Presentation Data Table

As a professional Cinematographer, I’ve looked at the world through the frame, sometimes spending 24 hours on set, searching out the meaning of the dark surround and its luminous content. As an artist, I’ve discovered that the idea of a frame must include intuitive boundlessness to transcend its limitations; as an academic I’ve found that boundlessness must be limited through critical reflection, to bring back news from the ‘frontier’ for you, my colleagues. In this talk about my research work, with examples of high-resolution imaging and its apparatus, I shall discuss the opposing and complimentary pressures arising from ‘Practice as Research’.

Abstract

The asylum seeker occupies both a local and an international position, straddling the borders of the nation state. By definition s/he is in a state of becoming (as Gilles Deleuze or Hannah Arendt might put it), an exile of one country and not yet a citizen of another. S/he is in a liminal state or in a kind of no man’s land, a non-person contained by the nation-state in a specially contrived holding centre, unable to work or function properly in society, effectively deprived of human rights, and subject to deportation at any time. This paper uses the writings of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Cecilia Sjöholm and Judith Butler to theorize the deprivation of the stateless person in the nation-state within the discourse of biopolitics, and applying it to recent multi-media events concerning refugees and homelessness.

Hannah Arendt has argued that the human rights of the exile or stateless person are not protected by the nation-state. Taking this idea further, Giorgio Agamben comments: ‘In the nation-state system, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man prove to be completely unprotected at the very moment it is no longer possible to characterize them as rights of the citizens of a state’. Cecilia Sjöholm clarifies, ‘While the nation-state has proven to be powerful organizations when it comes to protecting its own citizens, those that have not enjoyed the protection of the nationstate have come to be doubly exposed. The human being who is exiled by force and who is not recognized as a citizen in any state has proven not only to lack nationality, but has also not been able to enjoy any rights’. Moreover, as Judith Butler explains:
The category of the stateless is reproduced not simply by the nation-state but by a certain operation of power that seeks to forcibly align nation with state …
These spectral humans, deprived of ontological weight and failing the tests of social intelligibility required for minimal recognition include those whose age, gender, race, nationality and labour status not only disqualify them for citizenship but actively ‘qualify’ them for statelessness…In different ways, they are, significantly, contained within the polis as its interiorized outside.

This paper focuses on two multi-media performance pieces: Christoph Schlingensief’s Bitte Liebt Ostereich, which deployed an industrial container inhabited by refugees in a central square in Vienna and encouraged local citizens to vote over the internet (in a kind of big brother knock out competition) on who should be allowed to remain in the country; and Janez Jansa’s The Slovene National Theatre, a reconstruction (using verbatim TV and radio news footage relayed by live actors using headphones) of the Slovenian government’s eviction of a Roma family that caused a national scandal. Both pieces call attention to the bare life of the refugee and question the exclusive nature of citizenship in the nation-state.

Panel:  Interface Play: Media Environments for Ludic Cyborgs

The focus of this paper is the city as an as­sem­blage of in­fra­struc­tures, cul­tures, net­works, com­mu­ni­ties and peo­ple. Ar­chi­tec­ture not only re­lies on build­ing ma­te­ri­als, but also en­com­passes a vir­tual frame­work that has emerged over the last decades and be­come a fun­da­men­tal part of the urban in­ter­face. Artis­tic pro­jects in pub­lic space are be­com­ing a core vec­tor of urban in­no­va­tion, by ex­per­i­men­tally fo­ment­ing new ways of ab­strac­tion and using the city in un­usual ways to pro­duce an un­fore­seen in­ter­min­gling of real and vir­tual space. It seems that the city it­self is be­com­ing the en­vi­ron­ment of choice for media ac­tivists. How the city is being turned into a ludic in­ter­face, a play­ful en­vi­ron­ment and media dis­po­si­tion, is ob­serv­able in sev­eral artis­tic move­ments and pro­jects that trans­form it into a stage and place it in a per­for­ma­tive frame­work. This paper will draw upon the CODED CUL­TURES fes­ti­val and the LUDIC IN­TER­FACES pro­ject and pre­sent ex­am­ples of new artis­tic prac­tices and abil­ity pro­files that use the city as a lab­o­ra­tory, ex­hi­bi­tion space, com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­form or hack-space. It will use them to ex­em­plify a deep and crit­i­cal un­der­stand­ing of what code and cul­ture can be and out­line a broad in­ter­face de­f­i­n­i­tion.

Panel: Synaptic Scenarios for Ecological Environments

The biological and cognitive sciences offer compelling explanations of human behavior, which shows that human beings do not always act in their own interests. Public denial to be pro-active in relation to CO2 emission is one example. This talk will address the failure to act or even attend to what is essential for human survival and how artists have devised works that help spectators become aware of this level of attention failure and how this failure might affect our reactions to environmental complexity.

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

The Col­lapse of PAL is a realtime na­tion­wide tele­vi­sion per­for­mance that I pre­sented at TVTV on the 25th of May 2010, in Copen­hagen, DK. In The Col­lapse of PAL, the Angel of His­tory (as de­scribed by Wal­ter Ben­jamin) re­flects on the PAL tele­vi­sion sig­nal and its ter­mi­na­tion. This death sen­tence, al­though ex­e­cuted in si­lence, was a bru­tally vi­o­lent act that left PAL dis­re­garded and ob­so­lete. How­ever, the Angel of His­tory has to con­clude that while the PAL sig­nal might be ar­gued to be dead, it still ex­ists as a trace left upon the new, ‘bet­ter’ dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies.

ABSTRACT

My recent work incorporates motifs from medieval manuscripts. Because the computer frees the artist from the successive layering of physical paint, I can personalize my references by repeatedly going back and forth between templates of extracted designs and the developing computer painting. Through this interaction, the thinking of the medieval artist envelops the work in progress, influencing my own sensibility, and prompting me to cast off the earlier stages of the work.

The computer has provided me with the means to develop imagery that could not have evolved within the confines of traditional media. I am not referring to the product, which might resemble a painting, but to the processes available to the computer artist, which are uniquely suited to restructuring the traditional ways of conceiving imagery. Of particular interest is how the computer, with the addition of a scanner, can function as a vehicle for the direct interaction with visual sources.

ABSTRACT

The Computer Music Association (CMA) is an organization of individuals and institutions dedicated to exploring the inter- influence of the creative and technological in the art and science of computer music. CMA co-sponsors the presentation of the annual International Computer Music Conference, which, since its inception in 1974, has become the pre-emininent yearly gathering of computer music practitioners from around the world. The ICMC’s unique interleaving of professional paper presentations and concerts of new computer music compositions – juried by CMA-approved panels – creates a vital synthesis of the worlds of science, technology, and the art of music.

During the past decade there has emerged a revolution in the application of the computer as a tool for sculpture. With little or no awareness of similar investigations world wide, sculptors from many countries developed personal and often radical new approaches to the creation of forms as varied as traditional casting and carving to virtual objects, environments, and interactivity. The number of sculptors using computers grows yearly and now numbers in the hundreds. A panel on Computers and Sculpture developments in the UK, Europe and the United States.

English sculptor Keith Brown will present works from members of FAST-UK (Fine Art Sculptors & Technology in the UK). This new organization parallels the imilar organization of over one-hundred sculptors using computers in the US. Rob Fisher will present a number of new projects by principal members of the US group including Tim Duffield, David Morris, Bruce Beasley, Helaman Ferguson, among many others.

Martin Sperka, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, from Slovak and Czech Republics will feature the work of Jozef Jankovic (1995 Venice biennale, ), Juraj Bartusz (sculptor and concept artist), Milos Boda (New Media in Art, Slovakia, 1994: light sculpture with computer generated music); Alena Patoprsta, (computer and video); Zdenka Cechova, Czech multimedia artist, living in Prague (one of pioneers of Computer Art; author of the computer controlled “Singing water fountain” in Prague. Lastly, much has been said about how the computer will facilitate communication and learning between nations — particularly between “developed” and “developing” nations.

Christian LaVigne (director of Ars Mathematica) from Paris will make a presentation on his contacts with third world artists from Mali and Senegal as well as reports on the work of sculptors in France, Germany and Spain.

The faint sounds of Radio Four drift down Honeybee Lane from Buttercup Cottage where a bearded spinster sits at an old oak desk. A ginger tom cat sleeps undisturbed at her feet whilst she applies the finishing touches to Mr. Wrinkles’ waistcoat with a fine sable paintbrush. The mouse in a waistcoat represents the traditional view of illustration in relation to other art and design practices.

This presentation looks at how we can reconcile the traditional approach to drawing with modern digital media practices. The work itself is based on the writings of Ancius Boethius AD 480-524 and is about the concept of fortune. He wrote about the relationships between man and nature, good and evil.

Abstract

Conceptual foundations
My current project, The Confessional Machine, explores certain complexities of computing that are relevant to this discussion of ‘Emotional Tracking.’ I would like to sketch out my conceptual interests in this theme and then relate how they are integral to my current work.

My interest in the theme of ‘Tracking Emotions’ begins with the perspective that ‘tracking’ is a reductive, and in many situations, problematic practice. How can one ‘track’ or objectively target and categorize such a complex, emergent phenomenon such as emotions? Further, how can one catalogue, with any intent of representational accuracy, a phenomenon like emotions which are constantly filtered, and therefore conditioned by, systems of linguistic representation? As Jordan Crandall has noted, tracking is implicated in:

“…(a) landscape in which signifiers have become statistics … TRACKING EMERGED out of the mid-century demands of war and production. It emerged through the development of computing, the wartime sciences of information theory and cybernetics, and the development of structuralism”.

Images that present a constructed truth, like digital images. remind us to question the reality factor of any image. With its roots in photography. the digital image has forced artists to reconsider the photograph as a representation of physical reality. Although the photograph never was physical reality. digital images clarify this assertion. Because many artists and viewers assume that photographic representation of physical reality is in essence truth, the ability to construct that truth begs for a new definition of truth.
Embracing this question, some digital artists like Nancy Burson, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Pedro Meyer constructed visual narratives that appeared photographic, yet lacked the physical world referent that their images implied. Since the late 1980’s and early 1990’s when this kind of construction became popular, many digital artists have grappled with how to define truth in their art, after all this truth is no longer physical reality. This paper will present the art of a few digital artists and advanced art students who have resolved this conflict by defining their own artistic truths.

If we assume “peace” as a sign that has been inherited, with it we also inherit a whole series of previous constructions presumed as absolute truths. It’s evident that we can’t think of peace in the middle ages, as we think it today. The human being, as a project of projects, has the condition of being able to transmute, through updating. We build “peace” as a sign, first, from a human perspective that thinks its space/time, ejected it towards the future, but at the same time reflecting its past. Second, as a subjective constructed concept that fills the cultural and social space/time it inhabits. We have poems, essays, novels about peace. We inherited sonatas, hymns, sublime arias on the subject. Images that come from the memories and images that are passing by and we build to embrace and quote them. But, peace is a personal construct. It contains complexity, uncertainty and speculation statements, lightness form the three letters that make it up in Spanish, and it’s a short whisper that transits in images through a street without being transited.

In this talk, Ken Mogi will discuss how the origin of human creativity is a way of adapting to a world full of contingencies. The physical origin of the phenomenal qualities of our experience (Qualia), the nature of cortical networks related to emotion supporting our decisions and choices, and the principles of embodied intelligence will also be discussed.

The Center for Performing Arts and Technology at the University of Michigan is developing the Creation Station, a workstation-based software package that will provide the artist advanced sound synthesis and graphics capabilities, as well as the tools necessary to create multimedia pieces of art. This paper discusses the design criteria, programming obstacles and implementation details of the Creation Station. Because the Creation Station is coded in Objective-C, a brief tutorial on Object-Oriented Programming Languages is included.

The iPod and other mp3-players have now usurped other technologies as the device of choice for portable music listening. In fact, the iPod (as a brand) is almost a synonymous term for mp3-player [Abel, 2008]. Not only is listening to the iPod becoming ubiquitous, people’s listening experience has been dramatically transformed by being able to potentially access one’s entire digital music collection whilst listening on-the-move.

Most research of the iPod centers on how it could be used in various instrumental settings such as education [Miller & Piller, 2005]or its commercial success of the iPod [Reppel et al., 2006].  Others examine how iPod listening affords ability to create private auditory spaces and means to withdraw from public space [Bull, 2005, 2007]. However we argue that there is much more about digital music listening practices that is unexplored, especially people’s listening experiences when listening occurs within the heterogeneity of people’s quotidian lives.

We suggest that people’s iPod listening and their interactions with the iTunes management software result in experiences that are suffused with emotional, physical and social potential. Listeners can use music explicitly and tacitly in different situations in order to manage, enhance or facilitate different situations, affective states, processes or activities. In part, this is informed by listeners’ complex understanding of musical genre and style in their collection – an understanding cultivated through past personal or social experiences with music in different situations.

Our paper will first briefly survey existing literature on iPod digital music listening experience. This will serve as a point of departure for our empirical findings where we surface how this technology can influence how, why, when and where people listen in their quotidian lives. We will focus on the following themes connected to the iPod listening: Listening as a mundane activity, listeners intervening to reconfigure their listening experience and the affordances of the iPod technology. Finally this paper offers a perspective in discussing what music means to iPod users on an everyday basis.

Panel: Pervasive Media: Practice, Value, Culture

The vi­sion for Per­va­sive Gam­ing is often grandiose, noth­ing less than the play­ful mix­ing of game struc­tures and the every­day, the world as a game-board and life as the plea­sur­able in­ter­weav­ing of nor­mal­ity and game. But the cur­rent re­al­ity is loca­tive games with sim­ple me­chan­ics, ARGs played in in­tro­verted com­mu­ni­ties and new, urban sports played with­out any tech­nol­ogy. The field of per­va­sive gam­ing has an epic vi­sion, but an every­day tra­jec­tory. The ex­pe­ri­ences of these games can­not be eval­u­ated purely on the game or play it­self. The play­ers and de­sign­ers of these games sit in a web of sig­nif­i­cance that ex­tends well be­yond the games, the events and sit­u­a­tions that these games are played in. The aes­thet­ics of these games is only ap­pre­cia­ble when the cul­tural sit­u­a­tion they are em­bed­ded in is ap­pre­ci­ated. It is in this that they are truly per­va­sive, rather than based on mo­bile or ubiq­ui­tous tech­nol­ogy. The vi­sion for Per­va­sive Media is also grandiose, yet the ap­pli­ca­tions are also often banal and quo­tid­ian. What are the par­al­lels be­tween an un­der­stand­ing of the cul­ture and aes­thetic ap­pre­ci­a­tion of Per­va­sive Gam­ing, and Per­va­sive Media in gen­eral?

The CyberHuman Dance Series is an experimental dance work exploring metaphors of virtual spaces and bodies, the exchange and modification of narrative and physiological identities, and simulations of physical and virtual spatial phenomena in the context of performance. Utilizing the integration of innovative digital technology into the choreographic and design process this work investigates all aspects of design and performance in cyberspace with particular emphasis placed on issues of real and perceived boundaries between virtual space and real space and the possibility of a blurred distinction between two intersecting worlds. Questions are raised as to possible metaphors for the construction of virtual spaces and the bodies that inhabit them, leading to new ideas about the behavior of the body and its expression through motion.What, for instance, are the ways in which the cyberhuman begins to claim a virtually constructed space through movement? What kind of a relationship (physical, emotional, psychological) can be established between a real dancer and his/her cyberspatial counterpart and how can narrative identities be exchanged, modified, or made explicit? Finally, how can these investigations be brought to performance as a means of formulating an appropriate language for dance in the virtual age? An analysis of the work in progress will include issues related to the development of cyberspatial environments and virtual bodies. Issues of space, time, physicality, and gravity will be visited. How the body is to be represented and inhabited within a virtual space? What is the connection between humans and their representational presence in cyberspace and what, exactly, does it mean to be cyberhuman? How can an articulation of the process of the design of the cyberfigure provide an answer to this question? What is an appropriate representation for a physical figure in a space that lacks physicality? How can a sense of bounded space be accommodated within an environment defined through its lack of edges? In offering an analysis of the design and performance process, and the questions raised in the development of both cyberfigure and environment, a model for collaboration will be proposed between individuals and across technologies. Collaboration infuses the work with a concern for methods of expression in virtual spaces. Innovative digital processes can be explored through experimentation with choreographic software, three-dimensional rendering programs, and their combination into output to digital video. The creative process will be examined in the collaboration between choreographer, designer, composer, and video artist. The integration of the working methods of a group of individuals trained in different aspects of the arts offers insight into the range methodologies available for study and infuses the series with an energy of human discovery.

What is the future of the Cyberspace? The word of “Orai” can be the clue of this theme. The literal translation of “Orai” is “going and coming. So it means “traffic”, “road and “letter”. “Orai-mono” (objects of Orai) was the example collection of letters used as a textbook of elementary education. It had a lot of illustrations and became an information booklet. “Orai-mono” was written in old epistolary style originally. It was the common style all over the country. The space of “Orai” consisted in the network of highways. What a kind of culture did the space have? The great haiku poet, Matsuo Basho moved on the highways frequently. The haiku came out of linked poem. Basho went on a trip in various places and made collection of linked poems with cultured men of the lands. One of his most famous works is “Oku no Hosomich (the Narrow Road to the Deep North)”, the diary of his trip of Japanese Tohoku region. However, he went on a trip into deep space of literature rather than into real Tohoku region. Originally Japanese literature develops from love poems commuted between man and woman. These songs created rich stories, for example, the tale of Genji, and invented the world of symbolic Japanese poetry. In the literature world the people were always conscious of intertextuality. The space of “Orai” was a kind of virtual reality of texts and images. It may provide a clue as to how the Cyberspace is and will be.

“Orai-mono” developed from an epistolary style example collection into an information booklet with illustrations. From the information exchange, the Internet built the objects of texts, images and sounds.

“Orai” is not a network of one-way communication from the center, but a network of interactive communication. The Cyberspace exists in an interactive communication network.
The epistolary style Japanese used in “Orai-mono” was a kind of a common language. English used in the Cyberspace will be a common language such as Koine or Latin. It may change into a simpler form for communication.

The world of “Orai” was that of multilayer of texts and images. The artist was an editor interweaving the past works of art. In the Cyberspace quotation and editing of various contents is important. The creativeness in editing will be pursued.
The subjectivity in the world of “Orai” exists in the intertextuality. In the Cyberspace, people communicate through a computer mutually. Our subjectivity will emerge in turning the communications into the one symphony.

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

John Whit­ney and James Whit­ney began with ran­dom dots. Com­puter pro­cess­ing re­peated, re­arranged, and re­com­bined these dots into fig­ures, gen­er­at­ing pre­cise, strob­ing pat­terns, which they pre­sented as films, with ti­tles like Lapis and Per­mu­ta­tions. These films, from the 1960s and 70s, pointed to­ward a fu­ture for “ma­chine-re­al­ized art” that side­stepped tra­di­tional con­cepts and habits of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. In­deed, ac­cord­ing to the Whit­neys, their early films sought to de­stroy “the par­tic­u­lar of rep­re­sen­ta­tion” through a con­cept of se­r­ial per­mu­ta­tion by which a form could be “jux­ta­posed dy­nam­i­cally against it­self through ret­ro­gres­sion, in­ver­sion, and mir­ror­ing.” This paper will ex­am­ine the work of the Whit­neys’, across sev­eral gen­er­a­tions of com­put­ers, as ar­tic­u­lat­ing a cri­tique of hege­monic rep­re­sen­ta­tion.  This cri­tique is founded in a prac­tice of rep­e­ti­tion and dif­fer­ence that steps out­side the hi­er­ar­chies of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. The re­peat­ing forms cre­ated by the strob­ing dots sub­vert rep­re­sen­ta­tional self-pres­ence as they gen­er­ate an ex­pan­sive, pro­lif­er­at­ing dif­fer­ence, to be ex­pe­ri­enced rather than ac­counted for—a dif­fer­ence which of­fers an al­ter­na­tive way of see­ing with the com­puter.

Keywords: Hacking, Appropritation, DMI, Embedded Hardware

The D-Box is a novel digital musical instrument that can be modified and hacked by the musician, subverting its original design. The possibility to rethink and appropriate a musical instrument in unexpected ways is not common when dealing with digital circuits and hard-coded software. In this short work, we first briefly introduce the details of the hackable design that characterises the D-Box; we then describe how 3 musicians transformed their D-Boxes into 3 radically different instruments, according to their own artistic needs. Finally we argue why and how this is relevant to the domain of instrument design, music and creativity. This work comes together with a demo session, during which the audience will have the opportunity to replicate step by step the 3 hacked instruments and make music with them.

The DAM(N) Project is a large-scale interdisciplinary arts project that connects Australian and Indian communities around the common concern of global water security. The project was conceived and developed by Sydney based producer Jehan Kanga, Queensland based composer Leah Barclay and Shakthi Sivanathan, the director of Curious Works in Sydney. The first stage of the project involved working directly with remote communities in the Narmada Valley of North India, displaced by large-scale dams securing hydropower for Indian cities. The construction of large dams on the River Narmada and its impact on millions of people living in the river valley has become one of the most important social issues in contemporary India. In the initial phase the team collaborated with Attakalari, India’s leading contemporary dance company who selected dancers to participate in the field research and create site-specific choreography. The project team collected a rich diversity of audio-visual material, interviewed the key activists involved in the Narmada Protests and facilitated workshops in digital technology and dance for the local community. The DAM(N) project uses the many viewpoints and the living culture in the affected areas as building blocks for the creative process. Water scarcity is a significant issue for both Australia and India and the issue of controlling and managing hydrological systems is extremely politicised in both countries due to the cultural and economic significance of these systems. We wish to contrast the strikingly similar experiences in Australia and India around water management and showcase the value of digital technology and creative collaborations as a framework to inspire change, activism and ultimately a future where these communities will have a voice. The artistic outcomes range from immersive installations to dance productions all underpinned by the idea that innovative art is both a tool for community empowerment and cultural change.

In a world in which all entities are seemingly subsumed into the flow of data – economics, the real, things, money, people – under the various exchanges of Big – Big Mining, Big Capital, Big Economics – the resistance of protest often goes unheeded – people failing to call to account or articulate their protest in the commensurable terms of data. Protesters might be big in numbers, and ideas, but can they ever match the numbers – the plain simple data of economics – on which Big Decisions are based? This provocation is about data-incommensurables in the protest game, where no matter how many online signatures, how many people in the street, the people will lose always to the lobbyists with their portfolios of data, and advantageous economic balance sheets. Big Mining it seems has the monopoly on water data, people data [how many new jobs created], production and profit. It is not in its interest to count the jobs and productivity lost as Big Mining buys up farms and ruins the water, the tourism, or raises rents. Local councils do not keep this data; all they can do is comment on various compliances, they might even protest with their constituents, but they have only energy and angst and are inevitably defeated because they cannot make a compelling case in data terms. Data costs money and technological access to reap, costs which billion dollar trans-national companies with billion dollar super profits can collate. The people, the protesters, the local councils, are data-poor, and need new wikis, new modes of data collection, in order to have a commensurate say when the Big Miners and Frackers put their proposals before State Government Ministers. This provocation is a call to data mapping, to match the Big Mining and Big Economics at their game.

Advances in biotechnology suggest new use cases outside the domain of research. The Dermal Abyss (d-abyss) is our proposal to create novel biointerfaces within the skin. D-abyss renders an interactive display by patterning into the dermis biosensors whose colors change in response to variations in the interstitial fluid. d-abyss is designed to use the aesthetics, permanence, and visibility nature of tattoos to encode information. We replace traditional inks with biosensors that colorimetrically index the concentration of sodium, glucose, and H+ ions (pH) in the interstitial fluid of the skin: the pH sensor changes between purple and pink and the glucose sensor between blue and brown; the sodium and a second pH sensor fluoresce at a higher intensity under UV light. In this talk, we will discuss our preliminary evaluation of these biosensors in an ex vivo pig skin model, and the opportunities and challenges for biosensors implanted in the dermis.

Composer Yan Maresz will discuss the production of the interactive musical part of __Al segno__ (François Raffinot and Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh, choreographers), a performance for three musicians, dancers, an actor and a movement-sensing device based on infra-red sensors. He will describe in detail the interaction between the dancers’ movements and the electronic musical score involving two different modes of sound generation, resulting in two distinct choreographic approaches. In the first, one dancer interacts with sound materials produced by corporeal noises of various kinds (friction, swallowing). In the second, another dancer moves in a virtual instrumental space inhabited by the resonances of the trio’s three instruments. Finally, the composer will present the writing process he elaborated progressively in response to the particular features of the __Al segno__ project, which sought to bring the reciprocal influences of composition and choreography into play.

