Presentation Data Table

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.

The aim of this presentation is to present the series of ‘Polytopes’, developed by the famous Greek composer Iannis Xenakis after his collaboration with Le Corbusier and Edgar Varèse on the famous Philips Pavilion, at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. In these large-scale multimedia installations, independent layers of light, sound and space are brought together in an abstract and highly sophisticated cybernetic synthesis. Xenakis extrapolates here the Constructivist search for parametric form into a totally dynamic and immersive environment. Examining the artistic potential of the latest technologies in light and sound, they can be considered as an architectural laboratory. The Polytopes, a landmark in multimedia history, illustrate notably the transformation the concept of ‘space’ has undergone from the industrial epoch to the information society, and offer an intelligent interpretation of the at present too often banal in notion of interactivity.

The co-presenters will demonstrate a new movement-sensitive system software in development for onscreen image manipulation in real time, as part of their ongoing research into user and audience empowerment in distance teaching of performance. Synthesis is the core concept for digital art PORT, an experimental performance visualization system, synthesizes computer-generated imagery, output from photographic image manipulations and live movement in mediated forms which are randomized, materialized, and reframed on screen in infinitely reproducible variations. The PORT software in development is only one of a number of new authoring tools made by and for artists to be employed in the experimental Extended Body course, to be offered in Spring 2001. The PORT software and other tools in development will be demonstrated, and discussed in conjunction with the new RADICAL project (Research Agendas Developed in Creative Arts Labs) funded by the European Commission, for which Dr Goodman is Principal Investigator for the INMPR.

The post‑virtual stage transforms the real stage into the virtual display by projecting the virtual onto the real. In the post‑virtual stage, we can simulate stage designs, performers’ movements, lightings and other mise‑en‑scène. After the simulation, we can directly apply the virtual stage to the real stage as the post‑virtual stage. This paper proposes the post‑virtual as the second phase of media art. The first phase of media has been mainly in digitization shifting our physical world into the virtual world of computer. When “the virtual bleeds into the reality,” the post‑virtual is an entity in reality from the virtual, and the output of media artworks follows the physical condition based on physical computing in reality. Beyond the projection mapping and the physical computing, the post‑virtual stage transforms the real physical stage into the virtual.  Any shape of stage for performing arts can be changed into the virtually produced stage interacting with its performers or objects. Using depth camera (Kinect) and projector with computer, the real stage synchronizes with the virtual stage. Point‑based marking techniques enable the floor, the background and the sides of the stage to be differentiated one another and synchronized for the projection. This technique can be done by pointing designated walls on the image taken by Kinect. Four areas, top‑left, top‑right, bottom‑left and bottom‑right, are positioned by their center point, and all three dimensions are working simultaneously with one projector. And the projected environment is interactive with the object or the performer on the stage using TCP/IP communication. This project could work for performing arts directors or designers, simply for planning or for actual performances. The ephemeral repatriation of the virtual is neither the virtual as it were, nor reality as it was. The post‑virtual stage is composed of virtually produced mise‑en‑scène and real performers that can be simulated in advance. A new reality is discovered as the post‑virtual in our expanding scenes of technologies by transforming the physical world into the virtual display.

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

Using the lan­guage of Jour­nal­ism stud­ies and the­o­ries of the French so­ci­ol­o­gist Pierre Bour­dieu, and my own ex­pe­ri­ence of con­duct­ing an ed­i­to­r­ial board at a text-mes­sage sewing cir­cle I will in this paper dis­cuss the gen­dered prac­tices of col­lec­tive story telling in tra­di­tional news-medium as well as in tra­di­tional patch­work sewing cir­cles. Both these – equally tra­di­tional – prac­tices pro­duce prod­ucts with col­lec­tive nar­ra­tive: pieces of news and patch­work quilt re­spec­tively. In both prac­tices the de­ci­sions of what nar­ra­tive that is im­por­tant enough to be printed or sewn is made in a col­lec­tive gath­er­ing: the ed­i­to­r­ial board and the sewing cir­cle re­spec­tively. The dif­fer­ences are how­ever vast, and go be­yond medium pro­duc­tion processes and econ­omy. The prac­tices are con­strued on ei­ther side of the gen­der-di­chotomy. The ed­i­to­r­ial board in the field of jour­nal­ism is a place of male power and sites of conflict and power play, where ed­i­tors patch to­gether to­mor­row’s edi­tion by shar­ing out pieces of news to jour­nal­ists. The hard­est and hottest pieces are mostly awarded to male jour­nal­ists, whereas lesser sta­tus soft news is given to fe­male jour­nal­ists. In order to cope in jour­nal­ism, many fe­male jour­nal­ists use guer­rilla tac­tics.?The ed­i­to­r­ial sewing cir­cle can sim­i­larly be un­der­stood as a guer­rilla tac­tic. It crosses the gen­der-line by tak­ing some­thing con­strued as soft, fe­male, unim­por­tant, pri­vate hobby, and plac­ing it in a hard, im­por­tant, pub­lic, artis­tic, dig­i­tal media land­scape.

The Presence of Absence (A-gain) aims to explore the relationship Timothy Leary promulgated between the hallucinogenic drug culture of the 1960’s and the computer/virtual world revolution of the last twenty five years. The concept that utopian ideologies can not deliver more than they promise will be a running concern. The interrogation of the materials takes the form of an interactive performance game. The chair establishes a structural game which allows the members of the panel to contribute their materials through a process of association with other materials being presented. The material is drawn from divergent sources and uses different technologies. The idea of the game structure allows for a ‘performative’ element to ignite insights from an association of materials. Using a low grade performance environment the forum will engage in the notion of remembering. A memory is a re-constructed experience that operates, as the ‘earth Mother’ of all ‘virtuality’. Like all Mothers in the act of reminiscence the articulation of an accurate picture is a fleeting image coloured by time.

Works of art influence our perception in different ways. In exhibitions we pass the often successively lined up works of art and let ourselves be “touched” by them in different ways. But works of art are only one part of an exhibition. An exhibition is a framework, a grammar and in view of the changed visitor behaviour, the following questions arise: how can sentience be transferred to the strategies of exhibiting and what possibilities do media, especially interactive media, offer to stimulate and enrich our sensibility? How can a sequence of works of art be brought into a constellation in such a way that the exhibition creates a flow that supports sentience in various ways and leads to an added value?

Using the example of the various strategies used for the exhibitions The Age of Experience (Hong Kong 2015, Vienna 2016), ISEA2016 Hong Kong Cultural R>Evolution and Future Memories. Utopia Dystopia Nature (Hong Kong 2020), the exhibition’s various artworks, locations and narratives, the design and media of mediation can be mixed with the curator’s goals to create a rich spectrum of experiences for participative visitors. To discuss the curatorial strategies in individual discussions, this field report will be submitted as a poster.

Existing terminology is inadequate for the study of immersive design theory. This paper proposes alternatives for the catch-all term “immersion” and suggests a structure for reliably deploying immersive practice. Absorb/engross replaces the general use of “immersion”, the distinction between engrossment by form and engrossment by transportation is highlighted, and embodied praesence is proposed as a term that engages with the sublime experience of an alternate reality that is at the heart of immersive design practice.

Programming as a technique for creating individual artworks is employed by very few. Acquisition of sufficient programming skill to express non-trivial algorithms may be considered an excessive investment of time or deviation from principle for fine artists, particularly when applications software is as powerful and accessible as it has recently become. What are the benefits to be gained in this more difficult approach? How much time does it take? What kinds of images does it produce? Will it stifle your creativity or give you a pain in the head? Programming is considered with regard to the ability of the computer to embody process, particularly of a non-linear kind. It is this ability which distinguishes the computer as a medium from others. The level of abstraction of possible descriptions of this process has profound impact conceptually and visually on final imagery. The power of non-programming techniques to represent this abstraction is considered and contrasted. Difficulties of the programming approach with regard to fine art education are considered. Illustrations and exemplifications are made from the artists own work.

In this lecture, Professor Lessig will outline the proper scope and limits for copyright, emphasizing its critical importance in some fields of creative enterprise, and its hinderance to others.

Abstract

The story developed in Ulysses, the narrative of a lonely, cunning hero and his magnificent victories over the mythological powers, was not by any means a commentary on ‘the reality’ of the already realized event, of the discreditation of mythological timelessness, and on the establishment of the three-faceted structure of time, as Horkheimer and Adorno imagined in ‘Dialectics of Enlightenment’. On the contrary, it was the act during which the possibility of a narration of it, distanced from ancient myth was constituted for the first time. In the real world, structured like a text, an interactive interface with the past is impossible.

‘The Book of Life’ is meant to be read only once. Of the fragments of the Book, only those events that irrevocably sink into Lethe, can be subordinated to ‘re-reading’. These fragments can be equalled to ROM files: they can be given rebirth in memory, and for any number of times, but you cannot change anything in them. As opposed to the real world, in the virtual reality of cyberspace, no prohibitions are known to the reactualization of any event. Potentially, i.e. not depending on the hardware, the software can be multiplied infinitely, and in every act of copying the software remains the same because of its digital nature: since Plato’s time we know that in the case of ideas or numbers we are dealing with essences that cannot be effected by spatial or temporal changes. The digital nature of the beings and essences of cyberspace is based firstly to their protistic nature – all the members of a digital number group 0-9 are characterized by complete mutual transformability into each other – and secondly, to their prosthetic nature – the finger of a hand is explicitly an organ that centers in itself all the original capability of touching, dispersed in the somatics, which will then be modified into five senses and into all the prosthetics of human corporeality available today, that meditatively expand the scope of bodily touch to every existing thing. As a consequence of this, the prosthesis of an event in the virtual reality of cyberspace can be described as follows. Even a distinct digital simulation of an event does not know any spatio-temporal restrictions: it is simultaneously both in space and in time, a simulation of every possible and impossible event in the real world, completely corresponding to the ancient formula ‘One is all, all is one.’

Buffalo, NY presents a canvas for potential radical change, radically revised futures, radically alternative systems and most importantly, cultural practices that exist outside of any concept of the conventional market. This panel features practitioners and theorists based in Buffalo, whose work concerns the intersection of environmental, economic, cultural and technological factors in the revitalization and redefinition of the city in which they live. Panelists will sketch their forays into Buffalo’s wilderness, and discuss how their recent projects respond to and shape the city

Abstract

Chairs, tables, staircases, windows and doors are elements of a vocabulary belonging to the language of architecture. It seems a strange thing that these terms have been taken over by the emerging language of “Electronic Space”. Virtual space installations like “Sound Arch”, (Bernhard Leitner), “Huxley’s Door” (Ruth Schnell), “The Legible City” (Jeffrey Shaw) or “Columnism” (by the author) use elements of an architectural language. By analogy to organic architecture (Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames et al.) which picked up concepts from biology, we might now speak of “Architectonic Electronics”.

This does not mean, that electronic space will supply a brand new set of doors, chairs and tables (like organic architecture did not build new kinds of animals), it just means that in the paradigmatic shift from a world made up of bricks, wood and concrete to a world shaped by data-structures, we still feel bound to the formative imperative of physical laws, concepts and restrictions  The terminology of computer science and computer business points to the same direction: “Desktop”, “Windows” and “Gates” illustrate the notional inclination to mingle abstract concepts with concrete architectonical components. In accordance to Thomas S. Kuhn’s thesis about the structure of scientific revolutions one would have to suspect that architectonic space and electronic space are incommensurable. We might use words like wall, window or door in each of those spaces, yet the words mean completely different things in each of them. The link between the old and the new paradigm of space is built upon a contradictory set of  terminological items. Whereas computer business wants to make us believe that nothing has changed, that we still sit in front of the desktop, have the paintbrush in our hand and look through the same old windows, computer art makes us aware that nothing is the same any more. We are facing the doors, the gates and the whole furniture, but we have already left the house.

Since several years Art Historians and Restorers work on ways to document and mediate interactive moving image installations (e.g. Depocas, Ippolito & Jones 2003; Wijers 2007; Scholte & t’Hoen 2007; Jones & Muller 2008, 2010; Wolfensberger 2009; Kaye, Giannachi, Slater & Shanks 2010). By understanding documentation as a process of translation, the main challenges are translating the time- and process-based nature of these kind of art projects as well as interactivity and spatial components: These elements usually suffer from a loss within the translation process, especially if they are digitized e.g. for including a project into a digital archive. Up to now, the research focus in case studies dealing with time- and process-based art projects mainly strengthens the documentation and preservation of the physical and visual components of the installations, neglecting the aspect of experience for a long time. Only since a few years, attempts were made to capture the visitor’s individual experience (see e.g. Muller & Jones 2010). However, according to our knowledge, a translation of the visitor’s experience into a different dispositif was not yet undertaken.

Within our current case study we intend to close this ‘blind spot’ by experimenting with different ways of translating the experience of an installation. For the term of experience we follow the definition of ISO FDIS 9241-210 of user experience as “A person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service“ (ISO FDIS 9241-210, 2009, cited in Bevan 2009, p. 1). Starting from the moving image installation set up in the real world, we want to develop a 3D environment and a (interpretative) 2D interface, taking the ‘ideal’ (as defined by the artist) and ‘real’ experience (by the visitor) into account. In a second step we will evaluate, in which way the experience of the environment and interface resembles or respectively differs from experiencing the ‘real’ installation. The case study aims to discuss the potentials and problems of translating the experience of moving image installations especially into a digital format. In our paper we will discuss the first results of this study.

In this paper, I would like to discuss the public practice of video mapping and urban screenings through a specific project that I developed as my Digital Media M.A. Thesis. The paper provides the conceptual framework of the urban screening project “Would you like to swim in Umgedrehte Kommode (Upside Down Commode)?” which was realized on the historical water tower “Umgedrehte Kommode” in Bremen, Germany on 10th of April 2010.. The paper analyzes the necessary conditions of urban screenings in order to succeed within city space. It is also going to focus on the illuminative quality that it brings to the cityscape transforming architectural structures by emphasizing their unique identity.

A video work was specifically produced according to the architectural structure of the building and it was projected onto the four windows of the water tower. The aim of the project was to achieve designing an illumination project which would attract the public eye with moving images that are technically projected onto the surface of the architectural structure. This way, the spectators of the city would experience the water tower in a spectatorial visual setting which would let the building gain a unique identity in cityscape.

The visuals of video work consisted of people swimming underwater and giving an impression of looking outside of the windows of the building. During the production process of the video work, the citizens of Bremen was approached and asked if they would like to swim in the historical water tower: “Umgedrehte Kommode”. On a weekly basis, various citizens were filmed in a local swimming pool. While swimming, the volunteers casually and freely acted in front of the camera whenever they would feel to do so. The project aimed to create an intimate link between the citizens of Bremen and the historical water tank, which currently does not hold an active place within public space without any illumination agenda.

Through this specific urban screening project, this paper aims to discuss the transformation of architectural structures in public space through public involvement.

(Shortpaper)

Keywords: Art, algorithms, black box finance, resolution, renegade, dissent, insurrection, solidarity.

This paper traces the semantic field of the term resolution and its potential relevance in current techno-political discourse. Based on an artistic project engaged with the forensics of a market crash, I propose an approach – both artistic and political – for a radical material practice to (en)counter the black box of (automated) evaluation and decision-making. With an ambivalent, contingent and marginal figure at its heart – the renegade (a traitor inside and an educator outside systems) – it combines the varied meanings of the term resolution – from technology and visualization techniques and definitions; knowledge-production and decisionmaking; to discretionary competence and joint convention – to propose a multi-layered and transdisciplinary practice for rearranging (acting) against the “box.” By creating narrative instabilities, it works towards renegade solidarity that coagulates dissent into insurrection for profound socio-political change.

Nam June Paik created unprecedented art projects for his first solo exhibition in 1963. He invented a variety of interactive art pieces with diverse senses. They encouraged visitors to intervene in the process of making/manipulating unfinished art projects. Even though Paik ambitiously made interactive art for the audience, later on he hardly created interactive art. This paper examines concrete evidence for why he stopped making interactive art and about 30 years later revisited it as cutting-edge art.

Re-Thinking the Body explores the idea that the human body has changed to incorporate virtual (digital), organic (material) and mechanical (artificial) concepts. This paper is a plea to allow for both a fusion and an emergence of these three concepts, which include the unpredictable, wet, sensual and biological organic fluid of the human sensorium, and at the same time to remain conscious of the ethical implications of human manipulation. The presentation will formulate a set of paradigms about the changing idea of the body, taking into consideration the somatic and interactive relationships between the body of the viewer and the machines we create: a nomadic model in which interactivity, post-gendered perspectives, multiple personalities and combinations of immaterial and material surfaces could be re-shaping our spatial and temporal perspectives. While the virtual part of the body model could cross geographical boundaries causing symbiotic metaphors to occur, within the relational networks and techno-zones. of interactive art, the organic body of the viewer has shifted from a passive role into a physically active one. Meanwhile invasive mechanical technologies have changed the way we ‘see’ our body and multiplied our interpretations of it. The above concepts will be illustrated with a set of hybrid environments called Digital Body Automata.

The future is something that we all ought to concerned about because it is the time in which we will all be living….or we will be dead. But in any event, it is the time in which people we love and care about will be living. Our children; our children’s children. Their children. And so on. Should we care about the quality of the lives of our relatives, our friends, and of our communities that we leave behind? And if the answer is yes, is there an appropriate role for government? Or instead, should we merely allow the marketplace to exclusively determine who gets what, when, and under what circumstances? A short-term agenda, based on what Sun Microsystems CEO, Scott McNealy, calls “fierce Darwinism?” has been offered as our best way to the best future of our nation. “Fierce Darwinism” appears to be the dominant public policy in a number of areas of public life, including information and communication policy. It is a term, however, that implies survival of the fittest, let dog-eat-dog, “I’ve got mine, now you get yours,” laissez faire hands-off public policy, of the type that Thomas Jefferson defined simply as, “That government is best which governs least.”

So what is the right or most correct means of arriving at the kind of future we think we all want? What kind of society do we want to create at the end of the information highway? Should we even care? Whatever the answer, is there an appropriate role for electronic artists in making information and communications policy? These are not rhetorical questions. We do have meaningful choices to make that can make a difference in outcomes down the road.We can still influence public policy, which inherently looks to the future with the specific intent to influence the means and the direction of where we go as a society. In the final analysis, all public policy is what government does or does not do. It is unofficial as well as official acts of commission and omissions. It is generally what is done on behalf of the public at large by people who are charged to represent the overall interests and needs of the general public. In the case of communication policy, the public is defined in the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, as “All the people of the United States.” All the people, not just some of the people. In other words, the federal government is accountable to citizens and residents of this nation to ensure affordable access to a nation-wide and worldwide communications network service via radio and wire. What exactly comprises such service is crucial to determining, in the case of information and communication policy, the quality of the democracy we have, who gets access to what information and under what terms and conditions, who gets to speak to whom, who owns and controls the channels of information, who owns and controls information, who has power and who doesn’t. In the 21st century, will all the people of the United States have access to the dominate means of electronic communication? Will the common people be able to communicate, to speak, and publish—not just freely, but also effectively? Or will huge multinational corporations dominate all the effective channels of speech and publication? Can there be a public sphere when information is no longer regarded as a public good but primarily as a commodity? Is there room for public channels, public broadcasting, and public information in an economy where mass media and information systems and networks have all been privatized? Can the First Amendment guarantee free speech and free press where undue concentration of ownership and control of the public agenda eliminates dissent through legal private censorship of press owners? Will there continue to be a marketplace of ideas in the digital age, or merely just a market for information and information products that are sold as commodities? Do we need new privacy laws to protect the integrity and dignity of individuals? Are existing copyright laws adequate to prevent misappropriation and the wrongful taking of artists’ digital intellectual work products? Unlike Michael Dertouzox, head of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science, I cannot, with a straight face, Tell You What Will Be, I don’t know exactly how the new world of information will change our lives. And, I don’t think that any expert can or ought to tell us. Instead, I think that in a democracy, a participatory democracy, that is, citizens as well as consumers should decide what will be.

At this particular time in history, we are at the crest of a new age. A revolution of sorts. But a peculiar type of revolution often termed the”Information Revolution” or the “Digital Revolution.” Before I go into some of the characteristics of this phenomena, I wish briefly to discuss why I believe this revolution is peculiar. Unlike most revolutions, the instant one is not occurring at an explosive pace. It is more of an evolution that a revolution.While the pace of change is accelerating, the introduction of electronic information and communication technology has been ongoing, in earnest, for at least two decades, since the development of personal computers, facsimile machines, VCRs, remote control devices, desk-top-publishing and video, and, of course, the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW). The electronic communications age has its origins going back in history a hundred years with the advent of radio, telegraph, and telephony. Newer, better, more powerful, smaller and cheaper information technology has been introduced and has peculated into society at a quickening rate since the beginning of the 20th century and, indeed, continues, at a more rapid pace than ever. So, if the Communication Revolution or Digital Revolution is indeed a revolution, it is an evolving revolution in terms of its pace unless we ignore what preceded the advent of microprocessors (which evolved from the study of transistors). One might argue, even, that both the digital and information revolution began in the mid-15th century when Gutenberg invented the printing press with movable digits of metal type. Gutenberg’s single invention, led to revolutionary changes in society by very rapidly spreading literacy, free-thinking, and true revolutionary behavior that directly challenged the authority of the church and the state, leading to the age of Enlightenment, the codification of laws and science, the verification of history, etc.The printing press caused the old order to turn over and led to greater forms democracy in the governance of people because people demanded better treatment from the powerful forces of society when they were armed with relevant information concerning their true condition. It is simply human nature for people to act in their own perceived self interest when they have adequate information to act upon. But with all the new digital and analog channels of information available, are the people adequately armed today with relevant information concerning the information revolution, the knowledge economy, what will be, or the range of choices before them? In other words, is the digital revolution as effective as was the revolution of the printing press in promoting democracy, literacy or a better society? The fact that the old order is not being overturned as might be the expected outcome of a classic revolution, also makes this revolution suspect. Instead of a churn, the old order appears more intrenched and even more powerful because of its greater ability to purchase and exploit new and emerging communication and information technology for automation, social control, marketing, and globalization. This presentation will attempt to explain some of the significant trends and tenancies of the information age and to give a range of policy options that promote a greater public good. And, I hope to suggest some of the stories that electronic artists ought to be telling the people — in all formats electronic.

The JPEG, an acronym for the Joint Photographic Experts Group, is a technical standard that specifies how an image is compressed into a stream of bytes and decompressed back into an image. As a method of compression for digital photography closely associated with the World Wide Web, the JPEG is today the default mode by which we experience on-screen images from computer monitors to mobile phones. Curiously taken for granted in discussions around the web and digital photography, this paper argues that attention to the development of file formats provides a method to understand the way a camera ‘sees’, and how digital photographs function online.

For instance, today’s digital cameras invariably use a related EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) format, to record extra interchange information to image files as they are taken. EXIF data, embedded within the image file itself, includes metadata such as date and time, technical information and, increasingly, geo-coding in the case of GPS-enabled cameras. JPEG/EXIF data therefore includes both the compressed sensor data and a description of the environment in which the image was taken. This paper asks what is at stake in the development and implementation of these common standards? It also looks at contemporary artists who have taken up these ideas and questions in their practice. Ultimately, it proposes that the JPEG – which is only visible by its side effects such as compression artefacts – is an ideological phenomenon and a metaphor for the informationalisation of imaging in general.

Visualization as a technique of analysis has been employed by a wide range of disciplines in order to better understand large quantities of data about systems. The malleability of data and information in digital form, together with the interactive potential of real-time technologies, has made the use of the technique on computers and the internet particularly effective. The value of data visualization is generally understood in terms of the accuracy of the representation. This approach to the technique may commonly be identified in the way in which data visualization, when employed as a social critique in activist art, has been interpreted. Such art work on the internet has focussed attention on, for example, the use of the internet by corporations to acquire data in the pursuit of power and commercial gain. However, understood in these terms, the artistic use of data visualization has been criticised. The value of the technique to engage artistically with the immersion of societies in data flows whose speed and intensity have been accelerated by the internet has been doubted.

Questions have been raised as to whether or how its use by art may be differentiated from visualisations effectively employed by other disciplines.  I will propose that data visualization in art, instead of being approached in terms of whether it is a truthful representation of the world, may be understood to have rhetorical force.  My argument, using the work of Jacques Derrida, is that art may open a critical awareness of the value-systems and hierarchies of importance that give rise to the networks and data flows that are visualized. I will focus specifically on the way that legal systems enable the creation and enforcement of certain types of entities and relationships, such as corporations and their directors. Internet art may allow viewers to reflect on the justice of the system being critiqued through the interactive visualization of the contingent and finite networks that are represented. In doing so, internet art may allow for the arrival of what an existing social order has to occlude in order to maintain its existence without change.

The growing amount of user-generated data is a sign for the society’s dependence on digital networks. Not surprisingly the rapid development of technology is mirrored as well in arts. The virtual environment is an inspiration and as well a working medium for many creative people.

