Presentation Data Table

Keywords: Pollution, Air-quality, DIY, Analog-Recording, Air-Filtration, Ozone, Oxidation, Copper

The purpose of this work was to explore a potential low-tech DIY means of members of a community to track and mitigate the impact of pollution in their daily lives. For this project, we chose to focus on the presence of ozone in an industrial area located within a desert climate. We then describe a preliminary test in which volunteer participants from the community place pieces of ozone reactive material (copper) outside their residences in order to determine if the pieces would successfully oxidize over a relatively short period of time. We conclude with possibilities for future concerns and interests.

Keywords: performance art, DNA, DIYbio, visualization, large data, portraiture

This paper offers a brief history to bio- practice. A preliminary DIY method undertaken by the author will be followed by a discussion of the particular practical, technical and legal implications for the large scale collecting and imaging human DNA . The paper concludes with areas of future research and further questions. The findings presented are the result of research from the work “ONE: a durational performance by Rebecca Cunningham and all of you”

ONE is a performance that may take
ONE lifetime
ONE person
sitting opposite ONE person
there is ONE exchange
ONE sample of DNA is collected
if desired ONE sample of DNA is exchanged
this will happen ONE million times
until ONE million samples have been collected
once ONE million samples from
ONE million people has been collected
each DNA sample will be imaged. From ONE million DNA images
ONE will be made, a composite of all
becoming ONE

This century, will we genetically modify food, pets, our children, ourselves? Information and sharing information is reaching immense speeds and saturation, but what happens to that grey area between public and private? When are our bodies our own, and when are we the property of the global social corpus? Living in times where we rarely put ourselves in situations where we need to trust each other, and in most cases given more reason to distrust, will you trust me with your most intimate material? Your DNA?

First presented at the Brisbane Festival, Under the Radar 2011, ONE has been to Sydney, LA, New York, USA & now in the UK. In 2012 ONE was in residence at The Queensland State Library: The Edge. Recently, the paper “DIY DNA Visualization” derived from research pertaining to this project was presented at CSIRO SPECTRA Conference on art and Science.

This paper presents how technologies were explored to create site-responsive, immersive installations and performance art forms within the fabric of Chirk Castle in Wales. It discusses how creative technologies, materials, process and scale have been explored to create immersive sensory environments within a site-responsive exhibition: Golau (light).

My residency within the castle is reflected upon, in particular, by exploring what emerged through interdisciplinary exchange and heritage interpretation. To encapsulate the experience of the landscape, methods of walking and mapping were used to trace rhythmic patterns of perceptual engagement with the environment; these poetic geographies were used to begin to define my place in time. Intrinsic to this residency was the collaboration between artists from different disciplines including film, dance and sound, to enrich my personal practice, and to generate multi-sensory and multidisciplinary responses to the ‘memory of place’.

Traced networks of the landscape were transcribed into the art forms installed within Golau, through the exploration of CAD technology, coding and electronics. The representation of space within the tower of the castle was explored and translated through the implementation of light and sound installations, to provide an exhibition which aimed to stimulate a different perspective of heritage and enhanced meaning of place. Pure Data, a visual programming software was implemented to animate and correlate light to sound, to embody the experience of time, thus magnifying the networks within the tower. The multi-sensory exhibition was orchestrated to reveal the representation of space. Light and sound acted as points of communication, to illuminate and entice the viewer to voyage on a transcendental journey through the installations. The paper will explore the outcomes to the exhibition and how the immersive experience simulated a new perception of place, fusing together and reflecting a moment in time within Chirk Castle. It will find that creative technologies were integral to guide the audience through the exhibition and that the transient and static performances within the castle connected people to place, abstracting an experience of nature within the fabric of the castle itself.

Tendencies 4 exhibition (1968 – 1969) presenting international (both East and West!) computer art and Bit International magazine (1968 – 1973) on media theory, both form Zagreb, Croatia are wiped out of media art history.

Looking at the speed of technological implementation, activation in the development of a new, positive, contemporary consciousness seems necessary if we ever want to step out of Alice’s ever-expanding Wonderland. One of the most important areas of today to focus on is the club scene, as it has always been the environment where youth culture gathers together most consistently and in its most significant numbers.

The Daniel Langlois Foundation’s Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D)’s collections and tools constitute a major resource for researchers, students, scholars and of course, the “historians of the new”, who need an access to documentation that is rapidly growing old and that have suffered from a lack of care and concern. Indeed, in the last forty years or so, the development of artistic and cultural activities using or related to science and technology occurred mainly outside the so called mainstream art world. Because of this, a large amount of these activities have not been well documented and even when it has, this documentation has not been well preserved or has not been made accessible to the public. Documenting new media art remains problematic, even in our days. Two factors are responsible for this situation. First, the fact that many new media art practices are extremely ephemeral and unstable.

The second factor is more subtle: it is linked to the fact that many individuals and organizations are doing self archiving. The activity itself is far from being a bad thing, but too many people believe that the mere fact of keeping everything and putting it on a Web site will be enough to ensure its survival. It is with that situation in mind that we started developing the CR+D five years ago. We conceived the center so that it not only documents the present day new media art scene but also we wanted it to put this field in a historical perspective and contextualization. We believe that the CR+D’s resources are quite unique. While there is some excellent online and/or physical resources dealing with new media documentation and history, they are often limited to a very narrow domain or medium. Other are just not accessible for the public, or poorly organized or indexed. The fact that we have a long term preservation mandate and a high level of sustainability is also quite unique.

How can the Internet be used as a resource of interdisciplinary exchange concerning topical discourses, projects and developments at the interface between media art and media technology? Netzspannung.org, a laboratory for media presentation, artistic production and intermedial research, elaborates tentative solutions to these questions. As an interface between art, technology, science and society, Netzspannung.org is an information pool for artists, designers, scientists and scholars. The Internet platform communicates diverse activities from the media-cultural scene and since 2001 has been building up a continually growing archive. Netzspannung.org documents topical developments and media art history in the context of theory, technology and research. This multimedia database can be explored with new knowledge discovery tools, which facilitate the handling of the information stored within it.

From listserv collectives, irreverent podcasters, opinionated bloggers and satirical video performers to sensationalist ‘grammers and prolific Facebookers, online art critics have successfully challenged their Greenbergian forebears. Although there have been a number of recent articles (Gat, 2013; Jansen, 2015; Williams, 2015) and events (Walker Arts Center and MNArts 2015; Rhizome 2016) exploring the nature of art criticism after the internet, which follow much more extensive publication (Elkins, 2003; Rubinstein, 2006; Plagens, 2007; Elkins and Newman, 2008) and discussion (ICA, 2011; Witte de With, 2012; AIAC, 2013) on the Western crisis of art criticism, there have been no comprehensive studies of art criticism after the internet. Based on my forthcoming book, Art Criticism Online: A History, this paper will reveal some of my research into the broader history of online art criticism.

Highly ephemeral and transient in form, all art criticism is difficult to research and archives are rare. Online art criticism is particularly problematic given many early platforms are no longer live, content is frequently removed or reorganised, and even contemporary platforms seldom offer accessible archives. The paper will therefore consider some of online art criticism’s common forms and key characteristics. It will connect it to much earlier types of – often multimodal – art criticism. Finally it consider methods of archivisation for online art criticism and approaches to teaching art critical digital literacies.

Keywords: Popular Culture, Creative Writing, Cyber Space, Fanfic, Aura, Ritual, Ceremonial Cheerleading, Balloon.

This article refutes Walter Benjamin’s opinion about the disappearance of aura and ritual in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. According to this essay, rituals disappear through a method of mass reproduction— a film. I argue one of the mass reproductions, the film, actually creates a new aura and new ritual unlike Benjamin’s opinion. In the digital technology era, numerous replicas influence the fact that the massive re- production leads to create a new ritual phenomena as well. This phenomena appears as a piece of creative writing, a piece of fan-fiction in the cyber space. Firstly, we are going to look at a new ritual which is created by a character in the television series, Star Trek. Then, we will examine a new ritual phenomenon which is generated by a fan-fiction, in the late 1990s Korean pop culture, in the age of digital technology.

Keywords: Archaeology of the Present, Media Archaeology, Bottom-up Institutions, Poetics of Social Forms.

Domains, Publics and Access is an ongoing collection online of projects related to current access forms such as: open government, open design, citizen science, collaborative economy, commons, co- ops, crowdfunding, DIY, free culture, community currencies, p2p, piracy, etc. The main goal is to preserve initiatives that appear and disappear in different countries because each project is the declaration of a possible future. That’s why the project as the poetics of social forms is studied by an access archaeology that explores the hypothesis of the emergence of new bottom-up institutions. The hypothesis is latent in the work of several authors, but Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter pose it explicitly around the online organized networks. They provide the theoretical framework for the qualitative textual analysis of the accountability, sustainability and scalability of different projects. The faceted classification adapted to a MediaWiki articulates the field work as a distributed analysis process, and shows how not only organized networks but also top-down networked organizations define the poetics of access forms. The result is an online common- pool resource that displays the historic and antagonistic limits of access and that can be used to develop new research questions – in and out of academia- through the integration of new facets and projects in a simple way.

Society of Molecules was orchestrated by the SenseLab as an emergent and internationally distributed micropolitical event for research-creation carried out in several countries during the first week of May, 2009. This paper reports from the Montréal-based molecule named the Lack of Information Kiosk. It aimed at bringing attention to urban mobilizations on the frontierland between a traditional working-class district (Parc Extension) bordering a bourgeois neighborhood (Outrement) in the northern part of the city. Université de Montréal has bought the 56.0000 m2 space between these two districts to develop their future campus literally closing off access from Parc Extension. The quotidian appropriations of this space (by walkers, dog owners, homeless) confront the multiple layers of a space that suffers from a lack of information. The focus was on this ever-present lack of information in both governmental and everyday dialogues about the future of the physical and social spaces.

This paper will argue that participating in livestreaming is an efficient means to negotiate the (constitutive) inefficiencies present in videogames. Often it is purported that a central pleasure associated with videogames is the nontrivial effort required to play them, the actions required to transverse the ‘text’ as a subset of ergodic literature. Livestreaming problematises the idea that controller-in-hand play is a necessary part of videogame consumption. Whilst videogames are built to be configured through play, live streaming provides opportunity for (non)players to participate in playing video games without having to negotiate firsthand the affordances of the game-system. As such, live streaming reaffirms the observation put forward by Stuart Moulthrop, that participating in videogame play extends beyond the confines of the human-computer interface. Playing videogames is often arduous and repetitive work. As such, the practices of regulating gameplay through deferral to other players’ expertise is nothing new, nor one begotten by the recent proliferation of consumer-level broadcasting technologies. This paper will situate livestreaming as a continuation of such practices, suggesting that one of the virtues of livestreaming is that it provides an opportunity for participants to invest in the various configurativepractices of gameplay without necessary ‘playing’ themselves.

“Fig Leaf Rag” is a 3 minute 30 second video derived from the DRAMA BOMBS! project, an inquiry that turns a critical eye toward the anonymous statements we make with impunity online. Drawn from mainstream media comment sections, images are screen-grabbed and then recomposed in a slideshow format with attendant soundtrack, creating an entirely different dialogue. These statements, re-contexualized into a new artificial conversation, present a humorous, scathing, and insightful look into inhibitions, identity, and non-verbal communication.

DRAMA BOMBS! considers how language and common discourse are defined in today’s culture of literary road-rage, where the online author is protected behind a windshield of anonymity and nothing is considered off limits. It’s an arena of avatars, nicknames, and personas, where anonymous commenters are unleashed with little oversight or accountability, except as judged by an invisible moderator. What is the literary or social impact of this new technology on language and discourse, and how is this new media affecting how we communicate with each other? How is authorship, authenticity, or originality determined or ascribed in a realm where identity is fluid, and traditional forms of recognition are no longer viable?

A preliminary version of “Fig Leaf Rag” from the DRAMA BOMBS! project was screened in July, 2015 at the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia, Canada at David Wisdom’s Legendary Summer Slide Show, and inclusion in the program at ISEA2016 Hong Kong would constitute its formal international premiere. This work is entirely self-produced and financed.

Abstract

The network currently is not only widely used for performative actions but also extensively theorised. However, the artistic strategies in networked environments and the ways in which these new performance practices and cultural contexts can give rise to new design approaches have not been equally explored. This paper therefore draws on the notion of dramaturgy as it provides a useful framework for addressing design strategies and performative relationships in networked environment. I argue that dramaturgies suggest a robust method for understanding artistic practices in the network. The paper gives a brief overview of the history and the theories of the network as well as the histories of dramaturgies. This paper was designed in conjunction with, or as an introduction, to a paper by Pedro Rebelo in the 2009 Contemporary Music Review Journal (Rebelo, 2009), which describes in detail three dramaturgical models that I developed with the author in early 2008: an extended version of this paper will be published by Contemporary Music Review (Routledge), 2009.

Abstract

Why ants? And why should they need drawing lessons? Let me try and explain.                          We normally see ants from an aerial point of view, as lines of dots on a flattish plane. The connection with drawing – you may think – must be to do with laying trails of sugar: the paths they make in sand, a miniature Richard Long walking drawing seen from the sky; or perhaps SimAnt, Will Wright’s predecessor of the Sims; or the ‘marching ants’ of the selection tool. But here I am speculating about drawing, about the clash of values between digital drawing and supposedly traditional methods. What if we took this quite different perspective, the ant’s point of view? What would ants’ feel about the drawing process? Perhaps they follow unquestioningly a rigid dogma. Perhaps they don’t think about it at all. I am not an ant expert. They may well be communicating something to each other that counts as drawing, but that we would fail to recognize as such. They may be immersed in their art history, their own personal mark making. But I doubt whether they would take any interest at all in our culture of life drawing. Observational drawing would not make much sense. They really do see the world differently.

Abstract

Short Paper

Summary:

Some results from and reflections on a PET study into art-student volunteers performing  drawing tasks, presented in the form of a talk illustrated with an interactive visual display.

Intro

I would like to present some results and reflections on an art-science collaboration which I think fits quite well with the symposium theme “Education as a Bridge between Art & Science”. This collaboration took the form of a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) study of six right-handed male art student volunteers engaged in simple drawing tasks.
I helped Professor Chris Frith. of the Institute of Neurology, London University, a little in the design of the experiment, procured the volunteers, and have produced a visual account of the events In the form of a director movie, designed to complement the scientific papers. The experiment was carried out by Dr Gabriella Bottini at the Cyclotron Unit of Hammersmith
Hospital in London.

Abstract

“We wanted to explore the neural systems involved in planning and performing complex movements in space We measured regional cerebral blood flow as an index of synaptic activity during the performance of three different tasks… In one condition subjects “drew” the shape of a figure in different locations, in the second they ‘drew’ different figures in the same location while in the third control task they traced the figures on a screen. …Our results suggest that two distinct anatomical systems subserve a network for the representation of spacial coordinates and a network for the representation of objects.”

A simple interactive presentation of the experiment has been made in Hypercard with text, 24 bit images and simple animation. A more sophisticated version with better animations is ‘under construction’ in Director & will be ready for September 1996. Quote from the Hypercard stack, Prof. Chris Frith: “We have identified one area concerned with generating forms (left middle temporal lobe) and a different area concerned with generating position in space (bilateral parietal lobe). The areas we have identified are essentially the same as those previously shown to be associated with the perception of form and position in space when no movements are made and the volunteer simply looks at objects. This intimate association between perception and production has interesting implications for brain function in general and conceivably might have relevance for the teaching of drawing skills.”

Drawings of a Floating World is an immersive, responsive digital media environment, which invites participants to engage in a playful, intuitive, kinaesthetic and social interaction – through the simple and universally familiar metaphor of drawing and painting. Fluid patterns and sounds are projected on to a series of encircling, floating planes which dynamically respond to participants’ movements and gesture. Digital media is presented as a tangible and malleable medium that can be pushed, pulled, stretched and sculpted. The intention is to initiate a compelling and affective experience through embodied interaction, and to promote spontaneous and openended social interaction through ludic engagement and physical action.

New media technologies are expanding the range of possibilities for digital media design. Interactivity has been seen as one of the most dynamic features in new media technologies, especially for those new media artists who endeavour to explore the capacity of digital media technology. This paper aims to highlight the important relationship between the digital media artist, audience and the digital media work, by analysis of the audience’s reaction to a digital media work. Giving adequate consideration to how the audience might comprehend a digital media work helps to ensure optimal setting for interactive media design. In addition, this paper suggests the importance that the audience understands interactivity has been used to achieve an immersive creative experience, and it is vital for the artist to appreciate the extent of the audience’s understanding of the use of technology in their work. This paper discusses the relationship between the artist, audience and digital media work by evaluating an interactive media work, Drawn Installation.

Introduction
While information technology is currently based around technical rationality and the efficiency and effectiveness of content delivery, increasingly it impacts all aspects of our lives, including our sensory and emotional experiences and the parameters of our imagination. As such, interactive design should not simply cater to factors like base level cognitive processing but the affective and creative centres of the brain.

Interactive digital art works involve new forms of live interactivity and performance, especially those of particularly experimental nature which are difficult to understand or critique for most audiences. Even though what constitutes the ‘audience’ today is more ambiguous than in earlier times, one might consider the audience as an element of artists in their own right, some simply less familiar with the concept or use of digital technology. The Drawn Installation, the subject of this analysis, raised the question of how and to what extent the audience experiences and interpreted the thematic elements: interactive live performance of hand and ink.

Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic represent appropriate moments to innovate. Many organizations in the cultural sector have thus proposed numerous changes in their activities trying to develop new forms of symbiosis, bringing back the notion of resilience.

Beyond its buzz word aspect, resilience has essentially been associated with a set of organizational capacities to adapt and innovate in the face of a disruption in the cultural environment, leaving little consideration to question the main drivers of resilience in cultural organizations.

We propose then to study the adaptation of the Montreal festivals offer, building on primary data from 8 interviews with festival directors or managers and secondary data from internal and external documentation. We therefore mobilize the concept of the business model to identify and discuss the drivers for resilience in cultural organizations.

We show a trend for festivals to come back to their formal business model despite the deployment of different innovations and identify role and purpose as the two main drivers for the resilience of festivals.

Finally, we call for a comparison with other cultural organizations to discuss the preserving and reconfiguring aspects of their resilience.

Drone Garden is a contemplative noninteractive installation, showing a network of microcontrollers fighting for bandwidth in a network using basic electronic warfare strategies. Their behavior is surveilled by a computer program that runs on a machine which is also part of this network. The installation forms a utopical technogene garden whose “plants” are independent electronic agents and its aesthetics is derived from computerforensic analysis as conducted in IT security laboratories. The microcontrollers are fighting for resources like plants are competing for sunlight while they are floating in beaker glasses filled with a liquid just like young plants that are put into water for acceleration of growth.

The installation is challenging the contemporary issue of electronic warfare (cyberwar) and reframes it as an intrinsic and important feature of a global communication network by exposing the inherent security flaws of the network protocols used worldwide. Drone Garden is furthermore addressing the question of naturality of a technogene system, understanding survival as an indicator for life and therefore raises the question of an ethical framework for our human interaction with the closed network system as well as the emergence of a universal machine ethics.

Game proposal for the European Football Championship 2008 Austria – Switzerland.

Background
The internet pioneer Howard Rheingold predicts in his book “Smart Mobs – The Next Social Revolution” that collaboration, mobile communication and permanent internet connectivity will mutually amplify. Thereby, the idea of a “virtual” community overlaps with real life. Zorah Mari Bauer’s artistic research project “Viennese Stories” focuses on the potential of this “social revolution”.

“Viennese Stories” is a collection of mobile location based concepts which exemplify co-creative and user oriented applications. It focuses on social tools which are embedded within existing communicative “ways of live”. Handy-cam and micro blogging, buddy functions, telephony, bulletin boards, chat, etc. do not only exist in “virtuality” anymore. They are also usable directly within the experience context of the user. Location based services provide these ways of communication with a real spatial basis. Welcome to the world of games 3.0! Mobile collaborative gaming cultures become available by means of the new parameter “location”, adding the proximity of social acting and behaving.

The lecture states that these new formats are based on real life. They are not only creating new potentials for gaming, but also real social possibilities which have to be shaped accordingly. This is exemplified by means of the swarm-based football game “duliö Olé!” which is part of the application oriented research project “Viennese Stories”.

Game Concept
During the European Football Championship 2008 and especially for the finals, numerous fans will visit the city of Vienna. Duliö Olé! offers the fans the opportunity to play a common game while lingering through the city. The special thing about Duliö Olé! is that on a virtual playing fi eld with real geographical reference, a virtual match-ball has to be moved into the goal by means of the usage of mobile phones. The teams do not consist of dedicated players. Everyone with a mobile device can join spontaneously, thereby becoming part of (and contributing to) the “swarm-intelligence”. At the beginning of the European Championship, the fans vote by means of SMS which national team they want to send to the fi nals. The two teams with the most votes will compete in the game.

