Presentation Data Table

Wayfaring hones our ability to discern familiar and alien settings, reinforcing our sense of drifting or belonging. Ways of wayfaring evolve technically and cognitively: while star path steering of ancient vessels meant instrument-free navigation, the “star paths” of today’s spacecraft are largely controlled by remote apparatus. Navigation can be construed as a kind of exploratory tuning whereby we can access infinite or infinitesimal spatial and temporal scales, in contrast to location and situatedness which imply positioning, thus responsibility for the paths traced by our journeying. This paper suggests that the more we develop our wayfaring skills, the more we need to celebrate (in) specific times and places through aesthetic experience that uniquely tunes our responses in, and to, the Anthropocene.

This paper starts from examining the notion of location neutrality, contrasting artworks that feature a locatitive media or location independent aspect.

Art in these works serves to enable reimagining of a place, a defamiliarisation of the familiar. Indeed a recent rise in the popularity of psychogeography, has led to a number of interesting performances and installations which seek to create new juxtapositions between the physical environment and imagined spaces.

One recent work was the remapping of Blooms (Ulysees, Joyce) walk through Dublin onto any city in the world using a web interface to generate the new walk. It takes site specificity and neutrality to an abrupt intersection. Interestingly, due to copyright issues with the underlying map data, people in UK could not use the interface for generating maps for UK cities.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis connects with an imagined subterranean landscape that underlies our own. In her works, location is neutral or sited upon a certain facility (e.g. ice rinks) as the works explore the interconnected underworld, searching for life in coresamples, icecores and atmospheric moisture.

Atau Tanaka’s work Net_Derive seeks to extend artwork beyond the gallery into the urban environment. It is based upon mobile and locative technologies.

These are but a few artists engaging with locative media. Other examples will be drawn from Blast Theory, the play of GEOcaching, Beatrez Dacosta’s PigeonBlog and FoAM’s TRG amongst others.

I will argue that location neutrality can exist in some works, but that these are a special case, and overwhelmingly location is a significant component.

‘Fun‑o‑Hunar’ is an Urdu term often translated into English as Art and Crafts. The term comes from an ancient Persian concept that views art as a purpose of life with people, time, places, things and events running along the threads of current technologies of that time.Locationally Yours discusses the intersection of art and technology in South Asia at the crossroads of emergence of new media art forms from the East and the West. New media art is constantly evolving with technology and the art world and the public continue the debate prompted by the challenges and tensions created when technology becomes integrated into the human creative process. There are artists and art movements from Pakistan and the rest of south Asia who are using technology in art that are at the heart of the debate – those who are pushing the definition of art to its limits. Developing discourse from the works of established and emerging new media artists from South Asia, Locationally Yours brings a new perspective to the ongoing artistic and cultural exchange between East and West and constructs a dialogue that is informing the development of new media art both in the East and West. The discussion will be supported by a short video documentary on South Asian new Media Artists and their work processes followed by discussion.

Our paper examines how the production of participative hypermedia documentaries with mobile devices can foment subjectivities and generate social movement within the settlements of the Landless Rural Workers Movement in the state of Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil. The research project was initially underwritten by a CNPq/SEC/MINc 2013 grant, with on‑going research underwritten by funding from the Proext 2013 and Proext 2014 Competitions “Contributions of Interactive Art in ICT Education for Teacher Training”. We draw upon the appropriation of locative media and mobile digital devices to     establish links between the creation of subjectivity as emergent identity, the detection of memory as integrative process within social movement and the organization of parallel creative economies as alternative valuation. The theoretical thrust of our work couples Simondon’s communications theory and philosophy of technics with Guattari’s activist ecosophy. We examine the micro‑politics of the quotidian and memory as integrative of experience to bring forth singularizing experiences through the production of participative documentaries where both sender and receptor become generators of content mediated through a generalized web of connectivity which provides singular local value within global connections. Thus, we seek to generate an enabling ecology of practices which reposition the functionalities of digital technologies and the potentials of web‑based social media. This entails a shift from digital technologies and media as dynamic delivery systems of commercial information to the exercise of a sited, non‑sited ecology of practices which Guattari saw as being “created within the perspective of a new aesthetic‑political paradigm.” For both Guattari and Simondon, technology defines an active and vital realm of potential, not as a means to an end, but as an enabling ecology which interlinks aesthetic and ethical concerns. From a technical standpoint, digital technologies provide popular access to the means of production of professional quality content whereas web‑based social media provide unprecedented possibilities for dissemination and distribution of cultural production. In contrast to the sitedness of the participative documentary video production, locative media simultaneously bring into play a double function of mobility and fixity so that location need no longer be considered as a stable center of production or dissemination. By moving through space, the everyday user of locative media is a nomadic attractor of conditioned content as well as a radiator of data which retextures the moving location as a personalised, shifting informational landscape mediated by the locative devices. Modes of mediation of locative media continually reterritorialize the moving user according to a sham façade of choice. To counter this mediatic colonization, we situate these hybrid moving bodies with their wireless devices under the aegis of Guattari’s ethico‑aesthetic paradigm. As mediated cognitive subjects, users pass from being passive recipients of hyper‑targetted commercial hype into active agents of informational production and dissemination. Within this enhanced informational landscape composed with mobile devices, articulated, communicated territories can hopefully spring forth, both in the sense of being sited locally and linked globally, but also in terms of the creation of technologically mediated narratives and content as expressive of heightened subjectivity.

The introduction of a physical location as a criterion for determining access to digital contents has forged a strong relationship between physical contexts and digital information giving rise to what has been defined as hybrid space. It is, precisely, in the overlapping of digital and physical that the hybrid space is generated – carrying new opportunities to unveil the space around us through curatorial narratives. This paper presents a project that I have conceived and curated consisting of a web platform, called that’s contemporary, and its mobile version, an app for iOS and Android titled That’s App. Representing the city as an ever‑changing assembly of events and exhibitions displayed on a map, these platforms unfold curatorial narratives that users can interact with in digital space and enact in physical space. The     aim is to extend the experience of one exhibition at the time to the overall experience of the city. In this sense, the city becomes an evolving and never‑ending exhibition to explore both in digital and physical space (i.e. hybrid space). In this paper, focusing attention on the mobile app, two dimensions are considered: the digital interface of     the platform, which provides potential narratives of the city and the usage of these narratives made by users in hybrid space. Indeed, through activities such as walking, seeing, sharing and commenting, users play an active role in their experience of the city as way‑finders and meaning‑makers ultimately becoming co‑producers of their own exhibitionary narratives. This type of exhibition exists and unfolds through the user‑experience of it – becoming an entity in an  on‑going state of transformation. It triggers an experience of the city space that is, borrowing Umberto Eco’s term, an ‘open work’  – an unstable field of options that will prompt users towards a series of varying experiences (1989).

By critically self‑reflecting upon my own curatorial practice in constructing That’s App, this paper applies the Actor‑Network Theory (Callon 1991; Latour 1992) to trace the formation of a hybrid exhibitionary space through the creation of locative media experiences. Instead of trying to define ‘what is’ a hybrid exhibitionary space and, consequently, losing specific ways in which it could be generated and appear, I intend to grasp it ‘along the way’ attempting to grip its actor‑network and detect the mechanisms in which it functions. In doing so, I present That’s App mainly by following its hybrid curatorial narratives as enacted by two potential users in Milan, whose I have fortuitously named Ann and Andrea. This method will allow me to share the curatorial process pursued in the development of these hybrid curatorial narratives and, at the same time, providing a possible way in which we might address hybrid exhibitionary spaces.

In 2005, I began work on a hybrid video game and installation environment called Playas: Homeland Mirage, which was exhibited at ACM Multimedia 2005 and ISEA/ZeroOne 2006. During the course of development, and after several iterations of the project, I became aware of intrinsic problems when using the video game engine for the purposes of an interactive installation. I began to research video games and the current literature related to ludology and quickly realized that very little was understood or documented about the issues with which I was concerned. The use of video game technology in the production of certain artworks reveals deeper problems related to issues of immersion in virtual spaces. I sought to engender a critically reflective experience that encouraged participants to reconsider their notions of the world and their place within it; often, technology seemed to thwart that desire, mirroring a familiar critique of video games in general. As a result, I embarked on a trajectory of research concerning the functioning of this work.

Oliver Grau, Brenda Laurel, and others have recognized the effect immersion has on the critically reflective response of viewers. Using methods from Naturalistic Inquiry, I have performed a qualitative analysis using Playas as a case study. Semi-structured interviews of participants who have interacted with the work form the basis of an investigation into the functioning of critical reflection. This paper will discuss the findings of this inquiry in the context of contemporary visual art. The paper will illustrate how, despite some claims to the contrary, mediation requires us to re-address fundamental art-historical issues such as critical reflection. Rather than approaching media with an essentialist “||” (logical operator, or) disposition, we must incorporate lessons from the past, synthesizing a future that takes advantage of the meaning-generation potential of digital media using the metaphor of the logical operator, “&&”.

The talk by Marko Peljhan explores the tensions between the emancipatory and destructive potentials of technological systems for data aggregation and distribution, radio and related media fields. From the history of the satellite, life in the Arctic, to the realities of a modern battlefield.

The wars on the territory of former Yugoslavia from 1991 to 1999 have transformed multiple landscapes on multiple scales. These range from deeply emotional, personal and psychic, to the technological, techno-political and even strategic fields. As the wars started in 1991, one of the first visible and tangible consequences was that the skies went silent. Air traffic in one of the more congested air corridors in Europe stopped. No contrails were visible for months, and when they reappeared, they were a consequence of military, UN or other war related traffic. Air traffic control communications all but ceased. But one particular landscape that accelerated in the other direction almost to full saturation was the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. Telecommunications suddenly became a vital, congested and deadly tool in the hands of the opposing military factions.

This paper investigates how FM transmission can contribute to the public understanding of locational identity and agency in urban areas. How have transmission‑based projects developed specifically within cities and how can the appropriation of pre‑existing architecture offer an alternative to the development of homogenous municipal landscapes? The authors have created the media project Lomas On‑site Listening Station (LOLS), a site‑specific, solar‑powered radio transmission installed within an empty billboard located in Albuquerque, NM. A compressor microphone fastened to the appropriated structure of the abandoned billboard picks up ambient sounds such as the hum of traffic along the heavily travelled nearby highways, the wind, and the sounds of passersby. All of these sounds are broadcast in real time on an FM signal within several thousand feet of the billboard, creating a hyper‑local listening station that allows any person to become part of the project if they choose to do so. This work will be examined in the context of other radio transmission art works and projects that appropriate or imitate pre‑existing architectural forms.

The Expanded Animation Symposium is an annual event at the media art festival Ars Electronica. Since 2013 the symposium has featured 200 experts (i.e., artists, researchers, cultural workers, and curators) in the expanded field of animation.

The video and online documentation are essential because the conference focuses mainly on lectures, artistic presentations, and panel discussions. Such symposia on animation and media art are only possible through cooperation with different partners (e.g., festivals, institutions, and universities). In many cases, a big challenge is the low level of funding and restricted resources.

In the case of the Expanded Animation Symposium, cooperation between Ars Electronica and the Department of Digital Media at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and other partners enabled the production of such an event in the context of media education. Students attended relevant media production courses and were included in the organization of the symposium as equal partners. This article explains the various tasks of organizing, documenting, and archiving the symposium and shows how students successfully became part of this process over the last ten years.

Abstract

Long Paper

“Composing ‘s one thing, performing ‘s another, listening ‘s a third. What can they have to do with one another?”                                                                                                                                                      _John Cage, Experimental Music: Doctrine, Silence, p. 15

In this paper we hope, among other things, to describe various works that are interactive avant Ia lettre, or exhibit interactive qualities without actually being interactive. Time. Is it necessary? How does time get into, and how does it stay out of, art works that use recent technologies?
Meaning. How do artists put meaning Into art made under the influence of computers? How do viewers of this art get meaning out? Where is meaning located in these works? Does meaning mean anything? Or should we rather be thinking about power relations, desire, and textuality?
Intention. In interactive works does what the artist Intended count more, less, the same as it always did? Do we have to consult the artist to know how what to make of the work? This paper looks at some aspects of these questions, referring to the work by or about Slavoj Zizek,
Richard Wollheim and Roy Shafer.

Intro

Almost a year ago, after the end of the trial of O.J. the New York Post ran a front page that consisted of an image of O.J. Simpson with a zipper for a mouth. It was a composite. of course, and without question a journalistic joke. Actually I think there are at least two jokes intended. Most obviously. the Image is an instant commentary on OJ’s abrupt withdrawal from a planned TV interview in which he was scheduled to ‘reveal all’ . His mouth is zipped shut. But I think the Post is also making a broader joke about the very idea of the newspaper photo. The Image foregrounds the idea that photography is now as reliable guide to recent facts as Illustration. Of course everyone knows this. We are, after all, in the Digltal Age. But this widespread knowledge hasn’t resulted in a change in our attitude towards supposedly ‘documentary’ photography, even when the manipulability of the photo is thrust in our face. Tomorrow’s picture of a Mafia boss, or Princess Diana, Hurricane Herbert, the Kurds, or Saddam himself, will be still taken as reliable evidence of something that occurred. In other words, no matter how blatantly it is undercut, the photograph retains Its old place in our epistemological framework. The New York Post, or any other newspaper, even in its World Wide Web version, relies on an acceptance of photography – photographs are one the ways that the news is delivered, and the news consists of facts about the world. Mere knowledge of the easy transformability of any photograph is not enough to shake its ideological baggage.

The current ‘molecular turn’ and its accompanying ‘biologism’ has led contemporary artists to effectively construct links to non human ‘otherness’ while abstracting from previously dominant ‘cognitivism’. Biotechnological art that goes beyond metaphors and representation stages the very presence of the manipulated other (animals, plants, plantimals, tissue cultures etc.) in performative displays. By making themselves into Guinea Pigs for biotechnological self-experimentation, inserting (their) genes into plants and bacteria, co-culturing cells or setting up trans-species collaborative situations, artists question models of alterity by the means of producing authentic immediacy. As opposed to hypermediacy – which in terms of Grusin & Bolter’s ‘remediation’ theory means looking at the media – biomedia itself is most frequently employed in art to look through the media in order to achieve an immediacy of presentation. However, these displays are in turn linked to a network of hypermedial connections and paratextual discourses. Some works may question species barriers, others can be seen as postmodern vanitas – but is non human centered art even possible? This paper addresses volitionally post-anthropocentric art practices and their (in)ability to confer agency to their subjects and objects.

Manovich defines the trend of the “aestheticisation of information tools” as resulting from their increased use in non-work environments such as the home. He claims that the interfaces’ “associations with work and office culture and the emphasis on efficiency and functionality came to be replaced by new references and criteria. These included being friendly, playful, pleasurable, aesthetically pleasing, expressive, fashionable, signifying cultural identity, and designed for emotional satisfaction. Accordingly, the modernist design formula “form follows function” came to be replaced by new formulas such as “form follows emotion”.”

This paper makes a critical analysis of graphic user interfaces in order to define the characteristics and priorities of the “aesthetic interface”. It is demonstrated that the aesthetic interface often avoids standard interface design conventions in order to disrupt expectations of efficiency and instead elicit a state of “mindfulness” in users. Play is identified as a vital device in this quest for user attention.

Rather than simply cosmetic, it is argued that the highly stylised, overt nature of the aesthetic interface represents acceptance and exploitation of the mediatory role of the interface. In contrast, conventional interface aims of transparency indicate a denial of the necessity of mediation between system and user via the interface.

The conspicuous mediation of the aesthetic interface and its shift in priorities from control and efficiency to experience and play demands what Manovich describes as a “form follows emotion” design formula. In conclusion, the paper considers how such a formula is represented in design and development practices and references theoretical frameworks and development processes of entertainment media already familiar with emotive, experiential engagement of an audience.

‘Lost City of Mer’ is a virtual reality (VR) interactive experience combined with a smartphone app that immerses players in a fantasy undersea civilization devastated by ecological disaster caused by global warming. The project aims to harness the immersive and empathetic potential of VR to address climate change and create a sense of urgency in the player with regard to their personal carbon footprint. Players are invited to help rebuild the lost world of Mer and its devastated ecosystem in VR by re-establishing its unique flora and fauna, and fighting ongoing dangers and threats, with the aim of bringing back to life its mysterious Mer-people inhabitants. Guided by a solitary seal spirit named Athina players try to save the Mer population from extinction, in the process learning how their real-world actions impact the world around them. The experience is based on real science, but told through fantasy, as it draws on the cross-cultural myth of the mermaid to appeal to people across the globe.

Artist Meredith Warner situates lost, knitted items by unraveling and re-knitting found objects to the location they were found thus integrating alien objects into the surroundings. Here, the steady artist’s hand becomes the intermediary between alien and location. Similar strategies are seen in several locative media projects using strategies of urban performances to interweave otherwise dislocated people and their surroundings.

In Rider Spoke, Blast Theory transforms the City of London into a repository of personal memories by situating participants via bikes and mobile phones. Urban spaces devoid of personality become carriers of personal and poetic narratives through participants’ performances of their private memories. Likewise, Janet Cardiff’s audio walks situate the listener through a localized journey with mobile media (soundtrack, video, and/or photographs) thus composing a complex investigation of location, time, and physicality by converting passive perception to active performance. In both cases, participants are urged to investigate the immediate surroundings through the mobile media they are carrying.
Contrarily, the increasingly ubiquitous satellite navigation devices are repeatedly misleading and dislocating users, thus forcing authorities to erect warning signs alerting drivers of the faulty media devices even though these devices are supposed to be an aid through their location awareness. Instead, they create location-numb people behaving like robots towards their environment, driving into lakes and entering highways in the wrong direction. The paper will investigate how wayfinding can be a poetically situated performance and examine how the growing locative media industry can learn from the location aware performative strategies employed by artists using mobile media to create situated and urban performances for the curious participant.

The sculptural installations “Love Motels for Insects” began in Central America in 2001 as an investigative reaction to the intense arthropod diversity found within Neotropical rainforests. Attempting to attract insects, Ballengée set-up sculptures made from black (ultra-violet) lights and bed-sheets placed in the forest floor. Within moments hundreds of flying visitors came- Female moths released chemicals to attract mates and consequently “painted” the blank canvas, beetles hungrily lumped one upon the other while releasing vibrant colored eggs and primordial fluids- a kind of arthropod abstract expressionism. Fascinated and inspired by this initial experience, Ballengée began creating UV-light sculptures and public nocturnal field-trips around the world. Variations have been installed in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. At each location the arthropods reproduce and create pheromone paintings and the public participates by photographing visiting insects. Through this performative practice, art and science research becomes a transformative catalyst towards ecological awareness and cross-species interaction.

In the imaginary collective, insects hold a singular place. They are a perverted representation of the ornithological figure. In our analysis, we will demonstrate how Ballengée stimulates reflexes of the imaginary unconscious. Supported by Bachelard’s theory (L’air et les songes), we will confront the concept of the “imagination of the air” to Ballengée’s sculptural installation. We will see in which measure this piece, sculpture of living or performative drawings, substitutes the hand of men for the wings of animals. Taken in the oniric dynamic, “Love Motel for insects” is a suspension of the aerial fly prolonged in a terrestrial fly. The earth explained by the sky, the “imagination of the air” taken in the ephemeral impulse gives birth to the impalpable writing of a temporary fly.

Lucid Dream explores how humans experience nature through the perception of plants. This work applies intelligent computing to interpret the biofeedback of plants in response to environmental stimuli and extend it to the artificial space for human perception.

Creative responses to the new technologies of virtual reality (VR) will rest with those for whom the burden of the world has become unspeakable. In the hands of the disenchanted – the artists, the intellectuals, and the philosophers – VR represents a challenge, an opportunity, but ultimately a necessary expression of experience in the electronic era. A final overture towards the reconciliation of technological utopianism with the human spirit. Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge – and the leap taken from that point. Boundaries are made by those who cross them. When art, literature and music no longer offer the viewer, the listener, or the reader a compelling alternative, escape, or meaningful reflection on what has traditionally been defined as the sensory world, new creative forms will be developed to take their place.

We are moving from an age of collaborative computing into an age of pervasive computing. Electronic technology represents for us the development of an external central nervous system. And inevitably, our hearts will truly beat within the machine. The symbiotic relationship with electronic technology is a very intimate one, and bears close scrutiny. In particular, the media of VR represents an undisguised extension of our needs and desires and abilities. Applications of these technologies, whether for medical imaging, computer-aided design, or interactive virtual environments, will suffer if not informed and guided by a recognition and respect for the sacred. Ritual must be incorporated into a media which threatens to be overwhelmed by the profane – linear comprehension and manipulation of pure information.

This paper will present recent developments and current applications of virtual reality technologies in the pornographic publishing and tourist industries. The ‘recreational’ industries of tourism and pornography have already been changed by the western world’s tendency toward the creation of virtual environments and experiences. Telephone sex and high budget amusement theme parks offer the opportunity to momentarily escape into alternate worlds.

The World Travel and Tourism Council reporting that world travel generates a figure equalling 5.5% of the planet’s gross national product, described tourism as the world’s largest industry. Pornography also generates high revenues. The release or escape which these industries enable, will be heightened through the development and application of virtual reality systems which provide the environments and experience with none of the inconveniences or distractions.

Les technologies intellectuelles et les dispositifs de communication connaissent en cette fin du XXe siecle des mutations massives et radicales. En consequence, les ecologies cognitives sont en voie de reorganisation rapide et irreversible. La brutalite de la destabilisation culturelle ne doit pas nous decourager de discerner les formes emergentes les plus positives socialement et de favoriser leur developpement.

