Presentation Data Table

A discussion of The Hole Residency provides a context for assessing the crucial role that technology can play in art projects that are framed in the boundaries of social practice or socially-engaged art, especially by the near-absence of technology in such projects. The Hole Residency is a project focused on duration, visceral experience, collaboration, and the opportunity to engage directly with nature. It also provides a framework for considering the relationship between art, science and technology within a hands-on context.

On the occasion of this year’s ISEA Symposium in Germany the Gesellschaft für Elektronische Kunst Gladbeck/Cologne (Electronic Art Society) took the opportunity to set a time mark. It means a kind of halt and reflection on the passed developments of activities around electronic art, especially computer graphic art.

Why now? And how did it happen?
A quarter of a century ago we could intensify the exhibition programme in Gladbeck by starting a separate art gallery beside the existing town museum. Facing a broad cultural and artistic background in the Ruhr and Rhine region with institutions focusing on their mutual specific topics in exhibiton and collecting policies in the arts Gladbeck’s challenge was to find it’s special niche in surroundings like these. By chance a contact to an additional exhibit of works in computer graphics along with the C 84 Cologne Fair initiated the idea of transferring the activity to the Gladbeck Gallery and developing it to an open competition worldwide.

This article explores the changes in terms of place from a physical world to online communication. The alternation in the concept of place on the internet is regarding to be a tool to reconstruct a sense of place – a subjective quality determines by individuals. Focusing on the nature of online communication, we may say social interaction is a key to create the sense of place in the online activity. The outcome of this research was implemented in an installation project at Copenhagen Airport, Denmark. With an intention to promote social interaction among passengers, the installation aimed to re-establish the sense of place by facilitating an indirect communication, where the people could share their dreams with the others.

The Schizomachine is an ongoing work-research that consists in the development of a wearable neuro-biofeedback system for aesthetic-affective experiences. As all research is also a creative process, this work, thought to be introduced in an artistic context, crosses other fields beyond Art and Product Design, such as Computing, Biology and Engineering. In search of the realization of the ideas that emerged throughout the process, listening and sound (Schaeffer, 1966; Schafer, 1969; Cage, 1973; Pelling & Gimzewski, 2002) came out as important concepts, which have guided the research so far. This article addresses the intuitive path that has been traced from the very first idea to the very first prototype, with the aim of reaching other possible listenings

Panel: Slowness: Responding to Acceleration through Electronic Arts

“The enor­mous mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of books in every branch of knowl­edge is one of the great­est evils of this age; since it pre­sents one of the most se­ri­ous ob­sta­cles to the ac­qui­si­tion of cor­rect in­for­ma­tion, by throw­ing in the reader’s way piles of lum­ber in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of use­ful lum­ber, per­ad­ven­ture in­ter­spersed.” _Edgar Alan Poe (1845)

By ti­tling the last vol­ume of his novel À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) as Le Temps Retrouvé [Time Re­gained], Mar­cel Proust in the first decades of the 20th Cen­tury, cap­tured and an­tic­i­pated our con­tem­po­rary anx­i­ety about time and con­scious­ness of time pass­ing. A mod­ern phe­nom­e­non, the aware­ness of the speed­ing up of time is a re­sult of the in­creased rate of change since the In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion. In re­cent decades, and with elec­tronic media, this change has quick­ened into a tidal wave of ‘too much in­for­ma­tion.’ Per­cep­tion of change has al­tered as well, from an aware­ness of ac­cel­er­a­tion of time gen­er­ally, to an acutely in­ter­nal­ized sense of change. In a pro­gres­sion from Edgar Allen Poe’s 1845 quo­ta­tion de­cry­ing the pro­lif­er­a­tion of book pub­lish­ing and the dif­fi­culty of fil­ter­ing for qual­ity, to more re­cent books like Alvin Tof­fler’s (1970) In­for­ma­tion Over­load re­port­ing height­ened stress and im­paired judg­ment as a con­se­quence of rapid adap­ta­tion, and Richard Saul Wur­man’s (1989) In­for­ma­tion Anx­i­ety pre­sent­ing strate­gies for pro­cess­ing in­for­ma­tion over­load, there has been grow­ing alarm re­gard­ing the ef­fects of ac­cel­er­ated change. More re­cently, there has been a lot writ­ten on the ef­fect of the In­ter­net on deep think­ing, in­clud­ing nu­mer­ous hy­per­ven­ti­lat­ing polemics on how the Web, so­cial net­work­ing and the cul­ture of in­stant re­sponse is ac­tu­ally chang­ing our brains. Yet if speed, frac­ture and over­load are the out­come of the 20th cen­tury cel­e­bra­tion of the dy­namism of change and the ma­chine age, there are also many works of con­tem­po­rary art which en­gage ‘real time’ as coun­ter­weight. It’s pos­si­ble that ‘real time’ as an artis­tic con­ven­tion be­came in­ter­est­ing just as our per­cep­tion of ac­tual ‘real time’ in lived ex­pe­ri­ence sped up. In Warhol’s Em­pire (1964) or Michael Snow’s Wave­length (1967) time is ex­pe­ri­enced minute-by-minute, with a slow­ness that can be med­i­ta­tive, con­tem­pla­tive, im­mer­sive or al­ter­na­tively bor­ing, suf­fo­cat­ing and lack­ing drama. Yet even ‘real time’ isn’t safe from ac­cel­er­a­tion. The ‘real time’ for­mat of the TV se­ries 24 is para­dox­i­cal: the minute-by-minute equiv­a­lence be­tween plot ac­tion and view­ing time is exact, yet the ac­tion in each mo­ment of nar­ra­tive is so hopped-up it feels like real time on metham­phet­a­mine. That image of real time adren­a­l­ized is an apt frame­work for look­ing at the chal­lenges to artists work­ing with tech­nol­ogy. As an artist mak­ing pro­jects for the In­ter­net, I am aware of the tech­nolo­gies push­ing me for­ward in new work at the same time I am look­ing back­wards at erod­ing and van­ish­ing tech­nolo­gies, and ear­lier pro­jects that are stranded, mu­tated or ir­re­triev­ably changed by browser ob­so­les­cence.

This pull of si­mul­ta­ne­ous op­pos­ing di­rec­tions is a Prous­t­ian night­mare in which the in­vol­un­tary mem­ory is not the savor of a trea­sured bite of the past, but a con­stant reverie on the in­sta­bil­ity of past, pre­sent and fu­ture. The ten­sion of this pull in two di­rec­tions raises many ques­tions about ap­proaches to mak­ing, main­tain­ing and con­serv­ing In­ter­net-based art­work. Do we ac­cept the ephemer­al­ity and ex­pend­abil­ity of web art as it has a brief mo­ment and then ‘breaks’ when the tech passes on; mi­grate the work by up­dat­ing to cur­rent browser stan­dards; or ‘show’ the work in an­other form that may con­vey the ap­pear­ance and pre­serve the con­tent, but is no longer the ‘orig­i­nal’ work. What is the ‘shelf-life’ of art made in the con­text of rapid evo­lu­tion of tech­nol­ogy, and is it pos­si­ble to adapt one’s stu­dio prac­tice and re­la­tion to tech­nol­ogy in a way that as­sim­i­lates rapid change? This pre­sen­ta­tion will ex­plore these is­sues of adap­ta­tion to change in the preser­va­tion and con­ser­va­tion of art made for the In­ter­net and will also ex­am­ine a va­ri­ety of ap­proaches to the ex­pe­ri­ence of du­ra­tion in web-based art­work.

Before the digital age, humans spent years in training to gain matured physical fidelity and versatility necessary to become professionals in music, which nowadays is often called the organization of sound. As the concept of sound art expands and becomes more diverse and inclusive of various practices and activities made possible through the technological advancements of our era, the organization of sound in artworks no longer necessarily requires time restrictions or physicality. We certainly don’t know how expansively this “between categories” genre will develop yet. This essay presents the background thought process, through social and cultural perspectives, behind an in-progress sound art project to create a paean and elegy of human mortality through a self-driven artistic composition. The self-termed PhysiMusiking practice led this artist to self-study a musical instrument and yoga movements. The journey of building new craftsmanship, by itself, is part of the experiment in unifying original auditory-visual expressions, somewhat similar to visual music. The multiple-year project was initiated in November of 2017 in Hong Kong with an announcement of the imprecise future schedule of three-tier, evolving stages leading to the final assembly in South Korea.

In the spirit of combinatory play, this paper examines how the concept of environmental personhood may impact art, design, and culture in novel ways. It introduces the landmark legal decision in 2017 that granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River in New Zealand. Legal decisions such as this have the potential to provide productive conceptual fodder for artists, designers, and architects whose work imagines new relations between humans and the environment at a time when ecological degradation is ubiquitous. This paper then presents a heuristic framework called the Agency-Personhood Continuum (APC) that traces broad esthetic strategies used in artworks that engage with concepts of nonhuman material agency and environmental personhood. Finally, it seeks to open new imaginatory space by positing a new class of supra-governmental entities called allo-states. Allo-states are organizations that represent massive ecological entities such as the Amazon River which that transcend a single nation-state. Theoretically, allo-statescould exist alongside, but independent from nation-states in supra-governmental parliamentary proceedings such as the UN General Assembly. Ultimately, Allo-states provide a hypothetical means for environmental persons to receive representation that focuses on their intrinsic worth instead of their resource value. Through speculation about emerging notions of environmental personhood, the aim is to activate new areas of social, cultural, and creative inquiry.

Searchlights have been used historically for artistic, military, commemoration and promotion purposes. This essay begins with an outline of the historical uses of searchlights in international fairs and its deployment in political and commemorative events on the first half of the twentieth century. The second part tracks and analyzes the use of searchlights by contemporary artists who have explored the use of this medium to create spatial, personal and community results. Some artists draw lines in the sky exploring sculptural possibilities; not a few continue the traditional uses of searchlights for national celebrations; while others manage to reveal in their installations the paradoxical nature of reflectors that oscillate between being a tool of vigilance and spectacle.

In the Time of Clouds is a mixed-media installation that utilizes the networked “cloud” to explore our collective sensorial relationship to the sky. The project responds to a February 2019 Nature Geoscience article that speculates about rising carbon dioxide levels leading to a possible future without clouds. The project attempts to archive these ephemeral forms and document their influence on our collective imagination before they disappear from our atmosphere forever. Utilizing both social media discourse about clouds and live video streams from public observatory cameras, the project amalgamates linguistic and visual data, mining this data to create an atmospheric triptych of poetry, ice cream, and ceramics.

The installation is composed of three intertwined parts: Part I (The Observatories), a series of videos that combine algorithmically generated poems and livestreams from networked observatory webcams; Part II (Terracotta Clouds), a collection of handbuilt dessert wares based on unique cloud forms culled from the videos; and Part III (Cloud Ice Cream), an ice cream whose flavor profile is derived from social media discourse speculating about the taste of clouds, a “cloud ice cream.”

With reference to Dislocate – Festival of art, technology and locality, I will present activities concerned with the relationship between new media and our location.
Dislocate is an annual event held in Tokyo, along with offshoot events in the UK. Its aim is to bring together artists, designers, thinkers in the examination of the interplay between new media and our surroundings. Through exhibitions, workshops and an international symposium Dislocate aims to explore the potential new media has to increase our awareness of our environment, enhance participation in our locality and community and transform our perceptions of the space we inhabit.

How do we locate ourselves? How do we position ourselves in relation to our surroundings?

Location is not a set of coordinates, it is not something static and easily measurable, it is not a case of physical geography but is a state which exists through the complex interplay of history, culture, socio-politics, economics and technologies. Location is a multifaceted context, a situation and state of being and is not necessarily linked to the ground beneath our feet. The expansion and intermix of these various elements means they may no longer be defined by location. A shift from one location to the next seems impossible to define when locations constantly merge with each other, a positioning within multiple contexts, multiple spaces. History, culture etc. are not constructed in one defined place, our locations are innumerable, dispersed points of reference.

I would like to comment on the works of a number of artists who have taken on the notion of the locative in some form and have made investigations into our sense of place. These include Maebayashi Akitsugu, Fujihata Masaki, Christian Nold, Dan Belasco Rogers and Active Ingredient.

These artists have engaged new media in some form in order to examine some of the following:
– The relationship between the body and place
– Collective experience of location
– The hidden stories of a specific location, personal histories, the relevance of a particular place in our lives

Indigenous Domain discusses the limitations of current colonial paradigms for cyberspace which try to rope off “commons” or “reservations” for the public good, but which still operate within a larger colonial framework. The paper proposes alternatives to the prevailing colonial paradigm of the “commons” and “copyleft” based on models drawn from indigenous culture, permaculture and digital culture.

Abstract

emergence of data-double
One of the principles of modern meta-narration was the myth of total visibility. Transparency, recognized as an effect of rationalization and development of technology, was closely related to the issues of power and control. While referring to the idea of panopticon Foucault pointed out the importance of the transparencycontrol-power relationship, which defined specific characteristics of modernity but, at the same time, he stressed the utopian character of the modern project. Nowadays, together with the development of various types of surveillance technologies (from CCTV to satellites and biometrics) it seems that the idea of transparency is being realised in material form. Though commonness of optical and post-optical surveillance is not in doubt, its influence on broadening spheres of visibility seems problematic. The inflation of the information obtained makes a proper analysis nearly impossible and in fact causes opposite effect – instead of being transparent the reality of more and more data creates a complicated labyrinth of data. Surveillance technologies together with the popularization of wireless, wearable, and mobile technologies, this labyrinth of data becomes a hybrid reality which is invisible. Analysing the specific forms of digital surveillance Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson indicated that the strongest characteristic is the phenomenon of surveillance assemblage. (Haggerty and Erckson 2000). In the age of total information digitalization, control is based mainly on the gaining, storing and processing of data. This process engages various sources of information which, albeit operating with different motivations and aims, constitute a coherent network. Surveillance assemblage consists in an exchange of information which consequently leads to profiling a shadow of reality called ‘data double’.

As we navigate our way through life, the eyes and the ears play complementary roles in giving us information about our environment. Yet in research fields, the eyes predominate, as datasets are typically presented through visualization. There is much promise in complementary or alternative realizations presented for the ears, through sonification.

Studying large amounts of data with the ears offers a number of advantages. Small-scale variations may be “magnified” if they are mapped to a quality such as pitch, to which the human auditory system is particularly sensitive. The auditory system is also highly adapted for following multiple streams of information. That is, listeners can readily apprehend a number of simultaneous melodies if they are presented effectively. Thus, sonification is an effective way to display a multitude of signal processing operations simultaneously, with each being represented as a line of counterpoint, a series of chords, or a succession of musical instruments. Indeed, from an informatics perspective, sonification represents an exciting frontier of research methodologies. New ways of gathering information are constantly being created; it is not always clear how useful interpretations can be made from the multitude of information sources and the apparent “data deluge.” Finding ways to listen to data offers considerable promise.

This presentation will be a summary of sonification work being carried out at Penn State, on a number of projects, which may include:

1. ongoing work in sonification of heart rate variability;
2. correlations between dynamics of cardiac activity and movement and posture, as explored by Siang Lee Hong at Louisiana State University;
3. sonifications of nanomotor movements, a joint project with Penn State’s Department of Chemistry;
4. sonifications of computer network activity, a joint project with Penn State’s College of Information Science and Technology.

My doctoral project (2021-2024) is based on the intuition that we inhabit a world through the images we make of it. In this sense, it would seem that constructing ways of inhabiting a world involves ways of making images (physical or mental). But these images are the formal translations of the type of relationship we cultivate with the things of this world. Inhabiting therefore also, and perhaps above all, involves making specific ways of ‘relating’ to certain things in this world: cultivating a care in an attention to the Other, whether human or non-human, and using our images as compasses. Taking care of our relationships and their modes of existence goes hand in hand with taking care of the making of our images.

I will discuss the research mission of the team of biologists from the laboratory of the Paris Natural History Museum directed by Florent Martos (from 27/02 to 18/03/2023). Made up of Eve Hellequin, Rémi Petrolli and Tomas Figura, the team took samples of epiphytic orchids in the tree canopy of south-eastern Réunion Island, in order to determine whether this environment constitutes a particular mycorrhizal niche. These mycorrhizal associations are among the most specific in the plant kingdom. How do some epiphytic orchids arise and live in the Mare Longue forest? Can these associations be the source of new fictions (producers of the real), and in this way change our way of acting and inter-acting ? Can they inspire a specific aesthetic on the one hand and help us to think about our conditions as contemporary humans on the other ?

Intention: To photograph this place with the desire to feel it fully, while knowing that from it we will touch other places, both terrestrial and human.

Navigating the contemporary debate on the Vibrational Theory of Olfaction (VTO) as a quantum mechanism, there is a rising hope it can lead us to an understanding of the biological world more as ‘energy interchanging in charged playgrounds’ and less as related to molecules’ shape-dependent trades. This can teleport our understanding of the biological as ‘moist’ to the biological as ‘molist’ – crossing scales in complementary moves from the molecules-atoms-bits’ realm of moistmedia to the charged ‘scale free’ panpsychist realm of molmedia. As the third move in a series of works that starts as invitations to explore humans’ body molecular informational exchanges with the microbial, the paper presents and discusses the genesis of the installation ’Inhaling Quantum-Consciousness’ in a direct dialogue with Hélio Oitica’s appropriation of Russian Suprematism aesthetics and structural principia, expanding the use of the pure pigment to an experiment in biochemical art.

This paper describes the content capture, design and implementation of the Media Portrait of the Liberties project. It focuses primarily on the results of a subjective user study conducted to gauge reactions to this novel media format. We close this paper by discussing the results of this study, and speculating on future directions for this work.

This project aims to create interactive media to convey the real time zoo park by combing technologies for retrieving information on the Internet. This project is an ongoing project conducted in a small zoo park called Inokashira Zoo Park in Japan. In this Inokashira Zoo Park, the budget to maintain this park is limited. Therefore they have problems to promote the presence and to extend the service in the zoo. Based on these problems we collaborate on research activities for creating of a new media art stimulating this zoo’s regeneration and platform that it generates new services.

As the first project we realized zoo park media on the web named Inokashira Player (http://being.inokashira-zoo.jp/). Today, information retrieving technologies such as a RSS format are growing as a new framework between human and information on the Internet. This visualizing tool creates real time zoo consisted of the only information on the Internet. This information architecture is generated automatically by using the weather news source, visitors blog articles and each animal information (Google Images) on the Internet. The most important point is to focus on the unique keyword of “Inokashira Zoo” for acquiring real information from the Internet. So this Inokashira Player enables the link between physical space and information on the Internet. Users can enjoy the virtual zoo visualized this information. Inohashira Park Zoo, on the other hand, uses this visualizing application everyday for managing animals’ conditions and improving the services.

As conventional ways the zoo park had provided event information to people unilaterally. This project realized the sustainable media to create an effective circulation to improve the presence by emerging the real from the information on the virtual space.

Project URL: http://being.inokashira-zoo.jp/

The contemporary visions and constructions of the world based on virtual imagery and their relationships with reality are a complex media web structure where the transitional model from old media to new media is not sufficient to explain the interactions between technological structures, creative behaviors and images as processes of remediation. The concept of remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin is presented within a context of a digital medium that “wants to erase itself.” What Bolter and Grusin do not mention is the overlaying processes and hybridizations between media that create new languages and sublanguages, both textual and visual, generating new recontextualizations.

Bolter and Grusin identify the causes of remediation in a need for immediacy in the media/public engagement. But their brand of immediacy appears to be of a different nature from that to which Pier Paolo Pasolini refers. For Bolter and Grusin it is the immediacy of the artificial construct in creating an immediate and spontaneous style,2 for Pasolini it is the immediacy of a direct perception with the poetical and mythological realism of human existence.

Either as a process of exploitation, as described by Pasolini, or as a quest to create and achieve a sense of liveliness, as envisaged by Bolter and Grusin, the contemporary transmedia engagements between old and new media are characterized by processes of commixture, hybridization, borrowing and appropriation.

Transmedia and Recontextualizations
Bolter and Grusin look at the concept of repurposing as an elemental part of the media borrowing of remediation and subsume the complex processes of content transfer and recontextualization (cultural, historical and aesthetic) under the concept of remediation, abandoning or relegating to a minor contribution the characteristics of new and old media’s specifi c languages. Pasolini explained that there is an existence in the object of a mythological absolute and that the inability to recognize the mythological absolute generates a loss of meaning. “Has lost all meaning for you… …like a discarded memory…”. The loss of meaning, according to Jean Baudrillard, is caused by the remediation processes of digital media that function as generators of void.

A device permits the generation, in MAX/FTS on a single ISPW-16 card, of up to thirty-two voices of granular synthesis distributed in octophonic space. All parameters and their variables are accessible in real-time via a MIDI control console. The thirty-two voices can be triggered individually and/or synchronized in order to create rhythmic and spatial structures. A graphic or gestural (data glove) module provides the ability to generate sound morphologies that evolve between several groups of parameters.

Intro

Avant de d’ecrire le fonctionnement de l’instrument de synthese granulaire, nous definirons les objectifs generaux que nous crayons necessaires a la realisation d’outils d’aide a la composition adapte aux besoins des compositeurs de musique electroacoustique et acousmatique. Nous insisterons notamment sur l’importance a accorder au fonctionnement en temps reel, car les possibilites de commande gestuelle qui en decoulent permettent d’envisager differemment la generation de morphologies sonores. Nous proposerons egalement un certain nombre de methodes qui facilitent la generation de families morphologiques coherentes, en donnant une plus grande coherence & l’evolution des differents parametres de l’instrument de synthese.

Alors que de nombreuses techniques de synthese et de transformation sonore ont atteint un stade de maturite nous voulons focaliser notre attention sur le developpement de methodes de commande plus intuitives et mieux adaptees aux besoins des compositeurs de musique acousmatique. Pour cela, il faut prendre en compte trois facteurs clefs: la conception de l’interface graphique, le fonctionnement en temps reel et l’acces gestuel aux valeurs des parametres. Car la combinaison de ces points permet une approche de type instrumentale des outils de synthese, de transformation et de projection du son.

Recherche financée en Belgique par la Région Wallonne

There is consensus among the cyber-researchers in saying that digital technologies will introduce changes that range from the installment of new models of representation and the organization of knowledge to our own transformation or cognitive expansion. An interesting example of how is the argument elaborated by Alan Kay. In the text “The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet”, Kay formulates a series of questions about the introduction of the written printing press interfaces which, we all agree, had considerably transformed our oral society.

Kay’s questions are:
When did the written printing press revolution really take place? Was it in the middle of the 15th century when Gutenberg produced his Bible of 42 lines and demonstrated 20 copies – that looked like a handwritten book – at the book fair in Nuremberg? Or was it in the 16th century, when Martin Luther and William Tyndale translated the Bible into English and German, beginning the Reformation? (For those of you who don’t remember Tyndale was strangled and then burned for this effort). Or was it during the 17th century, when new styles of argumentation and ways of thinking began to be written and read?

The focus of this paper is the codes of human-machine interaction as a way to lay down the qualities of this emerging ecology while recognizing the importance of human accountability and situatedness. Consecutively, the implications of such a coupling for human and machine sensoria is taken into account to envisage the qualities of a distributive sensorium that this regenerative agency can put forth while alluding to practices of situated computing.

Emotion AIThe main aim of the artistic project described hereby is to create an intelligent audiovisual installation  exploring the combination of technologies such as biomedical signals and machine learning techniques used in affective computing (also known as Emotion Artificial Intelligence), in order to create an intelligent environment capable of recognising the emotional state of visitors and react empathetically. Furthermore, such environment is hereby conceived as a prototype of possible future homes, where the space itself is able to recognise the emotional current condition of its inhabitants and produce an empathetic reaction. In a first stage, visitors are not only audio-and visually confronted with their own current emotional state, but also are invited to raise awareness about the possibility of future home technologies and their implications. Consequently, this fact does not limit participation of common visitors, but also and specially invites scientists, artists, philosophers and producers and consumers of global digital technologies to a fundamental discussion about how our future homes may be and how new technologies inside them may or may not be beneficial to everyone’s well-being.

