Presentation Data Table

ABSTRACT

In the last years the use of more and more sophisticated computer graphics facilities has been changing the way of working of mathematicians. In particular the use of computer graphics techniques has been used not only just to visualize already known phenomena but in a more interesting way to understand how to solve problems not completely solved. In some specific cases such techniques have provided a new way of proving results in mathematical search. It can be said that a new branch of mathematics has been developing in the last few years that can be called Visual.Mathematic.

Institutional Presentation Statement

The CNUCE Institute, founded in 1965 and attached to the National Council of Research, has a staff of more than 120 active in the departments of logic programming, computer network, satellite flight control, data bases, parallel computing, structural engineering, remote sensing, computer graphics and computer music. The activities at the Computer Music Department of CNUCE/CNR – Pisa mainly consist of Applied Research, Education, Music production and Organization of concerts and special events: – applied Research involves the design and the implementation of original hardware and software tools to be used in interactive live ?performances; – a course on Computer Music is yearly taught at the Computer Science Dept. of Pisa University; – a special summer school is yearly organized together with the Music Dept. of the New York University including workshops and live-interactive computer music and computer graphics events. Interaction is the keyword that characterizes the activity of the Computer Music Department of CNUCE: a Workshop on Man-Machine Interaction in Live Performance took place in Pisa in 1991 and reported in Interface, Journal of New Music Research n.22, 1993. In order to put at work the power of the algorithmic composition approach, a special language called Real-Time Concurrent PascalMusic (RTCPM) has been developed: a peculiarity of RTCPM is the possibility of defining the composition in terms of many procedures running at the same time and interacting with the program/composition during the execution; this is obtained by selectively sensing actions performed on external devices and making decisions on the basis of human performers gesture. Sensors typically used in robotics are taken into consideration for developing original devices: infra-red beams (IR), CCD cameras for video capture and image processing (IP). The basic idea consists of carrying out special devices for remote sensing (i.e. without mechanical and/or electrical links) moving objects handled by performers or gesture of the human body (dancers, painters, etc..) to be used in interactive computer music/graphics live-performances. The most relevant devices developed at the Computer Music Dept. of CNUCE are: the Twin Towers device (IR) which detects positions and gesture of the hands so implementing a sort of two aerial tri-dimensional joy-sticks; the Light Baton system (IP) which detects the movements of an orchestra conductor for controlling virtual ensembles of performers; the Aerial-Painting-Hands system (IP) which detects positions and movements of a painter’s hands in live interactive computer graphics/music performances; the UV-stick system (IP) i.e. a UV-lamp lighted straight stick whose 3-d position and 3-d rotation are recognized; the Imaginary Piano system(IP), where the hands of a performer play in the air with no real keyboard. Following a tradition of the department in developing sound machines, special DSP based boards for realtime signal synthesis and processing have being carried out; besides, a special graphic-editor for DSP algorithms has been implemented. The Computer Music Department of CNUCE promoted, and is deeply involved in, the realization of the ESPRIT project CATS (Computer Aided Theatrical Score) for theatre and cinema direction simulation (also called the multimedia script). The staff of the Computer Music Department of CNUCE (Leonello Tarabella, Graziano Bertini, Alfonso Belfiore, Paolo Carosi, Giuseppe Scapellato, Massimo Magrini, Mauro Lupone, Giovanni Chiparo, Marco Cardini) consists of people specialized and graduated in the various work-areas: computer science, music, visual arts, drama.

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

This presentation focuses on experiments in computer music by engineer and composer José Vicente Asuar (1933) in Chile between 1970 and 1980; special attention is paid to the development of his own computational system for music composition: the Asuar Analog Digital Computer COMDASUAR around 1978. The work done by Asuar is contextualized in view of other developments in computer music and computer technology. Asuar’s case can be regarded as exemplary, since he was very active between the decades of the nineteen fifties and the nineteen eighties in the electro- acoustic musical scene in Chile as well as in Europe, the United States and other Latin American countries, and his work can be seen as a constant and continuous development of musical ideas materialized in a series of papers, compositions, albums and technological solutions.

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world” _Ludwig Wittgenstein

The language of the Canadian Eskimos has more than 10 different words for ‘frozen water’. There is one for ice that melted and froze again, one for ice that is extremely cold and at least eight others. If one wants to have a conversation about frozen water in a Central African dialect, the conversation will be much more difficult. There are no appropriate words.
Yet the matter is even worse when one tries to communicate musical ideas on a digital computer. Such attempts have existed since 1957 and are known as computer music languages. A short survey should point out some of the problems in that field. Special notice will be taken of the state of the art of general-purpose programming languages at that time.

Theatre is the performance art that has used computers the least. In this presentation Pinhanez argues that one of the main reasons is the lack of an appropriate computational representation for the fundamental theatrical concept of action.
The talk starts by proposing a categorization for the different ways computer have been used in theatrical performances: electronic puppets, hyper-actors, computer actors, and computerized stages. The presentation addresses through examples how drama and comedy can be revolutionized by this new generation of non- human characters and actors, and by novel ways of audience participation.

As an example Pinhanez discusses his recent work `It/I’, a theatre play where one of the two characters is performed automatically by a camera-based computer system. The computer character reacts to the human actor actions on the stage following the internalized script of the play. After the performance, the audience can go up on the stage and play one of the scenes in the role of the human character.

The presentation also aims to provide the context and to introduce the main questions to be addressed in the panel. From the current technological limitations and developments to the new possibilities open to play-writers, the objective is to critically examine previous works, to assess current tendencies, and to dream of what theatre can be in the future.

A platform to present research projects the Computer-Related Experiments in Art and Technology Studio (c.r.e.a.t.e.s) was established in the mid 90s at the Faculty of Applied and Creative Arts (FACA), Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. The primary objectives of its establishment were to promote new media art, and to experiment with all available and possible form of media, medium and technology. Among its significant contribution was the development of the art in the form of technological works, presented through the 1st Electronic Art Show presented at the National Art Gallery in 1997. According to their curators, this was regard as the ‘new media art’ exhibition, as well as giving an overview of practice in the art and electronic media in Malaysia. This presentation will discuss some of the issues relating to c.r.e.a.t.e.s since it was established including examples of artworks produced, issues and its future direction.

ABSTRACT

Most computer systems were, until recently, only graphic recording and output devices (electronic amanuensis) and though possibly useful, not significantly changing the role of art or the artist. The increasing interest in using machine intelligence as part of the creative activity has stimulated new developments in which at the very least the machine can be seen as a catalyst (electronic muse). Nevertheless, artists have hung tenaciously to their traditional roles and critics to their traditional criteria for evaluation. But the logical extension of the use of machine intelligence might more challengingly suggest a change in the nature of creativity and a change in the roles of the relationship of the artists creativity to that of the machine. It is the contention of the author of this paper that the use of such techniques as evolutionary and learning programs will inevitably raise fundamental questions about the role of the artist and the role of aesthetic judgement. It may force a division between evaluating the creative act at a conceptual level (the role of the artist ?) and the act of creativity at the level of an individual evolved manifestation (the computer’s role ?).

Panel Statement

Purpose: To present and discuss current projects and issues produced by sculptors from North America, the Far East and Europe which demonstrate a variety of applications of the computer to sculpture.

TOPICS:

1. Computer controlled sculpture: Kinetic, light and sound sculpture that responds to the viewer
2. Computer aided fabrication: Use of CAD and 3-D modeling programs to control cutting machines, laser and water jet tools, as well as the use of the computer in model making.
3. Sculpture and mathematical visualization: Computer visualization of complex mathematical formulae and genetic evolution applied to form.
4. Computer assisted presentation: Visualizing the site, lighting and animation. Computers as a design tool and for proposals.
5. Scientific computer imaging and its implications for sculpture: Futuristic tools and sculptural forms derived from the application of scientific software to sculpture.

The Computers and Sculpture Forum in the U.S.A. and Ars Mathematica in France are associations of sculptors who use the computer. This presentation will be a survey of the use of computers in the visualization, presentation, fabrication and control of sculpture and three-dimensional scientific and mathematical visualization. In October 1995, we will be holding a joint and simultaneous exhibition of sculpture in Philadelphia and Paris. The presentation will reflect the work that we will be gathering together for the exhibition. The sites will be linked via the Internet for events, demonstrations, and the trans-oceanic control of sculpture-making tools to complement the exhibition.

This panel will present a slide and video survey illustrating the growing use of computers by sculptors in the USA and France.

“in­tui-tiv, a. Perceived by the mind immediately without the intervention of reasoning; having the power of discovering truth without reasoning”. One of the most common terms one comes across when being convinced about a powerful new interface is “intuitive”. The very heart of the computer architecture is the rational and architects are working on developing an intuitive interface in order for the tool to be easier to work with, to be marketable. What exactly does the industry mean when they use the term “intuitive”? Does that mean that neither “rational” thought nor training is needed to use these machines? Intuition is also linked to supernatural powers which are so foreign in the technical/scientific/male-dominated world where everything has to be a proven fact in order to be accepted. Perhaps a whole new idea of the word when used in this context is being formulated.

Computers have already changed the production and perception of cinema and music. Choreographers and dancers have in recent years tried to experiment with the possibilities of the new medium. However, the use of computers in theatre is still restricted to a few pioneers, in spite of technological advances that are making more and more feasible the appearance on stage of computer-controlled characters or actors with enhanced bodies.

This panel addresses how drama and comedy can be revolutionised by a new generation of non-human characters and actors, and by novel ways of audience participation. From the current technological limitations and developments to the new possibilities open to play-writers, the objective is to critically examine previous works, to assess current tendencies, and to dream of what theatre can be in the future.

Papers, videos, presentations and demonstrations have been invited from artists, academics, critics and theatre producers concerned with the experimental use of computers in theatre.

Descriptions of ‘lifeforms’ – a three-dimensional computer compositional tool for dance choreography.

Panel Statement

Panel: Output Sufferings

Some artists using electronics take for granted that the art that will be significantly new is going to emerge through new technology. If they look at a painting, they see a medium that doesn’t do very much except sit on the wall. Old medium, old ideas. The new media involve intelligent and ambitious systems, radical shifts in our thinking. So it’s natural to expect radical and impressive art, too.

Working as a painter who also uses computers, I am more skeptical. The art of painting is built on asking questions about what you see, and the process has the feel of a stumbling search. Obsolete? During the sixties and seventies we had exhibitions with “beyond painting” in the title. Kinetic, Op, Minimal, Conceptual, all mixed make-believe and pseudo-science to suggest a future where only “de-materialized” art would be possible. In fact what evaporated wasn’t the “art object” but the credibility of this way of thinking, discredited and soon forgotten because the work with real punch and ambition proved to come from painting.
As well as finding another country for art – albeit a virtual country – the visual creativity of computing can function just as well within traditional media. The given technology of a painting – flat surface, nothing moving, no sound, no buttons or head-set, not even a plug required – is unimpressive, but it can whirl into life through the touch of color, the dance of line, the stare of a face. At the Minneapolis conference last year (FISEA’93) the neighboring museum (the Walker Art Center) held a small exhibition of Matisse’s graphic work, its vitality and simplicity a reminder of how far the computer graphic exhibits (mine included) fell short.
The technophobia of the mainstream art world is the routine excuse for the failures of computer works to be as impressive as they should be. But on exciting, sophisticated technology is just the starting point. Picasso on an Apple II might still be interesting. Whatever else is possible, a fusion of computer techniques and painterly sensibility shouldn’t be discounted too hastily. If there are frontiers in art they certainly aren’t where you expect them to be.

Se pretende delinear cierta relación sobre la acción social-comunitaria, el empleo del arte, como su respectiva producción (creación), en sinergia con la tecnología y la ciencia, para proponer una posible resignificación de la memoria e identidad cultural de determinada comunidad, en este caso, de una comunidad nahua (Cuauhtotoatla –San Pablo del Monte, Tlaxcala, México-), como determinadas formas de producción y práctica artísticas, que posibiliten dar con ciertas estéticas de algunos elementos propios-comunitarios. Estéticas que puedan ayudar, en segundo momento, a reforzar la reflexión de la situación colectiva concreta. Retomamos el altepetl (lit. Cerro con agua en su interior) como pueblo, comunidad e inclusive barrio, en tanto espacio socio-artístico de colectividad. De esta forma, el altepetl deviene en un espacio donde la interacción-relación y participación social, como las respectivas experiencias-saberes subjetivas y colectivas florecen en la rememoración y reapropiación del territorio comunal, con relación a la producción y práctica artística desde/con la comunidad misma. Así, de tal espacio socio-artístico pueden resultar tanto procesos de resignificación y reapropiación colectiva como creaciones artísticas que manifiestan una estética singular del espacio sociocultural; en este caso, dichas creaciones están ancladas en el arte de los nuevos medios y su relación con diferentes saberes, lo cual puede pensarse, también, como un arte con enfoque transdisciplinar.

Panel: Compumorphic Art: The Computer as Muse

This paper will in­tro­duce the panel theme of com­pumor­phic art and place the phrase in terms of the de­vel­op­ing re­la­tion­ship be­tween ma­te­r­ial art forms and inan­i­mate/dig­i­tal con­tent. Fur­ther­more, the no­tion that com­pumor­phic art­works refer to not only the vi­sual aes­thetic of the dig­i­tal com­puter but may also re­flect or ques­tion the emo­tion val­ues and on­to­log­i­cal qual­i­ties we com­monly as­sign to com­put­ing tech­nolo­gies will be dis­cussed.
I will also de­scribe re­cent ex­am­ples of my own art prac­tice as an ex­am­ple of com­pumor­phic art.

Panel:  Chasing Ghosts: Reactive Notation and Extreme Sight Reading

My con­tri­bu­tion to the panel will be to pre­sent live cod­ing as a new path in the evo­lu­tion of the mu­si­cal score. I will argue that live cod­ing prac­tice ac­cen­tu­ates the score, and whilst being the per­fect ve­hi­cle for the per­for­mance of al­go­rith­mic music, it also trans­forms the com­po­si­tional process it­self into a live event. A con­tin­u­a­tion of 20th cen­tury artis­tic de­vel­op­ments of the mu­si­cal score, live cod­ing sys­tems often em­brace graph­i­cal el­e­ments and lan­guage syn­taxes for­eign to stan­dard pro­gram­ming lan­guages. I will show how live cod­ing as a highly tech­nol­o­gized artis­tic prac­tice, is at its core, still a scor­ing prac­tice, and one that is able to shed light on how non-lin­ear­ity, play and gen­er­a­tiv­ity will be­come promi­nent in fu­ture cre­ative media pro­duc­tions. I might demon­strate some live cod­ing sys­tems and show videos of key per­form­ers at play.

Panel: Surveillant Spaces: From Autonomous Surveillance to Machine Voyeurism

Com­puter vi­sion is a branch of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence that is con­cerned with de­vel­op­ing al­go­rithms to allow ma­chines to process and re­spond to vi­sual data.  The de­gree to which the early pi­o­neers in ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence un­der­es­ti­mated the chal­lenges in­volved is often il­lus­trated with an anec­dote about Mar­vin Min­sky in­struct­ing a stu­dent to solve “the prob­lem of com­puter vi­sion” as a sum­mer pro­ject. The first break­throughs in com­puter vi­sion came from the field of com­pu­ta­tional neu­ro­science and the work of David Marr, build­ing low-level mod­els of the vi­sual cor­tex from the ground up.

Nearly forty years later, the state-of-the-art in com­puter vi­sion is still very much in the process of con­struct­ing rel­a­tively prim­i­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tions from cap­tured im­ages. Nev­er­the­less, the re­search has pro­duced a wealth of tech­niques that can be ap­plied to suit­ably struc­tured scenes to ex­tract mean­ing­ful in­for­ma­tion.  Many of these tech­niques are sim­ple enough that they can be im­ple­mented by novice pro­gram­mers while more so­phis­ti­cated tech­niques have be­come read­ily avail­able through pro­gram­ming li­braries and off-the-shelf soft­ware. The avail­abil­ity of com­puter vi­sion tech­nol­ogy pro­vides a base for ex­per­i­ment­ing with ma­chine au­ton­omy in cre­ative do­mains. In this panel I will dis­cuss the pos­si­bil­ity of de­vel­op­ing au­tonomous ma­chine per­form­ers that take ad­van­tage of the ad­vances in com­puter vi­sion by first re­view­ing some of rel­e­vant low-level and high-level tech­niques and show­ing how these can be in­te­grated with ma­chine learn­ing sys­tems. In par­tic­u­lar, I will pre­sent this ex­plo­ration in re­la­tion to my re­search de­vel­op­ing self-mo­ti­vated (cu­ri­ous) agents and my col­lab­o­ra­tions with Petra Gemein­boeck ex­plor­ing the per­for­ma­tiv­ity of the gaze through the cre­ation of ma­chine aug­mented en­vi­ron­ments. In this work­shop-like ses­sion we will ex­plore the con­struc­tion of a self-mo­ti­vated ma­chinic voyeur, ex­am­ine what it sees, how it re­sponds and what dri­ves it.

Panel: Signs of Life: Human-Robot Intersubjectivities

This paper will pre­sent a range of ideas un­der­pin­ning the de­vel­op­ment of John Tonkin’s new pro­ject, a se­ries of dys­func­tional ro­bots that ex­plore dif­fer­ent ap­proaches to think­ing about cog­ni­tion and per­cep­tion. Com­pu­ta­tional the­o­ries of mind have been used both by cog­ni­tive sci­en­tists as model of how to build an elec­tronic mind, and by cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gists as a means of un­der­stand­ing the human mind. They see the mind as an in­for­ma­tion-pro­cess­ing sys­tem and thought as a form of com­pu­ta­tion. These sym­bolic ap­proaches to think­ing about the mind have been chal­lenged by more em­bod­ied and em­bed­ded ap­proaches to cog­ni­tion and per­cep­tion. This has been re­flected through the de­vel­op­ment of a num­ber of bot­tom-up ap­proaches to AI and ro­bot­ics, such as neural net­works and be­hav­iour based ro­bots that are based on ideas of re­ac­tiv­ity and sit­u­at­ed­ness rather than higher level sym­bolic mod­el­ling. The ner­vous ro­bots that are being built for this pro­ject awk­wardly hy­bridise bot­tom-up AI ap­proaches with more clas­si­cal sym­bolic ap­proaches that use high level sym­bols drawn from a folk psy­chol­ogy con­cep­tion of the mind as being the home of in­ter­nal men­tal processes such as mo­tives, de­sires, pho­bias and neu­roses. They use a range of com­pu­ta­tional ap­proaches, for ex­am­ple Brooks’ sub­sump­tion ar­chi­tec­ture, to cre­ate lay­ered hi­er­ar­chies of stim­u­lus / re­sponse re­flexes. Ex­am­ples in­clude a claus­tro­phobot and an ago­ra­phobot, as well as needy/dis­mis­sive ro­bots based around at­tach­ment the­ory. One of the aims of this pro­ject is to ex­plore the lower bound­ary of com­pu­ta­tional com­plex­ity that still evokes some sort of self-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and re­sponse in the au­di­ence.

This poster is concerned with the development of a conceptual and technological framework for the realization of locative media artworks. Our approach focuses on multiplicity and hybridity, and seeks to create an instrument out of the urban environment. Mobile phones become the instruments that probe into the urban fabric and the lenses that modulate the way we perceive this web of threads. The poster looks at the instrumental and theoretical framework and three concepts that put them into practice. This poster was coauthored by Dr. Atau Tanaka.

Background: In the scientific discourse the opinion prevails that music can only be understood, if listeners have learned explicit musical logic. Therefore it is important a musician or a composer study different theories about music, in order to expand abilities and to develop its own practical style.

But which musical representations could attain listeners, which neither have studied music theories, nor play a music instrument?

Aims: This paper focus to explain that musical representations are constructed as combinations of conceptual relations between classes or categories of sounds. This construction is performed during classification or categorization, caused by unconscious and conscious ratings of possible relations. The second aim is to present an initial draft of a new musical description, based on mixture of conceptual relations, which, in a process of abduction, assign their dynamic identity to acoustical information.

Main Contribution: In a first step this paper points the working of the nervous system in relation the auditory memory and the underlying principles from the cognitive perspective as well as the process of memorization  from  the  perspective  of  emotion.  In  a  second  step,  we  outline  the  conditions  and functionality of conceptual relations between sounds as a process of abduction.

Conclusion:  With  the  resources  of  modern  science,  we  have  tried  to  shown  in  this  paper  that classification and categorization of information processes is a general mental operation in human beings. Hence, we suggested, non-musicians also have the ability to rate, separate and group individual sound events in relation to musical representations. Those representations can be different from those of trained musicians, as regards their structure, time span, and effect.
Our main point was to sketch an initial draft of a new musical theory, based on mixture of conceptual relations, which, in a process of abduction, assign their dynamic identity to acoustical information. In addition, such relations are responsible for musical concepts and emotional states arisen while listening to music, and for the musical perception of time.

I propose a poetic / performative “reading” of my web site, in which I present my brief paper, Confessions of Addiction, Love & Surgical Musings, as performance text, while navigating the site (please read enclosure). As ritualistic act, the performance would be a poetic decoding and interpretation of my own web site (which is a typical web based documentation of an artist’s work) with/for an audience, mimicking the shaman, mediator between the spirit and physical world; or rather, a psychoanalytic subject who mediates between the “Web God” and ISEA audience. Through the act of interpreting/questioning the meaning of the structure and images of the web site for the audience, contemporary issues addressed by critical readings of electronic media (i.e., spirituality, gendered identity constructions, body boundaries, etc.) would be addressed in a nonobjective language. Literally, I would “point and click” my way through the site while it is being projected and generate “improvisational” poetry and interpretation, in-between sections of the performative reading of Confessions… This performative/reading/ critique/demonstration would provide a stark contrast with more “traditional” presentations that try to articulate issues such as “Where is the subject or body located in electronic-media?” or, “Issues of access and control of electronic-media, and the effects of that control on the individual subject,” in a specialized academic language. The audience would be presented with a subject as it (I) is being [de)constructed, in a manner that requires interpretation and translation. Unlike information as it is generally presented on the Web, this performance will -not- facilitate rapid and unquestioned consumption of information.

