Presentation Data Table

Intro

The two fragments below are part of the media theory of ADILKNO (the Amsterdam- based Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge, founded in 1983). The concept of sovereign media and the figure of the data dandy are examples of UTOs (Unidentified Theoretical Objects). UTOs are potential media; their existence is unlikely, their forms vague. Many UTOs were first sighted in Mediamatic magazine and then brought together in the Media Archive book (originally published in Dutch in 1992 and updated in a German edition in 1993). Potential media are a recent phenomenon in the history of the Amsterdam alternative media movement. Potential media (figures) incorporate and move beyond alternative media strategies. In Amsterdam there exists the freedom to experiment with media, not just with respect to concrete political and economic issues but in other ways as well. The Californians imagine the fusion of high and low tech for the rest of the world in corporate dreams of virtual reality and data highways; but the future can be imagined in other ways. ADILKNO’s writings mix and cross-pollute cultural commodities and technologies. The paper will illustrate this practice through the example of the multirational Amsterdam pirate Radio Patapoe. Patapoe is anti-information and anti-fashion, preferring instead to reprocess society’s cultural waste. Patapoe laughs in a Nietzschean way at fascination for the new; it is an example of a sovereign medium which has emancipated itself from any potential audience or target demographic. The paper will also discuss the data dandy as an example of the phenomenon of the potential media figure. The data dandy searches for an aesthetic way to deal with information overload. (The Data Dandy is also the title of ADILKNO’s most recent German lecture tour and book.) Like the cyberpunk, the data dandy is a product of literary fiction and should not be viewed as a role model.

New technologies signal transformations of both individual and cultural consciousness.  Technologies can transform and/or extend our sense of ourselves: a hammer allows me to strike something with force that would otherwise injure my soft flesh; a bicycle allows me to travel much faster and farther than I could on foot with the same energy; writing allows for the transmission of ideas without the presence of my body.  During the transformation of self, a reciprocal transformation of environment occurs.  Material, space, time and energy are transformed as well.  What we believe to be possible co-structures what is possible to be believed.  The complex entanglement between the lived and the imagined makes it difficult to conceive of change.  Established ways of thinking are difficult to break, made no easier by the fact that the foundations on which they rest are often obscured or concealed.

In a 1977 paper describing experiments with what he termed, “responsive environments,” Myron Krueger states, “The design of such intimate technology is an aesthetic issue as much as an engineering one.  We must recognize this if we are to understand and choose what we become as a result of what we have made.”  The computer is a product of several disciplines (computer science, engineering, etc.) that are built upon certain fundamental assumptions about the world.  I would like to suggest, that this is not the world in which we would like to live.  Computing need not be abandoned, but it may create a richer world if we combine computers with a different set of underlying assumptions.  Here I would like to look at recent advances in science that suggest a different relationship between body–thought–organism–environment, combined with the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and consider how this new understanding might change the ways in which we live–imagine the present.  This includes how we can use computational media as a tool for thinking in the resultant transformed space.  This new space of thought, everyday “responsive environments,” are no longer conceived of as a intelligent spaces, but space alive.

Panel: Art(ist)s in Space

“Space Musical Instruments – Cosmical Seeds” a pair of musical instruments suitable for weightlessness, was selected by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to represent the theme of Cultural and Artistic Utilization of the International Space Station (ISS/Kibo). A metal artist, So Negishi and Ayako Ono developped the musical instruments together since 2009.The instruments were successfully launched on October 31, 2011. NASA astronaut Daniel C. Burbank, Expedition 30 commander, operated and played the instruments on the International Space Station (ISS) on February 10, 2012.

Panel: Art(ist)s in Space

Zina Kaye was born and grew up in London and left her job as Editor of Boardroom Magazine to move to Sydney in the early 90s. She earned a BA Honours (Class 1) in Fine Art from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. Since the 90s Kaye has worked in a variety of mediums including net.art, public sculpture, data visualisation, installation and painting. Her work often explores the science behind the radio spectrum, big engineering, climate change, behaviour and astronomy. Kaye has shown work internationally. She created a surveillance art airplane titled Observatine with a joint grant from the Australia Council for the Arts and the European Media Fund and this was shown at the Farnborough Artists Air Show in the UK. Significant exhibited art installations include The Line Ahead at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Melbourne Airport 2004 and Hyperplex at Westfield Shopping Centre, Bondi Junction as part of the Terminus Project public art series (2007). Since 2007 Kaye has been working on public art commissions and collaborations. As a founding partner at digital agency Holly, her main job is realising high technology/high design projects. Zina works out how people will interact with technology in human to machine and service design projects. She has been working with interactivity since 1995 and operates with the assumption that great design is the application of compelling aesthetics to a robust operationalized structure. Zina holds an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management and her recent research has been in the effects of reputation on gamification, crowd sourcing and the art value chain. Zina has convened art and technology media labs in social change, robotics, streaming media, astronomy, tactical media and data visualization.

With the invention of the moving image, carrying in itself the concept of space-time correlation, a whole new field of artistic experimentation emerged utilizing film as a basis for the transfer of space-time correlations into audio-visually perceptible representations. Around this topic, a number of outstanding works were produced that approach the challenge to design artistic and expressive transformations from different angles. These artistic representations of spacio-temporal data include sculpture in real space, 2D and 3D graphics, digitally generated video images, part of which are interactively accessible.

A rather recent trend in contemporary architectural thinking focuses on architectural space generation by and through the human body movement. Thinking space by means of events and scenarios seem to prevail over the static entities of traditional architectural conception. The great majority of architectural experimentation with digital technologies is orientated towards 3D environments, based on biological or mathematical models as well as on the mobile camera representation of space. Despite more than two decades of development, space organization and conception in interactive multimedia has been given a very limited attention.

This paper investigates analogies and differences in space conception between 3D environments and the multi-layer and multiple windows organization of interactive multimedia.

Interactive multimedia environment is a complex one, constituted by different types of media, of location and of travel. It includes the spatial composition of the surface of each screen (on-screen as well as off-screen space) and the time-based composition of audiovisual events. Moving from one element or event into another establishes a third dimension in the mind of the viewer, that of the interactive narrative that combines both cinematic and diegetic qualities.

Navigable space can be used to represent both physical spaces and abstract information spaces while hyperlinking often separates data from its structure. Space design is characterized by interactivity functions, hierarchical or non-hierarchical organization and modularity.

Another notion that can serve as a bridge between architectural conception and multimedia design is that of “program”. Program can be considered both as an organization scheme of space representation and as an abstract formulation of a series of symbolic decisions and actions (the software) that organize the data space. Thus, digital technologies have spatialized all representations and experiences while digital narrative is equated with travelling through information space.

In this artist talk, I will introduce my artworks of interactive dance performances that spatially and temporally reconstruct body movements. Dance is an art of body and movement. Technologies have been brought to the stage in various way by many artists. My key interest has been an expansion of bodily expression by technological means. Many of my artworks were based on spatial and temporal reconstruction of dance movement. I used video, depth image of the body or noise from joints as sources. Buffer(or delay line)-based heterochronic recombination or feedback loop and geometric transforms are my favorite structural approaches. Although these are hardly fresh techniques, they effectively stimulate fundamental elements of dance like rhythmicality and geometry. Also, It has enormous combinations yet to be explored. These are main topics of this talk. With description and video clips of scenes of several dance pieces, I hope I can share such ideas with audiences.

Electroacoustic Composition (2012) 8 min. 20 sec.

This work is an e ectroacousitc composition created with the recordings of speaking clocks in various sites around the world. A speaking clock is a tool of sonification of “time”, a phenomenon people cannot hear. It has various expression of time depending on the country or region. In this work, the music mixes various expressions of time, based on the concept of “the expression of time perception”. Through this work, I attempt to give listeners curious and unique feelings through the same sound experience depending on their cultural background.

This paper argues renewed considerations of the relationship between speculative identity, new media and cultural expression to account for translocal implications and mediations of place‑based articulations of difference. On September 10, 2013, the Government of the province of Quebec (Canada) introduced the Charter of Quebec Values, tabled as Bill 60 on November 7 and retitled the Charter Affirming The Values Of Secularism And The Religious Neutrality Of The State, which proposes to ban ‘conspicuous’ religious symbols worn by all public sector employees, including police, doctors, teachers, and daycare workers. It also explicitly requires anyone to remove such symbols to receive state services.

Critiqued for targeting members of groups whose religions are manifested in visible ways (i.e. Muslim women in hijab) and endorsed for establishing state secularism, the proposed bill continues to spark heated debate. A day before it was tabled, the National Film Board of Canada launched Toi, Moi et le Charte, an interactive online documentary (in French) to feature the perspectives of everyday Quebecers on the debate and reflect on one’s own views. Described as a ‘neutral project’, the website operates like dating game where users select words taken from the Charter that match their descriptions of ‘me,’ ‘my values,’ and mes malaises. The result is two profiles opening with the person reading a tweet or Facebook post expressing Islamophobic and generally xenophobic sentiments. In March 2012, a visit by a delegation from the United Arab Emirates stressed the need to further develop relations, economic ties and trade between the UAE and Quebec. The meaning of speculation here resides in a number of different connotations. I argue that the views and social criticisms supplemented by Toi, Moi et le Charte shed light on what is at stake in ‘playing with the values’ of emerging translocal relations.

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

My re­search ex­am­ines the re­cent urban de­vel­op­ment of spec­tac­u­lar, hi-tech cities such as Las Vegas, Odaiba, Abu Dhabi and Dubai that mar­ket them­selves as cities of the fu­ture; these cities pre­sent po­ten­tial vis­i­tors with their unique utopian vi­sions, which vary from tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vance­ments to es­capist re­treats from the ‘real’ world. What binds all of these spaces – in ad­di­tion to their re­liance on sen­sory en­gage­ment and tech­no­log­i­cal in­no­va­tion – is their con­nec­tion with the past. Fo­cus­ing on ex­am­ples that will in­clude the City Cen­ter in Las Vegas, the Palm Is­lands and Dubai­land in Dubai, Saadiyat Is­land in Abu Dhabi, and the ar­ti­fi­cial is­land of Odaiba in Tokyo I will also turn the clock back half a decade or so by vis­it­ing Walt Dis­ney’s early re­search and ex­per­i­ments with con­struct­ing a utopian city of the fu­ture. In this pre­sen­ta­tion I will ex­plore how the theme park Dis­ney­land be­came a test­ing ground for Dis­ney’s ob­ses­sion with re­al­iz­ing sci­ence fic­tional fu­tures and with trans­form­ing the urban en­vi­ron­ment into a utopia that was both tech­no­log­i­cally in­no­v­a­tive and spec­tac­u­larly en­ter­tain­ing.

This paper presents work investigating the importance of prosidy in speech to communicate emotion. A robot is described which uses bellows to blow air through a slide whistle. By altering a variety of variables, such as the pattern of breathing and position of the slidewhistle, a variety of recognisable emotions can be generated. Its ability to elicit empathy in observers is noted, despite the lack of information communication.

Jan. 1, 1994. Ejercito Zapatista de Liberation National, the EZLN, take over San Cristobal de las Casas, Ocosingo, Las Margaritas and Altarmirano without firing a single shot in order to defend the rights of the indigenous communities of Chiapas. The temporal fractalization of dead capital has allowed a spasm of micro-invention to emerge and flicker in the liminal-space of the Lacandona jungle; occurring somewhere between the imaginary borders of the American hologram and the real Taco Bell power of neo-liberalism’s NAFTA: the Zapatistas. In the Lacandona, a jungle in delirium, floats a temporary construction of plant, flesh, and circuits that is attempting to play out a rhizomatic disturbance, an “antechamber” of a “revolution that will make revolution possible…”. The Zapatistas are not the first postmodern revolution, but the last; they are a vanishing mediation between the breaking mirror of production (dead capital) and the shattering of the crystal of (de)materialization (virtual capital). Chiapas is a counter-effect, an armed aporia, that has come from below and accelerated the multiplication of contestational gestures, that have now moved away from questions of reform and liberation to questions of direct action as survival and resistance. Here in the Lacandona surplus flesh gnaws at the dreams of virtual capitalism, exemplifying that,”mirrors are for cutting”, and “crystals are for shattering …and crossing to the other side”. The Zapatistas run between walls of Third World starvation and the high-speed backbone of digital culture. From the Lacandona jungle they hail us daily, using a PowerBook, a modem, and a small satellite dish. Using these three elements the EZLN have moved to the forefront of what David F. Ronfeldt, a Rand Corporation security expert, has called”netwar: This dangerous”destabilizing”force enables marginalized groups to enter into the nomadological arena by utilizing e-mail.The Rand Corporation feels this kind of power could make Mexico ungovernable, claiming that”the risk for Mexico is not an old fashioned civil war or another social revolution”, Ronfeldt notes. “The risk is social netwar” (Joel Simon, Pacific News Service, Mar.20, 1995). The Zapatistas are hybrid real/net warriors who are developing methods of electronic disturbance as a site of invention and action. The disturbance of electronic bunkers with excess communication is an important act of radical emergence. The dissolution of informatic-economies will allow cells of electronic opposition-circuits to create speed-democracies. The Winter Palace is not being stormed, it is being dematerialized — as a state in ruins — and the lines of flight lead towards liberated terminals. The Zapatistas accelerate the new possibilities of fractal politics by displacing the signature-effect of command and control. Spaces of information are being disassembled and reconstituted as replicating networks of decolonization through the linking of free civic digital spaces. These free electronic spaces are being constructed by excessive communication and unlimited counter-memories — and no longer as part of the hyper amnesiac hierarchies of information. As a memo from the Rand corporation stated: “institutions can be defeated by networks”. The Zapatistas have become highly effective speed-democracies that continue to puncture the smooth-state by whatever means necessary.

New media technologies continue to change how intellectual and artistic work is done, and how scholars and artists form communities.The Interne, has allowed for collaboration across continents to become a matter of course. Because the stakes are so high, great care needs to be taken in the development of new technologies promoting creative intellectual communication. Care, however, should not inhibit experimentation. How might work be better disseminated? How might marginalized voices be amplified? What new kinds of inquiry and artistic expression will emerge from unorthodox methods of exchange? Will such exchanges fundamentally alter the disciplines of power in and out of the academy? Such questions are not only about how media technology will change our practice, they are about how practice will change our media technology. SPEED: Technology, Media, Society, is our contribution toward reflexively investigating these shifting terrains.

Panel Statement [also Artist Statement]

Panel: Post Conflict Storytelling

The Spomenik project looks at the notion of the stories places tell in the context of mass graves spread throughout Slovenia. In 1945, Yugoslavia set upon a programme of purges of political opponents and undesirables at the end of World War II, resulting in over 400 known mass grave sites holding tens of thousands of victims.

The ‘Square Kilometre Array – Looking for God’ (SKA-LFG) project is a live, real-time 3D graphical response to real-time observations from deep space combining Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) – a high resolution form of radio astronomy – high speed computer networks, real-time processing of VLBI data, interactive 3D graphics software, and virtual reality presentation systems. SKA-LFG combines science, technology, new media, and metaphysics within a time based art form linking three distinct perceptions of time – cosmic, computational, and human perceptual time. Through this joining of aesthetics, contemporary astronomy, and theories of human perception and cognition, SKA-LFG explores narratives of the sublime through computational simulation, dramaturgical narrative forms, interactive digital media, and Virtual Reality systems.

Intro
With its ability to look deep into space and time, Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI)  allows study of the astronomical objects such as supernovae and black holes, providing clues to the evolution of the universe. Via high speed networks systems, VLBI data can be transferred for processing in real-time with filtered data driving customised high-end real-time 3D graphics (game engine) software linked to Virtual Reality (VR) presentations systems within gallery and web based contexts. This paper will discuss the SKA-LFG project in terms of data visualization using very large data sets, narrative versus simulation, and the aesthetics of the sublime in new media art.

ABSTRACT

The field of computer music and “electronic music processing” has a unique and strained relationship to standardization and to (capital-S) Standards. On the one hand, there are very powerful and widely-accepted de-facto standards for several areas, such as real-time note-oriented music performance interchange protocol (MIDI), machine-readable music representations (DARMS, Music-V), printed representation of music (common-practise western music notation (CMN), PostScript), and audio storage media (CD digital and AES/EBU formats).

ABSTRACT

How have standards helped performers and composers of experimental music? I raise this question because I think the question of standards per se is not so interesting: manufacturers will set standards for electronic entertainment devices to create a mass market for their goods. What is perhaps more interesting is how standards work for or against the experimental artist, for whom standards can be enabling or restrictive. One can only assume that forces at work in the music domain apply to the visual arts as well.

Abstract (long paper)

Real Time Strategy (RTS) computer games have established themselves as highly successful Esports, however their capacity for single-player storytelling remains underdeveloped. In the case of Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010), the storytelling of the game was widely criticized for an over-reliance on filmic animated sequences that were structurally disconnected from the actual gameplay. We describe Starcraft II in relation to the RTS game genre and present its structural similarities to Chinese scroll painting. We present a selection of narrative strategies from within the Chinese landscape scroll, including cartographic narratives of the journey, poetic metaphors in transmedial landscapes and landscapes of geopolitical conquest. By analysing RTS games in terms of scroll painting, we seek to provide designers of RTS games with a set of narrative strategies that are more structurally congruent than the filmic animated sequences, and therefore encourage the creation of more innovate and coherent narrative structures for single-player RTS games. Our paper concludes with a thought experiment for how the game map of Starcraft II might be redesigned by incorporating narrative structures from Chinese scroll painting.

An artist’s presentation of two recent software installation projects. Both use quite different creative, technical and design approaches to interactivity and audience affect, yet these works are similar in their simple, elegant ludic interfaces and the resultant complex emergent behaviours that evolve during gameplay.

Discussion Program, hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University, Department of Fine Arts:
Expert Witnesses, Cross Examinations, Conspiracy Cells and Soapboxes, Breakfast Debates, Surveillance and Midnight Interruptions

Can you survive 72 hours of Terror in the City?

Expert Witness

– the Presenter’s case is open to scrunity by Cross Examiners from the same field of work. Finally, the audience as judge and Jury of performances, determine the survival of the fittest.

Cell

– a group of Activists, guided by an Activator, explore all aspects of a theme. Each Activist will argue her/his own corner before open debate with the audience to determine the consensus of opinion, and therefore Cell Policy.

Soapbox

– a chance for individuals or teams to make a point, or develop a theme. Strictly controlled sessions of free speech, with censorship imposed only by the crowd.

Breakfast Debate

– Hosted by members of the Programming Committee, and designed to provoke discussion without time for defence strategies. A further chance for promotion of ideas and collaboration, or an opportunity for self incrimination.

Surveillance

Terror Firma Surveillance
– a collaboration between isea98:terror and ISEA HQ, Montreal. Designed to monitor and record all sessions, and to broadcast internally and incessantly. An essential part of the access initiative, so that all approved information is universally available. Ignorance is no defence, and there will be nowhere to hide.

Sessions include:

1. World Premiere of Frozen Palaces
2. Racial and Gender Stereotypes
3. Neo Post Cyberfeminism Tongue Twisters
4. On the Road to Omniana
5. From Kindergarten to Total Carnage
6. Consensual Times in Digital Music
7. Terrorism Art Mainstream as the Enemy
8. Controller & Controlled
9. Hybrid Heroes
10. Open Electronic Book
11. Fine Art Curation and Spaces
12. Media Follows Art
13. Virtual Orientalism
14. Virtual Migrants Fugitive
15. Technophobia
16. Visual Rhetoric Light Dance
17. The Web Stalker
18. and more!

Under oppressive and hostile conditions, time is of the essence. Points must be sharp, presentations short and clear. Risks must be taken boldly – the luxury of hesitation is forfeit. Open debate must be our forum for ensuring all voices are heard. Presenters are tasked with drawing commitment from their audience, by any means available. For the future to avoid the tragedies of the past, each voice must be heard, and all voices must be of equal importance. Neutrality is not an option. Silence is not a choice.

ABSTRACT

The first generation of authors of computer art in Yugoslavia acted during the 1960’s under the patronage of the international movement of NEW TENDENCY. The isolated support of modern art gallery in Zagreb was not sufficient to hold these authors in the country so that the majority of them left for abroad where the working conditions, social status and the appreciation were more acceptable. During the 1970’s, in the period of irrelevant art and early 1980’s, in the period of coming back to the picture, any action within the computer art was sporadic, almost not existing. The second half of the 1980’s brings the change limited by the possibility of purchasing the available computer technology and now, already recognizable, the second generation of computer artist in Yugoslavia was developing in a broader sense. The presence and the success of these artists at the international scene will inevitably lead to the verification of the position of these artists in the field of the modern art in Yugoslavia.

Mixed reality art installation often contain complex interactivity and participatory requirements intermeshed with simulated synaesthetic and kinesthetic elements in real time that cannot be perceived by passive observation. These works can be approached conceptually as experimental creative laboratories exploring principles concerning enactive perception, embodied cognition, cross‑modal sensing and multi‑modal interactivity. Within these ‘laboratories’ the need for a complex conceptual framework that can be used to provide multiple interdisciplinary entry points and understandings is required. It is in the act of freely crossing and negotiating disciplinary boundaries when assessing these artistic multisensory environments that the practice becomes more deeply considered.

These works are sensing perceptual events (‘a speculative event’) that test definitions regarding embodied and extended cognition and modes of being across nonhuman and human form. It brings all forms into a relational practice based on process, iteration, encounter and exchange. Massumi states: “The form of the object is the way a whole set of active, embodied potentials appear in present experience: how vision can relay into kinesthesia or the sense of movement, how kinesthesia can relay into touch.” (1)

Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris (Aotearoa/New Zealand) are artists skilled in mixed reality installation who play with cross‑modal sensing and enactive perception. Turner and Harris have been creating a series of ‘backyard’ experiments that contemplate changes in the environment and atmosphere. Their recent works Moss (2014), Verdugos (2014) and Snatch (2013) will be examined. Moss takes data from real‑time ‘touching’ and remediates it into an auditory composition. As Turner explains: “When the moss is stroked it responds with piano notes. Data is captured from the audience’s touch, amplified and fed through an algorithm to produce a cultural sound. The hand on the land produces cultural artifacts” (2) Verdugos is created from pre‑bud fruit saplings wound with copper wire and is intended as an ‘atmosphere sifter’ receiving short‑wave radio signals.

In addition to the sensory and environmental concerns, these works reflect on decision making in a time of data‑driven reasoning. Their works scutinise the ownership and ‘truth values’ of data sets. They question data capture and support the debate posed by Gavin Starks: “Whose data and whose algorithms or interpretation are we trusting? Who wrote the algorithm? Who wrote the code? What are the unexpected consequences of combining different data?’ If our decisions are shaped by these data and interpretations what can we employ to see the bigger picture, how can we see past the algorithm?” (3)

(Short paper)

Keywords: EEG, brain-computer interfaces (BCI), Neurofeedback Art, Virtual Environment, Installation, Affective States, Emotiv EPOC.

State.Scape is an interactive installation in which audiovisuals are generated from users affective states (engagement, excitement, and meditation). The installation relies on a brain-computer interface based virtual environment and sonification, which both served as a platform for the exploration of users’ affective states. In this paper, we describe the aims, the system design, and the procedure for interacting with the artifacts and present the user experience gathered during interviews with the participants. Furthermore, we discuss the impact that this environment has on future real-world applications in altering affective states and its potential in meditation practice.

IDEA aims to provide a catalyst for arts and ideas, and in particular for the creative use of technology. IDEA is a not-for-profit company and registered charity with a Board of Trustees and an 18-strong Steering Group drawn from the arts, media, education and business. To date, more than 3,000 individuals and small businesses have participated in IDEA activities. Training modules range from a beginner’s guide to the Internet to high-level learning in multimedia. Creative technology trainingand productions have included the critically acclaimed 36MC, an innovative CD-ROM publication MccD, five single screen moving image works, Krystal Radio in Moss Side, and Seeing Is Believing in which 20 artists created short single screen works using non-linear video (AVID). All IDEA’s activities are aimed towards the establishment of the IDEA Centre, an independent incubator workspace for artists, craftspeople and media workers. The IDEA Centre will provide access to technology and structured creative and commercial expertise and will provide a base for up to 200 learning practitioners at any one time. Typically, they will remain in the Centre for 12 to 18 months and be supported by a number of longer-term resident companies.

