Presentation Data Table

The history of the evolving field of new media work is pushing individuals to take a huge effort to preserve important artifacts and analyze projects. Extended Nonfiction is a project that promotes the study, training, production and preservation of audiovisual, interactive, transmedia and immersive nonfiction narratives. Extended Nonfiction is an informative, formative and productive proposal that places emphasis on the field of reality, on real stories; but not just any reality, on expanded and extended reality.

Our high level research question:
How to utilize contextual design methods and collaborative software tools for creative writing purposes.

Some practical questions:
What are existing tools and technologies to harvest single human idea (think, talk, write) into innovation as fast / efficient as possible
–>Tools and technologies to record and push forward single human idea into metadata powered idea pool
–>Linkage into data mining technologies and collaboration tools

How to harvest raw idea into collective wisdom
–>What is good idea seed, like three word sentences.. ?
–>Semi-automatic text tagging, CMS presentations

We have end user study ongoing on collective film script writing process.  Currently, we are studying text mining techniques and usage of other media than text to support collaborative script writing process, e.g Mobile Multimedia Internet Forums.

Our goals:
1. seamless mobile system for idea creation (talk, write, pictures, tagging)
2. semiautomatic creation of story synopsis from noisy text data

Also, our goal is to apply collective copyright schema into distribution of the final media artefact (s).

Within the urban perspective, this essay looks at the space that location-aware media generates and the nature of flow that is projected from and is implied by the collective activities of locative media. How do these landscapes reflect and deform the intricate set of power relations that produced them? What happens to our relationship with the public space around us when we can collectively share information over time with others who are remotely nearby? How might locative territories renegotiate and redefine the original meaning of the spaces they occupy? Locative media is defined here as geographically-based media that can be used to actively create a reciprocal awareness between groups of people and their environment, thereby, merging various types of information and media within the limits of specific geographic landscapes; these limits may vary in dimension from a specific point in a landscape to large areas of space such as nodes and pathways. This essay is a brief analysis of several recent examples in the area of locative art and media, and an observation on the issues that they bring to the transforming public urban landscape.

When the Ethics Council held its annual meeting at the Utzon Center in Aalborg in October 2010, none of the participants at the meeting realized that a biotech ear was listening in. This was the result of coincidences and an acoustical accident: Someone turned on the speaker system by mistake in the exhibition spaces below the beautiful conference hall overlooking the fiord in Aalborg. In the exhibition space was located an artwork by the Australian artist Stelarc, Internet Ear, which was part of the exhibition Biotopia – Art in the Wet Zone. Thus Stelarc’s Internet Ear, suddenly and unwittingly, is able to ‘hear’ and ‘broadcast’ what was said at the Ethical Council meeting. The transmission is fed back to the ear as ‘speech-noise’ – and broadcasted once again as a transmission inside a transmission, etc., creating a feed-back loop of fragmented announcements from a debate on ethics.

The Internet Ear by Stelarc addresses the situation where data and communications in a distributed public are ‘tagged’ in a context and no ‘real’ cultural conversation is taking place outside that distributed public space. In this paper, I will take a closer look at how the aesthetics of Internet Ear is being reloaded / remixed and argue that this event of ‘electronic ear-dropping’ is created by an emergent distributed public in a ‘cloud’ of accessible data. The acoustical accident of the Internet Ear, then, is addressing the issue of converging and diverging realities in a cloud culture – and point at the situation where cultural patterns as we know them are renegotiated online.

Keywords: art, technology, collaborative, practice, action, situations, communication, theory

In this paper the authors analyse the incompatibilities and collisions that occurred when they tried to implement their real-life learning insights and experiences from transdisciplinary practice in the regular western education programmes for higher education and Vocational Education and Training (VET). The analysed case studies share an interest in transition issues in urban environments. The issues at stake were considered to be complex and were approached according to an artistic, designerly and participatory way of working. All projects had an innovative scope and thus an open ending or unknown outcomes at its starting phase. The case studies (interim) outcomes and its obstacles and challenges, that the authors and their collabo- rators encountered in the respective learning processes, were shared and weighted in a series of meetings and workshops with teachers, teacher/artists, teacher/designers, students and laypeople. Besides these feedback sessions and workshops the outcomes of the case studies are complemented with literature studies. The authors conclude  this part of their research with a discussion and suggestions for future research to bridge the experienced systematic or paradigmatic obstacles and future research.

Colors for All is an immersive narrative VR project that allows participants to put themselves in a colorblind person’s life through three 360-degree videos. The videos are from daily activities such as walking, shopping, and cooking that resonate different challenges from daily life. This project invites normal vision people to experience different types of color blindness and learn about daily challenges. We apply immersive VR narratives with the first-person perspective. The preliminary studies show that participants were very engaged with the project and felt empathy about people different difficulty conditions. We present the overall process of the project and user feedback in this paper.

“There is nothing more that can prevent interactivity from becoming the principle and essence of life itself: I am interactive therefore I am.”

-Pierre Moeglin, ‘Les transes de l’interactivité’

‘Interactive computer art’ as become fashion able, undoubtedly as part of the current vogue for anything ‘interactive’. Even the art world is finally showing signs of embracing it. One might argue that the proliferation of forms of computer-mediated interactivity in our everyday lives has already given rise to a new subject position in relation to modes of audiovisual experience. It has been in the making in interactive science museums (such as La Villette in Paris), video game arcades, flight simulators and by PCs in homes and offices.

Suntory Ltd., the Japanese drink and biotechnology company, acquired Australian-based Florigene in the middle of the 1990’s and along its research on the genetic modification of the pedal colour of carnations (Dianthus caryophyllus L.). Suntory and Florigene not only succeeded in creating blue coloured carnations, they also introduced them in 2005 into the general market.

The significance of this is not the bio-technical feat of creating a novel pedal colour – which was not possible through standard breeding techniques – but the fact that this blue GM carnation – “Moondust™” – constitutes the very first instance of a genetically modified plant with the function of aesthetic consumption.

Previously, GM-modified plants like soy, corn, tomato and rice were developed with the aim of serving as human food or animal feed. GM Food has sparked discussion and outrage, often justified, but often the issues are dealt with a gross simplification that distort the issues at stake and try to demonize the technologies involved. Technology, and especially Biotechnology can be considered neither good nor evil; as with all technologies it depends on the purpose for which they are deployed. By positioning the flowers as an aesthetic product – which is not intended for human consumption – Suntory manages to sidestep the ethical dimensions involved and exclude themselves from the ongoing debate about the possible negative effects of adding genetically modified products and their unknown consequences to the food chain. This projects tries to invite Suntory back into the discussion.

The countries of the first world discuss the inappropriate introduction of technology within the third world. One illustration are the Cargo Cults developed in the South Pacific as a result of insensitive exploration and exploitation. Nevertheless the first world remains largely unaware of the inappropriateness of the ultra-rapid development and introduction of information technology within their own culture. The development of high bandwidth human computer interaction via virtual interfaces will lead to intimate symbiosis between human consciousness and artificial intelligence.

One possible consequence of this is a new religion based on the current grassroots belief in technology epitomized by the popularity of subjects like Chaos Theory. Tightly coupled human computer symbiosis promises an electronic communion for this new religion and the possibility of a new hi-tech cargo cult that, unlike it predecessors, actually delivers the goods.

Keywords: community mapping, sense of place, psychogeography, site-specific art, relational aesthetics, locative media, GPS, socially-engaged art.

The act of mapping can either preserve the status quo or catalyse change.

A subset of mapping, community mapping, can be defined as a place-based approach that supports participatory action at the community level. It inverts the traditional ‘top-down’ approach to mapping by:

1. incorporating local knowledge
2. integrating and contextualising spatial information
3. allowing participants to dynamically interact with input and analyse alternatives
4. empowering individuals and groups

This paper reports on community mapping and discusses localised mapping efforts around the world. Groups already taking advantage of these mapping strategies include small scale farmers in Tanzania; urban neighborhoods in India, China, and the US; and indigenous communities in the Australian outback, the American Southwest, and the Congo. My work linking schools and communities along the length of the Colorado River will be discussed.

I review mapmaking tactics from the hand-made to the high-tech, with emphasis on projects utilising ‘bottom up’ data-harvesting such as ‘participatory GIS,’ crowd-sourcing, and ‘user-centric’ locative technologies.

Increasingly, community mapping is being used for coordinating watershed audits, environmental protection and restoration, tracking human health trends, and poverty alleviation projects seeking to comply with international law for human rights. It can aid neighborhood groups in formulating action agendas and making their case to elected officials and policymakers. It can reveal the stories of place that remain invisible to the casual observer.

Why should this be of interest to the ISEA community?

Putting mapping tools in the hands of artists helps to capture the complexity of a given place—including nuanced descriptions of physical settings, evidence of lived experience, and creative interactions with communities. Technologically empowered artists, partnered with specialists from a variety of fields, can build on the platform of a ‘site-specific aesthetic’ towards ethically-based action.

COMPANY is an interactive multimedia installation, exploring social dynamics within an indeterminate narrative experience, while engaging in unpredictable performances with its participants. Guests enter an installation environment suggesting a living room, and there they encounter a life-sized sculptural relief enlivened with projection, audio, and computer vision. The figure appears to test its visitors with absurd stories and requests, while reacting to participants’ decisions to obey or refuse the demands. COMPANY creates an illusion of complex interaction through sensor tracking, branching narrative pathways, a video bank of responses, and structured randomness. Responses change more radically depending on the number of people in the room and their behaviors. Each encounter unravels divergently, unpredictably, and strangely.

Iterations of COMPANY have exhibited in New York City and Troy, New York, with a third version currently in development.

Whilst born-digital collections continue to be developed in several museums internationally, this paper contributes to debates as to how we conceptualise born-digital objects. Many complex artifacts of digital culture, in fact, elude the behavior of traditional collected objects. Here, we concentrate on three examples to illustrate different degrees to which born-digital museum acquisitions can be understood as infrastructures. By examining an immersive reality piece, a procedurally generated film, and a digital platform, this paper addresses hybridity, fluid relationships across the main and auxiliary parts of an acquisition, and the lack of clear boundaries to define what the collected object is. It concludes that developing deeper understandings of the infrastructural properties of born-digital museum acquisitions could support changes in institutional practice and thinking to better accommodate this emergent area of collecting.

This artist talk presents some of my recent works that are representative of my approach to exploring interrelations between human and non-human natures, using timescaling and spatiality as essential elements. I discuss the conceptual basis of my installation works as well as my electro-acoustic music compositions in order to highlight thematic consistency across genres.

In this paper the author shows where concepts and mathematical models derived from the developing field of Chaos Science can be applied to electroacoustic and instrumental composition. Examples of non-linear dynamics include Lorenz’s model of fluid behaviour, Verhulst’s model of population growth, Hénon’s analysis of the multiple celestial body problem, Barry Martin’s Algorithm which produces quasi organic forms, and the ‘Baker’ mixing function. Besides broadening the numerical techniques available for electronic music generation, concepts such as fractal structure, feedback process and iterative function can be applied to ‘ordinary’ composition as well. For example, in designing melodic curve, defining meter, planning instrumentation, manipulating symbols, creating ornamentation and elaboration, etc. Some suggestions as to mapping are made, the critical boundary between science and art. Musical examples are used from the following works by the author: Harpsi-Kord for harpsichordist and tape, Fractal Piano for computer-guided pianola. The Five Seasons for 6 percussionists and tape, Brain-Wave for recorder-players, Modifications for marimba & tape, and Hyperion’s Tumble for tape.

300 years ago Newton formulated the laws of motion which laid the ground-work for a clockwork view of the universe. By the late 18th century the French astronomer Laplace optimistically stated that intelligent creatures could know any past or future state of the universe, if they only knew well enough its present state, what direction it was heading towards, and had powerful enough calculating methods. This deterministic world view has proved to need revision. Scientific and mathematical developments of the last 30 years have led to new insights into subjects, which because of their complexity, had previously been swept under the rug by the scientific establishment. Intractable problems in weather forecasting, the modeling of wildlife populations, the geometry of nature, the understanding of turbulent flow and bio-rhythms gave startling new results when revolutionary methods of analysis were applied. As a result, words such as “chaos”, “order”, “simple” and “complex” have been redefined; and a new concept formed: “fractal”.

Keywords: Mechatronic Instruments, Spatial Performance, Interface Design, New Loudspeaker Systems.

This paper describes compositional approaches to working with the new speaker.motion mechatronic loudspeaker system. The spatial affordances that come with the new loudspeaker system require new compositional ideas to explore the dynamic use of spatial attributes in electronic music. The speaker.motion system is first introduced and the communication protocols that composer use to control the system are discussed. The paper then continues with two case studies describing site-specific compositions that have been developed for the speaker.motion system each of which uses the spatial affordances of the system at the fore-front of their creative output. In assessing the compositional strategies of the system the paper also includes discussion provided by other composers who have utilized the speaker.motion system and their thoughts on the new ways it affords spatial performance and composition approaches. The paper then concludes with the future directions of both the system and the development of compositions for it.

“COMPUSER” concentrates all my researches, experiments and works. It consists of original elements as: (1). Psychoacoustic Model. Via an input of combinations of variables, actions and sequences, universal or individual understandings on all psychoacoustic reflexes provoked by musical phenomena are being produced. Consequently they are being interpreted by an original basic generative hypothesis on the basis of which many generative technologies are elaborated by accumulating different well known composition techniques. As a result we have a musical composition with certain artistic qualities in the given style, genre, musical form etc. Basic editor for creating/filling the knowledge base through the logical knots: dialogue, procedural, terminal, logical. By combining their functional possibilities, a musical semantic network can be described or enlarged. This network can contain all aspects of musical knowledge on a high logical /non programming level. Arcs connect the created knots and play the role of an operation conductor in the network. All described proces is mantained automatically.

The tradition that assimilates computer code to text is not completely appropriate for the analysis of audiovisual works based on digital media. It forces theory to take a detour through the field of linguistics, hiding the fact that – as physical phenomena – computation has more to do with architecture than with writing. This paper proposes the spatial disposit if as a concurrent paradigm for the evaluation of computational processes in the production of technical images. That, computational algorithms would share fundamental qualities with the cinematographic apparatus and the installation of art in a gallery.

The similarities between computation and the organization of objects can be traced back to the pre-historic origins of calculus. Men first kept track of quantities using proxies such as their fingers (digits) or small stones (calculus). This sort of calculation had no abstract dimension and it did not produce a directly ‘greadable’ outcome: the herdsman separated one pebble for each head of cattle that entered the cowshed; the ensuing pile of rocks did not represent a numerical value, but it could be used as a comparative mechanism to find if any animal was missing. Thus, both to count and to understand its results depended on the same activity of processing discrete objects in closed territories.

Computational serendipity is a method to generate and introduce desirable variability in generative art and storytelling, without sacrificing authorship but rather making it a manageable concept. What we, as creators desire, is a controllable amount of randomization, that juxtaposes well with the original intent and materials, and thus creates well behaved and enjoyable elements of surprise or variation.

Using experiences acquired from generative storytelling in implementing computational models for narration and improvisation on top of multidimensional ontological data, we can explore possible options to design behaviour, context awareness, and dynamic personalities for adaptive, interactive, and participatory systems and actors.

When the technological complexity and computational potential of autonomous systems increase exponentially, the role of interaction designers evolves from designing simple reactive interfaces to directing individual improvising actors, that adapt, adjust and fit into our world. The technology is in itself neutral, but the algorithms are not. We, as designers, make judgements in how we teach and direct these autonomous agents to act and react.

Over the last two decades, the evolution of art and design curriculum has been significantly impacted by the challenges and potential of digital disruption in the creative industries. Creative software tools first emulated then largely replaced manual production practices. There is growing evidence that another, and possibly greater, paradigm shift is eminent.

Predictions for the growth of Artificial Intelligence and its possible impact on employment are currently an issue of growing social concern. The current emergence of Procedural Content Generation software in the games industry, online journalism, architecture and music industry suggest that commercial creative practices will not be immune to the future impact of creative A. I.

Possible scenarios for the future may see practitioners eschew today’s generic software tools for bespoke applications that operate as semi-autonomous studio assistants. This has the potential to be a positive development that will offer new creative opportunities for those that embrace it. The education of artists and designers for this environment may require some level of programming ability but of greater importance will be the development of Computational Thinking as a fundamental foundation of creative imagination. Computational Thinking defines a common conceptual space that will afford access to creative partnerships between human cognition and A.I.

What demos are (not)
The demoscene (or short: the scene) is a vivid digital subculture of approximately up to 10.000 people which work internationally and collaboratively on different kinds of non-commercial digital artefacts (e. g. hand-pixeled images, music and magazines), essentially so called (computer) demos, which are audio-visual real-time animations. Pivotal to the demo aesthetic is the synaesthetic experience of the interplay of electronic images, animations and sounds in connection with its computer-generated background – the demosceners (or short: sceners) connect artistic practices with highly elaborated computer programming techniques in a unique way.

A proposal from Anomos

Anomos organizes a meeting on the theme of computer programming and conception of cities. Aleatory processes, generatively, networks are means of rethinking cities as open works, abstract machines or information support systems… Researchers will present their approaches, raising socio-political and artistic problematics, particularly in regards to the definition of responsibility and freedom of participants of the urban project.

Moderator:

• Jean Brange

Panelists:

• Ammar Eloueni
• IaN+
• Flavia Sparacino
• Gruppo A12 & Udo Noll
• Marcos Novak
• Dagmar Richter

A computer graphic method is described for simulation of calligraphic pens and brushes. Unlike a paint system which uses a mouse, here the artist uses a force-transducing pen to create realistic pen or brush strokes in real time. The system has been used for the production of western-style calligraphy and for writing with brush-based alphabets such as kanji. Successive values of x, y, and pen-tablet force are measured, and others are derived–such as velocity, accumulated stroke length, and stationary dwell time. These are all used to define the momentary geometric footprint of pen or brush; the incremental geometry of the stroke depends in turn on rules for connecting successive such footprints. Additional rules may apply at the beginning or end of the stroke. Crucial to the real-time aspects of the method are a very fast means for computing the momentary footprint, and for defining and filling the area connecting the current footprint with the previous one. This high-speed processing permits regular, uninterrupted acquisition of input data (thus avoiding improper polygonal faceting of curved strokes) and it produces a screen display without noticeable delay. Later, hard copy output may be produced at higher resolution by recomputing from the same data.

From the very beginning of computer era beautiful abstract patterns, worth placing into frame, appeared sometimes on displays even at resolving pure­ly engineering problems. These images were exhibited at «computer art» exhibitions. This was, in fact, not artistic but natural beauty (similar to beauty of snowflakes, crystals,water, fire). The contribution of human being, artist was limited to selection of images, as in case of «ikebana». The results of computer work become artistic only as they reflect manifestly the crea­tive «ego» of the artist, this «ego» not limited to creating in «game» mode extraordinary audio and visual combinations. It is necessary to be able to control, «articulate» this new material to elaborate own language correla­ting with specifics of the material. The specifics of computer image consists,in contrast to photography, cinematograph, in synthesizing it on «tabula rasa», using formalized rules (algorythms). This defines distilled puri­ty, regularity of computer images, allowing us to consider them as a kind of visualization of Plato’s Eidoses. Computers can be used in equal measure for creating both figurative and non-figurative images, this making them univer­sal instrument for getting rid from the non-democratic situation which have arisen in the middle of XXth century, that of historical lag of non-figurative arts (light-music, abstract cinema) behind figurative ones (photography, cine­matograph, television). Any new technology, including computer one, expands circle of those ones, who can realize their earlier creative potential, this being, only to speak about presence of progress art.

Intro

The words “computer” and “progress” have become regarded as synonyms long ago, though the development of cybernetics in our country, as it is known, met dramatic conflicts at the beginning. But “dramas of ideas” accompany computerization of our life permanently, even after it’s exclusive usefulness and inevitability have become obvious and indisputable – especially when applied to technology, natural sciences, economics, statistics, intellectual games and so on. The situation with computer application to art creative work appeared to be more problematical. Here we meet some inherent prejudices and myths that began to form since the very beginning and are present not only in common consciousness, but also in a social one. Let’s consider these myths in their logical and historical order.

