Presentation Data Table

‘Think of yourself as the Permanent Resistance.Things don’t change without activism. Ars longa, but so is activism.’  _Guerrilla Girls (2008) Letters to a Young Artist, New York, Darte Publishing LLC

Many contemporary artists working in the public arena have recognised the potential that the rapid development of digital media technologies presents. As a result new categories of artists have emerged – artists-developers, artists-engineers and artists-scientists. Analysing a number of activist artworks, this paper discusses the potential of art and technology collaborations stimulated by the continuous transformation of our cities. It explores the intersection between art, activism and technology as a new art practice used as a tool for creating situations prompting cultural change.

In the past decade art activists have been actively using various digital tools to realize their projects. Breakthroughs in technology have had a vast impact on the way activist art projects are initiated and developed. Furthermore, the internet, as a virtual public space, has presented the artists with an opportunity to organize and promote their practices.

Presenting a variety of case studies, this paper examines the works of contemporary artists and art collectives who use the power of technology to publically engage with political, social and community issues. From Google Map ‘mash-ups‘, to guerrilla interventions and site-specific installations, this essay investigates interventionist art projects which compel audiences to think about their environment in new ways, and aims to highlight the existence of a critical special practice where public artworks can be seen as a critique of the increasing marginalization of public space.

Astronomy is in a period of epistemological and ontological crisis. We now think that most of the universe is ‘dark’, dark matter and dark energy, and emits no light of any kind. I want to discuss the history of astronomy as a science and its symbiotic relationship with technology. Many aspects of the universe cannot be known about until the right technology is invented; as pointed out by many scholars we augment, extend and develop new senses. And many concepts necessary to understand cosmology are untranslateable to our own languages that are derived from our sensory experience that has no history with such phenomena. An epistemological revolution is under way with the arrival with the era of ‘big data’ with the exponential growth of available data. This terrain has been rich for art-science collaborations and a number of astronomers have collaborated with artists. I will review the major tendencies. I will address how some of the approaches of translations studies may be helpful in understanding the nature of these collaborations. If we are badly designed to understand the universe, as a species we have developed ever more sophisticated ‘avatars, our scientific instruments, with whom we work to overcome the deficiencies of our own cognitive systems. As an astrophysicist and an art-science researcher I will bring to bear my own professional background in cosmology to unpack some of the underlying issues.

In recent years game designers have been experimenting with blending technology and the real world. These experiments sometimes go by the name of pervasive games, are sometimes called mixed-, augmented- or alternate-reality games and sometimes simply big games. One aspect that links them is that they spill out of specific mediums and particular technologies, into the physical world and back again, blurring boundaries and challenging expectations.

There has been research that addresses the games, but very little on the players and designers. Who are these people? Why do they create and play these games? This talk takes a social and cultural perspective on the formation of these groups and the festivals where these games are played. These findings are based on ethnographic field work carried out, in 2010, at Come Out and Play, Hide and Seek and Igfest; the three largest, and longest running, pervasive, street and urban game festivals.

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is used to discuss cultures of taste and why these games appeal to certain people and not others; that aesthetics are determined by social groupings and and those groups reinforced by shared aesthetic preferences.

Pervasive and big gamers will be compared and contrasted with the now infamous subcultural group known as Hipsters, showing that although they are quite different people there are many functional similarities. Artists, designers and taste-makers from both groups have similar backgrounds and social roles and are engaged in creating cultural capital and constructing markets in cool. Specific attention is given to the emergent aesthetics that are shared between these two groups. These being a tendency towards historic referencing, intertextuality and lo-fi, appropriative design strategies.

The emergence of these groups helps us come to terms with the real world,  situated practice of these games, rather than the traditionally technologically determined rhetoric that surrounds them.

Biking has multiple benefits for individuals’ health and finances as well as for the environment and sustainability. My project is promoting bicycling generally, for recreation, for transportation, as well as for fun through a visually appealing, interactive interface. I hope that users will be able to learn more about biking data and then be able to make more informed decisions in the future.

The new flesh has arrived, synthesised out of silicon and carbon life forms, meticulous in its microscopic anatomy, global in its wired arteries. But has the cybernetic organism of the present-future provided us with anything more than the richness of community, the tactility of communion? And what is the price we pay for a planetary virtual body? The papers in this panel query the outcomes of the interfaces between the new technologies of the city and the new technologies of the body, converging on the problem of communication and community from a variety of perspectives and disciplines.

The panel opens with a session led by the Carnegie Mellon roboticists, whose work demands attention to the goals of human-machine relationships, but also asks us to pause before the utopian-dystopian discourses of cybercultural futurology to discuss where we are now, what is actually achieved and achievable. Later, the panel turns towards the death of privacy, towards social control and social change, to the urban and urbane, the cosmopolitan and the local, the sensual and the spectacular to seek the revolutionary struggles of the hypercity.

Panel: BioARTCAMP: Laboratory Ecologies in the Wild West

Chair person: Jennifer Willet                                                                                                          Presenters: Marie Pier Boucher, Paul Vanouse & Tagny Duff

Dr. Jennifer Willet Presents BioARTCAMP research at ISEA in Istanbul. Dr. Jennifer Willet will travel to Turkey present her BioARTCAMP project to The International Symposium on Electronic Art .  On a panel co-chaired with Marie Pier Boucher (Duke University), Paul Vanouse (UBuffalo) and Tagny Duff (Concordia University), Willet will report their experiences while camping and building a portable bioART Laboratory in Banff National Park in July 2011. BioART­CAMP is a large col­lab­o­ra­tive art/sci­ence pro­ject hosted in July 2011 by Jen­nifer Wil­let from IN­CU­BA­TOR: Hy­brid Lab­o­ra­tory at the In­ter­sec­tion of Art, Sci­ence and Ecol­ogy at The Uni­ver­sity of Wind­sor and The Banff Cen­tre for the Arts, in Canada.  With BioART­CAMP a va­ri­ety of artists, sci­en­tists and stu­dents will build a portable bioart lab in Banff Na­tional Park, Canada.

At this site they will con­duct a va­ri­ety of bioart pro­to­cols, and host an open house ‘art/sci­ence fair’ for the gen­eral pub­lic. In this pre­sen­ta­tion Wil­let will chart the prac­ti­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal un­der­pin­nings of the BioART­CAMP pro­ject with em­pha­sis on eco­log­i­cal metaphors for de­scrib­ing biotech­nol­ogy, and a de­sire to com­pli­cate the ‘Great Di­vide’ be­tween lab and field based re­search method­olo­gies in the hard sci­ences.  She will also take this op­por­tu­nity to ad­dress the in­evitable com­pli­ca­tion of her own the­o­ret­i­cal pre­sup­po­si­tions about BioART­CAMP – with the un­ruly hap­pen­stance of what ac­tu­ally oc­curred when she brought a va­ri­ety of artists, and sci­en­tists, and spec­i­mens, and lab equip­ment to­gether under a big tent in the Cana­dian Rocky Moun­tains! BioARTCAMP was directed by Willet as a co-production between INCUBATOR lab and The Banff Centre, and sponsored by The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Ontario Arts Council, University of Windsor, Hosteling International, the Glenbow Museum, and The Art and Genomics Centre, at The University of Leiden, and Fonds BKVB.

The following article describes some transdisciplinary artistic project, developed in Laboratory of Research in Art and TechnoScience at the University of Brasilia, Gama College in Brazil. Those works are using systemic theoretical/practical thinking and concepts from art, science and technology as a basis to understand relations of the connected body with technologies, of the living systems in symbiosis with digital elements, about  natural and artificial perceptive phenomena at the physical space and cyber data. The body performance art was tattoo with the augmented reality code, allows for interaction with virtual wings tagness in the back of body.

Another artistic experience that geolocated the information at the urban space by use mobile device is 14 Bis-Santos Dumont’s airplane-, the virtual object was geotagness in the sky and its structure was natural size. Our researchers intend to contribute for artistic creation of new body condition in the mixed space, as an reinvention of the environment and re-engineering of life and nature. The connected world that real phenomenal and digitals coexist and can interact since artistic urban works in Brazil, play of sensations created by complex systems, where organic and inorganic are self-dependent, we contextualized these relations by a new ecology, when the biological signals of body plus hybrid language add cyberspace, we called Biocybrid Ecology.

Nature has been an infinite source of conceptual, morphological and functional analogies; it has been inspiring designers and architects of all eras. Biomimetics is a discipline oriented to study different characteristics and qualities of nature to be transferred to the artificial world through a creative process. Since the last decades have been emerging the digital fabrication technologies, they are changing radically the design process of designers, architects and different creative professionals. Digital fabrication technologies offer technical and creative advantages never before seen, some advantages are: the immediacy (to fabricate parts or products directly from a digital file), possibilities of personalization, generation of complex geometries, fabrication of armed assemblies, wide variety of materials and finishes, among others. The integration between biomimetics and digital fabrication technologies is an emerging and innovative research area with few exponents in the world, in which is possible to see new working methods, innovative products and a lot of creative opportunities. The objective of this talk is to show the technical and creative possibilities of this new area for product design through the analysis of professional, academic and research cases and in this way to open a debate on these new exploration territories.

Panel: BioARTCAMP: Laboratory Ecologies in the Wild West

Biotopo­log­i­cal Re­con­fig­u­ra­tions will ad­dress the spa­tial re­al­ity of the BioART­CAMP. Build­ing a lab­o­ra­tory -a closed and ster­ile en­vi­ron­ment- into the wild gives birth to a pro­duc­tive re­la­tion­ship be­tween open and closed spaces, be­tween ster­ile en­vi­ron­ments and po­ten­tially in­fec­tious sites. These per­for­ma­tive re­la­tions amount to the prob­lema­ti­za­tion of biotech­no­log­i­cally shaped en­vi­ron­ments in terms of con­nec­tions be­tween mi­lieus of in­te­ri­or­ity and mi­lieus of ex­te­ri­or­ity, in terms of topo­log­i­cal con­nec­tions; biotopolo­gies. How does the open­ing up of a mi­lieu of in­te­ri­or­ity, of a closed -or ster­ile- en­vi­ron­ment, to an open -po­ten­tially in­fec­tious- space, that is to a mi­lieu of ex­te­ri­or­ity, to a space of in­de­ter­mi­nacy, to a fu­tu­rity, a chang­ing po­ten­tial, af­fects -or in­fects- liv­ing’s spa­tial con­di­tions? Draw­ing upon in­ter­views I will con­duct with all the par­tic­i­pants of the BioART­CAMP, I will offer a crit­i­cal analy­sis of the biotech fu­ture in terms of spa­tial and/or ar­chi­tec­tural tech­nol­ogy.

Research indicates we are living through the “Sixth Extinction” where loss of species and biodiversity is occurring at an alarming rate. Across culture and continent, birds are seen as “message bearers” able to communicate the future, announce changes in weather and warn of coming disaster. Viewed by many to be barometers of changing habitats and environmental health, it has been estimated that almost a third of all bird species will have disappeared by the end of this century. Approximately 3 billion birds migrate every year across the Arabian Peninsula providing a unique cross‑continental bridge. These important flyways are under threat due to issues such as urbanization, climate change, hunting, and pollution. In addition, there are at least 30 nomadic bird species on the Peninsula that are characterized by regional irregular and unpredictable migratory movements in response to conditions and availability of resources.

As an interdisciplinary artwork Birding the Future explores these issues and current extinction rates by specifically focusing on the warning abilities of birds. An outdoor sound installation is paired with a stereoscopic image walk as participants are guided through a journey of extinction. This global project is designed as a series of local, site‑specific works. This session places Birding the Future in a regional context by facilitating a roundtable discussion with ornithologists, birders, and other local experts. As a project utilizing technological reproduction as the only means to hear and see certain species, Birding the Future will serve as the springboard to begin this interdisciplinary dialogue. Focus will be on migratory and nomadic birds and ways in which local issues connect and map global concerns. Specific questions that will be posed include: What might happen as the messages of birds are increasingly being silenced? How can traditional ecological knowledge be combined with technological advances to increase awareness of our role in the environment? What does it mean that we can only see and hear extinct species through technology?

In the context of the Econotopias theme, Jaromil illustrates technical and political aspects connected to Bitcoin, a cryptographic commodity used to transfer value over the Internet without the need of any intermediary. Jaromil is contributing to Freecoin.ch and co-editing BitcoinMedia.com.

Panel: VIDA: New Discourses, Tropes and Modes in Art and Artificial Life Research

This talk will ad­dress a few thorny is­sues key to VIDA’s mis­sion and my own work in emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies of art: the ten­sions be­tween com­plex­ity and re­duc­tion­ism, emer­gence and de­ter­min­ism, and liv­ing and non-liv­ing via an­other du­al­ism, Bi­ol­ogy and Post-bi­ol­ogy.  Cen­tral to this dis­cus­sion are two pro­jects Rel­a­tive Ve­loc­ity In­scrip­tion De­vice (a VIDA prize win­ning pro­ject, 2002) and Oc­u­lar Re­vi­sion (2010). The for­mer pro­ject is a live sci­en­tific ex­per­i­ment in which DNA from my own fam­ily’s skin color genes are lit­er­ally raced against one an­other in a DNA fin­ger­print­ing gel, im­ply­ing a val­u­a­tion of their speed such as ge­netic fit­ness.

In the lat­ter pro­ject, the no­tion of Ge­netic Map­ping is turned up­side-down, as I cre­ate satel­lite-like im­ages of the Earth’s hemi­spheres by in­sert­ing uniquely processed E. coli DNA into a cus­tom, cir­cu­lar elec­trophore­sis ap­pa­ra­tus. These pro­jects re­flect upon epis­temic dif­fer­ences in the life sci­ences be­tween the Bi­o­log­i­cal and the Post-bi­o­log­i­cal pe­ri­ods. Whereas Bi­ol­ogy de­fined the cell as the basic unit of life and thus took upon it­self a new ob­ject, life it­self, Post-bi­ol­ogy shifts the focus of the life-sci­ences to non-liv­ing mat­ter, DNA. Fur­ther­more, this Post-bi­o­log­i­cal turn takes a fur­ther cy­ber­netic twist as the non-liv­ing mat­ter of DNA is in­creas­ingly treated as a pure code, rather than a ma­te­r­ial sub­stance. The dif­fer­ences are not sim­ply a mat­ter of scale in which more pow­er­ful tools allow us to look deeper, but rather a shift from the pri­macy of vi­sion al­to­gether to­ward a hy­per-ra­tio­nal­ized, sta­tis­ti­cal ob­ser­va­tion.  I be­lieve that these is­sues re­flect a chang­ing vi­sion of or­ganic life, a topic fun­da­men­tal to emerg­ing artis­tic prac­tices and the VIDA mis­sion.

Social media offer novel strategies for preserving endangered languages. The emergence of YouTube offers one platform to couple videography with the oral tradition to preserve features of the spoken word such as accent and cadence. Blogs and apps hold potential for sharing stories in aboriginal languages, but the critical mass required to keep a language vibrant often exceeds the number of native speakers. Therefore best the strategy may be to start sharing aboriginal languages with members of the general public to create the critical mass needed and to inject them with new energy. Starting the conversation will be difficult since there are purists who prefer a community centred approach despite the dwindling number of speakers. I will examine the status of this project and make the case for expanding the Blackfoot language beyond its cultural boundaries.

Reading Marc Augé’s study ‘Non‑Places’ (1992) on the conditions of our contemporary situation one can imagine that the processes which make our situation a ‘supermodern’ situation will not suddenly halt but instead continue. In these times, efficiency is key. Technology allows us to keep up with its demands. Consequently, human beings might soon become so closely linked to the apparatuses they create, and which keep them alive and healthy, faster and more secure at the same time that the differentiation between living being and machine becomes obsolete. Then, human beings might enjoy freedom from the hassles of daily life. At all times, they might be aware of the geographical location of everyone they care about, and think of it as a prerequisite to perfect timing.

Marc Augé warns us that a sense of place might be vanishing in supermodern times. Obviously, once humanity has perfectly adapted to the capacities of technology, and once the body is constantly controlled in favour of security and efficiency, narratives of place are not needed anymore. We can work, consume, educate ourselves, and even engage in   politics without connecting to the communities that create places and their narratives. Being a citizen does not anymore require an embedding in anthropological places.

However, there are questions which have not been answered. Does the process of increasing technologification truly lead to a replacement of anthropological places in favour of spaces which appear perfectly adapted to the conditions of a super modernity, and which are – for Marc Augé – closed and without future? There is probably no better location to rethink the relationship between technology and place than one of those locations that have entered the global media as images of superlative spatial design. These newly created and newly mapped locations appear from many viewpoints as perfect settings for supermodern life.

To which extent these new spaces may be understood as closed spaces, or as ‘blank spaces’ into which new generations can inscribe their own future to create places – possibly through technology, and possibly on the basis of desire not necessity – is outlined in this paper. It is suggested that it might be instrumental to re‑consider the newly created spaces of the East through suspension of assumptions that belong to Western culture. Such suspension means a radical shift in thought. It could allow an entirely new approach to the phenomenon that Dubai presents and to its possibilities. A journey with an expert of detours in favour of suspension – François Jullien – leads via China, via ‘blandness’ and ‘impossible nudes’, and via an Art that has a long history in thinking the observer as creator. Through an exercise in thinking suspension, the paper attempts to initiate a state of mind that makes different futures possible.

Blazoning is the act of exposing the body either visually or through words. In Renaissance to Tudor times the blazon was a varied expression of power. For the anatomist dissecting human corpses in search of an understanding of the human anatomy (particularly female anatomy) it offered the answers. For male courtiers blazoning was the bandying of bawdy verse at their rival blazoneur. The blazoneur would use imagery drawn from his lover’s body as a weapon of duelling with his opponent. Queen Elizabeth I ruled her court with power fuelled by sexuality. She had the knack of flashing her belly at her courtiers at parties with a simple, deft movement of dress to tease the men at court. The paper will look into the relevance and power issues for artists using their own bodies as tools for their art. How do we mediate the postmodern body? Is the site of flesh becoming more or less obscene, what is its power and how do the new mediums affect the impact of the body on our consciousness? As society becomes more and more alienated from the physical how do we approach and communicate our visceral life experience. Like pubescent children we are eternally fascinated by our bodies and yet are in the main ignorant of their physiology and anatomy. We consume narratives about the body on a daily basis searching conflicting narratives for the answers we seek. What are the future strategies for artists to pursue in exploring and trying to resolve the west’s difficult relationship with the body? Is there a hope of reconciliation with our bodies? With bodies being redefined with new technology, where is true cyborg art when the real cyborgs are amputees and the disabled and not Stelarc? Why are most body artists thin? Is scientific research the saviour or another devil with further questions? All these questions will be questioned and perhaps even answered.

In urban settings trees are often perceived at the edge of our awareness. As cities world-wide engage in large-scale tree planting initiatives to address a broad range of environmental issues, they are engaging in what is essentially a massive ecological and social experiment. State of the art imaging technologies — air-borne, space-borne, and field-based imaging and inventory mechanisms — fail to provide key information on urban tree ecology that is crucial to informing management, policy, and supporting citizen initiatives for the planting and stewardship of emerging urban forests. Mobile participatory/social media as a medium offers novel collaborative imaging approaches with the potential for public engagement at the intersection of cultural vibrancy, stewardship, sustainability, community participation and science. Smartphones hold the potential to enhance real-world experiences with geo-spatial networks of abstract data. We are designing and prototyping mobilebased tools to capture bio-imaging data about the health status of urban trees. The development process blends the arts, participatory culture, science and sustainability.

Drone technology combined with spatial augmented reality software provides novel opportunities in the creation of immersive audiovisual performances and installations. The Blimpy project leverages these opportunities by developing a spatial augmented reality experience built around helium devices, which are ideally suited for this application, to explore future research questions on the formal aesthetics and interaction between autonomous agents, people and physical spaces. This paper introduces the framework, which has evolved from the Blimpy project and provides encapsulated components dealing with the technical challenges arising in the creation of such experiences. The framework is designed to be transparent to artists and people whose sole interest lies in the creation of audiovisual performances and has been implemented at the Immersive Arts Space of the Zurich University of the Arts for verification and experimentation. The design of an interdisciplinary workshop employing the framework and Immersive Arts space will further leverage the interaction between researchers and students.

A series of dialogues between curators of new media art, and curators of contemporary art in general. These aim to tease out areas of common ground and compare useful experiences and methods. The context for the public dialogues will be an informal social setting involving a very nice cup of tea, and the chance for further discussion with the audience. The themes for the dialogues will include common interest in: collaborative curation; location, internationalism and festivals; and questioning networks, from artist/curator hybrids to self-organisation. CRUMB (The Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss), founded in 2000, is an online resource for those who curate, exhibit, organise, or archive new media art. CRUMB aims to share the knowledge with a professional and academic audience, though online discussion, face-to-face events, research and curatorial projects.

In this information-rich era, data is presented to us every day in various audio-visual format. How our senses working together to interpret the information and form our own understanding, particularly how this process reflects our cultural and personal identity and how this process shapes our perception of information, are topics worth investigating. This talk explains the process of making Bloodie Writes an Anthem, a project aims to explore the aforementioned topics via visualizing a poem with a combination of abstract pattern, text, ASMR sound and vocal music.

Emily Vey Duke’s poem Bloodie Writes an Anthem depicts a vital moment of a young women’s self-discovery, a moment that she sees the light within herself. We attempt to represent the poem with multiple audio-visual means that hopefully allows people to experience the sense of wonder, self-confidence and tranquility of that moment.

Angelo Vermeulen, artist and biologist will present Blue Shift [LOG. x], a Darwinian art project realized together with biologist Luc De Meester (University of Leuven, Belgium) and engineers from Philips. The project consists of an interactive installation piece with an evolving model ecosystem at its core. Visitors induce a microevolution of the light-responsive behavior of water flea populations. The project aims to question the status of the utilitarian in art and science. Video footage, photos and biological data will be used to demonstrate the working process.

