Presentation Data Table

Keywords: Proto-computational Arts, Algorithmic Devices, Early Computers, Geraldo de Barros, Jose Oiticica Filho

How Geraldo de Barros obtained abstract photographs using disposed punched cards makes evident that the origins of the interaction between algorithmic devices and the arts are deep and there is a clear need to describe the visual artifacts, and the historical and technological contexts as well to better understand his work. José Oiticica Filho and de Barros expanded the use of photography beyond the camera operation focusing on experiments in the darkroom. I have proposed that Geraldo de Barros must be recognized as a pioneer of computational arts “because he developed a method for using punched cards instead of the negative Film in the darkroom, exposing the photographic paper several times while changing the distance of the enlarger lens to the photographic paper in order to magnify or minimize the size of the rectangles through which the light would pass creating complex abstract compositions in the photographic paper”.

As a form of unsollicited advertisement, spam relates to offline media strategies. But spam has its own vernacular archeology, rooted in the folklore of the pre-Web Internet. Identifying proto-spam needs not searching for the first ever spam, but researching its primal media language forms and practices, at the level of discourse and software, context- and community-related, preinstitutional – i.e. a vernacular use of the Internet. We research sub-cultures from the depth of the pre-Web Internet (especially Usenet) on the stage of interpersonal communication, while questioning “Vernacular [as] crucial to [an] interest in power; in a community’s vernacular discourse are in-sights into its conception of itself, its negotiation of its identity, and its interactions with other communities” (Flores, 2009). With the help of a Media Archeology approach (Ernst, 2006), we dig out the experimental layers in the history of spam.

Keywords: Narratives, Puppetry, STEM/STEAM, Participatory design, Co-creation and Collaboration, Craft, Intercultural exchange.

We report on an ongoing collaboration that uses puppetry as a shared cultural expression in STEAM workshop designs that inform intercultural exchange. Collaborators in Atlanta, USA and Medellín, Colombia work in tandem on the design and implementation of a puppet-building workshops. These workshops use narrative framing, craft-based prototyping, and performancebased validation to teach students basic prototyping skills. They specifically encourage them to relate to their local culture and to inform an ongoing dialogue between the two cultural spheres.

Keywords: Art, Nature, Technology and Society. Rural Areas, Education, Network, Environment, Peace. Residences, Interculturality, Community

“Proyectos rurales ANT: Art, Nature & Technology in Latin America” brings together creators, teachers and researchers involved in art, digital culture and the development of rural spaces, in the shared conviction that, to face the environmental and social challenges that confront us all, it is necessary to engage with rural areas and other forms of “postextractivist” relationships, technologies and sensibilities.

The challenge lies in how to apply our knowledge of the arts, our experience in collaborative networking skills and digital culture to the healing of ecosystems and their respective communities, with indigenous people and local farmers as guides and companions. Together we are organizing spaces, gardens and houses that nourish experimental practices, new autonomies and investigations in common. We hope that many more will join us in this act of love and survival.

The projects represented are Upayakuwasi and Pujinostro (Ecuador), Manga Libre and Selvatorium (Colombia), Nuvem and Ruralscapes (Brasil), Rao Caya (Chile) and Goctalab (Peru). Valentina Montero (PAM – Plataforma de Artes Mediales) and Lucia Egaña have made theoretical and cartographic contributions.

To what degree can the creative use of technology enable highly specific, deeply embodied experiences that both express and ameliorate the shocks of ‘media cities’ (McQuire 2008) today? With The Line, the third in a series of research-creation (Smith and Dean 2009) works, we continue to explore this question and, more broadly, the role of digital media in shaping our relationship with public space, architecture, and data. The Line consists of a video database of lines at various scales (a line in the earth, a sidewalk, a fence, a road, a row of houses, a strip mall, a highway, a border, the flightpath of a jet plane, etc.) projected onto a 10-metre long snow fence. By sensing proximity to the fence, the system will enable viewers to recombine segments from this database to create a composite image. The Line will be included in Land | Slide : Possible Futures, a site-specific art exhibition in Markham, Ontario that aims to encourage a collective conversation around the future of land use. This project tests theoretical claims about the effects of interactive architectural public displays — namely, the increased transversality of identity and subjectivity (Murphie 2004), the re-embodiment of the experience of media that sees the body less as a point in a perspectival system and more as a vector in space (Hansen 2004), and the radical contingency (Harbord 2007) of surface effects experienced in public space. By deploying a phenomenological approach through various perceptual scales and levels of access to what is otherwise an organising principle, motif, and tool for arranging humans, objects and environments, we hope to afford participants the opportunity to sense their relationship to the line and its connection to environmental, social, political, technological, and human systems (Latour 2005, Rancière 2000).

A series of consoles have been developed to investigate the sharing of digital collections in public libraries. The interfaces reduce in complexity throughout the study to facilitate ease of access whilst maintaining playability and engagement. Interaction in the final interface is sufficiently simplified to enable browsing and publishing of the collection with hand movements, using a low-cost infrared sensor.

New media, particularly the development of digital art has redefined notions of public space, a parallel virtual network in which art can be developed and presented. The artistic intervention and its context are consistent, framed within the same paradigm. Contrary to this virtual world, my interests lie within the real world encounter, how new technologies provide a new ‘relational’ platform that interweaves the participants and the artwork. The viewer/contributor can enter the work though a process of documentation and manipulation during the early stages of an artworks evolution, or at the point of its presentation, where the participant provides the final kinetic extension of the artwork.

Secrets are the opposite of information. There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are “public secrets”—secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself—like, “don’t ask, don’t tell” Such shared secrets sustain social and political institutions. The injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are “public secrets” This paper will discuss the phenomenon of the “public secret” in the context information culture and present strategies for using information technologies to unmask such secrets. The presentation will reference an online audio database of statements by incarcerated women and injection drug users, which reveal the secret injustices of the war on drugs, the Criminal Justice System and the Prison Industrial Complex.

A kind of collision between the real and the virtual — a collaging of moving images and sounds onto real space — has formed the sculptural and conceptual basis for much of Collins’ work to date, with aspects of human behavior in public (including that of the viewer/participant), the subject matter so central to the work. Made as a response to a given site or situation, these interactive pieces—usually audio and video—aim to engage the viewer in an inquiry or reinterpretation of their role within specific and often everyday contexts. They are an attempt to make the audience recognize and question accepted behavior in public situations while also showing, of images, sounds, and site, the oddity of mundane social interactions.

The presentation will show documented examples of the presenter’s recent site-specific public interactive interventions on streets and in train stations including, Pedestrian Gestures, which was shown in Linz, Austria as well as various train stations in the UK; other works commissioned specifically for the gallery or museum including Tate Gallery St Ives; Tramway, Glasgow; Videopositive 95; Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. The presenter will also introduce a forthcoming project, “In Conversation” an audio/video interface between a street in Brighton and the internet, taking place in November/December 1997 (http://www.ucLac.uk /slade/sac) which is attempting to reintroduce these two very different kinds of public space for social interaction to each other. Collins will question the role of the public in the choreography, realization, and interpretation of the work; raise issues concerning the differences between the reactive and the interactive; and consider what might constitute a truly “public” medium.

The article proposes the development of a service that facilitates publication and monitoring of editions and collaborations made by users of memory institutions digital archives in environments such as Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. Therefore, it presents a technical modeling for a feedback service called roundtripping, which evolves the information networks from the wiki environment and Tainacan free software. Tainacan has been configuring itself as an important free software for the management and dissemination of digital collections from a network composed of Brazilians memory institutions.

There are considerable technical and operational challenges for the implementation of a service that not only allows the publication of collections from a digital repository of a memory institution, but also the monitoring of the reutilizations, editions and collaborations of users in other information networks. By allowing the connection among Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia information networks for the publication and encouragement of reuse of digital collections from institutions already published in Tainacan, this research aims to expand the circulation of heritage collections, makes the knowledge generated about them relevant and, thus, values Brazilian material culture in the network society. The objective of this research is to present in a case study format, how the roundtripping process has been modeled and implemented in partnership with the FILE Archive initiative.

A growing collection of self-determined reflections on dance practice are being published by choreographers in a variety of formats. Often working in collaboration with researchers, editors and designers, these heterogeneous publication projects make use of text, moving image and more open-ended digital tools and platforms. Many of these projects are either newly available or are in the process of development. In addition to offering practice led contributions to the discourse on dance, they point towards the artist’s role in developing alternative forms of documenting, analyzing, notating and archiving contemporary dance.

This research is concerned with a specific genre on graffiti that was documented within the duration of 2 months (18th October 2002 till the 28th December 2002) in Pudu Jail, a prison facility that lies between Jalan Hang Tuah and Jalan Pudu in Kuala Lumpur. A phenomenon known as the “Prisoner’s Graffiti” was initially noted on the first day of the observation. Intricate, yet, highly simplistic texts and rendered illustrations were found imprinted on the walls of the cell rooms. “Pudu Jail’s Graffiti”; was the updated term to be concluded for the title of this study (as of February 2005). To this particular genre of graffiti, it had emerged as a part of an expression and to be derived as an identifiable subject matter. The researcher had focused on the graffiti solely through a constructed scale of taxonomy and derived from developed theories that falls in the same line as Parsons’ (1987) studies in the interest of familiar artistic individual experiences within the collected samples. A mass series of documented photographs, were cross referenced from general recognition in visual identification in Panofsky’s (1939) iconographical identification of Art, and with relationship in the studies done on the taxonomy on street graffiti such as Blume’s (1985) “Graffiti”. As such, these writings then could be seen in a different point of view, as the frequency had begun to take pattern, within the confined walls of the abandoned prison.

With the imminent decay of Moore’s law and the difficulties in solving NP problems in computing, researchers around the world have been given the task of finding new ways to manage, process and store information. These new paradigms are known as unconventional computing and among them, biological substrate computers have been developed. These coupled logic gates do not work by directing an electrical current through circuits made of conductive materials, but with collectivities of living organisms and the interaction of their emergent patterns with specific geometries. In this article we will address the implementation of a genetic chip (bacterial computer) in the creation of an artistic work, as well as the paradigm shift from the individualistic artist to the ecology of affections.

The idea of the work came from an exhibition which was held in Liverpool Biennale in 2009. The theme of the exhibition was related to the local canal in Liverpool. The Organization Committee hopes to select the art work which could be interactive with local people. So we thought about using electronic technology to show visual effects of the canal wave. In China we have a proverb ‘The water that bears the boat is the same that swallows it’. We tried to use the work to explain the relationship between people and water. After comparing and testing materials repeatedly, we chose the acrylic tube, plastic ball, LED lights and industrial fans to make our work.

A residency is a conceptual space that typically sits within the physical space and networks of an organisation. The residency itself is intangible, yet exists through a structure of time, discussion, thought, action and proclamation. The residency provides space for creative practitioners to develop ideas within a supported environment, outside of their usual context. It enables immersion within different culture, exploration of practice with new people and a safe space to take risks. Practiced worldwide, the residency has become an invaluable resource for artists and the development of new work – but is its potential much greater? As producing organisations, can we work together to connect our individual residency spaces? Can we use this connection to increase value to artists and the development of art? Can we offer a more diverse cultural contribution? Can we open up our practice to new audiences? And in this unpredictable, global financial climate, can we offer greater stability by combining (often limited) resources?

These were the leading questions that we posed ourselves five years ago. What happens if we go back to these outcomes and use them as a format for evaluating existing collaborative projects and testing and setting up new collaborative residencies? In this paper we will present the background, development and outcomes of our previous experience with collaborative residencies. At the same time we will focus on what we have termed the Collaborative Residency Life Cycle, a model that can serve as a means to start thinking and developing new collaborative residencies. At ISEA2018 we aim to test the model with the audience and existing labs and individual artists/practitioners in Durban as well as the wider region of South Africa.

This paper introduces a new Lisp based software synthesizer called PWSynth. In simple cases PWSynth can be used like other visual synthesis languages with the help graphical patches. The main aim with this project is, however, to integrate sound synthesis with a novel music notation package. This scheme allows to control sound synthesis interactively with a familiar representation of complex musical information. The system has also proven to be useful when designing different control strategies for physical models of acoustical instruments.

Introduction and Background

Computer music software has been divided in the past roughly in two main categories: computer assisted composition and sound synthesis. The former category (PatchWork, Laurson 1996; Open Music, Assayag et al. 1999) consists of systems that are typically built on top of a high level programming languages – for instance Lisp – and are meant to be used as non-real-time environments. The main emphasis has been in representing and generating musical material for instrumental music. The latter category consists of real-time sound synthesis environments (e.g. SuperCollider2, McCartney 1998) where performance is of primary importance. This has led to systems that do not include extensive tools for representing complex musical entities.
During recent years the distinction between these two approaches has become more obscure. On the one hand SuperCollider2 has built-in tools that allow the user to specify compositional structures. On the other hand PatchWork contains user-libraries – such as PWCollider (Laurson 1999c) – which are meant to serve as bridges between non-real-time compositional work and real-time environments. Although the latter approach has made it possible to work in both domains, the idea of interfacing two systems with different logic and syntax causes several problems.
PWSynth is a PatchWork user-library that aims at a better integration of computer assisted composition and sound synthesis. PWSynth is a part of a project which investigates different control strategies for physical models of acoustical instruments. PatchWork is used to generate control data from an extended score representation system called Expressive Notation Package or ENP (Laurson 1999b; Kuuskankare and Laurson 2000). The actual synthesis was meant to be realized with a synthesis environment outside PatchWork (either with MSP or SuperCollider2). This approach, however, turned out not to be fruitful. It became obvious that we need better integration of the high-level aspects and the DSP parts of the system.
The rest of this paper is divided in four main sections. First we discuss in general terms ENP and describe how it can be used for sound synthesis control. After this we go over to PWSynth starting with the basic structure of the system and extending it to cover more complex cases that are needed when designing model-based instruments. The next section gives some ideas how ENP and PWSynth are interfaced and how ENP is used to control the synthesis engine. We end with a concluding section and give some ideas for future work.

PXN is a nonprofit organisation gathering independent producers engaged in the field of new media production. PXN aims at contributing to the digital transition in France’s cultural and creative industries. PXN intends to:

• Play its part in assessing the digital development strategies of public service broadcasters,
• Urge the authorities to significantly enhance the resources allocated to digital creation,
• Contribute to the reform of existing systems of aid for digital creation provided by the Centre National de la Cinématographie and regional support funds, as well as those determined on a European level,
• Support the activity of audiovisual-production associations in the digital field,
• Participate in the training of talented individuals (writers, graphic artists, web designers, developers, creatives, etc.) in the sector and encourage them to continue working in France,
• Defend the heritage status of digital works and protect their creators’ rights,
• Promote international awareness of French excellence.

This talk proposes the presentation of a research-creation project, granted by the program ”Cultures Connectées” from the région Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Pyrocumulus presents an interactive device integrating collaborative augmented reality and sculptures made with photogrammetry and Machine Learning. Pyrocumulus was born from the reflection of an ecological disaster that occurred on July 30, 2020 in the for- est of Pignada in Anglet (France). Inspired by the trees’ communication, this project questions the inspirations that we borrow from the living. Pyrocumulus, deals about the creation of an information network after a fire.

The art project is also a laboratory where arts and science are mixed to experiment scientific and artistic knowledge and techniques. By creating reconstructions of burned trees through 3D printing and by creating a collaborative augmented reality application, the project called upon tree specialists to understand the development of trees. It is by using the figure of the ‘pyrocumulus’ — cloud of fire — that we wish to draw what is the ”cloud”, the exchange of data, but also a worrying technological context that we name the ‘Pyrocene’: the Age of fire or ‘Human activity’. Creating from collaborative augmented reality is a direction that allows to put forward the relational stakes of the human and the non-human.

Pythia is an interactive sonic sculpture, analyzing the audience’s speech and interpreting it into absurd or perhaps prophetic messages, the so-called divine glitch. Glitch art is a direction in art where the main expressive method is a digital error. To consult the digital oracle, an audience member starts the conversation first. Their speech becomes a harmonious sonic composition with new words, whether they are absurd, prophetic, selfreflective, or just a digitized reflection. In ancient times Pythia was the priestess presiding over the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Consulting the oracle was consulting the irrational, the otherworldly. The Pythia priestess delivered her oracles in a frenzied state induced by vapors rising from a chasm in the rock. She spoke gibberish, which temple priests interpreted as the enigmatic prophecies. These prophecies are mentioned throughout Greek classical literature.

“… What was essential to Delphic divination, then, was the frenzy of the Pythoness and the sounds which she uttered in this state which were interpreted by the Ὅσιοι [Osioi] and the ‘prophet’ according to some conventional code of their own.” _Lewis Farnell.
gnōthi seautón = “know thyself” _from the temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Sound
The voice of Pythia in the sonic sculpture is created by harmonizing the text to speech algorithm with a vocoder using Pythagorean principles, or the Circle of Fifths that first emerged during the Baroque era. The circle of fifths is a visual representation of the relationships among the 12 tones of the chromatic scale, their corresponding key signatures, and the associated major and minor keys.

History
Pythagoras’ name, according to some sources, means “forecasted by Pythia”. According to Iamblichus, Pythia told Pythagoras’s father, that his beautiful wife give birth to a child that would surpass all humans for beauty and wisdom and would be a greatest benefit the human race.

PLAN
The sonic sculpture Pythia requires Mac Pro with a fast internet connection, microphone, multichannel sound and HD projection.

Pythia: collective unconscious
Visualization of database collected during the two months exhibit at MARS Center in Moscow. The list of words below are the most frequently used of 161532 words spoken by Pythia:

Привет (2.361) Translation: Hi
Я (1.047) Translation: I
люблю (609) Translation: love
тебя (373) Translation: you

We would like to show what huge potential resides, for the foundation of a musical analysis concept, in phenomenal consciousness (qualia) and in the conceptual metaphor and in the Conceptual Blending Theory. It would be possible in further work to develop an alternative description of music connecting the actual qualitative experience (qualia) and mental operations of the Conceptual Blending Theory.

Selected Test with Musical Qualia
A first test shows two motives beginning with the same note. In the first motive the initial note A is followed by neighboring tones in a traditional tonal manner. In a series of experiments with 20 music students, we played the tonal motive first, and the atonal motive only second. For this purpose the examples were recorded by electronic means so that there could be no differences between the durations and the colors of the sounds. After listening, the subjects were asked how strong the representation, i.e. the sound, of the intitial. A note was in their consciousness after each motive. We detected that, for all the subjects, the representation of the note was still present in the case of the tonal example (quale), while the initial note remained present for only 2 of the 20 students after listening to the atonal motive. This is the effect of the sequence following the note A. In the tonal case, the chunk of the note A is fixed by repetitions and a cognitive structure is built on the accumulation of this note. In the atonal case, this note does not even reappear and is not part of the following sequence: it possesses no significant relevance in the 2 musical bars. Thus vanishes the representation of this quale.

Perhaps there has been a time when men in all cultures handled rather similar objects, which demanded similar skills and were used for the same sort of tasks. Seen in today’s perspective -when technological developments are rapidly and enormously increasing the differences among societies – this egalitarian view sounds absurd and naive. Countries have been mainly categorized in terms of their technological stage, in spite of their natural resources, their territories, their people or their cultures. Because of technology, the world has been divided into the First and the Third. The expansion of the use of computer technology poses serious problems for developing nations, and makes us reconsider the idea that technology is always a synonym for progress. The modern way of living of the consumer society – a model originated in the First World – forces the adoption of a unique model on both developed and developing countries. This model jeopardizes or, in most cases, destroys the possibility of generating differing technological alternatives, according to the cultural, social and economic parameters of a given context.

This paper will deal with art, media and science via the concept of the spin as a fundamental property in quantum computer research, where flux and vibration are at the very core. The historical model of media art, science and technology now includes the potential for quantum phenomena.

I will look at the implications of quantum computing for media art and its evolving histories. I will argue that new forms of art are on the horizon that demand specific attention as we enter an age of experimentalism. The spin of the atom in the void, with its internal rhythms and vibrations, is the driving force behind the power of the quantum computer. The various media artists whose practice parallels progress in the area of physics are exploring frequencies and signals that are key properties at the atomic heart of quantum mechanics. The human interface with technologies will become more complex with the rise of the quantum computer and it ability to process multiple sets of data simultaneously. The controlling of atoms at the core of the computer will require a shift in our human relationship with matter, and artists can play a leading role in defining this new relationship through reflection and critique of computer mediated interactions.

The quantum computer uses traditional atomic material compounds such as phosphorous, nitrogen, silicon and graphene electrons as qubits and their properties of the superposition. The paradox of the quantum superposition (best articulated in the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment) exists as an actual and empirical condition in which an electron occupies multiple positions in space simultaneously, but none specifically. There is a shift that needs to occur in our conscious understanding of invisible quantum nature. How will quantum phenomena affect our understanding of materials, meaning and art?

“The third dimension is but a shadow cast by the fourth.”  _Marcel Duchamp

Introduction
In this paper I wish to explore the philosophical implications and metaphorical relationships between quantum theory and art. Few theorists have attempted to broach this subject and at first glance, arcane equations and subatomic debris appear to have little relevance to visual art. But if art is a creative endeavour that reflects human experience and understanding of the universe, then if that understanding changes, so too must the art we create. Art today largely remains a reflection or meditation on a concrete, classical understanding of the universe. Almost everything ever painted, sculptured or drawn is solid, continuous, structured and knowable. But at its smallest units the universe is fragmented, random and uncertain. I wish to examine the impact of this on today’s electronic culture and draw parallels with the increasingly fragmented lives we live… and its implications on the art we create.

The big news in patterns is that there exists a wholly different class of patterns –Quasicrystals. Two dimensional quasicrystals, often called Penrose Tessellation after Roger Penrose who discovered them in the mid 1970’s, are made 11g on only two shapes or “tiles” – a fat and a skinny rhombus. Three dimensional quasicrystals -made up of a fat and a skinny rhombohedra-are only a few years old. What is new about them, what has escaped 30,000 years of previous pattern making, is that they are non-repeating patterns. Quasicrystal patterns have astounding visual and structural properties that make them ideally suited for applications to architecture.

This paper acclaims the sublime of objectified human intellect by utilizing the quasi-autopoiesis in the generative art. Unlike the computational sublime, my discussion turns the computation as a tool for projecting the sublime to the computation as a copied intellect and connects the computation to the humaness.

