Presentation Data Table

Abstract

Present HCI research and interaction design theory tackle numbers of issues related to digital divide, social inclusion, environmental sustainability, ecological awareness and other challenges of the globalized and technically altered world. The traditional problems of ergonomics, different attempts to enhance the cognitive abilities with better GUI or user experiences and cooperation in interactive or participatory design, are giving place to more complex problems involving large groups of users and stakeholders but also different environments and institutions. Biological, social, political, geographical and various other aspects are becoming part of almost every design problem and the goal is to create solutions that affect whole ecosystems, habitats and institutions rather than just building a tool for a group of users. Users which were marginalized or simply ignored but also whole ecosystems and different institutions become active participants in this design process and influence the outcomes.

Design Indaba has been a champion of the creative sector for the past 23 years through hosting a conference, expo and running the Emerging Creatives programme. But the world is changing and the digital space offers an exciting opportunity to explore new avenues. Decolonising Futures will touch on our work across the continent, meeting these young creatives in their home countries from Egypt, Tanzania, Nigeria, Senegal, Rwanda and finding out how they are using the internet to spread their work and do decolonial work through their art.

Ambient Intelligence is a new paradigm for the design of hybrid spaces. The expansion of physical environments for work and living into the non-physical realms leads to hybrid spaces and environments for work and living. To create a pleasing and supportive environment for the individual as well as the various ways of human groupings and eventually societies ambient intelligence is introduced. This contribution will centre around the development of an understanding of new process and space design concepts for hybrid spaces loaded with and enlivened through ambient intelligence.

Advances in the creation of tissues following two paths: those arising from technological advances in the area, and those derived from ethical and environmental concerns, and the intersection point of these two paths that the tissues of the future will be produced (1). With the development of e‑textiles, these possibilities are enhanced with fibers, yarns, ribbons and fabrics that can conduct electricity (2). And with nanotextiles the potential of co‑evolving relationship between textile‑body‑environment intensifies, as the nanotechnology operates at the molecular level, allowing the creation of intelligent fabrics capable of structural rearrangements – e.g. tissues that contain chemicals which may be administered as a medicament or cosmetic. Therefore this research aims the design of textile fabrics capable of acting in a co‑evolving way in the body‑environment relationship. In this sense, we propose the investigation of fibers, yarns and fabrics, with features and physico‑chemical and technological qualities that promote interactive and uninterrupted flow between textile material, user and environment, in order to promote continuous adaptability of these systems. To this end, we consider the related studies to biodesign (Myersand & Antonelli, 2012; Zenios et al, 2009; Holmes, 2008; Benyus, 2003), to biomaterials (Vincent, 2012; Kalia et al, 2011; Lee, 2011; Burdick & Mauck, 2010; Anand et al, 2005), to biotechnology (Asakura & Miller, 2013; Carraher & Gebelein, 2013; Nyanhongo, 2013; Mather & Wardman, 2010), to nanotechnology (Hebeish et al, 2012; Haghi & Zaikov, 2011; Merhari, 2009; Brown & Stevens, 2007) and to textile technology (Hossain, 2013; Earle & Watanabe, 2011; O’Mahony, 2011; Kadolph, 2010; Quinn, 2010; McCann & Bryson, 2009; Hencken, 2005) as theoretical and practical frameworks essential to the development of products involving textile surfaces such as clothes, accessories, objects, among others, able to interact and turn themselves in this interaction process with the user’s body and the environment.

This paper will discuss the issues of sensory apparatus creating human reality. On the examples of artists, like James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, whose artistic practice is deeply anchored in the 20th century understanding of body and its sensual awareness, and who are using ephemeral materials such as space, light and its most subjective derivative, colour, the author is going to deliberate on the phenomenon of design of polysensual artistic experiments inextricably merged into the tissue of reality. In such experiments, human perceptory apparatus is used as a tool for creating certain cognitive imprints, impressions, effects; human senses are medium for creative activities in the permanent, uninterrupted process of reconstitution of subjective view of the world. Reality, in this way, is always subjective and ‘belongs’ to an individual. Contemporary artistic practice is able to show to what (high) degree our understanding, our perception of reality, is unique to human kind due to the anatomy and physiology of senses (and the way we define them). Consequently, artists by creating sensual experiences, designing sets of art-ificial circumstances, are able to prove that there is a number of realities and they are polyvalent, heterogenic and subjected to artistic creation. Design of reality  emerges. Author will also ponder on the ever-increasing representational and, thus, negotiable status of reality. Furthermore, highlighted will be the ongoing changes in the inherited hierarchical 5-senses order in arts and new approach to sensorium due to emergence of new technologies. The fascinating possibilities opened up by application of new technologies to arts shall also be discussed on example of chosen, recently created new media artworks.

This paper discusses the creation of a multi-modal data driven prototype application called the Conversation Viewer. Designed to visually represent the evolution of a conversation through a dynamic touch based graphical interface, it illustrates various elements of participants’ email, text and voice messages as they seek to find a mutual agreement around a meeting date. The basis of this research was designed to explore the manner in which visualizing the invisible relationships between various individuals and the information they wish to communicate could enable meaningful relationships to develop. It also takes into consideration the ever-changing schedules and situations that directly impact the nature of agreements in dynamic communities.

Managing the elements of this exploration and the design of the prototype application required the reexamination of the Conversation Viewer’s functionality, usefulness, usability, visibility and resulting form, which departed significantly from the way in which interactive products are commonly envisaged. The approach taken is indicative of a shift in design thinking that marks a clear difference between designing a product that fulfils a distinct purpose or is determinate in its facility, to one that carefully considers its design and utility for diverse ways of thinking and acting. For that reason the intended purpose of the Conversation Viewer, was not simply to send and receive digital communications, but to facilitate a contextual understanding of dynamic interactions and different forms of agreement that are illustrated throughout the evolution of a conversation.

This research highlights a necessity for designers to carefully consider the dynamic treatment of a product’s content with respect to the form of design outcomes because of the consequences that can arise from a narrow conception of the purpose of products or services. By way of example this design case study highlights the difference between designing for determinate products that follow standardized rules and innovative products or services that support the changing conditions of long lasting design situations.

Abstract

Arithmomania is a mental disorder that may be seen as an expression of obsessive-compulsive illness. Sufferers from this disorder have a strong need to count their actions or objects in their surroundings.

1. Five electronic objects
2. Five anecdotic stories
3. One fictional failed research

The electronic design project presents an experimental tangible narrative accompanied with five electronic design objects—the ‘scientific probes’. Ordinary products– a chair, a pair of shoes, a pair of boxing gloves, a doormat and a chestbelt– are supplemented with electronic digital counters that count peculiar interactions with their users. By ‘purifying’ the nature of the digital intervention to a simple counting act, the objects are transformed into interactive props that serve as both a sarcastic tangible rhetoric and avant-garde products.

The project’s ambiguous nature is amplified even more by dressing and contrasting the tangible-functioning objects with a series of anecdotal stories of fictitious research. In this storyline, the ‘probes’ are used to collect statistical data of domestic psychological, social and physical dynamics and interactions in order to design a better domestic space. Research fails, alas! Though, happily, stimulating results are produced that prompt to rename the research ‘Objects for Arithmomaniacs’, crowning the comedy of the poetic failure. Beside poetic aims, the fictional story offers some creative ideas or scientific ‘comments’ rarely applied in conventional design. In doing so, a borderline is drawn between static and dynamic design (physical/tangible VS digital/interactive) to demonstrate that electronic design has still yet unexplored creative potential. The project’s narrative complexity is also used to criticize often boring conventional interaction design methods and processes, while at the same time keeping an open-end interpretation.
Nonetheless, the objects are open for even wider interpretation or use since they may function as utilitarian objects with their own memory (of usage), as toys of design comedy, as occult instruments (e.g. for numerologists), or even placebos for arithmomaniacs, who are entirely neglected by designers (much like other minorities).

(Long paper)

Keywords: Interface design; interactive displays; crossmodality; natural user interfaces (NUIs); Social NUIs; public space; urban interventions.

Researchers at the Making Culture Lab use ethnographic methods to study how interactive technology supports digital practices in diverse cultural environments. This paper reports on how certain design aspects of display systems implemented in public space can induce social encounters and awareness. Field observations made since 2012 show that interface design may be a key factor in structuring such shared experiences. In 2014, HCI researchers introduced the Social Natural User Interfaces (Social NUIs) analytical framework to help HCI practitioners design interfaces that better support collaboration and cooperation in co-located multiuser interaction scenarios. This study describes four interactive media façades deployed in Montréal’s Quartier des Spectacles to suggest that electronic artists intuitively anticipated the Social NUIs relational approach to interface design. Analyses highlight how the artists used crossmodal interfaces – also based on intuitive modes of interaction such as gesture, touch, and speech – to design interactive installations that engage people beyond the ubiquitous single-user “social cocooning” interaction scenario. The aim of this research is to illustrate how artistic architecturalscale digital public display installations has the potential to parallel, drive, and contribute to, socially concerned design thinking.

(Long paper)

Keywords: nano-optics, research-creation, art-science, interdisciplinarity, emerging media, nano-media, iridescence, biomimicry, media history, materiality.

This paper draws on a collaboration between scientists, an artist, and a media researcher to produce ‘nano-media,’ a media surface designed at the nanoscale, to examine the interdisciplinary methodologies and circular genealogies of emerging media. Based on nano-optical structures and optical variable devices, the scientifically innovative technology uses many analog techniques to construct a new kind of material that can produce striking iridescent images and simultaneously store covert information. The first goal of this research was to use these novel optical nanostructures to create a cover for the periodical PUBLIC. This paper details the project as it moved from conceptual exploration to the prototype and manufacturing stages, considering the specific hurdles of translation between fields, the production challenges, and the points of intersection that brought the team together. By situating nano-media in ‘retro’ techniques of image production – including analog cinema and photography – the paper also provides a point of entry for artists and humanists to engage and participate in the imagination and innovation of media built at the nanoscale. Finally, through the lens of nano research, the paper challenges the ‘art-sci’ moniker to reflect a more fluid and multiple crosspollination of fields as we design the media of the future.

Keywords: nano-optics, optical variable devices (OVDs), plasmonics, pixels, nanofabrication, imaging and data storage, art-science, new media.

This project explores and expands modes of expression in media arts and communication practices through the development of nanotechnology and nano-manufacturing processes. The demonstration showcases techniques, prototypes and possible applications of ‘nano-media,’ from publishing and security to interactive wearable fabrics and entertainment. This new kind of media surface uses nano-sized pixels to produce extraordinary optical effects for displays while also storing analog or digital data, fusing the instruments and matters of vision and information. Emerging from technology developed for security/authentication, our ongoing collaboration with artists and media scholars has resulted in scientific and aesthetic breakthroughs in the field of nano-optics by drawing inspiration from many analog media techniques, such as Dufay color film. Here we show examples of our ongoing developments.

This paper is an intermediary between the bio-art sculpture Mycocene (2018) created by the collective somme, and the theory that led us towards creating it. Mycocene is a hybrid work that blends bio-art, sculpture and media art through the methodology of bricolage. It critiques the current humantechnological relationship and its subsequent effects on the environment. Humans have created a symbolic bubble around themselves that attempts to separate them from the natural world. Mycocene acts as a conceptual bridge between this anthropocentric bubble and the natural, aiming to exist as the opalescent residue between them and a discussion point around dissolving their membranes.

Interactive art is heralded as a great convergence of Art and Technics. the Millenial Gesamptkunstwerk. Artistic practice in general and interactive art practice in particular, partakes of a rhetoric of liberation and individual self-realisation. But the methods of interactive art are premised on the ideology of computer science which is inherently disembodying and is characterised by a paranoid panopticality and Pavlovian control. The many antagonisms between the disciplines are swept under the carpet. How radical or progressive can an interactive art practice be when it has such foundations? It is critical that artists examine the intellectual history of their adopted tool, the computer.
This paper will outline the philosophical background of computer science with reference to issues of embodiment, situated cognition, emergence and self-organisation, spatial representation and symbolic representation. I will examine several interactive artworks (works of my own and by other artists), identifying their complicity or criticality with dehumanising technical ideologies. I will propose an Art of Devirtualisation , a paradigm of interactivity that refutes the crypto-christian desire for transcendance and re-emphasises embodiment as the locus of being and intelligence; which de-emphasises continuity of data representations in Cartesian spatial terms, and affirms computational techniques which accomodate people, not the inverse.

Panel Statement

This panel will examine the strategic use of interactivity within net projects and ask whether to what extent there is an aesthetic based around interactivity. One of the consequences of the development of Internet projects, over and above that of other electronic media, has been the gradual defining of an aesthetic based around interactivity. This has operated both in the formation of the content of projects and in the way projects are developed for, and anticipate, the audiences. The development of recent applications and plug-ins has increased the use of ‘predetermined’ interactive devices in web projects but without necessarily diversifying the strategies that have been clearly developing over the previous years. Arguably, interactivity has been most prevalent as a device that is employed to facilitate non linear narrative structures. It is also, and more profoundly, the key element of projects which are predicated upon the ongoing participation of the viewers to contribute new material, and as such, use interactivity over the medium to long term to challenge the status of the distinct artwork. Not only are these strategies based on the assumption that the artist can anticipate a desire on the part of the audience to participate in the art work itself, as a creative agent or active observer, but, furthermore, it often pre-supposes the existence of a generic audience and is not structured to encourage diversity. The panel will address projects in which the status of the art work as a discrete object is reduced by, and enabled by, the focus on the interactive process. The panel will consider ways that artists choose to minimize the status of the art object within their work by focussing instead on the process of interaction; at the same time deal with the tension that can be created between conceptual engagement and the apparent lack of visual substance. The panel will also address the role of collective interactive projects: how ‘un-predetermined’ interactivity can shape the outcome of a project; and how a website can be used as central point for other kinds of interactivity that are facilitated through the site; how a long term relationship between artists and audience/participants can be developed and sustained while allowing artists artistic control over the evolution of their work.

Panel: Mind the Gap

De­c­la­ra­tion of Sen­ti­ments/Gün is a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween Arzu Ozkal and Clau­dia Costa Ped­er­son.  This pro­ject draws on the Turk­ish tra­di­tion of women’s so­cial gath­er­ings called “gün” (mean­ing “day” in Turk­ish). A gün is a ladies’ gath­er­ing for the pur­poses of con­ver­sa­tion, ac­tiv­i­ties and fes­tiv­i­ties ac­com­pa­nied by the serv­ing of Turk­ish food. These meet­ings are in­for­mal hubs of so­cial net­works, where women come to­gether to share con­cerns and skills, often gen­er­at­ing a mi­cro-econ­omy that in­volves the col­lec­tion of gold or money among the mem­bers. Dur­ing ISEA2011 we are bring­ing to­gether a num­ber of Turkey-based women to start the basis of a cul­tural-ex­change ini­tia­tive.  Guests are se­lected based on their con­tri­bu­tions to con­tem­po­rary cul­ture in Turkey in a num­ber of fields rang­ing from jour­nal­ism, vi­sual arts, music, lit­er­a­ture, new media, crafts, and de­sign. This meet­ing will be doc­u­mented in a lim­ited edi­tion book to be dis­trib­uted dur­ing the fes­ti­val.  This book will also pro­vide the basis for an on­line plat­form bring­ing Turk­ish women based in the United States and Eu­rope to the con­ver­sa­tion.  With this event we hope to spring­board the tra­di­tions of Turk­ish women’s cul­tural pro­duc­tion as a basis for ex­tend­ing the spirit of the Gün among net­worked women.

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

De­c­la­ra­tion of Sen­ti­ments/Gün in­ter­ro­gates cur­rent per­cep­tions of dig­i­tal cul­ture net­works as a new, tech­nol­ogy-based phe­nom­e­non, male dom­i­nated, and lo­cated ex­clu­sively in the West­ern do­main. The pro­ject con­sists of a se­ries of events tak­ing place and off line for nine months with a group of women artists, schol­ars and ac­tivists work­ing within Turkey and transna­tion­ally. The pro­ject ad­vances the con­tri­bu­tions of Turk­ish women to dig­i­tal cul­ture by way of con­nect­ing tra­di­tional women’s cul­ture, in this case in the form of the gün (the Turk­ish term for reg­u­lar and in­for­mal meet­ings gath­er­ing women friends for con­vivial and cre­ative pur­poses) with the work of women cur­rently using new tech­nolo­gies to ad­dress ques­tions of iden­tity, cul­tural and po­lit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion from a local (Turk­ish) and a global per­spec­tive.  The Gün is sched­uled to co­in­cide with ISEA and with the Is­tan­bul bi­en­nial this year. I will be pre­sent­ing on the re­sult­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion of De­c­la­ra­tion of Sen­ti­ments/Gün in the form of a lim­ited edi­tion art book and its par­al­lel open plat­form ver­sion on­line.

Panel: Serious Animation: Beyond Art and Entertainment

This pre­sen­ta­tion dis­cusses how 3D hap­tic tech­nol­ogy is used to de­pict faces of the dead. The paper de­scribes 3D anatom­i­cal mod­el­ling and the util­i­sa­tion of skele­tal mod­els from clin­i­cal imag­ing data and ex­plains how this can be em­ployed to aid recog­ni­tion and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in foren­sic in­ves­ti­ga­tions or au­then­ti­ca­tion and de­pic­tion in ar­chae­o­log­i­cal re­search. The pre­sen­ta­tion will show de­pic­tions of An­cient Egyp­tians, Bog Bod­ies and fa­mous his­tor­i­cal fig­ures, such as J.S. Bach and William Shake­speare.

Panel: Hybrid Spatial Experiences

With­out a pub­lic or de­mo­c­ra­tic dis­cus­sion we are being pushed into an In­ter­net of Things that will re­shape out ex­pe­ri­ence of pub­lic space. In con­trast, I pro­pose an In­ter­net of Peo­ple for a Post-Oil World. This vi­sion is one of a com­mu­nity build net­work which is both local and global and that pro­vides the tools and in­fra­struc­ture of daily life. To build this we need to set so­cial stan­dards that embed the so­cial qual­i­ties of that we want – into fu­ture tech­nolo­gies. What do we want those stan­dards to be, and how do we agree on them?

Panel: How dare you? Acts of Deviance and Strategies of Discreditation

With the in­creas­ing dig­i­tal me­di­a­tion of every­day com­mu­ni­ca­tion, novel forms of de­viant acts have emerged: po­lit­i­cal posters of can­di­dates are re­worked, fake-iden­ti­ties are em­ployed and ex­ist­ing me­di­ated com­mu­ni­ca­tion is or­ga­nized into novel forms. Em­pir­i­cal ex­am­ples of de­viant media tac­tics abound. By fo­cus­ing on Goff­man’s no­tion of the face as a sit­u­a­tional image of self, con­structed ac­cord­ing so­cially ap­proved moral at­trib­utes, this paper ex­plores de­viant media tac­tics as sets of im­ages pro­mot­ing other kinds of moral at­trib­utes, and thus other forms of main­tain­ing face.

Panel Statement

This panel presentation will consider, debate and reflect upon the exhibition `Kritical Works in SL’ to be presented at ISEA2009, with respect to online and real-world curatorial practice. The particular focus for this panel will be on virtual worlds and the Second Life platform developed by Linden Labs when understood as a creative space for exhibition.

‘Kritical Works in SL II’ is to present works selected by an international panel of referees and will be shown both inWorld and in an Art Gallery environment. Building upon, and extending, phase one of the Kritical Works project, this new exhibition will continue to showcase artworks produced in, and for, Second Life and raises such questions as: How well does the ‘idea’ trans-locate across virtual and gallery spaces? To what extent does an inWorld exhibition anchor a virtual world into a physical environment? As phase two of the Kritical Works project, this exhibition will not only present the SL island artworks and trans-locate them into a real-world gallery space, it will also present the virtual artists invited, while documenting and recording the in World curatorial process itself. This peripheral but valuable data will then help to inform the interrogation of a new form of curation through panel discussion.

The panel will bring together experts in the fields concerning online/real-world curation and collaborative practice, with artists developing creative projects in virtual world platforms.

The story of Genesis recounts the confusion bestowed on language as a means of halting the progress of the Tower of Babel. The unified purpose of mind which characterised this society was the direct product of a common language. The most effective means of dividing society was to fragment its language. As Dwight Bolinger points out, the number of languages in use today are still in the thousands, although very few, one or two perhaps, can be understood by the communities involved. Today we witness the confusion at increasing frequency as the desire for international communication ànd travel multiplies. Marshall Mcluhan’s ‘Global Village’ becomes an increasingly accessible place. With the discovery comes fresh challenges in communications for both individuals and corporate bodies.

Although it might be aqued that we all have a national interest, a national identity to cherish an impart to our new partners in dialogue, there remains an urgency to highlight our commonalities rather than our differences. The international traveller may often be surprised to find that, beneath the surface, their preconceptions are confounded. Their attitudes toward a speaker are illogically entwined with their attitude toward a form of speech. The multiplicity of existing languages is attributed to the divorce of meaning from form. The meaning of the smallest units is scarified so that they can be re-assembled to form an infinite number of signs. This leap into the arbitrary which has generated so many alphabets, has supplied a rich and complex system of differences for us to attach our prejudice, jealousy and mistrust. The manufacture and export of corporate products has often traded on these perceptions by turning stereotypes into unique selling points. National myths are authorised and underpinned through publishing and packaging.

Despite this questionable display of the selective and manipulative redefinition of national identities, commercial excursions into international language have nevertheless brought the alphabets and icons together on the same object. Naturally, this is usually confined to the level of instruction, warning and command. However, there remains a juxtaposition of differing codes where before we encountered our own familiar hand. This diorama of languages commonplace on displays and instruction manuals for electronic goods, the statutory lists on food packaging and the directional signs in public spaces all strive to find a common speech necessary for consistent corporate communications. As a visual artist, this is an invitation to seek ways of giving visual form to a common international speech, a speech which is appropriate for an international dialogue to set against the multinational monologue of directional and cautionary signs. In the muddled narrative of everyday life, dialogue is the most common means by which we convey information to each other.

We must ask ourselves whether the field of cultural production should reflect only the needs of the economic field. Are we satisfied that the economic field reflects all the needs of its various societies?

Artists Statement

DWTKS: Dialogue with the Knowbotic South- strategies for a changing view on nature concepts; a map of a dynamic information-landscape providing a form of interaction with multi-local/present data fields in electronic networks.

Following the example of the manneristic representations of 4 Continents as ‘Kunst und Wunderkammern’ by the Antwerp painter Jan van Kessel (1627-1679), Knowbotic Research (KR+cF) devises a knowledge space, a model of a Computer Aided Antarctica.  In his series of four paintings, Jan van Kessel portrayed cultural knowledge representations of the four continents known in his day. KR+cF in its DWKTS installation, limits the material to the available computer-processed information on current antarctic research as it appears in public data networks. The immaterial character of these virtual antarctic ‘substance’ can only develop meaning and effectiveness (much as in the 17th century) if these items are developed in independent constructs, which never the less remain in distance but related to their antarctic reference subjects. As the given empirical facts are both real and fictitious, the data space give rise to phenomena which are difficult to conceptualize – a Computer Aided Reality. We still lack the denotative tools to describe the development process leading from the real-world extraction of data to the emancipated operationally of these virtual spacecapes. KR+cF designs knowbots, devices operating as spatially and temporally dynamic interfaces for the observer’s interactive navigation through the information landscape. These data-bodies incorporate data sets of current antarctic research projects, which symbolize direct real-time links to the reference subjects occurring in scientific research and the underlying natural events at the South Pole. local computed model of the DTWKS environment at ISEA. Connected to a World Wide Web Server, the visitor, equipped with a virtual eye, can dial himself at a mobile terminal into the DWTKS project. He/she enters the territory of a ‘virtual Antarctica’.

