Presentation Data Table

This paper describes the techniques used in the realization of a Performance and Installation which explores the gradual “osmosis” between three different sound worlds: The song of swallows recorded at summer above the town of Corfu the song of Weddel Seals recorded in Antarctica (from the macaulay library of marine biology), and the emissions of short wave “Numbers Stations” recorded by amateurs all over the world (from recordings pubished by irdial). The sound recordings are segmented tools available in the SuperCollider sound processing environment and then the individual parts are analysed by several feature extraction algorithms based on fft data extracted by tools such as SPEAR and LORIS. Boid swarming algorithms are used to model the movement of samples in a parametric space, which is then mapped into simulated sound space with multichannel audio.

The sounds are transformed in real time by exchanging spectral characteristics through FFT-based processing methods, taking into account the previously extracted spectral characteristics. Several examples are given of the various ways in which the sounds are transformed. The work also includes graphics synthesized in real time based on physical models of particles and fluid modeling. Different ways in which the sound transformation technique are combined with the graphics and how they are contrlled in live performance as well as in an interactive installation are described. These techniques include various multi-touch surfaces ranging from iPhone or iPad to reactable-based technologies to open-handed gesture recognition from video input.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Mimesis, microcontrollers, prototypes, interactive, agency, autonomy, code, programming, hardware, physical computing.

This paper is a theoretical discussion about new media art prototypes that use interactive components such as programmed microcontrollers, which respond to the presence of viewers in a host of dynamic ways. The media art prototype is examined in relation to the Western philosophical concept of mimesis, or the convincing imitation of aspects of life, with the aim of understanding the overall aesthetic and cultural implications of media works of art that appear to possess life or agency of their own. Media art is shown to reinvigorate the ancient concept of mimesis in important politico-cultural capacities: by revealing that works of art can be endowed with the illusion of agency, contemporary new media artists also suggest that such powers of agency and possibility for change extend to other aspects of the lived world. The former modernist/postmodernist critique of mimesis as rote naturalism or hegemonic cultural coding thus modulates itself. The suggestion of mimetic animism in new media art prototypes proffers invention and manufacture as a potential space of reconciliation between mechanized materiality, systems of production, and organic life.

This paper proposes an EEG-based musical instrument system, MindPlay, that provides ensemble experience in a new way. MindPlay is a system that produces sound by controlling a melodic percussion instrument based on an user’s brainwave data monitored by a EEG device in real time. This aims to provide an user with aesthetic experience and satisfaction of ensemble with professional musicians even if they do not have the knowledge and skills of traditional instruments.

Keywords: Online video remix, extrasensory perception, sublime, informational complexity, mind waves.

How about the emergence of a specific kind of consciousness when we experience the sublime? What happens in the brain when our sensorial and extra-sensorial systems experience a state of astonishment – when these systems find themselves over-whelmed, unable to comprehend a phenomenon in its totality due to its informational complexity? In the present paper, the authors present and discuss a collaborative project where they are exploring the experience of revealing and facing the sublime by navigating personal online video memories, driven through databanks by our mind waves. To face the extreme in our emotions, in situations that detaches the self from normality, no matter if in deep meditative practices when in search for mindful awareness, or even jumping from a mountain with a paraglide, the sublime has the power to transform our informational structure – the sublime is disruptive.

This proposal is submitted in the request of obtaining an artist presentation entitled: Minus Worlds, Lost Levels, and Glitchscapes; Negative Space and Code.

The presentation will introduce a series of digital works (images, animations and interactive content) consisting of levels, structures, and spaces generated algorithmically by custom-built software running on various NES and SNES video game cartridges.

The work aims to explore the negative space of code; activating, reorganizing and reinterpreting the invisible datascapes embedded within the game’s ROM. These information geographies exist as undiscovered, unintentional wastelands, operating at the periphery of programmed terrain- glitch spaces exposed through the performance of inverted logic.

The software was built in Java on Mac OS X. It operates on the Read-Only-Memory of various NES and SNES video game cartridges. It reprocesses the image content of the games to create new levels/structures not programmed by the original game developers. These regenerated spaces are displayed as images, animations and even playable levels.

Keywords: Wonder, Poetic Science, Methodology, Interactive Design, Transmedia, Worldbuilding, Evocative Visualization, Marine Science, Interdisciplinary Science, Life-cycle, Immortality.

MIRAWORLD models an interdisciplinary design methodology centered on poetic science as exploratory research prompt. Wonder is a reawakening of spirit within the sense faculties. It can emerge as a bi-product of science unlocking the world around us. MIRAWORLD explores poetic science as a methodological design framework for evoking a sense of wonder across three cinematic media arts projects centered on the poetics of the life-cycle of the immortal jellyfish.

Our sense of the self and its relation to its surroundings is being increasingly reshaped by telematic prostheses. Geotagging, Google Earth, biomapping, telepresence, augmented reality (AR), and distributed intelligence are creating new locative sense-perceptions, unprecedented narratives, and new feelings (and praxes) of agency-at-a-distance.

Can locative media deepen our sense of embeddedness, recreating those ancient reality-maps where selfhood was co-extensive with community and Nature, perhaps spurring us to address today’s urgent social and ecological challenges? Or will these media further abstract actual relatedness, narrowing it to more quantifiable and qualifiable instrumental operations?

In particular, this paper will ask how new media technologies might help achieve a level of collective agency to effect actual transformation.

One project developed by the charity Green World Campaign proposes to use interactive geolocation to catalyze global treeplanting. Media facade installations planned for major cities will enable people to use cellphone shortcode to fund the planting of trees on degraded land, with stands of trees geo-tagged and displayed on a dynamic map. The project also encourages “global citizens” to upload the geocoordinates of trees they have themselves planted and embellish them with their own media content, embedding personal narratives of a “green world” into a growing forestation map. (Deleuze and Guattari’s strategy of “reterritorialization” becomes particularly relevant.)

Could a “global brain” with cyber-mediated hands and feet instantiate verifiable alterations in the natural world? With civilization itself threatened by environmental crisis, the conventional sense of where our own body begins and leaves off is incomplete without an intimately felt sense of the world we inhabit. Could a cyber-enhanced collective self extend its proprioception  to the very “skin” of the Earth? Could we harness the transformative potential of the Web by jacking into the planet itself? New media technologies and collaborative “social sculpture” (Joseph Beuys term) introduce fresh imaginal dimensions to our relationship with the natural (and human) environment, perhaps leading to a more tender and generative embrace.

“Mistaken Identities: The Electronic Transference” describes the technical and rhetorical strategies I employed in my recently completed CDROM (“Mistaken Identities”). The project bridges education, art and technology by combining aspects of a didactic presentation with ideas derived from several contemporary art media, such as performance, video, fiction and photography. The CDROM is organized around the lives and work of 10 famous women: Josephine Baker, Simone de Beauvoir, Catherine the Great, Colette, Marie Curie, Marlene Dietrich, lsadora Duncan, Frida Kahlo, Margaret Mead and Gertrude Stein. These figures were chosen for their emblematic status as female role models. However, the CDROM examines them as complex figures whose identities are not essential or fixed, but contingent and mutable. In representing them, I tried to subvert their commodification as icons by both the cultural establishment and feminism. As an alternative to this iconization, I configure their identities in the negotiated space between self and other, a negotiation that continues in my relation to them as narrator. The stories I tell demonstrate how each of these women derived her power from her ability to continually reinvent herself in response to the pressures and contradictions presented by her situation. “Mistaken Identities” constructs a genealogy around these women, observing the overlaps and parallels between their histories without undermining the specificities of each person’s particular accommodation to the dilemma of how to be a woman. A genealogy differs from a biography in seeking to investigate the complex operations of power in social contexts. The project has six sections: the Portrait Gallery, the Timeline, the Scrapbook, TV Movies, Morphologies and Puzzles. The boundaries between fact, fiction and interpretation are intentionally blurred in the project. For example, TV Movies consists of clips from documentaries and Hollywood movies based on the women’s lives. In the Scrapbook, quotations from the women’s autobiographical writings are juxtaposed with snapshots that convey a sense of the texture of their daily existence. With its potential for facilitating periphrastic navigation, the CDROM format enables the invention of oblique narrative structures that mirror the circuitous strategies these women devised for organizing their lives.

Misunderstood: Duologue with a Broken Machine explores the relationship between two imperfect entities: an algorithmic translator and a human reader. A North American actor reads aloud the text of a Polish citizenship form as translated on the fly by his overworked smartphone -he tries to make sense of what he is told to understand. Human and machine are seen to struggle in consummating an informational transaction. The embodied performance—moving between echo, question, and challenge- evokes that of playing with a Ouija board: easy answers are sought from thin air, but instead the user must seek meaning and structure through seemingly-arbitrary external cues. Despite the promise of instant information, the networked smartphone profoundly fails at its task, glitching as it leaves its human interlocutor at the mercy of a frustratingly, beautifully inscrutable set of instructions that can ultimately change the shape of his identity.

The MIXED REALITY PERFORMANCE LAB is the result of one-years practical research funded through the Australia Council’s Inter Arts Artlab initiative. It practically examines the limits and opportunities for using TECHNOLOGY AS SUBJECT in THEATRE, where the technology PERFORMS as an actor does in traditional theatre. It is about examining the interface between bodies as subject and technologies as subject; where the technology is capable of real-time spontaneous interaction with actors in a dramatic theatre work. Over a year, a team of Sydney and Melbourne based artists are undertaking a series of research laboratories developing cross-disciplinary methodologies into the interface between bodies and technology including: Human-robot interaction, Avatar and real-time projection of virtual worlds, motion-capture, 3D Stereoscopic animation, haptics and Virtual Reality. This research is being undertaken through residencies in technology centres (the Deakin Motion Capture Lab and the Centre for Intelligent Systems Research), testing the use of these technologies in the dramatic theatre work Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, exploring aesthetic, dramatic and philosophical implications. This research is driven by an assumption that dramatic theatre has been reluctant to include media technologies, whereas other art forms are more than comfortable to do so. We wish to respond to this resistance and seek to investigate where the technology is capable of real-time spontaneous interaction with humans on stage. Is it possible to maintain the fundamentals of dramatic theatre, and use new media technologies at the same time? Can audiences still empathise with character and plot when technology ‘acts’? Can the dramatic world still be drawn through dialogue and maintain a ‘closed fictional world’ when integrating technology with actors on stage?

Design representation/visualization is a key to the design perception and communication and is essential for meaningful design development and collaborations. Novel computer-based representation/visualization techniques have the potential to radically change the process of architectural design to match more closely the formal aspirations of today architects. Among the new emerging digital and media technologies, Mixed or Augmented reality (MR/AR) has shown a great potential to represent and communicate design ideas in Architecture. In this paper we will explore the potential of mixed reality in the representation/perception and understanding of architectural design as a set of dynamic spaces that can be experienced. The dynamic representation will not concern only the 3D spaces but more widely the user experience, this will be done through a comparison of a pre-processed and a real time construction of narrative expressive spaces. These experiences have been implemented in architectural design studios that employs AR as a medium of representation/visualization.

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

Cen­tral East­ern Eu­rope in last two decades goes through very dy­namic changes. They can be de­scribed as a chain of de­pen­den­cies in which po­lit­i­cal sta­tus shapes eco­nom­i­cal sit­u­a­tion and eco­nom­i­cal con­di­tion de­ter­mines ac­cess to new tech­nolo­gies which after all in­flu­ences tech­no­log­i­cally based art. This fact causes dif­fi­cul­ties in defin­ing new media art and leaves many ques­tions about local speci­ficity of dig­i­tal works. “Mi­grat­ing mean­ing. Un­der­stand­ing new media art in Cen­tral East­ern Eu­rope” tries to state what new media art is and what dis­ci­plines does it cover in the con­text of sub­jec­tive opin­ions of new media artists and the­o­rists from Cen­tral East Eu­ro­pean coun­tries.

Some twenty student pieces, including Switch at Birth (Co-ordinator Stewart Cook) – a performance about a sentient computer operating system. Questioning sentience, the plot, images, and music were all written partly by students and partly by computers. It was shown as three large video projections in the Holden Gallery.

Panel Statement

Panel: Post Conflict Storytelling

After conflicts, communities may find their buildings and streets fundamentally altered. In addition to economic, social and psychological repercussions, the inhabitants are deprived of their life milieu prior to the conflict. With the reduction or obstruction of space, memories and values attached to it are lost. This causes alienation, indignation and sorrow, sometimes with strong social and political implications. Building on the theories of Maurice Halbwachs, and Aleida and Jan Assmann, physical environment is here considered primarily as a framework for organising and disseminating our collective memories and meanings. In addition architecture is regarded as memory in itself, a store of cultural traces providing groups with identity. The loss of recognisable space hinders the collective processes of retrieving recollections shared by the groups, as well as reduces memory visible in built environment.

It is suggested that, actualised and problematised, these issues can have positive effect on rebuilding confidence in a community. By opposing any idea of reconstructing a true past, the paper proposes film making for engaging with the significance of remembered space. In situations where environments are lost, the film could offer a discursive space, here understood both as a space for discourse and as a discourse about space.
Two films are theorised in relation and opposition to each other – providing a field for analytical speculation: Harun Farocki’s Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1988) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique (2004) dealing with the questions, conflicts and the spaces of war. Farocki’s film is organised as a thesis with a narrator talking over assemblages of images and sound. Despite its seemingly linear structure, the film is characterised by relations of images and sounds, not possible to anticipate by logical association, creating unexpected fields of meaning.
Notre musique makes use of a semi-fictive and fragmentary story within a thematic montage.
In Christina Scherer’s description of essential features of the essayistic film in Ivens, Marker, Godard, Jarman – Erinnerung im Essayfilm, it is possible to recognise attributes present in the two films. With the decomposition and fragmentation of the narrative and the components of
meaning, the essay film builds on the very doubt of recollection and the image. It questions representation of reality, suggesting its suitability for thematising memory. The paper aims at conceiving a manner of film making, not like the examples, but as an extension of the argument.
In practice, the mnemo-spatial film work can run the gamut from engagement with people in diaspora, to on-site involvement with affected communities and a theoretical investigation into modes of spatial remembering. The paper argues film can be a mnemonic in situations of
spatial conflicts. It can become available to communities as open-ended reflections complementary to reports or argumentative texts, as well as a spatial expression in itself, complementary to the altered or lost milieus. The argument is intended as a contribution to theory and practice engaged with the enigmas of memories and space, and to the production of re-interpretative and ambiguous artefacts of thought.

Panel Statement

Panel: Post Conflict Storytelling

After conflicts, communities may find their buildings and streets fundamentally altered. In addition to economic, social and psychological repercussions, the inhabitants are deprived of their life milieu prior to the conflict. With the reduction or obstruction of space, memories and values attached to it are lost. This causes alienation, indignation and sorrow, sometimes with strong social and political implications. Building on the theories of Maurice Halbwachs, and Aleida and Jan Assmann, physical environment is here considered primarily as a framework for organising and disseminating our collective memories and meanings. In addition architecture is regarded as memory in itself, a store of cultural traces providing groups with identity. The loss of recognisable space hinders the collective processes of retrieving recollections shared by the groups, as well as reduces memory visible in built environment.

It is suggested that, actualised and problematised, these issues can have positive effect on rebuilding confidence in a community. By opposing any idea of reconstructing a true past, the paper proposes film making for engaging with the significance of remembered space. In situations where environments are lost, the film could offer a discursive space, here understood both as a space for discourse and as a discourse about space.
Two films are theorised in relation and opposition to each other – providing a field for analytical speculation: Harun Farocki’s Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1988) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique (2004) dealing with the questions, conflicts and the spaces of war. Farocki’s film is organised as a thesis with a narrator talking over assemblages of images and sound. Despite its seemingly linear structure, the film is characterised by relations of images and sounds, not possible to anticipate by logical association, creating unexpected fields of meaning.
Notre musique makes use of a semi-fictive and fragmentary story within a thematic montage.
In Christina Scherer’s description of essential features of the essayistic film in Ivens, Marker, Godard, Jarman – Erinnerung im Essayfilm, it is possible to recognise attributes present in the two films. With the decomposition and fragmentation of the narrative and the components of
meaning, the essay film builds on the very doubt of recollection and the image. It questions representation of reality, suggesting its suitability for thematising memory. The paper aims at conceiving a manner of film making, not like the examples, but as an extension of the argument.
In practice, the mnemo-spatial film work can run the gamut from engagement with people in diaspora, to on-site involvement with affected communities and a theoretical investigation into modes of spatial remembering. The paper argues film can be a mnemonic in situations of
spatial conflicts. It can become available to communities as open-ended reflections complementary to reports or argumentative texts, as well as a spatial expression in itself, complementary to the altered or lost milieus. The argument is intended as a contribution to theory and practice engaged with the enigmas of memories and space, and to the production of re-interpretative and ambiguous artefacts of thought.

Abstract

“Through these new technologies, the contradictory stereotypes of Japaneseness have assumed new forms; the new technologies have become associated with the sense of Japanese identity and ethnicity.”    _Morley & Robins 2004

Japanese comic images, often used in old and new media, benefit from a plasticity consolidated by the new technologies, which allows them to have singular viral properties. Animation, by having an origin in comics and later called anime, are impregnated with references to the nuclear holocaust. Since the post war period they have developed and conquered a ground of their own – pertinent and propitious with new media such as videogames. These days Japanese animation and their byproducts are meant to perform storytelling among young people – in a post-conflict society – which is still Japan.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Mobile Augmented Reality, Twenty-First Century Art, Assemblage, Deleuze & Guattari, Tamiko Thiel & Will Pappenheimer, Manifest.AR, Code, Embodiment, Public Art.

Experimental art deployed in the Augmented Reality (AR) medium is contributing to a reconfiguration of traditional perceptions of interface, audience participation, and perceptual experience. Artists, critical engineers, and programmers, have developed AR in an experimental topology that diverges from both industrial and commercial uses of the medium. In a general technical sense, AR is considered as primarily an information overlay, a datafied window that situates virtual information in the physical world. In contradistinction, AR as experimental art practice activates critical inquiry, collective participation, and multimodal perception. As an emergent hybrid form that challenges and extends already established ‘fine art’ categories, augmented reality art deployed on Portable Media Devices (PMD’s) such as tablets & smartphones fundamentally eschews models found in the conventional ‘art world.’ It should not, however, be considered as inscribing a new ‘model:’ rather, this paper posits that the unique hybrids advanced by mobile augmented reality art–– also known as AR(t)–– are closely related to the notion of the ‘machinic assemblage’ ( Deleuze & Guattari 1987), where a deep capacity to re-assemble marks each new artevent. This paper develops a new formulation, the ‘software assemblage,’ to explore some of the unique mixed reality situations that AR(t) has set in motion.

This paper describes the initial projects of Mobile Bristol, a collaborative initiative between industry and academia in Bristol, UK. Mobile Bristol is using the city space as a test bed for research into pervasive mobile computing and how context-aware information can add an extra digital dimension to augment physical surroundings.

Our purpose is to shape a select environment with active experience – inserting unexpected sensory stimuli. Technology not only facilitates this practice, it provides a base for aesthetic and theoretic representations. Digital video, audio, along with mobile computing and interactive programming allow our work to shape the public realm of everyday experience. Our interest in psychogeography and how technology affects the perception of place guides our creative vision. Technology can reform our perception of place, or at least temporarily punctuate it. We will discuss one of our current projects, Panopticam, to illustrate this relationship.

Abstract

The objective of this paper/presentation is to describe the potentialities of mobile tagging as a tool for increasing and spreading the effects of Mixed Realities, including the field of Arts. In this sense, we will start by introducing the main concepts and some examples of Mixed Realities, followed by the concepts and examples of mobile tagging, showing that they are connected and benefit each other.

Mixed Reality (or MR) refers to the fusion of the physical and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects coexist and interact in real time. On the other hand, mobile tagging is the process of reading a 2D barcode using a mobile device camera. Allowing the encryption of URLs in the barcodes, the mobile tagging can add a digital and/or online layer to any physical object, providing several levels of Mixed Realities related to that object.

The uses of these levels of Mixed Realities have applications in several areas – from medicine and engineering to the arts. This paper/presentation will use some artworks as examples to illustrate the functionality of the mobile tagging for creating mixed reality.

Abstract

At ISEA2009 Sadie Plant will be exploring the use of mobiles as mobilising tools, by those such as political activists, small-scale traders, and people caught up in times and zones of crisis and war.

Mobile communication, owing to its ubiquity, accessibility and adaptability, has permeated all domains of life. People have moved around actualizing different networks – physical maps and digital nodes, and configuring a programmed and self-configurable structure simultaneously. The diffusion of Internet, wireless communication, digital media, and a variety of tools of social software have evoked the development of communication networks that connect local and global in chosen time. The cultural dimension of that process can be defined by different protocols of accesses and communication among several networks. It means that “being on the move” concerns to operate and produce within in-between distinct space-time models of circulating.