The concept is that tenants will be supported and hosted by IDEA only until they are able to survive independently. The Centre will ensure that business start-ups related to the arts and media, to knowledge and science-based activity, and to creative application of technol-ogy, have increased access to affordable, well-equipped workspace, to structured training, and to funds for new ideas. This aim includes the purpose of providing an alternative to London-based media industries, so that graduates and others make Manchester home, to accelerate progress fromcreative ideas to successful enterprise. The IDEA Centre aims to combine Academy and Factory. IDEA also produces a newsletter which documents its innovative arts and training projects and includes informa-tion about new activities and training opportunities. IDEA/NEWS/ is distributed quarterly, free of charge. Formore information about IDEA or to join the mailing list, please write to or email us at: IDEA c/o Department of Fine Arts Grosvenor Building Cavendish Street Manchester.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Art, Technology, Education, Modeling, Projection, Intervention, Public Space, Montessori.

This paper presents the project Statuevision, an interactive public performance based on historical statues in Washington DC in October 2014. The project also served as a study of strategies for engaging communities in shared cross-generational learning experiences in both a playful and meaningful way. Statuevision explored community engagement and empowerment with an urban projection intervention into Dupont Circle in Washington DC. Several seven and eight-year-old local students led the audience in a guerilla world history learning campaign, augmented with 3D video projections on the trees and ground. The public performance deployed a fleet of customized projection carts into Dupont circle at night; each cart projected animated renderings of local statues and provided a stage for the evening’s young MC’s. The students from Capitol Hill Montessori spoke with passersby about the history and importance of the monuments with the assistance of customized teaching material that was created for the primary school students prior to the event. Statuevision aimed to engage a community by decontextualizing familiar statues and monuments and reexamining the history behind each figure through the eyes of children. Passersby became audience members as they rallied behind the young student’s learning efforts, and eagerly contributed to the narrative of each figure.

(Long paper)

Keywords: nanotechnology, gold, nanoparticles, myth, metaphor, nanoscale, macroscale, environment, art/science, poetry

Gold exists simultaneously as reality and myth in a kind of superposition (a term from quantum mechanics referring to the ability to simultaneously occupy two positions such as yes/no or one/zero). In ancient times, Kings Croesus and Midas were real life, historical figures that exist in contemporary life primarily as myths/metaphors referencing gold. More recent stories such as those of the Klondike and other gold rushes reinforce gold’s position in the imagination as an object of desire promising untold wealth and/or misery. There is another level where gold exists: as a material at the nanoscale, a nanoparticle. At this level, gold inhabits another superposition of sorts where it is inference (we can’t see at the nanoscale) but equipment which can sense nanoparticles renders the information visually to us as an object. Steep, a gold nanoparticle collaboration between Raewyn Turner, Brian Harris, Mark Wiesner, and Maryse de la Giroday along with a rotating list of collaborators is a multi-year, multidisciplinary, and multi-installation project exploring the superposition (mythic and real) posed by gold nanoparticles. Steep (I): digital poetry of gold nanoparticles, the first of the collaborations, is an artistic/poetic exploration of how these mythic/real particles may be affecting, changing, and disrupting the understandings we have of ourselves and our environments.

Taos Academy (TA) is a state chartered school for grades 5-12. Our vision is to be a model 21st-century learning community developing strong leaders who have the academic and social skills necessary to succeed in the modern world. The STEM Institute at TA, instructs middle and high school students in STEM concepts through project-based courses. Partners such as Los Alamos National Laboratory, UNM, Northern Arizona University, local and national artists and businesses allow students to collaborate with professionals in the field and ensure sustainability of long term goals. By providing real world applications students expand their understanding of the possibilities for a career in the STEM field.

How can artist influence new technological initiatives and push the expressive capabilities of animation and 3D Stereoscopy towards a new pictorial space? How can we create fully immersive painting where large scale moving paint marks and textures would appear to exist in real space? What is the significance of a Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) cinema in contemporary art painting and design practice today? Should painting expand the aesthetic experience by opening to new methods, other disciplines and to a different audience?

In recently completed research within School of Art Design and Media into innovative digital image methodologies, opened is an original field of explorations into inventive applications of 3D Stereoscopy as an art digital media expression. This paper would illustrate first outcomes of the art practice based research formed as collaboration among faculty from the Nanyang Technological University School of Art, Design and Media, Institute for Media Innovation, NTU and the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, along with collaborators from local industry.

While establish relationship between technology, materiality and aesthetics these works are inspired by the idea of pushing the limits of perceptibility, by the fascination of the surreal and abstract art, and by the aesthetics of high-definition, intensely multi-colored imagery. Presentation would to illustrate importance of an artist driven digital imaging fueling stereography at every level of image capture, generation and manipulation and display, and would emphasize the need for a fundamental pedagogy and toolset.

The paper would introduce artistic explorations of new perceptual, cognitive and interactive digital art ranging from: experimental 3D stereo animated painting to digitally fabricated art works and installations that converge seemingly unrelated fields of art aesthetic, cinema and science. With hope that it would inspire new ideas and possible future collaborative initiatives in synthetic image technology innovations within academic research environment and wider.

Stichitures is an interactive installation that creates an environment which proliferates communication through the meeting of design and technology. This dynamic piece encourages people to interact with it, which causes the art piece to evolve. However, the evolution of the piece depends on the interaction of multiple individuals; a single individual will only have a temporary effect on the piece. The co-dependence on others inspires communication between individuals, which builds to create a greater sense of connection on a human level . The atmosphere of a reactive and collaborative art piece magnifies the shared experience. To encourage interaction, the piece consists of a series of overlapping three dimensional patterns which use sensors to read the relationship of observers with the installation and each other. Reactions to observer proximity, which appear as interspersed light emanating from the structure, differ depending on the type and amount of interaction taking place. The observer dependent response encourages people to communicate and explore possible visual outputs from the art piece. The installation is then used to observe and collect data related to the effects of design and technology on human interaction. The paper will be on the data collected from an installation occurring early 2011 and the conclusions which can be drawn from such data.

A conference which takes revolution as its theme should look beyond the simple picture of “new” media supplanting “old media” at the local arts centre. The digital spreads sideways, so that old and new forms co-exist, blend, evolve. We don’t need a new hierarchy, a new “techno-aesthetics” full of “post-biological visions” and compulsory interactive art-formats. The Wiring Up of aesthetic response, the coercion to “take part”, the “user-friendly” museum, are not the only, or necessarily the most progressive directions the digital arts can take. In an electronic gallery filled with art shouting for attention, with techno-gimmicks, special effects, remote link-ups, virtual experiences, there is a need for the well-crafted image, composed, still; the self-sufficient object that invites a few moments contemplation. That may now represent a dissenting category in the impatient advance of new media art. Our session will emphasise the continuing potential of this stillness, this silence, this power of suggestion.

When did the still image, the digital print, fall from grace? The critical bandwidth is now given over to the technology of the network and the spectacle. Perhaps it’s because artists engaged in still imagery, in computer hardcopy, are considered insufficiently radical. They remain within the orbit of painting, printmaking, photography, i.e. the traditional. But assessing the strength’ and weakness of a new work shouldn’t involve a checklist of functions and enhancements. Art isn’t quite the same as software: it’s less useful, and it does sometimes linger on after the upgrade.

This paper shows how meaning is created through the process of arranging and re-arranging fragments; how meaning is created through patches, seams and quilting.

Various researchers have been using metaphors from textile handicraft in relation to knowledge construction, writing techniques and other forms for disseminating knowledge (eg. Haraway, 1988; Brännström Öhman and Lovholts, 2007).

The paper will, however, focus not only on metaphors, but also on the practice itself of quilting (Brännström Öhman and Lovholts, 2007) and seams (Sundén, 2008).  We use the concept of quilting as it allows us to move beyond the single narrator and include multiple voices. The concept of seams is used, as it puts focus upon the things that hold thoughts, stories, memories, and knowledge together, as well as what separates them (Sundén, 2008).

More specifically this paper draws on our experiences of the sewing circle Stitching Together, to which people were invited to embroider text messages by hand and/or by using an embroidery machine, which has been programmed to receive text messages. In Stitching Together knowledge is materialised through textile and create new knowledge from working with textile material.

In one version of the sewing circle we invited participants to put these fragments of conversations together, to create new narratives, and thus partake in what we call an Editorial Sewing Circle . This also included a patchwork-seminar in which we (authors) had prepared patches of texts, which were placed on the floor in front of a circle of audience, and used as a starting point for discussions. Throughout the seminar the participants were asked to make their own patches and join the conversation.

Based on these text-patches, and the conversations that took place during the seminar, we will in this paper tell a story that embraces several academic perspectives such as that of editorial boards and that of sewing circles as historical, professional and artistic forms for collaboration, production and hierarchies.

Artist Statement

1. SKIN: SURFACE/SELF. As surface, skin was once the beginning of the world and simultaneously the boundary of the self. What senses the world also becomes the means by which the body becomes inscribed. But now stretched and penetrated by machines, SKIN IS NO LONGER THE SMOOTH, SENSUOUS SURFACE OF A SITE OR A SCREEN. Skin no longer signifies closure. The rupture of surface and of skin means the erasure of inner and outer. THE SHEDDING OF SKIN…

2. INTENTION: INSERTION. To position an art work inside the body. An electronic structure in an internal tract. The body becomes HOLLOW, with no meaningful distinction between public, private and physiological spaces. Technology invades and functions within the body NOT AS A
PROSTHETIC REPLACEMENT, BUT AS AN AESTHETIC ADORNMENT. As a body, one no longer looks at art, does not perform as art, but contains art. THE HOLLOW BODY BECOMES A HOST, NOT FOR A SELF OR SOUL, BUT SIMPLY FOR A SCULPTURE.

3. STRUCTURE: MOTIONS/FUNCTIONS. Fabricated with IMPLANT QUALITY metals such as titanium, stainless steel, silver and gold, the sculpture is a domed capsule shell containing a worm-screw and link mechanism. It is actuated by a flexidrive cable connected to a servomotor and controlled by a logic circuit. The capsule opens and closes in three sections EXTENDING and RETRACTING. An instrument array light and piezo buzzer make the sculpture self-illuminating and sound-emitting.

4. PROCEDURE: PROBE/EXTRACT. The stomach was emptied by withholding food for about 8 hours prior to insertion. The closed capsule, with beeping sound and flashing light activated,  was swallowed and guided down tethered to its flexidrive cable to the control box outside the body. ONCE INSERTED INTO THE STOMACH, AN ENDOSCOPE WAS USED TO INFLATE THE STOMACH AND TO SUCK OUT EXCESS BODY FLUIDS. The sculpture was then arrayed with switches on the control box. Documentation was done using video endoscopy equipment. Even with a stomach pump, excess saliva was still a problem, necessitating hasty removal of all probes on several occasions…

5. SPECULATION: INTERNAL/INVISIBLE. It is time to recolonize the body with  MICRO-MINIATURISED ROBOTS to augment our bacterial population, to assist our immunological system and to monitor the capillary and internal tracts of the body. There is a necessity for the body to possess and INTERNAL SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM. The internal environment of the body would contour the micro-bots behavior, thereby activating particular tasks. Temperature, blood chemistry, the softness or hardness of tissue and the presence of obstacles in tracts could all be primary indications of problems that would signal micro-bots into action. The biocompatibility of technology is not due to its substance but to its scale. SPECK-SIZED ROBOTS ARE EASILY SWALLOWED AND MAY NOT EVEN BE SENSED! At a nanotechnological level, machines will navigate and inhabit cellular spaces and manipulate molecular structures.

We present a framework to promote the formation of slow intentional networks with characteristics of gifting, dialogue, and collaboration. These networks are formed through the physical gifting of river stones that are hydrographically printed with maps and embedded with an NFC chip. When handed from one person to the next as a gift, a stone (through the scan of its NFC tag) opens a channel to its virtual network and asks the recipient to contribute to the intention of the network. This contribution can be of any type (voice, picture, text) and once gifted, becomes part of the collective knowledge of the network. The recipient is then tasked with gifting the stone to another. By introducing a physical stone as the mechanism for connection, this framework deliberately slows the traditional notion of social media networks and enforces a more considered personal, intentional interaction between the network constituents and their contributions. The intent is to blend the best of physical and virtual interactions towards deeper, more meaningful conversations that can collaboratively create, solve, and investigate – a kind of documented collective sentience, a network that can be deeply and reliably interrogated.

Eileen Reynolds is one of the pioneers who helped develop and design the School of Art Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. As an expat living in Southeast Asia for the last 7 years, her stop motion video projects infuse subtle critiques about living in a culture apart from ones own and reflect on the rapid modernization of Singapore. A few pieces inspired by this rapid transformation will be shared: “Hungama, The Lap Top Project”, a collaborative project made by Bangladeshi Migrant Workers in Singapore and “Big Bio”, an experimental stop motion animation which toys with science fiction, biology, and reproductive technologies. Having recently relocated to the United States.

Stop-motion camera animation is a special animation technique where camera shots are made frame by frame. The camera is slightly moved between frames, and once these are assembled, it produces an illusion of movement. We are concerned with improving the existing stop motion camera animation practice. However, traditional animation methods in 3D software animation programs suffer from limitations. We present a state of the art for 3D animation of camera movements, outline its advantages and disadvantages in order to develop an animation interface capable to produce realistic camera moves. To this end we present an “ideal” process that overcomes the existing drawbacks and that is able to add constraints that greatly contribute to produce the imperfections and behavior of a real camera device. In particular, we are concerned with separating position and speed, as well as a curve representation that permits to control curvature. Linked to a motion control system, such a 3D animation method would produce realistic and handwork look camera moves for stop motion animation.

Abstract (Poster)

The Stories of Solidarity poster highlights the overall process of the project, from hackathon to working prototype with original code and user testing with precarious workers.

Shannon Lee Castleman will discuss her role in the Migrant Ecologies Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration about the memories of wood, trees and people. The project, as initially conceptualized and lead by Lucy Davis, combines artistic, scientific, ecological and public educational objectives that can be negotiated through this singular research project. Jalan Jati (or Teak Road) traces the historic, material and poetic journeys of a teak bed, found in a Singapore, back to the location in Southeast Asia where the original trees may have grown. Jalan Jati brings together cross-cultural natural histories, micro and macro arboreal influences as well as DNA timber tracking technology.

Abstract

In the past few years it has become clear that a new form of location-based cinema is emerging that combines visual storytelling with mobile technologies. The 2008 release of GPSFilm now provides the tools to create and view mobile cinema on 90% of the world’s mobile devices. GPSFilm is an open source application that makes it possible to use GPS coordinates to delineate ‘neighbourhoods’ and then associate video with each one. This new form of film-viewing experience uses the location and movement of the viewer to control the story; a movie is revealed by walking or riding through spaces. As content has begun being created for the system, further investigation into story structures for mobile cinema is now possible.

‘Stories on walls, representing text through architectural projection’ refers to Head’s involvement with architectural projection for a particular public art project, funded by the Arts Council England: ‘You, me and everyone in Portsmouth’. The endeavour, organised by the ReAuthoring Project, involved four writers and a production team gathering stories from the people of Portsmouth, UK. The writers retold and interpreted the stories as written poems, plays, prose, single words and flash fiction. In all 8,000 words of text were created to be displayed over 2 nights, projected onto Portsmouth Guildhall.Commonly, architectural projections are image based, utilising 3D graphics or illustrations to explore and transform the surface of a building into a fantastical display. Dealing with a vast amount of text created a different kind of challenge for the artist in the project, Anthony Head, and an alternative viewing experience for the audience, reading stories from a 60 metre wide building. The paper will discuss how Head went about resolving this challenge, including architectural mapping, software development, text editing and live performance and the reasons for the decisions made. It will explain how the balance between spectacle and contemplative experience was achieved, how Head dealt with the textual ‘data’ and the reasons for making it a live performance. It will explain how it is a different from previous outdoor projections, its artistic and technical innovations.The paper fits into the sub‑theme of in a slightly alternative way, in that the architecture was physical with the digital embedded into it via projection and 3D graphics. The whole project was collaboration, an exchange between the public and writers, and writers and the artist, mediated by the production team. The topic of the project was Location, the response of the public’s experience of Portsmouth.

StoryBeads are modular, wearable computer necklaces made of tiny computer ‘beads’ capable oÍ storing or displaying images. Beads communicate by infrared light, allowing the trade of digital images by beaming from bead to bead or by trade of a physical bead containing images. StoryBeads encourages users to build and share stories of images, text and sound. The beads are catalysts for oral storytelling, containers for collecting personal stories and connections to distributed story worlds.

The artist presentation focuses on a selected range of my works that relate to the implications of the interweavement of flows of digital data in the urban environment. The interplay of virtuality and materiality, the strategies of urban interfaces and physical anchors in space that interrupt and transform the flows of data to let experience ‘both sides’ of an urban reality are initial elements of the selected installation works. Different aspects of spatial perception related to the use of new media like peer-to-peer systems, cell phone- and surveillance technologies as well as the experimental use of the ?old and loved? radio transmission are highlighted. While confronted with this mediating instruments the human being with its elementary needs, its rituals and ability to subversion of sovereign power always stands in the centre of attention.

An initiative from a small international collective of artists and researchers, String, Sounds and Satellites (SSS) combines public art with emerging technologies to present new public space possibilities through both physical and augmented realities. SSS connects the public/participants’ experiences in everyday life with the immediate environment. SSS will be developed for specific locations in Sydney; the aim of SSS is to deliver a multi-sensory experience of place, site and its history, stories, imagery and issues. Initial proof of concept for SSS will be developed prior to ISEA2013. SSS participants will meet at the UNESCO-listed biosphere of Noosa, South East Queensland, during May/June 2013 to develop collaborative responses to this unique eco-environment. SSS brings together 3 individuals from 3 continents from 3 disciplines: Andrea Polli (USA) creates public media and ecology art works internationally, focusing on the role of art in the understanding of environment. Robbert de Goede (The Netherlands) is an interior architect and visual artist. His installations have strong connotations with wireframe 3D models and computer aided design software, playing with the senses and unbalancing the viewer. Nigel Jamieson (New Zealand) research centres on dynamic data visualisation of complex systems, virtual and augmented reality applications and mobile geo-reality.

Abstract (Poster)

For the experiment presented here, we have transposed an immersive film that was designed using the structural montage approach, a film for large-scale, public viewing in a fulldome planetarium theater, into a personal viewing sphere on a virtual reality headset. The goal was to test the technical constraints and perceptual conditions that arise in the VR format for an existing fulldome film. How do the reduced resolution in both the image and audio components affect the immersive experience? How does the reduced angle of view and fixed screen distance change the perception of the film? The poster includes workflows for image transposition from a fulldome, “fisheye” master to a equirectangular, “lat-long” format suitable for headmounted display and the conversion of a premixed, 5.1 surround soundtrack to a binaural stereo mix.

In December 2010, three volunteers participated in a two-week sleep study conducted by artist and experiment designer, Lisa Carrie Goldberg and administered by a certified sleep technician. It was through these nocturnal events that the process of employing the body and the mind during sleep as a means of art making was realised. Through her studies in sleep biology and sleep technology, Goldberg has found a disparity between the quantitative and qualitative analysis present in current sleep science practice, a field heavily driven by technological devices. Through the process of repurposing these sleep-measuring devices as drawing tools, Goldberg intends to subvert the sterile laboratory environment. This paper, therefore, will investigate the fields of sleep science and art. The first intention of this text is to present a brief overview of previous art forms that have used sleep as their central theme. By utilising the instruments and technologies of sleep research, a series of artworks has been created at SymbioticA, the art-science research centre, in conjunction with the Sleep Science Centre at the University of Western Australia.

Named the Structuring Somnolence project, the artworks include a series of sleep study performances that occurred in a sleep laboratory in Perth, Australia, as well as a single sleep study performance that took place at Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland. Within this text, a description of these sleep study performances will be positioned within a theoretical technoscientific discourse. Throughout this paper the nature of art-science collaborations is explored in order to suggest methods for producing drawings through the appropriation of scientific protocols. The paper outlines the procedures followed when embarking on an artistic endeavour within the framework of a research university, one in which, for example, human ethics approval is mandatory. The paper also explores the semantic crossovers between sleep science, art and architecture, as comparisons are made between Sleep Architecture and structural architecture. Structuring Somnolence is a synthesis of Goldberg’s research in sleep science and her artistic practice.

Caravan is a design collective active in several creative fields. Its members share common interest in cultural, material and social aspects of a globalized community, trying to re-establish a balance among being, having and doing. Crossing digital-fabrication and artisanal competence Caravan’s projects aims at creating awareness of heritage to face contemporary challenges.

The paper will present educational insights gained from developing studio pedagogy for situated learning in relation to emerging creative technologies. The Culturescape study abroad program – which has been conducted annually since 2009 – has been designed with a focus on exposing tertiary-level art & design students to the potentials for communication experiences that come into existence through combining site-specific, location-based practices with digital image-making and creative technology. Undertaken as an intensive and immersive studio over a five-week residency period at the Monash University Centre in Prato, Italy, participants are given the unique opportunity to develop individual and collaborative projects that respond creatively to their experiences of place, space and community. According to Lave and Wenger (1991), situated learning acknowledges how the process of knowledge co-constructed or creation occurs in context and is embedded within a particular social or physical environment. Through the integration of fieldwork in and around Tuscany, complemented by seminar critiques and studios, students were encouraged to explore their studio practices through designing creative content for emerging location-based practices, including a particular focus on “geo-cinema” – which according to artist Pete Gomes (2004) is “the new cinema of commuting, variable and embbeded in motion, locations, and fluidity”. The text and its accompanying presentation will thoroughly document course structure, creative outcomes of both directed and selected self-initiated coursework and reflectively evaluate the course’s pedagogical aspects and student experience.

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Pete Gomes (2004), Being On Location: The beginnings of ‘Geo-Cinema’ and ‘Place Code’.

Study 7/0 project visualizes the positioning errors generated by a static GPS receiver. Motivated by the idea of cognitive mapping as an individual, non-linear and discontinuous spatiotemporal experience, the project explores error and imperfections as generators of interesting conceptual, and narrative source material for further creative processing and expression unlike typical glitch art where the error is an aestheticised frontline layer. Study 7/0 is a concise study of the effective approaches to emergence in generative art in which the simple initial settings of a system can produce complex and surprising phenomena. In this context, it is spatiotemporal configurations and relations.

Placing a Garmin GPSmap 60Cx receiver on my desk, I turned it on with a draw track function, and kept it there powered on for 7 days, 7 hours, 16 minutes and 11 seconds (from 7 July 2010 04:46:36PM to 15 July 00:02:47AM). While the ideal GPS plot for an immovable object is a single point, this setup had recorded 8438 trackpoints on a path 34.7km long, covering an area of 2.1km2 with average speed of 0.2km/h and maximum speed of 17.9km/h. The path is a consequence of the limited precision of a commercial GPS receiver working inside a building under changing weather conditions, combined with the general GPS inaccuracy. With time-stamps, horizontal positions, altitudes and speeds for all trackpoints, the path constitutes a large dataset.

The author chronicles her collaborative on-line project TechnoSphere, and interactive artwork accessed via the Internet, exploring some of the issues associated with the work. These include a discussion of the process of collaboration between artists, software engineers, animators and visitors to the web site, the thinking behind TechnoSphere’s computer simulated landscapes, and the focus on interaction with, and within, the project. TechnoSphere is an on-line project which enables users to design artificial life-forms and send them into a 3D virtual world where they interact with life-forms designed by other users of the web site. The 3D world has fractally generated terrain, trees self-seed at certain heights to make forests and there are desert and mountainous regions in which the cyber beasts artificially `live’. The current version is a prototype written between March and September 1995.

