Presentation Data Table

Poster Statement

Plugincinema.com is a site dedicated to the exploration of ‘on-line» film-making’ (a film that is distributed and exhibited purely via the internet). It explores current practice but more importantly, the potential of this unique distribution and exhibition medium. Plug-in cinema.com focuses on the potential aesthetic of films created using available technology be it web tools or more traditional filmmaking media such as video. It explores, discusses, provides information, and acts as a forum. Plugincinema.com also provides information : sample story-boards reviews of the latest equipment as well as information on technical aspects such as transferring a film to the Web.

Keywords: Cognitive neuroscience, computational modelling, humanities, experimental psychology, creative industries, cognitive robotics, game design, PhD programmes, cognitive innovation, interactive arts

TCogNovo is a multi-national doctoral training programme offering a research network for cognitive innovation, both as a new field of artistic and scientific investigation, and as a strategy for research and innovation. We summarize the programme’s goals, themes, members, partners, projects, and activities in this paper. CogNovo aims to develop a ground-breaking training programme in cognitive research for technological, artistic, and social innovation. Our experience from activities that we have already completed provides us with some confidence towards meeting these aims. We look forward to further CogNovo training workshops in social creativity (January 2016) and the brain basis for Cognitive Innovation (April 2016). We expect that these sessions – in addition to the Cognitive Innovation Summer School (July 2016) – not only will develop among CogNovo fellows the advanced expertise and transferable skills that will prepare them for successful careers in academia and industry, but will also strengthen the worldwide network of leading research labs and innovative industries within which CogNovo is embedded.

Pocahontas is reluctant to live in a Digital matrix where she cannot feel the wind. She is dislocated from the multiplex of the analogue world. She believes that there is an animistic presence which pervades matter and that life is the prerquisite for its continued existence and evolution. As a toy in a Macdonalds Happy meal, she has been frozen into a singular physical aspect. After a conversation with a damaged and forgotten classical statue she realizes she is at least propelled by intent. The performance attempts to link projected images and sounds with physical objects creating an ambiguity between present and sampled events. An audio -visual performance, where a series of digitised sound and visual elements are controlled and manipulated by a series of actions involving fire, water, and touch. Digitised sound and images will mix with live elements but will also be modulated by thermal, moisture, and capacitance sensors. The context for this performance is the journey of a Pocohantis toy found in a Macdonalds “Happy Meal” through a number of scenarios which explore notions of animistic religion and the proposed realities of digital worlds with their isolation from the continuity of the analogue world.

The scenarios exist as a series of models visualised by the audience through a projected macro video system. Events in this real but miniature world have outcomes in the sampled digital projection. When a stone is thrown into a pond ripples spread out from the event. Perceptually and actually. The stone falling into a digital pond only sends ripples within the perceptual frame and there is no “material effect”. The digital condition only makes sense to people. It does not replicate the collision of the materials of water and stone and the infinitely complex outcome of that event. Technically the piece would combine an open ended Director movie with a series of events within a number of table top scenarios linked by sensors to the movie. The live events would be mixed with the virtual scenarios unfolding and available within the computer.

Microtonal sound installation for multiple mobile sound sources,  performed by Singaporean community artists as part of the IDMI’s New Music and the Networked Ensemble Project.

Pocket Gamelan – Mandala 7 is a microtonal sound installation for mobile devices in which sound projection relies entirely on hand-held battery-operated amplifiers of sixteen Nokia mobile phones. The work does not depend on mains amplification, fixed speaker placement or tethered performance interfaces but explores the collaborative potential of mobile phones used as moving sound sources and as hand-held remote control units. Sound interaction involves chorusing, a by-product of the movement of each sound source and microtonal tuning algorithms which are programmed into each handset and activated by commands initiated by the players.

Pocket Gamelan – Mandala 7 uses a tuning configuration that resembles a mandala. Its geometry defines a reflective listening space in which each of the players interact with one another as they explore a 35-note microtonal scale developed by contemporary tuning theorist Erv Wilson. This scale contains many harmonic intervals described by music theorists from antiquity and still found in musical traditions from various parts of the world.

Pocket Gamelan – Mandala 7 uses a j2me network framework developed at the University of Wollonging by composer A/Prof Greg Schiemer assisted by Mark Havryliv.

The talk will focus on the collaborative aspects of George Legrady’s installation “Pockets full of Memories” in terms of its multinational production and audience contribution by analyzing the work process and the contributed objects and their descriptions.

The term poiesis, the basis for the adjective poietic, is derived from Ancient Greek and denotes an act that is directed to create something out of nothing – from poieo (p????): ‘to make’; to create something where there was void. Giorgio Agamben calls it in ‘The Man with no Content’: ‘something passed from nonbeing to being, from concealment into the full light of the work. The essential character of poiesis was not its aspect as a practical and voluntary process but it being a mode of truth understood as unveiling, a-letheia (?-???e?a). (Agamben, 1999, p.42). Poiesis stands thereby in opposition to practice, whose end in itself is action: the notion of the will to act. Poiesis on the other hand is not about being a volitional process, but one of revealing and with that a mode of veracity; a possibility for humans to find their own certainties. This artist talk will examine poietic strategies in art productions and in which way they are different to practical approaches and do so at the example of my artwork Poietry. This method of artistic creation, in which the infusion of art through science becomes not only visual but a requirement will be presented with the intention to map out a discursive territory, where art is no longer an assistant for visualisation of scientific, in this case biological, data but becomes a partner in the search for the novel.

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

In a cul­ture of mass-me­di­ated ter­ror/ism, Ranciere’s no­tion of polic­ing takes up from where Fou­cault’s dis­cus­sion of Ben­tham’s ‘panop­ti­can’ ends.  For Ranciere, polic­ing is not so much the ‘dis­ci­plin­ing’ of bod­ies as a rule gov­ern­ing their ap­pear­ing – it is “a con­fig­u­ra­tion of oc­cu­pa­tions and the prop­er­ties of the spaces where these oc­cu­pa­tions are dis­trib­uted” (Jacques Ranciere, Dis­agree­ment, 1998, p.29). What hap­pens then, when the pow­er­ful and ubiq­ui­tous strate­gies of or­der­ing, con­trol­ling and polic­ing are re­versed – when the po­lice are them­selves po­liced; when the ‘voice­less’ begin to in­ter­fere in the rules of ap­pear­ance?

When Wael Ghonin cre­ated a Face­book page for Khalid Said, the 28-year-old Egypt­ian man who died after al­legedly being beaten by po­lice, the page be­came a ral­ly­ing point for the Jan­u­ary 25 protests against Mubarek’s regime in Egypt. When demon­stra­tions started to flag, an in­ter­view with Ghonin, broad­cast on You Tube, again gal­va­nized pro­test­ers, who came back on the streets in large num­bers in order to press for an end to the Mubarak regime. Sim­i­larly, many artists are in­creas­ingly turn­ing to the strate­gies of sousveil­lance in order to ex­plore and sub­vert ex­ist­ing power re­la­tions in a post 9/11 cul­ture. By turn­ing nor­ma­tive tools of sur­veil­lance and/or sys­tems of dataveil­lance, back upon them­selves, such artists seek to pro­duce meth­ods by which to counter-ter­rorise or de­con­struct the mech­a­nisms of po­lit­i­cal vi­o­lence as a se­ries of ap­pear­ances in media events. This paper ex­plores how, for artists like Rod Dick­in­son, Harun Farocki, Voina, Vi­sion Ma­chine or Uber­mor­gan, strate­gies of sur­veil­lance and con­trol can be re­played in re­verse and how the rules of ap­pear­ance can be re­vis­ited and ‘de­tourned’.

This paper presents Polivis, an infoviz tool for comparing online news about politics. The objectiveof Polivis is to collate political personalities, newspaper sources, headlines, words and quotes with the aim of counteracting negative effects caused by deformations in the existing political information and encouraging citizens to adopt a critical distance towards this mediated information.According to Dominique Wolton, news about politics suffer from severe distortions such as: the lack of distance between the event and its analysis; the fascination by the crisis; a bias towards mediatic personalities; and a lack of context and sequence in information. In a society where much of the information is mediated, the perception that citizens have of the world is distorted by this media dynamic.Polivis, uses resources from Information Visualization, Natural Language Processing and Comparative Studies, allowing the user to establish and visualize their own relationships and comparisons. Empowered with this comparative tool they are able to produce a direct and independent analysis on the political sphere, to detect omissions, contradictions and recurrences.The starting point for this project was a software system that can be used to help structure and filter news information. It acquires information from live news feeds, extracts quotes and topics from Portuguese news and presents this information in a web‑based interface.This prototype results of an ongoing investigation in the PhD in Design, in the Universities of Aveiro and Porto, which is dedicated to the study of design tools for more active citizenship, conscious and concerned about political matters. The research analyzes the destabilizing elements in communication policy and the influences caused by the media, to the scrutiny of this information.This prototype counted with the support of SapoLabs (University of Porto) and the Digital Creativity Lab (Guimarães 2012 ‑ European Capital of Culture).

Keywords: augmented reality, police, cops, cop, network, public space, community, occupy, panopticism, Portland, DC, NYC, Cleveland, Chicago

PolyCopRiotNode_ is a site-specific, augmented reality public artwork that is accessed via an Android or iOS app. Each PolyCopRiotNode_ location is surrounded by 2 story tall riot police. In the most recent installation, in Portland, Oregon, polyCopRiotNodes surrounded public spaces and areas of potential protest. PolyCopRiotNode_ makes visible what is ordinarily invisible: suspension of potential community and arrest of non-commercial uses of space. PolyCopRiotNode_NYC, launching in 2/2015 at bronxartspace, will feature NYPD nodes occupying all of of NYC.

PolyCopRiotNode_ was conceived and developed in line with a learned understanding that activity outside the priorities and value systems of capitalism, whether intervention, occupation, or simple cultural production involves a response by police. The name of this work, polyCopRiotNode_ suggests that it is a network of instances, of a class of power paradigms and hyperactive ideologies. In each implementation of this project, a network of polyCop augments are situated/revealed in specific geolocations based on our research of local activity.
In February 2015, PolyCopRiotNode_NYC will be displayed at bronxartspace in NYC, USA. In July 2014, PolyCopRiotNode_portland was hosted by Weird Shift Storefront.
In 2013 PolyCopRiotNode_DC was implemented as part of Washington Project for the Arts Experimental Media Series, “Cyber In Securities,” in Washington, DC curated by Lisa Moren. PolyCopRiotNode was also exhibited at Spaces gallery in Cleveland, OH, USA.

Abstract

Interactive dance works create new dramaturgical challenges, where notions of relationship and inter-relationships may be dynamic, where overall structure and form are malleable and where, the performer often needs to have multiple, parallel awareness’s. Composition of a work is challenging in this arena as form, narrative (linear or non-linear) and the consideration of ‘interaction’ all require careful and simultaneous deliberation. Furthermore, systems that do not use pre-recorded content (music or video), but rely on synthesis of all material in performance, break down the traditional processes of content creation and rehearsal, where constraints are set on material and the work is formed into a known whole, followed by a performance phase. In an interactive system with real time synthesis, the performance is also the moment of content creation. The authors are addressing these challenges through constructing clusters of potentials with inherent sets of relationships. Pools of potentiality may contain any number of composed foci and become the fundamental dramaturgical device, suggesting paths through the work, and relationships between interactive input and performative outcomes.

Panel: Motion Capture and Dance: what it can do, what it can’t do, and what it should never attempt

Gib­son/Martelli use an­i­ma­tion tools and dig­i­tal meth­ods to ex­plore and re­alise unique ap­proaches in de­vel­op­ing real-time screen based works. This paper will ex­plore the cre­ative ex­pan­sion of in­ter­face de­vel­op­ment into new ter­ri­to­ries evolv­ing sci­ence and new dis­play tech­nolo­gies. Spe­cific at­ten­tion will be paid to the mod­i­fi­ca­tion that na­ture un­der­goes as tech­nol­ogy de­vel­ops.

Panel:  Latin America and Cybernetics

Portables, consisted of a curatorial project, which the notion of portable devices was discussed and reflected upon. Electronic devices were developed by artists and then presented. The set of activities included in the curatorial project were: a cognitive mapping session, two workshops of locative media, one in a public school and the other one in Centro Cultural Matucana 100, four presentations of guest artists, seven documentaries of the electronic devices developed by artists working in the city, and an exhibition in the gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts of Santiago. All activities that were involved in the curatorial project, worked under a critical line of thinking assuming the notion of portable devices. This concept, derived from the Anglo-Saxon word “wearable,” refers to the use of circuits or computers that have been introduced both internally and externally to a given body, usually a person. Originally, these devices consisted of health monitoring systems and performance analysis models. Since the term “wearable” has no Latin root, it became necessary to find a word to replace it and portable was chosen.

In their intention to persuade (or sell), conventional representations of architectural proposals often hide conflicting opinions, discourage participation and cull desirable possible futures. Dissatisfied with this situation, this paper considers a different approach to architectural storytelling. This approach aims to emphasize co-presence of multiple voices, disclose power relationships, demonstrate lines of resistance and present existing or possible places as politically charged networks of enacted relationships. Motivated by the capabilities of interactive narrative, cinematic mediation and role playing, the paper considers polyphonic potentials of screen-based game-like interactive virtual environments. Such environments can enforce preconceived worldviews as blatantly as any others. However, generative capabilities of computational media can also support simultaneous construction of multiple emergent interpretations. Can the co-presence of multiple reconfigurable narratives better represent multiple heterogeneous stakeholders? The paper considers this question in an innovative multi-media environment, called Virtual Braunstone, which was constructed for the Design Excellency unit of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. This virtual environment attempted to consider a specific place – a health and community centre – as a conglomeration of embodied stories. In the case of Virtual Braunstone, these stories referred to particularly tense relationships given the location of the centre in a highly disadvantaged neighbourhood with generations of unemployment and high crime rates. The task of designing for this environment (the old centre was burnt down by the locals) brought together multiple stakeholders with different agendas that could not fit into a uniform propagandistic template. In attempting to incorporate this dynamic multiplicity of worldviews and behaviours, the Virtual Braunstone project implemented several artistic and technical innovations. While its practical implementation is just one of many possible approaches, its design and utilisation provide a fertile ground for the discussion of how power, politics, protest and resistance can (or cannot) be represented and enacted through new media.

All I hear about nowadays is “narrative” and “story”, yet wandering round London’s Portobello Market makes me wonder whether they really are prerequisites to making interactive movies. An evening visit to the ballet confirms my beliefs that neither of these are indeed necessary to produce interesting, novel, and rewarding work. Portobello is a familiar place to me yet seldom do I purchase anything there: the atmosphere is great, the smells and sounds, the way the stalls change from antiques via fruit to clothes and then to bric-a-brac. I love to observe it all from the balcony of Cafe Grove and really…I just like being there — it certainly doesn’t lack content! And I don’t believe there is a story or narrative in my relationship to it: just the “market” paradigm. Similarly, in some vague moments since childhood I have enjoyed rummaging around my granny’s attic. There are some amazing things in there that I haven’t yet uncovered, or at least I am sure they must be there, under the old tea chests and boxes. Even though it is some years since I last spent some time in the dust and must, I am happy just to know that granny’s attic is still there without always the need to explore it completely. In fact, perhaps that would ruin the mystique. Using paradigms other than the conventions of drama my own work attempts to subjugate or circumvent narrative and story whilst creating a meaningful and resonant experience to the viewer. In the same way that we recognize the characteristics of ballet, an original genre could exist which could be termed “interactive film art” or possibly “interactivity d’auteur”. Although the superficial resemblance to cinema is strong this work takes its direct influences from completely different things than dramatic structure and narrative. For the time being the level of interactivity is low and is determined by choosing routes through a repository of authorial material. Although in some quarters this is not looked upon as being at all special since the interactivity is mere exploration and selection, even to offer this on its own empowers the author of a totally new means of creating for the viewer. The resulting works can have a generic resemblance which is often lacking across the field of new media art. The presentation will be illustrated with much of this work and humor and emotion will feature strongly.

Computer software is not just the vehicle of production, it’s also the driver. It shapes not only the way we perceive the machine but also the way we form representations, and in turn the way we perceive the world. The ‘universal’ machine can be infinitely redefined, it is raw material, given form and structure by the theory and language of programming. Because of its multiple manifestations the computer can be described, at any one time, as a pose in a state of flux. This ‘pose’ however, is, more often than not, shaped by programming teams, operating systems and application software whose development, for the most part, is in the hands of corporate, military and marketing concerns. Artists are often caught in the dual bind of expansion and enclosure, with the hardware and software manufacture of needs, arousing and satisfying new wants, creating a cycle of dependency. As the surface definitions of the calculating machine become more convincing, seductive and all pervasive, individual and collective agitation is necessary if antidotes to the enclosure of our new common land are to be found.

This talk centres around re-mapping the subject using Global Positioning System (GPS). The author will be illustrating points with excerpts of my recent work created in New York City. The work Drifting: Position Drawings is a series of large format digital drawings and computer animations. The data is collected by dancers in the Cheng dance group, who are wearing GPS receivers while performing a choreographed work in the streets of Manhattan. The work explores tracking movement in urban spaces, the immediacy of satellite data and the range of error in GPS signals due to government control. GPS was used during the Gulf War by the United States Department of Defense to track missiles and locate targets.
GPS’s particular enframing of locality and territory provided the starting points for my investigations. Wollensak seeks to use the representations of movement and time in a manner beyond the literal streams of recorded data. Questions addressed include: where are the lines drawn between freedom and surveillence, absolute and relative, the recording of time and experience of time? The work examines the conditions and controlling factors that define where we are and our relation between electronic and physical locality.

Frank Warren’s website, PostSecret, has experienced over 380 million visitors since its inception in 2004.  His blog began as a community art project in 2004, where he encouraged people to submit their secrets in postcard form.  He said,  “You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project.  Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire,  confession, or childhood humiliation.  Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.  Be brief.  Be legible.  Be creative” (website).  This secret could range from the mundane (“I pray all those potato chips go straight to your ass”) to the profound (“I’ll be married to him for another 20 years.  I am that afraid of being alone.”).  Since its debut, the blog has become immensely popular, with over 380 million visitors.   Each Sunday, the creator, Warren, posts 10 new post cards with secrets he has received.

At its core, PostSecret reflects Foucault’s notion of “Western man” as a “confessing animal.”  The confessions of PostSecret also complicate and extend traditional notions of rhetorical theory, such as Kenneth Burke’s concept of rhetoric as identification. In Burke’s Rhetoric of Motives, he claims that rhetoric is not the art of persuasion as Aristotle would have us believe, but rather it is “rooted in an essential function of language itself, the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols”.  Most, if not all of the confessions of PostSecret either inflict self-blame or assert victimage.  In addition, the postcard, removed from its traditional form as a message of place, is reconfigured in a digital space and is an indicator of an individual’s identity. In Derrida’s “The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond”, he employs the postcard form to engage in philosophical questions, all addressed to his love, but observed by a third party (the reader).  His use of subverting a playful medium as a space to engage with profound questions parallels the intense confessionals of PostSecret. Instead of a postcard depicting the Duomo in Florence or the rolling hills of Ireland, the image is the medium for the “guilt” of one’s past, read by a third party, and offers a reader a digital example of Burke’s concept of the human condition.

Keywords: post-digital, publishing, artist book, e-publishing, e-books, hybrid publishing
The influence of digital on publishing has reached a preponderant level, questioning the very core of the practice. But more than speeding up a much touted “definitive transition” from traditional to fully digital publishing (still to be accomplished on mass) there are various practices which are pervading the timeless stoicism of the printed page with calculated processes, transforming it into something new. This had lead to the creation of “hybrids” which can be considered as new types of publications with the potential for having both physical and digital qualities, and which are helping to pave the way towards more complex transitions.

During the last two decades post-colonial studies and electronic media theory have developed in parallel to one another but with very few points of intersection. This paper suggests that the two fields have had opposing goals. Post-colonial studies have been concerned primarily with European imperialism and its effects. ln the eighties and early nineties, electronic media theory was concerned with establishing the electronic as a valid and even dominant area of artistic practice a function which might be seen as colonizing.

A survey of critical writing in the two areas discloses an overwhelming preoccupation with issues of the body, subjectivity, identity, history and agency which could be used imaginatively towards common ends. The theorization of topics such as feminism, place, community, race and representation at present seem to be at odds in the two fields. Can Post-colonial and Electronic media theory be productively reconciled? What obstacles stand in the way of such a reconciliation? This paper will examine these issues as a Íirst step towards imag(in)ing, theorizing and performing a post-colonial electronic media theory or an electronic media theory of postcoloniality.

Various tools have been developed to bridge the gap between the digital and physical. Augmented reality attempts to address such problems by reintegrating electronic information back into the real world [Van Krevelen & Poelman 2010]. However, this also introduces new challenges. What might have been missing as the Internet of Things increasingly connects sensor networks and programmable digital devices? As we further move into a digital‑oriented augmented reality, we become more isolated in artificial architecture. Nature has been gradually pushed out the way by technology. There is a real longing for contact with the non‑artificial, innate disposition. Where does nature end and technology dominate? How can augmented reality rebuild our connection with the local environment, not only the synthetic, manufactured environment, but also the natural, innate dispositions that technologies can hardly provide? What if we could manipulate the non‑digital, non‑artificial things? How do we engage the urban habitat in participatory experience of at a shared location? As urban spaces become more densely populated, the need for new ways to manipulate the physical environment – a freedom we’re used to from the digital world– has become an increasingly tangible desire. Sunlight is an essential element as we enter the post‑digital era. Shadows are at the core of how we experience the physical world. This research will present the Post‑digital Sunlight, an interactive kinetic installation. Accomplished through augmented remote reality, it engages urbanists and citizens to rethink about our relationship between technology and nature. The Post‑digital Sunlight initiates a new dialog between the programmable and non‑programmable worlds. While it pushes the boundaries across the physical and virtual, the artificial and nature, it further bridges the local and the remote

Post-dystopia: Language, Sound, and Machines is a larger research and creative project that I have been developing after my study of Samuel Beckett’s work in electronic media; my interests in contemporary-news-organizations as the data-build-structures that do the inventory our time; and language in four of its forms: (1) as communication tool; (2) as data, spoken and/or written data; (3) as pure sound; and (4) as a social construction, one that goes from the individual to the collective.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Post-Humanism, Post-Modern Dance, Mechanically Generated Art, Sensed Body.

