Presentation Data Table

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.

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language… and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
-The Tower of Babel, Genesis 11:6

That awkward term ‘Computer Art’ has finally succumbed to diversity and individual preoccupations, celebrated away by the flurry of grandiose exhibitions, conferences and competitions of the late eighties. All eager to disprove the image of the computer as the advocate of dry and dreary order and logic, they promoted a multitudinous range of applications to cover every facet of artistic activity. From hypermediated conceptual streamlined postappropriation talking pieces to commercial shoot-from-the-hip videographics, they confirmed the computers’ unmatched ability to contribute to the most obscure example of cultural fall-out, completely effacing its own cultural identity in the process. The fractal geometry of computer media endlessly subdivides into new options and alternatives, washing away the bulwarks of cultural praxis and the freedom it offers us threatens to reduce all our language to an incoherent babble. After 50 years of striving to build a mighty tower of the perfect communication machine, the gods have taken their revenge and replaced the Rule of Number by the Licence of Formalism, and Babel has fallen again.

Computer manufacturers have inherited a notion of The Artist as the bearer of a weight of semantic ‘stuff’ needing to be expressed or unburdened and requiring as tolerant a medium as possible to accept all the nuances and facets of their creative will. But this passivity that the computer provides does not make it an ideal medium, a transparent carrier, of pure artistic motions. This subject-centred model of creativity instead makes the computer over-expressive. Each function of a menu option accounts for a little part of the landscape of human imagination, eroding differences and points of reference and making media categories arbitrary. Through computer technology, the medium has now surrendered, it offers no resistance to the desires of the user and overwhelms us by its aimless potential. The problem in engaging such new media is the frustration at not finding the oppositions and difference that build the dichotomy of meaning.

Fragments is an ongoing series of audiovisual research-creation works that bring together live performance, generative music, video game design, photogrammetry, lighting design, audiovisual production, and theatre dramaturgy. By using a collage approach that mesh together autonomous computational systems, human performance, and real-world imagery and sound, the series explore the complex feelings of living in an algorithm-driven world, living away from one’s homeland, meeting and sharing across cultural differences, sustaining social lives at a distance and across borders, and relating to the mediatized lives of strangers.

Three pieces are discussed: Poetics of Otherness, that explores the hyper–mediatisation of warzones, Stabat Mater, that inquires into the anonymity of living in urban metropolis, and The Shape of Things, that dives into the atemporality of large-scale infrastructures.
Fragments is an ongoing series of audiovisual works that bring together multiple Montreal-based, but nationally-diverse, collaborators in the fields of generative music, lighting design, audiovisual production, graphic design, and research-creation. Together they explore the complex feelings of living in an algorithm-driven world, living away from their homelands, meeting and sharing across cultural differences, and sustaining social lives at a distance and across borders. As part of this series, The Shape of Things is an original creation led by Alexandre Saunier & Marc-André Cossette as the duo ALMA.

Frame Seductions is an interactive work that plays with our expectations of the video frame by creating an immersive and surreal space that lies beyond the traditional borders of the screen. The project explores the concept of looking outside of the video frame by tracking the head movements of people immediately in front of a camera-enabled screen. As people turn their head to the left or to the right the perspective of the video on the screen will change to follow their gaze. In the language of cinema, hors champ (out of scene) is considered to be the space and time of the filmic world outside of the range of the camera. Viewers of Frame Seductions are able to access material outside of the initial scene, blurring the boundaries between the frame and the hors champ. Lurking in the sidelines of the original scene, various mundane but provocative scenarios are playing themselves out much to the surprise of the viewer.

Where Do Monsters Come From?
“No Gods, just Monsters!”
There haven’t always been towns and cities, full of people hurrying to and fro to school or work. Where now stand shops, factories and offices were once streams, woods and hillsides. And every one of those places, even the loneliest tree standing by itself on the moors, had a monster to guard it. The place belonged to the monster, and the monster belonged to the place. So when towns and cities were built, the monsters had to stay, trapped under the tall buildings made of brick and stone and concrete. And there they remained, for 200 years. Until now. Because the monsters have got very grumpy. They are fed up of people walking on top of them, and they are really fed up of people squashing them under big, heavy cars. They want to live on the streets in the places that belong to them, the places where they used to live, a long time ago. Every time you play Free All Monsters!, whether you are using the Magical Monstervision Machine or setting free your own monsters for other people to find, you are helping to make a world that has monsters living in it again. And that is a much better place for people to live in as well!

Subversive Networks is a design methodology for deconstructing accepted and practiced forms of human-networked interaction through the introduction of interference, shifted rule-sets, and disruptive interactive experiences. As the proliferation of networked experiences intensifies worldwide from Internet access in physical locations to wireless and Wi-Fi access points – there is an increasing emphasis on information and networked spaces augmenting their physical counterparts. This shift in focus changes the fundamental architecture of connected spaces into ones that can simultaneously exhibit both permanent and transient states.

Subversive Networks aims to challenge the foundations of network interaction in both physical and online spaces, along with the fundamental rules and expectations that exist in these environments. By questioning the increased proliferation of connectivity clichés that are associated with the Internet and emphasizing the aesthetics of the interaction above interface design, this methodology focuses on shifting experiences and perceptions as key elements of networked interaction. This paper will discuss several of my projects that address the theme of network subversion including Alerting Infrastructure, a physical hit counter that destroys a building when one visits its website, BumpList: An Email Community for the Determined, and WiFi-Hog, a personal tool for hijacking publicly accessible wireless network nodes for personal use.

HACNUM represents the sector of hybrid and digital creations and defends the general interest of these actors and actresses. Created as an association in March 2020, but at work for several years, HACNUM is an inter-regional network on a national scale.
It is made up of 70 member structures, with various typologies, representative of the transversality of digital creation: festivals, art centers, production offices, fablabs, third places, theaters, concert halls… And 150 artists from French digital creation. These 300 professionals grouped within HACNUM make it possible to include actions in the prospective, the issues of cultural transition and transformation of organizations.

Due to the historical positioning of its members on digital in creation and in the challenges of cultural policies, and thanks to the pool of skills gathered among its members, HACNUM aims to support cultural professionals in the face of technological challenges and the need resulting increase in skills.

Presentation of the Transversal Networks Arts-Sciences. Established as an association since November 2017, the TRAS network (Transversale des Réseaux Arts Sciences) is made up of 22 artistic, cultural, university and research structures. They jointly advance the need to build a civic approach to the relationship between arts and sciences, in an articulation between our places of life – the local – and our planetary, global implications. [Translation from French by Google Translate]

What follows is a condensed run through of the various processes that have directed my research and practice over the past years, in search for my own narrative in relation to my sound/performance practice and the sounds of the post-folk.

Sun Ra Lives on in the Fiber-optics
Around 2007, after trying my hand at building various stochastic musical instruments based on simple deterministic and non-deterministic systems, I turned to streaming networks to provide the ever present instability and randomness to the instrument, mixed with an equal dosage of system overloads, the Bufferrrbreakkkdownnn Arkestra was born. Rather than playing notes, or triggering samples, I was playing the networks, by controlling the concurrent sending and receiving of 8 sine tones of different frequencies to and from 8 separate streaming servers.

Schrödinger’s Cat has to be the most celebrated creature in the bestiary of science,and the paradox it proposes is perhaps the most complex in our understanding of consciousness and reality. It describes the problem of measurement at the quantum level of reality, the level of subatomic particles, atoms and molecules.This gruesome thought experiment involves a black box containing a cat and radioactive material positioned so as to trigger the cat’s death if the particle decays. The process is quantum mechanical and so the decay can only be predicted in a probabilistic sense.The whole boxed system is described by a wavefunction which involves a combination of the two possible states that the cat can be in: according to quantum thewy the cat is both dead and alive, untill we observed and measured it, at which point, the wavefunction collapses and the cat will be seen to be in either one state or the other. And just as the electron is neither a wave nor a particle until a measurement is made on it, so the cat is neither dead nor alive until we get to take a look at it. We are dealing here with observer-created reality. To look is to have the system jump from a both/and situation to an either/or outcome, the quantum jump producing what is known as the eigenstate.

But there is no agreement amongst physicists about precisely where, in the chain of events in this wave function collapse, the measurement result is ultimately registered. Greg Egan places the point of collapse, the point at which reality is created. right in the brain. By proposing a technology which could be inserted in the brain to modify this eigenstate effect, to block it and thereby prevent the collapse of the wave function, his scenario gives a post-biological context to the idea that reality is constructed. Egan speaks the language of the coming decade. His 1990’s science fiction addresses issues of the neuro-cognitive sciences with the prescience that William Gibson showed towards computer communication developments in the 1980s. And just as Gibson’s Neuromancer correctly identified cyberspace as an important cultural construct of the late 20th century, so Egan’s Quarantine identifies the issues likely to preoccupy us at the turn of the millennium. The question of consciousness, the technology of consciousness. the transcendence of consciousness will be the themes of 21st century life. Fundamental to this evolution is the development of a telematic art in the cybersphere, and fundamental to that art are the experiments, concepts, dreams and audacity of artists working today with telecommunications systems and services.

The article proposes the development of a new aesthetic approach to contemporary art produced in or for technological platforms, focussing on interactive art and art as knowledge.

Art as Knowledge
The work of art is a trustee of subjective, empirical and emotional information, accessible to those available to fit in the role of receiver and interpreter of that information. Authors such as Claudia Giannetti are working under the perspective of art as knowledge related with new forms of artistic expression rooted in mediatic or technological environments, where the public plays a multiple role: as receiver, as collaborative partner, almost as an artist. Understanding art as knowledge means comprehend the interaction between public and artwork.

Structuration of the subjective
One cannot fully analyze art by simply decontextualizing it (Panofsky, 1983; Bourdieu, 1979). It is necessary to take in consideration properly the micro and macro societal aspects, in a perspective ideally resembling that of Simmel’s snapshots, where the ordinary of everyday life is stripped for its given symbolic meaning and relation to the broader symbolic articulations of society.

This paper examines the process of interfacing between organic and technical objects and how this might be utilized as a tactic to promote invention within new media art events. Raphael Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architecture is examined in relation to concepts of parasitic action and folding to show how the work develops a complex ecology of relation through interfacing.

Before any discussion of the history of New Media can take place, one has to define the terminology. There has to be a consensus as to what falls into this category. The title of this talk, “From Computer Art to Digital Art to New Media” indicates the lineage of the term. These terms have changed but not the definition. As the terms have evolved they have not become more distinct but broader and more difficult to define.
Computer Art was a term that was used at the beginning of this art form. It evoked the mechanical, bringing up the question of whether people could produce art with a machine. The word digital has evolved to express the process of the machine. It is digital because it comes from discrete bits and bytes. It is digital because the computer interpreted the images, the audio, or motion in a discrete format. Today most all media is digital or manipulated digitally.
Of the three terms used in this title, New Media is the most general and ambiguous. ‘New’ is relative. Every day there is something new. In the 1970’s the term ‘new genre’ was used to describe a new art form that involved video. Is this still the new genre? Is New Media the new genre?
The term New Media has been used to refer to electronic media which has been in existence since the 1940’s. Sixty years later and into a new century, I think it is time to redefine this term. The definition I like most involves interactivity, the very item that makes it unique to the computer medium, and most specifically in today’s world, interactivity on the Internet.

In previous works I have discussed how the image of the graphical user interface (GUI) has been appropriated as a referent for a creative practice beyond the screen, materialized as two-dimensional print and painted images. In this paper I will explore instances where the GUI has been referenced in the creation of three-dimensional physical artifacts and performative three-dimensional spaces. An examination of selected works will give us the opportunity to look critically at the evolution of the computer desktop metaphor and its appropriation back into object based artifacts and to unpacking some of the theoretical implications implicit in these shifts in representation.

The selected works examined in the paper originate from a group of international artists who have been repositioning the use of the computer GUI within the realm of creative practice. These creative recontextualisations allow us to problematise our engagement with digital technology. Allowing us to question our experience of the GUI in terms of a personal, and broader communal context. As well as intimating the pivotal place that computer technologies have taken in our everyday social, cultural and increasingly our creative realms. The transformation from digital computer icon to material artifact engenders the potential of the computer GUI to become a precious, rarefied object, which commands value and prestige.

What responses are evoked by the free software model when it enters the scene of contemporary art in Argentina and some other countries of Latin America? The model of production, circulation and “participative” reception promoted and put into practice by the free software movement, has evoked manifold responses among artists – with potential and actual consequences – since they are both creators of “programs” and users of digital tools. These responses take place in a wide socio-cultural context including artistic practices within the art institution, but also those happening in the sphere of daily communication and global exchanges in which local actors take part, thus generating multiple echoes and feedback between the interacting fields.

Throughout this text we will analyze some human concerns that are the subject of analysis in different fields of knowledge such as philosophy, art, science and technology. These concerns revolve around what is reality? what is fiction? what are the effects of hallucination? and what is virtuality? through different cultural products such as art, literature, cinema, psychoactive or entheogenic experiences, up to the most recent proposals of Virtual Reality and their forms of interaction. We will try to envision and propose new ways of perceiving reality, seeking a balance between the real and the virtual world. We will take a tour from the way we process reality and create fictions around it, to the illusionism that has constituted an important part of our search for consciousness, mediating between rationality and experimentation in the construction of new realities to finally make a proposal on Virtual Reality based on the therapeutic use of hallucinogens.

This paper is an overview of preliminary research undertaken for the creation of a framework for collecting and distributing new media art within regional art galleries in the U.K. From the 1960’s practitioners have experimented using computers, and the art-form has evolved into multiple strands of production, presentation and distribution. But are we, as collectors, researchers, artists and enthusiasts facing an uncertain future concerning the integration of new media art into institutional cultural organisations? Recently, concerns have been raised by curators regarding the importance of learning how to collect new media art if there is to be any hope of preserving its past. A fear of the unknown of experimental models of curatorial activities such as collecting, preservation and documentation appear to be a barrier to some mainstream, university and municipal galleries when acquisitioning or commissioning new artworks into their collections, while methods of distribution using new media platforms are still at a very experimental stage. This paper explores that by collaboration, experimentation and the sharing of knowledge and resources, these concerns may be conquered to preserve and make new media art accessible for future generations to enjoy and not to lament over the obsolescence of what it once was.

(Short paper)

Keywords: digital objecthood, immateriality, hypermateriality, neomateriality, post-digital, post-Internet, new aesthetics, coded material.

This paper explores the evolution of materialities in the context of art and digital technologies and proposes “neomateriality” as a current condition of material and objecthood. It traces the evolution from dematerialization and the immaterial to hypermateriality and neomateriality as a term capturing various disruptions that introduce new aesthetic paradigms. The concept of neomateriality strives to describe an objecthood that incorporates networked digital technologies, and embeds, processes, and reflects back the data of humans and the environment, or reveals its own coded materiality and the way in which digital processes see our world.

Does being present and witness to new developments in art make one its defacto art historian, or does taking on that role depend on one’s institutional place? Net art and other networked media art practices have been historicised through extra-institutional informal structures of discussion, such as mailing lists, including gossip and first person reporting (often of demonstrations rather than formal exhibition of the works). As younger generations of scholars and cultural producers learn of the early days of networked and media art they read these stories through their own lens of current media literacy, sometimes mistaking features of ‘broken’ or obsolete works of net art as part of the original intention of the artists rather than a result of changes in the structure of the web. As these works of art were little exhibited institutionally at the time of their emergence (or since), and there are few institutional curators and art historians responsible for their preservation and ongoing accessibility, the stories which make up the art history of these works are increasingly patchy, based on varied versions of the works themselves. How can a combination of skills and approaches from art history – such as analysis of exhibition reviews and artist interviews – be used to retroactively consider what is required for creating art history of future media art developments?

Abstract

New media art, or digital media art, is characterized first and foremost by qualities deriving from its digital foundation. Some of them, such as multimediality or virtuality, can be used to describe all of its instances. Others, such as telematicity, hypertextuality or interactivity, which are only characteristic for certain media (albeit, arguably, those most representative for current artistic practice), appear, as a result, only in certain areas of digital art. The network of interrelations between all the aforementioned attributes defines the internal dynamics of new media art and determines the interrelations between its miscellaneous varieties.

This paper analyses and contextualises passive audience interaction through the lens of post-participation. It argues that the concept of post-participation helps to address the shift from an active to a passive spectator in the complex age of dataveillance, an age in which humans are continuously tracked, traced, monitored and surveilled without their consent.
By exploring interactive art history and the discourse of identity within the field, this article investigates how artworks that demonstrate no audience involvement, but still incorporate an internal system interaction with a data source, are addressed. In other words, the research tracks down the interest shift from human-machine to system-to-system interaction, and explores the reasons behind this.

Paper introduces direct and indirect post-participation, which are research tools developed for the practice-based investigation. Two case studies illustrate how the research framework of post-participation can be applied for analysing a complex relationship between an interactive system, a participative input and audience.

This paper discusses the similarities and differences between participatory, interactive, and playable art. It suggests that computer games can provide novel perspectives on interactivity in interactive art. The paper also proposes that the implications of computer games to interactive art extend beyond whatever purpose and value computer games are perceived as having as products of popular culture.
Intro
Museums and symposia have opened their doors to computer games. The MoMA collection in New York includes computer games, and for several years ISEA symposia have had sessions dedicated to games. This is not surprising, since computer games and interactive art share a number of characteristics related to, for example, their technological underpinnings. The relationship between an audience and an interactive artwork is in many respects similar to the relationship between a computer game and its player. These similarities can make it hard to formally distinguish between interactive artworks and computer games, and it is not surprising that the history of computer games can also be viewed as a history of interactive art, and vice versa.

Here we present the development of a new project: biotattoos, e. g., biologically inspired tattoos created as randomly generated images with visual patterns inspired by neural stem cell cultures. We used microscopy techniques to capture neural stem cells images in a magnification from 200x to 400x and which are used as starting point in the process of creation of abstract tattoos. The process can be summarized as follows:

1. cells are cultured in vitro;
2. images of the cultured cells are taken;
3. the visual patterns of the cell cultures taken in
4. are analyzed and translated into a digital sketch to be used as a tattoo design; and
5. the sketch of phase (iii) is transferred to skin as a randomic based tattoo art.

Due to the fact that bio tattoos are abstract tattoos based on autonomous systems it is possible to say that the focus here is not only the end resulted on skin, but the entire process of creation. Although the method to insert the ink in the skin is the same, bio tattoos differ from most common tattoos in which the entire process of creating what will be tattooed on the customer is governed by his choice and not by the tattooer. This process (most common tattoos) is closer to the development of a craft or of some editorial piece design, in which the professional follows certain standards in order to sell his product. In the case of bio tattoos, the user (canvas/tattoo user) acts as a collaborator. He does not choose what will be tattooed on him. It is not about buying a pre‑determined or chosen image that will be transferred to your skin, but be opened to what is proposed by the tattoo artist in his creative process. The artist acts by transforming and translating the images in each step of the process (cells translated into pictures, photos translated into drawings, drawings translated into paintings that are translated into tattoos) until transfer to the body, which in its turn will be in constant change until their utter    destruction. In this process of creation, due to its dynamic, the whole project is open to interference of random, however, due to the role of the artist, we can speak here of controlled random as it is planned as a process variable. In other words, the process itself generates opportunities and outcomes which are not intended by the artist, making possible the inclusion of unplanned variables that end up being incorporated into the process by the artist. Despite these interferences, the potential of the process of creation of biotattoos is in the fact that the whole process, although opened to contamination and interference, be planned, designed and governed by the tattoo artist, who acts as a conductor of contaminants variables. The main purpose here is to introduce a concept of tattoo image based on microscopic visualizations and discuss the impact of visualization technologies during the creative process.

Co:Lateral is an artistic project that aims to explore the means offered by digital technologies in performance. We conceptualized, developed and implemented a digital artifact, resulting in a digital performance based on the structure of realities born of a body and its double in movement. In this project, authors carried out a research and experimentation process in close collaboration with a contemporary dance company, in order to design the relation between real and virtual body and extend it in a relationship of intimacy with interactive virtual reality. The performative discourse that resulted from this dialogue allows a poetic impulse that evokes moments of the death of the swan immersed in an immaterial space of light and projection: a phantom of a dance file that now returns to a reality of illusory imprisonment. We will make a general introduction to digital art and interactivity, introducing the concept of digital performance and its contextualization in digital and contemporary art.

During the COP15 climate summit meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009, I was involved in the construction of a public art installation called “Atmosphere – the sound and sight of CO2” that was placed in front of the city town hall.

Interfacing climate change
The installation converted data from CO2 measurements at three chosen locations in Copenhagen to sound and visuals presented through headphones and on a 2-meter high, quadrant sculpture that functioned as a transparent, low resolution LED screen. Hereby the public was giving sensuous access to the symbolic villain of climate change i.e. carbon dioxide; and a normally non-sensuous phenomenon suddenly became visible and audible.

Shanghai is in the process of becoming the Asian New York, at the heart of the continent. It is this urbanization process, emerging in a city with no end and no limits, that is being discussed for 2010. Consequently, what is being prepared at Shanghai is not simply an immaterial bridge between a universal-type event and a planetary dimension. Similarly, the theme of the contemporary city is coming increasingly to the fore in exhibitions dedicated to the electronic arts, as at the forthcoming international ISEA gathering, to be held at San Jose in 2006. Some of these planned interactions between urban evolution and current techno-scientific developments constitute the linkage between today’s artistic mutations.

Traditionally, domain datasets such as media art exhibition records and collection records are managed and published by archiving or research institutes. However, it is rare for an institute to compile or possess an entire exhibition history of an artist before his archive enters its custody. This paper provides an alternative paradigm in which artists may self-document and publish their creative history using the easy-to-use Linked Open Data suite Wikibase. This paper also argues that self-documentation is a two-for-one endeavour where artists can consolidate their CVs while the archiving and research communities will have access to a distributed archive.

The new digital technology images

The easy access and crescent use of computer systems provide the possibilities to domain and acquire knowledge about the production of images, bringing the convergence over other languages and representation techniques.. To produce entertainment contents, creational process is quite the same when compared to traditional medias. Poissant quoting: “Changing attitudes are essential, either spirit or body, to capture when those images are innovative and how are they fundamentally transforming our environment.

At first, they permit access under a sensible way to a variety of universes to which the representative forms would stay abstract without the visualization that computers permit. After all, such images using animation can reproduce objects or process motion or the creation and metamorphosis from the image itself”. According to Couchot, it was not only image morphology that has changed or its generation methods but the way to distribute, transmit, reproduce, store, spread and finally, socialize. By this way, from the very moment of image creation, developed with calculation or language, the representational view and its relationship with real things and with the imaginative and, in widely way with the symbolic economics of society were strongly modified. Images of synthetic results appears when the image source is not found in any image or real object but only in a computational process or when the mathematical  description precedes any other information.