“Although humanity has fashioned a system of powerful, immaculate machines and products, in their presence the human subject can only feel a sense of belittlement, incompleteness, lack-a feeling [Günter] Anders calls ‘Promethean shame’. [….It is the human body itself-comparatively unadaptable, vulnerable, mortal – that is felt to be the ultimate obstacle to the perfection of the machine environment.”                                                                                                                              _Christopher Phillips

In the age of smart houses, art that manipulates the perception of artificial intelligence downward gathers a critical importance. Why are divine or demonic powers of omniscience and immorality so often projected onto the bodies of machines in the popular imagination? If the Greeks had three levels of social interaction – between the divine, the human and the realm of the sub-human (in their eyes, the comic world of servants and slaves – then, the mythology of machine-human interactions is tragically organized around divinity. “Cyborg envy” (cf. Allucquere Roseanne Stone) is another aspect of this tendency to attribute perfection and the aura of futurity onto our own artifacts. Meanwhile, our own everyday experience tells us that even the smartest machines are pretty dumb with their one-track literal-mindedness and their tendency to break down at every contingency.  Why are we humans being inculcated with an inferiority complex or feelings of ‘Promethean shame’ about our own bodies in relation to machines? The pressure on artists to master the very latest software on the most advanced hardware is equally part of this endless and fruitless human quest to match purported machine progress and perfection. While pride in electronic craftsmanship should not be dismissed, the arts are not just a part of an electronic culture, they are also about it. An interactive art work that embodies a metaphor or meta-interaction about the relations between humans and their machines must be free to adopt any level of technology appropriate to the statement to be made. Art that demonstrates the dependency, solipsistic behavior, lapses of intelligence and the tendency toward fatigue and obsolescence and general overall stupidity of machines is welcome here.

This paper presents One Day Sculpture, Dunedin, an art project in which six geographically separate artists and curators collaborated over a six month period to conceptually develop a site-specific artwork in Dunedin, New Zealand. Contemporary British artists Walker & Bromwich together with New Zealand artists, Douglas Bagnall and ex-pat Adam Hyde and curators Caroline McCaw and Rachel Gillies, began with a dedicated online research period engaging with ideas surrounding collaborative arts practice, digital technologies, and location as it is understood from a distance. This paper navigates this online communication process and how both the artwork and the location were mediated through socially networked technologies.

McCullough (2004) suggests that location models are not just maps of physical position, but “frame” and “cue” the activities that may occur. Specifically, the One Day Sculpture project wiki explores the role and mythology of Dunedin, New Zealand as a location, through the online mediated discussion between people who have lived in Dunedin in the past and present, and people who have only read and heard about Dunedin through the internet and place-based tourism communication.

Collaborative artistic practices were explored widely and by numerous artists in the 1960’s and 70’s, with groups such as Fluxus creating an international network and profile for such collaborations. The impact of the quickweb authoring tool wiki, enables not so much the speedier creation of collaborative artworks, but the speedier connection between international art-groups and documentation integral to the development of the co-authored artwork. In this case collaborative intertextuality begins pre-production, through the use of networked tele-authoring tools.

The role of socially networked technologies enframes and enables the negotiation of a distant location and the establishment of a shared perceptual parameter in which to ground the development of this collaborative art project, and provides the basis for this discussion.

The artist’s latest works investigate and explore public and personal spaces, experienced through a variety of interactive media works produced. This multimedia presentation into the specific attributes of interactive art in public places is set in a larger context which engages with the role of randomness and predictability in the movement of people through public spaces; issues of control in self-directed experiences, and the relationships between physical and psychological space.

Interactivity in Large-Scale Public Environments: Electronic Garden/ NatuRealization (Rogala 1996), a large-scale, public interactive installation was undertaken as a part of Re-Inventing the Garden City, sponsored by Sculpture Chicago. Daily observation and periodic documentation (video, photography) was conducted over the 6-month period of the installation. Questionnaires, “round-table” discussions, and focus groups have also been constructed to engage meaningful feedback. This was an opportunity to apply initial principles of theory and research into practice. Through this development of on-site practice, a relevant base was produced for further research into the form of an on-line installation  with feedback from global communities engaged through the Internet website.

The installation emphasizes the relevance of the physical body to interaction and participation in public artworks. While previous work in media arts has emphasized the temporal dimension, little attention has been paid to space, to the behavior of the body, and to the implications of interactive systems for new kinds of spatial experience. This initial project has outlined the direction of interaction within large-scale public environments. Concepts of responsibility, freedom, and choice are central to the interactive model in group dynamics. Through the use of practice, research and evaluation, factors began to define components contained in complex and dynamic systems, which enable large groups of participants (3000 weekly); in a sustained (e.g., 5-10 minutes, daily visits, return visits, loggings into website) interactive relationship with the artworks produced.

Although a certain lack of distance is reflected in the context of interactive art and video art, and more recently in computer arts, the role of the artist has changed significantly, gaining independence from traditional art language, and becoming an active participant in societal change, rather than being a commentator on the outside. This in turn suggests that interaction may be possible not only between participant and device, but between participants, and between participants and creators.
The artist will present excerpts from his interactive installation and CD-ROM work, Lover’s Leap (1995), and Divided We Stand (1997-1998), a forth-coming audience interactive media symphony in six movements.

The video-and-sound works of Deborah Cornell, visual artist and Richard Cornell, composer, center on environmental themes relating regional and global arenas, crossing disciplines by using immersive-yet-invasive techniques. This talk will describe previous works, and building into a large-scale work-in-progress – Dys/sonance & Dys/ruption , an installation foregrounding human presence as a catalyst of disruption in natural systems – through interactive transformations in the work. The methods we use also involve a form of visual disruption – printed wall murals, with two-channel video projections that perceptually transform what is before the viewer, confusing what is actual with what is changing, even as the participants make interjections that affect elements in the work.
This new interactive project thus involves active disruption – and also metaphorically relates to the problem of “glitch” in its largest sense. Small environmental miscalculations have built into climate change and its intense repercussions, resulting from direct and indirect human activity that interferes with the sustaining order that supports human existence. Spinoffs from this glitch include sinking cities, wet deserts that corrode formerly desiccated structures, acidification of oceans. Adaptable and optimistic, humans fully intend to accommodate and adjust to this glitch as best they can – but at some point the consequences may turn unsustainable – which would become a much more extreme glitch than the simple beginnings of climate inversion now evident. Through interactive electronics, our newest work seeks to create both a sense of personal responsibility and a sense of direct agency affecting the simulated “world” we present.
Our new work utilizes projected two-channel video onto a large printed mural, electronic sound, and interactive processing to create a variable work that can be either disrupted or re-formed by visitors’ input (= human voice). Real time computation of one of the video projections simulates the flocking behavior of birds in migration. Using a microphone, ambient sound is analyzed for peak frequency. When peak frequency is in the characteristic range of human speech, its amplitude affects the transparency/color of the images and they fade. When amplitude drops below threshold level the images gradually re-emerge. The interactivity is not overt but builds from effects that are subtle and surprising. The conversation of the humans present in the space creates random effects within the work that reflects the altering course generated by human interference with the environment.

Timothy Murray traces the evolution of online curating, from early international collaborations to the development of robust online curatorial exchanges that forever altered the centrality of museum-based curation.

He begins by reflecting on three of his early networked curatorial projects as a means of highlighting the discursive shifts of e-curating. In 1999, he sent out a call for work over the emergent rhizome network for works for a small exhibition he was planning on CDROM art. Not expecting much of a response, he limited the call to a three-week delivery date with the idea that the exhibition may be extended beyond a small group of artworks from Australia, Europe, and the US. Within three weeks, an astonishing 130 works arrived from over thirty countries resulting in the 80-work exhibition, Contact Zones: the Art of CD-ROM, which toured internationally for four years, including ISEA2000 Paris. The ability to expand the initial network with such a range of international artists impacted and altered the conceptual organization of the show. The emergent network of curators and artists also resulted in a relocation of the exhibition in Mexico City for which he developed the first bi-lingual online catalogue (Spanish / English). The catalogue then provided the framework for other international exhibitions deriving from Contact Zones in Macau and Johannesburg.

This paper identifies new practices and possibilities at the intersection of Dance and e-Science. It is particularly concerned with the complexity of the concept of  ‘location’ in relation to internet enabled performance practices. Julia Glesner provides a useful analysis of spatio-temporal relationships in internet performance: “telematic and distributed performances dissolve the spatial (but not the temporal) unity between performers and spectators and distribute the scenic space into diverse remote sites”. This paper considers the ways in which the e-Dance project is formulating a new mode of choreographic practice that engages with this dislocation in the co-dependent interrelationship of space and time. This new modality is distinct from existing on-line compositional practices such as ‘hyperchoreography’ and ‘hyperdance’ and as a result of recent advances in Access Grid and Hypermedia Discourse technologies, is also distinct in form and process from ‘distributed choreography’  and other telematic choreographic practices. The research for this paper has emerged from the fi rst six-month’s findings of e-Dance, a two-year interdisciplinary practice-led project bringing together practitioner/academics from the fields of Dance and e-Science, in a unique collaboration across three UK Research Councils.

e-Dance repurposes the Access Grid (AG), an online, meeting environment using advanced video-conferencing and integrated knowledge mapping technologies, as a context for telepresent performance, and hypermedia documentation of this practice as research. Automated annotation of the media combined with human annotation using hypermedia discourse tools provides a rich, structured data repository, both for choreographic reflection in/on process and with the potential to support the subsequent construction of hypermedia research narrative better suited to non-linear argumentation and presentation. Through this convergence in the visualization of both spatio-temporal structures and discourse, the project addresses two intersecting questions. Firstly, what unique opportunities does the distributed AG environment provide for developing new approaches to choreographic process/composition and for capturing/modelling practice-led research? Secondly, how can choreographic knowledge and sensibility enable e-Science practice to make its applications more usable within performance/arts practice-led research?

Central to an interrogation of these questions and the locus for the interdisciplinary discourse, are multifarious understandings of space and in particular the concept of location. The paradoxical sense of the ‘located’ in the non-co-located environment of AG provides a fruitful intersection for a creative and critical engagement across the disciplines. e-Dance is focused on the integration of live and mediatised dance performance across multiple, remote sites. It is exploring this as a context in which choreographic process is radically reformulated and relocated. Like Bolter and Grusin’s “remediation”, ‘relocation’ articulates a similar semantic movement or procedure. Yet, this is not only concerned with the conceptual/creative/idiomatic shift from one medium to another but also with shifts in the substance/context/affect of space. Given that the medium for choreographic practice, in its most essential terms, is the body moving in space and time, this radical revisioning has ontological and epistemological implications for the discipline. Johannes Birringer suggests that telepresent performance fundamentally challenges traditional formulations of compositional process and structure.

“This is no longer the modernist notion of composition; rather…(it) resembles a kind of postproduction of recording/recorded data, which in the case of dance includes bodily movements, gestures, sensations. The emphasis has shifted from the object of representation to the emergent situation, and the materialization of technology, itself.” Performance within an AG environment is conceptualised and practiced as a ‘live’ phenomenon, in both the sense of actual, co-present activity and virtual non-co-present activity and the intersection between the two. In other words performers and spectators are co-present in physical spaces and simultaneously share multiple, virtual locations. Within an AG performance node the performers engage in live performance which is fed back to them and to other remote locations through streamed, wall-sized audiovideo media. Several video cameras are used to provide a multi-perspectival view of the dancer’s body and the performance space in each AG node synchronously. This streamed media can be recorded and re-distributed to remote locations synchronously or asynchronously.

Large media facades, reactive architecture, geo-tagging and location aware mobile devices represent a privileged confluence – a fluid, digital layer that permeates the city and in turn makes existing physical structures permeable. In an act of research creation, E-TOWER engaged this architectural permeability by transforming the CN Tower – until 2007 the world’s tallest free-standing structure – into a beacon for the city’s “energy” by allowing participants of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2010 to text the word “energy” and additional comments to a number provided in order to activate faster and brighter animations on the tower’s LED light system. E-TOWER enabled highly visible, distributed participation in public space using mobile phones and reactive architecture as part of a larger experiment in  e-imagining and augmenting social practices and public encounters by inscribing cooperation and collective play into urban subjectivity. An overview of relational architecture, urban screen, and projection based artistic and cultural interventions in public space that led to the development of E-TOWER is included.

The ingredients of technoculture in the age of supermodernity –urban space, projectors, walls, computers, mobile devices, LEDs– mixed together in the correct proportions, allow for rich interaction, and a reflection on community, subjectivity, and place – the very opposite of the distracting and distancing effects they have in more commercial contexts. Architects, new media artists, governments, and other stakeholders can capitalize on these emergent properties of architecture and urban space by creating dynamic, hybrid spaces that provide, collect, process, and display information and re-inscribe collective identity and play in public space.

With many issues surrounding our high-tech products including: 1) planned obsolescence, 2) a linear “cradle-to-grave” life cycle, 3) the accumulation of electronic waste (e-waste), and 4) consumer culture, there is potential in finding practical/creative solutions to reusing/repurposing our obsolete technology. These solutions not only benefit the consumer, but also the communities that are affected by the growing e-waste problem. These issues analyzed through a case study where an artist converts a typewriter into a USB printer using the design principles laid out in this paper, including the use of open-source hardware and software as well as incorporating adaptive design for future updates. While it is unfortunate that our massive accumulation of e-waste has turned this material into an unnatural, natural resource that can be foraged, there is potential for projects (both practical and creative).

Abstract

“… he ascended clad for venturing out, including his Ajex model Mountibank Lead Codpiece, to the covered roof pasture whereon his electric sheep ‘grazed’. Whereon it, sophisticated piece of hardware that it was, chomped away in simulated contentment, bamboozling the other tenants of the building. Of course, some of their animals undoubtedly consisted of electronic circuitry fakes, too; he had never nosed into the matter, any more then they, his neighbors, had pried into the real workings of his sheep. Nothing could be more impolite. To say, ‘Is your sheep genuine’ would be worse breech of manners than to inquire whether a citizen’s teeth, hair, or internal organs would test out authentic.”   _Dick 1977: 10-11)

Katherine Hayles’ definition of what it means to be posthuman, extends beyond the anthropocentrism often implied by discourse around techno-progressive and bioconservative approaches, to include a shift in assumptions about subjectivity – from the possessive (rational and objective) individualism of Modernist thought, to a subjectivity where there is ‘no difference or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.’ (Hayles 1999: 3)

These demarcations are made problematic and ambiguous in Phillip K. Dick’s speculative fiction Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick’s speculative fictions are not essentially about technology, as Bukatman notes, the target of Dick’s satire is the ‘mythifying uses to which [technology] is directed by forces of instrumental reason.’ (Bukatman 1993: 53) While Dick’s work has been noted as employing science fiction to explore speculative futures of capitalist production, technology and subjectivity, we are interested in the way Dick unsettles the ontological ground of what constitutes human. Specifically, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by asking whether humanity may be measured not by an ability to reason, but rather by an ability to empathise with and care for other species, and perhaps by way of extension, the environment in which we live.

This paper discusses the artwork e Menura Superba, and the influence of the broad question – what it means to be posthuman – through the making of this interactive sculpture, based on the form of the Australian lyrebird. Such a discussion necessarily requires consideration of the different approaches to animals and the environment, as seen through the lenses of our selected sources of inspiration, and in the context of information about the impacts of human influenced climate change.

Panel: Public Art of the Sustainable City

In­creas­ingly, artists and schol­ars seek (or are in­vited) to cre­ate di­a­logic works ca­pa­ble of cap­ti­vat­ing and ac­ti­vat­ing publics across dis­parate geo-po­lit­i­cal lo­ca­tions. How­ever, in as much as it de­pends on our abil­ity to trans­port/trans­late en­gage­ment strate­gies across bor­ders and be­tween cities, this type of work ne­ces­si­tates care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion of un­der­ly­ing as­sump­tions about the cul­tural po­lit­i­cal func­tions of con­tem­po­rary pub­lic art. In the con­text of new urban spaces and emerg­ing publics, these in­terur­ban col­lab­o­ra­tions chal­lenge the pri­macy of Eu­ro­pean or North Amer­i­can mod­els. In an at­tempt to lo­cate key ques­tions about the global mo­bil­ity of pub­lic art and pub­lic art dis­courses, this paper draws on the ex­am­ple of Maraya, an on­go­ing in­ter­na­tional art pro­ject that strives to link urban sites in Van­cou­ver, Canada, and Dubai, UAE. It be­gins from the no­tion that Van­cou­ver and Dubai are or­ga­nized around very dif­fer­ent no­tions of pub­lic space, based on dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal con­nec­tions to a Eu­ro­pean bour­geois pub­lic sphere. From here, my paper will set out to de­scribe key is­sues in­volved in think­ing or work­ing through in­ter­na­tional col­lab­o­ra­tions, specif­i­cally around is­sues of global mo­bil­i­ties, in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tice, and bridg­ing publics.

This talk presents a media art practice intent on revealing the flaws in modern attempts to map the world – accentuating the seams and ruptures which emerge during the capturing and processing of images by automated systems – and connecting them to the damage done to the Earth by historical and contemporary systems of land division and extraction. One way my practice tries to achieve this is by harvesting aerial and satellite imagery (from Google Earth and other popular mapping/imaging platforms), manipulating and projecting it as moving images in public space. Projection sites are chosen for their connection to the subject of each work, and the intention is that bringing the image back to spaces implicated in its extraction contributes in some way to the recognition of the damage done. The product is a phantasmagoric space neither merely material nor image, historical not contemporary. The talk presents past work as context: Transect, images harvested from the Greenwich Prime Meridian and projected at the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich, UK in 2014; parallel, recorded along the 49^th line of latitude, the border between the US and Canada, 2017; and Dominion, a meta-surveille of the impact on the prairie landscape of Canada’s 19^th-century Dominion Land Survey, projected at the Forks National Historical Site, Winnipeg, Canada, in 2018). A similar concern with impacts of technologies of labour and image on the human body motivates smaller works presented as part of the SNMAA-ISEA2022. Finally the talk introduces a work in progress (Net), which addresses routes of the international shipping industry and its impact on landscapes around the world. Taken together these works intend to raise the question: who might live in such spaces? What kind of a Possible world, and citizen, might they represent?

Keywords: Eastern Cultural Heritage, Traditional Chinese Landscape Painting, Video Painting, Digital Visualization Practice, Eastern Philosophy, Remediation, Remix, Cross-cultural Art.

The paper describes findings from a practice-based research project exploring cross-cultural influences between the West and the East by recreating the concept of Shan-Shui-Hua – the traditional Eastern landscape painting within the new genre of “Video-Painting” as wall-mounted flat screen video installation. It uses concepts of Art Appropriation, Remediation and Remix to re-investigate relationships of man and nature in Eastern traditional landscape art and philosophy and transposes the content to con-temporary global environmental issues and digital visualization technology. Using the “other” or the “unfamiliar” allows a fresh access and new interpretation of well known territory. As such cultural heritage is seen as an opportunity to explore new artistic boundaries and styles of representation within set commodities of contemporary (digital) image creation. Translating and adapting subtle aesthetics, rich metaphor and philosophy of Eastern traditions creates a powerful, subversive tool to address pressing ecological issues differently and allows alternative ways of seeing and thinking thereby detecting Western preoccupations.

As a meteor passes through the upper atmosphere, it produces an ionization trail that reflects radio waves. This reflection can be detected using a standard FM radio receiver with the aid of an antenna. By capturing the trace of meteors falling toward the Earth, the interactive sculpture Echos of Alakiwohoch reminds us of our celestial origins and the mutability of life our natal planet.

The internet’s materiality often lacks attention in recent controversies surrounding the environmental footprint of physical versus online activity. The operation of the internet presupposes a physical infrastructure that consumes natural resources and generates pollution. The obfuscation of the materiality of the internet conceals power asymmetries produced by the uneven access to the control of the internet’s material infrastructure.

This paper investigates the social and environmental impact of the internet’s materiality through the data-driven, media art installation eCO₂system. The installation consists of an aquarium which is connected to the Internet of Things and contains a small-scale ecosystem of fish. The technologically augmented aquarium retrieves data from a social media platform and detects digital activity promoting climate change awareness. The living conditions of the ecosystem deteriorate according to the number of awareness-promoting posts, highlighting the divergence between digital actions and physical consequences.

A complex network of more-than-human agents is articulated around the aquarium, including things, animals, humans, technologies, cultural structures, and other material and immaterial entities. The dynamics of this network impel us to rethink technology as part of a symbiotic whole of heterogeneous agents and to adopt less technocratic and more ethic criteria to redesign, reprogram, (re)use and recycle technologies.

ArTeC’s main goal is to facilitate the long-term cross-pollinisation of arts and sciences (particularly the humanities and social sciences) in education and research. ArTeC focuses primarily on topics and methods based on practice-based research and research-creation, as well as how creativity and art interact with the use of digital technologies, and what hybrid forms and theories this can bring to light.

For this short presentation, we propose to outline ArTeC’s main missions for its first five-year term (2018-2023) and well as goals and orientations for the second term (2023-2028). We hope that this paper allows for a conversation around the articulations and symbioses between research and creation that underpin the ISEA2023 symposium.

Stories that think and change; stories that deconstruct and distill; stories that make and provoke new stories, new pasts, presents, and potentials – all felt and thought, both affectively, and upon reflection.

Introduction
My new book, Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics (Dartmouth College Press, to be released 3 July 2018) reminds us that stories are simple, but precious – and, perhaps, a bit too rare in current critical discourses. And they are the “artful tactic” with which I propose we mostly orient ourselves towards concern with the world: with humans, nature, and politics, with how we move-think-feel and act. I give in-depth narratives around about ten artists and their artworks, over ten sections, like a gentle manifesto, moving between strong statement and rich description, thoughtful definitions and punctuated rhythms.