In this lecture I will present the results of an art project that was created with the explicit intention to function as a hybrid platform between visual arts and ecology. “Blue Shift [LOG. x]” is a Darwinian installation piece that was realized together with evolutionary biologist Prof. Luc De Meester from the University of Leuven (Belgium) and engineers from electronics company Philips (Turnhout, Belgium). The project was originally conceived for the exhibition “Hot Re-Strike” (curated by Stef Van Bellingen) in the De Warande arts centre in Turnhout in Belgium, beginning 2005. During this lecture video footage, photos, biological data and interviews with collaborators and visitors will be used to demonstrate the working process of the project.

Blue Shift [LOG. x] is an interactive installation with a living model ecosystem at its core. Using single-cell algae, water fleas, fish and water snails, a compact aquatic community is set up in the exhibition space. The whole system is designed in such a way that visitors drastically induce a gradual microevolution of the – genetically determined – light-responsive behavior of the water fleas. When the system is in standby, yellow lights illuminate the aquaria from the top. The water fleas are strongly attracted to this light and swim in close proximity to it, near the surface of the water. Whenever a visitor approaches the installation and passes a wall-mounted sensor, blue spotlights on the top of the aquaria are activated. The water fleas are repelled by this color of light, flee downwards and pass through holes in a false bottom in the aquaria. However, fish are residing in the lower sections of the aquaria and most of the water fleas are immediately wiped out.

What can be considered to be a survival strategy in natural circumstances – blue light indicates clear open water and hence potential detection by fish – has quite a different meaning in this set-up: it is exactly those water fleas that do not swim away from the blue light that survive and reproduce. In this way their genes will become dominant in the water flea populations and a “contra-natural” selection will occur.

When the work is on display the artists-scientists continuously adjust the set-up and carry out new experiments. The installation aims to question the status of the utilitarian in art and science and push interactive installation art into Darwinian realms.

Poster Statement

Bodies INCorporated, is a public space on the web (VRML/Java) that occasionally emerges in the physical realm. It will be exhibited from July 8 to August 11 at two network-linked sites — The Contemporary Art Center (for a show entitled “The Bridge”), and The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center (for SIGGRAPH 96), both in New Orleans. After this, the show will be exhibited at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Initially, the participant is invited to construct a virtual body out of predefined body-parts, textures, and sounds, and gain membership to the larger body-owner community. The main elements of the online site are three constructed environments (subsidiaries of Bodies INCorporated), within which different sets of activities occur: “LIMBO INCorporated,” a gray, rather nondescript zone, where information about inert bodies that have been put on hold — bodies whose owners have abandoned or neglected them — is accessed; “NECROPOLIS INCorporated,” a richly textured, baroque atmosphere, where owners can either look at or choose how they wish their bodies to die; and “SHOWPLACE!!! INCorporated,” where members can participate in discussion forums, view star/featured bodies of the week, bet in the dead-pools, and enter “dead” or “alive” chat sessions. Events occurring within each of the zones ignite a range of emotional responses, and raise a variety of issues related to online community dynamics. For example, how does the graphic representation of the body amplify our relationship to it? What sort of psychological commitment and attachment do owners exhibit toward their “virtual” bodies? What happens when people find out that, with neither their knowledge nor participation, their body has been publicly altered in some way? How does the body become a source of pleasure and anxiety as it moves through changes and permutations out of the hands of the owner? What sort of emotional dynamics result from bodies being displayed as public spectacle? These are the types of questions Bodies INCorporated actively explores.

This paper addresses the degrees of interactivity produced with and within an artwork. The act of experiencing an artwork shows that any experience is made up of relations of intensity within processes of interactivity between bodies and milieus. It is maintained that there are various degrees of interactivity in experience: mixtures, attractions, incorporations, embodiments and perceptions. Mixtures are the voluntary and involuntary affects between bodies in associated milieus. The understanding of mixtures of bodies is related to various philosophical conceptions of immanence. Attractions speak of an animal art that shows us the potential of the milieu and the affects of bodies. The body referred to includes not only the human but non-human others as well—animal, technological, immaterial—formed by the speed or slowness of matter-taking-form. Such bodies embody life through technics and technicities which do not dissociate the natural and the artificial, the analog and the digital, matter and form. The (mis)perceptions produces an ephemeral landscapeness within the meta-stable system constituted by the artwork-human-milieu.

These ideas are based on the philosophical writings of Baruch Spinoza, Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze and are applied to the field of interactive art in order to understand that artworks are created and modified through the artist/spectator/artwork/milieu experience. Interactive artworks are fundamentally relational, they break down the frame and require participation. By being an art of action, interactive art can instantly produce action-reactions, or the action can be the effectiveness of the techno-aesthetic operation of the artwork itself as performed by the spectators, in other words, an artwork keeps its operation open in order to allow the spectator to access its implicit forms. Therefore, the questions become: what is possible (or not) within this construction of bodies and milieus in interactive art? Where is the ethical limit which guides such productions? How much can a body endure within the proposed relations? Thus, interactive processes are driven by an Ethics of the potential of bodies to act, which is to say, by what a body can do in its intensity in the dynamics of degrees of interactivity in the experience of the artwork in media art.

Panel: Secure Insecurity

We’re ob­sessed with num­bers, codes, and al­go­rithms. As Berg­son points out, since our in­tel­lec­tual ca­pa­bil­i­ties are in­suf­fi­cient to per­ceive re­al­ity as an in­sep­a­ra­ble whole, we bring it to a stand­still, at­om­ize it into par­ti­cles and as­cribe nu­mer­i­cal value to com­pound phe­nom­ena. We live in the times where even the very rudi­ments of life have al­ready been mea­sured and ap­pro­pri­ated by the do­main of tech­nol­ogy. The code of life. The body de­scribed by in­tramol­e­c­u­lar se­quences looses its fleshy char­ac­ter and be­comes ab­stract, in­or­ganic, to use Freud’s ter­mi­nol­ogy: un­canny. Processed and trans­formed into num­bers: al­most an ab­ject. The feel­ing of es­trange­ment as­sists ex­er­cis­ing of power. Along with the recog­ni­tion, ma­nip­u­la­tion and patent­ing of human genome, we’re be­com­ing owned, our bod­ies turn into com­modi­ties, tar­gets, bio­cap­i­tal. Our el­e­men­tal data is con­verted into ex­clu­sive prop­erty of in­flu­en­tial com­pa­nies, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal moguls, rul­ing elites, se­cu­rity ser­vices then sold, ex­changed, re­leased into cir­cu­la­tion. Asym­met­ri­cal ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion re­sults in a hi­er­ar­chy be­tween „us” and „them” and en­ables wield­ing of power. Such im­bal­ance is the prin­ci­ple of human man­age­ment and gov­ern­ing. The body is turned against you. It serves as a pow­er­ful weapon of the state.

An arm of dis­ci­pline and con­trol. In­vol­un­tar­ily the body may be­come a medium, a car­rier spread­ing the dis­ease at the same time en­tan­gling it­self in the net­work of pol­i­tics, med­ical ser­vices, in­for­ma­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion, trans­port, data­bases etc. The knowl­edge and pos­ses­sion of life code data may af­fect free­dom of mi­gra­tion, de­cide upon in­clu­sion or ex­clu­sion, fa­cil­i­tate human seg­re­ga­tion alike eu­gen­ics, re­veal weak points in human con­sti­tu­tion thus de­liv­er­ing in­struc­tions where to strike to crash our bare sys­tems or even pro­vid­ing for­mu­las for cre­at­ing a bioweapon ca­pa­ble of ex­ter­mi­nat­ing par­tic­u­lar eth­ni­cal groups due to their slight DNA dif­fer­ences. Se­cu­rity state ex­ists upon es­ca­lat­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of these threats, upon ex­cit­ing the at­mos­phere of haz­ard. This leads to a con­stant state of emer­gency, to a per­ma­nent war. „The body is under at­tack on all fronts”. The body ab­sorbed and ex­ploited by the state ma­chine. The war is being fought via biopo­lit­i­cal body, a gun pointed at you.

With the development of a novel motion capture and analysis system using frontal infra-red illumination, and based on a systematic study of the relations between the human body movement and the visual art language, the Body-Brush turns the human body as a whole into a dynamic brush. The Body-Brush enables humans to interact intuitively with the machine to create a rich variety of visual forms and space.

Like many fine artists, modern & experimental dancers in the age of digital media have been early adopters of wearable technology. It seems obvious as the wearable itself can be an expressive media platform and at the same time, worn by a performer during performance, it elevates expression of body language as creating a stronger media platform combining two forms of media that have been so close to art and technology -wearable and performance.
This paper introduces a performance wearable project, ‘Body Graffiti’, a performance art wearable project that uses the illusion of persistence of vision (POV) to create ephemeral graffiti via body movement. As dancers (in this particular performance—break dancers) perform head spins, windmills and flares, messages programmed into the custom designed LED POV system are displayed. At the moment, the Body Graffiti prototype version 1.0 has been completed and performed with a B-boy team, “Last For One” during HCI Party Event in 2010.

The B-boy dancers wore the Body Graffiti system embedded in vests and leg shields, to express visual graffiti drawn with their body movements in the air. Body Graffiti uses a custom designed LED POV(Persistence of Vision) system which can be reprogrammed to express different messages whether it’s text or graffiti. LEDs and electric circuits are seamlessly integrated in wearable items therefore, dancers can move freely to express the message. The Body Graffiti with the B-boy performance has been on-going collaborative project since wearable has to be designed according to dancers’ speed and angle of movements; rotation such as head-spin in this case, and graphic and textual message we liked to convey. Body Graffiti is still in progress as it is being upgraded with more defined custom circuit board design with higher LED pixels to express more detailed graffiti graphics and fragmented sewable PCBs to be conducted with flexible electronic materials for better wearability.

This is an installation project based on the interactive body tracking software called StillDancing, a motion capture and body mapping software which defines interactions with Life Forms, a computer choreographic tool for dance. This paper will describe the development of the StillDancing motion capture software, and the BodyMaps installation which is based on that software. Movement phrases in Life Forms, can now be accessed and explored with real-time sampled movement phrases input directly from a participant “dancing” within the system.

Artists and theorist from film, music, architecture and literature with a concern for the technologized body and diverse cultural spaces will discuss the ways that body matters in cyberspace.

Given the new subjectivity introduced by virtual technologies, to what extent can the subject “inside” a virtual environment effectively let go of the cultural codes and conventions established “outside”? In what way can we establish a productive, critical interplay between the virtual and the operational worlds?

How do the body or the illusion of the body, and gesture change in a pliable environment, where distinctions between real and virtual are sometimes blurred? This discussion raises questions of how we are reinventing the body, space, and actor in performance-based art.

To examine the part that technologies play in shifting the way we perceive gender and the body and in the shaping of our experiences and identity. The Close Scrutiny session will focus on questions of gender in relation to the new emergent electronic technologies. It will aim to bridge the gap between a range of disciplines and develop a wide perspective on how the new technologies are cutting across conventional disciplinary boundaries, and will consider what have been, hitherto, distinct areas of study by exploring the relationships between technologies, the body and territories.

The Cutting Edge Women’s Research Group based at the University of Westminster is a group of female practitioners and theorists investigating leading edge technological developments in art, design, media practice, theories and feminism. The members represent diverse areas in the fields of art and design in an interdisciplinary framework and embrace historical and contemporary perspectives of technological endeavour in these areas. In May 1995, Cutting Edge ran a day symposium and digital art exhibition “Desire by Design” at the University of Westminster. The focus of the symposium and exhibition was to explore feminist perspectives on art, design, media and technology. This was the basis for a collection of papers by the core members of the group and a range of invited contributors due to be published into a book “Desire By Design, Body, Territory and New Technologies” in September 1998.

Selection of members of the Cutting Edge Research Group at the University of Westminster:

1. Dr. Helen Coxall, UK
2. Jackie Hatfield, UK
3. Jane Prophet, UK
4. Gail Pearce, UK

Architecture incorporates the possibility of action which naturally is tied to a bodily reaction. Any structure that aims to be evocative should go beyond being a something to look at. Unsurprisingly, the same can be said about choreography. In the second half of the 20th century, J. J. Gibson challenged the concept of visual perception and demonstrated that it is part of a perceptual system which actively involves locomotor movement. This paper aims to demonstrate how architectural education can be enriched through digital spatial analysis tools which stem from the need for an enhanced bodily awareness for architects.

Even if the architect has internal processes of her own, it is the external forces that shape the architecture itself. From this dichotomy arises a gap, which I will engage with, not retreat from, by incorporating the body and movement into architectural creation. Although the phenomenon is a direct consequence of the Beaux-Arts system, especially in the 21st century, architecture has retreated into an exclusive and self-referential world. Although the architectural outcomes look radically different, the processes that are used to achieve these outcomes are similar.

Bringing together my post-doctoral research on the subject as well as experience from courses I have taught to architects on embodied design, this research will deal with the question of how the use of digital media in architectural design can propose creative conditions for movement and how movement creates similar openings for architecture. Architecture is taken here in the context not only of the built environment but in that of the multiple groundings and environments for movement. Finally, this re-shaping of space-creation through digital tools will be presented as an educational model based on the creation of an informed architecture that invites ways of moving through not just bodily gestures of the humans themselves but relational architectural interventions.

Keywords: Interactive Performance, Somatic, data, remediation, agency, embodiment

Bodytext is a performance work involving speech, movement and sound. A dancer’s movement and spoken description of a dance are re-mediated within an augmented environment, where acquired speech is re-written and re-sonified through physical interaction. The displayed textual objects recombine, creating the score for an emergent and ever evolving performance. Bodytext seeks insight into the relations between kinaesthetic experience, memory, agency and language. Dancer, audience and machine are enmeshed in a recursive dynamic they must both follow to its (il)logical conclusion, the innate entropy of the system giving structure to the overall work.

Intro
Bodytext is a performance work by Simon Biggs and Sue Hawksley, with interactive sound by Garth Paine, which seeks insight into the relations between kinesthetic experience, memory, agency and language. A dancer’s movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented environment employing realtime motion tracking and voice recognition that drives interpretative language systems, digital projection and audio resynthesis. The dancer’s verbal description of an imagined dance, derived from somatic experience, is acquired and displayed in an immersive projection. The displayed written texts respond to the movement of the dancer with their own movement and, when they interact with one another, exchange grammatical and syntactical elements in a manner that retains syntactic structure, thus evolving new textual descriptions that, in turn, determine a new dance. The dancer’s speech is also acquired as a series of audio events that are subsequently  remediated and sonified.

Digital technologies have permeated all sectors of publishing. There are increasing expectations that books will contain multimedia, interactive, multi-genre content. What once were static pages are now responsive media arenas. Book apps allow for picture books to be presented in a multimedia, interactive, playful environment. Like most digital mediums, book apps draw on the conventions deployed within legacy media. Children’s visual literature commonly combines textual expression, visual art, multimedia, interactivity and play. Multimedia content has been incorporated into picture books for decades. And the idea that children’s picture books should contain interactive elements and playful aspects was one that was developed almost four hundred years ago. This being the case, how can the techniques deployed in the making of picture books inform book app design?

Within this discussion I analyse the media content within children’s book apps and trace the connections between picture books and book apps. This involves tracking a history of print picture books and investigating the links between picture books, games and film. I also uncover the ways in which book app animation influences the user experience. This is with the view to assessing how picture book making techniques have shaped, or could shape, both book app design and interaction design. In this presentation I draw on picture book theorists Perry Nodelman and Maria Nikolajeva. I also refer to digital media analyst Janet Murray. In conclusion I propose possible future directions for highly interactive, multimedia digital books, assessing how these works have the potential to either strengthen or weaken the evolution of literature as an art-form. I also highlight the ways in which picture book making practices inform children’s interaction design, specifically within works that include animation, narration and text.

The Book of Nadine explores the audial representation of Nadine Ross, a prominent black South African female character of the popular video game Uncharted 4, voiced by Laura Bailey, a white American voice actress. South African participants were invited to listen to short snippets of dialogue from the game, focusing on Nadine’s “South African” English accent, and were then invited to create and record fictional backstories explaining her accent. This project is a collection of those diverse voiced South African fictional narratives.

Book presentation Jakká- Ninudlamama

My practice is hybrid, blurring borders between geographic locations, civic and national identities and language, and between art, research, pedagogy in its form. I create projects for exhibition, for the web, for the street and for the classroom, with audiences, with students, with participants. Project methodology is collaborative, discursive, and conversational in practice, constructed and mediated in form. Responsive to my own personal history of multiple citizenry and to larger issues of global migrations, my presentation will address the specific issue of border crossings and transmissions in my work, referencing four projects, indicative of my creative approach that utilizes digital technologies and telematic strategies to shift, blur or collapse space and time in an attempt to transport viewers and participants into fluid zones of encounter and exchange.

In the Neighbourhood: multi-channel synchronized video installation presents dialogues centered on stories of relationships with neighbours, positing questions of international relations, world citizenry and negotiations of borders and difference.

The Former Resident Project: http://www.former-resident-project.net/
Ongoing series of multifaceted, creative collaborations with participants in multiple cities addressing ‘residence’ as a series of narratives and residues that shift and slip over time. Exhibited/performed at Conflux, New York, 2006 and the University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland, 2007. Each project takes different forms within a different context and happens in the streets and on-line.

Berlin Project: http://uregina.ca/rvk/berlin.html
Site-specific video project created for the CAFKA festival, presents constructed, mediated dialogues between three artists from Berlin Germany and Kitchener Canada. Installation in the council chambers of Kitchener City Hall.

Blur Street: http://blurstreet.uregina.ca/
A series of online video ‘conversations’, performed online, between students from the University of Regina, Canada, the University of the Arts, Belgrade, Serbia, the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland and York University Toronto, Canada.

botanoadopt is a participatory interdisciplinary art project at the interface of art, science and social commitment, defines plants as independent beings and offers them for adoption on the internet. A plants-hatch is available for the anonymous local handover for plants. The adoption contract requires adopters to send botanoadopt photos of their fosterlings. These photos are then published at botanoadopt.org, where they offer insight into the socio-cultural environments of the plants.

The humorous contextual displacement makes it possible, to question one’s own definition of nature, and the adoption process establishes links with the theme of responsibility. Artistic thesis is, that plants are beeings with their own perception.

botanoadopt draws on alternative economic models of exchange and donation; questions raised regarding ecological actions are investigated via models surpassing the boundaries of art.

The Internet presence botanoadopt.org is visited worldwide. This site announce plants with an individual biography and personality for adoption. Every plant is posted with phot. Adopting persons have to collect the plants from the former owners by themselves. In this way, people from different contexts are brought into contact with each other – regardless of age, education, occupation, ethnic origin or religion. The biographys are dealing with facts and fiction in a way, that they shift perspectives. They are concerning to actual themes too.

The aim of the project is – simply described – using artistic activities and intervention in everyday life to question and redefine ones definition of nature.

The internetplatform furthermore offers a wide range of articles and useful knowlegde around the themes of plants, nature and biodiversity (Fakten).

The unveiling of the world’s first “Pflanzenklappe” – a babyhatch for plants in Schöppingen brought within one week to about 99,000 entries in google. The Bannwald-Migration (avalanche forest migration) saved 33 trees from the area of the new rhein-main-airport which were planted in Schöppingen/Germany. This artistic work in form of a small forest is called “Bannwald” (avalanche forest).

botanoadopt is noncommercial. Every adopting person has to sign a contract. Adopted plants are living around Germany and all over Europe.

The panel proposed aims to investigate the notion of boundary-crossing interdisciplinary, that is, by simultane-ously considering this notion in the arts and the humanities, the biological and the mathematical sciences, as well as human geography and political economy. The artists and theorists represented will engage in a cross disciplinary dialogue that considers this notion across disparate con-tents and contexts: boundaries are used to establish delimi-tation among disciplines; to discriminate between the hu-man and the non-human (body and technologies, body and bacteria); and to indicate physical and/or artificial bounda-ries, separating geographical areas and nation states.

The project Boundary-crossing(s), with the plural in paren-thesis, is a SSHRC funded multi-site project that comprises series of traditional panels and roundtables, participatory performances, art installations and demonstrations over the course of 6 months that will explore different practices and aspects of boundary-crossing. At ISEA, we will include reflections on activities that have transpired, and revive discussions around the relationships between virtual/data and natural environments (or the hybridization thereof); investigations on the (human or more-than-human) body and the self, its perceived or imposed boundaries, as well as by DNA surveillance, algorithmic data and data analyt-ics.

The series will also be itinerant, literally crossing the boundaries of different spaces (the gallery, the theatre, the lab, the lecture hall) and institutions (York University, the University of Toronto, the Fields Institute, and University of Windsor), and between academia and public space. Through these processes, we ask “What is the significance of boundaries, and the value of boundary-crossing today, a time when old-fashioned ideas of boundaries appear to have been transcended in favor of more fluid conceptions, while geopolitical and institutional powers seem to rein-force and build new ones?” The panel at ISEA2020 presents the culmination of this multi-site project and will also present new perspectives and documentation of work arising from this engagement.

Karaoke and opera inhabit the cultural margins, existing as complex and rarefied instances of musical performance. They share common points of contact in terms of their semi public origins as well as the role and importance of technology – opera with its history of elaborate stage gadgetry and efects, and karaoke with the ‘representational technologies’ of recorded sound and video. The rich semantics inscribed beneath karaoke’s seemingly superficial surface reveal relationships which, it appears, are implicit within, and symptomatic of human interactions with technology. Karaoke provides a loaded paradigm for a set of technology dependent practices, relationships and themes within which musical material is coined. Karaoke looks to the popular song and the star singer as the locus for a mimetic ritual not of ‘self-transformation’ (as one would find in the related culture of the exercise video) but of ‘self-transportation’.