While the branches seek sky and light, the hidden entangled roots consume. What are the consequences of surfing the web for the next news headline, a nice pair of new shoes, or pornography? Can we spoil the real environment by exploring virtual ones like that in World of Warcraft? This exhibition will both directly address these sorts of questions about the environmental and ecological consequences of internet consumption, and also explore this relationship through an immersive, yet nontraditional mix of virtual and physical reality of the tangled tree of pleasure-seeking and environmental destruction that we have made for ourselves in the internet. This immersive exhibit will use a virtual representation of a Banyan tree to explore these issues.

An immersive installation and Virtual Reality artwork focussed on post-reproductive diseases and pain over 40’s women experience: endometriosis, fibroids, polyps, Ovarian and other cysts, cervical, ovarian, uterine and endometrial cancers. The sensory and emotional experience moving from the outside in within a real dome space into VR space, with a 3D audio soundscape of the voices and stories of real women recounting their experiences, making it an intimate, emotional and possibly haunting experience, with accompanying wearable haptic garment providing a visceral vibration responsive experience on the lower abdomen, where the various diseases occur.

In this presentation, InterAccess’s Programming Coordinator, Megan MacLaurin, will introduce InterAccess, delving into its rich history, outlining its vital role in Canada’s media arts community, and highlighting the organization’s annual programs. In particular, this presentation will fore-ground InterAccess’s programming that engages sentience—including the organization’s support of generative art practices, machine learning, and bio art.

The ‘i =’ series of installations and performances were intended to explore the notion of ‘interactivity’ and what constitutes ‘art’ in the current technological age. Central to the work is a focus on human/human and human/computer communication by a subversion of surveillance and control.

This presentation by Tessa Elliott and Jonathan Jones-Morris raises pertinent questions about interactive art. Is it merely created to placate the desires of the consumer age “I choose therefore I am”? What happens when you remove choice and deny selection? How can an environment be improvisational? Why redefine space and make it resound with visual and acoustic traces of physical presence? Some answers are offered by extracts from the “i=” series of interactive installations and performances (Camerawork, Sadler’s Wells 1995), created in collaboration with dancer Rebecca Skelton and composer Andrew Deakin.

The animation of large crowds is very appealing for interactive digital art because it offers a realistic representation of a public space through its social and affective life. We present an architecture for a sprite-based rendering of a crowd of silhouettes and its external control through behavior scripts. This architecture is illustrated on an installation of Benjamin Lee Martin called Humanography that depicts a collection of humans in their every-day environment performing easy-to-identify activities. Humanography is an interactive art installation that shows a world where everything has become transparent, everything but humans. We humans are the only visual markers in an invisible world, our world, earth.

Humans are accomplishing routines related to ordinary life such as walk, sit, run, work on a computer, or dance. If an animation is interrupted to be followed on by another one, an intermediary animation is triggered to allow for smooth transitions. A global parameterization of the installation is possible according to external events such as human control, measures of the ambient data, or remote data transmitted through the network. These parameters control how long humans stay in a loop in average, they control the distribution of humans on their activities, the speed of the loops, and the distribution of male and female avatars.

Humanography raises issues in digital art that are related to the complexity of animating a large number of virtual avatars with a high frame rate and soft animations. These issues concern rendering, animation, and control.

Keywords: Interactive Art, Nam June Paik, Random Access, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage

Random Access (1963) is one of the earliest interactive art pieces, which incorporates an electronic interface in art. Compared to Paik’s fame in video art, his originality in interactive art was hardly examined in the history of new media art. This paper explores Random Access as a pioneering project in interactive art. Paik was educated in West Germany from 1956 to 1963. Based on his academia in the center of music, Paik published several music articles for Korean and Japanese readers as a foreign correspondent. According to his articles about progressive music in Europe, Paik was inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer and John Cage when he started to create his own interactive project. His specific articles about these experimental composers reveal that Random Access shows a long-time development of a diligent academic artist. As a history of interactive art, this study traces Paik’s unprecedented creation, which made a significant transition from music to interactive art.

How do we resolve the paradox of computer supported interactive drama – that the human participant requires the very freedom to interact that the authored narrative structure denies them? This paper reports work around the concept of Emergent Narrative – the development of narrative structure through interaction itself. We cover both systems using a virtual world and those using a virtually augmented real world, exploring how far reworking narrative structure as a loop between the causal (plot) and affective (character) can produce engaging experiences for participants. We discuss the key role of a cognitive-affective architecture for characters and the process of cognitive appraisal as an engine for both in-character and in-role dramatic action.

This paper will discuss a symbolic grammar that allows the specification and creation of three-dimensional forms. The language of the grammar provides for control over shape, form, colour and texture overtime. The goal is to create Artificial Life environments where the logical production and interaction of the symbols within the grammar can be visualised via three-dimensional computer graphics. The practical results of this process will be illustrated with examples from a recent interactive videodisc installation, Turbulence, which was created using the language described in this paper. The work explores the use of algorithmic methods to abstract the structural elements, function and processes of natural life into rule-based systems that can be created and manipulated wholly within the data space of the computer. Like natural evolution, the interactive genetic evolution paradigm allows the user to evolve models based on aesthetic (as opposed to natural) selection.

Genetic evolution of models involves starting with a base form and mutating that form randomly. Several different mutations of the base forms are shown to the user, who picks the forms that most appeal from the ones presented. That form then becomes the parent of the next generation of mutated children and thus the process is repeated. This technique is applied repeatedly until a suitable form is reached or the user runs out of patience. The process allows individuals to evolve their own artificial forms according to personal aesthetic selection. The only criteria that determines the final shape and behaviour of the evolved entity is the choices of the user and the random mutations created by the machine. It will be argued that this is a powerful technique for the creation of complex models that would be difficult or impossible to implement by direct methods. In much the same way that life on earth has evolved its complexity and function through progressive selection, these techniques allow us to visualise ‘life-as-it-could-be’, via personal aesthetic evolution.

What happens when a theorist /radio producer and a visual artist journey into the terrain of computer interactives? This is the story I want to tell in this paper, by beaming you up and I morphing you over, by navigating you through some of these journeys with me. And, as we go, we’ll map the ground for a criticism of computer imagery and techniques in both popular games and in those interactives which lie at the crossroads of art, science, and education practices and paradigms. Along the way we’ll be venturing into the broader territory of tv and film computer graphics in order to excavate cultural meanings underlying the dominant aesthetics in these images and interactives and to ask what they do for their producers and users.

My interest in these cultural terrains lies at the intersection of a theoretical project on computer
culture and a practical project of working with a visual artist on an informational computer interactive. My theoretical project concerns how computer aesthetics and techniques express and (re)produce subjectivity, in postmodem culture – how they texture the ways that technology operates as “fundamental constraint in the production of subjectivity”. The transition to this culture, in the postmechnical, information age, is characterized by a sort of cultural crisis and accompanying identity crisis or crisis in “identity” and identities. This crisis is experienced and produced at the subjective level, through everyday aesthetic experiences, representational practices, and techniques and accompanying changes in perception and practices. My political concern is in the ground this opens up for different versions and subversions of computer culture, particularly across a spectrum of gender, age, ethnic and racial diversity.

“The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed among different substances-as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be canied by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend fable, tale, novella. epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting..stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation”. _Roland Barthes

Narrative permeates every aspects of our lives: all societies and cultures and individuals generate and live by the stories they tell themselves. In the personal sphere we are constantly converting the past into an ordered edit of the significant..or trivial, in other words: memories. While these may be recalled in an associative or seemingly random manner, they are tied to a structure implicit in the history of the individual. Once in the social domain, linearity seems to become an essential part of communication. The problem is that the addition of Interactivity places an intolerable contradiction on what is understood as traditional narrative. It implies that the reader/spectator be transformed into a true authorial role as shaper of events, weaver of stories, a possessor of agency:
“Interactivity replaces the concept of the passive viewer by the active participant….An interactive cinema needs to offer a fundamental range of choices lo the user. This cannot be confined to a few alternative linear routes, endings or character view-points in an otherwise linear narrative structure”. _Malcolm LeGrice
For the artist the struggle for appropriate form is never an easy one:
“Most people imagine there’s a spectrum between conventional written stories on one side and total interactivity on the other. But what I believe is that what you really have are two safe havens separated by a pit of Hell“._Walt Freitag

Poster Statement

Abstract

Strategies for developing intelligent scripting, visualization and implementation of narrative based work at undergraduate and post graduate research level at the faculty of Art, Media and Design at the University of West of England, Bristol. Illustrated through a selection of diverse student work.

Intro

In the brief time that interactive narrative has existed as a part of digital media, it has continuously been transformed and reinvented both in form and in through the audience’s increasingly sophisticated understanding of interface conventions. In this its development resembles the early days of cinema As we move from the equivalents of ‘tableaux vivant’ to the appearance of the first D.W Griffiths or Eisenstein, the need for authorial understanding of the medium becomes the more pressing. Even defining its quintessential differences from
other forms of narrative is not an easy task.

This research introduces a toolkit for creating interactive ob- jects as a strategy to observe and discuss their construction and experience as scientific, artistic, and social subjects. Interac- tive technology as toolkit is presented to be senseware (Hara, 2009), following three specific trajectories in depth: the de- sign and programming of interactive objects; the understand- ing of rich interaction; and the role of the design objects and their concurrent (scientific) models into the lived-in world. A multi-viewpoint theoretical approach investigates the concept and use of toolkits based on interdisciplinary research, replac- ing single viewpoint categorization. This is coupled with the concept of thickening (Geertz, 1973), as the research seeks to define a liquid form of understanding capable of approaching the complexity of artifacts that cross media and discourses, illustrated with an exemplary case study of Skweezee, a squeeze interaction toolkit.

The formation of limestone or petroleum from biological deposits has long been understood, but the extensive relationship between the biological and geological is just beginning to be sketched out. The recent discovery that, in the US, humanity has become the dominant geological force is significant. Our combined activities alter more of the earth’s crust than weathering, erosion and the activity of rivers. Having been ejected from the Garden of Eden for the development of consciousness we have always seen ourselves as a part from it. The categories of ‘the Natural and ‘the Artificial’ are ancient and fundamental to the cultures within which I and many of you exist. The intricate assembly of a beaver’s dam and lodge are understood to be of nature whereas the autobahn and Brazilia are clearly not. Yet, if we suspend the egocentrism for a moment, we can see that these are differences in degree rather than of kind. All the products of human activity are ‘natural’ ones.

There is no artificial. Machines are part of the ecosystem.

The development of computation machinery in the last half of the twentieth century is one of the primary developments during this period. Shrinking from room-size constructions to
handheld devices – they are posed to disappear into the woodwork. This migration fundamentally changes the nature of the environments that we inhabit. There is an erosion of inertness by the injection of intelligence. We must begin to consider the role we are to play within the context of intelligent environments. This work is concerned with issues in technology where the inability to control is at the heart of the matter. The project exhibits behaviors that are determined jointly by the internal logic of the software, the participation of the viewer(s), and by environmental circumstances. The work does not relinquish control to either the public, the environment, or the software, but sets up a condition where the confluence of the three results in a particular behavior. It uses rather simple technologies to explore issues that are raised by the larger contemporary technical environment in which we find ourselves.

Terms such as ‘interactivity’, ‘virtual reality’, and ‘cyberspace’ are among the biggest buzzwords of technological progress, media and media-art. This paper challenges certain claims made in relation to the subject of ‘interactivity’ in media-art, and especially of the tenor and choice of words such formulations often invoke. The predominant view holds that by programming a computer and connecting it to an interface that can receive and translate special movements in its surrounding into information that can be understood by the computer – which subsequently performs certain parts of its program according to the functions triggered by the spectator’s movements – we are presented with a liberating ‘interactive’ work.

Cybernetic ‘communication’ between the technical installation and its user is said to be achieved. The emphasis here is on ‘the technical installation’ and ‘the spectator’, not on ‘the programmer’ of the installation and its ‘user’. In my opinion there are two reasons for this particular slant. The first is not difficult: the technical deficiencies of interactivity are suppressed by the computer industry, which of course needs to sell its products and therefore build up sophisticated superstructures and PR campaigns which can advertise the products capabilities.

The concept of connecting information from various repositories of information has been around for quite a while, yet most online new media art archives exist independently without direct connections to each other. Programmers working on the ISEA, SIGGRAPH and FILE online archives have been collaboratively developing a system to link information about the people and art events documented in their respective archives to each other. This initiative will extend to include the Archive of Digital Art and Ars Electronica archives, as well as other archives, once the prototype is completed. This panel will discuss the challenging process of developing interfaces, building APIs, and working with wikidata as well as the process of analyzing, sanitizing, authenticating and modifying databases containing information about people and new media art events.

Abstract (Intro)

In this paper I will argue that, within the scenario of the ever more pervasive use of computers, the aesthetics of user experience and the relational paradigm experimented within interactive arts enable new categories of human-computer interaction to be imagined and investigated and fresh and creative new approaches to design to come up. A non-substantial development of human-computer interaction gives to the design of interactive systems the scope, depth and complexity demanded by a society that will become more and more involved with information technology and network connections.

Envisioning inter-connectivity

In a world of inhabitable and wearable computing, made of wireless connections, smart and transparent interfaces and molecular technologies, inter-connectivity will bring us towards a reality composed of multiple and connected space/time, materials and entities. Whereas other technologies will change our body (our genetic, physical and perceptual being), the technology of inter-connectivity will change the way in which we experience a new ‘natural’ environment, the human social world, and the self. Inter-connectivity, modifying our relational mode of being, will change the way in which we inactively produce our world and our consciousness. This paragraph addresses inter-connectivity in the light of the scenarios for networked applications enabled by pervasive computing, “environments created when computing power and networked connectivity are embedded in virtually every device humans use”.

According to David Messerschmitt, networked computing can be summarized in the following three trends:

1.  mobility (computing anywhere)
2.  ubiquity (computing everywhere)
3.  embedding (computing within)

Keywords: Learning, Academia, Transdisciplinary, “Hybrid” Laboratories, Collaboration, Creation, Innovation, Knowledge

This article describes a transdisciplinary and educational experience at the San Francisco de Quito University in Quito, Ecuador. I was a member of the faculty and a researcher from 2014 to 2016. I was also a visiting artist at the Microbiology Institute of the University. As a researcher, my projects require of an intense collaboration with other scientists and the close relationships I developed with many of them allowed me to create a new subject, which was taught for the first time in Ecuador. The subject was called “Transdisciplinary Research Lab”. This new course, which was 18 weeks long and was carried out during the second semester of the 2015-2016 academic year, was available to all students, regardless of their level or career.

On this paper, I will explain the work done during this experimental course and the conclusions obtained from it. I am also looking to highlight the importance of implementing transdisciplinary education as an enhancer of the creation of new knowledge, not only in the academic sphere, but in cultural and research centers too. Setting up new “hybrid” labs for experimentation, that work as a venue for two “opposite” fields like arts and science, enables the creation of bolder, contemporary, innovative and creative proposals which would better connected to the social demands of the XXI century.

This paper will look at two visions of human-machine symbiosis. The first is Nicholas Negroponte’s dream of today’s computer interface evolving into a personalized digital environment (a sense-surround “butler”). The second is Greg Lynn’s introduction into the architectural design process of a multidimensional vectorial space that actively responds to input. The question will be whether the one-way transfer of properties is adequate to either of these symbiotic visions. Some ideas on a model of two-way transfer, or mutual becoming, are developed from the contrast between Negroponte’s data-based anthropomorphism and Lynn’s eventful autonomization of the digital.

Intro

Early in the next millennium your left and right cuff links or earrings may communicate with each other by low-orbiting satellites and have more power than your PC. Have you ever wondered what your earrings would say to each other if they could have a confidential conversation? I have to confess I hadn’t. One of the endearing things about Nicholas Negroponte, who conjured up this image, is that he hasn’t either. What fascinates him, in ‘Being Digital’, is the possibility of the connection. Why bother with gossipy cuff links? Because they would connect. The titillation is less in the gadget itself, or in the goal of the gadgeting, than in the joy of connection. Negroponte is animated by a connection fetish that is refreshing in its lack of moralizing about what we should do in the future. Negroponte’s Media Lab is so busy manufacturing for us. For Negroponte, it is never really a question of goals or utility. ‘Being Digital’ is all about interface, for  interface’s sake. Why? Because the future, as Negroponte sees it, is information overload. The human body will be flooded with an impossible richness of information, to a degree far beyond the ability of its perceptual apparatus and nervous system to receive and sort. Delivery on demand is already passing before it has become a reality. In Negroponte’s future, information will be delivered in parallel, at all times, rather serially and on demand: ‘anything, anytime, anywhere”. All the world will be rolled up in data, its now digitized mass threatening to suffocate the unprotected body, swamped by a downpour of pure availability. The role of the interface is to filter the bombardment. “Personalization” is the watchword. The filtering interface Negroponte evokes would simulate human-to-human contact as much as possible, favoring voice command and integrating recognition capability for non-verbal cues. Each human body would surround itself in a custom-tailored double, a machine bubble composed of an intelligent network of “digital butlers” attuned to all the particularities of its “master’s” moods and movements. I will program myself into my “butlers.” The “butlers” will act for me. They will be my delegates in the infosphere. They will brave the chaotic waters of availability to search, sort, select, and process for me. They will be intelligent, self-adapting, “learning and developing over time”.

Digital Interactive media require metaphor based, organizational models by which to conceptually situate the viewer and to provide a way of accessing and understanding data. By knowing “the story” or metaphor; the viewer can successfully navigate inside the interactive program. As a result, these metaphor environments promise to be the key site for innovative developments of a linguistic, symbolic, aesthetic, sensory and conceptual nature, redefining the interactive viewer’s experience within the digital environment. This presentation will discuss the relevance and conceptualization of interface metaphors with examples of the artists’ recent works.

The mechanized sound of an old movie projector is triggered by the flickering motion of an early 1950’s black and white movie. A smiling woman turns her head towards the camera through a shower of film scratches. A man walks into the frame and they kiss. To the right of this scene a color panel comes alive with a fast moving camera pan of a graffiti covered wall and stairs, the movement accentuated by the sound of heavy traffic noises. The camera stops when it reaches the site of the kissing scene recorded some fifty years earlier. With the click of the mouse, the screen changes to an architectural floor plan animated by the sound of footsteps of
what we imagine to be archivists silently moving around. An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War is an interactive artwork on CD-ROM designed as a museum exhibition display. The Archive features early 1950’s Central European personal and official Communist material in the form of home movies, objects, family documents, Socialist propaganda, money, sound recordings, news reports, books, identity cards, photographs of public documents and video footage of Central European places and events. These have been part of my collection of objects and narratives related to the Cold War, gathered during the past twenty years. The items, grouped into some sixty topics, were organized thematically in eight rooms superimposed on the original floor plan of the former Workers’ Movement (Propaganda) museum in Budapest, the original contents of which have been in permanent storage since the end of Communism in 1990.

“Double Skin/Double Mind” (DS|DM) is an awareness preparation workshop for professional dancers, developed by the Amsterdam based dance company Emio Greco | PC since 1996.

The Interactive Installation is a virtual version of the workshop. The installation offers participants the possibility to take part in a virtual version of the workshop in real time, while receiving verbal, physical and peripheral information. The design consists of an aluminum frame construction with one projection screen, 3 peripheral monitors, four sound speakers and a tracking camera with Infra Red projectors- surrounding the participant. The movement – tracking program “Gesture Follower” (GF) developed by Frédéric Bevilacqua (IRCAM), compares the data of the filmed version of the workshop with the real time data of the participant’s movements. As result of this comparison, different forms of feedback are given: sonification, visualization and music will accompany the participant while mentally and physically traveling through the Double Skin/Double Mind structure.

Video piece that reflects on human dualism: our physical presence in the world that can be observed in our visible attitude and our internal sphere that reminds undercover for a simple viewer. [source: Vimeo]
See also: “Mavi: Movement Aesthetic Visualization Tool and its Use for Dance Video Making and Prototyping” by Ewelina Bakala, Philippe Pasquier & Yaying Zhang.

The main topic of my paper is the impact the virtual environment and the Internet have had on comics during the past 10 or so years. The aim is to show an aspect of how does a recently emerged medium relate to an already existing art form.

This article stems from ethnographic fieldwork I carried out in 2019 on the virtual platforms where vaporwave is developed. Vaporwave is a countercultural phenomenon between a musical genre and a meme developed entirely on the Internet since 2010. In this text I show how copyright laws and technologies operating in the context of vaporwave’s creation traverse and affect its creative forms and processes. Based on this case study of Internet vernacular creativity, I encourage an approach to digital countercultural or folkloric movements by putting into dialogue their symbolic dimension and the sociological, technological and legal bases on which they develop.

Keywords: Codesign, workshop, scripts, constraints, agency, Actor-Network Theory
The article reports on a participatory workshop in which, we were faced with two different types of resistance. We employ the notion of scripts to describe how this resistance emerged. On the one hand, we explain how a weak script caused distrust of the workshop rationale, while on the other, we explain how a strong script rendered the technological materials of the workshop useless and led to termination of the activity. We suggest that structuring workshops according to the notion of scripts may prove a useful way of exercising and learning from resistance and expanding our territory of exploration.

Revisions to our understanding of the Scientific Revolution in the history of science over the last several years, have prompted greater interest in subjects related to transcendental philosophy, colonial spaces, teratology and religious corporations such as the Jesuits. The Society of Jesus, since the time of its inception, exhibited a strong vocation for the accumulation of knowledge. A vast corpus of works written by Jesuits suggests their curricular diversity: theology, historiography, natural philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. In their schools, intellectual activity was heightened by newfound knowledge of cosmography and nature coming from the overseas missions. This information on remote regions and their inhabitants prompted the creation of a vast number of books on natural history.

“The present is not inherited from the past. It is borrowed from the future”.  –Chief Seattle, Sioux Indian

Buckminster Fuller gifted us the metaphor of thinking of the Earth as a space ship, and our attitude as “pilots” learning to drive correctly this enormous ship through space. The way I see things: if we behave like aliens, we are doomed to push the wrong buttons. Let me try to explain, briefly, a general portrait of the present of Latin America and how do I think there is a path to borrow from the future, to do this reflection, it is important the revision of the exact terms and definitions of a place hat is different in time. This is in order to have a clear conversation.

I have chosen the quote of Chief Seattle in a very strategic way to be the start of this essay. A character that belongs to the Americas, but that does not belong to the term Latin America, even though he belongs to the original tribes of this continent. We fail to learn the virtues of Mestizaje, the attitude of incorporating, mixing and being able to see everyone. There is a need of tribal wisdom in a contemporary attitude that takes us out of a reality of fragmentation.

Introduction
Technology has always been developed into perfecting the image and this may be seen as our beliefs and wills for understanding the world through its appearance. Technologies have always been present throughout the art history due to their intrinsic connection with image production, therefore we will reflect to what extent digital technology interferes with contemporary artistic procedures. The work is a combinatory addition of mobile probabilities, where the spectator is placed and transformed, allowing a mutation of attitudes, creating a complex and paradoxical situation, because nobody wants to state a model (in the sense of a truth), but an opening path for the physical and intellectual experience of art.

Framework of the problem
The focus of this paper is the result of the intersection between technology and interactivity, which drives us to perceive the development of the idea of shared production. The work, on being revealed in the aspiration of interactivity enounces a positioning that is linked to the technological means, on space and proceedings issues. Art is indeed a product of the human freedom, not seen as a need of the instinct face to the intention, but a primordial freedom, without direct intention as an orientation, where one finds out the causes and tries to foresee the consequences.

Our interest is to trace the intersections of community action, media and embodied experience that contribute to creating a sense of place and media democratization. A perfomative and interactive situation that mediates these intersections is referred to as situated media. The concept of situated media is focused on the interactive media events that are contextualized within a cultural and local knowledge, crafts and traditions reflecting a variety of approaches in new media, such as media performance, activism, and culturally reflective computing. Drawing on examples of interactive media art that promotes local knowledge through conversations and dialogue among its participants we point to the necessity for the development and integration of culturally reflective processes for technology design.