My personal and collaborative practice operates at the intersections of technology and wilderness in the interest of imagining possibilities for human and ecological survival. I draw from legacies found in conceptual art, socially engaged art, and biological art to work across many media, complicating divisions between the technological and the natural. I understand practice to be the work of trying over time to make one’s engagements better, and survival to require flourishing multi-species cohabitation, mutuality and care. My ‘practice of survival’ engages with electrical and political power, interactive narratives, and cultivation of biological systems. I seek out horizontal projects that emphasize intersubjectivity and exist in a tension with totalizing viewpoints. Two of my active collaborations include the Coastal Reading Group — readers from different coasts who trouble the subjects of wilderness, speciation, humanness and ways of knowing — and the Guerrilla Grafters. The Guerrilla Grafters graft fruit bearing branches onto sterile, urban fruit trees. Hayes Valley Farm, active from 2010 to 2013, was an interim-use urban permaculture farm in downtown San Francisco, where we cultivated low input ecological systems and developed a unique lateral governance structure while still navigating complex hierarchical politics with city agencies.

Conglomerate Distortions is a series of immersive, stereoscopic animations that cleave parallel experiences of heightened spectacle to displace geographic location and site through the use of omnidirectional photography and sound. The works explore how we recalibrate ourselves to global conglomeration and how the notion of “immediate surroundings” is changing in the age of augmented reality. Phased rotation is used as a formal element in order to convey the recombinant nature of Cultural Revolution. For each instance of the series, the artists visit a range of tourist spectacles in different locations and within a compressed timeframe. Throughout this process, they document their experiences using omnidirectional cameras.

Omnidirectional photography is used because, photographing in all directions at once, it provides an approximation of “immediate surroundings,” displacing the conventional “framing” of a scene and including visual information outside of the artists’ selective views. The project has thus far focused on sites in Asia: Osaka, Tateyama, Taipei and Hong Kong. These places thrive through reinvention: as one means of existence reaches its completion, a new one is improvised in its place. The completed “conglomerations” use CG Animation techniques and stereoscopic 3D projection, producing a dizzying reproduction of the artists’ practice of hypertourism.

Introductory Statement

Nearly 700 submissions. 129 reviewers. 140 artists. 4 locations. Like any large scale group exhibition, the challenge in curating ISEA Hong Kong was how to create a cohesive experience from such a profoundly diverse set of work. To begin, we attempted to situate the pieces within a framework of dialogues and confrontations, of responses and reflections. We were inspired here both by the “Conjunctions and Disjunctions” of Octavio Paz, and Italo Calvino’s “Six Memos for the Next Millenium”. In these works, Paz and Calvino explore the diversity of difference and its contribution to productive discourse. In similar fashion, we attempted to create dialogues between sets of works, with argument and refutations, point and counterpoint, all leading to some kind of compelling harmony, however dissonant at times. This strategic frame has, we hope, helped to bring the range of these works into some sort of order. The four locations of the exhibition (the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre of City University, the School of Design at the Polytechnic University, the Chi Wah Learning Commons of the Hong Kong University and Connecting Spaces of the Zurich University of the Arts) each feature different applications of these conjunctions and disjunctions. The works of art and the four architectures equally serve in the broadest sense as ‘resonators’.

GEOPOLITICS OF MEDIA

Pine Gap, a US-Australian Joint Defence Space Research facility and base for global satellite technology is one of the largest ground control centres in the world, located 17 kilometres outside Alice Springs. The base connected the world to Pine Gap. Connected considers how disembodied and shadowy the experience of being constantly connected can be.

Connected adopts a Pine Gap modus operandi. Sites are monitored, from the air and from the ground – Anzac Hill; the airport; the Pine Gap exit; Ormiston Gorge; Hermannsburg Mission; Kata Tjuta – to create a sense of a town and a landscape inhabited by shadows, mirages, and reflections.

People inhabit this space tenuously. You never get to see them. You hear from them, or about them. Every one around Alice Springs has a story, or a friend with a story, that connects them to the base. These anecdotes interweave with intercepted news reports; ambient sounds; static; Morse code from Telegraph Station, the roar of road trains speeding down the Stuart Highway; a lone didgeridoo.

Connected has nine related episodes and is presented as a single-channel DVD projection installation with 5.1 Surround Sound.

After the former promise of a flattened space where time and distances collapse, crossed by so called information highways conveying smileys and playful data, one could wonder how the inter-relationships between people, between people and data and between people and the public sphere, has been affected. One should also wonder what is at stake in the process of this mutation. I have addressed this topic through the past 20 years in which I’ve spent exploring the resulting mutations of being in the world (Dasein), a world of people.

In September 1995, during ISEA95 Montreal, I “dug” The Tunnel under the Atlantic between the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Museum of contemporary Art in Montreal. This intense experience for “diggers” to interact within a complex network system across time and space was the very first intercontinental telematic installation done in Virtual Reality. In the following 20 years, I have been exploring different kinds of communicational architectures, connecting spaces and people, and extracting meaning out of these experiences that arise out of such mediated contacts. Beside the innovative approaches of these projects, I was tracking the emergence of the phatic dimension of communication, revealing the intensification of remote connection through social network – how “being in touch” as well as building and maintaining the connection became more important than the act of communicating and transmitting information itself.

The “Paris New Delhi Tunnel” in 1997 (Cité des Sciences la Villette Paris, Pragati Maidan India), Crossing Talks in 1999 (ICC Tokyo) and Labylogue in 2000 (Brussels Museum of contemporary art), are subsequent exploration and interrogations on different systems of distant dialogues.

In 2012 the “Tunnel around the World” commissioned by ZERO1 biennial (San Jose, California) and Mediacity Seoul connected 4 cities including Hong Kong and Montreal (SAT). Here the user-centric dynamic organisation of the semantic material to “dig” became the centre of the work. This 3-months-long exhibition provoked a very different and exciting experiences resulting from the very nature of interactions. From dialoguing one to one with remote and unknown individuals to addressing a 1,000,000 citizen simultaneously in the public space, the experience moves away from consented “intercourse” to proposed/imposed expression, disturbing, as billboards cando, the course of individual and collective attention.

Using large-scale displays in the public space involves another kind of artistic responsibility. Recently we launched The Open Sky Project on what is probably the world’s largest display system – the ICC Tower’s LED façade (77 000 m2), which becomes a platform for artists and art students to make large-scale works that can be watched simultaneously by more than one million people. Starting in 2014 with a work by Jim Campbell, co-curated with Jeffrey Shaw, Eternal Recurrence, with swimmers moving tirelessly up and down on the highest tower in Hong Kong, the project facilitates young artists to express themselves on what could be the largest exhibition space ever for public appreciation.

Education often exists disconnected from industry, when both would greatly benefit from each other and possibly fuel innovative and sustainable development of human capital. Research is part of most commercial processes. How can research be servicing and connecting academia and industry, while preserving the neutral integrity within a university system? How can research innovate education and help to gain capital for future ventures within industry and academia? Research begins with documentation and cultural understanding. In the age of technology and heritage preservation, archiving and documentation store knowledge and allow learning for future development. How can we encourage a shared approach to research as a collaboration platform between academia and industry?

Abstract (long paper)

To move beyond the homogeny currently extant in design, Alain Findeli posits design should broaden its scope of inquiry. I will argue that to facilitate this shift and enable more culturally expressive design solutions, Indigenous symbols and visual spatial strategies should be acknowledged within design pedagogy. This study introduces the Pasifika ideologies of TaVā (time and space) and teu le vā (sacred connections) to illustrate the relevance and opportunity afforded design when Indigenous ideologies and aesthetics are purposefully imbued. Although the use of the term ‘savage’ infers a level of hegemony, Owen Jones was one of the first to ratify culture within design when he stated, “The eye of the savage accustomed only to look upon Nature’s harmonies, would readily enter into the perception of the true balance both of form and colour.” To illustrate the relevance of Indigenous ideology design students at Victoria University, investigate individual cultural legacies to identify and validate their heritage within design. Having acknowledged these sacred connections the students employ both analogue and digital media to parallel Modernist principles alongside Indigenous markings of time in space in which geometry is used to create the common goal, beauty from chaos.

Abstract

The use of mobile computing and new technologies as tools for mediation, interpretation and learning are not new to museums and galleries. Since 1994 museums have used new technologies, such as the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s use of Apple Newton interactive guides and the Weisman Art Museum’s use of a ‘Talk Back’ Computer in the galleries. New technology continued in the late ‘90s with webbased work, interactive websites and, most recently, there has been an explosion of mobile interpretive equipment—such as cyborglike wearable museum guides, mobile phone tours and positioning and proximity devices.
With the arrival of interactive digital technologies organisations have an opportunity to present their work (collections or temporary exhibitions) in new and increasingly innovative ways. The venues are now interfacing with publics that feel comfortable with new technologies and, most importantly, are providing new avenues of access into museums and galleries via relevant creative experiences.
This paper presents work in progress and research outcomes in relation to my current PhD ‘The Role of Museums and Galleries in a New Northern Ireland’, focusing specifically on the role of interactive digital technologies and mobile computing as a tool for mediation and interpretation in the visual arts sector in the North. I will map previous and current trends in Northern Ireland looking at those who have used innovative technologies in interpretation and mediation as well as curatorial and artistic practices in digital art as they interface with the museum and gallery sector. I will delineate initial and embryonic, yet significant examples, upon which the museum and gallery sector might build upon. Important to our understanding of these new interpretative models and mechanisms is acknowledging the impact of the Net Generation or iGeneration (born mid-1990s – 2000s). These young people are highly connected and steadfastly dedicated to Internet usage. They have used computers their entire life. They are not only competent in using new media, but actively push its boundaries activating a more sophisticated usage and earning them the nickname ‘digital natives’. In this examination, I will look at three areas of new technologies: mobile computing examples such as virtual web tours, digital sound interactive work, locative media project using handheld systems; innovative artistic practices that utilise new technologies; and the use of online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, UTube and Bebo by arts organisations.
The paper will also present initial work on a case study of the ‘Template 2.0’ exhibition in digital art and new technological interactive mediation devices used in 20 August – 26 September 2009 at Millennium Court Arts Centre (MCAC). I will outline the findings of ‘Template 2.0’ as an ISEA exhibition collaboration between the University of Ulster and ISEA conference and MCAC and is co-curated by Christopher Murphy and Joe Gilmore, ‘Template 2.0’ MCAC will use new interactive interpretive devices during the exhibition. I will conclude with proposals for a framework for the systematic introduction of digital technologies into the museum and gallery sector in the North.

This paper takes on a research on two sub-questions:

1. How effective cultural factors can be in the design process of icons to be used in info-assistant system interface?
2. How can these factors be transformed  into usable data by for the designer?

In the present cross cultural studies, the results of the tests applied to user groups have only been subject to evaluation but not established into design. However, our research looks for concepts through surveys applied to user groups, which are turned into designs with a participatory evaluation study, and finally presented to user groups again via control tests. In the end, all the data collected from three studies are turned into design guidelines for future studies. In the pilot study carried out, design guidelines have been established by a certain group of designers at the end of the first stage in which 210 users participated, and designs have been realized according to these guidelines. And the study resulted with %10 percent increase in user success.

Panel Statement

Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art is a forthcoming collection published by Cambridge Scholars in 2010. The collection brings together the essays of theorists and art practitioners about artworks made in the midst of conflict or from the position of commentary and critique. With the focus on surveillance and its impact on urban space, architecture, and citizenship this collection of essays helps us to understand the times we live in through art practices that consider the practical and theoretical status of surveillance from a variety of positions. In topics that span the 70’s to the present day the authors feature work made by artists from South Africa, the Federal Republic of Germany, the former German Democratic Republic, Northern Ireland, Poland and the United Kingdom.

Many of the artists whose works are considered in this collection have addressed lived experience dealing with complex issues such as resistance, positionality, censorship, control and state power, civic liberties, human rights and torture. Whilst others have commented on surveillance cameras in the midst of our cities or digital software for radical civilian and military technologies that promises in the near future to revolutionise invasive surveillance techniques. In contrast to these new technological advances traditional methods of surveillance and control may at first glance seem to be outdated yet they still have currency in our societies and are dismissed at our peril. While surveillance is an accepted form of mass observation in the shopping mall or the railway stations, we may ask where do we draw the line and how far does surveillance have to go before it worries us, and at what point is the citizen considered a threat to the state?

Contemporanity is georeferenced and the servers where these data are stored are managed, organised and disseminated by transnational corporations of telecommunications. Actually location is the omnipresent parameter at the social communication. And we are in constant exchange, reception and transmission of information and its metadata.

Karlis Kalnins started to use the term ‘Locative Media’ in 2001 as a category to designate processes, prototypes and applications that are based on the interaction of a screen with the here and now of the urban places. There is an intermediate space of computerized interaction that is crossed by some layers of information that ask our location to give access. Our actions, movements, and ourselves became another field more of these repositories of the contemporary power: the databases.

Technosciences have configured the modern geographic representation, and with that a global map that pretends to move away of the change, of the uncertainty and the subjectivity that involves all human relation. Satellite photography and the devices GIS and GPS have continued with the neutral point illusion as a panoptic where we voluntarily deposited our data on real time.

Is urgent to promote a critical point of view with the implicit control mechanisms on that technologies, that are conditioned by its origins: the military research. There are critical projects on the intersection of Contemporary Creation, Science, Technology and Society that focus on the abstract representation of the mensurable space. Those practices are injecting the lived space, always subjective, to locative media.

Constelaciones uses locative technologies to establish processes and communicative P2P mechanisms with local communities. Is a collaborative project in that mediates on Spanish neighbourhoods whose gentrification plans have reduced confluence espaces on that places. There is also a lack of communication between local and new residents. The project aims to the social agents to do routes and to documentate the significative commonal places on a navigable map throw a data visualization system.

The main device of the project is a digital collaborative on‑line archive of the elitization process. We encourage TO different neighbourhoods agents to documentate the change process. We promote a collective mapping process to identificate resources and needs of the community, and also to identify problematic and possible ways to tackle it. Constelaciones facilitates also a video online tool where users can create routes on a navigable map with the aim to watch the intersection points of between different people.

A mobile app will be able to visualise documents on the same space where were positioned, Also to realise and document routes, and to establish confluences between connected users. We pretend to study the feedback between the physical and digital spaces in neighbourhoods.

One of the main interest for us is to develop actions that promote the access and the digital qualification of people with low technological profile and the testing the communicative devices generated to verify his viability. The project is easily replicable in other contexts through the adaptation of the documentated methodology and the platform, generated as an open source code library.

Content of the presentation is defined by constantly changing technological environment allowing participation of the viewer. This area of interest is connected with development and change of cultural forms of film, documentary, interactive art, games and social media. The presentation is dedicated to history of artistic multimedia.

First task of the presentation is to outline the field what could be defined by terms like interactive cinema, documentary multimedia, online video, interactive art, combinatorial films, database cinema etc. I would like to make some general remarks concerning narrativisation of our non‑linear life‑experience and choice‑based reality, which could be of inspiration for interactive artworks (J. Bruner, N. Goodman). Discussions of the 1990ties concerning Art‑CD‑ROM (E. Huhtamo, M. Canter, P. Weibel) could be reminded.

Second task is focusing attention on documentary interactive multimedia projects by artist of the 1990ties, which represents innovative genre of art. I group them to categories based on evident documentary element: “Visual archives: from form to content” (Eric Lanz “Manuscript” 1994, Graham Harwood “Rehearsal of Memory” 1996 etc); “Interactive traveloques” (Sally Pryor “Postcard From Tunis” 1997, Chris Hales “Tallinn People’s Orchestra” 1998 etc); “The World of Things and Memories” (Veli Granö “Tangible Cosmologies” 1997, Mari Soppela “Family Files” 1998, Agnes Hegedüs “Things Spoken” 1998 etc). Some focus would be given to database cinema experiments of new millenium: “Soft Cinema” by Lev Manovich and Aleksander Kratky (2002), Korsakow System by Florian Thalhofer.

Third task would be show and discuss contemporary situation in interactive documentary, which became mostly web‑based. The 1990s can be seen as the “classical” decade of interactive multimedia, when it blossomed and became known as an international field. One goal of this presentation is to pay hommage to some historical multimedia artworks, which were famous in the 1990s, but are invisible now because of computer platform changes. The disappearance and lack of availability of these artworks are additional factors which give value to these projects. Actually, these multimedia narratives haven´t disappeared, but rather there has been a transition to new platforms, mainly online.

There are two kinds of truths; those of reasoning and those of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary, and their opposite is impossible. And those of fact are contingent, and their opposite is possible.
-Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz, Monadology (1714)

The belief that complex scientific data translates into effective communication only through collaboration with visual artists is not generally shared amongst scientists. Rather, science is frequently regard-ed as the method, amongst all others which attempt to ‘discover truth’, which has primacy and there-fore a pedantic approach to the visualisation of data is considered sufficient. However, scientific method would be seen to have a similar authority to practice if scientific ‘truths’ were demonstrated to be contingent. Then any claims of omnicompetence with respect to providing explanations for all phenomena. would be diminished and cooperation between practitioners of the two disciplines would need fewer rationalisations.

Ironically, the recognition that algorithms are an integral part of the tools currently employed by science can contextualise scientific method as only one of many valid cultural endeavours which attempt to describe reality. It would be useful to analyse the various stages of ‘production’ (from data gathering through to visualisation of data) to determine in depth the algorithm’s role in codifying the data, simulations, analysis and theories, in order to demonstrate that the resultant ‘truths’ are contingent. This paper will rely on a simple presentation of visualised astronomical data, along with their models. to hint at their contingent character. Firstly, visualisations exist in 2-D image space.

Therefore they are easy to view as cultural products and even lend themselves to being absorbed (perhaps inappropriately) into the domain of visual art images. Secondly, visualisation algorithms generate scientific content which is neither random nor arbitrary and yet which is not predicted by the unprocessed data or initial equations. In other words, the resultant object can not be determined by reasons alone. Therefore pursuing this aspect of the images demonstrates that scientific observations and interpretations reveal ‘contingent’ (not ‘absolute’) truths.

It is becoming clearer that our attempts to separate nature from culture, humans from non-humans, ancient from modern, and life from technology have been a failure. Recognizing this failure allows us to weave back together what was inappropriately cleaved during the modernist project. To deal with this moment we can learn how to be xenologists, ones who study, analyze, and develop elements of the strange, the other, the alien. Here I show how xenological encounters across the domains of plants, transgender bodies, and space enable us to construct new forms of living within our entangled existences.

“Film of Sound” is a video installation (and live performance) in which the screen is placed at the center or “sweet spot” of an acoustic space. Rather than acting as a window onto another 3D world, the screen becomes a semiotic surface for the 3D audio space; a skin of image and text on the body of sound. A collaboration between Roger Dean (sound), Will Luers (video) and Hazel Smith (text) the video surface hints at a narrative trajectory — a sleeping man, an evening in a hotel room, a journey across vast and challenging spaces – but the work remains open, as image follows the patterns and textures of sound rather than a pre-scripted narrative. In this talk, Will Luers will present the 10-minute video and discuss the indeterminate and remix processes involved in the collaboration and, in particular, the challenges of imaging sound.

The contemporary e-Artists from Malaysia are : Alizam Hasan, Anuar Ayob, Faizal Zulkifli, Hasnul J Saidon, Helena Song, John Hii, Liu Chun Hi, Lai Khing Ming, Ling Siew Woei, Tan Sei Hon, Ting-Ting Hok, Suhami Tohid, Syed Alwi. Their range or scope of practice includes video, light, digital collage/print, computer animation, interactive cd-rom, and interactive web art. Study of a map constitutes relationship between human activities with her/his physical environment – a system of scientific representation and visualization of the physical world involving replication, simulation, model, icon, symbol, scale, size, location, distance, point, direction, pattern and contour, etc. It supposedly brings comprehension of both natural and socio-cultural landscapes, providing a ‘guide’ for various forms of human «navigation» as well as ‘negation’. It is a secondary reality that claims to speak the language of fundamental material truth, bounded by «space-time» dimension of a ‘scientifically-assumed reality’. The essay will hopefully provide a justified contextualization of ‘present encounters’ faced by young e-artists from Malaysia. They practice their arts within the intricate web of the above-mentioned maps, of which the demarcation of boundaries and the relation between the center and the periphery are constantly negated. Hasnul J. Saidon introduces the works of these young artists whilst acknowledging their individual negation as a pathway for the future mapping of Malaysian art scene.

Abstract

Sites of history, those places that form part of ‘heritage’ are subject to practices of interpretation. A range of representations guide visitor, from architecture and sculpture to photography and web design. The visit is often produced as journey through a scene, an absorbing if not entertaining day out, which can obscure important cultural battles over access and ownership. Tracing debates about a series of sites, this talk considers the question of historical rights and cultural property in a place.

Session: Code and Generative Art

“Context Machines” (CMs) are a family of site-specific, conceptual and electronic media artworks that capture photographic images from their environment in the construction of generative compositions. These artworks are produced in the context of meta-creation, where artworks are systems constructed in order to exhibit creative behaviour. Their production began with a central question: Could a machine be constructed that found its own relationship to it’s physical context, without the artist predetermining that relation?

“Resurfacing” was the first outward looking installation produced. The system captures images of the environment, at multiple moments in time, to produce interactive temporal landscapes. This project is a precursor to the CMs that follow, it was not intended to find a relation to its environment, and was not produced in the context of meta-creation.

“Memory Association Machine” integrates photographic images of its environment into an organized structure. This process is enabled by an artificial intelligence inspired by a model of human memory. The system free-associates through this structure as initiated by the most recent captured image. These free-associations are framed as the creative actions of the machine, and are meant to situate it in the physical world shared with the viewer. The process of free-association is enabled by a model of creativity as proposed by L. M. Gabora.

