Presentation Data Table

As digital technologies evolve, new forms of art are discovered by designers and artists. Yet throughout this fast evolution it is hard to say these art forms develop a solid background. It’s a credible idea to achieve a well established approach by experimentally adapting art forms from past cultures to new digital media. One of the subjects of inspiration can be Turkish Traditional Calligraphy named as ‘Khatt’.

‘Khatt’ (pronounced as ‘hut’) is the art of aesthetic and measured lettering. Hat which gets its origins from the philosophy of Sufism/Tasawwuf, can be properly applied only after a long and difficult training. Master artists develop a visual composition by blending a given text in to a metaphorical form. A work of Khatt not only presents a group of words that make up a composition with a symbol that stands out; but also involves a dynamism formed by the emotional expression of the drawing technique. This paper is about the idea of composing contemporary interactive screen designs using multi-touch technology in union with the dynamism and spirit lying beneath the art of Khatt.

In these sorts of experimental designs, it is aimed for the user to catch the right rhythm and exhalation, then imitate the ‘Khattat’s (the Khatt artist) flow of movements with the help of certain clues with high predictability, and finally recreate a composition. For the auditory orientation, the sound of a wind instrument called ‘ney’ has been chosen. Demonstrating the same space of time and variability with the exhalation, ney is an instrument originating from the philosophy of Tasawwuf as a visual concept as well as a musical one.

In the application process of such project, sound and image take part in the orientation simultaneously. Consequently the result revealed after experimental studies can be defined as ‘a contemporary auditory output of a visual composition in Khatt’ or in another point of view ‘a new interpretation to the visual notation of music’.

This paper reflects on the qualities of life in digital cultures, the design of digital technologies and the philosophical history that has informed that design. The paper takes as its critical perspective the field of embodied cognition as it has developed over the last three decades, in concert with emerging neurophysiology and neurocognitive research. From this perspective the paper considers cognitive, neurological and physiological effects that are becoming noticed in user populations.

This paper is informed by two decades of research into embodied cognition and its relationship with digital technologies and digital cultural practices – work that itself is grounded in two decades of R+D in technologies for embodied interaction.

Alongside changing processes and theoretical frameworks for making art, artist-researchers working with digital technology are extending the physical interface by incorporating gestural control into their work, looking at ways to read human actions and ways to exploit the ways in which people understand the world through their body. Applications of gestural controllers, such as these, can be seen in a wide variety of presentation formats, from interactive installation and performance to gaming. Such technologies allow for the design of novel interactive experiences but challenges still remain in designing controllers that support expressivity, meaningful interaction and intuitive control.

Embodied Cognition is an area of cognitive science that focusses on perception, cognition and action as profoundly shaped by the human experience of having a body and living in a physical environment and in a culture. It offers a new way and an alternative approach that complements current initiatives in the design of interactive technologies and gestural controllers. Embodied Cognition offers a novel way to analyse the complex interactions between user and technology in terms of the fundamental categories of embodied existence.

Image Schemata are fundamental categories that are neurally encoded, pre-conceptual symbols that are recruited from experiences of bodily movement and perceptual interaction, including the body’s interaction with its environment in terms of spatial relations, perception of force and magnitude. These categories are involved in organizing mental representations into meaningful coherent units and are implicated in the formation of new concepts. This paper looks at the design of meaningful controllers that depend upon empirical knowledge of fundamental categories in terms of how the body interacts in and understands its environment. It proposes that these structures may be used in order to identify correlations between gesture and other phenomena such as sound and colour. Such correlations are the necessary building blocks of a grounded cross-modal mapping schema on which to base the design of controllers that allow for meaningful gestural interaction with music and image.

In doing so, it presents an interdisciplinary approach to the design of interfaces to digital technology, one that can have considerable impact in the arts and technology domain.

This Artist Talk proposal covers the description of two of our newest works in Robotic Art: Copacabana Machine Sex and Twin Bodies. Copacabana Machine Sex is a musical robotic cabaret involving solely biomorphic machines as musicians and dancers. It displays a metaphorical extravaganza about robots and carnivals, where music hall kitsch and industrial aesthetics intermix. The Twin Bodies project is inspired in part by recent artistic experiments in the realization of anthropomorphic robots. With this project, we aim to produce a series of robotic “doubles” of a human performer (Chun Hua Catherine Dong), characters with which she will interact on stage in very specific situations, sometimes very intimate, sometimes very wild.

We are approaching the end of the age of reason. Science has matured as a philosophy to the point where it recognizes the existence of the unknowable. No longer labouring under the naive Newtonian assumption that all the universe can be measured or predicted Science turns to the study of Chaos in an attempt to gain insight into the inner workings of the world. Communications technologies allow culture to instantaneously encircle the world and feedback on itself. Sampling and looping its way into the next millennium, the iterative nature of postmodern humanity makes it impossible to predict. Artists can embrace Chaos as a tool for deciphering and forging the new world disorder. Emergent robotic behaviour, genetic algorithms, and fractal mathematics are just a few of the approaches being taken. After more than 2000 years of living under Euclidean rule our head space is changing. The shortest distance between two points is no longer a straight line but a point of view. Just as Euclid planted the seeds for an age ruled by logic we are innoculating a culture of intuition. Try to imagine the world after one or two millennia of Chaos. What happens when feedback is produced as DNA starts to sample and manipulate itself? When an idea is as easily spread to the whole race as it is to conceive? When personal experience is not tied to the body? Revolution becomes evolution and thought becomes reality. We become Meta-human and culture moves into the Noosphere.

Keywords: Fulldome, media art, artistic research, cultural exchange, immersive, interactive, transdisciplinary, performance, mobile labs

This paper comprises the E/M/D/L [European Mobile Dome Lab] panel presentations which the activities and outcomes of the artistic research carried out during the international collaboration funded by the European Culture Programme (Strand 1.3.5). E/M/D/L built an international network for the exchange of artistic and technological expertise, with the goal of researching and documenting a language and grammar unique to the fulldome medium. Bringing together four European and three Canadian institutions and cultural partners, all leaders in the fulldome field, the project aimed to share and expand skills, methodologies, strategies and content under this creative and highly productive umbrella. Between February 2014 and September 2015, the participants took part in eight residencies and public presentations offered in five countries, clustered around domic architectural structures equipped with cutting-edge technologies. This culminated a series of works presented at the world’s most sophisticated virtual theatre, the Satosphere in Montreal, Canada.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Emergent behavior, dance, motion capture, distributed cognition, artificial neural network.

This research investigates the possibility for emergent choreographic behaviour to arise from the interactions between a human dancer and a learning, digital performing agent. The cognitive framework is extended through theories of distributed cognition to take into account the two interacting agents rather than a single agent and its environment. The Artificial Neural Network based performing agent demonstrated emergent dance behaviour when performing live with the human dancer. The agent was able to follow the dancer, create movement phrases based on what the dancer was performing and recognize short movement phrases, as a result of the interaction of the dancer’s motion captured movement data and the agent’s artificial neural network. This emergent behaviour was not explicitly programmed, but emerged as a result of the learning process and the interactions with the human dancer.

In what ways might telematic communities, intelligent environments, the bionic body, cyberspace and artificial life lead lead to new architectural strategies?

Panel Statement

Without doubt emotions are evolving as they are influenced by culture, context and behaviour. Davic Matsumoto (2007) elucidates these three influences on human emotion. Western and Eastern societies have witnessed change with the use of new technologies. Will our ability to read emotional expressions slowly change with the new communication systems? Might people soon no longer be able to read facial expressions? With the loss of the ability to read an emotion might come too the loss of the experience itself? Steven Pinker (2002, p.40) stresses that emotions and behaviour always represent an Internal struggle’. It is not merely culture and society that directs human behaviour, but the mind has an innate system that generates endless possibilities to choose from.

Emotions and feelings have been studied by some important researchers in the field, including Darwin Damasio, LeDoux, and Ekman. The discussion can now be expanded to include emotion research and emotional responses in Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, gaming industries, virtual environment studies and augmented reality systems. This research forum brings together leading artists and researchers ir the field of emotion studies. Researchers/artists and curators will debate artworks that primarily address emotions in humans.

Abstract

In Postemotional Society Stjepan Mestrovíc proposes that postmodern social response is fried by compassion fatigue. Bombarded by media’s exaggerated reports of violence and terror, we are manipulated by second-hand, mediated passions. Mestrovíc describes a world in which quasi-emotions are culled like historical data from the past by media, which trains populations to respond to current events via older, and predictable, symbolic emotions.

The postmodern mentality recycles and repackages – another Woodstock, another Great Depression, another Star Trek movie. All leverage our emotional memories of earlier cultural events. While Mestrovíc has his critics, the syndrome he describes is familiar and he asks an important question: how do we revive our emotional resources? One way to do this might be to stimulate emotions in unfamiliar contexts – like interactive garments that redirect our focus from the representation of emotion to its complex embodied processes.

Abstract

In 2004 I wrote a conference paper called ‘Talk to me: getting personal with interactive art’ exploring the emerging subjectivity and agency of interactive art works. New technologies such as robotics, computer graphics and animation techniques, combined with sensing technologies and automated ‘artificial intelligence’ programming, enable art works to ‘come to life’ and interact with audiences demonstrating sophisticated life-like behaviours. These new art works don’t just sit passively in the gallery waiting to be looked at, they actively engage the audience, interacting with them in real time, talking to them and positioning them as interactive social partners not just as mere observers.
As a curator and theorist my interest in the interaction between audiences and these lively and life-like interactive gallery entities, has continued with an ongoing investigation and analysis of the various strategies artists use in creating interactive art works and the ways that audiences respond to them.

Consider how technology has created new approaches to the medication, assessment, and simulation of emotional states. Chemicals act on neurotransmitter systems and influence behavior, obscuring the differences between what is innate to the body and what is extrinsic; imaging technology seeks to identify emotional ‘truth’ through indications related to blood flow; and emotion-recognition software is being perfected. In contrast to these goals, I consider how art can offer access to the rich cultural questions surrounding affect that are posed by our increasing abilities to erode boundaries through technology.

The desire for altered states of mind whether through plants, fungi, ‘dreamachines’ with flickering lights, or drugs has existed in many societies. One manifestation was Bryon Gysin’s psychedelic ‘dreamachine’ of the 1960s. Gysin’s machine was meant to induce trance, produce hypnagogic images, and alter brain wave activity. It may have been prompted by his experiences with LSD, which is structurally-related to a lethal fungus identified as ergot (Saint Anthony’s Fire). Like LSD, exotic myths attend ergot, ranging from Eleusyian rites to the Salem Witch trials. In a sense, one culture’s bane (the ergot fungus during the Middle Ages) became the counter culture’s ‘dreamachine’ (ergot’s related drug, LSD).

Artists, still intrigued by the emotionally-laden tribulations of Saint Anthony, continue this theme, blending the real with the virtual. Bill Viola, for example, forges a connection with Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of Saint Anthony, using technology to intimate a heightened state of being. I will also explore how artists (including myself) explore emotion, creating new ‘dreamachines’ which raise wide-ranging questions. These questions include whether emotion is universal as Darwin maintained, whether facial expressions by people from different cultures convey the same meaning, whether technology can be sensitive to how language differences inflect emotion, and whether imaging technology can offer insight into the brain’s emotional cues.

Colours, textures, shapes, sounds and motion are the building blocks for the new digital artist. Understanding the meanings of colours in other cultures is but one of many examples of what is required to effectively convey our emotions to this new and diverse audience, What are the commonalties? What taboos exist? Should we strive to preserve the diversity or will a global language develop? Do we, as artists, have any control over this cultural globalisation? In the recent past, digital art has often been criticized as being cold and mostly deprived of emotional substance. The Internet has also added a new global dimension to art, it has become an outlet for the works of artists and a chance to learn from contemporaries and old masters. Individuals, east and west, north and south. although with unequal means, now have the ability to share their artmaking and interact with geographically distant artists. This global network offers an unprecedented opportunity to learn from other cultures. How can we. as artists, convey our feelings effectively if we do not understand the various cultural codes of our audience? Examples exploring these issues will be presented in order to illustrate the concepts involved in this topic.

The Cyborg Surrogate Self extends the literary/artistic notion of emotional communication into the realm of telepresence through the creation of the empathic avatar to act as a first person emotional sensor/effector. The objective of telepresence is to experience a remote location without being there, often through the use of telerobotics and communications technologies. Though suitable for remote labour, inspection and exploration, such remote experiences often lack sensory input and emotional content to make them believable as “real” experience. To provide adequate sensory input is primarily a technical challenge, however, to provide emotional content requires the projection of the feelings of the observer to connect with objects and beings at the remote site. This emotional connection may then augment sensory input provided by purely technical means.

This relationship has precedents in history: 1) The everyman character in fiction, allowing the audience to project themselves into a story by visualizing themselves in everyman’s situation. 2) Astronauts in space. There are few scientific reasons to send humans to the moon, but many cultural ones. When Neil Armstrong uttered the famous words “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”, the astronaut represented all of humanity. An experience of remote emotional connection requires an avatar through which a remote user may project and receive emotional content from the remote site. This avatar must afford control to the remote user, yet personify the user in order to convey feelings of empathy. Ideally this empathetic avatar would be part human, to convey emotion, and part machine, to respond to user control. This mechanically augmented human is the Cyborg Surrogate Self.

Panel: Compumorphic Art: The Computer as Muse

The pre­sen­ta­tion shows two art pro­jects by Darko Fritz that make use of dig­i­tal com­puter as form of cre­ative in­spi­ra­tion, cul­tural com­men­tary or aes­thetic ref­er­ence point: Mi­grant nav­i­ga­tor and In­ter­net Error Mes­sages. How many peo­ple live in their place of birth? Darko Fritz posed that ques­tion in his pro­ject Mi­grant Nav­i­ga­tor, deal­ing pre­cisely with mi­gra­tions, repo­si­tion­ing, iden­tity, nos­tal­gia and a con­cep­tion and sig­nif­i­cance of home as a relict of fa­mil­ial and na­tional com­mu­nity in a pe­riod of all-per­va­sive atom­i­sa­tion of so­ci­ety. Mi­grant Nav­i­ga­tor is a work-in-progress, the multi(hy­brid) -me­dia -and pub­lic art (im­pli­cat­ing Web as a pub­lic space) pro­ject that started with a “mis.?informing” Web page, dec­o­rated with a frieze of Home icons (of a renowned in­ter­net provider) in­tro­duc­ing you to its con­tent. The sec­ond phase of the pro­ject was off-line:  in the pub­lic area next to the rail­way sta­tion in Linz , was planted a hor­ti­cul­tural in­stal­la­tion en­ti­tled The Fu­ture of Nos­tal­gia. From the grassy area a piece, 9×9 me­ters in size, “was taken “, and a pic­togram of a house was made by care­fully arranged flow­ers, or more pre­cisely the same Home icon of the Web browser was trans­lated in to the flo­ral arrange­ment. The rail­way sta­tion was thought­fully cho­sen lo­ca­tion for plant­ing -as a place of tran­sits and a check-in post for em­i­grants, the point of a warp­ing and a dis­tor­tion of space, where pas­sen­gers can eat, sleep, make trans­ac­tions, shop, pray… Such spaces Augé de­nom­i­nates as non-places (non-lieux), with no iden­ti­ties and re­la­tions. Even the in­stal­la­tion it­self goes through tran­si­tions cli­matic, or­ganic, changes of local mu­nic­i­pal au­thor­i­ties what might re­sult in a stop­ping of weed­ing and wa­ter­ing of beds of flow­ers (or the sea­sonal re­place­ment of flow­ers), and it is even ex­posed to a pos­si­ble anony­mous act of van­dal­ism …The third phase of Mi­grant Nav­i­ga­tor was re­alised as a poster mea­sur­ing 2×2 meter in size, made in silk-screen tech­nique with a replica of Home icon.

Bright-sil­ver back­ground was placed on cen­tral part of ex­ist­ing ad­ver­tis­ing screens (of a stan­dard, ag­gres­sive, bill­board for­mat) on both sides of Croato-Sloven­ian bor­der (and later at Slovene-Ital­ian bor­der). The poster does not con­tain any fur­ther in­for­ma­tions ex­cept the pic­to­r­ial one, in­duc­ing a se­ries of as­so­ci­a­tions in those ones cross­ing the bor­der and at very best it could in­spire them on re­think­ing the iden­tity -a na­tional one (as a so­cio-cul­tural con­struct) and a per­sonal one (as its bi­o­log­i­cal sub­stra­tum). In the age of civil­i­sa­tion of com­mu­ni­cat­ing, the Web re­duced the globe on to an at­tain­able size, while, at the same time, in the real world bor­der for­mal­i­ties dras­ti­cally de­cel­er­ate our move­ment, even call­ing it into ques­tion.. The posters with Home icons have spread out “vir­u­lently” to Za­greb, posted on the ad­ver­tise­ment pil­lars of the Ban Jelacic Square and next to the Main rail­way sta­tion, on the bill­board in Savska street, in­tended for the view of pedes­tri­ans and com­muters. In a re­la­tion be­tween the vis­i­ble ob­ject and the vi­sual medium (bill­board – strate­gic place of ad­ver­tis­ing cam­paigns), Darko Fritz in a con­cil­ia­tory way han­dle with a func­tion­ing mech­a­nisms of con­sumerist so­ci­ety, in­spir­ing be­hold­ers to a “wish­ful think­ing “; the ap­pro­pri­a­tion of mar­ket­ing strate­gies is ev­i­dent also through the con­cept of an ex­hi­bi­tion as a prod­uct -namely, it has its own sign and “logo”. The dig­i­tal net­works, of which the in­ter­net is now the most com­pre­hen­sive ex­am­ple, are sim­i­larly mi­gra­tory spaces of dis­lo­ca­tion. In­for­ma­tion trav­els in a non-space en­coded in a dig­i­tal code that has no anal­ogy to its ori­gin – it refers back only to it­self. All that is vis­i­ble within this non-space are tem­po­rary and fleet­ing ap­pear­ances, hy­per­real sym­bols, float­ing sig­ni­fiers. Ap­par­ently sta­ble ap­pear­ances are mere sim­u­lacra of the purest sort. Mean­ing is con­structed here in ac­tion, in dy­namic ex­change, through short feed­back loops. The ref­er­ent does not ad­here as much as that it floats by. Thus, sense and mean­ing is pro­duced in and through move­ment. Mean­ing in that sense is no­madic, it floats with the mi­grant / user, pro­duc­ing a highly use­ful space for tac­ti­cal op­er­a­tion, but a very com­pli­cated space for strate­gic in­vest­ment, yet also a space of con­trol ‘in flight’.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program aims to provide each child in developing regions with a connected laptop to allow them “to become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future”.

Uruguay, through its governmental project –Plan Ceibal– was the first country to achieve the ‘full deployment’ status, after successfully delivering a XO laptop to every public schooled child between 6 and 12 years old.

This paper shows the Enabling Stories project, a perceptual interaction based, interactive storytelling application, designed for children with motor or cognitive disabilities, as well as children with normative development, that runs on OLPC’s XO computers.

The application is not only an interactive storytelling game but also a tool for stimulating the development of specific cognitive functions and skills, as well as promoting digital inclusion, and improving social, emotional and motivational aspects on its users.

The art of storytelling in its many forms has been widely used to support the development of a wide spectrum of cognitive functions and skills. Children with motor or cognitive disabilities often experience difficulties using standard interaction schemes.

The interaction with our application is based on triggering actions when the user shows or occludes a printed image within the XO’s camera field of view (usually the space in front of the keyboard, seeable thanks to a small periscope we designed).

Our application models key aspects of the narrative, such as characters, places, possible interactions between characters, etc., and allows its users to construct new stories on real time.

The user interacts with the application by setting scenes up or answering to specific questions. For example, the application would describe a scene by using spoken text, images, music, video, etc. and then prompt the child for information.

A rather trivial example would be: “the girl is taking a hike in the forest, who does she meet?”, the child , then would take one of the images (let’s say, one with the drawing of a dog), and puts it in the space seen by the computer’s camera. The application then continues with the narration using the user input.

This paper introduces a pratical‑theorical work that follows a transdisciplinary methodology, inserting itself into Contemporary Art, within the field of Bioart. It brings the Art of the Body into a dialogue with Biomedical Engineering and Health in experiments and reflections generated by the synesthetic and proprioceptive action of walking, based on an enactive approach. The creation in the lab of an Affective enactive system allows the acquisition, transduction, signal processing and data visualization of the ‘affective exchanges’ as processes to further the understanding of the way the body displaces itself in a city. Bodies wearing this system’s electronic components, which are embedded in biomaterial latex and attached to the skin naturally, have their physiological signals obtained during vital experiences of displacement. Enactions emerge from the coupled relationship of body and environment and this paper explores the concept of the ubiquitousness and mobility of technology for an expanded sensorium. With the aim of a naturalized aesthetic in the domain of Art and TechnoScience, the results of a pHD thesis, developed at the Art and TechnoScience Research Lab – at Brasilia University,     contributed to the fields of Arts, Engineering and Health, inside the m‑health field. Comparative analysis with Cinema and the History of Art introduces poetic examples on the theme of walking and the vitality of the act of walking to the sense of presence in physical space augmented by our affective enactive system. They are events, episodes and anecdotes that deliver the ‘happening’ and the ‘performance’ amplified by sensor technologies. The system is composed technically of physiological sensors that measures the sensory and locative qualities. It is a disruptive, innovative technology. validated by test and control stages, executed inside research labs, in out‑of‑lab situations (on the street, visualized, commented and illustrated in this paper.

Abstract

The emotions we present to the world and those we feel inside may often be very different, in fact our facial expressions act as form of communication and manipulation in social settings, a non-verbal ‘language’. The ability to present the correct expression is an important and evolved tool for gaining sympathy, eliciting love or displaying anger. But would greater inter-subjective understanding be achieved if we had access to the hidden emotions? That question is investigated by the interactive media artwork Enactive Dialectics which is currently in development. The work, which investigates human interaction through an embodied, situated, enactive approach, comprises two ‘treatment’ chairs directly facing each other; these are used to evoke a sense of being a subject in an experiment. Behind each chair a
digitally modelled three-dimensional synthetic face is projected. Inside the chairs are placed a range of biosensors, reading the sitter’s emotional state. The biosensor data then influences the expressions displayed by the synthetic face above each sitter, however this can be switched to display the inner expression of the opposing sitter, enabling them to view their own ‘emotional’ state. This is likely to set up an emotional feedback loop where participants attempt to conceal their own feelings, even to themselves or try to develop a greater empathy for those around them. The ethical implications are clear and care must be taken; the biosensor data only gives part of the story and the representations of the emotions have been authored by the artists. This potentially false feedback then becomes part of the system, raising the question that even if we think we have inside information we still cannot really know how another person is feeling. We cannot even be sure if we ourselves are feeling the way we feel. Through this work we attempt to question how familiar intuitions about personal identity and subjective experience can be re-drawn and experienced with unexpected results through digital mediation, placing the boundary, between self and other, into question in both real and virtual space.

