Presentation Data Table

The network and its related concept of ‘networking’ has found increasing currency within diverse fields such as kinship, finance, information theory, media art, communication, bioscience, organizational structure and, most recently, contemporary forms of terrorist activity. Networks, generally operate on the model of a cell or unit system, wherein the exact nature of operation is defined by a parallel existence outside of any individual part. Simultaneously, the effectiveness of the network depends on its fundamental interconnectedness. Network functions and networking patterns therefore operate on a synchronous basis that deserves special attention from a comparative perspective. Proceeding from cybernetic perspectives on the network, this comparative analysis presents some of the key concepts related to networks and critically examines salient network models on a cross-dimensional basis. It seeks to establish key commonalities relevant to the intrinsic issue of sustainability that may be as meaningful for scientists as artists and cultural activists currently engaged in challenging hegemonic assumptions of the network experience.

Artist Talk related to the same-titled workshop. The workshop traces the edges and boundaries of the preservation of both analogue and digital networked art practice. Focusing upon artworks which draw on networks of distribution (such as mail art, and the Internet) as their primary medium of production, we aim to unpack existing digital preservation efforts concerning online and offline exchanges, while also feeling out the present and future implications of the use of machine learning and data mining within preservation strategies and how they affect artistic and curatorial agency and authorship.

Typically understood as inherently ephemeral (as in the case of mail art) or immaterial (as with internet-based exchanges), networked art practice often, deliberately, resists collection and preservation. Given its linkages to wider networks, knowing what the edge or boundary of the work is, and where to ‘draw a line’ around its preservation is a substantial challenge.

Workshop participants will collectively identify questions addressing digital preservation (including ‘preventative conservation’ and record-keeping) as it is manifest within the production, distribution and reception of networked art practices. Joined by guest practitioners sharing first-hand insights, participants will then work in groups to develop novel approaches, leading towards a greater understanding of the networked conservation concerns of a diverse range of work.

A PROPOSAL FROM ANDREAS BROECKMANN

The Syndicate Network is a large network of artists, curators and theorists involved in media culture and media art, many of whom live and work in Central and Eastern Europe. Since its founding in 1996, the Syndicate has sought to initiate encounters and cooperations between East and West, with the aim of lowering and finally abolishing the threshold between dif¬ferent parts of Europe.
The panel will give a rich survey of Syndicate-related activities over the past two to three years and will place an emphasis on the relationship between co-operation online and co-operation in physical spaces as a characteristic of these different practices. The panel will treat three aspects: Collaborative Events; Translocal Feasts; Cross-border Art.

Moderator:

• Andreas Broeckmann

Panelist:

• Frederic Madre
• Nina Czegledy
• Iliyana Nedkova
• Jennifer de Felice
• Maria X
• Guy Van Belle
• Jean-Philippe Halgand
• and representatives of the Ostranenie festival (Germany/United States), I am still alive Croatia/The Netherlands), Eurynome’s gambit (Germany/France) and x-arn.org (France).

The integration of technologies such as internet communication and collaboration tools, devices for human machine-interaction, live audiovisual media processing and live coding of performance, has led to the emergence of new fields of creativity in performance arts. Each panelist is asked to report on related aspects in their recent work, from the perspective of their practical experience, and giving examples from their own work.

This panel brings together artists, technologists and educators that approach this topic from different perspectives in order to report their experience as practitioners and to discuss how the combination of these technologies changes the way in which we collaborate in these cross-over performance and science assemblages. Each panelist is asked to report on related aspects in their recent work, from perspective of their practical experience, and giving examples from their own work. The objective of the panel is to illuminate the different aspects of this field, technological, aesthetic, social and philosophical, to show from their own perspectives how all of these aspects are interrelated, and to identify the central challenges and strategies involved in creative collaboration and research in this field.

Abstract

Human communication has expanded enormously in the past century. With the arrival of mass media such as film, illustrated magazines, radio and television, not only has the number of communication media forms significantly increased, but we can also see an enormous growth in the range of such media throughout the world. The past decades have produced the rampant growth of the latest shoot on this plant: computer-mediated networked communication. Media are no neutral way of communicating information, but they influence the way in which man thinks and feels, experiences himself, acts and treats others. Information technology, like previous forms of technology, serves to fashion not only objects outside ourselves but also human subjects. In his contribution De Mul will reflect on a crucial aspect of this relationship: the implications of computer-mediated communication for individual and collective identity. He will argue that the new electronic media put into practice post-modern deconstruction of the traditional, totalitarian concept of identity. At the interface of technology and imagination, one of the most important tasks of the electronic artist is to contribute to the construction and deconstruction of multiple identities.

Intro

‘Every decoding is another encoding’
-Morris Zapp

The Seventh International Symposium on Electronic Art, like the six that preceded it, covers a very broad domain. During the next five days, in an impressive number of lectures, panels, poster sessions and round table discussions recent developments in computer graphics, computer animation, computer music, video art, interactive art, including CD ROM and Internet applications, artistic applications of robotics, computer aided literature and dance will be discussed. However, there will be a special focus on two subjects: Networked Art and Education as a means to bridge the gap between artists and scientists. Focusing on these two subjects is not really surprising. The interest in networked art reflects the enormous growth of computer-mediated communication during the last decade, whereas the renewed interest in the relationship between art and science reflects the fact that the present day computer technology changes the relationship between art and science as It developed during the era of modernity in a fundamental way.
In this lecture I wiII discus a topic that – according to me – is highly relevant for both networked art and the changing relationship between art and science. I will present some philosophical
reflections on how information and communication technology affects both our personal and cultural identity. Information technology, I will argue, not only creates new objects of  experience, but new subjects of experience as well. Information and communication technology turns out to be a laboratory for the construction of multiple human identities. For that reason it is more than just a new tool for artists and scientists. Taking refuge in an oxymoron we might call information technology for that reason an ontological technology. Information and communication technology not only creates new beings in the world, but also affects the conceptual framework we depend on in our understanding of these beings in a fundamental way.

The following is a co-authored paper about Networking in the Margins of Eco-Activism for the panel in ISEA2010 of the same name. The speakers will show that a responsible attitude towards the definition of nature can be embodied within the margins of art and science. Networking between ecoactivists from both fields also tends to create a more robust level of knowhow transfer about the environment. The authors in this text will expand on the idea that both fields of art and science can no longer deny the state of the very world in which it exists.

This panel blurs the boundaries between artistic and scientific research. While artists have become more involved in ethical and social debates about scientific discovery, scientists have been exposed to the processes and contexts of art. Thus, networking tends to expand the borders of the exact sciences and to cause a more robust level of dialogue from the humanities and the arts.

The author claims that an informed and critical use of mediated technology can be combined with scientific investigation to construct new metaphorical interpretations which can raise public awareness. The results are interactive interpretations, which not only compliment the essential components of neural behaviour (contraction, adhesion, expansion, and retraction) but transform into a type of new knowledge and hence constitute a novel trans-disciplinary practice that the author calls: Neuro-Media. The main aims of Neuro-Media are to generate a high level of discussion within the scientific community itself, encourage collaboration between diverse individuals working in relation to neurobiology and create a transitional space between the artist, the scientific researcher and the public space.

This particular paper explores the combination of scientific research with media art about human eye disease and retinal behaviour in order to demystifying neurobiology for the general public. It includes a case study (1) as well as an example of Neuro-media (2). The case study is about the high incidence of glaucoma in the developing countries of Asia. This development is a great humanitarian loss, as blindness caused by the more common form of Glaucoma (open angle glaucoma) is largely preventable with access to existing medical technology. The study, conducted by Department of Ophthalmology, National University of Singapore, concludes that incidence of glaucoma in the Chinese community of Singapore itself is also definitely on the increase. A specific example of Neuro-Media entitled: The Electric Retina (2008) will be used as an example to reflect upon the research agendas of neurobiology researchers to combat diseases like Glaucoma. This mediated sculpture attempts to raise awareness about the relation between visual scientific research evidence and human disease. Through exhibition in popular science shows (“Parcours des Wissens”, 2008) the Electric Retina allows the public to gain a deeper insight into the genetic control of visual system development and function by analysis of zebra fish mutants-the main animals used for research in human eye disease. It uses interactive film to trace the evidence of this research and projected films to show how visual impairment can affect the animal’s behaviour.

By combining these case studies in specific Asian communities with actual scientific research and artistic interpretation, the author traces the impact that Neuro-Media could have on the future of human health and the raising of public awareness.

With special thanks to: The Neuhauss Lab, Esp: Corrine Hodel, Prof. Dr. Stephan Neuhauss, Melody Huang, Oliver Biehlmaier, Colette Maurer, Markus Tschopp, Marion Haug.

The Department of Digital Arts and Cinema of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece is a new department that focusses on the common ground between the hybrid field of film practices and cinema studies, on the one hand and electronic, digital, immersive and interactive arts, on the other. It was founded in 2019. The creation of this new department addresses the need for the provision of quality education, artistic innovation and practice-based research in the multidisciplinary field of interactive arts, working at the intersection between film and cinema studies and digital art in Greece.

The primary aim of the department is to fill a need for audiovisual and film production in Greek higher education by being one of the first departments to bridge the gap between established film-making practices, combined with the use of digital tools for high-quality artistic production. Its innovation lies at the fact that it transcends the boundaries of a traditional film school as it brings forward the interconnection with a wide range of contemporary digital forms of expression and multimedia. In order to appropriately support the above, the department’s infrastructure includes five educational laboratories focusing on supporting the following creative activities: Multimedia technologies lab, Film-direction and audiovisual production, Film and video editing, Sound recording and editing, Digital Art and installations, Virtual and extended reality laboratory, Ubiquitous, physical computing and 3D printing.

The curriculum provides students with both a theoretical grounding and a practical skill set pertaining to the above-mentioned fields. The two main corollaries of the curriculum are cinema studies and digital arts; a key identifying characteristic of the department is the interplay between these two basic pillars in an attempt to provide a holistic coverage of this emerging area.

This paper reflects on the reconstruction of the home as it becomes filtered through that data that is streamed from smart objects. Retrofitting a home for The Internet of Things involves the placement of multiple sensors that record changes in conditions in order to construct a simulacrum of the actual house from which to analyse and form understandings of behaviour and in turn opportunities for connection. This domestic data shadow (as it might be called) is not just a record of one inhabitants activities within the house, but the sum of all of the activities of all parties. The single routines that constituted patterns of behaviour of personal habit and ownership become mixed in a single database that, without individual signatures, are lost and the house loses it’s cognitive architectures. The paper will explore the implications upon the occupants sense of location as their model of home become reconfigured through the lens of a database. The paper will draw upon findings of the Hub of All Things (HAT) project funded by the Research Council’s UK Digital Economy Programme. Launched in June 2013, HAT will create the first ever Multi‑sided Market Technology Platform for the home, allowing individuals to trade their personal data for personalised products and services in the future. By collecting information through sensors on objects in their homes and integrating it with other personal data, the project will uncover insights of unprecedented depth and breadth into how we live our lives in relation to the experience of things and people around us.

My claim is that the ancient studies of maps and labyrinths could help us to better understand and deeper interact with the complex virtual spaces of our digital era. The concept of cyberspace, usually conceived only as an informational network, sustained by computers and telecommunication technologies, must be reviewed. We must enlarge the notion and foreshadow the cyberspace as a space in which people interact, inhabit and transform themselves. The old labyrinthine wisdom tells us that the one who makes the labyrinth isn’t the architect, but the walker who ventures himself inside it. The same point is fundamental in the studies of maps. A map is just a representation of a territory and we need a lot of different maps to start to glimpse a place. Besides, we should distinguish the map conceived just as an elaborated diagram of a philosophic and conceptual map. Since Deleuze and Guatarri, in Rhizome, map is something much more dynamic, that is always in transformation. In this sense, we should say that the conceptual map is created after a personal and subjective journey. Because, as we know from our personal experience, even when we have an excellent graphic, other geographies, other spaces emerge from our activity.

Intro

In this multidisciplinary article I explore some particular aspects of cyberspace’s aesthetics. My claim is that the ancient studies of maps and labyrinths could help us to better understand and deeper interact with the complex virtual spaces of our digital era. The concept of cyberspace, usually conceived only as an informational network, sustained by computers and telecommunication technologies, must be reviewed. We must enlarge the notion and foreshadow the cyberspace as a space in which people interact, inhabit and transform themselves. The old labyrinthine wisdom tells us that the one who makes the labyrinth isn’t the architect, but the walker who ventures himself inside it. The same point is fundamental in the studies of maps. A map is just a representation of a territory and we need a lot of different maps to start to glimpse a place. Besides, we should distinguish the map conceived just as an elaborated diagram of a philosophic and conceptual map. Since Deleuze and Guatarri, in Rhizome, map is something much more dynamic, that is always in transformation. In this sense, we should say that the conceptual map is created after a personal and subjective journey. Because, as we know from our personal experience, even when we have an excellent graphic, other geographies, other spaces emerge from our activity. The great challenge is: how could the net artists create new maps and labyrinths?

“When your eyes are fixed upon a dead blank — you draw purely from yourselves” _writes Laurence Sterne in his famous ‘Sentimental Journey’. What else can better describe the modern man in front of the TV set or a computer screen! But it also describes how ancient Technologies of Self may look in modern days. The notion of “Technologies of Self” was introduced by a French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe a process of  subjectivation, “thought‑through and intentional acts, with the help of which people not only establish particular rules of conduct, but also intend to transform themselves, to become different in their singular being, to make their life their own artwork”.

Our laboratory of interactive arts “Acoustic Images” discovered a particular usefulness of this notion when trying to describe results of our 7 year research. The main goal of the lab is to research diverse aspects of human – machine interaction in the arts field. For example, the interactive audio‑visual installation “Acoustic Images” is about interdependence of audience’s movements, sound and video. Every viewer becomes a co‑author, a conductor and a performer, who adds her own music part to the sounding     composition. A camera captures movements of the audience and transforms them into sound. Different motions produce different pitches, timbers and volumes and panoramic position of sound. At the same time the resulting music produces video images. Thus the audience can simultaneously see and hear results of their motions. Importantly, the resulting sound is harmonised so that it does not produce cacophony but meaningful music. It is a “concert sculpture” where a full‑length 40‑minute 4 parts concert can be performed solely by the audience. Originally we expected participants to enjoy the power of being able to control the process of music production. To our surprise, instead the participants preferred to enjoy themselves, their bodies and reflections of the bodies on the screen, rather than to control the results, and were not taken aback by the cacophony produced. They did not want to improve the cacophony by creating harmonious sounds. Instead they enjoyed the very act of the interaction. That made us re‑evaluate the very meaning, raison‑d’etre of the interactive arts. It turned out that the ancient technologies by which the Greeks and Romans represented to themselves their own ethical self‑understanding (Foucault) – “Technologies of Self” – did not disappear. Moreover, they have regained their power thanks to introduction of interactive technologies into our daily life.

Perhaps, one possible explanation for this is that today we are exposed to a constant flux of information mediated by all possible types of devices. To preserve oneself in this flux one has to work hard to constantly reproduce ones own integrity (Selznick). As results of our research suggest, in the human – machine interaction people put the interaction first, above the content. They actively involve in processes of subjectivation (Foucault). Thus we find Foucault’s notion of Technologies of Self useful to describe this proactive engaged viewpoint.

My paper explores the way new media art and politics affected the Venice Biennale in the late 1960s and how the Venice Biennale engaged with the notion of democratization of art between 1966 and 2001.

1966 represents a pivotal node in the history of this institution, when Categories and First Prizes were abolished by the Biennale’s Charter. Responsible for such a change was not only the cultural revolution against bourgeois society and capitalism that shook Europe in the late 1960s, but also the parallel revolution that computer art and experiments in art and technology brought to the art world during the same time.

By looking at the Venice Biennale as a miniature reflection of the broader changes that happened in the art world in response to developments in technology and new media art, my paper analyzes the way technology brought to the Biennale a new wave of creativity but at the same time an element of destabilization to the traditional asset of the institution. I will analyze two political projects related to the concept of urban intervention and democratic space presented to the Biennale in 1990 by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Jenny Holzer. How do we interpret such examples in the context of the discourse of democratization of art?

Other questions I am going to address are the following: what kind of consequences did the 1966 crisis introduce to the Biennale? How did new media art affect the art institution? How to interpret social radicalism and new media art in the context of the Venice Biennale, particularly after 1968? How did the Venice Biennale come to terms with the concept of democratization of art?

New Nature is a music video/ video art piece merging posthuman philosophy and eco-fiction. The story depicts a visual representation of rite of passage from current reality to posthuman, where nature, technology and human forms a new unity, orchestrated by one of a kind instrument from glass Bohemian Cristal Instrument as a demiurg of the change.

This panel considers the new and multiple relationships of the senses and related perceptual and cognitive processes which characterize contemporary performance integrating new technologies. Focusing on the corresponding effects on corporeality, performativity and representation, it considers the sensori-perceptual deconstruction, reorganization and reconstruction involved when the body is “touched” by, interacts with, and “incorporates” the effects of technology. And, as these new approaches directly concern current research -creation and are expressed through collaborations, hybrid artistic approaches, new forms of interdisciplinarity and communities of practitioners, the panel will also consider the implications of this activity for existing networks of research-creation, looking at their specificity while examining how participants in these networks exchange, interact and collaborate.

Keywords: New Technologies, Performativity, the Senses, Somatics, Perception, Cognition, Design, Embodiment, Research-Creation

This article is examines the imaginary future presented by the IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, especially its promotion of the ‘artificial intelligence’. As well as comparing this SF dream with other exhibitors’ fantasies about unmetered electricity from nuclear power stations and holidays on the moon using space rockets, the article also draws parallels between the 1964 New York World’s Fair with the ideological themes of its predecessors from the 1851 London Great Exhibition onwards.

Inspired by Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of ‘invented traditions’, this article argues that imaginary futures are also a method of sanctifying the transient socio-economic relationships of the present by disguising them as products of another historical moment.

Currently, the potential of (media) archives in journalism is underutilized. Historical data is scarcely used to connect historical developments to current events. With the design research project Newsslider, we explore how emerging technology (artificial intelligence and natural language generation) can empower journalists to connect historical events to contemporary reporting.

Western science, in fields such as computational ecology, has grown to accept the truths that Indigenous culture have long know: that computational ecology accepts that ecological models are too complex to be summarised in computational form. Since this complexity evades the codification of mere indexing, how then, should we work with computational companions ( code, algorithms, programs, platforms). What new ways of intra-acting can we develop alongside computational frameworks, which bring us one more step closer to sentient machines? Most importantly, how can ethical ways of thinking and doing motivate transformations in the computational space, in areas such as machine learning where extreme problems of bias are now embedded?

Night Walks is a series of distinct software objects connected to one another asynchronously through a private server. The intent is that these objects function together to form one videogame, distributed throughout multiple players and play sessions. This talk will discuss the benefits and challenges of using this as a form of artistic process. The author will discuss the creation of different software objects that commu- nicate with one another indirectly and interpret one-another’s communications abstractly. It will demonstrate how this leads to an iterative and expansive creative process, with novel forms of inspiration and constraint.

‘No place like now, now like no place’ will present a number of theses related to my PhD research and my ongoing creative research into online identity and community.
There are several key works I will refer to in the paper:

1. –    A screen projection work titled ‘Swipezone’ presented at CUBE37 in Frankston in 2006;
2. –    a web based work titled ‘swipe: airports, borders and fences’, stage one published 2005 and stage two in 2007; and
3. –    ‘Facebook fictions’ a new work that is currently in development.

This paper examines the role of the Internet and how it relates to the development of social movements, online identity and the spaces in between.

All of the above mentioned works explore how alienation affects perceptions of identity. The intention is to present a range of issues related to notions of loss of identity and displacement. By investigating the implications of diaspora and the breaking down of safe, describable forms of identification as a process that creates alienation, I attempt to present the spaces in-between. There are many cases where the condition of social displacement may occur in terms of social relations. For instance, a change of residence and community can trigger feelings of isolation and lack of security in a previously affirmed sense of self. As a community, we have become dependant on technology to allow us to go between here and there. These works ask us to consider not just who, but, where we are and the implications of navigating the zones in-between.

I wrote a fi rst text for ISEA in 2006 about the context of the Shanghai World Expo.This event is an urbanisation process, emerging in an endless and unlimited city that is under discussion for 2010. Consequently, what is being prepared at Shanghai is not simply an immaterial bridge between a universal-type event and a planetary dimension. It will be a setting for utopian realities. These will take form thanks to technologies and existing projects. The purpose is not to present a performance or an enviroment but to assert a new vision to remove the current borders existing in the world. Our research connections: from reality limits to invisible data for “rendez-vous” that are beyond our conception of space. As we said, we do not propose to add projects. We only use them to imagine and create another way of thinking up data transmissions. If physical networks and data processing exist in unlimited space, what are the new temporal limits and how can we bring them into visibility?

Panel: Short:Circuit:  Cross Border Communications in New Media Between US and Turkey

The­o­rist Gay­a­tri Spi­vak wrote of the pol­i­tics of trans­la­tion as being in­trin­sic to the con­struc­tion of mean­ing if one looks at lan­guage as being cen­tral to that locus of mean­ing.  But if we can use the dis­tance be­tween root lan­guages (Al­taic for Turk­ish and An­glo-Frisian for Eng­lish) as metaphor for dis­tance, be­tween cul­tures, to a sense of home, in trans­la­tion of mean­ing and iden­tity. In Amer­i­can cul­tural terms, the 20th cen­tury dream was that of as­sim­i­la­tion, or is now pos­si­bly that of het­eroge­nous in­te­gra­tion.  How­ever, for many artists cross­ing into the po­si­tion of ge­o­graph­i­cal oth­er­ness, the is­sues of trans­la­tion, dis­lo­ca­tion, and no­madism reemerge within the work.  To con­sider Shan­non and the idea of noise in the trans­mis­sion of ideas, in­clud­ing in­ter­per­sonal re­la­tions, how does trans­la­tion of al­ter­ity of space, time, cul­ture and iden­tity ev­i­dence it­self through the mi­lieu of cul­tural pro­duc­tion?

Ask­ing the ques­tion of why re­cur­rent is­sues emerge is not enough, but ex­am­i­na­tion of the phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of di­a­logue be­tween these mi­lieux can lend in­sight into the ex­pe­ri­ences of artists who have tra­versed spaces which, in their own way, have been every­thing yet noth­ing.  This would be Amer­ica, su­per­power with­out iden­tity, and Turkey part of Eu­rope, Mid­dle East, and Eura­sia and cen­ter of Byzan­tium. This pre­sen­ta­tion will ex­am­ine works by Turk­ish and An­glo-Amer­i­can artists who have ei­ther worked, stud­ied,or cre­ated in the other coun­try.  This dis­cus­sion will also ex­plore points of trans­la­tion, map­ping of mean­ing, and re­cur­rent themes, not in­so­far to re­duc­tivize this ma­trix of re­la­tion­ships, but to con­sider the role of lim­i­nal­ity as ex­pressed by the work of both sets of artists. This si­mul­ta­ne­ous locus of com­mon­al­ity and dis­lo­ca­tion be­comes the ex­pres­sion of “oth­ers” who have them­selves been in­flu­enced by that “other” place to re­flect on their own hy­brid­ity and al­ter­ity.