En particulier, Ie developpement de la communication assistee par ordinateur et des réseaux numériques planetaires peut être interpreté comme la realisation d’un projet plus ou moins bien formulé celui de la constitution délibérée de formes nouvelles d’intelligence collective, plus souples, plus démocratiques, fondées sur la réciprocité et le respect des  singularités. En ce sens, on pourrait detinir I’intelligence collective comme une intelligence partout distribuee,
continuellement valoriste et mise en synergie en temps reel. Ce nouvel ideal pourrait remplacer l’intelligence artificielle comme mythe mobilisateur du developpement des technologies du
numerique.

In Machine Biography, we are making a predictive biography of the future year 2050, of Clara Boj and Diego Díaz, using deep neural networks trained from all our digital activity (GPS locations, digital conversations, photographs, videos, etc.) compiled during 2017. Year in which we hacked our mobile phones with spyware software that captured all this information to generate the artwork Data Biography, composed with 365 printed books (one for each day with a total of 40k pages) and a cinematographic movie of 24 hours long. In this new project, we are using this data to train different deep neural networks that are subsequently generating our forecast activity during the year 2050 and we are reprinting the generated data to create another 365 books and another 24-hour film that constitutes the work Machine Biography; a fictional and predictive biography created by artificial intelligence where the limits of the true and the false are blurred and the veracity of the information itself is questioned. It is proposed to analyze the creative capacity of artificial intelligence to question the possibility of this technology to sentience our world and to be able to predict the future of our lives.

This paper is about the relationship between technological change and socio-cultural change. In particular it is about the position of the artist with respect to these types of change. The origin of the Art/Science schism, the history of the technophilia of the art community and the contemporary signs of reconvergence are examined. In conclusion the paper speculates on appropriate activities for art and artists in the post industrial context.

The technology of a culture and its world view are bound to each other in an isomorphic symbiosis (a chicken and egg analysis is beside the point). This was true in Plato’s day: the contemporary technologies of potting and weaving structure Plato’s images; and in Descartes: the idea of mechanical clockwork informs Descartes view of the world. It is true now. (I ,2). Since the Industrial revolution, technological development has been the major force for change in Western society. New machines like the steam locomotive became icons and images of power. The standardization of industrial mass production became a new structuring reality (. . .you can have any colour as long as it’s black).

In the sixties, electronics, particularly logic electronics, supplanted the brute machine as the image of progress. The product of technology became ephemeral and information was commoditied. The computer became the paradigmatic technology. By the early 1960’s it became commonplace for people to speak not only of their genes but of their minds and private psyches as being programmed The premises of this paper are:

1. That the machine has been and remains a major force in our culture, both literally and metaphorically.

2. That although art is a product of culture, and our culture is shaped by the machine, art practice has avoided considering the machine as a cultural force.

3. Both art and industry are concerned with the production of objects. It is of crucial importance for contemporary esthetics that the implications of the ephemeralization of the machine are considered.

Abstract

Long Paper

In this paper I discuss the role of Machine Learning (ML) in sound design. I focus on the modeling of a particular aspect of human intelligence which is believed to play an important role in musical creativity: the Generalization of Perceptual Attributes (GPA). By GPA I mean the process by which a listener tries to find common sound attributes when confronted with a series of sounds. The paper Introduces the basics of GPA and ML in the context of ARTIST, a prototype case study system. ARTIST is a sound design system that works In co-operation
with the user, providing useful levels of automated reasoning to render the synthesis tasks less laborious (tasks such as calculating an appropriate stream of synthesis parameters for each single sound) and to enable the user to explore alternatives when designing a certain sound. The system synthesis’ sounds from input requests in a relatively high-level language; for instance, using attribute-value expressions such as ‘normal vibrato’, “high openness’ and ‘sharp attack’. ARTIST stores information about sounds as clusters of attribute-value expressions and has the ability to interpret these expressions in the lower-level terms of sound synthesis algorithms. The user may, however, be interested in producing a sound which is ‘unknown’ to the system. In this case, the system will attempt to compute the attribute values for this yet unknown sound by making analogies with other known sounds which have similar constituents. ARTIST uses ML to infer which sound attributes should be considered to make the analogies.

This paper explores issues of bias on biometric data and anxieties about identifications through audiovisual interpretations of the biometric data artworks. As seen in previous historical approaches, many people have been concerned about the reading of race, character, and narratives into genetic traces. Recent history and current trends in biometrics show that biometric data relates to statistical prediction, and bias is an inevitable part of biometrics. The bias has been observed in my previous exhibitions from spectators who experienced their biometric-driven audiovisual outcome. The artist created an experimental version of the two biometric data artworks using machine learning (ML) methods of artificial intelligence (AI) to investigate the bias on biometrics. The AI-driven interface analyzes the input data, improves predictions, and extracts visual features based on sample data. Two biometric data (iris and finger-print) are used in the artworks, and an informal user study is dis-cussed. This project investigates the possible artistic approaches in using biometric data and attempts to find unbiased solutions for biometric data interpretations.

After a historic overview of the idea of computer art, the author envisages the return to the flexible sign through digital works. The development of communication networks, the hypermediatization of our society, as well as the invasion of electromagnetic space by images, sounds, and videos, and the hybridization of digital and analog, generate virtual spaces where artists find themselves invested with the power of omnipresence. The author poses the question of representation: memory spaces, screen spaces, spaces for representation, as support for images bringing together the preoccupations of the group.

The visual culture that defined the industrial era Ruhr District has in recent decades given way to a post-steel visual culture that represents a new resolution to the tension between nature and technology through cultivation of what I term landscape value based on an extension of Alois Riegl’s work on monuments (Riegl, 1928). From 1989 to 1999, the International Building Exhibition, Emscher Park (IBA) became a catalyst for discursive and material changes integral to new images and relations in the Ruhr District. During the decade long tenure of IBA Emscher Park, coal mining and steel production brownfields became important sites for understanding how the post-industrial order materialized in the Ruhr District. Astonishingly, decaying industrial structures were rededicated as architectural and technological masterpieces, and ‘weeds’ were designated as natural growth worthy of protection.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and its sub-branch machine learning (ML) promise machines that go beyond the boundaries of automation and behave autonomously. Applications of these machines in creative practices such as art and design entail relationships between users and machines that have been described as a form of “collaboration” or “co-creation” between computational and human agents [1, 2]. This paper uses examples from art and design to argue that this frame is incomplete as it fails to acknowledge the socio-technical nature of AI systems, and the different human agencies involved in their design, implementation, and operation. Situating applications of AI-enabled tools in creative practices in a spectrum between automation and autonomy, this paper distinguishes different kinds of human engagement elicited by systems deemed “automated” or “autonomous.” Reviewing models of artistic collaboration during the late 20th century, it suggests that collaboration is at the core of these artistic practices. We build upon the growing literature of machine learning and art to look for the human agencies inscribed in works of “computational creativity”, and expand the “co-creation” frame to incorporate emerging forms of human-human collaboration mediated through technical artifacts such as algorithms and data.

A microphone is a device used to amplify small sounds, but what I call a macrophone brings very large sounds—aka infrasound—into our perceptual range. Normally too low-frequency to hear, infrasound travels vast distances through the atmosphere, even across the globe. It comes from superstorms, heavy industry, wildfires, calving icebergs, HVAC systems at massive data centers, avalanches, and even police weaponry. Big phenomena like these are entangled with the climate crisis, which is difficult to perceive directly on a planetary scale. And yet this crisis continually makes sound—what can we hear when we’re able to listen to it from where we stand?

Macular is a collective of artists who share an interest in art, science, technology, and perception. The members of the collective collaborate on the creation and production of multi-sensorial immersive artworks. The collective functions as a nomadic lab in which the members do research and develop the technology and theory needed to create their works.

Light and motion are two of the main elements that link the works of the artists. Light is used as a direct source of emission and as a form of projection to generate morphing shapes, fields, and patterns. Flicker inducing stroboscopic light, oscillating through the color spectrum, is employed to create hallucinatory choreographies of shadows and colors, which trigger states of mental uncertainty. The works are often accompanied by a sonic component that is either a direct result of the light producing processes or connected on a perceptual and conceptual level. This multi-sensory approach is characteristic of the collective’s interest in the biology, psychology, and phenomenology of perception.

Macular’s body of work can be placed in the historical lineage of expanded cinema as it relates to lumia and visual music. In addition to their installations, the collective uses their work as instruments for live performance, taking the notion of musical thinking and inserting it into other media in order to create generative compositions in light, movement, and sound.

Urban spaces are rich in environmental stimuli. This high represents a challenge when creating visual communication objects that address the public’s attention. However, the presence of digital screens turns this into an opportunity to explore new resources for the creation of visual strategies and address the contemporary context of urban spaces.
Since attention is a limited resource, each person has to be selective when deciding where to focus on. This selection envolves attend to determined stimuli while rejecting others. To address this issue, we identified the need to understand how the brain processes visual stimuli and chooses where to focus its attention as much as how to create visual stimuli that activates these brain functions.
We cross findings in Cognition and Computational Design to support our research and the development of prototypes that explore the dynamic triggering of a selected set of visual stimuli in a visual composition. The findings regarding Visual Stimuli guided the collection of promising visual stimuli to use, either individually or in combination, in the situation we are addressing — contexts where the audience is goal-oriented to other tasks. Also, the knowledge of Computational Design allows the development of dynamic and adaptive systems, which application can be particularly interesting in less predictive and evolving environments such as urban public spaces.
In the present research we demonstrate the potential of this approach in addressing the issue raised. Through preliminary results we assign levels of efficiency to a collection of visual stimuli. Additionally, we propose a set of solutions for address the less efficient approaches while identifying new needs that shall be further tested. In sum, we aim to establish a research basis for the development of dynamic systems and consequent generation of graphic stimuli in visually competitive environments.

Digital technologies have settled in a great number of artistic practices, from the easel painting from the screen, to the 3D universes only accessible by virtual reality prostheses. Is this a promise of renewal for contemporary creation? The history of art, like that of science, was partly built at the rhythm of technical and technological evolutions. The mastery of firing for ceramics, cast iron, or crystal, of perspective for representation, or of 3D printing has offered artists new ways to fix their imagination in a tangible way. But have these evolutions made art progress, as we could claim so in the fields of health or science?

Three contemporary artists, winners of the MAIF Prize for Sculpture, are invited to discuss the place of these new technologies in their daily practice.

Digital is far from being bodiless. If the digital was a country, it would have two to three times the footprint of France. How can we reduce our digital impact in a world increasingly invaded by IT? What are the individual and collective measures to be put in place? Solutions exist, already tested by the civil society, which this talk proposes to share with you.

The Manual for the Curation and Display of Interactive New Media Art is a creative commons living document aimed at assisting curators and exhibition designers, particularly non specialist curators seeking to engage with interactive new media art. This paper will explain the design philosophy of the manual as well as the methodologies employed.

While paradigm of art changes as the society changes, it still seems to be a boundary between art to be shown for public and art to be sold to public. Designers produce products such as furniture, kitchen utilities or cell phones, with which design concept plays a major role if the product serves its function. Artists may produce gadgets-like objects that do not serve for particular functions, or have only funny functions. If they produce objects that could be commercially produced, which means that may sell as much as those design objects and feasible for mass production, can they be still regarded as artworks? Could artists be still regarded as artists, not designers?

With Device Art Projects, which has been carried in Japan with artists and researchers including internationally recognized names such as Nobumichi Tosa (Maywa Denki), Kazuhiko Hachiya, Sachiko Kodama, Ryota Kuwakubo and Hiroo Iwata, we examine and practice what it means for an artist to commercially produce an artwork. Some of the artists already have their works mass produced and commercially available, which required a very different process from showing a piece in a gallery or making limited number of pieces. Based on such experiences and further exploring what it means, the paper discusses both theoretical and practical issues behind the project.

The Glass Road refers to the spread of hot glass working that originated around 3500BCE in Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia then moved throughout the ancient world to the Far East. Much later, the well‑known Silk Road was established between 206BCE‑220CE. Muqarnas, also known as Mocarabe, stalactite vaulting, or honeycomb vaulting, are a visually compelling and unique feature of Islamic architecture that began to proliferate in 1100CE.

To contribute to this ISEA 2014 conference theme of Technology, Science, and Art: East meets west, I will discuss how reviving ancient creative precedents of hot mould‑pressed glass and muqarna has led to a new body of sculptural work. This work unites digital rapid manufacture, electronic art techniques, and hot glass. Molten glass is first pressed into muqarna which then form the architectural components of mixed sculptural and electronic media installations. Conceptually, these forms expand traditional interpretations of muqarna into contemporary sculptural contexts; from tangible metaphors of celestial light and spiritual communication to the ability to transmit and transform light and communications electronically.

The methodology for making these forms lies in reviving and integrating the creative potential of pressed glass and muqarna for contemporary art aims. The advantage of mining and reinterpreting these precedents of ancient analog making can benefit current electronic art methods. They provide ready‑made adaptable infrastructures that can ensure that rapid manufacture and electronic art‑making retain invaluable hand and material feedback. These are not merely manual techniques with nostalgic appeal in an era of rapid manufacture, but prolific, invaluable sources of innovation in making and conceiving of artworks.

From a technical standpoint, this presentation highlights glass’ unique potential as an electrically inert, versatile structural material for making fasteners and mould elements. Once joined and assembled, both fasteners and mould elements can be heated and fused together. The implications of making things this way are that objects, utilitarian as well as artistic, can be made modularly from component parts of a homogeneous glass material, then melted until the components coalesce into one form. While homogeneous, the constituent parts retain the tangible memory of their original function in the form of discrete zones of colour. Chemically, these zones could be made from electrically reactive rare earth elements or metallic foils so that in addition to providing color, these zones can respond in specific ways to electricity.

This work is being produced through my PhD research in digital manufacturing of press‑moulded glass at the International Institute for Research in Glass at the National Glass Centre, University of Sunderland, UK. It was also undertaken, and continues after a 2011‑12 Fulbright China grant at: The Craft Department of the School of Art and Design at Tsinghua University, Beijing China, Guangzhou Polytechnic, Suzhou Polytechnic, Hong Kong Baptist University, Xinchejian MakerSpace in Shanghai, and private glass companies in China.

Making Salt was created for a presentation at an electronic media symposium with the theme of “Terror”. The terror of the information age, to us, meant the shapeless super-abundance of information itself. We decided to use salt in our presentation-performance, as a metaphor for sifting information from the sea, and to remember Gandhi’s stroke of genius. He used ‘making salt’ as an act of symbolic defiance to the British authorities who had monopolised its production and sale in India. So he marched to the sea, and made salt.We wanted to ground our performance concerning this information age on something as ordinary as salt. A necessity of life, crystalised out of the formless sea by the act of (selection) filtering.
Our space for the performance began at the two entrances of a lecture theatre. Sarah Buist and Gaudi Hoedaya stood at each entrance and welcomed and ushered people into the centre space towards the back of the theatre. This forced the audience to sit next to each other and to sit behind me. I sat at a keyboard about halfway up the rows of the seats, waiting. I focused on my texts, trying to let them be part of me rather than just memorise them.
The doors closed and the video started. Sarah’s images of a pair of hands, projected on the wall, formed the letters ‘r-e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n’ in letter by letter in sign language. It was not only our introduction but also a moment of silence and a reference to the theme of the other half of the ISEA symposium in Liverpool titled, “Revolution”.
As the video projection on the front wall started, I began to type and each letter appeared in stacatto sequence in white across five small boards between me and the front of the lecture theatre.

The words started to fade when the text moved to the next panel and by the time the fifth panel was filled with text, the new text now typed in the first panel seemed to write over the now near invisible old text and so on for the all the panels.
Passages were also literally ‘filtered’ with some letters or words missing the ends of the boards, appearing either small over the video on the back wall they were obscured by the panels’ shadows.
In the discussion after the performance someone made the comment that the filtered texts were more or less legal depending on where you sat. Another expressed frustration at not being able to read all the texts because she sat so far to right of the panels.
The text began with:
“The air is never vacant” she sighed.
I listened with folded arms and inhaled the salty air.
Lyotard didn’t trust names, and everyday I discover more and more names. Names on the move.
Cum grano salis.
While Sonja typed the ‘filtered’ texts to do with our senses, history, politics, the spirit, science, and culture, Sarah and Gaudi poured salt into the palms of those seated at the end of the rows and asked them to pass this on.
This performance combined textural and visual references to the process of filtering where everyone was left with salt on their hands.
While working on the concept for this performance Gaudi and I discovered that rather than terror, we felt we were living in exciting times. For both of us, the world offered more possibilities than ever before and we wanted an approach that combined the poetic with the playful.

For us the postmodern world is a world of possibility.
[source: sonjavank.com/saltperf.htm]

Panel: NeuroArts-Noise

Tiny vibrations of the air molecules around us convey information about remote objects and their behaviour. What our ears receive is a mixture of the signals generated by whatever sound emitting sources happen to be present, which can of course change from one moment to the next. So, how do we make sense of the mixture and form mental images of the sound sources around us? I will argue that the auditory system constantly seeks out patterns in the incoming signals. These patterns range over many time scales, from the very rapid periodic vibrations perceived as pitch, to the sequences of sound events, perceived for example as a melody. Once a pattern has been detected, we can use it to decide which parts of the signal contributed to it and therefore belong together. Even more importantly, we can develop expectations of what should come next and when, and we can use mismatches between our expectations and what actually happens to refine our mental representations of things in the world. Since perceptual decisions are always made with incomplete information, the ability to construct alternative interpretations of the world and to flexibly switch between them is fundamental to natural perceptual systems. In this the role of intrinsic noise is crucial.

I see the human heart at the core of our physical, symbolic and emotive bodies – as a co-performative mechanism with the mind, bodies, technologies and our surroundings. This view had informed my art practice at a time when biofeedback technologies are becoming more domesticated and modifiable. Stetho-phone with pulse oximeter embedded in its handset is a biofeedback device created for Heart Lounge, a computer-mediated environment designed to construct the participant’s perceptual experience of the heart (internal) in a way that the changes of the environment (external) mirror the internal changes. Auditory and visual displays are the result of repetitive behaviour of the heart which is generated by the software and represented through a light projector and loudspeaker. These representations are not meant to mimic medical reports, but to offer participants introspection in a shared space. The “undressing” of the biobody in public view makes the embodiment of the heart possible and constitutes a new environment where a computational system reconnects an internal system with the mind itself; the heart becomes an interface of “mindbody” (Katherine Hayles). It gives rise to an inside-out experience that extends this “mindbody” to an external world.

The study of environmental sound highlights the limitations of human perception. Sonification and audification predominantly use scientific methods that favor transformation of sound to the sweet spot in the middle of our hearing range. This approach overlooks the different perceptual effects of high and low, loud and soft, fast and slow sounds. It is my contention that in our interpretation of how to make inaudible sound audible, we must consider the strengths and limits of human hearing and listening. The work of acoustic ecology focuses on listening to emphasize an awareness of the overall soundscape. This is usually limited to areas where it directly affects human presence, and it is largely because underwater and ultrasonic are inaudible to us that we are unaware of the impact of anthropogenic over biotic and abiotic sounds. Acoustic levels underwater are unregulated, and given that sound is essential to marine life, the impact of additional sounds is having considerable consequences.

The Makrolab project began in 1994 and was first realized during Documenta X in 1997. Its final state will be as a permanent art/science/tactical media station on the Antarctic in 2007 with primary research focus on telecommunications, migrations and climate. Up to now, the project has been set up in Germany, Scotland, Slovenia, Australia and Italy, with future plans for India, Canada and South Africa.

The MAKROLAB project was born in 1994 during the wars, that were raging in the former Yugoslavia. Its initial purpose was to function as an autonomous and mobile performance/ tactical media environment as it was explained during one of the first conceptual presentations of the project at ISEA94. Ten years later, the project has grown into a complex set of technological, political and environmental subdivisions and phases with the final aim of establishing permanent art/science/tactical media laboratory and station on the only transnational territory of the planet, the Antarctic, focusing the research on the three global fields of interest for the project, telecommunication, climate and migrations.

The MAKROLAB-UNTP [unmanned network tactical ) setup, together with the TRUST-SYSTEM S-77CCR platform is a specific net and geocentric focused phase of the project with the emphasis on open source protocol definitions and rapid deployment operations with ad-hoc networking capability for remote sensing and data distribution.

Where is that missile supposed to be landing?
Being teased to deal in words with the notion of “Lo-Tech” and, to come close to the subject matter while engaging and defining such an overly oxygenated notion could be or mean within the kingdom of tropical maladies one should at the very least try first to map the place where targeted group strives to exist.

It would be relevant to address in parallel the very notion of tecne, (from ancient greek Τέχνη meaning craftsmanship, craft, or art) which is always the very essence of thought. A track that is way too foreign as the language I’m using here, while the main is to lineate a place where the idea of “low-tech” can be presented and studied in the context of a Colombian editorial project.

Keywords: multi-platform, digital archiving, digital preservation, case studies, complex objects, apps

Mobile devices and Internet usage are now common in most parts of the world. Archives and other cultural agencies are challenged by the increasing amounts, and complexity, of digital content. New strategies are being developed and promoted to enable digital acquisition and preservation. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) is examining and addressing acquisition and preservation challenges for a range of complex digital content, within available resources. This paper will discuss issues associated with a range of multi-platform content with reference to selected case studies.

