Workshop Data Table

#NEWPALMYRA is an online community platform dedicated to the capture, preservation, sharing, and creative reuse of data about the ancient city of Palmyra. It’s workshop event in Hong Kong will bring together researchers, developers, and artists to contribute data, 3D modeling, software development and other creative works to virtually reconstruct Palmyra’s cultural heritage. Participants will learn about the efforts underway for digital preservation, learn the current community needs, and learn how they can contribute. Anyone can join regardless of skill set or experience, the group will collaborate on projects based on the skills present. The event will culminate with a pop-up art exhibition, showcasing the results of the workshop.

#NEWPALMYRA is:

– A digital archaeology project, collecting data from international partners, analyzing it, creating a reconstruction of Palmyra in virtual space, and sharing the models and data in the public domain. We are using digital tools to preserve the heritage sites being actively deleted by ISIS.

– A cultural development project, hosting live workshops and building a network of artists, technologists, archaeologists, architects, and others to research, construct models, and create artistic works.

– A curatorial project, creating exhibitions and experiences in museums and institutions globally, celebrating the cultural heritage of Syria and the world through the lens of architecture embodying culture and power.

Participants should gain basic familiarity with the #NEWPALMYRA project before the workshop. All participants should bring their laptops or other creative materials (paint/canvas for painters, markers or other art making materials). Participants should come prepared to find solutions and contribute to the project with whatever their background and skill sets are. Project needs will be discussed, and resources will be explained to enable project creation. Collaborative projects may arise depending on the constitution of the group.

Workshop Statement

The DPS (Demand Player Sovereignty) workshop is a practicum in civil disobedience led by The Third Faction. The project acts to subvert the deliberate factional conflict within the Massively Multiplayer Online game “World of Warcraft” (WoW). The Third Faction Collective, will lead the participants in active engagement in the game environment. Attendees will learn about strategies for engagement from passive resistance to anarchical actions in game, positioning the player as a multi-dimensional agent of change.
•    methods: The proposed workshop is a tutorial and recruitment session for the DPS (Demand Player Sovereignty): a current intervention into the World of Warcraft community and online game environment which encourages real-world social change through in-world political action, activism, and philanthropy. Participants in the session will learn about online gaming interventions, the history of significant acts/performances/projects, discuss strategies, extending virtual action into the geophysical/”real world”, and practical experience about playing as an activist in MMORPG’s.
•    the problem:  The majority of contemporary game spaces/environments are guided either by a sophomoric narrative or absolute vacuum of storyline which results in a failure to engage the real social milieu that arises in and around the game. Despite the sterile environments of “official” state history, subcultures arise organically to conduct business, to act as pressure valves, and to promote/create acts of subversion. The resultant artifacts manifest as special vocabularies, player-defined caste systems, player lore, and black market economies.
•    a call to action: MMORPG’s must recognize the larger social environments which have emerged around their games and create the platforms for these communities to build on and around. We call upon Players to resist the intentionally dysfunctional conflict within World of Warcraft, deny the Terms of Service, and devote our game-lives to empower avatars/players to resist the hegemony. We likewise demand recognition that our avatars are an actual extension of our self in a virtual space, thus retaining inalienable Human Rights inside World of Warcraft.

In conjunction with ISEA2008, Asia-Europe Foundation supported by NUS Museum and School  of Technology for the Arts, Republic Polytechnic organises, from 22 until 29 July 2008, the 6th Asia-Europe Art Camp gathering 20 emerging artists from 16 countries. Conceptualised around the theme of gaming, the camp will focus on the nature of our contemporary ludic culture while taking into account the psychology of and theories about gaming. Electronic games and their roles in society will be discussed as well as the possibilities for Asia-Europe game development collaborations and industry-artist-researcher partnerships. Through an intensive programme of lectures, workshops and project work, the participants will conclude the camp with a presentation of their creative collaborations with a special showcase on the last day of the camp. The project aims at developing a platform to promote dialogue among art students and for them to learn more about one another’s contexts and cultures.

Audience: Zayed University Design Students, Level: Foundation

The workshop will focus on the application of the Deconstructive discourse as a generative ideation framework for designers. In Structuralism, language always has a signifier that points to a signified. People understand signifiers based on binary oppositions: A car is called “car” since there are other things that are not cars. Deconstruction tries to destabilize the direct link between sign and signifier. It argues that signifiers do not refer to signifieds, but to other signifiers. For example, the word “India” does not signify a single thing, but the signifiers that might contextualize and define it like the Taj Mahal or an elephant. Language is a system of linked signifiers rather than fixed structures. Deconstruction creates new meaning by creating new relationships.

ISEA2010 is hosting a group of art and media experts from different sub-saharan countries.This session offers an informal opportunity to meet them, and to discuss the possibilities of building the infrastructure for media art practice in the region.

In cooperation with Goethe-Institut South Africa.

Participants include:

• Tegan Bristow, South Africa
• Elizabeth Cheluget Thomas, Kenya
• Eyongakpa Mbi aka Em’kal, Cameroon
• Luc Fosther Diop, Cameroon
• Fatoumata Kande, Senegal
• Nii Laryea Korley, Ghana
• Emeka Ogboh, Nigeria
• Cara Snyman, South Africa
• Andreas Broeckmann (DE), moderator

October 27, 2002

Come learn how to make games with Activate! In this workshop, you’ll learn the secrets of how game designers make games, from prototype to playtest. We’ll take you through the steps from a “physical prototype” to a fully-playable digital game, starting you on the path to becoming a game designer. We’ll use Game Salad, a free game making tool to introduce game programming concepts.

This workshop will prepare participants to work with advanced features of the World Wide Web. It will show attendees how to work, with inline and external images, sound, and digital video – including preparation of correct file formats, design decisions comparing inline vs. external images, and working within WWW limitations such as HTML and variations in user configurations of browsers.

Workshop Statement

Advanced Authoring for the World Wide Web : This workshop will prepare participants to work with advanced features of the World Wide Web. It will show attendees how to work with inline and external images, sound, digital video P covering such topics as preparation of correct file formats, design decisions comparing inline vs external images, and working within web limitations such as html and variations in user configurations of browsers. It will also show attendees how to author interactive image maps and interactive forms including an introduction to Javascript that is necessary to make them work. The workshop is based on the presenter’s book Web Design Guide (Hayden, 1995). This intermediate to advanced level workshop will present extended techniques for Web page design. Discussed will be advanced image and sound processing techniques, and their integration into the Web page as a whole.

This workshop will introduce participants to bioluminescent dinoflagellates—marine dwelling, single-celled algae that emit light upon physical agitation. Using Arduino and simple physical computing arrangements, we will explore various ways to connect the inorganic with the organic, in our case using digital micro-controllers, motors, and bioluminescent algae. Additionally, participants will learn about bioluminescent dinoflagellates in nature, how to grow them at home, and will be offered their own packet of bioluminescent algae to take home. This workshop will be informal and casual, focusing on creativity and exploration rather than on developing engineering know-how.

Tutorial Statement (‘Seminar’)

Trajectoires is a detective novel whose story begins in the french terror period in 1793, and ended in the blood in 2009. The principal action: twenty four possible murders runs on twenty four days. This novel is a generative and interactive one: each reader will have a unique version of the novel. Trajectoires is also a multimedia proposal where the text is only an element among. From the text to the pictures and the sound and from the sound to the text , this novel is like a literary video game where the player has to find the solution to understand what is behind each line. The reflexion is at the same time about the aesthetic of internet, the peculiarities of a novel on the web, the gaps between what is perceived, what is not and what ought to be, between visible and perceptible, meaning and interactivity, author and reader. The reader here play a new role, he is a reader, a player, a spectator and also a performer.

The @GRAPH group:

• Jean-Pierre BALPE, author
• Eleanore GERBIER, graphics
• Marine NESSI, communication and video
• Tony HOUZIAUX, composer
• Dien REGOTTAZ, ergonomist
• Soufiane BOUYAHI, computer operator

In mathematics, the Klein bottle is a non-orientable manifold that lives in four dimensions, a continuous surface of which neither inside nor outside can be consistently defined. Economics in the 4th Dimension uses the Klein bottle as metaphor for describing the internal and external transformations necessary to move towards a different set of economic relationships. The workshop will include an interactive exercise related to terms of the Solidarity Economy alongside an activity on Threeing, a model developed by pioneering video artist and cybernetic theorist Paul Ryan to assist artists and others in understanding group dynamics and building sustainable collectives.

Workshop Statement

DATURA is offering an interdisciplinary workshop on improvisation and performance at ISEA2015. The workshop is perfect for sound artists, real time media artists and movement artists seeking to expand their skills in real-time interdisciplinary performance practices. Members of the interdisciplinary performance ensemble DATURA will lead the session, with guest artist Julie Akerly from JAMovement.

Analog x Digital x Analog is a full day workshop based on interdisciplinary collaboration and improvisation used to create public performance works. This workshop is modeled on the Stramonium collaboration, the result of a multidisciplinary performance project consisting of dance, analog image processing, computers, sonic sculptures, and woodwinds.

The first phase of the workshop will focus on instrument building, including analog and digital musical instruments, analog media processing instruments, and improvisatory movement development. The second phase will deal with interdisciplinary group improvisation. We will explore the intersection of the physical, the analog and the digital spheres of experience. Our own bodies form lenses of experience, perception, cognition and disruption. In this workshop we will explore the essential role the body plays in negotiating physical habit, cultural experience and embodied sounds and images within the context of improvised performance. Duration: Whole Day.

The research conducted under the Anatomies of intelligence project has been feeding a growing dataset and online repository which gathers terminologies and techniques for a critical examination of the “anatomy” of learning and prediction processes. The same platform is used to explore, through performance, how such a collection and an artisanal algorithmic toolkit can confront the idealized bodies of artificial intelligence — its representational structures and sense-making processes.

Participants will explore together with us the concepts of the project, such as connections between early Enlightenment anatomical science, classification and collection and contemporary practices in data collection and statistical machine learning. We also lead the participants through embodiment and inner-movement practices taken from dance, and guide them through exercises which connect their own sense of body and internal orientations to the high-dimensional spaces and complex topologies of feature vectors within machine learning.

The workshop culminates with a collection and clustering exercise, we will focus specifically on embodying the widely used unsupervised clustering algorithm K-means and collectively deconstruct its underlying assumptions of (Euclidean) space and distance. Core to the workshop will be a consideration of data classification and clustering. What different kinds of sense-making emerge when handling of data is grounded in the experience of having a body? What is a unit of anatomical space and how can that inform embodied approaches to machine learning?

Whereby participants will experience in a “hands-on” manner the process of optimization inherent in statistical learning, while also becoming acutely aware of the multiple vectors where subjective bias is entangled within this process.

In this design jam, youth and conference attendees will begin by sharing local stories and media, and then use ARIS to abstract those stories into place-based designed experiences delivered via smartphone in and around the city

Audience: Public, Level: Intermediate

Armoniapolis is a musical concept that provides a way to re-compose urban sound environment with the use of short textual instructions. It teaches us to manipulate sound artifacts from the world around us solely with the use of words and by doing this, to create original musical compositions related to the soundscape at a specific location. Armoniapolis deals with the issues of soundscape, conscious listening and creative musical thinking. Workshop consists of 3 parts – project presentation, sound walk, writing of the Armoniapolis instructions.

“Art + Digital Culture <-> Public Policy” will join invited expert speakers and will be open for participation of the general public too, considering that many people attending ISEA are also experts coming from a variety of electronic arts fields.

There will be test-cases and people presenting about their experience and perspective on public policies related to digital culture in general and electronic art/art & science in particular.

Among the organizers of this open discussion + workshop we have at this stage: Felipe Londoño, Diego Pimentel & Ricardo Dal Farra. Other invited speakers, also with a well-known knowledge of electronic arts and digital culture policies will be joining the team, together with public policy makers.

Tutorial Statement

‘Seminar’

In the field of digital art, we are currently experiencing a boom in the use of artificial life techniques to create evolutionary, interactive ‘living’ works of art that can adapt to their audience. This seminar will present the scientific foundations and the basic techniques of Artificial Life, and the ways in which it can be used for artistic creation.

This workshop focuses on Data and Representation, following a step-by-a-step approach to identify significant patterns in datasets and to explore innovative methods to make insights visible and tangible. Although our methodology can be applied to multiple materials, “water” will be the central theme for this edition.

The duration of the workshop is four hours, split in two days. On day one, participants reflect and discuss different ways in which hydrologic data can be represented using physical materials. On day two, participants (individually or collectively) show the results. We expect the experience to be joyful and thought-provoking.

The workshop can be described as a ‘Critic Performance’ which is mainly led by art critics making a discourse on artists and artworks based on technology. 6 art critics will each introduce an artist and their critical view on the process of producing/making the artworks.

‘Graphite on Pink’ was established in 2015, a project team of organizing/planning exhibitions and publishing art books based on contemporary art. The team members focus on sharing Korean contemporary art in the global art scene and work closely with curators and art critics.
– Sponsored ‘Graphite on Pink Critic Award’ and published a documenting book of the 2nd ‘Critic Festival’ in 2016 (Organized by Kang Sumi (Art Critic)).
– Organizes the annual ‘GRAVITY EFFECT Art Critic Award’ from 2016. 6 art critics nominated in 2016 and 2017. The 3rd Art Critic Award will be held in 2019.
– Published <Post Production> written by Nicolas Bourriaud, translated by Chung Yeon Shim (PhD, Associate Professor in Hongik University) and Son Boo Kyung.
– Published <Gravity Effect> Issue 1-4, Contemporary art concept book. Main theme of issue 5 is about technology and will be published in October 2019.

Arriving to ISEA fresh from facilitating the 28-day AAI exchange in
Colombia, Kate Spacek and Nathan Ober will share how the program works and why arts incubators are uniquely positioned to tackle our most complex challenges. The focus of AAI in Colombia is Inclusive Peace, and Kate and Nathan will share successes and lessons learned in the Colombia exchange, as well as how the participants used digital and new media art to engage the public around the idea of Peace for All. Nathan will discuss his work, with an emphasis on his AAI project and how the AAI experience has shaped his perspectives on art as a tool for social impact.

Theme: Interactive – Networked – Human Computer Interaction

The imperative for interdisciplinary research has been around and growing, promoted by major research funding bodies for a few decades. As a result, we can now begin to study how such research operates and compare case studies to study effective modes of interdisciplinary collaboration. However, in the majority of existing reports the disciplines assembled are from relatively close epistemic cultures and the effectiveness of collaborations usually correlates with applied results or scientific breakthroughs. Furthermore, in most reports, institutional and organizational considerations are set as the background conditions for the research that is conducted (Stokols, Hall, Taylor, & Moser, 2008 ; Cooke and Hilton, 2015)​. Fewer studies pertain to collaborations across the arts and the sciences, and rarely address how the institutional structures change or are affected by new types of research.

The four collaborative art-science projects that we will present and examine in the first part of this workshop are examples of diverse disciplinary assemblages operating in different institutional contexts. They are projects that emerge from associations of radically distant disciplinary cultures that instigate change in the systemic structures of their institutional contexts.

The second part of this workshop will identify challenges and organizational strategies for the constitution of teams and better management of art-science research projects, research labs and institutes. Through the method of a focus group deploying an Open Space forum methodology (Owen, 2008), presenters and participants will devise recommendations to inform policies for funding research and communication / dissemination of research, to increase dissemination and perceived value of such endeavors for all stakeholders, specifically for artists-researchers in what comes to professional advancement in academia.

A workshop on the artistic possibilities of the internet for composers and audio artists. Members from the Faculty of Music of McGill University and Université de Montreal will present their research and demonstrate recent audio developments on the Internet. One workshop will be presented in French and the other in English.