This dynamic data map visualizes the effectiveness of data environments, and specifically the multifunction of the ‘order imposing’ knowbots, by transporting it from the immaterial data space of the Internet into the real space of the installation in Helsinki. DTWKS – Installation offers the simultaneous interaction inside and outside of the dynamic data map with multi-present knowbots. The visitor navigates parallel in a global area in the Internet as well as in a local computed model of the DTWKS environment at ISEA. Connected to a World Wide Web Server, the visitor, equipped with a virtual eye, can dial himself at a mobile terminal into the DWTKS project. He/she enters the territory of a ‘virtual Antarctica’. . This dynamic data map visualizes the effectiveness of data environments, and specifically the multifunction of the ‘order imposing’ knowbots, by transporting it from the immaterial data space of the Internet into the real space of the installation in Helsinki.

For this project, still under production, local community culture was interpreted for a global audience through my interactions. Multimedia is being used to bring all the participants together in one installation. With the help of digital technology I will be attempting to capture, then present some integral contributions that the presence of the vegetable-cart and its owner has made to the communities of Karachi.

Abstract

Without it, lunch could be a bland, tasteless affair. Every morning it is pushed by a vendor through the residential lanes of crowded Karachi neighborhoods. It’s wooden structure is versatile enough to overcome all obstacles when reaching even the remotest house on the block. As he walks, the vendor announces himself with a loud cry every few seconds. A welcoming reception awaits the cart and the vendor from most houses. When some home-makers complain about the wares bought the day before, the vendor reassures them most convincingly that his vegetables are the finest. After the selection of the day is made and the final price agreed upon by both parties, the deal is made and the vegetable-cart owner is ready to move on to the next house.

In the large metropolis of Karachi, Pakistan, the scene described above is one that marks the start of every day in most households. Cooking is an essential part of Pakistani living. Given the right blend of ingredients even the most simple food such as lentils can taste like a dish fit for royalty. Many ingredients such as the coriander leaf used for garnishing food are needed fresh for that day. At a time when other members of the family are at work or in school it is a great relief to have the vegetable-cart man make his rounds for it could make the difference in that day?s meal.

The cry of the vegetable seller resounds in my subconscious mind as an integral part of my daily living experience. It marks my childhood memories, not because of any interaction followed by it but because it could be reassuringly heard every morning. As a woman of the house now I hear this cry with a new understanding, that of the transaction it makes possible. On occasions that I have been away from my country I have sorely missed this part of my daily routine. I value it very much.

Using a multimedia presentation I would like to present the diary of a vegetable-cart. With the help of digital technology I will be attempting to capture, then present some integral contributions that the presence of the vegetable-cart and it?s owner has made to the communities of Karachi. The interactive multimedia presentation would be based on audio and visual interviews with one or more vegetable-cart men, physical aspects of their being, their interactions within the community and a few issues surrounding their existence.

As a digital artist presenting my work to an international audience, I feel that there has to be included something in the presentation that would connect directly with a viewer even if s/he is viewing the life of the vegetable cart as a strange and new experience. In this multimedia presentation, one of the icons on the main screen would lead to pages which would describe through mainly through images and little text, some typically South Asian vegetables, their nutritional content and a few recipes on how to prepare them.

Keywords: Poetic, disruption, surveillance, counter-surveillance, art, appropriation, federal, documents, visualization, augmented reality

This paper explores artistic practices that reappropriate released and “leaked” United States governmental documents. The steady trickle of documents from Edward Snowden’s cache, alongside the massive disclosures from Wikileaks, are only a small part of the regular release of documents via the Freedom of Information Act. This trove of material provides much fodder for artistic investigations into open culture, surveillance, counter-surveillance, drone warfare, and torture, among other topics. Nevertheless, the historical and contemporary artistic approaches discussed will focus more on poetic responses that upset a purely instrumental, objective analysis of the material. Art for Spooks and the Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency (CSIA) will serve as the main catalysts for exploring the efficacy of the poetic in a time of objectification and quantification.

Considering the notion of revolution, it is often tempting to consider the ‘new’ as revolutionary in itself, begetting the temptation to cast the whole within its light, inevitably leading to its own dogmatism. Thus, intrinsic to the questioning of revolution (in both senses), must be the questioning of world and our bond with it. A thinker who addresses issues pertinent to our consideration of the ‘digital revolution’ is Gilles Deleuze. In his ‘counter history’ of philosophy, we see the development of the Bergsonian notion of the virtual. The virtual, often seen as a possibility which seeks realisation, is seen as something real (difference in itself) which undergoes a process actualisation. The virtual has no identity, no connection with the one and the same, it is a multiplicity which is explicated into identity. Thus we can consider a sensibility where the virtual is that from which the phenomena of the world emerge. The hypothesis explored is that within the multiplicity and immateriality of the digital, we find, if we abandon the simulation of a reality which subverts its own, the most radical means that we have of encountering a sensuality of the virtual; and the revolutionary power of the digital.

I am a member of Media art group called PERFORMATIVE. In this group, people from different fields such as liberal arts, science and art together study and produce art works based on technology. As an engineer, I have been taking charge of technical part in collaboration with performers, video artists, and fine artists.

It is a very interesting process of art works by discussing with them and using various technological elements. However, it is not easy to determine who has the copyright of produced art works.

In 2009, PERFORMATIVE worked on Media Façade Project at Seoul Museum of Art with a team of two artists. The motive of the art work was suggested by them and we focused on the technical part of the project. The project was successful and favorably reviewed by the press and public.

After the exhibition, the artists themselves tried to re-promote the project for another exhibition, but they had a different opinion with us. They insisted that they have the ownership of the art work because other engineers could participate and produce the same output for another exhibition. On the other hand, in our opinion, the art work should be owned by both artists and engineers as the project was progressed together from the beginning.

The problem is this. It happens frequently in Korea. Does engineer have any rights of artwork which was made in collaboration with artists? Could the artists reproduce the same work with other engineers without restraint? On the contrary, what happens the engineers do the same thing in the art works? For example, video on the same technology they created?

Recently, collaboration between the artists and engineers is very common in media art works, and they may think differently on the ownership and right of the produced work. The copyright of the art work will be more important issue as the collaboration between different fields will be increased. I think general interpretation of the copyright may not solve this complex problem. Therefore, I’d like to propose that we should understand the situation and think of the best alternatives on this issue.

Panel: Media Art, Mediation and Contemporary Art

In this paper we walk through examples of what we refer to as ‘diffractive art practices’, focusing on works made using digital processes. Computation is presented as an ecology of intra-actions rather than the ‘idea’ or the ‘technological process’ or the ‘material’ in these works. We emphasize that  ‘diffractive art practices’ and the artworks that arise from them bring attention to the role, impact and function of computation. We suggest that such art practices move beyond the bifurcation of New Media Art and Mainstream Contemporary Art and partially reconfigure the ecologies of practices between art, science and humanities.

Abstract

This paper argues that “Jurassic Park” can be considered as an exemplary moment in the convergence of a number of contemporary discourses on technology and entertainment. “We’re all diggers” comments one character, musing on the significance of the mosquito trapped in the recently excavated amber he holds in his hands. We can take this comment as our cue for a different kind of excavation of the film’s cultural ground. The biggest movie of 1993, Spielberg’s blockbuster epitomizes everything about recent Hollywood’s increasing dependence on spectacular event-based cinema. By mobilizing a number of popular pre-existing fads and fears, the film manages to market itself on the back on a monumental popular fascination with the seemingly limitless bounds of technology. This paper takes the film’s depiction of cloning, artificial life, theme parks, tourism, spectacle and entertainment as the starting point for a discussion on the status of the spectacle in contemporary culture.

Over the past five decades there have been significant developments in the form and context of digital artworks, from the early Internet to the WWW and social media platforms; from the data abstractions of cyberspace to converging realities (hybrid, mixed, and augmented) and an Internet of Things. At the same time these different forms and expressions have been addressing some continuously reemerging themes, from identity and embodiment to socio-political constructs, among others. The presentation will explore the taxonomies and histories of digital art as they define and reflect aesthetics; the obstacles that the aesthetics of the digital have posed to the reception of the art; and the changes that the aesthetics of the digital have brought about in the traditional art world. By taking a critical look at over-hyped phenomena such as the much-discussed ‘New Aesthetics’ (and tracing its historical lineages), the talk will raise questions of how we can define digital aesthetics in all their complexities today and how their affects can be classified.

Resume : To pose the problematic of the African glance on the numerical aesthetic, it is to indicate the place and the role of the artists and critics of Africa in the use of new supports and new tools in the universe of Part_ The present communication is a testimony but also a call for the current stage of art to be combined with the human, that is to say brings all men from a mastery of digital.

INTRODUCTION
For the Black Continent, the future is combined with the mastery and appropriation of all scientific tools. Which authorizes to prophesize that the 21 ‘Meek will be African we will not be! Not to launch an easy joke, but to make a statement that can be made by carefully examining the aesthetic marks in which is defined
Aesthetic? Because, among the things that shape a civilization and identify the particularities of the men and women who carry such a civilization in their being, there is mainly artistic production and aesthetic discourse. Two axes of reflection to say it: the first would indicate in which of all the classical aesthetics, the plastic aesthetic remains that of all time, the second would develop the relation of complementarity or mutual fertilization between the plasticity, the numerical and the becoming of Africa in the world.

I have written a thesis-essay about cultural cannibalism in the digital age as well as a manifesto-poem with a new take on the original “Manifesto Antropófago” written by the Brazilian modernist author Oswald de Andrade in 1928. His manifesto was an assertion of the unique Brazilian voice in the emerging modern time, away from clichés of colonialism, while unapologetically metabolizing outside references from the First World. My “Digital Anthropophagy” paper containing the “Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Age” seeks to update the anthropophagic practice of cultural cannibalism with regard to the digital age, where the virtual world is the new frontier, and everyone a possible colonizer.

The term “Anthropophagy” comes from anthropos, “human being”, phagein, “to eat”). The main definitions are:

1. Cannibalism, as the eating of human flesh by a human or humans
2. Self-cannibalism, as the eating of one’s own flesh
3. Eucharist, the ceremonial eating of the body of Jesus as wine and bread

In my view, these forms of cannibalism have transmutated into a new form, which I would like to propose as Digital Anthropophagy, meaning:

-The sum of the anthropophagic practices if done virtually, i.e., with the aid of computers, social networking platforms or other digital devices; or if executed in reality but facilitated digitally.
-A new paradigm of input/output models generated via the internet.
-A new practice of cultural consumption involving a technological mediation for input (both the feeding and the being fed), digestion, and output.

The core subjects of my paper and manifesto are: colonization of thought and a new sphere of global influence, spread of ideas and the new phenomenology of humanistic interactions in the digital age, remix and recycle culture and “fair use” issues, inversion of the traditional vertical mass media methodology undermined by the advent of public as new producer of culture, and self-expression of the internetworked society as a bridge to immortality. Throughout, I examine the new acculturation processes in an era where all colonies have already proclaimed their independence and the virtual world is the new frontier to be conquered, putting into question once again: who is the cannibal?

I will discuss the intersection of digital and actual sculpture, animation and video through examples of my art practice. This practice includes creating virtual proposals and computer aided construction of large scale outdoor sculptures, small interior sculptures, installations, as well as the creation of “impossible” moving and still images and architecture designed using computer 3D modelling, video editing and image editing programs. The content of the art work often focuses on an oblique sense of paranoid apocalyptic fear tempered with a sense of whimsy and irony.

When art and business or economy is related it is currently often through the concept of experience economy (Pine & Gilmore), however, such concepts of aesthetics and art often borders on the escapist and argues for an aesthetic harmonizing of contradictions. This paper will suggest that the ruptures, disruptions, clashes and breakdowns of contemporary art are more valuable contributions.

In the 1930’s materialist theoreticians such as Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin were discussing how the change in the “Unterbau” of reproductions technologies affected the “Überbau” of culture, economy and thinking and how art could respond to this – either by submitting to it unconsciously (e.g. as a consumer good, “Zur-Ware-Werden”, (Lukács)) or by taking it up and exploring it as a conscious, dialectical “Tendenz” (Benjamin), which entails a critical exploration of how the art work is part of the production process, technology and economy.

The thesis I would like to put forth and test is that art has the potential to critically probe new media economies. Probably art can even be seen as a key developer of new economies such as we have seen earlier with the addressing of industrial production of the historical avant-garde leading to Bauhaus and modern design or with the 1960’s avant-garde addressing the tertiary sector (creative industries, mass media, advertisement, etc.). The question at the end might be what happens when this artistic exploration gets recuperated, if it is good or bad for art and artists and if there are opportunities to change this?

The paper will discuss its idea with examples from digital art, where the production, distribution, showing and selling has become part of the artistic work. An example will be Electroboutique (Chernyshev, Shulgin et al.), a series of works that address the current value of critical art, relations between software and objects and develops its own artistic economy.

A case study proposal is summarized in two ongoing actions. The first refers to the database of the FAD festival, one of the pioneer festivals in Brazil that has been taking place since 2007 in Belo Horizonte and together with File in São Paulo (since 2001) are the two largest and most important festivals in Brazil. Both have a non-integrated database. Especially the FAD currently has 2,000 entries of works ranging from performances and installations to internet-based projects. Documentation includes everything from manuals to videos, images. The archive to be developed has mainly Brazilian and South American works that participated or were evaluated by the curator in the 8 editions of the festival.

This collection was invited to become “a public collection” in the city of Belo Horizonte through the MIS (Image and Sound Municipal Museum), an entity that is still being developed by the local government. The same collection is a constant basis for research studies at local Universities (UFMG, UEMG, and others). It has already generated some thematic seminars in the city like SAD (from which the proponent idealized the first 3 years), and articles with publications in some events, including ISEA.

The second ongoing action refers to the Information Science thesis in progress by Tadeus Mucelli who is building the possibility of this file becoming “alive” through a peer-to-peer network and through machine learning that allows for the dimension (Memory & Heritage). This Archive and its maintenance of existence. This work in partnership with UFMG through the departments of computer science and information science. The result of this experiment, being positive, could be applied to festivals like File (in conversations that Tadeus Mucelli had with curators) and other South American festivals in constructing a Southern Cone narrative of these archival models.

Essentially this proposal intends to bring together the largest number of experiences and professionals in the conformation or not of peer-to-peer and machine learning networks as new structural dimensions of preservation and documentation of art and media. A series of interviews have already been conducted with ZKM, Artists and Regional Festivals (South America) about developments or developments from the perspective of cooperative work using metadata, data, information (in a curated form) and information management for model building. We believe other actions are also under development in other countries and initiatives.

From this perspective, we must inevitably build a big justification with the big companies that support us (Google, for example, cannot be an enemy but an ally). In our small dimension, we are using the LABCult laboratory of the school of information science at UFMG and we are looking for reinforcement in information retrieval (IR) in the computer science department. A background job is needed as building dictionaries and R vocabularies.

Based on the two previous proposals we move on to the third category on intercontinental support platforms. We understand that as a social and political “bloc”, Southern Cone narratives are unique, and unique from character to structures and weaknesses as well. Building a memory of the arts by technological means in South America is a complex challenge due to the absence of a tradition found in other countries such as Europeans. We are able to develop the above projects on a broader local scale and co-undertake with neighboring countries. The same goes for resource sharing. But it is well known that international support is always a mirror.

In short, we want to develop a HUB structure with other neighboring countries and other continents to take charge of the actions and goals for the development of more effective archiving, registration and documentation that will inevitably use from a new Internet perspective, the support of large players and companies and the legal discussion about copyright. Starting from Brazil from the first two proposals, we believe that models can be replicated with countries in which the entities involved here are already in dialogue. In this sense, we will have in the 2nd semester of 2020 the second edition of the Digital Art Biennial, which takes place in Rio. We had a good first symposium held in 2018. At the biennial, the symposium opens the event’s schedule. We can develop a task force (with goals and objectives) and gather diverse festivals and archives at this opportunity in Brazil, calling the location where some other international representatives may be.

This paper explores the concept of ‘mobile digital art’ and the increasing use of tablet technologies to create works of art. The first generation iPhone and iPad were released consecutively back in 2007 and 2010, introducing the term ‘mobile’ to the concept of digital art. During the intervening period we have seen an exponential growth in the use of these devices, which have undergone a process of rapid evolution through the continuing release of new generations featuring improved hardware capabilities and software upgrades, often including the inclusion of bespoke drawing applications that are designed specifically to run on these operating systems and devices. This research will focus in particular on the use of the iPad tablet computer and its associated software as a tool for making creative works. Digital art is often used as a general term to describe a range of artistic works that use digital technology as a core element in the creative and/or presentation process, and this paper sets out to investigate where the act and process of creating art via mediums such as the iPad and iPhone fit within the practice of digital art. Key issues around the impact of mobility, locational specificity and networkability will be discussed in respect to the conceptual and creative influence they have on the work. Research undertaken around the personal insights of artists drawing via the iPad will be discussed to help reveal the relationship between the technical and artistic possibilities of the medium, such as the creation of a ‘hand-drawn’ aesthetics, implications for touch screen technologies, sharing and reworking of content, distribution and exhibition issues etc. We will also examine the notion of the iPad as a tool for performing digital art as well as focusing on the medium itself.

After video emerged as a trend in the 1960s, it gradually acquired the status of artistic medium over close to 30 years. If it took as long for digital technology to achieve recognition as a contemporary artistic medium after having become democratized in the 1980s, then the time for acknowledgment has come. Thanks in part to the widespread use of the Internet and its mass appeal, digital culture, in all its forms, has become part and parcel of everyday life. Digital and networking technologies have made their way into all private and public spheres of contemporary society; they have also had an impact on how we relate to others and on our worldview. The time has come, then, to consider the consequences of such massive permeation for the art world, without neglecting any of its key stakeholders, whether artists or collectors, critics or curators, galleries or institutions. For the art world is an ecosystem with well-established rules. We must also acknowledge that the digital medium has a wealth of specific characteristics, which may be insidious at times—so much so that all artworks worldwide are now shaped, in part, by digital technology, sometimes unbeknownst to their creators. The way we perceive the world has changed now that it fits in the palm of one hand or can be grasped between thumb and forefinger. From now on, everything on the Internet belongs to us, from the most trivial files to the most sensitive data. The final impediments to acknowledging the interconnection of digital technology and art—from media permanence to artwork scarcity—have crumbled away. That is because digital media and art now resonate together, because the practices of artists and amateurs have become intertwined. It is now time to consider what digital technology brings to art and vice versa. It is now or never.

Direct transmission and cable casting of digital TV via desktop (DTTV). Illustrated discussion of the Amsterdam public access model and the presenter’s ‘Black Hole TV’.

Abstract

Digital channels change the structure of communities and thus indirectly influence the political participation of citizens in a society. This paper addresses challenges and opportunities that arise for political participation of citizens through these developments.

Yannis Paniaras’ presentation will give emphasis on the implications of virtual identity design in the process of constructing our presences in social virtual environments. The ritual of cultivating a personal visual experience is being relocated in the virtual domain. Design practices from the real world are being transferred into the virtual society. With the help of 3D technologies and design expertise we construct representations that ideally reflect our inner worlds and temporary emotional status. The costumed avatar becomes a ‘mask for the resident of a society manifested within the prohibited sphere of immateriality. While we participate in the spectacle ‘from a distance’, unable to inject our physical bodies, our awareness for a potential post-biological existence is nurtured. Does the avatar represent the prologue for the resurrection of an entity liberated from the torture of our material incarceration?

Abstract

Long Paper

As the creative use of digital tools continues to become more important to artists, new pedagogies are needed to help expose students to the potentials of digital technology. Currently, much education is concerned with “virtual” versions of and extensions to previous technologically-based tools and usually focuses attention on these tools in relation to input to and output from the computer in the form of images, video, sound and other media. The author argues for an alternative pedagogy which instead concentrates on the nature of the internal digital representation of the physical world rather than on either the tools being used or the nature of the output the computer creates. This focus on the various ways the computer might internally represent reality, be it digitized images, sound, Cartesian space, or time, allows students to better understand the implications of the computer in terms of the potential manipulations which might be performed on these internal representations, and to discover for themselves the close relationships between the digital versions of what are often considered completely separate mediums in the physical world. Likewise, digital representations of “thought processes,” beginning with simple Boolean logic and moving to much more complex representations of human rationality and “thought,” as well as simple indeterministic and stochastic representations of “nature” are areas which provide students with an entirely new insight into the potential of computers to simulate and to initiate actions. Most importantly though, this approach helps students develop their own “mental” picture of the processes going on within the computer, helping them to transcend any one software program or hardware device, and giving them an intrinsic understanding of how the computer may be used as a tool for manipulating things in the physical world.

Digital Divas Presents Between the Sheets: An attempt to generate a MOO mediated debate with a physical and virtual presence. Digital divas will stage this debate with the help of absent friends via a MOO space attempting to deflate the space between participants, inviting everyone to take a corner of this piece of patch-work and stitch a few ideas into the fabric of this textual quilt Digital divas speak with a language of textiles. Somewhere or how, for us (them), textiles became the model with which to explore new technology or vice versa. Textile + technology, the two are inextricably part of the same language, the same history. I would venture to say that in very few disciplines is there such a symbiotic existence, despite the nature of computers now having applied relationships to potentially every discipline. It has to do with language, an overarching system of signs and symbols and rules forusing them that is used to carry information, as in programming, Ones and Zeros, on/off, over/under. The work has been done that puts this on the map. Sadie Plant’s Zeros and Ones, Future Looms, Barbara Layne + Ingrid Bachmann’s Fault Lines: Measurement, Distance and Place, Regina Frank’s Address and Hermes Mistress, Gwen Zierdt’s Unabomber, Emily DuBois/ Michael Elinson’s 1984 “Woven Music” (a collaborative work for loom and player piano) It is at this point we say -what now? Textiles has been a guide that has led us all into new and challenging territory; issues of real and virtual are sensitised, high and hand technologies are juxtaposed, dynamics of community, of networking, of identity are addressed. Are there still places to go? Do we step further inside the mind of the computer or do we step back into the world of physical touchable objects? Rather than set any theme beyond the common denominator of textiles, participants are invited to say what’s on their minds, what is current in their thinking. Would this not be the ground from which to survey the possibilities of the future?

Studies have shown that minority communities are less likely to have access to techno-logically advanced resources. Created by deeply ingrained social and economic disparities, this “digital divide” has already led to underrepresentation of minorities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, with the consequence that these students may be less prepared to compete and participate in the 21st century workforce. This panel discussion addresses issues of technological accessibility within minority communities, and proposes ways to make technology culturally relevant. Panelists include: Sandra Begay-Campbell, Tameka Huff, Henry Rael and Juan Abeyta.

Photography is one of the creative fields at which technological advances influence artistic expression the most. The ease of manipulation brought by software and extra features available in cameras made artists (using photography as an articulation tool) reconsider their visions, themes, narration, syntax and ways of sharing their artwork. Sharing sites like Flickr, which expedite encounters of various individuals from different cultures, help in changing the perception of the much vital notion of time and enable artists to get faster feedback, revelation, exposure and layering of information to be conveyed.