Manifestations is a yearly Art & Technology festival in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. During the Dutch Design Week in October (350.000 visitors), we present 50-100 innovative and talented artists that develop accessible installations and artworks for a broad audience. All the artwork is about a more human technology – a lot of the work and projects we present are later in large international museums or festivals. At Manifestations we offer interactive artworks for events or festivals. We work with more than 5.000 international artists that create art using technology. We focus the spotlight on art and technology with a human dimension: sometimes confrontational and other times the perfect match, but always critical, playful, recognizable and awe-inspiring. Think of robot acts, performances with electronic music, exoskeletons, e-fashion art, data & privacy installations, artworks that integrate AI, sustainability, hackers, crypto nails, food printing and more.

The festival also reaches a non-art audience to prevent preaching to its own choir.

Other participants of the festival which will also present at ISEA are: Maartje Dijkstra, Jip van Leeuwenstein, Tim Dekkers, Daniëlle Ooms, more.

Keywords: space, sound, spatialization, acousmatic, sonic art, aesthetic experience, spatiostructural theory
Space is an essential element of human experience. In our daily lives we move about in a multidimensional sound field, constantly processing spatial cues in our encounters with our surroundings. Awareness of space as a fundamental component of sound is nevertheless limited among artists and listeners. This paper presents a framework for recognizing, analyzing and working with sonic space, based on identifying and categorizing spatial components from the level of the individual sound, via the combination of sounds in virtual spaces, to the experience of the fusion of composed space and the listening environment.

Introduction
This paper presents mapping and psychogeography as the background for an artistic experimentation done with mobile technology. In December 2007, with the project Lencois.art.br, local habitants, especially kids, created an artistic map of urban experimentation of the city Lençóis, in Brazil. Having asked to wander around town with a mobile phone and record (through image and sound) what they wanted, they highlighted different parts of the town drawing a line of their path. The result, and documentation of the practice, is a colored animated drawn map with photos, audios and videos that reflect these kids’ experimentations of their own town.

The motivation: The situationist dérive
This project was created by the motivation of practicing the Situationist’s psychogeography and dérive using mobile technology to take notes of it. The idea was to create psychogeography view of Lençóis town. As Guy Debord (1955) states:
“Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals… “

In the project the participants practice psychogeography through dérive, a practice encouraged by the Situationists in the 50’s as a way to encounter the urban space and experience it differently from our typically use of the city. As Guy Debord (1958), in “Theory of the Dérive” said, “Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.”

The participant of the project wandered around town, alone or in small groups, with this spirit of playfulness and awareness. They stopped their routine to engage on an unexpected discovery of the city, open to new encounters and visualizations.

Map(less) location
Lençóis is a small town located in the countryside of Bahia. Different from large cities, it does not have a precise map of its streets available to the public. Even website as GoogleMaps, MapQuest, Yahoo!Local does not have a map of the town. For someone used to living in large cities, a place with no map and no concern for one is unthinkable.

Innovation has become the key to understanding the functioning of contemporary capitalism, where “the new” is at the center of the productive model. Digital technologies are constantly updated, making obsolete and disposable all those products that are not able to adjust to the model of hyper productivity, which also includes ideas and cultural productions. How does this condition affect digital arts, digital literature? How to preserve works marked by the constant threat of technological obsolescence? How to build an archive of them, whose very principle, which is remaining, goes against the constant movement of the new, present in informational capitalism?

The construction of the Cartography of Latin American Digital Literature project was born in response to these questions, presenting an interactive map to account for a compilation of 200 literary works created for digital media and composed with code language by authors from Argentina, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Venezuela and Mexico in the last 30 years. The project was a collaboration with “Atlas of Brazilian digital literature” with about 150 works compiled by Rejane Rocha, researcher at Federal University of San Carlos in Brazil.

The cartography is navigated by different variables that relate genre classifications, formats and characteristics of digital literary works in the region, taking the same language of the web to create an interactive and scalable experience -to which new works can be added-, where the traditional boundaries of a political map fade away. In addition, this visualization is linked to a repository, which as a digital library, contains information sheets, folders with images, navigation videos, interviews with authors, and technical documentation.

What is archived when a work of digital literature is archived? This project accounts for the different layers of complexity of this kind of research, which crosses literature, technology, archive, digital media and creative processes.

Using a practical investigation as a sample case study, this paper outlines an initial investigation into the visualization of people’s experiences within a city space. Highlighting the shortcomings of conventional data visualization approaches, it presents an argument for the use of light as a useful metaphor for mapping and connecting emotion with place. Inspired by the impressionistic painters, and their use of light as a means to capture the sense or mood of a scene, the project advocates light as a possible way to develop a kind of ‘data impressionistic’ approach for visualizing the data-informed mood of a location. The paper outlines the ongoing practical project work and prototypes, and looks forward to future opportunities and project developments during the next phases of work.

Many locative services rely on mass participation and interaction between strangers. I posit that the majority are looking for traditional consumption models of voyeurism and vicariousness. Through this lens, I will present a brief history of locative media, and future trends in situated software.

Creative experiments with wearable technologies and speculative engagements with digital sensory data foreground the need of reinventing learning environments to reclaim sensory and somesthetic relationality, while interrogating the passive collection of sensory data by sensors ubiquitously embedded in everyday spaces and learning processes. This paper discusses an arts-based project of mapping the sensory-affective dimensions of school environments in collaboration with a group of participating-students (16-18 year-olds). The mixed media maps offer dynamic digital representations of staff and students’ experiences of the school buildings, shedding light on problematic spaces in the built environment. The paper discusses processes in which digital-sensory devices allowed young people to further their attunement towards previously unconsidered aspects of school atmospheres, while exploring the pliability of their sensory capacity in reconfiguring and reimagining those environments.

Abstract

Since 1990 in her book The Creative Mind Margaret Boden notes the existence of three types of creativity: combinational, exploratory and transformative creativity. Her main concern is to understand the origins and formation of creative ideas, within the context of discovery. The ‘idea’ the author refers to, could be taken as a structure to satisfy a style of thought or a solution for that style. According to Boden the solution and the style are associated with the conceptual space (system generator – genesis / training – which maintains a given area and defines a certain set of possibilities) thus, the greater the knowledge about the conceptual space, the greater the chances of obtaining better creative solutions.

Keywords: map, rhythm, space, time, network, cycle, light

“Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, time and an expenditure of energy, there is a rhythm”   _Lefebvre 2004:15

Rhythm is a fundamental part of the human experience of place; planetary rhythm, circadian rhythm and cellular rhythm underpin our interpretations of the world and ourselves. Traditional mapping, in its translation to the page, prioritises space over time, frequently removing the cyclical rhythms inherent in the experience of landscape in favour of a more linear approach. In a world of GPS, user-generated mapping and mobile data, we are constantly translating energies, marking places, and attempting to create interactions between body, space and time. The real-time interaction with the machine creates a rhythm of materiality and consumption of online connected places, reflecting only one facet of our existence.

However, the temporality of the sun and the moon, as systems of cyclical rhythm depict a relationship between night and day, body and landscape; expending the energy of the spaces we exist in. To map these rhythms allows for a different type of inscription, one that grows with the luminance of the place.

This paper explores the mapping of rhythms through luminance, focusing on two artworks, Two Places I Call Home by Michaela French and Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson. By slowing down the inscription through real time events of environmental change, the experience of the viewer shifts, relating to the mapped space through a new lens. Exploring the layers of ‘real-time’ inherent within our daily lives, as so often not exposed through the fixed nature of the map, we are able to re-frame the rhythms of the digital experience. Similar mapping technologies become repurposed in order to adapt our experiences of place so often lost by the ephemeral quality of location-based experiences constantly infiltrating our everyday lives.

This paper offers reflections on Maraya: a six‑year social engagement focused on connections between urban waterfronts in Vancouver and Dubai. Looking at the shared histories of two megaprojects (Dubai Marina, Dubai, and False Creek, Vancouver) — or more to the point creative responses to these — this paper discusses relationships between creative practice and urban development, critical research and social engagement. Situating contemporary artists among a globally mobile elite, which includes developers, architects, designers, and urban planners, Maraya has attempted to question the role of contemporary art and new media in responding to twenty‑first century city building. Through gallery exhibitions, public fora, publications, and a custom‑built online platform, Maraya has attempted to provide opportunities and imagery with which to re‑imagine the cities ‘we want’—i.e., alternatives to top‑down urban planning. What patterns of neighbourliness can we collectively produce that to fight the deracinating sweep of contemporary urban planning and developing. This paper will reflect on the history of Maraya’s critical engagement and locate this alongside its creative installations, including an interactive artwork proposed for ISEA2013. To this end, it will draw on global mobilities discourse and critical discussions of a renovated cultural studies approach capable of bridging the tensions between indigenous and diasporic identity formations (Clifford, 2013). This paper proposes to offer a retrospective analysis of the strategies, their successes and pitfalls, Maraya has brought to bear on issues of global urbanization and so‑called fluidity of an international exchange of ideas and capital. Using the Maraya project as a case study, this paper will provide an overview of relatively long‑term engagement with emergent global publics. It will also theorize the relationship between creative practice and contemporary urban development politics.

Multicast is a telecommunication technology allowing symmetrical real-time interactivity
between several correspondents communicating simultaneously in sound, image and data
transfer. It is a new communication space already in use in a limited manner, but not yet
widespread since new models of real-time interactivity have been limited. It is very different
from the broadcast model of the current network, one to many, which dominates the network
today and is the preferred commercial model. Multicast has a potential to become a new
medium of communication and this project will explore its potential, using the network as an
international online laboratory experimenting with art, science, research and education to
develop models of true interactivity and developing the tools to make it happen.

Context: Industry has avoided multicasting or even suppressed it by imposing on it the
broadcast model principally because people do not see an immediate return, a commercial use
with instant payback. Rather than experimenting with multicast’s potential in a form of
fundamental research to see what might be done, main players in industry have favoured
existing applications rather than understanding what can be done in the long term. That taboo
has been challenged by the pandemic and broken by Zoom. People have generally recognised
the importance of the network and well as the drawbacks of the current technologies and
resistance to multipoint connections has evaporated.

A multipoint fully interactive space is a new medium of communication with an enormous
potential for creativity, for developing new uses of the network, radically different kinds of
programming for art, education, research and culture. Inherently, there would be considerable
commercial fallout with new products and services becoming available. There are, however,
important sociological, economic and legal aspects which have to be examined, even invented,
to move forward in an effective way.

MARCEL, our response to that challenge, was built through a Performing Arts Fellowship to Don
Foresta at the Wimbledon School of Art from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In the
early 2000’s. It began modestly with experimentation particularly in online artistic
performance. Many artists and institutions joined MARCEL rapidly but over the first 10 years of
activity many of them dropped out judging the technology inadequate and not up to the
imagination of the artists and their artistic ambitions. We recognised very early that we would
not have the necessary tools for that experimentation from industry since they did not share
the same objectives and, as mentioned above, actually blocked efforts in that direction.
MARCEL began with the only multi-point platform existing at the time, Access Grid, and, while
that proved interesting, it was quickly obvious that its limitations were real. It was obvious by
the end of the 2000’s we would have to build our own platform for art, responding to artistic
needs and develop the necessary tools to respond to those needs. Online experimentation with
multicasting technology in sectors of intellectual and cultural activity is a concrete way to
advance pushing the technology through responding specifically to creative demands in
developing to the tools to respond to them.
[Text taken from Workshop proposal]

Keywords: Multisensorial, Documenta, Sao Paulo Biennale, Mutisensorial, Mariotti, Media Art

This paper will give an overview of the seminal works of Francesco Mariotti, an artist of Swiss origin (Bern, 1943) who has lived between Peru and Switzerland since 1952 and can be regarded as one of the pioneers of media art both in Latin America and Europe; more importantly, his work linked both continents in distinctive dialogues relating social processes, natural phenomena and technology. In 1968, during the 4th Documenta in Kassel he produced one of the first interactive installations in media art history: “Project Geldmacher – Mariotti”. A year later, in 1969, during the X Sao Paulo Biennial, he presented “The Circular Movement of Light”, a multisensorial (light, smell, sound) installation. Through extensive research of the archives of both Documenta and Sao Paulo Biennial, this paper focuses on these two seminal works with emphasis on their main characteristics and explores how these projects are an early example of works on participatory and social processes, natural and multisensorial phenomena, arguing that through the use of technology, these should be regarded as significant works of the history of media art in Latin America.

Massive Collaborative Animation Projects (MCAP) is an international collaborative animation platform. MCAP was founded in 2016 by Dr. William Joel of Western Connecticut State University, and currently has three on-going projects. More than 150 students from various regions, including the US, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore have participated in MCAP.

As of 2019 April, MCAP has three projects in development: MCAP01, a traditional 3D computer-animated short film; MCAP02, a 4K real-time animation designed for 360 degree dome projection; and MCAP03, a serial web animation project, presently in pre-production.

MCAP was started to help schools and students to experience collaborative animation production. Producing animation require wide variety of works, including visual designs, storytelling, animation and sound editing. Generally, productions are carried out by large group of artists. Such collaborative environment, working with people with different expertise and cultural background has become very important not only in animation productions but also in other fields, like academic research and software development. For small schools, large animation productions are often too ambitious to complete within their program. In MCAP, participating schools and students can take a part in various phases of production to provide international collaborative and real production experience for students.

Abstract

Material Beliefs was a two-year interdisciplinary project funded by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council. It aimed to take ’emerging biomedical and cybernetic technology out of labs and into public spaces’. The project provided access to technologies that will offer new configurations of bodies and materials: How can design stimulate a discussion about the value of these new forms of hybridity?

Rather than focusing on the outcomes of bioengineering research, Material Beliefs approached research as an unfinished and ongoing set of practices, happening in laboratories and separate from public spaces. The aim is to make labs permeable, so that non-specialists could consider the research. With this in mind, labs were opened up as sites for collaboration between scientists and engineers, designers, and members of the public.

Alongside the everyday business of the lab, which might include submitting funding proposals, conducting experiments and gathering data, and then writing and publishing academic papers, the collaborations produced a parallel set of proceedings captured through drawings, photographs, films and discussions. This led to the design of speculative prototypes, which transformed the parallel activity into something tangible. These prototypes were exhibited, reconfiguring emerging laboratory research into a platform that encouraged a debate about the relationship between science and society.

This paper opens with some description of the lab as a site for collaboration between design and engineering, then moves onto some examples of outcomes, and finally expands upon some strategies for opening up these activities to the public.

The relationship between materiality and mediality, between hand and eye, touch and visuality is a topic which had been controversially discussed long before the advent of the digital era, even before the “scopic regime” (M. Jay). This relationship concerned both, the production as well as the reception of art works. Until today the notions of medium and material seem to be in latent conflict, though the materiality of the medium and the mediality of the material may be regarded as two different functions of the same work.

A look back into history may help to understand the power and fascination of the long time favoured overthrow of materiality in the fine arts which was accompanied by the dominance (or tyranny, as some put it) of the optical. In Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s tragedy “Emilia Galotti”, which appeared in 1772, the painter Conti reflects on the characteristics of artistic production. He considers himself a great artist, though his hand does not always satisfy his artistic requirements. In elaborating on this shortcoming, the painter asks a meanwhile famous question:

“would Raphael not have been the greatest pictorial genius if he had unfortunately been born without hands?”

“Matter, like meaning, is not an individually articulated or static entity. Matter is not little bits of nature, or a blank slate, surface, or site passively awaiting signification; nor is it an uncontested ground for scientific, feminist, or Marxist theories. Matter is not a support, location, referent, or source of sustainability for discourse. Matter is not immutable or passive. It does not require the mark of external force like culture or history to complete it. Matter is always already an ongoing historicity”.  -Barad, 2003

This paper outlines how wearables reconfigure notions of performativity because of their admixtures of human / nonhuman agencies. It argues that contemporary wearables, in a continuum with technological / body performative entanglement dating from early 20th century art (Avant-Garde), materially alter practices of performativity because they propose new and intimately co-dependent agencies of the human/nonhuman. The theoretical arguments to substantiate this human/nonhuman reconfiguration of performativity via wearables are culled from recent Science Technology and Society (STS) and posthumanist approaches to materiality and performativity.

Progressive privatization of modern individual has led to the new definitions of privatized public space. Social independence has led to communicational gaps which have promoted current TCIs, as well as dreams of mobility associated to them. The impact of those machines in social life is proportional to the effect of social life on machines.

Public lecture, Sunday 9 June 2013, Museum of Contemporary Art, Veolia Lecture Theatre. Presented by ISEA2013, the Museum of Contemporary Art and National Institute for Experimental Arts at COFA, UNSW.

Abstract

Bodies increasingly perform as extended operational systems, with ‘mixed’ and ‘augmented’ realities. The contemporary chimera is a hybrid biological machine and virtual system. Aliveness and affect are expressed in choreographies of remote interface and interaction, of both ‘fractal’ and ‘phantom’ flesh.

Keywords: Listening, Perception, Space, Sound, Art, Science, Mental Imagery

Listening requires attention, engagement toward an environment, and relies on subjectivity and (self) consciousness. The paper explores mechanisms of listening in the sonic arts through an on- going research based on art process informed by cognitive science. The project focuses in particular on the American composer Pauline Oliveros’ concept of deep listening (Oliveros 2005). She proposes an expansion to all what is humanly possible to listen to. It leads to the phenomenal world that lies inside the auditory cortex about one’s personal space perception. To engage toward an environment as a sonic architecture and as a perceived atmos- phere, necessarily involves the body. Sound and space are linked to vibration, and resonating energy within the body may result in mental imagery of space. The vibrational aspect of sound through experience provides new ways for spatial perception, as well as new paths in novel philosophy of sound and auditory perception. That is, the paper investigates fields of possibility of sonic meaning and experience in mind in relation to the world. Collaboration with cognitive science includes the investigation of body perception in relation to a spatial ecology.

Abstract

In Sabrina Raaf’s Grower (2006), a robot detects levels of Carbon Dioxide in a gallery and draws grass on the walls. In my public art installation, (re)collector (2007), surveillance cameras are set up throughout a city, programmed to recognize and record anything resembling a scene from the movie Blow Up. In Philippe Rahm’s project Interior Weather (2008), light, humidity and temperature readings from one room are used to compose stories in another room. I want to provide some historical and theoretical context for this kind of work: work that intelligently responds to, and more importantly, generates knowledge from its environment. I would like to distinguish works such as these as examples of ‘mechatronic art’: systems-based works that involve customized mechanical and electronic devices to physically interface real world data with computer software. I want to argue that mechatronic art involves a specific set of vocabularies that separates it from other forms of digital art, in the same fashion that we might distinguish painting from sculpture, or video from sound.

In recent years, Media Art practices related to facial recognition reflect present concerns about AI in general and facial biometrics in particular. The ambiguities, biases and lack of ethics present in the development and implementation of facial recognition techniques is apparent in pieces and essays by creators determined to reveal the lack of ethics and transparency of these mechanisms of classification and control. Artistic spaces and festivals are beginning to support and make these kinds of issues more widely visible.
At present, we distinguish three lines of critical work: those that attempt to “annul” the effects of technology, those that show how detection algorithms work, and a small group, more experimental and less fruitful so far, made up of works that propose to reinterpret the uses of technology more in line with social needs.

The discourse of New Media Art (NMA is used here as a general term encompassing other related designations like Electronic Art, Digital Art etc.) emerged in a cultural and intellectual context of the late 80’s, which essentially determined its theoretical framework. From the very beginning NMA has claimed its cultural ‘added value’ by positioning itself as a vanguard of “creative exploration of New Media”, which goes beyond the borders of mere artistic practice: it is a socially useful field of experimentation, in which “art, science and technology” can be successfully integrated.

One could distinguish two major intellectual traditions, which became a feeding ground for a theoretical conceptualization of New Media and NMA in the 80’s. On the one hand, there was a distinguished neo-positivistic trend, represented by artists and institutions (e. g. the MIT Media Lab, Leonardo circle) primary concerned with a practical implementation of New Media in art practice. An “exploration” of new technologies was an implicit ultimate purpose of this trend.

On the other hand, we find an attitude rooted in an intellectual tradition and discourse of contemporary art, which was mainly formed by theoretical trends and tendencies in the academic humanities. Concerning the 80’s, these trends can be retrospectively clearly differentiated: French poststructuralism with its worldwide reception partly overlapped with the postmarxism and a Frankfurt school devotion and resulted in massive “postmodernism” debates, spreading out into public discourse.

The Media Art landscape of recent years is being increasingly seized by a phenomenon which has yet to receive any significant research, classification or analysis: the use of historic media configurations as an integrated part of contemporary media art installations. Internationally renowned artists like William Kentridge, Olafur Eliasson, Zoe Beloff, Jeffrey Shaw, Maurice Benayoun, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, create optical experiments, panoramas, phantasmagoria, perspective theaters, camera obscura, anamorphoses, magic lanterns, etc.

Never before has the world of images changed so fast in such a short span of time. Historical development of images between innovation, reflection and iconoclasm achieve new global linkage and complexity in the 21st century. Digital images became ubiquitous and key tools within the global reorganization of work, but these transformations hit society to a large extent unprepared.

Keywords: Media Art, Media Art Histories, Video Art, Electrographic Art, Ibero-American, MIDE.