The aim of the paper is to introduce a different approach for the interpretation and usage of geo-located social data and real-time web. To be more precise, the art project described here can be categories as a real-time and mixed reality art piece. We are proposing an innovative and artistic way for applying geo-located social data for describing a city’s pace of life. Our concerns are about the malleability of the digital world to the physical one, and the interpretation of social data for artistic purposes.

The goal of the art project is to metaphorically describe the locations by extracting geo-tagged content and translating it into a rhythm of physical metronome in real time. In short, a metronome represents a city. The installation consists from the 10 modified metronomes whose rhythms correspond to the selected cities’ the digital pace of life of. The audience is given a chance to discover and experience an alternative way of perceiving different locations through a continuous performance of 10 metronomes.

To put in a nutshell, “The Rhythm of City” is an art installation that explains in original way digital geo-located social content and characterizes cities. Even more, the work is an ongoing performance that embraces different locations, digital social data, and physical kinetic motion.

The second part of the paper aims to introduce real-time web as an artistic medium by discussing a number of related artworks.

This panel explores what is currently happening at the intersection of Art and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, why it is important to acknowledge the power of creativity, lack of diversity, and visibility of minority groups in the field, and how we share our knowledge to raise awareness of these issues and discuss what we can do for the better future. Four panel members bring their expertise and firsthand experiences as media artists, creative coders, machine learning researchers, educators, exhibition curators, and art and technology community members.

Panel: The Matter with Media

The ear is not the pri­mary sense of ra­tio­nal­ity. Only when it comes to hid­den mat­ters, it trans­forms it­self from a ne­glegted organ to the most suited sense of knowl­edge ac­qui­si­tion. This hap­pened with med­ical aus­cul­ta­tion as early as in the 18th c. or dur­ing WWII with sonar. Lis­ten­ing could be reconfigured as a method for a crit­i­cal in­quiry about the mat­ter with media, es­pe­cially with re­gard its hid­den agen­cies.

Abstract (short paper)

Eye contact is an innate and powerful way to communicate intimacy. This paper investigates the effect of eye contact in interactive installations focusing on the relationship between artworks and spectators. In a traditional exhibition setting, spectators take the initiative to connect with the artworks by taking actions such as watching or listening; specifically, the artwork becomes activated as a result of the spectators’ engagement with it. Therefore, the aesthetic experience of spectators and the spectatorship depends on the ways spectators see that artwork. But the gaze operates in a different fashion in interactive installations where the reactivity activates independently of the spectator. This paper proposes that interactive installations are activated in a different way that has implications for agency, mechanic systems.

Room with a view is a 360° interactive environment generated in real time. It is placed in a sphere of 12 meter diameter, in a Skoda Pavilon at the ‘Autostadt’, a theme park in Wolfsburg Germany. The visitors of the sphere can use an interÍace, so called Navigator. It is a touch sensitive, ratable LCD screen. 0n the top of the screen there is a video camera, so the user may have two levels of information while surfing with the Navigator: the icons which can be activated and a segment of the projected image which is taken by the camera and displayed on the screen. The user can enter seven different worlds and interact within the worlds in different manners.

The Running Nude is a generative VR experience inspired by the early chronophotographs of human body in motion. It renders a running nude figure in a 3D game engine by making use of generative storytelling, machine learning and invasive effects that the VR experience can have on users’ perception. Numerous artworks and approaches that are referenced and appropriated in this work include dadaist poetry, Queneau’s literature influenced by mathematics, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell. The core narrative aspect of the project consists of stories created by tinkering with the recurrent neural network (RNN) Neural Storyteller.

This machine learning system is trained to write a romantic story based on an image that it analyzes [9]. Multiple stories generated by this creative machine were used as voice over whispered in the style of Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) recording. The generated narratives sound like fragmented memories of the running nude. This element of the project also functions as a layer of the digital VR world capable of piercing transversally the membranes of physical reality and that way making this artwork permeable. By using pseudo-random functions, the system determines and generates the music, sounds, points of view, as well as the flexibility and properties of the nude’s animation rig/skeleton.

Orchestrating and controlling these elements with random logic, as well as enabling the system to make creative decisions, unveil the Frankensteinesque nature of the created character and the whole project. Its overall narrative architecture enables users to observe the running nude, to become one, and to experience traversing through nudes’ ghostly figures and imprints located inside the 3D digital world. These visceral encounters connect the VR experience with the early beginnings of film and experiments conducted by Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Art and Technology offers courses in the areas of installation, imaging, programming, telecommunications art, electronics, animation, kinetics, art with light and neon, as well as holography. Students from across the School, undergraduates and graduates, choose from the 20-25 courses offered every semester. The faculty strives to give students a grounding in the aesthetic and technical capabilities they will need to continue working as artists using technology after they graduate.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Text, Scroll, Book, E-book, Digital Art, Artist’s Books, Textile

An historical understanding of the scroll is useful for creating within new textual genres. Books and text art-forms are destabilizing, energizing future possibilities. Yet we must look backward to the reasons this first information technology existed, as I do in my digital scrolls that report, communicate, purge, and narrate. In light of our changing “book landscape,” we combine heirlooms, maps and artifacts with rounded and striped visual structures expressing the rich aesthetic of a fading old (slow) format. Where will the new and fast electronic formats lead our culture?

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

This pre­sen­ta­tion is a means of con­cep­tu­ally ex­am­in­ing the sewing cir­cle as under cover method to in­duce power into an un­equal power struc­ture. I will in­tro­duce his­tor­i­cal as well as artis­tic pre­de­ces­sors. His­tor­i­cally, the sewing cir­cle seems to have been used dis­guis­ing power under the cloak of meet­ing for an os­ten­si­bly lesser cause while re­ally dis­cussing im­por­tant mat­ters. Women have cre­ated semi-se­cret dis­cus­sion groups, let the men have the for­mal power, but not for­mally re­nounced the power of in­flu­ence. The sewing so­ci­ety is an­other ex­am­ple of a covert pub­lic realm where women have turned the un­paid time to ben­e­fit the com­mu­nity. It is more open in form than the closed cir­cle and is known to have ex­isted in Swe­den at least since 1840. Through­out the twen­ti­eth cen­tury this labour has been pro­fes­sion­alised within hand­i­craft as­so­ci­a­tions while lately ven­tur­ing into re­la­tional aes­thet­ics. Dur­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion I will ex­em­plify with some of the many con­tem­po­rary artists who have con­tin­ued to use the under cover method of the sewing cir­cle as well as the power to trans­form pri­vate house­hold chores into pub­lic art.

The word “refinement” evokes terror or fear of an Imperialist language game setting arbitrary rules based on elitist ideas of taste. But “refinement” can be defined as a condition of mind and nervous system. It involves the ability to appreciate “deeper” values, where “depth” is as an expansion toward infinity, and “values” are components or shades of experience in that expansion. While the world-wide convergence of digital media has been discussed by some as transforming consciousness, we would argue that the current development of digital media is not truly revolutionary (in the “developed” and “non-developed world”) unless utilized by individuals who have experienced a transformation on the level of knowledge and consciousness. Since consciousness is here understood as a universal field of all possibilities, the source of individual and social con-sciousness, the socially constructed self is a part of a set of circumstances structured by consciousness. Activating the universal level of consciousness by means of an appropriate technology, anything can be changed, transformed, reaestheticized. We would argue that the electronic revolution is indicative of, and parallel to, a quiet revolution of knowledge occurring by virtue of a new subjective technology, the Transcendental Meditation-Sidhi program. The effect of the practice of this technology has created an era where new digital media can begin to express transformative modes of awareness, a completely new concept of knowledge and aesthetics, and a possible new sense of self beyond that articulated by Donald Kuspit earlier this decade.

Keywords: book, library, situational, electronic book, archive, participatory art

This paper introduces the ongoing series of itinerant participatory artworks called the Situational Library. Through the construction of a publicly accessible and open-source archive of physical and digital books, the Situational Library attempts to create a heightened sense of the exchange of something other, or external, which accompanies the exchange of the book itself.
Intro
“The Idea of the book is the Idea that there is no end to this very Idea, and that it contains nothing less than its own proliferation, its multiplication, its dispersion, and always, at some moment and in some respect or another, there is the silent or eloquent advice from the book that is an invitation to throw it away, to abandon it.” _ Jean-Luc Nancy

We live in a time when we need to consider that many things previously thought impossible might indeed be possible, and that these changes profoundly affect what we can do technologically, and how we live as individuals in human society. Humanity is achieving at a quickening pace its deepest glimpses and understandings yet into the innermost workings of the universe, and with it the potential by which to tap into new energy sources to produce a benign, cheap and inexhaustible power production paradigm. This panel will investigate the implications of this possibility. Major technological change affects the way we live and the way we interact in society. Few inhabitants of this planet in 1890, who traveled to town by horse and buggy, could have imagined that in 60 years time, people would travel the World in jet planes in the span of a few hours. Likewise, in that same time period, the World developed a dense grid of instantaneous telecommunications, first over wires, and then even without the wires to provide greater mobility. In this same timeframe, mankind has sent machines into outer space, studied far away galaxies, gained an entirely new understanding of the Universe, and cured many diseases thought incurable. Today, we live in a time when we need to consider that many things previously thought impossible might indeed be possible, and that these changes profoundly affect what we can do technologically, and how we live as individuals and in society. This panel will investigate the implications of these possibilities.

Panel Description
The prospect of abundant or unlimited energy is a real and growing possibility. Unlimited energy was nearly achieved through a nuclear production scheme during the 20th century but the high costs and risks tempered the effort. During the mid-20th Century, research and development into nuclear energy offered society its first plausible opportunity of abundant energy. A sufficient set of reactor designs combined with radioactive raw materials offered to the world for the first time the plausibility of unlimited or abundant energy that could be produced at special facilities and then shipped to consumers nationwide through a complex distribution grid. Yet, there were serious practical limitations that tempered and ultimately curtailed these nuclear energy plans. True enough, nuclear power approaches appeared poised and capable of providing virtually unlimited amounts of energy to fuel all facets of society, but the approach carried risks and costs that were ultimately deemed too high. In short, the potentially devastating side effects included two serious problems: the generation of copious amounts of highly dangerous radioactive waste that would require storage and/or “disposal” and the increasing and ever-present threat that these dangerous radioactive waste materials could or would be weaponized. Ultimately, the appeal and practicality of a 20th Century nuclear energy panacea was greatly reduced with improved appreciation of the extraordinary drawbacks. Unfortunately, recent events around the world continue to remind us of the terrible costs and risks to society posed by nuclear energy, especially when combined with the powerful and unforeseen forces of nature in a world experiencing global climate and atmospheric changes.

Panel: NeuroArts

The Neu­ro­gran­u­lar Sam­pler is a soft­ware mu­si­cal in­stru­ment de­signed by a col­lab­o­ra­tive team, which trig­gers grains of live sam­pled audio when any one of a net­work of ar­ti­fi­cial spik­ing neu­rons ‘fires’. The level of syn­chro­ni­sa­tion in dis­trib­uted sys­tems is often con­trolled by the strength of in­ter­ac­tion be­tween the in­di­vid­ual el­e­ments. If the el­e­ments are neu­rons in small brain cir­cuits, the char­ac­ter­is­tic event is the ‘fir­ing time’ of a par­tic­u­lar neu­ron. The syn­chrony or de­cou­pling of these char­ac­ter­is­tic events is con­trolled by mod­i­fi­ca­tions in the strength of the con­nec­tions be­tween neu­rons under the in­flu­ence of spike tim­ing de­pen­dent plas­tic­ity, which adapts the strengths of neu­ronal con­nec­tions ac­cord­ing to the rel­a­tive fir­ing times of con­nected neu­rons. In this paper we will show how we can ‘neu­ro­engi­neer’ the col­lec­tive fir­ing be­hav­iour of small net­works of ar­ti­fi­cial neu­rons by ex­ploit­ing spike tim­ing de­pen­dent plas­tic­ity rules in a sonic con­text.

This presentation will provide a brief overview of projects curated and developed over the last ten years that create a space for dialogue between artists, audiences and the city. The Primavera exhibition curated for the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney) in 2003 focussed on artists contemplating the relationship of media with public and private space. Whilst the gallery was the starting point for this, the works extended into public space with the aim of transforming the familiar into encapsulating and enigmatic experiences. This exhibition provided the artists with space to play and explore potential for both intimate and large‑scale audience engagement. This is an area I continue to pursue, the scale of interaction from the personal and individual to the larger shared community experience. How does media facilitate this, how do artists create the discreet introspective experience to the large scale and how is the response of the audience guided by the scale of the interaction? In particular I will focus on the work ‘Rider Spoke’, developed Blast Theory (UK) during my time there from 2007‑2012. ‘Rider Spoke’ is a work for cyclists, who ride alone through the streets of the city, with an earphone and microphone, listening to questions asked by the artists and recording their answers as they go. Over the duration of the work, the questions become more personal and the solo rider is taken deeper into the own personal journey as they traverse the streets of the city. My experience of working with Blast Theory was a deep engagement with media as a site for emotion, confession and connection. A work such as ‘Rider Spoke’ crosses the boundaries between artist and audience and brings the two together in a brief moment of intimacy and honesty on the anonymous streets of the modern city.

Abstract (keynote):

What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image?

In his book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Benjamin Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation— smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental mega-structure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture.

The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds.

FISEA

The question of perspective posed by Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper has been addressed by an analysis supported by a computer-aided multi-processor. A three-dimensional space was built within the computer to explore the notion that Leonardo used the ‘trickery of the theater in constructing the nontraditional perspective of this Fresco. In this investigation, the compositional elements were manipulated in the computer-created space, and the resulting images were projected into the plane of the Fresco. The analysis compared these projected images, as seen from various points in the Refectory, to the painted ones in Leonardo’s mural. The results clarify Leonardo’s use of an accelerated perspective in his construction of the staging of the Last Supper and locate the vantage points at the door and in the viewing plane of the monks, who sat along the side walls of the Refectory.

Panel: Mind the Gap

The State of Ata is a vi­sual book about the so­cial themes that de­fine con­tem­po­rary Turkey and that specif­i­cally ex­am­ines the im­agery of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, its rev­o­lu­tion­ary leader after World War I. This is an artists’ book in its con­cep­tion and de­sign that weaves to­gether pho­tographs, in­ter­views, artists’ in­ter­ven­tions and archival im­agery. It is a crit­i­cal vi­sual ex­plo­ration on the mean­ing of Ataturk’s im­agery and how it is used in Turk­ish so­ci­ety today. Dur­ing a twelve year pe­riod be­tween 1997 and 2009, Mike Man­del and Chan­tal Za­kari, two artists, one Turk­ish, one Amer­i­can, have be­come en­gaged in this pro­ject to bet­ter un­der­stand this con­flict. In the tra­di­tion of Robert Frank’s ex­po­si­tion of The Amer­i­cans,The State of Ata chron­i­cles our ex­pe­ri­ences pho­tograph­ing the peo­ple in Turkey as we found them: stu­dents, fam­i­lies, cou­ples, friends, on the street, in the of­fice, or in the coun­try­side.

We pho­tographed peo­ple, sec­u­lar and West­ern, or re­li­gious and con­ser­v­a­tive in ap­pear­ance. We made thou­sands of pho­tographs, con­ducted in­ter­views and col­lected found ma­te­r­ial from archives, gath­er­ing pop­u­lar his­tor­i­cal il­lus­tra­tions and other ar­ti­facts. Many graphic rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Atatürk that were orig­i­nally based on pho­tographs, were later in­ter­preted by many dif­fer­ent artists along the way, each one more re­moved from the orig­i­nal. This has cre­ated a body of pub­lic im­agery that is often far re­moved from the like­ness of Atatürk, but has be­come an image short­hand, an iconog­ra­phy sim­i­lar to the im­agery of other cult fig­ures. The book is con­ceived as a col­lec­tion of books within books; a photo book, comic book, school book, album of mil­i­tary por­traits, a diary… Like other artists’ books made by Bill Burke, I Want to Take Pic­ture, Clifton Meador, The Long Slow March, Jim Gold­berg, Raised by Wolves, Susan Meise­las’ books, The State of Ata is an art ob­ject in­formed by the de­sign, the lay­out, se­quence of im­ages, and the re­la­tion­ship be­tween image and text.

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

The State of Ata is a vi­sual book about the so­cial themes that de­fine con­tem­po­rary Turkey and that specif­i­cally ex­am­ines the im­agery of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, its rev­o­lu­tion­ary leader after World War I. This is a crit­i­cal vi­sual ex­plo­ration on the mean­ing of Atatürk’s im­agery and how it is used in Turk­ish so­ci­ety today. He is seen as the link to West­ern cul­ture. His image is being used as a sym­bol in op­po­si­tion to the Is­lamist po­lit­i­cal move­ment. For the new Turk­ish Re­pub­lic the sym­bolic image of Atatürk is the icon that con­nects the cit­i­zen to the image of a mod­ern Turkey. His image per­vades Turk­ish life. A va­ri­ety of iconic im­ages com­mu­ni­cate the mil­i­tary hero, fa­ther of the coun­try, vi­sion­ary thinker, plan­ner, teacher, re­li­gious leader, even fash­ion model, as he moved to rein­vent every facet of Turk­ish life in­clud­ing mode of dress.

With the pre­sent-day strug­gle be­tween sec­u­lar­ists, fas­cists, na­tion­al­ists, Is­lamists, and the mil­i­tary, there is an in­creas­ing in­ter­est in using the image of Atatürk as an em­blem for every po­lit­i­cal po­si­tion. This work also rec­og­nizes the po­lit­i­cal bat­tles within Turk­ish cul­ture that re­volve around fem­i­nine po­lit­i­cal fash­ion, the wear­ing of the scarf and even more ex­tremely, the wear­ing of the black çarsaf. Re­li­gious dress has be­come a po­lit­i­cal state­ment that coun­ter­points the sex­u­ally evoca­tive styles from Eu­rope and the West. This is an artists’ book in its con­cep­tion and de­sign that weaves to­gether pho­tographs, in­ter­views, artists’ in­ter­ven­tions and archival im­agery. It is a crit­i­cal vi­sual ex­plo­ration on the mean­ing of Ataturk’s im­agery and how it is used in Turk­ish so­ci­ety today. Dur­ing a twelve year pe­riod be­tween 1997 and 2009, Mike Man­del and Chan­tal Za­kari, two artists, one Turk­ish, one Amer­i­can, have be­come en­gaged in this pro­ject to bet­ter un­der­stand this con­flict. In this pre­sen­ta­tion Chan­tal Za­kari (one of the two artists) will speak about iden­tity is­sues in re­la­tion­ship to her Turk­ish-Lev­an­tine her­itage.

Poster Statement

Performing multimedia sound creation has developed considerably over the last few years and yet it has not been given a space of its own. While considering what such a place should be like, the Studitorium was put forward as a possible solution. The Studitorium is a place both for creating and diffusing. It is a fundamentally interdisciplinary space that covers the field of all hybrid art forms between music, theatre, installation and exhibitions. It is a place which offers a new direction to multimedia art emphasizing on the sound, to put it on an equal footing with the image, with the aim of developing new art forms witch are different than those of the past. This parity of sound and image can only be achieved if specific sites are constructed.This presentation will enable us to give a more in-depth explanation of the idea of the Studitorium and to discuss it with the public present. A more detailed written document is available.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, archive, documentation, neoconcretism, site-specificity, tactical media, Ferreira Gullar, Robert Smithson, Art Forum, graphic design.

This paper focuses on a Brazilian newspaper archive from the 1950s—the Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil—usually considered as the vehicle for the neoconcrete movement. It argues that the artists and poets working in this six-year publication increasingly engaged this media as a medium. It further raises methodology and historiography questions regarding the status of documents and digital archives. And, hopefully, it helps disrupt established narratives with fresh transnational histories crafted through comparisons between a couple of artworks published in this cultural supplement and related examples from the New York based Art Forum magazine in the 1960s and 70s.

1. Industrial Exploitation
The Design Environment has for many years proven a lucrative, but also an unpredictable field for the Computer Industry to conquer. With many vibrant companies seeing the potential in particular areas eg. Computer Aided Design only to find that the industry had been exploited by one or two major 3D producers retaining businesses in long term agreements, even though many of their ideas had been surpassed by new concepts eg. AutoCad against the rest.

2. Inequality and Access
In recent years, Information Technology has developed into a integral part of Design Education revolutionising the Design industry as a whole with the requirement for high level presentations and 3D graphics, Although this a great benefit for very effective education eg. CDROM and the Web, 1 have found in my early research that, it has also resulted in many undergraduates being forced into purchasing new computer equipment as well as books and graphics materials, causing a financial strain for many. The “roll on” effect of this, is a “Catch22”, a possible reduction in valuable study hours as they try to supplement there income by part time employment, with which to acquire computer equipment needed to allow the students their only access to their course work . This inequality has also resulted in several students dropping out early, with only particular financially secure types of student able to apply . There is little doubt that Information Technology has been a significant breakthrough in world of Design in the past, but if we do not want to discourage a proportion of the artist population, we in the industry must be financially careful, and help in the education of Information Technology and Design.

3. Global Contact
There is little doubt that the concept of Information Technology has given many people a new and revolutionary way of communicating, this has allowed the Design industry to have ‘ structured’ global contact with people, but at the moment my research suggests, that again it is the fortunate few ,who benefit . Individuals who live in a city, a telecommunications area or can afford the expensive equipment, this highlights a vast technological inadequacy between the west and some developing nations. But this could be partly resolved by a phased action plan, which involves Industry and education by the setting up of “televillages” across developing countries, funded by companies who exploit the cheap rates and employment in these areas eg. British Airways.

4. Technological Preconceptions
In the early 1980′ s there were many technological preconceptions regarding information technology, for example the Internet was to allow everyone eg. students easy access to information, but as business gradually integrates it is developing into The Information Society according to Daniel Bell which could be construed as synonymous with control and power for the few eg. commercial management.

Navigating through the packed metropolis, a solitary figure wearing a backpack weaves through the crowd. Out the corners of eyes they watch; I retreat from their gaze.

In the context of global terrorism, mainstream media conveys notions of the individual as a threatening outsider. Meanwhile, the proliferation of portable technologies supports an ideal of the modern mobile citizen. Mobility, in our global village/mass metropolis, gestures towards the core values of freedom but only manages to reinforce our Orwellian visions/realities. New worlds full of borderless possibilities are offered with one hand, while individual rights for exploration of these offerings and subsequent discovery of fresh potentialities are clamped down upon with the other. This contradiction becomes increasingly prevalent in our post-9/11 society and, as a means of regulation, requires recontexualisation, by society, of the individual into the absolute outsider or other.

The Suspect Backpack, a wearable mobile sonic media art experience provides the individual user with the opportunity for first-person interaction and engagement. Intended for use in public space, members of the public become an unwitting audience, meanwhile creating a personalised and intimate environment for the individual. Immersive in its very nature, sound is employed to convey feelings of anxiety spoken by an ‘inner voice’, while using news report announcements to inform the public of suspicious individuals. Inevitable and intentional shifts in proximity between audience and individual, and readjustments in location to retain personal and invisible boundaries produce changes in sound content.

Using artworks such as the Suspect Backpack, an attempt is made at commencing comprehension of the other’s reality. Media artworks, from the fields of wearables and interactive installations, provide suitable immersive environments for intimate first-person experiences. How do media-embodiments and enhanced spaces alter perception? Can they aid in developing a personalised awareness of the outsider’s position in the current socio-political climate?

“During the initial assimilation period, all the technologies that man invents and succeeds in applying have the power to numb his attention.”
-Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962

The massive circulation of increasingly sophisticated representation techniques has turned our daily life into a veritable “video-sphere” (Regis Debray). A mirror of life, the theatrical genre has reacted to this situation in different ways. Some playwrights resist what they consider a form of dispersion, and have looked for ways to restore the simplicity of human presence by focusing on the physical work of the actor. People like Peter Brook, Vaiere Novarina and Marco Baliani, have succeeded in finding powerful, effective forms of work. Other artists have taken advantage of the possibilities offered by new representation techniques and by the theories (the disciplines, even) that these techniques have generated, to invent a new theatrical language. These attempts to renovate the theater concern a small, even marginal, percentage of all the shows presented. Yet the individual approaches are so varied that it is impossible to provide a synthesis. At most, we can identify certain trends.

Building on an acclaimed International design education program, Taylor will present interdisciplinary thinking and the use of a technology design studio p/k-12+ that unlocks the grid of teacher/textbook centered learning, giving power to students. The presentation will address “Technical Studios as Art, unlocking the traditional “power grid” in education which is stifling our teachers and students. This presentation offers an antidote to present day educational delivery systems from which many young students are dropping out. Developmental rights of students drive the design of learning environments that actually teach based on ecosophy and research that underpins future education.

As many theorists of culture observe (Virilio, Bauman, Levinson to name a few) we live in the world of speed and mobility. Wireless media such as mobile phones, laptops, palmtops, and GPS systems are crucial factors in the process of acceleration of life. They change all aspects of the theatre of everyday life: scene as physical space becomes augmented by invisible network of waves, behaviour of actors who perform on the edge of private and public space, and the role of audience as difference between the stage and the auditorium becomes blurred or even disappears.