Firstly, the text is concerned with the networks and flows of information and bodies, discussing other perceptions and movements configurations to perform our daily life and to comprehend the world. It means an embodied experience of the material and social modes of dwelling-in-motion. After, contemporaneous artefacts, as technological and cultural organizational structures, are presented to rethink personal spaces and the urban landscape. Thinking about mobile devices, we can have set other possibilities of people being temporarily “on the move”, creating gaps and holes, other dimensions and domains, and questioning the notion of metrics and scales to define territories. For example, the nine to five culture using mobile, in big cities as São Paulo, can engender interspaces and reorganize physical arrangements to transcend space and time models.

At the end, INmobility, an artwork in progress, is presented and concerns to temporary social networks and mobile technologies. Mobile and GPS technologies have been used to map the experience of moving as a collaborative platform, articulating different patterns of information and ways of distribution not coordinated. Import us the current instantaneous time involving the resynchronizations of the existent time-space paths. As November, Camacho-Hubner, and Latour (2010, p.3-4) wrote “there is no such a thing as proximity or a distance, which would not be defined by connectibility. The notion of network helps us to lift the tyranny of geographers in defining space and offers us a notion which is neither social nor ‘real’ space, but simply associations”.

Panel: Serious Animation: Beyond Art and Entertainment

The ma­jor­ity of cloth sim­u­la­tion al­go­rithms and soft­ware ap­pli­ca­tions in com­puter graph­ics are de­signed to sup­port vir­tual gar­ment cre­ation for an­i­mated char­ac­ters or vi­sual ef­fects (e.g su­per­hero capes). In these cases the pri­mary ob­jec­tive is for the sim­u­lated gar­ment to sup­port the per­for­mance of the actor. The cloth is di­rected by the an­i­ma­tor to be­have in a man­ner that is be­liev­able rather than ac­cu­rate. Ac­cu­racy (or fi­delity) is not the pri­mary goal; a so­lu­tion that is sim­ply plau­si­ble is usu­ally good enough for en­ter­tain­ment. For our pur­poses we need to vir­tu­ally pro­to­type gar­ments with a high level of mo­tion fi­delity. The MoCCA pro­ject in­ves­ti­gates the re-task­ing of dig­i­tal cloth sim­u­la­tion for pur­poses be­yond en­ter­tain­ment. We are sim­u­lat­ing ap­pli­ca­tions where gar­ments are em­ployed to sup­port the de­ploy­ment of a range of wear­able tech­nolo­gies (e.g. search and res­cue, crim­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion, etc) In these cases it is use­ful to be able to ac­cu­rately pre­dict the be­hav­iour of var­i­ous ma­te­ri­als in a range of en­vi­ron­ments and sce­nar­ios.

This paper examines the possibility of modeling intention in creative computer mediated systems. It discusses the way that I have employed logic and logic programming as a significant mechanism that has helped me develop certain kinds of generative art towards this end. Central to the approach to participant interaction is an extension of drawing practice which uses unhindered human movement within a motion tracked space. Central to this process is the absence of a physical connection between human and computer.

In light of the possibility of creating artificial life, in a computer processor, the question arises as to whether a phenomenon like death is even a matter of significance in a binary world that appears to be infinite and eternal, and what relationship exists between these death phenomena and the real thing. We can differentiate between two forms of immaterial death: artificial death as a programmed parameter, and self-emergent death in accordance with the biological model. At first sight the new arising virtual worlds appear like paradise before the original sïn, places without the determination of existence. From the point of their basic technological characteristics virtual worlds seem to be built for eternity. So aging and death have to be implemented artificially. A phenomenon like death has to be existant in cyberspace because digital and biological worlds are built up analogically as parallel, not as opposite worlds. The leading principle for all artificial worlds and creatures is the paradigm of a double death by Jacques Lacan symbolic/absolute-natural death) and an undefined twilight zone between the two deaths. The presence of a virtual death in the artificial world is for sure, but how can it be defined? ls virtual death a mutation or a transformation into other living forms avoiding bringing things to an actual end or are the artificial reconstructing and reanimating something that is already lost in reality like forms and rituals of coping with death? By looking at examples like computer-gaming (Doom, Creatures) and electronic gadgets like the Lovegety and the Tamagotchi this paper tries to find out about the symbolic forms of death in artificial worlds.

Most existing accounts of live performance concentrate on the specific features of individual works or on linking works according to commonly observed traits which allow their plausible inclusion in groups identified by authorship, style or genre. Similarly, most integration of digital technology with live performance is bespoke; an adaption of practice and enabling technology that solves only a single creative problem – that of the specific work being created. This paper takes a different approach, which through considering practice across the range of live performance traditions contributing to contemporary digital performance activity, is able to propose a generic model of live performance which is able to account for the processes and moment to moment connections within live performance across a wide range of styles and genres. The approach is non-taxonomic, but is based on set theory and Boolean logic, the formal unfolding of a live performance is considered as the sum of individual performances generated by semi-autonomous performers. Each performer enacting a series of decisions based on their perceptions of the overall state of the performance (and each others’ activity) and a rule-set – which may be explicit or implicit. Taking a view similar to that of Susan Broadhurst and others in seeing digital performance as an extension of existing performance traditions rather than as a completely, or mainly, new performative genre, the generic model of live performance is then extended to provide a rationale for the integration of digital technology with live performance which does not depend on specific activities or alterations of existing practice by artists or on features belonging to specific performance traditions. The model is able to provide a framework for analysis of existing digital performance and a framework for future creative exploration.

Most existing accounts of live performance concentrate on the specific features of individual works or on linking works according to commonly observed traits which allow their plausible inclusion in groups identified by authorship, style or genre. Similarly, most integration of digital technology with live performance is bespoke; an adaption of practice and enabling technology that solves only a single creative problem – that of the specific work being created. This paper takes a different approach, which through considering practice across the range of live performance traditions contributing to contemporary digital performance activity, is able to propose a generic model of live performance which is able to account for the processes and moment to moment connections within live performance across a wide range of styles and genres. The approach is non-taxonomic, but is based on set theory and Boolean logic, the formal unfolding of a live performance is considered as the sum of individual performances generated by semi-autonomous performers. Each performer enacting a series of decisions based on their perceptions of the overall state of the performance (and each others’ activity) and a rule-set – which may be explicit or implicit. Taking a view similar to that of Susan Broadhurst and others in seeing digital performance as an extension of existing performance traditions rather than as a completely, or mainly, new performative genre, the generic model of live performance is then extended to provide a rationale for the integration of digital technology with live performance which does not depend on specific activities or alterations of existing practice by artists or on features belonging to specific performance traditions. The model is able to provide a framework for analysis of existing digital performance and a framework for future creative exploration.

This talk presents some recent work from our research project EyesWeb concerning the development and experimenting of algorithms for expressive movement analysis. The computational models presented are inspired by several sources, including Rudolf Laban’s Theory of Effort. The ultimate goal is to contribute toward a deeper understanding of the relations between gesture, music, and visual languages, and enable artists with conceptual as well as system tools for interactive performance. The EyesWeb system tools for the design of interactive performance applications are also shortly presented and discussed in the scenario of the design of interactive dance-music systems.

Panel: NeuroArts

Start­ing with the work of Gal­vani in the 18th cen­tury and end­ing with mod­ern, su­per-com­puter ap­proaches, this talk aims to give an overview of the ba­sics of how neu­rons un­der­lie the nat­ural com­pu­ta­tion that takes place in the ner­vous sys­tem. I will cover some of the tech­niques that have been used for mea­sur­ing ac­tiv­ity in the ner­vous sys­tem at dif­fer­ent spa­tial and tem­po­ral scales, how it came to be thought that neu­rons are the basic com­pu­ta­tional unit of the brain, how in­for­ma­tion flows through neu­rons and how neu­rons wire to­gether to form synapses – the chang­ing strengths of which are thought to rep­re­sent the stor­age of mem­o­ries. The talk will end with a dis­cus­sion of some re­cent spec­u­la­tive the­o­ries of how the neo­cor­tex  – the brain re­gion where our high level thought processes take place – might work.

Moments of Space is a multiplatform installation of a series of rhizomatic portraits of strangers who are waiting in the Los Angeles Union Station. The waiting room of a train station is a space lost in time where I go to observe. The waiting body becomes the threshold between the everyday experience of public spaces and the unexplored territory of subjective motional states and gestures. The movements of waiting are documented and then tracked and treated as data, and visualized through print, video animation and sound. The waiting body, withdrawn from its everyday functional state, reveals the microgeography of the space that surrounds it. The project brings into attention the purposeless forgotten gestures of waiting, addressing their need for representation. “Moments of Liminal Space” suggest a subjective tracing and mapping of different ways by which individuals move in space. The installation consists of 6 inkjet prints (42.5 x 32 inch), video (3 portable dvd players with 9 inch screen) and sound (3 mp3 players and speakers).

The prints and the portable dvd players playing the video of the waiting individuals, are mounted on the wall. Electrical power supply will be needed for the  3 9-inch portable dvd players. The sound of the installation is playing out of 3 small portable speakers, connected to 3 mp3 players and it is not very loud, inviting visitors to go closer. The piece ideally requires bright lighting condition, in order to be viewed. In case of lack of space, the size of the installation could be reduced to 3 inkjet prints instead of 6. “Moments of Liminal Space” is a thesis project that was presented with great success at the UCLA New Wight Gallery, as part of the 2010 MFA show.

Follow The Void Live is an audiovisual journey that seeks to create worlds or dimensions that stimulate the dance of the senses from ambient sounds, glitch, break beat and synthwave. This project is the result of a process of research and creation that materializes from the composition, manipulation and adaptation of sonorous atmospheres for the creation of sounds and live images, these processes of creation pursue to provide an experience of synesthetic activations provided by the artist.

The Morphogenesis project explores the fusion of arts and bioinformatics. Generative artists can be inspired by biomathematicians in exploring the structure of nature. Some elegant mathematical models come from “morphogenesis,” a branch of biology studying the mechanisms of growth and pattern formation. The goal of this paper is to show deep relations between morphogenesis and generative art that can be called “morphogenesis art,” not just borrowing scientific tools, but participating in its own way to scientific research.

Some great scientists as D’arcy Thompson, Alan Turing and Stephane Leduc all share the same idea: life could emerge from inorganic elements by complex physico-chemical reactions. Life can then be synthesized. Seventy-five years after the decisive experiments of Leduc in “synthetic biology,” these ideas crystallize in Artificial Life (AL). As Christopher Langton says, describing AL: “It views life as a property of the organization of matter, rather than a property of the matter which is so organized.”

Morphogenesis art is investigating synthetic life by focusing on geometrical models of growth and pattern formation “in silico.” This model exploration is an important part of the biomathematics, morphogenesis and AL work. As Langton says: “We would like to build models that are so life-like that they cease to become models of life and become examples of life themselves.”
Morphogenesis find synthetic structures bridging the gap between organic and inorganic worlds. As Leduc says: “the first dawn of the synthesis of life must consist in the production of forms intermediate between the inorganic and the organic world — forms which possess only some of the rudimentary attributes of life”.

The Morphogenesis project proposes to create an “artificial phenomenon.” The ultimate goal would be to create an abstract synthesis between organic and inorganic manifestation as fascinating as a solar eruption, an eclipse, a virus, an alien life form, constantly evolving guided by synthetic physico-chemical reactions. The paper discusses three experiments called “Spherical product,” “Orbs” and “Genoma,” used as a testbed to experiment with the morphogenesis art conceptual framework.

ch of new media work explores some interaction between the real and the virtual worlds. Some of this work may require the viewer to balance conflicting messages coming from different parts of the brain, and challenge the perception of what is real and what is virtual. Other works utilize virtual partners or dopplegangers, which both react to and create reactions in live performers, which may be dancers, actors or robotic structures. The panelists span the areas of dance performance, theatrical performance, robotic installation and interactive media installations, and will discuss how their work intersects these questions of technology and perception.

The Motion in Place Platform brings together a cross-disciplinary group to develop new technologies allowing researchers to move out of the studio,to map and measure the human experience and response when moving through places. The video clip above shows an expert archaeologist working on summer dig. The MiPP team captured this data over the 2010 season at the Silchester Roman site.

Over centuries, societies have built up a wealth of written knowledge of human behaviour and emotion in response to specific environments. Such narratives are, however, subjective and not necessarily quantifiable. At the same time, the physical study of a site or the cataloguing of material objects often falls short of capturing the human experience of a site. In an effort to develop new tools for recording and articulating the human physical and emotional response to specific environments, the Motion in Place Platform (MiPP) is developing technologies and research strategies to enable the study of how people understand a site by moving through it.

The Banff Centre is world’s largest incubator of original art and ideas, welcoming 8,000 artists, mathematicians, business and community leaders from around the world to the Centre every year; exceptionally creative people at all stages of their careers. We are located in the oldest national park in Canada, in the heart of the Rocky Mountain, and we have an 81-year history of inspiring creativity across arts disciplines. The Banff Centre is an immersive laboratory for creative risk-taking and experimentation that crosses art forms and technologies, through residencies in visual and digital arts, film and media, music and sound, performing arts, literary arts, and Indigenous arts. The Banff Centre’s programs are both socially aware and responsive to the interests and needs of our artists. We offer space for retreat and incubation, as well as public performance, engagement, and experimentation. Our existence as a creative institution with worldwide impact, situated in landscape of unparalleled natural beauty and ecological diversity, means that we are uniquely positioned to explore the role of art in public space. We carry out our mission in relation to identities that are both hyper-local and globally interconnected.

The exploration of movement in humans and machines through gesture and nonverbal communication is the subject of the proposed research. In application to work in the merging of art and technology, new discoveries may be developed to integrate gesture with interactive technologies.The specific research is in the ongoing development of a movement language based on gesture and movement, that may be utilized as a tool in both artistic and scientific work. As the state of art shifts to an interactive environment between humans and machines, the application of dance and gesture may provide additional vehicles for human’ mankind understanding, communication, and expression. While progress is being made in the area of virtual reality, human sensory control and communication between humans and machines and between machines and machines is of interest.A truly interactive environment should include a dialogue between the operator and the machine. Human gestures are quite specific and unique functions of each individual and may provide a possible signature to specific human / machine interactions. Adaptations to specific human disabilities would make the technology more accessible to various populations. Gesture and movement control may provide a vehicle for such adaptations. This paper will report an investigation of research developing in the are of facial recognition based upon human facial expressions and gestures.

Moving Africa (Hosted By The Goethe Institut)

Abstract

Digital film archives are experiencing unprecedented growth around the world. They provide easy-to-use access to our historical moving images as never before. But what are the critical factors in their formation? Funding, technology, content, rights, consumers and producers all play a part, but how do these issues and influences interact? Who or what is creating – and controlling – our memories of the past?

This paper discusses these issues with reference to my work as Producer of the Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film Archive and Consultant to a number of UK publicly funded digital film archive projects, and in particular the recent innovative proposal developed for the East Anglian Film Archive.

Nina Waisman’s works highlight the roles that gesture, rhythm and mirroring play in forming our thoughts – scientists call such “physical thinking” the pre-conscious scaffolding for human logic. How might our new tech-inflected gestures, then, be shaping our relationships with bodies and systems we connect to when we move with technology? During her residency at Albuquerque Academy, Waisman will make an interactive sound installation in collaboration with 6th-12th grade students. Waisman exhibits nationally and internationally: venues include the House of World Cultures, Berlin; the California Biennial at OCMA; the Museum of Image and Sound, São Paulo, Brazil; and the San Diego Museum of Art.

In the context of the television medium typography has until relatively recently been largely absent as a creative element within advertising. This is in sharp contrast to the status placed on the typography in print based advertising where the relationship between the copy content and how it is typographically represented is considered crucial to the success of the advertising message. During the last decade the introduction of the desk top publishing and the development of digital typefaces has created an experimental typographic culture which has inevitably found its way into television advertising. This study examines the development of the application of animated typography in pursuit of a seductive message. The work focuses on the exploitation of the animation potential of the digital medium and the new screen reading capabilities of a contemporary audience. The work also looks at how written words move from a fixed medium to a fluid one can inform the development of web hosted communication.

Panel: Borders and interfaces: the challenges of the wearable computer’s design in the near future

This paper iden­ti­fies themes in wear­able tech­nol­ogy prac­tices within the con­text of re­search in uni­ver­si­ties and art and de­sign schools as well as in­dus­trial lab­o­ra­to­ries to sug­gest op­por­tu­ni­ties for con­cen­tra­tion of ef­forts and in­ter­na­tional col­lab­o­ra­tion. Re­search using bio­met­ric data, heart rate mon­i­tors, em­bed­ded sen­sors, blue tooth and mo­bile net­works, con­duc­tive threads, soft cir­cuitry, smart tex­tiles and shape met­als and other adap­tive fab­rics occur at sites in around the world.  Where are these? Sec­ondly, the paper be­gins to map these re­search ef­forts to the po­ten­tial of take-up by adopters (fash­ion de­sign­ers, health­care, and se­cu­rity ser­vices as ex­am­ples).  Fi­nally it sug­gests some op­por­tu­ni­ties for col­lab­o­ra­tion and points to strate­gies needed to bridge the gap be­tween re­search or art and de­sign pro­to­typ­ing and large-scale adop­tion.

Curator Statement

MS Stubnitz, a former deep-sea fishing trawler, was restored during 1993 into a mobile forum for the arts. The ship has been equipped with a spatial and technical infrastructure for cultural production, studios for design and new media. Under the patronage of the Council of Europe and the Lord mayor of the City of Rostock, the ship launched cultural projects in Germany in 1993.

1994 is the year of MS Stubnitz’ Baltic Tour. From July to September, the ship cruises the Baltic Sea, providing cultural platforms for different events: St. Petersburg Jubilee, ISEA’94 Helsinki and Hamburg. International Forum, Malmo Baltic During the Baltic Tour, a cultural contact
forum for the Baltic countries will be founded. The ship will activate cooperation between the cultural interest groups of the Baltic countries by organizing Contact Media workshops during the tour. In ISEA94 Helsinki, MS Stubnitz will present works from the Baltic Tour’94. The show of permanent works and artist-in-residence projects will be completed with works by Baltic artists from St. Petersburg, Malmo and Helsinki. The main focus of the Baltic Tour works is on ecology and environment.

This installation experiments with a multi-dimensional soundscape to map out migration tracks of pelagic (open ocean) species of one predator and three preys in the environment of their corresponding sea surface temperature (SST) change over the course of a two-year period. These studies would ultimately be incorporated into creating an immersive installation where audience would rely on wearable devices to experience a visual and audible environment that reflected the diversity and abundance of life in the oceans.
Specially, the installation would also address the pressing concern of over-fishing, and the evolution of these oceanic lives over time and across geographic locations. Our eventual goal for the project is to provide the audience with the feeling of being submerged under water and being able to detect and interact within a simulated oceanic environment.

Overview
This data sonification installation utilizes data extracted from the live Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) project. TOPP is a project began in 2000 as one of 17 projects of the Census of Marine Life, a 10-year, 80-nation endeavor to assess and explain the diversity and abundance of life in the oceans, and where that life has lived, is living, and will live. Tagged animals send back data via satellites such as Argos, a polar-orbiting satellite. [1] Intermingled in the soundscape are mapped migration activities of pelagic (open-ocean) species of one Salmon Shark and three Northern Elephant Seals over the course of a two-year period (Jan 2011- Jan 2013), along with corresponding Sea Surface Temperature (SST) change of the shark’s tagged positions.

[2][3][4] Sitting in the middle of the room, the blindfolded audience becomes the shark with a heightened sense of hearing detecting its prey’s spatial and directional location. (Fig 1.) These activities are submerged in the mapped sound of Sea Surface Temperature change surrounding the shark covering an area of 121,000 km2 along the track. The first two phases of the project experimented with various fitting methods using Mathematica to find the best-fit functions for migration tracks and SST data, which were then used to generate multi- imensional sound channels.

Data Mapping Method
-Two-dimensional tags are fitted into smooth curves to form migration tracks (seal relative to shark). Tracks are then mapped into the waveforms with subjective frequency assigned (within human audible spectrum).
-SST data is fitted into smooth curves, and then mapped into wave forms with subjective frequency assigned (within human audible spectrum).
-Mapped animal track sounds are outputted from speakers on the floor.
-Mapped SST sounds are outputted from speakers above participants.