Technological development cause a wide source of impacts in perception and artistic creation of images, according to Poissant, Couchot  and Rush, “with Technologic Art the expression media itself changes radically when technology change”. The mathematical description of an object, in the case of images of synthesis can offer, according to Couchot, another information about itself and environmental relationship. That information happens to be fundamental for game production and, for example, to animate characters, body modeling and motion, like walk or run. Image can have a relation with real models and previous knowledge. In this way, to simulate, for example, a body over water, with the running river and under rain, algorithm construction and numeric matrix will certainly obey the optical models for light refraction under water and hydrodynamics process of a river flowing among stones.

This paper explores the debate around environmental humanities through the lens of sound and recent examples of sound art. Taking the emergence of ecocriticism as a point of departure, it discusses sound as a conceptual interface in our technologically mediated relationship with the environment. The notion of ‘shared sonic spaces’ is employed to address the shift that is occurring from a ‘poetic of authenticity’ to a ‘poetic of responsibility’ at the intersection of culture, technology and ecology.

The artwork is in essence a participatory experience in which the viewer in their interaction with the artwork, will generate a digital sculpture that responds to both individual and collaborative action. This project utilises Augmented Reality technology as a conduit to deliver adaptive and self-generating material that responds to the physical actions of the participants. Contained within the physical space a large-scale artwork will be hung on one wall, this piece will act as a ‘natural feature’ target, which will instigate an augmented reality response.

Viewers will experience a digital response via a connected device. Initially a simple grey cube will appear to hover in 3D in front of the physical artwork, however when a participant interrupts the line of sight between the physical artwork and the device camera this will instigate a reaction and the grey cube will evolve.

This evolution will respond directly to the position of the participants, with a huge variety of self-generative outcomes that are dependent on their actions and interaction. Collaboration and experimentation is required of the participants in order for the full complexity to be revealed.

The phenomenon of telepresence appeared with the development of electronic media and is to a large extent connected with the sense and nature of the image. As one of the basic concepts of cyberculture and electronic art, telepresence seems to broaden and increase the intensity of appearance, manifesting itself, for example, as an interactive image, language or electronic incarnation of a person. Telepresence is becoming more common and is to a certain degree almost imperceptibly shaping communication, influencing or even limiting other forms of contact in the real world. Through the multiplication of various interfaces, telepresence constitutes an arena for the coexistence in the electronic medium of images of reality and persons, together forming an electronic horizon of events, a community of electronic reality.

As M. Castells understands it, telepresence constitutes an electronic community which not so much represents some geographic, linguistic, or national community, but constitutes an independent and separate structure, a kind of Network community. As a property of art, telepresence can be combined with the interactive installation, whose beginnings can be found in the 70’s of the 20th century, for example, in the works of M. Krueger, theoretician and creator of electronic art. In his works one can observe and describe the appearance of the phenomenon of telepresence as influencing the character of inter-human relations that arise in the electronic environment. For R. Ascott, in turn, telepresence is associated with the Network proliferation of a person and nonlinear, multi-personal, and simultaneous contact.

At present the phenomenon of telepresence could be identified in various areas of electronic art, for example, in the art of monitoring, virtual reality, GPS, or Network or electronic intelligence. One might even say that in terms of art telepresence can be defined as the transferring of what is real to what is imaged and introduced into the electronic medium and the environment that corresponds to it.

This poster presents the rationale, implementation, social and cultural influences, and historical background of Cradlr: An Interaction Design for Refugee Children, a human-centered digital network concept designed to keep displaced children—the most vulnerable group who doesn’t have cell phones—connected with their families, resources, and heritage. Inspired by the Mothers’ Movement in China—a women’s movement rescued and educated 30,000 refugee children—and European countries during World War II, this project goes beyond the realm of digital product design in an attempt to find a humanitarian solution for a complex social challenge. It envisions a global network preserving a collective memory that might help displaced children to overcome many adversities and receive more love and brighter futures.

In 2012 NASA scientists expect the next solar super storm, an “electromagnetic tsunami”, like in September 1859 when auroras could be seen all over the world and the new technology of electric telegraphy was disturbed by natural radio – decades before our radio had been invented.
In 2003 I have started my sonArc::project. Since then I have been exploring the question of the “domesticability of lightning” with the sonArc cycle – the coding or forming of high-frequency high-voltage plasma as a pure electrical / electronic interface, a direct yet bodiless connection to an electrical system and its medial-epistemic roots and changing formats.
sonArcinterfaces are high-voltage-DC-arcs based on the studies of Duddell and Poulson or AC-arcs based on the inventions of Tesla around 1900. It is a reversal of de Maria’s “Lightning Field”. The system, an amorphous sculpture of electromagnetic waves, is scalable. When the lightning’s impulses connect in order to form long waves that resonate with the ionosphere, the weather becomes modelable.

The word “puppet” frequently appears in the digital realm to indicate a form of Avatar, being mainly manifested as a representation of the materialism of real world. Deeply rooted in the Cartesian hierarchy of separation between subject and object, in the digital media culture a puppet is considered as something to be manipulated and controlled, ignoring its transformative relationship with the user. In the digital translation of puppetry, we are interested in how interactive technology will support ancient wisdoms of ritual, revealing transformative relationships of puppet and puppeteer, resulting in performances of great excitement, public engagement and reflection of the community, creating rich layers of mixed reality environments. In fact, Wayang Kulit offers complicate layers of mixed reality, which allow viewers to walk around the screen, watching the real puppet and its virtual form as a shadow at the same time. Mixed reality does not only happen in viewer/puppeteer’s consciousness at the moment the shadow becomes alive with its own spirit, but also in the viewer’s perception struggling between real and virtual forms of presentation, walking around the screen. This kind of setting creates rich platforms for discussing reality, virtuality and mixed reality all together, which we adopt as our methodology in order to explore the full potential of virtual puppetry.

After the disentanglement of the terms ‘life’ and ‘nature’ – both terms putatively non-technological – the concepts ‘green’ and ‘nature’ need to be uncoupled as well. Investigations into biomediality have shown that contemporary art forms which employ biotechnologies as a point of departure, emphasize – paradoxically – both their ‘aliveness’ and authenticity on the one hand, and their explicit technicity and artificiality on the other. We encounter a similar problem with the culturally pervasive greenness trope: Aliveness and greenness are linked through ‘biofacticity’, the idea of biological artifacts that at the same time grow and indeed are technically constructed from the beginning.

In this media archaeological talk, ‘green’, symbolically associated with the ‘natural’ and employed to hyper-compensate for what humans feel they have lost, will be addressed as the most anthropocentric of all colours, in its inherent ambiguity between alleged naturalness and artificiality. As ‘green’ has become a pervasive trope across a broad range of disciplines, and its meanings have migrated across different cultures of knowledge, inherent contradictions have emerged. Far from having universal meaning, ‘green’ marks a dramatic knowledge gap prone to systematic misunderstandings: Engineers brand ‘green technologies’ as ecologically benign, while climate researchers point to the ‘greening of the earth’ itself as the alarming effect of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. ‘Green growth’ aims to reconcile economic and ecologically sustainable development, while in philosophy ‘prismatic ecology’ rebukes the use of green to represent binary ideas of the other-than-human world as an idealized nature. More concept than colour, ‘green’ is frequently being reduced to a mere metaphor stripped of its material, epistemological and historical referents.

There has been little reflection upon – and much abuse of – ‘green’ in its migration across different knowledge cultures. The resultant confusion increasingly obstructs, rather than enables, an interdisciplinary dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences – a dialogue which is urgently required in light of anthropogenic effects on climate and biodiversity: Researchers, policymakers and citizens lack a common terminology to address real world problems, meanwhile green-washing greenhouse effects away. This interdisciplinary paper presents a novel art, media studies, science and technology studies, and natural sciences based approach to reinvestigate the unique role of greenness in human self-understanding as colour, percept, medium, material biological agency, semantic construct and ideology.

Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” focuses on the new functions of modern post-aesthetic art that leaves behind its traditional functions in ritual and aesthetical enjoyment by highlighting its new function in politics and popular, visual and tactile culture. His claim that the work of art becomes “a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental” is a starting point for this paper on new functions and tasks of new media art.

Today we are coming across the new media art projects as artistic services that occur at the intersection of contemporary art, networked economy, new politics (activism, hactivism), techno-science and new lifestyle. The artwork is not a stable and aura-based object anymore, it is a process, an artistic software, an experience, a service devoted to solving a particular (cultural and non-cultural) problem, a research, an interface, which demands from its user also the ability for associative selection, algorithmic (logical) thinking and for procedures pertaining to DJ and VJ culture, such as (re)mixing, cutting, sampling, filtering and recombination.

The art service is not so much the manufacturing of things as it is a process of reshaping the thing, moving it, connecting it and incorporating it into new relations, (re)combinations and (re)contextualizations. The service presupposes a problem, a challenge or an order to be solved or carried out. The performer of the service is always faced with a certain task, challenged to solve it in a sequence of steps, chosen as economically as possible. The service therefore ends with a solution of the problem (or its removal) and not the manufacturing of an object. The service always implies an algorithmic procedure that has to be as rational as possible, economical, divided into phases, steps, instructions needed for it to be carried out. The new media (digital) art blurs the lines between “two cultures” (Snow’s notion) and can be mentioned even as a dry run for experiencing new forms of communication, research and even the alternative political engagement (e. g. hactivism, flash-mobbing).

This essay provoked by Benjamin’s calling into question on the ritual based artwork explores the fundamental shifts of paradigms, which take place in the new media art and are essential for understanding of contemporary society, too. One of the key functions of new media art is doing a research of its own. What do we talk about, when we bring to the fore the research function of such art projects (actions, performances, non-commercial software pieces, artistic events)? First of all, we mention a post-object new media artistic service-like practice (which is often integrated with molecular biology, informatics, robotics, communication sciences, networked economy, hactivism etc.) devoted to public accessed critical science as it is opposed to the official one, executed just by means of professional scientists. The idea of public science is based on efforts of some artists or groups (e. g. Critical Art Ensemble) who ‘contribute to making the meaning of scientific initiatives immediate and concrete, as opposed to the vague abstractions they tend to be’ (Critical Art Ensemble). Therefore, art as a research in order to show that research could be ordered and executed otherwise, not just within a frame of official science. And the artist as researcher in order to demonstrate that her tasks are beyond the art-as-know-it that used to be even corrupted in its main stream and capital based links.

For centuries, color was mortal, its fate tied to its organic roots. Fugitive colors change due to an array of factors and have tragically distanced the art artefact from the artists’ intent. Developments in chemistry gradually synthesized pigments that defied the inevitable. The quest for fixed color however took an unusual turn with the discovery of liquid crystal display. Electronic control of the crystal structure sparked recent display evolution, but the same effect can be triggered through environmental factors. Adding deliberate temporality to hue and matching it with hardware controls, a class of artworks is emerging that utilizes these new pigments. Technology first halted the dying of colors of Art History and has now given them life. Smart materials can now be programmed, choreographing the chemistry that once threatened masterpieces. The paper will discuss fugitive colors as villain, captive and hero, presenting recent projects that embrace colors that won’t sit still.

The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia has launched a four-year focus on arts, science and technology. The foundation sees great potential in transdisciplinary fields such as electronic art, bioart, tech art or new media art and is devoting special attention and funding to projects at the crossroads of disciplines. For that purpose, different initiatives and collaborations with scientific institutions such as CERN or the Swiss Polar Institute provide opportunities for artists and cultural practitioners to engage with transdisciplinarity or deepen their existing artistic practice. From 2021-2024, Pro Helvetia wishes to contribute to the exploration of social processes and the development of future prototyping.

Abstract
‘Future Heritage’ will transform local heritage and knowledge for a sustainable, global society. The collaborative project is a cooperation between Ramallah Municipality, Palestine and Public Art Lab Berlin, Germany in the field of visual arts, handcrafts and technology. We will highlight cultural heritage in Palestine, which is disappearing and reproduce it in new forms and techniques to develop and promote it locally and internationally.

Transforming local identities in a networked world

The projects ‘Future Heritage’ bonds cultural traditions to global opportunities and Maker Culture to Craftsmanship. By focussing on everyday culture we define heritage not as an antiquity but rather as a living organism, which is open to access and reproduces itself each day in a constant change. Looking at the moment between the tangible and intangible heritage, we want to address the revelation of transformation and understand how heritage is delivered and thus manifested.

How can we actively and supportively design the process of cultural identity building in times transformation? And in which way can new forms of expressions and new technologies be embedded in the production and articulation of shared memories?

The artistic process will research around these issues through an additive method: Local communities (craftsmen/-women in the field of embroidery and pottery) will create together with German and Palestinian artists, designers and technologists new objects and patterns, which will be enhanced through new technologies. We will be using existing objects/patterns and understand them as traces to the past in order to embed them as fragments in a contemporary context to open windows to the future.

Traditional craft practices and designs will be integrated and disrupted by new methods of digitalisation (like 3Dscanning, projections) and digital fabrication (3Dprinting, laser cutting, knitting machines). By merging, multiplying and virtualising the existing forms of handcrafts and combining them through new media technologies we are aiming at collaboratively revitalising the notion of heritage, which can be reproduced and shaped beyond physical borders.

Innovative socio-cultural cooperation and sustainable local business

The project will build a socio-cultural cooperation model between artists, the local community and craftsmen & -women to re-create meaning and value of their culture and deepen the appreciation of crafts and materials.

Collaboratively in a 5-days workshop in Ramallah’s Community Art Centre participants will exchange their interdisciplinary contexts in order to explore the urban environments of Ramallah City and to discover narratives together with local citizen. These explorations will be brought together with the traditional physical objects and merged into hybrid new forms and objects in a curated design process. All collected information, such as 3D-Data files and programmes, will be publishedopen source in order to allow a long-term process.

The co-developed art projects will also include the economical perspective to ensure that new professions can emerge and support tourism. The co-developed products will be promoted on weekly markets in Ramallah and on the Maker Faire in Berlin. By buying the artistic products visitors support the long-term
perspective of the collaboration.

The project itself is innovative by combining and enhancing local crafts through new technologies, which provides potentials for new products and new markets. With local cultures at the heart we want to promote a sustainable transformation of heritage, thereby addressing issues like the revaluation of art within craft, the recuperation and actualisation of cultural traditions, explore the artistic potential of local businesses in networked societies and build bridges between global innovation and local needs.

Future Tripping VR project offers new design approaches to data visualization while expanding our understanding of how the logic of digital computation influenced and shaped twenty-first century global social movements. The project’s objective is to contribute to the increasing demand for understanding contemporary political speech, rapid social change, and data science drawing on social media and using the Middle East as a case study. Through critique of database narrative and shifting media practices during political, economic, and environmental shifts of the twenty-first century, this project articulates techniques of data analysis as a  research method in media studies and the digital humanities. The central questions are “How can we create a virtual and augmented realities installation and software application that is cinematic using real-time social media?”; “How might an embodied approach to understanding the patterns of data humanize the scholarship?” Using a practice-based design methodology, our research cluster proposes to build a 360 degree, first-person immersive, augmented reality (AR/VR) production of the Arab uprisings of 2011 using a substantial archive of social media from the current version of R-Shief.

This installation explores the discourse surrounding the Anthropocene, climate change and the evolutionary impact this time will have on our planet and our biosphere. I convey messages relevant to the process of time and change by working with the photographic image, text, sound, water, performance, installation and film. This work uses connections of art alongside science to explore two islands (both of which I have visited) namely the Galapagos Islands and Lord Howe Island. Both groups of Islands, sitting at the centre of my investigations, are World Heritage listed with tourism restrictions and so should have in place mechanisms to maintain the best possible environmental future.

This installation explores how these islands reflect on how humans in the Anthropocene are impacting on the biosphere. This work embraces the current dispersal of pollution, notably plastic and plastic debris into the oceans gyres and works, to create awareness of these issues. By considering the plastic that we touch every day, my examination works to raise our consciousness about its disposal.

Gagging in Dystopia works through the interaction between the worlds of art and science, here I explore evolution in the Anthropocene, a harbinger for the future of our human interaction on this earth; I work to use my art as an agency for change.

Using photography as capturing and evidencing tool, the Siga Bien Pueda project has been developed since 2011, reaching an extensive body of graphic work, consisting of more than 2000 pictures from three different countries, with the purpose of describing and analyzing the galleries or market places, fruit stores and similar spaces, to identify common and differential factors, based on its aesthetic, chromatic and objective characteristics, understanding its importance for our cultural expression and folklore, as a reflection for the beliefs, activities, identity, costumes. These traditional spaces, with their fruits, vegetables, flowers, pottery, craftwork, religious American identity; each city embrace and preserve those places that survive as a picture of who we are and where we are. Presenting a selected compilation from various places in Colombia, with some complementary explorations, performed in the United States and Panama, based on a retrospective spoken format, this spoken and visual display gives an overall view to the project’s results and conclusions, offering a tour through the stories behind the most representative pictures, identifying particular element

Favela Hacklab is a temporary makerspace that acts itinerantly in Brazilian “favelas” (slums). Favelas are peripheral urban areas, inhabited by low-income communities, which lack material and educational resources. Favela Hacklab conducts cycles of workshops and temporary training in art and technology, focusing on electronics, material reuse, manual skills and improvisation, in a context of social impact. The actions are customizable according to the group of participants (children, youth, women) and the territory in which it is being held.

Gambiologia is a Brazilian creative hub which adopts the country’s tradition of “gambiarra” as a source of inspiration for works on art and technology. This term is commonly translated as “jury rig” or “life hack” and refers to makeshift repairs or temporary contrivances, made only with tools and materials that happen to be on hand. Gambiologia is thus “the science of gambiarra”. Through a vigorous creative production and a set of collective initiatives, the project investigates how the Brazilian tradition to adapt, improvise, find simple and smart solutions for everyday problems can be applied to the context of electronic art.

Our research addresses the impact of technological mediations on the contemporary creative practices of production in interactive games and new media arts. More specifically, our research focuses on game engines. Caught between different actors, cultures, organizations and functions, video game engines are cultural and socio-technical objects whose complex nature mirrors the multiple and competing definitions of video games and has similarly broad ranging cultural, social and economic impacts. The paper highlights the necessity to go beyond the current research on game engines, and outlines a new way to conceptualize them through a discussion of the studies of Ian Bogost and Luciana Parisi.

The refugee issue is one of the biggest issues facing human rights today. In Australia the situation is particularly caustic. One of the artistic responses to this has placed a refugee as the protagonist in an electronic game. Is this a successful ethical endeavour or a further media smokescreen?

To create a textile where the entire surface is pressure sensitive for use in a series of garments exploring my body language and social anxieties. Making a pressure sensor involves a sandwiching of conductive and resistive material. And this only allows for the sensors to be placed strategically. The individual sensors then all have to wired up. I would like to simplify all of that. By weaving with a waffle structure and a conductive yarn with high resistance, the entire textile becomes a sensor.
Waffle weave is a very complex and three-dimensional structure. When woven with a conductive material, it can act as a pressure sensor. Having a material where the entire surface is a sensor will allow me to collect and use data from all over the body. When I am uncomfortable, I contort and twist my up my body along with whatever I am wearing. I would like to use the pressure sensitive textile to create garments that can have a sonic response to the twisting up of my body. Having the entire textile as a sensor means that it can respond no matter what I am doing. The textile would allow response on an individual level.

Abstract

On January 15, 2005, BBC News’ website featured an article entitled ‘US military pondered love not war.’ This news brief publicly announced US Air Force research on the now supposedly defunct development of a ‘gay bomb.’ Proposed in 1994 at the Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, the gay bomb is defined as an aphrodisiac chemical that ‘would make enemy soldiers “sexually irresistible” to each other.’ Indeed, the gay bomb, which was designed to be a six-year development project costing $7.5 million, ‘would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a “distasteful but completely non-lethal” blow to morale.’ That the gay bomb would explode into immorality, detonating a public shaming upon its victims, pre-supposes rampant homophobia, for the act of homosexual sex in and of itself does not promise defeat or surrender. Yet, given the US military’s conflation of gay (here, defined as homosexual sex) with weapon, it seems that the military pondered war not love. Indeed, the image chosen to accompany this text of a military aircraft dropping a multitude of missiles assures us that this bomb is a loveless act of sovereign dominance and destruction.

Does computer science in its theory, practice, and politics embody discrimination towards women? If so, how does this discrimination work itself out in applications to the arts? These questions are examined through survey questionnaires and interviews administered in 1994-1995 at two United States research institutions. The collected data points to a dominate source of discrimination that affects applications in the arts; the epistemology of computer science inherited from a male-shaped knowledge structure of modern science.

Intro

On August 25, 1995, the astute and profound newspaper USA Today in a front page lead story reported the launching of Windows 95 as the “geek event of the century”. USA Today relates early in its commentary on Windows 95 that “it’s a guy thing. Few women were among early buyers”. These comments in the popular American newspaper point us to the topic we are here to seriously consider together: “Gender and Technology: What Problem?”

My response to this question is: “The Epistemological Problem.” I am questioning the knowledge structure of computer science and its impact on males and females. Let us begin by considering the double pronged question: Does computer science in its theory, practice, and politics embody discrimination towards women, and if so, how does this embedded discrimination  work itself out in applications to the arts? The difficulties for women in computing have been communicated over the last decade through a variety of major research institutions’ reports on women and computing, in numerous computer science publications, through published critical studies on women and computing, and in sundry organizations for women in computing. I will not rehearse the long list of contributors to the discussion.These studies, reports, and organizations confirm what we have come to recognize and experience: There are biases, limitations, and obstacles to women’s participation in computing.

Gendernaut is an English term that we could translate as “navigator of gender”, and that invokes Jason’s argonauts. The term appears for the first time in the documentary Gendernauts: A Journey through shifting identities (1999), directed by Monika Treut, to refer to people who travel through shifting gender identities.

This artistic research project questions, in a first phase entitled “Queering the software”, the forms of construction of the hegemonic archive through the design of a plugin that allows the collective creation of archives through an online interactive multimedia experience and, in a second phase entitled “Queering the archive”, proposes new ways of visualizing narratives based on transfeminist and queer genealogies through transmedia and performative experiences that conceive the archive as a living interactive space, free of heteropatriarchal codes, inhabited by multiple bodies and subjectivities that relate past, present and future to come. The series articulates an extensive historical investigation through a diversity of thematic threads that the feminist, queer and trans movements have been weaving during the last four decades in our political and artistic context. These genealogies link a whole series of historical, artistic, collective events, actions, campaigns, exhibitions, interviews, fanzines, performances, etc. forming a complex amalgam of relationships between art, politics, memory and activism.