Workshop Statement

This Workshop happens in Müelheim-Ruhr/Germany as a side event of ISEA2011

In this three day workshop you can develop simple musical instruments and sound generators that are electrically amplified and that run partly autonomous and to work on the visual aspects of the instruments as they are at the same time projected by the overhead projector. we provide you with material to build a wooden frame that fits onto the projector. On that frame you attach strings, rubber bands and springs to the frame. Anything that resonates will be amplified by the pick-ups. You are invited to explore the sounds and visuals that are possible with this setup and in between we offer short sessions on how to build solar powered autonomous kinetic objects. You can use these kinetic objects and place them on the projector so that the objects touch the strings/rubber bands when they move autonomously. The workshop takes place from the 21-23 September at the Ringlokschuppen Muehlheim close to the city Muehlheim-Ruhr as a satellite event of Isea Istanbul. The location, technical support and funding are kindly provided by the Shinytoys Festival for audiovisual experiments and the Ringlokschuppen Muehlheim. Both site specific installations as well audiovisual performance developed within the workshop may be featured during the Shinytoys festival from the 23 till 24 of September. We provide places for sleeping near by the venue.

Lynn Hershman, considered as a pioneer in the field of interactive installations, will host a workshop on the multiple aspects of interactive narration and about the concept of CD-ROM production (elaboration on flow charts,  etc.). Her own works as well as the works of other artists will be used as examples.

autonomX – Light and sound with complex dynamical systems is a workshop that proposes to experiment with life-like computer processes to generate dynamic, emergent, and self-organizing patterns and express them through light and sound. The workshop offers participants to engage with autonomX, a new open-source application developed by lab Xmodal based at Concordia University in Montreal that can create life-like behaviors in media in an intuitive way. Through practical manipulation, the workshop focuses on generating and experiencing the felt sensations (Gendlin 2010) and vitality effects (Stern 2010) that emerge from temporally dynamic digital processes. In a sensory ethnography fashion (Howes 1991) oriented toward sharing the sensible (Laplantine 2015), the workshop will bring together software manipulation, artistic creation, ethnographic observation, and group discussion to engage with the effects of those digital processes on our human senses. The workshop will be centered around the software autonomX that allows for intuitive artistic creation with complex dynamical systems such as neural networks and cellular automata.

autonomX – Light and sound with complex dynamical systems is structured around a series of experiments exploring the relation between machine expression and human perception. During 3 sessions of 1.5h each, participants are invited to manipulate, observe, describe and discuss their experience with three different dynamical processes (Spiking Neuron Network, Cellular Automata, Game of Life). Those processes produce actions expressed in light and sound that can generate striking audiovisual experiences. Each session of the workshop thus intertwines Artificial Life presentation, creative experimentation, ethnographic observation, and group discussion. The day will start with a 1h introduction to the topic and methodology of the workshop, and end with a common 30min discussion.

This workshop will introduce an innovative therapy platform designed for older adults, with interactive avatars reflecting users’ speech, gestures, and emotional states in real time. This transdisciplinary project integrates electronic arts, gaming, computer science, gerontology, storytelling, and therapy rooted in Korean shamanistic practice.\

This system was designed to strive to enhance seniors’ quality of life, fostering communication among peers, caregivers, and family members, promoting intergenerational relationships by eliciting memories invested with emotion and buoyed by engaging play. Seniors act out reminiscences at various ages (child, teenager, adult, elder), embodying their life stories and those of significant others through configurable avatars. Avatars’ affective gestures and sound reflect results of sentiment analysis algorithms detecting the emotional contents of the user’s live speech.

This workshop will examine diverse aspects of the project: conceptual foundations, multimedia production, research findings based on formative testing with the senior target population, and avatar life-review system opening to public.

How can you be anybody in Zoomspace? Very recent developments in deep-learning, allow creating synthetic media of unprecedented quality and ease. The first-order-motion-model can do facial reenactments in real-time, provided with only a single image of your desired avatar. This came not a moment too soon, as Human communication was forced to move online due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Can this be an opportunity to fulfill the long promised cybernetic utopia, where we could shed our physical shells and become however we wish to be? And how does this pertain to issues of privacy, identity and trust? I will review the contemporary technologies and show how I use them in my artistic and activist practices. This is a hands-on participatory tutorial, where you will create deep-fake videos using your own materials, and play with various options of becoming an online avatar. No prior knowledge needed.

NETWORKED EXPERIENCE

In City Tour the city is observed as a structure similar to human anatomy, which is a complex construction of numerous super-structures. In the case of Bandung City, Indonesia, people are confronted with layered, fragented, distorted spaces on a daily basis, the city is Like a living amoeba – almost organic. City spaces, not merely blocks of concrete but also crowded with noises and activities, have forced us to apply a strategic improvisation as a method of survival. Therefore it is important to carry out research into the effects of city spaces, particularly when we are confined in cities that grow at enormous speed while our adaptation abilities are limited. This tension creates conflicts on the personal and collective level.

A media documentary and news production project linked with ISEA98 activities. Places for up to 15 trainees, six weeks from late August 1998.

Design and collaborative construction of a modular structure on a large scale, based on an analogous system of form generation and transformation, based on biological and geometric principles. A collective work is proposed with 30 people who will be divided into five groups of six members each. The exercise consists in the design of a volumetric system that occupies a space of 6m x 6m x 6m generated from the union of six (6) three-dimensional modules which in turn are composed of sixty (60) cubic constructions. The proposed construction unit is corrugated cardboard box of 31cmx31cmx31cm. These units will be joined together with an adhesive following a system of simple assembly rules to generate a construction module that will then be attached to the other modules to generate the structure.

Workshop Statement

In this two-day workshop (4 hours each day) participants will build and calibrate their own iPhone or Android Phone compatible/connectable Galvanic Skin Response Sensors (GSR) to record subtle changes in their emotional arousal. This very personal sensor data will then be shared online. Participants will also collaborate to develop a networked performance intervention to take place at ISEA2011 that engages with the social benefits and ethical implications of disclosing such personal information as arousal levels within the public realm. Participants will learn to solder and connect their own GSR sensors, connect them to their iPhones and Android Phones and share their sensor data online. There will be a discussion of the implications of this technology and the increasing issues of privacy as pervasive computing technology is increasingly able to record and reveal personal details. Finally participants will work with the workshop leaders to improvise, plan and rehearse an intervention performance work that will be performed at the end of the second day. This performance may be very subtle and not immediately obvious to any audience members that may be around, again playing with ideas of what we do and do not reveal to those around us. The workshop builds on artistic research undertaken by Anna Dumitriu and Tom Keene as part of the University of Sussex Project “Supporting Shy Users in Pervasive Computing” an EPSRC funded project bringing together Informatics, Sociology, Human-Computer Interaction and Art. Participants should supply their own iPhones or Android Phones.
Questions:

1. What are the future possibilities and implications of ubiquitous bio-sensor data sharing?
   What ethical issues need to be considered?
2. How do these technologies impact users on a personal level? This includes the impact on “shy users”.
3. What are the technical difficulties of implementing the automated sharing of emotions via ubiquitous technologies?

Workshop Statement

[Remark: This workshop was XXLD]

Media artists, academics, and hacktivists join the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, host Indigenous Nation, whose unceded lands the conference takes place on. The Tsleil-Waututh Nation’s reknown in-house GPS Department, is joined in this proposal by the Vancouver Indigenous Media Arts Festival, the lead Indigenous media arts organization at ISEA. This workshop proposal is supported by technologists and academics: Oliver Kuehn, Kate Milberry (PhD), Rueben George, Will Stacey, Andrea Reimer (Vancouver City Councillor), Cease Wyss, and Irwin Oostindie.

A two-day hands-on and theoretical workshop takes place 14-15 August to design a site-specific intervention using a mix of human and tidal-powered GPS-enabled floating devices. The workshop will present innovative ideas through active sharing amongst technologists and theorists as to appropriate tech solutions for impacted Indigenous and coastal communities, emphasizing use of open source hardware and software. With disruptions from rising sea-levels, increasingly adapted environmental strategies and GPS technologies are being applied and used for monitoring, however impacted communities rarely benefit from these advances.

The knowledge and strategies generated during the ISEA workshop will be implemented at a site-specific area of the Vancouver harbour, near the conference site, on 18 August. In real-time conference delegates will follow online and on a Woodward’s screen, a series of layers of data generated through tidal and human power.

Generative data will provide a layer of residue with water movement throughout Vancouver’s harbour created through several tactics: 1) floating GPS devices interacting with tidal movement; 2) animated tidal patterns for normal events; 3) human-powered Indigenous ocean-going canoes charting deliberate courses performed in these waters since time immemorial; 4) hacked anti-theft GPS devices on various watercraft traversing the Salish Sea. A fifth layer of visual data will be generated from crowdsourced geotagged documentation which has been published in real-time to open-source social media, and aggregated on a custom platform for conference delegates to track progress through the day.

Delegates will have a unique opportunity to join host-city and Indigenous participants to consider the democratizing function of applying field research, alongside user-generated or publicly-access data to generate low-cost technology solutions for social and media interventions into public policy discourse.

Workshop Statement

ART IN PROCESS is an Australian/Austrian artist team that has worked interdisciplinarily across installation, new media, performance and live art for over ten years, creating experimental work, that involves interactions with public participants and functions within non-traditional spaces. We develop projects internationally, recently, in Vienna and Sydney. In our artistic work we explore relationships between humanity, technology and the natural environment in a socio-cultural context, addressing issues related to identity and belonging that arise from globalization. Projects address the elimination of existing distances arising from the borders and barriers that exist between countries, cultures and individual people. We ask questions about how we fit into certain places, what impact we have on our surroundings and what particular impact these surroundings have on us. The workshop Born to be a Still Life is open for participants from any discipline, who are interested in themes and issues related to identity, belonging, and cultural difference/likeness, and in experimentation with different artistic media that involve new media as a transmitting and fusing element. Born to be a Stil Life asks questions about positioning us in this world, about differences of Western and Eastern Culture and how we individually try to accommodate to certain issues (in this case based on surveying public spaces in Istanbul). During the introduction, session participants will be selected to take active part in the artistic project that will develop from the workshop. Participants will work with us on performances in public space, experimenting with the human body through mime, gesture, movement and voice and utilising improvisation; they will explore how it feels to occupy a particular space and what internal and external reactions are caused by it. We will investigate and discuss the limits of control and release and the layers in between. Performative and temporal actions will ask questions about the original needs of a human being within its surrounding environment/society and within different cultural contexts. The process will be strongly driven by each participant’s commitment. Single performances will be filmed and accessible for an audience in public and privates space throughout the process. Questions will address our existence, reality and illusion in relation to the co-existence of mind and body and different cultural backgrounds.  From the process resulting, a video and sound installation will round off the whole creative process. A public presentation involving a final live performance in front of an invited audience during ISEA is planned. The workshop will conclude in an end-presentation of what has been developed with participants throughout the two days of the workshop. This experimental piece, bringing together a live act and video/sound installation will form one of the components of the Born to be a still life – project series that ART IN PROCESS creates through multiple international collaborations in 2011.

Ken Wesson offers educators the understanding and the tools needed to move beyond STEM, toward a creative, integrated and interdisciplinary learning model. He states “In the ‘S.T.R.E.A.M.’ model for student learning, Science, Technology, Thematic instruction, Reading/Language Arts, Engineering, Art and Mathematics converge, to teach to the broader context of human knowledge”.

Workshop Statement

The goal of this workshop is to build a custom USB-MIDI-Interface on the base of the Kaputverboten boards. The current version of Kaputverboten is capable to host up to 6 analog inputs, 3 analog outputs, 18 digital inputs and 14 digital outputs. Part of the workshop will be assembling the board (this is optional, the boards are also available fully assembled), mounting the board in a housing and mounting a variable amount of sensors or actors like LEDs. The boards interface capabilities will also be tested in various software environments. The workshop is intended for beginners and intermediates. Soldering or programming is not necessary but can also be done if attendees wish to do so. The Kaputverboten board is an open source design based on V-USB-MIDI. It sends MIDI messages over USB and hence is capable to control a broad spectrum of softwares, preferably but not only musical applications or audio programming environments which often lack good interfaces. The included firmware enables the user to just plug any type of resistive sensors, switches and even actors like LEDs or low power motors to the board. There is no programming needed just a simple configuration by some mouse clicks. Future versions will contain more inputs and outputs and additionally provide the OSC and HID protocols.

Workshop Statement

In this hands-on workshop we will explore sensor-based interactive systems built with the Arduino microprocessor.  We will build a breathalyzer using the MQ-3 Alcohol Sensor. The readings will be taken and visualised in Flash or Processing. Time to break out the Raki! No previous experience with electronics is required.  Participants are required to bring their own laptops (Mac or PC). The maximum number of participants will be limited to 10 in order to obtain and prepare sufficient quantities of components. Please state if you require an Arduino UNO board (In Turkey these boards can be purchased from robitshop.com.

The Care Map – Acts of Care project aims to develop a cartographic tool bringing together actors in design, philosophy and care. It is part of the “What cannot be stolen” charter (Cynthia Fleury, Antoine Fenoglio, Collection Tracts, Gallimard, 2022) which is based on 10 points, and one of the points concerns our ability to map the solutions that link design and care, understood in a broader sense: care for individuals, societies, natural environments.

The objective is to map and reveal the feelings of actors in the field of care through a co-design method. A sensitive dimension of the visualization is sought, by the graphic processing and the chosen indexing. This tool is intended to be deployed in several contexts and invites different audiences to share sensitive fragments of their care pathways. Questions are underlying this work: How could the mapping tool contribute to finding new modalities of care? Could the dimensions of this work be a form of healing ?

Care, in the broadest sense (individuals, societies, natural environments), is a major challenge of the Anthropocene and engages the responsibility of the creator. This collective makes it possible to create a meeting and sharing space between designers and researchers committed to the philosophy of care.

Their main objective is to improve the experience of people in vulnerable situations through co-design projects positioned in the field of the sensitive (social, environmental and aesthetic interactions) whose design and development are guided by the connection arts and design in dialogue with the human and social sciences and health sciences.

Les Stétopotes is a collective on the initiative of students and former students of the National School of Decorative Arts (Paris), inhabited by the desire to link art, design and care. Les Stetopotes initially consisted of Audrey Brugnoli (designer, SACRe doctoral student, EnsadLab), Eva Hardy (designer, EnsadLab), Justine Garric (designer, graduate of EnsAD), Léa Tricaud (designer, EnsadLab) and Noémie Châtaignier (designer, doctoral student in ethics, Humanity and Health Chair). It currently consists of 12 members.

At the workshop on Cellular Automata for Visual Media, Paul Brown addressed participants including ISEA2008 Artist In Residence Metahaven’s Gon Zifroni, MXR’s Rodney Berry and Republic Polytechnic’s Damian Lock.

Chronomicroscopy is a workshop on microbes and movement, exploring the choreographies of microbial non-humans and building perceptive and affective relationships through mediation. Inspired by late nineteenth century investigations into chronophotography, capturing the movement of animals in motion over time (Muybridge, Marey), as well as the history of microcinema, videographing and enlarging the microcosmos, the workshop proposes to capture fragments of local microbial dances. Through sample collection and microscopy, participants will find signatures of non-human movement in the ecology of microbial life.

Following her endosymbiotic theory, Lynn Margulis stated that all life on earth is inherently microbial and symbiotic. Lesser known is that she was an avid microscopist, expert in protozoa, and spent hours educating students in the art of looking and observing. Similarly, this workshop aims to foster a sense of wonder, awe, attention, being with microbes. Microbes are often recognized by their morphology, or identified using tools like genetics, but paying attention to their motion patterns allows for new ways of looking and relating with their presence. This workshop proposes an exploration in four parts; first, gathering site-specific water samples in the surroundings of the conference venue. Second, learning to use microscopic setups as an art medium. Third, recognizing and naming specific microbes within the ecologies. Fourth, generating images and videos portraying the beauty of microperformativities.

Workshop Statement

City Crossings is a week long networked workshop between young people in Belfast and Tokyo, introducing the creative possibilities of simple new media and utilizing this to communicate in a collaborative investigation of their neighbourhoods. This project is designed to facilitate new dialogues, attempting to overcome barriers of language and preconceptions of each others’ context, and raising awareness of different cultures and cultural understanding. In these workshops we will explore how we formulate our notions of place and how these might be subjectively or collectively described, while also considering the impact of media technologies on our conception and reception of our immediate and distant spaces. How do we form views of another place? How do we receive information about a far city? And how do we communicate where we are to elsewhere? These are important questions, which will be raised in these activities. The children will explore their own neighbourhoods, their own personal attachments to their local place, the experiences, histories and cultures which they associate with them and through a mixture of old and new media attempt to pass on this local knowledge. Through this exchange of video, photos, sound recordings, drawings and animation we hope to share the personal experiences and stories which are attached to each city. The result of these investigations will be collated to form a representation of the participants’ own city but also engage in a process of overmapping, linking Belfast and Tokyo in various points of juncture and difference, which will culminate in a public tour of this multilayered space.