A critical account illustrated by reference to the CD-ROM works Media, Myth and Mania and Dreamhouse. Media, Myth and Mania is an interactive spoof game examining issues of power and control of the mass media through a multi-choice biographical journey through the life of a media Mogul. The player makes choices at various life stages and views the consequences through photo-romance style tableaux. Dreamhouse is an attempt to create a multilinear structure of connected mythologies. It is a story-telling machine, driven by the user. The interactive house is a place of magic, permeable to other mythic spaces, but the narratives involved attempt to form a bridge between the personal and the political

ISEA2000

Contrary to the accepted idea that digital arts are dematerialized and disembodied, thanks to interactivity, a certain form of sensoriality has been introduced into these arts. Whereas it is true that interactivity initially used mechanist models, there is now an increasing move towards connexionnist and evolutionist models as well as artificial life models. In the same way, at the outset multisensoriality was specifically conceived from the spectator’s point of view, but it is now also viewed from the angle of work itself, which has been given its own perception facilities. This gives rise to one of the most frequent and topical questions in digital art : the relation between natural and artificial ‘perceptions-movements-actions’. During this panel, Marie-Helene Tramus demonstrates an artistic experiment which we are currently working on called The Tightrope Walker. By means of a movement sensor, the spectator can enter into interaction with a virtual tightrope walker (monitored by neural networks).

This “Multicultural Poetry Video based on Korean Culture” includes two positive effects: i) audience can explore both the beauty of Korean language and literature via new media, and ii) audience’s emotion can be touched via one of the most touching Korean poems. In recent years, the “Korean Wave” made young people in the world to learn Korean language. For this reason, the number of people who are interested in learning Korean is increasing. The Korean language, called Hangul, is considered one of the most scientific alphabetical systems in the world. It is formed by the combination of 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Reading Korean literature is one of the most effective ways to explore Hangul. For this, I selected a beautiful Korean poem “Flower” by Chun-soo Kim. To observe a semantic effect, I created petal-shaped Hangul font. The proposed art work displays all Korean fonts scattered all around the multi-layered screen. At each time, some of Korean fonts will be randomly highlighted. However, these ramdom highlight of the Korean alphabet is not completely random, but they compose the Korean poem “Flower” in the timely manner. The interactiveness of the system will facilitate and motivate the audience to learn Korean.

A Live Dance Demonstration

Just what does interactive mean? Who or what, interacts with whom? You can read the word “interactive” today used to describe almost any thing having to do with computers. Basically, it seems to mean that in using a particular program, the user has many choices to make. In this sense, there is a back-and-forth between the user and the computer. My response to this kind of interaction is a definitive yawn. People are naturally interactive. We go back-and-forth with one another every time we have a conversation. And in dance and other performing arts interactivity was traditionally part of the event. Indeed, there was surely much more interactivity in the past than there is today! Human beings have been dancing and making music for 10,000 years. During most of this time, the two were considered part of the same art form. Performers fed off of each other’s energy in a way which is seen today only in improvisation jams, but almost never on stage. Furthermore, performers were not separate from the audience. Everyone was part of the event…

Palindrome computer systems allow movement to control or generate sounds, music, text, stage lighting or project-able art. They are adaptable to an enormous number of applications, lending themselves to experimentation in genuinely new directions in the performing arts. The following information gives you a general idea of what these systems can do, both artistically and technically. We can install our equipment at your studio and teach its use in a workshop setting. For questions of any nature, we are at your service.

ABSTRACT

The integration of words, images, sounds and programs into a single work is a goal of many interactive artists. Advances in interactive art forms, such as hypermedia, simulation systems, virtual & artificial reality, interactive compact discs, etc., have lead to a need for the establishment of multi-media standards.

Abstract

Long Paper

Multimodal Environments (MEs) are a family of systems capable of establishing creative, multimodal user interaction, and exhibiting dynamic, real-time, adaptive behaviour. In a typical scenario, one or more users are immersed in an environment allowing them to communicate by means of full-body movement, including dance and gesture, and possibly by singing, playing, etc. Users get feedback from the environment in real time, in terms of sound, music, visual media, and actuators in general (e.g., movements of semi-autonomous mobile systems). MEs are therefore a sort of extension of Augmented Reality environments, integrating intelligent features. From another viewpoint, a ME is a sort of prolongation of the human mind and senses. From an Artificial Intelligence perspective, MEs are populated by agents capable of changing their reactions and their “social interaction” rules over time. A gesture of a user can mean different things in different situations, and can produce changes in the agents populating the ME. MEs embed multi-level representations of different media and modalities, as well as representations of communication metaphors and of analogies to integrate modalities. MEs open new niches of applications, from art (including music, dance, theater), to culture (interactive museums), to entertainment (interactive discotheque, “dance karaoke”), to a number of industrial applications, many still to be discovered. In the paper, we present a flexible ME architecture, and its four particular applications we recently developed for art, music, entertainment, and culture applications: the SoundCage Interactive Music Machine, the HARP-Vscope, the HARP-DanceWeb, and the Theatrical Machine. The HARP-Vscope is a ME application for the tracking of full body human movement by means of on-body, wireless sensors, for gesture recognition and real-time control of computer-generated music and animation. The SoundCage Interactive Music Machine (IMM) is a system based on a set of spatial sensors displaced in a sort of “cage”, whose design has been focused to track overall, full- body human movement features without the need for any on-body device or constraint. The HARP/DanceWeb is based on a different human movement acquisition system (based on ultrasound sensors technology), which can be used both in stand-alone installations and integrated with the SoundCage IMM. The Theatrical and Museal Machine is a quite different application, consisting of one or more semiautonomous mobile robots capable to perform tasks like Cicerone in a museum, or robot-actor on stage in theatre/dance/music events and art installations: such systems include audio output and a small computer on-board for basic, low-level processing (managing a sort of arco-reflex behaviors), and include radio links for (i) the remote supervision computer, (ii) the sound/music channel, and (iii) possible further radio links to control fixed devices displaced in the area. The systems described in this paper have been developed with the partial support of the Esprit Basic Research Action Project 8579 MIAMI (Multimodal Interaction for Advanced Multimedia Interfaces), have been utilized since 1995 in concerts and various events (theatre, museums), and have been selected by the Industry CEC Commission for presentation in live demonstrations at the EITC’95 (European Information Technology Conference and Exhibition, Brussels Congress Centre, 27-29 November 1995).

(Short paper)

Keywords: Body, Interactivity, Interfaces, Representations, New Media.

The present work looks into the place the body occupies within interactive experiences. Firstly, we explore the nature of the machine in its corporeal dimension, and the human body in the digital representation process. Then, a classification is proposed for the modes of articulation of the participant’s body in interactivity, following various analytic frameworks. Finally, we analyze the difference between the physical bodies within an experience and the construction of the bodies present in the artwork, outlining the dialogue between technical engineering and the symbolic dimension.

About The question: how do artists integrate data and the biological phenomenon in the creative process? Biotechnology is recognized today in the world as an emerging science that seeks to apply computational tools to collect, organize, analyze, manipulate, present and share biological information. Nowadays, it is stated that bioinformatics and computational biology correspond to the set of sciences with greater projection in the acquisition of scientific knowledge, which will bring with it and at world level, a crucial change in biological research. In a mega biodiverse country like Colombia, it is important that the government and the citizenry understand and empower themselves with the value of the information that is stored in the species of our biodiversity to face a future where the climate change crisis will force change Economic management and management of resources, management of arable land and water resources, which leads to the development of practices such as biotechnology that makes it possible to return crops that are more resistant to the new environmental conditions. That is why, in the current scenario, it is imperative to take advantage of existing technological developments to enhance the processes of training in biotechnology and thus strengthen the research and problem-solving capacities of future generations.

Panel:  Borders and interfaces: the challenges of the wearable computer’s design in the near future

In the con­text of mo­bile tech­no­log­i­cal in­ter­faces, more and more the users’ ac­tion and per­cep­tion have been or­ga­nized into com­plex forms that de­pend on the ac­tual con­text. From those re­la­tions, es­tab­lished by a dy­namic flux and ex­change of in­for­ma­tion, emerge pre­sent body spa­tial­i­ties, ar­tic­u­lated be­tween the phys­i­cal and the vir­tual, but both real. The body, com­pound­ing in­fi­nite aes­thet­i­cal and lived ap­proaches, can ex­pand the ter­ri­to­r­ial phys­i­cal lim­its and be un­der­stood as a phys­i­cal re­al­ity tech­no­log­i­cally me­di­ated, elab­o­rat­ing its ac­tiv­i­ties, which take place ei­ther lo­cally or re­motely, in con­stant jux­ta­po­si­tion of space and time di­men­sions not re­lated. All the time, in­clud­ing and ex­clud­ing peo­ple, de­ter­min­ing the tempo, the move­ments and the place­ment, and defin­ing the de­gree to which those ac­tiv­i­ties are si­mul­ta­ne­ous.

Ac­cord­ing to that the­o­ret­i­cal ap­proach, it will be pre­sented some po­etic pro­jects and de­scribed their sen­so­r­ial ex­pe­ri­ences pro­posed, as WHIS­PER, wear­able body ar­chi­tec­tures, and TEN­DRILS, in­ter­ac­tive ki­netic gar­ment (both cre­ated by The­cla Schiphorst), SOMO, so­cial mo­biles (cre­ated by Crispin Jones and IDEO), VESTIS, af­fec­tive spa­tial­i­ties (cre­ated by Luisa Paraguai), and RE­COIL, urban en­vi­ron­ments and the mi­cro-spaces (cre­ated by Kather­ine Mori­waki). Those art­works have as­sumed the body as a sys­tem es­tab­lished through the ex­pe­ri­ence, where the mean­ing has been elab­o­rated from the ob­ject re­la­tions with and onto the space, and ques­tioned some ideas such as the emer­gence of a new body lan­guage, the re­flec­tion about pri­vate space ver­sus pub­lic space, the per­cep­tion of body and space as a dy­namic con­fig­u­ra­tion, as well as the ap­pear­ance of new so­cial codes, be­hav­iours, and eti­quettes.

Keywords: self-animating, painting, visual texture, real time, processing, animation

Mushi is a project designed to create unique, self-animating paintings with possibilities for user interaction and collaboration. Created in Processing, the program utilizes relatively simple procedural animation techniques in order to create a complex, self-designing artwork without being overly cumbersome.
Computer generated animation, whether 2D or 3D, is based on vector shapes. This makes it difficult to draw images with a large amount of texture or complexity, since hundreds or thousands of vectors of varying opacity would need to be created. While computers can draw these images, it is extremely difficult to do so at animation speeds. The entire image would have to be redrawn with every frame (roughly 30 to 60 times per second). This problem can be avoided by running pre-rendered animation, but that eliminates the possibility of user interaction and real-time response.
One possible solution is to allow the added complexity of several frames of animation to build up over time. To do this, it is necessary to stop resetting the image with each frame, and allow new visuals to be drawn directly over the existing image. As the objects are animated, they appear to be `growing’ across the screen while leaving complex textures in their wake, like a brush stroke gliding across a canvas. The result is a seemingly complex and intricate animated scene that is accomplished without adding any extra strain to the computer. Furthermore, because the basic logic behind this process is simple, it can be implemented on most coding platforms.
In the specific experiments that I have been conducting, the goal has been to mimic the texture of painting while allowing for real-time response to ambient noise or direct user input. In order to most accurately recreate the texture of paint, a particle system is used to give the moving brushes a flowing, layered effect. Each brush is composed of several ‘bristles’, which change length and opacity over time, resulting in a more fuzzy and blended appearance, which can be used to mimic actual paint or fabric thread.

Hangul is the motif of the oral form. We developed a pro- gram to make and play music using Hangul principles. The program is an upgraded version of our existing programs and we plan to use it for various future performances.

Many artists throughout history have sought inspiration from contemplating celestial phenomena. These motivations were not restricted to art nor were sufficient to prevent many questions and hypotheses were formulated about the influence of what is now known as outer space in music. Is the universe musical? Can you hear sounds from outer space? Can we turn them into some kind of understandable music by known parameters of musical structure? Are we on the threshold of a new understanding of the “harmony of the spheres”? As the twentieth century began to gain these questions answers with more defined contours as well, thanks to the advent of electroacoustic music and electronic music, the composers who have awakened to start the research from non‑musical sound sources, transforming vibrations with computational resources to produce music. The experimental trend that sought to aggregate diverse sounds of nature, termed as Concrete Music, also contributed to the development of ideas that culminated in the assumptions for music from outer space. Furthermore, significant changes in perception and musical language enabled a new approach to sound like something decomposable. In this way then, some researchers are responding to questions about the ‘space music’ in an affirmative and enthusiastic way: yes , outer space can be a source for music composition. That is because, in recent decades, high‑tech equipment, coupled in space or positioned on the globe, such as telescopic antennae radio, ‘recorders’ connected to computers in research centers, among others, have become a kind of “ear vessels cosmic”, capturing vibrations coming from stars, planets, and even galaxies . All this material, collected from electromagnetic waves (gamma rays and X‑rays, basically) and received on numerical codes have been scientifically and artistically systematized and analyzed, acquiring a new meaning through specific music software , which converts data of all types in synthesized musical sounds in a process called sonification. Thus, it is possible to customize the information using tone, volume, pace and even different types of instruments to distinguish between different values and intensities from the electromagnetic spectrum detected by the technological apparatus.

Abstract (short paper)

Creating a publication about music has always been challenging, as the discussed matter couldn’t be visually represented in the printed page in its own listenable form. Nevertheless independent printed media has experimented with DIY inventive strategies to include sounds at various levels in traditional publications through different formats than its standards (classic records or CDs). This integration goes beyond the ‘multiple media’ approach, as affects either publishing as a practice, and print as a medium, creating a symbiosis which can lead to different grades of interaction.

Abstract

Gender is a powerful lens with which to analyze the meanings of music in our time, examining not just sexual content but a complex range of codes and cultural activity concerned with identity, diversity, representation, and particularly with power. Media studies is also an important way to understand many of these same issues, most notably the profound effects of technologies on music and particularly its commodification and industrialization, which has become the dominant way to extend the (‘masculine’) power of the music and culture industries. But the feminist project, like others addressed to race and multiculturalism, is understood not just as a plea for inclusion into this dominant power structure, but for a change in that structure in order to make it more receptive, diverse and decentralized. It is a struggle for meaning and for power and is most acute for the independent media artist, whose work has no longer the old (‘masculine’) competitive, ideological urgency of high art, nor a voice in the (equally ‘masculine’) commercial marketplace. However, these (‘feminine’) conditions of powerlessness and exclusion suggest important newer roles for the independent artist, particularly those working with new technologies and media. This agenda has long been understood by advocates for other excluded groups (women, racial and cultural minorities), and is essential now for meaningful artistic activity and continued creative access to technology as well. It includes:creating work which is both compelling and relevant to people’s lives, building collaborative and open communities, fostering diversity and multiplicity of artistic activity, and continuing to be artistic innovators, even ‘hackers’, with the emerging technologies. This is Jacques Attali’s vision in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, a fascinating book about art, power and social action, whose ideas warrant a new look in the light of our technologies.

The electro-acoustic and computer music field have in Latin America a long, interesting, strong, prolific and not very well known (even inside the region) history. My proposal with this paper is to collaborate to know more about electro-acoustic and computer music activities related, in a broad sense, with Latin America. Information about composers born or living in Latin America who have been producing music with electro-acoustic media or computers is compiled on this paper. References are sorted by countries, including: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The aim of this paper is to present some strategies for creating works in Mobile Music that diminish, undermine or eliminate the barriers between artist and audience. Inspired by the text ‘Notes on the Elimination of the Audience’ by Allan Kaprow. We will discuss this subject considering a public of music and sound art, illustrating it through some work examples and detailing the compositional process by the author. The definiton of Mobile Music might be as wide as as the concept of Musica Mobilis by Shuhei Hosokawa: “I define Musica Mobilis as music whose source voluntarily or involuntarily moves from one point to another, coordinated by the corporal transportation of source owner(s).” (HOSOKAWA p.166). Although, in practical terms it could be considered a music which any part of its compositional process is mediated by mobile devices and takes advantage of its portability. What could include stage performances with mobile apps, standalone mobile applications, algorithmic music that makes use of GPS data, portable interfaces, etc. Differently from creating works to be played inside the concert room, the outside world makes obvious that space and place are a crucial part of the piece, and that our perception is clearly affected by what surrounds us. The art work is exposed to aesthetic, sociological and political aspects in a much more crude and almost inevitable way, and the participant placed in a more complex situation. Georg Klein applies the german word Ortsklang (Ort =address and Klang = sound, meaning the place or address of sound) to his works, that the author translates as SiteSounds, which express a stronger concept of site specificity.Creating a stronger relation with place the artists is able to compose relations with the participants in a much more intimate sphere, working with the deconstruction of our routine and everyday soundscape.

(Short paper)

Keywords: algorithmic music, machine learning, style imitation, segmentation, k nearest neighbors, midi, self similarity, structure, form.

Segmenting music is important in academic and commercial settings. Imitating musical structure requires interpretation and generalization of discovered structure. The program shown here is a work in progress that demonstrates an approach to structure imitation using a segmentation algorithm with a look back algorithm based on a probabilistic variant of kNN. A monophonic piece of music is segmented, then kNN is used to generate the structure of a new piece. This work shows that although the problem of structure generation is complex, it is not clear that a solution must be similarly complex.

Mutante.Lab is a network for the transmission of knowledge and communities strengthening around science and arts in Colombia and Latin America. Our aim is to make the access to knowledge in these areas truly inclusive, equitable and fun, framed into the philosophy of collaborative work, open source culture, experiences design, and play. Our work, which has started in 2012, includes research, experimentation, and creation in new media and arts. Currently, our efforts are focused on building and strengthening communities of diverse kinds with the aim of promoting a truly sustainable social development. The Mutante.Lab network consists of four different modules: the base laboratory, the Mutante.Lab Traveler, the Mutante.Lab Seed and a digital platform. All of them have been designed to be open source and easily replicated.

An installation at the Grand Arts Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri

In this paper, I propose to address key aesthetic, artistic, bioethical, and scientific issues raised in the creation of bioart works. I will be addressing these issues via a discussion about my current collaborative, bioart project, “Mutate or Die”.

“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.”   _from the Brion Gysin/W.S. Burroughs Third Mind

My collaborative partner, Adam Zaretsky, and I will be venturing into some of the mystified representations and knowledge bases being generated by the life sciences. With this bioart project, we will address the life sciences’ enormous investment in the illusion of objective control over the biological world, and the tag team efforts of “pan-capitalism” and the bio tech industry’s privatizing genetic research and patenting life forms. This project will also chronicle my failed attempt in 1996 to get the writer William Burroughs’ DNA sequenced, and our current attempt to once again engage Burroughs’ genetic material in an artistic endeavor–this time in a speculative experiment that will involve the creation of a transgenic mutation. The public will be invited to participate in the process, specifically within the portable lab we will create in the art gallery at Grand Arts in Kansas City.

Bioart tends to use cutting edge biotechnology as an art making device and specializes in presenting living organisms as art. In this project, a DNA sample from William S. Burroughs will be isolated, amplified and shot into the nuclei of some cells. At the core of the project will be the gene gun blast that will biolistically combine tiny pieces of William S. Burroughs’ gut flora / script/ gene text with another organism’s genetic script / gene text, to produce a transgenic mutation, or put in another way, an “intentional-genetic modification orgiastic”, or “i-GMO”. After the gene gun blast sets the mutations in motion, we will invite the audience into the process as readers / interpreters of the stories embedded within the old beat writer’s gut.

Mutual Reality is the next step in virtual reality and interactive composition. Computers have given artists a new creative opportunity because of their capacity to respond to viewer interactions; and now the challenge for artists is to create meaningful interactivity for viewers in environments involving multiple users. Mutual reality, simply put, may be thought of as multi-user virtual reality. How can artists compose virtual environments that function effectively as more than ‘chatrooms’: How can we use the capabilities of computers to bring viewers together in virtual environments in ways that make them consider the meaning and intent of the artist/maker as well as that of each other? These compositions of performance art and architecture in thin air, these mutual reality environment will become a major design challenge as well as a wonderful creative opportunity for expression for artists in the coming years. This paper will examine mutual reality and its implications, opportunities and challenges as manifested in a new project, a virtual reality Moon Landing project, designed to be released to the public on the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, July 1994. We will outline ideas and considerations of technology and its implementation and will discuss issues of popular culture, transgression of electronic art from the effetism of the gallery to the homes of the public over the Internet, and the relationships of artists to the public brought about by changing technology and its effect on the human spirit of our time.

The exhibition ‘Silent Motion’ juxtaposed photo sequences taken in the 1880s by Muybridge, the pioneer of early cinema, with works by contemporary digital artists. These works ranged from web surveys to murals, demonstrating the enhanced methods now widely available for studying motion, and for presenting the complex ebb and flow of city life. This paper reflects on the enduring fascination of the still image ? whether the format be painting, photography, or digital media.