While some photographers, who are deeply obsessed with analog processes, deny digital technology; it is quite obvious that artists, who are aware of the complexity and particular advantages that this technology brings, indeed end up with a novel aesthetics of photography. In addition to the regular montage and collage methods remaining from the old analog days, digital imaging techniques allow artists to work with notions like augmented perception, chronophotography, subreal encounters, pictorialism, palimpsest-like superimposition, interlacing, simplification / minimization, creation of new worlds, delusion, synthetic realism / artificiality, appropriation…

Digital tools available for photography allow the artists in the field to think in a more daring and free way. This freedom influences the content and also the visual aesthetics of the recently created artworks in the universal practice of contemporary photography. Photography is probably one of the visual art platforms that is influenced most extensively by digital construction and creativity. Fortunately, it seems it will continue to be so in the future and digital means will strengthen photography’s position in the art world as one of the most progressive expression platforms. This paper will focus on the significance of digital technologies in changing aesthetics, planning, vision, fiction and realization of photography and various avant-garde photography forms nourished by digital culture.

Audio platforms and digital interfaces has been use to collect the sounds of a collection or aerophones made on pottery by Pasto indigenous communities that inhabit the high lands or Nariño in the Colombian southwest. This ceramic production has been recognized as Tuza (1250‑1500 C.E). These sonorous artifacts are related to believes and cosmovisions that the prehispanic indigenous communities manifested in harvest rituals. Ideas of the live‑cycle fertility are present in the morpho‑acoustic and visual design of these sonorous objects, resembling not only the proportional and cyclical shape of the snail conch, but also the female and male reproductive organs, and the 9 cycles maternity period.

Sonorous objects in a traditional museum are confined to be muted and silent. Any manipulation of them can carry a degradation of the archeological object. In this research and artistic project, the use of digital technologies allows the recording of these sounds, and a platform to edit, process and transform the sound material. In this way, digital     soundscapes are created to bring a bridge between prehispanic instruments and their sonorous context, in a contemporary vision of music.

This paper will present a digital approach to the archaeo‑musicology study of of material culture by Tuza communities, and how digital technologies used in the realization of the research, have improve to possibility to create contemporary sound design art of work based on archaeological material, proposing the sound as material inheritance and digital interface as a media to materialize sound in order to be explore, intervene and experience for new audiences.

The Tuza project presents an art installation experience, where a visual design is combine with an electronic composition, in a proposal that does not purport to recreate the musical production of Tuza communities, but use their sounds as primary material to propose ways of combination and transformation thereof; taking as a conceptual base pre‑Hispanic indigenous beliefs related to water, agriculture and fertility, in ritual contexts led to the consecration of the human being to the continuous and balanced cycle of life, which the conch spiral is a symbol. The contemporary public is invited to experience the soundscape, into a space in which, through a surround distribution of 5.1 monitors, digital sound proposal is reproduce.

In this space, the viewer will have contact with the soundscape that mimic these globular flutes: birds, monkeys and frogs, a metaphor of conversation that provides the hunter with his prey, before being brought into the ritual, where the sounds transform, and trance and conclusion are given by the arrival of the rains.

The Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia, had supported the research and the collection belongs to the Archaeological Museum Julio Cesar Cubillos. Adriana Guzman is a composer and researcher who work as a tenure professor in the school of music at Universidad del Valle.

Abstract

September 11th 2001 was a perfect example of a paradigm shift in the way real-time memories are processed using technology. On September 11th, U.S. civilians experienced an attack on U.S. soil via digital broadcast in real time as the events were unfolding outside their homes. This catastrophe was an example of a larger shift at the intersection of technology and memory. Digital technology allows viewers to experience events in real time as never before possible. In addition, digital technology, in contrast to analogue technologies of the past, is lossless. In other words, although our organic memories, those that we keep in our minds, and our analogue film recordings, the recordings of our past, degrade over time, digital recording of raw material is intact and preserved in its entirety, irrespective of the number of times the memory is recalled and played back.

This paper will centre around the emergence of digital media and video into the live entertainment world, and how that has driven and is now seen more and more in the built environment. It showcases four U2 tours I was involved with, and I’ll speak of the overall principles I learned during the formtative time of this technology, and how I now apply them to digital facades and architectural space.

In the contemporary global framework, the convergence between art, creativity and new media offer a different way to think about the community, with its local connections and intercultural relations. In the specific Mediterranean context is developing a renewed awareness around concepts like “mobility”, “representation”, “mutual understanding”, “connection”, “dialogue”, “exchange”, “network”, “flux”, that are inspiring an increasingly production of ideas, artworks, seminars, researches and new forms of encounter.

Is it possible to realize a new social and cultural Mediterranean dialogue through media technologies? How does it change the mutual understanding and knowledge through the new media dialogue? Is it Information and Communication Technology (ICT) a new stand and tool for intercultural education and comprehension? How does it change the practice of conversation, exchange and dialogue in the social digital era? How do art and creativity operate, interact and influence in the “Digital Mediterranean”?

Intercultural communication is extending and developing itself through multiple mechanisms: we seek, we find ourselves and we interact more and more through technology tools and social networks that act as platforms for gathering, dissemination and knowledge. Online participation experiences, festivals, exhibitions and virtual galleries; research and dissemination of free information, platforms of social and political criticism, etc., are just some of the stages where art, creativity and new information and communication technology meet and converge. The Internet becomes the continent where multiple cultures, one humanity coexist (Bauman, 2008), where the in between element of the border disappears.

There are several projects – between real presence and virtual communication, between “relational aesthetics” and the tools of Web 2.0 – with the ambition of finding different ways to create interconnection points where Mediterranean cultures and people can meet and shared their visions, creative expressions and thoughts.

A new media landscape – transformed also by art and creativity – is defining and challenging the social relationships and interactions within the Mediterranean area.

Abstract (long paper)

Laptop orchestra is a music platform that focuses on collaborative music making within a computer-mediated environment. It is usually formed by an interdisciplinary team with expertise in different disciplines such as music, composition, multimedia, and computer science that contribute to various aspects of a laptop orchestra. The iLOrk presented in this paper is a laptop orchestra from the Hong Kong Institute of Education that specializes in teacher education. It was formed by a group of music education students who were not familiar with computer music and performance technology. To complement the team’s lack of a technical foundation, it is necessary to develop iLOrk members’ knowledge and skills in the manipulation of digital instruments and participation in a laptop orchestra performance. A series of activities were designed to transform their classically oriented musical competencies into technologically oriented digital musicianship, including (1) development of an iOS app i-Orchestra for orchestral simulation; (2) the use of MIDI controllers as musical instruments; and (3) compositional work dedicated to a laptop orchestra. This paper details the strategies and pedagogical considerations in the digital musicianship training of classically trained members of this laptop orchestra.

Abstract

We live in a world networked by all-encompassing swathes of surveillance, a terrifying, thrilling, ubiquitous and pervasive mesh of machinic spies and surrogate watchmen. There is little else but I and eye: self, identity, digitality and the labyrinth of vision technologies that ensnare this all. We thread through it like guilty suspects, software fugitives seeking the few respites of unsurveyed terrestrial space that mirror the few remaining spots of untrodden land upon this earth. This is the age of the data environment – of vast interconnected spaces beyond our senses, control and imagination: a messy, complex sprawl of natural and man-made climates laced with swirls of data, electromagnetism and radiation, where the soft rules the hard and computers are more powerful than the buildings that house them.

Technology proliferates at a pace outstripping the most hyperactive imagination: at moments it appears that fantasy leads reality, that the everyday verges on the fictional as technological shifts exceed what we had previously thought possible. Some of our most shocking, provocative and intrusive revolutions emerge in the exploding field of surveillance.  This paper examines the identity and effectiveness of our ever-increasing spatial systems of surveillance and argues for their function not only as system architecture, but as an extensive and complete form of contemporary spatial architecture, replete with their own logic, language and systems of defence, their own mechanisms of social, climatic and dimensional control that one might more traditionally associate with architecture. It examines the way surveillance reinforces societal atomisation and categorisation, breaking crowds and cohesive groups into individual fragments whose flesh and bits are routinely further decomposed for clinical analysis. It also examines the way surveillance codifies and legislates behaviour, dictating an ever increasing slew of characteristics from pedestrian gait to lawful facial expression, skin temperature and minute electrical fluctuations, heartbeats and breathing rates. The paper then presents a complementary digital response, outlining not only software and hardware engineering solutions promulgated from within the surveillance fields to curb its excesses in the proposition of an acceptable equilibrium between liberty and justice, privacy and surveillance. It also surveys the radical counter and anti-surveillance measures from outside the field, exemplified by a host of artistic projects that have become increasingly propositional rather than documentary as, for instance, historical video work cedes to new media. The paper concludes with reference to, and illustration of, the author’s own work in relation to our performance under a surveillance regime, with its exploration of ‘ambiveillance’ – the ambivalent nature of our response to excessive surveillance (our host country, for instance, has the most surveillance per capita in the world, yet its population consistently, lasciviously, vote for further rollouts) – and methods for living harmoniously within a surveillance society whilst productively subverting it.

This session communicates the unrealized potential of the pen plotter as an output device for art.

Keywords: Popular culture, aesthetic of art, creation process, metacreation

This artwork investigates the Brazilian urban body through performance. Unifying concepts of new rhythmic music and conceptual dance in performance, this article uses artistic movements in Brazil that are suffering marginalization by breaking with the established aesthetic. Discoursing about aesthetic axioms, the influence of technology in people’s daily lives and connecting those elements with music and dance history pieces; this article aims to project questions around the value of popular culture. Small sketches of public dance interventions with live music are used in order to analyse the potential of daily movements and popular dance by digital media. Musical matrix connected to traditional rhythms involving everyday gestures, repetitions with the gradual introduction of electronic music in choreography after the performance, producing a videoart built by metacreation and performance concepts. We present a kind of critique of the new mass phenomenon that becomes a fever and viral spreads music icons and, through performance, invite the public to think about society reality and the questions around contemporary music, dance and old paradigms.

In The Metropolis and Mental Life, George Simmel exposed the objectification of life through the rationalisation of the metropolitan life at the start of the twentieth century, arguing that “modern mind has become more and more calculating” and the world becomes an “arithmetic problem” (Wolff 1950: 412). Similar arguments sustained the cybernetic construction of the posthuman subject throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century. Advances in computational power and the increased importance of information flows over physical space fuelled visions of a posthuman subject free from the constraints of embodiment and of a revitalised public space in a virtual environment.

Katherine Hayles refuted these visions in How We Became Posthuman, arguing that, rather than downplaying or erasing embodiment, we should embrace a posthuman vision where the possibilities of information technologies do not succumb to the rhetoric of unlimited power and disembodied information. She also reminded us that “human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity”. (Hayles 1999: 5).

Digital performances in networked public spaces foreground the embodied posthuman subject envisioned by Hayles. The term digital performance encompasses works where both embodiment and electronic flows converge, while networked public spaces bring together (private and public) urban and electronic flows. These performances have generated high hopes of both a revival of the public sphere and of public space.

I argue that we must test these assumptions by situating the posthuman subject’s participation and engagement in digital performances through their own prior experiences of networked public spaces and their engagement with everyday media according to their specific social and cultural contexts. In the relationship between digital performance and posthuman subject, collaboration becomes an important feature, especially when previously inaccessible and expensive technologies used in the past by digital performances are incorporated into our everyday technology devices, such as mobile phones and videogame consoles.

Recently, the concept of augmented reality has received wide attention. This paper presents an extended definition “digital re-presentation”, “simulacrum”  and “pleasurable design” of augmented reality. We used this definition to survey a number of recent works of digital art from across the world. We then move from augmented reality to digital re-presentation, building on the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacrum and re-presentation. Digital information processing can (almost magically) amplify augmented reality, allowing virtual objects and virtual reality to join together. The consequence is a digital re-presentation in a simulacrum world. The process also generates a new language for digital art. Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum and re-presentation describes man’s deep, pessimistic attitude to his environment. Through augmented reality we create a simulacrum world where we are totally immersed and feel lively pleasure. But, we are not pessimistic but optimistic as we present simulacrum and digital re-presentation.

ABSTRACT

Many of my images are visual ideas that I have written down in the PostScript Page Description Language. I find it exciting that these images can only be created by writing a PostScript program. Creating an image in this way is a romantic endeavor for me, much as a composer finds writing a musical score a romantic endeavor. I use image-making about music as a direction because I find an analogy in music notation in the work I do. Music notation is a rich language that gives the composer the means to document and write a musical idea heard in the mind. Digital Craft is one of my languages. The greater the depth of understanding and experience in any language, the greater the vision of what is possible. These different languages allow different realities to exist.

I will present images in black and white as well as in color that can only be achieved with the aid of computers and high resolution printers. I feel the images have a magic about them that goes beyond their being only a technical achievement. In creating these images, I have learned that numbers and logic can create emotionally satisfying images. I have discovered algebra is capable of both documenting organic form or a pattern. Seeing the threads of all disciplines more intertwined than once imagined is a new way of thinking for me – I may get inspiration for a design from an equation as well as a painting, poem, or song.

My research is being conducted through a practice-led documentary film project, web platform and published case study.  I am interested primarily in how the new paradigm shifts in digital technology and the democratization of the filmmaking process allow filmmakers to connect to an ‘expert’ global niche audience with more immediacy through the internet, engaging virtual communities, crowd funding and fan building initiatives and a variety of social media landscapes. Specifically, what access and resources are available and how to best exploit this new participatory relationship to create art? What challenges lie ahead for feminism and activism in the virtual space?

The question for [film] makers, consumers and scholars of moving images are what distinguishes documentary only from documentary made for
other channels, and whether the internet has any distinct, useful or unique characteristics that offer documentary anything more than just another means of distribution. (Birchall, p.279)

Questions being examined are:

1. How does this position the filmmaker as the ‘sole’ auteur/creator in this new method of film creation, production, distribution and financing?, 2) What are the advantages and/or the disadvantages to this new approach?,
2. What contributions can an ‘expert’ group of virtual strangers, via a niche audience, provide to support the filmmaker and the film’s contextual goals and content?, and
3. What sacrifices must be made by the filmmaker in creating a project in this new way?

In the film project entitled: ‘Single Girl in a Virtual World: What does a 21st Century Feminist Look Like?’ , engages a global audience of online fans, friends and followers, asking these virtual strangers to participate in the production, creation and financing of the film. Utilizing social networks, crowd funding initiatives, web blogs, viral video, second life, flash mobs, virtual chat interaction and traditional modes of documentary practice, the aim is to create a documentary film that exemplifies feminism in its profoundly new image.

Feminist documentary filmmaker, Barbara Halpern Martineau articulates…‘by empowering ordinary people to speak as experts, they question the basic assumption of dominant ideology, that only those already in power, those who have a stake in defending the status quo, are entitled to speak as if they know something. (Juhasz, p.304)

Bibliography

1. Juhasz, A. (2008) ‘Documentary on YouTube: The failure of the direct cinema of slogan’ in T. Austin and W. De Jong (ed), “Rethinking Documentary”: New Perspectives, New Practices. New York, NY: University Press McGraw-Hill
   Education.
2. Birchall, D. (2008) ‘Online Documentary’ in T. Austin and W. de Jong (ed), “Rethinking Documentary”: New Perspectives, New Practices. New York, NY: University Press McGraw-Hill Education.

A painter needs many years to master the tools of painting; an electronic artist would not recognize the work environment after such a time span. How does one master the programming them themselves?

Not only do artists’ tools and palettes have their digital equivalents today, but these are being refined and enhanced at such an incredible pace that we are now constantly faced with having to learn and adapt to these new tools. Has this overwhelming technological flux caused artists to sacrifice time spent on design and conceptualization in order to keep abreast of new media and technology? Is it time to learn to create with what we have or should we continue to push the bounds, go beyond and create more tools? Is the issue that we actually do not today have the tools at our disposal to create the desired content or have we forgotten the content while focusing on the power and ultimate possibilities?

While a programmer may be an artist, an artist does not necessarily have to be a programmer, not even an artist working in new media and with new technologies_ Media intensive art work has a long history of collaboration between visionaries and technicians, beginning with theater and film, then video, and now “multi-media.” The nature of the work often requires a team of participants each of whom contributes expertise necessary to the completion of the project.

Artists in the field of media arts are caught between two powerful forces: the market pulls us forward ever faster, more powerful, more complex hardware and software, at such a speed that we have no time to master the old tools before new tools become available; the existing field of visual art pulls us backwards, promoting categories of criticism and judgement which are anchored in other traditions. The first force carries with it the notion that the limits and constraints of tools are limits and constraints on creation – hence the search for tools that will “do it all.” It rewards those who “push the envelope”, which establishes a hierarchy where those who have access to the newest and most expensive equipment are on top. The second force rewards those whose media art most closely fulfills the assumptions of traditional art.

Attempting to reconcile a digital sensiblity with suclptural materiality steeped in the modenist legacy of “truth to materials” we can conceive of a form that is generated outward from its central core. At the center of which, the artist’s body is acknowledged as the performative instrument for production in a manner akin to action art of the 1960s and 70s in which “sculpture is recontextualised within an action” (McEvilley. 99).

This paper explores the theoretical and technical implications of the MORST funded interdisciplinary collaboration between artist James Charlton and engineers Olaf Deigle and Sarat Singamneni to produce a close to real time 3D printer. Integrating motion capture software with real time 3D printing the colaboration is realising a system through which the perfromative gestures of the artist are taransalated into concerete form.

The prototype system capable of produceing 1m2 forms is significant in that it effectively allows the artist to work hands-on with the mateirial digital, providing a sense of materiality central to other sculptural processes and eliminating the latency of conventianal 3D modeling that estranges the artist’s action and material output.

Effectively this allows the artist/perfromer to “draw” a digital/material sculpture. The resulting non-representational forms should be seen as manifestations of the artist’s actions over time. Organic in their appearance, they hold the expressive intent of gesture mediated by technology that renders an embodiment of the artist, freed by technology from the constraints of physical materials.

Central to this project is not simply the the development of a system capable of integrating of several contributory technologies – (4 axis CNC technology, FDM deposition, and CAD software)  but development of a system to capable of curved layer deposition. Conventional rapid prototyping technologies print in flat layers necessitating that two materials be printed to resolve overhanging features. The curved layer deposition process also demands a fast setting thermoplastic print medium that sets almost as soon as it exits the heated deposition head.

The paper, co-presented by Charlton and Diegel will adress both the conceptual framwork and technical resolution of the process as well as discussing approaches to collaborative methodology taken.

The rapidity and magnitude of recent advances in enhanced imaging and visualization technologies, have contributed to a significant shift in common perceptions of the human body. From physics to cosmetic surgery, imaging is changing the way we see. This ‘visual’ revolution has been achieved through prosthetic science, simulation technologies, informatics, biomedical engineering and most importantly, visualization techniques. The fractured parts can be isolated and when necessary replaced, reassembled. These manipulations created a dramatic change in the relationship between humans and machines. The resulting intimacy became further intensified by theories claiming that consciousness — have opened the door to the possibilities of humanizing electronic technologies. While the ethical and practical features of these developments permeate practically every aspect of our daily life, the consequences are far from clear. Critical discourses by artists working with scientific sources through imaging technologies are of extreme importance. It is in the contemplation of the discourse re the transforming body vis-a-vis the manifestations of the digital ‘revolution’ that we might gain a better understanding of our current perceptions and insight onto the future.

Panel: East & West

I will try to give a brief vi­sion of the dig­i­tal art scene in Turkey. I will talk about the re­flec­tions of so­cial and cul­tural cur­rent state on the dig­i­tal art scene in our local and the re­gion. I will try to ex­plain why the state of the con­sump­tion and usage of the cur­rent dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies in daily life does not have a cor­re­spond­ing ef­fect in the art scene.”

Panel: Serious Animation: Beyond Art and Entertainment

It is ir­refutable that soft­ware sys­tems have come to play an in­dis­pens­able role in the cre­ative arts with many dis­ci­plines reap­ing the ben­e­fit of soft­ware prod­ucts which aug­ment or en­tirely sup­plant tra­di­tional tech­niques. How­ever there has been lit­tle ap­pre­cia­ble ac­cep­tance of tech­nol­ogy within the dance com­mu­nity de­spite the best ef­forts of a core of pi­o­neers. Does the pro­lif­er­a­tion of per­sonal tech­nol­ogy which can “sense” the world in terms of mo­tion, audio, vi­sion and touch pre­sent an op­por­tu­nity for a re­boot of dance-tech­nol­ogy, and what new in­ter­face par­a­digms should we now be con­sid­er­ing?

Panel: On the Persistence of Hardware

This paper re­ports on a se­ries of ex­per­i­ments that were con­ducted as part of a prac­tice-led PhD, which ex­plored the dig­i­tal po­ten­tials at the in­ter­face of hard­ware and soft­ware through cre­ative prac­tice. The lab­o­ra­tory-style ex­per­i­ments de­velop along a tra­jec­tory from noise within ex­is­tent (com­puter) sys­tems to­wards spec­u­la­tive in­ter­faces, where con­cep­tions of ma­te­ri­al­ity of hard­ware and soft­ware are brought into ques­tion. Dig­i­tal processes are om­nipresent and yet re­main im­per­cep­ti­ble and in­com­pre­hen­si­ble (un­be­grei­flich) – eas­ily being mis­un­der­stood as im­ma­te­r­ial. This par­a­digm of the dig­i­tal im­ma­te­r­ial how­ever is highly prob­lem­atic, and chal­leng­ing it be­comes par­tic­u­larly im­por­tant in the light of re­lays be­tween tech­no­log­i­cal de­vel­op­ments and cul­tural con­cepts that de­velop into so-called Dig­i­tal cul­ture. Cre­ative prac­tice has a par­tic­u­lar po­si­tion from which to chal­lenge ex­ist­ing par­a­digms. The ex­per­i­ment here was used not as a strictly nor­ma­tive sci­en­tific method, but as a process that en­gages in con­tin­u­ous evolve­ment and in­ven­tion, while cel­e­brat­ing the con­struct­ed­ness of the pseudo-sci­en­tific lab­o­ra­tory. The se­ries of ex­per­i­ments makes use of the von Neu­mann ar­chi­tec­ture that treats soft­ware and data the same and through dif­fer­ent processes trans­forms soft­ware processes into per­cep­ti­ble dy­namic mat­ter.

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

Pas­sion­ate ex­per­i­ments in the in­ter­ac­tion of color gave rise to the Ab­stract Ex­pres­sion­ist move­ment of the 1960s, in which spa­tial am­bi­gu­ity ruled above all else.  This move­ment still in­forms my own work.  I began my ca­reer as an ab­stract or nearly ab­stract painter, then moved into com­puter imag­ing in the mid-1980s, and grew with the tech­nol­ogy of the medium.  My im­agery has shifted from nearly ab­stract, with only the slight­est ref­er­ence to the sources of the forms in na­ture, to the in­te­gra­tion of pho­to­graphic el­e­ments, re­sult­ing in clearly rep­re­sen­ta­tional work.  As the tech­nol­ogy has evolved to make easy the facile ma­nip­u­la­tions of pho­to­graphic im­agery, my in­ter­est has grown to in­clude a re­turn to the un­seen, be it in ab­stract form or in mi­cro­scopic el­e­ments.  I still crave Hans Hoff­man’s “re­la­tions of re­la­tions”, or the in­ter­ac­tion of clus­ters of el­e­ments through color in­ter­ac­tion. This is so per­va­sive in my think­ing that noth­ing can purge it from my vi­sual vo­cab­u­lary, even when I move into un­charted ter­ri­to­ries of mean­ing.