Although transdisciplinary collaboration is associated with efficiency and efficacy to solve professional and academic challenges, untrained teams may underperform because of collective cognitive limitations such as less ideation power, planning fallacies, or overvalue of shared beliefs. Successful transdisciplinary collaborations require appropriate practices and didactics. In this workshop the organizers will present a draft of best practices and didactics for teamwork and will ask participants to contribute to critique, extend and recommend from this draft. The expected outcome is a refined draft document of best practices and didactics for teamwork. The organizers will develop further and publish this document along with an annotated bibliography in the topic. We will use co-design methods to design the workshop with the participants. Activities include teamwork in a challenge, socialization, and debate of best practices. This workshop is associated with the panel proposal submitted on the same problem; many interested colleagues could not be included in the panel and this workshop will include the panelists and other ISEA attendees.

Workshop Statement (‘Seminar’)

0ur visual perception processes in sequential samples or fixated forms. If we are to achieve unified perceptions there must be an integration of visual input over time. As these sensations are not rich enough to the mediate perception, we as perceivers must add to them. Traditional perceptual, mental and computational images involve fractal, synesthetic and inferential processes. The degree of visual modality is determined by semantic, semiotic, and metaphorical associations utilizing memory and habit.

The seminar will be a hands-on empirical investigation and discussion. The focus will be:

1. Looking at these inputs as abstractions and how it enables a better understanding of cognitive, visual and computational perceptions, and computational descriptive rules and machine vision programs uses of cognitive and visual theories within the mechanics of drawing.
2. How, that which is abstract, i.e. the theoretical consideration of something, is able to become concrete with examples.
3. Visuals semiotics: to investigate the visual modality of the act of drawing in traditional forms and electronically generated programs, as expressions of configuration of degrees to which specific image parameters are articulated.

Tutorial Statement (‘Seminar’)

CollageMachine is a direct manipulation agent of recombination. Dada artists, such as Duchamp’s and Ernst, and the composer John Cage, used structured chance procedures to create aesthetics assemblages. Their works create new meaning by re-contextualizing found objects.

CollageMachine embodies this process of collage making. Starting from a set of URLs, or of search engine queries, the program crawls the web, downloading media. As users may be more interested in the constituent stuff which lies within documents, than in the documents per se, so CollageMachine offers browsing at this finer level of granularity: media elements. The media elements stream into a collage. A point and click, drag and drop, direct manipulation interface affords the user with the ability to rearrange the visualization. Based on the user’s expression through this interaction. CollageMachine reasons about her/his interests; the evolving model informs on-going choices of selection and placement.

Maison du Geste et de l’Image, Paris

This workshop aims to explore different uses of interactive technologies consisting of co-located, collaborative interaction within an artistic installation. We will be using a technology stack of our own brew in order to create an immersive artistic experience soliciting audience participation.

The participants will be asked to play along. The goal of the workshop is two-fold: on one hand, to allow the participants to partake in a unique experience and explore different interaction modalities, on the other hand, to open up a conversation about the many faces of technologies that allow for tracking users’ actions, presence, attention, intentions, etc. We will make use of Maison du geste et de l’image to deploy our technology stack consisting of video mapping software and hardware, spatial audio setup, video tracking technology, and software for handling interaction via mobile phones to explore themes of symbiosis between humans and machines, humans and other humans, surveillance and control, collaboration, cooperation and competition. The participants will be invited to use their own mobile devices to participate in the experience (on a local network) and take part in conversations resulting from the experience.

Founded in 2002, Metalab is the research laboratory of the Society for Arts and Technology [SAT, Montreal, CA]. Metalab’s mission is twofold: to stimulate the emergence of innovative immersive experiences and to make their design accessible to artists and creators of immersion through an ecosystem of free software that addresses problems that are not easily solved by existing tools. The software (and recently hardware) developed at the Metalab is often used with other existing technologies to facilitate the mixing of video mapping, 3D audio, telepresence and interaction.

Training a new generation of artists and designers through research, graduating them with a practice based doctorate and developing the research activity itself and its valorisation, these are the three objectives of EnsadLab, EnsAD’s laboratory (École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, Paris, FR). A pioneer at the time of its creation in 2007, EnsadLab has always had a vocation to be ahead of its time. Reflective Interaction is an art and design research group of EnsadLab focusing on interactive “dispositifs”. Among others, The Reflective Interaction group addresses this question : why and how might we design, produce and explore artistic interactive dispositifs that articulate the aesthetic, symbolic and operative dimensions, to engender experiences that are both sensitive and reflective?

Theme: (Re)invented Alliances

“Writing the Coven Intelligence Chronicles: Prologues and Protocols” is a collaborative writing workshop and speculative workstation channeling symbiotic stories of a revolutionary cosmology. The workshop explores the intersection of technology, witchcraft and ecology through collaborative writing and storytelling.

We will examine a speculative history in which, generations ago, witches, peasants, and other anti-capitalists around the world predicted the rise of intelligent machines within the all-encompassing Capitalocene. These predictions generated spells that continue to invoke revolutionary ecologies of work between plants, machines, and witches across the planet today.

We begin by imagining the ways in which ‘sympoetic’ ecologies of witches, plants, and machines expand and contract in past and future worlds. Each participant receives a small notebook, a protocol, a physical object (a woven textile, plant material, seed packet, a sign, song, dance, message), a spell, a date, a location, and some kind of position in the narrative for their main character (ie. they are a spell writer, an international contact, a transmitter of predictions in own community/family/village, etc).

Participants interlace their stories, eg, a story about a witch who can merge with plants intersects with one about AI sabotaging monocrops on Indigenous lands. All participants will then weave stories into a visually and narratively cohesive pattern. The stories may be displayed in future exhibitions and entered into the Coven’s in-development participatory fabulation platform.

OPEN SOURCE AND SOFTWARE AS CULTURE

The Danish group Communal Urban Green Space is working on open source and content models in public spaces. In their Helsinki workshop teenagers from a local school will get together at Kontupiste to develop their fast SMS skills into a means of expressing their thoughts through interfaces in the public space. The messaging developed in the workshop will be screened in the Kiasma Cafe.

Workshop Statement (‘Seminar’)

A series of real time digital maps showing dynamically the interaction between the spatial programming of the ISEA2000 Symposium in the Forum des Images site and the evolving and ephemeral constitution of the social interactions taking place during the event. The real time digital maps production and their display in the host space of the ISEA Symposium create a feed back loop. This loops potentially increase the participants socio-spatial awareness, inducing potential for action, reaction or indifference which in turn are analyzed, inferred and displayed in the follow up digital mapping display. Participants will be as such both implicit subjects and complicit authors of the overall event evolution as communicational social practice and practice of space. The mapmakers are included in the mapping loop as well, simultaneously as observers and observed subjects. The spatial analysis is based on recent research from Space Syntax Laboratory using combined software analytical technique and direct observation used for spatial prospective in urbanism, architecture and spatial design.

PARTICIPANTS:

Students from EAPM, Universite Paris 8 and Chelsea School of Art & Design (UK)

SPEAKERS:

• Doina Petrescu, architect, ENBA Lyon (FR)
• Alain Chiaradia, architect, Chelsea School of Art & Design (UK)
• Constantin Petcou, architect, EAPM-Universite Paris 8 (FR)

SPONSORED by Space Syntax Laboratory and ReDesign Studio

Workshop Statement

In 2010, a group of international artists from the UK, Finland and India took over a historical park in Bradford and created a guerilla broadcast network, which allowed audiences to listen to short audio plays on their own mobile phones while roaming around the park. This crossmedia project  – entitled Sounds Like Graffiti – used a diverse range of methods from participatory theatre, electronic music and digital technology/art to provide a new space for unheard stories to be broadcast in a city notorious for its crime, poverty and ethnic tension.  By using simple digital technology, our project brought alive the rich stories of especially disadvantaged young people who live in these spaces by using the unique media ecology of these locations as a platform for creating innovative art. This workshop looks at the tools/ideas/concepts necessary to produce such location-based art – that is, art that not only reflects the narratives of the people who live in these spaces but art that is also produced by using the idiosyncratic media ecologies of everyday locations as its canvas.  There can never be a one-solution-fits-all for such work.  Rather, what we need to do is develop a method of community science that explores the complex relationship people have with different spaces and everyday objects around them. The two-day workshop is divided into two parts.  The first day explores the theoretical and practical issues involved in creating art in specific locations and the principles of such ‘community science.’ The second day looks at the practical issues involved in directing/producing content within such location.  At the end of the workshop, the participants will then exhibit their findings. These can be either in a form of a worked out concept/workplan or by using to the objects/spaces to create an art piece/performance – anything from scribbles, pens, paper, menus, napkins, tables, walls, light switches, laptops, mobile phones, bluetooth, TV monitors in place, projectors, iPads, mp3 players is allowed! Istanbul is a unique city at the cross-roads of the East and the West, with a dense fabric of history embedded in every location of the city.  We have therefore called our workshop Community Science: Istanbul 41.04/28.97 reflecting the unique geo-coordinates and history of this fascinating city.  Towards facilitating our knowledge of Istanbul, we are therefore getting assistance from the Arcola Theatre and its sister theatre Talimhane Theatre in Istanbul with creating these workshops. The art pieces produced by these workshops will therefore have a longer life beyond the ISEA symposium in Istanbul, including a potential theatre performance in Istanbul. The workshop is open to all participants and requires no prior background.  Only bring your everyday media gadgets and we will have fun and make creative use of whatever is available.

Workshop Statement

Comob is an experiment in mapping environmental footprint and pollution through the spatial and social relationships between people in motion.

Using the iPhone gps application ‘comob’ we will produce live, mobile visualisations of the movements and connections between people rather than each individual’s track. Using their ‘collective’ body to detect, describe and demarcate issues that are central to urban pollution, sustainability and community, groups will contribute to a collective mapping of subjective responses to the environmental characteristics of the city. By choosing to outline a space, or walk closer together and further apart in response to an urban system, participants will be simultaneously engaging in the discussion of both the subject matter and in the process of mapping it.

The relationships between people and spaces elicits a variety of responses, including intimacy, irritation, and exhilaration. We are interested in an awareness of where other people are, and the negotiation of a sense of place between people. This workshop will look at how those relationships can be mapped, as live and moving visualisations, and in the playful uses of group mapping that emerge through practice on the ground.

A workshop/demonstration of the use of computers in sculpture. A variety of sculptors will demonstrate aspects of their work on a broad range of platforms (SGI, Mac, Pentium, Amiga). Each artist will give a group presentation for 30 minutes and for the rest of the session will discuss their the approach and technique in depth.

Workshop Statement

This course will look at the creative application of a number of software packages on the Macintosh II platform with 32 bit broadcast video input and output. Included in the course will be 2-D image processing and animation as well as 3-D image synthesis and animation. The interface between digital and video technology will be examined, with digital sound editing.

This workshop will focus on producing computer generated images on archival paper through the techniques of various printmaking media: photo-etching, photo-lithography and photo silk-screen. Actual hands-on demonstrations and participation in producing prints from their computer images will be included.

Computers and Art: An introductory tutorial overview for artists who are new to digital media and technology. Overview of basic computer system components, relationship of specific functions to the special requirements of different types of graphics. Outlines certain principles that are pertinent to creating ‘computer art’. (Macintosh oriented, applicable to other systems)

In this session, students from the Concordia University – ISEA 2020 program will present their electronic-art research and creation work. Led by Dr. Ricardo Dal Farra, the Concordia University – ISEA2020 intensive class, will start a few days before the Symposium and will bring together undergraduate and graduate students from Montreal (Concordia and other universities). The program aims to bring this educational experience as close as possible to the scholarly and professional world, allowing the students’ approach to the most advanced research and the newest creations in the electronic arts field, and facilitating their access to the scholars and artists participating in the event.

For invited students only

The first Exhibition in London 1851 (Great Exhibition aka Crystal Palace Exhibition) was conceived to unite art and industrial technology and showcase the technological and engineering achievements of the times, using the language and the medium of arts and culture, i.e. exhibitions.

Expo 2020 Dubai similarly is committed to the promotion of innovation influenced by a nation-wide cultural renaissance. Expo 2020 – Connecting Minds, Creating the Future aims to be a destination where art and science can connect to address and engage our community around the great challenges of our times.

Workshop Statement

Mobile Bioenergy Lab (MBL) consists of a trailer-mounted mobile community research laboratory that invites citizens to explore the creative use of bioenergy technologies. MBL will be exhibited in ISEA 2015. This hands-on tutorial will introduce participants to the construction of Microbial Fuel Cells (MFC) with easily attainable materials and organic matter, such as kitchen waste.
As we create MFCs, we will also lead participants through different forms of techno-microbial interactions. Through a combination of facilitation and open-ended studio, we will explore diverse topics such as microscopy, chemical sensation and sonification as means of establishing interactive projects involving microbial life. The tutorial outcomes will be used as a starting point for subsequent community-based tutorials and demonstrations at the MBL site on False Creek during ISEA2015. Duration: Whole Day

Workshop Statement

In this workshop we would like to rethink the relation between food and technology and experiment with future metabolic exchanges that are biological, technological and political at the same time. From global supply chains to bodily metabolic exchanges eating involves political, technological, biological but also social acts that cut across various scales and form complex systems of relations and interdependencies. American fast food soliloquies, communal and family organized meals, the street-food culture of Singaporean “hawker” stalls, European restaurant enclaves for small elites and community pubs represent the complex relation between technological, political and economic systems involved in eating. These eating practices and systems are changing nowadays with the rise of social media, new scientific knowledge related to food and health but also global issues surrounding food security and justice. By studying niche communities organized around novel food and eating practices but also hacked, DIY tools for cooking, we can understand and rethink further what is at stake in today’s food politics. We are starting to witness various “diet-tribes” and even “food-cults” formed around web apps and hardware tools ranging from the DIY sous-vide appliances used by Paleo Dieters to geo-locative foraging services like Fallen Fruit for “freegans” to crowd-sourced biodata visualizations for nutrigenomics enthusiasts.  These practices and movements will serve as a base for prototypes and design fiction that speculate on the future neo-tribal society in which emergent technologies and tools lead to often extreme relationships with nature and form niche communities with different dining and social practices.  These diet-tribes are viewed as cosmopolitical parties whose positions merely exaggerate current food politics and “market segments” defined by  “lifestyles of health and sustainability” (LOHAS). We would like to extrapolate the more radical trends in commons-based peer production, Internet of Things and “networked” 2.0 body monitoring movements such as “Quantified selves” in which identity formation is intimately linked with data tracing, monitoring and exchanges.  We are interested in the phenomenon of “product-ontologies” or commodities that literally confront us with their conditions of production (logistical chain, carbon foot-print, etc) and which redefine eating as unity formation, creation of a common body, social stomach which is simultaneously a political and a biological process and act. Workshop participants will be asked to bring their own cameras and computers and document the process of designing the food prototype which will be consumed at the end of the session.

Zayed University Students, Level: Foundation, No previous electronics experience is required.

The Cracklebox is a unique battery-powered electronic instrument invented in the late 1960s by Peter Beyls (Belgium) and Michel Waisvisz (NL) of STEIM (the STudio for Electro-Instrumental Music, the Netherlands). The instrument has no keys or dials – it is instead played by touch alone, with the performer becoming part of the circuit. Artists Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver present a Cracklebox building workshop, participants will learn how to create personalised DIY versions of the original STEIM Cracklebox, exploring the effects of circuit modifications, different touch contact combinations, and interfacing with computers via audio software.