The classical metaphor of Goffman is used to stress the performative aspect of social interaction. Although Goffman terms described social relations in the age of „old“ media his proposal seems to be even more useful for analysis of mobile society. Using symbolic interaction as theoretical starting point, the paper questions rules of performance in the information society and focuses on artistic practices that address the role, influence and effect of development of mobile technologies. The stress is put on these artistic activities, which involve cooperation of large number of inter-actors and become critical interventions in everyday life, as the logic of wireless media is the one of connectivness and interaction in hybrid space.

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

Start­ing with sam­ples de­rived from the his­tory of ar­chi­tec­ture il­lus­trat­ing the key top­ics of build­ings as ‘the third skin’ of mankind the pre­sen­ta­tion then jumps into main sev­eral ques­tions for build­ing en­velopes such as pro­tec­tion, func­tion, en­ergy and mean­ing, fac­ing sev­eral dif­fer­ent con­texts of today. Open­ing a sec­ond stream of ar­gu­ments, the state­ment dives into the wide field of ‘ar­chi­tec­ture par­lante’ elab­o­rat­ing on sense or non-sense  of nar­ra­tive el­e­ments  in ar­chi­tec­ture by bal­anc­ing out their pros and cons. Ever since build­ings have been ex­pe­ri­enced by passers-by through their façades  which are phys­i­cally defin­ing pub­lic space , their gen­uine ex­pres­sion has been an im­por­tant issue, though it has not al­ways been treated care­fully enough. After bare Mod­ernism and ex­u­ber­ant Post­mod­ernism new tools and ma­te­ri­als were en­ter­ing the do­main of build­ing ex­pres­sion.

Leav­ing aside the glit­ter­ing world of com­mer­cial ad­ver­tise­ment as well as the ‘night-beau­ties’  il­lu­mi­nated by ar­ti­fi­cial light when elec­tric­ity en­tered the cities in the last cen­tury new forms of build­ing-re­lated, adop­tive media com­mu­ni­ca­tion get il­lus­trated. Look­ing at the ex­cit­ing al­lures of pre­sent me­dia-façades the in­evitable ques­tion of con­tent is in­tro­duced and ex­ploited. Are we able yet to talk about new and re­li­able mod­els of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion defin­ing a media space or do we only face a va­ri­ety of elec­tronic at­trac­tions blur­ring the mean­ing of pub­lic space? Point­ing out dura­bil­ity and beauty as key is­sues for the longevity and life-span of build­ing so­lu­tions the glit­ter­ing media ap­pear­ance in ar­chi­tec­ture is re­flected upon crit­i­cally. In this con­text the wide range of move­able func­tional parts in build­ing en­velopes re­searched on and gath­ered into the ‘Move’-book at Prof. Michael Schu­macher’s de­part­ment at the Leib­niz Uni­ver­sity  in Han­nover (D) is il­lus­trated as gen­uine means of today’s ar­chi­tec­ture.

The Three Sirens sitting on their island’s shore surrounded by the modering bones of those not able to withstand seduction. The Three Sirens are partly robots, partly musical instruments. They teach themselves how to play. The implemented computer programs contain no information on notation, harmonies or musical systems. Artificial neural networks use self-organized and unsupervised learning to find out about improvisation and instrumental virtuosity. The neuronets learn by allocating related stimuli to neighboring groups of neurons. Using this mechanism it is possible to reinforce similarities and to find hidden information within the presented sensor patterns (audio input). They learn to control their motors and mechanic characteristics (position sensor input). To give the instruments a chance to interact, their audio inputs are connected not only to their own amplifiers or microphones but also to each other. They first play at random, listen to their own sounds and later on to the other sirens. In the course of the performance, they develop rhythms, invent melodies and improvise. Through a human user’s interface (electric guitar, microphone etc.) session-like experiences can be made available to everyone.

Abstract

The new multi-media game? To attract, to win, to conquer? Or is it all just a big let down? Too often, the focus of the interactive event demands the viewer’s continuous absorption into a world where “there is no end.” But is this really the case? The multimedia labyrinth generates a seemingly endless series of permutations (in the form of audio or visual stimuli) in the relation between the viewer and these digitized worlds. Embedded within this emergent cyberspace, however, are structural assumptions that undermine and, in fact, dislodge the kinds of liberating practices the works seek to embrace and affirm. What then, does it mean to interact with digital information, and why is such importance attached to these new hi-tech landscapes? And what of the tendency within interactive electronic art to fetishize the technology and the surrounding language along established lines of consumption, and the obvious connections this has to more popular forms of entertainment?

More often than not, the technology supplants the concept as the determinant factor in the artistic process, and the artist emerges as a technician, committed to producing value through the multiplication of networks and of vast quantities of data. This process equates interaction with content and expression, to the point where interactivity is privileged over everything else in shaping the necessity of the work. Interactivity is perceived as the only possible way of engaging human action with technology, subsuming all other media into its powerful aura. In a sense, it seems to have become the model for our understanding of the relation of people to technology, without really focusing on the potential for these processes to transform that relation beyond a recognition of a work’s technological resonance.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Mobile Apps, Networked Audio, Crowd-Sourced Performance, Granular Synthesis, Algorithmic Systems, Generative Music, Multichannel Sound, Greek Poetry, Microtonality, iOS, Web Audio API.

“The Tomb of the Grammarian Lysias” is a setting of a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy for voice and audience members’ mobile devices, composed by Ben Houge, based on software developed by Ben Houge and Javier Sánchez. During a performance of the work, a vocal soloist sings the poem in Greek, recording fragments of his or her voice using a custom application; these recordings are distributed wirelessly to the mobile devices of audience members for further processing and deployment, providing the crowd-distributed accompaniment to the soloist, with no other sound reinforcement required. The result is a uniquely portable and scalable performance environment in which the audience enables the work without directly interacting with it, representing an underexplored realm of app-based music performance. This paper presents an overview of the work’s genesis and antecedents, a description of the technology developed to enable the performance, and a discussion of its unique aspects and aesthetic ramifications. In closing we share some of the challenges related to presenting a piece that involves audience members’ mobile devices, including a comparison of the work’s two incarnations: as a native iOS app and as a web app using the Web Audio API.

Abstract

1. The Will-Desire space is not immanent; the compact groups of desires are not exchangeable as “hard currency”. The clump of desires is alike the cluster of flower. The flowers may have different degrees of suitability to each other, they may or may not suit to one common cluster.

2. The kinds of pleasures differ (first of all) in their topology. They have their own “soul slices” for resounding. I propose to divide the whole desire map into three spheres: 1) one’s own body; 2) The body and the soul of the Other; 3) The mirage (imaginary) territory without “natural” resonators of the desires.

3. The topological classification differs from the late Freudian division on Eros and Tanathos drives (which is founded on localization of the source of energy), it differs also from the well-known dichotomy of libido and I-drives. The Eros drive reverberates only in ones own body (first topos), but they can migrate to the second sphere, for example when one’s body enters into the state of decay and loose the possibility to be a good resonator (phenomenon of favoritism).

4. The third topos units all desires, which are realizing out body limits and are not connected with reverberating in the body of the Other. The special “long-drives” are projecting here, they were always the subject of interest of the ‘strong philosophers’. We may remember a will to immortality of Nicolay Fedoroff, the death drive of Freud, ‘la caress-de-soimeme’ of Foucault, a will to Power (Nietzche). These long drives, being re-flected, achieved the other two spheres also (here is the source of difficulties in philosophy and psychology). But here are some constructions in the imaginary topos, which are not connected with our long-drives.

5. Basically, the new technology of desire intends to expand to the territory of non-human for the aim of domestication the radical otherness of the world. Technology is looking for those slices of reverberation which are more solid and multi-dimensional than body. Computer games imitate the long-drives (an all-mighty politician, Demiurg etc.), while virtual reality tries to destroy the body-orientation of the I. We may say that technology (in the degree of it’s domestication) realizes the basic existential call, the most clearly formulated by Russian philosopher Nicolay Fedorov: the call for the synthesis of new body. In this case, technology has one supertask: to achieve the general convertibility of desires and pleasures.

It is expected that machines will be able to generate paintings on canvas in real time autonomously, creating news choices in areas of artistic reproduction and production; replacing the pictorial hand movement of the painter. Then will emerge radically new questions, concerning the understanding of art and even the nature of our relationship to the creation. The convergence of the real and virtual worlds impacts today not only communication and information, but also art in its modernity with such importance, that painters may not ignore the possibilities offered by the development of interfaces during the last decade.

Faced with the possibilities offered by data processing painting, the artist must reconsider the relationship between the artistic gesture and the paint on the canvas namely the relation between the invisible and the visible, between palpable product and model, between picture and its symbolic double and the contribution of the metaphorical, mathematical, intellectual and sensual to the essence of the pictorial work.
The digital irony holds in that, henceforth the pictorial image, escaping the sphere of metaphors, is joining the world of models, at the same time that the potential image that, seeking to compensate its clean limit, proposes tactility, textural and pictural analogies that allow it to interface real & virtual worlds.

Printed media have a highly consolidated visual infrastructure. But printed (preponderant) visual part has been wrongly considered as coinciding with its whole. That is why they have been recently massively translated into another universal medium (the digital) through a direct process. What is missed, much more than nostalgia, is a small perceptual universe that is instinctually unfolded every time the physical medium is used, while it is misdirected if not negated in its new screen-based embodiment.

Virtual environment at the GOETHE INSTITUT

According to the Nibelungen myth, the world’s most famous treasure ever produced was thrown in the Rhine river near the town of Worms (Germany). At the core of its principle is a Ring that can provide an inexhaustible source of gold, love and joy for its holders as long as it is not used for their own personal power. From the beginning of time, the people of Worms have always known this treasure to be lying beneath the city waters’. This kind of invisible monument structures their imaginary with more strength than the rare visible monuments remaining after the city multiple destructions. The museum of the Nibelungen (opening 08-2001) is a passage from the common space of the city into the poetic space it shelters, from the daily life into the everlasting myth. The outcome is the virtual environment The Treasury of the Nibelungen with images, musics and sounds generated in real time by the visitors wanderings.

Production, concept & art direction: A+H (Olivier Auber & Bernd Hoge)                                                                                                                                        VR development (AAASeed): Emmanuel Maa Berriet                                                                                                                                                                        Music, sound design and real-time musical software: Thierry Fournier

This talk will focus on my 3-channel video installation and photographic series, The Tree Alone. The project takes its title from a line within Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves. She writes, “The tree alone resisted our eternal flux, for I changed and changed.” The manipulation of imagery within this series attempts to visually manifest the conflicting durations between nature and self. Taken as a whole, the work emphasizes the necessary duration of present experience by asking the viewer to repeatedly consider their perceptive response to familiar, visual phenomena.

Panel: Emotion Studies in a Contemporary Art Debate

Frus­tra­tion is one of a small col­lec­tion of emo­tional states that is as eas­ily ac­ces­si­ble in in­ter­ac­tion with tech­nol­ogy as it is in in­ter­ac­tion with hu­mans. Pre­sented here is work-in-progress audio and video doc­u­men­ta­tion of sev­eral artis­tic ex­per­i­ments, col­lec­tively called “Um­brage”, that are being pro­duced be­tween 14 Jan­u­ary, 2011 and 14 Jan­u­ary, 2012. “Um­brage” is a cu­ra­to­r­ial pro­ject con­ceived by four Mass­a­chu­setts (US) based artist-cu­ra­tors in sub­tle re­sponse to the Amer­i­can media’s focus on bul­ly­ing in schools after a teenager from the re­gion com­mit­ted sui­cide (on 14 Jan­u­ary, 2010.) Its aim is cre­ative, crit­i­cal ex­plo­ration of the fa­mous frus­tra­tion-ag­gres­sion the­ory (Dol­lard et al, 1939,) fo­cus­ing in par­tic­u­lar on the type of dig­i­tal in­ter­faces that are in­tended as an in­ter­me­di­ary step to live cus­tomer ser­vice in com­mer­cial in­ter­ac­tions.

The frus­tra­tion-ag­gres­sion hy­poth­e­sis’ main prin­ci­pal—that per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ences of frus­tra­tion are the di­rect cause of the kind of tar­geted ag­gres­sive be­hav­ior known as scape­goat­ing—is cre­atively tested and ob­served within ob­vi­ously con­structed, but still fa­mil­iar con­texts. These works were com­mis­sioned out of an im­pulse to talk about the dis­place­ment of col­lec­tive frus­tra­tion and the re­cy­cling of ag­gres­sion in the mun­dane ac­tiv­i­ties of cap­i­tal­ist cul­ture, but have begun, halfway through their du­ra­tion, to be­come an in­ter­est­ing com­men­tary on what the in­di­vid­ual ex­pe­ri­ence of frus­tra­tion can teach about hu­man-ma­chine re­la­tion­ships, and where feel­ing lies within them.

Marynowsky’s paper will present his previous and current research into robotic art which explores concepts surrounding the uncanny automaton. He will talk through the processes of developing his robotic work through the development of prototypes to finished exhibitions as well at the theories surrounding the uncanny, for example

The Hosts: A Masquerade Of Improvising Automatons, 2009. As the title suggests, the work is a masquerade ball for robots at the same time it suggests the failure of artificial intelligence to mimic human intelligence. The work is partly inspired by E.T.A Hoffman’s The Sandman (1817). In which a young man falls in love with a feminine automaton, Olympia, who dances with him at a ball. The Sandman is a key-feature in Sigmund Freud’s essay The Uncanny (1919). Since Freud’s association between the uncanny and the automaton, the uncanny has continued to be a key term in robotics. Namely Professor Mori’s Uncanny Valley (1970). The hypothesis warned artists not to design robots too human-like, otherwise the robot would repel the human viewer and thus fall into the Uncanny Valley, a state of fear and disbelief. In this work Marynowsky seeks to test if an unnerving effect could still be reached if the robots are designed as abstracted human-like forms. Automated lighting, including moments of darkness and an eerie soundscape enhances the slightly menacing atmosphere. The robotic theatre experience creates “a space where (free of superstition and paranoia) we do not see the reanimated corpses of ourselves but rather other autonomous beings, improvising” _Bec Dean.

A mystical realist journey catalyzed by a series of interconnected events related to sexual infidelity, political conspiracy, and spiritual transformation. The project draws on the traditions of comics, graphic novels and computer games in order to create an environment that crosses boundaries between pop culture, fine art, and social critique. unexceptional.net incorporates an extensive database infrastructure for storing and delivering game-state data via Weblogs, GPS enabled mobile phones, and a 3D game clients.

Abstract

unexceptional.net is a mystical realist journey catalyzed by a series of interconnected events related to sexual infidelity, political conspiracy, and spiritual transformation. The project draws on the traditions of comics, graphic novels and computer games in order to create an environment that crosses boundaries between pop culture, fine art, and social critique.

The central character of unexceptional.net is named “Guy.” Guy is a frustrated comic artist, game designer, hacker who’s recently found out that his long-time partner is having an affair. This discovery launches him upon a series of quests, that you participate in, in effort to gain insight into the nature of his partner’s relationship. Guy’s experience is infused with a disturbingly co-opted and corrupted eastern philosophy and spirituality that dictates the nature of the quests, and the ultimate goal, his search for “enlightenment.” To achieve enlightenment you must follow Guy on a series of Web and GPS-based quests to find special key objects that will help unlock and open all seven of his major “Chakras,” the energetic centers of the body according to Buddhist doctrine.

The project involves an extensive database infrastructure for storing and delivering game-state data via the Web, GPS enabled mobile phones, and a 3D game client. The Blog is used for providing the player information about what’s going on in Guy’s life, and the current game state, player locations, and quest progress. The Blog also provides access to an administrative framework enabling game designers to alter the game and have it immediately reflected in the various game clients through a series of user-friendly Web pages.

One of the key innovations of unexceptional.net is the way we procedurally generate the game world on the phone. All terrain and structure data used in the game is location specific and sent to the phone from the game server during game-play. The game world is thus aesthetically representative of the physical environment it’s played in. If one is in the desert one sees an abstracted representation of the desert, if one is in the middle of the ocean one sees water, and if one is in a city one sees urban space. This makes the game world extremely extensible, since the small memory footprint and screen size of the phone are no longer a liability in terms of more complex and emergent game-play. It also allows for game customization, so that quests can be linked to specific locales.

In addition to using the screen of the phone to display the game, we also allow players to use their voice to advance quests. This has been done by integrating telephony software called “Asterisk,” that incorporates automated call routing. We have hooked a speech-to-text and text-to-speech system called “Sphinx” (developed at Carnegie Mellon University) into Asterisk. This enables players to receive calls based on where they are in physical space, so that they can continue quests in voice mode, using the phone in ways that are more native to the device.

Finally, we are incorporating a 3D client into unexceptional.net using the Torque Game Engine. The initial goal is to make the 3D client mirror how the GPS phone client works. In other words, to algorithmically generate the 3D game world, and to allow ease of content creation and modification to a far greater degree than is currently common in networked 3D gaming environments.

As game play ensues, game state is continually fed to the server via the different client interfaces, and broadcast back out to those interfaces. If while playing the mobile phone game the player logs back in to the Blog, the impact of game play via the phone will be reflected. As the player continues to do things via the Blog, the phone and the 3D clients will be affected. Players can see all of these interactions in a Flash based “Transaction Visualizer” that we have developed. The Transaction Visualizer displays visually and sonically, all player and database activity in real-time. These are just several of the innovative methods we have been able to explore by using a combination of freely or cheaply available software, while exploiting the network protocols that support this type of interoperability. A main goal of unexeceptional.net is to push at these boundaries, and to develop capabilities that can be made easily available to people for their own creative experimentation.

Key objectives of the project include:

1. using unexceptional.net as a test bed for deploying custom designed and freely distributed software that takes advantage of everyday communication technologies such as Blogging, email, 3D gaming, and mobile telephony in order to enable anywhere anytime access to heterogenous game worlds
2. implementing the game infrastructure in such a way that it can be used for alternative content development and deployment
3. facilitating ease of content creation through provision of Web-based tools for game modding
4. sharing the results in the public domain through Internet distribution, formal exhibition in fine art contexts, professional conferences and events, and publication and
5. exploring novel forms of individual and community interaction.

Abstract (short paper)

Chinese characters consist of “three levels of hierarchical organization: stroke, component, and structure.” This paper suggests that, unlike in works based on alphabetic languages, such structure is significant for analyzing and creating Chinese text-based digital artworks. The ambiguity of semantic meaning at the levels of stroke and component in a Chinese character as well as the culture of traditional calligraphy, which encourages artistic expression on the material level of brush writing, create tension but also potential that influence how we read the characters incorporated in digital artworks, whether as spectacle of visual effects or as a linguistic sign, or both. This paper will investigate the evolution of Chris Homhim Cheung’s artwork series “Shang Da Ren” and will focus on two versions in the series: No Longer RIGHT (2011) and Shang Da Ren (2013). Although the techniques and basic concepts are almost identical in these two works, changing the context and the textual content in the newer version provides a very different experience for the audience as they read and interact with the work; this highlights the specificity of Chinese text-based artworks.

This presentation argues that around the end of the 19th century a shift occurred in the relationship between the subject and time. A culture of the immediate, the contemporary, the new developed. This consciousness was enmeshed in the development of modern mass media. Communication media promised a connection to the present, specifically to what Bejamin refers to ‘homogeneous empty time.’

In the 1880s and 1890s major changes were made in the structure of the media, in photographic imagery, in advertising, in journalistic tone, in the speed of reporting. A satirical report in a British illustrated periodical The King’ in January, 1900, describes the Uptodateograph. The device comprises a telegraph which conveys animated pictures instantly. So compelling is the Uptodateograph that the entire population of the country lives in the theatre in which it is shown.

The Uptodateograph web site attempts to recreate the Uptodateograph by using material from the media of the late 19th century. These Victorian images and fragmented texts are linked to web sites which form the contemporary Uptodateograph, highlighting their similarities and differences.

Panel: Serious Animation: Beyond Art and Entertainment

The paper will be framed within a brief dis­cus­sion of Sys­tems Art, the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of time in art and the place of paint­ing in con­tem­po­rary art. I will briefly de­scribe my per­sonal mak­ing process and how an­i­ma­tion is used to doc­u­ment vi­sual de­ci­sion-mak­ing processes at all the key stages of the de­vel­op­ment of a piece of work. The key stages of my paint­ing process will fol­low, with the as­so­ci­ated form of an­i­ma­tion-doc­u­men­ta­tion em­ployed:

Stage                                                                                    An­i­ma­tion
1. Data col­lec­tion                                                               Stop mo­tion and GPS
2. Prepara­tory stud­ies in colour and com­po­si­tion      Data sam­pling, real-time & pro­ce­dural an­i­-                                                                                                ma­tion
3. Paint­ing de­vel­op­ment                                                  Pro­jected an­i­ma­tion
4. Cap­tur­ing the paint­ing process                                  Stop mo­tion
5. Post paint­ing time-based analy­sis                             Com­pos­ite of an­i­ma­tions from stages 2 & 4

An­i­ma­tion is used to doc­u­ment the sys­tems method­ol­ogy I em­ploy at each stage of the cre­ative process. It al­lows me to cap­ture any de­vi­a­tion from the sys­tem; to map the ran­dom­ness, and chaos. My pri­mary in­ter­est is to doc­u­ment in a time-based way the in­tu­itive de­ci­sion mak­ing processes tak­ing place within a con­trolled en­vi­ron­ment. An­i­ma­tion is an ex­cel­lent method for such doc­u­men­ta­tion. Ul­ti­mately I am in­ter­ested to un­der­stand what this might say about the re­la­tion­ship be­tween in­tu­ition, con­scious and sub-con­scious­ness de­ci­sion-mak­ing in art.

Panel: DON’T HATE THE BUSINESS: BECOME THE BUSINESS!

The de­vel­op­ment of an in­for­ma­tion econ­omy, and in par­tic­u­lar its more re­cent ‘so­cial econ­omy’ phase, has seen the plu­ral­iza­tion of con­cep­tions of value (Stark, 2009). The rise of brands, the grow­ing im­por­tance of rep­u­ta­tion, both for in­di­vid­u­als and for com­pa­nies, the need to at­tract af­fec­tive in­vest­ments and in gen­eral to es­tab­lish a pos­i­tive large-scale recog­ni­tion for com­pa­nies are all man­i­fes­ta­tion of this.  While com­pa­nies have clearly iden­ti­fied the strate­gic im­por­tance of these “in­tan­gi­ble as­sets”, an ad­e­quate and broadly ac­cepted in­ter­pre­ta­tion of how such im­ma­te­r­ial wealth is trans­formed into tan­gi­ble mon­e­tary value still lack. The issue of the new forms of value cre­ation has grown in im­por­tance with the dif­fu­sion of on­line so­cial media. This is be­cause so­cial media, such as Face­book and Twit­ter allow these sub­jec­tive per­cep­tions of “value”, like the ex­pe­ri­ence of or af­fec­tive ties that peo­ple can con­struct with a com­pany or a brand, to ac­quire an ob­jec­tive ex­is­tence as ob­serv­able and mea­sur­able forms of value.  As a con­se­quence, sev­eral new data min­ing tech­niques, such as opin­ion min­ing and sen­ti­ment analy­sis have emerged in the last few years. Among other things, such as mar­ket­ing and pro­fil­ing, these al­go­rithms are aimed to cre­ate a com­mon “mea­sure” of so­cial af­fec­tive in­vest­ments around a brand or a com­pany which can serves as a base to es­tab­lish a new “gen­eral equiv­a­lent”, i.e. gen­eral sen­ti­ment (Arvids­son, forth­com­ing).  My pre­sen­ta­tion will try to dis­en­tan­gle how the on­line so­cial re­la­tions are in­te­grated into the process of value cre­ation and in the mon­e­tary cir­cuit.

Institutional Presentation Statement

The Vancouver Film School Multimedia is currently the only cross-platform multimedia production training facility in North America dedicated exclusively to multimedia training. The VFS Multimedia facility officially opened in June 1995 and is a fully integrated environment where advanced hardware and software technology are housed in a configuration of specialty labs and presentation venues. The facility is open 24 hours per day providing students with almost unlimited access to equipment. The program recognizes various skill levels and backgrounds by providing a Core Program (compulsory) and series of Advanced Classes. The Core Program follows the production process and students begin assembling elements and acquiring skills that evolve and culminate in an electronic interactive production of personal and group projects which are mastered on pre-selected digital format and publicly presented in the VFS multimedia presentation gallery/theater. Students applying for this program should be highly motivated, entrepreneurial, artistic, have good communication skills, a strong commitment to hard work and ability to work independently and in teams. The ISEA96 presentation will include the best work produced by students at VFS Multimedia during the past year, including examples of video, audio, animation, interface design and graphics.