This paper explores design and implementation of user centric content delivery using biometric data capture and intelligent analysis to determine the imagery and content presented.

Forms of data, captured in non-invasive manner, such as facial data, height, weight, body type, age, gender and aspects of mood can be used to alter content presented. Such systems must have an inherent intelligence that is ambient and ubiquitous – allowing for interpretation of a wide variety of stimuli that is easily captured. The systems intelligence must offer a range of options that can be autonomously responsive and give meaningful responses to visual and sensor cues.

There are many potential applications, information delivery for target advertising, social communication and emergency communications needed in public or social environments. Application can be used to create socially engaging artworks, integrated media delivery within architectural spaces and interactive media within an exhibition spaces. This allows for viewers engagement in aesthetic experiences that are subtly responsive to personal physical attributes and moods.

Technically, the design of this systems use inherent ambient, and ubiquitous intelligence through three model: Detection Model, Data Training Model, and Demo Showing Model. The Detection model algorithm detect a face, calibrates the image and extracts features using OpenCV Haar-like application (Viola & Jones) and LibSVM to classify and determine gender (SVM). AdaBoost learning algorithm is used to boost the classification performance. The Data Training Model uses classification method, LibSVM data file to train analysis of data and generate a final data model file. The Demo Showing Model manages windows for system and audience. The detection result data is shown in face detection window and scene view window. The content images or steaming video is shown in a second projection display.

This paper describes a system that demonstrates feasibility and successful application of responsive information delivery tools that prefigure the use of facial and biometric data to cue for advertising, social communication or delivery of culturally relevant user experiences. While initially designed for marketing content in public spaces, the content can vary depending on installation location, expected crowd and population demographics.

Abstract
This project combines the art practice of critical gameplay with affection games. The author’s Critical Gameplay practice works to challenge the conventions of traditional gameplay by offering alternative ways to play. The 10 critical gameplay games have been exhibited and awarded on 3 continents. Affection games are commercial games that require players to flirt, hug, kiss or make love to meet their goals. Almost every digital affection game offered in commercial spaces feature heteronormative, non-diverse experiences.

Stolen Kisses was created as part of the Critical Gameplay art practice, to subvert affection game standards in the commercial space. The game requires players to kiss their devices to play. It features 7 unique characters who each like to be kissed a different way. Players must press their lips to their touch device balancing kiss duration and frequency to score the most points. The game was developed as an experiment in subverting the experience of affection games by providing a wider range of gender and racial identities. It functions as a kind of intervention in traditional mobile spaces, extending critical design practice into the community of casual mobile game players.

The game has been made freely available on Google Play and averages 50-100 daily downloads. The game attracted the most interest from English speaking players in the United States, the United Kingdom and speakers of Indonesian, Russian and Arabic. This sharply contrasts the demographics of dating simulation players.

Introduction
As the world of games evolves, there is an obvious space for growth among the softer elements of human interaction. While games have successfully designed, refined and iterated on the most basic verbs, such as shooting, collecting, bouncing and driving they have not had as rich a lexicon in affection. Affection games represent an evolution in games toward the complex interplay of love and expression of love. Little research has been done in affection games, particularly in digital entertainment.

Affectionate play offers several pro-social opportunities. If it is proven that violent digital games increase aggressive tendencies in players, then affection games may be proven to foster affectionate, pro-social behaviors. Affection games may also serve as consolation for players. Such games can offer an alternate kind of vicarious release for those seeking hard to come by affection. Such games might also serve to help clinically bridge gaps for autistic players or those for which affection is not a natural action.

My paper explores the potential of digital media arts technology to disrupt and resist apparatuses of control in surveilled commercial spaces.  Networked technologies create electronic surveillance systems that are used to monitor and track people in commercial spaces.  Although the consumer culture in these spaces appears complicit with the potential power in the surveillance assemblage, the leveraging of digital media arts technologies offers opportunities for the subversion of the power structure in the digitally networked surveillance assemblage.

My paper identifies opportunities for changing consumer culture so that people can challenge the commercial spaces’ potential power in the electronic surveillance assemblage.  I offer examples of digital media art performances that operate in liminal places, moments of disruption, and sites of resistance. However, these opportunities are not bounded by the confines of commercial spaces. The strategies of resistance against power structures in electronic surveillance systems that I identify in my paper can be extended to other private and public spaces.

In my artist presentation at ISEA2008 I would report about my 15 years long research on interactivity in film/video. I will focus on my web-based film “Sudden and Unexpected – An Inter-Action-Movie” (to be finished in January 2008) and I’ll speak about the specific aesthetic, conceptual and technological aspects of the work. The interactive participatory film is an online game for a single player. It uses the psychological phenomenon of Déjà vus as the non-linear structure of the dramaturgy.

“Sudden and Unexpected – An Inter-Action-Movie” is an interactive participatory film, a game for a single player. Only your curiosity and attentiveness will take you further in this film. You not only influence the course of the film, but also become part of the action yourself. As a participant, you will have to expect some surprises. As a prize, you receive a personalized funeral (according to your wishes and inspirations, with all the trimmings). As first prize, you can attend (even while still among the living) your own funeral rites.

What is it to navigate? What is it to know I am here now? The increasing accuracy of satellite navigation strives to eliminate the possibility of human error, but it also produces a sense of dislocation from one’s immediate environment by abstracting location as the coordinates of longitude and latitude. What place is there for one’s body, one’s senses, one’s conscious and unconscious awareness of space, if this knowledge is so apparently made redundant by GPS? What, if any, role can historical skills of navigation at sea, of observation, choice, intuition and improvisation play in navigating the spaces of the future?

Satellite navigation need not be reduced to the mundane but can potentially expand one’s consciousness of the environment by enabling a hybrid form of locative intuition enhanced by technology. Sun Run Sun explores the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of personal connectedness to one’s environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound.

Sun Run Sun investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position. A series of portable personal ‘instruments’, currently under development, transform satellite data directly into a sonic composition. This composition constantly varies in response to the changing location of the player as they move through their physical environment. The player/navigator’s experience of their own locational shifts are augmented by corresponding shifts in the electronic soundscape, as it is calculated/performed in real-time and played via headphones.

The sound presents a sonification not only of calculated longitude and latitude, but also of the individual satellite’s details of signal strength and altitude. These aspects of position tracking emphasize the technological mediation of navigational processes, not simply the final location result. The inherent abstraction of electronic sound makes it a fitting vehicle for exploring this data. Although it is made out of the information it receives from the satellites, this sonification allows one to physically experience floating through extended locations, shifting between the actual space of embodied experience and the abstract space of locational representation. Sun Run Sun enables exploration of this space between spaces, of the relationship between embodied and disembodied knowledge, and of the possibility of hybrid forms of knowing and experiencing.

Superdutch: New Media, Photography and the Internet-Polder addresses meta-photographic / meta-digital new media works from the aesthetic perspective of contemporary dutch practices in photography and new media. This is simultaneously a reference to their geographic-aesthetic origins combined with ideas of kitsch, excess, and process-based inquiry. This paper is couched in the framework of understanding the internet and screen based media as a method of production and comprehension as well as a means of image reproduction and dissemination.

Implications of internet reproduction can be understood through superdutch works within the context of the polder model. The polder phenomenon mirrors the presentation, perception, and function of all new-media and screen based works. Consider the following: all web space is reclaimed, artificially kept online through a series of routers, domain name servers, internet hubs, and server farms, all directing information and traffic to domains much like the dikes and damns route water away from a polder. I submit that the creation and presentation of work on the internet-polder is a cooperative and collaborative act that surrenders all work and information to the interpretation, contextualization, and consensus-based decision-making of the viewing audience.

The conceptual concerns of superdutch works are fundamentally tied to process as aesthetic, creating self-critical, yet self-effacing works that question the aura of the work while challenging the structure of media where works are an application of and inquisition into the role of technology as medium. In a sense, we are engaging in a modernist critique of technology in a way that was impossible for the doyens of modernism. Echoing the words of the seminal media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message.

For the past two years South Australian artists Dan Monceaux and Emma Sterling have been developing a body of work to present in a new media format- a performed balance of original electronic music and projected experimental imagery. Using the full gamut of experimental image making techniques from Super8 abstractions to video-sampling and hi-def video, the work is a fusion of old and new technology. Fronted by a keyboard player and a VJ, Supermarket will be sharing its debut hybrid new-media performances across the USA and Canada in 2007. Both artists are creators and performers of the work, which will premiere after a one month artists’ residency at Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Centre in Buffalo NY, USA. Debut Australian performances are scheduled for Adelaide Fringe Festival and the Adelaide Festival of the Arts in 2008, followed by dates in Canada and Japan.

The energy and vibrancy of the music and visual components of the Supermarket work are designed to captivate and stimulate audiences, and provoke enquiry about the systems, manmade and natural, that govern our existence. The tone moves through shades of light and dark, sharing the familiar and strange in equal measure and blurring lines between the two. A sonic and visual space that is timeless and universal is created and mutated during a 45 minute set; current modules of the work have been created on four continents. We believe that the abstract languages of music and image are the ultimate vehicles for reaching the subconscious mind and technology provides the tools rely on to achieve this; regardless of the audience’s cultural context. Linear narrative concepts are replaced in favour of impressions of places, feelings and dreams. Embracing the opportunity to hybridize the screen and improvise delivery, each performance is unique and each audience and venue will inspire a new arrangement of the Supermarket’s wares.

The work is a two-person performed 45 minute experience driven by two laptops, a video mixer, midi keyboard, sampler and FX. We are also available for artist talks and workshops.

Poster Statement

Web designers have in the past mostly focused on their specific sites-using an approach was strongly reminiscent to the handicrafts. The browser frame was the window through which designers examined their work. Today, designers face a set of complex challenges that go much further than this still very traditional approach. On the one hand, their level of technical expertise must rise as sites are created dynamically and are automatically patterned to changing individual user preferences. On the other hand, they must become aware of the changing economics of the Internet. They must consider the positioning of their sites in a network of links that are increasingly being dictated by advertising expenditures. Technology and economics are now more relevant than ever to designers, who must step back from viewing specific sites as isolated entities and must see how the Internet functions as a fluid environment that encompasses dynamically changing user communities and changing patterns of user interactivity. In the beginning of 1996, it was sufficient to realize that a site had to constantly offer up-to-date information and fresh design in order to stimulate the surfer to interact with it. Content merged with design since web page appearance needed to reflect the type of content contained in it. Part of the web design process also involved the task of automating authoring procedures. In order to produce a constant flow of new information, authors used procedures like dynamically generated web pages and database connectivity. Thus, fresh, content-specific design and authoring ease were two important design considerations that could easily contradict each other but needed to be brought together somehow. Challenge enough, one would think. From the Summer of 1996, agent technology was integrated into more and more sites. User expectations were pushed even further. Then, not only the authors publishing process, but also the readers surfing process, could be automated. Readers let agents do the tedious Web surfing, demanding to view only the results. Design faced the difficult task of needing to visualize fluid information outputs. Web design has from that moment on permanently moved away from the handicraft stage. This does not mean that sites ceased being produced in this fashion. These sites, however, were increasingly branded as unprofessional and moved to the periphery. Behind the glamour of the major Internet sites, a cottage industry is working away quietly in the background, mostly in private households and universities. In this increasingly vast sea of information, it takes ever-greater economic and technological resources to make a visible splash. In the information space of the internet, proximity is not determined by location but by connectivity; sites that are well-linked loom large on the horizon of possibility. The result is a margin that is as rich and varied as it is invisible. Much of the most interesting Web work is still done here, but it is being noticed only by a small group of home users and rarely stumbled upon by chance. The reasons behind the formation of a periphery and a center are, of course, not only technological, they are primarily economic. The people behind the major sites are constantly asking themselves one question: how do I best embed myself in this fluid ocean of links? Money dictates position. There was a time in which Yahoo listed a whole range of alternative search engines- in the spirit of that horribly overused word: Netiquette. Now they list only one: Alta Vista. In this poster session we would like to present our work in Web design and content development, using it as an example to discuss the set of problems and opportunities outlined above.

Drawing on several images from both military weapons systems and digital media artists, this paper sketches a critical phenomenology of the surface at the intersection of human sensoria and technological media—at the screenic sites where complex technological, social, and corporeal operations become perceivable events. Certain visual technologies, in both their vernacular and official uses, from the digital cameras at Abu Ghraib to the recent Gorgon Stare Reaper drone program, serve simultaneously to both document and implement acts of war. At the same time, the practices of digital artists have sought, in the same convergent digital milieu, to address, reframe, and think through these emerging militarized modes of perception. Engaging the work of Michal Rovner, Jenny Holzer, Martha Rosler, and Wafaa Bilal as “objects to think with,” this paper works toward a transmedial theory of the screenic by attending the way these digital-artistic practices address and are addressed by the interpenetration of technological media (the screen) and corporeal media (the human sensorium) in the context of war.

Humanistic Intelligence (HI) is a new field of research that challenges the notion that machines such as cameras should emulate human thought. Instead, HI asserts that humans and machines should be inextricably intertwined in a single synergistic unit where the ‘intelligence’ arises directly because of the human in the feedback loop of some (e.g. photographic) decision-making process as described in http://hi.eecg.toronto.edu/hi.html)

Connected Collective Humanistic Intelligence emerges as a new kind of intelligence when multiple humans are in the feedback loop of this process. CCHI challenges J.G. Ballard’s notion that we must choose between social interaction and machine interaction, for it transforms the cyborg entity into part of a community. Moreover CCHI facilitates intimacy and close synergy among individuals separated by vast distances. Most importantly, however, is the ability of the individual or the collective to re-assert itself in the face of hegemonic forces stripping us of our dignity and humanistic property.

Panel: Surveillant Spaces: From Autonomous Surveillance to Machine Voyeurism

My re­cent art pro­jects have fo­cused on var­i­ous themes emerg­ing from sur­veil­lance, in­clud­ing real-time data, si­mul­tane­ity, au­then­tic­ity, voyeurism and non-lin­ear­ity. Sur­veil­lance today is not sim­ply a grainy black and white image fed to a VHS recorder from a cam­era pointed at the out­side of a build­ing. In­creas­ingly, it is a net­work of high-de­f­i­n­i­tion, ro­botic vi­sion de­vices, ca­pa­ble of see­ing in ways that we will never be able to. Today’s sur­veil­lance net­works are pre­sent­ing mas­sive-scale par­al­lel per­spec­tives on re­al­ity – in sev­eral places at once – and through this are con­struct­ing com­plex vir­tual spaces that exist along­side, and not nec­es­sar­ily in sync with real spaces. The nar­ra­tives im­plied by this sur­veil­lance world claim to show us how we be­have, who we re­ally are – they exist purely in the do­main of the vi­sual and the be­hav­ioral, ig­nor­ing any kind of in­ter­nal psy­cho­log­i­cal states and show­ing us how mal­leable re­al­ity re­ally can be. Slavoj Zizek has re­ferred to a kind of re­flex­ive short-cir­cuit, a re­dou­bling of one­self as we find our­selves stand­ing both in­side and out­side our own image – to see one­self under sur­veil­lance is to wit­ness the only part of re­al­ity that we can­not ex­pe­ri­ence first hand, our­selves as an ob­ject act­ing in the world. This paper ap­proaches sur­veil­lance net­works as gen­er­a­tive art sys­tems, ca­pa­ble of ex­plor­ing themes such as lone­li­ness, iso­la­tion and sus­pi­cion. I will argue that sur­veil­lance is the in­evitable re­sult of the search for a cure to a va­ri­ety of 21st Cen­tury ail­ments. Rather than dis­miss­ing or re­sist­ing it, we need to ex­plore it in order to prop­erly un­der­stand the re­al­ity that we have con­structed for our­selves.

Panel: Surveillant Spaces: From Autonomous Surveillance to Machine Voyeurism

In 2002, I ac­ci­den­tally in­ter­cepted video trans­mit­ting from a wire­less se­cu­rity cam­era that was not in­tended for my eyes. While view­ing live im­ages on a mon­i­tor being pro­duced by my own wire­less cam­era, I was sur­prised to see some­thing else ap­pear. Black and white, ghost-like ap­pari­tions, peo­ple in aprons, emerged in­ter­mit­tently from the white noise. After some scrutiny, I re­al­ized that the video was com­ing from a cam­era in­stalled in a restau­rant kitchen, two floors down. This chance dis­cov­ery led to a five year search for more hid­den im­ages, found by walk­ing and using a video re­ceiver to scan the streets of 17 dif­fer­ent cities. Whether in­tended or not, a per­son that uses a wire­less sur­veil­lance cam­era be­comes a broad­caster who trans­mits live video that is eas­ily in­ter­cep­ti­ble. These anony­mous and un­of­fi­cial broad­casts cre­ate an al­ter­nate view of the city and its in­hab­i­tants. Within this pre­sen­ta­tion, I will act as a guide through sur­veil­lant spaces formed by pri­vate use of CCTV and dis­cuss some of the ar­chi­tec­tural and per­for­ma­tive qual­i­ties that are in­her­ent within them. I will in­tro­duce sev­eral urban in­ter­ven­tions that piece to­gether un­seen sto­ries from the in­vis­i­ble media pre­sent in the city and per­form jux­ta­po­si­tions be­tween in­te­rior and ex­te­rior, phys­i­cal and me­di­ated, per­sonal and pub­lic spaces.

Panel: New Media Archives- New Intelligent Ambiances

The paper “Sus­tain­able preser­va­tion prac­tices and the Rhi­zome Art­Base” is a case study pre­pared to de­tail the re­cent over­haul of the Rhi­zome Art­Base.  Founded in 1999, the Rhi­zome Art­Base is an on­line archive of new media art con­tain­ing around 2508 art works, and grow­ing. The Art­Base en­com­passes a vast range of pro­jects by artists from all over the world that em­ploy ma­te­ri­als such as soft­ware, codes, web­sites, mov­ing im­ages, games and browsers to aes­thet­ics and crit­i­cal ends. The paper is an overview of the chal­lenges, de­ci­sions, and tech­nolo­gies be­hind the new Rhi­zome Archive, as well as a roadmap for its fu­ture.

“Suum” is a virtual reality art game about mindfulness navigated by breathing. It is a virtual environment in which people can experience the basic human ability to be fully present via inhalation and exhalation. While the audience is wearing a virtual reality headset, they can view and interact with the 3-dimensional space, environmental elements, simulation, motion graphics, objects, and adaptive music. In order to take a step beyond the conventions of virtual reality, there will also be a respiration belt set up to measure participants’ breathing. The virtual setting and sound will be designed to create a lucid and relaxed environment that feels comfortable and can adapt the technology in order to focus on the user’s presence and surroundings. As a result, based on the length and strength of their breathing, users can experience the interaction between their respiration, the virtual atmosphere, and their own being.

This artist paper discusses the conceptual, aesthetic and technical aspects of the work Suzumushi: the silent swarm, which is proposed for inclusion in ISEA2011. (See art proposal.)  The paper provides an outline of the creative work and draws together the range of ideas that influenced the works form, the conceptual material and interaction design.  These influences include acoustic ecology, emergence, synchronicity and spontaneous order, as well as memes and network theory.  The work also continues the artists’ interest in the relationship between human society and the natural world, and specifically other species.

In Suzumushi these concepts are embodied in a swarm of stylized crickets constructed from stainless steel, plastic and electronics. The crickets in this work are hypothetical creatures that have evolved to survive in a noisy human environment.  This speculative species replaces auditory calls with onomatopoeia cricket calls and memes drawn from selected real time data sources. This content is displayed on small LCD screens within each cricket. The crickets use radio frequency chirps to communicate these memes with other crickets forming an unorganized social network, from which emerges patterns of synchronicity out of noise.

The paper also provides an insight into the artists approach to practice led research, considering the relationship between creative activity of the hand and the associated thinking. Through the practice of creating Suzumushi the combination of practice and thinking about practice raised critical questions about both practice and the conceptual material explored in the work.  As a result this artist paper is to be presented along side the creative work, acting as a form of exposition of and counter point to Suzumushi, the silent swarm.

Artist Statement

Swap Shots was an experimental project that aimed to find out to what degree an open and inclusive participatory project, emanating from Shetland, could use electronic media to generate creative engagement across a variety of national and political contexts; urban and rural cultures and generations. The mobile phone and the medium of film formed the foundation for the process of creative exchange. The project builds on a history of participatory projects since 1990 that I have realised in the UK as well as between Shetland and locations in the UK, Europe and Russia.

The project raises questions about the relationship between the local and the global as well as the nature of participation and creative engagement across cultural, generational and national contexts. Over thirty people from twenty different locations in eight countries, the majority situated at 60º North, created and exchanged films using their mobile phones over a period of approximately ten days in July 2008. Altogether they produced more than 140 films, most of which are six seconds long.
Participants ranged in age from thirteen to sixty years old. Approximately one third of participants were based in Shetland, one third in St Petersburg, Russia and the rest in a mixture of rural and urban locations throughout Australia, America, Germany, Norway, India, England and Scotland. A Weblog tracked the development of the project.
I created the project on the occasion of the 7th International Festival of Experimental Art at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall, St Petersburg, Russia. The opportunity to locate the project within this event offered a pool of potential participants who spoke a different language and lived within a very different cultural and political context to those participants located in my home base, the Shetland Islands. Many of the participants are located at 60º North. The gallery context defined the timescale for the project as well as an artistic and cultural framework. The project generated questions concerning the relationship between locale, new technologies and creative transformation through participation: Do the films reveal the personal and individual characteristics of each place or do they speak of the international? Does this engagement with new technology facilitate human connection and on what level(s) does this operate? What kinds of perspectives have emerged from people living in Shetland? How, within a wider perspective, do collaboration and transformation initiated from Shetland, work in relation to the national, or international, cultural map? How has participation in the project impacted on participants? Who are the participants, what motivated them to take part and what characterises their experience of participation?
The project has attracted interest locally and within similar rural contexts in Scotland and Scandinavia. A compilation film was exhibited at a new projection space in Shetland’s public gallery, The Bonhoga Gallery, as well as in Denmark at ET4U Contemporary Art in Westjutland.

Initiated by research in autonomous swarm robotic camera behavior, SwarmVision is an installation consisting of multiple Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras on rails positioned above spectators in an exhibition space, where each camera behaves autonomously based on programmed rules of computer vision. Each of the cameras are programmed to detect visual information of interest based on separate computer vision algorithms, and each negotiates with the other two, influencing what subject matter to study in a collective way. The realtime visualizations of what the cameras see are positioned in spatially-reconstructed representation of their three-dimensional visual environment. Each camera’s images are placed at the distance of focus in the virtual space, generating emergent sculptural forms out of the overlaid flat images which are positioned in relation to each other within the virtual space. In the exhibition setting, visual segments of spectators who enter the viewing space populate the images leaving an imprint of their presence which are later erased as the images sequentially fade away.

In this paper, after introducing a new hybrid algorithm based on Swarm Intelligence, the performance of the newly architectured algorithm is evaluated on a set of autonomous robots (Mr Confused Household robots). The goal of the autonomous robots is to agree on a task and, despite the inevitable existence of “organic” noise in the system, accomplish the mission through communication.

Communication  – social interaction or information exchange – observed in social insects is important in all swarm intelligence algorithms, including Stochastic Diffusion Search (SDS) [Bishop, 1989]. Although as stated in [Kennedy, James, Eberhart, 2001], in real social interactions, not just the syntactical information is exchanged between the individuals but also semantic rules and beliefs about how to process this information, in swarm intelligence algorithms only the syntactical exchange of information is considered.