An “ecological approach” takes account of agents, processes, thoughts, and relations. Humans and non-humans, matter and concepts, things and not-yet things, politics, technology, economics, and industry, for example, are all actively shaped in, and as, their interrelation. And “aesthetics” is five things: what can be said, shown, experienced, or practiced; what is said, shown, experienced, or practiced; how it is said, shown, experienced, or practiced; why it is said, shown, experienced, or practiced; and, most importantly, the stakes therein. It is, overall, a style of, and orientation towards, thought, and thus action.

This paper investigates the presence and use of ecopornography in digital arts. Here, “ecopornography” or “ecoporn” is defined as the representation of nature intended to stimulate the viewer into a heightened state of arousal and excitement similar to that when exposed to pornography. There has been an exponential growth in ecopornographic content in contemporary society and culture due to the massive use of digital media and technologies. Ecoporn is now more common, accessible, and persuasive on both personal and societal levels than conventional porn.

This paper calls for an in-depth analysis of nature-related content across digital media and media arts. How can digital arts be more critical in exploring and exposing the effect of ecoporn on society? When does ecoporn’s hyperaestheticization of nature lead to an anaesthetic loss of sensation? A new taxonomy of ecoporn can help us reflect on these questions. Five major subcategories are proposed: a) Nature Pure, b) Nature Rough, c) Nature Hurt, d) Nature Saved, and e) Nature Fake. Finally, the paper introduces the “Ecoporn Personality Test” – a digital tool that allows users to explore their ecopornographic preferences and tendencies.

This article presents the creation process of Écosystème(s) : a self-interactive installation. This work is based on an ecosystemic approach to sound creation. Such an approach aims at creating aesthetic, technical and conceptual links between ecology and sound art practices. In the context of Écosystème(s), it is expressed through the sharing of a sound and sensitive experience of fragile living systems. This perspective considers and practices listening as a means of understanding and confronting the ecological crisis, while attempting to convey it through an interactive work. This approach proceeds through the use of algorithmic processes for the fabrication of artificial sound environments that integrate, cohabit and underline existing natural sound relationships, in a dialogue between artificial technologies and natural ecosystems, while setting up a context for attentive listening. A great deal of room is left to intuition and imagination in this creative process, through the desire to seek a balance between concept and expression of interconnected subjectivity.

How do ecotechnologies of practice actualize? This paper traces the material/theoretical operations of an ongoing long-term research-creation project concerned with changing climates. It mixes information of collectivities: trees, data visualizations, media arts, forest science research (Smartforests Canada, led at UQAM by Daniel Kneeshaw) and publics. An individuation of symbiotic modulations, the paper crafts a thinking-with Balsam Fir, Diana Beresford-Kroeger, cameras, Domingo Cisneros, Dendrometer, Erin Manning, Isabelle Stengers, Gilbert Simondon, Light Emitting Diodes, Numbers, Microphones, Recorders, Scaffolding, Sapflow, Sensings, Sensors, Speakers, Sugar Maple, Temperature, Yellow Birch.

The paper presents the concept of ecstatic space based on the author’s earlier practice-led research exploring a marriage between digital technologies and ecstatic technologies of kut, a Korean shamanic ritual exerting a significant influence on the culture, art, and psyche of Korea. Ecstatic space is inspired by kut; it is the immersive and transitional space where is being given the potential of atmospheric change by the kut performer’s imagination and ecstatic technologies. This paper initially offers an alternative perspective to understand techniques of ecstasy by highlighting “spatial ecstasy” of kut rather than “ecstatic trance” of shamans.

Subsequently, the paper examines how the ecstatic space of kut is conceptually connected to virtual space of digital practices, discovering similarities and differences between them. Shedding new light on ecstatic space, this will open the way for future development of ecstatic space in the contemporary milieu.

Up Data Solar is a self-sufficient server designed to extend the lifespan of solar panels, electric vehicle batteries and electronic chips. These components are recycled today when they could still be functional for many years. Entirely produced from upcycled components, Up Data Solar can host a website, store data locally or power a relay antenna.

EE – Experimental and Emerging Art Norway- is a publication that gives a rapid response to and visual overviews of important contributions to all what art can be. The magazine presents major contributions to the field of emerging aesthetics, showing the field of art in a constant flux, challenging the major market driven trends of our time. One of EE’s main purposes is to support the interesting, the subversive, the abject, the striking but also intriguing, wondrous and the beautiful in the ongoing human project of making art. EE’s format is multiple; part magazine, newszine, part website and it spans across several media formats. Often EE articles are more visual than textual, but online you will find additional background material such as original sound files, video, additional photos and other Zeitgeist documents to all our coverage. While the issues are printed, EE is also freely downloadable online as a PDF based magazine.

Efterklang focuses on the relationship between sound environments and the self. The visitor is invited to explore a physical space occupied by multiple virtual voices where their position within the space dramatically alters it’s acoustics, allowing them to have a self-directed experience of many acoustical environments and to reflect on how acoustics mediates their experience of the world around them. A cluster of proximity sensors in a small, subtle enclosure sits on the floor of the exhibition space and senses the locations of the visitors. This information is passed to a real-time acoustical simulation, bringing the listener and the virtual voices closer and further apart, with apparent spatial relationships ranging from a whisper directly next to the listener in a small closet to voices heard from a hundred meters away in an
impossibly large cathedral.

Efterklang is a lab in which listeners can seamlessly move through different environments, at each step experience a new relationship between subject and object as mediated by acoustical phenomena.

The EIDEA project evolved out of the movement sensing research conducted at Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies in the Arts. Described is a system that combines the emergent phenomena associated with artificial life and real-time local weather input to create an autonomous interactive installation. A multi-channel sound environment provides a direct link between the movement of the life forms in the artificial world and current local weather information. A visual mural is produced by the artificial life world representing a composite of the creatures movements and interactions. Current plans will link these elements enabling the viewer to interact directly with the aural and visual elements of the work.

The EIDEA installation is created to explore emergent phenomena commonly associated with artificial life systems by means of an interactive sound and image installation. The work occupies a space of approximately 20 feet square, completely enclosing viewers. It is possible to visually navigate through the artificial world and its associated soundscape or choose to “travel” through a three dimensional image of life form paths that trace the movement history of the cyber-entities over time. The A-life aspect of the work is created to explore the possible interactions between life forms in the artificial world and between external influences such as local weather and viewers. The local weather has a subtle influence on the life forms, affecting their on-going life processes, while current plans allow for the viewers to navigate through this artificial world by means of a movement-sensing system designed by Lovell and Mitchell. The life forms can be sensitized to the viewers presence, and ultimately fashion a response to the presence of people in their world. The work will be described in its four parts; the artificial life world itself, the sound generation mechanism, the weather station, and the role of the viewers or interactors.

Artist Statement

How working with (nomadic) dairy transporters in Nigeria results in the need for software that makes GPS data flexible.

To scale is not yet to edit. Editing begins when scaling can be balanced and adjusted to differed, chosen parts of data, to make pace for a choreography. This will give data an interval, a rhythm and a tone: in brief, a style.

As an artist I have been working with GPS1 since 2002 in a series of projects. My engagement with GPS data means that I am an artist working in the field of locative  media. As it is very difficult to find a solid definition for ‘locative media’, I borrow a description by Mark Tuters and Kazys Varnelis:

‘Broadly speaking, locative media projects can be categorized under one of two types of mapping, either annotative – virtually tagging the world – or phenomenological – tracing the action of the subject in the world.’

For me, my main interest has always been slightly different still. Although I do trace subjects in the world, my focus is to create new visualizations of these tracks and see what new kinds of experiences of space these visualizations bring about. The newness of the medium is very important to me.

High technology opens phantastic possibilities for art and artists. With old techniques artists using simple means may create great new works of art. My Solar Art -one of many possible uses of sunlight in art- intends to unite these two worlds: Hightech art and painting and sculpture.

The impact of electronic technology on the intellectual property rights of artists is currently the subject of worldwide debate. We are at an important crossroads in defining intellectual property rights that will have a direct impact on the way we create and disseminate electronic art in the future. This paper takes a look at legal precedents involving copyright ownership and shows how current copyright legislation may not adequately protect the intellectual property rights of artists working with electronic media.

This panel intends to discuss operational strategies for public and private exhibition spaces, proposed by artists, curators, professionals in expography and museology in the field of Brazilian Electronic & Digital Art, from early experiences to a contemporary perspective. It also aims to analyze and discuss museological strategies for electronic art exhibitions as well as for interdisciplinary exhibitions involving art, science and technology. In this discussion we question not only the innovative functions of these spaces for electronic/digital art, but their necessary functions as promoters of processes for preservation and archiving. The panel comes from broader discussions among artists and researchers, many responsible for curatorial and exhibition projects, from the second and third generation of Brazilian Electronic Art in Latin America.

Keywords: Brazilian Electronic Art, Expography, Museology, Pioneers, Archiving, Art Laboratories, Digital Art, Latin America.

This paper deals with the methodological and cognitive processes involved in how innovative ideas evolve in the human mind. It also addresses the principles and foundations of creating new ideas and the different phases of creative processes: participation, tendency, incubation, intuition, evaluation, actualization, communication, and participation. Also significant are the reactive, interactive, and emotional facets of the participation phase of the creation process. Hence, these aspects are analyzed in order to produce an in-depth reflection on the elicitation of emotions during the production processes of electronic artworks. Finally, the paper examines a number of techniques and resources used to elicit emotions in electronic artworks.

History has shown us the importance of experimental artistic practice in the development of media, including the role of the novel and poetry in the media of writing, and the role of auteur cinema and video art in the moving image, and, more broadly, the electronic arts in their widest acceptance

If we consider symbiosis as a metaphor to describe many types of association or cooperation in which the protagonists come from different sectors of activity, the history of digital 3D spaces is a “symbiotic form”. The interdependence of the components of a symbiosis can be negative (parasitism) or positive (beneficial to the components). The contribution of artists and designers to socio-technical innovations – both in the evolution of interaction modalities (HMI) and in the production of content – is essential to ensure that these do not lead to a negative symbiosis for users. If we extend to cultural practices, the question addressed in this panel is:how can cultural practices stimulate positive and sustainable uses of the future Metaverse?

Two researchers in art and design through practice invite the authors of the report of a national inter-ministerial mission on the development of metavers, to discuss this question.

It is a question of considering, in an interdisciplinary approach, the tracks, the actors, the dynamics, the organizations and the devices that can stimulate a symbiotic and positive development of metaverse.

Keywords: electronic music, archiving, preservation, complex objects.

Musical composers frequently make use of new technologies in instrumentation. Whilst orchestral traditions remain strong and the instruments viable, what of the works of composers of electronic music where the sound sources have fallen into disrepair, obsolescence, or modern technology has changed the sound so that it bears no relation to the original? Beyond collections of manuscripts and recordings, the practicalities of the re-performance of electronic music compositions have not been widely discussed, and no methodology for archiving the artefacts for re-performability exists. In time, as greater importance is placed on these works, the issue will become more difficult to retrospectively resolve.

ELEKTRA is a contemporary art organization based in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) that provides exposure for artists from all over the world and presents works that combine art and new technology to reflect a contemporary aesthetic of research and experimentation. Through events and activities, our organization offers ideal contexts for disseminating the work of artists, locally, nationally and internationally, as well as works by those who want to explore avenues of their practice. ELEKTRA provides exposure for hybrid, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary projects that add a technological dimension to contemporary art.

This paper will discuss the aims and outcomes of an arts and science research collaboration to design a multi-modal interactive media art work titled Elements. The Elements environment aims to aid clinicians rehabilitate upper-limb movement in patients with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) attending Epworth Hospital, Melbourne. TBI refers to a cerebral injury caused by external physical force. The physical trauma can lead to a variety of physical, cognitive, emotional and behavioral deficits for TBI patients. These four deficits can combine to create psychosocial problems that may have long lasting and devastating consequences for the victims and their families. The use of interactive screen based technology in movement rehabilitation presents a number of creative challenges, and may assist TBI patients to regain basic mobility skills through action and play.

With the emergence of mobile computing and Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs), digital environments are able to transcend the “flat world” of the computer display screen and become part of the user’s physical space. Our conceptual approach has blended (ecological) motor learning theory with an embodied view of interaction design to inform the way we conceive of the relationship between performer and workspace. By focusing on the patients perceived affordances for action and play our design seeks to provide an interaction aesthetic coupled to perception, participation, control and response as durable aspects of agency.

The Elements environment consists of a horizontal tabletop graphics display, a vision-based passive marker tracking system, and Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) as a means of integrating performance and play. The TUIs incorporate low cost sensor technology to track movement that in turn, mediates the form of interaction between performer and environment. Each TUI design provides tactility, texture, and audio visual feedback to entice patients to explore there own movement capabilities in a self directed fashion.

In this paper we present the sound installation Eleven Movements of the Cryoscape which was created for the new Kangiata Illorsua – Ilulissat Icefjord Centre in Greenland. The installation is a near real-time sonification of the movement and melting of the Inland Ice, consisting of an array of eleven speakers, each transmitting from a different location in Greenland.

This research investigates the intrinsic role of scenography as an integral part of large-scale multi-user and multi-touch environments. While Tangible Media started to break the grounds for the role of proprioception and affordance in interactive environments, large-scale interactive works and participative public art bring additional requirements towards the design of such interfaces. The authors have developed a series of related artworks that integrates the scenographical and architectural setting in the definition, comprehension and operation of the interface. By further analyzing these works, the aim is to address the following questions:

1. How can the scenographical and architectural settings provide affordances, i. e., from their impact on the body in space to their cultural icon?
2. Can the proprioception (hand-eye) be extended beyond the body scale in a large (or distant) environment?
3. What are the roles of the human visual field in understanding an interactive system especially in larger than body environments?

This research has derived works that shift the visual perception in different architectural settings and body-eye coordination’s:

1. an interactive floor (looking down, foot-eye)
2. a multi-touch table (looking near, hand-eye)
3. an interactive wall (looking horizontal, body-eye)
4. an interactive building façade (looking far, disembodied).

This paper discusses how a system comprised of simple tangible blocks can enable playful and creative experimentation with the concept of emergent behavior.

Introduction
Distributed systems and the emergent properties that can arise out of simple localized interactions have fascinated scientists and artists alike for the last century. They challenge the notions of control and creativity, producing outcomes that can be beautiful, engaging and surprising at the same time. Emergence has been central to fields such as artificial life and its artistic derivatives. It implies something novel and unanticipated, and as such can be thought of as the reward which draws the artist to explore this bottom-up approach to creation. Furthermore, systems based on emergence carry the promise to allow the creation of complex behaviour from simple elements. The notion of using emergence as a strategy to manage this complexity is very attractive in an era where technology is becoming ever more complicated.

In immersive virtual space, the subjectively-experienced body plays a central role, largely neglected due to cultural bias. In Osmose, a work-in-progress, Char Davies has developed an interactive aesthetic beyond conventional virtual reality whereby intuitive breathing and balance act as chiasmatic links between body and world, leading the “immersant” into a receptive state of being which profoundly affects experience of the work. The author will discuss the theory behind her approach, including insights from diving in deep oceanic space.

Keywords: Computer Art, >=4D (Either Greater or Equal to 4D), Experimental Art, University of Brasilia (Brazil)

This paper refers to the development of (Experimental) Computer Art in Brazil, during the period 2004-16, from a frame view of artists researchers involved with the commitment of producing Computer Art exhibits, mainly the annual series of exhibitions EmMeio – Art and Technology. These exhibitions address the organization and strengthening of different Computer Art groups around the country. We highlight the role of the Art Institute at University of Brasilia, pioneer in this research area, promoting spaces for discussions, courses, theoretical- practical methodologies and exhibitions. The art modalities shown use innovative devices, concepts, modes of manufacturing, organizing data and information deeply inter-mediated by computational technologies while integrated with Computer Science, Robotics, Neuroscience, Ecology, Mathematics and Physics, among others. It was possible to observe during this period how the diffusion of sensor technology, physical computing, 3D print and neuroart became more intensive on the artworks pointing out to an increasing and more pervasive use of computer technology in Art.

This project emerges form a series of reflections about the state and the potentials of the arts and their exhibition spaces in post-pandemic times. The pandemic of 2020-21 forced many galleries and museums to shut their doors for several months or forever. These closures have created a void in social gatherings and cultural events, urging artists and cultural workers to rethink ways of making, exhibiting and bringing their work to the general public. Now that the world slowly re-opens to social gatherings, we wonder whether we should re-invent the role of the gallery as an enclosed space alltogether, by freeing it from the constraints posed by its traditional spatial and cultural configuration (real and virtual),and redesigning it as a multipurpose mobile object in dialogue with the city and its human and non-human dwellers. This choice is in part inspired by the first artworks and specimens this gallery will carry: a project at the intersection of art and science exploring “new life forms,” that is, living and imagined organisms emerging from digital, laboratory, and environmental contexts. The mobile gallery then acquires a new meaning: it is not just a new safe exhibition space, but also a space where emergent life is both debated and created, as well as an emergent “life” on its own.

Digital space is an electronic medium that serves as an artificial environment for architectural work. At least two different architectural conceptualizations of this electronic world are available:
1. digital space is a studio for the development and testing of architectural products aimed at classical reality. Classical reality is understood as the natural and sociophysical world wherein we carry on our lives. In this interpretation, digital space depends on the rules and laws of the physical world and its value is tied to being a (representational) instrument for worry free experiments and simulations. Utilizing digital space as a studio continues the historical tradition of using depictions to design, describe, reflect, or document buildings aimed for classical reality.

2. digital space, a reality of representations, is also a virtual place with nature, functions, aesthetics, order, etc., not necessarily following or referring to classical reality. In this immaterial world, people may work, meet other people, seek entertainment, find and generate information, etc. According to this interpretation, architecture should play a major role in the conceptualization, organization, and design of such an alternative reality. In other words, digital space is an environment in its own right that has no other justification than offering alternative experiences, structures and events to those of classical reality.

In this presentation we will investigate the potential of architecture within a digital space understood in the last sense.

Artists who incorporate electronic technology and other new media into their work confront a redefinition of the art object and its place in society. This panel examines some of the fundamental assumptions about electronic art and its wider context, including changes in meaning and practice.

Moderator: Annette Weintraub (USA).
Participants : Simo Alitalo (Finland), Thomas W. Sherman (USA), Tapio Makela (Finland), Florent Aziosmanoff (France).

It has always been the case that artistic and cultural practices transform with new technologies. As technology constantly evolves, contemporary artistic practices have increasingly engaged with non-traditional media. Museums, galleries, and art institutions are adapting their approaches to the presentation, dissemination and preservation of new media art. While media artworks and exhibitions are ubiquitous nowadays, archiving plays an important role in preserving history and generating knowledge of art. What are the needs and challenges of developing a media art archive? How can art archives encourage interdisciplinary collaboration to facilitate contextualization, preservation and presentation of artworks?

As a media art archive based in Hong Kong since 2008, Videotage Media Art Collection(VMAC) has continued its development with the expansion of its collection of artworks from Hong Kong to China, Taiwan and Macau in recent years. Esteemed curators from nearby regions are invited to collaborate for the acquisition. Local researchers are invited to study and write about the VMAC archive, providing reflections and new perspectives in media art archiving. This panel brings together art professionals, researchers and scholars to share their collaboration experiences and look at the issues of archiving media art in Hong Kong and China, and beyond.

This section discusses the types of emerging narratives that appear in creative generative practices. This study illustrates various unique artistic methods from the world of digital art, computer games, film and interactive media that lead to new narrative divergences. These methods and poetics are analyzed in relationship to a computer bit, whose nature largely influences our creative expressions.

A bit becomes a unit or a term to metaphorically address and encompass the reduced and abstract form that is often present in generative practices. Our growing sensation and constant interaction with bits that are taking various forms lead to more and more reduced forms, structures, and minimalistic creative expressions. The generative aesthetics with their cold, synthetic and non-figurative forms enable new spaces for creation of unique sensual experiences that lead to narrative transformations.

Abstract
Art Center Nabi, opened in 2000 as the first media art center in Seoul, Korea, aims to act as an intermediary that transforms the cultural desires into vital activities. Our goal is formed around the idea of humanizing technology and we seek to integrate humanizing technology with human’s cultural life to open a new space for creative practices. This can be achieved only after the fruitful collaboration and understanding among science technology, humanities and arts. Through presenting our recent projects about robotics and art, Art Center Nabi will point out the possibility of human centered robotics.

Emotional Intelligence
Two mainstreams of development of robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Mechanical Intelligence, are intensively focused on technology itself and exclude humanity. Art Center Nabi believes that an attitude toward a human is crucial in any kind of technology development in the future. Therefore, we claim that Emotional Intelligence is the one we should focus on for the near future which human and robot will share the life together.

Recent Projects of Art Center Nabi
Art Center Nabi has focused on warm-hearted robots which can comfort human, and developed various creative projects over the past few years. 8 times of international Hackathon with different creators from Korea, China, Japan and Taiwan had been hosted such as H.E.ART BOT(Handcraft Electronics Art Bot) Hackathon in 2014 and E.I.(Emotional Intelligence) Hackathon in 2015.
Nabi also held a big international festival in 2015 where robots and human enjoyed each other by sharing their lives. Through international group exhibitions, hackathons, and performances, various kinds of companion robots, social robots, and musical robots had been represented.