Painters and other visual artists have long admired, and even envied, the expressive power of musicians and composers. The desire for instruments that would provide graphic artists with some of the same facility as the musician takes for granted has even been expressed directly by some modern artists. A computer-based instrument, Imager, realizes their objective of integrating graphics and music. It allows a player to use a MIDI-controller to manipulate graphic entities. Their shape, colour, location, movement, growth, and other characteristics can be controlled in real-time using synthesizer and sequencer techniques. Describing the visual forms, controlling their movement and relating it to musical rhythm, and dealing with colour are all complex issues that are addressed in the design.

During the 1970’s, Taiwan was the main production center for animation, with the export volume in the world. In recent years, artists from the new generation continue to shine in the international exhibitions of new media art. They use the export of Taiwanese technology as its starting point, and selects subject matters which are relevant to Taiwanese local cultural. Its meaning in depth is the technical meta-image and through the mechanical and computer coding procedure, it gradually forms into a new perceptual experience. This proactive prediction coincides with the tendency of contemporary art, and the development of Taiwanese New Media Art would be one of the crucial examples.

In order to discuss the issues, there are some examples to point out production of a “Mirage” from works, which has the reliability of visual truth but is realised through the transportation of simulation. In immersive perceptual state, it instantly turns into another layer of refraction. This relative relationship between image viewing and psychological desire could refer to a piece of speech from the ancient book, “ICE-Making in Summer”. Thus, the sense of mirage in Taiwanese New Media Art is through the media of mirror image, viewing angle and the reaction of refraction. The visual codes therefore become folded (Le Pli) and then extend to be the dialogue between observation and immersion from the artworks.

How do the New Media codes become folded? If we employ the principles of the interface of refraction, how does the viewer become involved in this process of immersion? Gilles Louis Réné Deleuze uses the Fold theory to draw the “literary form of image”, which penetrates the surface film between the viewer and the image describer and stimulates a misty, separating and disturbing act. Referring to this point of view, which appears in the extruding and squirming place within the digital image. Furthermore, this miniaturized reality and illusion are a visual representation which has been integrated through electronization, analogicalization, digitalization and dynamicalization. As a result, the refraction which implies, is not only a physical phenomenon but also indicates the visual text and the education and cultural transcoding, the two have a very close relationship.

This poster session examines the use of storytelling structures in Crossroads, a project for the Web that uses architectural metaphor t0 create a spatlalized narrative. Crossroads explores the capacity of film and advertising culture to shape our sense of place. lt creates a series of spaces which are constructs of the mythic Times Square. The viewer engages narratives in the form of ‘pseudo films’: animated images and a mix of ambient sound, audio monologues and texts. These ‘pseudo films’ incorporate aspects of film genre identified with Times Square. In Crossroads, the architectural and commercial icons of Times Square are reconfigured to mix of personal myth and public space.

ABSTRACT

A video construct is an abstract animated video sequence controlled by, and generated from, a computer system. The way in which logic is employed in them was described at the FISEA and the paper published in Leonardo. This paper traces their development from the first one exhibited (London, 1985), through the one shown during the presentation at FISEA to the first colour video construct, shown in London 1989 and later ones shown at the World Trade Centre Rotterdam, 1989, and to be shown at Heads and Legs, Liege, and at the Menage, Moscow, in 1990.

In the current phase of ‘revolutionary’ time characterized by technological progress and accelerated acculturation, the development of mediative digital technologies bifurcates the human biological past and it’s present cultured self. In Homo Sapiens, the primitive structure which was once in command, has now been relegated to the level of the ‘visceral brain’ — a condition which may cause extreme unease.

Using the work of the philosopher Jay Appleton, this presentation investigates a series of biological re-readings of architectural space. The modern city, with it’s oscillating dialogue of past and present forms, instructs our habits of environmental perception. Appleton suggests that these habitual patterns, whilst influenced by various cultural experiences, are not solely a procuct of these processes, but, they are vestiges of survival mechanisms which were once the dominant instinct. Together with aesthetic choices, these systems drive human instinct and influence behaviour in architectural spaces — a sensuous response to the digital city.

Dramatic theatre claims that it is a unique site of literal co-presence while asking audiences to forget their own presence and give precedence to a closed fictional world ‘made present’ by the auratic actor. Two contemporary performance practices unsettle this notion – digital performance, where technology challenges the position of the actor as central; and live art or participatory performance that places the audience at the centre of the performance encounter. Although contemporary practitioners often rally against the prejudices of dramatic theatre, an understanding of its core assumptions can benefit emergent forms and prevent them from replicating those aspects deemed problematic in traditional practice. An awareness of literal, fictional and auratic presence as mediation can enable a richer theatrical encounter. I draw on Derrida’s analysis of the metaphysics of presence to establish the centrality of presence in a significant amount of commentary on theatre, arguing that such a privileging of presence demonises projected media as a form of contamination that impedes dramatic theatre’s ability to represent ‘truth’. While much has been theorised about presence in theatre, my position is that of a practitioner grappling with the problems that a privileging of presence brings to my work. Through a close look at a hybrid work that utilises the integration of live performers with avatars from the virtual multi-user on-line game, Second Life, I seek a way to move forward between conditions of possibility and impossibility.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Electronic Literature, Digital Poetry, Digital Diasthima, TimeLapse Reading, Philippe Castellin.

In moving texts, such as digital kinetic poetry, the reader-user might no longer control the duration of their reading, unlike the traditional and static nature of printed texts. The user deals with readable time versus executable time, the human time-line versus the machine time-line. By having an imposed and fixed number of milliseconds to perceive the text on the screen, the user might find themselves completing or imagining the unread text, following the dynamic forms with an imposed dynamic content. Yet, to understand the shifting reading patterns of digital poems, one has to consider another methods or tools that may complement traditional models. Therefore, performing a critical approach solely based in close reading methods might not accomplish a fully comprehensible reading of digital poetry. In this sense, following upon methods taken from other areas, e.g. time-lapse photography and R. Luke DuBois’s concept of “time-lapse phonography” (2011), I introduce the notion of time-lapse reading as a complementary layer in order to close read disruptions in reading processes that demand a set ‘experiencing’ time when letters, words, lines or stanzas are replaced, with a case study on Philippe Castellin’s çacocophonie (2013).

Panel: Short:Circuit:  Cross Border Communications in New Media Between US and Turkey

The ques­tion “What is a bor­der?” might seem sim­ple. Every­one has an idea what the an­swer might be, has had some sort of ex­pe­ri­ence with it, and yet would prob­a­bly have a hard time defin­ing it in sim­ple terms. The sim­plest de­f­i­n­i­tion I have found de­fines a bor­der as an outer part or edge! I found a more com­pli­cated de­f­i­n­i­tion at Wikipedia that says bor­ders de­fine ge­o­graphic bound­aries of po­lit­i­cal en­ti­ties or legal ju­ris­dic­tions. If one adds con­text such as, “in the age of mod­ern dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy” – the sim­ple ques­tion of what a bor­der is be­comes a very com­pli­cated one. A po­lit­i­cal en­tity or a legal ju­ris­dic­tion within a bor­der de­fines the rules that peo­ple play by. Peo­ple pay taxes, par­tic­i­pate in pol­i­tics, en­gage in eco­nomic ac­tiv­ity and per­form ser­vice du­ties ac­cord­ing to these rules. Re­ject­ing these rules has con­se­quences of pun­ish­ment or per­haps even ban­ish­ment. Once con­fronted with the con­se­quences, you are no longer part of the sys­tem de­fined by a bor­der; you are no longer one of “them”, but an “other”, the pun­ished, the ban­ished! So what does it mean to be one of “them”? Who de­cides the de­f­i­n­i­tion of “them”? If you have not re­jected the rules, have not gone against the sys­tem yet still feel like not-one-of-them does that mean you should still ac­cept the rules? Still pay taxes, still par­tic­i­pate in pol­i­tics, en­gage in eco­nomic ac­tiv­ity and still per­form ser­vice du­ties? What hap­pens if you are now out­side of the bor­der, not by pun­ish­ment or ban­ish­ment but by choice and you are play­ing by an­other set of rules?  Yet, what does it mean if you can still en­gage peo­ple within the bor­ders you left with­out an­swer­ing to the sys­tem? What if you were to be pun­ished and ban­ished yet still be pre­sent within the bor­der? Phys­i­cally out of their reach, yet dig­i­tally pre­sent.

I am an Amer­i­can by birth. I was born in Florida. I now live in Chicago. I pay taxes. I vote, do busi­ness and per­form the du­ties ex­pected of me. I am also Turk­ish and British by birth. I grew up in Turkey, and lived there for many years. I still hold a Turk­ish cit­i­zen­ship. Yet I never felt as if I was part of their sys­tem – at least as they de­fine cit­i­zen­ship. My non-Turk­ish side was al­ways high­lighted, and in many cases, I was con­sid­ered not Turk­ish enough! I have heard the term ‘gavur’ ut­tered at me so many times it no longer means much any­more. Add to the fact I haven’t paid taxes in Turkey for a decade and a half, I haven’t par­tic­i­pated in pol­i­tics, nor en­gaged in eco­nomic ac­tiv­ity. In that con­text I have de­cided that I will ex­pand my act by re­fus­ing to per­form du­ties also known as mil­i­tary ser­vice. Why hold to the no­tion of hav­ing to do my du­ties for a place I have very dis­tant sense of be­long­ing? How­ever, this re­fusal has con­se­quences! I will lose my cit­i­zen­ship and will be pro­hib­ited from en­ter­ing the coun­try. As I no longer live there, the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment will not be able to pun­ish me phys­i­cally or mon­e­tar­ily, so they will sim­ply ban­ish me! But do I re­ally need to be phys­i­cally there in order to be pre­sent? I will be able to be pre­sent through dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy, I will still be able to re­ceive news from friends, stay in touch, main­tain en­gage­ment through email, Face­book, Linked-In etc. So ef­fec­tively I will be tun­nel­ing under the bor­der with dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy, be pre­sent to the ex­tent I choose to do so and yet re­main out of reach. Out of the con­trol of the po­lit­i­cal en­tity or ju­ris­dic­tion of any Turk­ish legal body. In ef­fect I will be ren­der­ing the en­tity and the ju­ris­dic­tion just a lit­tle more hol­low. So in the age of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy what is the de­f­i­n­i­tion of a bor­der? And re­ally, how rel­e­vant is it?

Our cross-species artwork and research expose emergent strategies from the point of view of a non-human species. Dinoflagellates are the outlaws of micro-organisms, they defy simple categorization and use a variety of symbiotic or alternative strategies for survival. This collaboration between an artist and marine biologist will describe a ten-day installation for the Light City Festival along Baltimore’s Harbor where millions of bioluminescent dinoflagellates [pyrocystis] responded to participants voices. For instance, when the audience came to a microphone and asked “What is the Shape of Water?” the dino’s answered by illuminating the audio-induced water forms. Singer Bonnie xx performed an improvisational piece with the ancient invisible critters and when no one was speaking, when no one was speaking, the dinoflagellates illuminated according to their own DNA via a soundtrack composed by a DNA algorithmic conversion. A new project “Under the Bay” will use mixed reality [XR\\AR] by streaming data from Baltimore’s Harbor around the National Aquarium in order to see and hear what the water is saying.

These auratic shapes fill physical spaces and mirror endless outward and inward transactions of cultural codes. Inscribing dominant western cultural codes into an art object produces a unique commodity with speculative exchange value. While the visual representations etched onto the object grant it its integrity, they are held captive by its definition as a commodity. Digital technology functions as a means of producing, distributing, and viewing cultural codes, never becoming an art object. This disappearance of the object emancipates the art producers, their production, and their viewers, from the bondage of the mirrored object situated in the commercial context. Stripping the artistic codes from their material objectivity, freeing them from the constraints of the art market, delineates new possibilities for making art, which is oppositional, radical and autonomous. The possibility of a state of mind of detachment from material objectivity, combined with the digital means of creation, can extricate a stream of free imagination that would melt into endless web arrangements of distribution. This could result in a practical context functioning as a metaphor for fragmented society. Are these the conditions for the collapse of the hegemony of the art object?

A true state of listening cannot be acquired by force. The order to listen – LISTEN! we all have heard and experienced it – guarantees a closing off, a turning away, a non-listening, possibly even a permanent disturbance in our once open and trusting listening channels. It is perceived like any sound that annoys, disrupts, hurts, or injures: we cringe, we try to block it out, might fight it, may want to get rid of it, but we will not listen. By its very nature listening is a continual and gentle process of opening. We usually know when we are in that place of perceptual receptivity and we know when we have lost it. Listening is never static, cannot be held on to, and in fact needs to be found again and again. As such, it is disruptive in its nature. Paradoxically, while a grounded and calm state of mind, a sense of safety, peace and relaxation are essential for inspiring perceptual wakefulness and a willingness and desire to open our ears, normal routines, habits and patterns will be disrupted and laid bare in such a process of listening; noises and discomforts inevitably will be noticed, and all kinds of experiences will be stirred and uncovered. Listening in fact implies a preparedness to meet the unpredictable and unplanned, to welcome the unwelcome. How do we reach such a state of listening, why would we want to? Hildegard Westerkamp has lectured on topics of listening, environmental sound and acoustic ecology and has conducted soundscape workshops internationally. By focusing the ears’ attention to details in the acoustic environment, her compositional work draws attention to the act of listening itself and to the inner, hidden spaces of the environment we inhabit. For details check her website. Her music has been commissioned by CBC Radio, Canada Pavilion at Expo ’86, Ars Electronica (Linz), Österreichischer Rundfunk, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Germany…. She received Honorable Mentions in competitions such as Prix Ars Electronica in Austria, Prix Italia, and the International Competition for Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, as well as a Recommendation for Broadcast from the International Music Council’s 4th International Rostrum of Electroacoustic Music… Her articles have been published in Radio Rethink, Kunstforum, Musicworks, MusikTexte and a variety of books… For an extensive exploration into her compositional work see Andra McCartney’s Sounding Places: Situated Conversations through the Soundscape Work of Hildegard Westerkamp, York University, Toronto, 1999, and in the internet. As part of Vancouver New Music’s yearly season she has coordinated and led Soundwalks for some years since 2003, which in turn inspired the creation of The Vancouver Soundwalk Collective. A founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), and long-time co-editor of its journal Soundscape,Westerkamp was a researcher for R. Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project in the Seventies, and has taught acoustic communication at Simon Fraser University with colleague Barry Truax.

GEOPOLITICS OF MEDIA

The District of Leistavia Welcomes You was created specifically for ISEA 2004. It is part of the interRepublic of Hybridia, a non-geographical entity whose borders are mediated by digital files. Leistavia is a hybrid cultural space influenced by Pitcairn Island, Norfolk Island and Estonian cultures.

Questioning the boundary between and technology and culture is one of the main concerns of this project. Cultural theorists today are examining culture from the point of view of processes of change rather than fixed tradition — giving rise to the consideration of cultural hybridisation.

The project set out to Locate intercultural connections between Estonian, Norfolk Island and Pitcairn Island cultures. These connections were overlapped to create a hybrid culture — Leistavia. A constitution voting form was drafted, influenced by aspects of concern to people of the contributing nations, as located on the Internet and via email. Open voting determined the final constitution.

The process of creating the art work is documented on the website art-themagazine.com; an anti-video – a moving image projection consisting of a sequence of still images ‘of’ Leistavia was created; and the concept of a digital language — written but not spoken — identified: Keyboard, the native language of Hybridia. These elements were assembled for the gallery installation.

Estonian dance and media artist Kylli Mariste collaborated, and many have given images and thoughts – this project would not have been possible without their contribution.

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

This pre­sen­ta­tion ex­plores the play of the video game as a kind of blunt­ing of the promise of the play in art­works as the lat­ter was un­der­stood by Adorno. In his ‘Aes­thetic The­ory’, Adorno sug­gests that a func­tion of art is to ‘bring to light what is im­ma­ture in the idea of ma­tu­rity’. The art­work in­vites the sub­ject to play and in so doing cre­ates an open­ing to prac­tices and urges that are kept out of view in the adult psy­che, under the con­ceal­ing rubric of  being a ‘grown-up’. This open­ing leads us to aware­ness that adult­hood and its re­al­ity prin­ci­ple are il­lu­sory or de­cep­tive and ex­plor­ing the art­work makes us sen­si­tive to other pos­si­bil­i­ties by al­low­ing the en­er­gies of our own child­hood selves a tem­po­rary, per­haps mo­men­tary ex­pres­sion. This leads to an al­to­gether more ma­ture sense of thwarted pos­si­bil­i­ties and of pre­sent self­ness as a shell that could be bro­ken in the di­rec­tion of ful­fill­ment. In con­trast to this pro­gres­sive-utopian play of art, I will argue the com­puter game of­fers a kind of play that, while it sum­mons the same en­er­gies, freezes them and pre­vents us from grow­ing through the ex­pe­ri­ence. Play with a com­puter game re­sus­ci­tates some­thing of child­hood but then holds it up to ridicule and blunts its utopian po­ten­tials. This po­si­tions it some­where be­tween the art­work and the en­ter­tain­ment com­mod­ity, in a cul­tur­ally spe­cific space of in-ad­e­qua­tion and in­de­ci­sion.

In recent years there has been much interest in the structures of new media artworks and the creative use of databases. Typically, the central argument of this investigation is this: as technology and media change it is the human body that frame these changes, as they extend and interface the human sensorium. This paper will propose, not a counter argument, but an augmented condition: that it is not the body that has framed these changes but consciousness. It was Deleuze who identified that the trauma of World War II led to a profound change in cinema – from a classical movement-image to an “irrational” time-image that reflected an increasing subjective sense of the world. Within the time-image he identified an onirosign, a dream-image, which is characterised by: ‘visual and sound situations which have lost their motor extension,’ which are ‘cut off from memory-based recognition’ and are ‘an unstable set of floating memories, images of a past which move past at dizzying speed as if achieving a profound freedom’. This paper will outline an argument for dreams, onirosigns, as a theoretical structure for new media artworks. This paper will also discuss how new media art was foreshadowed by 20th century experimental cinema explorations, including Un Chien Andalou and Meshes of the Afternoon, which used ‘irrational’ and non-linear strategies. These films rejected the investigation of space and instead explored internal spaces through myth, ritual and dream-like logic. This can also be seen in James Joyce’s literary work Finnegan’s Wake, which employed a kind of dream language, involving the dissolution of the boundaries of the subject. These artists’ methods did not fully utilise non-linear strategies but pre-empted some of the qualities of interactive art. In recent years this structure can also be seen in the film Inception, which depicts a dreamworld created through the use of imaginary feedback loops. Like Inception, the new media artist is the architect of an imaginary world, which the observer or user creatively explores.

Panel: Variable Reality – Inter-formalities in Digital/Analogue Arts

Within cur­rent art prac­tice, artists en­gage with the earth sci­ences as a source of in­spi­ra­tion and as a provider of data about the phys­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment. This rich source of data in­cludes in­for­ma­tion on many el­e­ments: from the con­di­tions of the at­mos­phere, to phys­i­cal for­ma­tions; from small scale to gi­gan­tic for­ma­tions; ex­tremes of heat and cold; and the in­ter­ac­tion of all these in time and space. Ad­di­tion­ally, the mod­els, vi­su­al­i­sa­tions and ex­pla­na­tions of these phe­nom­ena by sci­en­tists can in­clude aes­thetic char­ac­ter­is­tics that are ap­pre­ci­ated by a wider au­di­ence than im­me­di­ate sci­en­tific peers. When we are con­cerned with dig­i­tal en­vi­ron­ments, the dis­cus­sion is most often cen­tred on vi­su­al­i­sa­tion, which in­cludes ref­er­ence to both ob­jects with a ma­te­r­ial or phys­i­cal ex­is­tence and to men­tal con­structs. These can be di­rectly ob­serv­able or be­come vis­i­ble through an in­stru­ment or de­vice.

Vi­sual char­ac­ter­is­tics can also be trans­lated from a non-vi­sual state into con­structed data, as a ‘con­cep­tual’ trans­la­tion. Using ex­am­ples re­lated to the earth sci­ences, this pre­sen­ta­tion will first dis­cuss the ways in which cre­ative works demon­strate the move­ment of ideas and con­cepts from the phys­i­cal to the dig­i­tal. Then, ex­am­ples of works that take us from the dig­i­tal to the phys­i­cal will be con­sid­ered that make spe­cific ref­er­ence to ge­ol­ogy, stud­ies of rock for­ma­tions and tech­nolo­gies sup­port­ing min­ing ac­tiv­i­ties. This will in­clude works that are en­gaged with re­lated en­vi­ron­men­tal, so­cial and cul­tural is­sues. It is pro­posed that a study of these ‘trans­la­tions’ to and  from the dig­i­tal to the ma­te­r­ial can open up fur­ther pos­si­bil­i­ties for pro­vid­ing a cri­tique of new media works in the con­text of a broader his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive, in­clud­ing land art, ecol­ogy and en­vi­ron­men­tal ac­tivism.

Panel: Art(ist)s in Space

I wanted to not turn with the Earth. In Switzerland, the Earth rotates at a supersonic 1158 km/h. Flying westward, and at this very velocity, I attached a video camera to a point thus fixed in space, and filmed the Earth turn.

 (Shortpaper)

Keywords: digital media art, economic valuation, new media theory, art valuation, cultural studies, art value, digital art, collectors, artwork.

While there are a variety of approaches to examining the valuation of digital media art, I limit my discussion to its economic valuation within the context of Western capitalist economies. In this essay, I argue that the dematerialized and reproducible nature of DMA requires it to have alternative models of economic valuation because the classical model of economic valuation does not effectively value DMA. I examine existing economic models of digital media artwork valuation and I explore unique opportunities for alternative and hybrid economic models of digital media artwork valuation.

Panel: Pervasive Media: Practice, Value, Culture

Dig­i­tal media has cre­ated an age of media plenty from the era of ana­logue scarcity the ex­ist­ing pat­terns of po­lit­i­cal econ­omy are being grad­u­ally desta­bilised. This pro­ject again brings aca­d­e­mic re­search meth­ods to bear on cul­tural in­dus­try case stud­ies to pro­duce knowl­edge about how the new gen­er­a­tion of web na­tive cre­atives will cre­ate sus­tain­able value net­works. New start-ups in dig­i­tal media are de­vel­op­ing new busi­ness mod­els rang­ing from tar­geted ad­ver­tis­ing, spon­sor­ship, prod­uct place­ment, sub­scrip­tion, re­tail, and ‘pay per play’ ap­pli­ca­tion mar­kets. These mod­els cross com­mer­cial and pub­lic sec­tors; some con­tinue ex­ist­ing pat­terns of media econ­omy, some are dis­tinc­tively new. How­ever the new con­di­tions of the dig­i­tal mar­ket char­ac­ter­ized by plenty as op­posed to ana­logue scarcity re­quire new ways of de­vel­op­ing sus­tain­able busi­nesses.

This ex­per­tise is as yet very un­der­de­vel­oped es­pe­cially within the cre­ative com­mu­ni­ties that hold the keys to suc­cess­ful ap­pli­ca­tions and com­pelling con­tent. Per­va­sive Media can be thought of as a new field; com­mis­sion­ers, brands, clients, fund­ing bod­ies often have dif­fi­culty grasp­ing its po­ten­tial. Very few media pro­fes­sion­als, let alone mem­bers of the pub­lic, un­der­stand what Per­va­sive Media is, or could be­come. We are at a new fron­tier. The work of the Per­va­sive Media Stu­dio is un­der­pinned by the work of de­f­i­n­i­tion and tax­on­omy through a se­ries of ex­per­i­men­tal pro­duc­tions that begin to de­ter­mine what this new form of media de­liv­ery can be. At this pe­riod of de­vel­op­ment prac­ti­tion­ers from art, de­sign, and tech­nol­ogy find lit­tle time or com­mon ground to re­flect on their prac­tice. Aca­d­e­mic ex­per­tise in a knowl­edge ex­change con­text can fa­cil­i­tate this re­flec­tion out­side of the day to day con­straints of the mar­ket.

ABSTRACT

The Computer Music Association (CMA) is an organization of individuals and institutions dedicated to exploring the inter- influence of the creative and technological in the art and science of computer music. CMA co-sponsors the presentation of the annual International Computer Music Conference, which, since its inception in 1974, has become the pre-emininent yearly gathering of computer music practitioners from around the world. The ICMC’s unique interleaving of professional paper presentations and concerts of new computer music compositions – juried by CMA-approved panels – creates a vital synthesis of the worlds of science, technology, and the art of music.

The electronic elaboration of the representation of information is suggesting to follow new paths not only to deal with amounts of data each time more extensive but also to penetrate better the domain of knowledge that every person should possess.[1] Moreover, the forms which this “representation of information” is taking are closely related to the ways in which the perception of this information is structured and shaped. In any case, the relation between information, its representation and the referent has to be re-thought.

In his article “The Archive Without Museums”[2], Hal Foster advances the hypothesis that photographic reproduction allowed a new “dialectics of seeing” represented by the positions of Walter Benjamin, namely, that photographic reproduction strips art of context and aura, and therefore its cult value as well as its exhibition value are lost forever; and André Malraux’s, that the museum guarantees art as such and photographic reproduction gives the means to put together the broken pieces into the meta-tradition of “style”.