Abstract (Poster)

A common format for newly released music, music videos can be created manually using readily available software such as iMovie or Adobe Premiere. The shift from linear to non-linear media has increased the desire to build models for generative media. For the music video in particular, images should align to the audio to enhance its acoustical aesthetic. However, manually creating a large number of assets is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, automatic generation can increase the efficiency in the production of such media. We present Automatic Music Video Producer (MVP), a computationally generative audio-visual system for music videos. We outline the design of MVP, shown in Figure 1, which automatically generates a music video for a given target audio track. A specific application of this system would be the fusion of Eastern and Western culture to generate a new form.

Many interactive artworks are currently being created which provide interactive experiences to single viewers who are usually outfitted with various input and output devices, such as a mouse, data glove or head mounted display. Less common are installations which provide interactive experiences to groups of viewers who are unencumbered with any equipment. The most popular formats of presenting interactive media currently are the CD-ROM and World Wide Web. Many people are not exposed to interactive installations which are experienced by multiple users simultaneously without any physical input devices.

Although the intellectual experience of screen based interactive art may be satisfying, the physical experience of sitting in a chair. clicking a mouse and entering keystrokes is not satisfying to the physical body. If interactive art is going to become an influential and cultural medium, the entire body—and not just the index finger–must be involved in the interactive and aesthetic experience. This presentation will discuss the aesthetics of multi-user and unencumbered interactive installations and present documentation on works of this type.

One of the main mechanisms behind free software relies on a set of rules that prevent improvements and changes to become inaccessible. Building up on these principles, artists and designers are now creating works as free software art, open source art or “art libre”.These works are distributed using free culture licenses and offer the same freedom as free software in terms of appropriation, study and modification. In this presentation, I will show that due to the explicit rules provided by these licenses, what is often introduced as a new form of artistic freedom of production and distribution, is in fact a networked evolution of constrained art creation that finds its root in the works and experiments from artist collectives such as Fluxus, the Surrealists and OuLiPo; artists and designers exposing these mechanisms at the root of their creation are in fact turning legal documents into artists’ manifestos.

Panel: Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 1

A mys­te­ri­ous thing called “data” flows from com­put­ers to com­put­ers, lap­tops to servers, servers to mo­bile phones. But data is use­less with­out a con­text of in­ter­pre­ta­tion. Al­ready, the bat­tle over the pro­duc­tion, own­er­ship and con­trol of these con­texts has been waged for quite some time in the world of web 2.0 and ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing. A pro­lif­er­a­tion of gray lit­er­a­ture plays a pow­er­ful role in this dy­namic, which is ar­tic­u­lated through di­verse terms of use, li­censes, na­tional and in­ter­na­tional legal frame­works and mul­ti­lat­eral agree­ments. My paper will ex­am­ine dif­fer­ent data prac­tices, tak­ing ex­am­ples from “so­cial” net­works, ac­tivist col­lec­tives and open source com­mu­ni­ties in order to com­pare the key el­e­ments of their eco­nomic and po­lit­i­cal or­ga­ni­za­tion. Ex­am­in­ing these ex­am­ples in their di­verse forms, I will look at the re­cent de­ci­sions taken by major fo­rums such as the EU Coun­cil, var­i­ous na­tional par­lia­ments and ACTA ne­go­tia­tors, in order to show how they priv­i­lege a very spe­cific form of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion based on spe­cific data prac­tices. I will an­a­lyze how these de­ci­sions threaten a wide va­ri­ety of spon­ta­neous as well as or­ga­nized col­lab­o­ra­tions, so­cial in­ter­ac­tions, and cul­tural and eco­nomic de­vel­op­ments. In con­clu­sion, I want to em­pha­size the im­por­tance of car­ing for con­texts of in­ter­pre­ta­tion and sug­gest sim­ple as well as more com­plex strate­gies to do so.

The ‘My Story Matters’ program aims to improve the mental health and well being of older people with a mental health condition through the implementation of a life review based program utilising digital storytelling.  This approach reports a 50% reduction in the incidence of depression for persons 75 years and older.  The implementation of this program considered the following elements:

1. Community Involvement
2. Selection Criteria
3. Context of meetings
4. Volunteer trainings
5. Environment

There was extensive consultation throughout the implementation of this program with the digital storytelling centre at the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, local historians, community groups, as well as mental health and other aged care specialists.

Staff and volunteers noted the following benefits for participating residents: improved sleep; increased engagement with staff and other residents; a reduction in medication use; a reinforcement of past memories relating to self, family members and significant others; a stronger sense of family, community and ‘belonging’; enhanced and maintained cognitive functioning.

Not only this, older people have returned to their creative art long forgotten. For example, George, a 93 year old man, composed a musical score for a song he wrote for his dyeing wife whilst grieving for her. MSM gave George the platform in which to channel his dormant creativity and express his feelings. (This DVD would be shown during the presentation).

These benefits indicate a reduction in depressive symptoms in this group of residents. The involvement of the family members / volunteer friends has also built a support network amongst the residents participating in ‘My Story Matters’. This program captures glimpses of older peoples’ past & present.  Not only sharing them with family, friends & community, it reaches out towards ‘grand & great-grand children’ through ‘modern technology’ – a critical digital humanities potential.

Human everyday experiences are seen as simple, yet when a person’s life event is merged with digital storytelling it becomes a powerful social media.  ‘My Story Matters’  captures a vulnerable thread of humanity we all share and links young and old, our past memories and future dreams.

‘My Story Matters’ won the 2009 Positive Living in Aged Care award.

Since 2015, when the authors first wrote a chapter about the state of curation for electronic art (pointing to the absence of works significantly addressing the epistemic implications of a computational logic), artificial intelligence and wider algorithmic forms of logic have become more pervasive themes within mainstream art, with, for example, exhibitions such as ‘AI More than Human’ (2019) at the Barbican Centre, London, the increasing profile of the Lumen Prize, as well as headline grabbing events such as Christie’s auction of the AI-generated painting ‘Portrait of Edmond Belamy’ (2018, created by GAN [Generative Adversarial Network]). The logic of computation is now, if not generally understood, a ubiquitous facet of the curatorial imaginary, begging the question: where are the alternatives and challenges to Western computation, to the Neoplatonist ideals of mathematical logic? Appraising discourse addressing the non-human and the arboreal, the authors present a radically alternative set of practices, framed as Mycorrhizal Curation, a provocative affront to human representational systems and power relations which place the human at the apex of all epistemic hierarchies, but also, the authors intend to provide a provocative challenge to the hegemony of the artworld, with shifts to models of amicable cooperation and wealth distribution.

Atoms are never still. They move and dance in levels of electrons shells negotiated by subatomic particles. Native American Kachina dancers move too, talking to unseen deities negotiated by spirit. I proposed a visual, motion and auditory performance installation on Myths of Creation and Destruction working with students and faculty at the IAIA Institute, as well as scientists to make a piece premiered at IAIA’s Digital Dome with images output on the EMMU-Ruidoso Gateway System of Video Teleconferencing. Also discussed will be more recent developments using the Kinect, the Emotive Cap, NeuroSky, Makerbot and others.

Abstract (Poster)

This website aims to share information about local art, music, farming, and dining in Nagakute, Aichi prefecture, Japan. In Japan, communication between fellow local citizens is weakening; therefore, this website is an attempt to stimulate communication between local residents and create a recycling oriented community.

Panel: Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 2

“Naked on Pluto” is a mul­ti­player text ad­ven­ture using Face­book, in­te­grat­ing a player’s per­sonal data and that of his “friends” as el­e­ments in a satir­i­cal, in­ter­ac­tive fic­tion. The game ques­tions the way so­cial media shape our friend­ships and the way so­cial re­la­tions have be­come a com­mod­ity through tar­geted ad­ver­tis­ing, based on the phe­nom­e­nal quan­ti­ties of in­for­ma­tion we sup­ply these data­bases with, lit­er­ally ex­pos­ing our­selves. The game was de­vel­oped in 2010, as a re­sponse to the ex­plo­sive growth of the data mar­ket, and the role so­cial media play in this. To some, the trade-off be­tween per­sonal data and free ser­vices paid for through ad­ver­tise­ment is more than fair, con­ve­nience comes at a price, but for many it has be­come al­most im­pos­si­ble to make those trade-offs con­sciously and with a good idea of what the con­se­quences might be. The goal of the game is to make these is­sues tan­gi­ble. This paper aims at pre­sent­ing the pro­ject and its con­text, more specif­i­cally how pri­vacy and the mech­a­nisms be­hind data har­vest­ing can be crit­i­cally ex­am­ined using on­line gam­ing.

Naked on Pluto is col­lab­o­ra­tively de­vel­oped by Dave Grif­fiths, Aymeric Man­soux and Mar­loes de Valk.

Throughout his life, Nam June Paik lived in disparate places such as Seoul, Tokyo, Dusseldorf and New York, where he found artistic camaraderie and which were the arenas for creative experiment. Paik’s unique take on eastern and western philosophies and cultures in his technology-based practice was inspired by the vision of a transnationally and technologically connected world. Influenced by his interest in the history of colonialism, war, immigration and globalisation, Paik’s international trajectory was exceptional at a time when travelling across borders was rare and difficult. Identifying what is Korean, Japanese, German or American about Paik’s art would be a futile task, for his practice was always related to a global community of creators and viewers. Paik freely dipped into diverse cultures and new technologies in a manner he described as ‘random access’. He selected various elements of civilisations past and present, eastern and western, and established a hybrid construct that defied any assumed characteristics of specific countries or cultures of origin. This lecture will address Paik’s vision of a world intertwined without national borders or cultural hierarchies that resonates strongly with our increasingly networked and digitally connected reality.

The artistic imagination inhabits spaces, with the most diverse qualifications, the world to be examined, that of Nanoart, provides additional perceptive coordinates, very few felt by the general public since it is located within the parameters of the quantum physics which experience is still confined to a small group. The nanotechnology world has its own laws. The transmutation of elements by manipulation of its molecules, the superstar of nanotechnology, introduces an almost magical connotation but still not always possible because it demands environmental requirements such as speed of action and scientific methods still not so accessible despite its social-cultural impact. For us, artists, this new space is tempting because it depends on the imagination to be led to consciousness; it has short history, making us responsible for this new association to science, aiming at producing and revealing the scientific secrets yet to be discovered and setup.

These requirements of nanotechnology make the creation in Nanoart difficult because we lack a deep and long experience of the quantum universe and of the art being generated. When we walk into a room or a Nanoart installation, our expectations are formulated by the experience in the macroworld and we seek to translate this experience by means of the logic of the macro but we face the demand to change it to a scale pertaining to the nanoworld, what can be done only by means of imagination. The condition of invisibility in the nanoworld and the presentation of its images provided by the electron microscopes, where the scanning by electron beams translate them into a topographic map, increase the sense of touch to the first magnitude. The art, since the historical vanguard, seeks the integration of all senses. This leads to new experiences in Nanoart because there is here no physic condition to touch the matter. This text discuss ways that have been updating Nanoart and introduces the artists that are responsible for it. The emphasis is on the presentation of  a group of works and research by the author: 200 million years, Installations and digital animations.

This research project seeks to approach nanotechnology from a new angle and to distance itself from standard treatments of the subject in various forms of discourse such as theory and fiction, where it is more and more commonly broached. Usually, the controversy surrounding nanotechnology is formulated in simple binary terms: either nanotechnology and nanoscience are perceived as capable of speeding up progress, or they are seen as catastrophes waiting to happen. Even though artists such as Albertine Meunier, Victoria Vesna, FElab and Greg Lynn have participated in this debate, its terms are unsatisfactory as each artwork raises specific issues and sheds a unique light on particular aspects of the problem. The point of this project is to look at precise examples in order to examine the strategies and theoretical/methodological tools best suited to an exploration of such works uninfluenced by preconceived ideas and pre-existing discourses. Particular attention will be paid to the exhibition shown in Reims in 2009 as part of the nuit numérique (a night-long event focusing on digital culture and art) at the Centre Saint-Exupéry. This exhibition aimed at making complex installations and artworks more accessible while bearing in mind the audience’s unusal expectations in a venue which is neither a science nor an art museum. The project touches on various issues such as the art/science debate and the relationship between artworks and scientific documents; as a result, it raises questions such as :

1. What new modes of cultural mediation are called for in this context?
2. How should such works be displayed?
3. What critical approaches do they encourage, and what methodological/theoretical innovations are required?
4. How can these works be understood from the point of view of art history? What place do they occupy in the development of contemporary art?

The emergence of haptic imaging technologies in the field of nanoscience has extended our perceptual reach into sub-cellular spaces beyond the reach of conventional optics.  In particular, the Atomic Force Microscope lowers a probe onto the surface of the sample, touching and allowing its surface forces to direct the cantilever deflections, algorithmically converting this data into image.  By attaining information through physical resonance rather than light, the AFM offers a poetic extension to ocular-centric observation methods.

The probe thus becomes an antenna for our eyes and ears into the nanoscale, tapping into the acoustic milieu of cells and their constituents, where all matter is vibrant, energetic, albeit silent.  Tapping these vibrations and presenting them as themselves – oscillatory, sonic energies – stretches the image out into an evolving soundscape.  This process of listening alludes to the function of the AFM as a super sensitive microphone; and by positioning a mammalian tympanic membrane as its sample, this project suggests the creation of a simple techno-scientific listening body, where the diaphragm is probed to echo its miniscule surface interactions with and within ambient sound.

Nanovibrancy extends previous Sonocytology research by Nanoart pioneers Jim Gimzewski and Andrew Pelling by challenging the veracity of the imaging device as an interactive tool.  By immersing the AFM in the sound of its own making, a feedback loop is created in real-time across the nano and human-scale, thereby implicating each visitor’s very presence in the space as sonic stimulus -a movement of air molecules that alters the surface character of the membrane.

Nanovibrancy presents fertile ground for a discourse between visual and sonic modes of information processing.  In particular, the paper will discuss the abstraction of the visual image through the primacy of listening, as well as exploring the multiple instances of technological mediation that challenge the accuracy of the eventual signal.  While discussing the body as technology, the premise of sound as an immersive and subjective form of art also draws a distinction between mechanical resonance and embodiment.

Nanovibrancy is developed at SymbioticA and provides a unique opportunity for inter-media art at the intersection of nanotechnology, sound and biophysics.

Abstract

Within the parameters of conventional narrative displays, several interventions have occurred in Australia which point to the possibilities of technological innovation being used in order to re-tell history. The three examples which will be discussed have an almost “underground” sensibility, although they cover several, very different sites within Australia.

The videos Dora’s Revenge and The Three Pigs both directed by Australian film and video artist, Tony Kastanos with a group of then year old children, and a compilation of video produced by Aboriginal children of the Central Australian community of Ernabella, are presented to illustrate their spontaneous wish to intervene in dominant narratives and provide alternative versions of accepted myth. They both use humor to challenge the orthodox reproduction of values. There is a certain sense of empowerment in the examples provided, which although not technologically ‘driven’, use technology as an integral aspect of the pieces. The cartoon length becomes the domain of the child instead of the other way round. Aboriginal children look at and play around with their own images rather than, yet again, becoming the subjects of the unrelenting gaze of the anthropologist, the filmmaker and such like. A different site at which technology and art will be active is at a large public site – a museum in Sydney Australia. In this space the audience will be presented with a personal opportunity to consider history through an interaction with the voices and visions of those previously muted by the victors of history. The site is cognizant of and responds to the potential presented in the dialogue between art and technology. The sophistication of technology, in this case, allows an unusual interaction
between the viewer and the viewed. Sound is used to evoke the lost subject, not so much as giving it a place in the script, nor necessarily documentation, but to evoke a sense of the existence of those travelled, extinguished and forgotten by history. These devices consciously provide the opportunity to step around the conventional, in this case the colonial texts of the nineteenth century museum.

This paper describes the development of a vision-based finger tracking system for media art; the system utilizes an infrared camera and a Kalman filter to accomplish this finger recognition image processing technology. The system is stable and fast, and is able to recognize not only gestures but also the speeds of gestures. Our work, called the “Narrative Hand”, switches movies to show the speed at which users close their hands. Our system was exhibited for six days at ACM SIGGRAPH 2001 Emergent Technologies, and many visitors experienced it.

Abstract

In this paper I present the concept of narrative inertia in my ongoing research on generative narratives, as well as the previous work on metadata, narration and montage theory developed together with the key collaboration team (Pia Tikka, Mauri Kaipainen, Joonas Juutilainen et al) from 2003 to date. The process, for my part, has been very practice and production oriented, where theories have immediately been implemented and evaluated in practice using real installation experiences – juxtaposed with artistic and theoretical academic processes. A core ideology has also been to review the models and theories from the perspective of authors, directors and designers, not distributors nor consumers. Our experience suggests that this has been a lacking perspective in a lot of research in similar fields to date, where the focus has either been on very technical issues of production, or on consumption, distribution and reception of already produced media artefacts.

Can traditional narrative make a successful transition into interactive media? Is a participation space between author and audience possible without losing the pleasures of closure and individual uniqueness?

Panel: Zones of Contact and Fields of Consistency in Electronic Literature

Sto­ries broad­cast in 140 or less char­ac­ters over the course of a day may, at first, seem only a 21st cen­tury up­date of se­ri­al­ized mi­cro-fic­tion, yet con­sid­er­ing the strate­gies au­thors take to pro­duce lit­er­ary works in­volv­ing so­cial media, their cre­ations re­sist easy de­f­i­n­i­tion.  This paper looks the broad no­tion of nar­ra­tive as it plays out in the so­cial net­work­ing site, Twit­ter, in works such as Adam Higgs et al’s  “Crush­ing It:  A So­cial Media Love Story,” Jay Bush­man’s “The Good Cap­tain,” and Dene Gri­gar’s “The 24-Hour Mi­cro-Elit Pro­ject.”  Specif­i­cally, the paper asks two ques­tions:  First, how do nar­ra­tives cre­ated for so­cial media sites work against what has be­come the con­ven­tional way to de­scribe e-lit­er­a­ture?  Sec­ond, what do we learn about so­cial media lit­er­a­ture if we think about it in terms of non-nar­ra­tiv­ity? At stake are as­sump­tions about what con­sti­tutes elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture and con­ven­tional views about nar­ra­tiv­ity in re­la­tion to works pro­duced with and for dig­i­tal media.

a. To commit audiences, artists and project collaborators to confronting their complicity in the widespread use of new communications technology for the dissemination and organization of nationalist and racist strategies.

b. To create a gallery installation that involves the audience in a contractual relationship with a computer program designed to address the process of “racialization” — the reframing of ethnic difference as racial distinction —and the new eugenics” — an aggregation of disciplines harnessing biological engineering technology to the values of the social marketplace.

c. To engender interpretative methods of collaborative working, between audiences, artists and project contributors that exploit the possibilities presented by new communications technology for art working within a social context.

d. Formation of Mongrel, Producers of National Heritage Although much of his work has been collaborative, Harwood has always been singled out as individual producer. In an attempt to deal with this, Harwood co-founded Mongrel, an artist-led group, after forming close working relationships with other artists on Rehearsal of Memory. Mongrel is an London-based artist-led organization of mixed people, instituted with the aim of confronting elite values composing the sites, events, media, technical and aesthetic practices of dominant cultures. Our work evades hegemonic culture and the uniformity of its privileged social groups, blurring lines of distinction and social categorizations. Instead we attempt to set up open practice on the terrain hegemonies refuse. We celebrate and foster the hybrid, clashing, mongrel forms of non-elite cultures and their rich brew of discourses on race, class and identity rooted in the mutable vernaculars of the public sphere.

e. What Mongrel does. We make socially engaged cultural products employing any and all technological means available to us. We have dedicated ourselves to learning and developing technological methods of social engagement which means we program, engineer and build our own software and custom hardware.

National Parking is an ongoing series of digital paintings, photographs, videogames, and other media. It explores connections between the institutions of art gallery and national park. As destinations, both offer transcendent experience in a public setting and derive authority or importance from notions of beauty. The work’s representations of landscape simultaneously celebrate and question the idealization of nature in art. Nature is presented as a construction, a product of human perception and action. National parks, iconic of the natural beauty of America, are shown to require a great deal of maintenance and infrastructure toward their production of particular experiences of nature. Likewise, the gallery space, often valued for an apparent absence of contextual noise, is implicated as a mediated environment with specific rules governing the experiential possibilities within its walls.

This talk will depict the outline of Baltan’s new strategy and business model and will elaborate on the role of collaborations with students and academia.

