of user experience.

From ISEA2000 Catalogue Papers.

Including:

• Mark Alizart – Red Pill
• Bastien Gallet – Sound, Gesture, Writing Electronics And Music
• Olivier Quintyn – Somethin’ Else. New Technologies: The Writer’s Challenge
• Philippe Langlois – New Technologies And The Film Avant-Garde
• Olivier Halevy – The System And The Event New Technologies On Stage
• Eric Sadin – Textual Mutations And Poetic Practices
• Olivier Lussac – Artists And Engineers: The Example Of E.A.T

Texts collected by Bastian Gallet. Translations by ALTO.

Institutional presentation statement

The Artstalker web site is a guide for main contemporary Japanese visual artists and electronic musicians using new technologies and a portal of selected web sites of institutions spreading artistic creation on the web. Based on the relationships between art and technology, the critical point of view chosen deals with the acceptance and visibility of art using computer as part of mainstream contemporary art. The content in English of the site is based on interviews and collection of information on the works of artists together with texts of Japanese media theoreticians.

The web site comes from a research done in Japan by Isabelle Dupuy, multi-media author and critic, with the help of AFAA through a residence grant at Villa Kujoyama, Kyoto in 2000.

Web Masters: Philippe Jarry & Vincent du Crest.

ARTWARPEACE sculpture plan is an internet/real space project built by Frank Riepe and Michael Falkenstein. Settled between virtual space and real space we are building projects concerning real space and internet. Projects are planned and constructed in the net where you find the work in its own special appearance. The real space appearances are events, happenings; video, sculptures or installations. The places for our works are any kind of public space as cities, museums, festivals or the internet.

Freie Scholle-AWP
The idea of happiness, settlement of worlds and the desire to achieve private happiness drive people on. The urbanisation of our planet is a land-art project lasting several millennia. The protagonists are those who searched for happiness and built the houses for future generations. Learning from the settlement and building societies, we have founded Freie Scholle-AWP. A settlement community that offers inexpensive purchase of your own home; the House of Happiness in which happiness is virtually preordained. With the aid of ancient wisdom, holistic insights, demands of the labour movement and scientific facts, we have created a system of components that guarantees happiness and satisfaction for the inhabitants.

Panel: The Media Space: Evolving Media Architecture and Its Legend

Through­out the his­tory of ar­chi­tec­ture, ar­chi­tects have trans­formed ab­stract ideas into tan­gi­ble struc­tures. In these build­ings of the past ex­ists an in­sep­a­ra­ble unity of de­sign and con­struc­tion processes. Today, how­ever, a com­plex and seg­mented process nearly sep­a­rates the ar­chi­tect from the builder; the sig­nif­i­cance of con­struc­tion is mar­gin­al­ized. The build­ing process is com­part­men­tal­ized rather than seen as an in­te­gral way to ex­tend and de­velop de­sign ideas. Ar­chi­tec­tural ed­u­ca­tion, es­pe­cially in North Amer­ica, has mir­rored this seg­mented process of ar­chi­tec­tural prac­tice. It is very rare for ar­chi­tec­ture stu­dents to ac­tu­ally build some­thing they de­sign. But, in some cases, such as at the Dessau Bauhaus, stu­dents were en­cour­aged to build in order to learn and pur­sue de­sign in­ten­tions. In re­cent years, de­sign-build has swept through the in­dus­try as a de­liv­ery method of­fer­ing faster and more cost-ef­fec­tive build­ings. But these pro­grams, for the most part, tend to em­pha­size cost sav­ings and ef­fi­ciency over de­sign process and rigor and there­fore these struc­tures have lost the con­nec­tion to de­sign that once ex­isted in build­ings of the past, rather they.

This study is a wake up call to acad­e­mia and in­dus­try to once again see the con­nec­tion be­tween de­sign and work­man­ship in ar­chi­tec­tural ed­u­ca­tion. The re­search in­ves­ti­gates the re­cent de­vel­op­ment of de­sign-build stu­dios (DBS for the pur­pose of this essay) in North Amer­ica. This essay pre­sents two process mod­els and de­scribes the fun­da­men­tal ped­a­gog­i­cal in­ten­tions. This essay iden­ti­fies and crit­i­cally an­a­lyze the in­ter­weav­ing fac­tors of de­sign and con­struc­tion seen against the com­plex back­drop of the stu­dents’ ex­pe­ri­ence and the pro­fes­sors’ in­ten­tions and ob­jec­tives. This re­search rep­re­sents a con­ver­gence of prac­ti­cal, ed­u­ca­tional and philo­soph­i­cal the­o­ries. De­sign, ma­te­ri­als and as­sem­bly are knit­ted into a co­he­sive whole through the fil­ter of ed­u­ca­tion (Boyer and Mit­gang, 1996; Lang, 1986; Pye, 1978). The book ex­am­ines the re­la­tion­ship of de­sign and con­struc­tion through se­lected the­o­ret­i­cal texts and places the re­search into his­tor­i­cal and par­a­dig­matic con­text (Nes­bitt, 1996). It aims to un­earth new knowl­edge through re­search and case stud­ies, fo­cus­ing on the na­ture of con­struc­tion in de­sign and its ef­fect on the de­sign process of the ar­chi­tect.

Abstract (keynote):

The electric sheep are set free range; the obsolete humanoids are dumped on the e-trashscape; the coin locker baby takes a teacup ride; the human bodies held hostage set for the BioNet startup; the erythrocytes programmed learn to compute orgasm data; the Net composted bursts fresh sprouts; the seeds gone underground leaving farmlands barren; agliomania charges the air; garlic is the preferred stinky currency; liquid future packaged are made to order;hoodies patched are made to network; Paris declares AIDS free by year 2015;Kazakhstan becomes a Central-Asian Snow Leopard by year 2030; the HIV virus mutated prompts sexual high; enter the BioNet, I hear the blood running.

ASCII Foundation for Contemporary Art Education, founded by artist and educator Shady El Noshokaty, is a research center for contemporary art, new media and industrial technology based in Cairo. The primary goal of the foundation is dedicated to supporting the education of young artists in Egypt, supplementing the art curriculum offered by the state universities by emphasizing rigorous research and archiving as the foundation for the practice of conceptual art. The Media Art Workshop, an annual event, was developed by ElNoshokaty, and the 14th edition was presented in Summer 2014.

Panel:  Chasing Ghosts: Reactive Notation and Extreme Sight Reading

The re­la­tion­ship be­tween the com­poser of a work and the in­ter­preter of it can often be de­ducted from the type of score at hand and how it is no­tated. Var­i­ous de­grees of free­dom have been given and taken away from the in­ter­preter over the his­tory of West­ern music. In early music styles, in­ter­preters em­bell­ished melodies with sim­ple to elab­o­rate or­na­men­ta­tions and im­pro­vised ca­den­zas; in con­tem­po­rary music the amount of free­dom an in­ter­preter is given varies, but is all too often very re­stric­tive. The fol­low­ing paper in­tro­duces the con­cept of mal­leabil­ity in score mak­ing and read­ing, in a step-by-step man­ner. Key con­cepts are il­lus­trated with ex­am­ples of var­i­ous score types from mal­leable paper scores to the in­ter­ac­tive screen based ones.

Panel:  @China, Virtually Speaking: A Virtual Roundtable Discussion on Emergent Practices in China

The 2008 Bei­jing Olympics was the chance for China to open its in­for­ma­tion high­way to the West. Yet three years later media cen­sor­ship pre­vails with an even tighter strong­hold than be­fore due to the re­cent up­ris­ings in the Mid­dle East. As China con­tin­ues to play host to in­ter­na­tional cul­tural events, what are the asym­me­tries in the ap­pli­ca­tion of cen­sor­ship? What is ac­cepted? What is re­jected? Based on her ex­pe­ri­ences as a cu­ra­tor for both the 2009 Shang­hai eArts Fes­ti­val, an elec­tronic arts fes­ti­val fea­tur­ing per­for­mance, work­shops and ex­hi­bi­tions and the 2010 Shang­hai World Expo, Ayas will dis­cuss the cur­rent state of con­trol in China’s cre­ative in­dus­tries and art cen­ters. Ex­cerpts from a doc­u­men­tary cre­ated by her stu­dents at New York Uni­ver­sity Shang­hai cam­pus will be screened.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Colonisation, 3d laser scanning, mapping.

This paper offers reflections on an artwork entitled, At Sea, (2012). At Sea is a picture derived from a 3d laser scan of a wave, presented as a two dimensional digital image, and printed at variable scales. My conceptual interests in this artwork were concerned with disrupting perceptions of the ‘first world’ as being perceived as ‘the centre’ and the ‘third world’ as being perceived as marginal. I have written this paper from the position of both the artist and commentator. I discuss my background research, working process, innovative use of technology, thoughts about ways of looking, methodology and results. Particularly noteworthy is my use of 3d laser scanning within a fine art context.

Panel: Zones of Contact and Fields of Consistency in Electronic Literature

This paper ex­am­ines the way lit­er­ary prac­tice in dig­i­tal media il­lu­mi­nates tra­di­tional lit­er­ary processes that oth­er­wise re­main un­re­marked, and con­versely, what the lit­er­ary con­cept of ‘ad­dress’ might con­tribute to an un­der­stand­ing of the way dig­i­tal media are rein­vent­ing lit­er­ary agency. It ex­plores hand­writ­ing as an em­bod­ied praxis link­ing thought with cor­po­re­al­ity through the medium of ges­ture, and its trans­for­ma­tions in text-based new media art. Hand­writ­ing (and es­pe­cially sig­na­tures) has long been thought to make per­son­al­ity traits man­i­fest. Its ex­pres­sive ges­tural and kine­matic as­pect can be il­lu­mi­nated by Werner’s the­ory of phys­iog­nomic per­cep­tion in which two-di­men­sional di­a­grams are shown as con­sis­tently cor­re­spond­ing to and elic­it­ing a small num­ber of cat­e­gor­i­cal af­fects (happy, sad, angry) in view­ers.

Diane Gro­mala’s ‘Bio­mor­phic Ty­pog­ra­phy’ (2000 on­wards) in which the user’s key­strokes gen­er­ate biofeed­back input which com­bines with the be­hav­iours as­signed to ty­pog­ra­phy to an­i­mate text in the pre­sent time of writ­ing draws on these con­ven­tions and com­pli­cates them in the process. By con­trast, John Geraci’s loca­tive media pro­ject ‘Grafe­dia’ (2004-2005), in which, as he says, ‘walls are made into web­sites’ hand­writ­ing sig­nals the pub­lic dis­course of graf­fiti with all its con­no­ta­tions of haste and il­le­gal­ity. In this work, users can write by hand on any of the var­i­ous phys­i­cal sur­faces of the world and link this graf­fiti to rich media con­tent that can be ac­cessed by oth­ers as they come across the texts, ap­pro­pri­ates the live di­men­sion of hand­writ­ing as graf­fiti into the memo­ri­al­is­ing and com­mu­nica­tive func­tions of a larger tex­tual work that might also be col­lab­o­ra­tively elab­o­rated over time. The hand­writ­ten graf­fiti (in blue and un­der­scored) mim­ics the de­fault HTML hy­per­link, which makes it vis­i­ble as a piece of Grafe­dia, also sig­nals the com­plex rec­i­proc­ity be­tween hand­writ­ing and print in new media work.