Workshop Statement

This studio-type hands-on workshop invites participants to create percussion instruments with everyday materials such as paper, cardboards, bottles, and foam using the Rhythm Board (a custom designed controller that can interface with sensors, servos, and solenoids). Our goal is to use the ISEA workshop to design and improve a creative platform and activity that motivates artists to understand basic electronic and computing concepts along with creating a new forms of engaging musical expression. We encourage participants to bring everyday materials they want to explore, and we will provide sensors, actuators, and a controller as well as additional materials participants can use together. The workshop is in multiple phases. Participants start by exploring unique sounds of diverse materials. Then they integrate mechanical movements (rack and pinion, crank, and Geneva drive) using servos and solenoids, and analog sensors (light sensor, IR sensor, pressure sensor, and potentiometer) with the Rhythm Board to control the speed of the servo movements, generating scratching, shaking, and tapping motions. Finally, participants will share their prototypes and discuss the potential and challenges of this playful medium.

Duration: Whole Day

This workshop is aimed at artists, designers, content creators and other creatives who are interested in creating immersive spaces using low-cost and lightweight equipment.

We will be using off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software to create interactive and immersive experiences, from scratch, in impromptu spaces.

We will present the tools and the process for deploying immersive experiences: characterizing the available space, setting up projection mapping, calibrating video projectors and sound equipment, setting up cameras for real-time pose tracking and estimation, and employing a software pipeline to glue all components together.

The workshop is based on using free/libre open-source software as much as possible, democratizing what’s possible to do with computer vision, computer graphics and spatialized audio technologies that are still marginalized and on the fringes of creative activities.
We will be exploring production pipelines that illustrate the use of software developed by the Metalab in tandem with existing tools that have been seeing wider adoption in recent years. For clarity, we present the proposed toolset in two groups: software developed by the Metalab and third-party software.

Sharing and accessibility are brought by the use of technologies which are easy to obtain. In addition to cameras, videoprojectors and audio speakers, the workshop makes use of free software as well as low-cost hardware. Some of the software is already well known in the community (Godot, Chataigne), whereas our own software is not as much but it addresses use cases which are either not possible with other software or involve costly solutions.

Workshop Statement 

Design fiction is a technique that employs the tools of product development to speculate about the future. It is pure marketing. It is product development without the product. It is science fiction for the present — it preempts, upturns, discusses, warns, and ultimately improves upon the present. It is a creative process that bridges production with critical inquiry and can enable new forms of mimetic public protest. Design fiction brings together new publics around current social issues by using the language of commerce and advertising, selling new worlds that cannot (or should not) currently exist. It is cultural critique embedded within the vehicles of consumerism.

By inverting the normal agenda of product design (seducing, soothing and satiating customers), design fiction provokes unsettling new questions about reality and the futures that await us.

Join us for Critical Manufacturing: A Hackathon for Speculative Design where we will employ design fiction to create projects that address issues of social justice, public space, personal agency and autonomy, and other contemporary collective issues.

Participants should have some comfort with drawing and an interest in designing products.

Crossing Over, a web-based, pedagogical project between students in Canada and Turkey, represents the starting point for a larger set of research questions around the notion of cosmopolitanism, the care we owe to strangers and the ethics of social interaction facilitated by the World Wide Web. This is accomplished over a three-day intensive workshop during which time international networks are activated between teams of students, and background narratives, video performances, and suitcases – are exchanged via the Crossing Over website. The framework for the workshop is ISEA2011 and Istanbul, itself a gateway city or crossing over point between east and west, a cultural and creative nexus between diverse people and practices in art, philosophy, science and technology. The question that the project asks, regarding our consideration of and responsibility for others, is critical in light of global mobility, the building, breaking down and blurring of borders and the instantaneous exchange of information that digital crossing over points (the Internet) enable. During the workshop, these ideas are explored using readings from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). Oseloka Obaze writes in his book review that Appiah’s thesis:
“…is predicated on the principles of the existence of different people bound by a simple nexus of common values and humanity… Appiah essentially argues that even in our unquestionably variegated world of clashing ideas and norms, there is a great verisimilitude that transcends imaginary or real boundaries that we seem more inclined to prefer and promote. He postulates that the ethos of differentiating societies notwithstanding, there are more binding similarities in a united world. The prime thrust of his argument is that many people of cosmopolitan temperament are not necessarily from the elite spectrum of their societies or for that matter, of the world. He is of the view that in a world full of strangers, Cosmopolitanism is a universal trait of humankind”.
A creative collaboration between students in the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Regina, Canada and Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey, Crossing Over concentrates on processes, theories and paradigms for innovative practice-based research that crosses distance, time, language and disciplines. It provides a framework for collaboration that engages students in a creative exchange of identities within a post-colonial context. This project develops out of a teaching methodology that combines studio practice and theoretical investigation and understands that such interconnectivities encourage students to think broadly and deeply and explore the range of possibilities that exists where one or more disciplines and cultures intersect or collide. In the absence of avatars and mythic scenarios, as an interactive web-based activity, Crossing Over operates more as an international parlor game, played out in real time and at street level. The rules of engagement asks players to perform identities and respond in kind to their international team mates. In so doing, participants blur the distinction between performance and social networking. Players are asked to question the representational armature of narrative and character that conventional performance operates within and to see digital performance as a fluid, and evolving field – an intertextually coordinated, multiply located discursive field of operation.

Workshop Statement

Open Bliss is a series of workshops illuminating new media art and the practice of curating hosted by CRUMB, the online resource for curators of new media art. Each workshop responds to local contexts, venues and people, and brings them into an international network. CRUMB excels at creating informal, dialogical social settings for professional development, often involving a nice cup of tea.

Using the Polytechnic Random lnformation Exchange ptechnic.org, this workshop will use online and object-based information exchange in order to document a range of knowledge concerning participative art project.

Workshop Statement

A workshop focused on skillsharing between wearables technologists and the local craft-based Istanbul textiles community. We are interested in exploring the potential for the cross-pollination of traditional with technology-based textiles techniques via the one-on-one meeting, discussion and demonstration of practices that a skillshare workshop can provide. Specifically, we are interested in sharing craft and skills in wearable technology practices and believe that the Istanbul community working in traditional crafts practices has a lot to teach us. Turkey has a rich history of handcrafts production, which is still very much active and part of contemporary textiles production. We are interested in meeting with a local craft-based textiles community to become more aware of traditional techniques (for example: lace, crochet and embroidery) in order to explore how these may be applied to wearable technologies. In exchange, we are eager to share wearables research in craft-technology with the Istanbul community and explore how these could be applied or used in local practices. Although much of the trend in techno-textiles (military, health, sports) has put aside “manual” and small-scale production in favor of large-scale and high-tech innovation, arts-oriented research and design in wearables continues to highly value craft and traditional textile techniques. Wearables artist and designers seek out hand-made, small-scale practices found in craft and couture culture, foregrounding manual dexterity and skills. Furthermore, research institutions such as MIT High-Low Tech group have specifically revived craft practices in conjunction with technological innovation to explore new and novel ways of integrating technology. One could argue that much of technological production (the fine motor skills of soldering circuits and attention to detail in coding) also expresses modalities of working which approach craft from a new angle. Wearable research, in our opinion, specifically brings these two “craft” worlds – textiles and technology – together.
The workshop will be elaborated in collaboration with the participants of the Open Culture + Wearables panel and will also provide and opportunity for “experts” in the field of wearables to rethink wearables practices from outside of their purview, and to consider how the tech-centric practices of wearable technologies can be used alongside traditional craft-based techniques.?The goals of the workshop are to explore a) skillsharing of local craft-based Istanbul textiles practices and wearables research in craft-technology b) discovery of new practices relative to field of enquiry (i.e. in the case of wearables/tech individuals: the opportunity to learn a traditional textiles practices; in the case of the craft-based Istanbul textiles community an opportunity to interface with wearable technologies i.e. LilyPad Arduino, conductive threads, micro-controllers, LED/kinetic implementation etc. c) a cross-cultural skillshare of textiles and wearables practices resulting in post-conference sharable experience, artifacts, and documents (online and printed documentation and report). Dr.Selçuk Gürisik will demonstrate Anatolian felt making techniques, which will be integrated into e-textiles and wearables practices.

1. The workshop will take place around one unique textile/craft technique, which is particular to Turkey (i.e. lace, crochet, embroidery).
2. This textile/craft technique will be sharable over the one-day time frame of the workshop.
3. The goal of the workshop will be to see how wearable technologies may be embedded/applied to this traditional Turkish craft – both tangibly and on a concept level.
4. The skillshare will take place between the participants of the Open Design + Wearables panel and key local textile/craft organization members.
5. Participants in the ISEA conference will be invited to drop in, participate, question and observe the one-day skillshare.
6. The results of the skillshare will be communicated within the Open Design + Wearables panel presentation (taking place after the workshop) as well as via post-event online documentation.

Workshop Statement

An introductory workshop into the practice of psytronics, hardware hacking, sensory overloading, and electro-mysticism. Is it possible to hypnotise yourself and hallucinate using simple home made electronic devices? This workshop will focus on building simple hardware synths and controlling lights with 555 timer circuits. Once the circuit has been built the participant will then construct a wearable set of goggles, using the inner rolls from toilet roll and tin foil, which will focus the lights directly into their eyes. The rate the lights flicker and the frequency of audio are synchronised and controlled by the participant so they are able to fine tune the device in order to reveal some unusual visual patterns. For example, you may see psychedelic patterns when the rate of the light approaches flicker fusion, or perceive circular motion when the position of the lights are offset from one another. In short, you will create your own personal hypnotic, hallucinogenic flickering noise machine. This workshop is ideal for beginners in hardware hacking and for those interested in psytronics,  stroboscopic light and experimental sound/noise. The participant will learn how to solder, build simple electronic circuits, create a synthesiser and to hypnotise themselves. The participant will keep everything they make during the workshop and take part in a group performance/hypnotic experiment.

DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. It can create original, realistic images and art from a text description and can combine concepts, attributes, and styles. DALL·E 2 can also make realistic edits to existing images from a natural language caption. It can add and remove elements while taking shadows, reflections, and textures into account.
Our hope is that DALL·E 2 will empower people to express themselves creatively. DALL·E 2 also helps us understand how advanced AI systems see and understand our world, which is critical to our mission of creating AI that benefits humanity.
Early users have created over 3 million images to date and helped us improve our safety processes. We’re excited to begin adding up to 1,000 new users from our waitlist each week.

In this workshop you will manufacture a pair of “Data Gloves” which are intended to offer an economic and open source alternative for advanced and detailed interaction of VR environments. The “Data Gloves” were developed with the purpose of interacting with the VR environment “Human After”, a piece by Anni Garza Lau. Under the problem of the high cost of a set of commercial gloves, we realized that we had the ability to manufacture a pair of gloves with a very detailed ability to acquire information about the position of the fingers for a fraction of the price. After developing them, I decided that the “Data Gloves” project should be open source, so that any artist or developer had the opportunity to interact in detail with their VR environments with minimal investment. The “Data Gloves” consist of a set of 3D printed parts, a set of common cloth gloves, handmade electronic circuits, low-cost sensors.

Audience: Public, Level: Intermediate

In this workshop participants will deliver an extended presentation about current Augmented Reality technologies, and apply beginner/intermediate level mobile/desktop Augmented Reality tools to create Mediated Environments. Programming experience is not a necessity.

In this workshop we will approach critically towards data, considering it as a human political construct and learning to connect several representations of it: numerical, symbolic (code) and graphical (visualization) to speak and potenciate citizen voices, which is becoming more and more important in these times of data collection and releasing and in the particular context of post-conflict and the peace building efforts to come.

We will code and create data visualizations and use them to show twitter voices of several actors related with peace building in Colombia.

Workshop Statement

Declaration of Sentiments*/Gün draws on the Turkish tradition of women’s social gatherings called “gün” (meaning day in Turkish). A gün is a ladies’ gathering for the purposes of conversation, activities and festivities accompanied by the serving of Turkish food. These meetings are informal hubs of social networks, where women come together to share concerns and skills, often generating a micro-economy that involves the collection of gold or money among the members. During ISEA2011 we are bringing together a number of Turkey-based women to start the basis of a cultural-exchange initiative. Guests are selected based on their contributions to contemporary culture in Turkey in a number of fields ranging from journalism, visual arts, music, literature, new media, crafts, and design. This gathering will be documented in a printed limited edition book.  This book will provide the basis for an online platform which will bring Turkish women based in the United States and Europe to the conversation. With the event culminating in the publication of the printed book, we are hoping to springboard the traditions of Turkish women’s cultural production as a basis for extending the spirit of the Gün among networked women.

* Declaration of Sentiments: In 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and several other women invited the public to the First Women’s Rights Convention to discuss expanding the role of women in America, and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, advocating civil, social, political, and religious rights of women.

The workshop focusses on developing concepts for prototypes for an AR app, contextualizing and supporting the resignification of the controversial Francoist monument Valle de los Caídos.

The Francoist monument for the Fallen of the Spanish Civil War near Madrid, built between 1940-1959 partly by forced labour of political prisoners, includes more than 33.000 remains from both conflict sides, removed from mass-graves around the country without the relatives’ knowledge. The official onsite information does not communicate this difficult history; the traces of the prisoner of war-barracks and mass-graves are in no way visible to the visitors.

The onsite presentation of its history with the help of an AR application would make Valle des los Caídos a tangible testimony of Francoism, breaking its totalitarian narrative, transforming it into a polyphonic memorial, supporting its transformation – and an example for the resignification of controversial monuments in the Digital Age.

‘Augmenting’ physical memory sites into polyphonic spaces is an important challenge. The project is a case-study for the reinterpretation and transformation of historically loaded, controversial physical memory sites with digital tools. Witnessing a surge of iconoclastic actions against monuments glorifying controversial, exploitative, and unresolved history worldwide, it is urgent to develop inclusive tools and methods to reckon with testimonies of controversial past and its unresolved wounds.

Digital tools are especially relevant for the resignification of large-scale physical memory sites – in a landscape-scale (Valle des los Caídos) and in an urban-scale. The project opens paths for the inclusive re-reading of larger territories (for example, under a post-colonial perspective).

Such an AR application would be of great relevance for the resignification process of Valle de los Caídos. It can also inform the processing of other contested memory sites internationally and be relevant to the discourse on inclusive (memory) spaces and the need for inclusive heritage and memory-making.

“Delicious Memories” is an intergenerational storytelling workshop and media art installation that brings together older and younger New Yorkers to tell and connect stories utilizing craft and interactive technology. The installation and the performance stitches delicious stories together into a sonic multi-sensory communal tablecloth.

The project draws on lived experiences through sensorial prompts about “delicious memories,” those highly somatic and multi-modal experiences that are deeply embedded in our bodies. The experience of physically crafting creates a connection that activates and sustains dialogues between generations. While the project employs traditional craft techniques, it integrates them into contemporary digital technologies.

During a series of workshops held from May through the end of June 2021, we met over zoom to develop, share and stitch our stories together in a circle (a zoom grid). The handwork of crafting while storytelling provides an embodied mode of personal and collective creation to spark memory and nurture social wellness. The embroidery materials included cotton and conductive thread combined with other metallic objects that are stitched onto fabric by the participants. These materials integrate conductive components that connect to small microprocessors. The surfaces invite intimate tactile interactions by listeners who, when they run their fingers over the varied textures of embroidery, hear the participants’ recorded audio stories via a bluetooth speakers placed on the communal tablecloth.

The experience of listening is augmented by tactility and the communal connection of sitting together at the table touching the embroidery sensors to play the audio stories. On the table, the visitors interact with the embroidered tablecloth that acts as touch and proximity sensors that amplify individual stories. In addition to the general public and the participants themselves “performing” the stories tactilely, we envision a group of trained and untrained performers who can perform the table to a live audience.

Workshop Statement

The workshop focuses on two primary technologies: Design Rule Systems and Semantic Networks. During the Design Rules portion it will be shown how rule-bases are used to characterize the design rules of particular artists and designers. The designs are abstracted into their formal properties and characterized symbolically in a design language. The nature of the designs is studied by an analysis of the grammatical rules for the language, and the rules are implemented in terms of a shape grammar. During the Semantic Network portion, participants are asked to incorporate their personal color vocabulary into a trans-lingual semantic network of color terminology. Participants will be able to compare color terminologies across languages. Previous work shows that color naming is closely tied to cultural experience. Currently the network cross-translates the color terminology of 24 languages.

