Presentation Data Table

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.

Sensing and responding to dynamic human activity occupies a rich position in the history of interactive art. Artists such as Camille Utterback, Golan Levin and Petra Gemeinboeck have explored human movement as a physical, distributed and social phenomenon. Their work and that of the broader community engaged in creating responsive experiential art is the focus of our research and the inspiration for our creative experimentation.

We present an overview of artworks that track and display human activity, particularly movement. We focus on the temporal and spatial lenses adopted by each work in interrogating and responding to human movement. The purpose and provocation of these diverse installations span a range from utilitarian to aesthetic.  Works such as Ishii’s Pinwheels and Agamanolis’ Reflexion provide information on social and technological interactions. In contrast, Rokeby’s San Marco Flow and Gemeinboeck’s Impossible Geographies render patterns of movement through space at vastly different scales and require varying levels of human participation. The works represent a distribution of approaches in terms of feedback mechanisms, analysis of captured data and scale of detected and represented activity.

Inspired by these works, we introduce Building with a Memory, an interactive installation which captures and represents human movement in a collaborative, multi-use workplace. We explore co-located and distributed sensing and feedback, and display activity over varying scales from a single room to the wider surrounding environment.  The workspaces in this building span the gamut from fabrication and performance spaces to computer labs.  Each hosts a variety of individual and group activities, characterized by different kinds of physical and audio activity.  Recording, analyzing and representing the ebb and flow of these activities over time provides opportunities for communal reflection and to develop insight into the community, for members and visitors alike. Indirect accent lighting and video provide feedback in an ambient manner. While we capture activity over time, we mask identity of individuals. This approach maintains privacy while providing practical information on the history of the community. We describe three integrated implementations of the Building with a Memory installation and provide insights into the challenges, reactions and impact of our work.

This paper presents a vision for rethinking old paradigms, and ideas we take for granted in our everyday lives by revisiting them through the eyes of new technology. While open to many fields, this paper focuses on methodologies in the field of typography that have been defined and understood for centuries. Many aspects of modern typography were defined at the time Gutenberg’s press was presented to the world, and are now deeply rooted in everyday perception.

Rethinking The Baseline considers the impact of new technologies on the linearity of typographic practice. It does so by presenting a media-art research project that exemplifies the possibility for non-linear typesetting through original artistic software as well as exhibited artworks that support a challenge to fundamental concepts in the field of typography. The software, called TypeIs, utilizes two elements that separate it from modern commercial typesetting software.

Foremost, a weighted baseline is used to determine the look and feel of individual characters. Second, a custom system for managing text allows for the individual retrieval of characters for rendering in real-time. Rather than setting a line, copying text, adding it to the line, then performing a variety of typesetting functions in a step-by step manner, the artist can draw directly to the canvas, but instead of ink, letters flow from his pen. Pressure, speed, angle, and direction are all mapped directly to each character which appear individually as the artist draws through any kind of text. Software applications are presented as a series of ongoing media-art research projects which can be thought of as digital canvases, such that the artist plays a predominant role in the creation of artworks, rather than submitting to generative or computational techniques.

The projects, however, are only example applications that utilize new technologies to rethink old ideas. The work that forms the basis of this paper also has ties to the field of gaming. Through the use of intelligent interactive surfaces, it is possible to reinvent our relationship to the idea of the grid, the turn, and rules that we inherently understand in the field of board games.

This paper theorizes emergent political qualities of media art as challenging the boundaries or definition of the social through an active experimentation with things. At a time where categorizations of artistic engagements with technology are increasingly complex and unclear – especially in the rifts, overlaps and possible convergence between new media and contemporary art (Manovich, 1996; Lovink, 2008; Quaranta, 2010) – I offer a theorization of object-orientated politics as a defining impulse of media art practice. Of course, stressing the constitutive role of things, materialities or objects has become something of a customary gesture in the field, from vitalist accounts of media ecology by Matthew Fuller (2004) and Andreas Broeckmann (1995) to the medium-specificity of software studies or general use of a vocabulary of non-human agencies inspired by Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and the work of Bruno Latour. As part of a broad ‘material turn’ throughout philosophy, social sciences and cultural studies, this orientation toward things, however, raises both important ontological and epistemological questions, especially regarding understandings of the role of politics. Against this general backdrop, my paper, therefore, aims to contribute to definitions of media art projects forged in adversarial contexts (works that might also be considered as examples of tactical media) and to understandings of an object-orientated politics through the concept of reticular aesthetics.

With reference to the ‘ecosophic’ art practice of Critical Art Ensemble and Preemptive Media as illustrative examples, my argument is that an important long-term trend in media art has been to draw together or reticulate object-orientated agencies in a political register. This mode of reticular aesthetics cannot be understood as purely representational; rather, it refers to projects that actively incorporate objects into the processual expressiveness of the work. Aesthetics here is defined in the well-known terms of Jacques Rancière (2006; 2010) as sense (aesthesis), or more specifically, as the ‘distribution of the sensible’ – where political resonance occurs by overturning stabilized formations of perception. However, as opposed to Rancière’s exclusive concern with subjectivities (or alternative contemporary art theorizations of inter-subjective or relational aesthetics), my argument is that a significant feature of media art is an engagement with objects as participating in political expressions by including themselves out. This should be understood as the definitive critical gesture of reticular aesthetics: a reordering of sense by experimental techniques that make objects intelligible, allowing everyday technical things to speak and become visible.

Panel: On the Persistence of Hardware

This paper the­o­rizes emer­gent po­lit­i­cal qual­i­ties of media art as chal­leng­ing the bound­aries or de­f­i­n­i­tion of the so­cial through an ac­tive ex­per­i­men­ta­tion with things. At a time where cat­e­go­riza­tions of artis­tic en­gage­ments with tech­nol­ogy are in­creas­ingly com­plex and un­clear – es­pe­cially in the rifts, over­laps and pos­si­ble con­ver­gence be­tween new media and con­tem­po­rary art (Manovich, 1996; Lovink, 2008; Quar­anta, 2010) – I offer a the­o­riza­tion of ob­ject-ori­en­tated pol­i­tics as a defin­ing im­pulse of media art prac­tice. Of course, stress­ing the con­sti­tu­tive role of things, ma­te­ri­al­i­ties or ob­jects has be­come some­thing of a cus­tom­ary ges­ture in the field, from vi­tal­ist ac­counts of media ecol­ogy by Matthew Fuller (2004) and An­dreas Broeck­mann (1995) to the medium-speci­ficity of soft­ware stud­ies or gen­eral use of a vo­cab­u­lary of non-hu­man agen­cies in­spired by Ac­tor-Net­work-The­ory (ANT) and the work of Bruno La­tour. As part of a broad ‘ma­te­r­ial turn’ through­out phi­los­o­phy, so­cial sci­ences and cul­tural stud­ies, this ori­en­ta­tion to­ward things, how­ever, raises both im­por­tant on­to­log­i­cal and epis­te­mo­log­i­cal ques­tions, es­pe­cially re­gard­ing un­der­stand­ings of the role of pol­i­tics. Against this gen­eral back­drop, my paper, there­fore, aims to con­tribute to de­f­i­n­i­tions of media art pro­jects forged in ad­ver­sar­ial con­texts (works that might also be con­sid­ered as ex­am­ples of tac­ti­cal media) and to un­der­stand­ings of an ob­ject-ori­en­tated pol­i­tics through the con­cept of retic­u­lar aes­thet­ics.

With ref­er­ence to the ‘eco­sophic’ art prac­tice of Crit­i­cal Art En­sem­ble and Pre­emp­tive Media as il­lus­tra­tive ex­am­ples, my ar­gu­ment is that an im­por­tant long-term trend in media art has been to draw to­gether or retic­u­late ob­ject-ori­en­tated agen­cies in a po­lit­i­cal reg­is­ter. This mode of retic­u­lar aes­thet­ics can­not be un­der­stood as purely rep­re­sen­ta­tional; rather, it refers to pro­jects that ac­tively in­cor­po­rate ob­jects into the proces­sual ex­pres­sive­ness of the work. Aes­thet­ics here is de­fined in the well-known terms of Jacques Rancière (2006; 2010) as sense (aes­the­sis), or more specif­i­cally, as the ‘dis­tri­b­u­tion of the sen­si­ble’ – where po­lit­i­cal res­o­nance oc­curs by over­turn­ing sta­bi­lized for­ma­tions of per­cep­tion. How­ever, as op­posed to Rancière’s ex­clu­sive con­cern with sub­jec­tiv­i­ties (or al­ter­na­tive con­tem­po­rary art the­o­riza­tions of in­ter-sub­jec­tive or re­la­tional aes­thet­ics), my ar­gu­ment is that a sig­nif­i­cant fea­ture of media art is an en­gage­ment with ob­jects as par­tic­i­pat­ing in po­lit­i­cal ex­pres­sions by in­clud­ing them­selves out. This should be un­der­stood as the de­fin­i­tive crit­i­cal ges­ture of retic­u­lar aes­thet­ics: a re­order­ing of sense by ex­per­i­men­tal tech­niques that make ob­jects in­tel­li­gi­ble, al­low­ing every­day tech­ni­cal things to speak and be­come vis­i­ble.

In this brief paper we research systems with respect to their abstract properties as structure and organization. In our approach important significance has theory of ordered sets and fixed points of morphism. We present state of art in this field and some new results based on retracts of posets. We point also the importance of methods to represent, manipulate and measure poset.

Retracts and fixed points have a crucial significance for recursion and computation.?Well know is that fixed points are important because they exactly characterize solutions to recursive definitions. It’s convenient to describe functions using recursion, certainly in programming languages, also tempting in semantics. The problem is, are they well defined? Idea is successive approximations. The approximation process yields a fixed point, that give us a solutions to the recursive equations.

We use morphisms for processing posets. In our paper we check out different measures of poset morphisms. We define a new concept: the energy of a morphism. The energy of the morphism of order set is a scale-invariant of morphism: function from morphism to rational numbers. Intuitively, the connection between the complexity of the morphism of an order set and its energy is simple: the more complicated morphism, the higher energy.

This kind of research have many application: for networking (portable knowledge management environments), cybernetic, for AGI and many other novel problem area: appearance of large, combinatorial data objects.

The Women’s Labor project uses embedded technologies to transform domestic tools into new musical instruments. Traditionally relegated to the private sphere, domesticity is recast in a new light through public engagement and performative spectacle in installations, workshops and performances. Women’s Labor is a multi-stage, ongoing conversation between the public and artists to interrogate issues surrounding feminism and domesticity. In this social activist artistic project, we revalue traditionally unpaid labour of women by placing it in public spotlight and interactivity.

These stages are: 1) instrument creation; 2) public installations; 3) community workshops; 4) commissioned compositions by female-identifying composers on the instruments with “female-friendly” historical instruments (clavichord and fortepiano); and 5) public performance of the new compositions with past female composers’ works. The instruments created for Women’s Labor include the Embedded Iron, the Umbrella Rotary Dryer , and the Embroidery Hoop that are in various stages of completion.

This paper focuses on the first completed instrument, the Embedded Iron, a sensor-filled 3D printed clothes iron modeled on an old fashioned coal iron, paired with a wooden ironing board with built-in speakers. The team for Women’s Labor consists of artistic director and project creator, Jocelyn Ho, UX designer and composer, Margaret Schedel, and technical director, Matthew Blessing. With its first sound installation and performance at the UCLA Art-Sci Gallery this year, this paper will discuss the Embedded Iron’s conception and task of bringing light to domesticity through material engagement theory, expanding sentience through tools.

Organs are figured, experienced and heard differently by different cultures and at different moments of history. This paper will explore and listen to organs as they are being reconfigured in computer culture. The paper is based on a sound work for radio and installation that the author is currently working on. In the paper, as in the sound works, Neumark wants to fracture the ‘natural’ body and listen differently. She will do this through two figures: (1) travelling and journeying, and (2) the computer as a revolting machine-organs of digestion, excretion, and transmission.

(1) Organs on the move. Historically in the West organs have moved around the body (the wandering uterus being the most errant) and shifted in their relations to emotions and consciousness. Moving South and East, organs decentre from Western individuated incarnations, reconfigure the relationship between inside and outside, and re-centre themselves and bodies – differently, untranslatably. How can they be listened to?

(2) Computers as organs of digestion and excretion, transmission and emission. Much recent theory and discussion about computers places them in the realm of the brain or the mind, as if the body (‘meat’) has been erased or left behind. While this does address an important aspect of the changed kinaesthetics, it doesn’t get to the heart and viscera of the matter from a sound artist’s point of view. As you scan in your images or digitise your sounds, you subject them to a digestion process carried out by you and the computer together. As digestion it can revolt and turn ugly, produce unexpected eruptions, and most excitingly, result in a noisy, undisciplined indigestion.

We have entered the greatest of all eras in human history, the Information and Communication Revolution which will dwarf any previous revolution including the industrial and technological revolutions of the recent past.

The proliferation of visual imagery is a major component of this revolution, causing society to change the manner in which it communicates information from the literal to the visual and especially the photoreal image. The notion of the photorealistic image as a canon of visual reality in computer graphics is already beginning to be displaced as greater information is demanded from 2D representations of three-dimensional spatial worlds.

This presentation concerns the representation of object surfaces in virtual 3D compositions using coloured linear contouring (with a restricted colour palette) to facilitate transcription to fine art printmaking media. The method arises from the author’s earlier work and offers new options for control in the making of divisionistic type images.

Publics, audiences, communication: how, if at all, have the new technologies infiltrated the relatíonships between people? The panel commences with a session on the oldest interactive art, the theatre, where digital technologies have raised the ante in a wild gamble with the randomness of performance. The panel moves on to explore issues of networking. Now that the information paradigm is in crisis, and the outlines of cultural exclusion have been drawn across populations accessing or refused access to the net, how are we to reconceptualise the human dimension? Perhaps the revolution is over, and we lost: the same genders, the same ‘races’, holding on to the anchors of power as the tides of change embrace everything but white masculinity. Is it possible that in place of revolutionary community, all we have achieved is public relations?

To understand these issues, we turn to history, as it is lived, as it ‘weighs on the minds of the living like a nightmare‘ in Marx’s words. Is hrstorical process over, leaving us with conservation of artefacts and attitudes? 0r has some awesome new process begun, sweeping away the discretion that has governed self and other, subject and object, dominant and resistant, to produce the grounds for a (r)evolutionary front in the digital ecology?

Cultural hierarchies, including the hierarchy of the senses, are never static; as new media evolve this hierarchy of the senses also changes. What may appear revolutionary in the short term takes its place in the broader perspective as part of a cultural evolution. This is reflected in the transition from an oral culture to a literate one, from a literate culture to a mass media society, and from the electronic world of mass media to the more interactive process of digital multimedia. These general transitions may themselves take a revolutionary – in the sense of revolving – turn. Different media represent the world by different means, placing emphasis on a particular sense at the expense of others; we can expect that the emerging new media technologies will inflect the human sensorium in a new way – or, perhaps, in a way that comes closer to previous configurations. This presentation includes discussion of innovative electronic artworks by Knowbotic Research and Audiorom, as examples of new media art which privilege the role of sound.

Revolve is an ongoing research project addressing the complexities of combining choreography, sleep science (chronobiology) and media art/design for contemporary performance. The outcome, an interactive performance that unfolds through story-telling, sound, light, video and dance, follows the path of the sleeper’s mind and body through the night. Driven by a curiosity about the body, its rhythms and potential for change, Revolve brings audiences an intimate, multi-sensory encounter. The presentation will outline the development of Revolve, discuss the various outcomes and address a number of different issues around the dramaturgies of collaborations and the role of agency when spread across multiple collaborators. Revolve derives from experimenting within the areas of intersection of the collaborators’ respective disciplines, and as such stands as a valuable experience in art-science collaboration. Further on, discussion points will include the design of the lighting score and interactive system that utilises wearable technologies to allow the solo dancer to control a generative sound environment. In turn, the sonic feedback influences the emerging choreographic score, inducing constraints and generative cyclic patterns for movement. The concept for Revolve developed in part through consideration of the impact of electronic and digital technologies upon our body’s capacity and desire for sleep in an era that is always ‘on’. Today’s multitasking digital media environment is changing the way we process information, and has the potential to transform sleep patterns, much in the same way as the invention of artificial light changed our sleep habits. Performance, which has the ability to slow down thinking and invite contemplation through physical effort and corporeal presence, insists upon the variability and affective trace of the body. It is one way of addressing or connecting those forces that relentlessly impinge upon us, from the outside, and those forces we can muster within ourselves, to transform that outside.

Panel: Visual Effects Remixed

Il­lu­mi­na­tion of build­ings with pro­jec­tors or media fa­cades has be­come a pop­u­lar means of vi­sual com­mu­ni­ca­tion: in the art con­text, many fes­ti­vals around the world ex­hibit pieces, and a grow­ing num­ber of ap­pli­ca­tions can be ob­served in the com­mer­cial con­text. As tech­nol­ogy ad­vances, the scale of il­lu­mi­nated sur­faces in­creases, the vi­sual per­cep­tion of ob­jects can be al­tered in real-time, and the use of sen­sors or smart phones en­ables the in­ter­ac­tion be­tween vi­su­als and the en­vi­ron­ment. Pa­ra­me­ters, such as tem­per­a­ture, move­ment or ges­tures drive the vi­su­als and allow peo­ple to per­ceive their body and the en­vi­ron­ment in a new way. In this paper, we pre­sent two aca­d­e­mic pro­jects, “Sen­si­tive Ta­pes­try” and “Pro­jected Re­al­i­ties”, which aimed at in­te­grat­ing above tech­niques into the ar­chi­tec­ture cur­ricu­lum and at lever­ag­ing the ar­chi­tect’s knowl­edge for a more seam­less in­te­gra­tion of in­ter­ac­tion and vi­su­al­iza­tion. The goal of both pro­jects was to cre­ate a novel ex­pe­ri­ence that arises from ar­chi­tec­ture aug­mented with dig­i­tal in­for­ma­tion, and from ar­chi­tec­ture that acts a user in­ter­face to re­veal in­for­ma­tion about the build­ing, its oc­cu­pants and its en­vi­ron­ment.

My goal is to explore and investigate the potential applications of new interactive artworks in public space that comprise of elements from nature, technology, contemporary art and socio‑cultural relationships.

Man’s relationship with his environment and with fellow humans is mediated by the collective/shared experiences in public space. In a community of individuals, we need to find common ground for people to interact and share their ideas. That is how a society comes into existence. Apart from formal conversation and interaction in public life, public art provides a powerful tool to express the collective sense of aesthetics shared by a society.

My research interest lies in exploring the use of interactive/participatory artworks in public space to transform and enhance that space. The aim is to introduce a new meaning and utility for public spaces, as something greater or more useful than just places of congregation or daily business. In the contemporary era, dominated by commoditization of everyday life, art and interaction can provide a much needed relief from the hectic daily grind. My idea is to introduce a play aspect to the art, since being at play is enjoyable, alleviates stress and promotes positive interaction among people.

The prototype, RGB Sphere, consists of an interactive installation that takes viewer input through some form of interaction. That input will then be passed on to the creative engine (implementation of conceptual framework developed earlier) which will generate an immersive and interactive experience for the viewer. The purpose is to explore the possibilities of deploying the art work in public space where it would integrate with the local environment and provide a playful, creative and participatory experience to the viewers.

RGB|Gate is an audiovisual installation utilizing the perceptual difference between the human eye and digital cameras. Using “super high frequency lighting”, transparent crystals are illuminated with seemingly white and stable light, but when observed with a camera, a color composition is revealed. Using additive mixing, selected combinations of colors are turned on and off thousands of times every second, yielding a static white light when observed with the naked eye. Seen through a digital camera however, due to lower frame rate and image rendering, the hidden combinations are unveiled as kinetic bands of color. Running the digital image through software, the detected colors are further interpreted as sonic events and diffused in a stereo field, generating a “hidden” composition sourced out of light itself.

n.a.

Keywords: Music, Biology, Random Boolean Network (RBN), Generative Art, Genetic Networks.

Inspired by the cyclical patterns of gene expression found in developing organisms, and the resonance these patterns have with rhythmic and harmonic cycles in music, our ongoing creative work focuses on the use of hierarchical Random Boolean Networks (RBNs) for musical creation. RBN models are widely used in scientific research to study the genetic networks underlying biological systems. A hierarchical RBN consists of multiple, interconnected sub-networks that run at different time scales. As a result, the sub-networks disrupt and influence each other’s cyclical behaviors. In biology, these patterns of interference, which manifest in genetic networks, are what define biological structure: for instance, which part of an organism will become a head versus a tail. Inspired by the way that disruption creates biological structure, we use hierarchical systems of musical RBNs to create musical form and compose “musical organisms.”

“Terroir, I think, is the notion that attempts to capture, in a sense, to bottle, this interaction between nature and culture for those involved in wine.” – Amy Trubek

“There is nothing in the senses which does not lead to culture.” – Michel Serres

Risonanze di Vino was a creative research project conducted with winegrowers in Campania, Southern Italy that sought to explore resonances between the senses, nature and culture. The non-visual senses were used as the main instruments of inquiry, to unearth the sentient interactions that often lie just beneath the surface of consciousness; in the intuitive ways the winegrowers worked with their changing environments, and through the crossmodal correspondences harnessed in the final multisensory artworks.