Karaoke Opera’s appropriate this paradigm, casting their narratives and sequences within its borrowed frame of reference, yielding a novel metaphorical and performative framework wherein the use of microphones, backing tapes and video projections serve to activate what we may dub ‘karaoke discourses’ ie. those to do with identity, utopian self-actualisation (the DIY ethic), narcissism, social fragmentation etc. These themes are embodied within a species of technology interactions which inhabit both the private and the social sphere, confuse traditional distinctions between performer and audience, and invariably constitute both a (revolutionary) response to, and a (colonial) product of processes of post-industrialisation and hyper commodification. These positions are variously celebrated and satirised in The Karaoke Opera Company’s work

Poster Statement

Boxing Match questions the relation of the real and the virtual and suggests a comment in the form of another space. Arghyro Paouri fights a boxing match by default, watches a kickboxing training session between an art critic and a champion, reads excerpts of the book On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates, visits the grave of Charles Bukowski, opens the sketching pad of Marcel Duchamp, looks at the Boxing Hare on Anvil, by Barry Flanagan, the photomontage Boxing by Moholy Nagy and the photos of the Boxing Match for Direct Democracy fought by Joseph Beuys the last day of the Documenta 5 exhibition. There are three parts in Boxing Match: eight mute video sequences of the training session between Demosthenis Davvetas, poet and art critic in France and Alain Calendrier, ex Europe’s champion on kickboxing; excerpts of the book On boxing by Joyce Carol Oates and three interactive scenes.

Tiling problems have appeared in many branches of mathematics and physics, and during the last few decades there has been much progress in understanding their nature.  In the visual and sound arts, they have potential interest as a system of reference in constrictive preforming for channeling the expressive energies.

Research on aperiodic tilings has been very intensive in connection with the field of mathematical quasicrystals and recently it has been suggested that aperiodic order already was present in the medieval islamic architecture. A cell complex is defined in the analysis of the cohomology of tiling spaces. It contains a copy of every kind of tile that is allowed, with some edges identified for the 2D case, and the result is a branched surface.  When the tiling does not force the border, collared tiles can be used. In this paper we discuss the use of cohomology for the generation of colored aperiodic tessellations which represent branched manifolds. The prototiles with the same shape, color and orientation appearing in the resulting patterns, represent the same tile in the complex. In the time domain substitution tilings and their appearance in the field of astronomy have been on the basis of several works where time harmonizations and sound synthesis play a central role.

This talk features women artists and curators from Brazil. Giselle Beiguelman and curator Priscila Arantes, mediated by Simone Osthoff speak on the international art scene, offering the public a chance to see dynamic dialogues about contemporary media art from first-hand experiences.

Illustrated presentation of three interactive installations with robot, computer-aided music, sensors and fractals.

Keywords: Electronic arts, media arts, sound arts, humanitarian actions, climate change, environmental crisis.

The equilibrium between a healthy environment, the energy our society needs to maintain or improve this lifestyle and the interconnected economies could pass more quickly than expected from the current complex balance to a complete new reality where human beings would need to be as creative as never before to survive. Environmental problems, economic uncertainty and political complexity have been around for a long time. What was different before was the speed and depth of transformations compared with today’s sudden changes. The frequent occurrence and severity that certain weather and climate-related events are having around us is increasing, and the ability of human beings on modifying adjacent surroundings as well as distant places have turn into a power capable of altering the planet. Have electronic art a role in all this? Have electronic artists a responsibility in this context? Aiming to use electronic art as a catalyst with the intent of engendering a deeper awareness and creating lasting intellectual working partnerships in solving our global environmental crisis, three initiatives were launched: Balance-Unbalance, ‘art! ⋈ climate’ and EChO.

In our indulgence to touch immortality, our fear of being forgotten, our unconvincingly altruistic embrace of selflove, our attempt to get rid of social and biological pressures or simply the uncaring lightness of an inadvertent encounter, we grip the reproductive practice Today’s tales of the birds and the bees are a wholly different reproductive conversation as male fertilization, female ovulation and surrogate gestation have become more and more hacked to respond, not only to the reproductively challenged, but also to a demanding array of kinship design strategies. This panel entitled “Breeding sentience: queering lineage and voguing enhancement” focuses on the enriched experience of procreative manipulation through artistically creative forms of ART (assisted reproductive technology). As critical “reprotech” voices, the six panelists approach the topics of: (a) the unnatural selection of species, (b) the growth of human-animal hybrids, (c) biodiversity and neoeugenic engineering, (d) gender/ genital sociocultural rebalance, (e) matchmaking based on genome sequencing, (f) the impact of preimplantation genetic screening, and (g) prenatal imaging. Our point is that art must be taken into account, to validate the checks and balances, at a time when the ethical limits and the multitude of potential human genetic manipulations are consistently challenged through the practice of formally deregulated principles.

Round Table Statement

This discussion will focus on the efficacy of education as a possible bridge between art and today’s highly technological media. Artists throughout the ages have used, if not invented, the highest technology available to their culture. Creating art has traditionally involved relatively high technical skills. Along with a talent for creativity, spiritual sensitivity and a well-trained eye, a good command of the medium has routinely been a prerequisite. Even lately, when using simpler ready-made art supplies, developing adequate skills and an understanding of the tools requires time and dedication. Today’s newest tools are little different in that respect. Study is as helpful with the new media as it is in learning to play the piano. For the talented, time and practice will lead to the desirable skills Many artists may benefit from scholastic assistance in dealing with technical complexities, but even more to the point, proper education provides an understanding of the revolutionary nature of new, magical media! Computers now afford an opportunity for exponential expansion for the arts. Today’s multimedia is really ‘mixed media’ and these mixed media are recombining and mutating into new varieties of potential. Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (Al) are examples of major new features that are poised to enter our personal art. Such phenomena have changed our perceptions of space, time and forms of dynamic expression. Traditionally, art created with any medium, is delineated by its culturally proscribed standards and functions. Eventually these fluctuate with the shifting of cultural priorities. Rapid changes demand ever more involvement from education at all levels. The educational system must provide the perspectives required for understanding new directions as they develop and we better decide on the essence of what needs to be taught and who, today, is equipped to do so! It is the meaning and the enormous potential of the digital revolution that provide the important issues, which are affecting the future of our entire society! While both the pursuit of art and of education are infinite and will sustain our cultures throughout their existence, techniques change according to a law of progress. Yet technology is finite. We can always count the number of its parts. We shape the technology before the results shape us! Addendum/message: Many related issues rise to the surface in discussing this question of art, education and technology. There’ll be no time to cover all the ramifications during the 60 minute ’round-table’ discussion. Therefore I will place more on this subject on my web site. (That’ll be all the ideas and comments that had to be edited out from this version!) Look on the page called [round-table] in the [symposium] section. All participants in the ISEA96 Symposium are invited to read more about the issues related to this panel and to comment by way of an on-line dialogue.

Abstract

Virtual worlds provide a platform in which to construct compelling experiences augmenting the material and temporal constraints of the physical world. The virtual realm has the potential to be united and engaged by physicality – informing and transforming the audience’s aesthetic experience in a profoundly transformative nature. John Fillwalk and Jesse Allison from the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts at Ball State University have been incorporating mixed-reality approaches into interactive performances, installation, environment, and interfaces employing various virtual environments and bridging technologies. These hybrid reality experiences – analyzing approaches to bridging with worlds with media streaming, client-side interaction, web services, external web server communication hubs – also provide opportunities for human/computer interaction.

One of the most engaging features of virtual worlds is their ability to represent our physicality in a three-dimensional spatialised dynamic environment. Through the simacrulum of the avatar, we can negotiate simulated space through this representation of our selves. This vicarious connection to virtualised spaces provides experiences that can transcend more typical screen-based digital phenomena. More compelling still is when the plane of the screen or fourth wall is expanded to incorporate physical reality in the design of time-based and spatialised hybrid mixedreality constructions.
The participant becomes the mediator of these inputs, negotiating the relations between imagery, sound and interactions – thus positioned as the active conduits between the worlds in providing rich opportunities (relevant to experience) – making physical and cognitive connections that result in the fundamental link across the divide. Experiences channeled vicariously through the avatar create a compelling association between the participant and virtual space. As avenues and cues are provided to the participant’s associated avatar to have a new influence over the physical world, reflexively they also can affect the course of the virtual. The bridge is thus strengthened and the experience deepened – eventually creating a context of parallel reality.
In spanning between continuums of physicality and virtuality, connections can be integrated bilaterally, augmenting and extending experiences in both dimensions. Media, geometry, data and information from physical reality can inform the virtual realm and vice versa. This presentation will outline several hybrid reality artworks employing various technologies, detailing motivation, methodology and outcomes.

Panel: Variable Reality – Inter-formalities in Digital/Analogue Arts

The vir­tual worlds of the new cen­tury are the play­grounds for artists to ex­plore space and time, the dig­i­tal ob­jects cre­ated here are ex­pe­ri­enced by avatar, with­out the full range of sen­sory per­cep­tions we use when con­fronting the real world. To ex­pe­ri­ence the vir­tual as a re­al­ity we need sen­sors con­nected to our phys­i­cal bod­ies or to solid ob­jects to sim­u­late real-world sen­sa­tions. In order to fur­ther en­gage view­ers as par­tic­i­pants in their work, con­tem­po­rary artists are ex­plor­ing ways of syn­the­siz­ing the ma­te­r­ial phys­i­cal real world with that of the vir­tual. This pre­sen­ta­tion will ex­plore one of the pro­jects cur­rently un­der­way at CADRE, Uni­ver­sity of Wolver­hamp­ton that ex­am­ple ways of pre­sent­ing the vir­tual as an al­ter­na­tive real. Shift-Life, is a vir­tual world of Dar­win­ian fan­tasy sweet-like crea­tures pro­jected into a sand-pit box which re­spond to the phys­i­cal ac­tions of vis­i­tors caus­ing real-time up­heavals in their en­vi­ron­ment. Through di­rectly pour­ing liq­uids, ham­mer­ing and ad­just­ing lights, when in­ter­act­ing with this hands-on in­stal­la­tion, the real world en­croaches upon the vir­tual caus­ing a life-and-death strug­gle to an ar­ti­fi­cial life form. This pro­ject was di­rectly in­flu­enced by ear­lier works con­cern­ing Mar­cel Duchamp’s Large Glass, where crea­ture-like be­hav­iors were given to Duchampian ob­jects to am­plify their fa­mil­ial re­la­tions.

Improvisational Animation is an emerging technique for using computer-based technology to create the illusion of responsively intelligent animated characters. A Virtual Improv troupe has some of the properties of live theatre — every performance is unique, and the virtual actors can modify their performances in response to their audience. At July 1998, at the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre, our Improv troupe performed the first live theatrical performance by a troupe of virtual actors.

We have been exploring methods of getting our virtual improv actors ‘off the screen.’ We have created robotic actors that move around in the physical world, and respond, with the appearance of emotion, to the physical actions of people. We’ve also been developing autostereoscopic displays that create the illusion that a computer graphically generated character is literally in the room, much as if the Princess Leia hologram in the film Star Wars could interact with her audience. Ken Perlin, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at New York University, directs the Media Research Laboratory and the Center for Advanced Technology. Professor Perlin was the recipient of a 1997 Technical Achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his contributions to computer generated special effects for motion pictures.

Britney is the name of a system, that allows for creating simple choreographies from people?s digital material that can be publicly displayed. Individual screens can be composed out of images, movies, slideshows or texts. Multiple screen together form a play list that is preferably displayed with a beamer onto a public wall or canvas. The structure of Britney is quite simple, what makes for an almost zero training curve for content producers to get access to the system.

Abstract

Britney was developed from an emerged need of the etoy.CORPORATION. A collective of people from various backgrounds was supposed to continuously produce content that could be immediately displayed in public. In that context, Britney was conceptualized rather as a composition and management tool for ready to use content, than as an editor or for post-processing of digital material. The general structure of the output is adapted to the common concept of single screens that together form the playlists. The possibilities of britney are in the process of composing the screens and playlists from a flexible range of formats. Britney is not bound to a specific context and serves for more expressive artistical, or entertaining purposes as well as for an information screen with continously updatd text information. By the time, the superordinated focus of an instant composing-, and displaysystem shiftet towards an utmost diversity of input sources. Soon, an interface for webcams was added, and we are currently working on RSS support – i.e. to include Weblogs into screen compositions. Britney is supposed to be release into the public domain this summer.

For the presentation we would like to introduce britney as a technological solution emerged from a collective background, which was developed with a concrete usecase and grown further according to changing needs. Along with the experiences of the etoy.CORPORATION, we would like to elaborate how this tool became meaningful under the aspects of helping to communicate activities in public and the potentials for a community in bringing its contents to display. The presenters are etoy.SILVAN and etoy.MONOROM who actively developed Britney and who are both engaged in the etoy.CORPORATION.

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

Broadcast (29 pilgrims,29 tales) was initially produced for the Tate Modern (London), as a one day event on September 11th 1999, a web cast, a permanent archive website and now as a video installation. Twenty nine modern day pilgrims were invited to undertake a 24hr pilgrimage of their own choice, some going to local destinations, others traveling as far as Southern France. Each recited a personal ‘tale’ en route via mobile phone to the artists and a live audience in Borough Market (the site of Chaucer’s Tabard Inn, from the famous medieval text The Canterbury Tales) in an environment which referenced live TV Each of these tales was developed over the previous months in collaboration with the artists, and was illustrated by a contextual prologue and visual material donated by each pilgrim.

Robert Smithson read about various scientific topics and applied this knowledge to his work, but he was fundamentally anti-institutional, and was as skeptical of science and industry as he was of environmentalism and the art world. His artworks and writings are brilliantly insightful, formally resolved, and logical as well as infuriatingly opaque, unresolved, and incoherent. He died at the age of thirty-five, leaving us to wonder how his work might have matured, and what clues his subsequent production might have offered to understanding his oeuvre. Like the pataphysical proposals of late nineteenth century author Alfred Jarry, who died at thirty-four, Smithson seems to have been seeking out and articulating an alternate reality, a new system of values in which the “imaginary nature of things as glimpsed by the heightened vision of poetry or science or love can be seized and lived as real” (Shattuck ix). In contrast to the academicism of prevailing trends in art research today, Smithson’s work seems much more aligned with the pataphysical pursuit of “imaginary solutions” that examine “the laws governing exceptions” and describe “a universe which can be – and perhaps should be – envisaged in place of the traditional one” (Harris fn 13). In this respect, the work of both Jarry and Smithson can provide a useful corrective to an overly rationalistic approach to art research, offering the field – and contemporary art in general – potentially valuable tools for forms of practice that challenge rather than adopt conventional academic models and epistemological constructs. The copious scholarly and critical writing on Smithson has made very little of the many parallels between the inventor of earthworks and the author of pataphysics, despite the established fact that the artist read Jarry while working on the Spiral Jetty in 1970, which undoubtedly influenced the subsequent Broken Circle &/ Spiral Hill (BC &/ SH, 1971, Emmen.) This  oversight can be explained in part by current trends in Smithson scholarship, which disparage readings of the artist’s work that emphasize symbolic and/or mystical inferences. Nonetheless, given the insightful literature reassessing Jarry’s influence on twentieth century artists including Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Rodney Graham, a consideration of Smithson’s spiral earthworks in connection with Jarry is long overdue (Harris, Anastasi).

Foremost in my mind are ongoing questions of how to continue to navigate issues of representation at this point in time. My speculations have revolved around how to make images which mark and map our perceptual relations to the technologically ailed momentum of the late 20th century. Rapid transitions from here to here and from now to then have a tendency to obscure or blur whatever is in between, confronting us less with a memory of presence, than the experience of never being present, never static, always rather betwixt arrival and departure, and under the intensity of velocity and transmission.

My activities have necessitated the trespass into zones occupied by the possessors of the architectures and apparatuses associated with the accelerated geographic transit of jet planes – both commercial and Air Force. In ‘Greenworld’ the familiar landscape view is ruptured, aerialized and re-translated as thousands of points of electronic information. It pictures a terrain flown over by aeroplanes and punctured by invisible passages of information-in-transit. ‘Brownworld’ has been a consideration of how to conceptually unravel notions of labour and intention – in which technical invention, information and the momentum of proposed motion become inextricably linked.

Browser Poems is an online exhibit created for TERMINAL in which classic works of American poetry or fiction were interpreted as visual experiences crafted for the web browser. This presentation will feature On The Web, a translation of Kerouac’s On The Road that investigates whether modern life and web surfing are reflected in the original road-trip manuscript. In many cases, the work still speaks to hitchhikers on the open road, and to wanderers of the information superhighway. Her talk will focus on the process and challenges faced while creating this work.

In the face of the global wave of nationalism and populism fueled by xenophobic leaders, three questions arise: How do you fight xenophobia in the digital age? What is the role and potential of artists and activists? How can digital tools, which to some extent are part of the problem, be part of the solution?

In the face of the global wave of nationalism and populism fueled by xenophobic leaders, three questions arise: How do you fight xenophobia in the digital age? What is the role and potential of artists and activists? How can digital tools, which to some extent are part of the problem, be part of the solution?

The development of collaborative on-line art projects pose questions that challenge the notion of the artist as lone creator of completed work. The hierarchical structure of artist/viewer is flattened as the artist relinquishes control and the public becomes a colleague in the creative process. Collaborative tactics may carry an implicit message of social change, attempting to move from symbolic actions to material ones by expanding the rupture of hierarchies outwards.
Whereas theatrical and performance-based art are often structured as ensembles, the visual artist typically works independently and is rewarded for autonomous innovation. The act of defying social expectations of independent creative genius often marginalizes the artist’s standing in established art institutions. Yet, more artists are seeking on-line interaction and collaboration as a means of overcoming the isolation of the studio.
The artist(s) who develop collaborative projects are often interested in investigating on-line interaction, development of artistic style through visual influence, differing response to various issues, and other human factors. Contributors to on-line collaborative projects often gain gratification through the publishing of their work, social interactions occurring via the project, the exchange of intellectual and visual idea, etc.
The notion of appropriation as a form of collaboration extends the genre further. When participants are freely invited to use other participant’s imagery to create their own, copyright becomes obsolete. The notion of “original” is challenged as many individuals’ imagery and ideas merge to create collective forms of expression. Legal authorship of the work is ambiguous even as expressed in current definitions of “joint work: The lack of independent ownership poses problems for artists wishing to financially prosper or protect the integrity of their work.
The concept of a completed work of art also becomes arbi-trary, if not impossible.”The meaning of the work is defined and redefined continually throughout the collaborative process. Intention and outcome differ as coordinator and participant become fused though on-line interaction. Oftentimes the project continues to evolve well beyond the predicted life span.
Although the structure of on-line collaborative art projects differ, issues of curatorial responsibility and integrity of the work prevail. Participation open to the public invites varying degrees of artistic ability and interpretations of the intent. Collaborative art thrives on multiplicity, yet obstruction, errors, and vandalism sometimes occurs. Occasionally the original concept of the project is challenged and manipulated by the participants. Oftentimes there will be participants that become active joint owners of the project and oversee the activities of the other participants.
While the experience of coordinating and participating in an on-line collaborative art project differs, the vision of the creation of art as a group activity with process and interaction as, or more important than the final product prevails. Artistic communities are formed and virtual friendships are defined through shared visual experiences. The resulting work reflects the merged vision and experiences of many, without the inhibition of cultural and social boundaries.

In the last decades, the increasing intersections between art, science and technology have challenged the traditional concepts of art and aesthetics, their contexts of production and reception and their relationship with the audience. But these intersections have also meant the emergence of new artistic “typologies” linked to new devices that have moved from everyday life to the realm of artistic practices; devices that have been adopted by artists as creative tools, becoming important means of reflection on the effects of techno-science on different aspects of life and thought.

This applies, for example, to Locative Media and Augmented Reality devices. Systems such as GPS, Bluetooth and satellite have been integrated into artistic practices to create new participative cartographies (Locative Media Art). At the same time, the display systems that superimpose 3D information on an image of reality have been used for aesthetic experimentation with new ways of re-presenting and visualizing reality (Augmented and Mixed Reality Art).

By analyzing concrete and significant examples of artistic works that use these media, the aim of this paper is to study the aesthetic implications of their use, the new strategies of representation and participation they involve, and, over all, the new concepts of reality emerging from all these elements. Thus, these examples will lead us to the re-interpretation and re-signification of such important concepts of the Digital Age as “place”, “body” or “informational space”, showing a complex reality in which the real and the virtual overlap to give rise to a multidimensional and dynamic experience of the world.

Even if these transformations are also reflected in the daily use of these devices, our goal is to show how artistic practices play a fundamental role in understanding socio-cultural transformations associated to the introduction of new technologies. The objective of this proposal is to highlight how digital art and aesthetics become a key element not only for comprehending the complex epistemological contexts arising from the interrelationships between art, techno-science and everyday life, but also for generating them trough the creation of new subjectivities and imaginaries.

Abstract (long paper)

Typical architectural design is reliant on prescriptive top-down decisions that seek efficiency through simplification. Erection of designs produced in this way depends on specially prepared construction sites and access routes. Such building procedures are destructive and cannot gracefully integrate with existing ecosystems. By contrast, this paper is motivated by the desire to assimilate newly built artificial structures with pre-existing dynamic, amorphous, highly variable and fragile sites. As one of the possible approaches to this challenge, this paper discusses the prospects offered by the utilization of intelligent robots. This discussion relies on an empirical study of autonomous robots that outlines the capabilities necessary for such construction.