Jane Bennett’s concept of enchantment materialism argues for aesthetics’ role in calling for an attentiveness to the ecologies of things. In turn, such experiences of appreciation and care have the capacity to instigate an ethics of generosity (2001). In Vibrant Matter (2010), Bennett enacts this ethics by including all entities, living and non-living, in what she calls an ‘onto-story’ – a counter tale to the anthropocentric stories of a disenchanted world.

This paper outlines how we told onto-stories through e-textiles installations, central to which are the transformative material encounters with non-human bodies. We begin with an account of working with a conglomerate of natural and electronic materials to attend to disappearing plant species in the site installation Twilight States and the Edges of Darkness (2016) for Bundanon’s Siteworks. We follow with a discussion on our collaboration with unfamiliar materials to explore coral polyps as bio-archives in the multi-sensory installation Spinning World (2018) for Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.

These accounts are framed within Bennett’s theory of political ecology to show how material assemblages open up spaces of wonder for encountering non-human and non-living entities. The paper concludes by addressing how sentience can participate in an environmental politics for an ecosophic world.

Read as diversely as the reemergence of 80s hacker culture (Sterling 2010), as a revolt against the attention economy and growing lack of investigative journalism (Lovink and Riemens 2010), as both the follow up on the 90s promise of internet democracy and as precursor to a new kind of cyberterrorism etc. etc., WikiLeaks seems to have been throughly examined in almost any light other than its stated purpose of enlightenment and questioned about anything, but its intended focus on creating a new interface for the public. This paper proposal aims to examine WikiLeaks in the light of both.

One often tends to forget that there are two sets of enlightenment thought emerging out of the 18th century. Two ways of distributing knowledge, two sets of organising data, two projects for the education of man, two notions of the public sphere, publicity etc., two sets and not one.
The one of these two, is the one that is easy to remember. The one born out of an increased engagement with rationality and a project of unity-seeking mediations and dialectics. From Kant, over Hegel, Habermas and Luhmann, this project is of continued relevance. The point is here not that every part can magically fit, be translated into or be represented by the whole, but rather that there in the attempt to make these translations and representations manifest, is a clear primacy of the whole over the part. This primacy is the inheritance of the first project of enlightenment.

Now, the second project emerging out of the enlightenment is a project of the opposite. A project resting not on processes of mediations and dialectics, but on the irreducible significance of the singular parts. As such, in effect: the multitude. A project where the individual particles holds a primacy over the whole, where abstraction from the singular article to the whole exists only in the means of a register, and where the acceptance of non-integratable elements, omissions, uncertainties and fractions are a primary condition. WikiLeaks marks a return of this second project.

Artists Statement

Australian artists Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski have collaborated on a variety of new media arts projects that incorporate interactivity and play as strategies for engaging with the social and political contradictions inherent in contemporary society. Their artworks are situated at the juncture of cinema, information visualisation and data mapping, playing off the tensions between the large and small screen, and between information and sublime landscape.

Their installation Seeker won an Award of Distinction in Interactive Art at the prestigious Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria 2007. Seeker explores the themes of diaspora and displacement under late twentieth and early twenty first century pan capitalism. The installation consists of three large projections with an interactive touch screen component. Viewers can drag and drop nodes representing episodes of their own personal family migration history onto a global map. Contributing a history triggers an abstract animated visualisation of all previous visitors’ pathways. Seeker enables the viewers to engage with statistics through poetic, animated sequences that represent information about economics, natural resources, human populations and migration flows. The statistics were gleaned from various sources and then translated into animated curves looping over desert landscapes projected onto large screens. Representing statistics in this creative way allows the viewer time to contemplate the imagery while taking in the information.
In 2008 Starrs and Cmielewski created a sound and video installation for the Third Guangzhou Triennial in Guangzhou China. This work included panoramic colour projections of the ‘Walls of China’ in Lake Mungo, Australia. Lake Mungo in Western New South Wales is Australia’s oldest Aboriginal archeological site as well as being used as a sheep station where Chinese indentured labourers worked in the 1800’s. The dunes and eroded sand formations on the eastern rim of the dry lake were named the ‘Walls of China’ by the labourers. The viewer’s movement around the installation space is tracked by sensors and an ambient spatial audio soundscape responds to this audience movement. Entering the space the visitor views a large suspended screen showing panoramic images of nightime desert landscapes. Each image floats gently back and forth across the screen, and as it moves it reveals another sublime landscape image. The visitor hears a subdued ambient soundscape evoking a desert night. As the visitor walks to the other side of screen the audio changes to evoke daytime in the Australian bush, and the screen shows panning images of Lake Mungo at sunrise.
The sound incorporates field recordings from the Lake Mungo site, as well as voices speaking various texts, such as ship passenger manifests, excerpts from court reports and the names of Chinese immigrants who contributed to Australia’s early colonial development. These are not stories per se, but their accumulated affect is of an overwhelming sense of the flow of people. The audio on each side of the screen has a different ambience, reinforcing the distinctively different image tone and mood. On one side the ‘Walls of China’ at sunrise evoking new beginnings, and the other at sunset symbolising the subsequent restriction of Chinese immigration to Australia. In this installation data is communicated through sound, with the viewer’s movement driving the audioscape. When the viewer stops moving, the voices gradually fade away.
Starrs and Cmielewski’s latest project, Downstream employs light box images and video projections on the floor to evoke river beds degraded through climate change. Colour coded spherical inflatibles thougout the space represent the carbon emissions of the world’s countries. Downstream is a media art installation that responds to climate change in ways that are mythical, biblical and chemical.

While interactive screen technologies are becoming ubiquitous, there are many issues associated with the implementation and agency of such systems in creative rather than commercial contexts that require deeper exploration. The growing infrastructure of dynamic digital display technologies be they in the form of electronic billboards, plasma screen displays in public transport and retail environments, information terminals, projections, ‘intelligent’ building surfaces or domestic consoles, are generally controlled by commercial enterprises to influence consumer behaviour. Struppek (2006) has recognised the significant difference between public and individualised forms of screen display and has suggested that the zones which exist between virtual and physical public spaces could be used more constructively for “the creation and exchange of culture and the formation of the public sphere through criticism and reflection” (p.2). To do this she suggests that new co-operative relationships are needed to enable new approaches and challenge conventions.

This paper addresses some of these issues in the context of the development of an interactive screen environment sited at The Edge performing arts complex in Auckland, New Zealand, and a program of interactive works being developed for this space in association with the Auckland University of Technology. The location and potential of this project is distinct from ‘urban screens’ located in public spaces, from ‘interactive art’ located in gallery spaces and from interactive games that increasingly are found within educational and domestic environments. Each of these forms and locations has particular cultural orientation, emerging aesthetic and theoretical directions and associated discourses. The specific framing of The Edge venue, as one of New Zealand’s leading performing arts, entertainment and convention facilities located in Auckland which is a key arts and cultural centre of the Pacific, engages many different communities and introduces some particular considerations and perspectives. The notion of performance as meaningful, embodied practice that functions both as a metaphor and an analytical tool activates a series of social, technological and cultural framings that are discussed in this paper in relation to some of the creative works being developed and presented through this project.

The paper presents how developments in the field of Smart Clothing and electronic textiles engenders new, corporal sensitivity and new artistic applications of touch. The senses of touch in the context of new media art and immersive environments pose many challenges. The paper centers around my work on haptic bodysuits that create somatic impressions of both touch and presence in such contexts. Haptic technologies in bodysuits enable sense‑manipulative art experiences using the somatosensory system to investigate the ways we perceive and understand the world. Within immersive virtual environments and multisensory interfaces the artistic experience promises to become a sensual fusion of man and artwork, dependent upon the user’s presence and bodily functions. A central component here is the design of bodysuits.A bodysuit is a wearable device in the shape of a suit that in some combination reads, feels and manipulates its users. Most bodysuit projects such as smart fashion (Seymour 2008) are passive devices, using the body as an input device to influence external expressions (projections, sound etc) and not as a surface for internal impressions and sensations. Here haptic bodysuits distinguishes themselves by using a larger part of the somatosensory system. Users are so better included as active participants and even performers in the formation of somatic artworks. My work on haptic bodysuits started with cyberSM (1993) enabling two users to communicate via touch, voice and visuals over the internet. The paper will further present the immersive, virtual reality installation Erotogod (2003) where the bodysuit is designed as a two way instrument, both reading users auto‑erotic self‑touch and impressing the users with complex vibrotactile patterns.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a term being used for a Computer Vision technology which enables overlaying 3d registered digital dynamic media on a physical space. This article will be undertaking this term in a trans-disciplinary approach to discuss the possibility of enhancing the experience of space through our bodies by augmenting it digitally in a 3d setting. The article will be searching for answers for the questions of reality and virtuality in terms of spatial experience and furthermore the question of how could the experience of space enhanced digitally in terms of body-space interaction and what might be the consequences of this change.

The authors will discuss the changes and new possibilities of spatial experience through digitally augmented spaces within the example of a Library. Library is a place of discovery containing limitless amount of hidden information which is waiting to be revealed and yet on the other hand most of the information is accessible only through catalogues which are either digital or conventional. Augmented Reality technology allows us to expose particular hints of the hidden information in the library by overlaying this information spatially to the existing physical library space. The new multilayered library space containing the digital and physical layers simultaneously is a hybrid space where the user may interact with the information spatially in a totally new understanding of space.

The Library+ project is a pilot study that has been experimented with undergraduate architecture students in order to discuss the questions above. Throughout the article the collected data from the pilot study by participant observation and firsthand experience and experiences of the architecture students will be interpreted and discussed intentionally to enable a further understanding of the spatial experience of digitally augmented spaces.

Long exposure photographs from the trajectory of a set of autonomous vehicles trigger question about our understanding of intelligence. The design of the behaviors of the mobiles was inspired in the previous work of Braitenberg and other scholars, whom have considered the vehicles artificial creatures that respond to the environment with many similarities to the way other living animals behave. The pictures reflect the colors and movements that characterized the trajectory of the mobile when interacting with the environment, leaving questions about their interpretation and the connection with synthetic psychology within artificial life. Future work with different environments, more advanced algorithms and several different vehicles is discussed.

WEARABLE EXPERIENCE

Ensemble was also presented as a workshop for children, with Christina Gadegaard Nilsen

Ensemble is a set of wearable wireless musical controllers created for children. It investigates the use of simple sensors as a means of playing a piece of electronic music, and is played by a group of children in a installation/ workshop environment.

A small group of children are playing in a theatre space. One of them, a four year old boy, is carefully investigating a man’s hat. The hat is making a singing sound that changes pitch when it is moved. He plays with it on his own turning the hat slowly or shaking it and listening to the different qualities of the sound, changing from calm singing to percussive noises.

Ensemble has been created to investigate how analogue sensors in tangible interfaces are perceived and understood through the emerging intuitions of children. Each piece of clothing includes a simple sensor that modifies a sound or a voice. The sensor is incorporated into a garment which posesses its own individual possibilities for movement and control… The position of a mans hat, the swoosh of a dress, the darkness inside a Ladies bag…

Ensemble is a ‘walk-in’, participatory installation. There is no audience -everybody plays, creating is a Live sound-piece played by the orchestra of those who dress up,

Ensemble was developed at STEIM by Kristina Andersen with assistance from Frank Balde, Jorgen Brinkman and Michel Waisvisz.

Abstract

This paper describes the electronic art project SMSage. SMSage is a security camera that speaks using a text to speech algorithm. After greeting passers-by identified through broadcast names of their Bluetooth devices, it asks to be sent SMS text messages, which it recites, verbatim at first, and then rearranged and spliced with previous messages. SMSage was exhibited at Conflux 2007 in Brooklyn, New York, and will be exhibited as part of ISEA 2009, in Dublin. This paper, written by the project’s authors, describes their motivations and intentions for the project, and situates it in relation to existing fields of practice: the creation of platforms for expression by the public, through text-message or otherwise; works that interact with surveillance networks; and cutup poetry production. They describe the modification and construction of hardware and software elements to enable the project’s behaviour. Some observations from the public installations to date are noted, and some recommendations for progressing the project conclude the paper.

Intro

My first visit to virtual reality (a cartoon-like ‘Virtual Seattle’ at VPL Labs in California a number of years ago) indicated that for me at least, the great attraction was not the lure of computer technology or of interface devices, which included a cumbersome helmet (‘eyephones’) which put little video monitors over my eyes; and, the coarsely rendered, neon-colored artificial world, in which I had the illusion of being immersed was not a convincing imitation of the physical Seattle, or for that matter, any other landscape which could possibly have drawn me in. The allure of this cyberscape was the impression that it was responsive to me, as if my gaze itself was creating (or performing) this world and that I was to some extent enunciating it according to my own desire. My most abiding memory was of exhilarating ability to fly through the artificial world at great speed simply by cocking my hand like a gun?’navigation’ is a poor term for this experience. Best of all, I had a sense of the weightlessness and super-power that I had imagined in childhood and had read about in myths and comic books, but had never before experienced, not even in my dreams. (My childhood friends in first and second grade and I tried fruitlessly to fly day after day by flapping blankets while jumping off walls and out of trees.) It is this feeling of transcendence of the mortal body and the gravity of earth that for me is a key to the desire and media attention which has been focused on ‘cyberspace’ and the subculture which has grown up around it.

In actuality, however, my field of view in the virtual world was constantly being reconstituted in ‘real time’ by a computer from a digital store through devices which tracked the position of my head and hand. (‘Simulator sickness’ and the disturbing experience of ‘lag’ between head-motion and image formation are clues to the inexact fit between a cyberscape and the body in physical space.) Despite its futuristic connotations, a ‘world’ like ‘Virtual Seattle’ belongs to the most traditional kind of virtual environment and may even be considered the last gasp of Renaissance space. However, the spectator’s station point is inside the projection of an image, transformed from a monocular and stationary point of view into mobile agency in a three-dimensional space. Of course, this visual three-dimensionality is supported by sound—the most potentially immersive and virtual medium of all. I was fascinated with being both in the picture and having control over it—that is, I could chase a whale or follow restaurant sounds to the Space Needle landmark, whatever took my fancy, and when I got tired of it, I could tell the operator at the computer, ‘Give me another world!’

enVella is a kinetic dress with movement triggered by the detection of the wearer’s state of fear and anxiety. The upper portion of the dress is surrounded by four fans which open and envelope the wearer when the user’s body temperature and heart rate increase. When the wearer’s heart rate and temperature increase, the microcontroller concludes that a state of fear has been achieved. As a result, the fans open to comfort and protect the wearer.

An experience everyone has in common is that of being in the mother’s womb. Inside the womb, one was safe and warm. This very experience has molded the human reaction to stress and fear. One naturally feels safer when enclosed and warm, especially when faced with darkness. To outline this effect, consider the comfort that can be derived by being wrapped in a blanket. In spite of offering no real protection, one instinctively huddles into a blanket when frightened.

With enVella, the project designers investigate the feasibility of detecting fear with a combination of biosensors; and, with a working implementation of such a system, to explore whether an enveloping form raised in response to the presence of fear provides a sense of comfort.

Information visualisations within the field of environmental art are often imbued with an agenda for catalysing changes in behavior. They are political images that rhetorically ask how we might act differently in our relationship to what is being measured. This paper explores the complexity of information visualisations by discussing the radically different informatic strategies deployed in the installation artwork, What the Frog’s Nose tells the Frog’s Brain. Exhibited at ISEA2013, the work uses smell as a medium for producing information. The politics of smell remain relatively open, making it a rhetorical device rich with possibilities for exploring alternative modes of information production.

Eco-visualization technology offers a new way to dynamically visualize invisible environmental data. Eco-visualization can take many forms. My own practice of eco-visualization involves animating information typically concealed in building monitoring systems, such as kilowatts or gallons of water used. A public display with real time feedback promotes awareness of resource consumption. The long-term goal of most eco-visualization technology is to encourage good environmental stewardship through hybrid practices of art and design. The presentation will provide a critical survey of this emerging field.

Abstract

Buildings breathe data. Our homes shelter technology that quietly counts in the background of our daily lives. We cook; we wash; we sleep. All the while, small electronic gadgets tally numbers. How many of us know how many gallons of hot water we use daily? Residential water meters are often hidden in dark basements. As a media artist, I design eco-visualization software that creates sounds and images from environmental information. My data could be concealed in local architecture or a nearby river.

Eco-visualization technology offers a new way to dynamically visualize invisible environmental data. Eco-visualization can take many creative forms. It is the purpose of this paper to provide a critical survey of this emerging field. My current practice of eco-visualization involves animating information typically concealed in building monitoring systems, such as kilowatts, gallons of water used, or water quality facts. A public display with real time feedback promotes awareness of resource consumption and offers a practical alternative to remote electricity meters or water meters concealed in utility closets. The long-term goal of most eco-visualization artworks is to encourage good environmental stewardship by either increasing conservation behavior or raising awareness. This paper will provide a critical examination of work made by artists working to picture ecologically significant and often hidden data using innovative visualization strategies made possible with new technologies.

My own artistic practice is inspired by conceptual artists of the 1960s like Hans Haacke who promoted environmental stewardship through the real time performance of water decontamination. After defining some key terms, this paper will first detail the history and context of eco-visualization. I begin with Hans Haacke’s influential installation Rhinewater Purification Plant (1972), and progress to a survey of contemporary media artists and designers working in the eco-visualization arena: David Birchfield and collaborators, the Static design collective, Natalie Jeremijenko, the FutureFarmers, and many others. This survey will end with an in-depth investigation of the successes and failures of one of my own recent projects, a public display that dynamically visualizes electricity loads. The survey is limited to an exploration of eco-visualization that raises awareness about resource conservation.

Building on the history of land art from the 1960’s, eco-visualization provides a much-needed link between scientific research and public education. This paper will suggest that media art–particularly the eco-visualization projects that focus on the imaging of hidden processes or the usage of key resources–can help redefine and strengthen our complex relationship to nature. Artists have a vital role to play in the representation of environmentally critical data that is secreted from public view due to either the inward focus of the scientific research community or the private practices of industry. Special attention will be given to eco-visualization software that involves collaboration or direct participation between any or all of the following groups: artists and scientists, scientists and the general public, and artists and the general public. Throughout the course of the paper, patterns of both pollution and consumption on the planet will be briefly summarized, as these are the forces driving both the scientific and artistic research. In the forthcoming survey of eco-visualization and other technology-driven art works that deal with resource conservation issues, I intend to demonstrate the following:

1. Eco-visualization offers a new way to visualize invisible environmental data.
2. Eco-visualization can provide real time visual feedback that can increase conservation behavior or environmental awareness.
3. Dynamic visual feedback through eco-visualization encourages perception of linkages between the natural world and the built environment.
4. Eco-visualization can encourage good environmental stewardship.

Panel: Playing for Keeps: Social Empowerment Through Physically Interactive Artworks

This is about a tem­po­rary as­sem­bly (Lind­ström and Ståhl 2010) that we call Threads – a mo­bile sewing cir­cle. Threads is a trav­el­ling ex­hi­bi­tion and work­shop where par­tic­i­pants are in­vited to gather for a day and to, among other things, em­broi­der SMS, by hand and with an em­broi­dery ma­chine con­nected to a mo­bile phone. This in­vi­ta­tion, to en­gage with var­i­ous ma­te­ri­als, tech­nolo­gies, sto­ries and prac­tices, can also be seen as an in­vi­ta­tion to share con­cerns, de­sires, and mem­o­ries in re­la­tion to old and new as well as phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. What char­ac­ter­izes this tem­po­rary as­sem­bly is partly that its bound­aries are vague and mov­ing. Each time it is as­sem­bled, it looks and works a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent. We sug­gest that trough our de­sign that al­lows for de­sign-af­ter-de­sign (Ehn 2008) we make it pos­si­ble for the par­tic­i­pants to add, alter and change parts and prac­tices of Threads. This con­tin­u­ous re­la­tional re­order­ing of things, can at times be frus­trat­ing and stress­ful since it in­volves un­cer­tainty. We do how­ever argue that this fluid (de Laet and Mol 2000) char­ac­ter is most of all a good thing, since it al­lows Threads to be­come closely en­tan­gled in the par­tic­i­pants’ every­day lives and thereby starts mat­ter­ing (Lind­ström and Ståhl 2011).

Understanding Visual Music Symposium is an international scientific meeting dedicated to developing knowledge in visual music. UVM 2015 Symposium focused on research-creation processes and the multiple relations between art, science and technologies. The participants had the opportunity to share research outcomes, show their artistic works, and to discuss concepts, current trends, technological innovations, aspects related to creativity and innovative use of technology. UVM 2015 was held in Brasília, Brazil, organized by Midialab – Laboratory of Research in Computer Art. In addition to the 27 visual music pieces screened, the event for the first time incorporated in its program a computer art exhibition. The works presented in this exhibition (entitled Visual Music: Interactions between Music and Image) offered the audience the possibility to participate in the creative elaboration of the work by interacting to the pieces, which were modified due to that interaction. The works dealt with interesting issues such as interactivity and innovative concepts of space-time, and the interfaces between music and image. The relationship between image and music received a special treatment, once most of the works presented in that exhibition explored interactivity possibilities in human-computer interface.

ePPA – Espacio/ Plataforma de preservación audiovisual (ePPA – Space/ Platform for Audiovisual preservation) aims at making Lima Art Museum (MALI) and Hi-Andean Technology’s (ATA) video art collections available to a wider audience. By creating a platform, the project provides remote users with descriptive information of the artworks, and museum visitors with full access to the collection of video art. This paper discusses the challenges faced by the project in creating a platform that would work as a comprehensive database and, at the same time, would narrate the possible histories of video art in Peru.