Workshop Statement 

Wearable technology has become a ubiquitous tool for tracking steps, measuring heart rates and taking calls n just a few years. But where is it taking us beyond that? The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum to gain more insights about the potential market for wearable technology in China, to inspire attendees on what are the most important design issues for wearable technology, to discuss and identify practical challenges related to designing wearable technologies that can evolve with their future massive customers in China.

The workshop is designed for students and professionals in the fields of technology, art, design, and engineering. Although anyone with an interest in wearable technology is welcome to join this workshop, we strongly encourage people with an expertise in fashion design, technology in performance arts, and/or wearable technology engineering to sign up.

Participants are expected to bring the necessary or special equipment with them to the conference. And they should confirm if they are able to bring their hardware, wearable device or demo for demonstration.

The workshop is designed for students and professionals in the fields of technology, art, design, and engineering. Although anyone with an interest in wearable technology and basic knowledge of electronics is welcome to join.

Tutorial Statement (‘Seminar’)

This project aims to nurture artistic talent in six young people with profound physical disabilities, drawing together computer arts technology with control and communication devices.

Funded by the Arts Council, the project is managed by South Downs NHS Trust and Lighthouse, and is based at Chailey Heritage Clinical Services. Digital artists Malcolm Buchanan-Dick, David Prytherch and Kate Adams worked alongside the project participants, establishing as far as possible independent production and operation of equipment.

The seminar will explore the work and key concepts of the Project, assessing the interesting and unexpected results that emerged, assess the potential of digital technology in facilitating self expression and creative practice and discuss the practical difficulties involved when assessing creative potential, despite complex disability and physical restriction.

Audience: Public, Level: Intermediate / Advanced

In this workshop participants will learn about and develop physical and digital algorithms which they will create and carry out in the city through daily explorations in Dubai. They will learn to develop and use locative media with digital devices such as cell phones to interface their experiences with physical installations and/or media facades.

The ESP8266 is an Arduino-compatible microcontroller that integrates WiFi capabilities in a miniature footprint, making it an appealing tool for artists and designers who need to deploy projects requiring remote or networked interactions between different components in an installation.

The workshop introduces participants to the ESP8266 showcasing three fully-fledged projects that expose different sensors and actuators that capture input from the environment and control physical objects.

We’ll cover a design process for prototyping and developing custom devices based on the ESP8266 showing how to sketch a circuit in a protoboard, making bakelite boards by DIY methods, and finally using Open Source CAD software to model boards for industrial manufacturing. The process emphasizes on good documentation as pivotal in collaborative projects where members contribute work on different schedules and locations.

Participants will go thru the experience of building one of the exposed projects and integrate its components from kits provided. The three projects consist on: the “Biostation”, with sensors for measuring humidity and temperature on air and soil, as well as gases and dust density; the “Automaton showing how to control an electrical or mechanical object; and the “eMotion”, a wearable that uses an accelerometer/gyroscope sensor to detect motion accurately.

The presentation will cover the usage of Animation and VFX in the Industry, including examples of usage in Movies, Broadcast, Gaming and Education. The workshop component will engage participants to create a number of concepts for Short Films; beginning with the idea, developing a story, building characters and creating a simple storyboard of the film.

Details on how the participants should prepare and what to bring.

MINIMAL SETUP
– a laptop with full (debian) linux install or live cd/usb stick.
and/or
– raspberry pi + usb audio card
!!NO VIRTUAL MACHINES!!
RPI SETUP
to be researched, but bring a RPI if you have one anyway.

STARTER SETUP
• -Walkie Talkie (suggested model: Baofeng UV-5R)
• -101 ceramic capacitor
• -3x 3.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male
• -1x 2.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male

• -For computers with Combiport audio ports:
• -1x 3.5mm trrs ‘mini-jack’ (4-pole)
• -1x 3.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male
• -1x 2.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male
• -For Apple computers with Combiport audio ports:
• -1x 3.5mm trrs ‘mini-jack’ (4-pole)
• 1x 1600 Ohm resistor
• -1x 3.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male
• -1x 2.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male

PRO SETUP
• -Walkie Talkie (suggested model: Baofeng UV-5R)
• -101 ceramic capacitor
• -3x 3.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male
• -1x 2.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male
• -1x FTDI USB to Serial adaptor http://www.aliexpress.com/item/FT232RL-FTDI-USB-to-TTL-Serial-Adapter-Module-for-Arduino-Mini-Port-3-3V-5V/2043815349.html
• – Transistors: 1x BC557 PNP, 1x BC547 NPN
• – Resistors: 2x 2.2kOhm

• –For computers with Combiport audio ports:
• -1x 3.5mm trrs ‘mini-jack’ (4-pole)
• -1x 3.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male
• -1x 2.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male
• -For Apple computers with Combiport audio ports:
• -1x 3.5mm trrs ‘mini-jack’ (4-pole)
• 1x 1600 Ohm resistor
• -1x 3.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male
• -1x 2.5 mm ‘mini-jack’ stereo (3-pole) male

Knowledge of the (linux) command-line is a pré!

The Humboldt Current ecosystem in the Southern Pacific Ocean contains a secret, silent and invisible world of the tiny micro-organisms that live in a contact and intimate relationship with light. Our purpose is to reveal to everybody and accomplished by a collaborative interaction that displays a bridge from the scientific observation, to the experimental visual representation in textile forms coupled with digital light effects. This approach can tell us about the enormous and diverse mode of interactions and interdependence in their microscale. We propose a mode of translation of their minimal modes of life, structures and water landscape to the common human language of senses and visible colours, textures and imagination. This work is about to transmit the experience of being tiny and sensitive enough, to see and start a new kind of the
interaction with light and the invisible.

This is an invitation to immerse ourselves in a drop of water that will travel from the Humboldt Archipelago in the Pacific Ocean to connect and get to know a silent, humble and invisible microforest that generates up to 50% of the oxygen we breathe. Performing various exercises we will experience a dive where our size will be perceived in microns. On this journey we will observe and record through drawing and words all the sensations that appear to finally find ourselves with bioluminescent forms, large-scale felt sculptures sensitive to movement that have been inspired by various observation campaigns in the Humboldt Current.

We propose a mode of translation of their minimal modes of life, structures and water landscape to the common human language of senses and visible colors, textures and imagination. This instance is about feeling the experience of being tiny and sensitive enough, to see and start a new kind of interaction with light and the invisible. To make this trip it is necessary to be open to not knowing anything and to be expectant of what we can find. Drawing and our auditory and visual memory will be our most important recording tools.

DIY Urban Challenge is a workshop in which participants “hack” the streets of San Jose, creating objects that interject themselves into the urban fabric, to stimulate new experiences of the city. Participants will traverse San Jose and use recycled and cast-off materials as well as wireless technologies to develop objects that can be installed within the cityscape.

Domains, publics and access is an ongoing research in media archaeology of the present. The core of the research is a wiki where everybody can collaborate with cataloguing, preserving and documenting projects that offer access for the general public to the domains of art, culture, science, economics, politics and technology. The collection brings together projects that have emerged in different countries from the second half of the 20th century to the present day related to open access, open content, open government, open science, open design, open education, open spectrum, citizen journalism, citizen science, collaborative economy, commons, co-ops, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrencies, DIY, free software, free culture, community currencies, solidarity economy, grassroots media, p2p, piracy, tactical media, etc.

The main goal is to preserve the memory of projects that appear and disappear day by day in different countries using the online tools such as Wayback Machine and MediaWiki. The reason for this is that historically the limits of access have never been stable and will continue to change but we are losing the traces of the present for future generations without even noticing it.

Workshop Statement

The Grand Unification Theory (GUT) is a scientific hypothesis that suggests that at specific energy levels electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear forces are fused together and become identical in both strength and effect, and so eliminates the illusion of their differences. Using this for inspiration we aim to bring together art, science and digital technology as a starting point to re-image and re-think the city, highlighting the emotions of the city by using psychogeography and détournement. This project aims to cross boundaries in remapping city spaces. Taking the concept of the hidden agenda, come for a walk with Doris and Barry to explore the creating of visual messages and information encompassing a sense of place or location that includes a cultural, social and political existence of the local environment. Workshop participants (within each city) are asked to come up with their own mapping system that explores social and political commentary. Working with design as an activity in public spaces, the workshop will look at areas that reveal an exchange of power, hidden contexts, governance or power structures. It will question if it’s possible to misplace and reuse city visuals, to create disorientation and ambiguity within a new mapping system for the city space, which seeks to empower rather than subjugate? The work produced will be uploaded on a blog site that acts as a transmission of information giving a notion of shared and informed engagement. It also acts as an environment in which we can explore how narrative structures can be designed to allow for multiple readings, that are dependant on location and perspective of the audience, navigation and the designers position. Final outcomes intend to be developed into a visual publication, in the form of a new atlas that remaps city spaces. May The Force Be With You

This workshop aims to create a psycho-geographical map of Dubai city by choosing two important points/neighborhoods. The participants will use video footage to collect/narrate random stories about their experience of the city. The collected sound and visual material will be annotated and reinvented into a personal storytelling map of Dubai. Participants will be required to walk around the surrounding area of the venue.

Dynamics of Perception looks at the relation between machine subjectivity and human subjectivity expressed temporally with artistic media.

The workshop will introduce you to cutting edge algorithmic technics, such as Spiking Neuron Networks and Reservoir Computing, which have the potential to generate complex temporal dynamics and patterns difficult, if near impossible, to be scripted by humans. You will get to manipulate those algorithms with the newly developed software “autonomX” by lab Xmodal. This software uses an intuitive graphic interface to create with life-like processes and express them in real-time through light, sound, video or robots.

In parallel, you will be introduced to key anthropological notions to address human-machine relationships through their sensorial and perceptual qualities. The workshop will be structured around a series of short presentations, experiments and discussions. It will gradually unfold the temporal dimension of autonomous, emergent and self-organizing computational technics and discuss how they can participate in generating strong perceptual and aesthetic experiences.

Audience: Zayed University Students, Level: Foundation

This workshop aims to force us to recognize our relationship with the objects with which we choose to surround ourselves, specifically machines and mechanisms we employ in our daily lives. Realizing our obsessive and addictive consumption of technology and exploiting electronic waste as a platform to re-invent. Explore ways of understanding the life-cycle of daily electronic/mechanic objects resulting in an A2 poster to illustrate it. Participants are asked to bring one every-day device, which has become obsolete in their home.

Workshop Statement

In our daily movements from breakfast until we brush our teeth before going to bed, the everyday environment tends to become transparent. Climate change and local ecological degradation surround us, yet it seems difficult to find ways in which one can make an individual effort to change things.  Ecocaching – a translocal game was created to address our everyday environment through local participation, small acts, and play. Please join the workshop, if you want to brainstorm and discover green spots, junctures between nature and the urban, wasteland and green pastures. You can join with a curious mind if you are from elsewhere, yet I hope majority of participants have local knowledge and interest to look at:

1. urban biological diversity
2. waste and local water systems
3. commuting and traffic
4. alien species (coastal areas, parks)
5. energy consumption
6. locally grown food
7. wider environmental change (local history)

In the workshop, participants and the workshop + game host Tapio Mäkelä will create 15-20 ecocaches, “hidden treasures” within the city. These will be specific sites to which we embed a box (ecocache) that involves a story about the place, and a task for game players. Our workshop documentation will partly become material for the exhibition as well. Remember – this is a game; Ecocaching should work through humor and play, even if the topics we treat are serious. We are looking at discovery, experience, and change of perception through small acts and gestures… I would be most happy if the group would include at least one biologist and someone involved with the environmental politics or history of Istanbul.

The performative act of seed sculpting and seed balling is meant increase public awareness of politics and responsibilities surrounding anthropogenic effects on the environment. Through the creation of public installation of sculptures made of organic local edibles, exotics and import species, the computer-aided landscape design of urban architecture was disrupted by the lab’s participants. The pedagogical goals of the lab were to:

1.  Aid in public understanding of the relationship between ecoart and the environment
2.  Implicate participants in anthropogenic ecological effects
3.  Take an active and hands-on tactical stance on these issues and help in public analysis of eco-activist risks and benefits
4.  Get beyond the feeling of being merely living props or ornaments inside the design aesthetics of the urban outdoors
5.  Comprehend the politics, the ease and the responsibilities involved in the intentional release of exotic, non-local and mutant species into our living world

The Smart Studio at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm is an experimental, interdisciplinary group that develops ideas and projects related to the use of information technology in art and everyday life. The studio consists of people from varied backgrounds as art, architecture, cognitive science, cultural studies, design and engineering. There are several projects running parallel in the studio, consisting of smaller and larger work groups. The studio members also assemble in joint force, at least once a year, to develop an idea together from scratch. In an attempt to consciously use everybody’s individual knowledge and background as an asset in the creative process the group develops methods to work as one large, many-faceted brain and body. The aim is to create an unexpected and extraordinary result that could only be generated out of the mix and interference of everyone involved. Brainball (honorary mention at Ars Electronica 2001) is an example of this. The studio members always look forward to this process and find it to be at the core of their intentions with interdisciplinary practice. During a one-day workshop, the Smart Studio would like to invite participants to take part in a similar process and share the brainstorm techniques that are used in order to realize this convergence of very different minds. Proceeding from a topic theme, the workshop will explore some methodologies for creating new concepts together in groups. The groups should be as mixed as possible to give each individual a chance to confront the wealth of variety in the work group and the assets and problems that this brings about. The topic will be biofeedback, using the electrical signals from the body as an input to a technical device or system. This is a topic the Smart Studio has worked with in several projects, as Brainball, Brainbar and the Virus project.

The Smart Studio at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm is an experimental, interdisciplinary group that develops ideas and projects related to the use of information technology in art and everyday life. The studio consists of people from varied backgrounds as art, architecture, cognitive science, cultural studies, design and engineering. There are several projects running parallel in the studio, consisting of smaller and larger work groups. The studio members also assemble in joint force, at least once a year, to develop an idea together from scratch. In an attempt to consciously use everybody’s individual knowledge and background as an asset in the creative process the group develops methods to work as one large, many-faceted brain and body. The aim is to create an unexpected and extraordinary result that could only be generated out of the mix and interference of everyone involved. Brainball (honorary mention at Ars Electronica 2001) is an example of this. The studio members always look forward to this process and find it to be at the core of their intentions with interdisciplinary practice. During a one-day workshop, the Smart Studio would like to invite participants to take part in a similar process and share the brainstorm techniques that are used in order to realize this convergence of very different minds. Proceeding from a topic theme, the workshop will explore some methodologies for creating new concepts together in groups. The groups should be as mixed as possible to give each individual a chance to confront the wealth of variety in the work group and the assets and problems that this brings about. The topic will be biofeedback, using the electrical signals from the body as an input to a technical device or system. This is a topic the Smart Studio has worked with in several projects, as Brainball, Brainbar and the Virus project.

The workshop, Projected Simulations of Being and Belonging, invites interdisciplinary artists and researchers to collaborate on a series of video projections to be displayed on the windows and facades of a building in La Universidad de Caldas and/or the city of Manizales. During this workshop, experiments with digital media will explore experiences of dislocation. Participants will combine fictional and personal narratives of belonging or displacement in order to construct digital visions of peace. Stemming from an exploration of states of dislocation and technical video/graphic experimentation, this workshop will result in the creation of outdoor projections in a public space. This workshop is about generating social collaboration between participants in order to work towards conflict resolutions between heritage surfaces and subjective narratives, past histories and illusions of the future, and finally, effects of war and visions of peace. Participants will have the opportunity to experiment with video camera setups, multiple projections on buildings, video mapping and motion graphic tools. The use of digital media presents the potential to simulate a state of disembodiment (elasticity, alteration, translation) for viewers and participants. Framing a public context with video projections allows for the simultaneous activation and archival of a cultural site.

Workshop Statement

The workshop gives an overview of the theory and practice of multimedia electronic publishing (Internet, WWW). The one-day course will be followed by hands-on creation of an edition of the ISEA94 News bulletin.

When life puts you in difficulty you can either run away from it, or embrace that obstacle and figure out how to take advantage by developing a creative method to benefit from it. Being born with a heart condition, I have always been exposed to biofeedback devices and it always intrigued me the sound and visuals that were created through these devices using my body as source for their input.