Generative Art as Quasi-autopoiesis
As an object for aesthetic judgment, the generative art makes its emergence not by the autopoiesis but by the quasi-autopoiesis. Though it is true that the representation of generative art is unpredictable, this cannot be an approval for what our intellect result in a true genesis. Regardless of whether the human has enough ability to judge the generation or not, we have to consider how the result of human intelligence can be independent from the viewpoint of human intelligence itself. And this logic also can be applied to the autonomy in generative art. So, it is not an exaggeration to say that the man-made autopoiesis reflects only the human understanding for the autonomy and emergence. Because the autopoiesis of generative art is always regulated by the human intelligence that designs and demarcates the boundary of generative art. (McCormack and Dorin 2001; 73) Moreover, as Immanuel Kant noted as he-autonomy the autopoiesis that human makes in reflective manner of nature is prescribed “only in a subjective aspect” (Kant 1914; V186) for human and human intelligence. Thus the emergence of generative art is delimited by human intelligence and the autonomy in the generative art is an abstraction of intelligence, the quasi-autopoiesis, derived from the he-autonomy of human.

In the times of Anthropocene, with global pandemic and climate change, it is necessary to investigate narratives that show respect and accountability for all forms of life. In this scenario, the research for interspecies communication reveals other ways to promote human-nonhuman encounters that overcome a past of human mastery over nonhumans. This research analyzes how interspecies communication can be conceived beyond language. Moreover, it also analyzes how those communications can be understood as queer. The source of investigation is the series of artworks Wombs(2018-2019), by Margherita Pevere. The artist researched for bonds between her body on hormones, from taking birth control pills, and two different species, bacteria (asexual) and slug (hermaphrodite). The queer communication in Wombstalks about disrupting the opposition nature/culture and man/woman in interspecies encounters and articulates more equalitarian narratives that are accountable for human actions.

When Picasso placed images of African masks in his painting Des Demoiselles d’Avignon, viewers were reasonably certain that he either personally observed African masks, or at the very least had access to quality reproductions. The very fact that his hand recreated the forms of the masks on canvas confirms that he did some careful looking. Had he done the same in constructing a computer image, viewers would not be so sure. Because the computer can be the instrument which transmits and stores information, as well as the construction tool, it places the artist in a different relation to source materials. Today, Picasso could have bought a laser disk on African art, cut out a mask with only a passing glance at the visual qualities of the object, and then placed it into his painted image. Is one form of appropriation more sincere than the other? Does actually holding the mask show more respect for the culture which produced it? Does working with it inside the computer help us to understand it, or is it always theft? How can we use the computer to expand the cultural materials with which we build our art, without exploitation?

I am a converted appropriator. I used to believe that taking images from other artists, no matter how long dead or removed from my own culture, was in some way immoral or cheating. And doing this with the computer was even more immoral, because it did not even require that I had the technical skills of drawing and painting. It was as if the computer and the dead artist conspired to eliminate me from the process of making art, leaving me as only the conduit. The fear was that somehow I could not make art all by myself. After all, those of us who are artists like to think that we are producing something unique, something which is a reflection of ourselves as individuals, something that could not be done by anyone else, and without our direct participation.

This paper explores the themes of recycling pervasive media, intervening in planned obsolescence, and practicing technological sustainability (R.I.P.) in the context of an event held by the same name during the summer of 2011 at the Banff Center of the Arts. R.I.P., the workshop, was an event organized by Katherine Moriwaki, Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Susan Kennard which brought together a multi-disciplinary group of artists, thinkers, and municipal workers to focus on reclaiming “good garbage” from waste facilities and integrating it into new public installations in urban space.

Through its Digital Archive project inIVA intends to engage in a process of re-examining digital media to see if there are particular multimodal and multisensory aspects of the digital environment and technology that afford us new perspectives and positions from which to interrogate and navigate the ‘archive’ in fresh and meaningful ways.

inIVA creates exhibitions, publications, multimedia, education and research projects designed to bring the work of artists from culturally-diverse backgrounds to the attention of the widest possible public. Anchored in the diversity of contemporary British culture and society, inIVA engages with culturally-diverse practices and ideas, both local and global. inIVA invites artists and audiences to question assumptions about contemporary art and ideas. It acts as a catalyst for making these debates and artworks part of mainstream culture extending the intellectual,
social and geographical boundaries of debate on contemporary visual art.

Taking in consideration diverse studies on multiculturalism, this paper interrogates how Internet can be a tool to different cultures expresses their ideas. It is a case study of Net time, a list with different language groups. It was done interviews with list moderators and an analysis of e-mails flow. The list served as a small sample of what occurs in Internet.

In the area of new media communication art we have to do with the process of cultural hybridisation. Net art may assume all discussed forms: expression of local culture, an agent of modernization, or a personal fantasy, being however in each case a merger of different and unpredictable cultural systems. Problem of identity belongs to the most discussed questions in the field of cultural studies nowadays. In most of the cases it is closely related to the issue of cyberculture and its characteristic instruments of expression: new digital communication media. Debates on identity in the context of new media aim to develop critical discourses concerning the position and features of the individual in the age of the global transcultural communication. Discussions, which locate such problems in the framework of art, extend sometimes the psychological concept of identity understood as an approach to specify a set of qualities defining the individual in order to ask about the identity of the work of art.

Radical Ecological Art and NO Greenwash Exhibitions – seeding ideas through creative action will present a showcase of artists that bring together culture and sustainability and examine new models for action. Advanced forms of ecologically sustainable living models are being put on the spot. The talk introduces into the fields of trans-disciplinary cultural practice, cooperative work between artists, researchers, scientists. Artists, inventing creative ways to protect our natural world and living cultures through applications of ecological systems theory and aesthetics; using cross-disciplinary tools (art, psychology, creativity, scientific knowledge, political savvy, marketing) to design new ways of living with the least negative impact, social and environmental responsibility.

Poster Statement

There is a variety of artists’ projects dealing with and reflecting the process and actual state of the current convergence between mass media, telecommunications technologies and the computer. Many of these projects take place in the public space of the radio medium and the Internet and are very difficult to grasp inside the traditional venues of (even media-) art.The examples in this presentation all come from the experience of the KUNSTRADIO – an on air and on line radio-and telecommunications-art-site based at the Austrian National Radio, Vienna).

Intro 

RADIO THE NE(X)T CENTURY IS the title of an art-project by Bruno Beusch and Tina Cassani. In this project (and others before) the two Swiss artists explore the medium radio (and our culture) as they are changing under the impact of digitalization. In RADIO THE NE(X)T CENTURY the two artists use the fictitious web-crash of a fictitious on line cult-radio as the starting point for an ongoing radio-(hi)story in actual radio programs and In the World Wide Web. They appropriate the format and styles of popular radio together with well known presenters, with producers, sound engineers, scientists, theoreticians, curators of technical museums, etc. They seduce listeners to phone in, users to contribute material to a Cyber Memorial, they turn technicians into resourceful actors etc etc.

In 2013, the Victoria and Albert Museum launched a new collecting strategy, one that challenged the established notions of collecting in a Museum context. Rapid Response Collecting is a new strand to the V&A’s collecting activity, curated by the Architecture, Design and Digital department. Objects are collected in response to major moments in history that touch the world of design and manufacturing. These objects are as diverse as the situations in which they are produced, unified by their ability as to change and shape the way we look at contemporary society. The display which changes regularly shows how design reflects and defines how we live together today. Ranging from Christian Louboutin shoes in five shades of “nude”; a cuddly toy wolf used as an object of political dissent; to the world”s first 3Dprinted gun, each new acquisition raises a different question about globalisation, popular culture, political and social change, demographics, technology, regulation or the law. How does this work in practice? How does a collecting strategy such as this challenge the notions of connoisseurship within the Museum context? How does the Museum represent the mass-produced, ephemeral or highly politicised object?

RAW is based on a tool that captures a minute of sound before and after a picture is taken. It is meant for allowing people to capture their everyday subjective experience. A third party, like journalists or documentary filmmakers, doesn’t mediate the sound and visual material created (it remains ‘RAW’). In August 2003, the tool was taken to Mali in Africa and given to 23 people who expressed themselves on their daily lives, recording sound and taking pictures, without editorial direction. The installation presents their content, without alteration, and allows the audience to immerse itself in a collection of moments of humanity.

Since its origins, the maps were meant to set a mode of understanding, interpretation and representation of the world. As a communication tool, the maps are able to spatializing the interaction among social, economic and cultural urban reality in a graphic expression that provides the meaning of the urban system itself. Geographical representation systems such as Google maps, Google earth and Google view have introduced a new way of understanding the world from a small to a large scale, allowing anyone, anywhere and anytime to collaborate in the construction of the urban representation by geotagging and geoblogging an urban experience. In the city, there are different systems of signs that collide, combine and hybridize setting up new languages and redesigning old modes of representation. This can be even more intense regarding the technological developments that not only modify how one represents the space, but completely changes what one calls space.

Knowledge Adventure Worlds est un site de réalité virtuelle sur le World Wide Web qui vous permet d’occuper un même espace virtuel commun, en temps réel avec plusieurs dizaines de participants situés partout dans le monde, et d’y converser avec ces personnes dont on peut voir les représentations évoluer sur l’écran. Pour entrer dans le jeu, il faut d’abord se choisir un costume virtuel parmi ceux qui sont exposés dans une garderobe virtuelle et le placer quelque part dans le décor commun. On peut faire jouer ce personnage sur cette scene, a la rencontre d’autres figures qui représentent les personnes avec qui on est en train de correspondre a ce moment précis. L’effet est hallucinant.

Keywords: nature, ecology, interventions, ecoactivism, Eco-Activist art

This presentation focuses on observations of an historical nature as well as considering emerging patterns in our individual and collective attitude to Nature, ecology and the environment. The dialectics also bring into relat the significance and future implications of a variety of initiatives by environmental art activists. Nature may be considered as the world of living organism and their environment; in a larger sense the shape of Nature can also be understood to include particular extents of space and time. These perspectives form a very specific thread that begins with the earliest depictions of Nature, the oldest theme in the history of art, and manifests today in the radical contributions of the Eco-Activist art movement. Contrary to popular belief, human interference with the environment dates back a long time, well before the advent of the modern period and its ‘new’ preoccupation with ecological harmony. While today the media as well as the general public seem pre-occupied with catastrophic predictions of global warming, – climate change has been a compelling factor for social collapse around the world for many centuries. Since the second half of the 20th century dramatic shifts have occurred in our attitudes and in the arts towards Nature. More specifically, over the past decades there has been a critical transition from passive representation to pro-active movements. Art today not only integrates new technologies and unconventional materials but it also blurs the boundaries between everyday life and art. Case studies will illustrate the new attitudes, to be compared with traditional approaches by indigenous people on different continents. The main goal of contemporary Eco-activist art is to re-Frame complex issues so that they maintain essential meaning while the process itself facilitates attitude changes to the environment – mainly through positive social innovation leading to social change.

This paper examines an analytic perspective on the nature of Art as network. It defines the nature networks as hypertextual information space described as semiotic meshes which consist of the emergence of self-similar alternates;, coded performances of interaction and immediacy. Art as network is defined as that which is the result of hypertextual coherency’s based on the dis-simulation of information.

Somniferous immersive actions of information immediacy and interactivity concede into networked like semantic meshes of infinite and simultaneous regress. Like the properties of hyper-dimensional mathematics matrices, semiotic meshes, associate and enact complex entanglements of information meanings through coded data behaviours. Entanglements, the result of such conditionals, of semantic meshes and mathematical operations are cognate Understood as hypertextuality, entanglements are compelled by dispersed connectivity and rates of accessibility subjugating semantic meshes into information entanglements as modes which shape the dynamic character of the internet and world wide web.

In that, “networked” information, can only be “present” as a dis-simulation of itself, that is, as a pretence to its own functionality, the performance of immediacy and interactivity guide network functionality as self-similar information modes understood as alternates. Self similarity of immediacy and interaction is not an equivalency in the perceived of subject but rather a hypertextual coded derivative embodied by the alternate, a dis-simulation of a networked appearance. The intention of design as purposed difference that make a difference is replaced by the alternates, identity of hypertextual performance. Subject is no longer bounded by its data and can no longer be re=purposed in the sense of appropriation. Re-configuration of networks via permutation, pandemonium, chaos give rise to emergent information behaviours that share tactical self-similar entanglement strategies. It is the alternates that expatiates on network hyper-dimensionality, warping the net’s entanglement meshes and commandeering strategic principals of substitution. Only the alternates is meaningful as search, navigation and speed.

Information entanglements of entertainment, news, business, advertising, porno, academics and personal communications are necessarily simulations of themselves and consequently the net itself. Every instance of hypertextual experience propagates a mimicked substitution of correlative and interactive distortion of network space rippled by mirrors of connectivity of self-similarity. Alternates, the casual catylist for hyper-dimensional expansion, replicate endlessly and unintentionally in an infinite regress of authorless histography of hyper-cues. Strategic and tactically implemented links shape network space as a depthless array of traversing interactions from alternate to alternate.

Modernist notions such as the persistence of meaning, casual relationships of information structures, association and context subsumed into a meaning that is derivative of coded behaviours of the purposed semantic units (what information does not what it means). Art as a self-similar, emergent hypertextual entanglements is Art as network.

Reach combines aesthetics, pattern exploration, and interactive qualities to create a new language for wearable expression. Areas of investigation include person-to-person communication, proximity, reaction to environments and weather stimulus. Reach is a part of a larger project platform, ‘IT&Textiles’ at the PLAY studio of the Interactive Institute in Gorg, Sweden. With this research project, we aim to join two different areas of design and technology development: information technology and textiles. On the one hand, we are looking for new applications and areas for textiles; on the other, we want to give information technology new clothes and expand the design space of everyday computational things.

Reach focuses on investigating new forms for wearable communication and expression through creating ‘wearable sketches’ or prototypes that test both material and interactive qualities. Through this iterative process we aim to incorporate our findings into new ‘smart’ clothing or textiles.

The wearable sketches include everyday worn items such as hats, bags, scarves, and skirts that react or interact with the environment or persons within the environment. In addition, they explore both additive and subtractive pattern-making processes where patterns grow or are revealed in response to changes in one’s personal, social or environmental space.
Material samples and prototypes include the use of cottons, woven linens, conductive materials, UV-sensitive textiles, thermo-chromic materials and electro-luminescent wire.

The Readers Project is an aesthetically oriented system of software entities designed to explore the culture of human reading. These entities, or ‘readers,’ navigate texts according to specific reading strategies based upon linguistic feature analysis and real-time probability models harvested from search engines. As such, they function as autonomous text generators, writing machines that become visible within and beyond the typographic dimension of the texts on which they operate. As the structures on which these readers operate are culturally and aesthetically implicated, they shed light on a range of institutional practices and present a critical perspective on what it means to engage with the literary in digital media, and with the linguistic commons as it is aggregated by corporate entities like Google and Facebook. Below we present the theory behind the Readers Project and the practical and aesthetic considerations that have guided its development, using as case studies the most recent set of public installations of the project. We conclude with a consideration of appropriation as a means of resisting the commodification of literary culture in the era of the ‘cloud’.

Realities in Transition (RiT) is a project co-funded by the European Union that aims to explore and support alternative XR productions and to experiment and promote new narratives and creative processes. RiT considers creative practices as the appropriate experimental context for reflecting on the challenges and opportunities of extending reality by digital means. Art and design provide the imaginative scope to assess the impact of technological developments in a social context and investigate radical alternatives.

This paper looks at how digital film is a cyborg text. By ‘cyborg’ I refer to Donna Haraway’s version of the social cyborg, found in “The Cyborg Manifesto”, which inherits similar characteristics as post-modern thought. This is important because more and more, we are moving into the cyborg era, in which we are all cyborgs. Digitalization is a key component in this process of transition because of the way it processes information – with speed, efficiency, and in great quantity, which gives it the ability to travel the entire globe easily, as compared to old media.

More importantly, digital technology, I believe, is an expression of the post-modernism because of the subjectivity that it inhabits simply by possessing a vast amount of potential to do almost anything with any information. The relationship between reality and subjectivity comes to the fore with the increased use of digital technology. While the world isolates fact from fiction rather stringently, the nature of digital technology itself potentially suggests that reality and subjectivity are very much interdependent on each other.

For this paper, fully digital films in particular are used as the case studies. This is because digital film is a near-complete product of the transition from analog media to digital technology. I choose film in particular because of its unique position of being a social marker as well as a technological marker in the world today. It is a medium that is useful and allows for broad analysis for my research.

In short, this paper is a textual analysis of how some of these fully digital films contain cyborgian characteristics of irony, hybridity and subjectivity, among others, and how these films are potentially relevant to measure the extent of a cyborg’s potential and to chart progress of the cyborg era that we currently live in.

Introduction
It is clear through experience that there is some significant relationship between media representations and cultural effects. Yet as practice leads theory through the sheer velocity of technological change, experience outstrips theoretical understanding of the relationship between the sign and the signified, the simulation and the social, the model and the real. For example, the international crisis provoked by the publication of a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed as an unexpected result of networked global media; or the pre-mediated violence of the ‘trenchcoat mafia’, where signification was an intentional precursor to real effects; or the trajectory of ‘celebrity’, where the ‘virtually real’ is designed, acted out, consumed and fed back in a co-evolving eco-system of signifiation. The proliferation of digital media means it is increasingly important to understand interaction per se, especially the interaction between systems of signification and the real. This paper argues that all representational systems have a performative capacity for transformation of the real and that signification is a dynamic intermediate realm between the real and the conceptual which can be best understood as a realm of invocation.

Mediated Cultural Systems
Within a ‘media’ culture, lived experience qualifies some significant relationship between representations and cultural effects. We can, for example, observe that successful advertising campaigns increase sales, for example, the ‘Coca Cola Oceana — a little wild’ campaign promoted their ‘rotational flavour’ strategy and resulted in a significant market share growth ‘in just four weeks’. This type of promotional activity is well accounted for in the post structuralist approach of Media & Cultural Studies, where effective analytical methodologies that are used to ‘deconstruct’ existing cultural ‘texts’ are also successful design methodologies for commercial success in industry. The same discourse also suggests that advertising campaigns create definable ‘pseudo communities’ where one shares a sense of identity anchored around one’s choice of products. Do you ‘subscribe’ to Coke or Pepsi; Volvo or Audi? Are you a ‘Marlborough Man’? Even an EEG machine can detect ones exposure to ‘putative branding moments within TV commercials’.

Of course, sometimes, unpredictable behaviours emerge, such as the unexpected adoption of Kangol headwear by members of the US hip hop community in the 1980s: Run DMC were wearing the same wool beret as English Boy Scouts. Umberto Eco used the term ‘aberrant decoding’ to describe such behaviour; where [an artefact] is ‘decoded’ by means of a different code from that used to ‘encode’ it. Stuart Hall suggested three positions for interpretation of cultural artefacts; ‘dominant’, ‘negotiated’ and ‘oppositional’. It is clear that free will plays a dynamic part in interpretive processes; we cannot define a deterministic ‘cause and effect’ between advertising and behaviour because human beings can make choices.

CCTV cameras have gained a certain ubiquity in the last decade – while they ceaselessly monitor us, we hardly seem to notice them. Biometrics and new voyeuristic forms of media entertainment are today much more in the public eye. Yet since the beginning of video art in the 1960’s there as been sustained interest in ideas of surveillance. Artists like Bruce Nauman, with his Live/Taped Video Corridor (1969-70) used CCTV cameras to transform the gallery into an uncanny space where the usual hierarchy of viewer and viewed is reversed. Today artists like Harun Farocki are still questioning the paradoxical nature of surveillance footage as an objective record of events and as fictions constructed in electronically simulated time/space.

This paper describes two of my own recent installation works using CCTV video projections. In The Mirrored Room (2004) a live video image of the gallery space is projected in stereoscopic 3D. Visitors are invited to don a pair of anaglyph glasses (the type worn in 3D movies) and to explore this playfully disconcerting 3D space. Depending on the viewer’s position in relation to the stereo cameras, their image will either step out in front of the screen surface or retreat back into the space of the image.

In Dis/appear (2005) a live video image of the exhibition space is processed in real time to incorporate a temporal delay. Time appears to stretch. Moving objects and people disappear from the projected image. Only things that are stationary are brought sharply into focus. Dis/appear was developed during a creative residency at the Banff Centre, Canada, in 2005. Video documentation shows how a live image of an ordinary corridor at the art centre was altered using real-time processing and how visitors interacted within this transformed environment.

Art deals with representations of objects and processes. Today, computers help to transform the artist’s mental representation into real artifacts or performances in a simple, interactive way. More advanced automation is used in some CAD systems and is investigated in architectural and industrial design. The state of the art in computer and related research enables experimentation with tools for “Artificial Art”. One possible playground for experimenting is “Cybergraphy”, a simulation of “psychic and graphic automatism”.

Intro

Could we create “artificial art” systems with an ability to generate visual artifacts of the same quality as humans? Many works of art have forms, with simple formal structure, shapes and appearance, where not only process of creation, but also motivation and inspiration is evident. Artists using computers in the Sixties and Seventies were able to imitate (and even some artists did these experiments) works of contemporary art. It is an interesting historical coincidence that in that, when machines were able to draw  synthesize simple patterns, similar to the some trends at the contemporary art (minimal art, neoconstructivism, kinetic and op art). Few artists at that time used computers, even when they would be helpful in their work. Potential ability of today machines is not only in synthesizing of artifacts, compatible with formal styles from the first half of this century, but also in imitating works of realistic descriptive or symbolic paintings, relief or sculptures from antique, middle age or 19th century – works which were attributed with an unified style, canonical forms and conventional themes (religious mythology, historical events, landscapes, still lives and portraits).

The “mission” of information processing machines in art is not to imitate what was done by humans, nevertheless the analyzing and simulating existing styles is the challenging topic for researchers. This paper analyses concepts and possibilities of creating artificial art systems, which include not only the automatic generation of particular (static and dynamic) objects, resulting from visual interpretation of abstract symbols and signs, generated by an intelligent program, but also able to build their cyberworld model (C) simulating learning, motivation, inspiration and evaluation of finished results. The following chapters will analyze conceptual model of relations between real (objective) world (R), their reflection in the subject’s brain (mental model M) and artifacts (A), created by humans or generated by machines. This model uses (for simplicity) Descartes’ divide paradigm between the thinking subject and the world of objects. In fact, all objects and phenomena, and representations become reality itself. In the following text the notation X-BY will denote transformation of representation X into  representation Y.