In the society we live in we have norms to follow. We have our own ‘right to freedom’ accompanying our responsibility and duty. However, individualism gradually overflows the society, as we begin to realize our rights. Individualism is led to consequential instigation and defiance against others. It can cause a victim mentality if basic ethics and morality go unheeded. This also becomes a key factor, for destroying the social norm, when the uneasiness among social members becomes aggravated. This belief started from a concern of my rational judgment as to whether or not it meets permitted norms. I am further concerned about my actions and behavior as it can cause uneasiness in others. These are all feelings of doubt I have about myself. As I mentioned above, solidarity among social members and unstable agreement with oneself can cause internal conflict. This conflict always draws people into confusion.
This work is 3D interactive installation using the hand tracking of leap motion. When seeing the art consider the cross strips (closely packed paper) that are packed upper, lower, left and right of the image. This is our conscious system, which seems separate from each other, but a straight line does in fact, connect the points to each other. This straight line points out the individualism that crosses the social norm. In this art work there is a total of 625 particles. They are arranged in a 2D sequence, each sequence contains 25 particles. The particles at the center respond to a physical motion in a virtual space. Within the particles there is a leap cam that will recognize the location of a hand. When the hand is located the particle will move, and the wave will be occurred based on the degree of pressure exerted. This is all based on the initial value of the particles in the Y AXIS `0`. A sound interference gradually occurs when there is a great increase or decrease in the wave. Reversely, the interference is barely heard in a calm wave with little change. (-0.5 ~0.5)
Therefore, the sound of interference caused through the interaction is to present the confusion in human ecosystem and the exceptional circumstances in the social norm. This is to criticize that mankind has a forked tongue – we are deeply concerned about how we plan our life while failing to comply with the moral norms.

Today, in the age of drone media, satellite photography and CCTV, image-making is increasingly decoupled from human agency and human vision. It can also literally show us the end of the world. The notion of “nonhuman creation” proposed in this talk will expand the human-centric idea of image-making to embrace imaging practices from which the human is absent: from the contemporary high-tech examples provided by traffic control cameras, space photography and Google Earth, through to deep-time impression-making processes such as fossilization. The Anthropocene, understood as a global ecological-economic crisis in which the human is said to have become a geological agent, will frame the analysis to highlight the interweaving of image-making processes with chemistry, minerals, fossil fuels and the sun. By examining a number of visual projects, including some from her own practice, Joanna Zylinska will argue that the Anthropocene becomes visible to us through altered light, and through the particulate matter reflected in it. In line with the theme of this ISEA symposium, she will also suggest that experimental, posthumanist image-making can allow us humans to “unsee” ourselves from our own narcissistic parochialism – and to take some steps towards envisaging new forms of biocreation and peace.

This paper explores fresh insights into the ways we negotiate our ideas about nonhuman creativity, emphasizing the need to recast traditional notions of what it means to be an artist today. In the prospect of the existence of entirely autonomous nonhuman agents of art production in the following decades, an attempt is being made to question the exegesis of the artificial creativity of generative art from an anthropocentric point of view. Through the observation of four art projects, the first part sheds light on the interaction of artists with generative art-making systems in order to demonstrate that the concept of assemblage between living and non-living agents is currently emerging. The second part attempts a new ontological exploration of algorithmic systems as a possible path for essentializing their creative agency. The discussion extends to whether these aspects can operate as a foundation of the ontological definition of nonhuman creativity.

LIFE
“The BwO howls: ‘They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body”. –Deleuze & Guattari,1996

This paper is not about Antarctica at all. In many imaginaries Antarctica exists as a virtualized yet real utopia. It is a place known through material productions that oscillate between the fictional and the scientific. The discovery of the Don Juan Pond lead scientists towards life formed by brine-derived nitrates (a kind of molecular self-organization by non-carbon sources) and onwards to the possibility of life on Mars. If it is autonomous, can reproduce and evolve, it must be life, mustn’t it? Amidst complex computational models, nonorganic matter is not static; it changes and tying it to either nature or culture is impossible. Antarctica is such an object of study.

While the digital transformation continues to outpace socio-institutional adaptation, the technological arts have moved on to vastly expand their temporal horizons. Timescapes of artistic research and creation now embrace the residual as much as the emergent; techno-diversity against digital solutionism; sympoietic rather than linear models of innovation. But nonsynchronous innovation is hardly unique to the current moment, as my recent book Northern Sparks reveals in its account of Canada’s early experimentation with digital media.

Poised as a “counter-environment” to the great powers, in McLuhan’s phrase, Canada’s unique experience of the transitional decades into the information age was grounded in a technological ethos that emphasized sensorial immediacy, embodied interaction, and improvisatory expression. This alternative ethos was situated between a pair of distinct yet inextricably bound forces, one national-political and proper to Canada, the other techno-mediatic and global in scale.

The unraveling of these forces by the late millennium reveals innovation itself as a complexly drawn process comprised of multiple layers with fluctuating degrees of synchronization. From a cross-media perspective, Northern Sparks also reveals how the differences between the arts with respect to improvisatory immediacy and discrete formalization make any neat chronological periodization of the digital problematic.

Northern Lights takes the Aurora Borealis as its source material in a collaboration between art and science. In 2001, when composer and sound artist Petri Kuljuntausta was searching for new ideas for a forthcoming concert, he discovered that interesting new sound material had recently been recorded under bright Aurora Borealis. During thousands of years many observations have been made, however, there are no earlier measurements or recordings containing similar data. He contacted the person behind the research project, scientist Unto K. Laine, and a listening session was promptly arranged at the Acoustic Laboratory of the Helsinki University of Technology. Kuljuntausta was excited about the originality of the sounds and the sonic range of their characteristics, and the idea of a composition based on these sounds from space began to crystallize. The collaboration had begun.

In this concert we hear the original field recordings as well as processed versions of Auroral sounds. A continuous dialogue between the auroral soundscapes and their digitally manipulated alternate forms is created on stage using only real-time digital sound processors, such as a touch-sensitive sound processor.

Performer: Petri Kuljuntausta.
Visuals: Sami van Ingen.
Original field recordings: Unto K. Laine.

Panel Statement

Almost as if by magic – whatever procedure you dream of – you can probably extend the power of your dream to the computer and let it develop the dream beyond your wildest expectations. You may identify procedures for improvising with color, scale, and position – which is what artists have always done. Given sufficient definition you could develop a form generator and from your new vantage point see new possibilities for further elaboration on your routine. Through trial and error interacting with the algorithm itself you proceed further into the new frontier.

So what can we learn from this? We learn what artists have always known -that ‘CAD’ programs, paint brush programs, paint brushes and drawing paraphernalia do not make art. Neither do  artists or designers simply ‘make art’. The one over-riding essential element to the process, ‘a developed artistic procedure’, is necessarily unique for each artist and for each work of art. The procedure addresses a singular conjunction of elements for which there is no ‘universal’ rule. The ‘calculus of form’ may be placed in the service of such procedures but should not be confused with the art-making procedure. For the artist who writes the code the artistic procedure is the act of ‘writing the code’, pretty much like the creative work of the composer when the composer writes a musical score. Making art does indeed require a ‘calculus of form’. But the artist’s instructions on how to employ the ‘calculus of form’ precede the ‘calculus’. One needs an ‘artistic procedure’ which addresses the entire complex of elements for each specific work. The final form, unique and specific to each work, embraces more than the ‘calculus’. While it embraces and grows from a “calculus” it might employ any of an infinite number of approaches to deliver the form. These may include metaphor, improvisations of the form phenomenon in and of itself, or reference to some other phenomenon or idea – historical, literary, political, mathematical or philosophic. Can an artist write an algorithm then for an artistic procedure? Emphatically yes! Such algorithms provide the artist with self-organizing form generators which manifest his or her own artistic concerns and interests. We are looking to an interesting time ahead of us when artists will be able to exchange and interact with each other’s form-generating tools in ways we never dreamed. There are procedures yet to be developed to make this kind of interactive expression accessible – a time ahead when we will literally see an evolution of form including a genealogy associated with its creators.

Eleven years ago, in the summer of 1997, I attended a conference at the MIT Media Lab about the intersection of education, technology and economic development. I was 20 at the time and was thrilled to be at the east coast epicentre of dotcom culture. There were educators from all over the world at the conference, as well as a small handful of young digitally savvy youth, of which I was a part. I was savvy at the time.

The conference held sessions on a wide variety of topics. There were keynote speeches, and breakfast and lunchtime conversations as you might expect. Educators from Africa explained that integrating digital technology into education was difficult when so many communities lacked electricity. Most Africans at the time had never even placed a phone call. This was news to me.) Educators from Costa Rica showed pilot projects where new technologies leapfrogged existing ones while promoting new models of learning; American researchers discussed how to better support student-centred-learning both abroad and locally.

Although many at the conference seemed to be focused on looking for funding, I remember one schoolteacher in particular who was just happy to be there and to share his experience. He was from a small village in the Canadian arctic and he enthusiastically described how
an intermittent satellite data connection allowed his students to learn about other places and cultures through direct communication with children in other parts of the world. It was a complete shift in his community where kids suddenly became the bearers of great knowledge and could themselves become teach their elders.

“Nourishing and Nurturing: Placentas, Incubators, and the Politics of Life Ex-Vivo” is a panel comprised of four differing perspec-tives on the placenta and its changing role in the future of human reproduction. Metaphorically, incubators are surrogate wombs in-tended to nourish and nurture life ex-vivo. In the not-to-distant im-agined future, artificial wombs may provide a supportive environ-ment for human gestation, ectogenesis. These are specific symbi-otic imaginaries about the placenta. How and why invent new ones? What will happen to the placenta when pregnancy is entirely mechanized, ex-utero? How can the cultural and biological histories about the placenta inform reproductive futures? And what be-comes of gendered reproduction and ‘mothering’ in this alternative narrative? Each presentation will probe themes on the symbiotic and/or parasitic relationships between mother and fetus as well as humans and non-humans. The talks will include ongoing artistic research on incubators and the placenta, and prompt questions about the socio-cultural impact of ectogenesis and the body politic.

Conic perspective with a fixed eye, born during the Quattrocento after several centuries of antique perspective, is used mainly in western realism. Cubism uses another kind of realism, gathering several viewpoints into a single picture viewed from, like two eyes looking at something. Computer graphics usually do not wonder about human experimental realism: it uses photographic realism. We have introduced in computer graphics these concepts of artistic realism, by developing new projection models that can be classified into three main categories: moving eye projections (antique perspective), wide angle projections and convergent projections (Cubism). These new projections have been integrated into an image synthesis environment, using constructive solid geometry for modeling, and ray tracing for rendering.

This text is set forth in consideration with a task we have already begun to engage in Mexico, whereby some of us researchers deem necessary to engage a genealogy of the relations between (relatively) contemporary art and media, alongside a reading through the prism of media theory that articulates an archeological notion of these elements. It appears increasingly necessary to bring about a first action of inscription for this mode of thought, structuring a program that covers not only the 20th century or current times, but one that reaches back in time to substantially inquire the formation of art-technique-science relations in the Novohispanic imaginary and as concerns the birth of a “criollo” historic consciousness.

This paper takes up the concept of artistic narrative intervention into various mediated social locations (read: institutions) in several of its forms. Through examining ideas of location as nowhere, anywhere, and everywhere, I throw into relief the mediated ideologies that come to us through various institutions, such as museums and the media, and how artists subvert these ideologies through the use of fictional, narrative interventions.

The most well known explication and classification of this tendency in late twentieth/early twenty‑first century art is the 2009 Carrie Lambert‑Beatty article Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility. In this important essay she defines the term parafiction, where she asserts that, “It [parafiction] does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature, but has one foot in the field of the real…these fictions are experienced as fact.” She goes on to cite (and site) many prominent examples of this mode of making work from the Yes Men to the Atlas Group, and analyzes how these works function, thereby laying a firm theoretical foundation for the further grouping of works under this term. Using her definition as a touchstone I argue for the expansion of the term; that for the work to be successful, it does not necessarily have to be experienced as fact, and that ‘the real’ itself is a social construction which is made actual through mots d’ordre as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

I take it as my task to add artists and works to her initial list, expanding her rubric, to affirm this term as a valid, generative, and necessary mode of artistic production, and to associate the notion of location as being non‑fixed and shifting depending on the purpose of the narrative. I will also show that, through this mode of working, structures of power are thrown into relief against the background of mediated cultural locations, and their fictional (yet all too real) power narratives exposed. So in addition to my own work, I highlight examples from the work of artists Ilya Kabakov, Tacita Dean, Jimmie Durham, and others. I also draw theory from Hillel Schwartz concerning the uncanny and doppelgangers (unheimlich); from Deleuze and Bergson concerning the virtual; from Arnaud Maillet regarding the Claude glass (portals between realities); and from my own research into the Catholic miracle of bi‑location. These examples will help to form a complex, shifting image of location, and show that it is always negotiated for as being an authentic, physical reality by those who wish to claim and control histories (and their meanings in the present), and conversely is often presented as something of a dream (or nightmare) by those who wish to resist the official version of “place”.

This paper presents a literature review rooted in Human-Computer Interaction research as the methodological basis for the proposal of a tangible interface called NUAGE. It is aimed at artists, performers and designers in the research field of Digital Live Audiovisual Arts.

Audiovisual performance combines musical and video arts together in a live artistic context. Tools to create such performances are often only software and do not provide the artists a wide range of interaction possibilities. A show where the performer’s actions are hidden behind his/her computer screen can be visually less interesting. To provide guidance to designers and help them branch out from the traditional graphical user interfaces, we propose a different and structured design approach, Digital Live Audiovisual Arts, that builds upon Tangible Interaction concepts. We map Digital Live Audiovisual Arts by investigating its distinctive design intentions (expressiveness, performativity, participation, aesthetics and engagement) and proposing interface types taxonomy. To implement and validate this novel methodology, we developed NUAGE, an original performative interface. We thus bring together different perspectives on understanding Human-Computer Interaction and set a platform for future research on artistic tangible systems.

Abstract

We outline an online market place with a visual interface facilitating any kind of dealmaking in the internet. Through the interface users can negotiate, conclude contracts and execute transactions online. Internet users can specify goals to be achieved or post specific bids and offers. O-d-o will propose matching counterparties via a userbased tagging system. Through the visual negotiation platform the two parties can then start to negotiate. If an agreement is reached, it is captured as a visual contract and a transaction may follow.
This system is meant to facilitate transactions in the niche markets of the current Internet economy. Besides it’s economic potential O-d-o may also serve as a generic platform for so-called transactional arts – art works where some sort of value is exchanged and which often involve a kind of deal-making. We also outline various applications addressing domains like finance, outsourcing and new forms of online collaboration in a globalized economy.
A special interest lies on the detection of win-win situations and what we call ‘creative-deal making’. According to findings in the field of interest based negotiation agents may increase the quality of agreements by exchanging information about their underlying goals, enabling for example alternative ways to attain those goals being
discovered. The enforceability of the contracts follows current cyber-law practices. In the context of social networking sites and b-to-b market-platforms the counterparty risk can also be reduced through the visibility of deal-making histories for each party.
The innovative combination of functionalities and the visual interface support all steps from interaction to transaction within one system. The commercial potential lies in supporting the various communities emerging around the subjects they negotiate.

The Internet of Things (IoT) involves physical objects monitoring their immediate environments through a variety of sensors, transmitting the acquired data to remote networks, and initiating actions based on embedded algorithms and feedback loops. The data in these loops makes its journey to an obfuscated proprietary taxonomy of corporate server farms and returns to the situated object as a transcendental revealation of an opaque order impenetrable to human interlocutors. [9] This case study argues that in effect the nature of an IoT enabled object appears as the receptacle of an exterior force that differentiates it from its milieu and gives it meaning and value in unpredictable ways. IoT enabled objects such as the aptly named Amazon Echo acquire their value, and in so doing become real for their interlocutors, only insofar as they participate in one way or another in remote data realities transcending the locale of the object. Insofar as the data gleaned by such devices has predictive potential when viewed in aggregate, the enactment of this potential in a local setting is always already a singular act of manifestation of a transcendental data nature.

In his work on non-modern notions of sacred space philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade conceptualized this act of manifestation of another modality of being into a local setting as a hierophany. [10] Hierophanies are not continuous, but wholly singular acts of presence by a different modality. By manifesting that modality, which Eliade termed as the sacred, an object becomes the receptacle for a transcendental presence, yet simultaneously continues to remain inextricably entangled in its surrounding milieu. Spaces punctured by hierophanies are not homogenous, but are experienced as a heterogeneous array of interruptions, crevices, liminal breaks, folds, and pauses of enchantment. In other words, the manifestation of a hierophanic presence reconstitutes heretofore homogeneous spaces. There is a strange attraction between non-modern imaginaries of hierophany as a gateway to the sacred, and IoT enabled objects transducing loci into liminal and opaque data taxonomies looping back as a black-boxed echo. The case study proposes that when viewed in aggregate, such hierophany-punctured spaces seem to resonate in a mode of anticipation of human and non-human agency in the form of a new data aesthetics.

The traffic of images on the Internet has reached explosive dimensions. Millions of images come and go, appear and disappear every moment. These images are dispatched and captured by almost anyone from children to the elderly; from private people representing any imaginable walk of life to businessmen and government officials. Some are premeditated, while others are inspired by a moment’s fancy. The situation represents a moment of crisis, at least for those whose profession it is to analyze the changing forms of visual culture. Grasping something so elusive and enormous has made some scholars to raise their hands in despair, while others have sought help from digital tools designed to handle and analyze Big Data. The problem with the latter approach is that while it may be able to detect patterns on macroscopic scale its possibilities are often limited to formal and stylistic analyses. By applying media archaeological topos study, this lecture outlines and demonstrates an approach that coud provide new possibilities of penetrating behind the surface manifestations of the image traffic taking place on the Internet.

Observation Instruments is the Title: of a series of interactive time‑lapsed video installations that investigate our perception and re‑imagination of Canada’s Northern landscape. The work is derived from a database containing images captured by a found webcam located in Kimmirut, Nunavut, as well as weather statistics. Started on June 21st, 2010 (the longest day of the year) the database, which grows according to an automated process developed by the author, now contains over 100,000 images. The installation consists of time‑lapsed projections of this image archive, in which the visual compositions can be filtered and altered according to time, weather data, or geometric parameters accessible via tangible electronic control panels (the instruments). These devices provide the viewer an opportunity to examine, contemplate and re‑imagine the Northern landscape, taking them on a virtual journey to a distant and unfamiliar place. Through the multiplicity of a single image, the viewer is given a narrow perspective on this remote land, while at the same time exposed to a variety of ways of seeing. This paper will discuss how the work proposes a mediated experience of a locale from the constrained lens and perspective of a distant outsider. Evoking notions of solitude and encroachment, the fragility of settlement and the powerful forces of nature, the work introduces us to a region of the country few of us have ever experienced. The North, or at least the Idea of it as developed by Canadian writer and composer Glenn Gould in his Solitude trilogy, is indeed a ‘convenient place to dream about’. The work also examines the role of the webcam as an unbiased and unrelenting image collector, unimpeded by aesthetic judgment, as well as the use of natural data to define structure in time‑based media.

Media art is an invaluable and extremely fragile part of our modern cultural heritage. Media artworks (e. g. video art, interactive art, net art, computer art, media installation, media performances…) distinguish themselves from more conventional artworks by the use of electronic media for artistic expression. These works are encoded and usually stored on a physical storage device such as digital or analogue videotape, optical discs, and hard disks… and they require playback and display equipment to be viewed. The use of the rapidly aging media technology for the recording, storage, playback and display of the media artworks affects their stability. The most obvious problem for their preservation is the obsolescence of physical storage and display formats. If the storage format becomes obsolete, one risks not being able to view the work anymore. If the display equipment becomes obsolete, the translation into new display devices (e. g. from a CRT monitor to a flat screen monitor) might change the meaning of the artwork. These are two of the most appealing challenges regarding the preservation of media art. The technology and associated knowledge are in many cases still available today but are rapidly becoming obsolete. If we don’t act quickly both will disappear and we risk losing a part of our modern cultural heritage.

(Long paper)

Keywords: Telematic, urban-screen, intervention, ludic, participatory art, play telepresent, performance, interaction, networked.

This paper examines the cultural and political implications of and for the proliferation of public urban screens appearing in cities around the world. Through a contextual and cultural study of cities and urban communities, informed by the work of Richard Sennett, Lucy Lippard and Scott McQuire et al., the paper asks what the opportunities are for creativity, intervention and public cohesion through these screens? This paper presents a case study of the authors/artist’s practice-based research project “Occupy the Screen” 2014 for Connecting Cities Berlin and Riga 2014 European Capital of Culture. Using a practice-based methodology the authors utilise a method which maps the five elements of play, as defined by Hans Scheuerl in 1965 to measure open and closed systems in order to develop a framework for artists and curators to maximise engagement with public audiences through play.

This dialogue is the text-based component of an evolving performative multi-media lecture. By rereading Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, in relation to the global Occupy movement and the rise of social media, we ask: in what ways does the proliferation of digital imagery enable and limit this recent form of political activism? By subjectively responding to selective quotations from Debord’s writing, we link the triumvirate of global capitalism, public space and digital technology, producing commentary on the displacement imposed by contemporary ‘spectacular’ technologies, the networked ‘technical image’ and the politics of public space.

Visitors to Oceanic Scales will explore their role in maintaining a stable ocean ecology through a multi-sensory, interactive art and science puzzle inspired by the micro-organisms of the sea.

The focus is to encourage change toward sustainable living practices by engaging the public to reflect on and perhaps better understand how humans impact the environment at local and global scales. Light, scent, sound and touch inspire new ways of thinking about ocean health. Oceanic Scales explores the visualization and contextualization of ocean sensor data into a creative digital output, streamed from local and mobile water sensors. This exhibit gives visitors the ability to experience the work either passively or actively.

They can absorb its multi-sensory interpretation of ocean data as complex patterns of light and sound, or they can decide to become an active agent of change, trying out various trial and error scenarios by adjusting temperature, PH and nitrogen levels within the automated gaming system. Instability may lead to a system crash; harmony and grace can be achieved through perceived stability, patience and new understanding. The physical structure is ecologically minded, built with local bamboo plywood and pine resin, corn plastic 3D printed forms, recycled cardboard, natural latex rubber, solar power and a living component of native plant species.

Biology, Ecology, Computer Science and Engineering at UCSC came together to make this idea possible. Gene Felice, Jennifer Parker and the Openlab research group and the Coaction Lab have given their creativity, time and effort to see this project through to completion. Students received access to equipment, experience, training and new inspiration as well as greater understanding of the natural systems that we have a responsibility to maintain.

