Presentation Data Table

Panel: Virtual Doppelgangers: Embodiment, Morphogenesis, and Transversal Action

From 2008-2011, Cárde­nas and Mehrmand have col­lab­o­rated and made in­di­vid­ual art­works which bridge re­al­i­ties and ex­tend the body son­i­cally and vi­su­ally. Through these ex­per­i­ments, they have de­vel­oped new tech­nolo­gies, aes­thetic strate­gies and forms of po­lit­i­cal em­bod­i­ment which are tran­sreal, cross­ing the lines of re­al­i­ties and using re­al­ity as a medium. These pro­jects work within what Ri­cardo Dominguez de­scribes as, “con­crete prac­tices as spec­u­la­tion and spec­u­la­tion as con­crete prac­tices – at the speed of dreams,”  ex­per­i­ment­ing with ways of link­ing their phys­i­cal bod­ies with our vir­tual dop­pel­gangers. These ex­per­i­ments form a tra­jec­tory of Sci­ence of the Op­pressed and point to­wards new lines of flight, mod­els such as tran­sreal, holo­graphic and clone iden­ti­ties. Be­com­ing Dragon ques­tions the one-year re­quire­ment of “Real Life Ex­pe­ri­ence” that trans­gen­der peo­ple must ful­fill in order to re­ceive Gen­der Con­fir­ma­tion Surgery, and asks if this could be re­placed by one year of “Sec­ond Life Ex­pe­ri­ence” to lead to Species Re­as­sign­ment Surgery. For the per­for­mance, Cárde­nas lived for 365 hours im­mersed in the on­line 3D en­vi­ron­ment of Sec­ond Life with a head mounted dis­play, only see­ing the phys­i­cal world through a video feed, and used a mo­tion cap­ture sys­tem to map her move­ments into Sec­ond Life.

Sub­se­quently, Mehrmand and Cárde­nas col­lab­o­rated on Be­com­ing Tran­sreal, using ex­panded ver­sions of this tech­nol­ogy to map two avatars’ mo­tions in a slip­stream nar­ra­tive about fu­tures of nanobiotech­nol­ogy. Cárde­nas and Mehrmand began to col­lab­o­rate on mixed re­al­ity per­for­mances such as Technésex­ual, in which the per­form­ers com­mit play­ful erotic acts in phys­i­cal and vir­tual space si­mul­ta­ne­ously, using de­vices to am­plify the sound of their heart­beats for the two au­di­ences. An elec­tro­car­dio­gram was used to mon­i­tor the heart rate with an Ar­duino/Free­duino, play­ing a record­ing of the heart­beat at the live rate using Pure­data. Tem­per­a­ture sen­sors mod­u­late the pitch based on touch. DIY bio­met­rics are used to bridge re­al­i­ties with audio, find­ing ways of ex­plor­ing the space be­tween re­al­i­ties. The mix­ing of re­al­i­ties in this pro­ject can be seen as par­al­lel­ing our own ex­pe­ri­ences mix­ing gen­ders and sex­u­al­i­ties, queer­ing new media. Vir­tu­al­worlds such as Sec­ond Life fa­cil­i­tate the de­vel­op­ment of new iden­ti­ties, al­low­ing for unimag­ined re­la­tions and re­la­tion­ships. Technésex­ual looks closely at these new re­la­tion­ships, and how they af­fect our every­day lives and hori­zons of pos­si­bil­ity.

The conceptual framework of Artificial Life (A-Life), and related methods, is reasonably nascent to the field of media production; it is more commonly used to model scientific schemas than employed in other forms of content creation such as games production or, particularly relevant to this paper, media art. Artists using A-Life processes draw from the broader conceptual framework of A-Life to evolve drawings, sculpture (three-dimensional digital objects) and music, the ‘classical’ arts. Little experimentation exists in A-Life screen based art with regard to film, with few artworks, if any, attempting to evolve the grammar of film and montage.

The project “Travelogue: a recording of minute expressions” explores the expressive processes of film and A-Life for the purpose of co-evolving an A-Life world with an A-Life filmmaker to evolve a documentary; a documentary of ‘interesting things’. This paper discusses “Travelogue: a recording of minute expressions” with particular focus on the relationship between A-Life and film and the potential to co-evolve an A-Life filmmaker. In this discussion the paper examines the potential to expand both the grammar of film and A-Life to evolve a new visual syntax and to create new logics for transitions and alternative visual/thematic analogies.

Although working with different representations of space may seem like one of the natural domains of artists, few have had exposure to work involving geometries other than our familiar Euclidean construction of space. As certain branches of mathematics become increasingly visual, computers are being used to view and explore spaces which have previously been described primarily through abstraction. Familiarity and perhaps involvement with these theories may afford the artist who works with new technologies a greater opportunity to explore and influence our conception of how our world is constructed. Delle Maxwell and Charlie Gunn worked together (with the help of many others) to create a video called Not Knot. Not Knot tells the story of one way that mathematicians understand, SF knots. The project was initiated to visualise some of the exciting results in three dimensional topology made by mathematicians working with the Geometry Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota — particularly the results of William Thurston in the classification of three-dimensional spaces.

His deep geometric intuition was suited to the medium of computer visualisation. Group members brought together skills from mathematics, computer animation, art, design, and computer science. We chose to feature hyperbolic space because it has great appeal to both mathematical and non-mathematical audiences. It allows people to experience the concept of curved space for the first time in a realistic way, a concept which is of central importance in many physical theories of natural science. After a brief introduction, we will show this video tape and will then discuss and illustrate via animation other strange visual characteristics of such spaces. Although the tape was not created as a work of art, it is meant to be a visual experience. As such, we believe it can serve as a catalyst for artists wishing to explore other geometries and to gain more insight into the theories that are shaping our understanding of the space around us.

Global warming and other environmental concerns present some of the most challenging dilemmas that we face today. In a performance based action, during the ISEA2012 conference in Albuquerque next September, we propose presenting some of these concerns in a new way. People will be asked to download a free QR code scanner to their smart phones. One or more performers will circulate, wearing custom designed interactive garments with printed images culled from various landscapes indigenous to regions in New Mexico. The Interactive QR codes will be embedded into landscape images of rocks, grasses, water, earth, trees, wetlands, etc. Seven to ten different codes will be available for participant scanning. Upon scanning any of the QR codes, a series of multiple-choice questions pertaining to an environmental dilemma will appear on the player’s phone screens. Each code (landscape object) will represent a different series of questions. The participant will be able to select an answer from the menu of three possible choices by tapping the touch screen. A panel of invited experts, creative thinkers, and environmental activists will compile the questions. At the end of the ISEA2012 symposium, we hope to have the community “tally” of answers to the posed dilemmas texted to all participants so that they can see how their answers corresponded to the other participants.

“These are underwater sounds made by humpback whales as they pass near Bermuda in the Spring. They were recorded through a hydrophone, which is a kind of underwater microphone. The water is very deep and the sounds are echoing off the under-surface of waves and from the submarine canyons and ridges on the island slope. If you listened for a long time you would hear that the sounds are organized into definite repeating patterns, so we call them songs, just as we refer to bird-songs or frog-songs. Unlike bird songs, humpback songs are very long, six to thirty minutes, and are strung together without pauses between them. They are probably the longest, loudest and slowest songs in nature” (Payne and McVay, 1970). The first images of Earth from space and the first publicly released recordings of whale songs were widely disseminated and had a profound effect on popular consciousness on a global scale. The Earth from this perspective seems precious and coherent yet isolated if not vulnerable in space, one of many planetary bodies in the universe. The whale songs revealed these mythic beings as far more intelligent, sociable, and complex, but also far more accessible, far more humanlike, than previously recognized. This tuning in to the sound of whales and spacing out on Earth emerged at a moment of rising environmental concerns and contributed to a growing ecological awareness. Borrowing from cybernetics and systems theory, this awareness recognized the intrinsic interrelatedness of various life forms and the Earth’s seas, terrestrial environments, and atmosphere. It appears that popular concern with environmentalism and ecology is cyclical in nature. And we are currently in the midst of another such cycle of heightened awareness, in which the whale returns again, as a central icon, and in which systems thinking underlies current conceptions of sustainability. This paper purposely ambiguates the roles of the artist and theorist, flowing between scholarly writing and firsthand accounts of personal experiences. It discusses historic and contemporary research on sound by artists and scientists including La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier, Yolande Harris, David Dunn and James P. Crutchfield, and Michel André. The authors share a fascination with sounds from environments that lie outside direct human experience – under water, in the atmosphere and outer space, and at non-human spatio-temporal scales. These environments often do not lend themselves to visual discernment; rather, sound becomes an invaluable means for understanding these spaces, for experiencing a form of “presentness” in them. By presentness we mean a heightened personal state of being – a psychical form of “tuning in” in which awareness of one’s immediate or extended environment is greatly enhanced, expanding consciousness outward from the self into an infinite metaphorical space. We see this operation as underlying the power of field recordings and other forms of acoustic soundscapes. Tuning in and spacing out to the presentness of sound becomes a method for creating an expanded, systemic awareness that is key to cultivating sustainable attitudes toward the environment and to developing interdisciplinary solutions to global ecological problems.

In this artist presentation, Thomas Asmuth will give a report of new works and designs in the Turbidity Paintings project. An extensive transdisciplinary collaboration of artists and biological scientists has generated ecologically and environmentally focused work which simultaneously exists as scientific research and artistic/cultural products including color field print mosaics, visual and numerical databases, sculptural and video installations, custom scientific apparatus, and product design. This project started in 2015 and has radically evolved since Asmuth and his collaborators did training fieldwork in Hong Kong and presented on the initial findings at ISEA2016.

(Short paper)

Keywords: Climate change, art-science, software art

One of the least studied aspects surrounding the debates about AI is the one related to the creative process. It is not until 1994 that light is shed upon this particular issue with the GENESIS (Generation and Exploration of Novel Emergent Structures in Sequences: Derek Partridge and Jon Rowe, University of Exeter) project, which aimed to provide a computer with a “creativity” capacity. It was based on the idea expressed by John Minsky in his book The Society of Mind (1985) that embodied “the representational fluidity for a multiagent system”, in other words, a memory mechanism that showed an increased creative behavior, based on the input data and its output. Nevertheless, twenty years earlier there was already an interdisciplinary project that, facing the question of whether machines were able to think, gave it a turn and added (from an artistic point of view): “if so, are they capable of creativity?” This project was carried out by Manuel Felguérez and the engineer Mayer Sasson between the years of 1973 and 1975 – through a Grant sponsored by the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico and Harvard University – in the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. This essay discusses how science, art and technology interfaced in Mexico during that period and makes clear how The Aesthetic Machine was a very precise artistic correlate to the topics been debated during that time around technological development, mind studies and cognitive sciences.

The representations that real-time, always-on, data-driven technologies will enhance society like never before promotes an historical inattention that ignores the entangled genealogy of contemporary social media. As we live our lives increasingly in the public realm of social media, we are not only exposed to a human gaze. What happens when we slow down the present through the past? Using a media archaeological research approach, this paper presents Twitter and the telegraph as related forms of social media. Developed by the first author, TwttrGraph, an object-based sound installation utilising obsolete media technology, is presented as an audio-visual representation of a genealogy of connections between past media technologies and contemporary social media. TwttrGraph can be considered a return to the material representation of media through the physical re-presentation of Twitter messages transported as invisible digital media through the physical materiality of the telegraph key. By enabling the ability to hear the present through the past, TwttrGraph reconfigures the existence of the telegraph within a broader history of social media.

U-Lang is a visual sound instrument which can be used to create digital sound sculptures on touch based devices. One of its core concepts is the reduced set of grammar, a limited set of input methods. The purpose of the application is to make the nature of sounds accessible to both novices and experts in a unique way. The instrument is based on a special synthesis method, where raw white noise is used for sonic reference material, and custom, parametrized filter processes can be applied to sculpt different sonic textures and compositional structures. U-Lang is introducing a multimodal gestural interface, a multitouch polar timeline that can change how we interact with linear data. By using multiple touch points and recognizing paralell gestures made by different fingers, several points can be accessed simultaneously within the manipulated data set. Patterns, gestures and touch topologies can be clustered into specific categories just like playing physical instruments.

Session: City, Public Space and Mobile Technologies

The use of mobile, pervasive and locative technologies in every daily  practices are reconfiguring our daily experience, putting us in constant  contact (co-presence) with friends, family and work´s topics. This paper  explores the art in Post Desktop Era and we propose the term Ubicomputacional  Art with a new field in Cyberarts for study of junction between Art + ubiquitous computing. The term of “ubiquitous computing” was proposed by Mark Weiser to describe a kind of “computing without computers”. Ubicomputacional Art is not just the sum of art plus ubiquitous systems but also a new mode that is born and a new paradigm for thinking about the relation of art, science, life and technology. The daily urban flows, security and new tolls for human health (like the development of mob biomedical sensors to help and inform the doctor about some  diseases) are some topics that we are working in a transdisciplinar way between Arts and Engineering. We will present some new technologies in development by LART (Laboratory of Research in Arts and TechnoScience_University of Brasília_Gama, coordinate by Diana Domingues).  Apparerently invisible, computers are “populating” the homes, offices, streets in smart environments, pockets and in many other portable technologies – devices can be attached to the body like many biomedical sensors. The ability of urban environments to add information is also  exploited in the art in some collaborative practices. We intent showing some mob applications created  like an artwork that allow the user tell stories about place in a new open narrative porpoise that mixes documental, ficcional, intimate stories with historical, scientific and political viewpoints as an example that how we can reconfigure the public space, the sense of co-located and new kinds of mobile social network and arrangements. Understanding the changes in computer technology is an important point for us what we really have to create new art with the ubiquitous systems. What extent the Art Ubicomputacional would help create a world view about the new technologies? In what way the artists would be broadening, subverting and re-contextualizing these technical tools?

The analysis of space has been historically dominated by a horizontal imaginary that privileges notions of wayfaring and planar geometries. Forging a new assemblage of performative, somatechnial and techno-choreographic approaches, this paper reflects on an art & anthropology project that examines the theoretical, phenomenological, artistic and political implications of thinking about space volumetrically and kinaesthetically, calling attention to the geopolitics of volumetric space. The project’s field work probed underground water movement, paleogeologic cave formation and industrial/built undergrounds as case studies, proposing to challenge the relation between practices of inquiry in the human sciences and the forms of knowledge to which they give rise. Its basic premise is that knowledge is not generated through an encounter between minds furnished with concepts and theories, and a material world already populated with objects, but emerges from the crucible of our practical, biophysical engagement with the world around us, while at the same time using recording and capturing technologies which, inevitably, remediate the biophysical, sensory aggregates and immersive sensation. Combining practices and insights from science, anthropology, and media performance, the project asks for expressions of sensings that are narrative as well as choreographic; narrative imaginings (based on fieldwork) are translated into collective multimedia explorations of underground space combining photogrammetric modeling (AR/VR), digital sound and film processing and choreography.

The concept of soundscape was shaped by Murray Schafer in late 60’s, describing it as the grouping of every audible sound surrounding us. Schafer conjoined the words Sound and Landscape, creating not only a new concept that would transcend to nowadays, but also an autonomous subject of study linked precisely to the characterization of spaces by their sound environment, allowing us to know them through what they reveal to us. Underground Soundscapes is a project that has started in 2015, making and putting together many soundscapes of different subways in different cities. We can hear how it sounds the subway in Ciudad de México, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Medellín, Valparaiso, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Madrid and Paris, and the project is still recording places. In this talk, we’re going to hear, understand, discuss and explore different potential expression of urban soundscapes, and their relationship with the heritage, cultural practices and traditions.

This paper will focus on the processes, methods and results applied to the development of the interactive installation Under the skin another skin (2016). The installation is presented in the shape of three humanscale three-dimensional objects and it is made from flexible materials, such as textiles, inviting the (interacting) audience, to physically engage in a bodily sensorial, and sensuous, relationship with the artwork. The objects enclose interactive devices and tactile sensors that, when used, trigger in the interactor multiple sensorial stimuli. The interactive installation focuses on the interactor’s intimate haptic experience taking in consideration his or hers sensorial and cognitive mechanisms as a potential apparatus for future interactive aesthetic experiences.

The paper explores the recent growth in critical gameplay, an application of critical design to the production of computer games. Critical gameplay games demonstrate alternative gameplay models. They reveal assumptions about the ways in which we play, offering new experiences by reflecting on the old ways of playing.  Such games include the Lindsay Grace’s Critical Gameplay collection, Awkward silence game’s One Chance, Zach Gauge’s Lose/Lose and others.

Where the affirmation design of industry standards seeks to expand through increasingly deep exploration of shallow mechanics, Critical gameplay seeks to expand through the shallow exploration of deeper mechanics.  It is not a matter of improving the way we shoot or jump, but instead asking if there are more meaningful actions that we can afford players.  Perhaps it is the opportunity to undo our biggest mistakes as in Healer, or to help us understand that in life, there really is but, One Chance.

Instead of imparting values or delivering allegory, these games impart new ideas through their game verbs or rules. Sometimes they comically remind us that walking on a sword is dangerous, instead of a mechanic for collection. Others are serious, costing us the contents of our Hard Drive (Lose/Lose), or leaving us with the guilt of all the virtual people we’ve killed (Bang!).

These games reflect an art practice that is both intellectual and visceral.  It serves as an experiment, eliciting player response and seeking to understand why these alternative ways to play had not been demonstrated previously. Each of the games pursues a single hypothesis with resolved specificity. The games ask questions about player values, gameplay heuristics and how we find entertainment.  It recognizes the democracy of play, understanding that people not only like to play differently, but that they playing differently expand the potential of games as expressive entertainment.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Art-Science, evaluation, collaboration, third space, third culture, expertise, aesthetics, curating.

CP Snow’s mid-century idea that a “third culture” might come into being to connect arts and science is perhaps most publically realised today through art-science – a heterogeneous field of creative research and production, characterised by the collaboration of artists and scientists and by research combining scientific and aesthetic investigation. This paper reports on the development of a new method for investigating the value of third culture collaboration for both the expert collaborators involved (artists and scientists) and the audiences who engage with the work. The visual matrix is a recently developed psychosocial method for evaluating aesthetic experience, which has been used in various sociallyengaged and site-specific art contexts. In 2014 it was experimentally applied to two art-science exhibitions staged in the UNSW Galleries, Sydney: Amnesia Lab and Body Image. This paper discusses the unique potential of this method to capture the shared, complex, emergent and transformative aspects of the experience of these exhibitions. In particular it highlights the ability of the method to capture the emergence of a “third space” at the intersection of art and science in the public domain – a site of trans disciplinary engagement, enquiry and knowledge production that plays a vital role in the contemporary research landscape.

Panel: Borders and interfaces: the challenges of the wearable computer’s design in the near future

In­stead of con­sid­er­ing wear­able tech­nol­ogy de­vices as pros­thetic tools that aim to aid and en­hance the human body, the au­thor takes a view­point that re­al­ity is part wise a con­struct of the tech­no­log­i­cal de­vices, and this con­struc­tion is ex­pe­ri­enced not only through them but also by them. Com­pos­ite in­ten­tion­al­ity is pro­posed by P.-P. Ver­beek as the in­ten­tion­al­ity of tech­nol­ogy com­bined with in­ten­tion­al­ity of a human using the tech­no­log­i­cal ar­ti­fact. In this con­stel­la­tion tech­nol­ogy is “ex­pe­ri­enc­ing” the world au­tonomously and con­struct­ing its own re­al­ity.

For ex­am­ple, the way a wear­able de­vice is sens­ing or “see­ing” as­pects of the world and pro­duc­ing vi­sual signs of it, which would not oth­er­wise be per­cep­ti­ble to the human. There is an in­ten­tion­al­ity of tech­nol­ogy to­ward “its” world and an­other in­ten­tion­al­ity of human be­ings to­ward the re­sult of the tech­no­log­i­cal in­ten­tion­al­ity.(Ver­beek, 2008) This kind of in­ten­tion­al­ity re­veals a re­al­ity that can only be sensed by tech­nol­ogy, but which is then made ac­ces­si­ble by the tech­nol­ogy for human in­ten­tion­al­ity. Tech­nol­ogy has here a dou­ble role; it is ob­vi­ously ma­te­r­ial part of the phys­i­cal world, but si­mul­ta­ne­ously it is a me­di­a­tor of its own con­structed (tech­no­log­i­cal) re­al­ity, which in this way be­comes also as a part of the (human) user’s re­al­ity and en­vi­ron­ment. In this kind of sit­u­a­tion tech­nol­ogy can no longer be thought merely as a tool, but it is a part of a user’s “hy­brid re­al­ity” that still has its base on phys­i­cal ex­pe­ri­ence of the world. Ex­am­ples of this kind of in­ten­tion­al­ity are found for ex­am­ple in the arts where in some pro­jects the in­ten­tion­al­ity of tech­nol­ogy is taken as rel­e­vant as­pect in it­self. The paper pre­sents both con­tem­po­rary wear­able tech­nol­ogy pro­jects and rel­a­tive his­tor­i­cal works.

Interaction with aesthetic artifacts produced by computational systems depends on processes of simulation that complement and expand human sensorial modalities but that are fundamentally intellectual processes. Therefore, anticipation, the validation of simulations and the violation of expectations, may play a significant role in the creation of narratives or of narrative-like experiences by humans. This paper proposes an approach to how the creation of narrative can be understood in the context of performance or interactive generative systems, in an attempt to study the perspective variable, originally proposed by Espen Aarseth in his study of ergodic texts.

Intro

Aesthetic artifacts produced by computational systems are characterized by how their computational traits and procedural nature become conceptual foundations and aesthetic focuses. These artifacts are strongly multimodal. The sensorial modalities through which they are formed and conveyed are more than aesthetic or communicational resources; they also mediate the logical and mathematical structures of the artifacts’ processes. The methods through which human cooperators in the aesthetic cybernetic aesthetic experience build an awareness of the processes within the artifacts depend on human perception and on processes of simulation that we can describe as an added, procedural, modality. This complements and expands those sensorial modalities on which it is dependent, but unlike them it is a fundamentally intellectual process. Reception happens sensorially, while perception is a cognitively developed epiphenomenon. The sensorium mediates the experience of the artifact and the brain fabricates perception, developing simulations of varying accuracy that through processes of “patternicity” and “agenticity” try to reduce the sensed complexity and to anticipate the outcomes of the witnessed processes. When we experience an artificial aesthetic artifact, we watch it perform while we simultaneously perform it. We probe its structure and draw the connections needed to participate and comprehend it. Even if unwillingly, we simulate its processes and create our own parallel sequences of probable events as the artifact unfolds. In the interaction with these systems, anticipation, the validation of simulations and the eventual violation of expectations, play a significant role in the creation of narratives or of narrative-like experiences. As with other aesthetic constituents of these systems, narrative and drama may either be hard-coded, much as they are in traditional or non-procedural media, or they may be emergent and procedural. This paper proposes an approach to how the creation of narrative can be understood in the context of performative or interactive generative systems, in an attempt to integrate in our analytical model of procedural systems the perspective variable, originally proposed by Espen Aarseth in his study of ergodic texts. The outputs of artificial aesthetic artifacts fundamentally differ from what we find in most non-procedural media because, much as nature, they weren’t necessarily created or even shaped by humans. These artifacts are rich with generative potential and have their own aesthetics, their unique patterns of desire, their ways of giving pleasure and creating beauty. They are inevitably mediated but also hyper-mediated, constantly confronting us with signs of what may be happening behind their modal expressions. It is this layer that marvels and allows the experience of the artifact as a symbolic drama in which we are the central protagonists.

 (Short paper)

Keywords: Augmented Reality, augmented interaction, Mixed Reality, hybrid environment, digital media, art, smart device, computermediated reality.

Advancement in human computer interaction technology has transformed our world to become increasingly connected and interspersed with digital media and information. This has given rise to a new form of environment called ‘mixed reality’ that opens a hybrid landscape for artists, designers and researchers to explore in creative and innovative ways. This paper presents the development of a framework for creating immersive augmented environments and showcases two of my Augmented Reality (AR) projects, exURBAN Screens and MADA AR Posters. Both projects explore augmented interactions with smart devices, focused on human-computer interactions and human-real world interactions. The projects utilize contextually and geographically aware artistic AR contents and code design. These projects demonstrate the successful use of a Mixed Reality framework for employing augmented interaction methods with smart devices in exhibitions and public environments. Developing video seethrough display technologies such as AR glasses and other wearable smart devices are expected to take this experience to new heights. I can envision future environments becoming increasingly hybridized and fused, employing augmented interactions to enhance our sensory perception of the environment through computer mediated reality. This will create new pathways for sharing information and promote new forms of digital media and art. The paper concludes with my project findings and a vision for future development.

The increasing use of biological forms and metaphors in art, engineering, architecture and design is based on assumptions about the efficiency, beauty and novelty of biological design, while the apparent efficiency and complexity of natural mechanisms has even been used by ‘intelligent designers/creationists’ to reject evolutionary orthodoxy. I will challenge these assumptions by presenting case studies of ‘unintelligent design’, biological inefficiencies and limitations. While biological structures are indeed marvellous in their design and intricacy, there are many design restrictions on biological tissue that man-made constructions can escape. The very nature of our carbon-based life forms restricts the temperatures, pressures and chemistry that can be employed in construction. Cells require a constant energy supply, while the need for nerves and blood supply means that many kinematic pairs are impossible in biological organisms. Biological scale is also restricted by this cellular basis; Reynolds numbers restrict the physical capabilities of biological organisms. The need to self-assemble, the fact that evolution can only act on pre-existing structures and can never start with a ‘blank page’, the need for variability; all place constraints on biological solutions. Selection drives the evolution of a beneficial trait until the marginal costs of continuing are balanced by the costs of not doing so. Evolution selects for traits leading to reproductive success rather than for longevity or health. Much of modern medicine is actually about treating the results of developmental and evolutionary compromises. Even some of our aesthetic tastes may be evolutionarily determined. I will discuss how inaccuracies (usually referred to as ‘natural variation’) are key to evolution and natural selection. How, paradoxically, far from being perfectly adapted biological machines, we may actually be selected and developed to be imperfect.

Abstract

United & Severed: That Window of Time is an installation based on the experiences of women living with traumatic injuries. It is a collaborative project that embraces feminist values of collectivity and intersubjectivity as central to the process of corporeal research and art making. The collaboration consists of a dance artist and scholar, a media artist, two sculptors Anna O’Cain and Richard Keely, and three participants, Ivy Kensinger, Michele Caputo, and Kim Anderson. For this paper, ‘we’ refers to Karen Schaffman and Kristine Diekman, who conceptualized the project and collaborated on the audio and video.

The project asks: How does the traumatic event disrupt narrative? How can the poetic process provide a way to re-imagine and re-member personal experience? What happens to one’s bodily perception when a traumatic event radically and abruptly shifts one’s reality? How does one see, hear, touch, speak, and move? What is the role of performativity in the project for the collaborators and viewers, and what can be learned through the experience?

ABSTRACT

The Universal Constructor is a working model of an interactive, intelligent landscape, environment and structure. The model consists of a baseboard which represents the landscape and a series of cells which can be stacked at specific locations on the landscape and can represent structure or environment. The model is described as intelligent because every cell and every landscape location contains an integrated circuit which can communicate with units above and below. Each cell and location also has an identifying code and is equipped with eight light emitting diodes which it can use to display the code or display any other state or message. The whole model thus knows where every unit is and what it is and this allows for the model to be interactive because anyone can change the configuration of the model, and the model as a whole then knows what changes have been made and can respond in turn.

Today’s tough economic times are adversely affecting funding in higher education. Especially hard hit are traditionally underfunded fields where costly technologies are used. In this panel, three educators with backgrounds in music, art, architecture, and engineering discuss ways forward under these circumstances. The common tools for the panelists are: using cheap and repurposed materials; using freeware; do it yourself books and websites; and collaborative cross-disciplinary research. The panel explores how to cultivate the correct mindset for this “doing more, spending less” approach, creating with these tools, the educational philosophy behind their use, and embracing financial challenges as a spur to creative problem-solving.

Brutalism originally rose to popularity in architecture as a response to excessive ornament, and lack of clarity in the function of buildings. Inspired by the modernists it took on many of the aspects, but stripped away any obfuscation of the functionality of the building. In recent years this design theory has been brought back for use in the field of web design, for the same purpose of removing obfuscation of function. The application also created pages that are more accessible to both those with disabilities, and those in developing countries, where connectivity is limited. This expansion of these theories suggests their potential to be adopted in further areas, such as the creation of interactive art pieces, and installations.

Through examination of brutalist design theories in architecture, their adaptation into web design, and borrowing from the process of speculative design, a brutalist methodology was created. This methodology was simultaneously created alongside and applied to an interactive installation. The two established brutalism as a useful method of constant justification of any content or additions to a project or artwork. It encourages the creator to think about what is important, and needed for the project over what is expected.

Unnatural Selection is an umbrella for a series of projects that examine human and cultural understanding of and relationship to the natural environment. The project is a collaboration between University of California, Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Art Elliot Anderson and Digital Arts New Media graduate students: Tyler Freeman, Adam Jerugim, James Khazar, Nichole Smith, Synthia Payne, no.e sunflowrfish, and Alan Tollefson. The designation Unnatural Selection was chosen to comment on and question human manipulation of the natural world. The work in the series reflects on current perceptions of biology, nature, and the environment from the point of view of environmental aesthetics, genetics and human desire, the sublime and genetic technologies, and the necessity of creative involvement in generating ethical and technologically less destructive interaction with the natural world.

In response to the global promise of and challenge to the expression of ethnic identity via digital means, the biannual electronic journal, CTHEORY Multimedia, is about to publish a special issue of internet art dedicated to the theme of “Wired Ruins: Digital Terror and Ethnic Paranoia”. “Wired Ruins” reflects on the digital and viral networks of ethnic identities that now so urgently emit faint signals for recognition among the overlapping diffusions of cultural angst and digital terror. A vibrantly pulsating network resisting the repression of the new age of censorship, “Wired Ruins” is a simulacrum of cross-cultural infection and cross-border fluidity. Reacting to the complex horrors of terrorism while resisting the surveillance regimes of the disciplinary state, its practitioners work passionately to reposition the code in counter-response to the aggressive parasites of religious fanaticism and ethnic paranoia. “Wired Ruins” will haunt the future as the skeletal archive of the many unrecorded artistic responses to digital terror and ethnic paranoia. The global media events of September 11, 2001, prompted the co-curators, Arthur & Marilouise Kroker and Timothy Murray, to invite contributions that would extend representation of ethnicity to its framing in the context of digital terror and paranoia. The panel will present the contents of the issue (roughly 15 works of art) while framing it theoretically and contextually. Our aim will be to introduce ISEA participants to artistic reflections not only on the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City but also on crosscultural terror and paranoia as it occurs across global points of artistic intersection: Israel and Palestine, Lebanon and Switzerland, Soweto and New York. In so doing, we will reflect on the contributions made by the artworks and their conceptual presentation in the journal to the understanding of terror in the digital age. Responding to more than the lingering residue of bent steel and disrupted economies, “Wired Ruins” invites its users to mix the psychic bytes and artistic interventions of its three interactive, databases for critical reordering and creative reconfiguration: “Digital Terror: Ghosting 9-11,” “Ethnic Paranoia, before and beyond,” and “Rewiring the Ruins”. ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu

Chair Per­son: Mark But­ler, Pre­sen­ters: Georg Russeg­ger, Al­i­son Gaz­zard, Moisés Mañas         Car­bonell, María José Martínez de Pisón Ramón & Athana­sia Daphne Drag­ona

This panel of the Ludic In­ter­faces Re­search Group (L.I.R.G.) re­volves around the cur­rent state of re­search into ludic in­ter­faces, i.e. play­ful in­ter­ac­tion spaces, a term that was coined at ISEA2007 and ISEA2008. It will give a work­ing de­f­i­n­i­tion of this core con­cept that is the ker­nel of a new re­search field, map out its de­vel­op­ment and pre­sent state of the art hy­pothe­ses.  The premise of L.I.R.G. is that in­ter­face in­no­va­tions and their prop­a­ga­tion – one only needs to re­mem­ber the ge­neal­ogy of graph­i­cal user in­ter­faces – have their roots in play­ful­ness. Ludic in­ter­faces are con­crete, sit­u­ated in­ter­faces in which the play­ful po­ten­tial in­her­ent in all in­ter­faces man­i­fests it­self. This po­ten­tial stems from the fact that all in­ter­faces are by de­f­i­n­i­tion in­ter­me­di­ary zones that exist be­tween het­ero­ge­neous di­men­sions.

This is es­pe­cially true with re­gards to com­puter-based in­ter­faces. Play po­tency is an es­sen­tial qual­ity of the dig­i­tal medium. Not only can it, given the nec­es­sary in­ter­face pro­to­col, con­nect any­thing to any­thing else;  every­thing also be­comes highly mal­leable once it is trans­lated into bi­nary code. Ludic in­ter­faces un­leash the pro­tean pos­si­bil­ity space in­her­ent in pro­gram­ma­ble media. They stand in con­trast to straight in­ter­faces: in­ter­face so­lu­tions that are solely used for a clearly de­fined, util­i­tar­ian pur­pose and tele­o­log­i­cal goal; de­signed from the be­gin­ning to di­rectly en­able the ful­fill­ment of  pro­posed aims, with­out de­vi­a­tions. Ludic in­ter­faces, in con­trast, have a patch­work of mo­ti­va­tional vec­tors that opens up a pos­si­bil­ity space  filled with myr­iad paths lead­ing to­ward goals that don’t have to be clearly de­fined. In short: The panel is in­ter­ested in the mo­ment of in­ven­tion, the mo­ment when the in­ter­ac­tion be­comes play­ful and the in­ter­face a game, and how it can be mo­bi­lized for cre­ative strate­gies.

Chair Per­sons: Paula Roush & Maria Lusi­tano
Pre­sen­ters: Annie Abra­hams, Mar­garida Car­valho, Cinzia Cre­mona, Eu­nice Gonçalves Duarte & Helen Var­ley Jamieson

For this panel we pro­pose to re­flect upon the prac­tice of dig­i­tal per­for­mance with the use of we­b­cams, ad­dress­ing is­sues of in­ti­macy in the net­work. We­b­cam­ming refers to the use of we­b­cams to stream live from per­sonal en­vi­ron­ments to the in­ter­net, and de­velop life-logs that archive such prac­tices as on­line doc­u­men­ta­tions of the every­day. We­b­cam­ming prac­tices have been the­o­rised with dif­fer­ent re­sults from within the areas of dig­i­tal per­for­mance /cy­ber­for­mance. On the one hand, an his­tor­i­cal ac­count of dig­i­tal per­for­mance equates the use of we­b­cams in the hands of artists with the “sub­ver­sion of sur­veil­lance,” and an ironic ques­tion­ing of we­b­cam’s myths of au­then­tic­ity and im­me­di­acy. The field of cy­ber­for­mance, on the other hand, the­o­rises we­b­cam­ming in the con­text of in­creas­ing on­line par­tic­i­pa­tion, and the types of col­lab­o­ra­tions it fa­cil­i­tates within web 2.0 en­vi­ron­ments. How­ever, none of these analy­ses ad­dresses the in­creas­ing in­ti­macy fa­cil­i­tated by the main­stream use of sur­veil­lance/com­mu­ni­ca­tional  tech­nolo­gies for per­sonal video stream­ing and archiv­ing, or the par­tic­u­lar aes­thetic  and sub­ver­sive spec­ta­to­r­ial  po­si­tions that in­form such in­ti­mate video prac­tices.  Our pro­posal for this panel at­tempts to fill in such gap by look­ing at the ge­neal­ogy of per­sonal video-stream­ing and its place within art re­search on we­b­cam­ming and the sur­veil­lant-sousveil­lant space.
1.What are the char­ac­ter­is­tics of cy­ber­for­mance in the con­text of net­works of in­ti­macy? What de­fines  its par­tic­u­lar aes­thet­ics and the spec­ta­to­r­ial po­si­tions that in­form such in­ti­mate video prac­tices?
2. Now that peo­ple’s lives are per­formed for the In­ter­net and dis­trib­uted across mul­ti­ple so­cial net­works as chunks of self-au­thored con­tent, is it still pos­si­ble to sep­a­rate or dis­tin­guish per­for­mance art from the per­for­ma­tive stream of every­one else’s lives?
3. How is on­line per­for­mance con­cep­tu­alised from a con­tem­po­rary art and media sur­veil­lance-sousveil­lance per­spec­tive?