In 1966, Billy Klüver organized Nine Evenings of Theatre and Engineering, in which ten artists, collaborated with nearly thirty engineers. Evenings left a permanent impression on the artists who participated, and inspired many younger artists who were in the audience. It has become a classic event in the history of art and technology, yet few people could experience it first hand. Two of the nine works from this pioneering event, have been released on video with original documentary footage and interviews, but is this an accurate representation of the artwork? Ultimately, time-based art is nothing more or less than an engineered experience, a temporal environment with a beginning and an end between which exist the performance. Performance is essential to the practice of time-based art as a living form, but has been complicated by the unique challenges in interpretation and re-creation posed by works which incorporate technology. Is a document of an event as moving as the event itself? Do we have a responsibility not only maintain and conserve work that incorporates new technology, but also to ensure repeated performances? The responsibility for this decision lies not only with curators, but also with the artists themselves who should document their pieces consistently and thoroughly if they wish their work to remain performable. The issue of sustainability should be on the minds of creators and producers of works involving technology. Great art rests on the tradition of what comes before, if we only can experience this art through documentation, are we cheating future generations? The greatest driving force for sustainability is the demand for works to be performed and heard. I will examine the rewards and challenges of creating work with a technological component which can be viable well into the future.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a much more familiar topic to the public as a result of the several attempts at making a computer and a human compete in a specifically mental sport competition such as Go or chess. Moreover, since recently, issues pertaining to AI have become as important to artifact creation as issues relating to the concept or styles of paint are to painting. It is not that AI and art necessarily share goals, but much of the knowledge about AI and its methods can contribute to human creativity, especially art making. This paper reviews several recent works that examined these issues in the context of creativity and visual aesthetics. Throughout the literature review and case analysis, this paper investigates AI creativity from several examples and practically applies AI creativity to the visualization of music. This research work investigated the concept with the creation described below. The application visualizes the similarities and relationships of many audio chunks from a single audio track. From this visualization, it is possible to see how many audio events happened in one audio file. In addition, the chunks are heard as time series. Every audio file has different sonic events and feature distinctions. Each music file can have its own form and figure in this visualization. Ultimately, this research work brought together a collection of research results and practice experiences that together helped illuminate this significant new and expanding area. In particular, it is suggested that this paper points towards a much-needed critical language that can be used to describe, compare, and discuss AI in the context of creativity.

An exploration into how portable projections can serve to counterbalance the bias towards screen-based media experiences and how these projection devices can contribute to a more texture-based understanding of the relationships between environments and their constitutive actants. The constantly changing relationships between media and things enable the construction of a sense of place which moves and flows. To undertake this exploration, I use a three-fold method to analyse site-specific video walks (The Surface Inside, I-Walk, and (wh)ere land), draw on nascent thoughts derived from a series of workshops about flows, environments materials, and resonance, and engage with critical discussions about space, assemblages and materiality.

New art media are increasingly responsive, interactive, and multi-sensory in ways that approximate human sensory / perceptual behavior. Sensory apparatus have been incorporated in some art works to respond to the viewer’s behavior. Some works act to movements of the viewer, such as eye movements and even brain wave patterns.

MediaLabs net, created in November, 2016, from EAFIT (Medellin), Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogota) Universidad de Caldas (Manizales) and Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano (Bogota), launches the Narratón, a proposal of collective creation, which look for to generate multi-format contents that speak of the reconciliation from the most varied optics and perceptions.

The Colombian post-conflict calls for new ways of being told both from the narrative and from the technical and the Narratón will be the meeting point to relate it from sound, written, audiovisual, photographic and interactive contents among other formats.

Artist Statement

Red Light, a newly commissioned project by Redmond Entwistle, reflects on the indeterminate space that Belfast finds itself – in between the unfinished work of the peace-process, and the phantom promises of the market economy. The project brings together a gallery installation and three short films shown in cinemas around the city. Twelve previously unpublished photographs from Belfast Exposed’s archive are displayed in the main exhibition space at Belfast Exposed and integrated in a sound and light installation feeding live sound into the gallery from Belfast’s city centre. The images selected were taken in the early to mid-1990s and are photographs of large crowds, both Nationalist and Unionist, outside Belfast’s City Hall listening to speeches.

Current collaborative mapping projects, using locative media technologies, have often overlooked the conventions of the basemap as a site for reinvention. Although these projects imagine alternative organizations of urban space through the way it is digitally mapped, they remain bounded by datasets that reinforce a Cartesian and static notion of urban space. This paper questions the methodology of the basemap, as it is utilized in these projects, and proposes alternative tactics for mapping the city.

In this work, we visualized Korea’s traditional constellations within an interactive 3D star map we created of the Milky Way. Unlike virtual planetariums based on celestial star coordinates from Earth’s viewpoint, our visualization enables people to experience and interact with Korean constellation forms and its constituent stars in 3D space, and appreciate their historical, cultural significance from a contemporary perspective. Our interactive constellation map is based on the most detailed and accurate information on the stars in our Galaxy to date, and combines our expanding scientific understanding of the stars with contextual information reflecting Korea’s unique astronomical culture and heritage.

Keywords: tachistoscope, flash frame, subliminal, perceptual psychology, digital Easter egg, mind control

The subliminal flash has had a long and colourful history in perceptual psychology, from its origins in WWII military and law enforcement training, through use as a tool for market research and by structuralist filmmakers of the 1960s, to more dubious associations with mind control. In more recent times the subliminal flash has been used in television advertising as a gimmick rather than a surreptitious form of brainwashing – though the practice is still officially banned in Australia. This paper explores the history of the tachistocopic flash as a methodology both cultural and technological, and more recently as an outlawed practice in commercial screen culture.

Presented as artists submissions for the Unesco Digiarts Award 2007 and Web Biennial 2007 (to hear piece with sound please visit link in internet explorer).

The concept for this project was for our group to come up with a digital piece on “art, ecology and the politics of change” using computers, digital cameras and sound design. I conceived the whole 5 weeks that we would have to work on the project as a constant give and take between myself and the other students, collaboration with positive results, respect for each other even if ideas and values were different and a final piece of work that truly has impact and is new. Not only have the other young artists learnt from me during this time but I have learnt a lot about a generation that has seen much more violence and blatant disrespect of the other in close surroundings and on media. I had to play the part of editor as there was so much material that we came up with that it was impossible to include everything but the attempt has been not to exclude anyone and show each persons style and message in the context of one piece about the city of Karachi, Pakistan.

These days the city of Karachi is receiving a lot of funding from the government to give it a facelift, but a lot of core issues have been ignored like adequate water, sanitation, pedestrian crossings and project planning. In a city of over 20 million people this means a lot of serious suffering. In addition to this Karachi is often targeted by unknown bombers and the sounds of explosions and sirens are always taken with a sigh of yet another tragedy. How do young people growing up in this kind of environment react when they are asked to represent their city first in words then in images and sounds? How do I work as a mentor using online portals, blogging and emails, to be always accessible to my students and providing them with a challenging and educational workshop?

Reflective remediation is an important component of contemporary media theory, which emphasises the creative efforts of avant-garde artists and designers to shape the evolution of media in a critical way. However, the critical capacity of reflective remediations may be compromised by commercial dynamics or conventions, such as the celebration of ‘reflectivity for reflectivity’s sake’ that aims to construct an auratic experience for viewers. Because reflectivity is a critical media practice, it is vital to investigate reflective remediations in tandem with the critical intensions and creative visions of artists and designers. We investigate the critical media practices of the Bauhaus master, László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) who explored the concept of ‘productive creativity’, according to which creative experimentation should lead to design knowledge, redefining the relationship between what is known and unknown. We then scrutinise the artistic practice of the Icelandic-Danish contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson (b.1967), who contextualises reflectivity as an embodied experience, in terms of what he calls ‘frictional encounters’. When applied together, the two concepts enhance our understanding of reflective remediation as a critical design strategy.

This paper reviews a virtual exhibition titled reflexive-vr.com. Initially planned as a public exhibition featuring cinematic VR works by media artist/filmmaker Sojung Bahng, however, due to restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, a different curatorial approach was needed in order to reconfigure the original installation plan into an interactive online viewing experience. This reflective analysis explores the design strategies involved in this case and how the viewing experiences associated with the artistic intent of three VR artworks (Floating Walk, Anonymous and Sleeping Eyes) was supported by the exhibition’s translation from a gallery-based installation into an online virtual environment. We will address technical specifications, consider curatorial strategy and implications to narrative flow and phenomenological experience, and – while acknowledging present limitations – raise the potential for online exhibition formats to serve as a distinctive presentational mode in their own right for engaging viewers with VR works.

Keywords: Coral Reefs, Code, Interaction Design, Drones, Tangible User Interface Design, Interactive Installation, Climate Change, Marine Biology, Transdisciplinary Collaboration

Coral Reefs are filled with infinite and unique forms, variations of shape, and complex phenomena and processes. These forms and processes have inspired both scientists to document, archive and collate, and designers to reimagine these intricate ecosystems in their creative design work. In this paper, we explore how designers integrate scientific data from coral reefs, by examining two projects. Firstly, we discuss Reefs on the Edge, an interactive installation using scientific data from a marine biologist to visualize the effects of ocean warming on corals reef ecosystems. Secondly, we discuss Coral Colonies, an installation that adapts mathematical codes of coral geometries to create biomimetic coral prototypes. We conclude how design and science use visual data taken from biological processes to help raise awareness and promote biodiversity, sustainability and the survival of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR).

Keywords: Free Libre Software, Open Source Software, New Art Practices, Art Institution, Commons-Based Peer-Production

Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is an encompassing term, which refers to the licenses associated with making the source code that is the instructions and language per se, which define how software works and is made available for others to read, modify and share.
Providing a brief history of FLOSS, this paper presents a hypothetical situation, whereby elements of FLOSS are applied to reimagining institutional change within the context of a contemporary arts venue and organisation. Framed as an artistic intervention, the art institution’s structure and its existing forms are considered as the living materiality of the practice. The paper presents a set of processes, defined as ‘Acts of Transition’, whereby the values of Free Libre and Open Source are collaboratively explored with the institution’s staff and executed together, across and within the organisation’s teams. As ‘Acts of Transition’ they aim to support more commons-based peer-production processes, by reimagining the arts organisation as an open source civic organisation.

Jeong Seon (1676-1759, 뇊꫕) was one of the most innovative painters in the history of Korean painting. Unlike the conventional art style of the early Joseon period, his attempts to directly observe nature and capture them in his paintings created a new art movement known as ‘true-view’ (jingyeong 덹陲). Despite the name, Jeong Seon’s style was not the only result of realistic observation but also a considerable modification of subjects of paintings.

This study begins with reconstructing one of his landscape paintings, Dosando (Painting of Dosan Confucian Academy, also known as Dosanseowondo) in immersive virtual space to verify his distinctive implementation of observation skills. Using multiple virtual cameras, our application introduces users to how the painter incorporated natural scenery from many vantage points, not just one, sometimes creating more revealing, but physically impossible compositions. The goal of this project is to reveal Jeong Seon’s subtle blending of real topographies and anamorphic distortions which normally is used in modern computer graphics for movies and game making.

Social networks have become not only an online artifact used by millions, but also a means of describing real-life interactions between people. Humans as nodes, and social connections between people as edges; the metaphor is the graph or network, inheriting all of the abstracting nature of this mathematical formalism. Even within science and technology studies, and specifically actor-network theory, is there use of the network metaphor to describe complicated assemblages of human and non-human actors (Latour 1987; Star 1991; Latour 2005). Yet this reappropriation of a computer science term is not without its problems, specifically the way in difference is erased when a human is transformed into a node that is simply like all the others. The network itself is political, as the choice of who is represented is vitally important and too-often ignored.

This paper begins as a critique of network views of reality, starting with the view that to completely represent the world through a graph is an impossible task. I then move into a consideration of actor-network theory, and the ways in which this expansion of the network to include non-human actors is still problematic as a result of the need to make choices of who or what to represent. These joint critiques enable me to see human and non-human assemblages as fluid and ever-forming and -breaking. I end with a description of a present project of mine that uses mobile phones as participants in these ad-hoc associations as carriers of data. The mobile phone, via temporary Bluetooth connections, acts to pass messages from one person to another, without a top-down topology, bypassing centralized networks and enabling activists to continue communications surreptitiously, even when access to other technologies, such as the Internet or phone network, are disabled or destroyed (see Scott, Hui, Crowcroft, and Diot (2006) as one example). Fluidity becomes an asset with the software designed to take advantage of the movement of people for political purposes.

This panel is organized to present three case studies that attempt to reinvent the Phonography as a technology for writing sound. In doing so, we would like to examine the validity of applying the concept of transduction to media art in order to clarify the aesthetic possibility of the nonhuman from the perspective of media archeology.

The first case is a historical survey which makes the original invention of the Phonograph by Thomas A. Edison reconsidered. Relying on the recent observations, we focus on the fact that this achievement of media history was a result of the materialistic understanding of the human organs. The second one presents an artistic practice of media archaeology inspired by the material process of the phonograph. In this work, Mary Had a Little Lamb (2019), Jo and DeMarinis (re-)produced the acoustic phenomenon by attuning the basic printing technology to electromagnetic principles. At last, Chromatophony (2019) is an attempt to redefine the phonograph through living materials, chromatophores of squids. In this work, we could find the phonography reinvented as a nonhuman transduction of audio-visual devices.

Through these cases, it would be clear that the attunement plays an integral role in making transduction sensible, and that the reinvention of Phonography can be effective in demonstrating it in concrete ways. As a result, this panel will reveal that the material process of sound art would be a theoretical contribution for exploring the further possibilities of media art.

This short paper accounts for a case study of artistic research revolving around Cyprus’ colonial past and inspired by present day decolonial affairs. The endeavour pivots on a hybrid AI system, trained on text from colonial handbooks of Cyprus (originally published when Cyprus was still part of the British Empire) and employing a custom image dataset meant to reflect this colonial view of the island. AI then generates new colonial ‘gazes’ of Cyprus upon demand. Output text and imagery is used in a number of physical and digital artefacts and events that are presented herein.

The ancient traditions and knowledge of all cultures have integrated the night sky with the phenomena of stars, constellations and cosmic events to give people a sense of meaning and belonging in their world and their cosmos. Astronomical observation was used to calculate the timing of customs, ceremonies, and agriculture, today some of these practices are still used by indigenous peoples. The writer A. Roger Ekirch in his book A History of Nighttime, reminds us that in pre-industrial Europe, people could travel at night by moonlight and the light of the Milky Way, which was present with over two thousand visible stars. Today, people travel far away from cities into the deserts in the UAE, Australia and remote regions of the world to view the galaxy. Thus the association of the city and starlight is rapidly fading from the collective memory, whereby the daily observable presence of starlight has gradually disappeared, due to increasing light and air pollution. This paper discusses ancient practices, the use of public space and starlight. Also the work of emerging international environmental movements, such as the Starlight Initiative and the Dark Sky Association which aim to bring global attention to the rights of humankind to observe starlight and preserve the cultural, scientific and environmental rights for future generations. In conclusion this presentation will include an imaginary proposal remapping the ephemeral night sky into the city of Dubai. This will include historic and contemporary maps of the city/region, star maps, constellations and traditional knowledge used as references to create a 3D installation of laser cut acrylic, acrylic rods, paper and a series of computer prints to propose a series of interventions in public space and city planning to reintegrate the presence of starlight into the city.

Remixer le Flying Words Project is a digital art installation crossing the creative sign poetry of Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner with a Virtual Reality (VR) experience. We present here how we are designing the first version of the artwork investigating the idea of symbiosis. It appears to be the central pivot of this project mixing sign-art and digital art, video of the performers with visuals generated by performance-capture and point clouds in real time. Instead of adopting the idea of translating the poem in VR, we have created a passage from one art to the other as a fusion in order to create synesthesia.

The method adopted is a “bricolage” between several scientific tools based on DIY practice, biomechanics, movement quality analysis, and on human perception, body referential to create a synesthetic experience. Analyzing the ways we address the first version of the VR experience reveals how the arts practice were crossed, the technologies were merged and the different
backgrounds of the team members got synchronized.

Disruption of my own traditional photographic practice has been an essential part of my process in distilling imaging of the land and our relationship with it. As images of pristine landscapes devoid of humans continue to be used to sell conservation ideas and cars, I have wondered about the dichotomy that I am a part of perpetuating. What are the actual layers of meaning which overlap in the land, and how do we honestly reflect our own nature in it?
In arctic forays and the subarctic where I live, stereoscopy has become an essential colour on my palette to disrupt two dimensionality of my photo representation. The z axis is our sense of presence. The emotive and visceral experience the added dimension brings us compelled expanding the still image to moving tableaux of the remote landscapes we are a part of but which most of us never see first hand. In large scale video installation, my photography becomes the slow food of cinema, as viewers would spend many minutes observing nothing more than the grass swaying in the wind on an arctic outcrop.
However the ultimate disruption for me has been to dissolve the separation of subject from object. I am confounded by the duality with nature that we perpetuate in images of it… the image perpetuates our own conditioning of separateness… the medium is an artifact, long removed from the cave walls of our ancestors where our canvas was part of the earth.
Or is it so removed? What are technology and creativity but our very own nature, and hence inseparable from the rest of nature? Why is our technological nature so at odds with the rest of the living community? Is it that our perception is orphaned, that we no longer see the wall of the cave connected to the mountain and the river…as though our consciousness has not caught up to the means of perception we have crafted?
To disrupt this separateness, I have been inspired to reflect the viewer in the landscapes so distant yet so inseparable from us. Working with my friend Baptiste Bohelay, fellow artist and highly skilled and playful interactive designer, we let the viewer find themselves in the stereoscopic imagery of remote landscapes: particles play in the land with our movement in the gallery space. The land is no longer an other, but a place which symbolically we are a part of. And in that symbolism, perhaps we begin to fathom the literalness of our relationship, as every calorie of energy, every metal, every plastic, comes from these distant places. These places are in fact now all around us, in the materials of our manufactured world.
I am compelled to disrupt how we see the land and ourselves in it, to have a deeper and more vigorous perception of human nature, the rest of nature, and the relationship between us.

Intro: RENATI
RENATI is an acronym for recontextualizing narratives for tangible interfaces. It serves as an umbrella term for our artistic experiments within a hybrid environment that uses various forms of narratives, such as oral narratives, diaries, essays, screenplays, and non-generative and immersive art with sensing technologies, to create tangible narratives. The roots of RENATI are in oral storytelling and filmmaking. We have been inspired by the growing interest in oral narratives and their convergence with digital technologies such as the growing use of mobile phones, the significant number of oral narratives housed in public and grassroots community institutions, the use of digital technologies by ministers of mega churches worldwide, and the weaving of spoken words into various forms of digital media by international hiphop artists. The explosion of documentary films, both commercial and non-commercial, and the use of digital cameras as tools for activism have also inspired us.

RENATI connects one of the oldest forms of communication, the spoken word, with one of the newest forms of communication, tangible interface technologies. It is part of a tradition of placing stories into physical embodiments to explore the sensing and manipulation skills that are a natural part of human interactions. Our artistic motivations grew out of our cultural and political motivations that include using technology to give voice and visibility to marginalized, submerged and suppressed voices. RENATI is designed to have participants engage with stories (and thereby points of view) that they might not consider if presented in more traditional artifacts such as text, broadcast television or long-form cinema.

To create tangible narratives, we interconnect three environments: narratives (personal experience narratives, creative stories), digital narratives (digitally recorded narratives), physical narratives (installation art). While tangible narratives can be considered a branch of interactive installation, adding the ability to access information specifically through tangible manipulation defines a new category. Generally, this type of work cannot exist if the participant does not “do” something with something, i.e. it is through some form of touching of a physical artifact that participants access or construct information.

Keywords: visualization, computer art, media archaeology, design, collaboration, experience.
The development of critical discourse and experimental practices in computer art of the 1960s and 1970s was informed by new forms of collaboration between artists, scientists and institutions. This paper acknowledges the debt owed by modern visualization practice to developments of this period but suggests that much of the artistic and philosophical legacy has been largely ignored in this area. It is argued that criticality in visualization practice should be informed by a number of aspects of 1960s and 1970s computer art practice, including implications for collaborative practice, thinking about mediation and the integration of aesthetics with life experience.

As basic science advances and new technologies become available, artists grapple with their meaning and impact.
Some of these are:

1. We are in the midst of a movement from virtual to embodied
2. We are trying to understand the present using the paradigms of the past
3. We live with an increasing mediation of the senses
4. With enhanced knowledge of matter at the smallest scale, we can see that some patterns are universal
5. Context and intention change our understanding of images
6. To whom will technological advances belong?

Virtual to embodied
One issue facing us is that of simulation vs. embodiment. The past decade was centrally involved with creating experiences that resemble reality, or that create a new (virtual) reality. The present decade’s concerns have shifted to manipulating reality itself and to understanding the impact that our powerful technologies and scientific advances have on the real world.

Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent rabbit “Alba” is a wellknown example of commenting on genetic engineering by engaging in it rather than representing it. Created in 2000, GFP Bunny “comprises the creation of a green fluorescent rabbit, the public dialogue generated by the project, and the social integration of the rabbit. GFP stands for green fluorescent protein. Transgenic art …is a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism, to create unique living beings.”

I would compare the work by Kac to The “Judgment” series by Daniel Lee.” Although the work wasn’t created with genetic manipulation in mind, it has been included in group shows like “Gene(sis)” (organized by the Henry Art Gallery in 1997) along with work that is clearly genomic because of the powerful and disturbing references to the combination of human and animal characteristics.

Keywords: Non-Fiction, Interactive, Transmedia, Colombia, Peace Process, Documentary, Journalism, Education, Museums

Over the years the emergence of interactive digital communication has added new narrative structures to the audiovisual media ecosystem. Dividing this ecosystem into fictional and non- fictional narratives, the evolution of the representation of reality has led to a new area called “interactive non-fiction”. Colombia is an interesting example of the use of this new area for two main reasons: it is one of the South American countries that has invested most in the development of digital projects in recent years, and it is now in a historical moment in which it is deciding which direction peace could take. This article would like to promote debate and discussion on how producers and audience could benefit from the non-fiction interactive formats and genres to promote peace in Colombia in the forthcoming years. To explore the potential of certain narratives combining with interactive media and the peace process, we will focus on four main forms of non- fiction according to their importance and presence in the current media ecology: documentary, journalism, educational formats and museology.

From a collective discussion around the symbiotic thought of Lynn Margulis, the artists and researchers gathered in this roundtable discussion will exchange on their respective practices, all of which, in a singular way, intervene in the relationship between the environment, the living and the relationship to symbiosis. Whether it is a question of operating modes, artistic processes and sensitive manifestations (between images and moving forms) how do artists establish dialogues with the living? How do they observe it, how do they grasp it and for what purposes?