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

Pho­tog­ra­phy is one of the cre­ative fields in which tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vances in­flu­ence artis­tic ex­pres­sion the most. The ease of ma­nip­u­la­tion brought by soft­ware and extra fea­tures avail­able in cam­eras made artists (using pho­tog­ra­phy as an ar­tic­u­la­tion tool) re­con­sider their vi­sions, themes, nar­ra­tion, syn­tax and ways of shar­ing their art­work. Shar­ing sites like Flickr, which ex­pe­dite en­coun­ters of var­i­ous in­di­vid­u­als from dif­fer­ent cul­tures, help in chang­ing the per­cep­tion of the vital no­tion of time and en­able artists to get faster feed­back. Dig­i­tal tools allow pho­to­graph­i­cally based artists to think in a more dar­ing and free way. In ad­di­tion to the reg­u­lar mon­tage and col­lage meth­ods re­main­ing from the ana­log days, dig­i­tal imag­ing tech­niques allow artists to work with no­tions of aug­mented per­cep­tion, chronopho­tog­ra­phy, sub­real en­coun­ters, pic­to­ri­al­ism, palimpsest-like su­per­im­po­si­tion, in­ter­lac­ing, sim­pli­fi­ca­tion / min­i­miza­tion, cre­ation of new worlds, delu­sion, syn­thetic re­al­ism/ar­ti­fi­cial­ity, ap­pro­pri­a­tion.

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.

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

Today’s new media artists and ac­tivists find them­selves in a po­si­tion sim­i­lar to that of the Russ­ian Pro­duc­tivists al­most a cen­tury ago: the rev­o­lu­tion has al­ready hap­pened and re­mains only to be im­ple­mented, mak­ing cul­tural pro­duc­tion less an ar­tic­u­la­tion of the pos­si­ble than a sphere of the ap­plied. As dig­i­tal forms of in­for­ma­tion ex­change and knowl­edge labor af­ford the dis­lo­ca­tion of tra­di­tional bound­aries of com­mu­nity and iden­tity, “tele-” and “cy­ber-com­mu­nism” de­clare the dawn of a new so­ciopo­lit­i­cal era. The suc­cess­ful im­ple­men­ta­tion of the eman­ci­pa­tory abil­i­ties in­her­ent in so­cial dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion thus de­pends on their prag­matic ap­pli­ca­tion. Tech­ni­cal util­ity, and the new-me­dia pro­duc­tivist as its provider, are the keys to es­tab­lish­ing “ex­treme shar­ing net­works” not to make con­sum­ables but to har­ness and so­licit sur­plus cre­ativ­ity.  Or­ga­ni­za­tions like Mikro.fm in Berlin, Fu­tureEv­ery­thing in Man­ches­ter, and the Waag So­ci­ety in Am­s­ter­dam em­ploy dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy to turn con­sumers into pro­duc­ers, avail­ing “mass par­tic­i­pa­tion” for “so­cial in­no­va­tion.”

These groups re­pro­gram GPS de­vices to re­nav­i­gate urban en­vi­ron­ments, de­vise open-source soft­ware for remap­ping eco-po­lit­i­cal land­scapes, and or­ga­nize fes­ti­vals and work­shops for the col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­duc­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion of in­for­ma­tion and tech­no­log­i­cal know-how. As such prac­tices seek to re­con­struct the pub­lic sphere, the ques­tion re­mains whether or not the ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion and the tech­no­log­i­cal means of its pro­duc­tion ac­tu­ally re­dis­trib­utes own­er­ship of knowl­edge, labor, and ex­pe­ri­ence: whether these pro­jects fo­ment real ac­tion and agency, or fur­ther in­sti­tu­tion­al­ize an ideal bour­geois pub­lic sphere by cre­at­ing a sat­is­fy­ing sem­blance of cul­tural par­tic­i­pa­tion. Tak­ing a crit­i­cal look at se­lected ex­am­ples, this pre­sen­ta­tion as­sesses these col­lec­tive prac­tices within a tra­jec­tory of his­tor­i­cal avant-garde strate­gies and their for­ma­tion of po­ten­tial “pro­le­tar­ian” or “counter-pub­lic spheres” in which par­tic­i­pants are trans­formed into net­worked ac­tors rather than re­main­ing spec­ta­tors in sym­bolic dra­mas of aes­theti­cized re­la­tion­al­ity.

Panel: Without Sin: Taboo and Freedom within Digital Media

In So­cial De­vel­op­ment The­ory Vy­got­sky (1978) ar­gues that so­cial in­ter­ac­tion pre­cedes de­vel­op­ment; con­scious­ness and cog­ni­tion are the end prod­uct of so­cial­iza­tion and so­cial be­hav­iour. A Key con­cept of Vy­got­sky’s The More Knowl­edge­able Other (or MKO) refers to any­one who has a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing or a higher abil­ity level than the learner. In these con­tem­po­rary con­texts the MKO could po­ten­tially be rep­re­sented by in­ter­ac­tions on the In­ter­net or ex­pe­ri­ence gleaned from so­cial media. Role test­ing or play­ing is ex­pected to be tran­si­tional – done in our youth, but within on­line and dig­i­tal gam­ing con­texts we can delay and ex­tend this de­vel­op­men­tal process. Both the re­al­ity of an un-chartable (dark) In­ter­net, the ac­knowl­edged rate of change and the sig­nif­i­cantly prob­lem­atic lack of any so­ci­etal sanc­tion or pro­hi­bi­tion, gives ‘us’ more space and op­por­tu­nity to ex­plore the taboo and ad­dress re­pres­sion. With ex­tended ex­plo­rations of self brings is­sues around con­scious­ness, to­tal­iza­tion of in­de­tity and what is au­then­tic and what now con­sti­tutes healthy be­hav­iour?

This paper starts with the first transfers which have occurred in the identity of African art in contact with the Occident, at the beginning of XXth century. From there, is explained the deepening of the upheavals identities created by the advent of new communication and information technologies. The occasion then is very found to reveal how these transfers take place in the theoretical plan, and how the artistic production arises in new aspects where the traditional plastic disciplines are reconsidered and worked again. The question of the receiving public is tackled to see what these changes precede a new aesthetic culture.

Quite naturally, the perspectives artistic ones with the numerical one are posed. Will Africa be simple consumer of cultural products, or will it be condemned to be of its time not to disappear, culturally? Is this then the concept even of African art, which is thus in danger with this aggressive presence of electronic art?

Intro

Mutations Disciplinaires Dans les Arts et les Nouveaux Champs de Creativite: Le Cas des Arts Africains

The African art of the year 2000 is not the African art of 1950, and will not be the African art of the year 3000. By introducing by this truism my communication, I want to underline evidences, unfortunately often sources of various interpretations, sometimes contradictory. It’s like in what is called globalization, or globalization, to say that changes are happening, has become the best-shared thing in the world.
But this apparent community of ideas hides many questions when it comes to proposing attitudes, artistic behaviors. What does it mean, for example, African cinema, or African music, when Artists in these forms of expression use the new tools offered by science that has no homeland? Where is the African, when the kora is amplified, the sabar integrated in the bass drum of a battery? Where does the African stop at an art critic who uses the computer to do his questionnaires, develop his communications and evaluate the state of world artistic creation?
Queries that translate a situation more complex than we think. Therefore, it seems essential to me to be interested in some answers to these questions. When some people put under the account of a Western cultural domination that crushes Africa and tends to level everything, this use by Africans of scientific tools, others consider that it is rather necessary to speak about adaptations capacities of the African cultures in the face of any new practice or theory. Still others explain this identity of the arts of Africa by the fascination of Western civilizations, American in particular.

However, these points of view, whatever they are, do not solve the problem of the interpretations on what is African and what is not, the less the question of this logic of mutations which takes hold of artistic disciplines in Africa. The artists set the audience and the critics in a kind of confusion where we do not find the criteria to correctly appreciate the productions and where the reflection remains blocked on rather eloquent clichés of the fragility of the opinions on the current artistic Africa. These are the clichés of the genre: “African art seeks a guide”, “African artists risk losing their soul by touching too much on electronics and new technologies”, “World art is doomed to be American or not to be “, etc.

Poster statement

The work was written for live performance of a saxophone quartet with pre-prepared tape. The work has some jazz-like qualities due to many rhythmic syncopations. The presentation will include the following points: the importance of the DISCUSSION series in Menachem Zur’s ouvre; the constraints and limitations of working with a homogeneous wind group and the compositional implications that result from those limitations; pitch organization and the form of the piece; the procedure of composing and description of the equipment used; the personal philosophy behind the electro-acoustic sound-world, and its influences; and examples from the drafts and the score.

The talk investigates how processes of gaze disembodiment / gaze virtualization related to new technologies of vision, can be addressed as an emerging political-aesthetic battlefeld, marking new regimes of visibility and, in parallel, new regimes of truth. Moreover, the research aims at introducing a new type of onto-epistemological category describing the hybrid organic-digital online-offline circulating subjectivity involved in these processes. Via a post-phenomenological approach connecting especially the Google gaze circuit (Google-based technologies of vision such as Google Maps, Google Car, Google360, Google Glass), to drone technologies, virtual reality devices, neural network for robotic visions, haptoclones (holograms that users can touch), and the latest Google patent for uploading personalities of death people on robots – the presentation connects processes of gaze disembodiment / gaze virtualization to new processes of subjectivation, de-subjectivation and trans- individuation, envisioning their social, aesthetic and political consequences.

Abstract

Long Paper

DisNet is a “multi user domain”; i.e. an environment for structured communication and collaborative working, learning and playing. It conforms with the basic idea of hyper-systems in that it allows for representing context as a linked, nonlinear knowledge structure integrating multiple data types. Additionally DisNet integrates the common capabilities of hyper-systems (i.e. representation, browsing, retrieval) with features supporting the generation and differentiation of contextual relations. “Discursive Networking” attempts to organize collaborative learning and working as an open discourse and to represent the development-process of a context as a networking of semantical units on the basis of their relations. The context which is continuously differentiated by collaborators in a group-project is accessible by them on different levels: these are represented as graphical domains of interaction, which are coupled structurally; the “Context Domain” organizes the context in a 2D- or 3D-space as a semantic network, allows user-centered navigation, aids the orientation in the contextual network and its structuring. In the “Content Domain” a sophisticated multi-field representation-tool supports the editing and browsing of contextual components. The environment is highly user-definable due to the modularity of the system; distributed maintenance of the contextual space as well as of the system is supported: beyond the authority over the content the student is given the responsibility for the organization and maintenance of the environment which intends to motivate a conscious and self-responsible participation. The pedagogical goals aim at improving argumentative preciseness, acquisition of analytical and integrative competencies and developing awareness of knowledge-relations. We understand that a main feature catalyzing learning is the feedback between mutually stimulating interactions, such as orientation, interpretation, reuse, differentiation, extension, etc. In the paper we will describe the approach, provide an overview of the main system features and elaborate our understanding of context generation with DisNet.

Disorientalism, a collaboration between Asian American artists, Katherine Behar and Marianne M. Kim, will give a presentation on their latest project, Maiden Voyage. Inspired by the Land O’Lakes Indian Maiden and the Shadow Wolves, a special, all-Native, border control unit of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, this project explores issues of privacy, disclosure, surveillance, social class, and mobility through online and offline methods of tracking. Maiden Voyage is part of Disorientalism’s series, “The Food Groups,” which investigates race and labor in American mass food production and promotion.

(Long paper)

Keywords: LocoMotoArt, place, digital eco-art, technologically mediated experiences, urban environment

In contrast to the spectacle of large-scale projections onto urban architecture, digital eco-art offers intimate experiences in reciprocity with the largeness of the sensorial realm of nature. Digital eco-artists position work in natural settings for the exhibition of interactive computer generative sound and visual installation works. In doing so, they push traditional boundaries of urban public art to be more socially interactive, immersive, and inclusive of place they offer a means for re-visioning urban natural green space.

Keywords: Urban screens, media façades, large dynamic digital displays, screen technology, interactive public space installations, urban interventions, design strategies, situated interaction, remediation.

For over a decade, human-computer interaction (HCI) research placed a great deal of emphasis on studying interaction, engagement, and appropriative practices in online technology- mediated social environments. Moving forward, however, we see computing systems increasingly designed to support digitally-augmented face-to-face interactions in public settings. As far back as the nineteen seventies, new media artists anticipated this interactive potential of digital public displays to foster new forms of situated interactions in urban space, quite distinct from mobile computing in that they altogether exclude online connections or exchanges. Drawing on examples of practice, this paper discusses and showcases some of the key creative strategies, which panelists deploy in order to remediate interactive screen technology into a platform that has the power to disrupt the ordinary course of our everyday experience within increasingly media saturated cities.

Presentation abstracts:

1. Dave Colangelo — Using Massive Media to Remediate Public Space
   What can happen when buildings become screens?
   The new sites of conversation, contestation, and commerce in public culture that emerge from the confluence ofbuilding and screen-based technologies have two key characteristics. Firstly, they are big – they are massive. As a result of their scale they are highly visible and loaded with significance and thus culturally and economically valuable. They take space, that is, they take up a significant amount of prime real estate and demand to be considered as public and communal. Secondly, they are communicative and technical– they are media.
2. Jean Dubois — Air(e) Libre: From Individual Bubbles to Full Blown Public Sphere                       Before the twenty-first century, modern conceptions of public space were intimately shaped by everyday life and encounters experienced at street level and in city squares. Today, it may be that the majority of our interactions collectively take place through online social media and this shift may well have radically redefined our understanding of what constitutes public space. The street continues to exist but it is no longer the locus of public life, the place where we share ideas and views. Digital networks now host virtual public spaces rendering them intangible. While online environments support new ways of being together, they also change the stakes and present unprecedented challenges and opportunities.  et, it is still not completely clear exactly what these are. We have a sense that the public sphere has become a liminal space for public life somewhere between the streets and the complex web of media networks we use, an indeterminate discursive space produced by the interdependency of one and the other.
3. Claude Fortin — Ancient Insights on Interactivity: Using a Media Archaeological Approach to Study Urban Screens                                                                                                                            Huhtamo argues that, as elements of visual media culture, public displays have been a common fixture of the polis since ancient times. Applying his media archaeological approach to urban screens also reveals that large screen surfaces in private, semi-public, and public space have an equally far-reaching history of being interactive. A case in point are the dialogical wall writings found in Pompeii. Since the eighteenth century, archaeologists have been excavating the Ancient Roman town-city that lay buried in pumice stone after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.. In these ruins, they found that the interior and exterior façades of public buildings, stores, and private homes were often marked with graffiti and dipinti. A graffito is an inscription – a writing or a drawing – produced by scratching into a painted or plastered surface that hides a different coloured ground a dipinto is a similar inscription painted over this surface with ink, paint or charcoal.

Keywords: Digital Art, Art History, DIY, Printmaking, Inkjet Paper, Aura, Lace, Textiles.

DIY for the digital artist must be thoughtfully considered. The unknown printing-tech at an online store is vastly different than the artist’s substrate preparation and pulling a print. Art utilizing “newness” (and its ease) alone is no substitute for art historical knowledge, reflection and time-honored, maker-engaged technique. I specifically explore that of book and needlework artists in my work. Much of the value in the computer art object rests in its connection to art’s roots.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Interactive Artwork, Digital Art, Activity Theory, Disruptive Aesthetics, Interactive Framework.

In this research, we studied the disruptive aesthetics of interactive artwork based on the activity theory. The audience engages in interactive artwork not only for the pleasure of participation but also for the disruptive aesthetics of social values in the organization of human life. We analyzed audience activity in interactive artwork using the activity theory and created a framework with a basic structure for a disruptive aesthetics of interactive artwork. The audience engaged in interactive artwork and overthrew the social structure in three categories: disruptive rule, disruptive community, and disruptive role. Through the framework, artist will create a disruptive interactive artwork, and the audience will enjoy the interactive artwork as part of disruptive aesthetics.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Consciousness, Artificial General Intelligence, Artificial Moral Agents, Autism, Person, Rights, Dissociation, Psychopathology, DSM-V.

Today we see the rise of new artificially intelligent entities. Some are embodied as robots and others as non-corporal AIs in devices, interfaces and games. Researchers in robotics and Artificial Intelligence and philosophers speculate that these entities will some day pass the Turing Test and exhibit Artificial Consciousness (AC) or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), act as artificial moral agents (AMAs), be our lovers and even manifest the signs of experiencing pain and suffering. If such entities become our fellow workers, associates and companions shall these entities be extended the status of personhood with all the rights, privileges and protections under the law? How can we judge if they are truly conscious? Will the Turing Test be sufficient test to judge their fitness for citizenship? What if they exhibit behaviors that match the diagnostic criteria from the American Psychiatric Association’s Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) for Autism Spectrum Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder or Antisocial Personality Disorder? This paper argues that a DSM “Turing Test” will be needed for what Marvin Minsky termed “self-improving” robots to determine if they are fit to work along side of and interact with human beings on a daily basis.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Post-Digital Space, Right to the City, Hardware Criticism, Appropriation.

The development of the sociotechnical apparatus shaping our PostDigital space and culture ran simultaneously with the conception of a relational and processual reality and the development of computation and networks, which are becoming ubiquitous. These technologies have embedded in our physical space, giving birth to a fuzzy system that struggles between the opportunities for collective engagement, offered by the networked communication, and the capacity of control of a pervasive and opaque system. Art has been experimenting with these new technologies from its inception thus assuming the aesthetical and political commitment to develop strategies capable of disrupting the codes of domination and promoting a collective and constructive appropriation of space. These strategies refer to practices of embodiment and encounter, capable of promoting new assemblages towards the accomplishment of the Right to the City, the new citizenship proposed in the theories by Lefebvre and the actions of the Situationists.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Interactive art, generative art, computational art, computation and creativity, Ernest Edmonds (b. 1942), art and technology.

This article explores the work of British artist and pioneer of computational art, Ernest Edmonds, and its relevance to the field of generative art. Its focus is on two important, but often overlooked, works he created: Fifty One & Fifty Two (1980) and Four Shaped Forms (Park Hill B) (2014). The article poses a number of questions about the origins and development of these works. How were these works created and what inspired their creation? How are they connected? Based upon an analysis of material held in Ernest Edmonds’s Archive, the National Archive of Computer Based Art and Design at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and a series of interviews conducted with Edmonds by the author, the article provides answers to these questions.

‘Container Culture’ is an exhibition of art works that travel from different port cities in Asia-Pacific in standardized containers to San Jose to be presented alongside each other; almost like a conference of containers. In an ironic reversal of the tendency of conventional travelling exhibitions to convert every new space into an empty container, this exhibition invites curators and artists from each of these port cities to convert a container into a culturally-specific space. The exhibition conceptually draws on and hopes to deliberate on some of the following notions:

a) Ports – as liminal spaces that have traditionally and still negotiate the relations between countries – and this draws on and elaborates a whole set of related concepts of commerce, exchange values, customs procedures, border anxieties, legal trade vs illegal traffic, etc..

b) Containers as Spaces- as instantiations that mimic the white cube as an empty ‘container’ even while potentially enabling the subversion of the white cube’s immobility by their portability.

c) Transportation – the notion of artworks traveling in space and time between countries and hopefully bringing some of the culturally specific elements of one place to another – and of course the related concepts of location, cultural specificities, speed, proximitiy and distance.

d) Networks. Transporting shipping containers from one port city to another maps a network of economic relationships. By specifically curating new media installations, Container Culture investigates the effect of virtual networks to create real cultural connections.

Some Issues to Deliberate on and Discuss at the Summit:

1. One of the original intents of this project was to enable a model for and instance of distributed curating where a single curatorial concept would be differently realized, locally presented and then subsequently travel or become connected to a final destination where the separate realizations of the concept would be presented side-by-side. However, the logistic difficulties and different funding levels of the projects in each city meant that several aspects of the original plan had to be abandoned. Despite the fact that we were not able to realize the original plan, the project as it has evolved is equally interesting. It will be useful then to begin to look at what other models of distributed curating could be evolved in the future. What are the peculiar challenges and possibilities of such curatorial projects? How does one negotiate the specificities of location in the development of such projects?
2. The original concept of the project also focused on engaging different aspects of the container; its vocabulary of standardization, its spatial restrictions and its portability. What are some of the specific ways in which some of the projects have engaged the specificities of containers as exhibition spaces?
3. An important decision in the project was where to place the containers. While the original idea was to place it in the Caesar Chavez plaza and exploit its openness and public accessibility, due to several reasons we could not use this space. We eventually are now working to show it in the South Hall; an interesting space that has the sense of a huge container albeit a differently shaped one. What are the strategies to work with temporary exhibition spaces? How do and should these spaces connect to the more permanent ones?
4. What are some of the curatorial issues of each of the containers? What are the issues and concerns of the various works in the containers from the different port cities? How do these works benefit from or resonate with the other works and containers in this exhibition?

(Short paper)

Keywords: Internet of Things, Spatial Audio, Sensor Network User Interfaces, Sonic Art.

With the rise of ubiquitous computing, comes new possibilities for experiencing audio, visual and tactile media in distributed and situated forms, disrupting modes of media experience that have been relatively stable for decades. We present the Distributed Interactive Audio Devices (DIADs) project, a set of experimental interventions to explore future ubiquitous computing design spaces in which electronic sound is presented as distributed, interactive and portable. The DIAD system is intended for creative sound and music performance and interaction, yet it does not conform to traditional concepts of musical performance, suggesting instead a fusion of music performance and other forms of collaborative digital interaction. We describe the thinking behind the project, the state of the DIAD system’s technical development, and our experiences working with userinteraction in lab-based and public performance scenarios.

The material impact of the network on our everyday lives develops in us a heightened sense of that which is invisible: rather than focussing on objects as markers of reality we begin to understand the world in terms of processes and relations, change and interaction. And whereas tangible borders mark the parameters between objects, network artists have found it necessary to use protocol to call attention to and mark the borders between one set of relations and another. Network artists devise protocols that frame – in numerous ways – the activities of participants. Although protocol is a controlling mechanism, it also enables relationally-based art to be replicated at home, away from the gallery and away from the computer screen.

It is through a consideration of different kinds of protocol that the artworks discussed here came into being, and in this artists’ presentation I would like to talk about possible relationships between protocol and ritual, and the emergence of a distributed artform whose transportability is based on fragile protocols.

love_potion is a durational work in three phases that can be performed by anyone at anytime and in any location. It uses borage plants, seeds, magic spells, aural-visual trans-narratives and networked technologies. The work uses a magic spell renowned for healing rifts and nurturing compassion.

Growing borage is the first phase of the performance, and involves seeding, tending, harvesting and drying the herb over half a year. The second phase involves preparing the magic potion and in the third phase, performers make a DIY installation from material on the artist’ website for themselves and others.

November is a collaborative networked performance for four people, web cam, found text and prepared garlic. It is a calendric ritual that marks Samhain, Halloween and the changing of the season from summer to winter. Even when connected via webcam, a live trans-narrative developed as the performers listened attentively to the other at the same time as reading their texts, producing a rhythm which contracts, pulsates, ebbs and flows.

Keywords: Group interaction, touch, physical computing, haptic feedback, generative sound, consumer technology, spatialized sound, multisensory, immersive, information interfaces and presentation.

This paper discusses a collaborative practicum PhD thesis work in its final stages of production. The project inquires about the possibilities of the tactile sensation in art to reestablish human sensory relationship with the current technology. The series of interactive sculptures investigate tactile interaction as an aesthetic experience within the multimodal multisensory system. The silicone sculptures Silicone Valley, Hemorrhage, and Disturbed System aim to take visitor’s experience with the artwork into unfamiliar sensory territory. Touch variations to the sculptural surfaces provide electronic feedback of embedded vibration and directional spatialized sound in an installation format. The artwork presents this sensory information in a form of unexpected assemblage of pulsing organic sculptural surfaces and emitting sound. It also places visitors in a shared interactive space, an aura of travelling sound warped by their touch to the sculpture. This shared interaction investigates relationships between nature, artifice, technology, human body and human social group behavior.

