Presentation Data Table

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?

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

The tech­no­log­i­cal make-up and in­ter­face con­ven­tions of many elec­tronic art­works in­vite con­fig­u­ra­tive au­di­ence prac­tices which re­sem­ble those we are fa­mil­iar with from the con­text of com­puter game play. Thus it is not sur­pris­ing that some con­tem­po­rary crit­ics have seen it nec­es­sary to be con­cerned about the as­so­ci­a­tions be­tween play and media art. Pre­vi­ously at ISEA2008, Daniel Palmer in The Crit­i­cal Am­biva­lence of Play in Media Art, con­cerned with media art’s “as­so­ci­a­tion with en­ter­tain­ment spec­ta­cle” sug­gested that if “media art as­pires to be taken se­ri­ously by the broader con­tem­po­rary art world, the links be­tween media art, chil­dren and mass cul­ture are fatal.” In this pre­sen­ta­tion I seek to clar­ify the ori­gins of the link­age per­ceived by Palmer, by recon­cep­tu­al­is­ing the play-com­po­nent ev­i­dent in new media art through de­scrib­ing it si­mul­ta­ne­ously as a styl­is­tic strat­egy, play­ful­ness, with its roots deep in art his­tory, and as a tech­no­log­i­cal af­for­dance, playa­bil­ity, invit­ing a unique kind of en­gage­ment best con­cep­tu­al­ized through ex­is­ten­tial­ist terms of free­dom and re­spon­si­bil­ity. Rec­og­niz­ing play­ful­ness and playa­bil­ity as sep­a­rate char­ac­ter­is­tics, I ob­serve that their co­ex­is­tence in new media art is ac­ci­den­tal rather than es­sen­tial, and there is room for a va­ri­ety of artis­tic strate­gies for ne­go­ti­at­ing their in­ter­re­la­tions.

Panel: Open Culture + Wearables

The bur­geon­ing DIY move­ment has res­ur­rected a re­newed in­ves­ti­ga­tion into wear­able tech­nol­ogy.  Un­like pre­vi­ous re­search in the mid-90s con­ducted pre­dom­i­nately by elec­tri­cal en­gi­neers and com­puter sci­en­tists, wear­able tech­nol­ogy today is being de­signed and de­vel­oped by in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary teams of de­sign­ers, artists and other mak­ers/crafters. As the bar­rier to entry (tech­ni­cal ap­ti­tude) has fallen in re­cent years due to ac­cess to in­ex­pen­sive tools (Ar­duino, Rapid Pro­to­typ­ing Tech­nolo­gies) and on­line re­sources for knowl­edge ex­change (In­structa­bles, Fash­ion­ing Tech), wear­able tech­nol­ogy re­search has shifted from the in­ves­ti­ga­tion of tech­ni­cal and com­pu­ta­tional func­tions to ma­te­ri­al­ity, aes­thet­ics, wear­ablil­ity, in­ter­ac­tion, and ex­pe­ri­ence of wear­able pro­to­types. As the new de­sign cul­ture in wear­able tech­nol­ogy ma­tures, we see a move­ment from pro­to­types to mi­cro-en­tre­pre­neur­ship and mi­cro-pro­duc­tion. From the use of mass-mar­ket rapid pro­to­typ­ing tech­nolo­gies to on­line dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels, wear­able tech­nol­ogy de­sign­ers are not only re-defin­ing ex­actly what cloth­ing is, but also how it is man­u­fac­tured and dis­trib­uted. Un­like pro­duc­tion in tra­di­tional fac­to­ries, the man­u­fac­tur­ing process for wear­able tech gar­ments is typ­i­cally flex­i­ble, open source, and or­ga­nized around de­mand not pro­duc­tion.

Keywords: Full-body Movement, Materialization, Digital Interaction, Design, Communication, Boundaries, Scripts, Scores.

Today our environments are increasingly digitized and interactive. We generate data by the very way we move, from locative signals to accumulated traces outlining direction and intensity as well as computational and comparative information. These digital environments are currently being built, and ask us to decide which movements matter and which do not. In the design of movement-based digital interaction, movement becomes a material with which we may shape new expressions, functions and interactions. The borders and boundaries of decisions on movement that are set in binary code become a complex, meaningmaking communication. I suggest that we need to visualize movement data together with movement expertise in order to harness an agency in movement itself, namely the kinesthetic, embodied sensation of movement as well as the relational ways we may move with data. I discuss several projects whereby code and the conceptualization of movement are explored jointly. The aim of discussing such processes is to find ways to tease out the rich communicative potential of full-body movement for digital interactions by enabling an explorative, creative engagement with movement data and, in turn, movement.

Analyses on film and photography often characterize the photograph as a still image and film as a sequence of images (Campany 2007). As a practice-based researcher and digital artist I challenge this notion, engaging with photography as a time-based medium and creating work that is situated in that very short moment when still images become moving and therefore not definable as just one or the other. Instead, they should be situated in media or electronic arts and not in the traditional label of photography.

I use the production of my artworks as an opportunity to challenge and redefine existing media with an ongoing interest in space and time – how each can be captured, represented, and redefined. In this paper I specifically discuss the principal techniques I incorporate into my image-based work, such as pairing and layering (digitally and physically), pushing it far away from the realm of the “still image”.  I question our capacity to perceive slow changes and multiple temporalities through works that explore both. Furthermore, I argue that in this fast-paced era in which 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute, we have lost our ability to slow down and really see images and small changes.

The work of contemporary artists such as Bill Viola, David Hockney, and Hiroshi Sugimoto offer a framework for my own artworks which, through physical and digital layering and pairing, superimpose various temporal moments to create “still” works in constant motion.  They exist more as time-based media that incorporate photography as a vehicle for the production of images, and less as “time-fossils” (Orlow 1999).

This paper examines two distinct approaches to the mining of memory in new media artworks that enfold testimonials, the silencing of trauma, and participatory viewer interactions within a technological frame. The first technological frame is that of the site‑specific public spectacle, as exemplified in the work of Rafael Lozano‑Hemmer (Voz Alta, 2008, commemorating the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City), Krzysztof Wodiczko (The Tijuana Projection, 2001, testimonials of Mexican border migrants crossing over to the USA) and Alfredo Jaar (Lights in the City, Montreal, Canada, 1999, giving presence to the homeless). The second technological frame is one that deploys the Internet to create online memorials, as exemplified by the human rights organization in Argentina, Memoria abierta (Open Memory), which has compiled photographic databases of portraits (Wall of Memory) and of artifacts (Vestigos, 2012) of desaparecidos (citizens kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976‑83).Through a comparison of these new media approaches to memorialization, I consider how engaging the testimonial in a public space as a collective viewing experience differs from and relates to the use of photographic databases to create a memorial site that is animated through the virtual function of web browsing. In so doing, I ask if there is an essential role for new media in mining traumatic memory, and how the experience of group exchange facilitated in real time and space relates to a photographic archive that is dispersed through virtual space. I conclude by asking how and whether we can view these distinct sites of memorializing as part of a larger social and political project in which the specificity of site and the diffusion of representation converge.

The phenomenon of telepresence appeared with the development of electronic media and is to a large extent connected with the sense and nature of the image. As one of the basic concepts of cyberculture and electronic art, telepresence seems to broaden and increase the intensity of appearance, manifesting itself, for example, as an interactive image, language or electronic incarnation of a person. Telepresence is becoming more common and is to a certain degree almost imperceptibly shaping communication, influencing or even limiting other forms of contact in the real world. Through the multiplication of various interfaces, telepresence constitutes an arena for the coexistence in the electronic medium of images of reality and persons, together forming an electronic horizon of events, a community of electronic reality.

As M. Castells understands it, telepresence constitutes an electronic community which not so much represents some geographic, linguistic, or national community, but constitutes an independent and separate structure, a kind of Network community. As a property of art, telepresence can be combined with the interactive installation, whose beginnings can be found in the 70’s of the 20th century, for example, in the works of M. Krueger, theoretician and creator of electronic art. In his works one can observe and describe the appearance of the phenomenon of telepresence as influencing the character of inter-human relations that arise in the electronic environment. For R. Ascott, in turn, telepresence is associated with the Network proliferation of a person and nonlinear, multi-personal, and simultaneous contact.

At present the phenomenon of telepresence could be identified in various areas of electronic art, for example, in the art of monitoring, virtual reality, GPS, or Network or electronic intelligence. One might even say that in terms of art telepresence can be defined as the transferring of what is real to what is imaged and introduced into the electronic medium and the environment that corresponds to it.

Panel: DON’T HATE THE BUSINESS: BECOME THE BUSINESS!

When Wen Ji­abao vis­ited Turkey in Oc­to­ber 2010 (the first Chi­nese pre­mier to do so) a bi­lat­eral agree­ment to triple trade to $50bn within five years was the most sig­nif­i­cant out­come.  Also in Oc­to­ber Turk­ish news­pa­pers re­ported that Chi­nese war­planes took part in a mil­i­tary train­ing ex­er­cise at an air­base in cen­tral Turkey, in what is a first in­volv­ing China and a Nato mem­ber coun­try. As one of the world’s fastest grow­ing economies, Turkey has been po­si­tion­ing it­self to boost eco­nomic and trade re­la­tions across the re­gion as well as glob­ally. The cul­tural dis­courses en­cour­aged in Turkey today should be seen as part of the cen­tral plank of the Turk­ish for­eign pol­icy: eco­nomic de­vel­op­ment and cul­ture as part of a pack­age of trade and in­vest­ment port­fo­lio. As state fund­ing for the arts in Turkey hardly ex­ists and what there is has his­tor­i­cally been un­der­stood in na­tion­al­ist, her­itage and tourism terms, my pre­sen­ta­tion will con­tex­tu­alise the busi­ness arm of the arts and the al­most ex­clu­sive pri­vate pa­tron­age that is the con­tem­po­rary arts in Turkey today.

Panel: Testing New Ground: An Interdisciplinary Discussion on Hybrid Habitats

A space sta­tion is not just a weight­less world de­signed to ac­climi­tise as­tro­nauts to the con­di­tions of liv­ing in space – it is a habi­tat, both real and imag­ined. Draw­ing upon my re­search into the his­tor­i­cal con­di­tions that en­abled the imag­i­nary con­sti­tu­tion of the space sta­tion as a habi­tat, I will ex­am­ine how NASA now em­ploys aug­mented and mixed re­al­ity tech­nolo­gies to blur the bound­aries be­tween the vir­tual worlds ac­cessed via the com­puter screen and the world in­hab­ited by the as­tro­nauts. Since build­ing on the In­ter­na­tional Space Sta­tion began, as­tro­nauts have played at house­keep­ing in space, their rit­u­als meant to be wit­nessed by those who ac­cess NASA’s web por­tal and its stream­ing media broad­casts. If these home-mak­ers have been agents des­ig­nated with en­act­ing the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal con­di­tions for emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies, then has their func­tion shifted with the in­tro­duc­tion of the first robot as­tro­naut, Robo­naut2, into the crew? And what of NASA’s use of Sec­ond Life, has this vir­tual world be­come the site at which the same spa­tial imag­i­nary that sent ‘men to the stars’ is merely reen­acted? Work­ing in the in­ter­stices be­tween space sta­tion and vir­tual world, I aim to ar­tic­u­late an am­biva­lence that haunts these hy­brid habi­tats, one that might open up al­ter­na­tive ways of imag­in­ing the re­la­tions be­tween self, screen and world.

Artist Statement

TUTOR project is a work in progress that I developed in 2006-2007 in Bilbao and in San Sebastian (Spain) within the framework of DISONANCIAS. DISONANCIAS is an interdisciplinary project, founded in 2005 by Xabide Group, to promote the relationship between artistic creativity and technological innovation and to establish a new dialogue between the business world (and its technological environment), the artists’ world (and its creative development) and society – the ultimate beneficiary of the results of innovation. During 2006-2007 I was artist in residency in LEIA Scientific Foundation. As a part of the Integrated Safety Unit, I was asked to carry out research on safe environments to integrate disabled people with the aid of advanced design and simulation tools under the Design for All concept.

Panel: On the Persistence of Hardware

In this pro­posal, it is sub­mit­ted to ap­proach the dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies through the ques­tion of their ma­te­ri­al­ity. To do this, the ref­er­ences will be taken from the­o­ret­i­cal and con­cep­tual propo­si­tions by some french philoso­phers. It means the philo­soph­i­cal con­cep­tions on new tech­nolo­gies con­cern­ing the ma­te­ri­al­ity that emerged from the ex­hi­bi­tion named  “Les immatériaux” or “The im­ma­te­ri­als” by Jean-François Ly­otard in 1985, con­ceived in the con­text of the post­mod­ern con­di­tion, and until the essay  “Econ­omy of hy­per­ma­te­r­ial and psy­chopower” pub­lished by Bernard Stiegler in 2009, and analysed in the sit­u­a­tion that he calls a hy­per­indus­trial so­ci­ety in an ul­tra­mod­ern per­spec­tive, this with­out for­get­ting the speci­fici­ties of dig­i­tal art de­fined by the artist Ed­mond Cou­chot and the philoso­pher Nor­bert Hillaire in their book  “Dig­i­tal art, or when the tech­nol­ogy comes to the art world”, edited in 2003.

Elec­tronic, com­puter pro­gram, vir­tual in­ter­faces, all con­stituents of the com­puter, make seem the dig­i­tal as im­ma­te­r­ial. Elec­tronic by its in­tan­gi­ble phys­i­cal ap­pear­ance, the com­puter pro­gram by its cal­cu­la­tion and its lan­guages, sys­tems that are al­ready sym­bols, and so, some ab­strac­tions. Don’t we call a com­puter an ab­stract ma­chine?  But, how about that?  The im­ma­te­r­ial has been used by Ly­otard to de­fine the new state of plas­tic art pro­duced with  com­puter, but also its sim­u­lated tex­ture com­posed by com­plex cal­cu­la­tions. And here is com­ing the pro­gram and its cen­tral role in the work­ing of com­puter: it is a speci­ficity of the dig­i­tal, up to Cou­chot and Hillaire. But for Stiegler, the in­vis­i­bil­ity of the ma­te­r­ial does not make it dis­ap­pear : in the con­trary, the in­fi­nitely lit­tle is still a state of ma­te­r­ial, and the prob­lem to con­sider is the form of the ma­te­ri­al­ity as an in­for­ma­tion.  This paper would like to de­velop a sort of his­tor­i­cal de­f­i­n­i­tion and con­cep­tion of the new tech­nolo­gies of in­for­ma­tion through these philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts.

My expressed formal focus of interest has been for several years what I call the “aesthetics of behaviour”, a new aesthetic field opened up by the possibility of cultural interaction with machine systems. A decade of making and using real-space interactive installations has left me with a deep dissatisfaction that the common mode of interaction is all too simplistic. The paradigm in most cases is a simple positional one. If you are at position “x,y”, event “a” happens. This is a real-space extrapolation of the conventional hypertextual paradigm of free navigation within a rigidly predefined range of possibilities. My formal goal in Fugitive is to build a system which speaks “the language of the body”, which responds to the bodily dynamics of the user over time.

I have argued in the past that the notion of universality of interface is untenable because interfaces are culturally bound. Nonetheless, in “Fugitive” I am attempting to construct a reactive system which is “intuitive” to the extent that changes in the response of the system are triggered by physiologically meaningful events. There is no textual, linguistic or iconic component. These events control the flow of digitised video imagery in such a way that no two people walking the same path in the installation will produce the same video sequence, because their bodily dynamics are different. “Fugitive” is a sort of cinematic hypertext in this regard. “Fugitive” is not, primarily a device for looking at pictures (or video), it is not a pictorial hyper-narrative. It is a behaving system.

The user is engaged in a complex interaction with the system. The content and location of the image is the response of the system. It is about the act of looking, embodied looking, and it is about the metaphorisation of looking in video. The title “Fugitive” emphasises the evanescence of the experience of embodied looking. The exercise is fraught with paradox, especially for the scopically-fixated viewer. The user is presented with a darkened circular space the only changing feature of which is a changing image, and yet the user is encouraged to understand the image primarily as an indicator of the response of an otherwise invisible system, rather than as an image or image sequence of any semantic significance. An interactive work is a machine, and one must learn to operate a machine. Thus a central issue in interactive art is the question of the learning curve. Often a work is so simple in the dynamics of interaction that it is easy to understand but immediately boring. Alternatively, works are so complex that the average user cannot discern the way in which they are controlling or effecting the events, it appears random.

In avoiding these two undesirables, the artist must either choose a well known paradigm, such as monitor-mouse-buttons or automobile controls, or the user must learn the interface. But nobody wants to do a tutorial or read a manual before they experience the artwork. Thus, my goal is to fashion systems which present themselves as facile to a new user, but which progressively and imperceptibly increase in complexity as the familiarity of the user increases. Clearly the user must desire to continue to explore the work. This is a basic requirement of any artwork. The presentation will outline the relation of Fugitive to previous spatial interactives. The computational and hyper-narrative structure of the work will be explained, as will the dimensions of interactivity. Pragmatic issues of vision system and motion control design will be discussed. Video and diagrams will be shown.

Funding Round Table And Pitching Den

This paper proposes an inquiry into the idea of continuums, challenging a number of professed dichotomies, particularly those that reference technology. I will focus on how we perceive, utilize and parse traditional divides between the virtual and the material. To that end, I use the phrase – virtual materiality – which describes the purposeful blurring, to the point of conflation, of screen-based digital production and, the seemingly other extreme, tangible hand-made objects.

Following the trajectory of the virtual/material dichotomy as it stems from a classicist position of the mind/body split, which has manifested into male/female divides, I propose feminist theory as a potent tool to effectively analyze the artistic and sociological implications of virtual materiality.

Mess, obfuscation, bedlam, redundancy – these qualities, redolent of humanity, are typically considered the antitheses of insight. They confound compartmentalization. Perhaps the necessarily chaotic can be an impetus for ‘soft’ thinking that relinquishes conceits of specialization. Art is, in essence, a repudiation of the polemics of division. In its essence, it seeks to confound division and distinction. Artists strive to complicate at precisely the same time as they simplify. The simultaneous existence and commingling of two extremes is a liberation from categorization and parceling – a continuum that curls back on itself.

A critical questioning of the separation of computer based technology from other technologies is at the heart of this proposal. Where does the virtual start and stop? Is the digital always virtual? How can we ‘know’ the virtual without a material manifestation? How can the material not impart the virtual as it is the conduit of knowledge of the world and others?

The reality of online virtual worlds is they tend to be highly charged, sexualized places, full of fruitful data to examine contemporary male/female ideology and practice. As well, traditional views equate technology with machine, attributed as male, and related to the sublime and power; whereas beauty is often the stand-in and proponent for the aesthetics of the organic, and gendered female. I believe critique around the issue of beauty can provide pivotal clues and associations for my discussion of virtual materiality with a feminist perspective.

Panel: Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 2

Wide­spread par­tic­i­pa­tion on so­cial net­works and use of lo­ca­tion-aware de­vices have helped cre­ate an ever-in­trigu­ing re­la­tion be­tween the in­for­ma­tion that peo­ple pub­lish on­line and phys­i­cal lo­ca­tion. Using cur­rent gen­er­a­tion smart phones to pro­duce im­ages and videos, such as Apple’s iPhone, by de­fault at­taches geo-tagged in­for­ma­tion to con­tent. Con­cur­rently, pub­lic APIs, such as from YouTube, pro­vide struc­tured ac­cess to con­tent with geo-lo­ca­tion, mak­ing it rel­a­tively easy to link an on­line video back to an ac­tual phys­i­cal site. As net­worked dig­i­tal ex­change makes the so­cial and ge­o­graph­i­cal ever more shift­ing, a po­ten­tial is cre­ated for un­ex­pected re­la­tions and en­coun­ters. How­ever does this po­ten­tial give us the home in­va­sion or the pos­si­bil­ity of a more play­ful, serendip­i­tous en­counter? In my pre­sen­ta­tion I will in­ves­ti­gate both sides of the ques­tion and in­tro­duce “Fu­ture Guides for Cities” a three-year re­search pro­ject that ex­plores the map­ping of cities through on­line video archives and the peo­ple who cre­ate them.