Chair Per­son: Elif Ayiter
Pre­sen­ters: Roy As­cott, Jan Baetens, Elif Ayiter, Max Moswitzer & Selavy Oh

Roy As­cott’s ground­break­ing new media art work La Plis­sure du Texte (“The Pleat­ing of the Text”) was cre­ated in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art mod­erne de la Ville de Paris dur­ing that same year. The title of the pro­ject, “La Plis­sure du Texte: A Plan­e­tary Fairy Tale,” al­ludes to Roland Barthes’s book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, a fa­mous dis­course on au­thor­ship, se­man­tic lay­er­ing, and the cre­ative role of the reader as the writer of the text. In 2010, La Plis­sure du Texte re-in­car­nated as a three di­men­sional, in­ter­ac­tive ar­chi­tec­ture cre­ated in the meta­verse and was pro­jected into Real Life in Seoul, Korea dur­ing the INDAF new media art fes­ti­val held at To­mor­row City, Songdo, In­cheon, through­out Sep­tem­ber 2010.

Fol­low­ing As­cott’s orig­i­nal premise of dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, the fairy tale is now being told by a text dri­ven ar­chi­tec­ture within which a pop­u­la­tion of ro­botic avatars tells the tale through end­lessly gen­er­ated con­ver­sa­tions which are har­vested from the On­line Guten­berg Pro­ject. Ad­di­tion­ally, vis­i­tors to the ex­hibit in the phys­i­cal realm may also con­tribute to the gen­er­ated text flow through SMS mes­sages or via Twit­ter. Thus all pleated text – the gen­er­ated, the con­tributed, and the stored – is si­mul­ta­ne­ously vis­i­ble as a mas­sive, ever evolv­ing lit­er­ary con­glom­er­a­tion. This panel will un­der­take a close scrutiny of La Plis­sure du Texte, tak­ing into ac­count both its cre­ation in 1983 and its re-cre­ation in 2010, dis­cussing the work in its role as a land­mark of New Media Art His­tory as well as an art work which has shown the ca­pa­bil­ity of re­gen­er­at­ing it­self as an en­tirely novel man­i­fes­ta­tion based upon the con­cepts of dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, tex­tual mo­bil­ity, emer­gent semi­o­sis, mul­ti­ple iden­tity, and par­tic­i­pa­tory poe­sis.

Chair Per­son: Alexia Mel­lor
Pre­sen­ters: Kerry Doyle, Karin Hans­son, Chan­tal Za­kari, Arzu Özkal, Clau­dia Ped­er­son & WRMC Col­lab­o­ra­tive

MIND THE GAP play­fully al­ludes to trans­porta­tion, but ref­er­ences bor­ders and gaps of all kinds: ge­o­graphic, so­cial, and eco­nomic. This panel dis­cus­sion is aimed at in­ves­ti­gat­ing the var­i­ous ways con­tem­po­rary art is ad­dress­ing is­sues of eco­nomic and cul­tural glob­al­iza­tion, and urban mi­gra­tion within the artis­tic and so­cio-po­lit­i­cal tra­di­tions of Is­tan­bul and Turkey. MIND THE GAP pre­sent pa­pers and dis­cus­sions from in­ter­na­tional artists and schol­ars in re­ac­tion to the con­cepts of cap­i­tal­ism, con­sumerism and cul­tural im­pe­ri­al­ism, and the ways that we ne­go­ti­ate in­di­vid­ual and col­lec­tive iden­tity. MIND THE GAP draws from Nicholas Bour­ri­aud’s no­tion of the al­ter­mod­ern, which of­fers a new vi­sion of the mod­ern in which ideas of iden­tity are fluid rather than rooted in our ori­gins. With this spirit, MIND THE GAP asks the fol­low­ing ques­tions:

1. In the face of global eco­nomic and en­vi­ron­men­tal crises, what op­tions do we have for a new vi­sion?
2. What does na­tion­al­ity mean in a ho­mog­e­nized world in which multi­na­tional chain cor­po­ra­tions are on every street cor­ner in every cor­ner of the globe?
3. How have our de­f­i­n­i­tions of place been al­tered by the tech­nolo­gies we use every day?
   “MIND THE GAP” in­ves­ti­gates the pos­si­bil­i­ties of con­tem­po­rary art prac­tices to shed light on and af­fect the po­lit­i­cal and so­cio-eco­nomic forces at work on local and global lev­els.

Chair Per­son: Kim Vincs                                                                                                                           Pre­sen­ters: John Mc­Cormick, Ruth Gib­son & Bruno Martelli, Sarah What­ley & Susan Kozel

Mo­tion cap­ture analy­sis of­fers dance new pos­si­bil­i­ties for re-con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing move­ment in ways that are not in­tu­itive, and not based on the tra­di­tions and in­grained move­ment gram­mars of spe­cific dance gen­res and styles. Look­ing at dance as mo­tion cap­ture data can pro­voke a more rad­i­cal de­con­struc­tion of ex­ist­ing move­ment dis­courses than is oth­er­wise pos­si­ble given the deep cor­po­real in­scrip­tions em­bed­ded in dancers’ and chore­o­g­ra­phers’ bod­ies. The flip side is that the vast vol­ume and de­tail of data mo­tion cap­ture gen­er­ates means that the pos­si­ble map­pings and or­ga­ni­za­tional par­a­digms mul­ti­ply ex­po­nen­tially.  De­cid­ing what to high­light and what to value, and what to con­sider ‘noise’ and ig­nore, is a crit­i­cal part of mo­tion cap­ture analy­sis. This in­escapable re­duc­tion­ism is also, how­ever, the an­tithe­sis of artis­tic method, which val­ues the whole, the ac­ci­den­tal, the in­clu­sive. Analy­sis forces choices based on value judg­ments, which have the po­ten­tial to dis­tort and close down, as much as open up and ex­plore, dance re­search.  The panel will use a round-table for­mat to ad­dress:

1. What aes­thetic and cul­tural choices are em­bed­ded in mo­tion cap­ture analy­sis?
2. What are the ben­e­fits and pit­falls of using mo­tion cap­ture to analyse and cre­ate dance?
3. What ex­am­ples are there of trans­lat­ing mo­tion cap­ture analy­sis into new chore­o­graphic works?
4. How can mo­tion cap­ture analy­sis in­form live in­ter­ac­tive per­for­mance?

Chair Per­sons: Jane Grant & John Matthias
Pre­sen­ters: Oron Catts, Paul Broks & Mag­nus Richard­son

Rather than con­sid­er­ing the aes­thet­ics of art and music as a way of ap­proach­ing an un­der­stand­ing of per­cep­tion and brain func­tion, Neu­roArts em­pha­sizes the di­rect use of Neu­ro­sci­en­tific mod­els and ma­te­ri­als in artis­tic prac­tice. In Neu­roArts, neu­rons and neu­ronal mod­els are ex­am­ined out­side of the body/brain em­pha­siz­ing an artis­tic-en­gi­neer­ing ap­proach with ei­ther the phys­i­cal ma­te­r­ial of brain, or the adap­ta­tion of bi­o­log­i­cal mod­els of spik­ing neu­rons. In using mod­els of spik­ing neu­rons within art, sound and music, the in­ter­nal struc­ture of the brain be­comes ex­ter­nal, its plas­tic­ity ex­posed, its path­ways and net­works mal­leable. This gives us a stand­point from which to crit­i­cally en­gage and ques­tion multi-scale con­cepts such as the im­por­tance of the cell, net­work topol­ogy and plas­tic­ity, self-hood, mem­ory and con­scious­ness. The first In­ter­na­tional Neu­roArts con­fer­ence out­lin­ing the new sub­ject area which took place in Feb­ru­ary 2011 at Uni­ver­sity of Ply­mouth. Neu­roArts at ISEA de­vel­ops key themes from the first In­ter­na­tional Neu­roArts Con­fer­ence, and will con­sider two main themes:

1. Philoso­phies of scale within Neu­roArts: from the scale of the sin­gle cell to the meso­scopic scale of brain em­u­la­tions through to emer­gent large-scale phe­nom­ena in­clud­ing self-hood and con­scious­ness.
2. What are the re­la­tion­ships be­tween plas­tic­ity, stim­u­la­tion and fir­ing pat­terns in small brain cir­cuits? And, how can their adap­ta­tion in artis­tic pro­jects along­side synap­tic plas­tic­ity, and cel­lu­lar topolo­gies be ex­ploited to make adap­tive art?

We hope that the ex­plo­rations of these themes will help to de­fine the bound­aries of this new sub­ject within an in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary en­vi­ron­ment.

Chair Per­son: Paula Perissinotto                                                                                                                   Pre­sen­ters: Gabriela Pre­v­idello Orth, Nick Hasty, Tim­o­thy Mur­ray & Jon Ip­polito

This panel pre­sents a dig­i­tal art archives in­ves­ti­ga­tion high­light­ing the use of in­tel­li­gent sys­tems ap­pli­ca­tions in con­ser­va­tion, re­trieval, in­dex­ing or ac­cess forms re­lated to the artis­tic ob­ject ma­nip­u­la­tion. The main goal of the dis­cus­sion is to de­fine pa­ra­me­ters for non lin­ear sys­tems on the new media art in­for­ma­tion treat­ment. The prin­ci­ples for an in­tel­li­gent ma­chine and friendly in­ter­face to archives am­biance is still a the­ory. How­ever, the ap­pli­ca­tion of this con­cept on cur­rent plat­forms is a healthy mech­a­nism of tran­si­tion from lin­ear and se­man­tic struc­tures to a sym­bolic, non lin­ear and fuzzy logic sys­tem. Ma­chines do not have the cog­ni­tive de­vel­op­ment of hu­mans. They do not de­velop con­scious­ness or in­ten­tion­al­ity pred­i­cates yet. Nowa­days, the in­tel­li­gent ma­chine ap­pli­ca­tions aren’t sep­a­rated from human acts. These non lin­ear sys­tems and re­la­tions work as a frac­tal com­ple­ment for re­search and knowl­edge.

Mem­ory is con­sid­ered not only by the pre­vi­ous con­tent in­dexed on the archive, but also by the in­ter­locu­tor’s ac­tions and per­cep­tions. To dis­cuss muse­ol­ogy, data­base sys­tems, data vi­su­al­iza­tion, artis­tic process and other themes by the lens of the mem­ory, this panel fo­cuses on doc­u­men­ta­tion tools and con­cepts to un­der­stand the ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence ap­plic­a­bil­ity in elec­tronic and dig­i­tal art con­ser­va­tion. The panel pro­po­nent FILE elec­tronic lan­guage in­ter­na­tional fes­ti­val is a non­profit cul­tural or­ga­ni­za­tion that pro­motes a re­flec­tion on the main is­sues in the con­tem­po­rary elec­tronic-dig­i­tal global con­text, al­ways keep­ing a trans­dis­ci­pli­nary vi­sion in the cul­tural man­i­fes­ta­tions com­plex­ity of our time. The FILE ini­tia­tive of doc­u­men­ta­tion oc­curs since its first edi­tion, in 2000. Al­ter­na­tive tac­tics are used to keep the archive up­dated with dif­fer­ent plat­forms to cover all its con­tents. Mech­a­nisms of tran­si­tion to in­tel­li­gent sys­tems arise as a so­lu­tion to FILE Archive doc­u­men­ta­tion and ac­cess. Cre­at­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for dis­cus­sions in this area and share with other ini­tia­tives such as ISEA event will con­tribute to en­large the dig­i­tal con­ser­va­tion knowl­edge.

Chair Per­son: Raivo Kelomees
Pre­sen­ters: Chris Hales, Ag­nieszka Pokry­wka & Piibe Pi­irma

The panel will dis­cuss how the changes in East­ern and Cen­tral Eu­rope have in­flu­enced the art ed­u­ca­tional sys­tem there dur­ing the last twenty years, with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to ed­u­ca­tion in the new media field. The rea­son for choos­ing such a seem­ingly broad timescale is to in­clude the ‘fi­nal­i­sa­tion’ of the po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­i­cal in­te­gra­tion of some post-So­viet coun­tries (like Es­to­nia) into the Eu­ro­pean Union whilst con­trast­ing this with ex­am­ples like Be­larus, which have be­come (or re­mained) more au­to­cratic and closed. One par­tic­u­lar point of in­ter­est is the change in the un­der­stand­ing and in­ter­pre­ta­tion of ‘new media art’ dur­ing the last two decades, partly due to the dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies and spe­cial­i­ties that this field of prac­tice en­com­passes.

1. Twenty years of change: in the po­lit­i­cal sys­tem, art par­a­digms, tech­nolo­gies and ways of think­ing
2. Travel and tran­si­tion: ex­ported artists and im­ported ideas
3. The tran­si­tion from arte­fact-based artis­tic prac­tice to process-based and non-ma­te­r­ial art
4. The sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences be­tween ‘West’ and ‘East’ men­tal­i­ties
5. Ini­tia­tives, cen­tres, de­part­ments and in­sti­tu­tions of new media and ed­u­ca­tion
6. Re­sources, fund­ing, fi­nan­cial prac­tices, gov­ern­men­tal sup­port, busi­ness schemes for pro­duc­ing and ex­hibit­ing new media
7. Changes in the art ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem: from tra­di­tional and man­ual fine arts prac­tices to me­di­ated and tech­no­log­i­cal ed­u­ca­tion
8. Dif­fer­ent net­works fo­cused on the or­gan­i­sa­tion, the­ory, and prac­tice of tech­no­log­i­cal art

Chair Per­sons: Åsa Ståhl & Kristina Lind­ström
Pre­sen­ters: Melin Mar­gareta & Jo­hanna Rosen­qvist

The panel will ex­plore how mean­ing is cre­ated through the process of ar­rang­ing and re-ar­rang­ing frag­ments; how mean­ing is cre­ated through patches and quilt­ing. Our pro­posed for­mat is a patch­work panel, i.e. a con­ver­sa­tion be­tween knowl­edge­able peo­ple through story patch­work quilt­ing. The pan­elists, and other in­vited guests, pre­pare ”text-patches” as notes or re­minders of what to say. These text-patches – in paper or tex­tile in A4 for­mat – can have im­ages, con­cepts, words writ­ten or stitched on them. The text-patches are put on the floor in front of the au­di­ence. The work­ings of the sem­i­nar is such that none of the pan­elists can as­sume to put down all of the patches in her own pre­ferred order as this patch­work sem­i­nar for­mat pre­sup­poses that any­one could con­tinue on the thread of thoughts put down on the floor, and thus cre­at­ing a new pat­tern. Also, the au­di­ence is in­vited in­ter­act and in­ter­vene by putting down its own text-patches on the floor.
Agenda:

1. In­tro­duc­tion of the pan­elists.
2. Lind­ström and Ståhl in­tro­duce the idea of the patch­work sem­i­nar and hand out A4-pa­pers to the au­di­ence.
3. Lind­ström and Ståhl put down the first patch: to tell sto­ries of an SMS-em­broi­dery feuil­leton writ­ten in gallery Krets in 2009. SMS-em­broi­dery feuil­leton is a way of telling sto­ries to­gether in what we call an ed­i­to­r­ial sewing cir­cle.
4. Melin sit­u­ates text-mes­sage em­broi­dery in the con­text of ed­i­to­r­ial boards, and refers media pro­duc­tion stud­ies.
5. Rosen­qvist sit­u­ates the text-mes­sage em­broi­dery in the con­text of tra­di­tional sewing cir­cles with ref­er­ences to art-his­tory.
6. The ac­tual patch-work sem­i­nar opens up with pan­elists and the au­di­ence putting down patches.
7. At the end, the bunch of patches on the floor can be stitched/glued to­gether and kept as a doc­u­men­ta­tion of the patch­work sem­i­nar.
8. The patches could be­come part of a fu­ture quilt.

Chair Per­sons: Dan Dixon & Jonathan Dovey
Pre­sen­ters: Con­stance Fleu­riot & Tim Kind­berg

Per­va­sive media is a new and de­vel­op­ing field; com­mis­sion­ers, brands, clients, fund­ing bod­ies often have dif­fi­culty grasp­ing its po­ten­tial. Very few media pro­fes­sion­als, let alone mem­bers of the pub­lic, un­der­stand what Per­va­sive Media is, or could be­come. We are at a new fron­tier. New, per­va­sive, ubiq­ui­tous and mo­bile tech­nolo­gies promise us an ever more con­nected world and the pos­si­bil­ity to ac­cess ever more de­tailed in­for­ma­tion about con­text. Al­though these promises con­tain dras­tic changes to media and tech­nol­ogy, they don’t en­gage with the nec­es­sary changes to the prac­tices of media pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion, tech­nol­ogy cre­ation and the com­mer­cial and prac­ti­cal re­al­i­ties that could make these promises a re­al­ity. These will be dras­ti­cally game chang­ing; cre­at­ing new busi­ness pos­si­bil­i­ties, whilst mak­ing oth­ers ob­so­lete. These promises, and changes, will be crit­i­cally ad­dressed dur­ing this panel. Per­va­sive ex­pe­ri­ences also re­quire a new, and sig­nif­i­cantly more di­verse, set of skills to im­ple­ment.

This in­cludes a wide va­ri­ety of media pro­duc­tion, tech­ni­cal skills and busi­ness acu­men. How­ever at this pe­riod of de­vel­op­ment prac­ti­tion­ers from widely vary­ing fields in art, de­sign, and tech­nol­ogy find lit­tle time, or com­mon ground, to re­flect on their prac­tice. This ses­sion will draw on re­sults from work­shops and events where the pan­el­lists have pro­vided space for re­flec­tion and dis­cus­sion amongst prac­ti­tion­ers in this emer­gent field. There are new, and dif­fer­ent, re­la­tion­ships be­tween de­sign­ers, com­mis­sion­ers and those using these new ex­pe­ri­ences. New equa­tions for value are emerg­ing, which are dif­fer­ent from those within more tra­di­tional medi­ums. What is the value, in per­va­sive ex­pe­ri­ences, to all these dif­fer­ent stake­hold­ers? Why is it worth doing, what does every­one get out of it and why do they enjoy it? The dis­cus­sions will be fun­da­men­tally grounded in the ecolo­gies of value that pro­vide per­spec­tive on these is­sues. This panel is as­sem­bled from the net­work of re­searchers and prac­ti­tion­ers who pro­vide prac­ti­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal per­spec­tives to The Per­va­sive Media Stu­dio. The Stu­dio is an or­gan­i­sa­tion that cre­ates space and op­por­tu­ni­ties for this emer­gent field of per­va­sive media, en­cour­ag­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion across bound­aries, ex­per­i­men­ta­tion, re­flec­tion and analy­sis. It draws in a di­verse com­mu­nity of artists, cre­ative com­pa­nies, tech­nol­o­gists and aca­d­e­mics.

Chair Per­sons: Andy Best & Atau Tanaka
Pre­sen­ters: Kristina Lind­strom, Åsa Ståhl & Merja Pu­usti­nen

This panel will pre­sent and dis­cuss meth­ods for cre­at­ing spon­ta­neous play­ful phys­i­cal and so­cial in­ter­ac­tion. The focus is on deep user in­ter­ac­tion with art­works using phys­i­cal com­put­ing meth­ods with an em­pha­sis on the con­struc­tion of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion within the group of par­tic­i­pants. What are the con­tex­tual and prac­ti­cal de­sign re­lated thresh­olds for will­ing­ness to in­ter­act and how can par­tic­i­pants be stim­u­lated to en­gage with the art­work? Does fa­mil­iar­ity with art, toys, com­puter games or music help to lower thresh­olds to un­der­stand­ing the in­ter­ac­tion? How does age, gen­der or cul­tural back­ground af­fect will­ing­ness to par­tic­i­pate in a dy­namic tem­po­rary com­mu­nity of pres­ence? The cre­ation of deep user in­ter­ac­tion with and through the art­works maybe in­sti­gated via novel ap­proaches to in­ter­face or by fresh ways of pre­sent­ing the art work to the viewer/par­tic­i­pants within the con­text of the art in­sti­tu­tion or in Pub­lic space. As tech­nol­ogy be­comes ubiq­ui­tous in so­ci­ety, artists no longer have to ex­plic­itly pro­claim their use of com­pu­ta­tional tech­niques; rather the so­cial and po­lit­i­cal con­text of the art­work takes cen­tre stage. Strate­gies used in­clude in­ter­ac­tive in­stal­la­tions such as multi-touch screens, bouncy cas­tles, and phys­i­cal in­ter­faces, as well as in­ter­ac­tion through mo­bile net­works and lo­ca­tion based de­vices. For each of our pan­elists the pres­ence and in­ter- re­la­tion­ships of in­di­vid­ual hu­mans is the cen­tral mo­ti­vat­ing fac­tor. Each will ad­dress these ques­tions from dif­fer­ent view­points, of­fer­ing ex­am­ples from their own work for dis­cus­sion.

Chair Per­son: Olli Leino
Pre­sen­ters: Olli Leino, Lind­say Grace & Graeme Kirk­patrick

This panel pulls to­gether in­sights from game stud­ies, game de­sign, aes­thet­ics and new media the­ory to ex­am­ine the elu­sive con­cept of “play”. We as­sume com­mon base­line in the dis­tinc­tion be­tween play­ful­ness and playa­bil­ity, and trace the sig­nif­i­cance of these con­cepts to the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the player and the game. We look at the op­por­tu­ni­ties for self-dis­cov­ery, ex­is­ten­tial re­flec­tion and po­lit­i­cal and cul­tural cri­tique within this re­la­tion­ship. This panel, in­volv­ing ex­am­ples from the fringe ter­ri­tory be­tween com­mer­cial en­ter­tain­ment and artis­tic en­deav­ors, con­tributes to a re-po­si­tion­ing of com­puter games in re­la­tion to elec­tronic art, and fur­thers the de­vel­op­ment of crit­i­cal strate­gies for chart­ing the aes­thetic ter­ri­tory be­tween art, tech­nol­ogy and en­ter­tain­ment.

Chair Per­sons: Eliz­a­beth Monoian & Robert Ferry
Pre­sen­ters: Pa­tri­cia Watts, Nacho Zamora & Glen Lowry

As we en­deavor to ex­tri­cate civ­i­liza­tion from fos­sil fuel de­pen­dence, the ex­is­ten­tial de­bate over the pur­pose of art de­serves re­newed at­ten­tion in the con­text of nat­ural ecol­ogy and human con­sump­tion. Is it pos­si­ble for works of pub­lic art to con­tribute ac­tively to the so­lu­tion to the prob­lems that con­front us? Can in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary art in­spire, through ex­am­ple, the type of so­cial change re­quired to sig­nif­i­cantly re­duce the neg­a­tive im­pact of human con­sump­tion on the planet? Pa­pers pre­sented will pre­sent ex­am­ples of pro­jects at var­i­ous scales that seek to ad­dress eco­log­i­cal is­sues, be­yond di­dac­tic ex­pres­sion, through the in­cor­po­ra­tion of tech­nol­ogy. This panel dis­cus­sion will ad­dress the con­tin­uum of pub­lic art, clean en­ergy prece­dents, and con­tem­po­rary tech­nolo­gies. Within this frame­work we will out­line and il­lus­trate the po­ten­tial that in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary teams and com­mu­ni­ties around the world have to ex­pand both the di­a­logue and ac­tual change.

Chair Per­son: Zach Blas
Pre­sen­ters: Elle Mehrmand & Micha Cárde­nas

The in­ten­si­fi­ca­tion and pro­lif­er­a­tion of global con­nec­tiv­ity has opened dig­i­tal net­worked cul­ture to uni­ver­sal con­ta­gion. In­deed, it has been ar­gued we now live in a viral ecol­ogy under the sign of viral cap­i­tal­ism. As vi­ral­i­ties spread into var­i­ous realms of cul­ture, new media artists ex­plore the viral as that which has the abil­ity to con­trol and re­strict as well as dis­trib­ute and lib­er­ate. Our cur­rent viral ecol­ogy has opened up new tac­tics of re­sis­tance for var­i­ous artists, ac­tivists, and cul­tural pro­duc­ers. In this panel, we will focus on queer new media art and phi­los­o­phy that uses and in­ter­venes into the viral to form a rad­i­cal pol­i­tics of re­volt and utopia. The viral will be en­gaged with tech­ni­cally, philo­soph­i­cally, ar­tis­ti­cally, bi­o­log­i­cally, and af­fec­tively. Our aim is to show that while viral rhetoric and dis­courses have mar­gin­al­ized and con­trolled queer pop­u­la­tions, the viral re­mains an al­lu­sive, volatile po­ten­tial that can be ex­per­i­mented with to­ward cre­at­ing new queer pol­i­tics and worlds.

Blas, Cárde­nas, and Mehrmand will give the­o­ret­i­cal artist talks, and Skanse will fol­low with a philo­soph­i­cal re­sponse to the viral in media the­ory. Cárde­nas and Mehrmand will dis­cuss their cur­rent col­lab­o­ra­tion virus.?cirus, an episodic se­ries of per­for­mances using wear­able elec­tron­ics and live audio to bridge vir­tual and phys­i­cal spaces that ex­plores queer fu­tures of latex sex­u­al­ity amidst a spec­u­la­tive world of virus hys­te­ria and DIY med­i­cine. Blas will speak on new works from his on­go­ing Queer Tech­nolo­gies pro­ject that at­tempt to for­mu­late a viral aes­thet­ics based on a repli­cat­ing dif­fer­ence of never-be­ing-the-same­ness against cap­i­tal’s own mod­u­lat­ing struc­ture. Skanse will ad­dress new di­rec­tions in viral phi­los­o­phy with par­tic­u­lar con­cern for how this per­pet­ual ‘move­ment’ of the virus is tied to no­tions of nov­elty within con­tem­po­rary aes­thetic dis­course.

Chair Per­son: Robert B. Lisek
Pre­sen­ters: Kate Rich, Marta Heberle & Ryan Jor­dan

The ob­ses­sion of se­cu­rity. What is the basis of se­cu­rity? Its ab­sence. Noth­ing needs to be se­cured, ex­cept the se­cu­rity it­self. Se­cu­rity is a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of state  and main cri­te­rion of po­lit­i­cal le­git­imiza­tion. Se­cu­rity vs. dis­ci­pline and law as in­stru­ments of gov­er­nance. On one side we have hard power struc­ture based on dis­ci­pline, dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and block­ade, iso­lat­ing power and clos­ing the ter­ri­to­ries and the sec­ond side: se­cu­rity pol­icy as­so­ci­ated with glob­al­iza­tion, in­ter­ven­ing and con­trol­ling processes as­so­ci­ated with lib­er­al­ism be­cause of se­cu­rity mea­sures may work in the con­text of move­ment of per­sons and goods. The di­vi­sion pro­posed by Fou­cault and Agam­ben on the hard law and the dy­namic ac­tiv­i­ties of the se­cu­rity pol­icy is an ar­ti­fi­cial as­sump­tion. These two areas are closely re­lated, com­ple­men­tary and pro­vide a medium for ex­am­ple laws can be quickly changed by power elite, or processes re­lated to the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of human life forc­ing changes in se­cu­rity pol­icy. The in­creas­ing dy­namism and com­plex­ity of so­cial space and vi­o­lent forms of bio-cap­i­tal make this model of think­ing is in­ad­e­quate. Bio-ex­change. The idea of “life” is con­sid­ered to be in­cluded in the do­main of tech­nol­ogy, both for eco­nomic prof­its and for se­cu­rity rea­sons. Meta-cap­i­tal. Every­thing is par­tially in­ter­change­able, as every­thing is con­nected. Life be­comes a cur­rency of the  code.

The code pro­vides for trade, works as a so­cial marker, as a new form of cap­i­tal. We are see­ing an in­creas­ing run­way where we can no longer talk about the con­trol of the phe­nom­ena that is so rapidly in­creas­ing com­plex­ity of the prob­lems that be­comes al­most un­com­putable. The ter­ror­ist act is a knot in which a large num­ber of so­cial processes in­ter­sects and ex­plode . It is a kind of crit­i­cal point in which the so­cial com­bi­na­to­r­ial ex­plo­sion emerge. This is not re­cur­sively de­scrib­able phe­nom­e­non. Panic sim­u­la­tion and dis­in­te­grated so­cial spec­ta­cle causes, that ter­ror be­comes the in­ter­est of the mod­ern state. Dis­in­for­ma­tion and se­crecy. The dif­fer­ence be­tween the open and the se­cret im­plies a hi­er­ar­chy, the first rule of power. On this dif­fer­ence, the struc­tures called the state are being built. Se­cu­rity state is an en­gine of vi­o­lence. Acts of ter­ror and dis­as­ter are the lifeblood of po­lit­i­cal ac­tion. That is why they are pro­voked and stim­u­lated by the power elite. Se­cu­rity re­quire con­stant ref­er­ence to the state of emer­gency. The quest for se­cu­rity leads to a global world­wide war. You have to change this state of things: re­ject the con­cept of se­cu­rity as a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of state pol­icy and test new mod­els / con­stel­la­tions of power. The task of pol­i­tics is un­der­stand of con­di­tions that lead to ter­ror and de­struc­tion, rather than con­trol these phe­nom­ena, as al­ready oc­curred.

Chair Per­son: Janis Jef­feries
Pre­sen­ters: Ghis­laine Bod­ding­ton, Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X) & Anna Du­mitriu

For this panel we pro­pose to dis­cuss a range of in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tices of em­bod­i­ment and tech­nol­ogy.

 “Today [the body] and its vis­ceral sur­round­ings are stud­ded with ear­phones, zoom­ing in psy­chophar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, ex­tended with pros­the­ses, daz­zled by odor­less tastes and taste­less odors, trans­ported by new media, and buzzing with ideas”.
_C. A. Jones, ed., Sen­so­rium: Em­bod­ied Ex­pe­ri­ence, Tech­nol­ogy, and Con­tem­po­rary Art (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

Fol­low­ing Jones’s dis­cus­sion we will ex­plore the ways in which prac­ti­tion­ers and writ­ers ad­dress the phys­i­cal and af­fec­tive as­pects of our in­creas­ing en­gage­ment with tech­nol­ogy, whether through per­for­mance or through en­gage­ment with ro­bots and avatars. What types of sen­so­r­ial ex­pe­ri­ences and in­ti­ma­cies can be ex­plored in which vir­tual and phys­i­cal spaces are in­creas­ingly blurred? Can play, be a part in re­vi­tal­iz­ing our sen­so­r­ial sys­tem? Can these prac­tices offer a time and a space for re­flec­tion on em­bod­ied tech­no­log­i­cal ex­pe­ri­ences? The panel aims to ex­plore per­for­mance prac­tices and con­tem­po­rary cul­tural dis­courses that study in­ti­mate en­coun­ters, ad­dress­ing is­sues around bod­ies of data and flesh, play in en­counter with ro­bots, avatars and phys­i­cal/vir­tual pres­ences- de­sire as em­bod­ied con­di­tion and dis­em­bod­ied fan­tasy, the human and posthu­man self.

Chair Per­son: Nina Wen­hart

Pre­sen­ters:

1. Rosa Menkman  – The Col­lapse of PAL
2. Melissa Bar­ron – Glitch Weav­ings
3. Daniela Kuka – Dis­or­der
4. Nina Wen­hart – <3break(s)core: an in­ap­pro­pri­a­tion

Dig­i­tal corpses all abound, zom­bie data that is still there, but can­not be per­formed any­more. Change is in­evitable, if the art­work should sur­vive. Be­sides the archivists’ ef­forts to re­vive the work in its orig­i­nal state, artists have de­vel­oped their own strate­gies of em­brac­ing the er­rors and glitches of re/de/transcod­ing processes.

Codecs, pro­grams, pro­to­cols and for­mats that are not sup­ported any­more have be­come cre­ative chal­lenges and often ini­ti­ate sub­ver­sive prac­tices. Not THAT, but HOW a work is changed and dis­torted be­comes the choice of the artist. In this process, the orig­i­nal and its res­ur­rec­tion enter a di­a­logue and open up ques­tions that go be­yond the sur­face, a di­alec­tics of orig­i­nal and copy, same­ness and change, ob­so­les­cence and progress, mem­ory and for­get­ting, sur­vival and death. And as the orig­i­nal (file) is dead, the orig­i­nal (as a con­cept) is re­born at the same time.

Artis­tic strate­gies of re/de/transcod­ing and serendipi­dous er­rors are po­si­tioned as an an­tithe­sis to an elit­ist or naive eu­pho­ria of con­stant tech­no­log­i­cal progress i.e. per­fec­tion. Nev­er­the­less, they are not nos­tal­gic but cel­e­brate a handson ap­proach where the code be­comes tan­gi­ble and ma­te­r­ial, lit­er­ally.

Chair Per­son: Mel Woods
Pre­sen­ters: Geraint Wig­gins, Aleks Kro­to­ski & Clive Gill­man

Many sci­en­tific and artis­tic in­no­va­tions have been at­trib­uted to serendip­ity, the fac­ulty of mak­ing and recog­nis­ing for­tu­nate and un­ex­pected dis­cov­er­ies by ac­ci­dent. The phe­nom­e­non is widely re­garded across dis­ci­plines as a valu­able way of spark­ing re­search ideas and trig­ger­ing new con­nec­tions. How­ever, while there is a wide­spread un­der­stand­ing that serendip­ity is a major con­trib­u­tor to in­no­va­tion, there is dis­agree­ment as to whether dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies pro­mote or sti­fle serendip­ity. The World­wide Web has al­lowed us to make many pos­i­tive changes in our so­ci­ety and en­vi­ron­ment, for ex­am­ple through so­cial net­work­ing and e-pub­lish­ing, but it also pre­sents prob­lems, by its very na­ture. Re­cently serendip­ity, and the role that the world­wide web and so­cial net­works now play in search query for in­for­ma­tion seek­ing, has re­ceived at­ten­tion from li­brary and in­for­ma­tion sci­ence, psy­chol­ogy, and com­puter sci­ence, art and de­sign. This re­newed in­ter­est and di­a­logue across art and sci­ence seeks to un­der­stand, sup­port and fa­cil­i­tate serendip­ity across dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal en­vi­ron­ments. The panel will ex­plore the no­tion of serendip­ity, from the un­der­stand­ing of its role in art and sci­ence in dig­i­tal do­mains. The de­bate will ex­plore of the so­cial and in­tel­lec­tual na­ture of serendip­i­tous in­ter­ac­tion, with peo­ple and com­put­ers; new de­vel­op­ments in prod­ucts, tech­nolo­gies and prac­tices such as those that are re­defin­ing lit­er­acy and re­shap­ing how we dis­cover, record and in­no­vate; the use and en­hance­ment of Se­man­tic Web tech­nol­ogy; and the role of new media and dig­i­tal arts in trans­form­ing and pre­sent­ing in­for­ma­tion and ideas.