This paper is a multidisciplinary comparative analysis of two recent ludo-narrative artifacts, Ori and the Blind Forest and Hollow Knight. Coming from the context of the uncertainty of light generated by the wave-particle duality paradox, and utilizing the analytical framework of game hermeneutics, this paper will argue that uncertainty acts as the central ludic and narrative impulse for both of these games. The first section will present the uncertainty inherent in the double hermeneutic and provide some brief context for the discussion of the two games. The second section will compare the gameplay experience, while the third section will contrast the narratives. The final section will conclude.

Ohme is a Brussels-based ArtScience production, research, and education organization. It works at the frontiers between artistic and scientific disciplines, contributing to the development of new conceptions of interdisciplinarity, with a keen interest in research, co-creation, knowledge sharing and the decompartmentalization of disciplines, mentalities, and audiences. Ohme’s actions are transversal, moving from the visual arts to the performing arts, from the exact sciences to the humanities, while trying to question societal issues in the light of the arts and sciences, in connection with the artistic, cultural, and associative landscape.
By bringing together established and emerging artists, scientists, researchers, and students, it produces performances, installations, science dissemination devices, multidisciplinary events and exhibitions, and it coordinates educational programs and interdisciplinary research projects in ArtScience. Relying on a multidisciplinary team of engineers, cultural professionals, researchers as well as on a large scientific and artistic network, Ohme’s objective is to develop new forms of artistic creation, scientific mediation, transversal pedagogy, innovation, and exploratory research, through collaborative and transdisciplinary practices.

The collaborative OMNI ANIMA art project investigates how the traditional and indigenous expression of the Sami joik can be compiled, transformed, processed and shared through an interactive electronic sound installation. Based on indigenous art forms, the project impacts several areas both within culture and arts. One being joik as a tool to negotiate identity in a post-colonial perspective and a tool that has been essential in forming the idea of a sami nation, Sapmi, in Northern Scandinavia.

In an evaluation of the idealized vision of scientific and technological progress, the multi-year AL GRANO project questions the rush by agribusiness to produce genetically modified corn to supply the needs of an expanding industry of processed foods without consideration of the potential chain of unbalances: maize’s biodiversity and its extinction, impoverished lands, water depletion, the demise of small-scale farmers and agro-ecological methods in Mexico, obesity in the USA yet starvation in developing countries.

The artist has lived in Mexico and in the U.S.A. Corn Belt, and through this experience she has come to see the defense of maize as a fundamental reaction to capitalist interests that instigate the protection of Mexican cultural integrity, specifically by indigenous populations who defend native seeds, their lands and their livelihoods.

Nested within the AL GRANO enterprise, the “Crop-Cropping” work transforms into art the current political, social and economic murkiness related to maize seed debates by drawing from Spanish American literature, and using an iconographic language that conjoins new media codes and ancient Maya codes. The title of the piece plays with the words –crop and cropping– used in agriculture as well as in digital art practices.

Reflections on Space, Neurons and Cities Inspired by the Projects “Ways of Neuron” and “2 Cycles”

“Steven Johnson coined the somewhat more precise term ‘interface culture’. The latter term is of particular interest because the world always shows itself through the interface. The interface is a semantic generating surface (in an abstract sense) of a medium.” _Hans H. Diebner.

On Brains
There is a common expression that addresses the delicate distribution of the different cortices, areas and cells on the brain as “Architecture”. Keeping in mind the enormous complexity, diversity and richness of the brain structure I prefer to use the metaphor of “Urbanism” to achieve a better understanding of the brain structure. Since the last decades of the XIX century with the rise of Phrenology and the production of images associated with that predecessor of Neurosciences, it is possible to find some formal coincidences between the division of specific areas of the head with the city map and its divisions.

When I had the opportunity to do interviews with prestigious specialists and researchers about Neurosciences for the project “Ways of Neuron” — a prototype for an on line scientific documentary — I used to try to visualize in my mind the structure of the brain. In almost every case I got mental representations of systems which could be compared with the traffic of a large city, the electrical power distribution in a metropolis or the water systems of the Inca Empire. That was a useful way for me to imagine the large and complex series of connections on the brain (complex understood as the opposite of isolated not as the opposite of simple).

Later on, I discovered Steven Johnson’s book “Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software”. Johnson had studied in detail the hidden connections of the evolution of these biological and cultural productions, finding the complexity as the crucial concept for the understanding of these diverse phenomena. Emergence that is a property of complex systems and it is the key point of the aforementioned book. In my opinion there are connections between the structure of the brain and the macro structures of a city. However more than formal coincidences, there are interesting similarities in the nature of processes that characterize both of them. For instance in brains and in cities some places have well defined borders and there are well known functions associated to these regions. Nevertheless there are also another processes that seems to be mysterious. Although cities as brains have regions which vibrate synchronically and this does not appear to respond to an obvious connection. It is possible to realize then that in these rich and complex systems everything is somehow interconnected and the vibrations and rhythm of every single neuron, or person could reflect and transform other remote spaces.

It has been said, it is a common place: new trends in portable devices boost not only consumerism but also a fetishization on owning products that not long ago we did not notice we needed them. The hype on mobility overrides real needs and drives endless releases of phone models promising features expensively charged by local carriers or that would never work as expected.

Motorola and LG have launched more than 150 cellular phone models each in the last 6 years. Samsung has released more than 300 in the same period of time. Most of these products will not stay on the market for long but produce a definitive, instant desire on the customers, due to their latest features. With a slightly different strategy Apple has launched just 3 iPhone models so far, but is taking vast advantage of such predisposition of consuming. For its 4G model (out on June 24) Apple is expecting to sell no less than 20 millions of units until the end of the year.

This reminds me of Bruce Sterling’s speech at ISEA Montreal, back in 1995. After mentioning the technological rhetoric present in the 90’s culture, he took his brand new PowerBook to compare how little such device would last compared to its source reference, saying that even the cheapest paperback book would outlive his machine quite easily.

Keywords: Ensemble, Electronic Instrument, Network Music

The use of DIY methods in the guidance of students in their own formation process are just as important as any research process now days, the access to open information and technology are growing at a fast rate and with a bit of a tinkering mind the periods of time it may take to build your own embedded acoustic instrument(Berdahl, 2014) is widely lessened with the technology available such as 3D printers or raspberry pi’s. Contemporary practices like network music become also more accessible thanks to the advance of the possible communication protocols and device robustness; in less than 40 years if we count from those experiments with low level assembler for hacking a chip and serial protocol for its communication(Gresham-Lancaster, 1998) to interfacing a couple of raspberry pi’s through OSC protocol.

This paper summarizes the process of cohesion of an electronic device ensemble where students and researchers live new expression practices throughout the use and misuse of technology, enhancing music interpretation and ensemble robustness through the practice of network music.

Looking at interactive artefacts of all kinds, it makes no longer sense to talk of a unified human subject as opposed to its representation in cyberspace. E.g. a computer player is not acting any longer by controlling his/her representational figure (avatar) in fictive computational realms. No, the player’s bodily and mental actions form part of both the fictive and the material world. Thus we have to talk of extended bodies (McLuhan) and conflated distinctions between reality and fiction.

Based on Western ontological and epistemological distinction between notions of reality and fiction, we can account for occurring collapse of the very same distinction in two ways: (1) by suggesting a general fictionalisation (and aesthetisation) of everything; or (2) by proposing that fictional worlds are enacted and therefore very real. The result of both ontological displacements is an epistemological implosion, dismantling the inherent resistant position of fiction.

My paper proposes that the horizontal distinction between reality and fiction gives way for a vertical distinction between different performative domains. In the age of pervasive computing, the constitutive structures for these performative domains are ‘synthetic’ (human and algorithm) communicational systems (e.g. computer games, online communities, interactive social art). These performative domains are producing their own specific virtuality in the sense of potentiality. But in contrast to neo-Hegelian notions like noo-sphere (semiosphere, ideosphere), I propose that these virtualities are brought about by the interacting human (Bergsonian) body. The body is thus the mediating system between synthetic communicational systems and subjective recognition rendering concrete (inter-) actions. Performative reflection becomes a system immanent scrutiny of intrinsic possibilities. Extrinsic resistant positions (criticism) on the other hand emerge out of interferences between multiple performative domains.

The paper exemplifies my conceptualization by analyzing a roleplaying game (e.g. WOW) and locative art (Blast Theory).

Abstract (Intro)

1. ALTERNATE POSSIBILITIES

Just as the Internet provides extensive and interactive ways of displaying, linking and retrieving information and images, it may now allow new ways of uploading, interfacing and accessing the body itself. Browsing the Net, generating Phantoms and constructing Virtual communities in Cyberspace is one contestable future. And instead of seeing the Net/Web as a means of fulfilling outmoded metaphysical desires of disembodiment, it offers on the contrary, powerful and unexpected individual and collective strategies for amplifying body functions and extruding body awareness. The Internet does not hasten the disappearance of the body and the dissolution of the self – rather it generates new collective couplings and a telematic scaling of subjectivity.

2. ZONE OF ERASURE

Consider a body remapped and reconfigured- not in genetic memory, but rather in electronic circuitry . A body needing to function not with the affirmation of its historical and cultural recall, but in a zone of erasure- a body no longer merely an individual but a body that needs to act beyond its human metabolism, circadian rhythms and the local space it occupies. A body that generates its awareness not through its mobility, but through its connectivity. Human awareness is altered by Al and AL and feedback loops filtering intense and extra-sensory experiences of tele-operated robots that navigate unimaginable micro realms and alien landscapes.

This paper focuses on theoretical and philosophical aspects of abstract animation aesthetic language. The origin of abstract animation as an art form can be traced in the notion of correspondences of the arts, common in ninetieth century symbolic poetry and expressionist painting. We consider that such systems of correspondences, as those found in 20th century avant-garde artistic movements, may create an aesthetic experience similar to synaesthesia, a neurological disorder, which when considered from a philosophical perspective challenges our perception of reality.

Firstly, clinical findings in the study of synaesthesia are put forward that prove the relationship of cross modal perception to abstract and symbolic thought, metaphor and ultimately the formation of language. Accordingly, an analogy is proposed on the basis that synaesthesia and media art history are following similar structural patterns: abstract animation as a separate kind of artistic expression can form a sort of language system that is historically evolving. Our hypothesis conceptualizes the above theoretical schema at a phylogenesis-ontogenesis model.

Methodologically, a selection of abstract animation works is analyzed in order to identify their linguistic elements. This research process ultimately aims at contributing towards the investigation of a syntactical system formed by a vocabulary of tones, colours, shapes and forms, as a system of reference following semantic rules, by means of which we wish to interpret the “language” of abstract animation, as used for both artistic practice and the production of meaning in the process of perceiving abstract animation works.

Chair Per­son: Baruch Got­tlieb
Abstract:
The surface of electronic utopia is always material. Any appreciation of the emancipatory promise of electronic media must integrate a sober reckoning of the intractable difficulties on the material level of the technology which should generate this. This panel will take Kittler’s “There is no software” to its ethical extreme, delving the shadowlands behind the brilliance of electronic creativity, exploring a new creativity fueled in a Flusserian concept of electronic media rooted in it’s substance.

Full Description:
The sur­face of elec­tronic utopia is al­ways ma­te­r­ial.  Should a utopian no­tion ap­pear here for you to read, it would ap­pear on a hard sup­port which has had to be built, con­structed or oth­er­wise fab­ri­cated.  There­fore utopia is not just ‘con­tent’, imag­i­na­tion, ideas. Utopia al­ways has its ma­te­r­ial coun­ter­part which is today al­ways pred­i­cated on global in­dus­trial processes.  Any ap­pre­ci­a­tion of the eman­ci­pa­tory promise of elec­tronic media must in­te­grate a sober reck­on­ing of the in­tractable dif­fi­cul­ties on the ma­te­r­ial level of the tech­nol­ogy which should gen­er­ate this. This panel will take Kit­tler’s “There is no soft­ware” (Kit­tler 1995) to its eth­i­cal ex­treme, delv­ing the shad­ow­lands be­hind the bril­liance of elec­tronic cre­ativ­ity, to­wards an­other, par­al­lel and sym­bi­otic  cre­ativ­ity rooted in the sub­stances. The per­sis­tence of the ma­te­ri­al­ity of our world, and of the media we use to un­der­stand it, may be taken for granted, but mer­its more at­ten­tion.  De­spite the enor­mous power un­leashed by our imag­i­na­tions through tech­ni­cal, sci­en­tific in­stru­ments, we, as human be­ings still exist es­sen­tially on a local and so­cial level.  There is an every-grow­ing dis­crep­ancy of scale be­tween that of our em­pir­i­cal ex­pe­ri­ence and that of the ori­gin of the tech­ni­cal in­stru­ments we use to un­der­stand and gain pur­chase over it. Our em­pir­i­cal ex­pe­ri­ence of the world is in­creas­ingly being sub­sti­tuted or un­der­mined by tech­no­log­i­cally-in­formed ideas, sup­ported by tech­no­log­i­cally-gen­er­ated man­i­fes­ta­tions, which offer us mul­ti­ple si­mul­ta­ne­ous lev­els of fac­tu­al­ity.  When we forego the in­stan­ta­neous­ness and sub­tlety of using our own senses to ap­pre­hend the world,  we are re­warded with a more in­for­ma­tional and dis­crete ex­pe­ri­ence, which promises us ac­cess and agency in hereto­fore se­cret and un­know­able realms of so­cia­bil­ity.  The sat­is­fac­tion of this com­pro­mise is al­ways pred­i­cated on the promise that the tech­nol­ogy will im­prove.  In other words, though fun­da­men­tal ques­tions re­main un­re­solved even in today’s light-speed knowl­edge econ­omy, the dis­quiet these have his­tor­i­cally pro­duced is as­suaged by the trust that the sup­ple­men­tary tech­niques are being im­proved.

Mean­while there emerge com­fort­ing al­le­gories of na­ture it­self being a kind of com­puter, with an (even­tu­ally) in­ter­pretable co­her­ent sys­tem based on codes (Roof 2007).  There is an ex­pected ex­po­nen­tial curve of the ‘im­prove­ment’ of the tech­nolo­gies we use to un­der­stand our world. How­ever, as we know, such curves never reach the as­ymp­tote, the truth. We will al­ways be ap­prox­i­mat­ing for noise and in­ac­cu­racy, we will al­ways need other knowl­edge sys­tems to com­pen­sate for the in­suf­fi­cien­cies of techno-truth.  Ad­di­tion­ally, the ma­te­ri­al­ity of the com­put­ing tech­nol­ogy on which all our fluc­tu­at­ing self-per­cep­tion is pred­i­cated is not, it­self, so im­per­cep­ti­ble and vague. The phys­i­cal tech­nol­ogy of the com­puter or the sen­sor or the  net­work orig­i­nates in the stuff of the earth, it must be mined or gath­ered or oth­er­wise ac­quired, not by ma­chines alone, but by or­ga­ni­za­tions of peo­ple.  There are peo­ple all the way down the chains of pro­duc­tion of the com­puter from the fin­ished prod­uct pro­vid­ing us with truth through the var­i­ous fac­to­ries and labs back to the earth.   All along this com­plex pro­duc­tion process we have a ‘paper trail’ of human facts, a new re­source of truth-data, that of the human con­di­tions of the pro­duc­tion of tech­no­log­i­cal truth.  In this panel we will dis­cuss  is­sues that arise on the hori­zon of an in­fi­nite pur­chase on uni­ver­sal ma­te­ri­al­ity promised by sci­en­tific in­no­va­tion.  We will in­ves­ti­gate the del­i­cate tax­onomies and con­ven­tions which at­tempt to ar­tic­u­late and evoke these is­sues (Gal­i­son & Das­ton 2007),  (Roof 2007) , Nan­otech­nol­ogy promises a made-to-or­der syn­thetic re­al­ity (Feyn­man 1959) Data-vi­su­al­iza­tion com­press human cul­ture into pat­terned maps (Manovich, 2010), the fine arts and the “hu­man­i­ties” strug­gle to mea­sure up to the mean­ing pro­duc­tion of the sci­en­tific arts, re­sult­ing in politi­ciza­tion (Ly­otard 1985, La­tour & Weibel 2005, Gillick 2009, etc.)  and sur­ren­der (Nigten 2011, etc.). Our love in­ter­est  in the ma­te­r­ial of the earth has been re­vealed by sci­ence to be rather child­ish. As a species, we seem to ad­vance at a snail’s pace com­pared to the ma­chines we have brought forth.  Our cur­rent epoch may fea­ture some of our species’ first hints of its ma­tu­rity, with its ex­i­gen­cies and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and the first fore­tastes of its de­cline.  Human art, cre­ativ­ity and imag­i­na­tion has tra­di­tion­ally been lo­cated in a no­tion of eter­nal child­hood.  Our hard­ware com­pels us to imag­ine a new, more ma­ture cre­ativ­ity.

On Translation: Social Networks is an examination of the complex networks of economic, cultural, technological and military systems operating throughout the social fabric of the present day. The vocabulary used by diverse organizations provides a reference point for how each of these organizations situates themselves within this context. The project will be realized by ‘scraping’ text from the websites of a broad range of organizations. Vocabulary usage will be analyzed and associated with latitude and longitude data for a spatial reference to each organization. The four systems mentioned (economic, cultural, technological and military) form axes along which vocabulary usage data can be visualized. This project has been developed with students at CADRE at San Jose State University.

Language is often a central question in postcolonial studies. Historically, language has been a functional tool of colonization. It has been argued that colonization destroys and replaces languages, cultures, communities and nations rather than enriching them. Undoubtedly, the use of English bridges communication gaps, however it also eradicates the importance of other languages. This presentation investigates the colonizing role of English in critical literature (focused on media art) including the meaning of translation into other languages. The term “translation” is commonly used for the act of rendering words into another language. In this text however, “translation” is employed to expand the concept into a wider frame of reference to include cultural “interpretation” and “transposition” in an international context. Cultural translations are performed in a constantly shifting global framework and thus involve divergent, often contradictory paradigms -while raising numerous questions. Where is the real translation taking place, how is this perceived in different parts of the world, who are the actual translators, for whom is the translation done, where and how is a cultural bias employed and most importantly what is being translated? This is of course one of the most important and also most difficult questions -seemingly without well-defined answers. How much of the content is being translated might be yet another issue. The concept for this presentation was inspired by the “Critique of Publishing/Publishing of Critique” workshop discussions in August 2007 at the Summer Academy in Bratislava. A summary of these discussions dealing with translation and professional literature and an examination of case studies will be included in the presentation. While many of the questions posed are difficult (if not impossible) to answer, it is hoped that an ensuing discussion will bring fresh viewpoints to the topic.

Can Arts & Science/Technology fruitfully co-exist in the minds and on institutional diplomas of contemporary scholarship? This paper considers how in the globall terrain of higher education, the historic tradition of largely mono-disciplinary degrees is being challenged by programmatic complexities that co-join seemingly disparate realms of knowledge and investigation through the introduction of dual degrees. Aided by the benefits of expanding communications technologies, such degrees seek to bridge academic divisions while still contending with very separate intellectual cultures. The discussion takes both an historical and exploratory perspective; ranging from the examination of instutional formations to experiential eamples provided by the authors, ultimately positing the central question of whether the expansion of dual degrees represents mere currucular innovation or some thing much more in line with a distinctly new approach to the structuring of intellectual foundation.

Abstract

In his introduction to Radical Thoughts in Italy, Michael Hardt wrote, ‘capital is undergoing the postmodernization of production’ (1996: 4). In lieu of the Fordist focus on the mass production of consumer goods, capital is generated through the production and collection of information via a networked, technological system. The change Hardt alludes to, though immediately relative to economic systems, echo through the cultural landscape affecting art and social practices. In Chat Rooms, Hal Foster’s book review of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, Foster wrote, ‘In a world of shareware, information can appear as the ultimate readymade, as data to be reprocessed and sent on.’ (2004: 191). Foster’s ‘world of shareware’ is a way of rewriting what Bourriaud terms the era of ‘postproduction’ where an artist’s work emulates postproduction techniques common to the contemporary networked consumer society. By way of quoting and remixing Hardt, Foster, and Bourriaud, I posit that as information has become the focus of production in a networked society, it is the new media artists’ material for appropriation, collection, and redistribution. The information is transformed through the artists’ interface or platform as a readymade manifestation where socially adept participants have access to adding, modifying, and acting upon it. It is through this lens that I will be presenting two works of art, both inhabiting the Internet as a vehicle of distribution and a virtual commons,
where the agenda of consumer culture is reverse-engineered.

Those living in poverty are often misjudged as being the reason they are in their situation. Because of this misconception, most people do not know how extensive and how many people are affected by poverty. The problem is commonly ignored mainly on the college campuses. We developed bodily interactive displays entitled One Step to address this issue and promote public awareness. One Step aims to create an emotional response and understanding in its viewers and nurture a relationship between individuals affected by poverty and students. To investigate effectiveness of the interactive displays, we compared a non-interactive version (print posters) serving as a baseline, with an interactive version where participants’ body movements are translated into the system playing the interactive contents. The study presents that interactive displays are more engaging than non-interactive displays and more effective to support promoting public awareness around poverty issues.

With the sewing of theoretical fragments as a starting point, we have structured a small framework for a “network of unconsciouses”. A conceptual provocation that articulates human, nature and technology, promoting the idea of the unconscious as a complex environment, in constant change. An intuitive, transversal, multitemporal and multispecific communication that goes beyond objectiveness. An unconscious which does not exist exclusively within the human, but also in the invisible fabric between things. With the “Pandemic Dreams Archive”, multiple series and different oneiric models were analyzed through graphs and interactive maps, allowing our investigation of dreams according to certain patterns. The semantic co-incidences allowed us to make associations between different dreams, and observe the relational fields between these oneiric manifestations. We have also created a bot called MacUnA (Machinic Unconscious Algorithm), a robot developed with NLP (Natural Language Processing), a subarea of computer science and artificial intelligence that deals with linguistics and interactions between computer and human language. MacUnA remixes the dreams’ archived narratives and creates derivative dreams. Its language is oneiric, bringing us closer to speculations of what could be the future of machinic unconsciouses and cyborg dreams algorithms.

This research examines opportunities for using virtual reality (VR) as an autobiographical storytelling tool for students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Collaborating remotely with eight university undergraduate students in Canada, we created eight individual 3D nonfiction VR pieces that express the students’ own pandemic experiences. Through a collaborative design process, our findings highlight how VR was used as a meaningful device for telling students’ autobiographical stories about the COVID-19 pandemic: delivering the storyteller’s own feelings, creating a sense of confinement and disconnection, showing environmental details, and expressing inner worlds.

Since early 2000, the World Wide Web has become a common place for online communities to collaborate and exchange information. Most of that exchange occurs under the auspices of equal participation on platforms that in fact are privately owned and controlled. In his article ‘The social web and its social contracts’ Michel Bauwens states such conflict clearly: “The social web facilitates an unprecedented level of social sharing, but it does so mostly through the vehicle of proprietary platforms.” (Bauwens 2008)
The centralization of control existing in communities based on the Web is not specific to some platforms but it is inherent to the Web architecture. The Web, as we know it today, is based on a client-server architecture using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as a communication standard. The power relations existing on the web have been extensively analyzed by Alexander Galloway on his book ‘Protocol – How control exists after decentralization’. For the sake of brevity, this text focuses on the less discussed aspect of server-client architectures.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, artists and institutions moved online while trying to recreate the experience of art and the gallery experience onscreens. For the most part, this shift of attention to the internet as an exhibition space lacked the experimental quality of net art forerunners and their unique explorations of space where gravity is irrelevant and references such as vertical/horizontal, bidimensional and three-dimensional are outdated. This paper explores the notion of Possibles in relation to screen-based art and asks what kind of spaces can be imagined as we move towards a post-pandemic future.