1st myth: sooner or later, computers should be able to make adequate model of any form of human mental activity, including art form. The pathos of such slogans was displayed especially brightly in our country, when after initial persecutions of cybernetics as bourgeois false science, the pendulum swings into opposite position. Even humanitarians suddenly began to sing enthusiastic hymns to expected potentialities of computer’s art. This forced one prominent poet to shudder: “Any progress is reactionary, if man falls to the ground!”. Such expectation of “Art ex machina” was, using the expression of French theorist in the field of cinema, A.Bazin, “most of all bourgeois”. Saying so, he had in mind cinema and photo-technique. By his opinion, the advocates of this conception see the destination of new technique in allowing ones “to fabricate art works, not being the artists themselves”. Let’s add that the following attitudes are “bourgeois” as well: a desire for man’s liberation from “pains of creation” by shifting them off onto computer; i.e., an expectation of marvelous birth of new artistic value spontaneously and practically “from nothing”. The father of cybernetics N.Wiener warned about danger of such attitudes. He anticipated that there might appear new tribe of “machine worshippers” who will gladly expect that “some functions of their slaves can be passed to the machine”. The logic of its operation might be unknown, but still it is regarded as “reliable” and wittingly “objective” . Of course both Bazin and Wiener point out here the position utterly humiliating both artist and art itself. But “drama of ideas” is called as “drama” just because one cannot achieve harmony immediately – harmony between question mark and exclamation mark, between desire and possibility.

Interactive documentary presentation. The interactive film “The East” brings out contrasts of North-East part of Estonia, which is industrial zone of the country with its picturesque nature, grim and beautiful landscapes and stories of the people living there. Audience should choose between 4 videos “in-waiting”. During last 20 second of the each clip appears a bar, which indicates selection period. In the same time number of choices made is projected onto image. After choosing time is over, new clip is projected to dominant position. Selection of clips is happening without interruption of the flow of main video.
We have done one experimental public presentation with individual interfaces for audience what we are going to update. Still there is possible make some conclusions and describe participatory experience of the project. Interface of the documentary is designed with Max/MSP.

Abstract

Long Paper

Summary

Cyberspace technologies provide new opportunities and questions concerning the spiritual. This paper looks the spiritual in 20th century art and science as the basis for examining the spiritual implications in cyberspace, itself the outgrowth of art and science This is followed by a discussion of the virtual worlds of William Gibson and Frank Tipler. The emerging discipline of studies in consciousness is Introduced as a link between the spiritual and the digital. and the prophetic work of the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin discussed for his concept of the ‘noosphere’, the spiritual implications of a conscious Internet are then examined.

Abstract

The start of the 20th century saw a profound influence on the arts from a strand of spirituality that had incubated at the end of the previous century. These strands included Theosophy (Blavatsky, Leadbeater, Besant), Anthroposophy (Steiner), and the work of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Theosophy’s impact on Mondrian, and the spiritual guidance of Itten at the Bauhaus are all evidence of a strong undercurrent throughout the 20th century, which also saw post second. As we look into the 21st century one is tempted to speculate that the spiritual movements of the early 20th century are now generally misunderstood, or even ridiculed, and that a new spirituality is emerging with its roots in science and not in the religious or the occult. The priests of the New Physics such as Frank Tippler and Paul Davies, however much derided by their reductionist colleagues, seem to promote a spirituality that is appropriate for the cyberspace artists of the 21st century. This paper looks at the teachings of Theosophy, Anthroposophy and Gurdjieff-Ouspensky and its influence on this century’s art; it then examines the genesis of cyberspace in the new technologies and in the writings of science fiction writers such as Gibson and Sterling, and cultural theorists such as de Landa and the Krokers. The spirituality of the New Physics is discussed and the parallels with older forms of spirituality identified: in particular the idea of transcending the body, and the relationship. The key question surrounding the vision shared in Neuromancer and Tippler’s Physics of Immortality is: are we just data? If so we can upload our personalities and become immortal. If consciousness is more than data than we cannot, and this question then brings us to the new Science of Consciousness. This infant science may be as doomed as phrenology was at the corresponding point a century ago, or it might provide us with the answers to our spiritual questions in cyberspace. While it is recognized that any discussion of the spiritual is fraught with difficulties, this paper attempts to open a debate that has been difficult to externalize in the arts for much of this century. The extraordinary challenge of cyberspace for the arts, with its questioning of the very bases of our identities and relationships, means however that it is a debate we cannot avoid.

Verina Gfader and Colm Lally are concerned with notions of event and event structures. They are interested in how such dynamics re-emerge in contemporary practices informed by new technologies, more particularly where the event shapes and to some degree triggers our understanding of a ‘site’, the construction of dialogues, the artistic intervention, and social processes. This enquiry includes questions around where ‘art might not/happen’; how ‘place’ can be understood as a site of potential for things to happen (a gallery, a space, a conversation); or how practitioners make use of spaces that are significant for their work as condition for it to take place.

A pivotal concern surrounding the recent growth in Massively Multiplayer Online Games and Virtual Worlds, and a question this paper sets out to explore, are the locations and conditions of the imaginary when moving between real and virtual space. Drawing from eastern and western philosophy, through Bergson, Grosz, Aurobindo Ghose, Sartre and Massumi, it will test definitions of the virtual and the imaginary against the backdrop of the virtual world of Second Life created by Linden Lab in 2003.

With an emphasis on embodied experience in virtual worlds, parallels can be drawn with yogic practices, and in particular, the practice of Tantra. The imaginary landscapes generated by visualisation practices and meditational techniques such as those in the Vajrayana tradition of Tibetan Buddhism or the meditational practice Tattwa Shuddhi from the Hindu Tantric tradition, are deliberate in their virtuality. With their focus on the particularity of the image, the exact definitions and details, these landscapes are not meant to be materialised; their pristine and deliberate virtuality is used as a tool for developing and transforming the body and mind.

The new imaginary from virtual worlds is a multiple space translation and is a continual interplay between, and stimulation from, both image and presence. The third space, between real space and the virtual space of the screen, is the charged space of tele-presence; where presence and absence is acted out; pushed and pulled, contracted and expanded. The borders where the virtual leaks into the actual are in constant flux. This paper will define these new dimensions of experience that are based on a simultaneity or plurality of presence and absence and will argue that there are multiple and different imaginaries operating when interacting with virtual worlds.

This scholarly presentation of research is linked to the practice based submission ‘Kritical Works in SL’.

This is a retrospective describing a research project based on simulations of future artists’ work environments. The Configurable Space project explores the creative process, and examines the tools and processes that form the foundation for technological resources designed to support creative activities. It is directed towards the development of a balanced understanding about how we use the visual, aural, tactile and configurable capabilities of digital technologies, and how the tools developed affect ways that we think, feel, formulate, and develop on intellectual, spiritual and emotional planes. Configurable Space environments incorporate any available technology that could be used to support the illusion that the implied resources already exist. The simulations incorporate representations of interactive computer display tables, walls and holographic images, within a multi-dimensional sound environment.

This creates the context for exploring relevant issues and for imagining how the space might be used in actual circumstances. This retrospective describes the various manifestations of the project, spanning a five-year period. The design methodology is based on the creation of models that simulate the functioning and potential usage of hypothetical systems. This method allows for modeling without the limitations imposed by considerations for specific implementation details, and carries the significance of being able to address ideal states. The goal is to provide paradigms to guide long term development, a goal that is particularly essential in considering virtual reality or immersive simulation technologies, given the fact that the computer resources available today are so constrained relative to the hypothetical systems they are designed to emulate. Liberation from implementation considerations paves the way towards a clarity in conceptual design. Issues relating to the use or non-use of head or hand gear, or even physical versus virtual input/output devices, becomes a question of personal preference and contextual requisites, rather than a technological necessity.

Connected:07 is a project that plays with connecting different realities. The project was initiated by cym and consisted of two phases. The first phase, the analog phase, took place during summer 2007 and focused on connections in the real space. The second phase, the digital phase, focused on connecting the real space and the virtual space and was presented in November 2007.

Real and virtual spaces can be found anywhere. The real space used for Connected:07 is an old farm in South-East Austria, that cym is turning into a small art center. In the first phase of the Connected:07 project, different artists were invited to spend some time at this empty farm and create art works, inspired by the abandoned building, its history and its surroundings.

Eva Nina Cajnko started the project by creating giant spider webs all around the old house. The spider webs, some of them more than six meters wide, were placed in locations where they are usually removed to clean the house: in a corner above the door, in the attic, in the window. They were made from thin ropes, carefully knotted together, reminiscent of traditional crafts.

The spider webs were followed by a sound installation made by Luka Princic. He placed his installation inside a wardrobe over 100 years old, that was left in the farm by the woman who used to live there before cym moved in. The sound installation inside the wardrobe encourages the visitor to listen more carefully to the original sounds in and around the house.

A project that lasted all summer was the pig-project by Belinda and Boris Ziegler. They decided to create a lifesize pig for the pigsty. As a first step, to get the exact measurements for the animal, they measured a real pig in one of the neighbour’s houses. During the next two months a lifesize pig, made from wood, chicken wire, old newspapers and finally polyester, slowly emerged.

Artists: Belinda Ziegler, Eva Nina Cajnko, Franz Bauer, Luka Princic, Nicole Pruckermayr, Primoz Oberzan, cym

The three Connected Archives that we presented – ArchID, Gendernaut and Argonaut – remind us of the importance of imagining the archives that reflect on identity, gender and sexuality, as live interactive spaces, free of heteropatriarchal codes, inhabited by bodies and multiple subjectivities that relate the past, present and future.

Artistic research project on self-representation, the body and identity construction, focused on the analysis of new processes of non-face-to-face (online) creation and diffusion. The main objectives are:

1. The identification and characterization, through the analysis of the current Ibero-American artistic panorama, of those artistic practices -photography and audiovisual- based on the self-representation of the individual that use non-presentiality in their creation and/or diffusion process.
2. The creation of a Research Platform on Art and Online IDentity DatArt-ID configured as a device for research, dissemination and transfer of knowledge with free access that allows reflection and debate on the processes of non-face-to-face creation and diffusion of Ibero-American identity artistic practices.
3. The production of artistic work as a result of research.
4. The dissemination and transfer of results through the publication of scientific articles; as well as participation in international exhibitions and congresses disseminating the results of the research carried out.

Online new media art archives exist throughout the world as repositories documenting theory and practice of electronic art. For a researcher, instructor, or student using these resources for scholarly work or inspiration, the process often involves visiting multiple websites with different interfaces and information. Without knowledge of the wide variety of archives that catalog new media art, the sought-after material may be missed. In 2018, the seeds of an initiative were sown at a roundtable discussion at ISEA2018 (South Africa) and during ISEA2019 (South Korea), the real work began to investigate and initiate the process of connecting new media art archives from around the world. Beginning with a core group including representatives from the ISEA, SIGGRAPH, FILE, Ars Electronica, and the Archive of Digital Art (ADA) archives, group discussions, implementation meetings, summits (Summit on New Media Archiving @ ISEA2020, mini-conferences (FILEALIVE 2020) and presentations at various conferences occurred. This paper outlines the details of the project along with the implementation procedures and challenges.

The Connectivity Café is an experimental dining experience in which a meal is reimagined as a vehicle for expressive interaction. Dining as a “social event” is viewed as a plastic context that may then be shaped and manipulated to promote surprising and meaningful connections between guests. The Connectivity Café uses various sensing technologies to extend the dining experience beyond the local and makes possible the real-time sharing of meals across great distances so that a guest in Montreal may share a meal and “break bread” with guests in Beijing, New York and/or Mumbai; rituals, flavors and objects that are culturally situated may be exchanged with strangers and friends. Our sensing and real-time media is sensitive enough to allow for a toast across time zones, complete with the sound of clinking glasses. The Connectivity Café involves a suite of subtle interactions via telematically-mated objects, such as augmented serving-plates, glasses, silverware, and placemats. Commonplace objects become diegetic as they detect contact or proximity to another guest’s position, and change state (glow, heat up, ring, etc.). Dining as a temporal event also presents the challenge and exploration of ceremony and ritual as malleable sequences.

This paper focuses on the archival process of the multimedia artist Teoman Madra who is an acclaimed artist creating artworks with technological means of multimedia capabilities between the 1960s to early 2000s. Preserving multimedia artworks is a challenging task that requires comprehensive solutions due to the nature of the always-changing technological environment. It is inevitable that there is a paradigm shift from the traditional approach to preserve the artworks as self-contained physical objects to a broader scope of regarding the artwork as an entity with its tangible and intangible dimensions. This manuscript stands as the debut academic dissemination of the intensive archiving process of the Turkish multimedia artist Teoman Madra and it aims to shed light on the missing answers for the following question, “How did the media arts evolve in Turkey between the 1960s and 2000s?” The cataloging process of the linear media (VHS, BETAMAX, miniDV, negatives, diapositive, etc) and the methodologies implemented for descriptive analysis have been discussed in detail.

This article describes a site-specific interactive mixed reality installation artwork involving a network of over a hundred motor-actuated bells, projections upon a 4x6m bed of salt, and a dual motion tracked virtual reality perspective inhabited by artificial life and integrating real-time volume capture. This work responds to very specific history of the host venue as a former centre for disease control and reagent storage, through a central conception of shadows as shared physical images between visible and invisible worlds, carried through with dual emphasis on functional and contextual meaning in all components. Details of this context, as well as the technical realization, are followed by discussion of mixed reality art as a site-specific expression, and directions for future development.

Artificial Nature is a research-creation project co-founded by Haru Ji and Graham Wakefield in 2007. Artificial Nature installations have counted over forty exhibits across nine countries, including festivals such as SIGGRAPH, Microwave Hong Kong, and Digital Art Festival Taipei, conferences such as ISEA, EvoWorkshops, and IEEE VIS, venues including La Gaite Lyrique, ZKM, CAFA Beijing, Seoul City Hall, MOXI and the AlloSphere Santa Barbara, long with selection in the VIDA Art & Artificial Life competition (2015) and the Kaleidoscope Virtual Reality showcase (2017).

The authentic preservation of interactive installations and their appropriate re-installation are challenging because of the basic conflict between the preservation of the equipment and the preservation of the functionality of the installation. Here this conflict is discussed exemplarily for Bill Seaman’s interactive video installation Exchange Fields. The installation was developed for the exhibition vision.ruhr at the Zeche Zollern in Dortmund 2000, and acquired by the Museum Ostwall, Dortmund. Only ten years later the museum staff had changed, so detailed knowledge about Exchange Fields got lost.

We propose a method of approaching contemplative interaction through an understanding of affect and embodiment that is multi‑layered and multi‑sited across the physical and the virtual. Such an assemblage may be found in so‑called mixed reality artworks that we define as software‑driven works that engage with a specific physical environment and explicitly mediate the boundary between physical and virtual space.

Notions of contemplation have traditionally been associated with the viewing of static visual art rather than an engagement with interactive media, although a number of researchers and artists have recently articulated connections between these two ostensible opposites. We further develop an understanding of how contemplative interaction operates with mixed reality artworks.

Through a critical analysis of several contemporary mixed reality artworks, we identify the nature and quality of the affect cycle in relation to a distributed and hybrid expression of embodiment and its role in contemplative interactive experiences. We also examine the role of reflection, engagement and meaning in this assemblage. Finally, we assert that a meaningful experience of contemplative interaction is constituted when an interactor engages in a collaborative feedback cycle of affect between themselves and the artwork.

Since the mid-1990s, new media art has become an important force for economic and cultural development internationally, establishing its own institutions, such as the ZKM, Ars Electronica Center, ICC, Eyebeam, and Laboral. Collaborative, transdisciplinary research at the intersections of art, science, and technology also has gained esteem and institutional support, as demonstrated by the Artists in Labs program (Switzerland) and the proliferation of interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs around the world. During the same period, mainstream contemporary art experienced dramatic growth in its market and popularity, propelled by economic prosperity and the propagation of international museums, art fairs and exhibitions from the Tate Modern to Art Basel Miami to the Shanghai Biennial. This dynamic environment has nurtured tremendous creativity and invention by artists, curators, theorists and pedagogues operating in both domains. Yet rarely does the mainstream artworld converge with the new media artworld. As a result, their discourses have become increasingly divergent.

Abstract

“Individuals, even when undocumented immigrants, can move between the multiple meanings of citizenship. The daily practices by undocumented immigrants as part of their daily life in the community where they reside – such as raising a family, schooling children, holding a job – earn them citizenship claims …”    _Sassen 2002: 12
“What intersubjective relationships are possible when image makers, exploring the temporal and spatial co-ordinates of migration across varied locations and public spheres, initiate different modes of collaborative production and fieldwork practices in their research imaginaries?”             _Grossman & O’Brien 2007: 3

Citizenship or xenophobia: Ireland’s dilemma
On June 13, 2008, Ireland’s citizens went to the polling stations again, this time to decide the future direction of the European Union under the Lisbon Reform Treaty. Ireland’s government and the majority of EU member state governments are still recovering from the shock of Irish citizens rejection of the Lisbon Reform Treaty. In 2001 the Nice Treaty, was also rejected but, under huge European pressure, a second referendum was put to the people and the yes vote won by a narrow margin. At the time of writing similar pressure is being brought to bear in order to ratify the Lisbon Reform Treaty.

Poster Statement

Summary:

A new art form is emerging, almost without being noticed. All around the world, major art institutions are representing their conventional collections digitally on the World-Wide Web. This paper reviews the way institutions are building these extensions to their galleries We show how the potential of such galleries is being limited. The problem lies in the way the Web is being treated as a sophisticated publishing channel; just another way of reproducing a gallery’s physical reality. We argue that engaging, effective virtual galleries can be produced if  fundamental computer qualities are understood and exploited. The use of computer power to organize information, facilitate communication and process data is illustrated with reference to initial work we have carried out with the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Abstract

Walk into any real art gallery, one with physical walls and floors. Art works hang on the walls or stand on the floors. Usually, they are placed not arbitrarily, or by chance but through a careful process of planning and thought by the exhibition curator. The curator will take account of the physical context of the “story” they want to tell. Which room would be best for a particular painting; what about the light for that sculpture? The characteristics of the space directly affect the design of the show. Many galleries and art academies, from the Louvre to the New York Met, are using the World Wide Web (W3). Those who are not yet wired are enthusiastically planning to be … soon. It appears, though, that there is much less thought about how to use this electronic space to display conventional art. The W3 is mainly reproduces aspects of the physical reality of these places. For many galleries, this means simply displaying electronic versions of their paper-based brochures, publicity etc. For the more ambitious (and wealthy) institutions, the trend seems to be the development of sophisticated Virtual Reality views of their rooms. All these things have a place on the Web. But, great opportunities will be missed if art galleries, artists, and technologists fail to think about what new possibilities are opened by the technology – what can the Web provide that no visit to a gallery will ever give? The Interaction Design Centre at Middlesex University has been working with several major institutions including the Royal Academy of Arts (London). Through these studies, we have begun to explore ways of really using the power of networked art information. The flexible nature of hypermedia provides ways of both directing site visitors, leading them through a particular story, and a chance to exploit the visual associations they make outside any curators narrative. W3 interactive elements let people engage with the art – not just to passively absorb it. Visitors can also be brought together, to discuss and experience the art in such different ways to those possible in physical spaces. Putting conventional art works onto the W3 is an art form that requires artists and art institutions to ‘use electronic technology as a prerequisite’ – the medium needs to be exploited to form meta electronic art works. Without the sorts of technique discussed, users will soon lose interest in Web-based art galleries, ending up feeling disillusioned after they see through the haze of hype currently surrounding the technology.

The Seongbuk Cultural Foundation is a non-profit public interest foundation established in 2012 to carry out various cultural projects, including support program for artists and organizations, and research and publication for the development of culture and arts in Seongbuk-gu, Seoul. Through cultural cooperation, we established a cultural policy that was created by all Seongbuk-gu residents, and operates various cultural facilities including libraries, a movie theater, art museums, a women’s and a community center, and a youth culture sharing center. In particular, we are trying to make a prosperous ‘Culture City Seongbuk’ through diverse programs such as local representative festivals, revitalization of living culture and children’s youth culture and arts education. Also, we are strengthening partnerships with various subjects, including artists, schools and private cultural and artistic entities, to expand culture and arts education and establish a knowledge ecosystem.