Chair Per­son: Chris Row­land
Pre­sen­ters: John An­der­son, Car­o­line Wilkin­son, Paul Good­fel­low & John McGhee

An­i­ma­tion meth­ods and tech­niques have evolved in re­cent years to be ac­cess­able to a wider range of cre­ative prac­ti­tion­ers than their orig­i­nal de­sign. Cre­ative prac­tice and re­search have taken meth­ods de­vel­oped for sto­ry­telling and en­ter­tain­ment and re­tasked them to solve real world prob­lems. An­i­ma­tion method­olo­gies are adapted to sup­port in­ves­ti­ga­tions into prod­uct vi­su­al­i­sa­tion, ar­chae­o­log­i­cal re­con­struc­tion, ar­chi­tec­tural vi­su­al­i­sa­tion, med­ical vi­su­al­i­sa­tion and many other spe­cialisms. Not re­stricted to vi­su­al­is­ing final de­sign so­lu­tions prior to pro­duc­tion, con­struc­tion and re­pro­duc­tion, but as an in­her­ent part of the de­sign and in­ves­ti­ga­tion process. This panel will ex­plore how a range of cre­ative prac­ti­tion­ers have adopted and adapted an­i­ma­tion to fur­ther their en­quiry. Using case stud­ies to ex­plore their aims and meth­ods, the pan­elists jour­neys will be de­scribed to il­lu­mi­nate their mo­ti­va­tions and in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary ap­proaches. Pre­sen­ters are drawn from the 3D Vi­su­al­i­sa­tion Re­search Lab at Dun­can of Jor­dan­stone Col­lege of Art & De­sign, The cen­tre for Human Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion at Uni­ver­sity of Dundee, Grid­loop and Northum­bria Uni­ver­sity.

Chair Per­son: Char­lotte Frost
Pre­sen­ters: Brid­get McKen­zie, Jack Hutchin­son, Dougald Hine, Mar­cus Romer & Ruth Cat­low

The in­for­ma­tion shar­ing abil­i­ties of the in­ter­net has vastly ex­tended a pre-ex­ist­ing ca­pac­ity among artists to com­mu­ni­cate with each other about their work and lifestyles. With the ar­rival of so­cial media and the wave of in­ter­net use known as Web 2.0, the abil­ity to share has grown ex­po­nen­tially, be­com­ing a sub­ject in and of it­self, and gen­er­at­ing ex­perts in the tech­niques and mean­ings of shar­ing. And now, eco­nomic down-turn and dras­tic cuts to fund­ing, these free net­works have be­come in­valu­able for help­ing peo­ple sus­tain their prac­tice. This panel brings to­gether a set of ex­perts in the prac­ti­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal use of dig­i­tal net­works and in­fra­struc­tures for shar­ing. Work­ing across a range of areas from vi­sual art to music, per­for­mance and be­yond, they are united by their use of col­lab­o­ra­tive dig­i­tal tools and dri­ven by their propen­sity for pos­i­tive so­cial change. From con­sol­i­dat­ing con­nec­tions be­tween artists and arts pol­icy-mak­ers to rewiring our ed­u­ca­tional and eco­nomic cir­cuitry, this panel has col­lec­tively de­vel­oped a wealth of skills for reach­ing out to oth­ers through tech­nol­ogy. After an in­tro­duc­tion from the panel chair, par­tic­i­pants will each be given ten min­utes to de­scribe the pro­jects and prac­tices that com­prise their ‘share work’. Fol­low­ing this, the chair will ques­tion them on the in­tri­ca­cies of what they do as well as its im­pact on the wider art world – a field not nor­mally known for its in­clu­sive­ness. As a group they will un­pack suc­cess­ful mod­els (along­side some of the in­evitable ob­sta­cles) to ‘share work­ing’, ad­dress­ing both the very prac­ti­cal – as well as some of the philo­soph­i­cal – im­pli­ca­tions of open­ness in an ad­vanced in­for­ma­tion age.

Chair Per­son: Patrick Lichty
Pre­sen­ters: Ali Mi­harbi, Eden Un­ulata, Clau­dia Ped­er­son, Burak Arikan, Iz Öztat & Chan­tal Za­kari

In keep­ing with the site of the ISEA2011 Sym­po­sium, this panel seeks to pre­sent pa­pers that ad­dress new media cross-bor­der dis­courses be­tween Turkey (the site of the sym­po­sium) and North Amer­ica (the birth­place of New Media). This panel seeks to in­ves­ti­gate North Amer­i­can/Turkey con­ver­sa­tions in New Media Art & Cul­ture; is­sues artists are ex­plor­ing, and res­i­dency and cu­ra­to­r­ial pro­jects. Also, we seek to probe the cross-cul­tural ef­fects of net­worked cul­ture and so­cial media upon the de­mo­graph­ics in­volved as well as the greater global mi­lieu. This will be done by ex­plor­ing artists, works, res­i­den­cies, ini­tia­tives work­ing be­tween these spaces and sites of on­line cul­ture that cre­ate frames of en­gage­ment for these is­sues. The ini­tial im­pe­tus of this panel comes from the chair’s in­volve­ment/re­search of Turk­ish artists who have lived in the States, North Amer­i­can artists work­ing in Turkey, and ways their ex­pe­ri­ences are re­flected in the work. In ad­di­tion, in con­ver­sa­tion with Burak Arikan, other is­sues such as the im­pact of Face­book, on­line dis­sem­i­na­tion of in­for­ma­tion, Wik­ileaks, so­cial media and other as­pects of net­worked cul­ture will be ad­dressed.

Chair Per­son: Cyn­thia Law­son Jaramillo
Pre­sen­ters: Una Chung, Eric For­man, Har­ald Krae­mer & An­nette Wein­traub

Im­mersed in a con­stant stream of in­for­ma­tion, los­ing our abil­ity to mean­ing­fully read any­thing longer than a page, and con­nected through a so­cial net­work that in users rep­re­sents the 3rd largest coun­try in the world, what hap­pens to how we make, view, and par­tic­i­pate in elec­tronic arts?  If our tools are also those which our ac­cel­er­at­ing our lives, how are we able to still make mean­ing­ful art?  Do artists dis­con­nect from the ex­pec­ta­tions of 24/7 and re­treat in their “stu­dios”? This panel fo­cuses on the topic of slow­ing down and elec­tronic arts.  Is slow­ness a use­ful con­cept for artists work­ing with tech­nol­ogy to con­sider?  Are elec­tronic artists using the same tools to com­ment on this ac­cel­er­a­tion?  Have we lost our abil­ity to slow down in the view­ing and ap­pre­ci­a­tion of art?  Fur­ther­more, do elec­tronic artists feel a re­spon­si­bil­ity to com­ment on and demon­strate al­ter­na­tive tech­nolo­gies that may pro­mote slow­ness and con­sid­ered thought? A panel of both artists and aca­d­e­mics will ad­dress these ques­tions, fo­cus­ing on both the­ory and prac­tice, and al­ways grounded in ex­am­ples of elec­tronic art­work. They will speak about aes­thet­ics and pol­i­tics in elec­tronic arts, the “hand wav­ing” phe­nomen in in­ter­ac­tive art, the chal­lenges and suc­cesses of teach­ing de­cel­er­a­tion to stu­dents, and the speed at which in­ter­net art is forced to change, and there­fore be­com­ing ephemeral at a rapid rate. Though di­verse in their ap­proaches and foci, no­tions of slow­ness and du­ra­tion will be the com­mon threads for the pre­sen­ta­tions and the dis­cus­sion to fol­low.

Chair Per­son: Renée Turner
Pre­sen­ters: Seda Gürses, Nico­las Malevé, Amy Suo Wu & Bir­git Bach­ler

We are liv­ing in a time of un­prece­dented sur­veil­lance, but un­like the omi­nous spec­tre of Or­well’s Big Brother, where power is clearly de­fined and al­ways pal­pa­ble, today’s meth­ods of in­for­ma­tion gath­er­ing are much more sub­tle and woven into the fab­ric of our every­day life. Through the use of seem­ingly in­nocu­ous al­go­rithms Ama­zon tells us which books we might like, Google tracks our queries to per­fect more ac­cu­rate re­sults, and Last.?fm con­nects us to peo­ple with sim­i­lar music tastes. Im­mersed in so­cial media, we com­mit to legally bind­ing con­tracts by agree­ing to ‘terms of use’. Hav­ing made the pact, we Twit­ter our sub­jec­tiv­i­ties in less than 140 char­ac­ters, con­tact our long lost friends on face­book and mo­bile-up­load our ge­o­t­agged videos on youtube. Where once sur­veil­lance tech­nolo­gies be­longed to gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies and the mil­i­tary do­main, the web has fos­tered a less op­ti­cally dri­ven and par­tic­i­pa­tory means of both mon­i­tor­ing and mon­e­tiz­ing our in­ti­mately lived ex­pe­ri­ences. Bring­ing to­gether artists, pro­gram­mers and the­o­rists, these in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary pan­els will look at how sur­veil­lance and data-min­ing tech­nolo­gies shape and in­flu­ence our lives and the con­se­quences they have on our civil lib­er­ties.  The aim is to map the com­plex­i­ties of ‘shar­ing’ and ex­am­ine how our fun­da­men­tal un­der­stand­ing of pri­vate life has changed, as pub­lic dis­play has be­come more per­va­sive and nor­mal­ized through so­cial net­works. “Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…”  is an on­go­ing in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary re­search pro­ject. Through a se­ries of work­shops, de­bates, lec­tures and pre­sen­ta­tions, the the­matic pro­ject was ini­tially launched in the be­gin­ning of 2011 at the Piet Zwart In­sti­tute, Mas­ter Media De­sign and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the de­part­ment of Net­worked Media.  The for­ma­tion of the pan­els at ISEA is an op­por­tu­nity to show doc­u­men­ta­tion and ex­pand upon ear­lier re­search.

Chair Per­son: Renee Turner
Pre­sen­ters: Steve Rush­ton, Michelle Teran, Aymeric Man­soux & Mar­loes de Valk

We are liv­ing in a time of un­prece­dented sur­veil­lance, but un­like the omi­nous spec­tre of Or­well’s Big Brother, where power is clearly de­fined and al­ways pal­pa­ble, today’s meth­ods of in­for­ma­tion gath­er­ing are much more sub­tle and woven into the fab­ric of our every­day life. Through the use of seem­ingly in­nocu­ous al­go­rithms Ama­zon tells us which books we might like, Google tracks our queries to per­fect more ac­cu­rate re­sults, and Last.?fm con­nects us to peo­ple with sim­i­lar music tastes. Im­mersed in so­cial media, we com­mit to legally bind­ing con­tracts by agree­ing to ‘terms of use’. Hav­ing made the pact, we Twit­ter our sub­jec­tiv­i­ties in less than 140 char­ac­ters, con­tact our long lost friends on face­book and mo­bile-up­load our ge­o­t­agged videos on youtube. Where once sur­veil­lance tech­nolo­gies be­longed to gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies and the mil­i­tary do­main, the web has fos­tered a less op­ti­cally dri­ven and par­tic­i­pa­tory means of both mon­i­tor­ing and mon­e­tiz­ing our in­ti­mately lived ex­pe­ri­ences. Bring­ing to­gether artists, pro­gram­mers and the­o­rists, these in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary pan­els will look at how sur­veil­lance and data-min­ing tech­nolo­gies shape and in­flu­ence our lives and the con­se­quences they have on our civil lib­er­ties.  The aim is to map the com­plex­i­ties of ‘shar­ing’ and ex­am­ine how our fun­da­men­tal un­der­stand­ing of pri­vate life has changed, as pub­lic dis­play has be­come more per­va­sive and nor­mal­ized through so­cial net­works. “Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…”  is an on­go­ing in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary re­search pro­ject. Through a se­ries of work­shops, de­bates, lec­tures and pre­sen­ta­tions, the the­matic pro­ject was ini­tially launched in the be­gin­ning of 2011 at the Piet Zwart In­sti­tute, Mas­ter Media De­sign and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the de­part­ment of Net­worked Media.  The for­ma­tion of the pan­els at ISEA, is an op­por­tu­nity to show doc­u­men­ta­tion and ex­pand upon ear­lier re­search.

Chair Per­son: Petra Gemein­boeck

Presenters:  Rob Saun­ders, James Coupe & Michelle Teran

Our every­day en­vi­ron­ment has be­come a patch­work of sur­veil­lant spaces; in­ter­lac­ing our so­cial net­works and mo­bile de­vices with CCTV sys­tems, satel­lite and other wire­less sig­nals to pro­duce an end­lessly grow­ing net­work of ‘nodes’ with never-sleep­ing eyes. As ma­chine agency grows more com­plex we in­creas­ingly be­come ac­com­plices of the voyeuris­tic spec­ta­cle. While each sur­veil­lant space may have dif­fer­ent mo­tives and tar­gets, all of them serve as more or less au­tonomous pros­the­ses that ex­tend, en­hance or pro­lif­er­ate the human eye. But what hap­pens if we push the ques­tion of own­er­ship of the gaze to a point where the ma­chine’s agency of see­ing not only aug­ments the human eye but be­comes in­de­pen­dent, gen­er­a­tive and ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing its own nar­ra­tives?  This panel ex­plores sur­veil­lant spaces from the point of view of the ma­chine. What does it see? Why does it look? And how does it re­spond? It will both crit­i­cally and play­fully in­ves­ti­gate the per­for­ma­tive po­ten­tial of the ma­chinic gaze and the agen­cies and ma­te­ri­al­i­ties in­volved. To do so, we will en­gage with artis­tic prac­tices that enact the pol­i­tics of sur­veil­lance through per­for­ma­tive in­ter­ven­tions to ex­per­i­ment with and push the con­tested re­al­i­ties they pro­duce. Ex­plor­ing ma­chine vi­sion and com­pu­ta­tional agency, we will dis­cuss the po­ten­tial for the ma­chinic gaze to de­velop a dis­po­si­tion to­wards what it sees. A sur­veil­lant space dri­ven by cu­rios­ity, de­sire and per­haps com­plic­ity both play­fully sub­verts and crit­i­cally ex­tends Vir­ilio’s (1994) dark vi­sion of the ‘au­to­matic-per­cep­tion pros­the­sis’.

Chair Per­son: Leonie Cooper
Pre­sen­ters: Pa­tri­cia Adams, An­drew Bur­rell & An­gela Ndalia­nis

The media en­vi­ron­ments we now in­habit are hy­brids: both ma­te­r­ial/vir­tual, ac­tual/imag­i­nary, sci­en­tific and sci­ence-fic­tional, fu­tur­is­tic and yet also fun­da­men­tally grounded in media his­to­ries. This panel will con­sider the is­sues at stake as we shift from think­ing of the screen as a por­tal to other worlds that mir­ror those we cor­po­re­ally in­habit to fig­ur­ing out al­ter­na­tive ways of think­ing about tech­no­log­i­cally me­di­ated forms of in­hab­i­ta­tion. It aims to con­tribute to new ways of think­ing about habi­tats by in­volv­ing artists work­ing with mixed re­al­ity tech­nolo­gies and think­ing through the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of their re­search for is­sues of self and em­bod­i­ment. The is­sues of self and cor­po­re­al­ity that emerge from sites that are ‘vir­tu­ally’ in­hab­ited are con­sid­ered along­side other habi­tats where screen tech­nolo­gies are in­ter­wo­ven with ma­te­r­ial ge­o­gra­phies. The­o­rist-his­to­ri­ans who have re­searched con­tem­po­rary urban en­vi­ron­ments and off-world habi­tats such as space sta­tions offer in­sights into the his­tor­i­cal con­di­tions from which they have emerged as well as what they re­veal of con­tem­po­rary  modes of tech­no­log­i­cally me­di­ated in­hab­i­ta­tion. Oth­er­wise in­vis­i­ble syn­er­gies be­tween prac­tice and the­ory will emerge from an in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary de­bate on hy­brid habi­tats guided by the fol­low­ing ques­tions:

1. How are new tech­nolo­gies im­pact­ing upon the imag­i­nary and ma­te­r­ial for­ma­tions of ‘habi­tats’ –  as ma­te­r­ial sites, as screen-worlds and hy­bridi­s­a­tions of both.
2. What eth­i­cal and aes­thetic con­sid­er­a­tions do these habi­tats raise? Are they atopias (non­places), utopias or some­thing else en­tirely?
3. Who in­hab­its these worlds and how? Are they con­sid­ered view­ers, par­tic­i­pants or do these habi­tats in­vite other modes of en­gage­ment?
4. How might al­ter­na­tive –  even in­ter­species –  habi­tats re­flect dif­fer­ent un­der­stand­ings of cor­po­re­al­ity, con­scious­ness and iden­tity?
5. How does nos­tal­gia and the past in­form and in­ter­sect with the con­struc­tion of new, utopian-in­spired habi­tats?
6. Do these al­ter­na­tive habi­tats have his­to­ries? How might such his­to­ries be re­con­structed?

Chair Per­sons: Chris­t­ian Ulrik An­der­sen & Søren Pold
Pre­sen­ters:  Saul Al­bert, Seda Gürses & Cre­tien van Campen

The pur­pose of the panel is to in­ves­ti­gate the aes­thetic and cul­tural im­pli­ca­tions of a sit­u­a­tion where new in­ter­faces ap­pear in pub­lic urban space (net­worked, mo­bile, ubiq­ui­tous, etc.). The urban media the­o­rist Scott Mc­Quire ar­gues that with this de­vel­op­ment, ‘the media event’ is in the process of re­turn­ing to the pub­lic urban do­main. The main ques­tion is in what way? Does dig­i­tal media merely pro­vide new forms and new pub­lic spec­ta­cles in the city, or does it also prop­a­gate pub­lic ac­tiv­ity? If so, what kinds of ac­tiv­ity?  In the panel we pro­pose to see this de­vel­op­ment of pub­lic in­ter­faces as an in­tro­duc­tion of not just media but also soft­ware into the city. Today’s media cities are soft­ware cities. A dis­tinct char­ac­ter­is­tic is that the rep­re­sen­ta­tions of media do not just imply new aes­thetic forms and rep­re­sen­ta­tions but are al­ways con­nected to un­der­ly­ing com­pu­ta­tional processes that change the com­plex life forms of the city. With a focus on new forms of cre­ative pro­duc­tion pan­elists will pre­sent their take on how re­la­tions be­tween pub­lic and pri­vate realms are af­fected and how al­ter­na­tive uses and re­la­tions around pub­lic in­ter­faces ap­pear in soft­ware cities. The fol­low­ing state­ments op­er­ate as points of de­par­ture:

1. Whilst ex­per­i­men­ta­tion and de­vel­op­ments in the cul­ture of free soft­ware re­flects emer­gent and self-or­ga­niz­ing pub­lic ac­tions, how can we ex­tend free soft­ware prin­ci­ples into soft­ware cities?
2. Does the con­cept of a ‘soft­ware city’ offer a way of fur­ther ex­am­in­ing the cul­tural re­gen­er­a­tion agenda and pub­lic art?
3. What is the in­ter­re­la­tion­ship be­tween soft­ware and sur­veil­lance in soft­ware cities?
4. Does the soft­ware city pro­vide new un­der­stand­ings of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween cre­ative pro­duc­tion and the econ­omy?
5. How does the pos­si­ble dis­so­lu­tion of the pub­lic and pri­vate spheres re­late to bio pol­i­tics and con­tem­po­rary forms of power?

The panel emerges from on­go­ing re­search around in­ter­face crit­i­cism at Dig­i­tal Aes­thet­ics Re­search Cen­ter and Cen­ter for Dig­i­tal Urban Liv­ing, Aarhus Uni­ver­sity, Den­mark.

Chair Per­son: Cyn­thia-Beth Rubin
Pre­sen­ters: James Faure Walker, Anne Mor­gan Spal­ter, Murat Ger­men, Beth War­shaf­sky, Net­trice Gaskins, Orhan Cem Çetin, Mal­colm Levy & Anat Pol­lack

One of the most pro­found trans­for­ma­tions of the elec­tronic age is the chang­ing re­la­tion­ship of rep­re­sen­ta­tional im­agery and ab­strac­tion. Once in­ex­orably bound to paint­ing, the ad­vent of pho­tog­ra­phy made it the medium of choice for doc­u­men­ta­tion, a split which in turn freed paint­ing to pri­or­i­tize for­mal el­e­ments over rep­re­sen­ta­tional con­tent, cre­at­ing a vo­cab­u­lary of mean­ing de­rived from color, form, tex­ture, and ges­ture, and set­ting artists down a path that even­tu­ally cul­mi­nated in Ab­stract Ex­pres­sion­ism.  When dig­i­tal imag­ing de­vel­oped, early com­mer­cial de­vel­op­ers of soft­ware en­vi­sioned that this split would con­tinue, but this was hardly the case for the early soft­ware artists, work­ing in the days be­fore easy scan­ning and dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy.  As they “painted” into the com­puter, they found the same unique qual­i­ties of rep­e­ti­tion and it­er­a­tive trans­for­ma­tions that their pro­gram­ming col­leagues found just a few years ear­lier, as well as the abil­ity to add ges­tural ex­pres­sion.

Over the slow decade in which scan­ning and dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy grad­u­ally be­came avail­able to artists, early dig­i­tal artists took the next step of in­te­grat­ing pho­to­graphic con­tent, jump­ing seam­lessly from Pho­toMac to Pix­el­Paint and back again, even if it took years for the soft­ware com­pa­nies to catch on. As dig­i­tal imag­ing be­comes the ul­ti­mate re­com­bi­nant medium, artists are now dig­i­tally paint­ing with pho­tographs as an­other el­e­ment in their work, just as they use color, form, and ges­ture.  Imag­ine the artist in the dig­i­tal stu­dio, being able to can pick up a flat red or­ganic form or an image of a build­ing.  In this con­text, the sym­bol­ism of the color “red” and sym­bol­ism of “the build­ing” be­come sim­i­lar el­e­ments – an artist chooses to use red be­cause it causes spa­tial ten­sion, or be­cause it rep­re­sents anger, or rep­re­sents com­mu­nism, just as the artist may use the build­ing be­cause it is a heavy rec­tan­gu­lar form with pointy tops, or be­cause it has a pat­tern of rep­e­ti­tion, or be­cause it ref­er­ences a known his­toric site or ge­o­graphic lo­ca­tion. Is this merger the gate­way to both a new aes­thetic and a new pub­lic en­gage­ment, as we in­te­grate doc­u­men­ta­tion of ex­pe­ri­ence, cul­tural her­itage, and sci­ence into our work?

Chair Per­son: Anna Du­mitriu
Pre­sen­ters: Alex May, Bet­tina Schülke, Luke Robert Mason & Gor­dana No­vakovic

Ein­stein said:  “If we knew what it was we were doing it would be called re­search, would it?”

This panel out­lines “The In­sti­tute of Un­nec­es­sary Re­search” and pre­sents a new par­a­digm in the way artists are en­gag­ing with the world through trans­dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tices. It brings to­gether art, sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy by cre­at­ing par­tic­i­pa­tory au­di­ence ex­pe­ri­ences, per­for­mances and in­stal­la­tions. Some­times hu­mor­ous and some­times grotesque, our work pushes bound­aries and crit­i­cally ques­tions the means of knowl­edge pro­duc­tion in the 21st Cen­tury. Artists are in­no­va­tors, if a new piece of tech­nol­ogy or a new medium, be­comes avail­able; artists want to try it, to ex­per­i­ment with it- from mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy to ro­bot­ics; from tis­sue cul­ture to neu­ro­science. Some artists take on the role of a sci­en­tist in al­most a per­for­ma­tive way and some sci­en­tists be­come artists them­selves. Phi­los­o­phy and ethics is al­ways at its core and the work un­packs the in­stru­men­tal­iza­tion of sci­ence and art for com­mer­cial and po­lit­i­cal ends.

Forms of “con­nec­tive aes­thet­ics” (Gab­lik) are used to en­gage au­di­ences in par­tic­i­pa­tory ex­pe­ri­ences that ex­tend and gen­er­ate new out­comes through ex­hi­bi­tions and events going be­yond sim­ple in­ter­ac­tiv­ity, throw­ing au­thor­ship into ques­tion, as mem­bers of the au­di­ence are in­spired to be­come Un­nec­es­sary Re­searchers in their own rights. The In­sti­tute of Un­nec­es­sary Re­search is a hub for re­searchers and artists work­ing ex­per­i­men­tally and deeply en­gaged with their spe­cific re­search areas. We pre­sent our re­search through per­for­ma­tive and ex­pe­ri­en­tial meth­ods, en­gag­ing the pub­lic and new au­di­ences in our ideas. The name “The In­sti­tute of Un­nec­es­sary Re­search” is, in many ways, con­fronta­tional. It raises the ques­tion what is nec­es­sary re­search? Un­nec­es­sary does not imply point­less, it often means going be­yond the nor­mal (in the Kuhn­ian sense of ‘nor­mal sci­ence’) and cross­ing bound­aries, ask­ing where do we draw the line with what we study or with what can be stud­ied? Un­nec­es­sary Re­search en­cour­ages ec­cen­tric, ob­ses­sive, cre­ative work­ing prac­tices and is an an­ti­dote to the stran­gle­hold placed on re­search by cen­tral gov­ern­ment and the gate­keep­ers of acad­e­mia.

Chair Per­son: Anne Bal­samo
Pre­sen­ters: Rose­mary Comella, Jeanne Jo, Amanda Tasse, Gabriel Pe­ters-Lazaro, Diego Costa & Joshua McVeigh-Schultz

Com­mon among the cre­ative fields–the arts, sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy and de­sign–is a com­mit­ment to the pro­duc­tion of new knowl­edge based on orig­i­nal re­search.  Re­search is the praxis of sys­tem­atic crit­i­cal re­flec­tion that fo­cuses on com­pelling do­main-de­fined ques­tions.  The “ques­tion of method” is often used to dis­tin­guish art and de­sign from sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy: where the lat­ter are de­fined by rei­fied method­olog­i­cal par­a­digms, and the for­mer by the re­pu­di­a­tion of such par­a­digms.  In prac­tice we know this to be a false op­po­si­tion: artists and de­sign­ers sys­tem­at­i­cally en­gage the em­pir­i­cal in many ways in their cre­ative work; sci­en­tists and tech­nol­o­gists cre­atively im­pro­vise to form ra­tio­nal ac­counts of their tech­ni­cal pro­jects. The par­tic­i­pants on this panel are each en­gaged in de­vel­op­ing in­no­v­a­tive meth­ods that demon­strates the no­tion of art prac­tice as trans­for­ma­tive re­search.  For some of them this takes the form of per­for­mance and real-time video mix­ing, for oth­ers it is the cre­ation of loca­tive media ex­pe­ri­ences that probe cul­tural dis­po­si­tions and habits. Key areas to be dis­cussed in­clude:  the ten­sions be­tween em­pir­i­cal, in­ter­pre­tive and crit­i­cal re­search tech­niques in the per­for­mance and pro­duc­tion of art prac­tice; the con­tri­bu­tion of psy­cho­analy­sis and cog­ni­tive sci­ence to arts re­search; mul­ti­me­dia tech­niques for the cre­ation of real-time knowl­edge pro­duc­tion; mak­ing re­search vis­i­ble to trans­dis­ci­pli­nary (aca­d­e­mic) au­di­ences; and com­mu­ni­cat­ing arts prac­tice re­search in dy­namic ver­nac­u­lars. This panel will de­scribe, ex­plore, and demon­strate a range of new meth­ods of emerg­ing arts re­search.

Chair Per­sons: Jamie Allen & Tom Schofield
Pre­sen­ters: Mar­tijn Stevens, Ale­jan­dro Schi­anchi, Ceci Moss, Shin­taro Miyazaki & Thomas Zum­mer

Along with in­vited pan­elists, the se­lected par­tic­i­pants will be wel­comed to dis­cuss their ideas, art­works, media and other forms of prac­tice-in­fused re­search in re­sponse to the fol­low­ing ideas:

“The early human artists who tapped into this ex­pres­sive reser­voir for their cave paint­ings, body tat­toos, and rit­ual cer­e­monies, far from in­tro­duc­ing artistry into the world were sim­ply adding one more voice to an on­go­ing ma­te­r­ial cho­rus.” _Manuel De­Landa

Our dig­i­tal, net­worked age hides from us in plain sight the con­crete, his­tor­i­cal and af­fec­tive cor­re­spon­dences be­tween mat­ter, in­for­ma­tion and per­cep­tion. The prac­tice and cul­ture of art-and-tech­nol­ogy make it easy to for­get the ma­te­r­ial un­der­pin­nings and im­pli­ca­tions of artis­tic ac­tiv­ity and pro­duc­tion. In­for­ma­tion sys­tems, media and the elec­tronic arts in par­tic­u­lar re­quire the sup­port of a be­wil­der­ing nexus of power and in­fra­struc­ture. This fact “alerts us to the at­ten­u­ated in­dex­i­cal trace of an ob­jec­tive real that haunts the ap­par­ently self-ref­er­en­tial world of pure sim­u­lacra.” The ubiq­ui­tous tem­po­ral and spa­tial free­doms promised to us by cy­ber-the­o­rists and rei­fied in ex­am­ple by artists, are a no-show, or as Kit­tler em­phat­i­cally put it, “There is No Soft­ware”.  Ques­tions & topic areas:

1. What frame­works for con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing “the dig­i­tal” best em­pha­size its tan­gi­ble ap­peal and con­se­quence, as well as its eco­log­i­cal and sys­temic reper­cus­sions?
2. How do we best chal­lenge the ab­stract rhetorics of cy­ber-the­ory and vir­tu­al­ity of later-day 20th-Cen­tury new media and in­ter­ac­tive art dis­course?
3. What is the ma­te­r­ial of “raw data,” and what are its canon­i­cal or iconic forms?
4. How can we work as artists with in­for­ma­tion/ sig­nals as ma­te­r­ial and un­der­stand the in­ter­pre­tive and rep­re­sen­ta­tive ex­trap­o­la­tions nec­es­sar­ily being made?
5. How does data dif­fer from other ma­te­ri­als which have a more ob­vi­ous phys­i­cal ma­te­r­ial forms?
6. What pow­ers have we del­e­gated sig­nals and data as things-in-them­selves?
7. Dis­tinc­tions be­tween the “nat­ural” and “man-made” as we re­gard tech­nolo­gies as com­plex ecolo­gies of mat­ter.
8. Dis­tinc­tions be­tween what is within and with­out our un­der­stand­ing, con­trol or com­po­si­tion (in­dus­trial or eco­nomic com­plexes, ecolo­gies).
9. His­tor­i­cal, cul­tural and con­tem­po­rary artis­tic prac­tice re­la­tions be­tween “tech­nol­ogy”, “new media”, “elec­tronic art” and “main­stream con­tem­po­rary art”.
10. Dis­courses on aes­thet­ics as to the pur­pose and func­tion of art as pre­scient, dec­o­ra­tive, memetic, in­ter­rog­a­tive, chal­leng­ing and de­fi­ant.
11. Ed­u­ca­tional, epis­te­mo­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences in the hu­man­i­ties, cre­ative arts prac­tices, and en­gi­neer­ing and the sci­ences.

Chair Per­son: Mark-David Hos­ale
Pre­sen­ters: Roy As­cott, Jerome De­cock, Mar­cos Novak, Al­berto De Campo & Sana Mur­rani

The term techné is an an­cient philo­soph­i­cal con­cept that was de­bated by philoso­phers such as Xenophon and Plato, as well as more con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers such as Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger and Félix Guat­tari. In sim­pli­fied terms techné con­cerns the art and craft of mak­ing. In par­tic­u­lar the dis­cus­sion of techné is not only con­cerned with what is made, but how and why it is made. The think­ing of art prac­tices (music, art, and ar­chi­tec­ture) as a kind of World­Mak­ing refers to a techné that is seek­ing to ex­plore art-con­cepts as ex­pres­sive al­ter­na­tive re­al­i­ties through the de­vel­op­ment of self-re­flex­ive and in­ter­nally con­sis­tent art-worlds. The Volatil­ity and Sta­bil­ity of World­Mak­ing as Techné panel dis­cus­sion will focus on the in­volve­ment of the tech­nol­ogy of World­Mak­ing in par­tic­i­pa­tory art prac­tice. Such prac­tice can be found in all areas of art, how­ever, the ones under scrutiny for this par­tic­u­lar panel are: in­ter­ac­tive, gen­er­a­tive, pros­thetic art, ar­chi­tec­ture and music prac­tices that de­pend on the par­tic­i­pa­tion of ob­servers for their vi­tal­ity and de­vel­op­ment. The panel will chal­lenge the level of in­volve­ment and in­te­gra­tion of the ob­server within the gen­er­a­tive praxis in a techno­sci­en­tific agenda.

Chair Per­son: Mar­tin Ko­plin
Pre­sen­ters: Hel­mut Eirund, Carl Skel­ton, Michael Jo­hans­son & Mikkel Thelle

All think­ing is in BETA – so how should the fu­ture city and ur­ban­ity be de­signed? The panel dis­cusses new processes for the Par­tic­i­pa­tive Evo­lu­tion of Smart Cities, the cul­ture and tech­nol­ogy of the new soft city. The aim is to com­bine ad­vanced new media art with re­search and de­vel­op­ment of in­no­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies, par­tic­i­pa­tion method­olo­gies and in­no­v­a­tive ser­vices for the de­sign of the new ur­ban­ity. The art ob­jec­tive is to arise new media and urban art sce­nar­ios in areas of re-de­sign and re-con­struc­tion. The tech­ni­cal ob­jec­tive is, to re­search and to de­velop mo­bile-sta­tion­ary en­vi­ron­ment for smart cities as par­tic­i­pa­tory and per­for­ma­tive cul­tural media 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 in form of media art and gam­ing processes. Which tech­ni­cal ap­proaches from media art, urban art, con­cep­tual art, eGov­er­nance, e-ser­vices, e-mo­bil­ity, LBS, to the user-af­fected eCul­ture and eCre­ativ­ity are to be in­cluded to de­velop and to pro­vide im­proved sys­tems for urban de­vel­op­ment, plan­ning and par­tic­i­pa­tion? Cit­i­zen par­tic­i­pa­tion in urban de­vel­op­ment has a long cul­tural tra­di­tion in Eu­rope. The ris­ing com­plex­ity of urban de­vel­op­ment and in­fra­struc­ture is­sues evoke the need of im­proved co­op­er­a­tion of gov­ern­men­tal en­ti­ties, ex­perts and cit­i­zens. De­ci­sion mak­ing processes for fu­ture ac­tiv­i­ties in the field of urban sus­tain­abil­ity re­quire an en­hanced ap­proach to cit­i­zen par­tic­i­pa­tion, ar­tisic ex­pres­sion and user-friendly ex­pert ar­tic­u­la­tion. It is re­quired to ac­cess the full po­ten­tial of the new ca­pa­bil­i­ties of com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works, the broad avail­abil­ity of mi­cro­com­put­ers, and the new de­sign and e-skills. The de­sign, de­vel­op­ment and im­ple­men­ta­tion of the Be­taville “soft­ware in­fra­struc­ture” meet all de­mands of fu­ture cit­i­zen par­tic­i­pa­tion for a sus­tain­able urban de­vel­op­ment. Pre­vi­ous ap­proaches did not took into ac­count ex­ist­ing ex­per­tise (eg. of media art, civic arts, par­tic­i­pa­tion or gam­ing or set a sin­gle dis­ci­pline per­spec­tives un­bal­anced in the fore­ground.