Any historiographic effort on Media Art shows the complexity of its own conceptualization regarding those artistic practices that it involves, since there is not unanimity between experts and researchers about this topic as it is shown in the media art history meetings. Neither a consensual taxonomy in these artistic practices. However, one of the most relevant is the taxonomy completed by Professor José Ramón Alcalá, MIDE´s director and a ground-breaking in the subject of electrographic art in Spain. Taking his taxonomy as a reference, we can resolve that Video art and Electrographic Art, both started in the 60’s but developed in the 70’s and 80’s, were some of the artistic practices that brought the first ideas of Media Art in Spain and Latin America. Regarding to Video art, some of the pioneer artists and researchers were Eugeni Bonet, Joaquín Dols, Antoni Mercader and Antoni Muntadas, as can be seen in the historic book En torno al video. With respect to Electrographic Art, some of the pioneers were Paulo Bruscky, Clemente Padín, Humberto Jardón and José Ramón Alcalá with the International Museum of Electrographic Artworks (MIDE) in Cuenca, the most important example adding the collection of this unique museum.

In Korea, Korea Culture and Content Agency’s “Cultural Archetype Digital Content Project” was initiated in 2002. The aim of this project is to provide digital contents based on Korea’s unique cultural archetypal data. In other words, as producing the digital content using diversity cultural archetype such as the Korean history, tradition, folk, scenery, etc. and they provide it in the creation material which is necessary for culture content industry. In business result, negative evaluation is compatible with affirmative evaluation. But it is an important and a thing worth discussion, the cultural archetype is changed in culture content and showed for the mass of people.

As an example, a special exhibition held at The National Folk Museum in November, 2007. In this exhibition, some media art work which the subject is sound of Korea displayed with historic relics. All the media art works of this exhibition utilized existing relics as a cultural archetype, and that were interpreted it newly without getting rid of the meaning that cultural archetype had. That’s meant new media and digital technology make a cultural archetype look and sound newly.

I will explain such example to three categories which are the representation of Korea traditional painting using visual media, the representation of the folk using interactive technology and the representation of the traditional dance using 3D display. Thus I will discuss at a point of view of culture content that how can the cultural archetype become media art, and synergy effect when cultural archetype was utilized in a media art.

Until Nov 3rd 2007, the only images of Pakistan, that people living outside it must remember seeing in the news, were of bearded men chanting slogans against a manifestation of freedom or liberty in the country. However, since that day Pakistan is being associated with a struggle for freedom instigated by representatives from the Institution of Justice in Pakistan. This struggle actually began on March 9,2007 when General Musharraf removed the Chief Justice from his position. After a stand-off with the lawyers of the country the chief justice was re-instated by the government a few months later. Media coverage of lawyers demonstrations and debates on television, radio and in newspapers was an integral factor in the cause gaining growing support from the public and the eventual re-instatement of the Judge. Before emergency declaration on Nov 3, the issue under review by judges of the Supreme Court was whether President Musharraf was eligible for re-election or not and there were chances of the verdict coming against the General.

By viewing other Pakistanis taking sides in this struggle for power between the ruling Army General and the deposed Chief Justice of Pakistan have the citizens of the country and political parties reacted similarly. How has coverage in terms of pictures and news changed perceptions on Pakistan internationally? How is media being used to support the cause of both the government and the agitators? There was a finality in the action by the government on Nov 3 when it declared Emergency, placed the judges of the Supreme Court under house arrest and within hours swore new judges to take their place. This was parallel to to the action taken against independent channels broadcasting news on radio and television. How have the supporters of the movement to revive the abandoned Constitution used internet and other networking to stay informed? This paper would like to give a view from inside the country. It will also elaborate on the other methods, from street graffiti to illegal dish antennas, employed by people to get access to news and to make news during the course of this conflict.

Keywords: Brazil, Heritage, Margin, Mário Pedrosa, Technophagy, Technological Disobedience, Rolezinhos, Virtual Museum

This article looks at current and future issues in the field of art, science, and technology—from the challenges of its own historicizing process to the curatorial exclusion of cultural heritages usually located at the margins of mainstream research. It argues the need for “other” histories and knowledge inclusion from overlooked sources such as oral cultures. With a few curatorial examples coming from Brazil, the paper emphasizes the social inequities in that country, as well as a deep rooted colonial mindset, unfortunately still dominant in many circles.
By emphasizing critical and original examples of artists, critics, and curators who uphold contemporary art alongside heritages from black, indigenous, folk and outsider groups, the paper examines strategic uses of technology, for instance, in the phenomena of the rolezinhos, and that of a nomad museum.

Media façades incorporate new technologies to augment urban space, inspiring people to renew their relationship with place, connection to location, cultural identity and sense of belonging. With emerging new technological applications, artists and designers are being called to transfigure public space, making it interactive by transforming the urban fabric into a dynamic tool. In this paper, we analyse how people reinvent their location by examining two contemporary international interactive media façades; the Digital Wall in Central Park in Sydney, and Islamic Design on Metro stations in Dubai.

Central Park’s Digital Wall is Australia’s largest interactive wall in a public shopping centre. Inspired by K11 Art Malls, a Chinese shopping mall franchise which features artworks by international artists such as Damien Hirst. We discuss artworks using mind computing technologies from the Digital Wall’s 7mm curatorial pitch, to analyse how the public can alter their inner-city location through interaction. In this urban shopping space the artworks invite users to wear a biosensor headset which captures their individual brainwaves, subsequently transforming the imagery displayed and creating an interrelationship between the wearer, the environment and the artwork. The Digital Wall is a new way of thinking about urban space by integrating local artists to promote community engagement and using interactive technologies to inspire and enable community interaction within the urban location. The Digital Wall rethinks public space by taking into consideration the citizens as main actors, empowering them to become instruments of transformation of the location they inhabit.

Dubai is hosting the 2020 World Exposition under the theme; Connecting Minds, Creating the Future. Interactive media façades will feature Islamic patterns on Dubai’s train stations. The artworks will provide the estimated 25 million visitors an opportunity to learn about Islamic heritage whilst being an integral part of the visual changes caused by spectator involvement. Moreover, the observed exploration of Geometric patterns will reinstate the concept of ‘dynamic and fluid’ Islamic art, both calligraphic and geometric, as an integral part of Dubai’s modern and traditional identities. The façades will contain integrated devices with monitors, in proximity to the train stations, allowing people to interact with and transform the fluid Islamic patterns. The key characteristics of this design relies on smart technology to create a dynamic metro station shell using sensors to capture solar energy throughout the day.

Media façades as a medium for human interactivity within urban space has philosophical, spatial, and social ramifications. As philosopher Timothy Morton argues, our sense of proximity to the elements that make up a “location” have now changed; we can no longer imagine ourselves as visitors to a location outside of ourselves or separate from the macro and microcosms of which we are part. Thus we endeavour to contribute to a global conversation with this paper; how media façades create public experiences through which a sense of intimacy with location can be explored, felt and understood. Identity is at the heart of these immersive experiences, bringing unique experiential experiences from East (Dubai) to West (Sydney).

Glenda Drew is a critical maker whose research is based at the intersections of visual culture and social change, with a particular emphasis on the working class. The content of her work is rooted in creating messaging with greater social implications, fostering innovation and encouraging behavior change. Her subjects include country musicians, waitresses, feminists and precarious workers. In addition, she has recently created a few projects that consider climate change through user interface and artistic installations. She approaches her work with an organic sense of play, exploration and curiosity tempered by the design discipline with the goal of making meaningful work. Past projects include Paper Tiger TV-ROM, Hands That Feed and Out of Bounds. Her current work in progress is Stories of Solidarity.

Previous Work: Paper Tiger Television
In 1993 I joined Paper Tiger Television (PTTV), a media activist collective that exposes and challenges the corporate control of media through use of creative, friendly, Do It Yourself (DIY) visual tactics. According to the Fales Library of New York University (NYU), Paper Tiger’s work was an “explosion of artistic creativity (that) radically challenged and changed traditional literature, music, theater, performance, film, activism, dance, photography, video, and other art practices.”

Previous Work: The Hands That Feed
Hands That Feed is a series of five trading cards that consider and celebrate the role of immigrant labor in the US food economy. Hands That Feed considers the cultural role of trading cards, such as baseball and Yu-Gi-Oh!, to commemorate cultural heroic figures, both real and fictional, and creates a cultural narrative. Combining labor statistics with scratch‑’n‑sniff technology, the audience is invited to “take one, collect all five,” and experience an olfactory sensation while considering role of immigrant labor.

Media Lab is an academic network for research, development and innovation in interactive media. The Media Lab / Br consists of three laboratories, located at the Federal University of Goiás, Universidade de Brasília and the Federal University of the South and Southeast of Pará. The laboratories work with a transdisciplinary method, covering several areas of knowledge. Media Lab works with some research axes, focusing on the relationship between user and system, technological art, computational interfaces and social experiences with technology. Researchers from various areas of knowledge develop research in the Media Lab, which also has support for the development of dissertation and thesis projects, as well as offering space for postdoctoral internships. Media Lab / BR is considered the largest laboratory of its kind in Latin America, having presented works in several countries.

Abstract (long paper)

This article departs from the observation of the worldly phenomena of media-aesthetic expressions on urban surfaces that followed the terrorist attacks in Paris on September 13, 2015: The colors of Le Tricolore were illuminated on landmarks, embassies, museum buildings, and various architectural facades in at least sixty cities around the world. In the paper I consider how these media aesthetic phenomena occurred by certain modes of behavior, with certain modalities of existence and conditions of becoming, as phenomena that not only appear but also disappear, circulate and function within the public domain. The paper considers the relationships the flag illuminations may have with the genealogy of media aesthetic urban surfaces, with artistic “massive media” and emotional spectacles of memorial events, and also considers how they may form a hybrid commons by mechanisms of virality, transversality, and other networked connections. Overall, the paper reflect on how our media-aesthetic engagements are deeply engaged with our communicative existence, including its sensibilities, imbalances, and biases.

How can media and technology be used to amplify the voices of local communities? Various groups are now forming to provide local communities with new media art opportunities for visibility and empowerment. These communities are micro communities or micro-cultures, often with immaterial infrastructures or unorthodox approaches. The organizers are interested in media art as a voice for autonomy and collaboration, and all focus on small scale human-centered activities that promote anti-monopoly and community orientation. Their activities aim to empower local users with hands on experience and technological understanding. They focus on curiosity and confidence through demystification and intersectional participation, indeed they value the very need to share and learn about each others differences. All all cases, the voices of the members from local communities are seldom heard and need to be recognized, celebrated and amplified. In this panel four representatives from current media-based initiatives talk about their own deep engagement with their respective communities.

They explore the relevance of these initiatives within their local and broader contexts, and focus on both the different and similar ways they engage with actors: artists, scientists, technologists and activists. They reflect on how these socially-engaged transdisciplinary collaborations may bring about empowerment and investigate the long-term potentials of the media and technologies that are put to use. Specific topics will be addressed like access, visibility, empowerment, feminism, the commons, ownership, colonialism and post-colonialism, appropriation, and reciprocity. The diverse disciplines of the communities represented in this panel – small scale farming, street music, feminist hacking and visual impairment–guarantee a rich discussion, backed by the depth of their theoretical approaches and the solidarity of hands-on and on-the-ground experiences for each community.

The Mediated Natures – Speculative Futures and Justice panel (parts I and II) addresses the radical aesthetics of ecological arts practices, multispecies worldings, and possibilities for survival in this epoch many term the Capitalocene. Undoing modernity’s binary of culture
and nature— which masks the hierarchy of human, subhuman, and nonhuman, and which fuels the engines of capitalism and colonialism —is of critical importance. Thus aligning with nonhuman others in resistance, revolution, and recuperation [1], panelists describe how their projects attempt socio-political acts of worlding through creative arts practices that have ties to new media, feminism, environmental justice, agroecology, science fiction, and/or citizen  science. Presentations fuse the political and the aesthetic and decenter the human in the more-than-human Capitalocene. Finally, panelists consider the ways that media, technology, and the speculative further, hinder or redefine one another when encountering nonhuman others.

Mediated Spaces are architecture investigations by aether architecture in various collaborations. Focusing is on design research relating to spatialities both in actual and virtual environments with a driving force to create a valid architectural response to the rapidly changing social spaces of our society, where information has dramatically altered our perception and understanding of spaces.

Presented here is our major research project, Indukció Ház, an umbrella for a set of installations, focusing on related issues. Conceptual, structural and software modules are developed an re-configured through different spatial and media setups. For the installation at ISEA we were delighted to have Bengt Sjöjén, independent gaming technology researcher collaborating on the openGL+computer vision interaction.

This presentation explores the impact of globalisation on emerging urbanities, and the relationship between the mediated and the physical city, and shows selected samples from the work carried out over the past years within A + URL, the Architecture + Urban Research Laboratory, and other collaborative projects, i.e. prototypes, installations, performances, etc. The projects intend to explore to what extent we can construct new environments, cities of intensity rather then cities of density.

The integration of social media into daily life is one of the most distinct demographic features of younger generations, especially among Generation Z (born between 1996 and 2015). For museums and other cultural institutions to engage with this audience group efficiently, their exhibitions have to take social media into the consideration of mediating strategies. This study aims to address the challenges and opportunities of such practice, by analysing and assessing the effectiveness of two different curatorial approaches to mediate exhibition context via audience participation on social media, namely the Collectivist and Individualist approaches. Purposefully curated in the respective curatorial approaches, two major media art exhibitions in the series One World Exposition 2 in Hong Kong (2017-18) were analysed using the Engagement Process identified by E. A. Edmonds, L. Muller and M. Connell with stages including Attractor, Sustainer and Relator. Through observation, focus group and data extracted on social media, the effort of the Collectivist curatorial strategies to intentionally manipulate audience behaviour showed generally better result in activating audience participation on social media. While recognising its limitations including the different institutions’ positions and motivation towards social media, this study raises critical implications such as the influence of social media celebrities, social media posts as audience’s interpretations and the concern of curatorial strategies overshadowing the artwork.

Abstract

Short Paper

Title as in Book of Abstracts:
Picture This: Artists Mapping the Ideological Territories of Cyberspace with a Correspondence towards Examples of 13th Century Medieval Cartography

Developing electronic technologies afford artists a new area of territorial mapping in the space of telecommunications. The territories of cyberspace, with their capabilities for collaboration, information transfer, communication, enterprise, journalism, education and Art , are forms of virtual reality, and, to some degree, virtual real estate. We already discern trade routes appearing, political factions emerging, creative arts blossoming, religious groups proliferating, educators conducting long-distance learning sessions, minstrels performing, and town criers disseminating information. These armatures of “scripts” and “maps” try to delineate what is, at this writing, a predominantly anarchical and chameleon-type space. In the 13th century, the medieval cartographer leaned towards an ideological mapping of the world became somewhat tempered by the re-rearing of classical traditions and models. This conjunction occurred at a time when the science of cartography had been predominantly dominated for centuries by theology. This paper will examine the paradigm of navigation in new media; and the role imagination plays in the delineation and shaping of space; i.e., whether the medieval cartographer was shaping an “external (world)” or “interior (mind)” space. It will also touch upon the consequence of the choice and effect of words and image as “communicative language” in medieval cartography as well as in contemporary literature. Contemporary expressions on the mapping of language have been explored in literature and critical theory by James Joyce, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Juan Luis Borges and others. The disembodied presence we have in cyberspace allows for appearances as “actors,” i.e., the taking on of assumed characters and identities. It is common practice in virtual on-line communities for participants to adopt extremely idiosyncratic, sometimes phantasmagorical, characteristics, similar to those of the medieval cartographer. The tensions between various notions of “reality” in this space open up verdant territories for artists. Our world is now recreating itself via new technologies. At a time when sensor and satellite technology have the potential to report the location of any particular creature in the world at any time, in what form will there be a simultaneous scramble for bearings in a rapidly changing technology?

Intro

What we consider the territories of cyberspace, with their capabilities for collaboration, information storage and transfer, communication, enterprise, reportage, education and expression, are places of virtual reality, and, to an increasing degree, virtual real estate Within cyberspace we can discern trade routes appearing, political factions emerging, creative arts blossoming, religious groups proliferating, educators conducting long-distance learning sessions, minstrels performing, and town criers disseminating information. These mirror images of travel, traffic, and communication form “scripts” and/or ‘maps” are employed to find order In what is considered, at this writing, a predominantly anarchical and chameleon-like space. For artists, the space of telecommunications offers a new opportunity for territorial mapping; one which could redeem imagination and even propaganda from the negative connotations deposited upon them by our culture.

The paper discusses the ‘What We Think About When We Think About…” project which uses real-time searches of large data sets produced by social media systems to permit the visualization of collective thought in real-time. It begins by briefly exploring the relationship between technology and those who make and use it and suggests that digital technology affects the ways modern humans think, thought-patterns which the examination of social media data can reveal. The operation of the project software is examined in some detail and two areas of application in augmented and virtual realities are discussed.

MEMODUCT posthuman.archive is a repository of media art practices in the field of digital humanities, site-specific media art history and cyber-anthropology. The major contributions of the project are: 1) Archiving of media art from the underrepresented regions, i.e., The Global Margin, initiatives that were recent and as such exhibited in the most important exhibitions and festivals, but which have not yet been explored in depth and systematically processed as a cluster, or a scene; 2) Documentation of the new media artworks that became “inaccessible” due to the instability of the Internet media and the rapid obsolescence of computer technology; 3) Modeling of new methodology in relation to the question: How to write European history of tactical media and environment art, the conjuncture of New Europe 1988-2022?

This paper presents the interactive installation Memoirs of the Blind, using it to reflect on the impact of surveillance technologies in contemporary and future society. The installation consists of an acrylic box containing a screen showing a desaturated face with its eyes closed.

When the visitor blinks, the installation detects it and photographs them at the exact time of blinking, replacing the face displayed with the new photograph. The artwork subverts the subject-object relationship between itself and its visitors, while reflecting on our relationship with technology, providing a contemplative reflection on its aesthetics.

The paper discusses our relationship with automated surveillance, and the impact of the difference between machine time and human time exploring the role that artistic production can play in the analysis of contemporary socio-political issues.

This paper explores the hybrid memory that emerges by combining the memory of human or things and the electronic memory of the digital processing. The memory of things are generally recorded on their bodies. If they are broken or transformed, they lose a part of their memories. And the human memory is gradually changes into the pieces of fragmented memory, and eventually lost the large part of information. Two works are introduced in the paper, and show the rememory, processing the memories of human/things through the digital media, such as computer programs, sensors, and 3D printer.

Rememory is “the rememberance, that defines the continuation of a memory. Also, rememory is used reformed as blend of remember and memory.“ In this process, Electronic memory is essentially involved in the most of the process of rememory. Therefore, the memory of human becomes the actual presence that acquires properties of a substance with the electronic memory in the process of digital rememory. In contrast, the memory of things acquire the virtuality and lose the materiality. Both of these memories are reproduced in the form of abstraction, its complexity and disordered information through the combination of the electronic memory. It becomes the hybrid memory.

Rediscover of Memories
Love Project is to bring up the latent feelings of love in past memories for the present, and it prints three-dimensional shapes using 3D printer. Participants are equipped with various sensors on their bodies, and they send the information that measures the speed of their heartbeats and fluctuations from their voices and brain activities onto the computer. The collected information becomes an output for the physical object by 3D printer.

Guto Requena tries to capture the emotions that people feel in their personal love stories, and transforms them into everyday objects. He said, “it will bear personal histories in ways that encourage long life cycles, thus inherently combining deeply meaningful works with sustainable design.”

[1] The objects of love story are different by each participant, and they are printed in various forms. When participants tell their love story, which are reminiscent of the past memory, their bodies release biological variations. These variations are gathered through the sensors, and then, are transmitted to the computer program to convert the data. These individual data are created as separate objects by 3D printer via the pre-configured program. In other words, the invisible emotions of love obtain a substance through the process of digital fabrication. In these processes, the past memory of participants is not only reproduced by the digital process, but also is combined with the stored electronic memory in the computer system and 3D printer. Therefore, the object made as the result of the Love Project, is the hybrid creature to be born between the memory of human being and electronic memory.

The past memory that is preserved in a latent state appears in the presence by the recalling. And the sensory information from the body goes through the electronic memory, and is created as the three dimensional object. Memory of the past gradually removes the subsidiary information, and ultimately leaves the imprinted information. The rediscovery of the memories leads us to the past. Rediscovery of memory is not only a process to recall the historical memory, but also a process to frame the fragmented pieces of floating memory. But the recalled memory only preserves its most essential nature, and creates the new memory to represent via electronic memory. Love story that is born by 3D printer is the nature of memory embodying time in this digital age.

Loss and Restoration
‘Three vases’ combined two creative processes of digital printing and traditional craft. This involved a challenging process that uniquely combines two forms of the original and the history, using traditional and digital tools. Broken pieces of the vase leave their traces in the 3D printed black net, and they still follow their original form. [2] In the restoring process of vase, digital printing replaces the glue that sticks the broken pieces in the traditional restoration. However, in the restored vase, the broken pieces disappear, only remain in the site of the glue. In the restored vase, the black line replaces the position of traditional glue that does not function as a glue.

Nevertheless, it provides information on the shape of the broken pieces, and through this, we know that the original pieces have been there. If the vase is broken, craftsmen typically aim to restore its original shape. But Three vases restored the form of glue, instead of restoring the original shape. According to Eco, “memory is physically an imprinted or printed record, and helps us reestablish causal links, reconstruct fact.” [3] In the restored vase, 3D printed black net becomes the restoration of memory with the memory of vase.

In the hybrid craft to combine with traditional and digital process, the original pieces disappear. But paradoxically, the boundaries of the piece provide information about the lost pieces. Therefore, we can recall the original pieces existed in there, through the 3D printed black net. And we can understand that it was recognized by inherited and acquired memory.