Post-modern art has adapted to post-humanism, and has begun to use technological advances as an extension of the human body. This paper will address the technological transformation occurring in the post-modern post-human dance era. The primary focus will be on pixelated representations of the moving body, mechanically generated art, and extensions of the physical body through technological sensing systems. The use of technology as an extension of the physical body in post-modern dance is a model of human computer interaction in the post-human era. This model can be utilized to maintain a connection between the physical body and an environment that is shifting faster than the evolution of the biological body.

Immersion is a much-fetishized word in the domain of media arts. It is through immersion that the audiences are often made to engage with the media artworks. In these works, immersion operates as a context for realizing the production of presence as an illusion of non-mediation (Reiter, Grimshaw et al.). The main concern of this paper, and the corresponding artworks, is whether the audience tends to become a passive and non-acting guest within the machinic immersive space often constructed by an authoritarian and technocratic consumer-corporate culture and driven by machine sensibility. I will argue in the paper that in this mode of non-activity the audience may lose the motivation to question the content and context of the work by falling into a sensual and indulgent mode of experience, therefore rendering the consumerist-corporate powers to take over the free will of the audience. From the position of a media artist myself, in this paper I will argue for producing a discursive environment with a human agency rather than a machinic immersive one. I will examine the possibility to create artworks where the individuality of the audience is carefully considered and taken into account as a parameter for the artwork’s dissemination.

Keywords: Digital artifacts, early stage dementia, elders, universal sensitive inclusive design, social space, postcards, tangible artifacts, touchscreen tablet application.

In this demonstration, we present ‘Postcard Memories’, an interactive tablet application to create a social space for elders with early stage dementia. The touchscreen tablet application encourages people to create, organize, and send digital postcards that combine photographs and short text with audio and video. Users can send digital or print postcards to family, friends, and caregivers to encourage memory recall and facilitate social interaction. Results from a mixed method user study indicate that people find the interaction with the application enjoyable and meaningful.

Abstract

“This is the end of the Darwinian evolution as we know it”. _Stelarc on his Stomach Sculpture project, 1994.

“… we can understand this mobile road warrior as the citizen of a new kind of utopia – in so far as utopia has always been about total control”. _Marc Tuters on locative media, 2004.

In new media art and related theory one can detect a repeating pattern: when new technologies are introduced, both utopian and dystopian views proliferate. In this paper I will examine the trope of the posthuman, which curiously lends itself to both disembodied virtuality, as well as to critique of ‘the western humanist subject’. In particular I am interested in (post)human geographies: how the subject is positioned in relation to earth, and if not, what the escape mechanisms or metaphoric machinations of departure may have been, and how they are performed.

While not wanting to be cynical about utopias or euphorically resist dystopias, the reason for writing this paper is to try to understand something that could be called ‘posthuman desire’. Video clips of Stelarc, Jaron Lanier and Timothy Leary from the 1990s discussing VR and cyborg futures may be extremes of post-human desire, yet they were once accepted as credible discourse within art and research. Can one, playfully speaking, construct a ‘post-human desire alarm’? What is it today that may ride the surf of the ‘new’ and soon recede into archives of the obscure?
If VR discourse pushed the subject into the matrix, more recent ‘biological turn’ as Tiziana Terranova puts it, positions the posthuman at the interstices of networks and biotechnology. What is common to both is a technological worldview based on structuralist systems thinking. Whether a dystopian vision of control, or the utopian view of empowerment however, system subjectivity is inescapably human. In fact, it positions a hedonistic subject always to the ultimate centre, even if dynamically (like in social networks).
The posthuman desire is ultimately about a sense of power; either its thrill, its lack, or its fear. This sensation of power favours virtuality over embodied perception, metaphor over practice, and speculation over experience. The main problem with such metaphysics is perhaps its non-human scale, a negation of human power that removes a response-able agency. In Companion Species, Donna Haraway discusses response-ability in the relationship between humans and non-humans.
Response-ability has to do with a reciprocal relationship (say between a dog and its ‘owner’), recognizing inequality of power, yet enabling responsibility and some level of response, both directions. Haraway’s remark in this context of our bodies being hosts of organs and organisms helps to destabilize a body as a separate entity. On these lines, I find the posthuman as in posthumanism offering important departures from centuries of neglect of the non-human. Fiction does not need to be responseable, but critical theory and practice do, provided they are and continue to be produced on earth.

Abstract (short paper)

This paper addresses one fundamental question: How does the relation between image and vision change when machines are involved? We argue that with neurosciences and computer vision, the image as a stable visual entity no longer exists, but that autonomous (machinic) vision does not necessarily render human vision or imaging obsolete. Adopting a posthumanist point of view, we stress collaborative vision across species, and proposes to define the posthuman image, or ‘postimage’ as the gathering/exchanging of (visual) data between humans, animals, and, increasingly, autonomous machines.

Abstract (short paper)

Some scholars understand the theoretical orientations of posthumanism and new materialisms to be in tension if not in distinct opposition to previous feminisms. This essay explores select works by two contemporary artists to suggest that posthumanism and new materialism have antecedents in previous feminist media arts. This proposition encourages the recognition of feminist contributions to the history of posthumanist and post anthropocentric art practices.

Both globalization process and the rise of new technologies of communication have recently imposed some radical changes not only on the categories of geography, but also on the same concept of ‘territory’. This process of transformation is tied to different complex phenomena, intertwining economy, culture and society, and at the same time opening up new perspectives which contrast old development models that are now in a deep crisis. In this scenario, factors like identity, sustainability and local culture provide a potential, unexpected centrality to territories, which modernists consider, though, marginal and peripheral. Starting from a methodological approach, in which different disciplines (such as sociology, aesthetics, anthropology, economy) and various research fields (such as design, tourism and food) converge, this paper delves into processes, mechanisms and transitions within this complex milieu; it will focus on the privileged viewpoint offered by art, a powerful research tool that combines different languages in order to frame its own language and that, at the same time is ‘ready to escape from its own next territory, without giving up the idea of dwelling somewhere’ (F.Casetti), building a dimension which is ‘glocal’ par excellence.

An examination of the dynamics of power at play in media arts projects that takes surveillance as their point of departure in setting up interactive encounters. Central to this discussion is consideration of the seduction of the viewer into these environments and a critical interrogation of the appropriation of Michel Foucault’s theory of the panopticon as a paradigm of control.

Abstract

A number of ironies circle the idea of virtual reality, the first being that it, as fantasized in the cultural imaginary, largely remains virtual. We might take Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s acknowledgement of the non-existence of cyberspace and include virtual reality; it, like cyberspace, ‘mixes science and fiction.’ Virtual reality is ‘a hallucinatory space that is always in the process of becoming’, but ‘where the future is destined to dwell.’ Indeed, the virtual is always a becoming. Like cyberspace, virtual reality often operates as a utopian space. Virtual reality in entertainment frequently operates as colonialist fantasy, where, ‘the Cartesian project is completed,’ as Simon Penny argues, and the dream of endless colonisable space, where finally there are no indigenous peoples prior to our presence, manifests. The idea of virtual reality, like the idea of cyberspace, is key to selling the Internet and late 20th, early 21st technology ‘as an endless space for individualism and/or capitalism, an endless freedom frontier.’ As a technology riddled with frontier narratives of dominance and control, virtual reality often favors spatio-temporal constructions in league with colonial narratives befitting progress and capital.

The power leveraged by contemporary mapping technologies is extraordinary. Only a month ago CNN reported the discovery (through Google Maps) of a US naval base in San Diego that was constructed in the form of a Swastika. As a result of this finding the US government will reportedly spend $600,000 to modify the 40-year-old complex. Mapping technologies have had a profound effect on the the way we understand place, yet few have critically investigated the dynamics of power at play within these tools. Google has quietly built a monopoly on how we view the globe.

This piece ultimately questions Google’s activity in digitizing, repackaging, and re-branding the globe. It investigates the layers of mediation that operate amidst mapping and land informationalization, while simultaneously questioning the inherent trust in these methods/technologies. The work subsequently explores how the collision of the informational and the physical control, reconfi gure notions of place. Google’s work is ultimately less about describing reality, than reshaping the places we inhabit. “Powered By Google” exists as a web application that distorts and transforms the topology of a given location through the user’s interaction with Google Maps, the most notable web mapping service. It creates an inversion in scale, in that as the user gets increasingly closer to a specific site (zooming in) the more fragmented and obscured the land information becomes. The location becomes an abstraction of place; an agglomeration of maps and logos; the convergence of a site and it’s mediation.

Implementation Details:
On the surface the piece precisely mirrors Google’s mapping interface. However, the site continuously fractures and reconfigures the topography of a place through the user’s interaction/navigation. As the user zooms in progressively closer to their desired locale, the image and experience progressively degrade. At the highest zoom level the original map is broken into a hundred different maps and the screen is engulfed in “Powered By Google” logos.

We are living in an era where air conditions and atmospheres enter our awareness and are made explicit. Through rising awareness of global warming and of how we modify our indoors and outdoors climates, it is clear that we must redesign the systems we use for air-conditioning different spheres of our planet’s air. This includes our power supply systems. French sociologist Bruno Latour claims: “As soon as artists, designers and architects are busying themselves with the light element [Air], we are going somewhere. From the philosophical point of view, Air will take the place of Earth as the ‘fundamental element’” (2004a). By looking at two digital artworks, dealing with air conditions and electricity consumption, this article will use the ideas of Bruno Latour and German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk to discuss what role art may play in rethinking ‘air-conditioning systems’.

Panel: Emotion Studies in a Contemporary Art Debate

At a time when “pol­i­tics” evokes feel­ings of alien­ation, pas­siv­ity or abuse of power and per­cep­tions are that in­di­vid­ual needs and griev­ances are sim­ply ig­nored, artists Dee Hi­b­bert-Jones and Nomi Tal­is­man ap­proach vi­sual art as a set of ex­per­i­ments to an­swer ques­tions such as: Can hope­less­ness be trans­formed? Is there any­thing use­ful about guilt? Can anx­i­ety fuel our de­sires for a bet­ter fu­ture? Can a be­lief in utopia be res­cued and if so how? Hi­b­bert-Jones and Tal­is­man will pre­sent four cur­rent col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­jects ex­plor­ing the re­la­tion­ship be­tween af­fect and po­lit­i­cal feel­ings in com­mu­ni­ties and in pub­lic space. Each pro­ject in­ves­ti­gates so­cial con­nect­ed­ness, emo­tional well­be­ing, meth­ods of cop­ing and iso­la­tion.

In Psy­cho­log­i­cal Pros­thet­ics, (“Help­ing You Han­dle Your Emo­tional Bag­gage in Po­lit­i­cal Times”) the artists uti­lize the per­sona of a cor­po­rate pro­fes­sional to offer a line of self-help prod­ucts and ser­vices to the pub­lic.  While of­fer­ing to mea­sure in­se­cu­rity, over­come anx­i­ety, and help to lit­er­ally, con­sume fear, the pro­ject en­gages the au­di­ence in dis­cus­sion, cri­tique and com­men­tary on no­tions of con­for­mity, co­er­cion and re­sis­tance. At the other end of these ex­per­i­ments the artists pro­duced Liv­ing Con­di­tion, a short an­i­mated film that ex­plores the trauma faced by fam­i­lies of pris­on­ers on death row. Col­lab­o­ra­tions with fam­ily mem­bers re­sult in an an­i­mated short film based en­tirely on their sto­ries. Each pro­ject will be pre­sented through short video clips, im­ages and de­scrip­tions of the­o­ret­i­cal in­tent, con­cep­tual ap­proach, meth­ods of ex­e­cu­tion and most im­por­tantly the re­sponses from the pub­lic.

This panel explores a range of strategies, poetics and possibilities of media art in and of urban public space practiced not in the spotlight but adjacent to and in the shadows of the spectacle. Each paper envisions a different mode of illumination, engagement and altered perception of our urban environs, calling our attention to ways of being in and sensing spaces and places that are often unnoticed, invisible or taken for granted. From media artists’ interventions that ask us to reflect upon the politics of disenchantment with the media saturated everyday in urban China, to the ways in which public art can potentially challenge the conventions of art not as object but as acts or gestures inscribed in the city itself and embodied in the memories of its inhabitants, to the design of urban interfaces that make visible overlooked cultural histories of peoples and places in Singapore, these papers present an inquiry into the ways in which urban media art can contribute towards a re-imagining and nuanced perception of the city’s corners, cracks and shadows and our sense of nature, place, poetics and politics in public space.

The Design disciplines have traditionally not been concerned with representing complexity or mirroring the precariousness nature of our existence. Rather, many designers tie themselves to the noble urge to serve society, to assist and simplify rather than to provoke. Within Western cultures, the living conditions of our reality, the ‘practical reality’ (Huizinga 1938), has changed significantly. It may not be a co-incidence that even Design has moved away from an industrial to human (emotive) centred approach.

In 2006 Jenkins observed a move towards a participatory rather than transactory culture in which play was becoming a default method in engagement and knowledge attainment. The assertion of the knowledge economy over the information society gives further weight to the argument that contemporary media literacy requires an increasingly more complex and fluid approach from the participant (Thomas et.?al. 2007).

Supporting this Antonelli (2008) states “… core human experience is rendered more urgent by the speed at which technology is moving” and that we “…routinely live at different scales, in different contexts, and at different settings – Default, Phone-only, Avatar On, Everything Off on a number of screens, each with its own size, interface, and resolution, and across several time zones.” This agility to move between interfaces, resolutions and time zones potentially equates to a new form of expertise, a new commodity.

In my paper I will discuss the changes in our practical reality and how this affects our sense of identity, self and what is authentic. In setting the context the paper will contrast and explore our quotidian living via social network services, email and video chat with emergent forms of escape and release such as Augmented Reality Games (Year Zero 2007, Conspiracy For Good 2010) and provocative Digital Art (Vested 2009). The paper will go on to posit that we exist in an increasingly precarious conceptual space (Foster 2009) and that both applied and artistic practices are striving to express what constitutes a core human experience and developing methods to survive within our fluctuating context of extraordinary change.

The 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA2016, was held in Hong Kong from 16 to 22 May, 2016. The Symposium was co-organised by City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design, Videotage, and, Microwave Festival. It featured a conference, a juried exhibition, performances, events in public space, an artist residency programme and exhibition, and satellite and parallel exhibitions and events. The conference consisted of two days of workshops at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University on 16 and 17 May, 2016, and four days of parallel sessions and keynotes at City University of Hong Kong from 18 to 21 May, 2016.

Contributions to ISEA2016 were solicited through an open call: authors and artists were invited to respond to a number of topics specified under the Symposium’s theme Cultural R>evolution. Each full paper, short paper, and panel discussion submission was reviewed in a double-blind peer review process by at least two members of the Symposium’s International Programme Committee. The final selection of contributions in full and short paper and panel discussion categories was made by the track chairs and the conference chairs based on the IPC members’ recommendations. The Conference programme of ISEA2016 featured also artist / work-in-progress talks, poster presentations, and institutional presentations, which were selected based on their relevance by the respective chairs outside the peer review process. Some submissions rejected from the juried exhibition and peer-reviewed full and short paper and panel discussion categories were accepted in the non-peer-reviewed categories. This volume contains the peer-reviewed full and short papers and panel discussions, and the abstracts of the poster presentations selected by conference chairs. The contributions in this volume are by no means an exhaustive representation of the response the ISEA2016 Call for Participation: the artworks in the ISEA2016 juried exhibition and in the Open Sky Gallery, the performances, and the events in public space are documented in the Exhibition Catalogue of ISEA2016.

The themes of ISEA2016, described in the next section, result from a process of collective authorship. While some of the themes rather straightforwardly reflect the specific interests of people involved, others were collectively deemed as warranted by the intellectual climate affecting the tone and mood of discussions about technology, art, culture, and society. To borrow a notion from Andrew Pickering, the ”dance of agency“ that led to the themes in ISEA2016 Call for Participation happened in places of work and leisure both online and offline between 2013 and 2015 with varying periods of intensity. It was a delightfully productive game of broken telephone, in which discussants faded in and out, brought along their associates, lost and re-gained interest, and planted seeds which later grew into previously unpredictable intellectual forms. Due to the obvious difficulty of attributing authorship of the themes in the Call for Participation, the listing of themes in the next section mentions the names of track chairs who oversaw the review of paper and panel submissions in their respective topic areas and made the acceptance recommendations to ensure a coherent and high-quality paper programme.

ISEA2016 would not have been possible without the institutional support from City University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Videotage, and Microwave. The sponsorship and other forms of support from a number of partners listed elsewhere in this volume was equally indispensable. ISEA2016 is greatly indebted to Prof. Richard Allen, the Dean of School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong, who ensured the School’s full support to the Symposium. I would like to thank the Artistic Director of ISEA2016, Prof. Jeffrey Shaw and the Co-Director, Prof. Cees de Bont, for bearing the responsibility and bridging together the inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional team behind ISEA2016. This volume was prepared before the Symposium and given to every registered delegate. Readying the diverse forms of intellectual biomass to fit between two covers already before the Symposium took a great deal of effort from everyone involved. I would like to express my gratitude to all the authors who responded to our call, to the IPC members — whose names are listed elsewhere in this volume — who diligently went through the submissions, and, to the accepted authors who toiled away at revisions within tight deadlines. Also to thank are the session chairs, moderators, and volunteers, without whom it would not have been possible to get together to transform the discursive currents in this volume into face-to-face conversations at the conference.

On behalf of the ISEA2016 conference team

The work of Berrada, who starts from his studies in art and science, unites both intuition and knowledge, science and poetry. In his work he explores scientific protocols that imitate, very closely, different natural processes and / or climatic conditions. “I try to master the phenomena that I use in my works, just as a painter dominates their colors and brushes. As brushes and colors I use heat, cold, magnetism and light.”

The Presence of Absence (A-Gain) Orchestrates a discourse through the use of multi media which explores the untimely death of punk/cyber writer extraordinaire Kathy Acker. Kathy Acker died prematurely from breast cancer. The presentation will explore the relationship between the notion of technological advances and horrific late 20th century female disease. The materials will include, Acker’s writing, testimonials, medical information, technological information, visual material and sound. The interrogation of the materials will take the form of an interactive performance game. The chair will establish a structural game which allows the members to contribute their materials through a process of association with other materials being presented. The idea of the game structure allows for a low grade performative element to ignite random insights from an association of materials. The structure of the presentation will be used to form a sister version which explores the sparks between the Hallucengenic Revolution and the Computer Revolution. (The related presentation took place at ISEA98Revolution, Liverpool).

About Media Art Interaction, the authors’s aim was both to do justice to historical relevance and also to the bandwidth of artistic presence and with the media — a field of tension between TV, film, visual and performing arts. The focus on aspects of hybrid forms, interventions and interference include selected references to parallel contexts like experimental film, sound installations or the media strategies of political activists.

Reviewing these decades, recurring motifs and utopias, disagreements and antitheses become obvious. From action and intermedia art of the EN to the interactivity and Internet euphoria of the 90s, from the autonomous video utopias to the breakneck pace of the industrial commercialization.

Institutional presentation Statement

The radical enlargement of the style stemming from media art implies important changes in the way in which artwork is perceived, taught and structured. These are the concepts at the basis of the project MECAD (Media Centre of Art and Design). Created in Sabadel, Barcelona, it is intended for research, production, support and diffusion for creative practices in Media Arts’ field. The ESDI (Superior School of Design) similarly focuses on the new level reached through Electronic Art.

ORLAN will present her artistic approach, and several works in particular: her CD-Rom ‘ORLAN monographie multimedia’, which is exhibited at Yvanomor Palix gallery in December 2000.

Institutional presentation statement

The University of Michigan pursues research, teaching, and exhibition activities in the electronic arts. Faculty and student research projects are supported in Art & Design, Music, Dance, Film & Video, and Engineering. Facilities include a virtual reality CAVE, Internet2 access, and state-of-the art production studios for multimedia, music, and video, as well as installation, performance, and videography. Excellent students from all over the world choose from many curricular options, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

One of the key insights from the InterPARES project investigating the preservation of electronic records was the observa-tion that preservation begins at (record) creation. While the numerous challenges of preserving media art are documented to some extent, the literature largely reflects a conservation paradigm wherein actions are taken to repair damaged works. The proposal to integrate an embedded digital archivist within an academic media art program instead adopts a preservation lens with the intent of reducing or preventing the degradation of media art by equipping students with digital preservation skills early on in their artistic career.

Although distinct phenomena, technology in the digital age and globalization have advanced in tandem, bringing benefits to many population sectors at the expense of others. Chief among the losers in this scenario are indigenous cultural communities whose lives are not organized around the information age, and in some cases may not have fully entered or embraced the industrial age. Other communities are ‘up to date’ but have lost or are threatened with loss of their unique heritage or identity as forces of technology and globalization overwhelm them. This panel will examine the issues and discuss the remedies.

Our poster focuses on the development of innovative archives for the SIGGRAPH Art Shows and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA). Our team created a custom content management system and taxonomies as well as coded templates and queries. The system allows cross connections between data in a myriad of ways and also automatically populates pages with information from thousands of data fields. The two archives are built using the same platform with variations to address the complexities of the two organizations.

Primate Cinema, by Rachel Mayeri, is a series video experiments on the subject of the primate order. Primate Cinema: Apes as Family is a two channel video installation: an original drama made expressly for a chimpanzee audience on the one side, and documentation of an actual chimpanzee audience at the Edinburgh Zoo, on the other. Chimps respond to the drama individually – some touch the screen, others ignore it, and some just sit and watch. The two channels create a prism for humans to learn about their primate cousins, who are, like us, fascinated by cinema.

We describe the conceptual background and implementation of various biologically inspired computational models for creative decision making in the realm of computer music.This includes the use of evolution as an alternative to explicit design as well as using emergent functionality in simulated societies of interacting software agents.We aim to explore complex behavior in interactive systems using self-organization: global, overall complexity is a side effect of the application of simple local rules in a distributed system.

The current paper documents three specific approaches. First, cellular automata for which the lookup table rules are seen as genotypes and manipulated using genetic operators.This provides for a huge genetic space to be explored although the structure of the rule does not itself evolve. A second method deals with this limitation and views the rewrite rules of Lindenmayer Systems as genotypes.These rules are represented as nested Lisp structures of arbitrary complexity. The user selects interesting rules by interactive inspection of their resulting phenotypes i.e. their realization to the midi domain. Evolution is guided by applying cross-over and mutation operators to selected rules and the cycle repeats. This method is an example of true exploration for it allows for growing complex artifacts without any initial formal specification. In addition, goals are mobile and dynamic; they are identified while engaged in the act of searching itself.