Rare Earth Elements have rapidly become pervasive in our modern electronic lives, existing in every touch response screen, laptop, solar cell, and hybrid car. They amplify fiberoptic data transmission and enable precision guided weapons. Though only used in trace amounts, the demand for REEs has increased exponentially due to their far reaching uses and their unique catalytic, magnetic, and phosphorescent properties. Despite this, public knowledge of both the geological and geopolitical realm in which these elements are mined, alchemized, and dispersed is little to none. “Conversation Pieces REEs” prompts the creation of art objects u sing Rare Earth Elements in the form of alloys or powders into wearable art that will spark conversation about the origins, geophiloshophies, environmental ramifications, and uses of Rare Earth Elements that is typically left out of everyday dialogue. There are three types of art objects proposed using recently accessible satellite imagery, 3D sculpting softwares, laser cutting and 3D printing technologies.

The immaterial Cyberspace, the net, is by no means an empty space. In the net a topography of a new kind has been developed, in which the former pioneers, eg artists and activists, have been declared outlaws by the law offices of the big companies. The economic structures claim control over the word, the name and its phonetic and etymological elements. In the virtual space of names typing mistakes provide an increase in turnover. To submit to this structural force means that the less experienced user can vanish from of the virtual community without trace. Virtual power is and makes any virtual live invisible. It aims at destroying any communication, the total isolation from media: name and image are to be deleted. For those groups of artists and activists operating within the net co-operating closely with other media, eg print media, is imperative.

The US-company Networksolution is operating like the residents’ registration office, it can reject immigrants and kick out inconvenient tenants. The loss of an arduously established domain is like a small extravagant boutique being hurled out of a capital’s main street into the side-street of a village.

The software of the order of culture is the precondition of the invisible execution of a structural force that transfers abstract routines eg juridical ones from reality into the World Wide Web in order to develop new economically motivated mechanisms of discrimination. Those mechanisms are founded on the same principles as described by Foucault (Foucault: Discipline and Punishment, 1977, engl. version The Order of Discourse, 1978). In the internet the grammar of culture becomes evident: who is speaking, who is allowed to speak (Blissett/Brünzels 1998, 25f) and in which context is it allowed to speak? Another crucial factor is: what is the name of the person, the entity, that leaves a html signature in the net while speaking?

Poster Statement

Summary:

An unsuccessful attempt to mount a major art/computer exhibition in London, the musings of a digital painter, and what this has to do with malls and tourists.

Intro

This talk is about my unsuccessful attempt to curate a major show of computer connected art in London. As a painter using computers, I sometimes feel caught up in a family squabble about who’s doing the real art, who’s living in fantasy land. So It’s been useful for me to meditate about art and its functions. This past year I’ve been photographing tourists – electronically of course -and I realize now that I identify with their hesitant curiosity, uncertain where they’re heading. I wanted to call that show Cool Heaven, conjuring up both the spiritual and the offbeat, the unattainable ideal of a pure and immaterial art. I wanted to maintain a critical perspective, the sense that dreaming about a promised land didn’t mean there wouldn’t be trouble along the way.

This talk IS about my unsuccessful attempt to curate a major show of computer connected art in London. As a painter using computers, I sometimes feel caught up in a family squabble about who?s doing the real art, who?s living in fantasy land. So it’s been useful for me to meditate about art and its functions. This past year I’ve been photographing tourists  – electronically of course – and I realize now that I identify with their hesitant curiosity, uncertain where they’re heading. I wanted to call that show Cool Heaven, conjuring up both the spiritual and the offbeat, the unattainable ideal of a pure and immaterial art. I wanted to maintain a critical perspective, the sense that dreaming about a promised land didn’t mean there wouldn’t be trouble along the way.

This article explores the impacts of information sharing and experimentation on electronic media practitioners. It draws on characteristics of ‘open’ or ‘DIY’ cultures prevalent in the technological ‘maker’ movement and suggests that we collectively describe such practices as cooperative experimentalism. In particular this article focuses on the discipline of music and describes how adopting an approach to making that privileges sharing of tools and knowledge might be a useful strategy in the development of handmade electronic music instruments and associated live performance practices. The implications of such trends in electronic media suggest that the notion of cooperative experimentalism may well apply more generally to creative electronic media practices in our (post) digital age.

If symbiosis is an essential notion, it is even more so in today’s geopolitical context. War, terror and massive extinction of people in Ukraine by Russia is a global challenge shaping our global future at this very moment. In this situation performing artists in Ukraine keep on strong commitment to help in any possible way. Since the beginning of full-scale invasion in 2022
situation is forcing us to search for not only new ways of dealing with challenges creatively but to discover new ways of implementing our art practices and skills to completely new levels and spheres, like: resistance in information wars, culture ecology maintenance, new forms of fundraising and help with physical and psycho-emotional recovery same as military and civilians
etc.

During this session Viktor Ruban, will share information about part of initiatives that he initiated or is involved in, such as: European Culture Parliament and culture diplomacy challenges that he faces on different international events; Ukrainian emergency performing arts fund and funding challenges for independent scene of performing arts in Ukraine; international solidarity events and visibility of Ukrainian actual art scene – why it is important; actual creations in Ukraine and trends seen through the actual national theater prize season; and for the last part – about developing project for training “psychological first aid instructors for military from the front line” and Art therapy force project – range of activities implementing art-practices and work with creativity for psycho-emotional health recovery, coping with stress and panic attacks as well as preventing self-destructive behaviors and PTSD for diverse groups of people. It will be brief introduction of initiatives to map a range of implementations. Final part will be open for Q&A to go deeper into details about any of initiatives upon request of the audience.

How do artists store and organize hardware and software? I investigate the analog Sandin Image Processor hardware using “zombie media” archaeology, examining the concept of “obsolete” or “dead” media to find sustainable, socially equitable art and design solutions by remaking hardware modules as software. Because Sandin shared the Copy-It-Right: The Distribution Religion manual, more than 20 copies of the IP were made. As a testament to the success of the IP community’s engagement and maintenance, the machines continue to operate through the care of artists who actively engage the tool for new projects. Sandin’s IP proposes preservation through replication, re-implementation, open-access archives/storage, DIY activities, and community Build-It/Fix-it parties. It represents an artist self-archiving and organizing resources to copy-it-right.

Keywords: Spatiality, Tactility, Proprioception, Multi-Screen Environments, Corporeal Cinematic Experiences, Interactive Art, Biofeedback

In this article I analyse performances, artworks and installations in audiovisual and contemporary art which emphasise tactile and corporeal experiences. This tendency can be observed in technological art, cinema and large visual attractions. I aim to demonstrate that due to technical developments and new tools, the possibilities now exist for new aesthetic experiences in which the body’s position and its biological reactions play a decisive role.

The Proprioceptive Experience in Art
This leads to the question of how the critical or theoretical point of view of an artwork changes when the spectator’s reactions to it are documented and quantified in real time and are changed into source material for the next stage(s) of the artwork. Does this constitute the next step in the research of interactive artworks which were based on the subjective analysis of the participant’s reactions? Does it require us to rewrite analyses of artworks which were based on the subjective judgements of the researchers?

Join a discussion with members from the Corpus Electric Collective (CEC) as they discuss the creation of reactive garments for an interactive fashion performance. The CEC—comprised of New Mexico Highlands Media Arts faculty and students, members of the fashion team: Taos Runway Vigilantes, and high school students from the Taos and Las Vegas STEMarts workshops—will discuss the process of creating technologically infused garments that change colors and respond to sound and light.

Corpus Electric is a tech-fashion collaboration between Media Arts students from New
Mexico Highlands University, the Taos Runway Vigilantes, and students from the ISEA2012
Visiting Artists Teaching Program. Participants integrate technology into wearable costumes
and accessories, multimedia backdrops, and lighting for a tech-fashion performative event.
Made possible in part by Intel Corporation

The rise of materialism questions the position of humans in relation to their surroundings. We engage craft practices as rooted in material encounters that directly affect crafters on various cognitive and physical levels. In these encounters, the crafter’s body is also material which interacts on its own terms. The body’s condition, and the material-at-hand act and correspond with each other. We argue that this contact is an in-the-moment material one, a shared moment of production and becoming. Based on this theory of material encountering, this paper presents the Corresponding Wood Tools project as “speculative fabulations” exploring the ways in which this correspondence can be made visible. It argues for re-shaping the encounter in woodworking to allow new reflections on shared themes, such as care and collaboration.

Panel: East & West                                                                                                                              Institutional Presentation

Cir­cle of Satan 3.0 / HONF
Cir­cle of Satan is a plat­form for ex­changes, meet­ings, shar­ing, dis­cus­sions and com­mon think­ing. It ex­presses the strug­gle and dis­ad­van­tage of a de­vel­op­ing coun­try. When­ever op­por­tu­nity arises, an­other ob­sta­cle de­feats progress, in ei­ther the form of nat­ural dis­as­ter or human cor­rup­tion. In­done­sia still re­mains one of the poor­est na­tions, with a sub­stan­tial lack of tech­nol­ogy for the pub­lic. Is there still a dream pos­si­ble in the face of chaotic in­fra­struc­ture, cor­rup­tion, de­for­esta­tion, il­le­gal log­ging, the Pa­cific ring of fire, sweat­shops and glob­al­iza­tion. Cir­cle of satan / COS have been pre­sented in Slove­nia, Fin­land, Ru­ma­nia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Sin­ga­pore, Ger­many, France, Nether­lands, Aus­tria, Czech Re­pub­lic, Canada, Aus­tralia, Tai­wan, China, Hun­gary, Lithua­nia, Spain, and so on and (of course) (es­pe­cially) in lots of uni­ver­si­ties and com­mu­ni­ties in In­done­sia.

Cosmic Tea Party is a sound installation that connects our earth-bound existence with the cosmic realm in a state of amplified energetic excitation, both conceptually and materially. There is a sublime quality released in the everyday manifestation of cosmic events, and the realization that we are intrinsically connected to the wider universe, in part through the invisible streams of cosmic particles moving around and through us at all times. Individual events in particle physics are utterly unpredictable, and science uses statistical analysis to stochastically dampen the noise of the unexpected in favour of the large-scale predictability.

Yet such cosmic noise is in a sense the primary reality, echoed in the Cosmic Microwave Background raditation, the 3 degrees kelvin afterglow of the Big Bang itself. This can be see in the snow on an analogue TV set or the hiss of radio static, and genetically felt in every cell of our being, as cosmic particles are perhaps the source of genetic mutation that has allowed us to evolve, through the invisible showers of cosmic particles that rain down upon us from the depths of the universe.

The Cosmic Tea Party installation utilizes cosmic particle detectors, comprised of scintillating plastic and photomultipliers hooked up to a variety of household objects such as cups and a teapot. When a cosmic particle, or muon, passes through a detector near the objects, they vibrate and emit percussive pulses and resonating tones. The overall effect, as well as producing syncopated musical motifs, is a kind of energetic connection made between the objects, the audience, and the cosmos.

The ‘mini version’, currently in development, which uses ‘Teviso’ radiation detectors and a ‘Raspberry pi’. The original ‘analogue version’ is comprised of components that are large and simple enough to be apprehended or ‘visually understood’ on a basic level by the non-expert. One can see the detector plates, and the cables going from it into the signal generator and then to an analogue synthesizer and the household objects. Documentation of the various versions will be shown, as well as future variations and mutations, plus possibly a live particle detector demonstration.

Architecture is not just a technological solution which mitigates energy losses but also a manifestation of ideology which separates the human body from the natural environment – or even reality. This paper explores architectural boundaries through different more-than-human aspects of memento mori.

Despite the often wide phenomenological and ontological divides between humans and non-humans (or indeed because of them), artists have experimented with a myriad of methods of “collaboration” with myriad different species. This panel will explore the tricky edges of collaboration, asking how art-making can be a way of understanding trans/inter/cross-species relationships; or as environmental  biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests, how can we learn
from instead of learning about the more-than-human world?

How do we understand the aims, desires and perceptual landscape of the non-human? We will discuss these questions as well as unpack terms such as symbiosis, parasitism, commensalism and mutualism. In doing so we hope to elucidate how the arts can contribute to an epistemological and ontological decentering, in order to open up possibilities for heretofore unconsidered collaborative relations.

For the team developing Nature Holds My Camera: The Video Art of Sam Easterson, it seemed obvious that an exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indiana, USA) could be both meaningful and playful. But that idea was one immediately challenged by experienced art viewers. Interestingly and expectedly, those new to art-viewing found the exhibition to be unquestionably compelling with its bold graphic treatment, video-driven installation and comfortable environment. Using technology both in the gallery and on-line offered viewers access to artist Sam Easterson and his work. Tools such as an in-gallery blog allowed visitors to ask the artist questions directly while the video installations provoked heated debate about the nature of art itself. How has technology defined our understanding of art and nature? Can a man allow an animal to direct a video shoot and call it art? Where does fun fit into the museum equation? These questions were asked, and answered, in many ways both inside the museum and in the community, resulting in a fascinating look into the definitions of contemporary art and how media and presentation play a role in viewers’ understanding of it. The playful tone of the exhibition heightened its appeal for some while creating a seemingly insurmountable appearance of immaturity for others. This paper will outline the development and implementation of this exhibition with a focus on how viewers interacted with the work of Easterson in this unique museum experience and the fascinating dialogue generated as a result.

Keywords: Social media, Twitter, crowdsourcing, museums, curating, Olympics; participation
This article is a case study of a Twitter project #citizencurators, which was jointly developed by the University of Westminster and the Museum of London to ‘collect’ Londoners’ experience of the 2012 Olympic Games. The cross-disciplinary research explored how cultural institutions can use social media to extend and diversify their collecting methos. As such this project demonstrates how the use of social networking can empower the Museum.

Meredith Drum will discuss her recent 3D digital animations, and her choice to employ the trope of the chimera and images of female power from gaming and cinema to explore feminist discourse around gender, sexuality, mutuality and violence, all within a larger consideration of multi-species conflict and interdependence in the capitalocene. Drum’s talk will be founded, in part, on her understanding of Donna Haraway’s tentacular thinking, and the motivation she takes from Haraway’s insistence that: “The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures”.

TOPO was founded in Montreal (Canada) in 1993. The centre grew out of the will of its founding members to develop a structure for the organization of collective and multidisciplinary projects, a will that very soon expanded to explore a digital new era for the artists.

TOPO’s creative, circulation, training, and mediation activities contribute to the development of its disciplinary field, at the crossroads of the visual arts, literature, and digital media. The centre guides, supports, and produces interactive projects, receives artists in residence, and offers specialized workshops. Its dissemination component explores innovative modes of presentation for digital artworks through exhibitions, performances, publications, and circulation on the web and in local, national, and international networks.

A member of the creative hub and exhibition space Pied Carré, in Montreal (Canada), the centre occupies a multifunctional production space open to the community and has an exhibition showcase on the ground floor of the building, in the Mile-End neighbourhood of Montreal.
From 2019 to 2022, TOPO proposed a thematic program around “Frontier”, with exhibitions, workshops, performances, artist presentations and a printed publication with a digital version to enhance the user experience.

Anchored in humanity’s history, this subject combines many questions brought up by the artist-centre which are as much political and social as physical and technological

Keywords: Processor-Based Media, Computational Art and Design, Artificial Aesthetics, Interaction, Creation of Meaning, Ergodic Experience, Virtuosic Interpretation.

Processor-based artefacts are often created following conventions inherited from analogue media forms, allowing the development of experiences that, in spite of the new platforms, are not fundamentally different from those that were already possible in the previous contexts. But contemporary media and arts often use processor-based artefacts focusing on conceptual and mechanical principles that do not attempt to simulate earlier forms but rather explore their computational nature. These systems bring about new modes of reading and new challenges, to both readers and artists or designers. In order to optimize the usage of processor- based media, creators need to understand how these artefacts are interpreted and how readers develop processes of creation of meaning in procedural contexts. This will allow authors to ground their practices on procedurality rather than only on surface contents, and to make a constructive use of contingent behaviour, learning, adaptation, selection, and other traits of these systems, not being limited to the emulation of well-established media forms. This paper outlines some of these challenges and proposes designing for the meaningful interpretation of computational artefacts.

This paper takes the question of the existence of life on mars as a pretext for a discussion of the quest for artificial/alien life and of the relation between evolution and becoming. It argues for the contingent association between artificial life and evolution, alien life and becoming and uses Bergson to distinguish between creative and conservative evolutionism in contemporary technoscientific art and science. The methodological, epistemological and ontological implications of an approach informed by mobility are drawn out, and finally the paper returns to the question: ‘is there life on mars?’, and answers it.

I will use examples from my interactive art works, which are themselves artistic and conceptual statements of perception and cognition. Within these works I view the physical environment as the art object, and the process of interaction as the art work. All art objects can engage the viewer in active forms of perceptual selection. We choose to look at a part of a sculpture, or do a structural analysis or an interpretation of a painting. Traditionally this is done as part of the detached contemplation often associated with the aesthetic experience – the phenomenon of aesthetic or psychical distance. Interactive art, in contrast, requires that viewers become behaviorally involved with the object and directly manipulate it, creating a new art work within the constraints of the environment created by the artist. It is thus a dynamic processes that changes over time and includes a high level of personal involvement with the work. In this process, interactive art is an extension of the ability of the viewer to analyze and interpret the work, but it is closer to the task of the traditional artist in which creative expression and problem solving are explicit parts of the process.

The possibility for supporting creative practice as a form of research has received extensive consideration both among creative academic practitioners and research policy-makers. This has been driven by a number of factors, among them an organisational need to account for professional creative practice among and expanding academic staff whose work contained an exploratory and innovative component; and growth in postgraduate programmes in the creative sector requiring equivalents to the knowledge-transfer models that have structured postgraduate study in other fields.

Recent research policy developments, particularly national assessment exercises in the UK and the British Commonwealth, suggested homologies between creative practice investigations and traditional research (if not always their equivalence) and facilitated the entry of creative practitioners into a formal Research Science and Technology (RS&T) support system. However, as a number of commentators have noted, this has often been characterised by a dynamic where creative practitioners are on the back foot, attempting to justify their practice as being as rigorous as “real research.” After more than a decade of these discussions, we can now see that there is the potential for creative practice to contribute far more to our understanding of research and innovation than simply being admitted inside an existing discussion about knowledge production. In a way, creative practices highlight fundamental areas of tension in dominant ways of thinking about knowledge, and these represent an opportunity to rethink the systems by which research is undertaken and supported.

Creativity within a University knowledge system
While creative practices’ understanding of creativity might be of a different order to most disciplines, it is also true that creative practice disciplines have not yet developed sufficient reflexive understanding of their position within the academy that would allow us to make stronger claims for a distinctive kind of knowing that could be the basis for support from research institutions. As Kevin Hamilton astutely observes, the difference between traditional disciplines (which aim to give a comprehensive introduction to a field at undergraduate level) and creative disciplines such as art and design are significant when we look at the way art and design is actually taught: Curricula and pedagogy for art and design at the undergraduate and graduate levels widely varies, undergoes little interinstitutional examination or critique, and is often still regarded with suspicion by even young professors who doubt that art can really ever be taught. ‘Hidden curricula’ dominate and there is no shared understanding of the discipline in the way that exists in most other departments.

This paper aims for the creation of a framework to address the following questions: can we build machines that merely simulate human creative activity or is there potential to emulate true creative thinking in a computer program? How do we build self-reflective programs given certain aesthetic criteria and what are these criteria supposed to look like? Social expression, introspection and the synthesis of meaning while handling multiple views of the same thing at the same time are at the heart of human creative behaviour. All this seems hard to expect from a machine though quite powerful statements have been produced in recent years, in particular by using methods of artificial intelligence and algorithms inspired by biological evolution.We are forced to study the psychology of creative decision making if we ever want to implement spects of it in a computer program These aspects have many faces including the creation of contexts to augment the chances for something interesting to happen, the invention of problems and questions (not answers), the persistence on exploration and flexibility rather than Gal products and precision, the expression of interest in the meaning of things rather than (or in spite of) their possibly extraordinary visual appeal, and many more. Because much computer art focuses on the generation of intricate structures does not imply that critique should be limited to formalist criticism i.e. the study of formal relationships or excellence in designed visual organization.