Panel: Playing the non-playful: On the critical potential of play at the overlap of videogames and electronic art

Do we re­veal pre­vi­ously hid­den or ig­nored val­ues by dis­cov­er­ing the un­playable from play­ful ex­pe­ri­ences? Con­sider that un­com­fort­able mo­ment in life when peo­ple dis­cover a play­ful ex­pe­ri­ence ceases to be worth play­ing.  Just as an arm is bro­ken on the play­ground, or a re­la­tion­ship can no longer be mended, there are ex­plicit mo­ments when art trans­gresses some un­fore­seen ter­ri­tory leav­ing us with a fear of its po­ten­tial.  There are games that cross into the taboo and art ges­tures that are too eager in their play­ful­ness. They leave us un­will­ing or even un­able to play and in doing so, offer us an un­fore­seen op­por­tu­nity for crit­i­cal re­flec­tion.  Such work is some­times po­lit­i­cal other times naïve in its pur­suit, un­com­fort­ably stum­bling on that which may have been for­got­ten.

Panel: (he)artbreaking to the core: zombie data and the arts of re/de/transcoding

Dis­placed things, ab­sent or sur­plus ar­ti­facts and un­co­op­er­a­tive ma­te­r­ial pre­sent more about the way we cat­e­go­rize and un­der­stand the world than about their own qual­ity. They sur­prise and rid­dle, they raise ques­tions, they chal­lenge prac­tices of (re)search and han­dling, they give rea­son to mys­te­ri­ous or spec­tac­u­lar ex­pla­na­tions and ad­ven­tures. As a kind of counterepis­temic or counterex­pe­ri­ence phe­nom­ena, they chal­lenge men­tal mod­els, rou­tine scripts of every­day and pro­fes­sional life and trig­ger sto­ry­telling and dis­course.

Thus, we should think about how we can archive such phe­nom­ena of dis­or­der and what we can learn from their ap­pear­ance and dis­ap­pear­ance for fu­ture forms of archives and archiv­ing prac­tices. How can archives in­te­grate dis­or­der as an own qual­ity?

Panel: Open Culture + Wearables

The field of elec­tronic tex­tiles is multi-dis­ci­pli­nary and op­er­ates at the in­ter­sec­tions of tex­tile and fash­ion de­sign, in­dus­trial de­sign, fur­ni­ture de­sign, com­puter sci­ence, in­ter­ac­tion de­sign and media art. Due to this di­ver­sity, the groups of stu­dents being taught in this field are equally di­verse and all pos­sess a spe­cific skill set as­so­ci­ated with their fu­ture work field. In cre­at­ing their work they must con­sider the ex­pec­ta­tions of the type of end prod­uct(s) and the way qual­ity is judged within that con­text. Ex­pe­ri­ence tells us there is no one way to teach elec­tronic tex­tiles that would serve each group equally well. Al­though the needs of the stu­dents dif­fer, the skill set re­quired to make a suc­cess­ful elec­tronic tex­tile is the same for each stu­dent.

It is im­por­tant to have at least a basic un­der­stand­ing of both tex­tiles and dig­i­tal elec­tron­ics and to know how to uti­lize and in­te­grate them in a pro­to­type. When the stu­dent’s skills in ei­ther field are lack­ing the re­sult is at best naïve or clumsy, at worst stu­dents will sim­ply not fin­ish the pro­ject. In these di­ver­si­fied stu­dent groups vir­tu­ally no stu­dent pos­sesses skills in both tex­tiles and elec­tron­ics. In order to bring stu­dents to the level re­quired for mak­ing suc­cess­ful elec­tronic tex­tiles we need to cre­ate a col­lec­tion of bound­ary ob­jects in the form of pro­ject doc­u­men­ta­tion that de­scribes the com­plete pic­ture from tex­tile tech­niques to elec­tron­ics and the way in­te­gra­tion is­sues were solved. Such bound­ary ob­jects would allow stu­dents to see the skills they need to learn in the con­text of the skills they have, giv­ing each group their own entry point into the knowl­edge. This pre­sen­ta­tion will dis­cuss dif­fer­ent meth­ods for teach­ing elec­tronic tex­tiles to artists and de­sign­ers in art schools and uni­ver­si­ties and will de­scribe the ed­u­ca­tional tools that aid these ac­tiv­i­ties, point­ing to fur­ther op­por­tu­ni­ties for open de­sign in the world of elec­tronic tex­tiles.

Panel:   La Plissure du Texte

Roland Barthes’ canon­i­cal state­ment con­tains an un­der­stand­ing of tex­tu­al­ity that lies at the cen­ter of this chap­ter and in­deed in­formed the pro­ject it sets out to de­scribe. The term telem­at­ics has its ori­gins in the 1978 re­port to the French pres­i­dent by Alain Minc and Simon Nora con­cern­ing the con­vergence of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and com­put­ers, par­tic­u­larly in busi­ness and ad­min­is­tra­tion. Dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship is the term I coined to de­scribe the re­mote in­ter­ac­tive au­thor­ing process for the pro­ject La Plis­sure du Texte: A Plan­e­tary Fairy­tale, which is the prin­ci­pal sub­ject of this text. My pur­pose here is to ex­plore the ge­neal­ogy of the pro­ject, how the con­cept of mind­at-a-distance de­vel­oped in my think­ing, and how the over­ar­ch­ing ap­peal of the telem­atic medium re­placed the plas­tic arts to which I had been com­mitted as an ex­hibit­ing artist for more than two decades. The pro­ject arose in re­sponse to an in­vi­ta­tion in 1982 from Frank Pop­per to par­tic­i­pate in his ex­hi­bi­tion Elec­tra: Elec­tric­ity and Elec­tron­ics in the Art of the XXth Cen­tury at the Musèe Art Mod­erne de la Ville de Paris in the fall of 1983.

Pop­per had writ­ten pre­vi­ously on my work, and I was con­fi­dent that his in­vi­ta­tion of­fered a per­fect op­por­tu­nity to cre­ate a large-scale telem­atic event that would in­cor­po­rate ideas and at­ti­tudes I had formed over the pre­vi­ous twenty or more years. La Plis­sure du Texte: A Plan­e­tary Fairy­tale (LPDT) sought to set in mo­tion a process by which an open-ended, non­lin­ear nar­ra­tive might be con­structed from an au­thor­ing “mind” whose dis­trib­uted nodes were in­ter­act­ing asyn­chronically over great dis­tances—on a plan­e­tary scale, in fact. As I ex­am­ine it in ret­ro­spect, I see how a com­plex­ity of ideas can cre­ate a con­text for a work whose ap­par­ent sim­plic­ity masks a gen­er­a­tive process that can bi­fur­cate into many modes of ex­pres­sion and cre­ation. It is the bi­fur­ca­tions of ideas speci.c to the con­text of LPDT—their branch­ing and con­verg­ing path­ways—that I shall ini­tially ad­dress in this chap­ter. The con­tent it­self is trans­par­ent, in­sofar as the text in its un­fold­ing is its own wit­ness.

Panel: Hybrid Spatial Experiences

The dom­i­nant dis­course across in­dus­try, gov­ern­ment, cul­ture and acad­e­mia falsely pre­sumes mo­bile telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy to be in­her­ently net­worked, global and urban.  Across these dis­parate do­mains, there is a ten­dency to as­sume an urban con­text, a global con­text, and a tech­no­log­i­cal bias in terms of un­der­stand­ing the spa­tial di­men­sions and im­pli­ca­tions of wire­less mo­bile net­works.  This tech­no­log­i­cally de­ter­mined po­si­tion is partly an ar­ti­fact of the focus on spa­tial di­men­sions as­so­ci­ated with fixed telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works (as in fixed tele­phone or sta­tion­ary com­puter / modem) that have tended to fol­low pat­terns of pop­u­la­tion den­sity.  Also im­plicit in such fig­u­ra­tions is the as­so­ci­a­tion of the ‘urban’ with the ‘rel­e­vant’, sug­gest­ing that mass con­sump­tion or par­tic­i­pa­tion in it­self con­sti­tutes an ‘urban’ con­di­tion that is of in­her­ent value.  Whether overtly or covertly, the ‘urban’ as in­voked in these and other dis­courses tends to sig­nal the pres­ence or po­ten­tial of large-scale and ex­pand­ing mar­kets, a mean­ing that ef­fec­tively dis­places spa­tial and so­cial prac­tices deemed to be less prof­itable.

Thus, the un­crit­i­cal ap­pli­ca­tion of the term ‘urban’ im­poses an im­plied hege­mony and di­chotomy be­tween the terms urban/non-ur­ban. In every­day terms, how­ever, the lived ex­pe­ri­ence of mo­bile net­works is highly lo­cal­ized to the body of in­di­vid­ual sub­jects, es­pe­cially as such net­works are spa­tially an­chored to the mo­bile de­vice and its cor­re­spond­ing range of net­work cov­er­age and ac­cess which to­gether con­sti­tute a three-di­men­sional dy­namic spa­tial phe­nom­ena.  An­chored to the mo­bile sub­ject in situ the lived ex­pe­ri­ence of mo­bile in­ter­ac­tion, while in­evitably in­ter­wo­ven with the global and urban as fac­tors of net­work so­ci­ety and the post-hu­man con­di­tion, is nonethe­less dif­fer­en­ti­ated in terms of cul­tural and ge­o­graph­i­cal con­text.  In “The Urban Rev­o­lu­tion” Lefeb­vre prob­lema­tizes the city by defin­ing the word “urban” ex­plic­itly as the in­ter­ac­tion of su­per­struc­ture and base in a mu­tu­ally con­sti­tu­tive re­la­tion­ship that is not lo­cal­ized to the city.  This for­mu­la­tion is wor­thy of re­call in con­tem­po­rary dis­courses that con­flate all things with the urban as if noth­ing could es­cape its cul­tural logic or an­a­lyt­i­cal frame­work.  Through the pre­sen­ta­tion of pro­jects drawn from my own prac­tice, I will re­veal mo­bile in­ter­ac­tion as a spec­trum con­di­tion, where the be­com­ing non-ur­ban of mo­bile sub­jec­tiv­i­ties is ar­tic­u­lated through hy­brid and het­ero­ge­neous spa­tial pro­duc­tions of em­bod­ied in­ter­ac­tion in the mag­ne­tos­phere.

The roundtable will discuss the implication and transformation of heritage and culture of the UAE over the course of the past 50-60 years and its evolution through technology locally and internationally. What are possibilities to learn from culture and heritage developments from the past and how can these be source for innovation for the future development and a thriving creative economy today for the city?

Divided We Speak is an interactive media laboratory for Miroslaw Rogala’s Divided We Stand (An Audience Interactive Media Symphony in Six Movements) featuring (Art)n Laboratory PHSColograms/Virtual Photography with interactive sounds. This work is being presented at the MCA Video Gallery Presentation from August 30 through November 9, 1997, and at the MCA Electronic Gallery from September 16 through November 9, 1997. An artist’s gallery talk featuring Miroslaw Rogala with (Art)n, Alan Cruz, Steve Boyer and Mac Rutan will be presented Saturday, September 27..

Featuring Artists: Ken Nordine; Jennifer Guo; Urszula Dudziak; Werner Herterich; Michael Iber; Jeffrey Krieger; Kristan Nordine.

Guest Artists: Ascott; John Boesche; Jan Erkert & Dancers; The Lira Ensemble; Cathleen Schandelmeier; John Sturgeon; Andrea Arsenault; Abu Ansari; and others.

Technical support for Divided We Speak is provided in cooperation with: Apple Computers Inc, (Art)n Laboratory, DigiDesigns, IBM Personal Computers, Opcode Systems, Passport, Macromedia, Rent Com, Skyboy Inc, Swell, and ZZounds Music Distribution Center

This paper describes the SPLIT BRAIN USER INTERFACE under development for a project entitled Anita and Thomas in der Holler: A Opera for Split Brains in Modular Parts which will be based on video documentation of the 1991 U.S. Supreme Court Nomination Hearings. The interface of this interactive work will be designed to deliver information independently to each hemisphere of the NORMAL brain and to target identifiable lateralized brain modules such as those for reading, writing, verbal/auditory comprehension, spatial reasoning, and left-right handedness. Based on published research methodologies strategies will be developed to deal with left-right hemispheric dominance, binocular vision and stereopsis, probe the “emotional brain” and explore different pathways linking the limbic regions to cognitive activities in the neocortex. This is inspired by the discovery of the split brain’ by Roger Sperry and Ronald Meyers in the late 1950’s, and the later work of Michael Gazzaniga with patients whose corpus callosum was severed as a “cure” for epilepsy which did not respond to anti-epileptic drugs therapy. Patients who had a commissurotomy in effect had “two brains” which could not communicate information from one hemisphere to the other.

Findings include a patient who when getting dressed in the morning would pull his pants up with his right hand while his left hand would pull his pants down. Another study performed in the United States during the Watergate scandal reports that “Paul’s” right hemisphere disliked Richard Nixon while his left liked Nixon. Other experiments expose words separately to each eye. When the right hemisphere receives the text information the patient is not able to say what word was flashed on the screen but is able to write with the left hand the correct word. Yet even after writing the word the patient was not able to say what he had just written.
An experiment completed during a residency at the Banff Centre in 1996 provided impetus to explore this interface. The separate testimonies of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill shot from the identical camera angle were digitized as QuickTime Movies. When the QT movie of Clarence Thomas is display only to the right eye and simultaneously that of Anita Hill is shown separately to the left eye with left-right audio separation most “normal” wired viewers report the fusion of the two independent images into a bizarre androgynous composite. Some report a morphing back and forth between the visual dominance of each image while attention to the audio shifts from ear to ear. The SPLIT BRAIN HUMAN COMPUTER INTERFACE will use off-the-shelf Head Mounted Displays with two channel video, voice activation and stereo headphones to deliver independent video with text and audio signals to each eye and ear. A gamepad with buttons and a glide style pointing device permits testing for the affects of higher level cognitive processing involving left/right political biases which may influence interpretation of the artwork.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Interactive art, motion-based interaction, M.C. Escher, video animation, Kinect-based interface, art installation, humancomputer interaction. 

We describe a Kinect-based interface for navigating M.C. Escher’s works. Our interface is based on the Kuatro, a framework for developing motion-based interactive virtual environments. Kuatro utilizes the Model-View Controller (MVC) architecture and Open Sound Control (OSC) to provide an expandable environment for motion-sensor based installations for composers, artists, and interaction designers. We present a case study based on “Print Gallery”, an intriguing, self-similar work created by M.C. Escher in 1956. Our interaction design involves a Kinect sensor, a video projector, a Kuatro server, and a screen; it allows a user to zoom in and out, as well as rotate the image to reveal its self-similarity, by navigating prerecorded video material. This material is based on previous mathematical analyses of “Print Gallery” to reveal / explain the artist’s depiction of infinity. We discuss adapting this approach to other M.C. Escher works involving infinity

Panel: Arabesque, Mandala, Algorithm: A Long History of Generative Art

A live video cam­era pointed at its own mon­i­tor cre­ates a ver­tig­i­nous hall of mir­rors in its feed­back loop. The shal­low dis­tance be­tween lens and screen is si­mul­ta­ne­ously flat­tened and ex­tended to­ward an ever-re­ced­ing hori­zon. The ap­par­ently au­to­matic re­al­ist codes of the video cam­era turn sud­denly sur­real by ex­ploit­ing an in­her­ent ef­fect of the medium. If one then tilts the cam­era at a 90-de­gree angle, this loos­ened hold on rep­re­sen­ta­tion slips away com­pletely into daz­zling ab­strac­tion. The image of a mon­i­tor placed per­pen­dic­u­larly in its own frame morphs and swirls under the pres­sure of feed­back. It pulls from the cor­ners of the screen, and re­con­fig­ures into tum­bling pin­wheel that grows more and more com­plex over time.

This live feed “man­dala” ef­fect is a sim­ple means of di­vorc­ing the video cam­era and screen from the iconic and rep­re­sen­ta­tional codes that usu­ally gov­ern it. Nam June Paik and Shua Abe ex­ploited this ef­fect and oth­ers to cre­ate their first video syn­the­sizer at WGBH in 1969. They sub­jected live video im­ages to a set of dis­tort­ing processes that turned the vis­i­ble world psy­che­delic and strange. The Paik-Abe Syn­the­sizer, how­ever, was still tied to the cam­era and its mimetic prop­er­ties; it needed the cam­era’s im­ages as the basis of their ma­nip­u­la­tions. At the same time, Steve Beck was work­ing on his own syn­the­sizer at KQED in San Fran­cisco. Beck’s syn­the­siz­ers, VSI#0 (Video Syn­the­sis In­stru­ment Num­ber Zero) and The Beck Di­rect Video Syn­the­sizer did away with the cam­era com­pletely. His syn­the­sizer was “con­struc­tivist in na­ture, not dis­tor­tion­ist.” He cre­ated cam­era­less video by di­rectly ma­nip­u­lat­ing the basic com­po­nent of video – the elec­tron. This paper ex­am­ines how Beck’s syn­the­sizer, as well as cam­era-based syn­the­siz­ers, pro­poses an al­ter­na­tive un­der­stand­ing of video and its es­sen­tial qual­i­ties. Far re­moved from Ros­alind Krauss’s read­ing of the in­her­ently nar­cis­sis­tic qual­i­ties of early video and its feed­back loops, this his­tory of syn­thetic video grounds it­self in the ma­te­ri­al­ity of the screen rather than the trans­parency of the image.

(Short paper)

Keywords: DMI’s, Families of Instruments, New Models of Musical Composition, New Sounds, Hybrid Projects, Musical Performance

In this paper we propose ways to promote the use of specific Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs)1 in live performance situations. Some of these instruments (DMIs) are usually conceived as personal objects, adapted to precisely instrumental techniques or as expositive artwork such as sound and multimedia installations. To make this possible, it is necessary that composition paradigms includes, from the very beginning, integration strategies of DMIs together with traditional instruments and groups (ensembles, orchestras, etc.). The regular presence of DMIs on stage with traditional musical instruments, could lead to new aesthetical dimensions of music and a new compositional and performance paradigms in the framework of contemporary music. The emergence of these instruments and their integration with traditional instruments in musical contexts, will also lead to new dimensions of DMIs design. Our research in the framework of DMIs prototypes is strongly concerned by all these premises and we hope to contribute to the development of new compositional paradigms and some instrumental techniques. This paper presents our vision concerning the DMIs and their role in the musical environment and in musical history.

This paper discusses how ‘culture,’ in an era of unprecedented technological and social change (a digital global connectedness with and in everything), inscribes or sculpts itself on the neural networks in the brain. An evolution in the way we ‘read,’ decode, interpret and process (visual) information. The paper suggests our innate social behaviour patterns and techno-cultural inflection in negotiating networked cyberspace initiate need for a paradigmatic shift to define how these iterative cybernetic loops between socio-cultural immaterial relations and the neural networks in the brain facilitate an evolved perceptual process and contextual reading of ‘visual language.’ How does this digital connectedness in and with everything subsume our collective psyche to sculpt the neural networks in the brain and as a result evolve our social behaviour, cognitive wherewithal and aesthetic processing in the perceptual and psychological reading of visual information?

The paper attempts to arbitrate interdisciplinary thinking at the intersection of technology (the social behavioural systems and mental constructs in networked transactions), art and design (how we decode and perceive the visual, contextual research practice) and science (current paradigms of scientific investigation into the ‘reading’ and psychology of art, yet also a neurologically derived understanding of aesthetic processing). It is suggested that socio-cultural systems and mental constructs in the technologically inflected mediation of simultaneous networked information propagate emergent epistemological learning patterns. This in turn creates profound differences in the way Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants [1] access, decode, interpret and process this acquired (visual) information as knowledge?

What I’m really interested in is the empirical documentation of the socio-cultural behaviour and automated (unconscious) responses that underlie the primary event. These may include social behavioural patterns and mental constructs in networked communications, mimetic behaviour, information filtering, concentration, overload and processing. Operating adjacent to the cognitive / perceptual systems we employ to mediate concurrent networked information, it is proffered that these mental processes may hasten an evolution in ways of knowing, ways of seeing, knowledge acquisition and usage, information processing, aesthetic processing and social behavioural patterns. Can we separate the extent and invasiveness of socio-cultural behavioural precedent in mediating concomitant networked information systems from the contextual ‘reading’ and aesthetic processing of the visual? Are we oversimplifying or reducing the component parts to something that is a far more complex process?

[1] Definitions classified by Small & Vorgan in their 2008 book ‘iBrain.’

The received notion of ‘body’ as a unique, bounded and coherent entity with mass has been set in question in cyberculture. However, virtual embodiment has existed for centuries. Has there been a revolution in bodies – or is it our concept of the body that is undergoing a paradigm shift? That is, is the body seen through an individualistic lens blind to notions of collective embodiment? (The collective body is not to be confused with political notions of the nation state – it is rather a bottom up creation.) The paper explores the notion of collective and partly virtual bodies with historical examples from religion, economics and philosophy as well as theories of crowds, cities and masses. Offering several examples of collective embodiment in film it turns to representations of virtual embodiment in networks in recent science fiction novels and film (Gibson. Star Trek). If we once questioned whether there is thought without a body (see Lyotard), this paper asks if there is collective (Levy) or artificial intelligence or agency without embodiment.

Abstract

This paper proposes an idea for new software which graphically represents a person’s movements around their environment. It demonstrates how emerging technologies can be combined in ways to implement the idea and suggests exciting applications of such software. It suggests how we can find the optimum way to visualize this movement and how. over time, we can utilize that information for many functions. The end data from such tracking technology has benefits for the individual and the multitude. This opportunity for innovative development has emerged due to new promising software and devices, which combined in new ways opens exciting possibilities. Enabling people to envision their own movements over time by representing it graphically on a screen is achieved using tracking software, through the subjects’ mobile.

Introduction
Why track people’s movements around their environment? Before discussing the technical details it would be beneficial to explain what the potential applications of such software are. Visual information obtained in this manner could be used as a tool to help create the following;

1.  a Generative/software artist’s apparatus,
2.  an urban planning device and/or
3.  a means to assess your life.

My work explores the relationship between embodied sensual knowledge and the internalized narratives we project onto the environment through human culture. For my thesis exhibition I am developing a week-long installation in which I will cohabitate in the University Art Department courtyard with a donkey. In an attempt to facilitate an unmediated audience experience of “nature,” I’ll lead regularly scheduled walks around the campus with the donkey, as well as invite the public to eat, sleep, and spend time in the courtyard with us. The project encompasses not only my love of donkeys, but also frustration with artistic attempts to “represent” nature.

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

Our world is a sea of of par­ti­cles that, for no ap­par­ent rea­son, choose to form in the con­stel­la­tions and pat­terns that we are. Our edges are not hard. We are per­me­able. We are largely empty space. We are a con­stant flow, a dy­namic pat­tern, ex­chang­ing atoms with all that is around us; form­ing, con­geal­ing, shed­ding, re­form­ing; swept around by forces, ideas, ma­te­ri­als and en­ergy. Per­haps our first mis­take is to an­thro­po­mor­phise our­selves, think­ing we are sep­a­rate, co­he­sive, au­tonomous be­ings, in sin­gu­lar com­mand of our thoughts, de­ci­sions and ac­tions. In the robot we then see re­flec­tions and par­al­lels of our imag­i­nary free stand­ing, con­tained, in­de­pen­dence in its sim­i­lar os­ten­si­ble au­ton­omy, de­ci­sions and ac­tions. We be­lieve we can con­trol the robot with pro­gram­ming and screw­drivers. We be­lieve it is inert mat­ter. We be­lieve it is a lit­tle crea­ture like us.