If the museum guarantees the status of art and photographic reproduction permits affinities of style, what might a digital reordering generate? Is there a new dialectics allowed by electronic information?

The present work explores the new relation generated by electronic information between the virtual archive (the Web in a broad sense, certain specialized archives in particular) and its referent (material reality in general, museums, artworks, in particular).

If there is a new dialectics established by electronic information and digitalisation in which the legitimisation formerly allowed by the museum is being replaced by that one of the virtual archive, the museum or gallery website, etc, this new dialectics has to be explored and the relation between the referent and the virtual database investigated.

In the same way that the object is digitalised in the archive, the medium is converted into a pure image, so the new data-base may be generating a dematerialisation of memory and record and at the same time an aesthetic shift.

[1] SCHIRRU, Marco; “Guide: Un ipertesto per l’istoria” in Adversus, VI-VII, December 2009-April 2010:61-83
[2] FOSTER, Hal; “The Archive without Museums” in October, Vol. 77 (Summer 1996), pp.97-119, Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.

In its strong behavioral dimensions, Interactive Art (IA) allows interactions in real time through interfaces that make it possible for man to dialogue with machines. By interacting we share desires, beliefs, emotions and values in ephemeral connections. My interactive installations offer an electronic trance through digital technologies. Bodies connected by interfaces manipulate computer data and provoke”visions” in real time.What matters in these living environments is to experience sensations that we cannot get without technologies. People gain shamanic powers because they can manage electronic metamorphoses. During the trance, shamans go through altered states of consciousness, being able to communicate with the beyond and intervene in the real world because they dialogue with spirits. In the same way, digital technologies in sensorized environments provide us with the power to experience “virtual hallucinations”. Neural networks, inspired in our biological neurological system, learn some patterns of behavior and return to us”visions” in an experience of TRANS-E.
When we are connected, our sensorial apparatus experience complex mutation processes, unforeseen circumstances, dissipations in an integrated sensorial circuit of “trompe les sens” giving us back new identities. In this sense the interfaces are synthetic bodies and neural net¬works provide intelligent behaviors, managing signals of the human body in a sensorized environment. Important is the relationship existing between the several sources of information and what results from this dialogue. In IA we experience the second natural environment. On networked artificial systems, the human body is in a symbiosis with technological/artificial/ natural life, interfacing with the physical/real and virtual/digital.
Interactive Art (IA) pieces put theory into practice. Via IA the artists enhance theoretical paths. Interactive Art offers a real showroom for scientific researches. The artists seek to exceed (excedere), to go beyond the limits. This is exciting, amazing and stimulating for the scientists and technicians. Science people work in friendly collaboration with us because they can catch their thoughts in our pieces.A real collaboration between artists and technicians determines the systems’ behavior and the control of the physical phenomena. Electronic systems capture the invisible forces when they learn behavior and in my art I try to manipulate the technological sublime or the absolutely big, our physical condition and limits enhanced by technologies.Our biological apparatus receiving ultrahuman power (Teilhard de Chardin). The sciences in the end of this century have an increasing interest in the spiritualism of their theoretical approach. Interactive Art is really humanizing technologies. To see, to touch, to experience algorithms, infrared waves, to capture invisible forces giving them visibility, to check organic laws, gives us many experiences of consciousness propagation in a symbiosis of organic/inorganic life in this post-biological era. Interactive Art embodies traces of biological systems. Plants, human body signals: gestures, speech, breath, heat, natural noises, water are being translated into computerized paradigms.The body lives unfolding out itself during the connections. I hope that in my installation people get immersed in an enigmatic experience of electronic TRANS-E.

Through use of a colour copier the artist synthesizes images from the space age and sacred prehistoric sites with powerful rhythms and forms.

A theoretical investigation on digital textual creation necessarily implies a reflection on language and thought, on the combinatory basis of verbal and written discourses.

The history of “ars combinatoria” reveals the extension of this instrument: the I Ching, the Art of Memory, the Kabbalists methods, the movable concentric wheels of Ramon Lull, the strategies of surrealists and dadaists, the works of Mallarmé, the potential literature of the Oulipo, Brazilian concrete poetry, the fictions of Roussel and Borges, the cut-ups of William Burroughs, the wordplays of Marcel Duchamp, the diagram-based semiology’s of Pierce and Greimas.
Those textual procedures have been re-conceived as elements of a evolutive process since the emergence of the computer, considered as a semiotic machine able to mathematically recombine signs.

This new writing methodology proposes a creative dialogue between the manifested linguistic structures and modifications induced by computational systems. The electroscript is writing a new chapter in the history of language.

Panel: SENSORIUM: Interdisciplinary Practices of Embodiment and Technology

The Emer­gence of Con­scious­ness pro­ject uses per­for­mance art and dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy in order to in­ves­ti­gate the sci­en­tific study of con­scious­ness and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of de­vel­op­ing ‘ma­chine con­scious­ness’. The pro­ject is in­spired by per­spec­tives of em­bod­i­ment as char­ac­ter­ized by Fran­cisco Varela, Evan Thomp­son and Eleanor Rosch and sit­u­at­ed­ness as ap­plied to evo­lu­tion­ary ro­bot­ics by Rod­ney Brooks. Du­mitriu, artist in res­i­dence in the Cen­tre for Com­pu­ta­tional Neu­ro­science and Ro­bot­ics at The Uni­ver­sity of Sus­sex, works with sen­sory and move­ment de­pri­va­tion (e.g. blind­folds, phys­i­cal re­straints etc.) and aug­men­ta­tion, in an at­tempt to take on the role of a ro­botic agent her­self and try to un­der­stand what it feels like to be a robot.

We live in the post-modern, post-communist, post-industrial world, a time that has been called the end of the historical era. We are past the first days of the information age with its whirring mainframes and images of massive data unreachable and unintelligible to the denizens of popular culture. Ours is the third generation of the information age. The culture is forming anew — old para-digms no longer apply. Ones that were significant a generation ago no longer hold. Our moment is no longer governed by paradigms from the 1950s. Our moment SIGGRAPH 93, USA is the end of the two cultures.

In his 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge, C.P Snow described his milieu: “There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with scientists and then gone off at night with some literary colleagues. I mean that literally. I have had, of course, intimate friends among both scientists and writers. It was through living among these groups and much more, I think, through moving regularly from one to the other and back again that I got occupied with the problem of what, long before I put it on paper, I christened to myself as the two cultures’.” His concerns in the lecture were: education, international competitiveness, the success of the Soviet Union, institutional barriers to success, how to improve the future, emerging Japanese economic competition … what to do at the end of the empire? He saw the artificial divisions in society, separated Art from Science and the Applied from either creating a sure recipe for disaster.

Two generations have passed. The rate of change seems to have increased dramatically. Computers are causing all kinds of trouble for the old paradigm and system. Industrial society is near collapse because it is unable to understand-digital scrutiny. Must we still abide by remnants of the high point of the industrial revolution — the division of the two cultures? For many reasons we should not. Personal computers have become a part of the mass culture without any formal government encour-agement. During the past 30 years their influence has become enormous. Children know that the machines they use for games are really computers and they do not need keyboards to control them, they use gloves, floormats, goggles, tiny hand-held controls, their voices. They live in a world where computers are ubiquitous.

Scientists are able to acquire results across networks. They discuss theories and debate significant events from their homes. The pure and the applied no longer have clear boundaries. Symposia and conferences are offered where the topics include discussions of the aesthetics of scientific visualisation. Artists again use technology commonly, with a renewed emphasis on the message, not the medium, writing programs communicating via electronic salons, speaking of teraflops or data or imagebases. The world has changed. The old metaphor of technology was the broadcast. It has been replaced with the login. Today the more digitally educated (digerati?) build their own idiosyncratic worlds with many more choices than Snow’s two cultures.

Abstract

Keywords: cognitive feedback loop, cognitive-driven interaction, affective computing, biofeedback interface, affective environment, aesthetic experience, Mind Cupola.

This paper introduces a new modality of interaction for art that produces meaning through cognitively inclusive sensorimotor capacities of the user. This application, which builds upon the psychophysical capacities of biofeedback interfaces, explores the potentiality of technological feedback for the affection and evaluation of the user. Through this the concept of ‘cognitive feedback loop’ will be applied in order to produce more effective aesthetic experiences. This proposal will be exemplified with the affective environment of the Mind Cupola. The paper finally anticipates that such a cognitive-driven approach to interaction might serve to enhance self-awareness and welfare through self-regulating processes.

The performative moment is a unique narrative, defined as a gathering of multiple elements of varied origins, a point in time, which is no longer past, neither is future yet, which stands between biography and fiction and is mediated by current technological means. We define our subject of study within the collective practices with emphasis on process and consisting of two basic components: audio and video. From this (still loose definition) the text will attempt an approach to the performative moment taking the reader through the work of several thinkers to whom the world is a permanent mutating process. We will look at AV performance as a construction of relationships rather than hierarchies, with emphasis put in the process of becoming rather than in a stagnated state. Following considerations from theoretical analysis, the subject of documentation will come to the surface. The text aims at presenting some considerations and many questions towards the possibilities for documentation of the AV project from the point of view of the construction of memory.

This point where we stand is a location of questioning.

Defined by its uniqueness, the moment is an artistic, collective, momentary manifestation that documentation should not replace. What is, in this context, the document? Which criteria should describe this documentation?

We put forward the possibility that audio and visual data are source material only capable of constituting meaning through the momentary construction of narrative. The bridge between moment and construction of memory is documentation.

The text will examine two documents of AV performance projects: the DVD by Granular Synthesis and a book by Aether9, to analysis into the possibilities for documenting both creative process and performative moment.

Documents constitute ways to extend our thoughts (individually and collectively) in the attempt to expand memory in time. Parallel to the institutionalized frame of the museum, we propose the collective to create its own ways to document activities, using the practice’s tools, technologies and knowledge, in order to leave traces that will allow future memory construction and its study.

Panel: Games Betwixt and Between

From the sec­onds-long scale of a gimme in Far­mville to the epic 70-hour hero quest in a mas­sive RPG, games are our cul­ture’s most de­vel­oped en­gines for cre­at­ing and ful­fill­ing de­sire.  And no mat­ter the gran­u­lar­ity, the sim­i­lar­ity of the pat­tern across time scales is no co­in­ci­dence.  This cycle of de­sire and tem­po­rary ful­fill­ment is thor­oughly fa­mil­iar to west­ern­ers; it per­vades our nar­ra­tive media and our con­sump­tive pat­terns, and has taken the fore­front in nearly every as­pect of human ex­pres­sion in­clud­ing music, writ­ing, and film, as well as games. The fa­mil­iar curve of in­tro­duc­tion, ris­ing ten­sion, cli­max, and de­nou­ment is of course strik­ingly sim­i­lar to one of the other best-loved sen­sory cy­cles in human ex­pe­ri­ence:  or­gas­mic build-up and re­lease.   Heather Kel­ley will make her case for the or­gas­mic chem­i­cal and be­hav­ioral cycle as the struc­tural basis for the power of nar­ra­tive and game­play.  Kel­ley pro­poses that lin­ear and in­ter­ac­tive media alike are ex­pe­ri­en­tal cog­nates of the bio­me­chan­i­cal process of erotic grat­i­fi­ca­tion.

Research on the historical relation of religion and technology in a cultural studies approach. Technology as eschatology (or the eschatology of technology) and the millenarian redemption of humanity. A critical investigation of inherent and archaic metaphors, such as the return from the suburbs to Paradise, the recovering of humankind’s lost divinity, the exercising of god-like knowledge and powers, the investing of technological acceleration with spiritual significance. The necessity for the rigorous re-examination of infatuation with unregulated technological advance and disdainful disregard for, even depraved indifference to, mortality. With reference to David T. Noble’s ‘The Religion of Technology: the divinity of Man and the spirit of invention’ (Knopf, N.Y, 1997).

On questions of ‘the religious sense’ and persons of vision who precipitate, produce the crises in dimension, in dimensions of meaning.

ABSTRACT

My paper documents the evolution of my own creative research, which I have entitled Electrosculpture. Prior to 1972, when I concocted the word Electrosculpture, people had referred to my work as being kinetic or cybernetic. Although my work shares a common technology with these genres, the underlying intention of Electrosculpture, is its stimulus interface with the spectator, for without physical involvement the full potential of these works can not be realized. The sensing systems and responses upon which this work is founded are best accomplished through the use of electronics, which translates input stimulus into output audio/visual response. Electrosculpture is a fusion of these constituents.

This paper is an extension of one delivered during a panel session at Sound Culture ’91 at the Performance Space in Sydney, Australia. It presents an alternate history of audio-visual media (including cinema, video, computer and installations and a ‘pre-model’ of the inter-relation of sound and image/movement in these media). It is alternative to the usual approach, which exclusively concentrates on the development of individual (usually visual) technologies.
The aim here is to demonstrate how these media are part of the larger history of ‘automata’, which in the widest sense includes mechanical toys, mechanical gardens and theatres, early attempts at automated writing, speaking statues and voice synthesis as well as associated technologies and techniques (such as punch cards) employed within barrel organs and automated looms.

Automata also form part of the history of control systems. Many were built as demonstrations of principles of automated control and give insight into what may be called the ‘experience of control’ that is both part of reactions to these machines and a fundamental aspect of notions of male creativity. This latter area becomes even more apparent when considering the mythological origins of these machines and techniques within western culture. The history of automata (including reactions to these technologies) allows for the construction of a second history: that of the experience of AV media.

This paper is born out of my experience as a sound artist and sound art consumer who engages in the procurance, application and exchange of soundscape recordings; an ambivalent engagement which is aesthetically rewarding yet on reflection deeply unsettling. The aim of this paper is to give some disclosure on why this apparently harmless procedure, ie. the routine of soundscape recording/sampling/abstracting (or ‘disembodying’), editing, retouching, processing, recontextualising…, may result in a durable confrontation with terror and disgust. In order to aid this endeavour – to verbalise a personal and intuitive response – I will be referring to writings on photography, taking the photograph as an analogy for the sonic record. Also I will be dealing primarily with the recording and representation of human utterance in sound art, as it is the most recognisable and inherently the most intimate and familiar material to humans.

The Exploratorium’s Invisible Dynamics project seeks to manifest the inevitable and reciprocal relationship between art and science that is at the heart of the museum’s mission. An attempt to visualize invisible, often cartographic, systems in the San Francisco Bay Area, it places various elements of Bay Area life in a context that can then proportionally be used to relate San Francisco to the greater Pacific Rim in a similar scalar relationship. The paper analyzes one part in particular of the lnvisible Dynamics project-Hidden Ecologies, a photographic, cartographic
collaboration between a micro-biologist and an architect. The flexibility between artistic and scientific processes is expressed by those involved in Hidden Ecologies as well as the “artists” of the other three projects that make up Invisible Dynamics.

Ancient Hawaiians named the estuary that fee ds Pearl Harbor, Wai Momi, or the river of pearls. Oysters (Pinctada radiate) once flourished in the harbor. The shells were used as scrapers to make cloth and rope; they were also carved into fishhooks. The mother of pearl was valued for its iridescence, often used to make the eyes of the gods. The Eyes of the Gods was a single channel video installation compiled from the underwater archive of the National Park Service World War II Valor. Divers from the team, video taped themselves surveying the USS Arizona, as well as, interning the ashes of survivors who have passed. I took part in this internment this December 7, 2016. Using both analog and algorithmic techniques I have found and compiled all of the images containing only the water and nothing else. This alogorithmic technique used to make The Eyes of the Gods is similar to face recognition and surveillance software utilized by the National Security Agency (NSA). I wanted to reflect this irony, as today the Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickman is the headquarters of the United States Pacific Fleet, including being home to the Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific (JICPAC).

The cinematic moving image arrested viewers’ bodies while immersing their minds in a projected reality. Interactivity has promised to re-integrate the body in the experience of the technologically rendered moving image. From lenticular animation to movement capture technologies, lately popularized by Kinect, interactivity has come a long way.

Departing from a Heideggerian understanding of new technologies, this paper examines ways viwers bodies have been disciplined and mobilized by moving image technologies. Informed by the art practice of the author, the paper focuses its theoretical lens on the experience of movement and vision as mediated by analog and digital media.

“No doubt, there are a thousand ways of working with color, but when you compose it, like the musician with his harmonies, it is a question of putting forward differences.” -Matisse, Interview by Gaston Diehl, 1945.

Introduction

Talking about color, outside of a scientific discourse, often requires the use of metaphors, analogies that cling to other senses than the visual. Screened through language, the analysis of a painting uses more words intended to solicit our ears or our taste (garish colors, cold, sweet, acids …). The composition of the space, the expressiveness and the intensity of the color are all common points between the musical composition and the pictorial composition. It is by these analogies, that we proposed to realize a multimedia reading of the painting Fauves, a painting based on an intuitive logic of the color. It is for explanatory purposes, that this sensitive approach has been elaborated, the hearing comes to meet the vision to emphasize, to amplify the perception of the work, by revealing hidden dimensions

(Long paper)

Keywords: HCI, Design Methodology, Phenomenology, Body-centred technology, Embodied self-awareness, Focusing, Wearable technology, Probes.

This paper offers the beginnings of a methodological framework for the design of body-centric artifacts, understood as those that use embodied self-awareness as a tool for bodily self-knowledge and wellbeing. We present a case study on the design of artifacts to be applied in the self-practice of the psychotherapeutic technique Focusing. The autobiographical journey of the researcher is documented in the use of different methods to be integrated into design research, such as crafting devices through autoethnographic phenomenological annotations, the application of secondperson methods such as facilitated interaction for novices, and the use of a design kit to be tested by previously trained users. Even though wellbeing is a core concern of this project, the application of autoethnographic exploration through Focusing has an important creative potential, particularly in the generation of selfreporting narratives informed by somatic exploration. These rich descriptions can be utilised as a core construction material in the creation of art and design pieces for bodily understanding.

This is an electronic archive accessible on the World Wide Web as of 1994. It utilizes the latest telecommunications technology to document numerous individual cases of censorship around the world and throughout history with an interactive computer archive. The work was initiated by multimedia artist Muntadas and produced by Randolph Street Gallery (Chicago) with the support of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois.

The paper discusses the relation of technology and ethics in the cyberspace. Cyberspace, as it may seem today, become a new battle ground of contested ideas and thoughts, but we no longer bear the vision that cyberspace is the site of subversion as properly noted by American scholar Danna Haraway in her A Cyborg manifesto. The author has described the function of fantasy, the ordering of desire, as the sheer force in pair them together by exemplifying the TV commercial of cellular phone. Using Lacanian methodology, the author has identified the process of the fantasy operated in the symbolic order of relation of subject and object petit a—whatever close the subject can attain the object, there is still a distance between them. It would be better to be seen this perfect pair, technology and humanity, is a simulacrum that the holistic picture of it is impaired, therefore more desirable than ever. Taking Tamnagochi as a point of entry, the author offers a critique to the over optimism of cyberspace and returns to psychoanalysis terms to examine what follows:

From Interactivity to interpassivity, how a subject inscribe itself in the symbolic network of desire.
How can technology be the big Other of today’s culture?
Humanity is represented in cyberspace in the form of fantasy.
Intro

By way of a simple reflections on the past decade of fast growing community in cyberspace, we find that what we have been aware as ethics is subject to change, and have compelled to accept the status quo of technology leading our everyday life whether we are voluntary or not. For forming and reforming of new community based on newly founded technological relations– be they social, cultural, or economic– have shaken the basis of ethics, anthrocentrism that rooted in Western philosophy. Precisely because of a community invoking another set of human interactions that need to be revalidated in ethics, the standard of ethic thus becomes a relative term. Therefore “what is right,” an age-old ethical question, becomes nullified. It is not even mentioned that the contested power relations in cyberspace where communication is ordered by those who have social and economic, political, and even military advantage. Ethics, proposed by American positivist John Dewey, is based on its relativity on democratic society. Yet paradoxically enough, his idea still hold ethic(together with morality) as priori which is contradicted to the current situation of technology constantly growing, expanding , regrouping, and deploying its network, as in modern life most man can feel the idea of technology has more or less become the capitalized “T” that almost goes along with the notion of Truth or the God, those which hold the idea of transcendental value. But can the notion of Technology be transcendental?

The Fly Printer – Extended is a second edition of a printing apparatus in a form of a closed environment that contains a flock of fruit flies. The flies eat special food that is prepared for them that is mixed with laser printer inks. The flies digest the food and print different color dots onto the paper that is placed under the fly habitat. The new version of the Fly Printer, which is currently in progress, incorporates a technological vision (a camera) and neural network learning software (DNNs). The purpose of the set-up is to juxtapose a human perception with a technological perception through a system that incorporates living organisms (flies, and human-observers) and evolving technology (DNNs). The developed technological system ironically addresses the over-interpretation problem present in the DNNs; in which evolved images that have became unrecognizable to humans, are interpreted with over 99% certainty by the DNNs to be recognizable objects.

In the Fly Printer – Extended the human, technology and non-humans create an ambiguous circle of interpretations. The work plays with the technological over-interpretation and points out how human abilities are considered the point of reference in technological developments. The Fly Printer – Extended is an artistic experiment that tests out a situation where human agency is playing in the background as the developer of technology, but when standing concretely beside the work the human can primarily observe the living organisms producing the dots and technology independently interpreting the results. The work does not allow control over the flies or the printing surface. In other words the images produced with this techno-organic device are uncontrollable – they are random traces of biological processes. What is the purpose of a machine or an artifact, like the Fly Printer, that produces images that have no meaning for humans before intelligent technology interprets them?

The recent extended version of the Fly Printer containing the technological perception and DNNs is collaboration between Laura Beloff and Malene Theres Klaus.

In the last years, linking sound and food is becoming an interesting research topic both in the psychology of perception and new media art studies. The latest research is focusing not only on the key factors of hearing related to multi-sensory perception of food, but also on some vernacular expressions that are rising from a performance-oriented aesthetics research, analyzed through a multidisciplinary perspective. Every recipe, as a list of operations to be executed in a time interval, could be considered as a contemporary full score that is at the same time well-defined and unpredictable in its sonic development. The sound of food and its flavour can take us somewhere in the world through getting us in touch with different cultural traditions, giving us a local characterization, covering the distance and definitely mixing.

If Heston Blumenthal once said food is especially evocative in conjuring memories, we could extend the meaning of his words, saying: food and sound. This conference session will discuss some case histories and concrete art/design examples related to sound/food topic, investigating the field bounded by performance art, sound art and research. Through comparing molecular gastronomy to experimental digital music and analyzing the connection among sound, food and new media as a way to re-design (and re-mediate) the identity of a rural territory (Click’n’Food – Interferenze new arts festival), I will be discussing how food/sound knowledge can add important levels of information in the “tasting” process, providing a deeper level of understanding of the “manufacturing” act and, more relevant, a much better conscious sensorial experience.

The Ford Folly uses audio, video, motion‑tracking and RFID technologies to create a web of biographical and historical narratives about place. These narratives branch out from a common starting point, the reality of contemporary Dearborn, Michigan, home of Henry Ford and now a post‑industrial city whose past and present stories connect it to locations around the world. When digital technologies are used to communicate historical and cultural narratives across time and space, something important is lost without the presence of actual historical objects. The aura of an object that has persisted through time is not replaced by digital technology, but is supplemented and revealed through digital means. We propose that an object is the locus of a ‘symbol stack,’ a set of connotations that have accumulated over time; storing these symbolic references as metadata, and recalling them through a digitally driven interactive exhibition, reveals the object as a historian in its own right.Too often the philosophical descendents of Situationism forget the purpose of the dérive and other tools as critiques not just of dull daily life, but of the larger power structures that shape the spaces in which that life takes place. Fifty years further on, we have the opportunity to look back into history along the axes of the detritus of Modernism—the objects of mass culture, and how they acquired a life and presence of their own through simple persistence and re‑use through changing contexts. We now live beyond the quintessentially Modernist utopian vision of the future; the 21st century has been shaped out of the fragments and structures left over from the 20th. In creating a remote evocation of a single post‑industrial city we will illuminate the persistences, differences, and connections that connect particular histories across time and space.