In “Dreaming Machine” these free-associations are framed as machine dreams. This interpretation of the work takes the naïve view that dreaming is a result of random activation in the brain, one conception of dreaming as proposed by Hobson, and therefore analogous to the concept of free-association.

The method of memory integration used in “Memory Association Machine” and “Dreaming Machine” is applied to thousands of prerecorded images in “Self-Organized Landscapes”. These landscapes are high resolution and intended for large-scale print reproduction.

CMs are produced at the intersection between art production, computer and cognitive science. Their application of cognitive models of memory, creativity, dreaming, and perception invite us to reconsider what is essentially human, how we relate to machines, and to look at ourselves anew.

The proliferation of touchscreen smartphones and tablets has created a surge of new interest in incorporating personal mobile devices into visual and sonic art. These devices provide millions of users access to an array of sophisticated sensors that artists can take advantage of in interactive installations and performances. Unfortunately, the development of software enabling the creation of custom interfaces for such works lags far behind the hardware advances of the last three years. Apple’s prohibition against the majority of user scripting has stopped developers from allowing artists to define interfaces with complexities going beyond simple banks of virtual sliders and knobs; such scripting is a necessity when creating dynamic interfaces that can change their behavior based on hardware sensor readings, user input and network requests. An additional problem with current artistic interface applications is that they only permit artists to take advantage of two of the many sensors in mobile devices (the touchscreen and triple-axis accelerometer) while ignoring other valuable sensors for interactivity such as gyroscopes, microphones and video cameras.

In response to these problems the author presents his own open-source software for creating interfaces on iOS devices (it will soon be ported to Android), named Control. Control allows artists to define interfaces in JavaScript that can easily be pushed to mobile devices for use in interactive installations and audience participation pieces. Every element of Control is scriptable (Apple permits JavaScript to run in their own web rendering engine, which Control uses) and the software provides access to the full array of sensors possessed by mobile devices.

This paper will contextualize Control by looking at the history of previous touchscreen devices like the JazzMutant Lemur, by examining other iOS and Android solutions for artistic interface development and by looking at the influence of two movements in the field of Human Computer Interaction on the project: End-User Programming and Meta-Design. The paper will end by discussing the author’s personal use of Control in his artistic and musical practice and by offering propositions about the future role of mobile devices in audience interaction pieces and participatory artistic installations.

In our culture the anticipated future has replaced the historical past as the most fundamental and decisive reference. Web artistic activity is a typical example of such anticipated future. It is a science fiction object. Technically it can be realised today but psychologically our society is not ready for it yet. We can predict the future characteristics of the Web by placing it within the history of telecommunication. The dream which inspired the invention of a telephone was that of being in two places at once. The telecommunication revolution fulfilled this dream of spatial co-extensivity by creating a radically new type of communication vector: now thought could be transmitted simultaneously and in many directions at once. The subsequent technical progress of telecommunication (video teleconferencing, appearance of a virtual reality, telepresence) moves from simply simulating the illusion of presence to actually realising this presence by letting the subject act over distance. Seemingly trivial insight crystallizes more and more to the fundamental finding of scientific and philosophical search for an consistent view of life. The high speed of the process creates a situation: from one side (Ego side), the illusion of overcoming of psychic trauma of the meeting with a fake reality (and any meeting with any kind of reality becomes a trauma); and, from the other side (Inter-Ego or Super-Ego side), the interweaving of human extensions into the common nervous network (M. McLuhan), or noosphere (V. Vernadsky).

This process might be considered at the same time as technological denial, as well as self denial. This situation on the level of controller-controlled leads to an inside struggle between the ego and the Super-Ego, to the hypertrophy of conscience, and then to the possibility of dissociation of a human being, to the mechanisms of the syndrome of psychic automatism. The example of an utilization of highjacking of time and the syndrome of psychic automatism is virtual reality, which is the next religious Golem of consciousness. Virtual reality constructs a future gadget that transposes beings from the present to the “reality” programmed and controlled by the past. Controller and controlled are transitional notions; their interchangeability can be revealed in diachronic as well as in the synchronic systems. However, while it was previously possible to juxtapose the positions of controller and controlled, in the mass-mediatized society the face-to-face opposition is vanishing in the network of cables and wires. Thus, TV and computers might be considered as two different examples of the interactivity between controller and controlled.

Abstract (short paper)

When we are completely free to choose what we want to read or watch, the question becomes: how do we know what we should be reading or watching. With the transition from curation to user-initiated methods of discovery of digital information, such as search, came the necessity for information discovery methods that enable us to encounter new and surprising information that broadens our horizons and enriches our understanding of the world. In other words, systems that promote serendipity. Interactive digital systems that answer this issue are currently being developed, many with the explicit purpose of introducing or engineering serendipity into our digital interactions. However, in our research on serendipitous systems, we discovered that interpretations of serendipity were varied and often contradictory. This led to a lack of definition of what a serendipitous system was exactly, necessitating constant qualification. As such, we propose a distinction of these serendipitous systems according not to their proposed goal – serendipity – but their methods: convergence or divergence. Through this classification we are able to identify both the systems’ ideological pretensions as well as what methods and mechanics they employ to do so.

This essay is an examination of the ongoing dialogue and negotiation of multiple subjectivities in the shifting contexts and spaces of the postmodern traveller. A number of approaches, including migrancy, hybridity, identity, deterritorialisation, digital media and installation are considered.It is put forward that the projected digital space serves as mediator to encode the fluid contemporary condition, capturing it in the floating structure of the digital artwork and its capacity to challenge time and space. The permeable multi‑layered structures of the digital are an analogue for the flow of interactions arising from multiplicity of positions that evoke and transfigure the fragmentary and transient journey of the traveller. The research explores the complex relationship between art and technology to express the flow and exchange of an itinerant journey within the digital landscape of bits and bytes.

Laurie Anderson is a renowned American performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art-rock styles. She is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. Anderson will speak in conversation with Tom Leeser, co-leader for The Cosmos: Radical Cosmologies theme. Sponsored in part by AMP Concerts.

Curator Statement

Russian media artists working with military technology. A show curated by Marat Guelman, Guelman Gallery, Moscow.

The program of conversion was initiated at the dawn of Perstroika. It stemmed from the belief that it was possible to modernize the Soviet Union without taking any radical economic steps. The passion for ideological stereotypes which were a far cry from reality became fully evident when the idea of conversion popped up. The populist ideas of how economic problems could be expected to be easily solved through conversion, using conversion as an argument in international politics, the break-up between its advocates and opponents from the public and, finally, the collapse of the program are all symptoms signaling a new Great Utopia.

In Russia, a peculiar relationship between art and new technology has always been predominant: think only of Levsha, the left-handed smith of Russian folklore, who knew how to shoe a flea, but with the help of technology that was primitive indeed. The technical innovations were regarded as follies, something one really did not believe in. For a long time, the theory of N. Wiener was looked upon as a bourgeois pseudo-science; which is why the concept of new technology had an overtone of idealist philosophy. Even in the 70’s, a normal audio magnetophone was considered dissident. The possibility of manipulating information with technology was the privilege of the State. The only official centra for new technology were provided by corporations of the military complex. This is why “Conversion” became synonymous for the “Eastern way” as opposed to the “Western way”.

Nikita Gashunin’s work “Global Ambitions”, a sculpture filled with electronics and microprocessors, symbolizing a technical miracle put together from debris in the backyard. The moving sculpture reminds us of the phenomenal gift of the Russians to turn unusual the
commonplace. The works of Savadov & Senchenko unite the two directions of Conversion: to recycle Army property and to exploit the technology developed in the military factories. As stated above, information technology was considered a medium only for propaganda, oppression, and conceit. Gia Rigvava’s works “You can trust me” and “You are powerless” start from this notion. “You can trust me” uses the genre of the”talking head”, sublimating the characters of massmedia: Jesus, Terminator, Gorbachev. The relation of man and technology is revealed in the work of the AES Group (Tatjana Arzamasova, Lef Evzovich, Yevgeni Svjatskin). The work demonstrates the impossibility of organically uniting man with technology: a tank, whose body has been dissected with the aid of a computer, is being reclad into human skin.

Panel:  If You See Something Say Something: Art, War, Surveillance and the Sustainability of Urgency in the Post 9/11 Era

In March of 2006, to roughly co­in­cide with the 3rd an­niver­sary of the start of the Iraq con­flict, I first en­tered the on­line US Army re­cruit­ing game, Amer­ica’s Army, in order to man­u­ally type the name, age, ser­vice branch and date of death of each ser­vice per­son who has died to date in Iraq. dead-in-iraq is es­sen­tially a fleet­ing, per­for­ma­tive memo­r­ial to those mil­i­tary per­son­nel who have been killed in this on­go­ing con­flict. My ac­tions are at the same time an in­ter­ven­tion­ist ges­ture to protest against the war in Iraq. This work marked the overt politi­ciza­tion of my cre­ative prac­tice. I went on to cre­ate an on­line data­base of memo­r­ial con­cepts and pro­jects en­ti­tled iraqimemorial.?org. This on­go­ing pro­ject in­vites artists, ar­chi­tects and other cre­ative in­di­vid­u­als to up­load memo­r­ial con­cepts ded­i­cated to the many un­told thou­sands of civil­ian ca­su­al­ties from the Iraq in­va­sion. Through these works and oth­ers, I seek to de­velop and im­ple­ment strate­gies for uti­liz­ing the In­ter­net as the lo­ca­tion for in­ter­ven­tion­ist acts of con­sience, mem­ory and protest. I will dis­cuss the pro­gres­sion of these works and on­go­ing ef­forts to con­tinue to en­gage is­sues sur­round­ing pol­i­tics, war and ter­ror, in­clud­ing my par­tic­i­pa­tion in the fake New York Times End of the War edi­tion, my ef­forts to place Hosni Mubarak up for sale on eBay and on­go­ing works to reify the us and them of rep­re­sen­ta­tions of war through con­tem­po­rary first per­son shooter video games.

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

Cli­mate change pre­sents us with one of the great nar­ra­tives to emerge over the last twenty years. The re­lated uni­ver­sal dis­course raises an apoc­a­lyp­tic storm that em­braces every place, every­one and every­thing. It sur­rounds us on a global scale that is so in­tractable and is so ex­ceed­ingly hard to rep­re­sent, be­cause it cries out for a myr­iad of re­sponses and change at all lev­els of ex­is­tence. Given the enor­mous scale of cli­mate change en­com­pass­ing the en­tire earth one of the tasks of this paper is to ques­tion the way cli­mate change is rep­re­sented at the polar re­gions and to point out the ways it is per­ceived so that new de­f­i­n­i­tions of re­lated art, sci­ence and pol­i­tics can be formed and put to more ef­fec­tive use. Fo­cus­ing on the work of con­tem­po­rary artists, I ques­tion the un-rep­re­sentable of cli­mate change not only be­cause many of the ef­fects of cli­mate change are in­vis­i­ble but also be­cause the cli­mate con­tro­versy it­self has made clear that many en­tan­gled in­ter­ests im­pact its rep­re­sen­ta­tion. The strug­gle to put an image on cli­mate change often hap­pens in spite of and some­times against var­i­ous gov­ern­ment con­trols, oil and gas in­dus­try pres­sure and var­ied pop­u­lar rep­re­sen­ta­tions. In the con­text of this po­lit­i­cal con­tro­versy, I ask what are the modes of rep­re­sen­ta­tion of cli­mate change.

How can cli­mate change be rep­re­sented? How should it be rep­re­sented? What kinds of eth­i­cal ques­tions should we con­sider in the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of cli­mate change? What and whose ex­pe­ri­ence is rep­re­sented? This paper dis­cusses a shift in rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the polar re­gions from the older aes­thetic tra­di­tion of the sub­lime as pure heroic wilder­ness to the aes­thetic of the con­tem­po­rary sub­lime wherein cat­e­gories of both na­ture and civ­i­liza­tion are un­done be­cause ex­treme na­ture is dis­ap­pear­ing. By fo­cus­ing on the work of three artists-Ed­ward Bur­tyn­sky, Anne Noble and Con­nie Sama­ras-this talk asks: What new sto­ries and im­ages are being pro­duced through re­cent at­tempts to re-vi­su­al­ize the Arc­tic and Antarc­tic? What im­pact have the gen­res of lit­er­ary fic­tion, sci­ence fic­tion and hor­ror, as well as the older aes­thetic tra­di­tions of the sub­lime and the con­tem­po­rary sub­lime, had on their work?  All three artists in­ter­ro­gate land­scape prac­tices and the role of pho­tog­ra­phy and new media in the con­struc­tion of vi­sual knowl­edge and un­der­stand­ing of Antarc­tica.

Panel: Without Sin: Taboo and Freedom within Digital Media

Con­tent Os­mo­sis refers to a sit­u­a­tion when an as­pect of a medium’s con­tent is trans­ferred to the per­son­al­ity of an au­di­ence, such as in­tel­lec­tual con­tent mak­ing the au­di­ence feel more in­tel­lec­tual, or when the ex­clu­sive­ness of the con­tent makes the au­di­ence be­lieve that they are ex­clu­sive. This en­hance­ment, how­ever, may only be a be­lief by an au­di­ence rather than some­thing  that is ob­serv­able: the au­di­ence does not ac­tu­ally be­come more in­tel­li­gent, ex­clu­sive or what­ever. Con­tent Os­mo­sis is a medium sub­terfuge which is often used to ob­tain fi­nan­cial profit from the au­di­ence, and con­tent os­mo­sis is often in­cor­po­rated into the con­tent of a medium ac­cord­ing to its in­dented au­di­ence.

Accepting the premise that technology is a “black box,” that any technological tool has no meaning until it is placed within a cultural system, there must exist cultural mechanisms by which new technologies are “naturalized” into culture. The exponentially accelerating speed of technological change leads us to question whether there is a maximum speed of cultural adaptation. Consider the paroxysms of confusion that copyright law is in due to the presence of new technologies. The mechanisms of cultural adaptation are slipping behind.

Despite the apocalyptic overtones, this is a very practical problem for artists in electronic media. Over the last twenty years we have seen short eras of technological art practice become technologically obsolete and slip from historical view. Thus artists, forced to upgrade technology continually, are caught in a cycle of unrequited technological consumption. In addition, the pace of technological change prevents a holistic consideration of the cultural context of the subject matter by the artist. And, the largely unacknowledged burden of artists who choose to explore new media is that they often find themselves in the R+D function of designing the technology, rather than simply aesthetically manipulating a traditional art technology.

Audiences as well as artists are affected by the rate of technological change. The codes and conventions required to “read the work” have not been culturally established. The unacknowledged burden on viewers of electronic work is that they must take care not to impose critical judgments germane to an older discipline (such as painting) upon a different technology. How do we cope?

Keywords: New media art, digital interactivity, immersion, corporeal experience, virtual reality

This paper will discuss the status of body and corporeal experience in the context of new media art, especially through the virtual works of art that involve digital interactivity and immersion. I will argue that an alternative understanding of aesthetics is needed in art historical and theoretical studies because the experience of virtual reality through new media art reappraise our ways of thinking about pictures and images.

Abstract

The human being likes to consider itself as a cultural and spiritual entity, removed from the rest of nature. This ‘split personality’ is reflected in the dualist perception of the universe that can be associated with Descartian philosophy and its followers. It clearly differentiates the realm of the physical and the spiritual from each other. What however inescapably links human beings with their natural environment is their physical body. As the Cartesian program progressed it became increasingly clear that the physical and the spiritual realm could not be separated from each other as clearly as expected. In the Cartesian tradition nature, and for that matter also animal-life, was considered as a gigantic mechanical system. Consequently the human body also became to be seen as a machine. But here an odd twist occurred. As it became clear that much of our psychological performance depended on our physical state (the body: a machine), then our psychological states should be considered the result of the states of that machine and its intricate mechanisms.

This idea, scorned when first proposed, served perfectly to legitimate a liberal ideology that would enhance the technologization of human life through the industrialization of the 18th and 19th century. At the same time the model cleared the way for an unsurpassed growth of medical research and discoveries. At present medical technology has advanced to a degree where we seem to be in sight of the ultimate aim of the Cartesian program: seeing all, knowing all, realizing all. The body can be (genetically) constructed and deconstructed in almost every conceivable direction. At the same time the body is immersed in an increasingly technologize environment. This ruthless invasion of the body scares many people, but it is left largely unquestioned at the conceptual level.

What issues are involved in twenty-first century representations of corporeality from an artistic perspective? What parameters and methodologies are required when contemporary biotechnology and neuroscience are rapidly changing the ways we see ourselves and actively remodeling the human body? These questions drive my research and have formed the basis of my art/science practice. They are discussed here in relation to my artworks and as part of my continuing investigations into what constitutes “humanness” in both the biotechnical and virtual domains.

My cross-disciplinary art/science projects, my methodologies and my aims are illustrated here. Central to my explorations is the juxtaposition of what is commonly termed “hard” scientific research with artistic re-interpretations of the resulting research data. These readings of experimental research image data are sensual and arouse emotional empathy between the viewer/participant and the artwork content. In this way they raise questions about contemporary biomedical research and current socio-cultural issues.

For the ‘machina carnis’ cross-disciplinary collaboration with a biomedical scientist I experimented on my unscreened adult stem cells. The fundamental practical and theoretical investigations informing this innovative research model were:

1. What will occur if a visual artist engages with biomedical engineering as a first-person researcher?
2. Can two customarily divergent disciplines create hybrid spaces where scientific research can be interrogated by an artist?

These questions are extended and re-examined in the context of the artwork: ‘Changing Fates_matrilineal’. This artwork introduces the discourse surrounding female genetic inheritance through mitochondrial DNA in connection with more ephemeral human residues and traces contained in material possessions and personal memories. Once again, the aim of this exploratory project was to generate individual engagement at the interstices between a participant’s personal experiences and the symbolic traces embedded in the remediated image data. Most recently the ‘mellifera’ project has explored corporeality and identity through both real-time and virtual sites and also a variety of participatory tropes. In all these examples of completed artworks, the use of technologies is discrete and the affective qualities are featured – with a particular focus on the feelings they arouse – creating layered networks of physical, emotional and sensory artwork encounters.

The body category is an important issue facing actual artistic theory and practice. In the present context of the development of technologies, can the body still be considered as a biological organism carrying the integrity of the subject? I attempt to explore the possibility of imagining the body in view of its present destabilized status. This reflection is developed through the concept of “performance” suggested by Judith Butler and certain sensual body perturbations in recent Canadian videos. How do the senses react to a destabilized body? What is a destabilized body? Do video performances of the body make possible the emergence of new categories and experiences of the senses?

Abstract

Keywords: moist media, romantic conceptualism, the body, speculative research and creation, poetics, laboratory, garden, boudoir.

Located at the cross-section of art, the body and biology, CorpsCellule: Le Jardin is a collaborative research and creation initiative responding to the inquiry of how bodies manifest and what the body(ies) can become. Contextualized in the emerging field of moist media, the project proposes the unlikely confluence of an orchid and a silkworm. Exploring the allegorical potential of where flesh and flower meet, somewhat pornographic metaphors are revealed in the encounter of these two symbolic life forms. Throughout the process of co-culturing these disparate organic entities, the realities of the uncommon interspecies immersion orchestrates an alteraction, carrying the discrete organisms involved out of themselves and into the realm of the other.

The daily research activities include the culturing and care of living entities,experimentation in tissue-culture, and observing the convergence of a worm and a flower cohabitating, cross- cultured, and modified at cellular levels. Throughout the experimental practice photographic documentation, descriptive drawings, video, and a reflexive research log are produced, chronicling the continuous transformation of Le Jardin and the performed protocols of creation and care. Addressing the eugenicist imperative implied by acts of aesthetic selection, Le Jardin also examines the control inherent in care and the ethical implications of working with living media.
The achievement or failure of this project lies not in producing a successful co-culture, but rather in the somewhat irrational attempt to realise the surreal. Not attempting to identify a stable body, nor to inscribe and explain its function, but rather to envisage the plural potentialities of embodiment. Articulated through a practice of installation, performance and photo documentation, the site of research synthesises conceptual and functional notions of a garden, a laboratory and a boudoir as an experimental locale to manifest poetic encounters. The controlled environments and systematic processes of science are adapted and performed, intuitively probing the potential of instrumentalising scientific tools as artistic media. To this end, select protocols of botany and biotechnology are appropriated in pursuit of the intimacies, the sublime, and the visceral grotesque revealed in the coupling of the body(ies) and technology. Drawing from both current and historical references, Le Jardin engages various discourses surrounding the body and technology, and through practice participates in the fictionalization of the real and the realisation of fiction, contributing a poetic manifestation of a speculative and imaginary embodiment.

Corpus Corvus is a mixed reality performance artwork that explores contemporary mythos through immersive media technologies.  The research is a multi-faceted engagement with posthuman embodiment, augmented/mixed reality, digital performance, and immersive media composition.  Corpus Corvus utilizes stereoscopic 3D projection, motion capture animation, an integrated physical/media choreographic vocabulary, and electroacoustic composition to explore the Pacific Northwest Native American myth of the raven as god and thief who steals the sun and creates the universe.

The title Corpus Corvus refers to the body of the raven. The piece traverses the landscape of the Corpus Corvus through dilations into ten corporeal dimensions: formation, throat, wing, eye, talon, belly, heart, spine, brain, dissolution.  Each of the ten segments articulates a densely integrated 3-dimensional kinesthetic-audio-visual composition, which I refer to as somatic media architectures.

Formally, the piece explores the relationship between movement of a physical body and animation in a digital stereoscopic 3-dimensional image field.  Through use of theatrical lighting and projection techniques in conjunction with stereoscopy, the body and animation are perceived to occupy the same 3-dimensional space. This physical-virtual dance is accompanied by a sound score based upon ravens’ vocalizations abstracted through human imitation and technological processing. The cumulative instantiation of performative embodiment spans a dynamic spectrum from the animalic to the immaterial.