There are different forms of recruitment in social insects: it may take the form of local or global, one-to-one or one-to-many, and stochastic or deterministic mode. The nature of information exchange also varies in different environments and with different types of social insects. Sometimes, the information exchange is more complex where, for example, it might carry data about the direction, suitability of the target and the distance; sometimes the information sharing is simply a stimulation forcing a certain triggered action. What all these recruitment and information exchange strategies have in common is distributing useful information in their community [DeMeyer, Nasuto, Bishop, 2006].

In this paper, the behaviour of the robots are explained according to the Mining Game metaphor (for details about this metaphor read [alRifaie, 2010]), which provides a simple high-level description of the behaviour of agents in SDS.

This paper is based on a project that involves the use of autonomous swarm robots to evaluate their interactions in the physical world. The main communication channel (one-to-one/one-to-many) is going to be through singing inspired by birds’ language. The goal of this project is to study and demonstrate the behaviour of swarm robots using decentralised control mechanism, where intelligence emerges through the interaction and communication among the robots rather than just by the endeavour of one individual robot.

Symbols give meaning and order to the universe as we know it. The simple shapes of the cross or X, triangle, circle and square emerge as symbols with applications to the sun, moon, stars and the tree. These images represent and transfer social and psychological meaning. They frequently combine the practical and spiritual. Many alphabets are made up of a series of circles, squares, crosses and triangles, born out of the ancient pictographs, which was the first attempt at written communication. These basic symbols still prevail as contemporary logos as they carry significant innate meanings related to wholeness, completion, harmony, and security. The logo/symbol can be realistic or abstract, or a combination. Abstract forms can often evoke a much greater emotional response than realism.

Humans think in analogies and metaphors; symbolizing can be the visual expression. Abstracted application means that the created symbol represents an object or thing. Visual abstraction is needed to express our inner and outer environments as they combine, integrate, take on new meanings. People will always be drawn to the aesthetic and vulnerable to its power. Therefore, consciousness of graphic symbolism is in our future, and society should be aware of what is changing our lives.

Abstract (short paper)

For thousands of years artists have been inspired by symmetry in the natural world. Their work, directly or indirectly, led to the science of symmetry: the symbols and codecs enabling the analysis and expansion of this phenomenon as a visual language. Presently, symmetry is a vibrant topic led by research in Mathematics, Biology and Physics. But what has happened to this theme in the arts? Since M.C. Escher’s works last century, there doesn’t appear to be much interest in symmetry. Symmetry is broken today, but in a good way. As in Lewis Carol’s masterpiece, when Alice falls through the looking glass she find an enchanting and mysterious world, far more curious and engrossing then her winter ensconced Victorian drawing room. The same pageantry is exemplified in the various fields of art: although a powerful starting point, breaking symmetry yields greater complexity in subsequent manifestations. When integrated with other techniques and concepts, the resulting artworks are sophisticated, intricate and at times awe-inspiring.

This paper investigates the spatiality of cyberspace and the way it connects to an individual’s personal experience. It deals with the nature of digital space in correspondence with the mental phenomena occurring to its inhabitants.More specifically, the research attempts to introduce a series of conceptual analogies that describe the spatial qualities of cyberspace through the mental state of its users. This happens through the introduction of some altered kinds of architectures that could also outline a theoretical configuration of the notion of the ‘digital body’. These architectonic scenarios are referred as ‘symptomatic’ architectures since they are discovered through a process of diagnosis of the mental and psychological experiences of an internet user.
Symptoms serve as the means to introduce qualities of physicality and phenomenology to the exploration of the digital space. They act as mechanisms of manifestation and they perform processes of corporealization onto the disembodied mind. In that way, they function constructively, as far as the invention of symptomatic architectures is concerned.
Abstracts such as dissociative, inertial, echoic and phantasmal architectures will be developed, constituting self scenarios and spatial narratives. The research aspires to explore alternative ways of apprehending digital experience, through fragments of a differentiated rather than disordered mental continuum – the digital space.

When we think of The Natural World we see it as separate to our own urban existence. But actually the natural world lives alongside us in our cities very successfully, perhaps more successfully. Other species having been around for millions of years longer than us use other ways to navigate their way around the cityscape. Other ways, which could give us a distinct advantage in these heavily visually, data oriented times.

So what can we learn from them beyond biomimcry?

Bats use sonar to see and mark iconic structures; these become ephemeral sonic markers around the city to guide them. By creating sound architecture they avoid the visual overload us humans absorb everyday.

Ant pheromones leave trails so that ant traffic flows continually with no traffic jams and fast and direct routes. We are learning from their smelling skills to create better flow around the city.

The circadian rhythms of nature support natural wellbeing; we can perhaps recreate them in a city that never sleeps to prevent mental illness?

You only have to look at the £160 000 motorway bridge designed and built especially for water voles to continue their pilgrimage to the other side to understand the English are obsessed with helping other species with their historic migratory paths, paths forged by generations of predecessors. However, we’re far less inclined to create culture paths through the city for cultural ways of being, passed down from our human ancestors.

But looking to other city animals and how their past informs their present and future, surely this is of utmost importance. The data we learnt from our past is why we’re here today. The museum of yesterday built our genetic blue print for today… We should learn from how other animals process data collected about our urban city. We should see new ways to reconnect with our past to learn for our future. Then data knowledge we gather from our ancestors will support our future survival.  Understanding data from Natural world technologies could help progress human evolution by inspiring new technologies to support our sustainable futures.

Computer programming cuts both ways: it utterly constitutes an indirect channel to specify intentions yet it provides a vehicle for conceptual navigation i.e. the pragmatic exploration of ideas and the interactive speculation on their generative potential. Both discrete models like cellular automata and continuous distributed agents-oriented systems provide a flexible computational environment to explore a wide range of interesting behaviours.

The CD ROM features two interactive applications accommodating emergent functionality; complex overall behaviour follows from the specification of local rules only. The ICA progam (Interactive Cellular Automata) maps patterns of cellular interaction to MIDI. Complex polyphonic musical structures emerge from only a few user controlled parameters. In addition, an auto-mutation function allows the system to wander through combinational space by itself.

The second program, called Actors, implements a self-regulating musical eco-system, it is a prime example of artificial life oriented methods used in the context of real-time interactive music systems. Actors features a society of creatures moving in two dimensional space interacting according to the expression of social affinities. All actors are engaged in a variable network of mutual relationships which translates to a wealth of interacting musical behaviours. The application somehow blurs the distinction between algorithm and controller, it can be thought of as a living interface. Effective exploration of both programs is non-trivial and requires reading the accompanying texts.

This artist talk discusses recent research in sonification and the tuning of synthetic machines in the project “Metopia”. In this project, Metopia Deep (Signal), the energy of electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere has been explored, with the use of machine learning and sound processing in Pure data, as emergent phenomena. The act of tuning into the electro-magnetic spectra, the material in this work, both light and beyond the visible, is central to artistic practice in this work. The synthetic machines are interfaces between the fleeing electro-magnetic waves and our listening, using vectors in machine learning models, and a metaphorical mapping of vocal rhythmic patterns.

A synthetic method of textures which looked like natural landscapes was developed by applying a fractal synthetic algorithm. A natural structure, such as a cloud, a forest and so on, is born while the process that the method carves a fine texture from a coloured graphical fragment. Our method has following advantage. Any required granularity can be realized and any size of textures can be created. Textures, which may introduce the similar physiological and psychological effects to the human brain, may be got as many as we want, by changing the setting of the random number series. Delicately different textures can be created by arranging the fining parameters. Applications of the method to animation, expression of a yuragi (a small quivering) and 3D image will be investigated in the future. The textures created by our method are also adopted as the presented samples of the experiments in which KANSEI reactions to them are analyzed and the load of the brain and investigated.

Keywords: synthetic physics, virtual worlds, art

When we enter one of the many virtual worlds available nowadays, be it a simple flat world represented in a browser game or a sophisticated three-dimensional world in a high-end computer game, we usually expect that most of the basic rules of every-day physics and geometry in the real world are implemented as well in the virtual counterpart. The geometry is Euclidean, objects look smaller when farther away, there’s an up and down, and if things fall, they fall down. Sometimes we can fly in a virtual world, sometimes things do not cast shadows, but in principle all the rules are a simplification of the real-world physical laws. But is that really necessary? Can’t we go “beyond physics”?

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

Tom Corby and Nathan Cun­ning­ham will pre­sent work aris­ing from their arts-sci­ence col­lab­o­ra­tion, ex­plor­ing ways of rep­re­sent­ing car­bon cir­cu­la­tion in cli­mate sys­tems, the con­ver­gence-di­ver­gence ef­fect in art-sci­ence col­lab­o­ra­tions and the aes­thet­ics of cli­mate mod­els.

This paper presents my research into the sociological effects of physical interaction with audiovisual systems in controlled interactive environments. Can a disruption or disturbance of insitutionalised conditioning according to class, education, gender and physical abilities be orchestrated by careful design and presentation of the interactive artwork? How can a physical interactive environment facilitate the experience of a temporary autonomous grouping in a similar way to that experienced in online communities? Can the artwork create a community of presence, an opportunity for living in the moment leading to unpredictable (inter)activity within the social group? The artistic TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) acts as a revealing agent within society using the tools of poetic terrorism to disrupt the status quo.

My research compares interactive environments made for the general population with results from works made through a collaborative design process with selected individuals with severe physical disabilities. Both sets of work encourage and enable creative expression by the participants beyond everyday norms. The aim is to enable deep audience participation in live performance through the control of audiovisual and robotic elements.

By contrasting the generic with the specific, the research uncovers new information about the benefits, desire, and motivation to interact with complex technologically driven systems, as well as proposals for rules and methods for the creation of artistic communities of presence.

This paper presents research into the social effects of a collaborative participatory design process with selected individuals who have severe physical disabilities. This process encourages and enables creative expression by the participants beyond their everyday norms. Selected individuals are able to control media such as audio and video through custom made bespoke interfaces which they help to design and develop. The research raises the following questions: Can a disruption of institutionalised conditioning according to class, education, gender, and physical abilities be orchestrated by careful design and presentation of interactive artworks? Can the new media artwork become a culturally significant tool for social empowerment leading to long lasting changes for the individuals involved?

Intro
Our current lifestyle is reliant upon media technologies. Our lives are organized through and by technology, such that we can easily forget the importance of physical social interaction rather than that mediated by online social networks. Instead of being empowered by technology, humans are enslaved to its seductive powers. Is it possible to move away from this focus on the technological and rather discuss the act of using the interface and the product of that action, the content? Does access to media technology in itself empower the participant, particularly if that person is herself on the margins of society?

The presentation ‘T/HERE’ will focus on video pieces that explore the relationship between self and place. The 2011 single‑channel installation ‘HOME’ merged the many levels of belonging and finding footing in the world, by juxtaposing countries and places I have resided, maps, satellite imagery, current home, and my body. ‘VIEW’, a commissioned site‑specific project, was created in 2012 for a light festival in Detroit, to portray both city and self. More recently, a two‑channel video installation Title:d CITE/SITE/SIGHT (2013), explore time and memory by employing smart‑phone video footage with tablet drawings, to bring into question the search of knowledge and place through the merging of symbols and references. These works also bring forth the contrast of the tangible with the ephemeral, as they feature hand‑made drawings as ground for the video projections. Much like our bodies in the sun, projections temporarily inscribe the drawing surface with vanishing information. The highly manipulated videos offer a reduced impression of the original footage, providing a vestige of something once specific, minimalized but still somewhat recognizable.T/HERE refers to a future project I plan on working before and after the conference. Prior to ISEA2014, I will compose a video from appropriated footage while researching for information on Dubai and the Emirates. Once there I will gather more video and still imagery from my surroundings. The resulting piece will eventually be presented as a two‑channel video installation. Each projection will be presented on two opposite sides of a wall, so that they can never be seen at the same time. My goal is not to document or critique the many representations of the East, but to use them to create visual interpretations that will hopefully entice the viewers to investigate their mind’s wanderings.

An integration of the so-called ‘lower’ senses into virtual reality is presently thought of to be essential: only they are able to grant an authentic feeling of space, atmosphere and ‘real’ presence. Similarly to the theory of perception from the Renaissance to the 18th century seeing and hearing are imagined as possibly deceivable whereas the tactile is able to experience `reality’. This paper will analyze and historicize conceptualisations of tactility and the skin in the aesthetics of cyberspace. How is bodily contact imagined? What kind of (phantasmatic) body images are involved? Can subjectivity and individuality remain constitutive, if this new concept of touch is implicitly based on the idea of verbal communication, with a limited code and a linear sender-response scheme? In how far does a new partialization of the body take place, if certain parts of the skin are covered with ‘touch suits’ whereas others are left out completely? The hidden metaphorics of a ‘real’ contact, which is so often analogized with the medium of touch, will be central to my argument. Theorists like Derrick de Kerckhove and VR artists such as Stelarc will be discussed.

Tactile Potentials is an ongoing practice-based research project, based in Sydney, Australia. It exists in several iterations as both a visitor interaction and a live performance. This research develops techniques for affectively co-composing with expressive conjunctions of augmented materials (both digital and organic), including: recursive strategies for modulating digital augments using touch, amplifications of bio-electrical data from plants to produce augmented audio, choreographing hand micro-gestures in tactile and signaletic connections with both augments and plants, and passing augments between the Leap Motion interface, Unity3D and Touch Designer.

TAFKAV aims to explore a poetic interpretation of communication as “text” flowing between particular subjects (plants) and humans. The hermeneutic circle describes a process of understanding a dynamic relationship and refers to the idea that one’s understanding of the whole is established by reference to the constituent parts and vice versa for a new relationship with nature for survival in our contemporary era.

This essay does not rely on any common base of information, so any that exists has to be created and then offered to the other in such a way that the other is able to discover its significance. First, the bases for an information exchange have to be set up, trough the establishment of an hetical context. Then, after that, we can activate the communication exchange.

At least TAFKAV is also an artistic interactive-installation that will explore communication with the flower-plant Orchids Vanda. An installation that explores the possibility, and attendant problems, of establishing communication where none yet exists. The aim of this experiment is to build a potential flow of human-plant information flow that generate a rhythm or pace and a series of constants that can then be codified – arbitrary, as with all sign systems – in a system of communication and hence a system of meaning between humans and others.

There is a distinct possibility that, once established, this exchange may reveal to us unexpected insights into our reality. Its very important to understand that the text (the paper that descript the theory, the experimentum…the installation) is part of the work, that’s why this art-research interactive work is based on a written part and on an installation. The written part is in fact part of the interactive installation and should not be considered less important, it stems from the experience. This relationship between the installation and the writing represents the relationship that exists between an experience and the fact of its being shared – its objectivization or communication. This relation paper-istallation take form as the printed copies of a scientific text and the ‘sound description’ (as a ‘radio bok’) that can be dowloadable trought an hardware memory.

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

This paper will dis­cuss the re­la­tion­ship be­tween speed and lit­er­ary crit­i­cism in the age of new media.  Specif­i­cally, this paper will ex­plore the dual metaphor of the “tag” as an of­fi­cial con­sumer label and an un­der­ground art form, and the pro­duc­tive ten­sion that ex­ists when both forms exist within the same urban space.  Using this metaphor to dis­cuss tra­di­tional ter­mi­nolo­gies and folk­son­omy as forms of “tag­ging” that can cre­ate pro­duc­tive ten­sion within data­base pro­jects like the Elec­tronic Lit­er­a­ture Di­rec­tory, I will con­clude with a call for at­ten­tive­ness that can push both ca­sual read­ers and con­ser­v­a­tive schol­ars to­wards crit­i­cism that is tech­no­log­i­cally ap­pro­pri­ate, eth­i­cally en­gaged, and cul­tur­ally vital.

Contested Spaces: The Myrtle Walks presents eight online images that use a slow-moving scroll through an extended horizontal format to recreate a series of meditative walks through the mixed industrial/residential neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn (NY, USA). This work-in-progress web project explores the disorder and fragmentation of the marginal spaces in which everyday life occurs — what Henri Lefebvre called residual space — represented by a jumble of vernacular architecture, hand lettered signage, discarded consumer items and industrial castoffs. This presentation first touches on the pictorial conventions historically employed in landscape painting, from the rectangular frame of the Renaissance picture plane to the long horizontal of Asian manuscript handscrolls and discusses how the panorama, cyclorama and moving panorama are formats that parallel the experience of walking and thus create an experience that immerses the viewer in a narrative space.

Panel Statement

ALL DAY PANELS at the BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE

Opening speeches by:

• Jacqueline Sanson, Bibliotheque nationale de France,assistant managing director
• Isabelle Giannattasio, Bibliotheque nationale de France, director of the audiovisual department.
• Ann Marie Duguet – Introduction to a history of electronic and digital arts

Ann Marie Duguet is director of the Aesthetic Research Centre for Cinema and Audiovisual Arts at Universite de Paris 1.

Debate led by Thierry Grillet: How to gather, preserve, and further people’s knowledge of the electronic arts?

First part: The artist’s point of view with

• Aurdlien Bambagioni (CD-rom Outline),
• Andrea Davidson (CD-ram La Morsure – The Bite),
• Antoine Denize (CD-rom Machine a ecrire – The Typewriter),
• Martin Le Chevalier (CD-rom La gageure – The challenge)

Second part: The mediator’s point of view with

• Annick Bureaud, director of the OLATS association, art critic and teacher,
• Anne Marie Duguet, Universite de Paris 1,
• Christophe Jouanlanne, manager of the bookstore at the Jeu de Paume museum,
• Francois Perrodin, teacher, the School of Fine Arts of Rennes.

Third part The curator’s point of view with:

• Sylvie Boulanger, National Centre of Printed Art, Chatou, curator,
• Pascale Cassagneau, chief inspector of education and artistic creation, member of the delegation for visual arts of the Culture Ministry
• Christine Van Assche, National Museum of Modern Art, curator in charge of the new media,
• Jane Garcia, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Audiovisual department, Multimedia departmental head

Presentation of the artist’s CD-roms

Tangible Data Economics in DATA LOAM

This paper presents the key concepts and products of the @home Project (FEEL group, Keio University Inakage Lab), a research group on communication media design in future home environments. This project looks at the design of humaninformation, and human-human communication media within the home environment. Through the study of design approaches for supportive tools, we produced nine prototype models using tangible media (managing digital information through graspable physical objects) and demonstrated them in a public exhibition.

Abstract

Short Paper

The important purpose of instruction in computer art graphics is to develop students’ working habits on the computer in order to stimulate their artistic growth and production. The common concern related to computer graphics instruction should be probable the aesthetics of student computer graphics. We strive to train people to create products with the highest visual quality possible, acquire high visual and aesthetic skills and values, as well s technical and programming skills. The crucial point in supporting quality of student art is providing the students with stimulating assignments. This paper provides theoretical framework for integrative approach to instruction in computer graphics, art and science. The instructional approach in many computer graphics classes is based on the structured and oriented way of monitoring students’ own projects at the end of the course. It happens very often that all students write own programs leading to the same visual solution. Students feel pretty well prepared for their professional careers, but find it difficult to create visually intriguing design. Standard rainbows and randomized colorful designs are the ones picked by the art juniors who search for technically innovative yet visually attractive artistic solutions.

TEAR SET is an installation, a crying machine, distributing artificially fabricated tear replicate of the artist’s own tears. The work creates a mediated, collective experience of intimacy with the artist by inviting audiences to wipe away the salty sadness liquid.

The artificial tear is made of purified water, salt, protein (lactoferrin and lysozyme), carboxymethyl cellulose and sugar. It mirrors the concentration of the artist’s biological tears according to a series of chemical analyses. Sharing the materiality of emotion production, the tear is a hybrid of elaborated sentiments and indifferent mass production. It weaves materiality and narratives into a social experiment where the simulation, expression and records of emotion become the source of affection.

A sense of place can be successfully manipulated to influence and control people by stimulating a response of recognition and recall. The construction of place parallels aspects of ‘technique’ which is a theoretical approach to technology. This theory determines technology to be a mode of ordering and an autonomous entity which surpasses the machine (Ellul: 1965). Technique orders space, amongst other things, into specialised, distributed, and efficient places (Lefebvre: 1974). This paper will cite the gallery to be a result of technique in spatialisation. The etymological link of ‘are and ‘technology’, stemming from the Greek word ‘techne’, reinforces the argument that both the gallery and the fine art work found within are suitable settings from which to explore the effects of technology on notions of place. Technology can only been confronted from within itself (Heidegger: 1954).

This paper presents contemporary fine art work which address aspects of technique, place, and technology. Artists referred to will include Mike Bode, Graham Gussin, Siobhan Hapaska, Marielle Neudecker, Julian Opie, Bridget Smith, and Elizabeth Wright, in addition to the author’s own art work.

Prologue: Instead of drowning in the waves of postmodernism, formalism has surfaced in terminal cultures. The genealogy of techno-formalism leads to the German Bauhaus. I present flashbacks of 1920s techno-utopias. Epilogue: Is formalism in media arts an erasure of identity, work, space? Instead of bipolarizing dystopias and utopias, content and form, the epilogue discusses acceleration and excess as strategies of deformalization. Flashy citations from works by Troy Innocent, VNS Matrix, and others are included.

Science-fiction cinema has always significant role as an art form to define and discuss the future of interaction between human and technology; telling the stories of altered identities and expanded bodies for instance; Videodrome (1983), the Terminator (1984), Crash (1996), the Matrix (1999), Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and so on.  As science-fiction cinema promises, today, in the non-fictional world, human being is exposed by machines; cars, computers, mobile phones, networks, prosthesis and others. Therefore, body and identity of human is changed by technology, especially by digital devices and it is necessity to find a new explanation for this new form of human in the renewed post-modern society. When Scott Bukatman (1993) explains this reformed human figure in SF cinema with the notion of “terminal” body and identity, after 10 years, Giuseppe O. Longo (2003) use the term “homo-technologicus” for man-kind of the 21st Century. Referencing these two approaches; this paper discusses the process of how human body and identity is affected by machines and how this alteration materialized from science-fiction cinema to the real life. In addition, this paper explains and uses a new term “techno-human” to define the new hybrid version of the human that lives in between non-fictional world of social networks, television, the Internet, mobile phones and fictional world of science-fiction cinema. Definition of hybrid “techno-human” includes implanted and virtual bodies, relocation of human limbs, devices as extension of bodies, digitized memories, technophilia and televisionized identities.

Techno-Intuition embraces the combined roles of mental, physical, and technological processes in building relationships to one’s environment through sound. It recognizes parallels between technological methods of making the inaudible audible and more esoteric techniques for revealing aspects of the unconscious. In many cases, relationships to environment drawn through sound are profoundly bound up with technology. In order to hear, collect, transform, study, analyze, and intervene through sound, special instruments must be designed. Such a hearing-through-technology raises questions as to how these instruments enable as well as inhibit certain forms of knowledge. These questions are addressed through examples from practitioners, including the author, who actively research the area between technology, intuition and the sonic environment. I consider an expanded notion of ‘instrument’ that emphasizes context and the environment it is placed in. Blending the (technological) instrument with (non-technological) intuition through physical practice, listening, and experimentation, promotes an attitude to both instrument development and artistic production that, by being more attuned to and aware of context, is potentially more sustainable and sensitive to environment.

Intro
Charging the Space Between Technology, Intuition, Sound, and the Environment
‘Techno-intuition’ recognizes the implicit coexistence between the creation of meaning and the technologies we use to sense and know (and navigate through) our environment. In many cases, relationships to environment drawn through sound are profoundly bound up with technology. In order to hear, collect, transform, study, analyze and intervene through sound, special instruments must be designed. Such a hearing-through-technology raises questions as to how these instruments enable as well as inhibit certain forms of knowledge.