Baltan Laboratories was founded in 2008 by the city of Eindhoven with the aim to perform research on the potential for a ‘future‑proof’ Media Lab. After three years of studies and experiments, Baltan’s findings resulted in the book publication ‘Blueprint for the lab of the Future’. Now, after recently have moved into the Natlab (the former renowned Philips Physics Laboratory), Baltan is committed to transform itself in becoming this ‘Lab of the Future’. Seen by the city of Eindhoven as the key player to revive the spirit of innovation by cross‑disciplinary collaborations that resided within the Natlab walls, its new business plan builds on strategies to optimally cultivate the potential of the high‑tech and creative communities in Eindhoven en beyond. With a clear goal to become less dependent from public funding, Baltan will pro‑actively pursue partnerships with paying industrial, cultural and academic organizations. Within this new strategy, Baltan sees great potential for collaborations with students. Over the past years, it has built relationships with a variety of institutes such as University College Fontys (ICT dpt), TU Eindhoven (Industrial Design dpt) Design Academy Eindhoven and ArtScience in     Den Hague. Baltan will build upon these relationships to take them to a next level.

As a first example, the talk will elaborate on the concept of “The Studio”; an interface between interdisciplinary student teams towards relevant external assignments on the crossroads of art, technology and free experimentation. In the academic world in The Netherlands (and beyond), it is hardly impossible to structurally engage into projects and    collaborations that span across departments (such as art, design, engineering, social sciences, economics…) or even across organizations. Baltan Laboratories makes use of this ‘gap’ and recruits multidisciplinary student teams to work on internal and external assignments. This way, the students get a first (semi‑)professional experience, build an initial network and get a real insight in how people from other backgrounds approach similar topics in a totally different way. The talk will give some examples of projects, explain more about the business model behind it and highlight the benefits for all people and organizations involved.

Secondly, the Open Labs concept will be explained and illustrated. Open Labs is an active community of creative individuals (professionals and students) that interact in a revolving way according to the following principle: get acquainted ‑ form groups ‑ work on projects. Baltan Laboratories facilitates this community by providing them with a framework and location to work in and by creating incentives to promote the quality and quantity of the interactions. The entire idea of Open Labs originated from a pilot project in 2013 with TU Eindhoven whereby the key objective was to link students to professionals.

Since 2014, the initiative has successfully been scaled up and opened up for the entire (local) community.

Problems faced at a third world countries like Mexico to start innovative and propositive projects that involve new media and new ways of thinking. Ads an example the Creative Residencies Program, which fosters the exchange of ideas among scientists, artists, scientific promoters and other individuals through the development of individual artistic projects related to the Natural History Museum of Mexico City’s (MNHCM) three key areas of interest: science, environment and art. The museum’s first project by Ariel Guzik developed the Plasmath Mirror and the Harmonic Spectral Resonator. Other submitted projects were Eric Olivares Lira Global heating video installation and Mariana Dellkamp digital photographs about medical archives and electronic microscope images. Due to political and economical issues, the program couldn’t stand still and now we plan to rescue it in other places.

Abstract (Poster)

This paper explores how to create a significant relationship between natural materials and interactive art. It deals with studying diverse examples from sculpture to architecture to interactive art. The research finds a coexisting relationship between computer-generated images and random algorithms. It suggests natural materials as a physical interface to provide the immaterialized programming with the quality of natural materials. This combination emphasizes natural materials as a creative interface between human and interactive art.

Nowadays ubiquitous computing, wearable electronics and multi touch technologies made “gesture based interaction” one of the core subjects of interactive media design field. Lots of designers and researchers are trying to find creative solutions for gesture based interfaces and most of these are based on real life gestures. This will help the users with predictability, WYSIWYG and lead to more usable interfaces. The problem is that the wide use of these standard gestures will be limiting creativity in interaction design. For this reason in the Interactive Media Design Department in Yildiz Technical University, we have been concentrating on imaginary natural interactions for random natural objects with our students since 2008. We asked the students to imagine how a natural object like an aubergine would react if it encounters an unforeseen action, and they developed the actions of the object. 80 students participated in 2 years time and we realised that this study helped the students understand interactivity in a better way, and design authentic interaction solutions in later semesters.

“Nature and Art: No sooner do they seem to flee each other, than they come together. In me, too, the antagonism has disappeared, and they seem to attract me both equally.” -Goethe

A presentation of Max Eastley’s investigations into natural phenomena and chance as applied to music, painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre and performance. Using examples of his own work he will discuss the objective of creating a synthesised organic art form that, through the operations of chance, interacts with a constantly changing environment and merges the distinctions between natural and artificial.

Since the coining of the term “virtual reality” (VR) by Jaron Lanier and development of head-mounted displays by pioneers such as Ivan Sutherland, VR has undergone several rounds of evolution, re-inventing itself slightly each time. It is only after over half a century, however, that this technology has now become accessible to the general consumer and therefore the mainstream. Not only that, anyone with access to this technology can now create content for VR including artists. This raises questions about a creator’s responsibility for a user’s experience regardless of whether it relates to perception, aesthetics, psychology, ethics or multiple other factors. This panel examines several of these factors with an ultimate questioning of the impact VR artistic creations have on their audience and how these concerns factor into the design of an VR experience.

Poster Statement

Multimodal systems present a new challenge of adapting computer inputs and outputs by using different media and modalities, depending on the user’ s tasks, skills, and preferences. Multimodal user interfaces provide users with multiple kinds of events, such as graphics, sounds (not only none-spoken sounds but also speech-synthesis) and haptic (or force) feedback. Haptic feedback is an emerging concept which consist of stimulating both tactile and kinesthetic senses. A haptic device is like a graphical display but instead of creating visible information, it creates touchable information. In addition, like computer mice, a haptic device is an input device: it allows a user to point to, select or manipulate computerized objects. However, unlike visual (or acoustic) displays, there is no universal haptic device, hence they must be designed and developed taking into account both technical and psycho-physical constraints. Haptic interfaces have numerous applications, such as virtual environments, artistic creation, tele-operated systems, computer access for handicapped or micro-gravity environments. Remote Multimodal Interaction Haptic feedback technology offers a new performance support system paradigm. Since a haptic device is used as the pointing device, it allows a system to physically guide the user’s hand: for instance, quickly pointing to small icons, selecting the thin window frames, opening pop-up menus and selecting the right items. Our system is composed of two (or more) workstations running Windows 95 linked via a network. A user is put into a work situation and uses a haptic device as the pointing device. A remote peer monitors the user via a second machine which reproduces all or part of the first machine’s reciprocal objects and actions. Thus, the peer is able to analyze and estimate, in real time, how and when it should take control of the haptic device and guide or suggest actions to the user. For example, in a training stage, the peer may notice that the user has difficulties with navigation tasks. The peer will then realize these tasks using a pointing device (e.g. a mouse). Meanwhile, remote haptic device will move according to the peer’s mouse motions, giving the user physical guidelines. Since the peer also has a force feedback device, remote haptic interaction is bilateral.

This aspect of the discussion begins with Ann Scott’s (1998) question: if medicines other than modern allopathic medicine can be said to ‘work,’ then ‘what are the implications for our [Western/Eurocentric] metaphysics? In what reality might these sort of [interventional practices] have an intrinsic place?’ This question will be discussed from the perspective of working with the human body within the Chinese medicine clinic (which encompasses two approaches to medical practice: biomedical and ‘traditional’ Chinese medicine). The lifeworld of the Chinese medicine clinic constitutes a situation of complex interactions between body-based problems on the one hand, and finding solutions in the form of treatment strategies on the other. Attending to body-based problems under the ‘logic’ Chinese medicine is accomplished by using a specific set of interventions and performance methods.

The Chinese medical constitution of the body is as an interfacing organism that is actively shaped by its relationship to natural and socio-cultural structures – structures that are themselves in continual states of transformation. Also central to the Chinese medical organisation of the body is that it is a ‘holistic’ organism of different interrelated substances and essences that are shaped and mediated by the alchemical processes of yinyang and wuxing – which is to say a cyclical and cosmological model of relations (logic) where the focus of relations is on trans-individual process, Whereas the biomedical model of the body, largely influenced by Cartesian and Augustinian traditions, views the body as a set of mechanical processes to be perfected. Moreover, within the Aristotelian tradition, technological concepts of time and space are based on progression and movement from one thing to another.

We present a design case study of NEO//QAB, an augmented reality speculative design experience that provides a provocative take on religious tolerance, empowering individuals to deal with those who resist cultural assimilation by replacing them visually. NEO//QAB is a two person experience, involving a wearer of a full-body garment, and a controller who controls the appearance of the garment. NEO//QAB falls within the intersection of speculative design and game design; this is a design space we refer to as speculative play, where digital playful interaction is leveraged to prompt speculation on alternative presents and futures. Across four iterations of NEO//QAB, we have observed how different prototypes and their materials have brought to life related, but different, instantiations of the NEO//QAB world. In this paper we expose the design trajectory that has led us to the current instantiation of NEO//QAB, and identify four design strategies for speculative play that focus on successful worlding.

Neon Festival

Definition: pragmatic benchmarks are used to define neosentient robotic entities: the system could exhibit well defined functionalities: It learns; it intelligently navigates; it interacts via natural language; it generates simulations of behavior (it thinks about potential behaviors) before acting in physical space; it is creative in some manner; it comes to have a deep situated knowledge of context through multimodal sensing; and it displays mirror competence. Seaman and Rössler have entitled this robotic entity The Benevolence Engine. They state that the interfunctionality of such a system is complex enough to operationally mimic human sentience. Benevolence can in principle arise in the interaction of two such systems. Synthetic emotions would be part of the system. The System would be benevolent in nature.
The concept of Neosentence (coined by Seaman) was first articulated in the book Neosentience / The Benevolence Engine by Seaman and Rössler.

This talk had four sections:

1. Providing a definition of Neosentience;
2. The concept of developing a new combinatoric n-dimensional bio-algorithm — employing a transdisciplinary database and search engine enabling distributed research;
3. The recruitment of a transdisciplinary research team to populate this database;
4. The ethics surrounding the generation of a new, selfaware autonomous techno-species.

What is at stake when bodies, technologies and landscapes become merged at the site of mobile interface?  The proliferation of wireless networks and pervasive computing over the last decade has intensified the expansion of mediated human presence and agency in both the built and natural environment, while equally transforming the influence of environments on bodies, subjects and consciousnesses.  The increasing degree to which our lives unfold in and through mobile media interfaces has led to significant transformations in the social and spatial relationships of bodies and environments at the level of the individual subject, as well as the collective.   In this post-human “post-environment” condition, social and spatial distinctions become increasingly blurred across self and other, organism and environment, space and time, and technology and the body.

Mobile media interfaces, as mediations of networks and bodies that operate across intimate and large scales, both spatially and symbolically constitute a form of landscape.  As a landscape, what do representations of where we are, as objectified in mobile media interfaces reveal about who we are and who we might strive to be as citizens of a globalized network society?  In this paper, which draws upon examples from my practice since 2007, I propose the model of “network landscape” as a non-anthropocentric and non-techno-centric approach to the design mobile media interface as social, spatial and symbolic form.

This paper concerns the sociotechnical relations between mobile ICT networks and ‘media publics’, using a term to describe collaborative practices emerging around the production, consumption, and distribution of digitally networked media. It advocates a ‘network media theory’ that explores how emergent media practices are alternatively constrained or enabled by telecommunications design.

Where the network as a cultural trope is prevalent in critical theory, the technical design characteristics of network media (architecture, topology, protocols and standards) are frequently ‘black-boxed’ in favour of overarching discussions of an immaterial ‘network culture’ as it relates to issues of governance, subjectivity and political economy. By eliding a deep consideration of the material substrate of the network and subsequently the many ways in which media publics are generated in diverse relations between human and non-human actors, contemporary theory has failed to explore the complex ecologies of sociotechnical networks. Instead, in the literature of ‘media 2.0’ we continually encounter causal models of analysis that all too easily equate centralised systems with broadcast cultures and decentralised networks with democratic media practices, failing to attend to the many nuanced ways in which network media constrains and enables the formation of media publics.

This argument is illustrated with a discussion of recent prototypes for episodic networks*. Superficially these networks represent an ideal platform for the kinds of user-generated practices associated with optimistic accounts of new media. However, through an analysis of the network protocol, this paper will explore how social aggregation techniques immanent to the network leverage normative models of media consumption and distribution whilst discouraging others.

This study demonstrates the need for appropriate frameworks and methods for research into network media. While a number of theoretical approaches from technology studies are useful for the formation of a network media theory, this paper will in conclusion consider ‘tactical media’ as one suitable method. Continuing the study of episodic networks, it will outline two recent tactical media art projects Undersound and UmbrellaNet that utilise an episodic network structure, and explore their role as critical tools for engaging with network media.

*episodic networks are a form of mobile ad hoc network which, rather than using a stable form of infrastructure, routes data packets through pair-wise connectivity between mobile devices.  Data is transferred opportunistically by everyday proximity between humans carrying mobile devices i.e. commuters on public transport, without the aid of a centralised relay structure.

Abstract

While immersive virtual reality dominates discussions of the possibilities and dilemmas of identity and the cybernetic body, a discourse burgeons in bulletin boards and on the internet about the issues of gender, identity and technology in terms of the relationship between textual language and telecommunication. The issues raised in these forums range from gender switching to the politics of rape. The overwhelming growth of the internet population has recently generated what could herald the need for the regulation of behavior raising many issues about free speech, the material effects of language, and the presumption that cyberspace is a neutral zone exempt from responsible agency. The internet is increasingly conceived as a community where words and actions are tangible.

Touted as a cure-all for every sort of distance, the net exposes some of the deepest frailties in the relationship between presence and meaning at the same time that it offers (at least now before it is regulated) access to communities whose interests are specialized and dispersed. Beneath the zeal to simultaneously create and exploit a developing technology, exists a collapsed set of assumptions. The most important of these believes that communication in cyberia is going to be an electronically adapted form of communication via the phone, modem, or through the television. And while it is clear that grounding these ideas is a logic of commodification, production in cyberspace will require a wholly revamped consideration of exchange mostly having to do with the consequences of language. Indeed, the seeming immateriality, and hence inconsequentiality, of language in cyberspace permits rapacious expression to dangle between moral relativity and rationalized simulation. At issue is not the difference between seduction and abandonment, illusion and simulation, fact or fiction, the Real and the virtual, but the logic of a system that either links the two as oppositional or that fails to theorize the symbolic as deeply consequential. This talk will attempt to unravel some of the consequences of the use of languages of identity, gender. sexuality, and politics in the not-so-virtual environment of the networks.

This poster session discusses the Networked Virtual Art Museum and the Networked Virtual Design Studios and teleconferencing sites/projects under his direction at Carnegie Mellon.

Panel: NeuroArts

Con­scious­ness as at­ten­tion to mem­ory is a term that neu­ro­sci­en­tist Eu­gene Izhike­vich uses to de­scribe a phe­nom­e­non in which the cor­tex re-lives or re-vis­its a spe­cific pat­tern of neural ac­tiv­ity in the ab­sence of sen­sory in­for­ma­tion. The model brain or cor­tex, de­prived of stim­u­la­tion, jour­neys around its own tem­po­ral ar­chi­tec­tures con­jur­ing past ‘ex­pe­ri­ences’ or ‘mem­o­ries’, pulling them into the pre­sent. Ev­i­dence that these path­ways con­tinue to be re-vis­ited once stim­u­la­tion oc­curs again is com­pelling. Re­fer­ring to re­cent re­search in de­vel­op­ing the sonic art­work Ghost, and two ear­lier works: Thresh­old and The Frag­mented Or­ches­tra, all of which have at their core the Spike Tim­ing De­pen­dant Plas­tic­ity model of Eu­gene Izhike­vich, I will dis­cuss the phe­nom­ena of ‘sonic ghosts’ a term I have used to de­scribe the buffer­ing up of the neural past with the neural pre­sent.

Panel: The Madness of Methods: Emerging Arts Research Practices

Draw­ing upon the­o­ret­i­cal works in cog­ni­tive sci­ence, af­fect the­ory, and sci­ence fic­tion, I will an­a­lyze con­tem­po­rary and his­toric rep­re­sen­ta­tions of neural in­stru­men­ta­tion through­out a va­ri­ety of media for­mats, in­clud­ing a per­sonal in­ter­ac­tive an­i­ma­tion pro­ject.  I will con­tex­tu­al­ize these rep­re­sen­ta­tions of per­cep­tual in­quiry across in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary frame­works, high­light­ing sug­gested fan­tasies as­so­ci­ated with each form.  I will show how uses of body-based sen­sors pre­sent the cor­po­real and cog­ni­tive sys­tems as nar­ra­tive spec­ta­cle.  As per­cep­tual tools and meth­ods are ap­pro­pri­ated from the sci­ences, new are­nas of hy­brid de­sign re­search prac­tice are es­tab­lished.

This paper has as a main objective to present the design aspects involved in the development of the NeuroBodyGame that consists of a wearable computer that allows the user to play games using their brain signs. It is a wireless interface for brain interaction with games loaded into the system. Both games and wearable computer react to the emotion of the user at the moment of interaction.

The playability can get easier or more difficult according to the brain wave frequency of the user at that very moment. The wearable computer interprets the brain activity of the user and reacts to it by changing the colors (back and front) and by applying vibrations (back). A really calm user, extremely careful and focused will have its playability enhanced and the NeuroBodyGame will mostly react by showing the color blue. If the user is just calm and focused, the color displayed is green. A tense user, if a bit unfocused or even nervous, will have his playability worsen and the NeuroBodyGame will react to it by turning into yellow and applying a soft vibration in the area of the back. However, a really tense and unfocused user will have its playability worsen and the NeuroBodyGame will react by changing its color to red and by vibrating really intensively. The cardiac sensor also incorporated to the wearable computer analyses the blood flow; functional oxygen; cardiac frequency and sympathetic and parasympathetic activity of the user.

The design of the NeuroBodyGame is adjustable to different body types. It means that the wearable computer can be expanded or contracted in order to fit the user’s body. Its main challenge lies in the fact that it tries to reserve the user’s comfort, in other words, it is ergonomic. Once each and every possibility of discomfort may alter the neurophysiologic signs and by doing so, it would compromise the biometric information.

In order to achieve all ages, two games that are being used with the NeuroBodyGame:one which aims at a low user and has a less complex playability and other which aims at a more experienced user and present a complex playability.

Current research and use of biosignal processing technology as an input device for computer graphic applications and graphical environments.

Neuron Conductor investigates the effects of biological neuron activity, cultured on a microelectrode array, in response to the introduction of viruses and pharmacological treatments. The responses are visualised through the movement of a robot which conducts a unique musical score. The resulting art/science work presents an alternative means of visualising and understanding neural responses as well as raising awareness and accessibility of the research. Neuron Conductor investigates real health issues in a unique manner as well as contemplating the role of non-human agency within hybrid biological/digital systems.

This presentation traces themes in the authors cunning work pertaining to mathematics and its relationship to the world and how the world is perceived within the current technologically mediated environment. The title Neuronature refers to the fundamental problem of the disjunction between the neural (interior) and the natural (external) world. This basic dialogue positions nature as the a priori model for technology while simultaneously positioning technology as a filter to the perception of nature.

Panel: Public Art of the Sustainable City

Through a bi­en­nial de­sign com­pe­ti­tion, the Land Art Gen­er­a­tor Ini­tia­tive gath­ers ideas that seek to cre­ate sub­stan­tive mod­els for change and that ad­dress pub­lic art within the urban fab­ric of a sus­tain­able fu­ture. The goal of LAGI is to de­sign and con­struct a se­ries of large-scale site-spe­cific pub­lic art in­stal­la­tions that uniquely com­bine art with util­ity scale clean en­ergy gen­er­a­tion. The art­works uti­lize the lat­est in re­new­able en­ergy sci­ence and in­no­vate the ap­pli­ca­tion of new tech­nolo­gies. The art it­self will con­tin­u­ously dis­trib­ute clean kilo­watts of en­ergy into the elec­tri­cal grid with each land art sculp­ture hav­ing the po­ten­tial to pro­vide power to hun­dreds or even thou­sands of homes, while ful­fill­ing its tra­di­tional role—pub­lic art as con­cep­tu­ally en­gag­ing amenity to our com­mon space. In this talk we will dis­cuss both the 2010 LAGI com­pe­ti­tion for the United Arab Emi­rates and the up­com­ing 2012 com­pe­ti­tion for Fresh Kills Park in New York City.