Earth is a planet where most processes are based on water. Water regulates climate, morphologically influence a landscape, is a medium of living processes. It is a medium of interaction of organism and mineral parts in microscopic view, between whole organisms and minerals in macroscale on the Earth, and endless interplanetary space. Water topic (more than ‘parasitically’ utilization of water resources), in the ArtSci project is focusing to its communicative possibilities. Water body figuration is related to possibility mediate interspecies communication to better understanding water-based life on the planet. Water is an essence and principle of form, which is actualized in the water body figuration. According to principle of ‘structural coupling’ patterned cognition and communication of each communicative actor is related to their environment. If water is essence of inner and outer environment of actors of communication and water body figures, their fluid principle, relates to their agency, then relates to the concept of agential cut, and in differentiation could appearing the meaning which would be presented by the ArtSci work.

Poster Statement

Summary:

This article examines the use of the telephone as a medium for artistic practice; from its early development to a case for alternative application. The theme of democratic communication is introduced as It relates to the potential audience for telephone art. The proliferation of telephone technology and use of voice mail systems are Identified as infrastructure that is already In place. The listener is challenged to participate in an exciting, intimate, yet public exchange. Included in this article are descriptions of some of the telephone based installations by Ian Pollock/Janet Silk.

Abstract

Pick Up The Phone. Visionaries with ringing in their ears take the higher calling. Heidegger took the call. Bell took the call. The flame dances inside the machine. The flame is controlled by the vibration of the voice interpreted by a membrane separating the two worlds: the world of the speaker and the world of the listener. The telephone communicates between two worlds, the world of fiction and the world of reality. Take the Call We are artists using the telephone as a medium for transmitting our work. The telephone, different from radio, is unique in its structural intimacy, the impact of the work is heightened by the physical relationship of the phone to the listener’s head. What’s your number? The phone is an ideal tool to locate issues in our society concerned with the mythologizing of technology and the pervasive narrative of Science. Our installation, Museum of the Future specifically targets these issues by relaying narratives about fantasies of the future in the past and the present via a voice mail system. Another telephone installation, Area Code utilizes the public phone as a transmitter of local histories, engaging the listener with perceptions of the site over time and contemporary social issues that are traced across time in an ongoing political discourse. For Local 411, we will be using the phone as a transmission device to call out into the newly opened Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for theArts. We will be delivering stories about the residents who were forced to give up their homes for the expansion of these cultural institutions. I’m cutting down to 10 calls a day. A very transparent medium, the telephone is often overlooked as a technological device. Its use is pervasive, telephonic art implies a world-wide audience. In the early development of the telephone, there was much discussion about its impact on existing social structures. Laws and social etiquette were questioned and eroded as the phone became a means to contact anyone at all times across class, race and gender boundaries. Our voicemail installations engage with a broad audience, encourage feedback and integrate response into the piece itself, or allow for a listener critique. Look at me, I’m talking to you. The first phone to transmit pictures as well as sound was demonstrated in 1927, AT&T spent over $500 million on development of a “Picturephone,” but sold only a few hundred devices. Ultimately, the Picturephone failed. No one really wanted to see the person they were talking to. I have another call coming in, can you hold please? Rigidly coded concepts of what is appropriate phone use predetermine its ability to exist as a medium for art practice. In the early years these lines were less defined. Throughout its short history, there are many interesting examples of using the phone as a transmitter of cultural and entertainment programs. An open-ended channel of communication – a line whose limits are only the result of the fears of the society it exists in – telephonic technology, like other technologies, reveals that the initial intention which fueled its development was greater than its final form of expression. We hope to remind people of this paradox. Contrary to the dominance of visual culture, the telephone is a refuge for an intimate exchange between artist and audience. Close to your ear, the artists are confessing their desire to connect with you. You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service, if you feel that you have reached this recording in error, please hang up and try your call again.

In this artist talk, I address the themes of Animality and The Ecosophic World through a live performance inside a virtual environment. In it, I lead the audience into a contemplative experience that explores interspecies communication.

In this investigation of sentience, I wrestle with the paradoxical experience of knowing an “other” (in this case a duck) intimately, both through immersive representational forms and through observation, touch, and taste. Through a combination of mediated experiences on screens and through direct encounters, I have been learning to feel with the mallard.

My novice ability in local animal and plant recognition is the result of repeated outings with official and unofficial experts, close revision of photo and video documentation, GPS and plant identification apps, and field guides. Careful identification has been crucial in this process because cooking and eating has been another way to know these others. My own scopophilia has been part of a wider multimodal engagement with the environment that includes other senses, such as taste.

This digital storytelling experience suggests that training the senses, through careful observation and habituation, can develop a critical sentience that is crucial in this era of climate catastrophe.

Abstract

Short Paper

Summary:
In this paper I will describe formal descriptions as a material for interactive and nonlinear artistic expression. The relation between formal structures and traditional means of expression in 4 Danish experimental works are outlined to give concrete examples.

Keywords: non-linearity, interactivity, formal descriptions, artistic expression.

Black box: any unit that forms part of an electronic circuit and that has its function, but not its components specified                                                                                                                    _Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English language.

Abstract

Digital media confront the author and artist with a new material for artistic expression. In principle every single sample in the soundtrack or pixel in the image are generated or manipulated after certain rules and descriptions expressed in a programming language, which can happen automatically or through interactive response from the reader/viewer. This calls for a theoretical framework to describe the new means of expression that are unique to the computer medium, not only to create theoretical insight, but also to enable artists and authors to understand and use the potential and nature of the complex, undermining and chaotic conditions ruling in interactive and nonlinear digital media. The point of departure is the thesis, that formal descriptions of the used representational material is an integrated part of the fiction or artwork if it includes interactive and non-linear effects. These descriptions can be very different in nature, spanning from mathematical descriptions of 3D shapes and figures to formal rules concerning the dialogue between two characters in a narrative. Books, films and paintings normally speak for themselves, whilst descriptions of their content and nature are made by their audiences, critics and academics. The artistic genius is often described as the person working mainly from intuition and talent combined with technical skills and analytical distance to the work. I stress the point that in interactive fiction or artwork an explicit description has a far more important role, since the description is defining the non-linear and interactive effects actualized on the computer. The construction of complex algorithms and data is a task in itself. Brenda Laurel has shown us, that in theory it is possible to create formal descriptions, that will generate an interactive first person experience of the diegetic universe in Starship Enterprise. My point is thus, that interactive art and fiction is only possible to judge when its actualized. In the process of visualizing such a project a whole new range of problems will occur; what montage techniques will work, how are the actors instructed, how is the dialogue and storyline written etc., meaning that the description and the actual audio-visual manifestation are interdependent and unique for each work. The people writing or directing the formal descriptions must therefore also possess artistic talent in a traditional sense – in this case writing and directing a sci-fi series. I have two main reasons for focusing on specific genres and techniques already established within art and fiction. Firstly because our basic understanding of narratives and artwork in audio-visual media derives from a culturally embedded praxis, and secondly because computer mediated fiction and art hasn’t yet reached a stage in both quality and content that is comparable to f. ex. video art, film, animation or comics. The outlined points will be illustrated by 4 Danish experimental works; a nonlinear computer generated collage “the Cliche Generator”, a non-linear video-montage generating drama-improvisation “the Improviser”, an interactive impressionist fiction “Lailah”and a sketch for an interactive comic “Sim-Existence”. This is followed by examples of how descriptions of cinematographic techniques used in German expressionism, Eisenstein’s films and the Hollywood film can be exploited as a point of departure for the development of new montage forms, that work in interactive and non-linear fiction. In the descriptions the theoretical framework is based on Metz, Barthes, Eco and Bordwell. The conclusion is that the artist or author as part of the creative process can enter the black box through a formal description involving both content and expression of the material they master. This is a necessary step in creating art and fiction that manifest an aesthetics and a poetic unique to interactive and non-linear works.

Intro
Much research and cultural production in the last ten years have focused on ideas of mobility, liquidity and movement brought about by a new geopolitical model based on the deterritorialized and all comprising networks of Empire, by the erosion of previously stable nation state borders, by migration flows and by seemingly ubiquitous (new) media technologies. A parallel rhetoric on the power of technologies in levelling inequalities and creating social change has led to the fetishization of the idea of movement and technology in the creation of new forms of power and belonging.

At Dualkollektiv departing from ideas of networks, mobility and deterritorialization, we started asking questions about borders, their materialization and dematerialization, their reconceptualization within the city in the form of enclaves and flows. What happens, for instance if we look at the distribution of infrastructures on the territory? Does access to technologies translate in active use of these technologies? Who owns the service providers and what is their relation to mainstream and non mainstream digital media? Can we still make such a distinction? Are we really a ‘city of villages’, according to one of the City of Sydney branding tags, that suddenly, thanks to digital technologies becomes part of a global neighborhood? Which meanings are given to the city through media arts? Which stories are told with the aid of digital technologies?

We started imagining what would happen if we layered three different imaginary maps over the city of Sydney. The first one maps the city that takes into account its affective borders: those borders determined by social and cultural practices that fragment the urban fabric in enclaves sometimes criss-crossed by flows and sometimes not. The second one is a map of infrastructures: the distribution of diverse kinds of internet networks and the institutions (such as galleries, museums, theatres, universities and arts organizations) active in the promotion, education, production, distribution and audience development of media arts. The third one maps the borders of media arts.

Let’s start with the last imaginary map. In 2006, the Australia Council for the Arts, the Australian Federal Government’s funding and advisory agency, commissioned a new media scoping study. The report redefined new media as simply media, stressing how artists used a combination of ‘existing, new and emergent technologies’. The report also highlighted the lack of infrastructure, both at the production and at the distribution and consumption level, which brings us to our second map.

The spectre of the ‘digital divide’, clearly a border in itself, surfaces in the report in relation to those artists located within ‘communities’ — those artists who are either Indigenous or of a non English speaking background. Media arts, according to this discourse, have a particular ‘enabling’ potential. Functioning as a tool of distributed agency and participatory practices in the most disadvantaged sectors, media arts is seen as making better citizens. If it wasn’t for the ‘digital divide’.

inTouch is a set of dresses that consists of a mother’s dress and a child’s dress sharing touch information through garments in an ambient way. They share touch information around the child dress and visualize it on the mother’s dress using thermochromic paint. This was developed to explore how remote touches can convey emotion and help people maintain being connected between remote locations. in inTouch, the artist focuses on creating an affective/shared moment that any parentchild relationships should have via an ambient visual effect on the garment. This project was created based on the artist’s personal experience with her child. When her son was one year old, he stayed with his grandparents in Korea apart from the artist. “Even though I was able to see him everyday via Skype and watch videos of him recorded by my parents over and over, I struggled emotionally very much because I wasn’t able to feel him.

I felt I was missing many important moments of my son’s life at that time. I wanted to him and wanted to be touched by him. Since he wasn’t able to communicate verbally at that time, a physical touch was a very important communication between us. Apparently, I often hugged a cushion that my son used to play with and I even smelled it. That really helped me to feel the presence of him in my place.”

As an artist, she wanted to capture that moment as a tangible artwork exploring the concept of remote touch. The child dress has five touch sensitive spots that look like flowers. When they are triggered by human touch, the green pattern of the flower changes its color to yellow and the touch signal is sent to the mother’s garment. The flower on the mother’s dress mapped to the sensor on the child’s dress changes its color from dark pink to lighter pink. This creates not an immediate alert rather an ambient experience. The final outcome and the process of inTouch really helped the artist to get immersed in the parent-child relationship and get overcome the emotional challenge. It is known that touch is immediate in that it carries emotional meaning in ways that words cannot express.

In inTouch, a parent can increase the vividness of her conversation with a child through contextualized touch, and the loved ones may enhance the affective tone of their communication using a remote touch technology. inTouch garments have been created using soft circuit techniques. All the electronic components for sensing human touches and actuating color-changing garment were integrated on the main fabrics. Even though the design of the dresses has a certain style, the concept was realized as a tangible form and the technology was implemented to two wearable garments. It can be expanded to different designs (i.e. cushion or toy) and applications to investigate qualities of tactile experience. Wearer-friendly designs are suggested to be worn in the daily life.

Thematic Statement
This project may fit into the main theme “Cultural Revolution”. In inTouch, the mother’s garment and the child’s garment communicate wirelessly via a wifi module and a Lilypad Arduino. The artist explores an embodied communication way of the parent-child relationship. Through the project, a parent can increase the vividness of her conversation with a child through contextualized touch, and the loved ones may enhance the affective tone of their communication using a remote touch technology. “Remote touch” is the ability to produce physical sensations without physical interaction. This concept has been experimented and created by artists and researchers. In inTouch, the artist focuses on creating an affective/shared moment that any parentchild relationships should have via an ambient visual effect on the garment.

PROPOSAL FROM IRCAM

The panel will bring together the four previous speakers and choreographer Francois Raffinot. Through the different perspectives presented by each of the participants, invariants and specificities of the interaction between gesture and sound will be highlighted with respect to the various artistic tendencies. Several questions will be discussed such as:

•  the integration of artistic languages of different natures;
•  the irruption of technology in the core of interaction;
•  the evolution of the creation process due to the presence of interactivity.

Moderators:

• Marie-Helene Serra
• Marcelo Wanderley

Panelist:

• Roland Auzet
• Antonio Camurri
• Van Maresz
• Francois Raffinot

‘Introducing Arc-hive’ is a 10 minute presentation by Antonio Gagliano and Luciana Della Villa that proposes to introduce Arc-hive’s framework, its fundamental objectives and challenges, and to open up the collective research process carried out so far.

Social media facilitate unprecedented levels of sharing but the social relation is produced in restrictive form. As part of the friendly (inter)face of capitalism, restricted social relations are perpetuated through networks of friends (everyone is more a potential friend rather than enemy), such that antagonistic social relations are masked and the political dimension nullified. 🙂 Evoking Carl Schmitt’s notion of enmity (in The Concept of the Political, of 1927), the political differentiation of friend or enemy lies at the heart of this, and offers a definition of ‘the political’. In order to examine the paradoxes of social media, its promises and its shortcomings, what is required is a more detailed examination of the power relations at work, and how they are configured within informational capitalism, and how social relations and control structures are managed. With no longer a centre of power to be found or established opposition as such, it is clear that the (class) enemy is increasingly hard to identify across its networks, and yet power continues to produce its own vulnerabilities, not least in the context of how social media are changing the face of the representational political process. This is partly evident in the apparent success of various campaigns that hope to influence the outcomes of elections and in the rise of services that offer effective participation in the political process.

Our mission is to foster year-round engagement and dialogue within the digital, electronic, computational, and media arts. We facilitate dynamic scholarship and creative programming and promote collaboration between artists and the larger computer graphics and interactive techniques community.

Founded in 1986, Videotage is a leading Hong Kong-based non-profit organization specializing in the promotion, presentation, creation and preservation of new media art across all languages, shapes and forms. Videotage Media Art Collection (VMAC) strives as the identity and body that documents Hong Kong’s extensive media art history. Through Hong Kong’s character of a cultural, geographical and political peninsula that uniquely merges Chinese and Western influences, the collection depicts how the city has been a sensitive witness to a period of art in history. It also displays the development of society as much as that of technology-exploring issues of identity and life in urban, political and cultural environments through a wide array of techniques that mark the transition from analogue to digital artmaking.

No abstract available.

The IntuiTweet project elaborates a dance perspective on Twitter emphasizing corporeal, expressive and aesthetic depth. The act of basing tweets on an intuitive corporeal moment, sending them to a social network, and then re-integrating them into our bodies only to re-tweet the new movement is an example of relational performative engagement through social media. It is also a form of dance improvisation.

Twitter has been both celebrated as a medium to convey our social zeitgeist and dismissed as a fundamentally superficial and disembodied epiphenomenon of social networking. This project began as an impulse to challenge the latter sentiment and to extract depth, physicality and poetry from a pervasive mode of cultural expression. Poets know the power of using a few carefully selected words, visual artists know the power of an image, or even fragment of an image, and dancers need very little to generate haunting improvisations: a word, sound, or colour is sufficient. The IntuiTweet project began as an attempt to access and share intuitive moments between three dancer-researchers (Keinanen, Kozel and Rouhiainen) and it has expanded both artistically and philosophically. This presentation will provide a glimpse into the current stage of artistic research, briefly describing three modalities of performance and some emerging philosophical thoughts.

Introduction
The integration of wireless media, tracking and mapping technologies and the impact of their use on mediated communication within urban public space is one of the primary concerns of theoretical research on the subject of Locative Media. Locative media are systems of technologically mediated interpersonal and group communication. By introducing context awareness and by supporting multi-user communication, these ICT systems alter the situation within which mediated communication takes place, thus bringing to light new spatial contexts and affording new types of experiences where social interaction may occur and novel forms of cultural practices may emerge.

The potential for supporting real social interactions among mobile individuals along with the unique “hybrid” spatial character of the experience afforded by the use of these ICT systems challenge the traditional ways in which we perceive and interact with the “physical” inhabited world. Mobile, wearable, devices could nowadays be networked, internet enabled and location aware. As a result, mobile users holding these devices could be easily positioned and their surrounding, concrete environmental elements in the physical world can be tagged as well as mapped onto appropriately designed environmental representations. By affording location detection of each user, multi-user locative media systems may allow groups of such users to interact with each other, while being aware of each other’s location at all times, thus triggering social experiences and a range of “latent” geospatial activities, in an existential, inhabited, “lived” physical space.

Locative media and the hybridisation of urban space
To city dwellers, the urban context is not merely a geographical term. Depending on a dweller’s preferences, experience, and daily routines, parts of urban space will be perceived as socially significant, as people attach meaning to them and appropriate them. Attribution of meaning, appropriation, and regular occupation of spaces may lead to their transformation to places. The concepts of space and place are not identical. Space refers to the spatial arrangement of elements which establishes an environment, whereas place has more social connotations and is not exclusively confined to the material world. Regular occupation and appropriation of a space are essential for the transformation of spaces to places. In addition to the social significance attributed to spaces in this fashion, locative media superimpose a layer of digital information over the urban landscape. Thus, physical space is enhanced, and at the same time the layer of digital information is mapped onto it. The result is an effective combination of the digital layer’s fluidity and the durability and permanence of real space.

In their attempt to find a proper definition of the term Art2.0, the two artists Kasia Molga and Sander Veenhof came to the realization that much of all presumed Art2.0 is hardly any different than what could be labeled as Art1.0. In search for the factors that truly differentiate between art which is basically a reflection on web2.0 technologies and artworks intrinsically structured according to contemporary 2.0 principles, Molga and Veenhof concluded that there is yet another radical shift taking place on the axis of artist and audience dynamics. We live in an era in which users/viewers have become responsible for their own experience by contributing to and customizing the content and that the distinction between artist and audience seems to disappear. The audience has changed from consumers to co-producers. In some remarkable cases of mass worldwide cooperative creativity, the resulting outputs could very well be defined as Art 2.0 according to the criteria specified by Molga and Veenhof, while an artist as an initiator or author could even be absent. That doesn’t mean that the concept of ‘artist’ is fully out of the equation. Artists are resettling at a higher level of abstraction in a new role, not asking their audiences only to contribute to an artwork but giving the entire control over the artwork away. Either by publishing the artwork as a creative tool, or by releasing the artwork as a reusable module to be integrated into a larger framework by means of an API specification of inputs and outputs, in analogy to how the world wide web is currently structured as a mash-up universe.

The investigation of these developments has been carried out through a study of the phenomena uncovered as being Art2.0 and several iconic “2.0” artworks, and by reflecting on a selection of works from their own artistic practice, in which Molga and Veenhof share a similar approach and interest on giving viewers the power of co-creation in various experimental forms, aware of the impact of their projects on their own position as artists in a 2.0 art world.

My research-creation on invisible animals explores what is invisible in the visual realm in order to explore immanence, power, and non-visual knowledge. Utilizing digital technologies, I create media artworks that I think about as being transformational objects, objects that can shift us into new ways of perceiving. The leap of perception through these media art experiences changes our understanding of the world, challenging notions of the utility of animals and the function of technology. My work offers an ethics of care as liberation from instrumental rationalism.

“sign n: something that indicates or expresses the existence of something else not immediately apparent”  _Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. 2005

INVISIBLE SIGNS attempts to reflect the prevalence of the sign within society whilst additionally raising questions as to their use, function, interpretation and meaning as part of our everyday experience.

Focus here relates to the physical and metaphysical support for such mechanisms / devices and the impact that these have viscally when this is removed.

The prevalence of the sign in contemporary society is unprecedented, whether this be information signage, such as a notice that instructs, advises, informs, warns or commercial signage which is designed to cause recognition, familiarity and affiliation with the viewer.

In this respect signs, signage and other way finding systems act as a symbolic language which have become an integral part of our global mediated environment.

Indeed the unconscious way in which we receive, digest and understand these insignia has become second nature, resulting in the signs themselves rendered essentially ‘invisible’ to us within our daily landscape, everyday experience and in our actual mediation of these.

Utilising a set catalogue of realistic motifs that co-exist within our environment ‘Invisible Signs’ attempts to provide a platform whereby the viewing and perception of the traditionally mundane, ordinary, given, and the known are imbued with an sense of the existential.

Via the subtle distortion of our perceptions and experience of these everyday emblems one begins to experience a visual juxtaposition of ideas and cultural elements that serve to act as a parallel to that of contemporary society.

Emphasis here is placed upon the field and use of photography in order to reflect upon the ubiquitous nature of the physical sign within society, whilst particular interest relates to the way in which we receive, digest and understand these transmitters of meaning within a public arena.

Panel: Emotion Studies in a Contemporary Art Debate

As part of my cre­ative re­search, I have been in­ves­ti­gat­ing emo­tional in­ter­faces, tac­tile meth­ods tra­di­tion­ally as­so­ci­ated with women’ work and the in­ter­sec­tion of the so­cial ex­pe­ri­ence and tech­nol­ogy. Gar­ments in­te­grate elec­tron­ics seam­lessly into the so­cial ex­per­i­ment and cre­ate a cor­po­real com­put­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. I am cur­rently an MFA stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Den­ver in the Elec­tronic Media Arts and De­sign pro­gram. I have cre­ated an Instructables.?com tu­to­r­ial on how to con­struct an emoti­con jacket with LCD screen. The focus of the jacket, in­traIn­ter so­cialite, is to cre­ate sub­texts for in­ter­per­sonal human in­ter­ac­tion.

The user uses a lim­ited “key­board” with force sen­sors and but­tons under soft sil­i­cone keys to cre­ate com­puter tex­tual sub­ti­tles to human in­ter­ac­tion (tex­tual emoti­cons, i.e. :P). My in­ves­ti­ga­tion with wear­able com­put­ing, par­tic­u­larly with this pro­ject, is an in­quiry into the loss of in­to­na­tion and body lan­guage that oc­curs at the in­ter­sec­tion of com­put­ers and tex­tual com­mu­ni­ca­tion is ev­i­dent in today’s cul­ture.  In this ap­pli­ca­tion, the ef­fort we put into re­plac­ing the nu­ances of per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion with punc­tu­a­tion and tex­tual cues in the vir­tual realm helps sub­ti­tle and en­hance (or con­fuse) the con­ver­sa­tion and in­ter­ac­tion that oc­curs in the phys­i­cal realm. It cre­ates a range of im­plied emo­tion from the wearer. This also in­tro­duces an im­pre­cise con­trol over the emoti­con dis­played and the per­cep­tion of the emoti­con in the con­text of the in­ter­ac­tion. The user has the abil­ity to change the ex­pe­ri­ence of the con­ver- sa­tion when they at­tempt to con­trol the level of emoti­con dis­played. They have the choice to dis­play re­ac­tions that they may or may not choose to por­tray phys­i­cally. This changes who has ac­cess to this form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Tex­tual punc­tu­a­tion be­comes its own graph­i­cally and in­ter­na­tion­ally in­ter­preted lan­guage.