In this talk I will look at how private autobiographical memory has become externalized and public through the emergence of recording devices and social media. With the introduction of the Victorian practice of photographing the dead, remembering became an externalized activity, made public through the status of the photograph as a memory object. The explosion of social media in the twenty-first century has given these objects wider circulation, allowing them to travel beyond their immediate geographically bound network. This movement from an internal circle to a wider network has produced a phenomenon of pseudomemory in which it is possible to possess memories of people and events that one has never met or witnessed.
Within this culture forgetting becomes a radical act. Forgetting functions as counter-productive to the infrastructure of memory preservation produced by archives, conservation and restoration experts, databases, and scrapbook artists. However, recent work in social psychology and memory science suggests that forgetting can be productive as a treatment for traumatic memory disorders. This paper looks at the tension between the act of forgetting and a culture saturated with persistent public memory objects.
I address these concerns in The Forgetting Machine, an iPhone application that digitally destroys memory objects. In The Forgetting Machine I imagine a space in which reconsolidation, a theory proposed by scientist Karim Nader, governs not only our biological memories but also the prosthetic memory objects we circulate using social media. The site for this interaction is the mobile phone, the device we use to capture, store, and share our personal digital memory objects.
Users download and install the application and take photographs using the phone’s camera. Each time they view their photograph or press the refresh button, the photograph displayed becomes slightly obscured or blurred. Through the user’s act of use or refresh the original becomes inaccessible and is replaced by a new original. Over time this image becomes unrecognizable. By performing this disruption, The Forgetting Machine renders a biological process, the constant reconsolidation of memory, as a technological glitch that interrupts the process of saving and offers in its place an oppositional process of forgetting. The Forgetting Machine proposes an alternate system of cultural values in which forgetting is seen not as error but rather as a productive practice of contraction and erosion.

This seems an appropriate moment to consider the role of the book as a vulnerable artefact of late 20th-Century culture, as new electronic media are being demonstrated and promoted. In the last year we have made more than 125 holograms of books, using a documentary form of hologram developed to record rare and valuable objects in museums of the former Soviet Union. Each of our holograms contains a three-dimensional image of an individual book with its spine (and title) visible and the body of the book receding into blackness; the holograms were cut to be the same shape as a book, tall and narrow. This type of hologram, called a Denisyuk hologram after its inventor, is a very ‘straight’ form of hologram without any ‘artistic’ effect. At the time we were visiting professors in the art department of Tsukuba University, Japan. We chose all of the books from a single library in the art department? Japanese and English texts ranging from books on optics to books on art. Some were very recent, others much older, including European technical and scientific books imported during the last century when Japan opened itself to the rest of the world.

The book presented itself as a common cultural carrier, an object with equal traditions in East and West and a suitable point to contemplate our own situation in relation to the culture we found ourselves in. After making holograms of books we started to draw books on a computer and to manipulate scanned images of books using digital photography software. We see this as providing an opportunity for a more imaginative, more London, UK plastic investigation of the book than that allowed by the rigour of the holographic project we set ourselves. The drawings explore the concrete forms of Western and Japanese texts in graphic abstractions without words. Scanned images of book spines become the starting point for us to invent a series of new titles derived from the title of a text and often at odds to the sentiments of the original.

Contemporary media artists doing installations, by the creative attention they give to both form and content, appear to be looking for a formula that could, by it general appeal, launch a new content based industry. I like to compare their work to that of early cinematographers who had to develop simultaneously the technology to create the content, the content itself and also the context in which the content could be delivered. We tend to forget that today’s cinema industry with it’s relatively stable technologies, unionised workers, marketing strategies, distribution networks, star systems and millionaires, evolved from modest experiments attempting to adequate form with content. In that sense, cinema can be seen as a hugely successful installation. In this timely turn of a millennium, new computing and connecting technologies appear to invite new type of contents just as individuals and societies are trying to look at themselves and at the world in new ways. The example of early cinema will give today’s media artists doing installations a sense of the time it might take for their experimental field to evolve into an art and an industry.

The challenge of the unready and the unforeseen. The omnipresence of technology dares artists to find their voices using new media.

While there is plenty of discussion about ease of artwork distribution, the reproduction of existent art in 256 colors and the economic implications of digital copyright, the crucial question remains the nature of art. As a practicing artist and interested spectator of biology, I’ve found the metaphor of artistic development as a genetic development intriguing and practical. Often, a change in the our angle of thought allows us to capitalize on the unexpected. Art, like all other human activities will develop by trial, error, and inexorable serendipity independent of analysis. Yet reflection in situ offers an orienting chronicle of our hopes and fears. The questions raised by this paper are equivalent to the inscriptions of ancient cartographers who wrote, “Here be monsters” on the seductive blank spaces bordering their known world. Facing a new technology can be disorienting for artists who have the habit of entrenching themselves in a medium to
perfect it. Role models for approaching new technology include Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Along with the Bauhaus movement aligned towards the machine, Duchamp appropriated the ready-made and Warhol, the commercialized mass production of objects. They responded to the technology of production by kidnapping it and calling it art. Following their appropriating precedent, artists can sleep well, to paraphrase Duchamp: as artists, we define art. Nam June Paik has also pioneered efforts to synthesize artistic and technological creativity. By presuming an interaction between viewer and work, he has highlighted the importance of interactively for the artist and audience alike. His optimistic view of technology tames the specter of machines to a friendly means of expression for everyone. New media requires a unique process of constant learning the latest developments and forgetting the obsolete. Everyday, artists exploring with technology glean anew what is useful to their work from past, present and future alike. The metaphor of biological development for artistic development interests us on two levels: the first, recontextualizing the history of art, and the second, a different level, extrapolating the Internet as an organism. In conclusion we use this metaphor as a method to help us understand the topography of the present.

Panel: Open Culture + Wearables

Craft does not mean made by hand, with­out tools or tech­nol­ogy. It means made with care, with fore­sight, with skill and in­volve­ment. When craft is op­ti­miza­tion for re­peata­bil­ity the process still re­lies on human judg­ment and is not com­pletely com­put­er­ized. E-tex­tiles are an ex­am­ple of a mod­ern craft, which pro­duces tech­nol­ogy it­self in the form of wear­able elec­tron­ics but its pro­duc­tion process re­lies heav­ily on crafts. Au­to­mated man­u­fac­tur­ing meth­ods for com­bin­ing tex­tiles and elec­tron­ics sim­ply do not exist yet. What will hap­pen when the first PCB weav­ing ma­chine hits the mar­ket? Will the craft in e-tex­tiles sur­vive? Craft, as op­posed to au­to­mated man­u­fac­tur­ing is a cre­ative process with much room for error, in­no­va­tion, ex­pres­sion and di­ver­sity. But it does not lend it­self well to serv­ing the needs of a pop­u­la­tion ac­cus­tomed to mass-pro­duc­tion. Will we be­come e-tex­tile grand­moth­ers, sewing LEDs onto t-shirts for our grand­chil­dren while in­dus­try pro­duces them in bulk?

Will our grand­chil­dren think of our cre­ations as un-cool be­cause they are hand­made? When our skills be­come de­val­ued be­cause ma­chines can repli­cate our work faster, cheaper and “bet­ter” we will still enjoy the craft process. But in­stead of sit­ting back to be­come e-tex­tile grand­moth­ers, per­haps com­pe­ti­tion from the ma­chine will en­cour­age us to move on. In ac­cept­ing this chal­lenge, the fu­ture mas­ter craftsper­son needs to re-in­vent craft in order to main­tain rel­e­vance and ex­press the ad­van­tages of man over ma­chine. In this paper we pre­sent a body of work cre­ated within the in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary field of e-tex­tiles. We re­flect on the in­tro­duc­tory themes in­tro­duced in the ab­stract by de­tail­ing and an­a­lyz­ing our craft ap­proach to build­ing elec­tron­ics as well as our ex­plic­itly open stance on doc­u­ment­ing and shar­ing our tech­niques. We con­clude with a dis­cus­sion on what it could mean to be­come fu­ture crafts­peo­ple and pass on our trade.

n this round table discussion, curators and practitioners with diverse perspectives on game art and interactive media art explore the historical, cultural, and political stakes of exhibiting interac-tive new media works that incorporate game technology across a spectrum of experimental, institutionalized, and commercial con-texts. In response to digital games’ emergence as a powerful component of contemporary culture, large cultural institutions are beginning to collect, archive and exhibit videogames. The result-ing ‘blockbuster’ initiatives fall in line with established main-stream ludo-industrial narratives, but they do little to explore the roles digital game technology is starting to play in new media art practices. This panel considers the contributions of independent cultural initiatives (exhibitions, festivals, etc.) to this process of exploring game culture and game technologies beyond commer-cial and consumerist contexts. Drawing on their own practices, perspectives, and experiences with art-making and curation, the participants will engage in an open discussion on topics includ-ing: *historical gaming exhibitions; *early avant-garde game modification practices; *the institutionalization of experimental game art; *the rise of the new arcade and ‘indie game’ cultures; *the establishment of the practice of machinima; *the emergence of appropriative practices under the banner of ‘game art,’ and the use of game-like interfaces in new media installations.

Key Questions Addressed:

1. What are the implications of exhibiting games under the larger umbrella of New Media Art?
2. What curatorial methodologies are employed in the field?
3. What are the consequences of the disciplinary siloing that we can observe within game ration?
4. How can critical questions of interdisciplinarity be addressed within the field?
5. How can we unpack the problematic categories of ‘game art’, ‘art games’ and ‘indie games’?
6. How can we create critical historiographical investigations of the roles games occupy within gallery cultures, blockbuster ex-hibitions, festivals and alternative spaces?
7. What future contexts are possible in light of these histories?

Panel: Creativity as a Social Ontology

Michael Joyce’s hy­per­text fic­tion af­ter­noon, a story was first pub­licly pre­sented in 1987, and is gen­er­ally known as the “grand­daddy” of elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture (Coover, 1992). It has been an­thol­o­gised by Nor­ton, is sub­stan­tially analysed and dis­cussed in dozens of aca­d­e­mic trea­tises and is taught or at least men­tioned in al­most every course taught on elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture. But af­ter­noon is not the first work of elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture. Why did this par­tic­u­lar work be­come the prog­en­i­tor of a com­mu­nity of writ­ers, a com­mon ref­er­ence point for schol­ars and stu­dents for the next 25 years? There were al­ter­na­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties. (The case has al­ready been made that in­ter­ac­tive fic­tion is equally a form of elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture – but IF is a dis­tinct genre with a dis­tinct com­mu­nity.) Why didn’t bp Nichols’ work “First Screen­ing: Com­puter Poems” (1984) start a move­ment? Why are there no cric­i­tal dis­cus­sions of Judy Mal­loy’s data­base nar­ra­tive “Uncle Roger”, pub­lished on the WELL in 1986/97? This brief paper will ques­tion the role of the myth­i­cal prog­en­i­tor in the cre­ation of a cre­ative com­muntiy. Why do we tend to imag­ine a fa­ther or “grand­daddy” of a field? Are cer­tain kinds of work more likely to be adopted as prog­en­i­tor of a field, or does the choice of prog­en­i­tor de­pend more on so­cial net­works, modes of dis­tri­b­u­tion or even chance? Would elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture have been dif­fer­ent today if Nichols or Mal­loy had been crowned as the grand­par­ent of the field?

The alchemical term ‘The Great Work’ (Latin: Magnum Opus) refers to Western alchemy’s perhaps defining, yet seemingly unobtainable, objective – to create the ‘philosopher’s stone’, a mysterious substance considered capable of transmuting base metals into gold or silver. The term has also been used to describe personal / spiritual transformation, as well as individuation, and as a device in art and literature.

The Great Work of the Metal Lover straddles art, science and alchemy in its attempt to solve the ancient riddle of transmutation through modern microbiological practice. A metallotolerant extremophilic bacterium is paired with gold chloride in an engineered atmosphere to produce 24 carat gold. Extremophiles are microorganisms that are able to survive and flourish in physically and/or chemically extreme conditions that would kill most of the life on our planet. It is believed that they hold the key to understanding how life may have originated, due to their unique ability to metabolise toxic substances such as uranium, arsenic and gold chloride. Gold, in turn, has been treasured throughout history for its rarity, malleability and incorruptibility, as it resists oxidation, corrosion and other chemical bonding processes.

This artwork, in addressing the scientific preoccupation with trying to shape and bend biology to our will in the post-biological age, questions the ethical and political ramifications of attempting to perfect nature.

Poster Statement

One aim of the “Institut Universitari de l’Audiovisual de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra” (IUA-UPF, Barcelona) is the production of interactive multimedia supporting the main research and educational activities and the dissemination of minority cultural knowledge through new digital media. Through these productions we want to bring together the research in multimedia design with its practical application and testing. We study the relations between interface, content and user personal characteristics, and also the possibilities of these interactive interfaces as a new creative and expressive forms. As all other activities in the IUA-UPF, we explore, on the one hand, the new ways that electronic art in general can open and, on the other hand, the application of these media to old artistic forms. Related to this second approach to interactive multimedia, our first production is “Dotze sentits. Poesia catalana d’ avui” (Twelve senses. Today’s Catalan Poetry), a CD-ROM made in collaboration with “Editorial Proa” (a catalan publisher) and “Diputaci de Barcelona” (a public regional institution). It is based on the works, lives and ideas of twelve living catalan poets. The CD-ROM has won the Spain and Portugal Möbius award, and has achieved an increasing success among local audiences, either general or poetry interested. We think this can be a good example of a way to approach poetry, an old and mainly textual or verbal artistic form, to the general public using the new language possibilities that interactive media offer. Through the design of our product we have tried to accomplish two main objectives. First, a user interface as transparent as possible in order to guarantee the fast and easy approach to information by people that are in principle interested only in poetry. Second, to create a surprise effect and promote the desire to exploring the CD-ROM, offering a collection of multimedia possibilities that probably the user never expected. With this aim the CD-ROM contains a set of different and specific multimedia materials: poems performed in video or audio by its authors, manuscript views, text and fonts animation, interactive and video interviews, and poets’ personal photographs, objects, works and hobbies commented by him or herself. We include also a more traditional encyclopedic approach which offers to the specialists a very exhaustive and textual information on biography, bibliography and the contents of articles about each author and contemporary catalan poetry in general. This information can be printed if desired. A third playful approach uses a theater metaphor with animation and audio elements to propose a poetry reading in video with a personalized list of poets. A very engaging and clear graphic design increases the user-friendliness of the interface, minimizing difficulties and reject and making easy the approach of a non initiated person to multimedia products towards this multimedia handling of poetry. As a summary, in this presentation we will discuss our approach to handling a classical art, such as poetry, with multimedia language through the particular case of this production.

Panel: The Art of Software Cities

“The ar­chi­tec­ture of to­mor­row will be a means of mod­i­fy­ing pre­sent con­cep­tions of time and space. It will be both a means of knowl­edge and a means of ac­tion. Ar­chi­tec­tural com­plexes will be mod­i­fi­able. Their ap­pear­ance will change to­tally or par­tially in ac­cor­dance with the will of their in­hab­i­tants.” (Ivan Chtche­glov, ‘For­mu­lary for a New Ur­ban­ism’, 1953). ‘The Ha­cienda’ is a mo­bile, in­flat­able, pop-up pub­lic space with a do­mes­tic in­te­rior, and a flex­i­ble stack of equip­ment and soft­ware that can trans­form it into a creche, a sports sta­dium, a meet­ing hall or a dance/per­for­mance space. It is the out­come of a 3 year con­ver­sa­tion con­vened by artist group ‘The Peo­ple Speak’ as part of the large scale re­gen­er­a­tion process of the Cray­lands Es­tate, an im­pov­er­ished sub­urb of Basil­don, in Essex, about 60 miles East of Lon­don. The story of ‘The Ha­cienda’ is an ac­count of how the bu­reau­cratic imag­i­nary of a pub­lic/pri­vate part­ner­ship of de­vel­op­ers, ‘non-profit’ hous­ing as­so­ci­a­tions, and local gov­ern­ment is ar­tic­u­lated through soft­ware, ser­vices, sig­nage, com­mu­nity events and spaces in ne­go­ti­at­ing and sanc­tion­ing the cre­ation of hy­brid pub­lic/pri­vate places.

Analysing the roles of the var­i­ous groups in­volved in the pro­ject: res­i­dents, prop­erty de­vel­op­ers, chil­dren, com­mu­nity rep­re­sen­ta­tives, artists, pro­fes­sional ser­vice providers, politi­cians and gov­ern­ment bu­reau­crats, re­veals how they in­ter­faced to each other through meet­ings, sur­veys, com­mu­nity pub­li­ca­tions and events, ar­chi­tec­tural plans, and so­cial pol­icy de­ci­sions. This talk will pre­sent the tools and per­for­ma­tive tech­niques em­ployed by The Peo­ple Speak to re-me­di­ate those re­la­tion­ships in fun and en­gag­ing ways through the pro­duc­tion of new com­mu­nity in­ter­faces as pub­lic media events, lead­ing to re-ne­go­ti­a­tions of those re­la­tion­ships, and the pro­duc­tion of ‘The Ha­cienda’: a plat­form for the de­vel­op­ment of pub­lic in­ter­faces. Fo­cus­ing on the fail­ures of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the fric­tion gen­er­ated by in­di­vid­u­als, groups and in­sti­tu­tions break­ing down and re­form­ing around me­di­ated rep­re­sen­ta­tions of them­selves as a com­mu­nity should help to stim­u­late a wider dis­cus­sion of the po­ten­tial of plat­forms for pub­lic in­ter­faces, and the pit­falls of reify­ing com­mu­nity re­la­tion­ships as art in soft­ware.

This paper explores notions of provenance, using storytelling to follow the lives of objects from their first inception to the narratives they collect along the way. As part of TOTeM[1] a £1.39M research project based around the “Internet of Things”[2], this research opens up new ways of preserving people’s stories through linking objects to the Internet via “tagging” technologies such as QR codes.

The process of appending immaterial data such as textual, video and audio stories, offers a significant additional dimension to the material attributes of an object. Hand produced creative artefacts already transcend a material value because of their individual characteristics and their reference to social and cultural frameworks. As the emerging technology of the Internet of Things supports the tagging of more and more objects, things will begin to accrue an immaterial data shadow that will begin to out weigh its material instantiation (Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things, 2005).

By examining creative artefacts, the authors explore how artists, designers and craftspeople express how such objects came into being. Using the public facing site, www.?talesofthings.?com, built for the TOTeM project, one can “tag” objects using QR codes, with stories in any digital media form. In this context, QR codes act as “digital makers’ marks” with the potential to hold far richer data than traditional ones.

Whilst the data shadow of commercial things may be logistical: price, temperature, best for before dates etc., information provided by artists and designers has the potential to provide significantly more evocative stories that may change entirely the perception of an object.  Through analysis of such stories, collected on talesofthings.?com, the authors reveal how digital makers’ marks have the potential to carry myths and fictions as well as truths. In doing so, this paper articulates the implications of relocating memories and stories around creative artefacts to a digital platform in a way that has previously not been possible.

[1] Tales of Things and Electronic Memories. Edinburgh College of Art, Brunel University, University of Dundee, University College London (UCL), University of Salford
[2] This is tagging technologies to track physical objects in the real world. Eg: Oyster Cards in the London Underground.

Morphing software by Gerard Holzmann is used to show creative decisions Leonardo made in using his own features to change the Duchess of Aragon into the Mona Lisa we know.

Abstract

The design of the interfaces is still the most important aspect in the current discussion on interactivity. The historical development of the interface in Interactive Art can be read as a creative trial to find a satisfactory, aesthetic, or even ‘natural’ symbiosis between the user and the computer system. Contemporary interactive artists were the first who realized that the old antagonism between man and machine is increasingly losing its importance. In Interactive Art the interface functions as a metaphor for communication – or to be more precise: for dialogue. The computer system requires more ‘activity’ in the sense of engagement than other electronic media, and what is even more important it meets the user’s perceptive habits.

Contemporary interactive artists are experts of perception as well as connoisseurs of pleasure. Since the late sixties they were establishing a new art form. The design of the interface in the work of artists like Myron Krueger, Jeffrey Shaw, David Rokeby, and others demonstrates this perfectly. Their work influenced the second generation of European artists, like Ulrike Gabriel, Christa Sommerer/Laurent Mignonneau, Joachim Sauter/Dirk Lüsebrink, Simon Biggs, Catherine Ikam, and Paul Sermon. Concerning the interface design and the situations of perception, it is
useful to distinguish the above mentioned interactive works from the works of Lynn Hershman, Grahame Weinbren, Ken Feingold, and Bill Seaman who are working with video disc-technology and are using ‘non-immersive’ interfaces like touchscreens or the mouse. These two groups – environments and installations – represent not only two different trends in interactive art, but also two ways of commercial activities and scientific research. While the installations tend to create a private, intimate area, the environments create a public space. Thus in the future the interactive installations will function as a model for the design of interactive home TV-sets, while the interactive environments will shape the ways of communication in Virtual Reality.

The Hoover Diaries is a multimodal artwork about a globalized economy versus a local fishing industry through the prism of a double homicide in a seaside town of New Zealand. The murders affected Amanda Newalls’ own family (the crime took place her father’s fishing boat but without perpetrators or victims in her family) and since then she has distanced herself from the traumatic childhood memories. This is something she wishes to maintain, so is planning an ‘anti-documentary’ by which, instead of getting close to the crime and its personalities, she will pursue the circumstantial aspects of small town Timaru at the time. Newall plans to revisit this place by two inroads: (a) retrospective research through empirical methods such assemi-structured interviews and anecdotal data, investigative journalism and archival investigations, personal memorabilia and mnemonic revisits; (b) artistic research through multiple modes of audio-visual, sculptural, pictorial, narrative and medial distancing devices.
In artistic and conceptual terms, media, sculpture, picture making, story telling, reinvention, costume, experimental filmmaking and artistic deception/illusion will be brought into thematic scenarios. In the frame of NZ film, there is a tradition of dark disturbing yet somehow political and imaginative film making, for example in mainstream film with Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (which Newall worked on as a teenager), Jane Campion’s films and TV work including The Piano and Top of the Lake, along with TV programs such as Under the Mountain by Maurice Gee from Newall’s childhood. The media legacy will conflate with more experimental approaches to film making at the intersection of documentary and fine art imagery. Newalls work has developed from performance art, social commentary and intervention, along with darker and more B-grade influences which is why it lends itself to installation and research processes of real life. The art work will provide an opportunity to embed real environments and a storyline in Newall’s particular style and thereby blur the boundaries between fact and fiction on material conditions; it will also give her a chance to use framing devices of fine art for ostentatious purposes, as if it is a dress-up reality where the very documentation of the real stands in for its socially and formally constructed constitution.

Panel: BioARTCAMP: Laboratory Ecologies in the Wild West

Techno-sci­en­tific tools and de­vices are rou­tinely used to mimic and re­pro­duce con­di­tions of life. The in­cu­ba­tor is one such piece of tech­nol­ogy that re­pro­duces tem­per­a­ture and hu­mid­ity needed to en­cour­age the growth of cell based or­gan­isms. Usu­ally such a piece of equip­ment- a sta­ble of sci­en­tific lab ecolo­gies- is used to in­cu­bate and fos­ter cell growth of mi­croor­gan­isms in a ster­ile and con­tained lab en­vi­ron­ment. The Human In­cu­ba­tor for Feed­ing Mi­crobes is a pro­ject reimag­in­ing the ma­te­ri­al­ity and func­tion of in­cu­ba­tion from a non-hu­man per­spec­tive  and out­side of the of­fi­cial lab­o­ra­tory con­text. The pro­ject em­pha­sizes the in­ter­re­la­tion and ex­change be­tween hu­mans and non-hu­mans via mi­cro­bial bio-re­me­di­a­tion of human waste ma­te­ri­als (like hair, dead skin cells, per­spi­ra­tion) and com­postable ma­te­r­ial (potato starch, corn­starch, agar, etc.). In this per­for­mance and site spe­cific in­stal­la­tion work, cus­tom made in­cu­ba­tors are worn on the human body in order to feed mi­crobes and com­mu­ni­cate with them through the process of de­com­po­si­tion, degra­da­tion and re­gen­er­a­tion of  waste ma­te­ri­als.

This paper will pre­sent key is­sues aris­ing from mak­ing, wear­ing and dis­pos­ing of hand­made portable biodegrad­able in­cu­ba­tors. The Human In­cu­ba­tor for Feed­ing Mi­crobes, done as part of Bioart­camp in the Banff Na­tional Park, Canada, will be the case study. How might the ma­te­ri­al­ity, func­tion and de­sign aes­thetic of techno-sci­en­tific equip­ment- specif­i­cally the in­cu­ba­tor-be al­tered by reimag­in­ing mi­cro­bial and non-hu­man-hu­man in­ter­ac­tions?

The Planetary Collegium is an international, transdisciplinary platform for research in art, technology and consciousness, with its hub based in the University of Plymouth, and nodes in Kefalonia, Milan, and Zurich. In 2011, it received the World Universities Forum Award for Best Practice in Higher Education.It was first established as the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA) in Wales in 1994, by Roy Ascott, who moved it to Plymouth University in 2003, reconstituted as the Planetary Collegium. With a widely dispersed membership, it constitutes a worldwide research community of artists, musicians, performers, designers, architects, theorists and scholars. It aims to produce new knowledge in the context of the arts, through transdisciplinary inquiry and critical discourse, with special reference to technoetic research and to advances in science and technology. It seeks to reflect the social, technological and spiritual aspirations of an emerging planetary society, while sustaining a critical awareness of the retrograde forces and fields that inhibit social and cultural development.The Collegium seeks outcomes that involve new language, systems, structures, behaviours, and insights through a transdisciplinary research. Some fifty doctorates have been awarded, and its graduates are internationally recognised as occupying leading positions in their field.The I‑Node of the Planetary Collegium is located on the island of Kefalonia, Greece and hosted by the Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture (ICAC). Its location can be characterized as a geographical point of great importance for financial and cultural exchanges between East and West. Therefore the I‑Node expands the original research environment of the Planetary Collegium to diverse cultures and societies which are embraced by the Mediterranean, the Black, the Red the Arabian and Caspian Seas. By this way it enhances the transcultural intersections and widens the network of telematic communities of the Planetary Collegium.