Which is be coun­ter­acted through the in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary con­fig­u­ra­tion of the panel. Sim­i­larly, tech­ni­cal and or­ga­ni­za­tional is­sues of par­tic­i­pa­tory urban plan­ning with dif­fer­ent ap­proaches for dif­fer­ent user groups are to be con­sid­ered. How al­ter­na­tive plan­ning processes by artists, media ac­tivists, de­sign­ers, re­searchers can be in­te­grated should be dis­cussed. Ad­vanced art and en­vi­ron­men­tal and so­cially sus­tain­able de­sign is to be of par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est and will get ex­posed. Dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture should be di­rected to their local po­ten­tial for par­tic­i­pa­tory art and de­sign, for de­vel­op­ment, for local knowl­edge processes and for the as­pect of cross-gen­er­a­tional, so­cial and eco­nomic net­work­ing. Think BETA Par­tic­i­pa­tory Evo­lu­tion of Smart Cities is chaired by the two di­rec­tors Mar­tin Ko­plin and Hel­mut Eirund of the “Think BETA Evo­lu­tion of Smart Cities” in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary think tank. It has part­ners from Asia, Africa, North Amer­ica and all over Eu­rope. The think tank is funded by the BMBF Ger­man Fed­eral Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion and Re­search (Bun­desmin­is­terium für Bil­dung und Forschung) and goes back to the co-op­er­a­tion be­tween Mar­tin Ko­plin of the M2C In­sti­tute of Ap­plied Media Tech­nol­ogy and Cul­ture at the Uni­ver­sity of Ap­plied Sci­ences Bre­men and Carl Skel­ton from the BxmC Brook­lyn Ex­per­i­men­tal Media Cen­ter of the Poly­tech­nic In­sti­tute of the New York Uni­ver­sity.

Chair Per­son: He­lene Black
Pre­sen­ters: Ian­nis Zan­nos, George Ka­todry­tis & Yian­nis Co­lakide

This panel will dis­cuss how oral­ity and tech­nol­ogy in the arts, through so­cial nar­ra­tives and urban de­ter­mi­nants, trans­mute re­sult­ing in lo­calised adopted new forms.  The pro­found changes that have in­flu­enced artis­tic cre­ative processes by dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy are lead­ing to a re­de­f­i­n­i­tion of both the role of the artist and the re­la­tion­ship be­tween artist and au­di­ence. It has been thor­oughly dis­cussed that dig­i­tal media art forms have a ten­dency to aban­don the clear-cut di­vi­sion be­tween in­di­vid­ual cre­ator and au­di­ence and move to­wards col­lec­tive sit­u­a­tions where au­thor­ship is shared be­tween many.

(Alexan­der 2007, Austin 2007, Bakioglu 2007, Pet­titt 2007). This panel dis­cusses how elec­tronic arts and tech­nol­ogy re­late to col­lec­tive and non-writ­ten as­pects of cul­ture. It ex­am­ines both spon­ta­neous processes sup­ported by the na­ture of dig­i­tal media and con­scious strate­gies that build on per­cep­tion and oral­ity in glo­cal cul­ture. The panel will pre­sent and dis­cuss is­sues re­lated to this topic cen­tral to their col­lab­o­ra­tive re­search as par­tic­i­pants in  the NeMe ini­ti­ated pro­ject Through the Road­blocks which was first pre­sented in May 22, 2009 at the e-Mo­bi­LArt con­fer­ence dur­ing the Thes­sa­loniki Bi­en­nial. This pro­ject in­ves­ti­gates how ideas and con­cepts are adopted and as­sim­i­lated re­gard­less of po­lit­i­cal, cul­tural and spa­cial bound­aries. A team of cu­ra­tors, cul­tural man­agers, schol­ars and artists lo­cated in 10 coun­tries span­ning from Aus­tralia to UK and from Turkey to Is­rael and Pales­tine have been in­vited and their pro­pos­als are cur­rently under de­vel­op­ment promis­ing a rich va­ri­ety of in­ter­pre­ta­tions which will de­fine the sec­ond stage of the pro­ject. The third phase is planned to take place in Cyprus in 2012.

Chair Per­son: Kristy Kang
Pre­sen­ters: Rose­mary Comella & An­dreas Kratky

This panel will pre­sent a body of work by media artists, schol­ars and col­lab­o­ra­tors who com­prise The Labyrinth Pro­ject – a Los An­ge­les based re­search ini­tia­tive on in­ter­ac­tive nar­ra­tive at the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia’s School of Cin­e­matic Arts. Under the di­rec­tion of cul­tural the­o­rist Mar­sha Kinder since 1997, Labyrinth has been work­ing at the pres­sure point be­tween the­ory and prac­tice. With media artists Rose­mary Comella, Kristy H.A. Kang and Scott Mahoy work­ing as cre­ative di­rec­tors, Labyrinth been pro­duc­ing award-win­ning mul­ti­me­dia pro­jects that jux­ta­pose fic­tional and his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive in provoca­tive ways. In the process, Labyrinth has pi­o­neered a new form of dig­i­tal schol­ar­ship com­bin­ing archival cul­tural his­tory and artis­tic prac­tice. Their “data­base doc­u­men­taries” an­i­mate the archive and make his­tory come alive for a wide range of au­di­ences across the pub­lic sphere. Labyrinth de­signs their in­ter­ac­tive works as trans­me­dia net­works—in­stal­la­tions, DVD-ROMs, and web­sites.

Their pro­jects ap­pear not only in cy­ber­space but also in the net­worked pub­lic spaces of mu­se­ums, sci­ence cen­ters, and other pub­lic venues. Labyrinth’s pro­jects all grow out of broad, multi-tiered col­lab­o­ra­tions with artists, schol­ars, sci­en­tists, stu­dents, archivists, mu­se­ums and cul­tural in­sti­tu­tions. In the process, Labyrinth has de­vel­oped three sig­na­ture gen­res: the dig­i­tal city sym­phony that ex­plores urban space through lay­ers of time; the in­ter­ac­tive mem­oir that probes the net­worked mem­o­ries and lived ex­pe­ri­ence of com­plex in­di­vid­u­als; and in­ter­ac­tive sci­ence ed­u­ca­tion that ex­plores the in­ter­play be­tween bi­ol­ogy and cul­ture and the re­spec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion sys­tems of art and sci­ence. Sev­eral of their works com­bine these gen­res. This panel will ex­plore the di­verse ap­proaches and work­ing method­olo­gies for de­sign­ing trans­me­dia nar­ra­tive ex­pe­ri­ences across a va­ri­ety of pub­lic spaces by show­cas­ing se­lected pro­jects from Labyrinth’s reper­toire of in­ter­ac­tive cul­tural his­to­ries and by pre­sent­ing emerg­ing works pro­duced by col­lab­o­ra­tors and mem­bers of the Labyrinth ini­tia­tive.

Chair Per­son: Dew Har­ri­son
Pre­sen­ters: Paul Ser­mon, Ian Gwilt, Julie Pen­fold, Denise Doyle & Anita McK­e­own

On the thresh­old of cross­ing over being nei­ther real nor vir­tual, an os­cil­la­tion be­tween two states of ex­is­tence, on­line-of­fline, awake but dream­ing in a sub-con­scious­ness state, the bub­ble be­tween start­ing and ar­riv­ing, the in-be­tween, a dis­ap­pear­ance, the third space … Con­sid­er­ing the di­verse de­ter­mi­na­tions as to what the lim­i­nal means in our dig­i­tally dri­ven cul­ture this panel asks ‘To what ex­tent are artists dig­i­tally fa­cil­i­tat­ing con­vivial spaces where par­tic­i­pants can en­gagewith and co-cre­ate an art work?’. Six dif­fer­ent ap­proaches are dis­played within the panel ex­per­tise to in­ter­ro­gate dig­i­tally fa­cil­i­tated lim­i­nal­ity as ei­ther a trans­for­ma­tive space of cre­ative tran­scen­dence, or a con­vivial and so­cial space where art can hap­pen. Dig­i­tal media and new tech­nol­ogy is re­con­fig­ur­ing our re­la­tion­ship with the world and is also af­fect­ing how artists re­late with their pub­lic. Now tech­nolo­gies can help to po­si­tion art into the every­day of peo­ple’s lives and ac­tiv­i­ties, out­side the gallery space. Dig­i­tally en­abled new spaces have opened up where artists can en­gage with au­di­ences in a par­tic­i­pa­tory ex­pe­ri­ence. Within the cityscapes of our urban en­vi­ron­ments ‘Big brother’ media and cctv sur­veil­lance allow for few in­for­mal, un­governed so­cial meet­ing places so it is the cre­ation of in­ter­stices be­tween the for­mal con­structed and ob­served so­cial spaces that artists are in­ter­ested in, where un­ortho­dox art can hap­pen and en­gage di­rectly with its au­di­ence. Dig­i­tal media pro­vides such re­la­tional op­por­tu­ni­ties but as vir­tual plat­forms where ac­cess­ing them means step­ping from one world to the other, a con­cep­tual mov­ing from one state of being to an­other. Con­tra to hu­man-to-avatar ex­pe­ri­ence, vir­tual ob­jects are trans­formed into a solid ma­te­ri­al­ity by cross­ing this thresh­old. The thresh­old is then a magic al­chem­i­cal space, an in­ter­stice be­tween the real and the vir­tual, a mo­ment of change, of be­com­ing other.  Artists con­tinue to ex­plore the no­tion of the ‘lim­i­nal’ that has arisen with the evo­lu­tion of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy. Through this panel we hope to fur­ther in­ter­ro­gate cur­rent con­tem­po­rary un­der­stand­ings of this amor­phous state of pres­ence by gen­er­at­ing dis­cus­sion and ar­gu­ment around its na­ture.
Ques­tions to be raised:

1. Does cross­ing the thresh­old from real to vir­tual spaces re­quire a trans­for­ma­tive ob­ject or is this a mat­ter of re­fram­ing our con­scious self-aware­ness?
2. Can dig­i­tally en­hanced ma­te­r­ial spaces allow a phys­i­cal step through to an ‘other’ ex­pe­ri­ence?
3. How do we freeze the mo­ment of such pass­ing to ac­knowl­edge our changed state of con­scious being?
4. Is lim­i­nal­ity a nec­es­sary and pos­i­tive at­tribute to mod­ern life in our tech­no­cratic cul­ture?

Chair Per­son: Seeta Peña Gan­gad­ha­ran
Pre­sen­ters: Jon Lei­decker, Joshua Kit Clay­ton, John Kim, An­thony Tran & Vasily Tru­bet­skoy

Work­ing across the arts, music, and pol­i­tics, this panel con­sid­ers the dy­nam­ics of power in me­di­ated par­tic­i­pa­tion. Bor­row­ing its title from the work of Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, who ques­tioned the le­git­i­macy of par­tic­i­pa­tory de­vel­op­ment pro­jects led by the World Bank and other in­ter-gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies, this panel ad­dresses the un­in­tended con­se­quences of, and the power strug­gles in, col­lab­o­ra­tive music plat­forms, so­cial net­works, wire­less in­fra­struc­tures and open gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives. The pur­pose is to ex­plore the con­struc­tion and val­u­a­tion of par­tic­i­pa­tory dis­courses, de­signs, or ex­pe­ri­ences and chal­lenge re­ceived wis­dom of par­tic­i­pa­tion’s power. When does the dis­course of par­tic­i­pa­tion mask power? Who has ac­tual ver­sus per­ceived au­thor­ity? How do bot­tom-up, col­lab­o­ra­tive-based, lev­eled so­cial, cul­tural, and po­lit­i­cal ex­per­i­ments cre­ate new in­equal­i­ties?

Chair Per­son: Maria Mi­randa
Pre­sen­ters: Bran­don La­Belle, Dar­ren Tofts, Re­nate Ferro & Tim­o­thy Mur­ray

With the growth of the in­ter­net and mo­bile tele­phony across the globe we are wit­ness­ing new con­fig­u­ra­tions of pub­lic space and pub­lic cul­ture. In his con­clu­sion to the book Net­worked Publics, Kazys Var­nelis de­scribes this new state of af­fairs as net­work cul­ture and pro­poses that net­work cul­ture has re­placed the log­ics of both mod­ernism and post­mod­ernism, be­com­ing the dom­i­nant cul­tural logic of our age. As the con­di­tions of net­work cul­ture ex­pand many artists are forg­ing a new re­la­tion­ship with the in­ter­net, not as a medium, but rather as an­other site of their work. Today it is not the vir­tual as a sep­a­rate space apart that is of in­ter­est, but the fact that the lay­er­ing of the vir­tual sits be­side every­day life through con­nec­tion. For many artists the in­ter­net is now act­ing as one site of the work as well as an­other form of pub­lic space. These artists are leav­ing the stu­dio be­hind, mov­ing and work­ing in pub­lic spaces, in a process that is both mo­bile and no­madic.

Un­sitely Aes­thet­ics refers to a par­tic­u­lar aes­thet­ics that has emerged with this mo­bile and no­madic shift in artis­tic prac­tices. Un­sitely plays with the fig­ure of site, a well-re­hearsed fig­ure in con­tem­po­rary art, but sug­gests a cur­rent dis­tur­bance of both sit­ed­ness and sight­li­ness. These un­sitely/un­sightly works utilise a DIY ap­proach un­con­cerned with is­sues of beauty or tra­di­tional no­tions of spec­ta­tor­ship, and they often use laugh­ter and hu­mour to get at some­thing else. While un­sitely up­sets site’s sin­gu­lar lo­ca­tion it sug­gests a space of ten­sion, am­bi­gu­ity and po­ten­tial. This panel ex­plores the mul­ti­ple and di­verse ways artists are work­ing in pub­lic space within the con­text of net­work cul­ture where being in two places at once, or the su­per­im­pos­ti­tion of real and vir­tual space has be­come the com­mon ex­pe­ri­ence. How is net­work cul­ture shift­ing the no­tion of both place and pub­lic art for spa­tial media art prac­tices? In par­tic­u­lar how is the in­ter­net a site/un­site of pub­lic art? How does site work in media art prac­tices that exist across media and in dif­fer­ent places?

Chair Per­son: Ian Gwilt
Pre­sen­ters: Dew Har­ri­son, Mar­tin Rieser & Suzette Wor­den

This panel will ex­plore the no­tion that con­tem­po­rary cre­ative prac­tice is in­creas­ingly tak­ing place in and be­tween ana­logue and dig­i­tal cul­tures. And that by en­fold­ing the cre­ative processes in­her­ent within these two en­vi­ron­ments we can gen­er­ate richly in­formed cre­ative out­comes that build on the qual­i­ties of both dig­i­tal and ma­te­r­ial cul­ture. This work­ing in and be­tween dig­i­tal and ana­logue en­vi­ron­ments, to­ward the gen­er­a­tion of cre­ative works is the essence of what the panel will dis­cuss as cross or vari­able re­al­ity cre­ative prac­tices. The panel will con­sider the po­ten­tial for mak­ing within and across dig­i­tal/ma­te­r­ial en­vi­ron­ments through the pre­sen­ta­tion of their own re­search/prac­tice.

Chair Per­son: Nell Ten­haaf & Mónica Bello Bugallo
Pre­sen­ters: Sally Jane Nor­man, Paul Vanouse, Sonia Cil­lari & Jose-Car­los Mari­ategui

For this panel, we will an­a­lyze new dis­courses and modes in art and ar­ti­fi­cial life re­search. This will be placed in re­la­tion to re­cent out­comes of the com­pu­ta­tional sci­ences to­gether with the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary de­vel­op­ments and dis­courses of the life sci­ences. The focus will be specif­i­cally on: cre­ative modes en­gaged with dy­namic liv­ing processes that have been af­fected by sim­u­la­tion, ex­plo­rations in syn­thetic life sys­tems, en­vi­ron­men­tal vi­su­al­iza­tions, hy­brid spaces, aug­mented and mixed re­al­ity land­scapes and prospec­tive meth­ods and de­vices.

Chair Per­sons: Patrick Lichty & Susan Eliz­a­beth Ryan
Pre­sen­ters: Gre­gory Lit­tle, Elle Mehrmand, Micha Cárde­nas & Stephanie Rothen­berg

In 1969 Gilles Deleuze the­o­rized the “BwO” or Body With­out Or­gans (in The Logic of the Sense, after Ar­taud’s orig­i­nal term). It refers to the vir­tual di­men­sion of the body and its po­ten­tials, likened to the egg as site of em­bod­i­ment (in Deleuze and Guat­tari’s Anti-Oedi­pus)—a set of mul­ti­ple po­ten­tial­i­ties as well as dys­func­tional rep­e­ti­tions. In this panel we seek to ex­plore the re­la­tions be­tween fleshly bod­ies and dig­i­tized ones as sites of em­bod­i­ment for our cur­rent, in­for­mat­i­cally en­er­gized ex­is­tences. From Face­book re­la­tion­ships to per­for­mances in Sec­ond Life, many of us ex­pe­ri­ence var­i­ous parts of our lives vir­tu­ally today. But how are these ex­pe­ri­ences ab­sorbed into our so-called “real lives”?  In what ways do our vir­tual and phys­i­cal spaces in­ter­sect—are they ag­glom­er­ated re­al­i­ties (Har­away), or em­bed­ded in some on­to­log­i­cal con­tin­uum?

There have been con­tro­ver­sies and sup­port­ing stud­ies (esp. con­cern­ing vir­tual games) sug­gest­ing that ex­cess so­cial me­di­a­tion is harm­ful to­wards our “sense of re­al­ity” and abil­ity to in­ter­act in so­ci­ety. But re­searchers of vir­tual life like Nick Yee (Di­rec­tor of the Daedalus Pro­ject sur­vey of MMO play­ers) have shown that avatar ex­pe­ri­ences pos­i­tively af­fect our phys­i­cal lives and per­son­al­i­ties. Still, new re­search sup­ports old wis­dom that too much vir­tu­al­ity is harm­ful to­ward our “sense of re­al­ity” and abil­ity to in­ter­act in so­ci­ety. How are we to think about our bod­ies and their vir­tual dou­bles? Artists and de­sign­ers know the meta­physics of the BwO. They have cre­ated in­no­v­a­tive ways to ex­plore how vir­tual ex­pe­ri­ences can rad­i­cally trans­form our real-world iden­ti­ties, as with Micha Cárde­nas’s Be­com­ing Dragon (2008); or so­cioe­co­nom­i­cally im­pact the phys­i­cal world, as did Rothen­berg and Crouse’s In­vis­i­ble Threads/Dou­ble­Hap­pi­ness Jeans pro­ject (2007-8). The ses­sion will ad­dress both art­works and the­o­ret­i­cal frame­works that en­gage our repli­cated bod­ies, the af­fec­tive re­la­tions they cre­ate, and trans­ver­sal ef­fects across mul­ti­ple en­vi­ron­ments, plat­forms, and phys­i­cal ap­pear­ances.

Chair Per­son: Peter Richard­son
Pre­sen­ters: Ste­fan Müller Arisona, Steve Gib­son & Chris­t­ian Schnei­der

Vi­sual ef­fects (VFX) are the var­i­ous com­puter gen­er­ated processes by which im­agery is cre­ated and or ma­nip­u­lated out­side the con­text of a live ac­tion film shoot. Tra­di­tion­ally mov­ing image vi­sual medi­ums in a per­for­ma­tive / gallery con­text have been pri­mar­ily ex­pe­ri­enced as “play­back” medi­ums, in which ma­te­r­ial is fixed in time and is played from be­gin­ning to end. Real-time vi­su­als on the other hand re­quire the in­ter­ven­tion of a per­former or a user. In the case of the VJ or live film­maker, he or she chooses the video clips in real-time, se­lects the op­tions for ef­fects and de­ter­mines the com­posit­ing of im­ages and ef­fects. Re­cently a num­ber of (tra­di­tional) Nar­ra­tive film mak­ers have moved away from struc­tural nar­ra­tive and into the realm of ‘live cin­ema’, remix­ing their films for au­di­ences as a per­for­ma­tive ex­pe­ri­ence. This raises in­ter­est­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties to ex­tend the genre with a per­for­ma­tive art based ap­proach. British di­rec­tors Peter Green­away and Mike Fig­gis in­creas­ingly work with this method. The ‘live cin­ema’ ex­pe­ri­ence is gen­er­ally lim­ited to pre shot or cap­tured vi­su­als which are processed or remixed. As yet few have at­tempted to in­cor­po­rate ‘live’ vi­sual ef­fects as part of this cin­e­matic ex­pe­ri­ence. “VFX Remixed” seeks to stim­u­late de­bate and gen­er­ate the­o­ret­i­cal pro­to­types for live cin­ema ex­pe­ri­ences that uti­lize the tech­nolo­gies of VFX and com­bine to cre­ate a more im­mer­sive cin­e­matic per­for­mance ex­pe­ri­ence. Areas of in­ter­est in­clude au­dio-vi­sual per­for­mance VJ(ing), phys­i­cal and se­ri­ous gam­ing, com­puter-based in­stal­la­tions in­cor­po­rat­ing real-time vi­sual pro­cess­ing.

Chair Per­son: Norie Neu­mark
Pre­sen­ters: Ner­min Say­basili, Igor Stro­ma­jer & Is­abelle Arvers

There is an un­canny qual­ity to voice in elec­tronic arts, vis­cer­ally car­ry­ing bod­ily in­ti­ma­cies to the lis­tener through phys­i­cal spaces, yet dis­lo­cated from the speaker’s body through re­pro­duc­tion and trans­mis­sion. The dig­i­tal voice is para­dox­i­cally human and ma­chinic – in­ti­mate and in­tense,  as it con­nects sub­jec­tiv­i­ties on the one hand and the dig­i­tally ab­stract on the other hand,  as it passes through ma­chines on to the other. Whether voices call to us across the in­ter­net, or across the smaller space of an in­stal­la­tion, or from the small screen of ma­chin­ima, media artists have found this para­dox­i­cal and un­canny qual­ity al­lur­ing and have worked with it across a range of media and emo­tional ranges. While voice is often dis­cussed in a po­lit­i­cal and metaphor­i­cal sense (giv­ing peo­ple a voice through media) the aim of this panel is to ad­dress the aes­thet­ics of voice in media art. Voice, with all its para­doxes and am­bi­gu­i­ties, is over-ripe for the the­o­ret­i­cal and art­tis­tic en­gage­ment that Roland Barthes in­vited with his now very fa­mil­iar con­cept of grain of the voice.  And voice with its in­ti­ma­cies, its in­ten­si­ties, its aes­thetic rich­ness, is all the more di­verse and com­plex in the age when grain has be­come gran­u­lar syn­the­sis. Voice moves across and de­fines spaces and re­la­tion­ships, it res­onates and re-sounds. It in­vokes, pro­vokes, con­vokes. The panel will ad­dress such com­plex­i­ties of voice in the cur­rent dig­i­tal and net­worked mo­ment of elec­tronic art by bring­ing to the fore the dy­namic re­la­tion­ship be­tween tech­nique and tech­nol­ogy and cul­ture, by in­clud­ing the­o­rists and artists in the panel dis­cus­sion.

Chair Per­son: Nina Wen­hart

Pre­sen­ters:

1. Rosa Menkman  – The Col­lapse of PAL
2. Melissa Bar­ron – Glitch Weav­ings
3. Daniela Kuka – Dis­or­der
4. Nina Wen­hart – <3break(s)core: an in­ap­pro­pri­a­tion

Dig­i­tal corpses all abound, zom­bie data that is still there, but can­not be per­formed any­more. Change is in­evitable, if the art­work should sur­vive. Be­sides the archivists’ ef­forts to re­vive the work in its orig­i­nal state, artists have de­vel­oped their own strate­gies of em­brac­ing the er­rors and glitches of re/de/transcod­ing processes.

Codecs, pro­grams, pro­to­cols and for­mats that are not sup­ported any­more have be­come cre­ative chal­lenges and often ini­ti­ate sub­ver­sive prac­tices. Not THAT, but HOW a work is changed and dis­torted be­comes the choice of the artist. In this process, the orig­i­nal and its res­ur­rec­tion enter a di­a­logue and open up ques­tions that go be­yond the sur­face, a di­alec­tics of orig­i­nal and copy, same­ness and change, ob­so­les­cence and progress, mem­ory and for­get­ting, sur­vival and death. And as the orig­i­nal (file) is dead, the orig­i­nal (as a con­cept) is re­born at the same time.

Artis­tic strate­gies of re/de/transcod­ing and serendipi­dous er­rors are po­si­tioned as an an­tithe­sis to an elit­ist or naive eu­pho­ria of con­stant tech­no­log­i­cal progress i.e. per­fec­tion. Nev­er­the­less, they are not nos­tal­gic but cel­e­brate a handson ap­proach where the code be­comes tan­gi­ble and ma­te­r­ial, lit­er­ally.

Chair Per­son: Stephanie Rothen­berg

Pre­sen­ters:

1. Michael Eddy, Elaine Ho & Emi Ue­mura – Home­Shop
2. Liu Yan & Aaa­jiao (Xu Wenkai) – Xin­dan­wei: Work­space, Cre­ative Net­work and Com­mu­nity
3. Defne Ayas – Asym­me­tries in the Con­trol of In­for­ma­tion and Ideas
4. Xi­aoy­ing Juli­ette Yuan – Cu­rat­ing New Media Art in China: A Cre­ative Ap­proach from Within
5. Sheng Jie (gogoj) – SHAN Stu­dio

“@China, Vir­tu­ally Speak­ing” lever­ages on­line and vir­tual plat­forms to bring to­gether a group of ge­o­graph­i­cally dis­persed art and de­sign col­lec­tives and in­di­vid­u­als through­out China to re­flect on the topic of “open source”. In this vir­tual round table dis­cus­sion, pan­elists will ad­dress how no­tions of  “open source” are being trans­lated and ap­plied cross-cul­tur­ally to gen­er­ate new mod­els of cul­tural pro­duc­tion and so­cial prac­tice within the po­lit­i­cal and eco­nomic bound­aries of China. For par­tic­i­pants not phys­i­cally pre­sent at the con­fer­ence, the di­a­logue will be en­abled through a live stream of Skype video and the vir­tual en­vi­ron­ment of Sec­ond Life.

The art and de­sign col­lec­tives in­vited to par­tic­i­pate on this panel are all chal­leng­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of what has be­come a highly com­mer­cial­ized art mar­ket and cor­po­ra­tized cre­ative in­dus­try in China through their cul­ti­va­tion of col­lab­o­ra­tive al­ter­na­tive spaces and un­con­ven­tional ex­hi­bi­tion and dis­cur­sive plat­forms. Pan­elists will dis­cuss how new tech­nolo­gies are being uti­lized and the ways in which par­tic­i­pa­tory and sit­u­a­tional modes of art and de­sign pro­duc­tion are being en­gaged mak­ing way for more emer­gent forms of prac­tice in both rural and urban lo­ca­tions.

Ques­tions the panel will ad­dress in­clude: What strate­gies are cul­tural pro­duc­ers em­ploy­ing to move be­yond the red door of on­line media cen­sor­ship? What is the re­la­tion­ship and in­ter­fac­ing of al­ter­na­tive spaces to local and in­dige­nous com­mu­ni­ties? What is the im­pact of these al­ter­na­tive spaces and pro­duc­tion mod­els on the Chi­nese art world and cre­ative in­dus­tries?

Part of the dis­cus­sion will also in­clude a re­port back from the 2011 Con­ti­nen­tal Drift in China that sev­eral of the pan­elists and the Chair will have par­tic­i­pated in over the sum­mer. This ex­per­i­men­tal re­search-based trip across China co-fa­cil­i­tated by Brian Holmes and Claire Pen­te­cost ex­am­ines the geopo­lit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tions of the coun­try through the lens of ur­ban­ism/ru­ral­ism.

Chair Per­son: Elif Ayiter

Pre­sen­ters: Selim Balcisoy, Murat Ger­men, Yacov Sharir, Diane Gro­mala & Mar­garet Dolin­sky

We have come to rec­og­nize the vast po­ten­tial of Vir­tual Re­al­ity en­vi­ron­ments as pow­er­ful agents of change, both on a per­sonal as well as on a so­cially in­ter­ac­tive level. Thus, this panel will dis­cuss the im­ple­men­ta­tion of Vir­tu­al­ity Re­al­ity tech­nolo­gies in the fields of heal­ing and of per­sonal growth, learn­ing, as well as an all im­por­tant re-cap­tur­ing of po­ten­tially lost adult play­ful­ness through three di­men­sional vir­tual pres­ence and im­mer­sion.
In this panel we pro­pose to look at Vir­tual Re­alites in their on­line as well as stand­alone man­i­fes­ta­tions with a spe­cial con­sid­er­a­tion for its ca­pa­bil­i­ties in pro­duc­ing emo­tional, per­cep­tual, be­hav­ioral changes in their users. That these changes ex­tend be­yond the ac­tual im­mer­sion and con­tinue into the every­day ex­is­tence of par­tic­i­pa­tors has been pre­vi­ously es­tab­lished by Yee and Bailen­son (2007). Be­yond their con­sid­er­able per­sua­sive ca­pa­bilites as we know them today, look­ing into the fu­ture, Biocca (1997) dis­cusses the pos­si­bil­ity of de­vel­op­ing a medium that al­lows greater ac­cess to the in­tel­li­gence, in­ten­tions and sen­sory im­pres­sions of an­other per­son through the usage of Vir­tual Re­al­ity en­vi­ron­ments and the em­bod­ied agent therin, a state which he calles Hy­per­p­res­ence: Propos­ing sen­sor based tech­nolo­gies, used in con­junc­tion with im­mer­sive three di­men­sional Vir­tual Re­al­ity Biocca points at the pos­si­bil­ity of a novel com­mu­ni­ca­tion codes which may en­hance/am­plify and even ex­tend be­yond spo­ken lan­guage and non-ver­bal codes such as fa­cial ex­pres­sion, pos­ture, touch, and mo­tion, that  “these can aug­ment the in­ten­tional and un­in­ten­tional cues used in in­ter­per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion to as­sess the emo­tional states and in­ten­tions of oth­ers” (Biocca, 1997).
In light of and an aware­ness of such of­fer­ings, both cur­rent and fu­ture, we have come to rec­og­nize the vast po­ten­tial of Vir­tual Re­al­ity en­vi­ron­ments as pow­er­ful agents of change, both on a per­sonal as well as on a so­cially in­ter­ac­tive level. What will thus be under scrutiny is how Vir­tual Re­al­ity based art­work can be ac­tu­al­ized within such a process: The im­plemeta­tion of Vir­tu­al­ity Re­al­ity tech­nolo­gies in the fields of heal­ing and of per­sonal growth, learn­ing, as well as an all im­por­tant re-cap­tur­ing of po­ten­tially lost adult play­ful­ness through three di­men­sional vir­tual pres­ence and im­mer­sion will be some of the sub­jects under dis­cus­sion.

Chairs:  Kris Paulsen & Mered­ith Hoy
Pre­sen­ters: Zabet Pat­ter­son & Laura U. Marks

This panel will in­ves­ti­gate the his­tory of ab­stract mov­ing image work from early com­puter films, to the first video syn­the­sizer im­ages, to cur­rent work in gen­er­a­tive, al­go­rith­mic art. Un­like typ­i­cal im­ages de­rived from film and video, which cap­ture in­dex­i­cal traces of the scenes and ob­jects in front of their lenses, these works gen­er­ate im­agery with­out ref­er­ents and often with­out cam­eras. Early com­puter an­i­ma­tions ex­per­i­mented with the trans­la­tion of code into graph­ics, video syn­the­siz­ers mapped elec­tric im­pulses di­rectly onto the scrolling field of the cath­ode ray tube, where as gen­er­a­tive art uses com­pu­ta­tional al­go­rithms to de­fine a set of rules which au­to­mat­i­cally set into mo­tion and ever chang­ing vi­sual land­scape.

The pa­pers on this panel chal­lenge the par­tic­u­lar model of vi­su­al­ity pro­posed by a tra­di­tional un­der­stand­ing of film. They trace out a long his­tory of gen­er­a­tive art, root­ing new media prac­tices in ex­per­i­men­tal work of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The work of John and James Whit­ney, Stephen Beck, and Casey Reas model an al­ter­na­tive his­tory of mov­ing im­ages that priv­i­leges ab­strac­tion over rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and pro­ce­dure over mimetic cap­ture of the nat­ural world.  In an ef­fort to make some­thing rad­i­cally new, these artists refer to older his­to­ries of knowl­edge and make ex­plicit ref­er­ence out­side of the lex­i­con of West­ern vi­su­al­ity to the East­ern fig­ures of arabesques and man­dalas. Like these spir­i­tual mo­tifs, the artists aim to cre­ate types of im­agery that ex­ceed the vis­i­ble ma­te­r­ial world by mak­ing works of pure light. In doing so, they not only au­thor an al­ter­na­tive his­tory of film, but also hy­poth­e­size a meta­physics of the screen. The pa­pers on this panel chal­lenge the par­tic­u­lar model of vi­su­al­ity pro­posed by a tra­di­tional un­der­stand­ing of film.

Oc­cur­ring within the scope of the 12th Is­tan­bul Bi­en­nial Par­al­lel Events and ISEA2011

A dis­cus­sion in two ses­sions on the oc­ca­sion of the 12th Is­tan­bul Bi­en­nial and ISEA2011 at the Con­sulate Gen­eral of The King­dom of The Nether­lands, Istanbul.

Today the trend in art and crit­i­cal the­ory often pre­sents a pro­gram fo­cus­ing on so­cial is­sues and con­cerns rather than aes­thet­ics. The con­tem­po­rary bi­en­nial, one of the hy­per­tro­phied ex­hi­bi­tion plat­forms of our global pre­sent, serves as the locus op­ti­mus for this focus. This type of ex­hi­bi­tion has be­come a stage for artists, cu­ra­tors and spec­ta­tors to re­flect and spec­u­late on our cur­rent con­di­tion. But has art be­come solely a ve­hi­cle for so­cial com­men­tary? And what is the role of the media in art prac­tice and ex­hi­bi­tion are­nas? How does media – in­clud­ing in­ter­net, twit­ter and so­cial net­works – serve as a tool for the art to con­vey larger is­sues? Does media de­moc­ra­tize our so­ci­ety, or is the de­moc­ra­ti­za­tion of media in fact a false­hood? The re-me­di­a­tion of our so­ci­ety is re-me­di­at­ing both its epis­te­mo­log­i­cal and on­to­log­i­cal sta­tus, with un­ex­pected ef­fects. Artists, cu­ra­tors and media spe­cial­ists are in­vited to con­verse about these top­ics and to elab­o­rate on their pro­fes­sional prac­tice and point of view within the field of bi­en­nial-mak­ing and con­tem­po­rary art.