We describe an Internet of Things-IoT system composed by a thermos flask with embedded sensors and network interface as result of art and technoscience experimental research. The system can connect to the internet after activity recognition and send a message over an online social network (e.g. Twitter/ Facebook) when hot coffee is made. The idea is to create a connected device that can engage people to interact face-to-face bringing old habits of drinking coffee as an excuse to socialize. Drink coffee with friends is a habit spread globally; in the south of Brazil, the tradition to cultivate and drink coffee is strong present especially in elderly people. The prototype is being improved before users’ tests, opening new perspectives to the concept of “online social network based on IoT”.

Abstract

Long Paper

The aesthetic heart of the debates on internet communication concern the two architectural models, proposed in the terms highway and web. At its crudest, the debate comes down, in a global info-ecology, to delivery versus dialogue. For both, the issue arises of translation: in and out of English, of course, hegemonic tongue of the net; but also at a deeper level, of translation between cultures –between artistic and technological, atheist and Islamic, whatever. I want to argue that this is possibly the single most fruitful challenge faced in interface and communications design, and that it is in artists laboratories that the real work is being done. The use of sound, repressed partner in most areas of audiovisual space, is a particularly fruitful place to start thinking about art at the interface. The idea of online soundscape is being split between A] communicative, instrumental use of voice to deliver data (telephony: talk, you listen; turn-taking) B] musicalized sound in a tradition stretching back through Stockhausen and Cage to Russolo, music as incidental background or organization of time. So the divisions of the soundscape into instruction and mood-enhancer are part of its subordination to the textual-visual. What I want to do in this paper is to point towards some emergent practices among online musicians, among sound and radio artists, film recordists and aestheticians — which may have lessons for us in how to explore the multidimensionality of sound. The reliance on the visual for interfacing is extremely limiting, especially in the form of the one-on-one, personalized and individuated screen: sound offers the possibilities for large-scale and SOCIAL interfaces, collaborative practices which occupy a space between what we currently have and the possibilities which constitute any possible future. Here the notions of architectures and geographies of sound are useful: how to inhabit, move through and share n-dimensional spaces created in sound. Reversing (deconstructing) the filmic relation between sound and image makes possible a genuinely new media formation.

Intro

The unit of humanity is the community. Anything human is communal, whether it be a village, a society or the global complex in which we find ourselves today. We are born not only prematurely, but incompletely, our presumably genetic disposition to language and mentation (reason, emotion and so on) is a disposition to commune. Steven Pinker explains that ‘Rather than selecting for a completely innate grammar, which would soon fall out of register with everyone else’s, evolution may have given children an ability to learn the variable parts of language as a way of synchronizing their grammars with that of the community’ (Pinker 1994: 243), offering as example, the babbling stage of acquiring speech, during which babies ‘must be sorting sounds directly, somehow tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the phonemes
used in their language’ (Ibid: 265). The peculiar bias of cognitive psychology towards individuals – a concentration on the brain (even extended through the nervous system to the whole body) – necessarily correlates with an ideology of individualism. But the same evidence can lead to
an opposite conclusion: that the function of the language instinct is precisely to socialize the species.

Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane, states that the sacred is that which ontologically founds the world. The sacred is the place for being, in its primary sense; all else is measured against it. This sacred space can be local and entirely personal, or global and hierarchical, but the essence remains. Space has vanished; we find ourselves, through instruments of mediation, together in the same room, looking at each other, occasionally revolted by what we see, occasionally aroused, and sometimes interested – the Circus Planet Earth, a tent with a T1, and a hundred million rings. All our sacred space is suddenly the same. The ego erodes; that figment of the Greek imagination, born when man as individual asserted the I of self over the I of species – and warred with himself ever since – will be gone inside a generation, lost to a growing hum of collective being. This collection is both rape and consummation; if we ignore the death of human ego, we will find our selves pierced by a thousand constructions that combine biomechanics and propaganda into forms of mediation which will leave us wholly as  receptacles for the being of others – Eros enslaved, ending as cyborg. There is another way; connection need not presuppose domination, or mediation, control. The ecology of souls, together behaving as one organism, has in its form the embedded understanding that each part is important, and none dominant. The center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. Pierre Teillard de Chardin called this nexus of connection noosphere; studies of connective mediation are equally studies in noospherics. The space of our connection is the ground of our being, the collective beyond we, the singular before I. The original Ontos can not be named, Tao before division, Nothing before Fool. Our final unity, in either form – or perhaps in a middle  which avoids the hegemony of either and creates a new assemblage of heavens and hells – is unspeakable now, for the Logos of our new aeon has yet to be uttered.

Keywords:  Art and Technology, Dialogic Pedagogy, Problem-based Learning (PBL), Intercultural Exchange, Teamwork, Programming, 3D Modeling, Journey and Cartography

This paper presents the continuation of our interdisciplinary work connecting art and technology at Purdue University (USA) and Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia). In particular, this presentation will analyze retrospectively the research, methodology and outcomes of the course experience “Open Studio / Estudio abierto: Interactive art and 3D animation”, during 2014 and 2015. We will also evaluate the course in order to provide improvements for the upcoming 2017 course. The academic exchange reflects on the topic of cartography in the digital era, introducing the concept of the journey as the starting point for reflection and artistic creation. Our methodology encourages cooperative work between students and professors, establishing a dialogical relationship without the traditional teaching hierarchies. The participants of the experience (students and professors of Purdue University and U.de A.) create a bridge for an interdisciplinary, geographic and cultural exchange. The social and cultural projection of this pedagogical research experience is expressed in the resulting art projects, as well as in exhibitions of the results and reflections of participants.

Public space is an open field, created and brought alive through various interactions. Interactive art with its life proximity, communicative issues and reflections on technologies should be linked with urban space. They contribute to its participatory reactivation and the rediscovery of the concept of the commons.

Our interest lies in the way interactive art reorders both the visual and spatial regimes that have historically informed the museum and the gallery and the way this interactive space connects with the conditions of urbanism.

Panel discussion around the OPLINEPRIZE 2022 on new technologies, with winning artists surrounded by their curators. In the presence of Michèle Robine, creator and president of OPLINEPRIZE, Maurice Benayoun, guest of honour, Jean-Jacques Gay, mediator, the curators ORLAN, Dominique Moulon and the laureates Evgeniy Chernyshov and Vidya-Kelie, Golnaz Behrouznia, Yann Minh.

Since 2007, the Digital Art Festival has spread the themes of Art through New Technologies in four pillars of action in Brazil (workshops, lectures, performances and art exhibition). The proposal of this presentation is to present opportunities to the community in the 2nd Digital Art Biennial (2020). The main theme is “Conditions of Existence”. The Digital Art Biennial was conceived in 2015 with the objective of celebrating in the year 2018 the 10 years of activity of FAD – the Digital Art Festival, one of the pioneering festivals about art and technology in Brazil. The Digital Art Biennial emerges how a new project platform as an international programming project in Brazil, seeking to verticalize the reflections for art in technological means and its derivations. The 2nd Digital Art Biennial 2020 is a great opportunity for all makers and thinkers present at ISEA and at the Image Festival.

Keywords: ACI, games, enrichment, touch technologies, non-human animals, game design
Non-humans in captivity require enrichment, which often takes the form of play. Over the course of past decades, various technologies have been introduced in zoos around the world to support captive animals’ wellbeing. With a critical design / player ethnography approach, TOUCH project brings computer technologies to orangutans living at the Tasikoki Wildlife Rescue Centre in Indonesia. This paper discusses the role of play in the lives of two young male orangutans, Bento and Is, and explores how play can serve as a basis for cross-species communication between humans and orangutans.

The Computers and Sculpture Forum in the U.S.A. and Ars Mathematica in France are associations of sculptors who use the computer. This presentation will be a survey, presented in slide and video form, of the use of computers in the visualization, presentation, fabrication and control of sculpture and three-dimensional scientific and mathematical visualization. In October 1995, we will be holding a joint and simultaneous exhibition of sculpture in Philadelphia and Paris. The presentation will reflect the work that we will be gathering together for the exhibition. The sites will be linked via the Internet for events, demonstrations, and the trans-oceanic control of sculpture-making tools to complement the exhibition.

Nietzsche would be laughing about Europe. He wouldn’t be complaining about the impending loss of national identity or the power of the Brussels bureaucracy. He would look down disdainfully at the bumbling, pompous Euro-citizens who, confused and without Witz or Idea, are trying to sidestep their own history. Europeans have the greatest difficulty putting into words the current dialectic of construction and demolition which manifests itself around them. The last intellectuals are still doing their best to characterize the post- 1989 juncture, but they are not succeeding. The amalgam of the war in former Yugoslavia, the strange new media, capitalism without an enemy, the Tigers in Asia, grassroots neo-liberalism, the Shell’s oil platform The Brent Spar and French nuclear tests, foreigners and refugees, the devastation of Chechnya – it’s all impossible to grasp anymore. One group believes it’s arrived in the 21st century, as others are catapulted back a couple of centuries. What one sees as progress spells sheer destruction for another. We observe developments with worry, but can no longer associate them with conclusions. But that’s no longer necessary, for what occupies Europeans.most of all is the development of one’s own lifestyle. And no one is laughing at the little worries of the middle classes.

This paper describes and analyses the emergence of “Organized networks” as new institutional forms. Organized networks, in contrast to “networked organizations” (universities, corporations, government, even contemporary art institutions), are distinct for the ways in which the organization of social relations is immanent to the media of communication. The paper considers some of the ways in which Organized networks facilitate the communication and production of educational resources across peer-to-peer, trans-disciplinary social-technical networks.

This article is a continuation of the ideas presented at the FISEA symposium in 1988 regarding different ways of thinking about the spatial and temporal dimensions of color. In the first part, historical as well as perceptual arguments are presented in discussing certain premises concerning color quality, structure and dimension. In the second part, questions regarding optimal strategies for color dynamics and space articulation are discussed with a focus towards a clear distinction between constructive and descriptive ways of relating color to space and time.

Based on plant intelligence and their capacity of learn we created a neuronal plant network connected to the Internet, composed of plants located in different places around the world. We designed an algorithm makes possible the remotely communication between plants through the training and learning to different stimuli.

At the same time, each of this living beings is being monitored through the recording of electrophysiology data and environmental data of their surrounding; thanks to environmental sensors that allow us to measure and link the changes in the surrounding of the plant with their behavior.

In this way we investigate, about the recognition of patterns by the plant, which allows it to identify with which plant of the network they are communicating and thus allow two way dialogue. To do that we have provided each of the plants with tools that allows them sending and receiving signals of light, sound and movement. The entire communication process is being recorded, to be analyzed afterwards with an Artificial Intelligence , in order to recognize patterns that humans cannot perceive with the naked eye.

Through the use of technology as a tool, we have created a network of plants connected to the Internet. A network analogous to the network of roots and mycelia of fungi that take place in the forest that the Professor of Forest Ecology Suzanne Simard began to study almost three decades ago. This woods’ network allows trees and plants to communicate with each other by sharing information and nutrients. In Other Intelligences, our network, is made up of data, algorithms and actuators, and it allows us to investigate alternative relationships with nature and technology through the use of artistic methodologies.

OTTO is an electronic musical instrument for realtime manual beat slicing. The beat slicing is a well developed technique used mostly in electronic music, by means of what short rhythmical audio samples, of a few seconds in length, are cut into pieces to separate the main drum hits. These slices are then re-arranged in time, stretched, reversed, pitched up or down and so on, in order to create a completely new rhythmical section which could ideally last forever with continuous changes. The purpose of this project was to design specific controls for a technique that doesn’t have a specific hardware yet. The device provides a tangible user interface designed with the aim of giving the user the feeling of having the sample in his hands. The performer can manipulate an audio sample in real time through the use of a restricted number of physical controls and clear visual feedbacks.

Once upon a time, there was a sort of musician, called Pierre Schaeffer, between the time of the Double-Croches and the Computers …”

To summarize the work of Pierre Schaeffer is a challenge. To evoke his itinerary continues to make him dizzy, as his personality and his artistic influence take part in contemporary battles for creation. However, despite all the curiosity that the character arouses, I think you do not expect from me a biography of the past, but tools or weapons for the future. Schaeffer himself defined his approach by this cryptic formula:

“I am a founder, not of orders but of services”.

I will summarize very quickly an extraordinary history whose risk of artistic risk eclipses, in my opinion, that of contemporary essayists, André Malraux and Walter Benjamin, until reaching the prophetic qualities of men as diverse as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard or the filmmaker Serguei Eisenstein.

The work of the Polytechnic engineer Pierre Schaeffer (1910/1995) has several indissoluble facets: from 1934 to the 1980s, he is known as a playwright and novelist; from 1948 on, he became the inventor and theoretician of musique concrète; it is finally one of the major essayists of the contemporary world who, like Canadian Mc Luhan, offers a global analysis of audiovisual simulacra. In addition, this resistant is not an academic but a senior official of the public service: he knew, in a constant administrative guerilla, to bring together technicians, artists and scientists around creative projects and to accompany the technological mutations by a total upheaval of the ways of working together.

This presentation outlines a model for arts experimentation developed at the Centre for Arts Innovation (CAI) at the Oulu University of Applied Sciences in Finland. Drawing from the concept of minimum viable product (MVP) popularized by innovation work from the field of service design, an arts-led, agile model is presented which adapts a design lens to focus on piloting arts experimentation within interdisciplinary teams including artists and creative technologists. A conceptual framework will be highlighted along with examples from the Centre’s various national and European level projects in the field of performing arts. Further areas for development of this model will be presented with specific opportunities for collaboration available leading up the year 2026 when the City of Oulu will act as the European Capital of Culture.

The umbrella terms of electronic or new or digital “media art” or technological art no longer cover the range of art – gardening, textiles, bio art, social media – that is being made today in their name. We are using an exhausted framework provisionally until we find a way of understanding what we do that encourages rather than constrains us.

This presentation has two parts and a concluding question:

First, the presentations in the New Art Theory panels will be briefly reviewed and contextualized as various proposals to reframe or to expand our understanding of “what we do.”

Second, examples of specific pieces of art are presented that challenge our notions of what belongs to “media art”: the faucet (as a social medium contextualized by Grant Kester); the smell of dandelion (Clara Ursitti and ARTLINK) and the distribution of art and the senses; and, the chemical computer (Bill Seaman and a very different approach by Herwig Weiser), challenging the conceptual binaries such as analog/digital, hardware/software.

Rather than an epigonal time (based on the past), we live in a period of epic struggle to maintain openness in areas of cultural innovation. The utopian impulses that originally informed and motivated media art have been taken seriously and evolved into a greater perceptual and symbolic range in recent art.

The presentation concludes by asking whether it makes sense to reframe the notion of “medium” and “art” so as to capture the complexity of current situation and find the common thread in our shared utopian heritage.

The lower part of the Korean peninsula is virtually an island. The upper one is also an isolated island in another way for half a century. The border, namely the NATIONAL border between the two Koreas, is the place where a non-Korean can visit whenever, unlike a Korean who needs to apply and wait for 60days. Time kindly spares the time as lesser and lesser people take the trouble to do so. People know that the border is there and it is enough for them. The physical border is getting not just older but more obstinate. On the other hand, the perceived border is getting more and more ambiguous or rather unperceived.

This is why this paper notes Masaki Fujihata’s Field-Works collaborations, especially the [Field-Work@Alsace] in 2002 and [Landing Home in Geneva] in 2005. He crossed the national border in Alsace casually interviewing people. In the final image, the official national border line is displayed with the personal and real borders consist of the memories of the interviews at each spot of his route. This work changes the perception of the physical, political, geographical borders drawing more meaningful lines across them. In Geneva, he explored the borders of languages and culture interviewing human borders supposed to be invisible, the interpreters, typically recording with panoramic lens which breaks down the distinction between cameraman and the pictured.

Although it is not feasible for the artist armed with a video camera and GPS to walk in the inter-Koreas-land charged with numerous mines, probes to find other ways to challenge it should never be given up. By manipulating new media, an artwork can change the way the world perceived. This paper explores these possibilities challenging visible and invisible borders by making them perceived in a different way.

This work is about the re-recording of the life experiences of a group of people detained in a maximum security mental hospital. It is a mirror to ourselves (“normal society”) and our amnesia when confronted with the excesses of our society, a nightmare that leads to misinformation and fear about mental health systems. This mental space is where strong fictions lie and invisibly glue together the mirror from which we view our own sanity. This is a rehearsal of memories not quite forgotten.

The production of this interactive programme has been commissioned by Video Postive 1995 and the construction of the artwork is set to take place during January to April 1995.

As public space in historically urbanist centers like New York City is diminished through gentrification and privatization, it is paradoxically ‘enlivened’ by the introduction of large‑screen moving images, digital advertising and other mediazation. This is an environment of alternating over-stimulation and anonymity, in which one navigates public spaces dense with video monitors and giant advertisements while beyond the explicit media zones the streetscape is increasingly generic and narcotic. The hyperactive and featureless landscapes, seemingly opposites, both prioritize the skin of architecture: each is the manifestation of an intense preoccupation with surface, demonstrated in the activation of surface by light and moving images on billboards and screens or in the ubiquitous grids of glass and metal that wrap contemporary buildings. Drawing upon Marc Augé’s ideas of ‘non‑space’ in his book Non‑places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, this paper will look at the way surface supplants space and visuality dominates function in urban spaces of circulation, consumption and communication, as well as in visual culture and art. This paper examines aspects of this reduction to surface which include: a diminution of sense of history and local place as elements of vernacular architecture are replaced with more uniform (and international) visual codes; the design of skyscrapers for visual effect and iconic presence in the skyline as opposed to on‑site neighborhood context, function and social integration at street level; the practice of demolishing architecturally important historical buildings save for isolated fragments that frame new construction in a poorly‑related mash‑up of old and new; the rising culture of the romance of ruins (sometimes referred to as ‘ruin porn’) that elevates the destruction of the recent past and aestheticizes decay; the dystopian and utopian 3D renderings of urban environments in video games and real estate promotion that are mirror images of one another; and the use of surface in images by media artists searching for     alternative ways of representing urban space (or in Augé’s words, ‘finding beauty in non‑place’). Using New York City as an example of an older city in evolutionary transformation, the paper will also contrast this established paradigm of urbanism with an emergent city like Dubai, where rather than displacing the past, the architecture of surface has been introduced into a ‘tabula rasa’ environment that is unconstrained by historicism or gradualism. This paper proposes that artists responding to the phenomena of non‑place need not subscribe to an aesthetics that simply documents and concedes the alienation resulting from a disruptive change in visual environment. Fragments of visual incident, variation in material surfaces, analysis and extraction of underlying pattern of the landscape both visual and social, can be used to reformulate a vision of     urban space that explores its essential dynamism and acknowledges its constant evolution and reinvention while avoiding the tropes of utopian longing and dystopian dread.

Street art has reminded us again of the power of media when artists practice outside of the white box. For centuries the frame separated the art from the “real” world, a boundary which was questioned by the introduction of screen technologies. More recently the screen has expanded, invading the walls, the façades and now the very skin of the building itself. Light and image are covering entire buildings in a way that, beyond any previous definition of screen, the urban architectural complex has become a medium. After the painting frame, the veduta, then the painted wall, and now the urban screen have each had their turn as places for the exaltation of the symbolic dimension of architecture. In each case, media scale was seen as a way to draw the public’s attention. At one time the skyscraper itself was enough of a statement, now it has been overwhelmed by the greed of the market keen on capturing consumer attention. Simultaneously, architects are understanding that adhering LED screens on buildings was merely a temporary phase in the evolution of the complex relation between architecture and image.

The first use of these massive urban displays was expectedly commercial. The public space became a gigantic stadium where commodities compete to catch the citizens’ attention: fancy watches v.s. expensive sedans, sexy models v.s. sparkling jewelry. Converting the world into an ever-expanding shopping mall, the market has extended display beyond Guy Debord’s anticipation of the society of the spectacle forcing us to now ask, “What could be or should be the position of the artist in the urban landscape?”

(Short paper)

Keywords: Planetary Urbanism, Google Street View, Infrathin, Mondialisation, Cine-philosophy, User navigation, Faciality, Algorithmic intelligence, Image flatness

Four decades ago Henri Lefebvre anticipated the complete urbanization of the planet, which no longer sounds so strange. Radical shifts seem to appear in our experience of the city, through dislocations of self and body, the World and the Earth. This paper explores a range of concerns underpinning a media performance project – O’megaVille – using Google Street View as a platform for critical approaches to planetary urbanism. This has involved dance workshops in Mexico, mobile media actions and video installation in Montreal and New York, and a performancelecture in Toronto, amongst other events. In this paper I’ll use Google Street View (GSV) to think about how media assemblages play an enactive role in the speculative nature of experience. How may GSV be seen to illustrate what I see as an emerging urban condition that is simultaneously planetary and embodied? What may be at stake here for bodies (broadly defined) that operate within a distributed field of forces – in part nonhuman, often inhuman? And how may these disruptions in the fabric of experience call for a speculative response? Linked to a separate Artist Poster session at ISEA, this paper offers a series of conceptual and theoretical sketches for surveying the ruptured cohesion of Google Street View.

Four decades ago Henri Lefebvre anticipated the complete urbanisation of the planet, which no longer sounds so strange. Radical shifts seem to appear in our everyday experience of the city, where dislocations of self and body take us into feeling the limits of the World and the ends of the Earth.
O’megaVille is an ongoing locative media project for exploring critical approaches to planetary urbanism, using Google Street View (GSV) as a platform for urban intervention. This has involved a series of works, workshops and talks in Montreal, Toronto, New York, and Mexico. Crossing performance, video, mobile media and locative interfaces, O’megaVille aims to unhinge the ways time, space, place and privacy are normally situated. GSV gives us an image of the Here-and-Now as an endless surface – a Flat Earth – the urban grid as territorial limit. Every street corner could be anywhere, and is everywhere through networked devices. And yet, the street always exceeds its coding, forever turbulent, informal, full of stories and hidden entities. For people caught by the 9-eyes of GSV, privacy is maintained through the blurring of faces, signs and license plates. And yet, the Google algorithm that performs the blur is fairly arbitrary, super-saturating a scene to misread identity traits – for example in a gesture, or a pile of trash. Just as privacy is protected, the public is privatised through ownership of the image, even as a different disjunct starts to leak through this machinic assemblage of human, nonhuman and inhuman elements. Between the invention of a people, and a feeling of ‘existing in open view’ – this new sense of ‘public’ edges across identity and perception, where disruptions of an orbital flatness may unsettle easy readings of technological dystopia / utopia.