(Short paper)

In this presentation I attend to the compressed image in relation to contemporary discussions on digital aesthetics. If compression constantly redefines visual information as it enables data to travel through digital infrastructures, the key question then is- what is this redefinition? I examine the way data compression translates information in an act of productive reduction that obscures, marks and folds the image. It draws from David Joselit’s After Art and Hito Steyerl’s In defense of the poor image to argue, not for its possible mass dissemination and representation, but for the ontological potentials and dangers of the image itself. Alongside this discussion images and video of my practice are presented. Compression and loss are incorporated as an artistic strategy in my practice whereby hybrid digitally and physically compressed works form encounters with trace, difference and loss.

Abstract

The close examination of communication artifacts can reveal much about the constituent elements of culture, values and the institutional contexts within which we function. In this presentation, the subject of inquiry is the repository of in-house corporate video based communications utilized in training employees of the Bank of America Corporation. Through an analytical critique of information technology within the corporate environment, the grammar of these communications is exposed for its implication of an imaginary subject: the virtual corporate body. In-house communications, particularly video communication and specifically ‘training tapes’, are considered as the manifestation or enunciation of the virtual corporate body, and also as the originally site of the imaginary within the institution. The presentation is a summary of two essays on information technology and institutional reification appearing in the American periodicals, ‘Afterimage’, ‘Video Networks’ and in the upcoming City Lights Press book, Un-Wired.

Abstract

The widespread and constantly increasing use of mobile phones with location detection capabilities presents opportunities for ubiquitous, ‘always on’ applications of ICTs. Such technologies may be employed for communication purposes, leading to the appearance of locative media. Due to their successful combination of physical and digital environmental elements, locative media can offer a unique experience when used for communicative, gaming and entertainment purposes, as demonstrated by a number of relevant implementations. In this paper we describe such an implementation of a location-based mobile game (LBMG) system called LOCUNET and highlight some results and conclusions drawn from a study of its use.

The LOCUNET project primarily aimed at formulating a comprehensive theoretical framework of locative media use as a communicative practice. This framework synthesises aspects of a number of theories on human behaviour, communication, and play. This paper is a follow-up to previous work that presented the theoretical foundations of this project and the general principles behind its inception. It describes an LBMG activity that took place in Athens, Greece for the purpose of evaluating the theoretical framework of LOCUNET and presents findings that are regarded as particularly relevant and useful to designers of location-based communication and entertainment media.

In its pure form mathematics is often practiced with inquiry as its motivation and aesthetic discovery as its goal. Defining aesthetic experience is difficult. I consider an aesthetic experience a heightened moment when one finds resonance with the perceived, transcending sensation and emotion, and for some, moving towards the spiritual. An aesthetic moment is not dependent on sensory information. It is cognitive, the mind interacting with perception. Cognition and perception are concerned with ideas, not external objects. Even as basic an experience as color is not dependent on sensory input. Anyone who dreams in color can attest to this. The experience is directly with thoughts, with ideas.

With the advent of technology it is possible to manifest mathematical objects as images, sounds, sculpture and even poetry. Artists in all media have found mathematics (most often described algorithmically) of value in their creative enterprise. Through algorithmic works we discover an inherent beauty and meaning in mathematics, perceived by the senses through objects defined in space or time, for example numbers mapped into color or pitch. Often the source of these works, the mathematical proof, the algorithm, has a beauty (elegance in mathematical parlance) that itself has aesthetic worth. Mathematical ideas can not only be a source for aesthetic construction, but can themselves catalyze aesthetic experience.

Ideas do not need representation in the external, physical world in order to be known. This premise is fundamental to creative activity. Mathematical ideas continue to contribute greatly to the creative endeavors of our civilization. Masterworks of this mathematic enterprise have survived through millennia not only as tools for science but as resonant ideas of aesthetic substance.

Abstract (long paper)

Curatorial trends in contemporary digital video art exhibition practices are very much reliant on both the standards and restrictions of digital art preservation, as well as new forms of art production and distribution. This paper assesses current approaches to the exhibition of video artworks that were either created for online distribution or first exhibited via online content sharing platforms. Often politically charged, these online works voluntarily take a marginal position in opposition to institutional exhibition modes. This paper addresses the specificities of online video art exposure and distribution, such as distributed aesthetics within contemporary cultural economies. We claim that online distribution and access are manifested in the digital video itself, through critical aesthetics of noise, compression and precarity as defined by Fetveit (2013). From our viewpoint, the act of commissioning online video artworks, as well as the preservation of online-generated aesthetics, is a mode of inquiry in contemporary digital culture and critical curating. We further discuss four curatorial models that expose online video works by contextualizing them in the art space. In this paper, we present case studies of video artworks that both demonstrate expressive or political use of noise and are distributed through online video sharing platforms. We analyze how the aesthetics of these videos –their poverty– operate in the conditions of cultural economy and how these videos circulate in between online and onsite exhibition modes.

The IndaPlant Project is an act of trans-species giving designed to facilitate the free movement and metabolic function of ordinary houseplants. Now in the first year of a two-year production cycle, this initiative is dedicated to creating a community of light-sensing robotic vehicles, each of which is able to respond to the needs of a potted plant by moving it around in three-dimensional space in search of sunlight and water. The initial IndaPlant unit currently carries out basic sun- and water-seeking functions and is wired through an Arduino board. It is chargeable via solar power and can perform motion planning to independently avoid obstacles during movement. IndaPlant is a collaboration among the departments of Fine Art, Ecology & Evolution, and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers University. It was initially conceived by the artist Elizabeth Demaray to be an installation in a domestic environment, in which a community of robotically controlled houseplants could share information with one another or, conversely, compete for resources. Demaray states, “My primary interest in creating this piece lies in the poetic implications of turning an immobile houseplant—which is completely dependent upon human largesse and care—into a free agent which, depending upon either programming or emergent properties, could become a potentially cooperative or competitive entity”. The emergent properties of a company of autonomous, light-seeking houseplants will be fascinating to both observe and program. Of particular interest to the IndaPlant work group is the possibility of creating a self-governing population of data sharers. In this scenario, the environmental data collected by one IndaPlant could be communicated between members of the community and be used for group decision making.

(Short paper)

Keywords: IndaPlant, robotics, eco-robotics, mobile plant, plantbot, machine vision, floraborg, cyber-physical interface.

The IndaPlant Project: An Act of Trans-Species Giving is a generative artwork in which houseplants are robotically enabled to freely move in search of sunlight and water. This project has successfully constructed a floraborg, a term its creators coined to describe an entity that is part plant and part robot. Originally debuted at ISEA2012, the interdisciplinary collaboration now consists of a community of three light-sensing, robotic vehicles, each of which responds to the needs of a potted plant by moving it around in three-dimensional space. This paper presents an overview of current floraborg life and details the research in and across art, engineering, computer science and biology that makes self-sufficient, data-sharing IndaPlants possible. These initiatives include the creation of a self-monitoring computer vision system, a self-watering mechanism that utilizes plants’ transpiration, and a cyber-physical interface to support plant-machine communication, and by extension, a new paradigm in plant-to-human interaction.

What is the impact of new (digital) technologies in the uses of language in visual arts? Different artists are researching in their work the implications of Internet and mobile technologies on language and communication. Widespread desires and longings for a global community are being questioned. Other questions arise including the way these changes influence our day-to-day life and our manners?

Panel Statement

Panel: Transcultural Approaches

In 1986 I took my first round-the-world trip. I was shocked to discover that current affairs and news television was the same everywhere I went The reason was obvious – all the tv companies were using the same electronic production devices, things like paint systems, caption generators and digital video effects generators. These systems contain a define (though often
overlooked) signature which imposes itself on the content of the work produced. In modernist terms this could be proposed as the “essence” of the medium. Turn down the audio and TV screens in Singapore or Bahrain looked identical to the offerings of NBC, CBS or the BBC. This experience stimulated my thinking about unintended forms of cultural imperialism and domination. I do not doubt the ethics of the designers of electronic graphics systems. It is highly unlikely that they intended to curtail the creativity of indigenous cultural groups. They did, however unwittingly, build their own cultural perspective into the systems they designed. The rapid growth in the use of these systems (along with more traditional production tools and media) has produced a global culturally homogeneous television.
It is as if a world-wide war has been fought and won (by the First World) or lost (by the Third) a few seem aware or perturbed. In fact when I discussed these issues recently one American delegate was indignant. She argued that anything that homogenizes human activity was beneficial (since it should increase harmony) and that my claims for cultural imperialism were negativistic (socialist?) rhetoric. Nevertheless the experience of global TV gives us a modern high-tech example of First World domination that ranks, in my opinion, alongside the Eurocentric “education” of the Australian Aborigine. This often included the separation of families and the forced adoption of black children by “right minded” white Christian families. These policies failed and the massive harm caused is well documented. Nowadays there are few who defend such atrocities. Why then do so few seemed alarmed by the ubiquity of high technology and its intrinsic value systems and cultural perspectives?

“The truth, the central stupendous truth about developed countries today is that they can have – in anything but the shortest run -the kind and scale of resources they decide to have… It is no longer resources that limit decisions. It is the decision that makes the resources, This is the fundamental revolutionary change—perhaps the most revolutionary man has ever known. _U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations

The Installation Series of Untitled (Wishes, Lies and Dreams >> Primitive Cool…) invites you to step into an enchanted garden, simultaneously idyllic yet bizarrely repellent in its stark beauty. Riches of baubles, pearls and diamonds are strewn alongside the frozen wildlife in this universe. The natural and the artificial are thrown into coexistence in this dreamscape that is both familiar and uncanny. A life-sized ape stares into the distance—is it fascinated by or fearful of what it sees? The human-ape has wishes, lies and dreams for its future, which may swing towards a return to a more innocent, primitive state, or continue on its materialistic march. This atmospheric glittering world focuses on the mechanisms of perception and dreams, the private world of the world of fantasy and unconscious, and the conditions underlying the system by which the human mind and spirit operates.

Sarawut Chutiwongpeti is interested in revealing the unexplored facets of experiences and exploring the interdisciplinarity of art and culture.

Relationship to Art & and the Animal
I am interested in finding out how contemporary art can foster a profound universality in human nature and investigating the uniquely human trait of consumerism and consumption. My installation provokes an ambiguous relationship between the object, its function and its appearance, unlocking a mysterious force field on the border of truths and lies, which force the viewer to take up a new position in the observation of the surrounding world. Our wishes, lies and dreams are human habits, which strive towards changing our reality. Would this be considered “cool” by our primitive ancestors?

This paper will explore two sets of virtual environments —Virtual Bodies, and NBC’s virtual environments as used in the OJ Simpson trial— as sites of continual contestation and negotiation among social, political, economic, and technological forces; as phenomena through which notions of subjectivity flow and collide; and as demonstrations of the incommensurability of pain and terror. This immersive, interactive virtual environment is comprised of digital data obtained from technologies which are able to extend our perception to apprehend previously inaccessible properties of our bodies.

The interaction of art and new technologies, design/architecture and science is the basis of visual languages innovations.

The 3D technologies and interactive projections enable artists and film makers to set new visions both for architectural and landscape scenes. There is a broad litterature about the relation between art, architecture/design and film, so the aim of this paper is not to deepen this discourse, while instead undeline the new hybrid relationships establieshed: architecture provides the spatial and visual  scenario to artists and storytellers, while 3 D digital artworks offer new sensorial explorarions for broadcast new ideas in museum studies and help understanding the environment we are living in.

This paper examines closely the role of interactive multimedia installations and 3D narrative fictions in order to communicate the representation of architecture within the exhibition design contests and how interactivity develops new behaviours and connections when it is a project of public art.  In order to confirm its arguments the essay examines and put in dialogue with Deleuze’s aesthetic positions and the transformations that occur in the exhibition and public space, when these installations are implied. This will be illustrated and analized by two case studies : ‘If building could talk…’ by the German film maker Wim Wenders presented at the last Architecture Biennale di Venezia in Italy and « Sandbox » by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at the beach of Santa Monica in California, still in 2010.

In the final part of the paper, I will explore how the immersive experiences and ‘contemplative immersion’ positions of the viewers/participants are enriching opportunities to learn and generate new form of sense in our contemporary society.

We are interested here in highlight relevant aspects and innovations of some studies that describe the choreographic implications in interactive art based on movement, as well as some experimental and theoretical references proposed by women who had a pioneering role in the History of Dance.

We are interested to describe, analyze and propose to dance a new concept: the concept of Interactive Digital Choreography. So our focus is in the digital choreographic possibilities with interactive quality, and contributions and new ideas proposed by women who participated in the recent history of Interactive Dance. It rather is an attempt to write the history of dance in interface with new technologies, highlighting those contributions often not revealed in official written, and generally male, history of dance.

Interactive means mutually influential. As against a traditional instrument that produces no more than what its performer specifies, an interactive musical instrument contains algorithms that share control of the music with its performer, thereby causing the music produced by the instrument to contain some unpredictable information to which the performer reacts. The historical context for such instruments was the notion of functioning system that grew out of the systems theories of the 1950’s, and the modular synthesizers of the 1960’s made it possible to create functioning musical systems such as those developed by Salvatore Martirano and the author. By the 1970’s, other composers, in Paris, San Francisco, and New York, had begun to work along similar lines. By the 1980’s, the idea became widespread and many composers in North America and Europe were creating and performing with interactive instruments. In 1986, ‘M’, a commercially available program designed to create interactive systems, was developed at Intelligent Music, a software company that Chadabe formed in upstate New York. By this time in the 1990’s, the idea has become manifest also in interactive media and it is likely to develop further in that direction.

Abstract

Do interactive systems provide equal access for the representation of the feminine and the masculine? If they do, they would revolutionize the existing signifying practice of the male dominated order based on the primacy of the phallic sign. It comes, therefore as no surprise that so far interactive systems have only contributed to the visual pleasure of the phallocentric culture. From a feminist point of view, the idea of the interactive systems as a revolutionary technology needs some critical examination.

An interactive system is here understood as an apparatus consisting of the user and that which faces the user: the inter-face. This inter-face is not considered as a transparent window to the information, but an opaque text carrying within itself the hierarchical presumptions of our culture. The “face” of the inter-face suggests capability for the mutual exchange of looks and establishes vision and visuality as the privileged means of communication. In privileging the sight, the interface functions as the mirror image of the phallocentric culture. Jacques Lacan
describes mirror image as the image of the complete self that the subject identifies with. The subjectivity constituted by the inter-facial exchange is that of the monocular subject navigating in the Cartesian space of linear light and graspable objects which provide the pleasure of control for the phallic I/eye. But, as Lacan has demonstrated, the subject should not be understood only as the eye looking at the screen but also as an image on the screen in the visual field of the other screens. Luce Irigaray has pointed out that the primacy of the phallic sign is based on its visibility. This means that in the economy of representation, the mirror of the phallocentric culture is only capable of reflecting the visible sameness of the masculine. It leaves the place of the feminine empty. Irigaray’s writing can be seen as a signifying practice impregnating the phallic discourse with the signifiers of the feminine sexuality: multiplicity and proximity mediated by touch. The feminine might turn an inter-face into an inter-skin. The hypothetical inter-skin does not leave us in complete blindness, but suggests the multiplicity of passages for the information flow.

The International Society for Art, Science and Technology (ISAST) is part of The Art, Science and Technology Network. Our Mission: Leonardo/ISAST serves the international arts community by promoting and documenting work at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and technology, and by encouraging and stimulating collaboration between artists, scientists, and technologists. Vision Statement: Science and Technology dominate our current landscape, emerging with an intensity and velocity never before experienced. This intense intellectual creativity needs to be integrated with the humanizing activity of creating art, to bring balance to how we experience our current existence and imagine our futures. Over the course of history, art has been both an organizing and integrating role with our emotional and intellectual lives. Art serves as a means of presenting, questioning, understanding and creating order out of chaos and change. Imagination often leads the way of discovery in science. Innovation of art, science and technology will allow for new ideas that may be important economically and socially. Leonardo/ISAST serves as the organization that nurtures and fosters this alliance between the arts and sciences, proactively bringing these social networks together leading to greater creativity and social change in both areas. Activities include publication of the art, science and technology journal Leonardo; the Leonardo Music Journal; the Leonardo Book Series; the electronic journal, Leonardo Electronic Almanac; and our World Wide Web Site, Leonardo On-Line (all published by The MIT Press). We have a sister organization in France, the Association Leonardo, which publishes the Observatoire Leonardo Web Site. We have a number of other activities including the Leonardo Educators and Students Program and an awards program. Leonardo/ISAST is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The activities of Leonardo/ISAST are supported by grants and donations from organizations and individuals. Donations are tax-deductible in the U.S.

Critical code studies draws heavily on a literary tradition that assimilates computer code to text. Their preferred method of analysis, the close reading of code, finds limits to cope both with the ongoing process of computation and with visual programming frameworks such as Puredata and vvvv. The aforementioned languages follow a paradigm called dataflow, which organizes algorithms as diagrams throughout which information circulates. Mechanical in themselves, these languages are impossible to be properly quoted and notated. Even the idea of writing would be insufficient to describe them, as it does not consider the necessary, reflexive engagement of the system to human operation.

Since these frameworks are becoming increasingly popular and turning into an important standard for the creation of art pieces, it seems necessary to define a proper method for their analysis. This paper aims to indicate some preliminary references for such method. It departs from the assumption that code is a manifestation of the computing mechanism’s performance (i.e. the concrete operation of carrying something into effect), and in that sense being equivalent to the computer’s mediatic surface effects, such as aural and visual outputs.

We test this hypothesis by comparing of the activity of computation to the very process of coding as it is enacted by the user’s performance. For that, we chose to analyse the practice of livecoding, which seem to be a particularly well-suited object because its condition of spectacle entails the most intense feedback not only between computer code and its effects, but also between the computer and the user.

Our particular case is Dave Griffiths’ highly constrained BetaBlocker software environment/ performance. Similar to dataflow languages, BetaBlocker’s mode of input consists of position-sensitive coloured patterns. These visual mechanisms, which are code itself, are also the program’s only visual output, creating confusion between control interface and surface effects. Thus, the nature of coding is revealed as the dynamic interplay between the programmer and the machine.

Finally, we look for a horizon to both the performances of coding and computation in Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm series, considering issues of agency, awareness and consciousness in computer operation.

The Exploratorium is planning to move to a new site along the cities’ northern waterfront not far from the San Francisco Art Institute. To better understand the context of this area, The Exploratorium is collaborating with SFAI’s Center for Art+Science, the Center for Media Culture, the Center for Public Practice, and the Center for Word, Text, and Image. As a team, it has become clear that to create an all-encompassing view of the new neighborhood in relation to the city, we cannot ignore our relationship with the Bay and also with the Pacific Ocean. By raising our sights from the neighborhoods surrounding The Exploratorium’s potential new home to looking at the City of San Francisco in relation to the Bay Region and to the Pacific, we have finally reached a scale where we think we can look back down through a series of lenses of different magnification and focal lengths to begin seeing the multiple interactions and relationships that give this place its character. What are the systems that make living on the edge of the Bay and the Pacific so dynamic? Are we adequately equipped to look at and understand the many layers of information? Do we have the appropriate ‘maps’, ‘tools’ and ‘technologies’ to help us understand this location? How can artists and other researches help us begin to describe these systems in ways that begin to reveal their interrelationships? To investigate these questions, we are forming partnerships with artists, scientists, scholars, researchers and practitioners. We plan to include more institutional partners as our direction becomes more sharply defined.

Five research projects are currently underway including Hidden Ecologies, a micro/macro/biological and cultural cross referencing of physical areas of San Francisco Bay; Trace, an exploration of the evolving urban wireless (“Hertzian Landscape”) networks of San Francisco, Cabspotter – an investigation of the social and electronic trails of a bay area taxi system, Move Here, a study of contemporary and historic strategies for compelling people to move to the Bay Area, and a piece installed by a team of Art Institute student researchers.

When the Exploratorium and the San Francisco Art Institute try to imagine what it will be like here in the future, many of the clues seem to come from farther west. Our future intertwined relationships with the communities and cultures of the Pacific Rim will define our way of life for many years to come. We posit that it is instructive to look at and try to understand some of the dynamics of the Bay Region as a step towards understanding the complexities of the systems that define the Pacific Rim. Given the scale of this investigation weighed against our limited means, the investigations we are conducting can only begin to create a skeleton of understanding. As we get closer to moving into a new home and as we engage new individual and institutional partners from the region, we plan to continue developing a clearer and more comprehensive picture of the Invisible Dynamics that expresses us in the context of the Bay and the Pacific Rim: the interrelationships of commerce, culture, climate, art, demographics, tectonics, science, transportation, basic infrastructure, communication, economy, education and many others.

We are interested in sharing experiences about related projects around the Pacific Rim. We look forward to hearing from people or institutions that are developing similar viewpoints and, in particular, we hope to meet like-minded people at the ISEA Conference.

Panel Statement

Panel: The Invisible Planet

Fred Truck will act as moderator of the panel, introduce the panelists, and give a very brief overview of the city as an image and metaphor, as well as explain the city as it is being used now as a metaphor in virtual reality.

Panel Statement

Panel: The Invisible Planet

I will present two recent ‘televirtual’ projects – TELEVIRTUAL CHIT CHAT by Jeffrey Shaw and THE TELEVIRTUAL FRUIT MACHINE by Agnes Hegedus. Both works were produced at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) Karlsruhe, Germany, and the application software was written by Gideon May.

TELEVIRTUAL CHIT CHAT was a telematic installation between the IMAGINA in Monte Carlo and the ZKM in Karlsruhe in 1993. Players at both sites communicated in a shared visual space generated by Silicon Graphics computers linked by modem. Players could choose letters from the alphabet and manipulate their shape and spatial position so as to create shared and interwoven word- architectures on top of a game board that represented the geographical space between Monte Carlo and Karlsruhe. The work evokes a metaphor for all those ‘first words’ now being projected into cyberspace. THE TELEVIRTUAL FRUIT MACHINE was a telematic installation between the NIT/IC’93 exhibition MEDIA PASSAGE in Tokyo, and the ZKM exhibition MultiMediale 3 in Karlsruhe in 1993. Players at both sites communicated in a shared visual space generated by Silicon Graphics computers linked by modem. An ISDN videophone link also enabled the players to see and talk to each other. Each player controlled the spatial disposition of half of a spherical object, mapped on whose surface were images of various fruits. The goal for the two players was to join the respective halves of this sphere, and their success would be rewarded by a shower of virtual Japanese or German coins – evoking those ubiquitous gambling fruit machines as well as fruitful intercourse.

Panel: The Invisible Planet

This paper describes the networked virtual reality application, Virtual Polis a three dimensional city, inclusive of a high-rise building, private domiciles, art museum, stores and a park. Tele-existence is an essential aspect, as potentially the city can be inhabited by a multitude of participants, each with their own purposes. As much as a grand social experiment, it also is a far reaching graphical user interface (GUI) for cultural experience, electronic home shopping, and entertainment. The city is discussed from technical, sociological and semantic viewpoints. The salient points of the virtual city include: – a distributed, three dimensional inhabitable environment – investigation of tele-existence in a distributed virtual construct – capability of supporting potentially unlimited participants – private spaces, property and moral code
exploration of tools to alter the environment, while inhabiting it – interface (GUI) for home shopping and entertainment.

The premier of the Virtual Polis Version 2.0 prototype was presented at Virtual Reality OSLO-94 where end users explored the city, as a dynamic example of networked virtual reality. The Virtual Polis is produced by Carl Eugene Loeffler, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University.

KeyStroke is a distributed Multi-User Media Synthesizer application currently running on the MacOS. It offers a dynamic environment for creating live, collaborative multimedia performances via Internet or LAN. It is a vehicle for simultaneous experimentation with cross-media interaction and social interplay. As a performance tool it provides a broad framework for live, networked interaction allowing a pervasive scope of artistic and communicative utilities and techniques including realtime audio and image synthesis, streaming and webcam functionality and extensive media chat capabilities.