This paper situates Risonanze di Vino within the framework of the artist’s concept of sensory terroir, an interlaced sensuousaesthetic system, which in this project blends sensory anthropology, wine studies and crossmodal psychology into a multisensory arts practice. It documents the creation of the artworks, which used the winegrowers’ senses to orient field recordings made in their vineyards and wineries that were shaped into soundscapes that worked in harmony or conversation with their wines. These crossmodal sensescapes were designed to both transmit the winegrowers’ sensory experience, and forge further sensory connections through harnessing crossmodal correspondences discovered between the wines and sounds.

A canvas for global and nomadic crossroads; north‑south immigration patterns; and east‑ west trading axes bisect a tabula rasa of hues, extreme climates and strange topographies. This provides a complex matrix of interconnectivities. These post‑colonial cities of the 21st century have grown out of new technologies, telecommunications and mega infrastructures that have brought about dramatic morphological and ecological changes. This is the future state of world urbanism – prescriptive and full of visual dramatization. The aerial view has provided encapsulations of civilization and modernization while simultaneously empowering the spectator with the omniscient gaze. The gaze of the cartographer mapping territory – territory to acquire and territory acquired – intrinsically associated with the production of knowledge and ultimately the    delineation of the ’empire’, be it geographical, virtual or imaginary. The past decade has witnessed the climactic boom and disintegration of urban daydreams embedded and immortalized in renderings, master plans and fictitious cameo appearances. As cities recover from hallucinated wealth, they also retain relics of the imagined and the unrealized along with the histories and global references accumulated from the past. Abound with spectacle, Hollywood‑esque appeal and the hyper‑planned, the future fictitious city has become a comment on its own urban, supra‑urban and suburban realities.

Roar is an audiovisual experience. It offers a poetic interpretation of cataclysmic events: the earth is ripping apart and its inhabitants must escape in space towards a new home. Geopolitical data is formatted into a kind of DNA code used by the system to generate the different 3D spaceship models for each nation. The voyage is punctuated by random events to create a narrative – ships colliding, programmed obsolescence, on-board mutinies, etc. Instead of using pseudorandom generators to control these events, probabilities are based on social statistics and the outcomes on real random atmospheric noise – linking real space with virtual space. The simulation is run on a persistent server for a fixed amount of time at the end of which the voyage will be considered complete. But will any ships have survived till then? As its previous inhabitants flee it, discontinued earth continues to crumble away. The crumbling accelerates or decelerates in synchronicity with real-time seismic data. The project is presented on two different screens with the roar of the earth crumbling on one side and the roar of the ships fleeing on the other, and addresses the use of meaningful data in digital art.

Roundtable: Semipermeable

Roundtable: Lovely Veneer: The underbelly of good design

The ‘lovely veneer’ of technology can be interpreted on many levels. One of them is that design is simply a glossy overlay to beautify and potentially obfuscate underlying system concepts and data gathering. ‘Usability’ and ‘interface design’ have given way to the term ‘User Experience’ (UX) and this shift is heartening in some ways as it suggests a more holistic approach, yet we should still question the terminology of ‘user’. User implies a simple, one way, consumer relationship, rather than the increasingly blurred interactions between consumer and producer, both in terms of content (e.g. YouTube, Path) and development (e.g. Git, SourceForge). Active ‘users’ involved in any part of a development process should be valued more than ‘users’, ‘participants’, or the even worse ‘informants’. Mobile devices are now used more than ever, consequently the design of these always on, ever present smartphones and their software must be considered with respect to their environment and aesthetics, as well as usability and functionality. This reframing of HCI and mobile design is part of the growing movement of Slow Technology created to support and develop longitudinal user experiences and relationships with technology. These reflective technologies are not “time consuming but time productive” (Hallnäs & Redström 2001). Allied with this movement, it is now time for a new ethical approach towards design and development cycles, embedding design and embracing openness at the heart of the process, engaging with stakeholders in a mutually beneficial process, whether in an academic, research context or otherwise.

Roundtable: Lovely Veneer: The underbelly of good design

The potential for aesthetics to influence human experience has been explored across many disciplines, from HCI with regards interface, interaction and usability, to Art and the role of beauty, the sublime, affect, and more provocative issues such as trust, identity and provenance. In business, aesthetics are an integral part of product development and branding, and are employed to invoke key qualities and experiences for products and services. Many technologies now present opportunities for interactions not restricted to the visual realm, making use of a range of affordances and modalities and furthermore are social machines, visualising data and giving alternative views through which compelling narratives can be developed. However, visual appearance does not necessarily represent the systems that underpin our interactions, and furthermore can be deliberately misleading, for example by mimicking, intuitive interaction styles that draw inspiration from nature (eg Galaxy S4), and social interactions that engage empathy and humility (eg Siri). Computation power infuses our lives through the technology we carry with us in our pocket, and as objects and devices become more connected they bring man and machine closer then ever before. The surface and the interface of these devices, which include touch, gesture, affect and the patina of objects, guide our intuitive sensemaking but can we still trust our innate and intuitive affective instincts, and do we require new values and ethics to guide the design of future technologies, services and spaces?

Roundtable: Lovely Veneer: The underbelly of good design

Humans, for the most part, find it difficult to imagine processes that they cannot see: the scientific method of Popper, Lakatos, etc., is, in part, a response to this deficit, supplying a rigorous framework in which the invisible and abstract can be addressed. Applied mathematics serves similarly, as a tool kit that allows abstractions of often hard-to-observe physical processes to be written down and usefully manipulated. Logic and stochastic reasoning are comparable tools for representation and manipulation of meaning, underpinning many successful quasi-intelligent computer systems.
Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction author, made (at least) two wise remarks on these matters. First, he argued that
  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
and then warned
   “Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.”
People are often content, and even keen, to believe in magic; indeed, human dependence on religious and supernatural myth betrays a desperate need to explain, combined with a startlingly gullible tendency to believe whatever is told them loudly and often (and often by an old man with a long beard and theatrical manner, wearing a sparkly ballgown). They believe it no matter how severely it contradicts either itself or what they see around them. In the SerenA project, these issues are at a premium: knowledge about people is used to support them, to challenge them, and, potentially, to lead them astray—but in positive ways. The idea of inspectable user models, borrowed from Susan Bull’s AI/education systems and used in SerenA, is a key way of enabling users to engage with the information stored about them, and edit it. Such openness, embodied as encouragement to understanding, is rare in knowledge-rich computational systems, but is to be encouraged as social IT develops.

oundtable: Lovely Veneer: The underbelly of good design

Why has it all become the norm? Not only convenience: that it is ‘free’, that is, you don’t have to pay money for a lot of this. But of course it is not actually free at all – there is no such thing as a free lunch. Users do not understand that they are selling their privacy, much as they do with a store loyalty card. Whether this is a sustainable business model remains to be seen – it is being tested, possibly to destruction – on Facebook. Longevity is out the window. I can read a 15thC will in the UK National Archives Reading Room. The digital scan of this document, which means I can read it almost anywhere, will last for how many years? Not 600, I am willing to bet. We can read the collected correspondence of a 19thC poet; but who will be able to read our emails in 150 years? And this mitigates the privacy issues somewhat: nothing that has gone onto the internet is private but neither is it necessarily long-lived.

Roundtable: The Sustainability of Future Bodies

Panel: Signs of Life: Human-Robot Intersubjectivities

In gallery in­stal­la­tions and per­for­ma­tive en­vi­ron­ments ro­bots act as quasi-au­tonomous agents en­gag­ing their au­di­ences in so­cial in­ter­ac­tion and per­for­ma­tive in­ter­play. This paper looks at the dif­fer­ent ways hu­mans and ro­bots in­ter­act and re­late to each other and the ways au­di­ences per­ceive and re­spond to an­thro­po­mor­phic and bio-mimetic qual­i­ties in ro­botic char­ac­ters, specif­i­cally their per­cep­tions of agency, emo­tion and in­ten­tion­al­ity. The au­thor ar­gues that it is au­di­ence per­cep­tion rather than the in­nate qual­i­ties of the robot that de­ter­mines suc­cess­ful ro­bot-au­di­ence in­ter­ac­tions. Robot mor­pholo­gies, af­for­dances and pro­grammed be­hav­iours all play key roles in shap­ing au­di­ence per­cep­tion and re­sponses. This paper also con­sid­ers the role of stag­ing and the the­atri­cal mise-en-scène, scenog­ra­phy, dra­maturgy and chore­og­ra­phy in fram­ing the so­cial in­ter­ac­tion of ro­bots and hu­mans in gallery in­stal­la­tions and per­for­ma­tive en­vi­ron­ments.

RPM will deal with the very physical (and physiological) relationships established between Sound, the Body, Memory, History and Architecture. This nexus will be explored and counterposed with the incremental disembodiment of aural experience within the histories of recorded sound, where the spatiality so vital for the fundamental operational categories of sound experience, surroundedness, immersion, directionality and depth have been effectively restrained within a representational schema.

Such a repression of the architecture of spatio-temporality is not dissimilar to the digital processing of sound which promises to return the collapsed ambient space as Virtual Space, where time and space are naturalistically re-deployed as metaphors literally standing-in for themselves. But why should we be interested in such faux Newtonian reconstructions in which visual grammars cuckold the metaphoric richness of aural experience – only to finally lose perspective in the Virillian chimera of speedspace? – a domain in which sound simply disappears! Can the experiential world of sound be reinstated to coexist with the representational domain of vision?

An illustrated talk on the work of Hull Time Based Arts in relation to artists intervention. Focusing on international collaboration, artists initiatives, membership organization structures and future ways of working co-operatively. Artists projects and collaborations (exhibited during the annual ROOT Festival—this year ROOTIess 97—Nomad Domain) will be used to show commissioning procedures and look at placing of artists’ technology based work in site sensitive locations/public places. The presentation will concentrate on

1. the relationship HTBA has to a developing sense of subversion of mainstream arts practice (a development that is happening on an international scale, made easier by new communication strategies).
2. the relationship between practice, political and practical expediency that has developed at HTBA and the way in which HTBA uses national and local funding
3. new tactical media and ways of operating: interventions, pranks, subversions of the mainstream

A definition of Time-Based Arts:
“Art that is experienced for a limited period of time. Any medium or process can be used, though painting and sculpture is normally considered time based art, however carving of rocks over thousands of years by natural forces is fast enough.”
—    Mike Stubbs, 1993

Time-based art is a hybrid, part of the chain of “third area”, “alternative media”, “other media” but usefully all embracing not framed in relation to the first and second media or dominant media—something in itself and increasingly intertwined with electronic art. Video, slide, and web documentation of artists commissions illustrating the talk will include:

•  Anne Whitehurs, Ida Agency/Denial
•  Simon Poulter, Counter Marketing/Propoganda
•  Heath Bunting/Rachel Baker, Routless/Tesco Clubcard
•  Granular Synthesis, Modell 5
•  Heather Ackroyd/Dan Harvey, Grass House
•  Susan Collins, Pedestrian Gestures
•  Roddy Hunter/Julie Bacon/Roland Miller, Dee-Commission

What these artists’ projects share is the ability to subvert and entertain through content or placement.They intervened in audience expectations, physical location, or the system they operated on.

Panel Statement

The computer age has brought many changes in how we think about images, construct images, and share them with audiences. It has even brought into question how we relate fine arts to other disciplines, including the other more established visual arts. What remains largely unexamined, however, is the role of the artist/professor in the academic world. Most academic institutions appear to have assumed that although the basic tool of computer based art may be very different from that of other media, the teaching of it is not. They assumed that faculty could easily slip into the same structures that have long been established for the teaching of studio art. Requirements governing teaching loads and class preparation,  and allocations for technical support services and budgetary allotments have not be re-examined. The assumption that computer art is just like other media is even applied to research, which includes exhibition and the demands of keeping current. While it may be logical for administrators to think of the computer-based arts as just another medium, for those of us in the field, the traditional structures just do not fit. This has led to a large discrepancy in the responsibilities of and expectations for faculty in this area as compared with colleagues in other studio art areas. Anecdotal evidence from computer media faculty from a wide range of higher education institutions indicates that they are burning out under the pressure to perform at unrealistic levels. Tasks that appear to be the same on paper are simply more demanding for the computer-based artist, ranging from the ordering of supplies to the maintenance of studio facilities. As in any rapidly changing discipline, the work load of simply keeping current is enormous, and frequently no provision is made for professional development. This disparity in the demands made upon computer media faculty and their studio arts colleagues grows ever wider as the technology continues to evolve and is incorporated in more aspects of art and design curricula. Frequently, colleagues and administrators outside of the electronic arts are unaware of many of these critical issues, and, as a result individual faculty in this area are often isolated and have little support. This panel presents a document which describes the problems and offers guidelines for the administrative and financial support which are necessary to sustain programs using computer technology and provides information about faculty working in this area that could be used in making evaluations in hiring, promotion and tenure. Topics addressed in this paper include: Descriptions of Typical Responsibilities Program Concerns: Curriculum Design; Keeping Current; Evaluation of Research/Exhibitions. Program Management Concerns: Administration; Budget; Program Promotion. Program Support Concerns: The Lab; Student/Faculty Relationship; Health Hazards; Other Support Issues. Recommendations.

This panel will open a larger dialogue with our international colleagues on these issues and formulate strategies for support of faculty in the areas of technology acquisition, performance evaluation, and the recognition of new venues for electronic arts. The guidelines document developed out of conversations between the moderators, who called a meeting at SIGGRAPH 93 in Anaheim under the auspices of the SIGGRAPH Education Committee. Attended by about fifteen individuals representing electronic arts faculties in the USA and internationally, the meeting addressed the document outline prepared by Annette Weintraub, and resulted in an Internet listserv group moderated by Cynthia Beth Rubin. Over the following nine months, the document was developed on the Iistserv, with significant participation from Dave Poindexter.  The final document, which incorporated comments and discussion from the listserv was written by Cynthia Beth Rubin and Annette Weintraub. It is being distributed for endorsements, and is being presented to ISEA as well as to SIGGRAPH and the College Art Association of America (CAA).

Panel members: Annette Weintraub, Cynthia Beth Rubin, Simon Penny, Paul Brown, Horit-Herman Peled, Tessa Elliot.

Abstract
The S T R A T I C project [1] is based on the phenomenon that occurs when filming a pulsating light – lines appear on the screen. The thickness and movement of these lines are directly related to the frequency of the sound and of pulsation also to the sampling rate of the camera. The visuals are examined by the use of shutter speed and frame rate of a camera. In this project we explore the interactive potential and the space for aesthetic expression by synthesizing the audio and visuals. The expression often creates a noisy, hypnotic and relaxing atmosphere. We find it highly relevant to ISEA as it concerns aspects of materiality at the intersection of the analog and digital.

Introduction
We want to expand on the ongoing discussion on materiality research and various connections between the digital and physical worlds. The researchers explore the separation of the audio signal in visual appearances; they map and deconstruct its properties to speed, thickness and color qualities. The notion of abstraction relates to the rejection of representation of realistic and visual references in the world. This sends the focus from the content of the message to the sensual experiences and explores the logics of the formal and minimalistic constructs of the audio and the visual.

This consolidate minimal appearance relates to synaesthetic experience. The concept of layers of abstraction talks about the sound being directly mapped to the RGB colors and layered in the strength of the colors perceived by the eyes of the viewers. This effect of seeing colors in different strength creates an illusion of 3D environment and involves the viewers into an immersive experience.

Artist Statement
The S T R A T I C project [1,2] is concerned with the limits of human senses at those edges where the boundaries dissolve. In the audio-visual performance, both audio and the visual work together – to create evocative and extreme experiences. The project seeks to overcome a separation of audio and visual, in broader sense, it also tries to merge practices and attitudes of contemporary art and new media art into a wholly perceived one.

S T R A T I C project
The S T R A T I C project explores the interplay of the sensed and the actuated in interactive media expressions, and the aesthetic properties of analogue/digital transformations formed by limitations and qualities of various forms of sensing apparatus. The result takes the form of noisy and hypnotic soundscapes linked with an abstract animation. The abstract animation is directly generated from the sound itself. In this way it becomes a kind of visual play of sounds.

Panel Statement

We live, swirling in images not of our own making, “echoes that arrest experience and play it back in slow motion. Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life the character of an enormous echo chamber a hall of mirrors. Life presents itself as succession of images or electronic signals, of impressions recorded and reproduced by means of photography, motion pictures, television, and sophisticated recording devices. Modern life is so throughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their action and our own-were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some time later”. The image has become central to the radical debate within culture and anything that challenges the production of imagery will lead inevitably to fundamental shifts in working practices and the theoretical positioning of disaffected cultural groupings. The current development of photo retouching technologies and the computer’s ability to create a level “aesthetic- playing-field” is framing the debate for the 90s. A new and urgent emphasis is now to be placed on the nature of “image as information” with its transition of the image from stable fixed entity existing in the physical world, to the plastic malleability of an image reduced to raw data waiting to be processed rather than authored.

Poster Statement

The classical Hindustani music of North India is rich in history and tradition. Samay Chakra is a computer music installation, written in the MAX/MSP programming language, that incorporates the basic rules of Hindustani music into a continuously controlled, ever-evolving music environment. Through information obtained from the current time and date and also from a variety of sensors (heat, light, and humidity), Samay Chakra improvises the proper music scales.

Panel: Curating and Collecting the New: Resistance is Futile

What is it to be a part of the gallery based curatorial profession, whilst curating in the digital landscape? The ‘same same’ is the curatorial purpose and intent: communication, engagement and access. The ‘different’ is the landscape in which I work; the digital landscape is a place of ever-morphing modalities of creative practice, experimentation of production and reframing of display. All of which seem to be gleefully romping off into unchartered territory. The role of the curator is in the keeping up with, the seeking out of, and the inclusion of practices and outcomes that are not always recognized within the current cultural discourse. And then exhibiting these practices within the galleries structure and systems, in ways that best suit the works, and discourse on show. If we take too much comfort in the programs of festivals, competitions and non-traditional sites, as the home of digital experimental practices, then we ignore the continued role that the gallery, museum and institutional collections sector play in the legitimization of the culture of our time. The challenge is in accepting, and still curating the digital landscape into the gallery context. And in doing so, know that these shows will often problematise both the gallery  conventions, and the audience’s perception of an exhibition experience.

This paper describes the use of contemporary technology to create a novel digital medium for theatrical storytelling. This involved integrating a team of creative technologists, animators, dancers, actors, storytellers, and production designers to create an immersive environment for electronic performance art. Samsara means reincarnation. Hindu and Buddhist philosophy embraces the concept of reincarnation as a way to learn, grow, and evolve. Samsara pulls inspiration from ancient morality fables found in the Panchatantra and the Jataka Tales. Five stories of reincarnation are portrayed: from an   elephant, to a monkey, to a bee, to a quail and finally to a lion. Each story was realized using a different set of robotic devices, animation, or wireless dance technology to create an immersive experience for the audience. For example, the mice in the stories are represented by ‘chattering’ of twenty dispersed mechanical ‘clappers’ in the audience seats, where as, the bee in the story is represented by 12 robotic spinning bees installed above the audience, moving from one location to the next. Where as 9 projection‑mapped screens portrayed animated characters that performed along a troop of 6 choreographed dancers. This new medium of custom technology, brought together a novel way to perform these stories in an unconventional manner. This paper discusses what was learned, and how to scale these technologies for digital performance venues in the future.

The Satellite Obscura liquid video speaker consists of one rotating main satellite dish, and two deflector dishes to each side. Non-conductive, clear fluid is pumped through the center of the main satellite to a large sub-woofer speaker and a flanged insert suspended above the dish. Via the flanged insert, the non-conductive fluid assumes the shape of a half-dome as it falls into the dish and its dimensions are controlled by frequencies received by and emanating from the speaker. In the center of the satellite, video images received from remote satellites or on-site sources are projected through a liquid crystal display onto the interior of the half-dome. Circling the dish on its outside edge, a live arc of electricity suspended between two wires tears through the fluid and the image. Incoming video and audio signals can be manipulated by audience members while the artist performs within the disk and moving images. The sounds, images, fluid, and other primary elements in the installation are interrelated through proximity switches, triggered flotation sensors, and other hardware.
The piece is designed to capture the imperceptible technological means of information transmission which pass through us in order to relocate those transmission tactics, in a sculptural and performance setting. They are then manipulated and transmuted within an area where fluid, electricity, sound, moving image, and artist coalesce.

This paper describes the framework and development of the e-agriculture project Sauti ya wakulima, “The voice of the farmers” in Swahili. The latest scientific findings acknowledge that in order to find a sustainable way of producing food in the future, it will be necessary to understand agriculture as a complex system which, besides economic and ecological factors, also includes the social context of rural farming communities. Sauti ya wakulima adopts this vision by establishing an open and participative research process, in which a group of farmers living near Bagamoyo, Tanzania, uses smart-phones and a web platform to document their environment, and create thus a collaborative knowledge base.
Intro
DEFINING THE FIELD
E-agriculture defines an emerging field in which information and communication technologies (ICT) are applied to the improvement of agriculture and rural livelihoods. The term was introduced as one of the key areas of application of ICTs in the Plan of Action of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), celebrated in Geneva 2003. Mobile communication technologies are presently the main focus of e-agriculture. In Africa, where most of the development projects for agriculture are concentrated, Internet usage is still low, reaching about 13,5% of the population; yet it has grown 2.357% over the last ten years, almost five times more than the rest of the world (Internet World Stats, 2011). However, more than a third part of the population in Africa are cell phone owners, and this rate is growing fast (International Telecommunications Union, 2010). The original definition of e-agriculture and its more recent applications, tend to consider agriculture as a merely economic-productive activity, whose purpose in rural environments is to provide food security and alleviate poverty.
While these goals undoubtedly are crucial, agriculture should not be understood exclusively from an economic utilitarian angle. The International Assessment of Agricultural Science, Knowledge and Technology for Development Report (IAASTD, 2009) argues in favor of a fundamental shift in agricultural knowledge, science and technology, towards the acknowledgment of the multi-functionality of agriculture, understood as the interconnectedness and complexity of agricultural systems within diverse social and ecological contexts. The report identifies a strong social element of food production, which includes health, gender, tradition, social structures, and culture. While improving productive efficiency and access to information in rural agriculture are certainly key areas in e-agriculture, ICTs can also empower farmers in less obvious ways. Sharing and disseminating farmer-held knowledge, providing real-time, audiovisual evidence of practices affected by climate change, and expanding the farmers’ social networks are some of the ways in which an advanced e-agriculture platform can strengthen also the social context of rural agriculture. Moreover, mobile technologies allow for a multi directional communication throughout digital networks, thus opening the opportunity of integrating farmer-held information and observation into the local collection of expert agricultural knowledge. Given the vertiginous growth of ICTs in Africa, and the dropping international prices of smart-phones and tablets, experimenting with state-of-the-art technologies that go beyond the limitations of SMS
and voice services supported by basic GSM mobile phones is a realistic endeavor that can open new, more socially oriented areas of action within e-agriculture.