Chair Per­son: Marc Tuters
Pre­sen­ters: Tris­tan Thiel­mann, Mark Shep­ard & Michiel de Lange

In 2006 Var­nelis and Tuters pub­lished “Be­yond Loca­tive Media”, which dis­cussed the emer­gence of loca­tive media as “the next big thing”. Five years on, with the ubiq­uity of iphones, loca­tive media has be­come banal. Loca­tive media had been much an­tic­i­pated within the media art world, no­tably at the ISEA symposia in 2004 & 2006 after which it en­tered pop­u­lar cul­ture as a trope in William Gib­son’s last two nov­els. Yet while it may have faded from the avant-garde, there is a thriv­ing loca­tive dis­course in aca­d­e­mic jour­nals, as­so­ci­ated with the “spa­tial turn” in media stud­ies. This panel con­sid­ers the role of loca­tive media in the arts and hu­man­i­ties dis­course. The afore­men­tioned text framed loca­tive media in terms of neo-Sit­u­a­tion­ist tac­tics which sought to ac­tively imag­ine an al­ter­nate city. While loca­tive prac­ti­cioners did not share the op­po­si­tional pol­i­tics of their net art pre­cur­sors, one can not help but won­der if some greater po­ten­tial for the medium has not per­haps been fore­closed by a par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture that sug­gests lit­tle more than re­con­fig­ur­ing ideas from past.

William Gib­son no longer writes about cy­ber­space in the fu­ture, but in­stead about loca­tive art in the atem­po­ral pre­sent. Hav­ing emerged in the mid-’00’s from media arts, loca­tive media are now part of the con­sumer tech­nol­ogy and pop­u­lar cul­ture. This panel dis­cusses the value of this con­cept in re­la­tion to de­bates at the in­ter­sec­tion of ur­ban­ism and media stud­ies, and con­sid­ers the (non)ex­is­tence of a loca­tive avant-garde.

Chair Per­sons: Marie-Pier Boucher & Jen­nifer Wil­let
Pre­sen­ters: Tagny Duff & Paul Vanouse

Biotech­nol­ogy forces a restag­ing of the ecol­ogy of our re­la­tions with other species: with biotech­nol­ogy we are now able to breed, to birth, gen­er­a­tional life forms that serve as tools, sub­jects and em­bod­ied tech­nolo­gies that in turn in­ter­act with and alter our bod­ies, and the planet’s ecol­ogy. This panel will pro­pose al­ter­na­tive mod­els (artis­tic and the­o­ret­i­cal) to the pro­lif­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal metaphors in de­scrib­ing biotech­no­log­i­cal pro­to­cols. Draw­ing upon the trans­for­ma­tive power of bioart in cre­at­ing new con­cep­tual and prac­ti­cal tools found in bi­o­log­i­cal ma­te­ri­al­ity, our dis­cus­sion will re­volve around a large col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­ject called BioART­CAMP. BioART­CAMP is best de­scribed as a bioart camp­ing ex­pe­di­tion in the Cana­dian Rocky Moun­tains where the Rock­ies will serve as a dra­matic in­car­na­tion of an ex­ter­nal ecol­ogy for six artists, two sci­en­tists and two the­o­rists to build a work­ing biotech lab­o­ra­tory as part of a du­ra­tional per­for­mance.

Bioart in­trin­si­cally in­vites us to en­gage the com­plex­i­ties of the ma­nip­u­la­tion of life to­wards human ends by forc­ing us to con­sider the moral and eth­i­cal im­pli­ca­tions that the artist (and viewer) must as­cribe to the ma­te­ri­al­ity of the work. In the form of a de­brief­ing after a bioart camp­ing trip, our dis­cus­sion will focus on the per­for­ma­tive re­la­tion­ships bi­o­log­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries pos­sess with ex­ter­nal ecolo­gies. These per­for­ma­tive re­la­tions, we will show, amount to the con­sid­er­a­tion of biotech­no­log­i­cally shaped en­vi­ron­ments in terms of con­nec­tions be­tween mi­lieus of in­te­ri­or­ity and mi­lieus of ex­te­ri­or­ity, in terms of topo­log­i­cal con­nec­tions; biotopolo­gies. We will in­ves­ti­gate (1) how biotopo­log­i­cal prac­tices af­fects liv­ing’s spa­tial con­di­tions; (2) how the pro­duc­tion and ma­nip­u­la­tion of liv­ing or­gan­isms (Biodegrad­able In­cu­ba­tor, An­i­mal En­rich­ment, Deep Woods PCR (Poly­merase Chain Re­ac­tion)) in open ecolo­gies af­fect the evo­lu­tion of biotech­nolo­gies and their di­rect links with larger eco­log­i­cal con­cerns and; (3) how these in­ter­ven­tions re­con­fig­ure our modes of un­der­stand­ing bi­o­log­i­cal ma­te­ri­al­ity. In brief, our panel will draw upon a sci­ence/art col­lab­o­ra­tion in order to dis­cuss biotech­nolo­gies’ spa­tial, eco­log­i­cal, ma­te­r­ial and eth­i­cal im­pli­ca­tions.

Our panel will draw upon a sci­ence/art col­lab­o­ra­tion in order to dis­cuss biotech­nolo­gies’ spa­tial, eco­log­i­cal, ma­te­r­ial and eth­i­cal im­pli­ca­tions.

Chair Per­son: Rie Saito
Presenters: Miyuki Endo & Machiko Kusa­hara

What was the crit­i­cal point of Japan­ese post­war avant-garde art when re-look­ing today’s art scene?  How have they in­flu­enced con­tem­po­rary art, cul­ture, and so­ci­ety until pre­sent?

Through these pre­sen­ta­tions, the im­por­tance of Japan­ese post­war avant-garde art will be clar­i­fied and how they af­fected the cur­rent art will be dis­cussed in de­tail. Three top­ics will be pre­sented to re­con­sider the body image in con­tem­po­rary arts, es­pe­cially from the view of media and the art as a per­for­mance. The work of At­suko Tanaka from GUTAI, Kat­suhiro Ya­m­aguchi and the work of Kenji Yanobe will be ex­am­ined.

The first pre­sen­ta­tion will mainly focus on the work of At­suko Tanaka (1932-2005), one of the main artists of GUTAI move­ment that oc­curred in west­ern re­gion of Japan in 1950’s.  By an­a­lyz­ing her works from cul­tural and so­ci­o­log­i­cal con­text, flu­id­ity and am­bi­gu­ity in gen­der and the body within the con­text of cur­rent media art will be ex­am­ined.  Re-think­ing early emer­gence of Japan­ese post­war art and fo­cus­ing on the ge­neal­ogy of con­tem­po­rary avant-garde art will bring a new mean­ing in a pre­sent new media art. More­over, Japan­ese mul­ti­me­dia art per­for­mance group called “Dumb Type” will be dis­cussed from the cur­rent media con­text to clar­ify the am­bigu­ous body image in Japan­ese con­tem­po­rary art.

The sec­ond pre­sen­ta­tion will focus on Japan­ese artist Kenji Yanobe (1965) and his work. Great East Japan Earth­quake in 2011, 03, 11 caused se­ri­ous dam­age and shocked all over the world. Be­sides ra­di­a­tion leak from nu­clear power plant re­minds us the in­ci­dent of Cher­nobyl in 1986, and also the ra­dioac­tive con­t­a­m­i­na­tion to neigh­bor­ing area is ter­ri­bly se­ri­ous in Japan. More­over from atomic bomb in 1945 and ther­monu­clear test of Bikini Atoll in 1954, to nu­clear-power dis­as­ter in this time, it is dif­fi­cult to talk about Japan­ese coun­try and cul­ture with­out prob­lem of nu­clear power. In this pre­sen­ta­tion, Kenji Yanobe, who con­sid­ers sur­viv­ing in the world con­t­a­m­i­nated by ra­di­a­tion and tries to ex­press his idea in his work, will be in­tro­duced. Many artists made ac­tion to ex­press anti-atomic power after 1950s in Japan. Re­fer­ring to the his­tory of them, this pre­sen­ta­tion dis­cusses body image in his per­for­mance and in­stal­la­tion.

The third pre­sen­ta­tion will focus on Kat­suhiro Ya­m­aguchi, who is in­ter­na­tion­ally known as a video artist, has played a major role in Japan­ese media art his­tory. Al­ready in 1950s he was a cen­tral fig­ure in Jikken Kobo (Ex­per­i­men­tal Work­shop) along with Toru Takemitsu and oth­ers ex­per­i­ment­ing the lat­est tech­nol­ogy of the time in their own per­for­mances and ex­hi­bi­tions as well as for ex­per­i­men­tal bal­let the­aters. After de­sign­ing a most in­no­v­a­tive pavil­ion at the 1970 Osaka World Ex­po­si­tion he co-founded Video Hi­roba that in­vited peo­ple to use video to ex­press their own voices. This pre­sen­ta­tion dis­cusses in­ten­tional ab­sence of his own body in Ya­m­aguchi’s works in con­trast to the demon­stra­tion of body-ness among his con­tem­po­rary avant-garde artists such as buto dancers. Cre­at­ing an en­vi­ron­ment (a “gar­den”) for the view­ers/par­tic­i­pants to be ex­plored using their own bod­ies was his con­cept, which led to the emer­gence of in­ter­ac­tive art in Japan.

Chair Per­sons: Luisa Paraguai & Rachel Zuanon
Pre­sen­ters: Laura Beloff & Sara Di­a­mond

The wear­able com­put­ing is a knowl­edge area in con­stant de­vel­op­ment, evok­ing sig­nif­i­cant trans­for­ma­tions on human/ma­chine com­mu­ni­ca­tion to con­fig­ure an ef­fec­tive and af­fec­tive in­ter­face. Those tech­no­log­i­cal arte­facts have aug­mented the per­sonal bound­aries re­design­ing the cor­po­real schema and lived ex­pe­ri­ences of bod­ily spa­tial­ity. So, the user’s body is be­yond act­ing the sup­port for those com­put­ers un­der­stood as a phys­i­cal re­al­ity tech­no­log­i­cally me­di­ated elab­o­rat­ing be­hav­iours and sen­sory-mo­tor skills, which works as es­sen­tial data for recog­ni­tion of own pref­er­ences. Those in­for­ma­tion ex­changes be­tween bi­o­log­i­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems have con­structed pos­si­ble di­a­logues evok­ing ques­tions and point­ing out chal­lenges. The panel with a con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous per­spec­tive about the cre­ation and the de­vel­op­ment of wear­able com­put­ers con­cerns with the main as­pects of those processes: the de­sign, cre­ation, in­no­va­tion, mo­bil­ity, us­abil­ity and er­gonomic per­spec­tives; the fash­ion, about the body-tech­nol­ogy-con­sume re­la­tion; the tex­tile tech­nol­ogy, about smart tex­tiles; the sus­tain­abil­ity, about re­cy­cle ma­te­ri­als, use of nat­ural en­ergy as the charger of the me­chan­i­cal and elec­tronic sys­tems and the de­vel­op­ment of sys­tems with low en­ergy cost; the net­works and tech­nolo­gies, con­sid­er­ing the aug­men­ta­tion of the body and mind of human sub­jects in net­works of in­ter­ac­tions pow­ered by com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies.

Chair Per­sons: Arthur Clay & Jason Free­man
Pre­sen­ters: Basak Di­lara Ozdemir, Thor Mag­nus­son, Georg Hajdu, Shane Mc Kenna & John Ea­cott

Over the last decade, a grow­ing num­ber of com­posers have begun to use what is known as real-time no­ta­tion in their work and many have de­vel­oped di­verse sys­tems to fa­cil­i­tate its use in all types of per­for­ma­tive sit­u­a­tions. Real-time music no­ta­tion in­cludes any no­ta­tion, ei­ther tra­di­tional or graphic, which is formed or cre­ated dur­ing the ac­tual per­for­mance. Other terms such as dy­namic music no­ta­tion, live scor­ing, vir­tual scor­ing, and re­ac­tive no­ta­tion have also been used to de­scribe the same process.  This panel event seeks to con­vey the ex­cite­ment of cur­rent real-time no­ta­tion prac­tice to the pub­lic by pre­sent­ing work done in the area by promi­nent com­posers, mu­si­cians, and re­searchers. The pre­sen­ters will ex­plore key is­sues be­hind vir­tual scor­ing and real-time no­ta­tion from tech­ni­cal, mu­si­cal and de­sign per­spec­tives and pro­vide an overview of the var­i­ous ap­proaches, their sys­tems, and the styles of music that have emerged from them.

Rel­e­vant works from the past and the pre­sent will be dis­cussed to show how real-time no­ta­tion re­lates to ear­lier ex­per­i­men­tal meth­ods in open-form and mal­leable mu­si­cal scores and in com­puter-as­sisted com­po­si­tion, in order to fa­cil­i­tate un­der­stand­ing through show­cas­ing the ex­plo­ration of the con­nec­tions and bound­aries among com­posers, per­form­ers and the au­di­ence.  Par­tic­i­pants from the planned ac­com­pa­ny­ing work­shop In­ter­ac­tive Music Ba­sics & Re­al­Time Scor­ing will join the panel and dis­cuss their ex­pe­ri­ences while using soft­ware and hard­ware tools to cre­ate real-time no­ta­tion sys­tems or deal­ing with the chal­lenges as in­ter­preters of ex­treme sight read­ing.  Above all, the or­ga­niz­ers of the panel hope that the events will spark in­ter­est and dis­cus­sion that will fur­ther the de­vel­op­ment of a com­mu­nity of prac­tice around vir­tual scor­ing and real-time play­ing and raise aware­ness of this new area within the con­tem­po­rary music cir­cles to aid in at­tract­ing new peo­ple to this ex­cit­ing field.

Chair Per­son: Ian Gwilt
Pre­sen­ters: Darko Fritz, Sue Gol­lifer & Melinda Rack­ham

In this panel the term com­pumor­phic art will be used to de­scribe an emer­gent col­lec­tion of art­works, artists and pro­jects that repo­si­tion the dig­i­tal com­puter as a form of cre­ative in­spi­ra­tion, cul­tural com­men­tary or aes­thetic ref­er­ence.

Through the pre­sen­ta­tion of their own re­search/prac­tice the panel will re­veal how com­pumor­phic art­works not only ref­er­ence the vi­sual aes­thetic of com­put­ing tech­nolo­gies but often uti­lize or ques­tion the cul­tural val­ues and on­to­log­i­cal qual­i­ties we com­monly as­cribe to the com­puter-dig­i­tal.

How­ever, this term is by no means fully re­solved and it is hoped that a lively de­bate around the no­tion of com­pumor­phic art – what this might mean and what it might en­com­pass – will take place in the forum.

Chair Per­sons: Lisa An­der­son & Josephine Starrs
Pre­sen­ters: Leon Cmielewski & Joni Tay­lor

This panel ex­plores multi-di­men­sional works that in­ter­act and ex­plore the nar­ra­tives of dam­aged land­scapes -ur­ban and out­back scars found on and within the struc­tures of land and ar­chi­tec­ture and scars re­lated to the move­ment of peo­ples. The speak­ers will pre­sent their art­works de­vel­oped from the ev­i­dence of weather shifts that are woven through var­i­ous forms, in­clud­ing per­sonal doc­u­men­tary-style im­ages, GPS data and satel­lite im­agery.  These art­works use im­ages of the earth’s sur­face to ex­plore nar­ra­tives of po­ten­tial fu­tures. Within past and pre­sent ac­tions can be found a fu­ture that rev­els within the sense of be­long­ing. The fu­ture could be based within a con­tin­u­ing par­a­digm or shift into greater un­der­stand­ings of new and an­cient tech­nolo­gies that shift our po­ten­tial for cre­at­ing and in­vest­ing in a fu­ture vis­i­ble world. The pro­jected im­ages and con­text ex­pand the premise that tap­ping into the nar­ra­tive of place re­veals an un­der­stand­ing of a fu­ture plan. This el­e­ment be­gins to ques­tion and push the sci­ence of weather, the land and the move­ment of peo­ples to a fris­son, wherein may lie a new ap­proach. Dr. Lisa An­der­son, Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski have all worked with Lake Mungo in the re­mote Aus­tralian out­back and have drawn to­gether some of these quests to look more closely at the im­pli­ca­tions of story in place. Dr. An­der­son and Joni Tay­lor have both ex­plored the el­e­ments of col­li­sion of the urban land­scape against a wilder life,  that takes the city back at any op­por­tu­nity.

Dr. An­der­son cre­ated Night Snow which ex­plores the shifts of an­i­mals into the vil­lages within the High Arc­tic and com­pares these sto­ries to those of drought af­fected cities in Aus­tralia. Joni Tay­lor con­sid­ers a shift in our ar­chi­tec­tural re­la­tion­ship to the wild to de­velop an aca­d­e­mic un­der­stand­ing and smart world ap­proach to the con­cept of ar­chi­tec­ture, to cre­ate an ar­chi­tec­ture that en­com­passes the changes in weather and move­ments of pop­u­la­tions, in order to es­tab­lish aware city sur­faces and en­clo­sures.  The panel will ex­plore a range of fac­tors to feed into an un­der­stand­ing of a fu­ture that is a brave new world ar­chi­tec­ture, that pro­tects from the void, that in­serts into this a pos­si­bil­ity for a gen­uine story of place to guide/in­form pro­jects. The spec­ta­tor­ship un­der­stand­ing of past en­gage­ments in­cludes the no­tions of na­tional parks and wild life as out­sider events and a pi­o­neer­ing ap­proach to ar­chi­tec­ture.  The speak­ers seek to in­te­grate nar­ra­tives of land, ar­chi­tec­ture and urban move­ments to focus on the prob­lems posed by the cul­ture/na­ture di­vide. The fu­ture is in­her­ent within this form of vi­sual un­der­stand­ing and draws on the very dif­fer­ent el­e­ments that con­cern these artists. They ex­plore the so­cial agenda of dif­fer­ence, imbed­ded within the ques­tion asked by the land­scape works of the Qing Dy­nasty – Am I in Na­ture or is Na­ture in Me?

Chair Per­son: Helen Sloan
Pre­sen­ters: Vicky Isley, Paul Smith, Susan Collins, David Cot­ter­rell, Si­gune Hamann & Susan Sloan

The panel seeks to in­ves­ti­gate and re­visit the po­lit­i­cal role that art can play in sub­vert­ing stan­dard­ised vi­sual form and lan­guage. Data ma­nip­u­la­tion and vi­su­al­i­sa­tion con­tributes to a large part of con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal arts prac­tice. A ten­dency to sep­a­rate out frame­work/plat­form and con­tent has meant that analy­sis of the ma­te­r­ial of vi­sual forms that arise from artis­tic processes can be over­looked. This panel ex­am­ines di­verse ap­proaches to the ma­nip­u­la­tion and vi­su­al­i­sa­tion of data ap­pro­pri­ated by vi­sual artists. While the works pre­sented by the pan­el­lists are not overtly po­lit­i­cal, there is a strong pres­ence of chal­lenge to the vi­sual tropes used by those en­gaged in pro­duc­tion in an in­dus­try con­text such as film, gam­ing, jour­nal­ism and mar­ket­ing.

The panel seeks to in­ves­ti­gate and re­visit the po­lit­i­cal role that art can play in sub­vert­ing stan­dard­ised vi­sual form and lan­guage.  Pan­el­lists will be drawn from artists in the con­cur­rent Bro­ken Still­ness ex­hi­bi­tion at ISEA, who are in­ter­ro­gat­ing the re­la­tion­ship be­tween his­tor­i­cally em­bed­ded forms of image mak­ing, es­pe­cially paint­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy, with those dig­i­tal prac­tices that are still in de­vel­op­ment or rel­a­tively un­ex­plored such as com­puter an­i­ma­tion, mo­tion cap­ture/track­ing, mod­el­ling soft­ware and high de­f­i­n­i­tion.  The work pre­sented and the pan­elists will ex­plore the new forms that are emerg­ing from an in depth ex­plo­ration of dig­i­tal tools com­bined with an un­der­stand­ing of more es­tab­lished forms of im­age­mak­ing in the vi­sual arts. Be­yond the con­cen­tra­tion of the dig­i­tal on speed, col­lec­tivism and band­width in much dig­i­tal work, the panel will call for a sub­tle ap­proach to mak­ing work.

Chair Per­sons: William Hart & Nancy Mauro-Flude
Pre­sen­ters: William Hart, Brad Miller, Linda De­ment, Danja Vasiliev, Au­drey Sam­son & Ju­lian Sta­don

This panel ex­am­ines bots & au­tomata as sub­jects of cul­ture, with the par­tic­u­lar em­pha­sis on how we ex­pe­ri­ence and per­son­alise our in­ter­ac­tions with them. So­cia­ble robot de­vel­op­ment raises many ques­tions with re­gards to cul­tures of spir­i­tu­al­ity and ex­pres­sion.  The choice of en­cod­ing tool and in­ter­face are in­trin­sic to any com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­form, which al­ways gives rise to new sit­u­a­tions that must be tack­led. Cre­ative re­flec­tion and crit­i­cal in­tel­li­gent play has al­lowed for the nu­mer­ous syn­er­gies be­tween man and ma­chine and in­flu­ences how we are nat­u­rally in­clined to in­ter­act and use these new tech­nolo­gies, and how these in­ter­ac­tions im­pact on so­ci­ety.  Such di­verse views to­ward tech­nol­ogy are shaped by re­spec­tive so­cial his­to­ries, cul­tures and ex­pe­ri­ences.  Ro­bots have be­come cult ob­jects of con­tem­pla­tion, giv­ing us a sense of con­nect­ed­ness with the world around us.

Con­cep­tion of the other is formed by re­flec­tion of our pro­jected per­cep­tions and these per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ences in turn cre­ate new cul­tural iden­tity aes­thet­ics or pre­sent chal­lenges to rep­re­sen­ta­tion as we know it.  There is con­tin­u­ing dis­course on how our ro­bots should look and what role they should take in so­ci­ety. We wish to offer com­men­tary on these de­bates and raise is­sues about our his­tor­i­cal and so­cial re­la­tion­ship with ma­chines and hope to ex­tend a unique way of see­ing ro­bots: as a cul­tural phe­nom­e­non, as com­pan­ions, as ob­jects of star­tling beauty and as an im­por­tant con­tem­po­rary art form.  Ever cu­ri­ous how the field of ro­bot­ics and com­pu­ta­tional media can yield new po­ten­tial un­der­stand­ings for the­o­ries of em­bod­i­ment. Over the years there have been many spec­u­la­tions around the para­dox of com­put­ing, the­atre ma­chines and play.  We have this strong de­sire to in­vest ma­chines with in­tel­li­gence. We col­lec­tively buy into this mythol­ogy, want­ing to be­lieve in­tel­li­gence ex­ists in these so­phis­ti­cated cal­cu­la­tors. An­thro­po­mor­phism con­tin­u­ally haunts us, and our ma­chines –  have we al­ways been and will we fun­da­men­tally re­main idol­aters?

Chair Per­sons: Geoff Cox & Ta­tiana Bazz­ichelli
Pre­sen­ters: Dmytri Kleiner, Elanor Colleoni, Chris­t­ian Ulrik An­der­sen, Søren Pold & Maya Bal­cioglu

The panel in­ves­ti­gates some of the in­ter­con­nec­tions be­tween art, ac­tivism and busi­ness. “Don’t hate the media, be­come the media”, was one of the slo­gans of In­dy­media. We are ap­ply­ing this crit­i­cal hands-on per­spec­tive to the busi­ness frame­work. Pre­sen­ters ex­am­ine how artists, rather than re­fus­ing the mar­ket, are pro­duc­ing crit­i­cal in­ter­ven­tions from within. As the dis­tinc­tion be­tween pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion ap­pears to have col­lapsed, every in­ter­ac­tion in the info-sphere seems to have be­come a busi­ness op­por­tu­nity. There­fore, the cre­ative in­ter­sec­tions be­tween busi­ness and art be­come a cru­cial ter­ri­tory for re-in­ven­tion and the rewrit­ing of sym­bolic and cul­tural codes, gen­er­at­ing po­lit­i­cal ac­tions or so­cial hacks that use a deep level of irony, but also un­ex­pected con­se­quences. The tac­tics demon­strate the per­me­abil­ity of sys­tems — that these can be re­worked — and more so, that rad­i­cal in­no­va­tion re­quires mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the pre­vail­ing busi­ness logic.  The back­drop of the Is­tan­bul Bi­en­nale makes a use­ful ref­er­ence point here as one of the mark­ers along with art fairs in gen­eral for the com­mod­ity ex­change of artis­tic pro­duc­tion.

We are not sug­gest­ing these are new is­sues — as there are many ex­am­ples of artists mak­ing in­ter­ven­tions into the art mar­ket and al­ter­na­tives to com­mod­ity ex­change — but we aim to dis­cuss some of the re­cent strate­gies that have emerged from a deep un­der­stand­ing of the net econ­omy and its mar­kets.  The panel ex­plores some of these con­tra­dic­tions: that on the one hand, there are al­ter­na­tive or dis­rup­tive busi­ness mod­els that de­rive from the art scene, often as crit­i­cal or ac­tivist in­ter­ven­tions, but on the other how these prac­tices can be eas­ily co-opted by pro­pri­etary busi­ness logic. This is per­haps ex­em­pli­fied by the busi­ness idea of ‘dis­rup­tion-in­no­va­tion’, where dis­rup­tion is con­sid­ered to be a cre­ative act that shifts the way a par­tic­u­lar logic op­er­ates and thus pre­sents new­found op­por­tu­ni­ties. Does this mean that well-mean­ing crit­i­cal strate­gies of artists and ac­tivists are self-de­feat­ing? How do we de­velop dis­rup­tive busi­ness mod­els that do not sim­ply be­come new mod­els for busi­ness that ul­ti­mately fol­low cap­i­tal­ist logic?  We main­tain there is noth­ing wrong with doing busi­ness as such.

Chair Per­son: Bar­bara Rauch
Pre­sen­ters: Dee Hi­b­bert-Jones, Heather Kap­plow, Mark Palmer, Semi Ryu, Kristin Stran­sky Mallinger & Joan Truck­en­brod

With­out doubt emo­tions are evolv­ing as they are in­flu­enced by cul­ture, con­text and be­hav­iour. David Mat­sumoto (2007) elu­ci­dates these three in­flu­ences on human emo­tion. West­ern and East­ern so­ci­eties have wit­nessed change with the use of new tech­nolo­gies. Will our abil­ity to read emo­tional ex­pres­sions slowly change with the new com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems? Might peo­ple soon no longer be able to read fa­cial ex­pres­sions? With the loss of the abil­ity to read an emo­tion might come too the loss of the ex­pe­ri­ence it­self?  Steven Pinker (2002, p.40) stresses that emo­tions and be­hav­iour al­ways rep­re­sent an “in­ter­nal strug­gle”. It is not merely cul­ture and so­ci­ety that di­rects human be­hav­iour, but the mind has an in­nate sys­tem that gen­er­ates end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties to choose from.

Emo­tions and feel­ings have been stud­ied by some im­por­tant re­searchers in the field, in­clud­ing Dar­win, Dama­sio, LeDoux, and Ekman. The dis­cus­sion can now be ex­panded to in­clude emo­tion re­search and emo­tional re­sponses in Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence, Ar­ti­fi­cial Life, gam­ing in­dus­tries, vir­tual en­vi­ron­ment stud­ies and aug­mented re­al­ity sys­tems.  This re­search forum brings to­gether lead­ing artists and re­searchers in the field of emo­tion stud­ies. Re­searchers/ sci­en­tists/artists and cu­ra­tors will de­bate dig­i­tal art­works that pri­mar­ily ad­dress emo­tions and autism.  I have cho­sen the for­mat of the forum over the panel to allow more de­bate be­tween the speak­ers and the au­di­ence. A 2-3 hour time slot would be per­fect. Ques­tions raised by the panel will cen­tre around how tech­nolo­gies in­flu­ence emo­tional well­be­ing. Pan­elists will be asked to pre­sent a brief 15-minute po­si­tion sum­mary that will then be fol­lowed by dis­cus­sion with fel­low pan­elists, mod­er­a­tors, and the au­di­ence.  The focus of this panel will be more on dis­cus­sion and idea shar­ing and less on paper read­ing.

Chair Per­sons: Judit Her­sko & Lisa E. Bloom
Pre­sen­ters: Jane D. Marsching, Marko Peljhan, Matthew Bie­der­man & Leslie Sharpe

Ques­tions of sub­jec­tiv­ity re­lated to gen­der, race, emo­tion, and per­cep­tion usu­ally do not fac­tor into think­ing about polar cli­mate sci­ence. This panel ex­plores cli­mate change and the en­vi­ron­ment as well as the land­scapes of the polar re­gions and geopol­i­tics in terms of shifts in aware­ness that in­form how we think about, act about, and set pol­icy for deal­ing with these global re­gions. Pol­i­tics, emo­tion and cul­ture are sig­nif­i­cant in­di­ca­tors for un­der­stand­ing the his­tory and pre­sent uses of the Arc­tic and the Antarc­tic, how sci­ence and data gath­ered in these re­gions is per­ceived today, and the re­sult­ing im­pact on prac­ti­cal pol­icy mat­ters re­lated to cli­mate change. This panel is a com­pan­ion panel to Far Field 2 and takes up some of the same is­sues but em­pha­sizes the con­nec­tion to the colo­nial his­to­ries of these re­gions, the tech­no­log­i­cal in­cor­po­ra­tions of tra­di­tional knowl­edge into data, as well as con­tem­po­rary ap­proaches to art about land­scapes that deal with is­sues of pol­i­tics, emo­tion, and cul­ture. The pa­pers dis­cuss con­tem­po­rary art that chal­lenges nor­ma­tive as­sump­tions about art mak­ing-what form it might take, what ef­fects it might have, and how it might in­cor­po­rate as well as be read as data-in ad­di­tion to how it might change our per­cep­tions of the land­scapes of the polar re­gions. Much of the art­work dis­cussed em­bod­ies a re­la­tion­ship to na­ture not as some­thing to be con­quered, trans­formed, or turned to our ad­van­tage, but as a re­la­tional space that makes us think dif­fer­ently about the en­vi­ron­ment, the fos­sil fuel in­dus­try, cap­i­tal­ism and no­tions of ter­ri­tory.

Chair Per­sons: Tom Corby & An­drea Polli
Pre­sen­ters: An­nick Bu­reaud, Nathan Cun­ning­ham & An­dreas Fis­chlin

In re­cent years the sci­ence and data of cli­mate sci­ence has come under un­prece­dented pub­lic scrutiny. This politi­ciza­tion of cli­mate data, whilst po­ten­tially dan­ger­ous, of­fers op­por­tu­ni­ties for us to re-think our re­la­tion­ships to sci­ence and de­velop dis­cus­sion around in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary art/sci­ence ap­proaches to our chang­ing en­vi­ron­ment. In this spirit the panel will ex­plore how cli­mate data op­er­ates as a so­cial and cul­tural phe­nom­e­non with cre­ative af­for­dances be­yond nor­ma­tive sci­en­tific and in­sti­tu­tional frames and prac­tices. Panel mem­bers from artis­tic and sci­en­tific com­mu­ni­ties will pre­sent col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­jects, the­o­ret­i­cal elab­o­ra­tions and vi­sual and sonic ex­per­i­men­ta­tions that ex­plore the fol­low­ing ques­tions: What data dri­ven ap­proaches to rep­re­sent­ing cli­mate change in the arts exist; what are the fu­ture pos­si­bil­i­ties?

1. What method­olog­i­cal and con­cep­tual chal­lenges do art/sci­ence col­lab­o­ra­tors using cli­mate data con­front?
2. Are ex­ist­ing mod­els of col­lab­o­ra­tion use­ful?
3. How might artists nav­i­gate the op­por­tu­ni­ties and dan­gers faced by the use of cli­mate data?
4. What is the proper role of such work in the pub­lic dis­courses of cli­mate change?
   
   

Chair Per­son: Bill Bal­askas
Pre­sen­ters: Christina Vat­sella, Beryl Gra­ham, Philip Glahn, Melanie Lenz & Athana­sia Daphne Drag­ona

From the early stages of its de­vel­op­ment, New Media Art read­ily adopted a va­ri­ety of means of artis­tic en­gage­ment and ex­pres­sion that aim at serv­ing modes of utopian so­cial being: from multi-modal col­lab­o­ra­tion to mass par­tic­i­pa­tion and from open soft­ware to hack­tivism, the germs of left­ist utopian thought seem to abound in the art of the Dig­i­tal Age. It ap­pears that New Media Art in­creas­ingly em­ploys new tech­nolo­gies in order to pen­e­trate all as­pects of global so­cial liv­ing and prop­a­gate such prac­tices as cat­a­lysts for change. It has grad­u­ally be­come part of an ide­ol­ogy whose ob­jec­tives al­lude to utopian the­o­ries of so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion lying closer to cer­tain vi­sions of com­mu­nism, than to the re­al­i­ties of late cap­i­tal­ism within which new media op­er­ate.

This panel ses­sion in­tends to in­ves­ti­gate the rel­e­vance of com­mu­nist utopi­anism to New Media Art’s ide­o­log­i­cal dis­po­si­tions, as a start­ing point from which wider po­lit­i­cal, so­cial and cul­tural im­pli­ca­tions of New Media Art could be ex­plored. In this con­text, areas of in­ter­est ad­dressed by the panel’s con­trib­u­tors will, amongst oth­ers, in­clude: Marx­ist the­ory and the dig­i­tal art ob­ject, de­moc­ra­ti­za­tion of art through au­di­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion, lit­eral and metaphor­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion in the realm of new media, eco­nomic ac­tors and net­works shap­ing the char­ac­ter of New Media Art, in­sti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion of New Media Art and re­lated cul­tural poli­cies. Through the syn­the­sis of such di­verse points of view, the ses­sion will at­tempt to de­mys­tify whether and to what ex­tent the art of the Dig­i­tal Age is, or could be, the re­sult of the seem­ingly para­dox com­bi­na­tion of cap­i­tal­ism’s prod­ucts and com­mu­nism’s vi­sions.