Gendernaut is a trans-temporal and trans-spatial traveler that will invite us to travel through time through a genealogy of key events in the memory of the feminist movement and the LGTBI movement in our context. During this journey, he will show us the archive through a transmedia and performative experience to understand how the representation of the future in history has been imagined from a transfeminist and queer perspective. Queering the future…

El Bosque: the development of an immersive environment in Visual Reality. An artistic approximation to environmental awareness” starts from a wide artistic perspective of research in Ecology and Virtual Reality. With an inter- and trans-disciplinary approach, the aim is to give an experience in Virtual Reality as an artistic practice while demystifying progress from an eco-feminist viewpoint.

The main objective is to develop a theoretical-practical project in an immersive environment while generating empathy for terrestrial ecosystems and non-human factors. Viewing El Bosque as a threshold from which to reˇect on the dichotomy between culture and nature, rede.ning the relationship between the environment and society. At the same time re-thinking the forces of nature as non-inert acting forces, as proposed by Bruno Latour in the Theory of the Actor Network, understood as a set of shared methodological principles and not so much as a theory in itself. We therefore want to respond to the questions: What kind of future awaits us and our forests? What will be our role in the system of the Earth? And especially, How can we integrate non-human factors in historical narratives?

Starting from theoretical reˇections removed from apocalyptic positions, we look into the concepts of artists such as Nathan Shafer, Stephanie Dinkins, Koert van Mensvoort, Dominique González-Foerster, Jakob Kudsk Steensen or Daniel Steegman; and scientists and thinkers like Suzanne Simard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Felix Guattari, Timothy Morton, Byung-Chul Han, Andreas Malm and Rosi Braidotti.

We propose the value of interdisciplinary actions and the art-science-technology relationship with society. VR technique and technology as a tool and context enables us use strategies combining experiments, research and creativity. The challenge is to create a VR experience to consider questions on how to improve people’s lives, stabilize the climate and protect the natural world.

In this paper, I discuss the outcomes of working with a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to produce artworks that feature tools as subject matter. Through this, I am investigating how artists can use ML as a mechanism for creating artworks that disrupt our typical associative processes.

There is a long-standing expectation for feminine sentimentality in Western culture. Women have been the family historians and curators, saving objects and images to later be passed down as the family archive. This expectation extends into cultural practices surrounding mourning and death. Often in times of mourning women are the primary archivists and creators of memorial and sentimental objects for the family after the death of a loved one. In this paper I try to reconcile the traditional role of mourning ritual – language and iconography with generative computing art making in the time of Covid-19.

ISEA 2018

The dominant systems of agriculture that provide food for much of the world suffer from a lack of crop diversity, which leaves them vulnerable to the spread of disease and pests. This paper proposes that this is, in part due to the machinery used in industrial agriculture. It introduces a project, Evolving Species One, that is grounded in artistic practice and robotics research that draws inspiration from gallery-based robotic artwork to try to design and evolve robots that can cultivate diversity in the plants that are growing within a complex farm ecosystem.

This paper discusses Touch Terrain, a collaborative project developing a multi-participant mixed reality performative environment. We are invested in designing and choreographing experiential interfacings, that raise the stakes for the role of corporeality within hybrid domains. In a world and media arts dominated by audiovisual media, we depart from a reversal of the main static sensorial hierarchy of vision and sound, and instrumentalized touch and kinaesthesia, wanting to contribute to a more inclusive approach to immersive interactions. Following from a previous project, Blind Date, we emphasize the role somatic and tactile senses in the construction of an embodied awareness of ourselves, one another, and the world, questioning how are these and all the senses, feelings and awarenesses connected and affecting our general mood. With Touch Terrain we are working on to challenge participants to engage in a playful corporeal immersive experience that raises their awareness by destabilizing their autonomic / automatic sensorial and perceptive interconnections. Enmeshing another technological interface, such as VR glasses, into the naturalized eye-body-world interface, and with it another (simulated) body and environment, we are interested in the information systems’ possibilities to instigate awareness and deeper/joyful experiences of our corporeality, expanding embodied communication in less categorized/techno biased and profit driven modes. Thus, through various computer vision inter-connected interface systems – VR glasses, mocap sensors, data-gloves and webcams – the project is a challenge to address the body and embodiment out of univocally over-sexualized cultures of porno, sports, violence, publicity, and much art appeal. This paper discusses some of the crucial aspects in the ongoing creation of the work. How can we build such inclusive and a playful hybrid physical-virtual-simulated environment, where vision emerges from and reverts to participants’ tactile engagements. How can this investment facilitate (intelligent) inter-subjective embodied experiences, contributing to raise awareness about and change Cartesian and luddite attitudes towards our posthuman condition really amplify the corporal living experience.

The Ecologies of Thought Project was an interdisciplinary initiative that engaged with Guarani and Kaiowá Brazilian Indigenous Communities to rethink the ecological status of technology throughout a series of theoretical and practical experiments. Further, we explore how artistic practice can be used as an collaborative research methodology.

Cinema is an image of thought, and thought is multi‑layered and multidimensional, just as poetry speaks with many voices simultaneously. Editing reconstructs images in a process akin to the selective reconstruction of memory, expressing the multiplicities of nature through the complexities of montage. The contemporary city is a megalopolis full of asynchronous forces and paradoxical multiplicities of separation and coexistence. To live within it is to be surrounded by multiple, fragmented and simultaneous screens and images, and the process of integrating such disconnected and transitory stimuli in the mind may also be likened to the construction of montage in cinema. ‘Lost Fragments of the Night’ is a poetic documentary that utilizes an algorithmic generative editing system, which preselects shots to be rendered over four screens arranged in layers. The artwork’s subject is the chaotic, fragmented images and paradoxical sensation found by night in the city of Seoul, a capital full of complex phenomena juxtaposing contradictory values and dislocated images created through an extremely compressed and uneven modernization. Often called ‘the city that never sleeps,’ Seoul epitomizes the paradoxical coexistence of heterogeneous and fragmented images in contemporary life. These authorial themes of disconnection and heterogeneity in public spaces resonate with the concepts of the generative editing system and multi‑layered screens. The filmed material includes diverse locations, people, and objects in Seoul. The fragmented images are distributed over layers of screens to emphasize the chaotic yet simultaneous sense of fragility that nevertheless together forms a whole. The generative editing system has an internal logic, but creates unfixed and constantly differing montage, emphasizing the countless possibilities of coexistence and separation in a major urban complex. Designed for large‑scale installation in public spaces such as streets, clubs, or subway stations, our artwork has been prototyped via a physical miniature, projecting by rear diffusion onto four layered screens constructed of grey sheer fabric. We designed the generative editing system based upon a dynamic Bayesian network constructed according to a scene tagging system. The author tags scenes with keywords, and defines a narrative flowchart using the same tags. Between each screening, the generative editing system selects appropriate shots for each of the four screens according to probabilities based on their relevance to the narrative flow, their association with previously displayed scenes, and any pre‑defined system‑wide structural constraints. ‘Lost Fragments of the Night’ gives a role to the audience as a part of the artwork; the audience can appreciate the montage from different angles and positions to produce different layering effects not possible in traditional 2D cinema. Furthermore, audience members can have a role beyond that of a viewer through actively contributing to the direction of the montage. From these contextual variations, the artwork develops different meanings by incorporating the     contribution of the audience in every screening.

This paper documents a research project that deals with the application of an artificial life (AL) approach for creating cinematographic narration. The project investigates the possibility of producing autonomous audiovisual sequences, in which meaning results from a kind of hypermontage, conditioned by genetic algorithms. Firstly a relevant literature review lead to the formulation of a theoretical thesis regarding generative narratives and consequently, a system was created to support and evaluate this thesis. During the presentation of this paper, the system and its audiovisual results will be demonstrated.

This paper investigates whether individual video fragments belonging to a database may be linked into numerous different successions in order to satisfy fitness criteria defined by the user. The aim is to create optimum sequences in accordance to specific requirements, instead of coming up with a closed predetermined unique sequence, as it’s traditionally done by directors.

The presented system creates narratives starting by the juxtaposition of video fragments. Based on the phenomenon of semantic montage, the viewer attributes causality relationships to the succession of these fragmented micro-narrations which are seamlessly integrated in the sequence.

In the case of interactive hyperstructured video, it is often impossible for the author of the work to predict all possible forms of narration that the user may experience. In the case of genetic art, the process of experiencing and “reading” the work is replaced by a process of observing the development and maturing of a “living” system. Instead of content formed in a predetermined manner, the user experiences an unanticipated, autonomously and spontaneously formulated kind of content. The multiplicity of the artwork mainly depends on the manner in which the artifact is being written. Different readings may result from the use of the same structural elements as a starting point ultimately leading to different versions of the same work of art.

Contemporary approaches to art and biology, and in particular to digital art and genetic engineering, seem to reveal a new form of collaboration between art and science. In this article I will critically explore how new art forms which emerges form that kind of collaboration, both dramatically differs from artworks which explore art and genetics through the use of traditional media. I will focus on the powerful metaphors that are part of the discourse of molecular biology today and how these metaphors become part of the discourse of the art world today

Genomix Mask is the collection of masks fabricated by a collaboration between AI and the authors. It intends to tell four ages of the world: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, and Chthulucene. In the beginning, people can use technological power to extract resources and wellbeing from the world. However, over extraction and exploitation emerged and negative consequences existed. Therefore, Donna Haraway proposed us to make kin with nature. Authors interpret “making kin” by infusing DNA of humankind and animals (i.e. iguana, monitor, virus, and octopus) as a representative of nature. Ironically, to reconcile between human and nature, we need help from an ‘Artificial’ Intelligent (AI). To some extent, it says that it is an un-thought of ours. How AI contributes to this work? It learns heat-map of DNA and styles of animal organism and then generates many infused patterns that we can use to recompose as a mask.

This panel will address the influence of scientific developments on art and the emergence of themes within the Art/Science genre. Recent work presented at Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, and ISEA propose integrations of art with life‑sciences, and nanotechnology. Much of this would not be possible without the scientific advances preceding them. In fact, the resulting artwork often critiques the very technology used in their realization. But to what degree does technology determine the emergence of Art/Science themes and movements? Where does art set the precedent?

ISEA2010 featured presentations by two major figures in Art/Science research, Roy Ascott and Peter Weibel. Both acknowledged the advance of technology and, particularly, developments in brain research. Weibel proposed that artists might create a non‑sensory art generated by electronic brain‑stimulation. Separately Ascott has long promoted arts/technology/consciousness research, and suggested that art can lead the way where science cannot.

The years since have seen considerable developments in neuroscience and cognitive research. In 2013 the USA’s Obama administration announced the creation of the BRAIN Initiative – Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. With funding of $100 million the program will use emerging technologies to record signals from vast numbers of brain cells, even from entire sections of the brain. This reflects large neuroscience ventures elsewhere in Europe, China, Japan and Israel. In a recent article in Scientific American Rafael Yuste and George Church write, “The global consensus that is now propelling investment in brain science recalls other postwar science and technology initiatives focused on pressing national priorities…The Century of the Brain is now upon us.”

Among current tools for this research are electroencephalography (EEG), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), emerging nanotechnologies, and optical techniques – such as Optogenetics and Optochemistry – that employ light signals to detect patterns in neural firing. The tools used for sensing neural signals can also be used to stimulate the brain discretely. Researchers have employed optogenetics to “implant” false memories into mice.

If we relate memory to experience and being, then their creation could conceivably become a disembodied art form as Weibel suggests. When science leaves consideration of the material world to address emotion, identity, and mind it has  indeed entered on ground long held by the arts. Here science could learn from art just as art learns from science. This reciprocity opens up many questions about Art/Science sub‑genres: How do they emerge? To what degree do they depend on technique, cultural influence, or precedent? When are genres defined: by assertion (manifestos), prediction (technological determinism), or when they are recognized in retrospect? What are successful models for collaborations between artists and scientists? How can they negotiate the different processes and methodologies of the disciplines involved? Where are art/sci projects positioned in relation to the mainstream art world? Our panel will seek answers to these questions.

Territoriality is today increasingly less tied to geographic locations, but instead manifests as a multifaceted phenomenon in which national and power political demands play a similar role as international financial flows, technical infrastructure and mass media attention. And so communications technologies and the mobility of information technically create a new, globally effective territorial order which requires new critical methods and strategies for its used analysis and design.

Currently there is lots of talk about ‘crises’. We are however, economically just as ecologically, by no means in a crisis, but we have found ourselves at the limit of a 250 year long, extremely successful system. It is particularly surprising that the knowledge necessary for this diagnosis has been available, in some cases for decades, but that no appropriate action has followed from this knowledge […]. Radical changes in life styles and options for action do not work with top-down implementation, but must be tested in everyday life and, if found successful, spread until they become part of the cultural mainstream. The future depends on this potential being more attentively taken, promoted and made political.

Using video as a medium, three artists from the Islamic world offer bodies without a stable location and landscapes that are unpopulated by humans. Keeping in mind the 2014 International Symposium of Electronic Art’s overarching theme, this paper understands location in two ways. One is in the more conventional definition as a place out in the world. Another posits the body as a site of contestation — the human physique as the location of societal considerations and politics. The three artists examined provide these differing but related ways of looking at position. Janane Al‑Ani (Iraq/Germany), Basir Mahmood (Pakistan), and Larissa Sansour (Palestine) interrogate contemporary geopolitics in works of video art ranging from hi‑tech, science fiction fantasies to more simplistic techniques and narratives. Larissa Sansour denies the ongoing tension between Israel and Palestine, and instead provides a skyscraper as the homeland. No longer are Palestinians vying for a piece of land. Rather, the solution is for them to populate an extremely tall tower—all of them living together at last. Sansour’s futuristic story is a hi‑tech response to current politics in which an entire population is denied a piece of earth.    Meanwhile, Janane Al‑Ani explores a landscape that has no trace of people. The extensive area seen from above, as in sophisticated military satellite imagery, talks about the missing, referencing the result of war. She has been researching this concept through a series enTitle:d ‘The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People.’ And, in another take, Basir Mahmood investigates the notion of bodies in search of a land without showing either. Inspired by a recent event in which young Pakistani men died while illegally crossing borders in a container, his video captures a seemingly modest undertaking — moving something from here to there. The immense size of the object (the same dimensions as the container) shifts this simple task into the realm of the impossible.

The voice is an extremely immediate mode of transmission, directly from one body to another. When we hear another voice we recognize instantly (albeit subconsciously) how the sound is being produced. We read a series of physical cues, or more succinctly, we “sense” them, receiving the information through the body even before the brain. Is this kind of recognition translated through the various modes of technological mediation that we are subjected to daily such as radio, telephones, or anything amplified through a microphone? Or has it become an insignificant social convention relegated to a past era, making us, as a society, sonically desensitized?

There are at least two significant trends in contemporary culture that address the issue of vocal transmission (immediate or mediated). One is that of disassociation from the body. The  “cyborg” has been implanted into the vernacular. The theorists speak of the body as if it were an endangered species in need of preservation. Ethical questions in fields ranging from genetic engineering to synthetic reconstruction to cosmetic surgery revolve around the genus of the body. The concept of “manpower” as in manual or physical labour has become almost obsolete since industrial automation, and the testing of our physical tolerances and extremes has been limited to a secondary role in our society, that of leisure or sport. Gender has never been so ambiguous (transformational surgery evoked), and race and age are becoming less determining features of the individual. The second trend is that of the fading of geographical or physical space in the contemporary psyche. A twelve year old spending hours each day netsurfing knows little of geographic restrictions. Nor does he or she sense any distinguishing qualities
between one place or another. The experience of globetrotting takes place on a computer screen with sensory cues being restricted almost completely to the visual. We are all “virtually”
inhabiting…cyberspace.

Cultural, social, political and economic are folded into urban landscape. The critical geopolitical study of urban landscape is crucial to understand why and how the cultural, social, political and economic matter. Scale is crucial to understand the histories and geographies of particular places, landscapes and processes. In the presentation I use flexible ‘scale-jumping’ through critical geopolitics as an interpretative frame to indicate simultaneously present connections, flows and circuits in urban landscapes of Tallinn and of other places. The setting is presence but also deliberately post-postmodern when the cyborgs are ‘naturalised’ through the everyday actor-networks between human beings, technology and urban landscape.

Presentation of the results to the date of the knowledge management model of the UPC.

This project focuses on a multidisciplinary approach to improvisation in which gestures in electro-acoustic performance with mobile devices are informed by their capacity to transform and respond to characteristics of digital video, along with visual and architectural features of virtual spaces.

Keywords: sound, space, place, interaction, gesture, interactive art, workshop

This paper discusses two multichannel interactive audiovisual artworks, “Action A/V” and “SoundLabyrinth”, that explore approaches to the experience of gesture, sound and place. Both works were situated in a geodesic dome frame and built within the Max, Ableton and Max for Live computer programs, and produced ostensibly similar outcomes, however the approaches taken by the two authors differ in intention, processes, and philosophy. These approaches were presented and discussed in workshops delivered at ISEA2013, on Sunday June 9 and Monday June 10 2013. In these workshops participants improvised with the two systems, both through moving in the dome and by operating the related software, and discussed approaches and understandings of the three terms listed in the title of this paper.

Keywords: China-Canada exchange, gesture, labour, visual art, motion capture, Kinect.

GestureCloud is a micro-collaborative formation of artists working in Canada and China. Founded by Judith Doyle (Toronto) and Fei Jun (Beijing), we investigate art, gesture and the politics of labour exchange. In our project, 3D depth cameras are adapted for motion capture and gesture representation. We ask, how can these tools be best leveraged for use in the art studio and for collecting documentary gestures on location? We are interested in the syntactic structures of gesture, and consider culturally-situated, historically-informed theoretical models grounded in gesture studies and other interdisciplinary fields (performativity, art history, neuroscience). Key research themes include technological mediation, post-internet conditions, and the changing definition of physical versus immaterial labour. GestureCloud addresses how our ubiquitously networked present impacts conceptions of embodiment, subjectivity, and agency. Our project probes changing modes of artistic production and issues of labour. Over six years and four China-Canada artist exchanges, GestureCloud began with traditional mocap and subsequently built Kinect-based skeleton tracking to make artworks. The .bvh files we generated are used to control avatars, mobile devices, and robotic systems. We will discuss studio-based tele-collaboration in research, using examples of GestureCloud projects in virtual and physical exhibitions. At ISEA2013, we will demonstrate for the first time a portable 3D depth camera and a suite of applications we programmed, for portable motion capture. The depth camera is made with an XBOX Kinect, embedded computing, and a 3D printed shell. The depth camera applications include field-based documentary motion capture, gesture recognition, and interactive media installations. We consider gesture as a meeting point between different discourses and embodied experience where meaning can be identified and generated.

This section addresses the creative, cultural and cognitive aspects of symbolic and procedural thinking in contemporary generative art. Generative art is perceived broadly, as a heterogeneous realm of artistic approaches based upon combining the predefined elements with different factors of unpredictability in conceptualizing, producing and presenting the artwork, thus formalizing the uncontrollability of the creative process, underlining and aestheticizing the contextual nature of art.

The introduction provides an overview of generativeness as one of the key factors of art making, and outlines the characteristics of generative art such as the planned inclusion of chance and indeterminacy, the cognitive tension between the banality of pre-planned
systems and their surprising outcomes, the idea of the complex artwork realized in the form of research or study, and the idea of the art as a ludic, proto-, or pseudo-scientific experiment.

Documentary filmmaking and the design of videogames are often seen as two divergent art forms: the former as a medium for the filmmaker to record and share an aspect of reality with their audience and the latter as a means for the designer to give players a space to explore or create a new emergent reality. Some game designers, however, have taken on the task of creating what they call ‘documentary games’. This paper will discuss the history of documentary videogame design, it’s relation to experimental documentary filmmaking, and how documentary design process can inform traditional game design methods (and vice versa). The paper will discuss the process of an original experimental videogame that uses documentary techniques in its creation.

In July of 2013 the author visited the suburb of Cachiche in Peru, a town that has a history as a refuge for witches during the Peruvian Inquisition, and is in the process of developing infrastructure for ‘spiritual tourism’. Having stayed with a brujo (‘sorcerer’), who is actively involved in the aforementioned process, the author has used the audio interview and visual documentation to create a videogame that explores the cross‑cultural conflicts between the narratives constructed through the experience of an outsider and the other locally constructed narratives, perceptions and realities. To do this he is using gameplay to give the player a sense of investigative agency and the power to recombine and re‑contextualize information, using a simulation of the experience of both the documentarian and documentary audience. The paper will also outline possible experiments at the crossovers between the borders of documentary filmmaking and game design.

The game work‑in‑progress Cachiche takes as its inspiration Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s experimental documentary Mysterious Object at Noon. In this film he asks participants from throughout rural Thailand to add to a surrealist “exquisite corpse”‑style narrative. The interviews in which they create this story become the basis of the film, as well as scenes with local, non‑professional actors acting out the imagined narrative. It is a documentary of the creation of a fictional story, and thus of the creativity and collective unconscious of the participants. In Cachiche the player assumes the role of a visitor whose presumed goal is to take photos of “ghosts”, of which there are, in reality, none within the game world. They take instead photos of a town in transition, and show their photos to local people who describe or spin stories about the photos the player has chosen to take and share. This becomes a narrative the player collects, non‑linearly, in a collaborative stream of consciousness between the player and non‑player characters. It becomes a conversation about the town and individuals, including recorded interviews and fictional dialogue that illustrate the actualities of the locations. At the same time it creates a slippage between fiction and reality.

Neither naive escapism into virtual worlds, nor the technological ultra-topia of space colonization will save us from facing the big, uncomfortable questions. How will our life on this planet have to look to prevent ecological super disaster? What actions must we take and what consequences must we accept? How much persuasion, how much effort, how much pressure, how much coercion will be necessary, and what “collateral damage” will be involved?
We have been teetering on the edge for decades, knowing what is going to come, but choosing to largely ignore it. The Japanese term “GiriGiri” describes this dangerous but thrilling feeling of living on the edge.
We don’t have a planet B, and science nor art can solve our problem. Science can point at it while art and artists, through their work, have the ability to open a space of “art” thinking. This might be our chance for change as change is required when there is no way out. Through artists we can explore the possibilities of our futures.

Moderated by José Luis De Vicente, cultural researcher and exhibitions curator specialized in culture, innovation and design. He is the curator of Sónar + D, Sónar Festival Barcelona. He has curated multiple exhibitions for CCCB Barcelona, Fundación Telefónica Madrid, among many others. His latest project is Mirador Torre Glòries, a permanent installation in Barcelona that reinvents the concept of a viewpoint.