Finally, a third class of programs accommodate complex social behavior in a collective of agents equipped with sensors and effectors. Agents move in a two-dimensional space. Sensors capture nearby activity from fellow agents as well as external midi input from a human wetware agent. Effectors control sensitivities, how the agent moves and how musical responses are created. Agents express a personal character yet they also wish to integrate external input from a human performer.A behavioral wealth issues from the conflicting forces of integration and expression. These programs provide real-time audio-visual feedback and are implemented in HMSL.

In summary, this paper offers examples of systems where man and machine mutually contribute to a climate which favors invention and collaboration. The results would not be obtainable by either man or machine when acting in isolation.

(Short paper)

Keywords: print, publishing, fake, library, digitalisation, plagiarism, wikipedia

The static and unchangeable printed page seems to be hardly considered in years 2010s as a key tool for political and radical strategies, as human beings are constantly looking at a few personal screen-based devices, most of them updated in real time. But there are a few cultural elements in traditional media, which are still playing a decisive role in the circulation of culture. Among them the recognition of their aesthetic “forms,” even if digitised in both design and content. The familiarity with those forms is based on metabolised “interfaces” (we’re all culturally “natives” when it comes to radio, TV, and print) that makes them almost invisible, especially when translated for the digital realm, delivering the content in a more direct way. And since we recognise those forms instinctively, we “trust” them, and so we trust their content.

In the modern architecture a tendency can be followed of opening to the public and displaying more of our private realms i.e. our homes, that goes hand in hand with the changes of the notion of privacy in society as can be followed in the Internet.

The house of the future is usually portrayed as the ubiquitous house, with all kind of sensors spread over the premises, and activators reacting to control all kind of daily functionalities in our future everyday life. But how will the architecture of our most private of all places, our home, change when all these sensors get hooked to the net and the information collected about us, placed at disposal of large companies? Companies that might use the collected information to control our consume habits. Will we have to lock ourselves in closets and let the water run in the bath to have a confidential conversation? Will there be sensor-free or even electromagnetic-free rooms in the houses? Or shall we take different roles in real life, like avatars in second life, in order not to give away our real identity when we don’t play the public role we otherwise assume? Or will the notion of privacy, as we know it, simply disappear?

The meaning of privacy for our own well-being in the future is too important to be left over only to scientists experimenting with new gadgets in “houses” or “labs” of the future financed by telecommunication companies. It needs to be tackled as a theme by architects, artists, anthropologists, journalists, lawyers and other experts to confront the public opinion with potential problems and dangers that need to be discussed and eventually submitted to the control of the public hand.

Session: Code and Generative Art

This paper discusses an analytical model for the study of computational aesthetic artifacts. This work is motivated by the growing ubiquity of computational media, by the study of how remediation and procedurality transform the media, and by the understanding of the creative potential and uniqueness of computational tools. It also recognizes the need to define and establish a common terminology for all those that interact with these systems, either as consumers, producers, critics, educators, historians, etc.

The starting point to this work is Espen Aarseth’s typology proposed in “Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature” (1997), defining seven variables and their eighteen possible values. We studied its adequacy for the analysis of ergodic visual and audiovisual pieces and adapted it with new variables or possible values, tailoring it to this broader field. We tested the new model in samples representative of diverse approaches to procedural art, design and other contemporary clusters of creative activity and aesthetic communication and we developed a control analysis, in order to assert the usability and usefulness of the model, its capacity for objective classification and the rigor of our analysis.

We demonstrated the partial adequacy of Aarseth’s model for the study of artifacts beyond text-based systems, and expanded it to better suit the objects in study and circumvent its shortcomings. The new model produces a good description of the pieces, clustering them logically, reflecting stylistic and procedural affinities that probably wouldn’t be found if the study was solely focused in their physical, sensorial or superficial structures and in the established aesthetic analyses that can be developed from them, and for which we already have well-established resources. The similitudes revealed by this model are structural and procedural, they attest to the importance of computational characteristics in the aesthetic enjoyment of the works and to the weight of procedurality, both as conceptual grounding and as aesthetic focus, as an aesthetic pleasure in itself.

(Short paper)

Keywords: DIY, publishing, book scanner, 3D printing, CCTV Camera, selfie.

DIY (do-it-yourself) has taken on expanded meaning beyond reappropriating communication and media typical for underground cultural movements since the seventies. DIY has been extended by the so-called ‘bedroom generation’ during the nineties, metaphorically opening its bedroom walls to the digitally connected world. Twenty years later the same and the subsequent generations seem to be trapped in an endless technologically driven self-referential narrative. Furthermore, the virtual disappearance of the walls has been conceptually replaced by the borders of the screen to which they’re constantly referring. The previous ability to question dominant cultural code and enable alternative ‘processes’, has been obfuscated by the easiness and almost instantness of producing virtual and physical products. This as generated an vacuous loop of self-gratification. Confronting the media strategies of contemporary DIY is then necessary in order to break out of this loop and find again a strategic perspective.

Over the last five years, Processing.org has grown from a small software initiative to an international community. The software is used by thousands of students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain. The related projects Mobile Processing, Wiring, and Arduino extend the ideas behind Processing to the contexts of developing software for mobile phones and for interfacing to the world through controlling sensors and motors. These tools are used around the world for teaching in universities, art schools, and arts organizations.

“Processus architecture” is the chain of operations leading towards the materialization of an architectural object. It starts with the conception of a plan, it passes through the phase of adaptation to user-expectations, and gets materialized through the action of various professionals. But the Processus does not stop with materialization: it triggers a sequence of numerous phases of adaptations by users succeeding one-another. “Processus architecture” is a long weary one.

It is evident that the Processus follows another route if all decisions involved are made by professionals alone or if they are the effective users who make them. In one case as in the other, the processus follows an erratic, unpredictable path, that can not be determined by formulas or recipes. The only way to describe the Processus with some credibility is through recording its “history”.

Generally traces of that history are not kept accessible. An important potential advantage of computer aided design might be the recording of all phases of that serpentine history.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Multi-sited ethnography; research-creation; inductive approaches; digital cultural heritage; intangible heritage; Aboriginal research.

Ethnography is an inductive methodology that generates its own object of study through a series of encounters, while laying bare the modes of construction that are used to do so along the way. The result, the ethnographic media text, serves as the canvas for a subjective reflection on culture, but it is also often its own art piece that can take the form of a literary work, an illustrated catalogue, a collection of photographs, a video or an installation. What happens when ethnographic works are made with electronic media or when they are interactive? Does the use of digital research tools disrupt the making of ethnographies or does it trigger the emergence of new possibilities for ethnographers? Are some methodologies better suited to addressing the new ontological conditions of emerging digital-material research tools? By presenting three new media ethnographies that have been produced with a multi-sited design approach, our article suggests that this particular methodology might offer significant advantages when conducting ethnographic research involving new media technology. These examples of practice aim to show how the affordances of electronic art can better support an object of study that is complex in scale, multi-dimensional, shifting, and multiply situated.

If you, the artist, speak computer, you can control your data. That’s all that computer languages do – manipulate data: words, pictures, sounds and other programs. Many artists can see the advantages of computer worlds with complex emerging behavior but can’t find the way in. The way in is with high-level languages used with an immediate relevance to the realization of an artistic idea. Literacy for electronic artists is fluency in programming languages and their digital interconnections. This paper proposes a methodology for the electronic artist wishing to come up to speed.

Institutional Presentation Statement

The pick and mix, cut and paste provision of commercially available software packages can be compared to the supply of ready-to-wear outfits and accessories. In both cases the user will find that the merchandise does the job. But no matter how much careful mixing and matching takes place, there should be no illusion, this is neither Fine Art nor haute couture. It therefore follows that instruction in the use of software packages simply is not enough if artists are to work creatively with computer technology. Submerged into a ‘culture of silence’ – that of the end-user, with little or no understanding and control over the metaphors of software and the conventions of others, artists become the oppressed. CONTROL, SHIFT, ESCAPE  is the current antidote for artists and designers united by their desire to change the status quo – by taking control of the technology, shifting from end-users to instigators, escaping from the dictates of pre-written software to create their own conventions. The degree show is the culmination of 1 year intense study on the MA Digital Arts course at the Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University. By a focus on the algorithmic use of computers in the representation of form, the MA demystifies the concepts underlying the digital medium and critically examines issues arising from the convergence of the arts and new technology. Throughout the course students use a range of the latest technologies, including Java, html and C programming to find a personal language to explore their concerns. Their video, robotic and sound installations, Web-based work, screen-based games, photographic prints, reactive and interactive systems challenge the look, feel and content imposed by commercial computer software. The orchestration of artistic intuition and logical structures results in the creation of new computer mediated spaces for computer-contaminated cultures.

Institutional Presentation Statement

The pick and mix, cut and paste provision of commercially available software packages can be compared to the supply of ready-to-wear outfits and accessories. In both cases the user will find that the merchandise does the job. But no matter how much careful mixing and matching takes place, there should be no illusion, this is neither Fine Art nor haute couture. It therefore follows that instruction in the use of software packages simply is not enough if artists are to work creatively with computer technology. Submerged into a ‘culture of silence’ – that of the end-user, with little or no understanding and control over the metaphors of software and the conventions of others, artists become the oppressed. CONTROL, SHIFT, ESCAPE  is the current antidote for artists and designers united by their desire to change the status quo – by taking control of the technology, shifting from end-users to instigators, escaping from the dictates of pre-written software to create their own conventions. The degree show is the culmination of 1 year intense study on the MA Digital Arts course at the Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University. By a focus on the algorithmic use of computers in the representation of form, the MA demystifies the concepts underlying the digital medium and critically examines issues arising from the convergence of the arts and new technology. Throughout the course students use a range of the latest technologies, including Java, html and C programming to find a personal language to explore their concerns. Their video, robotic and sound installations, Web-based work, screen-based games, photographic prints, reactive and interactive systems challenge the look, feel and content imposed by commercial computer software. The orchestration of artistic intuition and logical structures results in the creation of new computermediated spaces for computer-contaminated cultures.

For ISEA2014, DeLappe proposed to present documentation of ‘Project 929: Mapping the Solar’. In May of 2013, media artist Joseph DeLappe rode a customized bicycle, dragging pieces of chalk 460 miles in a 9‑day performance to physically and symbolically draw a line around the Nevada Test Site in Southern Nevada. Riding a long‑tail bicycle, which he reconfigured with an armature to hold handmade pieces of chalk, solar panels, video cameras, and a GPS unit, DeLappe delineated a geographical area equal to the measurement of a solar farm the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated would be ‘more than enough to meet the country’s entire energy demand,’ or 100 square miles. In this durational/endurance performance, DeLappe rode the bike approximately 50 miles per day for 9 days in the desert above Las Vegas, NV, dragging the chalk behind him on the road and encircling the federally confiscated lands that are the largest peacetime military base in the world: area of 928 nuclear tests; testing of the U‑2, stealth, and drone aircraft; and continued testing ground for bombs, training area for the US military, and site of weapon/technology and energy development. Conceptually, ‘Project 929: Mapping the Solar’ is an ideational and activist exercise towards representing another possible choice we could make as a nation, physically re‑imagining geographical space for energy sustainability. To map this desire – become a moving point, line of battle or communication, contour of an idea, measure or guide – was a driving principle. The   performance utilized mixed‑reality (Blue Mars Lite), GPS technology, and, where feasible, live streaming video for real‑time documentation. In collaboration with Manifest AR, selected photographs are currently being incorporated.

Theoretical idea:
Since 2003 Dune & Devil are altering existing systems of abstraction to compose an idiosyncratic world which is represented through the symbol «•». Within the transgression of sociotechnological configurations of globalized network cultures they explore a new kind of compositoric space. By developing hybrid spatial reconfigurations of geo-informations systems through sensing devices and communication-based modification Dune & Devil land-mark territories within undetected realities.

Short description:
In their work Tina van Duyne & Grischinka Teufl are focused on methods to expand time and space through mediatechnolgy and networked cultures. For their work they are using different forms of abstraction and concepts to create new kinds of place- and space-based phenomenons. Their selfmade worldsystem called «•» is held together by synchron interaction- and communication-scenarios dislocated by interconnecting the real world of vienna and tokyo through the mediatechnological network of virtuality. The emergence of «•» is developed within different circles of reference-systems and communication-patterns which are used to create a shared environment. The morphology of «•» is presented through artefacts out of this parallel-world and several visualizations (posters) of the appearance-context.
Technical description:

We are using two handheld computers with additionally installed open source java virtual machines (btw, thanx to mr. freebeans/japan for preparing mysaifu!) on a windows mobile operating-system. A specially, for this project, self-developed java application, is used to interconnect the two mobile computers via UMTS/GPRS for communication and navigation. The incoming GPS-data is streamed to a mysql database which collects all data produced (both outputs: Dune/Vienna and Devil/Tokyo). At last, the database provides the flash application for the visualization of the project «•» on the website.

E-mobileart lab + MediaLab Prado present their projects and discuss collaborative art-science practice.

European Mobile Lab for Interactive Media Artists (e-MobiLArt) is a project tailored around the process of collaboratively creating interactive installation artworks. Such mediated environments may involve the use of ubiquitous computing, communication networks and mobile or locative media technologies. Participants in this project are artists and scientists who are active in creating interactive media art or pursuing innovative interdisciplinary research and wish to collaborate in order to create interactive media artworks.

Project Coordination:

• University of Athens (Greece), Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, Laboratory of New Technologies in Education, Communication and Mass Media.

PARTNERS:

• University of Applied Arts, Vienna (Austria)
• University of Lapland (Finland)

Curatorial Advisors:

• Nina Czegledy
• Annick Bureaud
• Christiana Galanopoulou

Associate Partners:

• Leonardo/OLATS
• State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (Greece)
• Academy of Fine Arts – Gallery, Katowice (Poland)
• Cycling74 (USA)
• 1-CubeX (Canada)
• Haute Ecole `Groupe ICHEC-ISC St Louis-ISFSC’ (Belgium)

(Short paper)

Keywords: interactivity, participation, intervention, transgression, mind control, relational aesthetics, immersion, game, augmented reality, surveillance.

In this paper, we present Projet EVA’s artworks that focus on the interaction between social, synthetic and biological systems, outlining the inherently restrictive and subtractive aspects of the increasingly technological environment in which humans are situated. For over 10 years, we have used detournement strategies to explore the entanglements of digital technologies with human activities and psyches. In an attempt to suggest alternative modes of understanding these problematics, the Projet EVA collective has made transgressive use of media in order to ultimately build a critical discourse on how technology informs social and psychological realities. The different projects presented in this paper illuminate EVA’s singular approach to interaction design, one that produces experiential art that challenges the expectations of its discipline.                                                                                                                                                  Projet EVA is an art collective that was founded in 2003 out of a shared objective of creating critical, experimental and transgressive artworks in the new media sphere. The scope of the collective’s artistic activities spans robotics, electronics, video and audio. Projects are connected by the themes of loss and restriction and focus on problematics related to relationships among individuals, computer systems and their physical extensions. Projet EVA’s productions have been presented in Asia, Europe, South and North America and the Middle East.

ABSTRACT

An out-of-the-way concert had taken place in Kazan, 1962, where the light line ‘Luce’  from Scriabin ‘Prometheus’ score have been reproduced just in accordance with the composer’s conception. Having been established that time an experimental Studio ‘Prometheus’ attached to the Kazan Aviation Institute owes to just that performance for its name. A light instrument followed by another. The intention to extend the new art audience has led to the idea of composition creation by means of cinema just with the original technology, namely the films are shot on a black-and-white film but the final result makes sure of all the rainbow colors.

Panel: Games Betwixt and Between

Some­where in be­tween the dingy mall ar­cade and the gallery per­for­mance space sits the new ar­cade. At ex­per­i­men­tal game spaces such as New York’s Baby­cas­tles, and ar­cade events such as Koko­romi’s Gamma, games by (and for) artists min­gle with quirky au­teur ex­per­i­ments; game in­dus­try hope­fuls rub shoul­ders with DJs and mu­si­cians, elec­tronic artists, and artis­tic voyeurs.  The de­sign and cu­ra­tion of such games de­mands a holis­tic per­spec­tive on game­play that ac­knowl­edges and en­cour­ages fluid move­ment be­tween game­play, spec­ta­tor­ship, and emer­gent col­lec­tive ex­pe­ri­ence. The re­sult is a so­cial and per­for­ma­tive hy­brid—aes­theti­cized play. This paper con­tex­tu­al­izes “art”-cade and per­for­ma­tive pub­lic gam­ing, and ex­plores how the new ar­cade en­gages ca­sual and in­dis­crim­i­nant acts of ludic ex­pe­ri­ence.

ABSTRACT

The proposal will outline the aims and objectives, rationate and format of TISEA, the Third International Symposium on Electronic Art, as proposed bij a number of Australian organisations involved in Art and Technology, and will be presented bij the Australian Network for Art and Technology, who are the proposed co-ordinators of TISEA. A major focus of the proposal will be COMMUNICATIONS.

My performances have always been concerned with the dynamics of body and machine movement and how to choreograph and counterpoint them. In addition there has been a fascination with computer animation and motion capture. Alternate interfaces are necessary to coordinate the physiological, the mechanic and the virtual. We usually associate action with intention. In the virtual, Internet and robot performances the body has experienced the involuntary, the alien and automated motion- action without intention and action initiated remotely. The body becomes a more varied and extended system of awareness and operation, a more complex structure of peripheral and prosthetic and phantom augmentation. Phantom not as in phantasmagoric, but as in phantom limb. Phantom effects not the result of any bodily loss but rather through addition of new circuitry. In this way, the phantom is another way of speaking of the virtual. More intimate and varied interfaces for the body have to be constructed. The precision, power and speed of technology has been incorporated whilst body movements are translated into machine motions. Its position/orientation is sensed not only in the local space that it occupies but also in the electronic space that it operates. The body experiences more external inputs and uses internal signals as controls.

Panel: The Matter with Media

There is some­thing that hap­pens in the very mo­ment of a ‘live’ ut­ter­ance—that is to say an ut­ter­ance that is si­mul­ta­ne­ously per­formed and trans­mit­ted—that is often over­looked, in­vis­i­ble, and, in a strange sense, in­audi­ble. When one speaks, as Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Der­rida have ex­plored, as a philoso­pher, for ex­am­ple, or an artist, a politi­cian or a cit­i­zen, into a mi­cro­phone at­tached to a record­ing/trans­mit­ting ap­pa­ra­tus, one’s words, in the very mo­ment of their pro­duc­tion, are swept away from their locus—the body out of which they issue—to ap­pear else­where. It is the na­ture of this con­joined dis­ap­pear­ance/ap­pear­ance of the au­di­ble trace that this paper will in­ves­ti­gate. How is it that, in the mo­ment of its pro­duc­tion, a voice, al­ready a re­pro­duc­tion, be­comes an ar­ti­fact that must be (re)as­signed to a reg­is­ter of sense, a com­mu­nity of mean­ing, a ma­te­r­ial body? Es­pe­cially when the ar­ti­fac­tual ap­pear­ance of such a trace is plural, mas­sive, and dis­trib­uted? What one might say may be in­ter­preted, de­ployed, de­cried, and pos­sessed in a va­ri­ety of ways, with im­me­di­ate, con­tradis­tinct, and con­test­ing claims and in­ter­ests, draw­ing upon—or man­u­fac­tur­ing— the au­thor­ity of a cer­tain event, per­son, con­text or trace. How is it that such con­di­tions as cul­pa­bil­ity, sin­cer­ity, de­ceit, truth, or re­spon­si­bil­ity are reat­tached, via such au­di­ble ar­ti­facts, to sources which are nei­ther di­rect nor un­prob­lem­atic sites? And with what con­se­quences? This pre­sen­ta­tion will ad­dress the ma­te­r­ial as­pects of sound ar­ti­facts as ev­i­dence: sci­en­tific, so­cial, po­lit­i­cal, artis­tic. Among the var­i­ous as­pects of tech­ni­cally re­pro­duced sound as ev­i­den­tiary trace that will be ad­dressed are: the cin­e­matic hors-cadre or off-screen sound; au­dial spec­tral­ity (e,g., haunt­ings, pos­ses­sions, ‘phone calls from the dead’); so­cial media, audio en­vi­ron­ments, music and aes­thetic sound­work.

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

Protocollision is a Dutch-Japanese work in progress on the WWW. www.protocollision.org constantly changes and is expanded with individual and collective sites and textual contributions. Squint is responsible for the basic site in the form of a database, becoming more layered as the number of works increase. The participating artists initially develop autonomous sites in which (im)possibilities of the medium are explored from various angles. In addition there is space for collaboration between participants: the locations where protocols are traversed, where a collision is forced. Various respondents give textual reactions and visitors are invited to respond!

Artists:

1. Akitsugu Maebayashi
2. doubleNegatives
3. exonemo
4. Mami Iwasaki
5. Yuki Kimura
6. 0010
7. Daniel Rodenburg
8. D.U.M.B.
9. Gabrielle Marks & Stefan Kunzmann
10. JODI

Initiators/curators:

1. CELL -Initiators of Incidents-
2. Kazunao Abe & Yukiko Shikata

In this talk, I will first discuss our recent research on the neural basis of odor-evoked biographical memory, also known as Proustian memory. Smells, more than almost any other sensory input, can trigger very rich and vivid memories, immediately transporting us back to a long-forgotten time and place. This fascinating phenomenon has been coined Proustian memory, in reference to a passage in Marcel Proust’s 1913 book Swann’s way, in which the narrator describes how eating the crumbs of a madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea triggers a powerful process of remembering that takes him back to a pleasant long-buried childhood memory. But how does the brain create and recall odor-related memories? And why are some of these memories vivid and strong while others are poor and incomplete? Our recent findings shed new light on these key questions and provide a mechanistic neural account of odor-related episodic memory richness. Next, I will move to a different, yet equally enigmatic, form of memory: Our ability to remember the virtual experiences we call dreams. While some of us often remember our dreams, others hardly ever do. The neural underpinnings of dream recall abilities is still an open question. Here, I will discuss new work where we ask whether individuals with high and low dream recall frequencies exhibit different brain activity patterns during sleep, and how we use artificial intelligence (AI) to address this question. Finally, I will talk about the quest for sentient machines and whether better AI needs consciousness.”