The virtual reality performance piece ‘Gallery Guide’ is related to Atherton’s work with performance art in the 1970’s, when he often used film or video in the way he now uses virtual reality, as a counterpoint to ‘real time’ performance. ‘Gallery Guide’ however would not exist without his experience of making ‘site specific’ sculpture throughout the 1980’s and 90’s. These two areas of fine art practice performance and sculpture seemingly quite disparate from one another in fact have a lot in common in their shared concern for the viewer’s position i.e their time and place. In seventies performance art ‘real time’ was a paramount issue driven by a desire to connect with the viewer’s time which was also the time the performance was taking place in. Similarly, the now much missed used term,’site specific’ became a driving force for a generation of sculptors who wanted their work to share the same place as the viewer.

“With the advent of virtual reality which forefronts both the time and the place of the viewer (who has now become the participant) I find myself ‘going against the grain’. By this I mean that rather than collude with the viewer in the merger of two realities, the one that they are really in and the virtual one, I am much more interested in disrupting this merger. This might seem at odds with the very nature of virtual reality but by reminding the viewer/participant of the differances between where they really are and where the virtual world tells them they are it is possible to create an experience of two realities simultaneously which is far richer and far more rewarding than the fantasy world of just one.”

Gambiologia is a Brazilian creative hub which adopts the country’s tradition of “gambiarra” (“life hacks” or hechizos) as a source of inspiration for works on art and technology. It materializes itself on the production of multifunctional devices which are recognized either as electronics, installations, sculptures or decorative objects. In this workshop, we will collect unused objects from urban landscape and hack them in order to create upcycled design objects. For that, we will explore the concept of “industrial coincidence”, in which two industrial objects with distinct origins fit perfect in each other. We will also provide basic electronics theory and materials that will be applied in the student’s creations.

Gambiocycle is a Mobile Broadcast unit. It is a tricycle containing electronic gear for interactive video projection and digital graffiti in public space. The vehicle is inspired by anonymous ambulant salesmen who ride on wheels through Brazilian cities, mostly selling products or doing political advertisement. Gambiocycle subverts this logic by gathering elements of performance, happening, electronic art, graffiti and “gambiarra” (makeshift, kludge): what it advertises is only a new era of straight democratic dialogue between people who participate in the interventions and their cities.

This essay compares two states of technical objects: the prototype and the gambiarra. While the first is a well-known concept, whose meaning and applications are fairly clear, the second is very particular to the Brazilian context, but could be reasonably associated with practices such as bricollage and making do. I’d argue that these conditions constitute opposite epistemological and historical perspectives over technological development. This hypothesis draws heavily from the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Gilbert Simondon, Vilém Flusser and Jacques Derrida. We depart from the idea that the prototype is an in-between, insufficient object, critical of its own function. However, it critically is always directed towards the closure of the technical entity and the ensuing stabilization of the system. In that sense, it reinforces the positivistic agenda of technological development. We propose to look for a counterpoint of the prototype in the Brazilian gambiarra. Gambiarra is an improvised amendment to a dysfunctional artefact, normally by the means of its combination with another object. Just like prototypes are created based on expectations and the projection of integrity, gambiarras are born from deception and failure. To recover function, the superficial individuality of the artefact must be sacrificed. Simultaneously, another object reveals potentials that were not expected. Their combination results in a technical ensemble whose individuation is performed by the user. Hence, if the prototype narrows the technical object down into concreteness, the gambiarra abstracts it further, at the same time revealing potentials and limitations of its discrete parts.

Contemporary cities are economic centers and engines of innovation but they are also generators of poverty, pollution and home to plenty social problems. Administrating a city is balancing out all these factors, admitting that many are just too difficult to grasp.

Games in the form of rule –based, quantitative urban simulation models are more capable of describing, simulating and predicting urban scenarios but also to pro-actively create new urban landscapes. Games can be easily accessible and understood, so they allow non-experts to participate in procedures that would normally occur behind closed doors, truly a paradox, given the fact that the city is something that concerns all of us. Future Institute in New York, predicts that 3 billion hours a week are spent on online games. Even if designers could engage 1% of the global amount of players in true urban planning processes online, that would already be a significant population of people responsively altering their urban environment.

In the recent years, a big amount of initiatives have appeared that use game- like structures to engage people in an active attitude towards their cities. The development of social media and the widespread use of smart phones are two major enablers for these platforms that allow their users to map problems, propose solutions and ideas or express their desires about their neighbourhoods. I. In this paper we will examine a series of virtual platforms that, using game-like structures, try to answer real questions about real cities through the eyes of their inhabitants. Depending on the goal and structure of each of these platforms, public participation can lead to the administration of a city block, the organisation of a community garden, the redesign of a park or the development of new program for abandoned office building.

Poster Statement

Is the computer game a perfect way for artists to infiltrate pop culture? In this presentation I will look at the blurred line between computer game and interactive artwork and the problems artists face when trying to produce games. For example conservatism in the industry itself or draconian games classifications such as the ones being now implemented in Australia. Can gameplay produce meaning and culture? Is pleasure an important part of the art experience? Anticipating the action that will result from your touch, click, turn of the track ball or flick of the joystick creates moments of intensity which may empower or may manipulate the user. Is it the artist’s role to do one or the other or both. In games we can play with ideas of subjectivity through body options, weapon options, various forms of representation and the interaction with imaginary spaces. Gameplay especially on the Internet is enabling us to indulge in multiple personalities and explore strange shifts in our own subjectivity. In the rush to leave the meat behind, the disembodied self is relishing its new found flexibly and freedom. But the desire for and obsession with information seems to be reaching fetishistic proportions. We are constantly handing over information about ourselves to the point were it reinforces our identity to do so. I am digitized, therefore I am. I will explore these ideas through discussion and presentation of various interactive artwork/game/vapourware projects I am currently involved with such as “Fuzzy Love” and the “User Unfriendly Interface” produced in collaboration with Leon Cmielewski, VNS Matrix virtual theme parks and “Bad Code” a computer game being produced in collaboration with VNS Matrix artist collective.

Games for learning are often oriented towards normative school curricula and do not engage players beyond simple reward systems, but there are other ways to think about play that are deeper, more robust, and more meaningful. As potential sites for critically-minded, openended play, alternate reality games float in discursive space between game and not-game, creating environments for meaningful play that transcend current frameworks of education through games and create the potential for truly liberating play. This paper lays the foundation for the praxis of games for liberation, building from contemporary research and theory from fields in both games and education.

This panel proposes to demarginalize the role of gender in technology. It aims to create an increased awareness of the intricate relationship of gender issues to the most fundamental understanding of how technology impacts upon our lives.

Thinking concerning the role gender issues play in technologies is widely diverse. The purpose of this panel is to demarginalize the role of gender in technology by recognizing the diversity of views as a rich environment for understanding seemingly unrelated issues about the role of technology in our lives as artists. An increased awareness of the intricate relationship of gender to the most fundamental understanding of how technology impacts our lives, benefits discussions concerning issues including access, collaboration, differing cultural and ethnic views of technology, reason for advocating artistic use of technology, epistemological and ontological assumptions, as well as ethical implications in the development and use of technology.

Few would disagree that men and women are different, but few of us agree on how or why. I would like to review some highlights of scientific research in differences that seem especially relevant to new media and discuss how these differences are situated in culture, social practice, and technology. This knowledge can inform both product and practice, including how we think about designing and creating new media.

In the face of continuous leaps in technology, male digital artists seem especially prone to such deviant conditions as pixel envy, hard drive inadequacy, the CPU territorial imperative, premature exhibitionism, and recidivist high tech onanism. While the truly avant-garde induces tremors in the established order, the techno-garde impostor brandishing the cuffing edge substitutes intimidation and a misdirected adolescent desire to shock, and is unwittingly at the service of a rear-garde, uncritical modernist faith in the progress of technology inherited from the rationalist program of the enlightenment.

This discussion will present ideas of cross dressing on the net, as well as talk about the profusion of alternate identities, recombinant entities, and the look of cheating in cyberspace. The discussion will be supported with video clips.

Abstract

The electronic arts have their roots in the gendered society of the computer culture. This culture is comprised of a vocabulary, conceptual structures and strategies that reflect the male subculture of computer hardware and software developers. The social construct of computing embodies a male orientation to the technical personality of the computing machine, the knowledge and skills necessary to utilize this machine, and the political, commercial, and militaristic applications that have been developed. Consequently, women are “outsiders”. In confronting the gendered character of computing, women have developed ways of using computers differently from the prescribed modes. Creative computer usage comes about through the process of women changing what is for them unsatisfying modes of working.

As in scientific computing, women in the electronic arts negotiate with computing different than men, and consequently have established different ways of injecting the computer into the creative process. These methods inform the evolution of new forms of art as well as computing. One alternative form of computing is a relational model that promotes a nonlinear process of exploration and experimentation, with interactive negotiating; visually, gesturally and verbally. The structural relationships are not predefined and thus stimulate the viewer to choose their own points of view, to create their own connections and establish their own direction. The computer becomes a catalyst. A second model is one of kin-aesthetics in which the computer is capable of providing opportunities for integrated sensory experiences, facilitating a complete interplay of all of the senses. The computer is a multidimensional studio environment. A third model of computing is one in which software and hardware can be personalized by each individual user. Each of us must be able to arrange and personalize our own working environment like we do our studio, our kitchen, or our garden. In addition, software should be intelligent enough to generate processes and functions that are described by the user. A final alternative model for computing uses structures and processes from nature as a model for computing. These models integrate the female voice and a feminist perspective into computing, creating a pluralistic environment.

The Gendynish algorithm is software that runs on Arduino-class microprocessors to produces sounds similar to Iannis Xenakis’ dynamic stochastic synthesis. This article outlines the origins of stochastic synthesis and describes the Gendynish algorithm and associated electronic instrument development and performance outcomes. This algorithm takes a somewhat unconventional approach to Arduino audio. In doing so it demonstrates how once cutting-edge computer music practices are now much more accessible and that the spirit of creative expression through audio technologies remains alive and well.

On the surface, generative music has been successful in styles that provide clear rules for creators: tonal music [Cope 2005], jazz [Lewis 2000], Electronic Dance Music [Eigenfeldt and Pasquier 2011]. While such rule-based systems offer initial success, difficulties arise through the need of expressing finer gradations of rules. A more flexible approach is by learning through analysis of a given corpus. Machine learning, as demonstrated within Music Information Retrieval (MIR), is a hot topic of research, although still very much in its infancy. Collins, for example, stated his automated EDM analysis system “cannot be claimed to be on a par with the musicologist’s ear” [Collins 2012]. The Generative Electronica Research Project has undertaken a long-term investigation into creating EDM through generative methods, using a corpus of 100 human-transcribed tracks as models. As the music generation is autonomous, no interaction with humans occurs during generation, and no artistic decisions are made in real-time: in other words, all creative decisions are coded. Decisions such as how beats are constructed and varied are all derived from the corpus through analysis, without quotation, and without resorting to personal algorithms, however successful those may have been in the past. This paper will describe our methods, and present examples of autonomous generation by the system.

This paper explores the ideas of mobility and power using the case study Pedal Power for Bybrua, commissioned for ‘Stavanger 2008’ – Capital of Culture. Three pedal powered generators were made available to the community of Pedersgata. During daylight hours these devices were located in a number of public sites and situations. During nighttime, the stored energy was released as part of a pedestrian lighting system installed beneath the City Road Bridge ‘Bybrua’. This paper will focus on the only mobile generator; Bridgit known for its capacity to offer transit from one side of the bridge to the other. In an oil rich nation what would it mean to introduce more modest forms of energy production? How would the installation of a human powered lighting system change the way people perceive the underpass space? How might ‘human power’ change human behavior? What might the social, economic, and environmental benefits be? This project demonstrates a number of practical interventions inspired by the critical writings of Ivan Illich and Henri Lefebvre. These sculptural devices allow the problems of contemporary mobility to be seen as generative opportunities; both in terms of dialogue and energy.

Context (Intro)
Throughout the World the number of large-scale wind and solar projects is proliferating. Such schemes dwarf their surroundings and often face opposition from local communities. Whilst this drive towards a more sustainable energy mix ensures a bright future for renewables, the ‘passive energy gain’ offered (embodied by solar, tidal, and wind power) also has the potential to reinforce a public malaise in terms of consumption. “The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs”. (Illich, 1974: 22) The fundamental question then, has to be that of confronting the public with their levels of consumption and reducing those levels to a point where they are sustainable.

Generative Art is Art, Science and Technology working together. This creative process produces an endless sequence of unique and complex events, as in nature. A new icona for this era. This Generative Idea is strongly recognizable through each CODE as natural mirrors.

Humans are always interacting with the environment in the direct and not- direct ways. We have affected many organisms by engineering ecosystems to suit human comfort. Invisible microorganisms play significant roles in the recycling organic and non-organic materials particularly in the decomposition of natural wastes. Microbiota is the community of microbes inhabiting our body and helps us in improving health and preventing diseases. The piece “Generative Membrane” materialize this abstract concept of human interacting with microbes. The structure created by digital bacteria generated from bio-inspired algorithm to cover the sculpture is realized by implementing sensors in the textile object, which reacts to touch, moisture, heat and triggers by means of its shape mapped projections and amalgamated sounds.

Session: Code and Generative Art

We will look into the artistic practice of computational ecosystems, attempting to see behind its formal novelty and invention. Computational ecosystems operate in a distinct model of narrative. The concept of generative narrative
discussed here illustrates what Umberto Eco denes as ‘open work’. First published in Italian in 1962, Eco’s critical book Open Work, addresses questions which are found (also) transversely in Generative Art. Modern music, literature and art are said to operate in a state of potential, of unexplored possibilities which the work may admit. The open-ended nature of the works offer an unlimited range of possible readings, works are ‘open’ to continuous generation of internal relations, which the addressee must uncover and select in his act of perceiving the totality of incoming stimuli.
Generative narrative, is a concept we can nd in electronic literature. We extend this concept discussing it within the  framework of the computational ecosystems. We will look into Lizbeth Klastrup’s concepts of ‘multi-user digital textuality’ and ‘interpretative framework’ to assist in this project and  understand how the material aspects of code participate in the narrative processes.

To illustrate these ideas, we discuss two case studies, xTNZ and Senhora da Graça, two computational ecosystems, where, we argue, this model of narrative conveys context and artistic meaning to the works.

A discussion of the relationship of generative art to generative systems with the artist’s personal vision as founder of the 1970-1980 Generative Systems program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.. Generative art is presented as primarily associated with the computer’s capacity for ‘setting in motion’ an automated system to create art. It is considered as a part of the artificial life, evolutionary art movement. Generative Systems artists, on the other hand, explored contemporary communication systems using manual, mechanical, electronic, photonic and biological tools. A focus on the art process rather than art making resulted in courses dealing with process, energy and the visualization of time.

This paper will briefly review the development of evolutionary programs in design and art, explaining how genetic algorithms can be applied to technical, design and artistic problems. The main part of the paper will explain and demonstrate the surprising results that can be obtained by linking (quite naturally) evolutionary programs and genetic techniques. A variety of very different applications will be described ranging from evolving proportional letter forms and architectural features through to evolving imaginary forms in space. The special potential for using genetic algorithms with ill-defined or conflicting criteria will also be described. Experiments with the construction of neural nets for form-creating activities will also be shown.

Beginning with the experience of listening – the perceptual flux of sonic stimuli overwhelming the body – Labelle is led to consider the process by which music arises out of and refers back to this sensual experience of listening. The continual unfolding of the sounds around us exist as a perceptual phenomena within and against which we locate ourselves the sensual flux of sonic stimuli forms patterns through which the world becomes knowable. Yet this sonic excess exists as more than just information. It unfolds as part of the flow of the beating of time and place, the very sensuality of the material world in which we are enmeshed. Music as sound is constituted by the phenomena of listening – its very materiality is defined by the perceptual flux of sonic stimuli. ln this way music is always somehow wrapped up in the soundscape of the physical world. Yet as a cultural project it also extends the phenomena of the sound-world. This extension functions as an imaginary response to the materiality of the world: it defines its own space, traces a tender map of a possible reality.

Geodesic Sound Helmets (referred to as GSHelmets for brevity) will be a series of immersive and interactive personal sound environments. Currently a work-in-progress, GSHelmets are large geodesic dome-shaped helmet objects containing surround sound flat panel/flexible loudspeakers (FPS), motion detectors and breathing sensors. The use of FPS technology allows the helmets to be slimline and lightweight, where the interior of the helmet is seamlessly integrated into a singular component. Such a design is essential to the philosophy of GSHelmets as the comfort, both physiological and psychological, of the participant is paramount.

When a participant walks into the space they are invited to put their head inside different ‘helmets’ to hear three-dimensional manipulated soundscapes from locations including (but not limited to) Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Spain. Motion sensors will be built into the helmet to allow the unit to be switched on automatically when a participant interacts with the object by standing with their head inside it. Similarly, when the participant leaves, the object will turn off the sound. A breathing sensor (i.e., air-flow and humidity) located approximately 10-15cm from the participant’s mouth will react in real-time to manipulate the soundscapes according to the individual’s breathing pattern: the sound is changed as the person breathes faster or slower, more deeply or more shallowly. Surround sound spatialisation in the helmets will initially be through amplitude panning and phase decorrelation, with a view to implementing state-of-art near field 3D sound spatialisation algorithms.

GSHelmets explores differing roles of artist and audience, interactive installation within public interior spaces, new technologies within art, and the importance of physicality. As an exhibition, interactive installation and research collaboration between artist, engineer and audience, GSHelmets questions the validity of the author/artist as sole creator and suggests that the artist lays a foundation for the public to mould and manipulate into his or her own artwork or composition. Thus, the artist’s role within GSHelmets is that of facilitator, while the public become composers and listeners.

(Long paper)

Keywords: New media, new media art, aesthetics, geopolitics, politics.

Rhetorics conceived in geopolitically powerful contexts fail in allowing for the different relationships between art and politics that appear in the periphery. This paper analyzes this from a framework of cognitive capitalism. We identify a need for a sociopolitical vocabulary in new media art rhetoric that takes into account the geopolitical context. By reproducing the center–periphery model, peripheral art is reduced to a dichotomy proper of the modernizing discourse and to the arduous task of developing a replacement of the stories that constitute “the other”. Nevertheless, we argue that it is possible to assert the existence of both a distinct reality and the parallel construction of a language that transcends the re-reading of international tendencies from a local or “localist” perspective.

INTRODUCING GENEALOGY OF SPACE through concepts as GEOPOLITICS / MAPPING / CARTOGRAPHY. It is a theoretical concept based in Nietzsche, Genealogy of Moral; George Perec, Species of Spaces; Gaston Bachelar, The poetics of Space; the definitions of Panoptic and Heterotopy by Foucault, and also The Auters Spaces. It takes referees from Milleaux Plateau by Gilles Deleuze. Also, Paul Virilio in Speed and information. Alarm in cyberspace! An article for aleph arts, announces concepts as Geosphere, Geopolitics and Geostrategy for a new era in real time. Since the Cold War the dominion of public social space is determining and building the Hierarchy of spaces among different distinctions as Dystopia. Utopia. Atopia. Non-site. TAAZ. Borders. Surveillance. Internet. Cyberspace.  Neterotopies. Outer space, Universe. Etc. The geospatial studies imply satellite policies and mapping devices. This may refer to a society which does not have territorial borders and is also dealing with the causes and damage on human in the future. During the Cold War arms race, the nuclear policies treatment was to justify the costs of GPS, vital for nuclear policies and to determinate the Ballistic Missile launches position.

It is also known that geographical data was collected by U.S. defense mapping agency during Golf War 1990/1991. Contrary to war policies, the European Environment Agency is using a new mapping tool that allows users to see land-cover information. Also ACNUR is currently working with data satellites. Among other artist working with satellites imaginary, mapping and cultural policies, Tjasa Kancler (Paradigma) collects data about the US Missile defense proposal for Europe based in an antimissiles system at the eastern European countries, obviously based in satellites uses and des-territorialized outer-space policies. Trevor Paglen shows a real-time position of classified American military and intelligence spacecraft. Laura Kurgan uses satellites location devices to map real spaces inside the museums and Peter Sforza takes use of satellites to capture images of the earth. Eduardo Kac in Satellite Art: an interview with Nam June Paik deals with militarism, technology and evolution (progress) under awareness and risk conditions with carefulness in the electronic media.