This project proposes a forum for discussion that questions how we engage with our ecology. The panel will be framed within an acknowledgment of scale, time, and complexity as an entry point into a conversation about our local ecology and the universe beyond. The panellists’ aim to initiate a dialogue by situating the discussion around their own art and design research practices. These practices have emerged from local investigations into ecological issues that evolved into two overlapping research clusters, Art and Ecology, and Design and Innovation for Sustainability, at AUT University, in Auckland New Zealand. In our first collaborative project we explore how we might connect with and communicate ‘ecology’, in methods and practice that recognize and embrace scale, time, and complexity as a tactic into the subject, rather than as a barrier to engagement and the development of potential solutions. How do we engage and communicate with the ecology in methods that acknowledge and embrace scale, time, and complexity as a tactic into the subject, rather than as a barrier to engagement with it? The panellists approach this through diverse and divergent methodologies, from data visualisation, affective or poetic cinema, to human centred design practices. The subject of the ecology binds the discussion with the acknowledgement of no single path of interrogation into the subject. Jamieson, Denton, and Reay, have initiated a project that centers its focus on the ecology to develop overlapping pathways in and out of their distinct practices, as a method of both developing and interrogating their work, making new work that drifts across their disciplines, but also building towards an ongoing and evolving interdisciplinary teaching and research projects.

What can sentience teach us about politics? Sentience is often tied to human perception and apprehended in the (false) distinction between thoughts and feelings. As if feelings needed consciousness to find concrete expression. As if the political was primarily a brains affair. Departing from a definition of politics as that which problematizes the relationship between perception and action (and also from a definition of politics that acknowledges the possibility for organisms to think with their guts), we here question
modalities of engagement with sentience beyond the human. In our consideration of sentience, we are cautious of collapses into animism, wary of panpsychism, and wish to evade simplistic misanthropism and anthropomorphism. In an attempt to avoid these pitfalls, we approach the question of sentience by considering scales, from the biological to the cosmic, from the molecular to the planetary, from the microbiome of one body to that of many (social).

We ask: How can sentience move across scales? What are the socio-political implications of scaling sentience? Can scalar sentience bring new economies of care? This panel takes the form of a trialogue among the three presenters, structured so that our thoughts are read or spoken in a rotation of sections so that three perspectives combine and triangulate into a whole. We propose a threefold problematization which, instead of searching for the truth of scaling, performs sentience at different scales: the Earth (O’Reilly), the Sky (High), and Outer Space (Boucher), will act as three distinct poetic structuring devices of spatio-temporal sentience.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Vigilante online communities, digilantism, hacktivism.

In recent years, Internet users have been increasingly participating in so called digilantes or cyber-vigilante communities, becoming self-appointed avengers of justice who wade through the Internet to hunt down unlawful netizens. These groups see the legal mechanisms for criminal punishment as ineffective and use social networks to crowdsource both the prosecution and the execution of punishment. I conducted an experimental investigation into these justiceseeking activist groups to compare the ‘scambaiting’ antifraud movement and their methods and similar webformations like ‘Perverted justice’, ‘Human Flesh Search Engine’ and ‘Internet Haganah’. Each group’s motives are presented with recent examples, and parallels are drawn to similar projects carried out by journalists, artists or activists. Mass mediated prosecutions entertain popular culture and are used to regulate social norms. It was found that vigilante communities use congruent techniques in gathering intelligence and use comparable prosecution methods like shaming, humiliation, cyber bullying, or doxing. Furthermore, moral concerns of these deviant actions and possibilities of governmentality are discussed.

Smell can be understood as a cultural phenomenon, historically signified, enforcing social structures or transgressing them, creating social bonds – empowering or disempowering people. Odours, unlike colours, for instance, cannot be named, only described; in the realm of olfaction, we must make do with descriptions, analogies and recollections. From natural environments to urban spaces, the large variety of odours can stimulate our olfactory senses and evoke experiences, in which pleasant and unpleasant, and even non-smelling scents, can be combined as parameters of spatial limits and redefine social relationships with each other and with the place. The aim of this panel is to articulate artists and researches to discuss about cultural and social aspects of smells and odours, and their potential to reconfigure and create aesthetic atributes to spatial orientations. The attempt to classify the use of smell is determinant to think about perceiving and apprehending the world and human interactions. That is, it refers to the use of scents in ritual and everyday contexts, with the potential perspective of transforming or reshaping the world. Jenny Marketou, Josely Carvalho, Luisa Paraguai, and Nina Leo are going to present their researches about understanding, describing, and mapping physical spaces, social bonds, and cultural perceptions through smells. Jenny Marketou with “Nosing Around” presents her art works Smell IT: A Do-it-Yourself smell map and Smell You /Smell Me, and discuss translations of the olfactory system to the visual and linguistic and reveals something about cultural perceptions and valuations of smell in our society. Josely Carvalho with “From a Memory of a Smell to the Smells of Memories” presents her works with smells to discuss about places and memories, evoking relationships and emotional bonds. Luisa Paraguai proposes with “Scent objects: designing spaIaliIes through smells” the confront with other people through different smells to inspire and share particular kinds of presences, and maybe to create emotional reactions – as attitudes of attraction or repulsion. Nina Leo examines with the text “The Politics of Smell: how scent technologies are affecting the way we experience space, our sense of place and one another” how advancements in smell simulation technologies are being used and manipulated, not simply by corporations as an elusive marketing tool, but by governments to support and promote their agenda of war. And, how these technologies are also changing and challenging artistic practice as artists begin to question and counter with research and agendas of their own.

Affective states triggered in our body during an artistic/aesthetic experience have been discussed by philosophers over the years under the concept of sensation. From a philosophical viewpoint, sensation is a subtle but intense emotional phenomenon, mainly perceived when we are experiencing art. From another perspective, Neuroscience has dedicated itself to analyzing this phenomenon in laboratory practices by using biofeedback systems like EEG (electroencephalogram) and ECG (electrocardiogram), among other systems such as MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). In such procedures, the subject is aware that she/he is part of an experiment, which could repress spontaneous emotions as the one triggered in an artistic experience. Schizomachine is a research-work in progress that aims to investigate those subtle affective states of the human body during the aesthetic experience in a museum or art gallery by means of mapping and monitoring methods of the viewer’s physiological parameters. In this paper, we present the concept of the artwork and the prototype of the Schizocap, an EEG cap that composes the work. Schizomachine will be initially composed by an EEG cap (the Schizocap), that generates the input data, and by a clothing, called Schizobody, where the data can be seen in the form of light (the output).

Science has historically divided itself into disciplines. Some scientific disciplines have a hierarchy of knowledge acquisition e.g. mathematics, physics, and biology. The study of art also has esoteric topics, although it is less easy to articulate the study of art in a fixed hierarchy, given the multiplicity of approaches that make up its “family resemblences” in the sense of Wittgenstein. As science moves away from single disciplines into research that combines multiple scientific fields, it is less easy to define one fixed hierarchy. Here we have jumps and bridges between different hierarchies, suggesting  dynamic heterarchy born in the intersticies that exist between these multiple hierarchies. Yet, we seek to suggest a multi-perspective approach that also explores extra-scientific knowledge. Thus scienceand the artsprovide differing perspectives that can be brought into dynamic relationality. Here truth does not belong to one discipline but becomes illuminating through dynamic relation. Building a cross-disciplinary dynamic heterarchy out of the traditional hierarchies raises concrete problems of language (and categorization) that anyone who is used to transdisciplinary approaches has already experienced. The «babelization» of knowledge, when it comes to (collective or individual) awareness, reveals how critical the situation of hierarchies is, if no effort is made to fertilize the disciplines by criss-crossing their knowledge and – we emphasize – their language. The genetic metaphor speaks for itself: when species have diverged too much, no mating is even possible.?The notion of a bridging or symbiotic metaphore may make more sense here. Yet we also point to the limits of metaphor in reflecting the complexity of the thoughts we are discussing. A crisis in the sciences has been often claimed in the last decade, where mutual disregard between disciplines having an underlying hierarchical knowledge acquisition structure, namely here «hard»-sciences such as mathematics or physics and post-modern philosophy are contrasted with the heterarchical nature of the arts. We will present a series of ideas related to contemporary and historical art?science relationality. We will discuss a taxomonomy of Art Science relations.

A multi-million dollar National Science Foundation is in progress at Carnegie Mellon University. The project links aspects of basic brain biology to cognitive psychology and conscious experience. Headed by an interdisciplinary team of artists, neuroscientists and computer technologists the project will exploit of an educational strategy in which audience members control aspects of the display. Using the brain as the overriding metaphor, interactive segments will be designed in which audience members, cast as neurons, participate collectively by responding to stimuli presented on the screen. In effect the audience will emulate simple models of brain function such as cognitive processes. These interactive exercises will teach the audience about cooperative and emergent properties of the brain. The audience will learn by doing, by becoming a brain. There will be an emphasis on the evaluation process and the creation of a new research facility, the Interactive Studio/Lab, for the purpose of studying the educational effectiveness of group interactive technology. It will provide an opportunity to monitor and evaluate the reaction of pilot audiences to prototype segments, comparing artistic and pedagogical communication modes. Interactive technology will be employed for on-line gathering and evaluation of data about audience participation to reveal features like emergent behaviour, group dynamics, nearest neighbour effects, and changes in response time.

As the artist/technologist at the helm of this project it seems that there are many among us who are raising the issue of whether the final product will or should be science or.art or if it can be both. On the one side are a number of artists who insist that we should abandon efforts at making this a work of science education and produce instead a work of art that is what it is. In their minds the constraints that “science education” place on form and format confound the possibilities of creating art. Others suggest that we should devote a portion of the program to expostulating upon the science and then leapfrog into more experiential sections that have the freedom of character possessed by an artwork.

It appears that most visitors to science centres mistake terminology for conceptual understanding. Because they can repeat the vocabulary, they believe they have grasped the essence of the experience. Many mistake the acquisition of facts for the understanding of concepts. Conceptual understanding of the phenomena underlying the exhibitions is abysmally low. If both facts and vocabulary are a source of misconception about science concepts and one chooses to eliminate both of these from consideration as the main tools of communication, then one is left with the direct experience of concepts as an alternative. The good news is that sounds a lot like art. The alternative approach is to create “art OF science”, “science AS art” rather than separating the two agendas. The idea is to see if Cognition can be presented to the public in a manner that doesn’t look like education in the traditional sense but possesses characteristics of art conveyed through body movement, temporal passage as in music or film, colour and composition, spatial perception, juxtaposition, metaphor and context.

We plan comparative analysis of different modes of presentation, from the most traditional pedagogy to the embodiment of the concept in an artwork that conveys the essence of the concept through direct unmitigated experience. Using on-line realtime output of audience response and summative interviews with audience members after the program, the efficacy of these alternative approaches will become known. These varying modes will be presented to a variety of audiences to study the impact of learning strategies on individuals with varying personalities and backgrounds. Comparative evaluation of audience behaviour and conceptual understanding across cultures, disciplines, and ages will reveal much about the structure of information that reaches the widest audience. As the concepts are complex it will be extremely exciting to see whether Art holds the key to the sharing of these fundamental scientific concepts.

We intend to analyze the construction processes of the Installation “Um Novo Tempo – A New Time”, created by the Research Group LABI – Open Laboratory of Interactivity, from the perspective of Yuri Lotman’s reflections on semiotics. Our approach is guided by reflexive relations that lie at the intersection of the concepts of Biosphere and Semiosphere. We consider, accordingly, that the specific languages that contributed to its construction are only in existence in the Semiosphere, which precedes semiosis related to the art objects that build it. In this sense, the experience of interacting was occurring in and outside the cultural temporality to which it is extrinsic, as it is processed by perceptual channels – intrinsic temporality, involving both the immanent information contained in object through it is linked to processes and interaction, and personal information, through affection, and finally, the encyclopedic and sensitive knowledge which made this individual an unrepeatable singularity. Such cultural texture –  forming subjectivities lead us back to Guattari’s concept of subjectivity regarding the machines of subjectivities which are responsible for the creation of bonds and references, both poetic and scientific, in order to make the instauration of interactivity happen.

It’s important to say that the goal of LABI is scientific dissemination through the relations established between the interactor and interactive installations. These are presented as potential mediators and spaces of possibilities. Thus, our proposal is to analyze which concepts proposed in the statement find a form of receptivity that would be sensible to the intelligible, or, if the proposition placed, which consists in making the sensible intelligible and the intelligible sensible was apprehended and to what degree such accomplishment is achieved in view of the polysemy of meaning that such objects are proposing. To do so, we will refer in the analysis of the discursive strategies through which the object of our study was constructed and the intersemiotic relationships entered the broader concept of semiotics of culture. We believe that this methodology can contribute to the analysis of interactive installations tout court, as well as in the construction of an aesthetic reflection that allows artists to employ a range of operational and seminal concepts for the practice of artistic production.

Fundamental to SARC is the precept that science-art collaborations should be of mutual benefit to the furtherance of both the arts and the sciences, and to their positive implications for society. SARC is initiating a pilot series of professional artists’ collaborations with Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories research teams. Santa Fe Institute (SFI) has invited the artists and Lab collaborators for working group presentations, discussions and interactions with SFI scientists. Santa Fe Complex, the Bradbury Museum and other partners are providing public presentation and discussion opportunities. SARC has been initiated in partnership with 516 ARTS for ISEA2012, and is currently funded in part by Los Alamos National Labs/New Mexico Consortium, and Sandia National Laboratories/Lockheed Martin. SARC is co-directed by Jack Ox and Richard Lowenberg. (Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Los Alamos).

Public Art Interactive System, Performance, and Digital Archive (2016)

Scores for Distributed Dancing hacks the body in the same way other projects hack technology. It breaks the congruity of everyday, introduces new parameters, and provides positive feedback for what might otherwise be perceived as failure. It de-emphasizes virtuosity of movement in dance-like contexts and affirms the refined expertise of everyday actions. The project exposes the rule-based parameters of social interactions and even personal movement choices. Scores for Distributed Dancing presents these concepts in an experimental and emergent digital format.

This is an iterative project that accumulates over time and through presentation in diverse spaces. It engages viewers as participants and performers as facilitators of experience. This durational event appears from within everyday interactions and highlights the pre-existing movement systems of public spaces. Social programming modifications are printed on playing cards in the form of logical operators. As participants attempt their scores, the system responds. Participants change the tone and pace of the space through a collaborative phase shift. The intervention displays how small, accumulated actions deliver results on a grand scale. Every project space is digitally documented with pre- and post-rupture layered into an experimental video portrait for online archives and exhibition display.

Artist Megan Young/MegLouise examines the rules and strictures that dictate movement and physical action in a digital age. Long held as the primacy of identity creation, physical gestures influence how a body forms relationships with the world. Put another way, how an individual moves through life influences how they think of themselves. This pattern of identity formation through the interface of a body is already complicated by the multiple variables of culture, gender, and socioeconomic status. Now, there is an added variable of digital interface. Individuals regularly give and receive instructions from a non-human entity and that starts at an early age. Young interrogates the physical-digital relationship through experiments with embodied directives, disembodied directives, and seemingly embodied directives. She creates movement and new media installations that rupture standard use practices. She writes code for live performance in a language of her own creation including simple logical operators, thresholding techniques, and triggers for state changes. Projects maintain the casual, inviting aesthetic and blend into the world of everyday.

The process by which a full range of computer applications, from scientific visualization to CAD and architectural simulation, were brought to bear on a highly complex commissioned work.

A representation ofelectronic visual data from a series of activities which relate to the language of machine code. There are no significant electronics in these digital aftworks. The discourse may be digital but the work is not electrical.

An interim summary of interactive research, now in its third year from events and actions across the UK, in mainland Europe and the USA

Panel: Data Disinformation

Si­gune Hamann will pre­sent her work on rep­re­sen­ta­tion of move­ment, time and nar­ra­tive struc­ture through image ma­nip­u­la­tion with a focus on her process of cap­tur­ing the dy­nam­ics of urban en­vi­ron­ments in panoramic film-strips. Ex­am­ples in­clude ‘White­hall 9.12.2010’ show­ing at this year’s ISEA ex­hi­bi­tion.  Her work is hands-on image ma­nip­u­la­tion in­volv­ing the cap­ture of film-strips as a real or phys­i­cal process, a me­chan­i­cal one, but also sub­se­quently a pho­to­chem­i­cal and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion.  The paper will ex­am­ine shifts of in­for­ma­tion and lay­er­ing, rep­e­ti­tion and blur­ring of im­ages as they hap­pen in the ini­tial me­chan­i­cal process and in the fol­low­ing dig­i­tal out­put. These kinds of dis­place­ments draw at­ten­tion to how we ex­pe­ri­ence im­ages, how we make sense of them, and how they re­late to our mem­o­ries.  She will demon­strate the de­ci­sions made by an artist in con­trol­ling the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the dig­i­tal and ana­logue through the process of mak­ing and show­ing work.

Performance, Website (2012 – 2015)

Second Livestock is a virtual reality world for battery-farmed chickens. By performing a straightfaced parody of virtual reality platform Second Life, the project attracts non-traditional art audiences to a conversation about the consequences of people choosing to spend more of their lives in virtual spaces, and questions the differences between how we treat animals and how we treat ourselves. The artist performs the presentation in the persona of the CEO of Second Livestock. The vocabulary and visual language of the presentation mocks the hype of technology firms who are perpetually introducing new, disruptive technologies. After the presentation the audience is invited to experience the VR world through the CCI (Chicken-Computer Interface), a prototype consisting of an Oculus Rift VR Headset and a custom-made omni-directional treadmill.

Abstract

Can Lynn Hershman Leeson’s ‘Life Squared’, displayed in Montreal in 2007 as part of an exhibition entitled “Les vases communicants-e-art’, be interpreted as the reenactment, in the context of SecondLife, of a performance dating back to 1973-74 in which the artist staged moments in the life of her imaginary alter ego, ‘Roberta Breitmore’, at San Francisco’s Dante Hotel?

Rewriting the history of a performance                                                                                                The dialectical interaction of ‘self’ and ‘play’ play-acting and performance, has been central to Hershman’s artistic development since the 1970s. All through her career, she has devised imaginary characters based on real-life experiences of hers; she has also used various pseudonyms such as Prudence Juris, Herbert Goode and Gay Abandon. Aliases have featured prominently in her work as a visual artist since her student years; for instance, a sculpture entitled Self-Portrait as Another Person, dated 1969, has repeatedly been used as a prop in later performances involving Roberta Breitmore.

Secret Garden is an attempt to recreate a contemporary version of the Eden myth in the midst of an urban environment. The structure of Secret Garden will be loosely modeled on the ten paths of the Sephirot in the Jewish telling of the story, which is itself also a symbol of the Tree of Life and the oldest extant version. The Eden scenes will grow around a user in 360 degree 3D panoramas tied to the GPS nodes selected and will be triggered by location automatically.

Panel: Secure Insecurity

The ob­ses­sion of se­cu­rity. What is the basis of se­cu­rity? Its ab­sence. Noth­ing needs to be se­cured, ex­cept the se­cu­rity it­self. Se­cu­rity is a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of state  and main cri­te­rion of po­lit­i­cal le­git­imiza­tion. Se­cu­rity vs. dis­ci­pline and law as in­stru­ments of gov­er­nance. On one side we have hard power struc­ture based on dis­ci­pline, dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and block­ade, iso­lat­ing power and clos­ing the ter­ri­to­ries and the sec­ond side: se­cu­rity pol­icy as­so­ci­ated with glob­al­iza­tion, in­ter­ven­ing and con­trol­ling processes as­so­ci­ated with lib­er­al­ism be­cause of se­cu­rity mea­sures may work in the con­text of move­ment of per­sons and goods. The di­vi­sion pro­posed by Fou­cault and Agam­ben on the hard law and the dy­namic ac­tiv­i­ties of the se­cu­rity pol­icy is an ar­ti­fi­cial as­sump­tion. These two areas are closely re­lated, com­ple­men­tary and pro­vide a medium for ex­am­ple laws can be quickly changed by power elite, or processes re­lated to the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of human life forc­ing changes in se­cu­rity pol­icy. The in­creas­ing dy­namism and com­plex­ity of so­cial space and vi­o­lent forms of bio-cap­i­tal make this model of think­ing is in­ad­e­quate. Bio-ex­change. The idea of “life” is con­sid­ered to be in­cluded in the do­main of tech­nol­ogy, both for eco­nomic prof­its and for se­cu­rity rea­sons. Meta-cap­i­tal. Every­thing is par­tially in­ter­change­able, as every­thing is con­nected. Life be­comes a cur­rency of the  code. The code pro­vides for trade, works as a so­cial marker, as a new form of cap­i­tal. We are see­ing an in­creas­ing run­way where we can no longer talk about the con­trol of the phe­nom­ena that is so rapidly in­creas­ing com­plex­ity of the prob­lems that be­comes al­most un­com­putable. The ter­ror­ist act is a knot in which a large num­ber of so­cial processes in­ter­sects and ex­plode .