Abstract

The Equivalents II project has evolved out of an intent to mathematically produce believable still-images that convey the realism of the photographic. The project brings together discussions and references from three distinct but not unrelated disciplines: Iconography; studies in Language and Semiotics; and computer programming. This article discusses the historical references, aesthetic questions, cultural interpretation and technical aspects of a computer program that generates abstract, cloud like images whose tonal characteristics are defined by text typed in by the viewer.

The presentation touches on the following: Alfred Stieglitz’ Equivalents, Gerhard Richter paintings and the photographic referent, IannisXenakis’ mathematics as a base for musical composition, Paul Virilio’s infography, Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, Mark Poster’s The Mode of Information, Brownian motion and Gaussian random behavior models, general users vs specialist programmers, representation and truth, language as an interactive agent, text as a signifying process in the viewing of images (language as anchorage), computer programming practice as art activity, cognitive interpretation and cultural knowledge in the interpretation
of images.

Panel Statement

A much celebrated phenomenon of the emergence of the internet and digital media is the possibility for the interrogation of gender, subjectivity and identity. Contemporary art practitioners who investigate these themes have found electronic and online media to be a perfect vehicle for creative? and intellectual application of these ideas. The panel ‘Erotics of the Internet’ will explore how the internet is used to redefine identity and subjectivity and how, in particular, women are using the internet as a source of inspiration and communication. The panel will look at how imagination and desire combine to create textual and visual worlds where identity fantasies can be acted out and gender interrogated and manipulated. The panel will also aim to investigate how online interactions effect ‘real life’ and how the disembodiment of the internet can feed back and influence the corporeality of everyday life. The panel members cross a variety of disciplines including writing, electronic art practice and performance. Their work all shares the common goal of investigating the potential of digital media and in particular the use of online and interactive technologies as an artistic medium.

 (Long paper)

Keywords: Visually impaired users, art and science, wearable interfaces, tactile and sound perception.

«eskin» has been influenced by working with researchers in artificial intelligence, neuroscience and wearable computing who examine tactile perception, embodiment and brain plasticity. In this article I trace the inspirations, the challenges and the outcomes of this project with various scientists and technicians on the development of a prototype and the problems that evolved. What happens when the aims of projects are not clearly defined from the beginning of the project or when the funding is not adequate? It seems that experiment building in trans-disciplinary teams can be both, engaging as well as disruptively disengaging for artists and for users. This paper shows how the processes of production itself can either be encouraged by creative user engagement or driven by passions of artistic inquiry or stalled by disciplinary traditions and problems of communication.

 (Short paper)

Keywords: Esolangs, Esoteric Programming Languages, Language, Concept Art, Fluxus, Ouipo, Code Art

Esolangs (for “esoteric programming languages”) are a class of languages made by programmers at play, not intended for practical use. Ben Olmstead (creator of the Malbolge language) describes them as “pushing the boundaries of programming, but not in useful directions.” This paper looks at how these strange languages function as experiential art pieces, with similarities to Oulipean systems and Fluxus event scores.

Espionne lives in the fifth dimension. She is the illusion between time measured and time perceived, between material comfort and inner paranoia, and she lies at the border between signal and noise, at the point of irony between high expectations and low technology. Espionne lurks in the matrix of underground signals and overground surveillance in public transport. She is the spark of imbalance who must kindle the flame of social anarchy for survival. She is therefore a collector of human voices, profiles, thoughts and emotions who infiltrates the urban subnetwork in order to re-inject its patrons with the nevroses of their peers. Espionne is nothing but a rumor, presented to you in the form of a web interface, a sound installation, and a thirty-minute poster.

Since Isaac Newton, colorists have, with little success, looked for ways to associate the vibrations of light and color with the vibrations of music and sound. Although the idea of proportion has been mentioned in these efforts it has never been studied thoroughly. This paper proposes, through use of computers and digital raster graphics, a means of measuring the color balance of an image through proportions of red, green and blue intensities. With this method of measurement it is possible to apply several theories of color harmony and balance to computer-based abstract imagery. Through the computer we get specific control of the process. If, through this technique, a quantifiable means of creating concordant color relationships is possible, then it makes color available to the composer as material for the coherent structuring of time. As in tonal music, movement in time can be established by movement in and out of balanced, consonant areas. An area of balanced color relationships could be thought of as a tonic space, functioning like the tonic pitch or key in tonal music.

Panel Statement

Panel: Eliza’s Children

Computer-based systems respond to input from a user/visitor/audience. This interaction between the system and an outside party gives rise to a number of ideas about these systems:

1) That they engender more creative participation of the part of the user than non-interactive systems.

2) That this behavior is (can be) intelligent.

This paper looks at these questions from the perspective of behavior. The behavior of an interactive system is, as is the behavior of any being or system, a description of that system’s
actions in relation to a certain environment. Behavior is not something that the living being does in itself (for in it are only internal structural changes) but something that we point to. (Maturana & Varela) A being exhibits intelligent behavior when it is seen to learn and adapt to the environment, when it is able to move outside of its previous actions and do something new and creative. Thus, behavior is a description; it is attributed to a being by an observer. I will argue that when we attribute ‘behavior’ to a machine, we are projecting our own behavior outward. The Turing Test can tell us nothing about the machine. All it can tell us is about the human.

Panel: New Media Art Education in Central and Eastern Europe in the Last Two Decades: experiments and transition

Speak­ing of non-in­sti­tu­tional media art pro­duc­tion in Es­to­nia I rely on my per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence of or­gan­is­ing an­nual media art fes­ti­val in Tallinn.  We are a small and quite poor coun­try in a sit­u­a­tion where most of “cul­ture mak­ers” must be able to be suc­cess­ful by them­selves. On the other hand this poor­ness sit­u­ates us to be more cre­ative and look after new ex­tra­or­di­nary forms of co­op­er­a­tion, shar­ing ideas and con­tin­ious self-learn­ing.  I think that liv­ing and cre­at­ing art in small so­ci­ety gives us many ben­e­fits – fact that every­body knows each other makes re­la­tion­ships and group­works much eas­ier. On the other hand we have in sit­u­a­ton where we have less au­di­ence.

What char­ac­ter­izes non-in­sti­tu­tional media art in Es­to­nia?  First and best phe­nom­e­non is DIY – pro­jects are born with hands-on method by using low-tech tools. Artists are often work­ing in cel­lars or garages, old fac­to­ries or rooftop flats. So I should say that artis­tic work and cre­ativ­ity do not de­pend on lo­ca­tion. Sec­ondly I would say that media art does not de­pend of small bud­get.  Vice versa, I am happy to say that media art is evolv­ing and con­stantly finds new out­comes. Third and more broad phe­nom­e­non is that media art is dis­solved with other cul­tural forms and can be found every­where. And this is con­tin­u­ing and ever-ris­ing trend. Fourth is artists pe­cu­liar at­ti­tude of “big” prob­lems. For ex­am­ple prob­lems of sur­veil­lance so­ci­ety that have be­come pop­u­lar abroad didn’t pro­voke fears or neg­a­tively minded works at all, in­stead our artists joy­fully ex­pressed con­de­scen­sion about it. Through art­works it was con­cluded that the sur­round­ing cam­eras and care­fully in­spected per­sonal data are an in­evitable part of today’s so­ci­ety, which must be ac­cepted and which should be used in art in the best way.

The study of interdisciplinary cross-cultural engagement in networked improvisatory performance serves as the starting point for Ethernet Orchestra’s [1] 2010 live international audio-visual performance, Distant Presences [2]. Combining the disciplines of free improvisation and Internet art, the performance spanned four continents and time zones, networking musicians at the University of Technology, Sydney, Kunstmühle gallery, Germany [3], and Londrina, Brazil, with visual “net” artists in Sydney, London and Munich. Employing various audio-visual network technologies, the performance was broadcast by FBi Radio, Sydney [4], and streamed on the Internet as “Radio You Can Watch”, allowing listeners to view the accompanying live visual mixing to the radio broadcast. The performance could also be experienced online by opening both the visual platform (VisitorsStudio) [5], and the stations Internet stream in separate browser windows. The ensembles eclectic combination of instruments included Turkish oud and bendir, Mongolian horse fiddle and throat singing, trumpet, guitar and laptop Max/MSP processing. Similarly, manipulated images were a combination of animations, movies and still images of abstract film noir

collage reflecting on the multifarious nature of location in the “construction and representation of identity” [6]. Improvisation is often considered one of many disciplines within the practice and research of networked performance. However, as a vehicle for cross-cultural collaboration it is unprecedented in its ability to create dialogical exchange and learning across cultures. The interdisciplinary nature of this practice also requires a convergence of theoretical and methodological approaches traversing the associated fields of, musicology, ethnomusicology, cognition and HCI (human-computer interaction). This paper outlines the technical facilitation of the performance and the creative strategies employed by the musicians and visual artists to collaborate together as a dispersed collective. Illustrating incidences of intercultural musical transferences and visual coincidences, it focuses on distributed perception and how, as Chion (1994) suggests, “listening with the ear is inseparable from that of listening with the mind, just as looking is with seeing” [7]. As a multimodal performance Distant Presences also highlights the use of metaphor [8] as a signifier for perception across the audio-visual spectrum, creating shared “codes of recognition” across cultures [9].

Panel Statement

Panel: Nethics?

In principle, it is a good idea not to jump to conclusions, especially ethical conclusions, in times of great social and cultural change. We are in such a time, and yet an ethical imperative is developing in various guises, whether in political correctness, fundamentalist attitudes, anti-smoking campaigns or recycling crusades, or any other behavioral groupware. Some trends, such as ‘political correctness’ , multiculturalism, social responsibility movements in professional societies and even in free enterprise, talks about collaborative rather than competitive ventures, new gender relationships and attitudes, indicate a general orientation to a radical mood change. Part of this phenomenon can be attributed to ‘population implosion’: thanks to media, people are exposed to each other in greater numbers, with greater frequency, greater intimacy and greater impact. We are thrown to the face of situations that do not, at first, concern us. The media bring us to the world just as much asthey bring the world to us. They make each one of us commensurate with the planet. Just as we are responsible for our own welfare and happiness, we are becoming responsible? whether we are willing to recognize this or not ? for that part of us which extends far about and around the Earth. The self-centered ego is now calling for a counterpart in the world henceforth perceived as an extension of self. Furthermore, our minds are being extended very far and wide and fast by our computerized technology. The ecological consciousness is not only a matter of global hygiene, it is also the best metaphor for the expansion of our minds to global proportions. This technology is approximating the mind and enabling it to command material change in real time. So much of our technology is geared to information processing rather than industrial production that more than half the world’s population is engaged in activities more closely related to mind than to matter. New technologies are now preceded by popular metaphors such as ‘virtual reality’, ‘information highway’ , ‘personal digital assistants’ which turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. This implies that the way we think and the way we shape thoughts with language now is endowed with transforming power. When you can do (at least by simulation) anything you want, the question ceases to be what you can do, but what you want to do. As we move from a culture of archiving (oriented to the past) to one of programming (oriented to the future), we may discover a new urgency in thinking up the ‘right’ metaphors. It may be more urgent than ever to practice collective positive thinking when global mood changes can go either way. The word is not out yet on the fall of the Wall, the crumbling of all walls, for that matter. Getting rid of guilt, paying increased attention to other people’s voices, staying open, expanding one’s mental proportions to the new size of other people’s voices, staying open, expanding one’s mental proportions to the new size of our collective body, consulting one’s body and the body politic for proprioceptive information about the state of things generally, may be among some suggestions for grounding personal ethics in a democratic and sustainable development.

As social systems evolve through networks of exchange and economies of relation the relevance of Art is increasingly dependent upon divesting its traditions of authorship. Artists concerned with the social and political function of art practice, those, who wish to ethically engage the complexity of social life, are developing new methodologies. These include, re-inventing ethnographic practices, employing models of complex systems, and exploiting information technologies. Information space is public space. Advanced communications technologies required to enter and act in that space can be made accessible and empowering to individuals who currently have no access or power through public art practice. Interface design in art practice, consumer media, and information culture position the subject on a sliding scale of political power between consumerism and collaboration. The one-way vector of communication between artist and audience can give way to “context-dependent” practices in which the artist generates a framework for collaboration with an “audience,” that is meaningful relative to the audience’s social environment. This approach to public art avoids representation and appropriation, and provide material contexts for direct political action. Its goal is to open dialogue within and between communities, facilitate productive self-expression, increase political awareness, and challenge social codes. This paper will examine the potential of ‘context-dependent’ public art practices through a discussion of projects which use social strategies for the deployment of technology in an attempt to change the conditions of disenfranchised or marginalized communities.

Ethology I is an ongoing collaborative project based on the location of the self and the non self. It is grounded in the functioning of the Immune system exploring it at a symbolic level. The project explores the capacity of the immune system for learning and memory and the levels of distinct boundaries of the “fields of self” – it explores notions of specificity and location as complex systems relying on four premises:

Recognition – Presentation – Action (attack/integration) – Archive (memory).

The installation – a semi living organism – is an interactive ground controlled by artificial intelligent software that interprets the sensing of movement/positions of the viewers/participants as ‘others’ in the context of the work. Ethology I explores the social relations of the collaborative team and the nature of their location in the group.

All images shown are microscopy videos of on going scientific research of different fields within immunology: auto immunity, infection, virus, bacteria, acquired ‘in vivo’ and in cultured cells, with my presence. The phenomenological experience of being on location allowed us to engage with the research and the boundaries of scientific research and art exploration.

Location of ethological relations are explored in this project that envisages to demonstrate how external social relations mimics biological systems – the physical construct of the prototype is based on the diversity, fluidity and dynamics of the immune system. The attention is directed to understanding how the biological process might contribute to clarify nature/culture and dislocation/location dialectic relations we find symbolically in the immune system.

By co-localizing participants, including them on the system, it brings to surface ideas of how a older Cartesian perspective of a mechanism based on control, hierarchy and specificity, allows space for a neuro-phenomenological approach grounded on ideas of autonomy, co influence and assimilation, that leads to a newer possible of “fields of self”.

Institutional Presentation Statement

EI-TV activities: transmissions from the USA and Canada interactive TV – theoretical debates on Communication arts – contributions on the history of Communication Art – broadcasts in which communication art projects are introduced – transmissions of relevant Communication Art events execution of Communication Art events in which television plays an instrumental role – providing a service for interactive learning.

Ultimate goals of an El-TV:

1. – to respect the character of other countries.
2. – to make communicative and creative exchange for European “television consumers”.
3. – communication.
4. – cooperation.
5. – entertainment and enjoyment.

Abstract (long paper)

The hackathon format, which began as a commercial digital model, has been modified across different communities within the arts and cultural sectors. Adjusting the hack to work within the arts presents logistical challenges to organisers. The authors of this paper, an arts curator and artist-practitioner, have organised and run hack-style events together since 2014. In this research, they define hacks and cite examples of recent art and cultural hacks. They then present a series of three case studies that describe their collaborative projects. An analysis of this research shows that the format of the hack event has been modified in a variety of ways across different projects. These include removing competitive aims, considering needs that are specific to arts participants, strategically planning materials and resources, and carefully considering exhibition and showcase formats.

Artist Statement

The transit shelter, generally an overlooked, under-considered object, is a public space offering opportunities for engagement in larger issues and with a diverse range of people. A rethink of the shelter in terms of aesthetics, design, energy, and interactivity changes it from a place of waiting, to one of action, interaction, and power. Usually it is made as a glass box, an object intended to be ‘unseen’. Challenging this absent aesthetic – by announcing geography/location, promoting visible use of renewable energy systems, and increasing comfort of the space – the altered shelter  acknowledges the value of citizens and the transit system it supports.

The entire globe is experiencing a devastating loss of species and ancient cultures that is tied to humankind’s collective growth and technological march forward. The strength of the visual arts lies both in its potential to communicate across cultures and in the ability of objects to physically illustrate and theoretically illuminate often hidden processes, connections and costs.

Body image can be altered by pain, ‘peripheral ‘injuries such as amputations, or insults to the central nervous system. These conditions have also formed the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical enquiry into how we might understand embodiment. Within clinical practise attempts are made to ‘repair’ patient’s body image through rehabilitative techniques however the means of assessing these changes has been that of self-portrait sketches.

The use of self portraits has been problematic in that it has often been limited by the abilities of the patient and not without irony the additional limitations that the condition itself can place upon them.  Alexa Wright’s work on the Sci-Art funded After Image project (1997) investigated the phenomena of phantom limbs however the techniques involved in creating these images were not ones that could be easily utilised by patients within a clinical setting. As a result of this research was instigated that examined the possibilities of the manipulation of an avatar for suffers from Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPD) within the Digital to communicate their experience of their body image; this was instigated by allowing patients to remove, scale, displace and render the body in a variety a ways. Alongside this it has also been discovered that games utilising devices such as the WiiMote have allowed patients suffering from conditions such as CRPD to begin reintegration of ‘disowned’ and painful limbs into their body image.

This paper will examine issues surrounding issues concerning the perception and depiction of the body within the digital. It will draw upon research interviews with users of the system to explore how the digital, rather than promoting notions of ‘virtual’ self can help us understand our experiences of the physical. In so doing it will draw upon a phenomenological understanding of embodiment and seek to critique the structures that often assert the digital a space of the incorporeal.

Existential technology (existech) is an attempt at defining a technological framework for self-determination and mastery over one’s own destiny. The physical embodiment of existech grew out of an interest in expressive photography, the tools of which I re-situated as extensions of my mind and body. This work gave rise to my WearComp invention of the 1970s  which has more recently culminated in my Wearable Wireless WebCam. WearComp has three characteristics I call Ephemeral, Existential, and Eudaemonic. Ephemeral: The apparatus operates interactively (directly into my and then finally interact with. Existential: The apparatus is “empowering” to the wearer rather than”enslaving.” An extreme example of this dichotomy is the synergy of enslavement arising from the remotely—controlled wearable pain giving device attached to prisoners to make them into obedient “cyborgs,” versus technologies like the Sony Walkman which empower us with the ability to construct our own musical environment despite environmental control such as Muzak which may otherwise be foisted upon us against our free will. Eudaemonic: The apparatus is situated in my own personal space, in the sense that I regard it as part of me, and others do as well. Negative example: if you walk into a department store, they often ask you to leave bags and briefcases at the front desk. Clothing is much more eudaemonic, and is thus a more natural place to put such an apparatus.

The apparatus is typically worn on/in/under clothing, sewn directly into clothing, or becomes clothing. The latter case may be implemented in either an additive (e.g. sewing in conductive thread or the like) or subtractive form. The subtractive form may be implemented using conductive cloth, of which I have identified four kinds which I call BC1, IC1, BC2, IC2 (conductive one direction, and conductive in both directions, either bare or insulated, respectively). Ordinary cloth I call CO. Smart clothing may have multiple layers, e.g. BC2 as RF shield, followed by two la layers oriented at right angles. This allows components to be”wired” together into something that’s unobtrusive even to the new see-through-clothing security cameras (by virtue of BC2). VibraVest/Thinkrank is a computational tank top that is worn, in close contact to the body, under ordinary clothing, to afford a synthetic synesthesia of a new sensory modality, namely radar, which gets translated toleel”. The chirplet transform, and other DSP methodology may detect targets accelerating toward the wearer, helping him or her avoid bumping into things, and similarly make the wearer blind to targets that are moving away, solving the”information overload” problem. I originally developed this personal imaging system as art, to “see” in new ways, and to experience new forms of reality, but my hope is that this invention could also some day be of use to the visually challenged. I will present this and other forms of existech that function as tools of self-determination and mastery over one’s own personal space.

Transiting in the interdisciplinary domains between art, science and technology, Gilbertto Prado has been building a trajectory within the context of contemporary Brazilian art. His works have no hierarchy and are not restricted to a specific language or domain, being able to dialogue with issues that relate to network art as well as to explore the poetic potentialities offered by virtual environments. Many of recent Prado’s works are co-authored with the Poéticas Digitais Group, formed by artists and young researchers, creating collaborative networks and knowledge circuits. In this context, the purpose of this article is to analyze the work of the artist and the group as well as the Circuito Alameda exhibition presented at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City in 2018, based on the concept of rewriting, developed by the researcher Priscila Arantes.

By acknowledging that virtual reality is experienced in real space, this curatorial research posits that the ways in which mediated curatorial and museological contexts describes a distinctive set of exhibitionary conditions. As will be developed here, VR and museums, in their own respective ways, function as multi-dimensional spaces in which aesthetic experiences are situated. By critically reflecting upon field research involving notable VR artworks – including my first-hand exhibition encounter with filmmaker Alejandro Iñárritu’s celebrated Carne y Arena (2017) being focused upon here – I will argue that critical examination of immersive experience should not be based on an interpretation of the visual and affective qualities of the simulated, virtual image alone; but instead be responded to more expansively by contextualizing its viewing experience as part of a broader, unfolding exhibition encounter that the work’s gallery-based installation supports. These supplementary notes extend the line of inquiry initiated in my previous theorization of Carne y Arena by drawing Edward Kienholz’s environmental tableaux Five Card Stud (1969-72) into this constellation of concerns. In doing so, this text will extrapolate how the horizon of VR extends well beyond the cinematic to the cinematographic, and onto the curatorial design of exhibition space itself.

This paper set out to examine the creative practice of Australian media artist Brad Miller and his collaborations Ian McArthur, Adam Hinshaw, Tega Brain and Ian Andrews who together have created and exhibited a series of interactive expanded photographic/Image data visualisations. Specifically this paper will examine Miller’s installations augment_me, mediated_moments, le_temps, #capillary; all work have been publicly presented using what Miller describes as the Interactive Media Platform (IMP). These installations used very similar approaches to interrogating and visualising data and will be considered in relationship to a number of installations leading up and proceeding is exhibition.These installations in a series engage with folksonomies and visual patterns via social media image repository Flickr and the resulting installation is a multi‑channel visual and audio installation, which renders a large quantity of digital images that depict information systems, communications and transport and urban built environment are activated in a somatically engaging and interactive way. I have described these installations, in the past, as a memory machine of sorts. It tracks our relationships with people,     things, places and scenarios via the use of streaming photographs and an algorithm, developed with programmer Adam Hinshaw and sound Artist and academic Ian McArthur which is used to structure the flow of thousands of photographs unfurling in horizontal film‑like strips, sometimes in different directions, triggered by the movement of a viewer, under sensors, in the exhibition space. We live in an era defined by unprecedented quantities of available information (big data) and the mediated memories. Films or photos are not ‘memory’; they are mediated building blocks that we mold in the process of remembering.