Panel: The Art of Software Cities

The final chap­ter in Jane Ja­cobs’ The Death and Life of Great Amer­i­can Cities from 1961 is en­ti­tled “The Kind of Prob­lem a City Is.”  Ja­cobs ac­counts for the re­la­tions be­tween urban de­vel­op­ment strate­gies and the pro­gres­sion of sci­ence. Through sta­tis­ti­cal ma­te­r­ial, sci­ence in the 20th cen­tury be­came ca­pa­ble of man­ag­ing cities as com­lex or­gan­isms. Un­for­tunal­tely, urban plan­ners at the time did not know much about the ac­tual in­ter­ac­tions mak­ing up the or­gan­ism. Ja­cobs stresses that urban plan­ners need to think in processes that ex­plains the gen­eral by the spe­cific rather than in sta­tis­ti­cal in­for­ma­tion that op­presses both the process and the spe­cific. Today, dig­i­tal media changes the cityscape with media fa­cades, urban screens, mo­bile screens, com­puter gen­er­ated ar­chi­tec­tural forms and so on. How­ever it is not only media that is in­tro­duced to the city but also soft­ware.

A dis­tinct char­ac­ter­is­tic for soft­ware cities is that the rep­re­sen­ta­tions of media are al­ways con­nected to un­der­ly­ing com­pu­ta­tional processes that change the com­plex life forms of the city. Un­der­stand­ing soft­ware cities we must com­pare the city with the soft­ware at a spe­cific level. The pre­sen­ta­tion will seek to do this by in­clud­ing the ar­chi­tect Christo­pher Alexan­der’s idea of a ‘pat­tern lan­guage’ (that has been much more in­flu­en­tial in soft­ware de­sign than in ar­chi­tec­ture) and argue that we must look be­yond the form and spec­ta­cles soft­ware im­poses and begin to pay at­ten­tion to the ac­tiv­ity it fos­ters. The pre­sen­ta­tion will pre­sent a view on the pat­terns of soft­ware cities and fur­ther­more re­flect on the ac­ces­si­bil­ity of soft­ware cities as a pub­lic do­main. In what ways does soft­ware in cities re­sponds to our life?

Abstract

Electronic artists rely on technologies developed by disciplines which did not exist just a few decades ago: computer graphics, image processing, computer vision, human-computer interface design, virtual reality and so on. The paper traces the history of these currently prominent image disciplines. My analysis begins in the 1920s when avant-garde artists, inspired by modern engineering, tried to systematically apply its principles to visual communication. To engineer vision meant to be able to affect the viewer with engineering precision, predictability, and effectiveness. Thus, Dziga Vertov championed montage as the most economical kind of communication while Sergei’ Eisenstein searched for units to measure communication’s efficiency.

In its desire to engineer vision, the avant-garde was ahead of its time. The systematic engineering of vision took place only after World War II with the shift to post-industrial society. In post-industrial society, the mental labor of information processing is more important than manual labor. In contrast to a manual worker of the industrial age an operator in a human-machine system is primarily engaged in the observation of displays which present information in real time about the changing status of a system or an environment, real or virtual: a radar screen tracking a surrounding space; a computer screen updating the prices of stocks; a video screen of a computer game presenting an imaginary battlefield, etc. In short, vision becomes the major instrument of labor, the most productive organ of a worker in a human-machine system. The research into human-machine interfaces — from first computer graphics displays of the late 1940s to today’s VR — can be seen as attempts to make the use of vision in this new role as efficient as possible.

The importance of information processing for post-industrial society also leads to the necessity to automate as much of it as possible. The ultimate aim is the complete replacement of human cognitive functions by a computer, including the substitution of human vision by computer vision. This is the second trajectory of image research in post-industrial society; from pattern recognition systems of the 1950s to today’s computer vision systems.

In summary, most of the new research into imaging and vision after World War II can be understood as following two directions: on the one hand, making human vision in its new role of human-machine interface as efficient and as productive as possible; on the other hand, transferring vision from a human to a computer. Why should this historical analysis be of concern to electronic artists? The notion that the artist functions outside of society, history, and industry is a modernist myth. Modernist artists were not only the pioneers of the utilitarian
aesthetics of modern industrial design and the techniques of modern advertisement and political propaganda, but they have also pioneered the post-modern engineering of vision, the integration of human and machine in human-machine systems, and the replacement of human vision by computer vision. Today, computer graphics industry is one of the sites of this engineering. Whether computer artists acknowledge or ignore their relationship to this industry, it exists. Acknowledging rather than ignoring this relationship is the first step toward a critical computer art practice.

The Lake is the first in a series of artworks that track groups of animals via electronic tagging systems and transforms the motion data collected into musical composition and animated visuals. Supported by NESTA and presented at Tingrith Fishery, UK, the site-specific work collected real-time movement data from sixteen fish and used a modular software system to create a unique digital audio visual experience for visitors.The work explores how we can create an interface for communication between biological systems and technological systems in an artistic context.

Preface to the ISEA2016 Art Catalogue

The landscape of electronic art has over the years produced certain ‘must see’ loci of which ISEA is certainly one of its most important points of convergence. Instigated in the Netherlands in 1988, ISEA has managed to maintain currency and urgency by so far travelling to twenty-one cities across the world and continuously being reinvented and reinvigorated by the passion of its organizers in those cities. The landscape of electronic art has undergone remarkable transformations and evolvements over the last 50+ years. This has been driven by artists’ perennial urge to renew (to regenerate and rehabilitate) the practice of art, in conjunction with the exceptional flourishing of new media resources and new modalities of intercommunication. ISEA, together with the other landmark institutions, festivals and exhibitions that have sprung up to celebrate this efflorescence of creativity, constitute vital communities of practice that consolidate and replenish the aesthetic and conceptual vigor of this hyperbola. It is Hong Kong’s privilege to host ISEA in 2016 – to take its place and to contribute to the current and future trajectory of electronic art. It is also an opportunity to promulgate and integrate its own proud traditions of media art that have been a dynamic feature of Hong Kong’s cultural landscape for over 30 tears. The Asian contribution to the history of electronic art is paramount – its luminaries and singular formations have inculcated media art with many of its most essential aspects. Each ISEA is a fortuitous concatenation of the enthusiasm (and hard work) of those persons who pull it together, and the ardent engagement (and hard work) of those artists and writers who give content to its body of programs and exhibitions. It is also the purposeful platform for a community of zealots and supporters (and critics) to come together from all over the world and share and learn from direct experience. Electronic art today operates under the sway of the global entrancement with the ever more ‘out of this world’ prospects of an electronic future. The allure of the new, of ‘innovation’, goes without question and is an infatuation that underpins economic and social policy almost everywhere. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler talks about the immense transformation that is currently underway “…that is leading globalized consumerism to liquidate all forms of knowledge (savoir vivre, savoir faire and savoir conceptualiser, knowledge of how to live, do and think).” If our academic and artistic project is about ‘creating new knowledge’, then in Stiegler’s words we need knowledge that “ …enriches and individuates the social organization in which (we) live without destroying it.” This at heart is the project of ISEA2016 ‘Cultural R>evolution’.

Panel: Pervasive Media: Practice, Value, Culture

There is an emer­gent lan­guage of Per­va­sive Media. A set of jar­gon, ver­nac­u­lar and de­scrip­tive terms that sur­round the pro­duc­tion of these new ex­pe­ri­ences is being gen­er­ated by the pro­duc­ers, de­sign­ers, artists, aca­d­e­mics, crit­ics and users that sur­round Per­va­sive Media. This has de­vel­oped in re­sponse to the lack of the cor­rectly nu­anced lan­guage in other media pro­duc­tion. This cur­rent re­search de­vel­ops work that was car­ried out dur­ing the Mo­bile Bris­tol pro­ject, where var­i­ous de­sign di­men­sions of mo­bile media were iden­ti­fied, such as so­cial­ity, place, or genre. Through work­shops with prac­ti­tion­ers and aca­d­e­mics based at the Per­va­sive Media Stu­dio the key con­cepts and the de­tails of the lan­guage that is used to de­scribe the ex­pe­ri­ence and pro­duc­tion of these pieces of per­va­sive media. At first a num­ber of ar­che­typal and suc­cess­ful pro­jects were ex­plored, get­ting peo­ple to ex­pe­ri­ence them and then dis­cuss them, often with the de­sign­ers and artists them­selves pre­sent. Fol­low­ing on from that a num­ber of key con­cepts were iden­ti­fied, such as play and space, and these were ex­am­ined more gen­er­ally and com­pared across pro­jects. This work is lead­ing to­wards the pro­duc­tion of a ‘Per­va­sive Media Cook­book’ that will pre­sent key pro­jects in per­va­sive media as well as a crit­i­cal look into the specifics that set Per­va­sive Media apart from other media ex­pe­ri­ences.

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) is a well-known exemple of interdisciplinarity at the intersection of Art, Science and Technology. It was founded by Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer, Robert Whitman and Robert Rauschenberg in order to facilitate collaboration between artist and engineer, and conceived as a creative and experimental process for research.
The organization has been examined in part by curators, art historians and researchers who focus mainly on the “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” festival (1966) and, to a lesser degree, on the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at “Expo ’70”, at the Osaka World Fair. The Pavilion can be seen, as Fred Waldhauer says, as “a culmination of the experiment during 9 Evenings”. The organization and its projects are often interpreted either in terms of their success (by defenders of new media art), or their failure (by contemporary art critics).

From a different perspective, however, the Pavilion can be considered as a turning point. Closer examination of the statements associated with E.A.T. projects pre- or postdating the Pavilion, or even projects that remained unrealized (which are numerous and merit attention), reveals the omnipresence of the concept of “environment”. Beyond the development of devices as tools or instruments, that would be available to other artists, the idea of a variable environment that was investigated in the Pavilion, in both its sonic and visual dimensions, can be considered as a key concept in understanding the switch by E.A.T from an art to a non-art context. E.A.T.’s legacy can be said to rest on the early development of an environmental aesthetics. This aesthetics, however, does not focus on the idea of nature (as the prevalent notion of “environment” has it) but rather on the built and, particularly, the technological environment. This environmental aesthetics problematizes the nature/culture dichotomy in a manner that is of particular relevance to contexts that are increasingly infiltrated by technology. As a result, it can be brought to bear, fruitfully, on discussions of contemporary strategies in art and design, ecology and technology.

This artist talk describes the process of creating an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience. The virtual world was created entirely in VR using Google Tilt Brush and it was set up as part of a performance/installation along with 5 other physical stations, all working under the same narrative context. The experience was further enhanced, through augmented virtuality techniques. Through this talk, the author will explain the processes employed to create and showcase this work, along with some thoughts for further explorations.

In this paper, I would like to examine  the social function of interactive installations in public space by focusing on a specific multimedia work: ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel’. In addition to this, I want to analyse the potentials in the collaboration of interaction and public space, and to point out dynamic exchanges between them.

‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel’ was a non-commercial multimedia project for the fifth Light Culture festival, LUMINALE 2010, in Frankfurt. During this international festival, artists, designers, architects use the urban space as a canvas for creative illuminations. In this context, the Willy-Brandt-Platz underground station had become a platform to tell a theatrical story with the help of light and interaction.

The experience of passers-by of the place was guided from the entrance points of the station to the ‘interactive stage’. Through the large stairway at the B-level of the station, the passengers became ‘the spectators’ of a digital theater play which was staged by other passers-by. Via motion tracking and moving stage lights, each protagonist was pointed as ‘on stage’ and they were able to enter into dialogues with their fellows. They performed their roles only with the body movements and activated the quotes taken from the plays of Schauspiel Frankfurt as sound and text on LED panel. The result was a ‘quote theatre’ that was generated by people’s movements.

Willy-Brandt-Platz underground station was nothing more than being a functional subterranean transit zone. With the help of digital media, our aim there was to make the passers-by stop for a few minutes during their daily routine and to involve them into a theatrical, public experience. Using this specific example, I want to juxtapose practical and theoretical discourses and focus on the issues such as the levels of ‘publicness’ of a public space, the function of the interactive media in public space and the exchanges between these two realms. In addition to these, my aim in this paper is to highlight the interdisciplinar nature of these fields by introducing the mutual relations between interactive media and public space.

(long paper)

Keywords: acoustic ecology, field recording, ambisonics, immersion, virtual reality, modes of listening.

The Listenn project1 is an interdisciplinary media arts project, investigating the pristine acoustic ecologies of Southwest deserts of America. Establishing the largest database of ambisonic and stereo field recordings of the Southwestern landscapes of the United States, the Listenn project is designed to not only archive sound, but to explore how virtual environmental engagement through media arts and sound can cultivate environmental awareness and community agency. It delivers community partnerships and capacity building with enthusiastic communities in four American Southwest desert communities: Joshua Tree, Sequoia & Kings Canyon and Organ Pipe Cactus National Parks and the Mojave Desert Trust. Aiming to empower and encourage communities to make creative contributions to and have agency in the development of the Listenn project, this paper outlines the fieldwork undertaken in 2014 and 2015 and discusses the substantial online listening database, virtual reality and web based tools deployed and currently in development. It will also provide information on the project’s innovative application of ambisonic audio recording and playback to create 360-degree immersive experiences online and through the Oculus Rift VR headset (EcoRift).

The Living Liberia Fabric is an AI-based interactive narrative memorial supporting the goal of lasting piece in Liberia after years of civil war (1989-2003). Initiated in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Liberia, it highlights the role of memorialization in moving toward lasting peace.

The Living Liberia Fabric is an interactive memorial artwork resembling a traditional West-African textile. It is grounded in a multi-year combination of empirical fieldwork and research into cultural needs, values, histories, and aesthetics.

The system begins by displaying illustrated figures representing different stakeholder groups as the sound of the ocean plays comprising a reflective space for mourning. Interaction proceeds via mouse-input, users select a stakeholder group, which subsequently guides the themes invoked.

Poetic captions narrate background information on the war, reflections by stakeholders, and ideas to support peace and reconciliation in the future. These stories are also presented in patterned frames displaying assets such as video clips and archival photography. The frames fade in and out, leaving traces behind after they are gone.

The system was built using GRIOT, an authoring platform for interactive multimedia narratives. User interaction drives the composition and layout of multimedia assets and the generation of narrative text. GRIOT uses an AI representation of concepts and analogy between assets to ensure thematic coherence as users interact.

The Living Liberia Fabric memorial, rooted in Liberian culture, dynamically and improvisationally tells multiple stories to counteract phantasms of civil war that enable subjugation, violence, and oppression while supporting the needs for survival, human rights, and empowerment.

Panel: Beyond Locative: Media Arts after the Spatial Turn

Loca­tive media of­fers to de­liver in­for­ma­tion con­tex­tu­ally, typ­i­cally con­ceived in terms of ge­o­graphic space. Loca­tive prac­tice had sought to play­fully re-im­age the city. As the loca­tive ap­pa­ra­tus has be­come wide­spread, the nov­elty of this man­ner­ist Sit­u­a­tion­ism has di­min­ished, yet it re­mains a use­ful con­cept for dig­i­tal artists and de­sign­ers to con­sider the prospect of every ob­ject on the planet as ad­dress­able and na­ture as a po­ten­tial site for their com­po­si­tions. Key ques­tions ad­dressed in this paper and by the panel as a whole is what comes after loca­tive media’s “spa­tial turn”? What might be the “next big thing” for net­worked prac­tice?  How might we image the net­worked city be­yond loca­tive media?

(Long paper)

Keywords: Physical Computing, Computer Music, Visual Music, Physical Pixels, Arduino, Kinect, SuperCollider

Following the democratization of technology that we have seen since the mid-1990s, a new phase of democratization is currently underway with open hardware. After decades of advances within the software paradigm, interfacing with the physical world is currently one of the most prominent trends in creative computing. Computer music is at the heart of these new developments and many sound artists are part of this movement. In parallel to the development of musical input devices and the use of sensors for artistic purposes, many are working to interface with the physical world through actuators. The Lungta project, an audio-robotic performance, continues this idea of linking computing to the physical world hence propagating musical gestures to actual physical movement.

Method:

1. OBJECTIVE: This presentation proposes a new image representation system which would impress its users as a system offering ‘excitement, enjoyment, and discovery’.

2. THE NEW SYSTEM VS. CURRENT SYSTEMS: Current systems employ CG technology to display the images of, for example, ancient works of pottery in electronic museums. With these systems users can rotate the object by pointing devices so that they can view it from different angles. The Magic Light system has a wholly new feature, however. By putting the magic light to an object on a monitor, observers are able to see the inside part of the object. It looks as if the part of the object gets transparent and hidden part comes out on the surface. It is the effective way to entertain participant by using a light. Also participants can experience sense of discovery, as well.

3. CONCLUSION: The Magic Light system enables users not just to change the angle from which they view an object, but to see through the object. Example applications would include the ability to read the ancient writings hidden inside a treasure vase.

Panel: Voicing Electronic Arts

The dig­i­tally me­di­ated world is a gi­gan­tic mag­net, an or­gan­is­ing force for gen­er­at­ing reg­u­la­tory ac­tiv­i­ties and rul­ing their func­tions across its mag­netic field. The task for crit­ics is to map or – even bet­ter in a sense – to elec­trify other forces op­er­at­ing within the dom­i­nant forces that gen­er­ate so­cial pres­sures. From this per­spec­tive, the paper pro­poses the term mag­netic – which I have coined – as an im­ple­ment that in­vites us to re-think the art­work be­yond its ma­te­r­ial pres­ence and ac­tual sig­ni­fi­ca­tion in dig­i­tal cul­ture. The mag­netic refers to a par­tic­u­lar con­nec­tion be­tween art and pol­i­tics in the age of global cap­i­tal­ism. The paper aims to offer an un­der­stand­ing of look­ing and lis­ten­ing as cen­tral to the process of in­ven­tive and cre­ative in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the world and the mak­ing of knowl­edge of the world. Deal­ing with the el­e­ment of voice and sound in in­stal­la­tion works, the dis­cus­sion in the paper will be cen­tred on the idea that au­dio­vi­sual art­work can be­have like a mag­net by ei­ther pulling things and peo­ple to­wards it­self as well as to each other or push­ing them apart. The mag­netic is the other name of per­for­ma­tiv­ity in­volv­ing the map­ping of the in­vis­i­ble, the tem­po­ral, the de­tach­able, the con­nectible, the re­versible, the mod­i­fi­able.

Panel: Signs of Life: Human-Robot Intersubjectivities

The paper will pre­sent and dis­cuss Mari Velon­aki’s new pro­ject, the hu­manoid robot ‘Dia­man­dini’, in the con­text of Per­cep­tion, Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and Emo­tional ac­ti­va­tion dur­ing hu­man-ro­bot in­ter­ac­tion. Dia­man­dini is a five-year col­lab­o­ra­tive re­search pro­ject con­ducted by Mari and ro­bot­ics sci­en­tists at the Cen­tre for So­cial Ro­bot­ics, Aus­tralian Cen­tre for Field Ro­bot­ics at the Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney. The pro­ject aims to in­ves­ti­gate in­ti­mate hu­man-ro­bot in­ter­ac­tions in order to de­velop an un­der­stand­ing of the phys­i­cal­ity that is pos­si­ble and ac­cept­able be­tween a human and a robot. An­other as­pect of the pro­ject is to dis­cover through ex­per­i­men­ta­tion how human in­ter­ac­tion with an em­bod­ied ro­botic char­ac­ter is af­fected by as­sign­ing ‘per­son­al­i­ties’ and ‘emo­tional states’ to the robot. The Greek word for in­ter­ac­tive is aµdµs, or am­phi-dro­mos (amphi: around on both sides of, dro­mos: street or road). Thus it is de­fined as a mid­dle point where two roads meet. In Eng­lish, the prepo­si­tion ‘inter’ means ‘be­tween’ or ‘among’. In­ter-ac­tion, there­fore, sig­ni­fies be­tween or among ac­tions. A meet­ing point be­yond ac­tion and re­ac­tion and prior to dis­course, a brief mo­ment of recog­ni­tion be­tween two par­ties. The paper uses Dia­man­dini as a case study to de­con­struct se­quen­tial stages of in­ter­ac­tion: ini­tial meet­ing, then per­cep­tion and recog­ni­tion, fol­lowed by emo­tional ac­ti­va­tion. This emo­tional ac­ti­va­tion can lead ei­ther to in­ter­ac­tion with the robot, or cause a re­ac­tion where the spec­ta­tor chooses to ab­stain from en­gag­ing with the robot by, for ex­am­ple, leav­ing the ex­hi­bi­tion space.

A hard copy, code driven, series of “Illuminated Universal Turing Machines” has been created for ISEA98 and can be seen in the Department of Fine Arts. This project commemorates the contributions of Alan Turing to the Digital Arts Revolution

Cartography is living through an Era of Abundance and Waste. There was a time when mapmaking was a laborious craft, involving many years of research, calculation and skill – and even so, it produced nothing more than the approximation of a route, subject to successive revisions. Nowadays, though, it is enough to move around with a cell phone in one’s pocket and, thanks to discrete triangulations of signal, mapping is as precise as inevitable.But if all the continents have already been discovered and there are no new places to explore, what purpose must one give to this surplus of representation?     Perhaps Google will soon have on cartography the same effect that photography had on painting in the late 19th century: first, freeing maps from the burden of realistic imitation; then, legitimizing their character as exercises of formal or political imagination.Following this hypothesis, this essay examines the work of three young Brazilian artists: Daniel Escobar, Marina Camargo and Andrei Thomaz. It is my intention to show how their particular poetic strategies subvert conventional semiotic forms such tourist guides, architectural models, GPS positioning and Google’s fractal maps. By appropriating these forms either as material substances, diagrammatic rules, or technical ensembles, the artists suggest self‑reflexive means of world‑making that pierce through the standard regimes of spatial representation.

Against the anthropocentric binaries such as human/machine, subject/object, mind/body, this paper will offer a counter argument through the theory of originary technicty, which advances the perspective that humans have always been mediated, and as such, the privileged position of the human and its exclusive claim on agency and consciousness needs to be questioned. This perspective will be followed by an examination of the media-facilitated performance of artist Erica Scourti. Through a comparative reading with the work of playwright Samuel Beckett, the paper argues that Scourti’s performance asserts the entanglement of the human and algorithmic/linguistic and questions the boundary between the two.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI), or the notion of a computational system that is operational at the level of human intelligence, could be tentatively posed as the central concern for modern machine intelligence engineering. Qualities such as natural language processing, representation, teleological consciousness and the execution of judgements, if incorporated by an AGI system would not only level the system with the human, but would additionally secure an ‘outside view’, producing a schism between experience and its exterior. [15] The agents of this system, emerging out of a history of human-bound conceptions, now self-conceive their own practical movements, guided by intelligence-qualities and ideas semantically bound to statements of what intelligence is, and what the agents ought to do to make changes. In this sense, the ‘artificial’ in AGI is not merely indicating the system’s status as the artifice of a human engineer, but is the apprehension by the system itself of its own artificiality; the ability to make oneself the artefact of one’s own ends, intelligently crafting worlds exterior to any human-bound construction of concepts.