Electronic memory and Rememories
The memory is deeply buried in consciousness over time, and the form of memory is gradually changed into fragmented pieces losing some information. This memories are often unconsciously recalled through the people, things, and the place related to one’s memory.

There are also reminded from the similar experience of other people. But the recalled memories become to arrive at the spacetime that differs from the moment to be generated a event. The spacetime consists of each other information systems every moment, due to the change of the time and space. [4] Therefore, the recalled memories are reconstructed other information with original memory by changing the spacetime. According to Oxford online Dictionaries, “rememory is the remembrance, that defines the continuation of a memory. Also, rememory is used reformed as blend of remember and memory.” [5] Three Vases try to document the past event, just as the evidence, without restoring the original material form of the broken pieces. And Love Project try to materialize the past memory of human through the remembrance. Therefore, both are shown to explore the rememory of humans and things.

Now we need to consider that was involved the electronic memory in the rememory process of the humans and things. The example of Love Project and Three Vases are essentially involved in the electronic memory. In Three vases, the electronic process converts the information of the shape and location of broken pieces to digital data. And it designs the completed form of the broken pieces can be connected to each other. Also, the electronic process outputs the material object by 3D printer. In this processes, the electronic process is using the given information itself, and builds the final form of the object. Love Project uses the electronic memory in order to materialize the non-substance memory of human. Hereby, the electronic memory is essentially involved in the whole process, except the initial input data.

Conclusion
In the digital media, the electronic memory plays a role as the medium for rememory of the non-substance and substance memory. And the both all is evolved as the hybrid by the electronic memory. This memory reproduces, in the form of abstraction, its complexity and disorder information through the electronic memory. Therefore, the memory of past acquires the properties of substance by combining with the electronic memory in the process of rememory, and becomes an actual presence again.

I will talk about one of my research projects called Memory Rich Clothing: Garments that Display their History of Use (or Second Skins that Communicate Physical Memory). This project deals with the fact that physical objects become worn over time and carry the evidence of our identity and our history. Digital technologies allow us to shape and edit that evidence to reflect more subtle, or more poetic, aspects of our identity and our history. This work focuses on the research and development of reactive garments that display their history of use. We employ a variety of input and output methodologies to sense and display traces of physical memory on clothing. We will ask, how can an object have “memory”? How can an object be altered through interaction? What kind of interactions are appropriate to give physical memory to a wearable object? What is the difference between PASSIVE and ACTIVE interaction (manipulation versus sensing)? Who do we want to communicate with or to?

A deep dive into a new media arts practice built around the craft of scavenging for data emitted during acts of love and what it means to make digital artifacts on the web “handmade”.

This talk presents a media arts practice intent on revealing data trails from various forms of common technology that embodies handmade and empathetic qualities. Thematically framing data as supplement to memory formation, intimate datasets are sets of data that encapsulates the inner self. The talk explores two works that use real-time data input to display visual output in artistic installation. The first work called Pulse of Anonymous Memories utilizes a live feed of a viewer’s heartrate to animate floating images of “anonymous memories”. The installation is made up of hanging fabric that is illuminated by projection mapped imagery that resembles holograms when in the dark. The second work called Handmade Dataset imagines making datasets between two people of memories as an act of love. The two works explore interactivity between people and their data while carrying out actions that are both tactile and require an empathetical exchange with themselves or another person.

Who tells history? We can find multiple versions about the electronic art history, most of them with subtle differences, but it has been unusual -until a few years ago- to find references pointing to countries out of a small group from Europe and North America. Several projects have been developed to change that situation. The Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection, hosted by The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, represents an example of the relevant role and the impact that the archival of electronic artworks and its public access can play in having another perspective on history.

Keywords: Traditional fishermen, Fishermen of Old Providence, Taganga and La Boquilla, Colombian Caribbean Sea, Mental maps; Natural Signs, Empirical knowledge, Oral Histories, Paths, Ideological patrimony, Drawings, Metalanguage, Marks/Points, Sensory Image.

Traditional fishermen of Old Providence, Taganga and La Boquilla, Colombia rely on mental maps as a tool to identify the best locations to fish. Fishermen read natural signs and use geometry, arithmetic and images in the mind to create mental navigation maps for fishing in the Caribbean Sea. Life experiences provide the empirical knowledge to create oral stories and life histories in the development of mental paths in the minds ideological patrimony of the fishermen. These mental paths, revealed by the researcher-artist through drawings visualized, form a metalanguage that has its own visual codes, a visual alphabet and a glossary of images.

Introduction
This investigation is from the perspective of a visual artist, understanding and interpreting how mental maps contribute to the creation of mental navigation maps upon which the traditional fishermen of Old Providence, Taganga and La Boquilla depend, to locate optimal fishing. The fishermen read natural signs by identifying ocean currents and the color of the sea, analyzing wind direction, the moon cycle, solar position, and even how flying birds approach the beach. Paths are made in the sea by using three fixed reference points on the shore. Geometry, arithmetic and image are often unknowingly applied as the fishermen navigate the Caribbean Sea using empirical knowledge to help them identify the optimum places to fish. This knowledge and ability, stored only in the minds of traditional fishermen, is passed down orally from generation to generation and is not recorded in any literature.

This paper examines two public art projects at Cárcamo de Dolores, in Chapultepec Park, Mexico City: Diego Rivera’s El Agua, Origen de la Vida en la Tierra [Water, Origin of Life on Earth] (1951) and Ariel Guzik’s Cámara Lambdona [Lambdona Chamber] (2010). Because these projects are new additions to existing literature on environmental themes in art history and media arts histories, the incipient focus is on addressing both their artistic and conceptual significance. Both conceived as creative engagements with water, Rivera’s El Agua, Origen de la Vida en la Tierra is highlighted as the first underwater mural in modern art, with Guzik’s Cámara Lambdona as a sonic installation created to restore the former’s work. To additionally shed light on the artists’ respective aims in merging ecology, art, science, and technology, this discussion then considers these projects’ divergent articulations of human and nonhuman relations, and as well their kindred aspirations, to function as catalysts of a possible, more sustainable world. In including these projects, this examination shares current concerns with broadening the geographical scope of existing environmentally-themed art historical and media arts histories. Expanding upon this focus, this paper not only emphasizes the ecological arts in the Global South, but as well their interdisciplinary basis and media forms. Hence, it combines a global perspective with an inter-disciplinary approach, which, echoing the projects considered, is moreover relevant for further developing the existing histories of the environmental arts.

Storytelling with images may be our first record of narratives, such as sand drawings and rock carvings in the western desert tradition through to interactive meta‑narratives being produced today. meta‑narratives, the exhibition, will present works by artists who re‑interpret the manner in which stories are told. The artists are presenting large tales and small relying on the specifics of the locations from which the stories are sourced. The stories are site‑specific (the moon, a small town off the coast of South Eastern Australia, Arnhem Land). meta‑narratives presents contemporary, frequently interrupted, reception of texts and histories as explored by artists who find new modes of presenting our stories back to us. The oldest work (requiring to be sourced as loans) will be an animation of a bark painting depicting the journey between two islands in the north of Australia. The audio and video recordings formed part of Little Painting, Big Stories: Gossip Songs of Western Arnhem Land exhibition at the University of Western Australia. meta‑narratives includes works like the Book of Luna which is an interactive cabinet of curiosities collecting differing perspectives and responses to our view of the moon. Penumbra uses a hybrid art/literature application in development for tablet media. It expands ‘ebook’ conventions by carefully integrating video, illustration and fiction. Law of the Tongue (Helyer) presents a tale of the only documented example of inter‑species collaboration. A key consideration in selecting the works is that they have a highly resolved visual aesthetic approach to their content. They are poetic in their visualization and audio portraiture of stories and histories. They are all exemplary in the finely crafted use of electronic and digital arts and are highly sophisticated in the way the stories have been resolved for audience engagement and to stimulate the curious.

Metabolism holds potential as both a crucial topic and an analytical tool for our current biopolitical moment, for understanding the agency and significance of material forces as they move into and through bodies. From this vantage point, this statement suggests practicing a metabolic gaze by reading together metabolism and contemporary art. It discusses ways of defining metabolism that might be productive in helping to produce tools and touchstones for metabolic readings, before presenting examples of artworks which might be interestingly illuminated by light of this sign. Keywords: metabolic arts, metabolism, ASTS, bioart, microbes, digestion, soil, non-human, art-science.

Augmented Reality represents a collision of universes, between that of physical experience and the universe of symbols and meaning. Our passage back and forth between realities long predates our use of computers, and our attempts to separate the real from the virtual. Mixed and augmented reality offers the media artist rich territories for exploration wherever meaning migrates between the experiential and the symbolic. The authors? works in progress investigate both the practical application of mixed reality as an educational tool, and the aesthetic potential of the technology itself.

This paper aims at a topological contextualization of architectural ornament and its substrate membrane. A membrane acts as the interface to a building as a technical object (Simondon), yet ornamentation is its aesthetic (Simondon) projection. This synthetic deformation of a building’s limits punctuates a large tableau of simultaneous multiplicities including physical systems as well as the social, cultural and symbolic (Banham, Maturana and Varela, Simondon). The potential enunciation of an “ornamented” membrane and the translation of building systems into potential opportunities for public engagement will consider how passive (and active) systems can provoke action through material and immaterial phenomenological interfaces.

This contribution argues for the potential of Barr, Khaled and Lessard’s Method for Design Materialization (MDM) as a research through design tool that is specifically suited for new media preservation. Building moreover from the ISEA first and second Summits on New Media Art Archiving, this article introduces the reader to this methodological and epistemological design framework through four existing articles: both addressing important issues in the context of new media practice, education, display and archiving. Placing these articles in dialogue with four structuring ideas of the MDM initiative, it posits the importance of further introducing new media artists to processes of self-archiving through the use of cohesive platforms such as MDM.

This panel discusses practical and theoretical investigations in art and technology related to nature immersions, the construction of hybrid ecologies and transcultural connectedness. We will approach these subjects from the sand point of artists that question and propose the understanding of emerging hybrid organic structures as aesthetic organisms. Working within the immaterial, invisible, dynamical flow that intercommunicates biological (living systems) and artificial (machine/electronic/digital) organisms in the process of invention, we propose the idea of artworks as transducers, interconnecting artist, nature, and the audience into an integrated dynamical whole. Specific methodological approaches create a flow of informative and sensitive experiences based on nature immersions, field trips, rural residencies, among others. Processes in which performances, actions, meetings, and interactive platforms are not only spaces for experimentation, but also environments in which the art practice reflects the concepts applied in the artistic work. Artworks created are related to a field of experimentations where the blend between artificial systems (digital or analogue) and living organisms is explored creatively. Investigation is driven towards promoting experiences, which may propitiate sensorial and intuitive integration between species, beings, and organisms. Artistic processes are conceived in order to foster possible states of awareness that are provided by the expression of phenomenon in coherent poetic systems. Immersions in natural environments are usually stimulating our senses and perceptions, bringing about the sense of being enhanced by technology and connected to nature.

There is something inexplicable about nature’s vastness – it evokes ‘something’ – a feeling connecting us to a greater whole – wonderful yet simultaneously frightening. The Romantics called it the sublime. In the European Romantic arts the notion of the sublime was resurrected from its Neo-Classical lineage. A resurrection that contributes to our contemporary understanding of the notion; felt and experienced within the observer, rather than its earlier use describing grandness or terror as an attribute of natural phenomena. In a direct response to the thrust of growing Empiricism and its increasing impact on how people understood the world, the Romantics saw it necessary to evoke the sublime through representation; an attempt to retain mysticism associated with nature. This was done with aesthetic theory based on how the sublime is evoked through the natural.

This paper describes Metopia, a work in progress, a project that traces constant shift in air pollution in the environment, using generative principles and sonification to address the problems of the relation between humans, technology and the environment with its growing climate problem. The paper describes the first prototype, a wireless sensor network, where sound is used as a strategy for humans to experience the data from the measured ambient air-pollution. Not only air-pollution is invisible, but also the data from the measurements. Metopia addresses the concept of disruption from several aspects, which are described below.
What we breath have a continuous impact on our bodies and on our behavior. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated 3.7 million deaths from ambient air-pollution in 2012 [1]. Considering health issues and the destructive impact air-pollution have on the human health and body, Metopia addresses the air-pollution as disruptive to our systems. This problem is a wicked problem as describes by Horst Rittel [4], with not one solution, but an effort by everybody is required. Considering all aspects of this environmental and indeterminate problem, there is not one solution to this problem. Metopia is a hack, hacking the environment, tapping into the larger system, the urban operating system [2], [3], [5], [6] and is proposed to function as critical tool in the divers discussions around Anthropocene and its different frameworks, where aspects of social, cultural, political and economical dimensions are intertwined. It is in the intersection of science, creativity, culture, politics and economics where disruption takes place.
Metopia, this autonomous sensor system, is using generative principles to communicate complex processes in an indeterminate atmosphere. Various sensor are used to measure the environmental impact of air-pollution. In the project Metopia, the complex processes in our environment are examined using data from a versatile arrangement of sensors. The changes in toxic levels in the environment are used as meta-data in a sound composition, using generative principles. Metopia is work in progress and will be tested in urban space, with a start in July. The plan is to bring a working prototype to Vancouver and run tests in the wild, during ISEA2015, to sonify the air-pollution around the location of the conference.

[1] World Health Organisation (WHO). [online] www.who.int/gho/phe/en/ (Accessed March 1, 2105)
[2] Sjuve, E. (2014) ISEA2014, Zayed University, Dubai, UAE
[3] Sjuve, E. (2014) Metopia: Pollutants: Matter: Sonification. Internet of Things: The Philosophy, York: St. Johns University, UK
[4] Rittel, H., Webber, M. (1973) Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences (4) pp. 155-169
[5] Sjuve, E. (2010) Sonic Activation: Spectral Architectural Memories. Media City International Scientific Conference. Bauhaus University, Weimar, DE.
[6] Sjuve, E. (2013) Tap into the Urban Operating System. Hybrid City ll Conference. University Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC), National and Kapodistrian University, Athens, Greece

The purpose of this research is to show part of the Mexican electronic art scenario, which in many cases is produce with limited resources, low-cost materials and free and open source data and software. What characterized the most this artistic works is the concept and the main idea which is related to the Latin American context, because of that, these works of art are unique. The main statement of this research is to find evidence of the importance of the concept despite the materials, more than the spectacle that some works could offer to an audience with unlimited resources. Through this, an analysis of various Mexican electronic art works take place.

A unique cultural project, Micro-Folie illustrates the symbiosis with all the territories!

This program is supported by the Ministry of Culture and coordinated by La Villette. Micro-Folie offers fun and educational cultural contents through different modular spaces. These modules (Digital museum, virtual reality, game library, …) are set up inside many types of existing structures (library, hall, school, shopping center …) or inside spaces created specifically to welcome the Micro-Folie.

At the heart of the project lies the Digital Museum, a true digital art gallery that encourages curiosity. An open window to discover the diversity of the masterpieces of humanity.

Micro-Folie is a convergence of multiple possibilities, a crossroad for creative and recreational grounds.

We offer to explore with you the interactions, the sustainable links, the mutual benefits of this tool, through interventions, testimonies and demonstrations with and by those who use it and make it live.

In 1997 Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced the development of a living sensor, the “Critters on a Chip”, a tiny light-sensitive computer chip coated with bio-luminescent bacteria, placed on a standard integrated circuit. In the presence of targeted substances including petrochemical pollutants and explosives, the bacteria emitted a visible blue-green light. Small, inexpensive and fast, critter chips imagined an affective scene in which microbes could be used to monitor remediation and bio-accumulation at sites contaminated by petrochemicals. It was imagined these critter chips could be located in sites where humans and other non-humans could not survive.

As Rosi Braidotti has noted, the political economies of bio-chemo capitalism hold no distinctions between humans and non-humans when it comes to profiting from them. Seeds, plants, animals and bacteria all become sites that generate data. Although much feminist theory and art/science work has focused on the positive, co-creativity of nonhuman organisms and humans, little attention has been dedicated to the aesthetic practices of nonhuman organisms in the network, who don’t engage with us, but accompany us in the dark backgrounds. This paper foregrounds the relations and material loops of environmental data; relations between petrochemicals, waste, computation and capitalism, so that we might attend to the semiliving, exhausted, partial lives of particular organisms that are enrolled with the computation of (big) data, yet often disappear in its data structures. By focusing on nonhuman organisms, I do not wish to reinstate the categories of the animal, fish or bacteria as fixed.

Instead, I want to develop a fuller understanding of the capitalist practices of computing and the ways in which it extends its reach into non-human organisms through affect. I focus on the speculative figure of the critter chip and the artwork “Critter Compiler”. “Critter Compiler” is a speculative fiction writer, a botnet constituted by the queer musings of atoms, microbes, slime moulds and algaes. “Critter Compiler” engages with the more-than-human critters of the internet, an ecology of critical life that demands attention. Drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant I discuss the aesthetics and promise of critter chips that is brought into being by sensing corporealities. Highlighting the entangled intra-actions of bio-accumulation in the artwork “Critter Compiler”, I speculate on the resistances and revolting aesthetics of microbes that propose an alternate political possibility.

“Transplanting the Self: Microbiome Anthropophagy” (2018) was designed as a bioart installation that involves the audience as active participants in an experiment that invites for a reflection about the limits of microbiome manipulation, evoking and exploring ancient practices such as the use of young virgins’ saliva in the production of ritualistic alcoholic drinks, such as the ‘cauim’. The drink is produced from chewed and fermented manioc and the collective consumption of cauim integrates ancient rituals of hunting and cannibalism of native Brazilian tribes. Relating to ISEA 2019 subtheme Aeternitas: Eternity of the Mortal the work discusses and explores future possibilities in engineering personalities addressing critically issues such as the very nature of consciousness and the self. ‘Transplanting the Self’ can be understood as both an installation and a performance were the artist and the audience contributes for its actualization and activation as an artwork.

Mexico is living in an extreme humanitarian crisis since 2006, a crisis that has escalated up to an unprecedented situation. Among the different circles of the horror of this contemporary Mictlán—the underworld for the Nahua culture—, there is one especially painful: the kidnapping of civilians. With more than 30,000 people ‘gone missing’, and several independent groups searching for clandestine graves all around the country, the situation is unbearable. This paper addresses the making of a collaborative socially engaged art project that enables a collective of women based in Los Mochis to document their search for their loved ones in rural and urban areas of Mexico.

Artists Statement

By resorting to filming resources such as cell phones, webcams and GPS, the Migrateurs (Migratory) project proposes and experiments with new filmic forms that replay and distort relations between space and time. The title Migratory is a tribute to the heterotopic qualities of the network whereby images, taken in a continuous movement, become unstable nebulas and are organized into constantly reshaped migratory streams. Forms of image editing and interlacing are updated by searching through reticulated patterns, for example, through offsetting, crossing or delegating the shooting. Thus, the scenario for Switched Eyes (2009) involves crossing operators: one person in Europe and one in Japan are equipped with two cameras. When the filmer in Japan presses the record button on their camera, they trigger not their own camera but their opposite number’s in Europe. In a similar vein, the film Reward (2009) crosses territories. A still camera is found in the woods with a memory card full of pictures of persons unknown. By deduction, it would seem that these people live in the city of Grenoble in France. So an investigation is conducted to try and trace them, from Japan, by exploring the Grenoble area with the Street View tool.

Aimed squarely at the intersection between visual effects, video games and interactive media, NAD-UQAC’s postgraduate program in digital design offers an ideal environment for peering into research-creation practices. The Mimesis laboratory – founded by professors Yan Breuleux, Benoit Melançon and Louis-Philippe Rondeau – focuses itself on the complex relation between illusionary technologies and narrativity. The primary goal of the laboratory is to explore issues involving immersion (experiential design, narrative environments), interactivity (interactive and installation-related design) and previsualization (strategies concerning the materialization and prototyping of ideas). In the context of ISEA’s symposium and the presence of the digital arts community, the official launch of the Mimesis laboratory of NAD-UQAC will be followed by a discussion, where members of Mimesis will be available to answer questions and address comments.

This paper looks primarily at the development, and the possible present and future relevance, of two specific projects, the Groundcourse of the early 1960s and the Planetary Collegium of the new millennium. There is a third project of the early 1970s, lurking in the wings, which, although more radical, and potentially efficacious than the first, lasted a mere 12 months, and so has been consigned by some to the dustbin of history. The link between all three initiatives has been the search for structures that elicit and support creativity, enable research, and develop innovation – of systems, cyberception, identity, language, and behaviour. The field is art, technology and consciousness (technoetics). The thread that links these initiatives is what I call ‘cybernetics of the third kind’, the art of connective, interdependent, associative, transformative syncretic systems. Education as art resists orthodoxy, denies academic predictability, opens up the territory of the unknown in all its fields of inquiry and practice.

‘Body‑Movement interactive art installations, perception and consciousness in embodied Interactive 3‑dimensional audio/visual environments. Research paper which is based on arts‑practice‑based‑research concerning body‑movement interactive environments. The research relates to contemporary artists interactive installations, human machine interaction, culture, and society. They concentrate on creative/interactive experience within body‑movement interactive‑installations, combining interactive arts practice with embodiment and disembodiment theory. Particularly in the area of ‘kinaesthetic’ and ‘proprioception’, and body memory neurons, which are known to affect perception and consciousness? These artist‑led‑research interactive audio‑visual installations cause the experiencers to engage their mind‑body, with audio/visual environment affecting consciousness, which go beyond the human‑computer interface. I am exploring importantly human machine interaction not only from a ubiquitous and pervasive technological perspective, but from an embodied psychological perspective. In the context of complexities of visual/sound perception, empirical evidence is now showing more about body perception. This PhD artist research explored, body‑movement‑ interactive ‑perception techniques to the relation of body‑movement interactive audio/visual 3‑dimensionional/sound installations, and their effects on the user.