Once upon a time when black intellectuals used to elaborate their arguments against racism and colonialism, they would be compelled to explain that they did come from places that existed, that they did have a culture, or that they were in fact human. I think of them as I reflect on the suggestion that in the age of digital technology “we” don’t need to be concerned with the violent exercise of power on bodies and territories anymore because “we” don’t have to carry all that meat and dirt along to the virtual promised land. I think of them because I have been visiting places where the hardware of the digital revolution is assembled, and the people are not a part of this culture, and the conditions in which they work and live form the underside of the post-human.

If we are to comprehend how identity and subjectivity are being reshaped in the digital age, we must look at the relationship between the desire to enable minds to fantasmatically disengage from bodies and the actuality of technologies that objectify bodies and bodily activity, thus disengaging them from minds. Digital disembodiment’s fiction of transcendence relies on the expulsion of the abject inter-relations between bodies and technologies from the virtual imaginary. Clearly, I am not the first person to question the universal applicability of the digital revolution’s emancipatory rhetoric, or to ask who gains and who loses by ignoring the political realities in which these technologies develop. There are many ways in which the question of access to the electronic wonderland has been posed to demonstrate how imbalances of power in the material world carry over into the virtual domain.

This paper is a provocation to consider sounds as forces acting on us in urban settings, both on audible and inaudible registers. The constant stream of urban sound and its impact on us has been considered by disciplines as varied as audio-ecology, the arts, neuro-anthropology and town planning. The ways in which we interact with the urban landscape reveal how our capacity to hear and listen has both evolved and devolved alongside the gradual disappearance of quiet.

Increasingly interdisciplinary art works reflect the complexities of our contemporary self-awareness within this constantly audible and man-made landscape. Additionally works such as those by artist Professor Christina Kubisch point to an awareness of near silent, electro-magnetic sound. Her work can be used as a starting point from which to consider the effects on humans, of pervasive space informatics, which computerises the environment to respond to and transmit signals about our movements. Increasing volumes and dense sonification risk the erosion of human sensibility to our own interiority. This paper takes interiority as defined by an introspective monologue, or threads of thought explored in works such as the video experiments of neuro-anthropologist Dr. Andrew Irving. In order to be heard over the din, the inner monologue cannot afford to be sensitive, nuanced and open. In effect, we develop a hard shell to navigate the intensity of the city with, particularly engaging what this paper terms ‘an internal mute button’.

As urban development increases, city centres intensify and peripheries expand and so our mostly sound absorbent, natural landscape disappears. Additionally living, travelling and working within inconvenient proximity to one another becomes the norm, resulting in our own ambient circle of sound overlapping unavoidably with the those of others, and the sanctuary of near-silence becoming no more. This paper considers how the arts are addressing these concerns from the starting points that awareness is permeable and sound diffuse.

Auditory processing of these environments can result in sensory overload, yet we have learned to survive with the din as an everyday practice. If our sensory integration with ourselves and proprioception has become fraught with interruption, to navigate the streets our capacity to deal with prominent sound while being aware of our interiority has changed. This paper considers artists exploring the effects of this daily knowing disregard on our wider perception of the world and our position within social webs. Means of study include the examination of inner monologues in urban environments, public artworks that activate near-silent electrical phenomena and the musical field which, due to the urban landscape itself, has expanded since the last century.

(long paper)

Keywords: Audiovisual Installation; Ecological Performativity; Agency; New Materialism; Systems Theory; Ontology; Autopoiesis; Cognition; Interconnectedness; Practice-based research.

This paper stems from my practice-based research as a composer of collaborative multimedia works. The majority of artifacts that result are audiovisual installations that explore new relationships from an ecological perspective—that is—the perspective that considers the world to be a network of interconnected and interdependent phenomena. In an attempt to contextualize my research and explore new possibilities for creative practice, I have become interested in a number of theories about the agency and performativity of living and non-living systems. I present several of these theories within a historical context, and describe the audiovisual installations Aspects of Trees, Undercurrent, and the work-inprogress, Bridgings, all of which illustrate my evolving practice and ontological notion of Ecological Performativity.

Introduction
Over the past twenty years, my creative practice as a composer has increasingly become a multidisciplinary and collaborative endeavor. This work has been an enriching enterprise covering numerous perspectives that have expanded both my artistic practice and philosophical thoughts on creativity. In order to develop a supportive discourse for these creative activities, and explore new patterns of inquiry and networks of communication, I have recently been drawn to several scholarly discussions about the agency and performativity of living and non-living systems. In this paper I present several of these dialogues in their historical context, and give a descriptive account of the audiovisual installations, Aspects of Trees, Undercurrent, and the work-in-progress, Bridgings, which illustrate my evolving practice and ontological notion of Ecological Performativity.

Sean Clute is an inventor of video, sound and performance. He has presented work internationally in suspended pods, geodesic domes and cacophonic sonic environments. By developing custom software and hardware, Clute experiments with technologies and methodologies to construct audiovisual instruments, sensor-based interfaces and computer generative processes. In this talk, Clute will focus on recent works such as Mythos, in which he captures the sprit of an ancient culture within a contemporary context. Innovations in new media enable the fusion of past and present, while moving image and sound create a new form of storytelling.

The subject of the installation is the inter-spatiality in art. The key challenge is to detach color (sensations) from form (representation) and make the creative process aboveboard i.e. to deal openly with the audience. “Augmented Abstraction” deals with the creation of a simple Augmented Reality (AR) system designed to create an immersive environment simulated by a computer. Consisting of a camera, computational unit and a display, the system is run on a tablet PC using a built-in camera. By using marker-based tracking, it captures the marker, which is a digitally painted nude depicted in a mode of everyday visibility, displayed on a large TV screen.

The augmentation is in 3D, consisting of multiple parallel offset planes (and parallel to the marker), holding the Photoshop layers i.e. different abstract color patches, color patterns, brushstrokes etc. produced during the  painting process, thus creating complex 3D abstract permutations. By using the AR technology, the final result is the chance to observe simultaneously the real world, represented in the mode of everyday visibility, and the virtual elements which exemplify the idea or the abstract code.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Augmented reality, mobile technologies, GPS, locative media, community mapping, digital three-dimensional design, interactive design, virtual architectures, psychogeography, memory

Augmented Asbury Park is a free mobile experience created by the authors and their collaborative team, which involves the reconstructions of key historic landmarks in augmented reality on the Asbury Park boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey, USA and off-site. The project invites people to disrupt their present experience by using their own mobile devices and locations to interact with digital representations of historic structures. Augmented Asbury Park superimposes interactive 3-D history on the present using augmented reality (AR) technologies, including both geolocation-based and vision-based technologies.

This paper is intended to introduce the system, which combines BodySuit, especially Powered Suit, and Second Life, as well as its possibilities and its uses in an artistic application. The system which we propose contains both a gesture controller and robots at the same time. In this system, the Data Suit, BodySuit controls the avatar in Second Life and Second Life controls the exoskeleton, Powered Suit in real time. These are related with each other in conjunction with Second Life in Internet. BodySuit doesn’t contain a hand-held controller. A performer, for example a dancer, wears a suit. Gestures are transformed into electronic signals by sensors. Powered Suit is another suit that a dancer wears, but gestures are generated by motors. This is a sort of wearable robot. Second Life is software that is developed by Linden Lab. It allows creating a virtual world and a virtual human (avatar) in Internet. Working together with BodySuit, Powered Suit, and Second Life the idea behind the system is that a human body is augmented by electronic signals and is reflected in a virtual world in order to be able to perform interactively.

With the augmented reality technology available, the screen can now not only be directly fused with our visual field through the use of video glasses, but it can also response and correlate with our movement in space. Due to the proximity of the video glasses to the eye, the screen can be said to have become embodied. The images on this screen does not have to align with the strict Cartesian perspectival space inscribed to the external world. Instead, this ’embodied’ screen has the potential to alter and augment the dimensionality of our perceptual field through the form and content of the overlaid image(s).

Such augmented space would affect the way our body habitually move and navigate. How would the body re-adjust to movement beyond our usual body-in-space relationship? For instance, fragmented vision is adaptable, coherent and manageable when it is external to the body – as in the multiple viewpoints employed in surveillance systems or in computer games – but it is seemingly unmanageable when embodied by the moving body in augmented vision. Are there some thresholds in our movement-vision which the human body cannot overcome? Or is it simply a matter of re-habituation, practise and making adjustment to body-mind concepts.

This paper explores such expanded space and our body capacity, or plasticity, to reconfigure and adapt to movement in space with augmented vision by discussing this author’s ongoing media art projects from her PhD research, as well as other related media works in this area. Discussion will include cross-examination of studies from the field of cognitive science, philosophy and media theory.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Evolution, Artificial Selection, Interactive Installation, Telepresence.

This body of work explores the transformation of the human body, both physically and mentally as increased reliance upon electronic technology forces conditions of artificial that replace the “natural”. This Fundamental shift in stimuli becomes a tipping point in evolution.

In this paper we present a newly proposed augmented virtuality called “real-object based augmented virtuality” in contrast to a traditional marker-based augmented reality, in order to implement an AR storybook. In this storybook, the user brings up real objects into the computer-generated virtual space to make a story go on. The objects are recognized by means of an object recognition software MobileNet implemented by machine learning.

Session: City, Public Space and Mobile Technologies

This report is part of the research project called “Public Space 2.0”. Here, we provide a more clear-cut view for artists and researchers working in the realm of public space on “what is out there”. In presenting mapping techniques informed by technological solutions, we intend to introduce the personal perspective – really a 2.0 approach – to urban studies.

Does urban public space still serve the purpose of housing civic activities of today? The “disassembling of existing logics”, as Saskia Sassen calls it, may have to be read as an ongoing unsettling of the former urban order. Meanwhile, under the umbrella of far-reaching, invisible network technologies, civic capacities are being aroused rather spontaneously. Hence, the plain occasion of physically meeting with a foreigner (the other as non-homogeneous instance) claiming citizenship of the same place, summarizes one of the most crucial design challenges of today.

Public space comprises a multitude of data and media layers that do cause people to agglutinate to groups around invisible attractors. To provide a basic mapping of civic resources is what is intended with the agent. By attaching mobile sensors to human agents the subjective individual experience of the user is included in the perceived data. By moving towards or away, or lingering at places while rushing through others, it is expected to learn a lot more than by using data from a static sensor.

It is crucial to select appropriate sensors for mobile use on human agents among the vast variety of available ones. Contingent upon the sensor, where to place it is of equal importance. The same applies naturally for groups of sensors. Additionally, a connection to data storage and communication with the possibility to reorganize information in a collaborative 2.0 manner is required. We show our approach in melting together user and sensors and the DIY possibilities in order to include a large number of people in our search for data.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Virtual Reality, Video Games, Music, Sound Effects, Musical Robotics, Solenoid, MIDI.