Panel: The Media Space: Evolving Media Architecture and Its Legend

The ide­ol­ogy of moder­nity has de­voted a high im­por­tance to the pub­lic space. The de­mo­c­ra­tic con­di­tions were in­tended to man­i­fest them­selves there and sup­port the free com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween peo­ple. The ide­ol­ogy was deal­ing with flow­ing spaces that cre­ated no bar­ri­ers; it was deal­ing with the con­struc­tion of spaces that were not re­pelling or in­tim­i­dat­ing by rep­re­sen­ta­tive con­struc­tions. This evolved to the idea of trans­parency, the min­imi­sa­tion of all con­struc­tions, the con­cen­tra­tion on the es­sen­tials. What has be­come of it? The idea of trans­parency has led to the rapid de­vel­op­ment  of the glass tech­nol­ogy in re­cent years. Re­sult: All-glass façades, which in­crease the qual­ity of the inner space by their trans­parency, how­ever only con­tribute to a minor de­gree to the outer in­sight into the re­la­tions of the so­cial sys­tem within the inner part of the build­ings, be­cause most views are blocked by re­flec­tions. And an­other ques­tion is: What can we see in­side? Does that in­side view help us to un­der­stand the so­cial sys­tem be­hind the façade? The min­imi­sa­tion of the con­struc­tion was adapted with en­thu­si­asm by the con­struc­tion in­dus­try. With re­spect to this pa­ra­me­ter, every­thing was al­lowed to be op­ti­mized. Re­sult: There are hardly any re­gional dif­fer­ences in ar­chi­tec­ture; the ar­chi­tec­ture be­came glob­al­ized. Often, the anonymity of the re­main­ing pub­lic spaces ob­structs processes that pro­mote com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Many ar­chi­tects have cre­ated im­por­tant build­ing art by the con­cen­tra­tion on the es­sen­tial. How­ever, also merely profit-dri­ven com­pa­nies re­late to the con­cept and jus­tify the sim­plic­ity of their build­ings in pub­lic by the con­cen­tra­tion on the es­sen­tial. Re­sult: Many build­ings are so char­ac­ter­less that the cities suf­fer from a large in­hos­pi­tal­ity – they just do not offer any sen­sory stim­uli for the eyes to focus on. The idea of the pub­lic space is there­fore fac­ing hard times. How­ever, it is very ob­vi­ous that peo­ple have a large need for com­mu­nity and ex­change. Oth­er­wise the un­be­liev­able suc­cess of the “so­cial media” can hardly be ex­plained. Now many in­di­vid­u­als in our so­ci­ety are to­tally ir­ri­tated due to the ex­is­tence of real trans­par­ent re­la­tions. It is hardly pos­si­ble to hide some­thing. Es­pe­cially the old rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the mod­ern ide­ol­ogy re­gard it as a vi­o­la­tion of their pri­vate af­fairs. But what is pri­vate and what is pub­lic? A dif­fi­cult dis­cus­sion that is still on­go­ing. But the new spaces have clearly been pro­voked by the media. These spaces are much closer to the orig­i­nal idea of moder­nity than the con­tem­po­rary ar­chi­tec­ture it­self. How­ever, these spaces pre­vent us from real en­coun­ters be­cause they are an­chored only vir­tu­ally. In the mo­ment where these vir­tual spaces re­ceive in­ter­faces in phys­i­cal spaces, the urban space be­comes charged with so­cial com­pe­tence – I call  it the “Me­di­a­te­c­ture”. The me­dia-tec­tonic  in­stru­ment in the pub­lic space is the media façade. World­wide there are many ex­am­ples of media façades.  How­ever, in the sense of the pub­lic space as a room with so­cial in­ter­ac­tion, only a few have been cre­ated. There are many ex­am­ples of artis­tic façades, which rep­re­sent a sym­bol for the me­dial act­ing so­ci­ety through the dig­i­tal ap­pli­ca­tion of me­dial tech­nol­ogy. In most  cases  the me­dial il­lus­tra­tion is more or less ab­stract and sup­ported by cu­ra­tors of me­dial art or is funded by com­pa­nies as a sym­bol of their in­no­v­a­tive spirit. How­ever, there are only a few ex­am­ples of media façades which re­ally are based on so­cial processes.  Why is that?? An im­por­tant rea­son is the par­a­digm change that is in­duced by the media façade for those re­spon­si­ble for mu­nic­i­pal plan­ning de­vel­op­ments.  Now, vir­tual and urban spaces be­come mixed and that ques­tions the ide­ol­ogy of the con­cen­tra­tion on the es­sen­tial  in ar­chi­tec­ture. Dig­i­tal art is just ac­cept­able, it can be con­sid­ered as con­struc­tional art. But a media façade, which can cre­ate the whole range of dig­i­tal ap­pli­ca­tions with its full video per­for­mance, is very con­cern­ing for the build­ing de­part­ment heads. And this is un­der­stand­able, be­cause the build­ing de­part­ment head has only few op­tions to con­trol the con­cept of me­dial con­tent pro­duc­tion. There is an ur­gent need to con­struct me­dial de­sign statutes, which reg­u­late care­fully and in in­di­vid­ual ac­cor­dance with the neigh­bour­hood the com­mu­ni­ca­tional aims of such media façades. This is par­tic­u­larly im­por­tant be­cause media façades  are rel­a­tively ex­pen­sive. Such pro­jects are there­fore ex­pected to suc­ceed only if they fol­low a busi­ness model that al­lows the op­er­a­tor rev­enue through in­te­grated brand com­mu­ni­ca­tion.
Per­spec­tive
The con­cen­tra­tion of many cre­ative per­sons on media fa­cades with purely artis­tic na­ture will not be sus­tain­ably pro­duc­tive. The chal­lenge is rather to in­clude the enor­mous dy­nam­ics of so­cial media in the urban spaces.  Only eco­nom­i­cally ori­ented busi­ness mod­els can achieve this. And only by such busi­ness mod­els free spaces will de­velop, that can be use­fully filled with artis­tic ap­pli­ca­tions. Now, the art can rely on clear con­cepts and take over com­mu­nica­tive tasks in the pub­lic space. And this is the only way to pre­vent the art from being pushed in urban spaces with­out any con­tex­tual re­la­tion, which would even in­crease peo­ple’s dis­ori­en­ta­tion.

Chair Per­sons: Ste­fan Mit­tlböck-Jung­wirth-Fohringer & Mahir M. Yavuz
Pre­sen­ters: Christoph Kro­n­hagel, Eck­e­hart Loidolt & William Joseph Car­pen­ter

Through­out human his­tory, ar­chi­tec­ture played a key role in terms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the pub­lic do­main. In ad­di­tion to the es­tab­lished in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized ar­chi­tec­tural com­mu­ni­ca­tion (gov­ern­men­tal build­ings, palaces, banks, schools, etc.), a new field of adap­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion based on pres­ence, in­tent and own­er­ship is emerg­ing. Dis­cov­er­ies in the field of media tech­nol­ogy con­sti­tute the dri­ving force in this evo­lu­tion­ary progress. Media, by all means, is ex­tend­ing its ac­tive fields and is cre­at­ing a con­ver­gence be­tween psy­chi­cal and vir­tual spaces. Cities are in a rapid evo­lu­tion age: façades are chang­ing, ar­chi­tec­ture is de­vel­op­ing more into the dig­i­tal do­main and so­cial in­ter­ac­tion of in­hab­i­tants is be­com­ing much more me­di­ated. How are all of these changes af­fect­ing our daily life? It is seen that media ar­chi­tec­ture has al­ready be­come a key re­search topic at the in­ter­sec­tion of many dif­fer­ent fields such as ur­ban­ism, ar­chi­tec­ture, ma­te­r­ial sci­ences and so­ci­ol­ogy. There is a large spec­trum of in­ter­est­ing top­ics to dis­cuss within this new field rang­ing from con­tent to au­di­ence and from new mod­els of in­ter­ac­tion to ma­te­ri­al­ized media. With the con­tri­bu­tion of prac­ti­cal re­searchers work­ing in di­verse fields and com­ing from dif­fer­ent coun­tries, this panel aims to raise ques­tions such as: What is the im­por­tance of media ar­chi­tec­ture in the evo­lu­tion of land­marks and city de­vel­op­ment? Does media ar­chi­tec­ture cre­ate a new way of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion in the pub­lic space? Are media ar­chi­tec­ture pro­jects­gras­pable and leg­i­ble by the pub­lic with­out a leg­end? With in­def­i­nite bound­aries in ques­tion, how can media ar­chi­tec­ture de­velop into media space?

About Ars Elec­tron­ica Fu­ture­lab : Media Art and Ar­chi­tec­ture Group

Today, tech­nol­ogy and media are among major tools used in ar­chi­tec­tural prac­tices in de­vel­op­ing global cities. Ars Elec­tron­ica Fu­ture­lab Media Art and Ar­chi­tec­ture Group con­sists of artists and re­searchers from var­i­ous fields in­clud­ing com­puter sci­ence, so­ci­ol­ogy, de­sign, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and media sci­ences. The re­search group aims to focus on emerg­ing in­ter­faces and com­mu­ni­ca­tion meth­ods among ar­chi­tec­ture, cit­i­zens and en­vi­ron­ment. By ex­am­in­ing the em­ploy­ment of in­ter­ac­tive media as an el­e­ment of art and ar­chi­tec­ture in pub­lic spaces, the group also aims to re­al­ize prac­ti­cal pro­jects in se­man­tic and func­tional con­text. Smart cities, ma­te­ri­al­ized in­for­ma­tion, re­spon­sive/adap­tive ar­chi­tec­ture and in­tel­li­gent en­vi­ron­ments are some of the key re­search top­ics of the group. Like­wise, the group con­cen­trates on the po­si­tion and the role of media ar­chi­tec­ture with re­spect to dis­cus­sions on art and com­mu­ni­ca­tion stud­ies.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the physical concatenation of technological devices, specifically between memory capacities and qualities (a database, an archive) and the code that regulates its performance. The code is here pursued as an “element” as concrete as an object, and with a specific cultural history (a code as a program, and in a wider realm, an ethos as a code). But opposed to the fetishism of objects, a code would be conceived of as the aristothelic energeia, a process with an end in itself, an instruction that “produces” a qualitative operation upon the database, the archive, on which it is inscribed. The consequences of this analysis would yield some illuminations on the way certain digital phenomena behave in our time, relating information databases to the ways the information itself is shaped, generated, disseminated and understood. It would thus contribute to understand from a cultural parameter diverse entities, from wikis to viruses, from the assessment of financial algorithms to software art, from social media to the outbreak of political events such as the one raised recently by the Wikileaks.?org site. In the end, a set of specific issues would be addressed, for if the manipulation of code can sensibly affect strategic data on a functional level, we could raise questions on a historiographical, a technical, an esthetical, but most importantly, an ethico-political level. The conceptual articulation between memory and code is thus an open topic which will introduce a different dimension to our common experience of the political in the midst of a seemingly reshaping theory of knowledge.

Panel Statement

“Fire rise! Freedom! Seated before the hearth the fireside audience is in rapt attention. In the furnace/puppet theater dance the burning flame of passion. The heavenly chords sing and separate from the director. Inflamed by the new found freedom sink amidst the lapping tongues. Offered the choice you will gladly resubmit to slavery. This is too intense. There are those who in captive chains sink under the weight, then there are those perverts who, fettered, raise their heads high in joy. Am I sorry for the perversions of my past? …I’m sorry, please take me back!”

_Mike Kelly, Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile, (Venice, CA: New City Editions, 1986, p.44.)

The prehistoric cave was not only a shelter for human beings, it was a liminal sphere, a sacred place of transformation and for influencing the external world by means of images drawn on the wall. The cave or archetypal metaphor of being under or inside the earth evokes the enclosure of the womb and a sphere much like the underworld of antiquity, a realm not only of shades of the dead, but of unrealized possibilities, fantasies and dreams. For Plato, the cave was the counter- realm of reason. His Parable of the Cave is many things at once: a hierarchy of values—in Mike Kelly’s rendition: “You are just an imperfect shadow of a single perfect idea be fouled by matter, dirtied and made inconsistent by the clumsiness of matter—brutish matter” , a description of an apparatus of mystification, a metapsychology, and a prescription. The cave became the theoretical model for fiction in theater and later in film. What relevance does the cave metaphor have to various apparatuses in the electronic arts? What sorts of values and experiences are invoked in recent invocations of the cave as apparatus and metaphor? The object of this round-table is to use the cave not to arrive a unified conclusions, but as a way of following the unfolding of deep metaphor across cultures and apparatuses, and across different media and values related to concrete social and cultural experiences. Is the cave an appropriate metaphor for the transformation of information societies into electronic culture?
Margaret Morse will introduce the parable, the metaphor and the apparatus and discuss some of its ramifications for recent work in the electronic arts, including Beryl Korot and Steve Reich’s The Cave as Biblical story and socio-political metaphor, as well as the CAVE apparatus for projecting images, to which Jeffrey Shaw’s EVE apparatus was a response. After Jeffrey Shaw’s description of EVE, Frances Dyson will introduce ‘the cave of the imagination’ metaphor in sound art and her critique of the model of interiorization implicit in it. Finally, Alexandru Antik, a Romanian artist living in Cluj Napoca will introduce several recent pieces, including “The Prison of Fantasy”, a powerful evocation of dystopic enclosure installed at the “Ex Oriente…

[text truncated – p127 of ISEA94 Catalogue is missing]

The early avantgardist film theory was the first to formulate a metaphorical interface within media: Camera movements, subjective perspectives and reflecting montages etc. destroyed the objective spy hole character of the frontal observing position and the distant aura of the former art creation was dissolving. These subjective, imagination-based thoughts of creating media as surroundings for identification lead to actual hierarchical questions: the more an extension of body senses and functions is offered, the more a virtual space is perceived as “true”. The word interactivity has to be replaced by terms like potential of involvement or identification, representation of personality and intersubjective exchange.

This paper concerns the design, implementation and demonstration of interactive sculptural interfaces which need to be used by the public as well as by specialist performers such as musicians or dancers.  Options for automatic control are also available.  The set of interfaces under consideration is referred to as the ‘metapiano’, itself a ‘meta-sculpture’ comprising a collection of diverse and independent sculptural items, each of which are being developed to control a sometimes self-referential array of musically expressive algorithms.  In the case of the metapiano the primary sound source, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that of a (synthesised) piano.

The paper describes the manner in which a viewer/performer interacts with hardware and software systems, examines the nature of the music created, and details how the two are related.  Of particular interest is the way in which the resulting music relates to both new and more traditional forms of composition and performance.

Generally, interactive and electronic artworks are conceptualised as essentially immaterial. That is, the digital artwork is a pure abstraction that lacks the physical properties that literally ground an artwork in the empirical world. In contrast, this paper maps the effects of interactivity in an electronic artwork as beholden to a whole range of material actors. This distributed effect is explained in terms of Actor-Network Theory. The combined outcome is that the supposed immateriality of digital artworks is in fact reconstituted with a kind of relational and informational materiality. Composed of, if not dependent on, the heterogeneous nature of a whole host of actors that sustains an artwork from production into exhibition and interaction. The events observed and experienced in many interactions involving the artwork suggest that materiality is present at every stage. The implication then is that wherever actors, cognition and materiality meet, a mutually catalysing and constituting relationship is likely to develop. Consequently, when an actor interacts with the artwork, there is a shift in relational matter and hence the way it is expressed in information materiality. Thus, meaning is co-enacted in relation with the affordances in place. This cumulative generation of meaning points to a distributed and collective expression of cognition that constantly blurs the distinctions between intention and material affordance in interactive artworks. Therefore, the description that follows demonstrates that meaning, cognition and action arise together with the modal weight of materials in interaction that then shapes the nature of the electronic and interactive artwork.

Presentation on recent and in progress works that explore the computer mouse as a cultural icon and critical, humouristic and preposterous activities and reformations’ object. The mouse has already been at the center of numerous creative investigations, for instance artworks that seek to explore the gift of ubiquity of the mouse throughout various conceptual strategies. It concerns for instance The vagina Mouse; The Artist’s Mouse (automatic drawing and painting disposal linked to an active mouse) and of Weaving the Mouse Mandala, composed of about a hundred various dead computer mice.
Some works in progress will be presented (for instance a robotic sculptural installation that translates via internet the mouse’s activity on sculptural robots) to supply a general survey on creative works that explore in a conceptual way the interactivity, familiar computer technologies, work, game, human / machine relationships and the synthesis between traditional supports used by the artist and contemporary digital technologies.

We generally think of space as a coherent and continuous extent and the representation of it is dominated by the linear perspective. Even though art movements like cubism or the infinite folding of the baroque, as characterized by Gilles Deleuze, have introduced different ways to conceive of space and its representation, the tools we use to conceive space are still mostly following the invention of perspective as it was devised by Brunelleschi and Alberti. Tied to this concept is the conclusion that the viewer as a single individual can only be in one point at a time as a precondition for the coherence of the space.

In the project “Venture to the Interior” we are formulating a database approach to the representation of space. Devising a method that combines the rendition of computer generated 3-dimensional space with an array of different objects and media such as space-referenced photography, film, documents, taxidermies, and oral accounts we are creating a hybrid mixed-reality environment that integrates multiple points of view and allows to explore a layered structure of parallel spaces.

The proposed paper describes our method and design considerations involved into the creation of the interactive installation “Venture to the Interior”, a real-time 3-d environment that investigates the nature of the museum as an apparatus of collecting and cumulative knowledge construction. With the example of the Natural History Museum in Berlin and its vast collections we are reflecting the nature of the museum as a space that exists outside of time and that entertains simultaneous relationships to a multitude of different places.

This paper introduces live coding as a new path in the evolution of the musical score. Live coding practice accentuates the score, and whilst being the perfect vehicle for the performance of algorithmic music, it also transforms the compositional process itself into a live event. A continuation of 20th century artistic developments of the musical score, live coding systems often embrace graphical elements and language syntaxes foreign to standard programming languages. The paper presents live coding as a highly technologized artistic practice, shedding light on how non-linearity, play and generativity will become prominent in future creative media productions.

A careful investigation into the history of the score will illustrate that the score is not a simple object whose nature can be easily defined. It has had multiple functions in the various traditions at different time periods. But the score is more than encoded music. It is also a compositional tool, where composers are able to externalize their thoughts onto a medium that visually represents the sonic data. The score in its various forms is a mnemonic device that enables more complex compositional thinking patterns than those we find in purely oral traditions. This paper will consider live coding as a new evolution of the musical score. It will investigate the background of diverse scoring practices as applied in live coding, where the score is written in the form of an algorithm, either graphically or textually, yet always encoded in the functionality of a programming language.

With the advent of the world wide web came the idea of a globally connected network of information and on-line communities. It was part of the ideals of the postindustrial ‘information age’, promising immediate connectivity, instant access and ease of communication. The hype and promise of this new era has been created and radically influenced by the information moguls – whose communications and media corporations control a huge proportion of global information. In an ironic twist, empire-builders such as Murdoch, not only output the information, but influence or own the methods of transmission such as computer and satellite networks, television, the cinema and information super highway.

This nexus of information command and control creates a situation where the content is driven by profit, and the nature of information is dictated by the tenets of consumerism. Whoever controls this information influences and dictates not only global economies, but the global status quo. Information is big business, and its influence is exerted in all spheres of public and private life. Media corporations directly influence state regulation of telecommunications law and ownership, so in many ways the state succumbs to and is indebted to these media empires. The concept of information in the late 1990s is intertwined in a highly complex process of relationships between the state, media corporations and the public sphere.

The mutant offspring of information economies will dissect the mass media, opening up the body of information for analysis and scrutiny, it will ask the question – how as cultural thinkers and practitioners can we work as active agents in defining and creating a diverse and smart information culture? Artists are no longer passive agents… we must engage and use the tools of information to understand the nexus of state and power which is driving the new digital era.

The media arts situate themselves in part in relation to historical media theory in which the earth has been written out. This talk will introduce ways in which the earth has been in and out of circuit with telecommunications systems since the nineteenth century and other broad features of a natural history of media.

The prefix post (as in postmodern) can sometimes suggest the redundancy of ideas that are surprisingly persistent despite the aesthetic changes that come with the new ideology/technology. Looks can be deceiving!

Precision, perfection and beauty have a persistent presence in art, science and religion and a contemporary presence in digital technology, which carries these attribute/attitudes. Although the desire for and promise of progress can lead to image content that appears to supersede the preceding idiom, digital technology has a metaphysical character that has more in common with a pre-modern sensibility. Indeed, precision and perfection can be thought of as beautiful, much in the same way a scientific theory can be.

Another characteristic of digital technology is the extent to which the supposed separation of physical form and content actually masks its inherent qualities. Global communication suggests a transcendence of analogue imaging media such as photography and there is a sense that digital images are free or have gone beyond the physical limitations of older media. A photograph has intrinsic visual qualities inherent in the medium whereas a digital image does not; it can look like it wants, even masquerade as a photograph. Measured against the standards of older media digital media can be thought of as trans-media.

The organizing principle of digitization is mathematical and the appearance or pictorial content of the image is of no consequence to it. Like science, the method can be divorced from the outcome and the medium is indifferent to the consequences of image content. The difference between the aesthetic character of the medium/technology and the aesthetic relating to form/content of the image is a significant element of digital media

Kevin Todd’s paper will examine the conceptual archaeology of digital imaging technology and how it informs his art practice, exploring concepts such as the quest for perfection in art science and religion. His acknowledgement of a metaphysical character of digital technology suggests it has a longer history and can’t be neatly quarantined from an imperfect past.

This keynote was part of the ‘Innovate Durban’ programme, an annual event that was this year integrated with ISEA2018.

Panel Statement

Panel: Nethics?

The potential for democratic empowerment that the Net can imply has already been tested as some begin to live out McLuhan’s prophesied redemption through electricity. The development of various FreeNet systems, for example, suggests that universal access and suffrage are economically and politically conceivable, as individuals gain direct electronic access to strategic information and to the brokers of power. The Net can be the bidirectional conduit necessary for the mobilization of an informed citizenry. However, the unrestricted Iaissez faire approach to information provision on the Net also implies an inevitable shift from the civic to the commercial, as information, equally available to all for the exercise of effective citizenship, is diluted and pushed aside by market forces discovering and dominating this new enterprise arena. As others before who set out to create a revolution, and instead created a market, Net enthusiasts are testing the water for free so that major commercial interests can safely wade in. The Net has already proved itself an effective market place for pornography and propaganda. Without an agreed regulatory constitution, the future electronic superhighway is for gamblers, entrepreneurs and big business, as email becomes junk mail, voting becomes market research and information becomes advertising.

“The Network” is the abbreviation for [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]||cologne, an experimental project environment for art and new media developed, created, curated and directed by Wilfred Agricola de Cologne (AdC), a multidisciplinary media artist, New Media curator and media art activist from Cologne/Germany. Starting on 1 January 2000 as his big life experiment, he uses the Internet as a tool, as an art medium in its complexity and a platform for creating a new type of art, based on communicating — a big challenge in many concerns, also because its purpose is merely non-commercial, it does not require a membership, registration or password.

“The Network” represents a hybrid, simultaneously a media art project, a manifestation of philosophical ideas around the themes “memory” and “identity”, a research and curatorial project, a composition of dynamic social contexts in progress, a virtual and physical network on different levels, but also a multi-dimensional event environment organised completely online, however, not institutionally structured or associated, but realised in form of an independent art project. AdC himself is acting as a hybrid of different identities, not just as an artist, but also as the programmer, multimedia developer, curator, director in different functions and other virtual and physical instances of different kind, one might even say, he is representing “the Network” himself, re-creating himself continuously, he exists through others. What is now manifesting itself as “The Network”, was not planned like that. It developed from a small cell through exploring the Internet for what is Internet specifi c in terms of art. One can divide the evolutionary processes abbreviated in three phases, which, however, did not follow one after another in a linear way, but non-linear sometimes parallel, at the same time or temporarily displaced.

The Networked Virtual Art Museum project supports the design, development and operation of long distance, multiple user, networked immersion environments. The project team will design and construct a multi-cultural art museum articulated through networked virtual reality, and established by a grid of participants, or nodes, located in remote geographic locations. The nodes are interconnected using modem to modem, or high bandwidth telecommunications. Each participating node will have the option to interact with the virtual environment and contribute to its shape and content. Participants will be invited to create additions or galleries, install works, or commission researchers and artists to originate new works for the museum. Further, guest curators will have the opportunity to organise special exhibitions, explore advanced concepts, and formulate the basis for critical theory pertaining to virtual reality and cultural expression. The museum can also function as a stand-alone installation and is easily transportable for presentation in cultural or industrial venues.

Fifteen years ago being and artist and the ability to program were considered mutually exclusive by the mainstream art establishment.  Now the study of the tools and techniques of software art are a standard part of the curriculum for many undergraduate art degrees.

Some artists have always been interested in expanding the boundaries and potentials of art by adopting new technologies, which at the time, have been treated with initially suspicion and then acceptance by the mainstream, and software art appears to be no exception.  However, in this paper, it is argued that art in which expression occurs through constructing code is a more significant shift in kind than the adoption of technologies such as photography into mainstream art practice in the 20th C.  This makes it worthy of greater scrutiny; developing a practice of software art is more involved than acquiring logical programming skills in one or more “creative” software environments.

Art, in the context of this paper refers to processes by which materials are transformed to communicate experiences.  The relationships between “formal” and “natural” language; conscious agency and the creativity of the unconscious; free expression and near infinite permutation – are complex and difficult to define, but issues that lie at the core of any practice of software art.  Essentially, can “art” arise from within a well-defined ontology?

This paper draws upon readings across multiple disciples of linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy to sketch out an “open ended” unbounded approach to the expression of nebulous concepts through computer coding.  Touched upon are the Integrational linguistics of Roy Harris to reconsider the relationship between formal and natural language; the neuroscience of Antonio Damasio to conjecture about some of the mental processes used in art and coding; the “expanded mind” hypothesis of philosopher Andy Clark which extends the boundaries of cognition beyond the brain / body to include external artefacts, such as computers and artworks.

The author has an extended perspective on programming covering 30 years experience firstly as a physical scientist and for the past fifteen years as an artist, and in 2008 completed a PhD in software art.

This presentation is about a pedagogical experiment involving students in the digital arts, landscape architecture and architecture and the conclusion they reached in response to the country’s “largest green development”, The South Waterfront in Portland Oregon. In the Fall of 2009 an Intel sponsored studio called The Machine in the Garden: Rethinking Urban Gardens in the 21st Century, was taught by Tad Hirsch, Liska Chan, and Colin Ives, at the University of Oregon. The course took Leo Marx’s text as a ‘playbook’ but in this case not gleaning signs of the pastoral in literature but rather using creative practice to examine the current movement of ‘green’ urbanism. This speculative studio concluded that ‘green’ was synonymous with Marx’s pastoral — that in its’ clear simple nomenclature conceals the unresolved tensions and conflicts that, like the pastoral, it harbors.