Recent Projects of Art Center Nabi
Art Center Nabi runs a creative platform inside the museum, ‘E.I.Lab(Emotional Intelligence Lab)’ where artists, makers and engineers can develop their own idea to create artworks based on robotics.

Keywords: Data, Social Data, Data Visualisation, Data Art, London 2012, Olympics, Twitter.

In recent years we have moved from data scarcity to data abundance. As a response, a variety of methods have been adopted in art, design, business, science and government to understand and communicate meaning in data through visual form. emoto is one such project, it visualised the online audience response to a major global event, the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. emoto set out to both give expression to and augment online social phenomena, that are emergent and only recently made possible by access to huge real-time data streams. This report charts the development and release of the project, and positions it in relation to current debates on data and visualisation, for example, around the bias and accessibility of the data, and how knowledge practices are changing in an era of so-called ‘big data’.

Computational artworks develop very particular relationships with their readers. Being able to encode and enact complex and contingent behaviours, a computational artwork exists in a dual state between two layers that are inextricably connected, a computational subface that is often a black box which can only be peeked at through an analogue surface, that mediates but also isolates it. But the procedural layer of the subface can be unearthed through a process of virtuosic interpretation, through which readers are able to develop some empathy with the system and arrive at a theory of the system that ultimately allows the transferring of some of the artwork’s processes to human minds. This paper focuses on how this process is developed and how it is the basis for a unique type of aesthetic experience that leads computational media and art to involve readers in anamorphosis and in a dialectics of aporia and epiphany, that mirrors the superimposition of subface and surface, and from where narrative experiences emerge.

Keywords: Colour, RGB, YCbCr, Colour Vision, Technical Media, Trichromatic Theory, Standard Observer

Encoding schemes for producing, storing, and transmitting colour information in electronic media are based on a three-colour canon that originated in the 19th-century physiological studies of vision. During the 20th century this canon was first standardised and then implemented in technical media. Since then it has become ubiquitous for understanding and producing the sensation of colour. However, the precise technical operations to produce colours in electronic media has been usually overlooked in media history. This paper discusses how a certain interplay of scientific ideas, technical blueprints, and encoding specifications gave origin to the trichromatic theory and its implementation in electronic media. The first part of this paper happens in the scientific laboratories of the 18th and 19th centuries where the additive three- colour canon was set. The second part focuses on three implementations of this principle that have dominated electronic visual media ever since. These are: (i) the characterisation of a standard observer in the Colorimetric Resolution I by the Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage (CIE) in 1931, (ii) the implementation in of the NTSC color television during the 1940s and 1950s, and (iii) the ITU BT.601 recommendation for encoding digital video as a three-colour component signal from 1981.

Getting dressed is the most creative activity many of us pursue throughout our lives. Learning to dress in infancy provides primary experiences of color, shape, and symbolism in relation to our own bodies. Dressing has always been a hybrid, multi-determined, and socially embedded practice, but it now takes place within ever more technologically mediated cultural fields. Few studies have been made concerning the phenomenology of dressing, but studies of technology and embodiment abound. I will draw upon the latter and touch upon two manifestations of dressing in our hightech times: wearable technology art (WTA) and virtual self phenomena — avatars.

Elsewhere I have discussed the aesthetic and conceptual dimensions of dressing and its potential to stage discourse in the social sphere. I offered a diagram that plots variations in dress’s expressive formations. It was inspired by Gilles Lipovetsky’s notion of “fashion” (I call dressing) as a manifestation of media and information, and an essential toolset for individuals in postmodern societies. The upper part of the diagram represents wearable interventionist practices I call Critical Garment Discourse and it is there that WTA can be located.

I quit architecture. I also quit filmmaking. I quit video art, too. However, these indeterminate wanderings expanded my artistic field into intermedia, or art with no boundaries. Finally, I make intermedia with interactive technologies. I am creating interactive pieces to help visitors escape from a gallery or museum where they are captured. To achieve this goal, I explore to connect visitors’ isolated experiences in my project with their community. With simple cybernetic technologies, my project merges inside gallery with outside gallery. This ecological approach is a recurrent cliché in avant-garde art; however, it is still an unrealized dream for our society and us.

Project Description
Participatory art mainly deals with a social relationship. [1] Interactive art mostly focuses on emerging technology. For this reason, participatory art and interactive art have a concrete boundary as if each has a different genealogy, but that is not the case; both fields share the same origins. Endless Ripples explores a way to bridge the significant gap between them. To give viewers exciting experiences and an opportunity to contribute to society, interactive art Endless Ripples was created with the Max MSP Jitter and DMX technologies.[2]

Endless Ripples is a growing participatory pond. It consists of a huge amount of 7000k white LEDs under the tiled painting canvases and a disposable cup with some water in the middle of the pond, while advertisement sounds from Youtube and ambient noises from the EarthCam website Internet play in the background. When visitors come in the dark space, LEDs under the cup emit dim lights to attract them to throw their coin into the cup.

If they are successful, ambient noises disappear. Instead, they can see bright ripples through the canvases. The coins will be donated to the nearest public facilities from the exhibition. The coins outside the cup that they failed to put in will be used for growing and duplicating the project to provide more opportunities for audiences to take part in. Both outcomes will lead them to contribute to local areas.

Endless Ripples can be installed anywhere from a museum and a gallery to an arcade and outside of a building. It can be circulated or be permanently installed as it gradually grows. Endless Ripples explores how to coexist between art and life. The more Endless Ripples, the better the communities.

Location-specific art reveals hidden layers of a space by adding new scope enhancing the participant’s experience in the space. Sound of a specific site describes not only physical character of the space but also the culture that involves human interaction. Entanglement transfers the three-dimensional sound space, so participants at two locations can experience, interact with, and create a multi-layered socio-cultural scene of two sound spaces entangled together.

Entanglement uses a hyper-directional sound beam to draw a symbolic line between two distant locations. The sound field of each space pours into the other as if they are layered together in aural and physical space. When a participant in one space enters the sound beam, they hear an audio feed from the other space via a highly directional ultrasonic speaker array that forms a tight beam of sound that appears to come from the other site. When this beam is broken by a participant, a chaotic, processed version of the sound is played over loudspeakers heard over the entire space – as if breaking the beam caused it to ‘spill over’ into the room. Consequently an echo of this spill will be heard in the other space as well. With many participants in both locations, a carefully balanced feedback system is formed which is highly dependent on the movements of the individuals, showing the “entanglement” of the participant with their act of perception as well as the participants in the other space.

This project is a part of a research project focusing on creating hyper-directional sound beams to manipulate sound projection in an analogue way to light and applying it to media art projects. This paper/artist presentation describes Entanglement; our current enhanced location-specific telematic project, and other sound art projects.

IIn this paper I describe 3 different immersive field trips in nature resulting artworks and environmental appreciation. The first, it is an art residence I undergone in Norway, Sweden and Lithuania. The main subject of the call for this residency was “Cartographies of everyday life on the sea.” The second, it is an art residency I organized on a sailing boat with the theme “Experience the Sea.” The third, it is an artwork derived from different trips on nature. On the first, I focus on the process and intentions of being on that location. On the second, the focus is on the experience. And on the third, I talk about the outcome of different immersions in nature performed on recent years. They all have in common the urge– as an artist – to be in nature and produce something out of it. It can be a report, a note, a video, or a photograph, anything that connects me to nature, which can extend the feeling even when I’m not there anymore.

Keywords: Nature, Art Residency, Immersion, Environmental Aesthetics, Experience

Reading the Wrack Lines is an interdisciplinary environmental literacy and educational outreach project designed to engage the local community with innovative learning approaches focused on the reality and possibilities for change in our coastal environment. The project is framed by cross-cutting themes of diversity and inclusion, and includes partnerships with local institutions, environmental specialists, and underrepresented communities. Through a series of creative writing workshops and site visits, participants reflect on the changing environment and create poetic works for inclusion within two art works: a generative audio-video installation projected on a nearby lighthouse, and a laser-cut felt word-based floor sculpture that includes spoken word audio. The creative process and final artistic products of this project empower participants and articulates a vision for environmental change to the larger public.

HG Solomon discusses collaborative engineering and design projects focusing on human interaction with environmental data. These models playfully communicate ecological information, while relying on engineering and playful responsive media to convey streams of environmental data. The League of Imaginary Scientists’ projects span subjects from a balanced ecosystem to the survival status of near threatened jaguars.

Prosthetic tree limbs, human glaciers, and human sensory organs for perceiving data

Lucy HG Solomon from California State University, San Marcos and The League of Imaginary Scientists presents The Incredible Balancing Act, a series of art works that weigh the environmental balance of humanity through interactions with data and physical contraptions. In a world with compounded sets of information on complex environmental conditions, there is no common human
function for understanding that data. Evolution of human beings designed for adaptation to planetary conditions requires human sensory organs for the perception of that data. HG Solomon and her collaborators posit new approaches for perceiving ecological crises and the data that describes them.

How data melted my glacier…
In How Data Melted my Glacier, the League of Imaginary Scientists transforms global environmental loss with technological intermediaries and visual narrative. The collective investigates environmental and the concurrent data loss through mediation: a glacier’s data melts tangibly. The League of Imaginary Scientists anthropomorphizes data collected from global sea ice in
a memorial for lost ice in their work, Human Glacier, created with choreography collective, E.K.K.O, and Waterways project collaborators. With a human graph, the League makes glaciers relatable while linking a century of information on glacier loss to human bodies.

In another piece, Pianissimo 2.0, roly-polies play transitions in planetary surface temperatures over the last century on a miniature piano. The question remains: how do we perceive the vast amounts of environmental data that now constitutes the new information-based ecosystem of the Anthropocene? Environmental events small and large abound in the collective’s reflection on the need to develop a sensory organ for data perception. In a world in which a growing information ecology demands comprehension, the League of Imaginary Scientists maintains that, without the ability to perceive data, humanity itself is at a loss.

The effects of a hierarchical relationship of humans with non-humans are now more pronounced than ever. Anthropogenic ecological stressors, including high levels of carbon dioxide, water scarcity, habitat fragmentation have led to disruption of climate systems, in turn endangering many local and global species. ephemera, is an installation formed by nucleation of CO2 bubbles in water, representing animals from all continents and ecologies currently under threat as per the IUCN Red list. These self- assembling bubble pictures are in a homeostasis at the beginning of the installation and shrink each hour to eventually disappear in a few days. The tension between the present endangerment and the urgency of the future action, manifests in the shrinking of these bubbles, invoking unnatural ephemerality due to the human effect. The fauna pictures in this installation, composed of carbon dioxide bubbles, symbolize the transitoriness of now threatened species.

The presented work series is situated in the intersection of immersive formats of the audio-visual art and the emerging research area of immersive analytics. This series is critically motivated by the re-emergent and growing prominence of gambling factors in global economic activities – such as institutional promotion of increasingly complex investment products for masses, crypto-asset trading, online casinos, etc. Political philosopher Michael J. Sandel describes several last decades as a “drift from ‘market economy’ to becoming a ‘market society’”. Algorithmically manipulated financial trading is a prominent arena where algorithms merge with human emotions and value-seeking drives into a global hybrid sensorium.  As sociologist Georg Simmel had observed it in already in 1900: “Reality and value as mutually independent categories through which our conceptions become images of the world”. Mapping of the behaviour patterns in trader psychology has been an important aspect of the training in the trading process, besides the implementation and development of various mathematical models. It now appears, that value storage and trading infrastructure increasingly merge with methods of manipulation of human attention and emotions, and are mediated by computer networks, and increasingly – Machine Learning and AI. As an practical effort in artistic research in phenomenology and neuroaesthetics, this work proposes a set of parameters for simulated anisotropy, useful for designing the structure, notation, and physical, mathematical dimensions in the VR interface and environment.

This paper explores issues related to software that I have developed for personal use in my studio. The software, called Hodos, can generate paintings which bear an uncanny resemblance to work I did before becoming involved with computers.

First I will outline the features of the art concept which occupied the mature phases of my own work long before my involvement with electronics. Then we will focus on the essential features of the “artistic decision” procedures used in expressing the art concept.

Next we will review some of the salient features of the software which embodies these art form ideas. A review of several works generated by the software will show that they reflect essential characteristics of the earlier paintings.

Finally we will see that this view provides important considerations for the future of art:

First, this kind of software is a medium of a different “order” than any historical medium. Because such software embodies the procedures for artistic improvisation it can be used for innovative variation on the artist’s theme without the artist being present (Note 6). Although each work may be “one of a kind” it does belong to a family. We must ask whether, to what extent, and how the artist’s hand is present in the work or in a family of works. What can we say of the apparent feeling in the brush strokes?

Second, perhaps a more important consideration, is the ‘quantum leap’ in procedure or process. This new artistic process, while hardly the same, is remarkably analogous to the biological process of epigenesis. The software, Hodos, may be viewed as a genotype (gene) since it is the code for “how to make the work”. The software can make a “family” of works – with each work being unique (one of a kind, yet familial). The potential for crossing families of different artists opens new domains which includes the hybridization of form and, eventually, a genealogy of form.

These considerations open the door to a series of interesting questions on authorship, originality, the role of the individual and the art-making process.

Epilepsy is the most common chronic neurological disorder as there are around 40 different known kinds. All forms of Epilepsy are induced by a chemical imbalance, or a structural abnormality in the brain which couId be genetic, or caused by physical damage at one stage of someone’s life. These impairments can cause electrical malfunctions sparking off uncontrolled and excessive discharges that spread to other parts of the brain, leading to temporal lobe epilepsy seizures. When the whole brain or large parts of it become involved in a raging electrical storm of signals, the result is what is known as a tonic-clonic seizure. Both types of seizures trigger a range of symptoms, such as headaches, nausea, hallucinations, flashbacks, deja vu, emotional outbursts, lack of awareness, limb jerking and so on. They can make a person hear or see imaginary things, have strange feelings and engage in involuntary actions which often resemble the symptoms of a psychiatric disease. Crude sensations of smell and taste, epigastric sensations, rapid mood swings, chewing movements, lip-smacking, spitting, and other forms of uncoordinated movements are not unusual. As well, tonic-clonic seizures also induce aimless physical wandering, followed by periods of total loss of consciousness, convulsions and amongst other consequences, more or less severe falls. A large number of people diagnosed as epileptics experience some kind of personalized warning sign previous to a seizure known as an “aura”. Some don’t.

The difference between a temporal lobe epilepsy seizure and the beginning of a tonic clonic one can sometimes be minimal and difficult to notice, even for the person experiencing the seizure. All the sensations experienced in the context of temporal lobe epilepsy seizures can constitute the aura of a tonic clonic seizure. Epileptic fits am not thought to typically leave brain damage  but can definitely alter interrelating neuronal connections. Epileptic activities have a definite  physical, emotional and practical impact on the lives of people subject to epilepsy, as well on the lives of those surrounding them. Long term effects include loss of self confidence, loss of trust from other people, personality changes, multiple medication side effects, and so on. There are as many types of seizures as there are individuals living with epilepsy. For each person subject to some epileptic activity, no one seizure is the same as another: mental and physical environments always differ.

An error seems to be that which gets between the ideal being and the real being; the error appears to be a singularity, a Non-being that transforms and distorts the Being. Audiovisual techniques, technologies, devices and media try to suppress errors; however, an ideological and aesthetic possibility hides behind the use of errors. A failure in an apparatus program often sends back a faulty image or a sound which cannot be otherwise conceived. Limits are blurred, and we are faced with the naked truth, without attires or pretenses. We receive data, waves, and exposed information according to an artificial mechanism which constantly defines itself in its errors. This is what makes an error unique, revolutionary and beautiful, and there lies its value.

A short circuit in an appliance builds a new and unpredictable world that is embraced by the artistic field as one more aesthetic element.

The Laboratoire Modulaire is a place – at the ésam Caen/Cherbourg – of artistic and theoretical experimentation dedicated to the study and development of artistic practices in digital spaces (physical and/or virtual). This talk will give the occasion to present the activities of this artistic research lab

Espace vert is an installation-workshop that develops as it is presented and participated in. In a space resembling a chemistry laboratory, entirely lit with green light at 550 nanometers, participants are invited to experience the extraction process, crushing with a pestle, decantation with alcohol, filtration, evaporation, all in order to create the chlorophyll ink of a plant that they will have previously picked in the area. Under this green light, the participants create a set of botanical drawings of each plant, using the chlorophyll extracted from the plant itself as the only pigment. This green dye decomposes under white light, as chlorophyll is photosensitive to red and blue light. Only green light can preserve its color. A work on the nomenclature of colors is carried out collectively and the colors are listed. The participants are asked to share their personal connection to plants around a ‘chat table’. This installation on the vulnerability of plants aims to provide an immersive space in which to come up with new narratives on the common imagination and trans-species relations, as well as relocating human-plant encounters to this new, green-lit environment, where memories can be shared, and new experiences had.

A series of projects on stroboscopic light emissions has been installed by Arcangel Constantini, one of the frontline electronic artists in Mexico. His works, especially the Espherica01, raise interesting questions on how light-invasive media impacts our understanding of the behavior of the water molecule, and in the process help visualize the origins of life in a supposedly prespacetime environment.

The Computer Arts Archive is a not-for-profit company that collects, exhibits and promotes computer arts for the benefit of artists, audiences, curators, educators and researchers. We collaborate with other collections, museums and galleries to explore the impact of digital culture and ensure that computer art is recognised as a significant contemporary art form with a rich and diverse history. In particular, we work closely with the Computer Arts Society, a member-based organization founded in 1968.

Keywords: Artistic Medium, Institution, Art, Discoursive Territory, Performative Act, Artistic Strategy, Processuality, Experimentation, Dispositive

When realising themselves as dispostifs, no matter whether they extend into a physical or nonphysical dimension, artistic works are motivated by urgency.
The engagement of artists with and within institutions increased within the last century, yet they may well not only be applicants or founders of institutional formats, but utilise these formats and the processes establishing them as an artistic strategy, creating a dispostif to meet an urgency framed by a specific historical context. This paper discusses the properties of institutions, which are indeed exemplary for dispositifs and are permitting their appliance as artistic media.

Islamic Art is of a sacred nature. The language of the Koran is omnipresent in the Islamic world and determines subsequently the types and measurements of art. The most profound relationship between the Koran and Islamic art is of transcendental nature: it is reflected not in the form of the Koran, but in it’s HAQIQAH: its essence without form is more specifically found in the concept of TAWHID, the Unity or the One, with its infinite contemplative implications. Islamic art is essentially the projection in the visual world of certain dimensions of the Divine Unity.

To summarize the essential characteristics of Islamic thought, we find that the muslim quest of the ultimate truth implies at once an awareness of the world of  phenomena (the importance of science), but after this step we pass from the profane to the sacred. The entire Islamic theory of knowledge reposes on esoteric wisdom.  The principal objective of the Koran, then, is to awaken in man the ultimate consciousness of his multiple relationships with God and the Universe. Science is practiced in order to decode the laws and mechanisms of the cosmos and reflect these qualities into Being capable of achieving Godhood, since he is at the image of God and created in His Image.

To express the (Unity of Being, Unity of Existence, the muslim artist has 3 tools: geometry that manifests unity in the spatial order, rythm that manifests in the temporal order and light. There is no better symbol of the Divine Unity than light. Thus, the aim of Islamic art is to transform matter into a vibration of light. The contemporary expansion of technology, misunderstood and confused with science, has become a synonym for alienation, specialization, and division of knowledge. Nonetheless, the end of this century seems to bring together all the conditions for the development and generalization of previously inconceivable means of the performing of reality, of  methods of formalization and modelization supported by important progress in mathematics, the technology of electronics, and extremely powerful methods of calculation and simulation.

Today’s physics inform us that our environment is a complex of frequencies and angles; we live in a universe of multidimensional frequency-realms. Sight, sound, touch, tornados, nova, rocks, mosquitos and dolphins are all frequencies of varying levels of complexity.

It is from this macroscopic and infra-atomic platform that electronic art must elaborate its vision, build up its knowledge, establish systems, interact with scientific and human experience; in short, it must master the limits of universal knowledge before it establishes the models that transcend it.

In recent decades, new media art archives have multiplied and diversified across digital networks and online platforms, contributing to the creation of instant and unruly archives that often emerge in unforeseen and involuntarily ways. Concomitantly, our relationships with archival documents, new media, art institutions, and the historical, social, and political realities they pertain to have changed. Based on case studies discussed in previous panels, this roundtable addresses participants, first and foremost, as viewers themselves to think about how visual and archival literacy can be disseminated in order to respond to this unprecedented proliferation of new media art archives in more critical and engaged ways. Beyond questions of authorship, ownership, copyright, and consent, we will address issues around responsibility, authority, dignity, colonialism, and care to draw out the differences between performing and practicing ethics in and of new media art archives. Encouraging self-critical and self-reflexive perspectives, this roundtable invites users, artists, curators, and scholars to confront the complex and often ambiguous ethics vis-à-vis the subjects of new media art archives and to recognise our agency as well as complicity in ethical transgressions as equally responsible viewers and listeners.

Artificial Life has been enthusiastically adopted by artists and scientists alike, each rushing towards their own interpretation of “life-as-it-could-be”. Notions of machine intelligence, artificial consciousness and digital nature are popular speculations in the new vocabulary. There is something nihilistic, something strangely familiar/familiarly strange, something “more than us” about the creations of such techniques. Are these aesthetic chimeras essentially an example of our dexterity at image creation, rather than an expanded definition of life? The “post-human” phantoms of Artificial Life will be more than we can imagine, but will they ever be more than us?