Art Orienté Objet is an artistic duo created in 1991 in Paris, France, composed of Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin. Marion Laval-Jeantet is also Professor at the University Paris 1 and member of research lab (Institut ACTE). Last exhibitions : Zoosphères, Château du Domaine départemental de Chamarande (2023), Art Orienté Objet, L’air frais de la nuit est un soulagement (20 juin – 29 septembre 2023), Lourdes, France.

In this artist talk, I present my own artwork that exploits and subverts social media to make a comment on its commodifying and disembodying effects. Through inverting typical uses, the under-utilized artistic and relational potential of these platforms can be capitalized upon, and social media platforms can be repurposed for creative expression.

Digital media have shaped the way that we collectively relate to ourselves, to others and our world. Social media has grown to be a leading form of contemporary communication, and the personas that we present on these platforms have become a significant form of personal expression. In our use of social media, the users are the product, and these platforms exploit our use daily. The business models of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Google, etc. rely on directly commodifying our interpersonal relations. Although social media have become integrated into the fabric of our daily lives, the creative and connective potential of the platforms are under-utilized. Moreover, many do not realize their important role in shaping networks and how they can subvert the power structures that exist therein.

Within this artist talk, I present a series of my digital media artworks that point to the constructedness of the technology used to create it. Throughout my own practice, I intend to exploit digital media and social media platforms to make a comment on their commodifying and disembodying effects. Through subverting typical uses, and inverting the social context and content of these platforms, my artwork draws the viewer to reconsider their use of the technology and new ways of interaction can be explored. With this understanding, we can repurpose social media platforms for creative self-expression that benefits society.

Human + A.i. creative processes entail questions concerning sentience. In order to explore and evoke these questions, the artist will present one completed artistic work: ReRites, an artificial intelligence poetry project completed in 2019. And a proposed work ReLobo, a reinforcement learning micro-robot-arm programmed with the purpose of emulating affective curiosity.

During the exhibition and research project “Calculating Control: (Net)art and Cybernetics” the Zentrum für Netzkunst had designed and built a small archive on the website of the project. Working from the site-specific history of Haus der Statistik (a building that operated as the Central Administrative Headquarters for Statistics in the German Democratic Republic), Calculating Control explored the impact of cybernetics on artistic and social practices, networks, and technology. The online archive, which is still accessible and updatable, includes different resources and references related to the topics of cybernetics, GDR, as well as artworks and specifically net art. By “misusing” the open-source software for bibliographies “Zotero” the “Calculating Control” archive offers a structure that allows making new links between net art and other historical artifacts and references.

Even though it might seem that such an archive doesn’t fulfill its function as an agency for a long-term preservation of net art, it is not an “empty” archive. Rather than being focused on a singular medium or an art period, this research-based archive introduces one possible narrative, connecting net art to local history and supporting its circulation in the collective online memory. The lightning talk looks at the role of the research-based archive in the context of canonization of net art on the internet.

ReSilence is a project that is part of the S+T+ARTS initiative of the European Commission to foster alliances between science, technology, and the arts, centred on human needs and values. More specifically, ReSilence aims to re position the role of silence and that of sound by building technologies in the context of an innovative methodology, in order to shape in a novel way urban environments and soundscapes.

RESILIENT TERRA is a proposal for a collective curatorial research project looking for alliances. It aims at politicizing the notion of geoengineering by bringing together a variety of artistic practices and interdisciplinary approaches that explore geoengineering within and beyond the neoliberal context.  Through a relational methodology, RESILIENT TERRA’s objective is that of engaging the wider audience with concepts of geoengineering and climate justice, in order to create a space for socio-political debate that encourages transformation and speculative thinking on multiple ‘larger’ futures.

The Community Arts sector in Australia has a history of resistance. It has challenged hegemonic culture through facilitating grassroots creative production, contesting notions of artistic processes, and the role of the artist in society. This paper examines this penchant for resistance through the lens of contemporary digital culture, to establish that the sector is continuing to challenge dominant forms of cultural control. It then proposes that this enthusiasm and activity lacks ethical direction, describing it as feral to encompass the potential of current practices, while highlighting how a level of taming is needed in order to develop ethical approaches.

The Wikileaks founder addressed conference delegates and a small public audience via live video link from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Julian Assange has a unique insight into the futility, or otherwise, of resisting the incursion of the digital into every aspect of our lives. In systems under constant and multiple pressures there will always be leaks. Wikileaks exists because of this, embracing the digital, exploiting the ubiquity of digitised information: Resistance is Fertile. Artists creatively investigate the possibilities and push the limits of new technologies, helping us to imaginatively experience and critically reflect on their implications for life in the 21st century.

The ISEA2013 program explores the ways art and new technologies are used in the service of power, protest and resistance.

Recent critiques of electronic 2D art have proclaim the irrelevance of the still image. Yet, for a culture submerged in a ceaseless flow of images, a single image capturing a significant moment or idea can have great resonance. In an age of mass media, as images seek an audience, the still image trapped within the white walls of the art gallery can be released to seek its wider audience. This contextualization of the still image, and its liberation from the gallery is developed via models of the wall poster, billboard, broadside and public art commission.

Intro

In this presentation, I want to propose a recontextualization of 2D digital art, and open the question of how digital still images can be removed from the confines of easel painting and taken out into the streets to seek a wider audience.

It’s a common place of critiques of 2D digital art, that 2D images are irrelevant. What’s usually implied in this analysis is, that interactive or moving images represent the new ground, and still images – regardless of content or intent – do not. This view was reiterated at a recent SIGGRAPH panel, ‘Museum Without Walls’, in which the moderator, after giving a capsule review of visual imagery and spatial engagement beginning with the cave paintings, ended with an image by a famous artist which he referred to as “still just a painting”. It ’s come to the point that some interactive and multi media artists don’t even want their work hung next to 2D art, and there’s also always the struggle over the lights -on or lights-off installation. This is a narrow and dismissive perspective and one, which is weakened by the lack o f a substantial critique of interactive and media art. Yet it is true that the time is long past for very disparate work to be shown together simply because it’s all 2D and digital. There are too many divergent approaches  and processes. The result does often appear chaotic and unformed. The common origins of digital art are not enough of a factor to mitigate significant differences of context and content. Work seen under these conditions represents neither the individual artists nor the domain of 2D art very well. So what’s a 2D artist to do? For those of us who respond to still images, there are some possible directions. Looking at the work itself (as opposed to the curatorial issues of theme shows or exhibition installation), several approaches emerge: to extend still images into an environmental context through wall art, sited pieces and public commissions; to use the “publishing metaphor” of broadsides and artists books; and to develop a more “active” still image through group collaborations and installation. I’d like to focus primarily on the first of these approaches, that of extending still images into the environment.

Sound the way we listen is subject to so many filtrations. As I speak to you now, you may be focusing on the content of what I am saying. The words. But also, you are contextualizing those words within a host of other signifiers in the intonation of my voice, the space of the electro-acoustic apparatus and the room itself… all of which conforms to what you have come to expect from a conference hall. It is this material conjunction between meaning or content and the productive context that I would like to explore in this paper, in relation to new media production as it pertains to sound design in particular. We keep hearing about content as though it is something that can just be poured into the awaiting technological vessel. The question of content to my ear however, also begs the question of the container This split is just another manifestation of an old divide: hardware/software, technology/creativity etc. Sound, as a resonance of matter in space tends to resist this division between content and container. If I put the sound of my voice into this glass – it becomes a different sound. Digital audio storage and manipulation and the advent of desktop audio production have opened the way for a convergence in the sites of media production and of the formats of distribution – but on the whole, at least as far as audio production is concerned, this has not led to convergent forms of practice. Whilst it is commonly acknowledged that sound plays a crucial role in multimedia design it has received relatively little discussion in the plethora of books and articles in magazines etc. that have been spewed  forth to show us ”How To“. I would like to examine some of the practices currently employed in new media for both sound design and the conceptual production of which it is part, and raise some questions about the baggage those practices carry as well as the baggage that we are dealing with in bringing sound to the screen at all.

Since the emergence of computer technologies the notion of „location“ has been expanded. From the beginning, digital media were seen as world‑generating technologies being able to create alternative forms of “locations“, e.g. virtual environments. Currently, tendencies like ubiquitous computing and wearable computing point to a further dimension of “location”: hybrid spaces in which moving, multi‑sensing, and interacting may reach new levels of intensity. This causes a paradigm shift in digital technologies, because the simulation of virtual spaces is substituted by experiments with interaction and digitally expanded perception in physical space. Thus, mobile and pervasive technologies will change the future design and artistic opportunities of Human‑Computer Interfaces. Furthermore, their extended responsiveness will modify the individual’s perception and notion of the self.

In our own work we hope to get more insight into the consequences of sensory and feedback technologies for the generation of specific atmospheres, which will decisively influence the way people interact and perceive (and vice versa), This topic is currently discussed within media aesthetic theory, e.g. by Brian Massumi and Mark B.N. Hansen, who refer to phenomonological approaches which try to describe and explain processes of bodily affection. It has to be discussed if these approaches really cover all aspects which have to be considered when thinking of a future with (nearly) ‘interfaceless’ technologies.

The presentations in this panel will address different aspects of the immediate experience of technical environments:

• What are the characteristics of hybrid spaces and how can they intuitively be experienced despite the use of high tech applications? And what kind of technologies, artistic expressions, design principles and dramaturgic strategies are adequate to reach this level of intuitive and immediate experience in concrete locations?
• What is the role of multisensory design in this context? Do we need to transcend the audiovisual sphere and include kinaesthetic, olfactory and tactile experiences to create an immediate atmospheric experience? And what are the consequences for human proprioception when sensor‑based technologies like biofeedback establish an ‚immediate‘ relation of the human to the environment, which is mainly based on somatic processes (like heart beat and breath), and which can only partly be intentionally influenced?
• How can scientific qualitative and quantitative data be interpreted and designed aesthetically without being treated in a complete arbitrary way? This question leads directly into the center of the discussion on the relation between art and scientific research and the ways of data design (data visualization, data sonification etc.).

The Immersive Arcade was a retrospective of UK-based immersive content, showcased during 2021. The project was not set up to archive the content, but to restore it for new audiences. The production team made several observations about the lifecycle of immersive content and what types of considerations regarding the identity of a piece of content emerge in a restoration process. They are documented in this short paper with the aim to inform work on future retrospectives and similar archiving and restoration projects.

Oliver Grau has recently argued that “it is important that we continue to take media art into the mainstream of art history”. This paper will argue that media art must also be viewed through the discipline of science history in order to “consider other models for relationships to technology”. This is particularly important in the case of the cybernetic art of the 1960s. Science historians have insisted that cybernetics is “essential to the history of our present”; but grasping the massive impact of cybernetics on scientific thinking in its heyday requires an imaginative effort because cybernetics has all but disappeared from the contemporary scientific discourse. Cybernetics was the theory of the control technologies which unleashed the Information Revolution and was a fundamental challenge to the methodology and disciplinary hierarchies of contemporary science.

Emerging from wartime research into artillery control; signal transmission; and brain physiology, cybernetics asserted an “essential unity of the set of problems centering about communication, control, and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or living tissue”.  -Wiener

Keywords: IMEB, Electroacoustic Music, Digital Humanities, Data Visualization, Exploratory Programming, Multi-Agent Systems, Machine Learning, Live Visualization

Bourges’s Institute of Electroacoustic Music (IMEB) has been created in France in 1970 by the composers Françoise Barrière and Christian Clozier who directed it until its closure in 2011. During its forty years of existence this institute has been heavily involved in the development of electroacoustic music both on national and international scales. Its activities have included among others musical research, development of music-making software, creation of instruments and organization of music festivals and competitions. From 2005 to 2011, this Institute has donated all of its archives to the National Library of France that is to say a complete set of multimedia data about the history of electroacoustic music and its worldwide diffusion. In this paper will be describing the work that has been done to retrace the story of the international competitions organized by the IMEB using interactive data visualizations and multi-agent systems (MAS) that have been modeled based on the study of living organisms’ behavior. The use of MAS will be presented as a way of exploring wide set of cultural data and retrieve new information stored in a database from the study of click streams.

Media art poses a multitude of specific challenges for archiving, e.g., the weak interconnection of thematically similar archives. Furthermore, digital tools developed for image analysis as well as art research usually fall short when confronted with media art. LeFo and ImDaLi, the projects presented here, intend to address these issues in their research.

Keywords: Geolocation, Augmented Reality, Infrastructures, Data Center, Sonic Environment, 3D Audio, Mobile Phone, Web Application

Data centers are a necessary element of contemporary global network infrastructure, but are generally overlooked due to obscurity or more often indifference by the general public. This project aims to elevate the importance of data centers within urban landscapes by providing them with unique sound signatures. To achieve such a goal, a web based application has been developed that takes a user’s location and orientation and creates a synthesized three-dimensional audio space based on that user’s spatial relation to nearby data centers. This enables a user to passively listen to an audio representation of the combined virtual activity within a given region. Additionally, users can actively seek out individual data centers using their emanations as a navigation tool.

Dodie Bellamy’s essay “The Feminist Writers Guild”, describes her experience with a short-lived activist group in relation to Julia Kristeva’s concept of “tiny revolts”. Bellamy writes: “Need the success of a political group be measured by its impact on a larger social order? What about the ways it transforms the lives and psyches of its members –their tiny revolts—are they not profound?”. Revolt she said, revolt.

For this paper I will take these this idea of ‘tiny revolts’ as a starting point to address, mongrelised revolting data within some of my recent video works. I will discuss recent work that addresses amongst other things, ideas relating to the feminine écriture, pleasure, monstrosities and madness within practices of art writing and video installation. Anger is of little importance. The presentation also draws on Deleuzian concepts of assemblage and multiplicitous attractions and influences –inflections through my video works. Assembled edits and cuts within my recent video work and writing are rendered both exact and invisible, inciting both problems and provocations and ‘tiny revolts’. Identity is dead. Processes of performative assemblage, internet searches and Youtube browsing are constants through recent work; as a both a critical engagement with postproduction and the mediated. These processes, also act as a critique of Big data and the inaccuracies of decision making.

In this paper I links discuss links between ‘creativity’ and trends/un-trends, of the internet and the mediated in the fabric of everyday lives. Before the internet, in an interview, televised after his death, ‘L’Abécédaire’, Gilles Deleuze discusses with Claire Parnet the crucial link between creativity, the very possibility of thinking, and animality, through the practice of être aux aguets (being on the lookout) for rencontres (encounters). The best of Deleuze can be found on the Internet for sure. I discuss ‘L’Abécédaire’ (1988–1989) and practices working and thinking through performative assemblage(s) of browser doings, apparatus or equipment structuring’s, rhizomatic unfolding’s, nonhuman historiographies, and philosophies. I introduce as a response to these ideas, the artworks ‘A as in Animal’ and ‘Enflamma Diagra’ these works collide reverse path tracings; dissonance, discordance and difference, bringing into contact amongst other things; keeping fit with Donna Haraway, Derrida, blue and green screen special effects and spy mission project ‘Acoustic Kitty’. Emergent indeterminate properties pervade both sound and image. This approach articulates activities of tiny revolt, accumulation, arrangement and movement that call to attention processes, which are improvisatory as, expanded critical and aesthetic tactics.

Through this process less, emphasis is placed on observation, representation and subjectivity. Articulations stutter between different intensities, intensities that include, over-saturation of colour, shimmering substances, nondiegetic sound and trans-disciplinary couplings that resonant a rubbing up with the non human. The paper discusses how these video works are shaped conceptually by site and the context of peripheral indifferences. Software pre-sets and preconditions are cut with modalities of classification and taxonomy that flicker with continued involuntary repetition of sounds and image. ‘The (female) cat breaks the fruit bowl the cubists spend their time hoping to glue it back together’.

Boyadjiev’s work is in an exhibition organised by FACT for ISEA98Revolution and hosted by the Department of Fine Arts.

In Revolution for All, Luchezar parodies the seductiveness of power in his computer-controlled video installation. Starting with an over-exposed projection of a famous photograph of Lenin orating to the revolutionary masses of St. Petersburg, during the October Revolution of 1917/18, the piece captures anonymous faces entering the exhibition space, with visitor 666 finally replacing Lenin himself.

Revolution Refridge is a low-cost, energy efficient refrigerator that responds to local cultural, environmental and economic conditions in North-East Syria, developed through a cooperation between artists and engineers. Drawing from the Rojava Revolution principles of self-reliance, communalist anti-capitalism and ecology, the fridge takes its starting point from sci-fi imaginaries that are rooted in local and regional traditions. The project is part of the Rojava Center for Democratic Technologie, based at the University of Rojava in Qamishlo, Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.

The history of digital art goes back over forty years with the creative experimentation of artists at research centers, such as Bell Labs and MIT, and Billy Kluver and Robert Rauschenberg’s “Experiments in Art and Technology” and “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” in 1966. While there were a few seminal exhibitions, “Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer and the Arts” at the ICA in London and “Machine As Seen At the End of the Mechanical Age” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, both in 1968, digital art has largely gone unnoticed by the established art community until relatively recently. The emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990’s allowed artists and their audience to communicate globally, as well as enabling an international group of digital artists to develop. Net Art was heralded as uniquely digital, continually redefining itself as technology progressed. International organizations, such as ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, V2 and ZKM provided venues and support for digital art. The journal “Leonardo”, started in 1968 by Frank J. Malina, has provided an ongoing forum for digital art theory, history and practice. Recently, publishers, such as the MIT Press and Thames & Hudson, have begun to produce several books on digital art. There are now websites that focus on developing archives of digital art, as well as its theory, criticism and history. While these recent developments are welcome, there exists a vacuum of documentation and information about digital art in contemporary art history since 1960. We now have a generation of contemporary artists who have grown up in the digital age and do not see making art with technology as unusual. Digital Art is becoming Contemporary Art, and we now have an obligation to document its history and early practitioners, the people who built the foundation for making art with technology. This presentation will trace the history of digital art, and provide an overview of how it is taking its rightful place in contemporary international art history.

Panel: Slowness: Responding to Acceleration through Electronic Arts

“Why, you might just as well say that I see what I eat is the same thing as I eat what I see?” _said the Hat­ter to Alice.

Re­cently we eat more what we see than we see what we eat. Hun­gry for in­for­ma­tions and seek­ing any kind of va­ri­eties we are going to loose the dif­fer­ent mean­ings of per­cep­tion and re­al­ity. Mean­while a movie the­ater is a bet­ter place to show Media Art than a mu­seum. Our stu­dents pay for a 140 min­utes 3D ex­pe­ri­ence, but they are not will­ing to in­vest 90 sec­onds for a mas­ter­piece of Elec­tronic Art. Ask­ing my stu­dents why they are not in­ter­ested in works of art, they an­swer­ing: “Works of art are so slow and there­fore so bor­ing.” And: “It looks so an­tique.” Talk­ing with them about works of art often sim­ple state­ments and com­par­isons are mis­taken for in­sight. So the ques­tions are: How can we de­cel­er­ate the dy­namic of the stu­dents’ user at­ti­tudes? And how can we sim­plify the com­plex­ity of works of art for a „mul­ti­tasked“ gen­er­a­tion who is un­able to con­cen­trate in one item? In my sem­i­nars in CAST, a new study course at the De­part­ment for De­sign at Zurich Uni­ver­sity of the Arts, I teach my stu­dents how to de­cel­er­ate their daily speed, learn the power of slow­ness and how to dis­cover their abil­i­ties in find­ing „the right mo­ment.“ So we an­a­lyze the „self-de­struc­tion“ in Di­eter Kiessling’s mas­ter­piece „Con­tinue“, dis­cover the prin­ci­ple of si­mul­tane­ity in the dis­si­mul­tane­ity in the work „Fo­cus­ing“ of Tamas Wal­iczky, and we feel the rhythm in „Les larmes d’acier“ of Marie-Jo La­fontaine. By dis­cussing movie scenes of Hitch­cock, Cro­nen­berg, Peck­in­pah, and Bres­son, the stu­dents learn that dra­maturgy in a film is the cor­rect ap­pli­ca­tion of pac­ing, of rapid pulse beats and then to pause for a mo­ment.

This means that the story is not only used as a nar­ra­tive but also as a way of de­sign, and fur­ther­more also that the story serves as a means for the re­cip­i­ent to iden­tify with the con­tent. Retelling the story of a comic book by using only 6 im­ages is an­other strat­egy to re­duce the ar­ti­fi­cial com­plex­ity. And they have to ex­press them­selves by writ­ing „Haikus“ about paint­ings of Ed­ward Hop­per, Hoku­sai, Her­bert Starek, and about pic­tures of Taryn Simon or Chris Ware’s Jimmy Cor­ri­gan but also about TV com­mer­cials. On hy­per­me­dia clas­sics like Vi­enna Walk, Sig­mund Freud, and Vir­tual Trans­fer Musée Su­isse they learn how to ac­cel­er­ate and de­cel­er­ate the flow of in­for­ma­tion at the right mo­ment, as well as learn­ing to un­der­stand how to lead the user with a sto­ry­line and in equal mea­sure through a nav­i­ga­tional de­sign. Thus by fol­low­ing the phi­los­o­phy of „Fes­tina Lente“ („Hurry slowly“) – and al­ways re­main­ing con­sid­er­ate of the needs of the user – it should be pos­si­ble to cre­ate a story which is at the same time com­plex yet still in­tu­itive. And to pro­duce high qual­ity „short sto­ries for the small screen“ is the aim of CAST. But those who wish to tell sto­ries, will have to learn to lis­ten first.

The river Rhine as a flowing border area defines the municipal, cantonal and national boundaries and is utilised in different ways. It is a microcosm with a great ecological and socio‑economic diversity.     The research and exhibition project RhyCycling examined the border region of Switzerland‑Germany‑France along the Rhine and focused on how the non/human environment is connected.

An interdisciplinary team conducted the audiovisual research based mostly on methods from Visual Anthropology by observing and talking to different “agents” at locations along the river. The team cooperated with partners from the local government, NGOs, universities or evaluation offices involved in topics of sustainable development and ecology. The emphasis was on fish fauna, energy and the utilization of the riverbank. The goal of the project was to provide insight into the network, the interdependencies and un/balances of this ecological microcosm. (1)

The edited research material – videos, sound essays, texts, graphics – was brought together in an interactive computer platform containing a complex search structure, visualizing the interdependencies of content, places and keywords. Users build their own “dramaturgy” and create their own storylines while clicking through the material – an involvement which could lead to a (re‑)considering, a reflection of the personal lifestyle.