This paper introduces the concept of augmenting the experience of interacting with virtual worlds by making use of musical robotics systems. By creating or interpreting real-time control data from the music and sound-effect channels of interactive software while it is being used, signals for controlling robotic musical instruments and other acoustic sound-creating devices can be generated. These acoustic instruments add a physicality to virtual environments by bringing previously virtual sound into the real world. A proof of concept is described, making use of a set of custom-built robotic pitched and non-pitched percussion instruments playing in conjunction with a well-known vintage videogame. The system is presented as an installation of kinetic art and sound for participants to experience. The design of the robotic sound-objects, their control systems and the software used is described and the paper concludes with an outline of future work and a summary of some of the many potential applications for this technology.

Panel: Don’t Anthropomorpise Me: Electronic Performance Tools, Automatons and The Vanity Apocalypse

The paper will ex­am­ine iden­tity and our data shadow as sub­jects of the van­ity apoc­a­lypse, with par­tic­u­lar em­pha­sis on how we make sense of them and re­flect upon how we might or might not in­ter­act with them. I will in­ter­ro­gate the choice of rep­re­sen­ta­tions and in­ter­faces used to de­velop the re­spon­sive in­stal­la­tion aug­men­t_me and ex­am­ine it var­i­ous data flows. I wish to crit­i­cal ex­am­ine how we are “nat­u­rally in­clined” to in­ter­act and use these tech­nolo­gies. I pro­pose to ex­am­ine this ex­panded sense of self and I sus­pect a vic­ar­i­ous con­nect­ed­ness with the world around. I wish to offer re­flec­tion upon our need to be seen as com­plete and whole. Draped in our in­se­cu­ri­ties of dif­fer­ence and in des­per­ate need of sim­i­lar­ity we an­thro­po­mor­phise the other and aug­ment the self.

Sound is an omnipresent feature of all ecosystems, including the ecosystem soil. Since Rachel Carson’s influential work Silent Spring in 1962, sounds have been inextricably linked to the health of ecosystems. The living inhabitants of soil, including plants and their associated microorganisms are capable of producing and perceiving sounds at low frequencies to interact with each other. However, climate changes, such as temperature increase and reduced soil moisture can impact interactions among soil inhabitants, which will likely hamper interactions through sounds.

Sounds could thus be seen as an indicator of ecosystem health, which in turn is impacted by climate change. As an artist-researcher working with sound, space and technology and as a microbiologist working with the effects of climatic changes on soil microorganisms associated with plants, they aim to combine their expertise to approach this yet unexplored topic by giving a voice to the inaudible and invisible living in soil and to expand their ecological consciousness to climate change. Their ongoing experiments are leading them to renew their consciousness of this subterranean world, thus enabling them to interact with its subtle presence.

Abstract (short paper)

AURALROOTS is a media sculpture that combines viewer interaction with inspirations from tactile and aural sensory perception. The sculptural form is based on the functions and forms of the stereocilia, tiny hair cells on our auditory nerves of the inner ear in the cochlea. The content of AURALROOTS is about how we learn through sounds from being embodied in different environments: a) as a growing embryo in the womb, b) as a daughter listening to her mother and finally c) as a female artist communicating with auditory scientists.

AURALROOTS is a media sculpture that combines viewer interaction with inspirations from tactile and aural sensory perception. The sculptural form is based on the functions and forms of the stereocilia, tiny hair cells on our auditory nerves of the inner ear in the cochlea. The content of AURALROOTS is about how we learn through sounds from being embodied in different environments: a) as a growing embryo in the womb, b) as a daughter listening to her mother and finally c) as a female artist communicating with auditory scientists. The overall aim is to explore learning through sentience by giving the viewer the capacity to imagine they are immersed inside these sonic environments.

Abstract

The Aurora (known as Borealis in the North, and Australis in the South) is one of the most magnificent, and mysterious natural phenomena. Those who have witnessed it claim it is a sublime experience. We are interested in how such an awe inspiring spectacle can be conveyed through an artwork – how is it communicated and what is the impact on an exhibition audience? Our interdisciplinary international team attempts to investigate these questions. This paper is focused on our exploration to create a poetic environment comprising a tactile and technological sculpture, a soundscape, and real-time kinetic text – collectively forming an installation called Aureole.

This paper will combine text,-video, and slides, relating to experiences visiting and making images of and relating to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. It is based on travel to Eastern Europe and Japan with Warner Wada, a Japanese American artist whose uncle survived the Holocaust. A subtext of the presentation, the tapes, and any discussion was our experience of psychological similarities and differences. The text describes how the Japanese environment effected recordings; feelings about visiting grandparent’s home in Sighet, Romania; observation of Hiroshima peace day rituals and visits to ancestral shrines; chance meeting with Stelarc in Tokyo; theories of blind art; psychological insights; ongoing collaboration with Warner; and relationships to current international crises. The concurrent images will include original, real time recordings, raw processed images, and completed versions of Damaged Visions and Ten Thousand Things, slides of computer video systems, computer animations, and opaque projections.

ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology) creates connections and collaborations across art, culture, science and technology. It is Australia’s peak network and advocacy body for artists working with science and technology, creating opportunities for innovation, research and development both nationally and internationally. ANAT supports emerging and established artists in the fields of new media arts, internet, video, sound and performance to develop new work and create national and international networks. ANAT also provides financial support to artists through the quick response Professional Development Travel Fund. ANAT collaborates with a range of science, industry and arts partners within Australia and overseas to initiate innovative opportunities such as residencies, databases, Masterclasses and Summer Schools.Through avenues such as forums, artist talks and Newsletter, ANAT fosters critical debate on the synthesis between art, culture, science and technology.

This paper discusses the ways in which social media help us craft the narratives of our lives. Many discussions of social media look at self-presentation and the construction of identity on social network sites in particular and the Internet in general. This article switches the focus from the moment of self-construction and instead looks at ways in which social media represent our lives by filtering the data we feed into them through templates and displaying simplified patterns, visualisations and narratives back to us. The paper argues that social media helps users to see themselves by taking their raw data and re-presenting it in structured form, and gives examples of different ways in which this data is presented.

I will discuss the different kinds of patterns social media uses when re-presenting our data: geographic (geosocial services such as Gowalla and Foursquare, but also trip organisers like Dopplr and Tripit, workout trackers like Endomundo, and GPS-based photo organisation), temporal (Facebook or Twitter statuses, time-lapse videos compressing photos taken daily over years such as from Dailybooth, habit trackers such as Trixietracker, Moodlog, Bedposted), social (Facebook Friend Visualiser, blog mappers) or semantic (word clouds, Ravelry).

 (Long paper)

Keywords: Automatic Composition, Answer Set Programming, Harmony theory, Logic Programming, Declarative Rule Languages.

Harmonic music composition adheres to declarative rules and has, hence, become more and more subject to automation techniques. Specifically, Answer Set Programming (ASP), a declarative framework for problem solving, has been successfully used in recent attempts to compose music based on either a certain genre or a composing technique. However, the composition based on the combination of both has not been supported so far. This paper introduces chasp, an approach that considers the problem of automatic music composition from a more general perspective. More specifically, chasp creates simple accompanying pieces of different genres. To accomplish this ASP is used to solve the problem of chord progressions, based on the rules proposed by the theory of harmony. This results into a harmonic sequence that eventually provides the basis for the creation of simple musical pieces by applying genre-specific templates, through an additional imperative control framework.

Abstract

Once a fantasy of cyberpunk literature, digital avatars are now seamlessly integrated into popular culture. Yet, current avatars are quite limited in responding to real world issues of social identity injustice or construction of personal narratives. The author has initiated the Advanced Identity Representation (AIR) Project to develop transformative social identity representation systems that challenge disempowering norms and allow for creation of rich, imaginative, and dynamic ways for users to represent themselves. The AIR Project builds on a novel interdisciplinary framework that applies insights from imaginative computational discourse generation, cognitive categorization, and science studies and sociological theories of classification. Expanding on results published by the author, this paper presents a series of cultural productions that can be called ‘Avatar Art’, in which modular visual representations combine with back-end data structures and algorithmic generativity in order to make critical and expressive statements regarding identity construction themes including race, gender, community, marginality, exclusion, and power.

Panel: Virtual Doppelgangers: Embodiment, Morphogenesis, and Transversal Action

In 1989, after ex­pe­ri­enc­ing Jaron Lanier and VPL Re­search’s Re­al­ity Built for Two vir­tual re­al­ity sim­u­la­tor, I began to spec­u­late upon how we might ap­pear to one an­other in Multi-user Vir­tual En­vi­ron­ments (MUVEs). The po­ten­tial for choos­ing non-con­sen­sual, mu­ta­ble, or hy­brid self-rep­re­sen­ta­tions was dan­ger­ous and fas­ci­nat­ing on mul­ti­ple lev­els. As I cre­ated a se­ries of im­ages called “iden­tity con­struc­tions” and de­signed pro­to­types of po­ten­tial in­ter­faces, the World Wide Web ap­peared, Neil Stephen­son pub­lished Snow­crash, and on­line spaces like Al­pha­World™, World­Chat™, and World­s­Away™ com­bined MUDs with vir­tual re­al­ity. As the Web in­creas­ingly be­came a space for the ex­change of goods and ser­vices and these 3D chat spaces be­came en­vi­ron­ments for sur­veil­lance and map­ping psy­cho­graphic seg­ments, it be­came clear to me that the most sig­nif­i­cant prop­erty of the avatar was the free­ing of per­sonal iden­tity from ma­pable re­la­tion­ships to con­sis­tency and so­cial con­sen­sus.   The use of the avatar in on-line shared en­vi­ron­ments had the po­ten­tial to be­come a rev­o­lu­tion­ary poly­mor­phic trope un­ham­pered by is­sues of class, race, gen­der, beauty, or age; ca­pa­ble of di­vert­ing cap­i­tal’s flood­ing force of col­o­niza­tion; and of­fer­ing each of us a safe haven in an un­con­sum­able body of our own. The avatar be­came a po­ten­tial site of re­sis­tance, a trick­ster fig­ure in the belly of a mon­ster.

In 1999 I pub­lished “An Avatar Man­i­festo,” an essay that posited a his­tor­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal de­f­i­n­i­tion of the avatar, con­tex­tu­al­ized the avatar among other types of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and ar­tic­u­lated a set of strate­gies for build­ing avatars that would re­sist the grow­ing vi­sion of vir­tual space as a new utopian shop­ping mall.  The essay ref­er­enced Donna Har­away’s “Cy­borg Man­i­festo” of 1986 but used Ar­taud’s trope, “The Body w/o Or­gans” as a point of ref­er­ence for the con­struc­tion and ar­tic­u­la­tion of rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the self within dig­i­tal, vir­tual space.  “An Avatar Man­i­festo” was largely spec­u­la­tive in na­ture, as it was pub­lished at a time when there was lit­tle recorded his­tory of our re­la­tion­ship to vir­tual re­al­i­ties and net­works. In this pre­sen­ta­tion, “Avatar Man­i­festo Redux,” I will bring spe­cific tra­jec­to­ries of the 1999 essay to bear on some ex­am­ples of the cur­rent state of avatar re­search and con­struc­tion.