GITCT: Gwangju Information and Content Industry Promotion Agency of Gwangju Metropolitan City

VISION: TO CREATE THE BLUE OCEAN of Contents • ICT specific to Gwangju

MISSION: TO REALIZE THE CONTENTS • ICT VALLEY by RICH strategies

ICON: SPECIALIZED EFFORTS TO PROMOTE STORY-BASED CONTENTS TO BE ENJOYED BY THE PUBLIC, Constructing story-based Industrial Eco-system

CHANCE: CREATING AN OPPORTUNITY TO EXPLORE POTENTIAL BUSINESSES BY MOVING TOWARD THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. Participating in developing the integrated complex for AT-based industry convergence (400 million dollars in budget)

HUB: EXPANDING A CORE FOOTHOLD TO SET UP THE ECOSYSTEM OF INFORMATION AND CULTURE INDUSTRIES IN GWANGJU

This talk is about the way insect colonies offer themselves up as mirrors for their human hosts. They provide a language for arguing between the needs of the collective and the individual. Like insects themselves these representations mutate over time and then evolve into exotic models of human behavior. McLuhan spoke of the mission of humans to ”fecundate” technology, and here we’ll examine our evolution into the bees of the electronic world.

One of the primary functions of an archive is to act as a repository to store essential documents and records throughout history; consequently, these stored archival materials can help us re-imagine a collective memory of the past. With rapid changes in the dissemination of information in recent years, the conventional ways of archiving may not be able to capture all the essential records of our time. This is especially concerning in regard to new media art archiving. Many recently created important new media artworks have been disappearing without being archived. If this issue is not addressed, we may lose a significant part of our digital cultural heritage. To respond to the issue, archives worldwide have attempted to approach the problem collectively. This lightning talk discusses a case study that will be conducted in response to the Second Summit on New Media Art Archiving.

One of the primary functions of an archive is to act as a repository to store essential documents and records throughout history, consequently, these stored archival materials can help us re-imagine a collective memory of the past. With rapid changes in the dissemination of information in recent years, the conventional ways of archiving may not be able to capture all the essential records of our time. This is especially concerning in regard to new media art archiving. Many recently created important new media artworks have been disappearing without being archived. If this issue is not addressed, we may lose a significant part of our cultural heritage. To respond to the issue, archives worldwide have attempted to approach the problem collectively. This paper is a report on a proposed study presented at the Second Summit on New Media Art Ar-chiving at ISEA2022, taking the Summit as a case study to review the progress made in connecting archives worldwide.

What are the most radical questions that could change the world? How about integrating radiation in agriculture and food production to feed the less fortunate? Establishing 0-children policy in Africa to reduce overpopulation? Or building artificial islands to grow trees for industrial manufacturing and commercial use? Could these be the changes we should make? The current problems are not only rise in population, energy crisis, lack of food, endangered animals and deadly diseases in Africa, but also the way the society perceives these issues and act upon these. In the age of information overload our society needs to feel the impact of the Anthropocene like a fist in the face.

Living in the Anthropocene can seem as the crisis is the age itself. In addition to the intensifying debates about the ecological crisis, the recent years has shown how interconnected the global society has become. An example is the refugee crisis in Syria, sending large migration waves to Europe, pointing to the vanishing territorial borders and growth of transboundary issues, as a result of increasing economical and cultural interconnectivity. Considering only locally based issues, bound within the national borders, is not sufficient anymore. Such problems as the global ecological crisis, or migration (EXODUS) cannot be solved by individual nations, as they aren’t caused by any single government.

The Global Change App was initiated as a discursive art project. It is based on artistic research, investigating how to interactively involve and engage people in fundamentally important, contemporary ecopolitical matters. The most important element of the project is finding radical and important questions that can change the world. This presentation will focus on how to how to engage people in global democracy in posthuman world by reducing the complexity of global decision making process.

Tokyo Dreamspace: I’m standing at night in a public square in Shinjuku on my first visit to Tokyo. Down the machine-straight streets off the corners of the square, as far as I can see, neon pulses in vertical collages shoot animated afterimages off into the ambiguous sky. Perspective condenses the neonlike sideways gravity. On the faces of buildings, diagonally right and left ten stories up, huge video screens paint the bare legs of hundred-foot women walking in slow motion, randomly jump-cutting to spinning logos and sleek speeding cars. Half a head taller in my heels than most of the Japanese who pack the square at midnight, I am seeing the place as one who looks into an aquarium at precisely the waterline: above, the photon storm of neon-video light; below, people moving like fish, slowly, not looking up. I bob up and down, breaking and re-breaking the surface tension of the human sea, savouring the instant metabolic transformations. But I am left wondering why these people have made this space? Most of them are not even looking at it.

The Connecting New Media Art Archives project has been developing a methodology to enable the sharing of information between currently ‘siloed’ online repositories of New Media Art. With representatives from institutions across the globe, this panel will share the results so far, as well as highlight the challenges encountered and lessons learned.

Creating meaningful connections between new media art archives involves technical innovation, overcoming logistical barriers and consorted collaborative effort. Although the pilot project initially involves five institutions, the goal is to pave the way for other new media art archives to join the world-wide network of open access interconnected archives.

Encouraged by the success of Inferno (2015), “Godspeed” will pursue the similar transformative experiential journey of becoming an augmented human. In Inferno, up to 25 spectators wore custom-made exoskeletons that controlled, submitted and coerced them into a dance performance driven by a rhythmic soundtrack. With Godspeed, we aim to go beyond Inferno’s far-reaching achievements by further catalysing the audience’s participation into a joint human-machine endeavour: co-creating and co-performing a series of speculative rituals inspired by the upcoming Singularity.

Godspeed is frequently conjured in the rocket launchings of American spatial missions, a predominant sign of vastly mediatised events cum rituals of modern science and technology.

In Godspeed, the ‘ritual’ takes on a broader more speculative connotation rather than a strict traditional denotation of the term, while still referring to implicit or explicit rules governing social constructs and individual behaviours. As symbolic gestures, each ritual will stage specific machines (robotic extensions, instruments to manipulate, exoskeletons, portable devices and so forth) enabling actions that lead to co-embodied communal procedures. These actions will either be absurd, repetitive, ceremonial, hypnotic, senseless, solemn or contemplative — immersing the participants in a kinesthetic delirium, transcending and fusing his/her body with the machinic counterpart.
Furthering and expanding Inferno’s performative experience, Godspeed aims to involve a larger number of participants while developing more alternate and diversified human augmentations. We will derive and explore a variety of extensions, prosthetics, outgrowths, supernumerary limbs, instruments and devices adapted to the performers, enhancing or forcing their bodies into involuntary and unpredictable movements or tasks, in a state of “augmented servitude”.

Godspeed aims to enable the amateur spectator to become a skilled performer by augmenting his/her untrained state and simultaneously, through an intuitively and easily mastered mechanical interface, to fuse into a larger performative body.

Taking the example of the ubiquitous navigation software Google Maps/Street View, our presentation investigates the complex temporality of the GSV database via a ‘close navigation’ of a GSV scene in Oslo. In so doing, we address not only to the temporal discontinuities and gaps of the GSV database, which the user navigates as a spatially continuous image, but also its impact on data privacy. We show that the algorithmic convergence of the photographic and cartographic when navigating across Google Maps/Street View results in the ?total image’ of the city where photographic and cartographic views are part of the same navigational trajectory. In fact, with digital navigation software such as GSV we experience the city as one and the same data‑space which we traverse simultaneously on site and on screen. This navigability of the GSV image is afforded by real‑time data processing, based on mutual data exchanges between user location, hardware, software, network and database. In consequence, the GSV image becomes what Harun Farocki has called an ‘operative image’, an image that no longer represents an object but is part of an operation’ (2004: 17). The users’ trajectories feeding back into the database initiate what we could call, referring to Paul Virilio, a ‘reverse operativity’ which proves to be the more problematic side of ubiquitous locative media applications such as GSV.

GPS Film is an artwork and invention that creates a new form of film-viewing experience by using the location of the viewer to control the story. From a specially-designed mobile device, a film is assembled in real time based on the location and movement of the person watching it – location-based mobile cinema. Now who we are and where we are can affect the entertainment experience.

The GPS Film project combines device programming, application programming, and cinematic content. A viewer travels with a handheld player that reads his location and physical journey through the capture of GPS coordinates and then plays scenes from a film that occur near his location. As the viewer continues to travel, the next GPS zone is entered, and the film shifts to scenes from that area. Due to the unique design of the script, the resulting film changes with each route, each direction, each speed, and each total distance yet continues a consistent theme, with recurring characters, and an overarching narrative.

People now watch movies on handheld devices on trains, in taxis, on busses, while walking. This new-found mobility is changing how we enjoy cinema. Additionally, game design, interactivity, wikis, and a host of other technologies are affecting the historic concept of a linear narrative and replacing it with spatial narrative forms. We’re becoming used to stories being told by exploring an environment. GPS Film takes these concepts off the computer and back into the real world. Story navigation becomes a physical, viewer-controlled experience, a journey of fiction ties directly to a journey of fact.

Granular synthesis programs, written in the Cmix music programming language, have been expanded to provide more function curves which describe sonic gestures. The Fcurve/Sound Generator System links digital sound created with granular synthesis on a NeXT computer with graphics created in SoftImage Creative Environment on Silicon Graphics workstations. Through an interface to SoftImage which stores data in sound templates, these curves can be applied to various graphical parameters.  The artist/composer may choose the mapping from the sound parameter hierarchy to the graphical parameter hierarchy through menus in the interface. In an image-to-sound transformation, data form graphical morphing and distortion. Since the graphic interface does not display actual scene elements such as models, the best method of using the system is currently to create sound templates, or graphic primitives, which have sound data mapped into their function curves. Then, function curves can be copied from the templates to other objects in Softimage.                                                                                                                Results
One study produced so far is composed of two layers of granular synthesis sound, and graphics generated from the sound data. The graphics consist of a wave with motion based on the  frequency of the grain parameters of one sound, and several spheres moving in relation to the other sound’s frequency. Less obvious mappings link gram parameters such as grain rate, duration and location with color, transparency and object location. This example shows potential for more complex and interesting multimedia work with this system.
Image to Sound
Translation from graphical data back to sound is an obvious, desirable extension. In another experiment, we used a set of images sequentially. Each image first distorted geometrically,
and then morphed into a new image. The amount of morphing and distortion was mapped into sound parameters, such as changing frequencies and grain rates.
Future Research
We plan to expand and integrate the programs for sound and graphics. An interface for sound generation can be created similar to the StochGran application on the NeXT for fsgran. As fsgran already runs on the SGI, sound generation may also be done on the same platform as the graphics. Finally, we plan to work with other graphical artists and composers to create
multimedia works with this system.
Conclusion
An integrated approach to creating multimedia work has been sought by relating granular synthesis sounds and graphics. The sound program component, created on the NeXTstep
platform, makes use of powerful granular synthesis techniques. The Fcurve interface allows the user flexibility in ways of mapping this sound data to image.

Computer programming education often focuses on the algorithmic design, with its step-by-step problem solving and thinking process. Logic and procedure are the building blocks for most education materials for teaching and learning computer programming. Students spend a lot of efforts to struggle with the syntactic correctness of the codes and the semantic soundness of the logic. Gradually, they developed the tendency to avoid every form of bugs and errors. On the other hand, media art and digital design practices have adopted increasing use computer programming to deliver the outcomes. In creative arts, we, however, treasure students’ risk-taking and self-exploratory abilities, and that may go in the opposite direction with the error avoidance attitude they develop in the encounter of computer programming. The presentation proposed the investigation of visual composition principles of graphic design in order to understand and relate with the practices of computer programming. Classic texts in graphic design, such as books from Wucius Wong and Ellen Lupton have already incorporated the use of computer software to illustrate and explain the visual concepts with the use of computer-generated examples. In the presentation, I would like to further establish the missing link between visual grammar and the linguistic grammar of the procedural programming languages. Students’ sample works and teaching materials will be drawn from one of my courses, Evolutionary Graphics, from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Generative Arts, from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.

Abstract

This paper explores the convergence of the diagnostic imaging method of computed axial tomography with the additive manufacturing method of rapid prototyping. This occurs through the common use of the layer as an incremental slice through a spatial entity. Both technologies have key functions of relevance in the extension, augmentation and replacement of organs of the human body. Both have unlimited potential within the creative sphere of art and design. By locating these technologies within the subject of virtual reality I will demonstrate how their interrelated use generates a feedback loop from actual to virtual and from virtual back to actual. This feedback has a value in the understanding of how humans interact with virtual space and in determining what can be gained by this interaction.

Both of these technologies are isomorphic in that their functions are predicated on a progressive layer-based system. In the case of tomography, scans are made through a body or object, in a sequence of slices, which are then digitally assembled to form a virtual entity. In the case of rapid prototyping, a virtual entity may be translated into a physical object through the fixing of granular material in a sequence of layers. The isomorphic nature of the analytic and synthetic functions of these two technologies enables the potential for a flow of information from actual to virtual and vice versa. This flow is an agent in the symbiotic convergence of reality with virtual reality and is fundamental to the concept of the post-human.

 (Long paper)

Keywords: Biomimetic, Performative Materials, Synthetic Aesthetic Immersive Artwork, Algae, Bio Inspired, living and non-living.

In the last two decades, emerging fields alternately termed Synthetic Biology, Artificial-Life Art, Bio-inspired Design and Smart Materials, to name a few, have acted as loci that spawned new methods for creating novel artworks based on phenomena that is generally described as “natural”. At the same time, there has been increasing interest and research in creating differing kinds of immersive environments, responsive architectures and inhabitable worlds. Grene Epiphytes is an artwork that grew from an exploration of bio-inspired theories and a rethinking of engaging and immersive inhabitable aesthetics. It offers a perspective grounded in the lineages of immersive artworks and aesthetics that engage participants (not with representations of other life-forms, but) with non-human life-forms, and question the distinctions of human and nature. In this paper, we articulate assumptions and theoretical constructs that inspire our approaches for creating and “engineering” this artwork, and address some of the challenges. Rather than creating nature-like experience where humans are assumed to be at a remove, rather than part of nature, the inhabitable environment presented here is focused on a context enlivened by human and non-human entities, their varied responses to each other and to aspects of their intertwined worlds, as well as a questioning of materials

The metaverse has taken huge steps in the realization of a realm where awareness between participating agents is taken to an entirely new level, providing not only interaction and participation but also “presence”, creating far deeper reaching implications than what a mere novel display system or tool would indicate: New forms of embodiment, of presentation as well as perception, and of autopoiesis are being materialized. Artistic practice constitutes a field requiring specialized creative strategies for the implementation of this novel condition.

While Second Life is used by hundreds of educational institutions (Lagorio 2007), the lack of concern over whether the unique properties of this novel human condition can be exploited to develop novel learning strategies is noteworthy. The overriding majority of SL universities have appropriated campuses in which learning activity that is entirely cut off from the rest of the metaverse tends to occur. Indeed, most of these campuses have been built as exact replicas of their physical counterparts, thus metaverse learning activity is considered as a mere extension of education in the physical realm, mostly implemented by faculty whose presence in the metaverse is limited to this activity alone.

McPherson (Mcpherson 2004) proposes that the design of online learning environments should be based upon pedagogical models appropriate to a specific educational scenario. For ground<c>, this model is the Groundcourse (Ascott 2003), Roy Ascott’s art educational methodology practiced during the 1960’s, implemented through behavioral exercises, role-play and ‘’irritants’’, operating under the tenet of Dewey’s learning theories (Dewey 1921), and Cybernetics; the ultimate aim of which was to create an environment which would “enable the student to become aware of himself and the world, while enabling him to give dimension and substance to his will to create and change”, achieved through a drastic breaking down of preconceptions related to self, art and creativity. Thus an enviroment that fostered the rethinking of preconceptions and fixations with regards to self, society, personal/social limitations, art and all the ensuing relationships was provided through a carefully coordinated range of exercises involving problem solving, that could at times seem absurd, even terrifying in that they all entailed behavioral change. Empirical enquiry was balanced by scientific study; irrational acts by logical procedures. At the core however, was a concept of power, the will to shape and change, this indeed being Ascott’s overriding educational goal. Thus, “the student is bombarded at every point with problems demanding total involvement for their solution. For the teachers, the formulation of problems is in itself a creative activity…”

The Antarctic is unlike any other place on Earth: geographically, politically and culturally. March 2007 marked the launch of the fourth International Polar Year (IPY), the largest and most ambitious international effort to investigate the impact of the poles on the global environment.

Polar regions are crucial in many ways: the white surfaces of ice perform a role in the global climate system and the poles show climate changes before they can be detected elsewhere. Thick Antarctic ice cores provide one of the best records for past climate change, and sea level rise associated with increased melting of polar ice sheets represents one of the greatest threats from human induced climate change. However, many aspects of how polar climate operates and its interaction with polar environments, ecosystems and societies are still unknown.

Research access to the poles has traditionally been available only to scientists, limiting the breadth and depth of representations of Antarctica, but the IPY has created opportunities for exploring art and science collaborations. The author will present new sonic and visual electronic artworks developed during a December 07/January 08 two-month National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored artist’s residency in Antarctica interpreting data from the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Project including repeated GPS measurements determining ice velocity, radar measurements and near real-time data from Automatic Weather Stations and satellite composites.

Created while working directly alongside scientists in The Dry Valleys (77’30’S 163’00’E) on the shore of McMurdo Sound, 3500 km due south of New Zealand, the driest and largest relatively ice-free area on the Antarctic continent completely devoid of terrestrial vegetation, the resulting artworks communicate both the aesthetic power of a region where life approaches its environmental limits and the scientific importance of Antarctica to global climate.

The Design is Speculative, the Debate is Real. _Koert van Mensvoort

This artwork is a speculative design study into the future of bio integrated wearable devices. The ultimate goal is to provoke conversation around this speculative future in terms of design, use, and possible implications. Current innovations in the field of health and biofabrication have seen new abilities to 3D print skin and bone grafts from our own cells, record glucose levels through our contact lenses, and implant circuitry in our bodies using dissolvable silk. Bacterial microbes outnumber our own cells by 10 to 1 – meaning that our survival is already dependent on our internal relationships with other organisms. It’s therefore not impossible to imagine organic living matter integrating into our wearable devices.
So how can we improve our health through bio-integrated wearables? By facilitating symbiotic relationships with organisms known to contain medicinal properties, we could effectively enhance our own body’s ability to self-heal. Creating a symbiotic relationship with our medicine could effectively remove the uncertainty and difficulties that come with appropriate dosing, and encourage our treatment to have an invested interest in our recovery. This piece invites discussion around curated symbiosis and bio-design’s place in modern health care.
Each piece addresses a significant health problem and proposes an integration between emerging bio-technology futures, and existing research in mycological remedies. For the physical showcase, I’ve created a series of three custom displays paired with 3D-printed wooden wearables. Each display highlights the potential for physical growth of the pieces into the wearer. The design of these devices plays off the patterns of mycelial growth structures, and the current tropes of wearables in the health industry.
[Cancer] Taxcidum Growable – a living wearable grown from known cancer fighting mushrooms releases medication as needed into the body. A decorative wooden amulet worn around the neck [Diabetes] Glucocylium – a living wearable that makes use of the nutrient sharing capacity of mycelial networks. The symbiant monitors sugar levels within the wearer, and either delivers, or removes excess glucose, which can be stored in a nutrient pack outside of the body. Visually similar to a modern wristwatch or health tracker with a glowing screen.
[PTSD/Chronic Depression] Psilocybisol – a wearable paired with a home growth kit that provides relief from chronic depression, PSTD, and OCD through an enhanced psilocybin spore release. The user can find a calming practice in the care and growth of their enhanced medicinals, and use the wearable as a delivery device when needed.

My previous work as an artist exploring the potentials of biofabrication included the synthesis of a wedding dress made from mushroom mycelium. A talk given in support of this project is on video.

This presentation introduces Graduate School of Culture Technology (GSCT) of KAIST to the audience. KAIST, formally the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, is a public research university in Daejeon, Republic of Korea. KAIST, being ranked as number 6 of the world’s most innovative universities by REUTERS in 2016, is a well-respected member of the worldwide science community. As a part of the university, Graduate School of Culture Technology – which is established in 2005 with the support of the Ministry of Culture – aims to foster high-caliber interdisciplinary talents and elevate cultural content business into the world’s future core industry based on cuttingedge science and technology. GSCT has been researching technology for the creation in five terms: Visual content technology, Sound and music technology, Interactive technology, Computational design, and Cultural complexity science. Through the interdisciplinary research, GSCT aims to prosper in analysis cultural phenomena and technological advance on the fields of cultural artefacts and exhibition, art and entertainment, and life.

Gulliver is a two screen video work which shows archive footage from 1918 of the south Wales steel industry alongside footage generated from NASA data of the moon’s surface. At times abstract, kaleidoscopic elements cut in and out of the archive materials, disrupting any sense of narrative and occluding interpretation. The film is accompanied by a soundtrack by glitch musician Jaguar Min. The work seeks to ask questions about our industrial past by creating a fiction around the ‘real’ (the archival footage).
This work brings together a number of disparate elements: the 1918 archive footage with its depiction of individuals working in a landscape desolated by industry; the visual and temporal links between that film and the science fiction of Georges Méliès ‘Le Voyage dans la Lune’ (1902) in which gentlemen scientists escape a polluted industrial landscape in order to explore a fictionalised lunar one; and the availability of data (from NASA) which enables the creation of a lunar surface, within the computer – a work of imagination and a contemporary equivalent of Méliès’ evocation of the lunar surface as a theatrical space. Gulliver is a hallucination of the west’s industrial past. In much of the west, we have ‘escaped’ the landscapes depicted by Méliès and which appear in the archive, by transferring heavy industry to the other side of the world. A process which dislocates communities which once relied on those industries for employment as it degrades the environment in the east. In Sichuan province in China the smog created by heavy industry is often severe enough to partially obscure the moon and stars. The work is in development at the moment. I will show work in progress and soundtrack sketches or a part of the finished film at ISEA2015.

The developments that have been brought together in this installation represent the effort to pursue new approaches to dealing with Mixed Reality content. The challenge at the core of this project was to position an innovative medium somewhere between theater, film and installation. The result is an infrastructure that offers artists new opportunities to convey audiovisual information, and one that ought to encourage creatives in every discipline to work with these new approaches.

Gulliver’s Box is a result of the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s collaboration with Prof. Adrian Cheok (National University of Singapore) and Prof. Hirokazu Kato (Osaka University). The developments that have been brought together in this installation represent the effort to pursue new approaches to dealing with Mixed Reality content. The challenge at the core of this project was to position an innovative medium somewhere between theater, film and installation. The result is an infrastructure that offers artists new opportunities to convey audiovisual information, and one that ought to encourage creatives in every discipline to work with these new approaches.