Harrod Blank will present a visual history of Art Cars at Burning Man, how and why these vehicles have evolved from personal totems into large scale fantasies on wheels called mutant vehicles. Over the years Burning Man has inspired folks to bring more “wow” factor, larger scale interactive works featuring cutting edge technology integrated into virtually all expression such as contemporary art installations, sculptures, theme camps and especially mutant vehicles. Blank will also highlight and introduce Doc Atomic, a local ABQ nuclear scientist and visionary art car artist, along with other art car artists from New Mexico.

What is olfactory art in a digital age? Margaret Morse examines pieces by three contemporary artists who work with odors and asks what such olfactory expressions teach us about the body in cyberculture. Widespread assumptions about the disembodied and hence clean and odorless nature o’ digital realms are set in question in the process. Other questions arise including whether smell is already «virtual» to some degree and whether cyberspace is inherently smelly. Olfactory art is set in the context of shifts in the perfume industry and contemporary initiatives to rationalize digitize and distribute smell virtually. Historical studies on the cultural uses of odor in the ancient and pre-Modern world and theoretical concepts such as Benjamin’s ‘aura’ and Anzieu’s ‘olfactory envelope’ illuminate the role of odor in relation to the network of associations that compose the memory and the imaginary of community.

“Space is  the way of existence of life, and life is the way of existence of space”   _S.Semotiuk

Pythagorean idea of Harmony was the first model of this integrity. The discovery of the hidden order of the Universe expressed in numbers and proportions was not only a top achievement of pre-Socratic search for the essence of Nature but also the most influential and beautiful concept born by the human mind. His “Mathematic Song above Songs” for the first time linked the human inside with the cosmic space and inspired the development of science and art.

In the XIX century Charles Darwin changed our perception of the world: what was static and eternal became constantly evolving. Then, the theory of deterministic chaos replaced the everlasting harmony by temporal synchronizations of complex and vulnerable systems and living matter was reduced to the DNA, making the rest of organism a part of genes’ much larger, interdependent habitat.

These changes in our perception have altered but not erased the essence of Pythagorean concept. In the depth of micro and macro realities, in the slits of everyday life we seek for scattered fragments of the “ Grand Theme”; its phrases and cadences to order the chaos of our ignorance, and to find one’s own, ephemeral place within the dream of the non-human Harmony. About this search is my talk based on 2 my artistic projects:

“Tones and Whispers” (multimedia installation realized with the support of Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London and awarded by the first prize in Europlanet contest by Space Research Center Polish Academy of Science 2007),

“Proteios” – series of video and interactive installations (i.e. Secret Life,  Molecule, Hidden Dimension) inspired by the structure and dynamics of protein molecule, initiated at  the residency at Khoj & International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in New Delhi (2007) followed by the residency at CEMA/Srishti College of Art Design and Technology & National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India (2009).

We intend to discuss our recent collaborative video work ‘Bypass: What is an opera without an audience?’, that questions social justice norms and attitudes and what constitutes the real in our increasingly mediated world. We find it is critical to locate our lived experiences through local and global contexts afforded by new media and the Internet. Increasingly the intersection of the two is pivotal in how we construct our daily lives. Our presentation for ISEA interrogates the local Australian culture exposing what is often ignored / obscured or intentionally disregarded.

Panel: Tracking the Boom: Think Tanks, Mouse Hacks and more in the United Arab Emirates

The College of Architecture, Art and Design (CAAD) at the American University of Sharjah has invested heavily in digital technology. This goes beyond just computers and software and has moved into the realm of physical computing. This talk discusses digital technology within CAAD and how students react to it and how it is being incorporated across the College’s programs.

Shortly before his death in 1992, John Cage delivered a lecture-poem at Stanford University entitled Overpopulation & Art. Cages musical, visual and textual forms paralleled forms of his preferred social organisation. In his mesostic lecture, Cage relates various ideas about social change, the role of art (or artlessness), globalization, education, and environmental concerns. Cages position (social/anarchistic/libertarian) is that social revolution is possible at a grass-roots level – that change is bought about through positive individualism not government dictates – that change will also be assisted through an (electronic) democratisation of knowledge – that art, or more specifically creative mind is part of this gradual revolution, a utopian transformation. (A Coda Session).

Digital media and new technologies are ascribed a seminal role in the increase of DIY culture, the production of user-generated media content, and user-led participatory practices. There is also a noticeable increase in domestic craft-based DIY activities such as sewing, knitting, crochet, and weaving. Mass media including television programs, books, and magazines encourage and promote such activities by providing ‘how to’ articles, templates and patterns, and instructions for ‘personalised’ craft projects.

However, rather than promoting creative exploration, many pre-designed DIY craft and ‘how to’ projects are artefacts of commodification designed to increase audience numbers, sell materials or prefabricated parts for self-assembly, and emerge from a culture of copying and remaking. Such projects equate creativity with the customisation or individualisation of ‘pre-scribed’ forms. In such instances, creativity is located with the object and is measured by the extent to which it is a customisation of that from which it is modelled. Creativity is not acknowledged as being part of the process, that is, the craft activity itself.

Importantly, social media has become a platform for the dissemination of information regarding experimental projects, encouraging creative exploration and promoting alternative (and activist) approaches to, locations for, and ways of participating and engaging in craft-based textile activities. Many of these projects stand in contrast to the standardised, homogeneous craft projects of mainstream media.

This paper explores the growing interest in extending the possibilities for craft-based textile activities, and argues that there is a need for dedicated software tools for craft-based textile practitioners to effectively explore and interrogate textile processes. It reports findings from an experimental art project to produce software as tools for creativity in craft-based textile activities. This project advocates a rethinking of craft-based textiles beyond ‘fixed media’ and embraces the non-media specific nature of craft-based textiles which have historically operated as text, in diagrammatic form, as threads, and more recently as pixels and bio-materials. The project engages with craft-based textile activities through visual and spatial patterns, mathematics, instructional text and computer code.

Californium is a subjective search and exploration game inspired by the life and work of American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. You play as Elvin Green, a writer trapped in powerful, contradictory multiple realities. Guided by a mysterious being, will you find out what lies behind the pretenses? Explore the worlds of Californium!

Panel: Latin American Forum #3

Sound performance in which four antennas catch the frequency of cellular phones and the frequency of the Big Bang is filtered out. The audience hears the echo that remains from the beginning.

Recently, we are experiencing a resurgence of interest on multisensoriality, both in science and art. There are so many perspectives and terminologies related to this subject that it is sometimes difficult to address it in a precise way. The aim of this article is to analyze such semantic problems and discuss the relation between scientific and artistic research on multisensory processes. This work proposes that artworks can contribute in its own way to the research developed in the sciences. Therefore, some key characteristics of both areas are briefly discussed, and an overview of some semantic issues and possible solutions is presented. Finally, three contemporary art study cases are introduced in order demonstrate how art can contribute to this research.

(Short paper)

Keywords: post-digital, augmented reality, Hong Kong cinema, intangible cultural heritage, local culture, ubiquitous technology

In media arts discourse, the term post-digital describes art practices in relation to digital technologies. However, its concerns are humans and cultures rather than the technologies themselves, and the emphasis is on the aesthetics inherited through audience participation in artworks. This research project introduces a postdigital strategy for the preservation of local cinema and, at the conjunction of ubiquitous post-digital technologies, arts and the humanities, seeks to foster a new public awareness of the issues at stake in the city’s most representative cultural industry. The aim of the project is to re-forge the severed link between citizens and the cinematic representation of their own living space in the postdigital era. It argues that in the years to come, Hong Kong’s public cultural institutions should be able to conserve the city’s technological edge while reaffirming its modern specificity; to create a renewed sense of its own identity; and ultimately to propose to the general public an innovative feature of heritage mediation.

Within my research-led art practice I continue to explore ways of delivering complex concepts in an immediate and engaging way through digital mediation. I therefore pursue a computer-based practice that can support complexity through the associative trails permitted in semantic media. I persist with my interrogation of the ideas of Marcel Duchamp that formulated the trajectory to a contemporary Conceptual practice. Earlier works have moved from projected interactive pieces with mouse-click and roll-over access to a hard-linked hypermedia system, to more intuitive interfaces with open directional choices and less obvious connections between the digitised Duchampian objects. These latter works have involved endowing those objects with ‘flocking’ behaviours to observe them clustering into families of sense.

The idea of ‘flocking’ digital objects gave rise to that of giving ‘animal’ behaviours to virtual objects, and a change of focus from Duchamp to Darwin. From the convoluted ideas of Duchamp re art’s function and future, it was a natural progression to the current culture and human activity to which art responds.  Thinking around Darwin’s ‘big idea’ in light of our future as a current pathway to self-destruction via climate change, the hands-on installation ‘Shift-Life’ arose. Shift-Life is a virtual world of bug-like ‘candy’ creatures that exist quite contentedly if left alone, however physical human intervention can alter their environment into a volatile state where they have to adapt to survive. There are many computer games that let you play God in letting life-forms live or die -starve, thrive, fight, procreate, overpopulate or become extinct, but my intention is always to explore the complex concept and exhibit this in an accessible way.

The limited behaviours given to the Shift-Life fantasy creatures would be enough to allow them to evolve if left uninterrupted in their everyday existence, we might, for instance, be able to witness patterns of sociability emerging. However, the participatory nature of the work means that without interacting with the piece, that understanding cannot be brought to bear, here human intervention causes basic survival behaviours only.  Our meddling nature prevents us from seeing the creatures and their world developing as one sustainable life-system.

Panel Statement (abstract):

“When we change the way we communicate, we change society”. This panel aims to provide audience with a context to understand how social media technologies and the daily updating of the self is challenging our preconceptions of screen-based ‘Internet’ communication and influencing the development of our cultural/ personal identity(s) and sense of self. It will explore the use of portable; individual; personal; non identical; devices and their impact to our current lives through the present innovative communication apps. The panel would question whether being intimate with technology, in a non-anthropocentric way could provide new critical reflections on the self and how gender stereotypes will form the Internet of Bodies and the future human / machine directions.

Individual presentations:

• Anastasios Maragiannis – Texting a Machine: Assembling an emotional response

Intro

Existing research into contemporary machines, or in other words ‘robots’- captivating through a more humanoid oriented definition- generally complexes on a superficial unknown exploration of human senses and communication practices

• Stacey Pitsillides – Can non-anthropocentric relationships lead to true intimacy with technology?

Intro

The concept of human machine communication is a theme that has driven the plot of many sci-fi scenarios. It is a powerful overarching narrative, which allows us to question as an outsider, some of the most fundamental principles of what it means to be human. This includes but is not limited to our personal ethics, our political systems and our social interactions

• Janis Jefferies – Closer and The Nether: the end of intimacy as we once knew it

Intro

In the mid 1990s, when access to the internet was on the rise, there were many debates about on line interaction carried out in Internet Relay chats or chat rooms (and Multi User Domains). The second, and the one hand there were some who celebrating the fantasy and pretense of role-play partly because it was faceless and any identity could be chosen.

• Ghislaine Boddington – The Internet of Bodies – future human / machine choreographies

Intro

Today’s world of connectivity between humans and objects of all kinds – virtual and physical – is extending rapidly, as the experimental and pioneering work of pre millennium artists and creative moves into mainstream debate, development and usage.

The electronic arts could become a powerful tool of awareness and transformation in times of ecological threats. Can the electronic arts help to save the world? As an outcome of the BALANCE-UNBALANCE conferences a large project involving artists with the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre humanitarian organization is being developed. The conferences brought together artists, scientists, economists, philosophers, politicians, sociologists, engineers, managers and policy experts with the intent of engendering consciousness and creating lasting intellectual working partnerships in solving our global environmental crisis. Using art as a catalyst, these two conferences explored intersections between nature, art, science, technology and society. Do you want to know more or eventually join us? The project will be introduced during this presentation, when full information will be available and our next steps will be presented.

Every creator in the electronic arts is faced with the puzzle of becoming understood and recognized by inappropriate out-of-date institutions set up to evaluate and present their work. Many of these institutions developed their processes to handle a very different kind of work: often paintings, movies, etc. This paper describes the discoveries of a two year effort to create an international competition for electronic interactive media which started from several challenging assumptions:

1. no attempt would be made to discriminate art from not-art;
2. there would be no distinction of the technologies employed… only the content would be considered;
3. any representation other than the interactive experience itself would be considered insufficient; to allow evaluation of the work.

The unique competition process of the Interactive Media Festival of 1994 will be discussed with the aim of raising issues critical to electronic artists:

1.     deflating the influence of the social common denominator, emphasizing individuality;
2.     disempowering critics whose influence is unfairly great and whose thinking hinders change;
3.     deflecting the dominance of consumer sensibility in media art;
4.     encouraging new and even unpopular creativity; and
5.     spreading an appreciation of new ideas successfully through existing channels.

The 1994 Interactive Media Festival was designed to permit a public appreciation of some of the most excellent examples of interactive content of its day; but more importantly (and less obviously) it was thoughtfully created to encourage a healthy openness via a process of NOT defining what is electronic art before its time. In this spirit, my remarks are offered for consideration and discussion.

Panel: Creativity as a Social Ontology

Peo­ple on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea take re­spon­si­bil­ity for the fer­til­ity and re­pro­duc­tion of land and peo­ple. Through gar­den­ing, hunt­ing, cer­e­mony and ini­ti­a­tion, they are con­tin­u­ally ‘cre­at­ing’: both peo­ple/places, and the con­di­tions for the emer­gence of these things as recog­nis­ably human.

En­gag­ing in the con­tin­ual cre­ation of the human world is not op­tional for them but in­trin­sic to what it means to be a human being. Cre­ativ­ity is nec­es­sar­ily dis­trib­uted in such cir­cum­stances, power over cre­ation or de­struc­tion os­cil­lates, but to be a per­son means par­tic­i­pa­tion. As such, the emer­gence of per­sons or things, as ob­jects of con­tem­pla­tion, or ex­change, or value and beauty, are achieved mo­men­tar­ily as el­e­ments of the wider process of which they are part and through which they have mean­ing.  By briefly re­flect­ing on this ex­am­ple (of a peo­ple still lo­cated out­side the reach of dig­i­tal cul­ture and his­tor­i­cally un­con­nected with the con­di­tions under which elec­tron­i­cally me­di­ated col­lab­o­ra­tion takes place) I wish to high­light ques­tions about what we mean by ‘cre­ativ­ity’ in the realm of elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture and net­worked art (for ex­am­ple). In a cul­ture where every ac­tion is a part of mak­ing the self, one with a very dif­fer­ent his­tory and tech­nol­ogy from Reite, what is the an­a­lytic im­port of sin­gling out dig­i­tal arts prac­ti­tion­ers from oth­ers as an ex­am­ple of a so­cial on­tol­ogy of cre­ative prac­tice? What (or who) is being made? What are ef­forts and ac­tions di­rected through such chan­nels mak­ing? If we ac­cept (the premise of the panel rubric) that no ac­tion is out­side cre­ative process, then what kind of world is cre­ated by dig­i­tal arts prac­tices? Why do we use the lan­guage of cre­ativ­ity and of com­mu­nity here? Is it the recog­ni­tion of cre­ativ­ity as such that makes such prac­ti­tion­ers into a ‘com­mu­nity’?

Insects, fungi and bacteria are by far the most prevalent species humans encounter. These organisms are easy to ignore, easy to look back at without reciprocity. If we owe responsibility to ‘higher’ animals, those more similar to humans, the furry, the dangerously exotic, don’t we also owe responsibility to all non-humans? Are we drawing another arbitrary line? ‘The Animal’ is not an inclusive term: very little theorising refers to non-humans other than to ‘higher’ animals. Where are plants and fungi in the rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari? How do Irigaray’s lips speak without whispering about skin bacteria? Are vaginal yeasts not companion species?
This paper discusses the aesthetics of care experienced between humans and ‘unseen’ non-humans, that is, the embodied experiences constituted by sustained proximity and care. Most human encounters with non-humans are domestic and mundane and this paper introduces my attempts to explore the complexities and contradictions of these experiences through gentle and lingering meetings rather than abrupt and spectacular confrontations. These attempts are conceived through the lens of alterity, a phenomenological mode of negotiating relationships between Self and Other, and embodied in a series of artistic encounters. The radical difference of the organisms, specifically honey bees and Candida albicans, assists in clarifying and making conscious human negotiations with alterity, and making visible the performative nature of care. I also endeavour to respect them as adults of other species, to understand these organisms “as other, in [their] otherness, and to let that otherness be.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Machine Learning, Expressive Performance Gesture, Expressive Movement Recognition.

A better understanding and control of expressive performance gesture potentially could have a large and disruptive impact on electronic media and movement performance practice. We use digitally captured positional data, features extracted from this positional data, and a variety of machine-learning algorithms, to improve the accuracy of recognizing expressive qualities of performance gestures, using concepts derived from Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). Through these methods, we seek to develop better human-computer interfaces, to expand expressive movement vocabularies, and to shift movement aesthetics, by empowering users to exploit their full performance capabilities.

We present a novel approach for live performances, giving musicians or dancers an extended control over the sound rendering of their representation. Contrarily to the usual sound rendering of a performance where sounds are externally triggered by specific events in the scene, or to usual augmented instruments that track the gestures used to play the instrument to expand its possibilities, the performer can configure the sound effects he produces in a way that its whole body is involved.

We developed a Max/MSP toolbox to receive, decode and analyze the signals from a set of light wireless sensors that can be worn by performers. Each sensor node contains a digital 3-axes accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope and up to 6 analog channels to connect additional external sensors (pressure, flexion, light, etc.). The received data is decoded and scaled and a reliable posture information is extracted from the fusion of the data sensors mounted on each node. A visualization system gives the posture/attitude of each node, as well as the smoothed and maximum values of the individual sensing axes. Contrary to most commercial systems, our Max/MSP toolbox makes it easy for users to define the many available parameters, allowing to tailor the system and to optimize the bandwidth. Finally, we provide a real-time implementation of a gesture recognition tool based on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), with an original ”multi-grid” DTW algorithm that does not require prior segmentation. We propose users different mapping tools for interactive projects, integrating 1-D, 2-D and 3-D interpolation tools.

We focused on extracting short-term features that detect hits and give information about the intensity and direction of the hits to drive percussive synthesis models. Contrarily to available systems, we propose a sound synthesis that takes into account the changes of direction and orientation immediately preceding the detected hits in order to produce sounds depending on the preparation gestures. Because of real-time performance constraints, we direct our sound synthesis towards a granular approach which manipulates atomic sound grains for sound events composition. Our synthesis procedure specifically targets consistent sound events, sound variety and expressive rendering of the composition.

Panel: Motion Capture and Dance: what it can do, what it can’t do, and what it should never attempt

Mo­tion cap­ture pro­vides ‘snap­shots’ of the com­plex­ity of move­ment pat­tern­ing. This pre­sen­ta­tion ex­plores how this com­plex­ity can be mapped to spe­cific vari­ables for analy­sis, and what such analy­ses both re­veal and mask in re­la­tion to the chore­o­graphic prac­tices in­volved, draw­ing on my three-year col­lab­o­ra­tion with math­e­mati­cian Vicky Mak-Hau and bio­mech­anist Richard Smith at the Deakin Motion.Lab in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia. The paper ex­plores how can these analy­ses can po­ten­tially drive cre­ative processes in dance, and, through a dis­cus­sion of per­for­mance pro­ject Choreoto­pog­ra­phy, how real-time mo­tion cap­ture can vi­su­al­ize and en­hance spa­tial path­ways using 3D stereo­scopic pro­jec­tion.

(Short paper)

Keywords: research-creation, performance, complex systems, networks, semiotics, intervention, assemblage, ontology

We live in a networked world to which we find ourselves entirely ill-adapted, clinging to outdated means of perceiving and understanding our environment. Part art intervention, part philosophical project, cart(ont)ology proposes the convergence of cartographic and ontological approaches to the question of being/becoming. It seeks to account for both individual entity and its networked presence in a single discursive movement. Through the development of three interwoven artworks – a pushcart, inventory-qua-cart, and PCBs-qua-cart – the author explores how we might engender a network sensibility in ourselves which encompasses our relations with not only people but also machines and objects, and which renders us better adapted to act within our networked existence. Embodied across these three scales, the physical carts created serve as abstractions through which to understand networked relations from the local context outwards. They are also a performative investigation into how we might engage in a radically active receptivity as a means of networkoriented perception, encounter, and exchange.

This paper presents the work done at the NT2 lab (UQAM) designing a digital ecosystem specialized in research on contemporary imagination and digital culture. The very first Research and Knowledge Environment (RKE) was put online in 2005, specializing in Hypermedia Art and Literature. That experience led the NT2 Lab and the Figura Research Center to join their forces to build and promote the Observatory on Contemporary Imagination at the core of a research-based digital ecosystem.

Cascading Memorials offers a public space to mourn the devastatingly rapid changes to terrestrial environments due to the combined effects of climate change and urbanization. Memorials to specific sites are designed to capture the viewer’s attention, ignite curiosity, and provide questions for reflection. The work provides a vitally important public space to grieve the immensity of our losses. Having opened our hearts, this grief can inform the values by which we design technologies and build socio-political institutions for sustainable futures where all species may flourish.