The École universitaire de recherche (EUR) ArTeC is a consortium of fourteen French institutions including universities, grandes écoles, museums, and archives. Ar-TeC was established in 2018 at the initiative of universi-ties Paris 8, Nanterre, and Paris Lumière with the inten-tion to consolidate a long-term project on art and science for education and research. In this presentation we high-light some milestones over the last three years of devel-opment. Moreover, special attention will be given to the importance of ArTeC in the development of art-science and humanities-technologies projects. One of the pro-jects that will be showcased is HOM – Hydrology of Me-dia which aims at establishing connections at the cross-ing-boundaries between several disciplines and practices. We also discuss the role of ArTeC as an organizing part-ner of ISEA 2023 ,that will take place in Paris, France.

The École universitaire de recherche (EUR) ArTeC is a consortium of fourteen French institutions including universities, art schools, museums, and archives. ArTeC (which stands for Arts, Technologies, numérique, médiations humaines et Création) was established in 2018 at the initiative of Paris 8, Nanterre and Paris Lumière with the intention to consolidate a long-term project inter-pollinating arts and sciences for education and research. While the multi- and interdisciplinary approaches are fundamental for us, we aim at focusing on art and creativity as the entry points to studies and practices that proliferate with the use of digital technologies. In this institutional presentation we will describe the main aspects of ArTeC and a brief overview of an ongoing project that reunites several international teams to reflect on environment-related issues.

SHARE! brings together established key European media art institutions to develop embedded commissions in communities across Europe that work with, and for, audiences. These audiences will be targeted using segmentation data from each partner, to enable deep engagement with harder-to-reach groups. The artists (who will be chosen for their skills within digital and new media arts) will develop innovative commissions that will develop artistic digital capacity across the continent, resulting in extensive peer learning between arts professionals and creatives, transnationally. SHARE! incorporates partners of differing sizes and specialist areas to ensure that best practice is developed (and disseminated), and in doing so upskill the sector internationally. SHARE! has carefully designed programmes to create innovative art commissions, which are embedded within transnational European contexts. These programmes meet the three key Creative Europe Programme Priorities of: audience development, transnational mobility and digitisation.

Legacy has been key to the success of EMAN, and SHARE! offers a chance to widen the benefits and learning from these previous projects in a structured and meaningful way. Artists, arts professionals, academics, existing arts audiences and underrepresented communities need spaces to collaborate and test new models. The digital shift has offered new opportunities to connect, consume and disseminate; SHARE! places co-creation as the key driver to empowering people across the continent and beyond to do this.

EMAP manager Peter Zorn from the werkleitz Centre for Media Art in Halle (DE) will introduce the European Media Art Platform EXPANDED and its conditions for media artists and institutions interested in a partnership and briefly present some commissioned artworks from the former programme EMAP 2018-21.

The European Media Art Platform (EMAP) was established in 2018 with the support of Creative Europe. 11 leading European media art organizations and festivals formed the platform to support media artists within a two months intercultural residency production ranging from media installations, virtual reality, robotics, AI and Bio Art, amongst others, to present and promote their works in group shows and as well to the 80 partner organizations which support and collaborate with EMAP to showcase the EMAP productions. Selected via open calls, the art projects deal with the most urgent challenges of our time, including climate change, environmental degradation, social inequalities, inclusion or digital surveillance. Artists bring these issues to the public and develop alternative ideas.

Continuing and developing their 2018 successfully established brand which builds upon the legacy of the European Media Artists in Residence Exchange established 1995, werkleitz and its members seek to expand both the platform and its activities to host and produce more artists, and to also create a major international platform to promote the artists’ productions and to foster knowledge transfer between artists and institutions, not only from Europe but across the world. 15 renowned institutions will host 45 media art residencies for new innovative collaborative productions in the field of art, digital media, technology, and science from 2022 until 2024. In addition, 30 mobility grants will be awarded to partner institutions aiming to present an EMAP work and 14 capacity building workshops will be offered by the members online.

Next to the challenge of artistic production with cutting edge technologies EMAP/EMARE is based on intercultural knowledge transfer which involves experts and specialists of diverse disciplines and the access to the facilities, labs and studios of the host organization.
There is a special focus on art & science projects which reflect upon the effects of digital technologies on humans and nature. The works tour different members festivals and are promoted to museums, galleries, festivals and other institutions worldwide.

“Evanescent records” is a 10 minute talk about an artistic research project on obsolete sound recording devices through the personal archive of musician Victor Nubla. It reflects on artistic research methodologies and embodied approaches to the idea of archive.

Everyday Voices and Voids is an on-going interdisciplinary artistic research project, between interaction design, digital art and percussion, that utilizes voice assistant interaction data as expressive material for the creation of performative artefacts and embodied experiments.

Triana will describe how she uses her creative process to penetrate intangible aspects of nature, in search of a deeper understanding of how nature’s traits and behaviors are linked to the very existence and development of music and poetic expression.

Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old woman who went missing and got tragically murdered during her walk home, sparked an international conversation about women’s safety in early 2021. It is one thing to discuss such a tragic and unfortunately common occurrence, yet it is even more harrowing to experience it for yourself. A Walk Alone is a virtual reality experience that simulates what it feels like for women to walk alone at night. The experience is centered around a linear story involving the user in first person point-of-view navigating a night-city environment with eerie sound design, immersive visuals, and dim street lighting.

Keywords: Anthropocentric Design, Motion Capture, Computational Design Thinking, Morphogenesis, Architecture

Traditionally architecture has employed a limited oeuvre of drawings and two-dimensional representations to communicate what a design is. Sketches have served as a means to share preliminary ideas. The development of a project then resorts to orthographic projections that include scaled versions of the plans, sections and elevations. Axonometric, isometric and perspective drawings are also commonly utilized. Computers were adopted by architects at the end of the twentieth century to aid in the creation of these drawings. The desktop computer is still predominantly used for computer aided drawing (computerization which is representational) and to improve efficiency. However, this posture undermines the use of computation (algorithmic processes that require the definition of variables and actions) which is laden with potential for much more powerful operations that may deduce fitness and effectiveness which help to achieve greater levels of performance. “Systematic, adaptive variation, continuous differentiation, and dynamic, parametric figuration concerns all design tasks from urbanism to the level of tectonic detail.” (Schumacher, 2008) This shift towards computational design thinking is occurring and requires designers to shift the focus of design operations towards iterative processes. Furthermore, morphogenetic design processes, inspired be Goethe’s work on natural morphology, mark a turn from the predetermined end-product of form towards formation. On one level biology has inspired designers towards an evolutionary paradigm that seeks emergence order from chaos. (Frazer 1995, Holland 2000). At another level, design inspired by nature and biomimetic practices have led to a questioning of the degree to which an architect can engage with living matter. This paper highlights some of this development in relation to science (biology) and visualization. The text is illustrated with the work of the author and his students.

Poster Statement

EXODUS was a virtual tele-performance whose starting point lied in the Israeli desert of Negev. I spent the five days of Ars Electronica 1995 (June 20-25) in the desert, and each day I followed the biblical trail of the prophet Moses. Included in my equipment I had a portable GPS (Global PositioningSystem) which was linked to a modem and a cellular phone This equipment made it possible for World Wade Web users to follow my movements in real time The GPS picked up data from several navigational satellites and sent it to the nearest Internet server via cellular phone. Many digital desert landscapes were stored in the Internet server and can still be accessed through the WWW When Moses led his people out of slavery, nobody sensed what a radical effect this event would have on the development of human history. Man with his new consciousness was transformed into a new species both through his experience of liberation and through his acceptance of the Ten Commandments. I want to use this important event in mankind’s history as a metaphor for the newly developing man at the end of the twentieth century. Mankind’s emigration into the virtual net and the liberation from time and space associated therewith changes our consciousness just like the experience of presence in absence. The new ubiquity, not only passive but also active, creates the ‘Information Man’. The philosopher Vilem Flusser said in relation to this that materialized terms like ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ’identity’, ‘I’, or ‘self’ would have to be reconsidered. My desert experience put me in a new relationship with reality both through my isolation from the ‘flow of information’ and through the awareness that the outside world was ever-present through the Net and could register my isolation. Maybe the ‘omnipresence of God’ IS nothing other than the experience of the individual with the more highly developed consciousness of society. The novelist Stanislav Lem. in his theo-fiction novel Solaris, described this as the Oceanic Consciousness. So it seems that the technology of the Net helps man to develop a new impression of reality that will have both sociological as well as political consequences.

Expanded Animation is an annual series of events at the media festival Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, organized by the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg Campus (FHOÖ) and Ars Electronica, in collaboration with the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham (UCA). Based on earlier discussions at the festival and in conjunction with the Prix Ars Electronica’s category Computer Animation, the events address computer animation in the context of media art and serve as a hybrid between practice and theory. Expanded Animation features talks, panel discussions, workshops, and artist presentations at various venues (i.e., museum, university, festival, cinema). In 2020, the one-day symposium Synaesthetic Syntax was first included as part of Expanded Animation.

Since then, it has developed into an active platform for international discussion regarding the complex relationships between sensory perception and expanded animation. This paper is a proposal to present Synaesthetic Syntax, its archive, the collaborators, and the upcoming initiatives (events and publication).

The work presented here is a tribute to Hélio Oiticica’s radical series of red and yellow ‘Spatial Relief’ (1960) dialoguing with Moholy-Nag’s attempts to create sculptures that would inhabit  space without a support. Exploring the concept of ‘expanded cinema’ (specifically the idea of ‘Cybernetic Cinema’), in ‘Expanded Relief: Holographic Meditations’ (2018), the illusion of tridimensionality generated by optical physics, in a configuration similar to the Pepper’s Ghost technique, expands the algorithmic images produced in processing. The red color subtle  differentiations in the illusionary volumes, the geometric irregularity and variation, are resultants from movements and superpositions of shapes algorithmically conceived and animated. The installation is an invitation to meditate on the subtle existence of the image and the role of the observation in creating reality

In the presentation entitled “Expanding Net Art to Mobile Art ” I will explore the relationship between net art and mobile apps as both a means to an end and as the finished product. This presentation will include a discussion of the tablet (iPad) as a creative/artistic/poetic medium. I will touch on an exhibition I curated entitled “Poetic Codings” as in the exhibition I brought together the work of eight artists who are making apps as art. These include: Scott Snibbe, Erik Loyer, Lia, Rafael Rozendaal, John Baldessari, Jeremy Rotsztain, Jason Lewis and myself. Poetic Codings was one of the first exhibitions to juxtapose a table with iPads loaded with interactive artworks and interactive installations/projections. While some of the apps in the exhibition are not text based they all take advantage of the narrative opportunities of the app interface, scrolling, tapping, pinching as a way to unfold layers of content. In this presentation I will touch on apps that are content generators like “Visual Poetry” and discuss how those differ from apps intended to be finished artworks. Embedded within this talk will be the relationship between the web and an app.
The second part of this presentation will focus on my net art, apps and interactive installations and the difference between those experiences. The projects I will discuss include my latest interactive installation “Time Jitters,” my web projects “Spine Sonnet” and “Without A Trace,” and my mobile apps “Time Jitters,” “Episodic,” “4 Square,” “Urban Rhythms” and “Spine Sonnet.”
“Spine Sonnet” began a website that randomly juxtaposes 14 books from my library. Each time the page is refreshed a new stack of 14 books is created. As the titles are read they create a poem. I thought this project would work nicely as an iPhone app and transformed it into my first app also entitled “Spine Sonnet.” “Spine Sonnet” (free in the app store) is an automatic poem generator in the tradition of found poetry that randomly composes 14 line sonnets derived from an archive of over 2500 art and architectural theory and criticism book titles. “4 Square” is a project that divides the screen into 4 equal squares. Upon a tap the elements change, and with a swipe they can be repositioned. The elements in “4 Square” are the texts from a comic strip, the 256 web colors, pen and ink drawings and digital collages that reduce news images to grids of pixels. It is a modification of the website “Without A Trace” for this new platform. Both Spine Sonnet and 4 Square also have a parallel website. These apps explore the medium in creative and innovative ways and are designed to be poetic meditations that engage with ideas of remix culture, mash-up and appropriation. Lastly I will discuss my latest app “Time Jitters” and its relationship to a similarly named interactive installation presented at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC in January 2014 and a 40 page artists book. In this app twelve short video clips can be scaled and repositioned making new and different narratives from the fragments. “Time Jitters” is my first app to include sound as it repurposed some of the sounds created for the installation.
In my work I explore how a viewer can choreograph their own experience and how that experience differs from hand held to immersive media.

As an object at the boundary between the virtual and physical worlds, the screen exists both as a displayer and a thing displayed, simultaneously functioning as a mediator. The screen’s virtual imagery produces a feeling of immersion in viewers, yet at the same time the materiality of the screen produces a sense of rejection from their complete involvement in the virtual world. Thus, the experience of the screen is an oscillation between these boundaries.

By deconstructing and re-combining its separate existential categories, my screen-based artworks have created two kinds of screen experiences. The first is three-dimensional screens-3D structures with projected video images-which create a 3D space that invites viewers to physically enter into and be immersed in the virtual experience. The second is movable screens, which explore the possibility for the screen itself to become the physical device affording interaction between the screen artifact and the viewer. Physical actions by the interactors and real-world physics affect the virtual imagery, thereby creating a corresponding relationship between the real and virtual worlds. For example, in the tilt-able screen, projected virtual imagery on a horizontal surface moves as the viewer tilts the screen in different directions. Similarly, in spinning screens viewers spin the screen to make a virtual dancer in the screen spin as well. Both 3D screens and movable screens deal with the relationship between recorded time and real time, and the interaction between the past and present, which are also created by the boundary of the screen. In both works, the screen functions as a medium that connects the physical world in which viewers are located to the virtual space where images and illusions are located. They cross over the doubled boundary in different ways, but always with the screen at the center.

Experimenta is Australia’s leading contemporary arts organisa-tion dedicated to commissioning, exhibiting and promoting art driven by technology. Since its inception in 1986, Experimenta has developed a worldwide reputation for fostering creativity that extends the aesthetic, conceptual and experiential potential of new art forms. Experimenta showcases dynamic contemporary artworks at the nexus of art with digital media, science and tech-nology, and design. Melbourne based, with national and global reach, Experimenta supports Australian artists through regular touring exhibitions and major multi-artform projects. These exhi-bitions and projects present artists working with technology in unexpected and unconventional ways, creating artworks that are daring, ambitious, interactive and often remarkable. In September 2020 Experimenta will present its most ambitious exhibition theme to date: Life Forms. Experimenta Life Forms will show-case more than 20 leading contemporary Australian and Interna-tional artists whose work is about life as we know it, or indeed, as we don’t know it.

Experimenta is Australia’s leading contemporary arts organisation dedicated to commissioning, exhibiting and promoting art driven by technology. Since its inception in 1986, Experimenta has developed a worldwide reputation for fostering creativity that extends the aesthetic, conceptual and experiential potential of new art forms. Experimenta showcases dynamic contemporary artworks at the nexus of art with digital media, science and technology, and design. Melbourne based, with national and global reach, Experimenta supports Australian artists through regular touring exhibitions and major multi-artform projects. These exhibitions and projects present artists working with technology in unexpected and unconventional ways, creating artworks that are daring, ambitious, interactive and often remarkable. These artworks raise questions about the present and the past and new ways of viewing the world around us. They also provide a glimpse into possible futures. In 2020, Experimenta explores it’s most ambitious exhibition theme to date: Life Forms. Experimenta Life Forms will present more than 20 leading contemporary Australian and International artists whose work is about life as we know it, or indeed, as we don’t know it.

This paper seeks to investigate the resurgence of experimental animation in terms of its  contemporary redefinition as an expanded and hybrid form of moving image practice, one that  moves beyond conventional reception, modes and sites of display and into the realm of new media art. Indeed while experimental animation is enjoying a revival in the animation industry and various film platforms, it is at the same time emerging as an expressive medium within new media art practice. This is partly due to the current dominance of moving practices within visual culture but can also be attributed to its innate interdisciplinary potential. Wells and Hardstaff (2008) acknowledge that a hybrid approach has always been present in experimental animation, but they argue that the digital era has brought this all-embracing characteristic of the genre to the fore because the digital revolution has provided a platform with seemingly endless creative potential (Wells & Hardstaff 2008: 7, 15)

The paper intends to present a unique example of digital art archiving, the experimental website of Artpool Art Research Center, an underground art archive founded in 1979 in Budapest, Hungary. The website created by one of the founders, artist György Galántai can be considered both as the extension of the physical space of the archive, and as a web-based multimedia artwork to be archived. Artpool is known as one of the largest art archives of non-official art in the East-Central European region, with a focus on experimental mediums like mail art, artistamp, artist books, visual poetry, sound poetry, installation, or performance. Artpool.hu developed between 1995 and 2020 not only functions as a digital archive of the underground art scene of the region but also serves as an example of the experimental use of the web in the nineties, which was characterized by the positive vibes around the new political conditions in Europe and the prospect of a global network, the Internet. The underground status of Artpool has been challenged by recent years’ institutional transformation, becoming the department of the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest in 2015, also affecting Artpool’s digital archival strategies and online presence.

In this paper we use developments in the history of science to demonstrate the significance of experimental cultures and epistemic spaces within artistic research as an experimental system. We propose that ‘artistic products’ are process artefacts, which are of epistemic nature (epistemic-aesthetic things). We suggest that artistic research provides a unique opportunity to integrate diverse epistemic practices that currently exist outside traditional institutional frameworks to develop new hypotheses-generating experimental cultures.

ntroducing: A Multimedia Performance About Symbiosis
Song Cycle for Symbionts is an audiovisual composition for processed voice, analog electronics, and improvising ensemble. The evening-length piece explores sonic collaboration through the trope of biological symbiosis. Earth’s varied ecosystems involve complex relationships between myriad species. Often the mutual reliance of these organisms means that, while humans may consider them as separately, they cannot in fact exist without each other. Symbionts include iconic such pairs as the anemone and the clownfish. Such organisms range from the exotic (the leafcutter ant and the basidiomycete fungi it cultivates) to the mundane (homo sapiens and our life-supporting intestinal microbiota).

ABSTRACT

The Experimental Television Center loft dwells in a studio in Owego, New York, surrounded by vibrating monitors, pulsing LEDs, digital potentiometers.Through anecdotes and observations I will discuss the history, theory, and operational procedures of the Experimental Television Center, showing how different artists fuse concept and process using the unique prototype, hybrid, and conventional systems available there.

Sitting in the Experimental Television Center loft studio in Owego, New York, surrounded by vibrating monitors, pulsing LEDs, digital potentiameters. Outside the window, the river flows wide and deep, its movement barely perceptible; and outside the other window, the main street of this quaint, mountain village is quiet now, at night. I play the images through the sequencers, slightly realligning the start points. As they begin to weave I tune the voltage controls, breathing their frequency and intensity, until the ebb and flow of color and light match my own patterns of inhale-exhale. Suddenly a bat appears and swoops toward a screen, almost crashes, blinded by the unnatural light. It swirls high and low around me. I know it’s shrieking, my unconscious feels what my ears can’t hear. It’s joined by another, I drown the loft with lights; they disappear back into the wall. I’m making a tape called “Crazy Dog.” The images were recorded without looking through the camera, now these analog and digital processing systems are free to collage and abstract than further. I drive the decks and software, shift gears, steer loosely to allow accidents. This is a tape created after visiting Auschwitz; a hysterical wail about destruction and despair. I turn off the lights, but the panic remains.

Though they are segregated within the walls of academia, both science and art are rooted in our innate sense of imagination and wonder, and an impulse to explore. Yet, both the scientist and artist are defined by what they make, both fecund in new ways of creating and conceiving of knowledge through the application of imagination. It is incumbent upon contemporary practitioners to unlace the metaphorical corset that has bound us since the Industrial Revolution, when specialisation began to take precedence over interdisciplinarity, manufacturing became the dominant mode of making, and procedural efficiency and cost valued higher than artisanry and originality.
In my hybrid art-science practise as an independent researcher (biohacker) with my own home laboratory since 2009, I pursue the vestiges of that evolutionary schism that set apart our ancestors from that of the higher apes. There is a seemingly profound element to this endeavor—that the subject (a human being) is able to analyse the very matter (proteins) that makes it possible in the first place. My artwork utilizes this data to capture the beauty, dynamism and profoundly inspiring material this project examines. I have called this project The Matter of Humanness, and have thus far experimented with incorporating this data into 2D and 3D (holographic) artwork.
In my presentation, I wish to proffer my experience working as an independent researcher (biohacker), suggest that art-science hybridity is imperative to the future of creative practice, and scientific experimentation as a form of performance.

A study of the physiology of visual perception, in relation to the act of drawing in electronically generated programmes. How this enables a better understanding of: – Still images: powerful visual tools offering a unique digital aesthetic experience, especially when seen in series – the Artist’s Schema: illusions and delusions; how misconceptions arise – Krauss’s graph fields and Lacan’s L Schema; non grounds and objects within – Moving cast shadows, Velocity gradients and relative depth perception, and Perceptual anomalies – Gibsonian and constructivist theories of visual perception, in particular the optic flow of changing visual patterns across the retina, and how the encodement of these patterns can hold sufficient congruent forms Ritualistic space, within a computer drawing, becomes a liquious aesthetic image, moving into the realms that tend towards music. This concept is Anti-cubic, exploding drawn space outward into time.