Revolution implies many things in the technological age. but its basic principles are sometimes forgotten. Revolution also means struggle, contest and dispute. resulting in constant creation. Our social objectives are intimately related with technology and new ways of creation, because the new technologies are nowadays fundamental tools (weapons). It is also important to understand two things: (1) the role of the industrialized countries over the underdeveloped ones and (2) the importance of the latter in the creation and exploration of their identity using new technologies. Underdeveloped countries are continuously struggling against their own identity, much more than the western world. This is why it is very important to promote centres for digital creation, in other words, centres for the research of art and science. The current kinds of technological development in Latin America helps the proliferation of technical training centers (low-level education) but not the opportunity for students to test for themselves, creating and inventing their (our) own future. Identity, cultural diversity and technology, a creative of ideas and thoughts will help us understand the past and also create our future.

This paper examines some features of the emergent phenomena of Techno-gardism, its tribal tendencies and its fetish of technology. The Techno-garde lays claim to what Donald Kuspit has identified as two primary myths of the Avant-garde artist: “those that attribute to him special perceptual power and those that regard him as uniquely authentic in an inauthentic society.” Kuspit observes with dismay the replacement of the therapeutic claims of authentic creativity with: “novelty for the sake of novelty – the fetishization of innovation – becomes inseparable from the perception of the work of art as the supreme commodity.” The Technogarde inherits, largely without question, this tradition of the new coupled with the no-nonsense rationalist faith in problem solving as the generator of authentic innovation. The history of art becomes a succession of technological solutions.

In his search for the Mechanism of History Francis Fukuyama repeats Nietzsche’s argument that links the drive toward superiority to the creative force behind art: “For the desire to be recognized as superior to others is necessary if one is to be superior to one self. This desire is not merely the basis of conquest and imperialism, it is also the precondition of the creation of anything else worth having in life, whether great symphonies, paintings, novels, ethical codes, or political systems“. For the Techno-garde the drive toward superiority equates technological one-upsmanship with artistic creativity. Aesthetics are governed by Moore’s Law as a corollary to Darwin’s law of natural selection. The shock of the new is replaced by the anxiety of obsolescence.

Kuspit reminds us that the essential creativity of Avant-garde art represents a “subtle personal rebellion against society.” Overlooked by the Technogarde is the central role of the oppositional stance of critical discourse and contemporary art practice vis-a-vis prevailing cultural norms, “the penitentiary of consumerism,” and prerogatives of power. Condemned to a lifetime of upgrading and downloading the art of the Techno-garde is always in a state of becoming and is never complete. Yet the Techno-garde has no need to question or rebel against this fate of perpetual consumption because it seeks validation from it. While aspiring to an art of emancipation from the conditions of materiality the Techno-garde remains a prisoner of technology.

A critical mass of technological art is now visible through international exhibitions, public interventions, symposia, and specialized academic programs. At the same time, many nations are redefining the terms of technological innovation in ways that include funding technological art in their programs. These include:

1. a shift in focus among many European countries from efficiency and expertise-based economies to creativity-fueled economies;
2. institutional discussion in the U.S. of an expansion of the traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) curriculums to STEAM (STEM plus arts) curriculums; and
3. world-wide initiatives to establish IT-enabled creative clusters as a basis for innovation.

Yet when it comes to articulating the relationships between art and technology within such institutional contexts, we are often left with a focus on the “aesthetic”, “humanistic”, and “creative” contributions of art practice to technological innovation. In this talk I argue that these institutions would benefit from more complex articulations of the relationships between art and technology. Technological art amplifies certain characteristics of postmodern art, specifically its tendencies toward destabilization, experience-based interaction, and contextual contingency. In contrast, technological engineering foregrounds stabilization over its more destabilizing aspects. The practice of engineering is to stabilize natural forces so that they act reliably within a device. This emphasis on stabilization extends beyond technological reliability to social and cultural stabilization as well, so that when we are acting within a reliable threshold of a technology, be it a bridge or an iPhone, we are also stabilizing reliable cultural practices. Technological art acts outside of these reliable thresholds, thus inverting the stabilizing mission of technology and foregrounding its destabilizing tendencies.

Truly incorporating interdisciplinary art and technology practice into institutional contexts means admitting the dynamics of stabilization and destabilization within the dialogues of innovation. By allowing technological art to be a churn in the system instead of a well-behaved contributor to sunny-day scenarios of creativity and innovation, we open up new dialogues about what technology is and can be. Such dialogues would come as these institutions face the challenges of climate change, increasing competition for world resources, and a generation of innovations involving populations existing beyond first world commercial agendas.

Panel Statement

Panel: Transcultural Approaches

Discussions about the globalization of culture often assume that both technological development and the diffusion of technologies from the developed countries throughout the planet are “inevitable”. Two explanations are frequently given for the “inevitability” of technological diffusion: The first is the rapid rate of technological innovation. This argument usually assumes that technological development is independent from other aspects of culture. The second explanation is the unquenchable desire of the people from developing countries for advanced, primarily Western technologies. This suggests that technology possesses intrinsically seductive and redemptive values which drives peoples willfully to abandon their cultural and artistic traditions.

Regardless of desirability, no technology is ever distributed uniformly. The history of Latin American art indicates that the choice of electronic technologies as mediums for expression is mediated by social and historical factors. In Mexico for example, while computers are used in many urban businesses such as banks and travel agencies, the number of artists cognizant of the latest developments in electronic imaging technologies is limited to a handful. The widespread belief in the redeeming aspects of technology is due at least in part to unfamiliarity of “first world” critics and practitioners with social and economic realities other than their own, and to a long standing practice of presenting technological developments in humanitarian  terms. In order to evaluate the democratic possibilities of new technologies it is necessary to examine the production and consumption of both technology and science. Like scientific practice, art has been believed to have universal values.This position implies that artistic production is independent from its sociopolitical context. The argument has been made that with the advent of feminism, post-structuralism, multiculturalism and the multiplicity of aesthetic choices made possible by the computer the canonization of works of art has become impossible. On the contrary, I contend that at the same time that traditional aesthetic canons
are being challenged, new canons are being created. I suggest that in addition to the rapid rate of technological development, the construction of these canons is in part a response to  dramatic changes in the structure of the world’s economies and to the seemingly unending migration of people from former colonies to Europe and from culturally dependent areas to North America.

This paper’s aim is to comment theoretically on Andrea Nagy’s performance art practice and its delivery is as a sound installation. It explores sound’s ability to diffuse through boundaries; either material or abstract and to enter a space where physically the human body is restricted. It acknowledges that sound is both produced and received by the human body and includes arguments surrounding the location of power systems within an electronic culture and the creative attempts of performance artists to address such issues. The author considers how these principles of sound may be of advantage to western women. How can a woman use her body, her voice and sound technology; in a time-based art form without relegating her body and voice into the realm of the pre-symbolic (as defined by Lacan) and so into the realm of non-meaning? By analysing the way the female voice is and has been portrayed through recording and live radio transmission, the author will discuss how recording speech is a way of immortalising. A form of eternal life through the continuum of replaying the recorded voice and attempt to show how such a representation always falls short of being.

In the last few years technical progress in information technologies has ushered in a veritable revolution in the field of film making and audiovisual shows. Ever increasing storage capacity, the ever rising speed of microprocessors and the development of real-time image processing software have paved the way for highly innovative uses of image and sound. Today, image sampling, transformation and projection is carried out nearly instantly, which obviously has direct consequences on film making, concerts and performance. These technological advances open up new prospects in the search for links between image and sound, and breath new life into the concept of audiovisual synesthesia that has never ceased to intrigue filmmakers and musicians throughout the twentieth century.
While there were already certain technical and aesthetic analogies between experimental films and electro-acoustic music through the use of Found Footage (collages and montages made with discarded footage from existing films), today the live treatment of both images and sound place the two media on an equal footing. Thanks to the real-time treatment of images, film can now boast the same mobility as music. Visual sampling, instant transformation and video restitution in real time have brought visual and sound techniques closer together.
Today, image concerts, sound projections, visual and sound sampling are to be found at every music festival, together on the same stage. Like DJ’s, who mix their records live and process sounds with filters, VJ’s (Visual Jockeys) mix images in real time, create loops, accelerate or slow them down, transform the structure and so forth.
“We have entered the age of recombination, the age of recombined bodies, recombined sex categories, recombined texts and recombined culture.”‘ The age of recombined sound and visual samples is notably reflected in the work of Coldcut, one of the first performing groups to take an interest in assembling sounds with images, especially from Kung-Fu films, rearranged in the techno spirit, according to specific musical criteria. This appropriation process and the idea of recycling images is also a specialty of Hextatic, particularly in their last album Rewind, which is sold with a CDROM on which you can visualize the way the group explores rhythmic images. With Hextatic, the succession of sounds that goes with a given image is what creates the music. For instance, one of the many elements that make up the rhythm of “Auto 2000” is a loop consisting of a car door slamming. In “Deadly Media”, the rhythm is essentially generated by a dozen voices of TV hosts, sampled, looped, and transformed. On the stage, Hextatic does not just project images on a screen, but plays them; interprets them, and sometimes even improvises on them live.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Self-fashioning, fashion, ethnic apparel, race, gender, colourblind racism, Second Life, virtual worlds, SLart, Skawennati, Time Traveller.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework with which to discuss the critical engagement of media art projects in Second Life with racialized self-representation, fashion and ethnic dress. Examining Montreal-based Mohawk artist Skawennati’s machinima series, TimeTravellerTM (2008-13), a project of selfdetermination, survivance and Indigenous futurity, it argues the critically-aware act of ‘virtually self-fashioning’ racialized borndigital identities, or virtual ethnicities, disrupts ways in which today’s vast proliferation of self-technologies enabling the creation, recreation and management of multiple selves, would otherwise remain complicit with neoliberal colour-blind racism.

What happens when you cross softcore porn and paper dolls with Japanese Anime and the Internet? You get KISS, a Japanese digital paper doll program that exists as free-ware on the World Wide Web. Our presentation examines the cross-cultural, semiotic, technical, and interactive implications of the phenomenon of KISS. The KISS user interacts with the paper doll program by undressing lavishly clothed bodies of adolescent Japanimation girls. Genres for the doll figures range from sci-fi battle cyborgs to catholic school girls in plaid miniskirts to leather-clad bondage seductresses. KISS represents an incredibly rich vein of hybrid culture. Our presentation will touch on the many genres of pop culture from which KISS draws, such as Japanese Manga and Anime. KISS fetishizes technology as it plays with fictional bodies. The interaction of the user with the software is curiously unique in the digital world, requiring repeated, frantic clicks and drags to”unlock” the dolls’ underwear. In a spiraling crescendo of strange sexual technologies, the gestures of the user are conflated with the on-screen narrative of soft-core foreplay. The audience of KISS is diverse, from little girls to hardcore anime fans to classic Internet geeks. That KISS’ audience is so broad speaks for its potency as an aesthetic object and an engaging activity. Interestingly, the fans of KISS are also the creators of the dolls, and our paper will highlight the interactions of this group of producers/consumers on the KISS email mailing list over the last year. During our presentation, we will surf through a sampling of KISS sites as well as interact with the KISS software itself.

The author provides examples of low-cost information and communications technologies (ICTs) and suggests five major strategies for their low-cost deployment in developing countries:

1. appropriate technology,
2. free/ open software,
3. compulsory licensing,
4. pay-per-use public stations and
5. community/public ownership of ICT infrastructure.

Aside from the problems of affordability and universal access, the author identifes the Internet’s built-in biases for

1. English,
2. subsidizing globalization,
3. automation and
4. the technofix,

and explores the implications of these biases. The challenge is not only to design affordable and accessible technologies or to redesign technologies to be consistent with our deeply held values, but also to make ourselves less technology dependent.

Panel Statement

Panel: Eliza’s Children

Emergence is a new paradigm concerned with nonlinear, distributed interrelationships and emergent properties of collected wholes, as opposed to linear and unidirectional relationships. Emergence may be defined as rule-driven, local agents, self organizing into larger co-operative structures which in turn may organize into higher level structures. Ken Rinaldo will examine bottom-up modeling approaches to understanding emergent behaviors in natural and technological systems. Examples cited will be: the interaction and self organization of clay molecules , organization in nucleated cells, the organization of the inner ear (vestibular macular), collective behavior among termite colonies, bacterially based computers, approaches to achieving artificial life, and emergent walking behavior in legged robots. Living systems theories will briefly be considered as models for technological systems. Some universals of structure will be defined with speculation on structural development as it relates to efficiencies of matter, energy, and information processes. In this complex he will discuss the co-evolving relationships between culture and digital information networks (internet), and consider a form of neural/electronic consciousness as emergent. To conclude, Rinaldo will discuss emergence as a new aesthetic in interactive art, citing examples among his own and other artist’s work.

“Energetic and refreshingly rough edged, Technophobia is an exhibit of a dozen or so mostly interactive computer mediated contemporary art works. Light years away from the hermetic super realism and fractual abstractions of the Siggraph trade show variety, the work on this disk – from the disorienting subterranean space of Alan Koninger’s “Megalopolis” to the mega-corporate magic realism of Guillaume Wolf and Genevieve Gauckler’s “KGBforce” – displays a raw, confrontational energy … Drawing on underground film, performance and pop culture, this work is spontaneous and disruptive in a way that feels low tech even at its most synthetic…”

-Frank Lanz, ID magazine, November 1996.

Technophobia is a collection of original multimedia art made as an interactive exhibition. In addition to the original multimedia artwork on the CD its also possible to access a studio visit with each artist. The artists on the CD are:

1. Judith Ahern
2. Bill Albertini
3. Huma Bhabha
4. Joseph Ferrari
5. Alan Koninger
6. Tim Maul
7. Christian Perez
8. Troy Innocent
9. Guillaume Wolf & Genevieve Glaucker
10. Jody Zellen
11. Lynne Sanderson
12. Dooley Le Cappellaine

The CD also features electronic and ambient music by:

1. David Barnes & Charles Cohen
2. Moniek Darge
3. Joshua Fried
4. The Happy Jacks
5. Fugitive Pope
6. Phil Niblock
7. Mike Hovanscek with Pointless Orchestra
8. John Hajeski with Post Prandials

I think that this new technology offers the most exciting perhaps the only serious area of innovation occurring in contemporary art today. I’m using the technology to transcend the limitations of physics inherent in other methods previously available to artists. From the creative point of view, working in a new medium is both exacting and liberating. On this CD I worked with other artists who ranged the whole gamut of artists from those with no computer experience at all to those who had training in specialized tertiary institutions. I’ve felt for a long time that art has to go outside itself 5 that reconstruction has worked itself out as a modus operandi, For me working with digital technology provides the freedom to create something almost indefinable but which reflects the obsessions of my generation; cinema, popular culture, cutting edge art and electronic culture. Technophobia has been acquired for the collection of ZKM/Center for Art and Media Technology, Karlsruhe, DE.

Under the sign of “The Body as a Colonized Space,”  the panellists join minds, lenses and methodologies to de-construct, denounce and reclaim the use of technologies to problematize the Southwestern border of the United States, not merely as an epistemic or aesthetic site, but in its incarnation as a no-man’s land where late capitalism and empire merge, unleashing a techno-liberal assault upon the surplus of discardable bodies. Sponsored in part by the UNM Interdisciplinary Film & Digital Media Program.

Matthias Fritsch researched the internet history of his video Kneecam No.1 aka Technoviking from it’s production until it became popular with more than 20 million clicks on the internet and more than three thousand video responses on Youtube. The archive contains images, emails, blogs, forum discussions and a selection of some hundered videoresponses which are categorized to show the different attempts of the Web 2.0’s recycling culture.

The results are published in form of installation of the archive and lectures were Fritsch also shows the most interesting video responses. The artist illustrates new ways of production and distribution within user generated networks. From his experiences on the Technoviking Phenomenon Fritsch developed his following Work Music from the Masses.

Panel: The Volatility and Stability of WorldMaking as Techné

Tech­noetic ar­chi­tec­ture is an ar­chi­tec­ture that has a life of its own; that thinks for it­self, speaks for it­self, feeds it­self, takes care of it­self, re­pairs it­self, plans its fu­ture, copes with ad­ver­sity and an­tic­i­pates our chang­ing needs. Tech­noetic ar­chi­tec­ture is ar­chi­tec­ture that re­turns our gaze. It’s not what build­ings look like to us but what we look like to them. It’s not what we feel about places but how those places feel about us. Tech­noetic ar­chi­tec­ture recog­nises that Sec­ond Life is the re­hearsal room for fu­ture sce­nar­ios in which we will end­lessly re-in­vent our many selves. Tech­noetic ar­chi­tec­ture recog­nises that what we build today in the im­ma­te­ri­al­ity of cy­ber­space will to­mor­row ma­te­ri­alise in nano space.

Panel: SENSORIUM: Interdisciplinary Practices of Embodiment and Technology

The word medium and its cog­nates, such as media and me­di­a­tion, have a strangely dou­ble as­pect. On the one hand, a medium acts as an en­abler, as a bridge, con­nect­ing things that might oth­er­wise be com­pletely dis­joint. On the other hand, a medium is some­thing that pal­pa­bly stands be­tween. Me­di­ated ex­pe­ri­ence is al­ways sec­ond-hand; me­di­ated ex­pe­ri­ence is, by de­f­i­n­i­tion, not im­me­di­ate. Even air as a medium through which we ap­pre­hend the World dis­torts. Worry about this led David Hock­ney, for ex­am­ple, in the late-eight­ies, to pre­fer pho­to­copiers to cam­eras as he felt that the im­ages pro­duced by the lat­ter were largely pic­tures of the air be­tween the cam­era and the sub­ject. The tech­nolo­gies of what might be called new or dig­i­tal or in­ter­ac­tive media have been in­tense cases of this dou­ble­ness, but this may change. In 2002, re­searchers at the Touch Lab at MIT shook hands across the At­lantic with re­searchers at Uni­ver­sity Col­lege, Lon­don. They shook hands using a fast com­puter con­nec­tion, pres­sure sen­sors and ac­tu­a­tors. That hand­shake may well her­ald a new era in com­mu­ni­ca­tion across the In­ter­net and could also be the har­bin­ger of new ways in which we ex­pe­ri­ence other peo­ple and ob­jects through tech­no­log­i­cal me­di­a­tion. This change is much more fun­da­men­tal than sim­ply adding one more sense, ar­guably a rel­a­tively minor one at that, to the array of senses with which we in­ter­act with com­put­ers. Touch is very dif­fer­ent from the senses-vi­sion and au­di­tion-that, up to now, have been al­most the sole ways of ac­cess­ing the world through com­put­ing tech­nol­ogy.

The dif­fer­ence is bound up with the no­tion of dis­tance and me­di­a­tion. The things we see and the things we hear, even when not ap­pre­hended through ma­chines, are al­most al­ways at some re­move from us, me­di­ated at least by air; the things we feel are things that are in con­tact with us, things that are touch­ing us as we touch them. Once im­me­di­ate senses-like touch and taste-are added to the en­gage­ment with com­put­ers, the ex­pe­ri­ence be­comes man­i­festly more im­me­di­ate, more par­tic­i­pa­tory, more part of a real world. As Steven Con­nor points out, in his ar­ti­cle “The Menagerie of the Senses” (The Senses and So­ci­ety, 2006) spi­ders are the one an­i­mal that rou­tinely feels things at a dis­tance (Con­ners, 2004). Spi­ders do this, fit­tingly, by feel­ing things on the far cor­ners of their webs.  In this paper I dis­cuss pos­si­ble fu­ture tech­nolo­gies and the kinds of en­gage­ments with a range of prac­tices they en­able, re­fer­ring to Lud­wig van Berta­lanffy no­tions in Ro­bots, Men and Minds (1967) with re­spect to ar­gu­ing for a com­plex sys­tem of com­po­nents in in­ter­ac­tion to­wards fluid bod­ies and men­tal en­ergy.

Panel: Through the Roadblocks: Technology and Orality

The Ara­bian Penin­sula and the Gulf is home to some of the world’s most con­tro­ver­sial set­tle­ments that have grown into major eco­nomic and global hubs fol­low­ing rapid trans­for­ma­tion. 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, 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. This form of ur­ban­iza­tion also shows a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the fab­ri­ca­tion of an image. The ex­plo­ration of places through im­agery is a con­tem­po­rary phe­nom­e­non. As the tech­nol­ogy in the pro­duc­tion of im­agery of un-built or newly built ar­chi­tec­ture has be­come more so­phis­ti­cated, its image be­comes an end in it­self and can now be trans­mit­ted across the globe in­stan­ta­neously. Coastal neck­lace set­tle­ments, sand and sil­i­cone, pix­e­lated pat­terns, land­scape and ren­der farms, frac­tal and para­met­ric for­ma­tions, sim­u­lated Sim­C­i­ties, dy­namic for­ma­tions, mas­ter plans and spec­u­la­tive de­vel­op­ments are now pro­ject­ing new satel­lite ur­banisms. This spa­tial and urban ap­proach em­pha­sizes en­claves but also ex­clu­sive­ness. We are now plan­ning and de­sign­ing cities by gaz­ing down on the ac­tion from heav­ens. Re­con­nais­sance tech­nolo­gies turn into spec­ta­cle and ‘telegenic’ fan­tasies ad­dress­ing mass tourism. Sim­u­lated panora­mas and im­agery of un­fin­ished pro­jects give rise to an ex­cit­ing promise and fan­tasy. In ef­fect dig­i­tal im­agery and tech­nol­ogy is shap­ing the fu­ture of cities. After all we are all no­mads in­hab­it­ing an image.

My first attempt at a telematic music performance was a total failure, a beautiful disaster that was crucial for my understanding of the medium. In the decade since, I have participated in several dozen telematic concerts along with a constantly expanding community of collaborators who explore the aesthetic, educational and political potentials of networked performance. This presentation weaves together reflections on my own experiences and writings/work by others to present some polemics, poetics and proposals for music in an era of telepresence.

A collaborative virtual workspace demo with children at remote locations “painting” on a common digital canvas.

“We must rediscover a commerce with the world and a presence to the world that is older than intelligence.” Merleau-Ponty (1945)

My work considers the distance between the viewer and what is being viewed. How does technology alter our perceptions of distance, scale, and truth? Technologies for viewing continue to evolve, from the camera obscura to the telescope to the atomic force microscope; each new technology raises questions about what is real versus what is an artifact of the viewing process (Foster 1988). Recent evidence (Manovich 1996, Lunenfeld 1997) suggests that the subject of “telepresence” may be relevant to artists and theorists.
What is telepresence? I agree with Kac’s (1997) distinction between virtual reality (VR) and telepresence:VR presents purely synthetic sense-data lacking physical reality. Telepresence presents sense-data that (1) claims to correspond to a remote physical reality and (2) allows the remote user to perform a physical action and see the . results.The WWW has the potential to bring telepresence out of the laboratory. Some projects I’ve been involved with include:
The Telegarden (1995-97), Legal Tender (1996-97), The Invisible Cantilever (1997). The recurring question: “How do I know this is real?” suggests a Turing Test for epistemology. This may be the last refuge for realism.

“Although the senses occasionally mislead us respecting minute objects, such as are so far removed from us as to be beyond the reach of close observation, there are yet many other of their informations, the truth of which it is manifestly impossible to doubt; as for example, that I am in this place, seated by the fire, clothed in a winter dressing gown, and that I hold in my hands this piece of paper….”  _Descartes (1641)

The visitor acts and perceives this “reality” through an instrument with no objective scale. How does the framed vision of the microscope (Hacking 1983) differ from the framing induced by the World Wide Web? Discontinuities induced by these media can undermine what Husser calls the “inner” and “outer” horizons of experience.These horizons are vital to what I call “telepistemology”: how distance influences belief, truth, and perception.
R. Descartes, 1641. Meditations.
H. Foster, ed. 1988. Vision and Visuality. Bay Press.
I. Hacking.1983.Representing and Intervening. Cambridge Press.
J. Herbert.1997.The Robotic Billfold: Counterfeits and Telepistemology. Mondo 2000. 16, pp 126-128.
E. Kac. 1997. Aspects of the Aesthetics of Telecommunications. Leonardo.
P. Lunenfeld.1997 (to appear). In Search of the Telephone Opera.. Afterimage.
L. Manovich.1996.The Labor of Perception. In: L. Hershman ed. Clicking In. Bay Press. 183-193.
M. Merleau-Ponty. 1948. Sense and Non-Sense. trans by Dreyfus and Dreyfus. Northwestern University Press.