When art leaves the confines of galleries, exhibition halls or museums –places designated specifically for art itself, and goes out into the public space, almost always an intensely passionate debate arises about how it should be evaluated and criticized. Furthermore, when public art makes extensive use of digital technologies, what is already a fiercely complicated issue becomes even more perplexing. Technology calls for a redefinition of public space to accommodate new media like video screens, and 3-D virtual worlds; it transforms the way the artwork engages with its audience, enabling them to quit the role of passive bystanders, and become active collaborators in producing new meanings for the artwork. Yet, throughout the process, if the artist’s intentions conflict with the values or interests of others who share the same public space, it is then the artist’s responsibility to reconcile such different concerns, and secure the work’s co-existence in that particular site.

“AVATARIUM: A Consumer Paradox” (2008), Paul Sermon’s interactive video installation at City’s Nisantasi Shopping mall in Istanbul, was an intriguing example of such kind of public art. Through a telematic and live video installation, “AVATARIUM” linked the glamorous City’s Nisantasi shopping mall with its rickety counterpart, which the artist constructed in Second Life®, allowing the visitors of both malls to coexist and share the same public spaces like passages and sitting areas. Due to its invasive and disruptive digital nature, and its subtle but highly political message that was so deeply interconnected with the essence of its site, Sermon’s work carried a real potential to provoke conflicts with the other stakeholders of the real and virtual spaces it occupied. During the exhibition, some of those potential conflicts did materialize while others did not. We discuss in our paper how the artist and the curator managed such conflicts and disputes, and placing the issue in the larger context of public art, and reiterating the eternal question of where to draw the line between compromise and auto-censorship, we question the accountability and responsibility of the artist when the artwork is taken out to the wilderness of public space, real or virtual.

Keywords: Audio, Video, Multimedia, Open-Source, Protocol, Installation, Mult-Channel, Demo.

AVB (Audio/Video/Bridging) is a new open standard for distributing real-time multimedia signals over standard Ethernet infrastructure. Its goal is to replace ad-hoc computer interfaces with an easy to use, well-written, open, industry standard. We will demo a multi-channel sound installation running using Meyer speakers running AVB.

This paper will investigate the work of a selection of contemporary artists whose creative practice is engaged with technology and the spoken word. Although they come from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds including music, sound art and performance poetry for each of these artists sounded language and the spoken word provides the materials and often the means by which they carry out their artistic investigations.

In the paper I will identify and discuss similarities and differences between the various cross-disciplinary approaches to playing with words which run through their works alongside a consideration of the technical approaches within the context of a variety of twentieth century sonic practices with language and the spoken word. I will also investigate technological approaches , and creative tools and current and possible future developments in the technologies that might be used or influence spoken word composition as a distinct area of creative practice and research within an interdisciplinary context.

The majority of the works referred to in this paper can be found on Playing with Words: an audio compilation (2011) freely available online. A double compact disc is also available from Gruenrekorder.

Poster Statement

Babble is a Virtual Reality experience which takes advantage of the new technological channels to revive the debate around the babelic myth. Babble is a Ceremony of Confusion. The user becomes transient of the Virtual Tower of Babel. It is a fully immersive experience which uses a head mounted display. Before entering Babble, the user is given an explanatory leaflet in thirteen languages, designed in the fashion of the instructions of an electric appliance. When the transient enters Babble, he finds himself in a walking space completely surrounded by water. his space consists of a boulevard which leads to an octagonal square. The Tower raises at the centre of this square, helicoidal and infinite in height, which reproduces the structure of DNA. The boulevard is full of perched parrots of thirteen different species. Each one shows a unique behaviour and sound. The transient must choose one to accompany him in his ascent. Only accompanied by a parrot will the transient be allowed to penetrate the interior of the Tower. Inside, the only way to go is upwards. Babble is Ascension. The parrot chosen as trip companion is the main reference for the transient of Babble. It always precedes him. The parrot is the measure of all objects. It moves or stands still in relation to the progress or immobility of the transient. Throughout his ascent, the transient encounters a series of stained glass windows on his left. Babble is Light. Every time the transient enters the field of view of a stained glass window, a message associated to the window is heard. Each new window turns on the playing of its sonorous message. Babble is Confusion. The first transient to enter the Tower will already find a hundred and sixty nine stained glass windows previously generated by the artificers of Babble. Babble is Tradition. Babble’s tradition has been introduced by its artificers by producing several distortions on thirteen base stained glass windows, each of which contains the image of one of the thirteen parrots. The base stained glass windows are not textures. They have been modeled in 3D by vectorizing the image of each parrot into polygons. A distorted window is obtained from a base window and an oral message with a limited duration of thirteen seconds. The samples of the oral message serve as a chain of parameters, which conveniently re-scaled, are used as a deviation for each of the components of the vertices and the components of the color of every polygon. In the same manner, Babble’s tradition is increased by the contributions of the transients. The oral intervention of each transient distorts in real time the base stained glass window associated to its parrot. The new subversion of tradition in the shape of a sonorous stained glass window substitutes the one that occupied the same location. The previous window and message are finally located at the top of the Tower, which grows with each new contribution in its arrogant goal of reaching the ultimate sense. Babble is Growth. After hearing himself, the transient suddenly starts a free fall from the height he reached to the base of the Tower, where everything blackens out. Babble is Failure. The Tower of Babel that Babble proposes will not outlast the myth. A mechanism of virtual self destruction has been provided, which will cause the collapse of the Tower with all the stained glass windows that configure it at that moment and will delete the computer files that contain the information that makes them possible in the virtual environment without possibility of recovery. Babble is Annihilation. This mechanism is activated by a message previously introduced by the artificers of Babble. Any transient may detonate it. If a voice recognition system incorporated in Babble detects a remarkable phonetical similarity between the transients and the artificers message, an apocalyptic ceremony of destruction will start. Babble is Infarct.

A variety of augmented-reality games (ARGs) have been designed over the last decade. Often it is the case that these games have two main components – the technology and the story-narrative – that when combined create a rich playing experience. In this presentation, Vicki Moulder will discuss her ISEA proposal and most recent production with Radix Theatre called Babylonia. Babylonia used ARG technology to engage people in the co-creation of story-narrative. Moulder is a researcher at SIAT, SFU, the primary focus of her work explores creative collaborations at the intersection of technology and cultural production.

Ever since internet chat has become popular, the majority of chat users have indulged in the anonymity it provides and enjoyed the most adventurous yet safe way of socialization that has ever happened to mankind, role playing is no longer the actors’ privilege and cross gender internet romance become everyday soap opera. The introduction of 3D chat worlds and avatars have even further transformed the abstraction of anonymity: the way people use avatars does not swear by the quintessence of identification but the potential of metamorphosis.

The authors followed a group of teenagers and recorded their avatar behaviors in an attempt to explore the degree that gender myth have effects on the way boys and girls choose avatars to represent themselves. Apart from the usual courting process, teenagers incline to control over the look of their avatars, they like to pick and mix the body parts, not dissimilar to the ways they dressed their Barbie dolls and Action Men a few years back. Except that Barbies now like to wear Ken’s clothes and have mohican hair! If avatar is experienced as a practical mode of coping with external situations and events, does it mean that our world has evolved into an ultimate state of transvestism?

Artist Statement

Baglady 2.0 is a live performance with a customised electronic performance tool: a bag with an antenna and an embedded board, programmed for live wireless broadcasting on-the-fly of sound, digital images [motion jpeg]. It probes found wifi zones as a platform to pipe through this data. It highlights how such ephemeral oral or folk histories on the street can be played out on the WWW, being such an inhabited and ubiquitous place at present.

The bag can serve as personal recording device to capture one’s daily life, to record conversations, log geographical data, and take images. Or it can even be used as a tactical medium in urban space, this is not symbolic. Imagine the bag as a tool for grassroots journalists operating under the conditions of repression. They can record images and audio files, and send them immediately to a remote server, while deleting the compromising data from the bag’s memory. (‘BagLady: trading secrets spreading news’ Mirko Tobias Schafer (2008)
Scenario
A nomad living in the wreckage of the new dark ages, baglady2.o tracks and inherits neo-liberal capitalist waste, wanders through its discarded wardrobe, transforms it and plays with it. She is a hunter-gatherer of ephemeral moments. She finds it vital to collect and share signs, omens from the everyday, seeing the beauty in the banal, validating the fragile and shifting world made up of spontaneous aesthetic subcultures. She travels light, carries around with her a bag with an antennae to probes the aeather and pirate the network…
Details of material/media
Networked performance / custom built interface – suede bag, Alix3c3 mini euro-card format with Audio, VGA and Award-BIOS [super expandable] 500 MHz Processor antenna, Battery Power – 12 V.8 Gb Cf card, USB webcam Logitech CamPro 9000 is 1600×1200 ( HD-TV), LFS linux from scratch, KNOPPIX kernel, audio streaming darkice as client, encoding ogg vorbis, Webcam UVC video module.

Among Romanian peasants the ritual narration of stories (i.e., during the night) defends the house against evil spirits. Still more, the narration leads to the presence of God.

Creating a world entails the reconciliation of the real and the apparent. A system which legislates a strict distinction between these is a kingdom of darkness. So long as this distinction is maintained we cannot begin to understand.

This paper discusses Balkan.OS, a multi-world autopoietic operating system, that employs a region’s folkloric and cultural artifacts in an osmotic, continuously adaptive, context aware, dynamically relational assemblage that transcends deterministic/individual aspirations and the conscious imagination, towards a continuum of permutations between the real and apparent.

Unlike its western counterparts, Balkan.OS is not designed, programmed, nor authored. These approaches proclaim to liberate and empower us, yet often the answers they devise imprison us further by narrowing our field of vision so that all we are left observing are the ideas we create, superimposed upon the world around us. The gains afforded are often contrasted by the scarcity of meaning left behind.

We adopt the view that the world of living things contains the restrictions and structures necessary for a meaningful existence, resilience and growth. As such Balkan.OS is deeply rooted in the authorless, ageing and evolutionary processes that comprise a region’s folklore and culture and embraces reality as a generative, multi-layered continuum.

Balkan.OS is not a dislocated, contextless operating system programmed by experts for experts. It is an operating system suitable for children and the non-specialist. It is continually defined by the myriad interactions of a community, and therefore reflective of its social, intellectual and emotional dynamics. It is personally and communally meaningful and astutely intuitive, enabling the transposition/pollination of skills and knowledge between the real and the apparent.

The Balkans represents a commingling of worlds, what Foucault refers to as spaces that are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible …”. Its inhabitants, having been blown together and apart by the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and Habsburg empires, have evolved a multiverse of cultural traditions and artifacts.

Balkan.OS embraces this multiverse and presents an invitation to rediscover the pleasure of gesture, the spirit of curiosity, the notion of intimacy and sharing, towards an unpredictable yet dialogical, affective, continuous state of being.