Criticism should not be blinded by the complexity of the medium but receptive to the expression of intense feelings, the communication of ideas of truly great intensity and question the relevance of artistic statements i.e. do they say anything on the human condition as it really affects us? Or should critique be focused on the consequences of the ideas and feelings expressed, for instance, by serving some social end beyond the form of the work itself? Obviously, impressive pictures do not provide a useful ground to guarantee artistic integrity In any case, a work must offer the potential to raise questions and, possibly fundamental questions which trigger a creative response in the observer or listener. Perhaps, because of its interactive nature, the computer is the ultimate channel for introducing augmented responsiveness in the appreciation of artistic statements.

The connections between art and science, and the potential outcome of cross-linking both, are of great interest. In this paper I will explore the creative potential of hacking the substrate of the Universe and quantum noise. Art and science should each be evaluated on their own merit, and both are equally important in our quest to understand our world and to enrich our experiences. For the author physics is one of the greatest mysteries of them all, the mystery of understanding the fabric of reality. Creativity and imagination are enormously important in the history of physics because often the hardest part has been having creativity and imagination to question assumptions that everybody else has bought into. Imagination is crucial for imagining how things could be different. The author uses his artistic praxis, art historical knowledge and keen interest in the sciences as a starting point to explore the notions of the hole, randomness, true random number generation, quantum physics, the vacuum and vacuum noise. The first part ofthe talk explores scientific concepts; the second part focuses on the arts and artistic output. By setting up a lab experiment to measure quantum fluctuations and applying mathematics in custom made software, the author discusses visualizing the invisible by materializing his subjects through 3D printing.

This paper examines implications of “the crisis of representation” for various kinds of images basing its conclusions on recent and old theories of media.

The point of contact between human and nonhuman is an imaginary of possibilities and, if one is to follow upon Bruno Latour’s critique on the “tyranny of the globe”, the borders separating the body and nonhuman are even more porous, illusive and multiple than imagined.

[1] [2] Through interventions at levels of platform, system, code, sentience and nonhuman critical thinking, this panel con-ceptualizes this point of contact as a moment of art and one begging urgent response. Why urgent? Because, although the immediate and terrible crises of global warming maybe be directly caused by the human use of fossil fuel — some-thing straightforward that humans should be able to solve, the overwhelming incapacity of humans to build the will to confront the crisis (and other crises like mass extinction, perpetual wars, starvation, poverty) perhaps lies in the far broader, dystopic paradigms of the Anthropocene that im-prison our imaginaries within a cross-cultural mythos da-ting back at least to the beginnings of the Industrial Revo-lution.

Simultaneously, technological infrastructures and platforms are designed in ways that hide the material costs and damage behind glossy surfaces and disappearing inter-faces.

That humans of the industrial era seem incapable of breaking cycles of warfare, economic inequality and global destruction despite indisputable evidence suggests that systems of knowledge and action that seemingly might provoke action are trapped within some larger mythos. Such a mythos is embedded in our technologies, networks, iconographies, languages, disciplines and narrative models.

Though natural and machine-driven nonhuman and human-nonhuman approaches in the arts the panel looks for possibilities through alternate platforms, perspectives and con-figurations that may help transform the climate debates and discourse around other challenges of our time.

Artists have always used new technologies…the first person that blew paint through a hollow stick to reproduce an image of their hand on a cave wall was using technology. As Jean Picht has said “a flute is a machine and a piano is a very complex machine”.

I was looking at a Windsor Newton painting products catalog recently and the photographs in it show hands mixing paint with a mortar and pedestal, no where in it is any hint of a production line or the large powerful computers this company must own, certainly much more powerful than anything I could afford. The painting crowd is still in denial. The arguments about whether artists should engage with computer technology or not, are dead. Affordable computer technology has been in the hands of the general public and artists for fifteen years. Computers are old tech. The discussion about whether artists should engage with high technologies or not are now in the hands of those artists dealing with bio/medical art, Orlan, Joe Davis and Stelarc. The only determining factor on the popularity of electronic art is whether electronic technology is in current public moral favour, and the coverage of the gulf war certainly has put computer technology in a favourable light in the west. Now that our field has aged significantly and we are secure in our place in art history we can look forwards to openly discussing the factions within electronic art, the In Your face artists and… I guess we would have to call them the In Your Machine artists, the political artists and the apolitical artists. One thing that this field has sorely lacked is critical friction and critical friction is what will make or break technologically
based art works.

In this talk, I will return to some rudimentary issues that have been pestering me for some time and which now seem pertinent. I hope it isn’t a statement on the obvious. Rather than offering my thoughts on art and surveillance, as promised, I would like to respond to a comment that Simon Penny made on Tuesday in another panel on interactivity and art. When asked what he thought of the critical writing on interactive work he gave a witty and provocative answer, an answer provided by Mahatma Ghandi. Apparently when Ghandi was asked what he thought of Western civilization. he replied, “it would be a good idea”. The implication, of course, is that the same can be said of writing on art and new media technologies.

This response piqued my interest because it says something about the very complicated ties- the surface tensions- between different practices or modalities of expression: theoretical discourses, writing, criticism, art works, artists, and institutions. It made me reflect on the ways our terrains diverge and overlap. After all art and theory share some common features within North America in the popular imagination: they are both often seen as useless activities.

Over the last decade, a significant number of contemporary media artists and net activists have adopted digital games to intervene and participate in mainstream media culture. Though artists have taken up the medium of videogames for a variety of purposes, in this paper I am specifically concerned with game art conceived and developed within a western tradition of critical creative production in which play is a means to engage and attempt to reconfigure the technical, formal and social in relation to the politics of everyday life.

The overarching goal of this essay is to situate artistic gaming projects by contemporary artists and net activists within oppositional art-inspired practices. I explore the relationship between digital critical game art and the use of games and game concepts in developing a playful praxis by Situationists and related groups, such as Dada and Surrealism. I draw on a variety of projects by these groups, which range from urban design, collage art, and provocative performances in order to highlight key concepts and practices central to interventionist cultural production. Playful interfaces are central to the conceptualization and deployment of a variety of contemporary game art projects by artists and collectives, which include Wafaa Bilal, Anne Marie Schleiner, RTmark, and Critical Art Ensemble. I engage these projects in order to contextualize the effectiveness of play and critical gaming as tools for reflection and political activism today.

Abstract

This paper investigates cross discipline collaborative methodologies and protocols that are necessary for first time collaborators. Two situations are examined, one with first year undergraduate students that had never experienced cross discipline collaboration, who ‘don’t care and don’t want to know’ and the other with professionals from different disciplines. These were mostly face-to-face rather than online projects. What I am referring to when using the term cross discipline collaboration is collaboration across several disciplines working toward a common purpose: problems of common language – where not only are we unable to communicate across disciplines, but calling it something causes confusion. In spite of this, cross discipline collaboration is a term often heard these days. Filter Magazine (Issue 68), was overflowing with encouraging words about collaboration. Quote:

‘This process of collaboration is essential in our new world order. It is from collaboration and the cross fertilization of ideas that new discoveries will come’.                                                             Another quote from the same writer:                                                                                                    ‘So what do we do about it and how can we make a difference? Well, to borrow a term from science, one way of influencing change is to introduce a catalyst to the system, an enabler with an agenda for change. Such a catalyst paves the way, breaks through structural boundaries and brings groups and cultures together to design and pilot new ideas and programs’.

However unless participants are sufficiently skilled to launch and then sustain successful collaborations, then things can and do go wrong. It is necessary to implement learning systems for our young people. Programs do exist in some countries and this paper gives some indication of ours.

The maker culture, flourishing around the world across the last decade in the form of public, corporate and underground maker-spaces or diverse DIY/DIWO workshop programs presents one of the most important trends in experience-based learning, which often takes place not only informally, but also unconsciously, for example through embodied cognition. Upon this background and along several cases of projects, artworks, institutional alliances and initiatives, the article presents an emerging model for experiencing and learning through interdisciplinary collaborations between art and entrepreneurship. These practices are demonstrating new possibilities for disciplinary crossovers permeated by artistic thinking, such that are particularly fruitful for social, but also for technological innovation, which is confirmed by the current DIVA project as treated in the article. Art Thinking proves to be a key novel approach in the innovation cycle that may be integrated into formal education curricula, business practices and community learning alike, which was proven by the recently finished MAST project as discussed in this contribution. A concrete convergence of the above principles and concepts is finally presented through the concept and process of the current project xMobil as an example of blending maker methodologies with the art-thinking based crossover innovation approach.

The University of Nova Gorica School of Arts is a young and dynamic art school, offering interdisciplinary study programs in Digital Arts and Practices (BA) and its follow-up – Master of Arts in Media Arts and Practices, through the Modules of Animation, Film, Photography, New Media, Scenographic spaces and Art-Science-Technology, with a focus on Contemporary Art Practice. To foster students’ development as independent creators, researchers, and agents of change, the school pursues a personal approach and an advanced attitude toward interdisciplinary cooperation as well as artistic research, in particular in combining the arts with other disciplines within and beyond academia.

In recent years, the school has led major EU-supported projects such as:

MASTmodule.eu – Master Module in Art, Science and Technology;
IDEATE.me – Interdisciplinary Transformations in Education
ADRIART.net – Advancing Interactions in Art Teaching.

Besides such pedagogy and curriculum development projects, they have been fostering international alliances and advancing interdisciplinary research in projects such as:

DIVA – Art:Biz Innovation Ecosystems;
KONS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art;
TV Free Europe – 1,5 million Steps over the Borders;
EmindS – Interdisciplinary Entrepreneurial Mindsets;
HiLoVv – Hidden Lives of Venice on Video;
PAIC – Participatory Art for Invisible Communities;
and have founded ADRIART.CE, a growing network of art academies from Central and South Eastern Europe.

Project Description
Crude Illumination is a light projection installation. The piece consists of an acrylic container of oil (crude) and dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) placed on an overhead projector. As the room temperature oil causes the dry ice to sublimate (at -109.3ºF), the dry ice changes shape and state, and interacts with the liquid oil surface and light projection. This dynamic information exchange is projected onto a nearby wall, via an analog projection apparatus. Crude Illumination is a material and theoretical study of the influence of information embodiment in the anthropocene, an introduction to what I call signal flow.

Thesis
Signal materialism and information embodiment illuminates invisible subject-hood formulation. A deep viewing of Crude Illumination provides a complex consideration of petropolitics and climate change as a projected signal flow of decaying material technologies and western ideologies – in other words, a myth, a fiction, a haunting dance of ineffable light. As oil sublimates carbon into our environment, the cloud disperses information everywhere.

Background
Contemporary western culture privileges visual perception a priori, yet increased technological innovation sharpens our lens to the invisible forces shaping our mediated experiences. Increased attention to the anthropocene has shifted scientific consideration of materialism. Crude Illumination argues for a signal materialism; a state of flow in which the spaces of human experience becomes a plural terrain of shifting dynamics shaped by visible and invisible material forces such as acoustic ecologies, signal transmission, microbial clouds, and a history of capital extraction and resource exploitation.

These forces feedback onto themselves as a mesh of information exchange experienced as transparent observable phenomena. Unlike the ethical questions surrounding information privacy and transparency at stake in a culture of technological mediation, Crude Illumination highlights some ways in which information has never been private; it is exchanged, reconstituted, and catalysed into new forms. Furthermore, our own entanglement and complex personhood renders any point of origin a grand mythology.

Methods
-Material as method: signal materialism intends to bring to life the connected emergence of water as information conduit (sediment, nutrients, organic decay, etc.), light as information projection, oil as signal materialism of a crude capital translation (poor energy), i.e. a neoliberal market.

-Light as a primary signal flow: projection hurls information into space. The overhead projector fetishizes the historical information apparatus and points to techno-information as material object.
-Information is an object: Wendy Chun argues for software as a thing, yet increasing technological mediation renders techno-information invisible, much like the many invisible forces always already part of the anthropocene.

Technical Logistics: Overhead projector, 16oz Pennsylvania Crude Oil, 5lb Frozen Carbon Dioxide (Dry Ice), 16oz Water, 2 plastic or glass plates, White Wall and empty floor space (roughly 8’x8’), Electricity

Based on the meeting of new archives of the ISEA 2020, of which studies and theoretical models have been presented regarding the use of peer-to-peer distribution of collections and archives in the search to understand new possibilities for the preservation and conservation of the digital in the field of Art, the following panel proposal leads an essential discussion of Blockchain technology for memory spaces, museums, and festivals, in front of the challenge of the digitalization and digital transformation from existing and upgraded collections. In this sense, the Panel will seek different perspectives on encryption, legitimacy, and practical and theoretical challenges besides a contextualization to- wards post-digital societies.

How to express beyond-human phenomena and sensibilities? Is it possible to connect artistic and scientific languages to bring an invisible horizon to visibility? This talk refers to the creation process of the electronic installation entitled Crypto-chrome (The Hidden Color), an artwork dedicated to the “magnetic vision” of migratory birds, presented at the 13th Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil. With studies in computational biophysics, drone photography, digital simulations, and electromagnetic sound devices, the artwork discussed articulates contemporary art practices, scientific divulgation, and technological prototyping to emphasize world phenomena beyond human perception. Its realization relied on the consultancy of researchers in physics and biology, as well as technicians in electrical engineering. The articulation between art, science, and technology gave the installation multivalent qualities, considering its artistic repercussion, precise scientific approach, and technological experimentation.

Commissioned by Folly as part of its Portable Pixel Playground (PPP) project, Cubed is a networked set of gaming objects that enable the exploration of diverse physical spaces and helps to develop relationship-building skills. The project was launched at the Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Arts Festival held at Grizedale Forest Park, Cumbria, 2nd April 2010.

Cubed makes use of recent advances in embedded technology to deliver a unique platform for kinaesthetic engagement and creative play. A set of eight programmable plastic blocks – wirelessly interconnected to form a meshed system – Cubed enables a range of different individual and team based games and offers the capacity for further game developments utilizing feedback and input from participants.

Conceived as a system of Cellular Automata, Von Neumann (1966), Cubed enables populations to work as open systems of communication. In such systems programs can exist across individual components or nodes. Rather than standing independently, each cube benefits from its changing relationship with others in the system. Such organizing principles can be extended further, by taking into account each player and their relationships with other players, as well as the associations between players and cubes. Taken as a whole, these interactions form a complex web of reflexive relationships, heterogeneous assemblages of playful engagement.

How can art educators fulfill human potential in the process of teaching and learning in online art studios? How can they transmit their passion and enthusiasm for art making in virtual environments teaching and learning to cultivate human potential in the virtual classroom? This paper investigates the ability of remote art learning to unlock human capabilities. Based on the definitions of human potential, we specifically examine three aspects of learning behaviors and environments within this study. First, we focus on students’ self-discovery, self-directed learning, and self-efficacy. Second, we investigate the concepts of connection and communication, which are integrated into the virtual classroom. Lastly, we explore the unique characteristics of the educational environment for virtual teaching and learning. Inspired by Neurath, Chambers and Sandford (2019) illustrated educators in the digital age as “sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea” (p. 926). Based on these findings, we encourage other art educators to embed fluidity and flexibility into their online art educations practices, to facilitate the virtual art classroom that may cultivate human potential.

the possible, to capture a contemporary moment and to look towards the future. This seems to be their prerogative and a requirement for reflecting critically on ‘the now’. The digital medium demands this. In order for a new possible way of working to be imagined – artists and researchers need to look outside of their own contexts, towards other ways of working to ensure sustainability, longevity and relevance.
The covid-19 pandemic demands that artists, curators and researchers re-imagine their practice for a technology orientated future. As digital product design or interaction design has progressed, so have the research methods which aid in the realisation of digital products and systems. This field of human computer interaction (HCI), leverages design thinking as an iterative, agile approach. This paper will present //2Weeks special edition, theTMRW residency programme and the Floating Reverie website as case studies indirectly and directly been inspired by this way of working applied to an artistic research practice, curatorial projects and collaborative working within the digital medium.
Through the use of different methodologies and approaches to artistic research and art residencies, within the context of the digital medium, a reinforced connection between arts and technology has the potential to occur.

Martin Heidegger has stated that “technology is… no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm of the essence of technology will open itself to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth… There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techne …. Once there was a time when the bringing forth (poieses) of the true (aletheia) into the beautiful was called techne. And the poieses of the fine arts was also called techne.”

Viewing cultural maintenance and change as interactive and concurrent, this paper address-es areas of knowledge and belief in which computer graphics and other electronic art and information such as computer graphics may reveal or bring forth a new view of truth. As Heidegger states, “It is in revealing, and not as manufacturing or making that techne is a bringing forth… Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.”

The limits of current belief systems within and across cultures are illuminated as new ways of representing and communicating visual information emerge from electronic media. The dominance of prior American and European representational schemes in electronic media is examined with the view that these media may also generate new representation schemes that illuminate the limits of current Euro-American thought. Art and technology are viewed as cultural information bearers with potential to effect cultural maintenance and change. Specific examples of electronic art will be examined as maintaining artistic schools of thought and as revealing the limits of contemporary art theory and practice. Discussions of the boundaries of art in contemporary Euro-American theory will be used to examine a variety of current and past work in electronic media.

The human microbiome has received a lot of attention in the last ten years, with claims that human cells are outnumbered ten to one by bacteria, fungi, arachnid, and insect cells, and an explosion of scientific research into the importance of such microorganisms to human evolution and health. Monica Bakke claims that knowledge of our microbiome does not threaten our identity although “an awareness of it definitely alters the way we think of our bodies, as they no longer can be perceived as sealed vessels”. However, Bakke’s claim ignores a long lineage of scholarship that shows that the perception of the body as “sealed vessel,” a “unified self,” has always been a fantasy.

This paper discusses a number of recent artworks that demonstrate the ability of the human microbiome to disrupt the fantasy of the unified “self” through the production of food using members of the human microbiome. The ancient fermentation processes that produce bread, cheese and beer are disturbingly and abruptly shifted into the realm of disgust and revulsion through the use of organisms harvested from the human body. This paper traces the biopolitics of fermentation, self and disgustactivated through these artworks.

Curating Youtube Box [CYB] fills an important void in the modern art business by facilitating a meaningful reaction with regards to contemporary Web 2.0 phenomena such as user generated content. Following the principles of A SPACE INSIDE A SPACE, CYB may easily be installed in the context of a museum, a gallery, a studio or an art fair. CYB enables curators and scientists to present net videos in a format that is adequate to the art business. CYB will be mailed to the interested institutions upon request. The net videos presented in the various exhibitions will be presented in their original size, using apt players and thereby creating a feeling of “authenticity”. The players will be able to present online streams as well as pre-configured offline shows, such as looped playlists. The players will be, due to their user-friendly interface and their broad acceptance, easily controlled by the audience. The possibility of interactions is an integral part of the entire project.

Keywords: Curating, Evaluation, Audiences, Digital Art, Psychosocial Research, Practice-Based Research.

Museums and galleries have always been recognized as creating wellbeing outcomes. This paper builds upon this existing dis- course with a study that is specific to the curation of digital art- works addressing the topic of mental health. It documents my own practice based research and audience response to the exhibi- tion: Group Therapy: Mental Distress in a Digital Age, held at FACT, UK in 2015. Audience feedback was gathered using a psychosocial research method called the visual matrix, which is designed to capture more affective responses than existing meth- ods of arts evaluation. Presenting this feedback, I focus on a perceived dichotomy between the historical and the digital, where audiences understood the asylum as a place of sanctuary and the digital content as anxiety provoking. I use this tension to propose next steps in my own practice alongside some wider considerations for curatorial approaches to digital art dealing with mental health. Issues of curatorial care are central, as I consider how a curator can support audiences to encounter challenging digital artworks that deal with mental distress. I adapt and test Wilfred Bion’s concept of container-contained (also a key theoretical component of the visual matrix method) as a paradigm for this caretaking function.