The purpose is to gain a better understanding of body‑movement interactive installations. Most media theorists have been concerned with disembodiment associated with cyberspace and virtual Reality, which were not only triggers for theories of disembodiment, but also with it a revival of the corporeal – in the form of bodily action in the virtual world. Interactive works based on VR technical systems create possibilities for new qualities of self‑perception; as far as media can be used to reflect actions through direct depiction. The transformation of physical and spatial experiences brought about by information in the code call into question the boundary between material and immaterial, and also between physical perception and information flows. Mark Hansen (2006) believes that the human body, in the age of information flows, does not end at the   boundaries of its own skin. The human body constructs intimate relationships with digital information flows and data spaces.

The direction for this artist’s research was to discover how to open up sensual perception channels, and particularly body perception, to free us, by “self‑visualization”, from the habitual, day‑to‑day, culturally inscriptive truths, that affect the way we perceive. Bio ethics research is demonstrating this process, by cyborg techniques being developed in laboratories; sonar, infrared, ultraviolet, and a myriad of others. They are all exciting techniques enhancing sensory perceptions, techniques to newly observe and depict the natural world.

The ‘active realization’ of body‑movement perception is an alternating or a parallel manifestation of reflective and immersive moments. Aesthetic distance or reflection is possible and is an essential counterpart to absorption. Aesthetic experience of interactive art is especially shaped by the interplay between immersion and distance, for only in this way can one’s own actions become available as an object of reflection.

Abstract

If you could share and exchange your embodied dream experience, imagery, emotions and sensations with your friends and loved ones, how would you do it? If you could not only share and exchange, but remix and collage them, what would they look like or feel like? How would this work?
The aim of my PhD art-research is, at a meta-conceptual level, to uncover new understandings of the sensations of ‘liveness’ (Auslander, 1999) and ‘presence’, which may emerge from the use of mobile technologies and wearable devices within performance contexts. To explore these concepts, I chose to create a practical project to investigate them through and within several participatory performances, including live visual explorations meant to simulate dream and embodied VJ-ing (video jockying). The project MindTouch, discussed here, is a mobile performance project that uses biofeedback sensors and mobile media phones in live, staged, streaming, performance video events, to simulate dream embodiment and telepathic exchange. The aim of this paper is to discuss the project and research conducted at the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute at the University of East London, under the direction of Professor Lizbeth Goodman, in terms of technical and aesthetic developments from 2008 to present, as well as the final phase of staging the performance events, beginning July 2009.

The title of this work refers to a primitive instrument that has appeared in a multitude of forms in various parts of the world. All these instruments exist of a hollow form with a membrane mounted that can be brought into vibration by blowing or singing. The best-known member of the family is the kazoo used until present times in pop music. The point of departure for the work was the spectacular noise produced by children with minuscule plastic mirlitons in the cavalcade of the Funeral of the Sardine, the final act of the biggest fiesta in the Spanish town Murcia.
Our Mirlitones are much bigger than their predecessors and produce a world of sounds little known in musical practice. The installation exists of suspended vertical pipes, one to three meters long, equipped with a vibrating membrane at the upper side. The length of the pipes is related to the diameter of seven planets and the elapse in time of the dynamics for each pipe is deduced from day and night cycles. Each pipe is treated differently resulting in a slow, hypnotizing, ever changing sound mix. Small fluctuations in the air pressure cause subtle changes in the sound, composed of very low frequencies, harmonics and phenomena like beats and combination tones that arise from simultaneously sounding pipes. Because all the pipes share the air from the same limited source they also influence each other resulting in a fragile and complex sonorous system, unpredictable up to the smallest detail.
Mirlitones is a physical and sensorial experience due to its rather high sound volumes and ever changing, energetic and hypnotic sound environment. Although the work seems to be not much more than some vibrating membranes and sound chambers its hi tech proportional valves are essential. These make a very precise and gradual control of the airflow in each pipe possible, delivering new experiences in the field of listening to and “undergoing” sound: The public is invited to the experience to be in the centre of an ever changing sound cloud.
August, 2013 Mirlitones was shown as part of the ICMC 2013 and the Totally Huge New Music Festival at the Kidogo Art Institute, Fremantle, Australia. At this occasion the work was not only presented as an autonomous installation, we also invited Canadian bass clarinet player Krista Martynes to improvise with the work. At the talk at ISEA2015 all hard- and software (PureData) will be explained and a simple mouth blown demo pipe will be shown.

Misplaced Euphoria is an interactive performance that consists of expressive movement, expressive gesture recognition, and interactive visualization that aims to develop empathy for people with bipolar disorder. This project explored the characteristics of those with bipolar disorder through the mediums of dance and interactive visualization driven by expressive gesture recognition. To develop an interactive performance, we conducted an interview with a person to gather information. We used the insights collected from the interview processes as a base for our creative process. To convey the inner state of the dancer to the audience, 6-DOF acceleration sensors, attached to the dancers arms, were used to capture her movement. We then used the Support Vector Machine (SVM) to parameterize the dancers expression, and the results were visualized through the Rutt-Etra algorithm on a real-time basis.

Abstract

Mitate is a widely known Japanese tradition. It is a conscious act of showing/seeing a thing from a different viewpoint. The concept was further developed into an art of representation. While it is based on the universal human capability of imagination and association, mitate is a cultural phenomenon. As a part of the Device art project, since 2005, which seeks a new form of media art that goes beyond the art world, the author has analyzed ‘Japanese’ elements in today’s media art. Through the analysis it is understood that mitate adds multiple layers of meanings to artworks in playful manner, and serves to open up interaction between the artwork and its interactors: it is similar to metaphor but its notion is wider and multifaceted. This paper discusses the relationship between playfulness and mitate.

MIREVI is an acronym for Mixed Reality and Visualization and describes the main areas of our interdisciplinary research team. As part of the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf, Germany, we focus on human-computer interaction to improve various parts of life. With members of our “Kunst und Kultur Brigade” (art and culture brigade) we specifically look at collaborations with artists and cultural institutions and work on very different levels in the context of dance, performance, digital media and participation.

We report about several experiments on applying mixed reality technology in the context of accessing collective memories from atomic bombs, Holocaust and Second World War. We discuss the impact of Virtual Reality, Augmented Virtuality and Augmented Reality for specific memorial locations. We show how to use a virtual studio for demonstrating an augmented reality application for a specific location in a remote session within a video conference. Augmented Virtuality is used to recreate the local environment, thus providing a context and helping the participants recollect emotions related to a certain place. This technique demonstrates the advantages of using virtual (VR) and augmented (AR) reality environments for rapid prototyping and pitching project ideas in a live remote setting.

Abstract

“The digital yearns for the organic with the same passion with which text yearns for the reade”.     _Sean Cubitt (1998: 35)

Not since the science fiction film Tron (1982) have we seen such a conspicuously visual attempt at creating a hybrid juxtaposition between computer-based aesthetics and physical artefacts in an entertainment medium. However, whereas the 1980s futuristic movie attempted encapsulation of the physical real in the digital virtual, in the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony we see a perceptual shift occurring through the extension of the digital virtual – out into the material real. A key tenet to this notion of mapping the digital into a material space is the idea that there is a distinguishable computer (or digital) aesthetic. How this aesthetic has become culturally recognisable – to the extent that it was utilised so effectively and comprehensively in the opening ceremony – will be examined in the following 3 steps:

1. through the definition of what makes up the idea of a computer aesthetic;
2. how this aesthetic has achieved cultural traction, in particular around notions of Chinese societal norms and
3. how this recognition allowed for the emergent configurations seen in the opening ceremony, where properties of computer technologies were combined with material artefacts to engender social spectacle.

As mobile media becomes more ubiquitous in everyday life and contemporary art practice, how can we define mobile art? This paper seeks to coalesce some of the ways in which mobile art is being practiced and how we might begin to have a unified definition of mobile art. It seeks to frame the multiple ways in which art is playing in, and through, mobile media as part of a longer history of cultural mobilities and movement. In particular, this paper explores the rise of datafication and quantified self (QS) through mobile apps, and the critical role of mobile art which cannot be underestimated.

Social networks are believed to broaden participation and deepen democracy, but may play a role in reproducing social divisions. This project highlights the differences between computer users, whose social network use constitutes a form of mediated public, and mobile-centric users who primarily access the Internet via their phones, and whose contributions often remain digitally invisible. Mobile social networks serve a growing number of people with limited or no access to computers, who use their mobile phones as a primary form of Internet access, and who often do not use the platforms popular among computer-users. Differences in platform thus inscribe race, class, urban-rural and national divisions.

Since the invention of the transistor radio, people have used mobile technologies to create privacy within the public spaces of urban environments. Devices such as iPods and mobile phones enable us to control social interactions in shared spaces – ear buds signal to others that we are listening to music, even when nothing is playing, and moments of social awkwardness can be alleviated by text messages, games and social networks. While it is easy to blame our devices for disconnecting us from the sights and sounds of everyday life, the connections and interactions made possible through pervasive computing enable us to transform our experience of urban life by creating new modes of engagement in, with and through the places where we live, work and play. As we increasingly use our mobile devices to filter, augment and curate everyday interactions, our understanding of ‘place’ has moved from geographic specificity to spatial indeterminacy. Through a discussion of my own practice and other related artworks, I will examine how mobile sound artworks that rely on the body for context can shift the parameters of spatial practice from the body’s position within physical space to the liminal space articulated by the moving body; how broadcasting sound through the body can facilitate new modes of sociality in public spaces; and how these temporary conditions and connections may be explored though networked performance.

This paper investigates how location-based mobile games, known as pervasive games, merge virtual and physical spaces, changing our perception of urban environments. Games like Botfighers, Supafly, and Geocaching are descendants from multiuser environments, which formerly took place online. Cell phones equipped with SMS and GPS are responsible for bringing these online communities out to physical space. How urban circulation spaces transform into virtual places? What are the effects of role-playing games in physical spaces?

Mobile phone music requires a focus on sound as well as on mobile phones, but it does not necessarily involve ring tones. A mobile phone is not only a telephone, but also a computer, able to transform any kind of data into sound. New data can be basis for artistic sound work. This development reflects current social change.

Panel: Latin American Forum #2

The concept Mochilab* was used by Juan Reyes during a discussion within a mailing list to refer to the possibility of avoiding establishing workspaces with big infrastructures, like the MIT Media Lab, in the Colombian context, instead he proposed the uses of movable labs with the size of a bag that can be installed at different geographical locations that responds to the actual needs of specific practices. The need to produce a new laboratory model that is adaptable to the local context was born from the imposibility of successfully building working and experimental spaces based on laboratory alien models like the MIT Media Lab. Although they are funded through public grants, very often these innitatives dooo not answer to the specific needs of the context where they are embeded. This condition has motivated the creation of a series of projects that can be grouped under the laboratory concept, because they are experimentation spaces that keep the relation among science, art and technology, but they are inspired by singular conditions of a community more than the ones of an institution. This aspect marks the difference from the traditional model that tied to big institutions like academies, goverments or companies. In this diverse spectrum, we can find Mochilabs -moveable labs- where a group of people pack part of their work space in the bag, so they could travel to a place that is normally far from the big cities to work with communities in a process that is highly framed by pedagogical practices, along with a collective creative process. The subjects and techniques of these labs vary, they can deal with subjects like critical cartography, audiovisual creation and technology appropriation.

For the past couple of years I have been developing models of artificial creatures. These els are not only interesting from a biology point of view (they can be used to test theories about animal behaviour), but also from an entertainment point of view, since they can be used to build autonomous creatures with which a human can have interesting interactions. In particular, I developed an algorithm for motivational competition and selection of behaviours in an artificial creature.

In more recent years I added a learning component to this algorithm which allows the creature to change its behaviour selection based on experience and environment feedback. I have built several AI creatures (robotic and simulated ones) which illustrate and test these algorithms. I will show videos of some of these creatures and most likely give a live demo. I will focus on a recent experiment in which we modelled a live “dog” which lives in a simulated two-dimensional environment. A user can interact with the dog: change its motivational levels, teach it some new behaviours by giving positive and negative feedback and observing the resulting (and sometimes surprising) behaviour.

The basic idea forwarded is to view aesthetic decision making as a distributed process where a society of simple agents are engaged in local interaction and in global interaction with the outside world. The approach is inspired by recent work in biochemistry, pattern formation in biological work spaces, the study of non-linear systems, fluid dynamics and the cognitive theory suggested in Minsky (1986). Nature itself provides many examples where interesting and coherent overall behaviour results from surprisingly simple, local rules. The observation of this pattern-making potential looks promising in a wish to escape mechanistic performance often prevalent in a rulebased approach to algorithmic composition.

Whilst the world at large is only just coming to terms with the Net and the computerization of society, another media shift is occurring, whose consequences are likely to be even greater. The silicon dry digital domain of computers is converging with the wet biological world of living systems. The moist media emerging from this convergence will be the substrate of the art of this century, as telematics, biotechnology and nano-engineering together enter the working process of artists, designers, performers and architects. Just as globalization means that not only are we are all connected, but that our ideas, institutions, even our own identities are constantly in flux, so too will moist-media bridge the artificial and natural domains, transforming the relationship between consciousness and the material world. We move fast not only across the face of the earth but across the reach of our minds.

Intro

The dry world of computational virtuality and the wet world of biological systems are converging to produce a new substrate for creative work, moist-media, consisting of bits, atoms, neurons, and genes. There is also a convergence of three V.R.s:

1. Virtual Reality (interactive digital technology): telematic, immersive.
2. Validated Reality (reactive mechanical technology): prosaic, Newtonian.
3. Vegetal Reality (psychoactive plant technology): entheogenic, spiritual.

At this inter-space lies the great challenge to both science and art: the nature of consciousness. A technoetic aesthetic is needed which, in consort with moist-media, may enable us as artists to address the key questions of our time:

-What is it to be human in the post-biological culture?

-What is the ontology of mind and body distributed in cyberspace?

-How to deal with the responsibility of redefining nature and even life itself ?

-What aspects of the immaterial can contribute the re-materialization of art?

Molior is an organization specialized in the production of exhibitions and artistic projects which make use of technologies as a creation, expression and action tool. Since its foundation in 2001, Molior has presented numerous innovative projects in Canada as well as on the international scene in collaboration with multiple dissemination partners. Molior also carries out various activities outside of established networks in order to stimulate audience development and foster access to high quality productions.

MetaObjects is a digital studio based in Hong Kong and London. Founded in 2017 by curator and researcher Ashley Lee Wong and technologist Andrew Crowe, the studio aims to facilitate digital production with artists and cultural institutions. Working across VR/AR, 3D printing, motion-capture, audiovisual production, software and web development, MetaObjects seeks to encourage the sharing of knowledge of new digital tools and processes.

Montreal Digital Spring is a non-profit organisation whose primary mission is to boost digital intelligence through various activities including a yearly conference, an exhibition, networking events, and a series of workshops targeting the general public, digital creativity companies and organizations and the youth.

Monument Public Address System is an augmented reality mobile media platform responding to the racist history of confederate monuments in the United States. It has been invigorating to watch the removal of confederate monuments as part of the black lives matter protests responding to the murder of George Floyd. This project aims to add to this movement and present an avenue for public expression and healing, one of many that are necessary. For communities surrounding these monuments, particularly monuments that cannot be removed, covered or altered due to legal restrictions, the need for a flexible and mobile public platform that allows both deliberate and spontaneous verbal and visual expression is pressing. The social affordances of AR in relation to specific situations, particularly the properties that allow multiple participants to create, modify and annotate virtual assets, can broaden our understanding of complex and troubling historical sites. While Monument Public Address System will invite visual and aural expressions of anger, frustration, sadness and fear regarding our country’s racist history, it will also welcome the enunciation of anti-racist hopes, activities and initiatives.

Monument Public Address System is a multi-platform interactive documentary project centered around a growing collection of audio interviews about the past, present, and future of confederate and colonial monuments in the US. Two platforms are being produced to present the documentary narratives to the public. The first is a place-based augmented reality app accessible on participant’s smartphones and tablets. The second is an installation and musical performance. With this project, the artist aims to engender critical and thoughtful social experiences in public spaces through the presentation of narratives that offer truth and justice-centered perspectives, as well as anti-racist visions for our shared future.

Abstract

In October 2007 the Bangalore Space and Culture Symposium was held at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore, which aimed to bring scientists and artists together to share their common interest1. There was an agreement at this symposium, at least amongst the art and culture section2, that there should be projects pursued in relation to the upcoming launch of Chandrayaan-1, India’s first moon mission.

‘Moon Vehicle’ became the project title and is a translation of the name Chandrayaan. At that time, Moon Vehicle was described as ‘a method of transmitting the cultural and philosophical meanings of the moon in India’s culture and will initiate a dialogue about the public perception of space exploration in an Indian context’. It is a vehicle for change, dialogue, happenings, creativity and learning.

This paper addresses the politics of virtual representation of human bodies by focusing on two realms of on-line media: educational tutorials for modeling female avatars and market-places that sell virtual humans. As a professor who teaches 3D digital modeling and animation, I set out to empower my students with the critical language to unpack these problematic objects. Through reading and discussing D. Fox Harrell’s writing about phantasms, my students and I together dissect the ideology at work within these constructs, and we think through the mechanisms that allow these phantasms to appear socially real even though they are “rooted in processes of imaginative cognition.”[1] As part of this pedagogical and creative project, I have begun an ethnographic study comprised of an ongoing dialogue with the makers of web-based tutorials and the creators of digital humans for purchase. Through this research I am developing a stronger understanding of how virtual humans are produced and how they function in the marketplace. In turn, I am enabled, and my students are empowered, to build new phantasms to participate in less-violent, more inclusive worlds.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Video, art installation, Experience Prototyping, Rasaboxes, RSVP Cycles, ritual, improvisation, Bodyweather, dreams, embodiment, performativity.

Echoes of Balance and Push is an immersive video art installation that explores how a new mother’s daily life relates to tumultuous and unpredictable experiences of weather. This paper describes an interdisciplinary collaboration between the authors, who are artists and researchers. The researchers in tandem with the artist explored the creative process and experience of viewing Echoes of Balance and Push. Through the lens of an iPhone, an improvisatory experience of maneuvering a large weather balloon in the open elements creates the environment for exploring struggle in relationships to motherhood. We describe the design process and results of the work through concepts of Experience Prototyping: using methods of Rasaboxes, RSVP Cycles, ritual interaction, improvisation, and Bodyweather performances. Echoes of Balance and Push presents an exploration of improvisatory performance art through a perspective of design prototyping in order to highlight the creative process of a sensorial-based art practice.

Since 2015 we have been working on the use of organic organisms such as plants and fungi in the processes of recycling ewaste and how these systems create feedback audio signal transmission using moisture and decomposition of the circuit boards. Two projects with differing relations to mycelium, networks and audio diffusion were proposed : Motherplants as new computing experience and Biofeedback installation as a way to create an art installation or a performance using bioelectrical signal. This paper engages with the notions of symbiosis and mutation of existing technologies to explore new ways of interaction with recycling, art research and implementation of new network model based on mycelium communication cooperation system.

Is it an anti-cybernetic process we are developing? What if spores could calculate? What is a fungal network? Can we operate a mutation between electronics and mycelium? Can we generate power from these installations?

Keywords: Motivation, Design for Behavior Change, Behavioral Economics, Persuasion.

Motivation is a key factor that determine behavior change. In this paper, the researchers study how people is motivated when interacting with two strategies that aim to change grocery shopping behaviors. The strategies are similar but with differences in mindfulness and nudging elements. Researchers collected qualitative data with observations and interviews from 12 user participants. Motivation categories of Fogg’s behavioral model were used in the data analysis. Findings show that the strategies can trigger pleasure, pain, fear and social acceptance. People that used the reflective strategy with mindful processes were able to better express their motivations.

Can a complex site, such as an urban park, be better understood through a game? Might this playful preparation be useful for design? In response to such questions, this paper discusses a practical project that structured design-oriented site research as a development, implementation and deployment of a locative mobile game in which designers learn by racing colonies of virtual organisms. The analysis of this experiment demonstrates that this approach can support creativity and provide benefits compatible with goals of ecological design.

While migration studies are generally approached in geographical/statistical/geo-political terms (time, histories, routes), this project considers migratory movement at the scale of individual human movement. movement as a marker of identity expressed through qualities of posture, rhythm, gesture, tempo, orientation. Each person’s movement is unique, an individual’s movement ‘fingerprint’, and this project seeks to reveal and honor the specific, fluid, complex qualities of a people in motion of body and location, while adding to a critical discourse surrounding issues of contemporary migration. This is a position paper describing the research framework behind a new project which proposes an exploration of movement and mobility amongst internal migratory populations within two pilot areas; South Africa and Greece.

This  work develops our previous work [1] [Iyengar, V., Coleman, G. et. al. 2016], creating a repository for a growing collection of high resolution motion-capture ‘portraits’. This repository will not  only hold the source documentation of movement sequences, but also serve as an open platform for those recorded. It will become a space for discussion, creative interpretation, translation, annotation, and analysis. The repository opens a public space for artists, researchers, dancers, ethnographers, humanists, and somatic movement educators to respond and add diverse layers of meaning; creative interpretation, social and historical context, and technological and somatic analysis. Thus, we build an expandable platform for exploring the linguistics of movement through a range of responses.