Banana ‘copter was created for a one of a kind aerial artwork in Kam Shan Country Park, Hong Kong, a place where feral rhesus macaques live. Banana Mission a monkey behavioral study was filmed in a variety of locations around Hong Kong, starting with the banana rising from the produce section of the market and traveling through the city to Kam Shan Country Park AKA Monkey Mountain. It is at Kam Shan where the Banana ‘copter and monkeys meet. What the results would be was an unknown, but once captured it was edited to best reflect human perception of the recorded behaviors.

Bandwidth is an interactive exhibit that requires audience participation to be fully realized; blurring the boundaries between art installation, computer game and performance. There are three factors that make Bandwidth an interesting exhibit for academic discussion and study. First, Bandwidth is an example of the newly emerging field of Integrated Media Arts, a term which Victoria Gibson started using in 2007 to define her artistic practice. Secondly, the exhibit demonstrates how artists with little programming knowledge can utilize commonly available electronic components to realize a complex, interactive system that uses gesture control. Thirdly, Bandwidth encourages exploration of the social factors involved with audiences enjoying art through active participation, facilitated by technology, contrasted with passive viewing.
Integrated Media Art is defined by Gibson as a multidisciplinary art form that utilizes computer technology as an essential component of the work. The concept of integrated media arts originated as a response to the fusing of multiple artistic disciplines. Bandwidth exemplifies this emerging field as it pairs graphic designs with music, animated within a computer program that allows direct, real-time modification. Many artists use computers to extend or facilitate their artistic practice, as sophisticated software enables design and execution of tasks to be accomplished efficiently; but, they could create their work without the use of the computer.
The Bandwidth exhibit could not be constructed, controlled or viewed without the use of computer technology, so exemplifies this qualification of integrated media art. Further academic exploration of Gibson’s definition, and discussion on developments in the newly emerging field of Integrated Media Art, are areas where peer review is required.
Bandwidth demonstrates how an artist can design and realize an exhibit utilizing leading edge technology with some programming support. In 2010, Victoria attended the Summer Lab at EMPAC, located on the campus of RPI in Troy, NY; to learn the Isadora program. After extensive research, she had decided that the program Isadora would best fit her artistic vision and she brought Arduino control components for testing. The technology used to create the interactive control of the exhibit is inexpensive and commonly available. In the one week lab, Gibson was able to construct and present Bandwidth as a work-in-progress that included a working gesture control element. Thanks to her colleague, Victor Zappi, PhD candidate, who programmed the Arduino sketch, and software support by Mark Coniglio, the creator of the Isadora program, Gibson was able to realize her vision.
The social expectations of computer assisted art forms become an interesting area of enquiry as Arduino and the Kinect control make inexpensive interactive abilities available. In traditional animated media, such as film, the moving images solidified on recorded media to provide a repeatable experience that could only be viewed by passive audiences. The concept of ‘visual music’, pairing abstract images with music, was explored on film by Norman McLaren and others who were pioneers in this field in the 1950’s. Today, Bandwidth describes the joining of images and music in a 21st century language that allows each performance to be a unique, user-controlled expression.
As integrated media delivery systems become more interactive and user controllable, the dividing lines between game, performance and art installation become more difficult to define. The theory of passive/active mass audiences viewing may change, as the expectation of increased interactive control, widely available on personal computing devices, expands into other areas.

Brain activity has been always a scientific subject of interest to understand how the human beings behave or interact with others and with themselves, expressing their feelings in response to what affects them and the space surrounding them. A Brain Computer Interface (BCI) then, has been a big technologic advance to measure the electric activity of the brain and it has become the main instrument to obtain relevant information to truly measure the behavior of the waves which are equivalent to both cognitive and non-cognitive states of the human being. BCI, as an instrument to obtain information in real-time could be used then to communicate the measured data with external devices, in this case with multimedia software and audiovisual applications in order to expand the creative boundaries of what historically has been made in the field of joining science and art. The goal of this artistic talk is to show a brain computer interface as a tool to generate several artistic expressions.

Known as the Leonardo Da Vinci of the 21st century, Dutch Theo Jansen has devoted his body and soul to creating a new life-form over the last two decades. His Strandbeest (Beach Beasts) look so organic and real that from a distance they are mistaken for the skeletons of prehistoric dinosaurs. However, they are made of basic materials such as plastic tubes or sticky tape. With no need for motors or any kind of technological aids, Jansen manages to make these creatures come to life; they only require the force of the wind and beach sand. Engineering, biomechanics and art blend together in the surprising work of Theo Jansen, taking the concept of kinetic sculpture to its peak.

Anyone observing the beauty of these sculptures walking across the sand for the first time, will immediately understand that the work of this engineer, scientist and artist is exceptional. Jansen studies the history of biological evolution in order to endow the new generation of his creatures with increasing abilities. He even establishes eras or periods for his beasts, that evolve as if they were real dinosaurs.

Panel:  Interart / Intersensorium. On the Interrelation of Media and the Senses

Sub­jec­tive ex­pe­ri­ences, which have not been amend­able to ex­per­i­men­tal mea­sure­ments in the past can now be mea­sured in terms of brain ac­tiv­ity and re­lated to the in­ten­sity of the de­clared ex­pe­ri­ences. This in­flu­ences a new chap­ter in the study of the brain and its ac­tiv­ity in re­la­tion to ex­pe­ri­ences such as love, hate, de­sire and beauty in ad­di­tion to the study of per­cep­tion, which is it­self a sub­jec­tive ex­pe­ri­ence.

This paper investigates whether interactive works of art that are judged beautiful can contain criticism and adopt a resistant position. Its empirical case is Benayoun’s interactive piece World Skin dealing with the media’s involvement in modern warfare. The assumption is that the sentiment of participatory beauty is grounded in the pleasurable experience of agency as a feeling of unity and embeddedness. Here, also potential criticism becomes an integrated part of the interaction system consumed by each (inter)action. The paper argues for a non‑consumable rest that allows for felt criticism and cathartic beauty. In his short text “Digital apparition” (1996), Flusser writes that the establishment of science in the wake of modernity favours the presentation of the world by means of alphanumeric codes and algorithmic models on the expense of literal and pictorial representations. He concludes that such models are models of “alternative worlds”. Furthermore, there no longer are any objective criteria for their truthfulness, because there are only calculated and operationalized emergent models of alternative realities. According to Flusser, the only remaining criterion is the sentiment of beauty. Digital technology renders the numeric models of incipient modernity operational and dynamic bringing about real worlds through interaction and participation. Operational systems can be observed in many domains and societal levels exhibiting various formats of participation and agency. The entertainment and experience design industry, for example, build overt fictional realms of participation. Media and science is constructing worlds. Also artists increasingly apply digital technology and cooperate with various scientific disciplines in order to produce alternative worlds of participation. This paper briefly outlines a theory of participatory beauty for interactive art based on my findings described in my book Performing Beauty in Participatory Art (Heinrich, 2014). Participatory beauty differs from older metaphysical notions of beauty in that it is grounded in the pleasurable experience of agency within operational social (interactive) systems. Participatory art constructs these interactive systems and thus models of agency in various ways. Every participatory artwork brings about (f)actual, material interactions that render the world (of the artwork) real. Within this framework, beauty is seen as a sensory token (objectification) of an operational system’s coherence between its constituents and actants. Beauty is thus a sentiment that emerges in a coherent interplay between concrete participation and realisation, where participation yields cognitive realisation and where conceptual realizations feed into concrete interactions. Beautiful experiences tell us about the feeling of integratedness (and desintegratedness) in and thus realness of participatory art. In this process, a work of art’s critical intend seems consumed by participant interaction. In the case of Benayoun’s Word Skin, ethical judgments of media constructed wars are converted into operative functions. A paradoxical situation emerges, where the feelings of disgust and aversion towards both war and the media are transformed into ideo‑pleasures, seemingly annihilating the critical potential of the piece. However, the participant also recognizes that these (inter‑)actions are part of an artistic fictitious construction. Interactions within such overtly constructed worlds are simultaneously on‑going irrealisation and actualization processes; non‑consumable paradoxical state, which might yield criticism, in the case of World Skin in form of responsibility and guilt.

Beauty Technology is a novel area of research that presents an exploration between the body surface, beauty products and digital technology. The concept stemmed from a multidisciplinary perspective; computing, chemistry, body anatomy, human behavior, electronics and design. By using Beauty Technologies, we are trying to move away from traditional wearable devices worn on clothes and accessories where gestures for interaction and electronics are noticeable. Within this realm, imagine that with a blink of your eye, you could turn on lights, move your fingernails to open a door, and touch your hair to record a conversation (how could we add a new functionality to cosmetics to make them interactive?). This presentation highlights the conscious use of unconscious behaviors in Beauty Technologies in order to create seamless interactions. Several of applications and artworks of Beauty Technologies such as Conductive Makeup, Hairware and FX e-makeup will explain the design of these interactions that translate a human behavior to an input device.

Beepez-le, an artist project/public media intervention conducted in Cameroon, West Africa. The project used video installation techniques coupled with collective art strategies and cell phone technologies to invite passers-by to use a location-specific method of using cell phones, known in Cameroon as “beeping,” to communicate with God.

Project Description:
In the summer of 2006, I returned to Cameroon after a ten year absence. My return was prompted by a letter notifying me of a death in the family that had hosted me while I was there. One of the most striking changes I noticed upon my arrival was the rapid proliferation of cell phones. When I’d left, in 1996, there were practically no home phones in the country. Even a fairly wealthy family would go to a phone booth shop to make their calls. Now, everywhere I looked there were phones. Women in the market who sold fruit would open their bags and pull out two cell phones. Billboards for the two service providers [the French company Orange and the South African one MTN] and the cottage industry of selling airtime dominated the visual landscape of the streets. With an umbrella, a box and a power source you could set up a phone booth and a shop for selling airtime almost anywhere. A typical street corner in the city would have five or six of these stalls.

Through watching my host’s constant engagement with her phone, I learned of a system that Cameroonians had invented, to circumvent the expensive foreign owned cell phone networks, called “beeping”. A beep is a called placed and hung up after one ring. Through a context sensitive system, I learned that Cameroonians had developed beeping into a complex language capable of a range of communications. It was after a walk through the market, past the church where my host siblings sang in the choir, that I decided to buy a cell phone for God and to invite people to beep him. I formed a small collective the S.D.C.D., the Society for Direct Communication with the Divine. The first members were my host siblings Veronique, her oldest sister Suzy, Suzy’s boyfriend Patience, a student at the University of Yaounde I, and his roommate Gerard. They recruited a couple more of their friends and together we discussed the project. I said very little except that I wanted us to facilitate a conversation around the installation of God’s cell phone.

I built a simple live feed installation that used a camera, a video projector and cell phone to project God’s cell phone screen onto a wall in the city when he was beeped. I installed it on the street next to two luan and chalk signs, similar to those I’d found in the market. They read: Voici en exclusivite’le numero de Dieu “597-20-24” Beepez-le! [Here it is God’s private number ‘597-20-24’ Beep him!]

A spontaneous public debate occurred around the site of the projection. Following the debate, several people offered to give recorded interviews on the themes that emerged. An excerpt of the video that resulted, including some of these interviews, is available at the video link above.