Panel Statement
The in­tro­duc­tion of phys­i­cal lo­ca­tion as a cri­te­rion for de­ter­min­ing ac­cess to dig­i­tal con­tent, in loca­tive media ex­pe­ri­ences, has re­sulted in a strong cor­re­la­tion be­tween the phys­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment and dig­i­tal in­for­ma­tion. The en­vi­ron­men­tal ex­pe­ri­ence is aug­mented by mul­ti­ple lay­ers of in­for­ma­tion mapped onto the phys­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment, thus af­ford­ing hy­brid me­di­ated spa­tial ex­pe­ri­ences, con­sist­ing of both phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal en­vi­ron­men­tal el­e­ments, which func­tion as the con­text for new kinds of col­lab­o­ra­tive ac­tiv­i­ties and so­cial in­ter­ac­tion. This pre­sen­ta­tion will focus on the con­cept of hy­brid space and more specif­i­cally on the spa­tial ex­pe­ri­ence af­forded to users of loca­tive media. Firstly, hy­brid spa­tial ex­pe­ri­ences will be in­ves­ti­gated from the per­spec­tives of new media and com­mu­ni­ca­tion the­o­ries. Sec­ondly, a se­ries of dif­fer­ent con­cep­tions re­gard­ing the hy­brid na­ture of such spa­tial ex­pe­ri­ences will be dis­cussed, in an at­tempt to iden­tify com­mon ground or cer­tain dif­fer­ences be­tween them. Fi­nally, for the pur­pose of dis­cussing the issue of hy­brid space, the pre­sen­ta­tion will refer to re­sults of a re­search study, em­ploy­ing a multi-user loca­tive media sys­tem, which fo­cused on the user’s spa­tial ex­pe­ri­ence and at­tempted to in­ves­ti­gate its na­ture and char­ac­ter­is­tics by using quan­ti­ta­tive as well as qual­i­ta­tive meth­ods.

Our technologies are becoming evermore ubiquitous and universal. Technology now composes our lives. At the same time, in a sense we become more separated from these technologies due to a lack of understanding of the hardware and software of which they are made. This paper introduces these ideas of the black boxing of technology through the lens of science and technology studies along with media archaeology. These ideas form the conceptual framework behind iPhotograms, a series of cyanotype photograms examining the black box of an iPhone 5. In this project, a modern camera, the iPhone, was disassembled, dissected, and documented using one of the oldest photographic processes.

In recent years the Internet has often been associated with the notions of progress, improved quality of life and greater democracy. Nonetheless, research shows that – with rare exceptions – only the apex of the social pyramid in each community is connected to the Internet, totaling a paltry 7% of the population of our planet. “Unless we ensure proper capillary penetration and are creative in introducing alternative forms of universal access, we shall be helping perpetuate inequality and violating the essential right to communicate” (Afonso, 1999). At the Electronic Arts Unit, at PUC-Rio University, we run a series of research projects on social issues: our project “Internet, illiteracy and social exclusion” focuses on the emerging actors inside, at the fringe or outside the Net society. The projects’ site shows how 120 people living in different social-economic circumstances in Rio de Janeiro perceive and understand the Internet, how it affects their lives, and its implications for their future. It also encourages users to send their opinions, images and ideas so that they become part of the site’s data bank, in a very dynamic and intriguing way. In this paper, we present and discuss the results of this project, and the advent of what we call the “net-social-diversity”.

Abstract
Since 1988, the annual and bi-annual ISEA Symposia have fostered the exchange of information within the electronic art field. This international, multi-disciplinary gathering of practitioners and researchers in the arts, sciences and technology community present their work at the conference, exhibitions, performances and/or workshops. The ISEA Symposium Online Archive is an initiative that aims to bring together the papers, abstracts, proceedings, videos, artworks and other materials that have been presented throughout the history of ISEA. It provides an important resource for researchers and historians and also an historical record for many of those who have presented at ISEA over the years.

ISEA Background
The series of symposia known as the International Symposium on Electronic Art was initiated in 1988 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in order to support the founding and maintenance of an international network of organisations and individuals active in the field of the electronic arts. This network took the shape of an association, founded in 1990, called the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts. In 2008 the association was replaced by a foundation, called ISEA International. Historically the symposia were held as both a biennial and annual events. Since 2009, the symposium was held annually. The ISEA community has always drawn from an international audience, thus the symposia are hosted in different countries each year.

Symposium Materials
Each year a wealth of scholarly research, artistic artifacts and documentation of performative events are generated and presented at the ISEA Symposium. These artifacts take the form of academic papers, abstracts, artist statements, artworks, videos and animations, documentation of performances and photographs of events. The materials are often, but not always, published in printed or online symposium proceedings and/or exhibition catalogue. They are also collected by the authors and artists and members of the ISEA community and become part of their personal archives or online postings. Since 1988, Wim van der Plas, one of the two co-founders of ISEA, has been collecting and archiving ISEA artifacts. Having attended every symposium (except one when he was in the hospital), he also holds institutional knowledge not often available via the publications. ISEA “Headquarters” also holds a collection of printed proceedings and other artifacts.

ISEA Archive History
The Symposium Archives project was initially assisted by the Mondriaan Foundation and the VSB fund in the Netherlands. Archive material was gathered by intern students under the co-ordination of Nadia Palliser. Programming of the original site was undertaken by Michiel van der Haagen from de Balie, Amsterdam. The first version of the online archive was launched at ISEA2008 in Singapore. In 2013, the original archive was terminated and a new version with an easy to navigate interface was developed by Bonnie Mitchell.

The current online archive project is managed by Wim van der Plas and Bonnie Mitchell. Wim van der Plas has added over 8000 pages of content so far. As of April 2016, all symposium overviews, abstracts, and artist statements from 1988 to present have been added. Most proceedings and catalogues are also now available. The next stage of the process is to add the academic papers then tackle the difficult process of adding images or videos of the artworks and performances. Finally we will create an index of artists and presenters with robust search capabilities. Technical upgrades and design modifications also occur regularly in an attempt to constantly improve this resource for the community.

Conclusion
ISEA community members are welcome to contribute materials as well as proof-read their submission information to help us improve the quality and accuracy of the ISEA International Symposium Archives.

Eldon Yellowhorn — Blackfoot blogs and the charm of languages

Social media offer novel strategies for preserving endangered languages. The emergence of YouTube offers one platform to couple videography with the oral tradition to preserve features of the spoken word such as accent and cadence. Blogs and apps hold potential for sharing stories in aboriginal languages, but the critical mass required to keep a language vibrant often exceeds the number of native speakers. Therefore best the strategy may be to start sharing aboriginal languages with members of the general public to create the critical mass needed and to inject them with new energy. Starting the conversation will be difficult since there are purists who prefer a community centred approach despite the dwindling number of speakers. I will examine the status of this project and make the case for expanding the Blackfoot language beyond its cultural boundaries.

Jo Tito — Inspire-Raise

i visión es – Inspirar-Elevar, curar a través de la naturaleza y la creatividad. Soy un ARTISTA. Siempre he sido un artista desde el día en que nací, aunque no siempre lo he sabido. No fue hasta que dejé la escuela, cuando estaba libre de los límites y las limitaciones del sistema educativo que descubrí el artista en mí. Mi arte es una extensión de mí. Se extiende a todas las áreas de mi vida. Tengo una pasión por la vida, el amor y el cuidado de la tierra. Todo lo que creo tiene una razón – a veces esa razón es sólo para honrar la creatividad dentro de mí.

José Luis Romero & Emanuel Tepal — Comunidad, arte, ciencia y tecnología: Reflexiones sobre la producción y práctica artística

Se pretende delinear cierta relación sobre la acción social-comunitaria, el empleo del arte, como su respectiva producción (creación), en sinergia con la tecnología y la ciencia, para proponer una posible resignificación de la memoria e identidad cultural de determinada comunidad, en este caso, de una comunidad nahua (Cuauhtotoatla –San Pablo del Monte, Tlaxcala, México-), como determinadas formas de producción y práctica artísticas, que posibiliten dar con ciertas estéticas de algunos elementos propios-comunitarios. Estéticas que puedan ayudar, en segundo momento, a reforzar la reflexión de la situación colectiva concreta. Retomamos el altepetl (lit. Cerro con agua en su interior) como pueblo, comunidad e inclusive barrio, en tanto espacio socio-artístico de colectividad. De esta forma, el altepetl deviene en un espacio donde la interacción-relación y participación social, como las respectivas experiencias-saberes subjetivas y colectivas florecen en la rememoración y reapropiación del territorio comunal, con relación a la producción y práctica artística desde/con la comunidad misma. Así, de tal espacio socio-artístico pueden resultar tanto procesos de resignificación y reapropiación colectiva como creaciones artísticas que manifiestan una estética singular del espacio sociocultural; en este caso, dichas creaciones están ancladas en el arte de los nuevos medios y su relación con diferentes saberes, lo cual puede pensarse, también, como un arte con enfoque transdisciplinar.

Paola Lamprea Cardona — Gueê: a tribute to the Tikuna woman

Cine foro sobre la Película Documental “Gueê”, con Paola Lamprea Cardona la Directora. Conversatorio sobre el contenido de la película Gueê, un Documental etnográfico que retrata la vida de seis mujeres indígenas Tikuna, de la selva Amazónica. Gueê : Película Documental Etnográfico

Nina Czegledy — Introduction “The value of knowledge transfer in Aya Yala Abya Yala”

Hernando Hernández Tapasco — Educación propia para la paz

Oscar Salazar Gómez & Luís Nuivita Mamatacán — Book presentation Jakká- Ninudlamama

ISEA International is an international non – profit organisation that fosters interdisciplinary discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organisations and individuals working with art and emergent technology. As we approach our 25th Symposium anniversary at ISEA2019, Gwangju, Republic of Korea. It is now time for the ISEA Foundation to reflect on our future strategies to maintain and support ISEA into a sustainable long term future and to remain relevant to emergent digital artists.

Founded in the Netherlands in 1990, ISEA International is an international non-profit organisation fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organisations and individuals working with art, science and technology. The main activity of ISEA International is the continuation of the annual International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA).

Founded in the Netherlands in 1990, ISEA International is an international non-profit organisation fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organisations and individuals working with art, science and technology. The main activity of ISEA International is the continuation of the annual International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA).

Keywords: ISEA, international, art, science, technology, interdisciplinary, organisation, symposium, nomadic, electronic art, innovative

Founded in the Netherlands in 1990, ISEA International is an international non-profit organisation fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organisations and individuals working with art, science and technology. The main activity of ISEA International is the continuation of the annual International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA).

This institutional presentation focuses on the ISEA Archives team’s efforts in creating its online repositories to preserve the records of the ISEA Symposium series, a nomadic international cultural exchange experience over the last four decades: archiving the contributors and their works, including the documentation of the papers, artistic creations, presentations, exhibitions, performances, concerts, workshops, cultural events, and the symposium organisation itself. Moreover, the international volunteer team working on it has created one of the world’s largest archives of new media art documentation and theory. Over the last few years, the ISEA Archives have actively initiated worldwide connections among stakeholders in the new media art archiving community.

This institutional presentation focuses on how the ISEA Archive team was able to develop a comprehensive, robust archive of thousands of ISEA items, despite minimal funding and support. The archives were created and are still being developed by a large number of volunteers, students, interns and grant-funded assistants. Over the past few years, a huge amount of information has been added to the archives along with images and PDFs of the papers, publications and other artefacts. There have also been significant improvements in the functionality through the efforts of our volunteer programmers. This massive endeavor has been spearheaded by the four co-directors who are also volunteers. These invaluable archives are used by researchers, artists, educators, students, and the general public. It would not be possible without the dedicated efforts of all the volunteers and contributors involved.

The ISEA Symposium Archives have undergone significant changes in the past 8 years but in 2021, the project reached a milestone. All the information had been moved from the Classic archive to the New archive, therefore the focus transitioned from data input and basic development to finding missing information, fixing errors, developing structural consistency, cleansing the data, adding videos and developing features that would enable us to connect to other archives.  Although the ISEA archives are far from complete, this shift of focus has broadened our vision and enabled us to enhance the usefulness of this valuable resource.

This presentation focuses on the ISEA Archives team’s efforts in improving its online repositories to preserve the records of the ISEA Symposium series, a nomadic international cultural exchange experience over the last four decades: archiving the contributors and their works, including the documentation and videos of the paper presentations, artistic creations, presentations, exhibitions, performances, concerts, workshops, general events, and the symposium organisation itself.

Brief presentations by international and regional academics on the Location theme, followed by participatory discussions.

In the context of the ISEA2014 Education Forum the Location theme indicates a site of pedagogical variance including cultural similarities/differences, and diverse socio-political issues. Global education systems are presently under a considerable amount of pressure. One of the key questions for students worldwide is how to get a good education? For policy makers: how do you increase institutional access, but at the same time how do you meet the quality standards that society requires, and that the labor market demands? The last decade has seen an exceptional interest and rapid growth in higher education in the Middle East. Several countries have invested in developing new or invited education institutions from the U.S., Canada and Europe to establish local campuses with the conviction that these institutions will provide high standards of education. A similar interest in higher education on other continents contributed to the rapid growth of private institutions. How should we define the process called the internationalization of higher education ubiquitous presently around the world? Previous experience shows that imported knowledge, techniques, and institutions can be adopted and re-developed on site. Nevertheless these issues require cautious interpretation and forecasting on the geo and socio-political level.

The Education Forum brings together academics, researchers, students and conference participants to discuss the main topic, which is frequently debated by educators, experts, policy makers as well as students- with varying success. The Education Forum is co-organized mainly as a participatory discussion to be scheduled within the time frame of the ISEA 2014 conference schedule.

The aim of the ISEA2023 Education Forum is to explore and present dual degree programs promoting interdisciplinary synergies and conceivable symbiotic correlations between available programs in art & science & tech studies around the globe. Today the emerging generation from all cultural backgrounds opts for a preferred mode of activity and interaction that is frequently not in synchronization with traditional educational systems. What are the strategies and tactics to perform an appropriate transfer of shared knowledge towards the future? What are the existing opportunities to achieve an intercultural and intergenerational cooperation?

Communication between art & science education delegates addressing symbiotic activities for the emerging generation remains essential. The Forum opens discussions on the impact of global and local paradigm shifts and blurred boundaries in this digital age, and how these exchanges may affect the transmission of knowledge across generations.

An important dimension of dual degrees is their use of integrating ongoing studies between programs, between faculties, between universities and between countries even continents.

This panel will explore historical and contemporary engagements of Art that address our relationships with food and the systems that relate to these. In a wide sprawling discourse that intersects augmentation and ecological aesthetics with Art+Science practice, this panel will present a discussion around the plethora of artist’s work that creates cross-bindings and transdisciplinary approaches between the different topics of post-agriculture, post-growth and molecular cooking. The discussion aims to create new thoughts on food systems through artistic research that addresses topics of scale and scope in the Post-Anthropocenic era, micro to macro sub-connectivities in ecological systems, post-nature ideologies, microbial and fungal remedies and molecular transitions in human and non-human bodily encounters.

Abstract

More important than what you can make with electronic media is what you can do with what you make. Electronic media is not just a random collection of tools for making pictures but a system of interlocking artistic, technological and commercial interests that are coming together into new cultural and social formations. It has now become impossible for cultural institutions to ignore the pressure being applied by previously marginalized groups and formations as they exert their new found economic influence made partly possible by the commercial traffic in technological media. In turn, the potential appears for spaces to be created where a wide range of cultural interests can develop, gain confidence and begin to operate. It is becoming increasingly difficult to position new media practices within the cultural spaces of galleries, publications, conferences or popular entertainments with so many different interests at work. As new producers emerge their greatest challenge is the formation of new audiences and support structures. How the forces of cultural hegemony react to these new players will be crucial in defining what is possible and where far more than their technical facilitation. As aesthetic standards are disrupted there are many instances where new forms of legitimation are emerging, leading to the prospect of certain technologies and practices being declared ‘artistic’ at the expense of others.

ITCH is “an unpleasant sensation that causes the desire or reflex to scratch”.

This project is a broad artistic exploration of new phenomena originated by mobile communication/computing technologies. It consists of a series of experimental works, research activities, and workshops to investigate the media devices most closely connected to human bodies and its surroundings, and ultimately find new forms of individual expression with them. In contemporary urban life, people continue to grow increasingly consumer oriented, forcing our bodies to deal with media screens that provide commercially and politically stimulated contents while individual subjects disappear along with personal style. Individuality is critical in recreating everyday life within the otherwise closed world of continuously recycled and redundant mass-media imagery. Smartphones, for instance, took the already omnipresent TV/computer screens [Bourriaud, 1998] into the individual place.

From Virilio’s pessimistic takes on the effects of technology in our society [Virilo, 2006] to the utopian techno-fascination [Maes & Mistry, 2009], passing through humorous and/or scientific observations about the “social sacrifices and opportunities to interact with one another lost due to our own self-involvements” with always-available media/communication, we must find the spaces for transgressive uses of these technologies. It is within technology’s greater risks for control and isolation where the greater potential for transgression and liberation exists [Galloway, 2004].

In the late 1990’s a new performance practice appeared in the more experimental venues of the musical world, where performers would step onto stage with a rather strange musical instrument, the laptop. These performance contexts, in pubs and clubs, were primarily designed for pop or rock bands. Instead of locating themselves behind the mixer, where the best sound is normally to be heard, they placed their equipment on the stage, typically on a table, and presented some rather refreshing and novel musical worlds. Whilst the audience appreciated the texturally sophisticated world of sound these instruments were capable of, the performance aspect of the music suffered. What were these musicians actually doing behind these screens on the stage?

A decade later some solutions had evolved, addressing this lack of coupling between the performer’s gestures and the sound emitted by the speakers. One of them is VJing. By analyzing the sound signal – typically through Fast Fourier Transform Analysis or even OSC messages sent from the sound generating software – the VJ is able to generate visuals that connect and represent the sound in endless interesting, yet arbitrary, ways. Another solution is represented by a field often called NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression), with university courses and conferences dedicated to the investigation (see www.nime.org). Here various interfaces have been designed that allow the performer to use her body, in a manner inspired by acoustic instruments, to control a digital sound engine. The third response to the problem of the exclusiveness of computer music performance is live coding.

ABSTRACT

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel consists of a video camera attached to a motorized camera mount, a video monitor and a number of objects arranged in a semi-circle around the camera. The motor rotates the camera similar to an airport surveillance camera. As the camera pans around the room, the motor pauses it as it points at each object. The objects are recorded on video tape along with audio tones which start and stop the motor. On play-back the camera pans around the room, stopping at each object as it did when the objects were recorded. To the viewer, it appears that the camera is “looking” at each object and displaying them on the video monitor. However, the camera is no longer on. The video monitor is showing pre-recorded images. The objects have all changed over time. Flowers which were fresh when the video was recorded now lie wilted on the floor; the monitor shows a block of ice in a pan, on the floor there is now a pan of water, etc. A position sensor attached to the motor sends information to an Apple II computer which changes this information to audio tones which are recorded on the video tape along with the video picture. On play-back the audio tones are sent back to the computer, and converted back to position information. The computer compares the position that was originally recorded, with the current position and can speed up the motor that the camera is mounted on, to synchronize the past to the present movement.

As part of the 28th edition of ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art), the one consecrated to the theme of “symbiosis”, Franck Ancel with the collaboration of Federico Biggio (Paris 8/Paragraphe) organizes a conference on Jacques Polieri’s (1928-2011) research and realizations, with the aim of studying contaminations and hybridizations (i.e., symbiosis) between experimental scenographies and other scientific fields.

The year 2023 is not chosen at random, as it also marks the 20th anniversary of the first conference on “Scenography and Technology” as well as the 40th anniversary of Jacques Polieri’s historic “man-machine interface” video conference in New York, Tokyo and Cannes in 1983.

Since the Jacques Polieri retrospective, the meaningful scenography, as Polieri announced, has conquered the whole of creation at the speed of technological change. For Polieri, scenography is not only a scenic attribute, but a complex system of different linguistic elements that the director must orchestrate in the spaces, as s/he would do with the living bodies of the actors. This system is elaborated by the designer through the tools of different epistemological fields – scenography, semiology, performing arts, media art. Four of Jacques Polieri’s fundamental works, questioning these disciplines, will logically give the titles of the four sessions on Monday, May 15th, on the eve of the ISEA 2023 week in Paris.

In the first place, Polieri’s research on scenography raises questions about its aesthetic specificity as well as the semantic significance of the space of the performance. The architecture of the stage and theater space, their hybridization with the plastic arts, electrical engineering and lighting find a solid and coherent systematization in Polieri’s theoretical work. They constantly invite us to rethink what scenography is, as well as its functions, which is anything but incidental, as can be deduced from the numerous encyclopedic and iconographic definitions of contemporary scenography as they have been set out in Scénographie. Théâtre, cinéma, télévision (1990). Here, scenography is in constant dialogue with the twentieth-century avant-garde. Polieri’s scenography is a continuation of the history of stage machinery from antiquity to the Renaissance, as documented by art history and by the producers themselves. This makes this work an important contribution to the morphological evolution of theatrical and stage spaces.

Secondly, Polieri’s contribution to a formal theory of scenography adopts the methodological tools of semiology, by proceeding to a meticulous analytical deconstruction of the multimodality of the scenic device. The use of structural models allows him to put forward numerous taxonomies and to name different levels of immanence which, until then, had been conceived as an indivisible totality, going so far as to propose intuitions capable of explaining the implicit ideological aspects of language. In order to take his topological research, the adoption of elementary geometric forms to explain the possible interactions and intersections of the syncretic elements that combine to create the effect of symbiosis (sound, image, light, movement, song, dance, mime, play) was fundamental. This opened up a semiography of action, of gestures in a total movement (of actors, audience, stage and theater architecture) which is not, however, a Gesamtkunstwerk.

A third trajectory is that concerning the performing arts: in this field, Polieri’s contribution was not just historical: for example, in Jeu(x) de Communication (1981), he highlights the use of theater in the experimentation of visual media, and cinema in particular, between the 19th and 20th centuries. From proposals for the use of projections as intersemiotic translations between literature, art and performance to archaeological research on lighting and projection techniques, Polieri’s legacy invites questions about the hybridizations between the languages of theater and performance with other media languages (in the proposal of definitions ranging from “pre-cinema” to “post-theatre”), while preserving a specificity of the art of theater up to the electronic arts. We invite researchers to seize these concepts to propose contributions that transfigure the relationship between theater and stage.

Finally, the last trajectory will focus Polieri’s contribution on media art: the particular attention Polieri provided to the emerging visual media leads to the definition of new operational concepts that make it possible to imagine a more immersive and “hyper-topic” restructuring of the scenic space, such as cinematographic scenography and an “electronic image”, which will give rise to architectural proposals, from the “Théâtre mobile” (Paris, 1960) to the “Théâtre du Mouvement Total” (Osaka, 1970), or the concretization of his original intuition of a “kaleidoscopic theater”. Furthermore, the research on stage machinery – that published in Scénographie. Theatre, cinema, television – constitutes a veritable “archaeology of the media”, from the prehistory of cinema to the video art of the 1970s, through a documentary methodology capable of bringing together research on the image (in particular the “projected” image), specific to visual studies, and research on the devices and cultural “periods” of vision.

“Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today”
_The White Queen to Alice, Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll.

Reality jamming implies prior identification of realities to be jammed, and this in turn implies recognition of the framing mechanisms which separate phenomena that otherwise constitute a single experiential flux. Because the ways we aggregate and segregate our experience into categories are diverse and constantly evolving within individual and social contexts, framing which effectively demarcates spheres of activity for a given individual or group may prove totally inoperative for another. This elusiveness of the mechanisms whereby experience is differentiated is what gives “reality jamming” its critical transience.