This paper presents composition and system design across two contrasting dance/media pieces, created contemporaneously, having very different affordances and constraints. In each case, the structure of the music and its sonic details were driven by the movements of the dancers through the use of electromyogram and motion sensing, machine learning and adaptive transitions between sections. The first piece was a collaboration with the National Ballet School of Canada in which twenty-one dancers from different countries arrived in time for a single rehearsal before public performances.

The second piece was developed over the course of multiple sessions with a team of media artists and dancers, using existing cultural metaphors related to the elements in order to create a shared focus on gestural language, providing a shared perspective on non-human agency that resided “above” the level of movement, sound or light. The first piece was much more top-down due to realworld constraints as well as affordances of the genre, while the second was designed as a bottom-up approach from its beginnings. In each case there were important elements of fixed structuring as well as emergent gestures across sound/movement/light that resulted from the interactions of the dancer collective and the emergent agencies of the interactive systems employed.

This paper describes Gestus, a digital art project that investigates cinema as an art of gesture. The project comprises an archive of found footage from various genres and periods, all of which emphasize body gestures. Each sequence has been digitally processed using a custom software that analyzes its movements and compares them with the motion content of other sequences in the archive. The software uses this information to reorder the frames of each sequence and so alter the expressive content of the gestures depicted in them. The algorithm is a machine that (re)writes the gestures. The processed sequences constitute an alternative cinematic archive that can be exhibited as a multichannel video installation.

This paper describes the conceptual background to the project. Gestus was inspired by 19th century motion studies and by the simple actions recorded in early silent films. This tradition documented and displayed gesture as such, often against neutral or dark backgrounds. It isolated gesture from any spatial or temporal location and focused attention on its intrinsic kinetic properties. As philosopher Giorgio Agamben has noted, the original vocation of cinema was the purification, analysis, and exhibition of gesture. The hegemony of Hollywood narrative cinema, however, marginalized this gestural obsession. As character-driven storytelling became the dominant model of mainstream filmmaking, the purity of gesture was subordinated to the demands of narrative structure. The Gestus project returns to gesture as the fundamental aspiration of cinema.

This essay describes how this project developed out of a critical investigation into the fundamental elements of the modern visual culture. It pays particular attention to the interplay between expressiveness and “mute speech” (Jacques Rancière) and the interplay of difference and repetition in the cinematic image.

Patricia Watts will share her journey developing a unique space related residency and exhibition project in New Mexico. She will present proposals for projects statewide including sites near Truth or Consequences and White Sands Recreation Area, as well as additional space related artists’ work. Watts’ interest in this thematic is to find ways to expand human consciousness from a macro perspective exploring our place in the universe, and how getting off the planet in our thinking can influence what it means to be here now on planet earth. Getting Off the Planet is a multi-year project co-curated by Jenée Misraje and developed in partnership with the Santa Fe Art Institute.

This panel features artist collaborators Charles Lindsay and Eric Hanson who have created a digital video work of a morphing proto-world titled CARBON-X for the IAIA Dome in Santa Fe; and Scott Kildall with Nathaniel Stern who are facilitating the sending of Twitter messages at the ISEA2012 Gala toward an exoplanet 20 light years away. They address the role technology based artist practitioners can play in collaborations between the fields of astrophysics and art. Moderated by the co-curators of Getting Off the Planet, a multi-year site residency project curated by Patricia Watts and Jenée Misraje in partnership with the Santa Fe Art Institute.

This paper examines the relationship between the concept of the ‘social’ within an aspect of architectural practice. It explores how the detachment of a building site from an urban context through the use of fences and boards inhibits architectures ability to engage with social networks. Using de Certeau and in particular, Latour’s definition of the social as a critical benchmark, the author identifies the Arch-OS system as having a constructive methodology toward reconciling architectures use of digital systems in order to recover an integrated model of the social.

Architecture has been using computers for many years since IBM’s introduction of the first commercial computer aided design (CAD) system for General Motors in 1963. Since then, the advent of networked desktop PCs has allowed small businesses and academic centers to use computers to share work around the clock and around the globe, as well as being able to work simultaneously on single CAD documents across a network. In 1990 Mitchell used of the term ‘society of design’, derived from Marvin Minsky’s metaphor ‘society of mind’ to forecast how complex design problems may be solved through distributed actions.

Getting Together is an interactive electronic sculptural experiment in wireless social interaction, applying biomorphic textures to fabric, and emergence by failure. The work consists of several tentacles, which imitate, both in texture, and motion, living beings. They may coil away, out of reach, as the audience interacts with them. Originally, the work was a negotiation between the audience at large, and one audience member whose body was electronically connected to the sculpture. Touches to the sculpture were transferred to the person. The interface wearer, reacting to their situation, could cause the tentacles to coil away. This work changed over time, technical issues giving a new kind of biomorphism to the machine. Breaking free from an audience-driven motion, the tentacles developed their own independent, fearful consciousness. Now, rather than question the audience’s physical interactions with itself, the work questioned the audience’s interactions with this strange new entity, and by extension, questioned their interactions with “outsiders” in general.

Ghost City is a continually changing website that focuses on the representation of the city by the mass media. It uses the space of the web as a sculptural space, allowing viewers to interact with animated graphics to delve deeper and deeper into an imaginary city. Ghost City is a labyrinthine environment through which viewers can navigate, either following the linear narrative that unfolds by moving from page to page, or they can delve into the non-linear chaos of random links.

Jody Zellen will present her recent interactive installations. In her work she explores architectural spaces as well as digital spaces, making projects that are both site specific and unexpected. Her works mirror the experience of navigating a charged metropolitan area. Through a bombardment of disparate images her pieces celebrate the complexity and unpredictability of urban space. A walk through the city becomes a vehicle for a meditation on space, time, and human interaction. Interested in the patterns, structure and design of the urban environment, rather than document the cities she sees, she employs media-generated representations of contemporary and historic cities as raw material for aesthetic and social explorations.

Gila 2.0 visual signage is displayed at the Gila Wilderness trailheads or roadside, and in other graphical formats. The focus of the signage is the reintroduced Mexican Wolf, centrally positioned in the nature/culture debate that arises when interests (non-human as well as human) intersect. Seen either as the endangered poster child for native wilderness or as a competing predator, the Mexican Wolf coexists with landowners, livestock, game hunters, pets and eco-tourists. The signage leverages native “prehistoric” Mimbres/Mogollon designs – the animistic and geometric pottery that has become a graphic signature for the Southwest – and uses tracking data gathered from the radiocollared wolves, in order to visualize the complex set of relationships that comprise a contemporary ecosystem. (Silver City).

DK96 is the name of one of the most famous girls in Japan. The girl, Kyoko Date, appeared last year, and became popular among teenagers as a virtual idol. She the ultimate ‘idol’, who is bright, friendly, sexy and speaks some foreign languages. Japan’s largest entertainment talent agency, Hori production Co. and a major advertising agency, Hakuhodo, have put huge amount of money into this virtual idol project. Now, DK96 has succeeded in having a radio program and has appeared on the covers of popular magazines. She started to ‘live’ in our society.

Namie Amuro, a 19 year-old female singer, is a super star in Japan. She has long legs, a slender, tanned body and a beautiful face.A computer game company, SEGA recently has created”virtual Amuro” who mimics exactly Amuro’s performance, dance and songs in 3D CG. She sings while making quick stylish movement, that fascinate real Amuro fans. Like female characters in computer games, these virtual girls are obviously designed to be attractive to boys. Some young boys prefer girls found in computer games to real girls. They feel that real girls don’t quite meet their tastes, whereas virtual idols or girls in animation movies and games are controllable.

KO-SU-PU-RE (costume play) is also popular phenomenon among large numbers of Japanimation (Japanese cartoon movie) followers. They make costumes of their favorite animation characters and wear them to parties for other like-minded people to share their enthusiasm. They play the characters’ roles, identifying themselves as living creatures. In other words, they are the living Avatar in the real world. Avatar, originally recognized as a holy figure in Indian mythology has been appropriated to name characters/people living in virtual space in the computer. As the Avatar in the virtual community, you can be free from unilaterally determined identity such as those in your passport. You can change your name, gender, height, race, nationality, character and even your outward form. All these items which have been considered necessary to prove your identity have become mere changeable decorations.You might be able to meet some citizens or figures in that virtual town. Those citizens are the reflections of the people/members who are playing a role of each of their roles. Members are allowing their characters to act realistically. The story is created interactively through contact with other citizens and members. Thus, the line which separates virtual town life from real life is rather vague. Avatars are their diversified self. A monitor screen as a border of identification and differentiation between self and Avatar, is fading out. Playing Avatar aspect can be found in the art scenes, too.

This paper presents the underlying philosophy, design and initial implementation of a project which applies the distributed version control system git to a collective coding process oriented towards computer music composition and performance. The project, git show , is an open-source composition and instrument design experiment which re-assigns authorship to a different participant on a weekly basis. Each participant engages with previously committed recordings, scores, and versions of the instrument, and then presides over further development with total freedom.

The rules and structure which constitute the weekly iterations of git show are modified with each passing session, done so relative to observations made about participant activity and emerging questions about the project, leading the principal investigator to consider git show as a meta-composition. We discuss the philosophical grounding of the project relative to the framework of distributed creativity, relating our process to the notion of lineages of creative technique between electroacoustic composers. By providing a means to interact with ideas across varying stages of development, we propose that git is well-suited to capture divergent and confluent traces of ideation between individuals and artefacts such as one might historically trace between composers with respect to the synthesis methods they employ.

In my opinion Glitchspeak is a vocabulary of new expressions; an always growing language, that can be used as an exoskeleton of progress. These acts teach something about the inherent norms, presumptions and expectations of former utterances. They can make apparent what is not being said or what is intentionally left out. But, I also realize that the gospel of glitch art sings about new norms implemented by corruption and as such, can have sublimely devastating consequences.

The Glitch Studies Manifesto, which I published in January of2010, has gotten a lot of appreciation from many different fields and perspectives; for instance, the manifest found a place in the prestigious File exhibition in Brazil, was presented in Video Vortex in the Atomium in Brussels (and many other conferences) will be published in a book and was even performed as a live television event, together with Goto80.

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

The punch card Jacquard loom was the in­spi­ra­tion for the An­a­lyt­i­cal En­gine and ar­guably the mod­ern day com­puter. In­spired by this, I cre­ated a se­ries of glitched weav­ings, Un­ti­tled (screen­cap­tures), that uti­lize the Apple 2 com­puter and com­put­er­ized Jacquard loom. Dur­ing this pre­sen­ta­tion, I will talk about my use of these tech­nolo­gies in my art mak­ing.

This panel tackles questions dealing with cultural diversity when facing the logic of globalizing and standardizing the market; with making digital culture more accessible; and with the role of social, economic and political players in a context that is simultaneously local and global.

Moderator: Nils Aziosmanoff

Panelists:

• Etienne Krieger
• Philippe Quéau
• Andre Santini
• Louis Bec

Glowing Lichen is a media-art installation that explores a series of sensitive connections between a physical-digital artefact and an audience. This installation comprehends two luminous organisms that cohabit in the same ecosystem and react to the surrounding environment in distinct ways. Each organism has an individual pre-disposition, i.e., personality — it can gravitate across four types: calm, happy, nervous and aggressive. As a result of being sensitive to the audience behaviors, interactions and environment changes, each organism feelings and ransformations will be triggered by these characteristics. Hence, we propose a reciprocal system where the way an audience behaves will influence the way a set of artificial organisms evolves. In the end, this results in a series of emergent behaviors of two artificial organisms growing unique aspects spawn by the environment they inhabit. Additionally, we invite the participants to reflect on their own interactions when inhabiting a space in a certain moment either as individuals or as a community of shared behaviors and perceptions.

Sectors of the contemporary media arts and performance communities are increasingly concerned with creating affective, participatory experiences for audiences. My practice-led research focus is on praxis with a dominant imperative towards the visceral and immersive, yet narrative is almost inevitably a guest. Such art practices are framed by theories of affective affordance, experience design and participatory design; they are mirrored by trends in entertainment industries such as theme parks and casinos. When William James argued that we run from a bear then we feel afraid, rather than we know we feel afraid, and then we run, he proposed the sequence of feeling/emotion (‘What is an emotion?’, 1884). When Deleuze and Guattari philosophised that our embodied consciousness is an integral part of a porous, boundary-shifting rhizome, they succinctly evoked contemporary communications and neuro-biological models (‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, 1987). When Brian Massumi contextualised experiments in neuro-psychology within artistic and philosophic discourses, signification as the dominant driver of consciousness was laid to rest (‘Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation’, 2002).

These key moments reflect movements away from the domination of western culture by signification, content and moderately shifting meaning. Today artists and performance makers are creating opportunities for audiences to engage with spaces and embodiment, processes and systems – in short affective, porous experiences that touch us pre-cognitively before signification is brought into play. The event-space is often mobile, and it aims to be a constituent and affective space for creating new relations. As Andrew Murphie  explains it, agency can now be understood as a process of “participation and becoming” (‘Inflexions’, vol 1, 2008) rather than a simple facility, a calling and an inclination to act. Specifically, I am exploring what forms of affect, experience and participation might facilitate and precipitate an “abstract [yet] experiential knowing of material” (Margie Medlin and Garth Paine, SEAM Conference, 2010). Looking at the implications for practitioners and audiences, I ask what creative strategies are needed to reconcile a purely affective experience for the audience, with participation, narrative and cognition.

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

Go HOME grows out of the recent history of the former Yugoslavia to include both European and American participants in dialogue around the meaning of ‘home’. By translating domestic space into a creative forum for art-making and dialogue, the project examines from multiple perspectives immigration and physical, psychological and cultural dislocation. Introducing the project artists will show a number of slides by which they’ll illustrate the main ideas of the project.

Panel Statement

Panel: Futurics

Father Interactive of the Order of the Binary Brothers, just recently unmasked by the tabloids as the founder of the Cult of the Fibonacci Series and former lead singer for MYLAR, the seventies fin de decade, no wave group with such forgettable hits as “Self-surgery, “Micro-wave atrocities, (Put your poodle in the micro-wave!)” “Meltdown” takes to the podium to deliver not the old, not the new but the generation neXt Testament – Eternal Investment strategies brought to you by the Digital Religious and Electronics Corporation (DREC).

With missionary zeal Father Interactive will explain the marketing techniques that have made Automatic Confession Machine such an outstanding success in Europe and North America. With evangelical fervor Father Interactive will reveal the very strategies he used to match wits in Zurich with theologians, marketing czars and investment quants from the Vatican even taking on a representative of the Dominicans (the very order that ran the Inquisition). Leveraging to the max the proprietary neural net software developed for the Automatic Confession Machine, Father Interactive will unveil the Seven Sacrament Product line for point of purchase sales all providing the same patented convenience of the touch of the “AMEN” key. Pay per confession is just the beginning of a vast new digital information service that offers both users (sinners) greater ease of use and religious service providers a competitive edge over the conventional brick and mortar religious service approach. Of special interest will be a  discussion of new financial instruments such as the Mortal Sin Mutual Fund. Invest now, be saved or drop out!

GoGirls ICT is a Juba, South Sudan-based non-profit initiative founded by a group of dedicated young women in the fields of computer science, hacktivism and peacebuilding. Following a philosophy of ‘Chain Based Trainings (CBTs)’ it focuses on mentoring independent, innovative and confident girls and women who can proudly compete with their male counterparts in the world of ICT. Founded on December 2015 south Sudan’s Capital city Juba. GoGirls ICT Initiative aims at Engaging, Educating and Empowering girls and Women in South Sudan in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM); with a focus especially on Technology. We started with small workshops with a few girls from University of Juba. These workshops stemmed from our quest to build confidence in these girls who were shy and had poor performance in class compared to their male counterparts in ICTs and same in sciences at lower primary and secondary schools.

Abstract (short paper)

The paper proposes to re-examine a critical potential of glitches for studying contemporary media and computational technologies. Specifically, it shows how the dominant user interaction and digital representation narratives based on the illusion of seamless interaction, fluid continuity and perfect automation, can be critically challenged through emphasizing visual glitches in media content and in the GUIs. The research uses Heidegger’s things taxonomy (Conspicuousness, Obtrusiveness, Obstinacy) to conceptualize the ontic and aesthetic status of glitches that are manifesting in contemporary real-time, cloud-based, multimedia software. Postphenomenological standpoints developed by Peter Paul Verbeek and Don Ihde are also used to support the argument. Contemporary technological milieu is examined in the light of the “post-digital” approach (advocated i.e. by David Berry, Florian Cramer, Soren Pold & Christian Ulrik Andersen). The “Pirate Cinema” project by Nicolas Maigret, which makes the hidden activity and geography of P2P file sharing visible and the “Universal Texture” project by Clement Valla, which critically analyzes glitches in Google Earth, are used as case studys.

Abstract

Controller and controlled are the transitional notions, their interchange ability can be discovered in diachronic as well as in the synchronic systems. However, if before it was possible to juxtapose the positions of controller and controlled, in the mass-media society the face-to-face opposition is vanishing in the network of cables and wires. As two different examples of the interactivity between controller and controlled, TV and computers might be considered.

Who gives birth to a controller? The answer (the question) is the one to the question (answer) of who is a controlled? Power gives birth to the separation of controller and controlled. And power is coming into the light through the possession of knowledge. Knowledge is always appearing at the expense of time (and on account of time). The result of the expense-of-time operation is epistemological profit. Which might be considered as morphogenetic field of epistemology, as capture-mechanisms working at the expense of the time lag (Nachträglichkeit) between future and present. The high speed of the process creates a situation of: from one side (Ego side), the illusion of overcoming of psychic trauma of the meeting with a fake reality (and any meeting with any kind of reality is trauma); and, from the other side (Inter-Ego, or Super-Ego side), the interweaving of human extensions into the common nervous network (M.McLuhan),  or noosphere (V. Vernadsky). This process might be considered at the same time as technological Aufhebung, as well as Selbst-Aufhebung. This situation on the level of controller-controlled leads to an inside scandal between Ego and Super-Ego, to the hypertrophy of conscience, and then to the possibility of dissociation of a human being, to the mechanisms of the syndrome of psychic automatism. The example of an exploitation of the ‘high-jacking’ of time and the syndrome of psychic automatism is virtual reality, a next religious Golem of consciousness, constructing ‘future gadget’ at the account of taking a being from the present to the ‘reality’ programmed and controlled by the past.

GPS Film is an artwork and invention that creates a new form of film-viewing experience by using the location of the viewer to control the story. From a specially-designed mobile device, a film is assembled in real time based on the location and movement of the person watching it—location-based mobile cinema. Now who we are and where we are can affect the entertainment experience.

The GPS Film project combines device programming, application programming, and cinematic content. A viewer travels with a handheld player that reads his location and physical journey through the capture of GPS coordinates and then plays scenes from a film that occur near his location. As the viewer continues to travel, the next GPS zone is entered, and the film shifts to scenes from that area. Due to the unique design of the script, the resulting film changes with each route, each direction, each speed, and each total distance yet continues a consistent theme, with recurring characters, and an overarching narrative.

People now watch movies on handheld devices on trains, in taxis, on busses, while walking. This new-found mobility is changing how we enjoy cinema. Additionally, game design, interactivity, wikis, and a host of other technologies are affecting the historic concept of a linear narrative and replacing it with spatial narrative forms. We’re becoming used to stories being told by exploring an environment. GPS Film takes these concepts off the computer and back into the real world. Story navigation becomes a physical, viewer-controlled experience, a journey of fiction ties directly to a journey of fact.

The user of a computer-based work operates as a subject under the conditions and restraints of the algorithm which generates and controls that work. The algorithm describes a grammar of possible events open to the interpretations of the user. The user’s responses to and interactions with the algorithm are judged in terms of legal and illegal operations. The algorithm is an act of law that sets forth a structure of potentials only ever realised through action and deed.