Peltz will present Beepez-le and the method he has dubbed “auto-ethnographic intervention.”

video document: risd.tv/dpeltz/beepezleWebdoc.mov

BeeSpace : Audio Observation explores the bee’s natural system in an artificially built environment to consider the threat of modern living practices to both bees and humans. Creating a perspective shift by building new spaces and gaps and to call attention to our social landscape, generating critical sites and developing voices. Viewers are invited to reconsider the gaps from previous interpretations of established systems and consider the new gaps that are in the process of developing.

It is an exploratory interactive painting to raise awareness of the homeless people in Porter County, Indiana, in the United States. This is a part of The Invisible Project, which is a mobile exhibition designed to increase public awareness and understanding of homelessness, in collaboration with the Welcome Project and four area non-profits located in Valparaiso, Indiana.

Description
Initially, The Invisible Project began with a casual conversation with homeless women at Dayspring Women’s Center, located in Valparaiso, Indiana. It is a shelter for women and their children who are or were homeless. They shared traumatic experiences of being persecuted by the public and police. They were often treated as being invisible or criminal even though they didn’t commit any crime.

For instance, a homeless woman with her teenager daughter were seated in a park in Porter County. Others at the park reported them to the police. The police approached them and warned them to keep away from the park, since their presence seemed to make people in the community scared and fearful. Porter County is a relative wealthy county in Northwest Indiana compared to neighboring counties. The Invisible Project is a partnership between the Welcome Project, the Porter County Coalition for Affordable Housing, Housing Opportunities, Gabriel’s Horn, Dayspring Women’s Center, and the Porter County Museum.

My work, “Being Ignored”, is a painting using light and computer code. It is an interdisciplinary project crossing boundaries between painting, photography, computer art, and journalism. It aims to recognize the dignity and humanity of those who are homeless. A computer screen (the “canvas”), displays real time images captured through a web camera that is installed invisibly on the top of the computer screen. As viewers move toward the screen, the web camera captures the viewer’s portrait and display it on the computer screen. The computer code will eliminate the viewer’s facial expression in order to convey the concept of being ignored.

To implement the visual idea, I used Processing, a programming language for artists and designers, with a video library, Mirror, to detect faces through an external web camera. The visual style is inspired by Impressionism, which is a 19th century art movement that captures a moment in time,and Expressionism, such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which expresses a psychological theme.

Alain Bonardi and Chantal de Sachy are working on a production of the romantic opera Norma by Bellini (1831) to be performed outdoors at l’Ile d’Yeu (west of France) in august 2001. There is no material element of set on the stage, and they therefore use the principle of a computer-elaborated set to be projected on a screen. Two ideas are borrowed from the cinematographer Adolphe Appia (1862-1928) :

• -Part of the the cinematography must be inferred from music. The authors therefore use the ALMA software, designed in La Sorbonne University, enabling the real time creation of 3-D elements from textual musical descriptions in GUIDO. ALMA enables the association of these entities with various representations, for instance such constructions as tunnels with instrumental lines, etc.
• The necessary interaction between music, singers and sets. The authors try to create interesting interactions between the stage and the projected set. The aim is that singers play with elements on the screen.

For that purpose, the cinematography has the following features :

1. each character has his/her own computerized “avatar” on the screen, he/she plays with,
2. to enable the renewal of the production at each performance, a constraint solver program to animate the different elements is used. The rules set have to do with overlapping of the objects on the screen, with group displacements, and the temporal synchronization with music.

The presentation will examine the possibilities and approaches of artists and designers attempting to make new aesthetic forms in response to the emergence of spaces for culturally diverse groups in the electronic environment.The urgency for new aesthetics responds to the dynamic activities of cultural groups but also acknowledges the simultaneous transformation of the ‘narrative’ in the electronic environment worldwide.The processes for decentralised communications have enabled a level of subversion, political activism and cultural opposition proposing the destruction of a model for the dominant form in western contemporary society.Yet at the same time the evolution of electronic networking, virtual environments, and the increased engagement with interactivity to the point of submersion suggests a significant change in our understanding of cultural values, and even more radically devalues the presence and importance of the “object” If cultural values transcend representation of an enclosed social cultural canonization, will this new thinking of cultural practice and abandonment of the “object” in the electronic environment eventually supersede the current aggressive commodification of culture that ubiquitous technology permits? Important to this investigation is the exploration of”high”andlow” forms of media production, the differing levels of engagement for the audience and maker that defies a dependent relationship between pioneering scientific process and the success of the message especially for new virtual experiences. In particular notions of the”surface” will be examined in order to accredit claims for culturally specific aesthetics and to reveal the evolving relationship of the aesthetic to the process of the virtual experience. Case studies will be drawn from both developing and western countries contrasting the perceptions and utilization of wildly diverse technological processes in order to achieve new cultural forms which can sometimes surprisingly share common objectives and philosophies.

Panel:  The Institute of Unnecessary Research

This paper de­scribes the de­vel­op­ment and processes of video map­ping; an amal­ga­ma­tion of trompe l’oeil il­lu­sion, pro­jec­tive geom­e­try, lin­ear equa­tions, and a wide col­lec­tion of dis­parate tech­nolo­gies for the pur­pose of re­ac­ti­vat­ing fa­mil­iar ob­jects and sur­round­ings with new life and al­ter­na­tive mean­ings.

Satellite images of the earth present the planet as a whole and seemingly unified object. However, as Jennifer Gabrys argues, the planetary is not a uniform fixed set of conditions, and more distributed monitoring environmental sensors can point to the ways in which the earth might be seen not as one, but as many. This paper considers how contemporary artists use sound to hint towards the planetary by closely engaging with Leah Barclay’s WIRA (2015), a geolocated audio walk along the Noosa River, and Calder Harben’s Bodies of Water (2017), a low-frequency audio installation that engages with the violence of ocean noise pollution. Drawing on Brandon LaBelle’s theories on listening, it argues that these sound installations, by engaging viewers in acts of deep listening, amplify various forms of coexistence among humans and more-than-humans that challenge the satellite view.

These bring us to ask: How do we listen to what we have not been trained to acknowledge, understand, or interpret? Can listening to what we cannot understand still be productive? Ultimately, listening is elaborated as a productive sentient engagement with marine worlds that makes apparent our entanglement with soundscapes we do not inhabit and bodies that are not our own.

Poster Statement

ARCANA was developed by the German composer Wolfgang von Stuermer in April 1995 and is the first nonprofit Internet-service which is solely dedicated to promote contemporary music globally. Currently, the project resides in the WORLD WIDE WEB. It is the purpose and goal of ARCANA to disseminate information about and from composers, ensembles, organizations and producers of contemporary music and to become the Internet reference for new and experimental music.It’s main focus though, is the work of modern composers. ARCANA is open to all composers working in the field of contemporary music. Additionally, one of its specific tasks is the promotion of young, (not-yet) established composers and their work. We fulfill this function by representing the composer’s work in sound and vision, via the integration of an interactive information-exchange and electronic bulletin board, and by active promotion of ARCANA in the Internet and the media. Hence, ARCANA does not act as a direct agent for the composer but offers support and counseling and provides the Internet platform for promotion and representation. In ARCANA, all composers receive their own unique URL. Therefore composers can reach an international publicity by presenting biographies, text material, work lists, and for the first time worldwide: score excerpts and other visual or graphical examples of their work. Moreover ARCANA revolutions the standard of work presentation and makes it more vivid! Since May 1996 sound examples can also be heard in real time via RealAudio(tm). Additionally they can be integrated into work-lists in all usual sound-file formats, available for download. Moreover, MIDI-files may be utilized to provide a more concrete impression of unperformed compositions than mere text descriptions. It is possible to provide piano extracts of a larger instrumental score which can be played back with a MIDI-player, too. The integration of Live-Video-Streaming and RealAudio-Live programs as “Virtual New Music Radio” is in development and will launch this fall. This combination of visual, textual and acoustical information gives a precise picture of the composer’s work. Given access to the Internet producers, conductors, publishers, festival directors and music professors and teachers are able to get excellent first-hand information and views of criteria for program- and repertoire planning and are able to contact the composer directly. ARCANA also offers composers a basis for professional contacts mutually. The communication among one another is supported via email (or telephone and fax, if not available) as well as any feedback or info sent to ARCANA is automatically forwarded to the composers. Every two months the ARCANA NEWSFLASH is published. It contents reports about the development of ARCANA and is available free of charge via email. Since January 1996 the international communication among the composers is advanced and expanded through the highly welcomed “The Composer in Cyber Residence” program – an international exchange effort where every month a different composer presents his/her opus via sound and vision. This Poster-session will give an insight into the making of ARCANA and its features and services for the new music community and articulate future visions of ARCANA such as a VR listening space or virtual new music galleries.

Panel: Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 1

“We used to think that our fate was in the stars. Now we know that, in large mea­sure, our fate is in our genes.”  _James Dewey Wat­son

Benji is a fic­ti­tious en­tity that jour­neys into the world of bio-in­for­ma­tion as a com­mod­ity and con­se­quently en­vi­sions the prospects of ge­netic dis­crim­i­na­tion and the in­creas­ing per­son­al­iza­tion of mar­ket­ing strate­gies. Named after the child of Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google.com and Anne Wo­j­ci­cki, co-founder of 23andme.com (a pri­vately held per­sonal ge­nomics and biotech­nol­ogy com­pany), Benji rep­re­sents the ide­o­log­i­cal and eco­nomic union as his­tor­i­cally prac­ticed in royal po­lit­i­cal mar­riages and com­monly wit­nessed in cor­po­rate merg­ers. In­her­it­ing strands from both par­ents, Benji’s mis­sion is to be the world’s lead­ing DNA search en­gine. Using state of the art tech­nol­ogy, Benji matches you di­rectly to per­son­al­ized ad­ver­tise­ments based on your class rank which is de­ter­mined by an ad­vanced analy­sis of your ge­netic code. So rev­o­lu­tion­ary is it, that even be­hav­ioural pat­terns can be de­tected to pre­dict and pre­empt every de­ci­sion so that your con­sumer crav­ings may be sat­is­fied. This nar­ra­tive also touches on the su­per­nat­ural pow­ers that users imbue in search en­gines or per­haps tech­nol­ogy in gen­eral. Re­flect­ing on the ir­ra­tional and yet con­vinc­ing mech­a­nisms of be­lief ex­pe­ri­enced in for­tune telling and horo­scopes, a cer­tain will­ing­ness to be­lieve is per­haps key in cre­at­ing more pos­si­bil­i­ties to dis­crim­i­nate.