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

In the In­ter­net there are di­verse in­sti­tu­tions of knowl­edge pro­duc­tion. In ad­di­tion to aca­d­e­mic pro­jects of dis­tance learn­ing there are enough in­for­mal learn­ing pro­jects or­gan­ised by vir­tual com­mu­nity (in­for­mal in­sti­tu­tions of knowl­edge pro­duc­tion), arranged ac­cord­ing to the ide­ol­ogy of edu­tain­ment. In­for­mal e-ed­u­ca­tional pro­jects are pro­vid­ing knowl­edge de­manded by the e-com­mu­nity (The­ory and prac­tice in Russ­ian, va­ri­ety of ed­u­ca­tional pro­jects re­alised within Live­jour­nal etc.). The pur­pose of the paper to look closer into the con­cep­tion and struc­ture of in­for­mal e-ed­u­ca­tional pro­jects and clar­ify the cor­re­la­tion and con­trasts with for­mal dis­tant learn­ing in the new media de­sign area. The goal of com­par­i­son is to see if e-ed­u­ca­tion should be re­or­gan­ised as it was in music and book in­dus­try within In­ter­net development.?As a case study it is planned to analyse the ex­pe­ri­ence of teach­ing into cross cul­tural dis­tant course on Vi­sual Com­mu­ni­ca­tion held at Eu­ro­pean Hu­man­i­ties Uni­ver­sity and In­sti­tute for Fash­ion Tech­nolo­gies/State Uni­ver­sity of New York as a re­sponse to the chal­lenges to for­mal (aca­d­e­mic) ed­u­ca­tion pro­vided through In­ter­net.

Panel: New Media Archives- New Intelligent Ambiances

You can’t save the spirit of a new media work by fix­ing it in time or place, any­more than you can save a life of a but­ter­fly by pin­ning it to a wall. An­i­mated be­ings per­se­vere not by sta­sis but by mu­ta­tion and repli­ca­tion, so this talk ex­plores such “pro­lif­er­a­tive preser­va­tion” as a strat­egy for pre­serv­ing the no­to­ri­ously mer­cu­r­ial ar­ti­facts of new media. The cur­rent state of pro­lif­er­a­tive preser­va­tion in­cludes such mod­els as the Vari­able Media Ques­tion­naire; the fu­ture may hold more spec­u­la­tive evo­lu­tion­ary par­a­digms such as al­go­rith­mic and eco­log­i­cal archives. Gen­er­ally con­sid­ered a cul­prit in the de­struc­tion of tra­di­tional human ar­ti­facts, na­ture may end up serv­ing as the in­spi­ra­tion for such new au­to­mated par­a­digms for the per­se­ver­ance of cul­ture. Yet, as suc­cess­ful as ge­netic al­go­rithms have been in pre­serv­ing the petaBytes of in­for­ma­tion stored in the DNA of liv­ing crea­tures, har­ness­ing ge­netic al­go­rithms to prop­a­gate human ar­ti­facts would breed a new host of eth­i­cal ques­tions about au­then­tic­ity and re­spon­si­bil­ity.

Panel: Secure Insecurity

Lo­cat­ing hal­lu­ci­na­tions in the brain; the psy­che ob­serv­ing it­self; cut-up re­al­ity. Psy­choid uses home built, hacked up elec­tron­ics, ex­ces­sive wires, dark­ness and stro­bo­scopic light to cre­ate a re­al­ity shift­ing in­stal­la­tion. The Lon­don Psy­cho­geo­physics Sum­mit pro­poses an in­tense week-long, city-wide se­ries of walks, field­trips, river drifts, open work­shops and dis­cus­sions ex­plor­ing the novel in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary frame of psy­cho­geo­physics, col­lid­ing psy­cho­geo­graph­ics with earth sci­ence mea­sure­ments and study (fic­tions of foren­sics and geo­phys­i­cal ar­chae­ol­ogy). Open events in­clude prac­ti­cal work­shops in build­ing sim­ple geo­phys­i­cal mea­sure­ment de­vices from scrap ma­te­ri­als, field­trips for study and long-term use of such de­vices in the city, mea­sure­ment and map­ping of phys­i­cal and geo­phys­i­cal data dur­ing city-wide walks, de­ploy­ment of strate­gic un­der­ground net­works, fu­sion of fic­tion, de­rive and sig­nal ex­cur­sion, stud­ies of river sig­nal ecolo­gies along­side short lec­tures and dis­cus­sions of broad, in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary psy­cho-geo­phys­i­cal themes.

It is the responsibility of those aware individuals in society who recognize malfeasances in the world around them to act with the intention of improvement. Public art is the venue to juxtapose individuals from every avenue of life in a cross pollination of words and ideas. The viewing of a sculpture can create a momentary opening in the viewer’s perception of place and time. In this opening held conventions may be questioned and alternate layers of dialogue may be injected. Stubborn complacency may be jogged into cognizance. At each layer of communication, an increasingly focused spectrum of understanding is reinforced. Knowledge is shared. Conversation and collaboration are the foundation for change.

Yvonne Spielmann (interviewer)

 (Long paper)

Keywords: Making, Public, Constructions, Technology, Building, Artistic Responses, Museum Collections, Heritage, Performance.

This paper discusses the principle of ‘Public Making’, a strategy of conducting a creative process while working in and with the public to build artistic work. By first laying out a conceptual and theoretical framework around our intentions, this essay goes on to describe our practice through a significant program of work carried out during 2014. Our work included an artistic residency, two installations and a durational performance. The paper culminates on reflections into how Public Making opens up the artistic process and allows for multiple forms of participatory engagement to occur. This work was carried out on a variety of occasions with various cultural institutions including museums, heritage sites and arts organisations. This concept of building and making in and with the public attempts to open the ‘black box’ of creation allowing publics to engage with technological methods alongside an artistic process.

In the work of Hannah Arendt, the political realm arises out of acting together, in the sharing of speech and action. There has been much recent interest in revisiting Arendt’s ideas, in relation to a reconceptualisation of publicness. In Virno’s work, for instance, this is emphasized because of the relative ineffectiveness of political action today. Proprietary technologies arguably play a significant role here in distancing speech from affect in a situation where action and words have lost their power (to echo Arendt). But what of software more specifically, in as much as it both expression as in speech or writing but also something that performs actions? For Kelty, again referring to Arendt, the free software movement is an example of what he calls a “recursive pubic”, to draw attention to emergent and self-organizing public actions. Moreover, publicness is constituted not simply by speaking, writing, and protesting, but also through modification of the domain or platform through which these practices are enacted. And ordure? The quirky intervention of Dominique Laporte, in History of Shit (first published in French in 1978) verifies that modern power is founded on the aesthetics of the public sphere and in the agency of its subjects but that these are conditions of the management of human waste. The issue is that in parallel to the cleansing of the streets of Paris from shit (as it became privatized), the French language was similarly cleansed of foreign words. Can we say the same of software: that the kinds of software that are found on the streets (installed in mobile devices and such-like) are similarly cleansed? This issue is crucial for a fuller understanding of political expression in the public realm and the ways in which social intellect is ever more privatised through the use of pervasive technologies.

Panel: Public Art of the Sustainable City

How can pub­lic art uti­lize new tech­nolo­gies to cre­ate eco­log­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture that con­tributes to both the aes­thet­ics and sus­tain­abil­ity of cities? In this talk, I will give ex­am­ples of in­no­v­a­tive “green” Pub­lic Art Mas­ter Plans in North Amer­ica that have been de­vel­oped in the last decade, and dis­cuss spe­cific artists and pro­jects that both har­ness and ex­press the po­ten­tial of tech­nol­ogy to ad­dress global re­source con­ser­va­tion.

Panel: Unsitely Aesthetics: the Reconfiguring of Public Space in Electronic Art

In­creas­ingly our ex­pe­ri­ences of pub­lic space in­clude pri­vate ex­pres­sions, per­sonal emo­tions and in­ti­mate se­crets: the strict di­vide be­tween in­te­rior life and the out­side world has dra­mat­i­cally shifted, lead­ing to a new no­tion of pub­lic in­ti­macy. To be in­volved in each other’s lives has taken on new di­men­sions as net­worked cul­ture de­liv­ers home life to dis­tant ge­o­gra­phies and per­sonal mes­sages to nu­mer­ous points of open con­tact. Ex­plor­ing the theme of pub­lic in­ti­macy my pre­sen­ta­tion maps out this new un­der­stand­ing of com­mu­nity and pub­lic­ness by con­sid­er­ing dig­i­tal ex­change as a gift-econ­omy. While the in­ter­net and net­worked economies have cer­tainly spawned an array of new forms of con­sumerism based en­tirely on money and credit, it has also in­tro­duced forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, shar­ing, ex­change and col­lab­o­ra­tion that might be viewed as sup­ple­men­tal, that is, as an ad­di­tional for­ma­tion of econ­omy in which to be on-line is to give and re­ceive. Such a per­spec­tive may be found through a num­ber of artis­tic works. For in­stance in Christin Lahr’s Macht Geschenke work, a daily pro­ject of trans­fer­ring one cent through on-line bank­ing to the coun­try of Ger­many along with a quote from Das Kap­i­tal, or Seppuko.com, a site that sup­ports in­di­vid­u­als to com­mit face­book sui­cide, the econ­omy of being on-line can be traced through as­pects of ex­cess, ex­pen­di­ture, sac­ri­fice, and gen­eros­ity. Fol­low­ing such works, the in­ter­net will be un­der­scored as a per­for­ma­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with oth­ers that cre­ates un­steady forms of in­ti­macy equally in­spir­ing for imag­in­ing new forms of al­liance, friend­ship, and shar­ing as well as artis­tic in­ter­ven­tion.

This artist talk introduces Pulse Project (2011-2015), a practice-led performance research study that explores the cultural interfaces between art, science, the humanities and technology. The talk responds to ISEA’s main theme of “Cultural R>evolution” as this project engages with the “dual meaning of revolution: to always create new while returning to the old.” [1] This project also engages with the “New Media – Cultural Heritage” theme by exploring new media as a means for mapping the (human and non-human) body according to Chinese medical philosophy.

About Pulse Project
In Pulse Project, I embody transdisciplinary creative research itself through performing as an instrument or medium between others and myself, and between cultural traditions for understanding and mediating the body. Drawing upon my expertise as a clinical acupuncturist (with training in biomedicine), I combine traditional Chinese medicine and music theories together with audio programming to compose bespoke digital soundscapes expressive of embodied experience. These soundscapes are not sonifications of Western principles of circulation or embodiment but offer another perspective to conceive of/listen to the interior spaces of the body-in-being.

For example, each soundscape is composed by using Chinese pulse diagnosis as a method to interpret participant’s pulses as a unique set of sound wave images (a complex set of more than twenty-eight waveform images corresponding to mental/physical states of being) and also in accordance with traditional Chinese music theory. As Pulse Project soundscapes are composed using an aspect of touch informed by Chinese medical theory, this study therefore offers an alternate and comparative means for exploring and recording the alchemical nature of embodied being-in-time.

For this reason, the audio works and graphic notations of this study do not represent of the inside of the body from within the Cartesian logic of the “cogito”, but interleaves Chinese medical and philosophical approaches together with Western medicine and philosophy as a means for reconsidering the current discourses that attend the body and embodiment. In resisting the representation of sound in “realistic” (Western) technoscientific terms, this study sonically explores the phenomenal metaphysics of the interior and in-between spaces and processes of the body (according to Chinese medical philosophy) as a means for communicating the more enigmatic aspects of embodied reality than those currently explored by technoscience or those acoustic ecologies which deny the co-presence of the infrasonic ecology of the interior of the body with exterior sonic ecologies and intercultural emergences.

In conclusion, this research travels laterally between cultures and practices and calls for a radical change in conceiving of the body in either “Oriental” and “Occidental” terms in order to travel beyond the tired bifurcations between mind and body, self and others, and Western and Othered cultures. In combining art, science and diverse medicines together with contemporary digital culture, this project opens transverse lines of inquiry that build new channels between the arts, humanities and sciences whilst at the same time generating a new form of intercultural engagement through performance and sound works.

Artists Statement

PuPaa is a multimedia performance, inspired by Butoh, a dance-scape of transformative states of body, mind and perception. In PuPaa, the dancers are entities living in obligatory symbiosis reminiscent of a Mixotricha Paradoxa, a micro-organism which can be determined as both one organism of five entities or five organisms. While each entity of PuPaa expresses unique species characteristics, they create a collective body with incorporeal connections using video and sound projection technology embedded in their costume, an outer layer of their body. The body later embraces the world of others as well, i.e. the audience: during the performance, a dancer, who was a part of an installation in the lobby, transported the audiences’ sound during intermission into the theatre. Furthermore, their faces were projected onto the dancer’s body. The entity of PuPaa signifies (or speaks) with their monstrous body embedded with technology, and participates in a de-territorialized collaboration process.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Digital puppetry, remediation, theatre, Interactive Virtual Worlds, agency, aesthetic experience, co-authorship, interactive storytelling, perceptual computing, motion-sensing.

By drawing parallels from theatre, this paper examines new paradigms in interaction models for the viewer (user) of interactive virtual worlds. Studying the changes in the aesthetic experience of the viewer from theatre to cinema to interactive virtual worlds, changing dynamics of the author-viewer relationship across these media are highlighted. Agency of both, the author and the viewer are discussed, establishing a case for exploring interaction models based on ideas of co-authorship. Puppetree, a digital puppetry platform, has been developed as means to develop the ideas of co-authorship, taking inspiration from the position and agency of a traditional puppeteer. The platform is built with Intel’s perceptual computing that uses a motion sensing technology to detect a user’s hand and translate the movement to a puppet in a 3D environment. The direct handcontrol allows the user to experience the virtual environment as an extension of his immediate physical reality vs. immersing into an environment as an avatar. Exploring narrative structures that shape user-experience in such environments is in further scope of this work which requires an understanding of the logic of interactive storytelling in digital media.

My work is about changing the perception of space in function of art. Therefore, the subjects of my work are perception, space and, art. To change perception, I study sensation, experience, and phenomenology. To create spatial situations, I practice designing spaces, fabricating structures, manipulating materials, and integrating lighting and audiovisual systems. The core of my artistic research is the pursuit of the unknowable— the sublime.

The sublime has been a subject in philosophy and art since circa 1200 B.C. when the sage Veda Vyasa described it as a mystery in the sacred Hindu scripture Bhagavad-Gita. Since then, the meaning of the term has been vigorously debated, but it remains indefinable. My interest is not to define the sublime. Critical history has proven that the sublime cannot be precisely put into words, just as the meaning of life is inherently unknowable.

Postmodern French philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard recognized avant-garde art as a novel opportunity for accessing the sublime. He argued that the nature of avant-garde modern art has the unique potential to manipulate the balance of senses, reason, and emotion in a manner that results in a sensation of pleasurable pain. My further investigation is in practice of art that carefully entices senses, reason, and emotion in a way that results in an experience of the unknowable.

Artists including Anish Kapoor, Mark Rothko, Bill Viola, and James Turrell marked the twentieth century as an age of expanding our sensing apparatus to experience the sublime. Through their abstract but integrated use of materials, space, color, light, and image, they excite our senses and intrigue our minds to the point of reaching the essence of the unknowable. The success of their work is in experimental manipulation of senses through which the space is experienced cognitively and emotionally. Their innovative use of materials that engage sight, hearing, touch, smell, emotion, memory, and imagination transforms the spaces that they work in into places that demonstrate the existence of the unpresentable.

The technological age is allowing for more multisensory engagement. My interest is in elaborating on those technological advancements that can fuse perception of senses and add to the phenomenological experience of my artistic intention of presenting the presence of the unpresentable.

Panel: The Art of Software Cities

Dig­i­tal and mo­bile tech­nolo­gies cre­ate a sparkling blan­ket of diodes, sil­i­con and lenses over cities, re­con­fig­ur­ing un­der­stand­ings of both phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal space. While the in­ter­faces of this di­verse set of tech­nolo­gies, from cctv cam­eras to smart phones, are lay­ered with ac­tive-ma­tri­ces that are sen­si­tive to our ac­tions and/or de­sires, they also be­come the entry points into a ma­trix of data­bases that are just as ac­tively used to re-or­ga­nize pub­lic and pri­vate life. As Chris­t­ian An­der­sen notes “pub­lic par­tic­i­pa­tion in the city as soft­ware is mostly char­ac­ter­ized by ei­ther sur­veil­lance or con­fig­u­ra­tion”, sug­gest­ing that these con­fig­u­ra­tions can­not be ac­counted for with­out ad­dress­ing the sur­veil­lance as­pects and vice versa. Com­puter sci­en­tists, com­pa­nies and artists have tack­led this un­der­ly­ing city-sur­veil­lance ma­trix in dif­fer­ent ways. The ob­jec­tive of this talk is to ex­plore some of the dif­fer­ent ap­proaches to en­gag­ing or dis­en­gag­ing with this city-sur­veil­lance ma­trix. We will start our in­ves­ti­ga­tion with an analy­sis of the con­struc­tion of the sur­veil­lance and lo­ca­tion pri­vacy prob­lem in com­puter sci­ence. Re­searchers of pri­vacy and sur­veil­lance have dug into meth­ods for mak­ing in­di­vid­ual’s traces in the city in­vis­i­ble or anony­mous in re­sponse to the ma­trix of sur­veil­lance. In doing so, they ren­der the dig­i­tal pub­lic as a risky place full of “pow­er­ful and strate­gic ad­ver­saries”. They put their focus into cre­at­ing an in­vis­i­ble or uniden­ti­fi­able pri­vate space in the pub­lic, imag­ined as some­thing sep­a­rate from the pub­lic that this pri­vate is dis­en­tan­gled from. A sim­i­lar de­sire to cre­ate anonymity or uniden­ti­fi­a­bil­ity is seen in the work called I.-R.A.S.C. of U.R.A./FILOART, an in­fra-red DIY de­vice which pro­tects against in­fra-red cam­eras.

As the city-sur­veil­lance ma­trix is used more and more by com­pa­nies as a one-to-one rep­re­sen­ta­tion of our ac­tions and de­sires and of mech­a­nisms of dis­ci­pline, these pri­vacy tech­nolo­gies make sense and are in­dis­pens­able. How­ever, as David Phillips un­der­lines, “lo­ca­tion pri­vacy” “may be an in­ad­e­quate frame through which to un­der­stand these is­sues and to fash­ion ap­pro­pri­ate re­sponses.” In­stead, he sees the prob­lem in the cre­ation of a dig­i­tal pub­lic which is dom­i­nated by com­mer­cial ac­tiv­ity and gen­eral pri­va­ti­za­tion. The lo­ca­tion pri­vacy ap­proach fa­vors dis­en­gage­ment, leav­ing the pub­lic up for grabs. Here, Michelle Teran’s work ‘Bus­cando al Sr. Good­bar’ pro­vides an al­ter­ana­tive strat­egy to col­lec­tively nar­rate dig­i­tal cities, ques­tion­ing the use of the city-sur­veil­lance ma­trix to re-cre­ate pri­vate and pub­lic ab­solutes and to claim that the only pub­lic is the one that is com­mer­cial or pri­va­tized. Fi­nally, we will look at eye’em, a mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tion for bring­ing “to­gether mo­bile pho­tog­ra­phers from all over the world to cre­ate a stream of mu­tual in­spi­ra­tion and cre­ative ex­pres­sion”. We will look at the way in which this ap­pli­ca­tion blurs the lines be­tween the pub­lic and pri­vate. The ap­pli­ca­tion al­lows its com­mu­nity of users to col­lec­tively cre­ate a new se­man­tics, ques­tion­ing our con­cep­tion of an “event” in the city, ex­pand­ing it from its clas­si­cal de­scrip­tion as a cross­ing point of place and time. We will an­a­lyze eye’em’s con­cep­tion of par­tic­i­pa­tion, as well as its re­la­tion to labour and pri­va­ti­za­tion in the city-sur­veil­lance ma­trix.

Panel: Emotion Studies in a Contemporary Art Debate

Our bod­ies are our pri­mary means of know­ing the world. In fact the body often re­acts to events long be­fore we per­ceive those changes. Sim­i­larly Dama­sio as­serts the role of emo­tion as the pri­mary means through which we en­gage with the world with feel­ings then being ‘thoughts that rep­re­sent the body in­volved in a re­ac­tive process’. This poses a se­ries of ques­tions with re­gards the no­tion of emo­tions ‘within’ the dig­i­tal given emo­tion’s fun­da­men­tal re­la­tion­ship to the body. For in­stance al­though it might be pos­si­ble to emo­tion­ally react to events pre­sented through the dig­i­tal can there be an ex­pres­sion of that emo­tion be­yond the im­me­di­acy of the emo­tions of those ex­pe­ri­enc­ing it? How might the body and its emo­tions be­come pre­sent within the dig­i­tal?

Is it pos­si­ble to begin cre­at­ing ex­pe­ri­ences within the dig­i­tal that are ca­pa­ble of un­pack­ing our re­ac­tions to events as other time based media are ca­pa­ble of doing rather that dwelling within the power of in­ter­ac­tiv­ity? These is­sues will be ex­am­ined through Dama­sio’s work on Spin­oza as well as the op­por­tu­nity to con­sider the cen­tral­ity of the body through the phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of Mer­leau-Ponty. These ideas will then be de­vel­oped through the au­thor’s re­search ex­am­in­ing how biofeed­back pro­vides an op­por­tu­nity to vi­su­alise the phys­i­o­log­i­cal processes that are a part of our emo­tions and con­sider whether the ‘ex­pres­sion’ of these emo­tions through these processes might in it­self pro­vide an op­por­tu­nity to begin un­der­stand­ing our emo­tions through a new means.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Glass, waterjet, electronics, gesture, puzzle, digital sculpture, prototype, rapid tooling, interactivity, teleoperation, touch screen.

This paper presents the initial stages of prototyping a digitalsculptural project that mines conventionally undesirable artifacts of mass production and material residue for their expressive worth. These artifacts are used as both inspiration and raw material to transform touch and movement into reflexive structures. This is done in the form of a remote controlled ‘teleoperated’ interactive artwork. This artwork, called Gesture Puzzles, is inspired by antique glass and wood-framed dexterity puzzles that use a player’s hand movements to maneuver a marble through a maze. The piece describes practical collaborative methods that use creative electronic process to exploit both desired and undesired material residues from molten pressed glass, waterjet cutting and touch screen interfaces.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Sound synthesis, instrument design, app design, social music experiences, digital signal processing, user interfacing, game design.