In this telepresence installation, a mobile, wireless telerobot Ornitorrinco (Platypus, in Portuguese) in Chicago is controlled in real time by participants in Lexington and Seattle. Communication takes place not through verbal exchange but through the rhythms that result from their engagement in a shared, mediated experience. Viewers and participants are invited to experience an invented remote space from a perspective other than their own. Anybody in the world with Internet access can see it, thus dissolving gallery boundaries and making the work accessible to larger audiences. By merging telerobotics, remote participants and spaces, the traditional telephone system, and videoconferencing through the Internet, this networked telepresence installation shows one potential direction that interactive art may take in the future.

“I am part of the networks and the networks are part of me…I link, therefore I am.”                           _William J. Mitchell, ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City.

How do we trust each other as networking bodies?
In our contemporary networked society, interaction increasingly takes place through wireless, social networked media. The possibilities of tele-presence have made place and distance irrelevant for the experience of social proximity and allow ‘networking bodies’ to be present at several locations, temporalities and social settings at the same time. At the same time the public space turns into a ‘smart environment’ that increasingly interacts with the electronically and digitally enhanced body.
These developments cause profound changes in the role of the body and physical presence since mediated presence leaves little or no room for touch, face to face encounters, and body language that are, according to many philosophers and social scientists, core components for the building of trust and reciprocity, which are in turn the foundations of social structures.
Tele-Trust is a research into how mediated and tele-present society bodily based experiences of presence, reciprocity, and trust can be generated, mediated and maintained.

Tele_Trust is a critical and sensitive exploration in how we can intensify networked affective experiences in relation to the mediated body. It looks for new forms of interaction, participatory systems and interfaces, in which the conditions for ‘trust’ can be recognized and acknowledged or differently perceived. New insights, innovative technologies, and the human body meet to initiate and inspire (yet) unimaginable types of intersubjective engagement.

Tele_Trust contains both a theoretical and artistic experiential research.
The theoretical context are media-theories emphasizing the central position for affective and receptive sensory processes in the body experiencing the world – and perceiving the other. The artistic experiential research takes place in artistic ‘Social Labs’ in dynamic public spaces, where the parameters for body presence are tested using networked wearable devices. The testing takes place in multi actor systems in different social and geographical cultures. The ‘Social labs’ participants contributions are added to a data-base and website, creating an engaging, intercultural agora on new parameters for a hybrid, networking bodies’ trust.

This piece is a musical dance that documents the sounds of the principal churches in Manizales: the rituals, the spaces, the whispers, the prayers, the bells, the dialogues between people and the traditions within these places that are holy and syncretic in nature and which contrast against the busy streets of the city, the market, 23rd Avenue, downtown etc. The city becomes a sacred place with the smell of incense and the sound of bells; people carry out rituals in their workplace, when they buy their lunch, when they walk through the streets making everyday life something sacred, a soundscape inspired by the customs and spaces of Manizales.

Poster Statement

Through robotic installations, we pursue our researches on intelligent environments and life embodiment into matter. We regard machines as distinct entities from us, as much as we consider ourselves distinct from nature. Machines, through the ages, can be seen as an inner intermediate dialogue, in which they appear as the physical rendering of abstraction and also as our own comprehension of the structure of the world. First considered as the main intent of the human quest for its artificial double, machines now tend to become autonomous entities, leaning towards the behaviour of real living individuals. We do not intend to simulate nor physically reproduce real life animals but we rather deal with simplistic behaviours engendered by primitive mechanical animates. Shapes move from simple abstract objects (spheres, cylinders, sound, light) to kinetic and complex organisms as polymorphic patterns. We present robotic machines not as specialized and virtuoso automata but rather as expressive animated artworks. We also explore the reformulation of sound and light applications by simulating organic and metabolic functions and by creating dynamic virtual architectures. In addition to the intrinsic mechanical noise, loops and repetitive textures of both organic and metallic sound objects are part of the installations soundtracks, a collection of numerous heteroclite elements chosen for their evocative properties. The goal is to disfigure the inherent nature of the sound samples and to create a peculiar ambiance proper to the metaphoric habitat of machines. Movement itself can be seen as the objective nature of the machine while its perception (from the viewer) as its subjective counterpart. The hyperreal simulacra of the robot world goes beyond the unreachable simulation of life on a computer screen. Robots are not only a virtual model, a pattern in space and time, but also a dynamic and evolving phenomenon embodied in matter. The replication of machine-organisms is a fundamental concept. Ecosystems are obviously based on population (gender and number) and their complexity is obtained from multiplicity of the inherent interactions. The perceived emergent behaviours of these machines produce a multiplicity of meanings based on single dynamic pattern of events. Real Artificial Worlds engender the paradox of simultaneous illusion and reality by a complete immersion of the viewer in a metaphorical but physically responsive environment.

If one of my pictures of Shanghai has illustrated the ISEA’s coverage book 2006 in San Jose, and with one text, in 2008 for ISEA in Singapore my text only was present, I canceled my trip after that I did not found funds for my travel.

Also today, the global economic crisis, ten years after the world political crisis following the attacks in New York in 2001, should not be a border for the creators and theorists of electronic art.

For ISEA2011, I propose to think concretely through four elements that are a paper, an artwork, a workshop and a panel in Istanbul to open the world across the borders of a Global Village, 100 years McLuhan after.

If there is now a virtual museum of 9/11 in New York but nothing has really changed since then in the way of thinking about architectural place to imagine a planetary network with or without the 27 countries of Europe.

Iconoclastic violence acquired a new form in the recent conflict with terrorism and the war in Afghanistan. The fascination of terrorists with the home video and with “live” or “real time” presentations on TV has all the attributes of new iconoclasm. Its goal is to defeat the most powerful images in our time, the film and the TV image. These images may not be holly as in the past but they bear the same power and control over our feelings and actions. While the Gulf war CNN spectacle represented our power over the enemy by new means of satellite broadcasting, the recent “minimalist” and “low-tech” terrorist video tapes have overthrown this media power with the use of its own weapons – moving and real time images. The new iconoclasm of the home video poses many challenges to contemporary art that are analyzed in terms of iconoclastic issues of power, authenticity, transcendence and representation.

The Texas Border is an audiovisual installation in which the recorded broadcasts of surveillance cameras placed along the US Mexican border in Texas are shown. In a private Internet platform, 25 surveillance cameras are opened to anyone willing to control Mexican individuals attempting to enter the US in an illegal way and report those actions through the website. The installation also includes sixty four videos, part of the Internet platform archive, that show failed incursions into the US territory as a direct consequence of those reports carried out by anonymous users.

Radical anthropological and epistemological change, due to the exponential acceleration of technological history, is the main feature of the contemporary world. The continuous design and production of technological tools means that new tools capable of compressing immeasurable flows of events in very little time are being deployed. Changes of a hitherto unknown nature, the emergence of new data, which are immediately rendered obsolete, are taking place at an exponential pace.
Global event congestion is not due so much to a separate entity that we can call the history of technology as it is to the discovery of the universal techno-development of human identity that cuts through and disrupts a broad range of human activities, such as work, trade, health, learning systems, artistic practices, and circulation of culture. While all of these component areas of society are shaken by the radicalization of the process which is making behavioral systems increasingly technical, there is one field where a decisive change is taking place that is disorganizing all of that field’s structural components: the general economy of text.
Text, and language phenomena in general, have never before been so deeply disrupted. Many transformations are disturbing categories and habits, many of which go back several hundred years, that have culturally marked our relationship to textuality. These include text homogeneity, the figure of the author, the conditions of document circulation and trade, archiving, the library function, the legal principles of intellectual property, reading practices, and so forth.
This major technological event is twofold and combines universal digital extension with astronomic growth in telecom networks, culminating notably in the generalization of the global system that results from this combination of factors, namely Internet. The Web is revealing a multitude of inscriptions and sign uses that are wholly new: simultaneous global connection; uninterrupted circulation of written messages; hyper-textual navigation; interactivity; perception via a screen; predominance of the virtual over the printed; light-speed document transfers; cut and paste possibilities; the association of text with sound, as well as fixed and moving images; searches using super powerful engines; automated on line translation and more. Internet is the most emblematic system of the contemporary technological revolution in that it exemplifies the power of objects that function digitally and can also be put on line. The historical combination of these two technical features opens up a range of possible interconnections capable of circulating on the networks (nearly instantly even over great distances) an infinite amount of heterogeneous data expressed in numbered code. Yet Internet is just one device among a multiplicity of tools offering the twofold capacity of being both digital and connective, and that henceforth inscribe textuality in a universal web where all its components, redistributed and augmented, proliferate according to measurements of circulation, interaction and continuous change that have become universal.

Projection (2015)

ThalassoGlitch is a selection of glitch images of the sea. While mostly underwater photographs, they represent a mixture of nature, water and noise interference. Brunet uses the metaphor of sound, applying different effects such as echo, repeat, phaser, pitch, invert, speed, profile, noise removal, amplify, reverse, equalizer, leveller, click removal, BassBoost and normalize. The 20 photographs in the series portray a decaying and adulterated sea, a slideshow of corrupted files.

I present a paper on how different kinds of technologies can evoke the uncanny, while tracing the emergence of electricity as a kind of uncanny phenomena to more contemporary instances of the technological uncanny in the work of various artists and other assorted pop cultural references.

The uncanny as defined by Freud is that which is uncomfortably strange finds a special kind of resonance when combined with various kinds of technological media.

Perhaps one of the most striking and memorable experiences of the technological uncanny, occurred on a personal level on visiting an exhibition with my at the time  one year old daughter featuring the work of artist Tony Oursler. On entering the  darkened room and upon seeing one of Oursler’s familiar ‘electronic effigies’ of projected video onto a small mannequin, all was calm as both myself and my young daughter contemplated Oursler’s piece. However once the video started to move and talk, my daughter let out a blood curdling scream of sheer terror, which I haven’t witnessed since. Clearly she was disturbed by what she believed to be an inanimate object ie: a doll, suddenly come to life, however the uncanny effect was more so seeing her react in such an extreme and distressing  way, as if she herself was possessed.

Such an episode recalls Freud’s notion of epileptic seizures  and of madness having their origin in the uncanny, of the body being momentarily taken over  or possessed. Indeed the middle ages saw  such behaviors as ascribed to demonic influences.

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, it asks, can digital media be avant-garde (or neo, or post-avant-garde)? Second, it asks, why do we, practitioners, theorists and critics not only of new media but of all art practices, continue to value and aspire to be deserving of the title avant-garde?

I plan to present an image-rich 10 minute provocation outlining my research into the absent abject body in media arts. Paradoxically, while much of media art centres around ideas of the reconfiguration and augmentation of the body through technology, the body as a theme, in all its messy, bodily and abject materiality, has been largely omitted from the framework. While some media artists have engaged in themes of the abject body, they have remained largely on the periphery.

The dominant trajectory of media art culture has been one of progress, sophistication, advancement – a ‘futurist’ art of the 21st century. Contemporary media art and its common crossovers with art and science can also be seen to have connections with the period of the enlightenment, of rationality and reason, when the aesthetic appeal and pleasure of disgust and the abject were consciously eradicated, disqualifying them from the aesthetic register.

A common direction of much electronic art has indeed been to secure an aesthetic that is removed from more base level concerns of revulsion, the abject and the grotesque, towards an aesthetic which distances itself from the body, with its moist interior and bodily fluids. With the evolution of increasingly sophisticated technologies, we leave the body further and further behind in the rush of the media vortex; yet conversely, as I highlight, the rise of technology has made us more aware of the physicality of our ‘meat bodies’

Wade Marynowsky’s ‘The Acconci Robot’ expands upon his previous investigations into performative robotics. The artist’s robotic works combine artificial life and live art, creating a system of programmed parameters that allow the work to continually unfold and evolve. ‘The Acconci Robot’ is an interactive robot that follows you unawares. Appearing as a shipping crate of minimal design, the robot is mute and motionless as a viewer approaches. But when the audience member turns away, and starts to leave, the robot begins to follow. If the audience member turns to look back at the robot, it stops in its tracks. In this cheeky and playful work, the artist inverts our expectations of the direct engagement and reciprocal exchange typical of interactivity, by creating a work that only responds when the audience is most disengaged from it. The work draws inspiration from a 1969 performance work, ‘Follow piece’ by Vito Acconci, in which the artist followed unsuspecting individuals in an urban setting as far as he could. Acconci’s investigations of the body in public space are recontextualised by Marynowsky in a gallery context, re-examining interaction and audience participation by drawing parallels between sixty’s conceptual performance art and art in the age of interactivity.

Poster Statement

A simple tool for creating non-linear generative soundscapes. The need for a generative audio library and tool started at a workshop in Media Lab in 1998 and was immediately implemented in a CD-ROM production following with a few interactive sound installations. The basic concept with the generator is to create non-repetitive and natural soundscapes with a set of rules that are as simple as possible to be able to also combine other forms of media and/or interactive logics. The need for a non-repetitive and generative soundscape is crucial to successfully create an ambience, interactive or not.

Keywords: Interactive Art, Aesthetics, Code Literacy, Activism

For this demonstration the authors intend to present the Aesthetics of Activism as a work-in-progress. This interactive artwork explores the nature both of audience engagement as well as the interdisciplinary conditions of its making. The work is designed to visually represent an assemblage driven by people’s bodies that are tracked and translated into interactive collage elements via motion sensors. Images projected are composed from a mixture of algorithmically scavenged social web resources and artistically curated and altered videos. The demonstration will present a new interactivity feature that continuously tracks a body, coupling it with a distinct eyehole (a region distributing transparency), allowing one of the composition’s retrial layers to be viewed. The experience provided points towards the ways technological advances transform and shape public spaces, thereby subverting familiar strategies of activist practice while rendering possible new forms of aesthetic resistance.

The proliferation of tools for self-production of media content gives rise to the question: What to fill digital memories with?

Most studies of self-production are characterized by a certain degree of pessimism: the most probable result is products that have no meaning outside the individual sphere and the individual archive. After all, since the mass distribution of cameras, have they not been used mainly for the petty, shallow projects of tourists?

From this point of view, digital media can contribute nothing new or meaningful, just as photography and cinema, as mass technologies, failed to subvert the dominant reality. The exponential multiplication of sources of digital production has not enriched the world with meaning, it has only made it more complex and perhaps more multilateral. Nevertheless, it is commonly believed that blogs, pirate or street televisions, independent magazines and streaming radio broadcasts are more convincing to report upon contemporary events than official media.

In the paper I’m proposing, I tried to analyse the repetitiveness of ‘amatorial productions’, emphasizing two tendencies that characterize society as a whole: the preference for speed over depth (which contributes to a state of  ‘diffuse aesthetics’) and a devaluation of aesthetic concepts such as ‘beauty’ (and the form of experience occasioned by it), in favour of a new aesthetic category, that of ‘cool’.

‘Coolness’ is an aesthetic attitude that is perfectly confluent with the proliferation of tools for the creation of self-produced media and the lecture will try to address questions such as: What ideal of beauty is expressed within the ideal of cool? Is there any way out from insignificance?

The paper is a reworked text from my recent book: Web Aesthetics. How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society (2010, NAi Publishers – Rotterdam and Institute of Network Cultures – Amsterdam).

In an era in which state surveillance is capable of capturing, storing, and analyzing all personal communications, and in which even the much-heralded ephemerality of photographic sharing applications such as Snapchat is revealed to be just another instance of deferred, secreted permanence, erasure seems all but impossible. Yet this is precisely what makes erasure a vitally necessary artistic, technological, and social practice. Erasure provides a point of departure from network culture, from the constraints of big data, the archive, and the cloud; through erasure, forgetting and disappearance become radical, profoundly productive and disruptive acts.

This panel seeks to theorize the aesthetics of erasure across various media, platforms, and contexts in the digital era. Bringing together artistic and critical contributors from the forthcoming Spring 2015 issue of Media-N, the journal of the New Media Caucus of the College Art Association, on the special topic of “The Aesthetics of Erasure,” and chaired by the issue’s Guest Co-Editor Paul Benzon, we aim to consider the stakes of erasure for digital art and culture through consideration of a range of questions: What does it mean to consider erasure as an artist’s mark, and how does it reshape the relations between making and unmaking? How do acts of erasure allow artists to harness and resist the possibilities and problems of the archive, of (self-) surveillance, of public and private, and of datafication? What do practices of digital erasure, and the absences they produce, tell us about the materiality of digital activity?

“video art is a subdivision of home-made video“  _Vito Acconci

Looking at the early video works of fine artists in the 60s and 70s the connection to today’s aesthetics in Youtube is more than obvious. Often the tapes have been documentations of performances and it is stunning to see the connecting of reoccurring standards, such as a fixed camera (today’s webcam), lack or complete absence of editing or the focus on the performer and his or her body. Today the works of Maria Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman or the Vienna actionists have become cultural classics, shaping the identity of one of the youngest art forms. It is interesting to see that technical limitations and the lack of professional education led to the production of many of these early video works.

After introducing some of these tapes and comparing them to Youtube classics, I would like to focus on the question of aesthetic relevance, as it is often argued that only a few members of the elite have access to the fine art system and therefore it cannot have any real impact on a general public. In opposition to this preconception, art historian Boris Groys argues in his famous text “The body of Guantanamo”, that the pictures of tortured Iraqis by US troops would not have acclaimed such high media attention without a collective consciousness being “visually educated” by the works such as the Vienna actionists.

The successes of Youtube have not been unnoticed by the art community and even though it does not pose a direct threat for the aesthetics of video art, it is already noticeable that the trend towards technical perfection, represented by Matthew Barney or Bill Viola seems to be over. Today’s successful tapes (e.g. by Nathalie Djurberg or Ryan Trecartin) often play with bad quality and deliberate imperfection not out of a lack of recourses but because of aesthetic consideration.

Walking enables me to investigate people’s relationship with place and how that links to an interior landscape of memory and association.

Abstract (long paper)

This paper presents a theoretical discussion, as well as an experimental design approach to the modes in which algorithmic media influences, in a confrontational manner, the configuration of contemporary cultures. Thus, the first section seeks to introduce key media archeological questions, by displaying some aspects of Wolfgang Ernst’s and Friedrich Kittler’s work. Then, the second section, is devoted to articulate possible connections between the first section and Bruno Latour’s perspective on science and technology studies and their relation to art and design. The third section shows how experimental design approaches can constitute the creative argumentation for all the previously discussed issues, by presenting two case studies that have emerged specifically around the questions that sustain this article. Finally, the text closes with a brief discussion about the possibilities the paper’s subject matter has to offer as an area for research-creation.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Critical gardening, Taurus dexterous robot, weeds, gardens, robots, new media art, nature, technology, narratives, culture, algorithms, translation, metaphors, visual culture, synthetic vision.

The Algorithmic Gardener – Tales of Nature and Code is a collaborative new media installation that is currently being developed by the authors and Juan Wachs, a roboticist and computer vision expert in Purdue University’s School of Industrial Engineering. Using a two-armed robot with stereoscopic vision capabilities programmed to autonomously identify and pull weeds, the project investigates an emerging visual culture defined by synthetic ways of seeing and the material realities such seeing might produce. Conceptually, The Algorithmic Gardener focuses on the translation of a cultural concept, that of weeds, and its many connotations (from agriculture, to real estate to social contexts) into robotic action code. These algorithms, executed by the robot, merge culture and technology into tangible outcomes: a series of ideologically-laden micro-gardens that can activate agricultural, political and environmental narratives, metaphors and materializations for 21st century relationships between nature and technology.

Abstract (short paper)

Jane Grant Plymouth University jane.grant@plymouth.ac.uk Abstract In his 1999 publication “The Life of the Cosmos” the physicist Lee Smolin puts forward the hypothesis that black holes born from dead stars may spawn new universes [1]. He describes these new or “daughter universes” as having retained a trace or a memory of the universe from which they were born [2]. At his recent talk (2015) “Personal knowledge: embodied, extended or animate?” at Plymouth University, the anthropologist Professor Tim Ingold was asked “What is imagination?” His answer in short was that imagination may be some kind of longing. For some years now, I have been working with ideas of longing and science fiction, the inhabitation via imagination of other worlds, whether terrestrial or cosmological. In this article I will address aspects of longing in relation to memory, science fiction and the imaginary.

Humans have been cultivating animals and plants for more than 10000 years. But we can no longer live of mother Earth’s resources the same way as we did before. With the presence of the new geological epoch – the Anthropocene, it becomes evident that “the ecological catastrophe has already happened” (Morton). We have to adjust now if we want to survive. The important question for our near future is how to feed the soon-to-be 9 billion population. The Anthropocene Cookbook is an artistic research project investigating the future cuisine. The project maps and explores the most innovative and speculative ideas about alternative foods within arts, design, science & technology. How does food look from a perspective of a post-ecological catastrophe? Should we eat insect based food? Or nanotechnological nutritions? What about food printers for cooking? Or using genetic technologies to grow beef in-vitro in the lab? How can we prepare for indoor based farming? And how to turn such foods into something socially accepted and eaten on a daily basis, not just as a something exceptional or taboo’ish. How can insect based food become an everyday thing, such as Junk Food Insect Burgers for the Future? Let’s find the global taste of the Anthropocene.

Platforms, the latest series of work in the ongoing Aphrodite Project, is an interactive, wearable device that is both a conceptual homage to the cult of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, as well as a practical object for the contemporary sex worker. An integrated system of shoes and online services, Platforms uses the latest technology to improve the working conditions of sex workers. Implicit in this gesture is an acknowledgement of sex work as comparable to those socially and culturally esteemed public professions that likewise engage risk in order to serve a particular community’s needs.

Abstract

As an artist I have explored female sexuality and its contrary relationship to contemporary culture. The Aphrodite Project, which I began in 2000, took me to Cyprus on a Fulbright Fellowship to explore the cult of Aphrodite in both antiquity and present-day contexts. Early on during my research I discovered that in addition to Aphrodite’s well-known association with the control of human love, she was worshipped, by both men and women, due to her influence over nature, fertility, seafaring, and civic harmony, as well as raw sexuality. Aphrodite had temples across the ancient world, and her priestesses would often perform sexual acts in homage to her, and as a sacrifice for the fertility of the land and its people. Because Aphrodite’s power was broad in scope, the sacred prostitution of her priestesses was intrinsically tied to religion, ritual, and public policy. It was seen as a social service and legitimate commerce. It was practiced openly at places of worship, and was taxed and legislated, making prostitutes a vital part of city life. There are numerous references that describe the prostitute-priestesses and hetairai of antiquity as beautiful women bedecked in fine clothes and jewels. One of the most compelling is the description of their sandals, which would leave footprints with “Follow Me” written in the earth.

The Aphrodite Project: Platforms is an interactive artwork created for modern day prostitutes who work the streets. The main components of Platforms are sandals that combine the rich mythology of Aphrodite with the concerns of contemporary streetwalkers: safety, advertising/promotion, and community. The sandals are a sexy yet practical platform-style shoe large enough to accommodate an LCD color screen. As well, the shoes contain the requisite electronics for safety and communications features.

The shoes come with video artwork that features pink roses, rock doves, the Cypriot landscape and other imagery related to Aphrodite. These videos can later be personalized by the wearer. A video overlay with a phone number, email address, and other customizable graphics is included for promotion. Each shoe also has a speaker in the back of the heel, which plays audio tracks of environmental phenomena associated with Aphrodite: the sound of the ocean at Petra tou Romiou (Aphrodite’s birthplace), the waterfall from the Baths of Aphrodite in Cyprus, the cooing of pigeons and other birds. Audio and visual media, such as new heel tones, will be downloaded from the Platforms website, in a similar manner to downloading cell phone ring tones.