This Artist talk is linked to an ISEA short paper in which I explore the broader concepts and critical implications for O’megaVille. For an ongoing project that is iterative and processual across theory and practice, this talk offers an opportunity to show-and-tell some of the practical components in more depth. It also allows for developments occurring after the ISEA submission deadline to be included, such that the Short Paper and Artist Talk might enter into a process of cross-format disruption. In this talk, I will present examples both from previous iterations (2014), and those to come (April-August 2015). Previous iterations include performance workshops exploring movement and materials drawn from people and objects found on GSV; with mobile-media SmartMobs and 3D Photo Spheres, playing on the distributed stitching of the GSV image in a different way (see video). Forthcoming iterations will use the new Google Cardboard VR headset, and Geocaching performance events, to further disrupt the entwining of physical and digital domains.

Like a Fitbit for your ethical performance, P@tch is a textile-based new media project that uses light and social media to allow the user to track their progress as an advocate for an environmental, ethical stance. P@tch workshops are built to create a space for creativity and discussion surrounding the conflict between personal and corporate accountability to affect change.

Remuneration for labour or user-generated content on the web is based on gift economies, debt economies and mostly, attention economics (visibility). In attempting to understand the link between new forms of virtual labour and virtual money, might we need to look at them not only from actions of ‘visibility’ but from the perspective of obligation, debt and remuneration? If we remit our rights of privacy and right to remuneration, how can we create other systems of negotiation and payment? Will we all need to survive off of our freemium activities in order to generate more content to contribute to the critical mass?

In the context of the Archive Presentations section we would like to introduce PAM – Plataforma Arte y Medios [Art & Media Platform] an independent project which has been active since 2016. PAM was born as an answer to the challenge of researching, documenting and visibilizing contemporary media arts projects and practices developed in Latin America, while generating a theoretical and historical context for present and future interpretations.

The experimental sound practices extend the acoustic referent of the conflict and produce cultural objects related to experiences of violence, displacement and social disparity. The Panel on Sonology will gather five artists-researchers whose works allow us to reflect on the role of music, sound art and sound design on communities disturbed by social inequality and violence. From different perspectives, the panelists will show personal modes of sonifying the conflict, discussing artistic experiences where experimental sound practices have been introduced in communities traced by social disruption: (1) Musical instrument building in the periphery, by Tomas Laurenzo (2) Acoustemology of the Armed Conflict in San Juan Nepomuceno, by Luz Eneida Ramirez (3) Mestizo Machines by Jorge Barco, (4) Sound: expression of the conflict and pedagogical tool, by Joaquín Llorca and (5) In the interstices of a memorial: A Review on Triangulation Gender/Sound/Technology, by Ana María Romano G.

Keywords: Sonology, Sound Studies,Soundscape, Sound and Conflict, Experimental Sound Practices

Panel: Electronic Space and Public Space: Museums, Galleries and Digital Media

The London based organisation Film and Video Umbrella has been operating for nearly ten years and concentrates on researching and curating exhibits by British artists working with video and digital media. The presentation covered the logistics of running such an organization and detailed a major exhibit held last year at the Natural History Museum in London.

Panel: Electronic Space and Public Space: Museums, Galleries and Digital Media

Annick Bureaud e spoke in relation to a consultancy she has recently completed for the French Ministry of Culture about the future for museums and their object-based structures, their architecture, the intellectual patterns of the staff. She raised the issue of ‘cultural worth’ in relation to the space available for creation, the narrating effect of art historical traditions. The novelty of technology in some contexts, for instance science museums, avoided content problems associated with time-based media. Artists’ fees and commissions in this area needed urgent attention. Curatorial practices of themes and surveys needed to give account to the flexibility of forms that electronic media produced, which In itself raised problems of conservation for museum culture. Flexibility was the key for the future, along the lanes of theatre possibly: Ars Electronica Centre may become a model.

In the wake of recent claims made in the name of multimedia and the ‘new’ possibilities opened up by ‘new’ technologies, this paper argues that, if we are to escape from the seductive pull of ’new’ digital effects, and succeed in producing ‘new’ forms or texts'(‘new’ ways of presenting information), which open ‘new’ perspectives for readers/viewers; we need to consider the design of ’new’ graphic spaces in semiological rather just in visual terms (ie consider the nature, placing and interaction between each graphic element and their effects). The paper argues that close (and selective) attention to the theoretical discussions which occurred in film and literary theory, and a methodical search for alternative parameters appropriate to multimedia environment — rather than gratuitous play with plug-ins and special effects—is the surest way to help multimedia come of age and escape the vagaries and hypes of today fashion.

Panel: Electronic Space and Public Space: Museums, Galleries and Digital Media

Jill Scott described in detail the plans for the ‘hybrid’ museum that is shortly to open at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medien) in Karlsruhe, Germany, under the directorship of Hans Peter Schwartz using the Website that describes the exhibit to illustrate her points.

Panel: Im-position: a minor politics for interactive art

Technology becomes a great opportunity to precisely express subtle aspects of contemporary time and space. One of the artist’s objectives working with “Panorama Time” is to catch the shortest periods in technological time and surpass engineers with the ultimate aims of repairing, improving and upgrading everything until the most durable and robust form is achieved. In this paper we demonstrate examples and show the process of creating our digital photography art project “Panorama Time”. We also try to capture and document the richest moment of the iPhone panoramic camera through extreme usage-hack, resulting in glitch aesthetics. By showing how we hacked the digital artefact, we also discuss insights from several experiments in connection to broader photographic concepts of time and space.

Panorama Time project
In this paper we explore and shape our understanding of digital photography as artistic practice to find new ways of expression and possibilities to tweak time and space. We practice hacking of digital photography and try new ways to achieve expressive artistic results. Focusing on both artistic and technological discourses, we conducted practice-based experiments. In this project we try to break the concept of panorama, which might be referred to as an unbroken view in front of the viewer.

Technique
We want to show the most successful glitch experiments we have done by hacking the use of the panorama camera in iPhone 4s. First, however, we introduce the mobile panorama camera features. The main action of capturing panorama image with such a handy device is to pan the camera by following the landscape. Pan camera to the side (left or right) and the iPhone camera app will stitch together multiple images into a single photograph. A final panorama image will be long, covering a wide field of view. The iPhone supports a 240º panorama in one shot. It is a digital process, and a final result is generated by camera app by using a video-like stream of successive frames and stitching them together.

Technological Moment and Chance
Discussing our instances, which try to break traditional understanding of time and space in photography through digital means, we may also argue that such discourse is fracturing determined rules and traditions standing for the well-established and privileged world. With regards to photographic moment and time, we need to reveal the beauty of temporal artefacts, which are available at-hand here and now, and we have to catch that moment and chance to document important technological bits artistically. We experiment with technologies, which might be so temporal that they will stay in market for just a few extra days, and we will loose that fragile opportunity to gain and benefit from them or in other words upcycle their values. The moment in photography here is linked to the technological moment in time when technology temporarily holds bugs, faint links, dim faults, errors, etc., and we can upcycle them in a qualitative way.

The final panel paper manifests aspects of the panel ‘Mediation Beyond Surface’ theme within the context of the ISEA2016 conference site. During spring 2016 researchers from Parsons Design+Technology (NYC) will work with four Chinese universities (HKCityU, Tongji-SH, Tsinghua-BJ, SIFA-Chongqing) to create experimental computationally generated panoramas across a distance. Groups of 2-3 researchers in NY will work with similar sized groups at each university in China using tools including (but not limited to) OpenCV, openFrameworks, Cinder, PyVison, and FastCV to produce results that are dynamic and evolving. Form factors will range across traditional print, screen-based digital, mobile platforms, smart architecture (installation), and may include aural and zoological output. Emphasis will be placed on production of work that is unpredictable and if possible uncontrollable, with the hope of consequences that become independent. Groups will design and produce projects during February-April while interacting online, and convene in person during ISEA2016 in HK to demonstrate final outcomes. Resulting workshops and exhibitions will take place at ISEA, at the Chronos Art Center (Shanghai) in June, and in Parsons Aronson Gallery (NY) in September.

This paper investigates ludic interfaces invented by those who should, according to entertainment industries, only consume them as finished products: User consumers, who set their hands on electronic devices, computers, consoles, hardware or software, are the protagonists of a history and theory of technological misuse. And it is these forms of misuse, which offend technological industries and mass culture by opposing individual, creative and funny alternatives – consumer production in the words of Michel de Certeau – to homogenous and uniform commodities. We are methodically intrigued in customers, actually underdogs, who find gaps in the middle of new media multi business, who somehow subvert, board, or break technical systems from within the belly of the beast. For which reason, is not clear, they become inventive for their own creative projects, for their own style, hitting mainstream use, hybridizing interfaces, and crashing technical dispositives. In this however, they obviously make a statement on economic and political trajectories intended by the market. Certainly, they are having fun.

Following the approach of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, we investigate humor being linked to some kind of paradoxes in thinking. To think of things and uses and at the same time, imagine their counterparts, non-things and anti-uses, is related to some kind of humor occurring when circuits of figure and ground are completed. It is about conventions and about the inversion of conventions, which, not only makes fun, but which becomes important when conventions are usually set up by money-intensive markets and their industries.

In this sense, we will investigate different forms of media misuse that somehow close up the circle of paradox, and thus show alternative practices within the mass market. We will try to classify their different practices and strategies. Following fields will structure a systematic approach:
– Pragmatics of misuse, reuse, conversion, inversion, and subversion.
– All sorts of tinkering and do-it-yourself.
– Forms of play and pleasure.

The recent emergence of decentralized economies has foregrounded an urgent need for new modes of long-view care and stewardship in contemporary Time-based Media Art. This lightning talk presents some learnings and insights from 10 years of hands-on applied research in the gallery and museum context. Case studies are structured around design thinking methodologies, and outcomes from experiments ranging from new exhibition formats, to collecting models, decentralized storage experiments and more.

Climate as a Thing
Working with the politics and debate on climate change, you quickly realize that it is not merely a scientific fact but a complex issue that calls for a paradigmatic change affecting both how we understand our surroundings and how we deal with them socially, culturally and politically. Bruno Latour makes a distinction between objects and Things, where the latter contain both the object out there and “an issue very much in there”. Suggesting ‘Thing’ as a concept, he highlights a dialogical aspect of things where the scientific viewpoint concerned with facts, at a distance of the observed world, has come to an end. As Latour points out, the word Thing is etymologically related to the Germanic and Scandinavian “tinge” meaning both a thing and an assembly.

Abstract

This paper initiates an exploration into how modes of exhibition influence the experience, understanding and cultural representation of media artworks under emerging contemporary conditions. Viewing conditions establish new meanings and uses of virtual images, as well as offering alternative constructions of the social space of their exposition. By turning attention away from concerns operating at the formal or ‘local’ level of the artwork itself towards the construction of exhibition conditions, the increasingly complex interactions between art, technology and society taking place today become more clearly pronounced.

Proceeding from a design research perspective, this paper plays its part within an extended critical examination that will centre principally on the curatorial design process leading up to the realisation of the Len Lye exhibition premiering at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in July 2009. Arguably the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s career previously resulted in the exhibition, Len Lye: Experimental Filmmaker, Sculptor, Photographer. Touring to the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in Melbourne in 2002, this exhibition coincided with the establishment of ACMI as a cinemedia centre dedicated to promoting the moving image in all its forms. By retrospectively casting attention back to the staging of this iteration of the exhibition and comparing it with the recent exhibition developed specifically for ACMI’s Screen Gallery, this cumulative investigation provides an opportunity to review their respective installation strategies, exhibition design techniques and technological infrastructure. It is hoped that by focusing on such issues associated with exhibiting the work of Len Lye, a greater understanding of how the translation of filmic and interactive works in exhibition space has evolved in the intervening formative period.

Sonorities belonging to the indigenous Andean world have been “folklorized,” and so has been done “local geographies” tinted by racialized population suffering poverty and social exclusion. Sound art is a privileged field of critical practices addressed to question persistent racial stereotypes that determine the conditions for subaltern cultural production in An-dean rural contexts. Particularly, the contemporary practice of the soundscapes advances such kind of inquiry by fore-grounding the public dimension of the sonorous event. The Summer of 2017, I produced the soundscape Pasochoa in collaboration with self-taught musician José Sangoquiza, who is an inhabitant of the Pasochoa neighbor located on the outskirts of the inactive volcano of the same name (Pichincha province, Ecuador). My presentation approaches this artistic project to propose that the practice of soundscapes opens ways to oppose the “residual colonialisms of sentience” that, ultimately, have produced contemporary senses of “local culture” and “local nature” in the Andean highlands. I argue that the appropriation of the context of the musical that characterize soundscapes’ procedures, informs a transient mode of listening congruent with the relevance of sentient difference in a situation of globalization.

As an interdisciplinary production group we are exploring modes of representation that incorporate choreography and media arts, and lie at the border between installation and spectacle. We are interested in the artistic process as much as the artistic product. One of our objectives is to develop strategies and methodologies for artistic expression using new technologies in the live arts and to foster the integration of expressive systems as tools for creation in the performing arts disciplines. The work with new media and our multiple experiences creating interactive dance performances inspired us to produce an installation integrating live performance, in which the spectator is invited to actually “use” the body of the performer as the interface to the media environment.

Panel: Hybrid Spatial Experiences

As com­put­ing leaves the desk­top and spills out onto the side­walks, streets and pub­lic spaces of the city, we in­creas­ingly find in­for­ma­tion pro­cess­ing ca­pac­ity em­bed­ded within and dis­trib­uted through­out the ma­te­r­ial fab­ric of every­day urban space. Ar­ti­facts and sys­tems we in­ter­act with daily col­lect, store and process in­for­ma­tion about us, or are ac­ti­vated by our move­ments and trans­ac­tions. Ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing evan­ge­lists her­ald a com­ing age of urban in­fra­struc­ture ca­pa­ble of sens­ing and re­spond­ing to the events and ac­tiv­i­ties tran­spir­ing around them. Im­bued with the ca­pac­ity to re­mem­ber, cor­re­late and an­tic­i­pate, this near-fu­ture “sen­tient” city is en­vi­sioned as being ca­pa­ble of re­flex­ively mon­i­tor­ing its en­vi­ron­ment and our be­hav­ior within it, be­com­ing an ac­tive agent in the or­ga­ni­za­tion of every­day life in urban pub­lic space. This talk will un­pack some of the tacit as­sump­tions, la­tent bi­ases and hid­den agen­das at play be­hind new and emerg­ing urban in­fra­struc­tures.

This presentation looks at the development of a work entitled Peau d’Âne which coalesces fairy tales, three meteorologically modulated dresses and wearable technology. Inspired by the Charles Perrault fairy tale ‘Donkey Skin’, the aim of this project is to incarnate three ‘impossible’ dresses from the story in a material form. The dresses take on the unique and mutable characteristics of the sky, moon and sun, translating these natural qualities into real-time and location-specific actuated garments to be used in a performance context.

The aim of this panel is to showcase achievements in digital installation art in Latin America, especially as such art involves a transformation of media. Presenters, who are also experts and recognized artists, from various countries in Latin America, discuss recent innovations in-between genres and media technologies. Themes assume special importance at a time of transitions and political change, immigration and globalization. The panel which symbolizes the art of PENUMBRAL frontiers of the world may be considered from three perspectives: (a) networking (b) collective art and (c) search of alternative circuitry.

“Peoples Screen” by Paul Sermon and Charlotte Gould was a site-specific work commissioned by Public Art Lab Berlin for the Guangzhou Light Festival from 15 to 29 November 2015, linking audiences in Guangzhou’s new Flower Garden Square, China and Northbridge Piazza in Perth, Australia. Receiving over 25,000 participants over 15 days. This installation builds on practice-based research and development of previous interactive works for large format urban screens such as “Occupy the Screen” for “Connecting Cities – Urban Reflections” in September 2014 between Supermarkt Gallery Berlin, Germany and Riga European Capital of Culture, Latvia.

This new installation pushed the playful, social and public engagement aspects of the work into new cultural and political realms in an attempt to ‘reclaim the urban screens’ through developments in ludic interaction and internet based high-definition videoconferencing. Through the use of illustrated references to site-specific landmarks of Guangzhou and Perth, audiences were invited to occupy the screen. The concept development of “Peoples Screen” was inspired in part by 3D street art as a DIY tradition, referencing the subversive language of graffiti. The interface borrows from the “topoi” of the computer game, as a means to navigate the environment; once within the frame the audience becomes a character immersed within the environment.

“Peoples Screen” linked two geographically distant audiences using a telematics technique; the installation takes live oblique camera shots from above the screen of each of these two audience groups, located on a large 64 square metre blue ground sheet and combines them on screen in a single composited image. As the merged audiences start to explore this collaborative, shared ludic interface, they discover the ground beneath them, as it appears on screen as a digital backdrop, locates them in a variety of surprising and intriguing anamorphic environments where from a particular position the characters can look as if in a precarious situation.

“Peoples Screen” aimed to include the widest range of urban participation possible and aligns to a Fluxus “Happening” in a move away from the object as art towards the street environment and the “every day” experience. It also borrows from a tradition of early cinema where audiences were transfixed by the magic of being transported to alternative realities though screenings at traveling fairs. Lumière contemporaries, Mitchell and Kenyon, whose films of public crowds in the 1900’s present a striking similarity to the way audiences react and respond to “Peoples Screen”.

Through this research we found that the environment and timing have a large impact on the way that an audience responds. The inspiration was drawn both from the cities of Guangzhou and Perth, with input from the communities. The area of play was clearly demarked as a space via a blue box groundsheet in both cities identifying a theatre of play, once in the space the participant engages as they wish. In many ways “Peoples Screen” broke down cultural and social barriers, both in the local communities, but also between two cities, Guangzhou and Perth, where new collocated spaces and creative encounters could be founded and occupied.

The topic for this research paper examines the relationship between the human body and technologies used in live electronic music performances. By electronic music, it is proposed that any musical piece that claims to use sound produced electronically, electronic instruments such as synthesizers, or pre-recorded sounds. Performance of any piece of electronic music entails that it is constructed or produced on stage in front of an audience. By illustrating the aesthetics of early electronic music performance, it is easier to define what the performance aesthetics of the twenty-first century are.

These early practices have informed the vast majority of twenty-first century electronic music performances despite their limitations. The human body is discussed in relation to the history of electronic music and the performance practices of the twenty-first century. There is an increasing importance in performers being present and a critical part of the performance. Their active presence on stage gives electronic music a new meaning in terms of performance. The ontology of performers is no longer merely as a vessel for the music, but there are elements of theatre, dance and other disciplines that performers integrate into their performance.

In recent years computational and screen-based art has flourished within the digital arts world and has since had great influence across multiple disciplines. Fuelled by explorations into the beauty of algorithms and their translation into ever emerging visual outcomes, artists working with generative systems have created a substantial body of work and sets of tools using desktop and laptop machines. With the recent arrival of a multitude of mobile platforms, small systems-on-a-chip and electronic devices the potential for new tools, artistic expressions, transdisciplinary investigations and interdisciplinary collaboration is imminent.

Technology and networks had become an ubiquitous art of our urban lives. With easy access to hardware and software, the availability of technology for everyday activities had now become the norm and defines the conditions in which we live, play and work. How will these new conditions and systems influence and shape future art practices and interdisciplinary projects?

Perils of Obedience was an interactive dance piece that first took place at the “Fête de la musique 2009” in Paris, France. It is a generative audio and dance re-enactment of the Milgram Experiment.

A person dressed with the accouterments, and speaking in the languages of both experimenter and ringleader stands on the street with a mike in her hand. She entreats passers-by and on-lookers to become participants in the performance. The willing participant is given a control interface made from 1950’s British military surplus. Note that the salvaged components were originally made and used for export to Austria post-WW II, the materials used for the apparatus are a material aspect of re-appropriation of various modes of authority.

This paper describes my current project “Peripato Telematikos”, an experiment in social cartography and public authoring, drawing influences from performance studies and art. The project relies on public participation to ‘map’ a locale or neighbourhood. The mapping process requires participants to undertake guided walks and use a mobile phone to send images of interest during the walk. As the images appear on the web site in close to real time, there is a performative aspect to the work. The images are sent to a custom hardware and software system, composing a gsm/gprs modem, sms/mms gateway software, php scripts and a mysql database. All entries are stored in the database and await approval. Once approved the images are immediately available for viewing and manipulation through an applet at the website peripato.net. The applet implements an experimental interface developed by the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland that allows ‘zooming’ of all content. This allows the content to be manipulated by visitors to the site, allowing for an emergent montage of media elements.

This paper explores the connection between procedural generation technologies, specifically those used in world generation in 2011’s Minecraft, and colonialism. Specifically, it examines the ways that the Perlin noise generation algorithm generates a world that exists specifically for the player’s extraction of resources, and provides control mechanisms so that the world is never too wild or untameable. The paper concludes with reflection on some methods by which these colonial ideas might be subverted in games that use procedural generation technology.

Poster Statement

In our poster session we will show and discuss the interactive aspects of our sculptures from the series ‘Personal Observatory We will talk about three works in particular and show documentation of them projected through drawings, slides and video tape.

1. “ABRI” 1994 an aluminum sound sculpture permanently located in the dunes facing the North Sea at Wijk aan Zee,  Netherlands
2. “Turning point” 1995 a video sculpture with an interactive sensor. The sculpture is made from the following materials: copper steel aluminum 2 LCD screens 2 videotapes computer/ custom built controller.
3. “RE: SEARCH” an interactive audio/video installation for a stone, a tree and a person. The sound in this work is recorded on many tracks of a C.D. and played off at random which also determines the position of the sound in space.

Phantom Pain is a creative practice research project addressing the extinction of indigenous languages as a consequence of the marginalization of ethnic groups. Specifically, this project focuses on the history of Sirionó people in Bolivia, and how their struggle to maintain its language, almost on the verge of extinction, can be related to physical trauma if society is understood organically as a body. Seeking to mirror the speed, inevitability and impact of language loss, document conservation and restoration techniques were reversed in order to accelerate the destruction of the artwork itself.

At Connect 2022, Mark Zuckerberg announced what he called’ “The most requested feature on our roadmap”: Avatars will have legs! Current user avatars in Meta’s Horizon Worlds – a virtual reality, online game environment, appear as they would in a video conference call, from the waist up. When avatars move in Horizon Worlds, they look like cartoon ghosts, and when stand-ing in place like helium balloons gently bobbing in the breeze. Through my latest artwork, Sonic Stage 8 – X-tension 3, I explain the critical importance of avatars with legs by introducing the concept of Phantom Physicality through analogue and digital tech-nologies. Satisfying and effective digital environments give the user a sense of the physicality of the environment, reinforced by a sense of agency. In the everyday analogue world senses work in tandem in triggering physical reactions: Looking at a slice of lemon can cause the lips to pucker. The smell of freshly baked bread from the bakery around the corner causes the mouth to water. Reading or hearing these sentences can do the same. In my latest work, Sonic Stage 8 – X-tension 3¸ I created an ‘Experience Machine’ that acknowledges the embodiment of the beholder’s cognition. Sonic Stage situates the listener at the center of the performance, enveloped by sound from all directions. The ability to navigate through the digital space, leaving behind a trail in the sand rein-forces a sense of physicality, creating a richer and more satisfying experience.