We be­lieve it is noth­ing like the com­plex crea­tures we are. We be­lieve, god like, we cre­ated it. We be­lieve it is a man­age­able clever pet that never shits. We be­lieve it obeys us. We be­lieve it is a life­less ma­chine. We in­vest it with per­son­al­ity. We di­vest it of pres­ence. Yet we are not dis­creet en­ti­ties and nei­ther are ro­bots. What if the par­ti­cles we ap­pear to in­habit are pro­pelled by winds and flow forms of other ideas, other ma­te­r­ial par­ti­cles, other en­er­gies? Per­haps im­pe­tus sweeps into us from the robot or be­yond. Per­haps the robot’s con­stel­la­tion, its arrange­ment, has its own in­tel­li­gence, will and in­ten­tion. Given that we aren’t ma­te­ri­ally sep­a­rate from each other, nor in any way fixed, per­haps its will and in­ten­tion an­i­mate us at the same time as ours dri­ves them. Per­haps over time and in prox­im­ity, the par­ti­cles that seem to form the robot and the par­ti­cles that seem to form the human, can come into en­train­ment, just as pen­du­lums of clocks that begin their swings un­aligned will come into syn­chro­ni­sa­tion. The ex­change of atoms, the cur­rents of ideas, the forces and phe­nom­ena of the sea of par­ti­cles might man­i­fest through some dis­so­nant hum across human and robot fields of for­ma­tion.

DOUBLE VISION is an intermedia company that creates experimental performances for dance, music, video and installation. The group’s work explores methods of combining ideas, art forms, materials, and spaces. In this talk, Co-Directors Sean Clute and Pauline Jennings, will illustrate the complexities of interdisciplinary collaboration. In particular, they will discuss their work “Evolutionary Patterns and the Lonely Owl”. This series featured large-scale, interactive performances exploring simultaneity, chaos, and rule-based audience interaction. Components from this series can be applied to a multitude of artistic processes and physical spaces.

Panel: The Madness of Methods: Emerging Arts Research Practices

As we spend time ex­plor­ing the In­ter­net, what dig­i­tal re­mains do we un­in­ten­tion­ally leave be­hind? Based on this in­for­ma­tion alone, how would a stranger con­struct the story of an in­di­vid­ual’s his­tory? Like an arche­ol­o­gist might col­lect data and ex­am­ine phys­i­cal re­mains to cre­ate a plau­si­ble human his­tory, what might be de­rived from the ex­am­i­na­tion of dig­i­tal re­mains? Dou­ble Shadow is a con­cep­tual film pro­ject that seeks an an­swer to these ques­tions. The work takes the form of short bi­o­graph­i­cal film based on “fac­tual” in­for­ma­tion gleaned from the In­ter­net? The title Dou­ble Shadow pays homage to con­cep­tual artist So­phie Calle’s piece, The Shadow (1981), in which Calle asked her mother to hire a de­tec­tive to fol­low her, no­tate her daily ac­tiv­i­ties, and pho­to­graph her. My dig­i­tal dou­ble, my on­line ‘shadow’, tells a dif­fer­ent story than I do. I main­tain sev­eral web­sites, in­clud­ing one that doc­u­ments my pro­fes­sional ca­reer as an artist, and I am a mem­ber of over a dozen so­cial net­work­ing sites. Through a proxy, I hired an in­ves­ti­ga­tor to in­ves­ti­gate my life using only the In­ter­net as a re­source. With the text and im­ages un­cov­ered, the in­ves­ti­ga­tor cre­ated “my” his­tor­i­cal time­line. The data that was gath­ered was for­warded, via an­other proxy, to a screen­writer who used it to de­velop a char­ac­ter and write a screen­play. I then held a cast­ing ses­sion where I searched for an actor to play “me.” Ul­ti­mately a cin­e­matic art­work was made that raises and ad­dresses is­sues about the blend­ing of fact and fic­tion; the con­struc­tion of iden­tity or bi­og­ra­phy; sur­veil­lance; it­er­a­tive processes, recorded human ac­tion and the cre­ation of mean­ing; pri­vacy within pub­lic space; arche­ol­ogy; archiv­ing; and au­thor­ship and de­ci­sion-mak­ing both on­line and within an art prac­tice.

 (Short paper)

Keywords: Dramaturgy, performance, spatial theory, interactivity, installation.

This paper explores some of the important steps in the evolution of my doctoral research, which aims to relocate the notion of dramaturgy from the performing arts into interactive installation art. It briefly contextualises dramaturgy in the 21st century, and analyses the dramaturgical transformations caused by the impact of technology. It uncovers the still open process of the composition of a performative interactive installation, which supports the development of space dramaturgy concept. Developing the concept of space dramaturgy presupposes the analysis of other compositional elements vital for the elaboration of the concept: space, body and technology. The first aspect to be analysed is the philosophical scope related with both individual and collective experience of space. This draws on Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty and Lefebvre’s spatial theories. The theoretical underpinning is followed by a review of the process behind practice-based research, reflecting on the possibilities of adapting that to a dramaturgical questioning. Finally, the paper enquires into the interweaving of spatial bodily experience, participation, technology, the importance of time, and memory as a mean of finding performativity in interactive art installation, taking as a specific example the doctoral practice research.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Paul Virilio, drawing, visionics, media stream, memory, images, machine vision, accelerationist. 

Drawing_in_the_Media_Stream, a hybrid media installation, negotiates the collision between traditional forms of perceptual drawing and machine vision. Drawing provides a way to offer more lasting personalized and collective memories of the short-term presence of media images. By way of Paul Virilio’s arguments put forth in The Vision Machine, we critique and disrupt the production and packaging of sanctioned images as the result of visionics, supersynthetic machine-generated vision, and present alternatives to the resultant loss of short and long-term visual memory.

“…even nowhere has its twin: everywhere. Silicon Valley has become a nowhere … an obliteration of place, an ultimate suburb, a maze in which wars are designed, diversions are generated, the individual disembodied.”  _Rebecca Solnit from The Garden of Merging Paths.

How are the mass‑hallucinations posited by software developers projected into reality? How do they actually exist in our world? Is the cloud a physical manifestation of a collective subconscious? How does the role of place change in this virtual landscape and how does it translate into the real world, Particularly in the area of perceived value? Everyday, changes in the worth of resources and commodities results in the formation and liquidation of stockpiles. This panel will investigate ways that new technology can change how we can relate to ideas and the affect this has on the shape of our world.

This paper presents sculptures in my series, SETI situating them in the tradition of psychedelic and synesthetic art, particularly experiments with automated psychedelia such as the work of Brion Gysin and Thomas Wilfred. SETI are mechatronic sculptures which create continuously changing abstract video displays. In each machine, a moving camera scans an abstract fabric and glitter space-scape. The overlay of multiple translucent and transparent moving layers creates a glimmering and undulating mirage. The camera’s signal is transmitted to a projector or monitor, much as satellite images allow the real-time transmission of live events.

This paper concerns two dominant but oppositional agendas at work in wearable technology research and practices today. One of these conceives of wearables in terms of display and functionality—products are worn by subjects that intelligent systems sense and manipulate. This approach, which bears the stamp of its origins in military research, has been more recently advanced under rubrics like “Smart Clothes,” “Responsive Clothes,” “Computational Garments,” and “Fashionable Technologies.”  “Smart Clothes,” etc., explore innovative marketing concepts and coordinate with invasive regimes of control societies based on the speculative reach of digitized global capitalism. Examples include Scentsory Design’s aromatherapy clothing, Philips Technology’s mood-activated luminous dresses, and a wide range of other innovative applications based on sensing and piezoelectric technologies, such as Yoel Fink’s acoustic and color-changing fabrics which can be used to monitor autonomic body functions. So-called smart wearables, however beneficial their intent, advance a notion of subjectivity in step with neoliberal agendas.

By contrast, the second viewpoint, put into experimental practice in design institutes and by independent practitioners around the globe, might be classed as “tactical dressing.” This work is structured as time-based events, in line with Paolo Virno’s notion of virtuosity: works created are performative (ephemeral) rather than prototypical (productive in a market context). They use digital technologies’ potential to amplify already perennial capabilities of dress to solidify social sectors and roles, signal cultural/ideological positions to others in a larger community, and demonstrate the irruption of ubiquitous technologies in our lives. In doing so, they execute actions or “dress acts”—an extrapolation of Searle’s (and Deleuze’s) notion of “speech acts.”  Examples include Komalski & Weiser’s sonic Echo Coats, Berzowska’s electronically malfunctioning Skorpion dresses, and Nascimento & Martins’ microblogging Rambler sneakers.

The paper considers the questions: 1) what are the ideological differences, and what might be the relations, between “smart” and “tactical” approaches to wearable technology? and 2) what is at stake —in other words, how important is wearable technology, anyway? What is the real potential for wearables as performative acts—dress acts—in a world where communal space (the traditional context for dress) is increasingly fictionalized, factionalized, and virtualized?

In this paper, I will discuss the way in which the existence of the dérive is possible in Second Life and how this is demonstrated by John Craig Freeman’s “Imaging Beijing.” Freeman is a contemporary American artist from Boston, Massachusetts. His “Imaging Place” is an ongoing place-based work combining photography, video, documentary and virtual reality. It began in 1997 as an exploration of the forces of globalization, and was installed in the virtual setting of Second Life in 2006. Freeman’s overall project and its individual components such as “Imaging Beijing” can be analyzed through Jean Baudrillard’s 1983 essay

“Simulacra and Simulations,” particularly his notion of the simulation. Most importantly, “Imagining Place” assesses the realization of the dérive in Second Life.

The mid-1960s Situationist theory of the dérive explains that in order for a social change to arrive, subjects must re-experience the activities of daily life. Guy Debord, writing of an era characterized by the soaring popularity of television viewership and the wild proliferation of commercial media and advertising, noted that society itself was being transformed by technology.  His Society of the Spectacle (1967) describes this emergence of consumer society and proclaims that the spectacle that dehumanizes us. One of Debord’s proposed solutions was the dérive, which was to arouse in subjects an increased interest in the geography of the city. Most evocatively, the dérive was to create new encounters that were not otherwise possible, and through this allow for to positive social change.

Freeman follows Debord to critique our contemporary social geography as defined by computers and the Internet. Viewers encounter his work through an avatar that takes the role of the dérive’s psychogeographer and allows for a new awareness of the terrain. For example, in “Imaging Beijing,” the player’s avatar enters the city through satellite images and experiences it through panoramic documentary photographs. Focus on Beijing’s Hutong neighborhoods calls attention to the communities and individuals that bear the brunt of rapidly expanding globalization.  I find that Freeman’s insistence on active versus passive viewership is in alignment with Debord’s hopes for the dérive.

Drone Pilot is a live artwork which explores the conceptual subjective space of an individual connecting to a network. This network in turn connects to larger networks, which in turn connect to the violent apparatus of the state, to ideological systems the state requires and perpetuates, and to language itself. The work explores notions of the responsibility of the individual over the actions of vastly larger systems of power in which an individual plays a very small part.

Drone Pilot takes the form of a set of solo vocal performances in front of a projection screen. My work occupies an interstice between poetry and sound poetry: the text is semantic, composed to be meaningful, but its live rendition incorporates aesthetics of digitization, taking cues from code, digital systems, and cadences of computer-generated speech. This vocabulary of pseudodigital vocal aesthetics, which I have been developing for 5-6 years, can provoke effects of uncanniness on audiences, as the timbres and rhythms produced by my voice are apprehended as artificial, inhuman, yet they are clearly created by a live ‘analog’ body. My performances are intended to raise questions of the degrees to which digital technologies are internalized and become integral to the body and mind persistently, even when digital systems are seemingly disconnected or absent. The text of Drone Pilot contains remixed material from US military documents, by way of WikiLeaks. I perform part of this text as an extremely fast torrent of words that dissolve gradually into noise. By doing so I aim to convey a visceral feeling of an overwhelming flow of data, too much and too fast for a single individual to contain, retain, or understand. This in turn to suggest that attempts to grapple with kind of data ‘flood’ are related to a posthuman expansion of identity into multiplicity, as the individual becomes increasingly a cloud of other(s) and a component of containing systems. More simply, it also nods ruefully to the difficulty of dealing large quantities of information on a human scale, as sheer complexity make parsing a slow and laborious process.

Drone Pilot is an evolving project, an arc of material, that began in late 2014. It was performed in prior instantiations a half-dozen times in 2015, including at the New York venues Artists Space and Judson Memorial Church. The version of the work I propose to present at ISEA will be different and updated — it will include new material, and will be customized for context of the conference and space.

This short paper is a meditation on the technology, impetus, and cultural resonance of time-stretched audio.  From the lead-weighted keys and reconfigurable organ being used to perform 639 years of John Cage’s As Slowly as Possible through Hans Zimmer’s cinematic manipulations of Edith Piaf, to the digital alchemy of Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch that was employed last year to transform Justin Bieber’s U Smile into 35:29 of lush and blurry ambient textures, a variety of tools and practices now exist to drastically alter the tempo of music without significantly disturbing its pitch.  What are the technosocial motives for the current heating up of slowed down sound?  Who benefits from these greatly elongated soundscapes?  And, in the context of the near instantaneity of the Internet, what does it mean?

Institutional Presentation Statement

Digital tools and media demand a dynamic aesthetic to replace the static model.? Contemporary graphic designers must plan for movement, must anticipate interaction, must understand narrative. As publishers merge with television studios, and magazines create integrated web sites, convergence is more than just a catch phrase. The designer must be able to move from print work to dynamic media, from two dimensions to three, and sometimes even four. Design’s contribution to meaning has never been greater. It was for this reason that the Art Center College of Design instituted the Graduate Program in Communication & New Media Design. Educational institutions must speak to each other and discuss how they are responding to the onslaught of technology and the new paradigms in art and design. Our presentation will focus on three issues:

(1) curricular modeling;

(2) the importance of a theoretical underpinning for studio work in new media;

(3) integrating entrepreneurialism into design education. We will be showing selections of student work in print, interactive media, and the World Wide Web. We feel that response to our presentations in European contexts have been quite strong, as demonstrated in last year’s 101 Design Conference at the Van Eyck Akademie and at Doors 3 in Amsterdam.

What follows is an expansion of the three main areas to be covered:

(1) We will discuss how we built on Art Center’s renowned design curriculum, adding technical classes that span the range of tool sets necessary to create fully formed projects in the new media, with studio courses in programming, interactive design, motion graphics, 3-D modeling, digital font design, and web site development.

(2) Equally important, we will cover the seminars that create an intellectual context for these technical skills. These seminars include theories of construction, new media aesthetics, semiotic discourse, interactive narrative and classical story structure, the philosophical implications of virtual systems, and the interweaving of architecture and imaging systems.

(3) Part of increasing the significance of the designer’s role in the coming information era is to increase the designer’s ability to generate projects, to create intellectual capital and utilize it, rather than coming in at the end as a surface treatment.

Art Center prepares its students for just such an environment by encouraging an entrepreneurial approach to design, exposing students to other models of intellectual property systems — the film industry prime among these — in which creators have been able to wrest certain degrees of autonomy, control, and equally important, equity in the projects towards which they contribute.

In every day language the term “landscape” has several acceptations. The most obvious are perhaps the ones referring to landscape as an expanse of scenery that can be seen in a single view: a desert landscape, for example, or a picture, or an artistic representation depicting this expanse of scenery. In this paper, however, I’m using another acceptation of landscape – I will not consider a material landscape or its image, but an abstract one, emerging from contemporary scientific research. Nevertheless it also concerns vision: it is a mental picture offering a theoretical view on systems of interacting agents in an environment.

From the theory of evolution to embryology and statistical physics, the ”landscape” metaphor – qualified as “adaptive”, “epigenetic”, or “energetic”, depending on the domains under consideration – presents a characteristic shape defined by peaks, pits, and cols, and synthetically captures several essential questions for the modelling of complex systems :

What are the nature and the evolution of equilibria that characterise the landscape? How is their stability characterised? And their robustness? What is the effect on a landscape of different kinds of disturbances or interactions with the environment? At what spatiotemporal scales is it suitable to situate such analyses and investigations? What are the variables that are represented by the landscape? In what space do they live?

In this paper I will illustrate how, on the basis of a  structural (albeit dynamical) interpretation of the figure of landscape, this set of questions can be taken as an agenda for a performative design research program, DynLan, lead at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.

ABSTRACT

David Rokeby will be presenting the IntAct system, a combination of hardware and software which he has developed for the Macintosh computer. IntAct allows artists to create music and video installations that respond in real-time modifiable object oriented programming language, a syntax and vocabulary enforcing editor, real-time video motion analysis hardware, strong support for MIDI input and output and the control of videodisc players, plus a range of graphic tools for the shaping of interactive responses.

HOW DO WE EXPERIENCE SPACE in the American southwest? Usually through the window of a fast-moving machine. Unlike the pedestrian-based cities of Europe, modern cities here grew in tandem with rail and highway systems, and this history has given us an accelerated perspective on the landscape. We have built our lives around these machines at speed. They have become our homes, dining rooms, offices, and identities. we spend money and time on comfort, style, and utility and dot the landscape with our custom cars, motorcycles, and pick-up trucks. Hot rodding, stock car and drag racing, demolition derbies, car shows, motorcycle clubs, and psychedelic vans all define our car culture and our artifacts are custom-fitted to this lifestyle, with popular films like Easy Rider and technological developments like mobile phones and GPS. The ISEA subtheme of Dynamobilities attempts to address the phenomena of mobile machines and their local and global manifestations, implications, and futures. Specifically, Dynamobilities has been created to investigate more sustainable solutions to mobility in both physical and virtual space.

Dyne:bolic is an 100% free operating system shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives as a practical tool for multimedia production employing recycled PC computers found anywhere.

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

My 2007 work Do­mes­tic Ten­sion used a vir­tual, tran­si­tory and in­tan­gi­ble medium – the in­ter­net – to con­vey to the Amer­i­can pub­lic some­thing of the daily ex­pe­ri­ence of the peo­ple of Iraq liv­ing in a con­flict zone. In this pro­ject, in­spired by the 2004 death of my brother in our home­town of Iraq, I was con­fined for one month in a Chicago gallery with a paint­ball gun aimed at me, which peo­ple could shoot over the In­ter­net. Since this pro­ject, I have had an anti-ma­te­r­ial ap­proach. I want to cre­ate ex­pe­ri­ences that will last in peo­ple’s mem­o­ries far more vis­cer­ally than the pas­sive view­ing of a ma­te­r­ial ob­ject which will just end up in a gallery. Em­body­ing an ex­pe­ri­ence in an ob­ject is a West­ern no­tion. How can we re­verse that no­tion so the art­work be­comes the ex­pe­ri­ence it­self? So it is an ac­tive ex­pe­ri­ence, with no prod­uct and all process. The ex­pe­ri­ence of my daily life and those around me is the di­rect and con­stant fod­der of my cur­rent pro­ject, the 3rdi. With a cam­era im­planted in the back of my head, cap­tur­ing an image spon­ta­neously once a minute and up­load­ing it to the web, I am invit­ing peo­ple to ex­am­ine and ac­knowl­edge the oth­er­wise over­looked cor­ners of our lives and sur­round­ings; while also high­light­ing the ever-pres­ence of se­cu­rity cam­eras and other sur­veil­lance ap­pa­rata and the near-ab­sence of any truly pri­vate space in our mod­ern re­al­ity.

Poster statement

E-motion is a collaborative research project between a dancer, a computer scientist and an electrical engineer. It aims to explore how mood can be represented in Web-accessed 3D virtual environments using choreographed electronic motion. Groups of choreographed anthropomorphic agents take dance into a new place creating dynamic mood environments. Viewers’ perceived emotional responses to four different mood portrayals have shown that different moods can be created and that choreography has a significant contribution to make to the future development of inhabited virtual worlds.

Panel: Think BETA: Participative Evolution of Smart Cities

At Kris­tianstad Uni­ver­sity the in­for­mat­ics group have founded the “Col­lab­o­ra­tive media Lab” in­clud­ing par­tic­i­pants with a back­ground in acad­e­mia, de­sign and in art. The aim of the lab is to work with de­sign of new tech­nol­ogy and its ap­pli­ca­tion with a user-cen­tered per­spec­tive in both real, vir­tual and mixed media set­tings. Hav­ing worked with par­tic­i­pa­tory de­sign and 3D/vir­tual re­al­i­ties in sev­eral de­sign/re­search pro­ject, we have seen the strength of col­lab­o­ra­tive de­sign tools that allow new­com­ers to de­sign and work with 3D. They were able to en­gage in de­sign­ing in re­la­tion to rather com­plex sce­nar­ios and spaces, and in that way ex­plore the de­sign chal­lenges that are of­fered in a par­tic­u­lar con­text. This has typ­i­cally been done in groups lo­cated  and work­ing to­gether in the same room. But now with the so­cial web in­clud­ing dis­trib­uted and shared col­lab­o­ra­tive en­vi­ron­ments these set­ting can be used for en­gag­ing par­tic­i­pants in a di­a­logue of fu­ture urban de­sign chal­lenges in new ways. In our for­mer re­search we gained a lot of knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ence of how to use com­put­ers and soft­ware as tools when di­rect­ing and con­cep­tu­al­ize tra­di­tional pro­duc­tions, but we still have a lot to learn when it comes to see­ing dig­i­tal ma­te­r­ial as a de­sign or artis­tic ma­te­r­ial in it­self, es­pe­cially in the area of col­lab­o­ra­tion. How­ever it is not so strange, as dig­i­tal de­sign is not yet as ma­ture as tra­di­tional de­sign. Dig­i­tal ma­te­r­ial have char­ac­ter­is­tics that dif­fer a great deal from those with which most peo­ple are ac­cus­tomed. Dig­i­tal ma­te­ri­als are usu­ally more com­plex and flex­i­ble, less trans­par­ent and tan­gi­ble. We have to point out the need for a more pro­found re­la­tion­ship when and where to use dig­i­tal ma­te­ri­als and tools. We be­lieve that in­creased com­plex­ity in cre­ative de­vel­op­ment calls for both dis­ci­pli­nary depth and in­te­gra­tive skills. E-par­tic­i­pa­tion is a way of let­ting the pub­lic into plan­ing and de­ci­sion processes. The key­word here is “processes”. Rather than e-democ­racy, e-par­tic­i­pa­tion is about cre­at­ing di­a­logues, and being able to con­tribute with new sug­ges­tions and ideas.?Working in the re­search field of de­sign, we stress the im­por­tance to give the co-cre­ators a com­mon and grounded point of de­par­ture. We there­fore use a mix of fic­tion and facts in our plan­ning and writ­ing process, to pro­vide rel­e­vant and en­gag­ing back­ground in­for­ma­tion. This is later are handed over as sce­nar­ios to the in­vited par­tic­i­pants.

The sce­nar­ios pro­vide de­tailed and spe­cific data, which then the co-cre­ator can use as ref­er­ence ma­te­r­ial for their fu­ture ac­tion. The sce­nar­ios acts very much as con­straints, but also as a first gen­er­a­tor in a chain of as­so­cia­tive de­sign work that fol­lows, pro­duc­ing a shared pro­pos­als. Based on sce­nar­ios our model of ex­plo­ration starts in a be­liev­ably ter­ri­tory, were all of the co-cre­ators put for­ward, ex­per­i­ment and es­tab­lish­ing it­er­a­tions be­tween the them­selves and the sce­nar­ios in a col­lab­o­ra­tive 3d set­ting. The sce­nar­ios. pro­vide knowl­edge to the dif­fer­ent stake­hold­ers and in­flu­ence their de­vel­op­ment using this shared 3d en­vi­ron­ment as the sur­face for ex­plor­ing con­cepts and com­mu­ni­cate them amongst the par­tic­i­pants in an con­stant di­a­logue. A Col­lab­o­ra­tive 3d en­vi­ron­ment can be an ef­fec­tive en­vi­ron­ment for ex­pand­ing ideas and gain a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of the de­sign task. To­tally un­trained per­sons are able to build rather com­plex spaces within short time lim­its. It is play­ful, fun and stim­u­lat­ing to use, pro­moted in­no­v­a­tive think­ing and in that way ac­ti­vat­ing the de­sign process. Our con­clu­sion is that this is due to the fact that E-par­tic­i­pa­tion and the ac­tual de­sign of vir­tual spaces can sup­port par­tic­i­pants and stake­hold­ers to com­bine dif­fer­ent ideas, ne­go­ti­ate and pri­or­i­tize. In this way the shared en­vi­ron­ment deep­ened the un­der­stand­ing of de­sign­ing in the con­text of fu­ture and com­plex urban spaces.