Panel: Virtual Doppelgangers: Embodiment, Morphogenesis, and Transversal Action

Since the Vic­to­rian era, hob­bies have served as a form of leisure that offer both plea­sure and sub­ver­sively re­in­force spe­cific be­hav­iors, value sys­tems, and ide­olo­gies of the dom­i­nant cul­ture. Ac­tiv­i­ties such as col­lect­ing, gar­den­ing, or model build­ing uti­lize many of the same tools and tech­niques found in the work­place. An anal­o­gous re­la­tion­ship be­tween leisure and labor be­gins to emerge–work under the guise of play. If we fast-for­ward into the dig­i­tal age, the tools and tech­niques of the past are now vir­tu­al­ized. The no­tion of col­lect­ing hap­pens in Flickr and Face­book, gar­den­ing in Far­mville, and model build­ing in vir­tual en­vi­ron­ments such as Sec­ond Life. And sim­i­lar to our Vic­to­rian hand­i­crafts and 1950’s soap­box derby, the ide­o­log­i­cal and eco­nomic are in­ter­twined. Yet, what was once an anal­o­gous re­la­tion­ship be­tween our labor and leisure is now di­alec­ti­cal. In the world of so­cial media there are no bound­aries. Through a brief sur­vey of a few key so­cial media ap­pli­ca­tions and pro­jects cre­ated in vir­tual en­vi­ron­ments that tra­verse both busi­ness and en­ter­tain­ment, this di­alec­ti­cal re­la­tion­ship will be put on the round table. How af­fect is pro­duced through these em­bod­ied in­ter­ac­tions and the role of strate­gic in­ter­rup­tions in lo­cat­ing sites of agency will be on the agenda. It will be fun.

Better Hands is an interactive installation that explores the limits and the role of tools in the creative process. It questions the authorship by bringing the interface closer to the body, while giving to it its own agency. This work invites us to reflect on the effect of modern technology on the basic act of creation and whether we control or are defined by it.

Abstract

Although computer science research in immersive virtual environments (VR) has waned, real-world applications have grown and are used daily in numerous areas. These range from entertainment, education, pilot and surgical training, to clinical treatment for a host of illnesses, addiction and detoxification, visualizations and visual analytics, and world heritage sites, to name a few. Building on our experience of recognized virtual environments for medical applications, medical visualizations and forms of meditation, in this paper we compare ‘traditional’ immersive virtual environments with alternative, artistic virtual environments (sometimes termed responsive spaces or installations). These have all been funded and are in use by patients who suffer from chronic pain.
Past research and testing conducted in immersive virtual environments for use in alleviating pain were found to be consistently more effective than opiates during times of acute pain. Subsequent VR environments developed for numerous kinds of pain ‘distraction’, modulation and relief were found to be similarly successful. The suite of immersive virtual environments (VEs) described in this paper compare what has become ‘standard’ types of VR (which involve head-mounted displays [HMDs] or CAVES) with physically built, aesthetically engaging, alternative virtual environments that similarly occlude all but the VE. These alternative VEs were conceived of primarily by artists and by researchers who are experts in both computer science and art. All work was developed in collaboration with a team of physicians, psychiatrists, artists and designers, computer scientists and engineers and patients. These works were rigorously tested following scientific and medical protocols. In addition, the artistic aspects were also consistently tested following the practices and knowledge bases of scientific AND artistic realms. Since little research concerning consistently used and widely disseminated VEs has been conducted, we discuss differences and similarities in knowledge bases, how these influenced the conceptualization, realization and use of our immersive VR work by our collaborators and patients. Further, we examine the legitimization and recognition of our work by differing disciplinary communities, ethics review boards and granting agencies.
Studied over a decade, we conclude this paper by careful discussions of the importance of artistic practices: aesthetics; conceptualization practices and content creation; the specificities of which ideas, interface designs and media elements worked, didn’t work and why; and demonstrate the importance and variability of emerging forms of research in the Arts as it relates to our context of VR and pain.

Abstract (long paper)

Now that more than 40 years of electronic art history have passed, it is generally agreed that museums and art institutions are facing a serious problem in respect to the preservation of works of media art. A large number of historical media art works are currently disappearing due to the technical as well as organizational difficulties that their maintenance entails. While this might seem to be a problem that is only of concern for art historians and archiving specialists, artists and creative practitioners will also have to play a role in the development of practical solutions and innovative concepts to deal with the issue of decay and conservation.

There is an ongoing controversy in architecture about the role of electronic imaging in Postmodern Urbanism. The debate concerns whether these images erode or enhance the social contract of community. The electronic image has become a powerful tool for describing not only physical form but a kind of “quality of life” for the city of the imagination. Two of architecture’s most notorious radicals Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi, have made the “half real” electronic image an essential part of their polemic. But curiously one of the prophets of the electronic imaging revolution, Michael Benedikt cautions us about losing our humanity while dwelling in this new kind of virtual space.

This panel unfolds ideas around Animality, and the papers undertake a critical discussion on the relationship between the human and nonhuman and explore possibilities for us, as humans, to transcend intelligence and consciousness by focusing on nonlinguistic and affective experiences. Each panel focuses on different subjects in this context and introduces art projects as research methods, ranging from 3D game art, media performance and responsive media. This discussion leads us to acknowledge limitations in the anthropocentric perspective and to rethink how we should live, interact and co-evolve with nonhumans.

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

The concept of digimodernism as the latest paradigmatic shift fundamentally altering our societies and cultures has emerged only very recently and there is but a handful of publications on its lasting effect on the new “everyman” formation. Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave” and Alan Kirby’s “Digimodernism” are used for initial definition of digimodernism and probing into its various effects and aspects.

Once a certain outline of digimodernism is established, further analysis is carried out within different academic traditions. Firstly, by applying McLuhan’s concept of tetrad of media effects to blogging, forums and user comments, as innate textual formative properties of this paradigm, the attempt is made at describing the possibilities and limitations of the new information exchange structure. Secondly, comparative analysis of this transition from neomarxist perspective(s), selected for their most uncompromising and in that straightforward angle, is carried out. Works by Chomsky, Schiller, Bourdieu and Gramsci are applied to this task. Thirdly, inferences are made regarding the social formative function of this new paradigm, once again returning us to Kirby and Toffler, yet reshaping, debating and extending their hypotheses.

In sequitur the structure and some traits of culture of digital society is deduced from the above factors of this new environment and contrasted with that of late modern/postmodern type. The logical limitation of current paper is that its scope of analysis excludes developing countries with severely limited or even absent access to online digital networks, so much of it should be understood as forecasting.

Current paper aims to contribute to both new media analysis and a more general trend of fusing and implementing theoretical frameworks of different time periods to contemporary digital art, media and literature.

Computer-mediated communication has the potential for equalization of textual, visual and aural forms, flowing along multi-directional paths.

In 2005, Auckland University of Technology drew together four existing Schools (Art & Design, Communications & Media Studies, Computing & Mathematical Sciences, and Engineering) into one new Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies. In 2007, the Faculty formed the Interdisciplinary Unit, a “virtual 5th school” to develop forward-thinking experimental alliances, research collaborations and learning experiences across these overlapping disciplines.

In physical, virtual and networked studio environments, the Unit draws together radical elements of art, computer science, engineering, mathematics, design, digital humanities and philosophy of technology, as well as projects based on entrepreneurial practices and industry partnerships. Yet, while the Unit has been seen as ambitious and timely in challenging normative disciplinary boundaries and practices, it has also attracted initial scepticism and hostility.

This paper introduces a critical study of the ideas, agencies and structures involved in establishing this controversial fifth element, and the possibilities for new creative practices across disciplines in increasingly highly-institutionalised electronic arts/science/technology environments.

What are at stake here are the (frequently rhetorical) processes whereby certain modes of knowledge practices may be credibly authorised, legitimised, privileged, contested or marginalized.  More importantly, however, this paper argues that although there has been a revival of research into various forms of inter- or trans-disciplinarity over the last decade or so, there have been very few sustained attempts to develop accounts of how it really affects the day-to-day lives, experiences and practices of academics, students, practitioners, administrators and other stakeholders who are actually engaged in operating across the well-policed territorial borders of institutionalised education and practice.  This is even more surprising if we also consider the very different motivations for inter-disciplinarity, ranging from the top-down imperatives from senior administrators looking for institutional efficiency, to bottom-up, experimental or opportunistic approaches by academics responding to ontological and epistemological shifts or career possibilities.

In discussing the contested evolution of this interdisciplinary agenda, this paper will briefly revisit Kant’s 18th century Conflict of the Faculties – a treatise on disciplinary status and self-interest that remains prescient in our own new-Darwinian academic landscape.

The provocative findings of the current research are based on data obtained in interviews with situated individuals; highlighting frequently overlooked investments in the micro-politics of disciplinarity, and how these influence the wider socio-professional and disciplinary ecologies of practice within which they operate.

The presentation will also show examples of innovative art/science/technology projects that have been developed by the Unit.

This paper proposes that as artists build “sites” on the World Wide Web, they are constructing a revolutionary ontology for art – one in which the distinction of “site” and “non-site” will no longer be possible In her seminal essay “Sculpture in the Expanded field” Rosalind Krauss theorised the disappearance of the post renaissance “monument” into the negative ontology of postmodern sculpture, in terms of “a combination of exclusions” – the sum of the “non-landscape” and the “non-architecture”. The artist Robert Smithson offered a simpler theory in his opposition of “site” and “non-site”. Modernist sculpture “occupies” the physically empty, semiotically blank and ideologically neutral “non-site” of the gallery while postmodern work actually “constitutes” its “site”.

Contemporary installation works extend beyond art’s own objecthood into the space and the context of its presentation, encompassing thematic, architectural, social, political, historical, theoretical, critical and even market system concerns. Indeed, “site” specific installations, have sullied the “white cube” of modern art. Of course, sculpture is not the obligatory point of entry into postmodern installation art. In the curatorial “installation” of colour field and hard edge, the placement of works on the gallery wall was treated as being significant. Further, as Brian O’Doherty has observed, “the colour, field installation “shot” should be recognised as one of the teleological end points of the modern tradition”. In fact, it can be said that, modern art arose from paintings search for a more esoteric role as the optical precision of the camera displaced this art from its function as a medium of record.

At the end of this trajectory, with the transient and/or inaccessible qualities of contemporary installation art, photo-graphic documentation has become the medium in which the new art is widely experienced. While the “installation shot” confirms the “uniqueness” of the “site”, this documentation leaves its own artifice unindexed and it can be argued that “mass” photographic reproduction has, quite surreptitiously, become the primary medium in which this postmodern art form is experienced. Today the Internet has enabled photographic representation along with sound and text to be “piped” into our homes, as easily as water, electricity or gas. Further, as digital simulacra proliferate, the very distinction of a “real” place, person or thing, from its image or representation-photographic or otherwise, will be dissolved.

With the instantaneous connectivity of computer mediated communications, geographical distance appears to have been eliminated. “Here” and “there” have been brought together in the palm top “now” of fiber optic connectivity. Indeed, by virtue of Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) all the representations contained in the multitude of “sites” on the Internet exist in virtual proximity. As bandwidth increases and multimedia technology goes on-line, fluidly articulating the remote experience of image, moving image, text and sound in an interactive “virtual reality”, it will become difficult to differentiate the actual from the oneric.