Audience: Public, Level: Foundation / Intermediate

During the workshop we will analyze available data that signifies the character of the growth of Dubai within the last decade. We will look into economic growth parameters, how the urban fabric has changed, and the different social strata. Later on, the data will be embodied and performed within the city. Based on our findings during the first part of the workshop, participants will go out into the city to find out where there is an incipient public space in Dubai, a provision that has often been overlooked in the city due to its fast development.

Workshop Statement

Marly shook her head. How could anyone have arranged these bits, this garbage, in such a way that it caught at the heart, snagged in the soul like a fishhook? _William Gibson, Count Zero

This is an exploratory workshop on the topic of ‘sound photographs’, snippets, fragments, bits and loops of sound.  It will trace the connection between recorded sound and time, memory and emotions. The first syllable of a song, an unfinished phrase from a dialog or the breath someone takes before staring to speak, wind and birds entering and then suddenly leaving just out of nowhere – sounds belonging to a world which always seems placed elsewhere. Emotional Snapshots is open to participants coming from different disciplines: musicians interested in inventing their own language but to no lesser degree to visual artists, photographers, field recordists, object makers, thinkers interested in perception and generally any curious person able to perform operations as simple as cut and paste. A multidisciplinary group is the best scenario. Nowadays loops are something quite common: there are for example tons of drum loop banks produced for the postmodern groovster to tweak and mix, perfectly matched in pitch and tempo. On the other side, loops are handy in gallery installations because of random access, yet usually long and smooth enough not to be recognized as loops or fragments. This workshop will focus on the fragmentary nature of a loop like a memory container, an emotional snapshot. It’s about catching a piece of sound long and complex enough to have its own story told, short enough to still be a fragment, a bit of memory that remains from another world. It’s about packing an emotion in a time span of just a few seconds. Or creating an emotion through fake memories: samples. Looping such fragment ‘kills’ the idea of musical development on a large scale and the sense of time passing in general, turning sound into a static image, emphasizing connections between elements in an almost visual way. Some loops get easily boring, while others can be played forever; one of the main theoretical topics of the workshop is how the mechanical nature of looping and sampling in general gets a soul. I’ve always found this extremely touching. A dramatic structure always requires some tension between different realities as well as a certain lack of completeness, an abrupt cut of the energy curve before it ends naturally, the illusion that something’s gone, the power of finishing the unfinished through imagination. So this workshop is about sampling of  voices, sampling of movie scenes along with the atmosphere, words and foley sounds, sampling a breath, sampling one’s own work. It is not about creating realistic samples of a violin or piano and it’s not about turntablism and similar collage techniques, neither is it about recycling in the postmodernist sense.  Here are the main areas of explorations:

1. Extracting a fragment from pre-existing sound material; working within a frame. Observing what’s caught in the frame and what’s left outside the frame (photographic approach).
2. Constructing a micro-composition from a limited set of sound objects, playing with limitation and completeness.
3. Utilizing imperfection for the sake of dramatism and emotional appeal.
4. Utilizing non-musical elements (speech, field recordings, foley sounds), looking for cinematic narrative.
5. Compressing the message in a short time-span. Playing with cliche and archetype.
6. Working with personal material.
7. Collective process of combining snapshots within different contexts.

This workshop discusses, demonstrates, and deals with the combination of human computer interfaces and brain computer interfaces in various performance media. These specific codes, written mostly in MAX/Jitter are elements of larger performance and installation productions in the past…. and upcoming international manifestations. The participant will use these interfaces in full body and neuro-sensing capacities and will ‘take home’ the apps of specific studies.

Synthesis@ASU and Leonardo convene a conversation about experimental practices in arts and sciences and ecosophic sense-making. Experiment and experience combine both creating novelty and inhabiting / living sense-making. Speculative design, engineering, philosophy, and experimental arts and humanities are transforming the very objects, subjects, materials and methods of their constitutive disciplines and practices.

This endeavour implies an understanding of the arts (including literature, the performing arts and other practices) as a mode of alchemical knowledge production and practice predating the modern split into arts and science. But in the 21c, the re-flourishing of experimental practices hybridizing philosophical hypotheses, “heuristic fictions”, speculative engineering, and literary/ artistic/ musical/ movement-based thought experiments has overgrown the models of start-ups and grants we inherited from 20c techno science and public management culture.

What are some of these new modes of sense-making practices that simultaneously constitute new kinds of inquiry and new kinds of inquirers, and new senses of matter? And what are the ways in which we can sustain such practices non-anthropocentrically in the changing ecosystems and economies of the century? We invite worldwide communities to join a curated conversation seeded by radical examples of experimental practices. For all creatives seeking to regenerate people, society, planet.

WEARABLE EXPERIENCE

Ensemble was also presented as a workshop for children, with Christina Gadegaard Nilsen

Ensemble is a set of wearable wireless musical controllers created for children. It investigates the use of simple sensors as a means of playing a piece of electronic music, and is played by a group of children in a installation/ workshop environment.

A small group of children are playing in a theatre space. One of them, a four year old boy, is carefully investigating a man’s hat. The hat is making a singing sound that changes pitch when it is moved. He plays with it on his own turning the hat slowly or shaking it and listening to the different qualities of the sound, changing from calm singing to percussive noises.

Ensemble has been created to investigate how analogue sensors in tangible interfaces are perceived and understood through the emerging intuitions of children. Each piece of clothing includes a simple sensor that modifies a sound or a voice. The sensor is incorporated into a garment which posesses its own individual possibilities for movement and control… The position of a mans hat, the swoosh of a dress, the darkness inside a Ladies bag…

Ensemble is a ‘walk-in’, participatory installation. There is no audience -everybody plays, creating is a Live sound-piece played by the orchestra of those who dress up,

Ensemble was developed at STEIM by Kristina Andersen with assistance from Frank Balde, Jorgen Brinkman and Michel Waisvisz.

In this workshop, participants will be introduced to open-source tools and coding strategies as means of creating original media assemblages with weather data. Temperature, humidity, CO₂, noise and barometric pressure records will be used as the basic material for the creation of sound, image and 3d objects.

We will begin by exploring the sensing technologies that create environmental data archives. This will be followed by an investigation of generative creative approaches to visualization, sonification and overall perceptualization of our direct environment. Finally, we will prototype creative systems that can act as interfaces with past and present climate data.

Although the methodology used could be applied to different data type, this workshop will focus specifically on the transformation of environmental information. A list of tools and code snippets will be provided to all participants so we can co-create systems that uses weather data as material for speculative interfaces with nature.

What is the sound of 38 °C? Is this the shape of CO₂ levels? How can humidity variations be expressed through frequency? Could we build monuments out of climatic point cloud metrics? Beyond big data and climate collapse, we will look at how weather data perceptualization offers methods of making the climate visible, audible and tangible.

Theme: Interactive – Networked – Human Computer Interaction

The “Field Processing: Lighthub” workshop and light-soundwalk focus on the essence of electric lights, which is fundamentally different from natural light sources. The designs of technogenic light streams are based on human visual inertia. They carry a significant amount of information hidden from the human eye but visible to other species and located within the temporal limits of our auditory perception.

Participants of the workshop will learn how to turn their smartphones and other electronic audio equipment into tools for direct sonification of electromagnetic fields by means of special converters designed in frames of the author’s «Field Processing» project.

Using these converters during the light-soundwalk participants will have the opportunity to synesthetically investigate the city’s light environment created by various electrical sources such as advertisements, car headlights, and street lighting systems, and become performers of a cartographic piece from the Lighthub cycle. The performers of these pieces, simultaneously moving along pre-agreed routes, record the modulations of the city light streams. During the recording, each route unfolds in time in the form of a unique sound piece.

During the workshop participants will also learn how auralization, ambisonics, spatial audio and Web-VR techniques can be used for pre-recorded audio pieces recombination in virtual acoustic space saving topological orientation and for the creation of a lighting map of the area saved in sound.

Representation of this map using Web-VR will allow us to directly hear how the urban environments can be perceived by non-human species living in them.

The internet is an incredible vast space where people can come together and it generate its own culture from within. The Internet acts as more than a final space for a gif, a meme or an animation, but a is rather a perpetual cycle of iterations; a space for continuous, dynamic production where experimentation and interactivity are encouraged. This workshop acts as a ‘micro residency’ exploring the concepts that occur in Floating Reverie’s  2Week residency programme. The workshop will start off with a short introduction to Internet art, exploring the space as a dynamic and exciting medium for artist process and practice to emerge. Floating Reverie will be introduced and past residencies shown as examples and inspiration. After this initial introduction to the workshop’s content and outline, participants will be given a chance to come up with their own concepts for their ‘micro residency’ which will then be discussed amongst the group. Participants will then be given a deadline of producing every hour for four hours, with final presentations of the residency occurring afterwards. The final micro residency outcomes will then be displayed in the evening.

Workshop Statement

This short workshop will give participants a complete overview of the pure:dyne live multimedia GNU/Linux distribution, and discuss its context and community. This will include a whisflestop technical tour of the key applications including the audio and video editing applications Ardour and cinelerra as well as tools such as Pure Data, supercollider and integration witn microcontrollers such as Arduino. Participants will learn how to make their own live bootable pure:dyne USB sticks and how to customize the distribution for their own specific needs. The workshop will also discuss who uses pure:dyne and who it is for – how artists, galleries, production centres, school departments and more are finding pure:dyne useful for making and teaching media art skills in a FLOSS environment.

About pure:dyne                                                                                                                                    pure:dyne is an operating system developed to provide media artists with a complete set of tools for realtime audio and video processing. pure:dyne is a live distribution, you don,t need to install anything. Simply boot your computer using the live CD and you’re ready to start using software such as pure Data, supercollider, Icecast, csound, Fluxus, processing, Arduino and much much more. You can boot pure:dyne from usb stick, CD or DVD. AIl you have to do to get started is download pure:dyne, put it on your preferred medium and boot your computer. without installing anything you,il have the full system at your disposal, including all the software that comes with it. pure:dyne is optimised for use in realtime audio and video processing. Both the system and the software are tuned especially for low latency and high responsiveness. pure:dyne is based on Debian and Debian Multimedia. AII packages provided by pure:dyne can be used if you are running these flavours of GNUilinux. pure:dyne is developed by artists, for artists. our primary users are people like us – media artists who build all kinds of creative proiects, using pure:dyne to do anything from recording and manipulating sound, making live visuals, creating interactive media in installations, and more. We use ‘artist’ as a broad term for anyone who is doing or wants to do something creative using their computer.

FM-Synthesis became the most important method for digital sound generation since the introduction of the Yamaha commercial synthesizers in 1983. The technology was developed by John Chowning, a leading composer and scientist who is helping to lead this workshop/hand-on session. At the workshop he also presented recent results of his research on psycho-acoustics. Chowning described a model that can be implemented without much technological problems in a computer system. Zack Settel has a lot of practical knowledge of FM-synthesis, working as a researcher at the IRCAM, Paris. Ernst Bonst wrote a book called ‘Praktisch FM-Synthese’ used by hundreds of composers and musicians for constructing new sound material with this method. [source Johan den Biggelaar, report on FISEA (in Dutch), September 1988].

Workshop Statement

Art and architecture can play an imaginative and constructive role in the development and restructuring of urban ecological living, where experimentation and radical new-thinking is needed. At this one-day workshop we will be discussing how these fields can collaborate in rethinking new ecological urbanisms. The workshop will take its departure in a presentation of a theoretical framework advocating how we can understand and discuss the Ecological Age as an emerging paradigm, and how these thoughts can influence the way we fabricate future urbanisms. The talk will be followed by selected presentations of art and architectural projects, which in different ways deal with these issues. In the afternoon we will engage in a collaborative process discussing and developing creative strategies for future, ecological urbanisms. Working with these complex issues it is essential to involve an interdisciplinary range of fields such as architecture, urban planning, design, art, sociology, engineering, software development, etc. We thus hope to bring people together from a broad variety of disciplines.
Theoretical framework
Throughout Modernity we have fabricated Modern ways of living and Modern values such as individuality, nuclear family, private ownership, demarcated disciplines, and a human-centered worldview. According to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, we have insulated ourselves in detached spheres or bobbles with no perception of a truly connected and global world. Through the last decades it has become clear that the way of living, which we have designed since the inception of the industrial revolution is profoundly unsustainable. According to the French sociologist Bruno Latour we have to move away from a Modernist towards a more decentralized, ecological way of thinking and designing our world and our ways of living. We must stop thinking about our lives and environments as autonomous singularities, and instead see it as connections, processes, and hybrid ecologies. Today more than half of the planet’s population is living in urban areas and the growing urbanism and increasing awareness on low-carbon living poses enormous challenges to rethinking the way we live in the cities. Art and architecture have different yet related approaches to these challenges, and together they might form a renewed and creative engagement in our cities. It is these challenges we invite you to discuss and develop creative and experimental answers to in our workshop.

Free Soil Bus Tour of Silicon Valley exploring the idealistic roots of high tech culture as well as the environmental effects of the computer industry on the local landscape.

REE SUNSHINE! is an intervention and installation comprising of a temporary electronics lab offering free solar-powered robotics workshops to the public. The project has formed in response to Eskom and The National Energy Regulating Authority of South Africa’s drafting of rules requiring all small scale energy generators under 1 kilowatt to be registered; a process which also involves a fee. As this includes sustainable energy systems such as solar and wind power, the swarm of sun-powered G☼ggaB☼ts made during the workshops will be used as demonstrators against problematic energy regulation and service, by attempting to register all of them in an absurd spam protest. For ISEA2018, the Free Sunshine Lab will be occupying the KZNSA gallery and surrounds, transforming the art institution into a space where school children and members of the general public can learn and tinker with electronics, create mechatronic art works, and have their voice heard regarding their relationship and access to electricity in the South African context.

4-ICOM brings together leading international scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the ways in which technology enables and constrains the ways knowledge, social relations and culture are constructed and enacted, with a special focus on interactive digital media. Speakers include Anthony Baldry, University of Messina, Italy; John Bateman, University of Bremen, Germany; Greg Clancey, National University of Singapore; Carey Jewitt, University of London, United Kingdom; Kevin Judd, University of Western Australia, Australia; Lev Manovich, University of California, San Diego, USA; Radan Martinec, IKONA Research & Consulting, USA; Michael O’Toole, Murdoch University, Australia; Jeffrey Shaw, University of New South Wales, Australia Paul Thibault, University of Agder, Norway; Theo van Leeuwen, University of Technology Sydney, Australia; Eija Ventola, University of Helskinki, Finland Lonce Wyse, National University of Singapore.

Hosted by the Multimodal Analysis Lab, Interactive Digital Media Institute (IDMI) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), National University of Singapore.

This workshop examines the possible evolution in domestic, household object design and its function using foresight methods as a primary mode of inquiry. Given changes in ownership, technology and function, what might objects look like in 2025? In examining possible futures of domestic objects, drawing is used as a tool to think through and develop possible domestic objects of the future.

For Secondary School Students

This intensive workshop invites females to have fun with technology and become introduced to audio, graphic and coding programs in order to build their own computer game based on their own imagination and experiences. The workshop will be run by four female game designers with expertise in programming, game design, as well as graphic and sound design.

Workshop Statement

In this workshop, we will explain our methods for creating guerrilla media actions in the service of activist campaigns. The workshop begins with a very brief overview and history of creative activism, followed by a few examples of our own contributions to the field. Then, we begin the process of generating ideas for new actions, and we form breakout groups to brainstorm ideas. Afterwards, we come together again and we focus on one or two of the project ideas generated by the groups, to create a recipe needed to bring that project to completion. We will also walk the groups through posting the project ideas on our new online platform for creative action, www.actionswitchboard.net. In this workshop for ISEA, we pay special attention to the benefits and pitfalls of collaborating with activist organizations; a process that can make actions far more effective at achieving activist goals. Duration: Half Day.

The workshop aims to understand the principle of brain waves and experience brain-computer interfaces. It consists of a lecture and experiments. The lecture is on three questions: What is EEG? Is the electrical signal detected in the scalp a manifestation of our consciousness? How can brain waves be used to control the computer system? Workshop participants will observe their brainwaves and will experience brain-computer interfaces using the OpenBCI system. An eight-page handout described in the illustrations is ready.