One historical eruption of what might be construed as reality jamming is Russian avant-garde zaum or “transrational” art from early last century. Malevich, Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh sought to wrench percepts including colour, sound and phonemes from entrenched usage to make them the unbridled bearers of spontaneous meanings, of a fresh and soaring perception of the world. Key to zaum creation is the concept of sdvig – displacement, shift, dislocation – brought about by subverting and disrupting rules, scales, foreseeable logics. The dynamic reality of zaum aesthetics literally makes sense by contrast with existing perceptive orders.

Perhaps reality jamming is inherent to art’s poetic constructs, framed to resist the normative constraints of habitual perception. Perhaps the wrenching of percepts from usual contexts to trigger a new sensibility is as culturally vital as it is fleetingly utopian. This proposal will set in broader historical perspective recent live art experiments which mix and jam realities (e.g. biotechnology works by Symbiotica, performances by Crew, a-life installations by Unemi & Bisig). With such examples, I shall try to identify some of the temporal framing mechanisms which ensure reality jamming and precipitate its demise. This endeavour is invariably haunted by the “never jam today” paradox offered through Carroll’s looking glass where “memory works both ways”.

Japan is known for the wide use of mobile phone. The significance is not just in its wide spread use, but rather in the fact it is a social phenomenon. Mobile phone has become an important part of culture changing the way people communicate to each other. Its application penetrates into all aspects of daily life with all possible services being available, virtually realizing what are considered the goals of wearable and ubiquitous computer society. Another important feature is that the “explosion” of mobile phones took place within a short time in late 1990, led by young generation, initially by young women in particular. Today Japanese “mobile phone culture” or “Ketai Bunka” is often considered a likely model for the coming “mobile society” in other parts of the world, especially by the industry as well as researchers in the field. It will be worth examining the mobile phone culture in Japan from social and cultural aspects in order to identity general and universal elements in the phenomenon and more culture or society related elements in it.This essay is just a first part of the research meant for the goal described above.

How can we apply traditional ways of thinking into our new technology or digital contents? Our institution Digital Hollywood University had a special course in collaboration with Japanesque Modern Council in 2007. The Japanesque Modern Project (SHIN-NIHON-YOSHIKI) has launched as a part of national brand promotion policy by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Japan.

The concept of this project is to encourage designers to make something new to fit to our modern life by integrating traditional craftsmanship, hospitality and aesthetic manner and new technologies. For example, recent innovative products such as humanoid robots or portable game devices are considered to be related to the entertainment technology appeared in Japanese traditional mechanical dolls or small devices. The style of Anime can be traced back to the storytelling in old picture scrolls or theatre arts.

Through a series of lecture given by key persons of contents industries and also academia, we intended to let the young students get familiar to the roots of domestic media and recent hybrid artistic expression. Though most of the students who majored digital contents design have had little experiences to think about the Japanese traditional culture, they seemed to find interests and many hints for their new media creation.

Abstract

Short Paper

My subject is “Japanimation”, i.e animation made in Japan. Using film and video animation, I offer a critique of the situation of globalization as “Japanization”, and the notion of “techno-orientalism”. I focus on particularly on Mamoru Oshi’s works. His most recent film, “Ghost in the Shell”, was screened in many countries and he was interviewed by “Wired” and many other magazines. Three films, “Patlabor 1”, “Patlabor 2” and “Ghost in the Shell” will be used as examples. I will discuss the relation between “Japanimation” (Japanese pop culture) and the Japanese ideology (philosophy, religion and the Emperor system).

Intro: Japan as the Sub-Empire of Signs

The word Japanimation is a neologism that is made by two words, Japan+animation Now, Japanimation is seen in the whole world. And people outside Japan are Interested in the Japanese subculture, including Manga and Japanimation, etc. If people once asked “What is ZEN?‘, then now people ask “What IS Otaku?‘. But I’ m very skeptical about this condition.
This phenomena is absolutely the effect of globalization, information capitalism. Under the Fordist economic system of the past, globalization meant nothing more than “Americanization,” and media and entertainment were supplied by Disney animations. However, we must now consider seriously the fact that the post-Fordist social environment of globalization will include Japanimation and ponder its meaning. In other words, the strategy of this cultural movement is the effect of Sub-imperialism. According to Kuan-Hsing Chen, the sub-empire is a secondary dependent empire which has hegemony much more In culture and economy than in the military system. And this new version of imperialism uses sub-culture in general. By analyzing a Japanimation film I would like to illustrate and criticize Japan as the sub-empire of signs.

Je me souviens, (I remember) is a single-channel video installation created after working for seven months with five Colombian political refugees living in Sherbrooke, a city in southeastern Quebec, Canada. Through multiple image and sound textures, it invites the viewer to have different readings of life in exile. Inspired by the theory of recognition developed by the philosopher Axel Honneth, each participant of the project used a video camera to explore three “spheres of interaction” — love, rights, and solidarity — in their daily lives, while reflecting about their past in Colombia. These video recordings are connected to audio-visual portrayals of Sherbrooke and Colombian cities, through dreamy visions and echoes of a pastpresent mixed reality. Voice-overs of the five characters, together with different soundscapes form the voice of the film. A video-editing algorithm mixes images and sounds in real time, presenting a new version of the piece at each projection. This technique of eternal editing builds up a film without a fixed duration, nor a beginning or an end, speaking of exile as a closed circle, a continuous déjà vu where memories, presents and futures of the main characters are mixed.

The characters
Ana Cecilia, 53 years old
She worked with the Colombian army in the region of Norte de Santader. Infiltrated in guerilla groups for 15 years she was declared a target by the ELN group in 2002. She is the mother of three sons and two daughters.

Juan Ovidio, 49 years old
Juan was a social worker and teacher in Colombia. After participating in a watchdog group regarding the responsibility of the Colombian army in crimes against civilian population, he was menaced by extreme rightwing groups.

Dini, 21 years old
Dini left Colombia with her mother and sister, and together they relocated to Quito, Ecuador. After living there for several years, they moved to Canada as refugees. She is finishing high school and just received her driver’s license.

Cristina, 52 years old
Cristina was a judge in Colombia. During the 1990s, she worked in Antioquia, a region whose capital, Medellin, was considered one of the most dangerous cities in the world. After multiple threats were made against her life, Cristina left for Canada.

Dimas, 23 years old
Dimas’ dad owned the sole garage for cars in La Union Peneya, a small village in the Caqueta region. After his father was assassinated, Dimas was displaced with his mother and two brothers to the cities of Florencia and Neiva.

Jellyeye allows the audience to explore the evolution of our camera-based eyes and the effects of climate change on symbiont behaviour in and artwork about the Barrier Reef environment. Jellyeye is a tribute to Lynn Margulis and her research into a symbiotic theory of evolution (Margulis 1970) and her critical reactions to Neo-Darwinist theories that are based on population genetics. (See Film 2018)

It is an augmented reality artwork based on the idea that all of life is deeply interconnected and collaborative has radical implications for how we look at ourselves, evolution, and the environment. Through this augmented reality platform, the audience can explore the more controversial evolution of chloroplasts in both our photoreceptors that help us to monitor light and in coral blue green algae which perform photosynthesis. According to Margulis and due to chloroplasts evolved from early interactions with cyanobacteria. The audience uses an embedded iPad to follow stories based on two characters and three evolutionary theories: structural evolution, co-evolution, and comparative evolution. How might climate change influence the evolution of species in the Coral Reef in the future? How can we “see” this environment differently?

The Journal for Research Cultures (JRC) is an international peer reviewed Open-Access (OA) journal published by RIAT – Research Institute for Arts and Technology. JRC concentrates on the communication and presentation of strategies of experimental, transdisciplinary and artistic research practices across epistemic cultures. It focuses on strategies rather than outcomes of research activities and extends the philosophy of openness with the intention to be accessible to a broad audience both within the and outside academic framework.

Keywords: Computer-Journalism, Data Visualization, Visuality, Visual Modes, Online Newspaper.

The growing number of visualization devices in the online journalism world draws attention to the mechanisms both technical and symbolic that build the relation between the producer and the user in the interaction with the device. This relation has been studied in different approaches and empirical research; some of them related to the visual studies field. This paper aims to contribute to the study of the visual aspects of this relation through the analysis of the implicit representation of the user that the producer depicts into the device. This symbolic approach tends to find the guidance operation for interaction as a prescriptive model of information consumption focused in the visual representation. This paper propose six-visual modes for this guidance operation as the established models in the current online journalism: (1) visualization of events, (2) visualization of hidden issues, (3) visualization of spaces, (4) visualization of narratives, (5) visualization of the subject involved with data and (6) visualization of convergences. These six modes are defined and their characteristics explicated.

This paper / installation explores a project-in-progress titled Waters of the Past. The project has emerged from residencies in the Faroe Islands, Iceland, New Zealand and Norway in
2016-17. The paper specifically addresses a sub-project which has emerged from the larger body of work – Journey of the Ancients, which is a collaboration between Tracey Benson and Josiah Jordan. The project explores the iconography of the sea and natural environment as a juxtaposition to ancient runic symbols. These symbols represent a culture and language lost as well as a ‘proxy’ for ancestral links to the old country.

Abstract

This paper will discuss JoyceWalks, a participatory locative art project which uses Google Maps to remap routes from James Joyce’s Ulysses to any city in the world. The project is web based using the Google Maps API to remap these  routes from Dublin to any other city and to generate walking maps which are then used as the basis of Situationist inspired psychogeographical dérives.

This paper will argue that JoyceWalks acts as a tool through which participant action can be used to generate critical spatial knowledges of the urban environment. Through a structured mechanism of remapping spatially expressed cultural tropes such as (but not limited to) the Bloomsday celebrations in Dublin, the project questions the spatial commodification of culture as part of what Sharon Zukin calls the symbolic economy of cities (1995) and it’s implied fragmentation of space into zones of culture and zones of what presumably can be described as ‘non-culture’. My proposal is that JoyceWalks offers a mechanism for (re)mappings of cultural space in cities which privileges the social relationships of cultural production over the spatial, and in the process offers an expandable set of procedures for generating Situationist inspired explorations of urban space. I suggest that JoyceWalks produces ephemeral tactical spaces which are actuated by the user/participants and that this form, the ‘tactical toolkit’ as it were, represents an effective method for the interrogation of urban space.

Keywords: Pioneers, Electronic Art Digital Art, Le Parc, GRAV, Movement, Instability, Active Spectator, Participation, Latin America

The present paper examines the work of Julio Le Parc and the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) of the 1960’s. The concepts proposed in their programmatic writings and the integration of these concepts in some of their emblematic artworks are hereby analyzed in detail. Notions that Le Parc and the Groupe introduced, such as those of the ‘activated spectator’, ‘work in movement’, and ‘instability’, could be examined through the lens of technological art they created and also the evolution of that art in later times. These concepts also anticipate some of the features present in contemporary digital art. Especially, the concept of «instability» is examined in more depth with the help of existing parallelisms between ideas and the artworks produced by the GRAV. Additionally, we focus and reflect on the tension between technique and aesthetics, and media and artistic production, in their works which were built with new media of the kind whose starting point could be located in the notions forwarded by none other than Le Parc himself.

Artist Statement

The project Jurong West Street 81 revolves around the architecture and residents of a group of Singapore public Housing Development Board (HDB) blocks. The title of the work makes reference to the address of the HDB flats that are the subject of this video installation. The Singapore landscape has changed dramatically over the past forty years with the rapid development of HDB estates and currently, over eighty percent of the Singapore population live in public housing.

 n.a,

[no title, no abstract available]

Masaki Fujihata is one of the pioneers of new media art, renowned in Japan as well as abroad. His CG work was much celebrated in the 1980s, before his interests shifted to creating 3D sculptures from data using 3D printing, as in his CNC-routed Geometric Love (1987), the stereolithographic Forbidden Fruits (1989), and his small scale sculptures using Micro Machine technology. In the mid-90s, Fujihata produced canonical pieces of what would later be called “interactive art,” including the multimedia installation Beyond Pages (1995-1997) and the exploration of networking technologies Global Interior Project (1995-). His work problematizes everything from how we interact with interfaces to the ways we might communicate in virtual space.

In particular, his experiments with GPS technology beginning in 1992 takes a rather uncommon technical tack in gathering data, making for a meticulously composed and unexampled series of cyber-spacial creations that can only be called “the cinema of the future,” or “the shape of media to come.” His 2003 Field-work@Alsace compiled interviews about international borders. The 2009 musical piece Simultaneous Echoes was created in Northern Ireland. Fujihata’s latest signature piece is the 2012 Voices of Aliveness, created in Nante, France and assembling the shouts of bicyclists in virtual space. Global Interior Project #2 won the 1996 Golden NIKA Award, Voices of Aliveness won an Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in 2013, and Simultaneous Echoes received the 2010 Ministry of Education Award for Fine Arts. Guest professor at Kunst University Linz, Austria.

Art installation involving an interactive drum-playing robot.

When generating music in collaboration with a human, when is it appropriate for a machine to disrupt the flow of the music by introducing new themes or ideas? Kiki is a robotic djembe player under development at Arizona State University that is designed to explore questions such as this.
We are currently developing software that will allow Kiki to analyze, synchronize to, interact with, and learn from a human percussionist. This software will analyze the human’s playing in real-time and generate rhythms that are stylistically appropriate.
Periodically, the learning algorithm will be perturbed, causing the robot to start generating new patterns with no prompting from the human. We would like to demonstrate this system at ISEA. The demonstration would include Kiki and an additional percussion instrument. Visitors could play the percussion instrument, and Kiki would join in and play with them.

This paper is an overview of a Kinect-based RGB detection software developed as part of an ongoing ‘Smart’ (Smart Textiles and Wearable Technology in Pervasive Computing Environments) Costume project. The project involved a multi-disciplinary team in the domains of textile design, engineering and computer science. In this work we aimed to establish initial studies on how the Microsoft Kinect performs in tracking a ‘smart’ costume that has thermochromic elements under different lighting conditions. We explain the computer application capable of detecting, tracking and measuring colour changes (Red, Blue and Green) created using the Microsoft Kinect API.

This demonstration is of an interactive installation called Kinetic Voices, which is comprised of numerous LED lit balls hanging from the ceiling. Each ball has a unique color and a unique sound. Users can interact with the piece by flicking the ball, thereby activating them. The sound produced is that of a recorded female voice in the scale of C minor, with each ball representing a different note. This installation offers people an engaging tangible musical experience.
Kinetic Voices is an interactive sound and light installation, comprised of 16 different colored ping-pong balls (with LEDs) hanging from the ceiling. Each ball is motion sensitive and is triggered when it is ‘flicked’ or ‘bumped’ with other balls. Once a ball is triggered a sound is produced and the LED switches off momentarily. The sound produced is that of a recorded female voice in the scale of C minor, with each ball representing a different note. The vibration sensors and LEDs are controlled via an Arduino UNO. This installation uses 16 vibration sensors as digital inputs and 16 LEDs as digital outputs and in order expand the functionality of the Arduino, a MUX shield (made by Mayhew Labs) is used. A transistor switch circuit is also used to ensure optimal brightness of each LED. Pure Data (PD) is used to produce the sound when a ball is triggered. Serial communication is used to send data from the Arduino to PD. This is used to determine which ball has been triggered so that the appropriate noted in the scale can be played.
The ethos of the project was to create a fun and playful environment as way to increase social interaction. In order to achieve this goal, it was essential for the installation to be simple while being interactive and exciting. Wide ranges of colors were used as way to gain the attention of the observers. The hanging balls also created a sense of wonder and inquisitiveness, which urged the observers to play with the piece. No instructions were provided so it was up to the users to understand and figure out the interaction. This was a deliberate feature as the aim was to observe people rather than intervene or dictate a particular method of interaction. The ball were also hung at random heights, which made the installation seemingly more interesting and aesthetically pleasing. The sounds produced by the installation were also carefully selected to trigger a playful response. This was done by recording Annie Chung’s (a music student at University of Colorado) voice to generate notes in the C minor scale. A reverb filter was added to the sound to create an eerie effect.
To improve on this project further, the installation would be to scaled to include over 100 balls. This will not only allow many users to interact with the piece at the same time, but the enormity will add to the overall aesthetic of the installation. In such a scenario, each ball would also be hung at the exact same height. In such a configuration one would be able to swing the first ball (like a pendulum) causing it to hit the second one. The second one will then in turn hit the third one. This will continue as each ball is activated, creating a chain reaction effect.

Reflecting on the challenges and potentials that Mixed Reality (MR) media present for the production of digital performance art, we present the concept of the Augmented Reality (AR) artwork kin_. The piece is opening the question on how to transfer a real live performative experience into AR, as well as the question of owning and maintaining agency within an artistic fabric. This is explored with a focus on the interaction of different types of agents, using artistic research at the intersection of art, dance and technology.

How might we come to know the particular qualities and affordances – as well as the constraints and biases – of the medium of Virtual Reality (VR)? Responding to this situation from the perspective of Educations and Societies, we submit that more nuanced understandings of the qualities (aesthetic, narrative, experiential) and affordances (conceptual as much as technical) of the medium can be gained if VR is approached as a form of cultural and research practice. In this paper we will present a curated selection of innovative creative research projects developed at SensiLab, a trans-disciplinary research centre based at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia; and do so in the interest of exposing some of the investigative ways that practitioner-researchers (media artists, creative technologists, content producers) are extending understandings of both studio practice and the medium itself by engaging deeply, experimentally and reflexively with immersive imaging technologies. Illustratively, these dynamic, discovery-led PhD projects – undertaken by Sojung Bahng (visual artist and filmmaker), Oscar Raby (VR director) and Lucija Ivsic (performing artist) – reveal how we might come to know the medium through practice in an iterative way by investing in creating, making and exhibiting throughout the research process.

New Media Art reflects the dramatic creative and cultural shifts in science and technology of the past century. With these shifts the multitude of forms of art-making have expanded to include a wide range of ideas and techniques. Following several decades of new contributions this plurality of expression has resisted monolithic or curatorial approaches to organization along the lines of media. This paper defines knowledge cultures as flexible, over-lapping, non-exclusive, ideological sub-groups and seeks to identify such groups within the practice and theory of New Media Art. While practicing groups may be associated with specific media such as games, 3D printing, or artificial intelligence, we seek to identify knowledge groups by their explicit, hidden or shared ideological principles.

My ideas on the topic of media art and self-reference emerged from my research on strategies of analogue media art practices and their parallels with structures and approaches in today’s new media art field. My research materials from Moscow, Russia, and Riga, Latvia, (early 1980s) included some examples of samizdat publications – texts and tape recordings. Among the works were a poetic absurdist novel and a re-published documentation and discussion of collective performative actions. Both editions were typed or recorded and transcribed in a collaborative effort by a group of people, manually copied, and distributed (or intended for distribution) as samizdat , hand to hand. I also discovered examples of collaborative creative practices of documentation and reflection on the margins of the Western art canon – 12 dialogues, 1962–1963, featuring dialogues by Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton dedicated to their own fellow artists’ practice, and Filmmakers  by Takahiko Iimura (1966 / 69), which portrays the experimental filmmakers scene in the U.S. I think that some features of these collaborative creative experiments are similar to characteristics of new media and indie publishing and can also be traced in the growing participatory culture and collaborative writing practice emerging in wikis and blogs. In the following, I will try to sketch out some of these parallels, although I have not yet arrived at a comprehensive, elaborate summary of them. The topic raised several questions about the self-definition of experimental arts practices; the references that provide historical and contemporary context for these initiatives; their methods of discussion and documentation, and the role of media in this process. In a discussion of collective work, it is interesting to see what effect locality has on the scene, at what point practices become adopted in a wider social context, and how the autonomy of these practices is defined. I see these sets of questions not so much as institutional but as organizational.

The artistic poetics produced related to science and nature increased prominence as they incorporated political, technological, and social changes into their discourse aware of the environmental crises and their connection with the capitalist economic program. Hitherto, the union between artists and scientists has inspired works that, in general, incorporate new forms of organization between organic systems, technologies, and symbolic processes. Many contemporary artists conduct their projects through multispecies collaborations and work with a high potential for questioning and formulating non- hegemonic knowledges. This paper focuses on the recent KŌDOS experiments, a Brazilian art collective, which aims to investigate the visual poetics in relations with non-human organisms (living and non-living) and technologies to provide alternative and speculative models to inhabit the Earth. KŌDOS is composed by Claudio Filho and Fernanda Oliveira both members of ACTlab – laboratory for arts, science, and deviant technologies hosted at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil

Arts for Young Audiences Norway (Kulturtanken) is the Norwegian Ministry of Culture’s agency responsible for art and culture for school pupils. Most prominently, this includes nationwide responsibility for The Cultural Schoolbag (TCS), which is the centerpiece of the government’s policy for bringing culture to children and young people. Briefly put, The Cultural Schoolbag secures that all children growing up in Norway have access to professional art – spanning literature, music, visual arts, performative arts, film and cultural heritage.

This is done through close collaboration between Arts for Young Audiences Norway, county councils and municipalities, schools and cultural institutions. The program is ambitious and far reaching. Four times a year in average, 3300 schools, including 830.000 school pupils in the country are visited by professional musicians, writers, actors, dancers, artists and other cultural producers through The Cultural Schoolbag.

The explicit political aim is to provide all children living in Norway with a shared frame of reference and joint experiences, irrespective of their nationality, address, wealth and social background. It is held that artistic and cultural expression can transcend norms, languages and social identities, and in this way, being a force for democracy that ideally can be felt far beyond our national borders, reaching out into the world.

A forgotten transformer station in Jena called TRAFO is workspace, event space, and exhibition space for „Künstlerische Tatsachen“. Here, a new innovation laboratory for contemporary art forms and media of the city of Jena is created. From June to September 2022, up to six international artists will work in pairs with scientists from local institutes on a joint research question.
The starting point of the collaboration is the processual nature of the disciplines of art and science, which are often perceived as contrary: artistic practice as well as explorative basic research are characterized by experimentation and freed from the immediate demand to produce results that are close to application. Both require a high degree of abstraction and creativity. Based on this, the residency is designed as basic artistic research. It is aimed at artists who are engaged in the method as well as at Thuringian scientists who are open to an exchange with art and a disclosure of their research processes. Through the joint research process, the participants will explore the synergies of the disciplines, learn from each other, gain new perspectives on their work, and ultimately transform their findings into a work of art.
„Künstlerische Tatsachen“ consists of a research phase in the institutes’ laboratories in July, a production phase in the studios starting in August, and an exhibition in October at TRAFO.
An accompanying program with podiums with international guests from the Arts & Science scene, concerts and a participation format will open the discourse across generations for interested citizens from Jena and the surrounding area of central germany. Within the framework of the residency, the laboratory becomes the studio and the studio becomes the laboratory, so that the processual nature of both disciplines can be experienced by the participating artists, scientists and the public.

Panel Statement

Intro

At the ISEA95 there were two panels dealing with the “high end” of automation in Art – Artificial Life and Artificial Creativity (renamed to the Cosmic Art). Both panels opened discussion but many unanswered questions and unquestioned answers remain. Some discussion continued on Internet, especially concerning the paper of D. Hofstadter. In his paper, he mentioned a computer music program that the audience could not recognize (without an explicit knowledge) whether the music was created by computer or human composer. We can consider this argument as a parallel to the test proposed by Alan Turing and known in Artificial Intelligence (Al). As in AI, where the question of intelligent behavior remains open, similarly in art, there still exist discussions about aesthetic criteria. One of the attempts of formalizing these criteria was stated by Max Bense. His pupil, professor Frieder Nake proposed to modify the original title of this panel. The progress in computer science and technology and knowledge in human sciences, physiology, psychology, and cognitive sciences, as well as in art theory prompt us to design more advanced models: not only in representation of the virtual world of artifacts, but also in simulating human learning processes, motivations, imagination, associations, emotions… The diversity and deep specialization of these disciplines has increased borders between them. Maybe that term “Artificial Art” will motivate more integrated view of human creativity.