Pyxis Minor is a social musical application built for iOS and Mac OS devices. It is intended to be of use for people of varying musical backgrounds and knowledge levels by providing a low barrier to entry for the creation of electronic music and by emphasizing the playful nature of music making. Pyxis Minor achieves disruption of existing electronic music performance and creation paradigms in order to posit a democratization of electronic music processes. This paper outlines the user interfacing principles and the design architecture which includes the repurposing of a game engine in order to create a unique social music experience.

The paper is concerned with the complexities of interrelations between human sensory modalities and the role of artistic experimentation in triggering new forms of perceptual organization. The research field of sensory substitution, starting from the neuroscientific investigations by Bach-Y-Rita in the 1970s, has provided many insights into how certain brain functions can compensate for the others, thus demonstrating the brain capabilities for plasticity. Although trackable through brain-scanning and neuroimaging technologies, the emerging effects, such as vision-like qualia, remain subjective and can be communicated primarily only through analogies. One productive way to explore the dialectics between the subjective and possible objective knowledge is a comparative analysis of neurocomputational models and experiences designed in artistic projects. How can a model – be it computational or experiential – guide us into what happens at the level of the neuronal structures? In what follows, we consider some methods of testing the ‘sentience’ of the brain and making the inner changes ‘feelable’ explored through artistic means in a series of interdisciplinary laboratories and exhibitions in Moscow in 2013-2019.

My work critically examines the impact of technological ideology and control on the body, gender, and knowledge and how this reshapes representation. I work in varying degrees between art and commerce to fully investigate and take a stance of resistance against contemporary flows of viral capitalism.

Currently, I am researching technologies that can be queered and/or identified as queer, and in turn, related to specific physically embodied queer acts. Queer technology functions as a practical and theoretical tool for resisting heteronormative formations of technological control. Queer technologies are political tools for queer technical agency that create social interstices for connectivity and communication.

Projects in progress include transCoder, a queer programming anti-language; ENgenderingGenderChangers, a “solution” to Gender Adapters’ male/female binary; GRID, a computer virus that calls upon the history and legacy of HIV/AIDS to assess hygiene, infection, memory, and queerness; Gay Bombs, a technical manual manifesto that outlines a “how to” of queer political action through terrorist assemblages of networked activism; and the Disingenuous Bar, a play / attack on Apple Computer’s Genius Bar for tech support that offers a heterotopic space for political support for “technical” problems.*

Attempts to formulate queer technologies implicate the urgency in carving out a queer freedom in hi-tech culture and providing the queer community with discursive / practical tools for activism, resistance, and empowerment.

This panel questions what a politics of sentience might look like as it examines how the erotic as a queer method can be used to reimagine systems, networks and infrastructures as agential and embodied spaces.

In 1978, feminist writer Audrey Lorde presented her seminal essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” that challenged the word’s patriarchal overtones. In the essay, Lorde not only redefines but reignites the erotic as a power of feeling – a physical, psychic and emotional energy that can’t be reduced to a commodified good or systematized affect. In our current zeitgeist of neoliberal and recolonizing regimes, the use of the erotic as a vehicle for understanding and a means of empowerment is re-emerging. Conjoined with the tactics of queering networks, power is being reclaimed through more sentient experiences and actions that disrupt hegemonic narratives and engage a broader spectrum of bodies.

The invisible is becoming more perceptible through subtle shifts in knowledge production that embrace intuitive modes of learning. British artist Rachal Bradley calls for an “erotics of infrastructure” as a way to “explore how the pleasurable, the charged, and the circuitous might recalibrate infrastructure from a non-neutral to a negotiable framework underlying our perception and our behavior in manifold ways.” This panel questions what a politics of sentience might look like as it examines how the erotic as a queer method can be used to reimagine systems, networks and infrastructures as agential and embodied spaces. Topics include queering the atmosphere, money as a sensory device, laughter through multi species communication, and how aphrodisia can disrupt global machines.

The lack of reference for the sense of action and movement that “virtual” networks linked to”actual” spaces bring into being raises questions for telepistemology. This paper confronts the instabilities of scale (and thereby of time and space), that these networked environments engender. The extremes of spatiality — the miniature and the immense — are the new terrain of electronic media artists. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard discusses scale, first in miniature, and then in all its immensity.”The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature”. Immensity, on the other hand “is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreams”. All this talk of scale has profound implications beyond the realm of geography. “Philosophers, when confronted with outside and inside, think in terms of being and non-being”. Thus the transmutations of the miniature and the immense into the mutable datascapes of the computer have an effect on our epistemology, our ontology and our phenomenology. A group at the University of Tennessee measured perceived passage of time in relation to changes in scale. Researchers had subjects investigate 1/6,1/12 and 1/24 scale models complete with representations of furniture and inhabitants. They were asked to move scale figures through the environment, and to picture both them and themselves doing things appropriate to do within that space. They were asked to indicate when they had been in this scaled down “lounge” for a half an hour. Researchers found that “the experience of temporal duration is compressed relative to the clock in the same proportion as scale-model environments being observed are compressed relative to the full-sized environments”. 1/12 scale of 30 minutes is therefore 5 minutes, 1/24 is 2,5 etc. This kind of empirical data speaks to the both the opportunities and challenges of creating electronic spaces without a referent. These kinds of experiments both support and invert the postmodern “space-time compression” that David Harvey notes in The Condition of Postmodernity. I will discuss the importance of the miniature’s condensation, and the oneiric qualities of the immense as they relate to electronic environments — those spaces built without concrete referents. The work of artists like Ken Goldberg and Eduardo Kac who have been effecting actions in the real world over the net will be juxtaposed with the accomplishments of those like Marcos Novak who have been building virtual worlds entirely distinct from the hardscapes of built environments. Playing with scale brings both confusion and promise to the electronic arts. To manipulate scale is to make visible the flux and transformations of digital environments. Scale is part of the gnosis of telepistemology.

This paper will explore scientific endeavour in direct relation to creative practice and consider each as a site of the contemporary sublime. Central to this investigation is a series of video works that I have been producing over the last 18 months that are primarily intended as discursive spaces through which scientists reflect upon the nature of their practice. At the heart of this investigation is the idea of the laboratory and studio as the theatre for the exploration of the unknown and the creation of new knowledge. A central question I am exploring is how artists and scientists relate in their abandonment of a priori forms as they search for the not yet discovered. I am interested in how our approach to the unknown, the languages, codes and technologies we use, the materials and ways we negotiate the liminality of certainty, define the experience of the unknown and shape our creation of knowledge, thus create both ‘converging and diverging realities’. I am interested in contemporary manifestations of the sublime, particularly the existential terror of the sublime when contemplating the unknown as it relates to fields of knowledge. The presentation will explore how scientists engaged in the creation of knowledge negotiate this terror. Using video as both documentary record and art form I am filming four female scientists as they perform their research. The experience/experiment of filming in the laboratory is of primary importance to this project. Rather than intruding on the experiment, the act of filming pays witness to and in part facilitates the establishment a quiet and contemplative space. The relationship between camera and instrument transforms the experiment into something more concentrated yet circumspect. I will use brief segments of my film as part of my presentation to illustrate the key points of my presentation.

In bacteriology, Quorum Sensing describes a mechanism of communication between cells by secretion of self-inductive pheromones. The Quorum Sensing installation is based on this principle of mutual comprehension of the needs of all the bystanders. Its interactivity lies in their positions and their collective behavior to reveal a virtual microcosmos resulting from a set of concurrent programs based on cellular automata and genetic algorithms.

Composed of a device of capture and a video projector, this installation creates an open and sensory space, where the presence of new technologies is voluntarily hidden. This empty place encourages to meditation on the fugacity of life, even artificial.

For the second time the artists-in-labs program from Zurich University of the Arts is present at the ISEA symposium which is hosted in Hong Kong in 2016. Artworks and experiments of six artists/artist groups from East Asia and Europe will get presented at Connecting Spaces Hong Kong – Zurich. R<CONNECTING SENSES focuses on perception, the relationship of art, science, technology and sensory systems. Oscillating between kinetic mechanics, material collages and poetic acoustics, the artists share a strong interest in experimental concepts and transdisciplinary encounters. Thus, the exhibition functions as a laboratory by way of discussions and interactions. Artistic practices, aesthetic strategies and situated knowledge are presented and shared among the artists of the exhibition and the ISEA participants and visitors, who are more than welcome to challenge the visible and invisible. Together we aim to create new ideas and new artistic outputs by crossing, blurring and re-connecting the borders of art and science, cultural perspectives and the human senses. Since 2004, the artists-in-labs (ail) program has been facilitating artistic research through long-term residencies for artists in scientific laboratories and research institutes. The program is part of the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts ICS at Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK. It promotes sustainable collaborations between artists and scientists of all disciplines, in Switzerland and across the world. These transdisciplinary and cross-border collaborations provide artists with an opportunity to critically engage with the sciences and their experimental and aesthetic dimensions. The artists have the possibility to explore the lab site as well as a vast range of scientific topics, methods and technologies. The collaborative residencies of the ail program are presented at various national and international exhibitions, symposia, workshops and performances. They are introduced and documented in books and short films, in order to share explorations, ideas, discussions and aesthetic experiences with a broader audience.

Abstract

After the first year with my PC and a CAD program I wrote: – we are all on the way into computer age. Certainly in the field of Design, but also on pure artistic base. It is obvious that we as artists will face new and exiting sources to manipulate color, shape and patterns to replace the traditional way of production. In this perspective I am thinking of a methods, based on natural rules for variation. As an artist and in my design work I will form a technique that I call Random Aided Design.

RAD/RAM was registered as a trade mark in 1982. The vision of a new era in art and industrial design. The key factors would be endless patterns in a direct process to make any single part of the product an original work, an artifact. The first wore-station for my experiments was set up in 1985 supported by ASEH Robotics. I did my first “robot drawings” though It was a static system allowing no irregular interrupts. The lack of flexibility in automation equipment made me start on my own.

In 1989 a new and inspiring location was opened, Living Art Center. To the center I welcome various artists or technicians to encounter RAD/RAM the philosophy. The first result was the invention of The Art Recorder, a rotating wall for overlay painting with an interactive system, to study complex visual structures, living design and paradoxical ideas.

COSMOLOGY (from the Greek kosmos, “universe”; and logia, “study”) is the study of the Universe in its totality, and by extension, humanity’s place in it. Physical cosmology shapes this understanding through analytical relationships to science, whereas the philosophical perspective of cosmology is dominated through the domains of intellectual understanding, intuition, religion, and spirituality as formative concepts. Radical Cosmologies marks a considerable departure from traditional readings of cosmologies to consider extreme shifts in thinking within cultural and scientific research, and in regard to philosophical and theoretical interpretations of existing worldviews and conditions. At this nexus, cultural producers working with critical, creative inquiries in various constellations of science, technology, and mythology, offer fresh insights into our world through a range of unorthodox actions, projects, and pedagogical initiatives that often take the form of artistic mapping.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Maize, biodiversity, contamination, Mesomaerica, histories, languages, chunking, composition, decomposition, recodification.

The paper unpacks my working methodology in the creation of large, multi-year projects based on the segmentation and grouping of ideas, materials, and objects into chunks. As case study I use my current project Al GRANO: Framing Worlds, a composite gallery installation with individually installable pieces that can be connected in various combinations. Exhibited together, the chunks compose a large project that addresses conflicting historical, cultural, technological, and political positions related to maize, a contested grain considered both food and cultural symbol in Mexico, and source of macro profits for multinational agribusiness. I discuss the process of recodification embedded in the artwork itself and the influence of a Latin American literary ‘tour de force’ in my practice of dismantling languages and codes. I furthermore examine how the structure of material, changed through bioengineering, can be used to stress that the hybridization between natural and biotechnological genes is a source of division that spawns – in countries such as Mexico – the need to establish geopolitical immunological structures for the protection of ecological and cultural infection from external forces. I conclude by articulating that an interdisciplinary approach in the use of art and technology tools and systems can serve to critically inspect temporally and spatially continuous permeation of infamous incidents throughout social and political worlds.

Radio Chigüiro was a social platform for the distribution of Lafayette, Indiana’s “glocal” culture. It operated as a community radio, exploring youth practices associated with parties, live music shows, and free radio workshops by using a web site as a medium for contact, production, and participation.

Introduction
Radio Chigüiro emerged from the idea of making a participative radio station. The first reference is Bertolt Brecht’s essay from 1932, The Radio as an Apparatus for Communication (Brecht 1964:51). In the early development of radio culture and broadcast, he envisioned using radio as a participatory medium. He proposed it as a bi-directional medium as opposed to one-way broadcast, a model in which the listener could participate and potentially become a broadcaster himself. Much of the research on radio revolved around topics like media activism because some media activist tactics were studied and later adopted by Radio Chigüiro. Even though Radio Chigüiro had no activist content on its programs, the use of free wireless networks and the airwaves without official permission or mass media channels to promote non-mass-media content are methods that have been used by media activist groups in the past. This project explored the use of technology for community purposes. I approached this Idea by experimenting with it and doing it myself, networking with a local group of people. I was motivated to work on this project because I wanted to understand my ethical disagreement with copyright and the current model of culture production and distribution. When I think of the current context of culture production and distribution, the first thing that comes to my mind is a pop record that is specially designed for mass consumption.

Artists who use radio technologies work simultaneously in physical space and in the space of the radio waves they receive and transmit. The density and type of radio waves in a particular physical location is determined by a range of factors, including its relative remoteness or urbanness, whether it is outdoors or buffered by concrete walls, the number of transmissions that traverse it, and the sources of those transmissions. The kinds of radio signals available for use by an artist are therefore highly specific to a physical location, and create an extremely variable sense of radio-location. The location specificity of radio waves is not simply a matter of content, however. The presence, frequencies, and accessibility of the radio waves that carry broadcast and communications content is shaped in turn by specifics of regulation, commercial and government radio activity, and technical availability. Artists who use radio technologies are therefore located simultaneously in physical space and in a fluid radio space that is influenced by particular relations of power, systems of regulation, and patterns of use, and by the diverse range of cultural influences that manifest in content. This paper will discuss a number of media artists who engage with radio waves in Aotearoa/New Zealand to create work that is highly location aware, both in content and in the extended networks of radio space. The artists discussed include experimental musicians Adam Willetts, Bruce Russell, and Peter Stapleton, who use radio waves as sound sources, and the ‘Friendly Road Radio’ broadcasts by Daniel Malone, Kah Bee Chow and the Long March Project, which claimed a highly location specific presence in the radio space of downtown Auckland. The paper will discuss ways in which these artists use radio technologies to mediate the specificities of a dual location in physical and radio spaces.

Rational Games proposes to look at the immortal logic of technological application into penumbral biological spaces. By probing mathematical structures, philosophies of reasoning, their harmonies and practical fruits, this panel hopes to shed light on the effects of cybernetic acceleration on lived contexts. What sort of biology does instrumentalized rationality produce, what arts diagram the shadows of its fallout and finally what kind of enlightened reasoning can engage with the noise and environments it creates? Rational Games will take these questions as a starting point to examine the value of the arts and sciences, the eternities and light of artificial structure, and their consequence amidst our biological and social reality.

Panel:  Interface Play: Media Environments for Ludic Cyborgs

Have we re­ally en­tered the era of gam­i­fi­ca­tion and what does this new no­tion imply for the urban en­vi­ron­ment? Im­ages of new ad­ven­tur­ous cities have ap­peared, de­scribed as net­worked game­spaces of­fer­ing ex­cite­ment, fun and so­cial­iz­ing to cizitens that seem to be full of en­ergy and de­sire for chal­lenges, re­wards and sta­tus. The magic cir­cle has ex­panded to a ludic urban ter­rain that goes be­yond any prior ex­pec­ta­tion. There is no longer an out­side as all is dif­fused in­ter­con­nected and ac­ces­si­ble at the same time. By fol­low­ing new rules of a hy­brid game­play, the city awaits to be tagged, ap­pro­pri­ated and en­joyed. Roles can not only be taken but also gen­er­ated and mod­i­fied by in­hab­i­tants them­selves. But is this a new cel­e­bra­tion for a gam­ing gen­er­a­tion or an un­for­tu­nate ludic deca­dence?

Are play­ers being un­der­es­ti­mated in this new con­di­tion? What­ever hap­pened to the dig­i­tal play­ful mul­ti­tude whose po­ten­tial­i­ties are the very core of today’s urban and dig­i­tal wealth? The new sup­po­si­tion of gam­i­fi­ca­tion is bring­ing back once again the old bat­tle be­tween game and play, be­tween con­straints and free­dom, be­tween con­ven­tions and an­ar­chy, be­tween areas that are being com­mod­i­fied and areas that be­come com­mon. A new call for ac­tive play­ers there­fore emerges, not only in order to hack the new mar­keted urban game­space but also in order to re-con­quer the city by re-ap­pro­pri­at­ing its very wealth and essence: that is the dis­posal, in­ter­est, ca­pa­bil­ity and knowl­edge of the play­ers them­selves.  Isn’t this bat­tle a mere metaphor for the trad­egy of the post-fordist con­di­tion long­ing for po­lit­i­cal sub­ver­sion and sub­stan­tial change?

Abstract (short paper)

Programmed art is the definition given to the body of works by a group of Italian artists active between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. This definition was introduced by Bruno Munari and Umberto Eco in 1961 in the Almanacco Bompiani and used in 1962 on the occasion of an exhibition hosted at the Olivetti show room in Milan, featuring works by the artists of Gruppo T. Gruppo T’s artworks embedded the utopia of an interactive democratic art made for everyone and open to everyone’s participation. The paper addresses the strategies for making the Gruppo T’s utopia current in our days through the application of open source and DIY approaches that propose collaborative solutions to kinetic art preservation as well as subversive model to art distribution.

We seek to construct connections between visual art practice and neuroscientific research studies in the field of Alzheimer’s disease. The method is envisioned as a circulation in a network of four virtual intertwined archival spaces:
1. The patient;
2. The art studio;
3. The Alzheimer’s clinical research laboratory;
4. The cellular and molecular research laboratory;
In this process we are documenting the assessment and categorization of Alzheimer’s patients and their exposure to various therapies, as well as laboratory procedures and collecting science materials. Key elements are the visual – ordering – archiving – montage.

This paper introduces the overall concept of archiving and its circulation on the design framework in relation to the concepts and production of an installation – THE ARCHIVE. The work is analyzed in relation to notions of bodies, fragments and reconstitution activated according to Foucault’s theories of clinical manipulation of records and surveillance, and Mark Dion’s artworks strategies, such as re-creating and critiquing both scientific and artistic processes of cataloguing and display.

We explore interpretations that objects acquire when they are subjected to artistic processes and re-experienced in a different context. In the laboratory a sentence, a diagram or an MRI is read against the assumptions of medical discourse. The installation uncovers some of the representational strategies produced in the laboratories and searches for similarities between the visual technologies applied by neuroscience and self reflection in the studio; examining that in both contexts, decisions regarding handling, archiving, framing and time happen in parallel. Although if in science the effort to enhance or scale ‘inscriptions’ (Latour, 1986) reflect the power to make believe in the invisible world of scientific research, we propose that in employing artistic methods such as re-tracing, wax casts and edition we are challenging the associations of scientific images to an invisible truth and exploring their potential power to deploy the discourse of autobiographical memory. By recording/re-editing both the studies of Alzheimer’s disease and Lopes under similar neuropsychological examination we operate at a metaphoric level of endless revision of traces, comparing the never-ending chain of representations (scientific archive), to the psychological process that creates identity and integrates personality.

This poster presentation will demonstrate several aspects of the new electronic publication Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, together with its conception, mandates, infrastructure and funding, as well as its attempts at community building, and innovative collaborative design and interface development process. It is designed to spark discussion about the future of electronic publishing and its potential impact across a broad spectrum of academic output.

In his 1936 article, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin proposed that modern technologies of production, distribution and exchange could finally offer the possibility of bringing art practice into direct relationship with politics.This would, however, depend on the use of technology to radically destabilize the ‘auratic’ self-identity of the art object itself and, thereby, to wrest it away from its ‘theological’ role and function as reified fetish within bourgeois culture.The revolutionary potential of photomechanical reproduction lay, therefore, within the dialectical critique that it provided of the individual subject, whose freedom and autonomy were embodied in the bourgeois notion d’art for art’s sake: and political strategies which sought to use the work of art as an emancipatory and pedagogic tool within the struggle for cultural change. It was in the light of this, and the historical development within Fascism of the Platonic notion of the ideal state as ‘total work of art’, that Benjamin and Horkheimer warned against the use of technology in the aestheticization of politics and called, instead, for the politicization of aesthetics.

Fifty years later, the supposed failure of Modernity’s totalizing aspirations—often epitomized by the collapse of the former Soviet Union— are now the food and drink of more conservative and bloodless celebrations of endless diversity. However, Modernity’s other failure—that of analogic forms of reproduction and distribution to radicalize its political representations of itself—pose more fundamental questions to the development of our digital futures within the so called era of post-modernity.The celebratory rhetoric’s surrounding the NET, its speed, progressivism and potential for providing individual liberty and emancipation are more than reminiscent of the globalizing meta-narratives of political modernity. Is cyberspace already full of an ideological baggage that utopian futurology has naively consigned to the past? If this is so, then how are we to avoid the immanent aestheticization of digital politics and replace it with the more radical politicization of digital aesthetics? This paper will examine the political and philosophical implications of utopian and dystopian discourses surrounding the NET via the metaphor of cyberspace as an aestheticized re-mapping of the project of modernity.

The paper will evidence the ways in which digital and electronic media are re-shaping contemporary curation, it will specifically focus on VAINS, a curatorial and online art system we are developing as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration across arts and computing. VAINS, or the Visual Art Interpretation and Navigation System, is a substantial work in progress, it consists of a  site which offers repository, search and content recommendation tools adjusted to art content in an online environment, drawing upon the Computer Fine Arts database of digital artworks. The site is a response to the expected changes in content consumption as part of the movement towards a more complex web 3.0 generation, offering a customizable and personalized art viewing experience.  The VAINS system aims to be in part a text free environment, where visual experiences are interpreted through their contextual categorization and through the use of other sensual means, such as icons, sounds and textures. VAINS also deploys the embodied and situated nature of human users as core resources in its underlying computational structures, drawing upon enactivism and Real World Interaction as core computational principals.