Images and texts from varied sources are merged in order to release their latent meanings. “Al Kesah” (1988), for instance, constitutes a playful yet critical response to the penetration of global mass media into the local culture and consciousness. Ismail Zain was also very critical of the heroic status of the artist and in this series of piquant computer prints, he seems to delight in the downward mobility of the artist that results from the computer’s indifference to skills of the hand. Ultimately Ismail Zain must, himself, be “read” a signifier for the transition from formal to contextual concerns and for the critical assimilation of new technology into Malaysian artistic practice.

The Failure of Marcel Duchamp/ Japanese Fetish Even! is a harsh parody of Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnes, is an extension of Niranjan Rajah’s critical installation practice. While interrogating the ontology of the image in Computer Mediated Communication, this work also attempts to mark the problem of cultural constituencies in the Internet. In Wayang “Virtual”16, Khairul Aidil Azlin and his troup combine traditional wayang kulit with digital real time rendering, using IRIS Showcase software. The performance of this work will utilize single channel video back projection to enable a computer generated three dimensional puppet to interact with the traditional wayang kulit puppets. This wayang with two dalangs unites the realm of shadow with that of three dimensional illusion on the same screen.

The resulting ontological conflict that can be read as a metaphor for the Malaysian psyche in its present state of transition. Humanity is on the threshold of an information era. The rapidly developing countries of Asia are poised to leap-frog from national primary industrial production into the global knowledge economy. Set within a political globalisation of the “new world order” this technological and economic transition will engender a new social and cultural paradigm. In the Malaysian situation, given the priority of economic development, there’s no doubt that industry and commerce lead in the deployment of the new technologies The National Art Gallery’s 1st Electronic Art Show (Nov 1997) charted the Malaysian response to the electronic media of the late 20th century. It was premised by the belief that, in fact the arts should lead. Up till this exhibition references to Malaysian works of electronic art were scattered across a historical narrative which is essentially constructed in terms of the domestication of Modernism.

The 1st Electronic Art Show attempted to extract and organize the fragments of electronic art presently dissipated in the wider narrative, in order to construct the foundation for a history of electronic media in Malaysian art. Further the show gave an overview of current practice in electronic media, as it presents new works selected from artists proposals. The show was organised in terms of the following categories VIDEO ART, COMPUTER ART and LIGHT ART. Niranjan Rajah and Hasnul Jamal Saidon, the curators of the show, bring a selection of works from the COMPUTER ART category to ISEA98. This includes – Pioneering computer print works by kamarulzaman mat isa, Ismail zain; also, Contemporary computer print work by suhaimi tohid; Computer animation by faizal zulkfili; and Cd_roms by hasnul jamal saidon, niranjan rajah, helena song and … Online works by niranjan rajah, ling siew woei; Smart board/vrml “painting” by ling siew woei; Real time computer animation/performance by khairul and troupe.

Immersive virtual reality has shown to alleviate the trauma and pain of burn victims.?This paper is about ‘Beyond the Threshold’; a project for students enrolled in my course ‘Interactive Narrative Environments’, taught in the Design Department at Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, WA, USA.  In this project, students collaborate to create imaginative virtual environments that can engage the patient in interesting and aesthetic ways.

Working with Ari Hollander, CEO of the internationally renowned VR studio Firsthand Technology, Seattle, Washington, students use the Unity3D game engine to create simple first person games designed to engage the attention of burn victims and thus help alleviate their pain. This innovative immersive approach in helping patients through VR has been established to bring the pain down for such victims by as much as 75%.

We are thrilled for the opportunity to work with Ari Hollander of Firsthand Technology in order to give the students the opportunity to create interesting game like experiences designed to be aesthetic while serving a vitally important function for medical treatment and making a real difference for people in extreme pain.

Student examples, research, and interviews will be included in this presentation.

This paper discusses the processual ontological transitions of the curatorial after Paul O’Neil’s “curatorial turn”. Studying the curatorial from its discursive conception to a new materialist approach, it explores what can change when the curatorial is considered both a discourse and a practice, with no hierarchical distinctions or separations between them. To envisage the curatorial as a material-discursive practice is to admit that matter and meaning emerge together and one does not exist in the same way in the absence of the other. In this epistemology, the question changes from what the curatorial is to what the curatorial does, considering it as a mode of production of different kinds of knowledges.

Letters are the signs and signifiers that we use to create meaning and to communicate. They tell stories and convey news but there is more to a letter than simply its sound and shape. Before the age of digital typography, most typefaces were designed for very specific clients and purposes. Now, their histories are often overlooked or forgotten, the characters dislodged from their original context. Given the existence of over 100,000 typefaces, many of which are freely accessible to designers, what are the processes through which one chooses a font?  Are our choice of typeface based purely on our aesthetic preferences or influenced by the associations we have of a particular typeface’s history and cultural significance?

This paper reports the journey of making a interactive platform for learning the history and characteristic of typefaces. The approach is a combination of art with technology. Using the radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, this project uses images, videos and projections to create a typographic world that reveal the history, inspiration and experimental design of typefaces.

The result is a multi-channel platform that forms up by three sets of interactive installation: The journey of a font, Type Personality and Pangram Art. The journey of a font consists of ten typographic videos that explore the concepts of spatial dimension, human/environmental scale and motion to show the history of each typeface. Type Personality is an interactive exploration of the typographic form. It shows how the uses of letterform, colour, contrast, scale and layering give typefaces their distinct personalities. Pangram Art uses the pangram to give expression to the colloquial, yet unique, Singlish spoken in Singapore by merging language, illustration, and typography.

The experience of the multi-channel platform is designed to be interactive and informative. It allows viewers to choose the aspects of information they want to know by activate it using an alphabet tag or a cube. Survey result shows that the multi-channel platform can serves as a useful resource for novice graphic designers, as well as satiate the curiosity of anyone with even a passing interest in the typography. In addition, the use of typography in video allows us to reclaim the lost art of arranging typefaces in a way that would make an 18th century typesetter’s head spin.

Panel: Think BETA: Participative Evolution of Smart Cities

The Be­taville pro­ject has ma­tured from an ex­per­i­men­tal soft­ware de­vel­op­ment pro­ject into a ve­hi­cle of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and ex­change in the main­stream: as a cre­ative tool in plan­ning and ar­chi­tec­ture stu­dios, a medium for con­cept de­vel­op­ment and ad­vo­cacy in the con­text of local art and ur­ban­ism pro­jects. In this paper, one of Be­taville’s found­ing cit­i­zens will pre­sent some of the first re­sults from Be­taville’s im­ple­men­ta­tions in the field as a col­lab­o­ra­tive en­vi­sion­ing and de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ment: from adap­tive re-use of ex­ist­ing built forms to large-scale neo-top­ias built for New York, but in many cases draw­ing on a mind-bog­gling breadth of prece­dents. It seems to be pos­si­ble to “mash up” Prouns, New Baby­lon, New Ur­ban­ism, dis­carded de­signs for base­ball sta­di­ums, and next-gen­er­a­tion tech­nolo­gies… until the mix is just right for a next step in the real world.

Panel: NeuroArts

Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy is com­ing of age. Tra­di­tional ‘le­sion stud­ies’ – the painstak­ing method of ob­serv­ing the ef­fects of lo­calised brain dam­age on be­hav­iour – have been aug­mented by brain imag­ing tech­nolo­gies al­low­ing di­rect ob­ser­va­tion of the liv­ing brain. We are now build­ing maps of the brain’s func­tional ar­chi­tec­ture that, in scope and de­tail, could scarcely have been imag­ined 50 years ago. And yet, it seems to me, some­thing fun­da­men­tal is miss­ing from the scene. Where is the ‘per­son’? Where is the ‘self’? How do the var­i­ous sys­tems and sub­sys­tems of men­tal­ity (per­cep­tion, mem­ory, emo­tion, etc.) col­lude in the con­struc­tion and main­te­nance of the con­scious, in­tro­spec­tive, uni­fied and con­tin­u­ous sense of in­di­vid­ual iden­tity that we take as the bedrock norm of human ex­pe­ri­ence? Until re­cently such ques­tions were sim­ply not on the sci­en­tific agenda. They are now, and as this cen­tury un­folds the neu­ropsy­chol­ogy of per­son­hood is going to stir up ques­tions of pro­found con­cern not merely for neu­ro­science but for so­ci­ety at large. In this pre­sen­ta­tion I offer my own, some­times per­sonal, re­flec­tions on the neu­ropsy­chol­ogy of self­hood from the per­spec­tive of a sci­en­tist-prac­ti­tioner with a back­ground in clin­i­cal neu­ropsy­chol­ogy, but one who also has lately spent as much time ex­plor­ing mem­ory and iden­tity through the­atre and film.

Panel: Hybrid Cultures

In their nine-screen dig­i­tal video the Russ­ian artist group AES+F has sought to pro­vide an anal­ogy for the glob­alised third mil­len­nium by re/pre­sent­ing it through a he­do­nist glut in the en­vi­ron­ment- as imag­i­nary lux­ury hotel re­sorts that op­er­ate as com­pound non-places of su­per­moder­nity (Marc Auge). It is a place in which the power re­la­tions be­tween con­tem­po­rary mas­ters and slaves is re/en­acted and re/af­firmed through the con­ver­gence of re­spec­tive his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary cross-cul­tural sig­ni­fiers. The space-time con­tin­uum is col­lapsed into an ahis­tor­i­cal, tem­po­rary par­adise made up of frag­mented ,global/ised ref­er­ents from fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy, glossy tourist mag­a­zines, leisure ad­ver­tise­ments, broad sheet sup­ple­ments and soap op­eras (as well as art, de­sign and ar­chi­tec­tural his­tory) and shaped by metonymy (rather than metaphor).  Using this com­plex and dense work as a pri­mary case study, the pre­sen­ta­tion ex­plores the ten­sions be­tween its fore­grounded media and tech­no­log­i­cal hy­brid­ity and the mapped out al­le­gor­i­cal hy­per­space, as means to crit­i­cally in­ter­vene in the un­der­stand­ing of con­tem­po­rary me­di­ated cul­ture under the con­di­tions of a global flow of cap­i­tal.

Panel: Think BETA: Participative Evolution of Smart Cities

As most eu­ro­pean cities and towns, the dan­ish cap­i­tal Copen­hagen has many dif­fer­ent lay­ers of phys­i­cal build­ings and struc­tures, but also of sto­ries and mean­ing at­tached to the spaces and places of the city. These spaces and their mean­ing is of in­ter­est to many dif­fer­ent po­si­tions: plan­ners, artists, his­to­ri­ans, urban de­vel­op­ers, mu­se­ums, re­searchers etc. The city is today such a com­plex sys­tem that not many peo­ple can re­late to more than their own quar­ter or street, and cer­tainly very few have ac­cess to the sto­ries and mean­ings that per­me­ates the build­ings around them. From the point of view of city au­thor­i­ties, it is hard to get a di­a­logue with the pub­lic about vi­sions for the fu­ture of the city. Through a com­bi­na­tion of a web-based 3D-en­vi­ron­ment and a per­va­sive, mo­bile tech­nol­ogy, the many par­ties in­volved in the city can col­lab­o­rate in a way that vi­sions, his­tory and ex­ist­ing rules will im­preg­nate each other.