This paper proposes a shift in aesthetics that can account for the bio-chemical dimension of subjective experience. We argue that this shift allows to become more sensitive to how we experience, instead of focusing on just what we feel. To achieve this, we focus on media environments that manipulate temperature, air flow, or oxygen levels in the air, in order to affect human subjects in a bodily as well as emotionally-affective manner. We argue that media environments that intensify climatic processes so that they can be sensed, potentially change what we consider to be important in our environment and what we include in our consideration of future actions. To explore this shift, we will take an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment that we have created to flesh out the characteristics of such an embodied aesthetics. The VR environment represents a natural surrounding in which the participants’ respiration impacts the growth of virtual plants.

Over the course of five minutes the participants experience the correlation of their own metabolic processes, the photosynthesis of the plants, and the rising temperature in the surrounding with different sense modalities. Based on observations of emotional and behavioral responses to relations mediated by the environment, we propose that an aesthetics of metabolism allows us to become more sensitive towards our own bodily involvement with the world and towards other sentient beings we are sharing the world with. Lastly, we believe the media environment presented here illustrates how a practical aesthetics and prototyping can help developing new forms of knowledge in the humanities and provide best practice examples for interdisciplinary research.

The future of New Media depends on the breaking down the walls we find within the higher education. As we attempt to define a New Media major for the 21st century we find we are often hampered by our own 20th century mindsets of curriculum. This paper covers the curricular issues that are common in implementing new media today in higher education.

How do we ensure that artists working at the very edges of artistic practice can thrive? Is there a difference between experimentation and innovation? Can we move from an instrumentalist alignment of interdisciplinary arts and experimental arts in the creative industries and accept them as intrinsically part of a vibrant arts ecology? Is there a place for process as product in the presentation of experimental arts? The Emerging and Experimental Arts section of the Australia Council held a national forum on experimental practice in early May 2013. This paper will present an outline of the outcomes of this forum, and discuss some potential future directions for the support of emerging and experimental arts practice in Australia.

Functional models, traditionally used in artificial imaging and in interactive arts, only produce deterministic systems with trajectories defined once the initial conditions are known. However, behavioral models enable interactivity to be developed from these many interactions within a complex net-work can result non-programmed behaviors. Today, we shall be examining neuro-biological inspired models which should, or so we think, enable interactively created situations to emerge.

Michel Bret will present some of his work and try to develop the conditions and methods for new artistic work: from modeling living bodies based on the simulation of appearances, to generating behaviors or functions.

This paper presents Pero sans Cimon, a dynamic sculpture that critiques female body use and identity through the medium of soft robotics – a domain of robotics that uses materials and actuation mechanisms that mimic biological structures. Existing soft robotics research emphasizes the practical affordances of soft robotic mechanisms for locomotion, manipulation, wearable technology, and architecture. Instead, our objective is to examine soft robotics as an aesthetic medium through the analysis of the Pero sans Cimon artwork.

We use Andreas Broeckmann’s five aspects of the aesthetics of the machine: associative, symbolic, formalist, kinetic, and automatic to demonstrate how soft robotics, in continuity with twentieth-century machine art, can enable artistic expressiveness. Furthermore, we extend these principles by describing how the formalist and kinetic properties of soft robotics support new forms of artistic representation. We conclude by discussing the artistic implications of this technology. Specifically, we examine the potential social symbolism that may emerge from a robotic medium developed primarily for its aesthetic and mechanical resemblances to the human body.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Artistic Research, Bitcoin, Performance, Media Arts, Artistic Bokeh, Bitcoincloud, Community Practice, Artistic Capital.

Critical new media art is based on research-based art practice. It is both research- and process-oriented, so that the final result is not “completed” works (products) but rather process artifacts. This paper describes the artistic research and development of the art-group “Artistic Bokeh”, which is developing new documentation formats, and conducting experiments about the value of artistic practice and labor.

Abstract

Despite, or perhaps because of, a healthy skepticism, Artificial Intelligence (Al) has been making quiet progress in electronic arts. Artificial Intelligence has inspired traditional fields of electronic arts as well as it has developed new horizons composition for many artists working in electronic environments. Building on the success and shortcomings of previous experiences with computers in arts, the attempt to extend the paradigm of artificial intelligence systems to the domain of electronic sonic arts is made now. Musicians are increasingly using intelligent machines to deal with tasks for which they are better equipped than humans. Computers are increasingly being used to address the brain-numbing complexity of modern electronic music products and processes, thereby allowing people to concentrate on their music and ideas. Expert systems, for example, help people by searching a book of rules to decide what to do in a particular situation; as machines do not forget, these systems can manage rules more consistently than people. Some musicians are using neural nets, which can recognize complex patterns, to apply precedents that are difficult to express in numbers or words.

The real challenge facing technology is to recognize the uniqueness of machine intelligence and learn to work with it. Given enough memory, a computer can remember everything that ever happened to it or to anyone else. Furthermore, when faced with a logical problem or a theoretical model of how compositions or sounds should be, computers can deduce more results more quickly than humans. Their complementary strengths should allow man and computer to work together and do things that neither can do separately. Artificial Intelligence has already shown ability to help musicians work and gain access to all the computer power in order to deal with increasingly broad sound projects. The practical uses of Artificial Intelligence, expert systems, are presented and explained, e.g. some of the different ways in which machines can be used for reasoning or processing vision and language data in computer systems to improve the interaction between humans and computers. Central
to these computers is the element of pattern recognition, an element of human intelligence that can be thought as a kind of a detective that tirelessly collects and recognizes visual and auditory patterns. The ways in which musicians and computational-sound-environment users work with AI are discussed. In tables and sidebars, a glossary is presented; sound applications that benefit from Artificial Intelligence are listed; silicon neurons are described; and the costs and computational densities of the human brain and of expert systems are compared. Artificial Intelligence techniques require a lot of processing power and computer memory, but the driving force behind the use of more intelligent computers is more intelligent artists and computer users. It should be remembered that Artificial Intelligence, like any useful technology, is no panacea, as there are occasions when the technology just does not work or is badly managed.

This paper presents an ongoing research project studying AI ethics and algorithmic bias, through the creation of AI augmented devices operating in everyday life. The project explores the use of interactive objects as a platform for exposing the political, social and ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence. Within this project, we created BOX, a smart gumball machine that locks or unlocks its delivery candy system depending on the interactor’s ethnicity, highlighting potential ethical tensions that arise with the introduction of AI-powered objects. Our project aims to raise awareness on discrimination, ethics, and accountability in AI among practitioners and the general public.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Facial Expression, Facial EMG signal, Emotion, computer vision system.

In many affective computing paradigms a user’s internal state is used as an implicit control signal in an interaction. In the work presented here, we are exploring the utilization of two measurement techniques commonly used to assess a user’s affective state as an explicit control signal in a navigation task in a virtual environment. Concretely, we are investigating the feasibility of combining a real-time emotional biometric sensing system and a computer vision system for human emotional characterization and controlling a computer game. A user’s “happiness” and “sadness” levels are assessed by combining information from a camerabased computer vision system and electromyogram (EMG) signals from the facial corrugator muscle. Using a purpose-designed 3D flight simulation game, users control their simulated up-down motions using their facial expressions. To assess if combining visual and EMG data improves facial tracking performance, we conduct a user study where users are navigating through the 3D visual environment using the two control systems, trying to collect as many tokens as possible. We compared two conditions: Computer vision system alone, and computer vision system in combination with the EMG signal. The results show that combining both signals significantly increases the users’ performance and reduces task difficulty. However, this performance increase is associated with a reduced usability due to the need to have EMG sensors on one’s forehead. We hope these results from our study can help in future game designs, aid the development of more immersive virtual environments, and offer for alternative input methods where traditional methods are insufficient or unfesasible.

This project aims to design a novel way of rethinking cultural and social behavior by influencing social interaction using a series of interactive utensils. These devices provide different types of auditory feedback when used within a variety of social contexts. They foster social engagement by means of the habitual as well as explorative sonic gestures that they afford within everyday contexts. We discuss the design of this work-in-progress by introducing prior related work and current models, the methodology involved, and by offering some thoughts on its next generation.

Abstract (short paper)

Photography used as proof of scientific data often has to deal with problems arising from its overlapped indexical and iconic features. This paper is concentrated in the specific area of photography made by the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), which has expanded the boundaries of observation and representation of the micro world since it was introduced to scientific research in the mid-1960s. With the emergence of the digital era, photography‟s status as independent indexical register of reality began to be undermined by computerized imaging processes. Nevertheless, scientific photomicrographs aim to provide scientific evidence of data as accurately as possible. However, the results obtained with the SEM can be disorientating because the process of producing a picture is camera-less. The apparatus tries to recreate a reality that is not a visual phenomenon, which scientists try to analyze from its image that is captured through the SEM technology. This paper considers some of the ways in which SEM microphotographs can be used in an artistic practice, and argues that there is an urgent need to rethink the indexical function of SEM photography. The author‟s artistic practice can be seen as rejecting the traditional practice of minimizing noise in scientific representation and, instead, embracing experimentation that encourages the unexpected over the predictable.

Scott Snibbe will present selections from twenty years of interactive art, music, exhibits and entertainment. He will show many examples of interactive art that mine themes from science and cinema to produce unabashedly entertaining and poetic re-interpretations of our universe, including recent work creating the first app album with Björk: Biophilia; and interactive exhibits created for James Cameron’s movie Avatar. He will discuss the educational and societal benefits of interactivity; and the joys, challenges and research involved in the creation and distribution of interactive art as an artist/entrepreneur.

Abstract

This study and its works aim to highlight the significance and place of a number of postmodern ideologies in the evaluation of today’s interactive 3D virtual environments (I3DVEs). They notably focus on the ideas of Deleuze concerning the correlation between elements, time, and space, which in these settings are ever changing and linked to, and determined by, the user’s movements and actions. In addition, the ephemeral aspect of components and shapes, and the pledge for lightness, transparency, and instantaneity are analyzed through a Bachelardian lens, to describe the passage from a culture of objects to that of instability and flow.

In a transitory environment such as an interactive virtual world, the ‘transient’ derives from the capture of ‘appropriate instants’. Every moment is different, replaceable, repeatable, or could simply be ignored. The interval and passage from viewpoint to viewpoint and from shape to shape are of significant importance, and what is seen and felt has more to do with energy than with form. I3DVEs deal with ephemeral spaces between points. They result in deformation, dematerialisation, appearance, and disappearance of entities. They entail a constant change in scenery, perspective, mass and quantity.

Fluid Automata is a series of projects involving the interactive and stylized representation of a fluid system using custom image processing techniques. Together the hardware-accelerated fluid system and image processing techniques allow the user to create expressive representations of dynamic energy. Through the use of tablet computers (tablet), one or more users interact with the fluid system via multi-touch gestures. The technique has been used in a series of projects that have been shown in a variety of environments involving one or more people: as a multimedia art installation, within a 3D virtual reality environment, as a visual instrument in musical settings, and as a standalone generative art application for a tablet computer. This paper describes the basic algorithms governing the Fluid Automata technique as well as some of the installation configurations, and moreover explores the connection between aesthetic concerns and scientific visualization.

Intro
Fluid Automata is an interactive generative art system that explores the relationship of aesthetics and scientific visualization, and the interplay between collaboration and discovery. The Fluid Automata system invites users to create dynamic generative art via responsive tactile gestures using a tablet. The aesthetic experience includes both controlling the system through multi-touch and also adjusting a wide range of parameters to discover new patterns and visual properties. The user manipulates both the underlying system and its visual representation.

Abstract (long paper)

In this paper I present recent examples of my art practice which transverses the disciplines of media art and particle physics. As I will discuss, my work engages with both conceptual and material aspects of experimental particle physics, and is in itself an experimental practice. Through the analysis of the works and processes involved in the development of artworks produced at CERN, I will discuss aspects of art / science collaboration.

FISEA 

Many decades ago American composer Charles Ives speculated that eventually music would be made through a direct connection of the human brain to devices for sound production. Subsequently, the pioneering physiologist Adrian reported on experiencing a translation of the human electroencephalogram (EEG) into audio signals. Decades later, composers Lucier, Teitelbaum, Rosen-boom and others produced major works of music with EEG and other bioelectronic signals. Since then many have expanded these applications into the kinetic arts as well. The author’s work in biofeedback and the arts, begun 20 years ago, is experiencing a revival due to the fact that advances in technology now permit realization of musical concepts in performance which depend on complex real-time analysis of EEG signals, previously achievable only with cumbersome, non-real-time, laboratory-bound methods. In this paper the author provides an assessment of current techniques and prospects for further development of extended musical interface with the human nervous system. Topics discussed include the following:

• the musical cognitive significance of stimulus-bound EEG events measurable in real-time
• the relationship of these events to aspects of musical formal perception, such as feature extraction and temporal gestalt (TG) boundary detection in musical holarchic structures
• methods of circumventing inherent limitations on the information bandwidth of EEG signals
• application of event-related potentials (ERPs) to the building of formal musical holarchies in real-time
• paradigms for algorithmic improvisation using these signals
• traversing a musical knowledge base by driving an inference engine with cognitively significant ERPs
• the EEG analysis expert system—
• application of AI techniques
• comparison of the uses of EEG information in making decisions on relatively high levels of musical structure versus direct, low-level event feedback in musical textures—the applications of each approach
• techniques from the study of chaos dynamics applied to analysis of long-term EEG waveform patterns—their significance for music
• applications of recent advances in measurement technology, such as use of the SQUID (Super-cooled QUantum Interference Device) enabling EEG detection without direct electrical contact with the subject, super-conducting electrodes, etc.
• speculations on possible extensions of these ideas in the conception of musical instruments, performance and education
• EEG-to-MIDI—some direct mapping ideas for an input device.

Finally, a configuration of hardware and software currently being used to develop the author’s work-in-progress, On Being Invisible II, will be described. This includes use of a composition and performance language, HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language), to implement real-time composition strategies in response to EEG analyses; a software synthesis and signal processing environment, Cmix, for non-real-time mapping of these events to precomposed sound tracks; and EEG analysis software — all running on a Macintosh II outfitted with data acquisition and MIDI interface hardware and a NuBuss interface to the Digisound-16 audio conversion system.

Our own bodily perception shapes the way we think! By using Virtual Reality technologies to locate our bodies within a specific environment we can expand and perhaps improve our environmental literacy. Therefore, technology can become an aid to locate the self within the ecological system and increase our sense of embodiment. Self-Portraiture, with its reflective analogies can then be a theme to increase this awareness.

‘Keynote Panel’

Artists Clare Patey and Matt Moore, along with Gordon Knox and Heather Sealy Lineberry, discuss a new collaborative exhibition and initiative that explores fundamental changes occurring during our lifetimes and potential means of dealing with such changes culturally. This project explores both biological loss (the dramatic extinction of 90% of biodiversity) and cultural loss (letter writing, the practice of darning socks, or the loss of generational farming knowledge). ASU Art Museum‘s Knox and Lineberry moderate the discussion within the context of the evolving role of the museum in society from archive to agent of social change. Sponsored by ASU Art Museum.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Music Information Retrieval, Sonification, Audification, Inverse Discrete Fourier Transformation, Procedural Composition, Parametric Articulation.

A procedure for generating sound using visual information is outlined that allows for a data artist to interpret a visual work of art using the parameters of an Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform. This paper discusses the historical progression of musicians responding to visual artists, as well as the relevance of parametric articulation and how it relates to the science of audio analysis. A process is outlined that discusses how such techniques can be used to generate sonic art installation and performance.

Panel:  Intimate TV: Webcamming & Social Life-logging In the Surveillant-Sousveillant Space

In 2009 I started the artis­tic re­search pro­ject Huis Clos / No Exit. Part of it is an on­go­ing net­worked per­for­mance se­ries in­ves­ti­gat­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion, that I will dis­cuss in this panel. In this pro­ject I use a spe­cially de­vel­oped in­ter­face to unite sev­eral peo­ple re­motely in a shared per­for­mance space which be­comes sub­se­quently both a lab­o­ra­tory and a play ground. The ex­pe­ri­ences in this se­ries, as with other ex­pe­ri­ences in cy­ber­for­mance, might sug­gest that today’s  in­ti­macy is no longer re­vealed through pri­vate im­ages but through shared be­hav­iour cap­tured in real time in­ter­ac­tions. I hope to end the pre­sen­ta­tion with a short demon­stra­tion of a re­mote ca­ress.

Panel:  Intimate TV: Webcamming & Social Life-logging In the Surveillant-Sousveillant Space

A  year ago, I wrote a blog post en­ti­tled “why web-cast­ing is not cy­ber­for­mance”, in­spired by a num­ber of pro­pos­als to the Up­Stage fes­ti­val that as­sumed this was a plat­form for web-cast­ing. I ar­gued that, in its sim­plest form, web-cast­ing uses the in­ter­net as a broad­cast medium, to make some­thing that ex­ists of­fline ac­ces­si­ble to a wider au­di­ence; whereas with cy­ber­for­mance, the site of the per­for­mance is the in­ter­net, the per­for­mance is sig­nif­i­cantly shaped by this, and does not exist with­out the in­ter­net. In this paper I will fur­ther ex­plore these ideas by dis­cussing ex­am­ples from my own cy­ber­for­mance work that in­clude web-cast el­e­ments. In par­tic­u­lar I will ad­dress ques­tions posed by this panel re­lat­ing to the sep­a­ra­tion of per­for­mance art from the per­for­ma­tive stream of daily lives, and the aes­thet­ics and spec­ta­to­r­ial po­si­tions that in­form net­worked per­for­mance prac­tices.

Panel: Re-rooting Digital Culture: Media Art Ecologies

Corby ex­plores over­lap­ping themes around en­vi­ron­ment, ecol­ogy and in­for­ma­tion. In doing so it at­tempts to sketch a the­o­ret­i­cal back­ground for an elec­tronic arts prac­tice con­cerned with re­spond­ing to cli­mate change. Such an un­der­tak­ing is fraught with dif­fi­cul­ties. It in­volves syn­the­sis­ing be­tween cul­tural, eco­log­i­cal and sci­en­tific view­points that often ap­pear at odds, and ne­go­ti­at­ing loaded con­cepts such as ‘na­ture’ and ‘en­vi­ron­ment’. Draw­ing on his own prac­tice and the writ­ing of Kather­ine Hayles, Gre­gory Bate­son and Ur­sula Heise amongst oth­ers Corby will ex­plore re­cur­sive re­la­tion­ship be­tween ma­te­r­ial and in­for­ma­tional do­mains and in doing so sign­post an ex­panded ecol­ogy of so­cial and tech­no­log­i­cal con­fig­u­ra­tions that can help frame dis­cus­sion of dig­i­tal prac­tice in this area.

This paper will explore potential applications of aesthetic interaction with a particular perspective on emerging technologies that is inclusive of the user’s cognitive properties.  It investigates the philosophical concept of affection which in this  paper will be described  as the interplay between technological effect and affective human response. This paper argues that understanding such an interrelationship between technological effect and affective responses implies an enhanced affective intelligence of the system with a potential control of the user’s immersive experience.

In this investigation affection is applied through aesthetic interaction. This implies that there is a semantic framework developed  that is based on the affective capacity of audiovisual elements  (or “meta-meaning” ) rather than other coded references. As such the designer of such an affective system uses the semantics of technological effect to anticipate affective responses of the user in order to trigger the cognitive state of immersion. Such immersive experiences will be referred to here as a cognitive flow of the user with productive and potentially novel states of consciousness.

Applying the concept of affection in practice, the paper introduces the affective visualisation of “Mind Cupola”  which applies eye tracking technology to evaluate and respond to the changes in the  cognitive profile of the person. The paper highlights the development process of this affective visualisation and explains the technological aspects of the cognitively inclusive interaction design. It provides a conceptual overview of the interaction architecture including the system flow of the stages of ” limbo”, “meditative”, “chaos”, “eye-message board” and “golden state – nirvana”. It describes how eye tracking facilitates an aesthetic interaction through direct feedback and indirect effects to guide its user toward a productive immersive state. The paper concludes with the evaluation of this affective system regarding the concept of affection and how users reflected on the   degree of immersion and their quality of experiences.

eyeDazzler 1, 2012: 76,050 4mm glass beads, gel-spun polyethylene superline.

The eyeDazzler project combines traditional Navajo weaving and design with QR codes that
lead viewers to the project’s website. It is a transcustomary collaborative expression, which
brings together innovation, traditional Diné design, 76,050 4mm glass beads, over 1,000 hours
of artistic labor, and a portal to another dimension.

With Pamela Brown, Joy Farley, Dylan Mclaughlin & Jamie Smith

Eyes is an interactive biometric data art that transforms human’s Iris data into musical sound and 3D animated image. This artwork is created as a series of biometric data artworks. The idea is to allow the audience to explore their own identities through unique visual and sound generated by their iris patterns based on iris recognition and image processing techniques. Selected iris images are printed in 3D sculptures, and it replays the sound generated from the iris data and projects 3D converted image images. There is an interactive art installation that audience members can capture their iris data and experience 3D animated eye image with a unique sound in real time.

This research-based artwork has an experimental system generating distinct sounds for each different iris data using visual features such as colors, patterns, brightness and size of the iris. It has potentials to lead the new way of interpreting complicated dataset with the audiovisual output. More importantly, aesthetically beautiful, mesmerizing and a bit uncanny valley-effected artwork can create personalized art experience and multimodal interaction. Multi-sensory interpretations of the iris data art can lead a new opportunity to reveal users’ narratives and create their own “sonic signature”, which will be able to trigger a new way of “intersections” in the fields of art and science. Using camera sensing technologies, 3D printing and audiovisual experience, this artwork allows the audience to experience how arts and biometric science can create a new aesthetic.

f(x) is an audiovisual performance environment to enable exploration of 3-dimensional continuous spatial functions derived from the model of continuous spatial cellular automata. The time-varying functions provide the basis for sound synthesis and computer graphics parameter mapping. The audio and the visuals are independent from each other both physically and conceptually and the reciprocal influence flows in both ways in a non-linear manner. The segmentation of the visual space and acoustic time is controlled in the performance by affecting the behavior of the automata world in real time in an attempt to reveal the complex and organic behavioral patterns in three dimensions and modifying the mapping space in response to them. The audio synthesis, computer graphics and the performance interface have all been developed in open source software. Audio synthesis and performance interfaces are implemented in the SuperCollider programming environment, graphics functions in OpenGL and Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol is used for communication between the audio and visual applications.