Keywords: Data visualization, Moving Image, Navigable Space, Interactive Space, Sensitive Experience

Data visualization takes on different dimensions when analyzed from the categories of digital production of the moving image. This typology of image not only presents information, but also allows us to visualize data in both rational and emotional way.  Contemporary examples provide scenarios where a total viewer can flow as a vector through a navigable, interactive space. Furthermore, this type of work becomes interactive when the viewer/participant is able to alter the piece and build his/her narrative that creates a unique and sensitive experience. When moving image is used to create data visualizations, we fit into a fissure in the visual landscape, which have the potential to enhance the human experience related with data reception and cognition.

As an artist and researcher I am aware of how technology is reconfiguring our relationship with the world and our own sense of being and consciousness, our thinking. Technology can also enable benign spaces where art can engage easily with an audience and I am currently investigating a meeting space for conscious thought, through notions of techno-daydreaming. The daydream can be understood as a space between, an escapism from the everyday, offering a seamless transition from an awake and rational state to a daydreaming mind where the logical and the emotional are kept in a dream-like state of oscillation. The daydream can be seen as an in-between position where thinking is liberated and allows for free-form connections. To what extent is it possible to artificially emulate or produce such a creative mindstate?

Within this research ideas of daydreaming are derived from Paul Virilio’s work on inertia and picnolepsy. It is this understanding of “movement without moving” facilitated by new technologies within our ordinary everyday life, which has informed the making of three digital non-linear films. This series of work bridges new media and traditional practice using the collage effect enabled by new lens technologies and combinatorial software for the interweaving of moving and still images. The works address the conventional older art media values of structure, colour, tension, harmony and balance apparent within flat surface picture making, designed to move the eye around the canvas. For content, they play with the notion of the ‘spectator’ sport where leisure and daydreaming are encouraged as legitimate forms of time out and therefore allow us a “disappearance” from the everyday. As a spectator, there are moments of concentrated focus on the action, and lapses of interest where the eye meanders around the scenery and the mind wanders into reverie.

Over the years, the development of video games is trying its best to produce the virtual reality experience which getting closer to the reality. By changing the interface, from Atari’s joystick to Analog Vibration of PS2 joystick, then Gun Shape controller for shooting game, and Dance Mania’s floor controller to Wii wiimote, video game design is creating more and more “physical experience” for the players. Players now can actual smash and swing to play the game, but we are still playing the games in a 2D virtual environment: manipulating the character in an unlimited virtual space in a fixed static limited real world.

Moving Mario is definitely not reproducing Super Mario Bros in another way. By grabbing partial concept and some of the key elements behind the TV game development, Moving Mario is trying to challenge some of the traditional game elements. Throughout the gaming process, players can rethink the relationship between the player and the game. [source: Vimeo]

My artwork explores our perception of the landscape by drawing attention to the relativity of our memories of the natural world. In the Moving Mountains series, I use projection to map fields of colored light onto paintings from the Untitled Marine Vistas series to change our perception of the landscape and draw attention to the relativity of color, using material and media as metaphors, proxies, and surrogates to explore issues of permanence and impermanence. Structured and iterated combinations of paint and projected light allow me to explore our relationship to representations of place and position. I use digital video projection as a source for colored light, which through its interaction with the elements on the canvas, the environment of the gallery, and the passage of time, changes the image perceived by the viewer.  Manipulating the light which illuminates the paintings allows for the combinations produced by the programmed sequence I’ve created, by the intervention of viewers in the space, and the change of conditions in the environment of their display.

Landmasses move not only along the x axis of the canvas, but also spanning time and three-dimensional space, emerging from traditional points of painted perspective within the canvas, and from pinpoint sources of digital projection. My work explores the borders between the real and the imagined, the physical and the perceived. Separating what is within from what is without, what is physically accessible from that which exists only within memory or imagination, serve as a point of departure for considering the role of not just the act of painting and the act of remembering, but the sea, the desert, the wind, the salt, the earth, and the light in this process—the way that the non-human elements exert their existence and connect us to history, time, and geography.

Panelists will discuss their roles in a collaborative inter-institutional project funded by the Knight Foundation to create an XR & blockchain certificate enabled digital database that will archive, index, lend, and exhibit complex digital objects using a web-based platform that expands the current capabilities of the virtual 3D exhibition platform New Art City.

The panel will offer perspectives on collections management, blockchain certificates, artist contracts, and best practices for reauthoring. The team will provide insights from the first 6 months of the beta test of this collaborative project which archives and exhibits Creative New Media Projects produced in San José from 1984-2014 on New Art City. The Art & Technology Archive beta test will allow the technical and digital design upgrades to follow the material, social, and archival process; ensuring that necessary upgrades to New Art City are designed holistically and inclusively with integrated feedback from Museums, Librarians, Archivists, & Curators.

This research introduces the concept of ‘liquidity’ as a framework through which to observe the ways that the lived-in world and particularly society and culture are experienced and discussed as social subjects. It has become apparent that this notion of ‘liquidity’ plays an important role in the generation of novelty, that is, to generate new insights and meanings. Recent studies by Bhabha (1994) or Bauman (2007) identify an apparent shift in the way we experience and deal with modern society replacing the rigid cognitive frameworks by more ‘fluid’ interactions. To understand and to deal with this new concept, a cartography of these liquid times is installed through the design of an artistic Ambisonic sound localization and auralization project. The car- tography follows in depth two specific trajectories. What are the merits of a ‘point of view’ within a liquid society? What type of auralized experiments can be introduced? The scientific and artistic aim is to establish a multi-viewpoint approach (walking, listening and seeing through a state of the art technology) replacing single viewpoint categorization, a concept also to be applied  to the reading of the artworks itself.

Multimedia performative forms of art challenge the traditional notion of ‘art’ in many ways, especially within the context of new media art. But their impact reaches far beyond the pure aesthetic realm: multimedia art demands multisensory perception modes and models for interaction that still lack theoretical foundation.

The dominant epistemological theories in Western cultures are mainly influenced by a separation of the senses in emphasizing their different functions and hierarchizing their meaning. Western cultures have historically developed towards a mainly visual culture, at least also, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out very clearly, because of the overwhelming importance of printing technology (McLuhan 1964). Therefore the development of epistemological models and the establishment of certain cultural dominant media can be seen as inherently interrelated. In this context it seems to be consequent that the multimedial digital technologies challenge the monosensory epistemologies of Western culture, although the eye‘s cultural dominance can still be observed in discourses around the ‘iconic turn’ and in the characterization of the ‘digital culture’ as a visual one.

Overture
The attempt to apply a definition to multimedia has been a difficult proposition. To begin with, multimedia as a description of artistic activity has changed dramatically since the 1960s when it referred to experimental forms of performance art, happenings, mixed media, and other forms of interdisciplinary art. In the 1980s, multimedia was applied to the plethora of emerging forms of entertainment and educational media from CD-ROMs to interactive games to virtual reality. Since the mid-1990s, multimedia has taken on new definition and significance with the emergence of widespread networked technologies, most notably the World Wide Web. It is no wonder the term has become problematic: vague, over-hyped and referencing a seemingly endless array of new media forms, genres, and commercial application.

It was in response to this dilemma, particularly the medium’s lack of historical context, that I began my research in the late 1980s. It became clear to me at the time that an idealized model for contemporary forms of multimedia could be found in Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Artwork), as well as the work of later composers whose artistic pursuits led them to the notion of composing with media. Throughout the 20th Century, artists and composers alike have explored the interdisciplinary realm of music theater, performance art, and interactive electronic media. Of prime importance in this analysis was linking experimental forms that blurred the boundaries of music and the arts to parallel movement in the cybernetic and information sciences – the work of engineers who also embraced interdisciplinary ideals and the quest for new avenues of subjective experience through integrated and non-linear forms.
From this investigation, I began to explore a set of key paradigms that provided a conceptual framework for bridging these two seemingly disparate worlds of creative activity in the arts and sciences. This framework was distilled to five essential concepts that have come to form a meta-description for discussing multimedia: integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion, and the emerging narrative forms that have resulted from these evolving paradigms.

This paper presents BeHAVE, a web-based audiovisual piece that explores a way to reveal my mobile phone use behavior through multimodal data representation, considering the concept of indexicality in data visualization and sonification. It visualizes the spatiality and overall trend of the records of my mobile phone use as a geographical heatmap visualization and a heatmap chart. On top of that, BeHAVE presents a mode for temporal data exploration to make a year of data perceivable in a short period and represent the temporality of data. Based on a
microsound synthesis technique, it also sonifies data to simultaneously evoke visual and auditory perception in this mode. As a way of indexical visualization, BeHAVE also suggests an approach that represents data through mobile phones simultaneously by using WebSocket. Ultimately, BeHAVE attempts to not only improve the perception of self-tracking data but also
arouse aesthetic enjoyment through a multimodal data portrait as a means of self-representation.

Keywords: Multimodal interaction, multimodal learning, biological data visualization, medial arts, bioinformatics, education

Bioinformatics and computational biology seek to apply computational tools mainly to make decisions based on the visualization of the biological data [1]. For this reason, it is now stated that both belong to the group of sciences with greater projection in the acquisition of scientific knowledge [2], which will bring with it and globally, a crucial change in biological research [3]. This rapid scientific progress suggests that bioinformatics will play a fundamental roll in our daily lives and in this sense, interacting, visualizing and learning about the manipulation of these biological data gradually becomes more relevant to enhance the public domain of this knowledge. In a mega biodiverse country such as Colombia, learning the principles of bio-informatics is essential for the public to make informed democratic decisions about the benefits and perceived risks associated with bioinformatics. Educational interventions based on project research to expose students to biological data are urgent to meet these needs.

Co-creation strategies for building real-time storytelling through advanced Internet network. A project for the interconnection of knowledge considering human and technological inclusion.

Visits to the museum represent a powerful strategy to be developed. MuRe takes this one step forward, integrating countries, people, museums and objects. MuRe takes place in the field of cultural convergence and advanced internet networks. MuRe´s aim is to generate a real-time, advanced Internet circuit with different institutions. It would feature stories of heritage, dialogues and interactions with the public. Participants create an exhibition that only exists on the Internet. Participating institutions and audiences do not geographically coexist, but share the same virtual time and space. The object is conceived in a broad sense, art piece, heritage object, material and immaterial, aiming to stimulate the co-creation process in ICT. MuRe is composed of two projects: A Project of cultural intervention and a Project of educational research. This presentation will feature the main strategies, stakeholders involved and pre-production contents of the cultural intervention project. MuRe was created at Cultural Ring Latin America-Europe in Uruguay and this project was selected by the Cultural Funding (Ministry of Culture and Education of Uruguay) to be developed in 2017.

Most computer systems were, until recently, only graphic recording and output devices (electronic amanuensis) and though possibly useful, not significantly changing the role of art or the artist. The increasing interest in using machine intelligence as part of the creative activity has stimulated new developments in which at the very least the machine can be seen as a catalyst (electronic muse). Nevertheless, artists have hung tenaciously to their traditional roles and critics to their traditional criteria for evaluation. But the logical extension of the use of machine intelligence might more challengingly suggest a change in the nature of creativity and a change in the roles of the relationship of the artists creativity to that of the machine. It is the contention of the author of this paper that the use of such techniques as evolutionary and learning programs will inevitably raise fundamental questions about the role of the artist and the role of aesthetic judgement. It may force a division between evaluating the creative act at a conceptual level (the role of the artist ?) and the act of creativity at the level of an individual evolved manifestation (the computer’s role ?).

Institutional Presentation Statement

HISTORY In May 1990, the Rector of the University of Castilla-La Mancha inaugurated a center for research into new electronic media technologies located in a restored 18th century Carmelite Convent building. The center’s primary objective is to conserve, display and acquire an international collection of artists work who utilize machines and processes related to new technologies, for the generation, reproduction and printing of images. In January 1991, the Museum incorporated an electronic media technology laboratory into its working structure, to carry out theoretical and practical research into applications of the field of artistic creation. Some months later a documentation center, with a small specialized library; and the Center for Image Research was stablished, designed to provide additional support for the new media workshop in the field of graphic design, corporate image and creative advertising. Five years after its inauguration, the Museo Internacional de Electrografia is a dynamic museum; an art center with very specialized, unique lines of research, and though on a restricted budget, fulfills its five primary objectives:

1. Research : by creating an international artist-in-residence program that invites artists from all over the world to collaborate with the MIDE on their current research projects, with technical support and guidance from the University of Castilla-La Mancha and the Ministry of Education and Science; “dissemination: by holding exhibitions, offering a documentation and media information centre, publishing…;
2. Conservation: creating an active, dynamic collection of current works of art which are appropriate examples for displaying the latest national and international artistic applications of new image technologies;
3. Education: for artists, students and the curious, offering specialized courses and seminars (including programs of awards and fellowships for researchers, technical assistants and workshop assistants); and
4. Collaboration: by offering financial assistance for Research projects, providing MIDE equipment and in the broadest sense, making MIDE’s resources available to artists and researchers who wish to develop specific projects and activities. Some of the ways that this can happen is by MIDE contributing technical expertise, and offering financial assistance for research and interesting artistic proposals in diverse areas of Research which falls within the specific realm of the MIDE.

AREAS OF RESEARCH The Museo Internacional de Electrografía in Cuenca has the following, clearly defined, areas for research currently open:

1. Digital image techniques and processes using new electronic media technologies.
2. The contribution made by these digital technologies incorporating traditional processes of printing and reproduction.
3. Creative techniques and processes of graphic telecommunication technologies. (Fax- Art, Internet, real-time tele-transmission etc.).
4. Interactive multimedia, Computer Art and Postproduction of the dynamic image on digital video.
5. Educational philosophies that the new image technologies can generate.
6. New museum models for contemporary art in the data transmission era. This would include possibilities of the virtual museum.

The transformations that took place in the last century have brought about profound changes to the fields of culture and of public cultural policies. What can be noted, in the specific case of Brazil, is a progressive weakening of the role of the State in espousing cultural democratization, here understood not only as providing access to culture, but also as promoting initiatives that foster cultural diversity. In recent years, a dismantling of the policy area of culture and the arts has been noted, as is generally the case in times of economic crisis, once culture and the arts are generally regarded as having secondary importance vis-à-vis other areas under the domain of the State.

A debate over the role of the institutional context, particularly as regards the public sphere, is followed by the perception of a lack of congruence between institutional practices – which are often directed exclusively at the development of „spectacular‟ proposals – and actions that can create dialogue with and lead to effective participation of the public in its diversity. In this context, the question that is therefore raised is:

-What is the place of art institutions that propose more experimental strategies, different to those produced by institutional spaces driven by the promotion and dissemination of more spectacular proposals?

This paper discusses the potential of computational media and museum collections to enable encounters with the technological present that complicate narratives of progress, modernity and individual (male) genius that often frame the conceptualization of technology in the museum space. It provides an account ofan exhibition and associated time-based objects to help anchor a wider discussion of the potential of posthumanist modes of thinking in the museum space.

This presentation will discuss a university research project on contemporary art that is developing hardware and software solutions for critical problems in hypermedia computing, in particular navigation and interface design, authoring languages, and database development. In addition, the project seeks to examine and further the relationship between the visual arts and computer science by investigating the role of hypermedia in art education.

Museum curators and exhibit designers are using interactive computer programs to present information about art. With the adoption of this technology, the curatorial philosophy of museums is shifting from an object orientation to an information orientation, and this shift will effect the way we interpret and define art, especially electronic art. This paper traces the evolution of computers in museums and discusses the impact that high-tech exhibits and the changing philosophical role of the museum will have on the endorsement of electronic art. Technological advances in museum exhibits, presentations, and research facilities will alter the aesthetic criteria for defining art and initiate important changes in the way we evaluate and market art. In the end, a new awareness and sensitivity to the creative and aesthetic dimensions of electronic media will emerge, along with a personal approach to interpreting art that redefines the relationship between art and ‘commodity’ and enhances the relationship between art and technology. For 25 years museum administrators have recognized the important role that computers can play in museums. Beginning in 1965, museums ranging in size from the Smithsonian Institution to small college museums began using computers to catalog their collections. From there, interest in exploring the potential for computers in museums led to the establishment of the Museum Computer Network (MCN) in 1967. Since then hundreds of museums have adopted some form of computer technology for museum management, research, or exhibit presentation. International conferences such as the Conference on Automatic Processing of Art History Data and Documents (Pisa, Italy) continue to provide support for the expanded use of technology in museums.

With the digital platform nextmuseum.io by NRW-Forum Düsseldorf and Museum Ulm (both in Germany), a swarm of curators, artists, art enthusiasts, museum employees, experts and techies, shapes the future museum. They experiment on swarm curation and digital developments in the field of XR with the aim of creating further approaches and a more democratic museum.

The observation period and data collection was from August 2013 to December 2013. During this period the weekly report about the most engaging Facebook content provided by Museum_Analytics platform was the basis for the research. 22 reports, 220 posts and numerous comments were analyzed.  A sample size of 220 posts is not sufficiently large to generate statistically relevant results but it was possible to map similarities between the posts.

Example: On August 17, 2013 MoMA posted on their official Facebook page a post that contained an amazing image that brings a dramatic and mysterious scene. Additionally invited the public to know details of the artwork on the museum site. It was the eighth most liked post of the week of August 12 to August 18, 2013. There were more than 100 comments, among them, many comments suggesting deepening of structured content and research by the public. In the same week the post number 1, the most liked, belonged to Saatchi Gallery. An image, short text, no popular artist and no link. Over 300 comments were analyzed. Being the most comments of admiration as “good art”, really nice “,” Love 1″.

In this paper, we present an ongoing research project, focusing on creating an augmented, interactive audio-visual environment, for stage performance, installation arts and other related applications. We describe a motion and color sensitive system called MvM (Music via Motion), and report an interdisciplinary collaborative project to integrate dance, music, and costume design, using the system, called CoIN (Coat of Invisible Notes). The paper reviews public performances of CoIN, and discusses the interactions between choreography and music. The further enhancement of the MvM framework using sensors, and the future direction of the project, are also discussed.

Computers guided by complex programs can put letters and words, lines and colors together in never-before-seen ways. What results are pieces of text and pictures that can be seen and experienced by humans in much the same way as are human-produced writings and drawings. What about when computers put together sequences of sounds in never-before-heard ways? What kind of meanings do such complex patterns have? The key issue is that musical meaning seems to derive largely from the emotionallity of the person who first conceived the pattern of notes. When there is a program behind the scenes, and when the patterns sound like those dreamt up by a human being, what meaning does one attribute to such a piece?

We envisioned a type of computer-generated DNA music that takes cues for its musical parameters directly from the physiological ones present in genetic code. The code is an alphabet made up of four letters or bases that are arranged in three-letter words called codons. We have generated musical compositions for numerous viruses, including the common cold and HIV. We have avoided most human tissue because of large amounts of uncoded filler found in between sequences.

As a consequence of the Human Genome Project, there has been an explosion of primary DNA sequencing data available on CD ROM. This includes complete genomes of viruses, partial genomes of bacterias, and complete sequences for hundreds of human proteins. Consequently, we began to envision a type of computer generated music that would take cues for its musical parameters directly from the physiological ones present in DNA. DNA sequence consists of a specified order for the  production of amino acids. The physical properties of amino acids (dissociation constant, molecular weight, and chemical class) combined with the properties of the individual bases (melting temperatures) provide the basis for inheritance and evolution and our musical compositions. The converted results, one for each codon, represent distinct musical actions in MIDI note events. Thus far we have generated musical compositions from several human, viral, and bacterial sequences. This paper outlines our research.

Intro

The genetic code is an alphabet made up of four chemical compounds which form the nucleotide bases-adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). These bases are linked
in a specific order to form the double helical structure known as deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Each individual living organism has a unique order of bases that completely determines its
physical structure. The four nucleotides are arranged in threeletter units known as codons. Each codon specifies one of nineteen amino acids. When they are grouped by chemical type,
there are eight such categories. The DNA template, located in the nucleus of each cell, acts as a blueprint that directs the production of proteins. DNA is translated into messenger ribonucleic
acid, or mRNA that is in turn serially scanned by ribosomes, organeiles located in the cell’s cytoplasm. Ribosomes use the mRNA as a template to direct the synthesis of proteins.

How can computers help people compose music — especially if they have no prior musical training? The history of composition is interwoven with the history of music notation. And for many people, learning and mastering conventional notation systems is itself a barrier to composition. We are investigating this problem by asking the question: what could music notation look like if it was invented now — in the age of computers — rather than during an era dominated by pen and paper? Our initial result is a system — CompositionaALife — that combines insights from end-user programming and artificial life. There are two categories of intended users for the system: composers of compositional methods (e.g., Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method) — and composers who would then create works within a particular method. Using our system, creators of compositional methods create an artificial life “world” (of creatures, environmental features and phenomena, and interaction rules) that provides an acoustic structure for artificial life simulations. Composers then create musical works by creating specific simulations.

My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence is the both the title of my new book published by Stanford University Press and the title of my artist talk. The book grows out of the Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI) art project being developed inside the TECHNE Lab at the University of Colorado. The ACI art project investigates the interrelationship between a language artist and a language model and focuses on automated forms of creative expression across the human-nonhuman spectrum. The ACI project specifically addresses speculative forms of artificial intelligence, particularly the possibilities for creative collaboration between human and machine-generated embodiments of poetic expression. In performance and exhibition contexts, the ACI is presented as a fictional AI poet whose spoken word poetry signals the horizon of a new type of authorship that questions the philosophical, artistic, and legal implications of artificial intelligence. The ACI appears in the artist talk as a 3D “avatar-other” whose facial features and voice are uncannily like that of the artist it is engaging with. Throughout the short artist presentation, the artist engages with his 3-D doppelganger in a series of improvised poetic and conceptually stimulating riffs.