In this work an audiovisual product was generated through the exploration of a new narrative tendency called motion comic, which combines codes of two consolidated languages: comic and cartoon.

Keywords: Motion comic, animation, comic, languages, adaptation, narrative.

Keywords: Art & New Technologies, Experimentation Centers, Ecuador, Creation Labs, New Art Practices

The Ecuadorian art circuit is feeding on a plastic artists generation based on pictorial practices inherited by modernity for years. They achieved great national and international recognition and even nowadays they occupy privileged places in the most important Ecuadorian art fairs. However, a new generation of artists is abandoning traditional art practices to approach different ways of art making. This change comes hand by hand with the arrival of digital technologies to Ecuador in recent years. On one hand, younger artists have a growing interest in using new media for their creative processes and, on the other hand, different private and public institutions are betting on creating centers and labs for creative experimentation. They are using digital technologies like fab labs, media labs and university laboratories. Considering this, we will analyze the organizational models, the media, the concerns and the needs of the institutions mentioned above. Also, we will address, copyright management and its relation to the social sphere. All of them are relevant data related to the core of current participatory practices. This talk, will allow us to generate a cartography of the new paradigm in the Ecuadorian artistic creation, and, its connection with other international realities.

In 2022, the Laboratorio de Luz (UPV) will be 32 years old, and it is a good time to reflect, and to share that reflection, on the contributions and positions of the work carried out by this group of researchers and artistic collective that is considered one of the first university, Art and Science nodes on the Spanish scene. Rethinking our work in this presentation framed within the “artist talk” format also implies reviewing the conditions of possibility that existed in the Spanish context 30 years ago and those that exist today for art research-science-technology.

Institutional Presentation Statement

Laboratory of new Technologies is a non-profit organization dedicated to the research of new forms of cognition, neuro-interactivity, and perceptual/electronic materials in media. Founded in 1994, it started as a video art center, which pursued the Idea of autonomous media reality, as a basic factor in the fabrication of meaning in the sphere of mass communications. Today, LNT has become a multimedia institution organized on a dual platform of old and new media Integrated in the framework of (A)mediality. It focuses on the artistic manipulation of mentality and reflexivity by means of peripheral/subliminal structuring of human perception and creates autonomous environments, with a capacity to interact with bio-systems on all communicational and sub-communicational levels. Current projects of the Laboratory of New Technologies include: Perceptronic Materials, Pore, Subfauna and others.

This presentation of recent works involves technology-based performance and installation. Three works will be presented illustrating techniques for combining computer graphics, interactive systems, telecommunications and expert systems: DoWhatDo is best described as a techno-urban drive-in dealing with Silicon Valley’s romance with multiculturalism; Conduits introduces the C-Machine, a hypothetical telecommunications sculpture of unparalleled capabilities; and Telepresent Surveillance, an installation involving three autonomous self-navigating surveillance robots, each equipped with infrared scanners for targeting and tracking, collision detection and wireless communications.

Intro

This discussion presents three works by media technology artist Joel Slayton. Two of the projects, DoWhatDo and Conduirs, integrate large scale media technology with site specific experimental performance. The third project, Telepresent Surveillance, (a work-in-progress) is a media installation scheduled for exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign Illinois in November of 1995.

DoWhatDo revisits the urban drive-in as a principal means of social interaction. The top floor of the city of San Jose’s six story public parking facility was transformed into a hi-tech, multimedia drive-in movie environment. The performance was experienced from strategic vantage points in and around an atmosphere of automobile culture. The theatrical space enabled total immersion of the audience into the actual performance. DoWhatDo explored edges of cross-culturalism characteristic of the diverse demographic population in Silicon Valley. The  performance creates a world of illogical manifestations, where electronic forms of information challenge traditional perceptions of individual and ethnic identity. Silicon Valley’s romance with multiculturalism provided a springboard for an innovative conceptual, visual and musical experiment. Two hundred performers present a cross-cultural re-definition of San Jose in a
parade of circumstance and event. A professional rollerblade team, skateboard enthusiast, sport motorcyclist, young entrepreneurs, Latino, Indian, Afro-American dance ensembles, martial arts groups including Kendo, Fencing and Caporia, and a parade of low rider automobile culture in a finale that directly involved the audience in celebration of DoWhatDo theory, comprise the cast of performers. The event was moderated by a master of  ceremonies/ information theorist, located in a mobile 30 ft. mechanical lift posturing above the performance site. The performers engage the audience in a series of simultaneous demonstrations of sport, dance and ceremony with each act presenting a mixture of contemporary sub-culture and cultural tradition, all to illustrate the principals of DoWhatDo theory. Automobiles were directed into the environment pre-selected viewing positions in an orchestrated parking art event. Audience members were encouraged to leave their automobiles and move in and around the environment during the performance.

Abstract

Can recently ‘created’ public spaces become places of civic engagement – can they become a transnational ‘campo’?

A partnership between Australia and South Korea will incubate innovative and artistic practices via public screens. The hypothesis is that interactive artwork presented across nations on large public screens can have a positive impact on how we engage with each other and affect our civic lives.

Our questions:
The large screens and the transnational public sphere research project explores how information and content is exchanged between cities identified as media ‘hubs’, and what the impact is on the formation of a regional public sphere, in this case in the Asian region. In the first instance, the screens are linked between Federation Square, Melbourne and Incheon, Seoul.

We ask how the networking of these cities contributes to regional public diplomacy, in the light of an increasing emphasis on the role of culture in urban development, tourism and transnational communication. How can networked screens distribute regional cultural production and generate new social relationships in public space? Does this create new modes of civic participation at local and global levels? To what extent can a cross-cultural focus enable a new perspective on the relation between technological change and cultural production? What can the network model tell us about culture in the era of what George Yúdice has termed ‘culture-as-resource’? How might it contribute to inter-city cultural rivalry for economic infrastructure and development? And, crucially, how might this model be tested and adapted collaboratively?

The Latin American Forum was a platform for transdisciplinary and transcultural presentations, lectures, and exhibitions. The forum was operational for four years in the framework ISEA, International Symposium on Electronic Art: ISEA2010 in Germany, ISEA2011 in Turkey, ISEA2012 in the USA and ISEA2013 in Australia. Since the conception of the Latin American Forum, one of the goals was to prepare for hosting an ISEA colloquium in Latin America. Thanks to the efforts of a group led by Universidad de Caldas finally ISEA is hosted for the first time in Latin America, this year in Manizales, Colombia.

The Latin American Forum was a series of venues that intended to articulate a diversity of proposals ranging from topics such as digital culture, technological art, critical production and historical analysis. The forum also addressed the science and technology studies (STS) field, questioning geographical, cultural and critical perspectives. Latin American Forum participants came from: Argentina, Australia, Australian Aboriginal Communities, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, Navajo Nation, Peru, Uruguay, USA, and Venezuela.

This paper is divided in four sections; the first one is a historical recount of the different Latin American Forums. The second one is a reflection about the importance of the local references in the field of arts and technology. The third one presents a theoretical framework that is a response to Media Archaeology and the last one focuses on the concept of fragment in order to describe and understand Latin American reality.

Keywords: Latin American Forum, Latin America, Variantología Latina, Cybernetics, Media Art, Media Art History.

Panel: Latin American Forum #2

Keywords: kinetic art, electronic art history, Latin American art, lumino kinetic art

This paper focuses on the works of Latin American artists Gyula Kosice and Abraham Palatnik, looking to trace relationships between kinetic and electronic art in Latin America. Some characteristics they share are the inclusion of spectator participation and the early use of lumino kinetic technology in their work. These artists were both pioneers in kinetic art, as well in the use of technology in art, incorporating movement and technology before the concept of ‘Kinetic Art’ was introduced by the 1955 exhibition Le Mouvement at the Galerie Denise René.

Our investigation focuses on Latin American artists and works of KINETIC ART, a category within the visual arts introduced in the 50′s, bringing together a diverse rang of works which had in common being through movement, moving to the problems of visual perception (Op-art), the use of the light (Lumino kinetic art) and movement (in the work and the spectator’s action). Our approach in this range is to establish the relationship between kinetic and electronic art, first rescuing the pioneering of lumino kinetic art works in the artistic use of technology and second, to analyze common problems less obvious between the kinetic and electronic art in relation to the union of science and art, the incorporation of space and time in the work, and the centrality of spectator participation. For this we investigated artists and works from Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Venezuela, positioning the kinetic analysis in and from Latin America and from country to country, in a reading that considers exchanges and influences between Latin Americans and reciprocally with Europe and the U.S., not noticing centers or peripheries, but posing it as sharing networks.

Artists Statement

Over the past twenty years the body and substance of our media art work has been driven by a desire to create interactive experiences. Applying Brenda Laurel’s categorization, the forms range from the mechanical click-through solutions to the deepest sense of interaction where the work cannot be rendered back to any point of origin after the user participation. Our works range from 3D web based community gaming platforms through mobile applications to sensor-controlled real time video projections, audio soundscapes and immersive environments.

This study interrogates the contrast between the relatively unexplored territory of stock photography as an academic focus, and its widespread exploitation in visual culture. Ubiquitous online in its various commercial and editorial formats as well as on social media, stock photography is worthy of attention because of the many characters it takes on. Taking satire as a starting point, this study examines the limits of stock photography, or the “wallpaper of consumer culture”, captured by the renderings of stock images in meme culture, while surveying alternate possibilities of their handling in art and contemporary photography practices.

This paper outlines the conceptual background, design methodology, and future directions of LAVIN. This virtual reality (VR) artwork provides an immersive experience to visually explore one understanding of a neural network in which the real world maps to 50 daily objects. In the art installation, the neural network constantly analyzes the surrounding environments via a camera and outputs real-time semantic interpretations, which navigate the audience in a virtual world consisting of all the fluid abstract structures of daily objects that the neural network can recognize. We create these fluid virtual structures using data visualization, photogrammetry, and 3D modeling. By merging Artificial Intelligent (AI) system design with VR world-building, LAVIN offers an immersive art experience for symbiotic imaginations that questions the values and beliefs in the modern AI age.

Abstract

Lazarillo is a common word in Spanish, used to describe people who act as guides for disabled people. The word originates from the story, ‘El Lazarillo de Tormes’ about a blind man called Tormes who was always followed and guided by Lázaro, a young boy and from which the word Lazarillo appeared. This project, as the title announces, is part of a prototype which rebuilds the guide figure for wheelchair users with a GPS – as if it were the ‘Lazarillo’.

In February 2010 an outbreak of media panic spread through the British tabloid press concerning a marketing campaign called DubitInsider. The DubitInsider website recruits 13-24 year olds who consider themselves to be “peer leader[s] with strong communication skills” to act as “Brand Ambassadors”. This requires the clandestine passing-on of product suggestions to peers via posting on message boards and social networks, emails and instant messenger conversations, organizing small events and parties. DubitInsider ignited the moral indignation of the tabloids not because of its covert nature, but since Brand Ambassadors were apparently paid to market “unhealthy” junk foods to minors.

Until recently, the foremost digital infrastructure sustaining what Manuel Castells has dubbed “the informational city” – and what many since have called the “digital city” – was largely instantiated through the Internet. Since the early nineties, the twenty‑first century polis was to be continuously augmented and remade within its invisible architecture by an important migration of human activity to the World Wide Web. While in its first decade, the self‑publishing tools of Web 1.0 enabled consumers of content to navigate through a vast offering of new media environments that produced virtual reading publics;     the last decade’s shift towards the social web saw Web 2.0’s array of social networking services transform consumers into prosumers, and reading publics into interactive online communities. If this online world is increasingly becoming the habitual locus of information exchange, media activism and civic life, can it be said to constitute a new form of public space? And if so, is it a substitute for the physical semi‑public and public spaces of action and representation that have borne, since the nineteenth century, the flow of modern city life? As digital practices reshape the hermeneutics of the Internet by supporting new forms of social and political interaction, what roles shall urban space fulfill in the cyber age? These are but a few of the pressing questions and challenges that arise in the wake of smart cities.

Our empirical research suggests that studied in isolation, social media tell us very little about how online digital practices can support community‑building and civic engagement in real, physical space. According to our field findings, it is the relationship between interaction that occurs online and offline that underpins new forms of civic engagement and city living. Indeed, with the advent of mobile computing and augmented spaces, the online and the offline no longer seem to constitute two distinct sites of action. Instead, it appears that virtual spaces of representation and real world places have become interconnected through digital practices in what we call “emerging digital hybrid spaces”. Using ethnographic research methods, we investigate this new paradigm by asking: How could interactive digital urban technologies be used to facilitate new forms of social, cultural and political interaction in hybrid public spaces?

Learning from the Megaphone: Design Principles for Interactive Public Space Digital Installations presents an analysis of field data collected in Fall 2013 in Montreal, Canada, during our ten week qualitative evaluation of Megaphone, a site‑specific outdoor digital Speakers’ Corner and agora. This research suggests that locative media and interactive art installations have the potential to bring people back into urban space to communicate face‑to‑face with the support of digital technology, making the relationship between online and offline technology come full circle in hybrid public space. Based on    our field study of Megaphone, our paper offers insights on how smart cities might be designed to better support public interaction, community and culture in the cyber age.

This paper discusses a research study on how to enhance learning geology by creating computer graphics. Out of 300 students taking Geology 101 taught by Dr. Jim McClurg, 60 volunteered to create artwork based on information provided by their geology professor.

Students were asked to illustrate concepts formulated as a summary of each lecture set in a specific challenging task. There were four groups, each consisting of 15 students working in a computer laboratory. Students creating cg scored lower on the pretest, but higher on the post test, and the lab test. A Q sort technique was used to evaluate the scores provided by art experts. It revealed a progression of the quality of the artwork created by the students over the course of the semester. Thus, one might conclude, that geology-based inspiration supported artistic quality, while visual problem solving makes the process of learning scientific topic more engaging.

This paper shares learning from an artwork ‘Learning Nonhuman’ produced by a learning team working at FACT an art institution/production centre in Liverpool. [1] Artist Jack Tan worked with an intergenerational group of participants to develop a game that allows people to roleplay as nonhumans and propose policy changes on their behalf. The game was then played by FACT staff members, to inform the writing of a new environmental policy. In this paper, we are presenting our reflections on institutional learning coming from applying arts based learning experiences to the art organisation’s culture.

This article presents ideas, proposals and strategies to renew in a sustainable way the creative involvement and appropriation of the contents of online digital archives dedicated to media art. Under the premise of multilingual open access repositories, with the interaction in collaborative and co-creative networks, a training programme is presented in the context of the Anilla Cultural Latinoamérica-Europa in Uruguay, aimed at future teachers of primary and secondary education at the local level and the Spanish-speaking region. This initiative proposes keys that allow for the collaborative and co-creative expansion of teaching and research based on media art archives with a global perspective.

The article also proposes two ideas to be developed by ISEA Archives. These are: 1) to present a project to UNESCO to declare the ISEA Archives as a Digital World Heritage of Humanity, and 2) to study how the concept of “digital vellum” can be used to preserve the contents of the Connecting Archives project.

The proposal and the two ideas presented in the article are a step forward in quality and quantity to ensure a sustainable future for media art archives. Co-creativity and collaboration
will be the main tools to achieve these goals.

As one of the oldest forms of Chinese Opera since the 16th century, Kunqu features literary virtuosity in its scripts, sophisticated vocal techniques in its singing, emotional and elegant yet rigorous bodily motions and facial expressions in its performance. Over its history, Kunqu has developed established modes and patterns, which makes it especially suitable for neural networks to learn. In order to generate Kunqu literature and performance computationally, we applied multiple machine learning and computer vision techniques. Our result, Legend of Wrong Mountain, is novel twofold: it is the first and only generated opera at the time of this writing, and it is a machine’s attempt at Gesamtkunstwerk [12], “the Total Artwork”. It explores the marriage between contemporary technologies and traditional art form. By studying historical scripts, musical notations and traditional methods for creating Kunqu, we tweaked existing algorithms and devised new ones to conform to the traditional rules and norms as closely as possible. We presented this project as a video accompanied by audio.

A half a century ago, kinetic artist and astronautical pioneer Frank Malina set out to solve the needs of a community of artists and scientists working across disciplines by using the “new media” of the time: offset print publishing. As a groundbreaking, innovative venture, Leonardo represented a unique vision: to serve as an international channel of communication among artists, with emphasis on the writings of artists who use science and developing technologies in their work. The result was Leonardo, an academic journal for artists with the peer-review rigor of a scientific journal. For 50 years, Leonardo has been the definitive publication for artist-academics, and the field has gained momentum in recent years.

Today, documenting and capturing the creative innovators and provocateurs of culture is not enough. If media is the messenger, then we must expand our scope to represent the unique works and challenges we face in the 21st century. To fully realize our purpose and place over the next 50 years, we are opening our doors to a year and a half of community collaboration to inform our efforts to redesign our programs and mission to meet the needs of our audience. We are reaching out to pioneers, institutions, thought leaders and the curious in an effort to nurture the exploding art/science/technology global community. As a network of networks, we are reimagining our future with you at the forefront. We invite you to come along with us on this journey of rediscovery and reinvention. Why? Because the ideas that lead to critical breakthroughs can come from any direction and they don’t taking sides.

The global challenges and existential threats of our time require collaboration and cross-fertilization across the domains of art, science and technology. Leonardo fosters collaborative exploration by facilitating interdisciplinary projects and by documenting and disseminating information about hybrid creative practice and scholarship. Through its programs, publications, and partnerships, Leonardo offers the creative strategies most needed to face complex problems that overwhelm conventional problem-solving and transcend siloed disciplines. By applying a creativity lens driven by art, science and technology, we can see and set a new global agenda to humanize digital culture, deepen digital trust, inspire creative enterprise and advance sustainable development. This talk presents an overview of Leonardo, the International Society of Art, Science, and Technology, our legacy of impact, and our vision to ReImagine Everything in pursuit of a more vibrant, just, and regenerative world.

This workshop will address and share experiences and difficulties encountered while developing transdisciplinary art-science research, teaching, and when meshing curricula from diverse fields.

Workshop Moderator: Assoc. Prof. Paul Thomas

Workshop Leaders:

Focus Group 1. Discuss transdiciplinary colloborations: Petra  Gemeinboeck & Andres Burbano

Focus Group 2. Discuss transdiciplinary studio practice: Ross Harley and Ionat Zurr

Focus Group 3. Discuss transdisciplinary theory: Edward Colless and Wendy Coones

Transdisciplinarity is deemed ‘radical’, ‘provisional and opportunistic’ because it challenges traditional educational paradigms. It focuses critical and creative attention onto domain-specific problem areas of ‘chance’, ‘discontinuity’ and ‘materiality’ (Foucault, 1976) to transcend limits within established disciplinary knowledge practices. This enables (re)visioning of the role, activity and value of Art Schools in uniting the pedagogical and technological strengths of the humanities and sciences in a university context, utilising conceptual growth, experimental innovation, visual communication and flexible learning spaces to deliver a model of Transdisciplinarity.

The transdisciplinary model will be explored in the context of the trans-migratory role of ISEA and look for a different voice from the various constructed international institutional perspectives.

This workshop will address and share experiences and difficulties encountered while developing transdisciplinary art-science research, teaching, and when meshing curricula from diverse fields.

Each workshop leader will introduce their topic and the participants will be able to join one of the three groups  to discuss specific areas of focus (transdiciplinary colloborations, studio practice or theory) led by the panelists.

Each focus group will seek to identify and share ways to surmount some of the difficulties commonly encountered in interdisciplinary art/science practices and curricula with the aim of publishing effective transdiciplinary models and best practices.

Focus Group 1: Transdisciplinary Framework for Research Collaboration

Transdisciplinary Framework for Research Collaboration

by Dr. Petra  Gemeinboeck

This presentation will explore how historically experimental arts practices seem to be particularly privileged for opening up and navigating via transdisciplinarity such a complex, slippery terrain. Yet we haven’t even opened “pandora’s box” yet – asking the question of how transdisciplinary research can be practiced within the established institutional framework? This includes the issue of locating ones’ research and related barriers with regards to funding and promotion. How can we develop and foster a horizontal, open transdisciplinary framework for research collaboration that perforates and transcends existing disciplinary boundaries within an institutional system where both resources and career paths are confined to vertically aligned, formally defined codes and practices?

Folding “papers” and unfolding projects

by Andres Burbano

The topic of my doctoral research is the “History of Media Technological Inventions in Latin America” it is based on the study case methodological approach. At the moment I am confronted with a series of interesting and profound questions related to the subject. When I explore the contents of this particular research at least ten general fields emerge as the key components of the theoretical study: History of Technology, Art History, Archaeology of the Media, Computation, Music Composition, Photography, Bioacoustics, Color Television, Space Missions and Latin American Studies.

The implications of such research are not insignificant especially considering the current interest in societies in Latin America in processes of innovation and technology, and media development. An understanding of the  “History of Media Technological Inventions in Latin America”  will be an important contribution to the understanding of Technology and Media in non-Western societies.

Additionally as a media arts practitioner myself I am in the process of creating practical media art projects based on the findings of the historical research, this condition adds more elements to the problems already there. All this complexity does not come as a surprise to me, however I must admit that while developing these kind of research/practice projects continuously see myself facing questions that initially I have no tools to answer. The most important task is the process of acquiring those tools needed.

Focus Group 2. Discuss transdiciplinary studio practice

Working Across Disciplinary and Cultural Borders in Australia and China

by Prof. Ross Harley

For two weeks in September 2009 more than sixty art, design, and architecture students, practitioners and academics worked on a live design brief in an intensive two-week studio at Donghua University, Shanghai. e-SCAPE was a partnership between Professor Richard Goodwin’s Porosity Studio, and The Collabor8 Project (C8) led by Ian McArthur, in collaboration with Donghua University (Shanghai) and COFA (Sydney). This presentation will briefly outline some of the successes and challenges encountered in the process of working across disciplinary, cultural, and institutional boundaries.

Discipline Autonomy and Transdiciplinary

by Dr. Ionat Zurr

SymbioticA’s Master of Biological Arts degree enables a situation in which students with an arts background take science units and students with scientific backgrounds must enrol to arts units, in their first year of study. The second year is dedicated to a transdiciplinary research. In the forum I will employ specific examples to discuss and unravel some of the issues concerned with the understandings and perceptions of what is “research” in the different disciplines, especially when the research include hands-on practice that involves life manipulation.

Focus Group 3. Discuss transdisciplinary theory

Transdiscipilinary Occult

by Dr. Edward Colless

Does the “transdisciplinary” adjective, then, offer an alternative or a distinction to interdisciplinary, institutional consensus? I believe it does, but in a way that requires criticism as well as endorsement. I propose that we theorize the “transdisciplinary” as a disruption to interdisciplinary conferring: that we encourage it as disagreement and, in a more demanding finesse of its alterity, as the “un-relation” of disciplines. There is some caution in this: do we not lose the prospect of academic cosmopolitanism, and its imperative of universality, when the interdisciplinary meeting place is disrupted? Let us think of the “transdisciplinary” disruption, however, not as a deregulation of academic discipline (as a cultural relativising of the arts and sciences meeting on equal ground), but as an irregularity within academic discipline; as an insurgency or “in-discipline” of academe.

I suggest, in response, that we use the prefix “trans” to suggest drift and errancy, as disciplines cross each other with the eventful possibility of collision or collusion but without the eventuality of their consensus. I would provocatively call this crossing anoccultation, in that it induces an esoteric knowledge not manifestly conferrable, discernable or communicable. In this respect, the “transdisciplinary” induces an occulting of disciplinary research by an abnormality or unnaturalism, which is to say it offers a new manner of occult knowledge. Can we speculate, within our specialities of visual media for instance, on “transdisciplinary aesthetics” as such an occult vision? In the fugue-like drift of the “transdisciplinary”, could aesthetics become an occult science, or (in no way symmetrically or commensurately) could science become an occult aesthetics?