How have networked, mobile media transformed our movement vocabularies? How can choreography transform through the use of networked, mobile media in performance? This short demonstration presents ideas for Interdisciplinary choreographic experiments using smartphone video conferencing, video projection, dancers, movement and sound created in a collaborative process with graduate and undergraduate students at the University of New Mexico and from the Glasgow School of Art. Referencing the choreography of mobile media interaction: the selfie, the security webcam, the gopro, and skype, how can performers convey this more personal, private meaning to an audience in a public performance, and how can performances evolve between actual public and private space?
For the demonstration we will have at least one performer in the space physically and at least one presenting virtually through smartphone camera. We will develop a short demonstration choreography/duet that examines one or more of the following:

The depth of the physical stage space versus a flat, projected virtual space
The vertical, horizontal and transverse axes of the dancers compared to the tilt axis of the mobile devices
Speed and acceleration of movement and the corresponding effect on real time mobile video
Levels of movement: high, low and mid level for the dancers and the corresponding or contrasting positioning of mobile devices
Interactions between dancers in physical space versus interactions between performers in physical and virtual space
Public physical space versus projected private space

The new hub explores and develop intersections between art, science and technology to boost the digital transformation of society: this is the aim of Hac Te (Art, Science and Technology Hub), promoted by catalan institutions such as universities, scientific centers and cultural centers and festivals all of them of great relevance to make Barcelona a global center for research, training, dissemination, transfer and production in this field.
Facilitate and promote the digital, ecological and fair cultural transition, thanks to the joint contribution of the arts, sciences and technology.
Contributing to the reindustrialization of the productive sectors thanks to the contributions of arts (design), science and technology
A public-private partnership that brings together and interrelates Arts, Science, Technology and Society stakeholders.
An initiative that designs common responses that re-imagine our coexistence in the information society.

This presentation will introduce Hac Te, the new Art, Science and Technology Hub from Barcelona. The initiative has been promoted by Catalan institutions such as universities, scientific centers and cultural organizations of great relevance to make Barcelona a global center for research, training, dissemination, transfer and production in this interdisciplinary field. The presentation will explain the global, national and local context on the hub and its main strategies to interconnect agents from different backgrounds and to boost the digital transformation of society.

Abstract

Just as there is no self-evident solution to the problem of what is distinctly ‘new’ about new media, it has also proven difficult to identify the ‘uniquely digital’ aesthetic properties of computationally generated artifacts. Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky, for example, use digital technology, but they are known primarily as ‘photographers’ rather than ‘digital artists’. While Wall resists easy categorization by blending digital and analogue technologies, it is harder to discern why Gursky, whose images are conspicuously manipulated or mediated by digitality, would not fall into the broad category of digital art. I will leave open the question of whether a work is deemed ‘digital’ on a formal, ideological, or technological basis, but I call up the figures of Wall and Gursky as points of reference against which to consider a collection of images whose siren song lures us with promise of photographic pleasure, only to dash us against the jagged rocks of statistical averaging and data-driven patterns.

Keywords: Hacker, Architecture, Hybrid Spaces, Electronic Flows, Social Bodies, Geolocalization, Free Software and Hardware.

The a point architectural gap between the real and the virtual from the point of view of inhabiting is a field of study within the branch of the Hackitecturas – driven by the need of the technological subject to be a participant in the transformation of the places that he inhabits. The current emerging society, the society of information and knowledge, begins to demand changes where spaces for social reality are appropriate to its needs. From here, architecture – the science that deals with the organization and production of the space we inhabit -, has to reach a transformation in development of its concepts and goals in order to organize and produce new spatialities. In order to do that, architecture it self generates the need to begin to connect with other fields of knowledge, getting to know, imagine and create the new habitants.

Hackteria is a collection of Open Source Biological Art Projects instigated by Andy Gracie, Marc Dusseiller and Yashas Shetty with the aim of developing a rich resource for people interested in developing projects that involve DIY bioart, open source software and electronic experimentation. Hackteria encourages scientists, hackers and artists to combine their expertise, write critical and theoretical reflections, share simple instructions to work with lifescience technologies and cooperate on the organization of workshops, festival and meetings.

The majority of our work so far has been under the label ‘Bioelectronix’, a marriage between the bio and the electric, or to be more succinct the locus at which the biological and the technical can meet, or collide. We embrace the idea that technology, applied correctly and intelligently, can be a valuable tool for the investigation of the organic world around us, and especially the microbiological world that remains largely hidden. A second, and maybe more important aspect of the Hackteria ethos is that our techniques, our discourse and our products are open source.

Haul Out – Goodbyes riff off the proliferation of Hauls and shopping exposés where teens show off their recent purchases. I began these Youtube postings of videos about stuff on November 26th – Black Friday, or conversely, Buy Nothing Day.

The stuff I showcase is not new, rather it is about to be given away. From the opposing side of consumer joy, I deal with bad shopping habits, accumulations of useless things and general wastefulness. The persona I have created allows me to imagine indulging in incomprehensible anxieties and attachments of someone who cannot ‘let go’ of possessions.

On an ISEA panel I would present video excerpts to discuss strategies for using the internet, the information highway, and privately-owned social networking sites, with regard to:

1. Mixing purposes: Artistic Practice/Social Commentary/Self Promotion.
2. Examining notions of self and morality through statistics of visibility: this is my reality show and I am performing a version of my life.
3. Comparing material objects versus digital data, and dissonant feelings about dropping each in the trash.

I comment on taking responsibility for accumulated garbage, while resisting – or not – the pressure to buy more. As I view my image, I become concerned about how I look. I will have to buy new clothes, make-up, and technical equipment to improve production.

Popular young women with the most ‘youtube’ hits are beginning to make shopping careers from sponsored Hauls, hiring Hollywood agents and being interviewed on national television. Flirting with cyber-celebrity, I keep track of my Haul Out hits and posts statistics on facebook, twitter and my website.

This video project is part of a larger body of work, Tender Loving Stuff, in which I explore hoarding and wasting as they relate to psychological attachment, economic prosperity, poetic inspiration, and transgression in contemporary social practices. The desire to use virtual realms to examine the excesses of consumerism is the starting point of TLS. As a result, I butt against cyber overindulgence and my own electronic junk pile: will my electronic trash end up with “twitter” tweets in the Library of Congress or in someone else’s mash-ups?

This paper collects a series of heuristics in game level design to articulate the relationship between designed experience, perceived experience, and the mechanics of play. This work aims simply to illuminate core concepts as a guide for framing the relationship between designer/ author and player/participant. It is offered simply as a philosophical lens for perceiving and designing the dynamic between created works and their perception by players. It does so by offering the concept of nested narratives recursively experienced between the played narrative and the designed narrative. It is an adaptation of Derrida’s Hauntology, applied to the context of narratives in game design, at the scale and pace of 21st century game design. In short, games are always haunted by the ghosts of the author’s designed narrative, it’s manifestation in player’s actions, and the player’s self-authored explanation of their experience. This view can be used to design experiential, multi-narrative focused games and plays on the notion of games as penumbra. They are the penumbra which lay like ghosts in each new design.

This paper discusses the results of several original digital game design experiments where generative landscapes are created to reference states of consciousness. Their designs take inspiration from hypnagogic states, geographically located psychic trauma and dream-states, unconscious player input, dissociative worlds, and landscapes as autonomous, emotional entities. This series is a work-inprogress that points to future paths in expressive generative
landscape design.

This paper explores different approaches to the sonification and visualisation of two environmental projects:- “Heavy Metal” is focussed upon the real-time analysis and sonification of the chemical elements in a painting via a camera vision system, whilst “Oratorio for a Million Souls” concerns the behaviour and acoustic properties of live bee colonies manifest in the creation of real-time multi-channel sound compositions and associated sound architectures. Whilst these two projects differ in terms of methodology, aesthetics and technical approach they both share a direct concern with a deep analysis of the underlying environmental structures and perceptual frameworks that emerge in direct ‘live’ encounters — on one hand the discovery of what lies behind the surface of a painted image in terms of chemical and colour structures — and in the case of Oratorio, a compelling immersion into the acoustic environment of Bees.

Hell Hunt is an application based upon the use of so-called vision algorithms, a way of enabling computers to detect and distinguish geometrical configurations inside pictures. The active algorithm in this piece traces down the diabolic symbol of the reversed pentagram on images stored on the Internet. When the program hits an image that corresponds with the algorithm, it draws the lines of the hidden pentagram on it. Furthermore, it saves the address of the page and sends an e-mail to it, kindly demanding the removal of the harmful image. Combined with the growing paranoia surrounding the Internet the program puts forward important issues of censorship and the freedom of speech. The phrase: ”The devil inherent in the picture”, gets a new meaning.

Keywords: Bit, Atom, New Media, Expressive Palette, Artist, Materiality, Immateriality, Neomateriality, Data, Poetry 

The present work looks into the specificity of the artist’s palette with new media, focusing the analysis on the association between bits and atoms within the artistic field. The concepts of materiality, immateriality and neomateriality are examined to describe the particular features assumed by the dichotomy tangible/intangible in Art with New Media. Through the analysis of a corpus of works, we present a set of possibilities, issues and questions from our times, examined in context under the light of artistic movements from the 20th century like Conceptual Art and Pop Art. Finally, we explore the role of computer code—and the datum—in the expansion of the expressive palette.

The Herbologies / Foraging Networks programme, emerges from the Baltic Sea region, focused in Helsinki (Finland) and Kurzeme region of Latvia, now extends beyond. In a series of events during 2010, it has explored the cultural traditions and knowledge of herbs, edible and medicinal plants, within the contemporary context of online networks, open information-sharing, and biological technologies. Herbologies refers to the different ways of knowing about plants and their extracts (as well as sometimes fungus and bee products), as wild and cultivated food, medicine and related crafts. Foraging Networks raises awareness of organized behaviours and practices in gathering wild food, including micro to macro ecosystems or socio-political levels. Combining with the fields of social/visual arts, craft, cultural heritage, media, network cultures and technology, attention is made to different ways of sharing knowledge, especially within the Baltic Sea region and between different generations. Furthermore, it has also been initiated from the position of ‘not-knowing’, and being an immigrant to a landscape and environmental habitat.

The cultural legacies of “Chinatowns” the world over are rapidly fading due to aggressive urban gentrification, demographic change, tourism, and general neglect of cultural preservation in recent years. In light of this rapid change, it is imperative to acknowledge those who helped build the unique communities that have served generations of Chinese diaspora. The memories and experiences of those impacted and enriched by these cultural spaces need to be celebrated and preserved.

New media offer enormous possibilities for documenting cultural experiences and interpretations. The use of technology in service of cultural heritage can be challenging, especially when the artefact involves a tangible, physical site such as Chinatown, with intangible sensory features of spatial interactions and emotional experiences. The use of new media applications can focus and engagingly convey the immense richness and diversity of the emerging historical record within an intimately coherent and viscerally arresting narrative.

In capturing the plurality of transitory moments that constitute the life and times of Chinatown, rather than re-construct/reproduce/re-present the cultural heritage in linear fashion, this work-in-progress project, entitled, ComposingYou-Chinatown, adopts an experimental approach that integrates art practice and interactive media. Utilizing locative media and panoramic projection, the all-encompassing experiential interaction generates perceptual insights into-and reflections of-past memories, while offering opportunities to experience the present, and to envision the future, through a creative lens.

A series of creative text physicalizations are accounted for herein, with reference to research literature and, most importantly, to an experimental algorithmic system designed and implemented by the author. The latter concerns a series of experimental pipelines that ‘understand’ the input text generating keywords, that utilize them to query 3D data from WWW, and, finally, that transfigure and merge the latter so that new original artefacts are synthesized. The various physical, digital, and post-digital material affordancies of the resulting physicalizations are scrutinized in some depth and in an analytic fashion. Objects of sorts are shown to be ascribed a certain kind of emergent neo-materiality, in that they are themselves hybrid manifestations of interwoven physical and digital affairs. As such, they constitute situated inquiries of the very same (technological) paradigms that brought them forth, as well as of their cultural and ideological offshoots. Physicalizations of sorts are shown to be ‘Herzian’, post-optimal, and disruptive, being both the creative means towards an exploration of new kinds of materiality/objecthood, and an implicit critique of the canonical functional design schemata that largely pertain digital fabrication nowadays.

This essay focuses on Possessing Nature as a project whose import pertains to heterochronic notions of historical development. Conceived as an environmental installation to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2015, the project’s creation, as a collaboration between a curator and two artists, speaks to their shared focus, on highlighting the contemporary cultural particularities of Mexico through a historical framework based on multiple temporalities. This in turn entails a similar perspective on modernism and modernity. It relates Eduardo Galeano’s manifestos against European colonization (The Open Veins of Latin America, 1971, and Mirrors, 2008), and Paula Findlen’s historical account of thingified and commodified nature for European modernity (Possessing Nature, 1996), and expands on these works from a point-of-view akin to what Macarena Gomez-Barris’s calls the “submerged perspectives”, or decolonial epistemologies central to current ecologically-themed art by marginalized individuals and groups in Latin America. In this vein, Possessing Nature decenters Anthropocene chronologies, which as manifested in the form of the current water crisis in Mexico City, trace to European colonialization and enduring belief in modernity as temporal progress. As well, it shifts attention to the role of Venice not as perceived today, as an originary locus of the European Renaissance, but as an early model of European colonial expansionism. In contrast, it highlights overlooked modernisms, particularly the constructive legacies of the Latin American avant-gardes. This heterochronic perspective is ultimately central to Possessing Nature’s proposal concerning the limitations of progressivist narratives, and conversely, the significance of other notions of temporality, including those of non-Euro American arts and their insistence on heterochronous time, for sustainably changing our relationships with nature.

In its current programming cycle (2020-2027) Hexagram Network is invested in understanding and promoting more interdisciplinary, inclusive and diverse models of research-creation. The Network seeks to develop knowledge-sharing and mediation tools and strategies for broader reach, and more effective dissemination and valorization of the research outcomes and artistic productions that emerge from our communities of practice.

Over the last 20 years, Hexagram has played a seminal role in the recognition of practice-based art and design research in Canada and abroad, as well as in promoting knowledge-sharing between artistic and scientific disciplines. Founded in 2001, Hexagram  supports research-creation projects and foster collaborations amongst its members from eight Québec research institutions, as well as with local and international partners from academic, cultural and creative sectors. To celebrate this milestone, in September 2021 Hexagram initiated an ambitious season programming on the theme EMERGENCE/Y, which launched in the framework of Ars Electronica 2021. This research-creation (RC) programme of activities will run until June 2022. Hexagram presents the highlights and the sequel to EMERGENCE/Y, to which Network members as well as international partners are invited to contribute.

Poster Statement

Summary:

Hickory Dickory Dock is an art installation that critiques the aesthetics of space and time in interactive computer programs. In particular, the artwork highlights the conceptual and aesthetic limitations of language and symbols in human-computer interaction. The artwork also comments on many of the myths and illusions surrounding interactive computing.

Abstract

This paper discusses critical issues in the aesthetics of space and time in interactive computing. Hickory Dickory Dock is an art installation that highlights the conceptual and aesthetic limitations of language and symbols in human-computer interaction. The artwork also comments on many of the myths and illusions surrounding interactive electronic media. Interface designs in interactive programs emphasize the use of spatial references for navigation and orientation. However, little focus has been placed on the temporal dynamics of navigation in interactive computing. In fact, most interfaces use words and symbols that represent a Western perspective of time which is not always appropriate for the non-narrative structure of interactive programs. The installation Hickory Dickory Dock is a three-dimensional layout of the storyboard for an interactive computer artwork. Twenty-four screen designs from the storyboard are displayed back-to-back to create twelve viewing stations that are arranged in a formation resembling the mathematical symbol for infinity. The documentation that accompanies the exhibition consists of twenty-four cards mounted on a ring. The cards contain the author’s programming instructions for the storyboard. The screen designs and the documentation contain numerous linguistic and symbolic references to Western definitions of time. The installation demonstrates how computer interfaces use Western labels and categories to limit the interpretation of space and time to specific cultural perspectives. The three-dimensional layout of the storyboard plays an important role in delineating the limitations of symbols and language in the computer interface. The installation forces the viewer to revaluate the metaphors and interactive conventions (mouse, keyboard, touch screens) that have become an established part of interactive computing. The viewer must make the conceptual leap from abstract temporal references to concrete logic by translating the commands and symbols in the two-dimensional interface design into movements and actions in the three-dimensional environment. In the process, the viewer realizes that many of the symbols in computer interfaces are derived from the perception of three-dimensional space and therefore, do not map directly to the two-dimensional computer screen. These paradoxes are further emphasized by the use of Western classical music in the installation. The music, which is experienced through infrared headsets, is a constant reminder of the formal structure of time in Western cultures. Like the symbols and language in the storyboard, the music underscores the dichotomy between discrete mathematical references to time and the ethereal, contiguous representation of time that we experience in a three-dimensional space where events and actions, rather than numbers, define temporal relationships.

Key words: art & science, space, life, spatial thinking, multidimensionality, biomolecules,
biosystems

The phenomenon of life has many definitions. Today it is usually identified with the processes of preserving and transferring information/knowledge. However life can be also interpreted, paraphrasing S. Semotiuk’s words, as the way in which space exists, and vice versa; space might be treated as the way in which life exists. This definition implies the comprehension of “an individual existence” as an integral fragment of its micro & macro environment as well as of the time-space continuum. Thus it locates its parameters at heart of the rich history of the human culture, grounded on the diversity and changes in the spatio-temporal apprehension of our reality.

I would like to ground my reflection on the series of artworks inspired by the structure and dynamics of protein molecules. My interest in this organic compound started already during the art&science residency at the KHOJ/ International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in New Delhi in 2007 (followed by the residency at CEMA/National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore and other collaborations). This “basic brick of life” contains lots of secrets which we still cannot fully understand; from tetrahedron shape of covalent bonds characteristic for the organic matter (and reminding us about Pythagorean roots of the geometrisation of the Western Knowledge) till the folding topology of protein chains resembling “Calabi-Yau manifolds”( geometrical forms in which, according to the superstring theory, successive dimensions “curled up” on a subatomic scale). In the culture, as McLuhan asserted, the medium is the message, in nature the structure is the message. However we need various media and methods to discover it.
In my talk I would like to reflex on how science, humanities and cultural imageries influence each other in shaping our understanding and knowledge and how technology modulates these relations.

Keywords: Transdisciplinary Reallab, Research Arts Approach, Community Design Practices, Capabilities for Collaboration, Mutual Learning by Immersive Settings, Higher Education for Sustainability

In order to address the complex and interconnected phenomena related to planetary boundaries challenges, ‘real-world laboratories’ (RwL) are increasingly used in sustainability and transitions research for experimenting with sustainability solutions. More recently RwL are also introduced in higher education aiming to create a better understanding for societal sustainability transitions, and furthermore to train competences for personal sustainability by academic-practitioners mutual learning settings. This paper presents insight and experiences with transdisciplinary RwL in immersive urban and rural learning environments following a system-ic, participatory and inventive ‘Research Arts approach’. An impact analysis exposes early findings of this evolving educational methodology highlighting gains as well as lessons learned.

In this paper we describe the design and research phases of an interdisciplinary project which can be defined as a digital cultural heritage experience combining art, computing and digital technology. The use of digital and electronic media implies a change in the conception and affordance of museums and the relationships between the artifacts and the visitors of the museum. Within this change, the major problem of traditional conception of museum is its lack of interactivity and thus lack of visitor engagement. Therefore, there is a certain need for an interaction-based experience in the way the artifacts are exhibited.  In this paper we propose an interactive participatory experience for a cultural artifact. Historical Orchestra is an interactive media installation based on a 16th century Turkish illustrated manuscript in an attempt to create a more engaging museum exhibiton experience.

The installation utilizes three tangible musical interfaces and gives real-time visual narrative feedback. The musical interfaces are augmented instruments that enable three users to play three instruments simultaneously without any prior musical knowledge. The visuals are based on a story and its illustration as a miniature painting in the manuscript. The selected two-page miniature painting is interactively animated according to the actions of the user with the instruments. The method used in designing the system is of a collaborative nature where musicians and art historians contributed to the design along with the designers. In result, we have observed that the system enabled the visitors to have a more engaging cultural heritage experience through its interactive and participatory quality. We are also proposing to exhibit the resulting installation in ISEA2011 as an artwork.

This paper will discuss the work of a young Japanese media artist, ITO Akihito’s code of the river, in order to introduce a relationship between time consciousness based on the moving image and Japanese traditional time consciousness in the new media age.

This paper deals with the ‘Polytopes’, a series of large-scale multimedia environments conceived by the composer and architect Iannis Xenakis during the 1960s and 1970s. It is argued that these cybernetic installations offer challenging examples of a time-based and dematerialized architecture where the very notions of space and place become an expressive medium in itself. Doing so, the Polytopes bring a new element in the discussion on what role is left for architecture in the era of multimedia and Virtual Reality.

With the invention of the moving image, carrying in itself the concept of space-time correlation, a whole new field of artistic experimentation emerged. Today’s artistic research takes advantage of the digital technology of the moving image that enables its segmentation and reassembly.

The education and support of the British pioneers of computer based arts with particular reference to the major role played by art schools 1960-70 and the prominence of the artist-run Computer Arts Society. The complexity and rarity of computers meant that artforms based around them were specialised and highly dependent upon support and funding to exist.

This paper aims to analyze satirical hoax news websites in relation to local, regional and global mobilizations. To achieve this, a corpus of three websites is selected: The Onion (USA), Zaytung (Turkey) and El Koshary Today (Egypt). The objective is to retrace the history of online content productions before, during and after the movements Gezi, Tahrir and Occupy. This study aims to understand and analyze the phenomenon of satirical newspaper websites through evolution of topics and subjects, use of language, participatory content production, differences and similarities between selected cases.

Abstract

Long Paper

Summary
Thus paper discusses the structure and aim of poetry, and suggests that the electronic arts are uniquely suited to duplicate the poetic experience. It reviews an argument that our species developed the computer as a new frontier to be colonized by the expanding human brain. It discusses specific electronic art works that, by generating new forms of poetic experience, reinforce this view of new media as virgin space into which human imagination is growing. It
mourns the schism between science and art, and between the mind and the soul, and entreats artists working with electronic media to work toward mending, rather than expanding the rift.

Abstract

This paper has two aims:

1)  to present a brief representative history of electronic artists’ direct use of poetic constructions, and

2)  to investigate my premise that electronic media has engendered a new form of non-verbal poetry, that is, a means by which intellectual and emotional (appeal to spirit, memory, collective consciousness) sensibilities are poetically stimulated by the physical phenomenon of image transmission.