The conference paper aims to give an inside view into the situation created with the interactive computer platform during the exhibition and other public presentations and the different „modes“ of knowledge creation. Generally the presentation and publication of research results and knowledge takes place in textual formats although Science Studies described an interest of the sciences on alternative forms of knowledge presentation. Authors like Hans‑Peter Rheinberger or Karin Knorr Cetina (2) argued that knowledge is constituted through experimental systems itself as well through the formats in which it is presented. Therefore knowledge is not only inscribed in language and text. Media‑based presentations of research results and processes of cognition are interdependent. These circumstances have influenced the debates in research communities of Sciences and Arts, especially since the involvement of the Arts into research since the 1990ies. Inter‑ and transdisciplinary teams are working encreased with “open” research concepts. They focus on how, where and with whom knowledge is produced trying to involve non/academic experts in a non‑hierarchical way into the process of knowledge production. How the presentation format is influencing the reception respectively how the interplay between the medium and the knowledge formation looks like is of interest especially because of the aim to include the public into the process. And following the thoughts of Gabriele Brandstetter who considers research as to be an “ongoing process of rethinking” (3) – of the achieved steps respectively the created (forms of)   knowledge – a public presentation as for instance an exhibition, a performative event etc. wouldn’t be the final result but a “starting point” of an ongoing process which would be evaluated.

Abstract

Long Paper

Summary:

This paper focuses on kinetic abstraction as a painting expression appropriate to computing. It begins by describing the futuristic ambitions of early twentieth-century painters to create movement. The way in which the forms of computing fulfills those ambitions is substantiated by comparing the two kinds of art. The third section presents some of the artists who program paintings.

Abstract

During the early part of the twentieth century abstract painters created a form which departed from the illusionism developed during the Renaissance. With this new form abstract painters abandoned chiaroscuro and proclaimed self luminous color; they abandoned recognizable objects proclaiming a non-objective space – a space empty of objects as seen from one point of view; they proclaimed relative scale and distance as they abandoned measurable space along with foreshortening and the diminishing size. They abandoned the use of perspective. Cubist, Futurists, and Constructivist painters talked of a new, better, more complete illusionism as they made fun of Leonardo DaVinci’s Mona Lisa. They sometimes mentioned motion and the fourth dimension when talking about their work. Twentieth century abstraction was further developed by the Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists in New York. Since the development of relative space in painting seems to have ended. Has the computer made the further realization of such relative space and motion possible? It presents the painter with the possibility of shapes in motion not as filmed motion but rather as shape in abstract motion. This abstract motion does not rely on optics nor on the geometric relationship of the viewing eye to a perpendicular picture plane. It is distinct from that motion created by a movie camera or camcorder. Furthermore, electronic media is more technology suitable to the form of self-luminous color than is pigments on canvas. The Monitor is a luminous surface with a magical memory and with color variations greater than the eye can differentiate. Can the computer with its potential for motion, self-luminous color, memory, and programming be used to push twentieth century abstraction into newer formal realms not possible in static painting? Can abstraction, thereby, become as useful a way of imaging the world as Renaissance illusion? Furthermore, is the computer a new medium in painting or is it merely a technology. What are the theoretical differences between a medium and a technology and what are the implications of such differences? And, has software which is tailored for the Designer hidden from the painter the potential of the computer?

Artist Statement

Ribbons is a relatively small real time visual instrument created for maximizing the expressiveness of the performer within it’s aesthetic paradigm. It’s design questions the basic assumption of a flat rectangle as the traditional projection space by presenting a virtual three-dimensional space where the footage (or live video) can be projected and deconstructed, adding a new dimension of expressiveness orthogonal to traditional narrative. We worked with the following design axes: playability vs. autonomy, expressiveness vs. narrative, and originality, and applied some of the basic techniques of Human-Computer Interaction and digital lutherie.

Artists have experimented with cryptocurrency incentivized distributed ledgers such as blockchains since the advent of Bitcoin. In parallel, crypto advocates frequently claim that distributed ledger protocols will ensure an accessible and immutable record of anything registered to it, including artwork. This panel examines this idea with nuance, neither buying into the mass deception around NFT marketing tactics nor rejecting the reality that a subset of artists are creating significant, challenging works that inherently utilize these technologies. Preserving the asset may seem to be in the regular wheelhouse of preservation professionals, who have decades of experience developing guidelines for saving software-based art, but ledger-based technologies have their own preservation promises and challenges.

Riot Walk is an interactive self-guided walking tour that employs the use of VR technology to address a significant moment in Canada’s history: the 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver. This project explores the social and political environment of the time when many communities were targeted through legislated as well as physical acts of exclusion and violence.

We here explore the potential of rituals in order to more fully comprehend the subjective mechanisms of listening, leading to a broader understanding of phenomenal consciousness (why and how do I know that I am experiencing something?). The originality of the project resides in the blending of phenomenology, cognitive science, the sonic arts, and rituals studies. Rituals are explored in the context of a practice-led methodology between an artist and a cognitive scientist in order to decompartmentalize and possibly decolonize knowledge, namely shifting away from a purely Western techno-scientific perspective in order to embrace a plural vision involving indigenous epistemology. In this project, the sonic arts include music and sound in the arts, and focus specifically on the very act of listening. Rituals constitute structures for the lives of communities and societies, which we address more deeply from the perspective of sonic and cognitive research, so as to understand their roles and the epistemology emerging from them.

A new form of illiteracy is emerging, which concerns the relationship between the individual and technology. Even though familiarity with new devices is continuously increasing, the majority of those that are not intimidated by technology are nevertheless passive users. It is critical in our age to strive towards a community of active and constructive users. The discriminating factor is the ability to program a device: here, literacy is the writing of one’s intentions in a form executable by a machine. The primary goal of project RoB-ArtS (Robotic Behavioral-Arts System) is bringing to the general public a gaming platform through which to develop programming literacy. In this respect, RoB-ArtS rightfully classifies as edutainment. Inherent in the process of learning the spirit of programing is a great deal of potential for raw creativity to be expressed. Live-coding is a way to bring programming to the speed at which natural thought processes occur – in real time. It is important to bypass tedious mechanical steps such as compiling the source code and repeatedly running the executable files, so as to leave proper room for intuition, skill and creative instinct.

The current Japanese revolution in industrial, social and service robotics; the different mechanical anthropomorphic developments: assistance dolls, hostesses, dancers and concert performers, etc., are well known due to their constant appearances in all the media. But the situation in which we find ourselves today is a reflection of the natural evolution produced in the world of automata since the middle of the 16th century. Japanese artisan technicians begin to develop their own technology, initially influenced by the Western one. They will have to refine the mechanisms to suit their culture: clocks (wadokei) have to conform to the traditional japanese division of time. This knowledge began to be used in the creation of different wooden automatons: Karakuri ‘mechanical devices to produce surprise in a person’. Its objective is the reproduction of daily actions within Japanese social life: religious or private rituals, theatricalization of historical events, indigenous dances, etc.

Swarms are fascinating and hypnotic in nature. When observing a flock of birds or a swarm of ants, we sometimes wonder what their goal or reasoning (instinct or learned?) is, but, more often, we get lost in the contemplation of their complex organization and the aesthetic qualities of their coordinated motion. As part of an ongoing research-creation project, our team of choreographers, expressive motion experts, puppeteers and engineers designed a device to explore and manipulate the ‘swarm material’. This demonstration will provide the audience with a robotic swarm in a portable shadow theater.

In this Artist Talk, we are presenting a variety of Robotic Art projects that we have realized in the last thirty years and that involve machines in very close contact with humans (performers, viewers, etc.). This symbiotic theme is at the heart of our new participative project Godspeed, a large-scale performance where the audience is invited to wear robotic extensions, augmentations and prosthetics. Based on what we call speculative rituals of the machine, Godspeed is our way to wish “good luck” to humanity once we reach the point of singularity.

Withdrawn by the artist

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

Ex­plo­ration of the body as space/sur­face of trans­mis­sion and re­cep­tion. How does our in­ter­ac­tion with our every­day sur­round­ings change if our body be­comes a point of re­cep­tion. With mo­biles, smart­phones, iPads and lap­tops we be­come the cen­tral point of trans­mis­sion and re­cep­tion of elec­tro­mag­netic waves. Our new skins com­posed of these nu­mer­ous gad­gets are con­stantly up­dated and out­dated. The re­sults are known, land­fills of elec­tronic and chem­i­cal waste. Roger 10-4 ex­plores what can hap­pen if we work with the refuse of planned ob­so­les­cence, more specif­i­cally the re­ceiv­ing com­po­nents of those out­dated ob­jects, and re-in­cor­po­rate these com­po­nents into our at­tire; to make elec­tro­mag­netic fre­quency re­ceiv­ing ac­ces­sories.  What hap­pens if we are lis­ten­ing to the waves we trans­mit and re­ceive?

Roma Tre University has an important track record of Terza Missione activities, many of which have been developed within the frame of international cooperation. Among the main development cooperation projects, is a project for the recovery and restoration of the historic city of El Salvador in the Republic of El Salvador and in Africa in Burkina Fasu an agricultural training project. Among these projects, there is also one, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Italian Republic, with the IILA – Italo-Latin American Institute, for the creation of a Telematic Chair of the Italian Language and Culture, which consists of: Four modules for the learning of the Italian language, one of didactics of the language, four modules of synthesis on literature, music, art and history of Italy; Each module lasts for 20 hours.

The “knowledge factory” is a dear metaphor in Rome Tre. Since its founding, the University has been proposed as a constituent part of the social fabric in which it is part and its commitment has focused, through the recovery and reconversion of existing buildings, on the planning of the territory and the upgrading of areas destined for degradation. Through a constantly evolving project, always attentive to the needs of the context, our property has been enriched with buildings once destined for other purposes: little “university” silhouettes that, despite functional adaptation, have transformed them into new plants still keeping their “personality”. Here is the idea of the “knowledge factory”: a project that, in the full recovery of historical memory, is capable of transforming the territory through modern structures; A metaphor useful, therefore, to represent the transition to the formation of dense areas of cultural activities. The unifying idea of this path is surely the Terza Missione, whose reference activities relate to the transfer of knowledge and social commitment. Hence also the adoption of a cultural paradigm that is recognized in a concept of great relevance that is sustainability. This involves at least three interdependent dimensions: environmental protection, social improvement, and economic development.

But what is meant by the term “sustainable” if this is applied to the academic environment? From its synonyms emerge, on the one hand, the concepts of “acceptable” and “bearable”, on the other, “durable” and “feasible”, which project attention to the effect of the actions carried out but leave in shadow the Component of the subjective commitment. For this reason, I prefer to replace the terms “sustainable” and “sustainability” with the terms “responsible” and “responsibility” as they are more suitable to represent the initiatives that together with teaching and research measure the quality of a university, faculty to train students and to interact with all the realities, social, institutional, territorial, with whom he has relationships.

Taking the term responsibility means recognizing explicit academic implications in the academic world. The University is committed to integrating them into all its institutional and non-institutional (education, research, governance, etc.) concepts, and to disseminate its values, targeting goals become a priority precisely because framed within a shared strategy, backed by voluntary behavior, chosen as a lifestyle. Already oriented to the nature of their mission to responsibility, academic institutions are called upon to act in substantial terms to educate and accustom their students not only to confront different languages and scientific fields, but also to develop that sensitivity that A rapidly changing society like ours, imposes.

In this talk we present RUDEBot, a robotic artwork that explores the distribution of power in Human-Robot Interaction. The artwork consists of a robot that tracks its spectators and attempts to hit them with a wooden stick. By breaking the conventional rules of robotic behaviour adding a controlled amount of violence, RUDEbot emphasizes the limitations of power structures in HRI.

RUDEbot is an robotic art piece that has his own character. In this project we’ve decide to break one of the law of “Three Law of Robotics”, it hits its audience when they intrude his “private space”. RUDEbot is a face recognition bot that interacts with the viewer in front of it. Its camera traces and tracks audiences’ face, and determines the hitting action whenever the audience enters the “private space” of RUDEbot, which is a distance in the programed. As the audiences look into it, it will stare back with movements. As the audiences’ face move backwards, RUDEbot will trace in and lean forward; and vice versa as the viewer goes nearer, RUDEbot will lean backwards as if it is shy or scared. When the viewer got too near and RUDEbot tracks it, the arm will rotate between 0 degrees to 180 degrees and hit the audience.

Our memories are fragmented and incomplete. We create narratives to bridge the gaps between actual remembered occurrences and imperfect memories. Sometimes the narratives constructed distort and replace the memories that we originally had, and knew to be true, or at least relatively true. On a national scale, these narratives can lead to the creation of myths and fables, a process both creative and destructive. (Said, 2002) On a personal level, these narratives leave us with a mash of overlapping truth and fiction.
Within a geological metaphor, this mash could be visualized by a series of overlapping tectonic plates, constantly moving in slightly different directions, and abrading against each other. A process that resembles the fragmentation and fracturing the earth undergoes during the occurrence of the natural processes we call earthquakes. The earth, as it undergoes the stresses of the constant movement of the underlying mantle leaves traces (memories) of its past. It is a trace of violence, of disruption‚ Rupture creates a digital record of these disruptions.

A gallery space is filled with over 300 dried stalks of Japanese Knotweed, an invasive species in the United States, suspended from a wire array on the ceiling. The stalks are hung close together, so that they clatter against each other as visitors move through the space as though the entire gallery is an enormous bamboo chime. Speakers in the four corners of the gallery space play synthesized tones modeled on the acoustics of the Knotweed stalks. A camera aimed at the stalks above the head level of participants measures the amount of activity or presence in the room and controls the density of the synthetic sound; the more activity there is among the stalks, the less digital sound there is in the room. Initially, we wanted to respond to the violent language of localism, the semiotics of containment, management, and eradication that quietly trains us to accept xenophobia and racism. Harvesting knotweed, crouching in the monoculture it creates as it chokes out native species, we realized that knotweed is not a migrant, contributing to greater biodiversity, but a colonizer. This project became an interrogation of our own identities as participants in a settler-colonial project.

GEOPOLITICS OF MEDIA

Provoked by the notion of “the lack of women’s voices”, the Ruta Remake project works to map out relations concerning a politics of identity in Lithuania today. Ruta Remake unfolds as a search system that is suggested as the play between forms, ranging from the remainders of the ‘Homo Sovieticus’ through to the Modern Capitalistic Model.

Linguists, philosophers and music theorists join the Ruta Remake project to investigate the contemporary state of women’s voices. Through the shared recollections of media they build a pathway to navigate through a collection of samples that reflect social construction and metaphysical qualities, resulting in a ‘voice archive’.

Participants suggested a specific weaving pattern named Ruta (rue) that refers to a perennial plant. In Lithuania, this pattern was imbued with different meanings, to become an icon representing virginity and femininity. The Ruta pattern provides a system for sound notation, a shuttle for composing the voice threads of the archive, as lines of information and as routes, joined in patterns.

Ruta Remake employs an updated version of the Thereminvox, the TheraMiDi device, which allows a user’s hand gestures to mediate between sets of acoustic samples using two light-sensitive resistors linked through a MIDI interface. The hand’s movement within light casts shadows, and these register output and representation. In this way the TheraM/D/ based navigation turns the user into a performer, charting a path through the sound archive of voices in real time and weaving patterns to compose a sound fabric.

Over the last few years, chatbots, and voice enabled smart speakers like Alexa and Google Home, have been on the rise in consumer markets for everything from household automation, to being used to tackle things like companionship, and mental health management. While mental health based chatbots are interesting territory, the idea of what is useful in this context is still rather narrow. This talk considers a more personal and artistic approach to using technologies like natural language processing and networked devices, to explore the idea of mental health based chatbots, by documenting the development of an Alexa that experiences depression.

GEOPOLITICS OF MEDIA

Safe As Mother’s Milk: The Hanford Project is a website and installation examining the atomic history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The project incorporates recently declassified documents and historical photographs available online through the Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System.

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is Located on 565 square miles of desert in south-eastern Washington State. For more than forty years, Hanford released radioactive materials into the environment and onto an uninformed public while producing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War era. Although the majority of the releases were due to activities related to production, some were also planned and intentional.

Hanford workers, their families and other downwind residents became guinea pigs for radiation experiments that were carried out at the facility by the former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Defense, and civilian sub-contractors including DuPont and General Electric from 1944 to 1972.

Safe as Mother’s Milk examines these events through declassified historical photographs, media and documents available online at various government archives, like the Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System and Human Radiation Experiments Information Management System (HREX).

This project illustrates how the internet may be used to investigate, research, and disseminate “unofficial” social and political histories to the public.

On one level, Same Difference is simply an exploration of algorithmic imaging. The project takes as its starting point a single simple graphic routine. This ‘drawing engine’ takes geometric picture primitives and transforms these repeatedly using a combination of regular and random variables, ‘stamping’ the resulting forms iteratively on screen to create more or less complex linear forms. The many hundreds of images that are quickly generated in this way are mined for thematic potential, and candidate drawings then explored using a small set of simple image processing algorithms, or ‘painting engines’.

On another level, however, the project asks questions about what it means to create images computationally in the first place. In reality the neat method described above is messy and ambivalent, the division of labour harder to fathom. The process moves unpredictably back and forth between the physical and the virtual, the desk and the screen, between sketch, program, run-time animation, annotated print and writing. In doing so, the work explores the complex, ambiguous and reflexive relationships between these spheres of activity and embodies the central aesthetic concern of the work; liminality.

The thematic potential alluded to above is more difficult to verbalise than either the idealised or actual creative processes. This is because, on the one hand, it is impossible to extract formal concerns from technological or processual ones without loosening the intellectual coherence of the work overall. Suffice to say that a process that lives in liminal regions results in outcomes that themselves are explorations of the liminal; the contested territories of figure and ground, presence and absence, persistence and change, abstraction and figuration, the virtual and the physical.

Examples of the above work have been exhibited in Seoul and Bangkok. A solo show exploring processes and outcomes is planned for Bangkok in mid 2008.

What are the possibilities of accessing the reality of history? How can we read history and what can we learn from it? In this paper, I will try to contemplate these questions by putting my ongoing research-creation project titled Same Old Story (2020-present) in conversation with literature to expand its theoretical framework.

Informed by the ideas of U.S. feminist theorist Karen Barad about “agential realism”, I will elaborate on how this concept can be adopted in the study of history. To do so, after an introductory literature review, I will start with a detailed description of the project. Further, I will expand on the theory involved in Same Old Story under the three themes of Archive/Memory, Architecture, and Monument/Counter-Monument. These themes are chosen for discussion because Same Old Story incorporates them in its structure. Building from this discussion, I will elaborate on how to further expand my work, focusing on the possibilities and limits of revitalizing embodied realities in historical events and learning from them.

Abstract

Art and art
Japanese critic, former vice director and chief curator of InterCommunication Centre (ICC), Keiji Nakamura, lamented the degeneration of the term ‘bi-jyu-tsu’ which consist of two Chinese characters ‘beauty’ and ‘skill’ at the millennium in his essay on media art. He sighed with great regret that we could not help using the term ‘ah-to’ which means ‘art’ in Japanese Katakana character, generally used for direct use of a foreign language, instead of the term ‘bi-jyu-tsu’. What he felt shame for was, however, not the obsoleteness of a certain terminology, but the fact that there is no more clear difference between ‘bi-jyu-tsu’ and ‘non-bi-jyu-tsu’, a piece of artwork as a creative interpretation of the reality and the reality itself, which was very crucial for his generation born in the early 20th century. The result is a blind equalization of all factors in a society, including politics and the need to depend on another terminology to reflect a very uncomfortable change in the nature of art.

In this paper I discuss an approach to examining the boundary and border crossings and breakdown between the real and the virtual. To address questions like “How do gamers and inhabitants of virtual worlds manage these transitions? What are the short and long term effects of these border crossings?” I report on the development of two survey instruments to begin to investigate these questions. The results of these studies have implications concerning how virtual realities may induce dissociative experiences or lead to a blurring of boundaries of the real, of the virtual, of dreams and even identity.

Stars are decorations of the night sky. The contemporary cultural framework has always provided a way of interpreting them. This pattern interpretation led to the so called modern (western) constellations. The majority of which depict animals (Aries, Aquila, Taurus, Cancer, Leo, Scorpio, Pisces, Canis Major, Canis Minor, and so forth), followed by Roman, Greek and Babylonian mythological characters (Andromeda, Aquarius, Auriga, Hercules, Pegasus, Perseus, Orion, Virgo and others). The third biggest group of constellations are man-made machines – pieces of technology like the arrow (Sagitta), the triangle (Triangulum), the balance (Libra) and the lyre (Lyra). But there are also more curious ones like a ships keel (Carina), poop deck (Puppis) and its sails (Vela), an air pump (Antlia), a pair of compasses (Circinus), a carpenter’s level (Norma), a mariner’s octant (Octans), and compass (Pyxis), a eyepiece graticule (Reticulum), a telescope (Telescopium), a pendulum clock (Horologium), a microscope (Microscopium), a chemical furnace (Fornax), a sculptors chisel (Caelum) and a painter’s easel (Pictor). Those constellations were given names by the French theologian and scientist Nicolas Louis de Lacaille (1713-1763) during an astronomical expedition to study the southern heavens at the Cape of Good Hope. When Lacaille looked up to the nightly firmament he saw the high-tech equipment of artists, craftsmen, seafarer and scientists of his time. Like a Rorschach test he made his sense of the patterns in the sky according to his conditioning.

Abstract

Short Paper

Summary
To work effectively with new media, artists need appropriate principles to understand the nature of the space and the nature of the experience their work is to present to its audience. I will suggest two notions which may be useful when thinking about new art forms: firstly, stenography, as a way dealing with how aesthetic space is created and organized through the use of new technologies; and, secondly, synesthetic, as a means of considering the aesthetic
experience offered by synthetic qualities of new media

Abstract
If you have suffered “Doom”-induced motion sickness or watched the awkward gyrations of players of a head-mounted display VR game you will need little convincing that new technology based media can have a pronounced kinesthetic effect. There may be little aesthetic value in the knee-jerk, adrenalin-pumping stimulation delivered up by shoot-’em-up games. Yet kinesthetics and aesthetics – the sense of bodily movement and the idea of artistic experience – have something in common, as the words themselves reveal. Both refer, from different directions, to the senses, to our faculties of perception, of the external world and our bodies’ place and movement within it. 3D, first-person point-of-view games are just minor instances of how new technologies are directly addressing our senses, not just to achieve cognition of information but create experiences which are sensorially rich in themselves. The currency of the expression cyberspace clearly indicates that an experience of space is fundamental to expectations already surrounding new technologies. The experience of space has always been integral to all visual art forms – not simply on an illusionistic level, but on sensory, emotional and cognitive levels as well. New technologies lead to new artistic possibilities. To work effectively with new media, artists need appropriate principles to understand the nature of the space and the nature of the experience their work is to present to its audience. I will suggest two notions which may be useful when thinking about new art forms: firstly, scenography, as a way dealing with how aesthetic space is created and organized through the use of new technologies; and, secondly, synesthetic, as a means of considering the aesthetic experience offered by synthetic qualities of new media.