Inspired by bathymetric archives from the Atlantic Ocean, related to telegraphy, the doctoral research-creation Exploration.135 is interested in the relationships between the history of telecommunications, marine geosciences and terrestrial imagery with visual and media arts. Articulating from the current undersea infrastruc-ture of the Internet, this project interrogates our technological and environmental relationship to the world. How has the ocean become a conductive medium for this interconnectivity? How does it reveal a phenomenon of perceptual and infrastructural invisibility of these relationships? Based on the creation process of this research, and the analysis of the installation Transatlantic Visions, realized within the framework of this project, I will present an exploratory narrative of the symbiotic relationship between the environment and perception, the circulation of digital data, topography and oceanic flows, between undersea infrastructures and those of vision in orbit, the geological and technological scales, the ecosystemic interconnections between the cables, the climate and marine microfossils.

Since the invention of cinematography experimental cinema has undergone continual advances in both technology, aesthetics, and content. With the development of digital interactive technologies, these conventions are being challenged and reshaped. This paper examines the graphic representation of abstract interactive cinematic elements that seek to explore movement, time and space and build upon the graphic tools film-makers used in the early 20th century to express these elements and affect the cinematic language of movement into the 21st century.

Early pioneers of experimental film, such as Eggeling, Richter, Ruttmann explored a metaphorical and symbolic visual language of abstraction that defined spatial dynamics and temporal layering of movement, time and space (Le Grice 1979). These early explorations into the language of movement were conceptualized through unique systems of graphic representation that combined signs and symbols. They explored abstraction in the moving image though an “equivalence of opposites” (Richter 1952) analogous with musical and dance notation resulting in a fluid abstraction of geometric, organic and anthropomorphic forms. Later we see expansion of these considerations by Eisenstein in his seminal work on montage.

Among the most relevant phenomena of the last years, knowledge economy has risen in importance. Seen as a development strategy for over-territorial growth, it is strictly linked to the change of vision from global to local and it is strongly influenced by the competitive rules of globalization, among which we can find distinctive elements of a territory that represent an essential benefit. Rural areas, that often suffer for competitive disadvantages in terms of infrastructures, services, knowledge and opportunities, are anyway characterized by some strongly connotative elements such as living sustainability and cultural identity. It is possible, therefore, to consider a vertical overview that is not conventional and alternative to stereotypes or rural tourism, and that is achievable not only through increasing the value of cultural, historical, productive and environmental richness of one territory but as well through improving all peculiar resources of a territory, starting from its history always allowing new languages and new ways in order to preserve and hand them down.

Most digital archives still offer access through phonebook-like lists. However, the digital archive is a living (data) culture. An Artificial Intelligence chatbot predicts that the digital archives of the future will enhance the user experience. However, the authors developed the archive platform netzspannung.org more than 20 years ago with Knowledge Discovery interfaces such as Semantic Map that allow people to engage with the archive in an interactive and performative way. This approach enables visitors to become active participants and co-creators of the archive’s content, rather than passive viewers. It is not primarily about finding familiar information, but about searching and browsing in unfamiliar contexts. The goal is to create a participatory experience that encourages visitors to become data performers in a walk-through thinking space and to acquire new knowledge.

Abstract

In order to reach their daily destinations many people walk along the same pedestrian paths. Perhaps, at first, they gave this daily ‘journey’ their whole attention, but after a while they don’t actively notice it unless something out of the ordinary interrupts it. With time this everyday path can become over-familiar, an almost invisible part of the routine, where individuals walk around isolated in their own thoughts, trying to separate themselves from surrounding noises
and visual information. Many people make use of these ‘in between’ moments of isolation for daydreaming, whereas others try to find ways of making them less ‘boring’. What causes these changes in people’s behaviour towards their surroundings? From studies of Environmental Psychology it is a proven fact that the environment, and therefore environmental stimulation, has an essential impact on people’s psychology

Over the past ten years, SWAMP (Studies of Work Atmosphere and Mass Production) has created a body of work that examines various socio-political phenomena. While we have experimented with a wide array of media, a certain subset of our studio practice we have defined as inverse biotelemetry. Coordinating data mining with physical computing, inverse biotelemetry has been a supervenient discovery in forming a meta-narrative for our research. In essence, inverse biotelemetry has clarified our observations regarding the effects of metahuman systems upon the individual person; systems such as: automobile-centric urban planning, big box retail, and the military-industrial complex.

Meta-human systems relate to demography, not the individual. For instance, thousands of individuals, both civilian and military, have been killed during the US occupation of Iraq. Many of these deaths are the result of the US military having little regard for individual Iraqi civilians or US soldiers. And while the news media (another meta-human structure) reflects on these events, it is out of an interest for the spectacle and the story being generated. As a result, an ambushed convoy receives the same design consideration on a web page as an announcement that Britney Spears is pregnant – diminishing the individual presence of the event.

Improvised Empathetic Device (2006-present) is one of many SWAMP projects that employ inverse biotelemetry to comment on this phenomenon. With IED, custom software monitors a database that tracks how many US soldiers have died in the Iraq war. Whenever a change is detected, a signal is sent to the IED armband housing a receiver and customized electronics. The signal actuates a mechanized needle for each newly detected casualty, inflicting a painful prick into the wearers arm. The armband, like other inverse biotelemetry objects, acts as a transducer, interpreting and exchanging data between the realms of computers, meta-human activity, and individuals.

Ko Maungawhau ki runga is a performative research project by the author on the site of a former 17th century Maori Pa (fortified village) in Auckland, New Zealand. It is a subset of the long term project “Do we see in algorithms?” and uses location aware technology to deploy augments at precise nodes in a meaningful location. Accessed on foot, the augments explore multiple strategies for engagement between Global Positioning Systems (GPS), the smartphone as an art interface, user, artist and site.

Abstract

Situated computing for embodied interaction.
From a certain perspective, a tollgate, the latest robot at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a GPS mobile phone are not so different. They all integrate computation with physical processes. If the foundations of computing are built on the premise that the principal task of computers is the transformation of data, today a renewed attention to materiality unfolds alternative conceptual frameworks whose practical implications are productively engaged with vast and differentiated social and cultural realities. Neuro and cognitive sciences are showing an increasing awareness of the important interplay between perception, thought and action. Similarly, new models of HCI consider richer and more complex ecologies of people, physical artefacts and electronic systems, while robotics and AI expand their focus from
thought to action, from search spaces to physical environments and from problem solving to long term activity.

With the extension of cognitive dynamics into the environment and the incremental game of perception and action into spatially and temporally extended processes, the consequences for the praxis and poetics of interactive aesthetics are manifold. In interaction design, for example, such situated and embodied perspectives not only provide an alternative framework for evaluation but also opportunities for design to take a deeper advantage of multisensory interfaces and multimedia. If today’s technology can be perceived by some as intrusive and overbearing, an approach which emphasises the environmental physicality of computational action could then – along with, and thanks to, the massive increase of computing power and the consequent expanding context in which we can use it – enable fluent interaction with the minimum effort on the part of the user, bridging the gaps between cyberspace and the physical ‘external’ substrate of practice.

This doctoral work in progress centres around facilitating intergenerational Critical Making programs and designing a participatory platform for engaging in DIY citizenship and connecting environmental concerns. Through hybrid online and in-person workshops, meetups, and community art projects, the research investigates the prospects and problems of participation in exchanging ideas, skills, and upcycling. This presentation reviews independent maker spaces, eco-art, citizen-science and grassroots participatory platforms where alternate modes of media-making are possible. The culmination of the doctoral work is a participatory project for senior citizens, youth, artists, activists, and citizen scientists to contribute art, data (mostly on water quality), documentation of restoration efforts, and local stories in rural Colorado, U.S. The media submitted to the platform will be used in public large-scale interactive projection experiences. This will be the first arts-driven project with the citizen science platform CitSci.org.

Keywords: Wearable Technology Artworks, Perception, History of Art, Bio-hacking, Sense Substitution, Artistic Framework.

Our understanding of how we perceive the world, and our ability to manipulate it, has become increasingly mediated by technology. As this technology progresses, the possibilities for a closer coupling between technology and our sensing faculties is possible, blurring the line between body and technology. This paper explores the history of the relationship between wearable technology and our perceptual apparatus. It spans from the invention of the lens through to the current exploration of embedded technology, which allows for the manipulation of the perceptual apparatus itself. This paper discusses the various ways in which the relationship between our perceptual apparatus and forms of wearable technology has been developed and explored in the arts. It then uses this framework to speculate on new works, and describes two new works by the author: Your Hearing Them, and Your Localisation Exposed.

This paper explores a selection of mixed, virtual and extended reality artworks (MR/VR/XR), through the theoretical lens of posthumanism applied to media art, as well as practice-led conjunctions of media and devices. Exploring recent works by the authors’ and others, we speculate on plant blindness and homo sapiens immersion in the ‘technological virtual’, arguing this is not necessarily a retreat from the organic. The context of this paper is the ongoing pandemic, where artists have been forced to re-form their practices online, in the sphere of the technological virtual. For artist’s working with plants as co-composers, this challenge involves avoiding the evolutionary trap of ‘plant blindness’, while utilising algorithmic processes that are programmed to be blind to the organic.

Since the end of last century the US military has been transforming into a modern fighting force. High speed communications systems and real time imaging have changed the face of war but new weapons are only one factor driving change. New leaders and new policies also play an important part. This paper looks at the transformation of the US military and specifically the increasing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones. It also discusses my own work TRACKER and reflects on the role that art can play in raising awareness about surveillance and war.

Abstract

This paper points to a theoretical framework of our interests in a developing taxonomy of data-mapped art objects, the appropriateness of embodied interfaces for data-mapped art, and our own practice led research (see our collaborative project subscape).

The proliferation of digital data demand that artists engage with the aesthetics, forms and politics of data mapping. From molecular to stellar, from deeply personal to global, the growing scope of digital data has had a profound effect on ontology and subjectivity. Today we try to understand the complexity of socio-enviro-political systems through a proliferation of data, and its myriad forms of imprintedness (visualisation).

From dynamic weather maps, to virtual heritage and epidemiology, from tracking polluted water to pattern recognition in complex crimes like corporate fraud, new strata of subjects and subjectivity emerge. We are enmeshed in a data economy that is more complex and generative than we could have imagined.

This impactful phenomenon is further complicated by the cultural specificity of the forms, strategies and aesthetics of visualisation. New strata of subjects and subjectivity emerge, yet new mapping technologies do not necessarily interrogate, celebrate or account for the poetic and speculative affects of human consciousness and subjectivity in space. Access to data and complex visualisations does not necessarily make for a more culturally sensitive or comprehensive understanding of ‘deep space’, that combinative trope of physical place and social connectedness that we inhabit and that art seeks to access.

The key questions posed by this paper are: How can artists account for and make sense of this proliferation of data to capitalise on ecological, computational and embodied forms to explore a range of strategies such as generative systems,
patterns and poetics in creating an affective experience for the audience/viewer/participant? What do convergent spaces of biology and artifice offer the multi-layered conceptual apparatus that is the data-mapped art object? What new shifts of art and design forms, and modes of sensory experience, can alter the audiences’ experience and make ‘deep space’ of complex data mapping?

Abstract

Do we perceive landscape through visual abstraction or participate in its manifestation as a living system? Do we experience it as detached spectators or through affective charge? Does landscape represent a crystallised form or one of many states within a system of interaction? Unfolding the processes of inhabiting landscape constituted the initial conceptual frame of Fabrique. The intention was to create a living landscape, an organism in the place of the picturesque, visual landscape. To reinvent landscape as an experience, involves engaging people as both actors and spectators in a bi-directional relationship. Also, finally, to explore systems’ potential to allow for emergent relationships rather than imposed ones. Through the development of the project these quests became more pragmatic, addressing issues of affect and participation, the formation of spatial and algorithmic systems, and, the use of physical objects to create hybrid interfaces.

This panel addresses the role of the face in contemporary interface culture and how electronic art may help us understand the cultural and computational techniques related to its interpretation, production, and cultural significance? Through four short presentations this panel discusses how the face becomes an operation in the interface, and how this reconfigures the meaning of the face.

Presentation 1 – Techniques of the Face: The Zoom Performance
Presentation 2 – The facial disconnection of identity and expression in deepfake videos
Presentation 3 – Rise of the Meta-Self: AR Face Filters, Platform Art and Commodification of the Avatar
Presentation 4 – Blinded by the Profile: The Protective Eye in Facial Interface Culture

The paper presents an overview of immersive, electronic art installations dealing either with the topic of death, or promoting somatic immersions into experiences associated to death and dying. Death and digital afterlife, often for all eternity, are frequently encountered topics in online media and literature, but less so in the physical form of experiential media art installations.

Panel: An Alembic of Transformation: Virtual Reality as Agent of Change

The com­plex­ity of cre­at­ing art­work for vir­tual re­al­ity the­aters such as the CAVE Au­to­matic En­vi­ron­ment of­fers artists a mul­ti­far­i­ous palette that only be­gins with hard­ware and soft­ware. The aes­thet­ics of an ex­pe­ri­ence re­quires cre­at­ing a plas­tic en­vi­ron­ment that ig­nites the imag­i­na­tion in order to in­vei­gle the vis­i­tor and si­mul­ta­ne­ously en­gages the vis­i­tor. Vir­tual worlds im­merse vis­i­tors  with a range of per­cep­tual stim­uli (vi­sual, au­di­tory, kines­thetic…) that can be ex­ploited through the artis­tic process. By set­ting up sub­ver­sive con­fronta­tion be­tween the vis­i­tors and the worlds in terms of such tech­niques as per­spec­tive, il­lu­sion and pro­jec­tions, a per­cep­tual shift can occur that mo­men­tar­ily usurps or­di­nary re­al­ity. “Fig­u­ra­tively Speak­ing”, a VR en­vi­ron­ment for the CAVE, is based on orig­i­nal wa­ter­col­ors of ab­stract fig­ures whose faces, for the most part, are their bod­ies and con­cur­rently com­pose the land­scape.  This de­lib­er­ately con­founds the en­vi­ron­ment to en­gage the vis­i­tor in a face-to-face di­a­logue with par­tic­u­lar­ity and per­son­ality.

Artistic research is still in its infancy and continues to pander to dominant institutional discourses of what research is. In particular artists too often ‘borrow’ methodologies from the sciences to justify their practice as research. There is a need for a Novum Organum Artium that will form the foundation of an artistic method, just as Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum Scientarium did for the scientific method.

Keywords: Artistic Research, Research Methods, University-Based Art, Methodologies, Scientism, Francis Bacon.

The overarching themes of migration, perception, memory, tradition and uncertainty are explored in a series of video artworks that creatively investigate shared memories and lived experiences as personal constructs of identity, cultural heritage and family traditions.

This paper proposes that today’s computational and generative arts are the legitimate inheritors of the 20th century traditions of constructivism, systems, conceptual and process art. Often formed from close collaborations between art, science and technology this field of work also exhibits important aspects of contemporary culture and thought including: emergence, non-linearity, hyper-mediation, interaction, networking, self-similarity, self regulation and so on. They are also one historical root of the contemporary science of artificial life.

The paper represents research analysis of emerging varieties of wearable technologies as cultural expression; and, as such, compares and contrasts wearable technology and fashion.

This paper examines fashion, networks, and the body, placing the wearable experience within a social, spatial, and temporal context. The projects presented are specific outcomes which examine public space and connectivity under the auspices of the “mundane” and the “everyday”.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the change of communication via clothes with the emergence of wearable technologies. It focuses on how wearable technologies could change our experiences from the perspective of communication and self expression. This paper aims to contribute to the discussions in wearable technologies to form a theoretical background within the context of fashion and communication.

Abstract (Poster)

Over recent years’ mobile communication technologies have enabled capitalist networking algorithms to quietly penetrate our daily lives, becoming an integral component in the shaping of our identity. We no longer have sole agency over the presentation of self, as our everyday cycles of impression are laminated together to form a synchronized sphere of monetized data. Where total public transparency has become the default setting, and privacy glass is an alternative ‘tickable’ option. Faux pas is an always-on intervention to contaminate the oil of the personal information economy with a foreign body of demonetized labour. The live performance openly submits my personal sphere of ‘life – my quantification, my autobiography and my social media persona – to be publicly curated, socially edited and playfully embodied by others to collectively transmit a faux performance of self.

This article aims to present the collective research that has been made in the framework of the research seminar “Vocabulary of the Virtual” organized by IRCAV (Institute of Research on Cinema and Audiovisual Studies), Sorbonne Nouvelle and the “Spatial Media” group, EnsadLab (Lab of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs). The main topic is to clarify the notions that refer to the concept of the “Virtual” in order to define it through an interdisciplinary approach according to different fields of science (aesthetics, philosophy, film theory, sound theory, ergonomics, design, engineering, cognitive sciences, etc.).

This article presents many different conceptual tools such as cartography, mental maps, notional diagrams with several dimensions, etc., that have been conceived over the last three years, to show how the reflection on the concept of the Virtual was first established and constructed, and how it has been developed.

The notion of symbiosis seems to be defined as a structuring notion of the concept of the Virtual across the process of anchoring the levels of virtuality inside technological devices and concrete sites, as well as inside the physical body of the VR users. The user’s body serves as a catalyst for the concept of the Virtual which then becomes organic.

This entails how we sense life in the environment, in other beings and ourselves in an existence being constantly enhanced by technology. Questioning this situation, evokes a sense of the uncanny and a fear of being dominated by the machine, but also reveals possibilities of becoming, creation of new forms and behaviors. Could we develop aliveness and create a more balanced existence? Can we enhance our senses and communication abilities to become beings that are more adept at co-existence?

The core of FeLT is to investigate such ambiguous questions by artistic means in proximity to computer science research.
State-of-the-art scientific research provides inventories of living systems and their functions: intelligence, evolution, reasoning and learning. This is made available as an artistic material that is discursive and performative, rather than representational.

Through residencies and workshops, we will develop a body of works to present, reflect and share artistic examples and experiments. By entering a transdiciplinary discourse from an artistic point of view, we will learn more about the transdiciplinary as a way to navigate in complex, layered realms of sensuous experience and knowledge.

Questions and speculations that are not addressed or fully developed otherwise, can emerge through employing artistic methods. We will join together artistic methods and aesthetics from bio art and techno ecologies with contemporary perspectives on sensory experience and materiality in artistic production and research.

Inspired both by artistic works and contemporary, theoretical and scientific perspectives on technology, ecology and aesthetics, we will develop a transdiciplinary working environment driven by artistic research.

Keywords: Latin American Art, Digital Art, Mexico, Female Artists, Publishing Networks, kinetic Art, Video Art, Mail Art, Archives

Given the recent interest in developing archives to recover the contributions of Latin American pioneers in digital arts, in this paper I take issue with the lack of attention given to female artists born or working in Latin America. I argue that the process of recovery needed to build such archives needs to adopt a feminist lens that speaks to particular conditions of production and unpacks the local and international mechanisms of exclusion that have hindered the recognition of female artists. It should also consider debates on Latin American art and the recent contributions of media historians who have opened up art history to understand the shared histories of art, science, and technology. Finally, I give a brief overview of the work of three female artists working in Mexico who anticipated features of digital art by experimenting with publishing networks, broadcasting technology and kinetic art.

Ferment Radio podcast features conversations on living interconnectivities: from visible to invisible, and from societal to cellular. Together with people of the most diverse backgrounds, we see things through a microbial eye to give legacy to unheard voices and peripheral perspectives.

From https://www.supereclectic.team/pokrywka:
Fermentation is a metabolic process in which microorganisms convert a carbohydrate, such as starch or sugar, into alcohol or acid. Since time immemorial, fermentation has been used to preserve and enhance the taste of food in cultures all around the world.
Social Fermentation is a gentle and long-lasting transformation process inspired by microorganisms. Whether in science, gastronomy, or art, fermentation creates the right conditions for constant and continuous change.

Ferment Radio is a series of online Podcasts covering conversations with artists, chefs, activists, scientists and other practitioners of Social Fermentation. Each episode focuses on our macro and micro interdependencies, on restorative practices through fermentation, and other strategies. Ferment Radio is a platform to exchange ideas and perspectives. It provides tools and inspiration to develop social and bacterial fermentation.
Ferment Radio is hosted by Aga Pokrywka, a multidisciplinary artist and scientist, and is brought to you by Super Eclectic, a multimedia production team for the world we want.

The observation of public spaces has been a topic in both science and in the arts. Science provides quantitative methods to describe pedestrian crowds and pedestrian interaction. With person tracking and intelligent algorithms it is possible to measure the behavior of people moving across a place. In comparison, few is known about the impact of architecture and the design of public spaces on the ambiance of a site.

Present systems only passively observe places and pedestrians on it without influencing the situation. What is about to happen if the space itself changes? Or, taking it one step further: What if the place itself observes passers-by and responds to the behavior of pedestrians to the point of influencing them?

Presentation of the FILE ARCHIVE, a digital archive of FILE – Electronic Language International Festival. FILE ARCHIVE is an initiative carried out by the independent cultural non-profit organization FILE – International Electronic Language Festival – and aims to make available and share its collection, which brings together 23 years of achievements, in an accessible and free online environment. This expanding collection makes available the last 9 years of FILE FESTIVAL events and exhibitions (2014 -2022), through the free software TAINACAN.