Digital technology has provided an incredible variety of opportunities for artistic exploration and has fostered a new perspective on human culture and society. It has forced scientific methods and concepts into the working process and aesthetic framework of an artist due to its very nature. The beginnings of the digital computer are inseparably connected to research into the biology of self-replication and the possibility of artificial life. The work of Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam and many others was essential to the way the modern world operates and the fundamental concepts based on the spectacle of biological evolution and natural selection have been integrated into every piece of digital technology with which we have surrounded ourselves. However, we generally have little understanding of the nature of this technology and the long-term impact it has on every aspect of our existence. f(x) is a performance environment created to reveal some of the aspects and principles of digital technology. It is based on a concept that has only been made possible with the advent of computers – cellular automata – and was born out of research into artificial self-reproduction. It is designed as a live audiovisual experiment in which the performer interacts with a world of 3-dimensional spatial functions defined – analogously with the principles of cellular automata – in terms of each other. The performance is seeking to reveal complex patterns of behavior, generated by relatively simple instructions and rules that would uncover some of the elusive characteristics of digital media surrounding us now in almost every situation.

This interdisciplinary conversation with artist/designer Catherine Page Harris will alter the lecture format. We will engage a 20-minute, hands-on, learning process by building together. The artist’s work will be available for viewing through a rolling screen presentation. Issues such as material sourcing, collaboration, and fabrication techniques will be articulated by doing. Small-scale mockups will be created and may be taken home.

During the first half of 2005 an unusual project took place in Slotervaart (Amsterdam), initiated by the Rotterdam artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and architect Dennis Kaspori. It involved the design of the Staalman Park, which, together with the Brede School which stands next to it, is to form the new heart of this neighbourhood in Amsterdam West. The point of departure for the project was not only to arrive at a design for the park, so that it could function as a meeting place for residents of various ages and cultures, but above all else, to bring this about with the participation of the future users, including children, students and other neighbourhood residents.

Our love affair with personal screen-based technology – in particular the touchscreen – has been at the expense of much of the sensory engagement that emerged from early digital interaction. This infatuation with screen-based devices has installed a two-dimensional interaction metaphor as the de facto standard for engagement; something that is potentially worrisome for those with developmental disorders and disabilities. Many of the applications marketed to those with sensory processing disorders simply emulate existing physical interventions on the latest iDevice; however it is the quiet rise of DIY technology that promises more expressive and engaging experiences. This is buoyed by increasing accessibility of platforms like the Arduino microcontroller, which have more in common with a history of immersion, kinetic art and early multimedia installations than touchscreen mobile devices. In my research work with children who have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), I look to a history of physical interactivity and immersion as highly relevant to those who have very specific sensory processing issues. By constructing evolving systems with a focus on facilitation and freedom (both of the designer and of the participant), the aim is to allow the unique expression of the child to emerge, directing their own engagement. The self-determination to express agency and a sense of place is vital in giving children with an ASD a voice. To be given this freedom will require a disconnect from the screen interface, instead drawing everyday objects into a responsive tracking system that engages sensorily; creating fertile ground for exploring aesthetic choice in those without verbal language. This research discusses the feasibility of the designer resisting introducing their own aesthetic into an interaction, instead facilitating a dialogue between participant and system, and ultimately unpacks the paradox of programming freedom of expression.

My art draws upon the subconscious taking the form of personal moments that reflect emotions examining our understanding and measuring the trusting of our cognitive space. It portrays whimsical faces and characters from multiple perspectives representing intimate moments of self-reflection and confrontation that occur daily with others and our selves. It all begins with sketches and paintings that are transformed into animation for 3D VR, kinect interactivity, opera performances and sculpture events. The visitor is situated as an active character in the world and must adapt to the language of the environment in order to progress through the lively drama.

Panel Statement- Simon Penny

Electronic media arts in university and college contexts face new and demanding environmental conditions, both within and outside the college context. The most significant of these from a teaching and administration point of view is the rapid change of the technology. This is due to the fact that the rate of change and direction of change of the technology is controlled not by artists or the art community, but by the need for continued profits by the computer industry. This induces a false, technologically determined criterium on art works and art pedagogy. This results in heavy pressures upon faculty to continually retrain, and the spectre of students being trained on hardware and software that will be obsolete by the time they graduate. It also puts a financial strain that many schools cannot bear. Funding often occurs in large one time lump sum grants for hardware with no infrastructure, technical support or ongoing upgrade and maintenance budgets. This results in under utilized hardware which becomes obsolete before it has been well used. It is necessary therefore, that teachers and administrators establish a well thought out and sustainable plan for development of teaching programs in this field.

This paper will focus on that aspect of center/periphery relations which concerns the status of the electronic artist/professor in the educational system. Many will claim that the second industrial revolution, the computer revolution, has abolished the distinction between center and periphery in the art field. And, indeed, the marriage between communications and computers has produced tools that may allow us to carve a new shape for the art field. In my paper I will seek to sketch the contours of this endeavor and point out where educational institutions and electronic artistprofessors active in them may provide a crucial foundation for this reshaping of the art field. And, indeed, the marriage between communications and  computers has produced tools that may allow us to carve a new shape for the art field. In my paper I will seek to sketch the contours of this endeavor and point out where educational institutions and electronic artistprofessors active in them may provide a crucial foundation for this reshaping of the art field. I will focus the importance of developing a theoretical framework and critical concepts for the electronic arts. Such a conceptual framework will serve as a guiding apparatus for the art field, in order to make it accept electronic arts as an equal but different  art form, and not merely as a rather creative work produced by computers. The existence of this panel attests to the conceptual collapse of the centerperiphery perspective by raising identical problems for different geographical and cultural locations. Still, I will consider my geographical location as periphery. In Israel there are NO art (as opposed to art history)  departments in Universities; there are only art schools. Only one of those art schools grants the BFA degree and there are no MFA programs. However, the art field is thriving, and there are many indications that this anomaly in the educational system may soon change. The tension between the educational institutions and the few teachers of electronic art do exist in Israel.
Since here we are at the beginning of the development of electronic art as a legitimate component of art education, however, it seems to me that we can draw on the experience of the center and present programs that will take into consideration the lessons learned in the center. In presenting this as an international panel, I think we can empower ourselves in our profession and present the educational systems with our unique and different role as artists/educators.

The various forms of artists’ and activists’ printed fakes have shown how the narrative can take over communication without being noticed. From the early to the most recent experiments, they practiced how an essential amount of information can deceive a large public. It didn’t take long for these practices to be used as a powerful manipulating tool for the established powers. We need then to protect specific aspects of the publishing workflow in order to not be deeply influenced by what then reveals as post-truth.

Fak’ugesi

This paper provides an interdisciplinary study at the intersection of fashionable technologies and performance arts that focuses on the sensual and embodied abilities of electronic arts; questioning how fashionable wearables affect digital performance, while exploring the new qualities they introduce.

As performance demonstrates the transition of performers’ emotions into expressions, digital performance incorporates digital technologies in order to increase its aesthetic, visual, sensorial, intellectual, and emotional effects. Fashionable wearables, as wearable computers which emphasize aesthetics and style, offer a new stream of experimentation in digital performance; as they become an expressive digital extension of performers’ bodies, sensing at same time the performing environment.

Fashionable wearables enable digital experimentation in digital performance based on embedded electronic textiles and smart garments that transform them into ‘interactive interfaces’ displaying information captured from the body, other sensors, or the environment; as well as constituting ‘emotive interfaces’ which visibly broadcast performers’ emotions by sensing the human body.

Birringer and Danjoux (2009) introduce the term ‘wearable performance’ to describe the impact of wearable computers in performance arts; distinguishing ‘display garments’, which demonstrate interactive effects, and ‘performative garments’, which capture and integrate into performance stimulations from performers’ bodies or the performing environment. In particular, ‘performative garments’ enable a process, called ‘sensorial embodiment’; according to which wearable computers generate digital events in the wearable space.

In addition to ‘sensorial embodiment’, this paper argues that fashionable wearables introduce three new qualities to digital performance. First, fashionable wearables ‘remediate’ digital performance, which becomes a form of radical interface design reflecting visual, sonic, and sensual experiences. Second, they cause ‘re-embodiment’, in which the performers’ bodies become indistinguishable from fashionable wearables, and their extended bodies participates in an invisible electronic network which shapes the fluid architecture of performing space. Third, they enable ‘digital bricolage’; a creative process which blends the live and the digital, as performers and designers develop or alter fashionable wearables in order to match the aesthetic and functional expressive needs of the digital performance.

Unfolding the key design qualities of fashionable technologies in digital performance, this study aims to understand how interdisciplinary art and design fields shape electronic arts.

Panel: Open Culture + Wearables

At the in­ter­sec­tion of fash­ion and tech­nol­ogy there is a fer­tile grey zone of in­ter­me­di­al­ity and trans­dis­ci­pli­nar­ity, a vital de­sign space, which trans­gress the media of both fash­ion and tech­nol­ogy. How is this space con­sti­tuted and how can we work there? This pre­sen­ta­tion will take as its point of de­par­ture the prac­tice of fash­ion hack­ing, where fash­ion is re­verse en­gi­neered and tuned to make users “fash­ion-able”. Here, for ex­am­ple, so­cial media is used to am­plify ex­pres­sions and ex­pand trans­ver­sal tac­tics for the dis­sem­i­na­tion of fash­ion codes among users. Other traits ad­dress the shaman­is­tic rit­u­al­ity of fash­ion and how par­tic­i­pa­tory prac­tices can ex­pand the realm of fash­ion be­yond the cat­walk and ready-to-wear par­a­digm. Pro­jects by von Busch are ad­dressed as well as de­signs from his stu­dents at Malmo Uni­ver­sity as ex­am­ples of using in­ter­ac­tive tech­nolo­gies to in­ten­sify ex­pres­sions of fash­ion. The ques­tion re­mains: How can tech­nolo­gies ex­press the ephemeral and myth­i­cal beauty of fash­ion?

An Artist Talk based on the work Fathom. The Fathom sound installation created a sonic surface, 6ft above the floor of in Royal William Yard, at the mouth of the River Tamar, September 2013. Fathom was commissioned by the River Tamar Project as part of the Plymouth Ocean City Festival and was featured on Nick Luscombe’s BBC 3 radio show Late Junction in 2013. The film of Fathom was featured in the It Sounds Like Art exhibition at the Kasa Galeri, Istanbul, 2014.

On entering the building, visitors were immersed in an underwater sound-environment where the minute fluctuations of the sea are heard as they moved around the space. These fluctuations were marked by waves of live and recorded sound moving across the building triggered by environmental events, the tides in confluence with the Tamar Estuary.

These fluctuations and sound events included the massive change of vibration of the cross-channel ferries as they manoeuvred into Mill Bay, the smaller sonic events of the many other vessels that use the estuary, set against the fascinating soundscape of the tidal estuary. All of these events made up an underwater sonic representation of the Tamar Estuary and Plymouth Sound.

Above the fathom, over the 6ft surface of water, airborne atmospheric sounds were just detectable, drawn from birds and human-made sounds. Those who wished to elevate themselves above the surface were able to stand on small steps lifting their head above the ‘fathom’, above the watery sonic surface and into the volume of ‘air’.

The sonic boundary between air and water was created using cutting edge technology in an unusual way. The sound system used Multi-cellular Array™ technology to generate a very precise sound field, through the manipulation of phase, amplitude and equalisation. The system is more often used for localising sound at large-scale events, such as the recent concerts in London’s Hyde Park, where the audience experience has to be delivered with minimal disturbance to local residents. It is the only one of its kind, and is at the absolute forefront of modern professional audio.

Sound is thought of as pervasive, it is everywhere and unlike vision we cannot turn away from it. Fathom shifts our perception of this phenomenon, creating a vast but specific volume of sound, with a definite but mutable boundary that differentiates the world of water from our world of air.

For this video piece artist Bronwyn Lace requested permission from the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (Vienna) to document through time-lapse photography the process of Dermestesmaculatus (carrion beetle) removing the flesh of a Tyto alba (barn owl). The carrion beetle is typically used by universities and museums to remove the flesh from bones in skeleton preparation. Whilst at first the focus of this video piece may be on the dead and skinned body of an owl after some time it shifts to the movement of the beetles. The video makes visible all the stages of the life cycle of this beetle. While the subject may initially be death and decay it quickly becomes apparent that it’s equally about life. Museums and universities use the beetles to prepare skeletons because they preserve the DNA of the specimen. A sound component has been collaboratively created by South African composers and vocalists Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Xolisile Bongwana. The sound is a meditation on mourning.

“Female Kosmos: Planetary Writing” by Silvana Carotenuto. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet, we inhabit it, on loan (G.C. Spivak). The talk is interested in contemporary female writing devoted to nature, specifically reading the artistic-ecological sensibility of women when confronted with the cosmos. It sets its political agenda within the theoretical framework offered by some critical ‘intuitions’ of the planet (Spivak, Clement, Shiva), and then it reads the poetic evocations of natural elements (earth, water, fire and air) in the writing (a ‘enlarged’ – oral, prosodic, plastic, radical – concept of writing) of Hélène Cixous, Rony Horn, Jamaica Kincaid and Helen Oyeyemi. The intervention will provide examples from narrative, photography and visual installations.

Female networkers, artists and educators have established thousands of active discussion forums, mailing lists, websites and virtual worlds, forming on-line communities that express every variety of female concern, with a primary goal to maintain relationships and connectivity (Cherny, L. 1996. Wired Women. Seal Press). The numbers of women on-line have evolved enormously since the 1990s, rapidly closing the gender gap in computer mediated communications.

Global communication, and the art of networking. means something different for women, who gather on¬line to support. inform and discuss rather than to establish status. Female Net.communities are social bodies that employ gender difference as a strategy to link real personalities and interest groups side by side with information about technological developments, educational concerns, and teleworking concepts (Sudweeks, F. 1998. Network and Netplay. MIT Press). Mailing lists have become an easy to use, easy to set up organizing tool for women.

‘Females on-line’ will examine several notable international projects where women connect with each other over issues like feminism, cyber-feminism, and grrl behavior. It will also address the relationship between face to face events (where discourse is a physical reality) and on-line connectivity, demonstrated in the project Face Settings.

Feral City is a mobile media augmented reality walking tour, which invites participants to explore a constellation of situated events mixing the physical and the virtual. Narratives of city ecology emerge regarding human interchange with urban animals – coyotes, rats, pigeons, raccoons, foxes, beavers. The tour includes sound narratives, sound landscapes, virtual graphics, and virtual 3D interactive sculptures, a number of which are large, semi-transparent spaces that the participant can enter and investigate. The piece employs Palimpsest, a unique augmented reality browser for mobile devices developed by Phoenix Toews. The Feral City team is Meredith Drum, Rachel Stevens and Phoenix Toews.

GEOPOLITICS OF MEDIA PUBLIC SPACE PROJECT

The word ‘feral’ denotes a process that is wilfully wild (as in pigeon) as opposed to romantically or naturally-wild (wolf). The passage of goods through feral trade can open up wormholes between diverse social settings and organisations, routes along which other information, techniques or individuals can potentially travel.

The first registered feral trade was conducted in 2003, with the import of 30kg of coffee from the Association Cafetalera de La Paz coffee co-operative in El Salvador to the Cube Microplex cinema co-op in Bristol, UK. The coffee is traded through the UK and Europe via a number of social, cultural, familial and occupational networks.

August 2004: Coffee to Estonia, Inauguration of a new feral trade route connecting Bristol and Tallinn via the distribution of coffee. Freight methods for this route are various, but voluntary product-hitchhiking in the baggage of UK-Tallinn ISEA symposium delegates will be considered.

Route documentation and downloadable coffee packaging can be found at the project website: sparror.cubecinema.com/feraltrade.

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

“It’s from the future. A place so close to us now, filled with wonder and ease…”  _Mad Men: Season 1, Episode 2, Ladies Room (26 July 2007), AMC.

This presentation explores the liminal and reciprocal space that lies between the inside and outside of our heads. This permeable membrane has for centuries been a territory occupied by diagrams, plans and models, a space of abstract potential – somewhere between desire and becoming, reminiscent of a future, filled with wonder and ease. In recent years this liminal territory has been infiltrated by technologies that challenge an osmotic  balance between the inside and outside. Symptoms of this tension include: imaging technologies that visualise neural processes of the viewer; immersive environments that reveal things outside of our normal frame of reference; the delegation of a responsibility to perceive the world to remote sensors. Real-time modelling of ‘big data’, predictive and anticipatory analytics engines are removing the ‘resistance or friction’ from the diagram. Consequently, knowing the world through the diagram has suddenly become more traumatic. Predictive models of climate change, mappings of declining bee populations and faster than thought algo trading leave us stunned and bewildered and seemingly incapable of action. The space of the diagram is a place even closer to us now, but filled with neurosis and uncertainty.

The film Party comprises two parts and the plot is presented in the semi-tragic/semi-ironic way. The New Actors perform for the first time in this film. The New Actors are artists, musicians, fashion models, art critics by profession and they are already well known as personalities in the local cultural situation. They are selected for precise roles to present the modes of their behaviour and personal styles. The main characters in this story are famous cultural heroes of the Russian 19th – 20th century, who inspired not only the world cultural policy, but myths, film stars, amateurs and fans. Each part of the film comprises a story which never happened in reality. But the plot is based on the quotations from the products of writers and poets who are presented in the film like characters: Pushkin talks to Gogol and Mayakovsky to Marilyn Monroe. The quotations are well known for the Russian audience since childhood and the film works like a rebus or enigma, amusing and philosophical at once. The plot is worked out around the game on the billiard table. We trace the fantasises of the beloved. On the green table cloth as on the green field. The film as the art work will be interesting because of the combination of the new technologies and the old traditional idea of the film still structured as a picture.

John Wood (Keyboards)
Olu Taiwo (African drum)
Martin Hughes (Rock/ Jazz drum kit)
Kit Wood (DJ)

Finding Prana is a bio-art work that employs the yogic concept of prana (breath or life-force) and the practice of pranayama (regulation of breath) to bring awareness to our co-existence in air and breathing as our technology of being. Yoga practitioners make extraordinary claims concerning the value of the conscious observation and control of breath. Breathing here, is not just a gross bodily function segregated away from the mind and soul; breathing is our material of time and the producer of consciousness. In collaboration with Dr Philippa Jackson at Northumbria University’s Brain, Performance, and Nutrition Research Centre (BPNRC) this interdisciplinary bio-art work employs the neuroimaging technology fNIRS (Near Infrared Spectroscopy) to take real-time brain-state data during a live pranayama performance. fNIRS is recording the changing levels of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin levels in each hemisphere of the brain. The data is sonified, turned to vibrations in air, in real-time, creating a re-appropriated system for sound creation controlled by the practitioners moving and suspended breath. This bio-art performance acts to elicit an Irigarian remembering of our most essential element in the search for consciousness, unity and peace that is thought to be found in the practices and imaginaire of prana.

INTER-SOCIETY FOR THE ELECTRONIC ARTS

SymbioticA was originally founded to provide a research space where artists and scientists could engage in debate, where artists could learn and apply techniques of the biological sciences to their work.  In particular, to allow artists and others from the humanities to deal with living material and to interact with biological scientists from a position of strength, equality and mutual understanding.  It was hoped this would lead to creative friction at the interface between the life sciences and the humanities.

Fish and Chips was a pioneering project of SymbioticA using “wet ware” (functioning neural tissue from fish or rats) to power “hard ware” (a robotic arm designed by Phil Gamblen) involving founder members of SymbioticA.  Programmers, scientists, artists, engineers and philosophers were involved or asked to comment on the work. This and the later developments pioneered by Guy Ben-Ary, Phil Gamblen, and the Steve Potter lab in Atlanta have been widely exhibited Internationally.  As a neuroscientist, and past Scientific Director of SymbioticA I am particularly interested in the role of nervous tissue in these works. The ethics of its use, how it is comprehended by the audience, the difficulties of presenting and curating living tissue, its possible functionality and the implications for the future of the techno-scientific body.

For example, in “Fish and Chips” first exhibited at Ars Electronica, the “brain” was the eye of a goldfish attached to the visual centre of its brain.  The very title was meant to present viewers with an ethical paradox, to eat fish while at the same time worrying about the ethics of its use in a “machine”, however this clash was prevented by the organisers.  Fish were culled in secret.  We debated how much information to provide and kept it to a minimum, however many viewers imbued the system with more creativity than it had.  We debated whether it needed to be “real” – would the audience know given the complexity of the system?  These issues are common to many artworks involving living material.  I will discuss the wider implications of artists working with living material using these art works as exemplars.

Despite recent efforts by the media to reassure the public that ‘Computers Don’t Bite’, technophobia remains a very real problem for those producers, manufacturers etc. who crave interactive response en masse to the electronic arts. Fears of dystopian ‘virtual’ futures only serve to reinforce (potential) consumer concerns about the breakdown of real communities and allied risk of isolation. Widespread fears of new technologies, are, ofcourse, not new concepts with which to deal; and history is useful in pointing the way to a means of acceptance, via design, which has allowed the consumer to: interact with; feel comfortable with; and, ultimately, make sense of many electronic innovations. By using Blackpool Illuminations (1879 – 1998) as a case study, this paper will argue that the ‘first’ revolution in the electronic arts in Britain owed much of its acceptance by the people to an interblend of spectacle; extended community participation and popular imagery.

For interactivity with the electronic arts to take place on a mass scale, there must also be willing ‘consumer’ participation on a mass scale – perhaps a re-visitation of the value of spectacle, therefore, might provide one of the channels through which the technophobe might enter and engage more ‘comfortably’ with the ‘second’ electronic arts revolution.

It is an immersive sound and video installation inspired by the incredible journey that the Monarch Butterfly takes each year from Canada to Mexico. Combining video and sound footage recorded in the El Rosario reserve in Michoacán with flute and Mexican poetry, this explores the resilience of this beautiful creature in the face of climate change.