These propositions are addressed through a reading of Jewish Law informing an examination of interactivity in terms of personal ethics and signifying practice. The Law is a set of potentials for Jewish life, continually negotiated through one’s daily living, through which one identifies oneself as both subject and proponent. The deeds and festivals of Jewish observance recall, through the re-enactment of Biblical and legal texts, the historical basis of one’s subjectivity. Through one’s actions one is immersed in the Law, one interacts with the Law and realises the Law. Observance of the Law is an interpretative activity conducted in the first-person, present tense.

From this context the paper opens the questioning of our living with and within the law of algorithmic construction.

“Honey is a slow-moving liquid; while it undoubtedly has a certain consistency and allows itself to be grasped, it soon creeps slyly from the fingers and returns to where it started from. It comes apart as soon as it has been given a particular shape and, what is more, it reverses the roles by grasping the hands of whoever would take hold of it. The living, exploring, hand which thought it would master this thing instead discovers that it is embroiled in a sticky external object.” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty [1].

“Grasp of the Viscous Screen” explores Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and the complex chiasmic subject/object relations that occur within experience. [1] The proliferation of contact between body and technological screen bring about new complications in terms of embodied experience, as well as the need for new theorizations that account for the new materialist, corporeal and performative ontologies that arise in digital culture.

Honey makes explicit the intimate entanglement of body and screen surfaces which allows for a seemingly seamless flow of affect to flow from the here-body into the virtual and back again. The virtual is often spoken of as a separate reality that one becomes immersed in, but we can see here that the true nature of virtual experience is always a hybridity wrapped up in corporeal materialism. Media interaction necessarily involves affective actions of re:turning from the screen to the body and back again.

“Grasp of the Viscous Screen” brings forward a conceptualization of new media technology that gives recognition to the importance of the sensual, tactile sensorium bringing it into relevance to the affective and embodied turns. In this gesture, this series insists upon the importance of turning our focus to the nonrepresentational and non-ocular considerations of media and technology.

Further, this work gestures at a move beyond the screen-as-such, toward notions of post-screen in which the rectangular constraints of the screen perimeter disappear into a diffused interface that pervades physical space toward an invisible yet ubiquitous potentiality of digital interaction. This is in line with the popular discourse around the “Internet of Things”. This of course, is a paradoxical relation, in that an increasing tendency toward interfaces that foreground their materiality runs in parallel with their fading into invisibility, as well as the simultaneous paradox of the disappearance of the interface marks its increasing ubiquity.

This piece is the first part of an ongoing series of works that perform materialist interventions upon contemporary new media technologies to unravel the complex materialist notions that arise with the proliferation of glowing rectangular screen interfaces, and how their encounters with the fleshy, biological realities of the physical world bring forward a complex chiasmic encounter of public intimacy. [2]

Abstract

This paper is based on my current PhD study, which sets out to develop a new design approach – Gravitational Aesthetics. The research project examines and exploits today’s unprecedented means of manipulating bodily perceptions of gravity to create experiences that engage the whole body and imagination. Laying out the key findings of the research, this text stands both as an overview and design manifesto.

Gravity impacts upon us – our physical and intellectual selves – to such an extent that it is unimaginable that we could have evolved the way we have without it. Today, because gravity is no longer inexorably tied to evolution, we create and enjoy a myriad of gravity-related activities. Most of them provide unprecedented forms of perception and accompanying aesthetic qualities due to the fact that today the state of gravity can be altered in unseen ways, for example: robotic roller coasters, powered exoskeletons, orbiting satellites, and even muscular fatigue blockers. They not only give rise to new types of locomotion and perception, but also a wholly original and largely unstudied bodily-perceived aesthetics.
How might the study of gravity’s impact form an original aesthetic approach? Responding to gravity’s aesthetic potential, the study envisions a specific design paradigm by studying gravity’s impact upon our perception, our bodily senses, technological development, and the aesthetic possibilities that gravity allows us to imagine. The project is all the more pressing in a time when the body – the very product of gravity – is under threat from new technologies (e.g. telecommunications cause sedentary lifestyles, while visual technologies replace direct bodily experiences). Although focused on design, due to the pervasiveness of gravity’s impact, the study also informs other creative disciplines, especially those of arts and architecture, or for example, how to negotiate gravity and engage the body in new aesthetic ways.

Abstract

In the last couple of years, the new media art world has been flooded with projects and research addressing global climate changes. This paper rectifies misconceptions related to the production and development in this art field, by critical and creative analysis of the projects that are ‘green’, environmentally aware and which have potential in affecting communities outside of the field.

A majority of the projects approach environmental issues by emphasizing these problems repeatedly within the art communities that are already aware of them. By various visualizations of scientific, environmental and weather data or the beautifications of various natural phenomena along with numerous other methods, artists are fashionably producing, without being able to affect the climate changes. These trends affect more and more the ordinary consumer. What kind of forms in the art world and what kind of lifestyles in the consumer world are designed and implemented to create an eco-human? What are the effects that our environment takes when we become green or eco-human?
Zizek defines ecology as the new opium for the masses, which becomes another element of the ‘invisible hand’ and where living eco friendly and being environmentalist are new commodities that seduce civil society. The Marxist phrase ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’ is still valid here and it is compared to current conditions in the market of green products. This paper maps the positions and roles of the artists in creating new media artworks addressing the issues of world climate change, environmentalism, green technologies and renewable energies.
What is invading this world of art are a variety of fields where we notice intersections of activism, environmentalism, informational theories and where the notion of creation is neglected and surpassed by the formerly mentioned disciplines.
This paper analyzes various new media art projects and phenomena that are initiating social changes and which could be framed under the ‘green’ and environmental art umbrella. Projects that are analyzed are the works of: Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Beuys, Theo Jansen, Marko Peljhan, Beatriz Da Costa, Natalie Jeremijenko, Andrea Polli, Heath Bunting, Foam, etc. Affecting social changes, civil society and various social spaces is deconstructed by analysis of the following: what communities are those projects addressing, what are the possible questions raised, and in what ways are those groups affecting? Mapped are the methods that resonate and transmit changes of people’s mindsets, both inside and outside of the field.

Digital media have played a very significant role in anti-government protests in the Middle East (in Iran, Egypt, Syria and so on) over the last four years. It has changed the rules of political struggle and established new expectations and rules of confrontation for both protesters and authoritarian governments in the region. The Greens’ Art research project will be a curated exhibition of digital art and other works developed during the pre- and post-election period (2009-11), situated alongside participants’ accounts of the role of these works in the grassroots Iranian Green Movement.

Panel: Pedagogy of the Oppressed 

There is an ongoing debate in the classroom, academic journals, and the popular press regarding significant differences between men and women especially in learning, using, and designing technology as part of a more general discussion of so called “cultural studies”. One such view is that the edifice of western science and technology is but only a ‘constructed’ artifact of the dominant white male patriarchy driven by the imperatives of expansionist monopoly capitalism.

“Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Women, Men and the Cartesian Coordinate System” continues this discussion by examining the statement: The Cartesian Coordinate System is oppressive” overheard during the proceedings of the “Nano-sex” panel at SIGGRAPH’93. The title for this panel also makes reference to Paulo Freire’s classic “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Freire describes a “culture of silence” in which the oppressed are submerged. He asserts that all human beings regardless of their circumstances can look critically at the world in a “dialogical” encounter with others leading to a new self-awareness within the social order. This awareness in turn leads to action in the attempt to be more fully human. The women and men who embrace and utilize technology in their artwork are likewise engaged in a critical appraisal of their role in the technological and scientific order. By challenging certain assumptions, critiquing gendered constructions of space and interface and proposing alternatives (a feminist computer, non-Euclidean computer graphics) likewise reflects the will to transform and remake technology that is responsive to the range of human capabilities, limitations, needs and desires.

Greyworld is a group of sound installation artists based in London. The group consists of 3 artists from different artistic backgrounds: music, visual arts and crafts. In Greyworld’s work, the human is a central part of the Sound Installation and becomes integrated into the heart of the creative process. Their art is created in the main for public space where the highest degree of accessibility is guaranteed.

Greyworld was formed in Paris in 1994 with their first exhibition, Le Lait, in the 13th arondissement. Other important installations in 1996 were Les Echos de la Gare in the South of France and Shopping in Forum les Halles, Paris. Greyworld’s work has since been exhibited throughout Europe, much of which has appeared in print and on television. In 1997 Greyworld created The Layer, a sensitive floor surface that translates movement into generative music. The Layer was first installed in Greenwich Foot Tunnel during the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival in July 1997 and in the Barbican Art Centre. Since these events, The Layer has been shown all over Europe using SSEYO’s generative music software as its musical engine. Greyworld’s latest multiple, the Layer SE is a small sensing surface for the home.

FLIP A SWITCH AND THE LIGHTS COME ON. Flush a toilet and waste disappears. Swipe a card and money is transferred. Sophisticated yet often invisible grids of power sustain contemporary life throughout the farthest reaches of our world, providing electricity, gas, water, sewage, finances, materials, transportation, communication and more. Rolling blackouts, economic fallout, climate change, and natural disasters test the viability of this interconnected system of dependence. Gridlocked aims to provide a multilayered expos6 of the structures and infrastructures of power, and make visible their origins, mechanisms, consequences, and alternatives. ln 1879 Thomas Edison patented the light bulb. In the push to make this invention useful, a mass of new devices was created. ln fact, a light bulb is worthless without the supportive interaction of complimentary switches, sockets, cords, wirings, cables, generators, and more. Electricity became the basis for our contemporary grid. Powering sensors, alarms. bells, monitors, switches, pumps, and valves, electricity is essential to the workings of a vast and varied grid that includes water systems, gas lines, railroads, traffic signals, telephone exchanges, sewer systems, even the stock market.

Abstract  (Short Paper)

During December of 2008, the Greek state and the Greek citizens experienced a rather unprecedented sequence of events, which are now world known as #griots. After the killing of a young student named Alexis Grigoropoulos by a policeman, an almost general outburst broke out in the major Greek cities that lasted three weeks. An astonishing, unexpected feature of the #griots was the use of the so called digital activism, or more specifically the use of social media and cell phones not only for communication and co-ordination purposes, but also to relay the events towards a wider audience.

For years the discussion of the numerous constraints imposed by software has remained within a technical context, tucked safely away within a language of technological limitation. The “revolution” in technology has occurred in the daily dissolution of technical boundaries that only yesterday seemed insurmountable. Unfortunately this revolution has far fewer implications than a battle that places these boundaries within a historical and cultural context focusing on gender and race.

offers a critical reading of hidden constraints found in “preference”, “default”, and “library” palettes in animation and rendering software. It aims to reveal the subtle ways in which stereotypes of gender and race are reinforced, re-enacted, and distributed within multiple contexts including video games and educational applications. Knowledge of this thesis comes firsthand. During a collaboration with choreographer Yacov Sharir in the design of cyberhuman dancers (dance figures modelled and animated digitally I discovered that despite a “revolution-ary” approach to the materials and metaphors used to represent the body, the language of representation coded into the animation software in the form of libraries of human figures, animation sets, and poses was less than revolution-ary. It was, in fact, highly historical, rooted in a long tradition of stereotype and cliche. When the “ideal female” or “ideal male” (selected from libraries of pre-built figures) have as default settings pale pink skin and large breasts, or heroic upper body measurements and optional genitalia, gender and racial stereotypes are built into (and reinforced) by the very architecture of the software.

Cine foro sobre la Película Documental “Gueê”, con Paola Lamprea Cardona la Directora. Conversatorio sobre el contenido de la película Gueê, un Documental etnográfico que retrata la vida de seis mujeres indígenas Tikuna, de la selva Amazónica. Gueê : Película Documental Etnográfico

Keywords: commons, distribution, cultivation, cities, resiliency, ecosystems, networks, information, visibility, sharing.

The Guerrilla Grafters graft fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing, ornamental fruit trees. Over time, delicious, nutritious fruit is made available to urban residents through these grafts. We aim to prove that a culture of care can be cultivated from the ground up. We aim to turn city streets into food forests, and unravel civilization one branch at a time. This project is, at its heart, a simple rehearsed gesture: a graft. This gesture is so demonstrative that it also generates discursive theater as described by Augusto Boal, and social sculpture as described by Joseph Beuys. We are in the process of developing an online map but in San Francisco, where city agencies denounce such generative acts of resiliency and sweetness, what kinds of information about these branches will ensure that they bear fruit?

Is contemporary art still functioning as a role to propose the issue in a current society?  In a complex world like today, it is difficult to answer this question and to think about the relationship between art and society.  However, when think about the art movement that occurred after postwar in Japan, it is obvious that the specific intention and certain actions were happening in a chaotic situation.  One of the most important movement took place in Japan was GUTAI.

This paper will investigate GUTAI movement in 1950s and the correlation with today’s media art.  The first reason why it is important to reconsider GUTAI is that the uniqueness of this movement.  For example, Atsuko Tanaka, one of the female members internationally known as her work of “Electric Dress” was the most successful person in GUTAI, although it was not easy for her to keep continuing her work.  How contemporary art react to the society from personal point of view and how it connect to public is the theme of this paper.

The second reason is the importance to rethink about the pre history of media art.  It is critical to examine the postwar avant-garde art movement such as GUTAI to understand how it affected today’s media art especially in Japan.

The paper will explore about GUTAI and Japanese avant-garde art from 1950s to 1970s from cultural and sociological view to reconsider contemporary role of art and the relationship between culture and society.  The paper will open a path to new understanding of media art in today’s situation.

HABITAT explores themes of development as both a solitary and communal process. Participants lie alone in a cocoon like structure, cut off from outside stimuli. The cocoon vibrates gently in response to biofeedback from its occupant, creating a nurturing sense of calmness when the occupant rests peacefully, and likewise responding with dissonance when the occupant is restless. As other participants occupy their own cocoons, they are added to the others’ biofeedback, creating a temporary hive identity. In this state, HABITAT will adapt to the participants, creating a restful or tense whole from the sum of its parts. Growth is both a solitary and communal process. Internally, we each work towards some ideal but our progress is conditioned by the people around us. From interconnected individuals, each with their own will and purpose, society arises and an emergent phenomena of individual action. Society then moves towards its own ideal, shaping the people it is comprised of and directing the individual action it arose from.

This short essay analyzes the social and cultural implications of the work Hack-able Curator (2007). It is an interactive physical installation using robotics, a search engine of the Flickr API, and mobile messaging. It makes curatorial decisions by using an algorithm that allows it to choose images from the popular photo-sharing website Flickr. The online module searches Flickr for the best images containing the tags Slow and Plymouth, so that it can use them in a virtual exhibition. It is ‘hackable’ because everyone can both add images to the main resource by uploading them to Flickr or vote for any images displayed on the website by sending an SMS message to the system. Even if an image is chosen, there is an opportunity to opt-out, and the choice is displayed on this web site.

The Scrapyard Challenge Junior Maker Kits (SCJMK) was developed from the Scrapyard Challenge workshops which are intensive workshops developed by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki where participants build simple electronic projects out of found, discarded, or “junk” materials. SCJMK was developed together with our team at Parsons and presents an informal learning experience for youth that utilizes the integration of art, design, and technology to deliver STEM concepts. We introduce a custom input board to facilitate the workshop and the learning experience introduces basic principles of electricity and systems thinking using hands-on activities that encourage personal creativity.

The paper presents how mobile and ubiquitous technologies add new layers to the arsenal of medias potential for perceptional manipulation. This shift deeply affects and changes our impression of place, pleasure and identity. Experiments with haptic, wearable and GPS enabled technologies enable new corporal sensations and sensitivities that pose new possibilities, but also challenges to how we understand the world. Through a practice based approach, rooted in media arts, the paper describes how this new media reality can literally be grasped and applied to manipulate our impression of the world. Experiments with haptic, wearable and GPS enabled technologies enable new corporal sensations and sensitivities that pose new aesthetic possibilities. Emerging physical connections between humans and the Internet become new sensory organs that challenge the corporality of how we literally grasp and understand our environment. This both adds to and extends well beyond McLuhans audiovisual phenomenology. His quote that the medium is an extension of ourselves’ was based on the experience with the electric technology of radio and television (McLuhan, 2001). Now haptic telepresence and global, realtime networks add yet a new layer to media, promising to impact our very physiognomy, but also cultural production of meanings of touch.To understand these changes induced by perceptional manipulative media, I will first present mobile, haptic artistic projects such as the Psychoplastics experiment (2010 ‑ present), then discuss how this impacts us in different cultures. The author has here worked with women in Iran to map cultural differences in how touch can be experienced in order to produce changed perceptions of the world. In the context of ISEA2014 the paper will present both the utopian and critical issues of how these emerging technological possibilities add to media that manipulate our perceptions of the world as well as across eastern and western cultures.

Installation (2015)

Hauling Ice is an experimental setup and narrative environment featuring an animatronic sasquatch rowing a small, wooden boat. The boat, floating in a wading pool, tows a large, hissing, inflatable iceberg, in front of a wall-mounted, marine-glacial panorama backdrop. Wall text, charts and graphs included as part of the installation indicate the artists’ experimental design. It is an attempt to answer the question: Can a sasquatch tow an iceberg with a rowboat?

While reinventing the rather ‘old’ art form, a triptych is made out of repurposed documentaries to fit a tight production budget and to deliver content more meaningful than what advanced technology can offer.

TO LIFE! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet, the first international survey of twentieth and twenty-first-century eco artists, has just been published by the University of California Press. The text’s ‘ A to Z’ panorama of artistic responses to environmental concerns beings with Ant Farm’s anti-consumer antics in the 1970s and culminates with Marina Zurkow’s 2007 animation that anticipates the havoc of global warming. The author will explain how the book can serve students of art, design, environmental studies, and interdisciplinary studies integrate environmental awareness and activism into their professional and personal lives.

Working Classroom presents a talk with artist Mark Anderson, who will discuss Hear by the River, a digital mural that depicts the many characters and communities that give Albuquerque its unique flavor. The mural was commissioned as part of the 2012 New Mexico Centennial Celebration. Created in collaboration with Working Classroom, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Museum of Mexican Art, this matrix video wall is a joining of a strong mural tradition in Albuquerque and new digital storytelling techniques.

A sound event is not something to be heard; it is no longer necessary to invent an ear, to inhabit a sound point of view. Rather, it is a question of continuum, of how sounds are to be Therefore, to amplify and record sounds across a range of multimedia sites is to pass through a series of actual moments that are dynamic without depth, moments that enable us to reconceive what we define as the sonic event.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Virtual reality, interactive installation, performance, immersive environments, visualization, art, storytelling, torture, digital humanities.

Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is an interactive installation made for the CAVE2™ large-scale 320-degree panoramic virtual reality environment that visualizes stories of violence and the post-traumatic stress experienced by ordinary American soldiers who became torturers in the course of serving their country. During the American-led counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns in Iraq in the years after September 11, 2001, the torture and abuse of detainees was a commonplace tactic. The project is based on interviews of American soldiers and attempts to extend and make accessible difficult narratives based on the actual testimonies involved. By bridging together different stories and environments, the project uses visualization to provide conditions for stories to unfold—stories that connect the homes that soldiers come from and return to, with distant experiences of war. The immersion of the CAVE2™ virtual reality theater allows for a different type of affective experience of the narrative, activated through the visceral immersion in the visual and auditory environment. The project represents a complex contemporary issue and provides a platform for discussion of military interrogation methods and their effects on detainees, soldiers, and society. The project was developed through a unique international collaboration between artists, scientists, and researchers from five different universities.

Hello, I am is a futuristic prototype to embody digital identity. Hello, I am dynamically generates visualizations each day (24 hours) based on keyword usage in an individual’s software applications. The visualizations metaphorically represent an individual’s holistic mood throughout the day. Hello, I am is a personal emblem to the wearer. Thus, its physical design extends beyond decorative jewelry and becomes a bolder part of an individual’s appearance.

Intro

HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE is an arts and media project in three parts: live tv broadcast show, documentary project and interactive CD-Rom project. HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE studies the language, esthetics and contents of electronic and media environment. HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE will be realizied by 40 professionals on media and 70 finnish art students of Theatre Academy, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Sibelius-Academy, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki University of Technology and Radio- and Television- Institute of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE). The patron of HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE is the Director General of Finnish Broadcasting Company, mr. Arne Wessberg.