In light of recent and contemporary debates regarding ‘playful interfaces’ and ‘gamification’ both in previous ISEA events and elsewhere, and, new openings from mainstream contemporary art‑world toward computer games like the inclusion of computer games in the MoMA collection, therelationship between computer games and interactive art warrants a closer look now more than ever. The panel will bring together theoreticians, artists, practitioners, and media‑archeologists who share an interest in the overlap of computer games and interactive art. In terms of their technological underpinnings and use‑contexts, these allegedly separate phenomena are strikingly similar. Their contemporary forms emerge from the histories of computing devices and screen technologies, they demand commitment and concentration on the audience’s part, and dimensions of their expressive capabilities are constantly under discussion.Apart from the being re‑appropriated as contemporary art through (involuntary) inclusion in existing institutional structures, what can ‘art games’ be? What is the playable avant‑garde like and where do we find it? How does ‘gameness’ of artworks challenge the pre‑existing concepts and expectations of artists, theorists, curators, and audiences? What to do with the children who seem to think that the artworks are ‘fun’? The panel will consider the critical, practical, historical and theoretical implications of the blurring of the borders between new media art, interactive art, net art, computer games, art games, and interactive narratives. The panel will address topics such as the use of computer games as a source of visual material and as a target of thematic references, the use of computer game engines for real‑time graphics rendering, the use of game‑like interaction mechanics (like FPS camera, or dying and respawning) in art settings, and the curatorial opportunities and challenges posed by computer games.

We visualized music on the assumption that we can see music without limiting it to simply listening. Visualization was done using VR method using Unity 3D. Visualization through VR was able to confirm the developmental potential in terms of educational and artistic aspects.

Panel: NeuroArts-Noise

Taking my lead from this panel’s framing statement, I wish to address the question of noise as an in-between. Drawing on my recent work on the subject of the ontology of noise, I hope to figure noise as über-relational, as nothing other than the essence of the ontological relation that is itself constitutive of all ontology when ontology is conceived of as relational. However, the way in which noise functions as an in-between renders problematic, I want to suggest, the very possibility of being able to figure or conceptualise the world in terms or concepts as infolded as “inside” or “outside” or, as in communications theory, “emitter” and “receiver” or, of more interest in the present context, “artwork” and “spectator/consumer”. Whilst this has perhaps always been the case, I will suggest that in our media-saturated world it is now more the case than ever that the new cognitive mappings afforded by works of art call for, à la Deleuze, a reconfiguration of the site of consciousness (or neural events). However, rather than simply relocating consciousness in the objects or media to which we had imagined consciousness attends (“the brain is the screen”), I will argue that when filtered through the in-between of noise, it may be necessary rather to suggest that consciousness is deployed in a less-defined and wholly distributed space and that this might have important implications for how we think about modes of artistic consumption.

In this lecture performance I blend the coexisting fields of my work as a composer, performer and researcher. I report on my research and findings, simultaneously performing with mechanical and electronic instruments. My performance is governed by a multi‑layered score. As a composer, I precisely and succinctly notate my artistic plan to activate performance. The key here is that I recompose my thinking activity into performative action. My compositional plan places the private into the public domain. The score locates my innermost layers in a sonic environment.

Driven by a lifetime’s experience as a performing musician, I have made the observation of my ‘mind’ during performance the subject of artistic research. Drawing from a contemplative approach, I closely looked into the mechanisms of mental activities. I was inspired by the inclusive view of the mind as presented in Buddhist philosophy, and the multi‑layered structure of its activity. I found corresponding themes covered in contemporary artistic work, such as by the American poet Anne Waldman.

The scientific concept of ‘noise’ as found in technical disciplines contributed further insights. Noise can be defined as an unwanted signal. Following Bart Kosko, the interesting point is that the concept of noise implies value judgements: preceding decisions determine what is wanted, and what not. From this perspective, mind activity not directly connected with any performed action can be labeled as noise. The noise‑signal duality stimulates my creative process: disturbances spark my creativity. I find the noisy areas of mind particularly interesting, and re‑evaluate ‘noise of mind’ as a constructive component of my work.

I distinguish between ‘inside’ myself and an ‘external’ world outside my perceived body, i.e. my skin. In my observation of performing, there is a flow from my innermost layers to the outside world to communicate sound, and back inside again through hearing. In the context of a creative process, I perceive a ‘first thought’ accompanied simultaneously by a vague sense of longing to communicate. This longing seems to contain high emotional energy and precedes the actual artistic expression, or sound production. Through my ears then, the outward projection returns back inside.

The compositional architecture of my score was inspired by techniques I found in Baroque solo sonatas for melodic instruments. In works by Johann Sebastian Bach, the texture of a melody is enriched with so‑called ‘hidden’ or ‘implied’ polyphony: multiple voices are fragmented, deconstructed and condensed into one solo part. In my performance I do exactly that: I use my own body as a highly calibrated bio‑device to present a fractured sense of identity. With the help of my contrabass recorder, the voice, a throat microphone, radio transmission and my computer, I turn the totality of my physical and mental activities into compositional and performative material ‑ while reporting on my research. On a meta‑level, the performance centers on the questions: Is my thinking activity private or public? What defines my mind, where is it heard? Can I locate inner noise within a public sonic space?

This panel consist of five experts who have collaborated across hemispheres of Earth in the context of environment. Collaboration has become increasingly common over the past 15 years, to now being a pre-eminent form of creative practice. Over the same period, the human connection to climate change has moved from being predominantly known in academia, to a situation where the climate crisis is widely acknowledged intergenerationally and across most mass media. This development has forced a revision of knowledge and theory, led to engagement with indigenous peoples and new sites for projects. The notion of the constitution of a sentient human being has changed, in particular moving out of solely Western conceptions. These forces have led to an activist reorientation in creative practice, with ramifications for art, society, humanity and Earth which together lead to a re-shaping of language.

This paper discusses about the musical interactivity that is realized through the music descriptive language and the virtual musical instrument. The discussion has the structural and the ontological framework for musical piece. Three types of musical interactivity and noted: compositional-type, ensemble-type and mediating-type.

Panel: Ecology, Cybernetics and Open Systems in Art and Technology

Both Heidegger and Agamben referred to ‘the Open’ as forces unknown, those of art and of everyday experience. According to Heidegger, to be open is a strictly human experience. A nonhuman organism is closed off from anything except the strict routine of sustaining life. Agamben disagreed with this view and redefined ‘the Open’ as a reconciliation of the human with animality. In this presentation, several contemporary artists examine ways in which humans interact with nonhumans through cultivating the ‘other’ and integrating the bodies or remains of nonhumans into their work. In many cases, human and nonhuman organisms have been mediated. While Heidegger and Agamben use the human/nonhuman dichotomy to define what it is to be human, many of the works in this presentation tend towards Harroway’s notion of the inextricable connection between co-evolved species: man, animal and others. Like Harroway, most of these artists engage bioethics and biopolitics in their work.
Questions to consider:

1. What is in the gap separating human and nonhuman? What is the role of language, cognition and consciousness in this gap?
2. Does technicity play a role in what Agamben calls “the central emptiness that separates man and animal” ?
3. Can an artwork disrupt Agamben’s notion of the anthropological machine by inventing ways to reconcile human and nonhuman life?

OPUS can be described as a conceptual and aesthetic inquiry on electronic art, focusing the man-machine partnership and the continuum creation-production cycle. Its scope is the interactive generation of computer images based on random process—due to its inception, the resulting images are unique.With a time span of one year (199697), the project also included software development, under the responsibility of Carlos Freitas as system specialist, and was funded by a Vitae Fellowship in Arts (Brazil). In essence, the project is intended to promote an association among intuitive and logical qualities of the human being (‘author’) and logical algorithms of the computer (‘co-author’). This purpose is articulated through three distinct image transformation programs (plug-in type, Adobe Photoshop TM standard), briefly:

1.  Opus, sets a dialog in which the chance, from low to high, and the extent, from subtle to radical, of participation of the computer are to be selected, as independent variables, rendering an image directly on paper;
2.  Hermes, sets a dialog in which the extent of participation of the computer, from subtle to radical, is to be selected, rendering an electronic image;
3.  Chaboo, sets a dialog in which the participation of the computer is granted in advance, rendering an electronic image.

Opus and Hermes share a similar image transformation model, a set of mathematical equations following design guidelines. Chaboo resulted from programming errors , thus absorbed as non-predictable transformation models — it can be considered as a contribution of the project to the project itself. From the operational stand point, the interaction starts with someone, the ‘author’, submitting an image for transformation, entire or selected portions, and it ends with the participation of the computer, the co-author: For sure, this procedure can be repeated and/or combined with any other resource for image construction and manipulation. Funded in the binomial causality/non-causality, interaction and iteration are OPUS main issues, mediating project definition, software design and image generation. The project framework displays a connection with the Jungian notion of synchronicity and leans to the exploration of computers unforeseen behavior. Its emphasis remains in an”internal dialog” and at same time it underplays any “technological glamour’: The synthesis of those inter-relations rests on the images made with the Chaboo, Hermes and Opus modules, forming the CHO essay. They point to a process, as a metaphor of the interleaving of human and computer memories, rather than as representation of reality according some cultural tradition. For a viewer, finished images are seamless, been of little importance to establish the participation of each one,’author’ and ‘co-author: The OPUS project was conceived in 1990 as an offspring of Vectors, a series of images rendered on paper, exhibited at the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo (1991) and in “The Art Factor” show at FISEA’93.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Media polyphony, Canadian hybrid culture, identity, generative art installation, facial expression recognition, media ecology, emergence, complexity.

In this paper we discuss the Order of Passions, generative media installation that visualizes dynamism, disturbance and unity within the diverse set of human facial expressions that together create a collective and emergent polyphonic portrait of Canada. We discuss critical compositional, technical and meaning making strategies for the creation of this generative artwork. The discussion is positioned from the perspective of artist-creators dealing with computational media as a medium for both, creative production and presentation of the artwork. We describe the tools and processes that were used and developed to support the creation of the project.

In the mid-sixties, an experimental student program at San Francisco State College put community organizing and everyday life at the center of education. Students worked in city neighborhoods, learning about economic and social forces affecting others, and developing creative actions. Money was effectively diverted from the college/state to sites off campus. The program’s students saw themselves as part of a revolutionary process. Poised at the historical transition between industrial and biopolitical production, and between hippie culture and the contractions of the 70s, this little known program offers speculative lessons about corporeality and affect to education in a digital age.

We will rent a 40-foot or longer boat and use it for social and activist projects for which a sailboat is a unique and essential venue.The boat’s first major voyage (a “trading voyage of the future” especially targeting communities with diaspora components) will be from Lazar° Cardenas, Michoacan to a port near San Jose, California.The six-week voyage will take place prior to August 2006, and the results (as well as the boat itself) will be displayed at ISEA2006, where we will also offer tours of Bay industrial ports.

PandorBird: Identifying the Types of Music That May Be Favored by Our Avian Co-Inhabitants is an interactive outdoor installation that uses computer vision and interactive software to track and then play the music choices made by wild song- birds. This mobile learning system uses a novel algorithm for species identification, plays avian-favored human music, and builds a database of the musical compositions preferred by local feeder birds. Offerings in each genre of music will be chosen using standard criteria from web-based “music-discovery services,” such as melody, harmony, rhythm, form, and composition.

In an era where an increasing number of cultural forms are shifting into the emergent digital media such as the Internet and CD ROM, numerous questions arise from these practices vis-a-vis our reco(r)ding of these events and their place as engrams in the cultural memory. The creation and experience of the arts in the digital age is moving from the exhibition of art as material trace of a process to that of performative act. Secondly, media such as CD ROM create technological difficulties related to the obsolescence of said media. Paul Virilio states that technology is compressing all societal constructs including time and the acceleration of technological production itself. From this, we are presented with the challenge of presenting works that may be ephemeral due to software and hardware incompatibility problems. This, in sense, likens the dawn of the digital arts to the classical period of drama, in which many plays were written, but only a handful survive.

Technoscience is increasingly present in our daily lives, establishing new social rules and patterns of communication and interaction in a physical space which implements electronic devices and telematic systems in its design. In the race for scientific progress, the goal is making man a God, like Nietzsche’s Superman, without determining how the new human morphology will be fitted. This paradigm is treated by artists who warn of the possible fate of humanity while the technoscientific, as if he/she was Prometheus, dares to defy the laws of nature. Art exposes the actual course of science. Some artists complain that the false promises of scientific discourse, which is dominated by male vision, fails to be aware of the impossibility that technology is going to improve the moral dimension of human being. Some artists say the science sermon does not deal with humanity and the building of our future is merely phallocentric; an excessive anthropocentric vision.

Intro: Post-corporal Visions in the XIX Century
In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett explores the literary figure of Frankenstein drawing on the experimental studies of Luigi Galvani, who utilized electric currents on frogs and various other animals. These works demonstrated the existence of an “electric animal flow” that gave muscles movement. This was a groundbreaking discovery at the time given that the possibilities announced over corporal issues such as energy, life, and death were unusual. Positivism toward a scientific future was a clear symptom of Romanticism, and with said discoveries scientists were considered prophets. Science signaled humanity’s progress, this being the largest common feature of the romantic understanding of nature and science through the transgression of the rules hitherto used. Years later, in 1803, Giovanni Aldini, Galvani’s nephew, published the results of similar experiments using the cadavers of criminals. At the end of the XVIII Century, Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the theorist of modern evolution, dealt with similar questions in “The Temple of Nature”. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1816 at 19 years old. The text was the product of a simple game, a pastime that led her to develop a horror story. The Creature, a being larger and more powerful than any human, was created thanks to doctor Victor Frankenstein. Curiously, this inordinate being longed to be loved by the people, but his appearance terrorized the town. Once rejected, the anguished Creature kills the doctor’s younger brother, his best friend, and his woman.

This paper describes the construction of Paris Reseau, a “(net)work in progress”.Texts, images, and sounds collected in various ways before, during, and after a “performance” by members of the group Art-Reseaux at the Videotheque (Video Library) of Paris form different layers in the Paris Reseau archives, a hypermedia database. To begin with, the author will present excerpts from Paris Reseau: Art-Reseaux (1995), as well as more recent developments in this on-going information art project such as the Paris Reseau/Paris Network Web site (1996—) and the Paris Reseau Guide CD-ROM. P-R assembles photographs, videos, sound-samples, and texts to form a composite image of the city mixing reality and fiction, past and present, combining mediated (digitized) traces of physical places and people with information garnered from individual and collective memory. The second part of this paper deals with some of the theoretical questions raised by this project.Is it possible to articulate a heterogeneous and continually changing set of images into a unified esthetic statement? Can a structure be found which will be sturdy enough to convey a strong artistic position, yet flexible enough to integrate new data capable of perturbing or modifying this point of view? What is the role played by digital and electronic technologies? Since this project was begun, the cranes and bulldozers have left the Grande Bibliotheque and it has officially opened to the public, road construction crews have put in over 50 kilometers of bike lanes, Isabelle has moved again, taking her mannequins with her, Gilbertto has gone back to Brazil…All the while, P-R continues its sedimentation, accumulating, like Borges’ labyrinth,” infinite series of times … a growing, vertiginous network of convergent, divergent and parallel times”. Does the city “inform” (give form to) this work or does the work inform the city (insofar as it shapes our experience of it)? Is one a container and the other its content(s)? In what ways do (digital) images shape the content (our perception) of the city? In what ways do electronic networks, and the Web in particular, transform not only the content of individual artworks, but the very nature of art itself?

Current debates focus too much on what social tools can do and not enough on the people who use them. Motivations of the multitudes who add content to online environments matter a great deal. What follows here are hands-on guidelines and an outline of preconditions for online participation. Terms like: involvement, turn taking, network, feedback, or distributed creativity are frequently applied to characterize this kind of social and cultural interaction.

This special session is presented in conjunction with the 30th-anniversary celebrations of the journal Leonardo. Leonardo was the first journal supporting artists who worked in the intersection of science, technology, and art. The times have radically changed since 1966. Print publishers everywhere are wondering about the future of print in a wired world and the art world and electronic artists’ needs are quite different.This session will use the perspectives of Leonardo’s history to explore more general issue of the relationship of print to electronic publishing. Presenters will include those shaping print and electronic publishing services aimed at the electronic arts community. How can each kind of approach meet the variety of needs including announcing, networking, collaborating, exhibiting, creating audiences, archiving, validating, and interpreting? A significant amount of time will be allotted to invite the ISEA audience to make suggestions about what they see as future ways print and electronic publishers can serve their needs. Presentations include the following:

1. Roger Malina: Perspectives on the Journal Leonardo. What moved Frank Malina to establish the journal? What were its original audiences and goals? What was its relationship to the art world? How did it evolve in its first 30 years?
2.  Craig Harris: Perspectives on the Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Why was it established?   What needs does it serve? What is its relationship to other services? What is its future?
3.  Paul Brown: Perspectives on Fine Arts Forum.
4.  Annick Bureaud: Perspectives on IDEA.
5.  Stephen Wilson: Future Technologies — What is Beyond the Web? What trends in   technology will influence the kinds of services needed and possible?
6.  Roy Ascott: The past and the future of electronic arts in the larger culture.
7.  Rejane Spitz: Special needs of the developing world. How can print and electronic   publications serve artists in developing countries?

Matt Hawthorn is a performance artist exploring the relationship between the performing body and the landscape through live and electronic mediations. This approach considers the mediated landscape as a deconstructed narrative of traces connecting people, events and violences. More recently this has taken the form of a video collection entitled The Pathetic Landscape comprised of a series of encounters between the artist’s pathetic body and a global network of contested landscapes.

This paper examines the ways in which network and mobile technologies remediate documentary as a mode of practice for bearing witness to and shaping collective memory. Since the 2000s, a number of practitioners have experimented with the interactive and networking capacities of digital technologies to transform documentary’s modes of representation and the viewer’s engagement. These experiments have fallen within the categories of ‘interactive’ and ‘collaborative’ documentary. In this paper, I argue that the collaborative poetics of web documentary and locative documentary project reconfigures documentary memory as performative, participatory, social and connective, rendering it an ongoing interplay between the private and the public, and between the spatial (memory as navigating, locating, and mapping) and the temporal (memory as the confluence of the present and the past). To this aim, I examine several works in relation to the three modes of collaborative documentary projects based on the premises of the network and mobile technologies. First, non-interactive collaborative documentary projects based on the users’ participatory production or remaking of their memory about everyday life or cinematic fragments, which can be seen as the global archive based on the intersection of the individual and collective memories (Life in A Day, Kevin Macdonald, 2011 and Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, Perry Bard, 2007-Present); second, a couple of web documentaries, whose hyperlinking structure corresponds to the patterns of the user’s affective and epistemological engagement with the multimedia forms of the archive, such as making connections, discovering similarities, differences or ambiguity (Highrise: Out My Window, 2010 and Welcome to Pine Point, 2011); finally, a couple of ‘locative’ documentary projects that use the mobile phone to encourage the user to document her own city in lived, embodied manner (Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, 2007-9, Ulrich Fischer’s Walking the Edit, 2011).

This illustrated presentation explores the intersections of photography with painting in the nineteenth century and with computers in the twentieth century. Both a theoretical and historical perspective, it accounts for the aesthetic, technological, and ideological factors that shaped photograpny. Early photography revolutionized image making, and visual imaging is again being redefined in the electronic era.

The camera transformed visual information in the nineteenth century. Digital technologies now reiterate the ways we create and perceive photo images. Photographic perceptions change. We attributed a veracity to photographs rarely accorded other visual arts. Photos are never ‘real’, yet new skepticism has evolved with digital photography’s manipulative dexterity. Selection, manipulation, and outright fabrication of the image from camera to print always occurred. Early photographs were staged, composited and otherwise contrived. Photography invariably intersected with other methods, producing hybrid forms.

Current interplay between photography and digital technologies elicits new formulations. Confluence and collision occur when new tools combine with conventional techniques, yielding hybrid forms. Intersections provide fertile straits for contemporary imagery The artist remains the source of ideas; tools and techniques only serve. The conceptual and visual encounter endures. Projected images, from early photographs through cutting edge contemporary works, illustrate the dual revolutions of photography.

Panel: Beyond Locative: Media Arts after the Spatial Turn

Why has col­lab­o­ra­tive cri­sis map­ping failed in Libya? Where is the Bernard-Henri Lévy of the loca­tive arts move­ment? Per­haps he does not exist since loca­tive media art stopped ex­ist­ing a long time ago? This could be one of the reasons…?but the truth is much more triv­ial: loca­tive media only is of use for those peo­ple, who al­ready are aware of their lo­ca­tion, who know where they came from, and where they are going. It is the gad­get no­body needs, as it only grants more priv­i­leges to priv­i­leged places, caus­ing for­got­ten places to be ren­dered even more ob­so­lete. No won­der that the Ara­bic Rev­o­lu­tion does not need any loca­tive media at all!

Loca­tive media is (was) only of im­por­tance in an af­flu­ent so­ci­ety, in a so­ci­ety where the lo­ca­tions are sub­ject to an at­ten­tion econ­omy. Should we for­get about loca­tive media? No: even though loca­tive media failed as a so­cial media, dis­guised as a new, hip, mo­bile must-have, it leads us to re­al­ize that it is a highly hege­monic in­stru­ment of power like any other car­to­graphic medium, shown im­pres­sively by www.?ushahidi.?com. For that rea­son, it is so in­ter­est­ing to media the­o­ries. In­ter­est­ing be­cause loca­tive media func­tions as a map even with­out car­to­graphic rep­re­sen­ta­tion. This puts into ques­tion the de­f­i­n­i­tion of what we un­der­stood to be a map for cen­turies. Loca­tive media leads us to re­al­ize: The place (not the ter­ri­tory) is the map.

Panel: Hybrid Cultures

The paper willl dis­cuss ways in which hy­brid­ity con­sti­tutes a strat­egy of our con­tem­po­rane­ity to aes­thet­i­cally in­ter­vene into in­ter­na­tion­ally op­er­at­ing media in­dus­tries. The con­cept of hy­brid­ity is, amongst oth­ers, high­lighted in the non-west­ern and highly tech­no­log­i­cal media and cul­tural con­text of Japan.

Intro

Remember Vincent Van Gogh’s Painter on His Way to Work, carrying it all on his back? That’s where art education is heading. I don’t mean the canvas and easel. I mean carrying it all on your back, in the clothes that you wear and in the headband in your hair. 50% pure natural wool 50% optical fibre. I am talking about the interface moving onto and, eventually, into the body. That’s your electronic media artist on her way to school. She’s wearing the university on her sleeve.

We’re not talking about a few curriculum changes here. We’re not talking about the gradual replacement of some of the library stacks with a few computers. We are talking about the total dissolution, disintegration, and dispersal of Higher Education. From real estate to cyber estate. The university is becoming the “Interversity”. Ask the students. Hundreds of thousands use the Internet daily. When Larry Smart first issued NCSA Mosaic, the network interface to hypermedia browsing, there were ten thousand users in the first three weeks. Now there are over two million. Students are half in school and half in cyberspace. They live between the virtual and the real. They are in the Net more often than out of it. This is the advent of Inter Reality, the space we are most likely to inhabit for the next many years. The ethics of the net, its integrity and inclusiveness, are creating a social behavior, a morality, which will bring huge bonuses to the real world. I am with Esther Dyson of the Electronic Frontier Foundation when she says that organized political parties won’t be needed if open networks “enable people to organize ad hoc, rather than get stuck in some rigid group”. The end is to reverse-engineer government, to hack Politics down to its component parts and fix it. She echoes the words of Hazel Henderson writing twenty years before her: “Networks are a combination of invisible college and a modern version of the Committees of Correspondence that our revolutionary forefathers used as vehicles for political change”.
This post-political process also involves the student in learning to browse, to graze, to hunt for ideas, projects, data, as well as intellectual and artistic collaboration and friendship in all kinds of electronic places, virtual libraries, tele-common rooms and cyber colleges. The students’ time in telepresence and virtual learning mode is increasing rapidly. Have you noticed in the studios, libraries and computer suites how every terminal, every interface is occupied, all the time.

The “plant theremin” is a simple wooden box 12″ by 12″ with knobs and electronics inside. A small house plant sits on top.

Originally known as the etherphone, the theremin is an early electronic musical instrument invented by Russian physicist, inventor and extraordinaire Lev Sergeevich Termen in 1920. The theremin was originally a product of Soviet government sponsored research on proximity sensors but has remained a unique instrument that has captivated many. This instrument is played with out any physical contact. The thereminist stands in front of the instrument moving their hands near the two antennas, one that is responsible for pitch and the other volume. These antennas act as plates in a capacitor. The difference between the frequencies of the two oscillators at each moment allows the creation of a difference tone in the audio frequency range, resulting in audio signals that are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker.
With a background in plant physiology and inspired by this unique electronic instrument, I set out to build a theremin made out of a plant. Now, I use the plant theremin as my musical instrument by holding my hand up to the plant and literally “playing” the notes of the plant. I will present the research on my new instrument, the process of building it and of course I will perform with it. The aim of this new musical instrument is to bring people, music and plants together and to invoke curiosity of plants, physics and music.