This paper presents documentation of the performance work, discusses the research objectives underscoring its construction, and introduces the neopoetic immersive media language system that informs its composition.  The foundational ground for the neopoetic system is the Poetics of Aristotle and its relation to the ancient Greek theater as a practical systemic ideology for the Greek drama.  As Aristotle’s Poetics posits six basic components for the construction of drama (plot, character, thought, diction, song, and spectacle), the neopoetic system has six constituent aspects: expanded embodiment, experiential metaphor, technoetic mythos, matrix architecture, perceptual resonance, and the rheomode*).   In summary, the neopoetic system unfolds from the posthuman physical-virtual body and extends the human sensory system into immersive media perceptual hyperspaces.

*) a term coined by quantum physicist David Bohm that means “flowing language” and describes “the language of the quantum wave.”

Panel: Tyrannies of Participation

A video-di­rected group ex­er­cise/med­i­ta­tion/con­ver­sa­tion by Joshua Kit Clay­ton, Cor­don Off the Con­tempt in a Word Com­part­ment (and Other Whis­per­ing Mo­ments) in­ves­ti­gates the uses and val­ues of con­tempt, hy­giene, lan­guage and im­por­tantly, of whis­per­ing, as a means of con­tain­ment- para­dox­i­cally through the process of prop­a­ga­tion. The video asks au­di­ence mem­bers to con­sider and/or dis­cuss their own re­la­tion­ship to con­tempt and other top­ics within the space of the video it­self. Among other top­ics, this work plays with the no­tion that given a propo­si­tion (for ex­am­ple, a par­tic­i­pa­tory art­work) there is value in one’s con­tempt for the propo­si­tion and its ar­ti­facts, as a means of main­tain­ing one’s agency in the face of the propo­si­tion. Propo­si­tions them­selves may be con­sid­ered au­thor­i­ties and their pre­sen­ta­tion is­sues de­mands to the ob­jects of their “tyranny”, ei­ther im­plic­itly or ex­plic­itly. This work is an ex­plicit, though hu­mor­ous, tyrant, and re­in­forces its au­thor­ity through the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, en­cour­age­ment, and ma­nip­u­la­tion of the ob­ject’s re­sis­tance to au­thor­ity. A ques­tion for dis­cus­sion is whether given such a de­f­i­n­i­tion of au­thor­ity, is it ever pos­si­ble to elim­i­nate au­thor­ity, and if so what is the value in our ef­forts to do so?

Design and aesthetic decision making have previously been dominated by individual choices usually grounded in a singular cultural model, and naturally limited in choice. Artificial creativity opens new models of creative progression, leading to a quickly evolving aesthetic and changed relationship among author, audience and process.

Abstract

This presentation explores the Caribbean archives and the Trinidad archive (1838 – 1938) in particular – as being the basis of research for the interactive artwork Domino Effects (2009). The archive presents two paradigms as contested practices. The archive is inherently conservative and conventional both in processes of conservation and curation. And there is the persistent way in which the Trinidad archive is limited by the inherent absence of particular and personalised narratives.
I would like to present the fictional interactive artwork Domino Effects (2009) as an interpretation of historical material including the Trinidad archive, to centralise the women worker’s presence and everyday experience of the colonial period. As a creolised creative artwork that comments on legacies of forced migration, plantation landscapes superseded by tourist economics and services, Domino Effects offers a metaphoric method for the retrieval and reconfiguration of archival accounts that are so often formulated in the ‘language’ of the male colonial figure. The artwork also allows for an expansion of social and historiographical space to take account of the imagined horizons, futuristic dreamscapes and everyday contemporary practices of the ex-plantation worker experience.

Counter/Cartographies attempts to map out contemporary aesthetic practices in their various political terrains. To test collaboration and collectivity as a productive mode of artistic and political expression, a series of emails invite and enable participation in a virtual network of alliances.

Since the initial email invitation, C.CRED has developed the Counter/Cartographies project in three interlinked directions to include the following components:

1) A major cartography: The information we receive, and the way email does or does not spread into other networks, has been registered as a major cartography: a web-resource listing all participants and their various activities plus some of the email lists and contact networks we work with has been created.

2) Platforms and minor cartographies: Linked to the major cartography, we have setup a series of counter/cartography platforms. Their focus is the production of minor cartographies based on real-time events such as walks, meetings, parties, etc. staged in relation to a specific local terrain and dealing with issues significant within the context of that terrain.

3) Office and research structure: In conjunction to this cartographical system, provides a virtual and physical space where these cartographies and networks can be worked through theoretically and conceptually.
At ISEA 2004 the Counter/Cartographies project will be represented by a series of events in Tallinn, Helsinki, Mariehamn and on board the ISEA cruise. An archive installation in Tallinn Art Hall will link these events to previous components of the project.
C.CRED [Collective CREative Dissent] is a London based artist/theorist collective set up in 2001.

The word ‘curfew’ originated from ‘couvre-feu’, a French term that means ‘cover fire’. Historically, as early as the 11th century in Europe, curfew was enforced through the use of warning bells which signified the time to put out all fires, thereby blacking out the village. The blackout created a form of security in which the inability to see ensured the inability to move, especially on moonless nights. This presentation will explore the blackout as a form, function, and concept. From pre-industrial night, tangents will be taken to electrical failure, the bottom of the ocean, global black spots, solitary confinement, and death.

As India enters the sixth year of the new millennium, there seems to be ample evidence to validate the claim that it is new technologies and their infrastructures that have supported and enabled its current economic revolution. This revolution promises a new society based on knowledge and information. This emphasis poses tremendous challenges to educators and forces them to question the fundamental tenets on which they would develop pedagogies and create learning that is both sustainable and critical. The author argues new-media art can in itself be construed as critical pedagogic practice and that new-media artists have a role to play as public intellectuals.

Complaining as a means of expression should encourage the individual to acknowledge the seemingly inconsequential annoyances of everyday life as opportunities for discussion and participation. By encouraging potential for engagement, awareness and conscious expression can be experienced as creativity and even denote performativity. It is our understanding that expression in this sense can also lead to self-worth, gratification, and even collective well-being. Studies show that emotions are as contagious as a virus.

Inherent to being human, to complain was once seen as a powerful source for citizen definition and direction; to speak-up, to object and to protest was understood also as a reaction for something. The Complaint Department recognizes the importance of a platform for complaining and see this as a powerful means of expression and of citizen agency.

It’s not polite to bitch, grumble or wine. To protest against something, which is how the term is now usually implied, is discouraged. The ‘complainer’ is typically depicted as self-interested, cantankerous, over-emotional, even anti-social. One might find little understanding in a pervasive market where the ‘person as consumer’ becomes an aggregated commodity item with little individuality. One’s efforts seem lost in as many products and services and consumers out there as there are complaints to be made. Complaints are met often not without some sympathy but without agency. The current state of making a formal complaint seems curtailed to an industry operation, an endpoint having little palpable impact. Few bother, understandably, to invest the time or energy.

Complaining is at once a strategy and mode of intervention, a means to counter-act. By encouraging the expression of one’s reactions to events or situations, the act of complaining can be reappropriated. The Complaint Department regards the ability to crafting complaints as a civic imperative for the public good, to which any small contribution is valuable. Enacting a call for change, choice, or accountability, citizen democracy can promote accessibility and transparency. By leveraging the freedom to disagree, those who are dishonest or do not act in favour of the public good can be discredited.

Many domestic craft-based textile activities, undertaken by large numbers of the population, have provided generations with physical and mental stimulation and outlets for creativity, contributing to a sense of identity and providing social interaction when undertaken in groups or when ideas, patterns or products are shared. Participants in craft activities, such as knitting, crochet and sewing, report that these are lifelong activities and an important part of their lives. However, domestic craft-based textile activities are often dismissed as involving low-levels of creativity, and research into what these craft-based textile activities contribute to physical and mental health and wellbeing is limited. This paper will draw on an experimental art research project, using digital media technologies and practices, to examine the techniques and practices used in crochet lace. The project explores the creative potential of domestic craft-based textile activities, creates tools for creativity, and offers alternative possibilities for the future of craft-based textile activities using digital media. In addition, it will report on research investigating how craft-based textile activities contribute to health and wellbeing. The implications of these projects are that digital media can potentially extend domestic craft-based activities and open up new sites of creative endeavour. In addition, the production of digital media software applications, and games based on craft-based textile forms and content, could potentially enable older craft-based textile practitioners to engage in these activities despite infirmity, or reduced dexterity, and contribute to ongoing wellbeing. Furthermore, the experimental art project and research aims to introduce digital media and new technologies to members of the population whose needs are under-represented in digital media developments, by building on familiar creative processes.

The team of GORBET+ BANERJEE was selected as the Airport Art Activation Team for the San Jose International Airport.
Our mandate is to:

1. create an infrastructure that will support an ongoing program of Art &Technology;
2. design and build “flexible technological platforms” that will enable a rotating series of artworks commissioned for the airport; and
3. create a number of “pilot artworks” using the platforms.

At the Symposium we will present our research and designs, report on progress, and offer insights gained from the project.

GORBET+ BANERJEE: Matt Gorbet; Susan Gorbet and Banny Banerjee

The idea of the black box, in engineering, is that of a device in which one knows what to put in and what comes out, but not what happens on the inside. When it comes to modern scientific knowledge, black boxes are there to be opened and scrutinized. But other approaches can be undertaken. From the early cybernetics to scientific disciplines such as Chaos Theory or Artificial Life, systems in which important features remain unexplained, at least in some sense, have been studied and experimented with. These unexplained properties or behaviors have come to be known as emergent. In an artistic context, where explanation is not usually the main issue in the creation process, the experimentation with the concept of emergence can be understood in a close analogy to that of the creation of a black box.

In this paper, we analyze different approaches to the concept of emergence in philosophy, science and digital art practice in order to build up a working definition of emergence that is useful for the creation of emergent systems and behaviors in the context of interactive art.

After summarizing the approaches in non-artistic fields, the focus will be mainly on Artificial Life Art. It is within this discipline that the idea of emergence and emergent behavior has acquired a central role. Indeed, in ALife Art the creation of black box-like systems has been a central concern. According to the general approach of the scientific Artificial Life, ALife artists have sought to create systems composed of simple elements from which complex behaviors emerge.

Although the creation of artworks with emergent properties is not something new, more often than not the term emergence, when used in an artistic context, is at least too loosely defined. The aim of this research is to contribute to the clarification of the concept in order to make it usable for the artistic practice and analysis, both for Alife Art and for Interactive Art in general.

Site-specific compositions exist solely within a very specific time-space. It is totally inconsistent with the idea of site-specific art in the first place to try to remove or detach such a work out of its accommodating space. On the other hand, fixed media music – at least in theory – is composed in such a way it will sound nice in a variety of different listening set-ups. It is made to be portable in the first place. Would it, however, be possible – and in what way – to commence from a site-specific composition and somehow end with a fixed medium work that would still make sense outside the original context ?

The author answers yes. The composer has to confront his own work as if a found soundscape to be actively interpreted. Using carefully selected equipment and advanced phonographic techniques and by recording the way actual space responds and resonates, he has some control on very crucial qualities of sound. Then, it is perfectly valid to select those recordings that sound interesting, rearrange them and end up with a meaningful fixed media work that would make sense outside of the original context.

This might sound totally inconsistent with the idea of site-specificity in the first place, but the author does not claim that this way the original work is ‘captured’ on some medium or anything like that. What one comes up with is another work – a brand new one – that has to be confronted on its own terms. The two works remain explicitly but not implicitly associated. The site-specificity of the original work is definitely ‘documented’ in a sense (the one derives from the other after all) so the link is never lost, but we still retain all the potential to create a stand-alone piece of music by creatively working on our original material and to deliver a totally different work in terms of scope and aesthetic impact.

In this paper the author describes his practice in detail referring to actual projects he has already undertaken in the past.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Eye tracking, 3D sculpture, virtual avatars, 3D scanning, rapid prototyping, subsurface etching.

Technology has been used to assist in communication and concept development by artists, designers/inventors, engineers, clients, manufacturers and others.  The use of technology to aid artists capture what they see has been used since the Renaissance with the introduction of the camera lucida and the camera obscura. A modern method to assist in capturing how people see is to use eye tracking technology. The data collected from eye tracking experiments is widely believed to reflect what within the viewing space is being assessed. The analysis of this data can be output in statistical form, or as 2D graphic overlays placed on top of flat images. The innovation described in this paper is the application of a new methodology developed to allow quantitative eye tracking data to be used as a basis to create 3D sculptural forms. This paper is structured with first a brief explanation of eye tracking, leading to the description of the new 3D eye tracking methodology. The results from the test and the final output are reviewed in the analysis including the lessons learned and the possible areas for improvement.

Creation of Change was a collaboration graduation project among students from three departments: fashion design, interaction design, and graphic design. lt involves developing a digital trend book on CD-ROM that aims at informing and inspiring designers from various disciplines. The idea originates from our interest in the mutations of the society, which underlie the future evolution of design. We consider a design-dictation expiring in the future and hope that the “audience” will be more involved in a design process. Information transfer from the designer to the consumer will become information exchange. Trend-forecasting was until now presented as a linear story, what allowed the dictation of few people over the changes in design. Non-linear, interactive storytelling should make forecasting more “democratic”: The forecasters are not dictators any more, but more something like “foretellers” in the Middle-Ages: they bring bits and pieces of news important for a particular location of the (global) village, entertaining the people with their intriguing atmospheres, but its up to the people themselves to make their own associations and connections to their own situation. Creators of future stories are therefore not only the people gathering information and visualizing it, but also the people from audiences themselves. The notion of author and receiver is beginning to blur. The language forecasters/storytellers could use is a hybrid between visual, scientific, symbolic, and “common” (oral) language. The only media that allow the dynamics of this integrated language are new-digital media, not only because they converge different disciplines, but because the essence of these media is constant change and dynamics, as is the essence of the main topic of forecasting stories—the future. Within the narrative environment of Creation of Change the participant switches between the stories, following own interests and intuition, creating their own yarn about the future. The”switching” between the items and story-lines should be tactile and natural. Therefore we developed a “sensitive” interface, where the user has to draw and push the icons (symbols for linked items). The prototype shows the complex system of integrating different media into a structure of 5 stories, visualized in sometimes interactive animations with relevant text in between. The interaction within the animations should provide a stronger feeling about the content (for example, one of the items deals with the chaos within today’s cities, a chaotic way of interaction will let the user “feel” frustrated by this chaos). When a story is created in and for an interactive medium, the roles of influence change: instead of the stories becoming a part of our lives and swaying our experience, we are the ones who enter in the world of stories and our actions are influencing the story’s environment. At least, theoretically. Up to now, the language used to tell an interactive story was not “elastic” enough to allow a simultaneous influence of the user and his/her immersion in the story. Can this be changed?

In this paper we present and discuss Murmuration by Squidsoup. Murmuration is a massively multipoint sound and light artwork commissioned by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, comprising 720 individual networked devices, each with RGB LED light and a speaker capable of rendering sampled audio in realtime in an outdoor public environment. It is the first that we know of to use internet of things (IoT) technologies at this scale in the audio domain, and we present a discussion of the sound design considerations that were involved in the creation of the work and that have resulted from our experience of the work’s first manifestation, leading to future goals and design principles that will inform future iterations of our practice.

Abstract
My artist talk and work-in-progress presentations will include my generative artworks, share class tutorials and materials for the course, Creative Code and present excellent students’ works.

Description
Creative Code is a course to explore the aesthetic of computational graphic design at Valparaiso university in the United States. It is an interdisciplinary course crossed listed between art, digital media, and computer science departments, as well as, between graduate and undergraduate programs. I taught a similar course, Typography and Code, in Visual Communication department at the School of Art Institute of Chicago from 2012 to 2014.

This course is designed to explore generative art and typography, as well as computational and data driven graphic design with Processing, a programming language for artists and designers, initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. The course provides an introduction and demonstration of Processing with tutorial codes. I have researched and developed the tutorials and in-class exercises for design and art majors specifically because most Processing tutorials are not friendly for art and design majors since they are developed by computer programmers.

Through the course, students learn how to apply graphic design principles and functions to explore their own design projects in Processing. At the beginning the students learn how to use basic functions in Processing to get used to write computer codes directly, then, mathematic expressions, computer algorithms and libraries to implement their visual ideas. They build exploratory and innovative art and design projects with extensions to real design products such as logo, typeface design, poster, pattern design, typography, brand identity, etc. Their projects are collaborative with various physical communication such as real time motion tracking and sound interaction.

I studied computer science in undergraduate and started learning graphic design from Armin Hoffman’s book, Graphic Design Manual, in my first MFA graphic design program in South Korea, From the book, I became fascinated with modern and constructive graphic design with human and organic touches. Later I learned Dimensional Typography, by Abott Miller, extending two dimensional modern typography to spacial and multi dimensional typographic forms. My graduate director, Ellen Lupton, at Maryland Institute College of Art, introduced me to Processing in 2005. It was the beginning of Processing with future potentials as a tool for artists and designers.

At first I was more interested in creating experimental code driven typography to show the potentials of Processing as a tool for the graphic design community. My MFA thesis, TYPE+CODE, demonstrates the possibilities. The second version, TYPE+CODE II, reinterpreted traditional calligraphy into modern and contemporary typography. Dimensional Typography limitedly explored the visual territories by using only letter forms dimensionally. My typography extends letterform to words, phrases, and sentences to explore innovative typographic forms. It conveys diversified visual messages such as addressing environmental issues, healing through arts, and exploring philosophical and religious interpretation, etc. The recent version, TYPE+CODE III, is an extension of the computational typography aesthetic from cyberspace to physical space by using digital fabrication.

Creative critical action with STEM-A (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math through Art) is a philosophy which integrates exploration of STEM subjects through art inquiry. This approach to STEM education creates space for the instructor to include ethical, radical and inventive approaches to educating students.

Innovation is the most prized human dexterity, and STEM education is a critical component of societies to produce innovative products. However as global economies emerge in our post-google society, facing human impacted climate change, it is critical that we radically change the face of our education system and eventually our economies, to include a broader scope of STEM innovation. Art and diversity need to be included in STEM education to foster a sustainable community of ethical technologists who create solutions for humans beyond industry.

How does STEM education through art, media and technology defy formal education through DIY, viral and social media? With the exploration of electronic arts, media and sciences, students gain valuable skills for using and working with complex STEM concepts, while integrating ethical, and critical thinking skills. STEM acquired skills through artistic inquiry further the ability of users and creators to make educated decisions about innovative processes, products, or services; created or consumed. Thus the art of “Techno-Ecology” will blossom into another era of radically urban sustainable technology exploration.

STEM-A Example Classes/Workshops

Circuit Bending (remixing, culture jamming, re-use, re-appropriation)

STEM Standards:
Science (chaos theory/anti-theory, sustainability)
Technology (deconstruction of technology, technology ethics)
Engineering (Electronics soldering, multi-meters)
Math (reading and calculating voltage)

Video Remixed – explore the world of video remixing, looping, dj/vj culture, creative critical action and guerrilla art. Create videos that promote ethical dialog on human impacts in the environment.

STEM Standards:
Science (ecological ethics, leave no trace) Colorado [mining and geology] Taos [plastic bag tax, pollution]
Technology (camera, computer hardware, software, media)
Engineering (storyboarding, developing timelines, digital narratives, video installation)
Math (image quality, data storage, lighting)

For art-and-technology practitioners, the artist-led workshop is an established tool for public and community engagement.  The workshop format is integrated into academic and artistic gatherings and events, and is an excitingly varied and multimodal part of conference and festival activities internationally.  Perhaps most particularly in new media contexts, the invitation to participate in or deliver a workshop includes the implication that technological tools will be taught, and practical skills will be imparted.  As such the artist-led workshop, as a form, is a site where a complex ecology of artistic, social and educational goals and interactions are held in relief.

Within more traditional communities, the workshop has been regarded as a somewhat lesser format for the presentation of ideas that presentation of papers (conferences) or artworks (festivals).  To the curator, the workshop can be an economic way of having an artist involved in an event, lessening the cost of commissioning and/or transportation.  In community arts practitioners interrogate the effectiveness of engaging and congealing local communities.  Pedagogues usefully develop evaluations for educational and material goals.  For the artist-leader, too frequent delivery of workshops servicing broader agendas can serve to cloud artistic objectives.

This paper presents technology-based art practice workshops that have been designed to develop the workshop form as a collaborative and artistic output in its own right.  Inspired by Kaprow’s formulation of Happenings, and Beuys’ interest in open-works and wordless-teaching, the work presented attempts to make workshop groups into ad-hock creative ecologies in action.  These workshops are discussed with particular emphasis on the design successes and challenges of these events, the context specific environments employed and self-developed, low-cost construction kits created.

Through collaboration between artists and with educators, creative, conceptual and constructionist learning goals are designed into public invitational formats drawing on topics in interaction design, sound design, media ecology and sustainable energy.  The context of new media allows for a public invitation which is partially technical, yet centers more markedly on the embodied and social outcomes of bringing people together in experimental, interactive and technology-infused artistic happenings.

Panel Statement

The Creative Industries Forum is a platform that brings together leading international experts in the field of digital content production and underpinning technology development. It offers a critical space for both formal debate and exchange, and informal networking with key sectoral stakeholders and creative professionals from Northern Ireland.

The Creative Industries Forum will address crucial issues that have been identified in the Interim Strategic Action Plan commissioned by the Northern Ireland Department for Culture Art and Leisure as well as Invest NI’s Digital Content Strategy for the development of the creative industries sector ir Northern Ireland. These wider policy issues include the discussion of an  appropriate strategic growth of businesses in the sector for a region such as Northern Ireland, the effective development and utilisatior of talent, knowledge and skills in the field and  strategies for their internationalisation as well as the building of innovative partnerships.  Workshops in the afternoon will deal in more detail with key concerns that have merged from the morning debates.

This article reports on current developments within “creative industries” in Beijing. The article discusses Dashanzi Art District and the Created in China lndustrlal Alliance in relation to such issues as labor, intellectual property regimes, real-estate speculation, hightech development zones, promotional cultures and the global variability of neoliberal capitalrsm. The article maintains that creative industries, as realizations of a policy concept undergoing international dissemination, are most accurately understood as cultural practices in trans-local settings that overlap with larger national and geopolitical forces.