Viralnet.net explores the cultural, educational and creative possibilities of what a Radical Cosmology could look like. Visitors to the resource room at the Albuquerque Museum will be able to explore the site’s artist projects, essays and interviews. Radical Cosmologies: Conversations on Culture, Technology and Research Tom Leeser and Lea Rekow will conduct a dialogue with leading artists and visual strategists, exploring the question What is a Radical Cosmology and what does it look like? The participants are part of the Viralnet.net Radical Cosmologies project. Their research and creative practices pursue cultural critiques of geography, astronomy, mapping, neuroscience and the possibility of life beyond our universe.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Tibetan mandala sand arts, multimedia live performance, CHAI3D, body motion, human computer interaction, augmentedreality, dynamic simulation.

This paper presents the Mandala, a multimedia live performance piece that explores the use of body movement and virtual imaging to enrich musical expression. This project combines an interactive 3D bimanual interface with a computer imaging application designed to graphically render and physically simulate the interactive construction and deconstruction of the ancient Tibetan Buddhist sand arts, called Mandala. Mandala, an agent of ancient arts and philosophy, uses technology to lure the next generation into traditional cultural practices, disrupting the boundaries between ancient arts and leading-edge interactive imaging technologies.

Virtual worlds such as Second Life privilege a single point-of-view, i.e. the user. When logged into Second Life a user sees the virtual world from a default viewpoint, which is from slightly above and behind the user’s avatar (the user’s alter ego ‘in-world’). This point-of-view is as if the user were viewing his or her avatar using a camera floating a few feet behind it. The user can also see from the avatar’s point-of-view or even move that camera completely independent of his/her avatar. Easily changing point-of-view has ramifications. The practice of using multiple avatars requires a transformation of identity and personality. When a user ‘enacts’ the identity of a particular avatar, their ‘real’ personality is masked by the assumed personality. In real life such change can lead to psychological distress. In virtual worlds and games a change in identity or point-of-view is thought to be desirable, liberating and fun.

Yet we should take pause. While MMORPGs, virtual worlds and electronic games seek to provide a fun experience, all require that the users/players agree to Terms of Service (TOS). Rather than liberating TOS is a regime of ‘soft’ surveillance. Most include provisions that content created by users cannot infringe on the intellectual property rights of a third party; users agree to indemnify the owner of the virtual world from liability; all content created by users becomes the property of the virtual world owner and the owner retains the right to cancel a user’s account anytime for any reason. According to Greg Lastowka submission to the TOC is equivalent to a new feudal order: “Like peasants tilling fields around a medieval castle, users will lend their copyright labor and creativity in ways that will build the value of the virtual world platform, often paying for the privilege of doing so.” Foucault’s discussion of Bentham’s Panopticon applies equally to typical Terms of Service: “to induce in the inmate (user) a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” Today, the mummified Jeremy Bentham is locked in perpetuity in a box. But his omniscient gaze remains omnipresent.

Abstract (long paper)

This project addresses the creation and implementation of new media activities regarding the importance of the artistic work of Croatian artist Emil Benčić (1930–2011). The problem/purpose is to ensure that knowledge about him survives the physical limitations of human life. The general mission is to encode his heritage permanently for present and future generations through new media methods and to preserve it in the new media space and be accessible and relevant to people. In the context of the research-oriented and practice-focused process, we investigated alternate digital heritage platforms and examples of good practices, we mastered available tools and technologies, and we realized creative solutions up to the public presentation stage. The result of the research is the multimedia project The virtual thematic route Emil Benčić ̶ From Experience to Infinity. In its current stage, the content is implemented in eight subprojects, designed on infinity shape (∞) and is virtually located on the Istrian peninsula Punta Busola (Croatia). The practical outcomes are databases, applications for mobile devices, video, cymatics, graphical sound, performance, installation, storytelling, and gamification.

Keywords: Games, representation, signification, Gamergate, identity, social identity, race, gender, sexuality, feminism, cultural studies

Digital games are so pervasive that they increasingly shape how people ascribe meaning to their world; in short, games are now culture. Similarly to music, literature, television, fashion and film, games as culture constitute “networks of meaningness which individuals and groups use to make sense of and communicate with one another” (Hall). Games expand the ways that we image our own possibilities, create empathetic connection, and seed ethical engagement with lived-world challenges and problems. Recent games ‘culture wars’, notably, Gamergate definitively confirmed that games traffic in the politics of representation, just as any other form of mass media. This panel examines the social functions of playable media as powerful forms of visual culture and ideological world making, especially as they relate to notions of difference. This panel includes contributions in critical games research that model intersectional approaches foregrounding the politics of representation, and signifying practices of video games as new media and visual culture. Brought together are three important voices, who—each in their own field—utilize intersectional approaches foregrounding more nuanced or inclusive forms of representation, and therefore more sophisticated signifying practices of video games as electronic media and visual culture. Each panelist (Everett, Harrell, Jenson) presented their work for twenty minutes, with an informal question and answer session that included the audience, speakers and moderator (Murray).

Presentation intros:

1. Anna Everett – Gaming Matters: Playing with Black Womyn MPCs                                                A paradigm shift of sorts has occurred in the procedural rhetorics and gameplay structures of videogames over the last two decades where race and gender in games intersect, though the changes are not nearly enough. Gamers now negotiate and amplify the joy and pain of their videogame fandom quite publicly and enthusiastically as game characters of color are gaining some new visibility as optional play (OP) and must play characters (MPC). As powerful narrative agents in action-adventure, open-world and firstand third-person-shooter genres in mainstream, casual and online gaming spaces (including networked games on Xbox Live), black women as MPCs in successful mainstream gaming franchises and action-adventure game brands are redefining the gaming experience in terms of 21st -century multicultural, multiracial heroic/sheroic character ideals
2. D. Fox Harrell – Modeling and Expressing Social Identity in Games                                        Avatars and player characters in games offer us new ways to see ourselves. They also impact us in the “real” physical world. Studies show that avatars can have a range of effects on users such as performance and engagement (Kao and Harrell 2015b, a). Avatars can have other impacts on user behaviors, it has been shown that users conform to expected behaviors and attitudes associated with an avatar’s appearance (Yee and Bailenson 2007). Avatars can also trigger stereotype threat (Steele and Aronson 1995), the phenomenon of being at risk of confirming a stereotype about one’s group, and even impact future aspirations (Good, Rattan, and Dweck 2012). Since avatars can impact physical world experiences even including oppression and violence, it is important to look closely at the effects of avatars on users. This section argues for the importance of analyzing identities and how computational modeling can be used to better design expressive identity representations in videogames.
3. Jennifer Jenson – Fighting Gamehate: A Feminist Project                                                                In mid-August 2014, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, gaming websites and 4chan exploded with allegations of “corruption” in games journalism, naming the phenomenon “Gamergate”. Since that time, nearly every major English news outlet and gamerelated journalistic website has reported on Gamergate. Women (critics, game players, game makers and journalists) are at the center of the controversy, and many have received threats that, as games journalist David Auerbach put it, are “so egregious” that a prominent female journalist (Jenn Frank) publically announced that she would no longer be writing on games. This situation further escalated into a public threat of a “massacre,” forcing games critic Anita Sarkeesian (Executive Director, Feminist Frequency) to cancel a public address at the University of Utah, and even the author of this notation has been targeted.

The Walls have Ears is an environment where the surfaces and objects can be activated to show the history fragments collected in the walls of our city. Everything that is outside of its limits presents itself in fluctuating levels and offers a bigger perception field, the empty like a percent of territory has as support the manifestations, adjustments and transformations that the human being practices to habit. The space that is simulated have the characteristic to expose the diversity of situations, which ones are represented in the marks, deformations and sound that show the aesthetic connection between the inhabited surfaces and its inhabitants.

Living in an old textiles mill in an abandoned village to the North and West of Manchester in the fork of the complex tumbling currents of Pennine rivers that once powered the heart of the Industrial Revolution, I live amongst ghosts. They do not speak because they are the ghosts of Hands. The ghosts of Hands cannot speak because they are being watched by the ghosts of Over-lookers. The ghosts of Overlookers must be on the premises first and last by order of the ghosts of the invisible Masters. These premises were the property of the invisible Masters. The word, “premises”, itself is derived from speech – the premise – the aforementioned. Ownership relies on the ability to validate speech prior to its utterance. The permit of speech and the permit of the gaze is bestowed by the Masters. As described in the Rules to be Observed by the Hands Employed in this Mill for Water-foot Mill as printed by the appropriately named J. Read of Haslingden in September 1851: “Rule 9. Any person leaving their Work and found Talking with any of the other workpeople shall he fined 2d for each offence”.

Poster Statement

While many regard the Web’s strength as interactivity, and everyone acknowledges its vastness, one less recognized attribute of the Web is the quality of shared intimacy which provides a perfect environment for electronic narratives. As an artist creating work for the Web, I’ve become interested in creating work which uses the Web as an intimate storytelling space, and in the renegotiated relationship with audience that results. It’s a paradox of much art on the Web that the seduction of images is the lure that attracts audience (and artists), yet the intimate connection forged by reading and interacting with a text on the Web may be the core of the online experience. This unique fusion of text and image in a dynamic medium with a mass audience provided a particular challenge. My presentation examines the genesis of my Web- specific work (“Realism,” at http://artnetweb.com/projects/realms/notes.html, and “It’s Pedestrian” which is in development) and my ideas about the development of a text-based visual narrative. When I began my first work for the Web, “Realms,” I started with a vision of images accompanied by short narrative phrases. As I worked, the narrative took over, and the balance of the piece began to shift to become a narrative with images. I was struck by the power of text on the web, and felt the extraordinary intimacy between artist and audience. I began to develop what writers call “a voice”, and to design the piece as a very direct juxtaposition of deceptively simple, short texts paired with a background image. Each episode in “Realms” was designed to be complete on one page, and the texts were designed to play with or against the images in an unexpected way. The tempo of the piece, and its pacing, began to be determined by the speed of absorbing text, as well as by the speed of download over the Web. And the imaginary viewer became a tangible presence in the work. I found myself thinking intensely about storytelling, dramatic structure and the viewer/reader relationship. Several concerns emerged: the special qualities of the audience and the audience-artist relationship (a broad based rather than art audience); problems of timing and attention span (notoriously short on the Web); the possibilities for communication with the reader/spectator/participant; the choice between direct and abstract communication (in consideration of the broader and more accidental audience); and alterations in the theatrical model of attraction, development and resolution to fit the more sporadic and randomized space of the Web. From my perspective, Web-based art work is a largely theatrical and story-based medium with the potential for creating unique dramatic narratives of text and image and for reaching a diverse and engaged audience. My presentation will focus on this perspective, using the evolution of “Realms” and “It’s Pedestrian” to illustrate the process, and will examine these intersections of text and image, the development of a storytelling space, and the challenge of creating an richer and more complex relationship between artist and audience.

The Well‑Sequenced Synthesizer is a series of sequencers. Using digital representations of music and interactive technology, each sequencer creates music in collaboration with the user, giving her varying degrees of control over a generative algorithm. The sequencers are physical interfaces, designed for playing with musical rules intuitively rather than rationally.This playful project was inspired by J.S. Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier, and Wendy Carlos’ 1969 The Well Tempered Synthesizer. In particular, by the way these seem to explore music through the lens of the technology of their time: the well‑tempered tuning system, and the timbres and programming of the analog synthesizer, respectively. The Counterpointer takes a melody input and responds with voices that follow the rules of counterpoint. El Ordenador generates chord progressions applying a set of constraints inspired by the features of tonal music described by Dmitri Tymoczko in A Geometry of Music. Finally, la Mecánica uses a traditional music box mechanism to play back the progressions generated by El Ordenador.The paper will cover the research process (Bach’s The Well‑Tempered Clavier, Wendy Carlos’ The Well‑Tempered Synthesizer, Generative Algorithms, existing sequencer interfaces, motivation for designing interfaces to interact with music theory concepts); the design and production process (aesthetic references, from first sketches to paper prototypes, graphic design, physical design); the design and production process (iterative process: a series of throw‑away transversal prototypes. Graphic Design, Interaction Design, Software Design, Hardware design, User Testing and Feedback), Conclusions and Future Work.

Artist Statement

The spirit of the new frontier is still strong in the vast, yet unconquered spaces of the West Coast and the landscape itself prepares the humans inhabiting this land for making the transition to functioning within cyberspace. Driving down the freeway for hours daily develops an ability to parallel process movement through space and time with the higher thought processes functioning on a conscious level. The body is still, in a sitting position, with a simple task of automatic movement of the car and observing the few signs along the way while the subset of the mind operates. This is a form of active meditation that prepares one for navigation through cyberspace…

The vastness of the California landscape with all traces of history wiped out and the generic housing projects sprouting all over the place makes it impossible for one to internalize it and feel in control of it. When confronted with the artificiality of sites like Hollywood or Orange County and the immense surrounding spaces, it is easy to make the comparison to the newly evolving cyberscapes. These distances also necessitate the communication through the electronic space and it is by no accident that it was conceived in this part of the world where
Silicon valley sits. The inherent need to control nature manifests itself in the projection of visions of perfection that are in fact closer to a virtual world then that which is defined as virtual reality. Silicon, the same substance which is used in the production of chip technology, is used in redefining the human body, mostly women, and preservation of nature. Yet, when we delve deeper into the mysteries of the mind projected into the silicon chips, we once again return to the generative erotic—the Motherboard, the matrix. Here we find that the architects of the machine, no matter how unconscious, have left room for the feminine principle to participate in the creative process. Women are coming into the picture much later, but without any excess baggage of the past connections to war. The transmutation process involves the feminization of this mental space constructed by the masculine, inward looking mathematical process.

Using the installation “Another Day in Paradise,” which is composed of three preserved, reconstructed palm trees (symbols of Paradise) with integrated monitors, I will explain the preservation process and compare the artificial geometries of the California landscape (and many similar new areas) which elide hidden indigenous patterns to the spatial relationships of cyberscapes under construction.

In this paper I suggest that we need a complex, fractal-like intermingling of the wilderness and city in both real and virtual space in order to create a sustainable future for human beings on the earth. I discuss Mrs. Squandertime, a persistent simulation/stimulation of the slow alpha state that is conjured by watching nature without purpose, as an example of such an intermingling.

This work-in-progress explores the relationship between the formal qualities of a woodland landscape and a theory of aesthetics developed at the beginning of the 20th century by Roger Fry, artist, member of the Bloomsburry group, and influential art critic. Towards the end of the 19th century, he lived next to the woods which Liz Milner photographed over the course of the last year of the 20th century. The formal qualities within the photographs taken by Liz Milner, are being analyzed and catalogued using criteria suggested by Fry’s essays in Vision and Design, and will be used alongside sound, text and some moving image in a multi-media presentation (eventually a ‘Director’ movie). This project re-visits his ideas from the viewpoint of a century later – providing a perspective that has seen both the embrace and rejection of modernism.

Abstract

In keeping with a conceptual practice I continue to question and analyse the idea of art. My work concerns the use of computer technology to augment our thinking and elucidate deeper understandings of issues and positions within the art field. Participation is paramount here and much of my work is interactive where the visitor’s actions and choices contribute to the delivery of a piece’s content. Although there is a façade of entertainment in that the pieces are quite playful and engaging, the intent is to use new technology to present and help elucidate more complex ideas about what art is.

Intro

Table: An arrangement of numbers, words, or items of any kind, in a definite and compact form, so as to exhibit some set of facts or relations in a distinctive and comprehensive way, for convenience of study, reference, or calculation.

Richard Bolt (Senior Research Scientist in the Perceptual Computing Group at the Media Laboratory of MIT and author of The Human Interface) gave a presentation at Ohio State University, in a series on Technology and Postmodern Culture (fall, 1993), in which he argued that ‘dealing with computers will become less like operating a device and more like conversing with another person.’ Bolt demonstrated his point, as Susan Roth described it, by means of a computer program that responded to voice command, gesture (through feedback from a digital glove), and gaze (through feedback from an eye- tracking device). The display contained a chair and a table on which were placed a glass and a pitcher, on a floor covered with black and white tile.

The virtual table brings to mind Plato’s three beds (or tables), listed in order of reality from most to least real—the pure form (the idea of the table); the carpenter’s table; the picture of a table made by an artist. Where does the virtual table come in this list? How
should we understand the table Bolt displayed? The very insistence on the table—moving it, raising, rotating and lowering it before the fascinated gaze of the audience — evokes an allegorical effect. Our starting point is the meaning of this table — a hermeneutic question. We will not stop there, however, but move on into a heretic relationship with the table, to learn not what it means, but what we can make of it. Bolt’s interface metaphor may be considered in the context of the history of dialogue, and this metaphor (communicating with a computer is like having a conversation with a person) is the key to our project. Let us accept as the terms of our design project the idea that the future of education in an electronic era depends upon our ability to extend and adapt the dialogue to computing. The first thing that a quick review of the tradition reveals, however, is the fact that the meanings of the terms are unstable and shift from epoch to epoch. Thus for example ‘to converse with a person’ means quite different things in an oral civilization and in a literate one. We have to assume that when the technology is electronic rather than print or speech (the different media imply different institutions contextualizing their employment) both the practice of conversing and the nature of personhood will be undergoing a transformation. Our task as interface designers, then, is to invent the prototype of an electronic dialogue.

The Yorkshire Soundscape Project was conceived to retrace footsteps from 40 years ago, within the Yorkshire Dales and focus on specific artistic practices to cope with the search for change in an evidently and relatively unthreatened environment. Within the framework of ecoacoustics, supported theoretically by phenomenology and psychogeography, this is a case study in a sound artist’s experience of landscape through archive, composition, spatialised audio systems, and geopolitics of the ‘natural’ environment. This paper will offer an overview to these methodologies and highlight some emerging themes from its practice- based research. Bridges built with buzzwords bearing twisted roots in what is essentially phenomenology and environmental philosophy, coupled with the conceptualism of contemporary art, may be giving rise to a lack of things that actually matter. In a world of hyper-appearances and post-truths, certain areas of sound and music could be at risk of falling in an eternal ontological squabble whilst the world around it continues to change and disappear at an alarming rate.

ISEA 2018

[ECO]nomy. This is a rejection of the one-directional sovereignty of globalized humanity over nature, with adverse environmental conditions as the byproduct of profit-driven decisions. The [ECO]Nomic Revolution shifts the logic of economic decisions from individualized choice to reflect the logic of nature on a microbiological level. The installation documents the artists’ scientific and socioeconomic experimentation as they reflect on how values are assigned. The  artists encode economic indicators and area demographics into the microbiological terrain overlaid on a map of Durban.

As the microorganism, Physarum polycephalum, charts the territory with its own growth algorithm, Cesar & Lois reference the growth dynamics of this nature-based culture to ponder a city’s dynamics. Cesar & Lois respond to the algorithmic growth of the organism with a log of observations, interspersed with community members’ reflections on societal dynamics and growth. By referencing nature’s networking and the organism’s system of sharing resources, alternative logic models for growth may emerge. By  reorienting the logic of a city to the smallest entities within nature, the project hierarchizes the biological culture’s logic over human design.

Panel: Don’t Anthropomorpise Me: Electronic Performance Tools, Automatons and The Vanity Apocalypse

Any mod­ern com­puter Op­er­at­ing Sys­tem (OS) is de­signed with self-main­te­nance and self-sup­port fea­tures under the hood. OS mon­i­tors the health of hard­ware it runs on, ac­tiv­ity of ex­ter­nal pe­riph­ery, user input; it de­ter­mines the nec­es­sary pro­cess­ing and han­dles its own state. For ex­am­ple – in case of a se­vere error or over­load an OS can de­cide to re­boot a com­puter; other time, when user pro­gram uses too much mem­ory an OS would ter­mi­nate the program.?My in­ter­est here is to ex­plore be­hav­ior of OSes under dif­fer­ent con­di­tions and cir­cum­stances, ob­serve the meth­ods they uti­lize for self-main­te­nance, se­cu­rity and con­trol. Is User pro­gram prefer­able to Sys­tem process from the per­spec­tive of Linux ker­nel? Can one use an OS with­out ever leav­ing a trace in sys­tem logs? Does User im­pose ul­ti­mate con­trol over a run­ning OS or why the ‘shut­down’ com­mand some­times does not work?

If new technologies are often indistinguishable from magic it should not be surprising that story tellers and theatre artists are often among the first adopters of new media. Playwrights and directors working in limited live presentation environments are eager to broaden their range of expression using emerging technologies to advance their theatrical objectives.

The integration of electronic media into the theatrical stagecraft tool box, along side fog machines, slide projectors, and reinforced sound amplification, has gradually become an expectation of mainstream audiences. Some experimentalists in live theatre are merging traditional theatre values of virtuosity and verisimilitude with digital media. Emerging intersections of theatre and electronic art are many and increasing. Advances in electronic stagecraft tools include the use of powerful graphic engines that enable live actors to interact in real time in virtual stage sets.

In 1991 at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference George Coates theatre company, GCPW, introduced a stagecraft that enables live performers to inhabit projected virtual stage sets in stereographic 3D. Real time data animation allows live performers to improvise with unscripted digital media. Audiences wearing polarized glasses experience volumetric stage space as interactive scaleable sceneography. On September 26 1998, Blind Messengers, a music theatre production created using digitized cave paintings of California aboriginal muralists, has its world premiere in Sacramento, CA, USA.

When Brenda Laurel introduced her theoretical argument about computers as theatre in the late 1980s, it was a time when CD-ROM based multimedia was the center of attention in the contemporary field of new media. What makes her contribution remarkable in retrospect is that it is from that book, Computers as Theatre, onwards that interactivity is increasingly described as an experience, and not merely as a way to control a computer based system. Laurel put forward the notion of the computer screen being a representation and not a literal mimetic image of data objects, which in turn meant that since there are multiple interpretations involved, the computer medium is an expressive, artistic medium.

Obviously many people had considered computers as creative media before, Jasia Reichardt wrote in the introduction to Cybernetic Serendipity, the computer and the arts (exhibition at ICA, London in 1968) how not only do computers and new media in general alter the shape of art, but involve into creative activity from fields where this was not common, like engineers, who “… have started to make drawings which bear no practical application, and for which the only real motives are the desire to explore, and the sheer pleasure of seeing a drawing materialize”. There are a number of developments that tangentially evolve from the above “beginnings” that inform the conceptual background of ISEA2004. Laurel’s position marks a radical shift in the cultural theorization of new media. Reichardt on the other hands pinpoints a tradition that is not developed through computers: that of practice based research, which requires exploration without a clear teleological reason. It is not surprising that artists who at the time of creation are least sure of the outcome of the process have turned out to be most successful. This has been pointed out by empirical studies on creativity (early work by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).

In the field of science and engineering tinkering and blue skies research is inseparable of innovations – we all know this – but it is mistakenly considered to be a privileged characteristic of artists. I will discuss here ISEA2004 themes via a less physical conceptual apparatus that I’d coin the Theatre of the Invisible. This apparatus would combine several aspects of ideas by researchers and artists to try to comprehend, both historically and in its contemporary sense, what constitutes the environment in which new media are experienced, and how this relates to the themes in ISEA2004.
During history, physics and medicine have influenced the very perception of our bodies and the way that a primary physical experience is “made sensible”. For example, in the early industrial era the body was represented as both an engine and as a clockwork system (Descartes). In contemporary perception of the body, it is increasingly becoming quantified and traceable. The “bit body” goes back to theories of information, where the body is represented through neurons that communicated with one another, a system of information. Warren McCulloch and Ralph Pitts demonstrated with their theory of neurons how a neural net could calculate any number that a Turing machine can. This, according to Kathryn Hayles, -joined a model of human neural functioning with automata theory”. The cultural perception of digitality of today is comparable to the secrets of the early automata machines that excited many generations in the 17th and 18th centuries. As a technology, a digital computer and digital networks follow rather simple logics, but the Deus et machina nature of the invisibility of their action makes them into ideal contemporary mythic objects and machineries.

Early automata were according to Jean-Claude Beaune regarded as timeless due to their hidden, mechanical myth. The machines were to imitate human actions or to reproduce the -course of the world’. The digital automatons, personal computers and the “drama of interactivity” are like a classical automata turned inward, and the World Wide Web is often talked about as an imitation of the course of the world. Erkki Huhtamo points out accurately, that automation is not the opposite of interactivity, but its precondition. If a doll pouring a cup of tea was automated with wooden clockworks, then binary processes and algorithms, boxed as computers, have automated the feedback that a user receives to the actions done by an input device such as a mouse. Norbert Wiener has been quoted saying that “to live effectively, is to live with adequate information.” And further. “In my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the new communications machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback.