Institutional Presentation Statement

The School is recognized as a leading European provider of postgraduate education and training in creative electronic imaging through its established programmes: the PGDip *) in Electronic Imaging; Short Courses for free-lance TV professionals; and its production and research wing, The Television Workshop. In September 1994 two new undergraduate pathways – the BA (Hons) Fine Art (Time Based Art), and B Des (Hons) Design (Animation & Electronic Media) – were established in partnership with the Schools of Fine Art & design, extending the scope of the Schools of Fine Art & Design, extending the scope of the School and the opportunity for students to study and practice our specialisms from undergraduate though to postgraduate level and beyond.

*)  ‘PGDip‘ stands for ‘Post Graduate Diploma’.

Our contribution to ISEA2023 will briefly introduce what the JRC SciArt project does at the intersection of artistic inquiry, scientific research, and policymaking. After an initial contextualisation of how our art-science programme is linked to EU policymaking, we will discuss current work on the topic of “NaturArchy: Towards a Natural Contract”, which wants to re-imagine how we relate to nature and the more-than-human, currently characterised by a sense of sovereignty and exploitation, possession and control. Can we rethink our being environment and in relation to non-human scales? How can art, science and policymaking work together to activate our deep entanglement with the non-human, and re-imagine social relations, cultural frameworks and policy structures?

Panel: Assimilate This… Science Fiction and Media Art

Keywords: science fiction, media art, novum, estrangement, video, installation, critical theory.

Science fiction and contemporary art are connected by a set of related conceptual interests and formal expressions. This paper argues that two concepts in the critical study of SF, the novum and cognitive estrangement, are applicable to the practice and interpretation of much contemporary art. Discussing the work of contemporary new media artists whose practice has explicitly dealt with SF themes and tropes in various forms, the paper argues that the use of these two key critical SF concepts help to define a new and under-theorised cultural formation: the science fictional.

Martina R. Fröschl studied media technique and media design and wrote her thesis about computer-animated scientific visualizations of tomographic scanned microscopic organic entities. The depiction of realities and biological phenomena has ever since driven her creations. She contributed to various documentary and fictional productions for TV and cinema as visual effects and CG-artist. Her recent computer animations are based on scientific imaging data in collaboration with imaging experts and biologists. Currently, she is a senior researcher at the Science Visualization Lab of the University of Applied Arts Vienna at the Department of Digital Arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and chairwomen of the PIXELvienna Society.

What are the limits of natural forms? Could there be an alternative life based on alternative rules? Why don’t mermaids exist? Will alien minds be different from ours? Does human creativity have limits? Could an artificial system achieve the creativity of van Gogh? Could music be different from the way we know it?
Science explores the organizing principles of (living and non-living) systems and the formulation of laws that can define the boundaries of the possible. Using very diverse examples from life, artificial life and art as a reference for what we assume to be limitless, we will explore these and other questions.
Physics, mathematics, computation, biology and chemistry intersect with science fiction, painting and literature and allow us to raise new questions and look at reality with the vision of complexity.

Moderated by Pastora Martínez Samper, Vice President for Globalization and Cooperation at the  Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She is responsible for the UOC’s strategic planning dealing with the contribution of the University to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the implementation of the Open Knowledge Action Plan. She is also contributing to the involvement of both Catalan and Spanish Universities in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.

Art/Science
What is it, one might ask, that motivates an artist to position their practice at the art/science nexus — a random moment of eccentricity perhaps; or a more considered alignment with a discipline reputed to involve a systematically organised body of knowledge? Conceivably it could be argued that, if science is defined as knowledge gained by the study of the physical world, aware and interested individuals fall within the category of “scientist” in the manner of the erstwhile “natural philosopher”.

Today however, the disciplines of art and science are habitually regarded as divergent. Realistically speaking, neither artists nor individuals customarily possess the acumen or have access to the high-end technologies with which the contemporary scientific researcher is, by definition, equipped. I entered the rarified laboratory environment with the aim of exploring scientific constructs and research data from the perspective of a visual artist. My methodologies synthesised groundbreaking models and evolving outcomes; and I developed innovative collaborations which fore-grounded the artist/researcher as an active participant at the core of the experimental processes.

It is pertinent that one of my scientific collaborators described this pioneering construct as ‘something quite other’; a hybrid entity navigating the spaces of what might be regarded as a mixed reality that represents more than the sum of its parts. The three part ‘vital force’ series of artworks: Temporal Intervals, Wave Writer and Machina Carnis share an open-ended approach, empowered by the discrete use of technology. This enables the viewer to engage with the artworks from the position of a participant who brings them to life and completes them through his/her interaction.

Corporeality
I have explored contemporary constructs of “humanness” by shifting the activity of viewing from a transparent relationship of meaning and expression to an immersive encounter with the “self”. My art/science research projects have examined expressions of corporeality and moments of perception which exceed habitual boundaries. Both ‘Temporal Intervals’ and ‘Wave Writer’ probe the ambiguity of data flow and bodily “presence” through the interplay between the real-time installation and remote Internet access. Via the feedback loops of the informational mode — through the space-time separation enabled by computer and communications networked forms of dispersal and interaction — the artwork experience becomes more participatory and widely accessible. The divergent characteristics of digital technologies lead to a deliberation on contemporary notions of virtual realities that are redolent with the so called ‘worlds within worlds’8 that revolutionised perceptions at the advent of the microscope.

Standing on the ridgetop where one can look both into the fields of art and into technical subjects, one is impressed by the scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists who have made contributions in the field of art. I will survey some 20th century art pioneers who began in science-related fields-ones who did not work in the electronic arts, and who are no longer living. Then, I will discuss two who are still alive and currently using electronic means to bring their science-related expertise into the realm of visual arts: John Whitney and Kenneth Knowlton. Coming from the other side of the ridge are visual artists who are doing science with an artist’s mind. In the course of their work as artists they have been bitten by the bug of some problem that has drawn them over the ridge into the technical realm. They’ve made contributions in both art and a science-related discipline using electronic tools. This is a tribute to both scientists and artists whose careers have taken them to both sides of the ridgetop. These are towering figures whom I wish to honor. I have chosen seven to discuss in detail: Lillian Schwartz, Helaman Ferguson, Kenneth Snelson, Ellen Sandor, Roman Verostko, Harold Cohen, and Myron Krueger.

Screen City Biennial

Mouchette is an iconic virtual character from the early net.art time. Fourteen screen recordings of her website have been found online on Youtube channels. These videos are documenting the viewing practices of some visitors, the way they browse the website mouchette.org the way they comment their visit, and how they embed it inside their own narrative, stories of horror, of magic or of seduction.These recordings are an exceptional archival of this website recorded by the viewers in very different ways.

SeaCycles, an immersive mixed reality sound and visual art installation responds to patterns of change in the ecology of the Puget Sound region. Viewers of the artwork engage in a data augmented exploration leading to a sensual experience and deeper appreciation of larger environmental activity and place.

The artworks consists of mobile-device based augmented reality elements that situate the viewer in the face of a larger ecosystem which is undergoing irreversible change as result of human intervention. The work juxtaposes the human perception of the larger context as environment with the larger ecosystem model of all living and non-living entities, drawing a posthumanist perspective on site-specific installation.

In providing access as a translation and experience of data streams, SeaCycles aims to deemphasize human perception and interpretation and instead constructs a sensorium of collaborative and mutually interdependent factors that are in flux.

Today, we have access to information delivered over the Internet from the most remote parts of the world. As the use of the Internet increases, so does the use of search engines as the tool to access on-line information. We are becoming informed, constructing meaning, and understanding the world based on the results retrieved by search engines. SEARCH Behind the Scenes is an interactive-installation, which invites the participant to think from a critical perspective about how this technology influences our lives and its implication in our understanding of today’s world. It invites the visitor to conduct an on-line search; instead of retrieving the search engines’ results showing them on the computer screen, this time the search is simultaneously conducted by two search engines, and two computer monitors start a text-based conversation about their results.
The conversation is a constructed narrative generated by the real results retrieved by different search engines such as Google, Bing (using the results snippets) and on my own research on how search engines work. The dialogue between the different search engines has a human touch, allowing the visitor to engage with the conversation, and feel that the two monitors “are like friends having a conversation” By comparing their results and discussing why they are, or not, different, the conversation reveals different aspects of how search engines are curating our results, questioning their objectivity, and exposing a phenomenon that is not always visible to us. SEARCH Behind the Scenes focuses on the relation between the search engines and the users. How the search engines don’t expose their results selection criteria and rest on the ignorance of the web user about computer algorithms, and how we, as Internet users, have attributed objectivity to the search engines’ results without understanding how they are being selected, how they really work. Some of the reactions of the visitors were: “we are not getting the same things back…” and “that information we received over the Internet is biased…” These reactions allow us to envision the possible next steps of this project, which involve a more in depth analyzes of the patterns found in the results retrieved by search engines, that would allow visitors to develop counteroffensive strategies in their mode of searching.

Information technology systems are capable, in general, of storing at a low cost large volumes of pictorial data and we should anticipate a growth in the use of pictures and hence an increased reliance on pictorial databases. However, pictorial databases will only be useful to the extent to which that allows the flexible and rapid search.

This paper argues that, in general, information technology systems are capable of storing at low cost large volumes of pictorial data and hence we should anticipate an increased reliance on pictorial databases. However, pictorial databases will only be useful to the extent to which that allow flexible and rapid search. A distinction between depictive and descriptive representations is made and it is argued that visual depictions, such as drawings, are useful for representing visual-spatial properties of pictures.

Earlier methods for accessing pictorial databases make no provision for depictive search. In this paper, a system that provides methods that include search by depiction is described. Essentially the user creates a ‘sketch’ of the target picture from which the system extracts descriptions that are matched to descriptions of the pictures in the database.

This paper introduces Korean bio-artist’s works producing fungi-based patterns and analyzes them as aesthetic results which apply Erwin Schrödinger’s hypothesis of life and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s painting theory, in order to con- sider the impalpable entanglement between an artist and microbes in the creation process of bio-art. Schrödinger regarded life as an open system, and implied that a living sys- tem imports negative entropy and stores it. Interestingly, it can be linked to ‘the genesis of things’ of Merleau-Ponty. In his painting theory, he focuses on the inseparable interactions between an artist and visible things. It could draw the aesthetic discussion of life that recognizes things as living beings and connects the aesthetic process with the interaction between an artist and things. Furthermore, it is related  to the aesthetic characteristics of bio-art in which art inter- twines with life.

Abstract

When we use a computer, what do we do? Almost all of us look at some image on an electric display, grab and move a mouse, and type on a keyboard, then our right hand holds the mouse in order to point to an image called an icon on the display. This is very ‘natural’ for us; if our body makes some actions, then the images on the electric display change. However, this relationship between our body and the image did not exist until the computer, and especially until the Graphical User Interface, appeared. I call this phenomenon ‘Display Acts’: the action formed by connecting our body action with the change of images on the electric display. (Mizuno 2009)

Through living with the computer, we have acquired new actions in order to inhabit this new image world. In other words, ‘Display Acts’ is the first step for our new actions in the man-computer world. I have already discussed ‘Display Acts’ on the first computer graphic system, Sketchpad, concerning the action of drawing the image with light. (Mizuno & Motomaya 2008) However, that study did not show why we touch the image on the electric display.

Adversarial images, inputs designed to produce errors in machine learning systems, are a common way for researchers to test the ability of algorithms to perform tasks such as image classification. “Fooling images” are a common kind of adversarial image, causing  mis-categorisation errors which can then be used to diagnose problems within an image classification algorithm. Situations where human and computer categorise an image differently, which arise from adversarial images, reveal discrepancies between human image interpretation and that of computers. In this paper, aspects of state of the art machine learning research and relevant artistic projects touching on adversarial image approaches will be contextualised in reference to current theories. Harun Farocki’s concept of the operative image will be used as a model for understanding the coded and procedural nature of automated image interpretation. Through comparison of current adversarial image methodologies, this paper will consider what this kind of image production reveals about the differences between human and computer visual interpretation.

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

My con­tri­bu­tion to this panel seeks to analyse syn­cretic, hy­bridized agency, par­tic­u­larly in mixed re­al­ity data trans­fer sys­tems. Syn­cretism has tra­di­tion­ally been re­garded as an at­tempt to har­monise and anal­o­gise (in other words seek­ing like­ness within un­like things, and unity in dif­fer­ence,usu­ally rel­a­tive to dis­parate be­liefs and cul­tural prac­tices. Re­cent de­vel­op­ments in bridg­ing au­tonomous re­la­tion­ships with ma­chines through mixed re­al­ity in­ter­fac­ing has brought about the need for fur­ther analy­sis of these new post-bi­o­log­i­cal, hy­bridized states of being that tra­verse tra­di­tional par­a­digms of time and space. Syn­cretism may fa­cil­i­tate fur­ther un­der­stand­ing of multi-lay­ered world views, both ma­te­r­ial and meta­phys­i­cal, that are emerg­ing from our en­gage­ment with such per­va­sive com­pu­ta­tional tech­nolo­gies and post-bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tems. It is a pop­u­lar be­lief that we are now, through a media con­ver­gent, par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture (that is in­te­grated so­cially through a sub­net­work of plat­forms) cre­at­ing a ‘col­lec­tive in­tel­li­gence’ that ex­ists in a ‘global vil­lage’ of knowl­edge (data) trans­fer. This per­spec­tive evades tra­di­tional mytho­log­i­cal no­tions of an­thro­po­mor­phic in­ter­ac­tion as it moves be­yond the in­di­vid­ual and into a uni­ver­sal model of open ac­cess.

Self-propelling nanobots as active matter towards artistic practices allow for striking interactive microvisuals of collective nanobehavior, with enzyme propulsion enabling biohybrid pseudoalive artworks. This disruptive discipline paves the way towards bio-based interactive media/sculptures and biokinetic installations.

Almost from the first media product created by sub-Saharan African media artists, theories of identity have relied on a narrative of liberation built around the dual temporality of a glorious ‘albeit fallen’ past (tradition) and a redeemed future promised by Independence from colonial rule (Mbembe 2002). Operating the center of these constructs was a struggle to reclaim an authentic African self from a colonial legacy that dehumanized and denigrated black African culture. However, as the redemption promised by Independence failed to materialize and globalization grew in influence, the old boundaries of locality and race as markers of authentic Africanness appear to have been destabilized. Instead, ‘African imaginations of self’ are now moving beyond the restrictions of ‘race and geography’ to propose new models of identity that posit self as ‘born out of disparate but often intersecting practices’ which ‘open the way for self-styling’. Self, therefore, becomes a temporal condition that transcends geography, created by moving forward in time and repeatedly challenged and changed by traversing flows of personal, local and global histories.

By drawing referents from both local and global sources, many sub-Saharan digital artworks challenge static modalities of self and locality in favor of open-ended self-stylings that view identity as a process of becoming. Given this context, this paper will explore the narrative and aesthetic structure of Ingrid Mwangi/Robert Hutter’s digital artwork, Cryptic: a Traveller’s Diary (2007). Dedicated to surmounting difference in its many forms, the collective comprised by IngridMwangi/RobertHutter brings together artistic expressions that bridge racial and geographical boundaries by merging Kenyan and German perspectives. “Cryptic: a Traveller’s Diary” evidences this afilliative process by digitally combining landscapes of Nairobi, Tokyo, Heights of Aripo in Trinidad, Western Desert of Egypt and Dakar into an imaginary locale that questions how journey and intersecting histories affect identity.

Working with a new material inverts the usual design process: the research begins by determining the possibilities inherent in the material, not a preconceived final form. In this reversed strategy function now follows form and form is determined by behavior. As such, the process becomes founded in potentialities. Foregrounding behaviors in reactive materials, systems and organisms is an innovative starting point that can articulate new processes of creative making: design emerges from interactions among force, energy and matter. How do the unique struggles of surrendering authorial control by working with self-willed materials lead to creative advantages and deeper meaning?

Structured as a “Powers of Ten”, five creative practices are presented zooming out from the chemical to the cellular, followed by the animal, the human, and the ecosystem. This expanding perspective offers dimensionality in recognizing the creative struggle and transcendence of working with matter that won’t sit still. Each project focuses on the non-binary, self-determined moments of life in their chosen materials, when the spark of energies change properties in a messy but meaningful flux. Each member articulates a next scalar relationship to the previous as an example of material potentialities determining outcome within their selected strata. Collectively, they represent how new material behaviors and repercussions create unique opportunities in artistic expression.

The art project is an exploration with reference to the engagement between the self and the city. The way city projects itself and the way the self perceives it, as an “epistemological project to record and understand the world by objective means.”1)
A city as understood, is almost always seen from the top, of what we call a plan, a map. Most important thing in a city map are its roads and the pattern they create. At eyelevel, the city is something different. We can identify a city based on the map of its road network….Roads! The physical manifestation of development, liberation and freedom…. Roads the modern day sites for experiencing crime, inequality and totalising nature of cities in India.
As the selfie as in the electronic world is a projected image of the self – a constructed image, so the selfie of a city ought to be the image of the road from top, devoid of all the imperfections, projecting just the fast moving machines, or just image of the machine, an image which is almost like a map of the city but not really a map.
The output of the artwork envisages video panels with multiple projections. An audio-visual involvement in the gallery to bring about the nuances of the Indian city 2) thereby self critiquing the very process of viewing the urban. The visuals will be an X-Ray video of the specific parts of the city from above, with the road on the focus, which brings the rhythm of the moving automobiles in different parts. This visual with an audio will completely negate and/or dilute the glitches present, as a way to bring the anarchic ruptures of the city, inside the gallery space. The presence of the experience is brought about in the gallery space in intentional fading out of the human presence, far removed because of the ‘looking down’ act.
Cities perceived from top, by distancing the viewer, “lifted out of the city’s grasp … elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eve… The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.”3) Lust for a glitch free image in the making but never made. Taking into account the – social, economic and cultural inequity, inherent to the roads of Indian City, with the withdrawn ‘voyeur’ approach and juxtaposing it with the glitch free perception of viewing the road from top, gives a potent tool for critical engagement with the volatile context of urban India.

1) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 (Reprint))
2) This project deals mainly with the city of Delhi, India
3) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 2011 (reprint))

Abstract

“Once the whole social world is relocated inside its metrological chains, an immense new landscape jumps into view. If knowledge of the social is limited to the termite galleries in which we have been travelling, what do we know about what is outside? Not much.”  _Bruno Latour, 2005.

Locative media has capitalized upon the use of Global Positioning Systems to provide an adequate level of accuracy to support individual navigation and connections to services within a given vicinity. However as we move from the ‘Sat Nav’ model that provided us with route planning, to more context specific information, we can see how the base map is becoming less useful.

In as equally transformative manner, social navigation technologies such as collaborative filtering and recommender systems have supported the ability for Internet users to pass on tips, hints and tags and have provided a highly social dimension to cyberspace. Whether you prefer semantic web, web 2.0 or neither, devices such as ‘tag clouds’ have provided ‘bottom up’ ways to classify and attribute meaning to web content and, as the authors would argue, perform the function of a map.

The paper cites a series of precedents from contemporary digital arts and media which support social commentary upon place, as well as case studies from the author’s own research and teaching experiences. An analysis of these case studies are used to support a discussion about the ‘temporal’ nature of tagging that the authors argue often disappears as Cartesian maps are used as the primary interface to describe a socio/spatial context. The authors look toward a practical framework for the representation of social information that sustains an integrated model of space and time.

The paper explores the characteristics of a digital art project developed by the authors that allows users to ‘read’ and ‘write’ to a geo-located tag cloud that is visible under their feet as they walk through urban and rural environments. Map Cloud replaces the geographic base map that accompanies applications such as Google Maps for smart phones, with words derived from users who post ‘tags’ for specific locations. The authors reflect upon the temporal flexibility of this type of base map and upon the ‘semantic cartography’ that is constructed as users correlate meaning with location.

This study of kinesthesis starts from a dance perspective by considering a person’s sense of themselves in space, location and in relation to others as they go about daily activities. Kinesthesis is extended to a person’s body of presence expressed in media, including both dynamic media such as presence in 3D virtual worlds and in terms of the artifacts they produce and manipulate. Ways to sense people and places are in two broad categories: attaching sensors to the subject, or through remote sensing. In this work we develop public improvisational performance spaces that provide attached sensing of: heart rate, breathing and movement through accelerometers, and remote sensing through a web camera to allow expression of movement in the head, torso and arms. Synchronous remote presence with other dancers and the public is mediated through a location in a 3D virtual world that includes live video feeds of the dancers and remote live body data fed into avatars and effects at that location. Participants also manipulate their view of the 3D virtual world through a handheld game controller. Data is fed back into physical and digital media presences, affecting for example: body attachments, performance space effects such as coloured light, smoke and wind machines as well as effects in the 3D virtual world location. The collection and recognition of data used to create the feedback is through a computing system tailored for the particular performance space. Here we describe the practical application of literal liquid state machines in the form of small bodies of water to enhance pattern recognition that triggers feedback, with the intention that the systems automatically adapt to new performance spaces.

SenseStage is a research-creation project to develop small, low cost and low power wireless sensor hardware together with software infrastructure specifically for use in live theater, dance and music performance as well as for the design of interactive, real-time environments involving distributed, heterogeneous sensing modalities.

The project consists of three components:

• a series of small, battery powered wireless PCBs that can acquire and transmit input from a range of analog and digital sensors.
• an open source software environment that enables the real-time sharing of such sensor data among designers and
• plug in modules that enable the analysis of such sensor data streams in order to provide building blocks for the generation of complex dynamics for output media.

This Artist’s Talk presents the ideas and design challenges involved in the creation of the locative media app, Global Urban Wilds. GUW is a work in progress scheduled for installation in Montreal’s Champ des Possibles in June 2020. Screenshots, video, and sound files will be used in the presentation to illustrate the use of the app on-site, and conference participants will be invited to a playtest for the project on-site during the conference dates.

This paper intends to bring the experience of an art project developed in the university in Bahia, Brazil to the Arabian surroundings. Sensorium is a research and digital art project that aims to work with three major pillars: technological, environmental and artistic creation. On technological approach we have researched free software and hardware, DIY practices, open source programming language, sensors and GPS. In the environmental axis we work on notions of place and space, creating ways of perceiving the surroundings. The third approach, the artistic creation, is devoted to the development of aesthetic experimentation and environmental aesthetics on urban intervention, performances and data visualization. The focus of this paper is on the trip from the Baia de Todos os Santos into the Paraguaçu river to collect environmental data (objective and subjective data). This experience sensing the river and sea surroundings resulted in a variety of art and visualization pieces such as: Electrotravelgram, Sensorium in Correlations, Exploring Sensorium, Video Map and Sensorium Black Box. The paper analyses this practice and research, bringing up points of discussion on digital art, free technology, citizen and intimate science.