Artists and engineers from every discipline are increasing their collaboration between film and game production around the world. This presentation will illustrate, with images and animation, over 20 years of personal examples in successful game/film collaborations and some exciting recent trends for the future of production and academia.

Based upon Masson’s 20 years of interdisciplinary experience working in films and games, and leading the new team-based game program at Northeastern University, this presentation will highlight how a collaborative approach effects the creative process and provides unique insights into the creative process.

Design innovation, social entrepreneurship, and art activist movements are gaining momentum, spurred by our current economic and climate crises. This talk will explore the intersection between everyday objects, place making, and technology. Participants will learn about inspiring case studies that use creative risk-taking and systems-thinking methods applied to socially and ecologically minded projects with the potential for positive social change. Beth Ferguson is an ecological designer, public artist and founding director of Sol Design Lab based in San Francisco. Thousands of participants have interacted with Ferguson’s iconic SolarPump Charging Stations made from 1950’s gas pumps, bus stop LED light installations, solar payphones and public furniture made from up-cycled materials.

In its quest of exploring the underpinnings of the technological “intervention” within the flourishing of the city-spaces since the period of modernization, this paper will base its analyses on a philosophical and sociological theoretical standpoint. In this regard, the question of how technologies intervene in the creation of spaces will initially be examined taking into account the theories of Innis and Lefebvre. Accordingly, the issue of time and its compression and whether a new form of spatial presence has emerged will be discussed. In this regard, the global flows and how ‘translocal’ spaces are brought about within cities and how a digital divide is engendered within the large metropoles will be deliberated. Up till this point, the philosophical analyses of technologies and the sociological remarks in terms of their dissemination and impact within the global cultural network will be dwelled upon. Hence, the creative spaces (i.e. public art of various youth subcultures) will be elaborated taking into consideration the matters of diaspora and immigrants and their ‘possible’ place and relationship within the translocal creative and technological flows.

Accordingly, this paper in its second half will concentrate on the films of one of the most recent notable film-makers/directors, who is also a second-generation Turkish immigrant in Germany: Fatih Akin. Thus, the questions such as how his films “re-present” the everyday life of the Turkish immigrants and their interaction with other people from different national or ethnic origins? What kind of spatial alterity can be found in the filmic production of Akin? In what ways do the discourses of the artistic practices such as in this case of Fatih Akin can form an ‘antagonistic creative space’ in relation to the hegemonic discourse of the practices of the city-spaces where these immigrants dwell? Taking these questions into consideration and proceeding the philosophical and sociological arguments which it has initially started this paper will discuss the “likely” linkages between technology, city-spaces, artistic practices and creative spaces of the immigrants.

In this paper, we survey how to develop a creative Zen learning space and community through interactive technology, digital art, and installation art. This research which has been implemented in Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC) includes “Creative Meditation Room” for teaching Zen meditation and the creative corridors, “z_Move corridor” and “z_Circle corridor”, for learning “walking Zen meditation”.

In “Creative Meditation Room”, we use wireless pressure-sensor technology, bio-sensors, and media art to detect participators’ body balance for assisting them to practice Zen meditation. We gather the participators’ balance data for developing Zen database and infer each participator’s Zen meditation level at the same time. In addition, we also transform participators’ Zen meditation data into ripple animation projected on the ceiling. Zen advisors can easily know each participator’s Zen meditation condition through observing the ripples and then give appropriate directions in time. In creative “z_Move corridor”, participators can start their “concentration practice” when they across the corridor. In this case, we use the chat room communicating technology to create the concentration practice system, which can help participators to learn how to concentrate their attention by moving a “Zen ball” through ten screens. Moreover, we also implement the system in mobile phone to let the participators remotely control the Zen ball’s movement through ubiquitous learning in any place and at any time. In creative “z_Circle corridor”, we use wireless-sensor networks technology and acoustic design to encourage and guide the participators to walk and keep still thought. In addition, the system also make the experienced participators to have more advanced practice of walking meditation at a slow pace and teach them how to maintain a peace mind in their busy daily life. (http://techart.tnua.edu.tw/fbi/p=3102)

Through Zen meditation practice activities in Dharma Drum Mountain, more and more people can immerse in our creative Zen learning space. After the tests and evaluations of user participation, we find out that the creative Zen learning space can not only inspire participator’s interest in Zen meditation but also increase the efficiency of Zen meditation education. Besides, we also develop a creative Zen learning community on Internet called “Zen map” which records all data of Zen meditation students’ learning process. Our creative Zen learning system is not only web e-learning system but also a real space-learning system.

In the future we hope the results of our research can extend to more places and inspire more people to enjoy Zen experience. Moreover, we also hope to realize the concept of Ubiquitous ZEN under cultural context and mind-brain cultivation.

Panel: Creativity as a Social Ontology

Ex­panded con­cepts of agency per­mit us to ques­tion what or who can be an ac­tive par­tic­i­pant in cre­ative ac­tiv­ity, al­low­ing us to re­visit the de­bate on au­thor­ship. We can ask whether cre­ativ­ity might be re­garded as a form of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion. How might we un­der­stand cre­ativ­ity as the in­ter­ac­tion of peo­ple and things rather than as an out­come of ac­tion?  Whilst cre­ativ­ity is often per­ceived as the prod­uct of the in­di­vid­ual artist, or cre­ative en­sem­ble, it can also be con­sid­ered an emer­gent phe­nom­e­non of com­mu­ni­ties, dri­ving change and fa­cil­i­tat­ing in­di­vid­ual or group cre­ativ­ity. Cre­ativ­ity may be re­garded as a per­for­ma­tive ac­tiv­ity re­leased when en­gaged through and by a com­mu­nity and thus un­der­stood as a process of in­ter­ac­tion.

In this con­text the model of the soli­tary artist, pro­duc­ing ar­ti­facts that em­body cre­ativ­ity, is ques­tioned as an ideal for achiev­ing cre­ative out­comes. In­stead, cre­ativ­ity is pro­posed as an ac­tiv­ity of ex­change that en­ables (cre­ates) peo­ple and com­mu­ni­ties. The cre­ation of new things, and the forms of ex­change en­acted around them, can func­tion to “cre­ate” not just things but also peo­ple, bind­ing them in so­cial groups and “cre­at­ing” the com­mu­nity they in­habit.  It thus be­comes pos­si­ble to con­ceive of cre­ativ­ity as emer­gent from and in­nate to the in­ter­ac­tions of peo­ple and to con­sider the gift-econ­omy as fun­da­men­tal to so­cial for­ma­tion. Such an un­der­stand­ing can func­tion to com­bat the dom­i­nant in­stru­men­tal­ist view of cre­ativ­ity, that de­mands of artists that their cre­ations have so­cial (e.g.: “eco­nomic”) value.  This con­tri­bu­tion to the panel dis­cus­sion will seek to en­gage these themes and con­cepts in the con­text of how on­line com­mu­ni­ties of cre­ative prac­ti­tion­ers form and in­ter­act.

Creatures Such As We is an installation designed to ensure that the mistakes of Western colonization are not repeated as humanity ventures beyond the confines of our planet. By superimposing the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of Mars on Earth and placing democratized augmented reality monuments at coordinates corresponding to the landing sites of these spacecraft, Creatures Such As We strives to present a hopeful vision of interplanetary exploration as a force of good. The monuments are not odes to the robotic, microbial and human colonizers, but instead optimistic digital edifices that reflect upon a world united by the need for discovery: existential, personal, and scientific. These monuments are a holistic vision of the unity required in the face of political fragmentation that binds us to a planet facing ecological ruin resulting from human inaction, exploitation, and greed. Creatures Such As We is an ephemeral reminder of what cannot be forgotten as we take our first steps towards becoming bi-planetary, from the dark history of colonization to the immense diversity and interconnectedness of Earth and the ecosystems that define it.

Panel: Creativity as a Social Ontology

This pre­sen­ta­tion looks at the for­ma­tion of var­i­ous cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties as they emerge through net­work prac­tices. Dig­i­tal art and elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture com­mu­ni­ties largely de­velop out of mail­ing lists, on­line ex­po­sure to work, and the for­ward­ing of links that oth­ers may find in­ter­est­ing. Over time, net­works of prac­ti­tion­ers begin to emerge based on affin­ity and how cer­tain work or prac­tice fits into the per­sonal on­to­log­i­cal priv­i­leg­ing. As such, com­mu­ni­ties are dis­trib­uted and ap­pear dis­junc­tive from the out­side, yet are in­clu­sive and con­joined by way of net­worked com­put­ers and aes­thetic/po­etic ac­cord.  Based on ob­ser­va­tion over the last decade or so of cre­ative dig­i­tal prac­tice, this pre­sen­ta­tion will look at trends and pat­terns of com­mu­nity de­vel­op­ment in elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture and dig­i­tal art.

Panel: The Madness of Methods: Emerging Arts Research Practices

Media con­ver­gence in the form of trans­me­dia sto­ry­telling fran­chises that dis­trib­ute con­tent across mul­ti­ple plat­forms is a grow­ing field of in­quiry in media stud­ies. A per­spec­tive of in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary de­sign en­ables us to also in­ves­ti­gate the emerg­ing con­ver­gence of user ex­pe­ri­ence across dif­fer­ent media. This paper traces a com­mon logic of ex­pe­ri­ence de­sign that in­forms the hy­brid trans­me­dia ob­jects that are theme parks, dig­i­tal games, pub­lic art pieces, and mu­se­ums. This is the logic of the toy city, the com­mu­nity of at­trac­tions that op­er­ates at the junc­ture of the ma­te­r­ial and the dig­i­tal, the spec­tac­u­lar and the in­ter­ac­tive, to cre­ate a sig­na­ture ex­pe­ri­ence for the user that de­fies medium spe­cific modes of feel­ing, know­ing, and cre­at­ing. Case stud­ies high­light the ways in which these media phe­nom­ena op­er­ate on three lev­els, as af­fec­tive ob­jects, as tech­no­log­i­cal de­vices, and as imag­i­na­tive worlds.

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

Vi­sual com­put­ing has ir­rev­o­ca­bly blurred the lines be­tween rep­re­sen­ta­tion and ab­strac­tion. Just as pho­tog­ra­phy with its in­no­v­a­tive re­al­ism changed the na­ture of paint­ing, so dig­i­tal image cap­ture and com­pu­ta­tional cre­ative processes are chang­ing the re­la­tion­ships be­tween pre­vi­ous tra­di­tional art media and di­rectly in­flu­ence our frame­works for in­ter­pret­ing new media works. In my work, I begin by tak­ing dig­i­tal pho­tographs, ma­nip­u­late them on the com­puter, cre­ate tra­di­tional draw­ings based on these works, re-dig­i­tize the works, and then cre­ate geo­met­ric, com­pu­ta­tion­ally based com­po­si­tions that could never have been drawn by hand but re­tain the hand-drawn mark­ing of the orig­i­nal draw­ings. The works are often fur­ther de­vel­oped by adding a time-based el­e­ment to cre­ate com­pu­ta­tional video draw­ings. The final com­bi­na­tions of old and new media, rep­re­sen­ta­tional el­e­ments and math­e­mat­i­cally in­spired ab­strac­tion, and still and time-based ex­plo­rations take ad­van­tage of the new vi­sual re­la­tion­ships and ways of think­ing made pos­si­ble by the com­puter.

Abstract
Online dating cultures engage users’ social, creative and emotional labour and this is seen as affective. For some theorists and artists, this process is inherently exploitative but the potential of these cultures also provides fuel for playful critique. The concept of ‘play’ is frequently used to describe users’ engagement digital cultures more broadly and artists have also long used the word ‘play’ to describe a relationship to their ideas and processes. We might assume that the difference between the two is that artists have a critical awareness of what they are ‘playing’. Given this, what broader portrait of a ‘player’ might exist at the site of ‘critical play’?

This question is explored through critical play as the production of digital artwork. Reflections on the outcome of a series of explorations of affection-images in gay online dating applications lead to the construction of a broader image of what it means to ‘play critically’. This contributes to discussions concerning play in games studies and art more generally, as well as criticism surrounding online dating cultures.

Critical Affection
This is a work in progress presentation proposal for my practice-based PhD project titled “Critical Affection”. Throughout my research I have produced a number of interactive pieces that critically represent (gay) online dating apps such as Tinder, Grindr and Hornet.
The research refers to the writing of Mary Flanagan on “Critical Play” [1] who accounts for the relationship between critical processes in art history and contemporary games studies. Much of Flanagan’s writing is a feminist account of how real-world scenarios are navigated or subverted through (artists’) doll play. I augment this from a queer perspective. In my own artistic methods I often allude to the perverse play of representations of bodies in digital 3D space as doll-like bodies, as well as use the game “The Sims 3” to set up and depict scenarios that reflect gay online dating.

Originally inspired by the work of Ludovico and Cirio especially “Face to Facebook” [2], their discussion of “Portraits of the XXI Century”[3] and my own usage of such apps, I incorporate an analysis of affection-image (facial imagery) adapted from Gilles Deleuze[4] which involves the discussion of caricature and the playful subversion of facial languages online.

My discussion will conclude by contextualizing my work within a broader community of practicing artists that have made similar playful critiques of dating apps in the past two years, notably Dries Verhoeven’s “Wanna Play?”[5], Cors Brinkman, Jeroen van Oorschot, Marcello Maureira, and Matei Szabo’s “Tender”[6], and many of the works by Robert Yang (“Cobra Club”, “Rinse and Repeat”, “Stick Shift”)[7].

Abstract

This paper considers the work of artists and activists who, since the 1990s, have worked with dress as survival mechanism and social tool. The result is a ‘body of records’ of performable and technological wearable practices that have resisted categorical branding. Some of the work is designed for the gallery or runway, but other pieces are presented, performed, or simply worn on the street. The latter contribute to a notion of the counter-public sphere similar to that described by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge: a space to generate fantasy and consciousness outside of structures and regimens of appropriated existence, what the authors call ‘frameworks of valorization’.

Abstract
Big Huggin‘ is an alternative interface game designed to critique the way we play. It is offered as part of the ongoing Critical Gameplay project. Instead of firing toy guns or gesturing abstractly, players must hug a large stuffed animal to win the game. The game has been played by more than 2000 people at 8 venues in North America, South America and Europe..

Introduction
Big Huggin‘ is a unique gameplay experienced designed by applying Critical Design methodologies to the implementation of a video game. Critical Design is an exercise in critique through which social-cultural values are exposed[1]. The process involves examining socio-cultural trends and producing artifacts that heighten awareness to their attributes. The ongoing application of Critical Design practiced in the Critical Gameplay project seeks not only to offer alternative play, but to highlight assumptions players have about what types of games are interesting, engaging and even worth creating[2]. In this way, Critical Gameplay combines the goals of Critical Design with the Captology. Catpology is the study of computers as persuasive technology [3]. Critical Gameplay aims to change the way people play by offering alternative ways to play.

Games in which players are awarded for offering affection are available, although they are largely provided as online play and commonly of a sexual nature[4]. There are also interfaces which have experimented with kissing [5], although such interfaces and their result are intimate or sexual.

The Critical Gameplay project games have the potential to provide solutions to a myriad of training and psychological challenges. While these potentials are acknowledged, it is not the primary goal of such work. Instead, the goal is to provide researchers, practitioners and consumers demonstrative work for intellectual consumption. As stated in early Critical Gameplay work, the goal is not financial profit, but intellectual profit.

Abstract
This paper describes the theory and implementation of a 2-tiered procedural rhetoric game. The game, Black Like Me, employs critical design to encourage players toward situational analysis instead of mere attribute matching. Players are presented with a color matching game at the surface, but the game is designed to reward players for holistically evaluating a scene and subverting the explicitly suggested game rules. The game is designed to train players toward perceiving ambiguity and employing alternative play strategies.

Introduction
The Critical Gameplay project is a 4 year ongoing project to create and embed critical design games. The games have been exhibited at a variety of academic showcases, creative exhibits and related events in Europe, North and South America. It is an effort to raise awareness around game design assumptions that permeate traditional play[1]. Since 2009 the games have been displayed at 25 venues.

Game designers are often reluctant to embrace alternative play within the systems they create. In reality some of the most successful play experiences are about designers merely providing a set of toys through which players can explore concepts. This is true of megahits like Minecraft and World of Warcraft to construction set franchises like Civilization, The Sims and Tycoon games. However, the fundamental distinction is that many of these games seek to impose specific ideologies about the way systems operate. The Sims for example, can be understood as a model of capitalist ideology [2]. This practice in games is as old as Monopoly itself, a game designed to impart Georgist economics [3]. The history of such games is largely tied to the implementation of political ideologies or game theory.

On the other end of the spectrum are contemporary, self-identified social impact games. These games attempt to provide overt messages that are similar in character to first generation educational films. The games are often literal and their messages direct. Such games frequently ostracize their experience, leaving it at the fringes of player preferred play and interest. The games may ultimately become popular among the niche that produces and champions it. This is appropriate for developing a community around the practice, but it fails to impact those who do not know about such play or the concepts it seeks to promote.

The goal of the third generation of Critical Gameplay practice is to bridge this dichotomy in what is commonly described as procedural rhetoric [4]. Instead of providing overt messaging on the game’s agenda, it seeks to offer fundamentally basic and inviting gameplay based on new concepts in play. The gameplay continues to embed a message through mechanic, but the mechanic is subtle. The goal is to create games that can be popular of their own right. Yet, instead of revealing themselves as social impact, players do what they naturally do – look for the fastest way to win the game. The game’s message is embedded not in the explicit rules of play, but in the resulting methodological framework players derive to win. The lesson is not in the winning or playing as instructed, but in the player’s experience in discovering a better way to win.

The question the modern, digital designer must ask is how contemporary computer games utilize their larger player base to encourage players to think differently about the systems they assume on a daily basis. How can a game make people more aware of their own innate stereotypes? How can designer’s help people practice becoming more open minded, or perhaps even adopt an entirely new mindset?

A presentation of works utilizing digital photography, electromechanical sculpture, interactivity and space to create meaningful often participatory experiences.

The use of biology as an art medium is not a recent phenomenon. It is likely that ever since early humans have started domestication, animals and plants have been selected, and consequently modified, based on aesthetic values. Modern biology made possible the modification of life in an extremely controlled way, but also offered access to many other techniques: from protein structure analysis to direct visualization of neurons in the living brain.

Biotechnology was born to explore these new tools for the benefit of humankind. It is becoming possible to develop new therapies for incurable diseases, but at the same time the public fears misuse of this powerful technology. As society becomes aware of biotechnology, with all its hopes and fears, artists have started to include references to biotechnology in their works. Furthermore, modern biology and biotechnology offer the opportunity to create art using biology as a new medium. We are witnessing the birth of a new form of art: art created in test-tubes, using laboratories as art studios.

My work focuses on the possibilities that modern biology offers to artists. I have been working in research laboratories, alongside scientists, creating artworks exploring the possibilities of different biology methods from fields as diverse as neurosciences, developmental biology, genomics, protein structure, or cell biology. I have been trying not only to portray the recent advances of biological sciences, but to incorporate biological material as new art media: DNA, proteins, cells and organisms offer an opportunity to explore novel ways of representation and communication. Thus, although lacking formal scientific training, my recent artistic activity has been conducted in research laboratories. As a consequence, the resulting artworks are influenced with inputs from the artist and from collaborative scientists. Such artworks can be seen as the outcome of interactions across borders.

An analytical and experimental approach of activations profiles for audio-graphic navigation in foliage clusters.

The paper is part of the Topophonie research project, the aim to which is navigation within audio-graphic clusters. Clusters are wide ranges of objects of the same class. By Audio-graphic we mean synchronized audio and graphic object behaviour, both modalities been implemented in a single action.

Among the various examples of these kinds of objects, such as rain, flocks, grains etc, this paper focuses on foliage. We have selected two main audio and visual behaviour in order to find a good and costless way to simulate: the wind and a character crossing foliage.

This paper presents the work of designers and sound designers. It is an experimental approach, where we have tried to analyse the audio-graphic characteristics of foliage through video and simple simulation models. Within the project we are working on the concept of activation profile. An activation profile is a simple way to represent active and shaped event triggers. We needed to be sure that this concept was perceptible. Therefore, we have compared the user experience relative to two different symbolic activation profiles: a point for a character and a line for the wind.

The approach of this poster is signed by the personal experience with the crossroads, as a Colombian mestizo, between my Indian inheritance, represented in my contact with the corpus of knowledge and science maintained by our shamans (curacas, werjayas, mamos, taitas, etc) and the corpus of knowledge represented by my western education and contact with technology.

Theme

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-Dylan Thomas

This poster revolves around the encounter of western and indigenous ancestral cosmo visions, represented in the search of a mestizo individual at an artistic, aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual level. It depicts the comings and goings of an artist who has chosen to enrich his inner world in the sources of ancestral’ abyayalan knowledge and visions and who has found in electronic art a space to establish a dialogue between his western and ancestral formations.
The work in minga (collective, lending a hand), from the aboriginal tradition is closer to collaborative and transdisciplinary work proper of electronic art and multimedia. The new forms of narrative are making a full circle, without knowing it, and arriving in realms proper to oral tradition.

Session: Cinema after the Digital

‘CrossWorlds’  is a work about political manipulation. It comes from my experience of the both sides of the Berlin Wall.

The most popular part of American propaganda was delivered  through the Hollywood movie’s industry: “What the people believe is true“.  One of the most popular slogans of Soviet propaganda in the same period was “The dreams of the people came true“ – a way to explain to Soviet people that they already got the materialization of the “Hollywood dream”, and that “Each day we live happier!” Susan Buck-Morss  gives a detailed analysis of the similitude between Soviet and American propaganda since the twenties to the end of Cold War.