Artists Statement

A man washes his cow in a river. A spirit house stands alone in a field. Not the kind of images one would expect to see from the border area between Thailand and Burma. No photos of land mine victims, malnourished children, or burned out villages. Instead, images of daily life on this shared border taken by the Burman and Karen who live there: in refugee camps, as illegal migrant workers on the Thai side, or inside Burma, in IDP areas in Karen state. Wherever they live, life is precarious: subject to harassment and deportation by the Thai authorities on the one hand – victims of sporadic fighting, forced labour, or, used as human shields by the Burmese military on the other.

Since 2006, we have run the MY STORY photo project, giving entry-level digital cameras and basic photo instruction to small groups of young Karen and Burmese on both sides of the border.

The art collective Cesar & Lois discusses the collaborative, non-disciplinary-specific development of a mycelial AI, with the intent of orienting human socio-technical systems to non-hierarchical models persistent in the living world. In growing a system that integrates living and digital mycelia, the experiment-as-art unfolds through the duo’s accounting of past workshops that include mushroom foraging, spore printing and thinking like a mushroom. Ahead of the art collective’s premiere of Mycorrhizal Insurrection at the 2022 Mercosul Biennial in Brazil, the artists discuss the process of developing the training database for a non-anthropocentric AI, the challenges in connecting artificial and mycelial intelligences, and their conversations with mycologists and philosophers. Merging prehuman (fungal) and posthuman (digital) systems, the artists speculate on the possibility of post-anthropocentric futures. With documentation of iterative nodes in the project’s development, such as the June 2021 exhibition, “Eat the Anthropocene with Cesar & Lois, Mycelia and Friend Entities” at Yes We Cannibal in Baton Rouge, the artists project a machine logic that operates contrary to capitalist ideals, and the resultant values and concerns of a narrow group of humans. In response to Jason W. Moore’s use of the term, planetary proletariat, the artists imagine a socio-technological insurrection by incalcitrant bhiobrid (bio-digital) systems. Listening in to the pulses to hyphae, an AI thinks less and less like a human.

Machine intelligence is increasingly being used in the world with sometimes dramatic effects on human and other-than-human lives through its decision making capacity. Much artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is built on metaphors that centre extraction, competition and control. These also position AI itself as a resource to be extracted and controlled, paving a troubling path for speculative futures where AI may gain emergent or ambiguous levels of sentience or experience. These metaphors are part of a historical trend where humans place themselves above the other-than-human world, and this has formed the basis of an extractive and one sided relationship with that world. In light of this, what new metaphors might we employ to platform the relationships between human and machine intelligences? Thinking through mycorrhizae could be a productive way to foreground the entangled, generative nature of exchange between human and machine intelligences. This paper will briefly explore metaphor in human-computer interaction (HCI) and AI, before making an offering to think about these things through the material of the mycorrhiza, a symbiotic site of exchange between plants and fungi. It will then briefly detail a creative project that has emerged from this mycorrhizal thinking to produce machine imagined textiles and embroideries. It then concludes with a call to embed relational thinking into future practices between human and machine intelligence in order to create more equitable and even mutualistic outcomes.

This research explores and analyzes the technical and artistic forms of the Chinese movable type printing in the ancient and our contemporary new media arts. In the ancient civilizations of the world, the mysterious and ancient Chinese movable type printing technology played an important role applying various materials and producing a large amount of prints. In society, it has also created a new kind of labors and professions providing opportunities for women. Since the industrial revolution, the technical function of movable type printing has been replaced by new technical improvements, but its hidden artistic functions have been noticed and explored by many artists. Now, many digital media arts use the form and method of ancient movable type printing, shining in advertising, stage performances and artificial intelligence.

Up until very recently, mythological tales predominated in the explanation of the polar auroras. Early in the 20th century, efforts to scientifically explain this phenomenon began. Today, we understand that the polar lights are a phenomenon brought on by the solar winds’ interaction with the magnetosphere of the Earth. However, for a long time, this phenomenon inspired vibrant trans-border stories that had a profound impact on local communities.

In our interactive installation, Mytherrella, we aimed at creating a dynamic environment in which scientific data and mythological storytelling unearth new imaginaries about the aurora borealis. The generative video integrated in the installation uses a custom real-time StyleGAN algorithm that continuously samples from a model trained on a large set of all-sky auroral images. This method enables live interaction with the generated video, producing novel auroral formations that are unpredictable while remaining within the bounds of the learned features.

By combining the dataset with a small number of alternative-style images, the diversity of the generated content is increased, creating a divergent effect that reinforces the mythological narrative. We share the technique of interactive video generation as well as the research process behind the creation of the work.

Panel: Ecology, Cybernetics and Open Systems in Art and Technology

Keywords: Nam June Paik, Cybernetics, Systems, Art, Machine, Machinic Assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari, Norbert Wiener, Jack Burnham

Nam June Paik’s playful, imperfect and often ambiguous use of cybernetics has left an important legacy for contemporary media art. Paik’s works demonstrate that it is essential to temper aesthetics with ethics in order to question the utopian dreams of the very materials electronic artists work with. Paik’s works also suggest a new way to think about the machine in art. This paper focuses on the impacts of communication and control in the machine (and subsequently the network) in Paik’s Robot K-456 and suggests a reconceptualization of Paik’s cybernetic machine as a machinic process enmeshed in communication systems.

Nam June Paik often describes his mixed media based on bibimbap aesthetics. Bibimbap is a Korean traditional rice dish, which incorporates diverse side dishes as toppings. The discrete beautiful topping pattern on bibimbap becomes a whole new entity by mixing them together. Like bibimbap, Nam June Paik’s art shows creative combinations among a variety of media. Paik’s bibimbap aesthetics is a Korean reinterpretation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. This paper explores Paik’s artistic transition from non-mixed media to bibimbap aesthetics as a Korean version of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Abstract

The process of taking quantum theory and transforming it into a quotidian experience via nanotechnology seems inevitable. In the international marketplace, there are currently hundreds of nanotechnology-based products ranging from sunscreens and beauty products to fitness clothing and equipment to medical products, and more are being added every day. (Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, 2008) Meanwhile, government funding for nanotechnology research, over the last five years, is estimated at $40B (2004-2008) and, in 2009, it’s expected that an additional $9.75 billion will be invested. (cientifica, [sic] April 2009: 2) Still no one really knows how to explain or describe nanotechnology simply.

Scientists and others trying to educate and communicate to the public about nanotechnology focus on descriptions of size and scale. (Berger, October 17, 2008). The comparison to a human hair (one nanometre is 1/60,000 of a single human hair) is usually made in a futile attempt to describe and discuss it. Even amongst scientists, the standard for explaining nanotechnology is to invoke a measurement; nano means one billionth. (So, a nanometer = one billionth of a metre.) Alternatively, explaining that nanotechnology allows us to manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular levels will generally reward you with a blank stare. These explanations simply don’t fire the imagination or aid understanding.

Open News Websites combine news, rumours and commentary. These sites involve their users as content contributors and producers, turning them into ‘produsers’ of the site. Open News site produsers are ‘gate watchers’, observing the publication of news and information in other sources and publicising its existence. They apply Open Source principles to the gathering and publication of news and information.

The invention and realization of a new technique, software paradigm, or other large piece of work may take place over a period of one or even several decades. It frequently happens that the IP model under which the work was started changes before it is finished – sometimes more than once. This paper explores the development of the Max/MSP/jMax/Pd paradigm, along with some other related developments, in the period from 1980 to the present. Starting from these examples, some generalizations are attempted about how the question of ownership and IP control should be addressed in the arts world.

Keywords: memory, locative technologies, narrative, experience, territorialization.

This article considers the virtual (re)construction of the Vila Belga neighborhood in Santa Maria, Brazil in terms of memory and the role of place as integrative of experience, and the creation of narratives resulting from locative technologies as memory assemblages. In the early 1900s, Vila Belga became a vibrant settlement of Belgian immigrants which clustered around the railway station and embraced the local rail industry as the basis for the experiential machinic assemblies underlying this socio-economic associative milieu. With the demise of rail and its replacement by truck transport, the neighborhood lost its sense of meaning and collective memory. In May 2012, various buildings of the now defunct Vila Belga railroad station were occupied by artists, academics and multi-disciplinary researchers taking part in the arte#ocupaSM event for 5 days of intense artistic coexistence to understand this memorial disintegration. Our paper poses the question “What constitutes the memory of community as a collective process of (re)collection?” and seeks answers in the locative technologies used by the participants to (re)activate and (re)purpose the space and duration of experience towards a novel (re)alignment of actualisation as event. We will focus on aircity:arte#ocupaSM — an artwork using locative technologies to render visible the invisible space of territorialisation as mappings of expanses of intensification: through the integration of data from sensing and geolocation devices, the artwork produces mappings of relation which constitute the ‘groundwork’ of memory and serve to peg the continuity of experience as part of an ecology of being. Our paper will examine these mappings as landing sites which, on the one hand, create memories as planes of consistency yielding actualisation, and on the other, as territorialisations of the narrative (re)activation of collective memory in the integration of experience within the unfolding of actuality.

The gaze is used as selective and creative input to dynamic images and figures that are made apparent in fluid media, such as random surfaces, noisy textures, and chance images. The subjective selection of signals in the presence of noise (figure/ground) transforms observation into a reciprocal process mediating between visibility and invisibility.

Two projects, Imaginary Journey, a virtual trip across Europe and Syntymi, two public spaces for families wanting to announce the birth of their child with an MMS message, will be presented to describe a work process, in which narratives play the key role in the structuring of the collaborative design process and the framing of the audience participation.

While emerging technology and media are opening richly varied avenues for creative expression, most technologies play structural or other internal roles that are not always obvious in the surface sounds and images of an artwork. This apparent disparity in a single artist’s body of work can seem incoherent, suggesting a lack of “voice” or identity as an artist. A coherent body of work is important to an artist’s reputation, both in the art world and in academia; artists who pursue new forms of creative expression through emergent technology may be assessed inaccurately. One approach to articulating unity across a body of works that are diverse on their surfaces is to focus on how each work exhibits the same metaprocess, such as an approach of determining the materials, structures, and working process that is best suited to each artistic situation. The author’s body of work as a composer is unified in pursuing the concept of native composition, a set of techniques unified by the goal of turning each performance situation on itself in order to let its deepest, most natural features emerge, to let the thing itself sing.

“Nature of the Apparatus” is a media art project currently in development, as part of Henschke’s art@CMS collaboration at CERN. The project uses video shot by Henschke in the Large Hadron Collider, manipulated in a way that uses the ‘sound’ of the particle beam to control the flow of the visuals. As well as conveying the almost overwhelming scale and complexity of the science and technology involved, the video seeks to express the relations between the apparatus and what it detects. Inspired by pioneer physicist Niels Bohr’s insights into the nature of particle physics, the audiovisual manipulation process used in essence folds the energy back into the device that produces it. Henschke will discuss his experiences and projects at CERN, and may also undertake a spontaneous demonstration of particle detection and amplification devices.

The Latin American Forum at ISES2012 is proud to host Bill Toledo, Navajo Code Talker. The history of Native American Code Talkers remains as one of the most complex and intriguing interactions between indigenous communities and the geopolitical challenges that characterized the XX century. This conversation with Bill Toledo is not only an opportunity to engage with his personal history and the context of his work as a code talker, but is also an opportunity to explore topics related to the nature of language, code and computation. This presentation highlights the renovation of the discourse about Latin American understanding with the richness of the Native American Cultures.

The perception of the four-dimensional tesseract from three-space relies on motion, lending it an inherently cinematic nature. Virtual reality is uniquely positioned to visualize four-dimensional, cinematic space. The three-dimensional, time-based space and embodied navigability of virtual reality creates a supradimensional media space, providing an opportunity to experience higher-dimensional landscapes and acoustic, cinematic environments from within the fourth dimension. TesserIce is a four-dimensional, VR mediascape that utilizes this feature, allowing participants to enter the 4D space-time of glacial ice. The mediascape constructs an embodied cine-poem examining the effects of climate change in which participants propel themselves through the space-time of Earth’s polar ice. The stark imagery of ice serves as a distinct access point into the overwhelming complexity of climate change and its ramifications, creating an embodied experience of climate change’s time, scale, causes, and effects.

Through the 2000’s, Hindi (Bollywood) film music has undergone extensive technologisation – not only updates of existing recording techniques, but also high-end processing and editing with extensive incorporation of processed sounds and electronic devices, sounds and techniques. While this could be seen as a ‘globalising’ process with such music drawing from transnational genres (techno, hip-hop) emanating from discos and clubs of metropolitan centres across the world, film music has constantly renegotiated issues of locality and indigeneity. This period has seen continuing appropriation of folk and classical musics in technologised guises, evoking associations of authenticity and indigeneity even as they may be sought to be suitably hybridised and adapted for a metropolitan audience aware of ‘global’ trends. Such developments in music are linked with newer discourses on nationhood and national subjectivity in the period of liberalisation/globalisation: for example, the hybrid music of Hindi films like Bunty aur Babli (2005) or Swades (2004) clearly supports the cinematic construction of valorised national subjects negotiating between privileged metropoles and their perceived ‘peripheries’ such as rural or small town India.

I propose to critically interrogate the place of technology in film music within these larger trends. How is the division of the local and the global constructed through newer deployments of technology? How does technology construct markers of cultural indigeneity, by deploying folk instruments or regional modes? Can technology create a sense of locational access, a literal capacity to ‘mix’ diverse or split worlds? I’d like to investigate the politics of such a hybridity, its inclusions and exclusions. I will use not only the archive of films from the 2000’s but also media reviews of film music and interviews by rising music directors to get a sense of music as informed by other discourses on the national, the local and the global level.

Artist Statement

Negotiations is a project that explores cross-cultural communication and interpretation. Over a period of two years Daniela Kostova and Olivia Robinson developed an interactive system that utilizes blue screen video techniques as a tool for manipulating human bodies moving through unknown environments. The system has been performed in three distinct public environments: Sardinia, Italy, New York City, USA and Sofia, Bulgaria

Forces of Allusion

Post modernism is the inevitable outcome of the fragmentation of the non-transformative fixity of European languages. The prevailing nihilistic, empty set semiotics of post-modern theory is now imposed on tribal cultures as the current form of cultural re-colonization. In Cree language, Nehiyawewin, metaphor and metonymy are not simply pointers to similarity. They describe the threshold of transformation and shifting states of being. They are artifacts of the awareness of the describer, indicating the knowledge of the potential in the comparisons and the actuality present in the description.

Nehiyawewin represents the world in nouns and verb phrases that are animate and inanimate. The animate classification is present in the language among representations of both human and non-human beings, animal and non-animal beings, and biological and non-biological beings. The concepts of time and space are also significantly different from European languages in the sense that they are also potentially animate and personalized rather than quantified and and subjected to repetitious measurement. The codification system present in Nehiyawewin therefore also implicates any other form of Cree cultural and artistic representation beyond language acts themselves.

Today museums are looking for new ways to attract and engage audience. We have developed an audio platform facilitating innovative mobile applications, like audio augmented reality, soundscape design, audio story recording and listening, or audio memory sharing applications. The target of all these applications is to provide better experiences for audience who is very familiar with digital world. Our approach is viable innovation platform also for smaller museums and other culture sector’s actors who have a tight budget and at the same time want to utilize audio as a part of their creative activities.

Location aware media raise many challenges and questions about the significance of primal concepts like place, space, and location. The Neighborhood Narratives (NN) Project described here is a forum to respond to those concerns and provide insights into their theoretical underpinnings. We ask participants to apply various media (analogue, digital, text, sound, image etc) to real locations on the urban landscape. They use cell phones and GPS handsets to design projects and installations augmented by associated web sites, audio interviews, scavenger hunts etc. that locate their stories in the immediate environment. Exploring concepts such as public/private, physical/ mediated, place/non-place, a final project is created and presented ‘on location’ in the city.

Neighborhood Narratives is organized around the intersection of media, place, and space. It explores key technologies, ideas, applications, data, and policies that inform and shape the emerging geoweb of public space. Place is where the relevant encounters occur. Unlike the sociological, anthropological, political, or cultural perspectives commonly employed to analyze place; the new media ‘deploy spatial and topological notions’ to question and demystify discourses of knowledge and power in places.

At Temple, NN linked the main campus of Temple University with its international campuses in London, Tokyo and Rome. The complex historical, cultural, socio-political and economic contexts that affect each city, affect the students and classroom dynamic – thus heightening the exchange of information.

Neighborhood Narratives has fostered collaboration with an international group of movement artists (Center for Creative Research – CCR) to examine the role of embodied practice in interdisciplinary investigation. The central thesis is that movement artists provide a unique prism through which intersecting and parallel lines of intellectual inquiry can be initiated and examined. The next phase of NN is to orchestrate a set of long-term, campus-based pilot residency projects to test these ideas.

neighboring|towns is an immersive four-channel video and sound installation about borders, restriction of movement, and family/community life. It focuses on the unique border community of Derby Line, Vermont and Stanstead, Quebec where families affected by the US travel ban are reuniting and poses critical questions regarding the politics of sentience. Within neighboring|towns, an Iranian man whose family has traveled across the globe to reunite at the library describes their reunion. Music at the annual Vermont Sacred Harp Shape Note Sing, hosted by Derby Line’s bi-national singing group, provides a view into the local close-knit American/Canadian community. Other screens show the library’s quiet interior with a black line on its floor delineating the border; the Tomifobia River, which surges across the border; and two skiers, one in Derby Line and one in Stanstead, who guide viewers to, but not across international lines.

Nowadays, NFTs are increasingly emerging into public view. It is necessary to consider NFT as a sustainable trading model for media arts with the audience interaction as the symbiosis community.

This paper presents a design architecture of a Multimodal NFT with generative patterns triggered by sensors. By designing various 3D mesh attributes, such as eyes pattern and fur color of a robin bird, the authors generate a series of different NFT 3D artworks. We also demonstrate our experience with the generative system together with the rarity scoring model that could be used to evaluate the heterogeneity of NFT collections.

Artists have appropriated the Internet as soon as it became public to experiment new artistic, social and technical practices that have been gathered under the term net art. The museums and cultural institutions that are interested by those works have to reconsider the way they commission, exhibit, collect and preserve artworks, as they already did with other forms of ephemeral or process-based art. They have to construct new approaches to preservation that would also make them rethink how to conserve and display their entire collections, not just digital works. Very few museums have actually acquired online artworks, despite the interest that many showed towards these practices, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Paradoxically, museums have never been so ready to do so as many studies and research programs, often collaborations between institutions, have been dedicated to the preservation of new media art (mostly video artworks and rarely digital art pieces).

Abstract

As Internet technology and access has improved exponentially over the past two decades, there has been a global influx of new media artists using the Internet as a primary venue for exhibiting, distributing, and collaboratively authoring digital artwork. Many new media artists have turned to the Internet and alternative copyright schemes in an effort to embrace open source media content and production while distancing themselves and their work from commercialization. These practices have resulted in the popular myth that the Internet exists as an autonomous venue for creative work that is uninhibited by government regulation, commercialization, private interests, and economic policy. Drawing on the context of neoliberal practices, this paper analyses the Internet search engine giant Google and its function as an inhibitor to the dissemination of noncommercial, open source new media art. Netlabels are specifically addressed as an exemplification of new media art that has become marginalized by the Internet search techniques developed and employed by Google, which often favour advertisers and revenue over autonomous authorship and the public interest.

Netart latino “database” was born in 1999 and consolidated in the year 2000. It was not devoid of humorous and cynical allusions to the situation in which we Latin Americans found ourselves. Its interface, an inverted map of South America drawn in ASCII, is an obvious tribute to the work of Joaquín Torres García and uses “poor” (low-tech) design resources (ASCII sketches had always been a useful tool for designs in net contexts that operated very slowly). Even the word “database” (always in quotation marks) is an exaggeration, because the site only offers one HTML file in list format.

Reflecting the net as an extension of human informational processing one can encounter a certain sprout of its mental fractalization, which is essentially not a cluster or a map of possible informational pattern recombinations, but pretends to be as if it is, for a correspondent faculty of our mind has to survive and support the bio-electronic correspondence in the economy of action (operationally, it is nothing more than geometry of perception, of course). Hence, there is another economy, located beyond the simulation, a hyper simulatory pattern, which clashes artificial and human intelligence in the frame of homonified conceptual location. It suggests that the net can be a synthetic plane of Immanence, and that it can spatially realize the concepts which never could be realized before either on the institutional basis of philosophy, nor on the basis of folk economy of concreticism.

Session: City, Public Space and Mobile Technologies

Network culture is a broad sociocultural shift. Under network culture both art and everyday life take mediation as a given. Furthermore in our days networked connection replaces abstraction. Information is less the product of discrete procession units than the outcome of the networked relations between them, links between people,between machines and between machines and people. Although other ages have been networked, ours is the first modern age in which the network is the dominant organisational paradigm,supplanting centalized hierarchies. This paper is going to address the question of self in an intersubjective perspective that provileges connections between individuals, rather than separations, boundaries and borders.?It is also going to showcase a number of media art projects and discuss the relation between media art and network cultures. Furthermore it is going to investigate to which extent media art projects can relate to a new urban and cultural identity (from both artist’s and audience’s perspective).