The primary public space of our world is the universal space of environmental waters, home to the unseen microscopic life that provides the most elemental life on the food chain. Urban space, all space, depends on the hidden qualities of the water, the activities of the micro‑organisms that are the pulse of the ocean.

Bringing awareness of this hidden life to the urban setting, where layers of culture intertwine with the visible environment but rarely with the invisible, is one of the imperatives of our time. The challenge is how do we engage the public in a narrative that includes a true artistic dialogue?

As an artist who spent decades focusing on the imagined memories and sensations of past times and cultures, I took a similar approach to biologic imagery. One enters a space and imagines: what are the aesthetics, what are the sensations of the space? If we could truly enter the microscopic world of the waters, if we floated with the plankton, what would we see, not in the literal sense of a photograph, but in the more visceral sense: what color associations, what textures, what movement, would prompt humans to feel the space of the plankton?

Augmented Reality can prompt this dialogue of mixed realities. Imagery derived from a forest and pond, beckons the viewer to closer examination with a mobile device, which, like a magnifying glass, reveals the movements of microscopic life swimming in the murky waters.

The enticement to reflect on the shared space of our world took a different form in the ultimate public space of one of the world’s busiest cities, where a video of related imagery was played on a large video screen above New York City’s famous Cotton Club. Thus this presentation will include a reflection on the importance of scale.

‘Sensiqwerty‘ is an experiment in sensorimotorically enhanced computer interface design. The project is premised on decades of building embodied interfaces that attend to sensorimotor subtleties of normal human embodied performance, often excluded from conventional interfaces. ‘Traditional’ computer keyboard interfaces are binary––key states are ‘on’ and ‘off’. In ‘Sensiqwerty‘, we have enhanced a conventional qwerty typing keyboard so it is sensitive to key pressure and duration. As an object lesson in the nature of computer interfaces and the way they ‘dumb down’ sensorimotoric capabilities of embodied users, the project examines how many expressive qualities of hand-action have been removed from keyboard control and thus from the awareness and capability of users.

As a creative technology, it has several applications:

1. as a tool for generating digital concrete poetry––with outputs for both live-video and as static/printed text pages
2. as realtime graphical score generation for music/performance, particularly improvisation
3. as a tool for coordination of remote realtime online improvisation
4. direct integration with digital musical instruments (via MIDI), including phoneme and pseudo-speech synthesis

Artist Statement

The objective of this paper is to present the artwork Sensitive Rose, which was developed with dynamic mobile tags, and also to describe the potentialities of mobile tagging as a tool for creating artworks. In this sense, we will start introducing the main concepts of mobile tagging, and then presenting the artwork.

This paper describes the author’s series of audio-visual installations and VR environments (immersive staging of financial data feeds) that critically reflect upon gambling tendencies of financial products and immaterial assets, and the ‘gamification’ of trading experiences for masses.

A programmable I/O module and sensors are one of key technical factors for creating interactive works in the field of media art and design. However, beginners are confronted with difficulties because of lack of basic knowledge and experience of them. We researched a basic learning program for media art and design using an I/O module and sensor technology. The main subject in this program is to create an interactive media installation to give the audience a new experience in communicating with physical things or phenomena. We developed the original kit that includes an I/O module, sensors, switches, motor, and an original circuit board for connecting components. The kit enables learners to execute interactive installations without soldering and knowledge of electronics. Our program and kit can be used not only in class in universities and colleges but also in intensive workshops.

The game space is the new (post-)urban world, but artists are having a difficult, even perilous time, entering it. In 1982 Chris Crawford made the ambitious prediction that; “Eventually, games will be recognized as a serious art form.” For some time now, the art-world and the video-games industry have occupied distinct spheres with a level of mutual antagonism. Over the last decade, however, this distinction has been dislodged. The increasing prevalence of art-orientated games and artistic interventions within pre-existing games has been the catalyst for such a shift. These art-game projects occupy a slippery status; stigmatised by their association with the mass-market industry of games and dismissed by that very industry and its population of players. Despite its virtuality, the game space is largely an urban imaginary, and within this urban context of the first-person-shooter games, America’s Army and Counter Strike, player’s antagonism toward performative intervention has been especially exacerbated. This paper discusses the emergence of artistic interventions within pre-existing game-spaces as a clash of cultures. It questions whether such a clash is irreconcilable, or whether it opens up spaces: spaces for social commentary, spaces for political critique, spaces for difference within a long-stigmatised medium. In Crawford’s prediction the term ‘serious’ butts against the assumed playfulness of play and in these art interventions it is argued that seriousness is reaffirmed in alliance with play through the formulation of the concept of ‘serious play’.

The existential question “Are we alone in the universe?” has been pondered by scientists and artists alike. The SETI Institute’s Artist in Residence program’s mandate is to reflect on what the discovery of life (and intelligent life) would mean for humanity. Our artists offer fresh perspectives that spark new insights and ideas on scientific research.

Over the past decades, the development of technological equipment and the arrival of the Digital Era have generated numerous artistic products that integrate technological devices, and that have lesser durability than other traditional cultural objects, such as Media Art Installations. The field of Art Preservation, responsible for safeguarding the collective knowledge heritage artefacts contain, is facing new challenges, and the solution lies in applying innovative strategies all the way through the life of the artwork, starting in the acquisition stages. What should we as art conservators consider when performing feasibility analyses in the acquisition of technological artwork? This paper analyses the fragility of this art-science intersection with the aim of establishing preservation strategies that ensure the viability of this type of artworks in an institutional environment.

Shown initially in somewhat reduced form at Te Manawa Museums Trust in Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand, in 2006-7 and later at the 2007 Venice Bienale, Rachel Rakena and Brett Graham’s video sculpture Aniwaniwa is built from fi breglass moulds, set with traditionally-derived carved motifs appropriate to treasure boxes, suspended from the ceiling. Placed in each treasure box is an acrylic dome screen showing projected elements from a bank of video recordings, for the most part shot underwater with performers in traditional dress. Both artists are Maori. Brett Graham’s iwi, Ngati Koroki Kahukura, live around the town of Horahora, where his grandfather was an electrical engineer based at the town’s hydro generating station which supplied power for the gold mines at Waihi.

Horahora — ‘spreading’ — was named for the Tainui ancestor, Turongo, and his wife, Mahinarangi, who stopped there to spread the baby garments of their newly born son, Raukawa (founder of Ngati Raukawa), out to dry. Among the source materials are photos of Graham’s family as children at the power station. This ancestral and childhood home was flooded in 1947 to provide hydro power for the new generating station at Karapiro. Because hydro plants were still rare in the Aotearoa of the 1940s, the Horahora plant was still supplying power to the grid as the waters poured in to form the new lake.

As a last memento, Graham’s grandfather left a motto on the dynamo cover: “Kia Kaha ake ake”, “be forever strong”. Local legend had it that the turbines refused to die, even when they were inundated. In an e-mail on 2nd October 2006, Graham notes of the loss of sacred historical sites in the flooding. “I had expected to be moved by this. I had not anticipated being moved by the fact that our people had mourned the loss of the power station and the community it had created.”

Across the motifs engaged in the work, images of water and domesticity predominate; across them the intensity of the local experience is set in communication with traditions, notably the role of Tangaroa, water and sea, who is also the messenger and Tangaroa Piri Whare, who brings the news from shore to shore. The video element, like much of the carved work, speaks of riverbanks, and in some imagery of the foreshore, subjects of extremely contemporary relevance to the political landscape of Maori-Pakeha relations and beyond them the conception of radio frequencies as taonga, traditional treasures like rivers and seas. In these relations of indigenous people to submersion we should read too not only the metaphor of drowned memories but the actuality of global warming and its specific threat to the Polynesian islanders of the Pacific.

Panel: Tyrannies of Participation

Se­cu­rity Gate 26.11 is an Ar­duino-based, in­ter­ac­tive, elec­tronic art­work that de­tects wire­less emis­sions given off by in­di­vid­u­als, in­clud­ing cel­lu­lar and smart­phone trans­mis­sions, wifi, blue­tooth, RFID, and oth­ers. Se­cu­rity Gate 26.11 pro­duces in­di­vid­u­al­ized au­dio­vi­sual re­sponses to these trans­mis­sions. Our lives are sub­jected to daily forms of sur­veil­lance via mech­a­nisms that are less rec­og­niz­able to us as such, pre­cisely be­cause they are not vis­i­ble. Today, wire­less trans­mis­sions are the cor­pus of con­trol and re­pres­sion, as ev­i­denced by so­phis­ti­cated gov­ern­men­tal sys­tems of mass sur­veil­lance and snoop­ing (Car­ni­vore and its vari­ants) and cor­po­rate mon­i­tor­ing (data-min­ing and soft­ware rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tems). Se­cu­rity Gate 26.11 demon­strates how we vol­un­tar­ily par­tic­i­pate in tyran­nies of our own cre­ation. Var­i­ous crit­i­cal the­o­rists have com­mented on how in­ter­ac­tive par­tic­i­pa­tion is the ide­ol­ogy of cap­i­tal­ist con­sumerism over in­for­ma­tion net­works. By our par­tic­i­pa­tion in in­for­ma­tional net­works (in­clud­ing cell phone usage, on­line brows­ing, email, SMS and oth­ers), we ac­tively vol­un­teer in­for­ma­tion about our­selves to forms of gov­ern­men­tal and cor­po­rate sur­veil­lance. Data are di­rectly and in­di­rectly col­lected about us in our use of these net­works. Se­cu­rity Gate 26.11 ren­ders vis­i­ble these in­vis­i­ble mech­a­nisms of dis­ci­pline and con­trol and doc­u­ments our par­tic­i­pa­tion in pos­si­ble tyran­nies of our own cre­ation.

Recently, SNS has deeply penetrated our daily lives and social interaction. In particular, people express their identity through their selfies on SNS. At this time, many SNS platforms provide functions to modify selfie beautifully. The presence of this fixed pipeline makes us look at fake identity as an issue of the platform beyond individual users. Shakefie is an interactive art installation that criticizes the existing SNS platforms. The audience (1) cannot know when the picture is taken, (2) cannot try to take a better selfie, and finally (3) must upload a selfie containing the unintended imperfection to the SNS

“Shanawdithit VR” is a six-minute remix of “Shanawdithit” created by the acclaimed Algonquin playwright Yvette Nolan and the celebrated composer Dean Burry. A collaboration between York University graduate students (Sarah Choi, Racelar Ho, and Michael Trommer), Indigenous artists (Aria Evans and Marion Newman), and Tapestry Opera, it is inspired by the drawings and writings by Shanawdithit, the last surviving member of the Beothuk. “Shanawdithit VR” features mezzo-soprano Marion Newman (Kwaiulth and Stó:lo) singing the chorus of one of her arias: “How can I sing to descendants I will never have?” In a way, this film is a response to her anguish-laden cry – our generation’s acknowledgment of the painful, forgotten history of the original caretakers of our land – that we do hear her song, today. In this way, the VR project does not only offer a new visceral way to experience opera and dance, but also reach a wider audience who may not already be familiar with Shanawdithit’s story.

Keywords: Creative and cultural industries, Beijing, China, urban space, creative clusters, art parks

Panel: Creativity and Participatory Urbanism in China

Supported by research and policy reform, China’s creative and cultural industries have seen explosive growth in recent years and this rapid expansion is anticipated to have an unprecedented and farreaching influence on the future of the country and its economy. Researchers from Cultural Development Institute (CDI) based at The Communication University of China (CUC) and The College of Fine Arts (COFA) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) present recently generated data and discuss Beijing as a case study to provide an informed overview of the recent proliferation of art parks and creative clusters in the city.

This paper discusses the artistic and technical innovations in the depiction of non-naturalistic stereoscopic space in the virtual reality experience Shards. In Shards, there are four different realities existing simultaneously, but all are initially invisible to the user. To experience them, the user can create viewport cubes and throw them into the area around them to reveal 3D portholes into those spaces. The user can view multiple intersecting realities simultaneously. Shards is an active, playable experience, where participants are encouraged to explore and reveal the environment. Through the act of exploration, users generate Cubist-inspired interpretations of perspective and dimensionality, contrasting multiple stereoscopic
viewpoints in one composition. A radical approach to the use of 3D geometry with stencil shaders creates a unique spatial environment. The conceptual relationships to hyper dimensionality and heterotopia are also examined.

How does an Artificial Emotional (AE) kiss feel? Can AI/AE support an intimate kiss?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes human empathic interaction. AI systems applied to Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) for mining and interpreting biofeedback data of social behavior, focus on automatization, categorization, patterns, and prediction. Design for sharing intimate, empathic relations, however, demands a new Artificially Emotional (AE) design approach. In interdisciplinary collaboration (art, design, technology, science, society), art-science duo Lancel/Maat fundamentally rethink AI/AE concepts and ethical design of mirroring empathy (Freedberg & Gallese 2007) in future neural networks. In live experiments and dialogue with public participants, biofeedback-data are interpreted in new ways, building on artistic and scientific insights, visual data-patterns, data-sonification, shared participants interaction – leading to video-works, prints, publications (Lancel et al. 2019).

The poetic ritual and performance-installation Kissing Data proposes an AE/ BCI mediated multi-sensory syntheses of intimate touch, essential to empathy, well-being, and social resilience. People are invited as Kissers or Spectators to experience a shared kiss. While kissing, Kissers’ brainwaves are measured with Multi-BCI E.E.G. headsets. Real-time, their streaming E.E.G.-data-visualizations encircle them in a floor projection. Simultaneously, the Spectators’ brainwaves are measured (their neurons mirroring the activity of intimate kissing movements, resonating in their imagination). Both Kissers’ and Spectators’ data co-create an immersive visual, reflexive data scape, translated to an algorithm for a soundscape: a Kissing Data Symphony. Printed data-visualizations are exhibited as Portraits of a Kiss.
Participants can share kissing or caressing each others’ faces. The artists thank Mondriaan Fund; Delft University of Technology; STEIM Amsterdam/ Tijs Ham (sound); Waag Society Amsterdam ‘Hack the Brain’ Horizon2020 European Union Programme; RIXC-Riga; TASML artists-residency Tsinghua University Beijing; TU Twente; Universities of Amsterdam, Vienna; TNO/NWO Netherlands Scientific Research; Baltan Laboratories, Fourtress, Holst Center and Phillips Eindhoven; Eagle Science Amsterdam; EMAP-EMARE Creative-Europe Programme.

Abstract

Background
In the following paper, I am going to discuss Shin’m, which is a media art project where I create an immersive perceptual experience of bodily transformation of the performer and participants. This interdisciplinary project is a hybrid artwork using interactive video, spatial sound, wearable installation and performance. Shin’m is the expansion and evolution of several art projects that have explored the seamless integration between art and innovative techniques. The techniques include: ambisonic spatial sound, ultrasonic directional sound projection, wearable technology, video projection, motion detection, interactive visualization and Butoh dance imagery techniques.

In the relatively short history of interdisciplinary art1 using digital media, media artists have struggled to create high quality hybridizations. Overcoming the rough tangling of experimental practices is a great challenge. Within this project, I propose that Shin’m suggests a new level of interdisciplinary art that finely weaves together all the elements necessary to construct this project: forms, techniques, space and participants. In the following description, I will highlight projects leading up to Shin’m, the main concepts and its vision.

This article examines contemporary developments in the biomedical and ecological sciences and their impact on hybrid art practices in relation to the ‘shivering domains’ of cross disciplinary discourses and biotechnological research. Examples from the author’s projects: Temporal Interval, machina carnis and Urban Swarming are introduced to illustrate the points discussed. Evolving media technologies and historical perspectives are reviewed and located within the framework of an exploration into the permeable membranes of cellular consciousness and the biomedical sciences; which also considers the nature of constructs of corporeality and the ‘self’ in a socio-cultural context.

This institutional presentation focuses on the innovations and interconnections in the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Art Archive. Bonnie Mitchell and Jan Searleman have led a team of undergraduate students developing the back-end infrastructure and enhancing the content for this archive of SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, and the Digital Art Community Art Shows from 1980 to the present. In addition to adding innovative connections between the data, the archive now has the ability to create curated Collections of Art content from the archive resources. The latest achievement is the ability for artists to access the data to create custom visualizations.

ACM SIGGRAPH is a Special Interest Group of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, and each year since 1981 they have held a digital art show at their annual conference. Most of the exhibitions have been documented in catalogs but are not readily available; therefore our team developed an online archive that collates all the material in a single place. The archive contains the artworks, scholarly papers, abstracts, videos, audio and presentations from the SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia conferences, as well as the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Art Community Online Exhibitions. Academics, students, independent artists, and people working in visual art and animation benefit in a myriad of ways from access to these historical materials. The archives contain over 4000 images, 4000 people pages, and 200 writings that are accessible in a myriad of ways.

In 2019, we added the ability to create Collections therefore enabling curators to recontextualize the materials in the archives in thematic ways. The first Collection was curated by Everardo Reyes and focuses on the artwork from the SIGGRAPH 2019 Art Papers. Over the next few years, we hope to add additional Collections such as the Traveling Art Shows and on Women Pioneers. One of the exciting new features is the ability to export the data as CSV and JSON which enables data visualization artists to create works that reveal trends and relationships between the data. The ACM SIGGRAPH Art Show Archives is now one of the largest collections of digital artworks, and the team is working with ISEA to create an infrastructure that enables the two archives to share resources. The SIGGRAPH Archive is part of a larger consortium to cooperate with other digital art archive developers around the world. One of our goals has been to improve the accuracy and completeness of the archives as well as add the new DAC, SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia exhibitions. This work will continue into the following year and we will be adding unique standard name identifiers, gender identification, and other assets that enable researchers to understand the development of an innovative movement that changed the world.

Keywords: Transmission Art, Spectrum Policy, Broadcast Media Archives, Intermediary Liability, Art-Science, Public Engagement

This paper is one of the contributions to an academic panel titled: “Bio-creation of informatics: Rethinking data ecosystems in the network economy”. The panel seeks to explore different approaches for trans-disciplinary media art and design practitioners in re-imagining data ecosystems and at the same time engaging members of the general public to reflect and contribute to an inclusive discourse that may re-shape public policy surrounding data ecosystems , from the lenses of ownership, privacy, transparency, openness and choice of individuals. The panel is moderated, coauthored and edited by Catalina Alzate.

This paper shifts the critical focus away from the aesthetics of fetishized interfaces of access amplified by today’s networked consumer technologies, towards invisible broadcast infrastructures and data ecosystems that exist in demarcated ‘signal’ territories that harness the natural resource of the wireless electromagnetic spectrum (Parks, 2013). At the outset it calls for the need to revisit the role of the public as an active contributor to conversations in the broadcast media sphere and how as a practicing transmission and information artist, one may contribute to this goal. It takes a closer look at the nature of media infrastructures to bring to focus new trans-disciplinary fodder that exist for rigorous art-science interventions that explore the role of broadcast archives, network intermediaries and the transnational lines that they traverse. In the first section, it presents the history of contentions that the science and practice of public transmission is embroiled in. Next, it looks at other opportunities and hooks for public engagement with broadcast media that provide various entry points to engage in public discourse. Finally, the paper makes a theoretical contribution by introducing a new transdisciplinary lens to look at network intermediaries in order to explain various dynamics that occur in the physical and social transmission and mediation of information.

Chair Per­son: Kathy Cle­land
Pre­sen­ters: Simon Penny, Mari Velon­aki, Anne-Marie Duguet & John Tonkin

This panel in­ves­ti­gates the ‘signs of life’ that are ex­hib­ited by ro­bots in ex­hi­bi­tions and per­for­ma­tive en­vi­ron­ments and the ways that au­di­ences per­ceive and re­spond to life-like qual­i­ties in ro­botic char­ac­ters. As ro­bots and hu­mans come to­gether in gallery in­stal­la­tions and per­for­ma­tive en­vi­ron­ments, dif­fer­ent types of hu­man-ro­bot in­ter­sub­jec­tiv­i­ties come into play. Both hu­mans and ro­bots be­come ‘so­cial ac­tors’ ne­go­ti­at­ing re­la­tion­ships and modes of in­ter­ac­tion. How do au­di­ences per­ceive in­ten­tion­al­ity, per­son­al­ity and emo­tion in ro­bots? This panel ex­plores how the phys­i­cal qual­i­ties and af­for­dances of the robot (for ex­am­ple, its size, shape, form, mo­bil­ity and modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion) af­fect human in­ter­ac­tion and emo­tional in­vest­ment. How do ro­bots per­ceive and re­spond to their en­vi­ron­ments and to their human in­ter­ac­tors? Be­yond an­thro­po­mor­phism and bio-mime­sis, what other dis­tinc­tively ma­chinic ‘signs of life’ do ro­bots dis­play?

“Exist” can not express clearly that the relationship between architecture and human beings. In relation to each other, “which is facing the situation,” it will be a more appropriate representation. In this work a relationship with each other and the relationship to talk about any situation that is being created.

Looking back to classical architectural theories the concept of materiality and construction was regarded as the sole and consistent topic in architecture. In the 19th century architect and theorist Gottfried Semper has complained that they could cut granite, such as cheese. He criticized that the technical progress would overcome the resistance of the material and that architecture runs the risk to lose control over the building process. What would Semper have said to current developments in digital architecture and fabrication?

Daniel Miller will discuss how his artworks explore relationships to the physical world through simulating natural systems. These artworks investigate the parallels and incongruities between the human experience and the natural world we inhabit. Underlying themes explored in Miller’s recent work include: climate change, human impact, the body/mechanical processes, animal communication and the relationship of technology to nature. Miller will discuss earlier works and highlight the research, design and fabrication of his recent projects. The natural environment has evolved into system in equilibrium. In ecosystems there is a threshold where the system can no longer function when pushed beyond this boundary; Daniel Miller’s artworks explore these environmental boundaries. These artworks make connections to the natural world through the use of robotics and activated electronic objects. Projects use digital control to simulate various behaviors and generate feedback through interactions with participants. Miller will discuss how some works reference the body and its internal movements; other artworks investigate relationships to the larger ecosystem. In some cases, artworks activate and manipulate materials through heating, cooling and mechanical manipulation. Here materials flow and randomly generate new forms and evolve. Through mimicking natural systems these artworks embrace unpredictable and emergent properties of nature,such as production companies, multimedia studies, broadcasters and grants for new media production.