“In indigenous Africa, one cannot conceive of a community that does not grieve. In my village, people cry every day. Villagers believe that Westerners are afraid of emotion because they are afraid of a loss of control. Until grief is restored in the West as the starting place where the modern man and woman might find peace, the culture will continue to abuse and ignore the power of water, and in turn will be fascinated with fire.” _Malidome Some, The Healing Wisdom of Africa

Forests are dying throughout the western United States and Canada, and throughout much of the world. In the mountains north of the conference site and beyond, drought bark beetles are devastating Lodgepole, Pinon, and Ponderosa pines. Many forests are not only brown, but blackened in the wake of huge fires. Cascading Memorials offers a place to grieve the astoundingly rapid changes and losses of wild spaces brought about by climate change and urbanization. Memorials focus memory. The work calls viewers/participants to attentiveness, to appreciate the splendor of their surroundings, to listen to the wisdom of scientists and the memories of elders, and to contemplate the rapidity at which the environments in which we live are changing. The initial focus of Cascading Memorials, developed as an installation and web site, is San Diego County, my home for many years. Characterized by diverse habitats and extremely rapid population growth, from 60,000 to over three million inhabitants in the last one hundred years, San Diego is home to more threatened and endangered species than any other county in the continental United States.

Abstract (long paper)

Since Rancière, critical, cultural and social theorists have broadly accepted that aesthetics are inherently political. For instance, while the normalization of certain marginal voices can be understood as a distinguishing of signal and noise, the way in which aesthetic homogenization can become compulsory within certain communities is often cited as a mode by which accepted aesthetic paradigms can enforce social or ideological positions. As such, it would seem that the ability to broadcast/popularize minority or radical aesthetic paradigms would be a potent way to normalize those voices and forward alternative ideological agendas. However, the Situationists noted that aesthetics are also easily co-opted by the hegemony and can thus be stripped of their revolutionary potential; they dubbed this process, “recuperation.” Illustrating this co-optive process, this paper identifies the aesthetic norms of hip-hop culture through the application of Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible” and then traces how those norms have been co-opted, ultimately undermining hip-hop’s aesthetics-based revolutionary potential. However, and in order to suggest an alternative mode of radicalism, we combine Rancière’s aesthetic taxonomy with Attali’s, proposing a shift in focus away from “pure aesthetics” as a mode of radicalism and towards distribution as a future potential mode of revolutionary cultural production.

Technological solutions to climate change have so far focused on the carbon footprint of consumers and corporations in the industrial North. Yet if we look at where a large part of the world still lives – in rural areas in Africa, Asia and South America – most people are too poor to be consumers. Their footprint is that of production, not consumption. They are farmers who grow plants and trees for their livelihood into which carbon dioxide becomes sequestered in complex and often yet unaccounted ways. These hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers across Africa, Asia and South America represent a significant force in our battle against climate change. Yet if plants and trees are the “lungs of the planet,” attempts to include them – both in the compliance and voluntary offset markets – have not been successful. The current system is in shambles.
Based on previous research done in Ethiopia, this art provocation challenges our common sense notion of what climate change is by creating an imaginary stock market based on growth patterns of trees in the developing world combined with economic algorithms on which stock market relies on. The participants of the projects then – similar to the real stock market – speculate on the monetary “benefits” of growing trees based on this data, including how it can be processed into a new language of commerce and interaction between humans and trees. The end result is an open-ended game of buying and selling carbon dioxide and oxygen, dealt by a croupier in a real life casino, situated in an ambiguous container hidden in a clearing in Galloway Forrest Park in Scotland, 300 square miles of diverse landscape. This shows the importance of everyday natural objects such as trees when we talk about climate change and the planets future.

In 1889, German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz proved that electric waves and optical waves shared the same anatomy. His theory was cited by curators Peter Weibel and Gregor Jansen as their lead to “Light Art”, one of the most comprehensive exhibitions in the field, at the ZKM. Ever since then, light art has been part of the discourse of electronic art, not only for their shared energy properties, but also their symbolic or phenomenological manifestations.

My works have always an exploration of light as a medium, and its essential quality. As compared to a majority of works which delve into the materiality of light itself, my practice does not call for attention to light as a subject, but makes visible what already exists. It casts light on my subjects of inquiry, usually context-related. On the occasion of the 22nd ISEA held in Hong Kong, a place noted as the brightest city on the planet, I will share a selection of my works to expand the understanding of light art, particularly on how they interplay with the sensorial bombardment in urban environments.

Record: Light from +22° 16′ 14″ +114° 08′ 48″ (2008) draws attention to flashes from tourists’ cameras at the Peak, normally washed out in the neon-lit spectacle of a typical Hong Kong night. Moon.gate (2011-present) intertwines digitally rendered light and shadow with an ambiguous rendering of reality and simulation, creating a heterotopia where the audience experiences the coexistence of both active and contemplative states of being. While the aforementioned works are primarily presented in gallery settings, Tête-bêche (2013) is an actual intervention in the city. A tram is turned into a camera obscura to give passengers a moment of contemplation, as reversed images of the city glide across the tram’s interior as it moves along its routine paths. As light is cast on the contexts to illuminate narrative experiences and moments of contemplation, at the same time, my works are an inquiry to very nature of this medium.

ABSTRACT

Ceci n’est pas un oiseau is a projection installation comprising a specially built animation projector and a system of four automated semi-transparent screens. The projector projects a looped series of images of a cockatoo in flight made by Edward Muybridge onto the four screens. The screens are moved by the action of  six programmed, suspended fans.

The central concerns of the work are with:
-Human pattern recognition,
-The seduction of the cinema, behind which is a rigorous mechanics of sequenced still frames,
-The location of the sign in a chain of electro-mechanically reproduced singifiers,
-The rendering ‘scientific’ (thus ‘knowable’) of natural phenomena by the use of Cartesian, Empirical taxoniomic systems.

Muybridge’s grand project was to quantify animal and human locomotion by the superimposition of it upon a planar grid and then to ‘grid’ time through the sequencing of  the cameras. This procedure is a case study in the method of the ‘old science’ which traces its lineage through Euclid, Descartes and Newton, of a world resolvable to simplified relationships and excluded variables, where time and space are absolutes. The project is conceptually contemporary with Mendeleyevs’ periodic table of elements and Mendels genetics.

Cell Tango is an interactive multimedia artwork consisting of a series of visualizations based on a dynamically evolving collection of cellphone photographs contributed instantly by the general public. These images, and the accompanying tags which categorize and describe them, are projected large-scale in the gallery, continuously shifting as new contributions are added. The layout and animation for each of the four visualizations— Cell_Bin, Cell_Clusters, Cell_Burst, and Cell_Finale— is defined by the textual associations between the photos, and additionally shows connections with a set of similar photographs that are retrieved from the popular Flickr photograph-sharing database. A series of sonifications, based on various image-processing techniques, are synchronized with the position and movement of the photographs to enhance the narrative logic of the artwork. Cell Tango engages in a dialogue between the public and the private through the creation of an intermediate shared space. The artwork exists at the intersection of the collective, the prescriptive, and the personal, as defined respectively by the sampling of the database, the aesthetic of the artist, and the individual contribution of the viewer. This paper describes the aesthetic and technical components of the art project, with a particular focus on the software architecture and the use of interactivity and multimedia elements. Note that the artwork itself has also been submitted as an artwork by the authors. This submission is intended to compliment the installation of the project. The paper discusses the various and ongoing process involved in creating the artwork.

This session will bring together representatives of leading art and technology centers. Are this centers like minded in their support for art and technology? What are their specificities, their missions?

This session will bring together representatives of leading art and technology centers. Are this centers like minded in their support for art and technology? What are their specificities, their missions?

ABSTRACT

Centre Copie Art is a non-profit association run by a group of artists working in the field of electrographie, video and computer art. Founded in 1979 under the name of Galerie Motivation V, our Center is still the only space in Quebec and Canada which works full time in production and promotion of electrography/copygraphy and its interaction with other media arts.

What we at CETECH want is to bring people from various disciplines (artists, businessmen, designers, engineers, scientists. architects builders) and different countries together and enable them to reach critical mass. We believe this involves a tripartite approach: Understanding each others disciplines. In todays modern world, the only way in which a single body is in a position to attempt to know even a fraction of the world around us is to group together people whose skills complement each other.

Chance events lead to visceral pleasure, if the context, in which the event is constructed, is designed to surprise and transcend. There are two types of chance events: natural and planned. My work explores, is the development of planned chances. I want to intentionally create work that produces and defines unintentional effects. The conception of my work, often, comes about spontaneously, fueled by various sources of research and random, recreational reading (literally and metaphorically) into theory, science, art, design, and my daily life. Magic is latent it is exposed through chance and participation.

(Short paper)

Keywords: repetition, social systems, psychological systems, neurological systems, conservation, behavioral code, repetition compulsion, path dependency, change, subversion.

The ubiquitary, psychological and social phenomenon of repetition represents an integral factor to analyze human behavior and social processes comprehensively. A strong desire to repeat and conserve appears to be part of the human and social nature, which is based on various factors. In the following paper the reasons for these conservational processes and their functions and dysfunctions are outlined. Further, the paper discusses why we occasionally have to destroy what we desire to preserve, as we will otherwise endanger what we aim to secure in the first place. Because change is inevitable and this inevitability requires subversion.

The integration of bottom up community driven innovation and interdisciplinary knowledge often found within these groups can support local city leaderships and drive future development, while bridging the gap between community and policy level. This roundtable aims to discuss the leadership benefit from collaborative and inclusive methods often applied in the NPO sectors, while supporting the governance ambitions.

The chaotic scattering of light rays is harnessed to create fractal computer art images.

Abstract (short paper)

The authors examine the No Input Mixing Board (NIMB) as a complex instrument that reconfigures the politics of composition, cognition, control and expression in the context of Electro-Acoustic Improvisation. The notion of performance is relocated within the entanglement of the modulatory body of the artist along with the sound producing devices. Rather than control, the posture of the artist is best described as a form of existential availability to the instrument. This view rejects virtuosity as the pure control of the artist’s mind over the instrument, as well as the delegation of performance to automated machines.

“Like art, sex is fraught with symbols: a perfectly humane eroticism may be impossible…desire is intensified by ritual limitations. Hence the mask, harness and chains of sadomasochism.” -Camille Paglia

‘The Pledge of Fidelity, The Pledge of Self Discipline’ is an investigation into the psychological and anatomical effects of wearing a female chastity belt. “For 2 months I wore a chastity belt, recording my thoughts and feelings on a personal cassette recorder. The result was an installation, produced in collaboration with Karen F that took the form of an audio visual diary; a documentary of a performance work which confronted the politics of body ownership, sexual power and control. In using my body as the site for social research my intention was to begin to understand through experience what it is like to give up the right to my body sexually.

We present the interactive multi-agent system Chatterbox, as part of the sound art installation Translanguaging, exploring the notion of translanguaging as a mediation of multilingual and intercultural communication. We discuss the act of languaging as a dual process comprising both semantic language communication, as well as paralanguage that relates to the affective, personal, and cultural aspects related to translanguaging. Through the creation of the Chatterbox agent, generating gibberish vocal streams devoid of semantic content, we aim at highlighting the paralinguistic dimension of languaging.

The agent model comprises a kind of gradient map, clustering a segmented corpus of vocal sounds in the latent space of a self-organized map, according to its paralinguistic fingerprint. We utilize Factor Oracles for the creative generation of novel utterances of paralanguaging gibberish by the agent. Incorporating simple subsumption architecture inspired rules, we further moderate the interaction between the gibberish agents, creating rich and complex multi-agent behavior in “paralanguaging discussion”.

We outline the artistic and technical considerations in developing our Chatterbox agent throughout the paper. We share several observations made throughout the process of creating the Chatterbox agent, highlighting some of the connections between the notion of (trans)languaging and the implementation of our model.

Poster Statement

Computer technology is maturing as a significant medium for artistic creation. Software is the defining element of current technology offering remarkable freedom to sculpt and mold sound. Creative audio work is approached through process and intuitive application of tools and ideas, using some things that I have built myself and discovery through experimentation. Raw audio, that is any recordable sound, is manipulated through various processes and reconstituted into patterns of pure sound or in a manner which plays upon new meanings when the original sound is fragmented, counterpointed against itself, repeated, duplicated, distorted, etc. Computers are perfectly suited to these processes and software creatively applied can be the defining element for audio work.

Poster Session: I will be presenting documentation of computer controlled interactive audio installation work I have done recently including; germ originally Monstrous caused at ISEA95, under the influence of ether, an interactive radio transmission at the Western Front Lodge in Vancouver, and Cranking Out Paradigms; new work in collaboration with Lori Wiedenhammer. This presentation will encompass creative process, inexpensive sensor technology, and the Opcode Max programing environment.

This presentation serves as a link to digital media discourse in China. As such it is not narrowly focused but highlights 3 critical avenues into a more practical discussion suggested by the nature of the ISEA2006 proposal of an Asia-Pacific Summit: censorship, creative industry and education. I see the major challenge to China in terms of its entrance into the era of read/write media. From this perspective the issues can be looked at in terms of the rocky introduction to wiki/blog culture, user created content/ production, and the use of collaborative software in education.

Abstract
This paper addresses the reality that a number of artists of China and the Chinese diaspora use Chinese characters in their work. Some of the characters are legible and some are not, but all are wrought with deep layers of meaning. The fact that the characters originated as pictures makes them even more relevant for the visual arts as an international language.

Aesthetics of Brush Writing
The ancient art of calligraphy, Chinese characters written with brush and ink, was and is considered an art form of the highest quality, even elevated above the art of painting. The traditional training for a professional calligrapher begins at a very young age and requires a great deal of self-discipline and repetitive practice. A work of calligraphy is revered for its abstract visual beauty, regardless of the meaning of the words. The most renowned of ancient calligraphers in China was Wang Xizhi, who lived in the 4th century. He is known for his method of manipulating the pressure of the brush to create strokes of varying width and density. This results in an illusion of depth in what is usually considered a two dimensional art form.

The expressive character of Chinese brush writing, or calligraphy, when compared to painting, includes differences in ink thickness and opacity, and the weight of the hand on the brush. Varying amounts of water can be added to the ink to make gradations of black and grey, and the brush, which is held vertical, perpendicular to the paper, is pushed and pulled by the hand to vary the thickness of the stroke. There are also certain technical terms, like “flying white” to indicate a dryness of the stroke that leaves the white of the paper showing through.
The Chinese written language began to develop as much as 3500 years ago, and began as pictures incised on oracle bones and later cast into bronze vessels. Modern Chinese characters are direct descendents of the ancient pictographs. Since each character represents a visual concept, the written form of Chinese can be read throughout the many distant dialects of modern China. This universal written language is an important unifying factor in much of China.

It is no wonder that this visual communication system is utilized by a number of contemporary artists of China and the Chinese diaspora. It is used conceptually as an indicator of understanding or misunderstanding, communication or mis-communication, depending on the method of employment in the work of art.

Abstract

Hypertext/multimedia/interactive art can provide for polyphony, branching ‘choices’, and an escape from linear logic, but are we getting any ‘real’ choices, or a menu of white male options?

Looking at examples by contemporary artists from North America and Britain, and some samples of commercially produced interactive products, we can explore the positive and negative possibilities of computer-based interactive art in relation to gender politics.
Women artists such as Lynn Hershman (A Room of One’s Own), Toni Dove (Archeology of a Mother Tongue), and Lucia Grossberger (A Mi Abuelita) have been producing works where not only the content but the interface design marks a different knowledge to the mainstream.
Many theorists (including Regina Cornwell, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Donna Haraway, Ann-Sargent Wooster, Vivian Sobchack and Rosalind Krauss) have been discussing whether the very structure of computer interactivity is inherently male. They have also been exploring the psychological ontology of ‘virtual space’ and its relationship to ‘the body’. Parallels have been drawn between medical technologies/discourses of disease, and the discourses of computer technologies/cyberpunk. Whilst avoiding biological determinism, it would appear that the male-gendered experiences of interactive computer technology such as VR tend to differ from the female, and that the reasons lie deep in psychology.
Mainstream commercial products such as VR Games (Virtuality Boxing) and interactive pornography (Donna Matrix) reveal a deeply gendered content and structure, but there are also possibilities for the rewriting of gender (there, for example, many tales of men ‘computer crossdressing’ as women on email systems). Comics and S.F. writing currently show a more truly diverse set of possibilities than the less accessible technologies of CD publishing. A major pleasure of interactive art is ‘control’ but who’s in control? Real choice is, as ever, controlled by who gets access to the means of production and distribution (held by big galleries and big business).

The starting point for our roundtable discussion is an expanded concept of composition, choreography and scores to explore the implications of embodied and disembodied data as they blur the lines between composer and composed on many layers. The rapid proliferation of inexpensive networked biosensors and the ubiquity of sensor data from mobile phones, game controllers and similar devices, raise compositional questions / possibilities for re‑imagining concepts and practices of embodiment for artists working at the intersection of performance, installation, and networks.

Using the idea of choreography and scores as a point of departure our roundtable, we hope to open an informal discussion between practitioners, scholars, and researchers, working in the rich intersections of emerging technological possibility and performance / embodiment practices, of how this intersection of sensor, network and body can expand ideas of embodiment and composition.

All of the members of the Roundtable work directly with these technological and compositional issues in their work. The discussion is centered on a number of questions / provocations for discussion, posed to Roundtable members to consider or reject, both in the context of their own creative & technical practice, and through observations of others’ work.

Our goal is to instigate an open discussion amongst Roundtable members and audience about the opportunities and difficulties presented by using sensors to generate compositional material.

1. How does the current rapid expansion of sensor data inflect your work?
2. What implications does the ability to transform, re‑record, and re‑present, across many media, the data extracted from an embodied practice such as dance, performance or music have on the compositional process? How do you model andrepresent your work as it spans software, algorithm, choreography, sound and visual?
3. Are there ways you use sensor information as part of more complex compositional structures rather than a tool to read or trigger simpler “reactive” or “interactive” events?
4. Compared to the history of fields such as motion capture for dance and animation, the growth of inexpensive sensors located in mobile devices opens up a terrain between what one might call “high data” and “low data”. How does extensive, low‑quality (compared to a motion‑capture system) single point data (such as from a mobile phone) compare with more sophisticated methods of data collection?
5. Is the mobile phone sensor a special case in terms of embodiment?
6. If motion, location and bio sensor data is being stored and transformed as part of a project – especially with large scale participation ‑ how does this inflect authorship? If underlying compositional patterns or structures are being derived from crowd movements or patterns, who is the ‘author’?

This paper will explore how the use of real-time video projection in live dance performance creates various types of spaces for choreography and how these spaces result in a topological approach to dance-tech work.

Within the research, the types of space identified within choreography with real-time video projections, including physical space, camera space, projection space, and compositional space. By examining Massumi (2002) and Rotman’s (2009) discussions of topology, these spaces can be considered topological as they have transformative relationships, continuous functions between spaces, and are not defined by Euclidean geometry. The use of topology to understand this spatial configuration reflects topology as a system for movement and continuous change,

How these topological spaces are choreographed and incorporated into the choreographic process informs the craft and technique of the devising work with real-time video projection. An underlying practice-as-research approach is reflected in the use of performance work and the creation of performance works by the researcher to both develop the concepts of space and interrogate the main issues within these spaces. It provides the field of choreography with further explorations of how one may consider space when making dance work and how one may incorporate interdisciplinary approaches into the creation of dance work for black box theatre spaces.

Abstract

CinePlay is a simple, interactive educational program with which individuals can creatively explore the filmmaking process by combining digitized images and sounds in multiple ways. From a database involving four characters and cinematic action centered around one object (a gift-wrapped package), users can construct an edited sequence of their own design. Thousands of possible sequences emerge from these image/sound combinations, spanning the range from conventional narrative scenarios to more experimental forms.

CinePlay is designed to operate on any Quicktime-compatible Macintosh computer, and is appropriate for installation in a variety of learning environments including classrooms, libraries and other public settings. CinePlay enables users to acquire and develop a wide range of media literacy skills including editing, scripting, sound design, narrative construction and increased familiarity with the basic symbology of the audiovisual lexicon.

The project directors are Karen (K.D.) Davis and Jan Millsapps. Programmer: Andrew Coven. Interface design: Grant Guenin.

The paper will discuss the transmission of super-high definition motion pictures as the next step of cinematic transformation, following sound, color and the digital age. It will also report experiments conducted over the GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility) network, a scientific and experimental research network formed at the FILE and describe the Cinegrid workshop and its similarities to the old technology fairs in Europe, where mareoramas, paneoramas, keiseoramas etc. were exhibited; addressing the similarities between pre-cinema and post-cinema technology. It will reflect on the possibilities of live cinema with festivals being held in several different countries and regions, concerts and shows in public places, integrating different communities and reconfiguring the public domain. Other relations, such as the participative spectator, the collaborative aspect, the challenge of interdisciplinary work between artists, physicists and engineers, as well as the desire for the globalization of cinema since its birth will also be discussed. And, finally, explain the Project 2014K and what results are expected.

Abstract

This paper addresses our current stage of research and our strategy for addressing the challenges of developing a design driven narrative and methodologies.

Cinematics and Narratives (CaN) is a research project in its first of three years, whose goal is to significantly explore approaches to contemporary animation. CaN is comprised of three integrated objectives: the first is focused on developing and exploiting real-time animation and content within the context of a visual and narrative design based repository of primitives; the second explores the dynamic of context, exposition and expression, e.g. mixing our design primitives into a new form via cinematic narratives, and the third interfaces this system with an audience in such a way as to enable the system to learn from viewer interaction, where the system through a layer of predetermined rules automatically refines the design. CaN is focused on integrating computational intelligent agents designed as character
archetypes within a dynamically changeable world created to adapt along a possibility of multiple narratives.

In the context of design, this research investigates the viewer experience as played out by their reaction to the work. Using the notion of archetypes and viewer experience, our work delves into the notion of presence within subjective space and the viewer’s immersion therein. As part of our experience our goal is to develop a method to elicit contrasting reactions from the viewer. By designing imagery that emphasizes contrasts, we mingle the ‘attractive’ and the ‘repulsive’ in a single immersive experience.

Developing a method to capture the viewer emotion through a gesture based system is our primary goal. This is a system that uses proximity and action to assume the viewer’s state of emotional being. We incorporate this assumption back into our character system to further agitate a reaction from our viewer.