It is a kind of crit­i­cal point in which the so­cial com­bi­na­to­r­ial ex­plo­sion emerge. This is not re­cur­sively de­scrib­able phe­nom­e­non. Panic sim­u­la­tion and dis­in­te­grated so­cial spec­ta­cle causes, that ter­ror be­comes the in­ter­est of the mod­ern state. Dis­in­for­ma­tion and se­crecy. The dif­fer­ence be­tween the open and the se­cret im­plies a hi­er­ar­chy, the first rule of power. On this dif­fer­ence, the struc­tures called the state are being built. Se­cu­rity state is an en­gine of vi­o­lence. Acts of ter­ror and dis­as­ter are the lifeblood of po­lit­i­cal ac­tion. That is why they are pro­voked and stim­u­lated by the power elite. Se­cu­rity re­quire con­stant ref­er­ence to the state of emer­gency. The quest for se­cu­rity leads to a global world­wide war. You have to change this state of things: re­ject the con­cept of se­cu­rity as a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of state pol­icy and test new mod­els / con­stel­la­tions of power. The task of pol­i­tics is un­der­stand of con­di­tions that lead to ter­ror and de­struc­tion, rather than con­trol these phe­nom­ena, as al­ready oc­curred.

In this paper we outline three strategies used by Mixed Reality (MR) artists to produce experiences that challenge vision as a single sense modality. The interactions enabled in the works that we discuss emphasize how virtual technologies produce embodied experiences and a mixed sense of reality, thereby reconceptualizing both MR and virtual technologies as multisensorial embodied practices. Exploring three different installations, we show how this mode of multi-sensory experience is also a multi-media phenomenon. Seeking to reconsider both the ‘self-world’ and the ‘self-other’ relationships, these installations further demonstrate how such induced embodied experiences can be utilized to initiate what we understand as a sense of critical empathy. In seeking to both virtually and physically place the viewer in an/other body, an/other space, or in granting them access to an/other history or cultural knowledge, these works fundamentally aim to shift viewers’ perspectives of their environment, while at the same time exposing the constraints of their own embodied position.

This paper describes the authors´ interest in raising awareness about plants. For around 30 years they have been creating media artworks that connect plants and humans, in an effort to create more attention towards the vegetal world. The paper starts with recent findings on plant intelligence and then provides a historic overview of plant illustration as a means to study and understand plants. The authors also describe their own fidings during botanical illustration and investigate how this knowledge can be used for media art connecting humans and plants.

With the rapid advancement of information technology, many people live in data-saturated digital societies. The collection of our action, decisions and opinions are digitally traced and analyzed to inform decision-making or AI (Artificial Intelligent) products. Through the series of artwork, “The Sense of Data”, I artistically approached how our everyday lives could be expressed and influenced through data. This work-in-progress artwork, “Seeking for Outliers” is the process of my artistic exploration of data. I hope to reflect on how data brings a role as a concept driver in art practice, where it defines materials, forms, shapes and context of meaning-making through my creative practice and discuss further on the artistic exploration of possible ‘outliers’ in data.

This paper explores the concept of self-evidence in our experience with technology. Hilary Putnam, has suggested that a ‘non-alienated’ view of knowledge should include the internal reckoning of the self in connection with external account of the world: “The current views of ‘truth’ are alienated views; they cause one to lose one part or another of one’s self and the world… my purpose is to sketch the leading ideas of a non-alienated view.” Supported by concepts of somaesthetics, somatic phenomenology and discourse surrounding ‘felt-life’ within human computer interaction, this paper describes a history of applying somatic body-based practices as an epistemological framing to interaction design. The purpose is to invite a re-thinking of the process of design for technology, one that includes design for the experience of the self. This paper critically reflects upon the historical design of a series of wearable installations called whisper, exhale, soft(n) and tendrils. By engendering a role for cultivating self-awareness within interaction, our digital technologies can support the development of an attentional skill-set for experience. Viewing experience as a skill that can be evolved, is an epistemological framing that is central to somatics practice and growing interaction design principles which include self-efficacy and self modification as experiential outcomes of interaction. In Personal Knowledge , Michael Polanyi proposes the concept of indwelling: the application of experiential skills within our use of tools and technology. Polanyi describes the way in which we ‘share a field of experience’ by extending ourselves into our tools and technologies. Polanyi exemplifies the connection between an experiential self-evidence leading to a non-alienated view of technology design. By framing somatic body-based practices as an epistemological strategy that incites a fertile resistance within normative technology design, we suggest a fertile resistance that includes self-evidence as a central material in the design of ourselves.

Self-Intersection is a solo performance by a dancer, developed around themes of identity and selfimage constructed by the subjective relationship of somatic processes, such as self-sensing while moving and vocalizing. The performance is based on the intersection of sound, dance, voice, text and biosignals, all involved in an interactive system constructed with biosensors mapped to a real-time sound environment. Self-Intersection is currently a work in process, as part of the project Emovere, directed by the dancer Francisca Morand and the sound artist and researcher Javier Jaimovich, both academics at Facultad de Artes – Universidad de Chile. The project Emovere started in 2014 as a mutual interest on sensoriality, physiology, consciousness and experience as fundamentals for interdisciplinary and artistic experimentation. The artist talk will show and explain the artistic and technological foundations of one of the sections of the interactive solo, focusing on the interactive design between dance, sound and voice and the expressive possibilities that this creative process has provided to the artistic research of Emovere project.

Panel: Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 2

This talk will argue that me­dia-ac­tivist ini­tia­tives from the late 1960s and early 70s (such as Ant Farm and Rad­i­cal Soft­ware) share more in com­mon with today’s so­cial net­work­ing sites and re­al­ity TV shows than one might first sup­pose. I will in­ves­ti­gate how the no­tion of ‘feed­back’ works as a metaphor and a ma­te­r­ial con­di­tion which in both in­stances aims to pro­duce a self-per­form­ing sub­ject. Al­though the self-per­form­ing sub­ject has been re­al­ized through media such as Twit­ter and Face­book, it is of a dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter than the one en­vi­sioned by the media gueril­las of the past. My pre­sen­ta­tion will fur­ther ex­plain how the feed­back loop of non-scripted TV serves as an aid to the neo-lib­eral po­lit­i­cal rea­son­ing which pro­motes a cul­ture of en­tre­pre­neurism, pri­vati­sa­tion, vol­un­teerism, and re­spon­si­bil­i­sa­tion.

My PhD research on data visualization (started under the direction of Anne-Marie Duguet) has led me to the self-tracker community : people who gather, analyze and share their own data. According to their words and numbers (interviews, production analysis…), self-tracking appears as a new practice at the crossroads of technology, digital humanities and art.

Self-trackers log chosen parameters – reporting on work, sports or sexual achievements, measuring and monitoring mood, food, health or finances – to help, develop or complete a life project. Each tracker works out his own method and his proper goal, be they scientists (Bo Adler from Fujitsu Laboratories of America), artists (Nicholas Feltron) or just practicants.

The trend is growing daily: community sizes vary from hundreds (Me-trics) to thousands (YFD, Daytum) to billions (Runkeeper) of members depending on the parameters they focus on and the tools they use to monitor them. Smartphones are at the core of self-tracking. Trackers upload and share their data anytime and anywhere using specialized social platforms.

Being the experiment and the experimenter of their own laboratory their life is, using Gary Wolf words, a « data-driven » every-day exploration. Extracting meaning out of data, sharing and confronting results, a self-trackers’ first will is self-knowledge. They also aspire to a better understanding of mankind (collaborative medical projects…).

Self-tracking tackles the notion of humanity and society in the digital age. It offers new insights on technological applications and reassesses fundamental topics like language, communication, privacy and property.

Based on numbers, self-tracking is seen as an alternative – and a better – way than psychoanalysis to reach the self. Trackers mistrust words which they find too limited: they can lead to misunderstandings or lies and avoid communication with others who don’t use them – other humans, animals or plants.

As an extreme examples of data presence in peoples’ lives, self-tracking brings the question of data place and part: who can have access to personal data, why and what for? It also brings light on a social paradigm shift (suggested by Hal Niedzvieck): the progressive abandonment of the concept of privacy in favor of self-attention.

Abstract (short paper)

Glitch art is typically described as a kind, or style, of production error: “accidental” (caused or found) mistakes in the production or translation of a digital work. However, much of glitch is created using intended errors, or even simulations of error, created via reproducible means. The latter defines glitch aesthetics, as distinct from glitch production. This paper explores the semiotics of various types of glitch in the context of a fluctuating artistic practice.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Telehaptic, Wearables, VR Environment, Performativity, Tactile Feedback, Interaction, Virtual Reality, Spatial Sound.

This paper describes an interdisciplinary joint project that focuses on the cross-border networking of people between virtual and real space. We set up an encounter between two persons located at different places to experience the proximity between two people without any textual or verbal communication. In our experiment, one person in a virtual reality (VR) installation (CAVE) or wearing Oculus Rift glasses is able to interact with another person located in a dark room wearing a vest with vibration motors, compass and controller. The person in real space is represented as an avatar in the VR environment. The one in the real space is able to perceive the person in the virtual world with tactile and auditory senses. Spatial audio in the dark room supports the representation of the proximity of the two people and gives an intense spatial experience. The person connected to the VR environment can interact with the avatar and touch it by means of a 6 degree of freedom input device. Touching the avatar gives also visual feedback on the avatar. We separated tactile, visual and auditory feedback for this encounter in order to increase the intensity of the distant meeting.

Keywords: Telehaptic, Wearables, VR Environment, Performativity, Tactile Feedback, Interaction, Virtual Reality

This paper describes the interdisciplinary joint project Senseparation that focuses on the cross-border networking of people between virtual and real space. We set up an encounter between two persons located at different places to encourage people to think critically about today’s online communication. In our experiment, one person in a virtual reality (VR) installation (CAVE) or wearing Oculus Rift glasses is able to interact with another person located in a dark room wearing a vest with vibration motors, compass and controller. The person in real space is represented as an avatar in the VR environment. The one in the real space is able to perceive the person in the VR environment with tactile and auditory senses. Spatial audio in the dark room supports the representation of the proximity of the two people. The person connected to the VR environment can interact with the avatar and touch it by means of a 6 degree of freedom input device. Touching the avatar gives also visual feedback on the avatar. We separated tactile, visual and auditory feedback for this encounter in order to increase the intensity of the distant encounter..

This essay addresses sentience as engagement with sensorial immediacy with the non-human through the work of Mexican artist, Ariel Guzik. It discusses one of his sonic machines, Nereida, as an example of the overall focus of his overall practice, which interrelates the denaturalization of science with broader decolonization processes in ecology, and in particular concerning the degradation of oceanic environments in Mexico. From this perspective, the author argues for expanding art historical scholarship by engaging artistic practices, which like Guzik’s focus on critiques of science, as an integral part of contemporary ecological practices in global art, social movements, and indigenous thought.

This paper, based on research developed by the Laboratory of Front Poetics (research group CNPq/UEMG), seeks to discuss and reflect on the notions of reality and separation through the research and development of a poetic work. The results we present here arise from the context of research, development and innovation in the field of relations between art, science and technology. As a way of finding answers and the possibilities of understanding even multiplying realities, an experiment was developed that sought to obtain a credible prospect in the city of Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais/Brazil). The existence of an initiative that, at first, would not exist: the artist Froiid, one of the members of the LabFront’s project team, followed and discussed a narrative about the separation of a territory (Minas Gerais) from the rest of Brazil (2015-2018). In this work, we will briefly present what this narrative of emancipation is and we will present the artistic exercise developed by the LabFront that allows seeing through an interactive virtual reality installation in 2018 part of this “unreal/real” construction.

Synesthesia: communication between the senses; the translation of input from one sense into an object for a different sense; also, “amodal” perception — a sensation that arises from no one sense in particular, and all at once.
Kinesthesia: the direct perception of movement, in the body before the brain.
Synesthesia and kinesthesia are increasingly central to experimentation in and analysis of computer culture. Technological expressions of the conditions of human perception may in fact be considered a fundamental problem facing practitioners of computer-integrated art. How can an immersive, full-sense experience be produced through a medium that remains primarily visual? Can the functions of the other five senses, in particular tactility, be accessed through vision? Or is it necessary to address the other senses directly? Even in immersive VR environments where other than visual stimuli are provided, the body remains relatively static, anchored in the technology. Is an effectively synesthetic experience possible without the participation of the sixth sense, that of motion? Is not movement the medium through which the senses communicate? If so, for computer spaces to be effectively synesthetic they would have to be truly kinesthetic as well. But isn’t literal motion in an abstract space a contradiction in terms? Or is it conceivable that both synesthesia and kinesthesia are already in play, but unremarked, in even low-tech computer environments, such as email and hypertext? Is their functioning in fact the measure of “reality” in the virtual?
This panel will explore issues of synesthesia and kinesthesia in computer art and culture. The participants will attempt to define the terms and their interrelation, drawing on analyses of allied arts and cultural phenomena, such as performance, dance, literature, and the mass media, in addition to the electronic arts. The papers will converge around concepts of face, interface, memory, and affect as necessary points of reference in the perceptual economy of computer culture.

New directions in my creative practice focus on production within the genre of Visual Music paralleled with investigation into the neuroscience of audio-visual perception and multisensory integration. This talk will cover

1. psychological and neuroscientific studies on the interaction of the senses,
2. some effects of visual and musical stimuli on brain state, and
3. my own artistic experiments with attendant AV modalities.

Taking as a departure point Lygia Clark’s koan-like use of paradox and material juxtaposition this paper asks how her methods might be deployed in the context of contemporary technologies, like embedded electronics and algorithms, and what we might make if we take the spatial or sensory koan as a strategy when building with these materials. It will introduce the spatial koan as a lens through which to view Clark’s work, discuss her use of sensory juxtaposition in the object based therapeutic treatment she devised called Structuring the Self, and introduce The Relational Objects Project, currently in production, as an example of how this framework might be applied in the context of contemporary materials. This work developed through research in Clark’s archives and conversation with Lula Wanderley and Gina Ferreira, two psychotherapists trained by Clark in her Structuring the Self practice.

A lead group of artists and scholars initiate the Sensory Cosmologies group to discuss various strategies they have synthesized over the years towards engaging the senses to tackle both specific and “wicked” problems none-reductively. This panel will engage topics as pervasive as decolonization of space and time, research-creation at the intersection of art and science, comprehension of complexity, principles of undivided wholeness, and ethico-aesthetic paradigms for integration of non-western perspectives in cultural production of the new. Our guest sensory cosmonauts will discuss whether the difference between living and nonliving is a matter of degree with no beginning and no end: Sentience and liveliness as a degree-of-flux, propelled by complexity, expanding and contracting pre-spatial margins of indeterminacy which de-linearize rationality on different orders, magnitudes, and scales. From quantum indeterminacy, to fractal bifurcation, to post-human creativity within playful cosmologies, Sensory Cosmologies event will attempt to breathe chaos into order.

Refuting outmoded paradigms that lock culture into ‘once was’ models of tradition in which Indigenous life worlds and cosmologies are invariably rendered distant and past, Sensory Entanglements brings culture and heritage into sharp relief within the realm of contemporary media arts experiences. This round table will share insights about the collaborative processes of research-creation that led to the production of three portable sensory environments developed as uniquely embodied means for cultural knowledge transfer.

If architecture cannot respond radically to the advent of smart materials, intelligent systems,  and nanotechnology, the vision of a sensuous city to complement our post-biological condition cannot be realized. How to accommodate the technology of consciousness, house the cybernaut, service the telematic traveller, or farm artificial life? Archiculture means working from the bottom up: seeding ideas, growing structures, harvesting emergent systems in the interspace between the virtual and the real. This applies as much to our own bionic evolution as to cyburban design.

Panel: Emotion Studies in a Contemporary Art Debate

“Sens­ing with­out sens­ing” ex­plores new di­men­sion of sen­so­r­ial ex­pe­ri­ence shaped and sug­gested by vir­tual tech­nol­ogy and in­ter­ac­tive media. The core prin­ci­ple of “sens­ing with­out sens­ing” is light­en­ing weights of ac­tu­al­ity, in order to open the in­fi­nite space of meta realms, awak­en­ing un­der­ly­ing per­cep­tive lay­ers of our body trans­form­ing into in­tan­gi­ble, in­de­fin­able, and spir­i­tual. It is Ko­rean ex­pe­ri­en­tial re­al­ity, con­tin­u­ously con­flict­ing be­tween ac­tual and vir­tual layer: the chaotic state of nei­ther here nor there, in a quan­tum state of para­dox. Sens­ing with­out sens­ing is a Ko­rean on­to­log­i­cal jour­ney of tak­ing off to the sky. It is quite an emo­tional jour­ney, from ex­treme grief to joy, con­tin­u­ously dream­ing, de­sir­ing, and even­tu­ally tran­scend­ing sky.

This process is based on cos­mol­ogy of Sam- Tae-Guek demon­strat­ing three basic el­e­ments and their dy­namic swirling dance as a prim­i­tive east­ern cos­mo­log­i­cal model be­fore yin/yang.  Ko­rean quan­tum psy­che “Jung” ex­plains the emo­tional as­pect of swirling: nos­tal­gic and un­con­di­tional love to­wards in­fi­nite one­ness. Jung brings forth an­other cul­tural psy­che called “Han”, which is the first ac­tion of look­ing up to sky with ex­treme emo­tional state of grief, but with strong wish to over­come the sit­u­a­tion al­most seems im­pos­si­ble. Han is even­tu­ally trans­formed into ul­ti­mate state of play­ful­ness called “Shin-Myeong”. Fi­nally, this jour­ney de­taches us from phe­nom­ena, re­turn­ing us back to the po­si­tion of look­ing at the sky but with no mind, which move at­ten­tion from focus to hori­zon: fi­nally look­ing at en­tire quan­tum fields of na­ture. The mode of sens­ing with­out sens­ing will be fur­ther con­nected to the on­to­log­i­cal issue of the vir­tual body, ex­plor­ing a rich meta sen­so­r­ial ex­pe­ri­ence of user and avatar.

Enabling high fidelity haptics in the creation process will become an essential component in creating this notion of ‘presence’ for audiences. Beyond sight and sound we have other senses that can be triggered to create this feeling of ‘being there’.

Expectations for the future can differ greatly. Some await a technical utopia that will support harmonious and easy lives. Others predict a global ecosystem collapse that will threaten the future of humans as species. Both camps make appeals to sentience in support of their stories. Addressing this discordance, this paper combines narratives in ecology and technology to ask what roles sentience might play in future places. In response, it hypothesizes that an understanding of sentience as an inclusive, relational and distributed phenomenon can promote more-than-human cultures and contribute to the wellbeing of heterogenous stakeholders on the Earth and beyond.

To test this hypothesis, the paper outlines biological understandings of sentience (as applied especially to humans, animals and other lifeforms), contrasts them with the interpretations of sentience in artificial entities (including robots and smart buildings), gives an example of attempts at sentience in architectural design and discusses how sentience relates to place. The paper’s conclusion rejects the dualism of technophilic and biophilic positions. As an alternative, the paper outlines sentience as a foundation for richly local more-than-human cultures that have intrinsic value and can help in the search for preferable futures.

Theoretical notions about sentient and emanating bodies, dual subjectivity and the Eros effect are appended to my previous analysis of the ‘future’ metaverse. This latter term refers to technical, subjective and social-behaviour arrangements triggered by the condition of living, communicating, and interacting online when one is (almost) permanently logged into information and social networks. The sentient body is able to feel itself and the world even at mass level, preceding and exceeding perception, language and physical location (virtually); it is also capable of reality and sensecreation. A few questions addressed in this text are: Within the metaverse are our extended virtual bodies, sentient bodies? Do they act, react, and behave as emanating bodies? And if so, in which fashion: synthetic, virtual, hybrid? Are our virtual bodies able to create ‘magnetic allure’ (the vibe) to spawn mass mobilisation, as invoked in heuristics of the Eros effect? Answering these questions is important to broaden analyses of social networks and virtual worlds aesthetics merging through online interaction. The notions of bodily emanation (the vibe), autoempathy, and dual subjectivity are examined as constitutive parts of the rich transference between sentience and subjectivity production in the metaverse.

Artists and researchers work with living and semi-living organisms for many reasons. In 2004, the artist and theorist Roy Ascott coined the term “moist media” to represent the convergence between dry computational systems and wet biological processes. Ascott saw moist media as a way of extending the sensorium of the self. Some makers may utilize these materials to explore issues in the anthropocene that are faced by humans and non-humans alike, while others may be motivated by the aesthetics of life itself.

What do these artworks, studies, and designs tell us about the aims, desires, and perceptual landscapes of the non-human? This panel will explore sentience in our companion species through the work of five contemporary new media artists working with living and semi-living organisms. In their presentations, these artist-researchers will share what they have learned about sentience in other species from working in a non-anthropocentric framework. The panel will also consider the issues involved in collaborating with life, animal rights in the studio, and what our companion species can teach us about living systems.