One of the main concerns of contemporary urban sex workers, even in areas where prostitution is legal, is violence. Each sandal will have an audible alarm system, which emits a piercing noise to scare off attackers. The shoes are also outfitted with a built in GPS receiver and an emergency button that relays both the prostitute’s location and a silent alarm signal to public emergency services. Where prostitution is illegal and/or there are problematic relations with law enforcement, i.e. in most places, the shoes will relay the signal to sex workers’ rights groups, such as PONY or COYOTE in the US, HYDRA in Germany or SWEAT in South Africa. Because the shoes are specifically designed to help both sex workers and sex workers’ rights organizations, I am speaking with sex workers and as many of their advocates as possible to assess the actual needs of these user groups in urban areas.

The shoes will transmit their location via GPS and APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System) originally developed by Bob Bruninga, US Naval Academy Satellite Lab, in the late 1970s. APRS uses amateur radio to transmit position reports, weather reports, and messages between users. It is free and open to the public, and used by police officers, fire fighters, and other public service workers across the country to track their locations online. Using APRS brings sex workers on par with other public workers, whose lives are valued highly because they work in dangerous professions that serve the needs of the community.

GPS receivers typically function better outside of developed areas. To augment the GPS/APRS system, the shoe design will also incorporate cell phone-based tracking technology. Companies like Rave Wireless (www.ravewireless.com) have developed tracking methods that utilize cell phone signals to provide reliable positioning indoors and in urban environments. These tracking systems are being implemented at colleges across the country, including the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the University of South Florida and the City University of New York’s Baruch College, to ensure the safety of students.

The online component of Platforms is a website that will provide sex workers with a basic email client, calendar, “problem client” blog, chat rooms and an area for downloading audio and video for the shoes. There will also be a link on the website to track the user’s shoes (and other registered sex workers with transmitters) via the APRS system. This will be a secure community network that protects the privacy of its users. Tracking is voluntary, and can be turned on or off at any time. Each sex worker will have their own login to program their shoes, access email, and post information on problem customers. Workers can also track customers, set up appointments, create schedules, and access health and other resources.

Platforms is designed to question moral attitudes and value judgments, especially with this marginalized section of the population: Who gets new technology and when? What is the true value of sexual services? Using an archetypal model, is it possible to reclaim the profession for modern women? What are the ethics of surveillance and tracking? Is it possible to ensure that this information will empower and not endanger sex workers? Is it ever possible to guarantee that knowledge will stay within the hands of those who it is intended for?

The shoes address creativity and artmaking as well as practical issues of design and marketability. It is my hope that in addition to creating beautifully crafted objects, the project will contribute to the current international debate over the regulation, decriminalization, and legalization of prostitution.
Platforms is a collaboration with Andrew Milmoe, a physical computing expert, and is being developed during an artist’s residency at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York. Together we created a prototype that demonstrates the shoe’s features and can be displayed in a gallery setting. A second prototype with functionality is in development, along with a video demo that will explain the Platforms system of integrated shoes and online services.

“An empathy box is the most personal possession you have. It’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop being alone.” “I had hold of the handles of the box today and it overcame my depression a little… I felt everyone else, all over the world, who had fused at the same time”.
_Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In Dick’s novel, thousands of anonymous people connect haptically and emotionally through their empathy boxes in a lonely world. Inspired by the story, the Empathy Box and Empathy Amulet are two networked devices that connect many anonymous people through shared warmth.

Incorporating ideas from embodied cognition as well as cognitive behavioral therapy, both devices use physical warmth to cultivate empathy and a novel sense of connection with anonymous others. The devices encourage their users to make a deliberate and generous rate reciprocity into their design, such that helping oneself means helping other people. The Empathy Box explores synchronous connection, while the Empathy Amulet uses asynchronous connection allowing the user to experience the shared warmth unconsciously.

Abstract

Post-biological technologies enable us to become directly involved, body and mind, in our own transformation, and they are bringing about a qualitative change in our being. The emergent faculty of cyberception, our artificially enhanced interactions of perception and cognition, involves the transpersonal technology of global networks and cyber-media. We are learning to see afresh the processes of emergence in nature, the planetary media-flow, the invisible forces and fields of our many realities, while at the same time re-thinking possibilities for the architecture of new worlds.

Cyberception not only implies a new body and a new consciousness but a redefinition of how we might live together in the interspace between the virtual and the real, calling for a wholly new social environment and a reconsideration of every aspect of our ways of being.
Western architecture shows too much concern with surface and structures – an arrogant ‘edificiality’ – and is too little aware of the human need for transformative systems. There is no biology of building. A city should offer its citizens the opportunity to participate in the process of cultural emergence. Its infrastructure, like its buildings, must be both intelligent and publicly intelligible, comprising systems that anticipate and react to our individual desires and needs as much as we interact with them. A “grow bag” culture is required in which seeding replaces designing, and where architecture finds its guiding metaphors in micro-systems and horticulture rather than in monumentality and warfare.
Currently, architecture has no response to the realities of cyborg living, or the distributed self, or to the ecology of digital interfaces and network nodes. It has produced a shopping cart world of pre-packed products wheeled around the sterile post-modernity of a mall culture. Buildings, like cities, should grow. As products of creative cyberception, they must become the matrix of new forms of consciousness and of the rhythms and realizations of post-biological life.

Architecture has undergone a wide range of changes over the past two decades. Whether as the result of new technologies or economic pressures, they force a reassessment of practice and its service to society. The tools for restructuring architects’ role in our culture are already in their hands. Computers, combined with the skills of trained professionals, offer opportunities far beyond their present application as drafting machines.

Using computers architects can now create artifacts which do not model future projects the way drawings do. Instead, these objects function as autonomous artifacts within cyberspace. Current examples of this are the interactive objects in computer games and the graphics used in Windows or Macintosh operating systems. Both represent useful artifacts created for media space. Neither require manifestation in the real world.

The future is likely to bring us a greater variety of these objects. Popular interest in virtual reality and the InterNet will encourage the development of more sophisticated 3D media interfaces. These objects, viewed collectively might form a landscape or urban terrain which will help users of cyberspace to orient themselves within the information environment. The spatial metaphor allows users to get a general sense of information rather than being lost in undifferentiated detail. The creation of meaningful space is the traditional terrain of architecture. The purpose of this symposium is to show how architects, artists and designers have been working to create the landmarks of cyberspace.

The Ark consists of a decaying wooden ship roughly 40 feet long. Inside, there are 100 small digital screens. Each displays a still image of a local endangered plant or animal. To depict the extent of earth’s ecological problems, the species range from the photogenic jaguar to the homely moss beetle. A motion sensor located at the entrance is tripped by a person’s entry, each entry will switch off a different screen to symbolize the extinction of that species and the ecological destruction wrought by human progress. The destruction continues until all screens are off; until all species are extinct.

The Ars Electronica Archive contains documentation content since the start of Ars Electronica in 1979. A huge amount of artists and researchers from the field of art, technology and society were part of Ars Electronica activities during more than 40 years. They have left their traces in the archive.

The presentation provides a glimpse into what the Ars Electronica Archive is and stands for. Part of the archive is accessible online (Online Archive), part of it only internally (physiscal Archive & Internal Database). The recording of the ISEA2020 talk took place in the Deep Space 8K at the Ars Electronica Center. As example for artists and researchers, working with the archive, the project “Vector Space: Prix Ars Electronica Universe”, developed by the Ars Electronica Futurlab, is mentioned.

A Coda Presentation of the discussion previously occurring at ISEA98REVOLUTION in Liverpool: a brief history of the development of art & technology since Cybernetic Serendipity in 1968. Then a reflection on the fact that the art mainstream (academies, commercial and state galleries) ignored the field for a long period. When, finally, they did adopt it (in the early 1980s after it had become fashionable) they did so in a way that ignored (undermined) the “significant” agenda and served only to perpetuate their own outmoded paradigm. In particular they promote work where the value (aesthetic or monetary) is intrinsic to the work.

This places the mainstream’s adoption of art & technology as an extension of modern-ism (and of the concept of the avant garde) rather than a change to an extrinsic value system (In the context of post-modernism). The academies of art have failed to respond to the challenge of new technologies. They teach students how to push a mouse about and use “shrink wrapped” apps, which emulate traditional media, whilst simultaneously undermining attempts to develop a curriculum that can address “significant” issues and knowledge development. They are constrained by fear of the unknown and restrained by the new “rational” economics of higher education which prioritise funding for developments that earn immediate benefits (like enrolment income) rather than for “prestigious” developments like a reputable (albeit subversive) arts programme.

The Art of Lightness is a paper illustrated by video clips and CD-ROM extracts which will investigate artists use of light electronic technology. Over the last few years, this use of low and light technology appears to be one of the most exciting, controversial and dynamic areas in electronic art. Through this presentation, the relationship between technology and creativity will also be explored with specific reference to the contemporary work of visual artists in film, video and new media. The main thrust of the Art of Lightness is that through a form of technological irreverence there has been been a movement towards an ideas, content and concept lead artistic practice.Technology here is a means to an end as opposed to an area of investigation per se. For these artists the challenge is located in a critical and rebellious attitude to visual language and context as opposed to an embracement of the latest new technologies. The artists whose work will be discussed and presented include Anti-ROM, Douglas Gordon, John Maybury, Derek Jarman, Sam-Taylor Wood, Sadie Benning, Gillian Wearing, Jane and Louise Wilson and Soda amongst others. Furthermore, the question of why the dominant discourses in electronic art seem divorced and separate from the current debates in visual arts is extremely pertinent. More and more visual artists in the UK grab and run with low electronic technology in order to express new ideas, particularly in the gallery context. Yet, there is hardly any debate between this highly successful work and the practice of artists placed within the academic discourses of electronic art. If the debate in electronic art is to be more inclusive, than it needs to be placed within a more pluralistic definition in order to address work which is often subjective, political and addressing crucial notions of content and context.

In my paper I would like to turn to a fundamental yet still only partially answered question: what is life? The answer depends to a large degree on the definition we adopt. This ambiguity and indeterminacy is problematic and raises doubts, whereas crucial decisions often have to be made by means of precedent. Where paralogy is the best methodology available, questions still remain to linger: on what level of cell/ tissue complexity can we speak of life? What do we perceive as an entity? Can life be reduced to numbers, codes, or algorithms? Having these issues in mind, I would like to reflect upon a group of chosen art works, which literally utilize ephemeral cases of life. In the structure of each composition tiny bits of what is ‘living’ or ‘alive’ cooperate together forming a complex system.

These particular cases vary from life in the form of tissue culture (O. Catts, I. Zurr – Disembodied Cuisine), to artificial life (Ch. Sommerer, L. Mignonneau – A-Volve), from living architecture (Z. Oksiuta – Cosmic garden) to predatory biobots which feed upon real life (J. Auger, J. Loizeau, A. Zivanovic – Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots,) to a simulation of digestive system where millions of bacteria animate a network of a higher order (W. Delvoye – Cloaca). In my paper I will focus upon characteristic features that bring these seemingly different artworks together. I shall also propose a term “the art of living systems”, which serves as a common denominator.

AudioNomad is an interdisciplinary project that explores mobile, location sensitive immersive sound experiences for public art performances. This presentation will be presented as a conversation between Daniel Woo and Nigel Helyer, the two principal collaborators in the AudioNomad R+D project and will examine the philosophical, cultural and scientific elements of their work.

Abstract

AudioNomad is an interdisciplinary project that explores mobile, location sensitive immersive sound experiences for public art performances. This presentation will be presented as a conversation between Daniel Woo and Nigel Helyer, the two principal collaborators in the AudioNomad R+D project and will examine the philosophical, cultural and scientific elements of their work.

The discussion will focus on AudioNomad’s highly imaginative and creative approach to sound composition and sound design in order to highlight the potential of this emergent field of geo-spatially located virtual audio. Unlike conventional sound-design or musical composition, geo-spatially located audio needs to be highly sensitive to its environmental and architectural context as well as to the fundamentally non-linear manner in which the auditor may interact with the content via the position, speed and heading of the auditor in relation to the architectural/urban environment.

Conceptually and sonically, the principal challenge of the AudioNomad project is to develop a ‘compositional’ strategy able to deliver a non-linear but coherent ‘field’ of audio. The system provides possibilities for both (apparently) fixed and mobile audio events, as well as flexible mechanisms for sequencing sound files in a variety of ways.

Another significant conceptual challenge will be discussed is the need to re-conceptualise sonic events in the mould of a topology, thus escaping the view of the world (and of sound composition) which is ‘object’ oriented ~ but rather moving towards one which is relational and inextricably connected ? both through both spatial and temporal axes.

The approach of this paper is broad and historical; it attempts to expand a narrow technical view by looking at historic art media together with contemporary media art. By focusing on recent art against the backdrop of historic developments, it is possible to better analyze and grasp what is really new in media art and, using cornerstones from the history of media of illusion and immersion, it is a material and theoretical contribution to a new, emerging discipline: the science of the image. Where and how does the new genre of virtual art fit into the art history of illusion and immersion in the image, that is, how do older elements continue to live on and influence this contemporary art? What part does this play in the current metamorphosis of the concepts of art and the image? For example, the influence of Mixed Realities and their interfaces, where a new blend of traditional media is created through combining architecture, sculpture, painting, and scenography.

How time is represented graphically has taken many forms but most commonly as a line. This simple visualization is founded in man’s first drawings and advanced in sophistication in tandem with advances in projectile weaponry which required the additional representation of space. Trajectory, a timeline through a space, is now the standard method of revealing aerial machine movement. Celestial Mechanics is a two-decade research project addressing the need for a multivariant visual system that represents the current realities of aerial traffic management and congestion for better public understanding of the dangers. The unique design challenges of a single display capable of delineating all layers of movement — drones, helicopters, planes, weather balloons, layers of satellites, debris — often begin with the rudimentary tool of showing journey as a line. This paper considers the history, design and eventually art of the trajectory.

People have been speaking to machines for hundreds of years, knowing quite well that the machine could never hear them. Emotional moments find us begging cars to start or swearing at elitist cell phones for preferring temporary death to the dishonor of a 3rd party charger. We speak, thus we imagine something listening, understanding, and perhaps – responding. In this talk, I’ll discuss the convergence of technology just now enabling man-machine conversation, my explorations in verbally interactive art, using speech recognition as a tool for artistic expression, and how the natural human desire to anthropomorphize can help.

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

In what I have come to refer to as the post re­al­ity, we have be­come a so­ci­ety of “su­per-par­tic­i­pants” – ap­pro­pri­at­ing, am­pli­fy­ing and redi­rect­ing in­for­ma­tion via the so­cial media. In the post re­al­ity, the su­per-par­tic­i­pant feeds on user feed­back, in which every­thing they do, think, and say is cap­tured and processed and remixed and re-broad­cast – their every sen­sory im­pulse is con­nected and re-con­nected to the un­blink­ing eye of the elec­tronic media.  As a re­sult, I have con­cluded it is im­per­a­tive in the cur­rent epoch that the artist must now find new tech­niques and method­olo­gies to more fully em­brace mul­ti­me­dia and its per­va­sive­ness or else be­come in­ef­fec­tual as an artist.

This ne­ces­sity is akin to László Mo­holy-Nagy’s ur­gent view of the gesamtkunst­werk in the early 20th cen­tury when he de­clared: “What we need is not the gesamtkunst­werk along­side and sep­a­rate from which life flows by, but a syn­the­sis of all the vital im­pulses spon­ta­neously form­ing it­self into the all em­brac­ing gesamtwerk (life) which abol­ishes all iso­la­tion, in which all in­di­vid­ual ac­com­plish­ments pro­ceed from a bi­o­log­i­cal ne­ces­sity and cul­mi­nate in a uni­ver­sal ne­ces­sity.” There is now the ne­ces­sity for a cur­rent day gesamtkunst­werk, or gesamt­daten­werk as Roy As­cott has called it, in which the artist moves be­yond ab­strac­tion, be­yond rep­re­sen­ta­tion, be­yond the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief: the artist be­comes, in ef­fect, fully en­gaged as a sen­sory ma­chine. To demon­strate this idea and its im­pli­ca­tion, I will or­ga­nize and pre­sent a multi-sen­sory read­ing – a rhyth­mi­cal, vi­sual, tex­tual, ges­tural read­ing – that re­flects on cur­rent artis­tic thought con­cern­ing the artist’s role (and re­spon­si­bil­ity) in re­spond­ing to and com­ment­ing on the trans­for­ma­tive ef­fects of the post real con­di­tion.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Biomedicine, Curation, Artist, Patient, Care, Clinic, Laboratory, Museum, Collaboration

How can curatorial practice bring into contemporary art programming/contexts and to visiting publics, the profound collaborations between artists and scientists in the creation of biomedical art? This paper outlines a curatorial proposal that investigates the practice of three artists working at intersections of the Museum, the Laboratory and the Clinic, they are: John A Douglas, Helen Pynor and Guy Ben-Ary. This research addresses the atmosphere of openness between individuals and institutions across art and medicine, and the increasing porosity of institutions that allow artistic biomedical collaboration to take place. As a curatorial project, it questions the hidden nature of experiences surrounding disease, disability and bodily transformation and experimentation within our culture, and attempts to shift paradigms around corporeal representation, exhibition design and public knowledge. Central to the research is theory on the body, including feminist theory; a review of literature engaging with the connections between art and medicine, particularly bio-art; and recent discourse around curating and collaborating. The program aims to interpret and transform artistic and scientific reciprocity in clinical, laboratory and museum contexts, where curatorial presence is essential and involved through all stages of collaborative research & development and presentation.

Keywords: Art, science, exchange, building bridges, new methodologies, experiential embodiment as education, evolution of the program

Since 2003, the Artistsinlabs Program has placed over 40 artists into many different science labs in the life sciences, physics, cognition, computing and engineering. In this presentation I will give an overview of this history, an outline of the methodology we had to invent and an idea of how to facilitate this exchange for other people who might be interested to set up similar programs in their own institutions. Within this program my colleague Irène Hediger and I have facilitated international residencies for artists, exhibitions, concerts and publications, research projects and Art/Sci/Culture exchanges. The program has evolved through various stages and the funding sources have changed alongside the growth of art and science into a new discipline.

Panel: Latin American Forum #3

The Arts Catalyst is one of the UK’s most distinctive arts organisations, distinguished by ambitious art commissions and its unique take on art-science practice. Our primary focus is commissioning new artists’ projects, presented in a range of museums, art galleries and other public spaces in the UK and internationally. In its 17 years, The Arts Catalyst has commissioned more than 90 artists’ projects. Through our exhibitions and events programme, we enable people to have distinctive, thought-provoking experiences that transcend traditional boundaries of art and science. During ISEA2012 in Albuquerque and the first KOSMICA Mexico organised by The Arts Catalyst and Laboratorio Arte Alameda in the autumn, we had the opportunity to meet some of the artists we have been following from abroad. This gave us a better insight into the new work being produced by leading Mexican artists, and enabled conversations about potential collaborations with The Arts Catalyst; hence we have planned that in 2013 we are going to focus on working with some of these artists and organisations. For ISEA2013 will show the progress of this series of collaborations within the Latin American Forum. These collaborations include: Ariel Guzik, SEFT – 1, KOSMICA Mexico, Laboratorio Arte Alameda and Mexican Space Collective.

Panel Statement

Panel: Kunstliche Kunst

This presentation discusses the relationship between creativity in the “virtual world” of computing and its relevance to creativity in the “real world” outside the computer. Particular emphasis will be directed towards the question of limits, both physical and intellectual, which are made evident by the use of computers. A reductive hypothesis is presented that reduces questions of novelty and innovation, to questions of selection and reproduction.

Location and cultural identity are two of the key concerns in the works of contemporary artists in Singapore. However, these art makers are often unaware that artists working in the same geographical area in the past were grappling with similar issues. In this paper, I will discuss the notion of “Asia” in the art works of two Singapore-based artists – painter Liu Kang (1911-2004) and video/interactive media artist Tan Kai Syng (b. 1975) – whose practices are some fifty years apart, suggesting that both artists attempt to come to terms with an “Asia” whose meaning is continually reshaped by political, social and cultural forces. Focussing on Liu’s paintings in the 1950s, and Tan’s videos from 2004 to 2006, I hope to show that central to the works of both artists is the idea of a “pan-Asia” that is made up of human communities presumed to have primordial commonalities. While Liu relied on the notion of an “Asian bloc” to enable him to create an art form that was simultaneously relevant to China (the country which he identified strongly with) and Singapore (the place where he lived), Tan critically examines the idea of a homogenous Asia by revisiting the rhetoric of “Asia for Asians” used by the Japanese Imperial Army to legitimise their occupation of Singapore during the Pacific War. Thus, my proposed paper aims to address issues of regionalism, location and modern Asian identity as they pertain to the works of the two Singaporean artists.

(Long paper)

Keywords: portable electronic devices, portable projectors, expanding and sharing audiovisuals.

In this paper I explore the transition from static to mobile audiovisual media and the implications of this transition in the construction of collective or individualised audiovisual experiences. The focus is on how the transition from static to mobile technologies enables novel audiovisual experiences in the public realm. To explore the transition, I delve into how technological developments reduced the size of the devices that facilitate the display of audiovisual content, and how the size constrains or expands the affordances for interaction with audiovisual media in public space. Although the current trend of reducing the size and improving battery autonomy of portable electronic devices might amplify the isolation from the immediate environment and lessen opportunities to engage with other people in the public realm, I argue that with the incorporation of mini or embedded speakers and portable projectors into portable electronic devices (PED) audiovisual content can be brought back into the public space.

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

This paper adds to an increasing trend reinvestigating modernism on the basis of the ‘ordinary’ or the ‘everyday’. However, based on the scholarship of Madalina Diaconu, Yuriko Saito, Caroline Jones, Cecilia Novero, John Roberts, and others, the purpose here, explicitly, is to uncover an everyday aisthetic within avant-garde movements and to highlight and examine those senses, those modes and media of perception that, in a long aesthetic and philosophical tradition, have been marginalized: the senses of taste and smell. While a Western material cultural studies focus detected many inspiring connections between modernism and consumption, corresponding analyses of avant-garde movements and their products have been burdened by an overemphasis on the visual and the auditory.

Over time, they also hardly questioned the methodological angles by which a certain epistemological tradition of avant-garde scholarship has taken place. This paper, in working with select art products from Futurism (Marinetti’s cookbook), Expressionism (Claire Goll), Surrealism (Guillaume Apollinaire) and a number of lesser known works and artists, emphasizes an intersensory and interarts approach to the avant-gardes and their media. It will show that the question of everyday aesthetics in modernism is invariably intertwined with the cultural habits or ruptures of everyday aisthetics and should inspire explorations into an atmospherically oriented modernism of overlapping life-worlds (Lebenswelten) that remains to be defined.

The article focuses on the Bandung Center for New Media Arts (BCNMA), an autonomous cultural space set up in 2001 by three Indonesian artists and architects. The BCNMA aims to encourage a dialogue with circles outside the art world and to offer greater dynamic possibilities for experimental forms of expressions. The Indonesian sociopolitical context after 1998 has had a great influence on the nature, development and methodologies used by this center. The case study of the Third Asia-Europe Art Camp, coorganized in 2005 by the BCNMA and the Asia-Europe Foundation, also highlights how international projects are developed by the BCNMA while taking into consideration the local cultural networks and creative environment.

The transformation of creative tools resulting from the convergence of digital techniques is defining new codes of representation which are unique to cyber space and which call for analysis and questioning. This program provides a bird’s eye view of The Banff Centre’s New Media Institute and related Media and Visual Arts new media creation, research and residencies, reflecting on recent debates and discussions about artist created technologies.

Sara Diamond and Susan Kennard will present their work at Banff and as artists (Code Zebra; Radio 90) and the work of three other artist/collaborators, with associations with The Banff Centre. These are Joshua Portway, Elizabeth Vander Zaag and Arcangel Constanti.