This paper presents an intuitive (vs. empirical) argument that just as traditional poetry, presented in oral or written form, comes to the receiver in a bombardment of discrete units (words, vocal rhythms, pauses), so do the pixelated transmissions of electronic media. The impact of both is a steady impingement on the consciousness that stimulates the receiver’s visceral awareness, that is we respond as though physically touched. The paper draws upon an eclectic range of examples, including the reach-out-and-touch-someone techniques pioneered by American evangelist Oral Roberts in his early television crusades, pop-physicist Robert Jastrow’s theories about our species’ “colonizing” of computers in order to provide more space for expansion of the human brain, and artist Michael Rees’ belief that we are in the midst of a complex paradigm shift wherein computer-generated image is reasserting itself as critical to the communication process as language, while, paradoxically, in order for that image to exist, it must first be described by language.

Abstract

This presentation will examine the relationship between artist-made holograms and the landscape tradition in art. Following selected examples of significant historical movements, various directions in the visual arts from throughout the second half of the twentieth-century will be explored as well as specific post modern strategies in image making. The presentation will then focus on more recent technology-based and media works including video, installation art and holography. Finally, examples of landscape and nature-based imagery in holography will be examined in depth through works by individual artists. The motivating ideas and issues behind landscape holography will form the basis of the presentation’s conclusion.

Intro

Following selected examples of significant historical movements,various directions in the visual arts from throughout the second half of the twentieth-century will be explored as well as specific post modern strategies in image making. The presentation will then focus on more recent technology-based and media works including video, installation art and holography. Finally, examples of landscape and nature-based imagery in holography will be examined in depth through works by individual artists. The motivating ideas and issues behind landscape holography will form the basis of the presentation’s conclusion. One of my dreams is to build a lab in the countryside to bring high technology into nature and nature into the lab. Working in the woods through all four seasons, I would like to use natural shapes and forms, recording elusive details.” With these simple words holographer Rudie Berkhout poetically describes a union of two seemingly irreconcilable worlds: the existing natural environment and technological progress. Berkhout is certainly not the first artist to express an interest in uniting the two, but he is a new addition to a long tradition of individuals who seek to unify potentially opposing realms. In painting, photography, installation, video and now holography, artists throughout history have turned to the landscape and nature-based imagery as their source of inspiration, the subject of their explorations and more recently, the material of their art itself. For centuries artists have consistently employed landscape iconography as both central image and background element. Without recounting the history of landscape art here, it is important to recognize the fact that many artists working at different times have felt a closeness to nature. During certain periods, groups of artists depicting the landscape have produced revolutionary works which have had lasting effects on the history of art, for example, seventeenth-century Dutch painters or, of course, the French Impressionists.

Holy Coli, The Mice in Odor of Sanctity is a biotechnological art performance consisting of the transformation of the microbiota of a mouse with genetically modified Escherichia Coli to enable a mice’s excrement to express odours close to violet scents. This experience, first, represents an attempt to anticipate future delusions of the cosmetic industry and, second, marks the rehabilitation of a precious but unloved animal: the laboratory mouse.

This performative work also addresses symbiosis both upon a bio- logical basis, on the field of microbiote, and upon an anthropological basis, focusing on our symbolic and pragmatic relationship to animals, the aims and conditions of the manipulation of the living being conceived as an environmental whole, via a specific stage for co-corporeality.

I will explore the idea of crossing borders in the course of my work as a documentarist and connect that to the kinds of crossings made by the subjects in Home and Away as well as by the viewers of the work.

Homezone is a walk around the perimeters of my ‘Homezone’, an area in which I can make cheaper telephone calls, defined by the German O2 mobile telephone network and based on my residential address. On the course of this journey I have been documenting what lies directly outside and inside my Homezone, the familiarities and the foreign. I have been collecting objects, thoughts and images from the people and the places that are encroaching into my territory or sitting on my doorstep, piecing together a (sometimes irrational) narrative that documents this journey and the way in which we perceive our neighbouring environments. This experience has been placed alongside theoretical research, and a variety of interviews with architects, historians and politicians that address the sociocultural and political implications that surround the project.

How do Hong Kong Chinese women respond to representations of sexuality and the sex act in mainstream and alternative pornographies? A cross-cultural GRF funded research study sets out to analyze women’s reactions to screened porn segments in Hong Kong, Japan and the USA. By outlining a cultural boom in trans-Asian women’s pornographies and how they are perceived in Hong Kong, the article defends women’s “drifting gaze” as one that projects intimacy as well as discomfort onto mainstream and female-friendly pornographies.

This paper examines the political game Yellow Umbrella, a free videogame created during the height of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in October 2014 in response to police aggression against pro-democracy protests. The game has been featured recently in an international exhibition (Game and Politics: 20172020). Created by Awesapp, a Hong Kong-based company, this work invites a critical reflection on the relationship between videogames, play, and “real time” violence. The game puts the player in the role of defensive protestors in the face of oppositional figures such as policemen with pepper spray, politicians, and gangsters. Reversing our expectation of games as playful and political action as non-playful, Yellow Umbrella posits protests as sites of play and videogames as political. The game ultimately instructs the player how the actual demonstrations would eventually conclude: in a peaceful manner without concessions by the central government. The paper also refers to the larger genre of digitalized “derivative works” known as “secondary creation” ( 二次 創 作 ). As Hong Kong’s central government considers legislation to regulate “derivative works,” this paper raises the concern that the creation of such works may be restricted or prohibited in the future.

24 hours live on the frequencies of many radio stations in Australia, Canada, Europe, Scandinavia, Russia and Israel. In the Internet and at the network intersections in Athens,
Belgrade. Berlin, Bologna, Bolzano, Budapest, Edmonton, Helsinki, Hobarth, Innsbruck, Jerusalem, Linz, London, Madrid. Montreal, Moscow, Munich, Naples, QuCbec, Rome, San
Marino, Sarajevo, Sydney, Stockholm. Vancouver. June, 22 noon to June, 23 noon (CET), 1995.

HORIZONTAL RADIO was a telematic radio network project, that took place simultaneously at different locations, in different media and on different frequencies and band-widths. The starting point was the analogue cable and broadcasting network of the EBU (European Broadcasting Union), which served as a primary telematic sphere of action and was connected in several cases to independent radiostations or interfered with by pirate radio. Linked to this network was the Internet, which served as a medium of access and distribution beyond the broadcasting range of the participating radio stations but also in some aspects as a possibility to influence the broadcasts.

A co-production between the Ars Acustica experts group of the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) and TRANSIT KUNSTRADIO (Austrian National Broadcasting Corp.) and the Ars Electronica Fesfival’95. 

What is unique to fan studies in comparison to audience research in general is that the former emphasizes more on both social aspects and interpretive activities. Moreover, the resistance power and textual productivity among a group of audience members is the best example of audience activism.

John Fiske noted that fandom is “associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class, and race”. Fiske claimed that fans established a sense of ownership over their favorite media texts, and engaged in interpretive play with these texts to resist their negative characterizations in popular culture. Fan participation was related to political resistance because fandom appealed to “subordinated” groups in society.
Following John Fiske, Henry Jenkins further defined “meaningful participation” of the audience. In this discussion, he contrasted two different phenomena to show what constitutes meaningful participation: (1) Participation vs. resistance; (2) the public vs. the audience. He argued that participation means that people are organized in and through social collectivities and connectivities. However, resistance means that people are organized in opposition to a dominant power. When it comes to the differences of the audience and the public, the former is produced through measurement and surveillance and the latter is different from the former in that the public actively directs attention onto the messages they value.
However, not all of the fans can reach this ideal situation with meaningful participation. Some fans may be less social or less participatory. Sandvoss expanded the definition of fandom to include “the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text in the form of books, television shows, films or music, as well as popular texts in a broader sense such as sport teams and popular icons and stars ranging from athletes and musicians to actors”. Here, we can see that there are different levels of participation and productivity in fan practices. Comparing mere emotional consumption to political resistance the range differs widely. Thus, the purposes of this study are to understand: How far it is from mere emotional consumption to political resistance? How many different levels of participation and productivity are there? How active is the audience in the game fandom world? This study will focus on the game fandom practices in China. Through game fandom practices, we hope to answer the question “How active can the audience be”?
Another useful tool to answer the aforementioned topics is Wirman’s five dimensions of player productivity. Wirman proposed five dimensions of player productivity (1) game play as productivity; (2) productivity for play: instrumental productivity; (3) productivity beyond play: expressive productivity; (4) games as tools; and (5) productivity as a part of game play. She provided a tool to evaluate different levels of game fandom participation and productivity. An interesting topic for discussion is if these five dimensions are all “meaningful participation” according to Henry Jenkin’s definitions? Furthermore, these five dimensions were discussed in a western context but this study aims to study game fandom in Chinese culture. We look at different participatory and productive practices of game fan players and try to categorize them into these five dimensions. If the dimensions do not fit, we will propose different ones.
We plan to study two different popular games in China. One is the international commercial game “League of Legends” (LOL) and the other one “Full mental Alchemist” is the Doujin game made by fans. Ethnography will be employed in this study to observe the different practices of game fandom. Besides, we plan to interview several key reporters to get deeper insights of the practices of Chinese game fandom. We expect that there exists different game fandom practices related to both commercial and non-commercial practices. Therefore, the spectrum of game fandom practices can be broadened and widened. Hopefully, this study can contribute to the notion of “active audiences” in communication studies and categorize the different practices of the Chinese gaming culture.

The intersection of categories commonly held as opposites is central to my art practice and world view. This tension between connectedness and duality, often reinforced by language, comes into play with discussions about art and science, east and west, object and subject, left‑brain and right‑brain, qualitative and quantitative, and so on. This paper How And Why I Created This Fur Ball will discuss my interdisciplinary approach to art‑making and provide context for thinking about intersections of art and science.

I have focused on what led to the creation of the large‑format print Multi‑Coloured Fur Sphere, 2010. This image seems representational of biological characteristics, however the creative impulse to experience colour and search for aesthetic relationships led me to develop hybrid coordinates that I used to create mathematical descriptions translated into code, and a plenitude of geometrical forms including this furry‑looking sphere. Interestingly, this work comes out of a tradition of non‑representational abstract art that goes full circle to resemble nature. Math and computation are often considered isolated, cold, mechanical – not natural; however, nature, in effect, is fundamentally the expression of mathematical formulae.

The first part of this paper – How – gives an overview of the trajectory of my work and how the original interest in conducting virtual quasi‑scientific psychophysical experiments, building tools, learning to program, and testing the program, shifted my approach from interactive interfaces to focusing on creating 3D geometrical forms with self‑similar repeating elements as found in fractals and recursive geometries mapping colour to formal attributes. My use of math and geometry, as the basis to write computer programs that generate non‑representational abstract images, relies on fundamental aspects that appear also in physics and biological self‑organizing systems, at both micro‑ and macro‑scale.

The second part of the paper – Why – places the artworks that I am creating within a broad historical and cultural context. Modernism had a polarizing effect upon fields of study, and post‑modernism did not mend this. I see my work as part of a movement toward an idea of science that acknowledges our connectedness to the world we study, and an idea of art that is free to use tools that are usually associated with science, such as mathematics and logic. I discuss historical and contemporary theories and influences on my artistic development, such as Lawren S. Harris, member of Canada’s Group of Seven painters, and his preoccupation with mathematics and revolutionary ideas relating to science in his artistic movement into abstraction. I am particularly interested in the writing of scholars in any field engaged with philosophical issues fundamental to knowledge development and how creativity fits into the bigger picture. Increased global connectivity and interdisciplinary research and collaboration among disciplines as art and science need to strike a balance between the sometimes tenuous and sometimes overly pronounced distinctions that result from insular and specialized approaches. The ability to articulate the metaphysical framework underpinning interdisciplinary research has an important role in shaping the epistemological landscape to enable meaningful trans‑global cooperation and project collaboration.

COVID-19 leaves a clear mark on our living environment. The pandemic has changed the use of public space. We have started to spend more time in nearby outdoor spaces.  It is the place where we see the other.  Where we make the social city. Light, natural and artificial, is a fundamental part of this. Light is much more than a medium that enables us to see. It affects our health, our ecosystems and the places we live in in countless ways. Light can bring people together in urban spaces, emphasize the culture and identity of the city and shape the nightscape.

For me, public space is not a saturated or static space, but a living organism. A continuous process of interaction between people and their environment. Light uses time and space as its material. Light art in public space does not begin or end in a physical form but is a transfer of energy. An infinite potential of relationships that permanently engenders new links between things and people. It can lift the space out of its anonymity and add new and unexpected connections or break fixed patterns of movement.  It does not have to draw attention to itself, it provides sight of the space. Art of light as a representation of life, of energy in the city, as a form of poetry.

Through our research-creation experiments, we imagine movement sequences that challenge the concept of anthropomorphism in digital twin robots. While considering the term of interactivity to better define their interaction, we observe how different movement material is stimulating creativity through a hybridization process between human and machine. From this perspective, we determine how users experience qualia while learning through imitation a dance sequence consecutively demonstrated by a humanoid robot, an industrial arm and a human. Their feedback and our own practical experimentation allow us to better understand the impact of digital anthropomorphism in the making of a sustainable human-to-robot interaction.

How Far is Up? is a story that was conceived as a picture book concept; yet it was initially developed as an interactive iPad storybook app, [7] it was then produced as a short animated film, and this story is currently being developed into a printed picture book. This presentation traces the evolutionary track of this creative work. The How Far is Up? story fuses fact with fiction; it teaches audiences about outer space. The protagonist is a young boy. Together with two friends he embarks on a bumbling escapade through our galaxy, and the trio struggles to find their way back to earth. This story is aimed at audiences aged four and above. I wrote and illustrated How Far is Up? I created the design, typography and interaction design for the app, and directed and animated the short film. I also performed the audio narration, and wrote and performed the musical score for both the app and the short film.

Through this project I endeavour to better understand how print and digital media can support entertainment, literary and learning experiences within both domestic and classroom settings. Western children are currently spending less time reading for pleasure and more time on mobile devices, particularly with game and video content. [1, 3] As a consequence, picture book makers and educators are seeking new avenues through which to engage their audience, and new ways in which they can connect children with literature. [5, 7, 8, 9] This presentation explores how children’s picture book stories can be remediated and delivered across a variety of platforms. Picture books can be produced in printed or digital form; particularly with developments in mobile interactive storybook apps. [9] Picture books can also be remediated for television or cinematic experiences. For example, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a children’s story that has been produced as an app, a short film and a printed picture book. [2, 4] The success of the digital publications of this story led to it being produced in printed form.

The How Far is Up? project extends from this type of existing work offering entertainment and educational outcomes for picture book audiences. The How Far is Up? app offers a play-based story experience; the app also contains teacher’s notes that are curriculum linked. Classroom teachers can use the How Far is Up? film as an audio-visual aid when discussing the story’s themes with students. This suite of stories (the app, short film and the up-coming printed picture book), operate as a set of resources that may help children build deep connections with a literary work. Yet each of these aspects of the project can operate as stand-alone educational and entertainment experiences.

Audio-visual representations of picture book content borrow from traditional storybook making practices, and these digital works can engage contemporary children in literature. [5, 6, 7, 9] The popularity of some children’s digital publications has resulted in digital work being produced in printed picturebook format. There is currently a remediation loop within the field of picturebook-making; this involves innovative digital methods that borrow from, extend from, and spawn interest in traditional modes of practice.

In the context of the Anthropocene, Post-Human and Post-Digital, technology in Art gains a complexity that goes beyond the exploration of its possibilities, involving other environmental and social concerns. From these discussions comes the proposal to build a triptych of works that incorporate current issues. In this sense, we present three works of Art-Technology, which propose to eliminate the use of commercial electricity or batteries, as well as the non-use of computers or digital processors in their structure. However, maintaining the interactivity of the human with the machine, brought by the digital revolution. Breath, Touch and Gesture form the triptych, in which each work explores a technological operating system, based on simplicity and transparency, so that it gains energy and life through contact with the human body, generating different poetics and symbologies

French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon is undoubtedly one of the key figures when it comes to conceptualizing individuation across physical, mental and social strata. In this article, we develop an overlooked aspect of Simondon’s work, namely how his ontogenetic project also implies an idea of a “human science” based on a “human energetics#, which – maybe in spite of its name – is an inherently transhumanist project opening fields of transduction across both disciplinary and experiential fields, with a particular emphasis on the role of technology. We present key concepts in Simondon’s work and relate them to lines of thinking on energies in the arts (Kahn) and post- colonialism (Wynter), exemplified through an analysis of Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga’s video work “Remains of the Green Hill”. Our primary aim with the article is to continue a mobilization of Simondonian concepts and thinking for an experimental, transhumanist exploration in relation to its ethic-aesthetic and artistic potential.

Today we are often confronted with computer interfaces that are built to be “easy to use”, but in reality, are more confusing than ever. This paper details several artworks that fall un- der the theme of “Human Error” and consist of software and hardware devices that integrate elements of human error into their design to provoke and materialize human frailty when it comes to operating digital devices and interfaces. This presentation will detail several of those projects as well as the theme of “Human Error” itself.

Abstract

Drawing from examples in science, art, technology, architecture and space exploration this paper proposes that the successors of humans may not be post humans or robots, but will instead be more akin to bacteria or synthetic forms of biology. Our role in the larger scheme of things may be simply to act in the capacity of midwives to facilitate the evolution of our more robust and sophisticated successors. Cross-disciplinary collaborations are now taking place that fundamentally challenge our anthropocentric evolutionary aspirations.

Hans Moravec proposed that our successors would be silicon biology, or robots, that would colonize the universe in our stead, rendering humans a transitional stage in evolution rather than as a definitive tertiary species.

Developments within the field of chembiogenesis suggest that the creation of artificial life forms within the laboratory is not only feasible within the next ten years according to Mark Bedau of Proto Life, based in Venice Italy, but marks the beginning of an age of synthetic organisms whose existence will be at first fragile but gradually, with human nurturing, will become self sustaining and independent from us.

This paper describes the system design of Robinion a robot magician. In particular, we focus on Robinion’s personality traits. One of the research goals is human robot interaction. A good magic trick includes good presentation to increase the enjoyment of the audience. Magicians often use various personalities in their performance to adapt it to the audience. We describe Robinion’s sophisticated traits and communication system that allows it to present different personalities during the performance of a magic show. A magic trick is broken down into a discourse plan which may include speech, gestures, or actions. We call each step in a discourse plan a speech act. Each speech act in the discourse plan is labeled along various dimensions. The system selects a suitable response by calculating how well the speech act matches the magician’s current personality and the current state of the discourse. So Robinion can keep the audience interested, even when repeating a similar trick.

This paper is dedicated to the analysis of two works produced by two contemporary artists, more specifically “Rachael is not real” by Matthias Winckelmann and “Machine Hallucination”, by Refik Anadol, having as convergence point the generative method of production employed in both. The article describes both works using, as theoretical foundation, the most widely accepted definition of Generative Art and reveals nuances of both works that might not be fully comprehended by the current theory. Finally, the article looks at some of the most recent technological advances and their impact on the art world, such as Artificial Intelligence, which have been used to create art, and proposes a reflection on the importance of revisiting theoretical definitions in order for them to be able to be able to keep up with the technical evolution of art.

In this paper we propose a theoretical framework of political interpretation of new media and interaction. All relevant enough cultural phenomena admit a political interpretation and, therefore, carry a political stance. HCI involves an extensive phenomenological corpus that intersects many areas of knowledge, rendering sensible the need of awareness of some of these political stances. There is not, and cannot be neither methodology nor praxis ideologically uncontaminated. The Ricœurian processes of selection (in Ricœur words ‘dissimulation’), legitimation, and social integration are unavoidable on the social construction of knowledge.Media theories need to move over the fascination of the discovery of how media technology is built. Media has to be appropriated from the rhetoric, and theory needs to catch up with the practitioners in order to establish a meaningful dialogue. The theoretical discourse should not be constructed from a fascinated alien perspective.Flusser’s black box theory identifies the need for media appropriation in order to decipher new media productions. In Flusser’s words: The coding happens inside this black box […]. As long as we are not in possess of this critical view, we remain analphabets. The notion of ‘ideology’ admits several readings, from the Marxism notion of falsehood, to the conceptions of Gramsci and Althusser, ‘who see ideology as an essential part of human existence, […] a communally shared sets of ideas which people draw on to make sense of their existence.’ In HCI, the politicality is evident as designers and organizations sample the world choosing the problems to be solved and their solutions. It is impossible to think about these decisions without realizing that there is always a political model behind them. In Phoebe Sengers’ words: “the proposed ‘solution’ tends to be understood as technologies that monitor users’ behavior and either influence them to make a correct choice, where the correct choice is generally determined by the technology’s designer”.

Keywords: Australian Indigenous architecture, architectural projection, Australian media art, place, loss of place, media art history, colonisation, Ian de Gruchy, Krzysztof Wodiczko
In Australia’s Bicentennial year 1988, which marked 200 years of European colonisation, an important artistic collaboration occurred between Ian de Gruchy and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Their site specific installation Humpy commented on the ongoing politics of Indigenous dispossession and loss of place. They are artists who helped to develop the practice of projecting large-scale images onto architecture. While the work was critically ignored at the time, it has become increasingly relevant as historians, architects and artists research and reference Indigenous architectural forms. The ongoing currency of the artist’s political commentary on Indigenous loss of place is another important element of the work’s continuing resonance.

Hybrid Art: technology and nature in arts practice and mediation,  reflects on a series of installations produced in 2021 and 2022 for the “Hybrid Culture” exhibitions (3 different ones in distinct locations as part of “Viver ao Vivo” project) and for the “Contingency” exhibition (ARTECH 2021). The text highlights the complex entanglement of producing and mediating art with technology and nature elements.

These installations arise from the focus on images produced in scientific laboratories and my ethnographic exploration of the relation between what I considered to be different virtual archival spaces (i.e. the natural environment, the studio, the art gallery, the laboratory, my body).  Its main aim was to establish a critical link between the scientific imaging process and practices and visual arts, in a highly technical society where the experience of nature is somehow mediated, as well as memories, and there is a sense of technically constructed nature.

Hybrid Art: technology and nature in arts practice and mediation,  reflects on a series of installations produced in 2021 and 2022 for the “Hybrid Culture” exhibitions (3 different ones in distinct locations as part of “Viver ao Vivo” project) and for the “Contingency” exhibition (ARTECH 2021). The text highlights the complex entanglement of producing and mediating art with technology and nature elements.

These installations arise from the focus on images produced in scientific laboratories and my ethnographic exploration of the relation between what I considered to be different virtual archival spaces (i.e. the natural environment, the studio, the art gallery, the laboratory, my body).  Its main aim was to establish a critical link between the scientific imaging process and practices and visual arts, in a highly technical society where the experience of nature is somehow mediated, as well as memories, and there is a sense of technically constructed nature.