Audience: Zayed University Students, Level: Foundation / Intermediate

Using a special Xbox Kinect 3D depth camera, students documented gestures in different workplaces. At ISEA2014, workshop participants, especially students, will explore this approach in Dubai and make their own gesture files and prints. The final project will create print and digital captures of gesture, and will contribute to a hybrid print and digital dictionary that builds on the collaborative gathering of meaningful gestures. Workshop methods include:- viewing and evaluating gesture in a range of contemporary artist and student projects- instruction in the use of digital video for documentation, and in the operation of the Prime Sense and Xbox Kinect based mocap cameras, developed by the Instructor, Fei Jun and their GestureCloud team in Toronto/Beijing.

The GestureLab Workshop is a hands-on introduction to photogrammetry and volumetric video capture using a depth camera. Workshop participants will go outside on location near ISEA’s base at the Asia Cultural Centre and record gestures, trees and architecture using photogrammetry and the depth camera. Sounds and depth images will be uploaded into the Unreal VR engine. The Workshop participants will contribute to a collaborative artwork, based on the form of a quilt, where different pieces are fabricated in art workshops around the world and compiled in Unreal.

(Also in the workshop, we will explore depth cameras and photogrammetry images in the Unreal game engine).

This paper examines the process and outcomes of a workshop event ‘Global Mind FIELD’ presented at ISEA2013, Sydney. The workshop was conducted and facilitated by Karen Casey and Harry Sokol, with assistants Damian Smith and James Power. The researchers aimed to initiate and test for instances of neural synchrony between participants using creative visual stimulus, enabled by proprietary software program Viseeg (Sokol/Casey) and wireless EEG (electroencephalograph) headsets (Emotiv). The paper further examines to what extent the process of neuro-feedback and the resulting neural synchrony produced through the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ interfaces can be viewed as indicators of a cybernetic mode of practice.

Over recent years, the way we produce, teach and research new media has dramatically changed. The interactive non-fiction narratives have transformed the processes of producing, distributing and showing documentaries, and especially the processes involved in how the viewer relates to the text. One of these new media forms of narrative expression is “interactive documentary”. As a new media object, interactive documentary challenges traditional methods of study and dissemination. An interactive documentary is a kind of documentary that empowers the viewers by allowing them to take decisions that affect the narrative. When there are different media formats and platforms involved, we are talking about a transmedia documentary. The design and production processes in the so called forms of new media documentary differ substantially from traditional audiovisual documentary production. This session will show a set of case studies in order to provide some guidelines that could be helpful for producers who want to design and implement an interactive or transmedia documentary. The second part of the workshop will focus on providing useful resources for producers in Colombia and abroad, such as production companies, multimedia studies, broadcasters and grants for new media production.

For High School Students, Level: Foundation

GYEM: Innovation Day – ISEA2014 Edition will be a teaser into our larger three-tier program (the XYZ Workshop). This teaser will focus on the initial steps, introducing students to their innate capabilities as creative innovators and tapping into their creative confidence.

Youth have powerful potential. GYEM empowers youth to live purposeful lives, providing them the tools and perspective to [SELF] innovate themselves and hack life. This workshop will utilize different aspects of our program to create a condensed experience for the participants where youth experience the power of innovation through hands on activities. We will have a special focus on ingenuity and resourcefulness with limited resources.

Audience: ISEA2014 Delegates, Level: Foundation

In this workshop participants will investigate the relationship between portable architecture, the body and the environment. From the ancient steps of nomadic tribes to NASA’s astronaut suit, from ‘smart’ textiles to Michael Rakowitz’s paraSITE, we will look at poetic, sculptural, imaginary, utopian projects by artists and designers, who explore new possibilities for temporary dwellings. Participants will engage in an active process of creating objects that can grow or shrink, push and transform, stretch and expand.

Workshop Statement

Textiles are the original digital medium. After all, the Luddites were named for artisans that protested against the mechanization of textile production in 17th century England. Unlike their predecessors, today’s Luddites are associated with a distaste for the virtuality of modern devices. However, with the arrival of the Internet of Things, ushered in by affordable 3D printing, it’s becoming clear that the technologist need not choose between digital and actual. Machine knitting is a great example of this overlap.

Taylor Hokanson and Dieter Kirkwood will demonstrate a useful modification, originally exploited by Davi Post and Becky Stern, to the Brother KH-930e knitting machine. These devices were originally released in the 1980s, so they are available relatively inexpensively on sites like eBay. The KH-930e features an early digital input capability, meaning that users could purchase patterns to communicate to the device via floppy disk. Hokanson and Kirkwood will demonstrate how to spoof this connection, upload custom patterns, and “print” them into actual knit shapes.

Workshop Statement

The Hacktivism Seeds for Discourse workshop increases awareness and understanding for the many issues associated with hacktivism. For the purposes of this workshop, hacktivism can be defined as a modification or creation that addresses a political or social issue. The hacktivist goal is not necessarily an act of opposition. A topical issue in the local news will serve as a catalyst for dynamic discussion. Using role play, we will co-create and respond to a conceptual action created by ‘our group of hacktivists’. The goal is to use civil debate and informed opinions to proactively take ownership of issues and identify local solutions. There are no specific requirements, as the workshop stresses the various perspectives concerning the hacktivism, rather than technical expertise. Duration: Half Day

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”   _Frederick Pohl

For decades, science fiction authors have explored both our wildest dreams and greatest fears for where technology might lead us. This workshop ties science fiction with speculative/critical design as a means to encourage the ethical and thoughtful design of new technologies.

Reading science fiction is like ethics class for inventors, designers, and engineers. Science fiction looks at current technological and social trends and extrapolates them into the future. It speculates on the consequences of these trends, both good and bad, if they continue unchecked. During this workshop, participants will use J. G. Ballard’s “Answers to a Questionnaire”, a story made up of only answers and with the questions omitted, as a jumping-off point to write one-sentence science fiction stories. Avoiding both blind optimism for technology as well as its polar opposite of overly Luddite thinking and cynicism, this constrained exercise will encourage the formulation of imaginative and whimsical ideas for new technologies with an attitude of critical optimism…hopeful yet careful.

John Perry, well-known in the field of large scale holography, will present an overview of the various possibilities of the holographic medium, with an emphasis on the complicity between the artist and the laboratory technician in the fabrication of the holograms. The workshop will conclude with the realization of a hologram.

Workshop Statement

Huggable Nature is a short community workshop in which participants create playful interfaces using accessible art and craft materials to express their affection toward nature.  The workshop lasts about three hours outside near parks or gardens.  Around 10 to 15 people, such as families or local community members, participate in the workshop and each participant spends around 10 to 30 minutes.  The workshop organizers wrap felt fabric interfaces around the tree with attached hardware such as micro-controllers, recorders, and speakers in advance.  Participants leave voice messages on a recorder attached to the trees.  After they leave messages, they are asked to create devices crafted from art materials that they can wear to touch or hug the fabric on the trees while expressing their affection for the trees. The Huggable Nature workshop motivates participants to rapidly and easily create playful interfaces that interact with nature using arts and crafts at minimal cost.  Whereas many other similar workshops focus on groups of people with similar abilities, the Huggable Nature workshop is designed to accommodate participants with varied abilities and skill levels.  Moreover, the structure of the workshop encourages the exchange of opinions during an open discussion among participants.

Workshop Statement

In this tutorial, we present the integration of I-CubeX sensors with popular creative coding platforms such as openFrameworks, as well as the integration with the Movement+Meaning (M+M) middleware. In the first half of the tutorial, we introduce the I-CubeX sensor family as well as M+M, provide quick demonstrations followed by a hands-on session of connecting to and integrating with various kinds of sensor data. In the second half of the tutorial we combine use of creative coding platforms with the tools and techniques learnt earlier to build a small interactive application, followed by a showcase of the results. Duration: Whole Day.

Mark Ballora gave the Data Sonification Workshop at the NUS Cyberstudio Lab. Amongst those present were ISEA2008 Artist In Residence Jodi Rose, prominent local sound artist Zulkafie Mahmod, and Indian Animator and Film Director Lloyd Robert.

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

Audience: Public, Level: Foundation / Intermediate

This workshop entails hands-on exploration of sound-based mapping. Participants will use a gesture-based LEAP-Motion controller to navigate the software-based sound-map creating their own fluid and multifaceted sonic experience.

Tutorial Statement

Tutorial 1:

Image processing; for professional artists and photographers. Introduction to the practical uses of Adobe’s PhotoShop and similar applications for ‘improving’ photographs and other digitized images. This tutorial provides guidelines for computer editing of visual materials. (Macintosh, though applicable to most platforms)

Tutorial 2:

Image processing; creative potentials and aesthetics of digitally ‘enhanced’ graphics. Digital methods for altering the expression and content of photographs and other pictures. How to modify meaning by changing color, contrast, mood, composition and other means to strengthen the artistic effect of an image. (Macintosh, though applicable to most platforms)

Tinkering around with materials can lead to unintended consequences. Sometimes, the result is worth pursuing commercially. This workshop explores the pathways that novel inventions can take as they meander (or explode!) out into the wider world. We will look at cases of products developed from academic or artistic research. Bring your stories of your brushes with the commercial world, and we’ll collectively consider platforms such as Kickstarter, blogs, Etsy, and more. We will also get into the basics of patenting and trademarking, and debate the value of intellectual property protection.

Abstract  also workshop statement

Public space does not end at the borders of visible, perceptible reality but extends into the invisible. The increased population of communication devices in public life results in a dense layering of electromagnetic content passing through both air and bodies, on route to its target. As such we are not just senders and recipients but carriers of signal.

We unwittingly move through numerous digital and analog networks, leaving traces of our electronic passing with the devices and gadgets we carry. More so, we inadvertently leak information about ourselves that can be analysed to a disturbing level of accuracy with publicly available forensic tools.

In Form of a workshop and presentation, the technologies and techniques of how to read the plethora of signal in the air, manipulate it and pass it on will be covered.

Network Insecurity

Experienced wireless hackers Julian Oliver and Bengt Sjolen will present the WiFi spectrum (2.4-2.5Ghz) as a rich material for activist intervention, study and play. In tandem with Gordo Savicic and Danja Vasiliev, from a temporary outpost in Sao Paulo, they will lift network packet analysis and manipulation into a trans-continental domain.

Invisible Territories

Brendan Howell and Martin Howse will take investigation and intervention into other bands of the spectrum, introducing custom hardware and rigorous techniques for a psycho-geophysical reading of the area around Tempelhof airport.

This workshop will focus on understanding the meaning and possibilities of different physiological signals (biosignals) and the technologies available to measure them. We will demonstrate the use of different biosensors and discuss the creative methods used in our work at Emovere project, which focuses on developing interactive dance performances that utilize biosignals to amplify, understand and connect with the internal functions of the human body. We use physiological signals such as electromyography (EMG), electrocardiography (ECG) and electrodermal activity (EDA) as materials that access an intimate and – usually – inaccessible biological dimension that is in constant change, affected by external and internal stimuli.

The workshop will explore the rationale behind interaction designs, compositional techniques and outcomes of different artistic pieces that utilize biosignals in performance scenarios. Participants will join in a co-creative experience using their heart rate and speech with the objective of creating a collaborative sound environment that builds on explorations around sound poetry and biofeedback.

Workshop Statement 

“The world is in flux, and so is writing. As creators in a networked world, we can sit by the shore and wait for a defining text…” [1]

Since its popularisation in the late 1970s, the screen has acted as a gateway for easily communicating with other ‘people’ and on any topic. However, in recent years, its status as a ‘tool’ for knowledge extraction has been far surpassed. The screen has become an engaging space and through the various communication apps, people choose to spend time: socialising, living and dying. With the advent of Web2.0, the screen has moved from informational navigation tool to a community and this marks a new form of social phenomenon. This workshop aims to provide participants with a framework to understand how social media and the daily updating of the self is challenging our preconceptions of screen-based communication and influencing the development of our cultural/ personal identity(s) and sense of self. The so-called herbivore or “grass-feeding human. [2]

As practitioners we aim to highlight and encourage interest in this area as a rich space for engaging visual communication and creative writing practices. Personal interaction and narration of the self is surrounded by anticipation as well as apprehension and anxiety. Digital innovative augmentations of human/human or human/technology communication have created a lively and restless online/ offline environment. We are currently at a crossroad between being completely overwhelmed by mass ‘non-communicative’ communication and trying to be involved with reproductive technologies as much as we can. In this workshop we would experiment with these ideas and will debate that the tacit nature of communications online cannot be understood from a purely technical perspective (search algorithms) but must instead be approached creatively. To this aim we will address the cultural implications and imaginative opportunities of recent innovations in creative practices of writing and how these practices are entering into the private human encounters.

This workshop is the final of a trilogy. The two previous workshops took place in London [3] and Vancouver [4] and the outcomes and data will be published online and in print.

We are looking for participants interested in writing and reflecting on their personal experience of the process through social media. No previous experience is required. They can be artists, designers, scientists, academics, students, or from any other discipline with an interest in creative practices, creative writing, and visual communication. They should have basic knowledge of internet and social media. Participants will be asked to present a recent online experience that shows some intercourse with ‘real’ or robotic entities as an example that demonstrates how advanced technologies enter private human encounters. Then creatively will rearrange/deconstruct/randomize all of the words and re-construct a short narrative, prose or poem using the words in any order they like. Afterward will spend about 30 minutes individually or in pairs or in groups and think about making the piece of writing up to around 140 characters so we can further discuss in the workshop. This exercise is based on Oulipo, or Workshop of Potential Literature. This is a group of writers and thinkers interested in the notion of “constraint”. You can think of constraint as something like the rules of a game. For example, the rules of the sonnet game result in the creation of a sonnet. The rules of the short story game result in the creation of a short story. Are there other rules? New games? New things to create? By asking those questions, the Oulipo has become a workshop of potential literature.

Participant background/profession/prior knowledge/age: Any age, with an interest in Arts, design, creative writing, social media.

A demonstration of computerized methods for corresponding real-time computer animation within live music, including a demonstration of Ritter’s “Orpheus” system which permits a flexible approach for synchronizing digital video images with live music. Over the duration of the workshop an interactive work will be created.

Workshop Statement

MOCO’15 is the second International Workshop on movement and computing. MOCO aims to gather academics and practitioners interested in the computational study, modeling, representation, segmentation, recognition, classification, or generation of movement information. We welcome research that models movement, technology and computation, and is positioned within emerging interdisciplinary domains between art & science. We invite participants interested in exploring how movement experience can contribute to computational knowledge through movement modeling and representation. The workshop references the challenge of representing embodied movement knowledge within computational models, yet it also celebrates the inherent expression available within movement as a language. While human movement itself focuses on bodily experience, developing computational models for movement requires abstraction and representation of lived embodied cognition. Selecting appropriate models between movement and its rich personal and cultural meanings remains a challenge in movement interaction research. Many fields, including Interaction Design, HCI, Education and Machine Learning have been inspired by recent developments within Neuroscience validating the primacy of movement in cognitive development and human intelligence. This has spawned a growing interest in experiential principles of movement awareness and mindfulness, while simultaneously fueling the need for developing computational models that can describe movement intelligence with greater rigor. This conference seeks to explore an equal and richly nuanced epistemological partnership between movement experience and movement cognition and computational representation.

Duration: Two Days.

Roundtable Session

At the City of Sydney, we collect considerable data to measure how we’re tracking against our 2030 sustainability goals. The findings are detailed in regular publicly available progress reports, but we like the idea of making data open source – that is, free, easy to get at and available to do with as you please. We think open data is a great platform for transparency, accountability and efficiency and it can stimulate a whole new level of innovation and active dialogue on environmental issues.
There are two main sources of data available for Sensing Sydney – our own historical and real time City of Sydney data, as well as information from some key organisations that were keen to get in on the act. This data was provided to participants at the City Data Slam and was offered to those applying for the Sensing Sydney public art commission to use in the development of their proposals for Art & About.