I’ve built a particular protocol to realize « CrossWorlds ». I’ve selected some of the most popular pictures from the American and Soviet propaganda. I’ve taken seven American and seven Soviet slogans. I’ve encoded each slogan as an electronic tag composed with two pictures – one Soviet and one American. Each tag has a black part and a white part, it can be decoded tanks to this contrast. The slogans are also composed with threats and promises. In each tag one of two slogans represents it’s black part, another one – the white part.

« CrossWorlds » is an interactive program. The program is connected to the NY Stock Echange Server an it generates interactive electronic tags in real time. Each tag contains a slogan from the ideological propaganda of the cold war period. Then Dow Jones goes up, American slogans are encoded. Then Dow Jones goes down, the program takes a slogans from a Soviet database.

Visual artist and Academic Fellow at University of Saskatchewan Linda Duvall was invited by the Interdisciplinary Center for Culture and Creativity at U of S to curate an exhibition that highlighted the range of research being undertaken by undergraduate and graduate students across the Arts and Sciences programs. The intent was to show some of the research and art projects that have looked critically at the role of digital media in culture, as well as to initiate a dialogue among these students and the faculty that support them.

The exhibition was titled CTRL – O, the keyboard shortcut for “open file.” This show presented students who were paying attention to the possibilities of new global networks, and innovative intersections of the fine arts, humanities, sciences and computer sciences. These projects included analyses of social networking sites, use of new media in community building or teaching, computer modeling and simulations, and technically complicated digital manipulations such as 3-D and digital collages.

While the aim was laudable and the exhibition presented challenging projects, the curatorial process revealed much about the gaps between disciplines. From the beginning, Duvall noticed that each area had its own specialized and idiosyncratic language. Even more instructive were the conventions utilized by the various areas for communicating information. In areas such as Sociology and English the students included as much textual information as possible under titles such as goals, objectives, and checklists. The visual elements were clearly secondary, and proposed learning was through reading the compiled information. The Computer Science and Science students presented projects that included participatory elements such as buttons or models. Here the learning emerged through interacting with the material presented. The visual art students presented material that contained no clear conclusions, but embedded elusive personal questions. Their viewers were left to draw their own conclusions.

Duvall will present a range of visuals from this exhibition with a focus on both the challenges and potential within this wide discrepancy in the conventions of communication.

The drive and expansion of industrial capitalism has led us to the total realisation of the consumer society. This society is split absolutely between leisure and labour: a leisure society in which we work to obtain the instruments of leisure, the machines of pleasure — and this split organises our thoughts in every way. In our desperation to free ourselves, we rush with open arms to the soothsayers of the technical futures, to the Utopias made possible by technology. We, and they, forget that it is purely a human and social decision how any technology is used. How do we meet the challenge to create the freedom, intellectually and psychologically, that will allow us to use technology the way we dream we are able to: to make a better world?
Through a reconsideration of the work of Henri Lefebvre and Raoul Vaneigem, in identifying and criticizing the passivity of consumer society, this paper investigates the relationships of new technologies, and concepts of media freedom. McIver will refer to her research on the Undercurrents radical video publishers. Adbusters and The Media Foundation, and to her own work in Russian television.

Panel: Mind the Gap

El Paso, Texas/Juarez, Mex­ico is one of the largest bi-na­tional urban en­vi­ron­ments in the world. The cities of El Paso and Juarez have be­come in­creas­ingly iso­lated from one an­other since Jan­u­ary of 2008, when drug vi­o­lence in Mex­ico began to climb to un­prece­dented lev­els.  The Rubin Cen­ter has been a site for the de­vel­op­ment of a se­ries of cross-bor­der pro­jects that unite res­i­dents on both sides of the bor­der using both tech­no­log­i­cal and tac­tile ex­pe­ri­ences, in­clud­ing Tania Can­di­ani’s Bat­tle­ground (2009), Ivan Abreu’s Cross Co­or­di­nates (2010), Ar­can­gel Con­stan­tini’s con­tra <~> flujo (2010), and a year-long, in-process pro­ject with LA based artists Mario Ybarra and Karla Diaz of Slan­guage,  that con­nects youth on both sides of the bor­der using urban tac­tics and vir­tual com­mu­ni­ties (on ex­hi­bi­tion be­gin­ning May 2012).

Videogames are rapidly becoming a major medium of contemporary art. As videogames move into the popular and conceptual mainstream with exhibitions occurring at major international spaces, how are the complexities of this new medium playing out among arts workers, collectors and the spaces in which games are exhibited? More specifically, how are curators, artists and institutional spaces within the Asia Pacific region responding to the opportunities and challenges posed by videogames in arts practice? Are best practices being adopted from US and European models, or, given the Asia Pacific’s standing as the largest producer and consumer of videogames, and recognising its long history of videogame art from exponents such as Feng Mengbo and Cao Fei, are distinct and region-specific trends emerging? This panel considers future and present practices in the curation of contemporary videogame art.

The panel addresses the possibilities for collaborative curatorial practice, responding to the wider critical concern of how socio-technological systems (such as networks, online platforms and social software tools) have changed the practice of curating.

The suggestion is that curating not only increasingly involves open socio-technological systems but itself can be described in terms of open systems. Describing curating in such terms implies a state in which the curatorial system continuously interacts with its environment demonstrating characteristics of openness: the system is opened up to the communicative processes of producers/users and to the divergent exchanges that take place that disrupt established social relations of production and distribution. Thus, and importantly, the software opens up curating to dynamic possibilities and transformations beyond the usual institutional model (analogous to the model of production associated with the industrial factory) into the context of networks (and what is referred to nowadays as the ‘social factory’).

This tendency – that emerged from the shared perception of the Web and the Internet as an increasingly independent and open platform for the production and presentation of art – is well instantiated in a number of historical and more current projects such as Eva Grubinger’s C@C – Computer-Aided Curating (1993-1995), Alexei Shulgin’s Desktop Is (1997), Runme (2003), Source Code (Luis Silva, 2005), TAGallery (2007), undeaf  (2007), Hack-able Curator (2007), Robert Lisek’s FACE (2007), Pall Thayer’s CodeChat  (2007) and  kurator software (2007).

The panel reflects upon new curatorial forms and an expanded description of curating enabled by social technologies and an open systems approach.

Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa (chair), Vicente Matallana, Martha Patricia Niño Mojica, Yukiko Shikata, Luís Silva

(Long paper)

Keywords: Disruption, disruptive technologies, prototyping, authenticity, curating, action research, criteria, audience experience, interactivity.
ACM Classification Keywords: J.5 – Arts and Humanities, Fine Arts General Terms Design; Documentation; Experimentation; Human Factors; Measurement; Theory; Verification

This paper focuses on curating interactive art in ways disruptive to the traditionally disparate disciplines of fine arts, creative robotics, business theory and philosophy. It takes the interdisciplinary design of interactive systems outside labs/studios and into institutions and cityscapes in the form of prototype exhibitions. The artworks become schema for hypotheses offered for evaluation through the medium of audience engagement. This PhD research focuses on authenticating the audience’s experience of interactive art; first defining parameters for authenticity within fine arts and creative robotics, then examining how, through the application of evaluative frameworks to iterative exhibition processes, one might capture and utilize the audience as a material in itself. Through an examination of responsive systems, both artists and curator will be led through critical and creative spaces by speculative design, audience engagement and evaluation, and analysis of data collected. The exhibitions for examination are/will be produced by PhD researcher Deborah Turnbull Tillman through her research initiative New Media Curation (NMC).

This article contributes to this panel’s discussion with the case study of FACTORS (Rio Grande do Sul Science and Art Technology Festival) and its curatorial challenges in the context of Brazil and South America. The event has brought together Brazilian, Portuguese, Argentine and Mexican artists and their established and emerging research from recent years. The festival’s curatorial argument is based on a transdisciplinary concept to address issues such as digital art, art and robotics, art and nature, NeuroArt, BioArt, sustainability and art. The Festival is proposing that for the edition, FACTORS 4.0, curatorship be shared by a Brazilian and an Argentine researcher, strengthening South-South sociocultural conditions on the Latin American continent. In this fourth edition, the festival is part of the structure of Bienalsur 2017 and is thinking collaboratively about the political idea of cultural belonging in local and global terms.

The practice of curating is live and temporal. It has shifted dramatically from its anonymous backstage origin within dusty museums to a role at the forefront of modern art, and is responsible for conjuring both a synergy and a dynamic that operates across a multitude of levels. Curation is a rapidly growing practice and discourse that is fundamentally shifting the ways in which we view and receive art.

Much of this shift has been influenced by the works being curated, and with a growing body of works being process-led as opposed to object-based; the practice of curation has had to evolve accordingly. This evolution also encompasses the use of alternative exhibition spaces, a movement away from white-walled galleries, and the historic agendas these imply.

The increased integration of media-related artworks into mainstream art agendas has contributed to this development of the curatorial role, as it has for collectors, gallerists and archivists. Although it can be argued that performative and interactive works have been curated using traditional methods for a long time now, it is really media-practices that are demanding an alternative perspective.

This paper will look at how responsive methods and approaches are called for when curating media-artworks, and how they shift the curatorial role to that of an active practitioner. It will consider curation as praxis; positioning it at a point between what is known and what will be revealed.

It will refer to actual exhibition strategies employed by the author, and look to further discuss how dynamic curatorial approaches can be integrated into mainstream curatorial roles, and how these can subsequently evolve thinking on the presentation and display of contemporary art.

This paper will address some of the more pressing theoretical and curatorial issues facing the new media technologies and the postmodern museum. Too often established curators and museum directors are ignorant of the relevant socio-cultural formations, histories, effects and contexts of the new media in their problematic muselogical efforts to contextualise them in our post-mechanical age. Consequently, artists, technologists and academics who are concerned with the new computer-inflected media are poorly served by the postmodern museum’s attempt to present itself as a mass medium spectacle in our individual and collective lives. There is a pronounced aesthetic and ethical abdication evident in the more recent ahistorical drive to present the new technical media in the high-modernist ‘white cube space’ (0’Doherty) of today’s muselogical landscape. We need to remind ourselves that galleries, museums and the academy are obliged to examine contemporary museological practice in the context of a critique of amnesia as a mass-mediated malady of late-capitalist culture. This is not new in itself, as Andreas Huysen has recently reminded us, with Adorno’s, Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s inter-war writings on culture’s obsession with memory and the fetish nature of mass cultural forms. The postmoderm museum, despite its celebratory rhetoric of online avant-guardism, should be interrogated in terms of how today’s cybernetic virus of amnesia is problematising memory in everyday culture. Further, there is also a curatorial refusal (particularly in Australia; but noticeable elsewhere as well) to acknowledge the new media arts as a valid integral part of the overall conceptual and material architecture of the museum today.

In this paper I will discuss some of the techniques that I use as an artist to instill curiosity. The criteria for my ‘discourse’ are set out by Stephen Bann in his book “Ways around Modernism” (Stephen Bann, 2006) wherein he formulates an “ambitious brief for the present-day artist in respect to curiosity”.

I will elaborate on this brief with references to my own work, and show how a media-archeological mindset, facilitated by a strong interest in and linkeage between art and science, can be an important source of inspiration for an artist.

Being a media artist, I try to expand the code of the video apparatus by subverting parameters of the medium. One media-archeology based technique that I employ is re-injecting analogue elements into this highly digital apparatus. The technique of anamorphosis is one such analogue form of mediation that I employ in my PhD research: using multiple cathoptrical anamorphoses with multiple optical (analogue) ‘lenses’ as mediators between the digital apparatus and the observer.

This approach touches the core of my PhD research wherein I explore how interventions on a number of parameters of the video apparatus can generate a sense of wonder and curiosity with the observer, in search of a contemporary iteration of the concept ‘cinema of attractions’ (Tom Gunning, 1990).

‘Cinema of attractions’ being an everpresent undercurrent surging to the surface whenever the fascination for and the explicitation of the medium takes the lead.

It is clear that this stress on curiosity as part of an artist’s brief also has an impact on research methodologies being used: research through design could in this context easily be rephrased as research through curiosity.

Finally I will take this discourse one step further: if the artist succeeds in passing through (part of) his own deeply personal mode of curiosity to his audience, only then can curiosity start to offer the building blocks for a new epistemology for the present day (Madeleine Grynsztejn, 2007).

Founded in 2005, thejamjar is a community arts space that works to promote artists and support the development of Dubai’s arts scene through its extensive arts programme, educational initiatives, and community projects. The 4000 sq. ft. studio and project space offers the region’s first Public DIY Painting Studio alongside a year round exhibition and events calendar presenting a diverse range of art forms, including visual art, film, music, theatre and more.

thejamjar has moulded itself to the needs of the community and prides itself on making art accessible to all creating a platform for dialogue and interaction amongst like-minded individuals, artists, researchers, writers and creators.

Included in thejamjar’s extensive portfolio of services is art consulting through its brand 17A Art Consultants, and events organizing for private and public art projects involving professional artists, collectives, schools, universities, non-for-profit and corporate organizations. thejamjar is also the creator and driving force behind ArtintheCity, an initiative committed to promoting arts in the region, and encompasses the ArtBus, www.artinthecity.com, and the publication of the UAE’s ArtMap.

Harold Fortuin demonstrates “Curvaceous” the artist’s software for the computer as musical performer and for creating music straddling the borders of aural perception.

Includes a description and analysis of three computational cutting technology processes used to make hard copy ‘in the round’ artefacts in the laboratory and studio.

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

Work­ing as an in­de­pen­dent cu­ra­tor is a chal­lenge in any coun­try, yet in China, where in­sti­tu­tions are gov­ern­ment run and pri­vate gal­leries charge huge ex­hi­bi­tion fees the stakes are even higher. Fig­ure in the cost of ex­hi­bi­tion ma­te­ri­als and equip­ment needs for new media art and the prospects are even bleaker. Xi­aoy­ing Juli­ette Yuan, who has been cu­rat­ing new media art in China since 2004, will dis­cuss the chal­lenges and cre­ative so­lu­tions for work­ing as an in­de­pen­dent cu­ra­tor in China.

Cyanovisions: The Transmutation of Light Harvesting Bodies focuses on cyanobacteria, the first light-harvesting organisms on the planet to photosynthesize. Humans generate the pollutants that cause aggregations of toxic cyanobacteria blooms, yet we also create new life forms through synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and artificial life. What would the future look like if humans and cyanobacteria merged membranes, genes, and metabolisms?

Inspired by the recent experiments in CRISPR gene editing technologies, Cyanovisions posits potentials for biological hybridity and scientific spiritualities with microbial species that recognize the inextricable relationship of humans to those of other organisms. Though the trajectory for millennia has distanced the human body and consciousness from the chemical processes and organisms that it is composed of, it is eternally linked to forces, processes, and organisms.

Cyanovisions offers potentialities of symbiotically living with both other species and our technologies as extensions of nature. Cyanobacteria are one of the most ancient life forms; they were responsible for first creating oxygen on our planet as the first light-harvesting organisms. Through endosymbiosis they became the chloroplasts that plants use to process sunlight into energy today.

Cyanovisions imagines a future where the light harvesting pigment phycocyanin is engineered into human bodies not only to surpass their limitations but to protect against the toxic conditions that we have induced on the planet. Portrayed in the short film are landscapes of algal blooms and the inner workings of a DIY Biology Lab. Science fact becomes science fiction as lab technicians move from routine experiments into an embodied ritual as part of a speculative experiment. As a cine-poem, this piece meditates on different states of bacteria and water, the transformation of light, and the embodiment of this transmutation. Photobioreactor systems growing cyanobacteria cultures are incorporated into the installation, along with speculative future prostheses of the human body.

Poster statement

Cyber Kawachi is an interactive, artistic documentary based on the sounds of Kawachi (Japan) and its epic story singers. Cyber Kawachi expresses the hidden power of the Kawachi suburbs, overflown by airplanes, darkened by the highways and the smoke of old factories, distorted by a series of high-tech slums, but brutally animated by liminal characters; the trivial, local men and women of Kawachi. They insist on singing against the wind in winter, thus creating these cracked voices of Kawachi, symbolizing quarrels, alcohol and a life outside the society.

A Co-production with The Banff Center for the Arts, Canada, 1997

Abstract (short paper)

Increased awareness of cyber activism and civil disobedience in Hong Kong has led to a concurrent proliferation of so-called ‘derivative works.’ These computer-manipulated images are created for, and disseminated via, the Internet in response to the contested political climate of the city. This paper treats such derivative works as visual evidences to examine the ethics of image-making and photographic manipulation within the milieu of Hong Kong. It also discusses the cyber behaviour and interchange of image consumption and production via the Internet. Selected derivative works from social media and discussion forum in Hong Kong are framed as political expressions in relation to debates about pornography, misogyny, racism and terrorism. The emancipatory nature of derivative image-making practices, specifically nonhierarchical dissemination, is contrasted with an argument that these same practices are seen as a form of cyber terrorism that reinforces hatred of the ‘other.’ Derivative works, I argue, are not merely images of personal and political expressions but sites that embed and shape ideological repression. An image democracy without gender and racial justices as well as image ethics is not a future of hope and promise.

Cyberart and the New Territories of Art is the first major survey research of works in electronic arts by contemporary artists of Cyberspace.The research yields an intriguing and diverse array of works that explores new potentials for creative expression and interactivity. As part of my research, I try:

1. to preview and analyze the new dimension and strategy of Art in the new territories of cyberspace;
2. to look for innovations capable of reflecting the changes in consciousness which have undeniably taken place over the last three decades, to create an artistic and theoretical network that would interact with the networks of other parts of the world.
3. In order to focus on new strategies and new ideologies of Contemporary Art, a free artists’ forum was created.The following subjects have been examined:
4. the development of art in post-totalitarian Cyberspace in comparison with the cultural situation in post-industrial societies;
5. the changes of cultural consciousness in Cyberspace as a result of the introduction of new technologies, electronic media and non-traditional forms of cultural activity;
6. processes of integration and dissemination in post-totalitarian regions.The expected outcomes should allow;
7. to anticipate the expansion of the dissemination of information, entertainment and social discourse in Cyberspace;
8. to stimulate artists who work in electronic medium, or who are considering it;
9. to involve and inform different audiences, to interest institutions in artists’ use of electronic medium, to inform European students of the potential for expression and communication using this medium.

The two authors suggest to build a CD-R0M of fiction interactive, with the goal to developed new possibilities of navigation. One of their basic concerns in the digital arts is the potential form of the navigation, in other words to develop new ways to map a digital work. In this sense, to explore a new navigation, which Paula Perissinotto and Ricardo Barreto are calling ‘dynamic navigation’, is the possibility that the navigator or user simultaneously navigate, modify and produce a dynamic development of a choreography, avoiding like this the mere reaction of interactive in the outline input and output. The ‘dynamic navigation’ would take an uncertain production on the part of the user by taking him to the creative and inventive use of the navigation.

Keywords: participation, interaction, open-ended game design, metaverse, oSNS, deviantArt

From its first introduction onwards, the concept of cybernetics spread widely through many branches of academy and percolated into the everyday life soon after. Even today, it continues to affect our social and cultural life greatly. In this paper, we will trace the impact of cybernetics on electronic art, and how this impact resonates with 21st centuries’ social online networks and metaverses in the idea of participation, co-creation, and constant flux.

In this presentation, I will re-apply Benjamin’s critique of a ‘Mythic’ technological/historical progress, developed in his Passagen-Werk of the 1930’s, to the celebratory rhetoric which currently surrounds the Net. I will also examine the adequacy of Lyotard’s notion of the ‘Sublime’ — as the experience we have when faced by the necessity to represent for ourselves an experience which lies beyond our possible means of comprehension — when applied to representations of Cyberspace. Is such a postmodern rejection of master narratives simply a re-invention of the ‘Mythic’ denial of individual agency in the face of technological progress?

Fact: FORM FOLLOWS COMPRESSION. With a telematic tattooing machine strapped to your body the motif is filtered from the cognitive through the digital into the mechanical and downloaded under your skin. History happening all at once and now. “This painter. Real classical. Bio-meth”. (Virtual Light).  Collapse. Entertainment, media and the new establishment. CyberSex unwillingly developed it’s very own aesthetic. It created a series of images—beautiful humanoids covering their private parts with plastic gadgets in neon and anthracite. Clean and slick; hit and run. No scars, no blood, no body — just pleasure. FORM FOLLOWS FETISH. I never saw it. EyberTattoo? How ’96. The aesthetic of the interface. Information relies on com-pression. WYSIWYG is what the machine made for you. FORM FOLLOWS CROSS-PLATFORM. Cognition follows reconstruction. Beauty is in the control files of the beholder and vectors become the brush stroke of the art of digital revolution. The logo which has been converted by EyberTattoo conveys both. The reference to the corporation and the reference to the interface. Compression is the aesthetic prosthesis of the picture. In the context of mutual affect between the application and the compression it establishes an aesthetic on its own. Somewhere along the on-line we lost the link of the signified. But when? The iconography of the internet is the iconography of colonialism: ships and anchors, explorers, flags and oceans. FORM FOLLOWS SCOUTS. The seaside metaphor has been dusted down and reintroduced into high tech navigational systems. The mythology of the sea as U.S. American epics: Mayflower, Boston tea party, Netscape Navigator 3.0… Whereas sailors used to be the plug-inns for cultural imagery, they have long been exchanged by eternal carriers. Stigma, Paper, Fax, Internet. Today the tattoo.gif is being culturally exchanged at #tattoopics. There we go, and where do we want to go today? The new agents: While everybody is talking about uploading the self we are still pondering on downloading identity. Why is that? Here and Now: content is the act of detaching signifier and signified (when talking *about* the net). Users: we are encouraged to stay on the surface. In fact: we have to, or how are we expected to deal with the inflation of information? Call it post-modern? Economical and political success of colonialism legitimized detaching the surface form of culture from the origin of the colonies and reapplying the movable cultural heritage to enrich the fashion of the home countries. Using the imagery of colonialism as the SI of internet navigation we are encouraged to occupy and imbibe. Turn the search engine on and bookmark your territory. Who is supposed to read all this? Talking aesthetics/ politics. FORM FOLLOWS. Next thing we know someone will work on an application to directly translate a CyberTattoo control file into data vectors and render them onto virtual surfaces. Hey, the animated tattoo for the next millennium. Why didn’t we think of that?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the bodily threshold, which is the right to belong inside or outside the body, determined using subjective motivation. The foundations and features of the cyborg and prosthesis are explained in detail in the context of contemporary culture. Borrowing the term “xenembole” from veterinary medicine, the study further discussed providing a way to coexist with technology in addition to the grafting of flesh and extensions. The methods implemented on digital media texts, life phenomena, and art works revealed multiple contexts and code hints. The author used cases to illustrate the interactions between the body and prosthesis and examined the relationship of deconstruction and recontruction of the body. It can be concluded from the findings that bodily threshold is a dual system theory with two types of working strategies, namely wonder body and technical body. The results indicated that the theory can accommodate existing blind spots of interpretation and those beyond perception.