Abstract (short paper)

“Flip the Book – Flip the Memories” is a multimodal interactive artwork exhibited in Sir Robert Ho Tung Library, which is part of Macao World Heritage site. This artwork integrates smell with audio visual together into reading experience. When the reader turns the page of the physical book, it would trigger different videos projected on the book. Meanwhile, specific scents would be released from the side according to the videos. The video footages are collected from local video photographers, which have preciously captured the images of the old days in Macao. This artwork uses smell as an ambient medium to connect the present with the past. It aims to lead the readers to recall their memories from the past, also to think about the present while being surrounded by the environment of cultural heritage. By combining physical book with multimodal interaction, this artwork brings the cultural heritage visitors tangible and intangible experience altogether. This paper would take “Flip the Book – Flip the Memories” as the case study to discuss the opportunities and the challenges behind while bringing new media into cultural heritage, especially the role of olfaction in multimodal interaction.

The intent of Lenticular AR was to create a tactile object that could store and display multiple moving AR images, combining both analog and digital modes of memory. Two distinct AR maker patterns are contained within a single lenticular lens (see Figure 1); each of these patterns reveals a different moving AR image when the lenticular object is slightly tilted. Lenticular AR embodies early principles of animation and pre-cinematic devices, married with the virtual in AR. The end result is a layered form of a futuristic moving image, one which comes to exist via an analog mode of animation.

Lenticular AR may display memories over time from past to present, combining both archival film footage with contemporary moving images. The viewer can ‘flip’ between the two moving images in the same hand-held object, mid-clip, reverting between each, crossing over time with a slight hand gesture.

I am particularly interested in the dual memory inherent in Lenticular AR. Although the augmented image is stored digitally, activated upon recognition of the AR marker by the software, the lenticular lens also contains an analog based memory system to store and reveal the two different markers. Each technology, AR and lenticular, presents an architecture which serves as a memory container with the final image only coming into full-view upon activation by the user. The completed images otherwise remain hidden from the viewer; the AR digital image appearing only as a geometrical pattern to the human eye (without software), and the lenticular analog image a sole static still, unanimated.

Although the AR image output is reliant on the software to translate and produce, the AR markers are initiated by the physical maneuvering of the lenticular lens by the viewer. Both analog and digital methods must work together and coexist to disclose lenticular AR.

Design affordances of an everyday object guide us towards habitual behaviors. Physical actions that are not immediately associated with established body techniques are often neglected by the user. Can sound activate those interactions that remain latent in the physicality of an interface? How can it encourage underused, unusual bodily movements?

In this paper I describe the Flo)(ps project, a series of interactive glasses which were designed to study the use of habitual and explorative sonic gestures. I present the design, qualitative evaluation study and the insights into the effect of the habitual and unusual sonic gestures on individual and social interaction. These have shown that explorative play can be encouraged through sonic interaction, but that the complexity of real-time composition affects the users emotions and behavior. Finally, I identify future steps in developing and studying different types gestural interaction with everyday sounding artifacts.

The interface was used in psychological experiments exploring emotion, sound and gesture presented in the Sound and Music Computing Conference.

The project was supported by the European Commission project CLOSED FP6- NEST-PATH no. 29085. and the Hexagram research Interstices Lab, Montreal.

Credits:

1. Concept, development (electronics, product design, fabrication) and direction: Karmen Franinovic
2. Software development: Yon Visell
3. Thanks to Martin Peach for electronics advice and Fabienne Meyer and Thomas Tobler for fabrication support.

 (Long paper)

Keywords: Alfred Adler, inferiority complex, inferiority and compensation, modern females.

According to Alfred Adler’s theory of “Inferiority complex”, all individuals were born with different levels of sense of inferiority. People are usually unsatisfied with where they stand so they try ways to make up for what they do not own, thus forming a chain of compensation. This concept is focus on exploring the variety of symptoms caused by the compensation mechanism in females. This project use common psychological conditions usually seen in females to portray different levels of self-awareness. Include the viewers by taking them through a journey of mental stages using interactive demonstration, so they can experience the difference in intensity during different stages, leaving the viewer’s options to interpret and imagine themselves in such stages which in turn offering them a chance to rebuild and reform their confidence. Through qualitative analysis, we conclude the three mental stages, which are “space”, “process” and “introspection”. After reviewing the relationship between the three stages, we then observe and construct the psychological stages of denial, rebuild, reform, and reconstruction of self-relationship. The conclusion and achievement obtained are hoped to have the value of feasibility for future reference

Electroacoustic Composition (2011), 9 min. 05 sec.

We release extremely subtle sounds from inside our bodies which are hard to perceive. Although the sound is made by the body, it cannot be heard because of the limited audible range that a human being can hear. This work is a composition using the sound of the composer’s bloodstream as a sound source. All the sounds were created from the sounds of the bloodstream recorded mainly in an anechoic chamber. The purpose of this work is to deconstruct and reconstruct the components of personal biological information via computing. These sounds were composed to express another reality beyond the boundary of the animate / inanimate.

Abstract

Flora Petrinsularis associates to a real book an other one, a virtual book to be flipped through on the screen. At any moment, the computer “sees” the page where the book is open to offer other levels of reading. The real book is composed of two parts, with quotations of The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a small herbarium including flowers collected in the very same places where Rousseau botanized. The virtual book opens interactive sequences of animated images and sounds. For each quotation, there is a video illustration, like an engraving, focused on a character from the short love scenes, in the very moments of outburst, selected from The Confessions. For each flower, the memory of the plant gathering and its metamorphosis into an image is presented. The work underlines the passage between two forms of books, or movies, one of a traditional and the other of a future format, and is based on a literary masterpiece which is always to be discovered. The interactive setting tries to make an interpretation of The Confessions that refers exclusively to the text itself, to its secret or revealed motivations as an exemplary self-analysis.

This   paper   con­tin­ues   the   de­bate   raised   in   the   Next   5  Min­utes  media   con­fer­ence

This work is a consideration of the essence of existence. We need someone to really make us who we are. Inspired by the poem ‘Flower’ by the poet Chun-Su Kim, this work visualized the process by which meaningless thing turn into meaningful things when someone recognizes them. Participants interact with the artwork and complete it technically, and also its concept of existence. This work will provide participants something to ponder about the essence of existence.

The scenario of Flowerman is that a robot wants to become a flower. It wanders and searches for beautiful flowers in the scene. It creates a virtual flower by mimicking the real flowers. Participants can summon and play with Flowerman by holding a beautiful flower basket. When Flowerman is seduced by a participant, it will move toward him/her and try to catch the videograph of beautiful flowers in the basket.

Flowerman has a LCD screen as face, four web cameras as eyes, and four wheels which enable it to move in the scene. Its body is decorated with white acrylic strips in a form of dress. When Flowerman moves, its eyes will search and capture the video of flowers as element of virtual flower. Flowerman composes the video into a volatile virtual flower showing in its face. Participant also can change the amount of petals of virtual flower by making a big noise such as clapping or shouting.

In the interactive process with Flowerman , participant will get a new experience of vision and cognition. Participants will hold a power to control the new life form, but, the power can not really control the final result of flower’s semblance. The virtual flower is a constantly changing form and no one can really control it.

Flowerman create a perception exceeding the cognition with which we are familiar. The new existence status of being is in a vague appearance between reality and simulation. It shows the empathy conceiving of understanding feelings, desire, thoughts and activity of others. In the process, the response behavior of robot makes us believe that it understands our wishes; however, it is only our yearning of controlling.

“Flowers” is a kind of interactive art works which used with a LCD projector and a camera. I already made test pieces which use traditional western oil paintings as moving pictures. These pieces interact something when an audience stands and moves in front of them.

For instance, one of them is a portrait picture painted by Bronzino in Italy. A lady drawn in this picture is breathing slowly as if she lives. And if an audience gets across in front of her, she follows an audience with her eyes. Or if an audience stands in front of her, she makes a smile for an audience. (see the attached jpeg image) I held the exhibition to show them in the museum in Fall 2007.

As the result, they attract not only art enthusiasts but also ordinary audiences to watch these pictures deeper. Watching Art is main concept. Therefore, I succeeded to get a good result in this exhibition.

Next, I plan to make more direct interaction pieces using with an original subject, “flower”. In the next pieces, I will make flowers react by audience’s actions more directly. For instance, an audience can control flowers’ blooming and dying with his/her hand’s up and down. I think it will work good using long shooting pictures with an interval camera. Then, these pieces will fascinate audiences, controlling and stretching the “time”.

Abstract

In the current era of globalization we witness vast migration movements: masses of people moving between rural and urban sites, between countries and even continents. Moreover, trans-migrants not only move from one place to another but they also play an important role in connecting the different cultures. Nevertheless old as well as new migrants tend to look for their akin in their environment – people who come from the same family or at least from the same region. In many cases, especially in urban context of megalopolis, this is nearly an impossible task without ‘face to face’ social networking. We have often observed that whole villages or regions move to one city and keep their social structures. Such social structures allow the community to keep in touch with their roots over generations, allow easy access for newcomers and at the same time guaranties that such immigrants integrate more easily in to the new environment.

Nowadays digital technology offers new possibilities and challenges for social networking. In an anonymous world, sites like Linkedin or Facebook allow creation of non-perceived ties through databases of people with similar interests. This innovative format can be used to propagate social interaction of trans-neighbourhoods with the same roots. With this in mind, we aim to understand how digital technologies can be integrated in the participative process of constructing and transforming the territory. One of the new approaches is introducing technology as a means to revitalizing the region. This does not mean creating new industry or programming jobs, but instead, integrating a new technological medium of communication. Through a new definition of space enhanced through the integrated use of new media, one can enlarge the actual population by integrating a geographically scattered virtual population. Thus, technical means should be used to bring people together with an aim to intensify communication between people. Through this new extension of social space, new and unforeseen cultural and business opportunities emerge for the entire territory. The project Fluid Archive is an on-line platform allowing old and new migrants to define their familial and/or social roots for networking in their old and new environments. Such neighbourhoods are not based on a city quarter, but virtually, in a certain geographical and emotional range that is defined by each individual. In a region the size of London or a land like Switzerland, the platform allows the participants to contact other people in their geographical proximity. In a certain sense, the platform allows the overcoming of the social and digital divide that reins in their environments. Through the platform, one can find people of similar backgrounds, with whom one can share the memories, customs, culture and create a regional network. Moreover, sharing cultural objects such as photographs, films, sound recordings, food recipes and field notes with other members becomes a kind of digital archive of ethnographic value: the interchange of a digital footprint as a means to revive the cultural footprint that is decaying in the Matese region.

(Short paper)

Keywords: controller, computer interface, water, electronic music, video, mass inertia, fluid, potentiometer, switch, fader.

We have developed water based electronic elements which we built into electric circuits to control different parameters of electronic sound and video tools. As a result of our research we have constructed a complex controller whose main component is water. This tool makes it possible to control analog and software synthesizers as well as video software and other electronic devices, especially microcontroller based platforms like Arduino or Raspberry.

Artist Statement

Fluxitecture is a three dimensional virtual installation which takes to task the visualization of human motion, generating representations of spatial memory. One aspect of the project is the creation of a complex kinaesthetic tracking system, which moves between the concepts of space and duration through a set of simple rules.
A second ambition is the creation of a complex design system through the adaptation of simple shapes evolving into progressive complexity, again through the tracking of human movement over time, thus articulating complex spatial ideas grounded in duration and memory.
While Fluxitecture is a design matrix which can be adapted to many buildings, such as hospitals, shopping centres, museums or any type of space that can be walked inside, in this particular incarnation the physical counterpart is the information centre of Sabanci University, Istanbul. The three story high building is reconfigured as a virtual construct by the redefinition of the actual floor plans as a matrix. The resulting formation is a gridded set of building blocks, which serve the dichotomy of representing both virtual and physical elements. Architectural elements, such as walkways, columns and walls as well as the furniture was depicted by slight variations in the transparent grey texturing of the blocks. Elements that are context related, which can be categories of shelves, reading and study rooms or information desk in the library, are colour coded in different tones. All these architectural elements, static or mobile, are represented by the identical building block. The sum total of these blocks constitutes the virtual kinaesthetic matrix, thus visualizing spatial memory.
The flux that emerges in the virtual space belongs to the actual path of an occupant moving in the physical structure. Building blocks under this path are triggered to elongate according to the amount of time that is spent on the corresponding area, thus ensuring the motion trail to be visible. When there is no motion on the physical area, blocks start to return to their original size. In this representation, the structure is in a constant state of alteration and the flux joins two conceptual identities: space and time.
One of the primary concerns was the visualization of the kinaesthetic trails that cause structural changes or growth patterns in the virtual environment. The full colour spectrum was used to delineate a twenty-four hour time slot, where blocks in motion are slightly re-coloured according to the time of the motion in the day. Another feature of the building block is the low level of transparency in order to reduce three dimensional overlapping in the space. More importantly, the transparency becomes opaque when there are multiple crossing trails, which means multiple occupancy in the same area.
Fluxitecture aspires to be not only about the demonstration or visualization of a given, specific data, such as the tracking of motion trails over specific time spans, but wishes to investigate the poetics of the relationships between time, space and memory.

Human-Robot Interactions (HRI) has become a major field of research in both the engineering and artistic realms, even more so in the last decade. The main interests and objectives of the two fields were however quite different. While robotics labs focused more on physical interactions and safety awareness, artists were pursuing more philosophical, symbolical and aesthetical explorations, often supported by an often implicit critical stance. Challenges and stakes have evolved in both fields, following the expansion of robotic devices in about all fields of our daily life, both in the personal and professional spheres. Engineers and researchers are now striving to analyse and predict the way humans will interact with robots in different circumstances, in order to design optimal interaction interfaces and protocols for a huge variety of situations. Collaboration between researcher, artists and engineers has proved to be an efficient way to tackle these new challenges. Public installations in interactive robotic arts provide them with a wealth of objective and empirical data whose analysis and exploitation are likely to produce the next level of understanding in HRI.

This paper will present a successful interdisciplinary art-science-technology project called [VOILES | SAILS] , whose outputs led – and still lead- to an innovative approach in HRI research. The project consists in developing intelligent, geometric objects that hover and move in the air. From their first major performance in the Quebec Museum of Civilization in 2006 until now, several autonomous cube-shaped aerobots have been developed under the artistic direction of their creator, artist and architect Nicolas Reeves, following the technological developments implemented by engineer David St-Onge and the team of the NXI Gestatio Design Lab. They have been used in different performances involving other aerobots, vsitors, performers, actors… Their various sensors make them reactive to light, human voice and several other stimuli, thus increasing their similarities with living organisms despite their all-but-biological shape. This resemblance makes them a perfect platform for exploring human robots interactions in an artificial intelligence, or even artificial life context.

We will discuss the relations that developed between these “aerobots” and visitors, passerbys or actors in different circumstances. They proved a valuable and meaningful source of information and knowledge for the design of Human-Robot Interaction procedures, and demonstrated the rich potential of an artistic approach for the development of new interactions interfaces and behaviors.

As realtime video representation of the body becomes more and more common through video chat and smartphones, some people will want to exert creative control over their image. And although the video image is wholly constructed with digital data, and therefore capable of infinite manipulation, it is tethered to a live human being. No matter how abstract the image may become, its gestures are not that of an algorithm, but a spontaneously acting person – the language/expression of a moving, sensing body.

This paper draws upon examples from the past ten years of the author’s creative work in multimedia dance and interactive installation to examine the experience of live video processing and the body. In these works, scale is important – all of the projections are approximately life size to act as a mirror to reflect back the viewers’ movements. Whole body movements are also important – the viewer or dancer is fully engaged with freedom of movement, a sense of balance, and kinesthetic response. These works show a translation from the physical to the digital, a common theme in digital media research. However, what is most interesting is the feedback loop back: the digital image alters both human movement and sensation, which, in turn, alters the processed image. Viewers tend to imitate their altered image, finding a limited repertoire of movements that “resonate” with their digital double.

How do these processed images add new knowledge of our selves? How do we “feel” when observing our bodies extended, warped, colored or delayed in time? How are group dynamics affected when people find themselves interacting with others in the same altered world? Just as a distorted guitar effect adds new harmonic content to a plucked string, altering its expression with tremendous weight and power, video processing adds new information, changing the meaning and perception of our own image.

Abstract
This paper proposes an audio-visual performance artwork for ISEA2016 version by using datamoshing video and converting that video signal to audio.

Project Description
fmiDmsHK is a real-time audio-visual performance artwork. This performance system consists of hardware for converting the component video signal to audio, and software for easy control of the “datamoshed” image.[1] “Datamoshing” primarily refers to the inappropriate use of a video file compression technique that is used when saving videos in a computer. This produces a new representation that was not in the original video file.[2][3] Datamoshing is able to make a drastic change from an original video. Fig 1 is the original image and datamoshed image. The fmiDmsHK meanes For Musical Instruments with Data Moshing Sound in Hong Kong.

Thematic Statement
Datamoshing exploits the nature of video file compression techniques for artistic purposes. The complexity and unpredictability of results means that we have not seen the full potential of such techniques. Datamoshing exposes an alternative aspect of video file compression. The authors believe that we do not deeply contemplate the mechanisms of various equipment and systems used in everyday life. Intentional misuse of these devices and systems —such as to create this work— can be misunderstood as mere error simulation. Instead we propose the aesthetic appreciation of error and randomness so as to become more aware of the mechanisms of various equipment and systems used in daily life

Foldback, On a Transmedia Exhibition and Event Marking the 10th Anniversary of the Australia Network for Art and Technology. ANAT is Australia’s peak network and advocacy body for artists working with technology. The role of ANAT is to advocate, support and promote the arts and artists in the interaction between art, technology and science, nationally and internationally. Since its inception in 1985 ANAT has been at the forefront of the movement to position artists as active participants in the ‘information age’. ANAT maintains a database and artists files of artists working with technology throughout Australia, and acts as an advocacy and networking organisation for artists working in these areas assisting artists to develop their art practice, to forge links with science and industry, and developing and promoting opportunities for Australian artists to exhibit their work nationally and internationally. Information is disseminated though our newsletters and on our world wide web site.

I tag you tag me: a folksonomy of internet art is an ongoing project developed in 2007, specifically for Viennabased CONT3XT.NET’s project TAGallery. The point of departure for this exhibition was assuming tagging (within the context of internet art) to be curating, or more specifically, social curating. The concept of tagging as curating is derivative of a previous project, Source Code, which addressed the issue of blogging as curating.

A tag is a relevant (meaningful) term assigned to information, in this particular case an artwork, describing it and allowing its categorization. Tags are generally chosen informally and subjectively by the author and/or by the community it addresses. Social tagging, through softwares such as del.icio.us (I tag you tag me assumes the form of a del.icio.us account) allows for the creation of metadata, or folksonomies, where a new layer of meaning is socially constructed and shared.

Premise:                                                                                                                                                      The world in which we live is an integrated system of information in which we participate as consumers, increasingly unable to experience the immediacy of what we find standing before us. For us, reality is experienced through the media, is constructed by the media, which make events, places and people whom we have never seen or met familiar to us, and compensate their artifice by giving us a feeling of immediacy of that “dramatised” reality. At the same time the media bring about a sense of nostalgia for reality, a need for authenticity, spontaneity, physicality. There is a paradox: the media tell us that they manipulate reality, but the media also spread their accusations of their own falsifications. In other words, we live in a society where even immediacy is a construction.

The case of wikilieaks is exemplary of this double movement of the unveiling and dramatisation, of a staged immediacy by the media: an international not-for-profit organisation, Wikileaks, uses a coded system to receive anonymous and secret documents, to then upload them on a website. In other words, a un-transparent process where unveiling means to cover up something else (the anonymity of information, ways of checking the authenticity of the materials…); but through this website, we can find a “mediate” user with a responsible, ethical and critical identity.

A mediate reality is a reality where modern distinctions between public space and private space have very blurred boundaries, and concepts slip between one and the other, emphasising the need for safeguarding privacy at an institutional level but also as part of the media.

In such a context, secrecy is transformed from an object of desire of our collective imagination into an obsession for those who are more exposed to the media. In this way, privacy becomes a luxury for the few or for those who have the means to protect their own data from the omnivorous indifference with which the media metabolise them.

Concept:                                                                                                                                                      The project that I am proposing must be understood as a strong metaphor of the analytical and philosophical premise, concentrating on the following aspects: familiarity/difficulty of direct access to media legends; artifice/desire to encapsulate authentic experiences; un-transparency of the dynamic of veiling/unveiling.

In order to emphasise the omnivorous character of information and the necessity to metabolise it in order to acquire an identity, I targeted my research on the body, on food, on the legend. To reduce the body is the first movement of the concretisation of the experience, to feed is the physical expression of vital growth, to elaborate legends is the principal operation of language and communicating in the veiling/unveiling process.

At the core we find the mouth, a bodily organ used for introducing/injecting and consuming, the organ with which we exchange material and spiritual foods, real foods spiritualised in artificial delights and foods with the spirit=ideas that are materialised in recipes, quantities, data. The mouth is the cavity of the tongue and the base of taste, the organ of technology of the word, the first medium that is freed for communication between human individuals,

The tongue maintains the finesses of taste and the omnivorousness of communication.

As an example of familiarity and at the same time unfamiliarty of the legends of the media, I will take the category of chefs, the new demiurges of an increasingly common aesthetic in daily life, who are exemplars for their capability to manipulate food within mediate/experiential contexts.

The idea of identity will be identified through the portraits of the chefs. Every chef will accept the fact that he/she will be photographed in a portrait where they “stick out their tongue”, in other words exposing their tongue to the lens: this is to emphasise the symbolic importance of it, and also to use it as a metaphor for creativity as a ludic activity, irreverent and non-normalised (inspired by the famous portrait of Einstein), but also a reference to the medical test that doctors perform on small children to check their “inner” health. Wisdom and taste.

Every chef will give me an original recipe, written by hand on a piece of paper. Even the request for hand-written materials focuses on identity, as handwriting is a characteristic of every human being, just like finger prints, to the point that it can be part of a scientific inquest through graphology, which is capable of revealing identities and intimate characteristic of the person who is writing.

In order to give a theme to the reliability of the personal experience of what is often easily created on a mediate level, my artistic work will be presented online: the online connection will be the only way to discover and experience the recipes of various chefs who collaborate. On a website the names of the chefs will be put into alphabetical order, and by clicking on each name his/her portrait will appear, seemingly normal, but instead the image will be a steganography.[1]

In order to de-code the image and discover the hidden text underneath, users will have to download a very simple program, which will give the possibility to read the “secret” recipe.