GPS satellite-based techniques for positioning ourselves on the face of the earth have become increasingly more exacting.We now operate within a complex digital infrastructure comprised of real-time computer communications and surveillance systems.The planet is now utterly mapped out within an enveloping and constantly moving invisible grid that provides an address, a pixel, which articulates every place on earth. Determining location has shifted from mechanical to digital means, and as such, visual sites or physical markers are no longer required as positional references. Our sense of location is being challenged and redefined yet again by the invisible structures of streams of pure information. Geography and cartography have been exhausted and superseded by technologies of surveillance. Globe-encompassing satellite constructions like the Global Positioning System present us with hyper-extreme articulation of space, time, and location. Over two decades ago the United States Department of Defense developed the Global Positioning System at the cost of ten billion dollars. Designed for military missile deployment, the US government oversees, controls, and allocates military and commercial applications of its communications signals. Orbiting 20,000 km above the earth, this constellation of twenty-four interlocked Naystar satellites relays a continuous, multi-source string of radio signals to radio receivers on earth that permit the pinpoint determination of location in four dimensions. Long-range satellite technologies and the introduction of GPS challenges traditional definitions of navigation, specifically with regard to location, timing, and tracking. Like a huge invisible interactive map of networked information that blankets the entire globe, the Naystar satellites create a topographic envelope that choreographs points, lines, and planes in real-time. Now the representation of topography is defined by a moving, shifting ground visualized with numerical data rather than image information.Cartography has evolved from a two-dimensional system of representation of the visible for documenting the physical landscape to a four-dimensional invisible feedback system for surveilling an exhausted physical topography. The work presented uses GPS to locate and expose the intersections of regional spaces in Banff, Canada and to re-visualize place in an interpretative electronic environment. Global Positioning #4 explores the reconstruction of cartographies as seen through new technologies. Longitude, latitude, altitude, and time data was input to a Silicon Graphics workstation and Softimage software was used to reconstruct the physical path into a virtual animated path.

The New Composers are 15 years old now. The project was formed in 1983 in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) on the base of a sound recording studio in the Drama Theatre, where Valery Alahov and lgor Verichev worked as sound producers and made soundtracks for performances. There the concept of their creation was worked out. As in performances, where the subject was the basic item, in New Composers albums the subject or conception was the defining factor, surrounded by a musical pallette, lyrics and technical sounds and effects. Finally the performance-collage was worked out. For example, the first album of the New Composers, Space Between, where the samples of Russian Cosmonauts, engineers, messengers, orders from space command centre, famous phrases of politics and scientists were used. The most frequent are the basic phrases, which the New Composers with the help of tape-montage ordered in another way, or changed the meaning, creating new lyrics. Well-known soviet songs or compositions were the musical material, phrases were combined or went in turn episodiacally. Owing to that way of creating, the project got its name – New Composers. Popular-science topics were the most frequent subject of the New Composers. Myths and legends gave fantasy freedom in using special effects or occasional tricks, which the New Composers created in their studio. ln 1997 the New Composers organised a club, Science-Fiction (in the Planetarium, Leningrad), where two popular-science lecture-compositions for children and adults were created: Contacts of the 3rd Way (about UF0’s) in 1988, and Legends of the Starry Sky in 1989. In 1990 the New Composers were invited to Ark Records in Liverpool, and their first single Sputnik was recorded. It became the first Techno single in the history of Russian dance club life and the New Composers became famous as the first Techno group in Russia.

What could we think of when we speak of a post-Anthropocene and how does this affect the way we engage in a creative process? For his upcoming project ‘The origin #1’ Abel is working on a live audio-visual performance which functions as a collaboration between performer, computer and physarum, a collaboration between man, technology, and protist. How do you take a more emissarial position regarding the piece and all its components? Through engaging with the materiality and the autonomy of all the separate parts you arrive at new strategies and new artistic problems. In this the origin #1 is an experiment in a post-anthropocentric making. The project and the research are about dealing with the inherent otherness of big environmental actors the likes of technological structures and the planet in moments of environmental catastrophe. Through exploring these external forces, learn more about our own human position.

This artistic research is done alongside three musical installations which bridge technology, biology, and performance. In his talk Abel will expand on the process of designing voices for biological processes like beehive behaviors, building a synthesizer out of hybrid bio electronic components, or how he tackles sonification of the bitcoin blockchain. In his design process and performative work, he deals with the notion of a post Anthropocene and how to deal with a limited authorship in a creative process where nature and chance play a big part. How to function as an emissary to your work instead of an all-knowing author. Thus, switching up an understanding of the function of the artist that has been part of dominant thinking since the
enlightenment.

A Proposal From Esad, The Ecole Superieure D’art Et De Design De Reims

In wealthy countries, the 21st century is marked by the economic supremacy of the service sector, which generates immaterial products. Objects have become data carriers, meant to quench the consumer’s thirst for sensation. Computers are transforming society as radically as the steam engine did over 150 years ago. Production, distribution and consumption have increased from a rhythm of jazz or rock to one of techno. Long abandoned by the Bauhaus, design has broken free from Raymond Loewy and is trying to rebuild itself somewhere between cultural and stock values.

My paper and presentation examines the expanding role of lettering and typography within media, design and the arts. I will present the history, usage and creative potential of primarily the Latin/Roman alphabet in various forms: inscribed, written, drawn, painted and printed. The differences between writing, calligraphy, lettering and typography will be described. I will focus on specific categories within lettering and typography and their adaption into forms of communication and exploration. Forms of writing and lettering can be traced as far back as cuneiform script and the technique of pressing cut reeds into wet clay. The creative potentials of writing and lettering were achieved through the development of a continuous line, variation of widths, and the breaking of the line into connected and harmonious strokes. These developments illustrate a desire to explore the creative potential of symbols, letters and words. They define an impulse to personalize, impress, add authority, and beauty to expressive forms of communication. Artists, illustrators and designers have always been drawn to letterforms and have added to an artistic legacy of lettering and typography in addition to images and illustrations. I will present a number of historical uses of letterforms within the arts by artists, illustrators and designers such as George Bickham, Platt Rogers Spencers, Albrecht Dürer, Joan Miró, Cassandre and Bruce Nauman. I will also present examples of continuous variation and adaption within letterforms as well as the role of technology in the writing and display of text. The digital revolution and the incorporation of the computer in defining how letterforms are created illustrates the potential of letterforms to be manipulated in ways that allow them to be more three dimensional, tactile, and ever present within our environment. There exists a tension between the art and craft of writing and calligraphy. Letterforms need to be useful and efficient in communication but also connect individuals to a human experience. I question how artists and designers can mediate the need for humanistic qualities within the letterforms we create and the openness and tolerance that needs to occur in order to explore new forms of visual communication. My creative research examines the possibilities and opportunities for new interpretations of traditional calligraphy, scripts and lettering using vector and three-dimensionally based rendering software and hardware. I will highlight the ways in which letterforms are disseminated and how their distribution methods determine the character of the letterforms we currently see and use.

In my paper I intend to analyze piracy as a fight for cultural freedom. My goal is to place piracy in the center of a cultural and artistic production/reproduction. Especially the restrictions of copyright in the role of cultural production/reproduction will go parallel with my argument. So other alternative licensing methods like copyleft, creative commons etc. will take place. I plan to make connections with the moral and the story of Robin Hood with using case studies of social and artistic productions. These may include Michael Mandiberg’s aftersherrielevine.?com, The Droplift Project, P2P file sharing, some of 01001011101101.org’s works, Wikipedia etc. The tools for production/reproduction and sharing has as much importnance as the cultural and artistic output so my paper will also look into these. Some of the questions that might raise about my argument will concern “is piracy really offensive to an artists work?”, “is copying and appropiation or digital reproduction reduces an artwork’s cultural value”, “is cultural value equivalent to market value?”, “do agreements like ACTA and organizations like RIAA consider people’s pirvacy”…

I will try to conclude my paper with the discussion of: “if cultural value is a resource, is there any possible way to distribute this freely?” But thinking the concept as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.

The TEAR Studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has taken a unique approach to education in the electronic arts. Since 1991, we have offered an MFA in Electronic Arts which stresses integration of a variety of artistic disciplines, including computer music, video art, computer art, web art, performance and installation.Our model for this program has been to build an art school within Rensselaer’s out-standing technological environment. In 1996-97, in collaboration with the Institute’s Department of Language Literature & Communications, we began offering an undergraduate bachelor’s degree in Electronic Media, Arts and Communication (EMAC).This new degree combines iEAR’s approach to electronic arts as a multidisciplinary art practice, with a strong grounding in communications theory and practice.

This presentation will present a detailed description of the current state of evolution of the curriculum in the MFA pro¬gram, and of the electronic arts portion of the curriculum in the EMAC program. I will examine the underlying belief in the importance of an interdisciplinary education for artists who will be working the electronic tools of the 21st Century, I will also describe the differences in approaches used in designing the graduate and undergraduate programs, and show some examples of student work.The presentation will close with a discussion of the ongoing strategies which we have followed in purchasing and installing equipment for student use in these programs.

Myfanwy Ashmore is working on a series of works titled New Machines for Inefficiency.

Devices for Interacting with Strangers consists of two devices for two participants to communicate with each other non verbally. The devices are wearable. They are worn in a similar fashion as google glass in that they are worn over one’s head and but these devices only cover one eye. Each device contains a tiny LCD screen which is controlled by a micro-controller connected to a series of buttons. The LCD screen contains a controllable hand drawn image of an eye. The eye is controlled by the series of buttons. The users are expected to try to communicate non verbally through the their new inefficient augmented prosthetic eye. The eye can look from side to side, wink, blink. The user can explore communication through this very awkward device.

This work encourages the user to play, and explore expressions and the limits of this simple prosthetic eye game.These devices for interacting with strangers encourage strangers to play with each other and share an experience. This glass blinds one eye into a controllable device where the user must be intentional, and the interface is not seamless, and not efficient and not trying to embed itself transparently into ones life. This glass limits the communication of the users and by doing so augments and privileges the users choices within the limiting system. The users become performers, communicators, active participants. This work honours the inefficient, the miscommunication, the physical body.

Over the past decade contemporary art in many of its forms, technological and non-technological, has increasingly been shaped by concepts of participation, collaboration, social connectivity, performativity, and ‘relational’ aspects. One could argue that the participatory, ‘socially networked’ art projects of the past ~15 years that have received considerable attention by art institutions all respond to contemporary culture, which is shaped by networked digital technologies and ‘social media’ (from the WWW to locative media, Facebook and YouTube), and the changes they have brought about with regard to connectivity (interpersonal, social, and global), information economy, and new understandings of embodiment emerging from them. Yet the ‘relational’ artworks prominently featured in major museums seldom make use of these technologies as a medium and technologically based projects remain conspicuously absent from major exhibitions in the mainstream art world. While art institutions and organizations now commonly use digital technologies in their infrastructure—“connecting” and distributing through their websites, facebook pages, YouTube channels, and Twitter tours—they still place emphasis on exhibiting more traditional art forms that reference technological culture or adopt its strategies in a non-technological way.

From an art-historical perspective, it seems difficult or dubious to not acknowledge that the participatory art of the 1960s/1970s and the 1990s/2000s were responses to cultural and technological developments—computer technologies, cybernetics, systems theory and the original Internet/Arpanet from the mid-40s onwards; the WWW, ubiquitous computing, databasing/datamining, social media in the 1990s/2000s. While different in their scope and strategies, the new media arts of the 60s/70s and today faced similar resistances and challenges that led to their separation from the mainstream art world, respectively.

The paper will will sketch out the complexities of the uneasy relationship between so-called new media art and the mainstream art world by taking a look at exhibition histories and art-historical developments relating to technological and participatory art forms; and by outlining the challenges that new media art poses to institutions and the art market.

Drawing on post-phenomenological philosophy of technology, this discusses the flow of experiences through and into new media artworks, and the implications the directions and volumes of these flows may have to interpretation, theory and criticism of new media art. The paper will focus on new media artworks which can be described as transforming our ways of experiencing and/or constituting anew that which is being experienced. The artworks, which can be described as going ‘beyond mediation’ shift the locus of significance from its traditional position. They challenge the traditional notions of e.g. ‘dialogue’ or ‘interaction’ as the artistic material and/or primary mode of engagement with a new media artwork and call for call for new hermeneutics to be understood and criticized. Relevant questions include: what kind of worlds do these artworks constitute, and, what are the conditions under which we can perceive them Ihde (1)(2) describes a project he calls “a phenomenology of technics” as the attempt to explain the intentionality relationships between humans, technological artefacts and the world. Ihde explains how technologies like eyeglasses, windows, thermometers, vending machines, looking glasses and computers situate in the intentionality relations between humans and the world, distinguishing for example between those embodied and/or hermeneutic technologies ‘through which’ our experience goes into the world, and those technologies, which constitute a “terminus of experience” (6) for a human. Ihde’s framework has been later adjusted and amended by Selinger (4) and Verbeek (5)(6) to account for technologies which not only mediate or terminate human experiences, but can also fundamentally and corporeally shape the ways in which the world appears to us. This intentionality relations framework will be used to analyse both contemporary and archaeological examples. The analysis will support the postulation of new frameworks for the interpretation and critique of new media art, and help re-conceptualise the relationship, or, the “dance of agency” (3) between the artist, the audience and other entities that share the responsibility for the existence of the artwork.

Panel Statement

The aim of this panel is to analyze the economic structure of the new technologies art, from the practical point of view, in a rich understanding of the economy concept, based in the long term experience of LaAgencia and other invited organizations. Art’s traditional sector has been basically supported on goods interchange, the artwork for money. On the other side, the new technologies art sector has created or improvised an economic structure, more sophisticated, possibly more in agreement with the time. This structure comes from the media contemporarily and the work environment, the new technologies; and is conditioned and forced by the fact of not having a tangible object susceptible to be assimilated by the art market. The structure has evolved generating new practices and structures where the artist receives his/her return like fees for his/her work, awards, investigation grants or even orders where the border between artistic creation understood like fine arts, applied art and industrial creation is explored. This panel will review the evolution of the idea of economy on art, its development in the context of new technologies, going deep on the actual scenarios and the implication of research and industry on them. LaAgencia presents this panel.

Panel: New Media Archives- New Intelligent Ambiances

The paper “Con­tem­po­rary in­for­ma­tion par­a­digms: the re­ordered mem­ory on FILE Archive struc­tures” leads the dis­cus­sions that in­crease the per­cep­tions about the het­ero­ge­neous con­tent of dig­i­tal art mem­ory, high­light­ing the FILE elec­tronic lan­guage in­ter­na­tional fes­ti­val Archive, under the per­spec­tive of in­tel­li­gent sys­tems. With an In­for­ma­tion Sci­ence the­o­ret­i­cal ap­proach and con­sid­er­ing new prac­tices in the area, the study will raise per­spec­tives in using these ex­pert struc­tures, con­sid­er­ing the re­cent goals to de­velop a new FILE Archive en­vi­ron­ment.

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

I would like to look at new media ed­u­ca­tion from the point of view of psy­cho­log­i­cal, pro­fes­sional and so­cial prob­lems.  It has been pos­si­ble to see them dur­ing last 20 years in the ed­u­ca­tion en­vi­ron­ment of Es­to­nia and I am afraid that many of them have al­most been for­got­ten. When speak­ing about psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lems, is artis­tic imag­i­na­tion in­flu­enced by the medium of ex­pres­sion? Is imag­i­na­tion re­newed with new media? I mean new media in gen­eral, not only so called “new media”. New tech­nol­ogy, new tools, new equip­ment? Can we say that there is a spe­cific tal­ent, which is con­nected to a spe­cific medium and if he or she does some­thing else, then it is not good, not as tal­ented as this? Is tal­ent spe­cific to a medium or is it uni­ver­sal? If we call any­body tal­ented, then his tal­ent will ap­pear any­way, de­spite tech­no­log­i­cal or so­cial con­di­tions, or not?  Pro­fes­sional prob­lems. End­less ques­tions about how qual­i­fied an artist could be using a tech­ni­cal medium. How skilled should he/she be in using soft­ware and com­put­ers to work as an artist and au­thor of new media?  So­cial prob­lems. In­ter­con­nected pa­ra­me­ters of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion are the dis­tri­b­u­tion of in­for­ma­tion, re­courses and rep­u­ta­tion. There is com­pe­ti­tion in the field of pro­duc­tion of so­cial no­tion and rep­u­ta­tion which in­flu­ences per­cep­tion of qual­ity of artis­tic pro­duc­tion.

The proposal for this panel is to consider recent works by four artists whose work allows us to create a landscape of contemporary art with old and new technologies and their combinations, ones that find an eloquent form of expression in installations. Analogical audio-visual and numerical information processed by brand software is exhibited in the art spaces through different devices, each impacting other types of spectators.

Abstract

News is commonly intended to be delivered in an objective, unbiased manner – and therefore presented plainly and formally – even though its content often affects readers emotionally. The NewsViz system aims to enhance the news reading experience by integrating 30 seconds long Flash-animations into news article web pages depicting their content and emotional aspects. NewsViz interprets football news texts automatically and creates abstract 2D visualisations. The user interface enables animators to further refine animations. Here we focus on the emotion extraction component of NewsViz ,which facilitates subtle background visualisation. The emphasis of NewsViz lies on expression, impacting on the reader’s understanding of the article and making it more memorable. NewsViz detects moods from news reports. The original text is part-of-speech tagged and adjectives and/or nouns, the word types conveying most emotional meaning, are filtered out and labelled with an emotion and intensity value. Subsequently reoccurring emotions are joined into longer lasting moods and matched with appropriate animation presets. Different linguistic analysis methods were tested on NewsViz: word-by-word, sentence based and incremental minimum threshold summarisation, to find a minimum number of occurrences of an emotion in forming a valid mood. NewsViz proved to be viable for the fixed domain of football news, grasping the overall moods and some more detailed emotions precisely. NewsViz introduces a novel approach to a universally applicable emotion scheme which offers an efficient technique to cater for the production of a large number of daily updated news stories. NewsViz fills the gap of lack of information for background or environment depiction encountered in similar applications. Further development may refine the detection of emotion shifts through summarisation with the full implementation of football and common linguistic knowledge. Future work will reveal whether NewsViz is feasible when extended to different domains.

The expansion of the current media-environment due to user-generated content, portable media and social networks has changed the very notion of citizenship. We live in a post-Web world and the screens are extensions of a post-Google cluster, limit-surfaces of Web 2.0 brands. In this paper we discuss our media age, the Mediacene. A media theory is designed to depict current trends on space, place, data and history. Network-screens perform as portals to digital space. This is the Next Tension.

We present here the last developments concerning the graphical user interfaces we are designing to control sound instruments in the new FTS Client/Server architecture or through MIDI. In particular, MoveInSpace, the movement generator interface for sound spatialization significantly improved since our last publications (JIM96 and ICMC96 proceedings).
This interface is developed under object-oriented and real time concepts. It constitutes a graphical tool to define tridimensional trajectories, independently of the spatialization system. The composer can choose predefined trajectories or define new 3D trajectories with the mouse or with a data glove. From one particular trajectory, several other trajectories forming a class can be derived thanks to different transformation methods: translation, scaling, speed modification, moving, adding or removing points.These trajectories are saved by pressing the record button and are played back by pressing the forward or backward play buttons. During the saving process, an icon representing the trajectory is created. A set of classical command buttons—Stop, Play, Pause, Return To Zero, Loop — is also available. It is moreover possible to correlate the spatial movement with parameters of the sound (e.g.:frequency, amplitude, filter parameter,… ). Actually, the user can define other functions, in the way he defines the altitude curve.The composer can explore the resources of spatiomorphological transformations, correlating sound spatialization to other sound processing, like pitch shifting, dynamic filtering,… As a matter of fact, MovelnSpace becomes a general multi-controller. It allows to simultaneously control the dynamic evolution of a large set of parameters and can be useful to pilot sound processing programs that require the definition of many parameters. Different parameters concerning size and shape of the room where the sound is spatialized are easily specified and visually controlled by the user, such as the real and the virtual dimensions of the room, the number, the position and the size of the loudspeakers. We also introduced the interpolation concepts in this inter face.The user will be able to place and size interpolation spheres in space. Each sphere represents a set of parameters and a resulting set will be calculated by interpolation, depending on the position of a point moving in this space. We are testing this tool on different spatialization system : on an acousmonium controlled by VCA, on a quadraphonic spatialization system and on the Ircam “Spatialisateur.”This interface constitutes an efficient graphical tool to easily control spatialization instruments or, in general, any sound processing programs that require the simultaneous definition of many parameters.

Nibia Sabalsagaray (1949- 974) was a twenty-four years old Uruguayan literature teacher and social activist, tortured and killed in captivity at the beginning of the last military dictatorship (1973-1985) in Uruguay.  Although the Military Justice categorized this crime as a suicide by hanging, in November 8, 2010, two military (Dalmao and Chialanza) were indicted as responsible for the murder. As of January 2011, both military are in the process of appealing the sentence.