Chair Per­sons: Lynn Hughes & Heather Kel­ley
Pre­sen­ters: Cindy Poremba & Emma West­e­cott

This panel fo­cuses on some of the most in­ter­est­ing de­vel­op­ments in games and playable media. More specif­i­cally it will look at the re­cent surge in mak­ing in­de­pen­dent games or game-like media art and ar­ti­facts. How does the indie mo­ment in the games in­dus­try in­ter­sect with the rise of in­ter­est in playable media out­side the in­dus­try (art games, game art, games as re­search, em­bod­ied play, new ar­cade games, lo-fi and retro games, diy….)?  Pan­elists will pro­vide a broad overview of cur­rent “gami­ness” but will also be draw­ing on ex­am­ples of their own art/de­sign work. Pa­pers will ad­dress the fol­low­ing types of ques­tions:

1. The re­la­tion be­tween goal-based and free play mod­els of games/playable media, as well ex­am­ples of de­sign­ing for ap­pro­pri­a­tion. What is the re­la­tion be­tween ex­pres­siv­ity and rules? Whose ex­pres­siv­ity? What does/could it mean to au­thor playable media for ap­pro­pri­a­tion? (Lynn Hughes)
2. The rise of lo-fi games in the light of V.W Turner’s no­tions of the lim­i­nal & lim­i­noid. Con­tem­po­rary indie prac­tice in the spaces be­tween diy & artgames. (Emma West­e­cott)
3. How new ar­cade pro­jects draw the play ex­pe­ri­ence out into the ex­hi­bi­tion en­vi­ron­ment. What are artists doing to re-imag­ine games for al­ter­na­tive so­cial con­texts? How can cu­ra­tors en­gage with the de­sign of play -par­tic­u­larly in non-gallery spaces? (Cindy Poremba).
4. What kind of soft and hard ware con­tributes to a plea­sure ex­pe­ri­ence.? How can we make sure game goals and sen­sual “goals” are mu­tu­ally re­in­forc­ing? How might sex games be a fore­run­ner of other “gam­i­fi­ca­tion” ef­forts where the goal is more than self-ref­er­en­tial en­ter­tain­ment? (Heather Kel­ley)

Chair Per­sons: Alexan­der Schwing­ham­mer & Daniel Wes­solek

Pre­sen­ters: Nicholas Salazar, Asko Lehmuskallio, Anna Lena Seiser & Se­bas­t­ian Sierra Barra

A vi­o­la­tion of the norm whether in­tended or by chance en­tails the dan­ger of fac­ing pun­ish­ment ei­ther through law en­force­ment, vi­o­lent re­sponse, stigma­ti­za­tion as ‘de­viant’ or ab­hor­rence by so­ci­ety. Gen­er­ally acts of de­viance mark in­fringe­ments of es­tab­lished pat­terns. How­ever linked to the no­tion of in­tended de­viancy being in fact an al­leged de­viance as an at­tempt to at­tract au­di­ences or con­sumers. De­viancy ap­pears to pos­sess the po­ten­tial be used as a method to gen­er­ate an image, such as giv­ing a brand a dash of re­bel­lious­ness by at­tribut­ing de­viance to it. De­viancy can be em­ployed by oth­ers as a de­scrip­tion, as well as it can be used as a self-de­scrip­tion (for eco­nom­i­cal rea­sons for in­stance). In con­trast to de­viancy that can be used ex­ter­nally and in­ter­nally, dis­cred­i­ta­tion is a per­for­ma­tive act of as­crip­tion by oth­ers. A key in­ten­tion of dis­cred­i­ta­tion seems to be the in­tended dam­age of the ‘good’ rep­u­ta­tion of some­one or some­thing. Dis­cred­i­ta­tion hap­pens on pur­pose. This panel ex­plores dif­fer­ent so­cial for­ma­tions, events, artis­tic en­deav­ours, sites, per­for­ma­tive be­hav­iours and fields of in­quiry that em­ploy strate­gies of dis­cred­i­ti­a­tion. There­fore a wide focus is used to map an un­der­rep­re­sented and di­verse field.

Chair Per­sons: Ker­stin Mey & Yvonne Spiel­mann
Pre­sen­ters: Ryszard Kluszczyn­ski & Sabine Fabo

Hy­brid cul­tures are phe­nom­ena of es­sen­tial con­nec­tions in the pre­sent. They emerge from di­verse and com­plex in­flu­ences. Hy­brid cul­tures are merg­ers that com­bine past and pre­sent, local and translo­cal, space and place and technoscape. Hy­brid­ity is ex­pressed in var­i­ous cul­tural con­texts and in the in-be­tween spaces of arts, media, sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. Under the sign of the dig­i­tal and the global, hy­brid­ity con­notes a cul­tural man­i­fes­ta­tion of mul­ti­ple ap­pear­ances, as in cy­ber­space and mul­ti­ple selves. We apply the term hy­brid cul­tures to the con­tem­po­rary in­ter-con­nect­ed­ness that de­rives from the tech­no­log­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties of merg­ing vir­tual worlds and real life ex­pe­ri­ence and to art prac­tices that in­sti­gate cre­ative in(ter)ven­tion into our global media pre­sent, as well as to sci­en­tific re­search that aims to blur the bound­aries be­tween human and ma­chine,  sci­ence and sci­ence fic­tion. In ap­ply­ing the term hy­brid cul­tures, we pro­pose to dis­cuss a crit­i­cal con­cept of hy­brid­ity that in­ter-re­lates the de­bates and prac­tices of the in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary do­mains of media, cul­tural and aes­thetic the­o­ries.  The scrutiny of dig­i­tal cul­tures as fields of hy­brid in­ter­ac­tion al­lows us to more closely ex­am­ine the cul­tur­ally mixed ex­per­tises that com­bine dif­fer­ent as­pects of the­ory and prac­tice at work, in lo­cally pro­duced and glob­ally dis­trib­uted media forms, and in the con­ver­gence of net­work-based sci­ence and knowl­edge tech­nolo­gies, with cre­ative art prac­tices.  As a start­ing point, we wish to scru­ti­nise the crit­i­cal stance of hy­brid cul­tures: what are the cul­tural ef­fects of hy­brid prac­tices in arts and media, sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy? What kind of fu­sion can pro­mote in­ter-me­dial and in­ter-cul­tural un­der­stand­ing? How can hy­brid cul­tures re­sist cor­po­rate com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion? How can they ben­e­fit from transna­tional, tran­scul­tural, and translo­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion? With re­gard to the plu­ral­ity of media and cul­tures that are promi­nently dis­cussed as hy­brid, the panel en­cour­ages crit­i­cal in­ves­ti­ga­tion of:

1. the place of the artist, the cul­tural critic, the com­mu­ni­ca­tor and me­di­a­tor of tech­no­log­i­cal change
2. new forms of col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween dis­ci­plines and cul­tures
3. the ex­ten­sion of the con­cept of hy­brid­ity across bor­ders with­out los­ing its iden­tity of cre­ative in­ter­ven­tion into the here and now

Ques­tions the panel will raise: How much mul­ti­plic­ity and plu­ral­ity do we want and need in glob­ally net­worked com­mu­ni­ca­tion? And what kind of speci­ficity and dif­fer­ence in the midst of blur­ring is nec­es­sary for the iden­tity for­ma­tion of our cul­tures, arts, and sci­ences? How are com­plex re­la­tion­ships be­tween arts and sci­ences and tech­nolo­gies cre­at­ing a new vi­sion of hy­brid cul­tures?

Chair Per­son: Joseph De­Lappe
Dis­cus­sant:  Rita Raley

Pre­sen­ters: Bernadette Buck­ley, Wafaa Bilal & Hasan Elahi

This panel will pro­vide an op­por­tu­nity for the ex­am­i­na­tion of po­lit­i­cally mo­ti­vated, media based prac­tices as we move into the sec­ond decade after the 9/11 at­tacks and the re­sult­ing War on Ter­ror. The in­di­vid­u­als in­volved in this panel have been in­stru­men­tal in defin­ing the use and dis­sem­i­na­tion of tac­ti­cal media prac­tices that have res­onated widely in the cul­tural sphere by con­fronting is­sues of war, mem­ory, ter­ror­ism and sur­veil­lance. The panel pro­vides a cru­cial and timely con­text for these cre­ative prac­ti­tion­ers and noted schol­ars to dis­cuss the ef­fi­cacy of such on­go­ing ef­forts of en­gage­ment in works that seek to in­ter­vene in our con­tem­po­rary po­lit­i­cal con­text. This will be an op­por­tu­nity for crit­i­cal dis­course by these pan­elists and the panel at­ten­dees to con­sider the evo­lu­tion and adap­ta­tion of these ideas in light of the chal­lenges to sus­tain­ing a level of ur­gency in such po­lit­i­cally ac­tivist cre­ative prac­tice – as con­flict, ter­ror and fear have come to typ­ify the sta­tus quo.

Chair Per­sons : Anke Fin­ger & Chris­tiane Heibach
Pre­sen­ters: Ran­dall Packer, Cre­tien van Campen & Bir­git Mers­mann

In­ter­art Stud­ies has es­tab­lished it­self as a field wherein schol­ars from a va­ri­ety of dis­ci­plines an­a­lyze the in­ter­re­la­tion be­tween dif­fer­ent art forms based on his­tor­i­cally di­ver­gent con­cepts of mono- and in­ter­me­di­al­ity. In­ter­me­di­al­ity, in turn, de­notes in­ter­re­lated strate­gies of dif­fer­ent media de­signs that gen­er­ate new forms of pre­sen­ta­tion and re­cep­tion modes – modes that amount to more than just an ac­cu­mu­la­tion of the media in­volved. To cite one ex­am­ple: the in­te­gra­tion of film/video in some the­atre per­for­mances today merges 3-D-(the stage) and 2-D-(the screen) tech­nolo­gies. This in­ter­re­la­tion not only changes the stage de­sign, but also af­fects the ac­tors’ per­for­mances as they in­ter­act with each other while main­tain­ing vis­i­bil­ity in front of the screen. This si­mul­tane­ity de­mands in­creased at­ten­tion to both nat­ural (the co-ac­tors) and tech­ni­cal media (film/video) – and, by de­fault, the same ap­plies to the re­cep­tion modes of the au­di­ence. Con­se­quently, the no­tion of in­ter­me­di­al­ity com­prises media pre­sen­ta­tion strate­gies and in­ter­sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion modes.  This new phe­nom­e­non or trend is, as of yet, barely ac­counted for in In­ter­art Stud­ies, ex­cept­ing a few no­table mod­els such as Car­o­line A. Jones’s con­cept of “sen­so­rium” that re­lates sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion to cul­tural me­di­al­iza­tion. In­ter­sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion, nonethe­less, is cur­rently emerg­ing as a promi­nent area in var­i­ous dis­ci­plines, show­cas­ing new phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal ap­proaches.

This panel, then, seeks to push this area fur­ther, par­tic­u­larly em­pha­siz­ing the role of media and me­di­al­iza­tion: Brian Mas­sumi’s and Mark Hansen’s work, for ex­am­ple, de­spite its sig­nif­i­cance, con­tin­ues to em­ploy an un­dif­fer­en­ti­ated no­tion of “em­bod­i­ment“ to de­scribe in­ter­sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion. As a re­sult, they ig­nore the dif­fer­ences of sen­so­r­ial data, which an­chor sense per­cep­tions in di­verse cul­tural con­texts. Ad­di­tion­ally, the me­di­ated and hence cul­tur­ally pre-formed char­ac­ter of sen­sual per­cep­tion is mostly dis­re­garded in favour of a con­cept that em­braces a dif­fuse, im­me­di­ate sens­ing process that seems to be ‘pre-me­dial’ or ‘ex­tra-me­dial’. At its core, and to high­light the cul­tural dif­fer­ences of sen­so­r­ial data, this panel seeks to ad­dress cur­rent re­search un­der­taken by the cog­ni­tive sci­ences to em­pha­size the in­ter­sec­tions of in­ter­art and in­ter­sen­so­rium as processes of per­cep­tion that are in­ter­locked with cul­tural for­ma­tions – a tri­an­gu­lar con­t­a­m­i­na­tion or rec­i­p­ro­cal process much in need of fur­ther ques­tion­ing and ex­am­i­na­tion.

Chair Per­son: Donna Leish­man
Pre­sen­ters: Gor­don Hush, Sue Gold­ing, Don Rit­ter, Kriss Ravetto-Bi­a­gi­oli & Sheena Calvert

Framed by a con­text of in­creas­ing media anx­i­ety over the vol­ume of usage and the na­ture of so­cial net­work­ing web­sites (Green­field 2009), this panel will broadly ex­plore the roots of this fear and the role of dig­i­tal media and so­cial de­vel­op­ment, specif­i­cally in­ter­ro­gat­ing prac­tices of so­cial iden­tity and con­tem­po­rary ex­pe­ri­ences of re­al­ity/fic­tion. Fol­low­ing as­so­ci­ated fears there has been an in­creased pres­sure from the Amer­i­can Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion (AMA) for the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric As­so­ci­a­tion (APA) to in­clude video game ad­dic­tion as a sub-type of in­ter­net ad­dic­tion, along with sex­ual pre­oc­cu­pa­tions and e-mail/text mes­sag­ing in the up­com­ing 2012 Di­ag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­ual of Men­tal Dis­or­ders (DSM-V), the stan­dard di­ag­nos­tic text used by psy­chi­a­trists world­wide. The re­al­ity of an un-chartable (dark) In­ter­net, the ac­knowl­edged rate of change and the sig­nif­i­cantly prob­lem­atic lack of any so­ci­etal sanc­tion or pro­hi­bi­tion (when surf­ing the In­ter­net) gives ‘us’ more space and op­por­tu­nity to ex­plore taboo and re­pres­sion.
Panel pa­pers will ex­plore the no­tion of the moral econ­omy of human ac­tiv­ity and how this is re­flected in “moral pan­ics” and the space be­tween sub­jec­tive ex­pe­ri­ence (con­scious­ness) and the con­tem­po­rary en­vi­ron­ment (Hush), styl­is­tics of (sex­ual) dif­fer­ence (Gold­ing), ma­nip­u­la­tion within dig­i­tal iden­tity con­struc­tion (Rit­ter), re-ex­plor­ing The More Knowl­edge­able Other and so­cial de­vel­op­ment (Leish­man), and role of tac­ti­cal anonymity within con­tem­po­rary Net ac­tivism (Ravetto-Bi­a­gi­oli).
Ques­tions the panel will raise:

1. When con­sid­er­ing dig­i­tal media and so­cial de­vel­op­ment: what are the un­der­ly­ing causes of this new sense of fear?
2. How is so­cial iden­tity con­structed today / Has our ex­pe­ri­ence of re­al­ity/ fic­tion changed?
3. How does the in­trin­sic vari­abil­ity of media usage af­fect our sense of self/ con­scious­ness?
4. What is au­then­tic and what con­sti­tutes healthy when en­gag­ing with dig­i­tal media and the In­ter­net?

Chair Per­son: Davin Heck­man
Pre­sen­ters: Dene Gri­gar, Anna Gibbs, Maria Angel & Scott Ret­tberg

This panel will ex­plore the re­la­tion­ship be­tween crit­i­cism and cre­ative prac­tice in elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture.  This dis­cus­sion will dis­cuss the po­ten­tials of and lim­its to lit­er­ary crit­i­cism in the realm of dig­i­tal po­et­ics and nar­ra­tive.  Heck­man’s paper dis­cusses the re­la­tion­ship be­tween speed, lit­er­ary crit­i­cism and folk­son­omy.  Ret­tberg will high­light the ELM­CIP Knowl­edge­base and com­mu­nity-based re­search prac­tices in the field of elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture.  Gri­gar will ad­dress the nar­ra­tive in the age of dig­i­tal media.  And Gibbs and Angel will ex­plore hand­writ­ing as an em­bod­ied praxis link­ing thought with cor­po­re­al­ity through the medium of ges­ture, and its trans­for­ma­tions in text-based new media art. Pan­elists will ad­dress the crit­i­cal value of es­tab­lish­ing con­nec­tions with tra­di­tional lit­er­ary vo­cab­u­lary, both as a method for un­der­stand­ing new media art within lit­er­ary con­texts and as a method of ad­vanc­ing the de­vel­op­ment of new crit­i­cal tools, par­tic­u­larly those that aid the de­vel­op­ment of a world lit­er­a­ture of elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture.

Chair Per­son: Lorenzo Taiuti
Pre­sen­ters: Ekmel Ertan, Dia Hamed, Ven­zha Christ & Willem Velthoven

Let’s start from the title of the panel. In Eu­rope the other/cul­tures were tra­di­tion­ally de­fined as east­ern, Ori­en­tal, far out, a way of defin­ing that es­tab­lishes our bor­der­lines and pre­sent in dif­fer­ent ways in all cul­tures, since all cul­tures start from them­selves. So it’s im­por­tant to change the “Ge­o­graphic” de­f­i­n­i­tion that un­der­lines  dis­tance and re-place it with a mov­ing mind ge­og­ra­phy rhi­zome/like & multi/cen­tres, be­yond any post/colo­nial­ist and any self cen­tered cul­tures. The great de­vel­ope­ment of dig­i­tal media in the east and more gen­er­ally in the non/west­ern cul­tures chal­lenges the early asset of the dig­i­tal cul­tures. Not only Sil­i­con Val­ley, Japan and Eu­rope ( the source de­vel­op­ers of the 80’s), but many other cul­tures with a cross over of points of view ( and new uses of dig­i­tal cul­tures) that change the old dig­i­tal ge­og­ra­phy. The panel will try to make a point about what’s hap­pen­ing today, and what’s the “state of the art” of re­la­tion­ships and ex­changes be­tween East & West, and what are the dif­fer­en­cies in the dig­i­tal global so­ci­ety. We start from those points to con­front po­si­tions and in­ter­ro­gate ex­pe­ri­ences of work and col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween East and  West on is­sues of cre­ativ­ity and shar­ing. The ties have been made on mu­tual in­ter­ests and cul­tural syn­er­gies from Cairo “Medrar for con­tem­po­rary art” and Bar­cel­lona’s “Hangar”, Am­s­ter­dam “Waag” and In­done­sia’s “Honf”, and from “Me­dia­matic” on is­lamic cul­tures in Eu­rope, be­tween “Amber Fes­ti­val” in Is­tan­bul with Eu­rope and dif­fer­ent cul­tures of the east. “East & West” in­ter­ro­gates as well the as­sump­tion that dig­i­tal “par­i­fies” cul­tures and tries to re-as­sume  the data of cul­tural dif­fer­en­cies, and of the change­ments on the early ideas of the “dig­i­tal cul­ture” of the 90’s. Be­yond the myth of un­fail­ing global co­mu­ni­ca­tions, we might find dif­fer­ent lay­ered ways of cre­at­ing co­mu­ni­ca­tion and cre­ativ­ity through dig­i­tal ex­change. “East & West” would like to in­di­cate new so­lu­tions or un­der­lines the so­lu­tions that seem to fit bet­ter with a new cul­tural pat­tern where the ge­o­graphic di­rec­tions are right & left & every­where.

Dig­i­tal lan­guages seem to be the “im­ma­te­r­ial” “melt­ing pot” that traces, in the con­texts of con­tem­po­rary co­mu­ni­ca­tions and con­tem­po­rary art, sim­i­lar­i­ties and con­trasts of the dif­fer­ent global cul­tures.  In re­cent hap­pen­ings in Egypt and Tunisia the use of tech­nolo­gies it’s been strong and vis­i­ble.  So­cial net­works like Face­book, Google, Youtube have been used in many ways as well as it was usual to see women using cel­lu­lar phones tak­ing videos dur­ing man­i­fes­ta­tions.  One of the deads dur­ing the clashes in Cairo, Ahmed Ba­siony, was a young artist using dig­i­tal media for in­stal­la­tions. One of them it’s a very  in­ter­est­ing ques­tion­ing of the dig­i­tal lan­guage “Ascii not speak ara­bic”, where the shad­ows of the view­ers make ap­pear ara­bic let­ters on a screen cov­ered by ascii code.  There is a grow­ing num­ber of work­shops, labs, fes­ti­vals going on in­volv­ing con­tem­po­rary art and dig­i­tal all over the “East” of the world.  It will be a charm­ing per­spec­tive to see what will come out of those new en­er­gies and cul­tures in­volved in the field of dig­i­tal lan­guages.  The panel wants to bring peo­ple to­gether to in­ter­ro­gate the ac­tual ac­tiv­i­ties, cre­ate new ideas and col­lab­o­ra­tions, in­cite cre­ativ­ity, new di­a­logues and try to fore­see what’s hap­pen­ing in a new global dig­i­tal cul­ture where ge­o­graphic de­f­i­n­i­tions are chang­ing but cul­tures main­tain their sin­gu­lar­i­ties.

Untold Bodies examines the themes of retrieval and digital resurrection – bringing to light and into the light the objects, specimens and narratives previously hidden in dispersed archives and museum research databanks. This visual presentation is based on recent art/science collaborations and artist-in-residency exhibition projects with natural history and medical museums in Ireland, Italy. USA and the Netherlands/Sweden. It addresses the practice-based research concerns, the creative imaging processes involved, the institutional challenges encountered and the outcomes and new audiences for these projects. The work primarily focuses on collections in laboratories and public museums dating from the late nineteenth century to the present of fluid-preserved human and animal taxidermy specimens.

Central to this, is an examination of the aesthetic codes, display conventions and object-based epistemology inherent in these late nineteenth century museums, the communication challenges and fears faced by these institutions in embracing new audiences with new media strategies, allied to the sometimes entrenched curatorial practices and financial restraints that limit the opening up and uncontrolled distribution of imaged archival material beyond the institutional site. Untold Bodies takes as its content my recent collaborations and exhibition projects that aim to re-present and re-purpose historic content, at times uncovering the hidden histories stored off-stage, or re-staging the familiar displays for a new audience and context.

The presentation includes images and video from lens based projects with the following institutions: La Specola, Caregi Hospital, Florence, Italy (Still Life); Hubrecht Laboratory, Utrecht, Netherlands & Tornblad Institute, Lund, Sweden (Future Nature); Mütter Museum, Philadelphia, USA (Vial Memory); Natural History Museum, Dublin, Ireland (Dignified Kings Play Chess On Fine Green Silk).

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

We un­der­stand Un­cer­tain Aes­thet­ics to be a crit­i­cal com­po­nent in the per­for­ma­tive spaces be­tween con­tem­po­rary con­cep­tions of net­works. The surge of dig­i­tal ac­cu­mu­la­tion, the con­tin­ual sur­prise of in­for­ma­tional tex­ture and the lay­ers of ex­pres­sive mul­ti­plic­ity are what lend net­works their cre­ative power – as net­works in­ter­face both real and vir­tual spaces. We are at­tracted in our cu­ra­to­r­ial and artis­tic work to pro­jects that cap­i­tal­ize on the ex­pan­sive­ness of the dig­i­tal and that con­front the user with the re­al­i­ties of undis­ci­plined knowl­edge. Undis­ci­plined, that is, as we em­brace it from within the legacy of in­ter­ac­tiv­ity, a prac­tice that both so­lic­its the user to re­spond to a set of pre­de­ter­mined choices and gives it­self over to the users’ mo­men­tary stages, cre­at­ing works whose al­go­rithms leave them in­com­plete.

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

Phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal ap­proaches have be­come very promi­nent within the last few years.  One rea­son for that might be that mul­ti­me­dia art de­mands mul­ti­sen­sory modes of per­cep­tion that chal­lenge the tra­di­tional epis­te­mo­log­i­cal mod­els that focus on vi­sual per­cep­tion and inner imag­i­na­tive processes. They rely on dis­tant per­cep­tion and ne­glect the in­ter­re­la­tion be­tween sen­sory data and their in­di­vid­ual in­ter­pre­ta­tion in the per­ciever’s mind. Fur­ther­more per­cep­tion is the re­sult of the in­ter­re­la­tion be­tween mul­ti­sen­sory per­cep­tion and emo­tional, sub- and pre­con­scious processes – and this is em­pha­sized by some con­tem­po­rary phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal ap­proaches. But their con­cepts mostly un­der­stand phys­i­cal/sen­sory ex­pe­ri­ence as im­me­di­ate, that means: un­medi­ated. From a me­diathe­o­ret­i­cal point of view un­medi­ated ex­pe­ri­ence doesn’t exist as we only per­ceive through media – be it the human body or the air which trans­ports sound waves and light or the tech­ni­cal media we use for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and in­for­ma­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion. The ques­tion my pre­sen­ta­tion will ad­dress is the fol­low­ing: How can mul­ti­sen­sory and bod­ily ex­pe­ri­ence be com­bined with con­cepts of media with­out falling back into the clas­si­cal epis­te­mo­log­i­cal sub­ject-ob­ject di­vi­sion? And what kind of per­cep­tion model is needed to be able to ex­plain the com­plex­ity of our daily mul­ti­me­dia en­vi­ron­ment?

Panel:  The Institute of Unnecessary Research

This paper de­scribes the In­sti­tute of Un­nec­es­sary Re­search (IUR) from its in­cep­tion in 2005. The IUR is an in­ter­na­tional group of artists, sci­en­tists and philoso­phers ob­ses­sively in­volved in their own cu­rios­ity dri­ven re­search work­ing both (in­sid­i­ously) within and out­side of acad­e­mia. The struc­ture of the IUR is based on a typ­i­cal aca­d­e­mic model, with var­i­ous ‘de­part­ment heads’ re­spon­si­ble for their own spe­cific areas of re­search. Ap­point­ment to the IUR is ap­par­ently open but highly nepo­tis­tic (based on the aca­d­e­mic model). The re­searchers in­ves­ti­gate sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy from a wholly artis­tic par­a­digm, mak­ing wide and var­ied con­nec­tions, but work­ing solidly within their fields in such a way that their re­search could be of equal in­ter­est to the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity as to the artis­tic one. The re­search is widely dis­sem­i­nated via per­for­mance events and ex­hi­bi­tions within the com­mu­nity in a non-elit­ist way, with a view that any­one can un­der­stand any­thing, if it is ex­plained in a way that pro­motes un­der­stand­ing. Au­di­ence in­ter­ac­tion is also keyand often vis­i­tors to events par­tic­i­pate ‘hands on’ in the ex­per­i­ments/per­for­mances.

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

Tra­di­tion­ally, pub­lic art or art in pub­lic spaces has been as­so­ci­ated with work that is, as Claire Do­herty stated in her cu­ra­to­r­ial pro­ject One Day Sculp­ture, “per­ma­nently sited, mon­u­men­tal and com­mem­o­ra­tive.” In my paper I will pre­sent and dis­cuss work that is made for, and in, pub­lic space, but in con­trast to this de­scrip­tion or de­f­i­n­i­tion, is nei­ther mon­u­men­tal nor fixed. Rather the prac­tices I am con­cerned with play out in pub­lic spaces (in­clud­ing the in­ter­net) but are not con­sid­ered pub­lic art. They work si­mul­ta­ne­ously across a num­ber of sites, both on­line and of­fline, and uti­lize a range of media strate­gies and in­ter­ven­tions. They are ephemeral, net­worked and per­for­ma­tive. I call these art prac­tices un­cer­tain and argue they exist at the in­ter­sec­tion of media art and con­tem­po­rary art. I pro­pose that these un­cer­tain prac­tices cre­ate a dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ics, one that I call un­sitely.

Session: City, Public Space and Mobile Technologies

This paper discusses Utopian urban and architectural plans of the mid-20th century in the context of contemporary virtual gaming environments. In particular, it focuses on the potential for a combination of augmented reality technologies and open-ended sandbox games to produce immersive participatory urban experiences in the spirit of the visionary design projects of the past century.

The 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s saw a plethora of imaginative proposals for future modes of urban life from designers and artists including Archigram, Cedric Price, Yona Friedman, Constant Nieuwenhuys and the Situationist International. At the foundation of many of these projects was an optimistic belief that advancing automation technology would free humans from monotonous labor and enable a life of leisure time and free play. The open space frames and modular buildings they designed favored process, mobility, and participation over permanent fixed forms.

These historical projects engaged with the idea of computation at various levels (Cedric Price included a cybernetician on his design team) and computer science (i.e. software “architecture”) borrows metaphors of modular structure from the world of physical structures and buildings. This paper expands on these notions to argue explicitly that architecture is computational and computation is architectural. By cross pollinating the ambitions of these two fields, new systems, games, structures, and environments might arise that further realize aspects of their Utopian visions.

Augmented reality (AR) is a set of technologies that inherently involve a mixture of the virtual and the real. Whereas current vision-based AR frameworks exhibit several characteristics that make them primarily suited to manipulation of objects in interior spaces, this paper proposes an AR framework specifically designed for users with location-aware mobile devices moving through urban space. Games built on top of this framework could enable users to modify structures of the city in real time (in the style of games like indie hit Minecraft), generating experiences that reconcile the active urban plans of the 20th century with the interactive technology of the 21st. In reference to Situationist International’s “psychogeographic” dérive, these games are dubbed “cybergeographic.”

A forum to explore new cross-disciplinary thinking on sustainability in urban environments, with a focus on the interface between our digital footprint and our environmental footprint, non-Western perspectives, and on creative intervention to enable social change. What changes in social and material practice are required in order to enhance environmental sustainability, and what might be the local, national and global impact? The forum will consist of a series of quick fire presentations by artists, scientists, activists and commentators; and an open discussion. Luminous Green’s panel will follow afterwards. Part of the Environment 2.0 project, organised by Drew Hemment, ImaginationLancaster and Futuresonic. Supported by The British Council, Arts Council England, ImaginationLancaster and Futuresonic. This event is part of SHINE, a youth festival supported by the National Youth Council and the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports.

The growing number of neglected residual spaces are challenging the functioning of our cities. These interstitial spaces fall between the familiar boundaries of urban planning and are often labeled as wastelands, charactized by an apparent void. Urban cracks are conceptualised as in-between time spaces, where different logics meet and conflict.

Within the context of an ongoing interdisciplinary research project, studying the work of artists and social workers acting in urban cracks, this paper focuses on the research trajectory of visual artist Elly Van Eeghem. This research project takes place in Muide-Meulestede-Afrikalaan, a neighbourhood situated in the northern dockland area of Ghent in Belgium. The area is surrounded by water and characterized by harbour activities, residential quarters, heavy traffic, open space, industry and companies. A part of the neighbourhood is currently subject of a large-scale urban renewal project.

Through her practice of video and intervention in public space, Van Eeghem reflects on the role of artists in re-shaping urban cracks and the influence of these spaces in re-thinking artistic practice. Digital maps and audiovisual chronicles create a layered analysis and dynamic narration of our changing urban condition. Inspired by the concept of palimpsest, a layered reading of artistic practice in urban cracks is presented through video, photography and multimedia mapping.

Abstract

The rise of digital media technologies has been accompanied by the rhetoric of participation, interaction and a new realization of democracy in which everyone is given a voice. In the urban environment digital infrastructure increasingly pervades the physical but, as has been heatedly debated, this does not necessarily offer new freedoms. The urban is an increasingly contested space – public, private and corporate space have become progressively disputed. Our movements are controlled and under surveillance, personal data is collected and ideas of democracy are increasingly equated with consumption. The role of the citizen is a blurred one. What does the citizen belong to and what are their rights and responsibilities? How can
new technologies be utilized to counter the very methodologies of control that they are used to promote? How can they offer participation and authorship and form community, particularly in the urban environment? This paper will examine the particular context in Japan in relation to these questions and offer examples of creative projects which have tackled some of the emerging issues.

The locative media project: “In the City of the Apis Queen” is discussed here within the framework of urban ecologies. The artists describe how, through an innovative, futuristic quasi-gaming model, they have compared relationships between individuals in an urban social context and the behaviours of a community of European honey bees. During the project a futuristic socio-cultural narrative text is developed; combining such diverse disciplines as: visual arts, new media practice, literature, computer science and the biological sciences. This paper outlines the artist’s interdisciplinary concerns and the ways in which this approach lends itself to flexible, hybrid practices.

The project’s overall focus on open-ended, interdisciplinary methodologies that fully explore the creative potentials of hybrid media art are examined here in conjunction with the role played by the artist’s observations of honey bee behaviours. The development of the creative structures underlying participant experiences that encompass both ecological and socio-cultural narrative structures in the contemporary urban context are defined. The artists also expand upon their aim to generate a networked project consciousness that grows out of the recorded “energies” of participant engagement and evolves to resemble a “hive-mind-whole” artwork system.

The functions of programmed technologies that generate the artwork system are detailed; in particular that of the custom-made wearable devices that are fundamental to the work. The artists demonstrate how these components self organise into a local network and communicate with each other in real time through a digitally programmed system of web portals aimed at mobile browsers and the immersion of participants. Illustrated examples from the project demonstrate how participants navigate through this open-ended system to experience the unique presentation of the work’s literary, creative narrative and, through their participation, build new aspects of this narrative.

The relationship between communication and art on the internet is the subject of this paper. It draws upon the web-site Urban Framework, by the multimedia artist Carol-Ann Braun.
Urban Framework functions at two different levels. First, it is not only about image-making, but also about interacting with texts and images. Urban Framework articulates its content, much like a hypertext. Here the artist both exhibits her work and explicitly structures ways of looking at it. This first level of mediation fits into a second, larger level, created by the collective medium of internet. Web artists also design a place in which to share the experience of looking. Urban Framework is structured around this inherent multiplicity, and provides viewers with the means to communicate. Such work draws on the inter-subjective and communicative dimension of the aesthetic experience described by Jauss (1979) and Habermas (1987). The question here is the development of art in a medium which provides not only a technical framework, but also a means of broadcasting the work and of structuring social intercourse. In this context – bringing together a multiplicity of views and imaginary worlds – the fundamental issue is that of articulating or inter-relating people (communication) and objects (hypertext).

Artists Statement

This collaborative urban installation brings together multi-user virtual environment research within a site-specific Second Life urban intersection, designed and constructed for presentation at the Waterfront Plaza in Belfast. By reflecting on the ironies of contested spaces, and stereotypes in multi-user virtual environments, this project exposes the cultural identity, gender roles, digital consumption and virtual desire within this augmented world.

During the 2010-11 academic year, the DAAD gave me a research grant to investigate the importance of color in the manufacturing of consumer desire and political ideology in Cold War Berlin. At the heart of this research were concerns about consumer excess, unsustainable patterns, and resulting class divides. Many of these patterns were set after World War II and exported to Europe through the Marshall Plan. I studied art and design in divided Berlin because it was ground zero for related ideological debates. This paper documents discoveries made during my year in Germany.

Clever use of color has always been inextricably linked to commerce and politics. These connections are especially clear in the postwar West German discourse around Heiterkeit; literally “cheerful,” also “light” and “bright” as in color. In West Germany in the 1950s, the postwar victory over despair used the trope of Heiterkeit constantly as a way to design interiors and manufactured objects that lightened the country’s mood. Heiterkeit as a soft power strategy in the Cold War reached a fevered pitch during the 1959 Kitchen Debate between Nixon and Khrushchev at the American Home exhibition in Moscow. In front of brightly colored, American-made kitchen appliances, Nixon endlessly listed his country’s consumer objects to be admired while Khrushchev emphasized the Soviets’ focus on essential rather than bourgeois luxury items.

With the U.S. economy causing Americans to reevaluate their relationship to design and consumerism, now is an ideal time to study the psychological impact of color, especially as it is streamlined and easily indexed with digital technology. In the spirit of the Bauhaus, both my research in Germany and contemporary artworks about color, including my own, considers the complicated relationship between design and identity during tough economic times.

Leni Schwendinger’s site-specific artwork with light, computers and industrial materials are temporal performances and permanent installations in the urban environment. As seen in two of her works, Deep Time/Deep Space, Subterranean Journey (New Denver Airport 12/93) and The Urban Heart. A Homebody/ (Tokyo 5/93), she addresses issues regarding content and subject matter in relation to site and technology. The work is interdisciplinary, drawing on cinema, music, theatre and architecture. “Interactivity” is redefined as the physical/intellectual engagement of the viewer. Deep Time/Deep Space,

A Subterranean Journey was commissioned by the City of Denver. This light and sculpture environment is installed in a mile-long shuttle-train tunnel. Arriving travelers perceive sculptural forms “animated” by the moving train. Materials include steel, reflective materials and lighting. Images informed by construction, mining, aerospace and subterranean fantasy worlds surround the train and segue into each other.

The Urban Heart, A Homebody/ was performed in Tokyo using a biomorphically shaped concrete house as a canvas. The projection montage explored ideas about home, from the body as home to the heart, to the city as the intricate and pulsing center of contemporary life. Giant shadows cast by audience members were interwoven with projected paintings inspired by the human heart and symbols of Tokyo. Artist and audience created an ever changing visual landscape as the interaction of human figures revealed previously hidden images.