Wireless experience

Wireless networks and the client devices form a combination of an imagined cybernetic entropy and a personalized automaton; in popular discourse it is common to say that one is either on or off the network and any disturbances in seamless networking are immediately reacted upon. Also on a daily basis this comment comes along: see how it works? The marvel of networked mobile telephony is not due to the fact that one can speak to one another or that one can send messages in text format. The marvel is constructed through the invisibility of transfer and the mobility of the point of transmission and reception. The massive electro-mechanical infrastructure that sustains the services goes unseen. Classical stage theatre has precisely this effect: the suspension of disbelief is broken immediately if a mechanical swan passing in mid-air across the stage gets stuck. The marvels of mobility are wearing thinner day from day; unless it becomes “new” again.
The work that many creative and critical practitioners are doing in the contemporary wireless “field” is to make the physicality of the networks visible through hacking, transcoding data streams into sound, through mapping the positions and actions of individuals. These exercises also address issues of networks and power (not talking electricity here…). Furthermore, when taking as a starting point that mobile telephony, and more so also Wireless computing are becoming commonplace, a key issue is how can one enhance the social and cultural uses of them? What does your mobile enable you to do – and experience differently? One aspect that ISEA2004 artists and speakers remind us is that wireless networks are ultimately radio networks. The history of digital computing and telephony is very “connected”; Claude Shannon mimicked the basic principle of a telephone operator switchboard when he imagined a digital system with binary mathematics. How ironic is that? However, these digital underpinnings have very little to do with the actual experience of using any digital device. The issue is more about the socially, contextually aware and content wise relevant designs.

On a more pragmatic level in relation to contemporary mobile research and practice, one of the goals of ISEA2004 is to introduce practice driven research with the theoretical and invite people from the technology and culture industries to consider how the user culture driven discourse could benefit what is being produced next. Here, if one is interested in the impact of mobile telephony regarding politics of the public space and access to information, one has to be able to create dialogue between the social and cultural innovators, the industry, and the policy makers. To this end, m-cult, the Arts Council of Finland and The International Federation of Arts Councils and Cultural Agencies organize an expert meeting towards the end of ISEA2004 attempting to develop policy. Issues around sustainable translocal and networked initiatives are central to the agenda.

Critical Interaction Design

As briefly demonstrated, the histories of interactivity and digital systems run parallel up till the 1990s. The engineering culture’s perception of the end user has slowly changed to understand the multi-layeredness of the position, but the user still, largely, remains without “a lived identity”. Critical interaction design addresses a cross roads of cultural and media studies meeting system design and computer science. One has to also take into account that humanities are not trained into complex systems, nor are engineers trained to research complex humans. On a fundamental level, understanding interactivity is an interdisciplinary task. In the 1990s interface design the use of metaphor occupied a central aspect of interaction design research. The challenge already laid out by Nicholas Negroponte’s MIT team when building one of the early desktop interfaces was that of “ars memorabilia” art of memory, connecting images, memories and locations. How to connect the currently visible with the invisible, and how to make the latter available, known?

In his book, Where the Action Is, Paul Dourish (also part of ISEA2004 International Programme Committee) suggests that traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) models are no longer capable of understanding interaction between humans and computers. Whereas the traditional models used to comprehend the world in terms of plans, procedures, tasks and goals, the contemporary HCI looks at interaction “not only as whatis being done, but also as howit is being done. Interaction is the means by which work is accomplished, dynamically and in context”. His point about “where the action is” refers firstly to the development of visual interfaces for information management, secondly to physical devices that penetrate our everyday lives and thirdly to the networked, social nature of computer interfaces. In other words, when designing soft and hard interfaces one should be addressing both social and tangible computing, and consider interaction as a situated action. The becoming invisible, ubiquitous in this context, is very central to the Wearable Experience.

A good example of social computing is the ways in which the fastest growing new media industry, production of games, is changing its design processes. The game users are incorporated into the development of games in ways that go far beyond traditional software development models. Walt Scacchi from the University of Irvine has looked at Free/Open Source (F/OSS) development practices in relation to games production. Game users are increasingly becoming developers though F/OSS development, which “is inherently a complex web of socio-technical processes, development situations, and dynamically emerging development contexts”. The traditional software design life cycles and prescriptive standards are radically challenged. The users of software driven products (games) and their user culture (game playing) are at the heart of the design process.

The iterations in this design process are based on user experiences in their every day life contexts rather than in the sterile environments of usability laboratories. In other words, the design practice is intimately tied with the process of user experience being mediated amongst the users and back to the design team that started the process. My own research over the Last years has focused on the theme situated user experience. In that work I am making further arguments that interactive media involve radically new aesthetic and embodied ways for constructing, networking, experiencing and living with new media objects; and that there cannot be a unified concept of interactivity and use.

One of the arguments against a too visually oriented interaction design nowadays has to do with the fact that it is often the metadata structures that one needs to understand and envision, without actually seeing them. In some peculiar ways, the classic perspective drawing could be here understood as the user’s need to be able to imaginatively project into the semantic vector “space” to understand the complexity of the information and thus be able to be an empowered user. No wonder systems like Google are popular: most users are not keen to see beyond the visual interface. The other side of the coin, the database panopticon that I refer to in the introduction, is a key motivation why many artists and researchers invest their time to make these vectors of power visible.

Cultural uses of interactive media have been very sensitive in trying not to oversimplify the “user politics”. The very word use is a problem here, as engagement, intervention, participation often describe better the ways in which individuals are positioned in front of a cultural interactive environment. The confusion is often precisely that; as most of us have been trained by either IBM, Apple or Nintendo where the command and retrieve, play and proceed are often the modes one is accustomed to, when encountering another type of interface, it takes time to feel one’s way around it. This is perhaps one of the aspects why Kiasma felt the need to translate Wireless experience into Coded experience in Finnish (plus wireless experience literally in Finnish means to experience without wires). Large software companies are also alien to ideas of designing media for particular user groups. Work by the group Mongrel and media centres deWaag and Sarai are good examples of the culturally and politically driven design so vital for the Information society to become a cultural and social one.

Critical interaction design does not aim to kill a friendly interface, it may beat it up a little (deconstruction), but reassembled, the smiley takes on another meaning. Open Source and Software as Culture The technical discourse, gadget talk, is not only often limiting because of literacy but it also reflects gender politics of software production sociabilities. Linus Torvalds, for example, has expressed that unfortunately many hackers are men — and yes, he says, there are those computer users who prefer to look at the pretty pictures on the web. In as much as the open source software is a cultural and social phenomenon very much in need of analysis, it seems to have a somehow holy position in both new media cultural and technological scenes. What is particularly striking is how alike the person myths of software are to those of traditional arts; Leonardo complex revisited. In OS discourse the very visibility of the code and technical layers makes it less accessible to many. This is not to say that openness is not what should be done; but what is definitely needed are more public librarians to provide contextually meaningful access to the important and vast amount of work done as open source.

At ISEA2004 it has been a point not to debate politics of different licenses, as so many events end up in debate loops around free software. We wanted to emphasize the “and software as culture” aspect: that both open source and proprietary software need to be looked at as cultural artifacts and as social, economical processes. In this attempt, making the materialities and different power structures visible in both areas is a promising start to overcome dichotomies.

Another debate to take on is to look at the Software art movement, the next brand after Net art. To which degree have these debates and practices overcome the ivory towering effects of avant-garding? It namely seems that a majority of work in this area has returned to the techno formalist and perhaps fetishist, modernist avenues: code for code’s sake. Like the engine parts, the software bits and particles are another momentum of marginal micro wonder. Even with this sarcasm I find that within software art, there is an enormous potential for doing precisely what ISEA2004 aims for: addressing software as culture.

Interfacing Sound

Who do you hang out with? Where do you go in the evenings? Remember what we talked about at the bar … was it the SEA conference in Chicago in 1997? It is so often that the most constructive ideas arise in dialogue, and the very format of conferences and symposia go against that vitality. In the series of Polar Circuit workshops in the late 1990s I wanted to put aside the “representational” aspect of events, and create an environment where the new media circus can be more quiet, to have people work, dine, walk, and watch the midnight sun together. The less money for production, the less pressure to provide tangible results: nonteleologics result in new discoveries. With these ideas in mind, I wanted to create a floating platform to ISE42004, which would offer a primary space for such interaction. And a great party! Collaboration with Koneisto and MUTEA in particular, as well as partnership with FLOW04 festival are all attempts to bridge groups of practitioners and audiences who might not meet otherwise. And to enjoy the richest imaginable setting of electronic music and sound art ever before presented in the context of one event.

The ISEA2004 CRUISE provides a further took into how sound is interfaced with various phenomena; the archipelago, peer to peer music sharing traffic, bottom of the sea, constellation of the stars, and the crackling sound .of Aurora Borealis. Many projects at ISEA2004 ask the question what is sound and how is it generated? This will feed into new types of expression within different music genres. How are the situations formed where individuals or groups encounter not only music, but also the sonic experience where sounds are in context?

ISEA2004 CRUISE is a nomadic experience Laboratory, a site for networking and, welt, eating and drinking. This means making the invisible hidden moments of events more visible. Does it destroy the intimacy? Why do I get the feeling this should not be pronounced so loud? I want to insist however, never to underestimate the power of the symposium. The original story which inspired to build art of memory interfaces is where the poet Simonides tells about a party where he was, and which an earthquake destroyed. He survived and recognized the bodies because he remembered them in different contexts and as part of different conversations. How do you remember fifty out of thousand faces sitting down in a conference, a theatre, or walking on an itinerary of an exhibition? On the ISEA2004 CRUISE I have invited participating speakers and artists to join a dinner where their affinities through keywords are part of the menu, and the potential surprise of who you may be sitting next to may just lead to another idea or debate. Many artists do this in much more intricate ways during the event. I get the feeling that new media culture may be reaching a stage where it has the maturity to be both sensual, technically advanced and critically aware.

Hind Mezaina is a photographer and culture writer from Dubai. Her blog theculturist.com covers cultural news, events, reviews in the UAE and beyond – with an emphasis on film, music, photography and travel. Hind’s photography has been exhibited in several local and international group exhibitions, and her writing has been featured in local and regional publications including The National, Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia, Open Skies, Vision and Oasis and Uncommon Dubai. She can also be found on Twitter @hindmezaina.

Panel Statement

ALL DAY PANELS at the UNIVERSITE DE LA SORBONNE Amphitheatre Richelieu

Panel 1

1. Lev Manovich – Info-Aesthetics: Representing Information Society
2. Errki Huhtamo – Immersion: Excavations, Evacuations
3. Jean-Louis Weissberg – The author in Collective

Panel 2

1. Margaret Morse – Invading the Body Snatchers: My Adventures as Cultural Theorist in New Landscapes of Science and Art
2. Louis Bec – De l’opistemologie fabulatoire
3. Simon Penny – Embodied interaction as critical technical practice

Panel 3 Other Landscapes, New Sites in collaboration with Revue d’Esthetique

1. Anne Cauquelin – Semantic landscapes: Place and Site.
2. Anne-Marie Duguet – Farewell the Image!
3. Jean-Louis Boissier – Interactive perspective

ORGANISATION:
Centre de Recherches d’Esthetique du Cinema et des Arts Audiovisuels (C.R.E.C.A.) / U.F.R. d’Arts Plastiques et Sciences de l’Art, Universite de Paris 1 DIRECTRICE / HEAD: Anne-Marie Duguet.

As the market for teaching jobs in the fine arts becomes increasingly tight, colleges and universities are able to seek out candidates who can cover a variety of media. Many of the teaching jobs advertised today require the ability to teach electronic media, be they jobs in photography, video, painting, sculpture,  printmaking, or ceramics. Professors teaching most traditional media rely on the approaches to teaching that medium that they encountered in the course of their own studies. Those of us who are currently teaching electronic media are faced with novel challenges, for most of us are teaching material that we never studied formally, but rather learned on our own. Each of us develop assignments, course readers, and theoretical frameworks without much knowledge of what is being taught by our peers. The purpose of this discussion will be to share resources and ideas, both theoretical and practical, among educators, as well as to inform other artists about some of the current approaches to teaching electronic media. Issues to be covered include:

1. What are the conceptual implications of the ubiquity of the computer in out society?
2. How do we address generational differences in thought processes — how does this newest generation see and use the technology they have grown up and feel comfortable with? How can their needs be addressed while not excluding students from other generations?
3. How do we as educators keep current with technologies that change so rapidly?
4. Do models of education from other media apply to teaching new technologies, or are entirely new models called for?

The paper analyses historical development of a discourse on “Art, Science and Technology collaboration” from the 1960s till the present. It reviews the key concepts used for a theoretical and cultural legitimization of this collaboration, and implications of the “collaboration”-discourse for a media art practice. The “collaboration”-paradigm had a pivotal role for a theoretical conceptualization of media art itself and brought into being a common in the late 80ies definition of media art as an “interdisciplinary synthesis of art, science and technology”. On the one hand it endowed media art with an ‘alchemistic’ charm, which was especially attractive for an affinity, common at that time, to Foucauldian ‘cabinets of curiosities’ and other pre-modern forms of the organisation of knowledge. On the other hand, it revived within a media art discourse a rooted in antiquity conception of art as producing téchne, where art is considered as a set of practical skills and ‘know-how’.

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

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

Institutional Presentation Statement

New media applications are created in software houses and by individual digital designers and artists; new media are criticized largely by academics in Art History, English, Communications, and other humanities departments in universities. What is the relationship between their critical theories and the design of new media? Can such cultural and historical perspectives ever hope to effect practice in substantive ways?

New media provides contexts for global-scale interaction, but theorization around new media rarely intersects with globalization discourses. In a field largely driven by technological innovation, critical theory may be seen as unproductive and thus extraneous. This paper examines the intersection of digital media’s practice and criticality, moving away from theories of form and procedure, and situating its scholarship in a global ethical context. Few contest the idea that advanced computational and communications technologies play a definitive role in today’s global economic, social, cultural, political and even ecological orders. The evidence of this exists in technologies used to implement the internationalization of management, the globally shifting labor pools, the enabling of a cosmopolitan managerial elite, transnational banking and other such signs of economic globalization. It lives as well in social, political and cultural manifestations of globalization such as WikiLeaks and the social-media fueled Arab Spring. While new media forms have a transnational impact, and profoundly influence globalization, one sees little critique or consciousness around issues of globalization as the context in which new media discourses take place. What is the disconnect between new media’s global impact, and new media’s discourses, which maintain little engagement with theorization of larger social and ethical concerns? In the context of rapid technological evolution, should the study of digital and electronic culture mirror ethical concerns, given the urgent social and political work that needs doing in the world? For example, universal rights discourses might be one key area where computational and communications technologies have contributed to major shifts by increasing the fluidity with which global subjects move across traditional nation-state borders, in keeping with shifting international demands for both the managerial class
and labor. Considering the rights of diasporic, transnational and migrant subjects requires greater attention as their global numbers increase. How can these and other issues of social uplift extend to an area that is fundamentally concerned with perpetual innovation, and often situated in a profit-oriented context?

This paper sets out to present the public with Cyberdada philosophies and technical specifications. A number of concepts will be explored, including the current thoughts and actions of Cyberdada culture. A major theme of Cyberdada has been creating simulations of simulated reality (ie. cyberspace) using multimedia installations. We will present people with the workings of a future virtual reality, and the kind of society this system will support. All information (physical, psychological, visual, computer data) is transmitted and received in patterns. Cyberdada proposes new processes for human communication and thought, experimenting Melbourne, Australia with videographics and installation work to set up experience for the physical human interface. Offering information for the. computer that doesn’t imply or state money/power/consumer materialism, but using technology as a means of creating experiences leading to a higher state of consciousness/new system of communication. Technical aspects of the processes at work within the Cyberdada system include:

1. image generation
2. cultural referencing
3. improvisational computer art techniques new methods of
animation
4. playing with the technology, creating your own way of
using the system
5. intended telepresence systems
6. intended metaphysical integration

ThetaLab is a new project by George Poonkhin Khut and James Brown exploring alternate subjectivities facilitated by neurofeedback interactions, presented as part of ISEA2013. The project aims to develop and document new forms and contexts for creative practice that use the technologies of neurofeedback to explore alternate modes of attention and interaction as a focus for artistic enquiry. Electronic soundscapes controlled by increases in Alpha, and then Theta brainwave activity are used to assist volunteers to sense, increase and then sustain – these brainwave patterns to produce a state of heightened hypnogogic reverie, at the threshold of sleep, in sessions lasting between 45 to 90 minutes at a time. Recollections and reflections on the experience of ‘being inside’ the work, and its aftereffects, recorded with participants after their interaction – by way of journal entries, sketches and spoken narratives – provide the basis for an exhibition that invites visitors to consider the possibility of an aesthetics of engagement, and cognitive orientation.

In contrast to other work in the area of creative brain-computer interaction that have focussed for the most part on concert-performance – ThetaLab’s emphasis is on facilitating, documenting and then reflecting on alternate modes of attention and interaction – and the range of insights and subjectivities these specialised forms of cognitive orientation can support: how does it feel to engage with oneself and the artworks (sound design) under these unusual conditions? How might this experience colour subsequent experience of daily life activities and meditative processes?

This presentation will present an introduction to the creative neurofeedback methods used in this project, including a discussion of caveats regarding the reliability of EEG data in non-clinical settings, the compositional strategies required for this type of interaction, and preliminary interview materials gathered from volunteer neurofeedback subjects as part of ISEA2013.

Panel: VIDA: New Discourses, Tropes and Modes in Art and Artificial Life Research

Stag­ing ar­ti­fi­cial and hy­brid lives is the stuff of the an­cient human pur­suit called the­atre. This art form has left us a legacy of pup­pets, au­tomats, ef­fi­gies, cor­po­real and in­tan­gi­ble agents which in­habit and com­pellingly bring to life un- or other-worldly spaces. Con­se­quently, the­atri­cal cre­ations and metaphors pro­vide use­ful frame­works for set­ting cur­rent art and ar­ti­fi­cial life en­deav­ours into a broader cul­tural per­spec­tive, serv­ing as sound­ing boards for our no­tions of live­li­ness. For Gilbert Si­mon­don, “The liv­ing en­tity main­tains within it­self a per­ma­nent ac­tiv­ity of in­di­vid­u­a­tion; it is not just the re­sult of in­di­vid­u­a­tion, like the crys­tal or mol­e­cule, but it is the the­atre of in­di­vid­u­a­tion.” (L’In­di­vidu et sa Genese Physico-bi­ologique).

The­atre is thus posited as a locus of con­stant emer­gence, iden­ti­fied with live being and with being alive. No­tions of bound­aries, of open and closed sys­tems, of dy­namic mod­els and more or less au­tonomous, in vivo pro­jec­tions, are com­mon to the­atre and ar­ti­fi­cial life re­search. Evolv­ing de­f­i­n­i­tions of the­atre which ac­com­mo­date con­tem­po­rary live arts and ar­ti­facts, that en­gage (with) liv­ing processes be­yond the con­fines of sta­tic in­sti­tu­tional ar­chi­tec­tures, can nur­ture and pro­duc­tively in­form the ways we think about art and ar­ti­fi­cial life. My panel pre­sen­ta­tion will focus on a num­ber of VIDA pro­jects, read­ing them through the lens and terms of the­atre to en­rich in­ter­pre­ta­tions of their man­i­fold mean­ings. In this way, I hope to un­der­line the con­cep­tual orig­i­nal­ity of these re­cent ex­per­i­ments in art and ar­ti­fi­cial life, while in­di­cat­ing their ge­nealog­i­cal con­nec­tions to the more ar­chaic cul­tures and prac­tices of the­atre.

What kind of object is a sound? And what does object oriented design mean for sound design? Perhaps there is an underlying contradiction between the discrete symbolic functions of computers as we know them today and the indiscreteness of sounds as resonances of matter in space… A brief examination of the implications of sound oriented design for computer objects and the resonances of the new materialities of digital space.

There are currently few procedures, guidelines, public awareness or general debate about what happens to our online digital identities after death. This paper outlines what happens with personal electronic information after death and will endeavor to propose possible new solutions to the problems associated with disparate, legacy personal data.

As more people live increasing amounts of their lives online the issue of physical death in the digital realm is becoming pressingly visible.  Despite growing amounts of such legacy data there is little legal or cultural precedent as to how to treat the personal data of dead users.

The paper discusses current ideas, technologies, and debates around this difficult area and outlines the current state of affairs and presents possible avenues for future development.

There are currently several projects looking at aspects related to this area including, OpenID, oAuth, OpenSocial, VRM, vendor relationship management, PDS personal data spaces, the Mine! Project, Identity Commons et Al. the Paper looks into these in detail and identifies what common approaches may be gleaned from them and what traction their ideas may have in the real world.

The rapidly approaching digital Afterlife offers a challenge of almost unimaginable scope to the creative vision of Artists, Philosophers, Technologists and Cultural thinkers. This paper outlines some of the challenges and opportunities that are on the horizon in a current, near and far future context.

Panel: Think BETA: Participative Evolution of Smart Cities

Think BETA is a think tank for Soft City Cul­ture and Tech­nol­ogy – the Evo­lu­tion of Smart Cities. The fu­ture city and ur­ban­ity will be re-de­signed through par­tic­i­pa­tive ac­tiv­i­ties.  The think tank´s con­tains a new ap­proach to the Soft City Cul­ture and Tech­nol­ogy. The des­ig­nated part­ners im­prove the net­work­ing with each other in the Think BETA think tank to fa­cil­i­tate the ex­change of sci­en­tists, artists and knowl­edge and pro­mote a com­mon strat­egy for re­search de­vel­op­ment in ICT in­fra­struc­tures for Smart Cities from which ap­pli­ca­tions for R & D pro­jects are pro­duced. Also new part­ners are in­vited to link their ex­ist­ing re­search ac­tiv­i­ties with the think tank in a way that ex­tended co­op­er­a­tions into dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines in the re­spec­tive uni­ver­si­ties get pos­si­ble, as well as into re­gional R & D ini­tia­tives in re­lated fields. Over here, Think BETA es­tab­lished an in­te­grated think-tank, whose work is per­pet­u­ated in an in­ter­na­tional vir­tual re­search lab. Con­cretely from the re­searcher and artist ex­change and joint re­search strat­egy, joint in­no­v­a­tive ap­proaches, re­search pro­jects and pro­pos­als are brought forth. The ul­ti­mate goal is to de­velop a cross-bor­der Think BETA vir­tual in­sti­tute in ICT for Smart Cities. This is done through the in­ten­si­fi­ca­tion of in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary knowl­edge ex­change, the en­hanced cross-link­ing of re­search ac­tiv­i­ties, the ex­change of re­searchers and all other mea­sures. The aim is to link ad­vanced re­search and de­vel­op­ment of in­no­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies, method­olo­gies and in­no­v­a­tive ser­vices and to move them for­ward through co­op­er­a­tive R&D pro­jects. The tech­ni­cal ob­jec­tive is, to re­search and to de­velop a mo­bile-sta­tion­ary, multi-me­dia en­vi­ron­ment for smart cities as in­fra­struc­ture for their de­vel­op­ment. It is about the re­quire­ments for fu­ture tech­ni­cal and cul­tural (mass player) in­fra­struc­ture for the urban de­vel­op­ment of Smart Cities and the op­ti­miza­tion of mu­nic­i­pal ser­vices and dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­tures.

Ex­ist­ing tech­ni­cal ap­proaches from eGov­er­nance, e-ser­vices, e-mo­bil­ity, LBS, to the user-af­fected eCul­ture and eCre­ativ­ity are in­cluded to de­velop and to pro­vide im­proved mo­bile-sta­tion­ary dig­i­tal sys­tems for urban de­vel­op­ment, plan­ning and par­tic­i­pa­tion. Pre­vi­ous soft­ware ap­proaches did not took into ac­count ex­ist­ing ex­per­tise eg in the field of civic par­tic­i­pa­tion, in­te­gra­tion of de­cen­tral­ized power man­age­ment or the so­cial-eco­nomic bal­ance in ar­chi­tec­tures suf­fi­ciently, were not ad­e­quately de­vel­oped user-cen­tered, or set a sin­gle dis­ci­pline per­spec­tives un­bal­anced in the fore­ground. Which is be coun­ter­acted through the in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary con­fig­u­ra­tion of the think tank. Sim­i­larly, tech­ni­cal and or­ga­ni­za­tional is­sues of par­tic­i­pa­tory urban plan­ning with dif­fer­ent ap­proaches for dif­fer­ent user groups are con­sid­ered. In this case, al­ter­na­tive plan­ning processes are in­te­grated and per­ceived in par­tic­u­lar for the re­la­tion­ship be­tween life and work. Ad­vanced en­vi­ron­men­tal and so­cially sus­tain­able de­sign is to be of par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est and will get ex­posed. Dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture will be di­rected to their local po­ten­tial for par­tic­i­pa­tory de­sign, de­vel­op­ment, for local knowl­edge processes and the as­pect of cross-gen­er­a­tional, so­cial, artis­tic and eco­nomic net­work­ing.

Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places speculates on animation, documentary, experimental, interactive, and narrative media that probe human-machine performances, virtual migrations, global warming, structural inequality, and critical cartographies across Brazil, Canada, China, India, USA, and elsewhere.