In this paper we are presenting an interactive installation that questions the relationship between (Uruguayan) society and the recent past, through recontextualization and redefinitions of a particular, locally well-known, image.  The work consists of a small room, dark, with black walls, with only one entrance, blinded by double black curtains.  Hanging towards the end of the room, there is a projection of the locally very known picture of Sabalsagaray, in black and white. Two meters ahead of the projection, there is a wooden stool with a standard lighter on top of it.  If the user decides to take the lighter and lights it, the picture in the area corresponding to the position of the lighter begins to burn, disappearing, becoming black.  But it is impossible to burn it completely: a short time after a zone is burnt, it is reconstructed, allowing the image to reappear, which never fades completely.  The relationship between the spectator and the image is drastically resignified, by making explicit the underlying interaction between the graphic representation and its consumption.  By allowing to try to burn the image, it is not only said that there are always people who burn it (and in a way –perhaps distant– we all are), but also that the perception of any cultural phenomenon cannot be apolitical.

This installation, in spite of being explicitly interactive and engaging for its users, it is not perceived as a video game of sorts, but instead induces to the reflection and awe.  We propose that this occurs thanks to a combination of factors: the density of the message, the natural interaction, and the aesthetic setup.

Nightly Light from Suns merges visual art and technology to explore the notion of Nostalgic Futurism, a yearning for a time when it was possible to imagine a corporeal, tangible technological future, uncomplicated by knowledge of the current moment. The handcrafted materials and antiquated electronic sounds are reminiscent of 1950’s science fiction, reigniting a promising dream of what lies ahead. Visions of the future cannot escape the ideologies of the present moment. Similar to the nature of memory, these projections are romanticized ideations, born from a longing to “be elsewhere”. To facilitate this unhinging from the present, we experiment with the relationship between sonic and visual information by staging various points of intersection. Nightly Light from Suns represents an otherworldly intelligence that implies an unknown and advanced functionality. These unmapped qualities of the work renew a positive sense of longing and wonder about the future that seems to be all but a memory of the past.

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The Jerusalem-based Sala-Manca Group, comprised of Lea Mauas & Diego Rotman, has been active since 2000. The group produced, initiated and curated the Heara Independent Events for Contemporary Art (2001-2007), published the art journal Hearat Shulayim (1-11), and curated and produced various art events. They teach art, activism and urban space at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, organize the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem node of ‘Upgrade! On culture, art and technology’ and are the founding directors of the brand new center, Mamuta at The Daniela Passal Art and Media Center in Jerusalem, a joint project by Hearat Shulaym and Jerusalem foundations. The group has presented its work, performed, and given talks in different frameworks worldwide, among them: PSI Conference — New York University, `Transmediale’ Festival — Berlin, Liverpool Biennial, Ulster University, Belfast, Observatorr Festival, Valencia, Eyebeam, New York, EPAF at the CCA, Warsaw, La Fabrica y CCEBA, Buenos Aires.

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UBERMORGEN.COM is an artist duo created in Vienna, Austria, by lizvlx & Hans Bernhard. Behind UBERMORGEN.COM we can find one of the most unmatchable identities — controversial and iconoclastic — of the contemporary European techno-fine-art avant-garde. Their open circuit of conceptual art, drawing, software art, pixel painting, computer installations, net.art, sculpture and digital activism (media hacking) transforms their brand into a hybrid Gesamtkunstwerk. The computer and the network are (ab)used to create art and combine its multiple forms. The permanent amalgamation of fact and fiction points toward an extremely expanded concept of one’s working materials that for UBERMORGEN.COM also include (international) rights, democracy and global communication (input-feedback loops). `Ubermorgen’ is the German word both for ‘the day after tomorrow’ and ‘super-tomorrow’.

In 2006 I was invited to do a site specific piece consisting of three rubber mats with water jet cut text stating: NOBODY WILL HURT YOU, NOBODY WILL SAVE YOU AND NOBODY for the Yard at Casa Lin during Art Basel Miami. The Yard at Casa Lin is an alternative outdoor exhibition space created by Lin Lougheed located within a small ungentrified neighborhood in the Wynwood District of Miami.

Abstract (short paper)

This small paper focuses on ‘noise as communicating presence’  in performance and digital communication by mapping Gertrude Stein’s 1934 lecture ‘Plays’ onto the interface through contemporary digital theorists Ulises A. Mejias and Alexander Galloway. How do the critical resonances between performance and digital media allow us to develop a theory for a practice that values the accumulation of these disturbances? I argue that Stein’s spectatorial ‘nervousness’ provides a tactic for an expanded understanding of noise that positions presence – our own, the interface and those communicated with – firmly within digital communication technologies. I aim to use the intersection of media theory and performance to develop a theory that enables us to layer the agencies at play in a process, to attend to how ‘interface as an intersection of these agencies’. Ultimately, I argue that understanding this affective presence is vital to how and why we might act as ‘accumulators or curators and of disturbance’.

This paper is examining noise/signal, both as a material and as being an active part of a music composition. Noise/signal is looked at in the context of communication technologies and from noise in the environment, such as chemical agents and lethal clouds, in relation to the art project Metopia. How can toxic noise in the environment have an impact on the audio signal in this project? Unstable data networks and machine processes are examined in this project and how these can be expressed through the use of sonification. Noise in the environment is in this context referring to toxic substances sensed by electrochemical sensors and together with system process noise, resulting in a musical composition

Abstract (short paper)

Sound studies are incorporating signal analysis, rhythmanalysis, physics, engineering and computation. According to Shannon and Weaver, signal analysis is the principle to understand all processes in information theory. This process follows the schema: sing – storage – transmission. Signal emission is produced in communication systems, computing and noise responsive environments. Rhythm is a characteristic of signal emission, and its detection and transmission is studied for example through the experimentation with electromagnetic devices. As a result, noise is produced. Noise is defined in Norbert Weiner as a nondesired message. However, content and context, support and message in noise responsive systems cohabit in the electronic continuum generated by signals to be deciphered.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Generative Art, Cellular Automata, Mechatronic Sound-sculpture.

As Burraston and Edmonds state, “creating patterns and sequences is necessary for the creative artist working spatially and temporally within a chosen medium”. Accordingly, cellular automata’s capability of creating a wide range of evolutionary and generative patterns has made them of special interest to musicians and sound artists. While this has led to a great number of works of sound art and music that integrate generative patterns of cellular automata in one way or another, the sonic output of these works has been primarily retained within the realm of electronically produced sound. Followed by a concise overview on a selected number of these works, this paper presents a proposed audiovisual installation in which cellular automata is incorporated in the medium of mechatronic sound-sculpture, where the sound is generated physically and in the acoustic realm, through a mechanical apparatus.

The Nomadic Dolls was an initiative by the College of Art & Creative Enterprises (CACE), Zayed University graduates, Arwa Bukhash and Hind Bin Demaithan in 2009. The concept was to unite artists for a fundraising project through the Doll as a blank ‘canvas’, of sorts.

CACE’s Student Council, as a means of promoting the college and engaging the wider community, picked the idea up again earlier this year at Zayed University’s Carnival. The Nomadic Doll has become a mascot for CACE activities, as the Council became renown through the customization, and enabling individual creativity to thrive. The Nomadic Doll allowed non-art students to showcase their creativity.

We at CACE are pleased to explore the possibilities of the Nomadic Doll initiative. ISEA2014 has presented CACE with an ideal opportunity to share the Nomadic Dolls with the wider community, incorporating the Nomadic Doll into a collaborative student exhibition that spans the Middle East region. The exhibition will be a part of ISEA2014, Oct 30-Nov 8.

The exhibition has gained interest from professional artists, art & design students and non- art students alike. This has begun to prove the playfulness of the Initiative.

The participants will explore idea generation, limitations and possibilities. Some have spent time exploring the character created into a narrative, character interaction and narrative options were investigated by the participants – from photography to stop motion, animation, and traditional video approaches.

The Nomadic Doll project has proven that it is a wonderful bridge between designers & artists and the wider community, as a means of creative play with the goal of fun and whimsy at its heart. It demonstrates the reason we begin to create and reminds us of our ability to surprise ourselves.

Abstract

We aim to progress the debate about the possibility of machine consciousness towards the implications of the actuality of elements of consciousness emerging from outside the human situation. We will bring together work done by artists and scientists on dream states, out of body experiences, near death experiences, brain machines, and the use of light and psychoacoustic sound to affect the human capacity to visualize and imagine.

Using these examples we will examine specific ‘phenomena’ such as hauntings, geomantic disturbances, UFO sightings, ‘abductions’ and contacts as have been reported as being apparently genuine and investigate whether the artist can interface with these in some way without being drawn into the opposing camps of belief and skepticism. We will examine the implications of the western desire for a technological ‘other’ whether it be as emergent  machine intelligences, extraterrestrial visitors, or parapsychological phenomena. Using virtual reality and the more complex technology of the body as a starting-point, we will look at attempts to simulate ‘models’ for these phenomena and how they reflect human culture, both conscious and unconscious. As people whose principal concern is art we are not prepared to judge the legitimacy of specific phenomena. The fact that ‘something’ is happening ‘out there’ and the processes which humans have to undertake to understand ‘it’ is more interesting than photographic ‘evidence’ and conspiracy theories about government cover-ups. We would prefer to offer the possibility of the concept of clusters of ‘leak ages’, whereby non-explicable  phenomena enters the conscious perception on a random and accidental basis.
Kathy Rogers on her work: “I am researching into into the remote replication and extension of human perception, cognition and human presence. I am also looking at the practical and theoretical aspects of the para-sciences and identifying ways in which telepresence technologies might allow us to distribute persistent manifestations of identifiable personal energy. I propose a synthesis of recent developments within the study of dreams and the paranormal phenomena such as ESP, hauntings, lucid dreaming and nightmares to push us towards a pluralistic understanding of the deeply imagistic capacity of human consciousness. I use the metaphor of the void to elaborate on the absoluteness of inner space that each human being possesses”.

Panel: The Volatility and Stability of WorldMaking as Techné

This ar­ti­cle is a dis­cus­sion of the core tech­ni­cal and aes­thetic mo­ti­va­tions be­hind my work as a media artist, which is built upon a non­lin­ear model of nar­ra­tive form. The ap­proach to ad­dress­ing nar­ra­tive is­sues in my work is de­rived from think­ing of nar­ra­tive not only as a story, but also as a model of knowl­edge. The ques­tion of non­lin­ear nar­ra­tive is an epis­te­mo­log­i­cal ex­plo­ration, and the sto­ries we tell each other and our­selves are con­nected to the way we know, in terms of both con­tent and struc­ture. The struc­tures of my works de­part from this per­spec­tive. There­fore, I see my works as knowl­edge spaces that are a con­cep­tual re­flec­tion of a mod­ern un­der­stand­ing of knowl­edge and na­ture as a non­lin­ear nar­ra­tive. Non­lin­ear nar­ra­tives are qual­i­ta­tively trans­modal (sep­a­ra­tion of data and rep­re­sen­ta­tion), par­tic­i­pa­tory (con­sumers and writ­ers are one in the same), and in­de­ter­mi­nate (the con­tent and struc­ture of in­for­ma­tion changes un­pre­dictably). The qual­i­ties of non­lin­ear nar­ra­tives are not only flex­i­ble; there is no steady state, they are in con­stant flux. The qual­i­ties of non­lin­ear nar­ra­tives exist on strata, one is bound to the other, but they vary in­de­pen­dently. It is the com­bi­na­tion, trans­for­ma­tion, and re­com­bi­na­tion of these vary­ing qual­i­ties that re­sults in the chang­ing per­sonae of non­lin­ear nar­ra­tives.

The chal­lenge of cap­tur­ing the qual­i­ties of non­lin­ear nar­ra­tives has led me to de­velop an ab­stract model use­ful in the con­cep­tual analy­sis and prac­ti­cal de­vel­op­ment of non­lin­ear nar­ra­tive in my work. This model is based on a com­pos­ite of op­er­a­tions (data gen­er­a­tors), struc­tures (scaf­folds for data flow), and char­ac­ter­is­tics (the in­ter­ac­tive input and out­put rep­re­sen­ta­tion of data), re­sult­ing in the emer­gence of the qual­i­ties of non­lin­ear nar­ra­tive de­scribed above. In this ar­ti­cle I will de­scribe the con­cepts and de­vel­op­ment of the non­lin­ear nar­ra­tive model de­scribed above. The terms and ideas pre­sented in sup­port of the con­cepts put forth in this ar­ti­cle are de­rived from a va­ri­ety of sources, in­clud­ing the his­to­ries of art, music, and lit­er­a­ture; con­cepts in phi­los­o­phy (in par­tic­u­lar Deleuzeian phi­los­o­phy); and pat­tern lan­guage as found in the field of soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing.

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

In this paper, I will ad­dress ways in which the North is ac­cessed, un­der­stood, ex­pressed and re­de­fined through re­mote ac­cess to data and meta-phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal un­der­stand­ings of space, place and the be­ings that in­habit and tra­verse the North.  How is this ma­te­r­ial used to build a new un­der­stand­ing of the North and in what forms? How does that un­der­stand­ing also rely on, and draw from, re­lated non-tech­no­log­i­cal datasets? In cul­tural ex­pres­sions, data gath­ered re­motely (e.g., an­i­mal teleme­try) and data gath­ered from di­rect ex­pe­ri­ence of place, might both con­tribute to a sys­temic struc­ture, chore­og­ra­phy or shape of a work, and also pre­sent al­ter­na­tive ways for artists to ex­press un­der­stand­ings of space, place, his­tory and pol­i­tics. Ex­am­ples of data used in­clude the pres­ence or ab­sence of an­i­mals, hu­mans, plants or tox­ins, or shift­ing bound­aries of an­i­mal mi­gra­tion that defy po­lit­i­cal bor­ders.

I will dis­cuss ex­am­ples from my own work re­lated to the Cana­dian North as well as the fol­low­ing ex­am­ples from the Cana­dian Arc­tic: an­i­mal tele­met­ric data, maps based on tra­di­tional land-use by in­dige­nous res­i­dents, data re­lated to human land-use (e.g., oil-gas ac­tiv­i­ties), archival and his­tor­i­cal in­for­ma­tion of pas­sages through the Cana­dian North and my own ge­oloca­tive in­for­ma­tion gath­ered trav­el­ing through North­ern Canada. I will dis­cuss how these data are in­ter­preted or man­i­fested in art­works. In my own ex­am­ples, I will dis­cuss par­tic­u­larly how the spaces of the Cana­dian North have been, and con­tinue to be, re­de­fined in our imag­i­na­tions and re­al­i­ties due to human po­lit­i­cal bat­tles over sov­er­eignty, rights to oil and gas, ship­ping routes, etc. In ad­di­tion, I will dis­cuss how the re­cent ac­cess to North­ern spaces – re­motely through data, for in­stance through teleme­try that re­veals habi­tats of an­i­mals that ex­tend be­yond human bor­ders, are af­fected by cli­mate change and human use of land and arc­tic seas, as well as, how such data might pre­sent mys­tery be­yond its dry in­for­ma­tion.

Nostalgia Ti Frega is a photographic exploration of memory, identity, and place focusing on the emigrant community of a Sicilian village destroyed by an earthquake 40 years ago. The project, being completed as part of a Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Technology, Sydney, aims to capture a sense of the virtual space the village now inhabits within the community, the memories and stories that form this space, and the role of photographs in its construction. The intention is to create photographic objects, both digital and analog, that depict and engage the community of villagers and their descendents, and allow them to interact with and experience a sense of the ‘village’ today.

This presentation outlines the key influences across disciplines that have shaped the creative practice, and showcases a work-in-progress prototype of the final, hybrid, digital/analog product. Influences include Svetlana Boym’s work on nostalgia (2001) and Paul Connerton’s work on modern society and memory (1989, 2009). Investigations in the area of material culture and ethnography, examining the role of objects in the development and understanding of self, identity and emotion, have also contributed. Daniel Miller’s research into the material cultures of contemporary British life (2008), Sherry Turkle’s work on evocatively potent objects (2007) and Greg Nobel’s insights into containment and the cumulative self (2008, 2009) are key points of reference.

Another important factor has been the use of user-centred design principles from the User Experience field of digital media. Developing out of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) discipline of Computer Science, UX principles are concerned with the affect (or emotional impact) on users when using digital products. Donald J. Norman’s work on product design (2002, 2004) and the hybrid digital/analog work of Brendan Dawes (2007) are examples that have informed the project’s direction. And finally, Through showcasing the creative process of an artwork that is specific to a time, a people, and a place, and which traverses both analog and digital mediums, this presentation explores the ways in which ideas across different disciplines can be drawn on to create a bespoke and relevant framework within which to conduct creative practice.

The basis for contemporary digital, interactive, multimedia art were created in the sixties and seventies. It was conceptual art to lay fundamentals for the present state of art, together with its products (emanations): performance art, happening, installation art. The most important characteristics of conceptualism, which are relevant for the aesthetics of new media art are:

1. Rejection of the idea of producing beautiful objects/forms treated as vehicles for aesthetic values, replaced by textual artistic praxis; – dematerialization of artwork
2. Split between material arrangement (artefact) and its semantic extension (artvvork)
3. Relations as new values

Some of those features got new shapes (and entered into new structures) in post-conceptual, palimpsest-like artworks, which bridged conceptualism with formal art. But nowadays interactive arts accept again main conceptual principles. There are some changes, which do not damage, however, conceptual spirit:

1. Semantic object is being transformed into immaterial one
2. Split between artefact and interface has been established.

In general, there is a sort of continuation between conceptual art and contemporary hypermedia art activities, as well as a close structural connection between them. This is a reason for the idea of building digital aesthetics on the conceptual fundamentals.

Since the emergence of the seventh art has felt the need to explore even beyond what already ‘established’ to deepen the characteristics of an emerging new film, away from mercantilist and commercial purpose that this was coming permeating from Hollywood; It is so precisely as theoreticians, artists and experimenters in film managed to come up with other speech, accepted and valid from an audiovisual context. It can be stated that the experimental film and video art has not been made to understand, but from a viewpoint of subjective judgment within a given space and time, is unable to reach a result as such, but the process itself, the ideas they are covering what is observed; thus, an infinite range of views and interpretations is obtained.

In a pervasive media culture featuring connectivity and content available at every step, can augmented spaces and location based media offer the potential for fresh experiences and engagement with the physical environment? In this creator session, Megan Heyward will discuss Notes for Walking, a media artwork staged at Middle Head National Park and Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney from January 5-27, 2013 as part of the Sydney Festival 2013. Developed in association with Mosman Art Gallery, UTS and the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Notes for Walking allows visitors with smartphones to download an app and discover a set of thirteen short video ‘notes’ that are tagged to locations at Middle Head, a heritage site containing decommissioned naval forts in a harbourside landscape of sandstone tunnels, bushland, cliffs and abandoned lookout posts. The project brings together Megan Heyward’s ongoing research into locative media, spatial narrative, augmented spaces and landscape practices. The project works deeply with elements of landscape and is layered to acknowledge the contentious histories of the site. The video notes involve site-specific video and audio, including hydrophonic and ELF recordings of Middle Head, merged with short textual sequences that encourage audience engagement with the area. The gallery installation integrates social media photos and responses as people explore the site and experience Notes for Walking. In this session, Heyward and sound designer Michael Finucan will share key elements of the work, and discuss technical and creative issues including the complexities of delivering video and audio contents via smartphone. The session could possibly be presented on site at Middle Head, so that ISEA2013 attendees can experience the work on location, otherwise in an atypical setting. More broadly, the session will explore challenges and paradoxes of augmented and locative technologies, and whether they can encourage new experiences of landscape and environment.

This paper argues that new synthetic senses can be designed for humans. Scientific visualization maps the output of a range of sensors into the visible spectrum, showing how these phenomena would appear if they were visible. These are only representations. The present work aspires to go beyond representation to the direct perception of physical properties not now available to the human sensory apparatus. Sensory substitution systems allow blind users to ?see? using the output of a video camera mapped onto the surface of the skin or to the tongue. Artificial vision systems prove that spatial distributions can be apprehended through surface receptors by means of a systematic variation in stimulation modulated by bodily movements. The transduction of a range of physical properties no more accessible to normal human perception than light to the blind becomes possible in principle. Its realization is a matter of empirical investigation. Artificial senses are sought, in part, to enable a richer world to become a part of direct human experience, and to open new aesthetic fields to investigation.

The most underrated technological revolution to have ever happened has been the invention of the Phonograph. Prior to this momentous event no one had ever heard themselves before except through momentary echoes and reverberations. Sound is a vibration in the air registered by ear and brain. Sound waves produced by a late-twentieth century loudspeakers can be identical to those produced by the original source. A picture cannot be anything other than a picture. There is no ambivalence with objects. As Wittgenstein said, “Objects can only be named, signs are their representative, I can only speak about them; I cannot be put them into words,…”. Do we say what a sound is, or what it is of? If a sound comes from a loud speaker is it the sound of a loudspeaker? The moving image as it exists in time is automatically accompanied by ambient sound (machinery noise, doors, traffic, talking/breathing and so on) and sound from loudspeakers (the soundtrack) usually rendering the former inaudible.