Abstract

Keywords: Sonic art, music technology, interaction design, urban space, alternative energy, creativity, networks, embedded computing, situated art, trans-disciplinary research, ghost communication.

A custom built urban machine equipped with microphones, wheels, embedded computing, networked with wireless communication was used in a quest for hidden layers in the urban environment. This paper describes a tool for urban interactive sonic action – Ghost Scraper, a solar powered unit consisting of two networked and mobile modules for creating amplification of sonic properties hidden in urban material, such as walls, streets, buildings, staircases and more. Ghost Scraper is used as an urban tool, activating the sonic landscape. Layer by layer Ghost Scraper looks for sonic activity of ghosts, buried in the architecture of the city. Ghost Scraper is a tactile machine and easy to use and several people can search for activity at the same time.

This paper examines sonic properties of the urban landscape and mobility – in the creation of temporary urban spaces when activating hidden layers. This is part of ongoing research concerned with bridging data spaces, urban landscape and interactive sonic spaces, using custom built sonic tools. This paper’s context can be seen in the light of early experiments and implementations of wireless communication technology from the early 20th Century. Pioneers in wireless communication, such as Thomas Alva Edison and Guglielmo Marconi both developed wireless radio machines, to be able to detect and communicate with the dead.

In recent years, the territories of creative practice and archeological study have seen a marked increase in collaboration through the integration of immersive and interactive technologies. This unique collaboration between these fields has produced fertile territory for new syncretic forms for research in the perception and experience of information. In 2011, Virginia Commonwealth University‑Qatar’s School of Art, the University of Wales Trinity Saint David’s Department of Islamic Archeology and the Qatar Museum Authority embarked on a collaborative project in the visualization of the State of Qatar’s built cultural heritage. The principal aim of this project, entitled ‘Visualizing Qatar’s Past’, was to build a visual record of Qatar’s archeological and heritage sites and to develop new methods of recording and analysis based on the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photography, video and infrared imaging. The project was funded by a Qatar National Priorities Research Grant (NPRP). This collaboration subsequently expanded into the integration of interactive and immersive technologies to examine the shifting the roles of viewer and participant in the perception and experience of built cultural heritage. In 2014, we produced an exhibition, entitled ‘Lines in the Sand’ examining and exploring various levels of engagement in Qatar’s built heritage through a series of interactive technologies. These seven projects incorporated gesture, game and augmented reality. The exhibition took place in the VCU Qatar Gallery. Through visualization and    interaction enabled through emergent technologies, we are able to engage and understand Qatar’s the urban spaces of the past. The result of which produced insights into Qatar’s cultural identity within the interconnected global landscape. This paper will present the research findings to date generated from both Visualizing Qatar’s Past and the exhibition Lines in the Sand as well as the trajectory of continued development of the project.

Digital technology and communication media have brought about new perceptions and social interactions in the urban environment, transforming the ways we experience our cities. The concepts of space, time, and social relationship in the urban environment are put in flux via emerging technologies such as wireless networks, locative media and mobile computing. There is growing interest among communities of artists and designers, viewing the city as fluid interface, geographical canvas, social playground, and as public space. Using mobile phones, laptops, surveillance cameras and even radio, these artists and designers are exploring various hybrid spaces, between place and media technologies, the physical and the virtual, the social and the personal, the past and the present, and so on.

On the cross-platforms of art/design, technology, and social sciences, submissions are sought to deal with the issues of participation, play, process, and engagement upon the theme of urbanity and locative media. The papers and projects may reflect on, but are not limited to, the following critical issues and ideas:

1. What are the creative roles and alternative visions that locative media bring to the urban environment?
2. How can artistic intervention and tactical approaches transform the ways we experience the city?
3. How are the past, present and future of the city envisioned and experienced through locative media?
4. How does digital technology open new ways to engage people in the public domain?
5. How can diverse aspects of the city – whether cultural, historical, or social – be reflected and engaged via locative media?
6. How can the artist?s vision and sensibility contribute to new visions on urbanity?

(Short paper)

Keywords: Surveillance, Subversion, Identity, Performance, FacialRecognition, Data, Power structure, Prejudice, Prosthetic.

This self-reflective art paper examines my position within the ecology of surveillance art focused around facial recognition. URME Surveillance, transforms my identity into a defense technology for the public’s protection against facial recognition software. This project encourages the public to substitute their identity for my own by wearing a 3d printed prosthetic mask made in my likeness. This paper will begin by examining our relationship to surveillance and identity by discussing the surveillance system in Chicago as a case study. I will then discuss the work of Adam Harvey and Zac Blas as two contemporary artists working with identity recognition technologies. I will then use their work as a jumping off point for my own, discussing the strategies that lead me to URME Surveillance including an overview of its successes and failures

The purpose of the presentation in the use of technological tools of reality increased in the area of natural sciences to foster spaces of learning and innovation. With the technology of augmented reality it is possible to innovate in the different areas of knowledge, one of them, the natural sciences specifically in the area of biology, the above with the purpose of making the classes more didactic and dynamic that allow the Elementary student Primary and secondary education, motivate themselves towards teaching processes in learning environments in a way that fosters interactivity, collaboration and creativity and through the use of multimedia cards for different grades.

We present a new understanding of interactive installations that goes beyond action-reaction communication between actor and installation. The goal is to enhance the user’s experience and engagement as well as the reflection about the creator’s initial intention. Our strategy allows the actor to edit the action-reaction framework and modify the installation’s behavior rules. We employ ”Mapping” as method to redefine the user’s role from consumer to ”re-creator” within a specified scope, set by the creator.

Mapping for Experience
On the crossroads of technology and arts, we consider User Experience Design as a promising approach to empower the design process of media art pieces and ensure the actors’ engagement and reflection. We focus on interactive installations as media art pieces; the actor provokes a system’s reaction by his actions (e.g. full body movement). Most installations only provide a closed action-reaction framework, some employ programmed randomness to include surprising moments. Therefore, we argue towards a new understanding of the actor’s role. Hassenzahl says: „[…] experience emerges from the intertwined works of perception, action, motivation, emotion, and cognition in dialogue with the world (place, time, people, and objects). It is crucial to view experience as the consequence of the interplay of many different systems. […] While many processes together produce experience, emotion is at its heart and has an accentuated position. One may go as far as saying that emotion is the very language of experience.“ (Hassenzahl 2010: 4).

Accordingly, we see the actor as an active re-creator instead of an active user. Through an additional interface, the re-creator is enabled to reflect technology, aesthetics and experience. Technology becomes a visible artifact of the installation. Performing the mapping process motivates the re-creator to explore the action-reaction framework and underlying rules. Adding personal meaning enhances the experience. The actor exploits the installation and modifies the mapping within the given scope. Examples are presented in the installation Der Schwarm (Hashagen et al. 2008).

Applying this approach allows an enhanced experience for the actor and provides new possibilities for the creator to reach the actor. The actor becomes a part of the whole process (not product).

References

1. Hassenzahl, Marc. Experience Design: Technology for All the Right Reasons. San Rafael (CA): Morgan & Claypool, 2010.
2. Hashagen, Anja; Schelhowe, Heidi; and Harry Seelig. “’Der Schwarm’ – An Example for Interaction of Computer Science and Performance Studies.” Proceedings of ISEA2008. The 14th International Symposium on Electronic Art. Ed. Ingrid M. Hoofd, et al. Singapore: ISEA2008 Pte Ltd, 2008. 510-512.

Principles of biophilic design, and neuroscientific theories of the Orienting Reflex (OR) show some similarities that together make for an effective way to creatively develop the aesthetic use of generative ambient screens in public space, as a way to foster orientation and place making. This paper gives an account of three examples of generative ambient public installations and interdisciplinary methods applied through ethnographic methods to interpret responses from those who attended the installations. In reflecting on the effects of aesthetic elements I have used in generative ambient installations, this paper is motivated by the question: How can principles of biophilic design be used in public ambient media screens to enhance mood, attention restoration and place-making?

Artists Presentation of work that incorporates computational presentation techniques within locative media practice.

Abstract (long paper)

This paper presents the first qualitative user study focusing on composers’ experiences in working with musical robots. Increasingly complicated mechatronic musical instruments have resulted in an increasing number of expressive affordances exposed to users. As the mechatronic instruments grow more complicated, they potentially become more difficult to use, necessitating some form of mapping scheme. This paper seeks to evaluate the mapping schemes employed by a number of parametrically-rich musical robots (including a two mechatronic chordophones, a mechatronic harmonium, and a high degree-of-freedom mechatronic drum player). The user study’s findings indicate that multiple mappings must be made available for each instrument, allowing for both rapid compositional prototyping and for finer-grained control over musical nuance of these electronic artworks.

Abstract

The performance of The Salt Satyagraha Online: Gandhi’s March to Dandi in Second Life coincided with the 78th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s seminal act of nonviolent resistance, The Salt March to Dandi. The original march was made in protest of the Salt Act of 1882 and has been considered the historical turning point in Gandhi’s struggle against Great Britain’s rule of India; the re-enactment took place at Eyebeam Art and Technology in New York City and in Second Life. The reenactment involved a 240-mile (386 km) walk using a customized treadmill that translated my forward steps to the forward steps of my avatar, M Gandhi Chakrabarti, as he/I/we journeyed throughout the territory of Second Life (SL). The live and virtual
re-enactment of the walk took place over the course of 26 days, averaging 6 hours and 10 miles a day (three rest days were taken that coincided with those taken on the original march).

Panel:  Chasing Ghosts: Reactive Notation and Extreme Sight Reading

The mu­si­cal works Flood Tide and Hour Angle are soni­fi­ca­tions of live en­vi­ron­men­tal data. Flood Tide takes data from the flow of tidal water and Hour Angle uses a com­puter model of the an­gu­lar re­la­tion­ship be­tween Earth and Sun. Both works are per­formed by live mu­si­cians as the data is col­lected so a mech­a­nism to dis­play mu­si­cal no­ta­tion as it is gen­er­ated is es­sen­tial. I have been per­form­ing both works reg­u­larly since 2008 with vary­ing sizes of en­sem­ble up to 39 which has been an op­por­tu­nity to gather prac­ti­cal ex­pe­ri­ence of tech­niques of de­vel­op­ing and im­ple­ment­ing live no­ta­tion to­gether with dis­cus­sions about why it is an im­por­tant and emerg­ing area of music. The de­sign of a live no­ta­tion sys­tem is chal­leng­ing and in­trigu­ing as it in­volves much more than sim­ply dis­play­ing con­ven­tional no­ta­tion. My own sys­tem writ­ten in Su­per­Col­lider is fairly basic al­though still may be used to gen­er­ate per­for­mances that are mu­si­cally rich and chal­leng­ing for per­form­ers. I’m in­ter­ested to learn bet­ter ways of de­sign­ing and im­ple­ment­ing live no­ta­tion sys­tems and to help de­fine ways that it can be used to pro­duce pow­er­ful and mean­ing­ful mu­si­cal per­for­mances.

Artists have been traditionally concerned with expressing simple ideas or feelings using complex visual forms and, inversely, with understanding how complex realities can be represented by and express simple, abstract rules. Our goal is to explore and classify the range of visual forms that ?minimal? abstract models may give rise to. We have therefore defined a framework that integrates an abstract model or rule, together with an expression function that translates model results to structural elements or properties of a visual form. Number series appear to be good candidates for this type of experiment, because they are simple (the whole series is usually represented with a single simple mathematical expression), inflexible (once started, it cannot be changed) and infinite (it never ends). Expression functions on the other hand may be arbitrary and subjective, and are chosen by an artist at will. Our case study is based on the well-known Fibonacci series and shows that, by constraining some aspect of the visual form, an expression function may translate the number series to a complex visual form confined within a predefined 2-D area. The technique is applied to morphing of polygons using Fibonacci numbers as coordinates of control points. Three morphing variants are investigated and the wealth of resulting visual structures is demonstrated on a set of examples. Finally, the perspectives of the approach for visual form description are briefly outlined.

The newest version of my installation, “Homes,” is included as a part of the exhibition of the ISEA2016 symposium. The installation is constructed from several thousand photos. In connection with it, I would like to discuss the various modes of the employment of photography in my computer-based artworks.

Three-Dimensional Space realised on the basis of Photo Series
My “Homes” installation was completed in 2015. The installations present the interior spaces where people from the fishing village Tai O live and the kinds of objects they surround themselves with. Visitors to the installations can perambulate the virtual interior spaces with the aid of a simple interface.

The virtual three-dimensional interiors were realised from several thousand photos taken on-site, with the technology of photogrammetry. This technology is capable of constructing three-dimensional models of the photographed objects, on the basis of the differences between the photos. The “Homes” project differs from similar heritage projects in two aspects. The first is that we intentionally used open software that are easily accessible to anyone. The other is that while the majority of similar projects represent historical edifices, this project documents the personal environment of a contemporary average individual.

In my computer animation from 1997, “Landscape”, the illusion of three-dimensional space also is realised from photo series. Here, however, we cannot speak of three-dimensional virtual models. In the animation, just the illusion of space is realised with the aid of morph technology. Morph software is capable of engendering a feeling of almost holographic depth, by constructing a soft transition motion between photos taken from different angles.

Motion realised from Still Images
In the “Micro-movements in Snapshots” video installation (2015), motion is realised in just one photograph. In general, to attain the illusion of motion, several different still images are required per second. In this installation, the various details of the exact same photograph projected rapidly one after the other in the appropriate order, achieve the illusion of motion.

Photographic Database
The foundation for the 1998 interactive installation, “Focus”, is a database of approximately 900 photos. The photos depict people and houses. The viewer of the work can search freely among these photos with an interface that resembles the viewfinder on a camera. S/he can put an individual figure or house into focus, and then take a virtual snapshot of it. This work was produced for the “Photo ’98” festival in England, within the framework of photography and Europe. The figures appearing in the database are my own friends or family members, and the houses are their own houses in the various countries of Europe.

Photography as Memory
My computer-based animation entitled “Pictures” was made in 1988. Amateur family photos assembled together create a collage, whose resolution is theoretically infinite. If we enlarge a detail, then newer details emerge, which we can then further enlarge. With the aid of these enlargements, increasingly early photos become visible, i.e., increasingly older memories come to the surface.

This presentation will explore how designers might participate in the scientific debate and in which areas science and design overlap. Utility Pets combine advances in biotechnology with current trends in pet ownership, providing a context for thinking about the complex array of biotechnology that might affect our lives.

Abstract

This presentation will explore how designers might participate in the scientific debate and in which areas science and design overlap. The specific science addressed in the Utility Pets project is xenotransplantation (inter-species transplant). Transgenic genetically modified pigs are used in xenotransplantation. The goal is too create a living production line of partially humanised pig organs to use as spare parts for the human body. Emotional and material considerations are important in our relationship with animals, just as they are with people. However, sometimes these consideration provoke conflict. The wired and wonderful ways in which human beings have sought to resolve such conflict provide the central theme of the Utility Pets project.

Perhaps the medium of design can offer a platform that lies somewhere between reality and fiction where we can freely discuss how we were, how we are and how we will be. In other words, the project wants to explore biofutures before they happen and stimulate the public to develop an understanding that enables them to deal, not only with applications of biotechnology, but with the social development of biotechnological knowledge.

The narrative process provides a context for thinking about the complex array of biotechnology that might affect our lives. Starting with a series of “What if” stories, each with a different name, the process gives the public a common language for talking about biotechnology. It then encourages the public to think about each story as if it had already come to pass. “Suppose that your life could be saved by a pig, what would happen to you and the pig?”

It looks like by mentioning Neoism?! in my previous message I gave you the wrong input concerning what can be the subject of my proposal for ISEA98. It was only a short introduction to start with and a few words about my background but it wasn’t suggesting that I wanted to include Neoism?! As a subject for the ISEA program (in some ways it will be there anyway as all networks are hooked up to each other), I’m simply interested in the event and try to figure how could I get a part in it. In a few hours, I’ll leave for Dessau (Germany) for the International Electronic Media Forum event where I’ll perform Executive Machinery, a concert/ performance/installation that involves a computer controlled pneumatic armed file cabinet robot/sculpture that creates sound (I performed this same piece recently in Hull (England) for ROOTless 97).

As a sculpture/installation that is also a working model of communication networks, a kind of project I would love to take to Manchester for ISEA 98 for example, but talking to someone at MonteVideo (Amsterdam) a few days ago, I got the suggestion that my Joris Ivens based video/CD-rom installation would be the perfect (no such thing) piece for the ISEA event. In this work, entitled “Utility S(h)elves”, I use Ivens quotations (images and words) and my own ideas to make a statement on the subject of revolution. Of course, anything I do will always bring up questions about Neoism?!, and when it happens I’m ready to demonstrate my own ideas. Neoism?! is a large network today and there are millions of different individual definitions of what it is. Anyway, looking forward hearing from you again.
Ciao,
Istvan

ln January 1992, seven months before his death, John Cage presented his lecture ‘Overpopulation & Art’ at the Center for Humanities, Stanford University. Cage relates various ideas about social change; the role of art (or artlessness), globalisation, education, and environmental concerns. Cage’s position – social /anarchistic / libertarian – is that social revolution must occur at a grass-roots level: that change is bought about through positive individualism not government dictates; an (electronic) democratisation of knowledge; that art, or more specifically creative mind, is part of this gradual revolution – a utopian transformation.

Gregg Wagstaff will be reading John Cage’s ‘Overpopulation & Art’ with a simultaneous performance of Cages Four 6 composed in the same year. This will be followed by a paper presentation discussing Cages text and a broader socio-environmental artistic discourse in the light of an Ecological paradigm. In particular, the relevance of Social Ecology (Murray Bookchin) and the emerging discipline of Acoustic Ecology (the study of the effects of soundscape on the physical responses or behavioral characteristics of species living within it).

Institutional Presentation Statement

V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, is an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Founded in 1981 in ‘s-Hertogenbosch,, V2_ is an organization that concerns itself with research and development in the field of art and media technology. V2_’s activities include organizing (public) presentations, research in its own media lab, publishing, developing an online archive and a shop offering products that are related to V2_’s area of interest.

This public art project in Phoenix is a model STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) education project that brings together beautification of vacant urban land in downtown Phoenix with an educational project engaging Phoenix Bioscience High School students who are growing a two-acre field of sunflowers to harvest to produce biofuel for a hybrid biofuel/solar vehicle they are designing. This presentation is sponsored by Arizona State University Art Museum.

Vanishing Walks is a show without actors. It is “acted” in its totality by the public on stage with the help of tablets. Taken together, viewers are connected to a device that is going to be inseparable from the theatrical performance. The device is both an expression space and a tool that determines the rules and restrictions of the show. Viewers follow the instructions of a text that appears on the screen of their tablet. This has the form of a classic theater text, with the stage direction, for the indications of play, and a text “dialogued” intended to be read aloud. As much as the scenographic factory that supports reading, the tablets are connected to all the scenic elements: from video projections to lighting, to music. Each viewer intervention is synchronized with the writing of music or video projections, giving them an additional dramatic “responsibility”. Two stories are told simultaneously: the story of a community that is disintegrating -within the story- and the appearance of a new one -the spectators- actors on the scene. Vanishing Walks describes the events that led a group of people to shed their body wrapping in favor of a purely virtual existence. Vanishing Walks describes the events that led a group of people to revel in their bodily wrapping in favor of a purely virtual existence. The characters belong to the Furry community and their group was created in Second Life before alternating their encounters between the real and the virtual. Following their will to transgress their human condition, they found a way to discharge their consciousness in a computer machine, seduced by the promise of an immortal life in the form of an artificial intelligence. But this new life, far from being singular, reduces them irremediably to a form of computer life without autonomy. Converted into executables through a computer program, the “consciences” became script lines. Deprived of humanity, turned into computer language but incapable of developing their intelligence, “consciences” do not try to recover their human condition or escape from their new life, they simply repeat the lines of command constantly, for in this has become their function. Vanishing Walks proposes a reflection of our relation to virtuality through a spectacle without actors. It is a form of participatory and immersive theater that aims to break the barrier between performing arts and new technologies, in particular, the inclusion of mobile technologies on stage. It also breaks the boundary between the viewer and the actor, between the audience and the stage.

P2P: Power to the People is a metaphor for the enabling power of technology for individual expression. In creating this piece we’ve experienced first-hand the friction, the excitement and the unanswered questions that accompany bold new opportunities for people to engage. We will discuss what we’ve learned so far, having installed the piece in three fairly different cities and cultural contexts. We will relate the piece to the significant issues of accessibility, accountability, empowerment and oversight. In addition, we’ll give a brief overview of the technical and user interaction design of the P2P installation itself: our goals with the project, how we achieved them, and what we’d do differently.

Gorbet Design, Inc.: Matt , Rob & Susan Gorbet

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

This paper will in­tro­duce the panel theme. In it I will also dis­cuss how tan­gi­ble trans­la­tions change our re­la­tion­ship to screen-based in­for­ma­tion.  Through a set of ex­am­ples I will also dis­cuss how by en­cod­ing dig­i­tal in­for­ma­tion into a phys­i­cal ob­ject we can es­tab­lish a dif­fer­ent way of read­ing data through spa­tial, tem­po­ral and ma­te­r­ial vari­a­tions that sit out­side of the com­puter-mon­i­tor and the dig­i­tal en­vi­ron­ment.

Abstract

An audio/visual presentation which outlines four recent projects by Nigel Helyer. “Big Bell Beta”, “Semi-Automatic Writing”, “An UnRequited Space” and “La Zonu del Silencio”.

This paper discusses the conceptual and pragmatic developments of a ‘pluri-discipline’ which combines site specific sculptural installation, performance and live radio broadcast in a synthesis of Hybrid Cultural Forms. This enquiry enters the paradoxical zone between our experience of Materiality and Virtuality with a critique which initially addresses the sonic domain from a Sculptor’s perspective. Here the emphasis is on the experiential and phenomenological nature of sound and ‘sound-events’ are indexically linked to the material, dynamic systems which generate them, as well as to the architectures and environments which contain and propagate them. These concepts are subsequently developed as multi-site works which critique and manifest the enigma of describing tangible (phenomenal events) via the organs of transmission (an enigma which has become the central feature of the paradoxical logic that we ‘accept’ on a daily basis, eg. Radio/TV!!!). My interest as an artist is to explore this ‘suspension of disbelief’ with research which inverts and parallels this enigma by pursuing the definition and manifestation of various forms of cultural ‘silence’ (not the “Silence” of John Cage). Within the works discussed silence has both a physiological and metaphorical weight – the silence (silencing) created by political and economic processes lies in concert with the qualitative silence(s) of physical locations, or the incommensurability which exists between languages (cultural silences). In contra-distinction to the accepted role of the broadcast media – to turn the tangible into ethereal signs, my intention is to materialize those interstitial spaces which are overlooked or resistant to definition.

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

In the age of in­ter­na­tional telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, global mi­gra­tion and the emer­gence of the in­for­ma­tion econ­omy, how can class con­flict and prop­erty be un­der­stood? Draw­ing from cri­tiques of po­lit­i­cal econ­omy and in­tel­lec­tual prop­erty, The Telekom­mu­nist Man­i­festo is a con­tri­bu­tion to com­mons-based, col­lab­o­ra­tive and shared forms of cul­tural pro­duc­tion and eco­nomic dis­tri­b­u­tion.  Propos­ing “ven­ture com­mu­nism” as a new model for work­ers’ self-or­ga­ni­za­tion, Kleiner spins Marx and En­gels’ sem­i­nal Man­i­festo of the Com­mu­nist Party into the age of the in­ter­net. As a peer-to-peer model, ven­ture com­mu­nism al­lo­cates cap­i­tal that is crit­i­cally needed to ac­com­plish what cap­i­tal­ism can­not: the on­go­ing pro­lif­er­a­tion of free cul­ture and free net­works.  In de­vel­op­ing the con­cept of ven­ture com­mu­nism, Kleiner pro­vides a cri­tique of copy­right regimes, and cur­rent lib­eral views of free soft­ware and free cul­ture which seek to trap cul­ture within cap­i­tal­ism. Kleiner pro­poses copy­far­left, and pro­vides a us­able model of a Peer Pro­duc­tion Li­cense.  En­cour­ag­ing hack­ers and artists to em­brace the rev­o­luty po­ten­tial of the in­ter­net for a truly free so­ci­ety, The Telekom­mu­nist Man­i­festo is a po­lit­i­cal-con­cep­tual call to arms in the fight against cap­i­tal­ism.

This visually stimulating presentation investigates the Euclidean, Spherical, and Hyperbolic transformational capacities of Conformal Geometric Algebra [CGA].  I introduce VERSOR, a CGA-based open source cross-platform computer graphics synthesis library for manipulating immersive 3D environments and activating dynamic animations.  VERSOR aims to advance spatial systems thinking by introducing Geometric Algebra to artists and engineers within an integrated multimedia platform.  A highly expressive and remarkably consistent mathematical grammar for describing closed form solutions within various metric spaces, Geometric Algebra is finding increased application in computer vision and graphics, neural nets, DSP, robotics, astronomy, gauge theory, particle physics, and recently in metamaterials research, among other sciences. Geometric Algebra is a combinatoric system of spatial logic derived from William Clifford’s hypercomplex algebras developed in the 1860s.. Introduced into the Geometric Algebra community by physicists Hongbo Li, Alan Rockwood, and David Hestenes in 2001, the particular model implemented here represents a 5-dimensional graded algebra based on Riemannian projection of 3D Euclidean space onto a hypersphere – a higher dimensional mapping which opens the door to a rich set of functions for describing Mobius Transformations typically restricted to the 2D plane.  Integrated with various dynamic solvers, a graphics user interface library and audio synthesis library, VERSOR introduces some novel compositional methods into the CGA research landscape enabling exciting new techniques for the analysis and synthesis of dynamic structures and spaces, such as fluid-like warp fields and spontaneous surface generation.  It provides a path for researchers eager to engage in advanced concepts from fields as diverse as quantum mechanics, bio-surface design, hyperbolic tessellation, form-generation, and worldmaking.  A short introduction to the geometric algebraic system and its provenance is accompanied by explorations into its features and demonstrations of various organic animations.

The everyday silent conversation that we carry on when perceiving with our proprioceptive facilities, is it a continuous ideokinetic dialogue, for instance, when the hand readily navigates the space between the fingers and the keys on the computer?

The complexities of culture shape the individual, the ongoing interchange between the body and the machinic & humanoid entities that surround it can be seen as a form of an expanded software script. Both the internal patterns and habitus which illuminate the body’s lived experience and the designs of information systems are to a large extent shaped by cultural, political and economic interests. Transferring information into systems and managing machine language communication is a learnt practice and ritual that one has to monitor, just as there are idiokinetic techniques that are often used for longevity and kinetic practices used to imagine ones own self, as a vessel of infinite veracity. I reflect upon the internal micro choices and actions our automated nervous system performs every moment of our living existence, which plays a large part of the instrumental process of learning a new set of movements, tools or even machine operation for managing processes.

Recent developments in nanotechnology, virtual world simulation and high-definition industry standards, for the most part, conjure up a strange sort of vanity based on form and surface, which becomes more and more removed from embodied human complexity and requires virtually no interaction or maintenance from the user.

We experience our world as fabric woven together out of inextricable sensory threads, not as individual sensory media, nor as individual data. The human form is ephemeral, not concrete and never quite what we think, I ask what this all means for daily modes of engagement and embodiment with an electronic medium whilst referring historically to how objects, props and machines have long been emblematic of deception, trickery, charlatanism and healing (often combined) in many cultures.

Rachel Lin Weaver is an interdisciplinary media artist working in video, experimental documentary, sound, installation, and performance. Her projects explore personal and cultural memory, resilience in the face of adversity, landscapes and people in flux, and ecological systems. She is influenced by her upbringing in wilderness areas and rural communities in poverty, and finds many useful metaphors in the natural world. Weaver is most drawn to the murky areas where her personal perspective or deep memory confuses her ability to be scientifically objective. She negotiates this fertile and bewildering territory through collection (field recordings), and experimentation with composition and narrative that transforms understanding of a place or data. By combining deeply personal reflection with empirical observation, Weaver offers unusual and evocative meditative spaces where viewers contemplate the richness of ecology, and the overlap and collision of the personal and impersonal, the physical and metaphysical, the scientific and the ecstatic. Most recently, Weaver has worked as a facilitator of creative decolonizing workshops, and has co-created experimental oral history and documentary projects with indigenous groups in Alaska and Central America.

Abstract

Mirror neurons
One of the most important recent developments in neuroscience comes from the discovery of mirror neurons, a type of brain cell that is activated both by performing an action and by watching the same action performed by others. Mirror neurons offer a scientific explanation for our intuitive or ‘gut’ understanding of how others feel, by the direct transmission of experience through the stimulation of the viewer’s brain. The viewer senses and understands someone else’s emotions and sensations as if they were experiencing it themselves. Using advanced sensing techniques to measure brain activity and physiological response, scientists have found that the same neural activity is shared by both the observer and the observed. Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran calls mirror neurons ’empathy neurons,’ as they give us the ability to feel what another is feeling, and thereby understand their internal experiences. This leads to the dissolution of the barrier between self and others, the basis of many philosophical beliefs and artistic experiences

This paper will discuss new research involving repurposing the mobile phone from a textual and voice device to a more multi-modal, synaesthetic, and tactile performance and expression device. This new work seeks new ways for individuals to express themselves in intimate, visual and non-verbal ways – akin to sending remote ‘touch’ messages, immediately ‘known’ or intuitively understood at a pre-conscious level – to create a direct tactile route to interpersonal communication. The project develops novel ways to repurpose mobile phones, wearable technologies, video and textiles, for different or fresh approaches to expression, in as close to physical means as possible.  This would use both with the mobile connection and wearable, tactile interaction. Ideally, there would be an exchange, a way to reply to mobile message sender. This creates not only a one-way connection from phone to body but a non-verbal, embodied, multi-sensory dialogue. Thus, this research explores how to relay the “felt experience” or touch sensation back through wearable biofeedback devices in the garment, to send back a reply directly from the garment, as well as through the recipient’s mobile phone.

This project will draw upon the visual material in the mobile users’ environment and any imagery they think relevant or essential. It will investigate sensory experience, conceptual and interaction and facilitation of the physiological experiences of emotion in the body and brain. This ‘tactile video’ exploration, however, will develop a new or specific video vocabulary or symbolic lexicon to express with, to construct video ‘sentences’ or ‘utterances’ then translated into a distance touch or embrace. The intention is to create a more structured semiotic method for people with physical, verbal or linguistic limitations to use for more personal purposes and have a more embodied, tactile and visual means of messaging.

It seems like that at this point of our timeline a lot is already written about the object named “video”. Video in itself therefore appears as not questionable or not questioned. Video is an undiscussable companion of the everyday. It is an attachment in a variation of practices. It is a relation, a relative. Rather than an object it is an appearance, a fog, a cloud. May be it is just a definition.

Of course, these statements need to be discribed, elaborated, explored further in depth. Underlaying as a motivation is a question hardly to ask: “What is video?”. The question is closely formulated, such to speak with the eye directed to and being on the historical work of Andre Bazin and his collection of essays named under the title ‘what is cinema’. Of course, once again suggesting that cinema is an ancestor or at least a close relative of the object in question. But it is understand as just setting a direction. Object ‘video’ and the direction of the question ‘what’ creating a vector, which is traversing various kinds of environments. In other words formulated walking along a path, following a road of exploration from the moving image as electronic construct or built by code towards its cinematic forms and further to its various applications as a tool and medium … and more forward seeing video as crystallization of time. In our daily life we not only can touch video screens, we touch the video itself as the video touches us through various kinds of gadgets, smart phones, navigation devices, tablets and further more to come.

Viet Cong and the Internet: Examining the influence of the Viet Cong on the development of current information technology. I would argue that in their (boys’ own) obsessions with whiz bang military hardware and the Soviet threat, North American (and americanophile) intellectuals have missed one obvious point. That the U.S. Defence Depart-ments research and development of the ARPANET, and thus the Internet, were directly influenced by the low tech. tactics deployed by the victorious liberation movements of South East Asia. Why has this been excluded from debate? Basically because the USA lost the Vietnam war, as a result this disastrous episode of US military history has been conveniently erased from the collective memory. Before the story of the Internet is completely etched in stone I would like to offer an alternative view to the dominant myth.

In this paper a set of basic elements and colour, structure and time operators is proposed. The elements and operators define a 2-D abstract digital video world. A prototype implementation of a program ‘VIK’ is described: VIK is a simple video-sequencer that can be used as a video-score interpreter or as an interactive video keyboard. The current version of the program was used to make some short abstract videos (‘keyboard exercises’): the same result (given some manual ability) could be obtained with a real time performance of the same score. The idea of visual music is quite old — starting with Aristoteles (Whitney 1980). Colour structures changing in time produced by a ‘visual organ’ were used by Skrjabin in the music work Prometheus, the Poem of Fire at the beginning of this century (1911) (Storia, 1970).

Abstract animation was explored in the movies too — Fantasia by Walt Disney, 1938 (Finch 1988). Computers made the exploring of the abstract 2-D movie or video and/or interactive visual systems feasible: Whitney’s works, Cohen’s Aaron, Zajec’s NC just to mention a few (Whitney 1971, Cohen 1986, Zajec 1973). The idea of a ‘general purpose visual keyboard’ or a ‘universal visual organ’ is probably a myth, as was the idea of ‘THE Universal Programming Language’ for artists in the sixties. In fact even for a still image, possibly produced by an aesthetic automaton or program (Cohen, Zajec 1971) the basic colour and structure elements and the possible compositional rules (that have to be defined as a basis for any possible ‘gen-eral purpose’ tool for visual experiments) give so many degrees of freedom that any choice will set up some limits that will prove not satisfactory for other authors. The addition of the time factor adds new choice problems. (Evans 1990, Kawaguchi 1986, Zajec 1983).

This paper presents some work in progress “with a simple interactive abstract digital video keyboard, IVIK’, based on a limited set of operators or keys that act on the definition and the changes in time of simple matrix colour structures. The system gives some possibilities to explore the 2-D world defined by these structures. The choices of the basic elements and the operators are partially determined by the interaction goal: all operator and element specification can be given with a single key stroke. In the prototype version the keys are given by the computer keyboard. A personal choice give one of the infinite possible integration schemes of the image structures, colour coding structures and the time variation scheme of the two structures. The element and operator set is an attempt to solve the problem of abstract video work that can convey some meaning with only colour structure changes, without ‘actors’ or foreground / background figures. The prototype VIK system is implemented in Think Pascal on a Macintosh II with standard video card (640 x 480 x 8).

Having observed that people often times get upset when things are taken from them, it is probably safe to say that humans take ownership quite seriously. In fact, one could argue that a majority of our conflicts, big and small, do actually revolve around trying to negotiate ownership over something. But as the very idea of what can be owned has expanded to include things such as ideas and culture, those engaged in cultural production have also been tasked with considering the morals/ethics of ownership in relation to the creation of their work. As a musician that primarily works with digital signal processing and digital audio recordings, it is evident that many of the materials I work with, such as synthesizer presets and sampled audio, can be attributed to someone other than myself.