It will be a very simple operation because my objective is not to transform my work into an unnerving code-programming exercise, au contraire! It will be an invitation to reflect on the concept of privacy through games and cuisine.

Promotion:                                                                                                                                                      A concept on the mechanisms of communication would not make sense if it was not accompanied by an adequate use of means of communication and distribution. Therefore the disclosure and modalities will have to be studied carefully, so that it can obtain much visibility, can create interest and stimulate participation.

P.S.:                                                                                                                                                                    I want to emphasise that despite the fact that a portrait with a tongue sticking out can perhaps seem unbecoming, and may accentuate physical defects, it will be of utmost importance to me to exalt the aesthetical side of the image, because the concept of beauty is part of my research: “beauty” intended as a form of seduction that takes one back to oneself.

And anyway, as another guarantee for those who are photographed, every image will be chosen with the chef involved each time, so that they can be convinced and satisfied of their photo. I will also give the chef the possibility to decide how they want to show their tongue so that the collection of portraits is not repeated with the same gesture.

[1] “Steganography is a security measure that is normally confused with cryptography. Actually there is a great diffeence between the two. The objective of cryptography is to hide the content of a message, whereas steganography hides its existence. It has come about as in many situations the use of cryptography is insufficient. The example of a soldier who is discovered while exchanging coded messages with a hostile government is clear: indepedently from the content of the message, the sole fact that coded messages are exchanged creates suspicion. The restrictions applied by various governments to coded systems has also pushed for a study of alternative methods for the exchange of rpivate messages, including steganography.”     _Meo Pasquale, Ciardiello Silvestro

52 years of electroacoustic creation at the INA Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM)

If these twenty last years the French institutions proved quite unable to defend their own artists, in particular those which were labeled as the very first pioneers in the emergence of technological arts and communication, we are not sure that this situation is changed today… Not more than a spontaneous generation regarding living organisms, there is no appearance ex-nihilo in the Art! Everything comes, always, from somewhere! It appeared particularly relevant to us, in a given context, at the time of this moment of intense reflexion which constitutes ISEA2000 on the evolution of Art and its becoming, both related to the determining development of the NTIC*)in our societies, to question us on the conditions which governed the appearance of numerical and technological arts. To operate a flashback. A return behind and a memory effort to restore some elementary truths…

* nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication

Summary

Artist adopt artificial life techniques as a method for artistic expression. Besides this use, it is possible that the medium itself becomes a product concept. Marshall McLuhan’s principle that ‘the medium is the message’ does not emphasize sound and image content, but instead draws a link with the technical nature of future media that will break the chains reality has with equivalent symbols As technical standards rapidly improve, reality as it stands now is
becoming alienated from our lives. As we create a virtual life that is nothing short of an artificial life, and communicate with this life itself, we have to ask where our future is leading us.

Abstract

Why do people, regardless of age or gender, have an affinity for objects manifested in the human form? From the earthen figures of ancient times to mechanical dolls, teddy bears and robots, is it not true that man has conceived such objects in his imagination, then formed attachments and transferred emotions to them? We address the issues of communication and the aesthetics of artificial life that possess this “human form” in modern society, both from artistic and engineering standpoints. As we create a virtual life that is nothing short of an artificial life, and communicate with this life itself, we have to ask where our future is leading us. An example is presented in which emotions are interpreted from human voices, and emotional responses are triggered within the interactive setting of Maturing Neuro-Baby , “MIC & MUSE.” “Neuro-Baby”(NB) is a communication tool with its own personality and character, including emotional modeling, such as reacting to changing voices, facial expressions and behavior. Based on the experiences of developing the early version of NB, we started the development of a revised version, “Maturing Neuro- Baby”. The basic improvements in Maturing Neuro-Baby are the following. The Neuro-Baby character customizes itself to individual human communication partners by learning. Leaning is achieved by Artificial Neural Networks(ANN) mapping from the input signal emotional state of the NB (recognition mapping), to an appropriate expression showing the response by the NB (expression mapping). “MIC” is a male child character. He has a cuteness that makes humans want to speak to him. MIC recognizes several emotions (joy, anger, surprise, sadness, disgust, teasing, fear) from the intonation of the human voice. People use a microphone when communicating with MIC. For example, if one whistles, MIC’s feeling will be positive and he will respond with excitement. If the speaker’s voice is low and strong , MIC will feel poorly and become angry. “MUSE” is a goddess. She is very expressive, has refined manners, is feminine, sensual, and erotic. MUSE’s emotions are generated by a musical grammar. For example (joy — rising musical scale, anger— vigoroso, sadness —volante, disgust— discord, teasing— scherzando, fear–pesante) People can communicate with MUSE in an improvisational manner by means of a musical installation. From the standpoint of an artist, it is interactive art based on communication and on creatures that have a real ability to participate in an interactive process. Moreover, we think that by selecting a “human” – the creature with which we realistically communicate the most – we establish a condition that demands a creative character from a creature. From an engineering standpoint, we have come to the conclusion that if we want to create life-like characters, we have to develop non-verbal communication technologies. These are expected to give characters the capability of achieving heartfelt communication with humans by exchanging emotional messages. These life-like characters, or “androids”, will unravel a new point of view in a new direction which allows the blending of art, computer science, psychology, and philosophy in a kind of novel research on realistic human expression.

The idea of a natural and anthropic plenitude of sound in the arts arose in European avant-garde music during the early twentieth century and became codified in John Cage’s call “for more new sounds.” Concurrently, engineering visions promising to generate any and all sounds, including musical ones, and to create batteries of new sound, took on a new reality with digital signal processing in the 1950’s. These two strains merged in the American experimental music of the 1960’s at the edges of the largesse of Cold War science, in what composer Gordon Mumma called the astro-bio-geo-physical application in live-electronic music, and what composer James Tenney called a generalised signal and possibility for a total transducer of any and all signals. Sounds seemed exhaustible when compared with opening vistas of energetic environments. Sonic plenitude was being superseded by signal plenitude, more new sounds by more new signals.

Artist Statement

film, 55mins, 2009

Is there ever a ‘right’ time to discuss contentious issues from our past? What benefit can be gained by remembering a wrong? Can a wrong be righted in the remembering? Can film making be used to aid understanding and healing? My contention is, that the use of recording devices in post conflict societies, can aid individual self-reflective remembering in the re-telling of past events. Combined with openness of officialdom, with regard to access to historical documents and records, a history can be re-storied and told in a way that aids and facilitates closure on past events. This can be of value not only to individuals who feel their story has not been heard or understood, but to a post conflict society as a whole were large public inquires are not possible or economically viable.

The case study
In December 1956 at the age of 23, my father, P.J. McClean, was arrested and taken to Crumlin Road Prison Belfast. He was accused of ‘having acted or being about to act, in a manner prejudicial to the Peace and Order of Northern Ireland’. Because he would not sign a paper admitting to this, he was held indefinitely by the then Minister of Home Affairs, W.W.B Topping. This turned out to be for almost four years of his life. He was never taken to court or given a reason why he was selected for internment but when he was released it was an ‘un-conditional’ release. He left there never having a prison record, having never been a sentenced prisoner. At that time, Dad was only one of several hundred men interned from across Northern Ireland. This period in our history has been largely forgotten due to the more ‘explosive’ news
stories in the late 60’s and early 70’s and the increase in communication/media technologies and the use of public campaigns. Can his story be remembered and discussed now in a way that does not alienate or inflame an old wound?

The film
The focus in the film FOR THE RECORD is my father’s prison diary, secretly written on the inside of envelopes during the first 30 days in his cell. It brings the viewer into the intimate space of personal testimony and record. This intimacy is also reflected in the interviews between my father and myself, by the use of close up camera shots and the nature of the discussions themselves. The space between asking questions, as an interviewer might, and having a daughter/father conversation, is blurred, bringing into question the nature of conventional documentary filmmaking technique used in recording testimony.
Throughout the film, the prison diaries are illustrated with experimental Super8 and 16mm footage of home life in County Tyrone, shot by me over a period of 10 years. The intention of the work is to record and remember that which has been left unrecorded and unseen through media representations of the conflict to date. Personal remembering combined with the airing of closed public records has led to a necessary and timely catharsis:

“Remembrance and commemoration are difficult peace-making strategies and memories of the conflict can be obstacles to successful post violence adjustments, nonetheless memory must become an object of public policy after communal violence.”
_Memory, truth and victimhood in post-trauma societies, John D Brewer

Jared Winchester and Cory Greenfield will present recent work from their collaborative design studio, Entropic Industries, including their proposal for the Albuquerque Public Art Design Competition. The studio seeks new ways of conceiving architecture so that the forces of time and nature are not an antithesis to its inhabitation, but a catalytic ingredient. Each project, in different ways, accepts the inevitability of a changing environment and forecasts ways in which the building or infrastructure can not only persevere, but be transformed through these dynamic and unpredictable states. The designs emerge as a result of serendipitous relationships staged between built form and a set of geographic variables—the initiation of a process, not the execution of a fixed result.

In the footsteps of Voyager, a group of Australian artists and curators will present and discuss curatorial strategies for the creation of a new digital ‘golden record’ to be launched as part of ISEA2013. The work examines the question of who has the right to represent Earth and the elitism of curatorial processes versus the democratisation of digital space.

Introductory Statement

Engaged Creativity in Mobile Environments maps the territory of inquiry, debate and display for ISEA2009, the 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art. The incessant change of physical and virtual environments under the influence of global capital and mass migration as well as the fluidity of personal and social relationships effected by digital information and communication technologies have come to determine the life experience for billions of people. The radically and rapidly altered ways in which we communicate, inter- and transact re/define how we appreciate and make meaning of the world in and around us, and how we conduct our lives along dramatically changing fault lines of the private and the public.

Greg Lynn has recently been producing buildings by [mis]using animation software for their “automatic” design, rather than the more traditional architectural approach of VR simulations and CAD renderings. The cinematic special effects and animation industry has developed useful tools for investigating deformable surfaces and physical forces. In animation, a form is not just modeled using its internal parameters, but also by a mosaic of other fluctuating forces, including gravity, wind, turbulence, magnetism, and swarms of moving particles. Lyn pioneered the use of these gradient fields as architectural analogies for pedestrian and automotive movement, environmental forces such as wind and sun, urban views and alignments, and intensities of use and occupation in time.

Form of Resonance is a series of biometric artworks developed by Yuan-Yi Fan since 2009, it explores different methodologies to manufacture the common knowdege of pulse diagnosis. The idea of pulse, as a tangible but subjective metric of blood circulation, has existed around two thousand years and people have tried to understand the pulse in terms of flow, wave, and eventually resonance of the cardiovascular system.

The thesis: self-expression in representational imagery may be obtained strictly through the access provided by the formal logic, and accomplishing this represents an event of significance to the history of the creative process. The formal logic is that of computer programs and scientific models of nature, couched as they are in mathematics. The artistic self-expression takes the form of renderings in which the artist is satisfied that an internal archetypal image has been rectified, thereby providing a window into his/her soul. Using logic, math and science so directly in the inherently subjective practice of obtaining self-expression marks a peculiar and novel artistic process, one that entrains with it the formidable conceptual depth of those objective disciplines.

In this method, process and medium are neatly partitioned: “process” is the highly abstract task of formulating an appropriate formal system and deriving a suitable theorem in it, while”medium” concerns the physical manifestation of the visual interpretation of the theorem. The formal system consists of “rules of production” in the form of a mathematical model of Nature mapped into a computer program, and “axioms” — the input to that program. Using these instructions, the computer deterministically derives a theorem, which is an abstract “metarepresentation” of an image. The theorem consists of a large string of symbols. These symbols are interpreted as numbers; the numbers are in turn interpreted as colors; the series of point-values for colors as an image; the image as a representation of a possible aspect of Nature; and that rendering of Nature as a spiritual statement by the artist/scientist/mathematician/programmer.

The method is abstruse. The author attempts to describe various aspects of it and to illuminate some of the deep conceptual foundations involved, to the end of supporting the claim that its inception represents a significant event in the history of the creative process. The direct linkage of determinism, contraindicating free will as it does, with spirituality, at least provides an interesting philosophical juxtaposition.

Abstract

Challenging the Dualistic Paradigm of Computer Music The utilization of computers fosters several attitudes of music composition, whose extreme cases can be recognized as: automated composition and timbre design.

The former reflects a purely formal approach involving the processing of abstract symbols; its emphasis is especially on the syntactical properties of music. Within the compositional process, such attitude is captured in the composer’s models of musical design. The latter is closer to the perceptual and semantical properties of the sound material, captured in the composer’s  models of sonic material. The emphasis is on sound morphology and its meaningful  implications (sound source, gesture, environment). Although overlapping in actuality, still the two attitudes entail distinct tasks and distinct cognitive representations, i.e. separate kinds of domain-and action-knowledge. However, computer music makes possible a novel perspective which blurs that distinction: the merging of models of material and of musical design, the weakening of the neat separation of sound and structure. Composing is then experienced as a knowledge-level activity of micro-time sonic design: data to be manipulated by formal processes are less abstract elements of large-scale structures than micro-structural sonic units of the musical signal. Accordingly, the new paradigm demands two related efforts of deep revision. One concerns the design of computer music interfaces and control structures. The other concerns music theory, required to re-think its epistemological basis as well as the very notions of sound materials (now something virtual, no more preexisting to the compositional process, hence dematerialized or “spiritualized”, as Adorno said) and musical form (which now overlaps with the notion of timbre). Revision is needed because composing seems to involve exploratory models of a theory of sonological emergence. Work in this area can be enriched upon contact with auditory perception modeling and mathematical modeling of sub-symbolic dynamics.

Panel: The Madness of Methods: Emerging Arts Research Practices

Ex­plor­ing the ways in which the dig­i­tal works as an in­ter­face for queer sex­u­al­ity (in fan­tasy and in prac­tice) this paper ar­gues for a Queer The­ory re­turn to psy­cho­analy­sis, and its tra­di­tion of the­ory-based prac­tice and prac­tice-based the­ory. The con­struc­tion of the human body – its dri­ves, its af­fects, its mark­ings, its ill­nesses – have all been ques­tions taken up by Queer The­ory as it has had, from the be­gin­ning, the lived body as its main ob­ject of study. Yet Queer The­ory’s rise to aca­d­e­mic promi­nence has also co­in­cided with an in­tense re-con­fig­u­ra­tion of this human body and how it deals with its ob­jects of de­sire through the in­creas­ing em­bed­ding of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy in the every­day. Tak­ing up bare­back­ing (un­pro­tected sex among strangers) as an em­blem­atic con­tem­po­rary “prob­lem” of and for queer­ness, the paper in­ves­ti­gates the ways in which psy­cho­an­a­lytic the­o­ries of early child­hood de­vel­op­ment help us un­der­stand what is at play be­tween the new media sub­ject and his new media ob­ject.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Community development, community of practice, art and technology, new media art, focus group, interdisciplinary collaboration

The Pacific Northwest is a top region for innovators at the intersection of art and technology. This density of technology creatives – artists, programmers, technologists, designers, entrepreneurs – combined with the Pacific Northwest’s uniquely community-oriented zeitgeist has had a meaningful impact on the local arts community, creating fertile ground for genres of interdisciplinary, technology-mediated art. In order to help foster this growing community of artists/technologists in pushing the bounds of what is possible in their work, we organized a workshop bringing together key stakeholders in the region. The workshop was structured as a focus group including a brief questionnaire to generate feedback for how to best support this community. The unique concerns and collective agenda of this interdisciplinary group are discussed as they would apply to broader contexts.

Abstract (short paper)

This paper discusses a new research-creation project, which proposes to explore the DIY making and deploying of humanscale portable interactive displays for the purpose of supporting both artistic exhibitions and performances. Made from colorful modular panels and electronic components, these interactive screens are meant to serve as mobile digital public displays and nomadic screens for artists, activists and others who wish to stage improvised events in public space. A key objective of this project is to recover, reinterpret and combine historical traditions of interactive media and visual storytelling to inform the design of these artefacts. Accordingly, this paper adopts a media archaeological approach to look at four topoi that might lay the theoretical foundation of a design framework for DIY nomadic public screens. In doing so, DIY making becomes a détournement of cultural appropriation in that, here, it is DIY minority cultures that draw on elements of dominant cultures.

Julie Andreyev will present her internationally performed projects and her current work in co-production with Banff New Media Institute. These projects examine urban culture through the use of cars as interactive, experimental VJ/DJ platforms. During performances, audio-visions of the city are repositioned into the public as performance and that which is private—the space of the car—becomes public and a tool for commentary about the city.

It was recently discovered that the inter-reflections of light between highly reflective spheres is fractal in nature. The work investigates this phenomena through ray tracing using very high levels of recursion; this allows many levels of reflection to be traced. The fractal nature of the inter-reflections means that no matter how much we enlarge parts of the images created by the ray tracing, we always see more and more reflective images of the spheres. These images do not form any regular pattern, but are arranged in seemingly random patterns. By ray tracing spheres of different colours and textures, interesting artistic effects can be achieved. The ray tracing technique is also applied to three dimensional osculatory packings..of spheres. These are three-dimensional arrangements of spheres of different sizes that just touch each other. They are fractal in nature because an osculatory packing can contain an infinite number of spheres in a given region of space with no regularity in the shape or size of the spheres. When the fractal ray tracing tech­nique is applied to these packings we obtain images that contain two types of fractal information: one from the arrangement of the spheres themselves, and one from the inter-reflections.

Abstract

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a web-based site-specific interactive installation. This participative work encourages camera phone users to send their own photographs and corresponding text tags by multimedia messaging service (MMS) to be incorporated into a visual display in real-time, thereby enriching he shared experience of a specific event situated in a particular place.

Abstract (short paper)

Abstract In the last two decades, a series of games that interweave fiction with reality and often involve real world outcomes have appeared. Encompassing serious games, ubiquitous games, location based-games and gamification, these reality-based experiences seem entirely new. But what I here collectively call reality-based games have a past. Threading though the Surrealists strategies of automatism; the cybernetic utopian visions of Marshall Mcluhan, Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand; the social change objectives of the serious games movement; and the engagement strategies of gamification; there is a persistent motivation connecting the history of reality-based games. Specifically, the desire to put play to work. But too often the bodies that develop and promote these experiences work in isolation from each other. As a result, their knowledge and findings lack the self-reflection and critique deserving of the powerful experiences they create. This should not be, as the stakes are high given these game types are often global in scale. This paper connects the ambitions of realitybased games in artistic, progressive and corporate contexts and calls for a productive framework of critique for these game types, one that can be universally applied.

Frankenstein2… involves rewriting Mary Shelley’s 1831 novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, using all and only the words from the original to create a new, contemporary story. The rewriting of Frankenstein has been facilitated by the creation of a bespoke piece of database software, called FrankenWriter, developed by Patrick Tresset.

By way of a loose plot, the lead protagonist of Frankenstein2… is a modern-day monster, an amoral product of mainstream influences, a banker, who, lacking the courage to kill himself, resolves to travel back in time to ensure that he is never born the first place.

Afflicted by a speech impediment which locks him into protracted cycles of repetition, the (as yet unnamed) protagonist indulges in wanton violence, pornography, chatroom banter and car chases, amid musings about his fondness for soft rock and recollections of his family: the cousin who died in the Twin Towers, his union-chief wrestling father, and his mother who lives in the mindset of a period drama.

In a topological, database-driven, reconfiguration of Shelley’s work, Frankenstein2… presents an act of over-identification, rather than mere subversion. In its consumption and regurgitation of Shelley’s original text, Frankenstein2… performs a work of auto-cannibalism and/or post-production that explores a new form of horror in the zone that vacillates between blind affective immersion and analytical cool distance. An allegory of neoliberalism, perhaps, it draws on the tension between speculation and wandering, between the power of potential and the poetics of indifference, where, as horrified ‘author’, I am caught between the story I want to tell and the language (technology) available to tell it.

Extracts of Frankenstein2… have to-date been exhibited, printed and performed in a variety of contexts and media:

1. Arnolfini, Bristol: A Theatre to Address, 2010
2. Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London: Use & Mention, 2010
3. Revolve Wire magazine, 2007
4. V&A, London: Prints Now: Directions & Definitions, 2006
5. Vilma Gold, London: slimvolume, 2002

Free Network Visible Network combines different tools and processes to visualize, floating in the space, the interchanged information between users of a network. People are able to experience how colorful virtual objects, representing the digital data, are flying around. These virtual objects will change their shape, size and color in relation to the different characteristics of circulating information in the network. Using the Visible Network Client users can superimpose images, texts, sounds and 3D models on the urban space customizing it and participating on the design of the city. Free Network Visible Network is done in collaboration with Liu Wei, Duy Nguyen and Adrian Cheok at IERC, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

In this poster I aim to reconsider the role of radio broadcasting on a local level, and examine the interesting revival in this ‘secondary’ medium as a tool for community awareness and creative expression. Community radio broadcasting as a movement for social empowerment is undergoing transformation and expansion. Grassroots wireless digital networks are enabling localised sharing of bandwidth and services. This poster will explore these phenomena, looking at examples of projects, comparing and contrasting approaches and positions, and analysing issues.

Abstract

There is a natural way to transform any 3-dimensional shape into a musical harmony, such that nearby points go to pitches which are harmonically related in a simple way, and the transformation can be inverted under certain assumptions. For each point making up the shape and having integer-valued coordinates x, y, z, form a sine wave with frequency 2x3y5z and sum these sine waves. More generally, one can have any real-valued density distribution defined on the Z3 point lattice and use its values as the amplitudes of the corresponding partials. Still more generally, the density can be colored or complex valued. The hue or complex phase angle is taken to be the phase of the sine wave. The 3D transformation can be generalized to any number of dimensions.

Because 2, 3, and 5 are distinct primes, anything so transformed can uniquely be transformed back, provided one could keep infinite precision. For spectra with imprecise or irrational frequencies, as is always the case in practice, inversion appears to be impossible. There are,
however, heuristic methods to invert the transformation, like the bounding box method, the tonal centre method, the multiple tonal centre method, and the charge distribution method. I have conjectured that something like this actually happens in the auditory system. In music theory the transformation neatly explains the diatonic scale and the major/minor symmetry. The inverse transformation provides an analysis method for tonaI and microtonal music. The direct transformation may be used as a compositional tool. For example, one can put a cellular automaton to operate on the Zn lattice, and transform the state pattern into music. In prosthetics, the direct transformation gives a potential way to realize virtual vision for the blind, and the inverse transformation a way to visualize music or any sound for the deaf.