Title: 3 + 5 + 7 = 1 * Propagating Transdisciplinary Theory

by Wendy Coones

The propagation and cultivation of an international field requires diverse and concerted efforts. Between formal education curricula, digital and print dissemination points, common research tools, national / international collaborations and continually developing interaction structures; a polycultural space can evolve. Taking into consideration the parameters of individual endeavors and their possible influence on one another, a larger image of the interconnectedness can be discussed.

In this institutional presentation of the non-profit Franco-European organisation Leonardo/ Olats, we shall focus on our experience in art-science collaborations and artists in residence programmes, which took place mainly within EU supported projects, and open for expanded collaborations with other geocultural zones. We shall reflect on space art and bioart, two fields that have been prominent in our activities.

We will discuss the need to consider the three principal communication channels (visual, auditive and gestural) in the user-computer interaction process. We describe a strength-reversal device — the Pantograph — a new type of retroactive mouse. With powerful engines and a large workspace, it gives the objects of the interface a real physical appearance, one which can be felt and touched. The integration of such a device in contemporary interfaces is not immediate. In fact, the gestural channel, however rich it may be, can be approached reasonably only as a complement to its auditive and visual forms.

Intro

Avec les interfaces graphiques à manipulation directe (GUIs), l’utilisateur interagit avec l’ordinateur à l’aide d’un écran, d’un dispositif de pointage et d’un clavier. Ces interfaces sont dites faciles à apprendre et a utiliser, grâce à une spatialisation de l’information qui réduit la charge cognitive de l’utilisateur. Toutefois, ce schéma d’interaction est incomplet. En effet, il exclue les utilisateurs non-voyants, il est non-portable à des milieux exceptionnels comme la microgravité et finalement, il néglige la nature multi-sensori-motrice de tout en chacun. Avec la standardisation de ces interfaces, il est donc primordial de mettre en oeuvre de nouvelles interfaces, en se laissant guider par les capacités sensori-matrices potentielles des utilisateurs, conjointement aux avancées technologiques répondant à cette logique modale.

Depuis 1991, le CITI, centre de recherche du ministre de I’industrie du Canada, conçoit, développe et évalue, en collaboration avec le milieu universitaire et des partenaires privé, des interfaces multimodales avec retour de force. Il s’agit d’interfaces personne-ordinateur qui combinent trois types de stimulations: visuelle, auditive et haptique. Ces trois types de stimulation sont combinées, complementaires et redondantes, dépendant de l’application et de l’utilisateur cible. Cet article décrit l’avancement conceptuel, matériel et logiciel de la recherche sur ces nouvelles formes d’interface.

One of the many virtual worlds inspired by the cyberpunk literature movement, Second Life has attracted global attention since 2006 and counts today with millions of residents. Aligned with the Web 2.0 trends and considered by many as the best digital life at the present moment, the SL Metaverse (Stephenson) gives flow to cybrid processes. In despite of the fact of not being a complete novelty – since 3D MUVEs (Multi User Virtual Environments) and social networks have existed for more than one decade on the web – Second Life brings several new questionings and possible influences in language and personal relationships that can not be despised. Instead of bringing computational simulations to daily life (digital life), Second Life takes the daily life to computational simulation (Life Digital). Regardless the polemics about the real number of residents in world or whether how long Second Life is likely to keep existing, the fact is that it has started a new way of interacting on the web, where we can choose to follow or break the laws of physics and nature, maybe shortening our distance to “The Matrix” metaphor. The objective of this paper is to explore the new possibilities for expression and interaction provided by Second Life and other virtual worlds on the web, especially in art, and to bring reflections about their probable influence in the future navigation interfaces on the web. Some selected artworks in Second Life will be discussed to illustrate the paper, including one developed by the author.

Artists Statement

Keywords: digital media, biological life sciences, artistic imaginative vision, computer animation, music visualization, video.

In exploring a perception of life growth and digital visual art, these new short animation films create a serial of new life cycle systems, by combining biological life sciences, artistic imaginative vision and music together. These artworks were invited to be shown in the 11th China ART Exhibition and Tsinghua University.

If only the clock of life would stop … if only we could stay forever young … if only our aged body could be reborn, like a new embryo in Spring, and we grow youthful again! Is this not the most dreamed dream we have been dreaming of? Yet this dream could actually be fulfilled – when we understand the key of the grand circulation of life. Do not say that it is death that gives the meaning to life, because this is only true if we have no knowledge to fight aging, and no power to go against death. We will all grow old in time and will all disappear someday, like each individual leaf on a tree. But the new leaves will keep growing out from the tree of life, season after season, generation after generation. The tree of life has grown for millions of years and it will continue to grow for millions of years. In this sense, this grand circulation makes our life the most beautiful and forever young. However this grand circulation goes through a seemingly vulnerable place we call placenta – the place where all life cycles begin.

In these works, 3D computer visualization techniques were used to create a scene that combined biological life sciences and artistic imaginative vision to create a serial of new life cycle systems. We use MAYA 2008, AFTER EFFECT for the animation and Sam created the sound.

On the Internet people are able to inhabit multiple worlds and explore multiple aspects of the self. For individuals, online life can serve as a sort of moratorium or “time-out”, a time of experimentation that facilitates the development of identity. For organizations, virtual communities offer a place for experimenting, parallel play, an environment for working through new ideas. Although many speak about a movement from a psychoanalytic to a computer culture, the reality is more complex. Our need for a practical philosophy of self-knowledge, one that does not shy away from issues of multiplicity, complexity, and ambivalence, has never been greater as we struggle to make meaning from our lives on the screen. It is fashionable to think that we have passed from a psychoanalytic culture to a computer culture – that we no longer need to think in terms of Freudian slips but rather of information processing errors. But the reality is more complex. It is time to rethink our relationship to the computer culture and psychoanalytic culture as a proudly held joint citizenship.

At ISEA98 I proposed that artists should engage with recycled, “trailing edge” technology combined with free, open source software as an antidote to the commercialism and exclusivity of digital media. The project that emerged from that proposal, Access Space, has proven to be a robust model for public engagement with networked digital media and has influenced numerous local initiatives. It is now the longest running open access media lab in the UK.

In 1998 open source was seen as marginal. Now the cultural significance of the free software movement is recognized and proprietary software and formats have become marginal for many artists, activists and commentators. Yet proprietary formats, software and practices (which provide convenience at the expense of autonomy) still dominate the mainstream and some artists remain uncritical digital cheerleaders.

Digital technologies tend to manifest as a centralizing force: concentrating knowledge, power, skill, information, money, opportunities, resources, and (with the advent of social networking) even friends. If digital media artists only engage at the level, “Hey, this is cool!” they fail to challenge the figuratively toxic social and literally toxic physical effects of an industry which both creates and accelerates the premature redundancy of the tools of their trade.

Psychologists have claimed that finding something revolting, being disgusted is evolutionarily advantageous to humans as it prevents us coming into contact with disease and contaminants. disease and contaminants. Humanities scholars have further argued that the basis for disgust is the messiness of the processes that are a necessary part of living and dying, that disgust developed not only as a way to police the boundary between “safe” and “contaminating” states but also to prevent moral and ethical decay. Some psychological experiments have been interpreted as showing that human disgust is related to our sense of being ‘other’ than animal. Ernest Becker’s suggestion that the human body reminds people of their “animal limitations”, the most basic of which is the inevitability of death.

Experimental psychologists have tested disgust’s role in human/nonhuman animal boundary reinforcement to test the hypothesis that “cultures promote norms that help people distinguish themselves from animals” to protect humans from their concerns about mortality. This pres-entation discusses the author’s memento mori artworks, made from neuro-images produced during experiments designed to analyse brain activity during death meditation and while looking at memento mori. The process of making the works with neuroscientists is situated within an interdisciplinary feminism. Specifically, new materialism is used to consider revulsion and disgust in relation to memento mori, combining a cultural analysis of disgust and death with scientific insights about the physical and chemical processes of decay. I argue that the life seen in the putrefying and decaying corpse challenges the “historical materialist sense that the agency of matter is derivative of deliberate human activity”

This paper discusses Codex Virtualis_Genesis (2020-2022) as an artistic engagement of artificial life (AL) that explores the nature of informational life as a symbiotic process. Created by Mexico City-based transnational collective Interspecifics (INT), this work follows on from the expanded notions of life central to the field of artificial life, including organic, inorganic, material, and virtual forms. According to its founder, Christopher Langton, “there is nothing . . . that restricts biology to carbon-based life; it is simply the only kind of life that has been available to study”. From this perspective, Langton proposed in the late 1990s that AL be dedicated, as he put it, to speculating “. . . beyond life-as-we-know-it into the realm of life-as-it could-be”. This discussion examines Codex Virtualis_Genesis in light of Langton’s proposal as a speculative inquiry into a symbiotic view of life, and as well in contrast to notions of artificial life art as a predominantly technophilic practice. Instead connected to the speculative imagination, the synthetic life forms of Codex Virtualis_Genesis offer a glimpse into life otherwise: as an interspecific relation.

LifeBoat is a prosaic title indicating both the physical reality (the project is contained within a ship’s lifeboat) and somewhat more conceptually, as the lifeboat has become home to a Biotechnology lab; to the processes of life itself. On a metaphorical level, this project is designed to deal with concepts of sustainability, survival and notions of biological, cultural and ideological re-generation, and naturally its obverse, the degradation of life and all its manifestations. When the Maori people of New Zealand first encountered Cook’s ship (the Endeavour) they thought it to be a floating island. Although at first this may seem a ‘quaint’ reaction, the Maori were perfectly accurate. As a device of European expansion and exploitation [and as a scientific voyage) the Endeavour was in fact a highly compressed version of English culture.

This was no simple floating transport, but a microcosm of language, mathematics, philosophy, foodstuffs, social and political structures, religion, not to mention sexual appetites and exotic diseases. If England itself had somehow drifted into the South Pacific, the effect would have not really been any different!
On board of Silja Opera, The SymbioticA crew inhabits a standard (fully enclosed) ship’s lifeboat and develops a working Biological Laboratory that focuses on tissue culture of elements of the local marine environment. The lab produces small biological survival packs as well as [instructional) starter packs for re¬establishing and/or deconstructing cultural and political structures [e.g. starter packs for alternative democracy seem to be a good idea in the current political climate!). In addition to exploring life on the Baltic, the LifeBoat crew will carry out preparatory lab work at Heureka’s Open Lab.

Keywords: crowdsourcing, cinema, mobile phone, video, mass-creativity, communication

Crowdsourced filmmaking is still largely unexplored as a creative process and as a social phenomenon. In recent months it has started to spread rapidly throughout the arts community as a cheaper and more democratic mode of expression than traditional filmmaking, and often manages to ignite unexpected tangential narratives and new meanings. The Lifemirror project is a crowdsourcing tool and cinematic system designed to enable collective creativity and filmic argumentation based on geotime tracked video through mobile cameras. The paper will explore the nature of the time-movement image within a considered virtual space of intentionality, and so aims to provide an insight into social behavior surrounding audiovisual communication. The data gathered from Lifemirror sheds new light on the collective activity of user-artists and provides a reframing of what it means to communicate through cinematics. In this way, we aim to identify emerging patterns and hierarchies of discord in the evolution of digital film and the communities from which it emerges. The system itself looks at the potential of the ‘collective artist’ as a seeker of truth and disrupter of accepted truths (referring in particular to the nature the raw-state digital video image). A series of collectively produced films informs the research and provides a ground level perspective of community issues, imagined narratives, political debate and activism. The Lifemirror system will actively accompany the writing of the paper and the conference presentation to create an active artistic representation of the theories and findings in the research.

Keywords: crowdsourcing, cinema, mobile phone, video, mass-creativity, communication

Crowdsourced filmmaking is still largely unexplored as a creative process and as a social phenomenon. In recent months it has started to spread rapidly throughout the arts community as a cheaper and more democratic mode of expression than traditional filmmaking, and often manages to ignite unexpected tangential narratives and new meanings. The Lifemirror project is a crowdsourcing tool and cinematic system designed to enable collective creativity and filmic argumentation based on geotime tracked video through mobile cameras. The paper will explore the nature of the time-movement image within a considered virtual space of intentionality, and so aims to provide an insight into social behavior surrounding audiovisual communication. The data gathered from Lifemirror sheds new light on the collective activity of user-artists and provides a reframing of what it means to communicate through cinematics. In this way, we aim to identify emerging patterns and hierarchies of discord in the evolution of digital film and the communities from which it emerges. The system itself looks at the potential of the ‘collective artist’ as a seeker of truth and disrupter of accepted truths (referring in particular to the nature the raw-state digital video image). A series of collectively produced films informs the research and provides a ground level perspective of community issues, imagined narratives, political debate and activism. The Lifemirror system will actively accompany the writing of the paper and the conference presentation to create an active artistic representation of the theories and findings in the research.

During a lockdown, there was a supermoon over Europe. A beautiful light filtered through our surroundings, however, a paradox with the obligation to stay indoors when we should be going outside for our health. Light and health are fundamentally linked. Light is related to our well-being during the day and at night. The biological clock of humans and animals, greening, sustainability, public space, every-thing is related to light. 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. Without reciprocity, we could not survive. We are eating and drinking light.

Art of Light in public space
For me, as a public art artist specialized in light, 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. Light, both natural and artificial, brings people together in urban spaces, emphasize the culture and identity of the city and shape the nightscape.

Artistic research experience-based process
The goal is to identify different light ecosystems, characters and qualities of the living environment. Defining functional, emotional and social dimensions, in order to experiencing what is of real value of light, rethink the relationship with nature and by focusing on bodies and perception rather than reason and intellect. In order to make people the owners of the light in their living environment.

‘The Walk’ shows an intense, red glow of light a fascinating variety of colors and movements. The spherical shape and the change of light and color give the impression of a rotating planet. Based on Dante’s Divine Comedy about the journey from the Inferno to Purgatory, an illusory story unfolds that gives a sense of catharsis and the transition from fire to light. Flames and figures with torches appear as a non-stop procession into infinity, searching for meaning and happiness.

The spectator is invited to enter the procession, approach the sphere and walk around it without ever moving away from the light. In this form of interaction between spectator, space and object, the visitor is not only absorbed by a play of light and image, but is also a participant in a journey in search of light.

Introduction: The Relationship of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies to Art
that Focuses on Emerging Technologies

The impact of technology on contemporary life and culture is a vital issue in our age. Critical theory and cultural studies attempt to link the arts, literature, politics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and technology in an interdisciplinary search for relevant concepts and frameworks with which to understand the current world. Art practice and theory are being radically reshaped by this activity. This hybrid world of culture/art criticism, which places great import on the impact of emerging technologies, has seemed unexpectedly uninterested in the work of artists who work with these very technologies. Similarly, the discourse in the art/technology world -and in the technical world in general – has not engaged deeply the concepts from cultural studies. This essay attempts to elucidate some reasons that might underlie this mutual lack of attention. The essay has two objectives: It applies some concepts and lines of inquiry from cultural theory to inspect the practice of artists working with new technologies, and identifies ways their practice challenges these theoretical formulations. It then considers a range of theoretical stances artists can assume in relation to working with new technologies. Its goals are to help artists define for themselves a theoretical stance toward their work with technology and to advance the ability of art theory and art criticism to contend with new technologies.

Light Attack is a media artwork, as well as social experiment, performed in public urban spaces. While driving through the city, an animated virtual character is projected onto the cityscape, exploring places ‘to go’ and places ‘not to go’, according to the popular Lonely Planet travel guide. Light Attack elaborates the concept of the’moving moving’ image – the projected moving imagery corresponds to the movement through the space while the character’s behavior is influenced by the urban context and passers-by. The car’s movement through the city determines the virtual character’s behavior, utilizing custom computer software that arranges short pre-recorded video loops into seamless motion patterns, allowing for real-time interaction with the architecture and passers-by. The piece has been performed in a variety of neighborhoods in Los Angeles (USA, 2004), Florence (2005), Boston (2006), Hong Kong (2006), Seoul (2006), and Mexico City (2007). It wishes to illuminates the condition of public life within socially and culturally diverse urban spaces.

The paper discusses Light Attack in the context of emerging urban screens in Asia, Europe and the Arab Emirates and the United States, raising questions about privacy and property. How does this redefine the public sphere? How does ubiquitous ‘projection’ and LED screen technology change the environment in which we live? What happens if media art abandons the dedicated channels for media distribution and advertisement? The paper juxtaposes cultural programming for urban screens and media architecture to site-specific art as commissioned by public art programs in the United States since 1989 (dismantling of R. Serra’s Titled Arc at Federal Plaza, NYC). It relates contemporary media art practice to notions of site-specificity in public art, such as phenomenological aspects of the site (scale, topological, and architectural features), institutional critique, and discursive practices that employ social, economic and political processes into the creation of the artwork.

The shift from the notion of architectural buildings as passive objects towards active ‘mediatecture’, broadcasting messages 24/7, present novel challenges for city governance, building codes, and urban planning. Calls for ‘air-time’ dedicated to art and culture are being expressed at export forums, such as the Urban Screens Conference (Amsterdam, 2005; Manchester, 2007). Dedicated places like the Victory Media Network in Dallas (Texas), are specifically designed around movable screens, dedicating their programming to a large degree to artworks with an ongoing call for artists’ submissions. The paper illuminates both the opportunities and challenges of the urban screen as an emergent ubiquitous medium for artistic expression.

By design the audio/visual effects of light shows, live coding and transcoding events have captured the attention of researchers, artists and scientists for decades. This panel summarizes Robin Oppenheimer’s media arts research on the histories of early Light Shows, specifically the psychedelic audio visual productions created in North America. Alex McLean will discuss the origins of algoraves, as they emerged from an international live coding scene as well as its cultural prehistory. Vicki Moulder & Michael Heidt will present works by artists who are transcoding larger technology infrastructures and networked system(s); with an emphasis on data extraction and orchestrating events in public spaces.  The complex connections between these art movements and artists exemplify how the roots of electronic arts histories from diverse regions of North America and Europe are interconnected and interrelated in unexpected ways.

In this paper we outline the structure for coordinating engaged parties in developing scalable urban screen infrastructure and considerations necessary for installing rear projection urban screens in existing city spaces. We discuss the network architectures and topologies for creating networked urban screen systems, borrowing concepts from networked music performance and installation contexts. Finally, we demonstrate the use of our approach for developing an urban screen, showcasing multiple exhibitions.

The conception of interval refers to an approach to narrative experimentation: the use of empty gaps that are regarded as unimportant to the plot, which is extensively practiced in the narrative of traditional painting, architecture, literature and cinema art. Interactive documentary, as a new genre that narrates the real and enables audience interact with reality through interactive digital technologies, its physical interactivity and non-linear narrative form generates inevitable pause, gap and intervention of storytelling. These intervals in storytelling of interactive documentary become significant reason of the contradiction between immersion and interaction. Through the investigation and two selected cases studies: Prison Valley (2009), The Space We Hold (2017), this paper aims to address following questions: 1) What’s the specific manifestation and effect of intervals in interactive documentary storytelling? 2) Can interval become a promising technique to solve the contradiction between immersion and interacti and evolve non-linear storytelling somehow?

LIMBO (2021) is a Live Sound and Live Visuals performance that reflects on the rise of the sea levels environmental issue, its impact and effects in our cities and countries. Being both the visuals and the sound designs constructed in an impro-vised live performance, the method on which the performance itself is built – intrinsically connecting both mediums – has got layers of complexity, not only from a technical perspective. That synesthetic relationship is also indeed dialectic: how to construct a live sound thinking of a visual impact and how to construct a live visual to be “disturbed” by the sound. Or, in simpler terms, how to paint with music and how to play music with paint. From this, the voyage about our impact in the loss of our cities, of our biodiversity, on our heritage is a meditative, immersive, andreflective act, and a both personal and collective experience.

We live in a hybrid space. This short sentence indicates one of the most important features of postmodern world and society, it also informs of changes in perception and experience. Reality is being described as augmented, virtualized, hybridized, dematerialized, hard world being accompanied by the sphere of electromagnetic waves and digitalized information. New electronic and digital technologies play crucial role in these processes because new forms of reality and existence develop in close relation to principles inscribed into them. However, as we walk the streets of our computerized cities and cross borders of materiality with every use of cell phone or laptop we rarely notice that being connected to the net is at the same time being caught in it. Wearable and mobile technologies liberate us from constrains of space but they make our mobility seen, tracked, measured and controlled as well. Accepting this double-sidedness of mobile technologies is an inevitable condition of using them, still this ideological and ethical cost is difficult to see and very often goes unnoticed.

In the paper I will focus on different forms of artistic practices, which try to disclose or make the hidden dimension of hybrid reality visible. I will also propose critical reading of its influence on both public and private sphere. In this respect I will analyze works that not only use technology in a critical way but also take a form of activistic provocation that destabilizes and deconstructs notion of technology as transparent and neutral. On one hand I will analyze works that make zones of panoptic control recognizable by hacking wireless surveillance systems and questioning strategies of dataveillance (Rokeby, Teran, Lozano-Hemmer), on the other I will focus on critical interpretation of the use of mobile phones and GPS systems (Beloff, project Ashaver220) as technologies in which ‘freedom and control are one’.

Abstract

From Aristotle’s proposition that the soul never thinks without a mental image, to Kant’s call for non-representational ‘image-less’ rational thinking, and to the more recent attempts by post-modern philosophers1 to find dialectical solidarity between image-based, rational thinking and mathematical metaphysics, the exploration of the link between human thought and images has been an influential creative catalyst of Western philosophy and visual culture. In the present age of New Media and the worldwide web when images are stored and transmitted electronically as binary files, the question of whether thought can be expressed as (digital) image acquires new urgent significance, particularly given the mobile transmission, immersive gaming and virtual archiving that now become basic ingredients to our everyday lives. The question becomes: where can we locate the materiality of digital photographic images transmitted in rapid volleys across networks, shared between computers and beamed from one handheld device to another? How does materiality of the image emerge in an environment that no longer requires any concrete, physical presence?

Today the word on the page has ramified into (at least) oral performance, book arts, and text on the screen, with or without graphics, animation and sound. Hypertext is partly a bridge between the world of the book and the world of multimedia, but art made entirely of words is not going to go away. So I’m going to concentrate on hypertext and on texts made of words. Most of the issues I will discuss map onto my colleagues’ presentations as well.

I like very much the two questions printed in the program to describe this panel: Can traditional narrative make a successful transition into interactive media? Is a participatory space between author and audience possible without losing the pleasures of closure and individual uniqueness? To ask these questions is to reflect where most readers and most writers are today. But they are two really different questions, and the answer to one doesn’t necessarily determine the answer to the other.  think the first question, about traditional narrative, is, at
the surface level, the wrong question, and the answer is probably “no” – traditional narrative can’t make a successful transition, and why should it? New media often start their lives as
platforms for performance of old forms (e.g. films of staged plays), but they soon develop genres of their own, which depend on the aesthetic potential of the new medium itself. If electronic literature were nothing but pages on a screen, it would be a failure. But not to worry – it was clear as soon as computers were widely available that interactivity is the most interesting new potential offered by electronic literature. Hence hypertext. Yet the nostalgia for traditional narrative points to a deeper question, a dynamic which may be based in human biology and even physics, rather than based in culture or technology and susceptible to cultural change. It may be that verbal language is inherently linear

The paper presents the motivations, evolution, and directions behind the spatial sound performance tool named Live 4 Life. It aims to simplify the creation and control in real time of masses of spatialized sound objects on various kinds of loudspeaker configurations (stereo and particularly quadriphonic or octophonic setups, as well as domes of 16, 24 or 32 loudspeakers). This spatial research, which questions ways of associating rhythmic and spatial parameters, is based on the concept of free and open works, both from the point of view of form (improvisation) and in the diffusion of the code. The tool, which was initiated in 2011 and distributed in open source in 2022, has been conceived as a long-term dream against capitalism and loneliness. Several scenarios between (technical, social) death or symbiosis of this tool (with other programs, works and the visual representation field) are presented.