How did we become a species willing to poison the environment that sustains us? Perhaps, the answer lays in a long history of anthropocentric cultural narratives, that gradually drove many westerners towards sensory and somatic illiteracy, and deeply disrupted our relationship to sentience. Sentience is a form of sensory awareness that is deeply embedded within our bodies. It simultaneously facilitates internal, social and spatial non-verbal communication, allowing awareness of one’s self, others, and of natural sentient eco-systems. Born a sentient being that thinks, feels and senses through the body, westerners are acculturated to become rational beings that ignore their sentience. This article explores some of the ecosophic dimensions of sentience. It retraces how anthropocentric culture, which developed at the intersection of multiple histories and forms of cultural colonization, has progressively remapped sensory perception with mediated simulations, and profoundly altered our perception of reality. In this process, we grew increasingly blind to the complex needs of our natural sentient environments. As simulation and data supersede sentient reality, we are becoming disembodied frenzied selves, unaware of the toxicity we bring to our environment. Sentience seems to be the antidote to the internalized western techno-anthropocentric norms fabricated over millennia of sensory oppression.

As a follow-up to the operating image concept defined by Harun Farocki in 2004, this round table will address a series of aesthetic and critical approaches that endeavour to probe the global visioning system that today conditions the perception of our physical, social, and political environment.

Since the end of the twentieth century, cameras no longer capture images for human vision only. Some of them are now exclusively dedicated to the operation of autonomous devices. It is no longer a matter of simply conceiving vision machines, but a vision for machines. Today, one can say that the images we see are now supplemented by images that see. Filmmaker and essayist Harun Farocki in fact called them “operative images,” stressing the fact that they are more participants in automated operations than objects for contemplation in themselves. The operations involved are performed in opaque systems, at such a speed and such a complexity that they elude not just human sight, but human attention altogether. These images have now permeated our lives and can inform the critical examination of other visualization technologies, encompassing digital imagery, contextual data sampling, and computer processing algorithms.

Operations related to geolocation, automated image indexing, photogrammetry, or biometric quantification are thus fuelling a new infrastructure for visualization that is progressively organizing our environment. It is then no longer a matter of simply examining how technology endows machines with sight, but especially of seeing how these machines may also suggest to humans new ways of looking at the world and, more generally, experiencing it. At a time when our conception of the world is influenced by an operative intensification of sensory experience, this round table will address a series of aesthetic and critical approaches that endeavor to probe the global visioning system that today conditions the perception of our physical, social, and political environment.

Artist Statement

The Sentient City Survival Kit is a design research project that explores the social, cultural and political implications of ubiquitous computing for urban environments. It takes as its method the design, fabrication and presentation of a collection of artifacts, spaces and media for survival in the near-future Sentient City. As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, information processing becomes embedded in, and distributed throughout, the material fabric of everyday urban space. Pervasive/ubiquitous computing evangelists herald a coming age of urban information systems capable of sensing and responding to the events and activities transpiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, this ‘sentient’ city is envisioned as being capable of reflexively monitoring our behaviour within it and becoming an active agent in the organization of our daily lives.

Few may quibble about ‘smart’ traffic light control systems that more efficiently manage the ebbs and flows of trucks, cars and busses on our city streets. Some may be irritated when discount coupons for their favourite espresso drink are beamed to their mobile phone as they pass by Starbucks. Many are likely to protest when they are denied passage through a subway turnstile because the system ‘senses’ that their purchasing habits, mobility patterns and current galvanic skin response (GSR) reading happens to match the profile of a terrorist. The Sentient City Survival Kit critically explores the darker side of this near-future city. Conceived as an ‘archaeology’ of the near-future, it posits a set of playful, ironic techno-social artifacts designed to raise awareness of issues of privacy, autonomy, trust and serendipity in technologically augmented urban environments. Components in the kit include: an umbrella studded with infrared LEDs visible only to CCD surveillance cameras, designed to frustrate object detection algorithms used in computer vision surveillance systems; a travel mug designed for creating ad-hoc ‘dark’ networks for communication along a morning commute; his and hers underwear designed to sense hidden Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tag readers and alert the wearer to their presence through vibrating motors sewn into the garments; and a GPS navigation software application for mobile phones that determines a route to a destination that the user has not previously taken, designed to facilitate finding something by looking for something else.

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

This talk pur­sues a com­par­i­son in the last chap­ter of En­fold­ment and In­fin­ity: An Is­lamic Ge­neal­ogy of New Media Art, that com­pares two bod­ies of al­go­rith­mic art: con­tem­po­rary gen­er­a­tive art­works and 17th-cen­tury Cau­casian car­pets. Each of them re­sponds to new in­for­ma­tion and come up with re­sults that could not be pre­fig­ured in the al­go­rithm’s ini­tial state. Cau­casian car­pets re­tain qual­i­ties of nonor­ganic life, mol­e­c­u­lar or­ga­ni­za­tion, and ap­peal to sen­sa­tion. They ex­em­plify the cre­ative élan vital of art­works whose forms os­cil­late be­tween fig­u­ra­tive and ab­stract. The life of forms in these car­pets, in its em­pha­sis on self-or­ga­ni­za­tion rather than im­i­ta­tion, is mol­e­c­u­lar rather than molar. In these car­pets life seems to arise from any point what­ever, to self-or­ga­nize and mu­tate. Though the car­pets’ de­signs obey strict com­po­si­tional rules, they nev­er­the­less sug­gest the Open, in that the odd­ness and par­tic­u­lar­ity of the forms sug­gests they could have evolved dif­fer­ently. Fi­nally, I sug­gest that Cau­casian car­pets ad­dress not only cog­ni­tion, not only per­cep­tion, but sen­sa­tion di­rectly, in what Deleuze calls the Fig­ural. This is one of their most sub­ver­sive qual­i­ties.

These ob­ser­va­tions about car­pets bring new cri­te­ria to art­works pro­duced with gen­er­a­tive soft­ware. Nonor­ganic life, an ap­peal to sen­sa­tion, the sub­ver­sion of or­na­ment all char­ac­ter­ize many con­tem­po­rary gen­er­a­tive art­works. The ques­tion that arises is, Where, in an al­go­rith­mic art­work, does in­di­vid­u­a­tion occur? In­di­vid­u­a­tion is the ac­tu­al­iza­tion of the vir­tual, a be­com­ing, a ma­te­ri­al­iza­tion of a life force from within. Cau­casian car­pets re­quired in­dus­trial-level de­sign and pro­duc­tion; in­di­vid­u­a­tion oc­curred at the level of de­sign. Sim­i­larly, in gen­er­a­tive art­work, we may seek in­di­vid­u­a­tion at the level of pro­gram­ming and of ma­te­r­ial ex­e­cu­tion.

Panel:  Interart / Intersensorium. On the Interrelation of Media and the Senses

The novel trans­me­dial as me­dia-trans­gress­ing qual­ity of elec­tronic in­ter­art forms is rec­i­p­ro­cally re­lated to their grow­ing mul­ti­modal po­tency. As Brian Mas­sumi has high­lighted when re­flect­ing on the sit­u­a­tion of media in cri­sis, “the dig­i­tal isn’t a medium. (…) Dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy is an ex­pand­ing net­work of con­nec­tive and fu­sional po­ten­tial. You can take an input in any sense modal­ity, and trans­late or trans­duce it into an­other.” (Mas­sumi 2008) Draw­ing upon this trans­me­dia ap­proach, the paper stud­ies inter/ac­tions of sen­so­r­ial transcod­ing as fun­da­men­tal con­di­tion of dig­i­tal­ity. On the basis of con­tem­po­rary elec­tronic art by artists from dif­fer­ent cul­tural back­grounds (among them Golan Levin, Hung Keung, Kim Kichul), it will in­ves­ti­gate the si­mul­ta­ne­ous trans­la­tions and mu­tual tran­si­tions be­tween sen­sory per­cep­tions and ex­pres­sions on dif­fer­ent modal com­plex­ity lev­els such as speak­ing and writ­ing, lis­ten­ing and read­ing, sound­ing and hear­ing, vi­su­al­iz­ing and view­ing, touch­ing and sens­ing. The pur­pose of this sen­so­r­ial transcod­ing analy­sis is three­fold:

1. to pon­der how a new the­ory of dig­i­tal synaes­thet­ics can be built on the cat­e­gory and con­cept of hy­per­modal­ity,
2. to ex­plore the con­nec­tiv­ity mode be­tween dig­i­tal ab­strac­tion and dig­i­tal em­bod­i­ment, and
3. to dis­cern the uni­ver­sal and cul­ture-de­ter­mined com­po­nents of the cod­i­fi­ca­tion of (multi)sen­sory ex­pe­ri­ence.

It is lived to do and is done to live, thinking that it does not get lost the time, but inevitably the time’s running out and gets lost, because this one is never stopped. But what would we do, if we could return the time fifteen minutes, two hours or more? Maybe we would do the same thing: To try to do more, taking advantage of the possible maximum thing this space of time. Because of it, this offer is a metaphor in which the wear or the use of the time, it is also an accumulation of hours, minutes and seconds that remain registered as evidence of the passage of time; times that become exhausted to fill or to complete a time. A time full of past.

One of the enduring mysteries of life is the other washroom. Public lavatories remain a bastion of segregation as well as a haven of modesty. They have recently become a battleground for gender equality over the issue of annoyingly one-sided queues. A charged nexus of privacy and parity, rest rooms provide a suitable sanctuary from which to contemplate social issues facing a tele­computed world. What are the demands of equality, access and opportunity in a virtual universe whose activities are the antithesis of bodily functions?

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

SHAN Stu­dio is an artist-run plat­form for mul­ti­me­dia dig­i­tal art and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Op­er­at­ing out of a small stu­dio in the heart of old Bei­jing, its in­ti­mate at­mos­phere and more per­son­able, in­for­mal ap­proach to ex­change has made it a pop­u­lar al­ter­na­tive spot for the Bei­jing media arts com­mu­nity. SHAN in­vites local and in­ter­na­tional artists of var­i­ous gen­res to share their wealth of cre­ative ex­pe­ri­ence and con­cepts. The stu­dio hosts artists talks, hands-on work­shops, an in­ter­na­tional res­i­dency pro­gram and spe­cial courses in media arts for local youth.

In 2013 Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer developed a new interactive installation called „Shanghai Express’. It premiered at the „City of Counterlight’ exhibition at the Power Station of Art in Shaghai, China on 3rd December 2013. The exhibition, curated by Yang Dongjang from Tsinghua University brought together installations, designs and artworks that deal with issues of urbanism, archiecture, location as well as how the public space is changing through media. The intention of the exhibition was „to reveal to the public the unique point of view of contemporary designers usually taken for granted in daily life, the intelligent and systematical combination of innovative thinking and social concerns, the interpretation of the city value through the integration of art, science and the analysis of urban organization in the past and present.’Our artwork „Shanghai Express’ consists of an interactive window that resembles a train window. Two users sit on the side of the window and they can swipe their hands along the window’s surface. Doing this, they travel through a virtual city scape that is generated on the fly through user interactions. A generative software created by Laurent Mignonneau grows skycrapers, buildings, bridges, lamps, rivers and street lights through generative algorithms. These archictural elements appear on the virtual train window’s surface, they represent an abstracted landscape at night. Users can change the direction of the train ride as well as the speed of the journey through the movements of their hands. At certain times of interactions fires, smog, rain and snow can occur as well. All depends on the interaction parameters and collaboration the two users and their sensitivity.„Shanghai Express’ deals with the concept of the city as a fragile organism that is created, influenced, changed and even put in danger through public decisions and interactions.

Can technology be used to pry open new viewports to the previously invisible, inaccessible and private subjective domains of sensation, emotion and thought? This roundtable explores new concepts of interface design resulting concepts of interface design resulting from socio-political discourses arising from dematerialization and virtualization of the body.

A prominent topic in discussions of cyberspace and new media technologies is the possibilities they offer for developing re-configured, ‘electronic’ subjectivities that allow the user to shed the social entrapments of the body in the physical world. In cyberspace, it is argued, the user has no body — therefore s/he has no necessary or preordained gender, race, class, “look” or even personality. For some, it is this aspect of cyberspace – together with its prosthetic, body-enhancing potential — that is the most liberating. For others it raises questions about the consequences of disembodiment in general. Can a purely electronic presence escape the determinations currently organized around the various matrix of power-permeating post­industrial culture? When the body, as emitter of signs, is removed, are there other signs which take the body’s place? And, how will the electronic “body” be represented – will it conform to the usual representations of physical bodies, or will an entirely new conception of corporeality and presence be formulated?

Abstract

She Loves It, She Loves It Not is an interactive CDROM disc created by Christine Tamblyn in collaboration with Marjorie Franklin and Paul Tompkins. It contains texts, sound, movie clips and images about women’s use of technology in the past, present and future. Over the last two decades feminists have identified men’s monopoly of technology as an important source of their power; women’s exclusion from access to technological prowess is a crucial element in their dependence on men. This project addresses this issue from several different angles.

The viewer accesses a series of screens by clicking a mouse. The initial interface is a graphic image of a daisy. Each of the petals of the daisy represents a loop of screens with a particular theme: Memory, Control, Power, Communication, Violence, Homunculus, Labyrinth, Interactivity, The Other, Representation and Ideology. When a viewer clicks on a petal, the loop she has chosen begins. Each screen is composed of a headline, a block of text, a static image and several “buttons” that open up to various elements. The images are derived from various found sources, including  comic books, a catalog of robots, magazine advertisements and art works. The text concisely analyzes the topic from the perspectives of cultural studies, sociology and film history. A continuously looping sound is also associated with each screen. Special animated buttons allow viewers to read handwritten letters, watch Quicktime movie clips (digitized at 5 1/2 frames per second for a defamiliarizing effect) or see a “footnote” text with more detailed information about a specific topic. The text contains 84 screens and takes about an hour to view once in its entirety (in one possible configuration.) Because it is an interactive, non-linear piece, viewers can choose how long to spend with it, what order to view it in, whether to repeat or skip screens and whether or not to open buttons. The visual aesthetic of the piece has a handmade collaged look; we have deliberately avoided the slick sterility of much computer art. Its content combines aspects of an academic essay or documentary film with a poetic series of associated links between graphic, film, text and sound elements. Thus, the project serves as a prototype exploring some of the new potentials of the interactive CDROM format. Both the form and the content of the work attempts to demonstrate how women might use and have used technology differently and how technology might adapt to female learning proclivities and female culture. An integral part of the project is the design of computer interfaces that are more user friendly for women. Because computers have evolved as tools built by men for men to be used in warfare, the current interfaces tend to have a violent, aggressive character. They are hierarchical, mirroring the militaristic male pyramid with its rigid chain of command.

Current interfaces also have a predominantly visual bias, privileging the male gaze and male strategies for control through surveillance of territory. Interfaces designed to be operated by women ought to be multi-sensory, personal, affective and dynamic. Our approach to redesigning the interface involves the creation of a female persona in cyberspace who serves as a guide to the system. The navigation buttons on each screen appear inside an image of this persona, and her voice gives instructions about how to proceed. By envisioning a more productive relationship between women and technology, the project will benefit women who are using new technologies in a variety of academic fields and artistic endeavors. It is designed to be exhibited as an art installation as well as to be used as an instructional resource for women students by providing positive alternatives to the negative stereotypes regarding women and technology often inculcated in early educational experiences. Just as feminist theorists have stressed the importance of women having access to the position of speaking subjects and “having a voice” in our culture, it is similarly important for women to have role models for computer literacy as computers become an essential
communications tool.

The CDROM requires a high-end Macintosh computer (MAC IIci or above with 6 RAM available), a color video monitor and stereo speakers to operate. It was programmed using Macromedia Director.

This paper explores the concept of fields of experience as a way to engage with the conditions of emergence of what we might call sentience. As a process of fielding, sensation and processes of sense-making are of an emergent and entangled quality in the overall ecology of experience. We specifically wish to emphasize the dynamics of the closely interrelated conditions for sensing and sense-making – what we conceptualize as ‘shifting immedations’ – and its affective politics. Rather than transgression, ‘shifting’ foregrounds the sometimes almost imperceptible reorientations of fields of experience that are lived immediately as tendencies and vectors for change (feeling the non-sensuous). In particular, we wish to zoom in on specific practices and technologies that might modulate and reorient such experiential fields.

We do so by analyzing two cases that emphasize the emergent relations between digital and interactive technologies and their fielding potential; BERMUDA is an interactive installation that attempts to relay affective intensity into tendencies for collective action, whereas the interventions of etcetera emphasize time-sensitive modulations of experience. Exploring these cases, we ask how experiential fields and shifting immediations might allow us to think and act towards new forms of engaging in a politics of sentience beyond the human subject.

The global ecological crisis has become a catalyst for interdisciplinary collaborations at a time when a shift in thinking is urgently required. World leaders are now looking towards the validity and possibilities of creative methodologies as tools for change. This presents both a challenge and an unprecedented opportunity for creative practitioners to gain a critical understanding of the situation and devise new processes for a sustainable future. This paper explores the role of auditory culture in a sustainable future and introduces the Sonic Ecologies Framework, a multi-platform methodology proposed to initiate cultural change through sound. The core of this methodology pivots on a site-specific creative project embedded in a multi-layered community cultural engagement process developed in response to a specific environment. This evolving model is implemented by the artist, acting as an agent of change spiraling between contextualized theory and practice. This research introduces the five stages of the model with examples from projects recently implemented in Australia.

Intro
In John Cage’s pivotal 1937 talk, The Future of Music: Credo, he said, “I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard” . In 2012, the centennial of John Cage, his visionary genius is clearly evident with a musical world of infinite possibilities aided by technology. The dramatic advancement of technology has truly cultivated a paradigm shift in how artists interact in both physical and virtual worlds. These changes have evolved and expanded our tools of expression but most importantly they have opened the ability to communicate at a higher level in an interdisciplinary context. In a recent addition of Musicworks, Joel Chadabe stated that the current artistic practices of electro-acoustic composers are rooted in the idea that new technologies, unlike traditional musical instruments, can produce sounds used to communicate core messages, including information about the state of our environment. He claims that we are all participating in the emergence of a new type of music accessible to anyone, which can be used to communicate ideas that relate more closely to life than those communicated through traditional musical forms. He – The Wilderness at Home

This presentation traces the author’s digital imaging projects from the mid-1980s to the present based on computational processing and the integration of noise as an aesthetic element. Building on his background in photography, the projects explore the relationship of noise-to-signal and the influence of Shannon’s Information theory in the author’s work.

Part of ISEA98Revolution, Nigel talks about his piece, Ship to Shore. Over the past decade my practice has undergone a transformation in which discreet conceptual and methodological practices have converged to form a pluri-discipline – a cultural practice which synthesises, sculpture with architectural or environmental sites and combines performed soundscapes (textual, musical or electronic) with public radio broadcast. My initial formation as a sculptor has provided me with an orientation which insists upon an experiential, rather than a representational means of expression one in which the body (its sensorium and its memory) is invoked as the primary location of meaning. Such an orientation has drawn me to an area of research which seeks to critique and develop a nexus of relationships between the body, sound and public space.

My practice is broadly intended to redress this apparent lack of awareness of the sonic domain in the fields of design, architecture and art practice with a programme of Sound-sculpture projects designed to signal and promote the creative, cultural and technological potentials of the aural.

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

My re­search ex­plores the na­ture of cor­po­re­al­ity in the bio­med­ical sci­ences and queries the sta­tus of our “hu­man­ness” at the be­gin­ning of the twenty-first cen­tury. In this panel I will pre­sent the in­ter­sec­tions be­tween art and bio-med­ical prac­tices that are il­lus­trated through my re­search. I will give an overview of the ground­break­ing bio­med­ical ex­per­i­ments I car­ried out to ‘change the fates’ of adult stem cells from my blood into beat­ing car­diac cells ‘in vitro’ and link this cor­po­real mal­leabil­ity with my on-go­ing ex­plo­rations. My re­cent in­ves­ti­ga­tions into the small brains of the Eu­ro­pean honey bee and their com­mu­nal ‘hive con­scious­ness’ will also be ad­dressed through the vir­tual and real-time in­ter­ac­tive art­works that have re­sulted from this re­search. I will demon­strate how my over­all em­pha­sis on hy­bri­dis­ing vir­tual and real-time ex­pe­ri­ences cre­ate al­ter­na­tive habi­tats that place the viewer in the role of a par­tic­i­pant who can ex­am­ine the ‘shiv­er­ing bound­aries’ be­tween mind-body-self at first hand.

‘It’s a words into symbols – symbols into words thing’ Beaufonts will present a case study of their symbol generating typo-utility ‘ShorthandLite’ and discuss various issues surrounding digital typography, generative work, interactive page design and the relationship between screen and paper based graphics. Beaufonts is a loose collective of designers based in Liverpool, Manchester and London.

Across the globe, museums filled with glass and plexiglass vitrines display collections of Indigenous belongings. The typical display scenario for such belongings places them upon plinths, underneath a plexiglass. These cases render the life they contain into objects of display, things to be seen but not touched. For Indigenous people, experiencing this objectifying system of display is often traumatic because that which is on display fits neither category of object nor thing; they hold life, and are beings or ancestors. They are treated as kin.

Alongside the life of ancestors who take material form, thousands of Indigenous songs collected by ethnographers on wax cylinder recordings and reel-to-reel tape are similarly confined in museum collections. These songs also hold life, but of different kinds from their material cousins. To re-assess the role of the museum as a place that confines life is to put into question its relationship to incarceration. If the museum is a carceral space, how then, might we define repatriation alongside practices of “re-entry” and kinship reconnection? To what extent might we also apply the discourse of prison abolition to the museum?