This paper explores a renewed approach to curation as research-creation (CRC) through its practical application in the annual art and technology festival. CRC envisions a shift in curation from a care for objects to a care for the emerging social relations of the curatorial project in a shared quest of meaning making.

We set out with outlining the features of CRC as interdisciplinary, concerned with programmatic boundary objects, and centered around the unfolding event trajectory – the forms and methods that facilitate affective encounters. Following we outline how this approach to curation unfolds in practice through the case study of the Fest-Forward workshop series that speculates on the future of art and technology festivals.

Concluding we summarize how this workshop series showcases the potential of CRC’s shift of attention from a mere presentation of artworks towards the facilitation of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural encounters that enroll artists, curators, and audiences.

Keywords: Curatorship, New Media, Digital Culture, Exhibition, Contemporary Art

One of the discussions related to contemporary curatorial practices focuses upon the impact of new media and digital media in the formats and exhibition circuits. In addition to only exploring curatorships that showcase digital media art projects, what interests us in this article is to investigate how certain characteristics of media culture – such as collaborative processes and networking – are present in current curatorial practices.Examining this premise, we divided this article into two parts. In the first, we conducted a small curatorial history to show how the curatorial procedures have been adapted to the changes occurring in the field of contemporary art. In a second part, we use as a study case the curatorial projects developed by the Paço das Artes such as the Livro-Acervo, MaPA and Ex-Paço.

Introduction
The principle of curating, as we know, is linked to museums, which in turn refers to their origin in the cabinets of curiosities. The obscure Wunderkammern began to emerge in Europe during the Renaissance. They were collections of zoological, botanical, and archeological objects, historical and ethnographic relics, paintings and antiques. Unlike traditional museums, however, which have among their responsibilities the documentation, organization, and arrangement of objects in accordance with a filing methodology aimed at the conservation of artifacts for future exposure, cabinets of curiosities lacked the concept of cataloging.

The panel aims to explore the diverse range of symbiotic relationships technology enforces, using examples and a custom interactive black box to demystify the metaphor of “black boxes” and its design aesthetics, discussing how designers can mediate human-technology relationships and strategies for a more mutually beneficial symbiotic world.

Technology appears as the symbiotic partner in human evolution, both co-constituting and always redefining their relationships that are becoming more complex and entangled nowadays. Throughout history, this relationship was one of symbiotic power-dynamics, mediating and guiding our daily interactions within social, political, spiritual, and environmental contexts. Often glorified in techno-positive imaginaries, many technological objects intervening in our daily life and the life of other species appear as “black boxes” – sometimes mystified, inaccessible or alienating but yet omnipresent.

The panel aims to outline the spectrum and problematics of the diverse range of symbiotic relationships technology enforces – be it mutual, commensal or parasitic ones. Using a set of technology-examples, and with the help of a custom made interactive physical black box as well as speech recognition algorithm visuals mediating the conversation, the panelists seek to unpack and demystify the metaphor of the “black box” and its design aesthetics.

Revolving around the agency of designers, the panel conversation responds to the question of how human-technology relationships are being mediated through design and what kind of strategies could be followed to open up pathways of a more mutual-symbiotic world beneficially connecting humans, non-humans and technologies alike.

With the understanding that we are a part of an interconnected and interdependent planetary eco-system, contemporary human culture slowly moves from a culture of consumption and segregation to a culture of participation, integration and generation. Our technological inquiry, into the minutae of molecules, atoms and bits, is reaching the limits of rational reductionism and rediscovering the robust beauty of growth and interdependence in complex systems – from food to fabrics, from genetics to global networks. We are beginning to see design which aims to produce and recycle, rather than relentlessly consume resources and deplete energy. We suggest that these changes in contemporary culture, economy and technology are beginning to resonate with the characteristics of our close neighbours in the domain of eukarya – the plants.

As a botanical parallel to the oft misunderstood field of HCI – Human Computer Interaction, HPI – Human Plant Interaction, explores the nature of surfaces and processes required to facilitate mutually beneficial interaction between humans and plants. HPI necessarily takes a symbiotic approach, being shaped by the questions it poses, such as; how can this two-way interface be realised? What assumptions are we making with regards to how we understand humans and plants? Do we need individual, specialised interfaces for each species, language or alkaloid, or are there more general approaches? Where, or what is the point of contact between the humans and plants? How do we make the transition from machinic to organic? From boolean logic systems to systemic ecologic? How does the nature of time, place and metabolic byproducts differ on each side of these interfaces? Are they reconcilable, or even mutually explicable? Communication, or pollination?

An HPI could reveal possible futures where interactions between humans and plants move from consumption, nutrition and competition, towards a fertile, symbiotic entanglement.

This paper investigates modes of activist engagement on a performance in public space. The discussion anchors on the case study analysis of the project WagonNet (Brazil, 2011-2014). The artistic practice combines a procedural and relational aesthetic to presuppose the other in the city context. It imbricates human and non-human agents in a wagon converted into a “cyber machine”, which works as a mobile digital station connecting the material and the virtual world and audiences. The performance evidences some dialogic aspects of culture, such as the relations between local and global, archaic and modern, backwardness and progress. The authors focus on this artistic experience to discuss two main topics: how to potentialize the urban environment as a place of encounters, and how the exploration of the city suburbs
can be turned into an activist act.

Cyberdelia Mexicana A.C. is a Media Art association, based in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. It focuses on the artistic manifestations that touch the intersection between technology, body and consciousness, in all its facets, from the study of machinic, biological and material systems. It addresses multiple combinations, manifestations and hybridizations of technological art, such as interactive design, immersion, AR/MR/VR, neuro-hacking, algorithmic music, bio-art, human-machine symbiosis, digital manufacturing, computer vision, AI/ML, computational design, among others.

Cyberdelia Mexicana A.C. emerges as a figure that encompasses the practice and independent expression of technological art in the city of Guadalajara. Its main objective is to articulate, promote and create spaces for exchange of knowledge and professionalization in the field of Media Art with local actors and institutions in dialogue with institutions and communities abroad through the creation of cultural dialogue and exchange spaces such as the ANEMONAL festival, live audiovisual events, art residencies, conferences, exhibitions of technological art, workshops and a physical space, Laboratorio Media Arts in center of the city.

This research examines the connection between cyberfeminism and the preservation and archiving of digital art. Utilizing Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986) as a poetical framework, which suggests that the first tool created by humans was a basket, not a spear, the paper offers a speculative interpretation of the history of technology that emphasizes the significance of gathering and sharing over hunting and domination. The field of digital art is particularly susceptible to technological obsolescence, making collecting and preserving such work even more critical. The Cyberfeminism Index provides a valuable case study for tracing the genealogy of digital artifacts of cyberfeminist art from the 1990s and 2000s through collecting and curating them and ensuring their preservation for future generations. It is a web-based plat-form that facilitates the collection of digital art while also preserving the autonomy of each individual artifact and serves as an ex-ample of an archive that is imagined, organized, constructed, and maintained in a manner that aligns with cyberfeminist visions of building a feminist Internet. This study addresses the question of how to create more feminist archives and aims to explore the question of what to do with digital art that is already available online. By selecting, reinterpreting, and presenting existing digital art in new contexts, cyberfeminist artworks can be revitalized and given new meaning.

In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 megabytes: compressed Cyberfemmes are everywhere, but cyberfeminists are few and far between. Sex, danger, women and machines – the plot of every other futuristic, sci-fi movie in which women play any role they want. Adapted to reflect male high-tech fantasies, the influence/power which these women wield is evil, technological and, of course, seductive.

Intro

In her latest incarnation she is exceedingly voluptuous. The scalpel blades beneath her fashionably manicured nails are discreetly retractable. The arm twisted up behind her back is, at first glance, barely noticeable. Meet Molly in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, or Melanie Griffith in the film Cherry 2000 – sexy, tough, aloof, and ultimately a fantasy.

The power which these women wield is evil, technological and, of course, seductive. Any influence or control which they exert is clearly misguided or accidental. And, if they happen to be pre-menstrual, they may just blast you to hell and back. The powerful woman, bitch/ goddess, ice queen, android, is represented in popular culture as a 21st century Pandora. And the box which she holds this time is electronic and very definitely plugged in. Linking the erotic representation of women with the often terrible cultural impact of new electronic technologies is not a new concept. Cinema addressed the desire to anthropomorphize machines and vilify women in the process as early as 1927 in Fritz Lang’s cult classic Merropolis. Women as anti-technology neophytes is also an enduring theme. Sex, danger, women and machines: the plot of virtually every mainstream, futuristic, scifi movie in which women play any role at all. Cyberfemmes are everywhere, but cyberfeminists are few and far between. The deconstruction of feminism, the division of women according to geography and sexual or other politics, is as often selfinflicted as it is directed by the corporations and corresponding figureheads which oil the gears of mass media’s machinery. A response to the acceleration of technology and history. Our lives are careening very nearly out of our control With the pieces and parts scattered at our feet what can be salvaged from 20th century  feminism? Through examining the relationship between women and technology, perhaps where science and fiction converge (in the new technological ethos of new electronic media and art) there may be an opportunity to reconstruct feminism. Post-gender, transgender – the possible parameters of a new philosophy.

Poster Statement

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited. It is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first meta-medium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered ….. [Alan Kay, 1984] Computer software can of course simulate other, more traditional media. However, considered as a medium, computer software can also do many new things: it can interact with users in relatively arbitrary ways; it can simulate other processes; and perhaps most importantly, it can adapt. Unfortunately, as commonly implemented, computer software is not a very good communications medium. It is relatively cumbersome to distribute software, there are too many incompatible platforms that can only ‘display” very specific forms of it, it has very little structure, and it is relatively difficult to create “content” that exploits its full interactive potential. Also, software can be a dangerous medium. “Display” of the “content” in this medium (the execution of computer software) can actually cause damage to the property of the reader through theft or destruction of information. The internet/web is a bubbling primordial soup of opportunity and change. It is also a poorly developed and largely misunderstood rat’s nest of incompatibilities, platform incongruities, brain bending hacks and glossed over problems waiting to be solved by ruthless corporate mega-labs willing to spend whatever it takes to dominate the nature of art and art in life into next millennium. Many “cybernauts” jumped into this broken tornado bright eyed, open hearted and flush with ideas waiting to be loosed on a receptive, like-minded world. I want to peel away some misconceptions regarding the capacity of the net to deliver dreams in tact while opening a dialogue and demonstration on how to good stuff done. Suffer not the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune 500 companies. Understand a little more about how tools are made, what art requires of all of us and put aside the notion that 18 hour days make you a better anything.

Henry Lowengard: “For my part of the poster session, I demonstrated my animation
program Vapor Paint and showed a video tape of some of the animatrons and VRML objects made with the program. Vapor Parnt is written with a lot of philosophy In mind – Ideas about how drawn art should be created on a computer.”

Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0 is an interactive installation which makes explicit the sublime correlations between human digital communication and bacterial chemical communication. The project was a collaboration between a visual artist (Anna Dumitriu), a microbiologist (Dr Simon Park), a philosopher (Dr Blay Whitby), an interactive media artist (Tom Keene) and an artificial life programmer (Lorenzo Grespan) and was commissioned by The Science Gallery in Dublin as part of their exhibition “Infectious”.

The artwork combines raw network traffic taking place live around the gallery (including web traffic, mobile technology and Bluetooth), a time-lapse film of bacterial communication occurring (involving two strains of genetically modified (GM) bacteria which will indicate, by changing colour or glowing, the communication taking place) and (generated from those sources) a new Cellular Automata artificial life form.

Cybernetic theory and interactive media art share much in common, including an interest in human relationships with technology, and in what their interactions reveal about both human and technological agency. In this paper we identify four characteristics of cybernetic systems and discuss their relevance to interactive sound art. We hope to contribute to a critical lexicon around the cybernetic nature of interactive artworks more broadly, and to promote further engagement with the principles of cybernetics amongst electronic and digital arts practitioners and scholars.

Artists Statement

‘CyberSM III’ uses the human body as the interface for a dialogue through touch. To further complicate matters, the participants in this dialogue are physically separated. They must carry on this dialogue over the Internet.

In the installation, participants at 2 locations wear suits connected to each other over the Internet. These suits contain hot zones which generate various forms of physical stimuli and sense the touch of a participant’s hand. When a participant touches one of the zones on their suit, several things happen: the local computer sends a message to the remote computer telling where, and with what intensity the participant has touched the suit; the remote computer then starts a stimulus in the same area, and with the same intensity as the local touch, i.e., the computers send the touch across the network, and continue it through the remote suit. The computers then enhance the local participant’s perception of the touch with sight and sound. A display projected in front of the participant shows the location and intensity of the touch, while the computer plays sounds corresponding to the touch. Once the local participant removes their hand from their suit, the computer enhanced touch continues until that zone is touched again. Participants can control the intensity and location of these touches by touching their own suits in varying manners, or they can speak to the remote participants, and ask to be touched in other ways. The ‘CyberSM III’ installation creates a full environment of touch, images, and sound, but the interaction, the dialog, takes place only through touch.

Loss of biodiversity is posing an immense threat to the ecosystem, in particular the drastic decline in insect population endangers both the natural food-chain and crop production. In response to this development many cities have started rewilding efforts, aimed at increasing biodiversity. In this paper, I introduce and discuss the Urban Cyborganics project, which makes these nonhuman urban spaces available to human perception and experience through sensing technology, online connectivity and haptic output. As a speculative design project, the Cyborganic concept presents a fictitious nature-humanmachine hybrid, deployed as a form of material and experiential storytelling.

Leaning on Haraway’s notion of sympoeisis, i.e. becoming-with and making-kin, the device emulates an insectlike perception of the urban landscape, prompting a change in perception of the city space and promotes a re-evaluation of how we align ourselves with other species in a built habitat. Building on Fernandez- Armesto and Ingold, I discuss the act of creation, of both cities and artifacts, as an ongoing negotiation between humans and the material agencies embedded in the environment. Lastly, I examine the Cyborganic in relation to traditional and indigenous practices.

Abstract

“Modern consciousness has been modified, people are trained through advertising and the corporate owned mass media to learn to be controlled and dominated. ‘On-job control’ involves deskilling the working class and turning them into robots doing repetitive tasks. The dominated class work so hard they don’t have time to think about revolution. ‘Off-job control’ turns the dominated class into a passive consumer of superficial fashion and other forms of uselessconsumption as entertainment”.
_Noam Chomsky (Interview with Barry Pateman), Imperial Grand Strategy, 2005.

In contemporary society we consume electronic products that reduce our physical labour and make menial chores fast and easy. From machines that are used to make communication easier, to ones that can clean our houses and wash our clothes. For some, the dream of a modernist utopia has been fulfilled. Those who can afford it are given freedom from physical labour and menial chores, and more time for leisurely pursuits. However, there is a dark side to our utopia. It is not just our machines that are used as slaves, but the people who are used to produce and dispose of them. Most people, ignorant of the suffering that belies the production of consumer goods, are either unaware or choose to be unaware of how their purchases support economies that are based on sweatshop labour and environmental destruction. If such injustices and human suffering caused due to the lack of workers rights were occurring on a local European level there would be outrage and condemnation. But not for the producers of cheap consumer products who live in the developing world. Why and how is there this moral double standard? Why are there merely small fringe groups that are aware of the inequalities and speak out against them?

Founded in 2007, CYLAND is a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding the intersection of Art :: Tech through an annual international festival, visual exhibitions, sound art, video art, and educational programming. CYLAND brings together artists, curators, technologists, educators, and thinkers to create innovative projects around the world.

CYLAND houses the largest archive of Eastern European video art online, organizes exhibits around the world, and is the force behind CYFEST. CYFEST has been held at world-renowned art institutions, including The State Hermitage Museum (Youth Educational Centre), Made in NY Media Center by IFP, National Arts Club (New York), Dartington Trust (UK), Ca’ Foscari University – Venice Biennale, Tate Modern (UK), the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, the Sergey Kuryokhin Modern Art Center, St. Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design (Museum of Applied Arts), Borey Gallery, the Gallery of Experimental Sound (the Museum of Sound) and Creative Space TKACHI. In September 2020, CYLAND Media Art Lab has become the official representative of The Leonardo / LASER Talks. CYLAND was cofounded by Marina Koldobskaya and Anna Frants. cyland.org | facebook @cyland.mediaartlab | Instagram @cylandlab

Barcelona, like other large metropolis in the world, has grown by developing unsustainable economic models that have extended its borders to the natural spaces that surround it. In this artistic research project, the acoustical science of Cymatics is used to understand the environmental changes caused by the human action inside of delta of Llobregat, a natural park located only 15 kilometers from the city center on the south side of the city. In the last 30 years, the transformation of the final stretch of the Llobregat river, the enlargement of the cargo port of Barcelona and the expansion of the airport and the industrial zone, have modified the environment of many no-human species specially from birds. All ecosystems have been altered and it is especially evident through noise pollution caused by industrial environments and the sonification caused by the incessant passing of airplanes on their final descent.

Joanne Jang, the product manager for DALL·E at OpenAI, will give a presentation about DALL·E 2, a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. It can create original, realistic images and art from a text description and can combine concepts, attributes, and styles. DALL·E 2 can also make realistic edits to existing images from a natural language caption. It can add and remove elements while taking shadows, reflections, and textures into account.
Our hope is that DALL·E 2 will empower people to express themselves creatively. DALL·E 2 also helps us understand how advanced AI systems see and understand our world, which is critical to our mission of creating AI that benefits humanity.

The mixed-reality performance with the working title Dance Vortex: Creative Forces will use interactive 3-D projection with dance to convey the dynamic forces of difference in creative discovery. The audience will see colorful projections, fragments of story drawings arising from the floor and swirling in a vortex towards the sky. A lively, slightly ominous ambient soundscape establishes the emotional tone. When a dancer chooses a story-drawing with a game controller, the vortex recedes and a full projection of the drawing, which can be handled like an object by the dancer, appears as the spoken story emerges from the soundscape. The projected image, a physicalized memory, becomes the dancer’s partner in conveying entangled social and personal realities. As the passage concludes, the associated scenario fades out and the vortex arises again, giving another choice to the performers.
The content is based on true stories from researchers who challenge scientific “norms” in some way (age, background, gender, or ethnicity), the project emerged from a month-long dialogue during the first art and science session at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program. As I worked on Dream Vortex, a virtual interactive art installation based on the dreams of researchers, fellow resident and choreographer Donna Sternberg saw the experimental technology of the interactive vortex as an exciting movement environment. Simultaneously, we discussed creativity with my scientific collaborator Dawn Sumner, cognitive scientist Pireeni Sundaralingam and immunologist Devavani Chatterjea, whose stories of scientific discovery were entangled with memories of encountering social barriers in science. The “threshold” space of the vortex’s new 3-D technology offers new artistic means to convey such complex experiences.
Our work with the developing technology of interactive 3-D projections emphasizes a tangible “threshold” between physical and digital realities that has not been much explored. The unique spatial properties of the vortex, which oscillates between 2-D and 3-D, and is functionally both light and and an object, support an unusually integrated relationship between movement and environment.
Commercial 3-D experiences emphasize immersion through a “realist” esthetic and remain primarily visual. The research technology that we are adapting for art is not slick, and it includes movement. Therefore it has different expressive possibilities for imaging felt realities. The visual integration of opposites in the work, which integrates our oldest (charcoal marking) and newest (digital rendering) drawing technologies; 2-D and 3-D space; and weighty physical and weightless projected bodies, echoes this “humanist” emphasis.
The development of the precursor work, Dream Vortex, intersected with the rapid move of 3-D media towards mainstream availability. We experimented with moving the vortex onto the Oculus Rift 3-D viewer, which was technically successful but also let me see that interacting physical and projected bodies in real space had a sensual communication that was lacking in passive 3-D. This works-in-progress artist talk will be accompanied by a new demo video of the vortex with dancer scheduled for completion June, 2015 and will address the challenges and opportunities we have encountered marrying the technology with the content.