Thinktank tries to open the process of developing a groupware to practitioners from the arts and social and cultural production. In a research phase we gather the expectations, requirements and wishes towards online collaborative spaces, which pay attention to the dynamics which appear in voluntary working processes, such as agreements, compensation, and trust, but also practical aspects such as conferring online, and publishing (printing on demand). In collaboration with other partners, the conceptual design emerging from the research phase will lead to new add-on modules, to be attached to the existing groupware drupal. Furthermore the Thinktank will develop a new user-friendly interface.

Keywords: Electronic literature, e-lit, blog fiction

“Thirteen Ways of Killing a Scrub-Jay” is an online work of electronic literature by the author. A prose-poem in the form of a blog, it explores a modern theme of violence while playfully or darkly echoing Wallace Stevens’ well-known poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” “Scrub-Jay” transforms Stevens’ structure of thirteen meditative stanzas into the reversechronological narrative of blog entries for thirteen consecutive dates. Each entry, along with an original arresting image, describes a different method used by the unidentified bloggernarrator to kill a Western Scrub-Jay. Scrub-Jays, an aggressive and violent species, can be annoying not only to other birds but also to humans; certainly the narrator finds them objectionable. In the course of these thirteen blog entries, the narrator’s murderous methods evolve from the more distant to the more intimate (if read in chronological order), or from the more intimate to the more distant (if read in “blog order”). Thus the work comments on the blog form as well as the Stevens poem.

Abstract
This paper investigates conceptions of materials in regard to what actions they make possible. This is done by way of a close up investigation of materials role in a design student project. The study adds dimensions of social and relational character to what is defined as “material” in design and it shed’s light on materials as sources of agency.

Affordance
We are all able to act with our own body but also limit

This panel focuses on artistic issues in Real Space Interactives and Robotic Art Practice. The goal is to discuss the emerging esthetic of interactivity from the makers point of view and to share intuitions and ideas in this new field.

My presentation will discuss artistic issues in Real Space Interactives and Robotic Art Practice. The goal is to discuss the emerging esthetic of interactivity, from the maker’s point of view, to share intuitions and ideas in this new field. The scope of the session will be restricted to mobile, interactive and installation work using electronics or embedded microcontrollers. What are the new and special questions and problems that emerge from real space, realtime interactive work? What ideas (old and new) are useful in shaping the aesthetics and methodologies of this new realm? What programming architectures and strategies are particularly appropriate to this field and what are not?

Human sciences and technologies continue to decode parts of our world we previously held to be natural or whole, remorselessly dividing, exposing, and then re-synthesizing them. Humans endeavor to “crack” these phenomena with the explicit goal of creating things which are alive and intelligent. I would like to make sure that at least some of these creations model other modes of human interaction and aspiration than for war and profit. Using microcontrollers, self-regulating bodies, and computational models derived from natural systems, I create robotic agents which can sense, make decisions, and change their environments. The work exposes and challenges the boundaries between humans, machines, and animals, as well as the relationships between technology and society.

I’m a fossil, a sculptor of mass. Presented with sensors, microprocessors, servos and such, I dream of my sculptures attaining Golemhood. But, I already have dogs, cats, pigs and fish. I don’t need another pet. I especially don’t need one which interacts less than a bacterium. The “look”, and richness of material are still the most important features of my work. The electronics and the action, while not “add-ons” are still minor parts. If I last long enough, I may be able to integrate the look and the action, but for now I value silence, stillness and opaqueness.

Panel: Through the Roadblocks: Technology and Orality

“We can­not process your in­for­ma­tion. Your in­for­ma­tion is cor­rupt and needs cleans­ing. Erase brain?”  _Mark Amerika, OK TEXTS

At a time when ter­abytes of in­for­ma­tion are stream­ing in our homes oral­ity and hearsay (vi­rals/so­cial net­works) be­come all the more rel­e­vant in the de­vel­op­ment of ideas. Com­pa­ra­ble to Lewis Car­oll’s map (Sylvie and Bruno Con­cluded: The Man in the Moon, 1889), our media land­scape is ex­panding to­wards use­less­ness. Through the Road­blocks ex­am­ines both the tra­di­tional in so­cio-po­lit­i­cal terms and tech­no­log­i­cal means by which ideas come into ex­is­tence and are shared.  Echo­ing the land­scapes in Song­lines the me­di­ated space be­comes syn­ony­mous with cre­ation.

THYK produces artistic, educational and commercial projects that connect with the public meaningfully, impactfully, and memorably. THYK’s creative process synthesizes the benefits of great interaction design, user-centred approaches, relational art, cultural mediation, community development, public engagement, experiential marketing, and multi-platform design. This poster will present a range of completed, in-progress and research projects undertaken by the artists to illustrate THYK’s thoughtful approach to conceiving, designing and delivering public art.

The oldest undergraduate programme in electronic and computer music in the USA, offering degrees since 1969, has recently undergone a major shift in emphasis, and a major revision of its curriculum. Oberlin Conservatory of Music is one of the world’s leading conservatories of music, recognised for the strength of its offerings in classical music, particularly in instrumental music. The emphasis of the Technology in Music & Related Arts Department (TIMARA) has always been more than just music, and it has attempted to support multiple disciplines within the electronic arts. As of this academic year, students are able to define a wide variety of pathways through courses in digital media, composition, music technologies, performance technologies, computer science, and theory and history courses in music, art, dance, and theatre. This presentation highlights the new directions available within the programme, and discusses the development of an undergraduate programme that accelerates its students through the maze of technologies now available, whilst placing an emphasis on aesthetic, cultural, and compositional practice.

What is time? Defining time in a non-controversial manner has eluded most people. The interactive installation Time Axis evokes the consciousness of the concept of time through an unfamiliar experience – taking self-portraits and watching them vanish on paper instantaneously. Photography is a process of capturing an instance of dynamic events as a permanent visual at that moment: turning fleeting matters to permanent. Still images are time-invariant, whilst still images that fade away are time-variant: turning permanent matters to evanescent. More interestingly, the evanescence of the event captured by the image is different from that of the ephemeral image itself. The installation combines the use of thermochromic paint and thermal printers to create the effect of fading image on paper. The portrait of the participant will be captured by a camera, and printed on two types of thermal paper: one is regular receipt paper and the other is custom thermochromic paper. Images created on the thermochromic paper will disappear after a few seconds of being printed out. The mechanical noise generated by the printers is manipulated by a digital resonator and sent through the headphones to be listened by the participants to intensify their experience.

As Terry Eagleton and Susan Buck-Morss analysed, aesthetics is … a discourse of the body…a form of cognition, achieved through taste, touch, hearing seeing, smell — the whole corporeal sensorium.’ (Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics”, new formations, Summer, 1993, p.125). Sound has a capacity for a particular sort of affect and effect, moving past the. interface, through time and into the body of the user, speaking directly and viscerally to the imagination. But, with the valorisation of speed in multimedia aesthetics and kinaesthetics, there is less and less time for sound. Using a number of works as examples, this paper argues that a central concern for new media aesthetics is to rekindle the sense of hearing, to revitalise listening – not necessarily to replace sight as dominant, but to let the different media and the senses rub against each other. This is essential in any experimental art work aiming to do more than reproduce existing forms and aesthetics – aiming to shift perception. The paper also asks what sort of listening bodies are being habituated, produced by new media? What are the techniques and aesthetics of sound in multimedia and how are they reconfiguring the senses?

‘Time Frames’ will use digital media to comment on two subjects – that of time and memory. Within the parameters of digital technology, time and memory both ‘factual’ and ‘imaginary’ will be explored around issues of race and difference; tracing and tracking stories that network, map and are collected as contemporary references. The work will explore the concept of journeys.

The most profound effect of the physical journey is the experience of cultural and social difference. While the mental/imaginary journey can be free from anxiety, a utopia where the self and family are constructed into an experience of similarity and the familiar. Using the internet and CD ROM format, the author is interested in looking at the effects and junctures of these acts. How is digital technology effecting our individual and collective knowledge and memory – our cultural specificity? Are alternatives sites and significant shifts of emphasis beginning to the break up the predominance of the myth
of ‘white, western’ stories as we know them?

Keywords: mobile app, interactive art, interactive documentary, social practice, augmented reality, gentrification, homeless, landscape.

Time Lens is an interactive, multiplatform art project and a mobile App featuring a series of immersive panoramas documenting the rapid gentrification of an urban neighborhood in Philadelphia. Incorporated into these digital panoramas are the voices, stories, dreams and memories of members of the largely invisible homeless community. A collaborative participation model is used to engage the community. We partnered with men from a homeless shelter to create photographs, videos and interviews of the neighborhood’s past, present and future. At the core of the project is the idea of home and community and what these terms mean to people in the neighborhood. What are the cultural treasures and invisible markers that are wiped away to make way for the betterment of a neighborhood. What are the stories that are lost forever? What traces remain behind? Users can download the App on their mobile devices and then follow along in the actual location and experience both the past and the present, the virtual and physical worlds all at the same time. The goal of Time Lens is to bring people to a specific location to participate in a transformative experience of that space, to infuse media art into the geographical landscape.

Prof. Sean Cubitt will discuss and present his views on the dominant media of the 21st century that are now in place: spreadsheets, databases and geographic information systems.

Intro

The dominant media of the 21st century are now in place: spreadsheets, databases and geographic information systems. Evolved from double-entry book-keeping, from the early adding machines and filing cabinets of the first office revolution, and from the maps that guided the first wave of European imperialism. All three share a move away from origins in chronological ordering. Time is being squeezed out of contemporary media. We need to look hard at its position in digital technology. The moving image media begin with succession – one frame after another – adding the interlaced and progressive scan with the invention of video. Digital imaging brings with it the clock function in image capture and processing; and the introduction of the time-to-live principle in packet switching, which ensures undelivered packages erase themselves so that they do not clog the system. Time is integral to digital media, far more so than to their mechanical predecessors. Vector graphics are a startling example of the potential of this temporal specificity. However, vectors are both constrained by the universality of raster displays, and redeployed in video codecs as a means for managing and controlling time. The aesthetics of digital time cannot be separated from its political economy and art that is digital needs to pay attention to the materiality of digital media, and the politics and economics that define them, especially in the moment of IPv6, HTML5 and the MPEG-LA patent wars.

Abstract

In the ‘time-and-information-based environment’ content and form, the central focus in art are becoming less and less significant. This doesn’t just affect the traditional visual arts, but has a fundamental impact on our culture as whole, its cultural institutions, especially the art-schools, art and design schools, academies, Hochschule der Künste, etc. are challenged to become aware of their very own transition. But as recent examples already have shown, the answer to ‘post-modernization’ isn’t just the foundation of ‘media-labs’, but lies in the question of their cultural integration. It is the question to strengthening culture as a whole, the fundaments of our traditions, the moral value systems, ethics, etc. for the sake to cope with the inevitable overall transformation. In defining this cultural realm art schools could function as a ‘social lab’ for the ‘information-based society’. From this it follows its new social significance by interacting between the conventional methods of ‘materializing’ a world – as for instance done with painting and an electronic, technological, dematerialized approach. This dialectics affects the center of the art schools in being part of the fundamental historical knowledge and the extreme innovative experiment in communicating between these areas of preservation and creation. In this respect at least four aspects define the owned qualities of an art school in an ‘information-based environment’:

1. The aspect of continuity. The deliberate acceptance of the art school’s traditions, and of its specific quality as an artistic, cultural and aesthetic institution in research, teaching and education.
2. The aspect of transformation. Scrutinizing the artistic traditions as to their sustainability as a basis for the imagery of our day-to-day techno-reaIity.
3. The aspect of social change. The confrontation of a technically dominated and technologically dramatically changing every-day reality with the traditional values and standards to which the art school continues to feel committed.
4. The aspect of transparency. Opening the art school to extra-mural science, disciplines and research, integrating the art school with the technical, technological, informational environment to enable it for fulfilling its social responsibility: to process its aesthetic and creative qualities within the community.

This ever-changing sculpture is controlled by the occurrences in a public place. Like a naturally grown architecture this form is embedded into the contours of the immediate environment of the current location of the viewer. All these spatial elements are determined by mapping the traces of the visitors of the site according to their different walking-pace and according to their frequency of presence onto a SOM, which feeds a mathematical shape-the Isosurface that changes according to behaviour.

TMRW and The Digital Foundry

Alta Tecnología Andina (ATA) is pleased to announce the publication of The Future Was Now. 21 Years of Video Art and Electronic art in Peru, a compilation of essays on the past two decades of Peruvian video and electronic art, edited by Max Hernández-Calvo, José-Carlos Mariátegui and Jorge Villacorta. This bilingual edition in English and Spanish gathers a number of essays and reflections on video art in Peru during the first two decades of the 21st century, and the general impact of new media art on the cultural landscape, as well its connections with other disciplines, and with other regional and international initiatives. The overview that this important research effort presents, examines the rich and complex trajectory of the development of recent video and electronic art in Peru, from its experimental and precarious beginnings to its current relevance in the local contemporary art scene, through strong gallery and museum representation, and fluid distribution networks.

In this history, as examined by the book’s essays, the emergence of the seminal Video and electronic art festivals in Peru is a key moment in the establishment of a local video-arts community, which attracted artists from diverse backgrounds and training. By charting the early years of the festivals, The Future Was Now highlights the aesthetic contributions of a number of artists who, for many years cultish yet obscure figures. But the book also acknowledges the vital role played by the various projects and organizations that shaped the new media landscape in Peru through their multiple efforts. In that regard, as the title suggests, that “aesthetic future” that was sought during the last decade of the 20th century, did indeed happen through the combined efforts of many actors of the time, even if unacknowledged at the time.

Other issues the book engages are the launching of video art competitions, regional initiatives focused on the medium, as well as the development of specific practices and languages, such as digital cinema, animation, video installation and video performance.

A strategic word game articulating forms of digital aesthetics and transformations. A panel session consisting of a total of 14 small individual essays each 1-2 pages long, developing a performative talk session in which participants can freely interact with the development of our panel presentation. Several switch devices will be positioned throughout the room acting as an interface between us and the audience. On each occasion the audience can play the pool of potential essays and their order by pressing the switch and therefore shape the course of the ideas presented. We are foremost interested in creating an open platform for discussion encouraging exchange and understanding rather than offering a menu of prescriptive ideas delivered out off a paper bag. Everyone will have a go in participating in the rules and discussions. Numerous small essay’s will be “played” one on one creating a critique and overview of electronic art practices, related research fields, and its effect on our common social consciousness. We will comment on how our own electronic art practice has begun to re-shape community awareness from an individual to a public sphere but without any protest or resistance to this infiltration. Usually mere speculative transformations in politics, policies and social choices are often accompanied with outcry and resistance. Thus we will begin to query how a network of ideas can shape a consciousness – a community where this infiltration is not felt at the first instance but will cause some casualties of this electronic revolution.

Values (wants-advertising), mis-interpretation (fear-geography) and educational access (computers-government funding) are still the major factors in how this revolution may or may not surface. With the daily arrival of new technologies that re-organizes our relationship and understanding to digital aesthetics and the course of art making the panel will proceed to comment on the responsibilities faced by artists, the audience and the wider community at large to make a positive transition from the now to a possible electronic art future. Each specific theme of past ISEA symposia will be interwoven to showcase the growing convergence between the visual arts and digital prophesies with visual documentation of interactive works and sound pieces. Kate Richards & Maria Stukoff describe themselves as foremost interested in creating an open platform for discussion – “encouraging exchange and understanding rather than offering a menu of prescriptive ideas delivered out off a paper bag.” Their work in the publication may reflect their approach to such transactions and explore a number of different formats which will be further developed in gatherings at The Terror.

(Short paper)

Keywords: 4D Data Visualization; Information Arts; Strategic Design; Spatiotemporal Semiotics.

Tracking software paired with 3D modeling now provides animations of movement in nearly every context of our highly sensed world. However, few visualizations exist that show adjacent systems, usually because of wildly divergent data. One such spatiotemporal adjacency is crucial to our safety – our increasingly cluttered skies rapidly filling with drones, budget airlines, helicopters, weather collection sensors and Asian satellites. The scale, number, tiered altitudes and variant speeds of aerial hardware are a physical reality that can only be understood through the moving image. However, no visual model exists to reveal all the machines when stratified causing our culture to lack an understanding of the expanding system. Can stratified aerial traffic be represented through a hybrid of informative data visualization and evocative information arts? What are semiotic strategies and taxonomic delineations that can merge into a visual language understandable across the growing number of cultures now involved in aerial movement and its dangers? This paper will present a creative context to explore visual strategies for better cognitive and perceptual understanding of multi-tiered, spatiotemporal data. Creative design tools will provide insight into finding meaning in dynamic data and may lead to advances in understanding other sets of Big Data.

New media is a way to connect diverse communities seeking solutions to the global collapse we are experiencing. The unsustainability of our current environmental, economic, social and cultural practices reveals the extent to which our siloed approaches have failed. Each affected ecosystem represents an entangled web in which many different types of knowledge have a specific role to play. We will address the need to create bridges for the different communities directly affected by the emergence of new problems but lacking a productive communication interface. We will present novel design methodologies for participatory, problem oriented research projects, and ways in which digital communication technologies can articulate and modify dialogues.

Johnny DiBlasi’s hybrid creative practice sits at the intersection of art, science and technology. Through his works DiBlasi explores how networks of data can generate interactive, aesthetic experiences of local ecosystems. He utilizes sensors and the wireless network to explore site-specific data and infrastructures to create a media architecture that reveals the interface and sets up an alternative experience of a landscape. DiBlasi will give an artist talk that covers his practice and past works that utilize data to create immersive experiences. He will discuss past projects Array and Topologies, as well as current projects. Array is an interactive audio video installation made up of fifty LCD video monitors hung from the gallery ceiling facing downward. Textual data from the current news cycle as well as visitors’ movements drive the audio and visual output. Topologies, is a site-specific installation that functions as an architectural extension and an expression of the space’s invisible electronic infrastructure. Real time data alters the topological structure of a shifting grid suspended overhead that spans the entire space. DiBlasi’s works seek to understand space as a medium and how we understand a place itself in terms of physical form and electronic information.

Panel: Without Sin: Taboo and Freedom within Digital Media

FILM & LEC­TURE PRE­SEN­TA­TION: At a time when tech­nolo­gies of ex­change promise the new, the un­lim­ited, the wild and free, let us give a small thought to the styl­is­tics of (sex­ual) dif­fer­ence, frac­tal in na­ture, se­quen­tially in­fi­nite and se­duc­tively com­pelling – a kind of ‘be­yond’ the plea­sure-pain/death prin­ci­ples that sug­gest a whole new end-game to morals, ethics, and the sta­tus of being human.

Abstract (long paper)

This paper introduces Pulse Project (2011-2016), a practice-led performance research study that explores an ecology of complex relations between art, humanities, medicine, and technology. In this study, I embody transdisciplinary research practice itself through adopting the role of “acupuncturist-investigator” and acting as an instrument or medium between myself and others and between cultural traditions for understanding and mediating the body and the embodiment of consciousness. Pulse “reading,” (readings of the energetic body), algorithmic compositions, case histories and notations of pulses are all used together as methods for exploring the cultural encounter between a creative producer, participants and diverse cultural/informational practices.

Multitouch technology has existed for several years today. While big multitouch tables have mostly been found in public places like exhibitions, small screen devices like multitouch smartphones have become an everyday phenomenon. In both cases the context of use has been different from the use of a desktop computer. Multitouch table systems often are designed for specific content, an individual location and fixed context of use. In contrast, smartphone applications are to be used in any context – due to mobility. With the emergence of medium sized multitouch devices like the iPad, more and more digital products which are known from a work-related desktop context, are being redesigned for multitouch use. But in addition to that we will see the emergence of novel media formats and applications which will be specific and typical for medium-sized multitouch devices.

Just like the invention of the computer mouse was a prerequisite and an activator for the design of graphical user interfaces, multitouch interaction will be a prerequisite and activator for novel interfaces. Today two trends in multitouch interface design become already apparent. One is the re-introduction of the real-world-metaphor approach of the 1990s, in which symbolic interface elements disappear in favour for hyperrealistic everyday objects in everyday environments. This is said to reduce cognitive complexity and learning time. It can be argued if reducing learnability should always be top priority and if the destiny of interface design will simply be hyperrealistic copies of the real world. The other trend is towards invisibility. In traditional interfaces interactive elements are visible, and users learned in which way they have to interact with them. With multitouch and especially with sensor based interaction (controlling parameters by spacial orientation or acceleration of the gadget) visual cues that indicate interaction possibilities disappear. Therefore the famous “pinch” gesture to zoom images is not intuitive at all: Neither the interface shows any affordance that would indicate “pinchability”, nor does the idea of a real photograph suggest “zoomability”.

These trends will be demonstrated and discussed in a talk, which will be illustrated by examples from research projects and student’s work.

Computers have been used for some time in museums in information databases of documentary details about objects in museums collections, although initially for the use of museum staff and researchers, some have been designed specifically to be accessed through touch screens and made available to museum visitors. A more recent development is the design of interactive touch screens which enable visitors to access stories, themes and issues, as opposed to objects. Dr. Coxall looks at the potential differences that interactive touch screens make to museums exhibition display, with particular regard to the ways that people’s lives and work are represented.

In this paper we introduce the concept of volatile, collaborative messaging as a means of creating a relatedness experience, in this specific context for couples in a long-distance relationship.

Based upon the idea of message leaving in a romantic relationship, the “Touch Trace Mirror” is a mirror which enables leaving a message on a steamy bathroom mirror over a distance. It is a set of two bathroom mirrors, one to be placed in each partners apartment. Writing a message on one mirror will result in the message being sent to the partners mirror, where a light will emerge on the mirrors surface. If the partner places a finger on the light, it will move, letting the partner trace the message that his or her loved one wrote.

Initial user testing showed that the concept and the aesthetics of the interaction, which developed over two cycles of a user centered design process, seem promising for creating a joyful relatedness experience.

Sound unfolds in time and disperses in space. It arrives from a distance and resonates in the body of the listener. As an ephemeral phenomenon it disappears again, but comes back as an echo. Hereby sound represents the presence of an absence, something that is and is not. In short a ghost.

Touched Echo by German artist Markus Kison is a public sound installation shown at “Brühlsche Terrasse” in the city of Dresden in 2007.

The installation presents the sound of the allied bombing of Dresden on the 13th February 1945 from original recordings. The sounds are hidden as vibrations in the railing running the length of the terrace. The listener has to place his/her elbows on the railing and wrists at the skull, in order to hear the sound, which is then led into the cranium through the bones of the forearm.  The posture of the listener resembles the posture one normally takes in order to avoid listening. This is a feature of the artwork, since it is a posture one can imagine the victims of the actually bombing took in order to protect themselves from the horrifying noise.

In the paper I will discuss the ghostly nature of sound and how echoing sounds of the past, in this case the sound of the allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945, interferes with reality as history on one side (known, objective and factual) and something lived on the other (remembered, recalled and experienced).  The relationship between the remembered and the known, the subjective experience and the historical fact that “Touched Echo” touches upon, echoes today’s political debate of this incidence as either an act of war or an act of terror; A debate that concerns Dresden as a haunted place, the land of a ghost.

In order to qualify my discussion of “Touched Eco” and the ghostly nature of sound, I will draw upon Jacques Derridas concept of Hauntology and Gaston Bachelard idea of the Miniature. The aim is to unfold a discussion that concerns sound ontology, sound as interface and related perspectives around control, authority and sociality.

Touching Existences is a presentation about some issues that came from a recent project called ‘4 Walls’. It is an interactive installation where the actions of the viewers may cause changes in the moving images – and the meaning we get from that. By confronting real objects (non-animated shapes) and images projected on its surfaces (short narratives) it deals with the public and private use of shared urban spaces. The presentation brings together two different issues related to new media today: the interface as a sensorial and immersive experience and the supposed lack of privacy in public spaces such as the Internet – addressed as one of the biggest problems for our civil rights for a near future.

Abstract (Poster)

This paper presents Touchology, a series of interactive plants that explore serenity and emotional attachment through meditative touch of plants with interactive audio-visualizations. Gardening is seen to improve mindfulness, memory and cognitive abilities. Those who are unable to benefit from this activity, such as the mentally and physically disabled, are less prone to be exposed to this leisure. Our approach focuses on creating various audio-visualizations for tactile interactions with living plants to enhance relationships because the plants and users while evoking their empathy. Due to simple technical setups, the projects presented here can be placed anywhere at the ease of the user. Pilot studies with target populations indicate that calming tangible interaction with plants can evoke mindfulness in a similar way to gardening related experiences.

Intro

I am reading, you are reading, you are listening to a text. What is happening? First, the text is perforated, dashed out, strewn all over with blanks. They are the words, the members of the phrases, that we do not see (in both senses of the term, the perceptual and the intellectual.) They are the fragments of the texts that we do not comprehend, that we do not apprehend together, that we do not reunite with others, that we neglect. To the extent that, paradoxically, to read, to listen to, means to begin by neglecting, by misreading, or by untying the text.