And in the process of wrestling with ideas such as intellectual property rights and the power relations that lead to the misappropriation of culture, it occurred to me just how easy it was for one to occupy a position that is offensive. Continuing my reflections on moral/ethical concerns in regards to creative practice, I began to wonder what these considerations would look like beyond our sentio-centric value system. In the fields of environmental ethics and the ethics of technology, ethical considerations are often expanded beyond humans to include animal life, plant life and perhaps even non-organic entities. Drawing from their discourse, and risking sounding like an animist or a pantheist, I began to toy with the idea that perhaps all manifestations of human will, even upon materials such as metals and electromagnetic waves can take on a dimension of violence. The performance Violence of a Different Kind is a piece that looks to highlight how in the expansion of our ethics, one can interpret a certain violence in the taking of materials and shaping them to fulfill our desires.

Artwork Description
Borrowing and taking ideas from others plays a significant part in how culture furthers itself. In the global-villageof-a-world [1] that we live in, it is increasingly easier for one to know about cultures far removed from their own, and thusly much easier for one to take from another. In light of the ease in which information or resources can be transferred as such from one party to another, conflicts in regards to ownership and propriety inevitably arise, which in turn could raise certain moral/ethical questions – When is it okay to take? Who has the right to take? What are acceptable things that we can do with the things that are taken? Initially, the potential answers to these questions were meant to serve and protect the interests of people, but in recent discourse the boundaries of ethics has gradually expanded beyond ourselves to include animal life, plant life and perhaps even non organic entities. The performance Violence of a Different Kind is a piece that looks to highlight how in the expansion of our ethics, one can interpret a certain violence in the very act of taking materials and shaping them to fulfill our desires.

One notion related to ownership that society has come to more or less agree upon is that theft is inappropriate – or that it is not appropriate for someone with no right to an object, to take it without the consent of the rightful owner. While this social agreement may be quite straightforward, it is more complicated when identity and power relations come into play in determining who does or does not have a right to something. A good example of this can be seen in outsider participation in hip-hop culture. Despite how hip-hop has been accepted into the hegemonic mainstream, certain outsider adopters of hip-hop may still be perceived at times by those within the culture to not have the right to do so; such as in the case of chart topping white rapper, Iggy Azalea, who is originally from a small town in Australia. Iggy Azalea and other white rappers have been placed under scrutiny for exploiting the form of hip-hop when they themselves have not experienced or demonstrated empathy towards the historic oppression, institutionalized racism and other struggles faced by African-Americans. [2]

Another example of this kind of propriety has less to do with the identity of one who does the appropriating and more with how the manner in which an object is appropriated may offend or go against the will of those who have a claim of said object. To illustrate this inappropriateness in terms of treatment, let us take a look at the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes by American cartoonist Bill Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes is about a little boy and his stuffed toy tiger and the comic has gained quite a bit of popularity since the 80s and 90s. Yet despite Watterson’s syndicate putting continuous pressure on him to license the characters in Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson has steadfastly refused to do so. Beyond finding the commoditizing of his work offensive, Watterson disagreed with his creation taking on other forms, as he felt that if Calvin and Hobbes were to begin appearing on T-shirts and cell-phone cases or in TV-specials and animated movies, these characters would then be stripped of a certain innocence and honesty that was embodied in the original comic strip form.

[3] So if one were to go ahead and appropriate the likeness of Calvin and Hobbes in manufacturing place mats or car bumper stickers, it would of course first and foremost be a breach of copyright law, but it could also be considered ethically objectionable or at the very least disrespectful, since the treatment of his characters in such a way would be in direct contradiction of Watterson’s intentions. While these standards of propriety mentioned above are typically established in relation to another person or to another group of people, in the field of environmental ethics, it is recognized that beyond humans, other living creatures including plants and animals also play an integral part in society, and thus certain ethical considerations that are normally reserved for other human beings ought be extended to also include all organic life. This extension of ethics can be seen in the art world with the debates elicited by Eduardo Kac’s transgenic artwork involving the genetic engineering of a glowing fluorescent rabbit [4] and Damien Hirst’s work that actively puts animals in harm’s way.

[5] Furthermore, scholars working in the field of ethics of technology have suggested that ethics can be extended to also include non-organic life in the way of artificial intelligence and robots. [6] In continuing this trajectory of finding commonality with that which is around us, it can be argued that non-organic, non-life may one day also possibly fall within the bounds of our ethical consideration. Thus as one who is engaged in creative practice may need to pay attention to power relations relevant to the context of their work to prevent a misappropriation of culture, perhaps one may also need to reflect on the ethical implications of using non-sentient, inorganic processes and materials to avoid misappropriation of a different kind.

In the performance of Violence of a Different Kind, I will be using the electromagnetic fields generated by electrical and electronic devices such as electric fans and cellular phones as materials for making music. Tightly wound copper coils will be used to pick up these electromagnetic fields and generate a current that will then be amplified and converted into a digital audio signal via an audio interface – laptop computer setup. As the copper coil pick-ups are hovered over different devices, as well as different parts of these devices, a diverse soundscape of hums and patterned glitches will emerge. These sounds will then be sampled, processed and “played” by the performer in the context of musical performance. In the context outlined above, the enactment of music in this way can be seen as a violent act in that objects and processes, which in this case is electromagnetic noises, are reappropriated according to established conventions and aesthetics of electronic and digital music making.

Panel: The Matter with Media

My paper will ex­plore how a par­tic­u­lar sub­set of con­tem­po­rary in­ter­net-based art­works in­ten­tion­ally op­er­ate as “work as as­sem­blage” (after N. Kather­ine Hayles in My Mother Was a Com­puter). The ex­am­ples I will use – Seth Price’s Dis­per­sion (2002-On­go­ing), Oliver Laric’s Ver­sions (2009 and 2010), and David Horvitz’s Idea Sub­scrip­tion (2009) – all desta­bi­lize the idea of a sta­tic, ideal “work” by re­ly­ing on their dif­fuse cir­cu­la­tion and in­stan­ti­a­tion through net­works for their re­al­iza­tion. No­tably, they all in­volve a text in some way – Dis­per­sion and Ver­sions are es­says about vi­sual cul­ture and the dis­tri­b­u­tion of con­tent on­line and both take many forms,Dis­per­sion cir­cu­lates across var­i­ous media – sculp­ture and printed book­lets – where Ver­sions is remixed by other artists and cu­ra­tors. Idea Sub­scrip­tion was a year-long tum­blr blog dis­clos­ing writ­ten (often whim­si­cal) ideas for read­ers to im­ple­ment, which was re­cently repack­aged in book form as Every­thing That Can Hap­pen in a Day.

In re­sponse to what Alan Liu terms “viral aes­thet­ics” in The Laws of Cool, I will argue that these works offer an­other, al­ter­nate aes­thetic mode to “viral aes­thet­ics” – one that op­er­ates through its im­mer­sion within the end­less stream of in­for­ma­tion, where pres­ence re­sults from serendip­i­tous in­stan­ti­a­tion. Liu em­pha­sizes the “de­struc­tive cre­ation” of art by Joseph Nech­vatal, Jodi, and William Gib­son’s Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) – ex­am­ples that sub­vert knowl­edge work by en­gag­ing in a de­struc­tive mode of pro­duc­tiv­ity, one that prob­lem­at­i­cally con­tains the as­sump­tion that tak­ing some­thing apart re­veals its inner truth. While the art prac­tices I would like to dis­cuss also cir­cu­late in a “viral” fash­ion, they do not en­gage in cor­ro­sive de­struc­tiv­ity, e.g. Nech­vatal’s com­puter virus pro­jects. Rather, they offer in­sight by way of a con­struc­tive, sym­bi­otic re­la­tion with the in­for­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies that en­able them, be­com­ing pow­er­ful through their own mo­men­tum and spread, an as­pect yielded by their ex­is­tence as “works as as­sem­blage.” By fore­ground­ing the facets of their own trans­mis­sion, Dis­per­sion, Ver­sions and Idea Sub­scrip­tion pro­voke a med­i­ta­tion on the move­ment of in­for­ma­tion on­line.

Illustrated presentation of the ‘Virtopia’ project, a virtual world of emotions, memories, dreams and wishes.

Abstract

Virtual Identity (VI) is a new phenomenon in the media society of the Western or industrialized world. VI is like brains, age or physical body – everyone has it. Commercial companies and public administration have created personal data files of all of us, including our level of education, credit card numbers and so on. At the moment both the commercial and the administrational data keepers sell our personal info to the market, a pile of raw info of the potential consumer. Our identity and personality have been commercialized.  But in the Net we can tailor our VI as we wish. Typical Net identity hacking is to try to emulate the opposite sex than the user is in real life. The Gibsonian cyberspace does not exist yet, but it has been realized by pilots and projects like Abbeye de Cluny, DOOM, Habitat, SIMNET, Virtual Art Museum and Virtual City. When cyberspace will come into existence, it will provide a whole new medium to express our thoughts with 3D visualization – a little like the 2D cave paintings for the ancient humans. In cyberspace, you will be able to send 3D animations/pictures instead of the very gesture-restricted email. As inhabitants of the cyberspace, we have to remember that digital space can not satisfy our physical needs for food, drinks, sleep or personal hygiene. Other forms of ‘life’ will habitat the cyberspace more efficiently. Agents, butlers and personal digital assistants (PDA) are personal, profiled programs, which ‘learn’ the routines of the human user and after learning it will do tasks autonomously. The robot researchers of MIT leaped on to the next generation in the 1980’s, inventing that a robot needn’t make preprogrammed tasks – it is
enough for it just to survive. This means that if the efficient computer program ‘wants’ to survive it might reject its original task-making and ‘decide’ to behave unexpectedly. In the Net history we have the example of R.T. Morris and his worm of 1988. And this was a mere coding mistake, to begin with. ‘When all the phones in the world ring at the same time, you know I’m alive.’ What if the purpose of human life is just a step towards the evolution of a-life and other true habitants of the cyberspace.

The theoretically claimed translation of the embodied experience is specific to the nature of digital technologies. This shift is addressed in practice by the development of computers’ multisensory responses. But what kind of interaction does favour the emergence of embodiment?

We study this question by exploring the cognitive mechanisms of embodiment in the context of multisensory artistic installations. Our hypothesis is that the conceptual and technological consistency of the composing elements may play an important role in the embodiment of the experience. Interaction metaphors, such as the instrumental interaction, could also improve the enaction of the situation.

In order to explore our hypothesis, we set an experimental installation, which was based on simple virtual scenes, addressing the visual, auditory and haptic channels. About twenty visitors successively interacted with each scene through a force-feedback device connected to a synchronous physical simulation engine, which also produced the visual and auditory signals. Through this configuration, most visitors experienced for the first time a multisensory interaction with physically consistent virtual objects. We consider this discovery as a unique moment during which visitors can experience aesthetical and emotional “shocks” and question their senses. This is the opportunity to collect essential information about the way our sensory-cognitive system works in an artistic situation. To stimulate visitors’ response, we tested an experimentation method in which the exploration and reactions of the spectator/actor are explicitly part of the installation. Once the exploration phase was over, we continued with a semi-directive interview addressing (1) the felt sense of the experience, (2) how it was felt, and (3) what it felt like. The interviewers encouraged the visitors to transcend comments about what they liked or disliked. The resulting subjective descriptions are expected to access deeper levels of consciousness of the felt experience, for example through ‘forgotten’ memories or evocative thoughts.

Our method has proved to be a valuable way to collect rich information about the visitors’ experience, providing insights into the sensory-cognitive process. Preliminary results of our analysis suggest that the consistency of sensory signals and the instrumentality of the interaction significantly help the embodiment of the virtual scenes.

Virtual Kingdom of Beauty is a ‘Sculpture’. It includes the presentation wall for projection of three-dimensional interactive computer animations, many slide projections and wooden sculptures. The observer equipped with stereoscopic glasses enters the world of digital and real art work. This world is simultaneously historical and contemporary deals both with mythology and the current reality. lt is to be experienced as if it was a dream. The ‘Sculpture’ features a group of sculptural presentatíons. Using the digital world’s latest technology it incorporates ancient aesthetic principles to develop a composition. Effects of disintegration and growth, gliding and flying, metamorphosis and morphings are put into practice. The viewer will be able to hold conversations with 3-D busts which one could assume to be speechless. The internet-version is planned. The exhibition will combine both an artificial and classical aesthetic. Virtual Kingdom of Beauty is a forum which superimposes on ancient sculptures seen as symbols of beauty images of Kings and Queens, Princes and Princesses living today. The images of Majesties and Royal Highnesses will be scanned to allow their 3-D measurements to be modelled together with sculptural elements of ancient mythology into one virtual unity. The virtual sculptures correspond with the busts of the artistic installation. The project is a three-step process: the Royal personages are scanned, artistically sculptured within virtual reality and finally produced out of wood by machine. A series of breathtaking interiors of Royal palaces will be projected onto the walls and ceiling of the exhibition space, harmonically combining virtual space and sculptures. The spectator will be able to make a new type of journey through beautiful worlds.

Virtual Migrants focuses on globalisation, barriers to migration, state ideology and the paradox between the shrinking world with freedom for information to travel, and yet the increasing tightening of immigration laws and ever-increasing gaps between the ‘first’ and ‘third’ world. Imperialism is more than ever the dominant global system perpetuating extreme oppression and inequality. Its pre-development created modern racism, and therefore attacks on racism will only scratch the surface unless they relate to anti-imperialist struggles. Art along with media is a form of ideological production – consciously or unconsciously it reinforces, re-presents, questions, or attacks various views we hold about our world, hence it always has an educative component, positive or negative.

Many artists (unlike media practitioners) feel unable to think of audience and the political effects of their work – a writer once said “If I worried about that, I’d never write anything at all!” Furthermore, the art establishment is over-critical of art that speaks out with a direct voice – I recall continual skepticism during production of “Nachural Struggle” (CD-ROM) as to whether it was “Art” or an educational CD. Yet in effecting change, art and ideological production is most powerful when linked to progressive struggles. As Angela Davis says, “Progressive and revolutionary art is inconceivable outside of the context of political movements for radical change.” (from “Women, Culture and Politics”, Women’s Press 1990). It is as important for campaigns to use arts/media as required to meet their immediate and foremost objectives as it is for arts/media to raise awareness and generate discussion around those campaigns and the relevant issues.

It is also the social use of a new technology which finally determines its future, and this project develops this area through collaboration between artists, educationalists and campaigners. But let us take the relationship between art and ideology a step further – how can a work of art consciously and purpose-fully describe and express an ideology, and thereby develop the tangibility and currency of the concept itself? If an ideology is a set of related beliefs, attitudes and opinions, then the old linear narratives have surely done a disservice to their understanding. The nonlinear nature of the CD-ROM lends itself particularly well to the artistic exploration of such abstract social concepts which are not normally described easily using such narratives as in films and books.

Virtual Migrants is currently researching this potential for enabling the active viewer to link together seemingly disparate events and pieces of information into a well-defined conceptual framework, in any order. It initially focuses on the story of Liver-pool-based Nigerian dissident Bayo Omoyiola (currently threatened with deportation) and the layers of interwoven connections that link together Euro-British racism, colonial history, global economy, and definitions of nationality. The brief “soapbox” session for isea98 will discuss the above ideas with reference to excerpts from the previous “Nachural Struggle” CD-ROM. Presenting the results of a CD-ROM /research and development project focusing on the concepts of Globalisation, Barriers to Migration, and National Identity. The paradox between on the one hand the shrinking world and freedom for information to travel, while on the other the increasing tightening of immigration laws and the ever-increasing gaps between the ‘first’ world and ‘third’ world, The non-linear nature of the CD-ROM lends itself particularly well to the artistic exploration of abstract social concepts which are not normally described easily using the linear narratives of films and books.

This potential has been rarely developed; Virtual Migrants would examine this potential for enabling the active viewer to link together seemingly disparate events and pieces of information into a single, well defined conceptual frame-work, in any order. The CD-ROM medium enables possibilities for a piece to be discretely artistic, educative and also campaigning all in one physical format, due to the ability for a user to navigate through specific sections without the need to encounter other entire bodies of sections. The project is a collaboration between a group of artists, an educational institution (CGEM) and a community/ campaigning agency (IAU). Each will have their respective demands on the final audience, use and application of the CDROM and the project will examine this potential. The project will examine the use of CDROM (and secondarily the web) for black issue-based campaigning groups; for the development of anti-imperialist education; and towards the development of a black digital aesthetic. A parallel website is being produced in conjunction with the pilot CDROM.

In Media & Ethics symposium, Helsinki, and ISEA96, Rotterdam, Toshiya Ueno gave a talk on Techno Orientalism. In DEAF ’96 and Digital Dreams ’96 Tapio Makela worked on the topic Orientalist Aesthetics. In Ars Electronica 97 we had a dialogue in Net.Sauna on how to converge these two topics. We will have prepared this topic in advance, have parts prewritten (dialogue as theatre), parts visualised (imaginary dialogue) and parts generated on location (performative dialogue).

Poesie virtuelle (Virtual Poetry) is an obsolete diskette containing my collection of poems frozen in an irreversible state. My videographics contribute to the research of sounds and images, figures of the voice of an oratory Art, of my previous manuscript. For me, the hand that starts the action is the same hand that would write on the pages. The hand, so close to the eye, so close to the idea, in line with the elaboration of thought, seizes the camera lens just like a stiletto open on the world. The body of a scribe rose to join the traveling vision and write down in space the loops and limits of writing, prefigured in my videoglyphics.

In ‘Work in Progress’ real-time virtual reality technology has been used to bring to life a series of drawings in order to examine the possibilities of a life beyond the frame. A still image leaves much to the interpretation of the viewer. virtual reality technology, however, can place us inside the image where we can explore and interact. The work attempts to offer up new paradigms for virtual space as a fluid sketchbook/studio and exhibition space, where ideas can be dynamically realised, documented and presented.

A recurring factor in the creation of virtual reality artworks is the relationship between the artist, the work and the audience. In its current form ‘Work in Progress’ is intended to be presented by the artist to an audience, drawing on the ‘art of memory’ techniques discussed by Frances Yates. It acts as a visualisation of a memory space where the layout of the architecture orders the narrative and the placement of objects within the space prompts the recall of significant points to be addressed.

Panel Statement

Panel: The Invisible Planet

This presentation will describe the possibilities for social interaction between users and computer generated agents in networked Virtual Reality applications.

In many ways networked virtual worlds can be described as social experiments. Since it is networked, it will be inhabited by persons that have had no previous personal contact, and
have to learn to interact, and develop conventions for behavior within the virtual worlds. This also puts the awareness on the responsibility of the developers of VR applications, as they as the interpreters of cultural and social codecs. Virtual Reality can also challenge the traditional role of users of different media. First of all the user can walk around in the virtual worlds as a spectator, just watching, like a visitor. On the other hand computer generated agents can be programmed to follow a dramatized sequence. The user can first of all watch this sequence as a linear story, like traditional TV. But the user will also be given the possibility to interact with the agent role, and influence the sequence of actions. The third level is for the user to virtually inhabit the agent role. The user perspective in Virtual Reality is based on the work related to  Virtual Polis Version 2.0 and a reconstruction of an ancient viking settlement, Virtual Viking Village Version 1.0, both of which were premiered at the conference Virtual Reality Oslo 1994.

For the past eight years, since the first symposium on Cyberspace in Austin, issues relating to informational structure in a fluid environment such as online spaces have been discussed. One outcome seems to come from this discussion. In this presentation, the author wishes to look at these issues on the level of the user from the standpoint that the architecture of cyberspace is a locale in which humans must reside and interact with their environment. In this local study, we will look at the ergonomics of virtual spaces from standpoints of contemporary and ancient traditions. It is my intention to take a broad look at these issues, looking at contemporary models of interactivity and interface structure, design precursors such as the Bauhaus, and ancient disciplines such as Feng Shui, the Chinese art of creating spaces optimally configured for human habitation. In this way, the author hopes that when examined from these disparate sites of engagement, we can gain insights in how the human organism interacts with virtual spaces and how we can build cyberspaces that are more attuned to human habitation.

In a world where graphics dominate the meeting-point of art and information processing systems, and where almost all our virtual reality scenarios are stuck in a visual mode, there is a largely overlooked realm which is more subtle, broad, and fertile than the merely sensorial. Shuck off that data helmet and those data-gloves a while, and consider a most fundamental virtuality: pseudo-organic behavior.

Panel: Queer Viralities: Resistant Practices in New Media Art & Philosophy

In “After Life: De Anima and Un­hu­man Pol­i­tics,” Eu­gene Thacker writes: “If our global con­text of cli­mate change, dis­as­ters, pan­demics, or com­plex net­works tells us any­thing, it is that po­lit­i­cal thought today de­mands a con­cept of life ad­e­quate to it anony­mous, un­hu­man di­men­sions, an un­hu­man pol­i­tics, for un­hu­man life.”

While Gal­loway & Thacker have urged us not to look for pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics in dis­eases, can­cers, and viruses, every­thing about our con­tem­po­rary mo­ment forces us to look there. It has been ar­gued we now live in a viral ecol­ogy under the sign of viral cap­i­tal­ism, along­side viral media and philoso­phies. This ex­plo­sion of all things viral sug­gests fas­ci­nat­ing, weird, and un­hu­man move­ments be­tween the life of the virus and the human des­ig­na­tion of what is viral. Fol­low­ing this, can we have a no­tion of the viral that does not co­in­cide with cap­i­tal­ism? Queer­ness seems to tell us we can. I will pro­ceed to ar­tic­u­late what a queer viral (or un­hu­man) pol­i­tics might (or ought to) be by ex­am­in­ing the over­lap­pings, dif­fer­ences, and ir­re­ducibil­i­ties of the virus (bi­o­log­i­cal en­tity) and the viral (char­ac­ter­is­tics of the virus ap­plied to other things). I will specif­i­cally con­sider the virus/viral re­la­tion along two axes: 1) from virus to viral based on ac­tion: repli­ca­tion and cryp­tog­ra­phy, or what Alex Gal­loway and Eu­gene Thacker call the “be­com­ing-num­ber” of the virus, and 2) from virus to viral based on its per­cep­tual world, or how to gen­er­ate the viral through a spec­u­la­tion on, or “alien phe­nom­e­nol­ogy” of, its “umwelt.” I will argue that the un­hu­man is the me­di­at­ing link be­tween the virus and the viral, and that a queer viral pol­i­tics en­gages with both these axes in novel ways. I will specif­i­cally look at Tim Dean’s writ­ings on bare­back­ing cul­ture, Luce Iri­garay’s work on mim­icry, and the art­work of Queer Tech­nolo­gies.

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

Ac­cord­ing to one pos­si­ble nar­ra­tive, the his­tory of com­puter graphic imag­ing has priv­i­leged verisimil­i­tude, at­tempt­ing to achieve a vir­tual image that im­i­tates op­ti­cal re­al­ity as faith­fully as pos­si­ble. This ac­count posits an evo­lu­tion­ary tra­jec­tory for com­puter graph­ics be­gin­ning at rudi­men­tary pixel-based fig­ures and pro­gress­ing to­wards richly lay­ered, vol­u­met­ric vi­su­al­iza­tions of an al­ter­nate world whose prop­er­ties mir­ror our own. This his­tory may or may not hide the fact that this vir­tual world is often vi­su­al­ized as if it were cap­tured by a cam­era; the cam­era-based image is sim­u­lated  by en­cod­ing a math­e­mat­i­cal model of a pic­ture as it would ap­pear through a lens, with a spe­cific field of view and focal length[1] <#_ftn1> . So al­ready, com­pu­ta­tion­ally gen­er­ated pic­tures analo­gize and favor the vi­sual qual­i­ties of a world seen through a cam­era lens. Thus, they would seem to tend in­her­ently to­wards the par­tic­u­lar qual­i­ties of vir­tu­al­ity, and the vi­sual dis­tor­tions, pro­duced by a cam­era.  But there is an al­ter­nate tra­di­tion of com­pu­ta­tional ab­strac­tion that rev­els in the fa­cil­ity of the com­puter to ren­der vi­sual equiv­a­lents of ab­stract math­e­mat­i­cal cal­cu­la­tions. There are ex­am­ples of such screen-based ab­strac­tion that gen­er­ate im­agery based on for­mu­lae for phys­i­cal forces such as grav­ity, or painterly com­po­si­tions that emerge as a re­sult of in­putting ran­dom val­ues into an al­go­rithm en­cod­ing change over time.  This paper as­sesses whether or not there are a set of prin­ci­ples with which cam­era­less, com­pu­ta­tion­ally based ab­strac­tions are con­cerned, and what kind of “world” is imag­ined through this al­go­rith­mi­cally gen­er­ated vi­sual model. Tak­ing into ac­count the his­tory of ab­strac­tion in mod­ern art, it con­sid­ers whether com­pu­ta­tional ab­strac­tion fits into a mod­ernist nar­ra­tive or whether it en­vi­sions a new call to order dis­tinct from that set forth by 20th cen­tury mod­ernist move­ments.

The transcultural and multilingual magazine, founded in Montreal in 1983, now enters the virtual triangle formed by the three great metropolis of Eastern America: Montreal, Toronto, New York. Humour and a sharp critical faculty are our weapons as we tackle from the cities in the triangle. But where are all these people running, what’s all this tremendous activity inside the Triangle all about? We shall delve journalistically to come face to face with the high energy which powers our incredible megalopolis. A critical but witty journalistic writing. Inquiries, reports, interviews, commentaries from the three cities in a comparative, original approach.

Visible From Space is the name of a thought experiment. It is an open series that exists in multiple materials – video, relief prints, installation, projection, handmade paper, artist’s books, found objects, field notes, interviews, essays, and site specific events. I am proposing to exhibit several of my ongoing video experiments from this series in the context of the ‘Arabian Nights’ panel format.  In particular, I have a number of videos of experiments performed on residency near Death Valley with rockets and balloons, and a number of experiments performed on the US/Mexico border using drones / UAV’s that I believe will generate a charged conversation.This work erupted from a fanciful supposition to create drawings on the Earth so large they would be visible from the moon. For such a feat, the stroke width of the line would need to be close to 60 miles wide in order for barely a hairline to be visible from that distance. It is charming to think that the Great Wall of China is visible from space – but this is merely a popular mythology. It is difficult to resolve an image of the Great Wall even from the International Space Station with the naked eye – which orbits about 250 miles above the Earth, let lone from outer space or nearby celestial bodies.

There has been much discussion over the last 25 years on issues surrounding vision and power, from Foucault’s model based on Bentham’s panopticon, to Laura Mulvey’s critique of the masculine gaze in Hollywood cinema. Focusing on technologies from cinema to the computer, the discussions examine the disempowering and controlling aspects of vision, and establish clear distinctions between viewer/viewed and empowered/ disempowered. This trajectory reaches its conclusion in work of authors such as Paul Virilio and Manuel DeLanda, who locate the military industrial roots in contemporary vision technologies.
Contemporary critical artistic practice has responded to and sought to expand these ideas in light of new relations between viewer and viewed in the contemporary electronic landscape. For example, does seeing and being seen via electronic mediation always already imply a hierarchical power relation? How do these relationships manifest themselves through technologies such as the internet, with its see you see me protocol? Does this new landscape demand new models of vision, with paradigms that address forms of erotics and display as well as power and oppression?

These issues will be explored by each of the artists on the panel with work both informed by and also informing critical writings on vision, surveillance and technology. Each artist seeks to move beyond a simple articulation of binaries of power and vision, and in different ways uses strategies that can be seen alternatively as a coping mechanism, subversive appropriation, martyrdom, and an erotics of seeing and display.

(Short paper)

Keywords: neuroaesthetics, collaboration, reinforcement learning, beauty evaluation, combinatorial creativity.

This paper describes the design of a computer program which will assist artists in producing aesthetically interesting pieces of visual art. In contrast of existing creative drawing computer programs, the proposed software will attempt to simulate the creation and perception of visual art. The program, called BICASSO, will be based on previous neuroaesthetics findings which offer an understanding of what the human brain considers beautiful. The program will include features representing the roles of the brain regions enrolled in visual perception, memory and decision-making. BICASSO will modify visual elements of the visual art being created, depending on aesthetic rules to render visual components easy to process by the human visual system. The aesthetic rules rely on the hypothesis that processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure are linked. The artist will give feedback so the program can learn and modify its behavior when its collaboration is not considered beneficial. As the program will only suggest aesthetic improvements (based on its knowledge, and ratings of the collaboration and the final products), we will be able to observe if this asynchronous collaboration can generate creative products which are considered as more valuable to the human eye.

ABSTRACT

The VEL is an experimental computer visualization facility located within the College of Engineering at Penn State University, USA. It is under the auspices of the Artist-in-Residence in Engineering program. The philosophy of the lab is interdisciplinary, serving students and faculty from all sectors of the university. Typical classes contain a mix of engineering, science and art students who share their personal skills with each other in an informal atmosphere. Instruction on the computers is offered by advanced students with master classes in applications or lectures on aesthetics, philosophy and case studies.

With the advent of artificial intelligence and its applications to all aspects of daily life, an old saying that a pictures is worth of a thousand words will indeed have a broader and deeper impact on human quality of life, especially to those who have lost partial or total ability to articulate ideas in any form. How can people with aphasics acquire language skills? If aphasics do not process either partial or total ability to verbalize their ideas in words, how can hey study language? Language is generally defined as the aspect of human behaviour that involves the use of vocal sounds in meaningful patterns and, when they exist, corresponding with written symbols to form, express, and communicate thoughts and feelings. In this paper, we have focused our research on the picture cards for current computer-based therapy. On the basis of data used and collected, we began with an assumption that pre-conditions of digital picture cards were the essential step to the development of the language training software for aphasics. We proceeded to explore the impact of the visual information design of digital picture cards on those who have varying degrees of aphasia.

Visual music is just one facet of many in the current visualization revolution in education, communications, and the arts.Visualization tools such as VCRs, video camcorders, CD-ROMs, AV microcomputers, MMX technology, test equipment, and relatively inexpensive yet powerful software for doing high quality multimedia are commonplace in the late 90s in the home, business place, and classroom. And DVD and Java, a software multimedia synthesizer, are in the early stages of exploding onto the scene. Add to that technology mix the genre called “creativity” software (algorithms and generative systems that make it relatively easy for the any user to produce the illusion of a work of art) plus a genuinely joyful creative attitude that’s picking up steam in society and what you have are conditions ripe for a visual music harvest. An abbreviated set of Visual Music Flavors:

1. Literal visualizations of music are generated directly from channelized musical wavetrains;
2. Literal visualizations are mapped to some of the symbols used in traditional music scores;
3. Scrolling scores in software MIDI sequencers bring the look of the piano roll to the digital age;
4. Software for the creation, animation, and sequencing of graphics spinning out in time shaped by musical gestures is modeled on the principles of MIDI sequencers;
5. Interpretive visualizations emerge from dance and theater traditions which undoubtedly extend back to the dawn of human rituals;
6. Object oriented programming environments are endowed with flowcharting procedures that represent instruments or orchestras that can be performed or play themselves;
7. Appropriately dramatic, humorous, or lyrical music closely synchronized with natural or invented moving imagery is now a mainstay of the popular media scene;
8. Musical materials and/or gestures are mapped to imagery to create visual instruments that are meant to be played by a variety of input devices;
9. Some performing musicians are so at one with their music that they move their bodies in ways that articulate every nuance of the music they’re creating as well articulating the thought processes that lead to the music they’re creating;
10. Audio software manufacturers rely heavily on analytical routines to visualize audio recording, editing, processing, and mixing.Their software programs are so highly evolved that they make excellent resources for multimodal learning and teaching of music fundamentals based on the physical nature of sound, human perception of sound, how music instruments work, auditorium acoustics, and music recording and playback systems;
11. Any good book, article, film, video, or CD-ROM on the science of sound should be packed with charts and diagrams illustrating the basic principles that tie music with the fields of physics, psychology, physiology, mathematics, speech, engineering, audiology, architecture, etc.;
12.  Sonification of dynamic visual processes intersects with music visualization enough to be considered a candidate for another visual music flavor. Sonifying or translating into music natural dynamical systems such as weather, ocean currents, planetary or celestial movement, solar storms, and the like has gained currency and momentum since its beginnings in the early 1970s.

As the contemporary writings of artists such as Alberti and Leonardo make clear, the use of perspective in Italian Renaissance art was not promoted in a naive belief of its power of aiding the realistic depiction of three-dimensional space. Renaissance artists were well aware of the short-fallings and compromises of perspective space as it stood in relation to actual human perception. The true power of perspective lay in its ability to efficiently control the presentation of painted objects within the viewer’s gaze. Perspective enabled painting to achieve the clarity of disposition, selective isolation, emphasis and de-emphasis of figures as was taught within the composition of rhetoric. Italian Renaissance art addressed the viewer directly by means of engagement and visual immersion. Painted and sculpted figures sought eye contact with the viewer and gestured towards him. Large scale frescoes, such as Masaccio’s Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, were able to directly extend the real architectural space of the church into the painted space.

Contemporary with the emergence of this visual technology was a genre of devotional handbooks which encouraged the reader towards forms of private meditation upon Biblical subjects in which they were instructed to imagine themselves as though actually a bystander of the events. Such books taught that one should select locations familiar to the reader so that they may be more immediately imagined. These merged such devotional routines as the Stations of the Cross with forms of visual mnemonics derived from Classical rhetoric. Adherents of such mnemonic techniques organised their memories by locating a series of distinctive and suggestive objects within a space either familiar or easily recalled. Information was retrieved by the means of an imaginary walk within the building. The “Ante delle memoria locale,” of Angostino del Riccio, published in 1595, recommends the use of Santa Maria Novella as such a memory building. Painting and private practice were combined in an information technology focused around the acquisition and retention of knowledge through highly experiential activities “It is necessary that when you concentrate on these things in your contemplation, you should do so as if you were actually present at the very time when he suffered. And in grieving you should regard yourself as if you had your Lord suffering before your very eyes, and that he was present to receive your prayers.” Psuedo-Bede, Little book on the meditation on the Passion of Christ divided according to seven hours of the day, mid-late 13th Century.

My current Doctorate research is engaged in a re-assessment of Renaissance visual practice in the terms outlined above as a possible model for the development of computer media. Rather than placing an emphasis upon the technical issues of perspectival representation which have influenced the development of modern three-dimensional computer graphics, my work is focused around issues of interactive engagement and the utilisation of such media for purposes of the rhetorical address to the user. It is not realism but the enhanced subjectivity of personal response which computer media ought to develop towards, the experiential engagement with media, which, in itself, must lead towards a more heightened ethically questioning form of user interaction.

The e_Motion research proposal integrates 3D visualization, haptic technology and rapid prototyping as a window into the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) mind. It represents an exciting evolution of past work done on emotion and digital media. Through the ground-breaking research of Simon Baron-Cohen and others we have learned that ASD falls along a broad spectrum, and high-functioning autistics like Temple Grandin have taught us that they are handicapped not by their ASD, but by the fact that they learn in different ways from “neurotypicals”. It is now well known that many ASD people are visual thinkers and learners, and Dr. Rauch proposes to utilize state-of-the-art but “APPROACHABLE” digital technologies that will allow them to speak with distinct and enhanced visual voices. This differs from art therapy in that it will lead to a better understanding of how ASD individuals think and feel, through visualization. That the products of creativity might allow psychologists and neuroscientists to better place individuals along the ASD spectrum is especially critical on an international scale. Dr. Rauch currently joins collaborators such as Dr. Stuart Shanker, Prof. Jason Nolan and Dr. Evan Thompson, who are working on studies in ASD, emotion, education and communication. Dr. Rauch’s unique contribution emphasizes emotion and visualization through digital 3D production and haptic technologies.