The paper will put the VAINS system into a historical curatorial context as well as explaining and analysing the VAINS project and its methodology, outlining the reasons for placing the body at the forefront of its navigation systems. The paper will also present a narrative of interaction with the tools we have created, showing their impact on a range of users and illustrating the value of RWI or real world interaction in the context of online curation.

Shifting the strategy from the customary ground where arguments are constructed and fought with slogans (for or against the ‘revolutionary’ claims made in the name of new technologies, or whatever the issues at hand), the paper invites us to acknowledge the working of metaphors on their own claims to truth; starting with a discussion of the spatial implications of the revolution metaphor. This, in turn, provides a methodological ground for further analyses, leading towards identifying the epistemological requirements for the development of new forms of authoring and assessing the respective roles of authoring, designing and programming in a digital environment/platform [What is a (digital) author?]. The discussion is illustrated with specific examples of digital work [including the authors own multimedia typographic work ‘Re: (s) ist – ance(s)’], in which all efforts are made to place technology ‘at the service of the mind’. Throughout, the paper insists on the importance of acknowledging and examining the functional interactions between communication strategies, artistic forms and genres and the constraints of codes. Finally, the paper concludes with a few concrete methodological suggestions about how we might interpret and respond to the claims and counterclaims that digital technologies are ‘revolutionary’.

This paper considers the moving image as a defining form of the contemporary age, a form that operates and circulates by constantly evolving and mutating logic. It is a logic that is at once driven by, and embedded in, the prevailing state of technological flux. Rather than settling around the relatively stable formal and ontological parameters of the historical forms of cinema and television, the moving image is now defined by its fragmentation, ubiquity and volatility. That these phenomena are often accompanied by a pervading sense of irrationality and new, barely graspable forms of affect are of primary interest to this investigation. If affect in the contemporary sense has, as Brian Massumi observed, become unqualified and unrecognisable, how then do we approach the possibilities of the contemporary moving image? With this question in this mind I propose to look at the very embeddedness of historical forms within the contemporary moving image-scape. To this end the idea of the ‘cinematic’ is evoked not as a totalising system, but rather as a persistent conceptual and visual presence that informs contemporary moving image production and artistic inquiry. Examining a range of forms, from participatory media platforms like YouTube to installation-based video art, I will consider how the intensification of affect that these forms engender are enabled and activated through fragmented, though none-the-less, cinematic means. In this sense the cinematic itself is to be considered as a trace element, a diffuse presence that permeates the contemporary moving image in diverse and often obscured ways. It should be foregrounded that this paper is not concerned with attempting to redefine the idea of the cinematic (or vis-á-vis the cinema), but rather with examining the contours of its presence. I offer a brief inventory of these ‘cinematic’ traces: spectacle/hallucination spectatorship/identification materiality/immateriality genre narrative performance light.

International new media art discourse is stimulated by festivals and events like ISEA2006 that form temporary cultural centers to represent, present and discuss networked and digital technologies. However by forming temporary centers we also tacitly create a notion of a periphery – with temporary centers also come temporary peripheries. In new media culture this is a paradox as much new media art, theory, and discourse reflects on the network itself and the elusiveness and redundancy of centers and peripheries.

ISEA2006 re:mote attempts to dissuade us from imposing these distinctions by providing a platform for artists, commentators, curators, performers and theorists to participate in 1SEA2006 via online and prerecorded media. Technologies used will be up to each presenter, the premise is that the technologies should be easy to use and access. ISEA2006 re:mote will focus on presenting media spaces and people that would otherwise be excluded from presenting their work at ISEA2006 due to financial, political, or logistical reasons.

ISEA2006 re:mote invited media spaces and individual artists, theorists, and curators from around the world to speak or perform via remote technologies to the audience at ISEA2006. Presentations will be directed at the four themes of ISEA2006: Interactive City, Community Domain, Transvergence, and Pacific Rim. Participants are invited to present or perform on topics included within the ISEA2006, and onsite audience interaction with the presenters is also encouraged.

ISEA2006 re:mote is a collaboration between ISEA2006 and Adam Hyde, and is based on the re:mote series of events:

re:mote Auckland Organized by radioqualia and ethermap

re:mote Regina Organized by radioqualia and soil media lab http://soilmedia.org/remote/

Reach combines aesthetics, pattern exploration, and interactive qualities to create a new language for wearable expression. Areas of investigation include person-to-person communication, proximity, reaction to environments and weather stimulus.

Reach is a part of a larger project platform, ‘IT&Textiles’ at the PLAY studio of the Interactive Institute in Gorg, Sweden. With this research project, we aim to join two different areas of design and technology development: information technology and textiles. On the one hand, we are looking for new applications and areas for textiles; on the other, we want to give information technology new clothes and expand the design space of everyday computational things.

Reach focuses on investigating new forms for wearable communication and expression through creating ‘wearable sketches’ or prototypes that test both material and interactive qualities. Through this iterative process we aim to incorporate our findings into new ‘smart’ clothing or textiles. The wearable sketches include everyday worn items such as hats, bags, scarves, and skirts that react or interact with the environment or persons within the environment. In addition, they explore both additive and subtractive pattern-making processes where patterns grow or are revealed in response to changes in one’s personal, social or environmental space. Material samples and prototypes include the use of cottons, woven linens, conductive materials, UV-sensitive textiles, thermo-chromic materials and electro-luminescent wire.

Abstract (long paper)

Against the background of the collapsed dichotomy between high and low culture as well as the concept of postmodern double-coding (allowing surface and in-depth perceptions to occur simultaneously), the essay offers a close reading of a classical example of digital art: Der Zerseher (Iconoclast) by Joachim Sauter and Dirk Lüsebrink (1992), an interactive installation where viewers (observed by hidden eye trackers) deconstruct a painting (presented on a screen) by looking at it. Beyond the facile claim that the work reverses the power hierarchy between painter and onlooker, the essay discusses the irony that (if we understand perception as an autobiographical act) the image cannot be de-viewed on a semantic level if it deconstructed on a physical one. The essay finally reveals the artwork as a commentary on art history and connects it to aesthetic discussions about the end of interpretation and the culture of presence. Against the prevalence of technique over content and meaning often in place in digital artworks, the essay ends with a call for an “erotics” of interpretation.

Panel:  La Plissure du Texte

In the his­tory of new media art and dig­i­tal writ­ing, Roy As­cott’s La Plis­sure du Texte (Elec­tra, Musée d’Art Mod­erne, Paris, 1983), a work using telem­at­ics to cre­ate in real-time a world-wide, col­lec­tive nar­ra­tive (more specif­i­cally, a col­lab­o­ra­tive, multi-player fairy tale), has proven a wa­ter­shed mo­ment (Plis­sure, n.d.). Basic con­cepts and is­sues of au­thor­ship, text, in­ven­tion, and lin­ear­ity, among oth­ers, have been dra­mat­i­cally re­de­fined as well as im­ple­mented in a con­crete prac­tice (as much a process in it­self as a model for fur­ther de­vel­op­ment) of dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, text as “work” (in­stead of “prod­uct”), users’ par­tic­i­pa­tion, and mul­ti­me­dia con­nec­tiv­ity, that it is no longer pos­si­ble to study the art and tech­nol­ogy field with­out tak­ing into ac­count this major achieve­ment.  Putting the stakes of As­cott’s in­volve­ment with col­lab­o­ra­tive world-mak­ing even higher, the re­cent up­grade and recon­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of this sem­i­nal work in the meta­verse of Sec­ond Life, LPDT2, proves that the cre­ative po­ten­tial of La Plis­sure du Text is still in­tact, to say the least (LPDT2, 2010).

Yet by cre­at­ing a dis­tance be­tween the “old” and the “new”, i.e.  by mak­ing the (once) “new” now (sup­pos­edly) “old”, LPDT2 gives also the op­por­tu­nity to come back on an as­pect that may have been over­looked in the eu­phoric re­cep­tion of the truly utopian first ver­sion of the work, namely the ques­tion of its “read­ing”. So strong has been the em­pha­sis on the shift to­wards the new par­a­digm of par­tic­i­pa­tion and con­nec­tiv­ity, that the very ques­tion of the work’s read­ing did no longer seem rel­e­vant. Read­ing in­stead of “doing”, “per­form­ing”, “cocre­at­ing” La Plis­sure du texte seemed an ex­am­ple of McLuhan’s “rear-view mir­ror” ap­proach of the fu­ture: (1967: 74-75).  The ne­glect of read­ing, how­ever, is not fully mo­ti­vated here. First be­cause read­ing is much more than just de­cod­ing the words of a text, it has also to do with the var­i­ous stances and at­ti­tudes one takes to­wards a work (in this sense, read­ing has to do with global cog­ni­tive and cul­tural is­sues of “per­cep­tion”). Sec­ond be­cause As­cott’s key in­no­va­tion has not been made from scratch. La Plis­sure du texte is in­debted to all kind of tex­tual an­ces­tors (texts, mod­els, au­thors). The rev­o­lu­tion it brings about is not a tab­ula rasa, yet one new (big) leap in the his­tory of art as con­nec­tiv­ity, and it is plau­si­ble to argue that the re­la­tion­ship with this cul­tural and lit­er­ary con­text, and hence the read­ing of it, is part of the work it­self, so that par­tic­i­pa­tion can only be com­plete if one takes also into ac­count the work’s back­ground.

The hyperreal simulacra of the robot world goes beyond the simulation of life on a computer screen. Robots are not only virtual models but also dynamic and evolving phenomena embodied in matter. Real Artificial Worlds incarnates fictitious habitats composed of machines and their immaterial and expressive extensions. These invented ecosystems evolve around the viewers, constantly creating new virtual architectures within a fixed physical space. Real Artificial Worlds engenders a paradox of simultaneous illusion and reality by a complete immersion of the viewer in a metaphorical but physically responsive environment.

This paper describes some recent efforts to “render” the complex acoustic fields experienced by a listener within an environment. It represents an extension of earlier efforts to synthesise externalised, three-dimensional sound cues over headphones using a very high-speed, signal processor, the Convolvotron (Wenzel, et al., 1988). The synthesis technique involves the digital generation of stimuli using Head-Related Transfer Functions (FIRTFs) measured in the ear canals of individual subjects for a large number of equidistant locations in the anechoic chamber (Wightman & Kistler, 1989). The advantage of this technique is that it preserves the complex pattern of interaural differences over the entire spectrum of the stimulus, thus capturing the effects of filtering by the pinnae, head, shoulders and torso.

Panel:  Chasing Ghosts: Reactive Notation and Extreme Sight Reading

Schwer…un­heim­lich schwer (dif­fi­cult…in­cred­i­ble dif­fi­cult) is a piece for bass clar­inet, viola, piano and per­cus­sion about Ger­man Red Army Fac­tion mem­ber Ul­rike Mein­hof. It zooms into the mo­ment when she, in a TV in­ter­view, talks pub­licly about the fate of po­lit­i­cally ac­tive women and ex­presses the pos­si­bil­ity of leav­ing her chil­dren in order to pur­sue her in­ter­ests. In this piece, based on the tran­scrip­tion of Mein­hof’s speech and com­posed in real time by a com­puter (send­ing parts onto com­puter screens), the dif­fi­culty of ex­treme sight-read­ing, in­clud­ing mi­cro­tones and large leaps for viola and clar­inet as well as com­plex har­monies for marimba and piano, con­veys a sense of the dilemma that Mein­hof is clearly ex­pe­ri­enc­ing. The real-time com­po­si­tion was done with MaxS­core, a com­po­si­tion and no­ta­tion en­vi­ron­ment de­vel­oped by Nick Did­kovsky and the au­thor.

Panel:  Chasing Ghosts: Reactive Notation and Extreme Sight Reading

For me, dy­nam­i­cally-gen­er­ated music no­ta­tion is a pow­er­ful mech­a­nism for con­nect­ing peo­ple to each other through in­ter­ac­tive music sys­tems. Much of my artis­tic work is con­cerned with ex­plor­ing new re­la­tion­ships among com­posers, per­form­ers, and lis­ten­ers (often blur­ring those cat­e­gories be­yond recog­ni­tion). Over the last six years, I’ve in­cor­po­rated dy­namic music no­ta­tion into my com­po­si­tional prac­tice in three ways. In live per­for­mance, I use real-time no­ta­tion to link the cre­ative ac­tiv­i­ties of au­di­ence mem­bers to the music per­formed by in­stru­men­tal mu­si­cians in real time, cre­at­ing a con­tin­u­ous feed­back loop link­ing per­form­ers and au­di­ence mem­bers through­out the per­for­mance. On the In­ter­net, I have use dy­nam­i­cally-gen­er­ated scores as a way to in­cor­po­rate the ideas of web-site vis­i­tors into fu­ture con­cert per­for­mances of works. And with lap­top or­ches­tras, I have used real-time no­ta­tion to link the ac­tiv­i­ties of im­pro­vis­ing lap­top mu­si­cians to the music played by in­stru­men­tal mu­si­cians and to share this process with the au­di­ence. I bring con­sid­er­able ex­per­tise to the panel in terms of de­sign chal­lenges and po­ten­tial so­lu­tions, tech­ni­cal plat­forms and im­ple­men­ta­tions of real-time no­ta­tion and aes­thetic and his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tives on its use.

Panel: Imaging Capabilities of the Future

Ever increasing, spectatorially overwhelming rates of resolution have, since Russell Kirsch’s early experiments with digital image scanning in 1957, been associated with the exponential capacities of computer culture. But apocryphal (and likely exaggerated) accounts of pilgrims fainting at the sight of Giotto’s angels in Assisi suggest that the relationship between the realist image and the overwhelmed audience has a long and colourful history. In the twentieth century, cultural narratives surrounding ‘overwhelming’ experiences of highly realistic cinematic images performed the promotional role of attracting news media attention and free publicity for the emergent medium. By mid-century the advertising industry had recognised the relationship between richly detailed imaging and viewer attention, with the result that it drove production values in neighbouring film and television sectors. This presentation will not only ask to what extent historical precedents bear relevance to our understanding of the contemporary context; more importantly, it will ask what the future holds for high resolution imaging and discourses of realism. As movie and visual effects production companies enter a frame rate and resolution arms race, games companies assert that the longed for visual event horizon of photorealistic resolution in real-time games will soon be upon us. The question here is not “what will happen when games achieve the visual veracity of the cinematic image?” Rather, it is that “given the history of realism in imaging, will the point of optimal ‘realism’ ever be reached?” From such a perspective the resolution, colour gamut, contrast ratios of emergent screen technologies bear similarities to the Dutch development of oil and canvas technology in the 16th century. Unlike past iterations of this techno-cultural nexus, screen technologies now under development are in the process of passing the limits of human perception. When this happens, what becomes of the notion of realism?

In our proposed aesthetic research project, we investigate contemporary mixed realities through innovative performance and artistic activities both on site (at the workshop) and online (MySpace). Specifically, we act as reality jockeys (RJs) working directly with the production, consumption and distribution of contemporary media, sound and the ‘sensible’ itself through social media technologies such as MySpace and Eyespot, and digital media production tools (sound recording, laptops, software, cameras).

Rea’location: Towards Trans/Multicultural Visual Communication System for a Trans/Posthuman Era. In today’s world, there are more than 5000 languages and dialects in use, of which only 100 may be considered of major importance. As Dreyfuss (1972) states, inter‑communication amongst them has proved not just difficult but impossible. Because a universal language would be the solution to this problem, over 800 attempts have in fact been made in the last 1000 years to develop an official second language that in time could be adopted by all major countries. The aim of this project is to explore the world of pictographic visual communication and develop an effective system for conveying information/knowledge on a universal scale. This would potentially bridge linguistic and cultural gaps, and thereby creating a broader vision of  trans/multiculturalism. Furthermore, the research explores novel forms of communication that help in the formation of global societies. These societies consist of both humans and artificial entities that posses very diverse social capabilities and cultural backgrounds. I believe that new media and artificial intelligence can help in the design of new types of languages that cross cultural and species barriers. A particular focus is placed on multimodal forms of non‑verbal, (in particular gestural and visual), communication between natural organisms (humans) and artificial organisms (AI Systems). The research is to investigate the role that new technology and visual communication play in finding a language for the transhuman/posthuman future, and in transcending the boundaries of individual cultural identities towards a broader perspective of Trans‑Multiculturalism.

It seems obvious to say that software is man made, but this fact does have far-reaching implications. Each program is the structured vision of an individual or group of individuals, through which the artist must work. Decisions concerning the style of a drawn line are made at a conscious level, whereas in conventional drawing, decision-making occurs at a more intuitive level. In addition, there is the intervention of the display itself, as distinct from the final (printed) output. The screen imposes a notion of completeness from the outset, a structurally uniform matrix of pixels of equal weight — in essence, a perfect democracy of surface. The image is constrained by the dimensions of the screen, compelling the artist to work centrally, to peer in; the perimeters of a piece tending to lose their significance. The screen imposes a viewing distance for both user and viewer. During output, the technology used in translation and printing applies its own authority and perfection, defying any further intervention. This presentation will consider the use of computing within fine art practice in ways that challenge the authority of technology whilst maintaining a physical relationship with the work.

ReBioGeneSys – Origins of Life is a hybrid installation (process) that combines sculpture, chemistry, alchemy and conservation to autonomously create extreme minimal ecosystems capable of autopoetic evolution. ReBioGeneSys utilizes the processes and materials of science to ask fundamental questions about how all life seems to proceed from previous life and yet had to emerge from inorganic materials. Is life something special or is the possibility of life inherent in matter itself? Can the artist’s approach to such questions help to resolve the conundrums that have stymied scientists?
ReBioGeneSys is a fully functioning scientific experiment capable of being reconfigured into any real or imaginary world, be it Venus, Titan, our prebiotic Earth or Middle Earth. By combining in one set of integrated processes all the research on origins of life by scientists, ReBioGeneSys creates “mashed-­‐up” extreme minimal ecosystems theoretically capable of forming the self-­‐organizing chemistries necessary to produce semi-­‐living molecules and perhaps even protocells.
Artistically, ReBioGeneSys draws on the legacy of artists such as the myth of Pygmalion and the attempts of Jacques de Vaucanson to create “living” sculpture. But ReBioGeneSys is the first installation that actually does have the ability to evolve itself. A system that can evolve by means of natural selection must incorporate means of not only producing living matter, but also to select among the matter it produces that which is best adapted to that minimal ecosystem.
The evolution of ReBioGeneSys is inherent in its materiality and the processes it carries out, independent of the human beings that sculpted it, unaffected by the transience of the audiences that view it. An incarnation of new materialist philosophy that nonetheless is designed to produce a vitalistic outcome, ReBioGeneSys is an artifice designed not to mimic, but to produce nature itself through self-sustaining, ever-recursive autopoesis.

‘Holographic poetry’ or holopoetry refers to experimental text the author has been producing since 1983, which is characterised by parameters such as ‘textual instability’ ‘fluid sign’ and ‘discontinuous syntax’.

This paper will consider the dynamics of participation and social negotiation in the reception of the transmedial text offered by the interactive soap Lonelygirl15, and the role performed by playful mood and play-like activity in the transmedial apparatus, as a way to connect the classical definition of audience to the next generation of ‘wreaders'(Iser). Lonelygirl15 combines the episodic structure of soaps with the iconicity of YouTube ‘self-biographic’ videos, the participatory structure of social networks, and the ambiguity between fiction and reality characteristic of alternate reality games. While forums, fan fiction, and gaming present direct calls for participation, novel reception strategies aroused by transmedia storytelling raise the question of how an audience can be ‘active’ without necessarily participating – through just being a ‘leecher’. Playful mood can be seen as a necessary preliminary to participation: by setting the tone of the interaction, it allows contributions by the users, it opens up to spontaneous and creative activity, and it generates a playful environment that leaves space to fictionalization, even in the absence of gameplay, play activity or clear play goals. Lonelygirl15 story line and plot advancements are written/designed by a team but also socially negotiated online, featuring a seamless intersection of user generated content (video clips with new episodes, discussion, written plot suggestions) and designed content, with the online social media to act as a container and a leveller in the balance between fiction and reality. While the cinematic, explicitly ‘fictional’ object is made more realistic by its insertion in the ‘real’ environment of everyday interactions, like those happening on YouTube, MySpace, and the forums of ‘real’ people in a web page, the reality of social interchange is, on the other hand, slightly fictionalized by the playful mood and the presence of play and play-like activities, allowing non-diegetic actions to amalgamate without clash with diegetic events. Such a process is especially evident in the relationship between audience response to Lonelygirl15 alternate reality game and the web series: the behaviour of the game oriented community, united by common game goals such as solving puzzles and finding new plot points, is very similar to that of the non-gaming audience, also focusing on creative interpretation and detective-like investigation, and adopting the ARG’s rules of mild role playing as a habit. The similarity in behaviour and the common psychological attitude of the two groups indicate the advantages of considering the alternate reality games audience, the web audience and the film/television audience as a future single reality, and suggests a future convergence between media audiences and game audiences. To consider the growing importance of social media in the mediascape and their possible function as a framework connecting together different aspects of a transmedial story in the individual experience can give new depth to Jenkins’ notion of ‘social convergence’ as a communal and dialectic activity that decodes the messages and sometimes recodes them into new stories.

Consumer self-tracking products help generate optimization expectations about diverse aspects of the lived human experience including levels of physical fitness, mental health, and general wellness. The commercial rhetoric and positioning of the humans who do not, or cannot use these devices and systems is that they are somehow diminished or not aspiring to be all they could be. This notion that humans need to be fixed by a technological solution can engender considerable anxiety and stress, particularly when there are different power dynamics in who gets to determine who is supposedly broken. The work presented here seeks to reclaim and reframe difficult human experiences as complex events that require acknowledgement and emotionally reckoning with, rather than striving for a neat resolution through socio-technical means. The Done Medals are personal awards commemorating the successful endurance of an assisted fertility cycle. The medals reorient the maker and wearer away from stressful trackers, apps, and data, and towards an affirmation that a series of difficult events were completed and can now be shared as a social good.

Recombinant culture is body work for the 21st century: android skin pixel eyes, and the body hollowed out, dried up, and hardened for fast travel into the virtual future.