The research attempts to create a bridge of immersion connecting the physical space with the synthetic. To create a space that immerses the viewer in such a way that they are forced to reconsider their impact on the world around them. As  referred to by French Renaissance writer Rabelais when writing about medieval carnival, ‘not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because it’s very idea embraces’.

This research approach plans to leverage upon the mechanics and genre of magic realism. As Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer a Spanish post-romanticist writer of poetry and short stories writes about grotesque mechanisms in literature, The first of these is the fact that the mechanisms of imagination depend in good measure on distortion and violence. Secondly, this subjective distortion is linked to a larger chaos in the universe, whose tragic force can be glimpsed by poetic fantasy. Third, the manifestations of that universal chaos are found in the grotesque aspects of Nature and art, and particularly architecture. They are also found in a ‘second’ reality, a nether-world of demonic forms. And finally, both realities often fade away in the presence of the commonplace and disillusioning environment that we all live in, which can also be grotesque.’

Abstract

Keywords: film, architecture, montage, mapping city

In a city spatial and temporal fragments can be conceptually examined, expanded, and physically mapped through moving image manifestations of memories, sensory affects and situations, as spatial storytelling. How can sensory spaces in film be recognised and then further visualised? Creative montage techniques using film and video can work as multisensory portals to map lived experience. This paper proposes Eisenstein’s dialectic montage theory as the basis for experimenting with ‘conflict’ as a creative sensory dimension. Haptic qualities of film are explored as technical and experimental cognitive methods of mapping filmic memory. In ‘creative geography’ montage for instance, the aim is to create a narrative from juxtaposing multisensory spaces of film and identifying a flexible spatial cognition in film, a soft database cinema, termed Cinesensory.

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”          _Meno, from Plato’s dialogue (in Solnit, 2005)

The OWL project is an evolving interrogation of how we might design technologies that do not yet exist, and are not predicated on what we already know. How do we support the emergence of radical future technologies that reflect and respond to personal desires? How can those outside the design process inform and shift the way we think about design, such that our usual processes are not only short circuited, but are rendered irrelevant?

The project began with a series of bodyprops that aimed to support magical thinking around potential (yet to be imagined) body-technology relationships. The props were used in a series of interviews with a relatively broad sample of participants from Europe, Australia, North America and Japan. Participant responses were consistently surprising, sometimes so exceptional that we began to wonder what kinds of props people would make if they were to make their own.

From this work the OWL circle naturally emerged. The circles take the knowledge and understanding accrued over the course of 31 interviews into a slightly different space, perspective or approach. The circle creation process is a structured gathering in which participants are supported to create a personal exploratory device. The device is not designed in any traditional sense, rather it emerges from an open making process that combines art and design ideation techniques with scientific curiosity and retrospective ethnographic evaluation.

The traditional design approach is to imagine a scenario, to define a device, object or experience-based “solution” for the scenario, then to “design” and prototype or otherwise describe this solution. In the OWL project we work backwards by allowing people to consider where desires live in their bodies, then to work instinctively on how those desires could manifest themselves in new unknown devices. Rather than predicating design on scenarios based on what we know, our aim is to discover what we do not yet know so that devices, objects and other experiences might emerge from a physical making process.

The paper outlines the theoretical background for the OWL project and shows the results from both the interview and the circle processes.

I know you can’t sort the world’s problems out single handed – I mean you spend most of your time trying to figure your own situation out, let alone having spare time to take all this other stuff on board – but there are some things out there that bug the shit out of me, and I really wanna try and figure them out. Like, how come there’s this crowd of no-goods out there getting fat off our blood, sweat and suffering, beating us all into one big booby-hutch social club and then trying to sell us the video…

Grass thing on my part. No way. There’s some real heavy duty bad-ass head breaking going on out there, and I guess there’s more than genes at work. I give thanks that I have clean water and a mobile phone. Which all kind of spurs me on to get involved with this other stuff, which is why I like it when I’m with people, or watching people, or taking stuff in that reminds me there’s a beating heart out there, people pushing the envelope, breaking the boundaries, breaking the law.

Analog, digital, make a miracle: why settle for less? Stay alive or die on the vine.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) was initiated as a means to combat the monopoly of the billboards, advertisements and screens that have come to dominate the urban landscape. It works with artists and micro–communities in sites of contention to articulate the di-versity of perspectives, share stories and provide a public platform to intervene directly on the city itself through mobile exhibitions. These interactions open up the visual environment, moving beyond the concerns of the market to engage with the discourses of the area. The moving images, comprised of works originating inside the community as well as from artists working in different locations, are projected onto monuments, buildings and temporary structures, providing a site for communal gathering where a multiplicity of voices can emerge to create informal networks of knowledge.

IGVFest draws on the Situationist idea of the dérive, described by Debord as a mode of interacting with space through a type of wandering that reconfigures the subjective encounter with the area. The portable festival uses a GPU (Guerrilla Projector Unit) to project the videos onto the surfaces of the city. Composed of a multi–channel sound system, digital projector and self–contained power source, the GPU is a completely autonomous cinema–on–wheels. The design enables rapid incursions into the public arena to show a number of different artists’ videos at different locations during an evening. This fluidity allows the festival to utilise hit and run tactics to open up new strategies of spontaneity and potential in an urban context fortified by advertisements. Billboards can be transformed from outlets of commercial messages into sites of exchange that encourage discussion instead of consumption, interaction instead of isolation, and landmarks for the community instead of the market.

The paper will discuss the 2009 Dublin edition that focused on three diverse areas of the city and captured a singular moment in the cities history before the recent economic crash.

A Proposal From Charlotte Pochhacker

Dealing with contemporary cities and its architecture is dealing with the changing perception and experience of (public) space, and by extension with the public sphere. Some critics have reduced the evolution of the urban experience to the decline of the city, and the loss of reality. And the fact that the public space is no longer only a (physical) city space but also a (virtual) data space, has only strengthened their pessimism. But how do contemporary artists perceive and experience the contemporary city and the evolving public space ? How do they use city architecture and the structuring of the public space as a cultural text through which the economical and social can be read ? Does their (new media) art offer a possibility to formulate an alternative vision ?

Moderator:

• Charlotte Pochhacker.

Panelist:

• Hermann Asselsbergh, Els Opsomer, Rony Visser, Sabine Bitter, Helmut Weber, Yvonne Wilhelm, Alexander Tuchacek, Christian Buehler, and Bart Lootsma.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Visualization, Mapping, Internet, Interactive, Public Space

City to City is an interactive artwork that visualizes the geography of the internet, from place to place, and allows individuals to see their own unique participation in it. Users conduct their online activities and observe their own inquiries, distinguished by color graphics and sound, as messages travel from their points of origin to their destinations. Participants are able to see the visible and distinctive paths that compose the larger, collective global internet. City to City’s visualizations reveal the map of online traffic along with our dependency upon the invisible infrastructure of place to place connections; this infrastructure forms the foundation for all of our daily online activity.

We know a great deal about the problems of contemporary cities: their total lack of flexibility makes of them merely remnants of the very modernization they were meant to lead. However, there is precious little concern for those whom such spaces were built to serve. How do people experience the city? How do they cope with its complexity, size and, most poignantly, the isolation it engenders? This research is framed to uncover how people draw meanings from the built environment and how, in an act of reciprocity, the latter underpins their identity.

The goal is to develop an original analysis of the role of contemporary cities in shaping and supporting western democracies as achieved by means of an innovative interdisciplinary approach: the interpolation between cinema and architecture. A series of short films will be the final research output, shot in significant metropolitan areas around the world. The first case study is the city of Rome as reinterpreted in a trilogy of films exploring its outstanding relevance to the history of architecture and the contemporary debate.

This research is set to determine exactly what makes contemporary cities tick from the perspective of generic public engagement. The aims are to identify critical issue and illustrate them through visual means. 3 short films – “Consuming Culture” (20’), “Visual Noise” (20’) and “Historical Limbo” (20’) will be produced in order to investigate 3 different aspects inherent to the first city at issue – Rome, the issues being: mass tourism, surveillance/surveyance, the past/present continuum.

Tapping into the West’s highly sophisticated appreciation of visualization (i.e., the importance of images for mastering reality), architectural issues will be therefore interpolated with the most sophisticated visual means: cinema. This would not only break the impasse affecting current architectural debate, but also furnish new opportunities to study, understand and improve the complexity of everyday urban life. An innovative, multi-disciplinary approach has therefore been set in place in the form of experimental films, that will be shot in order to grasp and bring to the fore the overlapping between fantasy and reality in the beholder’s mind.

The project is a continuation of my doctoral research in Visual and Digital Poetics, with an interest in the new and still unexplored genre of e-poetry and how it is integrated in the realm of social and urban poetics. It is an interactive piece formed by pallets with audio, animated and visual elements of the multicultural city of Melbourne. The user can create phonetic and textual-visual compositions. The ultimate aim is to make this work accessible via the web to enable users to recreate these fragmented realities and send them back to the city, to a common urban screen.

The technics of silent cinema and its ties to other media (photography, theatre, magic) have been discussed extensively as an intermedia construct over the last decades (Brownlow, Gunning, Robinson et al.). Early film theorists’ quest for the essence of their subject has made it difficult to describe film as a self-sufficient phenomenon. In order to study mature cinema I take an approach that amends film analysis with methods of science and technology studies by means of looking at processes rather than results.

The proposed paper concretely focuses on the development of optical effects in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. What makes looking at effects within film production worthwhile is that they are not prerequisite but sought-after for various reasons and by various participants of cinema as a network. Not looking at film’s more or less solid core (camera, projector) like apparatus theory in the 1970s did, but studying its periphery -i.e. techniques that ‘come along’- enables a perspective that is neither essencialistic nor relativistic.

While silent film effects borrowed a good many of their techniques (glass shots, mirrors) from predecessors, the apparent hermeticism of the studio system found its equivalence in the self-referentiality of optical printing and process shots in the 1930s. Both of these techniques were couplings of the essential devices camera and projector but in closed circuit setups that carry out more copying and modifying than recording actions. Thereby film in its self-reliance turned effectively into image engineering and animation.

In my paper I will discuss structures, machines, people, and institutions than built this network. This includes namely the visual effects cinematographer Linwood G. Dunn, RKO Radio Pictures, the Acme Tool and Manufacturing Company, the United States Navy, and others. This research is part of my current PhD thesis Aesthetics and Techniques of Cinematic Composite Images at the University of Zurich, Institute of Art History. Coming from the field of media art myself I clearly regard this as a prologue to contemporary image media.

Panel: Data Disinformation

Susan Sloan has re­searched ex­ten­sively the use of mo­tion cap­ture in an­i­ma­tion as­so­ci­ated with gam­ing and spe­cial ef­fects. In this paper she will focus on the post pro­duc­tion ‘clean­ing’ process eras­ing glitches in move­ment com­par­ing her aim to show sig­na­ture ges­ture and char­ac­ter in her sub­jects in con­trast to the styl­ized move­ment as­so­ci­ated with in­dus­try tech­nigques. Susan Sloan is able to de­velop the lan­guage of por­trai­ture and like­ness through image and move­ment.  Anal­o­gous to tra­di­tional no­tions of por­trai­ture, drawn or painted, at the core of these an­i­ma­tions is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the sit­ter.  She will ex­plore these por­traits which are pro­duced within the con­text of paint­ing, an­i­ma­tion, video and sculp­ture.  They draw from all of these prac­tices and whilst en­tirely con­structed in 3D soft­ware the mo­tion of the sub­ject is recorded from real life. The works be­come a record and an in­ter­pre­ta­tion at the same time. The re­la­tion­ship be­tween the recorded data and man­u­ally an­i­mated and sculpted forms be­comes sig­nif­i­cant. The por­traits are not just an in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the ex­ter­nal vis­i­ble char­ac­ter­is­tics of the sit­ter but also a doc­u­ment of their ex­is­tence.

When talking about representation and reproduction it is hard not to talk about authenticity. The term ‘authentic’ stems from Greek [authentikos], meaning ‘principal, genuine’. It carries a connotation of authoritative certification that an object is what it is claimed to be. In cultural heritage it is most often related to the ‘original’ state of a work. In this paper I will link authenticity to reproduction and representation: I will discuss different attitudes towards the need for the authentic and examine the changing meaning of authenticity and art in the last fifteen years, in which I will pay special attention to the influence of web2.0 strategies used by museums. Underlying questions that I will address: What does the Web 2.0 mean for art and authenticity? And, related, what does online participation mean? How do museums deal with user-generated content? Will this new content become part of documentation archives, and if so what are the challenges? How can museums deal with the different contexts and processes inherent in new these structures? What can be learned from existing internet practices and artists practices? These questions will be answered by looking closely at several works that deal with strategies that are now labeled as Web2.0 or social media tactics. At the same time it will explore the meaning of online participation, collaboration and networking. The examples I show are ‘historical’ artworks, like Nine by Graham Harwood (Mongrel) and Mouchette by Martine Neddam and more recent attempts that raise awareness, use or question ubiquitous social media, for example Naked on Pluto by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk, ALLYOURVIDEOAREBELONGTO.US by JODI and You Tube as a Subject by Constant Dullaart. The examples will be analysed from a technical as well as a conceptual point of view to highlight the various participatory possibilities. At the same time they raise awareness to the changing meaning of the “authentic” and address the implications for the future archives of museums.

Global climate change and its effect on the environment is a concern that affects humanity’s collective cultural conscious. Understanding and developing a relationship to this problem is key to uncovering solutions and inspiring change. To the extent that new technology holds the answers to these problems, artists are poised to explore these technologies to discover and critique remedies. New Media, after all, relies on the energy infrastructure that powers it, and is therefore obligated to it. These issues challenge and inform my work – a work to decipher environmental data, to question the uses of new technologies, and to inspire the use of alternative, green energy sources.

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

For a vast ma­jor­ity of peo­ple, cli­mate change re­mains largely ab­stract, per­cep­ti­ble only by its ef­fects, by its symp­toms, to use a med­ical vo­cab­u­lary. Like­wise, for a vast ma­jor­ity of peo­ple, sci­en­tific charts re­main largely ab­stract and il­leg­i­ble. How can they be turned into a “gras­pable re­al­ity”? How can these data be brought into a fa­mil­iar realm? They can be made fa­mil­iar by pro­vid­ing a human scale to what is largely be­yond human senses and means of ap­pro­pri­a­tion, in ways that in­clude a phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal com­po­nent. This em­bod­i­ment of data will be ex­am­ined and dis­cussed through a se­ries of art­works re­lat­ing to the Poles and the re­cent Lovely Weather artists-in-res­i­dence pro­ject in Ire­land.

Artists Statement

Any conversation about the environment inevitably comes to the automobile. Necessary for the movement of people, goods and services, automobiles are essential to the lives of most urban residents, but with these benefits come serious consequences: polluted air, dangerous roads, noise and congestion. Increasingly, we look at the world through the window of a car, airplane, or other transportation vehicle, less and less aware of what’s going on outside. The connection between the automobile, life and the air in the city is explored through Cloud Car, a car fitted with special effects equipment that produces a cloud of mist, enveloping car and rider. In-person guides stationed near the car distribute fact sheets and encourage passers-by to discuss the environment, automobiles and traffic in the city.

Automobiles and air
The most devastating impact of the automobile is its effect on air quality. Automobile pollution causes cancer, respiratory problems and heart disease. Research suggests that air pollution is responsible for 310,000 premature deaths in Europe yearly (BBC News, Feb 21 2005). Beyond the direct damage to our bodies from auto pollution is the fact that automobile emissions are contributing to global warming. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), a heat-trapping gas, have increased by one third since pre-industrial times, and a majority of that increase is caused directly by the burning of fossil fuels. The effects of this global warming are widespread and are happening now: rising sea levels, habitat destruction, extreme weather conditions and the spreading of infectious diseases. According to the National Resource
Defence Council, cars emit a huge amount of CO2, 20 pounds per gallon of gas burned.

Significance of research to public architecture
In the 1950s and 60s, Yves Klein’s idea of Air Architecture challenged the definitions of art and architecture. Klein was interested in the ways that humans can use science and technology to conquer the ephemeral, to the point of turning even air and fire into building materials. Klein sees science and technology as the saviour of architecture, promoting new forms and structures made from sculpting the air and other ‘immaterial-materials’. (in Peter Noever and Francois Perrin’s Yves Klein Air Architecture, 2004). Klein’s work was very influential. In the late 1960s several artists including Robert Barry started producing work questioning the limits of art. Barry’s work, known as ‘invisible’ art included The Inert Gas Series (1969) in which a specific amount of gases such as neon, xenon and helium are released ‘from measured volume to indefinite expansion’ in the Mojave Desert. Lucy Lippard observed in Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object that ‘novelty is the fuel of the art market’, and at the time of The Inert Gas Series, this ‘fuel’ is was being burned at a rapid pace, constantly stretching the boundaries of the definition of art. These works paved the way for the contemporary use of ephemeral materials in public art and architecture, for example Diller + Scofidio’s Blur Building (2002). As a public artwork, Cloud Car uses immaterial-materials for aesthetic reasons, but also to focus attention on the issue of air and the automobile. By creating a cloud of mist, air is made tangible and visible to the public. Cloud Car presents the automobile as an object to be observed, but also highlights the car as not only a vehicle of transportation, but as a space of contemplation and exchange.

The Patchingzone is a transdisciplinary laboratory for innovation where students and young professionals from different backgrounds create meaningful content. In our laboratories the students and researchers work together, supervised by experts, on commissions with creative use of high-tech materials, digital media. This paper highlights the co-creation processes of two electronic art works that were created as part of the Big South Lab; the Vjacket  coordinated by Andreas Zingerle and Tyler Freeman in collaboration with Kevin Brito and The Big South Orchestra, coordinated by Lars Kynde in collaboration with 12 youngsters from Rotterdam South were the BSL was developed. Big South Lab, executed and initiated by The Patching Zone and its partners, distinguishes itself from competitors and other initiatives through its way of working: above-average students and young professionals addressed a socially relevant project as a team. The team combines some principles of participatory design, co-creation and interactive art.

This means that stakeholders (young people/residents) play an important role in the design, realisation and distribution process. Their roles vary from designers, usability testers, interns, trend watchers, co-owners of projects. In contrast to the familiar 1970s community-art model, negotiation and collaboration are central at The Patching Zone; thus for example, much work will was done in processes of exchange and peer-to-peer learning processes. In contrast to the Big South Orchestra, the Vjacket an interactive sensor equipped jacket that works as a VJ interface for movement and dancer was developed for and tested by a small group of young people. While the Big South Orchestra was co-developed by its stakeholders, the young people from the neighborhood. In this paper we’ll analyse these collaboration approaches that were applied the Vjacket and Big South Orchestra, what can we learn from these approaches and are these relevant for future projects.

Networks as locations of “the information war” are dataworlds which are shared and continuously constructed by man and machine. These networked multiworlds inform, generate illusions, simulate and construct, hurt and destroy without any direct human activity. The need for “placeholders” in the hyperdimensional webs is emerging. Computer science offers simple agents as a solution for information selection and navigation in virtuality. Do these placeholders have the potential to fabricate themselves since their movement in networks can hardly be controlled, their effectiveness in time cannot be limited, and their number can be continuously increased through copying?

Can “softwarization” of media process currently underway define a new method of education?

In the encounter between dataflow, live coding and cartography will high light the emergence of a new approach in learning digital art.

The need to manage this wealth of information in always more effective ways have determined the centrality of software in the cultural domain by creating a de facto “data hyper democracy” in which the media disappears and everything is translated into code.

Among the necessary conditions that have made that possible free software, also knows as FLOSS, is one of this.

FLOSS has first made evident the cultural and ethical inherent in the production of software, making of it a political campaign and generating the technical and political context in which different artists, researchers, hackers were able to freely experiment with different degrees of manipulation of digital data. During this experimental season have been developed educational methods (and only after production methods) that have the ability to maintain different levels of abstraction simultaneously: graphical programming languages based on dataflow paradigm.

This approach allows developer to draw the software and then transform the conceptual diagram in code that, in the form of visual blocks are connected to each other through a relational logic. The logic diagram that follows does not distinguish between the physical world and data information and it seems to organize the incoming and outgoing information and process similar to what a mind map does.

It is precisely in the approach to a relational mapping method, where the concepts and actions are correlated with each other in a visual way, just by giving priority to the relations between actors, it’s possible to get good results both in terms of accessibility of computer science as of learning skills. Learning skills related to the possibility, entirely contemporary, to better understand the socio/ technological process behind the technology it self. If today digital knowledge is considered of strategic importance for advanced industrial cultures, it may not be considered just as the ability to handle procedures of a given computer program. It should be considered as a process of understanding what goes on behind a computer.

Through a close analysis of Thomas Ruff’s JPEGs series, we will explore the JPEG codec as the new paradigm of the digital image. Trained with Bernd and Hilla Becher, Ruff is one of the leading figures in contemporary photography. For his JPEGs series, he took his own images and digital photographs from the web and compressed them using the maximum rate; he then decompressed them into large-scale prints. This method exposes the mathematical infra-structure of the digital image, the pixel blocks into which the image is split during the compression process. We will trace the passage from archive to archetype at play here, the double meaning of taking an image from the web or from the wide world, and the possible return of beauty as a means of societal reconciliation. We posit that JPEG compression calls for a new conception of photography in which the perspectival projection gives way to the mathematical abstraction of the numerical tableau.

In the year 1910 Lars Magnus Eriksson, a blacksmith and engineer by education applied his skills of a telegraph repairman onto an invention by one Alexander Graham Bell. He decided to install a massive yet mobile telephone device to his wife’s car. Eriksson thus made the first “mobile” phone, which despite the difficulty of connecting it to Local telephone cables on the roadside was nevertheless mobile.