Il n’y a rien de plus immediatement concret que le corps du danseur, et pournant il ne sert a rien. Il n’a pas de fonction autre que le geste et la forme. Son apprentissage consiste a ce qu’il arrive a faire correspondre, grace a une integration de toutes les sensations internes (kinesthesiques et autres), les mouvements du corps a ses sensations pures. Il va donc realiser une unite du corps dans laquelle le role de la conscience des mouvements collabore a un processus d’abstraction.

The Blockchain-based application DAO not only confronts the complexity of the modern society through its comprehensive application potential. It also channels the elements of contemporary discourse such as political qualities of art, participatory art and cybernetic forces. Within the timeframe of the existence of the concept since 2014, DAOs enable the interconnection of culture, technology and ecology.

Keywords: Internet Policy, Human Rights, Data Infrastructures, Freedom of Expression, Privacy, Inclusion, Copyright, Cell Phone Databases, Citizen Engagement, Advocacy

This paper is one of the contributions to an academic panel titled: “Bio-creation of informatics: Rethinking data ecosystems in the network economy”. The panel seeks to explore different approaches for trans-disciplinary media art and design practitioners in re-imagining data ecosystems and at the same time engaging members of the general public to reflect and contribute to an inclusive discourse that may re-shape public policy surrounding data ecosystems , from the lenses of ownership, privacy, transparency, openness and choice of individuals. The panel is moderated, coauthored and edited by Catalina Alzate.

The public policies that encourage the implementation of infrastructures for data management are mostly adopted by governments with great technological enthusiasm, leaving aside the notion of human rights and potential effects for freedom of expression, privacy, inclusion and security of citizens’. The government of Colombia encourages spaces for citizens’ participation like public consultations, in order to include people in the design of polices that can dramatically modify the way they interact with other citizens and with the state.
In this paper two examples that look at policy for data infrastructures will be discussed for researchers and information artists interested in public interventions and engagement. The discussion around the copyright reform, as part of the implementation of the FTA (Free-Trade Agreement) of Colombia with the United States. 2) The implementation of cell phone registry as part of the strategy against mobile theft in Colombia. As a civil society organization, our advocacy strategy has included creating or taking advantage of participative spaces to introduce new narratives into public policy.

Field Computing is an ongoing interdisciplinary research project to design and build wearable devices for use in citizen science applications. The works from this project is derived from the fields of wearable electronics, citizen science and environmental biomonitoring through a critical design perspective. Data HarVest, one of the works in this series, is a wearable tool that collects physical artifacts and contextual data about fungi for scientific surveys. An early prototype for this tool is discussed along with design considerations.

This institutional presentation focuses on the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Art Community Committee’s effort to preserve past art show materials in an online multimodal interactive archive. A team consisting of Bonnie Mitchell and Jan Searleman as codirectors and Bowling Green State University (USA) undergraduate students have worked on developing the back-end infrastructure and content for this archive for nearly 4 years. They are currently adding innovative inter-connections between the data, proofing the content and finding missing materials. This presentation will showcase the overall structure of the archive and highlight how the interface enables easy access to relevant data. The project has involved formatting and adding over 8000 assets and writing code to create automatically generated pages from templates and cross connections between data. Future goals are to develop visualizations and to add additional ways to connect the data to international scholarly indexes.

Keywords: Lifelogging, Quantified self, Critical design, Automated data collection, Technology design.

Data is becoming a ubiquitous phenomenon in our culture. Technologies that collect data about us on our behalf, such as lifelogging and quantified self devices, have been presented as able to help people change behaviors. This paper presents a study exploring the meaningfulness of these devices and their use. To investigate this topic, we designed our own QS device, using a critical design approach, called Feeler. We also conducted an experiment in which five participants used the device. Feeler guides users to meditate, study, and play. When the user is engaged in these activities with the device, it collects biological data (EEG) from the user and further asks users to share their own impressions about their attention and relaxation levels. From the experiment we collected about 7.5 hours of audio data, including think-aloud and semi-structured interviews. The audio was processed by marking interesting sections for further analysis and contextualization. Our results indicate that people are trustful of QS technologies and the ability of such technologies to help them initiate behavioral changes. We also found out that the use of these technologies is targeted towards productivity and self-improvement, such as avoiding procrastination, improving focus, and avoiding social media.

This presentation will introduce an educational program called “Data+AI+Design” that includes a series of workshops and guest speaker lectures in the intersection between art, design, technology, and sustainability. The topics specifically include the use of artificial intelligence (AI), data analysis, data visualization, interaction design, and interactive media technology to address the issues and solutions in sustainability. Many internationally recognized scholars, artists, designers, and researchers participated in the events. Students had chances to learn how AI impacts the design and what they can make out of the current AI technologies for design solutions for sustainability in many approaches.

Effective activism is predicated on its ability to summon strong emotions and desires, yet its affective palette appears depleted. Next to a fear for destruction of the planet, other emotional and affective programs seem to fade rapidly. Is it possible to develop an eros for a future dominated by hyperobjects like climate change, characterised by unravelling of traditional political structure, and populated by new technological monsters in the form of AIs and lifelike robotics? What kind of desires can provide cohesion to activist collectives? Digital art presents unique opportunities for practicing negotiations and desires within collectives to come. Within this paper we are proposing the notion of Xenoactivism as a conceptual ally to activists and digital artists alike. To this end the notion of xenoactivism seeks to productively hijack new materialist discourse around machines. Art practices are discussed as germinal agents for these unborn, nascent, and as of yet unproduced desires. These are desires for novel formalisms and abstractions that span anthropic, vegetal, faunal, and machinic phyla.

In a moment we sadly see young birds forgetting their songs as adults are dying faster, the series of data sculptures, using as raw data birdsong of five species extinct in nature, invites us to meditate on how fragmented audio memories of birds, recorded by humans, haunt our imagination as phantoms of forests increasingly replaced by anthropogenic landscapes.

Art and technology awareness is used in new media as a strategy since 1989, the end of the Cold War. It symbolizes the analogue to digital system conversion and the end of industrial mode of production. It also implies the dominion of public social space under surveillance and the impact on landscapes, among others. Cartography is a system of visual representation of knowledge to display in exhibitions of contemporary art solving problems to society under value of ethics. Also it belongs to Genealogy of Space, a categorization initiated by Foucault with panoptic and heterotopia, which continues with non-site, atopia, distopia, utopia, the permanent site of power, TAAZ (Temporal Autonomous Zone and Borders). All physical or non-physical spaces are conceptualized in an embodied/disembodied effect on the subject. Psycogeography is another system of representation giving solutions as heterocronos or real time, an approach to performance. The deconstruction in dada objecthood and the meaning of surrealist images make contemporary cinematic visual era understand what Tarkovsky in this film Stalker synthesizes under the meaning of the cave, a manner of production art in relation to society.

We present a prototype for a Tangible User Interface designed for interactive data visualization, which we believe will be useful for facilitating collaborative work in data analytics. Our hybrid system combines a tabletop graspable user interface with a two-dimensional screen display; the users interrogate the data by manipulating tokens on the tabletop and the screen displays the results of the user’s query. We demonstrate our system with demographic data from the UN, but we have designed our system such that the user can enter their own data to visualize.

The path is an extension of walking […] Thus the walking body can be traced in the places it has made: paths, parks, and sidewalks are traces of the acting out of imagination and desire.            (Solnit 2006)

The natural world allows us to leave our mark through the footsteps we make in the sand, and through the wearing of the turf as we create short cuts to our destinations. It is these individual, unique distinctions that track our movement, yet due to natural world phenomena we may not see or experience these exact same routes again. The footsteps are washed away and the desire line once created by a shortcut may become overgrown as a new, quicker route takes its place.

GPS datalogging devices now enable us to track our routes through space. A walk across the worldly landscape can now be saved into the digital landscape, a world of multiple pixels and in many instances two-dimensional flat plains. De Certeau writes of the ‘walker’ who experiences the routes through the city, in contrast to the ‘voyeur’ who views the city’s design from the rooftops above (de Certeau 1984: 92). Now, both the walker and voyeur are in many ways coexisting simultaneously through these technologies.

In Cyberart, the anthropological effects of cyberspace homologate post-biological forms of existing experiencing sensitive qualities of interactive worlds. By interacting, we generate “interval zones”, between the body and the technologies, mixing artificial and biological and expanding cognitive processes through an amplified, electrified, computer-interfaced body. Telematic reality in OUROBOROS is related to Brazilian rituals and the desire to incorporate animals receiving their powers. When connected, we reach another level of being: that of the reptile, live among snakes, what means to stimulate life in some level of dream and imagination. By hyperconnections, immersions, navigations, telepresence and robotic remote action, or creating artificial life and self-regenerations, we experience OUROBOROS’ principle: “My end is my beginning”, or the cyclic nature of the universe, the life’s unending principle.

1.Theme

In Cyberart, the “sujet interface” surpasses the human condition experiencing sensitive qualities of interactive worlds. Body’s structural copulae connected to interactive technologies exchange natural and artificial signals. Consequently, the anthropological effects of cyberspace homologate post-biological forms of existing in individual or networked computer-generated artificial environments enabling complex ways to act into the data structure. We act in the field of phenomena, experimenting invisible forces, physical and mathematical laws, simulating genetic behaviors of organisms in artificial environments. By interacting we experience the poetic existence in memescapes inhabiting and habiting within artificial landscapes no longer made of earth, but of memory units. Interfaces and data extend gestures beyond the boundaries of the body, and our sensitivity can live in a new cognitive space as an extension of our sensory space. What radically modifies the art scenario is undoubtedly the possibility of interactive technologies to offer responses, feedbacks and self-organizations, generating “interval zones”6 between the body and the technologies, by mixing artificial and biological signals. Interfaces and algorithmic processes expand cognitive processes through an amplified, electrified, computer-interfaced body. Interactive art goes into the field of complexity sciences, and techno-ecosystem’s issues are important to understand what is implied in the sensitive experiences.

It is now possible, using all the artifacts of artificial life, to construct a typology which takes into account a certain form of evolution. This evolution is part of a biomimetic by the construction of Animats. In this phase, the objective was to further general biological knowledge by constructing models which simulate living behaviour. In a second phase, the orientation and parameters that determine this evolution were enlarged and refined by the transfer of biological cognition to constructed technological devices. A new class of artifacts appeared, the Adaptats, conceived from Larmarkian or Darwinian presuppositions. This binomial Animat/Adaptat is symptomatic of a line of inquiry which continues to try to employ a relatively classic approach to study life as it is.

Today the “quantified self” is a technical reality that structures datasets of all kinds of interfaces. These interfaces are created with the goal to establish, develop and transform the relationship with the self, the data and the society. In a “datified” world, data visualization challenges traditional representation systems by opening up a wide world of analytical and graphical opportunities. As user interfaces, data visualizations are artificial devices that carry cultural messages in a wide variety of forms and media. Additionally, data visualizations are never neutral mechanisms of data transmission since they affect the messages, providing a model of the world itself, a logical and ideological scheme. The fascination related with big data and the creation of increasingly sophisticated user interfaces pave the way for the proliferation of diverse mutations in the perception of the world and of ourselves. The false neutrality and transparency of quantitative representation of one’s own self is built on the assumption of a closed and measurable self that perceives itself as an entity that can be calibrated, compared and evaluated using numerical parameters. In this context, our research is focused around the implications and mechanisms of the quantified self and its visualization and also about the role that artworks based on data can play.

This paper intertwines our respective artistic and scientific investigations by deeply explorating “In Question”, a “space” created by Regina Trindade and produced in collaboration with Hervé Guillou in an experimental and critical approach. “In Question” is part of the artistic project “Perception intertwining”, four “spaces” articulated, interconnected by fluxes of biological, cultural, imaginary and symbolic information. This project is inscribed in the complex relation established today between art, biology and the society.

The discoveries in biology about the organisation and functioning of the living are the basis of numerous technological inventions which open possibilities of direct interferences of human on the living matter, including programming, transforming and creating living matter. Probably, by these actions differing from what we were used to, has us transiting between our “real” and “fictional” constructions. The shifting frontiers become more and more permeable and we are taken along toward a “creative-doing” linked to the complexity of the contemporary “doing” and “thinking”, which affect art, science, ethics, philosophy. Thus, we evoke artistic and scientific practices involved in deciphering the “reality” while creating new worlds or ways to perceive it.

“In Question” is a work of cell culture on protein micro-pattern, which deals with the interactions and modifications enabled by the “bio-and-technology” applied to living systems. The geometric shapes adopted by the cell result from the constraints imposed by the artist and, on the other hand, from elements which escape us. These shapes amaze us and question our willing to control the living. A dynamic to be grasped by a “in between” biologic-social, natural-artificial, reality-virtuality and “amongst” several symbolic links. In this paper, we start from the process of creation and production of “In Question” to come up to the reflections of the artist and the scientist arising from our common interests for the dynamic of the living systems at the theoretical, experimental, technological levels and the questions posed. We propose here to weave together the presence and virtuality of science and the creation of “new possibles” by the artistic and scientific intervention.

The underlying gaze on space and presented interaction possibilities in arts, science, and technologies seem to replicate ideas of exploration and annexation of new territories. The interaction with humanoid machines and other social and electronic devices seem to follow certain strategies. The designs of the apparatuses change with time, but the implied perspective on and interaction with the easy-to-dominate other remains similar.

To analyze the question of repetition of perspectives and interaction patterns in media arts I would like to confront recent media art pieces, with the notion of gaze as used in cultural studies. Gaze, as a term used in cultural and image studies, operates on the distinction between a (supposedly) objective perspective and look, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a culturally informed and selective gaze. I employ the term gaze in the sense in which it is found in Foucault´s Birth of the Clinic (1973), in which the author attempted to identify the reductive perspective of medical doctors on human subjects as mere bodies, and not persons. The term became current in studies of visual media in the seventies of the last century with Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in which she used the term gaze for the male perspective on female actors in film. Laura Mulvey described gaze as ‘to–be–looked–at–ness’. She argued that cinema creates sexual difference in the way we look, fostering female passivity and male actors as drivers of the narration. The distinction between look and gaze can be applied to other media. In 2006 Laura Mulvey connects the idea of gaze to technological settings in general: “while technology never simply determines, it cannot but effect the context in which ideas are formed”. I want to apply her idea of a culturally and by medium determined gaze to multi-media experiences. In this short presentation I want to show that certain cultural strategies of exploration or hierarchical structures in social interaction are not only reproduced in images, but are also strengthened in technology-based, interactive environments.

This essay starts from a reading of Decolonizing the virtual: Fu-ture Knowledges and the Extrahuman in Africa, a collection of essays published in the Journal of African Studies in March 2021, responses, and commentaries to the Abiola lecture delivered by Achille Mbembe in 2016 in the context of #Rhodesmustfall and the new light given by this movement to the question of decolo-nizing knowledge.[1] During this lecture, Mbembe states that Africans are better able to leap into the digital because there is a similarity between the plasticity of pre-colonial knowledge and the plasticity of digital virtuality. I therefore sought to know if this hypothesis could be verified: is the digital, through immer-sive works, video games and machinimas, a good way to docu1-ment, archive, represent and promote oral tradition and ancestral knowledge? And it is then that I discovered the text of Lia Beatriz Teixeira Torraca published in April 2021 on the Aesthetic look of affect which analyses the machinima as being a medium allowing to change the point of view, to proceed to a displacement, to a reterritorialization while simultaneously presenting multiple worlds and spaces, often invisibilized.[2]

Black feminist scholar Sylvia Wynter identified how the notion of what it means to be “human” is marked by race and other axes of difference, and points to how different ‘genres’ of humanity (full-humans, not-quite humans, and nonhumans) are encoded through racial, gendered, and colonial hierarchies. Disability studies scholar Margrit Shildrick proposes that embodiment is never self-complete or protected against otherness, noting how the neoliberal notion of embodiment is grounded on an imaginary of corporeal wholeness and integrity. Recent scholarship has looked at how these hierarchies and imaginaries are encoded through biased digital technologies that systematically harm persons of color and elide people with disabilities. However, critical race studies, decolonial theories and disability studies are rarely considered in discourses surrounding machines and art.

What are the impacts of algorithmic bias and encoded discrimination in the context of machine vision algorithms, natural language processing and robotic embodiments as they relate to gender, race and disability? How might artistic practice and rogue research methods challenge/refute/disrupt/blow up the dehumanizing practices that are encoded into machines? Our thinking/framing is informed by Sylvia Wynter, Margrit Shildrick, Alexandre Weheliye’s Habeus Viscus, Louis Chude-Sokei’s The Sound of Culture, Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology, Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, Jennifer Rhee’s The Robotic Imaginary, and Joy Buolamwini’s work on inclusive coding and The Coded Gaze. We critically inquire into issues of race, gender and disability as they relate to performing machines/technological bodies in robot and cyborg art.

Keywords: Sound Art, Media Production, Landscape, Heritage, Ambience, Sitespecificity, ambient sound, Artistic Transformation, Mediation

Site-specific sound artworks are developed through location based listening and recordings made at specific places with a particular cultural heritage. The compositional strategy in these works relies on artistic intervention by intricate processes of field recording and processing of recognizable environmental sounds using multi-channel spatialization techniques. The artistic transformation renders these sounds into a blurry area between compositional abstraction and portrayal of their site-based narrative. The question is: how much spatial information is retained and how much abstraction is deployed in these works? In this proposed paper presentation, I discuss my recent multi-channel sound work: Decomposing Landscape (2015) to shed light on the specific approaches and the methodology of handling site-specific evidence in sound art production dealing with environmentally troubled heritage sites in India.

We suggest that a critical examination of computer-human design, as a field developed under industrial requirements, could be helpful at addressing the problems derived by the industrial development of digital technologies. Since it would seem difficult to conduct current problem-solving logic under the unprecedented yet probable conditions derived from industrialization problems -as energetic and material scarcity-, this examination could also aid in tackling their derived emergent (social and environmental) effects by exploring new situated approaches.

The project “Deep Space: Re-signifying Valle de los Caídos” pioneers the development of new methods and digital tools for re-signifying and transforming controversial physical memory sites.

The Francoist monument for the Fallen of the Spanish Civil War near Madrid, built between 1940-1959 partly by forced labour of political prisoners, includes more than 33.000 remains from both conflict sides, removed from mass-graves around the country without the relatives’ knowledge. The official onsite information does not communicate this difficult history; the traces of the prisoner of war-barracks and mass-graves are in no way visible to the visitors.

The project addresses the re-signification of this most controversial Francoist monument. As part of the long-term investigation “Deep Space”, dealing with politics of memory, controversial monuments and heritage in the Digital Age, it focuses on creative processes and digital tools.

Panel: BioARTCAMP: Laboratory Ecologies in the Wild West

Deep Woods PCR is an his­tor­i­cal fic­tion of sci­ence, in which I source pri­mary mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­ogy chem­i­cals from the re­mote en­camp­ment. The Banff re­gion is famed for its nat­ural hot springs, which are the habi­tat for bac­te­ria named Ther­mus aquati­cus. This bac­te­ria pro­duces the heat-ac­ti­vated Taq DNA Poly­merase, one of the most im­por­tant en­zymes in mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­ogy be­cause of its use in the poly­merase chain re­ac­tion (PCR) DNA am­pli­fi­ca­tion/iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tech­nique.  In this pro­ject, I will har­vest Taq Bac­te­ria from the springs to use in each re­ac­tion and then per­form PCR with­out elec­tric­ity as I will thermo-cy­cle DNA re­ac­tion tubes by phys­i­cally mov­ing from one tem­per­a­ture re­gion of a hot­spring to an­other, and thus in­duce am­pli­fi­ca­tion. While ac­knowl­edg­ing its his­tory in the first great patent war of mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­ogy, my retro-pi­o­neer­ing of this PCR iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tech­nique will also hope­fully in­voke mythic nar­ra­tives of (self) dis­cov­ery.

The paper introduces the concept of deepscape—the planetary flows of media intensively computed by deep learning throughout infrastructures of AI. It describes the diffractive prototyping of a RAVE deep generative model over worldwide soundscapes. It relates three deep listening experiences raising awareness of non-human scales of deep learning.