Circadian rhythms subside in the complexity of cyber-systems. Absent, Obselete and Invalidated Bodies proliferate, facilitating The Vanishing. It is not a ‘vanishing away’ but rather a ‘vanishing to’, where remaining human, being gendered or having a self are no longer meaningful concerns. Bodies need no longer be biologically affirmed but electronically erased. Internet-coupled bodies will be able to extrude agency and awareness from one body to another body in another place. Notions of species evolution and gender distinction are ‘remapped and redefined’ in alternate hybridities of human-machine and image-machine systems, Spoken tongues subside in the Hum of the Hybrid. And invading technology eliminates skin as a significant site. The Post-Human strategy is the shedding of skin…

As practice-theory orientations the arts and sciences have often seemed juxtaposed. We are interested in how a new generation of artist-scientists think, operate and communicate. We argue that it is crucial to find new forms and formats for engagement and communication in communities of interdisciplinary research and practice. In this paper, we investigate the discursive and communicative relation between different disciplines, in social and experiential events (conferences, festivals, and the like). For this purpose, we will build upon the experiences and observations from various ‘Remix’ situations in which art-scientists meet in conference and festival settings.

What level of audience instruction is appropriate for the exhibition of a research-based media art project, and how can those instructions be presented? This is one of two issues that I will discuss based on exhibiting my interactive sculpture Push/Pull for the first time [in Ottawa Canada, November 2010 to January 2011]. This work is the outcome of a multi-year research project that included several user-tested prototypes and a team of people working on the project. Push/Pull is programmed in such a way that layers of agencies or “voices” are presented to participants – from the agency of the system itself to abstract entities composed of a few lights. We imagined that the part of the interaction overtly based on gaming would be most accessible to viewers, but the opposite turned out to be true: they are reluctant to shift from perceiving light and sound as a play of abstraction to perceiving autonomous agents that are composed from the same elements. The question becomes how, or whether, to give instructions in the non-instruction environment of the art gallery. See www.?lo-fi.?ca, where videos are under Key Concepts –> Push/Pull.

Secondly, what does the media artist most effectively do with user experience data? We are interested in contributing to guidelines for artists to develop user experience documentation. Preservation of new media artworks, media art histories and archives, and public understanding of these works are all bound up together in the concept of “user experience” and “usability studies” – for example in the work of The Variable Media Network and the Capturing Unstable Media project. There is space made in these structures for experiential documentation gathered by the media artist her or himself, but not yet methods for analysing the significance of this aspect of documentation or addressing how it can feed back into productions. Is it to be treated as an interpretation outside of the experiential dynamic of the work, or can it be brought into that dynamic? Instructions and experience reports seem to both be elements outside of exhibiting a media artwork that might be more intrinsically part of it.

This work-in-progress interdisciplinary project makes connections across the humanities, from historical literature tocontemporary art and dance. I am interested in leveraging public participatory responsive environments, treading between the virtual and the physical, to construct dimensionality to access the otherwise inaccessible. Medievalists identify the problem of using familiar historicist protocols to reconstruct the medieval aesthetic past as being “an overly limiting dichotomy in the context of medieval culture.”

[1] Using an exemplary medieval performance tradition of danse macabre, as a case study, and incorporating modes of inquiry used in new media, this project recasts Medievalists’ theoretical exercise in new practice through the designing and crafting of a responsive environment to negotiate spatiotemporal distance to further understand the significance of public participatory social act in the medieval aesthetic past. This project also furthers the inquiries of sensor-driven multi-dimensional human participatory environments in contemporary art practice; at the same time contributes to the ongoing discussion of the Humanities and its changing meaning in the context of digital culture.

Overview
Medievalists have long lamented the limits of historicist methods to reconstruct a far distant aesthetic past. [2] Archival vestiges on danse macabre largely present the visual representation of skeletal death dancers leading people from different walks of life to their graves. Is there more to the story?

Real-time motion capture, light, multi-channel projection and sound will be used to create a large-scale responsive environment in which dancers as well as participants trigger, activate, configure relevant visual and audible information, at the same time have the ability to collectively create additional images and sound to deepen the dialogue. Through the engagement with the experiential volume, they negotiate spatial and temporal relationship to gain further access to danse macabre. This project experiments to intensify medial juxtapositions to generate complex and dimensional temporal vectors to produce multivalent construct experiences.

The danse macabre Experience
The experiential volume contextually juxtaposes the historical with the contemporary. The three-dimensional space will be divided diagonally into angular composition either via rays of light or using physical medium. Contemporary dancers wearing sensors will weave in and out of, or transcend these angular dimensions to real-time trigger and manipulate visuals.

The public will be invited to interact within the space and to participate in a contemporary interpretation of danse macabre. They will wear mobile cameras and sensors to real-time transmit imagery to be weaved back into the overall projection visual. Participants will also verbally interact with recorded audio verses of danse macabre, and other sound elements. Here, dancers serve as temporal points of departure to ignite, connect, and thus provide opportunities to construct a sensory experience to extend imagination in order to gain access to reconstruct a far distant aesthetic past.

Beyond danse macabre
The heart of this project is an inquiry into the complex interrelationship between culture, image, text, viewer and participants in the context of passage of time; and, what it means to incorporate new media to allow for the swift shifting between structuring an experience and structured by that experience to examine the socio-historical and cultural framework of past cultural traditions in relationship to the present.

Camera is made on the restriction of cut out in a certain size. What is the framing on the things dispersed in the spread world in front of us, or the scenes made of things through the square frame of viewfinder? To see is a newly building action. To see or to watch is a self reflection as it is. When human is interfaced with environment surrounding his or her body, Human’s visual system is a medium to recognize the world. Furthermore, the visual system structures human’s experience and human’s memory is a structure made of accumulated his or her experience. Eventually, the perception of human is to identify the time and space by re-constructing the disconnected fragments into a series of the panorama. The square frame of camera is a frame of recognition as it is, and it can be regarded as format of thought because it is structured for watching through the cut out into a certain size.

The space in my photo is made of a series of many frames. It is a method of restructuring an image of a stadium by cumulating the actions of cutting out a certain stadium into smaller cutting. The precess of structuring into an image of stadium through the recombination of the floor images which are fragmented meaninglessly is even close to “play”. When a piece of photo out of the many pieces of photographs is shown on the computer monitor, it is not recognized what the part of where in which stadium it is. The 1st and the 2nd photographs are connected. And the shape as a certain stadium is emerged when the tenth of photographs are connected. I restructure the recombination of images and the decoded of stadium through such play. The view of the photograph can be something crossing over the frames as if the photograph can be taken through a frame. Therefore, to make the viewer of the photo (artwork) recognize the inner side of frame for the photo taker (artist) unconsciously, that it the space of photo which I really think about Since a photo is the image within a square boundary, the frame of a photo, a photographer as well as people who see a photo limits their space within the frame. My work, however, breaks the barrier of a traditional frame and I maximize the space of my work to cross each photo’s frame. When I took a photo, a part of the stadium, I unconsciously thought of both real image in the frame and illusion out of the frame. I expect people who see my work also enjoy breaking the frame of a photo and maximize the space of a photo.

Furthermore the space of my photo is not limited within the image combined with tens of photos. Now, when I see my work, I imagine both real image shown in my work and illusion not shown in my work. It is the space of my work, ARENA.

This paper discusses the relationship between the concept of ‘reflexive’ within forms of architectural practice. It will explore how aspects of current architectural practice have used the development of notational systems, as a remedy for its own failure to engage with the concept of the reflexive within design.

Red Hot Spinning: Immersive 3D Narrative in Asian Gaming is a new media installation project that explores the aesthetic dimension of Asian storytelling in a virtual environment. The project reflects critically on the unique Asian aesthetics in the wuxia genre that is different from those genres of the western game industries. One of the differences between Eastern and Western aesthetics is that Eastern game tends to focus on setting atmosphere or creating mood, whereas, Western style emphasizes on action. The game, Qin’s Moon, reflects Asian style cute wuxia game in an easy-to-use virtual environment. Through the use of virtual technology, part of the game’s playability will be reconstructed, and its audio and visual narratives will be integrated into this space of virtual reality to elicit an immersive and interactive experience of gaming in Asian games.

Is it still possible to experience a revelation in the age of Technology? One might be tempted to answer no. No, because Technology seems to be the incarnation of lies and appearance, concealment and glitter, seduction and death. No, because Technology projects a host of inconsistent, virtual shadows on the walls of our cave and we are immersed in a flow of contradictory language and images, lulled by false, elusive promises, tricked by the all too perfect computer — enhanced pictures of models, betrayed by visions of a better future cooked up by marketing and propaganda departments. No, because unlike a bright revelation that tears through the Night and shows that the Night is Night, Technology is Night. No, because Technology — and this may well be its worst feature — manages to make us believe that Night is Day. Marx’s camera obscura is like an echo to Plato’s cave.

Technology does not reveal that it is Technology. On the contrary, it invites us to participate still more in its own deployment by convincing us that it will make us ever more prosperous. Technology eliminates the distance that we could maintain between us and it by submerging us with its own imperatives of profitability, competition, forced labor and compulsory leisure. In fact, Technology can be defined precisely as the factor that abolishes the distance between humans and things. It is what abolishes the necessary distance implied in the very definition of the word revelation. There can be no revelation unless there is a veil to lift (re-velum). And veils, like theater curtains, imply a stage and an audience. These in turn imply a certain depth, a certain perspective that allows what needs to reveal itself to do so with majesty.

Artists have been quick to start exploring the potential of new media technologies for artistic expression. New media technologies have also attracted much critical interest since their interactive capabilities promise the possibility of a greater engagement on the part of the audience through physical participation in the artwork. Thus claims are frequently made that digital artworks are empowering the user while redefining the artist as a collaborator or facilitator. Implicit in such claims is the suggestion that artist and user now play virtually equal roles in the creation of artworks. This paper will argue that this is simply not the case. Through an analysis of the discussion, promotion and exhibition of new media art, it will suggest that there is an inherent problematic with regard to the ways in which new media art is promoted and presented in the gallery context. This problematic has resulted in the critical and practical neglect of the real-life user and the continuing privileging of the artist. The paper will argue that this inhibits digital artworks from fulfilling their interactive potential and will demonstrate how this functions to limit the possibilities of building a wider audience for new media.

Robot Choreography, a method of programming robots to dance, explores the aesthetic implications of robotic movement. This work, integrating human and robot performers on stage and in video, has met with a mixed reaction. Acceptance and anxiety issues raised by robots in our society now apply to the world of art, as the technology spills over into creative venues. Clearly, performers and audiences must be prepared and reeducated to fully comprehend and appreciate the value of technological innovations, Robot Choreography provides an exemplary case of how computer and robot technology has expanded the role of the artist and the audience. Robot performances illustrate that a real robot (programmable, intelligent and dexterous machine) is able to communicate and express feelings to an audience. Industrial robots, programmed to capture graceful and human-like gestures, are cast as dancers and actors in various performances. Seemingly, a machine comes to life on stage.

Integrating art and technology can provide a new look at the same world: art utilizes science and science recognizes art. As our world becomes integrated with new technology, the human response must grasp a reality beyond the novelty of mere illusion and imagination. The intention of merging the worlds of art and science is not to replace the artist but, based on skill and technique, create a new form of expression.

The following describes a research project‑in‑progress based on the idea to use curatorial practice as methodology for investigating responsive sound interfaces. Sound art is a transdisciplinary practice. As such, it creates new domains that may be used for redesign‑purposes. Not only do experiences of sound alter; the way we listen to sound is transforming as well. This paper analyse and discuss two responsive sound interfaces and claim that transdisciplinarity generates a redesign of the way we listen to and use sound.

It is well known that the 1960s was a pioneering decade in the history of computer art, particularly in the West. However, little attention has so far been paid to equally important work being undertaken in Japan. This paper aims to introduce the innovative work that was taking place in Japan at this time, and its origins and activities. With the aim of highlighting the importance of this little known history, particular attention will be paid to the work of Hiroshi Kawano. Kawano is a philosopher and aesthetician who was interested in both visual art and music, with the first publication of his visual art as early as 1964 in the IBM Review, making him one of the earliest pioneers experimenting with computing technologies in art. The paper will discuss how he first became interested in using computers as a way to apply his theory inspired by Max Bense and Claude Shannon, to visual art. His early theories, influences and experiments in the 1960s will be considered as well as his participation in the First Computer Art Contest Exhibition in Tokyo in 1968 and his first solo exhibition that took place in Tokyo in 1970.

Through research undertaken in Japan as well as in the Hiroshi Kawano archive that was acquired by ZKM|Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in 2010, this paper will bring to light the impressive contribution to computer arts history that has been made by Japanese pioneers such as Kawano, and how his work did not go unrecognised then, and should be remembered today.

RTI is planning a direct action compute, salvage programme and art installation during Manchester’s Digital Summer. Here’s a quote from RTI’s website:

1. 1998 over 1 million PCs are scheduled to be dumped by British businesses. As it stands most of this equipment will end up in landfill.

2. Artists are the ideal people to experiment wilh redundant technology. While the rest of us may find that computers won’t do the tasks we want them to, artists can investigate playfully and be creative with what the machines can do, rather than be frustrated by what they can’t.

3. Artists should be making work that is relevant to what’s going on right now. But many of them aren’t getting involved with information technology because it’s expensive.

There’s been a lot of media attention given to artworks that use the newest, most expensive computer. But many these artworks seem less like works of art than like advertisements for the latest technology.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Cathode Ray Tube, Materiality, Recycle, Remediated Technology, Waste Cycles, Disrupted Technological Development, Redundant Technology.

The cathode ray tube (CRT) found in television sets, radar, oscilloscopes and legacy computer monitors, like many redundant technologies have been integral to Installation and Video Art since their first documented use in galleries in the early 1960s. Despite a steady decline in their production since 2005, the recent use of CRTʼs by video and installation artists continues in the work of artists such as Justene Williams (Crutch Dance, 2011), Pia Van Gelder (Apparition Apparatus, 2012) and Tivon Rice (Burn-In Portrait # 1, 2007-2010). Most of the literature in the field of CRT’s in contemporary art, such as Miller (2013), Ratti (2013), Stumm (2004) and Laurenson (2005) focuses either on the material logistics of the use of CRT’s and future curatorial implications, or their utilization as ‘electronic canvases’ – conduits for pre-recorded/transmitted images. This paper explores the use of the CRT in video installation art in an attempt to distinguish, categorize and define modes of disruption to the mainstream lineal narrative of media consumption caused by artists using what are commonly deemed obsolete or redundant technologies.

The article turns to exploration, understanding and practice of artistic-scientific landscape transformations. The landscape is understood as the space of experience dominated by the embodiment of the subjects and objects. Physically, the body inhabits the space that it is. To be is to become a matter of corporal space. Thus, the space is part of the body. Body and space are blended, mixed, impregnated because  the spatial structure of landscape belongs to the  description of our surroundings. The sensório-motor apparatus is on the landscape, space for anthropic proposal, as Peter Anders’s (2003) purpose, based on human experience in the body, between the space and information. The research involves studies on the imagined geography and environment art.”

Geotagging  transforms the territorial configuration of the landscape by creating an abstract projection of connection nodes in a global cartography, and each new appearance of synthetic objects, change the context and  also the meaning generation process. According to the Brazilian geographer Milton Santos (2004), physical reconfiguration allows the construction of a new story. We, the humans beings,  are responsible for the rebuilt our environment. and Santos purpose that it happens through the perception of motion of the all things and events. In this re-construction of the environment we exist as co-loccated ecological beings. Domingues (2008) stress that the subject becomes biocybrid  in the flow of the dynamic relation between subject, object and environment. And this proposition overcomes the dichotomy between subject and object, as well as the nature and culture.

Our researches describes a transdisciplinary artistic project in art and technoscience that is  developening in the LART– Research Laboratory of Art and TechnoScience, at the University of Brasília, Brazil.

ABSTRACT

As the -indirect or direct- result of visual and aural stimuli (other stimuli are left aside) abstract worlds come into being in the artist’s brain. To make these worlds, which, in this initial stage, do only reside in the brain, perceptible to others, an interpretation of them by means of sounds and/or images is required (see diagram). Here, the task of the artist is to find a balance between the abstract world and its interpretation, i.e. the abstract world should be ‘mapped’ onto real world objects like sounds, moving pictures on a screen or paint on a canvas. One might say, the artistic challenge lies within the field of tension between the real world and the abstract world.

REFLEXION In (out of) Sync is a reactive installation consisting of electroluminescent (EL) wire, in which visitors are encouraged to create together a light environment. In this manner two visitors are invited to sit next to each other surrounded by a light structure made of EL wire steered by their heartbeat via a finger pulse sensor. The purpose of this project is on the one hand to make visible unconscious internal reactions that are produced in the subject in a simple situation such as sitting next to another human being; on the other hand the project serves the purpose of inviting people to be aware of their inner-self and of the other, as well as of their environment. The installation is currently a work-inprogress.

This interdisciplinary research mathematically analyzes an old philosophical idea: the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions somehow governed by the laws of nature. The research searches for mathematically elegant equations describing the paring between cause and effect, particularly when the laws of nature seem random and unpredictable. Based on the research, our art practice creates linkage between the scientific description of randomness and its reflection in contemporary culture. It seeks to inquire the relationship between perceived virtual experiences in science and the lived experience of accepting a certain degree of chaos in our daily routine. It also blurs the border between scientific nature and its physical appearance.

This research is titled Regular Irregularity (R.I.).Irregularity refers to an apparently complex random system, and Regular refers to a simple equation describing the system. Iteration method, a mathematical operation that repeatedly feeds the result of an equation back into the equation itself, is commonly used in the study of a random system. R.I. utilizes the iteration method to model a random system’s sequential behavior, which exhibits extreme sensitivity to the input values. R.I. excavates further by developing fitting techniques suitable for predicting future events in a random system.

Projects under investigation using R.I. theory are carried out under the name of Doodle Lab, http://sifting.org/doodlelab. These projects include, Random Marking which examines the resemblance between lines generated by mathematical iteration method and by random mark making; Baby NuNa transforms sound collected near a nuclear power plant into visual patterns forming a visually chaotic representation of public perception depicting controversy associated with nuclear power plants; GPS doodling geographically maps an individual’s daily movement, compares the movement patterns made by different individuals; and Beijing 2008 converts Chinese calligraphy into corresponding sound and graphic patterns using R.I. theory.

This is a fictorical account of the life of a multifaceted protagonist we know as Picturebook. Our hero is both antiquated and innovative. Over time, Picturebook has drawn on a myriad of media in order to communicate and build an active relationship with both adults and children. From the early days, when Picturebook was a handcrafted infant, to the adolescence of the Gutenberg era, this biography traces a life that has a sense of an ending.

Like many young adults, contemporary Picturebook refuses to adhere to notions of endings. It ignores prophesies of doom, stubbornly aligning with its savvy cousins Game and Animation as it forges a silicon future. As a consequence, Picturebook now speaks to a reader who is alone – in solitude. Yet will there come a time when adults and children once again sit side by side and share in the company of Picturebook? Let us take you by the hand as we meander through past tales and future musings. History, after all, is but a story waiting to be told.

Abstract

This paper explores the emergence of cyberformance, a form of live networked performance, and its impact on the established discourse of theatre, in particular the concepts of liveness and presence. The changing role of the audience, its relationship with the performers, and inter-audience relationships are also examined.

Abstract

Current video games are commonly based on an underlying narrative structure. As with most narratives in various media, the intention is often to affect the audience on an emotional level. To accomplish this, the storyteller creates a world that mimics or references the audience’s ‘real’ experiences. Once the audience can accept the virtual worlds of these media they are more likely to be receptive to the characters, story elements and aesthetic cues aimed at affecting their emotional responses to the experience. The game experience is created through the relationship of player to the environment within the narrative structure and underlying rules of the game. While the relationships and interactions among players may be the driving force in the game experience, the aesthetics of the game world play a supporting and sometimes central role in efforts to establish mood and influence players’ emotions. ‘It is the game’s aesthetics that generate the atmosphere necessary to establish a themed environment, but it is not the determining factor in the meaning of the game’ (Wright 2007: 252).

In this paper we will focus on how emotional cues are expressed through aesthetic elements that form the basis of game world design. In this sense mood is not emotion, but an environment that favours some emotions and discourages others. Once the audience is in the proper mood, the author may use additional storytelling devices to evoke a specific emotion; for instance, once the audience is in a suspenseful mood, the author can scare them more easily. Mood management theory explains how people select specific media to suit the mood they are in or wish to be in. Studies have shown that a player’s mood influences decisions made in the game and that the mood a game communicates to a player can influence that player’s later behaviour in real life.

The Relative Velocity Inscription Device is a live scientific experiment in the form of an automated electronic installation in which Paul Vanouse literally races skin-colour genes from his Jamaican-American family against one another. Vanouse’s work Operational Fictions/The Relative Velocity Inscription Device explores peculiar intersections of “big-science” and popular culture. It addresses complex issues raised by varied new technologies through these very technologies. These Operational Fictions are hybrid entities — simultaneously functional machines and fanciful representations — which are intended to resonate in the equally hyper-real context of the contemporary landscape. Contextualizing this work are previous projects involving human genomics such as Cult of the New Eve and his current project Latent Figure Protocol.

This presentation addresses the cultural activism manifest in widespread free culture and open access movements, which engage reproductive practices and technologies in a radical response to cultural  policies that do not adequately acknowledge the enormous importance of sharing and reusing for creative processes. Tracing a shift away from negative opposition to such policies (which had had a tendency to feed the criminalizing rhetoric of dominant intellectual property discourse), my paper shows how contemporary remix and mash up cultures carve out para-legal spaces which challenge the relevance of property-based intellectual property policies by imagining alternatives that invoke concepts of the common and the collective, thereby pointing to a vacuum of functional and relevant cultural policy. Among the examples presented in my discussion will be the challenging of digital rights management technology by media art collectives and sampling musicians, and the critical appropriation of data-mining technologies by contemporary appropriation artists.