HELSINKI MEDIASCAPE is a large collaboration on media art and media culture between KROMA Productions Ltd, the Finnish art academies and main national tv-channel TV 1. The project will be completed and produced within a centre of media arts, The Magnusborg Studios where the
high quality production facilities will be provided by the companies of the centre. The production company in charge, KROMA Productions Ltd. is specialized in media arts and cultural programs.

In this paper I outline the current findings of an on going investigation begun in 2009 at the Visual Effects Research Lab (VERL). The three-year project links the worlds of film, art, technology and computer science. In sharing methodologies and promoting cross, trans and inter disciplinary understanding the project challenges established notions of visual thought and creates new synergies between scientists, artists, and film-makers.

In 1985 painter David Hockney was invited by Quantel to experience its TV computer graphics system Paintbox. Hockney worked for 8 hours nonstop creating artworks with the ‘tablet’ and ‘pen’ set up. He described the system as like ‘painting with light’. In the spirit of Quantel’s project VERL and Creative Scotland invited Artist to propose fantastical moving image projects un-realizable with incumbent technology. VERL worked with the four selected artists to shoot high resolution (up to 4K) and post-produce in Nuke and Maya a series of innovative film projects for cinematic exhibition.

“The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute is only attainable through faith and in the creative act”.  _‘Sculpting In Time’ Andrei Tarkovsky.

The notion of depicting time (the literal translation of Tarkovsky’s book title) and in particular ideas of infinity became the projects prevalent theme. The  artists pushed the labs facilities and team to its limits creating impossible ornithological stunts, buildings rising from burning embers, real and imagined robots and visceral fantasy worlds. Would working with the Lab allow greater flexibility for the artists to create? Would access to this previously unaffordable technology provide more scope to experiment, or, would realising these unique visions be like ‘herding cats’?

VERL is a ground breaking project funded by a €500K European Union grant and consolidates established world-class research at DJCAD in video art, digital film and 3D computer visualisation. VERL provides a well-equipped laboratory environment for invited artists, filmmakers and researchers to create new works.

Panel: Data Disinformation

Susan Collins’s land­scape works exist as archives of im­ages or real-time pre­sen­ta­tions of im­ages gath­ered from point­ing a we­b­cam at a lo­ca­tion over a pe­riod of months to show im­ages on screen gen­er­ated by chang­ing pixel by pixel over about 21 hours in a day. This work pro­vides a time­frame as well as an in-depth study of a sin­gle land­scape. Pre­sented on the screen in land­scape for­mat the artist in­tro­duces rep­re­sen­ta­tion of time show­ing si­mul­ta­ne­ously day and night views of the same scene stud­ied and recorded over the course of the year.  This paper will show how the ma­nip­u­la­tion of data can in­tro­duce new de­vices and lan­guage to the tra­di­tion of rep­re­sen­ta­tion of land­scape.

“Here to There” will investigate how perceptions about the passageway between home and work, as well as the general relationship between the two, are influenced by various forms of (social) media and data.

Millions of people commute between home and work everyday – the thread that connects one’s personal life to one’s professional life. While many do this by foot or bicycle, the majority of people in developed, industrial cultures commute by car, by bus, or by train. As people move from home to work they pass through intervening communities that may or may not have a resemblance to their own. Commuters generate an idea of these communities’ livelihood, their economic situation, their demographic composition, or even their political persuasion, through the consumption of all forms of media, and possibly without any actual contact with the members of the community itself. Their perception may not be based upon little other than the ‘view out of the window,’ or ‘common wisdom.’

How do commuter perceptions compare to those of the community members, and to the general perception of a community as it can be perceived on the Web in the form of chats, blogs, images, and so forth? The disparity or congruence between commuters’ perceptions of life along the commute may parallel their perceptions of global culture, which may also be ‘viewed out of the window.’ All the while the commuter is immersed in a construct that is both product and producer of interconnected lives.

This research is part of a forthcoming artwork that utilizes locative media, video and Internet search for visualizing connections between commuters, locations, and perceptions; initially this will be in a non-interactive form, and eventually in a real-time installation format. The paper will draw upon the ideas of theorists such as Saskia Sassen, William J. Mitchell, Frederic Jameson, and Malcom McCullough.

Hexaphonics is a system for teaching, learning and playing music based upon a simple geometric representation of the relationships between musical pitches. When these numerical relationships are represented graphically in a manner that reflects their true musical structure the fundamental nature of music can easily be perceived and learned. The problem with most existing systems for representing music visually is that the spatial models tend to obscure the true relationships. Hexaphonics clarifies the structure of harmony in such a way that the structures that are seen correspond directly to the structures that are heard. This structure is derived from psycho-acoustic research conducted by Gerald Balzano, Roger Shephard and others. This solid theoretical background supports the thesis that the structures of music may be simpler than they have been traditionally represented.

How do you think we, the electronic artists, could and/or should contribute to the health of our environment? Do you have ideas and projects to propose? Do you have a working model that could be replicated? Each panelist is expected to contribute to the reflection, debate and promotion of projects and actions regarding our environment and our responsibility as human beings in trying to heal the deep wounds we can see all around us.

Abstract

Never use the words higher or lower (Charles Darwin). When, over a decade ago, Stelarc flew naked over the roof of the Theatre Royal, Copenhagen, suspended from the arm of a giant crane, he looked for a moment like Superman. He came to ground again to talk of obsolete bodies and of a new order of post evolutionary being for a species whose fusion with its own technological productions was imminent. But Stelarc has also admitted to experiencing a certain anxiety up there, high over the city, as he heard his own skin creaking in the wind. Few people could watch or even contemplate this spectacle without a sense of vertiginous anxiety, but vertigo may be only one element in the complex of anxieties that may be associated with a critical experience of height.

As high technology raises the evolutionary stakes and gives us visions of the post-, trans- or superhuman species, we are haunted by the master slave connotations which the machine-human relationship has acquired in our cultural history. This history has taught us that the high/low distinction is hierarchical , but also that hierarchies are violent, and violently reversible. This paper is concerned with the high/low distinction in the co-evolution of human and machine, and with the thematics of struggle, domination and destiny which inevitably attach to this distinction in Western traditions. It speculates on the possibilities of evading high anxieties through the evasion of hierarchical terminologies and their attendant thematics. Such evasions are being successfully negotiated in the work of certain artists, notably Australian performance artists Stelarc and Sue-ellen Kohler . These two artists, working respectively at the ‘high’ and ‘low’ ends of the technological spectrum, are rediscovering the spacescape of the body in ways which disrupt its vertical axis and raise fundamental questions about its status as ‘human’.

Indeterminate Hikes +
What is a waterfall? A cascade of water tumbling over boulders, brilliant in the sun, beckoning backpackers with sturdy leather boots to climb into remote, magical valleys? Or inspiring tourists to follow road signs to popular, sublime spectacles, such as Niagara Falls. Or the path taken by droplets of moisture falling to the sidewalk from an air conditioner hanging out of the window of an eleventh-floor apartment in NYC. In 2011, our ecology, art, and technology collaborative launched a mobile phone app called Indeterminate Hikes + (IH+) that re-imagines ecological awareness. Ecoarttech’s post-disciplinary work fuses theory with creative practice to deconstruct traditional environmental categories, showing the limits of preoccupations with wilderness, nature, and the rural and exploring the sort of ethics that might arise from cities, suburbs, the cultural commons, and even the “virtual” environments created by new media technologies. A significant part of our practice is the effort to rethink the remoteness and inaccessibility so often applied to “nature” or “wilderness” in contemporary critical theory. This separation of the social from the natural has silenced public, democratic discourse about environmental issues, according to Bruno Latour, and for Timothy Morton, modern thinking has turned “Nature” into “a reified thing in the distance, ‘over yonder,’ under the sidewalk, on the other side where the grass is always greener… in the wild,” preventing “access to the full scope of [ecological] interconnectedness” (Latour 75). When we co-founded ecoarttech five years earlier, our aim was to create eco-art “without nature”—to borrow a new phrase from Morton’s book, Ecology without Nature—and to examine what it means to be an ecological being in the context of convergent networked environments, biological, digital, social, and cultural, from biological systems and industrial grids to media networks and the world wide web. Indeterminate Hikes +, enters into dialogue with theories like those posited by Latour, Morton, and others by bringing nature out from its “reified”, faraway realm and into daily life. However, Indeterminate Hikes holds onto the concept of wilderness—not as a synonym for an originary Nature, which is ethically and intellectually immobilizing concept, as Latour and Morton point out; but rather as otherness, the unimaginable, that is both part of and beyond the self, wilderness can call on us to see un-wild environments in bewildering ways. In the IH+ smart phone app, the discourse of sublime wilderness is imported into everyday locales, transforming chance encounters on the street into public performances of bio-cultural diversity and wild “happenings.” Inspired by the way Fluxus in particular, and early- to mid-twentieth-century avant-garde art movements in general, reinvigorated the way we see mundane life rituals, IH+’s artistic gesture refracts this ethical impulse into the contemporary concern of about the environment.

Since its emergence in the mid 1970s, Hip Hop culture and music have been transformed by technological innovations. Through the research of Tahir Hemphill, creator of the Hip-Hop Word Count: A Searchable Rap Almanac, an ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 Hip Hop songs, users can analyze and track this evolving language. Kwende Kefentse’s focus on urbanization has led him to explore parallels between the emergence of Hip Hop culture and the built environment on a global scale.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Games, History, 3D, New Philadelphia, United States National Park Service

The New Philadelphia AR Tour is an historical mobile app that uses Augmented Reality technology to present the lost 19th Century town of New Philadelphia, Illinois to visitors. New Philadelphia is a United States National Historic Landmark that is historically significant as the first town in the United States to be founded by an African American. After being abandoned in the early 20th Century, however, the site reverted to farmland. Today there are no visibly remaining buildings or artifacts. The app enables visitors to view 3D reconstructions of buildings overlaid onto the current landscape in their original locations. The historical buildings and artifacts are carefully reconstructed based on a collaboration between the author, the United States National Park Service’s Network to Freedom Program and archaeologists from the Illinois State Museum. The project represents an innovative model for interpreting historical sites that have traditionally been challenging to interpret, particularly when there is an absence of remaining artifacts. The New Philadelphia AR Tour challenges the notion of what kind of historical site is worth interpreting and what value or historical residue remains when there seems to be little that visually remains. Moreover the project’s use of Augmented Reality and its minimal footprint help to address the dilemma often faced by those managing historical sites of facilitating public access to a site at the risk of compromising site preservation.

Dissemination of the colonial ideology and utility for administrative needs were the main objectives of the educational policy of the British government, nevertheless the educational program of the (nationalist) Indian intellectuals was oriented to the ‘re-generation’ of the country. Among other things, this primarily calls for canon-building.

The Indian intelligentsia was however caught between a serious dichotomy: whether to believe in Enlightenment as a panacea, embrace western ideas and focus on England as the birthplace of progressive values or to ‘re-invoke’ (cultural) indigenity. The former group of elites disowned an assorted chunk of India’s heterogeneous cultural past in the name of the ‘folk’. The distantiation between the colonizer and the colonized, the West and the East, was made, according to Said, by deictic categories ‘we’ and ‘they’. Xenophobic and paranoid ‘we’ designated ‘they’ simply as primitive, savage; ‘we’ called those homo sapiens by the name ‘tribe’, ‘ab-original’, ‘folk’ and so on.

Is there any natural or biological basis for these categories?  Who, for what cause and intention set up these categories to signify a certain group of people? What is the ‘telos’ of this dividing practice? Which politico-historical milieu allowed this ambiguous polarization of the ‘Homo Sapiens’ into the ‘folk’ and ‘non-folk/ classical’?

Tracing back the originary moment as early as the German Romanticism (c.f. Herder, Hegel) obsessed to find human beings in the ‘raw/ natural/ organic’ state, the paper initially aims for a genealogy of the politics of in/exclusion in what eventually came to be known as ‘folk art’. The paper shall account for how the nineteenth century/ nationalist inhibition for clinically sanitizing the ‘classical’ against the ‘folk’ forges links with the ‘public/popular art’ in the contemporary. Citing works by Abanindranath Tagore, Ramkinkar Baij, Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose, Benodbehari Mukherjee (each preferring  non-Western modes of representation in their unique way) on the one hand and the ‘folk/popular’ art forms like the Kalighat paintings (patachitra), woodcut prints, Chau masks, calligraphies etc on the other, it would be shown how there had been a perennial bi-way traffic between the ‘folk’ and the ‘classical’; and hence the collective identity ‘folk’ born out of the exclusionist practice seriously problematic.

Abstract

Keywords: poem, Haiku, Haiku generation, art, interactive art.

Human communication is fostered in environments of regional communities and cultures and in different languages. Cultures are rooted in their unique histories. Communication media have been developed to circulate these cultural characteristics. The theme of our research is ‘Cultural Computing’, which means the translation of cultures using scientific methods representing essential aspects of Japanese culture. We study the reproduction of a traditional Japanese Haiku by computer. Our system can abstract an essence of human emotions and thoughts into a Haiku, a Japanese minimal poem form. A user chooses arbitrary phrases from a chapter of the essay ‘1000 Books and 1000 Nights’. Using the phrases chosen by the user, our system generates the Haiku, which includes the essence of these
words.

Keywords: Creative process, art education, interdisciplinarity, interface, mixed reality, performance, rapid prototyping

The Media and Performance Laboratory (MAPLAB) at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht (NL) is an innovative learning and research environment, focusing on creative processes involving performativity and interactive technology. The MAPLAB projects engage art students and educators, professional artists, and various external partners in disciplines such as theater, dance, puppetry, music, and visual arts. These projects typically combine the MAPLAB core activities of education, research, and technological development, stimulating students and professional practitioners through rapid prototyping and agile development learning modes. In addition, MAPLAB trains educators to guide creative processes in technologically enhanced environments.

Introductory Statement 

ISEA2016 impresses with a multifaceted visual arts programme that engages an unprecedented number of international artists and displays throughout Hong Kong. Masterminded by Dr. Harald Kraemer and co-organised by City University and Polytechnic University, The University of Hong Kong is thankful for the opportunity to participate and to display four innovative and thought-provoking projects on our campus. The overall selection of artists and works stimulates a discussion on public art and the meaning of and necessity for an enhanced engagement of our students and the local public with high-quality art. We are grateful for being part of this process.

Moments in Place is a series of site‑specific virtual performances, created for the Brighton Digital Festival, inviting visitors to consider movement qualities of different locations in the city of Brighton as well as relationships between these spaces and the visual artworks, including murals, mosaics, and graffiti, which have been created in them.

Each of the performances were recorded on Brighton’s streets using portable motion capture systems. When phones or tablets are pointed at select urban artworks (graffiti, benches, mosaics, etc.) around the city, the Moments in Place app recognises the location and plays out the performance previously recorded at the location. The performances are re‑created in 3D and anchored to specific locations allowing the viewers to walk around and explore the relationship between the performance and location.

Double‑tapping on the screen while the Moments in Place app is running brings up menus displaying “what to look for” and “where to look” in order to help find the appropriate artworks. Alternatively, users can select “Just Dance” to view one of the performances without tracking.

The project invites viewers to think about movement qualities of various locations. Some of the locations are quiet and     inspire slow, reflective movement while others are very hectic ‑‑ full of shoppers and tourists. Audiences are invited to visit at least a selection of locations. However, if this is not possible, the project website contains images of each location to allow audiences to trigger the performances as well as allowing them to play a single performance directly from the app.

The underlying Motion in Place Platform (MiPP), used to created the piece, was developed through a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council grant of £435,345 to develop portable motion capture and analysis tools for exploring relationships between movement and place. MiPP was created through a combination of traditional scholarship and     practice‑based application. Initial field tests were conducted through VERA (Virtual Environments for Research in  Archaeology) before addressing contemporary Arts practices through the creation of the Moments in Place project. The MiPP tools were initially trialed through the (re)construction of movement within an Iron Age Round House, and later to (re)construct performances on the streets of Brighton during both the 2011 White Nights and 2013 Brighton Digital Festivals.

This paper details the initial research questions and contexts behind the MiPP projects, how these have been applied through creative practice in the development of Moments in Place, and future plans for the platform.

Abstract

In its past history holography was an illusory medium. Although our eyes were never deceived by its representation of three-dimensional spaces. It was because of our experience with central perspective that we saw in it the great illusion of perfect space. Only after holography broke away from a representational subject it was possible to emphasize its immanent qualities as a medium, its close relationship to light and its optical properties. Freed from the encumbrance of trivial contents, it has become a material for creative light design. Currently, there have been attempts in experimental architecture to include holographical material in intelligent buildings to direct the light and warmth and store the information. On the other hand, holo-graphers since the late eighties have designed inner architecture with the help of holographic elements.

Walter Benjamin lamented in his “Passagen-Werk” that iron and glass in the middle of the 19th century “were to a certain extent discredited”, because of this time it was not yet known how to work with these materials. The employment of holography today has similarities with this development. It is an unnecessary designing element in a Bauhaus architecture. Only after micro electronics were integrated into building, the role of light and information in architecture
changed. Light in media architecture is not only an essential design element, but becomes a vehicle for information. In the media architecture holographic optical elements are to be named along with electro-chrome glass, large projection installations, LC-Displays and video monitors.
As a last consequence, not only do they direct and organize light and warmth, but at the same time, they produce information, alienation, embezzlement and conversion.

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

Home­Shop began as a store­front res­i­dence and artist ini­tia­tive in Bei­jing, 2008. Lo­cated in the cen­tre of Bei­jing on one of its old hu­tong al­ley­ways, the space and its win­dow front are used as the be­gin­ning points from which to ex­am­ine ways of re­lay­ing be­tween pub­lic and pri­vate, the com­mer­cial and pure ex­change as such. Artists, de­sign­ers and thinkers come to­gether via mul­ti­ple, in­ter­wo­ven se­ries of small-scale ac­tiv­i­ties, in­ter­ven­tions and doc­u­men­tary ges­tures, processes by which Home­Shop serves as an open plat­form to ques­tion ex­ist­ing mod­els of eco­nomic and artis­tic pro­duc­tion. Daily life, work and the com­mu­nity be­come ex­plo­rations of mi­crop­o­lit­i­cal pos­si­bil­ity, and of work­ing to­gether.

Homo Machina is a 2D exploration game inspired by Dr Fritz Kahn’s iconic illustrations of the inner workings of the human body. The player navigates inside the industrial palace of the manmachine, solving puzzles along the way. This metaphorical journey within the extraordinary world of the human body allows the player to make sense of our inner biology with the help of Kahn’s simple and evocative graphic system. In Homo Machina, tiny workers are hard at work round the clock to ensure the proper operation of every bodily function. Every part of the body has its own avatar – the eye becomes a folding camera, the lungs take the guise of copper piping, the stomach and the intestines figure a train of conveyor belts – that the player must understand and manipulate to go forth in his exploratory journey.

Poster Statement

Virtual Characters and Virtual Stage

In April 96 we presented the pilot ‘Muybridge’ at the MIPCOM in Cannes. In this paper I want to tell you about ‘The making of Muybridge’…  ‘Muybridge’ is one of a series of five art programmes of 25 minutes each. The episodes are based on great, but not always well known or recognized, inspirators and pioneers from the late 19th century, the previous ‘fin the sicle’. Each episode is a piece of music, dance, design and animation mixed with very short fragments of graphical historical information.The first episode is about Eadward Muybridge, a photographer who unintentionally laid the foundation for the cinema. The other episodes will cover the life and works of Tesla, E. Plankhurst, Max Planck, Freud.

Framework and Techniques used

Each episode is an artistic interpretation of the life and work of the protagonist. ‘Horses in the Air’ is visualized by integrating traditional as well as the latest techniques and disciplines in order to connect the fin de sicle of the 20th century. Unprecedented combinations of disciplines and formed to stretch the boundaries of contemporary television production. In this way each episode will obtain a different approach in contents, character and design. By means of the use of virtual stage, motion capture and computer animation new ways of expression and visualization are being explored. The combined choreography of the dancers and their co-players which only exist in cyberspace do cause a dynamic tension. Although dance has an important role one cannot say that the episodes are purely dance pieces. Movement is the most important ingredient. The movements of the dancer or dancers function as a kind of animation controller. In some episodes the tool of dance as an animation controller are replaced by other to be captured movements, for instance a moving hand or a movement in the music. This new approach in the way of handling the contents, the cooperating disciplines and the innovative realization techniques will result in a ‘state of the art’ series of television programmes.