The installation Map Me is a tactile version of a social networking page like myspace or facebook. You create a profile for yourself using of bits of paper, drawings, business cards or photos then hyperlink to the profiles of people you know using coloured wool (yarn). Map-Me brings virtuality back into reality, making the act of networking, the connections and the people appear in ‘real’ time and space.

Map Me playfully allows new interactions for social networking as participants combine and evolve rituals and tactics developed from previous exchanges in both digital and physical space. But the work also raises questions about the significance of relationships and creativity in physical and digital spaces. Can social networking applications truly foster new communities or do they just re-enforce old ones? Does a physical presence invest creations with a heightened value or can a drawing on someone’s super wall achieve the status of a work of art? Can interacting within these applications truly nurture meaningful human connection and creativity?

Using images and footage from recent presentations of the work in Australia and the US, I will present and discuss the social and creative implications of Map Me. Following the talk, the audience will be invited to participate in a Map Me event in order for them to experience the work first hand in its physical platform.

Containing several thousand works from the 1980s to today, the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) The NEXT, created and managed by the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL, Washington State University Vancouver), is the largest repository of born-digital literature and net art on the web. It provides free online access to early hypertext fiction, animated poetry, literary games, and more, including many works otherwise now inaccessible due to obsolete software and hardware requirements. This paper presents a project to extend ELO’s The NEXT by setting up a new server in France to hold a copy of the collections, developing local curatorial and research activities to preserve European works, to be shared back with the US server, and growing a digital art and literature preservation network in Europe for practice sharing and collaboration. The project will include a participative Wikidata initiative on electronic literature to enhance the discoverability and searchability of the collections, which could be an opportunity to integrate this born-digital literature focused archive with the Connecting Archives project and feed the data into a shared database. The paper invites a discussion on the requirements of such alignment and the best way of working together towards a global new media archive.

We are 2 students from the DOGtime/Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam and we are studying Unstable Media/Interactive Design. My collegue is Arjan Scherpenisse, who has a background in ICT/programming and I am Eelco Wagenaar, and I have a background in mechanical engineering/industrial design. We have build an installation called ‘PING’ which we would like to enter for your ‘Ludic Interfaces’ program.

A little explaination about our work.
We have built an installation which makes it possible to play physically pingpong with a person on a different location than where you are. We are making a promo film for our installation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6h3klf1Hn4. The featured film is just the first cut, but I think it makes everything clear enough.

We already showed the installation on 2 events and we are now developing the installation to be technical (almost) perfect. We featured in a show in Mediamatic, Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and we also featured on PICNIC 2007, which was a fairly big cross-media event, also in Amsterdam (the Netherlands).

The steps we want to take in our development is to make the installation more fail safe. Meaning we are still working on the sensoring of the bats. And also the next steps we want to take is to make the installation work using a wideband internet connection (we now still running it through some wires..), which means that the installation could work over big distances using the internet.

Every day we transform our surrounding space into proper place. We have our own ways to walk through the city and creatively reorganise our houses. Partly under the influence of new technologies our environment grows in diversity, size and complexity. We cross borders more easily and make faraway, invisible or vanished places “tangible” through television or mobile phone. This, however, stands in tension with the intangibility of all sorts of technological networks in our environment. We are not always aware of the “controlling” power of surveillance cameras, RFID or data banks.

It is in the field of tension in between visible and invisible interferences, between actively and passively dealing with the environment where some developments within media art are situated. These projects do not only take the man/technology/environment relationship as a point of departure of an artistic interference, but also as a goal. The work of art is a result of reflecting on the relationship mentioned above, but at its turn wants to intrude on the environment and “tactically”  reassess the relationship between man, technology and living space. This they do, for example, by making invisible qualities of spaces visible, “writing” spaces or giving tools to people so they can create their place in space themselves. The often – literally – border and discipline transcending media works make a different, often more holistic approach to space possible.

The fields of tension between tangible and intangible, place and space and between disciplines serve as the source of inspiration for alternative field studies on “space”. In this research we chose to combine methods in the cultural and visual studies with the artistic and design research to make a more holistic and material approach to the man/technology/environment relationship possible. The study takes shape in a tactile interface that reveals possibilities to develop a creative and enduring relationship with the hybrid environment.

Keywords: Indigenous Media, Place-Making, Landscape and Living History, Cyber Museum, Digitization of Tangible and Intangible Heritage, Collaborative Museum Practices, Telepresence, Aura

A Journey into Time Immemorial is an interactive website that historically represents the everyday way of life of Sto´:lo¯-Coast Salish peoples in a computer-generated naturalistic setting. This paper closely examines aspects of its seven exhibition spaces to investigate the relationship between the poetics of new media and contemporary curatorial practices in Indigenous culture. By doing so, it seeks to showcase an award-winning example of how an Indigenous community made use of digital technologies and online platforms to reclaim the right to curate, design, and display its own living history, to extend placemaking into cyberspace, and to establish a direct relationship with the general public.

I propose to discuss research which investigated the construction and representation of the ‘figure and the ground’ in both photography’s old and new technologies through overlapping temporal and spatial renderings of the same subject within single photographic images. This included a critical investigation of the representation of time, perspective, and location in historical and contemporary photography with particular attention to the synthesis, imitation, and distinction of characteristics of human vision in this medium especially where they are indicative of consciousness of space and attention to presence. These inform a radical refiguring of the premise of the genre of the photographic portrait and its setting, especially within the unstructured environment of the Central Victorian ironbark forests and goldfields. Analogue and digital photographic experiments were conducted in superimposed shifts in camera position and their convergence on significant points of ‘focus’ through repeated exposures across different time scales. The images correspond to a stage in human stereo perception before fusion, to represent the attention of the viewer, where, in these images, the ‘portrait’ is located. These findings were then applied to the large format camera production of high-definition images that extended the range and effectiveness of selected pictorial structures such as selective focus, relative scale, superimposition, multiple exposures and interference patterns. The outcome was exhibition at Smrynios Gallery in Melbourne, at the University of Tasmania School of Art in Hobart, and at Bendigo Regional Art Gallery. My paper will include discussion of relevant work of significant Australian practitioners Daniel Crooks and David Stephenson alongside the traditions of the phenomenology and sciences of spatial perception.

This paper explores merging technology and biology into semi-living designs in order to rethink and advance current ecological surveillance tools. Drone technology combined with (the sensory capabilities of) living plants could provide our monitoring tools with plant based intelligence and more advanced ways of sensing ecological changes. Drones are currently designed to collect specific data through single-flight missions without longer-term interaction with the target location or non-human species. The paper speculates on the potential use of recent discoveries of the ways plants sense and interact with their environments as well as each other as part of the monitoring process. The paper presents and discusses a future design proposal The BIO_DRONE—an autonomous hybrid drone designed by merging the plant Boquila trifoliolata with a flying device. The resulting concept is a hybrid biosensing drone that aims to provide manifold data about the world’s most complex biome—the Amazon rainforest.

Abstract

During the past few years we have found ourselves joining networks and becoming participants in interconnected worlds of the virtual sphere; we have been making friends, expressing thoughts, sharing moments; we have practiced exhibiting our selves and ‘following’ others; we have become contributors of today’s news and shapers of tomorrow’s trends. The emergence of the social web, commonly known as web 2.0, and its various social platforms have given us opportunities of communication, participation and social interaction that have brought enthusiasm and excitement but also questioning and concern. Promises have been followed by contradictions in environments such as YouTube, Facebook or del.icio.us where leisure became work, creativity became production and subjectivity turned into an object of surveillance. Haunted by the need of the continuous presence of our online self, we have formed temporary realities of intimacy, tension and control where we have chosen to situate ourselves. What attracts us all in these environments? How is the ‘feed’ being fed?

Aiming to examine the complexity and controversies of today’s social platforms, this paper, which is part of a current PhD research, proposes to study play as a main driving force behind web 2.0 structures and interactions. Taking into consideration play as an activity performed within particular contexts as well as play as a notion and a tactic against constraints and impositions, the paper suggests that a new interpretation of the social media structures and the users’ interrelations within them can be offered through play.

Abstract

This lecture presents an ‘open collaborative digital space’ for the planning and good management of the stream of game design activities. This system design concept could be looked at as a shared toolkit among designers, researchers and artists that work with multimedia content and it aims to sustain the cogeneration of creative ideas for developing multimedia artefacts.

This software concept is the main contribution of my doctoral thesis in Industrial Design and Multimedia Communication at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy), which highlights the importance of the gameplay issue in interaction design. Gameplay design can dramatically improve the relationship between digital technologies and participatory culture and this practice suggests new directions where the benefits of collaborative design could be developed.

Abstract

Theories related to the discussion of space within videogames are often focused on ideas such as player relationships with their avatar (Wolf, 2001), (King and Krzywinska, 2006), (Stockburger, 2006), bounded landscapes (King and Krzywinska) or genres of videogames (Wolf, 2001), (Rollings and Adams, 2003) amongst others. This paper instead, discusses the various routes through gamespace in particular those of the path and the track. In doing so, the focus then shifts to an understanding of warp devices found along the paths of the game world and the experiences they can create for the player.

Introduction
Interactive lighting concepts have been widely used to please the eyes and enhance the mood at concerts, karaoke bars, and other live music events. [1][2] Going beyond the visual effect, what if lighting could be used to enhance the social and cultural aspect of music? We look into body motions and explore how they can become a medium for enriching music experiences through interactive lighting. Consider certain kinds of behaviors that typical people engage in. People can tap their foot rhythmically in response to a musical stimulus.

It is common to see attendees at the concerts holding bright mobile phone displays and waving to participate in the music and the mood. Such body motions contribute and lead people to experience and express music socially and emotionally. Many researchers and designers have explored professional side (performer) of musical behaviors for sound and gesture mapping in live music environment. [3] We investigate music-related ancillary movements of the typical users engaged in the music, not the performer.

In this work, we present PlayLight, an interactive system that captures hand gestures of users while engaging in the music environment using smartphones, affecting the intensity and color of virtual projected lights. The prototype system includes two main concepts, musical gestures and lightings, which both contribute to the enjoyment of music.

PlayLight
For euphoria to happen, the gestures that come naturally during euphoria are used for input types. Observations with six participants were done in a karaoke room that reflects the context of live music environments and used to identify possible hand-gestures to sense ultimately for controlling light. We want participant’s actions to get animmediate and identifiable response. The participants’ actions should be immediately identifiable from changing the color and the intensity of light. Each hand gestures inform different lighting mappings.

Discussion
The test trials showed the combination of body motions and interactive lighting proved to be an appropriate medium for musically coherent and visually satisfying experiences. We are still in the process of understanding audience interaction and developing practical interactive systems for live events. Some of the biggest challenges are reconciling the effect of lots of audience members interacting at once and letting them operating the system without their attention being distracted from live music or social interactions. These issues should be further studied for visually more pleasing lighting designs to create better music experiences.

Plink Jet is a robotic musical instrument made from scavenged ink jet printers. The mechanical parts of four printers are diverted from their original function, re-contextualizing the relatively high-tech mechanisms of this typically banal appliance into a ludic musical performance. Motorized, sliding ink cartridges and plucking mechanisms play four guitar strings by manipulating both pitch and strumming patterns like human hands fingering, fretting, and strumming a guitar. Plink Jet is designed to play itself, be played, or both. The result is an optionally collaborative performance between both the user and Plink Jet, with the user choosing varying levels of manual control over the different cartridges (fretting) and string plucking speeds (strumming).

The repurposing of consumer technology is a growing trend for artists and technologists in the DIY genre exploring circuit bending, hardware hacking and retro-engineering. Artists who have used the mechanics of printers for producing sound include Paul Slocum with his dot matrix printer and Eric Singer’s scanner-inspired musical instrument, GuitarBot. Inside an ordinary ink jet printer are the same toy-like, clockwork mechanisms that have delighted people and sparked imaginations for centuries. In the creation of Plink Jet, we have investigated how human improvisation can interact with these mechanical forms. Plink Jet transforms the predicable function of a printer into a unique and irreproducible performance.

Look for words like ‘mobile’, ‘portable’, ‘wearable’, or ‘nomadic’ from any standard media history, say, Brian Winston’s Media Technology and Society, A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet (374 pages, 1998), and be ready for a surprise: they are not there.1) At best, what you may find are a few hasty references, usually from the concluding pages of the book. Media histories have been constructed upon the idea of media as fixed coordinate systems changes to the ways in which humans perceived temporality in relation to space. The development of the urban metropolis emphasized the role of the automobile as a mobile prosthesis and an extension of the home, particularly in extreme environments like Los Angeles. Elsewhere, it was linked to other forms of urban mobility, often combining the use of public transportations like taxis and the underground with the -proto-motion- extreme environments like Los Angeles. Elsewhere, it was linked to other forms of urban mobility, often combining the use of public transportations like taxis and the underground with the “proto-motion” of walking. Purportedly there are various modes of urban walking, from goal-oriented darting along pre-defined vectors to leisurely “urban roaming” (derived by critics from Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s flaneur) Whether by driving, walking or even flying, we are spending much of our time within non-descript venues defined by Marc Auge as “non-places”.2) While doing so, using mobile media – mobile phones, pocket cameras, car radios, CPS tracking devices, FDA’s, pagers, Gameboys, iPods – has become a self-evident practice for us.

Why have media historians neglected mobile media? Did mobile media really appear so unexpectedly? Could the suddenness of its appearance be an illusion, caused by our inability to perceive the past from an appropriate perspective? Is it possible to excavate enough “traces” to develop an “archaeology of mobile media-, a cultural mapping of those phenomena that have raised issues about media and mobility in earlier contexts? How would such a mapping help us understand the current uses of mobile media and the discussions surrounding them? These are the premises underlying the present article, an early mapping of the territory.

Prolegomena to Mobile Media

There is nothing self-evident in the connection between “mobile” and “media”. Being in “perpetual contact” with absent people by means of a portable device would have made little sense for the inhabitants of a medieval village, who rarely travelled and stayed within a limited radius all their Lives. Daily communication was based on regular face-to-face encounters with familiar people. If the idea of remote communication was evoked, it probably addressed metaphysical realities in the form of a prayer. However, much the same could be said about the leisurely lifestyles of the landed gentry during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The habit of listening to MP3 files through headphones with the iPod while strolling in an English garden would not have made much sense either in an environment where noise and crowds weren’t problems.

However, it probably would not have pleased Baudelaire’s flaneur either, roaming the streets and arcades of nineteenth century Paris. For the flaneur, deliberately blocking one sensory channel would have denied a potential source of seductive pleasure to be derived from the city. The urban experience had to go through many changes before auditory seclusion from the surroundings became an accepted and desired practice, the question of the “origins” of mobile media could be approached from a different angle as well. Instead of looking for portable devices with explicit communicative and recording functions, we might focus on the fact that objects are assigned symbolic meanings both by their owners and others.3) Whether they are kept visible for everyone to see or hidden from the others’ sight bears significance. From this perspective the habit of carrying mobile media machines could be seen as a manifestation of the much wider tradition of portable objects.

An example could be women’s fans and hand-screens, those seemingly superfluous objects that have, however, a long and varied history.4) Not only have they been used to guard the bearers from heat and intruding gazes; they have also become symbolic manifestations of the owner’s social status, and a means for erotic play. For centuries, enormous varieties of pictorial fans have been produced, from delicate miniature artworks to cheap mass-produced advertising giveaways. This makes the pictorial fan a visual medium of a kind, and a predecessor to objects Like promotional T-Shirts. This does not mean, of course, that we should treat fans as a form of mobile media. Neither would the gun belts worn in the Wild West qualify, although speculative connections may be drawn between them and the current habit of wearing pagers and mobile phones attached to one’s belt. Easy and fast access does not seem to be a sufficient explanation in any of these cases. Whether intended or not by the wearer, the displayed objects become tokens of power, wealth and technological prowess. Once they are hidden, the meanings they emanate change.

The Legend of the Wristwatch

Wearable media seem to be situated somewhere on the axis between over: and covert. In one extreme this has to do with status objects – things meant to dazzle and impress more as signs than serving as practical appliances. In the late nineteenth century Ladies’ dresses covered entirely by photographs or (illuminated!) lightbulbs were sometimes designed as publicity stunts for these new technologies; although in a sense an ultimate manifestation of “wearable media”, using them for any other purpose would have been totally unpractical. In the other extreme the-e is, for example, the nero-tech”: the large family of miniature objects often carried around and, when discreetly displayed for someone, intended to raise sexual thoughts.5) Another example of covert technology is the “spy tech”, the huge tradition of hidden devices that have been used to record conversations, take snapshots, transmit secret messages and kill people. Spy tech is interesting, because unlike most forms of media, it tries to carve out secret channels of “private” communication.

If conventions of use and symbolic meanings are equally important as functions, considering a device like the wristwatch as a predecessor to “wearables” makes sense. There is a wonderful story according to which this ubiquitous device was invented by the Frenchman Louis Cartier in 1904 for the Brazilian aviation pioneer Santos Dumont, who found it difficult to check the time from his pocketwatch while steering his aircraft. What can be said about the pocket watch, the predecessor of the wristwatch? While it also belongs to the prehistory of wearable media, it often remained hidden within the owner’s clothing (including dedicated pockets), to be inspected only sporadically. The wristwatch made more sense in the high-speed technological environment of an aeroplane or a motorcar, where intense concentration was required, and one false move of the arm could be fatal. However, the story is not quite right: the wristwatch had been invented decades earlier, but its popularity grew slowly because it was considered feminine – perhaps it was associated with the habit of wearing bracelets. Obviously it needed the masculine, technology-studded profile of Santos Dumont and the fame of Cartier to convince men. Further proof of its usefulness and newly found masculinity were gathered some years later in the trenches of The Great War.

When David Sarnoff, one of the pioneers of radio broadcasting, spoke in 1922 about his vision of the portable radio, he used the watch as his reference point. The radio should have as its ideal “the watch carried by a lady or a gentleman, which is not only serviceable but ornamental as well.6) Although it is not clear whether he meant a wristwatch or a pocketwatch, his idea of the portable radio as a personal utility, which is both useful and neatly designed, resonated within media culture. Indeed, the St. Louis jeweller J.A. Key soon introduced a radio set modelled after the pocket watch, and a radio “pinkie ring” was proposed by another inventor.7) In the 1940’s, Chester Gould’s comic strip hero Dick Tracy wore a voice-activated videophone looking like a wristwatch. Although such novelty devices (still constantly presented, as one can see from the Play Fetish section of Wired) have usually remained little more than publicity stunts, the association between usefulness and visual appeal is a permanent aspect of product design, evident in the field of mobile media.8) The right combination matters much more than in Sarnoff’s time, because of the greatly increased design awareness, tough competition and the urgent need to differentiate between products meant for many different user groups.

The Life and Times of the Mobile Cyborg

In California it is more and more common to see people seemingly talking to themselves, whether paying for their purchases at the supermarket, jogging, waiting for a latte at a coffee shop or sitting in the car waiting for the traffic lights to change. Of course, they are really engaged in a remote conversation. The choice of the hands-free interface is justified by health reasons (fear of radiation), busy lifestyle (risk of losing a contract or a deal) and the safety of driving. Although these explanations make sense, an underlying motive could be the lurking “cyborg logic”, the physical co-existence with and within the medium. Tracing the evolution of such a logic here would take too much space, but clearly the phenomenon seems much older than usually assumed. In the nineteenth century, cartoonists often presented the early photographers as “a new species”, partly human, partly technological: the camera, with its one large “Cyclops eye” had replaced the photographer’s head, hidden under the hood. Later we encountered the “cyborg ladies” at the telephone exchange, where young women were forced to spend hours “bondaged” to the switchboard, donning a headphones / microphone combination.

Within the field of mobile media, a decisive event in the “Life and time of the mobile cyborg” was the launching of Sony’s Walkman in 1979. Unlike earlier portable media – transistor radios and cassette decks – the Walkman was meant to be listened to exclusively via headphones. Since Shuhei Hosokawa’s pioneering “The Walkman Effect” article (1984), quite a lot has been written about the phenomenological and psychological effects of the Walkman. Most researchers seem to agree that listening to a Walkman represented an experience that had few if any real precedents. Using headphones to listen to music was not something unprecedented; it had been common already in Edison’s Phonograph Parlors in the late nineteenth century, and the early radio listeners also normally used headphones. The novelty was using them while roaming in public spaces.

It would be hard to deny that the uses of the Walkman really differed from the habit of carrying transistor radios or even ghetto-blasters in urban environments. Although perhaps experienced as disturbing by others, these devices still existed within the mutually shared continuum of sounds and noises. A ghetto-blaster may have challenged their supremacy, but even when used in a deliberately offensive manner it was only a “counter-social instrument”. The Walkman had a seclusive and privatizing character that early observers often found irritating. It was as if the user, while sharing the same space with others, was refusing to accept the “social contract”, based on certain codes of availability and communicativeness. Many of the issues raised about the Walkman are still valid when thinking about devices like Apple’s phenomenally successful iPod, which, in spite of radical changes in technology and design, is essentially a -boosted” Walkman9) for the era of the internet and downloadable MP3 files.

Although the Walkman user experiences a kind of “bi-location” the sound and the visuals belong to different “realities” before being integrated by the user’s mind), it seems to be quite different from the ones experienced by the users of other devices. The Gameboy user interacts with a fictional world that may deeply absorb his/her attention, in spite of being “non-immersive” (the reality surrounding the device and the screen isn’t excluded, albeit perhaps by the player’s mind). The multimedia mobile phone, even when used with a headset and a microphone, seems to allow a more radical and varied form of bi- or multi-Location: the mind wanders between “here” and “there”, present and remote, physical and virtual, active input and passive reception, as the user switches between applications and modes. While doing all this s/he may be travelling in a car or walking down the street, which adds another layer of mobility and visuality to those emanating from the phone. How all these elements are co-ordinated into one integrated experience is not yet clear. What is clear is that mobile phones, as well as devices like the PDA’s, are giving rise to intricate forms of co-existence and possible symbioses between humans and ever-present technological prostheses.

Pod.Field is an aural, sculptural environment made from laser-­‐cut plywood and felt. When an individual enters Pod.Field, s/he sees several skeletal, beehive-­‐shaped forms. Each shape has two long, red flexible feelers, and each feeler has a pod-­‐like form attached to its end.
The audience is invited to push these stalks aside in order to wind their way through the implied pathways of the exhibit. As they brush the fiberglass rods away, the pods bounce and dance freely, triggering attached bamboo chimes to produce clacking, insect-­‐like sounds. The more people move in the space, the more it fills with natural, clacking sounds. As the entire space becomes activated, people are engulfed in a rising sonic environment that feels alive.
This nature-­‐inspired artwork can be read as an exaggerated representation of sensing. As the feelers are triggered, the bodies are “turned on.” When the system is activated as a whole, the bodies symbolically communicate as a community. This visual and sensory system is meant to remind audiences that the body is always sensing the environment while the ecosystem is always responding to the body’s presence. Everyone exists as an individual and as a component of a vast, elaborate organism. This new work was created for a solo exhibition at BOX 13 ArtSpace in Houston, TX in May / June of 2014. I also exhibited it at the Maker Faire Milwaukee in September of 2014, where over one thousand people interacted with the work over two days.
The central forms in Pod.Field are built with slot-­‐fit construction, and can be disassembled and flat packed for shipping. They can be assembled and installed in one day, by one or two people, using a laser-­‐cut scaffolding that assists by holding the horizontal pieces in place. In this way, Pod.Field is very modular, portable and inexpensive to travel.