ABSTRACT

Mission, purpose, values and an overview of the organisation.

• ACM SIGGRAPH’s Mission

Our mission is to promote the generation and dissemination of information on computer graphics and interactive techniques.

• ACM SIGGRAPH’s Purpose

Our purpose is to foster a membership community whose core values help them to catalyze the innovation and application of computer graphics and interactive techniques.

• ACM SIGGRAPH’s Values
• Excellence

We value excellence in the information and experience provided by our products and activities.

• Integrity

We value personal and organizational integrity in the selection of our content and in our interpersonal and organizational relationships.

• Volunteerism

We value volunteers and volunteerism in an environment that actively supports its volunteers.

• Passion

We value the passion our community feels for ACM SIGGRAPH and for the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques.

• Cross-Disciplinary
• Interaction

We value the interaction among the many disciplines that make up our community.

In this paper, we examine how browsing multimedia content by similarity can foster new practices in new media arts, blurring the boundaries between composing and performing, curating and authoring, creating and interpreting… building upon techniques such as Cut-Up, Plunderphonics, Collage, Mash-Ups.

We developed MediaCycle, a framework to design application for browsing multimedia databases by similarity (audio, images, video). We present several artistic works and prototypes making use of this framework: an audio loop manipulation software application for “realtime playlisting”, a website for browsing dancers’ identities through video recordings, and interactive installations recomposing mixed media. We also propose other possible uses of this framework.

Abstract (long paper)

This paper presents an approach to the concept of the image articulated through non-hierarchical modes of being which include the human and the non-human, the technical and the biological, the animate and the inanimate. This approach to the image elaborates on the ideas of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) who conceives it through an understanding of technical culture that sees no dichotomy between nature and culture and dissolves the rift between the human and the technological, the animal and the machinic. For Simondon, technologies are assemblages between instruments and machines, machines and humans, animals and milieus, invention and experience which produce new hybrid modes of thought, of being, of communicating—of existence which composes through expanded, hybrid beings. These hybrid beings sustain, unite and bring together the actual and the virtual, the human and the non-human, the animate and nonanimate as individuations, as machinic assemblages within a multi-phased imagistic process. Like Bergson, Simondon’s ideation of the image is non-pictorial, non-visual and steers away from an anthropocentric static conception, so that we can come to express the image as a process of individuation arising at the intersection of the animal and the technological.

The 50th anniversary of the L.A.S.E.R. invention fell in 2010, while in 2011 is the 40th anniversary of the Nobel Prize awarded to Dennis Gabor, the Hungarian scientist who invented holography. Holography can create an accurate visual simulation, with total parallax: a replica made of light which has the visual properties of the real object but is immaterial, intangible.

A well-known visual simulation technique is the Renaissance perspective, which represents the three-dimensional physical space onto a bi-dimensional one. Although the perspective was invented in the XV Century we are still immersed in (and influenced by) this way of representing and interpreting the world. In fact the perspective was inherited by photography, cinema, video, computer photorealistic images, virtual reality, 3D videogames, the metaverses… We live in a perspective-based culture. But, although the perspective is presented as an “objective” visualization technique, its objectivity is theoretically and technically based on the “point of view”, that is on the most subjective and personal element of the discourse production.

Holography gives more freedom to the observer: he can choose the viewpoint, his spatial position and he can successfully change his own visual perspective, like in front of a real, material, object and scene.

The media can produce, reproduce and transmit bi-dimensional images on flat supports. The media system has a high coherence degree and the images share similar morphostructural rules, so they can be transferred from one medium to another without any fundamental information loss: bi-dimensionality and image-support coincidence appear to be at the basis of this high level of translatability. Conversely holograms can’t be displayed through the usual media without loosing their peculiarity: they require new displays, new visual media, new genres of communication, even if they hybridize with the existing media.

In a near future holography-based techniques will open up new possibilities in the visualization domain, allowing new visual worlds. In the meantime holography can be a useful technical and theoretical tool for reflecting on how our everyday mediascape works.

Panel: Visual Effects Remixed

In this paper the au­thor will de­scribe and show ex­am­ples of his live au­dio-vi­sual work for 3D spa­tial en­vi­ron­ments. These pro­jects use mo­tion track­ing tech­nol­ogy to en­able users to in­ter­act with sound, light and video using their body move­ments in 3D space. Spe­cific video ex­am­ples of one past pro­ject (Vir­tual DJ) and one cur­rent pro­ject  (Vir­tual VJ) will be shown to il­lus­trate how sub­jec­tive and flex­i­ble user in­ter­ac­tion is en­abled through a com­plex but pre­dictable map­ping of 3D space to media con­trol. In these pro­jects au­di­ence mem­bers can in­ter­act with sound, light and video in real-time by sim­ply mov­ing around in space with a tracker in hand. Changes in sound, light and real-time vi­sual ef­fects can be syn­chro­nized with changes in sound and or light (i.e. music vol­ume = light bright­ness = video opac­ity). These changes can be dy­nam­i­cally mapped in real-time to allow the user to con­sol­i­date the roles of DJ, VJ and light de­signer in one in­ter­face. This in­ter­ac­tion model sim­u­lates the ef­fect of synaes­the­sia, in which cer­tain peo­ple ex­pe­ri­ence light or colour in re­sponse to mu­si­cal tones.

Panel: Art(ist)s in Space

SINGULAR OSCILLATIONS attempts to know the oscillating space of parabolic-flight in its own right rather than use it to understand its effect on other phenomena. The project is a collaboration between Bradley Pitts, Projekt Atol Flight Operations, and the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in which the entire cabin of the IL76-MDK is cleared except for one subject who is allowed to float and fall freely with their eyes closed, ears blocked, and naked. This immerses the subject in the variable-gravity space and heightens their awareness of it, while minimizing their affect upon it. Thus SINGULAR OSCILLATIONS explores the empty volume of the plane in and of itself. While SINGULAR OSCILLATIONS takes place within the context of a scientific facility, the expressed aim of the project is to produce immeasurable, subjective experience. Historically, these sorts of experiences have been marginalized within national space programs, as they do not conform to the inexorable demands of science. With the advent of artists and tourists in space, however, Pitts is interested in the shift from the scientific paradigm of space exploration to one of play, which fully embraces the entire spectrum of human experience and understanding. SINGULAR OSCILLATIONS is made in collaboration with Projekt Atol Flight Operations and the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC) with support from Rob Defares, Fokker Technologies, and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL.

Beyond the threshold of our mundane senses, electromagnetic wave fields(EMF) are a component of our daily life. An increasingly omnipresent phenomenon, ambient EMF has the capacity to recharge batteries, power LEDs and fluorescent bulbs in areas where the signals ae quire strong. In this presentation, Goeringer will discuss her ongoing work sonifying electromagnetic wave fields, and discuss the potentiality of EMF as a hidden component in the places we inhabit for power and creative endeavors.

“Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up.”   _Hannah Arendt

Sex Workers, after being denied visa’s to travel to the US because of travel restrictions imposed by the US Government to attend the annual International AIDS Conference in Washington, staged an alternative conference in Kolkata, India. The five day “Sex Workers’ Freedom Festival” ensured sex workers’ a voice and their right to meaningfully participate in issues that affect their lives. This alternative event made visible the on-going exclusion of sex workers to address the need, for sex workers to be seen as partners in HIV prevention, treatment and care. Over the 5 days a highly successful campaign, that embraced info-activism and co-creative digital media, engaged local and international media. The issues and demands of sex workers became front page news and stories shared via social media. The vibrant and diverse global sex worker movement unrestricted, ready for download. How has the changing digital media landscape affected activists and storytellers in their pursuits of positive social change? What are the impacts? And what is the future role of of the community-based artist/activist in uncovering ‘untouched’ and ‘touchy’ subjects?

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

Draw­ing on Guy De­bord’s no­tions of the de­rive and de­tourne­ment, as well as Ouli­pean con­cepts of po­ten­tial­ity and be­com­ing, this paper will en­gage with the au­thor’s re­cent ex­per­i­ments in re­defin­ing urban space as aes­thetic space.  It will offer a crit­i­cal en­gage­ment with the au­thor’s de­tourned ex­pe­ri­ence of the chance iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of po­ten­tial, or ac­ci­den­tal art in the streets of Mel­bourne and Rome, a com­men­tary upon emer­gent sit­ings of art in un­sitely places.  It will also argue for an al­ter­na­tive con­cep­tion of art in­stal­la­tion be­yond the sit­u­at­ed­ness of the gallery, using GPS satel­lite co-or­di­nates to di­rect local and re­mote vis­i­tors to si­mul­ta­ne­ously en­gage with un­sitely aes­thet­ics in both cities, thereby ex­tend­ing both telem­at­i­cally and aes­thet­i­cally the no­tion of what art and in­stal­la­tion can be­come.

This novel work of Andrea Manzoni and Marcel Zaes articulates an aesthetic position of minimalism and introspection in the seamless equilibrium between acoustic and electronic material. Sjö : två, consisting of eight tracks, is a journey through the common sonic cosmos of the two artists, capable of displaying the permeability between popular and contemporary classical music cultures and of going beyond present structures and genres.

Tracklist
01 PULSE 000 02:34
02 PATTERN 001 06:13
03 SOLIDIFICATION 002 09:21
04 OSTINATO 005 06:15
05 ALTERNATION 004 08:46
06 PULSE 008 07:57
07 PARALLELS 006 03:54
08 PATTERN 003 10:02
Total playing time 55:07

Andrea Manzoni — Piano
Marcel Zaes — Electronics, Programming

This uniquely augmented skateboard called the Lickr is a new musical controller instrument/toy. Equipped with a wireless microphone, battery pack, optical wheel rotation sensor, two proximity detectors, three gyro sensors and a bluetooth transmission device, the system tracks the 3D-movement of the skateboard. Movement is analyzed and turned into musical fantasy. The music becomes a game and skaters can jam like a band.

Skediomata, the robotic entity dedicated to the study of drawing was born in research as a guinea pig. Perhaps not surprisingly, it and its siblings have been found to be gifted leading performers when participating in art installations. The original Skediomata is being developed in the context of the Aikon-II research project, a multidisciplinary investigation into sketching from life.

The Aikon-II main research objective is to gain a better understanding of the emergence of style in observational sketches. The methodology deployed to shed light on this complex activity consist of developing a computational model of the various processes at play during the sketching cycle. To better understand the drawing activity it is important to simulate, even if somewhat imperfectly, all the known processes active during the sketching cycle. These include — perceptual, motor, mnemonic, cognitive — activities and their interactions including control mechanisms with a focus on those mechanisms relying on feedback data.

At the start of our Aikon-II project, we had not planned to have a physical embodiment as a robotic entity. But after we experimented with some new hardware and software frameworks, with a view to produce an artistic installation, we realized that it was possible, financially and technically, and further beneficial, in the perspective of simulation, to have a robotic agent version of Aikon-II. By designing specifically the robot to fulfill AIkon’s function and using open source libraries, we were able to significantly cut down development and hardware costs.

Interestingly, when designing a robot that interacts with physical reality, the issues encountered are of a very different nature than if the system is solely computational. It is one of the reasons that lead actors from the artificial intelligence community such as Rodney Brooks at the MIT  do consider that disembodied artificial intelligence is essentially flawed. Looking at drawing as a complex sensorimotor activity brings new insights into the processes we are investigating and into ways to model these. Furthermore, the type of software architecture that supports communications by distributed concurrently running processes as used in contemporary robotics is well adapted to the simulation of an activity recognized has being the result of the interaction and cooperation of multiple processes such as sketching.

Apart from being an essential and influential “guinea pig” that furthers our research, due to the fascination that robots exerts on the public, Skediomata has proven to also be an excellent ambassador to promote Aikon-II’s work. Furthermore due to its low cost and the type of software architecture developed, groups of Skediomatas feasibly collaborate as performers in art installations.

In this paper after a brief historical introduction of drawing machines and laying out possible avenues to explain the performative qualities of Skediomata, we present a comprehensive description of the Skediomata platform. We then describe two recent artistic installations presented in 2010 and hint at the future.

This paper presents part of a larger, practice-led research project to develop a new understanding of sketching as a methodology for creative practice in the post-digital age. It will be presented through a reflective critique of the researcher’s own hybrid, interactive, public performance-based practice.

Descriptions of sketching throughout history have emphasized its spontaneous, exploratory, unfinished, indeterminate, contingent and/or disordered qualities; often characterized by loss of control or openness to the unexpected (Petherbridge, 2010). Modern art also focused on aspects of the sketch to isolate, capture or value “the essential” as even more important than the finished work (Stjernfelt, 2007). In design disciplines, sketching is commonly seen as an interim activity; making images to assist in the creation of something more “real”.

This paper draws on recent research in mathematics, physical computing and cognitive science to suggest that sketching shares with these disciplines properties that can externalize cognitive processes or reveal categories of thinking. (Bhattacharya & Petsche 2005, Petherbridge 2010).

New “sketches” will be created for the ISEA conference to illustrate interdisciplinary mixed-reality relationships – neither “real” nor “virtual”, but always “in-formation”. The presentation may also refer to recent work such as ‘Vending Machine’ (Splore festival, New Zealand 2010), where digital designs were sketched and materialized into real attachments for the body, and  ‘Evolutionary Experiments’ (MIC Toi Rerehiko Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand 2010) where creatures developed from ‘sketching’ with software, hardware and cardboard, created and occupied a new space that would not have been possible in either digital or analog form.

Through this linking of sound- and video-based work, computer hacking, modeling, new and archival material, with traditional drawings, the presentation itself takes the form of a real-time, improvised sketch.  The accumulation of such sketches (archived in “sketchbooks”), in turn, in-forms further conversations between differing modes of knowledge and expression.

The paper will thus invite a wide audience to consider the (as yet “sketchy”) internal codes of an as yet un-named territory, rather than the normative external representations normally associated with sketching.  From this, we argue that an original language – with further possibilities for interdisciplinary interaction – is emerging from the authors’ practice.

Fingerprints are unique biometric patterns on human and primate bodies. They are clearly recognizable patterns that can be manipulated and saved into large databases. Due to their distinct and unique visual patterns, they have been useful for personal identification and security. We believe fingerprints are the most intuitive and powerful source of data that represent an individual’s pure voice and identity. There is no trick or filter on the fingerprint patterns. Only the simple, spiral pattern displays the truth of human birth, genes, and growth. Thus, fingerprints are a powerful resource not only for revealing societal identities, but also for exploring our bodies’ inner, unconscious, and pure voices. Digiti Sonus is an interactive audio/visual art installation based on fingerprint sonification. Transforming fingerprints’ unique patterns into sonic results allows the audience to experience the discovery of sensory identities. The sonification of data produces a real-time music composition as a representation of integrated human identities. The distinct visual features of fingerprints as an open musical score are executed in diverse ways and converted into three-dimensional animated images. By varying the starting point of animated visuals, the musical notes are reorganized in different orders and duration, and they resonate in listeners’ bodies and minds. In this artwork, sonification can serve as an effective technique for representing complex information like human body patterns, due to the auditory system’s ability to perceive a broad range of stimuli. Transforming fingerprints’ unique patterns into sonic results allows listeners to discover sensory identities. The data is transformed into different XYZN scales and magnified into an immersive audio/visual representation. Listeners can ‘perform’ musical sounds, providing input that results in dynamic audio/visual output.

The skin is the largest human body organ, and besides being its protecting layer and a system that regulates the body temperature and receives pain and pleasure stimuli, it also strongly contributes to the individual identification: it is the skin that in the first place separates physically our inside and the outer world – the other. The color of skin -– maybe its most interesting and controversial characteristic — has been reason for passions and wars in the human history, for it can either unite or separate, regarding resemblances or differences.

Using the skin color, the present work – SKINdoscope SL – builds an interactive tree in Second Life where each person who interacts with it creates a leaf with his/her skin color. The poetics and visual results are formed by and depend on the relationship between the leaves and their colors, in a game of alterity and identity. Since the person who interacts can choose the color either of his/her body or of his/her avatar body, the SKINdoscope SL – a digital work – reflects data from “real” and digital lives coexisting.

Also, the tree produces L$ 1,00 coins for each 10 new leaves created and the coins can be taken by any avatar who touches them. The coins represent the richness of people interaction and diversity. This ability of producing money in a tree is only possible in digital realms but it has extensions in the “real” life, in a cybrid process. Since this digital money can be used in “real” life too, digital and “real” mix again.

In this context, the present work intends to lead the participant to reflect about questions related to the poetics of the alterity/identity and the interpenetrations of the “real” and digital lives through a metaverse.

Participate by searching skindoscope in Second Life.

Radio astronomy is being developed globally through the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. The SKA will enable astronomers to observe the most distant objects in the Universe, measure Galaxy evolution and study the phenomenon of dark energy in a project of unprecedented scale. Currently two ‘radio quiet’ sites, one in Western Australia and the other in South Africa are being assessed for its location. The decision is expected in 2012 with construction taking place from 2014 to 2024.

For the chosen site, the project means enormous scientific and technological investment, with potential long-term benefits reaching far beyond the immediate scientific agenda. There are already significant scientific developments with high levels of government support. How will the SKA be understood in a broader cultural context? How is the project being communicated to audiences beyond the scientific community?

Educational projects are being run through the SKA websites of Western Australia and South Africa.  There are imaginative visualisations of the project using new technologies for conventional illustration and within realtime interactive environments. For example, in 2008, Paul Bourke modelled the proposed sites of the SKA and the ‘pilot’ Australian SKA Pathfinder Project (ASKAP), allowing the project to be more closely identified with a proposed location.

In 2009, as part of the International Year of Astronomy, the ‘Ilgarijiri’ Project (‘things belonging to the sky’ in the Wajarri language) brought artists and scientists together in a collaborative project between Aboriginal artists from the Yamaji Country, in Mid-Western Australia, and radio astronomers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), based in Perth, Western Australia. The Wajarri Yamatji people are the traditional owners of the proposed Western Australia site.

This paper will examine the potential of the SKA as a catalyst for art-science conversations and collaborative projects. What is the likely benefit for different communities? Will the SKA become part the popular imagination? What metaphors will be developed for the SKA, to demonstrate its capacity to excite and be understood? How will the data collected, made available, be understood visually? Can it be transformed into aesthetic experiences to be enjoyed by a broad audience?

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

This paper ex­plores some po­ten­tial uses of Skype in videop­er­for­mance prac­tices. Skype em­bod­ies the para­doxes of screen-me­di­ated videop­er­for­mance and screen-me­di­ated com­mu­ni­ca­tion with its il­lu­sion of trans­parency and im­me­di­acy, its dis­tance be­tween cam­era and image on screen, per­formed eye con­tact, and ef­fec­tive re­la­tional per­for­ma­tiv­ity. Start­ing from the doc­u­men­ta­tion of an ex­per­i­ment con­ducted dur­ing a week­long res­i­dency in Colch­ester, UK, I will ex­am­ine some re­la­tional as­pects of Skype, mov­ing be­tween straight­for­ward one-to-one com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and live and recorded per­for­mances.

Sleeping Eyes is an interactive cinematic virtual reality (VR) piece that tells the story of a narcoleptic Korean artist, Sungeun Lee. VR was used as a medium to represent the symptoms of narcolepsy and provoke fundamental reflections on the boundary between dreams and reality. In VR, even if we are immersed in the virtual world, we simultaneously exist in the physical world. This duality of presence and embodiment resonates with Sungeun’s narcoleptic states. We investigated these ontological similarities as a catalyst to provoke the audience’s self-reflection about Sungeun’s situation. Non-linear narrative and gamification techniques were applied to allow the audience actively explore the stories. Additionally, a heart-rate sensor was used to visualize the audience’s stress states, implicitly making them aware of their own feelings about the artwork.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Slowness, duration, mobility, critique, locative media, environment.

The “Slow Movement,” originally associated with conservation efforts in food consumption or city planning, has rapidly spread to many other areas of culture and commerce. This paper anticipates future articulations of “slow art” in general and “slow media art” in particular, as a path to new critiques and perspectives on the modern desire to “slow down.” As a term, Slow Media Art offers some unique opportunities for considering contemporary appeals to slowness as based in both sensation and structural understandings of social order. When viewed in light of the history of artists’ ambivalence toward modernization, and with an eye to recent scholarship on media abstention, the notion of slowness proves a useful frame for foregrounding the essentially relational nature of speed. Within such a frame, the many paradoxes and contradictions within appeals to slowness appear rather as efforts at positioning by modern subjects in relation to one another; the move to “go slow” is almost always a move to “go slower than” someone or something else. Slow Media Art, through its deep engagement with sensation, duration, and speed, helps bring such relations, and their motivations, into view.

The roundtable will look at the creative methods used for innovation, ideation and project governance and implementation and how those methods can impact and directly influence and inspire new forms of smart future city spaces routed in the local urban/cultural and socio-economic context of the city. Best practices of other city developments shall be reviewed and possibilities to innovate based on the artist method of exploration and innovation applied to city development. How does the knowledge of a location influence the creation of a smart city? How can we read the understanding of smart cities beyond the understanding of technology?