Historically, aesthetic theory has often been informed by considerations of the reader/viewer’s role in “producing” the work-through interpretation and, increasingly, through more material forms of participation. Mondrian and Cage offer two instances along this axis, suggesting a societal drift towards art’s dispersal linked both with new technologies and with greater individual freedom. Recent developments in other areas, such as business management, echo the trend toward participatory structures. But all these can equally be understood as marking an exponential increase of efficiency within a productivist culture. Can the freedoms and constraints that characterize digital technologies be used toward other ends?

Intro

This paper is a cumulative piece, charting the transition from my work as curator at The New Museum, New York, over the past eight years, to my current project, which is to develop an infrastructure for exhibition practice that operates outside and between existing institutions. Reflecting on recent transformations in art and exhibition practice, I want to bring into focus art’s participation in a widespread cultural shift toward open, networked, participatory systems. The infrastructure I envision utilizes networking technologies as part of a curatorial strategy that engages with this environment.

When I started at The New Museum in the mid eighties, thematic exhibitions were a genre on the rise. Such high concept exhibitions as Damaged Goods, organized by Brian Wallis for the museum in 1986, were not just shows, but thematic investigations, emphasizing art’s close associations with a wider sphere of cultural effects. Damaged Goods helped to announce the advent of “commodity art,” but also sought to illuminate a more pervasive trend, the “damaged” or precarious status of objects in an era of simulation. It situated art within a mediated landscape of consumer culture moving into hyperdrive. At the same time, activist art practice was engaging the idea of a social aesthetic. The installation, ‘Let the record show’, organized at The New Museum in 1987 by curator William Olander, is an example. Olander offered the museum’s large shop window on Lower Broadway to the AIDS activist group, ACT UP, both as a platform for their sophisticated agit-prop and in recognition of ACT UP’s contribution to the visual culture of our time. The installation resulted in the formation of the smaller collective Gran Fury, which went on to use the infrastructure of the art world – administrative and interpretive as well as financial – to gain access to venues otherwise beyond their reach: subway and bus poster projects, billboards, and the media coverage that their work eventually earned. The concept of the curator as a cultural producer, rather than an arbiter of taste, helped carry curatorial practice further into the realm of public culture.

This panel aims to discuss some artistic and research projects that explore new methodologies of working with digital museum archives and User Generated Content (USG) to ‘demusealize’ some established institutional practices. In a moment when the role of museums and their very definition are strictly problematized, how Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and collaborative hashtags on social media can be used to dismantle museum discourses? In which way these digital tools are able to be explored as a new kind of institutional critique? Could these systems also be used as a way to expand poetic layers of art beyond its marketing and productivist focus? From these raised questions, the researcher and curator Nathalia Lavigne will moderate a discussion with the artists and researchers Dr. Giselle Beiguelman, Dr. Bruno Moreschi and Rafael Pagatini, whose artistic projects are questioning traditional museological narratives and problematizing the colonialist gaze in museum collections using digital tools.

Poster Statement

Intro

In this speech I want to talk a little about my current perspective regarding the development of the Internet- a theme that a great number of people are constantly dedicating themselves to these days. Specifically, however, I want to talk about changes that are occurring right now, not changes that happen overnight, but rather shifts that will take some time to fully become apparent. These changes are caused by both technological as well as socio- economic developments. They are, in one way or another, portrayed by the media and by common perception as answers to the so- called ?Information overload? the Internet is facing today. I want to question this assumption a little, but more importantly, I want to point out how the combined Impact of these changes IS of special relevance to the World- Wide- Web designer, a field my partner Markus Weisbeck and I have been heavily involved in in the past year and a half.

First, I am going to talk about the unique position Web designers, whether they are professionals, hobbyists or anarchists or all three at once, are in today. Secondly, I want to get into some definitions In order to highlight what I refer to as the difference between the ‘Interface’ and the ‘information landscape.” Thirdly, I will finally discuss the technological and socio-economic changes that are Influencing the Internet “landscape’ today Here, I will get into the so-called ‘agents’ technology and developments imposed by social and market pressures, such as the rating system of the World-Wide Web Consortium ‘Pits.’ Fourthly, I wiII speak about an aspect that In the media so far has almost exclusively been portrayed only as the ‘Battle of the Browsers’, namely changes in the World-Wide Web Interface. As if the future of the Web interface could only be defined by the dialectical battle between two corporations that happen to be at the exclusive top of market penetration right now. Here, I will present you with my favorite alternative Web browser – not Netscape, not Microsoft – but rather a character from the film Star Wars: R2’. My fifth point is my conclusion and a ‘fliegender Wechsel’ as we call It in German to Markus Welsbeck, who wiII talk about his project “Icon.gif’.

Have you ever sat in front of your computer, looking at the little box with the word search next to it? This seemingly innocent box demanding your attention, demanding to be responsive to your every demand. Have you ever tried to deny it’s pleading emptiness and instead to go on a journey of discovery, charting new and unknown digital territories? During 20th century ‘walking practice’ was used extensively in the avant-garde movement as a critical method to challenge the authoritarian and capitalistic character of the city. Moving through the concept of flâneur who goes on an ethnographic journey (‘botanizing on the asphalt’: Benjamin, 1973), to the distinctly political implications of dérive, arriving at the comparison of ‘resistive walking’ in the physical environment which has a direct correlation to the resistive practices of online non-navigation.
An online psychogeographical dérive could be a form of digital resistance to the various ways information is being dictated to us from contemporary authoritarian rules and search engines. The current information architecture directs the citizen of the online space to find only that, which is highest rated, rather than allowing the tacit discovery of the obscured. The effective search limits the qualities of that which ‘I’ am searching for and in this way pushes our consciousness through a computation landscape discounting the emotional, the affective and the discovery that excites and stimulates our curious being.
This paper seeks to explore whether the psychogeographic technique of dérive can be used to break out of the directed pattern of ‘search to find’ in the online space following from Lev Manovich’s concept of the Poetics of Navigation (The Language of New Media, 2000: 223).

DESCENT ≈ An Atlas of Relation, looks to the fish – who have occupied our planet for millions of years in a constant struggle for survival – as an entryway to visualize the entanglements of interspecies relation through time-based imaging systems referencing the imperceptible slowness of evolutionary processes. Digital photographs, scans, and video documentation are combined with UV-sensitive direct contact printing methods that require multiple minutes, hours, or days to construct an image of/with the natural world. While these camera-less works archive the durational period of each exposure – appearing as frozen traces serving as documents or specimens – the digital images and time-based video clips function as infinitely reproducible experience. Together, these recording techniques result in unpredictable visuals corresponding with feminist perspectives on Darwin’s theory of descent emphasizing anti-essentialist understandings of matter and nature, considering all aspects of Being as forever transformed by and within time.

Thus far works have been produced throughout the U.S. in locations undergoing restoration or habitat conservation, and where relationships to land and water are disputed, revered, mourned, misunderstood, or unacknowledged. This requires recognition of how private and public land acquisition and corresponding histories of displacement (have and continue to) physically and culturally shape these watersheds. Connecting this knowledge with the unimaginable span of deep time embedded within the lives of fish and their watery homes to varied understandings of descent – as passage, downward movement, decline, sinking, legacy, lineage, origination – suggests both the promise and peril of ecological longevity. Resulting visuals consider how our bodies, along with fish and other organisms, find ways of being and living together within the midst of a globally shifting climate impacting our shared resources and, subsequently, our relations. As a collective of inhabitants, how do we persist, together, within the relentless ongoing-ness of our worlds?

The UC Davis Design Department is the most comprehensive Design department in the University of California system, offering B.A. and M.F.A. in Design. The Department offers a creative, challenging, and flexible approach to the study of design with emphasis on socially responsible, human-centered, and sustainable practices. The department is investing in curricular expansion and preparing to provide new tools and methodologies to educate critical makers with life-long learning skills in order to contribute meaningfully to an interconnected local and global society. With an outlook to deeply and broadly integrate emerging theory and practices in design, the department seeks opportunities to dialogue, exchange and network with similar programs at the conference. In particular, we are seeking directions to expand the following areas: kinematics, code-based design, network and data-based design, industrial design, interactive media, physical computing, systems design and wearable technology.

Our pedagogical innovation is centered around an innovative methodology to learn how to innovate differently: Design Fiction. Increasingly used in companies by directors of innovation in particular, it is aimed at all those who wish to renew their innovation process.

This method combines phases of foresight, ideation, prototyping and storytelling. Participants collaborate in project mode with the aim of designing an innovation rooted in an imagined future. Design Fiction particularly uses design thinking and science fiction to put the imagination at the service of innovation. Around creative workshops, inspiring conferences or educational escape games, we have set up an experiential pedagogy that alternates theory and practice to create an environment conducive to creativity. The goal is to give participants confidence in their creative abilities and teach them new ways to innovate. The pedagogy that we offer thus makes it possible to renew the learning of creativity. It participates in training collaborative individuals and future entrepreneurs. In our VUCA context (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity), creativity is indeed one of the most essential soft skills to generate new ideas and ultimately find innovative solutions.

[Translated from French by Google Translate]

Through the common thread of utilizing crowdsourced content and public participatory acts, Professors Glenda Drew and Jiayi Young present their projects that engage the public to envision a more equitable and sustainable future social environment. Undergraduate students Michelle Lee and Darin Reyes will present their work on immersive/interactive sound-based environment, innovative interfaces and social media for safe travel.

New forms of technology now support shared experiences between humans and other species and may enhance the function of non-human life forms. Design for the Non-Human, brings together artists and design- ers working on generative, agent-based artworks that either (1) allow a non-human life form to use technology in such a way that its abilities are greater than those of a non-technologically enabled member of its own species, or (2) extend the sensorium of us humans to the sensorial experiences of our companion species.

Keywords: Non-human, Anthropocene, Design, plants, Animals, Microflora, Art

Keywords: Graphic Design, Signs, Pictograms, Education, Game-Based Learning

The text documents the process and the necessary conditions for the design of pictograms during the ‘Signage’ university course at the Design Department of Guanajuato University, taught as the IV semester design workshop. During this course the student applies visual techniques and specific concepts that conduct to the graphic design of pictograms. These pictograms are used in a product for the educational area that the student must also design.

Keywords: Wearable Technology, Urban Ecology, Soft Computing, Sonic Interaction Design, Environmental Awareness

This paper reports the creation and research process of the AirQ jacket, a wearable device that conveys temperature and air quality data through embedded electronic devices emitting light and sound. The project is oriented to enhance environmental awareness to the local passerby, since the proximity of Manizales (Colombia) to an active volcano brings the topic of air contamination to the everyday life city concerns. While the research process is introduced, some topics will be discussed such as the policies and actions taken by governmental institutions in monitoring air pollution or some wearable technology projects and approaches facing similar challenges. The paper will also describe in detail the prototyping process, on the one hand, by discussing high-level topics such as the perceptualization of scientific data. On the other, by addressing low-level topics related to the assemblage and electronic components embedding, such as portability or washability. Our systematic method of design research will be presented, outlining the dilemmas we faced and solutions we followed in the four stages of the research process.

Keywords: Digital Cinema Production, Documentary Studies, Transmedia and Digital Storytelling, Media Management, Media Analytics, Sound Studies, Participatory Media and Learning, Public Interactives, Transnational Studies

The School of Media Studies links media theory, creative production, and management practices to provide students a scaffolding for understanding the social, cultural, and economic impact of emergent media technologies, the expressive capabilities of media forms, and the nuances of diverse global media cultures. The Media Studies program offers innovative graduate studies that educate people for existing and emerging creative, academic, and business careers. It offers an MA in Media Studies, an MS in Media Management, a BA/BS in Media Studies, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Media Management, a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies, and Continuing Education Certificates in Film Production and Screenwriting.

Keywords: Extreme Heat, Adaptation, Sustainability, Critical Making

In the wake of global climate change, our world is projected to heat up and experience more extreme heat waves over the next few decades. Phoenix, Arizona, where this research was conducted, is one of the hottest locations on the planet and presents a testbed for understanding and addressing heat-related challenges. This paper focuses on adaptation as a design strategy that compliments existing approaches to mitigate human impact on the environment. We report on findings from a summer-long diary study that reveals how extreme heat impacts human lives, how participants cope with extreme heat. These findings motivated our critical making work themed around adaption, focusing on artifacts for visualizing, coping with, and utilizing extreme heat. In constructing these artifacts, we critically reflect on both the benefits and drawbacks of designing for adaptation and suggest hybrid approaches that mitigate human impact on and help people adapt to climate change.

The paper focuses on the shifting relation between two aspects: technologically enhanced human and technologically enhanced environment.The author is concerned with the currents of human biological evolution as such notion relates to self‑conducted design alternatives for the human body, which often no longer follow survival as its primary guide, but are motivated by different aims. Similar development is apparent in nature that is under anthropogenic impact, and in our close environment where the divide between technological, artificially‑built environment and biological environment is disappearing. Richard Dawkins has claimed: ‘The world is divided into things that look designed like birds and airliners and things that don’t; rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided to those that really are designed; submarines and tin openers, and those that aren’t designed but look that way because they result from Darwinian natural selection; sharks and hedgehogs.’ (Dawkins 2013) One could add to this list of Dawkin’s: things that used not to be designed, such as biological nature, but which today are increasingly designed by humans. A new kind of relationship between an enhanced human and an enhanced environment is emerging. The author’s on‑going research and artistic works presented in this paper speculate specifically on the reciprocal relationship between human and her habitat. The paper includes three recent works by the author, including a work in‑progress; a wearable bioreactor. These works speculate and reference Gregory Bateson’s argument that organism + environment is the unit of survival (Bateson 1969).

Almost any electronic gadget can be transformed into an audible and sometimes rhythmical sound object. “Detektors” presents such a transforming device, making manifest both a cartography of user-generated geolocational sound recordings, logs and walks, which reveal hidden electromagnetic geographies of our urban areas, and a database or catalogue of sonic studies of electromagnetic emissions produced by our everyday electronic devices. At the beginning of the 21st century we are surrounded by ubiquitous electromagnetic oscillations, which are more and more results of computational protocolled processes, which turns them to algorhythms. “Detektors” suggests a new form or methodology of the dérive, possibilities afforded by a novel geophysical terrain. Psychogeophysics meets algorhythmics, as use of the detectors in city space allows for novel city play algorhythms.

There has been growing interest in and an increasingly wide application of dynamical mathematical models in the domain of electronic music composition and synthesis. Iterative models and mathematical chaos algorithms provide for fertile creative ground among composers and researchers. Iterated functions systems, discrete time maps, and chaotic nonlinear systems and their applications in composition and synthesis have been discussed recently by a number of composers pressing, 19881. [Truax, 1990, Di Scipio, 1991, Gogins, 1991, Xenakis, 1991, Degazio, 1993] demonstrating the continuing fascination that these models hold in a wide variety of musical applications.

We explore the intersection of human and machine creativity by generating sculptural objects through machine learning. This research raises questions about both the technical details of automatic art generation and the interaction between AI and people, as both artists and the audience of art. We introduce two algorithms for generating 3D point clouds and then discuss their actualization as sculpture and incorporation into a holistic art installation. Specifically, the Amalgamated Deep Dream (ADD) algorithm solves the sparsity problem caused by the naive DeepDreaminspired approach and generates creative and printable point clouds. The Partitioned DeepDream (PDD) algorithm further allows us to explore more diverse 3D object creation by combining point cloud clustering algorithms and ADD.

This paper proposes to study the development and distribution strategies of independent mobile games in China. The paper examines the alternative game culture that is different from the dominant cultural form of MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). Literature in Chinese game studies has focused on the outcome of a rapidly growing Chinese game industry in both game developing and publishing sectors. As the Chinese game market will soon grow to surpass the Untied States and becomes the world’s largest online game market in 2016, a comprehensive framework to study the Chinese game industry, market and its game art and culture is necessary. The paper considers China’s game development one of the cases for game production locale in Asia that is capable to produce different form of game art from the creative style of western games. This creative capability deserves research attention as it opens up the possibility of alternative design system that gives rise to local culture and creative talent. This creative framework goes beyond current creative system controlled by major transnational corporations.
A review of current Chinese game development in the mainstream sector, however, points out both strength and weakness in the design of Chinese games. Relevant industry report has identified censorship, over-commercialism and shanzhai (an act of copying in the creative process) as challenges that hinder the creative freedom of game designers in China. The paper will contextualize discussion on China’s independent games in this creative context. It will first provide an overview of the game industry development, highlighting the structuralization and concentration process of major game companies including Tencent, Alibaba and others. The paper will then introduce the history of development on independent games in China. It dates back to 1970s based upon historical material that the author gathers from her research fieldwork. The paper will also introduce the rise of current independent game culture by connecting the discussion to current game jam tradition and global independent game culture. The paper illustrates the political and economic significance of independent game creation within limited industrial resource in China. The paper lastly reviews major award winning independent games of Mr. Pumpkin Adventure, Finger Balance and Breezy Bay, etc. It analyses alternative game art represented in these games. It also discusses publishing network adopted by these major independent game developers in China. Conclusion section of the paper will focus on the contribution of independent game in reviving a progressive game development culture in China. It concludes with the contribution of alternative game art to revitalize industry dynamics at forming a sustainable value chain in China’s game industry.

In the international community of media art, Japanese media artists are often criticized for having a positive attitude in regard to technology rather than being critical. It is true that playfulness is often appreciated in Japanese media art, and there is no clear border between art and entertainment, or with popular culture. Why is that so? Is it wrong to appreciate technology? The paper discusses the cultural and historical background of Japanese media art that leads to a proposal of “Device Art,’ a new concept in media art.

Dhvāni is a Sanskrit word, which means resonance. The responsive and self-regulative installation Dhvāni develops an Indian epistemology-informed approach to sound art, emphasizing the role of the listener, inter-subjectivity and situational context as the primary trigger towards construing an artistic experience. Incorporating current research in acoustics and AI, the project examines the role of the “self” and inter-subjectivity against an overarching emphasis on the artistic object permeating in the Western art tradition.

Departing from the object, the project aims to create fertile and evolving “auditory situations” where the selfhood and subjectivity of the listener can be considered in an inclusive manner through interactivity so as to encourage a participatory approach of artistic experience in terms of a networked collectivity. In doing so, the project develops an understanding of the role of chance and contingency in sound experience as a mode of creating temporal disjuncture for the “divine intervention” as Indian musician Gita Sarabhai informed John Cage in 1946 helping to shape Cage’s subsequent work with chance composition (Cage 1973: 158, 226).
Premiere: EXPERIMENTA Arts & Sciences Biennale 2020.

The Digital Britain Report (2009) and European regulations raise concerns about ownership of the net and the impact on its potential as a ‘common land’. Are these new regulations 21st century enclosure acts? If accessible territory is carved up and owned by the few, why should we care?

In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley’s Diggers utilizing common land aimed to promote communal and collective production and laid the foundations for the concepts embedded within FLOSS / Creative Commons practices. Winstanley’s vision of an egalitarian society came to him in a dream yet despite this mystical associations his vision should not be considered less valid. I suspect Tim Berner’s Lee and other early Internet and open source pioneers would have much in common with this 17th Century visionary’s ideals.

This paper suggests a social digital archeological approach in digital archiving of social memory as cultural mapping of computer culture. Social digital archeology is understood as the use of digital media and digital information to acquire a clearer picture of the society that uses them. This approach was developed in the project Operation Cassava at the Media Art Living Laboratory (MALL), at Multimedia University, Malaysia.

In the project, the authors outline a vision of an online archive that enables storage and access of data in the form of images, sounds and texts related to the cassava plant for its rich cultural history. The authors look at the social and cultural significance of cassava and collect stories and memories related to the evolution of the plant through its migratory process, drawing parallel between diasporas and the dispersal of meaning over the internet. The goal of Operation Cassava is twofold: first, to create cultural narratives corresponding to the living condition of a cassava plant. The second part of the project is the archiving of the social memories related to the plant in an online repository. The digital archiving strategy contributing to these goals will be discussed. Operation Cassava is deployed as a participatory     project that invites participants to contribute stories or memories related to cassava. A wiki‑based approach to crowdsource social memories emphasizes the collaborative acts of individuals. Working through this approach, many peculiar stories related to the subject matter have been collected. The resulted online museum is a public repository that archives social memories on cassava, capitalizing on the networked social space. Despite the digital archive being called a ‘museum’, the authors believe that database archive is different from institutionalized narrative of history by addressing the transformation of memory institutions as they shift from the paradigm of institutionalized memory to the information habitat (1). Following new media theorist Lev Manovich’s (2) analyses of database as a new symbolic form of the computer age, it is the aim of this paper to discuss Operation Cassava as one of this kind of cultural form supported by database. Whereupon then it is appropriate for the author to discuss poetics and aesthetics of the archive that is now being collectively built by the Operation Cassava participants. Essentially it might be possible for Operation Cassava to recast the cultural distinctiveness in the midst of the diversity of people and experiences as a positive integrative force in the sustenance of social identity.