Mobility, connecting movement and location, was central to the industrial 19th century: steam engines, trains, cars, airplanes and flying in general contributed to rapidly changing the cultural position of the western subject in ways that we still cannot fully comprehend. Wars and conflicts raging in different parts of the world also called for better or worse) technology. Hence transportation and communication technology became central to Western expansionist and imperialist capitalism.

We are undoubtedly talking about the most successful (r)evolutionary project in human history. All rocks have been turned and crushed to become raw material for industrial production. Technology is however, always a double-edged sword. In its twists and turns it carries a possibility of being beneficial as well as harmful. Technology is political as it is a bandwagon of progress, the central god of progress as a religion… yet it also enables its own criticism.

Mobile space or rather communication space usually suggests bi-directionality. Wireless mobility in fact creates small wireless spaces, beyond which there is the infrastructure of massive hardware. Mobile spaces are thus for the most part from a center to many networks or nodes, which connect individuals with one another. It could be argued that the most advanced aspect of wireless technology is not its telephony but its ability to provide electricity for mobile devices in the form of tiny chargeable batteries.

Increasingly mobility is becoming a property of a group space, in which artworks can also be experienced and experiences shared by many participants. In this respect the interfaces and server structures of wireless media (WiFi and shared media experiences) begin to resemble more and more the spaces of experience that were created by interactive art forms in the 1990s. The audience or the service client becomes an active user, a position that requires increasing curiosity and bravery.

Interactive works of art are not worthwhile if only glanced at; one really needs to spend a small, shared moment, a micro time, during which different layers emerge. Media artwork or integrated interfaces can also have a strong research angle. The work of art researches’ phenomena in the field of media studies and sciences thus enable new research practices. These can include notions of the -intelligence- of the computer based system or software to understand cultural categories, similarities and differences of events, things or social roles.

In media art this research aspect and the coded worlds of experience involved in the semantic dimensions of computing are central. They also sometimes contribute to the ambiguity of situating media art in the wider contexts of contemporary art. It is in fact precisely this area, where art, science and social research with respective audience interface that constitutes media art as an interesting, multi-layered field within the ever-expanding terrain of contemporary art.Musician and media artist Brian Eno has talked about his wish to find a Language through which it is possible to talk, within the same symbolic matrix, about fashion, cookies, interior design, Cezanne, abstract art and architecture. Eno sees this as a new culture, which in its entirety could be referred to as a non-functional style behavior, and where people increasingly spend their free time.

Media art does not draw boundaries between art and art institutions but instead expands as in waves, through the interstices of corporate innovations, university research, IT-laboratories, media activists critiquing big brother surveillance society, and more traditional audiovisual narrativity.

Media art is at the heart of this continuously evolving field of new media. For many coming from the contemporary art field, media artists appear to them -Gyro Gearlooses”, inventors who make curious but not very useful things. What media art can contribute within the Western techno civilization is to give a critical pinpoint perspective to the near future.

It is this process that I find ISEA2004 to be about as a whole, and I wish the very best to that path, and our collaboration.

In most of the world Indigenous people are thought to be behind in using new technologies and either on the other side of the digital divide or in the chasm of the unknown that separates haves from have-nots. Yet to the contrary, Aboriginal artists have been, since time immemorial, ‘making things our own’ and, certainly since the 1960s, finding our own indigenous aesthetic in digital storytelling and in the unique contributions and ingenuity we’ve contributed to computing and technology.

This presentation will be the first of sizeable future involvement featuring the landmark creations and innovations of several Indigenous artists from around the world. It will illustrate and critically analyse their contributions that need to be included in the field of electronic arts internationally so that a more truly global picture of aesthetic and technological advancements can be viewed. Works critically contextualised (and illustrated using powerpoint) will range from interactive and participatory websites/net.?art productions, performative MIDI and haptic objects/screens, locative and i-phone/android applications, kinetic art, computer generated and sound installations.

The artists’ projects discussed have all been included in three exhibitions (Codetalkers of the Digital Divide, RE:counting coup, S-O-S) curated by award winning media artist, musician and curator Cheryl L’Hirondelle for imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival as part of their commitment to focus on presenting cutting-edge, groundbreaking new media exhibitions from an Indigenous perspective. What L’Hirondelle envisioned for imagineNATIVE and will present for the ISEA assembly is the findings from a  three-year “triangulation” of exhibitions that artistically, culturally, and critically examined and located the intersections between new media practice and that of Indigenous history, cosmology, and artistic expression.

Keywords: Computer Aided Drawing, Computational Drawing, FORTRAN Programming Language, CalComp Pen Plotter, CalComp Subroutines.

Early computer aided drawings were created in 1975 using Fortran, CalComp subroutines and a CalComp Pen Plotter. The gesture of making a mark was envisioned and experienced through the mathematics, the code and the drawing process. Making an image of something normally invisible to the human eye, came to fruition through this process. Wind gusts blowing against one’s face, and light waves reflecting off of irregular surfaces were ‘imprinted’ on paper through the digital process. I incorporated mathematical formulas that described invisible phenomena from the natural world, into Fortran programs. In order to create drawings from this code, I integrated CalComp subroutines into the programs to implement instructions for the pen plotter. My intention to create expressive drawings using the computer and pen plotter in 1975 disrupted the normal studio practice at that time. As my hand was not holding the pen, or the brush as it moved across an artist’s canvas, there was early skepticism about the expressiveness and the craft of this process. I had an intimate relationship with the programs I developed and thus created very expressive drawings.

Location is not just an external, geographic terrain, but can be an internal cognitive site within the human brain. Instead of gazing outwards, peering inwards can reveal new insights about human perception. The new ten‑year initiative undertaken in the United States by President Obama is mapping the human brain, bringing into focus both startling and troubling insights. There already exist special algorithms developed by MIT computer scientists to track the non‑visible changes in the human body like iris dilation and facial blood flow. The semantic brain, a new area of research, maps multiple areas of brain topography that process similar conceptual and visual information across gender, age, language and cultural differences. The University of California at Berkeley is investigating the semantic brain, and has a rudimentary experimental method to recreate a bank of images of what one experiences while dreaming. The location of one’s memory, fantasy, dream, and identity are being mapped as a new cartography, though a robust analysis of the human mind is years away. These tools can be used for diagnosis, healing, or in a more dystrophic scenario, surveillance and interrogation, issues artists are beginning to address. This panel aims to present and discuss work in brain mapping, imagery, artistic practice and the various implications for visualizations, performance, sonic, and haptic works produced now, and in the future.

Institutional Presentation Statement

CoLab is a newly established interdisciplinary creative technology centre built on a core partnership between AUT University [Auckland University of Technology (New Zealand)], a public university and MIC Toi Rerehiko, a charitable arts trust. It aims tc facilitate and promote creative practices, research and development, knowledge sharing, innovatior and collaboration.

CoLab brings together arts organizations, practitioners, educational institutions, commercial enterprises, technology developers, industry bodies and communities. It supports the development and public dissemination of hybrid ideas, research and creative practices through converging technologies, innovative formats, modes and networks. In so doing, it forms a community of enquiry and a physical meeting-ground for creative expression, new media industries and trans-disciplinary educators.

CoLab is a core partnership research initiative between AUT University’s Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies which brings together Schools of Art & Design, Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Engineering and Communication Studies, and MIC Toi Rerehiko as New Zealand’s leading contemporary creative media and interdisciplinary arts centre. CoLab is working to build a strong social network of partners and associated organisations.

Key research strands include:

1. Interactive & Performance Technologies: engaging with responsive environments, audience interaction, pervasive, sensory and ambient computing, animatronics and virtual worlds.
2. Mobile, Spatial & Locative Media: focusing on social interaction with place and technology through the use of mobile devices, site-based systems and environmentally responsive installations.
3. Digital Storytelling and Community Media Practices: enabling diverse communities to access, develop and extend cultural and social dialogues through new media.
4. Visualisation: exploring modes of conceiving, organizing and representing information, knowledge and data structures, digital ontologies, collective intelligence and topological networks.
5. Realtime 3D: deploying graphical communications technologies and software applications for business, education and research, interactive web3D, rendering and real-time algorithms, complex virtual worlds for both real-time and offline domains.
6. Critical interfaces: interrogating the theoretical, philosophical, political and cultural implications of emerging technologies and forms of practice.
7. Cord: a networked group of researchers involved with and interested in graphic programming environments. It serves as a hub for development, dissemination and debate of issues and techniques related to interactive technologies and real-time audio and video manipulation.

Current CoLab projects will be discussed in depth in light of the hybrid model that is applied – moving across not-for-profit, academic and industry sectors as well as across multiple technology platforms.

Artists Statement

Keywords: collaboration, collective practice, indigenous knowledge

Artists and cultural organisers have periodically developed new collaborative initiatives to take a more active role in determining the agenda and context for their work. This has often been in response to institutional and critical environments which fail to support interdisciplinary aesthetic and political agendas for creative practice.

For Guillermo Gómez-Peña, the performance collective La Pocha Nostra is conceived as a ‘virtual maquiladora (assembly plant)’, which ‘creates regenerative sources of labour from concentric and overlapping circles’ in a state of permanent reinvention and a desire for radical inclusivity. Raqs Media Collective have foregrounded the possibilities of new media to support new forms of collectivity. They ask: what kinds of documentation strategies are required to enable the sharing of experience and conceptual development in the move from individual artist to collective? The work of these groups have sensitised us to the critical issues such collaborations face, and raised questions about the opportunities they/we have to sustain and develop practice under conditions of globalisation.

As a collective, Local Time is researching the conditions of their own development as a collective engaged in interdisciplinary, intercultural practices in a postcolonial context. This paper is a report on our participation in the SCANZ residency in Taranaki, New Zealand, Jan-Feb 2009. We begin with an overview of the critical issues and inspirations for our work as image makers and writers in the new media environment, then discuss our understanding of the unique dynamics of Aotearoa New Zealand as a post-conflict society which is renowned for its unique modality of negotiation between indigenous and colonial cultures.
Significantly, the residency allowed us to develop our relationship with Parihaka, a village where a significant invasion by colonial forces occurred in the late 1800s, and a famous non-violent resistance movement led by Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi that has since provided inspiration for many significant New Zealand artists. Parihaka is a key site in the politics of recognition of indigenous culture, which has occurred in New Zealand over the past few decades, and is now the home to an annual peace festival.
We have been visiting Parihaka over a number of years as a site of learning and a means of contributing to a visual and textual discourse on sovereignty and cultural self-determination. As Te Miringa Hohaia, kaumatua at Parihaka notes, ‘indigenous languages that grow from the biodiversity and ecosystems are filled with histories, song, poetry and metaphor.’ The tension between indigenous and colonial knowledge systems in this location provides a valuable frame to consider the limits and opportunities of collaboration. This frame guided our key research question on the dynamics of collective practice, which we have pursued through interviews with the other residency participants, including a number of established international new media artists, curators, and theorists.
In this presentation the two members of the collective – who work primarily as media artists – will present both oral and audio-visual accounts of the research and seek to engage local audience in dialogue around the symposium themes of citizenship and contested spaces, local and global transactions and post-conflict societies.

Panel Statement

Panel: Kunstliche Kunst

My presentation documents research aiming at the introduction of aspects of natural creativity in machines. It explores the concept of social computing where man and machine contribute to a climate of invention and discovery. It documents interactive works exhibiting a creative drive in either of two senses. First, in the sense of a conversational approach: how to make a self-expressive machine that also strives for the accommodation of a larger social whole — in other words, how to solve the conflict of expression vs. integration. Second, in the sense of total autonomous behaviour: how to make a machine (soft or hard) that remains expressive in the face of ever changing environmental constraints. This requires that we also address the machine analysis and representation of ‘character’ and ‘style’. The work presented bears strong relationships to current work in both artificial life and conventional knowledge-based Al. We shall offer examples of projects realized over the last 5 years including agent oriented simulations for real-time musical improvisation and interaction, genetic algorithms running cellular automata and emergent functionality in distributed, self-organizing systems.

Keywords: Video Sculpture, Physicalizing the Image, Chinese shi, African aale, Memory Work, Vigilant Things, Vibrant Matter.

Video sculpture is disruptive, both to the behavior of an object, and to the linear sequence of the video imagery. Objects have a vital impetus that acts upon the video as it permeates the object. This is an assemblage of unlike material and ephemeral forces combined in an interactive collaboration. Artists like Tony Ourlser, Joan Jonas, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Bill Viola have inspired this artwork. Confronted with an emotionally distressed facial image peering out from under an overturned chair is a highly charged experience for the viewer in a art gallery. Tony Oursler’s installation Stone Blue projects this distressing video imagery with a confrontational dialogue, into a large ordinary pillow shaped like a body, disrupting the neutrality and passive character of the white pillow. Krzysztof Wodiczko projects facial imagery on to exterior of the dome on the Centro Cultural de Tijuana, disrupting the role of the building or architecture. Other artists including Ann Hamilton, Susan Collins and Anti VJ in the architectural projection “Desherence” have incorporated video projections to disrupt the flow or narrative in their installations.

Abstract (Poster)

We propose a basic learning program to foster ability to understand and empathize with others. In the program, a student creates a digital storybook collaborating with an elderly person who needs care. The collaborative expression activity in the program provides the elderly persons a way to express themselves while promoting students’ learning. We developed a Web application for publishing storybooks, and a tablet PC application to view storybooks for execution.

Panel: Rogue Troopers: Designing functional and fictional disruptions

The pervasiveness of contemporary technology goes hand in hand with opacity. Users generally have little or no knowledge of how the objects and networks they depend on work, becoming black box operators. As a visual artist working with technology, I am investigating ways of reducing this ignorance. I run durational collaborative manufacturing units where technological items are broken and recycled in creative ways. The participants engage in learning, making and sharing an experimental process that disrupts the disempowered consumerist attitude towards technological items. The talk explores some of my projects, as well as recent initiatives by other artists and activists.

This is an artist presentation of a collaborative self-portrait moblog and its final piece. The project started as a practical focus of a theoretical research on mobile media. Going through studies on the uses of this kind of media and the possibilities it offers, I decided to created a project that had and artistic intention as well a technological experimentation.

Peculiaris is inspired by concepts of an identity that is open, fluid, and mutant. This identity is represented by photo self-portraits produced with camera phones. Mobile phones have changed with time, they are not a mere wireless telephone anymore, and in addition they have become powerful devices for communication. Nowadays a mobile phone can be an instrument to produce media, with them we can record audio, video, take photos, write text, send and receive emails, navigate on the web, and so on and so forth. The project Peculiaris decided to experiment with one of these features of the new mobile phones: the still image (photography).

Peculiaris.net intends to collect assorted “identity photos”, these ephemeral end fragile emotions of mobile self-portraits. Zgymunt Bauman, in the book Identity, when reflecting over identity uses the theory of Beata Frydryczak to say that the hero of modernity lives the moment, the “here and now”, it couldn’t be a collector, unless he/she would be a collector of sensations, emotions, Erlebnisse.

After one year automatically collecting self-portraits, in June 2008, a final piece will come out of this experimentation; it will be a slide show of the self-portraits sent to the moblog. The photos will be displayed on a 7-inch digital picture frame and presented on art museum and/or galleries. The point is to have the art museum as the place for legitimize this “temporary” archival of self-portraits.

This paper will discuss Collaborative Systems, works of art which employ and exploit information and communications technologies as new ‘sites’ for ‘public art’ – art which connects individuals and groups and opens dialogue around issues within given contexts. Through Collaborative Systems community groups and individuals are given a framework for building a database from their own experience and then structuring and interpreting that data themselves. Collaborative Systems re-cast networked online environments as public, community and collaborative sites. These works re-invent ‘public art’ and redefine the role of the ‘artist’ by allowing individuals and communities to evolve aesthetically, intellectually, and politically expressive, collaborative environments on-line. This paper will examine a variety of models for the design and implementation of ‘collaborative systems’, which have implications for codes of ethics as well as codes of aesthetics.

This panel invites curators from Dubai and internationally to share working practices around collecting contemporary art, including media and new media art. The collections of museums, galleries, online art organisations and private individuals are increasingly broadening to include more new media art. Because new media art is sometimes non‑material, process‑based or involving audience participation, how might these kind of practices be collected? What is actually collected (objects, beta software, instructions?), where (online, offline, nomadic?) and how (commissioned for collection, bought from art fairs, versioned from production labs?). Does new media art challenge, or become embedded, the globalised nature of art markets? Because new media is used as a means of documenting, archiving and distributing art, and because new media art might be interactive with its audiences, this highlights the new kinds of relationships that might occur between audiences as viewers, participants, co‑producers, selectors, taggers or taxonomisers.

What are the conditions for an interaction to spark a collective movement of expression that is truly ecological in the sense of exceeding both the individual inputs of the agents involved and the sum of those contributory parts? This is the question addressed in electronic art, embodied cognition, network theory, and posthuman philosophy under such rubrics as “distributed agency,” “distributed cognition,” and “nonhuman agency.” Too often, presuppositions about what constitutes agency and cognition are left unchallenged, with the gesture of multiplying and redistributing the existing categories implicitly considered adequate to the task. This talk will attempt to set in place certain conceptual signposts for an integral rethinking of these categories along radically ecological lines. The starting point will be the seemingly least amenable to this project: language interaction. Starting from pragmatically from a particular technique for collective expression practiced at the Montreal-based research-creation laboratory, the SenseLab, the discussion will work out from language to the ecological field within which it takes place. The aim is to resituate language in relation to its outside: the larger field within which it occurs, populated by elements and beings beyond its ken, and beyond the purview of the human subject, whose capacities for thought and action they immanently inform. The path will lead through certain outlier concepts of C.S. Peirce’s theory of signs, revolving in particular around his enigmatic concept of a “Commind,” cast in terms we would call ecological today, as more fundamental to expressive action than the individual utterer or agent.

The construction of scientific knowledge takes place far away from the periphery where data are collected. The peripheries with their ecosystems are the ones that, through the “transformation networks”, feed the centers with data collected in the midst of a diversity of phenomena. The correspondence and the exchange of specimens between Fritz Müller (1822-1897) and Charles Darwin characterize what Bruno Latour called transformation networks. Fritz Müller, who lived in Vale do Itajaí, southern Brazil, from 1852 to 1897, established a link with Charles Darwin and with other European researchers. As naturalist and researcher with the National Museum and as a Primary School teacher in the cities of Florianópolis and Blumenau Fritz Müller faces difficulties in adapting to the southern hemisphere and in the colonist life.

The paper focuses on the science network between the German colony in the south of Brazil and the center with the European scientists and naturalists with whom Fritz Müller exchanged letters, and tries to map the plant specimens that he sent to Europe. Initially published in his paper entitled “Einige Worte über Leptalis” (1876), circular mimesis, or Müllerian Mimicry, as it became known, is a concept attributed to Fritz Müller’s discovery. The naturalist, in his observation of the flora and fauna, emphasized that when some species undergo a transformation process, they end up resembling one another. Mimesis and plagiarism have always been the conductors of new formulations and possible collaborations even in the essence of science. The concept is employed in the paper to refer to the naturalist’s procedure in his observation of the phenomena in loco in the forest and also to highlight that his observations could only be legitimized as science after the screening of the “transformation networks”. Transformation networks is the movement of the observation  carried out in the periphery that is legitimized as an abstract data in the calculation centers that promote an accumulation of knowledge, the surplus value of information. It is in the transformation network that intellectual control is exercised, and through it the centers are capable of representing phenomena that were previously out of their reach.

Keywords: Colorigins, color theory, color mixing algorithms, gamification, pedagogy, interaction design, interface design, design process, Sifteo Cubes, physical / tangible computing.

This poster briefly introduces Colorigins, a tactile color mixing and matching game designed and developed for the Sifteo Cubes platform. Colorigins presents a softly gamified approach to learning elements of subtractive color theory. The game objective is to accurately match a randomly generated target color by mixing it from a set of source (conventional primary and secondary) colors. Throughout the process of color mixing, players can gain experience with concepts such as value, saturation, tints, shades, tones, complements, chromatic neutrals, and the relative visual strengths of particular colors.

Colour Data Processing questions the veracity of photographic and digital reproduction, but not with the intent of challenging the context or state of photography, but rather establishing photography as a flawed method of reproduction.
Our system recontextualizes the functionality of the Gretag MacBeth ColorChecker1, addressing the instance of digital reproduction and valuing data over the accuracy of reproducing the physical referent. However, our referent is collected data from a sensor rather than the colour rendition chart, removing our process by a full reproductive generation. We embrace the same deviations and error commonly found in digital reproduction to critique and analyze our current methods of digital photographic reproductions.

The Einstein’s Brain Project is a group of scientists and artists working together to develop installations and environments exploring ideas about consciousness and the new constructions of the body. Recent work has used strategies taken from paranormal science and psychology to explore how interpretation in shared machine-human environments contributes to the construction of our worlds.
This paper briefly introduces and contextualizes a new, developing work – ColourBlind – that explores the internal workings of a machine through an implementation of the Ganzfield Effect and Closed Eye Visualisation as they relate to ideas about hallucination in human and machine hybrids. The work explores ideas about machine vision and how hybrid interpretation gives rise to unbidden and unexpected colours, images and patterns in streams of unstructured data, and considers these as machine hallucinations.

This examination of the work ColourBlind, explores machine vision and computational analysis to examine a machine’s interiority – its phenomenal self-model, asking the question where is this model to be found? It does so in, in the context of earlier work that used ideas found in Electronic Voice and Video Phenomena to explore ideas about presence and absence, and pattern and randomness. These installations took the form of blinded cameras that sent visual and audio noise to a computer that analysed it for patterns that looked like human faces and sounded like human speech.