(Intro)

(Long paper)

As media platforms shift towards more dynamic interfaces, the separation between user and content grows infinitely. While advertised as thin, light, and seamless, these platforms mask a thick and complicated space in which society must navigate. This is what I call the Thick Interface. The Thick Interface is the space between user and content. It is a space that has grown vast, complicated, and consequential through the evolution of society and technology. This space began its growth at the infancy of design practice, the Gutenberg press, but has grown exponentially in recent years to encompass a space that is occupied and lived in. Starting at the Gutenberg press reveals that the practice of graphic design was born out of and is married to technological advancement. While this growth in scale and complexity may affect all professions and all of society, I would argue that it affects graphic design on a deeper level. After all, it is designer’s role to sculpt society’s relationship with content and to narrate and disseminate the information used to guide us through our complex environments. When we design interfaces— books, posters, artifacts, websites, mobile applications, etc.—this thickening space is not only vital, but also a powerful communication tool worth utilizing as a means to understand and relate to the complexity of these engagements.

The University of Brighton Design Archives has created over 6,000 digital images in recent years, making visible to wide audiences highlights from one of the largest libraries of industrial design photography in the world. Repurposing these images to enhance their research and learning potential is an ongoing ambition and this paper discusses a major step forward in this respect, a collaboration with one of the most exciting innovations in the resource delivery landscape, The Retroscope, a ‘visual time machine’ that offers a way of surfing time online by integrating images, moving images and sound in chronological and spatial arrangements for people to explore, add to and curate.

The Retroscope has partnerships with many leading archives, including Getty’s Hulton Archive, the Bridgeman Art Library, the Central Office of Information and the BBC. The Retroscope is due to be launched in 2011 and has attracted considerable attention already, described by Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture as ‘the next big thing’ and by John Mitchinson, Director of Research, QI as ‘one of the richest uses yet for the web’.

This paper describes how a University collection can work outside the educational sector to push the boundaries in terms visibility and currency and to make more porous the perceived boundaries between conventional educational environments and other, more public, venues for learning. Indeed, joining forces with The Retroscope presents a high prolife opportunity for Design Archives resources to reach audiences unimaginable alone. What might this advance in digital curation mean for arts education and research and for cross-sector dialogue? How can the situation of archival data in a merged spatial and chronological delivery environment (as opposed to the rigid conventions of archival hierarchies) inform new thinking in the arts and humanities? How might a collaboration of this kind provoke research challenges and opportunities? These are some of the questions this paper will address. It will also be the first public presentation of the outcomes of this project.

According to Baugh (2005), in terms of the function of technologies in performance, most often technologies have served to assist the performance. Baugh claims that the history of integration of technologies in performance has created a certain mode of perception, which he refers to as the “hierarchy of perceptual importance”. According to Baugh, the hierarchy of perceptual importance places the performer center stage while the technology remains in the periphery.

Also in the art form of dance, the role of technologies is most often reduced to that of assistance. Technologies are, generally speaking, considered to compliment the choreography and expand the corporeality of the dancing body. In other words, the integration of technologies into dance does indeed largely operate on the basis of what Baugh calls hierarchy of perceptual importance.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that this hierarchy of perceptual importance no longer holds when we consider dance performances that integrate recently developed motion-tracking based real time interactive technologies. Via a case study of a digital dance performance Glow (2006, G. Obarzanek, F. Weiss), dance reviews, and literature on digital dance, this paper argues that Glow’s choreography changes the conventional center-periphery mode of perception to one of center-center. Moreover, it argues that Glow allows a mutual interaction between the animate and inanimate elements onstage, which transforms the role of technologies into a performer, and thus, the relationship between dancer and technology into a duet.

Surveillance is seen as one of the most important features of postmodern society. Many authors (Foucault, Deleuze, Virilio, Lyon to name a few) has analyzed influence of surveillance technology on development of media society showing how changes in technology result in new perception and understanding of the role surveillance plays in culture of late XX and XXI century. As new forms of technology appeared shifts in the paradigm of surveillance society could be observed. Oppressive society of control and punishment has turned into society, in which we face “democratization of exhibitionism” (Virilio) what leads to notion of surveillance as “spectacle of entertainment” (Weibel). No wonder that the issue of observation, control, tracking, detecting, measuring, gathering, storing and processing information has been undertaken by many contemporary artists. However, complex relationship between changes of social order and development of new technologies is reflected especially in technology-based art.

Since the beginning of video art the issue of surveillance has been an important theme but at the same time surveillance technology has formed a material background of media art. As David Rokeby observes, surveillance could be seen as the foundation of any art, which involves the observer into an active participation. Hence, surveillance is both theme and method of media art with video installations, interactive installations, and net art as the most significant examples. The focus of the paper is on analyzing various ways of using surveillance technology in media art. I will try to show how choice of certain technology influence artistic discourse in terms of form and content. But, at the same time, I will analyze subversive strategies by which artists deconstruct dominant mode of thinking about surveillance. By doing so art practice will be shown as critical voice in debate concerning cultural effects of expansion of surveillance technologies.

The Icelandic government granted the rights to scan the DNA of all its citizens to the company deCODE genetics, Inc. This company believes that the Icelandic model for it’s inhabitants mixed with other phenotypes can be of great interest in the study of certain mental illnesses like schizophrenia etc … To avoid bankruptcy the Icelandic company later goes on the market reaching $ 485 million worth by integrating international “joint venture” investment companies. After various phases, the Icelandic data is passed to a Chinese mining company which is currently marketing Icelandic DNA information with the restrictions and rules ofanonymity.

We can think of many rabbit holes here: What is the market value of your DNA? What is the DNA business model? What benefits did the Icelandic state receive from it’s “deal” with the company deCODE? What are the implications when the data can be inherited by subsequent companies? Will China copy the model of Icelandic DNA and create blond cyborgs, with blue eyes and Icelandic mentality?We will talk about our Project “From DNA to NSA, an action-intervention based on DIY bio laboratory to extract DNA strings from the visitors and data visualization and sonification of human DNA.

Project Description
From DNA to NSA is an action intervention and a data visualization and sonification of human DNA. It consists on setting up a DIY bio laboratory to extract DNA strings from the visitors. Using common, domestic products, audience can follow an easy DIY process and experience how their DNA strings looks like. The DIY biolab serves as a proof of how easy your privacy can be broken.Visitors, once they finalize the 5 steps can choose to blend their genetic material with the others visitors formulating a new common DNA. A blender is set up at the exhibition space. Meanwhile, public DNA records from an internet database is compared to one of the genomas from the Icelandic DNA database, and the results are visualized and sonified, at different monitors and audio system.

From 3D Modeling to Character Animation, from Storyboard to Production, from Basic Animation to Intermediate Animation, computer animation courses comprise a complex composite system. This paper explores approaches to computer animation education systerm in China and the United States. More and more universities and schools have started teaching computer animation courses, but there is still a shortage of talented computer animators in the Chinese animation industry. By comparing the Chinese animation courses with American computer animation courses, we will examine the different approaches and philosophies, thus giving insight into how to most effectively teach computer animation.

One area of attention will be the development of story and visual content and conceptual development of animators. Chinese universities generally promote the creation of fine art works using computer animation. Many American universities focus on having their students position themselves for commercial production, although there are several art schools which use an approach very similar to the Chinese. A comparison of computer animation programs will be explored through an examination of their curriculum, faculty, the philosophical foundations of computer animation programs, 2D and 3D computer animation works, lab facilities, environmental and aesthetic similarities and contrasts between the two countries. Research methodologies will also be discussed. The goal of this presentation is to provide an international perspective on computer animation education.

“Lunda Tchokwe” was a major initiative of the first Trienal de Luanda in 2006.  Conjuring ancestors of a pre-colonial past, the project digitized and reprinted images from an anthropological volume on wall murals of the Chokwe ethnic group of northeastern Angola, Paredes Pintadas da Lunda by José Redinha (1953). My concern in this paper is with the continuous reinscription of protocols of access to ghosts and ancestors of a mythic past, of which “Lunda Tchokwe” is the latest. The digitization of “African” culture presently thematized by many African artists negotiates communalism in terms of “free” information technology and visibility/access, a postcolonial return to ancestors that overcomes colonial appropriations of “African” creativity.  Underneath that myth of free access, however, lie real and hidden protocols of its transmission.  The ever-evasive communal control over transmission, or the access to the powerful ancestors that secure contemporary resources, is figured in this paper as the specter that haunts digitized heritage projects.

One particular type of visual symbol that recurs in the book and the “Lunda Tchokwe” project derives from sona drawing practice, a self-organizing algorithmic method of drawing in which young Chokwe boys learn about hierarchy and social mores.  Once mastered, the drawing practice allows the practitioner to speak publically to/for the ancestors: to own the myths, legends, and to access the power structures of the Chokwe. Importantly, sona is at once an open and a closed logic system.  This paper compares sona logic to the information science underlying the current digitization of the sona symbols in the “Lunda Tchokwe” project. Similar to the open and closed logic of today’s information systems, in which Lunda Tchokwe is now embedded, sona contains “bottom up” logic as well as the more specialized and occult realm of code and its ownership. Since the moment of colonization of Chokwe art, it has been in the realm of transmission media (as code and as material) that access to knowledge was seized and its restrictions again circumscribed.

The fall of communism in the former soviet countries was marked with the rise of activist attitudes, in many cases organised around Internet and new media practices. Development of new media culture was linked to the proces of developing new forms of social organization. Both were sort of great challenge since infrastructures of communication technology and structures of civic society were underdeveloped and centralised in this region. Communist governements considered all means and forms of independent communication and collectivity an attack on them. The old Roman dictum: Divida et Impera was their political principle.

The panelists will discuss different aspects of these transformations, both from the general perspective and with a focus on particular countries and issues.

• Ryszard W. Kluszczynski will talk on the 80’s in Poland where during the Martial Law period and boycott of official state art institutions, the avant-garde artists developed the independent art network. The important roles in this process were played by media artists. There were several editions of underground festival Silent Cinema organized as well as numerous other forms of artistic activities undertook. Some forms of continuation of such work in the 90. will be analized as well.
• Nina Czegledy will talk about the network of Soros Centers of Contemporary Art, their activity, and about the heritage of Soros funding at the cusp of cultural and funding transitions: fresh initiatives, hybrid educational projects, international exchanges including networked projects, altered funding structures signalling a new era.
• Renata Sukaityte will focus on the new forms of independent social self-organization after Soros, with the stress on the situation in Baltic countries. She will review the shift in institutional paradigm and hierarchy in the field of media arts production in 2000s: networking and temporary experimental production venues – as an alternative institutional strategy for small and independent communities
• Zoran Pantelic will present the development of activism in Balcan countries with a focus on situation in Serbia. In the mid 90. activism got strong visibility through non-govermental organizations there. Paradox is that Serbia situation nowadays is that institutions controlled by the governement are not ready to cooperate with NGOs. In the same time the latters are very active internationally and produce numerous collaborative works with the foreign countries partners.
• Maciej Ozog will talk on the independent music scene. The 90. were the time of fast rise of independent labels which soon became ‘safe harbours’ for experimental musicians and activists who did not agree with total commercialisation of culture and decided to stay away from academic art at the same time. There are similarities and differences between independent music scenes in different countries in respect to political, economical but above all cultural context (tradition of avant-garde, experimental music; connection between art and music scene, etc.). The stress will be also put on the issue of cooperation and creative exchanges between individual artists, projects, and independent organisations and collectives.

Intro

In his classic expose of the “archaeology of the cinema” C.W. Ceram puts the prehistory of the motion pictures straight. He states promptly: “Knowledge of automatons, or of clockwork toys, played no part in the story of cinematography, nor is there any link between it and the production of animated ‘scenes’. We can therefore omit plays, the baroque automatons, and the marionette theatre. Even the ‘deviltries’ of Porta, produced with the camera obscura, the phantasmagorias of Robertson, the ‘dissolving views’ of Child, are not to the point. All these discoveries did not lead to the first genuine moving picture sequence.”‘ In another paragraph, Ceram elaborates on his position: “What matters in history is not whether certain chance discoveries take place, but whether they take effect.” Curiously, the profuse illustrations of the English language edition (1965), collected by Olive Cook, openly contradict these statements. Plenty of “chance discoveries” have been included, supported by meticulously prepared captions. No doubt, for many readers this polyphonic array of curious traces of the past remains the truly exciting aspect of the book, not Ceram’s pedantic attempts to trace the one by one steps which led to the emergence of cinema in the end of the 19th century. The writer’s primary focus is on the narrowly causal relationships which supposedly guided the development of the moving image technology. Tracing the fates of the personalities who made this happen comes next; other factors matter little. The reasoning is matter-of-fact and positivistic. Ceram never ventures upon speculations rising above the materiality of his sources.

The illustrations in Ceram’s book, as well as the historical collections on display at such wonderful places as the Frankfurt Film Museum, can, however, be persuaded to tell very different stories, full of intriguing possibilities. As the French historian Marc Bloch taught, our conception of the past depends on the kind of questions we ask. 4 Any source, be it a detail of a picture or a part of a machine, can be useful, if we approach it from a relevant perspective. There is no such trace of the past, which does not have its story to tell. Another historian with a comparable attitude towards historical sources was, of course, Walter Benjamin, who (according to Susan Buck-Morss) “took seriously the debris of mass culture as the source of philosophical truth”. For Benjamin (particularly in his unfinished PassagenWerk) the various remains of the 19th century culture – buildings, technologies, commodities, but also illustrations and literary texts – served as inscriptions, which could lead us to understand the ways in which a culture perceived itself and conceptualized the “deeper” ideological layers of its construction. As Tom Gunning puts it, lib` Benjamin’s method is fully understood, technology can reveal the dream world of society as much as its pragmatic rationalization”

As the Emperor’s daughter at the start of David Lynch’s epic “Dune” suggests, “a beginning is a very delicate time”, and this is really the position I found myself in whilst attempting to prepare for this presentation. Where, within a discussion of the issues surrounding the production and use of computer games, a theme still very much in its infancy, do you begin? Perhaps I should start from my own experience of this phenomenon as, now being one of the twentysomething generation, I feel as if my generation has really been the first to witness, in an almost chronological fashion, the birth, growth, and subsequent world domination of the computer game. From early arcade adventures with the blocky graphics of Space Invaders or Defender, identifying with the Pac Man and his ever increasing appetite for small blue pixels, or just trying to get that elusive backspin in Pong, these early games relied almost exclusively upon the strategy, quick-wittedness and sheer gameplay of the competitors, such were the limitations of the graphics hardware at the time. But, for the young adolescent, who had faithfully given up his pock et money in order to enter the virtual world of saving the Earth (again), for however brief a time, it was money well invested. Now of course, these early games can be looked back upon with a sense of quite curious nostalgia, but what is it perhaps which makes today’s computer games (to paraphrase Richard Hamilton) so different, so appealing? How is it that the ‘idea’ of the computer game works?

This artist’s talk will explore emergent forms of biological narrativity in relation to threads between the subdomains of new media and the evolving/cumulative data streams of bio- and ecoinformatics. Weaver will present his creative investigations into new media-based processes for the re-animation of the digital residues of lost lifeforms (including ancient DNA & protein sequences) and sonic, visual and data sampling from extinct habitats & endangered environments. Presented works will follow the emergence of life and afterlife interactive cinema as sensorial access to complex biological, ecological and biogeographic interactions across a spectrum of scales from the phylogenomic to the biospheric.

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

In its orig­i­nal mean­ing u-topia means the lack of topos. This con­di­tion is in­her­ent in the new media art­work. Due to its im­ma­te­r­ial qual­ity and non-ob­ject sta­tus, the new media art is not phys­i­cally tied to a spe­cific space un­less dis­played. Thus the white cube, turned black for the oc­ca­sion, hosts its vir­tual and ephemeral image, or, in other words, it be­comes the topos of its phys­i­cal re­al­iza­tion.  Whereas the non ob­ject-based art is a pre­dom­i­nant ten­dency span­ning through the 20th cen­tury, the time-based media in­tro­duce a new multi-layer spa­tio-tem­po­ral con­di­tion within the work. The mov­ing image, de­rived from the cin­e­mato­graphic par­a­digm, has by de­f­i­n­i­tion its own vir­tual spa­tio-tem­po­ral­ity which un­folds dur­ing its pro­jec­tion.

As far as the soft­ware and net-based cre­ations are con­cerned, sup­ple­men­tary lay­ers are au­to­mat­i­cally added. When the art­work is in­stalled in a phys­i­cal space, a new di­men­sion ap­pears: the real in­stal­la­tion space and time as ex­pe­ri­enced by the spec­ta­tor. Since both vir­tual and real spa­tio-tem­po­ral lay­ers co­ex­ist si­mul­ta­ne­ously, the work evolves within this di­alec­ti­cal pat­tern.  This lit­er­ally “u-top­ian” con­di­tion re­sults from the utopian (in the sense of rev­o­lu­tion­ary) na­ture of the new media art that rises above ques­tions of unique pro­to­type, con­trolled re­pro­ducibil­ity and ob­ject own­er­ship; hence, a new gen­uinely utopian artis­tic con­di­tion emerges. To speak in Marx­ist terms, it is the a pri­ori nega­tion of the com­mod­ity fetishism that im­poses the lit­eral, as well as the metaphor­i­cal, utopia. Thus, new media, the pil­lar of the late cap­i­tal­ism pub­lic sphere, be­comes the new field of rev­o­lu­tion­ary cul­tural prac­tices. I will fur­ther analyse this para­dox­i­cal -or rather co­her­ent, ac­cord­ing to Fred­eric Jame­son- con­di­tion where the Marx­ist logic is fully im­ple­mented in the most em­blem­atic form of the post-mod­ern art: the new media.

(Long paper)

Keywords: controller, computer interface, water, electronic music, video, mass inertia, fluid, potentiometer, switch, fader.

Artists like Sachiko Kodama have demonstrated the aesthetic potential of ferrofluids in unique, visually spectacular installations like the Morpho Towers and Breathing Chaos. This paper presents a more systematic approach to ferrofluid manipulation: a vertical display, build under project-name: “Liquid Choreography”, later released as “Ferrolic”. This Digital FerroFluid Display’s (DFFD) potential rests in visual references to movement of fluids but also living creatures. Specific dynamic and graphical properties that generate a narrative in the form of an animation are displayed in a video that is central to this paper. In order to understand the written descriptions in this paper, it is strongly advised to review this video before reading this paper. Also see figure 1 and figure 2. In the first part of the paper, the principles of operation of the DFFD are described. Creation of images, transitions between images and fundamental aspects of FF manipulation are presented. In the second part of the paper, a first attempt to come to a vocabulary for the use of the DFFD as an expressive platform is presented. For this purpose seven different animations were generated and presented to in total five experts in the field of art and design. These experts were interviewed about their personal constructs for the animations. Based on a systematic (thematic) analysis of these interviews, the vocabulary was derived.

In 2008 I crowd sourced an Olympics-style competition among members of the Amazon.com Mechanical Turk virtual workforce, the Mechanical Olympics. At an ISEA round table discussion in Belfast in 2009 I met a curator from Cornerhouse who took an interest in the project. Subsequently, it was recreated in Manchester, UK for the Abandon Normal Devices festival in 2010. A discussion of the project returns to ISEA in regards to the ways in which it changed during its transformation from one economic infrastructure, Mturk.com, to another, the Legacy Trust UK, UK National Lottery/Big Lottery Fund.

Visual media technologies have always been used to bring about the scientific image. In his experiments Robert Koch has relied on photography because he valued the stability of the photographic image. Later on film played a pivotal role in physical experiments, microbiology – it was the first medium to provide an insight into the living body – and x-ray technology. Especially in the case of the x-ray film the borders between scientific exploration and entertainment blurred. Following on this we can observe the explosion of imaging technologies. In the course of this development the scientific image is gradually taken for the scientific object. This is a process which has started with Robert Koch, using photography as the basis for his scientific experiments and it ends with the image in nanotechnology, where the image completely stands for the invisible and unimaginably small scientific object.

The papers wants to point to the following aspects of this development.

1. Aspects of the epistemic image: Bruno Latour and Lorraine Daston have underlined that the visual image is brought about by social and technological contexts: there is no such thing as an “objective image”.
2. Practices of visuality: Since the scientific image is always constituted in technological and cultural contexts, the paper seeks out to explore these contexts and it intends to demonstrate how visuality has to be understood as medial and cultural practice. Thus media technologies function as a dispositif, shaping the respective image.
3. The blurring between science, popular culture and art: especially the image in nanotechnology travels between different contexts: it is used in nanotechnology but also serves as artistic image and image within popular culture. This point also wants to refer to the political implications of the nanotechnological image.

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

A discussion of Myfanwy Ashmore’s Mouse Hack workshop and the student outcomes developed as a precursor to ISEA2014. The different outcomes are compared between Zayed University’s two campuses and the ideas that are motivating future projects. The talk is followed by examples of what is happening with new media at the university, and an iPad pilot project.

How is it possible to “sense” the planetary? It is now not uncommon for the planetary to be invoked in discussions of technology. Technology—especially computational technology—is analyzed as something on the “scale” of the planetary. Technology is seen to overrun and command the planetary. The planetary is discussed as a figure of massiveness. Its invocation suggests total dominion: the rolling out of behemoth systems that hold the planet and all of its entities in a space of complete capture.

This total view of Earth has an even longer history within modes of control and colonialism. The detached and distant view of Earth produces an entity that could seemingly be managed—or programmed. This total view of the planet suggests complete interconnectedness, but also forms of imperial control. It is the product of globality as well as universal science. A total view can even seem to be necessary: as a way to organize the problem of climate change, for instance, in order to act upon it.

Yet in what ways do these modalities of the planetary reduce the possibilities of what the planetary is or might become? How might it be possible not to remake the pretensions of globality and globalization through planetary media projects, but rather begin to unsettle figures of totality and regulation in order to attend to the incommensurate, the unjust, and the yet to be recognized?