Throughout the 20th century and up to the present day, many artists have addressed the archive by questioning its function, classification systems, legitimacy, registration technologies or inclusion/exclusion protocols. Considering that within digital culture, AI has become a key factor for information management, this article explores how the use of these technologies in art is offering new perspectives to think about the archive, heritage and memory.

Within the meshwork of existing practices and approaches that operate creatively challenging traditional hierarchies and protocols of the archive, we will pull from two strings: 1) on the one hand, the group of appropriationist-type tactics that operate by activating new interpretations of already constituted archives; 2) on the other, those that propose the creation of new archives, generally dealing with scattered elements that were previously ignored or discarded.

We will delve into these two anarchival strategies by focusing on two case studies that address critically the filmic and audiovisual heritage: Jan Bot: bringing film heritage to the algorithmic age and the Oráculo de Capturas de Pantalla (OCP). In both cases we will study the strategies by which other possibilities are opened up for history, and the place given to algorithms in their construction.

The Digital Anatomical Theater includes 360-degree photographs viewed on a Virtual Reality headset. The series explores medical spaces from historical to contemporary times. The photographs were shot in anatomical and operating theaters in Europe, former mental institutions, and in present-day digital anatomical theaters— spaces where visualization technologies are used to view the body such as MRI machines.

Early scientific practices for representing the body were conducted in Renaissance anatomical and operating theaters, places where public dissections and operations were performed in order to study the body. Today’s digital visualization technologies eliminate direct observation in favor of mechanical objectivity. This decision assumes that computers do not interfere subjectively and that images produced by a machine are superior ontologically. The reliance on technology in diagnostics creates an interesting ‘fusion’ between machine and body. I look at the comparisons that have been made between the anatomical theater and visualization technologies, while reflecting on how gender has played a complicated role in understanding the body. I make use of the immersive experience and sensory limitations that occur when using VR devices. The work questions how history reverberates through medical practices and spaces, processing epigenetic histories and altering something deeply encoded in the body.

Background history leading to my discourse on Digital Anthropophagy: For many years I have dealt with the conundrum of legal usage of found and acquired visual materials in my video art and experimental filmmaking. As an artist, I create new contexts for these materials. By using such imagery in my work, I call under question the validity of ownership claims of usage of the owner’s discarded materials, and what is considered fair use. I construct new narratives out of other people’s discarded and dejected recorded memories, creations, and events. In the process of doing this type of work and the advent of the internet with its new paradigms of the digital revolution, I was constantly reminded of the anthropophagic practices in Brazilian indigenous culture. The cannibal eats what he/she considers to be foreign in order to see through that person’s eyes and incorporate their strength, experiences and qualities. But I find that in today’s digital culture, we as an audience, watch the world around us in a globalized structure, thus quickly acquiring worldly references and spitting them out in a personal but also somewhat homogenized way. We have thus become both the cannibal and the cannibalized because of the wide and immediate access to information and the incredible reduction of time it now takes to consume that widely available culture. It no longer takes a passive person watching the ships arriving on the shore in order to consume what they might bring aboard, and conversely, for the colonizer in those ships to take away the riches they “discover” in far-away lands. Over five hundred years later, that exchange has now become horizontal and thus cross-pollinated and equal, and happening with an inhuman speed cycle.

Who discovered whom? Was it the Portuguese discovering the native Brazilians just because of the effort in building the caravels, setting them onto the ocean and embarking on the long trip? Why not the other way around? Just because the indigenous people were in a passive position of merely having their eyes open and seeing the foreigners arrive? Who ate whom? Since your discovery, you have taken our colors to brighten with a brilliant red your ecclesiastics and royals, while we contaminated you with our tireless smiles. Now let us taste you in your new garments. We’d like to see through your engorged eyes and incorporate your assimilated happiness. It’s too late to turn back and contest it. Let’s accept the past, but turn the table onto the future. We ate everything and swallowed it dry, but now may we spit it out with a lot of flavor to make good for the foreigners’ eyes and leave them hypnotized with so much hunger. Our pau-brasil wood was taken away, we were left with just a name: Brazil, while getting stuck with a stick. So, cover your assets, ‘cuz now it’s our turn at bat’. Pindorama is no longer! Never! No going back! Hail to the technologic indigenous of the digital revolution who wants more than a whistle blower toy.

Through mobile and networked technologies such as the smartphone, digital technologies, environments and experiences are to an increasing extent impacting the production and presentation of everyday aesthetics. Yet, most art productions offered to young audiences are still based on methodologies and expressions that predate the digital shift. Arts for Young Audiences Norway is the Norwegian Ministry of Culture’s agency responsible for bringing and presenting a wide variety of professional art and culture to all school pupils in Norway. In this paper, we address the important question of our children’s digital rights, outlining future and needed policies for bringing digital arts and culture to children and young people, asking: How do we produce and present digital arts for young audiences?

There would be today, according to Norbert Hillaire summoning Marcel Duchamp, a digital coefficient in each work. When this is expressed in different ways according to the plural practices of a unique contemporary art. And how could it be otherwise, in this totally numeric world? Start with the artists who carry out their initial research through engines to determining algorithms. Without omitting those who, from the Internet, extract the very materials of their creations in becoming for the purpose of contextualizing them into ‘white cubes’. The objects of our comorality are empowered. There are also artists from the cultures ‘open sources’, to divert them in order to invite us to reconsider our relations with the world of machines.

Considering the premises of a strange/rare relationship of art with the technologies that we can today, dating from the end of the sixties, it would have taken fifty years before finally, the digital would have contaminated the integrality of the artistic means. Images or sounds to objects, such as mechanization / manufacturing treatment. In order, beyond the tendencies, to become the essential medium of contemporary art.

Replication of the self and engagement with liminal spaces has informed our collaborative practice. 3D body scanning, processing and digital printing proffered new methods of engagement as yet uncharted to capture ourselves faithfully. Test body scans suggested the potential to reveal public and private aspects of ‘the self’ – representing both the physiological and psychological aspects of a subject.

Digitized Doubles was a practice led enquiry funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). The aim of the investigation was to examine how artists might creatively engage with the possibilities afforded by advances in 3D scanning, 3D software applications and 3D rapid prototyping to achieve self-portrait exploring the poise and unique character of an individual subject.

When given almost total freedom, many users of the “virtual”, online world Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003) invest considerable economic, creative, and emotional resources in search of a home. The goal is to establish a sense of belonging; the means are architecture.

This paper frames online worlds as an example of convergence culture, a culture characterised by participation and interaction (Henry Jenkins). The paper then goes on to consider a specific, participatory and interactive practice, building projects within the online world Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003), as a practice taking place in an affinity space (James Paul Gee). Exemplary of affinity space, Second Life provides powerful opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, letting users teach each other how to build inside the world. Architecture is practiced among users in a craft-like and collective fashion.

Theoretical discussion shows how online building challenges the concept of affinity space, and calls for it to be supplemented with notions found within architectural theory. The concept of affinity space offers an understanding of online building emphasizing the social while opposing any sense of attachment not socially generated. In contrast, the architectural concept of dwelling (Martin Heidegger) brackets the social and focuses on essential and non-social traits.

The theoretical discussion is informed by case studies of building collectives in Second Life. The studies demonstrate how strong economic, social and emotional user investments intertwine in architectural building projects, generating a level of attachment that becomes easier to explain with recourse to architectural thought and its notion of dwelling.

“Panic theorists for the end of the millennium, jaywalkers on the infobahn, data dandies cruising the pan-global shopping mall: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker are a double-act with a difference.” I-D Magazine, London

Digital Hybrid is a work in progress that incorporates sensors, Internet of Things, social networks, IA agents and post-humanism theory to create a suit that increases the artist’s capabilities but confronts her with artificial cognition, affections, and machine expressions.

The following is to present artist practice pursued through the process of research at the School of Art Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.The work delves into exploring alternative methods of artistic expression by using novel synthetic image creation technologies and their evocative possibilities. With a focus on digitally generative systems and techniques for integrated image generation, converging painting methods with digital technologies and integrating traditional art methods and materials, the emphasis is on expanding the limitations of the digital medium, abstract painting and other forms of visual imagery, striving to achieve greater creative levels.

The resulted art works cover broad mode of expressions ranging from spatial imaging for large-scale built installations, to 3D stereo animation and online 3D virtual environments.

Keywords: Digital Material, Theoretical Model, Creation, Code, Information, Art Practice

Digital Material explores fluctuant dynamics between artistic creation and digital systems by projecting a theoretical model to analyze variable methodologies implemented in creative processes. The proposed model is articulated through levels and layers of information representing abstraction barriers where the information changes and assumes particular identities. Through these strata creative thought is filtered informing the material, manipulating its information and becoming art.

Museum websites have evolved from offering information on the collections of institutions over the virtual space to providing the richer user experience. However, previous research in museology has mainly focused on the causal relationship between online users and actual visitors of physical museums, neglecting users’ behaviour within the digital platform or human-computer interaction (HCI). This study aims to explore the way in which online users are affected by the interface tools of digital museums with a case study of the Google Art & Culture. Drawing on the concept of remediation [1], our analysis reinforces the interactivity based on its interface tools such as “Zoom-in” and “Museum View” for delivering information (transparency) and “User Gallery”, “Share”, and “Details” for compelling experience (reflectivity). The outcome of this research suggests ways in which museum professionals can develop and manage user interface of their institutions.

The Digital Research Unit in Art and Design of ESAD Saint-Étienne/Ensba Lyon is a research laboratory dedicated to digital art and design which hosts post-master and PhD students for a period of three years. As a result of the grouping of these two higher schools, the Digital Research Unit offers material resources and working conditions suitable for the pursuit of long-term research on contemporary topics.

New Media institutions lack on a digital strategy and relay on an isolated, non-coherent, sedimentary and fragile digital environment. After COVID-19, different programs were created to support these institutions, but the question of the maintenance in the long term is unclear. This is a common problem between academic and cultural institutions (museums, archives, etc.), and a network has been created to confront these challenges together.

The claim of new technologies altering our world is omnipresent. But what power does this postulation really hold? In a kind of personal approach, related terms and concepts are examined and evaluated. The starting point for this investigation was a course called “Performativity, Interactivity, Computer Art – a bouquet of creations and explorations” in the Master program of Digital Media in Bremen, Germany. By analyzing a paper by researcher Espen Aarseth and familiar topics emerging around his work, like computer games, the ideological nature of hyped concepts is revealed. This paper also introduces two other approaches challenging Aarseth’s belief: the work of American artist Kristin Lucas and the section of captology, the study of computers as persuasive technology. A lot of buzz words dominate recent debates without having the potential of changing the world at all. But the concept of simulation, being used in a lot of different areas connected to Digital Media could be beneficial and worthwhile to pursue.

Keywords: Representational Environments, Self-representation, Mental and Physical Perception, Remote Sensing

Bioinformatics and computational biology seek to apply computational tools mainly to make decisions based on the visualization of the biological data. For this reason, it is now stated that both belong to the group of sciences with greater projection in the acquisition of scientific knowledge, which will bring with it and globally, a crucial change in biological research. This rapid scientific progress suggests that bioinformatics will play a fundamental roll in our daily lives and in this sense, interacting, visualizing and learning about the manipulation of these biological data gradually becomes more relevant to enhance the public domain of this knowledge. In a mega biodiverse country such as Colombia, learning the principles of bio-informatics is essential for the public to make informed democratic decisions about the benefits and perceived risks associated with bioinformatics. Educational interventions based on project research to expose students to biological data are urgent to meet these needs.

This paper introduces the early stages of the research conducted by the recently awarded Horizon project (RCUK 2009-14), in which an interdisciplinary team comprising staff from Computer Science, Psychology, Sociology, Business, the Arts and Humanities collaborate with over 36 industrial partners to research and develop new ways to use the electronic ‘footprints’ we leave behind whenever we utilise mobile, internet and other digital technologies.

We focus specifically on one of Horizon’s projects, ‘The Documentation and Archiving of Pervasive Experiences: The case of Rider Spoke’ (2010), which aimed at creating a new tool called ‘CloudPad’ for the annotation of time-based media.

With digital weaving I am creating installations envisioning the symbiosis, and communication patterns within the mycelium. Woven in, fiber optics create sparks of light together with 3D surfaces of digital embroidery. Incorporating thread colored with dye created by fungi in a lab, is a model for sustainable color in textile arts, fashion and design.

Working in the liminal space between the digital/virtual and the physical, material realm, my
artworks in progress are digital textiles that will be part of an installation envisioning the
mycelium; a symbiotic interdependent community of organisms communicating through
electric impulses. Creating the complexity of twisted, tangled lines of the fibrous networks that
are invisible, hidden underground, as digital fiber art, uses thread colored with dye created by fungi in a lab. This is a model for creating sustainable color in the textile arts, fashion and textile design industries.

With the rise of home computers in the 1980s and the worldwide web being publicly available in the 1990s there has been a boom of media that was created by the public. As these files are getting to be over 30 years old, there is a unique opportunity, as an archivist, regarding curating these files and providing a perspective of this time period for future generations.

“Digitized Analog Memories” is a case study of possible methods for curating personal media found on discarded floppy disks. The method for the study was to create a “desktop vignette”, or digital collage, of the previous owner’s life using legacy hardware and software (Pentium III Windows 98 PC). During the collage process, specific desktop color schemes were chosen based on the content found on the floppy disk as a means of recreating the previous owner’s desktop when they originally created the files.

From this study, three key nodes of discourse around the topic of archiving and presenting historical personal data came up: 1) Is all personal data relevant to archive for historic or anthropological reference? 2) How much subjective flexibility can be given to the curator/artist when it comes to presenting historical digital media? 3) How should the hardware for reading dead formats be maintained for future archival use? From this study, all personal data was relevant, however personal photos and journal entries were the most popular to exhibition viewers. The curation of this material should be minimal and maintain period-correct aesthetics. The media should be raw, but personal information of the original owners should be redacted. While legacy hardware is still cheap and easily available today, institutions need to make the effort to maintain legacy machines for use in the distant future.

Keywords: Interactive Art, Nam June Paik, Musique Concrète, Random Access, Max/MSP Jitter, Arduino

Nam June Paik (1932-2006) exhibited the progressive music environment for audiences, Random Access (1963) in his first solo show. It allowed audiences to make their own sound collages by interacting with visual audiotapes on a white wall. This unusual music project was based on Paik’s musique concrète composing experiences. Studying the practical relationship between Random Access and musique concrète, Diligent Operator (2016) develops Paik’s idea of interactive collage music by employing Internet system to access a wide range of sound data all the world over. This new version of musique concrète was created with computer programming including Max/MSP Jitter and Arduino.

Lambeosaurine hadrosaurs are duck-billed dinosaurs known for their large head crests. Researchers hypothesize these large crests were resonators for vocal calls. This talk will present my project, Dinosaur Choir, which brings these calls to life as singing dinosaur musical instruments, creating a dinosaur choir and musical ensemble. The work is both an interactive installation exhibited in displays and an instrument for on-going performance practice.

Musicians and participants give voice to these dinosaur instruments by blowing into a mouthpiece, exciting a larynx mechanism and resonating the sound through the dinosaur’s nasal cavities and skull. By breathing life into the dinosaur, in a sense, they fleetingly experience being a dinosaur. This intimate action with an extinct creature aims to stimulate excitement and educate the public about dinosaurs, paleontology, and raise awareness and questions about global ecological instability and the passage of deep time.

Cities are living information systems, undergoing continued evolution and reconfiguration. Most frequently, media in this landscape is aimed at commerce/marketing. However, contemporary technology is increasingly being used to create affective, embodied, and/or meditative experiences that are not primarily commercial in nature. The novelty of this project is in working with local culture bearers and community stakeholders to inject site-specific cultural and historical narratives in the urban landscape. Currently focused on the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, LA, this project uses contemporary technology to draw attention to and to celebrate the many contributions of the historic residents of the oldest black neighborhood in the United States.

Moreover, by working directly with community stakeholders in the curation and development of these media outcomes, this project intends to outline a model for centering the voices and narratives of underrepresented groups in any urban environment. Finally, these works are part of a larger research project towards the creation of a strong, location-based augmented reality mobile application that also allows individuals to experientially discover the history of a place.

In this work-in-progress artist talk, I will discuss the successes and challenges of the installations created to date – covering both the technical and the social components of the project. I will also discuss intended plans for both the media installations and the augmented reality component – discussing my work with the Google’s MediaPipe as well as Google’s global localization system.

In this paper we discuss the notion of disembodiment as a driving force of inspiration in artificial systems using Virtual Reality (VR) and 3D audio technologies. In these environments, immersion is the common denominator between the impression of disembodiment, which involves the spatial ability, and the auditory perception from the perspective of a creative binaural input. Our research focuses on three public artistic virtual reality works as examples of sound-driven immersive virtual experiences. Through interviews with the contributors, we explore the way that disembodiment can serve immersion in VR, and how binaural audio improves those experiences. As the body becomes virtual, the lines between real and imaginary are redefined and recreated, altering the sense of body ownership, oscillating between embodiment and disembodiment sensations. Ultimately, we intend to explore immersion on a theoretical and philosophical basis where the body is perceived as the mediator, a phenomenon and an extension of binaural reality and hyperreality.

In this session, I will present my work using artificial life techniques, emphasizing real-time, physically-based stick figures whose anatomy and behavior can evolve. I have been using emergence in generating images and animations for many years. My work is an attempt to advance the art of artificial life – an art which can evolve potentially towards immense complexity and expressivity, which would be impossible using top-down design strategies. I have always used the computer as a medium for generating emergent art forms, from my early experiments with fractal and cellular automata, to later developments using evolutionary algorithms. I would like to step through my development as an artificial life artist, and to site the works of other artists and thinkers working in similar ways.

The reception of Marcel Duchamp ideas concerning the displacement of the role played by the spectator in the creation of art – that is, as an active component with the responsibility to create himself the work of art – reflected first in Brazil in the sixties on Hélio Oiticica art production. Although this reception in the work of Oiticica essayed to mix spectator and artist as producers of art, the artist was still the major responsible for his politic and poetic conception of art; by him the artist was actually charged to give the required environment to create Art. In the nineties Eduardo Kac developed this tradition with the sources of Electronic Art and the connection made possible with the popularization of Internet; in his ideas the work of art became a sort of communication between the world wide public and the artist’s production. The result itself of this communication was the work of art. Since a few years, but following the same tradition, the young part Brazilian Influenza Group is trying to increase the possibilities of interaction trough the Web Art and its programming tools. Trough the ideas of Hélio Oiticica, Eduardo Kac and the Influenza Group, the work of art as a sort of communicative production is a strong reality in Brazilian art world. In our presentation we are going to explore the collaborative/communicative skills and its tradition immediately before the Era of Internet still our days in the Brazilian Visual Arts context.

The Dispositivo de Realidad Mutada (Mutated Reality Device) is an inhabitable ambisonic sculpture. Inside, space expands far beyond its compact walls and invites listeners to navigate the worlds that result from disobedient linguistic experiments assisted by AI.

Acknowledgments: Rawa Muñoz, Enmy Muñoz, Valeria Tenaud, Tivon Rice, Marcin Pączkowski, Juan Pampín, Eunsun Choi, DXARTS at the University of Washington, USA.

The actual task for disruptive avant-garde art of today should be understood as the decolonization of our imaginaries that perceive nature through the logic of growth and the harmonious model in the direction of shaping post-growth imaginaries for symbiotic futures.