In her text, “The Virtual Body in Cyberspace,” media arts scholar Anna Balsamo coins the term “cultural autism” to refer to the new intersubjective experiences which arise from inhabiting the information environments of VR. Balsamo uses this term to characterize the virtual body as being a “disabled foil to the presumed able-bodied ‘real’ communicator.”

In recognizing that this term is drawn from a reductive understanding that people with autism are removed from “authentic” bodily experiences, “Cyborg Encounters” draws from Art Historian, Anne Pasek’s text, “Errant Bodies: Relational Aesthetics, Digital Communications, and the Autistic Analogy,” by considering how the term cultural autism can be used to positively reflect alternate lived experiences through digital media. Combining Pasek’s notion with Judith Halberstam’s low theory and haptics, this paper explores the opportunities granted through limited game mechanics as well as different gaming communities in order to investigate how players corporeal act of embodying an avatar creates a celebratory experience for differently abled bodies.

In a peculiar dynamic pixels melt in an hypothetic city : the cyvers city and the informational one…A particular idea of space-time is generated  by ‘strecthing’ the time. Movements of evolution and degradation merge from the text in un ambiguous and apparently linear space. At the first sight, the spectator does not recognize the place or view of the city. With the application of an algorithmic- poetical language, we reach the essential meaning of Cyvers…

The first sequences that become visible concern changes that man produces in the environment. The images’ mutation is related to the recent epidemics and environmental catastrophes that motives the scientific environment. After a while the signs and indications appear in a kind of loop, but in an extra-temporal text-space. By technological means I create a metaphor of living processes and represent the historical changes that men produced in the environnement.

In the project Cloning Shapes the images are born of a flux created by a particular program and algorithmic. The words are transformed into images letters, viruses and pixels generated by a genetic, unpredictable and evolutive algorithm. In the global era, cyvers is a synthesis of morphogenetics and physics contents, constructing a total art work.

It is in this way that I understand the peer to peer network, in the construction of a new poetical and intelligent environment. Poesis and techne synthesize the actual language of a digital civilisation. The general meaning of my project is that with cyvers :  poetry and techne we can change the world.

(Short paper)

Keywords: data, visualisation, generative, art, poetry

Inspired by Tristan Tzara’s DaDa poetry, in which the words of a newspaper article are randomly reassembled to create an original poem, DaDa Visualisation is a whimsical interactive artwork producing dynamic generative visualisations based on a catalogue of poems. This paper outlines the work and examines the key issues and ideas to which it responds. It defines data visualisation as a lens that is increasingly applied to all aspects of our lives, and while typically heralded as a revelatory scientific instrument it shows data-vis as a creative cultural form. Fundamentally, DaDa Visualisation is an irreverent celebration of our fascination with data and data graphics but also provides a valuable critical perspective, reminding us that data visualisations are neither benign nor impartial but the product of authorial agency.

Regarding 0rgia, his first play, written in 1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini said:
“Orgia relains the habits of the lyrical author, who considers the monologue as the most dramatic of theatrical events. It retains enough ‘action’ that cursed action that the cinema, television and the gesticular theatre have since monopolised”.

Pier Paolo Pasolini also gives the key to his poetic production with this expression:
“Ab gioia le rossignol qui chante ab gioia: joie par joie“.

And it is this expression alone, without cultural explanation or any other factor, that Jean Lambert-Wild has tried to recapture in the preparation for death of which Orgia is a symbol. It was very important to him that the scenery reflects the latest techniques for communication. The Daedalus system is a scenic interaction between actors and artificial organisms. These organisms have been created from algorithms inspired by living organisms that can be found at the bottom of the sea. We call these artificial organisms ‘Posydones’.

Dala.org

This paper argues that the specifics of dance as a language, as being beyond writing at the same time as being a form of writing itself, can be used as a tool to evidence an aesthetic of code that includes a direct empathy with a formal, machinic feeling and not a metaphor of this feeling. The paper focuses on two specific cases: the live-coding performance The Theatre of Re-Sources by programmer and dancer Joana Chicau, which concretely provides connections between dance and code through its exploration of distances, and the Cunningham Technique developed by choreographer Merce Cunningham, which rids movement of any affect to later free the body through movement, illustrating a relationship between the formal and the feeling. The uxtaposition of these two works not only proposes an aesthetic of code that transverses the problems of its formal language, but it also illustrates a possible methodology for a reading of this aesthetic that goes beyond the instrumental and the expert.

This talk will look at the various ways human figures can be represented in computer graphics, and at the methods available for animating such figures. Dancing will be examined in terms of the principles of human perception of space and time, the conventions of music and dance,and the physical constraints of space and time. These lead to representation of a dance as a sentence in a formal grammar, and as a straightforward way of making a computer figure dance. The additional problems of two figures dancing together will be discussed, and examples shown of experimental computer animation of two figures dancing together. For comparison, a live demonstration of Australian New Vogue.

The main subject of this artist talk is the discussion between “analogue” and “digital” and “virtual reality” and “natural world” , As technology develops, Virtual reality is becoming a huge part of People’s lives, and many analogue things has been replaced by digital over past years. But on the other hand, we still emphasize the importance of physical space and analogue.

In this confusing transition period what is the virtue we need to follow, does Virtual Reality (VR) can alter our state of consciousness? Or we need to take close look what happened to analog while everyone is watching digital?

Also, end of the talk, the artist going to introduce her project ‘Dance of infinity’, by this hybrid ritualistic dance which made by combining layers of digital moving with analogue still images, the artist Red Pig Flower examines the existing relationship between cyberspace and reality.

In this paper, I introduce an interactive dance performance that applied a feedback loop to the 3D point cloud of a dancer’s movement. Along with simple delay line buffer, feedback loop structure enables motion data accumulated and created a rhythmicality to a single dancer’s movement and enabled to build up a structure of numerous movements in the space. This approach enabled flourishing and complex pattern output with a simple pipeline. Parameters were controlled by an operator in real-time, so that it gives more liveliness and dramatic flow.

In dance, we have conducted research towards musical and graphical augmentation of human movement. We have built DanceSpace: a stage in which music and graphics are generated on the fly by the dancer’s movements. A small set of musical instruments is virtually attached to the dancer’s body and generates a melodic soundtrack in tonal accordance with a soft background musical piece. Meanwhile, the performer projects graphics onto a large back screen using the body as a paint brush. In this context, the computer’s role is that of an assistant choreographer: the system is able to improvise a soundtrack and a visual accompaniment while the performer is creating or rehearsing a piece using their body as the interface. This is a great advantage when the choreographer wishes to create a dance performance based on the pure expression of body movements, and not by following a pre-chosen musical score.

Humans have a unique ability to build formal languages. We use them for both communicate among us, but also to communicate with the machines we assemble. Computer programming languages and natural languages are both formal languages. Nonetheless they stay at the antipodes: one is close to our anthropological way of communicate and the other is close to how the inner machine logic works. But, they both instantly establish an understandable abstract environment to describe processes. Their point of contact is centered in the way we’re able to write programming language code closer to our natural language (English is the universally adopted one) transversally modifying the way we formulate what we’d like the machine to do, and so generating a significant output. This formulation is a hybrid territory where pure language, explicit dynamic structures and simple to complex formulas collide. Loops, cycles that run depending on value-driven decisions are outputting computed meanings. Words and numbers, meaningfully sequenced are directing the formation of a text, a drawing, a picture, a sound, a movie, or a combination of all the above, with the programmer acting as an open scriptwriter and the user acting as a temporary director and spectator at the same time. These two actors (the programmer and the user) have an invisible and time-delayed relationship that is defined through the programming code, and the same code embodies the many adapted and twisted senses mutating the natural language. This is the territory where historically “software art” steps in. Playing with language and its power to generate impressive output thanks to its ability to use a readable formal language, that is potentially generating infinite sense (as the natural language does).

Abstract

In this paper, we present the algorithmic interpretation of free body movements with sound. The interacting person moves within a specified area while his or her movements are detected by a laser scanner. We developed a methodology and a software application to translate free body movements to sound using swarm intelligence algorithms. In order to provide space for exploration the mapping from swarm intelligence to sound is fully adjustable. The system is integrated in the installation Der Schwarm that provides a visual, semantic reaction of light spots projected on the floor to free body movements.

An interactive, visual and dance performance work in virtual environments. Collaborative team of:

– Diana Gromala, visual artist,
– Marcus Novak, architect and
– Yacov Sharir, dance choreographer

my current project, the birds the bees the flowers and the trees, works as an allegory for desiring bodies and their energetic contribution to war and organized violence. i examine the interconnectedness and implication of the forces of western bodies, and how these energies feed war. in this project, the theme of desiring bodies and their energetic contribution to war is explored through an allegorical flower garden. conceptually, this garden theme is working on three levels. firstly, building from manuel delanda, i want to suggest that war might attract bodies to it in the same way flowers attract birds and bees in order to reproduce. while the flower works on this metaphoric level, the garden setting speaks to the pastoral ideal of the west, and what is required in order to maintain this ideal. the garden also works as a more general allusion to the relationship between early agriculture, the state, and war in that sedentary life, brought about by agriculture, has led to the state and its subsequent appropriation of the war machine (just as the flower can exist outside of the garden, so can the war machine exist outside of war).

for ISEA2008, i propose to present my conceptual approach to the birds the bees the flowers and the trees, and then focus specifically on my methodology. how can a “ludic interface” to use ISEA’s term, be a useful means of engaging a primarily priveleged set of educated people, who normally comprise the “art audience?” how might fiction be used to facilitate participatory scenarios, where those formerly known as audience can experiment with, and transgress scripted emotions and desires?

Panel:  If You See Something Say Something: Art, War, Surveillance and the Sustainability of Urgency in the Post 9/11 Era

With the re­cent tran­si­tion from sol­diers wear­ing con­ven­tional cam­ou­flage in war­fare to dig­i­tal pix­els on their bat­tle uni­forms, we no longer have a need for the sol­diers to blend into the land­scape of war­fare, but in­stead  we need them to blend into the ma­chin­ery of war­fare – namely the dig­i­tal noise in the chip found on night vi­sion gog­gles. With the wide­spread use of house­hold dig­i­tal tools today, for the first time in our cul­ture, we have al­most as many pro­duc­ers of in­for­ma­tion as we have con­sumers. As we gen­er­ate data at a con­tin­u­ally in­creas­ing rate, col­lec­tion of in­for­ma­tion is no longer as im­por­tant as the analy­sis of that in­for­ma­tion. In an age where every­thing is archived and the need to delete is al­most nonex­is­tent, can we hide and re­main pri­vate by gen­er­at­ing dig­i­tal noise of our own?

Keywords: data, data visualisation, data visualization, data mapping, data mining, interspecies communication, psychogeography, Laika.
Today the affordances of contemporary data representations and presentations allow for the reading of complex relational works, which I am classifying as data ecologies. Data ecologies can be performed with and across spatio-temporal networks of relations, and can be understood as assemblages of the agentic quality of flow. Data ecologies connect with the rise of statistical thinking throughout the nineteenth century, and developments in technology into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this paper data mapping and data mining strategies are explored to develop a concept of data ecologies in interactive, reactive and generative creative works.

The installation transforms the 2016 United States Presidential Election data into a large-scale immersive environment to provoke thought as to how social media assumes form and dominates the shaping of the future of a nation. By mapping election data into flickering lights, ticking sounds, and the exchange of fluid between IV bags, the installation recounts Twitter activates on the topic from February 2016 to the election date of November 8, 2016. It exposes the inner mechanisms of a world where true human tweets and tweets generated by Twitter Bots mutually influence each other and propagate inseparably as a combined voice. The installation allows the examination of the machine world infiltration that shifted the generative entropic propagation of social media influence on this U.S. election, and provides a physical space for contemplating the significant challenges social media post in our understanding of the social fabric and the radical transformation of the ways in which we now relate to each other.

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake was a cultural revolution that established an intimate relationship between data and nature. This panel examines how data has been increasingly perceived as an analogue of nature, capable of figuring its shape. The panel converges on this conflation by examining the politics and aesthetics of prediction, arguing that both data and nature are variable. Although, data cannot be used to make precise predictions—such is the nature of nature, which precludes such figuring—data is one currency through which we might predict environments. Yet, if data is not nature expressed systematically, then what is data? Data both makes sense and generates sense by conjuring patterns in amassed signals; prediction then is a way of guessing where the next point will fall in an identified pattern. The panel presents four case studies that (re)frame this relationship of data natures. The individual position papers locate scenarios in the internet of things, radiation ecologies, interactions with waste, and the collection of weather data by citizen science in order to explore the aesthetics of data and nature based on instability and variability. In these events, data and nature are shown to be transformative and forever unpredictable.

Individual presentations

Susan Ballard – The Radioactive Ecologies of Ken and Julia Yonitani
Intro

Any discussion of nature is inextricably linked to the data politics of environmental catastrophe. After the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and tsunami it seemed that no amount of data or statistics could ever encapsulate the true ecological impact of the most powerful earthquake to hit Japan in recorded history. Thinking about art in this context offers an imaginative and real space in which people can process the horror of abrupt disasters such as this. An understanding of the aesthetic energies of nature and their entanglement with the scalar forces of nature is the stepping off point for Japanese-Australian artists.

Jo Law – The Study of Things in the Air
Intro

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

Teodor Mitew – Object Hierophanies and the Mode of Anticipation
Intro

The Internet of Things (IoT) involves physical objects monitoring their immediate environments through a variety of sensors, transmitting the acquired data to remote networks, and initiating actions based on embedded algorithms and feedback loops. The data in these loops makes its journey to an obfuscated proprietary taxonomy of corporate server farms and returns to the situated object as a transcendental revealation of an opaque order impenetrable to human interlocutors. [9] This case study argues that in effect the nature of an IoT enabled object appears as the receptacle of an exterior force that differentiates it from its milieu and gives it meaning and value in unpredictable ways.

Jo Stirling – The Modern Midden
Intro

The Modern Midden, a small part of the big story of waste (2015) is an immersive visual data story that engages with waste generation and disposal in Australia. The project questions a reliance on landfill as a final destination for waste disposal and this being the predominant and relied upon solution.

Keywords: panic, metadata, condensation, musical intelligence, collective composition, algorithm, genre and the generic, noise, speculation

My work has already been selected for the main ISEA2015 exhibition, so I would like to present an artist talk to discuss the ongoing work, putting it briefly into the context of my practice and research more generally. Drawing on my position as an artist and academic researcher this would hopefully offer productive crosspollination between the exhibition and academic events.
Saturated Highway Forest Death Psych Synth Panic (2014) is a 3 second pulse of metadata-composed collective musical intelligence. It is composed by collecting and mixing all music tagged as ‘dark’ as it passes across my computer. It proposes itself as a new genre, approaching (without ever touching) a collective generic distillation of TOTAL DARKNESS. It is an ongoing composition, where it is re-tagged as ‘Saturated Highway Forest Death Psych Synth Panic’, and re-shared, plugging back into the generic metadata system. The flashed image acts as a ʻlabelʼ for this new genre. For ISEA2015 it is presented, in progress, as a looped insistence, infecting the space – 3 seconds of sound/image, then 3 minutes of silence. Each day the file will be updated (as the composition changes) so it grows and develops over the event. Corporate music intelligence platform algorithms are put to work, producing something both filled with speculative hope and absurdly reductive, opening a core of panic within the data.
I will argue, briefly, in relation to the ISEA2015 themes, that the work functions as an insistent affective disruption, as well as disrupting and re-using the technologies it inhabits. This draws on work such as Ray Brassierʼs writing on noise and the generic. Constructed as fiction from the residual debris of digital culture, where physical materialities and the digital are intertwined, the piece occupies categories, which are always on momentary verge of collapse. Talking on the work in this way would allow me to introduce a further performative element to the work (live ʻdistillationʼ for example) as well as capturing more ʻdarkness nodesʼ from listeners.

Technically, the capture of “big data” is usually eclipsed by the complexity of the devices we operate: smart phones, tablets, laptops, Internet of Things (IoTs), drones, self-driven cars. All of them are equipped with passive sensors, cameras, GPS and tracking software that provide high-level readings of texts, digital images and videos. According to Philip E. Agre, (2003) these distributed computer systems have established a regime of total visibility through realtime human activities. Additionally, these devices are continuously and indiscriminately uploading users information to data-servers where it is managed by companies and data-trackers without authorisation.

This paper explores the functional aspects of devices involved in the process of data-capture, including internal structures, processes, operations and system-to-system relationships of computer tracking, analysed from the artistic perspective, including fields such as Tactical Media, Software Studies and Critical Interface. Specifically, Christian Andersen and Søren Pold’s concept of “Metainterface” (2018) in which our computer is both omnipresent and invisible, Wolfie Christl and Sarah Spiekermann’s “Network of Control” (2016) and Shoshana Zuboff’s term, “Surveillance Capitalism” (2015) are used to describe how data analysis creates new power relationships hiding mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control. The artists outcomes explored rely on the potential that artists have to arise questions, unmasking the invisibility of computational culture.

Panel: Compumorphic Art: The Computer as Muse

Data Trash looks crit­i­cally at the evo­lu­tion of the on­line in­ter­face and its ap­pro­pri­a­tion back into ob­ject based ar­ti­facts, clar­i­fy­ing the piv­otal place of the net­work in our cul­tural realm.  Archiv­ing and the doc­u­men­tary have come to the fore in many are­nas of arts prac­tice, and the web has changed print de­sign for­ever. Net­worked art how­ever has often re­lied on non-stan­dard soft­ware and hard­ware, glitches, and happy ac­ci­dents, but archives usu­ally only re­tain works which are easy to con­serve, be­cause they use com­mon and sta­ble for­mats. With the cer­tainty of cor­rup­tion, mu­ta­tion and decay, on­line art as­sumes the man­tle of data trash.  In re­sponse a mu­tant field of mi­gra­tory prac­tice emerged from net.art cul­ture. Artists started pro­duc­ing sta­tic arte­facts from the ephemeral on­line world in me­dias such as em­broi­dery, paint­ings, draw­ings, en­grav­ing, sculp­tures, ma­chin­ima, etch­ings and vinyl records.  Oddly these mi­gra­tions to other media have a ready-made fu­ture while the ephemeral coded works they are de­rived from do not.

This paper presents an analysis of the material produced during the “Digital Narratives for community participation on coastal ecosystem management” workshops held in Garapuá, Brazil and Aguiño, Spain (http://?narrativas.?ecoarte.?info/?). It is a reflection on the themes and contents identified and collected by the teenagers. Alongside our analysis tries to facilitate the exploration of the materials to users and to identify topics and problems relevant to the participants, their communities and territories.

Here, art and ecology get together to produce a visual and conceptual narrative of these peoples’ lives, culture, economy, religion, territories, landscape and so on. The workshops were facilitated by a group of artists and scientists that worked together to get a picture of these two places and see their connections, similarities and discrepancies.

Art, being here a subtle form of communication and protest, uses data visualization to empower community members allowing them to visualize, and realize, facts there were sometimes misplaced, or hidden, or forgotten. The cataloguing and careful handling of the media produced during the workshops has a key role in this visualization. At the same time, we explore the software and graphical possibilities of this visualizing process. Concluding, in this paper we propose an analysis, conceptual and aesthetical, of the content and its visualization.

This paper presents Hemo-resonance #1, the first in a planned series of art works situated at the intersection of art, chronic illness, disability, and the increasing prevalence of body-related data produced through sensors and selftracking. Hemo-resonance #1 operates as an attempt to open alternative pathways for thinking about and practicing diabetes. It does so by introducing the concept and practice of “data resonance” as a way of following the possible trajectories of data and bodies, attending to the multiplicity of their affects and co-constitutions. Typically, self-tracking, and especially the monitoring involved in diabetic selfmanagement, is most often put in the pursuit of understanding and uncovering cause and effect, patterns, and trends in the operation of the body in order to act on them to optimize future health outcomes. “Data resonance” moves away from the focus on legibility and goal-orientation so prevalent in these self-tracking activities to explore what else can be done with the collected data and their modes of emergence. I argue that such an approach is important for ongoing questioning of the boundaries and configurations of human and non-human bodies.

This talk focuses on different conceptual cinematic investigations that create experimental forms of narrative. One such project is a large scale database of narrative film sequences. The film sequences, or micro-narratives, are modular and exist within a recombinant system with multiple permutations. The work is non-linear and randomness operates to generate a number of pathways or different audience experiences. In the work, different aspects of emergent and generative narrative are explored as well as issues of representation–specifically the performance of femininity and the trope of the heroic.

Abstract

This paper relates to an ongoing collaboration between myself as an artist/producer and the Oxford Anthropologist, Wendy James. Through this work, we are exploring new possibilities for the use of interactive digital media in the communication of anthropological ideas and arguments. The work sits alongside James’ writings on her long-term fieldwork in the Sudan/Ethiopian borderlands, and is intended for distribution within museum gallery settings and networked environments, and as DVD publication. It is articulated within the context of the ‘sensory turn’ in anthropology (Howes 2003) and ‘beyond text’ debates within the arts, humanities and social sciences, which seek to bring non-textual forms of communication into the heart of scholarly discourse.