Panel: Compumorphic Art: The Computer as Muse

This paper seeks to ad­dress the is­sues in­volved in cu­rat­ing Dig­i­tal Art: From SIG­GRAPH to ‘Sec­ond Life’, which is an on­go­ing con­flict be­tween ma­te­ri­al­ity and im­ma­te­ri­al­ity of both the medium and the art­work. This is a cu­ra­to­r­ial co­nun­drum in con­tem­po­rary new media, that chal­lenges the role and con­nec­tions be­tween dig­i­tal art and tra­di­tion­ally based art prac­tice such as paint­ing, print­mak­ing and in­stal­la­tion art when it is ex­tracted from a dig­i­tal art­work.  In this new land­scape of dig­i­tal cul­ture, old tra­di­tions and new prac­tices are both in con­flict and sym­bio­sis: con­tem­po­rary artis­tic prac­tices re­flects the so­cio-cul­tural land­scape cre­ated by new tech­no­log­i­cal ap­pli­ca­tions, de­fy­ing no­tions of dis­ci­pline, bor­ders, bound­aries and jour­neys.  Dig­i­tal in­no­va­tion can be seen on the one hand as a growth in ef­fi­ciency and power, an emer­gent source of en­ergy and a test bed for the in­tro­duc­tion of new knowl­edge and em­pow­er­ment.

Which ac­cepts a leap for­ward in speed and cost-ef­fi­ciency, using so­cial net­works and vir­tual cul­ture to in­ves­ti­gate and chal­lenge the ex­ist­ing no­tions of the re­la­tion­ships be­tween ‘the artist’ and ‘the au­di­ence’. An­other is to fa­cil­i­tate in a new com­put­erised net­work and col­lab­o­ra­tive world that opens up op­por­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate, re­ceive and in­ter­act with con­duits of in­for­ma­tion and data. Al­low­ing for the ex­ploita­tion of tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial pos­si­bil­i­ties through the use of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy, to en­gage in new forms of prac­tices, using in­no­v­a­tive spaces for view­ing and re­ceiv­ing work both vir­tu­ally and phys­i­cally, in what can be per­ceived as new and emer­gent art forms.

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

CRUMB, the re­search cen­tre CRUMB at the Uni­ver­sity of Sun­der­land in the UK, has a deep in­ter­est in how the ‘be­hav­iours’ of new media art, such as con­nec­tiv­ity, com­putiv­ity and in­ter­ac­tiv­ity, pre­sent op­por­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges for cu­ra­tors. In­ter­ac­tiv­ity, in par­tic­u­lar, high­lights how be­hav­iours of in­ter­ac­tion, par­tic­i­pa­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion have often been im­por­tant in art, in­clud­ing ac­tivist art, con­cep­tual art, and more re­cently, re­la­tional aes­thet­ics. This pre­sen­ta­tion con­sid­ers art­works and ex­hi­bi­tions in­clud­ing those by Hans Haacke, Chris Bur­den, Rirkrit Tira­vanija, Les Liens In­vis­i­bles, Josh On, Pad.ma, Har­rell Fletcher and Mi­randa July, and Heath Bunting. It sug­gests a crit­i­cal de­f­i­n­i­tion of types of par­tic­i­pa­tion which draws on both po­lit­i­cal and net­work vo­cab­u­lar­ies.

This paper argues that locative media art has had a significant role to play in the shaping of emergent location-aware technologies with this influence very evident in the latest generation of locative smartphone apps.

The paper presents case studies of early locative media art projects drawing connections to popular commercial location aware mobile applications. It will be argued that their influence goes beyond the specifics of similarities in approach between particular applications and artworks but rather represents a fundamental conceptual shift in thinking about location which has far reaching implications for the future of location-aware applications.

From its inception locative media has set itself the task of defining a mode of operation for emergent locative technologies. This approach emphasises the technology’s ability to augment space through revealing hidden histories and layers of meanings and associations which foreground the rich lived experience of place. It will be proposed that this approach of locative media has shifted the locative agenda from an emphasis on cartesian position to a more user-centred focus on location as the locus of lived experience.

In the past year location-aware mobile phone apps and services have become mainstream with the rise of locative social networking services like FourSquare, place based narratives such as Soundwalks and a plethora of location-aware information services typified by Yelp. The paper will trace a connection between the user-centred idea of place at the heart of these applications and the concept of place espoused and developed in locative media art demonstrating that this approach stands in stark contrast to the native cartesianism of GPS and other locative technologies. I propose that this is not coincidental and in fact represents the agency of locative media in shaping these emergent technologies.

While location-aware services and applications may not have made their much anticipated breakthrough in 2010 there is no doubt that location will play a significant role in the future of the mobile internet. This paper argues that this agency of locative media points toward a framework for the consideration of art engaging with emergent technologies.

Abstract (long paper)

In this paper, I argue that traditional Chinese thinking and its manner of approaching art can be successfully expanded onto a different platform: digital media art. My research (both in theory and practice) shows how this transformation expands the notions of time and space and forges new interdisciplinary correlations by addressing traditional Chinese culture in four different but interrelated manifestations: the philosophy of Dao, calligraphy, painting and sculpture. As a result, I claim that digital media can shift the notions of time and space from traditional Chinese thinking into contemporary digital art. Conversely, the digital concept of time and space can be interpreted by an analysis of the traditional Chinese philosophy of Dao, as well as a new understanding of ‘scroll format’ and Chinese digital art has been introduced through my own practice.

Our panel explores machinic sense and sensibility through a discussion of our joint work on generated media systems. The three of us have been collaborating in various ways for the past 15 years; We all three worked together to create the combinatorial video artwork Three Rails Live in 2013. We will discuss how we have worked together to develop simple but culturally meaningful systems that generate combinations of language, images, and sound. Rather than trying to produce systems that mimic human intelligence or pass as human, we have created systems that perform the basic functions that computers can do well: Manipulating symbols and drawing from distributions. In doing so, we have relied on each other’s human sentience to collaboratively develop voices and visions that are overtly machinic, but which work to exchange and arrange human visual and textual elements.

An update on latest VR research at the University of Minneapolis Human Factors Research Laboratory.

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

Dis­cred­i­ta­tion is a human strat­egy to de­val­u­ate some­body or some­thing. Its mean­ing is very close to “dis­crim­i­na­tion”. For in­stance, na­tions, eth­nic groups, classes, in­di­vid­u­als etc. were and are able to sta­bi­lize their sense of self-worth by com­par­ing mi­nori­ties or spe­cific eth­nic groups with an­i­mals. Here, the world of hu­mans and the world of an­i­mals are brought to­gether. Nowhere else, the bound­aries be­tween hu­mans and an­i­mals dis­ap­pear so eas­ily as in the field of dis­crim­i­na­tion.  This pre­sen­ta­tion will pur­sue the sci­en­tific tracks of self-dis­cred­i­ta­tion and in­ter­pret them as forms of crit­i­cal be­hav­ior. By look­ing at dif­fer­ent ex­am­ples, like the Human Genom Pro­ject and its as­so­ci­ated ex­pec­ta­tions, re­sults and dis­ap­point­ments, this paper will show that fetch­ing man down from the evo­lu­tion­ary tree should be val­u­ated as an act of eman­ci­pa­tive self-dis­cred­i­ta­tion.

GET Thin – GO FAST
Forget the Middle East. Forget Exxon Mobile and their crude oil. Part of the city’s vehicles can get their fuel from a greasy, yellowish liquid distilled from the remnants of liposuction.

HUMANFUEL is presented as a response to the hunt for alternatives to fossil fuel and posits an obligation to embrace a larger perspective to the Anthropocene – to include the human form in the biological chain of recycling – through the proposal of using human fat to fuel vehicles. The quest of vanity might flip the perspectives of extorting and excavating the world for its natural resources. Human body fat is an oil that can be rendered and burned very easily into fuel like any other oil. Biodiesel is produced by transesterification of triglycerides with the aid of an alcohol such as ethanol or methanol, and a diesel engine can be powered by biodiesel without substantial modifications.

Fuel derived from fat will give approximately the same mileage as regular diesel. In energy terms, the average BTU (British Thermal Unit) of a gallon of human body fat is actually 11% higher than the BTU of a gallon of diesel gasoline. If we assume the average person to be 17 pounds over their ideal weight, at a population of 300 million; that means there is 5.1 billion pounds of fuel stored in our fat, which is 637 million gallons of fuel. In 2003 approximately 320,000 people in America had liposuction. If we assume these numbers to be constant, and that 2-8 pounds of fat is removed in each procedure, that is 10 to 40 thousand gallons of potential fuel tossed into the biohazard bin annually. Bearing in mind the deviant behavior of some humans throughout history, this project might elicit a sense of disgust or provoke a negative reaction in some individuals. The artist’s intention is to invite to reflections around why we might be repulsed by including ourselves into such an “ecosystem” and also to reflect on how we treat life and living beings outside of ourselves in our quest of resources – as fuel or even food.

In the extended phases of the project, the artist has engaged extensively with her own apprehensions against including her own body in this process. The prospect of having an invasive procedure performed on the body, and the following manipulation of the material, presented personal boundaries that needed to be confronted. Furthermore, the work incited reflection around the ethical aspects of the project, on how we treat other living beings and how we regard ourselves as part of the world we live in. Considering the amount of energy that was needed to render fat and to esterify one’s own triglycerides, the concept can hardly be defended as the foundation of a sustainable (or slimming) green movement. Not least, one should perhaps take into account the tendency of humanity towards industrialization and mass production – such a solution might lead to some undesirable outcomes.

HUMANFUEL addresses the use of human fat as alternative biofuel. The project is currently presented as an installation including:

1. Three glass vessels, each containing biofuel from either lamb, chicken and human.
2. Banner with logo
3. Model car with logo
4. Small LCD screen with images from the project
5. The installation also comes with additional text material, introducing the audience to the concept of the project and the process of making biofuel from human fat.
6. The project also have available a special edition of collector objects in the form of resin cubes containing the biofuel made by human fat, extracted from the body of the artist.

The early development of the project has a website presenting the fictive company Lipotechnica – presented as the producer of the HUMANFUEL product and brand.

This paper discusses work commissioned by Chrysalis Arts, for a participatory locative media artwork in the North Yorkshire Dales, UK, as part of the Geo Art Cache project launching for visitors in May 2011. Combining locative media, context aware platforms and new forms of ‘experience design’, the work interrogates potential of pervasive media and experimental participatory methods to augment traditional geo-cache; to  appeal to a diverse target audience of artists, geo-cache community and visitors to the national park.

The commission develops ideas from the author’s innovative practice with filmmaking mediascapes, in which the route taken by walkers exploring the landscape informs a unique composition of site-specific sound and image, triggered by GPS, played back on hand-held devices during the walk. Traces of walks and the resultant short films are collated in an online gallery celebrating the diversity of individual experience, improvised within the whole.

Investigations will be presented exploring personal response to landscape, gathered in order to further customise locative media playback. Experiments combine subjective mapping, environmental response colour grids and symbolic landscape (drawing on David Grove’s therapeutic questioning technique, Clean Language). Creative transdisciplinary methods feed into the design of the geo art and user interaction with the cache. Motivation for user collaboration, drift, hunting and gathering, are explored.

Three considered approaches for creative public engagement will be outlined, with a discussion of the decisions made, final form and content of the project, and an evaluation of the challenges, success and opportunities presented through development of the work.

These approaches are: user-generated content through a preliminary workshop facilitating creative and synaesthetic responses (participatory arts), dynamic interaction of geo cache ‘hunters’ (experimental walks) and collaborative online documentary (web gallery/social media).

Technical challenges, platforms used, public response and artistic issues around participatory locative media will be explored. The work will be positioned within the transdisciplinary theoretical framework of the author’s PhD research and thesis, with specific reference to creative improvisation and way-making (Ingold), technicity and individuation (Stiegler), narratology and the visual (Bal), metaphor (Lakoff, Casasanto, Tompkins & Lawley), transdisciplinary theory (Nicolescu) and creative participation (Robinson, Bishop).

What fascinates people to use visual elements in a musical thinking? Throughout the centuries, musicians and image-makers had suggested new kinds of representation combining music and visual elements. For instance, in Romantic era, color had its leading role to carry out a desired aesthetic. Even as it was in painting, the idea of using color in a musical piece was realized by the inventions of some specific instruments, like color organs. However, it can be stated that the collaboration of seeing and hearing is not confidential among musical sounds and colors. It flourishes other senses with a cross-modal relationship. Beginning of 20th century is the time when this interaction between music and visual art became more intensive. It drives new perspectives for existing arts and made the development of hybrid art forms such as visual music, abstract animation and installation art, possible. By offering new perceptual experiences, these art forms inevitably engaged a relationship between scientific developments and the culture in change.

This paper will focus on relationship between music and visual arts through the idea of hybrid art forms. Within this interdisciplinary approach, it aims to consider scientific and cognitive developments and their effects on art and perception. In this context, examples with regard to some of hybrid art forms will be analyzed and finally compared with recent multi-media works.

New developments in science and bio‑medical technologies challenge our sense of being and our models for understanding the world. Long held views about human nature and definitions of life and of nature are being re‑examined in what has been called the biotech century. What occurs in individuals when new medical and biomedical technologies threaten to radically disrupt this accepted relation? The loss of a clear sense of boundaries, whether it is the proprioceptive boundary of our own bodies and other bodies, or the boundaries between territories leads to some interesting reflections. In 2007 I was given access to a unique interdisciplinary research study into the emotional and psychological effects of heart transplantation for the purpose of creating art works that could be publically disseminated to explore diverse aspects of this complex phenomenon. This interdisciplinary study was produced by a research team based at Toronto General Hospital and the University of Toronto Health Network.   Since the 1960’s cardiac transplantation has been an accepted medical therapy for patients with end stage heart failure. With organ transplantation, pressing new questions have been introduced as to what it means to be a human being, and what constitutes individual and community identity. Little research has been made into the emotional or psychological states of the recipient post surgery. In this paper I will use the transplanted heart as a trope to explores issues of reciprocity, embodiment, kinship and foreigness (the transplanted heart is considered ‘foreign’). I will outline the research study and show some of the media works produced in this project. The use of the visual and media arts as knowledge translation strategies provides an exciting model for transdisciplinary exchange across the fields of medicine, philosophy, and art.

Our “revolutionary” hybrid heroes, the progeny of hi-modernism and postmodernity’s hip-theoretical trends, stand at a critical distance from us. From privileged positions they distribute hierarchical knowledge systems which purport to describe non-hierarchical, branching, nonlinear, digital systems. Speaking from their elevated status, our heroes create binaries between the artist/ intellectual/speaker and audiences which problematizes our hi-mod/ post-mod hybrids’ “revolutionariness”. Institutionally insulated, the “hero” stands on a platform constructed from modernist models of authorship, genius, grand narrative, dualistic divisions and capitalist modes of production.

These hybrids speak, center staged, to audiences rather than participants. The star status attached to the solitary (too often male) voice of our hybrid heroes positions audiences in circular orbits, revolving around the fixed point of the speaker. To this degree, their audiences are “revolutionary”. These audiences are arranged economically through a capitalist exchange of reality/identity configurations which are part and parcel of the price of admission. In their retrograde motion, our hybrid heroes recast the “future”, an illusive construct, into shapes more appealing to hi-modernism. These dystopic re-entrenchments and terror based marketing schemes exploit pancapitalist language of ultimate newness, “revolution”, suspiciously backed by corporate sponsorship and bound by nostalgic modernist mythologies. Legitimating structures of the “revolutionary” leisure class, terrified by its own reified world, form a centralized discourse on reportedly decentralized artforms.

Our hybrid heroes gather, playing their roles in an annual reconstruction of a temporary society. This socially constructed reality is currently congealing, being assembled by the signal receivers, international individuals with an eye for style, anxious to select out new hybrid heroes around which revolutionary bodies will orbit. Packaged in media saturated appropriations of contemporariness, avant-edginess and propagandist marketing approaches, this reality thinly disguises it’s hi-modernist tendencies, corporate ties and academic seals of approval. But the empire’s new “revolution” also asks us to disrobe it. To be, so to speak, “revolutionary”. So, who speaks? Who chooses? Who gives voice?

ISEA indexically orders anomie net activities, assigns artistic value, limits options and variance through such assignments, performs a revolutionary farce, codifies, normalizes and retrojectively constructs a “history” of “originators”/”innovators”/”authors” of retroactively modernist approaches and elitist artworks. And so signal receivers, this self conscious meta-narrative asks questions characteristic of our postmodern predicament, however, the question remains… “why should you care?” about this voice. Signal receivers, surrounded by incoming texts, attempts to be revolutionary, recall that each text has politics, a socioeconomic locus, a cultural context, an agenda. These texts will be the next scripts for y(our) hybrid heroes. I have nothing to lose but a voice.

Hybrid Learning Environments

(Long paper)

Keywords: Networked Mixed Reality Art, Post-biological Identity, Embodiment, Speculative/Flexible Frameworks, Hybrid Terminology, Transinduvidual Ontology, Hypersurface Interfacing, Data Bodies.

This paper provides an introduction to recent research that explores the psycho-topographical relationship between bodies of matter, embodied data and data bodies, presenting a contribution to the field of mixed reality art, with a particular focus on postbiological identity. The research presents an exploration of several theoretical discourses, along with introducing a number of new hybrid terms, in order to reposition current discourses relating to this field. Through this, a new speculative and flexible framework is proposed that disrupts existing mixed reality discourses, in order to focus specifically on networked mixed reality art in relation to post-biological identity. While there was a considerable practical contribution to the development of this research being presented, this paper focuses particularly on the development of a theoretical framework for speculatively understanding the field, articulating the background to this process and the resulting hybrid terms that have been established in order to better discuss the field.

Abstract

Several critical issues and problem areas have evolved over the past 20 years as computers have been introduced into the art and design curriculum. Issues of concern include:

* tools usage and skill > fundamental knowledge automation of traditional tasks > new opportunities creative potential > productivity enhancement pressures from the job front conservative attitudes in academia and industry role of tradition > new opportunities

* the InterNet and beyond the global library the global studio – distance collaboration peer contact and inter-institutional opportunities ownership of the net

* changing role for members of faculty the “computer expert” > integrated teaching professional development opportunities

* needs of fine arts > applied arts computer painting > a new medium the virtual studio

* expanding role of research opportunities for doctoral and post doctoral studies in the area

* redefinition of the discipline paradigm shift content > hype increasing credibility from other disciplines

* the place of art and design within broader academic institutions cross-disciplinary opportunities – potentials and pitfalls visualization – illustration rediscovered – or – cheap decoration? communication and information design

* the place of art within society political implications censorship technology and cultural imperialism

* the increased need for visual literacy in a hyper-mediated, telecommunications-based economy opportunities for service teaching primary and secondary education home schooling and edutainment – the private sector

You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns to your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking.
Yours beautifully, MUC 1950

When Alan Turing used the Manchester University Computer to create random love poetry, algorithm-generated text was a bold incursion into what had been considered uniquely human. Fifteen years later, Weizenbaum’s Eliza program seemed uncanny and profound to those who engaged it.These two works anticipated much of what was to become electronic art, including the nagging question they leave a modern observer: How could anyone have been unsettled by such simple tricks?

Four years ago, a piece using CD-ROM, multimedia, or Laser Disc created a stir because it involved new and exotic media. Now, it is more likely that an avatar, a life system, or web piece would attract such attention. Does this inclination towards spectacle indicate a surface art as meaningful as a texture-map, or the necessary responsiveness of a relevant and current discourse?

The Hype: panel will look at electronic art through a variety of filters — historical, regional, and disciplinary — in order to analyze its narrative strategies. Don’t expect resolution, but rather playful analysis, taxonomies, and contrasts. For instance:

•    Western artists usually take technology very seriously, despairing when it does not work. Post-communist artists, on the other hand, seem more willing to recognize that technology will necessarily break down.They accept that, in the words of Claude Shannon,”what is noise in one situation can be signal in another.” Russian artists and intellectuals are offering a useful alternative to the West’s default thematics, while articulating a distinctive visual poetics of new media.