At the same time that we tear it apart by the act of reading (or, like now, by listening to it) we crumple the text. We fold it upon itself. We bring together passages corresponding to each other. We sew together members scattered, disassembled, dispersed on the surface of the pages, or in the linearity of the discourse: to read a text is to retrace the textile gestures that have given it its name.

The passages of the text keep up a virtual correspondence, almost an epistolary activity that we realize, for better or for worse, following, or not following, the directions of the author. Letter carriers of the text, we travel from one end of the space of significance to the other, assisted by the addressing system, by the pointers, that the author, the editor, the typographer has laid out. But we can also disobey the directions, produce illegitimate folds, weave secret, clandestine nets, make appear other semantic geographies.

Such is the work of reading: this act of tearing apart, of crumpling, of distorting, of putting the text back together, starting from the initial linearity, or platitude, to open up a living milieu where significance may become unravelled. The space of significance does not exist prior to the
act of reading. It is by traversing it, by roaming in it, by charting it that we fabricate it. But while we are bending it upon itself, thus producing its relation to itself, its autonomous life, its semantic aura, we are also relating the text to other texts, to other discourses, to images, to effects, to the immense reservoir pulsating with desires and signs in its totality that constitutes us. Here it is no longer the unity of the text at stake, but the construction of oneself, the construction that always has to be redone, never to be completed. It is no longer the sense of the text occupying us, but the direction and elaboration of our thought, the precision of our picture of the world, the completion of our projects, the evocation of our pleasures, the string of our dreams. This time the text is no longer crumpled, folded into a ball upon itself, but cut out, powderized, distributed, evaluated according to the criteria of a subjectivity giving birth to itself.

(translated from the French by Riikka Stewen)

In Aristolian Philosophy the process of change from a lower level of potentiality to the higher level of actuality is known as becoming. Maslow  refers to this process as self-actualisation, or to become more and more of what one is or capable of becoming.

The paper will firstly outline the importance of liminal spaces for this process through an introduction to Jungian psychology and the concept of individuation and Maslow’s heirarchy and self-actualisation.

The paper will then consider the  potential of Digital Media, particularly open source software / culture within public / community arts practice for its potential to contribute to this process, through its inherent liminal qualities and the liminal spaces it can create.

Digital photography is largely banal. Since its inception has depended on grafting the aesthetics of chemical photography onto its production. In the same way as photography initially borrowed an aesthetic from painters (the Pictorialists) before a purely photographic aesthetic emerged (the Purists), exponents of digital photography have largely depended on the mediums ability to reproduce seamless versions of earlier practices (photo-montage etc.). The debate about digital photography has been sidelined into the already well trodden territory concerned with authenticity (both in terms of the relation of the image to ‘reality’ and the nature of the intervention of the author/photographer). The debate on aesthetics has as yet to properly surface. Will digital photographers produce a new aesthetic? The technology does not impose these limits upon the practice — rather it is the limits of institutional aesthetics which have come to dominate photographic production.

Something has been happening to the relationship between the artist and artifact, at least in a growing sector of the digital domain.  The old certainties upon which notions of authorship and attribution are based, and within which ideas of creative control reside, are slipping and giving way to new forces.  Of course, in a time of transition, this process itself – and the forces behind it – are ideal sites for artistic engagement and interrogation, and some of the most profound interventions to date owe themselves to this community.

In fact, cracks and fissures have been appearing in the relationship between the subject and the object more generally, undermining the carefully wrought distinctions upon which the modern era was founded.  Let me make clear at the outset that cracks do not a transformation make, but they give us an early warning and an important place to look for further signs of change.  My argument in a nutshell is that over the past decade or so, we have had increased access to new ways of calculating, representing and seeing the world, ways dependent on algorithmic interventions between the viewing subject and the object viewed.  This intervention has many manifestations, from the changed model of authorship and expertise that Wikipedia represents over and against the Enlightenment paradigm represented by Diderot’s encyclopaedia, to the dynamic and location-aware cartographic systems that we can find on our iPhones and TomToms over and against the fixed cylindrical projection grid of Gerardus Mercator’s 16th Century maps.  We can find it in the domain of the archive, where a long fixation with the physical artefact has given way to dynamic information repositories, digital in form but algorithmically accessed and reconstituted.  And in the case of the image, grosso modo, the long regime of three-point perspective and its reification of an underlying understanding of subject-object relations constitute the representational order that is also exhibiting fractures in the form of algorithmic visualization systems such as Microsoft’s Photosynth and image recognition-based augmented reality applications.

These binary oppositions are complicated by our residual practices – we often act as if nothing has changed, treating these new assemblages as if they were consistent with the much older practices we are familiar with.  And this can prove confusing.  In our world, the coincident transformations of form taken by information (digitalization, for example) further confuse the issue, garnering credit (or blame) when in fact the algorithmic processing of that data (whether analog or digital) is the real issue.  We shall then consider the algorithmic, extracting it from this thicket and reflecting upon its impact.

Contemporary art has taken different directions, the most recent artwork of the Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza deals mostly with microorganisms, environment issues and electronic media focused on different kinds of transformations and implications. In his last project entitled Plantas Nómadas (Nomadic Plants), up to date technological developments are integrated into his artwork that navigates the everyday life proposing a new urban ecosystem.  His work is based on the recycling of consumption technology, human wastes and a robotic mechanism that survives from served waters and solar energy.  The complex system obtains the nutrients from bacteria contained in polluted water, those bacteria are temporarily lodged in a micro biotic chamber of the robot and together with two flexible solar cells provide the necessary energy to keep the machine moving and feeding a green plant.  The hybrid machine-nature ecosystem tries to adapt itself to an altered state of nature.  The fourth and last step of the riveting project that is under development at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico can be seen on the web page:

The poster takes the criticism of colonial metaphysic as its point of departure – in which Euro-centric worldview depicts Other as not fully sentience in relation to the western subject. While the violence of such reductionist and essentialist perspective has been greatly criticized, however such criticism is built upon a Western philosophical tradition that inherently requires a compliance to specific definition of a sentience. As such, the critique only manages to liberate the Other from the confinement of colonial paradigm but on the ontological level, anything outside the western subject is denied a proper existence. This paper sets out to critically examine the meaning of sentient from a post-colonial perspective. Specifically, by looking at the pioneering works on ‘tradition’ by Malaysian new media theorist Ismail Zain, this research argues for an accountability that recognizes the inherent biases in discourse on sentience that restrict the method of enquiry. In doing so, the paper aims to shift the question from asking ‘why sentience’ to ‘which sentience’, that, in turn, opens the way for an acceptance of a sentience outside the Euro-centric worldview.

Multimedia technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for combining textual, auditory and visual content, enabling artists to develop more or less complex interrelations between diverse media, and it is sometimes argued that since digital text, sound and image are all ultimately represented in the same way (as sequences of bits in computer memory) they are therefore freely interchangeable. In principle, it is not difficult to output any kind of data in any desired form -for example, a stream of text bytes can be interpreted as image data, or output as a sequence of sounds. However, the results of such transcriptions are very often meaningless because of syntactic disparity or dimensional mismatch (text is essentially one-dimensional, whereas images exist in two or more dimensions), or because things expressed in one medium might be difficult or impossible to express in another. This research attempts to forge meaningful connections between text and image through the use of generative grammars. The grammars, implemented in software, are used for the origination of visually descriptive or evocative texts; the same or similar grammars are used also for picture generation, enabling examination of the relationship of text to image, and of the potential of computer-generated texts as aids to visual creativity.

A great deal of contemporary art purports to be interactive. In this paper I take a critical look at the notion of interactivity; an inadequately defined and somewhat abused term.

Interactivity has very deep roots within the world, first as it self-organises and then as we construct it. At the very least it is at the roots of all biological behaviour (as biosemiotics) and may in fact be seen as the basis for all levels of the organisation of things, from the interactions among sub-atomic particles from which everything is produced, right through to sophisticated communications between humans and societies, and, obviously, between machines and machines, and machines and humans.

Based on the notion of “relations” as a general term for the linkages or interconnections through which all interactions occur, I examine how those linkages must be organised so that information flow is enabled. Thus it is clear that, once interactions begin in the biological realm, all interactivity leads to communication, which between humans, is thought of as conversation. Those classes of interaction that do not lead to communication/conversation are not in fact interactions and are more in the line of responses to events. It is in this situation that the abuse of the term has occurred.

In working towards a theory of interactivity, this paper offers a taxonomy of interactions, so that the understanding of much so-called “interactive” art – particularly when presented as installation or as robotics – can be understood, critiqued and developed. It will also consider the role of sensors and interfaces in implementing and enhancing interactivity.

Ultimately true interactivity is a function of both sides of the conversational process being able to generate new behavioural repertoire that extends, but is not beyond, the understanding of each entity involved in the process. New art works that engage in interactions that extend the behavioural repertoire of the participants might then function as a laboratory for experiment in the further development of robotics and other human-machine interaction systems.

There is a straight line linking the ‘cybernetic’ paradigm of the mid-1950s to the various ‘robotic’ applications of the 1980s. During the last 3 decades, in the most vital research in sound synthesis, sound processing and sound recording, there have been continual attempts to bring ‘control’ and ‘auto-control’ into the field of music. I remember, in the early 1970s, when I was still a student, being thoroughly impressed by Peter Beyls’s and Joel Chadabe’s experiments; they were real ‘control-voltage sorcerers’ to me. During that glorious period in analog electronics, the role of electronics was huge compared to that of digital technology. This ratio has been completely reversed since then.
In the past decade there has been an explosion of control experiments, as never before — an eagerness to apply to the arts, and especially to music, what had been or was being developed in other, usually less peaceful fields, such as the military/industrial field. I am thinking in particular of pattern and speech recognition, artificial vision and audition, and the like. I suspect that one of the main reasons for this explosion is the shift from heavy electronics to digital computing and micro-computing. A great deal of electronic operations have shifted to programming, making this world accessible to many more people. I would say, ironically, that the control field has become affordable to ‘ordinary’ researchers, in the sense of ‘computer-literate individuals not necessarily supported by large research and teaching institutions’

The recent evolution of technology allows a broad community to create live interactive works, based on gestural capturing devices and real-time sound generation, which are presented in different contexts, such as interactive installations and dance or instrumental pieces. Due to its inherent multi-disciplinary, the creation of an interactive system depends on numerous fields of expertise requiring the collaboration of artists and engineers. In order to design interactive systems controlled by gesture, it is important to analyze current works with the help of theoretical elements. Interactive systems can indeed be seen and evaluated from different perspectives. In this talk we consider two main perspectives regarding technological and semantically aspects. The technological perspective encompasses the discussion of topics such as sensors, analysis techniques for sensors outputs, mapping strategies between sensors and sound generation, and sound synthesis methods. On the other hand, semantically considerations focus on goal of the interaction, the role of users, the types of actions, gestures or postures, and the role of sound output. We will further analyze each of these perspectives by considering two case studies: sound installations and instrument performances.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Surveillance, autopoiesis, networks, new media art, Foucault, Deleuze, Maturana & Varela, cybernetics, protocol

Surveillance has now become a ubiquitous phenomenon that envelops the globe in an uneven and non-transparent manner. While the work of Foucault (the panopticon and the administration of subjectivities) and Deleuze (the control society with its reliance on communication and marketing) provides powerful tools for understanding the surveillance apparatus, closer attention to its digitally networked nature must be given. To this end, the work of Nancy Paterson’s IXMaps and Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev’s PRISM: The Beacon Frame provide morphological samples of the autopoiesis of surveillance. Autopoiesis, a concept related to cybernetics and developed by Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Valera, posits the existence of self-sustaining and regenerating unified systems of relations that are indifferent to their components. Autopoiesis, they argue, is a necessary and sufficient condition to consider a particular system living or otherwise. We speculate at the end of this paper the degree to which the global surveillance apparatus might be considered a living organism, albeit one of our own accidental design, and what the possible implications might be.

Keywords: ecology, autarky, self-sufficiency, climate change, sustainability, media art, art &
technology, curatorial practice.

Today’s ecological threats call for far-reaching changes in the way we live. To achieve these changes however, they first need to be envisioned. Art plays a crucial role in such imagination of us dealing with ecological threats. This paper assesses the role of art as a catalyst in climate awareness by analysing artistic scenarios that deal with climate issues. It will focus on artistic scenarios that call for increased levels of self-sufficiency with respect to existing infrastructures and systems, such as alternative energy infrastructures (e.g. the mobile architecture projects Walking House by N55 or The Blind Painters’ World in a Shell project), reflect on agricultural systems (e.g. Christien Meindertsma’s PIG 05049, Sjef Meijman’s Chicken Tractor project, or Claudy Jongstra’s textile projects), or question consumer economy (e.g. Thomas Twaites’ The Toaster Project).

Certainly, science and philosophy also propose scenarios that call for far-reaching changes to cope with ecological threats and increased levels of self-sufficiency. The more radical their proposals are however, the less chance there seems to be that they will lead to concrete experimentation or implementation. In contrast, in the context of art, radical ideas are never merely conceptualized, but always put to practice through art projects, that serve as proof of concepts for micro-ecosystems or as conversation starters. While doing so, art dealing with climate issues often helps establishing constructive dialogue and knowledge exchange among different disciplines, as the artistic scenarios discussed in this paper will illustrate.
The artistic strategies will be discussed in the light of an existing body of theoretical work that proposes increased levels of self-sufficiency as a solution to ecological threats. The paper combines artistic research and theoretical work to sketch the contours of a new version of autarky: An ecological autarky, in which individuals live ‘autonomous’ with respect to existing infrastructures.

Interactive composing implies dynamic on-the-fly musical negotiation between a live performer and some musical aptitude captured in a computer program. Much software interfacing human and artificial players involves mapping features in human input to parameters affecting output entailing responsive behavior. Our work suggests viewing human and machine as convincing creative entities sharing a common biotope with equal authority. No one is in control; man and machine express mutual influence and complex behavior emerges from the interaction of many simple cognitive building blocks. Such systems exhibit unpredictable though coherent, life-like behavior. Our method takes inspiration from human psychology: we implement artificial relationships, explore qualitative features in perception and competing machine motivations.

In addition, a reinforcement-learning algorithm aims (1) to maximize sensitivity and diversity in system behavior and (2) to deeply link human and machine initiative as to sustain a compelling and rewarding interaction format. Over the years, various systems were implemented approaching intelligent interaction from the above perspectives. Most programs suggest an interaction format of one human soloist interacting with a small virtual chamber orchestra, itself supporting the expression of social affinities between individual players. Our presentation sketches their specific conceptual orientation and computational architecture. We conclude with a live demo. for new technologies with an attitude of critical optimism…hopeful yet careful.

Abstract

There’s a great postmodernist fuss around new interactive media. Media event after another, we hear about non-linearity, free association of ideas through new media, poststructuralism et cetera. What actually lies behind the “revolutionary” expressions? Is electronic art truly giving up the story lines, the thematic intention of an artist and the well-considered dramatic structure of a presentation? If so, I fail to find the development desirable.

Fortunately, I cannot see we are going in such a direction. The postmodernist vocabulary is wildly exaggerated and gives a wrong picture of the true development of the field. In my presentation I intend to reveal some of the many fallacies of postmodernist thinking as I’m speculating the actual future of interactivity. The future will most probably not be a chaos without structures and contents, which have throughout the ages been the foundation of all art. Rather it will the time of new, more complicated structures and fascinating contents.
As an example from the interactive film art, I can foresee a new concept of action emerging. The Aristotelian dramatic rule has finally been broken: action is no longer bound to a certain place at a certain time. There can be simultaneous events and a certain event may occur, according to a viewer’s choice, in very different places and times. By showing different possibilities of a character’s action, interactivity in the movies has a unique chance to emphasize the alternatives of action, interactivity in the movies has a unique chance to emphasize the alternatives of actions and consequences. The viewer can actually be made responsible for the choices. I believe this to change revolutionary our relationship towards invented reality -perhaps towards reality itself.  Whatever the postmodernists cry out loud, don’t worry: the sky is not falling. We’ll still tell stories, though they might be structured differently. We’ll practice free association of ideas with interactive devices as we have practiced it with other artwork before. We’ll still create art that reflects reality by structuring it. Though the tools may change, our job remains basically the same – the job is, as Hamlet puts it: “– to hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

I work as an anthropologist on the problem of man-machine relations with an emphasis on electronic communication and information technologies. My subject is techno-culture and we can certainly state that this culture is as ‘foreign’, ‘different’, ‘other’ to the old western mechanics-dominated culture as to many non-European, so-called ‘primitive’ cultures. Here we have an interesting point to be investigated. The confrontation with the emerging electronic culture is as new for the (old) western culture as it is for the non-European cultures. A main influence in the building of western culture has been the establishment of a phonetic-alphabet, which introduced an Intellectual instrument’ (as Jack Goody called it in his Consequences of Literacy) that has contributed to the development of our linear-sequential thinking.The so-called ‘non-literate’ cultures that work with an oral system of communication utilise different intellectual instruments.

The comparative study of literate and of non-literate culture into the age of electronic information and communication technology will allow us (for the first time in history) to gather a body of data to do with the elaboration of codified communication-systems as it is happening. In 1991, I spent four months in the deserts of Central Australia to study the use of television by remote Aboriginal communities. I discovered that we have a phenomenon here that surpasses the simple ‘televisual education’ of a non-literate culture and the old literate / non-literate discussion. The reflections of the late American anthropologist Eric Michaels (who worked between 1982 and 1986 on a community-TV project with the Warlpiri of Yuendumu) have not inaugurated a new age of electronic information. Communication technologies have to be developed in the light of the new (theoretical and practical) requirements.

I propose to read the Aboriginal culture-text as a bona fide ‘primitive cybernetic system’. In the passage of their culture into the electronic information and communication age, Aboriginal peo-ple have an intellectual instrument that is destined to work with the principles of electronic networks. We will have to elaborate a field for western / Aboriginal collaborative efforts in electronic creativity. It is not sufficient to bring some VHS-cameras to remote communities with the hope that some concerned individuals will produce indigenous TV-programs. It will be necessary to set up a media-lab that illustrates (in a non-didactic way) the systemic functions of electronic machinery in the context of the cultural agendas of various communities.

The information system of the Gulf-War can be considered as a electronic metaphor of Aboriginal totemic tracks. We have to look at the architecture of the totemic ant hill as a cybernetic information system. As western and Aboriginal cultures both are at the same beginners stage in the creative use of electronic devices, we find here a common cultural trait. My talk will include a proposal for an intercultural education-model in cybernetic literacy to be carried out in the deserts of Central Australia. Electronic creativity in remote communities might boost Aboriginal media-art, along the lines of the confrontation of this culture with canvas and acrylic paints.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Toxicity, biotechnology, biopolitics, Foucault, Heidegger, bio art, phenomenology, Enframing, bio-society, apparatus.

The paper looks into how “Toxicity” entrenches itself into what Phenomenology sees as the co-constitution of society and technology. The cultural deciphering of the toxic societal terrain resonates with current socio-economic global transformations. The topic of toxicity reconstructs the current environmental situation and socio-political contexts by looking into modes of contemporary cultural and technological production. Biopolitics maintains an extended role today by shaping life and attaining central role in society. It adds a complexity of layers that allows radical reconstruction of relations between politics and nature, allowing for a reassessment of how we look at life today. The trajectory of development of Biopolitics is altered, for life appears not to be what we have originally assumed that it was, and therefore its regulation cannot continue under previously granted premises. The dualities of power and right, sovereignty and law, do not leave the contemporary Biopolitical discourses for a minute. The Bio-political characteristics of Toxicity are seen by some in line with eugenics, as the toxins will most certainly lead to sterility of the indigenous population, and are to be seen in correlation with the degenerative pathology of the prevailing illnesses such as alcoholism, STDs, obesity, diabetes, cancer, etc.

Panel: Travels Through Hyper-Liminality: Exploring the space where digital meets the real

In ARIS­TOTELIAN PHI­LOS­O­PHY, the process of change from a lower level of po­ten­tial­ity to the higher level of ac­tu­al­ity is known as be­com­ing. Maslow refers to this process as self-ac­tu­al­i­sa­tion, or to be­come more and more of what one is, or ca­pa­ble of be­com­ing. In order for the process of be­com­ing to take place the dis­so­lu­tion of the nor­ma­tive val­ues or un­der­stand­ing of one’s self and con­text is nec­es­sary (Turner 2008). This dis­so­lu­tion, a lim­i­nal phase, al­though ini­tially desta­bil­is­ing, can cre­ate an en­vi­ron­ment con­ducive to the in­di­vid­ual’s val­ues and nor­mal modes of be­hav­iour being re­flected upon and trans­formed. Dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy, par­tic­u­larly the in­ter­net, ‘ a nat­ural en­vi­ron­ment for lim­i­nal­ity’ (Waskul 2004,40) in con­junc­tion with open source soft­ware/cul­ture and their in­her­ent lim­i­nal qual­i­ties are con­sid­ered as tools for the cre­ation and pro­duc­tion of lim­i­nal phases / lim­i­noid spaces. The paper in­tro­duces the role of lim­i­nal phases/lim­i­noid spaces for the process of be­com­ing, draw­ing from an­thro­po­log­i­cal the­o­ries of Van Gen­nap and Turner, and the con­cept of in­di­vid­u­a­tion as ar­gued through Maslow’s con­cept of self-ac­tu­al­i­sa­tion and Jun­gian psy­chol­ogy. In­formed by these the­o­ries, the con­tri­bu­tion of par­tic­i­pa­tory art/tech pro­jects for the prac­tice of place-mak­ing is con­sid­ered as a process of be­com­ing, both for par­tic­i­pat­ing in­di­vid­u­als and their wider con­text. (Place-mak­ing sim­ply put is the process of peo­ple com­ing to­gether in space to ‘make’ place). Through ex­am­ples of par­tic­i­pa­tory art/tech pro­jects and the lim­i­nal phases/lim­i­noid spaces they pro­duce, the paper ar­gues how the un­do­ing of given un­der­stand­ings of place can occur, af­ford­ing new un­der­stand­ings of place and the in­di­vid­ual’s place within that con­text. To con­clude, the paper ex­plores the po­ten­tial of this process to pro­duce com­mu­ni­tas (so­cial struc­ture based on com­mon hu­man­ity and equal­ity rather than rec­og­nized hi­er­ar­chy the par­tic­i­pants and place in­volved) through the con­tri­bu­tion of par­tic­i­pa­tory art/tech pro­jects within the prac­tice of place-mak­ing, po­ten­tially a process of ‘be­com­ing’ both for the par­tic­i­pants and place in­volved.
Ref­er­ences:

1. Witt, C. Ways of Being: Po­ten­tial­ity and Ac­tu­al­ity in Aris­to­tle’s Meta­physics. Ithaca: Cor­nell Univ. Press, 2003.
2. Turner, V.  Lim­i­nal­ity and Com­mu­ni­tas, in The Rit­ual Process: Struc­ture and Anti-Struc­ture. New Brunswick: Al­dine Trans­ac­tion Press, 2008.
3. Waskul, D. D. Net.?seXXX: Read­ings on Sex, Pornog­ra­phy, and the In­ter­net. New York: P. Lang, 2004.

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

A uni­fy­ing thread that runs through­out Bur­rell’s the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal re­search (which in­clude mixed re­al­ity and vir­tual art pro­jects) has been one of ex­plor­ing and search­ing for a po­ten­tial site of the self – and to dare to won­der if this site ex­ists at all. In his pre­sen­ta­tion he will focus on ob­ser­va­tions of the nat­ural his­tory of the phys­i­cal world and ask what a nat­ural his­tory of a hab­it­able vir­tual en­vi­ron­ment may be and how one may emerge as we move into this en­vi­ron­ment and make it our own, and in­deed how this may dif­fer from those of the real world. In doing so he will also ask how the post-hu­man self is start­ing to in­habit these spaces and how it will fit into these new ecolo­gies. The pre­sen­ta­tion will take the form of a po­etic jour­ney fo­cus­ing on the artist’s own phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cally per­ceived self. He will move from a poorly re­called past (as a per­sonal nar­ra­tive of his own his­tory) and into an imag­ined fu­ture – as vividly il­lus­trated and an­tic­i­pated through the artis­tic imag­i­na­tion – with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to his own cre­ative pro­jects and to the works of the Aus­tralian writer Greg Egan.

Panel: Hybrid Cultures

One of the most im­por­tant fac­tors of the hy­brid con­di­tion of con­tem­po­rary arts is the com­plex re­la­tion­ship be­tween arts and sci­ences and tech­nolo­gies. Such re­la­tions de­velop a new con­cept of third cul­ture, not based – as in the the­ory of John Brock­man – on the con­flict be­tween tra­di­tional hu­man­is­tic val­ues and sci­en­tific sys­tems, but on the in­ter­ac­tions be­tween them. I will analyse the de­vel­op­ment of this con­cept, from C. P. Snow’s The­ory of Two Cul­tures,  in re­la­tion­ship to re­cent processes cre­at­ing a new vi­sion of hy­brid cul­ture.