While digital technologies continue to make copying an inevitable component of virtually all of  our interactions with contemporary cultural content, creative expressions that incorporate processes of appropriation and copying continue to face sweeping vilification. At the same time, cultural theorists broadly acknowledge that all art forms that are based in reproductive media have contributed to the emergence of a resistant, critical cultural landscape which upholds open access and sharing as concepts that are universally embedded in humankind’s inherent drive to create and communicate. The different fields in which these values are manifest all explore a democratization of culture that benefits from the reproductive qualities of digital media. In this, insistence on the positive value of copying and sharing always resists the enclosure of creativity and productivity by intellectual property policies that are based on profit-driven models of private property. Yet, over the past few years this resistance has taken on a new quality. Initially, opposition tended to directly target property-based limits to creativity. My paper will trace a shift away from resistance that is based on the diametrical, often anarchical opposition of property-based models. I will discuss how instead, resistant cultural movements that insist on the merits  of sharing and copying are today framed in a positive rhetoric of civil liberties and constitutional as well as human rights.

As I will show, this approach makes possible a conceptualization of resistance to existing cultural policy that refuses to indirectly confirm the validity of profit-oriented intellectual property regimes (i.e., theft as a challenge to property), but that challenges this assumed validity through the invocation of basic  democratic values such as the freedom of expression, the freedom to receive and impart information and ideas, or the right to privacy, as outline, for example, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and various national constitutions. A range of examples from the world of contemporary art will show how this pushes existing national and transnational doctrines of fair use and fair dealing to their limits, by  urgently demonstrating the need for policies that honor the inherent value of sharing and collaboration, and by imagining (and performing) viable alternatives to traditional property models.

The following is a proposal for an introductory revision in understanding the notion of the Collective in Latin American art creation; regarded as a model for dislocation of programmed strategies as an alternate layout to Contemporary Art practises. In which ways the collective and the notion of “being networked” -proposed by Surófona collectiveallows us to develop a narrative of divergences and confluences over a complex identity, where Language, both spoken and written, reveal both differentiation and identification.

Three ways substantiate the practise of the collective: (I) “Regiocal” creation (regional and local relations), (II) Alongside other subjectivities, (III) in Alternative circuits. This way, it is intended to reveal the ever present cultural multiplicity in LatinAmerica as a contrastive factor (opposed to unifying and hegemonic views sustained in globalist voices), denoting a diverging view of wide and contrasting shades, blurring the notion of an unified body. Therefore, a question arises on the existence of a possible discursive body in the regional practises of Art and technology.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Interactive art, participatory art, politically engaged art, digital art, new media art, surveillance, embodiment, interactivity.

Remote Sensing is an interactive artwork that previewed during The Image in Question conference at the University of Sydney in August 2014. Making the work led me to ask, “Why has interactive art been sidelined in recent publications about participatory art and politically engaged practice?” In this paper I discuss recent theoretical perspectives on participatory art and interactive art and the sociopolitical and cultural contexts for my work Remote Sensing, which seeks to raise awareness about surveillance. As a vehicle for social and political comment, interactive art objects might not have the ‘hit-and-run’ appeal of tactical media and augmented reality projects but as divisions between art forms become increasingly blurred perhaps it is time to rethink interactive art, which engages the user in embodied actions.

What does locative media from remote Australian Indigenous communities look like? How does access to Next G mobile phones impact remote communities communications? What media is being created on these devices?

This paper is an analysis of some of the ad hoc strategies and technologies being used in remote and rural in Australia to leapfrog the digital divide; and an analysis of the potential to introduce tools and processes that encourage creative development and cultural engagement that is both iterative and participatory.

Despite Australia’s position as an industrialised nation, there are still significant limitations to broadband access in regional and remote locations. This scenario presents as a challenge as well as an opportunity for residents. Many people living in these areas have worked around the lack of access to broadband in a range of creative ways, especially by the use of Next G mobile phone technology.

There is much talk of ‘closing the gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and this initiative has implications on a range of issues, most significantly access to health and education services. But what is emerging as an interesting phenomenon is how young people in remote Indigenous communities are engaging with mobile technology as a means to access the Internet as well as communicate with friends and family.

These will be a number of examples presented of works created collaboratively with young people from remote communities and documentation of the project, which was aimed at skills development and transfer and creative expression.

Revolution considered through a textual eruption of poetic play, whereby interactivity and digitalisation decentres the author, may be a way of also de-centering the polarisation associated with the term ‘Revolution’. A critique must emerge of the way new technologies are appropriated, read and thus written, becoming perhaps fetishized; a repetition of ‘toys for the boys’, where the immediacy of result and control take precedence over ephemerality and jouissance?

As Barthes suggests ‘As institution, the author is dead…but in the text…I desire the author.’ (Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, Hill and Wang, 1975, p.27)

Therefore how does this desire form the interactive space in its image? If desire and fetish can be read for a vacillation and deferral rather than a projection and a goal, surely the uniqueness will be removed from new technology as the answer, to a re-reading of the materiality of existing and traditional creative processes. Perhaps the question then becomes whether new technology can shift the emphasis of practice into a reconsideration of cultural product, where the value of interactivity of process; between people, people and machines, person and materials or machine and materials, displaces that of finished article.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Maps; abstract inscription; phenomenon; Knowledge Network.

Maps are a key element in the practices of Rodrigo Arteaga and of Fitz Roy, despite the different backgrounds, and the interval of centuries. Fitz Roy is the commander of Beagle and Adventure who explored the Chilean landscape cut by the oceanographic topography, channels, rivers and capes from Patagonia to the Antarctic Continent in the nineteenth century. Rodrigo Arteaga is the young Chilean artist, in exhibition since 2009, whose work deals with expanded cartographies like hydrographic basin, astronomy and others. In Libros Abiertos a series from 2012, Arteaga juxtaposes pages taken from old volumes of anatomy, botany, astrology, maps of the watershed. The capillarity of rivers and tributaries are displayed next to scientific images of arterial anatomy and membrane fragments suggesting what, in a way, resembles calligraphies to be interpreted. We know that for the observed phenomena to be transcribed into a flat topography, various tools and much knowledge are needed. And yet the transcription should be intelligible in the Knowledge Network. This is exactly what Fitz Roy wanted from the phenomenon transformed into a readable abstract inscription. Rodrigo Arteaga predicts that the inscription is reversible and can be reopened into the observed phenomenon again.

Working as a freelance digital image-maker, Joe Magee has had over 500 digital images published – from the New York Times to Liberation. He currently has weekly images in The Guardian and The Independent. Reproduction, the current stage in an evolving exhibition project, is a series of digital images which draws parallels between geneticist and artist – both compulsively reconstructing in pursuit of the intangible.

The aim of this research is to explore the expressive nature of dreams related to visual arts. Dream is equal to thinking in sleep, it is thinking in a simulation. This simulated world is built with infinite creative material. The lack of self reflective awareness in dreams leads us to perceive the supernatural, surreal or irrational aspects of this world simulation as real. In my opinion dreams are developed in absence of a “visual expression organ“. Humans and other mammals usually have an auditory organ of perception (ears), an auditory organ of expression (vocal tract) and a visual organ of perception (eyes). However, we lack a “visual organ of expression“, which can be compared to a monitor. My theory links visual mental imagery in general and dreams in particular with this missing visual expression organ. In my opinion this organ is still in evolution. Because dreams and visual arts resemble each other in many ways, such as creating imaginative worlds using a visual language with dramatic presentations, symbols, allusions and ironies, I propose that visual arts have emerged as a prosthesis for this missing visual expression organ.

There are many analogies between artistic expressions and dreams and likewise there are many artistic possibilities to depict dream experiences [1]. Van de Castle stated that dreams and films have many features in common such as moving visual images, changes in settings and characters, spoken conversations, perceptual distortions, temporal discontinuities or flashbacks. [2] Virtual reality can mimic dream experience with a higher fidelity than other media. Biocca, Kim and Levy track the development of virtual reality throughout the art history with the ambition to create a magical “ultimate window” which can exhibit the “essential copy” [3]. Biocca and Levy suggested virtual reality based simulation as a medium of communication. [4] Both dreams and virtual reality can imitate physical reality as a simulation or go beyond its limits and create impossible or bizarre.

The alternation between dream and awake states creates a contemplative fictional life as an intermediate position. Dreams are subjective and volatile worlds of thought, which can be experienced as non-intersubjective and immersive. Simulation theories of dreaming describe dreaming as a world simulation in a functional form. Revonsuo defines dream experiences as world simulations with a virtual self, surrounded by virtual places, objects and characters (Revonsuo 2006). In “Social Simulation Theory” Revonsuo et. al. describe the function of dreaming as follows: As a social being, humans simulate their social perception, communication and behaviour in dreams for the purpose of detection, recognition and identification of other humans (Revonsuo et. al. 2015) . Dreams are tightly related to visual arts especially to virtual reality in their resemblance of being a world simulation. At the moment of its creation dream happens as a solipsistic artwork. Solipsistic means that dreams can only be experienced by the dreamers themselves. The dream as an artwork is then produced and perceived by the same person. Through the lack of self reflective awareness, the dreamer is unaware that he/she is both the creator and recipient of dream world, i.e. dreamers are both artists and observers of the oneiric art. And exactly here lies the major difference between virtual reality and dream.

Virtual reality experiences can be shared. In waking life, through visual perception, persons, scenes and objects are transformed from world into mental images. In my studies, I try to develop a method in order to conduct the transformation in the opposite way as well. The aim of the „Reproduction Method“ is to transform mental images such as dream images into visual perceivable images. The term “reproduction” refers to a process in fine arts. Reproduction techniques, such as photography and video, are used to make artworks accessible to broader audiences, who cannot be present at the exhibition of the artwork. I think a similar approach can be applied to dreams. Developing a dream reproduction method will make dreams accessible for people who cannot be on the place and time when the dream occurs, i.e. dream will be no more a solipsistic experience. This will enable a more objective study of dream imagery. In this talk I want to present several of my artworks. [7]

What happens when as a pregnant woman you are simultaneously interpellated by both art and cyberspace? This paper examines the social value of reproduction within the body of the same producer. The author situates her own experience (to avoid my possible dismissal as case material) by reviewing a range of writings on motherhood. These are in turn related to discourses of the post-human. Finally, Jones documents the experiences of becoming-mother and becoming-digital artist, identifying transient sites which go unseen and unnoticed by western culture.

“Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever”   _Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, 1911

How will we live on the Moon? Despite long-term plans to send humans to Mars, in the short term the Moon is the most likely place to rehearse living away from the Earth. It is envisaged that sooner or later a small outpost of humans and robots will be established, possibly living in tunnels drilled under the Moon’s surface and quite possibly established by emerging superpowers such as China or India.

It is likely that a future moon habitat would be a human/robotic presence on the South Pole or the Moon where water ice is expected to be found. So how might artists respond to this new territory, which technically belongs to everyone? One strategy could be the pre-emptive setting up of a micronation which could claim the Moon independent of national or commercial interests.?This stragegy has already been used by artists such as Slovenia’s Neue Slovenisch Kunst (NSK) who issued their own passports, the Danish group N55 or artists like Antti Laitinen. Alexandra Mir famously declared herself the ‘First Woman onThe Moon’ on a Dutch beach.

The initial idea came from a recent International Astronautical Federation meeting in Paris attended by the exhibition curators, in which issues of space governance were discussed. A United Nations official with an interest in the peaceful uses of space stated, “The last thing we want to propose is a Republic of the Moon”. We wondered: why not?  So we propose to set up, in advance, an artist’s micronation- a Republic of the Moon and will communicate with specific artists and groups inviting them to participate, to start thinking about methods of governance, diplomacy and autonomy of this future artist’s territory.

Keywords: Wearable technology, laughter, responsive wearable tech, psychophysiological mirroring, social mimicry, emotion contagion, prosocial behavior

This paper presents the potentials of laughter, a natural body expression that can elicit enjoyment and positive mood, as a bodyhacking intervention on physical social isolation. We report on our exploratory research investigating how an audio-visual aesthetic for laughter on a wearable design can prompt a sensibility of social warmth and connectedness within a shared public space. Laughing Dress is a wearable responsive garment that displays light and audio representations of social distances based on physical distances and kinetic interactions between wearer and colocated participants. Through deconstructing and repurposing the body’s organic composition of laughter, new perspectives on our human and social body, against other human entities are introduced in relation to our situated environment. This new paradigm of transferring positive emotion through a wearable tangible interaction design initiates new public interaction possibilities for prosocial connection and bonding.

Keywords: Vancouver Park Board, Artist Field House Studio Residency, community-engaged art, urban space

Parks throughout the City of Vancouver, British Columbia, have “field-houses” where on-site caretakers formerly resided and over time, have become vacated. Having a surplus of these unused facilities, the Vancouver Park Board explored options to repurpose these spaces. As part of the Cultural Plan, the City and Park Board sought to provide artists free space, in exchange for 350 hours of their time engaging the community and having opportunities to develop artistic practices. The Field House Studio Program places artists with community engaged and social practices into neighbourhoods to create work in and with community. The program brings the arts as an integral part of everyday life, into Vancouver neighbourhoods. It creates space to invite community, colleagues and curious visitors to share in intimate creative processes with artists through daily, shared arts experiences that are social, cooperative and collaborative. This paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of building arts communities, while emphasising its importance in emerging multi-disciplinary discourse related to urban futures.

This document discusses creation environments of virtual reality, understood as temporal and spatial constructions that assemble objects, sounds, and images mediated by digital technology, in a habitable environment interaction. In general terms, relates the formal and functional structures between the perceptual, sensory, and cognitive with the object, space, and body, these being the new field of digital interfaces. In summary, the research explores how the use of technology platforms enables the ownership and development of fields of interaction and interface design, the development of different virtual reality environments was planed, so it allowed a glimpse of how the analysis for formal and digital structure today is not only happening by the ratio of feedback, but by the interface, gesture and control supported in virtual media spaces. 360 poses the evolution into a new type of environments, of synesthetic character, to examine these hypotheses in the research there were a series of prototypes that corroborate and rethink some of the ideas these parameters were developed under functional prototyping methodology which is described briefly at the end of the document.

Artist Steve Storz will speak and show images about the kinetic sculpture workshop he gave at Taos Academy with kids who built machines conjured from their imaginations. Using low voltage electronics and light duty power tools kids made: a robot with lighted top hat and rotating claw hand, a surplus Los Alamos Labs test device with electronic flowers growing out of it, a Paranormal Activity Imager, an Energy Portal with hand carved wooden gears and a Political Ping Pong sculpture using air to push a ‘president’ between rivaling parties and lots more. The sculptures are marvelous examples of the synergy that comes from combining STEM plus Art concepts.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Documentation, research through art, research through design, experience design, exhibition

The practice of research through art and design can pose challenges in terms of evaluating contributions, formalizing methodologies and generating extensible principles. Creating a middle layer of critique and interpretation between the generated artifacts of research through art and design and the foundation of general theory provides a viable space for exploration. We propose integrating artifact description, process documentation and participatory annotation as a useful approach in this intermediate critical area. We introduce a multimodal documentation framework for capturing, annotating and presenting the activities, processes and generated artifacts of research through art and design practice. We describe findings from our experience documenting a series of research through design workshops, and illustrate our annotation and presentation approach in the form of a curated exhibition.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Artists’ research, immanence, encounter, phenomenology, Deleuze, Agamben, lacuna, Laura U. Marks.

My practice-based research explores what is invisible in the visual realm in order to investigate immanence, haptic perception, and non-visual knowledge. I approach the non-visible realm through video, animation, writing, installation, experimental collaboration, and drawing. Through this context, I ask: what is at stake in the recent shift in Canadian academic institutions for artists to define their work as artist-researchers? While this shift does suit the practice of many artists (myself included) it also carries a dangerous edge, a subtle implication that applying ‘research’ to art practice entails a more rational, articulable, or self apparent explanation of the function and value of art. The coined term “researchify” exemplifies this erroneous rational order. I argue that this urge to “researchify” is a dangerous tendency, and artists must protect the unutterable lacuna within their process. The leap of perception in the art experience remains fundamentally within experiencing the art itself. Art is an encounter that exists through the act of making and/or through the viewer’s experience, accessible through phenomenological investigation. I apply the basic tenets of Gilles Deleuze’s fold, Giorgio Agamben’s lacuna, and Laura U. Mark’s immanence of irreversible time to eschew rational over-determination

Janet Echelman found her voice as an artist when her paints went missing, which forced her to look towards her surroundings and at a new art material – fishing nets. Now she makes billowing sculpture the scale of buildings that become inviting focal points for civic life. She combines ancient craft with cutting-edge technology to create monumental, ultra-lightweight art that moves gently with the wind.

How can we enhance public spaces in cities to make them engage individuals and community? What can entice us to slow down and take a moment of pause in our busy lives? Janet Echelman shares her journey exploring these questions in cities across the globe, from San Francisco to New York City, Amsterdam to Sydney. Echelman will discuss her work to create social spaces for people to gather, including her most recent work, which embodies the infusion of art and technology. “Skies Painted with Unnumbered Sparks” spanned 745 feet across Vancouver’s waterfront and was presented with an interactive lighting program, as visitors were able to choreograph the lighting in real time using physical gestures on their mobile devices.

Residency and exchange programs, networks and formal structures support the ability for practitioners, curators, writers and academics to meet with each other, create new work and develop new ideas. The Residencies, Symposia and Directories Group aims to:

a. Identify residency programmes in place in the region
b. Assess existing dialogue and collaborative activity between networks and organisations
c. Develop a credible on-going platform for key organisations to collaborate, capitalise and share resources to support residency programmes

Key questions
To what extent are these networks, organizations and programs already in dialogue with each other? What possibilities are there to create new connections and forge new relationships? This international working group looks at shared programming, residencies, exhibition and research opportunities.

To facilitate this and other collaborative opportunities, the group will develop the Pacific-Rim New Media Directory. It will serve as:

a. A platform for the exchange of information on the development of new media arts and initiatives in all countries represented at the Summit.
b. Become a virtual meeting point for diverse approaches to new media in the vast region of Asia-Pacific.
c. Provide a ‘first point of entry’ for the relevant stakeholders.

When our relationship to time, history and the ‘archive’ is being reconfigured by computation, it is clear that established approaches to public display of images require reconsideration. The digital turn provides photography curators operating in public galleries with an extraordinary challenge, to reconsider how they engage with audiences and how they articulate their practice within and outside network culture. Today, one can no longer speak of photography in terms of discrete, framed, singular images (if one ever could). The question becomes: Where is the image? Every minute, millions of fingers swipe the screens of iPhones and iPads in the hope that each caress will bring forth an image more retinally seductive than the last. The photograph on-screen is experienced in movement, as a flow of temporary constellations brought to the screen through algorithmic operations obscured by the interface. The paradox, therefore, is that whilst photography has been completely incorporated into general computing, the internet has intensified photography’s visibility and popularity. The curatorial challenge is to engage the audience with this form of visuality without reducing its processural complexity. Taking my experience curating the digital program at The Photographers’ Gallery, London as its starting point, this paper will explore digital resistance and resistance to digital in relation to cultural value, authorship, audience and the archive.

Re-locating migrants: resonance, borderlines and virtual migrants, a political visualization of history and globalization through digital art.

Along with the dominance of post-modernism in western art, Digital Arts have often been singled out for being ‘content free’, the victory of style over content While this comes under increasing criticism, non-linear forms of narrative also have roots in older traditions, such as cinematic montage as developed by Eisenstein to expose underlying political ideas and relationships. Digital art can restore to the montage the ability to communicate complex ideas and ultimately assert a popular consciousness around the theme of globalization. Further problems arise due to the largely western frame of reference for post-modernism and for the vast majority of new media art.

‘Borderlines’ and ‘Resonance’ focus on migrant issues and imperialist globalization to create works concerned with Black and Third World aesthetics and the issues around a European-dominated audience for such work, as in Britain. One role for the digital artist must be to connect with content and global realities; this is not just a social argument, it is an aesthetic one.

In the mid-1960s I wanted to find out where the action was, go to the front lines, and participate in making the future happen. In one of the first BASIC classes at Dartmouth College, I discovered the computer. Later as a grad student in Computer Science, I found that my liberal arts background had failed to inculcate the proper engineering values. While I thought of the encounter between human and machine in philosophical terms, to view it as one of the central dramas of our time, the computer science field concerned itself with the optimisation of computer hardware resources. I considered the human being the precious resource and wanted the computer to adapt to me rather than the other way around.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Responsive Environments, Protagonism, The Gift, Sustenance, Productive Principle.

This positioning paper is in two parts. The first part examines the notion of ‘the gift’ as applied to artistic works in The ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Artwork, edited by Anna Dezeuze (2010) and to disrupt this notion with the countervailing concept of sustenance. This analysis critiques sociologist Marcel Mauss’ research into the First Peoples of Canada, specifically in terms of the development of his theory of ‘potlatch’ based predominantly on the Kwakwakw’wakw People and their destruction of property as a show of strength. The paper seeks to disrupt this concept, summarised as ‘the ‘gift’ as obligation’, with the Coast Salish Peoples’ practices of offering sustenance to their fellow tribes through the sharing of food wealth. This can, it is asserted, provide resources for the author’s present research on responsive environments. The second part explores the principle of sustenance. The paper argues that, from this perspective the artist’s role is to create resources that can be productively extended, challenged or repurposed by a process of ‘protagonism’. This is because those resources, supported by digital technologies, sustain opportunities both in and out beyond responsive environments. This position, it is asserted, supports an intensification and diversification of Claire Bishop’s participation motivations of ‘activation’, ‘authorship’ and ‘community’.

Modern techniques for high resolution still image display offer new expressive possibilities for photographic portraiture and exhibition. Responsive Portraits challenges the notion of static photographic portraiture as the unique, ideal visual representation of its subject. Editors are usually confronted with choosing ONE ideal portrait from a limited set of pictures which represent poses, gestures, and expressions that ALL contribute to define a character. In our view the entire set of a subject’s typical portraits should be kept for interactive exhibitions. A responsive portrait consists of a multiplicity of views whose dynamic presentation results from the interaction between the viewer and the image.The viewer’s proximity to the image, head movements, and facial expressions elicit dynamic responses from the portrait, driven by the portrait’s own set of autonomous behaviors. This type of interaction reproduces an encounter between two people: the viewer and the character portrayed. The individual’s experience of the portrait is unique, because it is based on the dynamics of the encounter rather than on the existence of a unique, ideal portrait of the subject.The sensing technology that we used is a computer vision system which tracks the viewer’s head movements and facial expressions as she interacts with the digital portrait; therefore, the whole notion of “who is watching who” is reversed: the object becomes the subject, the subject is observed. Face recognition techniques allow the portraited character to keep a record of previous encounters with a visitor and adjust their response based on the history of their interactions.