The presentation is about the digital archive of FILE – Elec-tronic Language International Festival. FILE ARCHIVE is an initiative carried out by the independent cultural non-profit or-ganization FILE – International Electronic Language Festival – and aims to make available and share its collection, which brings together 22 years of achievements, in an accessible and free online environment. This expanding collection makes available the last 5 years of FILE FESTIVAL events and exhi-bitions (2017 -2022), through the free software TAINACAN.

With this tale we tell the story of the International Festival of Electronic Language (FILE). From where did it emerge? FILE was born in 1999, on the internet. And soon organized its first exhibition, at the Museum of Image and Sound (MIS) in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, in August 2000. One of the projects – which we announce here and now – is to make publicly available the documents and material we have accumulated over 20 years in a single, reliably encrypted, online archive which will be as dynamic as the content that it aims to sustain and preserve. We already have a name for it: FILEALIVE. Who knows, maybe in this way we can preserve the traces left by our technology and leave a legacy, while in some way reformulating what is traditional in art, in the sense that we deepen and strengthen the relationship between art and technology.

The presentation is about the implementation process of the digital archive of FILE – Electronic Language International Festival.  The digital archive of FILE festival is being carried out according to a defined semantic and data modelling, including the input of data information for the years 2015 to 2019, aiming at its organization in the Tainacan digital repository. The talk will  also point out the practical developments arising from the FILE ALIVE online meetings, held in March 2021, and more specifically what emerged from the session entitled “Archive as an Institution”, in which an alliance of partners was effected between the team ISEA (International Electronic Art Symposium), ACM SIGGRAPH (Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) and FILE; with the common objective of seeking interconnection between the digital archives of each organization.

Since its beginning, the videogames history has revealed that the player-machine interaction evolved into much a more subjective version of playing videogames. From early videogames like Tau Ceti, Driller or Battle Zone, till games like Doom 3, Bioshock, Half-Life 2 and specially the futuristic Crysis, what has matured is precisely the concept of cyberspace has a subjective digital space.  Videogames, which have been the pinpoint upon which William GIBSON have coined the term cyberspace, are becoming each time less games and look more like a sort of expanded cinema (YOUNGBLOOD). The question is that cyberspace as it is described in cyberpunk sci-fi short stories and best-seller novels is objective: an objective matrix shared has “consensual hallucination”. However, the latest generation videogames, specially the First Person Shooters enhance the subjective point of view of the player in order to provide a thrilling experience; games such as Red Steel, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas or Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare. In doing so, the augmented screen-based virtual realities, rather than HMD-based ones, explore a new art of hunting which thrills gamers that look for a cinematic experience. The result in FPS gaming is that subjectivity itself becomes machine-like due to the requirements of the graphics and physics engines that run this videogames. All images, which are “machine-images” explore the military and voyeur-voyager aesthetic, perspective devices, and they show a technoculture changing (and McLUHAN said that “when games change, so does culture”). Also, in multiplayer online game parties, FPS games gather typography and topography in an unpredictable gathering of ludic technology designed to play, write and speak, whether it is with humans or synthespians. And in this matter, several years after Neuromancer (GIBSON) and Life On Screen (TURKLE), the MUDS are already beyond chat.

Flâneuse>La caminanta, is an interdisciplinarity art research project that addresses critical questions about gender inclusion, empowerment, and safety in public space. The project aims to explore intersectional feminist narratives through storytelling and technology. The title of the work, emphasizes a missing word in the French and Spanish language of women as wanderers. This lost world also represents, historically speaking, the lack of visibility in which the female-identifying bodies can safely perceive their autonomy as walkers. The project has three iterations, departing from a Virtual Reality documentary and then re-contextualized as an audiovisual performance. The project feeds from memories and experiences of mobility in public and private spaces by self-identified women, living in different cities. The performance is the result of collaborative work with two sound female artists working with improvisations and choreographic gestures. The result carries a multiplicity of voices, ages, nationalities, ethnicities, and approaches to the construction of the Flâneuse identity through the multilayered performance. The performance and VR documentary have presented in New York City at La Nacional culture center, Folly Systems Festival in La Roulette in Brooklyn, The Electronic Arts Festival of New York organized by Harvestworks, in NYC.

This paper developed out of my attraction to painting-digital hybrids and my frustration with antiquated structures inhospitable to media flexibility. I’ve organized the paper in that order – first, as a survey of best practices, followed by thoughts on structures that allow innovative experimentation with traditional and digital media to thrive.

Now that digital tools are ubiquitous, contemporary artists use them at all stages of development. Ideas might be researched on the internet, sketched with pencil, scanned into the computer, manipulated, transferred to canvas, painted, recaptured with a camera, manipulated again, projected again, revised and perhaps resolved. This is nothing new. Cave men incorporated new tools into the practice of painting. What’s changed, gradually over time and now at a fevered pitch, is emerging technologies’ effect on the speed of progress, both within a painter’s practice and the medium’s history. What’s also changed is the influence of digital media on painting decisions.

Acting as both an introduction to and discussion of the new media works of acclaimed Canadian artist Lorna Mills, this screening and talk will provide a survey of Mills’ recent explorations of the animated gif format as well as a look at how her curatorial practice, especially as the key organizer of multiple international exhibitions, have placed her at the centre of the so‑called “gif revolution”. The animated gif is hardly a new art form or format for presentation. However, Mills, who has been dubbed “The Queen of the Animated Gif” by the Spanish art media, is at the forefront of a revival and re‑invigoration of the genre, in both form and distribution. Mills takes what was once a coy (and even twee) form, one previously used exclusively for creating clever but disposable sequences of repeated motions (particularly of adorable animals) and invests the form with a striking sculptural depth and precise, formal composition ‑‑ while at the same time remaining true to the genre’s roots in popular culture and meme‑dispersal.

As “The Queen”, Mills has curated an extraordinary number of exhibitions, mostly, and by intention, one‑offs and one‑night‑only events, events that have brought together hundreds of artists from dozens of countries – thus exploring, and indeed exploiting, the gif genre’s portability (all the works are internet‑transmittable) as well as the genre’s boom growth as an art form that exists, and thrives, (mostly) outside of traditional systems of commodification, a genre that defeats the formal barriers of customs/international trade. Mills produces a bounty of work that both feeds and is fed by this new world‑wide art phenomenon, and she has no plans to abdicate her throne.

The presentation will include screenings of recent and early gif works by Mills, with commentary, followed by an overview of her current curatorial projects (including the popular Ways of Something series, which is playing across Europe and employs 60+ artists). After an initial glimpse into Mills’ “world” – one that includes representations of everything from abstracted folds of fabric to strange animal behaviours ‑‑ Vaughan will freeze‑frame individual works and delve into the seeming contradiction between the animations’ surface appearance of randomness, and indeed silliness, and what really lies beneath this initial reading: an arch attention to detail, precise (to the very pixel) sampling, and Mills’ keen application of the core mathematics of composition (it is not accidental that Mills began her career as a high‑realist painter).

Virtual spaces have long been projected though, evoked by and intertwined throughout our physical environment. Wall paintings provide windows onto alternate realities; statues capture imaginary scenes at particular moments in time; theatrical plays recreate fictional scenes on constructed sets. Cyberspace is a newer kind of virtual world, where human imagination can exercise its creative and artistic capabilities. And while digital interactions today remain dominated by a limited set of interaction portals (desktop PCs, mobile devices), emerging sensor technologies integrated into physical spaces/artifacts provide opportunities for our physical lives to feed into computationally-mediated virtual worlds, which in turn can feed back into our surrounding environment.

This paper presents a collaborative artwork, Flora Electronica, created by artists and researchers during a course in tangible media arts. This playful artificial/computational garden is a stage where spontaneous media performances unfold, manifested across both the physical and virtual worlds. The emotional tone of the space is set by the real-time perceptions/interactions of a participating audience, both local and remote.

The inhabitants of the artificial garden are reactive plants equipped with sensors and actuators, which invite visitor interaction and enact captivating robo-media performances. The plants are clustered into three groups with different personalities: sociable, shy and curious. They respond to visitors through light, sound and movement, influencing the overall emotional tone of the space. Through data capture, the garden maintains an online presence in applet-based web interfaces. In addition to providing a virtual representation of the activity in the garden, these connected spaces allow remote visitors to influence the physical garden from afar. When visitors (both local and remote) coordinate their interactions with the plants, the responses of the individual clusters intensify, ultimately resulting in a synergy of movement, sound and light that is displayed both physically and virtually.

Among the various labels for art’s social engagement that have diversified since the 1990s, “participatory art,” as first coined by Claire Bishop, theorizes and emphasizes its “participatory” rather than political characteristics. In the recent “nonviolent” tendencies of political protests around the globe, this “artistic” collaboration of citizens has been facilitated by social media, lowering the threshold for participation. This study aims to investigate this new emergent genre of art, namely “participatory art utilizing social media,” through a case study of Flower Wall Project conducted in South Korea’s 2017 “Candlelight Protest.” Rather than assessments based on political achievement or technological determinism, this paper seeks to lay the groundwork for establishing sophisticated evaluation criteria with a balanced perspective between esthetics, politics, and technology.s.

“Flows of connection” is a panel discussion which will explore the connective element of water across cultures, technologies and story. In this discussion water is given sentience as a life giving force and its role in supporting life on the planet will frame a discussion and presentation of digital and locative media art works which engage with water and climate issues.

The  panel  highlights  the  importance  of  giving  rightful  recognition  to  knowledge  keepers  and  provides  some  guidance  for  readers  interested  in  developing  productive  and  respectful  partnerships  with  First  Nations  collaborators.  Here  knowledge  can  be  safely  shared  and  celebrated as ways  to understand  the world around us  that are restorative and regenerative. The discussion builds on discussions and presentations by speakers and participants at LMO.

Keywords: Fluid processor design, ecological computing, Informed Matter, discursive Design, Environmental Aesthetics, Sustainability.

This paper proposes ways of designing processor like devices operating with nothing else than natural flow of water to execute basic physical computing. Such types of fluid processors carry the potential to form the fundament of future fluid computing devices allowing for complex forms of ecological computing integrated directly into our environment. The proposed design works on natural principles of physics, uses no electricity at all, lasts almost forever and can literally be thrown around. That might sound like a radical, game- as well as life changing form of computing. And it will be. If we up-engineer the many and proven designs of old mechanical, analogue and physical ways of doing computing. So, what is the solution? Future and emerging computers will be carved out of and into stone. Their ornamental design will be more than environmental aesthetics, it will enable physical principles known from fluid and liquid dynamics to interface and interact with our world in multiple and –for now- speculative ways.

OPEN SOURCE AND SOFTWARE AS CULTURE

FluID is a multi-user computer game about identities. You can discover your identity, change it, steal or borrow another person’s identity, destroy identities or create new ones from scratch.

What is an identity? It is the idea that single parts of yourself belong together. It is the idea that your past, your present and your future all belong to one single owner, called: YOU.

Do cities have identities as well? Mathias Fuchs and Sylvia Eckermann, developers of FluID believe that cities have fluid identities. They relocate Gilles Deleuze’s question “what is the identity of a particular city, a person, a face?” into an artistic context, which is a gaming context as well. As users, participants are able to explore the changing identities of Tallinn, Helsinki and other cities, through a virtual cityscape.

The fluid game puts you into a terrain of identities where you start as a perfect nobody. You have no face, no name, no clothes, no sex, not a single thing to differentiate you from other players.

So now ‘s your chance! Try to be someone!

How can we account for practice-based research at the intersections of art, design, and sciences in ways other than text-based format?

The traditional methodologies and forms for journal articles are not always adapted to research that explores sensorial and singular forms. Arising from this observation, the .able journal is designed as an innovative valorization of interdisciplinary practice-based research, thanks to image-based formats.

A peer-reviewed journal, .able experiments with what academic publishing could be when stepping further than the conventions of traditional print publishing to explore the many alternatives and potentials presented by multimedia and multi-platform media, beginning with smartphones

.able is a new multi-platform visual journal that publishes research at the intersection of the arts, design and science through images. It puts contemporary, environmental, anthropotechnical and socio-political issues into perspective and into images. Conceived on the initiative of the Arts & Sciences Chair of the École polytechnique, the École nationale
supérieure des Arts Décoratifs – PSL and the Daniel & Nina Carasso Foundation, it is published by Actar Publishers and supported by some thirty international partners.

By providing access to free and distributed visual essays, .able journal multiplies the points of entry to address its content to peers but also to a wider public, and thus to foster dialogue between the research community and civil society

For this session, ELEKTRA proposes a series of short presentations highlighting the work of a selection of international Quebec artists present at the symposium. Covering a range of current topics such as artificial intelligence, biology, participatory robotics, soft robotics, deep-sea infrastructures, questions of nature in an increasingly virtualized society and more, the afternoon will provide an overview of contemporary digital creation in Quebec. In addition, a selection of works by Quebec artists will be on view inside the Forum des images (May 16 to 21) as well as under the Canopée of the Forum des Halles (May 17 and 18). Presented in collaboration with Hexagram.

This paper explore the translation of the maze from a ritual path to the computer game, and how this is re-working our cultural relationship with the folded spaces of the maze.

Where the age-old physical maze addresses many cultural activities and functions from ritual to play, from threat to entertainment, the computer game adopts the traits of the maze as a puzzle, seeking to contradictorily both engage the player and delay the action and its rewards. Where the worldly-maze is a dwell and enjoy device, a pathway of experiences, the game-maze is a pathway to, a device for completing the multiple objectives of the game.

All games can be seen as information strategies. The worldly-maze relies, often, on visual and spatial confusions of many kinds. Low affordance surfaces, space and configuration, vertiginous twists and turns, etc. Although the maze puzzles of computer games adopt and exploit many of these strategies there remains a significant difference between the pathways to in the virtual and the pathways of in the embodied world. In part this is because worldly mazes suffer entropic change – inadvertent, accidental and co-incidental events leave their marks, whereas the game-maze is invoked identically on each of its instances.

Worldly mazes are explorable spaces where exploration itself signifies a particular richness of experience. The puzzle mazes of the game are more like stations along a route with other objectives, aims and ends. Worldly mazes are thinly spread and rarely experienced. Geography and occasional visit contribute to their ritual power. However, the game-mazes are near ubiquitous, readily available, easily accessed in their daily play across the planet. This familiarity dilutes the potential for ritual, reframes our experience of exploration.

The paper will be illustrated by examples of game mazes from Zork through Pacman and Bomberman to Tomb Raider.

If we want to give ecology its rightful place, it is necessary to reconsider our approach to knowledge. Instead of limiting ourselves to an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary vision, we should speak of ecologies of practices or compositions of knowledge. This perspective invites us to consider disciplines as part of complex and ever-evolving ecosystems with which they must negotiate and adapt. These ecosystems are made up of cultures, practices, professions, institutions, interests, motivations, procedures, statuses, and representations that are extremely diverse, and these disparate elements mean that there is no single model of composition.

However, despite the inevitable singularity of knowledge composition projects, it is possible to share experiences to gradually build a common ground to cultivate. This task is vital, as composers need to break down the barriers of their practices and venture off the beaten path. It is not a matter of starting from scratch in the history of knowledge, but rather of inheriting it while finding ways to dehierarchize the relationships between arts, sciences, and society, and placing them at the center of our activities rather than on the margins.

When I presented first in 1987 my concept of an Electronic Bauhaus, I pointed to the statement of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy that the school was the catalyst of the visual revolution for the twentieth century. The content and the dimensions have completely shifted since then towards greater scales, greater demands. Our actual environment enlarged towards the biosphere, mainly articulated and anticipated by researchers-philosophers like Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) and Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). With Vernadsky the biosphere is as much or even more the creation of the Sun as the manifestation of earthly processes. It is the idea of space and the biosphere that enters into today’s Electronic Bauhaus. To be a student of space means to be first of all a student of the biosphere.

‘For a design of the Deformation’ is a creative research project, as part of a practice-based PhD, carried out at ENSADLab, in the Reflective interaction research group, Paris and at the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« in Berlin. Through the methods of design, the subject of soft robotics is explored, in its materiality, its dynamism and the possible functions that result from deformation. Looking for new modes of creation and material agency. The project seeks to develop interactive devices, which question the conditions that allow a soft robot to adapt to its environment. That is to say its capacity to create a form of symbiosis with its milieu by its deformation.

With interactive computing, the metaphorical use of biological notions of hybridization and symbiosis has become widespread. They refer to the possibilities of mixing as well as to the conditions of emergence of relationships ranging from mutual benefit to instrumentalization between technologies and humans. In order to better understand the relevance of such analogies with the field of biology, this article relies on scientific and artistic research concerning interactive avatars. These seem particularly instructive on our relationship to technology because this kind of virtual being hybridizes the living and the artificial, while constituting a key- condition to access some digital spaces, to co-evolve with other users, who are likewise avatarized, or other autonomized agents. In this paper, we wish to to make a distinction between “cyber” avatars populating persistent universes, video games, virtual realities, that is to say, cybermedia environments of simulation and interaction; and “hyper” avatars that are found on the Web, online services, 2.0 platforms or social media that are juxtaposed in a networked informational and documentary hypermedia. What is at stake here is the way we could be able to reconsider the potentialities and the responsibilities linked to our potential of augmentation and simulation, in particular by supporting cooperative interactions, by striving for synergy between Science, Arts and Technologies.

Education is not a homogeneous field and pedagogical practices themselves are undergoing major changes. The relationship to knowledge has indeed changed considerably in recent years. The cultural sector has not escaped this, even if the relationship between teachers and students has long been much more horizontal than in universities. These transformations also modify the relationships between organisations in charge of pedagogical or mediation missions. Thus, museums, universities and art and design schools are increasingly working together. New actors are also emerging with methods that can shake up the old ones.

By observing these emerging ecosystems and, more importantly, by inviting key representatives of these ecosystems, this roundtable is a collective attempt to define what a ‘symbiotic education’ between who and whom, and what, for what benefits, could be? The scope of the discussion is that of ISEA: arts, design and sciences. This debate will also allow us to propose a synthesis of the workshop dedicated to the same theme and will thus constitute a very concrete starting point. This panel is also part of a reflection initiated during the international colloquium “Crossover between arts, design and sciences to teach differently” held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2021.

Poster Statement

Summary:

Artist adopt artificial life techniques as a method for artistic expression. Besides this use, it is possible that the medium itself becomes a product concept. Marshall McLuhan’s principle that ‘the medium is the message’ does not emphasize sound and image content, but instead draws a link with the technical nature of future media that will break the chains reality has with equivalent symbols As technical standards rapidly improve, reality as it stands now is becoming alienated from our lives. As we create a virtual life that is nothing short of an artificial life, and communicate with this life itself, we have to ask where our future is leading us.

Abstract

Why do people, regardless of age or gender, have an affinity for objects manifested in the human form? From the earthen figures of ancient times to mechanical dolls, teddy bears and robots, is it not true that man has conceived such objects in his imagination, then formed attachments and transferred emotions to them? We address the issues of communication and the esthetics of artificial life that possess this “human form” in modern society, both from artistic and engineering standpoints. As we create a virtual life that is nothing short of an artificial life, and communicate with this life itself, we have to ask where our future is leading us. An example is presented in which emotions are interpreted from human voices, and emotional responses are triggered within the interactive setting of Maturing Neuro-Baby , “MIC & MUSE.” “Neuro-Baby” (NB) is a communication tool with its own personality and character, including emotional modeling, such as reacting to changing voices, facial expressions and behavior. Based on the experiences of developing the early version of NB, we started the development of a revised version, “Maturing Neuro- Baby”. The basic improvements in Maturing Neuro-Baby are the following. The Neuro-Baby character customizes itself to individual human communication partners by learning. Leaning is achieved by Artificial Neural Networks(ANN) mapping from the input signal emotional state of the NB (recognition mapping), to an appropriate expression showing the response by the NB (expression mapping). “MIC” is a male child character. He has a cuteness that makes humans want to speak to him. MIC recognizes several emotions (joy, anger, surprise, sadness, disgust, teasing, fear) from the intonation of the human voice. People use a microphone when communicating with MIC. For example, if one whistles, MIC’s feeling will be positive and he will respond with excitement. If the speaker’s voice is low and strong , MIC will feel poorly and become angry. “MUSE” is a goddess. She is very expressive, has refined manners, is feminine, sensual, and erotic. MUSE’s emotions are generated by a musical grammar. For example (joy — rising musical scale, anger— vigoroso, sadness —volante, disgust— discord, teasing— scherzando, fear–pesante) People can communicate with MUSE in an improvisational manner by means of a musical installation. From the standpoint of an artist, it is interactive art based on communication and on creatures that have a real ability to participate in an interactive process. Moreover, we think that by selecting a “human” – the creature with which we realistically communicate the most – we establish a condition that demands a creative character from a creature. From an engineering standpoint, we have come to the conclusion that if we want to create life-like characters, we have to develop non-verbal communication technologies. These are expected to give characters the capability of achieving heart-full communication with humans by exchanging emotional messages. These life-like characters, or “androids”, will unravel a new point of view in a new direction which allows the blending of art, computer science, psychology, and philosophy in a kind of novel research on realistic human expression.

In the situation of playing computer games, most of the human sensory I/O channels are unused. However, examples such as feelSpace belt successfully augmenting our sensory repertoire with the sense of direction suggest that the human sensory system is rather flexible for rewiring itself to accommodate new forms of input. With Harawayan spirit, we can assume the game/player as cyborgean entity whose sensory system is composed of all the individual interface elements available, (e.g. visual flickering on a minimap replacing the aural indicators of an approaching enemy) each corresponding to one or more competences of transhuman body. Interface forms an umbilical cord through which new senses are enabled and existing ones limited in the gaming situation.