For the visually impaired navigating the city is a truly invisible experience, one that relies on cross-modal interaction, from audible and tactile stimuli. E-skin uses new technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, and new touch and sound-based metaphors, which may help the visually impaired learn to experience the city as a shared cultural feedback loop.

Through workshops with congenitally blind users, E-skin is evolving into an experimental project to develop wearable electronic skin for special awareness and Interactive learning. The interface is based on the biological sensorial of the human skin. In neuron-psychology clinical studies, clearly prove that the information-acquisition and processing capabilities of human skin rival those of our visual and auditory system (Kaczmarek and Bach-y-Rita, 1995). Tactility can be combined with sound feedback and transferred via cross-modal interaction into neural patterns, which are optimal for learning (Te Boekhorst et al. 2003). The different receptors participating in our bodily haptic system contribute to a neural synthesis that interprets position, movement, and mechanical skin inputs. Druyan (Druyan, 1997) argues that this combination of kinaesthetic and sensory perception creates particularly strong neural pathways in the brain. It has been also been proven that our haptic system is superior to vision with regard to its capability to discriminate different textures (Sathian et al., 1997; Verry, 1998) as well as micro-spatial properties such as compliance, elasticity, viscosity and temperature (Lederman, 1983; Zangaladze, et al., 1999). Vision and haptics (tactility) complement each other in that vision aids in the perception of macro-geometry while haptics excel in the detection of micro-geometry. Research on blind people’s mobility (Colledge et al, 1996, Ungar et al, 1996) indicates, that the deficiency in the visual channel is compensated with touch and hearing (Lahav and Mioduser, 2003). In case of non-impaired people most of the information required for mental mapping of space is gathered through the visual channel (Lynch, 1960). From our related studies and workshops we have found that while there is has been a lot of studies in the role of skin modalities in object manipulation and recognition, there is relative little information available on how pressure, temperature and vibration participate in our perception of space. In our e-skin prototypes temperature plays an important role orientation and navigation (the skin can detect a warming of only 0.4 degrees centigrade and a cooling of 0.15 degrees centigrade (Kenshalo et al., 1961), providing us with important information about our current environment. In e-skin we are attempting to fill a gap about the relationship between tactility and sound with the aim of improving access to information and navigation. The aim of e-skin is to develop two wearable and usable accessories, with slightly different configurations for the visually impaired. The first version of e-skin will support the visually impaired in the market street or in supermarkets and the second version would enable the person to attend and actively participate in cultural events (art galleries, theatre events or dancing on a dance floor). Existing navigation aids for blind people are either obtrusive, not wearable and/or only rely on acoustic feedback. Many of these devices are difficult to use for blind people, for example, acoustic feedback interferes with and blocks normal hearing, one of the most important senses for gathering information about the environment. Our technical goal is to substitute vision by a combination of tactile and acoustic feedback and actuation provided by accessories with sensor and actuators linked to a wearable computer (QBIC). These devices would be connected using a Wifi network. The e-skin accessories will consist of several interactive components: – An armband with pressure sensitive and electro-tactile fabric, acoustic bone transducer, accelerometers, temperature sensor, a directional RFID antenna. And vibration motors – An ankle band containing accelerometers and vibration motors – A shoulder strap with electronic compass and ultrasonic range sensor – A computer belt, containing a QBIC computer (inc. Wifi), RFID readers, antennas and vibration motors.

E-skin is being developed for and tested in two different city environments: Firstly, a real shopping market environment or street. This setting has been chosen because shopping is one of the most inaccessible and frustrating experiences for any visually impaired person. There are too many similar looking products, too little variations in light, and too many obstacles in their way. From a research point of view, the supermarket is interesting because it is a highly dynamic and complex environment. Also many retailers are looking at the potentials of RFID technology for their environments. The second environment is a dance or disco, in which visually impaired people can participate in a dance event supported and enhanced by the e-skin interface. We have been experimenting with our eight blind collaborators who have expressed a great interest in working with the potentials of gesture and communication in cultural environments with non-impaired people. From a research perspective, the workshops test the technical usability and ergonomics of e-skin, as well as extend the robustness of the interface in a fast and dynamic multi user setting. As an artist who works in Artificial Intelligence, embodied interaction should take into account the physical and social phenomena, which unfold in real time and real space as a part of the world, and know-how in which we are situated. Many artists use 3D virtual environments because they are interested to improve the level of audience immersion. Acoustic feedback, alone is not strong enough forms of interaction to achieve truly immersive results. E-skinE-skin is a shared research and development attempt to combine know-how in sensory perception, cultural studies, engineering and software design in order to humanize technology for the visually impaired. The tactile and sound perception of the visually impaired can be utilized to increase their awareness of space. The combination of tactile sensors with movement interaction can generate valuable feedback for orientation and navigation. These potentials might also be helpful for people who have only slight vision deficiencies (like the elderly). e-skin allows for a very intuitive interaction due to its sensory modalities, feedback methods, and ergonomics potentials, which are all based on the human skin. Unlike most interface developments, this project integrates visually impaired users into the entire process of HCI Interface development. The project will increase the accessibility of two environments (shopping mall and dance stage) to visually impaired people. We consider this an important towards the overcoming of the social separation in the city street, between handicapped and normal people.

In academic debates around culture and media, creative interventions into new technologies that seek to bridge the ‘digital’ and the ‘analog’ as well as the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, have traditionally been discussed under the rubric of hybridity. While cultural discourses largely focus on radical practices that try to challenge borders and engage in in-between-spaces and creative zones with the aim to resist globally networked homogeneity, the media debate instead tends to be more concerned with questions of medium specificity and the affirmation of difference. The latter is seen as crucial for aesthetic, social and cultural intervention into commercial industries. The two-fold challenge for creative practices is therefore to somehow move towards a ‘borderless world’ while at the same time to address, affirm, and/or contest (the notion of) borders for the sake of radical intervention and the articulation of identity under globalisation.

This challenge foregrounds itself especially when ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ concepts and traditions of creative practices interact through new digital technologies. With regard to the emergence of media cultures that merge ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ influences and components in increasingly complex ways, the panel scrutinizes to what extent the digital provides a ‘universal(ised) language’, as well as how differences in culture and media remain relevant. The panel consequently seeks to address the ways in which the discourses, technologies and aesthetic practices of investigating and crossing borders and boundaries, in their cultural but also in their material specificity, reproduce or even aggravate contemporary modes of gendered, raced, and classed in- and exclusion under globalisation. What kinds of borders are overcome, mediated, transformed, veiled, reproduced, or even newly established? Main focus for such analyses are cross-cultural collaborations and networks that operate in blurred zones, for example creative industries, collaborative networks, open sources, and so forth. Questions of in- and outside are of high importance in such contested spaces, in which diverse identities, potentially conflicting interests, and discordant perspectives meet each other in real, virtual, and imaginative spheres.

1. Kerstin Mey — Hybridity and Interactivity in contested Spaces
2. Yvonne Spielmann — East-West interaction in digital Media Arts
3. Zaki Omar — Across the Net: collaborative digital productions (on collaborative digital productions (Potsdam-Beijing)
4. Ingrid Maria Hoofd — Mediations of ‘East’ and ‘West’: The productive borders of networked globalisation
5. Sean Cubitt — Settler dread and indigeneitiy: digital media arts in Oceania’.
6. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun — Imagined Networks: From the erosion of national sovereignty to networking sites?

Easy Jazz is a system that helps people improvise jazz solo without musical knowledge and training. The web-based system allows users to easily access to it without any special equipment or software. The system offers two versions of backing tracks and three types of instrument options. Once the user selects an instrument, the icons of the corresponding instrument appear on the screen. There are nine icons in total, and each of them represents a single note. The user can play the desired note by hovering the cursor of mouse or other compatible input devices over the icon. The notes that the icons represent keep changing adapted to the chord of the backing track. Four notes out of them correspond to the chord tones and they are displayed as large icons.

The Echology: Making Sense of Data initiative seeks to break new ground in arts practice by asking artists to innovate with respect to a) the possible forms of data representation in public art and b) the artist’s role in engaging publics on environmental sustainability in new urban developments. Initiated by ANAT and Carbon Arts in 2011, Echology has seen three artists selected by National competition in 2012 for Lend Lease sites across Australia. In 2013 commissioning of one of these works, the Mussel Choir by Natalie Jeremijenko, began in Melbourne’s Victoria Harbour development. This emerging practice of data-driven and environmentally engaged public artwork presents multiple challenges to established systems of public arts production and management, at the same time as offering up new avenues for artists to forge new modes of collaboration. The experience of Echology and in particular, the Mussel Choir is examined here to reveal opportunities for expansion of this practice through identification of the factors that lead to a resilient ‘ecology of partnership’ between stakeholders that include science and technology researchers, education providers, city administrators, and urban developers.

During the second half of the 20th century, a growing number of artists produced work with an ecological dimension, including such luminaries as: Hans Haacke, The Harrisons, and Mierle Laderman-Ukeles to name a few. This panel will focus on the complex triad of eco-art, situated practices – those modes of engagement that are ordered by the conceptual and physical contingencies that arise from the specific conditions of their site of production, display or distribution, and social practices – varied forms of community engagement, participatory intervention and project-based public work that embrace democratic processes and inspire progressive social, cultural, and environmental change.

In current artistic interventions deploying locative technologies, there are now two distinct domains of practice—one that engages the “digital tame” of social media, online consumer culture and other post-Situationist urban interventions, and another, which critically interrogates the “wild” by considering ecological and environmental conditions in the “natural” world, which are approached less often than urban activities by pervasive digital art. This panel will account for what we are calling the “Eco-Locative”—a strain of art practice that uses digital and locative technology to mediate on our understanding of the natural, nature, and wilderness.

Eco-media is the creative use of new media tools to connect to the natural world. Recent projects include digital media systems that respond to real time and model-based data describing the global environment. As was seen in the recent Tsunami disaster, thousands of lives can depend on the interpretation of global data, and Eco-media art explores how the interpretation of data impacts life aesthetically, socially and politically.

Abstract

I will present what I call Eco-media art projects. Eco-media is the creative use of new media tools to connect to the natural world. For example: an Eco-media work might be a networked media system that interacts with weather or climate both locally and globally, or might use media tools to analyze and respond to human over-consumption of natural resources in order to promote greater efficiency and less waste.

New media is a discipline that changes rapidly based on technological and scientific research, and in order to respond to these changes, many new media artists find they must be engaged with science and technology. Most new media artists follow trends in computer science and some even develop their own software, but increasingly, new media artists have also connected with developments in other areas of science and technology, for example: biotechnology, robotics, or nanotechnology. In my own work, I have explored emerging technologies, written and developed custom and open source software, and worked with scientists from various disciplines to explore new aesthetic forms.

I have been drawn to scientists who study the natural world, in particular weather and climate. I have discovered that developing technology has also caused dramatic changes in this area. Faster computers have allowed scientists to develop more detailed weather and climate models, and networking has allowed for real-time sharing of information. This new information is a great benefit to science, but it also can and should be explored by artists to encourage an aesthetic appreciation for nature in all its complexity and beauty. As was seen in recent Tsunami and hurricane disasters, thousands of lives can depend on the interpretation of weather and climate data, and my interest as an artist is in how the interpretation of this data impacts life aesthetically, socially and politically. This exploration of information about the natural world that combines art and science is Eco-media.

I developed the idea of Eco-Media over the past five years by creating a series of art projects that use digital media to respond to real time and model-based data describing the global environment. In the process of creating those projects, I worked closely with meteorologists and atmospheric scientists, with climate scientists, with computer scientists and with other digital media artists.

In her artist’s lecture, Holmes debates the potential of technology to promote positive environmental stewardship and showcases a range of work from this expanding field of creative production.

Panel Statement

Ecolocated – Littoral Lives combines ecological marine data with locative sound in an installation at the Catalyst Arts gallery as well as on a web based interface. Part of M.A.R.I.N. residency at the Irish Sea before and after ISEA2009, Ecolocated is an exploration of littoral zones near Belfast, areas where human impact on the marine ecology is strongest, and where local communities also experience the sea. It is this juncture, an experience of the sea as a historical or romantic imaginary, an every day environment for work and leisure, and a complex ecosystem that the term littoral bridges. Our ‘field’ or rather, sea bed recordings include environmental and meteorological data, interviews with scientists and local communities and sonifications. Part of the project is shaped through local workshops exploring marine ecology in the wider context of climate change. Our work can be followed on a geo tagged blog and pod casts.

Ecolocated is a collaboration between three artists, Tapio Makela (FI), Nigel Helyer & AndreasSiagian, in collaboration with the Audio Nomad software team, Daniel Woo, and Michael Lake (AU).M.A.R.I.N. is an art and science residency initiated by Tapio Makela and Marko Peljhan (SL/LV/ US).

Panel: Synaptic Scenarios for Ecological Environments

As I become increasingly involved in broader issues of bio-technology development and wonder about a democratically legitimated, sustainable global future, the active debate on agro-fuels, international agriculture, hunger and poverty alleviation are becoming more urgent. This requires a trans-disciplinary perspective based on changing “how scientists think” as well as how they communicate to each other. In the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility (ENSSER) we offer a support group for scientists concerned about the preservation of independent research and particularly about how to transfer these debates about biotechnology into the public realm.

In the matter of funding their endeavors, ®™ark and its workers face a condition familiar to nearly every USA artist, and to others as well: there are virtually no government grants to be had. Foundations are few, and direct corporate grants are rare in the USA – especially for activities that have no bearing, or, worse, have desired negative impact, on the ‘bottom line’ of the donating corporation or corporations in general. One way that ®™ark has resolved this impasse is by profiting from the fundraising intelligence that has accumulated in the corporate world.

®™ark has now successfully implemented a ‘mutual fund’ system for its projects, complete with ‘celebrity fund managers’, in order to make project investment more palatable. ®™ark is also considering methods culled from the political sphere: direct canvassing of pledges for actions against specific companies (‘bond issues’) and somewhat covert solicitation of funds from foreign groups with shared interests. We will discuss these ideas, and also display some of the promotional tools (videos, brochures, etc.) we have employed to popularize ®™ark and ®™ark projects among our contributor base.

On a base of any philosophy and any technology (if we see it as a ‘prosthetic appliance’) – from the stone axe to chemical drugs and cloning – lies an ethic (axiom). Russian culture/philosophy, art, science, literature, etc. is more religious and mystical than rational. It propounds the ethical question in a very radical way. To understand what is going on in Russia these last ten years: what can be called a -schizo (contra) revolution’- total non-stop crisis of identity for everybody, the collapse of any subject or narrative etc. – it is necessary to revise the history of Russian culture in the 20th century. Without this we cannot understand the creative “schizo (contra) revolutionary’ strategies in contemporary St. Petersburg (based on economy of holy energy), which are the object of the author’s research. New accents means new names: from animal-trainer and gardener up to scientist-utopianists and holy saints. Two persons will be identified.

First A.A. Bogdanov (1873-1928) – bolshevik leader, medical scientist, economist and science-fiction writer. He created a new science – “Tectology” – some moments of which are ‘proto-cybernetic’. Everything in the world is an energy (“Machism” – from Ernst Mach).

Another figure Vl. Vernadsky (1863 – 1945) – was a geologist and creator of the theory of “Noosphere”. This theory states that culture, our reason, dreams, etc. are a part of nature (the universe) in the same way as the atmosphere, geosphere, biosphere, etc.

These theories are full of Hellenism/God/Eros as world energy – is everywhere and the iconoclastic spirit. This kind of idea we can find in Western anthropology in the study of shaman magic in the 1960s – 70s (‘Castaneda’s’ world as a conscious energy), and science-fiction (Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris”, filmed by Andrey Tarkovsky in 1972).

The “creative economy” is an evolving concept, capturing the effects of intellectual capital as it interfaces with the arts, culture, business and technology. The speakers on this featured panel explore the topic through diverse perspectives. OurGoods.org co-founder Caroline Woolard talks about the problems and possibilities of non-monetary exchange while Denis Roio, a.k.a. Jaromil, a software developer, artist and activist illustrates the technical and political aspects connected to Bitcoin, an experimental digital currency that uses peer-to-peer technology to bypass central authority. Ted Howard, listed as one of “25 visionaries who are changing your world” in the Utne Reader, will discuss his role in the Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland, Ohio, an innovative model of community wealth building and sustainability.

In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler alleged that living organisms on our planet worked according to certain self-recycling rules which can satisfy their own needs constantly, within a gigantic organism called Gaia.  About two centuries later, in 1924, this theory got backed by the concept of “biosphere” raised by Viadimir Vernadsky. The biosphere is a kind of global self-sustained ecosystem, generating all the living organisms through various biological chains. All of nature’s movements alter the appearance of our planet by ceaseless circulation and recombination of elements. The natural ecosystem possesses certain self-restoration abilities and this kind of restoration needs a certain period of time. The traditional agricultural production, based on natural resource processing, is a mode of production conforming to the nature’s rules. On the contrary, the industrial era is developing at fast pace : the pressing production cycle does not allow the necessary  duration for the nature to restore itself, which means that the producing capacity of the industrial society has gone far beyond what the nature can bear. In the long run, the serious ecosystem imbalance is inevitable and it results in damages to the ecosystem.

In this paper I present and discuss a project of insertion of a restoration system into the city where the living surroundings are getting worse and worse, aiming at accelerating recycling and regeneration of the system. This restoration system  consists of a series of eco-machines which are not isolated from each other but are making up an “eco-tribe”, that could rehabilitate the urban ecosystem with eco-technologies and eventually could be integrated into the urban environment. The proposed restoration system, simulating the operation of natural ecosystems, will be inserted into the wrecked urban ecosystem and connect all communities to take effect in the range of the whole city. With self- reproduction and duplication, the system could constantly grow and evolve along with the city’s development and technology innovations. I will discuss this restoration system together with a semiotic system which inspired it, interpreting the relationship of various representitive organisms in the urban, rural and wild environment.

Educación propia para la paz

FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF DIVERGENCE BETWEEN Science and the arts has ingrained specialized learning in our educational systems, by design and practice. Most recently, this has taken form as an increased focus on STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), in response to research showing that nationwide our students are lagging behind in science and math. ln turn, funding for arts and humanities has been cut in order to direct more time toward STEM education. How can we begin to integrate our experiences amidst this fragmentation? The arts and sciences combined create a unique portal of exploration through which we discover the nature of reality and express what it is to be human. Has the fragmented approach of the industrial age made way for a new vision of humanity in this century? Is it possible to harness global connectivity and open source technologies to reverse the fragmentation of knowledge, the separation of reason and emotion. the divergence of art and science?

The Working Group seeks to address the question of transformative education and learning within a critique of the economic, political and social dimensions of technology and development especially among the countries in the South. The Group cooperates to argue new forms of tactical education and learning programmes, challenge the dominant developmentalist ideology of literacy, and open a forum for greater discourse on the themes of people’s empowerment, participation and organization.

Broad perspective: HOWTO: the will to organize

“hoping to not have bored you so far. willpower we have, we don’t need to manifest it. more people is counscious, even without manifesto. we need to do and to tell people how to do. we need to focus on problems and document how to solve them. we don’t need a manifesto. we need an howto. there we go with everyone bulding it up in his/her own language. there we can point out problems we all know about, there we can focus the ways out then, and i hope we won’t be all staged on a hollywood movie at the end. ciao”

jaromil
Broad perspective: COMMONING.

Global challenges and goals: a glocal design to educate for commoning.

The coming decade worldwide will be determined by the strained relationship between formal and informal structures and environments. A design for commoning, for living together locally in a globally connected world, is the new challenge . On a political pedagogic level there is foremost the need to redefine the balance between securities and insecurities. Feeling safe has to do with the ability to deal with un-safety and insecurity, to have a corporeal experience of agency. It has very little to do with being safe. For how long will it last? The education we aim for can be defined as creating and facilitating the intellectual, corporeal and socio-cultural temporary zones of potentialities within which insecurity is distributed on an equal level. Learning then is lifelong by default, an intricate multiple relationship that is about learning how to deal with insecurity and instability. This relationship forms the basis of all democratic action as it creates trust on a convergence of levels we humans need in order to sustain the practice of everyday life and confrontations. We start – crudely naive and simplistically – our discussions with the assumption that this notion of distributing insecurity has been employed inadvertedly as a political principle in the Pacific Rim, in sharp contrast to the US and Europe where notions of security, control and safety as a default in business, health, have led to a deep mistrust of risktaking and employing distributing security as a political and pedagogic/didactic principle, leading to only more fear of public space and fellow citizens. Our next assumption is that we find embodied the practices and embodied processes of a new found agency of citizens in forging new balances between security/insecurity in Asia in new media centres. We then posit that it is vital for the project of commoning that we find ways of documenting what is going on, harvest a concept-scenario-prototype format from their ways of working. For that we need to find common ground, identify.

Panel Statement

The Convergence of art and technology, and art and science has been pronounced loudly for a long time globally and locally. While the artistic practice of the convergence has been done practically and still goes on actively, the educational practice and its result are problematic and various following local contexts, which are educational systems, academic traditions, social understanding and cultural recognition.

Here, we, three professors will introduce and talk on the Korean college education of the convergence of art and technology using our practical experience for almost 10 years since 2000, and bring out problems in the education with our artistic-scholastic collaborative practices in media art. South Korea has been known as a well-IT-equipped country, but the traditional academic and educational system keeps two major divisions of art and science exclusively. Simply put, mathematics-based and nonmathematics-based, literature-based and non-literature-based, and art-based and non-art-based since the high school education.

We, educators and scholars, have made efforts to overcome the mutual lack at the college-undergraduate level education with our own actual collaborative practice. Various attempts include simultaneous obligatory classes of programming and art-expression in a semester, collaborative team projects for the mandatory final exhibition, and professors’ collaborative governmental, commercial and fine art projects. Those attempts have also been partly applied to the graduate programme that was established in 2004, and the graduate programme was selected as the Digital Media Division of Brain Korea 21 by Korean Ministry of Education in 2006, which supports the program for 7 years. The major issue of the suggested programme was the convergence of art and technology.

In the panel, conventional barriers and their sensitive breakages for the convergence will be discussed.

The intention of this paper is to reflect about the interaction of music and/or digital media with data from brainwaves obtained from performers or an audience via the usage of an EEG interface. This creates dynamical systems1 -as defined by Abraham and Shaw – for interactive performances and/or installations.

It introduces a brief historical overview about the usage of EEG data in interactive art, presenting examples from performances and installations produced in the past 45 years, such as Alvin Lucier’s piece Music for a Solo Performance (1965), David Rosenboom’s piece On being invisible (1976-7), Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO, (1999–2002) and my audiovisual performance INsideOUT (2009), all of which are based on biofeedback methods developed from the late 1960s.