Carlos Franklin will introduce the work he has been doing during the last three years as director of the animated documentary series Smart secrets of great paintings and animated documentary VR experiences Unframed. The first subject is about creative documentaries. Carlos Franklin will present some excerpts of the episode “View of Warsaw from the Royal Palace by Bernardo Bellotto” (dir. J. Darakchiev) focusing on the rebuilding of central Warsaw from Bellotto’s paintings and how we rebuild all the historical process using digital image. Carlos Franklin will also present the case of VR experiences “Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez” and “The temptations of Saint Anthony by Hyronimous Bosch”, and the transformation of paintings into inhabitable spaces thanks to 3D / VR software. This presentation will open the discussion about strategies of collaborations between artists and museums, in the frame of artistic commissions and/or communication plans for diffusion of artworks and exhibition pieces. The documentaries will be shown during the symposium.

The paper is based on the research project “Artistic Approaches to Engage Girls and Young Women in Technology and Engineering Education at School and University” held at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology’s Institute of Vocational and General Education.[1]

The research approach looks at coupling arts, science, technology and engineering in transdisciplinary education settings. It applies the education-through-arts concept to technology and engineering education at school and university. The paper discusses examples of more playful and artistic approaches introducing textile and wearable interfaces for interdisciplinary media-art-technology education, based on shapable low cost Arduino technology. The project aims to explore the pupils’ image and understanding of technology, their perception and attitudes towards computers. The paper argues that the introduction of artistic processes linked to meaningful contexts developed by the girls themselves can be support key to trigger interest and motivation.

Smart Textile technology used in the project blurrs the boundaries of the school subjects taught separated from each other. Wearable Computing crosses the borders of curricula of subjects such as art, textile, (computer)science, technology and engineering. Furthermore, the shaping of Smart Textile artifacts brings together a variety of activities, such as shaping, programming, designing, experimenting with media and materials in teams based. Textile as media serves as a metaphor for an educational model of creatively discovering computer science and technology embedded in wearables, objects and the environment developed by the pupils themselves.

The project aims to answer the question, why the integration of artistic processes in science and technology is important for future curricula and the rethinking of technology education.

[1] Head of IBP: Prof. Dr. Martin Fischer, the project is realized in collaboration with ZKM Karlsruhe, the Center of Art and Media, department of Museum Communication (Head: Janine Burger) using a software development of the research group “Digital Media in Education” at the Univerisity of Bremen (Prof. Dr. Heidi Schelhowe). The project is applied in 6th grade at the Hebel-Realschule Karlsruhe (secondary school).

ABSTRACT

Artists have always asked new questions regarding the creative process. “Smarter Than Dogs,” is a new performance work that explores the use of current technologies as a virtual “crossing point”, where the boundries of individual art forms are explored. The collaborators include a composer, a choreographer, two computer animators, a poet-text writer and a stage and lighting designer. As each artist introduces a sensory component, be it visual, text, sound, movement or light, all are capable of interacting with the others process electronically, making every performance unique. The performance exists in real time, yet it is interactive with earlier rehersals as well as stored visual and audio events that have been composed and recorded as the collaboration evolved. These stored events are controlled by the movement of the dancers through light sensors that are connected to four computers through a midi-interface device and projected onto three 100 inch diagonal screens. At times three live video cameras are used to digitize and alter the performance in real time. Other times electronic music devices arc used to alter the live performance of a vocalist, percussionist and cellist. Smarter Than Dogs explores relationships that extend beyond traditional models of performance. Each member of the audience is invited to participate in “controlling the context of the simulation.” Ultimately we hope that people do not view our effort as a particular fascination with technology, but as a passion for exploring new traditions in the arts made possible by the new tools.

With the onset of cloud computing and the increasing ubiquity of our technology we are increasingly consuming electricity and natural resources, with the relationship between our gigabytes of storage and our carbon footprints easily overlooked. Is the cloud the green alternative or a dark storm brewing? With avatars in Second Life generating a carbon footprint up to three times that of an individual in the developing world then perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at The Matter of Technology. The panel convenes artists, technologists and activists to present their practices and consider our complex relationship with technology.

 (Long paper)

Keywords: Visual Design, smart phone, South Africa, mobile creativity, resource-constraints, DIY

With the rise of the ‘visual web’ the visual design capabilities on feature- and smartphones are increasingly expanding. We investigate how young resource-constrained people in Cape Town, South Africa are using the free tools on their mobile phones to make instrumental visual designs. We suggest that an alternative space for production of, and learning about, electronic arts and design is offered by ubiquitous mobile phones among this group. We offer a discussion of this repertoire of tools in relation to ‘professional’ design software, such as Adobe Creative Suite – describing the need for software that blurs the distinctions between professional desktop tools and casual mobile tools. We relate experiences from the participatory design and development of an open-source design tool for mobile in response to such a need, and find that many of these design processes are, in turn, hampered by limited developer libraries for visual design on Android. We posit that, in order to promote cultural diversity within the public domain, and in mobile-centric young people’s lived realities, it is becoming increasingly necessary to expand and democratize visual design tools for the mobile ecology, in order to explore local design needs and visual vernaculars.

An art project with two components: a) Website and b) a computer mediated video projection/installation for four video channels. During the panel presentation the author discusses her reflections on the new complexities in the implementation of her web intervention project ‘Smell Bytes’. The project is a cyber thriller based on forms of communication on the net and particularly in creating a virtual world based on database, where an intelligent agent/avatar, an on-line vampire of scent lives to posses the essence and body odor of the netizens. He lurks on on-line teleconferences, such as CU See ME, and squats the netizens driven by the desire of their ‘body odor’ and their facial symmetry and beauty. His insane quest takes him beyond boundaries. He grabs the participants’ profiles, processes them, analyses them according to their facial beauty and symmetry, and correlation to their body odors, he compresses them, evaluates and transforms them into smells and flavors, and saves them as menus and smell bytes. `Smell Bytes’ is taking as a starting point the cultural importance of the Avatar and artificial intelligence in the virtual worlds. Increasingly netizens of the developed world are judged by data imprints they leave behind them. Whether this is a data from consumption patterns who is becoming our virtual profile, or genetically determined traits which define us by odor data. But how can we give shape to a personality without a body? Can such entity be accepted as real? Is the replacement or partitioning of the profile which causes a great terror or the visualization of any data into a profile rating can be presented as an avatar? Or maybe one day we will discover that we are literally chemical reactions?

Panel: Patchwork Panel: Conceptualising Seams that Separate and Stitch Together

SMS-em­broi­dery-feuil­leton is a way of telling sto­ries to­gether on sev­eral lev­els; an em­broi­dered feuil­leton as well as the oral sto­ries told and shared while em­broi­der­ing it. The sto­ry­telling is sit­u­ated in what we call an ed­i­to­r­ial sewing cir­cle. An SMS about anger was cir­cu­lated on, for ex­am­ple, Face­book, in a dis­play win­dow of the Gallery KRETS and the street-mag­a­zine Aluma in Malmö, Swe­den. This was the in­vi­ta­tion to take part in the writ­ing of a feuil­leton made out frag­ments of sto­ries stored in peo­ples mo­bile phone in­boxes; close to their bod­ies and every­day lives. Par­tic­i­pants could em­broi­der their SMS by hand or for­ward it to an em­broi­dery ma­chine.?When the par­tic­i­pants spent some time in the sewing cir­cle they usu­ally also started to tell the other par­tic­i­pants about what is not said in the short text mes­sage. An em­broi­der­ing in words, and not only tex­tile took place.

At the end of the pro­ject, par­tic­i­pants were in­vited to form a tem­po­rary ed­i­to­r­ial board about what se­quence to put the em­broi­dered SMS into. This ver­sion was later pub­lished in the street mag­a­zine Aluma. SMS that were writ­ten to be part of one set of re­la­tions, usu­ally not aimed to be con­nected to other sto­ries nor to be pub­lished, is in the SMS-em­broi­dery-feuill­ton given at­ten­tion and brought into a new set of re­la­tions. In mo­men­tar­ily ar­rang­ing the em­broi­dered SMS into what the par­tic­i­pants de­cided to be a mean­ing­ful story and pub­lish­ing it with gaps and holes, our at­ten­tions is drawn to the seems that sep­a­rate as well as hold to­gether the nar­ra­tive, which con­stantly can be ripped and re-arranged and re-stitched.?Through the com­bi­na­tion of the prac­tices of text mes­sag­ing, em­broi­dery and the genre of the feuil­leton, we put focus on nar­ra­tives and prac­tices that rarely are part of head­lines. Sto­ries that are ab­sent pre­sent.

Urban landscapes change through time however architectural legacies prevail as part of shared cultural pasts. Likewise the city of Izmir, in Turkey have undergone many changes in time however, local residents of the city who were once cradled into turn of the century houses, also known as “Old Izmir Houses,” still cherish these elegant buildings of past architectural tastes. Each of which with a story to tell, these precious little houses with lavish facades, windows, doors, elaborate staircases, and marvelous ironworks today have flourished in the penmanship of their hosting residents, and other travelers into books, documentaries, poems, and novels speaking about the local history and culture of their city.

Archeologists and historians’ views about the origins and age of Izmir constitute part of their ultimate professional interest: with due respect to inquiries as to whether it is a continuation or a rupture which constitutes the culture of a particular locality; cultures thrive through each other’s palimpsests. Yet nature’s corrosive effect constitutes of an unavoidable trace upon all constructed matter. Such impending doom which awaits every monument, every work of art, and architectural creation inspires the merge of cultural landmarks with the healing touch of technology. Second Life simulation environment with its ever evolving techniques today have become a space in the virtual for the reanimation of architectural constructions, in three dimensions. Second Life in world builders’ dexterity offers residents and participants of the simulation environment to have a feel of real life architectural works, amidst many other creations. Therefore Project Smyrna/Izmir 2011, as part of an ongoing study will introduce, turn of the century Izmir Houses as constructed in Second Life, and to be accompanied by a critical evaluation in order to articulate the conceptual framework of such a virtual merge with the historical as a recent cultural paradigm.

This paper asks why, given the general agreement that the periodisation of the history of technology as a series of revolutionary ruptures is unsustainable, many respectable sources refer to our present condition as revolutionary? The idea that technology shapes culture in such dominating ways that we can use terms such as the stone age, iron age, bronze age, is now so discredited that it is surprising that in quite sophisticated contexts we still read of the digital age and the electronic revolution. History the reconstructive process, and history the sets of realities which took place, are now so self consciously distinct that the idea of a revolutionary moment after which nothing is the same again is generally understood to reflect a selective memory rather than any recognisable condition in culture.

So what does it mean when scholars and commentators claim that we are undergoing a revolution? This paper opens that question, not in terms of the meaning of the reconstructive processes that insist upon revolution, but the technical realities of our time. It concludes that the very technology which has alerted us to the unreliability of history has also endowed us with revolutionary ways of remembering using digital storage.

I have you programmed into a cell, as an activist. That gives you five minutes of solo flight. What is solo flight? What do you expect from an activist? Some kind of prepared verbal statement (preferably evocative or provocative) to be delivered [preferably enthusiastically] to a group? I had proposed a kind of small performance piece that was interactive with a prepared video tape, but it feels like you aren’t expecting anything so elaborate. I will bring my own copy of Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” as a backup.

The exponential growth within the unreal space of the Internet has raised many issues about the application of metaphors to the spaces both constructed and unconstructed. The unproblematic adoption of terms and beliefs from real-space risk duplicating the power structures of the real onto the not-yet-formed. This paper examines the processes and potential outcomes of these vectors, and what reference they have to previous imaginary spaces within the civic environment.

This paper discusses the argument that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies benefits the powerful few, focussing on their own existential concerns. The paper will narrow down the analysis of the argument to jurisprudence (i.e. the philosophy of law), considering also the historical context. We will discuss the construction of the legal system through the lens of political involvement of what one may want to consider to be powerful elites.

Before discussing these aspects we will clarify our notion of “powerful elites”. In doing so we will be demonstrating that it is difficult to prove that the adoption of AI technologies is undertaken in a way which mainly serves a powerful class in society. Nevertheless, analysing the culture around AI technologies with regard to the nature of law with a philosophical and sociological focus enables us to demonstrate a utilitarian and authoritarian trend in the adoption of AI technologies. The paper will conclude by proposing an alternative, some might say practically unattainable, approach to the current legal system by looking into restorative justice for AI crimes, and how the ethics of care could be applied to AI technologies.

The space of the Internet, from its very first days, has been an attractive space for artists. It provided a virgin area of unknown characteristics, dispensable to be discovered, with anticipated adventure and new opportunities, an area that had not been recorded, therefore an open space for a new beginning.

Artists, professional pioneers as they are (or addicted to the forefront), found interesting the exploration of the Internet and fascinating the ideas of the hidden surprises. To those familiar with technology as an expressive tool, it was the perfect place to develop their art.

It was a place they could build inexpensively on their own and set their own rules.

The art that first approached the Internet with significant results was literature to which we owe the term cyberspace. Literature is responsible for the mystification of the new space to an extent that the artists, youth, and people who like adventures, consider it as their own space.

The first inhabitants of cyberspace originating from the world of art, as well as programmers who considered programming as creation were characterized as Internet artists, and shaped its initial form. Later came web designers, practicing an applied art, and a modern kind of art related mostly with manipulated images, sounds and texts.

It was a community of cursed, adventurers, explorers, or romantic revolutionaries such as those of the 18 century, in the new American continent that formed the vacant and wild area in a utopian state.

Gradually the situation changed: Internet space was filled with shops, newspapers, yellow pages, maps, classified or even sexual advertisements. It became everyone’s daily routine.

On the other hand, visitors could have their own personal space to post artistic pursuits, to display or discuss them.

Where is the place of the artist in this new situation?  As an animator of visitors through the social web? In the compromise in order to be included to a new populous and commercial Internet? Or in the exploration of virgin areas that are situated on the edge of the Internet?

This presentation will demonstrate the aforementioned experience and will support the idea that artists need to excess current experience.

Social Structure [Construction no. 1] addresses concepts of resonance, feedback, deconstruction, and inundation in the contexts of sound, music, audience interaction, and social media. The installation is a collection of position-aware resonant acrylic cubes with tactile transducers. With the use of computer vision and projection, audience/ participant interactions with the cubes control the responding audio and video. A resonator-laden platform, on which the structures are built, will continuously feedback all aural material, causing the entire structure system to shake and buckle on its own resonance.

Soft clouding is a blended concept which describes the aim of a collaborative and transdisciplinary project. The concept is a metaphor implying a blend of cognitive, embodied interaction and semantic web. Furthermore, it is a metaphor describing our attempt of curating a new semantics of sound archiving.

The Soft clouding Project is part of LARM – a major infrastructure combining research in and access to sound and radio archives in Denmark. In 2012 the LARM infrastructure will consist of more than 1 million hours of radio, combined with metadata who describes the content. The idea is to analyse the concept of ‘infrastructure’ and ‘interface’ on a creative play with the fundamentals of LARM (and any sound archive situation combining many kinds and layers of data and sources).

This paper will present and discuss the Soft clouding project from the perspective of the three practices and competencies brought together in one transdisciplinary process of curating a semantics of sound: Technological, Humanistic /Curatorial, and Design / Action-based practice.

Everything is tagged…

One of the main obstacles of creating an interface for an infrastructure, which contains a combination of many already rather large archives, is the amount of information involved; the way it is structured and described – on all kinds of levels.

In this regard, it is very near – but not similar – to the concept of ‘cloud computing’.  (Leadbeater, 2010)

Cloud computing is a concept for next generation internet where data is organized in a different manner, than is the case in the current www setup. The speed and growth of the Internet means we are drifting away from taxonomy and the search-oriented architecture gives us new possibilities in crowd sourcing and collaboration. The innovative idea of Cloud computing is that everything on the future www is ‘miscellaneous’, yet traceable in tagged contexts (Weiser, 2008).

Emergent technologies like Echonest and others, gives us a opportunity to ‘trace’ sequence and identify ‘hidden’ content in large amount of sound data. On the other hand, some of the mechanisms of emergence are organizational and collaborative, rather than purely technical. (McAfee, 2009)

The next most likely stage of the web’s technical development – cloud computing – will act as a giant accelerator for cultural cloud formation. It will be like a giant machine for making clouds of culture. (Leadbeater, 201 [text truncated]

The aim of this presentation is to investigate the possibilities of different kinds of aesthetic organization offered by ‘soft computing’ practices. Through the production and application of fuzzy logic, evolutionary systems and neural networks, this rapidly advancing area within computer science provides us with inexact, indeterminate and generative solutions as novel responses to ‘computationally hard’ problems that cannot be addressed via classical algorithmic structures. The paper will explore the employment of these techniques in software art and, more generally, their conceptual and practical relevance for the field of computational aesthetics. I will then look at notions such as undecidability, uncertainty, randomness and approximation, characterizing them not as opposite but complementary to the procedural, regulative and axiomatic nature of computational logical forms. Contra the common view that takes these ‘soft’ solutions to successfully account for the perceptual, the empirical and the contingent, I will argue that their most interesting theoretical aspect consists instead in indirectly continuing what can be called a ‘rationalist’ project of optimization, compression and synthesis of deductive knowledge. In other words, I see these practices worth investigating exactly in virtue of the fact that they situate themselves within the broader philosophical and cultural debate about the limits of formal reasoning, consequently complicating issues about the constraints of computational images of rationality. In this respect, the paper argues that soft computing can perhaps help us to unfold the indispensable role played by abstract, logical and formal processes in the construction of aesthetic experience. On that basis, I will draw more speculative conclusions by putting forth an approach to computational aesthetics that maintains the possibility of retaining and working with the reality of algorithmic entities. The presentation will then conclude by discussing how such a conceptual position involves viewing the computation’s abstract forms and limits not solely as an expedient means of performing a specific type of reasoning (i.e. deduction) or as a process that stands in contrast to direct experience (i.e. induction), but rather as an ontological reality itself.

Panel: Signs of Life: Human-Robot Intersubjectivities

The his­tor­i­cal as­so­ci­a­tion of ro­bot­ics with com­put­ing and Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence has led, in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion and in the minds of many artist-re­searchers, to the as­sump­tion that a robot must have a com­puter ‘brain’ and a soft­ware ‘mind’ which con­trol ‘dumb’ sen­sors and ef­fec­tors. Such as­sump­tions sub­scribe to a neo­carte­sian­ism which is con­tra­dicted by stud­ies of bi­o­log­i­cal or­gan­isms and em­bod­ied cog­ni­tion and mit­i­gates against the suc­cess­ful con­struc­tion of per­sua­sive au­tonomous aes­thetic agents. Con­trary to a com­pu­ta­tion­al­ist and soft­ware-cen­tric method­ol­ogy, the ar­gu­ment of this paper is that in order to achieve suc­cess­ful de­sign of per­sua­sive ex­pe­ri­ence in such sys­tems, soft­ware de­sign must be the end-re­sult of an in­ward move­ment of at­ten­tion from a con­cep­tion of the cul­tural and ex­pe­ri­en­tial world of the in­tended au­di­ence which de­fines ma­te­r­ial as­pects and code. This paper pro­poses that the ‘tra­di­tional’ artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ties of sculp­ture, in­stal­la­tion and per­for­mance have much of value to con­tribute to such pro­jects be­cause they are cen­trally con­cerned with the sub­tle ma­nip­u­la­tions of ma­te­ri­al­ity, ar­ti­fact, space and ges­ture for gen­er­at­ing sen­so­ri­ally rich ex­pe­ri­ence.

The broad field of ro­botic art en­com­passes a spec­trum from min­i­mal sen­sori-mo­tor func­tion anal­o­gous to sin­gle celled or­gan­isms, those mod­eled on an­i­mal be­hav­ior, all the way to sys­tems which con­duct con­ver­sa­tions. The ques­tion of in­ter­sub­jec­tiv­ity is rel­e­vant in the lat­ter, as an aes­thetic vari­able ma­nip­u­lated by the artist for par­tic­u­lar ef­fect. The artist en­gi­neers a sense of in­ter­sub­jec­tiv­ity in order to evoke the un­canny. To what ex­tent it is nec­es­sary to en­dorse a vi­sion of ma­chine sen­tience in such work? Some sub­scribe to a covert mys­ti­cal ex­tropi­anism, while the more prag­matic en­dorse a po­si­tion of ad­e­quate verisimil­i­tude for sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. Such cri­tiques can in­form a grounded dis­cus­sion of ro­botic art along two axes: the con­di­tion of a ma­chine which em­u­lates the bi­o­log­i­cal (in var­i­ous ways) and: the sta­tus of ro­botic de­vices as aes­thetic ac­tors in em­bod­ied in­ter­ac­tive con­texts. This dis­cus­sion will offer his­tor­i­cal ex­am­ples and draw upon cy­ber­netic, bi­o­log­i­cal and aes­thetic the­ory.

Panel: Public Art of the Sustainable City

“Solar Art­works” com­bines art, ar­chi­tec­ture, de­sign, sci­ence, and a com­mon ob­jec­tive: how to make our cities more sus­tain­able through pub­lic art. We can find solar art­works in dif­fer­ent parts of the world, and their cre­ators gen­er­ally are mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary groups of spe­cial­ists. In this con­fer­ence we will see some of the most in­ter­est­ing ex­am­ples of solar art­works stud­ied in the frame of “Solar Art­works” to date, in par­tic­u­lar how dif­fer­ent the pro­jects can be, and why they have been cre­ated.

Artists at the art/biology, human/animal interfaces have embraced evolving technologies, particularly over the past half-decade, producing works that explore sentience and non-human subjectivity; cognition and perception; animal welfare; and interspecies communication. This panel will discuss a selection of works that engages technology to explore the territories of human/nonhuman sentience, agency, interactivity and collectivity. This panel will also consider DIY biology and a host of exhibitions over the past decade in which polarizing debates concerning animal welfare, censorship, and the claim of racist culturalism have emerged.