This paper discusses the challenges of interpreting SEM images as pictures because the microscopic sample seems as if it is illuminated by the detector and observed in the eye aperture. The process of producing a picture by the SEM is camera-less; images formed by a focused beam of electrons, they are not photographs in the classic way that we perceive photography. The paper also raises concerns about mechanical objectivity in representation by the SEM. Having a closer look at both the imaging process and the examples of manipulations, such as adjusting the SEM and its in-built software settings, it is possible to illustrate that they can affect the resulting image and offer different interpretations of the same sample. Such “misinterpretation” is capable of providing a new meaning of that was previously unseen, that is, desirable for artistic context.

Throughout the history of art, creative advances have paralleled technological advances in media, permitting the artist to illuminate new visual concepts. Such a situation exists today with the computer’s assistance in synthesizing knowledge from different disciplines. Physically-based simulation permits such an integration and provides a new animation approach for the artist. This paper outlines a functional foundation for artists to use different simulation systems in the design of computer animation. The functional model seeks to bridge the qualitative – often idiosyncratic – conceptual orientation of the artist with the quantitative orientation of computer simulation.

Chair Per­son: Chris­tiane Paul
Pre­sen­ters: Tanya Toft, Jack Toolin & Teri Rueb

The pro­posed panel will iden­tify dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of loca­tive, site-spe­cific media art and ex­plore their im­pact on un­der­stand­ing the con­text of place and on our aware­ness of the en­vi­ron­ment. Mo­bile com­put­ing po­ten­tially en­ables var­i­ous forms of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion and has to be con­sid­ered in re­la­tion to con­cepts of em­bod­i­ment, the cre­ation of mean­ing, as well as in­di­vid­ual au­ton­omy and agency. The lat­ter as­pects of mo­bile com­put­ing and loca­tive media con­sid­er­ably af­fect our per­cep­tion and aware­ness of en­vi­ron­ments. Mo­bile de­vices can func­tion as tech­no­log­i­cal ex­ten­sions of em­bod­i­ment, con­nect­ing us to lo­ca­tion-based in­for­ma­tion and en­hanc­ing aware­ness of our en­vi­ron­ment or ‘so­cial body’. Loca­tive new media art, which uses lo­ca­tions in pub­lic space as a ‘can­vas’ for im­ple­ment­ing art pro­jects, has be­come one of the most ac­tive and fast-grow­ing areas within the larger field of dig­i­tal arts. Cam­era and video phones, smart phones, and mo­bile de­vices with em­bed­ded GPS have be­come new plat­forms for cul­tural pro­duc­tion, pro­vid­ing an in­ter­face through which users can par­tic­i­pate in net­worked pub­lic pro­jects, as well as en­abling the for­ma­tion of ad-hoc com­mu­ni­ties.

The panel will dis­cuss var­i­ous cat­e­gories of loca­tive media art, for ex­am­ple pro­jects that en­hance con­text by al­low­ing par­tic­i­pants to ‘leave a mark’ on their sur­round­ings, sub­mit or re­trieve site-spe­cific in­for­ma­tion, or re­con­fig­ure the map; pro­jects that cre­ate a sys­temic aware­ness of peo­ple’s moods or be­hav­iors by re­flect­ing the pres­ence, move­ments, or ac­tions and re­ac­tions, pro­file, tasks and goals, emo­tions and be­hav­ior of peo­ple in their en­vi­ron­ment. Also dis­cussed will be mo­bile pro­jects that ad­dress sur­veil­lance or en­vi­ron­men­tal is­sues and place em­pha­sis on in­creas­ing peo­ple’s aware­ness of the larger so­cio-po­lit­i­cal con­text of site, often en­cour­ag­ing or en­abling their users to be­come proac­tive and en­gage in local pol­i­tics. The pan­elists will rep­re­sent these dif­fer­ent artis­tic prac­tices within the field of mo­bile media. A major goal of the panel is to dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween forms of con­text aware­ness and site-speci­ficity that mo­bile media can pro­duce.

Physical freedom as implied by tourist photography is being pushed to a new level by the growing popularity of GPS Image Tagging. The increasing “liberation” of images continues to intertwine the visual with the vernacular, with the earth itself becoming a surface for the inscription of every-day images and texts. Taking artistic projects as examples, this paper will examine the correlating of image and terrestrial space with regard to tourism and historical site.

In site-specific art, irrelevant to any kind of contention, the instinctual characters, Thanatos and Eros are obliged to be rendered. Eros, as a compulsion to repeat, inhibits onto the locus. Thanatos, as a compulsion “that aims at a state of things which has never yet been attained” (Freud 1973), destructs the site. And this ambivalence has the biased inclination by the dominance of one side. What decides this inclination is not a static force which is owned by each side but the transformation of the “neutral energy.” (Freud 1961) And the character of site-specific art totally depends on this imbalanced duality.

Roundtable: SITEWORKS: Ecologies and Technologies

Since 2009, I have had the privilege of attending two Siteworks events at Bundanon and each has offered unique connections, insights and moments that have been fundamental to the development of my own practice, Carbon Arts. In 2009, Ten Trenches, the first Siteworks project, came at a time when I had just started planning Carbon Arts as a creative agency tasked with generating multi-disciplinary, artist-led projects to address climate change.

Abstract

Long Paper

Summary:

SIT0 is one of the biggest Internet-based art cooperatives, with thousands of Images. hundreds of artists, and numerous online collaborative projects. Since its birth nearly four years ago, SIT0 has grown dramatically in both size and complexity. How can one address some of the day-to-day maintenance problems of an online art site while simultaneously making it easier for people to participate as both artists and audience?

Abstract

More than three years ago, a small ftp site, that took the name “OTIS” (Operative Term is Stimulate) appeared on the Net. Its very loose mission was to collect art and “display” it via the Internet. It was also a way to meet other artists who worked in both “digital” and “traditional” media. With the aid of the World Wide Web, and with the assistance of many wonderful people (and even a lawsuit!), the project now known as SITO is a thriving experiment in both “online art galleries” and networked digital collaboration. This talk will cover the history and current undertakings of SITO, as well as what we are doing to move ahead. Focus will be on the two main lobes of SITO: the “Artchives”, which are the static collection of thousands of images from hundreds of artists worldwide; and, “Synergy”, which is SITO’s exciting and dynamic collaborative half, where projects are always popping up and growing and mutating. Special attention will be given to EGADS, the flexible, timesaving new system being built to both administer and present the Artchives; as well as Synergy:HyGrid, the latest collaborative undertaking, which recently won a distinction at Prix Ars Electronica.

The theory-model “Smartject” describes a new global type of human individuality, emerging through media- and communication technologies, net-mediated space, instantaneous information-streams and pervasive digital infrastructures. By adding the prefix “smart” to the suffixes of subject, object and project the term “Smartject” describes a new way of human knowledge-transformation by modeling the complexity of today’s media realities with smart and adaptive ability-profiles of individual self organization.

This presentation is based on the research for my dissertation-thesis about creative delineation-processes in proto-social and proto-cultural fields of digital-media related art, media-theory and media-production in Europe, Japan and the USA. Within this short outline I want to point out some theoretical threats about near future-previews of mediacultures and “Networked Societies” (Castells, 2001). Triggered by communication- and media specific reality-shifts, new forms of “Cultural Programs” (Schmidt, 2003) have been created and established within a paradigm of digitally-networked and “vireal” (virtual/real­­) locative dispositions. In this case artistic projects and communities often play a key role as early adopting “Prototopes” and experimental test-environments within cultural development. The parameters can be observed through communication-based interdependencies between environmental-, artifact- and participant-structures. Under the perspective of liquefied, informational and dissipative net-virtualities, traditional “subject / object distinctions” are no longer arbitrative for the maintenance of communication processes. They rather (re-) assemble formations of human and non-human counterparts and thereby configure an exclusive internal- / external-relationship.

These progressive movements are shifting the forms of human cooperation and transform the vectors of creative development. Hereby the model “Smartject” is specified through multiple individual ability-profiles and project-identities, under the conditions of information- and media technological transformations. Above all, these transformations are concerning the informational and social connectivities and commitments of humankind. This requirements are forcing endurable creative self-transformations of individuals and organizations within the rising complexity-fields of media environments. Within this vectors the type of the “creative” is more and more applied in cultural industries, knowledge work, self-design, etc. and increasingly is becoming a major role model for post-contemporary development-structures.

This Paper proposes a novel application of psychometric computer vision analysis. It describes the experimental use case of an interactive voting booth, which is able to retrieve, in real-time, the political conviction of any given person from their facial physiognomy by means of  computer vision. After an overview of relevant developments in the fields of psychometrics, computer vision as well as AI-driven political data science, the article describes the design and the operating principle of the interactive voting booth.

The social homelessness on US campuses is a multidisciplinary art and design research project to raise awareness of the Asian female faculty on US campuses. It is a series of generative selfies (self-portrait photographs) with light and computer algorithms, compared with photography, drawing with light. Initially, it began with interactive art, Being Ignored Version 1.0, to recognize the dignity and humanity of those who are homeless, being invisibly treated, and ignored, in Porter County, Indiana, which is relatively a wealthy county, compared with neighboring counties in Indiana. Later it has extended to the project, Social Homelessness on US Campuses.

It was inspired by the book, “Here I am, Faith Stories of Korean American Clergy-women“. It defines that social homelessness has no friends with whom they can associate or count on, they have no place to go. They seem to be very isolated and alienated. Asian female faculty on US campuses may experience the highest levels of isolation, and marginalization on US campuses, compared with other minority faculty groups. Particularly the Asian female faculty from predominantly patriarchal Asian cultures may be deeply challenged to navigate where they belong between two distinguished communities, Asian, and American. For instance, their conventional social role as being a full-time mother would be more welcome and inclusive in their traditional ethnic groups, but working as Asian female faculty may occasionally face lesser hospitable and somewhat harsh responses from the groups since their existences may impact negatively their patriarchal hierarchy led by men.

Simultaneously the Asian female faculty may invisibly be demanded to be more persistent, dutiful, and non-complaining for extra service activities without compensatory supports on US campuses. Also, they may be subject to harsh teaching environments by student resistances and lower student evaluations on US campuses. It is routinely challenged for the Asian female faculty to find social and psychological comfort zones to rest between two exclusive communities, Asian, and American. As a part of the multidisciplinary research, the author co-founded the group, Asian Female Scholars, with Mary Szto, a law professor at Syracuse University. It is a social group consisting of around 40 Asian female faculties in particularly Indiana, USA, where white populations are relatively dominated in the academic world. The group provided regular workshops and social gatherings for mentoring, connection, networks, and, resources such as pedagogical strategies for Asian female faculty to survive and succeed on US campuses.

The social homelessness on US campuses consists of the Being Ignored 2.0, a series of selfies (self-portrait photographs) by the software, Being Ignored 1.0, site-specific art installation, public speaking, and Asian Female Scholars. The Being Ignored 2.0 is a generative selfie software system and documentation to portray Asian females on US campuses. The mobile version of the Being Ignored 1.0, Social Homelessness, is developed to enhance public exposures and participation by using smart phones and social media.

Code-based technologies have become commonplace in the fields of Media Art, Digital Design and Software Studies. The term ‘creative coding’ emphasizes code as an expressive material, exploring code concepts and producing creative works through experimentation. While we are experiencing the digital world in which data is constantly generated, captured, monitored and analyzed, the critical aspects of code become increasingly important for us to understand this networked and ubiquitous techno-culture. The courses and seminars in higher education seem to primarily focus either on programming practices or critical aspects of code, however not many of them have been established to address both the practical and critical study of code. We argue that having a computational thinking through both programming practice and critical code theory would offer a different learning approach to understand code-based technologies.

This presentation will discuss a parallel strategy with two inter-linked courses of ‘Software Studies’ and ‘Aesthetic Programming’, running together within the same semester. The strategy refers to ways of thinking about software culture through both practical and analytical assignments to understand wider political, cultural, social and aesthetic phenomena beyond its functional application. Through emphasizing programming as critical work in itself, the two courses offer the possibility to open up new insights into art and design processes, and to offer new perspectives on cultural phenomena increasingly subject to computational procedures and logics. The presentation will address the inter-linked structures, outcomes and challenges of the two courses, in which students require to demonstrate reflective and critical thinking through coding practices.

This artist talk presents excerpts from two film projects exploring movement and challenges to movement, raising questions about re-embodiment and experiential dimensions of propriopecption in inter-pandemic society under a global climate crisis. The primary focus is on techno-choreography (using prosthetic devices and the Oculus Quest2 VR headset) and the somatechnical predicaments in the face of disturbance-based ecologies and blasted landscapes. A second concern is the exploration of new expressive techniques for ageing and differently-abled bodies. Electric Dance, or How to Talk with Birds and How Much of These Hills is Gold portray a series of outdoor performances during the COVID-19 lockdown periods: ‘compostitions,’ to use Donna Haraway’s term, which involve intimate individual and collective probings and drawings-to-perform enacted outdoors in a valley. The films evoke a series of climbs (up electrical power masts and hills) and submergences into river flow, which seek to combine body weather techniques (derived from Japanese butoh dance) with digital processing and speculative drawing in 3D virtual environment. The site-specific performances are creative responses as well as social choreographies in an era of climate crisis.

A presentation of findings from Jones’ artworks, Somatic Drifts and Plantarum: Empathic Limb Clinic, that contemplate the non-human by altering the perception of the participant to reflect on transitory states and trigger new experiences of empathy. [1] [2]

Somatic Drifts
Somatic Drifts is a live artwork and accumulative audiovisual installation by Cat Jones. The artwork explores trans-human, species and material empathy. Jones enables the participant to experience the body of another entity through body illusion and touch. These mediatised shamanic transgressions challenge internal and external difference and communicate across
consciousness, culture, time and geography. The project accumulates a recorded bank of bodies and unique audio narratives that accompany them. The artwork raises personal and political questions: What realm does the sense of self exist within? How far can it drift? What can this drift enable us to change?

Plantarum: Empathic Limb Clinic
Plantarum: Empathic Limb Clinic precedes Somatic Drifts, offering an immersive sensory experience in a mobile field laboratory. The experience blends horticulture and neuroscience and offers participation in Jones’ experimental proposal for a new treatise on the art of grafting.

The live exchange references certain histories of botany and recent developments in the science of plant signalling and adaptive behaviour. The methodology used in the experiences, visualtactile feedback, has previously shown interesting results in neuroscience applications and research. [3] Mirror therapy is used to alleviate some chronic pain conditions; and Mel Slater’s research in (human) virtual embodiment has shown evident reduction in implicit racial bias. [4] These novel artistic experiments begin to dissolve the physical and conscious boundaries of the participant and provide a space for reconsiderations of empathy and the post-human.

Sound design by Melissa Hunt.

A counterpoint is developing which offers a special complementarity of relationship between musical and visual design. This counterpoint is composed by computer algorithms. I would define such algorithms as the routines of computer instructions that play out color design and/or music through solid state memory in time, as an event in time. These algorithms are a performance that could never be performed.

I search for a more appropriate word than algorithm or performance. In concert, we hear an artist’s performance which later may be re-enacted over and over on a laser disc recording. Each time we play the CD, more or less, we relive that original performance. I need a proper word for my own compositions which were never performed, but are still a recording which indeed relives my creative choices and temporal options. I offer you my composition, or my set of algorithms, or my recording, or whatever. It must play to you from some form of solid state memory. I’m the composer and performer of this music yet it was never really performed.

Musicians of course resist the idea of non-performing music, believing each detail in musical art demands a precious and exclusive effort from a performer. How right they are — the vitality of all music we have ever known is expressed in acts of performing. Regardless of this perception, however, I refer to an altogether different kind of music. And I must ask: is this new music possible today? Will fast computers allow a genuine musical art that belongs to TV? Will digital visual and audio capabilities permit an art as pure and popular as the diverse artistic musical traditions around the world? in other words, can we find yet another art form able to match our lively musical past?

No doubt with suitable talent we’ll invent a new music. It’s been done before. Formal pattern interrelations can be composed with algorithmic software today much the way composers created new music in the past employing technologies of their own time. More to the point of these remarks, however, is the idea that there are computer powers promoting a counterpoint h music which involves visual structures possessing the broad temporal architecture of music.

Focusing on pervasive games, we compare the performative actions of three groups.

Influenced by Allan Kaprow’s Happenings and by Augusto Boal’s Invisible Theater, Grupo ERRO follows the line of performances in the tradition of the group Fluxus. Its familiarity with the concept of dérive and of the psychogeography of the Situationist International enabled the group to identify strategies of action, urban space appropriation and displacement, which are confused on the streets with passers-by. The group, coordinated by Pedro Diniz Bennaton, has regional affinities with collective activists of Brazil, like Grupo Laranjas, of Recife, Empreza, of Goiás, and GIA, of Bahia, and also of Latin America, in the actions of H.I.J.O.S. In the urban scenario, which constitutes the group’s stage, improvisations are at the same time protest and entertainment. The interventions build a situation with the public and the street, and confuse reality with fiction, questioning certain social standards, like the one of mental sanity in Carga Viva.

FISEA

In this paper the author considers some of the issues that arise when mathematics is used to make art (predominantly visual art), in particular the possible conflicts between the role of the mathematician as artist and of the artist as mathematician. Mathematics in art can be approached in a number of ways, as analyses and ‘simulations’ of artworks and processes perhaps by artificially intelligent systems, as ‘ready-made’ mathematical objects appropriated by an artist, or as products of the creative imagination in their own right. These approaches are examined and criticised, and connections are made and used to highlight the difference between the mathematics of art and mathematics as art. The relevance of ideas in the theoretical history of computing and philosophy of mathematics is revealed and used to open up a critical context for this kind of computer art.

This paper examines how interactive technologies contribute to artistic reflections on human body augmentation. It introduces digital performance, the reference field for this study, and narrows it to interactive practices. It outlines non interactive body augmentations and discusses how the incorporation of real-time interactivity led to the creation of new artistic explorations. It presents interactive on-body projections and human-machine systems as novel art practices  that extended the state of art in body augmentation.

The objectives of “SONIC ELECTRIC: sonic recipes with experimental intermedia” are located within the fields of experimental sound performance and electronic art as inter-media [sound/video, performative and community practice] to develop a strategic laboratory for collective engagement by exploring principles of participation and relationality. The aim of this project designed for ISEA Hong Kong is to develop a practice-based creative analysis of identity, power and place, through the immersive environment of the kitchen. The spatial politics of the communal kitchen workplace shape our daily experience.

With a collection of hand tools and electric motors that will be gathered together from kitchens in Hong Kong, local participants will be bending kitchen instruments and appliances into doing things they were not designed to do and will learn to shift and reposition their status as tools and social markers, in ways that seek to open up sites of resonance and resistance. Participants will also learn how the spatial and deep listening experience of the kitchen interior may open through collaboration via the fidelity of kitchen utensils and motors to sonic textures in sound performance. Sound has the ability to create a relational space, a meeting point, diffuse and yet pointed.

This makes sound a significant model for thinking and experiencing the contemporary condition, for as a relational spatiality global culture demands and necessitates continual reworking. It locates us with an extremely animate and energetic environment that, like auditory phenomena, often exceeds the conventional parameters and possibilities of representation. This connection is equally a spatial formation whose temporary appearance requires occupation, as a continual project, emphasizing our place and is also potentially, emphasizing our local community.

This dynamic provides a key opportunity for moving through contemporary social discourse by creating shared spaces; it belongs to no single public. It can exist as a network that teaches how to belong, to find place and still search for a new connection, for proximity. A critical and practical hands-on workshop will introduce recruits to, the concepts of Sound Improvisation from a dynamic perspective using kitchen tools and appliances and the manipulation of such tools and appliances. Utilizing Performative Improvisation, Sound Exploration, Music Electronics and Music Recording.

Participants will also experience how to make deep listening an effective tool or as an active collective process. The workshop will finalize into a sound and performance art work presentation fusing cryptic beats and experimental noise with live sound improvisation created by the amplification of manipulated kitchen apparatus assisted by electronic hardware such as Contac mics plugged into bass guitar amplifiers. They will play their kitchen appliances through these devices for the final performance presentation.

Sonomatter (2017) is a sound installation and performance that transforms the bioelectrical signals from microorganisms into sound. This work starts with building Winogradsky Columns to make a small ecosystem out of mud and water and generate an electric signal with a Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC). As time proceeds, the microbes will create electricity and eventually die when they lack nutrients. A custom designed Bioelectricity-Controlled-Oscillator (BCO) circuit converts the bioelectricity to sound at the same time, it consumes the (bioelectrical) energy to control the sound of the oscillator.
In this work, mud is seen as a matter that implies a circular relationship between life and death because life and death phenomenon happen in the same material. Mud takes in valueless things such as dead bodies and digest it into nutrients to grow living things. A poetics of microbial sphere can be described throughout the interaction between organic matters such as soil and water, and natural phenomenon such as respiration and oxidation in the mud. It describes a symbiotic relationship in a microcosm. The project is thus not only a metaphorical exploration of the interaction between living matters and natural phenomena, but it also explores the domain of energy harvesting as well as sonification.

“Sono-lumínica-mano-morse: pulsating study for narrating hands” is a sound installation that invites the public to interact and reflect with the world of non-hearing. As sound artist, my propose for this talk consist to present a short revision about the development process – since the idea conception until the making of- with the purpose of sharing my experience and reflections about the sense and maquinic sensibility from the area of artistic production. Also, I want to show the relationship between the public and this type of creative works.

Sonus Maris is a collaborative creative-research project at the Water Research Laboratory, Sydney Australia (University of New South Wales) which is developing a series of artworks that attempt to manifest the underlying dynamics and complex interaction of natural climate and oceanic systems. Employing visual and telemetric data from satellites as well as on the ground observations and ariel surveying the research team aim to generate sophisticated sonification and visualisation that offer a palpable and visceral experience of the long-term flows and patterns as well as of the singularities that make up the world around us. The work is currently being developed as a large-format audio/visual presentation and as a touring exhibition and associated project website.

Keywords: Art-Technology, Energy, Blow, Sustainability, Post-Digital

This paper talks about “Sopro” (The Blow), an interactive work energized by the public through the force created by their blowing on a propeller. This art work is based on the use of a simple technological system, a poetics of the blow and on primordial scientific principles. The system present in the work aligns itself with current energy and sustainability issues, inserting them in the context of art-technology, and post-digital thinking.

This panel will examine both historical and contemporary idealogical usage of sound within the military / media complex – and the juxtaposition of sound, voice and architecture to form oracular and political force.