Processes of recording music (production/engineering) has produced particular sound quality which may be distinctive either as the identity of the artist(s) or as genre. Call signs, jingles and alert sounds are aural icons whose duration is insufficient to be experiential. Intellectual understanding of the aural domain is (understandably) impoverished. The development of visual/aural work is hindered by unconscious assumptions where thinking is dominated by language and the visual, and music is limited by instrumentality.

The first impression one has when you hear the word terror is highly negative. It means great fear. But, interestingly when you look it up in the dictionary there is no fear, literally, surrounding the word terror. You will find terror sandwiched between the words territory and terra (earth or ground). On the other hand it can involve positive construction and evolution.
These concepts of the relationships between positive and negative or yin and yang seem key to the fear that lurks in David Lynch’s movies. He has a unique and uncanny way of using terror. Unlike horror or action film which provokes terror from literal events, David Lynch renders dreamscapes which evoke extreme disquiet but also humour and whimsey.

David Lynch leads the viewer in and yet out of the grotesque. There is a purity of expression and a dreamy beauty. Chris Rodley in his book “Lynch on Lynch” said that the indefinable mood or feeling Lynch seeks to convey is strongly linked to a form of intellectual uncertainty of being lost in darkness and confusion. Freud said “the uncanny is uncanny because it is secretly all too familiar, which is why it is repressed”.

Perhaps the most powerful method of evoking terror in a film audience is through sound. Yet, when you watch a truly compelling movie you become so absorbed by the picture that you hardly ever notice how the sound affects you. If the audio were turned off, the moving pictures lose their impact, become flat and disjointed; however, if the screen goes dark and you hear only the track, the mind creates its own rich images.

In this body of work I create a space of disruption, a dark room where the only source of light is illuminated when nuclear issues are discussed on the Internet. Two types of lamps will merge the natural with the man-made world. An altered commercial street lamp is filled with bioluminescent algae, activated when a servo agitates the algae liquid, which is triggered by nuclear-related keywords appearing on Google, Twitter and the NY Times. Two bioluminescent bacteria lamps will also be in the room and will be triggered by the keywords, releasing a drop of enzyme into the bacteria solution, continually increasing the amount of illumination.

For a week, bioluminescent algae lamps filled my apartment, acting as the only source of light. They were activated when nuclear-related keywords appeared on the Internet. Just as I would settle into a task, the bioluminescent light would turn on and off. It was a constant reminder of the urgency of these topics, during a time when radioactive water continues to flow from the Fukushima plant into the ocean. The disruptions made me conscious of my dependence on electricity as well as a comforting reminder that there is a dialogue happening.
Glitch: Many would view the nuclear meltdown as an event caused by a series of glitches in the nuclear reactor’s system. Likewise, we will see a series of glitches spread across the affected area in the form of biological and ecological abnormalities. I view the activation of the algae as a type of glitch, a short-lived disturbance in the system. This glitch, however, might just have the power to remediate the damage we caused. The active discussions and concern about the meltdown is its own type of remediation that slowly, but surely, is pushing its way to the surface.

Since 2010, NANO Nucleus of Art and New Organisms, a research lab facility at the School of Fine Arts from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, has been developing a consistent body of works, theoretical and practical, on the intersection of art, science, technology and nature. These works, which encompass a twilight zone in-between organic and artificial life, including plants, bees, bacteria and robots, are inspired by nature and models of thought drawn from scientific to ancient knowledge, such as indigenous Amerindian traditions and eastern cultures. This paper aims to present NANO’s creative production and methods, focusing on aspects of art education, transculturalism, sustainability, based on the experience of the project “Land as an Educational Principle”.

‘Null Point’, an architectural scale installation, is connected with scores of thousands of springs. With the connection, it forms large walls like a net-shape. And these walls form a maze by taking open and closed wall. When participants enter the exhibition hall, they pass through this maze. The walls that are connected with springs are blocked spatially, but lie open visually. And the walls are not fixed firmly. The maze is kind of floating. It reacts, moves according to the motion of participants. These movements result from connecting relationships, and the motility of spring adds tension.

State of Interactive Design: Report On the Papers Session

The main facets of the discipline are discussed: aesthetics, metaphor, dynamics, narration, usage and metadesign. The report is in French.

On December 8th, 9th and 10th, the numer association organized numer.oo, the first international meetings of interactive design. Between the morning of 8 at the Forum des Images in the framework of ISEA2000, and the six conferences of 9 and 10 December at ENSBA, National School of Fine Arts, nearly 30 speakers of international stature animated these meetings. 1500 places were distributed in total. For this first founding event, the objective of accelerating the emergence of a critical eye on interactive design has generated support beyond our expectations: high-end presentations (interactive design panorama, aesthetics, metadesign) exciting debates (art / design, metaphor, dynamic), and sometimes passionate (narration). The reactions were extremely positive, on the spot as in the many mails that we receive since, some with constructive proposals.

The questions of meaning and function have been widely debated. The “too much design” was stigmatized and several demonstrations (Casey Reas, Joshua Davis, Lab [au], etc.) bounced the reflection in unexpected directions. The concentration of talent in this prestigious place, the confrontation of the points of view of the practitioners and the theorists, have germinated intuitions that the words do not describe yet … All the speakers, and many participants, declared themselves ready to play a role of correspondent of the community Numer, who will live now on his site and by his mailing list. More than 15 hours of presentations and debates were filmed and recorded, in French and English, and will soon be online. Finally, the artistic performance of Servovalve on Saturday evening in the ENSBA multimedia room impressed by its masterful exuberance of visual and musical instrument in real time, pushed far in its limits (30 minutes live Director!).

A description of the processes and techniques used in a computer composition played in Istanbul 2010.  These manipulated Turkish folk songs recorded by Bela Bartok into a 54-channel ambiosonic sound sculpture, The Morning Line, in Eminönü Square from May to September 2010.

The emerging phenomenon known as the Internet of Things refers to the technical and cultural shift anticipated as society moves towards a ubiquitous form of computing that facilitates the connection of everyday objects and devices to all kinds of networks.  The Internet of Things creates a link between concrete objects and abstract data, producing a hybrid of physical and electronic spaces, which enables communication and interaction between people and things, and things themselves.  However the Internet of Things, resulting through the convergence of identification and location technologies, is at risk of simply becoming a platform whose primary benefit is to offer improved indexing and tracking of manufactured consumer goods from cradle to grave; through manufacturer to distributor, to potentially every single person who comes in to contact with it following its purchase.

Through the combination of digital art practice and theory relating to Human Geography and Actor-Network Theory, the author aims to re-contextualise the Internet of Things, arguing how objects endowed with informational shadows could create a new layer of complex relationships that were previously not visible in our networks.  This in turn could allow us to rethink our understanding of the structure and agency of a network, by examining the pattern of interactions represented by how people to people, people to things, and things themselves are connected to one another.  Networking objects means we could possibly gain new insights into how we make places, how we organize space and society, how we interact with each other in places and across space and time, and how we make sense of others and ourselves in our locality, region, and world.  The Internet of Things may well provide a possible framework that not only allows human agents, but also object agents to play constructive as well as destructive and transformative roles in the social production of space.

Object permanence and persistence have been explored philosophically by the likes of Plato, Locke and Leibniz; and psychologically by Piaget and others. The way in which we perceive the existence of objects over time is fundamental to how we experience the world and our place in it. Robotically-controlled sculptural works will be presented which exploit this phenomenon. The pieces employ on-screen “virtual” objects that appear to manifest in the real world, exhibiting behavior in and impacting physical space. This work will be discussed, as well as future directions to explore this space.

Abstract (long paper)

The text A Guest + A Host = A Ghost once appeared in black print on a green wrapper around a candy given out by Duchamp at an exhibition. This artwork is considered as a point of departure because of its timely connection to theurgical performance and occult computing. The alarming ability of people and organizations to misappropriate and recolonise wild configurations and marvelous tactics, condensing them into a homogenous version for easy digestion, is not to be overlooked. In this genealogy the act of creating is defined, like most things in the twentieth-first century, by acts of consumption. The artwork from which this paper transcends epitomizes the notion of a code and cypher key and thus gives insight into the arcane and ubiquitous nature of central technologies existing among us (and their cultural, political and occult substructures). Precisely relating to the manifold of time in which we exist, this small monograph, albeit briefly, both critiques and draws parallels between contemporary computer culture, performance and arcane cultural practices such as; cyphers and their simultaneous concurrence and conflict with present-day modes of expression in contemporary art forms.

Society, economy and technology are merging into one continent realm informed by what Nestler terms the derivative condition of contemporary life. Information capitalism turns knowledge into the means of production, creativity into an industrial sector and time into a future-at-present, as it penetrates and molds our relations to one another, to other species, to nature. New technological, legal, and social codes emerge and consequently new glitches appear – be they disruptions, breaches, bubbles, bugs, manipulation or leaks.

SOCIAL GLITCH addresses the consequences of the interactions that inform this paradigmatic shift and raises the question as to how it affects human and non-human actors and victims alike. In the derivative condition, all relations are subject to the contingency of stochastic (probabilistic) models and their social execution.

SOCIAL GLITCH
Codes drive imaging media in science, art and architecture; inform economy and politics; facilitate social practices and digital communication; define the New Aesthetics of algorithmic procedures. Their discrete operations, executed in between processes of modeling, evaluation, debugging and optimization, are, however, subject to the contingency of unexpected events and failures.

“Glitch” is a term that denotes electric and electronic malfunctions in information data flows. Against the background of a world of experience shaped by technology and media, the term describes flaws and blurs manifesting in image interferences and bugs, amongst others. While they display undesired problem areas in the art of engineering, their effects and artifacts have been made the material of aesthetic experiments in media art and related fields since the 1960s. Increasingly, however, the “peaks” of these glitches flash over and affect the social realm.

SOCIAL GLITCH, therefore, takes such events as the starting point for an actualization and reconsideration beyond media-immanent questions. Instead, the project focuses on new approaches from different artistic fields that address the performance of events, which in a kind of “negative transcendence” exert their influence into society and individual biographies. Thus, they reveal central issues at stake today, be they caused by defects (such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill), produced deliberately (such as manipulations disclosed by Edward Snowdon) or the result of algorithmic forms of speech (such as financial flash crashes). We coined the term “social glitch” to address these events and occurrences in terms of a historic-technological continuity of intensifying escalations.

SOCIAL GLITCH assembles artistic projects that range from subversive and playful interventions, fictive and performative narratives to speculative experiments and research-based visualizations and interpretations of factual circumstances. The common theme behind these different approaches is an (often activist) engagement with and a radical interest in the “deep horizons” of the sea changes we are witnessing today, together with attempts to “enhance the resolution” of what we perceive and how we might thus improve knowledge and informed decision-making. The (media) aesthetics of error, which have shaped the glitch theme in recent decades, are thus expanded and differentiated in favor of an aesthetics in the field of consequences to evoke and formulate concrete social and political potentials as well as artistic ones.

Hence, The artist talk on SOCIAL GLITCH examines the controversial consequence whether art still delivers radically critical aesthetics beyond the interests of the contemporary art market by taking a leading rolein conceptualizing and focusing our perception for cultural, social and politicalchange.

Perception is not objective, uniform, or universal. Indeed, as we know from those with the synesthesia — a neurological condition where one sense will automatically trigger another — sensory perceptions of the world vary greatly among individuals. This opens the door to questions about which aspects of our “realities” are shared, and about individual vs collective sensory experiences of the world. Like any persons who exhibit a difference, synesthetes are often misunderstood or excluded by others. This concern was the starting point for the Odorama V2 prototype that we created and that is presented here. Using an Arduino microcontroller, we aimed to simulate a synesthetic experience as a way to promote empathy for neurodiverse perceptions of the world. Specifically, the goal was to produce a prototype that could simulate touchsmell synesthesia, and in this process, provide a reflection on the synesthetic experience, on the senses of smell and touch and, unexpectedly, the limitations of “maker” culture. Finally, we assess how the making of the prototype in itself raised awareness of synesthesia and neurodiversity, confirming the importance of community and process in research-creation methodologies.

After The Angel cycle (1 985-2000), featuring the constant transformations of a medical photograph of a hermaphrodite, which the two artists install in site specific environments, they inaugurate in 2000, a new cycle of works entitled Sublime Disasters. The Twins. Here, the starting point is a found photograph of a wax figure: two children, conjoint twins, a “double phenomenon with a unique trunk”, from the anatomical collection of the Spitzner Museum (end 19th century). This extraordinary body is associated with marine organisms – photographs of sheils, and etchings extracted from the Artistic Forms of Nature (1899) by German biologist Ernst Haeckel. This work develops critical visual strategies reconsidering body, identity and “outsiders” in the digital era.

This two-year project and its exhibition was made in collaboration with the NMSU Department of Engineering. This project was a process of discovery into the complex history and current significance of the Rio Grande and its territory. Water is a primary issue in New Mexico, as it is worldwide. The Rio Grande river water is essential to the survival of a large part of the state and the region. It is conceived as an introductory visual essay through drawings, writings, artists books and digital imagery. The river and its region encapsulate the ecological challenges of our time. Water is life.

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

Stigma is a Greek word mean­ing a body mark, de­signed to ex­pose some­thing un­usual and bad about the moral or phys­i­cal sta­tus of a per­son. In the fol­low­ing paper, I will pre­sent a cor­po­real semi­otic study of acts of per­for­ma­tive dis­cred­i­ta­tion by fo­cus­ing on the use of what Erv­ing Goff­man calls stigma sym­bols, par­tic­u­larly the use of so called ‘badges of shame’, aimed as typ­i­cally dis­tinc­tive sym­bols to be worn by a spe­cific group or an in­di­vid­ual for the pur­pose of pub­lic hu­mil­i­a­tion or per­se­cu­tion. Of par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est is the coded na­ture of these sym­bols, that is, the use of colour-cod­ing to dis­tin­guish per­se­cuted groups, the use of geo­met­ric sym­bols and graphic sym­bols to be worn by stig­ma­tised in­di­vid­u­als, the use of mark­ing and brand­ing on peo­ple’s skins, par­tic­u­larly the brand­ing of al­phanu­mer­i­cal sym­bols on in­di­vid­u­als.

The badge of shame is not only a vi­sual aid in sit­u­a­tions where nor­mal and de­viant meet, but an em­bod­ied lan­guage or a lan­guage of marked bod­ies, whose en­act­ment have the per­for­ma­tive ef­fect of so­cial re­jec­tion. The biopo­lit­i­cal dy­nam­ics here is not aimed as a Fou­cault­ian dis­ci­plina­tion through cor­po­real prac­tices, but a per­for­ma­tive act where in­di­vid­u­als are ren­dered less than human, in­fra-hu­man- where the per­for­mance of shame al­lows the in­di­vid­ual to gain, in the eyes of the nor­malised au­di­ence, the sta­tus of an an­i­mal. The chang­ing from man to ass, to an­i­mal, is thus a beas­t­ial­is­ing per­for­mance in­stalled at the level of the body, and of a per­for­ma­tive act that trans­forms the body from human to in­frahu­man, thus per­form­ing a dy­namic of im­bal­ance that in­ten­si­fies the rhythms of power and dom­i­na­tion.

My Studies of Work Atmosphere and Mass‑Production work has created a body of work that examines various socio‑political phenomena. While I have experimented with a wide array of media, I have defined an important part of my practice as Inverse Biotelemetry. Coordinating data mining with physical computing, Inverse Biotelemetry has been a supervenient discovery in forming a meta‑narrative for my research. In essence, Inverse Biotelemetry has clarified my observations regarding the effects of posthuman‑systems upon the individual person. The defining paradigm shift of the last hundred years can be seen as a movement from defining individuals as citizens, to seeing corporations as citizens.

Partnerships between psychology and industry have also lead to a demotion of individual citizens to the role of consumer. Advances in our understanding of how our individual minds work have accelerated and expanded upon this post‑human shift. As corporations shift from branding products to branding consumer’s experiences, notions of ownership, authenticity and disobedience become more important than ever before. What will tomorrow’s protest look like? Post‑human systems relate to demography, not the individual. For instance, thousands of individuals, both civilian and military, have been killed during the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The global news media reflects on these events, it is out of an interest for the spectacle and the story being generated. Improvised Empathetic Device and Notepad are a pair of projects that comment on this phenomenon. Like many of my Inverse Biotelemetry based projects, IED and Notepad filters between the spectrums of where outcomes where humans are regarded in masse rather singularly. This inversion represents a strategy many present day artists and designers are deploying in order to tackle the important issues that confront our culture today. These strategies represent a ‘vocabulary’ of adversarial design.

Keywords: Participatory Design, Social Art, DIY, Urbanism, Placemaking, Residue, Social Spaces, Speculative Design.

The Leimert Phone Company is an experimental community design collective based in South Los Angeles. Our goal is to shift from designing technology for a neighborhood by planning technology as part of the neighborhood. By repurposing unused payphones and other public furniture, our designs seek to reinforce the identity of the neighborhood and create new forms of civic engagement. The collective is run through workshop teams composed of university technologists, artists, and designers who work with local artists, musicians, and concerned citizens. Members bring a variety of knowledge sets that contribute to imagining alternative systems that are culturally specific to the historically black arts community of Leimert Park. Our workshops are structured around rapid-prototyping, embodied prototyping, radical accessibility, and speculative design. In this presentation, I’ll explain the socio-cultural dynamics that inspired the collective, our methodology for maintaining a balanced participatory design process, and the impact the collective has had on reshaping public space and social relations in the neighborhood.

An AI robot tells your fortune.

Omikuji are short personal fortunes obtained at Japanese temples and shrines. Exhibition visitors are invited to play the artists’ ‘Belief Machine’. You can receive omikuji in the form of a personal mini sound-artwork, made by the robot and delivered directly to your phone!
Omikuji began as a live-stream event taking place between Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) and major international art precincts. It is part of Knox + Watanabe’s art–science experiments Alter versus Deep Belief.

Alter is an android robot with an experimental AI system that is stimulated by sensor input. It is created by Ikegami Lab and Ishiguro Lab. Alter can sense, learn, and sing. It uses a self-organising neural network to classify its surroundings. Such AI strategies include deep belief networks, through which machines determine certain inputs to be believable. Alter is beginning to believe things about the world.

Knox+Watanabe make art–science projects exploring sensory and computational perception and conviction in robots and artificial lifeforms. We observe how a nascent robot learns and embodies its ‘beliefs’. If the goal of artificial neural networks is for machines to discern phenomena in a humanlike way, Alter is outputting its discernment of sensory data via its machine body; by this performativity, its belief and behaviour evolve.

In robotic intelligence that mimics human ‘deep belief’, machines are trained to recognise characteristics and then to recreate (infer) them by probability, eventually being able to perform classification tasks. They ‘think’ in layers of computational variables which are inferred from initial, lower layers of direct-measured values — yet each sub-network can only ‘see’ the one that came before it. Layer by layer of accumulated belief, the deep layers of the machine-brain act as truth filters (‘feature vectors’), guiding the learning process.

Belief systems are maximally contentious in our globalised world, and are important to both the inter-harmony and the preservation of culture/s. We create artworks to uncover and express the layers of Alter’s budding belief system, in their naïve mutability and contingency, even their idiosyncrasy.

People may be prompted to ask: How are we transmitting our beliefs to and through machines? How sure are we in our beliefs? How soft are they, and how hard?

Panel Statement

Panel: Pedagogy of the Oppressed 

The impact of the Cartesian paradigm on the natural world has been immense. How do the two most consistently oppressed groups in this culture animals and children, fare in the context of the Cartesian coordinate system?

Virtual environments (VE) and visual components of artificial life (Al) systems are two of the more recent additions to our efforts at simulating the natural world. Animals and children share a lack of integration into the pervading cultural constructions of that world. What effect will the present developments in the fields of VE and Al have upon the development and quality of life for these two groups?

This presentation will discuss the challenging nature of making art with microbial pathogens in an era of global epidemics and fears of bioterrorism. I present a series of artworks that explore the physical, emotional and political relationships between humans and Candida albicans (an opportunistic fungal pathogen of humans). These relationships span immunology and epidemiology, sexuality (both human and microbial), public health and body discipline, institutional frameworks and the biopolitical implications of the recent revolution in our understanding of the human body as being at least half non-human. In addition to the challenges of working with pathogens, the rapid simplification of genetic engineering technologies (eg the Bento Lab, “an easy-to-use, laptop-sized DNA analysis laboratory”) and increasing commodification of human microbes (eg fecal transplantation) raises complex questions about whether these organisms have ethical standing: are they living or merely machines? This presentation will ask the audience to consider the perspective of the microbe, of the pathogen, as a creature that is more-than-human, through a series of artworks developed in a microbiological laboratory.