Those whose works we reference include: philosopher and social theorist Brian Massumi, who views the body and media as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation and who also claims that through animality, humans can ascend to an ethic that is creative, expansive and vital; art historian, curator, and critic, Caroline Jones and her critical writing on the mediated sensorium; Professor of Comparative Literature Daniel Heller-Roazen and his theories on the archeology of sensation; and ornithologist Richard Prum whose research on birds substantiates the role of avian and human songs and their impact on gesture and language, social memory, the social ecologies of songs, and the conditions that make cultural transmission possible.

Abstract (Intro)

The experience of destruction or loss of aura, as theorized by Walter Benjamin in his essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, is the direct consequence of the sudden and irreversible impact on esthetics of the machinery of science and technology, questioning the Platonic model of Original vs. Copy, eliminating the subject as the focal point and replacing it with “a process that can no longer be identified through a point of view”). If the value of a work of art is no longer its role as object of worship but as object of exposure; if the respectful and religious distance that in the past linked spiritual intention with plastic configuration is disappearing as primacy is given to the mastery of a technical apparatus (Apparatur) and to the intransitive treatment of a given material; this is because the experience of what is striking and heterogeneous, which is the peculiar feature of modernity, plays a role not only in the circulation and reception of art but in the construction and composition strategies of the work itself. The model for this rupture is the shift from painting, the ultimate auratic art, to the cinema, which is essentially an art of discontinuity and montage. This model has been operative and is still operative in the specific ontological context of image. In contrast, the relationship between text and the technical modalities of its circulation and inscription has a different history, which is counter-cyclical, and has other effects that are anachronistic as regards the time differentials that they establish. The revolution of the printing press has recently been superceded by the revolu-tion of digital technology and the infinite and changing proliferation of anguage in pixel format connected by complex software that is reminiscent of brain cell systems or root structures. To ignore the impact of these changes on the practice of poetry (i.e. the production of fiction) because of some sort of idealistic repression, is the same as confirming this absence of “view point” discussed by Walter Benjamin, but in a non-dialectic sense. By a paradoxical contamination, the very act of separating fiction and technology, in the name of fiction’s hypothetical essence (e.g. style, images, emotions) — in other words removing literature from its historical context — contributes to the transformation of the ideology of virtual reality and cybertext into a collective fantasy, a modern mythology, before which all thought gives way. This is the return of mass alienation by images, or Zerstreuung, in a new form. It recreates the aura as it makes a fetish out of e-merchandise (the new economy and the web are viewed only as an expo-nential global supermarket). In response to this digital delusion, it is essential to return to the function of the work of art, which is to “awaken” and to acknowledge technological upheavals in order to intensify its own exploratory dimension, while retaining its critical lucidity. The purpose of this essay is to determine how the use of digital software in writing can multiply the number of areas for practical experimentation on language as an art material and how this approach can become a form of undercover revolution, of covert irony, even though it appears to take part in the blind approval of the dominant ideology. We will cover the three traditional categories of rhetoric, inventio, dispositio and elocutio, to classify and to understand the structural and/or temporary displacements that affect the economy of poetic text. In other words, we will show how by damaging a text’s esthetic appearances you can implicitly re-politicize and rescue them.

Abstract (short paper)

As cybernetic progress is opening more pathways for telematics, the experience of presence in mediated environments is creating even more dissolution between corporeal intimacy and virtual intimacy. This ultimately leads to the questioning of the very nature of our being, identity and perception of reality. This paper addresses the neuro and cognitive aspects of tele-intimacy and through the discussion of the project Somplexity, examines what is the nature of our intimacy now? It will address the representational issues and performative aspects of tele-intimacy and develop a context for techno sex with neurofeedback system to mediate human perception of intimacy.

Artist Statement

1. lost for words
2. found objects
3. seachange

SONGLINES is a ‘non-narrative’ narrative. Many texts were gathered, primarily folk myths from a diversity of cultures. These were laid in parallel to form a landscape through which a path might be laid. Points in common, archetypes such as emotional states, physical elements and structural signposts were used to build bridges between the sources to enable the path to travel as freely laterally as linearly.

This path was used as common to the various strands of the project. The path could be travelled with music, dance, video or animation. These various journeys having been made, the original landscape and path were discarded, leaving SONGLINES as a trace, a structure with the
ceremony and form of a narrative, but none of the content.

Sound: Joseph Hyde
Visualizations: Tamara Cater, Lorne Christie, Rosie Gunn, Joseph Hyde

Sonic City is an immersive environment installation focusing on the human perception of space through the manipulation of spatial sound. The immersive environment integrates spatial sounds recorded from the various streets of Hong Kong and the reconstructed city model. A participant can navigate the virtual city with a virtual reality helmet and a hand controller. We define our perception of our worlds by our relationship to space. Like our own modified sonar, the way we spatially locate sounds within our environment tells our mind what sort of place we are in. This is a very subconscious feeling. Hearing is not one of our major senses that we can easily turn off, and because of this our brain is always processing sounds spatially. The visuals usually overpower any thought of what sound is doing to us in our environments. Sonic City aims to flip this relationship around. Instead of guiding ourselves through our environments based solely on visual cues, we let the sound guide us. The subconscious trait is brought forth to the foreground. Using this audio guidance will force our minds to think about the relationship of how sounds spatially build the world around us in our brains.

Sonicanvas is an artwork to visualize the frequency information of sound or music using motion graphic design. This work is designed to intuitively observe the entire sound data of an audio file by displaying the sound flow in real time and at the same time by expressing it as a designed image on a canvas. The frequency band of the input audio is represented by a linear graphic module according to predefined rules, and the energy size of each band is mapped to the size and opacity of the graphic module. The bar-shaped graphics module on the canvas displays only real-time information changes. The circular and square modules display cumulative visual information as well as real-time changes. We implemented this artwork using Minim and Processing. We show the result in a live demo.

Parallel to the increase in problems due to contemporary urbanization, it is not possible to state that today’s cities are better analyzed, designed or known, all yielding to a current crisis of comprehensibility. One set of the reasons has to do with the qualitative change in the urban realm, while another set of reasons arise out of the tools we try to understand our cities with.

Rapid urbanization brings unexpectedly dynamic problems in certain parts of the world. In addition, technological advances increase mobility and communicative connectivity. Clearly these new dimensions have to be included in urban analysis with their fully temporal nature and inter-scale relationships in the city. An operative framework based on the notion of ‘event’ could be devised for a novel understanding of the effects of new technologies on the emergent transformations in the city, as well as design and intervention tools, in mind.

The old tools for urban representation such as plans, sections and maps have remained non-temporal spatial tools that reflect abstract Euclidean space ideals. With these, it is not possible to trace the temporal processes on urban networks and the environment. Mathematical and computer models devised later also relate to the same conceptual fundamentals. Following these observations and the reported insufficiencies of the tools that have been used, it seems logical to argue that new tools with digital interfaces could begin to provide a new sense of understanding and intervention.

It is shown that the auditory sense is fit for the task of tracking emergent events with its temporal qualities and knowledge processing capacities*). Furthermore, ecological psychological principles could be used to map these events to our sensory matrix. Therefore, a sonification environment with operative principles of granular synthesis is proposed in order to explore emergent events in the temporal and multi-scalar processes such as urban mobility. Real-time applications as ongoing research show the perceptive potential for developing such a new urban design interface.

*) Erkal, F. Emre, 2006. Ecological Event Perception In The City: A Proposal For An Urban Design Tool Based On Sonification. Doctoral Thesis, Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Architecture.

Panel: The Data Landscapes of Climate Change (FARFIELD 2)

 An­drea Polli will pre­sent a brief sum­mary of the book Far Field: Dig­i­tal Cul­ture, Cli­mate Change and the Pole (a col­lec­tion of es­says) as his­tor­i­cal back­ground to the for­ma­tion of this panel. She will also pro­vide ex­am­ples from her per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ences as a media artist re­search­ing, vi­su­al­iz­ing and soni­fy­ing cli­mate-re­lated data in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists through­out the United States and at field sites in the Arc­tic and Antarc­tic.

Abstract

Techno music is an aggressive, technology and future oriented genre of youth culture and popular music. The historical background of this musical form lies in the avant garde groups of 60’s and 70’s; especially Fluxus and Kraftwerk. From a philosophical point of view, techno can also be seen as a continuation to the modernist avant garde movements such as futurism, surrealism and dadaism of the early 20th century. Techno music is especially popular in Europe. What used to be pure underground five years ago has become evidently mainstream. The recent commercial success of artists like Sven Vaeth, Westbam, LFO, Orbital, The Orb and Aphex Twin has proved techno to be a fast growing youth movement. Pop journalists and music experts have claimed techno to be ‘rock of the 90’s’. Concerning this, its is not surprising that the massive party concepts of Mayday and Love Parade have been called “Woodstocks of the 90’s”. In my paper I will introduce and analyze the latest developments of techno music and aesthetics. During the recent years techno has divided into several sub-genres such as ambient, trance, hardcore and gabber. A clear turning point can be seen. At its current status quo, techno seems to be a cultural phenomenon with a fascinating mixture of experimental avant garde music and transnational pop culture.
Techno music has been said to be “a soundtrack of the information age”. Juergen Laarmann, the editorin-chief of German Frontpage techno magazine, has also written that techno music is only a small part of a broader concept of techno culture. In this case, we have to ask what is techno culture? In Laarmann’s opinion all the computer based technologies from computer networks to video games and hypermedia programs represent techno culture.  Concerning this point of view, it is interesting to bring up a citation from Bill Nichols’ remarkable article “The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems”: “The Computer is more than an object; it is also an icon and a metaphor that suggests new ways of thinking about ourselves and our environment, new ways of constructing images of what it means to be human and to live in a humanoid world. Cybernetic systems include an entire array of machines and apparatuses that exhibit computational power. Such systems contain a dynamic, even if limited, quotient of intelligence. Telephone networks, communication satellites, radar systems, programmable laser videodiscs, robots, biogenetical engineered cells, rocket guidance systems, videotex networks – all exhibit a capacity to process information and execute actions. They are all ‘cybernetic’ in that they are self-regulating mechanisms or systems within predefined limits and in relation to predefines tasks. Just as the camera has come to symbolize the entirety of the photographic and cinematic processes, the computer has come to symbolize the entire spectrum of networks, systems and devices that exemplify cybernetic of ‘automated but intelligent’ behavior”. [Screen 29 (1); Winter/1988] In my paper I will propose that techno music should be seen and analyzed as a musical and aesthetic manifestation of cybernetic systems and digital computer age. Therefore, techno shouldn’t be seen as only music but as a broader philosophy and way of life heavily linked to the developments of new media technology; especially  computer networks (especially Internet), video manipulation technology and virtual reality. Techno music has also created its own communicative and aesthetic code; such as cyberdelic art that was introduced in Chromapark and TechnoGraphica festivals in Berlin last spring. It could be called the musical Zeitgeist of 90’s. Techno has replaced the concept of ‘concert’ with a concept of ‘rave’. Ecstatic, gigantic rave spectacles aim to create an immersive total experience. By hypnotic sounds, colorful laser lights and staccato-like stroboscopes an immersive, interactive ‘cyberspace’ is created. This experience is often catalyzed by ravers with the empatogenic drug MDMA (better known by its nicknames ‘Ecstasy’, ‘E’ and ‘XTC’). Techno beat and non-stop dancing are the substantial particles of rave atmosphere. It is natural to relate techno music and rave culture to the history of shamanism. On a psychophysical level, rave experience also manifests the classical question of the relation between body and mind. In this context techno refers to the themes of a cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) and androgyne. These ideas are near what could be called a trans-humanist thought; an idea similar to Stelarc’s or Hans Moraveck’s visions of the technological future of mankind. Techno music and rave culture should also be seen as a manifestation of classical techno-utopian thought. Man/machine cult and computer romanticism bring it near the visionary landscape of cyberpunk novels with the fictional concepts of cyberspace, 3D information networks, virtual identities and artificial intelligence. Techno has been called “music in the age of  deconstruction”. The role of the DJ has changed from a passive “disc jockey” to an active “composer” and “programmer” of the intertextual material of techno sound. The key concept is sampling – a kind of a “cut and paste” method – that could be seen as a concrete example of postmodern cultural theory and postmod ern thinking. Techno music and rave culture can also be seen as examples of ‘spectacle of ego’ or a ‘schizophrene action of postmodern panic’.
Theories by Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard have become important when analyzing the philosophy and aesthetics of techno music and culture. Many of the key hypotheses presented by postmodern cultural theoreticians seem to fit well to the strategies of techno music. Concerning all this, techno music is a natural choice of music for a generation being born in the age of micro computers, video games and Terminator movies. It reflects to the needs, hopes and nauseas of the current youth. Therefore, techno is the music for ‘techno pagans’ (Timothy Leary), ‘zippies’ (= hi-tech hippies, Fraser Clark) and ‘Generation X’ (Douglas
Coupland).

Illustrated presentation of permanent interactive sound and light environments.

Intro

Because of the apparent transparency between the real and its recorded, replayed (and now digitalized) image, sound designers have been among the first to propose virtual space. Through Hi-Fidelity technologies sound designers can fashion virtual sound environments that are faithful to the real. So much so that soundscapes, ‘captured’ from endangered natural environments, are being used in an effort to recreate ‘natural’ habitats in zoos, and so deceive animals into behaving as if they were in the Wild.

As the theorist Paul Virilio says, “The question of modernity and postmodernity is superseded by that of reality and post-reality”. This post-reality, here in the form of sound architecture, is able to puncture the real and interact with it. (Sound is living; It creates response patterns, resonances, rhythms and counter rhythms). These sound-grafts, as virtual worlds, have the potential to substitute themselves for reality, and return to us a world (in virtual, distilled form) that we are in the process of losing. In this sense, Sound Design proposes a Sound Ecology. Here, the Virtual becomes a bridge joining Nature to Culture; a graft composed of the distilled spirit that Nature offers up to heal all wounds. The sound designer can believe he is Nature’s shaman, or Medium, for communicating with the dead Distilling spirit from the virgin earth, finding in the lure of the virtual a way back into alchemy. There is a little known history here which deserves further distillation. The religious and utopian underpinnings of this post-reality, created by sound (which always has real effects) have gone largely unnoticed by the cultural critic. It is not that sound cannot after all heal or that such interventions in culturally constructed  environments like zoos may not lessen animal (and human) distress. It is rather that these interventions are taken at face value. Much is assumed uncritically. The transparency of the microphone for instance, the transparency of the digital, the category of Virgin Nature as distinct from corrupting Culture.

The presentation includes a participatory workshop of an interactive interface and program for creating, storing and replaying animated drawings with sound, a description of its development and the case study for which it was created. This interface was initially developed to reestablish and maintain coherent connection with a longtime friend and artist who suffered severe memory impairment due to metastasized breast cancer. Through this effort we found a way for her to continue to work as an artist by increasing and sustaining her ability to focus and concentrate for extended periods of time.

The interface includes a computer, drawing tablet and a series of programs I have written to record and assign personally significant sounds (i.e. sounds from familiar environments, daily activities, speech, music, etc.) to regions on a two-dimensional area corresponding to the surface of the drawing tablet. Once sounds are assigned, the movement of the hand is tracked as it initiates and scrubs through the sampled sounds, and the data of the movement is recorded and stored. When this data is fed back through the interface, the drawing recreates itself, unfolding both a map and legacy of the attention of the person who made the drawing.

Abstract
After reading an article that stated the average viewer only spends 30 seconds in front of a work of art, Ashley Lane and Bhakti Duran set out to see if art could be designed to literally give viewers pause. Bhakti’s immersive sound work andAshley’s work on the impressionist animated painting come together to draw in viewers and encourage focused contemplation on the art at hand. After spending time with Sound Painting , participants have reported feeling “refreshed” and “relaxed”.

Project Description
Sound Painting combines an animated painting with 3D binaural audio to create a mixed media participatory installation. The binaural audio extends the flat projected painting into the space of the viewer, encompassing them in the world of the painting. The magnetic pull of oceanic sounds draw the viewer in and the subtle movements of the painting gently entice the viewer to stay. In Figure I, you can see the relationship of the viewer and the projected painting. The movement of the painting is not immediately perceptible, but those who spend time with the painting are rewarded with its secrets. Sound Painting has been called “very calming and relaxing” and “refreshing” by many participants. Indeed, Sound Painting seems to have an uncanny ability to imbue a meditative-like state of stillness and mental focus in its participants.

Abstract

In Art Practice as Research: Inquiry into the Visual Arts, Sullivan outlines the historical conditions that have characterised the emergence of visual art practice. Making reference to critical vision, he states ‘Artists continue to inquire into issues of everyday life and to disrupt our perceptions through [their] studio art practices.’ (Sullivan 2004: 3). This paper seeks to illustrate the role that artists can have in offering new insights and/or understandings into real life and lived experiences through the fusion of creative arts practice and systematic intellectual enquiry. Drawing on the tragic events surrounding the racially motivated murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, the research practice has attempted to fuse the dimensions of sound, narrative, and computer-mediated interactivity in order to deepen audience understanding of the case and to extend the possibilities for contemporary storytelling.

SoundCulture is an international collective doing sound-related work that explores artistic and cultural contexts for this work outside of the traditional modes of presentation of music. For members of SoundCulture, sound is a transvergent medium. Presentation of sound in public works and installations involves objects and systems for producing sound, interactivity, and other modes of presentation associated with the plastic arts. SoundCulture practitioners are increasingly object makers, programmers, and visual artists. In this panel discussion, SoundCulture artists will discuss this aspect of their current practices in particular, and how working from a background in sound informs these other activities.

Come Out and Play! Why Are Gender and Feminist Studies So Late To Come to Music? Andra McCartney will introduce the panel by exploring reasons for the late appearance of feminist theory in music. Referring to the work of feminist music theorists, particularly Susan McClary, she will discuss the relationships among music, the body, space, gender and sexuality.

A discussion of the role of gender in music, reception, radio, technology and the construction of the female voice.

Talk about her work and the potentialities of the female voice, having written several electroacoustic works that explore the creative, erotic and spiritual potential of the female voice. Operatic convention allows the female voice to be the most beautiful, to soar to the greatest heights and with the most freedom, but the price for this is high, often the death of the character. Unlike the opera heroines who transgress musical and social boundaries, and therefore must be destroyed, Wende’s characters are never tamed.

Susan Frykberg’s works often develop themes of motherhood, technology, and agency. She will talk about her ways of combining electroacoustic music, theatre, and conceptual ideas from the point of view of a woman and mother, namely through three of her works: MachineWoman, Mother Too and Woman and In particular, she draws parallels between the blurring of media boundaries and the subsequent cross-fertilization of ideas, and the blurring of physical and psychic boundaries in pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.

There is a complex and mysterious place between a sound and the listener’s experience of it. A quiet place perhaps, or a noisy one. Perhaps a psychic playing field, where anything can happen. Isn’t it the place where the feminine within each of us or within a whole culture receives sonic events differently than the masculine? How on earth can these differences be defined in words? And can they be distinguished from other ones (physical, technological, social, religious, political, environmental, etc.)? Or shall we pay attention to the playing field itself: listening to the listening?

ISEA 2017

SoundMind is a virtual environment in which, through the power of technology in combination with the mysterious phenomena of creativity, sound becomes visual. Participants can relax, observe, and participate in unified creative expressions. The goal is twofold: First to explore and understand the ways in which the technological environment affects the individual and the individual’s interactions, and Secondly, with these understandings, to develop an environment that will build participant’s empathy, curiosity, interpersonal understanding and soundness of mind via the sharing and receiving of audio and visuals.

Abstract

In calling for a new understanding of sound, the French composer Erik Satie suggested that “…we must bring about a music which is like furniture – a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration.” Creating such a music would be to open out to sound, to follow sound all the way to the point where it is no longer that; to the point where it becomes an army, or a chocolate cake, or a walk by the sea. One must know how to listen in ways other than in proper forms, if only to hear what is heard; if only to follow through the possibilities of a sounding out. One must listen to the heat, to the smell of death, to the return of good friends, for these sounds are long in the living of the ear.

With the rising popularity, and the obvious ubiquity, of ambient soundscapes, from deep trance to lush rainforests to rippling piano lines, Satie’s call for a furniture music, for a music that functions in the same manner as light and heat, inevitably intersects with the seamless surface of these new sonic environments, raising the possibility of who might be listening, and how they are listening. In this sense, the concept of ambience, as the trajectory of modern musical experience, releases hearing from the drive towards a pure sound, towards an absolute music, pointing instead towards the application of sound, towards the possibility of reconfiguring sound around what can be heard, around the act of hearing. Ecology, ornithology, ethnography and marine-biology; a vast typology of elements is brought together in a frenzy of sampling that sends the listener spinning off into a sonic ether. The “sounds of the day” are made audible through their replication as compositions as part of an affective pulse that acts upon the way in which sound becomes apparent as sound, while enfolding the listener within a sonic space that creates an echo, a reverberation that alters the way of sounds in and around us.

SoundScapes: Environment Generation Through Voice, Ambient Noise, and Alternative Perceptions of Reality is an immersive, experiential sound-visualization application built for browsers and virtual reality headsets. SoundScapes is a culmination of user experience research on audio interactions and explorations of the JavaScript coding language. The project was inspired by our recognition of the unexplored potential of new experiences in human/computer interaction through audio analysis and visualization. In our latest prototype, users are presented with a particle-based environment that reacts to the amplitude and frequency of speech and ambient noise. While our current prototype is meant to immerse the user in a meditative experience, we are already looking at applications such as adding a new analytic and experiential dimension to speeches and crowd reactions.