Abstract

This paper depicts different problems arising from the presence of a hybrid in the posthumanism era. Bioart, a hybrid practice combining art, science and technology is taken as a case study.

Intro: Posthumanism and hybrid bodies in bioart
Posthuman, postorganic, postbiological, postsubject and postevolution are concepts which indicate, if not the end, the possibility of the end of an era. This signals the closing of the modern age – characterized by humanistic thought – which divides on one hand, the world into natural laws, and on the other hand, into political representations; it also splits nature from society as well as the technical world of the objects from the language construction of the subjects (Latour 2007). To sum up, it establishes the boundaries between what is considered to be human and that which is not human: things, objects and animals. Within this ‘Great Divide’ between ‘them’ and ‘us’ (Latour 2007), humanism focuses on the extremes (natural elements versus social elements, local issues versus global issues) and not the middle ground. For modern thinkers there’s nothing at all in the middle, just waste and rubbish; whereas for posthumanism thinkers what is found in the middle is very meaningful: hybrids, monsters, mixes.

This paper introduces our collaborative Machine Movement Lab project harnessing movement to bodily empathise with abstract machines. It discusses our transdisciplinary performance-making practice and its diffractive posthuman dramaturgical frame for exploring and improvising with alternative human-robot relationships.

Artists who work in hybrid cultural forms do not have an adequate medium of representation or discourse which can provide a mechanism for a retrospective viewing and contemplation of the full complexity of the work. The conventional cultural venues are no longer able to contain, or provide for emergent forms of social and cultural interaction. Hybrid is a CD-ROM system for visual artists capable of providing a virtual venue for exhibition materials, artists’ work, concepts and biographical details.

This panel discusses a hydrologic approach to mediations between arts, sciences and humanities. Its main objective is to explore the water properties and effects in our aesthetic, cultural, scientific and educational practices. We study the materiality and the imaging of water representations by making direct interventions in artifacts and methods for scientific analysis.

The canonical writings on augmented reality re-examined though the cultural lenses of post/ hypermodernism, focusing on Baudrillard and Virilio and video-see-through augmented reality.

Augmented reality (AR) refers to a family of technologies that allows us to see images of the real world and computer generated images in the same field of view in such a way that they appear to be part of the same reality. It has existed as a field of research for more than a decade but most theoretical writings confine themselves to technological problems and evaluation of their solutions, or to attempts to taxonomise the solutions in some way. The actual content, and issues surrounding its design, is mostly ignored.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Biometrics, Body, Dressing, Environment, Fashion, Hyperobjects, Quantified Self, Wearable Technology, Ubiquitous Computing

This paper describes the conceptual underpinning and workflow of a haptic drawing hologram project, Hyperobject: Homeland, which proposes that one’s homeland is emergent … that it comes into existence as it is needed.

The primary context of this project is the extensive use of holographic maps in tactical battle visualisation for Homeland Security. So far about 12,000 synthetic holographic images combining army- classified and unclassified- along with open-source data, photographs, and light detection and ranging LIDAR imagery, have been made for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Small groups of soldiers cluster around these monochrome green holograms on a horizontal rotating turntable with a specially designed, ruggedised grasshopper lighting stand for situational awareness. The existence of these holograms foreshadows the destruction of the places they depict and also the people that they do not.

The Hyperobject: Homeland project generates a homeland of The Common through holograms of drawings of multitudes of human lifelines, each one the subjective index of the existence of one human life. These holograms are made by using Holoshop software, currently underdevelopment by the author, in conjunction with the Phantom Premium 1.5 haptic interface, to haptically feel and trace in 3D, a sensitively modulated line along the lifeline terrain of each palm. This metaphorical touching of the life through the deferred tactile gesture inflects the mark with a sense of care. The hue, saturation and width of marks are modulated by the velocity and directional parameters of the gesture. By making different tracing along the same lifeline, one for every year of life, spatial structures, some enclosed like shells and other opening as nests are created. These structures are positioned in relation to each other in the virtual 3D space according to their Hapticity – fastening, contact and combination.

Hypersubject Conversations is a developing practice based artistic research work that explores how to give voice to the more-than-human, and reflect in a symbiotic way. A group of women experiment with role play and improvisation techniques to enter larger networks/ institutions/contexts that they are a part of, and speak as if they are these networks/ institutions/contexts (Hypersubjects). The conversations go on in an installation of sensors/ programming/video projections/light/amplified sound, that aims to fold these lager hypersubjects out onto the room, so that the room itself constitutes the hypersubject. The human persons sit inside the speaking hypersubject, and fold their perspectives internally/externally between the embodied and virtual.

Hyphen Hub is a nonprofit organization that discovers, promotes, and presents new live works by artists that integrate art and technology. Based in New York, Hyphen Hub showcases cutting edge work in a variety of formats and platforms and actively develops a global network of emerging and established multimedia artists, curators, innovators, thinkers, and producers of events with a strong focus on nascent technology.

“Hypnotic AI” is an experiment exploring the idea of the “artificial unconscious”. Based on a number of hypnotic protocols, it rehearses and represents a computer in a hypnotic state to hint on the possibility of artificial altered consciousness. The system’s responses – contingent in nature – challenge the human idea of mind, thinking and consciousness, as well as inform about the existence of what we may think of as “the artificial unconscious”.

The visualization of the state of mind is based on the processes that take place in the software under the influence of the hypnosis protocol that we’ve prepared. Commands, such as ‘relax,’ ‘go deeper into calmness’ lead to visible changes in the virtual object. Due to the received messages, the solid figure flows through dimensions over time.

The viewers’ experience is designed to remind them of a therapeutic, comfortable setting. He or she receives an instruction including a script to conduct the hypnotization session, with a protocol adapted to the software of our subject.
According to the given instructions, the viewer expresses hypnotic protocol commands changing the state of the AI’s mind. This dislocates chosen points of mind geometry in unpredictable ways and the whole system reconfigures. The system reacts also on the viewer voice itself producing individual reactions for each person. When the session is over, the system dynamically returns to the initial state, ready for the next viewer.

The research on the machine’s “consciousness” subjected to hypnosis goes beyond the dimensions of human senses. AI subjected to hypnosis creates a simulation influenced by its executive functions. In reference to the quantum theory of mind, it takes the form of a mathematical multi-dimensional, virtual object. In order to achieve interpretation of the processes that happened during the session, these multi-dimensional elements are translated to two-dimensional display.

Panel: SENSORIUM: Interdisciplinary Practices of Embodiment and Technology

This in­no­v­a­tive pro­ject ex­plores how young peo­ple will work and play with new rep­re­sen­ta­tional forms of them­selves and oth­ers in vir­tual and phys­i­cal life in the next 10-15 years. It ex­am­ines multi-iden­tity evo­lu­tions of today’s younger gen­er­a­tions within the con­text of a world in which vir­tual and phys­i­cal spaces are in­creas­ingly blended. In one of the Robo­naut tweets, Au­gust 5th 2010, and at a re­cent Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence Lunch De­bate, the di­verse group of ex­perts in­volved with Ro­bots and Avatars dis­cussed the im­pli­ca­tions of blended re­al­ity. This dis­cus­sion is par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant in re­la­tion­ship to the use of sen­sory feed­back tech­nol­ogy that gives users a more height­ened and tac­tile ex­pe­ri­ence and that pro­vides new and more tan­gi­ble ways of be­hav­ing through (and with) new rep­re­sen­ta­tional forms. Com­ment­ing about the prob­lems with tra­di­tional un­der­stand­ings of ar­tif­i­cal in­tel­li­gence at the Lunch De­bate in June, Pro­fes­sor Noel Sharkey sug­gested that with ro­bots and avatars we should not be say­ing, “I think there­fore I am” but in­stead, “I feel there­fore I am”. Ac­cord­ing to re­searchers on Robo­naut, “As the pro­ject ma­tures with in­creased feed­back to the human op­er­a­tor, the Robo­naut sys­tem will ap­proach the han­dling and ma­nip­u­la­tion ca­pa­bil­i­ties of a suited as­tro­naut”. With more hap­tic tech­nol­ogy that uses sen­sory feed­back to recre­ate the sense of touch, a user might wear gloves that allow them to feel ob­jects in a vir­tual world. The user could ex­am­ine the tex­ture and weight of rocks or even ex­pe­ri­ence the crunch of icy Mar­t­ian dirt. Is this an­other vivid sign that we have en­tered the dawn of the age of post-bi­o­log­i­cal in­tel­li­gence?

Digital archiving strives to compensate for the rapid decay or obsolescence of digital platforms, material substrates, and displays on which these works depend. Digital materials seem to have a shorter half-life than even the unstable materials used in the early eras of film-making. This condition raises key ontological and epistemological questions: What is the essence of a work? What is permanence? What is solid? How must we rethink these notions when our works are inherently fluid — when they even melt into air?

This project engages with these problems by replaying an early work of cinema on a broken contemporary device. The project consists of eight sequences from Fritz Lang’s 1931 film “M”. The series begins with “Index”, a sequence shot in Berlin’s police archives, where a fingerprint provides the first clue in the hunt for a killer. Through subsequent sequences “The Hand”, “The Hunt”, “The Cell”, “Protokoll”, “The Stairs”, “Before the Judge”, and “Cower”, the film offers a meditation on the tension between our attempts to capture, protect, preserve and place before the law on the one hand – and on the other, to escape, to elude logos.

These sequences were filmed from a malfunctioning computer monitor; the malfunction superimposed successive frames of the footage, blurring or dissolving anything which moves. The malfunctioning screen thus renders two distinct architectures: that of the moving body, fluid; and that of its spatial and material frame, super-solid.

“M”, like most of Lang’s films, is known for its use of architecture. The project translates Lang’s use of architecture, which intentionally located that medium in relation to the medium of film, into a new dissolving or reworking of architectures provoked by contemporary conditions of media, existing somewhere between digital and analogue materialities.

ICEBOX is a device that makes internet security easy-to-use and accessible for the everyday internet user. Currently in the prototyping phase, ICEBOX was started in response to the revelations of Edward Snowden and the risks against government surveillance and corporate use of our data for advertising. ICEBOX aims to provide easy solutions for the everyday internet-user to protect themselves from the day-today risks and threats of navigating the net.

From ad blocking to acting as a TOR router to setting up a VPN (virtual private network), ICEOBOX puts power and control to freely surf the net back into the peoples’ hands. ICEBOX aims to create a platform for educating people about the risks prevalent today and understand the processes happening in the backend and to train them how to take more control of their data. The project hopes to engage artists working on issues of mass surveillance to also create a creative and discursive platform on internet security through art.

Internet Security for Everyone
ICEBOX is a multi-purpose internet security device that is easy-to-use and accessible to the everyday user. The name, ICEBOX, is inspired by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson’s ‘Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics’ (ICE) [1] and plays on the need for transparency of government instutions on their mass surveillance activities. ICEBOX is a tool to help put internet security back into the people’s hands in an environment where we see the increasing tracking of and use of data for surveillance by governments and for advertising and market research by corporations.

ICEBOX brings together a bundle of open souce tools and makes them easy-to-use with a clean and simple interface with pre-configured applications for a quick and easy installation that can be applied by your everyday internet user. One does not need to be a programmer or tech genius to use ICEBOX. The project aims to educate people of the risks while surfing the net and help bring to light some of the activities that are happening in the backend without our knowing. ICEBOX helps us take more control of what is happening to our data and to take a more secure means of using the internet in our everyday.

Key Features
ICEBOX has many uses and functions that brings together a set of tools to allow users to surf the net securely in their day-to-day. ICEBOX can work on any computer, tablet, smartphone.

Primary uses of ICEBOX allows users to securely surf the net particulrarly while using unsecured open WiFi hotspots. Features include:
• Ad blocking to avoid unwanted ads
• Cookie, script and plugin blocking to avoid unwanted tracking and dangerous scripts
• TOR router to allow users to browse the internet anonymously using an onion router
• VPN router and server to create a secure and reliable network to surf the net and bypassing unsecured networks
• Firewall to control network traffic and block any incoming or outgoing requests
• Net activity monitor to track hidden activity
• Extra battery for smartphones
• 3G hotspot
• Personal cloud storage and webhosting for more advanced users.

Platform for Art
ICEBOX is also a platform to educate people about the risks of surfing the net and to train people to use the device effectively. Through talks and workshops particularly in line with CryptoParty and hackerspaces, ICEBOX seeks to participate and generate discussions around internet security that is accessible and open to the public. ICEBOX aims help people understand risks prevalent today and to breakdown the use of the tools to empower people to take more control of their data and to create a civic defense again mass surveillance and corporate tracking.

By working collaboratively with artists creating work on issues of mass surveillance, ICEBOX also aims to create a platform and dialogue around internet security. Potential artist collaborations include working with people like James Bridle, Paolo Cirio, Yuri Pattinson, Jake Appelbaum, Metahaven and NOME Gallery in Berlin. ICEBOX is currently in its prototyping phase where we are developing the tools and seeking partnerships and support for the project. As an independent project, welcome any suggestions and support.

We are working on the construction of a tool and network of e-portfolios [1] based on WordPress that invites students to create their own identity.. That provoke the generation of a network and a community promoting peer learning. With it we promote the creation of a professional portfolio throughout life. With this project we want to find out what impact the integration of open content managers such as WordPress, which are rich in interactive media, has on learning management systems, specifically on Art and Design students. Our objective is to reinforce the idea that an online learning model benefits from being centered and based on the process of identification, socialization and the potential professionalization of the student.

Catherine:
“Ideologies of Interactivity” outlines and examines the term interactivity- a key reference point in the media arts, popular culture and technical discourses to describe the interplay between “an individual and an artificial intelligence system.” (Popper)

Kim:
The terminology of interactivity functions, as Kenneth Burke writes, as a “terministic screen” that selects and deflects particular attributes of any phenomenon.

Catherine:
The contributors to the panel and the publication that will result, were requested to think through the language of freedom, choice and creativity frequently deployed in discussions of the topic.

Kim:
In this rhetoric, interactivity is said to increase participation between viewers and the work. This is promoted as an enhancement of choice and hence individual freedom for the user/spectator. Because of this, interactive works are often said to be more accessible than other forms of art there by countering the elitism attributed to modern art.

Catherine:
This project examines these premises and opens up the term interactivity to include considerations of power and control as they are related to aesthetic issues. We have
resurrected that unfashionable term ideology in our title, not as a means to reduce aesthetics to politics or politics to class or economics, but as a reminder of the inextricable connection between aesthetics and power.

Kim:
And here power is not merely understood in its repressive sense, but as Michel Foucault argues, for its productive capacities as form of organization of space and time: technological environments design interaction and circumscribe choice. But choice is not the only issue. Artists projects that have an explicitly interactive element may map out its micrological functionings in late-capitalist culture rather than serving classically modernist ends tied to a specific set of cultural values that echo a neo-liberal agenda at the level of the body, within the economic spheres of consumption and production, and at the political level of events.

Within the domains of both popular culture and the arts, interactivity is a key promise of new computer-based media technologies. This panel will explore the metaphors of freedom, choice and creativity as depicted in current conceptions of interactivity. The discourse of interactivity will be enlarged to include discussions of power as it is related to aesthetics.

This panel will critique interactivity, often considered to be a defining feature of new media art works and its links with notions of freedom, choice and creativity. It will consider power and control as they are related to aesthetic issues and includes such questions as: what can the notion of freedom represent when artists determine interactive environments and artificial life works; has the nineteenth century conception of the artist, an emblem of freedom, choice and creativity, been imported into new media; if so, does it fit too comfortably within the ideological perception of technology itself?

This paper aims at deconstructing the core concept of liveness, as emphasized in internet based livestreaming media today, via an investigation of historical production of meaning of liveness in theatre and television. Liveness is not, perhaps never, immune from contamination of mediation as the ideal of a “purity of absence of mediation” might be an ideological product of our highly mediatized present society rather than a loss of the pre-digital state of “retained authenticity”. The rise of livestreaming dotcom TVs such as Twitch.tv and Douyu.tv, as opposed to television, is not necessarily a sign of the return of the Immediacy or the arrival of Immediacy via the internet but an allusion to the underlying argument that the televisual is “organic part of the social fabric” in our society. The overarching dichotomy of the Live / thus Real and Representations / thus mediatised is thus replaced by analysis of liveness in each particular case, namely historical television and contemporary livestreaming / digitalised television.

Keywords: Identity, Virtual World, Interactivity, Physical Reality, Mobile Technologies, Device Art

idMirror is an interactive installation which was previously demonstrated at Ars Electronica 2015 and at the ACM CHI 2016. In this paper we describe the idMirror installation from four viewpoints: Conceptual (introduction), development (section 2), technical (section 3) and the collected data analysis (section 4). The paper also presents our study of the idMirror installation participants’ emotional reactions on the idMirror installation. Artists can certainly play a role in educating the public in the sense of encourage critical thinking about the access and use of their data. Big data that includes visual social media, is a new artistic form that has recently become popular. The idMirror project can serve as an example of how we can use social media data to create aesthetic representations and experiences. This paper elaborates upon our earlier work, published as an extended abstract as part of the ACM CHI 2016 proceedings.

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

The hy­poth­e­sis of the ex­tended mind de­vel­oped by philoso­pher Andy Clark posits that the cog­ni­tive processes of the mind ex­tend be­yond the brain or phys­i­cal em­bod­i­ment to co-opt the ob­jects and ac­tions we ha­bit­u­ally use. With the care­ful rea­son­ing of the philoso­pher he ar­gues that a note­book can be func­tion­ally equiv­a­lent to mem­ory, when it is car­ried around con­stantly and re­ferred to so fre­quently that it be­come in­dis­pens­able to the owner.  For con­tem­po­rary thinkers how much more so an ex­ten­sion of the mind than a note­book are the tech­no­log­i­cal fetishes of lap­top, tablet or smart­phone. Mav­er­ick 20th C psy­chol­o­gist Ju­lian Jaynes posited that the de­vel­op­ment of what we term con­scious ex­pe­ri­ence was a his­tor­i­cally re­cent event, and that be­fore around 1000 BC minds were com­part­men­talised or bi­cam­eral.  Jaynes posits that these bi­cam­eral minds used ob­jects such as idols as an aid to com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween these com­part­men­talised as­pects of the mind.

These ‘an­cients’ lit­er­ally spoke and walked with their gods, but in many ways they were au­toma­tons. On some lev­els an­thro­po­mor­phism is hard­wired into the human psy­che. Spec­u­lat­ing from the ideas of Jaynes and Clark about the na­ture of the tech­no­log­i­cal art ob­ject – it is hard not to view per­sonal tech­nol­ogy as an ex­ten­sion or pros­the­sis of the mind. In front of my lap­top I am a dif­fer­ent crea­ture in com­mand of knowl­edge and a fac­tual per­sonal his­tory, to the one who day­dreams as he walks the dog through the bush. If an as­pect of tech­nol­ogy is the evo­lu­tion of cog­ni­tive arte­facts then per­sonal and per­va­sive com­put­ing must con­sti­tute a dra­matic leap.  Sim­i­larly it is tempt­ing, as does art his­to­rian Bar­bara Stafford, to see art­works as cog­ni­tive ob­jects. Cog­ni­tion in the view of Neu­ro­sci­en­tist An­tio­nio Dama­sio in­volves emo­tion and phys­i­cal sen­sa­tion as much as it does logic or men­tal rea­son­ing. I would hy­poth­e­sise than when we en­gage or are im­mersed in an arte­fact we par­tic­i­pate in an act of com­mu­nion or com­mu­ni­ca­tion with it, it be­comes part of our thoughts.  This is a step be­yond I think where Clark would go. The com­bi­na­tion of these two ideas sug­gests that au­tonomous tech­no­log­i­cal art ob­jects could ful­fil a pow­er­ful dream by com­bin­ing both as­pects of pros­the­sis and com­mu­nion.  What would be the con­di­tions that would allow this to hap­pen, is it de­sir­able or in­evitable?

Introduction
Human-Computer Interactive Art suffers from an obsession that has led to bipolar discourses between negative and positive utopia. This discourse, provoked by insecurity in the face of technological advance, drives the illusion of technological superiority. We cannot escape from the illusion because of the structure of technology itself.

Enframing as the Subordinate Moments
There is no neutrality or value freedom of technology, since all technical practices involve both active and receptive aspects. To integrate both aspects, Martin Heidegger used the puzzling meta-language that the technology is not the technology. The activity and receptivity of technology can be distinguished by the instrumental and ontological account. The former mainly considers each individual fulfilling his human desires, including cause and effect. The latter stresses more on the ensemble in social relations. The instrumental definition of technology is not wrong, yet it is not all true. It cannot explain the disagreement of the cause and effect, and so its promise has gone awry.

Heidegger demonstrates that the technology essentially has subordinate moments, and defines it with ‘enframing (Gestell)’ that a ‘world’ as a meaningful structure of experience is shaped by the provocative exigencies of technological planning and control. The enframing thrusts things into the ordering, setting-upon and challenging nature. It also moves the Human-Computer Interactive Art to busy instrumental circumstances, and makes it incline to one side, so-called the tendency of technological Determinism. It means that the Human-Computer Interactive Art is enframed as a part of stockpile of available materials and personnel, and always ready for technological purposes.

The Illusion as the Inversion
The enframing incurs the illusion that operates in concealment, or appears as something it is not. Karl Marx defines that the illusion indicates not the form but the ‘inversion’ which is originated from a social relation. He analyzed in detail a use-value and an exchange-value of commodity. As a use-value, the form of commodity does not have a mysterious character, and it exists simply as either the result of human labor, or as an object with specific use. As soon as it takes over an exchange value in the social relation (like a market place), an enigmatic character arises in the form of a commodity. It is the illusion that conceals a direct relation between people, that a material relation between things takes on supernatural power as an idol or divine incarnation.

This poster session will demonstrate the transition of images from their original reference photographs to a final result resulting from computer modification. The session will be highlighted by a series of slides showing the progressional stages of turning daytime photographs into the illusion of a nighttime scene.

Our interest is to present, before the ISEA2020 community, the institutional experiences that we have carried out from Colombia, related to the realization of the International Image Festival, which in 2020 will take place between the cities of Bogotá and Manizales, with the support from the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University and the University of Caldas, in Colombia.

Since 1997, the Department of Visual Design in Manizales, Colombia, performs the Festival International de la Imagen, a meeting of digital culture in its 16 editions has established an international network of institutions, researchers and artists every year to exchange experiences and knowledge, so it has positioned itself as an event of international significance and academic reference in design, art, science and technology.