•    From project management to virtual pets, emotions are leaking out all over the software industry. Production teams learn to honor emotions as the key to shipping great software, while emotional authenticity is displacing intelligence as the holy grail in research on artificial agents. Toys employing artificial life technology target affections through the extraordinary ploy of death and dependency. What’s up with all this digital emotionalism? More to the point, how does it make you feel?

•    Electronic art derives its media from various scientific disciplines. Artists often borrow scientific themes, as in the case of Al or Alife. But science is an engine of cultural production in its own right, separate from art. Where science and art converge, what does this proximity mean for the artist, and for their work? Have we become unwitting agents of another discourse, slaving away to provide free scientific visualization services?

•    Visualization of mathematical algorithms and optimistic promises are key ingredients for success in the contemporary marketplace of technology, marketing, and arts. Modern critiques of science would seem to deny the mathematical image of any power alien to its origin. But many observers seem to have a semi-religious way of perceiving mathematical visualizations. How an algorithmic automaton such as a computer animation is given a sense of being, and hence meaning, is crucial.

Panel Statement

Panel: Futurics

A man exits the gilded Chemical Bank Automated Teller Machine at 14 Wall Street in Manhattan. He is dressed in an Armani shirt, Fendi tie, Body Glove surfing trunks, and Leader swimming cap and goggles. A head-mounted microphone, which is connected to a cellular telephone in his pocket, sometimes completes his ensemble. He’s on Rollerblades that are equipped with 80 millimeter 78 and 81 A Hyper Shock wheels. He executes military maneuvers with a metal sabre while he skates his way to another ATM.

This is science fiction this is not. This Hyperformer rollersurfs the terrain of the city, weaving his way through taxis, heating grates, trucks, oil splotches, busses, cigarette butts, pedestrians, and other surfactants. He surfs from one ATM to the next, and the next, and the next. At each machine he uses his card to check his balance. He then collects his receipts. As he leaves each ATM, he calls his personal answering machine via the cellular phone while the head-mounted mike records the rhythm of his breathing patterns as he makes his way to the next ATM. He hangs up before he checks his balance. After he has completed his performances, he makes fragmented digital maps of where he’s been, which are then uploaded onto America Online. The Hyperformer is an investigative tool with which to unpack various meanings that circulate through culture. He seeks to forge and maintain a variety of connections, exploring the always-intermediate interconnectedness that increasingly characterizes our experience. He attempts to interpret and filter a variety of issues, including: the alchemical aspect of interacting with an ATM; the use of swimming and surfing metaphors in the context of information technologies;  and the dispersion of identity; among others. The outgrowth of these links is a hybrid organism coupled with a hybrid analysis, the combination of which works toward developing navigational tools for the emerging cultural spaces of information.

The proposed lecture “HYPERIMAGE reloaded. The expansion of the photographic image in virtual spaces” is based on the ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between the artistic practice (by Hanakam & Schuller; artists, Vienna/Austria) and the art/cultural sciences (by Karin Mihatsch; researcher, Paris/France). “HYPERIMAGE reloaded” will broaden and deepen some of the issues raised during the interworking for the online-work “Palaces & Courts”. “Palaces & Courts”, by Hanakam & Schuller questions the structures on the Internet. The work – based on the imagination of photography – was created within the ongoing discourse with the researcher Mihatsch. Thereupon she has written the essay “Photographic Representations of Imaginary and Its Beholders in the Light of Web 2.0.” to refer “Palaces & Courts” to a theoretical background.

In this context, some of these issues were critically examined on the occasion of a panel discussion named “HYPERIMAGE. The expansion of the photographic image in virtual spaces” (Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna/Austria, 2010). “HYPERIMAGE reloaded” will broaden and deepen the raised themes by focusing on the references to “Palaces & Courts”.

By his concept of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee paved the way to a wide distribution of images on the Internet starting in 1990. Images on the Internet follow other regularities than the printed images and are committed to the process: links between images may be set by respecting a network or structure called “Hyperimage”. According to this structure, any image can be integrated in any network or sequence. These sequences may be narrative or not, transparent or not. As mentionned, images on the Internet have a processual character contrary to printed images; but they can loose this characteristic by being transferred to another medium.

By referring to the idea of ”Hyperimage” to the work “Palaces & Courts”, Mihatsch and Hanakam & Schuller evoke the following sections in the lecture ”HYPERIMAGE reloaded”:

1. from exhibition structures and guiding systems to image structuring in networks
2. narrative aspects, associations and role of the beholder in hierarchical and net-like structures
3. photography in the light of the transformation of its materiality in depictions of exhibitions, printed and online exhibition catalogues.

The lecture by Mihatsch and Hanakam & Schuller will not only deal with theoretical practice but also with artistic practice.

6 cliches in Search of a Publicist’ Cliches and buzzwords litter the virtual landscape and everything is becoming ‘hyper’ and ‘interactive’. The result could be a visual monoculture.

Session: Cinema after the Digital

Today technology enables us to process and transmit data. As a result of the real time transmission of data, we now are able to affect things, and gather information from the places which we are not present. This bidirectional flow of data enables the telepresence concept. Today telepresence is interpreted as video conferencing or tele-robotics, which represents a very narrow window of the whole concept. The paper aims to introduce a different artistic approach to the telepresence concept via an artwork “HyperPresence” by discussing the two fragments of the project; remote location and stimuli.

The perception of reality is a key concept in telepresence. Observation of the remote location can be done by a combination of visual, audial or mechanical sensing. However, the perception of the user can distinguish the remote location being real or virtual depending on the properties of the obtained data. Lack of quality of the data gathered from a physical space can transform the perception from reality to representation. Virtual spaces with real time response can also be perceived as real, as the duration of the experience elongates.

Motion capture cinema provides the sense of reality even if the context is fictional as a result of the user’s intention to suspend their disbelief. This also eases the immersion process, as the audience convinces themselves to the reality of the depicted image.

Interactive cinema mainly focuses on augmenting the user with the ability to alter the narrative by using various types of tools. However, the interface creates a disruption on the user’s immersion with the film. Interfaces also create an obligation to interact, which consumes some attention of the user and diminishes the effect of the designed experience. In order to sustain and exploit the aforementioned perception of reality in cinema, unconscious interaction of the user should be considered.

Regarding unconscious interaction, the interface should gather the responses from the user without its initiative. The data provided by a biosensor based interface is not fully governed by the user. As their functionality implies, biosensors are usually wearable instruments, which increase the awareness of the user. However in order to sustain the unconsciousness of the interface, it has been chosen not to inform the user about the way of interaction with the medium until the end of the experience.

Biosensors have been used for non-medical purposes, like lie-detectors, assuming the body doesn’t lie. The cognition of bio data results in the emotional states of the user. An electroencephalogram (EEG) has been chosen as an interface of stimulation to the cinematic remote location, which results in changing the narrative of the film depending on the emotional states of the user obtained by the brainwaves. Combining with the frames of the film shot from first person point of view, the ability to change the narrative of the film by emotional responses transforms the user to the protagonist of the film, thus constituting teleprescence.

Institutional Presentation Statement

HyperStudio is a Swiss center for research and production in the field of interactive media based in Basel. After years, it became a collaboratory, where interactive tools are use for supporting teamwork and creative group processes. The goal is to use the tools and structures of interactive media to support the transformation of institutions in the information society.

HYPERWERK: THE CHALLENGE
Since spring ´99 a three-year course of graduate studies are offered to look at the challenges of knowledge acquisition, management, organization and retrieval. After graduation our students will leave with the title of ´interaction manager´ with the important and difficult purpose of transforming organizations into learning organizations. They develop new tools and methods for supporting teamwork under asynchronous and de-central conditions.

Abstract

Short Paper

This paper describes the project ‘A Hypertext Journal’ by Nina Pope and Karen J Guthrie, and through this explores the potential of the Internet as a site for art production and interactivity.

Excretia is the first subcomponent of a re-examination of the 500 year old book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – the Hypnerotomachia in our context of technological change. Excretia is a responsive, interactive typeface, dataspace, and information system that morphs in response to a user’s scientifically measurable physical states, in real-time.

The ‘typeface’ is not unified, but is a sampling of many typefaces it elides both the early Renaissance typographers’  desires to reveal the trace of the body in letterforms, and ideas that arose later in the Renaissance – that the bodily responses to, and the visual and material aspects of the text are ‘transparent’ to meaning. The literal connection of Excretia to the body and to phatic pictorial images, and the transgressions of sense through metaphor and wordplay paradoxically reveal our distance from bodily and phenomenological awareness.

Panel: Hybrid Cultures

This talk will take a crit­i­cal view on the blur­ring of bound­aries be­tween vir­tual worlds and real life ex­pe­ri­ence. The focus will con­cen­trate on a con­cept of re­al­ity that en­cour­ages the re-en­act­ment of highly trau­matic mem­o­ries within the vi­sual frame­work of 3D-vir­tu­al­i­sa­tions as sug­gested by the ther­a­peu­tic sim­u­la­tion pro­gram Vir­tual Iraq.  Here the com­plex process of mem­ory, imag­i­na­tion and sup­pres­sion is con­fronted with its trans­la­tion into the aes­thet­ics of a com­puter game.  In an­other work, Harun Farocki’s an­a­lytic video in­stal­la­tion Im­mer­sion, 2009, the merg­ing of im­ages be­tween vir­tual worlds and real life ex­pe­ri­ence is ques­tioned by de­lib­er­ately sep­a­rat­ing the vir­tual and the real.

Panel: An Alembic of Transformation: Virtual Reality as Agent of Change

This paper will dis­cuss two stu­dent pro­jects, which were de­vel­oped dur­ing a hy­brid course be­tween art/de­sign and com­puter sci­ences at Sa­banci Uni­ver­sity; both of which in­volve the cre­ation of three di­men­sion­ally em­bod­ied avatars whose vi­sual at­trib­utes are de­ter­mined by data feeds from “Real Life” sources.

In as early as 1999 Frank Biocca’s asked sev­eral ques­tions on how the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the body in vir­tual en­vi­ron­ments might af­fect the mind states of avatar han­dlers: The ef­fects of em­bod­i­ment on the sen­sa­tion of phys­i­cal pres­ence, so­cial pres­ence, and self pres­ence in vir­tual en­vi­ron­ments; and the ef­fects of avatar rep­re­sen­ta­tion on body image and body schema dis­tor­tions. Today, with the wide spread usage of three di­men­sional on­line vir­tual worlds and the ex­tended abil­i­ties to ma­nip­u­late the vi­sual rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the inner per­sona, Biocca’s ques­tions would ap­pear to have ac­quired even greater ur­gency. While such ef­forts usu­ally seem to be ex­pected to work to­wards the con­ceal­ment of iden­tity and/or inner states of being; can a sec­ond ap­proach, one in­volv­ing rev­e­la­tions of the inner ‘self’ that may in fact go be­yond what is avail­able to our phys­i­cal bod­ies also be con­tem­plated? Can such ‘rev­e­la­tions’ bring about change, both in terms of human in­ter­ac­tion but also in terms of self-per­cep­tion?

Fol­low­ing up from Biocca’s sem­i­nal text, The Cy­borg’s Dilemma (Biocca, 1999), this paper will de­scribe the cre­ative and tech­no­log­i­cal processes which went into the ma­te­ri­al­iza­tion of these two avatars.

Elif Ayiter is a de­signer and re­searcher spe­cial­iz­ing in the de­vel­op­ment of hy­brid ed­u­ca­tional method­olo­gies be­tween art & de­sign and com­puter sci­ence, teach­ing full time at Sa­banci Uni­ver­sity, Is­tan­bul, Turkey. She has pre­sented cre­ative as well as re­search out­put at con­fer­ences in­clud­ing Sig­graph, Con­scious­ness Re­framed, Cre­ativ­ity and Cog­ni­tion, ISEA, ICALT, Com­pu­ta­tional Aes­thet­ics (Eu­ro­graph­ics) and Cy­ber­worlds. She is also the chief ed­i­tor of the forth­com­ing jour­nal Meta­verse Cre­ativ­ity with In­tel­lect Jour­nals, UK and is cur­rently study­ing for a doc­toral de­gree at the Plan­e­tary Col­legium, CAiiA hub, at the Uni­ver­sity of Ply­mouth with Roy As­cott.

Brian Davis’ work has included chairs that move, outdoor dance floors, and reactive video installations. In I don’t care about the avant garde, I only care about you, Davis talks about repurposing off-the-shelf technology and bridging gulfs between individuals.

I am a social scientist by nature and training.  My work involved understanding and improving mental health, life experiences, and education.  I believed that science could advance the well-being of individuals and of societies. Two decades into my career and nearly as long since I was diagnosed HIV+, I started to notice changes in my behavior and in my abilities.  These were subtle and difficult to pinpoint and I kept them to myself; I told myself that if I tried harder, I could get my brain to function the way it always had.  I also knew that I couldn’t try harder; that was one of the problems:  I didn’t care or worry or remember as I should.  Or I did care but I could not will myself into actually taking action or completing what I set out to do.  I also began, uncharacteristically, to write unstructured prose and taking photographs of ordinary things I never noticed before.  I became less competent at managing my life.  I was ashamed and I was terrified.

In this paper, I tell the story of how I pieced together what was happening in my brain through studying recent neuroscience journals. And I explain the comfort and resonance I found in some of the vocabulary of neuroscience (e.g. ‘inflammatory cascade’ and ‘dendritic pruning’ and ‘disinhibition’ and ‘prospective memory’).  And I explain how I studied images of my brain in trying to find what was wrong and how I found myself making art and seeing in new ways.

Panel: Queer Viralities: Resistant Practices in New Media Art & Philosophy

Due to re­cent viral out­breaks, pro­tec­tive latex bar­ri­ers must be worn at all times.
Skin to skin con­tact may re­sult in viral con­t­a­m­i­na­tion.
Fail­ure to com­ply will re­sult in a min­i­mum of 10 years in a fed­eral pen­i­ten­tiary.
Touch­ing, and ill­ness, are pro­hib­ited by law.
The virus must be con­tained.

virus.circus fol­lows the viral as a trans­ver­sal line of in­quiry that in­ter­sects with the mil­i­ta­riza­tion of med­ical au­thor­ity, mi­cro­scopic transna­tional mi­gra­tions and global eco­nomic in­equal­ity. Con­sist­ing of an episodic se­ries of per­for­mances using wear­able elec­tron­ics, soft sen­sors and live audio to bridge vir­tual and phys­i­cal spaces, the per­for­mances ex­plore queer fu­tures of latex sex­u­al­ity and DIY med­i­cine amidst a spec­u­la­tive world of virus hys­te­ria. The his­tory of queer pol­i­tics shows that the rhetoric of viruses such as HIV are used to con­trol mar­gin­al­ized pop­u­la­tions, while viruses such as H1N1 re­pro­duce these struc­tures of power. virus.circus asks how erotic af­fect can be a form of re­sis­tance to west­ern med­i­cine. Across episodes in­clud­ing virus.circus.touch, virus.circus.breath and virus.circus.probe, Mehrmand and Cárde­nas have de­vel­oped open source hard­ware and soft­ware to fa­cil­i­tate new forms of erotic ex­pres­sion.

New pos­si­bil­i­ties of em­bod­ied knowl­edge un­fold through the soni­fi­ca­tion and vi­su­al­iza­tion of bio­met­ric data in­clud­ing heart rate and R-R in­ter­vals, as well as data from an ul­tra­sonic rangefinder bra, a pres­sure sens­ing chok­ing col­lar, touch sen­si­tive dress and a mo­tion sen­si­tive glove that con­trols a strap-on vi­bra­tor. Wear­able elec­tronic gar­ments allow the per­form­ers to ex­per­i­ment with tran­sreal em­bod­i­ment, ex­tend­ing their phys­i­cal bod­ies son­i­cally and vir­tu­ally. virus.?circus at­tempts to im­merse the au­di­ence/par­tic­i­pants in an al­ter­nate re­al­ity by cre­at­ing a slip­page of per­cep­tion. Code switch­ing be­tween mixed and al­ter­nate re­al­ity, virus.?circus asks how we can use re­al­ity as a medium, res­onat­ing across a num­ber of modes in­clud­ing pub­lic space in­ter­ven­tions, per­for­mances in mu­se­ums and gal­leries, and net­worked per­for­mances.

The Oculus Projects: Technology Performance And Body

The Oculus Projects are an on-going series of digital and interactive works of art performances, interactive installations, digital Iris prints, and a dedicated website with live webcam transmissions that explore the merging of body and technology and its possible effects on consciousness and the self. Borrowing from the traditions of film, theater, and performance, the Oculus Projects employ interactive narratives that extend traditional western linear narratives of the individual subject to include the possibility of a polyvalent understanding of consciousness and self.

Writing in the 1960’s and 70’s, American art critic Jack Burnham argued strongly against the prevailing Formalist approach to art criticism. Instead he put forward the idea of a ‘systems esthetic’, a way of rethinking art as a system or network of social-technical processes. While he showed great foresight in shifting the emphasis away from artifacts and towards the idea of networks and systems, Burnham was criticised for his quasi-scientific rationalism and for transposing the myth of progress onto avant-garde art. In attempting to come up with an all-encompassing theory of art he repeats a number of very traditional ideas, including the argument that sculpture is fundamentally mimetic. According to Burnham, sculptors in the past had to content themselves with life-like but static representations of human or animal figures. In the 1960’s, as the simulation of the living organism became closely aligned with technology and cybernetics, Burnham speaks of artists and scientists sharing “an unstoppable craving to wrest the secrets of the natural order form God – with the unconscious aim of controlling human destiny, if not in fact becoming God itself.” (_ack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, New York: George Braziller, n.d., p.314).

This paper examines Burnham’s ideas and tests them against recent ‘robotic’ works by Australian artists Mari Velonaki, Simon Yates, Wade Marynowsky and one of my own works. While not all these artists use cutting edge technology, each work questions what it means to be human in a world where machines are often autonomously acting agents. In doing so however, each artist seeks to do more than simply imitate life.

GEOPOLITICS OF MEDIA

“A patent is a type of property right. It gives the patent holder the right, for a Limited time, to exclude others from making, using, offering to sell, selling, or importing into the United States the subject matter that is within the scope of protection granted by the patent.” -U.S. Patent Office

i-BPE 2.0 takes its cue from Large institutions and governmental agencies that have begun a procedure they call ‘Deep Harmonization’. Deep Harmonization is an attempt to come up with a Global Patenting System. ii-SPE wilt participate by giving the public the right to revise existing patents for the non-scientific, non-bureaucratically inclined.

i-BPE agents will offer patent play, for non-governmental ownership.
i-BPE will filter the gene market’s esoteric intelligence networks for aggressive take-over by 1-BPS users.
i-BPE is an open patent project.
i-BPE is a counter-market-objectivity tool.
i-BPE will offer to patent the patent action.

“monsieur baudelaire je fais des excuses, votre fleur ne suis pas mauvais du tout, it est hors de mar que vos fleurs viennent”  -i.j.oog, des excuses au baudelaire du wagga wagga australie

A frustrated, would-be French hypertext poet with a lubriciously imperfect grasp of the language who was born at least half a century too late, Australian based i.j.oog is nevertheless an expert on love (unrequited lost impossible)… Whilst is moot whether love is such an appropriate subject for art – it is a historically proven obsession of poets, hypertext or otherwise, as well as those who produce prose which threatens to become a poem… A discussion of the oeuvre of i.j.00g with specific reference to curious clique of digital artists based in the Australian town of Wagga Wagga with which oog is closely associated. These include experimental sound/noise exponents minus eleven error and the multimedia artist Dan Zero.