Poster Statement

Trace is an interactive sound installation that is site-specific to the network of hiking trails near the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia. The installation transforms the trails into a landscape of sound recordings that commemorate personal loss. Walking through the installation is like wandering through a memorial sculpture garden where, instead of visible monuments, hikers weave their way through memorial poems, songs and stories that play in response to their movement through the landscape. Contributors may submit recordings to the sound collection which evolves with each submission. Trace explores loss and transformation in an historical moment when time, memory and the body are undergoing dramatic shifts in cultural meaning.

What happens when the public space of the city intervenes in the private experience of art? We present the initial stages of an interdisciplinary research/creation project between two artists and an anthropologist that uses emerging technologies to explore the interstitial space between the private and the public in relation to art. ‘Art’ for us includes visual arts, performing arts, and other streams of creative culture such as architecture, design and literature. We define public urban space as those spaces in the city that are accessible to everyone (regardless of ownership), in which strangers interact in many different ways. People’s experience of art is typically private, whether or not the art is in a collective setting. They move through the art gallery in the bubble of their own personal space. They watch films ensconced in the dark of the cinema. Their emotional reactions to art are located in the body, and divulged to just a few companions. However, we posit that the public space of the city can challenge and interfere with the private experience of art. Indeed, we posit that the public space of the city can creatively be made to intervene in the private space of engagement with art.

Our project asks: What happens when the private experience of art is disrupted, unsettled or reframed by the chance encounters and events of the public space of the city? How do public art works incorporating decentralized, collaborative modes of production integrate into the city? How does this collaboration affect the structure and content of the work? How can interactive, locative technologies affect creative production or generate data? How can we use social science methodologies to both generate and interpret engagement with public artworks? We will explore these questions by combining creative processes in the visual and media arts, principally film (interactive cinema) and public art (site-specific installations), with empirical qualitative social science research (urban anthropology). This paper presents our theoretical framework and our plans to produce artworks that are generated in part by the intervention of the people, events, circumstances and knowledge of the urban public.

For five years I have observed a set of technocreative practices in different multimedia sectors in Montreal. My study is based on more than fifty interviews with technocreative workers/artists and on several observations conducted at digital arts centers. I focused my research on the paths and practice of digital artists across different technocreative milieus. Compared to other technocreative workers, digital artists are simultaneously involved in different production sites – companies, universities, digital arts centers. They have plural careers (Bureau, Perrenoud, & Shapiro, 2009) and their digital arts practice appears to be highly hybrid (Gere, 2005; Ross, 2005). Digital arts practice cannot be reduced to the logic of production specific to an art milieu and unfolds itself along varied paths crossing different milieus.

The question of how this complex practice endures (Massumi, 2002; Stengers, 2002; Whitehead, 1979) implies to pay attention to the plurality of elements that informs its perpetual (re)constitution. This requires new ways of theorizing digital artists’ paths. We propose a new way of conceptualizing these paths – as trajectories (Massey, 2005) – to highlight the plurality of ways the digital arts practice is articulated along those paths. This practice is thus considered in terms of its co-constitutive mediations (Hennion, 1993, 2007) with different elements – institutions, materialities, discourses, technologies, people – forming successive assemblages (DeLanda, 2006; Latour, 2007; Mar & Anderson, 2010). We will discuss the maintenance of digital arts practice through three main points. The first point covers the technologies involved in digital art practices and a correlated “savoir mineur” (Auray, 2002; Simondon, 1969). The second relates to the montrealese digital arts community and the situated knowledge characteristic of those locales. Finally, I will deal with the relationship between technocreative companies and practice in digital arts. Heterogeneous elements contribute in various ways to the endurance and the singularity of the digital arts practice that in return deploys its effectivities far beyond a circumscribed social space (Grossberg, 1992). Framing the digital arts practice as more than an esoteric practice emanating solely from a specialized art milieu, this research brings out the cultural, technological and material significance of digital arts.

The questions which face us all in regard to our own death, and the experience which occurs and follows, are the fundamental questions for an art form whose ‘places’ are the dream-like narrative stages for a ‘Virtual Theatre.’ These non-corporeal spaces provide rehearsals for the experiences which may be difficult or impossible to represent in any other way due to the overwhelming intrusions of our physical presences. It is common for us to represent aspects of our experience in ‘characters’ and ‘identities’ which are familiar to us all but are fragmented in the chess game of a narrative of conflicting and cooperating motivations and reasons. However, in what sense does a character in the Virtual Theatre have a ‘body’, and in what sense a `viewpoint’ and a ‘presence’? And within the experience of non-deterministic and repeatable narrative, what is the sense of the ‘tragedy’ of fate, the certainty of ‘objective’ experience, the agony of one-time choices, and the finality of a present moment? Could it be that these new aspects of narrative provide rehearsals for the experiences we are to have after we are dead? And can we reveal a beauty so sublime and satisfying that we will be happy to ‘be’ its narrative existence ‘forever’, or without time?

Abstract

The rapid technological change of our society provides a revision of the perception of cyberarts and interactive works. While the spectacle of technology remains a dominant factor concerning many interactive projects, surprisingly few artists examine the social relations of the viewer with art objects. This is intriguing as current technological advances clearly enable enhanced communication between the artwork and the audience, providing a variety of options for an effective exploration of interaction as a state of transaction. On examination, underneath the most obvious and often dazzling exterior layer, one mostly encounters a predetermined set of responses nested in pre-framed constructions. Consequently, the interaction between the audience and the artwork needs further exploration. How more effectively could we involve the viewer within the artwork? Audience awareness indicates comprehension, knowledge, cognition, perception and recognition. How do these concepts correspond to notions of interactivity? How is consciousness (of the participant/viewer) addressed in interactive artworks? How can interactive technology be used to enrich social interaction?

“As for the potentials and validity of methodology we used in the mid-seventies remains to be rediscovered and reaffirmed as soon as those in the arts with Internet2 capabilities become bored with watching local performers interacting with displays simply presenting remote participants.”    _Kit Galloway, Sherrie Rabinowitz, “Aesthetic Research in Telecommunications”

Telematic Art, first described as part of the “telematic embrace” by artist and theorist Roy Ascott, and inferred by Marvin Minksy of MIT labs as “telepresence” or digital spatialization and temporal distributed events with real-time interaction is being re-calibrated incorporating a new generation of software, connectivity and arts practices over robust 1gigabyte fiber optic research networks. These networks are limited in their ability to conduit information only by the speed of light.  Due to advances in digitization, connectivity, upgrading of core infrastructures and the prioritization of nations throughout the globe to construct high-speed networks, these environments are undergoing rapid development.

Human movement can be transformed into digital images that become sound, and that sound can then be reincorporated back into the image, launching new potentialities of interactivity between different global telematic nodes. Different sensor technologies data can be sent to various locations. These new software and methodologies raise compelling technical, aesthetic, social and cognitive paradigms of meaning concerning the intersection of human and digital arts, sound, storytelling, dance, music, installation, and participatory works.  What are the emerging aesthetics of these combined mediums over distance networks? Are they developing into something truly unique, or are they just repackaging appropriated forms? By necessity the issue of presence and immediacy become mediated.  Does this mediation make arts practice into augmented broadcast or something more compelling?

This paper will explore recent experiments using telematics with 3D Virtual worlds, improvised performance, motion capture suits, spoken word, video art, live and pre-recorded dance, VDMX V-J effects, MAX/MSP/Jitter and various music and sound programs in front of both live audiences and as on-line performances.

Abstract (long paper)

This article explores an animated adaptation from a cultural heritage source. It discusses the source, approaches and technical aspects in my animation – NUNUI (2013). Nang Talung, the southern Thai shadow play, offers unique, simple characteristics as a creative resource for Thai animation. The puppet uses jointed parts, which can be animated separately. This study aims to synthesize the ancient and modern by integrating Nang Talung folk puppetry with contemporary animation. Following the original source, most of Nang Talung animated adaptations relies on conventional stories, plots and the use of dialogues as shown in original performance. I argue that not only similarities, but also differences, are important for the dialogue between the two art forms. This study allows animators to open to change and embrace the other creative possibilities that ‘new’ media enable. It also offers an animator the opportunity to experiment with Nang Talung puppet’s movement and to expand its limitations with computer graphics (CG).

(Short paper)

Keywords: Interactive Art, Aesthetics, Code Literacy, Activism.

The Aesthetics of Activism (2014) is an artwork that aggregates visual material from social networks into image and video collages. Visitors within an interactive zone can explore playback and correlation between images. The authors’ approach to transcoding aesthetically is grounded in their interpretation of both design and theatrical practices. They provide a detailed analysis of the artwork’s operation boundaries (e.g. spatial layout and themed structure) to support insight into the new roles and processes employed to translate code and aesthetics. Their approach to transcoding is a process that undermines the commercial platforms that rank, sort and filter the information on the Internet. Rather than enact document agency the artwork demonstrates the artistry required to transcode the representation of real world activism.

Panel: Transcultural Approaches

In his report on the study of pictorial perception among African subjects, William Hudson (1967) says that we take it very much for granted that methods which are only moderately successful in our own cultures will prove equally, if not highly, successful in an alien culture: “We fall into the error of thinking of the black man’s mind as a tabula rasa, which we have only to fill with the benefits of our own cultural experience in order to promote whatever objectives we may have in mind. We forget or ignore the fact that the black man possesses his own indigenous culture”.

During recent years, many artists have addressed the issue of cultural diversity as part of their discussions on Electronic Art. Although the vast majority of artists claim the need for a transcultural approach, most of them have taken a superficial look at this complex problem, turning attention away from some of its more crucial points. Their discourse focuses on the possibilities for providing artistic bridges across different cultures, while their attitudes and works reflect, in many cases, a typical ethnocentric view.
The discussion aims at promoting a debate on transcultural issues, as one of the major challenges electronic artists face today. In a world of social, cultural and economic disparities, how can technology meet basic human needs in both developed and developing countries? Which are the dominant cultural values that underlie computer-related technologies today?
What is the impact of new electronic technologies on Third World nations? How can we minimize technological dependence and cultural domination, when 30 developed countries–with less than 30% of the world’s population– account for approximately 95% of the world’s scientific and technological production?

Panel Statement

Panel: Transcultural Approaches

In the history of human culture there is no example of a conscious adjustment of the various factors of personal and social life to new extensions except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists. The artist picks up the messages of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs. (Marshall McLuhan).

What is meant by a transcultural approach to electronic art? Is ‘transcultural’ to be read as something that effaces difference accross cultures or as something that is constituted by it? The conflict between geographical, cultural rootedness and the space defying freedom of the Internet maybe at the heart of the problem of conceiving a transcultural approach to electronic art. The ethos of the computer industry in India emanates from the western world, and employs the same marketing and training strategies. Is this fertile ground for creative assimilation of a foreign technology or is this another avenue for cultural colonization? How have the technologies and language of photography and cinema transferred to the Indian subcontinent? What processes of imitation, subversion, appropriation and creation were  released? It is not possible to talk of an Indian approach to Electronic Art with the same hindsight clarity with which photography and cinema can be talked about. But a consideration of individual works and culturally moulded sensibilities is possible. In the minute of such considerations,
we can perhaps realize the truth of McLuhan’s statement and go beyond the bottleneck of ‘style’.

This talk presents initial responses from Transformational – a bio-art workshop that forms part of an ongoing research collaboration between Northumbria University and the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Newcastle University. Tranformational introduces the concept of psychotransgenics: the situating of oneself physically in the position of transforming a thought into a living organism and the encounter of doing so. The workshop enables participants to explore the potential of DNA as data storage device for text, music or image, create their own DNA storage designs for potential future use, choose whether they wish to physically store information within the body of a living organism and then reflect on their decision via a video diary.

Transformational forms a part of Evolution of the Subject – an ongoing research project that explores the evolution of data within living material through fine art practice. It is in part a dissemination of the artist’s research, addressing the questions: How might the agency of organisms be explored through a fine art practice situated within biotechnology? What possibilities exist when we have the ability to store data within living organisms? In what ways can an art practice situated in the laboratory expand the discourse around the use of transgenic organisms?

Abstract

The rapid and unprecedented changes effecting societies since the 1960s are having a profound effect on the production, dissemination, interpretation, documentation and archiving of cultural artefacts and events. Many refer to these changes as globalization, although other terms such as ‘the post-industrial society, the information society, the network society, disciplinary society, control society, informatization, scale-free networks, small-worlds and smart mobs’ are also used. The exact nature and extent of globalisation is fiercely debated and competing analyses are often rooted in claims and denials regarding epochal shifts, the decline or otherwise of the nation-state and corresponding transformations in social relations. Suggesting that the ‘information society’ perpetuates and promotes longterm capitalist relations enormously, social theorist Frank Webster declares that ‘while there is undoubted change taking place, and this at a speed and with a reach hitherto unimaginable, it is for the most part a matter of the continuity, consolidation and extension of established relations’. Whilst acknowledging the significance of information, knowledge, advanced communications and computing technologies to these developments, he urges resistance to any consideration that these are the cause or indeed privileged factors in contemporary change. Instead, Webster identifies ongoing features of capitalism such as: ability to pay; market criteria, competition, private ownership over state holdings, wage labour and commodification of activities as markers of global network society.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Ephemeral material, digital fabrication, foam structure, dynamic and transformable, algorithm, chemical substances and thickening agents.

This paper introduces the notion of transient materialization through an exploration of the relationship between digital and material-based digital fabrication. The research was inspired by direct observations of nature’s beauty in the form of thin films. The building block of the experiment is an n-hedron structure composed mainly of soap foam, which is blown, through a mixture of air and helium (used to control the physical properties), into a foam structure. The paper questions this structure’s materiality, examines its physical performance and ephemeral characteristics, and expands on its meaning through an experiment in digital fabrication. Specifically, in this paper, we demonstrate the first phase of this technology and achieve a programmable foam structure. The experiment presents various configurations of dynamic and transformable foam structures on a large scale of fabrication. The fabrication interacts with the algorithm, which involves a mixture of air and helium (controlled by pneumatic valves) and additive chemical and food substances, all of which exist in a certain space and time. The aim of the project is to take architecture beyond the creation of static forms and into the design of dynamic, transformable and ephemeral material experimental processes.

This paper is an inquiry about how the field of translation studies and translation-related issues could provide good practices for enabling successful transdisciplinary collaborations. The focus is on transdisciplinary practice and research, which bridge experts in very different disciplines that do not share success criteria, exact methodologies or dissemination methods. We argue that either disciplinary translators or collaborators with disciplinary translation skills will support better transdisciplinary outcomes. After reviewing literature and reflecting on diverse translation concepts and experiences, we developed 10 preliminary heuristics that collaborators from art and sciences can use to improve teamwork with transdisciplinary outcome goals. This paper is also an experiment in language and transdisciplinary translation and collaboration. The background of the authors includes design, astrophysics, education, and art.

The artist talk, Translational Spaces, by Santiago Tavera presents his latest creative-research on the construction of interactive and immersive digital architectural environments. The use of digital media presents the potential to simulate a state of disembodiment (elasticity, alteration, translation) for viewers and participants. Tavera investigates the potential of digital technologies to create virtual environments that alter our thresholds of perception. Tavera’s creative-research combines fictional and personal narratives of belonging and displacement to construct digital environments and virtual architectural sites. The research, Translational Spaces, recently resulted in the production of an artist book that includes written fictions and an interactive web-project. This work has recently been exhibited as an interactive website with lightboxes (Chromatic Festival, Montreal, 2016), as a live screening performance (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2015), as reading performances and a video interactive installation (Agence Topo, Montreal, 2016) and finally online (The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale, 2015-2016). Tavera’s creative-research questions how through the mediation of digital media, experiences of virtual displacement parallels states of disembodiment experienced by migrant bodies. Immersive and interactive digital spaces have the potential of generating dialogues on cultural identification, social collaboration, and processes of conflict resolution, with the goal of creating illusions of a utopic future.

Over recent years, the way we produce, teach and research new media has dramatically changed. The interactive non-fiction narratives have transformed the processes of producing, distributing and showing documentaries, and especially the processes involved in how the viewer relates to the text. One of these new media forms of narrative expression is “interactive documentary”. As a new media object, interactive documentary challenges traditional methods of study and dissemination. An interactive documentary is a kind of documentary that empowers the viewers by allowing them to take decisions that affect the narrative. When there are different media formats and platforms involved, we are talking about a transmedia documentary. The design and production processes in the so called forms of new media documentary differ substantially from traditional audiovisual documentary production. This session will show a set of case studies in order to provide some guidelines that could be helpful for producers who want to design and implement an interactive or transmedia documentary. The second part of the workshop will focus on providing useful resources for producers in Colombia and abroad, such as production companies, multimedia studies, broadcasters and grants for new media production.

Frederick Ostrenko is a new media artist and educator within Louisiana State University’s AVATAR initiative. He will present on his interactive environments that focus on revealing hidden networks between people by creating structures for expression and discovery. His installations use brainwaves, text messages, live video processing, and electric shock as interfaces for people to explore their identity and connect with other participants. Frederick will also talk about a recent work, which is inspired by a hero’s journey towards transcendence, and how such a narrative relates to a participant’s experience within a digitally augmented environment.

This paper proposes a machine learning based interactive system, TransMotion, that helps one to experience the aesthetic value of body movements. TransMotion recognizes the body pose of the user in real time and presents the ballet movement that appears to be triggered by the user’s pose in an immersive way. It aims to help users to discover the aesthetic values inherent in their body movements, but not recognized in everyday life. Furthermore, it aims to improve the user’s physical self-efficacy and to increase the interests in the artistic activities based on body movements.

Abstract

Short Paper

This paper purports to examine the dynamics and implications of the notion of “language as interface” by tracing a genealogy of the concept of transparency as it is employed by various discourses. More specifically this paper foregrounds three usages of transparency and argues for a reorientation of the “language mode” of meaning-making within our visual culture and digital discourses that might, consequently, help to account for the perpetual negotiation of interpretation between the visual and the textual. These usages include transparency in architecture, transparency in language and transparency in digital media. As Anthony Vidler suggests, modernity has been haunted by a myth of transparency: transparency of the self to nature, of all selves to society, universal transparency of building material, spatial penetration, and the ubiquitous flow of light and physical movement. Following this genealogy, this paper attempts to redirect our over-reliance on the perspectival-material based visual cognition to the metaphoric assumption of transparency in language. Transparency here is defined as the convention in which both author and beholder are absent from representation, objects rendered as if their externals are entirely perceptible in a unified field of vision with their internally fully accessible. By linking architectural transparency to the transparency of language, I will then discuss how the metaphoric usage of transparency in digital media is broken down by the actual program application. Namely, the data compression technology that renders and alters our concept of layering and interface. Finally, I propose to reconfigure a new epistemological paradigm in which to contain discourses of transparency in digital media and transparency of language. After all, echoing the spirit of Heideggerian and Freudian UNHEIMLICH, transparency reveals as much as it hides.

“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, …”   _From ‘Regarding the pain of others’ by Susan Sontag.

It is difficult to create a sense of equivalence in terms of impact and scale between what is distant and what is local. This paper discusses “transpositional mapping”–creating templates of events or circumstances that take place elsewhere and overlaying them on local spaces. This paper presents Shadows from another place, a series of transposed mapping projects that are discussed within a larger practice where hypothetical spaces are created in order to destabilize, recast, reinvent and reorder familiar ground.

Abstract

Shadows from another place is a series of new mapping web projects using GPS coordinates, strategies of mapping and the web. The projects transpose foreign events onto local and familiar spaces, creating hybrid territories. These new, conceptual spaces reflect impact of distant and foreign events as though they were domestic. Places of dispute become the templates mapped upon other, undisputed and undisturbed locations. The impact of war, for example, or other political forces that reshape and redefine foreign lands, are overlaid upon local places that are otherwise untouched by these drastic and traumatic forces of change.

The first project in the series, San Francisco <-> Baghdad was instigated by the March, 2003 U.S. assault upon Baghdad. The impetus for the project was the question: What if the safety of distance between foreign and domestic territories collapsed, and the impact of foreign events could be seen, ?experienced? and grounded in local terms?

The second project, Separation Wall, Israel, is in progress. Using similar strategies, it maps and documents with GPS coordinates a segment of the current wall under construction in Israel creating a template that will be superimposed upon other locations. This project is currently in development with collaborators in Palestine and Israel.

These projects are discussed within a larger framework of radical mapping practices, both current and past, and new possibilities emerging with locative media.

Human perception has long been influenced by technological breakthroughs. An intimate mediation of technology lies in between our direct perceptions and the environment we perceive. Through three extreme ideal types of perceptual machines, this project defamiliarizes and questions the habitual ways in which we interpret, operate, and understand the visual world intervened by digital media.

1. Hyper-allergenic Vision Syndrome
The modern society has observed an increase in allergies and intolerances. Hypersensitivities are emerging not only medically but also mentally. Technology has this mutual reinforcement effect that people tend to become less tolerant because they interact even less with people who have different backgrounds and opinions. Digital media as mediator reinforce people’s tendency of overreacting through the viral spread of information and amplification of opinions, making us hypersensitive to our social-political environment. Similar to patterns of intolerance to signals that we see with our immune system, we also see with our mental responses to our environment. By creating an artificial allergy to redness, this machine manifests the nonsensical hypersensitivity devised by digital media.

2. Tactile Vision
Vision works well when we have an overview of the total system, but the way we search in digital media is through little steps, from link to link — a tactile experience as we feel the landscape. We can never see it as a whole because it’s not a continuous space. Instead, we look through a pinhole and build up everything without an overview. This wearable is the extreme version of us possessing only one sense for one thing. Depriving all other sensory experiences and leaving only one signal channel, this hyper-narrow, focused, and filtered vision is an analog version of the searching behavior on the Internet.

3. Commoditized Vision
The commodification of the visual field requires observers that can rapidly consume visual information. The downside is the extreme overloading of information that has to be packed into the visual field in order to make the most out of every second. The meditative relationship to what we are staring at is no longer possible because everything has an overlay of commercial information trying to extract value from us. The visual field becomes a commodity that has real estate value. By creating the tension between meditative state and consumptive state, this machine contemplates on how augmenting the visual field with new technologies affects our relationship to the world in this particular social-economic context.

Panel: Emotion Studies in a Contemporary Art Debate

Where do emo­tions re­side?  Are they the sole prop­erty of the body or do they res­onate in the in­ter­sti­tial spaces be­tween the ma­te­r­ial world and ephemeral realms; in in­vis­i­ble but pal­pa­ble elec­tronic spaces, in vir­tu­al­ity, in spir­i­tual and an­ces­tral realms in in­dige­nous cul­tures? As re­search de­vel­ops in Af­fec­tive Com­put­ing, cre­at­ing com­put­ing de­vices that em­body emo­tions, – rec­og­niz­ing, ex­press­ing, and sim­u­lat­ing emo­tions in their in­ter­ac­tion with users.  In the field of Emo­tion De­sign can we in­sti­gate spon­ta­neous emo­tions?  Is there an elec­tronic mime­sis that can em­pathize with the user? In­spired by the power of rit­ual and cer­e­mony in in­dige­nous cul­tures, in my art­work I jux­ta­pose ob­jects with video pro­jec­tion. The ob­ject main­tains a pow­er­ful ref­er­ence with a cul­tural and so­cial mean­ing, while mul­ti­ple video pro­jec­tions in­ter­vene.

These video/mul­ti­me­dia in­stal­la­tions trans­form the emo­tion em­bed­ded in the dig­i­tal video, the ephemeral stream of elec­trons into the mime­sis of the body, into spaces of mem­ory and imag­i­na­tion.  Con­tem­po­rary re­search shows that the en­gage­ment of emo­tions is es­sen­tial for an­a­lyt­i­cal and cre­ative prac­tice.  His­tor­i­cally, Mar­shall McLuhan ad­vo­cated for kines­thet­ics in the ac­ti­va­tion of our sen­sory per­cep­tion, call­ing for the in­te­gra­tion of the senses.  Mo­holy Nagy, in his book Vi­sion in Mo­tion, says that we need to add emo­tional lit­er­acy to the de­vel­op­ment of our in­tel­lec­tual lit­er­acy, which in­cludes an ed­u­ca­tion of our sense, giv­ing peo­ple the abil­ity to ar­tic­u­late feel­ings and emo­tions through a means of ex­pres­sion.  As a mul­ti­di­men­sional pro­cess­ing, trans­form­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion en­vi­ron­ment, can the com­puted ex­pe­ri­ence stim­u­late in­ter­ac­tive kines­thetic emo­tional ex­pe­ri­ences.

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

This paper speaks about how mo­tion cap­ture analy­sis trans­lates into per­for­mance events, and specif­i­cally the im­pact on the viewer; what choices do artists make in terms of com­po­si­tion/en­vi­ron­ment/du­ra­tion and how does motor ac­tion and em­bod­ied human ex­pe­ri­ence com­mu­ni­cate through mo­tion cap­ture vi­su­al­i­sa­tions?  What does the viewer ex­pe­ri­ence and what are the crit­i­cal frame­works that the artist/viewer/scholar draws on to de­scribe and doc­u­ment the work?