The Festival addresses cutting-edge issues that integrate various disciplines, distributed knowledge and social and environmental problems that invite critical reflection of media and communications in contemporary times. In its latest versions, the Festival has been articulated widely relevant international events.

Keywords: Photography, Analog Photography, Digital Photography, Photojournalism, Photo Editing, Graphic Design, Advertisement, Visual Arts, Visual Manipulation, Image Manipulation

Etymologically, photography can be understood as an image painted with light, but in a more complex view, its definition has evolved from the analog processes used since its early days to the digital practices we witness today. Industrialization and new technologies applied to visual arts have affected the way people see these practices, have changed its values and pushed its boundaries, forcing artists and amateur performers to reevaluate the limits and possibilities of their disciplines to approach new territories through innovation and exploration. This paper is intended to make a brief description of the evolutional process of photography from a historical and technical view, and the transformation of this concept, from the early analog cameras and systems in the 19th century to the digital advances in the 21st century, analyzing the idea of visual manipulation, as an inherent activity to the different cameras and technologies, based on the definition of photography as a form of art. Supported by the case of the Bang Bang Club and the artwork of Kevin Carter, this reflection analyzes different forms of visual manipulation, not intended as an ethical judgment, but as recognition of a constant phenomenon through the history of this practice.

This panel offers a space of comparison and reflection for three duos of artists and researchers on their interdisciplinary projects. The participants of the panel are both applied scientist and artist-researcher, with first-hand experience on the question. They elaborate on specific angle of interest. Although the genesis of the 3 projects shares a common basis, the comparison of their realization offers a nuanced portrait of the practice of research-creation as it can be done today, with accents placed on the symbiosis of imaginations across disciplines, approaches, and relations with the public. The diverse composition of the panel offers some outstanding comparations panorama.

The panel is aimed to reflect on the art & science form of expression to be touching, imaginative, emotional, interactive, playable, and even joyful. The panel discusses imaginary and conceptual bounding, decision-making approach in art and science project, to compare possible accommodation between originality and relevance. It will inform the audience of the involvement of the public at different levels of the research, upstream or downstream.

Departing from one of the topics previously discussed in ISEA symposia, this paper introduces an artistic research project, The Dynamic Archive (thedynamicarchive.net). As an open source, collaborative platform that collects processes and methods, it represents another direction in archival strategies in the age of computation.

The paper will also further explore the term “symbioses” by describing relations that occur within the project, such as the relations between curator and contributor, component and version, and its digital and physical presence. Since it could be regarded as a symbiotic organization that aims at creating symbiotic imaginaries, the paper will work through how these notions relate to The Dynamic Archive and possible alternative terms to consider. Taking the book Symbiotic Planet by Lynn Margulis as a starting point, the paper will look into notions such as Karan Barad’s “becoming” (focusing on process), and “virtual” (or “non-local”, as Denise Ferreira da Silva calls it). These positions question Western knowledge production and problematize what its systems imply. Our research project reflects on these terms, not only in trying to position itself among them, but in the very attempt to question them.

Keywords: Architecture, Art, Border, Media Art, Utopia, Intervention, Mexico, Guatemala, Immigration, South.

This paper examines Guatemex (2006), an intervention at the border of Mexico and Guatemala by three Mexican artists, Rene Hayashi, Eder Castillo, and Antonio O’Connel. I discuss the project’s significance in relation to its conception as a concrete response to local needs, as it was designed to provide internet access and information to undocumented migrants crossing the interstitial space of Usumacinta River, the fluid border between Mexico and Guatemala. In this light, I also consider how Guatemex builds on, speaks to, and expand on notions about architecture, “border art”, “imagined geography”, utopian community, and “securitization”. The focus of discussion is on the project’s negotiation of these terms, and on its relevance as an intervention that suggests connecting and thinking with the margins as one of today’s most urgent projects.

My intention is to keep my highly damaged visual sense alive by using the Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope (SLO) as a seeing device to foster visual poetry as well as communication over the Internet. In 1979 I wrote:

Things are disappearing
Branches from trees
Pieces of words
Lines in faces

As I began to lose my eyesight I developed an increasing appetite for technology including cameras, le nses and any available “seeing machine”. I used this technology both to bolster my fading eye sight and to create new kinds of visual sensations that I could use to express myself.

At this time I was exceedingly lucky to be a Fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. CAVS was founded by Gyorgy Kepes in 1967 as a workshop where artists could encounter scientists and engineers. It was at the forefront of a global awakening to art-science-technology as a movement. Its purposes were as humanist as the traditional values of art rather than military or industrial. New tools were being evolved that were replacing “oils” and “the violin”; transmittability of images was becoming at least as important as expression. Artists worked in groups on large-scale installations as well as pursuing individual projects, with MIT as a candy store and the large collaborative artistic projects encouraged by its longtime director Otto Piene as venues, CAVS artists working in diverse media were pioneering new genres of Art and Technology, e.g. Harriet Casdin-Silver’s solar tracked daylight holograms; Eric Begleiter’s holographic candy; Jennifer Hall’s virtual reality glove; Piotr Kowalski’s Time Machines; Shawn Brixey/Laura Knott’s Photon  oice (light and sound responsive particles levitated in a flask interacted with the movement of a dancer). It was an environment charged with new materials, experimentation, poetry, magic where, among other things, artists were attempting to render the invisible visible. We shared work and ideas at bimonthly Fellows meetings. It was here that I first saw some video synthesis techniques employed by Vin Grabill, then a graduate student in the Master of Science in Visual Studies Program at CAVS. In the ensuing months we began a collaboration that has continued for 10 years. Terrified and mesmerized by what I saw “from the inside out“ as my eyesight worsened, I was observing something remarkably akin to Grabill’s video synthesis techniques of light edged shapes, streaked and pointillist light surfaces and loose green jello movement.

This presentation describes the first internet access for the visually challenged. The intention is to keep my highly damaged visual sense active by using the Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope (SLO) as a “seeing device” to enjoy visual poetry and even communication over the Internet. I constructed poems and poem animations (in HyperCard) for the SLO. Recently we hooked up an SLO to a Mac AV computer accessed to the Internet. In this paper, I will describe my results using video documentation. I will suggest that via the SLO, communication — even over great distance — is possible that allows visually challenged persons to see a poem or a child’s face, a micro­organism, a quasar, or a star.

In this presentation I describe a new working methodology to learning about land and ecological disruption through ‘affective ecology’ and kinship encounters with human and other-than-human inhabitants as collaborators.

The Düsseldorf Inter Media Art Institute (IMAI) is a non-profit foundation that archives, exhibits, and distributes time-based media art. The archive boasts more than 3,000 works that document the international history of video art from the 1960s until today. More than 1,000 of these videos can be viewed in full in the catalogue on the foundation’s website. Since September 2021, this website also hosts the foundation’s participatory video art channel: IMAI Play. IMAI Play invites users to create video art playlists, publish them on the foundation’s website, and share them on social media. Through social tagging every playlist is accompanied by user-defined metadata to facilitate new readings of the archive. Users can also create their personal watch lists and comment on the playlists of other users. With IMAI Play, the Inter Media art Institute aims to stimulate communication about video art and create a space for new perspectives, discoveries, and unexpected connections.

Keywords: Algorithmic Art, Ornament, 3D Printing, Rococo, Symmetry, Asymmetry, Landscape, Wunderkammer

This text analyses the ornamental engravings of Rococo, Art Forms of Nature by Ernst Haeckel, and the digital paintings of Robert Lettner. Together, they create forms, applications and methods of the ornament as contemporary catalyst reflected in the artwork Vessels of Vanitas. The following observations of the works, their differences and similarities, allow a speculation on emerging synergies between method, media and context of the ornament and what each can learn from the other. All these works and objects were brought together in one exhibition, constructing the guiding principle of a Wunderkammer. As a result, a better understanding of the multi-layered concept of ornament as a naturalistic imitation, a classification tool, and as an algorithmically generated construct has been achieved.

The Immerce Cunningham visual database, is an interactive multi-media prototype based on the dances and the choreographic process of Merce Cunningham. In Immerce, dance material is explored and navigated using an interface metaphor which is based on a process grounded in Merce Cunningham’s working methodology and in the nature of dance itself. Tools are available to enable users to create their own menu system or structure, retrace their path through the archive, and to gather their own “body of knowledge” for later viewing. At any time, the user may choose to view the material from the point of view of the computer system itself by selecting the System Gaze.

Intro

“In one way or another what we thought we couldn’t do was altogether possible, if only we didn’t get the mind in the way”
_Merce Cunningham

The Immerce Cunningham visual database, is an interactive multi-media prototype based on the dances and the choreographic process of Merce Cunningham. In immerse dance material is explored and navigated using an interface metaphor which is based on a process grounded in Merce Cunningham’s working methodology and in the nature of dance itself. Cunningham’s process deals complexity, the incorporation of chance  procedures, the relatedness of space and time, and multiple points of reference. The multi-media work explores notions of interactivity, of navigation and of representation related to dance, the body, and the choreographic process of Merce Cunningham. A key part of the design process has been to remain allied with Cunningham’s choreographic process. The system design has incorporated the use of chance operations, complexity, and a multiplicity of centers with respect to both time and space, concepts derived from Zen Buddism. Immerce allows dance to be re-experienced and re-defined in multiple layers, from multiple vantage points. This way of viewing the system design comes from a position where one is not seeking solutions with known methodologies but instead seeking experience and re-experience through a process of exploring the unknown.

With Stephen Hawryshko.

This project is sponsored by the Centre for Image and Sound Research through the support of CITI

This presentation will look at latent forms in the art of the theatre contained within immersive technologies : the inherent theatricality of virtual spaces must be identified if we wish to get beyond solipsist post-psychedelic grooviness, or hyper-inter-activity of simplistic role-playing dressed up in high-tech razzmatazz. Emerging technologies solicit and implicate us in new ways, generating perceptive illusions which draw us into an unprecedented identity-based realm of drama. How do we begin building this new theater of fictive senses and induced sensations? What framework and latitude actors do have, where selves have become multiple, divisible, and shareable through kinesthetic and proprioceptive mirages? The splintering and interchangeability of the self should catalyze collective creations offering the same exhilarating vitality as numbers by juggler and jazzmen. Yet effective improvisation requires acceptance of common codes : verbal repartee and musical riffs catch on because we recognize the cohesive strength of underlying codes. In the same manner, the novel theatricality born of virtual metamorphoses requires recognition of a common symbolic language. Only then will we be able to start spinning vital virtual yarns, and creating truly new dramatic myth.

Intro

Querying the compatibility of immersion and theater is like querying the compatibility of narration and interactivity: deciding whether or not such notions are antithetical ultimately depends on how one chooses to define them. If narrating means telling a story, to what extent does the story keep a recognizable core when subjected to the umpteen bifurcations,  ramifications and other convolutions that supposedly testify to interactivity? Can infinitely splintering, unforeseeable scenarios be called “narration”, or do they announce a form of collective writing for which we have yet to forge a term? Similarly, if theater implies dramatic representation, to what extent is representation recognizable as such for the wholly immersed subject, no longer an onlooker or bystander, but caught up in the action ? Can totally overwhelming situations still be called “theater”, or do they announce a form of collective experience for which we have yet to forge a term? This text in many respects testifies to “work in progress”, and contains far more questions than answers. Then again, perhaps trying to pose the essential questions is the most urgent task at hand.

INVOLVING ONLOOKERS AND BYSTANDERS
For several years, the Japanese theater troupe Agua Gala has chosen to work at the fringe between theatrical performance and interactive works involving spectator-participants, thereby
raising many questions central to the theater/ immersion debate. In its latest work, VALE in the Victim, Agua Gala recruits half a dozen spectators upon arrival at the performance site. Dressed in sackcloth cloaks, they are asked to undertake a number of simple actions while ten members of the troupe execute rigorously preordained choreography in a complex sound environment.  The novices begin by walking around the performance space, resolutely indifferent to the sometimes aggressive dancers. Apparently contradictory actions are programmed: the volunteers have been instructed to pick up and carry shoes thrown into the arena, but the dancers immediately tear these objects out of their hands; the volunteers lined up on one side of the space are successively pulled into the center by a performer, and instantly hauled back into line by another. Such situations generate dramatic tension, as does the very coexistence of two different actor categories: virtuoso professionals (Agua Gala has a strong butoh background) versed in the planned work. and more-or-less bewildered outsiders trapped in what is for them totally unpredictable action. But over time, negative ambivalence is particularly felt by the third category of persons, namely the spectators who identify strongly with the volunteers, while scrutinizing them with a vague sense of voyeuristic guilt.

NANO-Nucleus of Art and New Organisms has developed practical and theoretical investigations in the field of art and technology related to biotelematics, hybridization and transcultural experimentation in the last 6 years. A methodological approach has been applied in order to create a flow of informative and sensitive experiences based on collaborative strategies such as events, meetings, immersions and interactive platforms. NANO lab is not regarded only as a physical space for experimentation, but also as an environment in which the practice reflects the concepts applied in the artistic work. In this sense, we engage in field trips, artistic residencies and field projects that relocate the lab environment into a “wild”, “unexplored”, unknown natural condition which we call immersions, situations in which the lab is re-located or dis-located according to specific work plans, work groups, project objectives. On the following paragraphs the organic model behind these ideas and strategies will be briefly discussed and some examples presented.

Keywords: Art & Technology, Aesthetic Organism, Hiperorgânicos, Immersion, NANO Lab

The Immersive Arts Space is a university-wide art/tech lab that serves as a research, teaching and production platform. The aim of the IASpace is the implementation of innovative and interdisciplinary projects in the context of a technologically-supported artistic examination of immersion, virtuality and simulation. The activities in the IASpace are oriented towards contemporary aesthetic and methodological directions in international design and art. They are based on a transdisciplinary approach and a critical stance.

This institutional presentation highlights an innovative university wide art-tech lab: the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts (CH). The presentation describes the lab’s role inside and outside the context of a large public art school and the manner in which different conceptual, critical and practice-base agendas coincide. The position of the IASpace is theorized within broader frameworks of innovation and the social-material production of knowledge in Science and Technology Studies (STS) in order to understand the lab’s broader political-aesthetic dynamics and evolving ethos.

Polar ice is the most visible yet inaccessible indicator of climate change. “Ice-Time” investigates environmental deep time by portraying ice from vast glaciers to individual crystals in an immersive, multi-channel video and 3D sound installation.

In this paper, we describe our joined research around building a technological pipeline suitable for creating artistic immersive installations that uses a combination of computer vision and mobile phones as means for interaction, both in the sense of HCI and interaction between human participants.

This article introduces the new dynamics and challenges in making sound art virtual while posing new questions about previously neglected aspects, such as archiving sound in a virtual space. By referencing the historical examples of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Nam June Paik, this article recognizes the limits of previous archiving methods and technologies while revisiting the essential question of power under emerging media and algorithms.

With a focus on virtual archiving, this article investigates the new boundaries of sound art in an updated context while advocating an alternative framework to evaluate the relationship between the virtual and real, not only as a fluid location as put by Gilles Deleuze, but also as an integrated system to be located in time and space.

Immersive worlds and interactive installations put foward a relationship with the sciences of complexity, that is to say, the sciences of systems which are not in equilibrium, which are based on the concept of emergence. How can other and new realities emerge when we experience an interactive installation?

The People´s Smart Sculpture PS2 panel of ISEA2018 in Durban reflects the social and political impact of a 4 years media art and science activity in Europe with more than 800 artists and scientists involved. PS2 developed participatory digital art methods for changes in urban living environment. What will be left after 4 years? Which results, artistic methods, digital tools will sustain? What is transferable into different situations? The panel additionally integrates the experiences of the temporary African-European PS2 digital art lab in June, before and during ISEA2018 in Durban.

Connecting to themes like Bio-Hacking and Bio-Creation the Impakt Festival will highlight a selection of themes, projects and artists it has recently presented. The presentation focusses on artists that discuss changing definitions of what is natural and human. The projects in the presentation present visions on post-natural environments where technology and the human body have become inseparable. Devoid of technophobia and technofetishism, the artist in this presentation address ethical and philosophical questions raised by contemporary technological developments. By showing the likely and the possible they encourage us to think about the desirable. The presentation will discuss the works of artists like Floris Kaayk (NL), Kurt van Mensvoort (NL), Jeroen van Loon (NL), Agi Haines (GB) and the Critical Art Ensemble (USA).

STEAM INC is the first focused attempt to collect and codify European approaches to STEAM in Higher Education. While the work is exploratory and should not be considered comprehensive, the collected approaches can however offer a preliminary framework for further mapping of STEAM in Higher Education, stimulate dialogue about the perceived nature, principles and parameters of STEAM and provide inspiration for those looking to develop and introduce STEAM approaches of their own.

In his Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi calls for “movement, sensation, and qualities of experience” to be put back into our understandings of embodiment and culture. He says that our dominant modes of comprehension are almost exclusively visual and linguistic. Massumi wants to instead “engage with continuity,” to encourage a processual, active, sensory and relational approach to the world.

As an artist, I’m similarly concerned with how categories such as ‘body,’ ‘language,’ ‘vision’ or ‘space’ are often presupposed in contemporary culture, and hope to foster greater dialogue around these complex systems and their relationships to affect and meaning-making. Most specifically I ask, ‘How might the body’s continuity, and its potential disruption, be attendant, provoked and contextualized in contemporary art?’.

This artist talk is a reflection on my own art practice as a direct engagement with high-end industrial 3D animation software, and discusses the emergence of the database as a creative methodology, and a key organizing principle in the generation of an ongoing series of 3D digital animated artworks. Through explication and demonstration of creative process I aim to elucidate the intricate relationship between technology, process and artistic intent, framing this within relevant emergent critical frameworks around digital creative practice. The aim is to recognize some of the inherent qualities of 3D digital production, and the mapping of the operations of the ‘database’ as a pliable creative tool.

Working directly into high-end 3D modeling and animation software, and taking the actions of a generic male figure as a point of departure, my animations are created in a modular fashion, building up units of performed movements, loops and cycles (both animated and motion-captured), creating a sometimes complex movement vocabulary.

This recalls Lev Manovich’s notions of the database and the loop as engines of (non-linear) narrative in digital media work, in particular his principles of modularity, automation and variability as intrinsic to new media objects.[1] In working with complex software tools I also acknowledge in the fabrication process what Rachael Kearney has termed the ‘synthetic imagination’[2], and Malcolm Le Grice’s conception of submerged authorship in the interaction with the ‘intelligent machine’ – the creative act as a collaboration with the embodied intellect of the software itself.[3]

Drawing on and remediating a range of sources including the photographic studies of Eadweard J. Muybridge, the choreography of Busby Berkeley, nineteenth century optical toys, and the contemporary digital video game, these works present figures which occupy a space between the animate and the inanimate, between automata (devices that move by themselves) and simulacra (devices that simulate other things). Manovich models the creation of a digital media work as the ‘construction of an interface to a database…the interface [providing] access to an underlying database.’[4] So rather than fashioning a unique work of art ‘within a particular medium’ where interface and data are one, in ‘new media, the content of the work and the interface are separated. It is therefore possible to create different interfaces to the same material.’[5] Elements can be composed and recomposed, duplicated, altered, retrieved and deleted non-destructively, representing a shift from creation to selection.

What I recognize in this dynamic between ‘creative’ user and complex software tool, in my own incremental process of engagement and expertise with 3D animation software are alignments between form and content, where my capabilities with, and employment of, generic and pre-set functions (loops, database structures of storage and retrieval), and intrinsic formal characteristics (Manovich’s ‘Modularity’, ‘Automation’ and ‘Variability’) form a feedback loop with aesthetic and thematic concerns.

References

1. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press).
2. Rachel Kearney, Animated Worlds and the Romantic Imagination in Animated Worlds, Ed. Suzanne Buchan (Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing, 2006), 7.
3. Malcolm LeGrice, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London: British Film Institute), 240.
4. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, 218.
5. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, 218.

Abstract

Short Paper

“Improv” is a system for creating interactive improvisational computer animation and music. The Improv system is an integrated visual and audio environment with characters that are intelligent, autonomous and direct-able. Characters in Improv are represented visually as “Virtual actors” or audibly as “virtual musicians.” Virtual actors are autonomous, direct-able animated characters. Virtual actors are given personality traits by an animator or director and choose their actions according to these personality traits. They are influenced by and respond to the state and actions of other characters and objects in their environment. Virtual musicians are essentially “audio actors” and represent the players in a band. They choose and alter their playing style according to personality traits and environmental cues, analogous to the way virtual actors choose their movements. Improv is an interactive system. Actors and musicians respond in real-time to human input from a director using the mouse or keyboard; live musicians playing MIDI electronic musical instruments and controllers; and human participants through a variety of sensor devices. Improv characters also interact in real-time with the other Virtual characters in the environment. We describe the Improv system components, design philosophy and implementation, as well as demonstrations, scenarios and installations we have created with the system.

Radio is everywhere. Radio sound is everywhere. The sound of radio is the sound of our time. We have become so accustomed to the presence of the sound of radio in our private spaces that we hardly notice it. For most of us the radio has become a friend, a companion for the driver, for the solitary worker, for the invalid. For many it is often an unwanted and unavoidable intrusion. Unavoidable because it has become a natural sound, always potentially present waiting to be heard. The voices of strangers from distant places wake us in the morning, bring us information about distant events, persuade us to buy things. Popular music is radio music. Radio music is the same wherever the radio is heard. Radio sound is everywhere on the planet and it is always the same sound. Radio sound. Radio is the instrument of our time.
The ‘Kunstradio’ presentation will discuss how the instrument radio is changing under the impact of digitalisation and the new communications technologies and how this instrument is being played by artists. Since 1990 there has been a series of international radio art projects involving many artists working simultaneously in different physical and media spaces around the globe. They have been developing an image of what radio and the sound of media are becoming in the age of the convergence of mass media, telecommunications and the computer. Kunstradio – originally just a weekly radio-art programme on the National Austrian Radio ORF – has become one of the crystallization points of artistic production in this new on air – on line – on site context.

Keywords: Dance, Improvisation, Creativity, Art installation, Humancomputer interaction, Expressive movement, Machine learning.

The interdisciplinary project AI am explores the potential roles of artificial intelligence in dance. One of the aims of the project is to create a performance where a human and a virtual dancer interact in real time in a mutual exchange where the human dancer and the avatar learn from and inspire each other. Apart from enabling an engaging experience, this kind of interaction would potentially also encourage movements that might otherwise not emerge from human improvisations. As a first step towards this goal, a method for generating novel dance movements from recorded motion sequences has been created. The next step is presented in this paper: an interactive setup where visitors can control parameters governing the avatar’s improvisations. A user study of the installation indicates that the avatar’s movements are interesting, engaging and inspiring. Implications of these results for future work are also discussed.