The paper presents an overview of the Einstein’s Brain Project, a work that examines the idea of the world as a construct sustained through the neurological processes contained within the brain. What is suggested is that the world is not some reality outside ourselves, but, is the result of an interior process that makes and sustains our body image and its relationship to a world, and that the investigation of virtual reality and its accompanying social space is an exploration of the construction of consciousness. Einstein’s Brain is a collaborative work that explores the notion of the brain as a real and metaphorical interface between bodies and worlds in motion. The work comprises several developing projects, including CD-ROMs, film and most particularly immersive VR. Each version has at its core landscapes digitally generated from neuro-physiological and topographical maps and dxf models of the human body and brain which are rendered and organized so as to provide familiar, yet unnamable, highly-detailed naturalistic navigable landscapes. This presentation will focus on two aspects of the project:  the development of the worlds as states rather than objects, and the use of VR as an illuminating perceptual filter.

The advent of digital media and its rapidly developing online and urban manifestations has changed our understanding of the city. From large format urban media screens to iphone Google Earth apps, the contemporary ‘overexposed city’ described by Virilio can be understood as a fluid, animated surface of extreme light; symptomatic of the exponential development of ‘urban spectacle’ identified by Guy Debord where content is irredeemably driven by consumption.

Popular culture is also strewn with visions of urban spaces. In cinema, the rise of graphic-novel derived films set in alternative or futuristic cities, such as the Gotham of Batman or Bregna of Aeon Flux, as well as disaster movies such as The Day after Tomorrow, I am Legend and Independence Day, nudge popular imaginings towards ‘new’ urban forms and disaster narratives. In these imaginings, the city-as-light of Virliio can be traced as a recurring motif.

These super-luminous images of the city are increasingly defined in relation to notions of landscape, seemingly spurred on by ecological concerns and the portrayal of war as well as ecological crisis – the antithesis of the city of light  – in the media and entertainment industries. How do contemporary artists navigate this territory? This paper addresses various modes for the current digital imaginings of urban disaster in contemporary art. It draws upon Lev Manovich and Paul Virilio to consider the conditions of vision, ‘digital light’ and their ability to address these notions of disaster, the city and the sublime.

Electric Prayer Wheel is a new collaborative installation and web site by Ari Salomon and Permi Gill themed around issues of genocide. Inspired by the tradition of Tibetan prayer wheels, the artists refer to the specific political situation of the Tibetan people as a means to open a dialogue regarding cultural genocide. Salomon was inspired by his work in India with Tibetnet, a online project to improve communications between the Tibetan Government-In Exile and Tibetan refugee communities around the world. Gill’s body of work has been utilising washing as a metaphor for issues of ethnic cleansing The installation will incorporate 3 parts:

1) Entrance: a large (8 foot high) prayer wheel will be covered with washing symbols (found on clothing labels). Viewers must walk around the wheel as they enter. An electric eye chimes a bell for every revolution of the wheel.

2) Interior: a series of smaller prayer wheels will present text describing a multitude of genocides from this millennium.

3) Projection: a video projection of an electronic interpretation of a prayer wheel. The electronic prayer wheel will be a collage of video, still images and text rendered as if spinning on the surface of a cylinder. If resources allow, live video of viewers in gallery as well as web-based public interactions will be incorporated into the collage. The collage will be stimulated by a research project on the Tibetan struggle as well as two historical struggles related to the artists own ethnic backgrounds (Indian and Jewish). The Web site will incorporate small animations with images used in the installation. These animations, like the video projection, will be a contemporized version of a prayer wheel: loading the web page will set these wheels in motion. Viewers will be able to submit their own reflections on the theme of genocide in the form of images and text. Viewer input will be processed into spinning animations.

Keywords: Radio, environment, noise, participation, disruption, alienation, installation.

Electromagnetic Landscape demonstrates in direct, tangible and immediate ways effects of the disruption of the familiar. An ubiquitous technological medium, FM radio, is turned into an alien and unfamiliar one. Audience participation, the environment, radio signals and noise create a site-specific, ragged sonic landscape. The work exhibits intrinsic, non-trivial, emerging behaviour, cyclic or wave-like, which converges and ebbs. It varies its sonic and visual display through a dynamic interaction of light sources, fog and light sensors. The system maintains a fluxing state of ambivalence between proximity and distance, engagement and rejection, curiosity and annoyance; it slips in and out of participants’ control.

Electronic mural project, sonorous and visual, specially conceived for the main wall of the station “Los Orientales” of the Metro of Santiago (Subway). This is composed of eight hexagonal modules, which were built from an updated pictorial concept using contemporary technologies. Fusion between painting, electronics and digital. Its theme is nature, in particular, water cycles. In short, an “electronic mural” that tells us about nature created especially for citizenship. Ko means water in Mapudungun.

Until recently, the Electronic Art world mostly talked to itself, and discussions were primarily among the inner circle of initiated artists and small group of loyal observers. But as Electronic Art matures as a discipline, it is now increasingly subject to the critical consideration by the art world at large. This is an open discussion by prominent curators and critics who are actively engaged in promoting and viewing Electronic Art.

This paper begins by examining the cultural and political assumptions underlying specific cases in the history of electronic network art practice. These assumptions are a starting point in a more general discussion of the condition of art making in the context of a global (cultural) economy which is increasingly subject to the forces of transnational control. Cultural identity and technological empowerment: two issues traditionally examined separately are here discussed together as aspects of the same condition. The implications of the demise of the power of the state in the face of growing transnational control is discussed. The cultural product of this demise, the ‘dissolution’ of the centre, and the implicit impossibility of peripherality or marginality is considered. As the state becomes hollow and a new order of transnational economy arises, the channels by which the transnationals purvey goods, and the goods themselves, are technological: Electronic hardware, media and information networks. Automated technologies transmit the cultural practices of their producers.

Transnational economy works its own hypercolonialism as the ‘margins’ are appropriated and reconstituted: this argument is applied both to third world nations and to the art world. Appropriation and reconstitution are achieved through instantaneous markert surveillance and analysis and the flexible pruction practices allowed by modern, rapidly reprogrammable machine tools. This induces a condition of “hyper-conformity of difference” (Fry). The potential for art as a critical activity and the concept of marginality as site of resistance are examined in the context of the rapid rate of change of technological tools and the possibility of intervention. The work of contemporary artists attempting such intervention is discussed. The computer-artist synergy is still in its infancy. The distinctions between dimensions may be an indication of this infancy. As it grows and matures these distinctions may fade into arbitrariness, and computer art- may earn the recognition it deserves as a rich new medium.

The ISEA symposia are held all over the world and organised by a different group of people each time. This means central archiving of the produced materials, like papers and art work documentation, needs a separate effort. In 2006, the Dutch Mondriaan Foundation subsidised the set up of an online archive, complimented by support from the VSB fund (NL) and later the Bowling Green State University (USA). The ISEA Online Symposium Archives are now up-to-date (1988-2017) and can be found at isea-archives.org. Additional work, like adding photos and videos, is being undertaken, and a new website, with much improved usability, is in preparation.

The main archivists, Bonnie Mitchell and Wim van der Plas, are now aiming at connecting all relevant (new media, electronic art, etc.) archives with each other, for two reasons:

1. : to connect to each other on-line, and investigate the possibly of a common platform, that searches all connected archives
2. : to learn from each other and to avoid duplicate efforts

We invite anybody interested to join us at this roundtable for an exchange of thoughts and to assist us all in making progress.

his panel session is a continuation of an initiative taken at ISEA2018 in which a roundtable of practitioners and academics from around the globe participated in the discussion. The topics for this panel include the continued discussion of:

1) How to equitably, comprehensively, and legally capture the content of past symposia, exhibitions, and performances and 2) Co-operation of existing online electronic art/new media archives for the purpose of creating a comprehensive archive. As well as these issues the meeting identified other critical topics including:

1. Institutional and electronic hosting
2. Funding, grant writing
3. Development of archive toolkit
4. Standards for archive inclusion (difference in value systems for art and science)

The aim is not to solve all these questions, but to bring cooperation (and implicitly, the work on these issues) a step further.

The notion of globalization has brought to the underdeveloped countries a way of achieving social welfare. Cyberspace has penetrated in our consciousness with the magic force of a revelation, since new technologies will allow new possibilities in all the disciplines of human creation. The technological differences among the societies are returned as creative differences in the forms of the most sophisticated works of art. Interactive arts and the related fields of complex systems or biotechnology uses advanced technologies, which are only available in few places around the world. This globalization of science and technology is creating differences on the artistic creation among nations, creating an artistic underdevelopment of the countries that could not participate in these scientific developments. We need to fight these differences in a creative way to participate in the future of a better understanding of the artistic and scientific theories in the search of human equality.

Institutional presentation statement

With the support of the University of Rennes 2 and of the Rennes School of Art, Station Arts Electroniques main aim is to promote art and current technologies (video art, electronic arts, digital works, experimental cinema, electronic music…). In order to attain this objective, Station Arts Electroniques has defined three main lines: the Rennes annual festival ‘Rencontres Arts Electroniques’, regular film projection-meetings, and regular performances with ‘Electrohappening’.

For almost seven years Station Arts Electronic has organized about one hundred thematic projections, five installation exhibits, about ten lectures which have enabled the public at large to discover new artists and unpublished works, and also internationally renowned structures and artists.

This session will discuss electronic cinema in the context of image-processed narrative.

In this brief presentation, the author will give the seldom-before-told story of Groningen’s development of both software and prominence in the field of computer graphics. Dr. Shostak will employ his unrivaled collection of soporific slides to show how the present SISEA symposium, and its sponsor, SCAN, trace their existence to a Dutch need to explain the expanding universe to the man in the street. It is a story of some drama, and considerable humor, and might even prove instructive to those who would like to see expanded interest in the topics of this symposium in their own home towns.

We know that electronic music is one of the styles in contemporary music, and it is composed in styles of both art music and popular music. Although there are its listeners in popular music, but they are at least in art music. So it can be told mostly. Electronic music started to compose firstly in the world at the beginnings of the twentieth century. Electromechanic instruments were produced like Teleharmonium between 1898 and 1912. Amplification of electrical signals, radio broadcasting, and electronic computation, amongst other things were used firstly in electronic music, they still have been used today. However, the first electronic instrument, called Theremin, was invented by Professor Léon Theremin between 1919 and 1920, and then the first work was composed by Joseph Schillinger for Theremin, First Airphonic Suite for Theremin and Orchestra, in 1929. After other electronic instrument, called Ondium Martenot, was invented by Maurice Martenot in 1928. It was used firstly in The Turangalîla-Symphonie composed by Olivier Messiaen from 1946 to 1948.

Composer Ferruccio Busoni wrote firstly about electronic music in his book Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music in 1907.  It was discussed by some Italian futurists like Luigi Russolo, and he wrote The Art of Noises for electronic music in his manifesto in 1913. Despite all the debates, electronic music have been gone on until today. Over time, its various styles emerged that the styles are Musique concrète, Computer music, Live electronics Synthesizer, IRCAM, MIDI, Circuit bending, etc. from 1945 to 2000s. Such as electronic music is composed in the world, composed in Turkey, too. There are even two important composer from Turkey in electronic music, they made the works in USA. Bülent Arel (1919-1990) studied in Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center 1959 to 1989, and he composed the works. His notable students are Daria Semegen, Conrad Cummings, Jing Jing Luo, Joël-François Durand, and Frederick Bianchi. As for Ilhan Mimaroglu (1926)  has studied and composed the works in Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center since 1960s. This descriptive study included information from general to specific on electronic music in musicology discipline.

Peter Zinovieff will give a presentation on examples of the inventions of the Electronic Music Studios (EMS) including the now legendary VCS3 and Synthi A – the first portable music synthesisers ever to be produced commercially. For a time the British companies synthesisers (designed by Peter Zinovieff) rivalled the American Moog. Electronic Music Studios Instruments have been used by a broad variety of artists since the 1960’s and are currently going through something of a renaissance as they are rediscovered by a new generation of sonic experimentalists in the late 1990’s.

Panel Statement

Panel: Nethics?

The utopian rhetoric that is characteristic to discourse on the electronic arts bears a certain resemblance to narratives of conquest. Electronic spaces are thought of as uninhabited areas, where our corporeal bodies and practical politics literally loose their ground. These spaces are often described as a newly found terrain for democracy, a McLuhanist democratic network for improving communications, deepening experiences and strengthening democracy.

The reason for me to use the rhetoric of colonization in this paper is linked to the following argument, which I hope will be debated. I claim that electronic arts, and especially the written discourse around it, are simply continuing the modernist project. Beginning with the early days of colonization, the western concepts of subjectivity were based on projection on other cultures and a self-contained, self-centered will to power. As Berger, Foucault, and others have pointed out, the control was often optical, and Simon Penny sees Virtual Reality as the latest stage of employing the Renaissance Perspective. Thrill of the conquest is to live on the frontier between the self and the unknown. There has been a dual history for this frontier: a physical and an imaginary one. A continuous will to project oneself outside one’s corporeal body. This usually takes place by using physical murder and technological discoveries to achieve economic and geographical power under auspices of an imaginary concept. An interesting shift occurred in the sixties, when a bunch of WASP males turned to Zen Buddhism and began a search inside
one’s body, which, nevertheless, was seen as a space. Timothy Leary was one of the entrepreneurs who got fed up with that project and continued his search inside the computer. Different ways of exceeding corporeal limits in search of an(other) self? This projection goes on with Virtual Reality and, as far as I can see, most of the electronic arts. The works that transgress this projection are usually those that are consciously made to underline that process. Thinking about Lynn Hershmans’s work (Lorna), where the male (colonialist) gaze becomes an object of criticism by focusing on the way media allows this way of looking. Modernism in the electronic arts is based on politics of sameness. Postmodernist projects, to which I would include at least feminism and 2nd world ethnic movements, have critically examined identities and differences. Paying attention to the medium itself has made most of electronic art seemingly genderless. It could be claimed postmodern because of its ability to transform into the identity a user or a viewer desires, but it is very rarely possible. Just think about the female figures in computer animations, or the modernist computer graphics… The images could be claimed postmodern on the basis of the mixing of styles, exploitation and amount of citations. As long as the interest in electronic art is focused on interactivity or the medium, it remains helplessly uncritical and modernist. That does not need to be so. I suggest a project of decolonizing the electronic space.

Panel: Creativity as a Social Ontology

Com­mu­nity has been a cen­tral focus of my ca­reer in the field of elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture, par­tic­u­larly in help­ing to shape and struc­ture the Elec­tronic Lit­er­a­ture Or­ga­ni­za­tion, a USA-based non­profit or­ga­ni­za­tion cen­tral to the field, and more re­cently as pro­ject leader of ELM­CIP: Elec­tronic Lit­er­a­ture as a Model of Cre­ativ­ity and In­no­va­tion and Prac­tice. I con­sider prac­ti­cal re­search and artis­tic com­mu­nity de­vel­op­ment vital to the cre­ation of a per­sis­tent en­vi­ron­ment that en­ables net­work-based cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties. When cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties and re­search com­munties are not ge­o­graph­i­cally co-lo­cated, in­sti­tu­tional iden­ti­ties, on­line pub­li­ca­tions, di­rec­to­ries, and knowl­edge bases, and in-per­son con­fer­ences, fes­ti­vals, and events pro­vide for a kind of float­ing agora that en­ables cre­ative com­mu­nity to thrive across bor­ders. At same time, my prac­tice emerges from my back­ground as a fic­tion writer. Cre­ative writ­ing is gen­er­ally if not cor­rectly con­ceived of as a soli­tary act in which col­lab­o­ra­tion plays a lesser role than in other sorts of cre­ative prac­tice, for ex­am­ple the pro­duc­tion of a staged drama or film. Both writ­ing and read­ing fic­tion are typ­i­cally un­der­stood as highly sub­jec­tive acts, and au­thors and artists are un­der­stood to “own” their ideas and works in a per­sonal way. Net­work based read­ing and writ­ing prac­tices fore­ground a num­ber of com­pli­ca­tions of sub­jec­tive writ­ing and read­ing, from com­mu­nity-based writ­ing pro­jects, to mul­ti­me­dial lit­er­ary pro­duc­tions, to rad­i­cal changes in the na­ture of the re­cep­tion and reader re­sponse process.

None of these changes elim­i­nate “the au­thor” per se, but all force us to re­con­sider the frame of au­thor­ship and the mod­els of col­lab­o­ra­tive cre­ative lit­er­ary prac­tice en­abled by the com­puter and the net­work en­vi­ron­ment.  This pre­sen­ta­tion will dis­cuss some of the ways that elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture com­pli­cates con­cep­tions of au­thor­ship and col­lab­o­ra­tion in the con­text of its emer­gent cre­ative com­mu­nity. I will test these ideas against ex­am­ples, both from my own prac­tice as an au­thor of net­work-based fic­tion pro­jects in­clud­ing The Un­known, Kind of Blue, The Med­dle­some Pas­sen­ger, and Im­ple­men­ta­tion, all of which in­volved dif­fer­ent mod­els of col­lab­o­ra­tion, as well as re­cent col­lec­tive or col­lab­o­ra­tively au­thored elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture pro­jects in­clud­ing The Last Per­for­mance by Judd Mor­ris­sey, Mark Jef­frey, and oth­ers, the Ex­quis­ite_­Code pro­ject by Bren­dan How­ell and oth­ers, and TOC: a New-Me­dia novel by Steve Toma­sula and a team of artists and de­vel­op­ers.

My work in general explores the relationship between human culture and the elephant. The images present the experience of the animals in nature through simulations. In the enclosure, the surface of information is cleverly constructed; it contains fabricated material that symbolizes nature. It also contains the actual animals that represent their own species in the wild. The work demonstrates the reality of how we view elephants and engages with the different representations informed by history, tradition and culture.

This research is aimed at creating a body of work that communicates, in digital and video imagery, key issues around the representation of elephants. To develop this work I will investigate the changing role of the elephant in Thai culture both in historic and contemporary terms and explore the impact of imported ideas on the process of change. A significant corollary interest in this research is the problem of representation and simulation in contemporary life and the impact it has on perception. My art work is a fabricated simulation created from material images. The animal images are transformed into illusions and explore how humans experience nature through simulation. In this way I engage with different kinds of representation for their specific forms and effects.

Sometimes experiencing nature has nothing to do with the real or unreal. The model of tropical rainforests in a controlled environment such as in some botanical gardens, may even look healthier than the real one in South America or Asia. In many regions tropical rainforests are threatened by uncontrollable factors such as over logging, mining, and the expansion of human settlement, as well as global warming, so the experience of the model is a fiction of the ideal, and does not match the reality of the world.

The images express social commentary on the changing role of domesticated elephants in Thailand. The images also demonstrate the animals on display in contemporary society. We love to look at them and appreciate the greatest living figures. We manipulate them in a way that provides us animals of almost absolute integrity. We project images of fabricated environment onto the animals in the way that we want to see. We place them in our society and celebrate our triumph over nature. Elephants still continue their journey through the coexistence of cooperation and confrontation between human culture and the animals. This journey probably will never end and we may have to walk with them every step of the way.

This paper will discuss my A.I.R, funded by the Australia Council’s inter arts board, at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive & Brain Science in Leipzig, a prestigious neuroscience research center in Germany where I will be working with the director of the social neuroscience lab, Prof. Tania Singer (research area: role of trust, compassion and altruism in our lives). Among other renowned scientists, Singer also works with the Dalia Lama and his close circle exploring the biological effects of compassion meditation on the brain and body. The residency will follow the developments of longitudinal studies on the effects of compassion training on brain, health and behavior. Singer has been awarded a large European Research Council Grant (ERC): healthy individuals will receive extensive training over one year by professional instructors in empathy and compassion enhancing techniques. I will be immersed in Singer’s group, strategizing the best ways to monitor, document and elicit the psycho-physiological effects of this training using a range of methods (Video capture, sound capture, interviews, biopsychological markers, psychological and behavioral tests, 3T and 7T MRI scanners).

This is an important step in my work. Over the last five years, I have been studying social emotions such as empathy, mimicry, and emotional contagion via cross disciplinary and collaborative methods, creating psycho-physiological interactive art experiences, short films, papers and scientific visual databases. This residency will lead to a deep understanding of compassion and its associated human behaviors while incorporating a more holistic approach to knowledge (modern science and Buddhism). Compassion is a complex emotion as it requires a time investment: It requires a desire to alleviate or reduce the suffering of another.

The presentation/paper will be structured as follows: I will discuss the research of myself and Dr Singer, then discuss the artworks being produced and how they may work with in Dr Singers research remits. I will then discuss future works and collaborations.

Increasing numbers of art works are concerned with constructed systems which in some way simulate, emulate, imitate, replicate, encapsulate, or approximate behavior, most often within an ‘interactive’ venue. Critical responses to the behavioral level of such works tend to call attention to specific aspects of the perceivable actions. That is, features of the action enjoying a verisimilitude in relation to commonly recognizable behavior patterns are automatically privileged. Rather than explore the internal structures, processes, and strategies necessary to achieve results perceived to be ‘behavioral’, the perspective to be unfolded here confines itself to the other line of approach, evaluating externally observable behavior. This approach has the advantage of more explicitly factoring-in the position and agenda of the evaluator, and requires that behavioral features have a basis in recordable observations. As a result, considerable stress is placed on video documentation.

The two main points made are the following:

1) There are many disciplines to be found among the sciences and humanities which can contribute analytical tools useful for understanding sequences of behavior. Often such methodologies are based on close observation and quantification of what would otherwise appear to be unbroken continua. Paradoxically, a basis for specific subjective responses to the work can often be found in such measurable details as the timing and grouping of component events and gestures. The paper provides a number of examples of these sorts of analysis applied to specific work.                                                                                                              2) The very technologies used by artists in constructing works which exhibit interactive behavior are far more commonly used industrially to first supplement and then replace a wide variety of human capabilities. The paper will explore the cluster of positions artists are occupying in relation to this axis of concern, and will attempt to map the principal relations between these positions.

The Electronic Literature Knowledge Base is an open-access contributory digital humanities database which documents the international field of electronic literature. Begun in 2010 as part of the HERA-Funded Collaborative Research Project ELMCIP, over the past eight years it has grown to become the premier online knowledge resource in the field, including records documenting creative works, critical writing, authors, organizations, events, teaching resources, software platforms, databases and archives in a way that demonstrates the relational connections between all of the objects and actors it documents. It grows steadily (currently including over 15,000 records), as it is documenting a very active contemporary field as it develops. Contributors include both members of the Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group and international researchers from around the globe.

ELMCIP also participates in the Consortium of Electronic Literature (CELL), which is The Consortium on Electronic Literature (CELL) is an international organization led and managed by the ELO that currently includes 11 member organizations, research labs, and research centers. Since 2010, our collaborative network has been developing the information architecture needed for making born digital creative works and scholarly criticism findable across databases, world-wide. CELL developed a federated search engine (currently in re-development) that will enable search across all of the participating databases in the consortium.

This infrastructure, which documents a field and domain closely tied to that of ISEA, is presented in hopes of exploring connections between this and related documentation and archive projects, and the possibility of working together to share ideas, practices, and advocacy for digital arts research infrastructure.

Abstract

Electronic mail and messaging systems are becoming the more dominant communications tool of modern life. From the teenagers in their bedroom to the pensioner in the library – email is a de facto way to communicate for personal and business use. Email is different however from other means of communication, for instance the dimensions differ in: speed, permanence of the message; cost of distribution, deliverance to individuals and groups; an ability to filter, channel, record, and control messages. Graphic design can be viewed from a structuralism perspective as a language system – to extend the understanding of language from a spoken and written system of signs – to a manner of visual signals. Designers play a part in reinventing and redefining signs and symbols and cognitive semiotics is something designers explore over time with intuition and experience. This paper describes the need for expression in electronic mail.