Mühleck’s windows and murals in a public music school and a prison are the fruits of discussions about art and architecture as well as electronic tools and today’s society. Their content represents two extremes: the “freedom” of art and the power of captivity. While orders for art in public buildings often have the function of hiding architectural errors, these are examples of successful cooperations between artist, architect and client. A major reason for this is the fact that the artist was included in the discussion at an early stage of planning.

Contemporary culture produces volumes of data such as research results and often this information remains inaccessible to the public or is presented in a manner that is difficult to digest or unengaging. The traditional presentation style, for example, of presenting data as numbers and statistics is often inadequate in its ability to engage the public. In attempting to engage the public with information, the challenge is to make it appealing, impactful and memorable by making it personally relevant and meaningful.

Art and technology offers new and alternative possibilities for presentation and audience engagement. Artist researchers are addressing the use of computers to advance the presentation and organisation of large volumes of complex information by creating visualisation methods that incorporate experimental two-dimensional, three-dimensional, time-based, meaningful and metaphoric visualisation. They are also looking at ways to extend the physical interface by looking at ways to read human actions and ways to exploit the ways in which people understand the world through their body. The artist working with multimedia and technology can exploit these possibilities to present a complex view of many layers of information in an accessible and meaningful way.

DATAmap is an immersive interactive multimedia installation that presents factual information on the levels of representation in Irish State bodies, with a focus on gender balance. It is the novel result of an exploration by the artist into how the interactive installation could be a physical platform for the presentation of the complex set of local, regional and national data on the gender composition of State bodies around Ireland. This research and resulting artwork represents a step forward in the creation of art for social change by presenting an interdisciplinary and novel mixed-method approach that informs the creation of artwork to raise awareness of gender balance in Ireland. It sets out to explore the possibilities for applying art and technology to the creation of art that addresses social issues. In doing so, it explores the possibilities of an interdisciplinary approach to inform and develop an artistic practice that embraces other disciplines in order to expand the palette of artistic approaches and tools.

Airports are awe-inspiring places: concentrated, tangible examples of the wider notion of “technology/’ the application of scientific knowledge for practical purpose; to travel from point A to point B. But scratch beneath the surface of these massive manmade structures and you start to find a much more intimate, human-scale landscape. DataNature is a multi-site electronic artwork that reveals and celebrates the strange, secret beauty and interconnectedness of seemingly disparate natural and man-made aspects of Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport and its environs_

The most attractive quality of technology is It produces the pleasurable feeling of direct contact between the body and the object. The old, sterile contemplation of “artistic illusion”, where the object is unalterable through contact with the subject of interpretation, is replaced by the actions of the body which leaves its mark on the object. By physical actions in real time, the natural energy of the body enters into flux with the artificial energy of the machine. From now on, artistic creation counts on technology which both permits poetic thought to symbolically treat the world of sensorial situations experienced in connection with machines, and to ponder the questions of our human condition.

Augmented reality is a way of both altering the visible and revealing the invisible. It offers new opportunities for artistic exploration through virtual interventions in real space. Media artist Silvia Ruzanka presents recent work that investigates the relationship between machine/technology and nature through the lens of augmented reality. Using technologies including cellphones, telegraphs, and tiny stereoscopic projections, these projects explore invisible phenomena ranging from Spiritualism to bee colony collapse disorder.

(Sub-title: L’imageà l’ère de la recomposition informationnelle du sensible.) We shall ask what happens to the Image when, after being integrated into the information economy, it goes from an archeo/logical state (the Analogical trace image) to a radically new techno/ logical (the Numerical numbered image) state. Expanding on the attractive notion put forth by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, we will try to look at the Image, its functionality when the old life-giving couple, Eye & Nature (“the skin’s eye”) gives up its power to a new non-optic logic-based couple: Brain & Information.

This paper attempts taxonomy of interactive and non interactive screen-based spectacles based on the application of anthropological criteria in the analysis of specific technological works of art.

After an introduction in the notion of solicitation of the spectator and the real and playful engagement in a simulated world, we describe existing digital works of art and we point out their common technical characteristics (interaction perimeter, etc.) and the way they address the user-spectator. Non interactivity, interactive confrontation and interactive immersion are depicted as the main axes of solicitation, while the corporal response of the user (face, hand and motricity following Andre Leroi-Gourhan) permits the set up of functional taxonomy for the described artworks.

Interactive installations are often studied in the light of recent developments in cognitive science and human-computer interaction techniques to consider innovative aspects of the interactivity. It is useful however to apply notions from the disciplines of presentation and representation (psychology, anthropology, mise-en-scene) to establish the virtual environments in the continuity of technology based spectacles and understand that the foundation of the interactivity lies in the simulated space-time mechanism that already proved its power in the case of  mechanically or electronically reproduced simulated environments.

The theoretical discussion provides the background for the classification of the digital works of art in categories, useful for the establishment of an international database that is undertaken with the collaboration of four academic laboratories from Greece and France. In order to broaden this research, the Greek-French consortium aims to organize a workshop during ISEA 2011. Emphasis is given to include in the database the majority of digital works of art analysed in various academic symposia and workshops during the last 3 decades.

Among the canon of mid-century thinkers concerned with the question of technology, French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1924 – 1989) presents a unique body of investigation. His work ruminates through a careful, painstaking, if not obsessive reflection on what he terms as the “technical object”. A broad and complex compilation of the artifacts of technology, that embodies its genealogy of concretization: the moments of clarification or “individuation”, cultural and technical, that allow the object to momentarily define its own world of operation as a unique and authentic artifact. Simondon takes unprecedented care and rigor in unfolding the slow, and often accidental evolution of specific technologies through a philosophical dialogue spoken only through the specific constraints of the corpus of the machine itself. The most notorious is his painstaking and minute description of the material and mechanical transformations in the evolution of the cathode ray tube in his seminal work “Sur la Mode de L’existence de L’object technique”. A radical, technical, hermeneutic, if you will, of the embedded technologies that underpin the infrastructure that surrounds us.   Behind the seemingly disparate collection of highly detailed technical objects that fill the pages of “Sur la Mode de L’existence de L’object Technique”, there is an intentional and profoundly poetic strategy. Each of Simondon’s objects punctuate a dense collective of interconnected technologies, but as well as a specifically targeted philosophical critique of the phenomenological model. The mode of conduct often implies a transformative departure from the discreet physicality of the construct to the energetic flux of the thermal, phasic, electromagnetic, and even the sonic. It is here that Simondon reveals a profound possibility for phenomenological revelation of within the technical domain. To perceive the immaterial, we must introduce an order of technical objects that draw the flux from the perceptual background. The act of distinguishing from the “fond”, and the instruments that allow for this possibility reside in the domain of the techno – aesthetic. A meta static condition where device can be at once a utilitarian tool, or an instrument of creation. Thus opening the possibility of an artistic engagement with the hidden infrastructure that underlies and circumscribes our lived environment. This paper will discuss the phenomenon between Simondon’s technical objects and the opportunity it addresses for both technology and electronic art practices.

Abstract (short paper)

Nowadays we are living in a fluid geo-politic landscape, the emergence arts and educational movements are playing between material and immaterial, this can be read as a symptom of unstable situation. Consciousness and perception of reality are related to internal and external factors as the sum of collective and social interactions. On the other hand, awareness and consciousness have an epicentre through our body as internal milieu or interoception and from outside/inside as proprioception, the awareness of body in space. The ancient Aristotle’s peripatetic School and the context of Zen Buddhism highlighted the senses and the experimental knowledge as the first important tool in order to cultivate intellect. We might assume that each of us perceive the world differently according to the culture where we live in. To be able to perceive again we need, as Ivan Illich suggested in 1971 in “Deschooling Society”, de-institutionalize the society and perhaps the first step could be de-institutionalizing education. The article will describe an experimental blend between physical theatre and design education in a non-tactile society (Thailand). Moreover the article will explore and underline how a physical theatre approach could be an important stimulus for a product design education especially in Southeast-Asia.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Recording, Archiving, Life-logging, Total Capture, Media Practices

This paper serves as an overview of a part of the research conducted towards a PhD at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University in Sweden. In the context of the changing nature of the archive, big data exhaust and data surveillance, the research explores alternative and voluntary recording and archiving practices mapped among artists and media practitioners concerned with self-tracking and collecting personal data. Today’s media-scape presents recording and archiving as one of the major media practices performed by an increasingly growing number of people. Practically every personal digital device is equipped with some recording function allowing to capture and categorize texts, sound clips, images, video sequences, geographical location and increasingly bio-physiological processes. On the other hand, often without us being aware, the same technology passively tracks and records ever more detailed information about our behaviours, movements and decisions. As some scholars suggest, latest advancements in technology made the dreams of recording one’s whole life come true. This total capture becomes a condition that calls for reaction. In this paper I interrogate the idea of a passive and automatized capturing by confronting it with a concept of a reflective and proactive recording practice. As an exemplification of the latter I introduce a set of artistic practices I have been performing regularly since 2009. These practices aim at constructing a record of my life and the space I find myself in. Contesting the enthusiasm around the technologically enabled possibility of recording entirety of one’s life I argue that recording and archiving are generative and active processes requiring reflective and critical approach to media technologies that they inherently rely on.

Societies across the globe seem intent on moving technologically forward while increasingly synthesizing urban life, as if the only way to move forward is to leave all else behind. However, we are not predetermined to continue down this path. We do not need to abandon Nature or our natural selves in pursuit of progress. Rather, we may seek to preserve our bodily experiences and evolve through our emerging technologies. The world and its inhabitants are endlessly de/composing around us. My hybrid art practice embodies this notion; I de/compose organic and synthetic forms, breaking down and reassembling the aged with the new, in pursuit of hybrid evolution. Interactive technologies give life to my experimental art objects, creating tangible memories, sensorial vignettes bridging body, nature, and technology. I do so in hopes that one day we will learn how to achieve our own hybrid evolution. My latest experiments, Heartwood and Prey, utilize simple and intimate forms of interactivity. Technology lives quietly in the background, allowing users to reflect directly on the materiality of these objects and their own sensorial experiences without distraction.

Artist Statement

Online gaming performance/intervention projected video installation

dead-in-iraq commenced in March of 2006, to roughly coincide with the 3rd anniversary of the start of the Iraq conflict. I enter the online US Army recruiting game, America’s Army, in order to manually type the name, age, service branch and date of death of each service person, who has died to date in the War in Iraq. The work is essentially a fleeting, online memorial and protest for those military personnel who have been killed in this ongoing conflict.

This talk presents progress in an ongoing data-mining and visualization project exploring the archives of Time magazine. Our goals are to extract and re-contextualize images of faces (along with their associated metadata) from the entire Time magazine archive (dating back to 1923), and to create public-facing web-based visualizations (as well as interactive VR and AR installations) that display our results and invite viewers to explore how representations of human faces have changed over time within the archive. This work combines work in machine learning, data analytics, interactive design, and the humanities, bringing together researchers from across disciplines. A parallel project objective is to develop an interdisciplinary methodology for systematically deconstructing any periodical image archive.

We propose a panel discussion on surveillance versus surveillance and critiques of both of these opposing viewpoints by artists, scientists, theoreticians and inventors in the wake of global terrorism, media frenzy and government witch hunting. We propose elucidating both the reality of terror as well as the fabrication of its reality and all technologies that assist these processes. We will present strategies and preliminary responses to current surveillance issues and proposals, especially as they relate to surveillance in the Anthrax Age (mass decontamination, large-scale information collection, population control, quarantine, triage biometrics and mandatory medicinal control). The following submission reflects three reactions to this situation.

The tactic of using time on satellite for diffusion by community groups has been the premise of Deep Dish TV Deep Dish compiles local programming from across the United States (and international programmes as well) around specific themes such as health care, housing, militarism and justice and has rented time on commercial transponders. The principle targets for Deep Dish transmissions are the receivers (dishes]) at local cable channels, where the programmes are then taped and used on local access and educational channels. Central to any project for constructing alternatives, is the necessity of a vigilent opposition to commercial media. The notion of non-commercial public interest media is in direct opposition to the commercial logic that has overtaken the world. We need strategies that take initiative, that go beyond the flea-market, beyond being parasites, beyond cyber hacking. If we want to stop the Titanic, we need to study ice berg construction.

DEEP/PLACE is a site-based installation that features an expanded interactive audiovisual space consisting of diverse media elements. This multidisciplinary collaborative artwork merges materials from discrete domains—such as architecture, cultural geography and geology—in an immersive site-specific experience. Participants explore the multifaceted information by navigating a rich media landscape through intuitive gestures. The media landscape is represented by a system of interconnected nodes of site-based information that include spatial and geological information, archival blueprints and images, 3D models, and audio material. The system uses a gestural interface that allows a user to move between and within nodes, exploring the media landscape.

The gestural interface connects the graph of nodes both chronologically and thematically. Color threads dynamically guide the user between nodes, creating adaptive and dynamic place-based narratives. Using a wireless glove that senses flexing and position tracking, a gestural vocabulary creates a kinetic interaction, encouraging discovery and re-contextualization. In addition to an exploration of the virtual environment, the system allows the user to connect expressive gestures to an artistically generative component of the system, helping form a bridge between the virtual and the physical, between perception and action.

The specially designed technological infrastructure enables node interconnectivity to define possible narrative paths through the media landscape. These paths can be followed deep within the spatial context (including into geological foundations) and also the chronological one (through architecture and history). It is based on a 3D virtual environment into which the informational elements are interwoven. This collaborative project involves three core faculty (in Studio Art and Computer Science) as well as students within the Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology. Additional expertise in site-specific history, architecture, geology and geographical information systems was provided by affiliated faculty.

Our first realization of DEEP/PLACE features a chapel that was designed as a reflective gathering place for community building, with a rich history of performances and recordings. This installation presents its past in an interactive and deep experience encompassing culture and architecture. DEEP/PLACE is a flexible site-based installation that can be re-purposed for other historically rich sites, using relevant media and research inputs to the system.

Keywords: Hard Drive; Interactive Installation; Digital Forensics; Data Recovery; Media Art; Delete; Save; Rewind; Residue.

This paper reports on my ongoing practice based research, which aims to examine the importance of the ‘Delete’ function in the context and practice of Media Art. DEL?No, wait!REW is an interactive installation, which de- and recontextualizes the process of data recovery by displaying found disclosures of retrieved data and posing a series of questions to the audience in a recurrent manner.

We can describe art as an asynchronous delivering of messages over physical or time distance. It maintains presence from the past and from far away, distant presence. Masters have been making artworks which are perceived by audience hundreds and thousands years later. It could be, that the sender of the artistic message has not been in existence for millennia (like authors of cave paintings). In this case, interaction between sender and recipient is not possible, but still, the act of delivery exists as there is a receiver.

We could create an imaginary axis of reception divisions, based on delay, where there are works of art on one side, whose ‘transmission’ to the receiver has lasted for millennia; and artworks sent and received in real time on the other side. Although this kind of formulation points to the vocabulary of information theory and though this viewpoint has been considered, art in this presentation has not been dealt with in this way.

Delays between performative acts and non-materiality in participative works are substantial attributes in new media art, but there are many examples in earlier art practice and art of the 20th century, which belong to the rich history of non-material art.

My interest in delay concerns its ability to be part of the concept, when delay between sequences of creation, elements of time-based artwork, exposition and reaction or feedback becomes an integral part of the interaction with the artwork and inseparable from it. Naturally, we can distinguish other episodes of delay, like one which is happening between creative intention of the artist and creative execution of the artwork.

I am discussing following works: “Telephone Paintings” by  László Moholy-Nagy, collaborative “Refresh project”, “FragMental Storm 02” by Exonemo, “Nothing Happens” by Nurit Bar-Shai and others.

This paper describes the implementation and outcomes of a real world, foundational computer science curriculum for digitial artists to learn how introduction to programming. This course was applied to a dispersed, virtual pedagogical model through a massive open online course, or MOOC. The course was developed to augment a previous initiative for an experimental, transdisciplinary pedagogical model to teach computer science to novice programmers through music. Computer science fundamentals and proficiency in coding are taught to students through ChucK, an open source programming language for ‘on the fly’ musical composition and performance, and developed further with short, weekly composition assignments. In the MOOC, the real world model was applied through video lectures and online learning modules for self and peer assessment.

Test‑based assessments were developed to encourage students to master specific concepts. While the elements of the MOOC were developed to be used locally in a flipped classroom scenario, the outcomes of student learning within the MOOC were significant. Early results suggest the MOOC students outperformed the students who took a similar, concurrent foundational course in person. The MOOC’s open framework and reliance on peer assessment gave students increased opportunities to share their work, and in turn, view their peers’ contributions. This increased exposure to different strategies of coding and composition augmented the learning process. The MOOC classroom was decentralized, but individualized learning was augmented by peer‑to‑peer support. We believe that programming a key aspect of electronic art, and providing pedagogical techniques like this, we can disseminate key building block skills to artists world wide through free online education platforms.

Locative arts could be better described as relational arts, as very few artworks created using GPS or other location data address location as such, but rather movement, relationships between participants, relation to place and its multiple histories. As such, locative arts conceptually demap location as a Cartesian dot on a geographical scale and suggest that sites are experienced as they are performed, visited, and played at.

Paradoxically, locative used to mean stationary, not in movement in military discourse. In several languages the locative case indicates “a place where”. And indeed, locative arts share that preposition, bringing participants to places where they play, discover, learn, and communicate. In other words, to experience locative arts, you have to be on the move, and not locative.

In my talk, based on three years of research I will discuss locative art projects by Blast Theory, Christian Nold and Esther Polak as practices of demapping location and offering ways to perform sensory and social relations.

Dematerialization, media, and memory in the digital age explores the relationship between the media industry’s representation of important events and our personal and collective memories of these events.  The paper investigates what happens when an important personal and collective event is recorded to digital and neuronal memory systems.  The paper also examines the space between an individual’s personal memories of real-time events and media’s influence over an individual’s constructed memories of these events.  Because digital sequences of images are broadcast in real time to media outlets worldwide at the same time as important events unfold, an international consciousness is informed and influenced by these images both during and after these events.  On the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, my paper explores and illustrates the effects that the repeated broadcast of lossless imagery of the fall of the World Trade Center has on the individual and collective consciousness.

The paper presentation will also include screening the author’s abstract 3D computer animation.  The animation examines the author’s memory of the fall of the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11.  On that day, the author watched the tragic events unfold outside his apartment in lower Manhattan while simultaneously watching the events broadcast digitally to his television in real time.  Screening the abstracted representation of this event to the conference participants opens up a dialogue between a newly formed collective memory of events and the author’s personal memory and representation of the fall of the World Trade Center in New York City.

In collaboration with engineers, robotics experts, geographers, car enthusiasts, military historians and others, Portuguese artist Miguel Palma has converted a former military vehicle into a remote exploration vehicle that explores desert surroundings during the day and returns to urban areas to project the desert imagery on buildings at night. Sponsored by ASU Art Museum and the Desert Initiative.

DESIGN + CREATION RESIDENCE OBJECTIVE: The development of a hybrid biological-electronic system wherein variations in electrical potential from an array of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) are translated into rhythmic, amplitude and frequency modulations in modular electronic and software-based sound synthesizers. We will also endeavor to take the research lab outdoors into urban space in order to engage citizens in conversations surrounding these technologies,

Method
The research will focus on three primary areas:
(1) Exploration of various materials and design strategies for MFC architectures. Several different housings will be built and several exhibition and performance strategies will be explored. Sources such as local ponds, rivers and easily attainable organic matter such as compost, aquatic plants and wastewater will be explored for use as the electricity-generating component of the MFCs. This may include expeditions to local aquatic/wetland environments to construct ad-hoc MFCs “on-site” as an installation/performance.

(2) The MFCs will be connected to a Eurorack-based modular synthesizer system and/or a customdesigned software synthesizer built in Max/MSP or PD so that the bioelectrical fluctuations of the MFCs can be used as modulation and trigger sources. This will entail building electronic circuits to amplify the electrical signals generated by the bacteria and software to translate the signals into control voltage (CV) sources appropriate for the synthesizers.

(3) Use of machine-learning algorithms as a method of interpreting the shifting electrical patterns generated by the bacteria. We will investigate the use of pattern recognition/ classification to trigger synthesizer presets and CV gate signals and statistical regression to predict variations in electrical potential. If a comprehensive understanding of the bioelectrical patterns can be attained, it will be used to inform the development of a sonic compositional system that is dictated by these patterns. In essence, allowing the bacteria to “express” themselves sonically. In order to involve the public with our research, we will also construct a mobile laboratory using a small vendor cart or trailer, repurposed to serve as bioenergy construction and demonstration station. We will traverse the city, collecting organic matters for use in constructing simple diy MFC systems and performing interventions and demonstrations in public space.

To design novel biological systems, synthetic biology has created new software technologies, such as GeneDesigner, Rosetta, Foldit, and molecular graphics programs such as Chimera, that draw on other areas of design such as architecture, fashion, media production and electrical engineering to manipulate DNA and produce novel protein structures –the work horses of cellular function.

These new design technologies, it is argued, capture a surplus essential to life within a web of aesthetic and cultural practices, aimed at mass producing novel life integral to the digital economy and biocapital (Mackenzie 2010). Rather than capturing a surplus essential to life, however, I suggest the creation of these technologies as a means to design novel biological systems signals a change in the meaning of biological life indissociable from its digital aesthetic expression.

To address the creation of new media technologies to synthetically produce novel biological systems, as it bears on what is meant by biological life, I will draw on my recent research at the Pier Luigi Luisi Synthetic Biology Laboratory in Rome.  Drawing on Greg Lynn’s development of architectural design software to create architectural forms, based on geneticistWilliam Bateson’s notion of symmetry breaking, I have begun to explore the generative design of proteins aesthetically interpolating the experimental debate between the control of life through bioinformatic design and its emergence through the random sequencing of DNA.

(Please note my creative research is indissociably theoretical and practical, interplaying the philosophy of biological science with the aesthetics of bioinformatic design and experimental synthetic biology.  To what extent I discuss the practical dimension of my work, however, will depend on its progress at the time of presentation).