New work suggests it is possible to use machines and their interiorities in a phenomenologically driven investigation to discover hallucinatory tendencies that can create something akin to machine imagination. Increasingly our machines see and discriminate much as we do, and in turn change our perception of the world. This paper explores ideas about how we and machines see and experience the world, and raises questions about the capacity of both to discriminate. In the search for pattern in randomness, for colour where there is none, when faced with the horror vacui of sensory deprivation, the brain, and in this case the machine, we suggest continues its processing regardless, creating its own colours and forms as interpretative hallucinations, as part of a grid of a memoriously relational world.

Panel: Open Culture + Wearables

V2_ is an in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary cen­ter for art and media tech­nol­ogy in Rot­ter­dam (the Nether­lands). At V2_Lab, artists, tech­ni­cians and sci­en­tists work to­gether to pro­duce art pro­jects that make use of new tech­nolo­gies. V2_Lab is a place for artis­tic Re­search and De­vel­op­ment (aRt&D) and cre­ates generic tech­ni­cal so­lu­tions that are rel­e­vant to the fields of art and cul­ture. The re­sults are pub­lished and made avail­able under open-source li­censes when­ever pos­si­ble. De­vel­oped hard­ware and soft­ware is doc­u­mented on­line and avail­able to use or mod­ify to any­one who is in­ter­ested to use it. Shar­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing knowl­edge is one of V2_Lab’s pri­or­i­ties, be­sides co-cre­at­ing new media art­works. V2_Lab has ex­ten­sive ex­pe­ri­ence with work­ing in in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary teams. The Lab crew sup­ports artists to re­al­ize their pro­jects, from con­cept to work­ing pro­to­type. Work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tively on art pro­jects guar­an­tees chal­leng­ing group dy­nam­ics and often re­sults in in­no­v­a­tive art­works.

Artists, de­sign­ers, tech­ni­cians and de­vel­op­ers share the same goal: cre­ate a work­ing pro­to­type of an in­ter­est­ing con­cep­tual idea, which needs to be fully func­tion­ing and ready to pre­sent to an au­di­ence within a short pe­riod of time. The Sum­mer Ses­sions (brief, in­tense artist-in-res­i­den­cies for young and promis­ing artists) are a good ex­am­ple of this work­flow. V2_ Lab sup­ports the in­di­vid­ual artist both tech­ni­cally and con­cep­tu­ally. Se­lected artists have a per­sonal coach to guide them dur­ing the Sum­mer Ses­sions and the Lab de­vel­op­ers give all their en­ergy to make it hap­pen. In weekly meet­ings, the whole team gives feed­back on the de­sign and ideas, to get a max­i­mum re­sult. Some­times con­fronting, but al­ways di­rected to­wards a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of the ne­ces­sity to cre­ate a spe­cific work. Piem will talk about her ex­pe­ri­ence with su­per­vis­ing in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary aRt&D processes and the ef­forts of V2_Lab to be­come a cen­tral hub for wear­able tech­nol­ogy.

Panel: Without Sin: Taboo and Freedom within Digital Media

“The prob­lem of lan­guage is at the heart of all the strug­gles be­tween the forces striv­ing to abol­ish the pre­sent alien­ation and those striv­ing to main­tain it… Under the con­trol of power, lan­guage al­ways des­ig­nates some­thing other than au­then­tic ex­pe­ri­ence.” _All the King’s Men, Sit­u­a­tion­ist In­ter­na­tional, 1963

This paper takes the po­si­tion that the lan­guage[s] of tech­nol­ogy, and the ap­pli­ca­tion of lan­guage within dig­i­tal en­vi­ron­ments, con­tinue to be in­ti­mately en­twined with the on­go­ing strug­gle against “the pre­sent alien­ation”, as well being im­pli­cated in the un­der­min­ing of au­then­tic­ity (the lack of a true iden­tity). Sup­ported by Adorno’s ob­ser­va­tion that “[O]bjects do not go into their con­cepts, with­out leav­ing a re­main­der…”, (Neg­a­tive Di­alec­tics), the ways in which lan­guage frames ex­pe­ri­ence, iden­tity, and po­lit­i­cal and so­cial re­al­i­ties, in on­line con­texts will be thought through. If, as Adorno sug­gests, lan­guage is a total sys­tem which re­sults in con­cep­tual clo­sure, and mis-di­rects ex­pe­ri­ence, where might we glimpse the lin­guis­tic ‘re­main­ders’, with their po­ten­tial for rev­o­lu­tion/re­de­f­i­n­i­tion, within the dig­i­tal con­text? A close read­ing of All The King’s Men, and other texts on lan­guage and power, will be pre­sented along­side a se­ries of ex­am­ples which high­light the prob­lem of lan­guage. If we are col­lat­eral dam­age to the con­tin­ual tyrrany of lan­guage, how do we re­sist this, in the new in­for­ma­tion en­vi­ron­ments and play­grounds we in­habit?  If the per­sis­tent  taboo which haunts lan­guage is mak­ing any at­tempt to stand out­side it, in order to as­sess its in­flu­ence, how do we break out of this dou­ble-bind?

Abstract

Keywords: emotion, intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), Olympia, probabilistic relational models, serious games, virtual learning environments (VLEs).

Attaining student understanding and motivation for learning is the main challenge of virtual learning environments (VLEs). Educational games easily obtain the student’s attention, which is reinforced by an emotional link established between the game and the learner with a high level of interactivity. This research aims to enhance the human computer interaction (HCI) of a VLE through the addition of specific features present in the architectures of serious and commercial video games. The Olympia architecture, which enables the combination of VLEs or serious games with intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), is introduced. A new generation of learning environments that synthesise the features of both learning environments can be created. Olympia was evaluated in a particular case study focused on teaching introductory Physics to 20 undergraduate students at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City Campus. A traditional VLE and an enhanced VLE were implemented. The differences between both environments are in their affective feedback, graphics rendering and game mechanics modules. Probabilistic relational models, i.e. Bayesian Networks, were deployed to infer student knowledge. Weighted hypothesis testing was used in evaluating the effectiveness of Olympia. Results show that students learn in a similar way with both learning environments, although they feel more motivated whilst interacting with the enhanced VLE. Olympia is an effective guideline for the creation of intelligent VLEs. Future work will focus on repeating the experiment on a larger population, creating educational games and enhancing the student model.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Computational humour, automatic comics generation, incongruity theory, text-image relationship.

This paper proposes a system’s design for generating comics based on the incongruity theory of humour. We describe the field of Computational Humour, while also examining the nature of humour in the context of images and text to help provide frameworks for developing a system, comedy53, to produce computer generated comics. Based on the results of comedy53, we then propose strategies to help improve the future development of comic generation in the context of Computational Humour.

Between 1970—1989 in the city of Arad (Romania) a research and creation group was active in the field of cinematographic experiment. Since 1990 on Kinema Ikon functions within the Multimedia Atelier of the Arad Museum and switches from film to video tape. From 1995 on, as a result of the recycling of competence, the KI members produced hypermedia works on CD ROM: Opera Prima and Commedia del Multimedia. In using the new image producing instruments, the new experimental hypermedia works are characterized by a ludic-ironic treatment of the content and the expression forms. Since 1994 the group has issued the experimental review Intermedia (offset & CD ROM). Commedia del Multimedia by Kinema Ikon group: Commedia because of the playful approach proposed with ironic crossreferences where the mythological referent is paraphrased by the digital processing of everyday-objects and analogic frames put on screen by the authors as electronic variations of the labyrinth theme. Locomotion Pictures by Calin Man: Using the pretext of Zenon’s paradoxes a homage to Black Maria Studio is payed. About 600 BMPs have been used, programmed to be exhibited, following a simple logic, by the computer, which plays the role of a projection machine.

The “Communicating Bacteria” Project combines bioart, textiles and 3D mapped video projections to explore new research currently being undertaken in the field of bacterial communication. The project a collaboration between artist Anna Dumitriu, microbiologists Dr Simon Park and Dr John Paul and video artist Alex May.

Bacteria have intricate communication capabilities, for example: quorum sensing (voting on issues affecting the colony and signaling their presence to other bacteria); chemotactic signaling (detecting harmful or favourable substances in the environment); and plasmid exchange (e.g. for transfer of antibiotic resistance genes). Using signaling chemicals such as Homoserine Lactone, the bacteria pass on messages to nearby cells, which can be either part of their colony or other living cells (including eukaryotic and plant cells).

The antique whitework (white on white) embroideries are worked in to by hand with delicately stitched images of communicating bacteria whilst additional patterns are created using a genetically modified strain of Chromobacterium violaceum called CV026.  Chromobacterium violaceum is white in its natural state but turns purple when it receives a communication, since bacteria grow in colonies and individual bacteria are continually sending and receiving signals it always appears purple. But the CV026 strain is in effect mute. It can receive a chemical communication signal but cannot send one, so it only turns purple in the presence of a communication from another bacterium. When exposed to unmodified Chromobacterium violaceum it slowly turns purple as the chemical signal spreads.

Around the time of the enlightenment the perversely difficult practice of whitework embroidery was considered to be the highest level of achievement for a woman at the same time that the male counterparts, the “gentleman scientists” began to rigorously study the Earth.  By combining whitework with microbiology Dumitriu considers paradigmatic changes in the process of scientific research.

The final outcome of the project is an installation comprising embroidered textiles with killed bacterial decorations, objects created during the research process and delicate  3D mapped video projections that reveal the bacterial communications behaviours taking place.

… the re-evolutionary war – World War Four – has begun. The new technological revolution is plopping as advertisement, as commodity, through the letterbox whilst simultaneously and surreptitiously altering our conceptual maps as fundamentally as the first Industrial Revolution. I outlined some sweeping overview comments in the deliberately polemical paper, The War for World Four (reproduced in the ISEA98 Book of Abstracts), concerning the responsibilities of “the artist” in the world of a new technological revolution and began mapping a changing world diachronically. As an extension to this theme, it could be posited that the cumulative effects of world change may actually be initiating a paradigm category shift in the meaning of the term “artist”. As with the shift from the artist-as-artisan to a new, more contemporary, meaning set for the term “artist” in the Renaissance, one may suspect a possible major “keyword” shift in the meanings of “art” and “artist”, in the evolving future, that should attract the attention of a budding Raymond Williams. Whilst these concerns are of enormous importance, “The Terror” was also to be about taking stock, allowing the past to speak rather than be elided or forgotten in a retro-modernist, pseudo-revolutionary technological fervour.

Painting, the technology which went hand-in-hand with the evolution of the contemporary meaning of the term “artist”, has died more times than Doctor Who. It is an activity that is often said to be terrorised by the advent of new technology. It was said, after all, to be threatened by the advent of the photograph. As a practicing artist, it seems to me that painting is superbly placed, on its deathbed or in its grave, to observe the convolutions of contemporary contexts. As a healthy ghost, like John Lennon or the undead Elvis Presley, it still seems to be hanging around haunting our cultural spaces. It is part of the rich heritage (cultural baggage) with which we either sit down at a computer terminal or enter the studio. It is true to say that the mood is abroad for the abandonment of the sophisticated technology of painting.

This presentation will say the “Unsaid” and declare a necrophiliac relationship between me and the dead technology to see what light it casts on the advantages and limitations of new technologies. “Sexier and livelier” as the opposite position may appear on the surface, I have not abandoned an interest in painting, even when such an abandon-ment would be easier and more fashionable. This paper explains why that interest is still alive, amongst other interests, in the face of a context in which all the ‘art monitors attached to the body of painting appear to display a flat-line beeeeeep. Painting is pronounced dead again. As an artist, I want to share these thoughts on painting: to contextualise painting and to try to discern if it still has value(s) in a cyberian landscape.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Emergence, Interactivity, Narration, Sound Installations, Video Games

In the design process of sound installations, the composer designs his sound for a real or a virtual space according to the listener’s walking path. One way to design this walk is to allow the listener to interact with the system via Non-Player Characters1 . For a given piece, the creator affords the interactor a certain amount of freedom; and the system, according to its level of self-sufficiency, a certain amount of autonomy. We assume that these choices are directly related to design styles: the ”scripting style” and the ”emergent style”. In the scripting style, the designer takes the point of view of the interactor, who becomes the narrator. In the emergent style, the designer takes the point of view of Non-Player Characters. We have designed two versions, composed in each style, of the same interactive sound installation The Listening Walker. This paper is mainly devoted to a comparative analysis of the sound design styles experienced, and to the presentation of the two artistic and development experiences.

The article explores possible cultural approaches to new-media art aesthetics and
criticism through an in-depth appraisal of recent works by three contemporary practitioners from Asia and the Pacific: Lisa Reihana, Vernon Ah Kee and Qiu Zhijie. Particular attention is paid to the issues of place, location and cultural practice in their work, issues currently under-examined in new-media art discourse. The analysis pays close attention to the operationality of the works, the influence of pre-digital aesthetic histories and the richly locative and virtual schemas of indigenous epistemologies that serve to meaningfully expand Euro-American notions of locative media art.

This text highlights the issues of a complex poetic strategy intended to tackle the multitude of contemporary textual mutations. Never before has text and more so the language phenomena as a whole seen such a thorough and rapid shake-up. Radical transformations are disrupting categories and usages, some of which are several centuries old, that have culturally imprinted our relationship to textuality.

Abstract

In this paper I will give an overview of the new Chaos Science, and show were it may be of some application to composers, with examples chosen from my own work. Basic new concepts such as ‘fractal’, ‘fractional dimension’ and ‘strange attractor’ are explained; mathematical monsters such as the Cantor Dust, Koch Snowflake, the Julia and Mandelbrot Sets are graphically reproduced. Examples of Chaotic dynamics are given: Lorenz’s model of fluid behavior, Verhulst’s model of population growth, and Hénon’s analysis of the multiple celestial body problem. Several new compositional techniques based on chaos worked out by the author are presented: computer algorithms, analogue electronic music generation, projection of graphic design into melodic curve, and formal considerations (such as metric structure and instrumentation).

Examples are chosen from the following works. Harpsi-Kord for harpsichordist and tape applies the iterative principle to sampling techniques. A series of studies for a computer-guided pianola were made in 1988 using a feedback algorithm. In 1989 I wrote The Five Seasons for 6  percussionists and tape, which integrates fractal structures and techniques derived from chaos dynamics. Brain-Wave sets up a self-regulating improvisatory situation fora group of record players. Mod iFications for marimba & tape was composed using a principle I call statistical feedback in which groups of musical elements are subject to chaotic serialization. Finally, Hyperion’s Tumble for tape (in ISEA94 Concert program) was composed by using chaotic algorithms and computer-based synthesis.

New media offer enormous possibilities for documenting cultural experiences and interpretations. The use of technology in service of cultural heritage can be challenging, especially when the artefact involves a physical site such as Chinatown, with intangible sensory features of spatial interactions and emotional experiences. The use of new media applications can focus and engagingly convey the immense richness and diversity of the emerging historical record within an intimately coherent and viscerally arresting narrative. In capturing the plurality of transitory moments that constitute the life and times of Chinatown, rather than re-construct/reproduce/ re-present the cultural heritage in linear fashion, the work-in-progress project, ComposingYou_Chinatown, adopts an experimental approach that integrates art practice and interactive media. Utilizing locative media and public projection, the all encompassing experiential interaction generates perceptual insights into -and reflections of- past memories, while offering opportunities to experience the present, and to envision the future. An artist talk will discuss the strategies and theoretic concerns in exploring cultural heritage through the use of interactive media, an attempt to advocate the value of aesthetic art experience through which visual/sound qualities allow our sensory processing systems to adapt and emerge with new vision that could generate harmony and peace with the current states of Chinatown.

Abstract

We have created a story visualization system for literary works. A hint as to how this can be accomplished lies in language education; babies and small children grasp the meaning of long complex sentences by focusing on the keywords that they had already understood. The overall meaning of the story is then roughly reconstructed by the combination of these keywords . One of the problems that remain currently is how to reconstruct a story systematically from scattered keywords. A number of trials in robots and human interface machines have achieved a dialogue with humans by means of pattern recognition in the conversation. Such software development is now underway in artificial intelligence research, beginning with corpus classification, topic mining and language compilation. Another approach to analyzing a long story is to introduce advanced mathematics into the text data.

A second problem is how to present the meaning of the story to a third party. Different from the visualization for nature or physical phenomena, though which are often observed as beautiful image, the story itself includes emotional substance for the readers.

In the present work, the first attempt towards story visualization considers the two issues discussed above. Shakespeare’s plays have been selected as the target of the visualization since these are the most famous historical literary works and the structure of the sentences have been investigated in great detail. Although the results presented in this paper might seem primitive to literature researchers, we are confident that this initial step is necessary to pioneer future development. A possible achievement might be that someday a robot will enjoy reading a human letter, and will begin to write a literary work by the end of this century. The visualization of a story aimed at in this study, will hopefully become the basis of such a system that is realized in the future.

The author conducts a simple thought experiment investigating the existence and scope of ‘computational art’: the utilization of the computer in the visual arts and music. In the experiment he sets the task of constructing an artifact that is capable of producing works of art. Since it appears that the artifact needs at least the capability of imagination, he queries the nature of images and imagery and argues that imagination is strongly intentional. Next he introduces the concept of notational systems, since they seem to govern the artistic activity of (not exclusively) machines. Confronted with the question of whether we are able to develop a computational analogue for taste, he finds that notational systems prove to be necessary for mediating the method of production of an artwork and the appraisal of its artistic value. Furthermore, the author shows that there are certain epistemological limits to the creativity of an imaginative device. Although the outcome of this hypothetical construction task clearly denies the possibility of an autonomously creative artifact, there seems to be no reason to worry about the opportunities for computational art: the computer appears to be a unique tool in exploring the possibilities of artistic production, guided by artists.

Drawing inspiration from Sol le Witt’s privileging of drawing concept over the material space of actual drawing, computational art typically focuses on the conceptual logic of the software program rather than the electronic space of program execution. The latter is positioned as secondary – a mere technical means. My aim in this paper is to argue for a more equal and complex relationship. This is not lend the computer some awkward creative agency (or even to envisage a dimension of generative semi-autonomy), it is to consider the labour of the computer – to think through the implications of its iterative event-space. Programming itself demands thinking in terms of this labour. Creative concepts do not simply precede computation but are developed in relation to a language of data-structures and algorithms which has its basis in the possibility of non-reflective mechanical operation. Of course, the actual texture of computer labour is largely invisible – happening so quickly and at such an alien scale that there is no adequate human way of observing the process. This does less, however, to obliterate the importance of computer operation within computational art than to highlight its poignancy and power. The terrain of execution takes shape as the spatially and temporally obscure space in which the conceptual logic of the program gains concrete realisation. The two are tied together, neither subordinate to the other. If anything, in its silence and disappearance the plane of execution provides the well of darkness from which the potential for creative conceptualisation emerges. This paper explores this relation within the context of traditions of computational drawing and through a specific examination of the development of one of the author’s own drawing projects.

This project aims to incite an aesthetic transference between Impressionism and emerging media art practices. How might we design a framework that is able to perceive and capture the characteristics of sceneries to portray its impression, much like Impressionists did? Inspired by the philosophy of Impressionism,this paper explores a way of depicting an impression of the world made by computers using deep neural networks (DNN). First, we built a conceptual framework adopting the insights acquired from Impressionism from a historical context. Then, we reconstruct an original image through the DNN as an approximation of human perception of the world. Our results demonstrated an opportunity for adopting a machine learning approach to generate visualizations for emerging digital media art purposes conceptually as well as practically

What happens when artists use computers to quantify the infinity? We will explore the sublime in a few computational artworks that evoke both pleasure and fear. Where, on one hand, we aesthetically comprehend the process and results; but, on the other, we are overcome by the sheer magnitude of data and cosmic time scales needed to completely compute the simple algorithms.

Computer Architectones result from the evolution of 3D / two layers constructor cellular automatas, whose behavior is inspired by urban systems that cannot be mapped with a global geometrical principle (medieval cities, slums, medinas). 0n the first layers, numerical animals appear, live, and die. Under certain circumstances, they produce geometrical blocks (‘mass-like’ or ‘space-like’), whose behavior defines the second layer: their interaction with their neighbors depends on their prescribed ‘personalities’. Such societies of objects have many counterparts in the realm of architecture. They produce unpredictable but deterministic environments which can be materialized through stereo lithography. The scale of these sculptures (25-30 cm) is reminiscent of architectural ‘bonsais’, minuscule cities or buildings with fractal-like details just waiting for an opportunity to become full-sized environments. The outcome of three experiments using large-scale architectone fragments are presented.

1970 was a crucial year for the development and acceptance of computer art at the Venice Biennale. Between May and October 1970 the Venice Biennale organised two parallel events. One was the International Art Exhibition, held at the Giardini, which included the first computer art show at the Biennale; the other was the International Music Festival, held at the Fenice Theatre, which included the First Symposium of Avant-Garde and Computer Music.

Despite the presence of a number of international computer art pioneers such as Herbert Franke, Georg Nees, Frieder Nake, Auro Lecci, and the Computer Technique Group, the experimental art show at the Giardini was disappointing for several reasons (limited selection of computer artworks and lack of communication between the curators and a number of participating artists, to name a few).  On the contrary, as I would like to argue, the Music Festival offered artists more opportunities to communicate and disseminate their work. A series of debates, laboratories and round-tables created a prolific interdisciplinary environment where composers and theoreticians in the field of computer art and music could meet. Participants to the Symposium of Avant-Garde and Computer Music included, among others, John Cage, Earl Brown, Pietro Grossi, Morton Feldman, and Alan Sutcliffe (Computer Art Society, London).

My paper will consider the two experimental Biennale’s events to discuss to what extent the institution reflected different approaches to computer art and music in the early 1970s. What consequences did these events bring about to the Biennale?