Remediated interfaces of modern music software have deeply changed music composition and performance. Designed as visual editing machines most music software operates on sound objects, sequentially organized in time on multiple tracks. Today, approaches to music making like e. g. live coding, a contemporary art form in which music and visuals are programmed during performance, challenges the concept of the sound object and along the materiality of music and, perhaps even more fundamental, the concept of poesis i.e. the very condition of music making.

Materiality: From object to signal
Music per se is a time-based art form and has due to music notation a long history of literacy. A history that was broken when analogue recording technology in the 20th century turned sound into an object for phenomenological investigations. Sound was no longer just a phenomenon in time, but suddenly a phenomenon in space. As a media object it could be stored in a sound library and retrieved for analysis, manipulation and composition. Sound recording and playback led to new approaches to music composition, as in the practice of Pierre Schaeffer that originated from the listening to sound objects and not from the writing of them. The music culture of today has for a long period of time been dominated by operations of selection and compositing, or rather of cut, copy and paste taking on the legacy from Schaeffer.

Keywords: Aesthetic Experience, Survival, Body, Breathing, Perception, Connectivity, Technology, Poetic Instinct

This paper aims to discuss the concept of poetic instinct, considering the urgent need to reformulate the relationship between humans and nature considering technological ubiquity and its affective side effects. We start by analyzing the current process of disaffection and the impact of our intellectual, social and technical development on our abilities of perception. We approach Yuasa Yasuo’s body theory that develops a comprehension of the body based on four levels of consciousness. We get inspired by his theory to discuss the process of perception, analyzing how we can understand the aesthetic experience as a vital function. Finally, we present the performance “Avocado Tree, we’ll follow your act” and the installation “Preamar” to discuss two approaches of the poetic instinct in an artistic practice and discuss the role of technology on this proposed poetic reading of the survival instinct.

This paper presents and critically discusses the installation “Political Crystals: Numinous Hashtags” (2018) – a poetic exploration of the ironic numinous aspects of Brazilian 2018 presidential elections. Combining parametric modeling generative strategies for data visualization with digital fabrication, the work includes the algorithmic design of a series of geometrically intricate models using as raw data Twitter APIs to perform sequential data analysis and conversions having as the Search phrase hashtags related to Brazilian 2018 presidential elections Twitted from defined geolocation. From one perspective, the 3D shapes can be seen as aggressive and sharp materialization of online hashtags’ wars that includes metadata tags. From another perspective, the translucent 3D shapes and its sophisticated data-based generative modeling evoke sublime and numinous aspects of natural crystal cluster such as quartz crystals while hiding the dramatic force of a manipulated faithful army in spreading hate discourses against minorities, defending a populism that returns to its fascist origins in Latin America.

In this paper, using a theoretical framework of political interpretation of new media art and interaction, I describe some political new media artworks that I have created and exhibited. Knowing that all relevant enough cultural phenomena admit a political interpretation and, therefore, carry a political stance, new media art’s relationship with new technologies carries an extensive phenomenological corpus that intersects many areas of knowledge, rendering sensible the need of awareness of some of these political stances.

Keywords: Politics, Users, Programmers, HCI, New Media Art.

In this paper, we propose characterising Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) as a negotiation between a specific design and its context of use. We then argue that HCI design is a political activity, and that the classification between users and programmers it commonly uses reflects a political stance, deeply rooted in its socio-political context. Finally, we propose that HCI can take inspiration from new media art’s subversive appropriation of technological knowledge.

The overall thematic of the POM-conference series is the question of how the machine and technology impact and contextualize artistic and cultural production and our perception of the world. Moreover, it is aiming at investigating the histories, theories and practices of machines and technologies in-between and beyond disciplines. It seeks to question the governing ideas in the sciences and the humanities through critical engagement with and empowerment of activities of creative production.

Panel Statement

Panel: Kunstliche Kunst

Artificial art (Kunstliche Kunst) was the self-contradictory term coined in Stuttgart in 1965 in order to distinguish art with the computer from that without. The artificial has since then tremendously gained in strength, and reality sometimes gets replaced by virtuality. It may be worth the attempt to consider art and aesthetics under this aspect.

1. Information aesthetics was the heroic attempt in the sixties by Max Bense and Abraham A. Moles and the disciples to use the mathematical concept of information as the guiding principle for an analysis of aesthetic processes, both analytic and generative. Although, on a very general level, some exciting insight into the nature of aesthetic processes could be gained, the attempt failed miserably. Nothing really remained that would nowadays arouse any interest for other than historical reasons.
2. The failure of information aesthetics is due to its most fascinating starting point: the radical idea of an aesthetics of the object. All subjectivism was to be banned from aesthetics: Measure instead of value judgement, number instead of feeling, mathematics instead of psychology. An aesthetics of the object was supposed to produce methods of measuring the object such that a feature vector of quantitative and descriptive factors would replace the aesthetic object. It appears obvious, in retrospect, that this approach was bound to cripple once the notion of an information independent of the perceiver crippled. Not many are left now who still believe in such a concept. An aesthetics of the object is hard pressed when asked for the difference between aesthetics and physics of the object.
3. Information aesthetics contained one assumption whose importance has increased and has become the central idea of a different approach to aesthetics. That assumption is the notion of the aesthetic object, or the work of art, as a sign. “Sign” here refers to the fundamental concept of semiotics, as, e.g., in Peircean semiotics. A semiotically grounded aesthetics not only opens to the discourse of postmodernism, it also links parts of aesthetics to informatics, which, in this view, turns out to be a technical semiotics.
4. Any formalistic approach to aesthetics is, of course, only capable of addressing the lower levels of aesthetics. In particular, if computers are to play a role in the game, whether analytically or generatively, only computable aspects of aesthetics can be addressed.
5. Treating any real process by computer pre-supposes three reductionistic steps: a semiotic transformation of things to signs, a syntactic transformation of signs to representations, and an algorithmic transformation of representions to computable structures. On the other hand, this very process of reductions opens up the field of aesthetic semiosis for new algorithmic works, and thus for new aesthetic experience. The field of algorithmic semioses is still to be explored aesthetically, both on the analytical and generative levels. An aesthetics of algorithmic semiosis is more likely to produce interesting results for sequences of objects than for individual objects. It’s genuine realm is the small difference more than the grand gesture.

We introduce “Possi(A)bilities,” an Augmented Reality concept and system that presents users sitting at a table with animated visualizations of a virtual hand projected on the tabletop next to the user’s own hand. As a combination of possibilities and abilities, possi(a)bilities focus on the motor abilities of the human hand in the synchrony between the physical and the virtual, and constitute into a medium for examining and reflecting on the nature of diverse abilities that become possible when transcending the physical world and the individual’s agency. Ultimately, possi(a)bilities question assumptions, norms, and accepted definitions of motor ability and skill in the context of hybrid, physical-virtual worlds.

Mental Dance engages audiences in modes of performance that call attention to multiplicitous dimensions of the present. As an interactive improvised dance-sound-tech event, we invite perceiving attention to the mutable present as always already shaped by perception, prior experience, cognition and corporeal change. Neuroscientific research underscores our approach to a digital interface that proposes new relations between audience and performer as a result of repeated COVID-19 lockdowns. Using MediaPipe pose estimation technology to track dancers’ movements from webcam feeds, we directed telematic rehearsals and performance of the work on Zoom where dancers in their home environments sculpt and respond to sound in real- time. Constraints such as forced isolation, lack of access to technology and space to move, were embraced to create a new type of collaborative performance where the screen becomes the stage and the interface between movement and sound. This workflow can be used to enable interactive telematic performance where collaborators are unable to be in the same physical space with no specialist hardware requirements.

Digital technology has duplicated, extended, and/or juxtaposed our existences and interactions, transposing a large portion of our life from material to immaterial. These panels investigate diverse possibilities in the entanglement of physical and digital worlds and interrogate meanings of bodies, cognition/perception, autonomy, and social relations in the era of coevolution with technology. Through their art and research practices, the panels acknowledge the virtual – not actualized reality, which is often evoked by various forms of technologies – ranging from computer graphics, digital information, wireless communication to artificial intelligence to virtual reality. By exploring emerging concepts and alternative visual experiences in the digital era, this panel discussion demonstrates critical and diverse perspectives on possible beings we cultivate together with nonhumans – technology.

Electronic art occupies a transmedial space with other media including film, television, streaming video and, as the paper asserts, architecture. These forms of media are charged with the politics and cultural value of space, and these are often mediated through the image of the city: a media-space. This paper takes as its lens the mediated image of a mid-size, mid-western city: Winnipeg, Canada. It sets up a discussion of the image of this city by considering key examples of (industry-based) narrative media shot here, before moving on to works of independent film and media art. Industry film frequently repurposes Winnipeg’s urban spaces to depict other cities – Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit – to tell stories of crime, and worse. The paper makes the case that what visiting filmmakers are in fact “buying” is a heritage of historical pain: the legacy of colonialism embodied in urban space, indeed hidden there in plain sight. This legacy has only begun to be visible to most Canadians, but it has been there for all to see as harvested and displayed on the screen, a sign or symptom of a deep malaise. A more complex relationship between city and image is revealed by what is done with the same urban spaces by independent film artists – and architects. Their crop, which is explored last, exposes more completely the potential for new relationships between city and image, buyer and seller, authenticity and fiction, colonial legacy and possible city.

Intro
In artist Sean Synder’s Analepsis (2003-04), a sequence of video snippets present alternating sweeping and zooming shots of various landscapes and settings. The work is made up of establishing shots taken from satellite news broadcasts (each lasting 1-4 seconds), yet devoid of sound, text, explanation. Rather, the spaces are de-territorialized and impenetrable. Shipping containers, compounds, apartment blocks, scrub and brush, cranes, an airport runway, guard towers, oil fields, mountain ranges, office grids; these views are offered impartially, as if in a film which seems to lead nowhere in particular (the widescreen format references both cinema and the obscuring of the rolling news feeds). This could be anywhere, or everywhere. As in his other works, which have utilized images acquired from news agencies such as Associated Press and Reuters, Snyder takes on the position of the critical observer, cataloguing and representing extant imagery and information as his own. However, this gesture, while clearly in the tradition of the Duchampian readymade and the appropriation art of Sherrie Levine or Louise Lawler, differs in the absence of acknowledgment. The work is neither antagonist nor ironic; Snyder’s practice claims this material as his own, and, in doing so, not only questions notions of authorship but of factual truth itself. As Daniel Birnbaum has written:

“Entering what might seem to be a hermeneutical labyrinth as puzzling as the hieroglyphs were before the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, we question whether we should take what the artist has excavated as factual or ask further questions. Or should we question the source from which the references are extracted? Do we even want to look for the source of the reference, or could we even find it?”

The artist, whether appropriating tele-visual or online media (a distinction gradually disappearing in the expansion of interactive technology and niche programming), acts as a cypher, a selector of anonymous and interchangeable items. There is no attempt at authenticating the material or its source. The quantity of information available is significant here; for every point, there is a counterpoint; for every apparent statement of fact, there are a number of variations, contradictions, possibilities, refutations. The news report, once assumed to be singular and incontrovertible, gives way to particular positions, to different takes. The factual has been made aesthetic. Snyder’s digital prints of photographs taken by soldiers in Iraq — of shots from behind rifle turrets, of Saddam Hussein’s hideout, of improvised explosives — refine this approach. The implications of the death of the author, and of authority, transcend the theoretical, textual play of art criticism. They end up ‘embedded’ in moral ambiguity and indecisiveness, in the snapshot which aspires to neither pacifism nor propaganda. Rather, these images retain a critical distance and detachment, through layers of camera lenses and mediated representations. And yet, the passivity of the relative position, the refusal to take sides, betrays a very specific strategy of power and hierarchy.

Keywords: post-digital, aesthetics, audio, neomodernism, sound-in-itself, music, non-intention, glitch
The theorisation of post-digital aesthetics in music and sound art seems to be split in two contradictory directions. One direction emphasises the foregrounding of digital processes through the use of process-based procedures, while the other tends toward a neo-modernist, sound-in-itself tendency that would seek to obscure the role of process in the work. This paper argues for a re-evaluation of postdigital music and sound art practices from the perspective of non-subjective modes of composition and making, where aesthetic intentions are suspended.

Technology and design have been in a symbiotic relationship. New technologies, processes, and materials enable new possibilities in art and design practices. They fused new ideas and creative design solutions. With the development of technologies, typography has evolved with the creative process, shifting the emphasis from two dimensions to multi-dimensions. The digital revolution with the introduction of personal computers caused radical changes. The new digital revolution of our time is under its way and urges educators to implement the new technologies in our classroom environment.

As part of an ongoing postdoctoral research on post-human motherhoods in media art, the paper examines selected artistic expressions of mother-offspring bonding and its relationships to different technological cultural basis. The introduction addresses the handling of the concept of mother and its related operations in the research scope. In the sequence, we suggest as standing points for reflection both the material basis of the placenta and the playfulness as elements shaping the mother- offspring bonding. They constitute fundamental aspects triggering affection in the potential symbiotic relationship established in mother-offspring bonding. The discussion is permeated by artworks examples, brought on demand to the text to feed the reflection. The notions of “natureculture” by Donna Haraway and the theoretical framework by Second-order Cybernetics are grounding references. The final considerations point towards the human and post-human aspects of motherhood revealed by the artworks, as well as to the need for concrete actions towards the reduction of the gender-based technological gap in media art, in order to increase the imaginary variability of the field.

Abstract

Philosophy and art increasingly reflect upon the emergent forms of life, society and politics created in the biotech laboratories and further developed and tested across the biotech industry. These translations of scientific protocols into philosophical tractates (Donna Haraway, Hannah Louise Landecker, Nikolas Rose, Aihwa Ong, Catherine Waldby, etc.) or even art manifests (Symbiotica, Marta de Menezes, Eduardo Kac, Adam Zaretsky, etc.) express our expectations and fears vis-à-vis the newly discovered and created entities. Custom made bacteria, artificial DNA, viral quasispecies, various transgenic, chimeric, synthetic and copyrighted organisms challenge our anthropocentric presumptions, notions of life, evolution and nature – but also normative ideals related to our ethics, society and politics. They transform the common world into a postbiological arena in which the organic and the nonorganic, the natural and the constructed, human and nonhuman, physics and techné, mix, play and blend.

As we become increasingly entangled with digital technologies, the boundary between the human and the machine is progressively blurring. A posthumanist perspective embraces this ambiguity, giving primacy not to the individual agents that comprise a system, but to the relationships between them. In this hyperconnected age, our relationships with technology mediate and mould our perceptions of reality, and now they are beginning to define us. This research project explores new possibilities for human-machine relationships, moving away from relationships marked by habitual, unconscious behaviours towards those imbued with intention and meaning. Three works: Mirror Ritual, Message Ritual, and Worn Ritual take inspiration from the mutual entailment of matter and meaning in the dynamic configuring and re-configuring of self-identity. The proposed relationships are not intended to replace or imitate existing ritual practices among humans, but to inspire new forms of shared meaning in the human and non-human assemblages of contemporary culture.

This article aims to discuss and argue about the tangled and intricate relations between posthumanism and technology in the attempt of elaborating upon the creation of new monstrous forms of life within the framework of bioart. By dwelling on works by Oron Catts and Ioana Zurr, the article seeks to re-think posthumanism’s species inclusiveness as a scientifically and technologically determined trait and to emphasize the role of technology in decentering the human-normative understanding of life. Nevertheless, using examples pertaining to the artistic field, the paper implicitly re-phrases the artistic enterprise from the point of view of a theoretical, lab-researched based endeavor dictated by accelerated biotechnological changes.

The existence of a new hybrid spatial ontology (mate-rial/virtual, offline/online) has triggered some unique territorialization processes closely linked to the technopolitical and technoeconomic domain. These processes involve a new symbolic-cultural output that questions the validity of locative art’s theoretical framework, initially associated with situationist psychogeography and with the informational context associated with GPS metadata. By contrast, postlocative art deploys strategies that critically accept the important role that non-humans play in public representation as well as in delegating the production of meaning to AI, thus moving beyond the locative framework and closely associating itself with the postphenomenology of complex systems.

Artists Statement

In this paper, we examine the contrast and correspondence of analogue and digital ways of interaction to the specific context and environment of our artwork Postponed. Moreover, we’ll look at the effects of analogue ways of interaction on the user during the interaction, as well as on what the conceptual motivation behind our preference of using analogue interaction methods.

Abstract  (Intro)

The signs of a change in the field of aesthetic production, which are now evident, are actually beginning to appear in some fundamental components of the avant-gardes of the first decades of the twentieth century. I will give only a few examples that are of particular importance:

-In 1920, Naum Gabo wrote a ‘manifesto’ where a breakdown of the artistic dimension occurred, in which we explicitly asked to introduce the scientific spirit: “The plumb line in our hands […] we build our work […] – he writes – as the engineer builds the bridges, as the mathematician formulates the formulas of the orbits “(Manifesto of Realism, 1920).

-In Moholy-Nagy, whose role in aesthetic research should be reconsidered and carefully evaluated, the trend towards scientific knowledge is specified as the awareness of the basic character of materials and technologies, and their experimental aesthetic activation purified of all content symbolic or imaginary; The expulsion of Itten from the Bauhaus in 1923, with the consequent elimination of all the mystical and expressionist inclinations of the school, and the appointment of Moholy as director of the Preliminary Course are events that mark the history of Western aesthetic experimentation.

-Moholy’s work, interrupted in Europe by Nazism, resumes in the United States and is continued by György Kepes, his student and great friend: the New Bauhaus, the Chicago Institute of Design, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, take root and universally spread a new way of conceiving and proceeding in which techno-science and aesthetic experimentation begin to merge and merge giving life to a type of production substantially different from all the productions attributed to the traditional field of the artistic.

These products have been taken over and assimilated to the art for absolutely extra-aesthetic reasons. In reality, profoundly different movements have been unified in the term “avant-garde”, namely:

1) Movements that in many ways have pursued and tried to renew the tradition.
2) Movements that have manifested an explicit intention to break with art and to destroy.
3) Movements that worked for the transcendence of art and for a reconstitution aesthetics on the basis of the undeniable advent of techno-science.

Degrowth is increasingly gaining attention as an alternative model to the unfolding eco-social crisis generated by indus- trial capitalism, though questions concerning digital technologies have yet to be addressed in degrowth research. Among the movement of the (digital) commons, whose practices complement degrowth theory, one of the research areas is the viability of such systems to release spaces from capitalism. As (digital) commons spaces frequently revert to capitalist logic, we introduce the “technological dramas” model to encompass the reciprocal and recursive technological production of political power by agonistic entities. We suggest that such a techno-political perspective could contribute to better frame degrowth-related HCI research.

Where is technological progress leading us? To get a sense of the digital transformation societies are going through, and more importantly, to grasp a hold of it, we must be able to imagine the future we desire. Yet, at a time when algorithms can pretend to be “creative,” our capacity to understand the world and make sense of it seems more than ever entangled with the digital tools that mould our lives. Reclaiming the human gift of imagination is much more than a matter of digital ethics in the face of artificial intelligence, it should be a political priority for the future of democracy.

Where the public space turns into private space and the private space opens up to the public.

What happens when our private life becomes public and we use the public space for our private concerns? What happens with the way we communicate, socialise and relate to each other and to the space around us? What happens when technology becomes invisible and disappears from our awareness? What happens to our autonomy, who still has agency?

These questions come up when we think about our relationship and the changes that have occurred over the past years where our environment has increasingly shifted towards the intangible: from mobile devices such as telephones, game controllers and gps to CCTV systems and electronic tags (RFID) for travel and products. These changes have affected our experience of location, space and geographical positioning on a personal and global level in both a digital and physical way. Moreover it poses questions regarding the relation between our private and our public space. The Web2.0 opts for a public space in a private domain. The new tools that came out of this structure of self-publication and -promotion changed not only our view of what is private but also affect our relationship within the public sphere. With the emergence of the new public life, the meaning of both the private and public space changes. Artists like Jonathan Harris, Michelle Teran or groups like MediaShed are exploring into the consequences of this shift from that what is private is now being made public.

At the same time where the private has become public, the public space is used as a private space. Electronic devices like mobile phones, GPS and other tracking devices personalise and privatise the public space by either giving the opportunity to start a personal conversation at any time and place or showing personalised routes through a city. Wireless and ubiquitous media are affecting the constitution of the public space. New projects by artists like Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat, Intimate Burka, Yolande Harris, Sun-Run-Sun and Valentina Nisi, Trading Mercatorstories are focal points of the shifting conceptions of private and public space. The projects address the social dimension of human environments and possess qualities that make the communication of interaction visible in the realm of the public/private sphere. Moreover they reflect the essence of what is meant by ‘ubiquitous computing’ and its effect on the changing relation of the public and the private space. By analysing these artworks it will become possible to formulate and discuss our understanding of the specificities of location, which is mediated along political, aesthetic, social and scientific lines.

Informed by contemporary research in performance studies, this writing examines the ongoing challenges and possibilities of using XR technologies to create a virtual archive of embodied theatre techniques. This is part of a research project working with the (analogue) archive of Odin Teatret in Denmark, in which we are facing the challenge of transferring the embodied knowledge of actors’ training into a virtual navigation system which evokes interaction and affect. We begin by outlining a critical epistemological framework which calls for new accounts of knowledge distribution and the place of embodied and affective praxis within this frame. We describe the process of having different training strands from practitioners of Odin and pupils being mapped with the use of motion capture technology. Further on, we approach one of the key aspects of this research, that of the translation of such embodied techniques and movement qualities into data and, consequently, into an immersive experience of archival navigation. With this paper we aim to contribute to the discussion on documentation of embodied knowledge in present times, one which calls for new approaches to practices of transmission, archive interaction and embodied navigation.

The key issue to examine with locative media and pervasive games is that many of these new, mediated experiences refer to and appropriate space while divorcing it from its meaning, history, and significance. (Flanagan 2007; 5)

All Generic Cities issue from the tabula rasa; if there was nothing, now they are there; if there was something, they have replaced it. They must, otherwise they would be historic. (Koolhaas 1995; 1253)

Discussing locative media projects Flanagan (2007) argues that digital urban games often demonstrate a striking lack of reflection on the particular urban space they are designed for. Many claim to be psychogeographic, but hardly any of them actually are, Flanagan argues, as they neglect the historical and political aspects that were essential to the Situationists’ investigations. With the Situationists and Lefebvre as analytical tool, she thus presents a critique of those games where the game ‘engine’ and not the context itself defines the game play. Concluding that most games understand the urban landscape simply as an advanced game board where the actual location is only superficially explored, Flanagan calls for designers to understand that locative media projects “must begin to reflect the contested nature of the lived reality of such spaces” (Flanagan 2007).