Some recent games including Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Game of the Movie represent a shift from prima facie non-transparent interfaces (e.g. EveOnline) to transparent interfaces. For individuals desiring to become transhuman this, as well as for example the direct correspondence between the movement of WiiMote and the movement of the tennis racket in WiiTennis, are regression rather than newly gained freedom. The transhuman umbilical cord has been cut, and for those without the extended sensory modalities the simplistic enticements of computer games are attractive only while the cheap fixes of euphoria from novelty, storytelling and competition last. In games with transparent interfaces the facticity in play is the facticity of meatspace. The activity requiring both sensomotoric and cognitive skills has become to resemble a contest in putting a thread through a pinhole repeatedly. Discarding of the interface necessitates a transhuman player whose limbs and sensory organs are violently amputated to facilitate an unholy alliance between diegesis and interface greatly limiting the abilities of both.

This paper aims to show that the game interface is one of the unique but underrated features of ludic media. Interfaces are elementary parts of computer games, not distractions to be overcome with proper usability engineering. We will explore the interface as a games’ ludic, expressive, and emotional element. The game interface should not be seen as a means to an end (e.g. as affording access to a virtual world) but as a part of the end itself. By drawing on Haraway and Merleau-Ponty the paper critically evaluates the phenomenon of sensory deprivation of the transhuman player and discusses the consequences it may have to the capabilities of computer game medium.

This paper describes an artbook created through the adaptive behavior of a deep learning neural network computational agent as it “reads” a novel. Through this process, the agent builds a model of the syntactic and stylistic principles behind the original text and uses this model to generate new, unforeseen content. A limited set of unique printed copies of the artbook are generated through this process.

Each unique edition of the work thus embodies the learning process of the agent as it goes through the adaptive process, one wherein the agent begins from a state of randomness and gradually refines its output as it reads the novel. I examine the text through an analysis of generated excerpts, discussing how they reveal the behavior of the system as an adaptive agent. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed in the context of generative literature, machine learning, and behavior aesthetics.

Forensic Love and Visceral Data is an art project that claims the urgent creation of a bio-antidote, a biomaterial, performative-ritualistic-scientific-medical, to cure (us) of romantic love and eradicate this chronic pandemic. A disease, a linguistic virus, the malware that constitutes one of the basic pillars of patriarchy, diluted in songs, sayings, and compliments. The raw material of the bio-antidote(s) is our visceral data, which is obtained from the contrast and verification of romantic love sayings with some medical analysis techniques hacked into their significance and interaction (dose/spell indication) with the participant-patient. Then, each bio-antidote is created from the data and matter of the “sick” organ that is the one that has received and assimilated the curse of romantic love. Medical protocols will be followed to identify and treat the disease: Diagnosis, Creation of antidote and finally Dosing, dividing the project into three stages. Our preliminary diagnosis is that the language being a virus enters the body from an initial point to expand and affect the different organs. The project begins by analyzing these popular sayings, the internal programming of romantic love and its physical effect on our emotional body. These are the symptoms of the disease called “love”, but they are not just ours, they are the choral symptoms of our sick society. Then, analyzing our social fabric, we respond, returning to it, not only the possibility of a cure with a bio-antidote but also its dosage as indications-spells, created from the same sayings that will be re-evaluated through social networks. This performatic dimension of the project allows us to hack our body-minds and at the same time decolonize the western medical tradition, making fiction with it, creating a body performative narrative. A DIY/DIWO/DIT epigenetics, a methodology/declaration of war that mixes scientific-medical and ritualistic protocols.

Foresta Inclusive is a technologically (Internet) connected indoor and outdoor art installation that links the ecosystem of a forest through a solar powered sculptural sensor hub, to an art installation within a gallery. The project will include collaboration with climatologists and historians affiliated with ‘Environments of Change’, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant. The artwork will use collected historic data found in dendrochronological core samples from trees alongside live sensor readings, in order to create an in-gallery interactive experience where the movement of the viewer body can explore the historic and lived realities of the ecosystem of the Herstmonceux forest located in East Sussex, UK. This project proposes to make perceptible to the human senses, the slow and subtle movements of trees and surrounding ecology, in order to find ways to create a context for in-gallery human/forest interaction and collaboration. This work is not meant to replace real life experiences within a forest, but rather to materialize the often-invisible life movements of the forest and to use technology as a tool to give voice to nature within a human cultural environment.

keywords: flâneur, psychogeography, Paris, ituationist, locative media

Everyone loves the flâneur, Baudelaire’s symbol of modernity, the anonymous man on the streets of nineteen century Paris – drifting through the urban crowd, strolling through the arcades as a detached observer, part of the crowd but also aloof from it.

The flâneur has also found his way into the digital world from the nostalgic notion of the cyberflâneur surfing the (Geocities) arcades of the world wide web with no particular place to go. A recent op-ed in the New York Times even blamed Baron Haussmann in the guise of Facebook for destroying these cyber-arcades, and along with them the cyberflâneur.

Discussions of the intersection of digital media and physical space, from early Locative Media practitioners on, also invoke the notion of the flâneur in his new incarnation as the digital flâneur, traversing the streets equipped with location aware devices observing and studying the augmented hybrid spaces of the city “existing in a haze of code”. Certainly location-aware mobile devices lend themselves to these analogies, it’s an easy connection to make, but is it the correct one?

This paper argues that it is time to forget the flâneur; this nineteenth century model of male privilege is no longer fit for the purpose. As Benjamin notes, the flâneur arose from a change in architecture in Paris, and it was the subsequent Haussmannisation that were to prove his undoing. Whatever the merits of the connection between the cyberflaneur and the WWW, the architecture has changed and a new model is needed to consider the peripatetic nature of location aware networked devices in the digitally augmented city. The detached passivity of the flâneur needs to be replaced with an alternative model that is of necessity engaged, a disruptive activist who does not merely observe but actively seeks to create alternative narratives and shape outcomes.

Affective computing is an interdisciplinary field that studies computational methods that relate to or influence emotion. These methods have been applied to interactive media artworks, but they have been focused on affect detection rather than affect generation. For affect generation, computationally creative methods need to be explored that lately have been driven with the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a deep learning method. The experiment presented in this paper, Forging Emotions, explores the use of visual emotion datasets and the working processes of GANs for visual affect generation, i.e., to generate images that can convey or trigger specified emotions. This experiment concludes that the methodology used so far by computer science researchers to build image datasets for describing high-level concepts such as emotions is insufficient and proposes utilizing emotional networks of associations according to psychology research. Forging Emotions also concludes that to generate affect visually, merely corresponding to basic psychology findings, e.g., bright or dark colors, does not seem adequate. Therefore, research efforts should be targeted towards understanding the structure of trained GANs and compositional GANs in order to produce genuinely novel compositions that can convey or trigger emotions through the subject matter of generated images.

Abstract
This presentation outlines the artist’s exploration into the possibilities of artificial intelligence in narrative, beginning with the database movie Talk with Your Hands like an Ellis Island Mutt and extending toward a conceptual framework for interactivity that allows for the operation of task-specific intelligent agents.

Discussion
Our creative inquiries leads us into theoretical inquiries that shape our future work. As I sought to assemble the videos that comprised Talk with Your Hands like an Ellis Island Mutt I chose the Korsakow cinema database system because it allowed the database itself to make rudimentary “decisions” about the progress of the narrative. The involvement of the system itself in the navigation of the video led me to consider the role of artificial intelligence in narrative, and what role narrative artists may play in shaping it. Korsakow asks authors to break their narratives into what developer Florian Thalhofer calls SNUs—Smallest Narrative Units. For HandMutt, those SNUs were short video clips ranging from six to twenty seconds. In Korsakow, keywords determine navigation from one SNU to the next; each one is labeled with keywords in (lead to the nodes) and keywords out (leading from the nodes).

When the SNU above plays, the database will select from other SNUs marked with its specified “out” keywords and display them as thumbnails onscreen, which the interactor then chooses. Because there are usually more choices of SNUs than there are spaces for thumbnails, the database “decides” which SNUs to display for selection. Though it brings no systematic intelligence to its decisions, the Korsakow database is a rudimentary computational actor in the narrative. From there, it was a short step to the subject of artificial intelligence. Though I have found a robust community built around AI and digital narrative (for instance the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference and the Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshops series), its conversations there tended toward the construction of AI systems rather than toward the decisions artists make when constructing stories. (This is natural, since the AI community is predominantly computer scientists.) Narrative artists can actively prepare for new sets of creative choices that will arise as AI tools develop, as well as participate in that process by defining what specific actions we want artificially intelligent agents to perform.

“General” AI of the type we see in popular film is far off, but smaller-scale AI implementations are much more reasonable. Harvesting interactor data —in the form of choice, biometric information, etc.— enables an AI story manager to participate meaningfully in navigation. Narrative artists can and should be part of the AI conversation by working with computer scientists to create task-specific artificially intelligent agents to function within digital narratives. This puts AI tools in the hands of artists faster and indicates fruitful directions for AI scientists who are developing such tools.

“One day the Emperor received a large package labeled The Nightingale. But it was not a book. In the box was a work of art, an artificial nightingale most like the real one. Thirty-three times it sang the selfsame song without tiring”.  –Hans C. Andersen, The Nightingale, 1849

Recorders – Transmitters – Generators
Long before the advent of electrification, people began developing automatic mechanical recording devices for their musical pleasure, and the many constructions that have been built since then continue to enchant us: music boxes, barrel organs, cylinders, records, optical tapes, paper tapes, magnetic tapes and disks, and with them the accessory perforating, punching, cutting, blackening, drawing apparatuses as well as those for reading and playing back the stored data.

Forgotten Landscapes is a site-specific public art installation of interactive virtual reality (VR) viewing machines. The machines provide a perspective from which to explore a series of 360-degree videos of deserted landscapes filmed at the last-known location of missing persons in Austin, Texas. The piece revisits several cold cases related to women, children, and minorities from 1970’s to the present. Using customized computer vision software all human activity is removed from each landscape while preserving the motion of nature, the sky, trees, grasses, and birds to promote the sense of isolation and emptiness. The project addresses criminal cases against minorities as well as challenges the use of media technology in a public space.

Keywords: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Code Governance, Code Politics, Coded Cultures, Consensus, Cryptography, Cryptopolitics, Cypher-punks, DAO, Disruption, Distributed Autonomous Organisations, Ethereum, Forking, Governance, Hacker Culture, Innovation

Since the microcomputing revolution in the 1970s we live in the age of permanent (technological) disruptions, but institutional and educational practices have barely changed. “Technologies come and go but the university remains, in a recognizable and largely unchanged form” (Flavin, 2017). Disruptive technologies, such as distributed consensus systems (blockchains, DLTs) challenge the role of the university as gatekeeper to knowledge and question the structure and organisational architecture of institutions. The only chance for traditional institutions is to find interfaces to informal and technology-driven “production cultures” (Tarasiewicz, 2011) to be able to radically reinvent the university. If the universities don’t react to technological and societal change, they will be forked, replaced, and decentralized.

From the art school’s studio-based format, the authors situate Form and Time as a Studio Presentation course. Scheduled to launch on campus in Fall 2020, the course pivoted to fully remote. Thematic units of Space, Form and Time were explored in synchronous meetings and asynchronous video lectures and micro-workshops.

Studio Presentation courses can engage art students in dispersed, interdisciplinary research-creation networks, through strategies including a diversity of fabrication options, DIY and place-based knowledge and accessibility as approaches to meaning through making.

The authors ask: how can hands-on fabrication skills and health and safety instruction be incorporated into large format studio courses? When is face-to-face, hands-on learning crucial and for whom? How can virtual studios be used for community collaboration and exhibition opportunities, online and in-person?

Form and Time and its collaborators in WebXR foreshadow new modes of art school studio delivery that decenter and critically intersect with studio precedents suddenly disrupted by remote learning during COVID-19.

Panel Statement

Panel: Algorithms and the Artist

Determinism precludes free will. Artistic expression is perhaps the highest manifestation of free will. Yet artistic expression can be obtained strictly through the digital computer, which operates precisely in the realm of formal logic, which in turn is the epitome of deterministic reasoning. The creative act of self-expression directly through a computer program places in unique juxtaposition these mutually contradictory philosophical extrema. My own work entails mapping scientific models, based on the formal logic of mathematics, into the formal logic of computer programs, and using these programs to generate images which (I claim) represent artistic self-expression of a spiritual nature. This bizarre new creative process marks, I further claim, a greater discontinuity in the creative process than any other new medium or process in the history of the visual arts. It’s deep and well-developed roots in the formal disciplines of math, science, and logic give it unprecedented conceptual depth.
I propose to present, fortify, and defend these claims in this panel. In the process, I will highlight the serendipitous character of proceduralism in the process, the use of random fractal models in reproducing the kind of visual complexity and typical of natural scenes, and the ramifications of the computer’s returning representationalism to the ‘open problems’ category in visual art.

For the first time Polish institutions will be showcased at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), held this year in Hong Kong. In May, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute under the Culture.pl label will present the activity of three modern Polish museums: the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Warsaw Rising Museum, and the Fryderyk Chopin Museum.
Culture.pl is an Internet portal dedicated to Polish culture that hosts events across the globe promoting the achievements of Polish artists. Our website includes the world’s largest database about Polish culture, comprised of biographies, essays, descriptions of works, articles, videos and more. [source: Vimeo]

Abstract
The Forty-nine Views of Denali is a collection of data, including visuals, text and sounds. The project addresses two main topics: capturing daily lives of contemporary Alaskan, investigating a question, “is a medium still the essential part of an artwork?” This Artist Talk is a presentation of the project in early stage of progress.

Project
In 2015, President Obama renamed the tallest mountain of the North America from Mt. McKinley to Denali, the Native Alaskan name which has been used for long time in Alaska, the 49th state of the US. Denali is iconic as Mt. Fuji in Japan. Katsushika Hokusai depicted Fuji in the famous series of Ukiyoe prints, the Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji in the 19th century. As Mt. Fuji is a ubiquitous symbol in Japanese culture in both sacred and worldly ways, Denali is prevalent in Alaska. It is everywhere from oil paintings to local business signs.

There are many writings and images about Denali, but most of them are from views of visitors, such as mountain climbers and photographers. The mountain seems eternal and unaffected by changes in the human world in their images. However, Alaska is facing many changes today. The state with many isolated small communities and the economy depending on the petroleum industry is extremely vulnerable to global changes, such as the climate change and the crude oil price. I would like to capture daily lives of contemporary Alaskans in this state of flux, as Hokusai portrayed Japanese people’s lives in his images.

For this project, I am recording interviews of 49 Alaskans in various industries and academic fields about their view of Denali through their personal and professional experiences. After interviewing several individuals, I will follow their social connections to meet more interviewees. Using the social connections, the project will also capture the way Alaskan communities are networked. Each interview includes photographs the interviewees have taken, panorama photographs, text and video recordings of the interview including 3D stereo or wide-angle video of interview sites.

At the beginning of this project, I was not able to overcome one issue: what medium it should be? Would it be a photo book, videos, VR or SNS? The medium determines the final output and also eventually the longevity of the project. Then I realized that artworks don’t have to be bound to one medium today. The interface or the output format could be only facade of the content stored as data. How that would affect the messages? I decided that the final product will be a collection of information stored on the University of Alaska Fairbanks Film Archive server. The data will be organized in the way it could be printed as a book or presented as an interactive project.

I am also aware that the media still affect many aspects of the project. One interviewee stated that the medium affects the way he would talk, because to him, the audience who read books would be different from ones watch online videos. Through this project, I will be able to see how the media and the final output affect the data collection and the audiences’ interpretation of the content.

Currently, I am interviewing initial small group of Alaskans, including a scientist maintains an observing station in high altitude, which is few days climbing from the basecamp. The social graph is still small and doesn’t look like a network yet. I am planning to do outdoor recordings in summer and conduct more interviews after the tourism season ends in September 2016

Evolution of symbiotic relations with the biosphere in the context of major global ecological and societal challenges: towards an evolution of interactions between human beings, but also between humans and “other than humans”: animals, plants, even future humanoid robots (AI, “thinking” machines)? Symbiosis v/ “civilizational rupture” at the time of the emergence of a new youth more and more engaged everywhere on the planet? With the advent of human relations via screens, are we witnessing the victory of transhumanism over humanism rather than an evolution towards “symbiotic human” as imagined by Joël de Rosnay?

Forum Changer d’ère (Change Era Forum) was started in 2013 by Véronique Anger-de Friberg.

The Forum des images, a cultural institution of the City of Paris, is pleased to once again welcome, more than 20 years after its 10th edition, the International Symposium on Digital Creation (ISEA) from May 16 to 21, 2023.

Facilitator of meetings between the different forms of narrative images, the Forum des images builds its annual program around 4 arts: cinema, comics, video games and digital creation. The symposium, which this year proposes to reflect on the theme of symbiosis, echoes our desire to unite various arts and industries around strong common issues.

Supporting and developing digital creation ecosystems is also part of our missions and is illustrated through  programming for the general public, the TUMO Paris digital creation school and, this year, the launch of NewImages Hub, which is structured around three areas  of support for projects or artists: creation, production and dissemination. Our ambition through the Hub is to structure XR activities in a cyclical logic, with a holistic approach responding to the needs of the ecosystem and stimulating innovation and expansion of the sector.

For more than 30 years and today more than ever, the Forum des images has never ceased to give audiences the keys to questioning new images and making them their own. This is why we are delighted to host the 28th edition of ISEA2023, a global meeting bringing together the artistic and scientific communities as well as the cultural industries, within the Forum des images.

As a support platform for digital and immersive creation, the Newlmages Hub aims to accompany creators at all stages, from creation to production and distribution. The Newlmages Hub channels a wide range of activities all year round: international residencies, workshops, conferences, shows, networking, XR co-production and distribution, broadcasting opportunities …

Discover differents innovative and creative projects that each in their own way tell something of the Newlmages Hub and its missions: Artcast4D an experimental European research interactivity project aiming to create an open source program, a cross-media project on Marilyn Monroe between theater, exhibition, graphic novel and VR, and XR residencies to support creators.

Panel: Beyond Locative: Media Arts after the Spatial Turn

With the in­tro­duc­tion by Apple and Google of Lo­ca­tion-Based Ser­vices (LBS) on smart phones world­wide, Loca­tive Media has rapidly been main­lined to the masses. For­merly a term that re­ferred to a loose col­lec­tion of media art prac­tices that ex­per­i­mented with lo­ca­tion as a con­tex­tual fil­ter for media  sit­u­ated within or dis­trib­uted across urban or rural en­vi­ron­ments, today Loca­tive Media has come to con­note any soft­ware ap­pli­ca­tion that fil­ters con­tent based on what is “nearby.” While some would at­tempt to re­cu­per­ate the term for dis­course in the arts and hu­man­i­ties, look­ing for the “be­yond”, “after” or “post-” Loca­tive in an at­tempt to the­o­rize an his­tor­i­cal pe­riod of media art prac­tice in order to lay claim to “the next big thing”, oth­ers might argue that it’s time to sim­ply FOR­GET Loca­tive Media – that the cre­ative, the­o­ret­i­cal and aes­thetic pos­si­bil­i­ties of lo­ca­tion as con­tex­tual fil­ter have been ex­hausted – and that in order to en­gage the broader and more sub­tle nu­ances of con­tem­po­rary urban, ex­ur­ban and rural en­vi­ron­ments, new ap­proaches to con­text are nec­es­sary.

Keywords: Agential provotyping, Subversive design, Emotional design, Empathy, Interactive installation, Public space, Ecology, Ontology, Plant sentience, interactive artifacts.

Human societies are deeply entangled with biotic and abiotic entities that constitute and sustain our life-world, consequently to address peaceful coexistence within and between human societies, necessitates addressing a much broader issue: peaceful multispecies coexistence and the end of environmental violence. Key to this is a change of the present dominant neoliberalist ontology, which is wreaking havoc on the planet, socially and ecologically. This paper introduces agential provotyping as a catalyst to prompt a dialectic process of reflection of the assumptions and beliefs, which constitute the foundation of our present exploitative and human-centered value system. Agential provotypes are tools of subversive design practice, which are readily accessible design artifacts aimed at a broad heterogeneous public that reveal the taken-for-granted elements of the human life-world through playful interaction and aesthetic experience. The paper starts by explicating the relationship with provotyping as emerging from systems design and positions agential provotypes in relation to critical design. It thereafter demonstrates agential prototyping on the basis of an interactive installation consisting of digital artifacts and plants; finally it discusses the impact of the agential provotype on interactants’ beliefs and assumptions and their development of empathy towards other lifeforms in their environment.

During FISEA a plenary meeting was held to discuss the founding of an umbrella organisation for the Electronic Arts. This had been the aim of the SCCA for organising FISEA from the beginning. The name Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts was coined by Roger Malina and it was later (1990) founded as a membership association by Theo Hesper and Wim van der Plas.

It was also decided that the symposium should get a follow up and a second, third etc ISEA ought to be organised. The representants of the Utrecht Art School (HKU) announced their intention to organise the Second ISEA. However, they later withdrew and the Groningen Polytechnic organised it instead.