My Paper/Presentation will deal about IART in general, IART’s LAB and the use of IART for computer art conservation.Something about IART. IART stands for Intersubjective ART and it presents a model for computer based works of art. IART was initiated in September 2010 by Bill Spinhoven van Oosten. What is IART’s mission:IART’s mission is the creation of Art that is capable to maintain and develop itself physically and mentally. Art that is capable to easily interconnect with people, social networks and similar works of art across the globe.Art that can learn from its interactions. Art that will have relations with people, institutions and businesses. In short Art that will behave much more as a subject instead of an object.
In order for this kind of art to evolve over a longer period of time it has to be robust enough to last for many years. It is this robustness that makes IART an ideal model for computer art conservation.Research into the use of IART for computer art conservation is currently conducted by the NIMk. This paper/Presentation will report about this research and give the final or preliminary results of this research.Proposals for further research are currently made and submitted by the University of Amsterdam and The University of Twente.

In order to let IART easily reach out to potential developers a Cooperation with the department of Pervasive Systems at the University of Twente was made in November 2010. As a result of this cooperation IART can use the research lab of the faculty.Parts of the development of IART have been integrated as projects into the curriculum of the University.The paper will go into detail about IART’s lab.

Finaly the paper/Presentation will invite the reader to participate in IART’s development if he or she beliefs this would create  synergy.

Currently Ibero-America lacks, unlike the Anglo-Saxon countries, of a systematization of the history of media art in that region. There are fragmented accounts, non-centralized information, sparse and scattered bibliography. We are interested in approaching the different efforts that have occurred or are taking place in our region, to build a common story and history, that integrates and discovers its origins and map out its main exponents and current trends. Building a non-hegemonic and decentralized view of those that currently prevail.

We will focus on the different efforts that both Latin America and Spain are making through academic and non-academic projects, and initiatives such as the creation of the “Red y Observatorio Iberoamericano de Arte Digital y Electrónico“ (Ibero-American Digital and Electronic Art Network and Observatory). Which integrates various countries and institutions in the region, with the aim of building a network that articulates efforts with the objectives of generating that narrative, systematize media art collections and strengthen regional links.

Enter an exciting, entertaining and mysterious virtual world, an interactive 3D environment where you meet, compete, and socialize in real time with other people logged in from around the world. An art work where you the viewer are able to create, inhabit and explore. An interactive story which you join into. A community which you are a part of. A social art work which entertains and educates. IceBorg is all these and more.

Created by an international team headed by renowned media artists Merja Puustinen and Andy Best from MEET Factory, Helsinki, with team members from Finland, Russia, Germany, Finland, France, Ireland, Canada and the United States.

IceBorg is part of the Helsinki 2000 European City of Culture artistic program, and is reproduced by MEET Factory and the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada.

“For Duras as for Barthes, the body is not a mode of self-identity: the body is a figure of madness, not self-possession. It is not an essence or nature, but a reverse of an essence or nature; it is a name for that which provokes crisis in the realm of representation by producing irreducible difference…” – Leslie Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires

Exploring the “irreducible difference” of the body as it disrupts cultural representation and complicates issues of self-identity and self-possession, eVokability: The Walking Project is a performance project that is concerned with “mic-ing,” amplifying, reading the body with dis/ability. The performers use their bodies as a locus of investigation at the intersection of dis/ability, performance and wearable media technologies. Each performer wears an eVokability device tailored to the specificity of her body and movement, and generates a visual/sonic/performative language of the different body “speaking.” Body difference, the notion of dis/ability as “deficiency,” sets in motion the question of the body itself – all bodies – as beyond control, governed by frailty, desire and mortality, defined by irregularities and surprises. The Walking Project engages a notion of embodiment as a dynamic resistance to representation, taking place in the space between the body and the responsive image.

The process-oriented collaboration between project director Sarah Drury and Walking Project performers is concerned with using sensing technologies and live animations to virtualize body difference, building an iconography of movement-driven imagery. This talk explores this notion of embodied iconography through three different works with performers Cathy Weis, Lezlie Frye and Shelley Barry.

Abstract (long paper)

This paper examines how artists and product designers could develop objects in a technological social era by using foresight and ideational drawing as a method of inquiry and anticipated development. It examines methods how artists and designers can consider future states of objects that bridge social engagement between users. It also provides a framework for design considerations of how objects may outgrow its technological value over time. The methodology of foresight and ideational drawing aids in understanding how designers can approach and create an understanding how the object could operate in various future world states and its possible comingling. This paper examines how a nested framework process informs how product designers and the designing of objects are interrelated to techno-social experiences. A nested framework process is a series of applied research methods used in combination to approach a complex problem. It argues for the inclusion of ideational drawing as a method to be included in the Popper diamond.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Crowdsourcing, digital curation, network co-curation, community resources, art/science

The curatorial process is typically an expert led endeavor that requires extensive content review and judicious selection to assemble an archive of shared cultural value. Recent innovations in digital social curation open up new opportunities for non-expert participation in assembling collections, although challenges remain in terms of maintaining quality, straddling expert and amateur goals and integrating disparate and related efforts. In response, we present a flexible online web application designed to computationally support collective curatorial decision-making across diverse communities of interest. Findings from a 10-week deployment with a technology-arts community point to the utility of the system in accurately identifying and recommending useful content.

The authors are currently creating two video projects – ANTIGONE and TELENESIA – that explore audience experience, individual and place in differing ways.

ANTIGONE is a collaborative web documentary work that examines the effects of economic and political migration through the eyes of the individual narrative and personal story. This is being developed as a web based project, optimized for iPad, and it looks at how the realpolitik of national boundaries interfaces with the subjective.

Exploring the wider themes of change, loss, identity, and ultimately the meaning and notion of ‘home’, each documentary within the ANTIGONE interface presents a unique, “local” story from different parts of the world. When combined these unique and local stories become a chorus of narratives exploring the nature of migration and the experiences that go along with it.

TELENESIA is an interactive video installation that the audience engages with using an analogue interface of knobs and dials (physical computing) on “sculptural” boxes created from driftwood. Central to the project is the notion of the mythic “non-space” of the island of Telenesia – a place where an archive of “lost media” resides.

The work is situated in a gallery space comprised of computer-generated imagery of a sea horizon cycling through the changes of light through day and night. Amongst flotsam and jetsam strewn across this “island” lie discarded and weathered boxes that the audience can “tune in” to fragments of archive film clips edited to emphasize the textures of scratches, grain and glitch.

Both these works pay careful attention the narrative implications of the choices made around technical delivery and the paper will examine the reasons behind decisions made. The two projects have been in development for the past two years – TELENESIA will be exhibited in a UK gallery in late summer 2011 and ANTIGONE will launched in beta form during the period of ISEA 2011.

Artist Statement

The desire to travel has accelerated into a frenzy satisfying our fantasies of uncovering unfamiliar places, a demand for the exotic and confronting rituals of the primitive. Technology has permitted travel at phenomenal speeds, ironically shortening the length of stay in territory which ultimately remains foreign. The western traveller confronted with an alien environment observes an array of ‘ethnic rituals’ through a range of sophisticated electronic products, then frantically returns home with each recorded image serving as a measure of his/her western supremacy. Experiencing the ‘other’ really occurs.

The electronic gateways continue to channel traffic along all possible routes, yet the traveller approaching from the opposite direction is confronted with these gateways that rapidly metamorphosing into barriers. The West becomes a frontier impenetrable without the correct data and sufficient information. Each gateway selects, records, and tags the individual. Once within the walls of the fortress each movement is discreetly observed, the act of surveillance embedded within local environments carefully observing the identities of those that are alien – Distance is encouraged – Interaction is not. For the visitor, routes are preset, environments controlled, orientation determined by those in control. The visitor has arrived but the culture remains remote. Identities are preserved.

Our project creates a fluid form of sound‑based mapping, moving beyond the key difficulty in sonically re‑presenting space: the inability to engage with the mapped environment in an embodied way. Our presentation explores the phenomenological process of mediating the listener’s experience of both space and time, allowing them to move seamlessly between multiple perspectives. Our project integrates elements of art, science, and technology; combining sound mapping and recording, acoustic ecology and electroacoustic composition into a digital gestural control environment. Our project is a multi‑dimensional gestural control interface exploring interconnected physical and temporal regions of mapped sound. These regions include:

1. Present‑day sounds of Dubai, collected and interpolated during the conference period
2. A sonic imagination of the area in the past
3. A projection of what the sound of the area may become.

The fluid and flexible nature of the gestural control interface (LEAP Motion) is very conducive to application in the construction of a new form of embodied sound mapping. By applying layers of meaning to multiple vertical strata of gestural space, the listener is able to navigate both time and space in a single movement.As a new form of mapping and technological mediation, our project fits very well into the ISEA2014 primary theme of Location, as well as several of the subthemes, particularly Interlacing Worlds. This project requires a Mac computer with USB 3.0 compatibility. Video projection would be ideal. Sound from the map can either be presented via loudspeakers or headphones.

Ifu Elimnyama is a recital of a piece of literature written by Russel Hlongwane that fuses Zulu mythological figures as agents from the fourth dimension. These figures (imincwi) have travelled through spacetime to deliver messages to the Zulu people who lost their culture when they lost connection to the ‘’cloud’’ which is their repository of all their histories and collective memories. They are desperately needing to reconnect with the (dark) cloud in order to unlock their connection to uNomkhubulwane (the Zulu goddess of rain) through the (dark) cloud by means of laying a fibre network. History is a contested space and this work uses Zulu history and mythology as ingredients to reposition Zulu mythology in modern parlance through the vocabulary and activities associated with digital ‘’customs and/ or rituals’’.

Illuminant is an interactive installation which visitors can scribble and display 3D optical trace of user inputs in three dimensional spaces. This installation is consisted from two boxes. One is a 3D input device ‘3D IN’ and the other is a 3D display device ‘3D OUT’.

3D IN box is provided with three cameras on its top three corners. Users put an optical ‘wand’ and scribble 3d shapes in the box and record its movement and colors in 3D. Full-color LED is attached on the tip of the wand and cameras in the box record its movement and colors in 3D.

3D OUT box is a 3D display consisted from layers of LCD filters and a projector. Each of LCD filters turns white when electricity is turned on and displays the projector image on it. An electronic controller controls these LCD filers and the focal range of the projector to scan the box vertically to create a 3D illusion.

Scribbled 3D shapes are stored in a database and visitors can browse other people’s scribbled 3D data.

To create a sense of place in urban life, there is a tension between the desire for familiarity and stability in our everyday environment and the drive towards growth and evolution. Singapore, like other rapidly developing cities, is in a constant state of becoming – a global city that exemplifies hyper-plasticity while concerned with cultivating its national identity through cultural renewal and development, as geographers Lily Kong and others have studied.

[4] However, because of its rapid urban re-development, its landscapes of inscribed personal meaning are unevenly and rarely fixed or stable. Singapore is largely unrecognizable from what it was over five decades ago and its rapid renewal creates a certain anxiety and sense of placelessness among its citizens. A recent article in Singapore’s national newspaper, The Straits Times, critiques unabated urban development and the endangerment of vernacular post-independence architectural heritage in Singapore, challenging the state to preserve a sense of place and belonging for its citizens rather than continually serve the interest of private development. [5] As a city in a state of continual becoming, Singapore provides a useful case study for asking how cities in a continual process of urban renewal are challenged to cultivate and communicate cultural heritage and a sense of place for its diverse inhabitants.

As cities develop, the invisible layers of history embedded in them are often erased or overlooked. Initiated as a collaboration with the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore, this presentation will discuss a research project that uses new media to uncover overlooked cultural histories of Singapore’s diverse ethnic communities. In contrast to public exhibitions on urban planning that typically serve as an interface for visitors to learn about the city’s plans for the future, this project creates a way for visitors to hear and view stories and histories from Singapore’s disappearing past. Here digital technologies become a tool by which narratives of place and past are illuminated within an urban landscape that is continually shifting.

This interactive mapping project engages new media to create a greater awareness of the invisible histories of our built environment and the diversity of peoples who populate it. It asks what kind of urban interfaces could be designed to communicate with the city and its communities, and what overlooked stories could be uncovered in order to enrich our understanding of the urban landscapes we move through.

On Saturday, September 20, 2014, the United Nations Department of Public Information presented a spectacular 30-story architectural projection in partnership with the Oceanic Preservation Society, Obscura Digital, and Insurgent Media. The United Nation’s General Assembly and Secretariat buildings were lit up with massive projections as part of a revolutionary call for action on global climate change.
The event took place in connection with the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Summit. “Now is the time to take decisive action on climate change. Protecting our planet is the responsibility of each and every one of us. We must make our voices heard. These exceptional projections shown at the United Nations will help draw attention to the need to make climate action a reality in every community and every society,” said UN Secretary-General General Ban Ki-moon.
This 10-minute presentation will reveal some of the behind-the-scene creative processes that led to the projection mapping show.

The subject of the lecture is the development of some techniques related to illusionism and their social and psychological effects on the audience in general and on the spectator, in particular.These illusionistic techniques and theories are invading the concepts of today’s discussion about interactivity and virtual reality.

Starting from the Baroque age — when certain political and cultural shifts drove to new models of communication, both in the artistic and political realm, based on the idea of continuum space where spectators couldn’t avoid feeling integrated within the urban and architectural scenario – the idea of spectacle has developed as a tool for social powers to channel their policies and to avoid critical approaches to them by the audience-public. Not in vain, those shifts happened due to important scientific changes and discoveries: from the baroque time, science and tools are no longer separated.

Illusionism, as we know it today, began to take shape in the XVI and XVII centuries. In the art world, the increasing importance of visual tricks, such as anamorphosis, trompe-l’oeil, infinite architectural perspectives, etc, defined the new approach of artists to the idea of reality and to the idea of subjective perception. These techniques and cultural approaches are part of our cultural reading and social behavior nowadays. Benjamin, Foucault, Debord and other social researchers have explained it already.

On the other hand, sleight-of-hand, conjuring, prestidigitation were the forerunners of current spectacular and representational techniques like photography or cinema. As a matter of fact, most of the first developers of cinema were illusionist before they adopted cinema as the ultimate trick. The appearance of cinema engines was directly related to the mechanisms used by magicians to perform their seances. Cinema, and afterwards, the efforts to turn original screens into wider screens – such as the Panorama or the Cinerama during the 50’s and 60’s – enlarged this old idea of evolve the spectator in a total spectacle, forcing him/her to become unavoidable part of it.Television’s perceptive techniques have always focussed this issue as a main topic. Cable and interactive television seem to reinforce this idea.
Magic is based on the idea that the trick can never be seen by the audience. This is the main guarantee for the success of a show. Moreover, this idea is based, in its turn, on the fact that if people knew or saw the trick the whole spectacle would be gone overnight. Magic only shows the results, the outcome, not the trick. The whole idea of the spectacle relies on the idea that the public itself don’t want to see the trick; they are in front of the stage to get the illusion, not the mechanism that creates it. Digital technology today is based on the same optics. Mechanical technology was abled to be understood by the general audience. But not digital technology, which is only dealt by high-skilled technicians. People just use it, but without understanding it. The outcome is visible, but no the internal process behind the screen. In this sense, digital technology and magic are intimately tied up.
Virtual Reality environments represent today the latest application of this techniques. Not only in psychological terms, but also in scientific ones, since one of the approaches to VR by scientists and programmers, for example, is the very idea of “anamorphosis7o create a world where the spectator is an essential part of it, legitimating the very function of the machine, seems to reproduce this institutional will of incorporating the public in a dream that don’t belong to them, given that it’s been programmed in advance, following certain patterns, external to the very idea of the engine.With this, the paper doesn’t want by any means to demonize technology of VR in itself, but to raise several questions that can be useful in developing a critical sense of this fast-growing, evolving and interactive technology.

The lecture will trace an historical perspective of the techniques and theories of “interpassive” illusionism, from the Baroque Age to now, crossing boundaries with magic, political institutional projections, the birth of modern spectacle and the rise of interactive technology, with the aim of describing how the spectator has always been targeted to become part of the social representation, with the danger of losing any critical perspective.

Contemporary music is often thought of in terms of musical objects where tonic notes, appropriately clustered, give a mass corresponding to height and tessitura criteria. A mathematical characterization of a musical phrase permits various visualization techniques of the figure. In accord with philosophical concepts, the pattern is perfectly represented by an envelope which is a tangent surface at a set of notes in a polyphonic score. Two image models are discussed in this paper. The first is based on the B-spline surfaces smoothing a discrete musical event set in the space: height-duration-timbre. The second performs the Discrete Fourier Transform signature of the digital musical signal.

Imaginary Futures project establishes a relationship between the projections of the future and the fulfillment of these projections. Project promotes questioning heritage of social vision, in this case, the legacy of the ‘utopian urbanism’ in the 1960s, and today’s social awareness through the problem of planning the urban area.

The project consists of series of artworks, film Zagreb Confidential – Imaginary Futures, video triptych Panorama, and now-in-progress interactive installation. In the movie I used archival footage of New Zagreb (1950s – present day), and computer generated images of both planned and partially realized urban development plans and their various phases. Project examines the visions of future in the specific case of New Zagreb on the one hand, and the structure of the film on the other. Film is conceived as the structure of time in general, and this notion was leading force behind creation of the structure of Zagreb Confidential.

Most of the editing was carried out automatically, and not according to footage quality. Mathematically exact dynamic of moving video images was achieved by using algorithmic editing, which follows classical mathematical algorithms such as the Fibonacci sequence, magical squares of different sizes, etc. By using this method, the idea of a “higher order” and ideal measures used in antiquity, the Renaissance and Modernism, in modern urbanism and art in general (e.g. the golden ratio) are put into question.

The algorithms were used to determine the duration of the basic unit of the digital video image, one of the 25 frames in a second. When using such algorithms, it is hard to predict what the result will be, so this method required a lot of experimentation, in the strictest sense of the word. With the help of a team of experts in various areas, I made an experimental film in the true sense of the word which, like any structural film, does not aim to please the viewer by presenting him or her with visual pleasing images and a linear narrative.

Video triptych Panorama making use of one only algorithm, that of the magic square (7th order), also called Magic Square of Venus. Centuries old algorithm is used it at time axe, using 1 frame as basic unit (25 FPS). The numbers associated with Venus are 7, 49, 175 and 1225. This is because: 1) each row and column of the magic square contains seven numbers. 2) the square contains 49 numbers total, ranging from 1 to 49. 49 frames are 7 seconds in film. 3) each row, column and diagonal adds up to 175. And 4) all of the numbers in the square add up to 1225. It shows that this number making 49 seconds in film (7 x 7 seconds)!

The bio-electrical activity of the brain (EEG) is being used to control a cursor on a computer screen to finally communicate via an interface with the outside world. this high-tech sophisticated brain-computer-interface (BCI) has to be fed with imagination, the archaic domain of the artist. information is the common denominator of ‘imagineering’ to create a truly coherent “art-science” that’s what culture begins with. ‘Imagineering’ has been built to melt imagination and engineering, art and technology, personality and society, culture and politics. the audience is being asked to take part in the installation to proof its own power of imagination, whereas five handicapped artists communicated via the internet to create in contradiction to their own bodies a perfect virtual body by the means of communication only.

For the past 73 years, the CBC has disseminated a unique Canadian perspective across the world, producing a phenomenally rich multimedia record of the country and our social, political and cultural heritage and news. This project utilizes visualization and sonification of portions of an enormous historical CBC Newsworld data corpus to enable an ‘on this day’ experience for viewers. The digitized collection of 24‑hour news videos spans a 23‑year period (1989‑2012) within an immersive multiscreen environment, to enable gesture‑driven context‑aware browsing, information seeking, and segment review. Employing natural language processing technologies, the interface displays keywords and key phrases identified in the transcripts, enabling serendipitous video search and display and offering a unique browsing opportunity within this rich ‘big data’ corpus. Goals ‑ The CBC Newsworld archives present a video corpus completely unlike any other that has been made available in searchable/browsable form. This project has three inter‑connected preservation and research goals. The first is to digitize, visualize, and make available this collection of 23 years of Canadian news broadcasts through a     state‑of‑the‑art multimedia search and browsing system, to ensure its preservation and make it available as a valuable resource for researchers and students. The second goal is to design a real‑world project as an arena in which to conduct exploratory research and develop and test new technologies for video browsing, search and visualization, and spoken document and video retrieval. The third is to design and test an immersive environment and aesthetic interface design, employing gestural and touch interfaces for browsing this incredible corpus. This is a novel proposition for video browsing and serendipitous search, which to our knowledge is not currently available otherwise, which would have many applications for searching large spoken word news and video corpora.