The tools that artists create are interventions in their own right, sometimes illuminating, sometimes providing irony, sometimes allowing collaboration. These artists create music improvisation, emotional computing, visualization and navigating systems. Tools are playful as well as cogent.

Diamond, Kennard and Portway are collaborating on Code Zebra, an Internet discourse analysis tool, emotional visualization software and musical game that makes use of reaction diffusion patterns, lycanthropy and pattern evolution to create new data meanings.

This paper aims to discuss how faulty, ill-designed and semi-broken objects might be analyzed as to their potential to stimulate the development of new, personal and unique ways to interact with technology. By exposing the inner workings behind interfaces of common artifacts, a malfunction might allow the exploration of individualized, performative responses and interactions from individuals. The starting point was the creation of a small series of faulty electronic devices by slightly modifying iconic household items. These objects were then presented to unknowing subjects in order to observe each individual’s responses and reactions. Taking these small experiments as a base, the paper goes on to discuss the relevance of such observations in a society increasingly dominated by and dependent of invisible, ubiquitous technology.

This short paper presents a sensory ethnography of audience response to a pulsating, highly dynamic light sculpture called “Totem” that formed part of the “AI: More than Human” show at the Barbican, which ran for four months during the Summer of 2019. Totem was created by Chris Salter and associates. The piece (which is dotted with sensors) could be said to hold a mirror up to our brains, so that we see the neural processes involved in our perceiving the environment while the artwork perceives us. Totem takes the idea of interactive art to a new level, and in so doing short-circuits the brain.

The construction processes of artistic pieces are at a crossroad. The fact that artistic production is unlimited in terms of blending techniques, theories and knowledge; intersecting areas and disciplines that do not recognize boundaries between them; methodological proposals; eclecticisms of methods and models that adapt to the context and the construction of reality itself; materials and multiplicity of the same ones that the technology has built for us to use them, have made that, within the current art system, that responds to a market model, we have to rethink how to think the production processes of artistic pieces. From this perspective, the being of the piece, which contains its own condition of possibility through a bio-generative/ constructive process, has led us to rethink the question: what is the artistic piece? Thus, increasingly, we move away from occupations like who decides what artistic is, what aesthetic is, the artistic critic to build criteria, and focus on sharing the process and experience of the being of the piece that doesn’t recognize any category or definition.

Panel: Think BETA: Participative Evolution of Smart Cities

Be­taville is a pro­ject of the think tank: Think BETA – Evo­lu­tion of smart cities. It sup­posed to re­sult in a plat­form that fos­ters on­line col­lab­o­ra­tion and par­tic­i­pa­tion of com­mu­nity groups in urban liv­ing by pro­vid­ing ad­e­quate tools and meth­ods. It pro­vides a de­vel­op­ment, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and de­ci­sion mak­ing en­vi­ron­ment for local ini­tia­tives and pro­ject groups. Be­taville sup­ports the com­plete de­vel­op­ment process from early-stage ideas and dis­cus­sions through on­go­ing en­gage­ment of com­mu­ni­ties in pro­ject de­ci­sion and pro­ject im­ple­men­ta­tion.

Ap­pli­ca­tion Sce­nario
In Al­phav­ille, a fic­ti­tious city, an old fac­tory has been torn down. The va­cant area is to be re­vived in the near fu­ture and the city hall con­sti­tutes a plan­ning board¬¬–the of­fi­cial process has started. In order to take into con­sid­er­a­tion its cit­i­zens’ de­mands for a liv­able city on the one hand as well as po­ten­tial in­ter­ests of au­thor­i­ties and tech­ni­cal re­stric­tions on the other, the pub­lic ad­min­is­tra­tion is in­ter­ested in the ac­tive par­tic­i­pa­tion of other par­ties in the de­ci­sion and de­vel­op­ment process. There­fore, it cre­ates a new pro­ject within Be­taville and con­fig­ures the avail­able real es­tate in the vir­tual sys­tem. Bob likes to ac­tively take part in the plan­ning process about his vicin­ity. As he is in­ter­ested in a mixed use of the area, he uses Be­taville’s func­tion­al­ity to in­cor­po­rate 3D mod­els of a town houses set­tle­ment as well as a small shop­ping mall with space for dif­fer­ent shops. Alice gets to see Bob’s pro­posal on Be­taville and adds a 3D bound­ing box that serves as a re­quest for a kinder­garten that she finds es­sen­tial for a vivid quar­ter. Later, oth­ers can spec­ify ex­actly the 3D view of it in new pro­pos­als. After re­leas­ing her ideas, her friend Carol also wants to par­tic­i­pate in the re­de­vel­op­ment of the area. Equipped with her mo­bile de­vice, Carol in­spects the area and uses Be­taville’s mo­bile client for 3D on-site-vi­su­al­iza­tions of the dif­fer­ent plan­ning pro­pos­als on her mo­bile screen. With these au­then­tic im­pres­sions in mind she re­al­izes the long dis­tance from the hous­ing area to the kinder­garten and changes the pro­posal di­rectly on her mo­bile by draw­ing the kinder­garten nearer. Back at home she re­al­izes a lack of green space and sub­sti­tutes the shop­ping mall in Bob’s de­sign by a small park.

Mem­bers of the com­mu­nity, local au­thor­i­ties, or even po­ten­tial in­vestors now have the chance to re­fine and ex­tend the de­vel­op­ment branches cre­ated by Bob, Alice, and Carol, to re­arrange the pro­pos­als or even to cre­ate new branches. Fur­ther­more, every mem­ber of the com­mu­nity has the chance to par­tic­i­pate in the de­ci­sion mak­ing process that should end up in a small set of pos­si­ble so­lu­tions. Cur­rently, Be­taville ex­per­i­ments with dif­fer­ent strate­gies to per­form this task. In order to in­te­grate as many cit­i­zens as pos­si­ble in the process, Al­phav­ille ad­di­tion­ally al­lo­cates in­ter­ac­tive urban screens in the vivid city cen­tre for com­mu­ni­cat­ing the cur­rent sta­tus of the de­vel­op­ment process. At multi-touch ta­bles small groups can meet and col­lab­o­rate in real life, dis­cuss al­ter­na­tive pro­pos­als, cre­ate and ma­nip­u­late new ideas and vi­su­al­ize them on the at­tached urban screen. Al­though we have fo­cused the ap­pli­ca­tion sce­nario on urban de­vel­op­ment, the pro­ject is open to other ap­pli­ca­tions that apply these three lev­els of (web-, mo­bile- and table-) colla¬bo­ra­tion and par­tic­i­pa­tion, like urban art pro­jects or com­puter aug­mented learn­ing.

Panel: Transmedia Narrative: Modes of Digital Scholarship and Design Across Public Space

The com­puter is a ma­chine of the fu­ture – not only do we still at­tach to it the con­no­ta­tion of tech­no­log­i­cal so­phis­ti­ca­tion and fu­ture ori­en­ta­tion, also in its func­tion as an in­for­ma­tion pro­cess­ing ma­chine it only deals with the pre­sent, cal­cu­lat­ing to­wards to fu­ture. Being solely aware of its cur­rent state and the tran­si­tion rules of how to move to­wards the next state the com­puter is an in­her­ently am­nesic ma­chine. The mem­ory com­ple­ment to this in­for­ma­tion proces­sor is the data­base, adding the op­tion to store data and keep them shielded from the on­go­ing mem­ory era­sure. But as it is part of the regime of the pre­sent the data­base of­fers its records as co-pre­sent, elim­i­nat­ing the no­tion of the past as a time vec­tor span­ning dif­fer­ent chrono­log­i­cal in­stances from past, to fu­ture.  The paper ex­plores how the pro­ject “Bleed­ing Through – Lay­ers of Los An­ge­les 1920-1986” uses the pres­ence-struc­ture of the ma­chine to con­struct an al­le­gory of the process of re­mem­ber­ing and the era­sure of mem­ory in the in­ter­play of per­sonal rec­ol­lec­tion and col­lec­tive mem­ory. In­spired by Nor­man Klein’s “His­tory of For­get­ting” we de­vised a process within which el­e­ments from the past end­lessly fold upon them­selves in a vir­tual nav­i­ga­tion through Down­town Los An­ge­les. Using sig­ni­fy­ing chains fol­low­ing the con­cept of Markov chains we are de­vis­ing a mech­a­nism that touches on the sub­con­scious processes of mean­ing cre­ation de­scribed by Jacques Lacan.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the perception of space in the context of digital architecture. Our starting point is Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh which represents the continuity between a perceiving body and the perceived world.

While moving in space, the body is able to incorporate direct spatial relations and make dynamic and constantly-in-movement synthesis. Models of posture are consequentially projected onto changing spatial situations by the body whose position in space is constantly updated in order to interact with the environment. The communication between the body and the world takes place through a praktognosia, a practical and direct knowledge of the world. The body’s posture is also predictive because it assumes multiple or possible tasks and acts in an oriented-space connected with an historical time. The intention of the body creates a space-time structure of here-and-now. An architectural environment convey certain spatial experiences, refines sensibility and enlarges consciousness by exploiting multiple possibilities of movement.

The perception of architectural spaces is nowadays connected with the rise of technology and virtual reality produced by computer and digital designing. In the case of computer-aided architectural design – in which the architect can manipulate visual representations – architectural spaces gain a new reality by supporting the creation of new architectural objects. In this process, the constituting elements of a building become technical networks of communicating nodes. Digital design becomes not only a way to create new objects but also supports communicative and intersubjective platforms as means of mediation between people. In the virtual context of digital architecture the body oriented space is modified and the original movement is replaced by an exploring virtual body projected by mind inside a non-Euclidean and non-orthogonal context. If architectural, urban structures are designed to experience body’s motor faculties, does digital architecture, by modifying space-time categories of the lived-body and modifying brain’s treatment of spatial perceptions, open new paths of experience?

Abstract

In my paper I would like to discuss the disarticulation of the notion of the body with reference to the theory of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and the performances of Italian theatre director Romeo Castellucci. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari introduce the notion of the ‘Body without Organs’ (‘BwO’) which can be contrasted with the organized body which is the object of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The task of psychoanalysis is to create the image of a whole self, whereas the ‘anti-psychiatric programme’ which Deleuze and Guattari introduce, refers to the body as the platform of experimentation. Deleuze and Guattari say:

“Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other words, the ones that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and subjectification. (…) To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or n articulations), experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place, never stop moving… desubjectification)”. _Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987: 177.

As Elisabeth Grosz points out, ‘the notion of the BwO is Deleuze and Guattari’s attempt to denaturalise human bodies and to place them in direct relations with the flows and particles of other bodies and things. (…) The BwO invokes a conception of the body that is disinvested of fantasy, images, projections, representations, a body without a psychical or secret interior, without internal cohesion and latent significance.’ (Elisabeth Grosz, “Intensities and Flows”, In Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994: 168-169)

Of course, a researcher should raise a simple question: why do we need this programme of the BwO, why can’t we stay where we are? What does it mean to disarticulate, to cease to be an organism? Deleuze and Guattari reply in this way: ‘You invent self-destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive. Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity… ( Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987: 177). It is precisely these connections which let us evade subjection, let us ‘unhook  ourselves from the points of subjectification that (…) nail us down to a dominant reality.’ (Ibid.) Here I would like to make a connection between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the BwO with the performative strategies of Tragedia Endogonidia by Castellucci. In my paper I will concentrate on these specific issues: 1) the disarticulation of the body; 2) experimentation as the destruction of signification and sense; 3) desubjectification.

Castellucci destroys the organic unity of the body and rearranges it as an assemblage collected from different surfaces, prosthetic devices, machines and mechanisms. In this sense we can say that Castellucci invents the Body without Organs, in other words, a body which isn‘t organized into a whole but functions as a platform for producing different connections and distributing variable intensities.

“Bodycoder … opens a domain of cyborg art that exceeds the human without simply rejecting it.”
-Drew Hemment – for MUTE

Bodycoder II is a complex system which, in addition to it’s on-the-body sensors, has a custom built vocal cavity microphone which enables the real-time sampling and manipulation of vocalisations by the performer Like the original Bodycoder System the aim was to create a new performance mechanism using the movements of the performer to affect and control audio and visual compositional material. The new system takes this aim one step further by allowing movement to control the sampling and manipulation of vocalisations. In other words the system allows vocal qualities to be amplified through body movement. This project intentionally challenges conventional notions concerning the nature of body language.

The brief was to design a system which would interface with the kinetic qualities of dance. In order to enhance and not limit the mobility of the dancer a 35MHz radio transmitter/receiver system, more commonly used for model aircraft, was employed. The transmitter was customised to accept proportional and/or switched inputs. An interface was designed and built to convert the PPM signals from the receiver to 8 discrete analogue voltages, these voltages were connected to a customised PC1600 Midi Controller.

The Midi output from the PC 1600 is connected to 2 Macintosh Computers running Opcode’s StudioVision Pro program and Steinberg’s X<>Pose visual>sampling software.
The StudioVision Pro program is used to hold several sequences mainly carrying patch change information for the PC1600 to recall setup strings to map the various inputs to sound modification parameters of audio samples held in a 128Mb EMu Sampler. The samples are triggered by the performer and extensively changed by utilising the real time filter morphing facilities and ‘cord’ system of modulation routings of the E4X sampler.

The X<>Pose software is used to hold several patches of stored Picts and QuickTime movies to be recalled and affected in real-time. Midi controller signals from the PC1600 manipulate and affect these images in direct response to the actions of the performer.

A second radio transmitter is employed to transmit vocal sounds from the performer to an SE70 digital effects processor, these ‘effected’ vocalisations are again controlled and modified in real-time by the movements of the performer. Ring modulation and vocoding patches are designed to respond to the sensor control signals from the PC1600. A vocal cavity microphone is used in order to transmit the vocal signals to the sound processor.

The sound palettes used in this piece comprised of a variety of Electroacoustic samples of throat and overtone singing which are then re-authored using various computer based processes including Sound Designer II , Alchemy and Hyperprism. The performers vocalisations are processed live, this sets up an on-the-body dialogue between movement and voice which is expressed as a complex off-the-body multi-timbral, multi-layered audio/visual performance.

The Book of Ruins and Desire is an interactive, mixed-media sculpture that explores failed synapses and unknown possibilities between desire and communication. An ‘open work, where the ambiguities of life, the fuzzy edges of what we perceive and experience creates a web of complex yet universal information. From its wooden case a barely audible voice murmurs ‘touch me.’ As its metal pages are turned, spoken text juxtaposing philosophical and emotional attributes of desire crescendo and decrescendo. When a page is completely opened video interpretations of Ned Rorem’s song cycle, ‘Poems of Love and the Rain’ are viewable.
Its pages are photo etched printing plates. Its base is crafted in wood. The degree of a turned page as well as it’s velocity are calculated via the fuzzy logic inference engine. Through an Opcode MAX interface the data from the inference engine is manipulated to control the qualitative dynamics of the media and algorithmically produced MIDI compositions.

(Long paper)

Keywords: surveillance, brain sensors, posthuman, memory, consciousness, brain opera, datatyping, BCI, EEG.

Do our EEG, fMRI and other biometric data contain the essence of who we are and what we think? In the future could this data be used as an identifier for security and thought modification, as well as exploring virtual worlds? If our “brainotypes” or ‘brainfinger prints’ and concurrent cognitive processes are monitored, how do we prepare for this looming horizon? Though no one is entirely sure, these questions invite both scientific and metaphorical approaches to address these issues. This paper looks at past artistic investigations using the human brain. It then discusses the emergence of technologies, research, and methods on brain datatyping; privacy and its ethical implications; sending and receiving motor commands between two different brains; moving robotic prosthesis through thought; the formation of memory; manipulating memory via frequencies of light; and hacking brain computer interfaces (BCIs) to extract vital information. Keeping these methods and techniques in mind, this paper then touches upon the author’s nascent creation of a ‘brain-opera’ using both open source and proprietary BCIs. This research, in an early phase of development, will be developed throughout the coming year.

Medical Imaging is an increasingly important part of personal and social lives. A tool of medical diagnosis, scanned images of our interiors produce new identities and anxieties. Anthropologists like Rapp and Dumit have documented the ways in which categories of person and senses of self are produced and contested through images of fetuses or brains. Rose, Rabinow and others have argued that identities are formed and understood through biological and biomedical discourses, producing biosocial identities. Similarly, medical imaging can suddenly create a social category for a person such as ‘schizophrenic’ or ‘2nd stage breast cancer survivor’.

Breast cancer patients rarely see their MRIs or get a sense of the shape or physicality of the malignancy. The tumor remains an unseen, dark and invisible monster lurking within – even after it has been surgically removed. We believe that visualizing tumors can be an important aspect of dealing with the aftermath of the disease. Research with brain tumor patients suggests that visualization has positive psychological and even physiological effects. Bringing art to bear on biomedicine, we are interested in investigating the agency of objects and the power of objectification, especially within socially charged categories like the ‘the breast’ and ‘cancer’.

With help from radiologists, we digitally imaged breast cancer tumors obtained from the MRI’s of patients and friends – that is, we imaged the last form the tumor assumed before being excised. Through a complicated process going from medical imaging to 3D software, we ‘printed’ the tumors on a rapid prototyping machine to produce concrete versions. Finally, we made molds and cast them to produce pendants which we returned to the patients. Externalized, the tumor can now be visualized, even held, by the breast cancer patient – as a fetish now in the world, it can be ‘active’, a new force with a positive effect. We are the first to have imaged and prototyped breast cancer tumors.

In this panel, we will describe the process through which we achieved this and present narratives of the effects the process has had on us and on breast cancer survivors.

This paper will explore the video-cued-recall method as an ethnographic tool in the evaluation of an interactive installation utilising bio-sensed data. It builds on a body of research by Lucy Suchman and Randall Trigg, Bridget Costello, and George Khut and Lizzie Muller who have used this method to document interactive art as lived-experience. The artwork which forms the test-bed for this paper is Inspiraction, an interactive video installation that uses bio-sensed data to enable participants to explore how their breath affects their engagement with others.

It has been eighty years since John Dewy pointed to the importance of audience experience in completing an artwork. More recently Dourish highlighted the need to capture user experiences of interactions to fully understand their generative nature. Only then can a fuller understanding of the artwork be gleamed, as Dewey put it, “in experience”.  Dialogue with participants provides the only way to understand these lived experiences. While self-reflexivity in the interviewer is paramount, the biggest challenge in understanding these experiences, for both the interviewer and participant, is the limitation of words to describe an embodied experience. The interviewer must find creative ways to help the participant verbalise their body language and taking time to unearth meaning where ambiguity exists.

The video-cued-recall method uses video to record participants during their interaction. The recording is then played back to support participant recollection of the reflexive, conceptual and reflective aspects of their encounter with the work. Using video to record individual experiences honours the temporal, embodied and emotive nature of inward focused interactive artworks. The medium can record all the tonal and rhythmic subtleties of the participant’s voice as they articulate their experience. A video record preserves body language, gesticulations and breathing quality, simportant elements in a work focusing on embodiment. However the performative nature of this evaluative method affects the encounter and the sharing of lived experience when participants preempt the expectations of the interviewer. This paper presents a critical analysis of the video-cued-recall method’s advantages, disadvantages and characteristics, using the Inspiraction work as its test-bed.

For creative artists, a suite of digital tools offers steadily increasing production capacities and broadening opportunities. But inherent in these tools is a complexity of machine operations which often impose a programmatic approach to art‑making at odds with spontaneous and emergent visual practice. The unique conversational encounter with materials is often lost. According to Brooks, cultural evolution relies on accidents, mishaps, and incursions of the unexpected, yet digital tools in 3D animation production imply rational planning, structure and intention. For 3D animators and CGI artists, the technical rationalism imposed by software systems may limit both the visual results and the responsive art‑making experiences available to practitioners.

Malcolm McCulloch questions whether eventually the mind, working with the stream of ‘fleeting, freely‑associated’ imagery may eventually be reunited with the knowledge‑bearing ‘hand’ through the development of software sufficiently intuitive in its interfaces and operations to facilitate the expressive spectrum of human abilities and imagination. Citing Focillon, McCulloch outlines a desire to return to a “pure phenomenology of sensate presence” imagining a software based reversal of the erosion of concentration and calmness, and a return to contemplative, rather than analytical evaluative visual responses to digital crafts.

Working with the perpetually moving stream of new software opportunities, how might the digital artist circumvent restrictive practices? This paper explores opportunities for improvisation in the 3d animation workflow through the ad‑hoc re‑purposing and intentional mis‑use of 3D production software. This exploration will focus on a current project using improvised, animated digital sculpture to re‑inject spontaneity and open‑ended creativity into digital practice. This re‑injection of improvisation and attempt at bypassing the multiple ‘removals’ between the hand (and eye and mind) of the artist and the produced artefacts draws on the notion of the extended mind, and material engagement. Lambros Malfouris describes the synergistic site of this action on, and direct manipulation of material culture as an ‘act of thought’; a cognitive act. As digital artists come to consider their use of tools as intuitive, embodied and even unconscious, these computer/artist relations become important both for the artists using the software and for software developers focussed on “artist friendly” toolsets.

The visual results of digital improvisation are unpredictable, raising questions about the status of digital artists as artists or as production specialists and this question of industrial/cultural status may return an impact on production methods and tools. This is relevant for many practitioners and theorists as it reflects a common tension in electronic art between poesis and praxis.

Panel Statement

Panel: Algorithms and the Artist

With technology it is possible to manifest mathematical ideas as images, sounds, sculpture and even poetry. Artists in all media have found mathematical processes of value in their creative enterprise. These processes are often described using algorithms. An algorithm is nothing more than a recipe, a finite list of instructions. This recipe will have precise steps to follow, perhaps requiring some initial input (i.e ingredients). The algorithm will have a desired outcome, and be considered effective if the outcome is achieved. A tasty apple pie is the result of one algorithm, an image or piece of music derived from a mathematical process, generated from a computer program is another. In describing mathematical processes with algorithms, beauty and meaning can be discovered. Numbers are mapped into light and/or sound, and perceived through the senses as objects. It is the mathematical source of these works that has aesthetic worth. Algorithms, implemented on computers, make it possible for us to see and hear the beauty of mathematical processes. We can explore the inherent beauty of these abstract processes, logical, human-made constructs that initially seem to have meaning only because they can be used to predict natural phenomena. These are processes our culture exploits to myriad purposes, from predicting tomorrow’s weather, to navigating and landing a jumbo jet. When we see a mathematical model visualized, perhaps a model of water resistance over the hull of a racing yacht, a chart of planetary motion, or even the abstract image of a Mandelbrot Set, are we looking at something that, in some metaphysical way exists? Or is the mathematics describing nothing more than an intellectual construct, and the images simply pretty, and sometimes inexplicably useful? Is meaning culturally attributed, or is mathematics meaningful and effective because it describes ‘grand truths’? We trust our lives on a daily basis to the effectiveness of these mathematical models. What is the basis of our faith? Why do we trust them? The algorithmic image or composition gives us something to see or hear and begin to ponder. Aesthetic experience isn’t in the viewing or the listening, it’s in the pondering. For me it reduces to a question of divine presence, a point of irresistible curiosity and a source of infinite wonder.

About the frantic process of archiving and the conditions of the historical practice in the field of electronic and computer arts.

How to think this history while turning away the defense of territories and the withdrawal on specific identities? Which can be the dynamics and the role of the archives in the building of this immediate history of arts, techniques, médias, always newer. Shall we stay blocked, bound to forget, lost in accumulating and hoarding, or shall we work on mastering and fertilizing memories by comparing, linking, crossing fragments of a constantly larger complexity? To follow Michel Foucault, the topics is not so much the recording, by the way infinite, as the activity of delimitation, cutting off. We’ll question the building of the archives and the document, at this moment of the technological development, and the use which is done of them. What do we do with our knowledge and our memories?

This interrogation will go through some examples such as the Anarchive series.