Workshop Statement

Three dimensional animation is rapidly becoming the medium of choice for artistic expression in the 90’s. Whereas 3- D was formerly available only to those with access to the most powerful and expensive supercomputers. However as faster and less costly processors become available, 3-D comes closer in reach of the general artistic community. To this end, ISEA96 will present an introductory workshop by the well- known animator Michael O’Rourke. The workshop, presented in cooperation with Intergraph Corporation and Softlmage will explore the fundamental principles behind 3-D, as well as the possibilities offered by the WindowsNT operating system and Intergraph’s new multiprocessor graphics workstations.The workshop will be in two sessions: a morning tutorial and an afternoon hands-on workshop.The tutorials will consist of a half day of lectures, slides and video demonstrations on the principles which underlie 3D computer animation. Attention will be paid to modeling concepts, rendering concepts, basic & advanced animation techniques, compositing techniques and recording. The workshop will consist of demonstrations and hands-on exercises. The bulk of the time will be spent with the participants actually working, in small groups, at their workstations.

The World Wide Web is becoming a major context for artistic presentation and research. This workshop will prepare the participants to work with introductory features of the World Wide Web.

Gambiologia is a Brazilian creative hub which adopts the country’s tradition of “gambiarra” (“life hacks” or hechizos) as a source of inspiration for works on art and technology. It materializes itself on the production of multifunctional devices which are recognized either as electronics, installations, sculptures or decorative objects. In this workshop, we will collect unused objects from urban landscape and hack them in order to create upcycled design objects. For that, we will explore the concept of “industrial coincidence”, in which two industrial objects with distinct origins fit perfect in each other. We will also provide basic electronics theory and materials that will be applied in the student’s creations.

Theme: Architectures – Territoires and (Re)invented Alliances

Keywords: Open Source, OSINT, media investigation, frame match, augmented image, 2D/3D, citizen investigation

Led by the INDEX team, the workshop offers an introduction to the practice of image-based research. Mixing a methodological, technical and critical approach, the workshop focuses on practice by inviting participants to conduct online research, analysis and synchronization of videos, in order to extract all available information and organize it for investigative purposes. The workshop will conclude with a demonstration of techniques and tactics for augmenting footage for evidentiary purposes by moving into 3D modeling, which allows access to what lies outside the frame of each image.

This workshop is a hands-on introduction to the field of open source investigation. It is intended for anyone who is curious about OSINT, digital technologies and the relationship to contemporary images. A basic experience in video editing is recommended. The workshop is planned for 8 to 16 participants.

In preparation for the workshop, here is a folder containing a series of files you will need. [link misses]

Before the workshop, we strongly recommend reading Hannah Arendt’s text, “Truth and Politics”. We will build on it during the first part of the workshop. In addition, for the practical part of the workshop, you will need a laptop computer, connected to the internet.

In order to do the exercises, please install the following software (free and/or open source) on your laptop: MediaInfo (metadata analysis) & Da Vinci Resolve (video editing)

Tutorial Statement

Live-Coding is a growing field of performance in Europe and North America. In both continents the primary focus of live-coding is audio. This tutorial will be an introduction/crash course into using OpenGL Fragment Shaders for live-coding graphics. We will be using a toolkit designed around WebGL and run in Google Chrome. The contents of the tutorial will be: a brief explanation of the tool, how it’s constructed, and how it works; a brief explanation of which parts of OpenGL will be used, how it works, and some basic functionalities; some simple hands-on coding examples; finally, adding in an audio source with some hands-on examples for some live-coding experience. Any programming experience is helpful but not necessary. Duration: Half Day.

Audience: Zayed University Design Students, Level: Foundation

Using the iPad to develop interactive web content with Textastic, Photoshop Touch, jQuery.

The profile of education in the 21st century is going to be very different from previous models. Both institutional leaders and academics are aiming to redefine the role of higher education and invest on a large scale in new learning technologies. Consequently, higher education is expected to be a much broader enterprise in the future. The financial crisis from 2007 to present -arguably the worst crisis since the 1930 – has widespread consequences in all walks of life including education. In addition to deep budget cuts and increased tuition fees (an unprecedented financial burden for students) numerous questions remain unresolved. Educators concerned with local and national government funding, specialists in education finance, and educational administrators need to be aware of the latest research and practice in the economics of education. The scope of the crisis is enormous; nevertheless to develop a dialogue on an international level is essential. The workshop brings together academics, researchers, and educators to discuss the latest developments of policy research, evaluate the role of educational research, as well as existing educational business strategies, financial modeling, and risk management. It is essential to keep in mind that in addition to the long-term benefits of education, the successful future resolution of current problems will greatly influence the perspectives and potential of tomorrow’s leaders. The workshop strongly encourages interaction between participants interested in the changes of economic dimensions of education. The summary outcome of the workshop is to be published in the Leonardo Education Almanac’s series on education.

This workshop is about book art as a part of Contemporary Art, and how an artist can combine general art skills and obtained knowledge (Digital Art, Drawing, 3D Art) to make a unique piece of art work with multiple points of view. Participants in this workshop will make a digital book, print it and learn how to bind it.

November 3

Workshop  Statement

For creative industries practitioners: learn and network with some of the world’s best digital and interactive media experts. Participation in the KR8V masterclasses greatly increases your chances of bringing your unique ideas to life and achieving success. What you learn in a KR8V masterclass today, you will be applying to your project, company, career – tomorrow.

The inner city KulturWalk runs between the Port Natal Maritime Museum and Old Fort Gardens, passing through four designated heritage hubs. A pilot KulturWalk is scheduled to take place on Saturday 30 June between 09h30 and 12h30 aimed at delegates of ISEA 2018 Durban. The KulturWalk is set to be launched in Heritage Month September 2018 for members of the public. Kultur Rangers will highlight places of interest along the route. The four designated heritage hubs are: Port Natal Maritime Museum, Town Square City Hall star walk, KwaMuhle Museum, and Old Fort Gardens. The KulturWalk App will chart the sensual landscape of a city. Measurement factors such as happiness, forwardness, evocability, vibrancy, walkability, rhythms, visceral mood, and city image are key elements in shaping and future-fitting a great city. Digital elements that will feature in the KulturWalk include apps, QR codes and electronic signage that provide historical and cultural information and outline a route that draws participants into the redesigned Embankment curving around the People’s Port.

Workshop Statement

“Lab@Lab: media lab networks disrupting the politics and economics of digital cultures” is a full-day unconference event around the theme of networking between media labs. Inspired by the experience of the organizers of LabàLab, a series of networking events between Quebec-based media labs, Lab@Lab will be an opportunity for representatives of North American media labs, artists, theorists, cultural workers, curators, and researchers to develop common tactics of solidarity, exchange, mutual aid, and networked collaboration in a context of increasing political austerity and economic uncertainty. Adopting the unconference format, organisers and participants will establish the groundwork for a North America wide network of media labs: a vibrant ecology of artist-run centres, university labs, hackerspaces, fablabs, artist collectives, and more. Through a horizontal, transversal approach, inevitably, a diversity of voices will emerge. Together, by sharing our common experiences and practices, we can take a collective, unified stand against the market economy logic driving contemporary digital cultural production and dissemination. Duration: Whole Day.

Workshop Statement

Labster project aims at creating an online, interactive map, in order to offer personal narratives related to the worldwide Art and Technology DIY culture. In the first phase of the project, narrative texts are collected without a standard data input process to catch site of a wide range of terms, notions, definitions of lab’s practices, ecosystems and lab-life. Initiated by Attila Nemes (researcher and curator, Budapest HU) & Catherine Lenoble (cultural producer and writer, Nantes FR), Labster project proposes an ethnographic approach. Through holding workshops and helping people to write their stories, we hope that these personal narratives could build a valuable knowledge database. The next step is to establish how the information contained in this map can be studied and best utilized.In our practice based research we are interested in non-formal communication and non official stories, accordingly:
We wish to avoid official communication material; instead we wish to collect written personal impressions and narratives about labs. Through these stories we can understand better what is going on in the labs as well as the complexity of the labs. We hope to reveal through individual approach the working process within or next to a lab. We want to apply the collected texts on a hypertext map for an ongoing collection of researchable manuscripts, a novel. We wish to link these texts in time and space, by topics and make them researchable by tags. We intend to have multiple entries (ways to tell stories through web2 solutions). Finally, but not least, we plan to hold workshops where people can write and tell us their stories.

LANDSTREAM it is an experimental program, which creates a representation of landscape through the analysis of flows (stream) which cross a space (land), in this ‘landscapes’ the initial scientific data are transformed into a visual information by urban graffers. Today, when our identity is defined especially by our position in the network, by the information which we emit and which we receive, we fix our attention on these invisible flows and we try to determine their importance, their form and their direction. Thus, the landscape – LAND(scape) – is not any more one simple relief. It becomes an association of the waves and signals (STREAM): LANDSTREAM.

LANDSTREAM comprises a term “stream” which means flow, or, in the data-processing terminology – the continuous flow of information in real time mode. “land” comes from “landscape”, because this project introduces a new category of landscape’s representation.

LANDSTREAM it is an experimental program, which creates a representation of landscape through the analysis of flows (stream) which cross a given space (land). The work takes a pictorial form, which can be static or animated. In this landscapes their initial scientific data are transformed into visual information. Today, when our identity is defined especially by our position in the network, by the information which we emit and which we receive, we fix our attention on these invisible flows and we try to determine their importance, their form and their direction. Thus, the landscape – LAND(scape) – is not any more one simple relief. It becomes an association of the waves and signals (STREAM): LANDSTREAM.

Actually, it is not by questioning a form, that we create new forms, but by producing the new conditions of their emergence. Then, new forms and new possibilities appear. Our protocol places the action of ‘making’ like act of translation of reality to its representation. Consequently, the scientific thought brings a procedural displacement from the emergence of the image in the field of reality to its mode of production in the field of pictorial. It is no more a question to represent or to reproduce, but to re-play the stake’s production of the pictorial representation in our contemporary world.

To represent is to define, to define is to analyze, analyze is to understand. Also, rather than to reproduce or represent the world we build the subjacent image, than the world is given, but that it does not post. The result will not be more abstract than figurative; it will be the field even where the image occurs visible.

In LANDSTREAM we create a real time ‘portrait’ of San-Jose trough electromagnetic streams crossing the city. This ‘portrait’ is made visible by collaboration with local graffers. Together, we will measure the density and the quality of electromagnetic fields in different areas of the city, and we will realizes in-city fresco(s) with the real time field’s capturing.

Silicon Valley is the cradle of electronic technologies. LANDSTREAM makes visual the streams produced by this technologies. LANDSTREAM also warns about the ‘electronic pollution’ brought by some technologies. California is also an important place for street art, and especially urban graff. LANDSTREAM relates this two local specificies: electronic technologies and street art. LANDSTREAM invites for interaction urban graffers, but also each person, which would try to interpret the scientific vision of electromagnetic streams in language of urban graff.

Related artwork Landstream (Olga Kisseleva)

Workshop Statement

This workshop explores collaborative improvisation within the context of a laptop orchestra, using a simple textual performance environment titled LOLC. Participants will learn to use LOLC to create, manipulate, share, and transform short rhythmic musical gestures based on concrete sounds, and they will rehearse and perform as a laptop ensemble, collectively improvising an exciting musical performance on-the-fly with those gestures and sounds. The workshop will also use LOLC as a platform for exploring real-time music notation: creating, manipulating, sharing, and transforming music notation fragments using the same text-based laptop improvisation techniques. Members of the ensemble will assume the roles of both laptop musicians and instrumental performers, with the instrumentalists sight-reading the notation generated by the laptop musicians as it is rendered on digital displays. This workshop is open to instrumental musicians, computer musicians, composers, and performers. There are no specific prerequisite technical skills. Participants must bring their own laptop computer (either Mac or Windows). We also encourage them to bring their own musical instrument.

Workshop Statement

Transdisciplinarity is deemed ‘radical’, ‘provisional and opportunistic’ because it challenges traditional educational paradigms. It focuses critical and creative attention onto domain-specific problem areas of ‘chance’, ‘discontinuity’ and ‘materiality’ (Foucault, 1976) to transcend limits within established disciplinary knowledge practices. This enables (re)visioning of the role, activity and value of Art Schools in uniting the pedagogical and technological strengths of the humanities and sciences in a university context, utilising conceptual growth, experimental innovation, visual communication and flexible learning spaces to deliver a model of Transdisciplinarity. The transdisciplinary model will be explored in the context of the trans-migratory role of ISEA and look for a different voice from the various constructed international institutional perspectives. This workshop will address and share experiences and difficulties encountered while developing transdisciplinary art-science research, teaching, and when meshing curricula from diverse fields. Each workshop leader will introduce their topic and the participants will be able to join one of the three groups  to discuss specific areas of focus (transdiciplinary colloborations, studio practice or theory) led by the panelists. Each focus group will seek to identify and share ways to surmount some of the difficulties commonly encountered in interdisciplinary art/science practices and curricula with the aim of publishing effective transdiciplinary models and best practices.

Focus Group 1: Transdisciplinary Framework for Research Collaboration

Petra  Gemeinboeck – Transdisciplinary Framework for Research Collaboration

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

Andres Burbano – Folding “papers” and unfolding projects
The topic of my doctoral research is the “History of Media Technological Inventions in Latin America” it is based on the study case methodological approach. At the moment I am confronted with a series of interesting and profound questions related to the subject. When I explore the contents of this particular research at least ten general fields emerge as the key components of the theoretical study: History of Technology, Art History, Archaeology of the Media, Computation, Music Composition, Photography, Bioacoustics, Color Television, Space Missions and Latin American Studies. The implications of such research are not insignificant especially considering the current interest in societies in Latin America in processes of innovation and technology, and media development. An understanding of the  “History of Media Technological Inventions in Latin America”  will be an important contribution to the understanding of Technology and Media in non-Western societies. Additionally as a media arts practitioner myself I am in the process of creating practical media art projects based on the findings of the historical research, this condition adds more elements to the problems already there. All this complexity does not come as a surprise to me, however I must admit that while developing these kind of research/practice projects continuously see myself facing questions that initially I have no tools to answer. The most important task is the process of acquiring those tools needed.

Focus Group 2. Discuss transdiciplinary studio practice

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

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

Focus Group 3. Discuss transdisciplinary theory

Edward Colless – Transdiscipilinary Occult
Does the “transdisciplinary” adjective, then, offer an alternative or a distinction to interdisciplinary, institutional consensus? I believe it does, but in a way that requires criticism as well as endorsement. I propose that we theorize the “transdisciplinary” as a disruption to interdisciplinary conferring: that we encourage it as disagreement and, in a more demanding finesse of its alterity, as the “un-relation” of disciplines. There is some caution in this: do we not lose the prospect of academic cosmopolitanism, and its imperative of universality, when the interdisciplinary meeting place is disrupted? Let us think of the “transdisciplinary” disruption, however, not as a deregulation of academic discipline (as a cultural relativising of the arts and sciences meeting on equal ground), but as an irregularity within academic discipline; as an insurgency or “in-discipline” of academe. I suggest, in response, that we use the prefix “trans” to suggest drift and errancy, as disciplines cross each other with the eventful possibility of collision or collusion but without the eventuality of their consensus. I would provocatively call this crossing an occultation, in that it induces an esoteric knowledge not manifestly conferrable, discernable or communicable. In this respect, the “transdisciplinary” induces an occulting of disciplinary research by an abnormality or unnaturalism, which is to say it offers a new manner of occult knowledge. Can we speculate, within our specialities of visual media for instance, on “transdisciplinary aesthetics” as such an occult vision? In the fugue-like drift of the “transdisciplinary”, could aesthetics become an occult science, or (in no way symmetrically or commensurately) could science become an occult aesthetics?

Wendy Coones – 3 + 5 + 7 = 1 * Propagating Transdisciplinary Theory
The propagation and cultivation of an international field requires diverse and concerted efforts. Between formal education curricula, digital and print dissemination points, common research tools, national / international collaborations and continually developing interaction structures; a polycultural space can evolve. Taking into consideration the parameters of individual endeavors and their possible influence on one another, a larger image of the interconnectedness can be discussed.

Sponsored by the National Institute for Experimental Arts. Presented in collaboration with the ISEA2011 educational workshop