Chair Per­sons: Joel Swan­son & Rachel Beth Egen­hoe­fer
Pre­sen­ters: Zach Blas & Maja Kalogera

In her book “My Mother was a Com­puter,” the­o­rist N. Kather­ine Hayles has writ­ten about the crit­i­cal dif­fer­ences be­tween nat­ural lan­guages and com­puter lan­guages. She writes, “…?code dif­fers from speech and writ­ing in that it ex­ists in clearly dif­fer­en­ti­ated ver­sions that are ex­e­cutable in a process that in­cludes hard­ware and soft­ware…” (Hayles 52). The rise of dig­i­tal arts within aca­d­e­mic pro­grams has meant that many more peo­ple are now learn­ing how to pro­gram and write code. Within the dig­i­tal arts, pro­gram­ming is most often taught through code sam­ples, tu­to­ri­als, mod­i­fi­ca­tion and adap­ta­tion. But this prac­tice can be­come prob­lem­atic as we try to lo­cate in­tel­lec­tual prop­erty through reg­u­la­tory prac­tices de­signed for nat­ural lan­guage, like pla­gia­rism, onto com­puter lan­guages. Pla­gia­rism is taken ex­tremely se­ri­ously within higher ed­u­ca­tion, but rules gov­ern­ing these prac­tices ex­hibit cer­tain fail­ings when ap­plied to non-nat­ural lan­guages. Within the hu­man­i­ties, there are nu­mer­ous and highly de­tailed meth­ods for ci­ta­tion (MLA, Chicago, etc.). Yet within pro­gram­ming, there is a lack of stan­dard­ized ci­ta­tion prac­tices. Be­yond the prac­ti­cal level of ci­ta­tion, how should orig­i­nal­ity and in­tel­lec­tual prop­erty be lo­cated within com­puter code? Ad­di­tion­ally, there has been ample di­a­logue sur­round­ing ap­pro­pri­a­tion and Fair Use of im­agery, but again, code stands in con­trast to the logic of the image. For code, what is orig­i­nal, how should au­thor­ship be lo­cated and de­marked, and what con­cepts fall under the aus­pices of Fair Use?

Through an open dis­cus­sion, this panel seeks to ad­dress these the­o­ret­i­cal com­plex­i­ties, and ex­plore ped­a­gog­i­cal per­spec­tives and prac­ti­cal so­lu­tions. The scope of this panel will in­clude the­o­ret­i­cal per­spec­tives on the dif­fer­ences be­tween nat­ural lan­guage and code, legal per­spec­tives on Fair Use and In­tel­lec­tual Prop­erty, and ped­a­gog­i­cal per­spec­tives on teach­ing com­puter pro­gram­ming.

“Piazza virtuale” by the art collective Van Gogh TV” was one of the most ambitious and probably the largest media art project in history. The group created for more then three month a daily television program at the 1992 documenta in Kassel from a container studio right next to the Fridericianum that was broadcast by a public cable television station, by various other TV stations in Europe and internationally via satellite. The goal was to include the audience in as many ways as possible into the program: “Piazza virtuale” therefore was interactive television and an early Social Medium. The viewers could call in and discuss during the show or trigger various application with their touch tone phones. This paper describes some of the findings that we came up with during a three year research project on “Piazza virtuale”, but more importantly the different ways and media that we used to publicized the digitized and archived material from “Piazza virtuale” as well as our own research. Apart from a book and a website, there are also a video documentary, an exhibition and a permanent online exhibition with the new and innovative tool common. garden that was developed during the COVID epidemic by Dutch artist Constant Dullaart.

Keywords: Information, Museology, Digital Preservation, Digital Art, Heritage

This article aims to elucidate two fields of interest on the aspect of information management by museology and other actors of ‘art systems’. The first field refers to the issue of the preservation of ‘digital’ information focused on the perspectives and dilemmas in digital arts. The second one seeks to discuss memory issues through the access of information present in the context of management, curatorship and mediation, mainly in the context of digital arts and inserted in the perspectives raised by the article, regarding information capacity to perform and allow such processes, access and memory.

Keywords: Media Art, Heritage, Territory, Network, Interactive, Collaborative, Intervention, Narratives, Actant

The present article elaborates on the preservation of material and immaterial heritage through the production of community-based artistic propositions in Media Art in order to activate the discursive and enunciative potential of blighted urban neighbourhoods rendered invisible. We consider the media art project Rede_em_Rede 2015/2016 (Network_in_Network 2015/2016) based on the concepts of the territory in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and the actor network theory developed by Bruno Latour. This project builds upon and continues the work of previous community media art interventions, Aircity:arte#ocupSM 2012 and Aircity:arte#ocupSM 2013. The three projects were developed in the Vila Belga cultural and historical heritage neighbourhood of Santa Maria/RS, Brazil.

This paper summarizes the efforts and findings of a collaborative case study undertaken by a team of digital preservation and conservation staff to preserve legacy Apple hardware included as part of an accessioned artwork Yale University Art Gallery. Intended to test the capabilities of the EaaSI (Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure) framework for assessment and exhibition of digital art, a number of specific technical and logistic hurdles in pursuing emulation raised challenges for long-term preservation workflows involving unique hardware.

Code is the textual aspect of computer technology that may be loaded up on a text editor and easily changed. I’m consciously avoiding any discussion on the subject of text editors – jot down your edits on a piece of paper and then write them to new file with echo. What’s important to me is that this be easily accomplished. With enough time and energy, anyone could write interesting code. The best project would be if my grandmother took the time to re-write the linux kernel from scratch, and if she kept a record of her reflections about code. As much as I like Pierre Menard, this is not feasible. The processes of code should be manageable without the need of resorting to too much external technical support. This means that code is relative. What’s code for some will not be code for others.

Surveillance capitalism is a model based on the commoditization of customers’ information, with the consequent impact on their privacy, and opening the door to large-scale social manipulation. This has brought the weaponization of social media [2], where invisible actors can harm the public interest using personal information, profiling and exposing groups or individuals, and manipulating the social narrative in sophisticated manners.
XR (mixed or extended reality) is a group of technologies including Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Telepresence, among others. These technologies rely on a growing number of sensors that allow for an extreme deepening of the existing surveillance. This paper analyzes the potential social impact of XR, as well as proposing strategies aiming at safeguarding users’ privacy.

This panel features artists, curators and scientists who collaborate at the intersection of art and science. From particle physics at CERN to polymer chemistry at the AMI Institute for nanoscience, gain insight into their artistic research and scientific creativity. The discussion aims to show the innovation potential lying within encounters between art and science as well as the challenges of those encounters. The showcased collaborations don’t simply use art to visualize science or use scientific information to create art, but rather generate new forms and types of knowledge.

Food, technology, and humans are entangled in a set of complex relationships that both produce and resist systems of power. The specifics of these dynamics often remain hidden, whether in agroscience, cuisine, mobile apps, or other mediated contexts. In this paper, we present a reflexive analysis of Orchestrer la perte / Perpetual Demotion, a food-and-robotic art installation that demonstrates how putting food matter ‘where it doesn’t belong’ can reveal what often remains obscured in our bodies, digital realms, and other relational spaces. Conceived around the themes of domination and nurturing, OLP/PD features a feeding robot that delivers spoonfuls of edible paste to humans’ mouths, using facial-tracking technology. The work probes issues of mutual enslavement, deskilling, the loss of privacy, and the fear-risk-trust within eating. At a broader scale, OLP/PD also troubles food and safety policies, probes culinary authenticity and heritage, and heightens tensions relative to eating and bodily penetration. Drawing on our experiences, we show how digital-material art can illuminate a variety of ways in which dominance and power arise. We propose that this can help surface different and more equitable forms of interaction, whether among food, technology, and humans, or in the more abstract realms of power, culture, and ‘mattering.’

The exhibition Process as Paradigm poses a bold thesis: process – nonlinear and non-deterministic – has become one of the major paradigms in contemporary art and culture. Here we mean process based art in contrast to the process art of the sixties and seventies that was all about performance, the here and now, the ritual, the artist conducting the process, whereas we use the term in a different way: process as a property or behavior of a system, be it nature, society, culture or art.

This paradigm reflects the fact we have ever better means, concepts and technology to observe reality. As a result we have both a deeper understanding but simultaneously realize reality is far more difficult to master. Reality is an all-entangling process that holds many uncertainties – of which we are part.

The processes of creation of Mexican digital artists had not been studied so far, there are digital artists but just a small amount of them have worked in the field for more than ten years. This article is about the processes of creation of Mexican digital artists and their work, in order to propose a methodology for new artists and to contribute to the knowledge and comprehension of Mexican digital art. The beginning of the article is a description of the characteristics of the context of the artists; after this, a description of the process of creation according to various specialists in the field in order to propose a focus based on digital art. Then we establish relations between the theory on creation processes and the information provided by Mexican digital artists on various interviews we made. Finally, a Conceptual Map that shows the findings and the links between the eight artists of this research was made.

Kombucha is a fermented drink that has been drunk in Asia for centuries, and has been recently popularized in western cultures. The production of the drink generates a co-product, a biofilm of Bacterial Cellulose (BC). This biofilm is today at the center of a typology of bio-design practices, ranging from initiation workshop to fermentation to practical and plastic research around shaping objects with this living matter. This paper proposes an overview and initial classification of the current design practices that use Kombucha Bacterial Cellulose as raw material of artifact. To this extent, we structured a corpus of selected projects in a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) map. We classified 38 projects in the field of design, made between 1985 to 2022. Each project is positioned in an orthonormal frame of reference according to its degree of definition of use (from the most open use to the most defined use) and its scale of manufacture (from single experimentation to industrial production). This map tries to bridge the gap between the communities.

Processing/Lampreys explores the method of Francois Laruelle’s photo-fiction through animation coding processes that transform digital surfaces of images of the lamprey eel species. While the lamprey species is classified as a parasitic, jawless fish that latches its fanged mouth onto other fish in order to suck the blood of its host, this project emulates the practices of the parasite as an art practice that complicates notions of representation. The project presents a series of animations as a photo-fictional parasite apparatus or a conceptual camera. Ultimately, the parasite is framed as a generic condition through which a philosophical science of parasite aesthetics is posited.

In this institutional presentation by V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media we will present our Lab’s interdisciplinary practice with a focus on art and media technology. It will cover our three core activities – the production, presentation and publication of research at the interface of art, technology and society, as well as highlight five pillars to our success: 1.) an emphasis on experiment as opposed to end result; 2.) the support of practices instead of mere single projects; 3.) the integration of theory with practice; 4.) our care for archiving activities; 5.) and our vast international network.

Furthermore, the presentation will highlight our thematic approach based on the recent example To Mind is to Care, a long term research project into the notion of “Caring for”. This interdisciplinary study of care covered care of people, other life forms, and technology and resulted in the book To Mind Is To Care, which included contributions by Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Sjoerd van Tuinen, Michael Marder, Arjo Klamer, Driessens & Verstappen, Frank Pasquale, Ellen Dissanayake, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Pieter Lemmens, Jeannette Pols, Bernard Stiegler, and Frederiek Bennema, a group exhibition carrying the same title featuring four new productions by artists Ana María Gómez López, Driessens & Verstappen, Nathalie Gebert and WE MAKE CARPETS and the curatorial research Art and Care: Reflections on the To Mind Is To Care Exhibition.

Craving is a site specific spatial sound composition set up by the two artists in the public space of Vienna‘s Donaustadt district. It unfolds while the audience individually wanders the high-rise area. Wearing headphones and mobile computing devices they physically navigate the piece. Their path is in no way – auditory or visually – predetermined, thereby allowing the audience to let themselves be guided by intuition and the aspects of the place.

Technology has become ubiquitous, it is all around us, being a permanent part of our day to day. Along with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and other innovative technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, IoT-based smart wearables and apparel harmonize functionality, with design, electronic art, and science. On the other hand, the textile industry is considered the second most polluting industry in the world, making it necessary to rethink and replace ordinary products in great global demand produced from unsustainable processes with ones that contribute to the reduction of the greatest number of environmental problems.

For thus, the synthesis and structuring at nanoscale of an extracellular renewable biopolymer is proposed. This bacterial cellulose (BC), obtained from a fermentative process that requires low amounts of water for its production, it has been demonstrated having an excellent potential in the slow fashion movement due to low hydric and carbon footprint, and diminishing of tree falling or use of non-sustainable fibers; as well as, into the textile industry due to its low-cost raw materials, mechanical properties, and versatility.

Keywords: Digital Art, Creation, Process, Artists, Methods, Production.

My hypothesis is that the observation of processes, products and context of Mexican digital artists’ activity reveals common patterns that define Mexican Digital Art as a distinct artistic area. Through a qualitative research which included semi-structured interviews applied to eight artists, I was able to gather and ana- lyse data that confirmed my hypothesis. No other virtual or physical documents address this issue with the perspective shown in my research. The interviewed eight artists use different expressive materials and media, like sound, robotics, free software programming, laser and obsolete technologies, and internet. Notwithstanding their formal differences, they share several common aspects like interdisciplinary approach and poor funding. The robotics project, for example, uses bioremediation, water supply and decontamination technologies. All of them, with one exception, started their artistic activity with no funds and operated in precarious conditions.

Abstract

The human subject and the production of reality in quantum systems and interactive media art.

The division between subject and object is a natural result of our sensory impressions of the external world, which seem separate from the thoughts in our heads. When we stare at a painting we apprehend it as an object distinct from our conscious self. This binary split between the world ‘out there’ and the world in our heads is the foundation of classical logic. The very notion of objectivity is predicated on the idea that the universe is composed of subjects who are capable of remaining aloof from their objects. This is not the case when we confront interactive media art or quantum particles, neither of which can be considered ‘objects’ in any normal sense of the word. Instead we have systems – open, complex systems – in which we play a starring role. ‘In the drama of existence we ourselves are both actors and spectators’.

Abstract

Keywords: Africa, Rwanda, informal justice system, arbitration, mediation, dispute resolution, Abunzi, Web 2.0, wiki, e-development, social networking, ICT, infrastructure.

We present the Griotphone, a system with wiki-like functionality that is accessed and interacted with by phone. This technology could serve as a networking tool that would strengthen informal justice systems by facilitating discussion around best practice and establishing an archive of decisions. These objectives are important as many informal justice systems, such as the Abunzi system in Rwanda, lack an archive of decisions and a forum for informal justice actors to discuss their profession. This technology would facilitate information sharing between informal and formal justice systems. This system aims to increase transparency and accountability in informal justice systems. This technology strives to enable informal justice actors to more quickly resolve cases, which would in turn ease tensions in communities and support reconciliation in developing areas of the world.

Our individual existence, our bodies, our minds, are embedded within and artificially augmented by technology; we interact with similarly extended others. These interdependencies pose urgent ethical and cognitive questions. When looking into these complex relations and ethical urgencies, claiming that the individual, society and technology are separated from one another, may feel counterintuitive. Separation however, does not imply causal isolation, or complete independence but instead that one system does not directly control the other, however eligible they may be to influence one another. Social and individual existence is tied to digital technologies. Informed by patriarchal power structures, their design and investigation both extends and creates new forms of oppression and alienation. As such, they become feminist agendas.

Rather than refraining from participation in the technological sphere, radicalised exclusivity can be used as an operable device to increase inclusivity – a conclusion derived from the text “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation” by the group Laboria Cuboniks. In the recognition of one’s own alienation, one can find identity and liberation; and by actively increasing alienation there isn’t simply reconciliation with the exclusionary status quo but the freedom to construct a different world. With this focus, this paper examines the importance of acknowledging the social and political implications of programming, and the limitations of this acknowledgment within theory and the discursive spaces it happens within.

This article examines the philosophical fundament for the composition of Project Time. The composition conceives ‘time’ as the domain where the old and the new coexist in Singapore, articulated through the confrontation and cohabitation of Indian and Chinese drum traditions, as well as interactive computer manipulated sound.

The first part of the article describes how Project Time was conceived, from philosophical, textual, musical and technical points of view. The text, assembled from multiple sources, determines the process in which the musical elements unfold and develop. The piece starts out with giving an individual’s perception of physical change as being in time, then leads into discussing the society’s change through time expressed as urban planning, and finally arrives at presenting a metaphysical view of change outside time.

Traditions, by definition, are long-established customs or methods of procedure. If there is to be a change in outlook, it will happen over a long time. By contrast, new currents, heightened by the digital age, are susceptible to change at a comparatively fast rate. Not necessarily antithesis, these temporal movements of the traditional and the new create tension as well as dynamism. Such a climate demands one to address the issue of what is ultimately left of the old. Is urban renewal a skin therapy or a transplant?

The second part of the article discusses the validity of the metaphors exposed in Project Time. Is the inside–out presentation of relationships between private and public space logically leading into the idea of immortality? What does it mean to say that an individual transcends the personal and becomes public?

The piece was conceived while we lived in Europe, observing Singapore from a distance. When returning to Singapore in 2007, the urge to revisit the project surfaced. Reconnecting with our earlier thinking, we see a new set of questions: what has changed in Singapore since 2001? What is changing today? Would we deal with the topic of Singaporean anxiety – a materialistically motivated ‘wanna-be joie de vivre’ – in the same fashion today? If we were to remake Project Time, in what way would it be different?

Keywords: Media Art, Environment, Dowsing, Flow, Poéticas Digitais

The purpose of this communication is to present some recent projects developed by the Poéticas Digitais group related to the theme of environment and flow, visible and invisible forces, and how to dialog with the construction of the context, in which the public is part of a large collaborative system related to the environment. The discussed projects are: “Desluz” (2010) and “ZN:PRDM – Zona Neutra: Passa um Rio Dentro de Mim (Neutral Zone: A River Passes Through Me)” from 2013.

Keywords: Soft Robotics, Soft Robots, Robotic Art, Bio-Inspiration, Materiality, Ecology.

This paper presents exploratory research on the materiality, aesthetics and ecological potential of soft robots. Within the still emergent paradigm of soft robotics research, bio-inspiration is often hailed as being of central importance. The paper argues that soft robotics should equally be seen as giving prominence to materiality and the enactive and processual potential of soft matter. The paper excavates different notions of materiality within media art that uses soft robots and in technical soft robotics re- search practices and discourses. Against this background, the author’s own practice-based experiments with soft robots are presented.

Panel Statement

The panel [prologue]: Transitional Geographies / Feminist Mapping explores the cultural and political impact of European enlargement on feminist art and discourse: feminist participation in the cultural, economic, technological and structural spheres of a changing Europe remains a challenge. This panel aims to map out the crucial issues of how and where feminism remains a radical innovator in art, technology and society and to make public contemporary feminist art and discourse. The panelists – media artists, theorists and sociologists – are invited to reflect on the impact of shifting European borders and interests. This is extended to how feminist work addresses these changes.

The huge paradigm shift of the late 80’s has had a huge impact on the notion of what it means to be European – and feminists have been active at each step. Current economic and political shifts constitute yet another huge paradigm shift and feminists are more engaged than ever. An interdisciplinary approach combines old and new media, sociological research, theory and art from a feminist perspective Following a summer academy that brings the panel participants together with numerous artists, activists critics and theorists to address the challenges presented by shifting geographic spaces and their ma economic and political impact, the panel will focus on the status of a project to map feminist discours( and practice within (and without) European borders. As Action Research, the panel is derived from series of [prologue]: New Feminism/New Europe events that will take place in Tallinn over 2009 and 2010 with the title prologue EST, and past events in Berlin, Graz and Manchester.

ART ECONOMY POLICY                                                                                                                            [prologue]: New Feminism/New Europe resulted from a series of formal and informal discussions about the need to reclaim the radical elements of feminist movement and to re-articulate a feminist perspective in terms of East and West Europe. Past Prologue events have focused on themes such a transgender, language of resistance, witty works, and open source software. Participants have been from Albania, Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Poland and the UK. By combining works once disregarded by historical blind spots and emerging artists, prologue has worker across borders, genres and generations. As such, Prologue refers to setting the stage for future action. An abundance of feminist art exhibitions across North America and Europe have affirmed the historic importance of feminist art, however, mainstream media art discussions still question the relevance of gender in art and media. [prologue]: Transitional Geographies / Feminist Mapping embraces the future: not only is feminist work valuable, it is more important than ever..

In cooperation with Kathy Rae Huffman & Reet Varblane: prologue                                            Surgery led by Kathy Rae Huffman and Reet Varblane in cooperation with Diana McCarty and Mare Tralla

This paper presents the practice of designing mediation technologies as artistic tools to expand the human repertoire. Three artscience collaborations: Mandala, Imagining the Universe, and Resonance of the Heart are elaborated as proof-of-concept case studies. Scientifically, the empirical research examines the mappings from (bodily) action to (sound/visual) perception in technology-mediated performing art. Theoretically, the author synthesizes media arts practices on a level of defining general design principles and post-human artistic identities. Technically, the author implements machine learning techniques, digital audio/visual signal processing, and sensing technology to explore post-human artistic identities and give voice to underrepresented groups. Realized by a group of multinational media artists, computer  engineers, audio engineers, and cognitive neuroscientists, this work preserves, promotes, and further explores underrepresented cultures with emerging technologies.

Abstract

What if we had devices that induced emotions in a manner similar to instincts, but triggered by non-tangible stimuli? What if we used machines to act as prostheses for instincts we have not yet developed? With this project, I propose a scenario of transhumanity, in which machines induce human emotions, while exploring their aesthetics, functionalities and ethical aspects. This work builds upon a common theme in transhumanism – the augmentation of our natural sensory experiences and thus widening the spectrum of things that we can perceive.

It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1400cc brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity and quality of information it has accumulated; it is intimidated by the precision, speed and power of technology and it is biologically ill-equiped to cope with its new extraterrestrial environmment. The body is neither a very efficient nor a very durable structure. It malfunctions often and fatigues quickly: its performance is determined by its age. It is susceptible to disease and is doomed to a certain and early death. Its survival parameters are very slim -it can survive only weeks without food, days without water and minutes without oxygen. The body’s LACK OF MODULAR DESIGN and its over-reactive immunological system make it difficult to replace malfuncting organs. It might be the height of technological folly to consider the body obsolete in form and function, yet it might be the highest of human realizations. For it is only when the body becomes aware of its present position that it can map its postevolutionary strategies. It is no longer a matter of perpetuating the human species by REPRODUCTION, but of enhancing the individual by REDESIGNING. What is significant is no longer male-female intercourse but human-machine interface. THE BODY IS OBSOLETE. We are at the end of philosophy and human physiology. Human thought recedes into the human past.

The article asks how political agency play out in contemporary uses of the interface. It, firstly, stipulates that the interface is a ‘spectacle’, belonging to a longer history of media spectacles, mass organization, politics and aesthetics. Secondly, that contemporary interfaces are metainterfaces, depending on a new organization of the masses characterized by mass profiling. Finally, it analyses how this play out in examples from art and cultural practices, and speculates on what political protest and revolution is in light of the interface.