This short paper discusses the value and potential of live data feeds in live performance. Live data feeds offer a new kind of liveness – a characteristic that is prized in the performing arts. Dance and theatre experiments using movement and biometric data processed in real time have already taken place, using data from performers and spectators. Artworks by data artists such as Andrea Polli and David Bowen demonstrate the creative potential of data drawn from natural systems, such as meteorological data. Proponents of Gaia suggest that we adopt an understanding of the world as a multi-species network of living beings and systems, in which humans are integrated, not separate or superior. Using data from natural systems on stage could enable these phenomena to participate as dynamic, unpredictable forces, and thus contribute to a less anthropocentric portrayal of the world.

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT ) is a powerful general-purpose algorithm widely used in signal analysis. FFI’s are useful when the spectral information of a signal is needed, such as in pitch tracking or vocoding algorithms. The FFT can be combined with the Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) in order to resynthesize signals based on its analyses. This application of the FFT/IFFT is of particular interest in electro-acoustic music because it allows for a high degree of control of a given signal’s spectral information (an important aspect of timbre) allowing for flexible, and efficient implementation of signal processing algorithms.

This paper presents real-time musical applications using the IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation (ISPW) [Lindemann, Starkier, and Dechelle 1991] which makes use of FFT/IFFT based resynthesis for timbral transformation in a compositional context. Taking a pragmatic approach, the authors have developed a user interface in the Max programming environment [Puckette, 1988] for the prototyping and development of signal processing applications intended for use by musicians. Techniques for filtering, cross-synthesis, noise reduction, and dynamic spectral shaping have been explored, as well as control structures derived from real-time signal analyses via pitch-tracking and envelope following [Lippe & Puckette, 1881]. These real-time musical applications offer composers an intuitive approach to timbral transformation in electro-acoustic music, and new possibilities in the domain of live signal processing that promise to be of general interest to musicians.

This paper concerns several pieces composed and performed by the author between 1984-90. in the context of the computer music language HMSL, a widely used environment which supports experimentation in musical intelligences, live interactive programmable stimulus-response environments, and redefinitions of approaches to musical form. The specific pieces described include

• 1) B’rey’sheet (for voice and computer); 2) Simple Actions;
• 7) 17 Simple Melodies of the Same Length (for melodic instrumentalist and computer);
• 4) Cocks Crow, Dogs Park… (in collaboration with Melody Sumner and John Bischoff); and the most recent,
• 5) Three Studies (for instrumentalist and computer).

Each of these works explores a different form of interaction with the system, and each focusses on different problems in the performance of interactive intelligent computer music: dynamic timbre control, computer-aided decision making processes, and performer interaction. Ideas for further works are discussed, with particular attention placed on the development of programmable DBE’ technology under the HMSL platform, and the integration of timbral processes with larger scale formal ones.

This paper considers the practices of young women who live stream their high performance play on the North American game broadcasting platform Twitch.tv. These players represent cultural producers, e-sports fans, championship game winners, and regular competitive players broadcasting their play. Key themes produced in this research surround issues of networked access and participation, gender politics, and performance in mainstream e-sports, which are discussed from qualitative research with seven players who broadcast regularly in 2013 – 2015. During this time their viewership numbers ranged from under 50 to over six thousand per session, and they broadcast with a variety of motivations, incentives and awareness of their practice and mainstream e-sports in mind. In turning to Twitch broadcasting, as an alternative path towards involvement in mainstream e-sports, the productive labour of the participants is deeply engaged with DIY aesthetics and participatory culture. Through these performances, interconnected realizations and concerns around women and e-sports are voiced by the women who negotiate this new outlet of media sports culture everyday. In situating the everyday experiences of women who play at the high performance level of computer game play, alternatives to mainstream e-sports are revealed through dynamic human-non human relationships, which alter traditional forms of participation and remuneration in this new media sports ecology. Such practices go beyond revealing the changing relationships of female players as resourceful player-producers; through a lens of participatory culture, they also highlight the ongoing inequities for women within high performance game spaces and online gaming cultures.

Life in the era of biotechnology opens up opportunities but also brings challenges related to our values ​​and questions on how we want to see coexistence on our planet inhabited by many species.

The parasite is our case study and an interesting concept that we inherit from biology, but which is also addressed in humanism and philosophy. As humans, we commonly understand a parasite as a negative concept that suggests that someone or something benefits at our expense. However, French philosopher Michel Serres has thought differently about the parasite. According to him, the parasite is based on relations between different entities and that there is often noise in these relationships. Michel Serres refers to biologist Henri Atlan, who has argued that noise forces the system to reorganize in a way that incorporates noise as a part of the complex system. The idea of ​​noise included as a part of the system is quite far from today’s thought-processes with the development of bio/technology that typically aims at noiseless, error-free and aesthetically attractive results.

Therefore, although parasites are often associated with terms such as inhospitable, undesirable and disgusting, and they are seen to be located outside of art and technology, in this paper we argue that the concept of parasitical is tightly intertwined into our contemporary biotechnical lives.  The article relates the parasitic thinking by Michel Serres to an artistic mediation of the biological parasite, a tick.

This paper sketches the links between personal data and digital fabrication, and the creative opportunities that arise from that. Two artistic pieces, Twipology and Rabota, illustrate our arguments as they suggest an experience where digital fabrication becomes intimate, embodied and disruptive. Overall our talk outlines the premise for interacting with our physical world.

Personal Data
Our daily activities are increasingly recorded, captured, archived by way of the tools we use and the expansion of storage capacities: from emails, to photos, biometrics and a wide variety of logs. Clearly, individuals develop as well many creative outlets for these records, as we see them shared on numerous social network platforms.
The artworks Twipology and Rabota situate themselves in this context of aggregating data and using it to propose a new kind of user experience.

Specifically, as we can now monitor many types of behaviours and movements with countless sensors. These projects take that opportunity to translate the collected data into a physical manifestation or materialisation of common daily activities, respectively our Twitter feeds and our sleep patterns. Data becomes a commodity for design and fabrication [1].

Interactive Fabrication
These projects are part of a doctorate research that links emerging trends in personal fabrication with new possibilities of data tracking and collection. We’re here proposing to use human-based data as parameters for machine control in a fabrication process: the premise for interactive fabrication.

By the term “interactive”, I mean that a user can provide her own data as the numeric input for machine control, as opposed to the input that is usually sourced from a pre-determined geometry which is then translated into gCode by specific software (ie. MasterCam). In our investigation, we look for ways to generate the geometry and the gCode from human interactions.

Human-based data is generated usually from two main sources: sensor-based (i.e. heartbeats, gestures, temperature) or application-based (ie. emails, photos, text messages). With this research on interactive processes, we expand on early experiments done at on early experiments done at the Computational Design Lab at Carnegie Mellon [2].

We propose here that interactivity is an opportunity for involving users with fabrication
processes in a playful, intuitive, direct and affective manner [3]. It is not meant as a precise and a systematic design method although notions of control are addressed
in a sub-text.

Material traces and the un-production
Interactive fabrication is thought here as a modus operandi that invites users to fabricate things in a distinct way compared to most formal and professional contexts: meaning not in a linear process that requires a predesigned digital file to be fabricated. Thus the fabricated outcome or final result is not our primary purpose.

With digital fabrication tools, we can use tangible metaphors to comprehend the data that we accumulate in our everyday life. Beyond that, we question the current paradigm of production itself and its determinism. With these aesthetic experiences, we challenge the idea of efficiency and precision. In that sense, we capture a moment in a person’s life as a poetic material trace.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Mandala, Visualization, Data, Interactivity, Real-time, Cosmology, Mythology, Universe, Knowledge, Symbol, Graphics, Icon, Nature, Generative, Technology, Digital Art, Processing, Arduino, Center.

This paper presents the motivation, background, and implementation of Living Mandala: The Cosmic of Being, an interactive graphics installation that combines real-time data, multi-cultural mandalas, scientific imagery, cosmological symbols, and sound. Built with an open source programming language and environment, this living contemporary symbol is an exploration into uncharted territories of the human soul sculpted by our present time. Its interactive revolving graphical system visualizes our perceptions of life (microcosm) and the universe (macrocosm), our connections to ancient mythology, cosmology, and cultural heritage, and the relationships among humankind, science, technology, and nature in a globalized society. Merging cultural traces – art, history, science, and technology – this living organism alters every moment, responding to the movement, color, light, sound, and temperature of its surroundings. Following ancient quests, it separates indigenous mandalas from traditional cultural context to build one that is contemporary and universal.

One and half year living with kombucha drew a path through several domains (gastronomy and food, health, textile design, social practices) and various locations (from bio-hack lab to kitchen, art performance, design school, and brewery lab), diverging from a disciplinary point of view in favor of a “global design” (Papanek) approach that embraces co-dependencies (Haraway, Tsing).

The research “project living-room2” is an ironic take on consumer culture. It consists of a physical living room decorated with familiar furniture and objects from daily life: a white couch, a cabinet, a mirror, reminders of IKEA interior design. Wearing a HMD (Head Mounted Display) and carrying a handheld device, visitors can interact with the space and furniture interfaces, selecting different narratives and landscapes.

The project “Living Sculptures” consists in the realization of a creative research experiment in the field of Local Based Entertainment (LBE). Relating to the issue of avatar creation within the context of a virtual reality environment, the project studies new forms of interactions between individuals within a shared virtual space. More specifically, it explores the language of augmented virtuality. How can the participants’ bodies can be modified, following a Reality-Based Interaction (RBI) approach, in a way that transforms them into living and interactive sculptures? The following research presents the results of two iterations of the same experiment. The first was performed in collaboration with artists Lemieux and Pilon (4D art) during the year 2018, and the second takes the form of an independent immersive and interactive experiment. The new version allows three users to interact with each other under the guise of living sculptures.

DIY Pornography: Living and Breathing with Cybertypes
AFF.com is a massive transnational social network run by a corporate-driven American entertainment company that allows people to buy a membership and upload sexually explicit photos and videos. It is one of the leading commercial websites of an ongoing trend towards Internet sexuality as participatory digital media or DIY pornography, involving a blurring between selfhood and the ephemeral signs, myths, and pathways of netporn culture. Web users across the globe are encouraged to formulate and depict sexualized selves to get access to other people’s databases and arrange cyber encounters or actual sex dates.

This talk will draw attention to digital works that offer alternatives to the discourse of virtuality by making reference to their own technological bodies. An immanentist aesthetics of digital media understands their meaning to be embodied in their physical and codic architecture. Low-tech digital artworks offer alternatives to the discourse of virtuality and the corporate-sponsored myth of transparency by making reference to their own technological bodies. The talk draws on the “digital aesthetics” of Sean Cubitt, the criterion of which is materiality, as matter cannot be reduced to symbolic systems. Low-tech digital artworks assert their own materiality and the economic and social relationships in which they are embedded. These works for the Web insist that electronic media occupy not a “virtual” space but aphysical, global socioeconomic space. They invite a phenomenological understanding of online media in terms of our shared fragility, corporeality, and mortality.

Discourse of virtuality vs. material reality:
Against the tide of virtuality of electronic media, a popular counter-current is beginning to move in favour of the actual or the material (more on the distinction between these terms in a moment). From cinema to television to the internet, some of the most popular images appeal to the desire for the real and for the indexical: evidence that what the image represents actually occurred. In cinema, a new science fiction genre deals with “virtuality anxiety,” the fascinated fear that our real worlds will turn out to be virtual constructions. Movies like Fight Club, The Matrix, Strange Days, Nurse Betty, and the Spanish crossover success Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) play on popular anxieties that our everyday immersion in symbolic, computer-generated worlds is ruining our ability to distinguish between virtual and actual. (Though this can also be seen as an enchantment with the indiscerniblism of actual and virtual.) Now that so many spectacular images are known to be computer simulations, television viewers are tuning in to Big Brother, COPS and When Good Housepets Go Bad. Internet surfers are fixating on live webcam transmissions in a hunt for unmediated reality. The re-issue of archaic computer games like PacMan speaks, if not exactly to a desire for indexicality, then for the warm, gritty immediacy that these once-cold-seeming games now connote.

This paper is a part of the panel “Locating Cyberfeminism” that seeks to present a varied set of cyberfeminist theories and art practices by situating them within specific political, technological and cultural contexts. While presenting papers that address issues of cultural difference within cyberfeminist art and aesthetics, this panel also attempts to widen the possibility of how cyberfeminism could be imagined. It could be enabled through the inclusion of projects, theories and practices that take place geographically and/or conceptually outside of what one can simplify as Western cyberfeminist trope. This trope often finds its origins in individual identity and body centered analysis. While acknowledging their immense influence on today’s situation with women, art and technology, this panel seeks to locate them within specific histories of Western (often white and middle-class) feminism, thus, opening up spaces for other histories and genealogies. Without dividing too neatly Western and non-Western locations, all presentations aim at contributing ‘other’ cyberfeminisms, often relying on comparative perspective to be helpful in our recognition of the politics of location and histories of cultural difference within this growing field.

In my paper I seek to provide a comparative analysis of cross-cultural art collaborations that are focused on the art works of subRosa cyberfeminist art collective. First, I outline the terminological difficulty using the concept of cyberfeminism for the purposes of my analysis. It is possible to argue very effectively for doing away with either parts of cyberfeminism especially today and in post-colonial situation: cyber art for being a passing fad and not political enough, while feminism portion for being assumed as a universal struggle for all women around the world, with a defi ning standard set, arguably in a colonialist fashion by Western white middle class women. However, it is more effective, I claim, to move beyond the terminological battles towards using this term as an umbrella for a variety of conceptual and creative practices that deal with gender and technology in the same fashion as ecofeminism has done for women and environment. This section of my paper will end with a certain takeover of this term that has been somewhat out of fashion lately, obsolete and therefore, becoming interesting again, especially in cyberfeminist postcolonial and post-communist ‘periphery’. Periphery is usually defined through working with art movements and concepts which are old and left behind by creative intellectual centers of the Western centers. The culture of innovation and creative consumption is looking for the next big thing, while cyberfeminism, like the music of the 90s, has become a rarity once again.

Second, I move on to establish the work of subRosa cyberfeminist art collective as a rare example of working with risky and unpopular topics in the area of art, science and technology: namely, issues of class, race and cultural difference in relation to technology and latest biomedical sciences. This work is not so unique in other parts of the world, and unites them with many artists who seek to combine “art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work” (from www.cyberfeminism.net). Even though new media and electronic art scene has been slow in recognizing the importance of class, race, sexual or cultural difference, today it is catching up. After all, how long can we be inspired by our own merger with the machine? Often this recognition manifests itself as an exotic element, a spiritual or political “add-on” from places that are foreign to the mainstream ear (in terms of gender, it often leads to some references to ‘those Asian women assembling computers’), rather than attention to wider and more fundamental processes of economic and cultural imperialism. Therefore, I argue that certain subRosa’s works exhibit, albeit indirectly, what Derrida called globa-latinisation, especially international collaborative works. SubRosa’s insistence on recognizing global differences among women, being as ‘old-fashioned’ as cyberfeminism, is revealed in their texts and aesthetic processes, and is explored in my paper. Specifically, I am going to focus on the way in which subRosa deals with reproductive biomedical technologies.

The machine as a character has a long history dating from ancient times with the creation of automata in Ancient Egypt, Greece and China, and then more recently between the 14th and 18th century. However, the appearance of robots as entities acquired a more important role in the beginning of the 20th century. It is not until the work of Karel Capek when, in his 1921 play R.U.R., he introduced machines as human replacements for labour that we began to refer to these mechanic constructions as robots. Even though this definition survives until today, robotic representations and their function have been explored from diverse perspectives, ranging machinic constructions, to a means to exploring notions of identity, autonomy, psychology, sexuality, politics etc. However, such approaches bypass an alternate, hidden history of automata – one that understands the development of the robot within the context of a rich tapestry that explores parallels between past and present, East and the West. Through an analysis of the automaton tradition – its technology, its function, and the philosophical issues it inspired – it is possible to gain insight into how this practice inspired and consequently drove the    development of modern day cinema, theatrical performance, device interaction and broader mainstream entertainment innovations. In this panel we will consider the nature of Human Robot Interaction relations, suggesting some new ways of thinking about these issues that may be generally applicable to the history and development of the creation of contemporary new media art mediums.

This paper addresses the ways in which meaning and experience of mediated narratives translates to exhibition space by focusing on the direct application of curatorial design to the co-production of artworks and exhibition strategies involved in the curatorial project, ‘Remote’ (Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, Hobart 2006).

Discussion will centre upon:
How the character of distributable media was translated through spatial practice resulting in the exhibitions distinctive scenography;

1.  How a convergence of concepts related to site-specificity and distributed aesthetics influenced the resulting exhibition and its inte rpretation of contemporary networked culture; and
2.  How curatorial design was applied towards the exhibitions realization by illustratively focussing on a detailed description of the strategies employed in co-developing ‘Littoral Map “ Tasmania’, a locative media artwork by British artist Pete Gomes.

The realization of this specific mixed media artwork involved an exploration of distributed spatial practice. Conceived to examine real and imagined locations, Littoral Maps hyper-linking and cross-referencing between separate but connected locales contributes to transforming the general experience of the overall exhibition.

This investigation is drawn from an overarching project, which focuses upon virtuality and the art of exhibition. This larger project involves practice-based research methodology combined with reflective and speculative critical theorization of institutional practices. Representative of the interdisciplinary nature of this research, this paper will offer a theoretical perspective of how the exhibition, as a form in and of itself, mediates the social interaction and interpretative experience of network-based artworks in a site-specific exhibition setting. Illustratively by drawing upon this practical application, the resulting installation will illustrate both critical and constructive design thinking.

Forming an integral part of this cases exposition, the presentation of the paper will draw upon extensive supporting documentation of the exhibition, including developmental design and visual records of the installation, In addition, a full resource of the project is available online through the dedicated exhibition website.

The concept of ‘location’ is a central concern to socially‑engaged practitioners. Breaking from a focus specifically on the physical and social geography of participatory projects, artists and researchers Alexia Mellor and Anthony Schrag suggest the need to examine ‘locating the artist’ in regards to cultural policy‑making, the institution, and ultimately as facilitator of dialogue and change within the physical and online communities in which they work. Our research takes as a starting point the Artist Placement Group and their pioneering projects of the 1960s and 1970s that located artists directly into governmental institutions and businesses, and looks at the social, digital and political contexts of socially‑engaged practices today: How are artists working within these settings? What do these institutions demand in return? How does locating creative thinking from within structures create space for transformation to a general public? And, in a digital age, how can artists explore the tensions between the specific and the global locale?

In addition to a scholarly paper that would explore these ideas, we propose creating an intervention into public space where the ideas could be further explored by an accompanying group and where we could discuss and challenge the ideas raised in our research. Using the format of the ‘Diwaniya’ (originally a Kuwaiti place of gathering and discussion, with roots in Bedouin culture), we propose a DIY‑waniya: a bespoke, portable tent structure that can taken into various public spaces in Dubai, designed to engage ISEA participants and the Dubai community in conversation in discussions about location, as well as to propose models of instigating social engagement. In addition, we plan on online version of the DIY‑waniya to open the dialogue to another audience unable to attend the conference that can also create global discussion around notions of art and location.

Background
The blogosphere allows for the networked, decentralised, distributed discussion and deliberation on a wide range of topics. Based on their authors’ interests, only a subset of all blogs will participate in any one topical debate, with varying intensity, based on a variety of sociocultural factors: a blogger’s time, interest, and awareness of current discussion; their status in the blogosphere; the topical focus of their contributions; and their political ideology, gender, age, location, sociodemographic status, as well as the language they write in.

In combination, these factors mean that networked debate on specific topics in the blogosphere is characterised by clustering. Individual clusters in the topical debate may be able to be distinguished according to certain factors: for example, their topical specialisation (focussing on specific sub-topics of the wider debate) or their shared identity (e.g. a common national, ethnic, or ideological background).

Such blog-based debate is difficult to conceptualise under the general terms of the Habermasian public sphere model (which as formulated depends on the existence of a dominant mass media to ensure that all citizens are able to be addressed by it); at a smaller level, however, it may be possible to understand networked discussion on specific topics in the blogosphere to constitute what may be described as a public spherule (Bruns, 2008). It may be that when layered on top of one another, the public spherules on various topics of public interest can stand in as a replacement for the conventional public sphere (whose existence is undermined by the decline of the mass media as mass media; see Castells, 2007). This networked public sphere would necessarily be more decentralised than the conventional, Habermasian model of the public sphere.

Our project aims to develop a rigorous and sound methodology for the study of this networked public sphere.

Poster Statement

Summary:

As East Asia accelerates from medieval culture and consciousness, through a compressed period of industrial modernization, into the communications era; the convergence of living sacred traditions and information technology presents a deep ontological enigma. Starting from the premise that the ‘image’ is an index of the ‘locus of reality’, this poster session will attempt to ‘locate the image’ in an age of instantaneous communications, virtual reality and hypermedia.

Abstract

In etymology, the word ‘image’ is linked with the Latin ‘imitari’, which is the root of the word ‘imitate’. In the Medieval view the likeness between any thing and any representation of It must be analogical. Here ‘analogy’ is ‘similitude’ in the sense of ‘simile’ rather than that of ‘simulacrum’. Medieval representation imitates the idea of the thing and not its substance.
From the Islamic standpoint, the law of all phenomenon can be symbolized geometrically in the way that space, seen as extension, is created by unfolding through the dimensions and can be ‘folded up’ again, leading back to the point of unity. The confusion caused by sculpture in the
round, chiaroscuro, perspective and other illusionistic representations in the process of folding up explains the prohibition of images in Islamic art. The image of a Hindu devata, latent in canonical prescription, must be inwardly visualized by the icon maker in an act of ‘non-differentiation’. This inner image is the model from which he proceeds to execute in a chosen material. The viewer in turn applies his or her own ‘imaginative energy’ to the physical icon, ‘realizing’ the devata within the ‘immanent space in the heart’. All images are interior and reality itself is imaged within consciousness. In modern consumer capitalism everything that was once directly lived becomes representation as images proliferate outside of the viewers control. This ‘spectacle’ has been described as capital accumulated until it ‘becomes an image’. It is the ‘televisual’ image of our desires; of desire itself. It alienates us as it permeates our consciousness. In works like ‘Theme Song’ (1973), Vito Accoinci assaults the limit of this image. He implicates the viewer and paradoxically
compounds the alienation of a medium that promises interaction but does not permit it.
Today the ‘alienation of the spectacle’ has dissolved Into what has been called ‘the ecstasy of communication’. There is a ‘loss of private space’ and simultaneously, a ‘loss of public space’. This is the ontology of Paul Sermon’s ‘Telematic Dreaming’ (1993). With electronic interactivity,
the body appears to be situated wherever ‘its effect is’. Enabled by ‘microtechnology’, consciousness has left the physical body and merged with the image in an interactive
‘outer-space’.

The advent of smart phones equipped with GPS technologies and constant connection to the internet has fostered a suite of applications allowing developers and owners to associate data and information with physical locations. Longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates create geofences around physical locations and platforms such as FourSquare use a combination of established addresses and crowd sourcing to add locations to their database. FourSquare as a social media game, with members vying to become the mayor of a location, has led to the FourSquare database becoming amongst the largest and most active index of georeferenced places on the internet. The virtuous circle of users of the mobile app, ascribing their attachment to a place by ‘checking‑in’, and places wanting to be part of a global map, means to have your longitude and latitude in the FourSquare database is an important survival strategy. The database is the new map, and if you’re not in it, you won’t be on it. In the emerging battleground for locative media services, Google Maps appeared to have a distinct advantage, dominating mapping services (43% market share). But it transpires that they do not own all of the data that matters to people. Owning a base map is one thing, but owning where people like to go is likely to prove even more valuable and what if the basemap is adaptable? In this paper the authors present a third condition for locative media practice, where geofences are connected to moving objects and basemaps are customisable to the user’s needs, abilities and desires. In digital and network mapping, longitudes and latitudes are merely numbers in a database, open to constant change. In support of their theoretical premise the authors present three funded research projects that introduce the application of geofences to moving things: people, buses, clouds and basemaps.